Strange Days

Genesis presents all of creation as a temple, and humans as divinely ordained priests. Whereas we are used to thinking of temples as buildings, God originally established the whole world as a temple. The divine, the sacred, was not confined to brick and mortar.

Heaven is where God’s will is obeyed, thus there is no delineation between heaven and earth.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant, a humanist and major figure of the Enlightment, dreamed of a community of nations that would adhere to global laws, with this international cooperation leading to a new golden period on earth of perpetual peace.

Non-places are also formative. They are more than closets; they are prayer closets, filled with what James K. A. Smith calls secular liturgies. Liturgies, whether religious or secular, “shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.”

The key point here is that it is what we do rather than what we believe that ultimately shapes us.

It is as Aristotle once remarked, we are what we repeatedly do.

When you are advocating for a new moral order, your tactics are insurgent. However, when you are self-imagined guardians of a moral order, your tactics must be authoritarian.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently noted, in the New Left and alt-right we are beginning to see first signs of truly post-Christian politics,14 a world without forgiveness, which seeks not compromise but the utter humiliation of one’s cultural and political enemies. A political discourse, shaped by the unrestrained ego, and the concept of the leader who sacrifices for the people, but instead enriches oneself, while revenge-tweeting.

If decadence gives way to entitlement and severe individualism, then cultural diffusion naturally follows. That is, shared cultural platforms break. Take, for example, the liberalizing, modernistic dynamic that powers globalization. It is resisted by both the left and the right, but in different ways. Conservatives celebrate the freeing of markets and the internationalizing of trade that globalization brings, but bemoans the way it has eaten away at morals and values. Those on the left applaud the cultural liberalization that globalization brings, but they bemoan the way markets spread economic inequality. So the right and the left, deciding who’s responsible for the decaying of culture, point to each other.

All the powers swarming around us, most of them beyond our understanding, have been disarmed. Yes, they are still active, but only in the same way a chicken is after its head is cut off.

All our human programs, our desire for home, for place. Our Babel-infused dreams of an enlightened, placeless utopia, our political programs both left and right, our individual seeking for satisfaction, all come to naught. Creation still groans. Self, blood, soil, technology, ideology, religiosity cannot save us. The only hope is found in the Savior, who would come and die. Triumphing above all the powers, the principalities, the elemental forces of the world, over you and me. The only truth, the only way, the only answer, found in the re-patterned life, that emerges from God.

Disorder will continue, not because we are entering a particularly disordered time, but because human history inevitably will be disordered until Christ ends the age. We struggle with this because we bought the myth that history had ended, and that we could enjoy a kind of heaven on earth existence without God.

Melancholic, anxious, and pining for the warmer days of the past, churches, Christian organizations, and believers can find themselves retreating from their God-given mandate, forgetting their prime place in Christ’s mission to win the world. Instead of providing a shining alternative light to the anxiety and despair of the surrounding culture, we can simply be a mirror reflecting its worries.

Our unhindered comfort not only makes us spiritually sick but mentally and physically weak. We are like astronauts coming back from space, muscles atrophied after months of zero gravity. Our lack of hardship weakens our resilience.

We are born for struggle, created for a cause, formed for a great battle. We as individuals find meaning in struggle. And the church is God’s army. However, in the West she has been away from battle far too long. Not only has she forgotten how to fight, but she’s forgotten that she’s in battle. What is more, she’s come to expect peace. Resistance is foreign to her. “What battle?” she says. The armor of God is gathering dust in the corner.

What this means is that Christians in the world have a role to fill that non-Christians cannot possibly fill. They have to break the fatality that hangs over the world through reflecting in every way the victory that Christ gained over the powers. They are to be a sign of the new covenant, a demonstration that the new order has entered the world, giving meaning, direction, and hope to history. This means that Christians dare not uncritically and automatically reflect even the best of the world’s patterns of conduct, social amelioration, and service. The world’s agenda and the world’s methodology are not to be theirs, largely because the motivation behind their activities will shape their service differently. And the powers must be confronted with this.

Thus it is the church’s time. In a moment of upheaval, marked by the atmospherics of fear, worry, and anxiety, we may flinch. But if we open our eyes we will see that the church faces some incredible opportunities. The Lord has defeated our foes. Look into the future and they are bowing before Him. Knowing this, we can charge ahead.

