| "So, what are the churches to do? How are we to evangelize post-Christians?...
First, we must purge our churches themselves of almost-nihilism and abstracted Christianity. Or rather, we must pray to God to purge us of them, for we plainly are not going to do it voluntarily. If God is thus merciful, our churches will of course get much smaller than they are...
We also need to face another fact often spoken of but rarely acted upon: that the West is now a mission field. We can no longer count on the culture doing half our work for us. On a mission field, the church has to do its own work, and that means first of all knowing precisely what is NOT there in the culture...it must know and cultivate its difference from the culture...evangelism in the late-modern or postmodern West means rescuing our fellows from superstition, to worship the true God."
-Robert Jenson, "What is a Post-Christian?"
I recieved in the mail today a long-awaited collection of essays entitled "The Strange New World of the Gospels: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World." I must confess that I sought out the wisdom of this volume not only out of concern for my fellow Mainliners, many of whom are rightly called "nominal" by my evangelical friends --but I also sought it for the sake of my own faith, and my own soul. The Post-Christians problem mentioned by Prof. Jenson is not a mere drama abstracted from our community for the focus of our zeal in the New York Times. It is our reality too.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the tragic prophet of our age, foretold that with the so-called "death of God," all of reality would eventually be coroded by the inevitable avid of nihilism. Like a virus, the tragic suspicion of man that there is no future for which to hope or upon which to wait has infected our eschatology, turning every cell of our imagination into abstraction and image, simulacra of the realities they once represented to us. Even Christ's prophet Keith Green often falls prey to a functional nihilism in his music, as he cries "come away, come away, come away with me my love," and triumphally awaits the moment when he can escape "from this mess" to be with Christ. What he is really waiting upon is a form of nothingness, tinged by the psuedo-gnostic belief that the world has been abandoned by God, sucked dry of its meaning, and exists only as a theatre for our own personal salvations.
In truth, the scope of the Gospel is much larger, and much grander. As Christians who are called to wait not upon the end, but upon the New Beginning, the New Heavens and the New Earth, we are not told to contracept our reality with pie-in-the-sky visions of flight, but to prepare the Bride of the Creation, dressing her in the white linen of redemptive transformation by the work of the Holy Spirit through the proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus is Lord Over All, so that when he comes, he may consumate his union with his beloved, and give birth to the fullness of the wedding night of our Sabbath rest.
I am reading about re-evangelizing post-Christians because I can feel in my heart that I too am infected with the virus. As a life-long Lutheran and as equal an heir of Nietzche as I am of Bonhoeffer, my tradition is ripe with the soil of paradox in which both these men could have grown up. That space, that place of unknowing, this Neither-Nor is precisely what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls a "chasm of placelessness," a "forbidden and impossible In-Between" where post-Christians commit the folly of "observing faith from the outside," and as simul just et peccator, "making the measure of faith the power of their own weakness." This place he calls Vertigo; he calls it anxiety, depression, and despair. It is in places of ambiguity that the modern harvest of depression has begun to spring up after the deluge of attacks upon our modernity. Yet Balthasar makes a similar remark as Jenson: more is required of us as Christians in this time, and if that means fewer true followers of Christ the King, so be it.
I feel the virus battling for control within my own system. I struggle, as one who has been Christian his whole life, not to equate myself with the Jews of Romans 10 who knew the truth yet turned away. Yet I find hope in this same passage, as Paul encourages the firstfruits that through the remnants, they will save if they will only believe, repent, and return. We Mainliners, the inheritors of the great traditions of the faith, are such Jews, born into baptism and faith by lineage, yet still awaiting the moment when we shall wake up from our slumber in the light to reclaim our heritage as God's chosen beloved ones, and will wake up to contribute our light to illuminating the darkness. There is always hope in God's prophetic condemnations, and this is what differentiates us from the Nietzsche's predictions of nihilism.
Jenson urges us to view the superstitions of abstracted, post-Christian faith not as something to be transformed from within, but as idols and evils that must be eliminated, as "simply evil, to be dealt with a such," as "bondages of the principaltiies and powers." I know in my life, I have far too ofteh sought to work from within these structures, even within my own soul, hoping to unlock the possibility of mission that lies inherent in them, and the new perspectives of God I think lie within. I see now that this has been a lie, has been a help to the evil and not a hindrance. Von Balthasar states the the Scriptures explicitly forbid a Christian to enter into anxiety, unless it is through the Cross; psychiatrist Peter Kramer has said similar when he claims that the traditional gnosis associated with people of melancholy which is thought to make them deeper, is in fact a dangerous force that leads to self-laceration and suicide (and this from a non-Christian who writes about Prozac!). If I, or any of us, continue in our pain, it is because we have made out of it an idol which serves the pragmatic function of making us feel real in a world that is composed of abstraction. A friend from Honduras put it bluntly in her visit: "you have a strong mind, Matthew, but you do not yet know the One True God."
I ask your prayers, brothers and sisters in Christ, not only for myself, but for the West, and for the Post-Christian community. As Jenson wrote, it is only by the mercy and True Power of the Living God that the Church can be purged by the power of the Gospel of its idols of nihilism, which have seeped into every last cell of the creation. Christ's redemption needs to be applied at the micro-cellular level of our existence and in every last recess of our consciousness if we are to be given the strength of faith, by grace to hope for the love that is to come. I praise God that He has made me aware of the sin in me --but I entreat Him all the more to show me the path out. If I may be so bold, I would claim myself as a spiritual type of all sincere Mainliners who desperately desire the True God, but who are still locked in the struggle within themselves, who are sincere and true, but also sick, almost unto death.
Praise God, who promises that where sin abounds, grace may abound all the more. Let us pray for His Holy Spirit to descend upon the Mainliners, to renew us, and to raise us, as he raised St. Paul, from the path of destruction, to the path of discipleship. Grace and peace to Him who was and is and truly IS TO COME, the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. |
