Secular challenges to the church
One of the church’s greatest needs is a sensitive awareness of the world around us. If we are true servants of Jesus Christ, we will keep our eyes open (as he did) to human need, and our ears alert to cries of anguish. We will respond compassionately and constructively (as again he did) to people’s pain.
This does not mean that in every respect we ‘let the world set the agenda for the church’, as people used to say, or that we trot like a little dog at the world’s heels. To behave like that would be to confuse service (which is our calling) with servility (which is not), and to interpret sensitivity (which is a virtue) as conformity (which is a vice). No, first and foremost we have to declare and do what God has sent us to declare and do. We are not to pay fawning homage to the world.
At the same time, unless we listen attentively to the voices of secular society, struggle to understand them, and feel with people in their frustration, anger, bewilderment and despair, we will lack authenticity as the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. We will run the risk of answering questions nobody is asking, scratching where nobody is itching, supplying goods for which there is no demand – in other words, of being totally irrelevant, as we began to see in our Introduction.
This chapter explores the threefold quest of modern, secular people, which in fact reflects universal human aspirations. They are hopes which Jesus Christ himself arouses in people, which he alone can satisfy, and which challenge the church to present him to the world in his fullness.
The quest for transcendence
Until quite recently, many assumed that secularism would gradually expel any religious sensibilities from society. ‘Transcendence’ was seen as a rather obscure word whose use was limited to institutions of theological learning. There students were introduced to the distinction between ‘transcendence’ (meaning God above and outside the created world) and ‘immanence’ (meaning God present and active within it). But increasingly people are recognizing that even in modern cultures the quest for transcendence goes on. This quest is a kind of protest against secularization, that is, against the attempt to eliminate God from our own world. Human beings do not ‘live on bread alone’, for materialism cannot satisfy the human spirit. Consider some examples of the recent disillusionment with secularism and the persistent search for transcendence.
First, there was the collapse of European Marxism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Marxism was originally presented as a substitute for outmoded religious faith. But converts were few and far between. As Canon Trevor Beeson wrote about Eastern Europe, ‘the basic doctrines of Communism have neither convinced the minds, nor satisfied the emotions, of the intelligentsia or of the proletariat. On the other hand, religious life has displayed remarkable resilience and, far from disappearing, has in many instances found new vitality and power.’ The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn drew attention to something which the leaders of the former Soviet Union had not expected:
that in a land where churches have been levelled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where clergy are utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labour camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells – they [i.e. the Soviet leaders] could not suppose that beneath this communist steam-roller the Christian tradition could survive in Russia! But there remain many millions of believers; it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out.
The second sphere in which people are seen to be disillusioned with secularism is the desert of Western materialism. Secularism is no more satisfying to the human spirit in its capitalist, than in its communist, guise. Theodore Roszak is an eloquent American exponent of its emptiness. The significant subtitle of his book Where the Wasteland Ends is Politics and Transcendence in a Post-Industrial Society. He laments what he calls the ‘coca-colonization of the world’. We are suffering, he writes, from ‘a psychic claustrophobia within the scientific worldview’ in which the human spirit cannot breathe. He castigates science (pseudo-science, I think he means) for its arrogant claim to be able to explain everything, its ‘debunking spirit’, its ‘undoing of the mysteries’. ‘For what science can measure is only a portion of what man can know.’ This materialistic world of objective science, he goes on, is not nearly ‘spacious enough’ for us. Without transcendence ‘the person shrivels’. His prescription (the recovery of Blake’s ‘visionary imagination’) is woefully inadequate, but his diagnosis is right on target. Human beings know instinctively that Reality cannot be confined in a test tube, or reduced to data in server farms, or apprehended through cool scientific detachment. For life has another and transcendent dimension, and Reality is ‘awesomely vast’.
Third, the quest for transcendence is seen in the epidemic of drug abuse. There are, of course, a number of different interpretations of this almost worldwide phenomenon. In part, it can be an innocent experimentation, or a protest against conventional mores, or even an attempt to escape the harsh realities of life. But it can also be a genuine search for a ‘higher consciousness’, and even for an objective transcendent reality. Carlos Castaneda, for example, describes how he used drugs as a form of ‘divination’, bodily flight or bodilessness, adopting alternative bodies, and moving into and through objects. Clearly not every drug user is pursuing such a distinctive path, but many are trying to escape the boredom of the mundane.
The fourth example of the quest for transcendence is the proliferation of religious cults. Alongside the resurgence of ancient faiths has gone the emergence of new religions. The American clinical psychologist, Professor Margaret Singer, estimates that 2 million people are involved in around 5,000 separate cults in the United States alone. A leading article in The Economist warned that ‘a groping has begun for new forms of spiritual experience’. It added, ‘In that search for God, it is all too easy to blunder into the arms of Satan instead.’ Peter Berger, the sociologist, has given a similar explanation: ‘The current occult wave (including its devil component) is to be understood as resulting from the repression of transcendence in modern consciousness.’
