The Gospel and the War for the Cosmos
My talk from our Christ & Culture event, with audio so you can follow along!
[Hey friends. Before I begin, a quick note about this post. First, a big thank you to everyone who came out to our Christ & Culture event earlier this month. The turnout was even better than I had hoped for and I had a great time engaging with everyone that night.
Unfortunately, our live audio feed was corrupted during the recording, so I don’t have video to share here like I had hoped. However, since I more or less wrote out my entire talk before presenting it, I was able to resurrect it in article form here on Substack. I made a few modifications to the wording here and there to make it easier to follow, but the majority of the content is unaltered here, so you’re still getting the same stuff from me.
In addition, I’m trying something new this time. Thanks to Substack’s Voiceover feature, this post comes attached with an audio version so you can follow along in the car as well! This was really fun for me to do. I’m hoping the audio might help some who struggle with longform content to still find a way to engage the material. If this is a feature you enjoy, I would really appreciate your feedback.
Okay, I think that about covers everything. So without further ado, here’s “The Gospel and the War for the Cosmos.”]
Introduction
The Church in America today finds herself in unprecedented times. Not only is our world more confusing and divided than ever before, but that confusion extends up to our highest halls of justice, and that division now marks the distance between the very rows and aisles of our congregations. Urban analyst and cultural critic
points out the dueling fault lines that exist within the modern evangelical church: some are accusing their faith leaders of adopting woke, secular ideologies in place of longstanding biblical doctrines, while others are stunned to see fellow believers support an egotistical windbag in his bid for the presidency. The contrast between these two extremes is striking, and living in the tension becomes harder and more exasperating for the believer with each passing day. As a friend said to me recently, it certainly seems like the ground has shifted under our collective feet in recent years, and in more ways than one.How did we get here? What transpired that put us at odds, not only with our our world, but with our fellow believers in such a new and perplexing way? Renn suggests that, over the course of many years, the way Christianity is viewed by society at large has undergone a transformation. To explain this, he divides our recent history into three stages that aim to reflect Christianity’s declining status in America. He defines them as such:
Positive World (1963–19941): Christianity is in decline, but is still viewed as a social good. Calling yourself a Christian helps you get a job, makes people want to vote for you, and Christian moral standards are still considered normative, reasonable and fair by the majority of people.
Neutral World (1994–2014): Christianity is neither a privileged nor a detrimental status to have, but just one option among many in the marketplace of ideas. The Christian and the vegan are seen as indistinguishable by society as a whole. Think of it as the “whatever works for you” attitude.
Negative World (2014–present day): Christianity is viewed as a threat to the public good.2 To call yourself a Christian in public does you no favors in society and often calls your very character into question. Christian moral standards are seen as dangerous, bigoted and hateful, particularly by cultural elites.3
There is much we could say here with respect to Renn’s paradigm. Many critiques of his “Three Worlds” model have been bantered about since its inception, and I would understand if this premise already has questions digging about at the back of your mind. For example, hasn’t the world always hated Christians for their beliefs? Doesn’t Jesus say that we will be hated by all nations for his name’s sake (Matthew 24:9)? Doesn’t John say not to be surprised if the world hates us (1 John 3:13)? And anyway, does it really matter what “world” we’re living in? There’s always been sin in the world, and since we can never bring about a Christian utopia this side of eternity, isn’t this conversation just a distraction from the believer’s real work of “loving others” and “following Jesus?” Put plainly, who cares?
My intent here is to provide what I hope are good-faith answers to these questions. The heart behind my words henceforth is this: I fear that the church in our day is fighting modern warfare with the weapons and strategies of ages past, then wondering why she has been so thoroughly outmaneuvered by the world around her. We are playing modern NFL football while calling plays for a fullback designed by Knute Rockne: while derived from a good and faithful source, a one-to-one application simply cannot work in today’s context. To wit, it is the responsibility of every generation to apply the truth of God’s Word within the world it inhabits. We must do this because we believe there are eternal implications for us, for our families, and for the world, that are bound up in the way we view our calling as believers. We have been given a Great Commission, a command to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and make disciples of all nations, and we have also been given a Cultural Mandate, a charge to take dominion over the earth, subdue it, and cultivate its God-given goodness. We are called to to fill the earth with His glory through the way we care for the things we have been entrusted with. And that charge extends to every area of life.
