The Pastor After 2020

By Joel D. Lawrence

[Joel D. Lawrence is President of the Center for Pastor Theologians in Oak Park, Illinois.]

[This is the third article in the three-part series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.]

The Crisis Of Western Liberalism

We are living in a moment of crisis for Western liberalism. The year 2020 and its aftermath were not the beginning of the crisis but rather an accelerant of an already present weakness. On both the left and the right, people are questioning the premises of Western liberalism. On the right, we have calls for “illiberal democracy,” a philosophy pursued by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and approved by numerous pundits on the American right.[1] This notion claims that because liberalism promotes the selfish interests of individuals, it is not sufficient to serve the interest of and secure the tradition of the nation.[2] Therefore, we need more authoritarian leadership to protect the national interest. On the left, we have claims that Western liberalism is fundamentally racist because it was created by and aims to serve a powerful elite, leading to a rise in Americans who argue that the United States should embrace socialism.

Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism failed because liberalism succeeded. He writes, “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.”[3] What he means is that liberalism, founded on the self-interest of humans, will inevitably lead to a factionalized, disintegrating, self-protective society in which overarching goals of society that transcend individuals are lost as each person is trained by the liberal anthropology to be an autonomous individual—not connected in any essential way to a larger community. Liberalism, positing the self-actualization and self-definition of individuals, is a tradition-dissolving philosophy that views tradition as a barrier to the achievement of the self and so leads to ever-deepening factions of self-interested autonomy. Such a traditionless society cannot long endure. Barbara Walter, in her recent book How Civil Wars Start, having studied civil wars around the world since World War II, shows that the primary predictor of a civil war is when a political society turns from a shared ideology to an identity that is focused on the self or the in-group the self belongs to. Though Walter doesn’t make the same point about the logical conclusion of Western liberalism, her account of what creates instability in society aligns with Deneen’s account of the success-driven failure of liberalism.[4]

My goal in this lecture is not to solve the crisis of liberalism. I don’t know the course of the future of liberalism, though I do believe Western liberal societies are in for some difficult times ahead. I don’t see a clear path that leads to a unified American society, and so I believe that we will continue to experience fracturing in our civic society. Though Christianity on both the left and the right has often believed that the progress promised by Western liberalism is the advance of God’s rule,[5] there is no theological basis for believing that the Western liberal order will avoid the fate of all other ideologies, which do not last but are replaced by something else.

As a pastor theologian, my primary concern is with the health of the body of Christ. I believe that the apocalypse of 2020 is forcing the church to ask significant questions about how we understand our presence in the world and how that presence has been captured by the pattern of the age. My goal in this lecture is to encourage the church toward a faithful witness in the present and coming crisis by calling us to a nonconformed presence in the world—to be ambassadors who represent God’s political rule, even as the political rule of earthly kingdoms falters.

For the church to be faithful witnesses, to be citizens of the holy nation of God, we must have pastors prepared to shepherd the body of Christ through the challenging days ahead. To prepare pastors for this task, we must reclaim the pastor theologian as the primary identity of the pastor. The church needs a vanguard of pastor theologians who will shepherd God’s people by producing a robust ecclesial theology. A theology that is rooted in and aimed at the local church. A theology that is the living font of the church’s life in the world. A theology that shapes the church’s life together by centering the church on the common objects of love that are ours as followers of Jesus. A theology that forms the church’s theological imagination and so frees the church from that pattern of the age. Only then will the church be free to love and serve the world as those who are, through the Spirit, the presence of the crucified and resurrected Christ on earth.

In this lecture, I want to offer a vision of the church’s non-conformed presence in the world. But before I do, let me offer a brief recap of where we have been so far in these lectures. In the first lecture, I suggested that the political anthropology of Western liberalism defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals. This anthropological vision brings with it a humanity enthralled by the enchantments of mammon, longing for the power to ensure its own self-defined identity. As this vision has expanded across the globe, it has become evident that Western liberalism’s promises cannot be universally granted, and so our age has become the age of anger, an anger deriving from the reality that billions have been promised a life of self-interested autonomy but have not had those promises kept.

