Missiology in late modernity

Catching up with an old friend for lunch he informed me that he had a new three-year contract for the Uniting Church in Australia to work on missiology. My response to this news was that my denomination (Anglican) did not have a clue about what being at mission in late modernity would entail and that I would be interested in his experience.

Later that day I read a short piece by David Bentley Hart in First Things in which he defended his mostly negative attitude to natural law ethics. While this was interesting, the following quote about the achievement of modernity caught my eye:

I simply cannot shed the suspicion that many of us today fail fully to grasp the sole true intellectual achievement of modernity: the creation of a fully developed, imaginatively compelling, and philosophically sophisticated tradition of metaphysical nihilism…. There is now a story that makes nihilism-in the technical sense of disbelief in any ultimate meaning or purpose beyond the physical-plausible and powerful.

In other words late modern man, unlike his predecessors cannot see order in nature, cannot see it as the work of an intentional creator. Nature is now pure mechanism. This makes any quest for meaning in nature impossible. It also means that we can no longer talk about nature as the good creation of a benign God; talk about God's plan in this respect is now no longer possible.

I think this is an indisputable conclusion. Weber described the universe as disenchanted. It is true, the universe has always been devoid of mind or spirit. It is the conflict between this understanding and that reputed to be the Christian understanding that has resulted in the disaffection with Christianity.

If it is true that the universe has always been disenchanted does that mean that the Christian witness is empty? Does it mean that we must regard it as the product of ancient ignorance about the world and move on? The advantages may be that we at last come of age and become "the masters of my fate/ the captain of my soul." No longer do we have to acknowledge an authority above ourselves, we have forsaken the childhood of mankind and at last have achieve independence and adulthood. Now there is only the "overman" and his will for power.

You can see how this might inspire. It feeds into all of the ideas of individual freedom that have been promoted through the ages. But what other alternative do we have when we realize that the world is a totally natural place? The stories and poetry of scripture are obviously a human creation and are enabled by the scientific ignorance of the writers. How could they possibly claim authority over our newly found freedom? There is now no room for acts of God in our conception of the universe. This is the realty that the church, by and large, refuses to recognize, and until it does it will be impotent in our world.

We must understand the two-fold process of modernity. Firstly it projected god as a supernatural being that existed as an extension of the world. Secondly, when this fell apart under the pressure of the scientific revolution, widespread intellectual atheism emerged and with it the sophisticated "comfortable nihilism" that Hart talks about. This has been integrated into liberal democracy to achieve the guiding philosophy of our time.

Is this the end of all talk about God? If it is, then it is best that we all get used to the nihilism that descends upon us, involve ourselves in meaningful work and enjoy our family and friends until the day of our death. This is the conclusion of a large part of our society. That is why the churches are empty. Those in the church who think that we can grow the church through old fashioned evangelism miss this point. They assume that it is business as usual.

The church would be advised to recognize the truth of some of the conclusions of the modern project. God does not exist as a being among beings. God is not the first cause or indeed any cause at all. God does not act in the world in terms of a Spirit acting on matter nor is there a divine plan for the universe. These assumptions about God are based on the view from nature and as such are foreign to the original Hebrew and Christian traditions that existed before "nature" became a description of the world. Rejecting them is no loss and will allow a new theology to arise that is more faithful to the ancient traditions of the Church. We must admit that the Church is playing catch up here, it is recognizing the truth that the non-church world has known for quite a time.

How does the church preach the gospel into this world? A return to an unexamined theology that used to work will not now work. We can stir up some enthusiasm using a mix of pop psychology, biblical literalism and appeals to morality together with an eye to the bottom line but this will not last. It is basically a lie.

When Christianity spread across the ancient world the old idols and gods were easily toppled because they were exposed as projections of human fear and desire. How does Christianity deal with a society that has given over all fealty to a vacuum? I am convinced that the church does not understand the perilous position it is in. It is common for church leaders to think that the old methods will again bring surging congregations back into existence. Indeed, there is always a new fashion and a new language that holds out this hope. We have had the church growth movement, the emerging church, the missionary church. Nothing happens.

Nothing happens because we have missed the mark. We think we are still targeting people formed by modernity who understand that god is universal, that there exists absolute truth, that religion can be used to gratify the self or control a population, that free will and choice are at the center of human freedom. The arguments about the existence of god that go on forever without resolution tell us that what is at stake here is the a god that can only be described in terms of Monarchical monotheism, the construction of modernity.

We have yet to learn that modernity had distorted Christian theology to such an extent that it has no traction in our present society. The god produced by modernity is not the God that Christians worship but an abstraction and it is now almost universally recognized that this god does not exist. Either that or supported by lip service theism.

The church has yet to learn that we now live in the final working out of the modern project and the result is comfortable nihilism. Sure, on the surface it looks good, but it is really an ideology balanced on the edge of the abyss. There is increasing unease and dissatisfaction with the result.

Liberal democracy seems to work even though its foundation is nihilism. It is certainly better than totalitarian forms of government. Surely it is the end of history, the final culmination of humanism in which all are free to act out their choices. Linked with capitalism it has produced peace and prosperity for millions, a feat unparalleled in our history.

However, not all is well in paradise. While there are certainly problems at home, every time I watch television or movies like Breaking Bad, or No Country for Old Men, or The Councelor, or Fargo I have the feeling that something new and awful is on the horizon the likes of which have never been seen before. There is unpitying violence that is beyond the bounds of what we can imagine. And this violence is driven by the drug trade that responds to the desire for a better feeling or oblivion. This is the dark side of liberal democracy. Such developments can only occur in a people for whom nihilism is the only reality. Our much vaunted freedom and prosperity has led to the emptiness of staled desire.

So what does the church do to be at mission in late modernity? Firstly it must examine its understanding of God that is contaminated by the modern project. This should be worked out in terms of abandoning an understanding of god as "existing" and turning to the doctrine of the Trinity that alone can explicate the gospel. Indeed "existence" is too flimsy a description and brings with it no qualities. On the other hand, as my friend Bruce Barber has written in his book "Lanterns at Dusk?" "Rather, today we want to say that God is the conclusion of "what happens" between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit."

The recovery of a fully functional doctrine of the Trinity is the only way Christianity will be able to speak into the void of nihilism, firstly because it is not beholden to the view from nature and secondly it functions as the key to Scriptural interpretation and of how God reveals Himself to us.

The missionary activity of the church must be an activity of retrieval of orthodoxy and a cleansing of the ruins of modernity and the false piety that it inspired. We must remember that the gospel is still potent in the world; it still has the capacity to topple the death dealing idols that we have all built to comfort ourselves. It is just that these idols are more sophisticated and subtle than ever before and have infiltrated our political life to its depths, not to mention the almost total dominance of our educational institutions.

The contest is one of David and Goliath proportions. The church now exists on the fringe of our society. Where it does have influence it is often so conformed to the spirit of the times as to be unrecognizable. The church will get smaller before it recovers and perhaps that is a good thing. The great danger in this happening is that we will find it increasingly difficult to keep an authentic church culture alive. But the gospel remains!