With that said, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, I am asking you to assume along with me here that Renn is right about our current state of affairs. And as we suss out the necessary consequences, you can decide for yourself if this framework matches the world you and I inhabit or not.
As we consider the implications of life in the Negative World, I believe we must contend with three key issues that will frame the conversation for us moving forward: that is, how we ought to think about morality, how we think about evangelism, and how we think about what I will call public life.
The God of Order
Let’s begin with morality, if only because I think this will clear up some confusion about why we can talk about today as a particular time called Negative World over and against other times in our modern history.
One of the fundamental aspects of the Negative World is its denial of what has traditionally been understood as natural law and how it relates to the moral shape of reality. To explain this, I want to call on someone who has influenced me greatly on this point, and that is C.S. Lewis. I imagine many reading this will no doubt be familiar with Lewis’ Mere Christianity or Narnia series, but in this case I want to deploy another book Lewis wrote on education called The Abolition of Man. The book was originally published in 1943, but has much to say about the state of the world we find ourselves in. Listen to Lewis here, then I’ll unpack what he says:
“Until quite modern times, all teachers and even all men, believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt …It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know (this) can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”4
At one point in the book, Lewis confesses, “I myself do not enjoy the society of small children.” (As a parent of small children, it comforts me to know that even C.S. Lewis had his moments.) But, Lewis says, because he speaks from within the natural law, “I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colorblind.”
Here is what Lewis is saying: God has made a cosmos and has filled that cosmos with order and structure.5 The very first thing Genesis tells us about the world before time is that it was “formless and void” (Genesis 1:2). The Hebrew word here is tohu va-bohu, which means “wild and waste.” And out of that chaos, from verse 2 of Genesis 1 to the very end of Scripture and time itself, God sets about bringing the cosmos into alignment with His perfect will. That cosmos is ordered in such a way that has integrity, it has congruency, it has compatibility, and it has design. He really is the God of Order.
To this point, the cosmos God made also has an objective, rational and moral order to it, what we call natural law. You are born with a certain set of intrinsic values and beliefs that govern your reasoning (your mind) and your behaviors (your body).6 And that cosmos, the world material and immaterial, is not itself indifferent: it has a telos, an intended objective, and its end is to glorify Almighty God. Lewis is saying you can either be in harmony with the moral order of God’s universe, or out of harmony with it. That which God has made and called good, as he says, “demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”
Now, I say all that to say this: within our Negative World context, this idea of natural law and an objective moral order has been altogether repudiated. The idea of morality today, that which we perceive to be good and right, has nothing to do with natural law, and is instead presented as a choice for every individual to determine whatever they deem to be good. All truth claims have been reduced to what Lewis refers to as subjectivism, a belief system best summarized by The Dude from the Big Lebowski saying “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” If there is no ultimate truth beyond what one feels inside, any claim to an objective moral reality is merely viewed as an assault on the individual and an attempt to gain power over another. Author
put it this way: “the fundamental lie of modernity is this: that we are our own and we belong to ourselves.”7 This belief that we can individualize everything and tailor reality itself to meet the perceived needs of the individual is one of the hallmark distinctions of the Negative World; the cosmos is indifferent, and we create our own realities.Thus, we can see that the Negative World is about the denial of objective reality even more so than what theologian Joe Rigney has called “the peculiar doctrines of Christianity.” In the Negative World, Christians are seen as a danger and a threat to the social order, not because we believe in the resurrection of Christ and justification by faith, but because our belief in the natural law puts us at odds with the poison of subjectivism. We are told we are permitted to believe whatever nonsense we like about crosses and devils within the walls of our churches, but wade an inch into into the waters of what constitutes a boy or a girl and we are branded as bigots, phobics and pariahs. This is because a genuine belief in God’s good cosmos is constitutionally incompatible with a subjectivist worldview.
