Guest Post: How Should We Then Live?
Guest Post: How Should We Then Live?
More strategies for Negative World engagement from our Christ & Culture event.
[Hey again friends. If you read my last post, you know our audio feed got corrupted while recording our Christ & Culture event earlier this month, preventing us from sharing our live talks from that night. Since then, I’ve reformatted my talk, “The Gospel and the War for the Cosmos,” into a Substack post with accompanying audio to make the material available to everyone. Today, I’m excited to share with you the sister talk to mine, which was delivered by my good friend Jeff Caldwell. The thing you need to know about Jeff is that he’s an info-junkie and spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about this stuff. To know him is to listen to him, and listen to him, and then listen to him some more. I think you’re gonna love what he has to say. We recorded an audio track of Jeff’s post as well, so you can check that out if you prefer listening to reading. And if you can, please take a moment to leave your feedback in the comments below.
Anyway, that’s enough from me. Here’s Jeff.]
Introduction
“How should we then live?” The question posed by Francis Schaeffer in the title of his famous 1976 book remains a pressing topic for the Church today. This same question was also the focus of a talk I gave recently at an event called Christ & Culture. The purpose of the event was to discuss in long form Aaron Renn’s “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” which you can read more about here. In the article, Renn seeks to explain the marked shift in our culture’s attitudes towards Christianity and how this shift divides the American church, past and present. He does this by separating recent history into three eras, or “worlds:” the Positive World (pre-1994), the Neutral World (1994-2014), and the Negative World (2014-present). To Renn, these time periods are defined by their attitude towards Christianity. In the Positive World, attitudes towards Christianity were generally positive, being known as a church goer was a status enhancer: people wanted to hire you or vote for you, and aligning yourself with the faith gave you some degree of social capital. In the Neutral World, attitudes towards Christianity shifted more towards indifference. Christian morals were seen as one option in the free marketplace of ideas in the pluralistic landscape. Being a Christian was neither a status enhancer nor a social negative. And now, in the Negative World, attitudes towards Christianity have become increasingly hostile, being known as a Bible-believing Christian could lead to the loss of friends, status, or even the loss of employment.
This essay is a synopsis of my talk and will assume two things: first, that Aaron Renn is generally correct and we are in fact living in a Negative World; and second, that this is worth discussing. Yes, sin has always been present in every culture and Jesus promised we would be hated for our faith, but there are unique ecclesiastical challenges present in our time that demand a response from followers of Jesus.
My Story
My story is similar to that of many others. Growing up, I considered myself to be mostly apolitical. I went to church but did not engage in many deep theological discussions. I attended a progressive university and had a difficult time finding my way in the real world after graduation. Then I saw the world change in 2020 (Covid, BLM, LGBTQ) and I struggled to make sense of what I saw as massive cultural transformations unfolding, which led me to discover Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, a book that effectively changed my life. I read the book cover to cover and wanted to talk about it with anyone who would listen. More recently, the company I work for has decided that the SOGI agenda will also become a core part of the organization’s identity and mission1. And since collecting people’s information is a part of my job, this directly impacts me. I am compelled to employ the fashionable jargon du-jour: “what is your sex assigned at birth?” and “what is your gender identity?”
I believe that, in the Negative World, Christians will need to open their Bibles and rediscover two biblical virtues: the fear of God that leads to true courage, and wisdom that leads to prudence. Christians will need to recover a theology of the body and better understand the power of language in our strange new world. Finally, the church will need to start considering how to build an off ramp for people by crafting a coherent, biblical worldview and becoming a real Gospel community.
Know the Fear of the Lord
Scripture is littered with the phrase “the fear of God,” or “the fear of the Lord.” But what does it mean? When we talk about fear biblically, you can conceive of it in two ways: subservient fear, like you would expect to see between a slave and his master, or familial fear, like having love and reverence for a father figure. Here I’ll focus on rediscovering a familial fear of God. And for the sake of conversation, I will attempt to define the fear of God as “a loving, primary reverence to who God is and what He says” or “living for an audience of one.”
The fear of God is foundational. It is the beginning and end of wisdom. And as the fear of God grows in us, we develop a true courage.
