Decline and its possibilities

Is society in decline? Is our culture getting worse? Is the West less Christian by comparison to the past? And are these things a cause for lament?

Your answers to these questions do a lot of work in locating you in debates among Christians about the state of things today. I’m thinking in particular of anti-declinists, who resist and reject declension narratives as hysterical, overwrought, incomplete, or even unchristian. It occurred to me recently that anti-declinists confuse a number of concepts—which is not their fault, since their opponents often confuse them as well—that are distinct from one another.

First is decline. In what sense decline? In what area(s) of life? Religious in particular? Social, moral, aesthetic, political, economic? Or is the question a matter of net gain/loss? Claims about net loss are always going to be inordinately subjective. Countering a sense of loss in, say, church attendance with an equivalent gain in household wealth is a textbook instance of changing the subject. To be frank, Christians concerned about whether people have left church for good don’t care about the economy. It’s apples and oranges.

The second issue is blame. It’s often assumed that, if things have in some sense gotten worse (over the years, decades, or centuries), then those responsible are them, out there, the Bad Guys. But this doesn’t follow. It may well be the case that things have gotten worse because of us. The culprit, in other words, is Christians. Christians are on the hook for the things they bemoan. The church is culpable for social, moral, or religious decline. The proper response to recognition of genuine decline, then, is not pointing fingers at the world but donning sackcloth and ashes; fasting and prayer; contrition and repentance. (Next is figuring out a faithful path forward, but doing so is still an in-house affair.)

The third issue is judgment. Christians believe that God is Judge. And within history, God’s mysterious providence does not withhold all consequences of the actions of individuals, communities, and nations until the End, but enacts them, in part, in time, as anticipations of the Final Judgment. Our chickens do not always come home to roost. But sometimes they do. And when they do, it is the work of God. In the realm of social or cultural decline, then, Christians are inclined to see the hand of God. And often as not, it is against the church that his hand works. Judgment begins at the house of God. Nor is divine judgment a sneaky way of outsourcing blame back onto the culture. Well, this is God’s work—guess y’all will acknowledge him now! On the contrary, sometimes divine judgment works for the world to the detriment of God’s people. Assyria wins and Israel loses; Babylon wins and Judah loses. Not ultimately, but for quite a while. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. But Caesar made thousands of martyrs for a full three centuries before the bloodletting stopped.

The fourth issue is suffering. Not all suffering on the part of Christians is God’s judgment on our sins. But all of it is an opportunity to imitate Christ. That is, to unite out sufferings to his in patient endurance as a witness to the power of his resurrection. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Let us say, even, that the sweat of the saints—the smallest of pains in the mundane challenges of daily discipleship—is likewise the seed of God’s word scattered on the soil of our culture. It is God who gives the increase. All we can do is witness. We are not to seek after suffering. But when it comes, as it always will, in whatever form, our calling is to persevere. Not to whine. Not to complain. Not to eschew martyrdom for a martyr complex. Not, certainly, to feign bemusement at this strange disruption of how things should be, namely, life running smoothly. Life running smoothly is a blessed temporary relief from the ordinary run of things in a fallen world. So even and especially when society is in process of some kind of decline, even and especially if it is religious in nature, the task of the church is the same: faithful witness in suffering.

The fifth issue is hope. To spy decline is not to deny grounds for hope. Hope is in God alone. His promise is sure: the gates of hell will not prevail against the people whose God is the Lord. Nevertheless they will claim victories along the way: provisional victories, but victories all the same. Christian hope lies neither in the absence of decline nor in renewal following decline but in the ultimate victory of Christ above and beyond the waxing and waning of human civilizations. Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket. For the Lord, that is, and therefore for the church. A whole political theology is contained in that single verse. The peoples are like grass, which wither under the Lord’s breath; he makes nations rise and fall, but his word stands forever. Decline is both real and inevitable. It is also subordinate to the mission and worship of the church.

If I’ve been training my sights on the errors of the declinists, a few implications follow for anti-declinists as well.

First, decline is possible. To read some anti-declinists, you’d imagine they’ve sincerely bought into the myth of progress. They’re like film critics who tell you, every year, that the movies have never been better. Novels and music and all the other arts, too. Did I mention epic poetry and its public performance and memorization by children? Nothing ever changes, except when it does, and it’s for the better. That’s a mighty dollop of silliness no serious person should countenance. But it’s ruled out a priori for Christians. So for any Christian writer or thinker not driven by pessimism about our age, he or she must at least admit the possibility that decline may happen and perhaps even is happening.

Second, Christian decline is possible. Some anti-declinists read as though, even if a civilization might get worse, the state of the church within that civilization can never get worse. But we’ve already seen that this, also, is a red herring. I often think, in this respect, of Alan Jacobs’ marvelous review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which opens with a description of the extraordinary Christian culture of fifth-century Cappadocia created and fostered by saints like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. Yet no such culture exists there today. Here’s Alan:

If the complete destruction of a powerful and beautiful Christian culture could happen in Cappadocia, it can happen anywhere, and to acknowledge that possibility is mere realism, not a refusal of Christian hope. One refuses Christian hope by denying that Jesus Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, not by saying that Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time.

