Above All Earthly Pow’rs

ABOVE ALL EARTHLY POW’RS
BY
DAVID F. WELLS

 
Cultured people were thought of as men and women who tended the soil of their lives, who worked at self-improvement, especially by immersing themselves in those matters which were thought to improve the human condition: classical music, great literature, high moral discourses, and the pursuit of disinterested goodness through philanthropy or works of mercy. (p. 17)
In the West, 94% of the population lives in cities and in 1999, for the first time, the world became urbanized with more people living in cities than not.  (p. 27)
The dangers in being modern are those that arise from being cut loose from place and community, from clan and family, and sent off to drift upon a mighty ocean amidst all of its storms, storms of violence with technology has sometimes made possible and storms of loneliness and meaninglessness, with no shore points in view. If the old social order was held together by the bonds of kin and custom, here social relations are stabilized all too often only by fleeting sexual encounters. (p. 28)
Most Asian countries are currently modernizing but a number of Islamic societies are in their structure and function still quite premodern even though they may also have capitalistic interests and may use modern technology. Inasmuch as they remain premodern in their view of the world and in their social structures, it is inevitable that they feel themselves to be at war with the modern Western world with its individualism, its loss of the centrality of God, its irreverence, and its moral vacuity. (p. 28)
The Enlightenment’s centerpiece was freedom. Indeed, its demand was freedom: freedom from the past, freedom from God, and freedom from authority. (p. 29)
Thus was the Christian Trinity replaced by a substitute trinity of reason, nature, and progress. (p. 31)
And here we encounter at least three of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment which have come to us by an entirely different route: the disappearance of God, the disappearance of human nature, and the omnicompetence of the human being. (p. 32)
This leads, for example, to books on spirituality tha tread like the owner’s manual for operating a machine, replete with steps, easy-to-follow directions, and practical “how-to-do-it formulae. In so reducing the greatness of God and of his truth to formulae and rational steps, this mindset makes of Christian faith a small, this-worldly, manageable formula for success which, in the end, comes to differ very little from all of the other small, manageable formulae for success of the secular therapeutic kind which are also on the market. (p. 36)
Craig Gay has argued that “those who operate under the assumption that all human problems can be converted into technical problems amenable to technical solutions are, in effect, automatically predisposed to accept the nihilistic proposition that reality is itself a kind of human artifact, and that there is no truth or order in the world save that which we have managed to construct for ourselves. (p. 36)
Capitalism has no internal logic or morality which will place limits on the abundance or surfeit which it produces. (p. 39)
Desire, today, is the only norm and this is another indication of the way in which our modernized world has brought us to a place which, at a practical level, is godless. (p. 40)
This never-ending transformation of luxuries into necessities, the experience of comfort only fueling the desire for even more comfort, “appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events,” he remarks, “not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century.” (p. 41)
The idea is that shopping should not be done out of necessity alone. No, it should also be fun. The mall should beckon. (p. 43)
Much modern literature has spoken of our anomie, the aloneness and sense of drifting which afflicts those who live in our fragmented social world. (p. 44)
The modern self, as a result, has grown very thin, insubstantial, and distracted. (p. 45)
In the persistent preoccupation with surfaces and appearances, God and matters of ultimate concern simply disappear. (p. 47)
…we have come to think that happiness is unattainable and unimaginable in the absence of comfort and affluence. The means to reach this end – capitalism and technology – have, in the absence of serious engagement with the truth of God and the God of that truth, become themselves the final ends of life. (p. 47)
In the early 1950’s, C.S. Lewis took aim at the evisceration of human nature that some in the field of education had unwittingly accomplished. Their ideas were leaving people without the internal capacity for making moral judgments about the world. (p. 48)
The first major shift in this period was the replacement of Virtue by values. It was the practice of the virtues, those aspects of the Good that ere the same for all people in all places and ere what endured, that gave life its structure an meaning. The belief in Virtue, however, was slowly replaced in the wider culture by that in values, and values could be nothing more than personal preferences which are not normative for all people. Thus it was that values have come to be thought about in an ironically value-free way. (p. 49)