I once heard a story of a woman who took her SAT test on a Scantron sheet where you fill in the little holes for each answer. The test took hours, but she was feeling great, right up until she arrived at the last question only to find there was no space for an answer. She panicked as she discovered she never answered number 1. Although she may have got every question right, because she started in the wrong place, she failed. To me this story speaks to the foundational nature of the fear of God. If we don’t start there, we are lost. We see this in Scripture as well. Proverbs 9:10 tells us, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” plain and simple. But that is not all. Later in Ecclesiastes 12:13 we read, “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man”. The fear of God literally bookends all biblical wisdom.
As we grow in the fear of God, we can and must develop true courage. David Powlison explains this well in his book “Suffering,” when he says:
“Grace teaches you courage. When God says, ‘fear not’ His aim is not that you would just calm down and experience a relative absence of fear. He does not say ‘Don’t be afraid. Everything will turn out ok. So, you can relax’ Instead He says ‘Don’t be afraid. I am with you. So, be strong and courageous’ Do you hear the difference? The deep waters have not gone away. Troubles still pressure you. The opposite of fear is courage, not unruffled serenity. Fearlessness is courageous in the face of fearsome things. It carries on constructively in the midst of stress that doesn’t feel good at all. Courage means more than freedom from anxious feelings.” (emphasis mine)
“The opposite of fear is courage, not unruffled serenity.” Powlison shows us that, as the world presses in and makes seemingly impossible demands of us, we ought not seek relief by pursuing the absence of fear and anxiety. The Negative World can appear as a hegemonic force at times, demanding full compliance. At some point, Christians may need to stand up and say “no.” But when we live for an audience of One, He is with us and helps us in our moment of need. We can lean into the promises and presence of God in a world that hates us and becomes increasingly hostile towards us, we can have real courage. “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,” the hymn reminds us, “and grace my fears relieved.” God’s grace teaches us that a familial fear of God relieves the subservient fear of man and our world. In order to truly fear God and have courage in the Negative World, we will need God’s wisdom to know how and when to do so.
Know Wisdom
What is wisdom? An article from Christianity.com was helpful for me in framing this conversation: “Knowledge deals with information and intellect. Reasoning and experience add to what we know. Wisdom enables us to take that knowledge and make proper judgments and decisions. Skillful application of knowledge demonstrates wisdom.” (emphasis mine). Wisdom in the Negative World knows how to skillfully apply God’s truth to our cultural context. Rediscovering God’s wisdom leads to prudence and the ability to make prudential judgements. A few years ago, self-described conservative Christian (I’m resisting the sneer quotes) writer David French got himself into trouble when he wrote that drag queen story hour was “a blessing of liberty”. To paraphrase his argument, if Christians wield state power to cancel drag queen story hour, then maybe the government will wield state power to cancel Sunday morning church services, arguing that DQSH is protected speech under the first amendment. My response to this argument is that we as Christians can make a critical, categorical distinction between drag queen story hour and Sunday morning church service; one of these leads to human flourishing and one does not. One is good, and one is evil. And it is ok to say that. When we elevate the ideal of pluralism above all other values and then detach it from the sacred order, we lose our ability to make prudential judgements about what is good and what is evil. This is a bad strategy for Christians in the Negative World. Listen to Isaiah 5:20, ““Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light, and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” Using God’s Word, we can know what is good and what is evil, and we can make wise, prudential judgements in applying God’s truth to our life.
One final caution on courage and wisdom. Courage without wisdom is only noise. One negative world strategy seen from conservative-leaning Christians is a “bravery for bravery’s sake” strategy, as if God’s wisdom is best applied in dunking on Twitter or owning the libs. There is certainly a time and place for skillful and strategic mockery of the negative world’s transgressive pieties. But courage divorced from wisdom is also a bad strategy. It is ultimately counterproductive and fruitless. We should hold equally to these two virtues as we move into the Negative World. Courage without wisdom is noise, but wisdom without courage can lead to a paralyzing cowardice. The Negative World will make demands of our inner life, our hearts and minds, and we will need equal doses of courage and wisdom. Notice that the Negative World not only targets our inner self, but also sets its crosshairs on the body and the outer life.
