Good News In A Secular Age
Recovering joyful confidence in the gospel.
Is the good news really good? Many of us believers are feeling less confident about our faith—perhaps even embarrassed by aspects of it. Previous generations felt doubts over rational challenges to the faith, such as the historicity of the resurrection or the apparent contradictions in Scripture. However, these days we are plagued by moral embarrassments. On the one hand, many in our culture find the God of Scripture (especially the Old Testament) to be morally repugnant: he seems abusive, vindictive and unjust. On the other hand, there is the bad behaviour of Christians themselves. Think, for instance, of the seemingly endless string of church abuse scandals or indeed the countless ways that Jesus is used to make money or maintain power.
It is no wonder that many of us have lost confidence that what we believe and proclaim is truly good news for the world. Now, in no way do I wish to defend or downplay the tragedy of Christians behaving badly. My focus here is rather on the fact that we have internalized significant doubts about the goodness of the good news itself.
Christianity in a secular age
Such feelings have been fostered by major shifts in our society, in which Christian faith is no longer at home. In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor points out that, back in medieval Christendom, spiritual realities were taken for granted. So, if there was a housefire, people would have blamed it on demons or attributed it to divine judgment. By contrast, today Christians and nonbelievers alike will explain it in terms of poor wiring or human carelessness. We conduct the whole of our lives within a natural framework. It is permissible to add the transcendent realm into the explanation, but it often seems unnecessary or superficial.
Nevertheless, our societies increasingly find this natural framework to be inadequate. We are fascinated by the possibility that there may be “more” than the natural world, and we are hungry for our lives to have transcendent meaning.
This is why recent years have witnessed the explosion of interest in all kinds of “spirituality” and also why a recent Barna survey of teenagers worldwide characterized them as the “open” generation with regard to matters of faith (See Barna - The Open Generation). Thus, a door is opening for Christianity to be heard as good news once again.
However, the same environment has also induced people to place faith in their own intuition to discern what is right and wrong. Gone are days of “classic liberalism” in which we could respectfully debate ideas and values in the public square. In its place has arisen a strident confidence about a number of moral issues; those who dissent have no place in our society. Canadian scholar, John Stackhouse, calls this “the new moralism” (see Faith Today - The New Moralism).
In this new environment, Christianity is often seen as behind the times at best, or at worst a social ill to be eradicated. Moreover, Christianity is part of the problem and therefore cannot be part of the solution. When combined with the various failures of the church and the suspicion that the Bible is out of touch with morally progressive sensibilities, the goodness of Christianity seems to crumble. Young Christians often internalize such judgments deeply in high school and university classrooms. And the “deconstruction” of many prominent Christians over the last several years only serves to fuel our doubts.
What then should we do?
At such a time, it is tempting to look for ways to dress up our faith to appeal to the current palate, or else to retreat into enclaves where threat and embarrassment may be avoided. Neither reaction is particularly Christian. More importantly, both overlook the one thing that I believe is most needed: a rediscovery of the basic goodness of the good news.
The Christian message has produced in the world an astonishing catalogue of goods such as hospitals, widespread literacy, modern science, the idea of human rights, the abolition of slavery, gender equality, and innumerable contributions to the arts, to name a few. Yet, many in our society want these fruits without the Christian root. Much could be said about this (Tom Holland’s recent book Dominion does so at length). But if such goods are to remain, I believe we must be recaptured by the basic goodness of the singular root which produced them.
The God of the good news
At the heart of the good news is an astonishing God who deserves far more of our meditation, fear, and adoration than the tokens we give him. Here is a God who delights in all things thriving and bearing fruit in the places he arranged for them. This God tethers himself to creatures who cause him untold grief, cheapen his gifts, and belligerently repel his interventions. He makes covenants with such people and suffers long on their account. He is a God who is “longing to forgive,” a God who is coming for you to make you wholly alive.
In short, this is a profoundly good God. In Scripture, he is often associated with light, which is a metaphor for such goods as knowledge, truth, sight, beauty, holiness, and life-source. So, when the psalmist says, “the Lord is my light” (Psalm 27:1), he is proclaiming that God is pure essential goodness. Evidently, God is good news.