In the second lecture, I traced the church’s conformity to this pattern, demonstrating how the church has adopted the Western liberal political anthropology as her own and so been captured by the enchantments of mammon that dominate our age, a capture seen in the church’s self-interested striving for worldly power to protect ourselves. This striving has also infected the church with anger, an anger that has burst forth in the past few years, born out of the sense that we are losing what we have been promised, having accepted Western liberalism’s promises as our own.

If, as I argue, the church is conformed to a particular anthropology and its effects that make up the pattern of the age, then what remains for me to do today is to propose an alternative anthropology that can enliven the church in our life and mission and free us from our conformity. So in this lecture, I turn from lament to hope, from the conformity of the church to the pattern of the age to the freedom of the church as those released from the pattern. I am proposing that the church is called to live as the Sabbath presence of God, an anthropological vision that frames the church’s life together, the church’s political life in the world by calling us to be the Sabbath people of God on earth.

In my previous lectures, we have gone back in history to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, to the Reformation, and the medieval world it sought to overturn. This morning we must go further back, way back, all the way to “in the beginning.”

Sabbath Politics: Genesis 1–2

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen 1:2–3).[6] So begins the story of God and his creation. We know it well: the origin story of the light that bursts forth, the stars that shine, the earth filled with fruit, and humanity created to dwell in the majestic world of God’s creative love. In my first lecture I stated that politics is anthropology, the ordering of society based on human nature. And that is true but not complete because, biblically, politics is not merely anthropology; politics is theology, the ordering of the world based on the nature of the creator God. As such, Genesis 1 should be understood as the political ordering of the heavens and the earth. If politics is about how to order life so that we can live together in society, then Genesis 1 is the foundational account of political order, the picture of God organizing the world under his rule. The six days of creation, the “And God said . . .” and “so it was . . . ,” describes the Lord God creating politics, that is, creating an ordered universe under the sovereign ruler of the cosmos. This political ordering is the shaping of the world that will prosper under God’s good rule. In his creation, the Lord demonstrates his heart and nature as the Triune God—the God who is love, who in God’s very self is ordered as Father, Son, and Spirit; united as one God in the perfection of love; the one who is holy, holy, holy; the very template of peace, prosperity, and mutual self-giving. And this God creates a world to live in his grace, in his care, under his truly benevolent rule.

On the sixth day of the political ordering of the universe, the Triune God establishes his image on earth—humanity as male and female, created to reflect the divine life. As male and female, shared inheritors of the life and promise of God, Adam and Eve are a template of humanity living under God’s political rule: fruitful and multiplying, truly free, not in self-interested, independent autonomy but in the self-giving love of God and neighbor as they dwell in life together in the presence of the Lord.

In Genesis 2:1–3 we come to the culmination of the political ordering of the heavens and the earth, the seventh-day Sabbath:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation (ESV).

There are many books on the Sabbath these days. Almost all of them are in the genre of spiritual formation, having to do with how individuals can find rest in a manic world by keeping the Sabbath. While I have benefitted from and appreciate the emphasis on Sabbath as a spiritual discipline, I don’t believe we understand the fullness of the biblical teaching on the Sabbath if we view it as a spiritual discipline of rest, because this misses the primary nature of Sabbath. Fundamentally, Sabbath is a political concept.[7]

The word used in Genesis 2:2 to state that God rests is שבת: “On the seventh day God rested” (i.e., sabbathed). What does it mean that God sabbathed? Commenting on these verses, biblical scholar Scott Hafemann writes, “God ‘rests’ not because he is exhausted, but as the sign that there is nothing more to provide. . . . The King's rest on the ‘Sabbath’ day of creation declares the good news that under his reign everything in his realm is as it should be.”[8] In the ancient world the notion of the king at rest is a declaration that the realm is secure, the people provided for, the peace of the nation assured. At the end of the sixth day, the world is ordered according to God’s loving, giving, peaceful nature, and all is as it should be. God has established a universe under his rule. The earth is productive through the Lord’s providential creation. Humans as the image of God are present on earth, not as sovereigns but as servants, not as self-interested, autonomous individuals but as a community of shared blessing, peace, love, and rest, called to live for God and neighbor. The Sabbath is the declaration of life intended by God. The creation is to live under his Sabbath rule and so live in his provision and protection. Genesis 2 reveals God providing for his creation through the fruit of the earth and shows a communion of humans living in the peace of God’s protection, secure in his loving political rule.