Love Thy Body
One key feature of the Negative World is that it is hostile to the body. We see this demonstrated today as a new brand of Gnosticism that I am calling “Therapeutic Gnosticism.” The old Gnostic heresy tore the person into two, dissociating body and soul. It elevated the spiritual and denigrated the material. This is an over-simplification but for the sake of this conversation, essentially Gnosticism says, “soul good, body bad”. Today what we see is the same old gnostic heresy (over-emphasizing the soul, disregarding the body) but with new therapeutic packaging. The clearest example of this is transgenderism. In a documentary called “I am Not My Body,” filmmaker Jessica Savano says, “I know I’m not my body, I’m a spiritual being”. This is classic Gnosticism. But consider the language today surrounding transgender surgeries and medical interventions, that of “life-saving, gender affirming care”. If you look at post-operative pictures or hear stories from de-trans people who had elective sex-change surgeries and now regret it, it is the stuff of nightmares and barbarism. Yet the cultural milieu saturates the narrative around these procedures in euphemistic and compassionate language. We can begin to see how the old Gnosticism has hijacked virtuous language and then coats itself in a new therapeutic gloss. Anne Hathaway famously said on The View that “abortion is another word for mercy” and “abortion is reproductive destiny.” Again, we see overly emotional, triumphant language used. But we also hear that the fetus is just a “clump of cells” as if it is merely goo or snot, void of any humanity or personhood. So we see the emphasis on the inner feelings and position of the mother, and the de-personing of the baby’s body, but all in the new shiny therapeutic language. And because of the internet, the growing number of subcultures where Therapeutic Gnosticism manifests is legion. How can we begin to build a Christian worldview that places a higher value on the body?
No amount of Orwellian wordsmithing or semantic engineering can obfuscate the beauty and simplicity of the Christian view of the person. Listen to Catholic podcaster Matt Fradd here:
“We are body soul composites; each being equally a part of who we are. You don’t have a body, you are your body. If your body wasn’t you, I could never slap you. If my daughter’s body wasn’t her, I couldn’t kiss her goodnight. [If we are not our bodies, then] to kiss your child goodnight would merely be to manipulate the husk that is not you and press it against the husk that is not them. It is precisely because we are our bodies that we should have reverence for the body, because the body expresses the profound mystery of the person.” (emphasis mine)
Fradd is trying to help us recover a Christian anthropology. He is saying the body is a symbol of the soul. The body is a representation of the soul. The body is an expression of the soul. In the Christian worldview, body and soul are interdependent, not independent. Therapeutic Gnosticism wants to pit one against the other, Christianity reconciles one to the other. And it matters what we do with our body.
I was struck by a film I recently watched called “A Hidden Life.” The film is based on a true story of a Christian German farmer named Franz Jagerstatter, who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler during WWII. Throughout the movie people would come to him and try to help save his life. In an unforgettable scene, his lawyer desperately trying to help the farmer says (I’m paraphrasing here) “just sign the paper, just raise your arm and heil Hitler, just say the words. You do not have to believe in your heart or mind. But just say and do these things and you’ll be free.” But Franz looks at his lawyer and says, “I’m already free.” The point of the scene is this farmer realized that Hitler knew the profound effect controlling people’s language and behavior would have on their conscience. Hitler knew if he could get people to raise their hand and say words out loud, over and over, that it would affect their hearts and minds. And Franz refused. I am not comparing the Negative World to Hitler’s Germany. I am making a point about the methodology of compliance. There is a reason why we are witnessing the sprouting up of new language, and also the redefining of old language.
Why Words Matter
A second key feature of the Negative World is that through the use of language, the burden of proof has now shifted; it is no longer the political radical that must explain themselves to the culture, but rather the traditional religious thinker on their back foot, having to defend their views. This is primarily done through language. Consider the word “TERF.” TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” It is a pejorative slur, usually directed at feminists who are critical of gender ideology (women who believe, like most people through human history, that men cannot become women and should not be in women’s sexed spaces). Do you see how this word shifts the burden of proof? The women who hold beliefs considered common throughout all of human history are the ones positioned as “radicals” today. Or consider the word homophobia. Have you ever wondered why the “phobia” is attached to the end of the word? The “phobia” functions to irrationalize the opponent, the traditional religious thinker. As Christians of course we can acknowledge that actual homophobia exists; there are violent, abusive people that hurt same-sex attracted people just because they are attracted to the same sex. However, we also need to see how these words are weaponized in a new way to irrationalize traditional religious thinking.