Christianity can disappear from a particular place at a particular time. When I read non-declinists, I wish they would begin every paragraph with an affirmation of this possibility. Because most of the time, it sounds as though they do not believe it is possible. Yet we know it is possible, because it has happened time and again throughout history. Which means that people worried about it happening here are not fantasists; they are not hysterical just because they worry about it. Their worry may take the form of hysteria. They may be foolish in their response or ungodly in their lament or wicked in their prescriptions, not to mention their treatment of others. But the worry is valid in principle. The only question, ever, is whether it is a plausible worry given our time and place, and thence whether it is likely. It becomes a cultural question, a hermeneutical question, even in a sense an empirical question. That’s the arena for debate. Not its sheer possibility.

Third, non-declinists have to distinguish not just the mode of pessimism from its judgments but also the judgments from their implications. Bemoaning some particular religious or social loss is not ipso facto an endorsement of everything in the past (whether that past be the 1980s or ’50s or ’20s or 1770s or 1530s or 1250s or whenever the ostensible golden age is said to have occurred). Nor is it a denial that anything has improved. Declinists are on the hook for their rhetoric, which should be nuanced and accurate rather than generic and overblown. But anti-declinists are on the hook, too. They often write like to give an inch is to lose a mile. Any decline means total decline. Perhaps also despair. None of which follows.

The Christian theology of providence is an extraordinary analytical tool. It allows the soberest of diagnoses and the most confident of hopes. It’s always a delicate balancing act. Any Christian who writes about the state of society is going to fail in some way. But we can fail a little less, it seems to me, not least by being mindful of the distinctions I’ve elaborated above.

Once more, negative world

I sometimes think of what I write on this blog as mostly just drafting off two other, far superior blogs: Richard Beck’s and Alan Jacobs’. Both are friends whose work I’ve been reading for more than a decade, and who have been kind enough, more than once, to link to my own work or to respond to it in some way.

Recently Alan wrote a follow-up to his blistering rejection of Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds” framework for understanding Christians’ social status in the United States. In the follow-up, Alan mentions both Derek Rishmawy’s and my respective attempts to interpret and commend a version of Renn’s framework. Gently but firmly, he rebukes these attempts and underscores why he finds the whole business—the whole conversation—a misdirect: a futile, self-regarding failure to attend to the main thing, namely following Christ irrespective of our surroundings and their purported (in)hospitality to the gospel. We do not, Alan argues, need detailed plans in order to fulfill this charge. Nor do we need an ostensibly (or fantastically) friendlier society in order to succeed. We just need the will, the resolve, the obedience to Christ requisite to set one foot in front of the other, answering the call of the Lord whatever it may be, wherever it may lead, whenever it may come.

I see that Derek has written his own response to Alan (though I haven’t yet read it). I’m going to attempt my own here, with the aim both of understanding what Alan is concerned about and of clarifying my own position.

The simplest way to put my view is in the form of two broad questions:

1. Do different societies, in different times and different places, treat an individual’s or a community’s public identification as Christian in different ways?

2. If yes, does knowledge of those differences make some relevant difference for how Christians should understand, approach, engage, and inhabit their societies?

I take the answer to the first question as read: yes, obviously. I take the answer to the second to be yes as well.

To me, that settles the matter—at least at the formal level.

The third question descends from the heights of history and missiology, respectively, to applied sociology: Is it accurate to say, all things being equal, that being known publicly as a Christian in the U.S. is less likely to enhance one’s social status than at any time since World War II? Or, to put it differently, that public identification as Christian is more likely to downgrade one’s social status that at any point in living memory? Or, to put it more weakly and less comparatively, that in general “being identified as Christian” is not something a non-Christian would, in our society today, be tempted to pursue nominally for the sole reason of trying to enhance his or her social status?

Granted, the U.S. is a big country. I live in a town of 120,000 in west Texas. Having a nominal membership at a local church one doesn’t actually attend or care much about might still grant a certain cache here. (Though, in most circles, I doubt it.) Any comment, then, about “the U.S. today” is going to be an “in general, on balance, all things being equal, thinking about the country as a whole” comment. If you don’t think such comments can be meaningful, fair enough. But if you do, then this sort of comment is permissible like any other.

Region and subculture are one element here. Institutions and professions are another. Some organizations and careers will be neutral as regards religious identity; others, far from it. Also granted.

The upshot, all qualifications made, is simply that something has changed in the last century regarding how self-identifying as a Christian orients oneself to the wider culture; how one is perceived as a result. And apart from claims about this as a change, the point about the present moment is that, whether or not there ever was such a time (in this society or another) when being seen to be a Christian was something that might raise one’s prospects—marital, educational, financial, professional, political—this time, in this society, is not one of them. We can haggle over whether it’s preferable to say “it is not” one of them versus “it is no longer” one of them. But either way, it’s not.