Robert Wuthnow notes that in the pre-War period, churches assumed responsibility for the financial upkeep of 15% of all hospitals, 42% of all homes for the elderly, and about one third of the nation’s institutions of higher education. (p. 55)
As a result, psychologists, and those who pretend they are, have set themselves to “work out ever more affirmative and uplifting therapies that promise not only personal regeneration,” says Lasch, but “in many cases, social regeneration as well.” And the premise beneath it all, what produces this “liberation psychotherapy” as John Rice calls it, is made up of a set of very simple beliefs: we do have a self; the self can be found; the self is essentially benign; and most importantly, the self carries within itself its own healing powers just as the body does. (p. 57)
Human nature, assaulted by the Enlightenment, also disappears in modernized culture but for a very different reason as values replace virtues, personality replaces character, and the self takes the place that human nature had once had. (p. 58)
The gatekeepers to our culture have not allowed Christian ideas past the threshold. (p. 63)
During the Enlightenment, this was worked out in antireligious ways, the Enlightenment thinkers refusing to be fettered by any transcendent being or any authority outside of themselves. In postmodernity, the autonomous being refuses to be fettered by any objective reality outside of itself. (p. 68)
At the same time, postmodern attitudes are part and parcel of our postmodern context which, in its sparest and most unqualified expression, rejects worldviews, absolute truth, and purpose. (p. 72)
Any attempt, therefore, at seeing life in terms of a worldview is dismissed as typical Enlightenment arrogance or as a afailure to see that all thought is conditioned by its cultural context and must, accordingly, be acknowledged as being relative. (p. 74)
To say, similarly, that worldviews have collapsed and been replaced by privatized interpretations of existence is no less a view of  the world which is answering the question as to whether anything is ultimate than were the earlier attempts at grasping such matters. (p. 75)
What was once just a matter of producing goods has become a way of producing culture and meaning, for what we consume has merged into what provides us with our meaning. The road to this meaning, however, is reached only by a path that runs through a valley of choice so diverse and so multilayered that it is easy to become lost. (p. 77)
Reality is fluid, changing, and always “open.” (p. 79)
However, Plantiga counters that , on the Enlightenment’s own assumptions, foundationalism itself cannot be accepted as a basic belief since it is not empirically provable nor is it self-evident. (p. 82)
What, then, does a christology which is wanting to be biblical look like in our postmodern world, a world in which orthodoxies have no place, in which the idea of truth has been abandoned, in which worldviews have collapsed, in which religions and spiritualities jostle side by side with each other, and in which the religious consumer is in the driver’s seat? (p. 90)
Indeed, it would probably be true to say that the context in which Christian faith now finds itself is, from an ethnic and religious angle, more like the century in which the New Testament was written thank say, the nineteenth century in America or, for that matter, Europe. (p. 95)
However, it appears that between the time that the Immigration Act was passed and the end of the twentieth century, the Muslim population in America grew from 800,000 to a little over four million (though some place it as high as six or even eight million), and in 2000 there were more than 1,200 Islamic centers in America. Buddhists, during this time, grew from 30,000 to to and one-half million, and Hindus form 100,000 to one million. (p. 107)
New religions are born – about three every day worldwide – and old ones sometimes fade away or, at least, become inconsequential. (p. 109)
Beginning in the 1960s, and blossoming in the 1970s and 1980s, “spirituality,” for a significant number of people, came into its own and became preferable to “religion.” The distinction that quickly took root as that religion stood for organized belief in its public form. It stood for participation in worship, support of the church or synagogue, and acceptance of its doctrines. Spirituality, by contrast, has come to stand for what is private and internal. What this typically means is that those who are spiritual accept no truth which is not experientially grounded. (p. 110)
In churches, according to one survey, 20% believe in reincarnation, 24% read their horoscopes, and 11% believe in trance channeling. (p. 111)
