“For many people today, setting aside their own path to conform to an outside authority simply does not seem comprehensible as a form of spiritual living,” writes Charles Taylor in A secular era. This statement is at the heart of the greatest challenge facing the contemporary Church.
To help our neighbors trust Jesus for their salvation, we must make the Christian gospel understandable.
Comprehensibility is not the same as making the gospel enjoyable or comfortable. Rather, the Gospel must be imaginable to people who can no longer conceive of true faith as a possible vision of reality in a secular age.
The beauty and goodness of the good news must be highlighted, in all its complexity and simplicity. We must demonstrate that a reality exists outside of our minds and experiences and that the gospel requires conformity to this external reality. This requires disrupting materialistic conceptions of the Christian faith through contemplation of the gospel, teaching a sound biblical sexual ethic, and questioning the belief that we belong to ourselves.
Contemplate the transcendent
Many of our neighbors will have difficulty conceiving of God as a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent being who desires to know us and love us as his children.
As modern people, we imagine ourselves to be “buffered,” to use Taylor’s language. Being protected means we feel we can dictate the terms on which we engage with the world. This requires us to live within an immanent framework, which involves viewing reality in essentially materialistic terms. We are cut off from the world beyond our own experience and interpretation.
Even for Christians it is difficult to imagine something like a rainbow as a sign from God. We simply experience it as a material phenomenon. Part of making the Gospel understandable involves helping people see and experience the Christian faith as more than a lifestyle option, disrupting their conception of God by affirming its reality, identifying and questioning the immanent framework and to engage in practices like the Lord’s Supper.
It’s hard to break our materialistic assumptions because we’ve all been swept up in the buzz of a technological age, an age that demands more and more of our time and militates against contemplation and reflection. The Gospel is cognitively taxing. It disrupts our very understanding of ourselves.
The Gospel is cognitively taxing. It disrupts our very understanding of ourselves.
Breaking free from the immanent noise of technology to think deeply about the gospel requires contemplation. Ultimately, the results of any presentation of the gospel depend on the work of the Holy Spirit. But we must be aware that the distracting material circumstances of our neighbors actively work against the type of thinking that brings awareness to our sinful nature and our need for a redeemer.
To reach our neighbors, we must invent practices that lead people away from distracting technology and invite them to contemplate the transcendent wonder of the gospel.
Adopt good sexual ethics
Because we are experiencing a second sexual revolution, we must be able to communicate the beauty of a biblical sexual ethics. We need to clear up the confusion about what Christians believe in general (as a post-Christian culture develops), but especially in the areas of sexuality and gender.
We must be able to explain the essential relationship between marriage, our bodies, sex and procreation. Marriage should be presented not just as a license for sexual relations or a legal bond, but as a covenant grounded in the act of creation and a living metaphor for Christ’s love for his Church.
Our bodies must be understood as belonging not to ourselves but to God and, in a limited way, to our spouses and children. We must teach that the purpose of sex involves both the pleasure and intimacy of the couple and an openness to children. Although not everyone is capable of having children, procreation should be considered part of the very nature of marriage. These ideas will be a challenge to our secular neighbors – and to those in the Church who have been taught that their bodies belong to them and that children are just a lifestyle option.
Communicating this sexual ethic must take place off platforms that require soundbites. Social media is not conducive to discussions about our faith. Social media is particularly hostile to explaining sound biblical sexual ethics. Rather, the local church must be an example of the beauty of Christian sexual ethics. Additionally, Christian leaders must offer lengthy and nuanced explanations of why the Bible’s sexual ethics are beautiful.
The world is going to tire of empowerment and sex positivity. The Church has the opportunity to offer something true and liberating.
Remember we are not our own
To tackle the root of these cultural barriers, we must holistically challenge the belief that we are ourselves and that we belong.
The concept of self-ownership makes it difficult for modern people to accept external authority as a source of spiritual life. We can understand the search for authentic spirituality within, but not outside of ourselves. We imagine ourselves autonomous. And we have been taught that autonomy is our greatest freedom.
Whether from the mouths of mid-century existentialists, advertisers, or Instagram celebrities, we are told that we are radically free to create our reality because we are our own. However, this ideology is not liberating. It’s a form of slow death, and the evidence is all around us.
Our neighbors (and many in the Church) publicly rejoice in their radical autonomy. During this time, they are miserable, fragile, insecure and desperate. The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg argued convincingly in Self-weariness that there is a direct relationship between the modern conception of the self-created, autonomous person and modern expressions of depression and anxiety.
The burden of self-belonging overwhelms us. When our neighbors realize that autonomy is not a source of life but a form of imprisonment, the alternative…belonging to God– becomes more conceivable.
Resist cultural pressures
It is not that these three emphases define the heart of the Gospel or that they are unique to Christianity. Rather, contemplating the transcendent, displaying biblical sexual ethics, and maintaining awareness that God owns our lives each reflect an effort to push back against three important pressure points in our culture. None of them East the Gospel, but each of them actually poster the implications of the gospel in a way that is distinct from the world around us.
Our neighbors (and many in the Church) publicly rejoice in their radical autonomy. Meanwhile, they are unhappy.
As the Western Church faces unprecedented change, there are opportunities for us to offer a true counter-narrative. This requires us to make Christianity understandable.
The gospel will always be offensive, but it has not always been globally incomprehensible as it is in secular times. Our task is to probe and find the points of tension where we can disrupt misconceptions, offer a beautiful alternative, challenge dominant social myths, and proclaim the good news.
