Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a teacher, a former pastor, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has practicing tae kwon do and pondering the mysteries of light.
Over the past few years, and for the life of this blog, I’ve been trying to find a way to name what is going on in the world and in the church. Because something is obviously happening. We see it in the news. We encounter it on social media. And more importantly, we feel it deep within us. Something is not right.
Now sure, from a Christian perspective there is nothing new about this. The Christian doctrine of sin makes it clear that something is not right about our world and about us. But I’m inclined to say that our present experience goes beyond the reach of this doctrine, or at least beyond the reach of common explications of this doctrine. Or maybe I’m just seeking a deeper way to articulate the way that we experience the distortions of sin in our world these days.
Over the summer, I began working on a book. The book is an exploration of the interaction between science and faith in the modern world, and more specifically I’m using light as a means of exploring this interaction. So far, it has been a lot of fun to work on. As a part of this project, I’ve been looking at ways that other ages (like the Medieval age, for example) imagined the shape and workings of the universe. And through this study, I have found new language about what is going on in the world and in the church. Quite simply, I have become convinced that we are living in disordered times.
Disordered, disintegrated, disconnected, disenchanted, dissonant. This is the language that I think offers the clearest explanation of what we are experiencing and have experienced in our world over the past several years, if not decades. The fruit of this disorderedness on the surface of our lives manifests in polarized politics, free-floating rage, the elevation of rhetoric as truth, and a deep unsettledness about who we are and what this world is all about. But I’m convinced that the core issues lie far deeper. We feel disintegrated from the world we live in, disconnected from our fellow human beings. Our lives lack coherence, meaning, and purpose. We strive after fame, pleasure, and wealth as we seek to fill a longing felt deep inside. We want to do right, but the web of unintended consequences that even our simplest actions produce is stifling. We consume our way through a flat world of products and entertainment (designed just for us!) and itch for something more. But despite having virtually all the knowledge in the world and anything we might want at our fingertips, we remain deeply unsatisfied.
In the next post, I will try to articulate more clearly where this feeling of disorderedness stems from and how it came about. And in future posts I want to dig more deeply into specific ways that our lives are disordered or disintegrated. But for this week, I want to just look at the big picture and consider the implications, especially for Christians, of living in disordered times.
We all feel the disorderedness of the world and since we feel it as disorder, our primary reactions revolve around efforts to create order. So we find different organizations or movements attempting to reorder things around a specific narrative or ideology. For some, that narrative centers around the idea that America is somehow divinely ordained by God for some great eschatological purpose, and our goal is to purify the country and recover what God intended when he established the nation. For some, it is the ideology of tolerance, diversity and social justice that offers the key to reordering our times. Some look to economics, some to technology, and some just seem to be accepting good, old fashioned hedonism as the way forward. And of course, some still look to the church.
Oh, the church. The place where order should be found. Why does it feel just as disordered and disintegrated as the rest of the world? Why does every new initiative in the world of church leadership feel just like another instance of the blind leading the blind? Why does the Christian faith so often feel just as dry, just as flat, just as manipulative as the world does? Why is the church just as polarized and divisive as the rest of the world? And most importantly, how then can any Christian live faithfully in these disordered times?
Even if you don’t use the language of “living faithfully,” I believe that, in one way or another, we are all seeking ways to live well in these days. We are striving to alleviate the collective tension that we experience every day due to the disintegrated lives we are living in this disordered world. We are seeking some respite from the chaos, some bit of sanity in a world gone crazy, some firm foundation that we can rest upon and catch our breath.
I think the roots of this disorder are deep. They have been growing for hundreds of years, but it has really been a series of events over the past century or so that has brought this feeling of disorder to the point of crisis. Which means that there are historical, philosophical and theological reasons why the world feels upside down. I’ll get into this more in the next post, but if this is true then it means that the issues are settled deep within us and our culture and there isn’t any easy solution.
By the way, that is my big takeaway: There is no easy solution. The world is disordered and it will remain disordered for a long time. No matter how hard we try, no matter what programs and initiatives we put in place, no matter what technological advances we make, no matter what good things we do, we will not be the ones to reorder the world. I hope that every Christian reading this has the humility to recognize the truth in that statement. The church’s efforts to re-order the world have largely done more harm than good. (Yes, I’m implicating myself in that statement.)
The cliché today is to say that we are living in unprecedented times. This is a ridiculous statement. It is nothing more than the ignorant hubris of modernity. Others have lived through times that were even more disordered and chaotic than ours. (Think of the fall of Rome, or the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, or for goodness sake the Holocaust.) If we can be wise enough to recognize that others have walked a similar path before us, we may also be humble enough to learn from them.
On that note, I can think of no better biblical paradigm for our current time, than the Exile of the Northern Kingdom around 587 BC. For the nation of Israel, this was a time of chaos and disorder. And I mean that quite literally. The exile was a time of intense disorder for the people of God.
