Convincing the Contemporary Mind Redemption is Necessary
If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our dead bodies. And if they perish, let them perish with our arms wrapped about their knees, imploring them to stay…and let not one go unwarned and unprayed for.
Charles Spurgeon
If the biblical story is not the one that really controls our thinking then inevitably we shall be swept into the story that the world tells about itself. We shall become increasingly indistinguishable from the pagan world of which we are part.
Lesslie Newbigin
If God created the world, then fixing the problems it has fallen squarely on his shoulders. If anything needs redemption it seems to me it's him or her or it. He should focus on saving himself and quite blaming us for his mistakes. When he gets his act in order, then he can come calling. At least he should stop blaming us for his problems by telling us all we are sinners and must repent, then we will be forgiven and he won’t destroy us. Who does he think he is, trying to run that line of philosophical tripe by us?
Zeitgeist “spirit of the age”
The first statement was issued in the 1800s by English preacher extraordinaire Charles Spurgeon. It was largely non-controversial in 19th century London; graphic in its depiction, desperate in its spirit. The meaning of the words, the belief that truth was a category that could be trusted, were still intact. Life was still tough enough in a world with plagues and without antibiotics, oxycodone, penicillin, and good anesthesia to keep everyone focused on the reality of pain, death, and of the second death.
The second quote comes a hundred years later from a missionary statesman and scholar who spent thirty-seven years working in India. He was a rousing success in that enchanted land, writing and preaching with eloquence in the language and dialects of that land. This Englishman adapted to a culture which Western logic, and its commitment to the law of non-contradiction, frowned upon and rejected. There could be more than one way to understand the universe, to establish truth, and ways to find God. And for that matter, many, many other gods who were not personal or particularly interested in the human problem. Yet Newbigin returned to Birmingham, England some forty years after his departure with his orthodoxy, intellect, and integrity well in hand. He released his seminal work, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, in 1989. It is a masterpiece of philosophical navigation through our skepticism and confusion.
The third statement I wrote to depict the “spirit of the age.” There have always been skeptics, but now, another forty years after Newbigin, skepticism prevails. It is in the philosophical air we breathe. It isn’t a formally held position as much as an attitude that we humans have problems; we know the world is broken. But who broke it? Was it ever not broken? To believe it was once perfect and not broken means believing in a very convenient fairy tale like the story about Adam and Eve.
I recall a conversation from thirty years ago when I recognized a benign non-combative skepticism was coming. I was seated next to a young MD who had just graduated from medical school and was starting her career. We had a couple of hours to discuss all things “religious” on the flight. She seemed fully engaged and was very cordial as I worked through her list of intellectual problems with Christianity. After answering many of her questions, it was clear that I had thought a great deal more about the issues than she had. I thought I was in the driver’s seat and thought to myself, “Now she is ready to pray with me to commit to Christ.” When I asked her if she had ever considered committing her life to Christ she said that she had thought about it. Then she said the oddest thing, “But it really doesn’t matter because no one can really know the truth. If I become a Christian, it becomes just a placeholder until more information comes along in the evolutionary cycle.” She presented to me that truth as a category was no longer something to be taken seriously and certainly not something to dedicate your life to.
What she went on to say was that it was God’s responsibility to make things right. Her personal guilt or sin was rooted in the false narrative presented by the church. You can only imagine how much this attitude has grown in the last decades and how much more work God has to do now than then.
This is what Lesslie Newbign in another statement warned us about.
“Every missionary path has to find the way between these two dangers: irrelevance and syncretism. And if one is more afraid of one danger than the other, one will certainly fall into its opposite.”
As people on mission with Jesus, such as with the young physician, I endeavored to make Christ relevant. The temptation in the conversation was to capitulate and fall into syncretism. Syncretism means to be sympathetic to several contradictory religious ideas, to coexist like the common bumper sticker suggests. This is becoming one of the church’s fastest growing sins - the idea that accommodation, agreement, and compromise with the “spirit of the age” will help the church be relevant. One sage warned, “Do not marry the spirit of the age, for you will soon become a widower.”
So, how do we find our way back to a place where the contemporary person sees their redemption as necessary?
First, let’s attempt to deal with why the human mind has trouble with this concept. Why is the gospel not good news to the Jews or the Greeks? Essentially, in Pauline categories, this includes everyone. To the Jews it is foolishness, as he put it in 1 Corinthians 1: 22, “So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense.”
William Blake expressed the powerlessness of the human being thrown into the world.
My mother groan’d, my father wept;
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Blake was aware of good and evil.
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born;
Every Morn and every Night,
Some are born to Sweet Delight;
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
Blake powerfully conveyed the mysteries and inequities of life. He lived a life of joy, accomplishment, maltreatment, poverty, and sadness. He was a Romantic poet and artist trying to find meaning after the despair of the enlightenment, much like the idealists in the 21 first century who seek a utopia. Communist China knows socialism doesn’t work and that is why they have abandoned it for capitalistic fascism. Marx has lost credibility with Russia, China, and the former USSR. The only hold outs are Cuba, North Korea, and the powerful ruling class - the largely white rich leaders and upper 1% of the American public. And it will crumble quickly once the reality of the human condition comes to visit their lives and penalize them for being stupid and foolish. Then the private university will fall because it is too crazy and it helps no one. Even tenured professors in English departments will repent when all they own can fit in a stolen shopping cart.
The real trouble starts when the confused, such as Blake, are thrown into this veil of tears without a good story that explains it. If humans don’t like the story because it requires repentance and submission they start thinking, “If I were God, then I would do this.” From that very high place, where the air is thin and the dangers many, the best and the brightest proceed to prosecute God. The difference between the idealist and Lucifer is that the devil didn’t know, or would not face, his limitations. Three times during the wilderness temptation he offered Jesus power, bodily comfort, and the kingdoms of the earth; all Jesus needed to do was kneel down and worship Satan. He offered Jesus what Jesus already had, just not then and there. Jesus knew about and took the long view.
Satan never repents, he never accepts his limitations, he never changes his mind. Therefore, he will spend eternity outside of God, even totally destroyed. The idealistic and confused human however, can repent, change their mind, and find reconciliation with this hideous to some and capricious to others God who in reality is the only one with a solution. More accurately stated, the only one with a solution that can be accomplished. People have come up with their own ideas, such as just put it back like it was in the first place. If things were perfect in the pre-fall days, God, just take us back and let’s start over. I suppose erasing history, and all its injustice, misery, and wars has an appeal. But then you would need to erase all the good, and there is much more good than evil. Then of course, you would need to erase all people - their families, their histories, and their accomplishments. It sounds like a great deal of work and there would be no one left to care about if it had been done at all. Could we all just agree that whatever perfect is we don’t have it? If it ever existed it is now smashed and gone, and we are fallen, alienated from our creator, and from one another.
Maybe a clean start that included the admission of our responsibility to the problem would actually help, but where do we start? It just so happens that we don’t need to start up or think up anything. This God, that so many blame and hold responsible for the awful world in which we live, has made his move. And he actually did something that, since he went first, may convince us to join him in doing the same thing and that big idea of redemption can begin. More next time.
