Above all earthly pow'rs: Christ and the postmodern world

Christ in a spiritual world

It is not just any worldview that we encounter in the postmodern world, but one that increasingly resembles the old paganisms.

It is one that is antithetical to that which biblical faith requires. It is this transformation of our world, this emerging worldview, which has passed largely unnoticed.

That, at least, is the most charitable conclusion that one can draw. For while the evangelical Church is aware of such things as the fight for gay and lesbian rights, hears about the eco-feminists, knows about pornography, has a sense that moral absolutes are evaporating like the morning mist, knows that truth of an ultimate kind has been dislodged from life, it apparently does not perceive that in these and many other ways a new worldview is becoming ensconced in the culture. If it did, it surely would not be embracing with enthusiasm as many aspects of this postmodern mindset as it is or be so willing to make concessions to postmodern habits of mind.

The contrast

This casual embrace of what is postmodern has increasingly led to an embrace of its spiritual yearning without noticing that this embrace carries within it the seeds of destruction for evangelical faith. The contrast between biblical faith and this contemporary spirituality is that between two entirely different ways of looking at life and at God. Nygren, some years ago, used the Greek words for two different kinds of love, Eros and Agape, to characterise these worldviews, and his elucidation is still helpful.

In the one worldview, which he calls Eros, it is the self which is in the centre. In the other, which he calls Agape, it is God who is in the centre. Eros, Nygren says, has at its heart a kind of want, longing, or yearning. It is this fact, of course, which has always put the Church in something of a conundrum. Is this yearning a natural preparation for the gospel, human nature crying out in its emptiness, calling out to be filled with something else? It was this thought that led Clement of Alexandria in the early church to speak of the ‘true Christian gnostic’ as if gnosticism’s yearning for what was spiritual reached its fulfilment in the Christian faith. Yet if this yearning is a preparation, it is one that stands in need of serious purging for it carries within itself an understanding about God and salvation which is diametrically opposed to what we have in biblical faith. In this sense, it is less a preparation and more of a wrong turn. Why is this so?

God or what we get?

The movement of Eros spirituality is upward. Its essence, its drive, is the sinner finding God. The movement of Agape, by contrast, is downward. It is all about God finding the sinner. Eros spirituality is the kind of spirituality which arises from human nature and it builds on the presumption that it can forge its own salvation. Agape arises in God, was incarnate in Christ, and reaches us through the work of the Holy Spirit opening lives to receive the gospel of Christ’s saving death. In this understanding, salvation is given and never forged or manufactured. Eros is the projection of the human spirit into eternity, the immortalising of its own impulses. Agape is the intrusion of eternity into the fabric of life coming, not from below, but from above. Eros is human love. Agape is divine love. Human love of this kind, because it has need and want at its centre, because it is always wanting to have its needs and wants satisfied, will always seek to control the object of its desires.

New spiritualities

That is why in these new spiritualities it is the spiritual person who makes up his or her beliefs and practices, mixing and matching and experimenting to see what works best, and assuming the prerogative to discard at will. The sacred is therefore loved for what can be had from loving it. The sacred is pursued because it has value to the pursuer and that value is measured in terms of the therapeutic payoff. There is, therefore, always a profit-and-loss mentality to these spiritualities.

By contrast, in Agape faith, God is not loved simply for the benefits that flow from that loving such as the forgiveness of sins. He is loved for what he is in himself. If Eros loves the sacred because it is worth doing, Agape, by contrast, loves God without ulterior motives. Agape surrenders; Eros grasps. Agape loves simply and only because it should, because God is most lovable. This Agape faith loves God because it is the consequence of his Agape and in his love there is no calculation. It is a completely free and spontaneous love. He is to be worshipped even if there are no returns.

Grace alone

Furthermore, he is sovereign and cannot be controlled or manipulated within the human spirit. Indeed, he is not even found naturally in the human spirit. His salvation is not by mystical technique or psychological understanding but by grace, grace alone, grace coming from the outside, and grace that will not tolerate any human contribution. In Eros spirituality there is always a sense of self-sufficiency, one which is also suffused with pride; in Agape faith, it is precisely the recognition of the self’s spiritual insufficiency that is the condition for the coming of grace. The one tries to storm eternity borne up on its own mortal wings; the other receives eternity as the pauper does the help which kindness extends.

A form of temptation

Contemporary spiritualities must be recognised as a form of temptation. The question that arises, as Barth rightly suggested, is whether the Church is able to take its own revelation seriously.

For what these spiritualities do is to invite the Church, theology, and faith ‘to abandon their theme and object and become hollow and empty, mere shadows of themselves’. They do so in their assumption that Christian faith is simply one member in this vast extended spiritual family and one that is not particularly enlightened. And the historic stance of the Church is that this is false. Christian faith, constituted by the Word of God and the Spirit of God, is not just an outcropping of human beings’ internal spirituality but something which, in its supernatural construction, in its uniqueness, stands apart from all other spiritualities. It is by the Word of God, given to the Church, that all religions and all spiritualities are to be judged.

Spiritual seeker

The ‘faith’ of the spiritual seeker and the faith of the Christian believer may, in some ways, look alike, but, in fact, they are radically different. The one is the upward questing of the human spirit which speaks of human emptiness and uncertainty; the other is the work of God which speaks of his grace and judgment.

As authentic as the human questing may be, it is still, in biblical terms, unbelief. For the searching is not a search of the one locus in which God has spoken and decisively acted; it is a searching for its own sake, a searching for its own rewards. In religion of a Christian kind, we listen; in spirituality of a contemporary kind, we talk. In religion of a Christian kind, we accept a gift; in spirituality of a contemporary kind, we try to seize God. In the one, we are justified by the righteousness of Christ; in the other, we strive to justify ourselves through ourselves. It is thus that spirituality is the enemy of faith.

Seeker sensitive?

Many in the new seeker-sensitive experiment in ‘doing church’ have seen only the surface habits of this postmodern world and have not really understood its Eros spirituality. Theirs is an experiment in tactics in which innumerable questions have been asked about the ways the Church can become successful in this culture and they are all prefaced by the word how.

How do we get the Boomers back into the church? How do we get on the wavelength of Generation Xers? How do we worship so that the transition from home to church, from mall to church, and from unbelief into a context of belief, is seamless and even unnoticed? How do we speak about Christian faith to those who only want techniques for survival in life? How can we be motivational for those who need a lift without burdening them? How can we say what we want to say in church when the audience will give us only a small slice of their attention, especially if we are not amusing?

And what is emerging, as the evangelical Church continues to empty itself of theology, is that it now finds that it is tapping, wittingly or not, into this broad cultural yearning for spirituality, and capitalising on that disposition’s inclination not to be religious. Evangelical spirituality without theology, that even sometimes despises theology, parallels almost exactly the broader cultural spirituality that is without religion. Evangelical faith without theology, without the structure and discipline of truth, is not Agape faith but it is much closer to Eros spirituality.

This article is an extract from Above all earthly pow’rs: Christ and the postmodern world by David Wells, published by IVP (£14.99, 978-1-84474-106-0), and is used with permission of the publishers.