Private worlds of meaning have no ambitions to project themselves onto the cosmos. They are private, not universal and absolute. And this, of course, means that this spirituality is thoroughly at home in the modernized world which, in so many ways, disengages what is private from what is public. (p. 115)
America is tuned in to spiritual matters but not to religious formulations. (p. 119)
It is very easy to build churches in which seekers congregate; it is very hard to build churches in which biblical faith is maturing into genuine discipleship. It is the difficulty of this task which has been lost in many seeker churches, which are meeting places for those who are searching spiritually but are not looking for that kind of faith which is spiritually tough and countercultural in a biblical way.(p. 119)
The instruction is what comprises the spirituality of the “house” with its set doctrines, its unchanging God, and its absolute moral expectations. Here there are clear boundaries, rhythms and routines, an internalized sense of what is ultimately right and wrong, the disquieting grace which will not allow sin to become routine. That being said, it is also the case that Christian is on a journey. He is but passing through this world in its fallenness and headed for a sure and certain destination which is a “better country.” In all of these points, the postmodern journey is different. The journey is not started by God’s gracious work within the soul, there are no boundaries, no internal rules and routines, there is no ultimate sense of right and wrong, no ability to understand when the road is leading in the wrong direction, no sense as to what the destination is, and no ultimate accountability. (p 123)
It is as predictable as it is desultory that 44% of Americans think that “the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon are different expressions of the same spiritual truths. (p. 126)
That, in a way, is no surprise since 54% also think that the only truth that anyone can find will be found through reason and experience rather than in an external source such as the Bible. (p. 128)
All Gnostic systems of thought, as a  result, were  philosophically dualistic or semi-dualistic, positing that what had been made had been made by an enemy of human beings. (p. 139)
So what is the nature of this insight which held the keep to self-liberation for these ancient Gnostics? It is, of course, “knowledge.” This was not really intellectual knowledge, though it was often accompanied by complex philosophical speculation. It was more of a private insight, an internal revelation, a spiritual perception, one given from within Gnostics believed that they had dropped from a spiritual existence into the bodies in which they were trapped. (p. 140)
It was not so much knowledge of God that was sought, for he was perceived to be ineffable, distant, removed, and unattainable. (p. 140)
It was apparently this observation that led Gnostics, according to Irenaeus, to speak of human beings as falling into three different classes: those naturally spiritual who are assured of salvation and of their election; those who are suspended in equilibrium between the forces of good and evil and whose destiny could go either way; and those who are irremediably held captive to what is evil because they are so thoroughly part and parcel of what is material. (p. 142)
Gnostics saw themselves as caught in a creation that is flawed, dark, ominous, whose rhythms being no connections with anything divine, and whose God is far away, alienated, aloof and incommunicative. (p. 144)
Indeed, 80% of Americans across the generations, believe that people should arrive at their own beliefs independently of religious institutions such as churches and synagogues. (p. 151)
A worldview is a framework for understanding the world. It is the perspective through which we see what is ultimate, what is real, what our experience means, and what our place is in the cosmos.(p. 156)
Everyone, however, has a worldview, even if it is one which posits no meaning and even if it is one which is entirely private and true only for the person who holds it. (p. 157)
Eros spiritualityis the kind of spirituality which arises form human nature and it builds on the presumption that it can forge its own salvation. Agape arises in God, was incarnate in Christ, and reaches us through the work of the Holy Spirit opening lives to receive the gospel of Christ’s saving death. (p. 159)
Evangelical spirituality without theology, that even sometimes despises theology, parallels almost exactly the brader cultural spirituality that is without religion. Evangelical faith without theology, without the structure and discipline of truth, is not Agape faith but it is much closer to Eros spirituality.
This, however, is not understood. Church talk about “reaching” the culture turns, almost inevitably, into a discussion about tactics and methodology, not about worldviews. It is only about tactics and not about strategy. It is about seduction and not about truth, about success and not about confrontation. … Biblical truth contradicts this cultural spirituality, and that contradictions is hard to bear. ….