Suppose Alan agrees with me (though, if I’m reading him correctly, I don’t think he does). Does it matter?

I think it does. But let me say how I don’t think it matters before I say how I think it does.

It does not matter “because America is no longer a Christian nation.” It does not matter, that is, as if this analysis were at heart a declension narrative, according to which things have been getting worse and worse and now, at this moment, we’ve reached the nadir; or at least have crept up to the edge of the cliff. No. The social status of being-seen-as-Christian is simply one among many sociological variables relevant to Christian consideration of the church’s mission.

I also don’t think it matters “because things are really bad out there.” They’re not. It’s bad when Christians get thrown to the lions. It’s bad when Christians can’t vote. It’s bad when certain Christians aren’t afforded basic rights and privileges common to civic society. It’s bad when it is against the law for Christians to gather on Sunday mornings, to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, to read their Bibles and worship without fear, to share the gospel with whomever will listen.

American society does not fit these descriptions, and it isn’t close to any of them. Christians in America are remarkably free; our privileges are innumerable. Words like “persecution” are inapt to our context, and unwise to use—not least since we have sisters and brothers elsewhere in the world who suffer actual persecution at this very moment.

How, then, is the social status of public identification as Christian relevant? In this respect:

The church cannot bear faithful witness to Christ in a given context if she lacks awareness of the particular features that constitute that context, that make it what it is.

Think about different locations and cultures today. Does Christian witness look the same in Riyadh, Nairobi, Beijing, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Miami, Milan? Does it look the same in 2022, 1722, 1422, 1122, 822, 522, 222? Surely not. And surely all Christians would agree that differences of context in each time and place call for different forms of response to those differences? Such that the specific contours of Christian witness actually and rightly look different based on when and where one lives, and how a culture or society in question responds to—welcomes, rejects, shrugs, punishes—public identification as Christian?

Perhaps, again, Alan would agree with this. Let me try to say a bit more, then, to get enough meat on these bones to prompt a meaningful disagreement.

Consider the difference between life under Diocletian, about half a century before St. Augustine’s birth, and life under Honorius, when Augustine was bishop of Hippo. The former was a time when the imperial authorities were your enemy, if you were known as a Christian; the latter was a time when claiming to be a Nicene Christian might enhance one’s political or financial prospects (though not necessarily). How should the church navigate each setting? This was a real question faced by bishops, monks, priests, and laypersons around the Mediterranean. The first was, in Renn’s language, a “negative world”; the second, a (more) “positive world.” I see no reason to declare a priori that such labels, and the analysis underlying and following from them, an inadmissible distraction.

Now for an example closer to home. I teach undergraduate students of all kinds, but every semester I have a class all to myself composed only of Bible and ministry majors: i.e., young persons preparing for a life of formal service to the church in the form of teaching, preaching, pastoring, and so on. These students largely come from the Bible Belt, and many of them come from big churches in big cities where being Christian and attending such churches doesn’t feel abnormal. This experience in turn nurtures in a good number of them a sense of their context, present and future, as either neutrally or favorably disposed toward Christianity. A world of megachurches and popular pastors and celebrity Christians and spiritual influencers is just “the world”: yesterday, today, and forever. The churches they one day will lead will be large, healthy, full, and financially stable. The folks in the pews will lead lives as middle-class American Christians long have (so they imagine): unthreatened and tacitly buoyed by the surrounding culture.

Not for all of them, but for quite a few, it is something of a shock to learn about the declining rates of identification as Christian in America; about the decades-long decreasing numbers of church attendance; about how many churches are closing their doors each month; about some of the modest but real social, political, and professional challenges facing folks known to be Christian in what once were considered mainstream careers and institutions in this country.

In a word, most of my students believe they live in Renn’s Positive World. They really do. Others suppose it’s a Neutral World for Christians. Few to none see it as a Negative World. And I’m telling you, it makes a difference for how they understand their faith, their future, and their eventual ministry in the church.

This is one reason, in my view, why we keep seeing so many pastors quitting formal ministry in their 20s and 30s. It’s hard out there. And many of them are unprepared for what’s awaiting them. As I see it, part of that lack of preparation is a gap between the “World” they expect to inhabit as ministers and the actual “World” they find. And the gap is perpetuated if and when professors and writers like me fail to help them see—clearly, soberly, and accurately. I want them to see the world as it is. Not to scare them. Not to lament the supposed loss of a prior world. Not to remake the world in our desired image, in the image of what it “should” be. Not to be fatalist about the future or to forsake the challenge of persuasion or to give up on faithful witness until the world is nicer to us. By no means. The world owes us nothing, and as the apostle teaches, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

What I want, rather, is for them to be equipped to minister in the real world, not the cloistered world of their childhoods, or the 1990s/2000s, or a fictional 1950s, or any other time and place. In that sense and to that extent, I find the “Three Worlds” heuristic to be useful. As a starting point. As a conversation starter. As an initial sociological, historical, and missiological framework, by which to help normie Christians and ministers to begin thinking about the particular challenges facing the mission of the church today—here and now, in our setting, not our parents’, not someone else’s: ours.

