It was the contention of the Protestant Reformers that Christian faith will always be misunderstood if the Cross is misunderstood. Or, to put the matter positively, those who understand the Cross aright, grasp the meaning of Christ aright and can then see the entire purpose of revelation clearly. For Christ and his Cross stand at the center of God’s disclosure of his moral will and saving ways in Scripture. Indeed, without the Cross we are without the magnifying glass through which his love and holiness are most keenly seen. To stand beneath the Cross is to stand at the one place where the character of God burns brightest and where his resolution of the problem of sin is sounded for all time.
It is hard to stand here, though. The cost of admission to this place is the humbling of our pride — intellectual, moral, and religious. For to stand here is to repent of our proclivity to elevate our own standards of what is right and wrong to universal norms and to accept the judgment of God in their place. It is to repent of our trust in the innocence of the self, which is the fount of our self-righteousness, and to acknowledge instead the corruption of the self. It is to displace ourselves from the center of the universe we inhabit and to elevate Christ to that place of honor. It is to see in our chronic self-absorption nothing other than chronic self-centeredness. It is to accept the sobering evaluation of God on fallen life rather than the rosy assessment we are inclined to register upon ourselves. This is a hard place to stand, and few choose to stand here. That is why so many have dismissed the Cross. It is why in the last century liberal theology claimed that Paul had perverted the original doctrine of Christ’s death to give us this kind of Cross. It is why in our own time, much contemporary theology is proposing, in one scheme after another, that since the Cross achieved universal salvation, there is no price of admission to its benefits. No humbling, no repenting, no believing is necessary.
The reality, however, is that in the postmodern world the enmity sustained is toward God and not toward our fallen selves and their extension in culture. Indeed, wherever the Church has lost its sense of sin, and much of it has, this antithesis toward the self and culture naturally disappears on the mistaken assumption that it can all be lost without an antithesis toward God, his Christ, and his Word replacing it.
That is as profound a mistake as any Christian can make. In this fallen world, the issue is not whether we will sustain this sense of antithesis. The issue only will be who is its object. Is the antithesis against God or against the world?
The evangelical Church today imagines that this choice does not have to be made, that it can be on friendly terms with both. This attitude, more than anything else, accounts for the Church’s diminished spiritual stature – for why it appears as a moral pygmy among the dilemmas of the modern world, which seem to be giants. Amidst enormous pain and confusion, evangelical faith seems by comparison to be trivial, as it indulges itself with “happy clappy” praise songs, light Sunday morning dialogs or, worse yet, drama in their place. Contemporary evangelicalism places a premium on being amused and, like a petulant consumer, makes its sales people in the pulpit tremble. The consumer, after all, is always right. Unless it recovers some spiritual gravity, some seriousness, some authenticity, indeed, unless it recovers the substance of classical spirituality, the evangelical Church will rapidly become an irrelevance in the modern world.
Scripture is clear in its teaching that the “old man,” who has lived comfortably in the fallen world, must die with its entire understanding of the self and of its relationship to God, if the “new man” is to emerge in Christ. Faith lives in the midst of this polemical context. It lives between the ways of death in culture and in the self, on the one hand, and the ways of life in Christ, who is above it, on the other.
Faith thus requires both a transition in loyalties and in enmities. The transition from the existence of the “old man” to that of the “new” is one from faith in one’s self to faith in Christ, but it is also a transition from enmity toward God to enmity toward the world. That is why the Church’s idolatry is so profoundly wrong. The enmity that should be expressed toward the self in its fallenness-Jesus, after all, did speak of the necessity of crucifying the self if one is to become a follower – must inevitably be redirected against God if the self is going to be indulged rather than crucified. This is why James asks indignantly: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity against God?” (James 4:4). The problem of idolatry is always a problem of both misplaced love and misplaced enmity. So, how can we exchange the enmity we have for God by one for the world? How can we exchange the love we have of self and the world by a love for God?
We ask this question assuming that the answer has to be complex. How could it not be? The Church, after all, is living in the late twentieth century, in a culture with no cognitive horizons and with a moral core that has crumbled. Should we not then use new languages for translating the Gospel into the contemporary vernacular, either the psychological or the contemporary? Do we not have to have at our finger tips all of the latest information about Baby Boomers and Generation X if we are to be relevant?