“a community of people that, in the midst of all the pain and sorrow and wickedness of the world, is continually praising God is the first obvious result of living by another story than the one our world lives by.”

The brilliance of Christianity is turning our challenges into the gold of a Christlike character. The rhythms and realities of human life are transformed into discipleship resources.

The gospel says, “You are more than your orientation, experience of gender, marital status, or societal role. You are a child of God.” This frees us from holding those descriptors as identities. We don’t have to enforce the border of social identity, because we aren’t behind it. We’re not vulnerable to its attack.

One of the most beautiful aspects of Christianity is that the incredible truth that Christ saves us in His body of flesh by the Spirit is not something we apprehend only spiritually. We meditate on it, we receive it, we build our lives on it, yes, but we can also have dinner with it. I’m talking here about the church.

Christians, formed by the church, shaped by its relational rhythms, abiding with Christ, fighting flesh and living in the Spirit, are built for the real world.

Yes, the new digital landscape has delivered handy ways to connect, as well as unparalleled access to information. Yet its technological utopianism, now monetized and designed to elicit consumer desires at a neurological level, has profoundly formed us.

For a hyperspeed culture of connectivity, the slow and steady pace of discipleship can seem glacial. The silences and pauses of the Christian life, the waiting and abiding, can seem deafening. A life defined by the holy Word, the preached Word, and the Word made flesh, can seem alien in the age of the image, archaic compared to omnipresent screens, online shopping, and continual scrolling. For those shaped by digital silos of the likeminded and the social clustering facilitated by the algorithms of tech giants, encountering the body of Christ—consisting of many parts, made up of people not like us—can be a shock.

I believe this cognitive dissonance, this gap between the promises of twenty-first-century globalized culture and what it actually delivers, is behind much of our epidemic of anxiety. The elemental powers are a smokescreen keeping us from knowing life as it should be.

And so a generation of Christians is saying no to something God designed in part for their sanctification, opting instead for continued unbridled autonomy. (And they are seeing that autonomy often comes with loneliness.)

Why, despite all the advances in church ministry practices, the embrace of cutting-edge technology, the wealth of resources available on the web, are we seeing degradation in the moral and spiritual climate of congregations? Why has the church failed to address the epidemic of anxiety and depression in our culture, the distance between the promises of consumer culture and the reality of life, and the emotional fragility and lack of resilience created by the self-esteem ethos? Because the church has subtly reinforced that very self-esteem ethos. It has propagated the patterns of achievement society and non-places. To put it bluntly, the church has become a marketing firm for Jesus.

The grandeur of Christ’s kingship and glorious kingdom reduced to less conspicuous consumption, physical and emotional well-being, community engagement and simple pleasures. A faith to flourish in exile, but minus Jesus’ call to repentance and relinquishment. A broad path that leads not to the cross but to disappointment, anxiety, and paralysis.

Attempts to communicate Christian truth increasingly run awry because the promise of kingdom living, abundant life, and exilic flourishing can sound a lot like having it all—deep friendships, satisfying marriages, simple rewarding lifestyles, communion with nature, wellness of mind and body. If we are not careful, discipleship and faith can thus become overwritten by the achievement society, in which unlimited potential is promised, earthly expectations are inflated, and repentance is ignored.

The fundamental elements of the universe had irrevocably been changed. No longer is the temple the center of the biblical universe. No longer do the people of God pine for the Shekinah glory to return to the temple. Instead, as Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, the people of God, filled with the Spirit, have Christ as their cornerstone. God’s household, of which Christians are members, “rises to become a holy temple in the Lord … a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:21–22 NIV).

As heavenly citizens we exist in a kind of exile, but in a different epoch, thus deserving of a different missional posture.

we are called to flourish, but we are called also into a spiritual war against the powers and principalities, now humiliated on the cross by Christ. There is a key nuance here: flourishing needs a fight against the flesh. We find meaning not in the promises of the achievement culture, or the mirage of the “end of history,” but in the battle against that which is not God, a conflict that takes on a personal dimension as we battle the flesh within.

is good for us to encounter troubles and adversities from time to time, for trouble often compels a man to search his own heart. It reminds him that he is an exile here, and that he can put his trust in nothing in this world.”