Maybe Renn’s “Three Worlds” comes with social or political baggage not worth onboarding in this particular conversation. Maybe it’s overdetermined by the uses to which various of its adherents want to put it. Maybe it’s wrong in certain key details, not least its laser focus on the last few decades and specific public events that occurred during them; a myopic legal and juridical cultural frame. Maybe its examples are wrong, such as offering the rhetorical style of Tim Keller as an artifact of a now-past “World,” no longer relevant. Maybe the “pre-1994” timeframe of “Positive World” is far too open-ended, and needs bracketing closer to the World Wars than to the Founding Fathers. Maybe the emphasis on elite institutions combined with a blurring of the lines between “public profession of Christian faith” and “actual discipleship to Christ” renders the framework finally useless at the practical level.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. With the qualifications I make above, I find it useful enough. More broadly, analysis like it seems to me self-evidently helpful, even needful. Not because Alan is wrong, but because he is right: The content of Christian witness is always and without exception the same: the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But what does imitation of and conformity to those life and teachings require in this time, in this place, by comparison to other times, other places?

That’s the question I want to answer. And I’ll take all the help I can get.

CCM

My friend and colleague Richard Beck, author of the best theology blog around, has been on fire lately with some stimulating reflections on church, ministry, preaching, and what it means to be faithful in the contemporary American context. If you’re not reading his Friday series on Jordan Peterson, get on it forthwith. His post this past Monday was a sort of follow-up to his latest Friday piece on Peterson. Both posts, along with many preceding ones, are about interpreting the state of the culture and what that interpretation tells us about how to respond with the gospel—not in 1950, not on an exotic mission field, but here, now, today, in the United States in 2022.

In particular, he points to three popular phenomena that wise Christian leaders should be learning from but, on the contrary, usually treat with disdain, if they engage them at all. Those three phenomena are (1) men like Peterson; (2) Joel Osteen; and (3) contemporary Christian music, or CCM. Beck isn’t interested in recommending any of these to us as samples of faithful Christian teaching or practice. Rather, he wants to draw the attention of snobby, Master’s degree–holding pastors and academics to persons and practices in which normies (Christian and non-Christian alike) find pleasure, meaning, and inspiration. Having drawn our attention there, he wants us (1) to stop being so condescending and (2) to learn something about where our culture finds itself today, what it might need, and therefore how that might inform the work of evangelism, catechesis, worship, etc.

Here’s how he concludes the second post (my emphases in bold):

I can't tell you how many times I've heard seminary-educated pastors and seminary professors sneer at Christian praise music. The music is castigated for being overly individualistic, therapeutic, and sentimental. We sneer and call it "Jesus is my boyfriend" music. You'll see the point if you listen to the lyrics of a song like Hillsong's "Oceans" (over 129 million YouTube views) or Lauren Daigle's "You Say" (over 242 million YouTube views), lyrics like "You are mine and I am yours" and "In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity."

Instead of sneering at the therapeutic individualism of these songs, their focus upon me and my feelings, take a second to listen to the songs as a missionary, as a cultural anthropologist. Instead of lol lol lol how about we think for a second? To what deep ache in the modern world are these songs appealing to?

This isn't rocket science. The reason praise songs centering therapeutic themes of God's intimate care and love are so popular is simple. As I recount in Hunting Magic Eels, anxiety, depression, suicide, loneliness, and addiction are all sky-rocketing. So the appeal of songs like "Oceans" or "You Say" are no mystery. These songs are hitting us right where we are hurting. Their appeal is blindingly obvious to any decent missionary.

But sadly, we're not very good missionaries. We've been too busy sneering at Hillsong, Osteen, and Peterson.

Now, am I suggesting that churches and pastors should follow their lead? Am I saying that we should ignore the theological content of praise music, preach the prosperity gospel, and hand Bible studies over to Jungian psychologists? No, I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is WIPE THE DAMNED SNEER OFF YOUR FACE AND LOOK AT THE CULTURE! If we took a moment to think like a missionary there are some things about Hillsong, Osteen and Peterson staring us in the face. Things we need to address, like any good missionary would, if we want to get a hearing for the gospel in this culture. But we can't see any of this because our seminary degrees have turned us all into elitist snobs. 

The modern would is suffering, staring into a void of meaninglessness where something true, beautiful and good once existed. Families are broken. Depression, anxiety, suicide, loneliness and addiction at high tide. And if you look out upon all that pain, with a compassionate heart and the mind of a missionary, there really is no mystery as to why Jordan Peterson, Joel Osteen or Hillsong are so popular. This, dear pastors, seminary professors, and church leaders, is our mission field. Let's stop sneering and get to work. 