To speak of this engagement with culture in the language of confrontation is, no doubt, an offense to sensitive evangelical ears, especially to those who consider postmodern culture to be neutral and innocent and all of it a matter only of taste and preference, and it will be especially offensive to those who are most comfortable only hen they are blending in and using it to achieve their own churchly success. That, unfortunately, has been a besetting sin among God’s people going back to the beginning of the Old Testament record. (p. 163)
There can be no transformation of culture by those who have taken themselves outside of it, either physically or mentally, because transformation comes by engagement. (p. 164)
That being the case, a response to this ne spirituality needs to be formulated from three complementary perspectives. Firs, that the self is fragmented, not innocent; second, that truth is public, not private; third, that reality is personal, not impersonal. (p. 164)
The consequence is that we have come to believe that the self retains its access to the sacred, an access not ruptured by sin. (p. 165)
Sin, however, is not some small aberration, some violation of inconsequential Church rules; it is the clenched fist that is raised against God. (p. 166)
This is the fatal principle of all paganism, that the divine and the human are part and parcel of each other, that there is no absolute barrier between God and the creature, that the sacred is found in the self. (p. 167)
And biblical truth was given publicly, within the framework of redemptive history, and the consequence was that the revelation thus given was as public, as unchangeable, and as objective as the events to which it was tied and through which it had come. It was truth that, because it was public, unchanging, and revealed by God, was universal in its reach. (p. 169)
This was at the heart of Israel’s faith, that God was faithful, not capricious or unreliable, that he was the God of promise whose promises never went unfulfilled. (p. 172)
The Holy Spirit who inspired the Scripture is also its privileged interpreter, which means that the content of Scripture is not subject to being overridden by the interests of the interpreter, or those of a later culture, or those of an ecclesiastical tradition. (p. 174)
The difference, then, between an Agape faith and an Eros spirituality, between the God who reaches down in grace and the human creature who reaches up in self-sufficiency, is that in the one case there is address and in the other case only yearning, in the one a summons and in the other  only a sigh. (p. 176)
There is no doubt, he says, that the “secret logic of Western culture” is nihilism, that “the worm was in the bud all along.” (p. 187)
Thielicke has said of this cultural nihilism that it has “an attitude in which the question of meaning is no longer negated but it is simply no allowed to appear. It is a matter of unquestioning surrender to the moment, to the immediate activity, the immediate duty, the immediate pleasure.” (p. 189)
When the world becomes meaningless, it also becomes dangerous. (p. 191)
Luxury and plenty, entertainment and recreation, sex and drugs, become the way of creating surrogate meaning or momentary distraction, or at least some numbness. (p. 192)
Postmoderns find themselves always moving and never stopping, going from one temporary oasis to another in search of palliatives for what is bleak within, but it is always movement without a destination. (p. 193)
Biblically speaking, meaninglessness is primarily soteriological in nature and only secondarily sociological; as it is experienced by people, its soteriological nature is often not comprehended.  (p. 194)
To speak of these contrasting loves, Agape and Eros, the one reaching down and the other trying to reach up, is simply to state that there is a boundary between god and human beings. (p. 204)
There is not a self-help program on the market today which is not, in some way, utilizing the knowledge, resources, techniques, products, and tools of this “age” which, in biblical terms, is dead. It is filled with offers of help and of hope, of meaning and of fulfillment, and even of surrogate regeneration, but they all come from a world that is spiritually dead and therefore of dubious worth. That is an extraordinary, a breath-takingly radical position to take. The New Testament takes it unapologetically.(p. 209)
God’s inbreaking, saving, vanquishing Rule is his from first to last. It has no human analogs, no duplicates, no surrogates, allows of no human synergism. (p. 214)
And though the sacred is now making a return in the modernized West, it is in a form which is wholly domesticated, wholly therapeutic, and completely non-interventional. (p. 239)
What has replaced the idea of providence, of God’s exercise of his rule in life, is chance and luck, and evil has simply devolved into bad luck. (p. 241)
He [Pinnock] observes that every generation reads the Bible with its own issues in view and that it also brings to bear on that reading its own culturally accepted presuppositions. (p. 247)
This is true at two points. First, the open theists’ libertarian freedom is indistinguishable, it seems to me, form the postmodern’s autonomous self; second, the open theist’s vision of the world in which creatures are autonomous is not easy to distinguish from the postmodern’s view of the world as being decentered. (p. 248)
This convergence and this accord explain why open theism of the Pinnockian kind is left with very little to say to the postmodern world since, by a different route, it has fallen into the same morass as that in which postmoderns find themselves. In the one case, the world is now seen to be devoid of a center because it never had one, and in the other the Center has abdicated from being the Center.  (p. 251)
And increasingly what pastors are up against are churchgoers’ preferences. This is a buyer’s market and what the buyer wants has become as large a consideration as what the church wants to give. And what churches have discovered is that these preferences are significantly affected by deep therapeutic longings, by fallacious assumptions about human potential, by a sense of entitlement to wholeness, by an almost sacrosanct assumption about consumer sovereignty, by the entertainment industry, and perhaps even by a desire to be cocooned from society as much as possible. (p. 271)