Most striking of all recent religious trends is the rise of the New Age movement. It is a bizarre assortment of diverse beliefs, religion and science, physics and metaphysics, ancient pantheism and evolutionary optimism, astrology, spiritism, reincarnation, ecology and alternative medicine. One of the movement’s leaders, David Spangler, writes in his book Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred that ‘from a very early age’ he had himself been ‘aware of an extra dimension’ to the world around him, which as he grew older he came to identify as ‘a sacred or transcendental dimension’. ‘The rebirth of the sense of the sacred,’ he adds, ‘is at the heart of the new age.’
Here, then, are four contemporary pieces of evidence that materialism does not satisfy the human spirit, and that as a result people are looking for another, a transcendent, reality. They seek it everywhere – through yoga and the Eastern religions, through sex (which Malcolm Muggeridge used to call ‘the mysticism of the materialist’), through music and the other arts, through a drug-induced higher consciousness, through modern cults, New Age speculations, the fantasies of science fiction, and the immersive experience of online gaming and virtual reality.
The immediate Christian reaction to this complex phenomenon should be one of sympathy. For we surely understand what is going on, and why. In the words of the apostle Paul before the Athenian philosophers, men and women are ‘feeling after God’, like blind people in the dark, groping after their Creator, who leaves them restless until they find their rest in him. They are expressing the human quest for transcendence.
This quest for transcendence is a challenge to the quality of the church’s public worship. Does it offer what people are craving – the element of mystery, a sense of holiness, in biblical language ‘the fear of God’, in modern language ‘transcendence’? My answer is, ‘Not often.’ The church is not always conspicuous for the profound reality of its worship. In particular, we who call ourselves ‘evangelical’ do not know much how to worship. Evangelism is our speciality, not worship. We seem to have little sense of the greatness and the glory of Almighty God. We do not bow down before him in awe and wonder. Our tendency is to be cocky, flippant and proud. We take little trouble to prepare our worship services. Sometimes they are slovenly, mechanical, perfunctory and dull. At other times they are frivolous to the point of irreverence. No wonder those seeking Reality often pass us by!
We need to listen again to the biblical criticism of religion. No book, not even by Marx and his followers, is more scathing of empty religion than the Bible. The prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries bc were outspoken in their attack on the formalism and hypocrisy of Israelite worship. Jesus applied their critique to the Pharisees of his day: ‘These people . . . honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’ And this indictment of religion by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus is uncomfortably applicable to us and our churches today. Too much of our worship is ritual without reality, form without power, fun without fear, religion without God.
What is needed then? Here are some suggestions. First, we need such a faithful reading and preaching of God’s Word that through it his living voice is heard, addressing his people. Second, we need such a reverent and expectant administration of the Lord’s Supper that (I choose my words carefully) there is a Real Presence of Jesus Christ, not in the elements, but among his people and at his table. There should be a sense of Jesus Christ himself, objectively and really present, coming to meet us, ready to make himself known to us through the breaking of bread, and anxious to give himself to us, so that we may feed on him in our hearts by faith. Third, we need such a sincere offering of praise and prayer that God’s people say with Jacob, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it’, and unbelievers will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, ‘God is really among you!’
In summary, it is a great tragedy that people today who are seeking transcendence turn to drugs, sex, cults, mysticism, the New Age and science fiction, instead of to the church, in whose worship services true transcendence should always be experienced, and a close encounter with the living God enjoyed.
The quest for significance
There is much in the modern world which not only smothers our sense of transcendence, but also undermines our sense of personal significance, our belief that life has any meaning.
First, there is the effect of technology. Technology can be liberating, of course, insofar as it frees people from domestic or industrial drudgery. But it can also be dreadfully dehumanizing, as people feel they are no longer persons but things, their lives processed by inanimate computers and their personalities reduced to data sets.
Second, there is scientific reductionism. Some scientists argue that a human being is nothing but an animal (what Dr Desmond Morris calls the ‘naked ape’), or nothing but a DNA sequence, programmed to make automatic responses to external stimuli. Statements like these prompted Professor Donald MacKay to popularize the expression ‘nothing buttery’ (human beings are ‘nothing but . . .’) as an explanation of what is meant by ‘reductionism’, and to protest against this tendency to make human beings less than the fully personal.
To be sure, our brain is a highly complex machine, and our anatomy is that of an animal. But that is not a complete account of our humanness. There is more to us than a brain and a body.