We are in a war of words; and what we see in the Negative World is ideological warfare. The Negative World battlefront is one of the meaning of words and symbols, which is why today the questions we hear the most are “what is a woman?” or “what is a person?” It is also why there is so much debate over flags and what they symbolize or represent. This is precisely why, if I could remove one phrase from the English language, it would be “that’s just semantics.” Semantics is the study of meaning, and if there was ever a time to dive headfirst into the meaning of words, it is today. Reformed pastor and writer Kevin DeYoung says, “We are using the same words, but from different dictionaries.” In our minds and in our conversations, we need to start defining our terms. We also need to start asking semantic questions. In this war of words our two greatest weapons are questions of (i.e. “what is marriage?”) and questions of teleology (“what is marriage for?”). We can continually point to the meaning of words and the design, purpose and function of those words in order to help people rebuild a Christian worldview. Words matter, so pay attention to your language, because it matters what we say.
Judith Butler, the queen of queer theory, recently gave a talk where she described almost exactly this point, that since more LGBTQ people have come out, people using new words and behaving in a new ways has changed our reality. I heartily agree with her. Language and behavior have enormous power within our conscience, but there is a fundamental difference between her worldview and mine. Butler is an excellent postmodernist: that which is “real” is only what we can see, construct socially, or perform. There is no upper-case Reality, natural law, moral order to the universe, what C.S. Lewis refers to as “The Tao”. But she is correct in pointing out that this is a war over defining reality. But who has the authority to define reality? And who will bring that truth and reality to our confused world?
One-Anotherness
The Church needs to build an off-ramp for the Negative World. And recovering a real “one-anotherness” in the church will be critical in our efforts. Jesus answers the question of how people will know, John 13:35; “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”. In order to begin building this off-ramp, the church must focus on two things simultaneously: crafting a coherent biblical worldview (Gospel doctrine), and becoming a real community (Gospel culture). The church must craft a biblical moral vision that is embodied in the way we treat one another. The church must become a real community, confessing sin to one another in a culture of shame and darkness, praying for each other in a culture of loneliness and need, forgiving one another in a cancel culture, disagreeing in love in a divided and outraged culture. Imagine the power of a Gospel culture on display. What a massive opportunity is before us! I have heard it said recently that “Christianity is the new punk rock,” and I agree. As the Negative World becomes the new established order and forces compliance to its pieties, dissidents will be driven out in all directions, seeking relief. Where will they go?
Konstantin Kisin is a public figure and atheist who was once captured by the new atheist movement of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but has since begun asking some very good questions. In a recent interview with Carl Trueman, Kisin said this:
“The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?”
Kisin is pointing to a huge area of opportunity for the American church. The Negative World causes so much harm and damage to souls and bodies. Are we prepared to welcome them into a real Gospel community that preaches clear Gospel doctrine?
A brief word of caution here. What do we see getting in the way of this “one another-ness” we are looking to build? Two things come to mind: a general lack of clarity and clear biblical teaching, and a right-left divide, or what I will call a paradigm-person divide.
To experience true one anotherness, the church will need to revisit and settle on primary doctrines so that the secondary doctrines have a footing on which to be debated. Rallying around the essential issues of our faith will give us the stamina to appropriately disagree and sort through the secondary issues. For example, if we cannot agree on the inerrant and exhaustive nature of scripture, debating a challenging issue like headship will feel petty and irrelevant. I also see this lack of clarity with cultural issues. For example, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, I heard Christian pastors express how “complicated” and “nuanced” the issue is, with no deeper explanation. Of course, most people can agree that the hard edges of abortion can be incredibly complex and nuanced, such as ectopic pregnancies, genetic abnormalities, assault etc. But as Christians, we should also be able to agree that some things about abortion are not complicated at all (the routine, systematic killing of innocent unborn lives is clearly wrong and should be strongly opposed). In the negative world, the demand for clarity outweighs the supply. And this lack of clarity creates unnecessary confusion and division. Now more than ever we need clear biblical teaching that addresses these disorienting cultural problems.