In response to this all one can say is: Preach!

*

Well, maybe not all. I think Richard is dead right about Peterson and Osteen both. And he’s got all of us over-educated patronizing highbrow jerks dead to rights on CCM. The class divide both across and within denominations in the U.S. is rarely remarked upon yet staring us in the face. It may be, besides technology, the single greatest threat to the church’s spiritual, social, and moral health today. So preach on, I say.

Having said that, something in Richard’s comments about CCM hasn’t been able to work its way out of my mind, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t have a settled or confident counter to his claim, only questions I want to wonder about out loud. Perhaps he or you or someone else might provide me some clarity on the matter.

Here’s what I’m circling around.

It isn’t clear to me that the content or style of CCM reveals something important to us about our culture, perceiving that culture the way a missionary would—at least nothing revelatory on a par with Peterson and Osteen. Obviously anything with some level of popularity tells us something about a culture; it doesn’t come from nowhere. Nevertheless I wonder in this area. Part of my wonder has to do with the market, namely, the commercialization of “Christian music.” Pop culture critics often make this mistake. “The market” “has spoken” about this or that “popular” artifact or content, ergo we are entitled to analyze said content to death in search of a meaning that ostensibly reveals something deep about us.

I’m not so sure. Not least because “the market” largely delivers sedatives in the form of forgettable, bite-size entertainment whose primary effect is to numb us. Sure, in the aggregate the fact that we’re all looking to numb ourselves into oblivion is itself a datum that calls for analysis. (Though even then, Christians have a ready-made answer to why it is we do this: it’s called sin.) But often enough X-entertainment will substitute perfectly well for Y-entertainment. In fact, what often seems of world-sharking importance, given its popularity, is forgotten almost the moment it is finished. (Remember Game of Thrones?) Put differently, the species of numbing-fun isn’t especially important. It’s the genus—i.e., what Huxley called “soma” in Brave New World—that matters.

So back to CCM. What I want to suggest as a possibility is that CCM’s popularity as Sunday morning praise music might be an accident of relatively little significance. It might, for example, merely reflect people’s pleasure in singing in church what they sing in the car; and since CCM is what’s on the radio, that’s what we get at church. Perhaps you suppose what’s on the radio (or Spotify) is itself meaningful. For a moment, though, go in for a materialist rather than a market-demand analysis. Perhaps, after the success of CCM in the 1990s, the big corporations that stepped in and made CCM not only Big Business but Global Business were the ones who set the terms for what CCM could sound like and be about going forward. Perhaps they are the ones who are responsible for the sort of lyrics most CCM songs contain: minimal biblical allusion, imagery, and terms, few polysyllabic words, plenty of you-and-me generic love affairs, oodles of spare repetition. Call it the Hallmark-ification of CCM. Hallmark sells. But that doesn’t tell us much. It’s just a known quantity built to sell in a continuous, self-replacing fashion—i.e., in such a way that we forget the best songs from last year so that we stream the best songs from this year, so on and so forth, into capitalist eternity.

Is that an entirely implausible interpretation of CCM these last 30 years? If not, it suggests to me that the popularity, such as it is, of CCM in the worship assemblies of low-church traditions (i.e., non-denom, baptist, evangelical) may not mean that much. In other words, we don’t need to put on our missionary hats in order to learn from this particular phenomenon. We need only put on our economic—perhaps our Marxist—hats to do so.

In short, it is all too believable, in my view, that if other music were on the radio, that’s just what our churches would be playing. Or suppose we had replacement songs—songs quite different in content but that were equally singable, equally catchy, equally popular, even equally kitschy. Suppose that, without anyone’s knowing it, these songs were more or less seamlessly substituted for our current CCM worship. I submit that they would do the job, and people would enjoy them well enough.

I admit that these are hypothetical conjectures. Remember, I didn’t promise much by way of compelling argument, much less a confident thesis. Anyway, this is what Richard provoked in my thinking, for what it’s worth.

*

Two final thoughts, while I’m at it.

1. None of what I’ve said above should imply that, because CCM mostly comprises kitsch, it should be rejected. Though it is true that plenty of CCM isn’t very good, musically or theologically, such a judgment is not per se a judgment about its kitschiness, which in turn is not a judgment on its worthiness either to be used in worship or to be enjoyed by Christians. As Paul Griffiths has rightly written, kitsch is very near to the heart of the church. It is not the church’s primary business to make aesthetes of the baptized. It is to make them little Christs. It is, that is to say, to make them disciples, conformed over time to the holiness of the image of Christ. That may or may not involve aesthetic formation in genuine appreciation of the truly beautiful. (This is where Hans Boersma, in my view, went wrong in his reflection last summer on the role of beauty in the liturgy.) Some of the most faithful saints in church history wouldn’t know the difference between a Rembrandt and a Warner Sallman, or which is to be preferred, Bach or Michael W. Smith. Who cares? The beauty they know is the one that matters: Christ himself. He contains all the beauty they need. And if Christ, in his wisdom and mercy, uses kitsch as means of his grace—and he certainly does, every day of the week and twice on Sunday—then glory to God for one more illustration of his great love for us. In fact, the real miracle is that he loves us snobs.