Yet a God who dwells in light is also a God of immense power—the power by which he calls forth the stars like sentinels, halts the proud waves of the sea, and fashions the mysterious depths of a human being, including our capacity to puzzle after him in his universe. Here is a God who does not answer to me or need to explain himself to me when his movements befuddle me. He is no one’s puppet and will not be reduced to what we find palatable. And he is coming to realign all things with himself. That “coming” will involve melting the mountains and vindicating the valleys, destroying the destroyers, and raising the righteous. Here is a God, in other words, who is unfathomably great, who warrants our worship—yes—and also our fear.
Surprisingly, this too is actually part of what makes him such good news for us. Let me explain. If God is only a figment of our wishes, we would of course always approve of him. But he would also be incapable of delivering us from anything that we can’t crack ourselves with our imaginations or techniques. And if he is real enough, but a small, insecure deity who is content to be a satellite orbiting our lives, then we are no better off. Because what we most need is deliverance from ourselves. Indeed, his greatest kindness is that he comes to thoroughly deconstruct and decentre us in order to rebuild us around himself.
This is the kind of God you need if you want something to be done about religious hypocrisy or the abuses of power conducted in Jesus’ name. The corrective to these ills is not to abandon the good news, but to be more deeply embedded in it. This God also offers us gracious relief from the impossible pressure of being at the centre of our own lives, producing our own meaning. Our society proclaims that you are most truly yourself when you are free to define yourself. “You do you.” “Live your truth.” But the gospel announces that we become more ourselves, not less, only when we are fashioned in the likeness of Christ who is the image of God. So, the aspects of God that unsettle us and the events by which he demotes us are essential to his movement toward us in love.
The basic goodness of the good news
God is pure goodness and absolute greatness. Both qualities are marvelous in their own right. But where these collide together—that is the white-hot centre of the good news. This God combines goodness and greatness so completely that the ultimate display of his power is his laying it down. He deals a death blow to all that mangles and destroys by receiving one himself. He looks Judas in the eye and … washes his feet. By marrying in himself power and weakness, glory and shame, he does the impossible—not to mention the unpredictable.
This is the essential persuasive beauty of Christianity. It’s why a first century instrument of execution now adorns our churches and our necks. And it is just as likely to be the sharp edge of good news in a secular age as in any other age. Indeed, in an age of corrupt political and religious leaders, we encounter in Jesus the very opposite of abusive, coercive, deceptive tyranny. And in an age drawn increasingly to measure greatness in terms of technological, military, or coercive power, the persuasive power of a crucified God which radically redefined the Roman world sparkles once again.
This is the God who moved the likes of the great 19th century Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, to pondering:
“I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully has it tormented me (and torments me even now)—this longing for faith, which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it. And yet … I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour; I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like Him, but that there could be no one. I would say even more: that if anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth and that the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.”
A similar sentiment is expressed by the character Puddleglum in a memorable scene of The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis. The queen of the underworld is seeking to bewitch Puddleglum and his companions with the thought that her realm is the only world. She plants the thought in their minds that they have imagined an overworld with a “sun” and the lion “Aslan” only as an extrapolation from the real cats and hanging lamps they have seen in her world. In a memorable response that attests to the intrinsic beauty of the gospel, Puddleglum defiantly declares:
“Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one … We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.”
These two excerpts reflect an awareness that Christ/Christianity may not in fact be true. In a secular age in which we are aware of other competing worldviews and moral systems, this is to be expected. In fact, this situation generates what Charles Taylor calls “cross-pressures” for everyone: while believers are haunted by doubt, unbelievers are haunted by the possibility of a transcendent reality. Yet, Dostoevsky and Lewis also bear witness here to what we might call the “pressure of the cross”—namely, a God who looks like Jesus on the cross is deeply compelling, persuasive, and inviting—even in a secular age.
It is time for us to rediscover the basic goodness of the good news. This will mean we are willing to be dismantled by a devastatingly great God. At the same time, we will be enthralled with a God who is, to put it quite simply, beautiful. Moreover, our wonder at this particular crucified God cannot stop at the theoretical level. It must lead us to be so wrapped around him that we cannot at the same time be self-righteous or triumphalist. Rather, we will marry in ourselves both truth and love, humility and confidence. Rooted deeply in the goodness of the news entrusted to us, we will have a confidence that is as joyful as it is unshakable—not least because we proclaim a God who weaves even that which embarrasses us now into his beautiful story.