The fear of which I am speaking is an old one; it has everything to do with our unbelief and nothing to do with the complexities of making the Gospel known in the late twentieth century. The only way that our love of self can be exchanged by a love of God is through believing the Gospel. The only way that a moral enmity toward God will be replaced by a moral enmity toward fallen human life is through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit remaking fallen nature, on the basis of Christ’s atoning death, so that the recovery of the Imago Dei might begin as we are “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). The Church must find the courage to recover both the language and understanding of sin. It must reinhabit the universe of meaning given in Scripture. It must recover its enmity toward fallen human nature and fallen culture and stop mumbling on these subjects. It must care more about truth than its success, more about faithfulness than being culturally at home. It must find the strength to believe that modernity poses no problems that are insurmountable to the grace and power of God. Despite all of our sophistication and wealth and knowledge and information, the dilemmas of life in the postmodern world are still addressed in God’s economy by the same Gospel the Church has always proclaimed to confront human dilemmas. The Church’s problem today is simply that it does not believe that, without tinkering, the Gospel will be all that interesting to modern people. This is not even an accurate assessment. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of the Gospel and much to do with the flaws of those who are hesitant, or embarrassed, to proclaim it undiluted. Why should the postmodern world believe the Gospel when the Church appears so unsure of its truth that it dresses up that Gospel in the garments of modernity to heighten its interest? It is a self-defeating strategy. What the Church needs is not more of these strategies but more faith, more confidence that God’s Word is sufficient for this time, more confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit to apply it, and more integrity in proclaiming it.
In the long section of Paul’s description of the ministry in 2 Cor. 2:17-6:10, one thread is apparent throughout. It is Paul’s confidence in what God will do through the ministry. “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God” (2 Cor. 3:4); “Since we have such a hope, we are very bold” (3:12); “Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy- of God, we do not lose heart” (4:1); “So we do not lose heart” (4:16); “So we are always of good courage” (5:6); “We are of good courage” (5:8). Today, the Church does not share Paul’s confidence, it does not have his courage, and it is not bold. It cannot see the bankruptcy of postmodern culture, nor does it see that understanding sin in biblical terms unlocks so many of the painful dilemmas of life that would otherwise remain closed and inexplicable. It thinks, instead, that new strategies are called for, when all too often these strategies entail new evasions that make it look increasingly likely that the gates of hell will, indeed, prevail. And what it has forgotten is the greatness of God’s power to liberate people from their blindness and to remake life. Today’s churchly trendiness is really yesterday’s unbelief.
Men and women of faith have always been confronted by the insurmountable task of proclaiming what seems absurd in a world of unbelief. That, however, is why the sovereign grace of God is necessary. Consider, for example, the remarkable discovery in the Jerusalem temple, toward the end of Judah’s existence as a nation, of “the book of the law” (2 Kings 22:8), which may have been Deuteronomy. The young king Josiah, great grandson of Hezekiah, had set out to renovate the temple, which was in a state of much disrepair. This was part of the reform that the king had slowly begun initiating over the prior decade (2 Chron. 34:3). It was in connection with this work that the high priest, Hilkiah, made his momentous discovery, which greatly sparked the impetus for reform.
The king’s own reaction to the reading of this book was immediate contrition (2 Kings 22:11; cf. Neh. 8:1-9:38). He realized that the idolatry and social abuses of which Judah was guilty would bring down upon it the full weight of God’s judgment. Josiah, full of sorrow and repentance, sent a commission to the prophetess Huldah to learn how the fate of Judah would be worked out. Her reply was that Josiah would die at peace before the awful sentence would fall on his people. “Phis notwithstanding, Josiah called the people together. They, too, heard God’s Word. They were moved to repentance. It is clear from the prophecies of Jeremiah that this repentance was not heartfelt enough (Jeremiah 2-6). Nevertheless, the people of Judah did follow the king in renewing their covenant (2 Kings 23:3). Josiah also restored the Passover Feast (2 Kings 23:21-23), drove out the spiritists and mediums (2 Kings 23:24-25), and destroyed the pagan cult shrines and places of sacrifices (2 Kings 23:11, 14-15, 19). An important reformation followed.
This description of Josiah’s reform is so sparse in its details, unfortunately, that we are left ignorant of its inner mechanics. What we can say is that the cultural darkness that prevailed at that time was very great and that the cultural pressure to capitulate was also very great. It is also clear that those who had domesticated the abominable practices of the pagan religion in Judah had lost their moral sensitivity. Their consciences had apparently become singed, and the moral fabric of life had worn very thin. The book of Deuteronomy was strange and alien to those who heard it, for Judah’s religion at that time was in complete shambles.
Josiah knew of the preaching of the prophets Jeremiah and Zephaniah. Perhaps this had encouraged him. The Word of God was able to penetrate the conscience of the most rebellious and obtuse. Against all odds, and in the midst of a troubling world situation, this Word brought back what had long since disappeared: a sense of sin, the understanding of how morally offensive to God we are when we do not live by and within his law.
And thus it has been, again and again, across the ages. In the hand of God, the biblical Word is a fearsome weapon, “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and narrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And thus it is, Hebrews says, as we stand in the presence of God by its work, that everything is “laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:12-13). Is it too much to hope that the evangelical Church can yet again recover its moral seriousness, that it can recover its vision of the holiness of God, its trust in the greatness of his power? This is the key, strange as it may seem, to Christian effectiveness in the postmodern world. It is the reform of the Church of which we stand in need, not the reform of the Gospel. We need the faith of the ages, not the reconstructions of a therapeutically driven or commercially inspired faith. And we need it, not least, because without it our postmodern world will become starved for the Word of God.