2. Perhaps this is burying the lede, but the real liturgical phenomenon I want to subject to missionary analysis in modern low-church worship is not the style or content of the songs on offer. It’s the very fact that the songs are the star of the show. By which I mean that, outside of high liturgical traditions, in (very broadly speaking) evangelical Protestant churches, there are two and only two options for why one is there in the assembly on Sunday morning—what I have elsewhere called the inner rationale of worship. It’s either the sermon or the concert. Reformed and Baptist churches typically offer a version of the former: preaching that lasts 30, 40, 50 minutes, not in spite of but in service to both what the church and what its members want out of the sermon. Long, rich, deep saturation in the biblical text and the proclamation of the gospel. But if it’s not the sermon—and my anecdotal observation is that previously sermon-centric congregations and ecclesial traditions are in the midst of an enormous shift here—then it’s the concert.

As I tell my students, think of worship as a pie chart; slice it up by time allotment, and you’ll know pretty quickly what a church cares about, that is, what it thinks worship is all about, why people are there or want to be there or should be there. And in many churches today the majority of the liturgical pie chart is a concert performed by a band. The songs performed by that band are the very songs the faithful listened to on the radio or Spotify on the way to church that morning and on the way home afterward. The Lord’s Supper (if it happens, and if it isn’t optional self-serve in the back) takes little more than a few minutes. There are prayers. Some Bible. A modest sermon. But the main event is the stage. This is where “worship”—which is the word young evangelicals typically use to mean “praise and worship music in big church”—is performed by a group of four to ten individuals.

Of even greater theological interest: In such a church the once-normative priestly role of the pastor, whether he be an actual priest, formally ordained, or “just” the pulpit minister, has vanished completely. Even in the lowest of low churches, only a few decades ago, the priestly character of the preacher-minister-pastor was a given. He would call the church to order, open with a prayer, welcome newcomers, etc., and then serve in a continuously public role throughout the service. He would—again, whether he or his congregation thought of it this way—do what a priest does: represent Christ to the people and the people to Christ. For some Protestants this role might include the blessed sacrament, but for all and sundry it culminated in the preaching of the word. Now, for the communities I am thinking of, no longer. I actually can’t emphasize enough how epochal this change is. It is monumental. It is a wholesale shift from every form of liturgical practice in Christian history of which I am aware, outside of the rare Quaker or equally radical departures from the norm.

I said Richard got me thinking. He did. But I’m not thinking of the songs as such, nor their lyrics or style. I’m thinking of their overpowering centrality in worship, their outright displacement of both word and sacrament from the heart of the liturgy. That calls for comment. Let’s don our missionary hats and figure out what’s going on there. I’m all ears.

The Book of Strange New Things, 3

So I don’t think Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things works. Its lead is unbelievable; the prose is unmemorable to a fault; the payoffs meant to explain the eerie human and mental atmosphere on the alien planet are unsatisfactory, and call in turn for further explanations that are never forthcoming.

What works, if anything? A few things.

1. The aliens. Or as Peter calls them, the Oasans. Faber succeeds in creating and depicting—with considerable restraint—a plausible and heretofore unimagined style of intelligent life beyond Earth. We get to know them, but at some distance. They are hungry for Jesus, and believably so. They are stubborn, and stubbornly non-human, yet intelligible. They are both like us (bipedal, five-fingered, linguistic) and unlike us (misshapen, hideous faces; radically communitarian; lacking something like an Ego, though individuated nonetheless). Faber is at his best when he’s describing the Oasan community or narrating a conversation between one of them and Peter.

2. The most theologically pregnant feature of the book is the suggestion that the Oasans are mortal, profoundly vulnerable to suffering, illness, and death, but may not be sinful. This is half a virtue for the novel, because Faber is clever enough to imagine this state of affairs (and, by extension, the effects it might have for pastor-missionaries who think of Sin as the one great problem addressed by Christianity), but not committed or interested enough to follow through on its many pastoral and theological implications. C. S. Lewis did so in the first two books of his Space Trilogy, but that is a work of fantasy as much as it is science fiction. Faber here could have offered a more realistic or at least less of a #FullChristian take. But he just leaves it untouched, beyond the crisis it creates for Peter’s faith, since what the Oasans want is healing of their infirmities, and he doesn’t know if he truly believes he can offer that. Then he decides to leave them. The end.

