Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
There's too many men, too many people
Making too many problems
And there's not much love to go around
Can't you see this is the land of confusion?
So sang the band Genesis in their 1986 song Land of Confusion. It isn’t hard to connect with these lyrics today, nor with the chorus which says,
This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth living in
Certainly this call resonates with many of us today as we are acutely aware that we live in a world that is in many ways fractured and hurting. The relevance of this song hasn’t been lost. In 2005 the band Disturbed covered it and earned their first #1 Rock Single. Their version made a minor change to one line in the bridge, but otherwise kept the lyrics the same. Which means that both bands, Genesis in 1986 and Disturbed in 2005, sang this third verse:
I won’t be coming home tonight
My generation will put it right
We’re not just making promises
That we know we’ll never keep
It is a noble sentiment, but it isn’t hard to see how the 1986 generation failed to “put it right” as did the 2005 generation, as is today’s. Which is why the song is still compelling. We resonate with the problem and the desire to enact change, but our history suggests that we haven’t found the right formula to make meaningful change happen.
I think this song’s history offers us another insight into the question I posed two weeks ago: What Are We (White Evangelicals) So Afraid of? For generations now we have recognized a number of societal ills with each generation taking up a set of causes and promising to solve them. The failure to do so surely has led to a subtle feeling of futility that has grown in us all over the past few decades.
Consider the social causes that Evangelicals have tended to champion. The more conservative side has spent decades advocating for pro-life legislation and fighting for traditional definitions of marriage. And regardless of the political configuration, the trajectory of our society continues to move away from these values. The more progressive Evangelicals have engaged in civil rights movements and social justice causes. And despite all their efforts, “Black Lives Matter” is perceived as a threatening phrase by some, and justice seems to be just as far off as it ever was. How can this not breed a sense of futility in those who have rooted the outworking of their Christian faith in such causes? And how can this sense of futility not bring with it anger, fear, and fragility?
I think this speaks to the secularization of the church,* which is a huge idea that I am surely foolish to introduce here. But let me try. The idea is that the world we inhabit is a flat, dry place devoid of mystery, enchantment and transcendence.** It is a world that we think should be fully understandable. Nothing should happen that we can’t explain. And resorting to supernatural causes is being intellectually dishonest. Ours is simply a material world meant to be used and consumed. No part of it or our experiences within it point us to anything greater. We create our own meaning. We exist for no purpose other than that which we give ourselves.
Within such a world, the highest goal is the flourishing of humans and human community. And though, as Christians, our words continually invoke the supernatural, our values and our deeds are firmly rooted in projects related to aspects of human flourishing in this life, and honestly not much else.
This is good work. But it can’t be the full purpose of the church. Instead, to quote a book that I’m about to start reading, “it is only other-worldliness that guarantees an appropriate kind of this-worldliness.”*** That is to say that we only maintain the right focus and perspective on this world, when our values and goals are aimed toward another. This is a tricky issue as there have been plenty of cases of evangelicals whose concern with heaven has led them to ignore the issues of this earth. But once again C.S. Lewis comes to our rescue, this time in Mere Christianity.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.
It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.
I almost cringe when I read these lines from Lewis because my mind automatically supplies all kinds of objections. But I think there is deep truth in them. And parsing that out will be the focus of next week’s post.
*For more on this see, How (Not) To Be Secular by James K. A. Smith. For much more on this see, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
** If you haven’t read Reframation by Hirsch and Nelson you really need to.
*** From the preface of Heavenly Participation by Hans Boersma