I can think of a recent exchange I had with someone who made the statement that the church had failed the LGBTQ community. My response to this person was that I agree, but I have a rejoinder. The church has failed the LGBTQ community, but not in calling sinful that which God has called sin. The church has failed the LGBTQ community, but not it its dedication to the proposition that marriage as created by God was and is designed for one man and one woman for the purpose of procreation, companionship and mutual help. The church has failed the LGBTQ community, but not in its steadfast belief that the world God made is good, and to live within the order of His design creates untold blessing for everyone involved. We cannot renounce these foundational tenants under the auspices that do so somehow makes up for the sins of our fathers. It doesn’t work that way.
So what does this mean for us? In the Negative World, we cannot annex off our faith from the objective, rational and moral order of the universe. We must keep this truth firmly affixed in our minds: there is a war going on today, a war for the cosmos itself. And while we know in the end “the battle belongs to the Lord,” that does not mean we should abandon the fight and adopt the posture of peacetime. So fight on we shall. We must hold fast to a biblical worldview and preach the whole counsel of God, which includes our fidelity to the natural law baked into His creation. For the law is a mirror, and therefore cannot save, but in our weakness it reveals our need for a great Savior. We know this, and as we will see later, what God has called good must be good for all people, even those who would wish not to seek Him.
What’s Your Secret?
Given the moral reality we face today, a common temptation Christians will grapple with is the pressure to present their faith in the most palatable way possible in an attempt to convince those who don’t share their views to open themselves up to the possibility of belief. This cultural engagement strategy is best understood as being winsome for the Gospel. I define winsomeness here in the words of James Wood as “minimizing offense in order to maximize openness to the Gospel.” To be sure, we are called to be gracious to everyone, our speech seasoned with salt, and to be the light in a dark world. But as Wood and others have done elsewhere, I want to caution us here against the dangers of being merely winsome, which I believe risks minimizing the Gospel itself.8
In the main, winsomeness is overly informed by how one is perceived, and when left unchecked it subtly slides into little more than “niceness,” allowing others to set the terms for engagement while we convince ourselves we’ve done all we can for them, since Jesus had only mercy for nonbelievers and saved his criticism for the religious folks, right!?9 Sadly, what remains is an overly-simplistic appeal to love one’s neighbor as a veneer to avoid confrontation with those we want to think well of us. In a post-Christian Negative World, Christians can regularly expect to run into this issue when given the chance to share their faith.
This brings us to the heart of the matter, and it’s the very issue Jesus brings to his disciples in John 6 when they question what they perceive as difficult teachings: “Does this offend you?”
Are we ashamed of the Gospel? And if so, why?
To illustrate this, I want to share a story from my own life. A few years ago, my sister was about to get married, and I was invited to my brother-in-law’s bachelor party. We rented a house in Miami with maybe 10 or 12 guys, and all of them except one were either single or unmarried. I met everyone on the first day, and at one point early on while we were sitting outside by a pool, one of the guys found out that I was both happily married and had two children. He was intrigued and said casually, “Hey I gotta ask you, what’s your secret?” And I while would love to tell you that I was ready to pounce on a golden opportunity, I have to be honest: I fumbled the snap. I can’t even tell you what I said, but I can tell you I wasn’t ready to field the question. Not in the sense that I didn’t have enough information, but because I had just met these people, I was preoccupied by how they might perceive me.
I tried to get that moment back all week. But it never came.
And while I can’t go back and make it right, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, what I should have said was this: “You want to know my secret? It’s this: I have nothing to offer my family, no special skills, no wisdom, no tricks of the trade. There is only one thing I have worth anything at all, and it’s Christ. And in Him, I have everything I could ever need and more.”
Because the believer knows that the Gospel of Jesus is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. It is the transforming work of Calvary that sets us free from the power of sin and of death. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
But I said none of that, because I was afraid of what people might think of me.