Third, existentialism diminishes people’s sense of significance. Radical existentialists differ from other humanists in their resolve to take their atheism seriously and face its terrible consequences. Because (in their view) God is dead, everything else has died with him. Because there is no God, there are now no values or ideals either, no moral laws or standards, no purposes or meanings – except those which individuals create for themselves as they go along. There is nothing that gives my existence any significance except my decision to seek the courage to be. Meaning is found only in despising my own meaninglessness. There is no other way to authenticate myself.
Bleakly heroic as this philosophy may sound, there must be few people able to perform the conjuring trick of pretending to have significance when they know they have none. For significance is basic to survival. This is what Viktor Frankl found in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He noticed that the inmates most likely to survive were those ‘who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfil’. Later he became Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Vienna and founded the so-called ‘Third Viennese School of Psychiatry’. He claimed that, in addition to Freud’s ‘will to pleasure’ and Adler’s ‘will to power’, human beings have a ‘will to meaning’. Indeed, ‘the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’. ‘The mass neurosis of the present time’, he wrote, is ‘the existential vacuum’, that is, the loss of a sense that life is meaningful. He would sometimes ask his clients, ‘Why don’t you commit suicide?’ (an extraordinary question for a doctor to put to a patient!). They would reply that there was something (perhaps their work or marriage or family) which made life worthwhile for them. Professor Frankl would then build on this.
Meaninglessness can lead to boredom, alcoholism, delinquency and suicide. Commenting on Viktor Frankl’s work, Arthur Koestler wrote,
It is an inherent tendency in man to reach out for meanings to fulfil and for values to actualize . . . Thousands and thousands of young students are exposed to an indoctrination . . . which denies the existence of values. The result is a worldwide phenomenon – more and more patients are crowding our clinics with the complaint of an inner emptiness, the sense of a total and ultimate meaninglessness of life.
According to Émile Durkheim, in his classic study of suicide, the greatest number of suicides are caused by ‘normlessness’ or ‘meaninglessness’, when somebody either has no goal in life or pursues an unattainable goal. ‘No human being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means.’
If the quest for transcendence was a challenge to the quality of the church’s worship, the quest for significance is a challenge to the quality of the church’s teaching. Millions of people do not know who they are, nor that they have any significance or worth. Hence the urgent challenge to tell them who they are, to enlighten them about their identity. We need to teach without compromise the full biblical doctrine of our human being – its depravity, yes, but also its dignity.
Christians believe in the intrinsic worth of human beings, because of our doctrines of creation and redemption. God made humanity in his own image and gave us a responsible stewardship of the earth and its creatures. He has endowed us with rational, moral, social, creative and spiritual faculties which make us like him and unlike the animals. Human beings are Godlike beings. As a result of the fall, our Godlikeness has been distorted, but it has not been destroyed. Furthermore, ‘God so loved the world’ that he gave his only Son for our redemption. The cross is the chief public evidence of the value which God places on us.
Christian teaching on the dignity and worth of human beings is of the utmost importance today, not only for the sake of our own self-image and self-respect, but even for the welfare of society as a whole.
When human beings are devalued, everything in society turns sour. Women are humiliated, and children despised. The sick are regarded as a nuisance, and the elderly as a burden. Ethnic minorities are discriminated against. The poor are oppressed and denied social justice. Capitalism displays its ugliest face. Labour is exploited in the mines and factories. Criminals are brutalized in prison. Opposition opinions are stifled. Concentration camps like Belsen are invented by the extreme Right, and forced labour camps like the Gulag by the extreme Left. Unbelievers are left to live and die in their lostness. There is no freedom, no dignity, no carefree joy. Human life seems not worth living, because it is scarcely human any longer.
But when human beings are valued as persons, because of their intrinsic worth, everything changes. Men, women and children are all honoured. The sick are cared for, and the elderly enabled to live and die with dignity. Dissidents are listened to, prisoners rehabilitated, minorities protected and the oppressed set free. Workers are given a fair wage, decent working conditions and a measure of participation in both the management and the profit of the enterprise. And the gospel is taken to the ends of the earth. Why? Because people matter. Because every man, woman and child has worth and significance as a human being made in God’s image and likeness.
The quest for community
The modern technocratic society, which destroys transcendence and significance, also destroys community. We are living in an era of social disintegration. People find it difficult to relate to one another. Yet we go on seeking the very thing which eludes us – love in a loveless world. I summon as my witnesses three very different people.
