Circle of Hope

In our cell group, someone asked about the “malaise” (the feeling of general uneasiness) that permeates the West right now, and why there was one? I didn’t have an answer then, but I’ve been thinking about it.

I think it’s the removal from our culture of Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Modernism eliminated Jesus as the Way. In The Last Word, N.T. Wright describes one of the Enlightenment’s accomplishments as “kicking” God upstairs (the Truth being somewhere “up there”), and making religion a matter of personal piety. Secularists dismiss God and the scriptures, replacing them with Reason, while Believers reduce those same scriptures to “merely” guides of personal morality and personal salvation. Both work together to “undermine its global, cosmic and justice-laden message.” Jesus is no longer “transformative,” but merely “informative.”

Post-Modernism goes further, and eliminates Jesus as the Truth, because “there is no Truth!” It too dismisses God and the scriptures, but (with an emphasis on extreme complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity) replaces the Truth with nothing else as an alternative, not even Reason. Post-Modernism leaves us to rearrange or dismiss God and the scriptures however and whenever we want, because in its view, all ideologies are power plays anyway (except, ironically, its own). Jesus is no longer “informative”, but merely “insightful.”

Since the Way and the Truth have been eliminated, we are left with the Life, and in this area, we most often appeal to our “experience” as a source of authority. But because experience is “fluid and puzzling and because we are all prey to serious self-deception”, Wright says that “Theology and Christian Living become no longer rooted in God, but rather rooted in ourselves, with the ‘highest’ religious good becoming self discovery, and then being “true” to the self thus discovered.”

Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic describes it similarly, saying spiritual concerns are not abandoned, but recast purely as enhancing personal well being instead of serving as a source of love or awe before God. So, lacking any foundation other than our-selves, we live for today, shying away from commitment that might curtail our personal growth, and view other people as mere instruments to be manipulated in our quest for fulfillment. Yet we also invest too much in emotional experience with others, seeking “the richness and intensity of a religious experience” and investing romantic attachments with demands they cannot possibly fulfill. Disappointed, we develop a protective shallowness and cynical detachment.

And that’s where the malaise hits us. With nothing shared beyond “a commitment to the self” we are left with a commitment to nothing. Jesus became only “informative”, not “transformative,” and then even that was taken from us, partially of our own doing. In a popular culture where everyone’s self expression might result in celebrity status, its difficult to argue for any sort of moral, or spiritual (let alone Jesus-based) way of Life.

Jesus is “an alternative to the dominant ways of the world, not a supplement to them” as our culture and its “spirituality” (the form of religion without its substance) would have us believe. But Eugene Peterson sees how we adopt so many of these ideas, and take on “the very ways and means that Jesus rejected.” How do we stop looking inward as self- serving consumers and get out of this malaise? In The Jesus Way, Peterson says the local Christian congregation and community of believers is the “primary place for getting this way and truth and life.” It is the place for listening to and obeying Christ’s commands. “The Jesus way and the Jesus truth must be congruent. Only when the Jesus way is organically joined with the Jesus truth do we get the Jesus life.”