This raises the issue as to whether traditional religion will be unaffected by its non-traditional delivery and practice, whether content is secure from the change which enters its form, how far and in what ways a traditional orthodoxy can be wrapped in contemporary consumer culture and still survive intake. In other words, the very way in which survival is being sought raises questions as to whether that strategy for survival may not itself bring on the demise of its orthodoxy just as it did in liberal Protestantism. (p. 281)
The reason is that there is no theological truth upon which the methodology is predicated and upon which it insists, because theological truth, it is thought, is not what builds churches. (p. 281)
The fact is that across a broad spectrum of church life, enormous effort is now being invested n making the Church seem desirable for reasons that have nothing to do with worship, biblical knowledge, or service. Investment specialists, entertainers, and inspirational gurus make the rounds. (p. 287)
My point is that these additions to what churches once used to offer illustrate the fact that buying and selling have entered into the Church’s inner sanctum. (p. 287)
What we see is the gospel traversing all socio-economic, ethnic, linguistic, and class barriers to draw God’s people not into subsets of the like-minded who could be comfortable with each other, but into the richly diversified people of God. (p. 294)
What militates against this unity is immaturity of doctrinal understanding (Eph. 4:14) and immaturity in moral behavior (Eph. 4: 25-32). (p. 296)
The apostolic vision and the marketing vision would appear to lead in different directions, as so we need to ask ourselves what fundamental assumptions the marketing of the Church has made which are taking it down a road that it should not be travelling. (p. 296)
Yet the parallels are now being pressed so injudiciously, so unwisely, that the promotion of (imperishable) faith has come to be indistinguishable from the promotion of (perishable) products (I Pet. 1:4,5, 18,19) as if the dynamic of success in the one naturally duplicates itself in the other.(p. 297)
The reason for this is that people in the past have been looking for something different, something which is other than and larger than life, something which cannot be had under a secular guise, and churches which have offered this have flourished. Churches which lose their distinction from the surrounding culture have failed and disappeared. (p. 298)
A majority of 52% of evangelicals, it was noted earlier 52% reject the idea of original sin. (p. 299)
Laurence Iannaccone argued that strict demands strengthen the church in three ways: “they raise overall levels of commitment, they increase average rates of participation, and they enhance the net benefits of membership.” This is true but the reason it is true is that the commitment, participation, and the enhanced value of membership are nurtured by the knowledge that what people are participating in is true. (p. 300)
The paradox is that over the life of the Church of America, as Stark and Finke have shown, the churches which have grown are those in which a cognitive distinction and separation from the culture have been preserved. (p. 301)
If they cannot clarify for themselves who is sovereign – God or the religious consumer? – what is authoritative in practice – Scripture or culture? – and what is important – faithfulness or success? – they will find themselves walking the same road and facing the same fate as the churches that failed before because whatever seriousness now remains will dissolve into triviality. (p. 301)
Barna stumbled upon a most disconcerting fact. Why is it, he wondered, that Boomers were initially so opposed to institutional religion but now make up fully half of the born-again movement? The answer, he concluded,, is that they are practiced consumers who were offered a deal that they simply could not turn down. For “a one-time admission of imperfection and weakness” they received in return “permanent peace with God.” The result was that “millions of Boomers who said the prayer, asked for forgiveness and went on with their life, with virtually nothing changed.” And Barna adds that they “saw it as a deal in which they could exploit God and get what they wanted without giving up anything of consequence.”(p. 302)
But Os Guinness is right to ask what the “decisive authority” is in each church. The Church is only the Church, he says, when it lives by God’s truth, and if anything substitutes for this authority, “Christians risk living unauthorized lives of faith, exercising unauthorized ministries, and proclaiming an unauthorized gospel.” (p. 307)
What is not tolerable, and what will not be tolerated, is the kind of faith which makes absolute claims, which recognizes the right of all religions and spiritualities to exist but does not accept as viable their claims to religious truth. Christianity practiced and believed in private is not in any jeopardy; Christianity which makes its beliefs public in the sense that it asserts its own beliefs as being normative is not wanted. (p. 313)
The more the culture abandons truth and goodness which are absolute, the less the evangelical Church speaks about truth and goodness which are absolute! (p. 314)
It is only as the evangelical Church begins to put its own house in order, its members begin to disentangle themselves from all of those cultural habits which militate against a belief in truth, and begin to embody that truth in the way that the Church actually lives, that postmodern skepticism might begin to be overcome. (p. 315)
The moments of the Church’s greatest influence – and, in fact, its greatest moments – as James Stewart, the Scottish preacher noted, have not been those when the Church reached for worldly power, or when it adapted to its culture, but when it sought to be authentic. (p. 315)
Can the evangelical church once again find its authenticity? (p. 316)
However, the people of God, across the ages, have also learned that they can, indeed, recover their lost authenticity when they are willing to cry to God from the depths and make good on what has gone badly. Today is just such a day, and God has always been, and always will be, the God of new beginnings. (p. 316)