Modernity as a Barrier to Belief - Part II

Last week we concluded with a discouraging assessment of the "worldview" thinking on the part of professing Christians and pastors but what about the next generation? According to Barna in 1999, 82% of American teens say they are Christian. Three out of five teens say they are "committed Christians." One-third (34%) of all teenagers describe themselves as born again, a figure unchanged in several years. And more than seven out of ten teens are engaged in some church-related activity in a typical week: attending worship services, Sunday school, a church youth group or a small group.

According to these figures we should be mightily encouraged but sadly that is not to be the case. If we take a closer look at the theological and doctrinal beliefs of young people today I suggest that my case has been made: Christianity in America is in a pathetic state of decadence and decay.

According to the latest research two out of three teens (65%) say that the devil, or Satan, is not a living being but is a "symbol of evil." Three out of five teens (61%) agree that "if a person is generally good, or does enough good things for others during their life, they will earn a place in Heaven." Slightly more than half (53%) say that Jesus committed sins while He was on earth. Thirty percent of teens believe that all religions are really praying to the same God, they are just using different names for God. In total, 83% of teens maintain that moral truth depends on the circumstances, and only 6% believe that moral truth is absolute. When it comes to believing in absolute truth, only 9% of born again teens believe in moral absolutes and just 4% of the non-born again teens believe that there are moral absolutes.

I charge that in light of these conditions, either Christianity is not true or Christians who today are living in America have lost the understanding of true Christianity. I, of course, am convinced that it is the latter.

We seem to have no real or meaningful understanding of who God is or of how we are to relate to Him. We, like the world have set Him at a very great distance; an irrelevant being whose influence in our daily lives and personal decisions is marginalized at best, or worse, ignored altogether. "We, like sheep have gone astray" embracing a "way that seems right to us" but is ultimately focused on ourselves and not the Holy, Living God; the Creator of all things and Redeemer of the world. We have descended to a "form of godliness (religious practice) but deny its power." Our post-enlightenment, modernistic minds have pushed from the realm of possibility any idea that the supernatural God still intervenes in the daily affairs of men - that God remains central to every event and every action. The result is that we have confirmed for the world that they are correct in saying, "God is not real" or at the very least, "He is irrelevant." (Jeremiah 2:13) This is the great tragedy in America today and the call upon those who still know Christ as Savior and King is to stand, at all cost, against the 'current of this age' with love, grace and sound minds grounded in theological truth, doctrinal depth, and cultural relevance.

Furthermore, we must graciously endeavor to entreat, exhort, and persuade our brothers and sisters in Christ to understand and embrace the fullness of faith in Christ and His Lordship in every area of their lives. I appeal in particular to those of us who hold to the richness of Reformed theology; to abandon our prideful and sometimes arrogant distance from those whom we believe are lacking in knowledge.

As I have wrestled in my own attempts to understand the causes of this condition and what we in our imperfect flesh can do to present ourselves as vessels equipped for His good works I have become increasingly drawn to the influence of modernism and modernity as principal barriers to both the integration and acceptance of the full Gospel.

I have been researching, in particular, the chasm that is apparent among young professing evangelicals - they claim to be Christian, they point to Christian beliefs as their basis for life and living and yet their behavior is completely inconsistent with what they claim to believe and their theology is even worse. What they lack is a comprehensive Biblical framework through which they analyze, assess and determine their response to life's challenges and opportunities. They do not posses a view of Christianity that connects with reality. Instead many today follow the modernistic impulse which compels them to ultimately trust in technology, the ingenuity of man, reason, and the assumption that progress is perpetual and ever upward - they are practical modernists. Thus there is no confidence in the supernatural and therefore they never expect nor seek the supernatural God to intervene in human affairs. Nor do they believe He will punish our unfaithfulness. (Jeremiah 5:12) We have simply lost an understanding of who God is.

I have come to believe that the depth of modernity with all of its attendant forces of time pressures, careerism, family separation, technology dependence and distractions, is so pervasive that it is no longer distinguishable as a force often antithetical to Christianity. I here use the term modernity in the same sense as Os Guinness, "Modernity...refers to the character and system of the world produced by the forces of modernization and development, centered above all on the premise that the 'top down' causation of God and the supernatural has been decisively replaced by the 'bottom up' causation of human designs and products."

We are immersed in modernity to the extent that we accept everything about it as true and correct and never test the times in which we live against scripture. This condition coupled with its modernistic assumptions has placed God at a very great distance in the lives of most professing Christians which in turn validates this same perspective in the unbelieving culture at large. God may be ignored in the secular culture but He is largely irrelevant among too many in the so-called Christian culture.

Furthermore this condition discourages us from pursuing knowledge of "ultimate things." We just don't think about such things anymore as Chesterton said, "The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says." Thus, if Christianity advances in such a culture it does so often at a superficial level. We seem to want to put God in a category that meets these modernistic criteria that conform to how we think the world is and not how God has made the world and everything in it and how He wants us live regardless of the times.

To be continued...

[This article appears in the Reformation & Revival Journal - 4th Quarter 2005