The first is Mother Teresa. Born in Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, she left for India when she was only seventeen years old. Then, after about twenty years of teaching, she began to serve the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. The same year (1948) she became an Indian citizen, and two years later founded her own order, the ‘Missionaries of Charity’. So India was her home for over sixty years. This is what she wrote about the West:
People today are hungry for love, for understanding love, which is . . . the only answer to loneliness and great poverty. That is why we [i.e. the sisters and brothers of her order] are able to go to countries like England and America and Australia, where there is no hunger for bread. But there people are suffering from terrible loneliness, terrible despair, terrible hatred, feeling unwanted, feeling helpless, feeling hopeless. They have forgotten how to smile, they have forgotten the beauty of the human touch. They are forgetting what is human love. They need someone who will understand and respect them.
I remember that when I first read this assessment of the Western world, I was a bit indignant and considered it exaggerated. But I have since changed my mind. I think it is accurate, at least as a generalization.
My second witness is Bertrand Russell, the brilliant mathematician and philosopher, and uncompromising atheist. He wrote with moving candour in the Prologue to his autobiography:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy . . . I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one’s shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss . . .
Woody Allen is my third witness. Most people think of him as a comedian (he was selling jokes to the press while he was still at high school), but ‘inside the clown there’s a tragedian’. For all his acclaimed brilliance as an author, director and actor, he never seems to have found either himself or anybody else. He describes love-making as ‘two psychopaths under one quilt’. In his film Manhattan (1979), he quips that he thinks people ought to ‘mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics’, but he appears unable to follow his own precept. He confesses that all his films ‘deal with that greatest of all difficulties – love relationships. Everybody encounters that. People are either in love, about to fall in love, on the way out of love, looking for love, or a way to avoid it.’ His biographer ends his portrait of him with these words: ‘He is struggling, as we are surely struggling, to find the strength to found a life upon a love. As the character says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “Maybe the poets are right. Maybe love is the only answer.”’
Here are three people of very different backgrounds, beliefs, temperaments and experiences, who nevertheless agree with one another about the paramount importance of love. They speak for the human race. We all know instinctively that love is indispensable to our humanness. Love is what life is all about.
So people are seeking it everywhere. Some are breaking away from Western individualism and experimenting with communal styles of living. Others are repudiating the age-long institutions of marriage and the family in an attempt (vain and foolish, Christians believe) to find the freedom and spontaneity of love. Everybody is searching for genuine community and the authentic relationships of love. The well-known words of ‘Love, love changes everything’ from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Aspects of Love say it all.
The world’s third challenge, then, concerns the quality of the church’s fellowship. We proclaim that God is love, and that Jesus Christ offers true community. We insist that the church is part of the gospel. God’s purpose, we say, is not merely to save isolated individuals, and so perpetuate their loneliness, but to build a church, to create a new society, even a new humanity, in which racial, national, social and sexual barriers have been abolished. Moreover, this new community of Jesus dares to present itself as the true alternative society, which eclipses the values and standards of the world.
It is a high-sounding claim. But the tragedy is that the church has consistently failed to live up to its own ideals. Its theological understanding of its calling may be impeccable. But, comparatively speaking, there is little acceptance, little caring and little supportive love among us. People searching for community ought to be pouring into our churches. Instead, the church is the one place they do not bother to check out, so sure are they that they will not find love there.
It would be unjust, however, to be entirely negative in our evaluation of the contemporary church. For there are Christian communities all over the world where true, sacrificial, serving, supportive love is to be found. Where such Christian love flourishes, its magnetism is almost irresistible. Bishop Stephen Neill expressed it well:
Within the fellowship of those who are bound together by personal loyalty to Jesus Christ, the relationship of love reaches an intimacy and intensity unknown elsewhere. Friendship between the friends of Jesus of Nazareth is unlike any other friendship. This ought to be normal experience within the Christian community . . . That in existing Christian congregations it is so rare is a measure of the failure of the church as a whole to live up to the purpose of its Founder for it. Where it is experienced, especially across the barriers of race, nationality and language, it is one of the most convincing evidences of the continuing activity of Jesus among men.
Here, then, is a threefold quest on which human beings are engaged. Although people might not articulate like this, we may say that in looking for transcendence they are trying to find God, in looking for significance they are trying to find themselves, and in looking for community they are trying to find their neighbour. This is humankind’s universal search for God, our neighbour and ourselves.
Moreover, it is the Christian claim (confident I know, humble I hope) that those who seek will find – in Christ and in his new society. The contemporary secular quest seems to me to constitute one of the greatest challenges – and opportunities – with which the church has ever been presented: people are openly looking for the very things that Jesus Christ is offering!
The only question is whether the church can be so radically renewed by the Spirit and the Word of God that it offers an experience of transcendence through its worship, of significance through its teaching, and of community through its fellowship. If it can, then people will turn to it eagerly, and our proclamation of the good news will have a credibility which otherwise it lacks.