3. That’s a tad glib. The final two pages, the final paragraph, and the final line are all utterly fitting to the book, and quite apt to the biblical verse on which they are a riff. Speaking of which…

4. The relationship between Peter and Beatrice (hello there, Meaningful Names; may I take your baggage?) that is, or is meant to be, the emotional heart of the novel largely works, I think, though I am undecided on what Faber himself thinks of it. Due to the distance between them, Peter’s poor communication skills, and the roiling catastrophes on Earth, Bea more or less lets go of Peter within two or three months of the six-month mission. Seems abrupt, no? She doesn’t stop loving him, but she in effect hands him over to the Oasans, thinking him dispassionate and uncaring, even as she is carrying their first and only child in her womb. It would not be an unjust reading to say that what the novel reveals is that Peter and Bea’s relationship was fragile from the start, built on codependency (she rescued him from addiction and led him to Christ; marrying him brought her out of shame for her upbringing and past sexual experiences) and persisting mutual neediness (they have no friends to speak of; they have no activities other than evangelizing and caring, together, for their little flock). Each of them has nothing but the other, plus Jesus. When all is right with the world, that’s more than enough. When the world—their world—starts to crumble, it proves not nearly enough. What I want to know is: Does Faber want us to see this? Or does he think their relationship a beautiful, healthy, antifragile thing that is only called into question by the stress shocks, so to speak, of unprecedented distance and trial? In any case, it’s emotionally credible, and while I wasn’t devastated by their increasing detachment and loss, I felt it.

4. Speaking of which, Faber also succeeds in his depiction of Peter’s relationship with Grainger, his main “handler” and only real friend on Oasis. Their budding no-yes-maybe-no relationship—little more than seeking some kind of basic human connection in an emotional wasteland—is worn and lived-in and all too recognizable.

* * *

I cannot conclude these reflections, however, without instancing a few quotations to show how off, finally, Peter is as a character, that is, as a Christian convert, pastor, and missionary (recall: not because his theology is wrong, but because it doesn’t hold together; the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense of his character, or that echoes anything one would find in the world of Christian faith and ministry). First:

“So what’s your role?”

“My role?”

“Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?”

“None that I can see.”

“So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?”

Peter wiped his brow again. “Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz; that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.”

Mmm. Okay. An enormous buzz. Filled with excitement. Did I mention that this guy left behind his wife and all he knew to share the gospel with aliens? That he and his wife, back on Earth, would hand-stitch tracts of Bible stories to be mailed and delivered to foreign, “unreached” people groups? For what? Buzz and excitement? (NB: He’s not a charismatic, and his faith is rocked to the core when an Oasan asks him to pray for her to be healed from a physical injury.)

Second:

He only wished he’d had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn’t a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one’s energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God’s love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body. A miracle similar, in principle, to the one that had given human form to Jesus.

Ah. Gotcha. So this dude’s a “we’re all incarnations of God/Jesus is just the highest version” sort of Christian. Excellent. No further comment necessary, none whatsoever.

Third and last:

“You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last Judgment, 100 percent less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?” Tartaglione’s voice dripped with contempt. “Marty Kurtzburg—now he was a man of faith. Grace before meals, ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,’ none of this Krishna-has-wisdom-too crapola, always wore a jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes. And if you scratched him deep enough, he’d tell you: These are the last days.”

Peter swallowed hard on what tasted like bile. Even if he was dying himself, he didn’t think these were the world’s last days. God wouldn’t let go of the planet he loved so easily. He’d given His only son to save it, after all. “I’m just trying . . . just trying to treat people the way Jesus might have treated them. That’s Christianity for me.”

Faber almost grasps the nettle here. Almost. The problem is that he supposes there are only two options: either fundamentalist (the Lutheran Kurtzburg) or non-fundamentalist (the (Abelardian?) evangelical Peter). Faber’s imagination can conceive a traditionalist Christian believer exclusively as a fundamentalist who travels to an alien world in “jacket and pressed pants and polished shoes.” Equation: true believer = traditionalist = confesses an actual bodily resurrection = fundamentalist = culturally parochial and anthropologically naive stereotypical Western missionary. And since Peter is not that, that is to say the last item, he cannot be any of the others. But Faber also wants—or rather, his narrative requires—Peter to be a Bible-believing, hyper-evangelistic, tract-mailing, low-church Pietist type. One who thinks Christianity is a matter of life and death … and yet who also describes Christianity as an exciting emotional buzz, moralized without remainder into treating other people the way Jesus would treat them.

The novel remains powerful and evocative, and I don’t regret reading it. But the unrealized potential makes the whole thing all the more disappointing. Oh well.

On the church's eternality and "church as mission"

"The Church is Catholic, that is, universal. First, it is universal in place, because it is worldwide. This is contrary to the error of the Donatists. For the Church is a congregation of the faithful; and since the faithful are in every part of the world, so also is the Church: 'Your faith is spoken of in the whole world' [Rm 1:8]. And also: 'Go into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature' [Mk 16:15]. Long ago, indeed, God was known only in Judea; now, however, He is known throughout the entire world. The Church has three parts: one is on earth, one is in heaven, and one is in purgatory.