Friends, the Holy Spirit doesn’t need a better PR rep. He can do His job just fine. Your job and my job is not to vet the Word of God and sift it for dodgy parts, the way a copy editor proofreads an essay before it goes to print. As Tozer put it, what we win them with is what we win them to. And if we try to win others with anything other than the Gospel, we cannot hope they will be ready to receive it when they come face-to-face with the genuine article. When someone asks if our churches really mean “come as you are,” we must not shy away from responding with “Yes, but that does not mean ‘stay as you are.’” We can and should lead with the truth of God’s Word and be prepared to give an answer for the hope that is within us. If Jesus could feed a multitude with five loaves and a few fish, just imagine what he could produce from the quiet boldness of our confession.
People Have Feet
This leads us to the implications for Christians on what I am calling public life. When I say “public life,” I simply mean the way you represent Jesus outside the four walls of your sanctuary and outside the four walls of your home. Everything else counts as public life. This extends to representing Jesus at the grocery store, representing Jesus at your job, representing Jesus in your local community and even representing Jesus in the voting booth.
There’s a sentiment I’ve encountered from some Christians that our personal faith and public life necessarily exist in conflict with each other. I’ve heard this referred to as the “Boromir Option:” the idea that Christians who involve themselves in civic and political duties are merely using the weapons of the enemy to defeat the enemy. And the solution presented by these believers is we should abandon our roles in society and focus our attention solely on fostering community within our local churches. “Why should we care about politics?” they say. “Let’s just focus on following Jesus.” Do you hear how it’s framed as a binary? This paints Christians who seek to use political means to foster a just world as power-hungry, or Christian nationalists. Even outside the church, any Christian who holds a belief that goes against the New Public Orthodoxy is branded as a political extremist.
I want to challenge that notion. In the Negative World, Christians will see the state of our culture and be tempted to abandon our roles as ambassadors in the public square. We will feel the pressure to capitulate on our beliefs in order to avoid being seen as mean or unpopular, to lie for what we are told is the greater good of all.
My point on this is simple, and it comes once again from theologian James Wood: Politics is just one way we love our neighbors.
In the era of progressive liberalism, political quietism is just not a tenable strategy. Like it or not, excusing ourselves from the table because we don’t want people to be mad at us does nothing to advance the cause of justice in a world that is constantly trying to rewrite the dictionary itself on what justice truly is. The Church must answer the bell, to walk in a manner worthy of her calling by embracing the world God made by treating it like a home and not a hotel room. God did not put us here so we could get a cup of coffee on earth before we head off to the real party in eternity.
I remember my teacher Phil Cary once told me, “You know, people don’t have wings. We have feet.” His point was this: when Christ returns at the Second Coming, we don’t suddenly grow wings and fly away. The kingdom of heaven comes down. We have to remember that this is our home, and what we do here matters, and will matter, for all eternity. What you believe about how the story ends has implications for how you live it today. Participating in advancing the cause of justice and the ordering of a just world is no distraction from our calling as believers. In fact, it may well be the whole point.
Here is a practical point for us to remember: it is not loving to affirm destructive lies. Nor should all sharpness be seen as inconsistent with love.10
Consider this quote:
“The more we love someone, the less we ought to present him with the possibility of sinning a great risk to himself…If anyone spares punishment for public injustices, and fosters vices so they are encouraged in order to avoid upsetting the wishes of sinners, he is no more merciful than someone who does not want to take a knife from a little boy in case he should hear him crying, but is not afraid of grieving at his injury or his death.”
Friends, that’s not some right-wing Christian nationalist. That’s Augustine, better known as maybe the most influential Christian thinker outside the pages of Scripture.
Let us be clear: it is not loving to say you love your neighbor while allowing them to do things that will ultimately destroy them. Nor is it loving to say you love your enemies while allowing them to do things that will ultimately destroy others. There’s a name for this kind of behavior, and it’s cowardice. We should not be afraid to name it as such.