Another thing that gets in the way of one-anotherness is the right-left divide, which I would argue is better understood as a paradigm/person divide. What I mostly see are surface level reactions on both sides of the spectrum. On the right, I often see a visceral reaction to the world’s paradigms (“Transgenderism, YUK!”), and on the left I see a therapeutic reaction that is exclusively person-focused (“we just need to love them”). Neither of these having a deeper moral rootedness. We need less strong feelings on both sides and more of a grounded, calm articulation of a coherent biblical worldview. Doing so will enable us to critique and deconstruct the world’s paradigms, while not missing the individuals in our lives that need to hear the Gospel.
Take intersectionality, for example. Intersectionality is a legal paradigm that posits that one person can have multiple layers of oppression that intersect in their life and identity; if you’re a woman, you’re oppressed, but if you’re a black woman, you’re more oppressed, etc. As Christians we can acknowledge this paradigm has some merit to it. If someone is poor, their life may not be as difficult as someone who is poor and disabled. But on the ground, what ends up happening is intersectionality begins to create a very postmodern, truncated list of identity markers in a clear hierarchy, with race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation at the top.
Here’s a scenario I run into at my job. I work at an office where people call looking for talk therapy. One day, I got two calls. The first call came from a gay black woman, but this woman had a cell phone, an email address, a job, a car, and a family who supported her. The second call came from a straight white male who was a veteran, lived alone, was not very tech savvy and did not have email. In this scenario, which caller is more marginalized? If I strictly followed the dogma of today’s intersectionality, I may have been tempted to pick the first caller. But when you consider the individual and their particular need, clearly the second caller is more marginalized. The world’s intersectionality paradigm can blind us to other marginalized people. Do you see what we must learn how to do? We need to be able to critique the world’s paradigms, while meeting individuals in their unique stories.
The Way Forward
In the Negative World, Christians must be able to read the room and to know what time it is. We must also recognize that we are not simply talking about status-quo theological quibbles in the church today. The prognosis is dark; the far-left capture of most of our major American institutions is contaminating and destabilizing the Church. The scope of this new orthodoxy’s dominion over our culture is chilling, and it seems like every day we hear of another once-trusted theologian who has been compromised by the Negative World’s pressures. But this does not mean that Christians ought to be motivated by outrage. For Christ is King, grace is a gift, and our hope is built on nothing less. As we strategize as believers and consider our approach to the Negative World, there are many simple, core Christian principles ready to serve us. As the church rams against the gates of hell in this war, we must ask ourselves: what methods and weapons do we use? It is always striking how beautiful and simple the list is: read the Scripture and know it deeply, pray with and for one other as often as you can, bring your family to church and worship together, lead your family well and catechize your children. Our most effective weapons can be found in rediscovering these ordinary Christian truths and practices that are packed with extraordinary and unimaginable power.
*Image credit: Adobe. / **Sources2
SOGI law refers to the collection of health information related to sexual orientation and gender identity, which is now New Jersey state law.
The following are sources from which I pulled my material. I am sure I am forgetting many sources but wanted to share as many as I could think of for now.
Aaron Renn, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” (article)
Aaron Renn, “Cultural Insurgency” (Youtube)
Abigail Favale, “The Genesis of Gender” (book)
“A Hidden Life” (Movie)
Ben C. Dunson, “The Winsomeness Wars” (article)
Carl Trueman, “The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self” (book)
Carl Trueman, Triggernometry interview (Youtube)
David Powlison, “God’s Grace in Your Suffering” (book)
Gavin Ortlund, “Finding the Right Hills to Die On” (book)
Joe Rigney, “The Tao in America” (article)
Judith Butler Explains Gender Theory (YouTube)
Nancy Pearcey, “Love Thy Body” (book)
Paige Benton Brown, Fear of God TGC (Youtube)
Ray Ortlund, The Gospel (book)
What Does The Bible Say About Wisdom, Christianity.com (article)
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