"Second, the Church is universal in regard to all the conditions of mankind; for no exceptions are made, neither master nor servant, neither man nor woman: 'Neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female' [Gal 3:28].

"Third, it is universal in time. Some have said that the Church will exist only up to a certain time. But this is false, for the Church began to exist in the time of Abel and will endure up to the end of the world: 'Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world' [Mt 28:20]. Moreover, even after the end of the world, it will continue to exist in heaven [Sed post consummationem saeculi remanebit in caelo]."

This is Thomas Aquinas's all too brief discussion of the church's catholicity in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed. Yesterday on Twitter I quoted the last section, on the eternality or temporal catholicity of the church, with some comments following it. Specifically, I wrote, "This text is ground zero for returning to the Bible to counter the argument that the church—God's people— is constituted by mission."

I got a lot of helpful replies, mostly pushing back or challenging my challenge to the claim that the church is constituted by mission. As I said later, the tweets weren't intended primarily to be polemical; I was preparing to teach Thomas's text in class, and so I jotted some thoughts down on Twitter before heading off. And though John Flett's The Witness of God is on my shelf, I've yet to read it, so I can't speak substantively to where our disagreements might lie, if anywhere.

But let me float a few questions to the church-as-mission folks, for greater clarity of understanding, at least on my side of things.

First, what motivates the claim that mission constitutes the church? Or, put differently, what are the stakes? One reply requested a less polarizing approach to this question. My response was and is this: I'm trying to lower the volume in our ecclesiological rhetoric. My sense is that, in recent decades and perhaps the last century, talk about mission has become over-inflated relative to its material importance to the doctrine of the church as such. What I'd like to say, simply, is: Mission is a crucial feature of the church, though it neither defines nor constitutes it. Or perhaps: Mission constitutes the church militant, but not the church triumphant. My question is: What would be lost if we say "the mission is consummated with the kingdom's coming in full, yet the church endures in the new creation as God's elect and holy people," etc., etc.?

Second, is there biblical support for the church's "sending" being something other than or beyond what is spelled out in Matthew 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8? That is, is God's people "sent" prior to Christ's sending of the apostles (and the apostolic church) or following his second advent? Where in the Bible suggests that?

Third, all the counter-proposals I saw (on Twitter: again, Flett excepted) very quickly became metaphorical in the extreme and/or reductive to the point of emptying the concept. That is, "sending" is interpreted in terms of Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, the never-ending journey into the infinite life of the triune God's eternal, inexhaustible fellowship. (My friend Myles Werntz posed this idea.) Well, okay ... but what work is "sending" doing there that epektasis isn't already doing? Why hold on to "sending" when we have another term or concept that is perfectly adequate to the job? Others suggested something like the church's never-ending task in the eschaton of worshiping God or testifying to one another about God's grace and love. Sure, those are traditionally (and biblically) the description of what it is we'll be doing in the kingdom; but what conceptual connection exists between those activities and "being sent"? All kinds of descriptions of life in resurrected glory exist in the church's tradition, and few to none include or require language of "sending." (Cf. Dante's Paradiso.) So what, again, does "sending" add materially to the description? "Sending" cannot and should be reduced to "asked/called to do stuff"/"tasked with actions from and for God." Why not advert, say, to cultic language, in which we will all be priests, ministering in the one temple of the one new world of God? You don't need "sending" language for that.

So on and so forth. But my fourth and last query gets to the heart of the matter, I think, which is this: My push-back on church-as-mission is meant, theologically, to de-center ecclesiology that (a) makes Israel secondary or subordinate to the missionary church and/or (b) conceives of election and peoplehood as essentially instrumental, coordinated as a means to some greater end. My counter—and this will be the article, God willing, I write sometime in the next few years—is that divine election to peoplehood is in part an end in itself. Israel is called to be holy, set apart from the nations, to witness to the divine glory and grace, and to be a divine blessing to the nations: yes and amen. But Israel is also called by God simply out of God's inexplicable, unpredictable love for Israel, and therefore out of God's bottomless desire to bless the children of Abraham, the friend of God. Pentecost and ekklesia open up the people of God to the gentiles through faith in Israel's Messiah, and indeed, that was always God's intention for the world; hence the mission to the nations, Christ's sending of the apostles to every corner of the earth as his witnesses. But when the mission is completed—when the gospel has been proclaimed to every nation and people under the sun, when "the full number of the gentiles has come in" (Rom 11:25)—then all Israel will be saved, and will live as God's people under God's reign in God's new creation, no longer sent, but gathered in the city of God where God dwells with them, they as his people, he as their God. But "peoplehood" will not be defunct as a concept in the same way as "mission," for the saints in glory will not be a mere aggregate of individuals, but the corporate bride of Christ, the holy Israel of YHWH, from everlasting to everlasting.

Those are the stakes as I see them. But what say y'all?