The temple was the center of order for the Israelites. This is true for their cultic, religious lives, but it is also true on a much deeper level. God was the bringer of order. He is the one who tamed the primordial waters and created a space where humans could be fruitful and multiply. God was the Agent of cosmic order and the temple was the place of His presence here on Earth. It was the center of order on the Earth. To move away from the temple was to move farther from God’s ordering presence and deeper into chaos and disorder.
In the exile, the Babylonians came and destroyed the temple and carted the people off to a foreign land. Their world had become disordered. The people of God now found themselves living in a strange land, full of strange people, strange customs, and strange languages. They were foreigners. They had no power. They had no influence. They were outcasts. And God was okay with that. In fact, God wanted it that way.
One of the most famous verses of the Old Testament in the past couple decades has got to be Jeremiah 29:11. Here God makes a promise:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” - Jeremiah 29:11, NIV
We love this verse, or at least we loved it in the 90s. It seems to offer hope in a disordered world. And it does. But it is part of a much larger message, a message sent to the exiles who were living in the disordered world of Babylon. And there is much that we could learn by paying attention to the whole letter.
For instance, God’s statement in verse 11 actually begins in verse 10 with the words, “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.” Seventy years. Think about that. I’m 40. In 70 years, I won’t be 110, I’ll be dead. As will most everyone else my age, everyone older than me, and likely even many from my kids’ generation. Nearly everyone who heard this message from God must have realized that it implied that they would never return to the Promised Land. They would live the rest of their lives in a disordered world.
After the 70 years, the Bible says, the people will call on God again. They will pray to Him again. They will seek Him with all their heart. And, “‘I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity…to the place from which I carried you into exile.’” In other words, God brought about the exile. In the eyes of God, the exile was a good thing for the nation of Israel. It was His will that His people experienced disordered times. This is obviously the case if you follow the story as it unfolds through the books of the Kings. God sent his prophets to warn the nation over and over again that a time of trial would be coming. But the nation was stubborn and refused to change and thus…exile.
I can’t help but believe that the disordered times that we are living in are part of God’s good will. It seems to me that this exile is God’s will for the church in this time. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once said, “God is killing the church, and we goddamn well deserve it.” In other words, there are good reasons why the church isn’t flourishing today. Just like there were good reasons for the Babylonian exile. I doubt we will be able to fully parse out all the reasons for our present disorder, but if the biblical story is our model then the basic answer would seem clear: idolatry. We have done exactly what Paul warned against and we now worship and serve created things rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:25). We worship celebrity pastors, leadership gurus, podcasters, worship leaders, biblical interpreters. We worship feelings of comfort, certainty, and righteousness. We worship emotional experiences. We worship institutions, organizations, buildings, denominations, creeds, polity, doctrine. We worship activism, diversity, inerrancy, infallibility. We worship power. But more than anything, we worship the Bible itself.
We are in exile. For a reason. By God’s will.
If we go back a bit in Jeremiah’s letter from God to the exiles, we find more wisdom. Just before talking about the 70 years, God warns the nation not to heed the lies from various prophets and deceivers who “are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them,” says the Lord. God says that there will be plenty of voices promising to have the answer. Promising a path to re-ordering. Promising truth. Promising power. But we are not to trust any of those voices. Their messages are lies. We will all die in exile.
But all is not lost. For exile is not a place devoid of God’s presence and goodness and order after all. At the beginning of the letter, God gives commands to the people of God who find themselves suddenly living in a disordered world. “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.” Even here, in a disordered world, the people of God can still live into the original blessing of being fruitful and multiplying. We often forget, but God knows that original blessing is a more primary part of our world than original sin. I take the command to marry and find spouses to include the people of Babylon, which means that God is also assuming the promise that the people of God will be a blessing to the nations. Even in a disordered world, Israel can still experience the blessing of God and live into the promise of God.
And I have to believe, that we can too. God is still good, even when our world is upside-down. (Or perhaps we have become accustomed to living in a world that is truly upside-down from God’s perspective and the disorderedness we feel today is just an instance of God tilting things back towards the way they Really are.)
If this paradigm is true, then maybe we need to dig into the prophets and people of exile and see what their faith looked like and how they lived. Perhaps Daniel should be the church’s main leadership guru. Maybe his quiet, powerless, non-political, faithful way of living is just the example we need. He was integrated into the Babylonian world, and served the Babylonian authorities, but he never lost himself to the Babylonian ways of thinking or being. He was able to maintain his own faith and identity without the need to force it upon other people. He was willing to be sacrificed on the altar of Babylonian ideals and gods instead of thinking he could be the one to redeem those ideals and gods and used them for God’s good.
God worked through Daniel, but it seems to me that this was possible primarily because Daniel had no power, no authority, and could affect no change himself. What if the church acted more like Daniel as we seek to live faithfully in our modern, disordered exile?