It’s true, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:33, that we seek to please all men in all we do, not seeking our own advantage, but that of others, that they may be saved. But, as Puritan theologian Richard Baxter put it, “no man must be pleased by sin, nor his favor preferred before the pleasing of God. If doing our duty will displease them, then let them be so displeased. We can but pity them.”
So what must we do? As stated earlier, do not mistake this as an argument for establishing a Christian utopia. This unresolved tension of our present evil age is characteristic of the already-not yet Kingdom of God. And yet, we do pray “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” We must learn to see our calling as ambassadors for the Kingdom as an inheritance to steward and not a scarlet letter to repent of.11 We can and should work to further the cause of a just world, and that means building our communities, leading our cities, and refusing to compromise where we cannot yield. If that means we are misunderstood or hated for our efforts, then that is our burden to bear. Let us not be swayed by society’s applause. We serve the King.
Final Thoughts
The reality of living in the Negative World can be both challenging and disorienting. But keep in mind this is not the first time the people of God have found themselves in a Negative World, just the first time his people in modern America have encountered this. We can look to the past and see countless examples of how our brothers and sisters in the faith around the world met their moment unflinchingly and without compromise.12
I’ll close with this. The Bible gives us two great examples of how to conduct ourselves in the Negative World. The first is Noah, who along with his family was the only one willing to heed God’s commands in a world that wouldn’t give God a second thought. God’s call came to Noah, and Noah led his family through what had to be years of mockery, indignity, and generally not getting invited to parties. Yet God was faithful and spared them judgment. Once again, we see the blessing of fidelity to God’s command extend not only to the one who obeys, but to his family as well.
Second, we have Daniel, who I think is really the best example of Negative World engagement. Daniel is brought to the literal Babylon, yet refuses to compromise on his faith practices and habits. And despite the threat of death on multiple occasions, God delivers him time and again. Interestingly, he ends up being a government official for four different kings, all of whom come to see him as a trusted voice of wisdom and counsel. Daniel showed us the way forward, and you and I can do the same.
Live not by lies. God’s design is good. Christ is Lord. Let justice roll like a river.
And even when the specter of the Negative World looms large, we know that Christ will have His church, that the gates of hell will not overcome it, and that no weapon formed against us will prosper.
*Image Credit: NASA.
Renn himself states that these dates are mostly impressionistic in their conception, so consider them less important than the argument in sum.
Given the plurality of belief that has led to heterodoxy within various denominations, the prevalence of this attitude today applies most specifically to traditional, orthodox Christianity.
If you find Renn’s model compelling, I would encourage you to check out his video essay from First Things here.
The Abolition of Man, 27-28, 31.
If you’ve ever read Mere Christianity, the very first chapter deals with this exact point.
Compare this to the very first question in the Heidelberg Catechism, which asks, “What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer: “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” See Noble’s book You Are Not Your Own for more.
For a good treatment of the larger winsomeness discussion, see Ben Dunson’s article “The Winsomeness Wars” here.
As an aside, this is a tired oversimplification to the point of being just plain untrue. Jesus gave plenty of challenging rebukes to the less-than-religious folks too. For a brief summary of some of the hard sayings of Jesus, see here.
This is Wood again, who has been both insightful and instructive for me as I worked on this project. Wood has written several articles worth reading, but the piece most pertinent to the present conversation is “This Is Not About Tim Keller” over at American Reformer (less the parts about Keller per se, more the parts about how we think about justice and what is meant by speaking with “gentleness and respect.”)
This is not to say that Christians should not be held accountable for the sins of the past. We must denounce evil wherever we find it, and that includes the evils we see within the church. My point here is that a Gospel centered around the many failures of our forbearers is no Gospel worth anything at all. Christians may indeed fail, but our Christ has not.
For the sake of brevity here, I’ll commend to you the recent works of
, in particular his excellent book Live Not By Lies.
Amen!
Romans 1:16- For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
May God grant us the grace to believe this, help our unbelief, and empower us by the Holy Spirit to boldly proclaim this glorious gospel to the negative world.
Very well done, brother.