This is a vision of a world in which there is no war, violence, or competition for resources because God provides through the fruit of the earth and the labor of humans to bring in that fruit. This means a world in which there is no factionalism, no nationalism, no racism, no “us” versus “them,” because all are one under the Sabbath rule of the Lord. There is no injustice because there is no need to accumulate power to secure our own autonomous vision of life for ourselves, no need to amass resources for the sake of securing our own. There is no enchantment with mammon because we are secure, not in our own power but in God’s power. There is no anger because we are not striving to achieve our own vision of ourselves but living securely in God’s presence. There is Sabbath. There is rest. There is shalom. This is the Sabbath rest of the political order of the cosmos—the Creator King is at rest; the realm is secure; the people are provided for. All is as it should be.

This is Sabbath politics—the political life humanity was created to enjoy—and it is the life we lost when we rejected God’s political rule over us in order to exert our own. This, of course, is how the story continues in Genesis 3.

Politics East Of Eden: Genesis 3–4

At the beginning of these lectures, I said that the pattern of the age of Romans 12 is rooted in the rebellion of Genesis 3. I have described the pattern of the age as the structures and ideologies that dominate our age, the wisdom of the world, living according to the things that are seen rather than things that are unseen. These structures and ideologies arise from the human heart in rebellion against God, the rebellion depicted in Genesis 3.

If my reading of Genesis 1–2 as the political ordering of the cosmos is correct, then Genesis 3 is best understood as a political rebellion against the Sabbath politics of the Lord—a rebellion through which humans reject the ordering of the world under God’s rule, instead believing we can be our own rulers. This is the sinful condition, and it is a political condition. It is about who rules, who has authority, who has power. When the serpent tempts Adam and Eve, he does so by declaring to them that if they would take of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would become “like God,” a proposition that tempts Adam and Eve to believe there is a better way than God’s way. After they take the fruit, God declares that Adam and Eve have become “like us,” a condition with a specific definition: knowing good and evil. But what does it mean that we have become like God, knowing good and evil?

Bonhoeffer in Creation and Fall suggests that this means what it says: humanity was never intended to have the knowledge of good and evil.[9] If humanity didn’t know good and evil prior to ingesting the fruit, what did we know? We knew God. We were created to live in unbroken fellowship with the Lord, walking directly with him in his presence, an immediate life of communion with the Lord. In this we would live in utter dependence on God, trusting in every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord, confident that his word was our very life. But we were not intended to scrutinize that word, to sit in judgment over that word, to appeal to ourselves as the analytic center through which we determine whether or not the word of God is practical, beneficial, or effective. We were not intended to have the knowledge of good and evil because we were not intended to be our own gods, the center of our own lives. Instead, we were called to obey the Lord, trusting in God as our benevolent ruler, and in this obedience to God we were free to dwell with him and our neighbor in unbroken unity with hearts directed away from ourselves toward God and neighbor.

Because of this, we can see that it is the knowledge of good and evil that separates us from God. This is the content of our rebellion against God. In taking for themselves the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve break fellowship with God and neighbor by exercising autonomy. Autonomy derives from two Greek words, αὐτός (“self ”) and νόμος (“law”). In the rebellion of Genesis 3, Adam and Eve reject life under the rule of the Lord and instead choose a life of autonomy, of self-law, becoming a law unto themselves, becoming their own lords, their own gods. And in doing this, the human orientation to the world was turned from a God-referential life of obedience to a self-referential life as autonomous, independent individuals, separated from the fundamental community with God and neighbor that we were created to enjoy in the Sabbath politics of the Lord.

After the rebellion, God pronounces the curse that their sin brought to the world, declaring the implications of this new reality. Where there was to be Sabbath, there will now be striving. Where there was to be rest, there will now be struggle. Where there was to be love of God and neighbor, there will now be self-interest. Where there was to be obedience, there will now be autonomy. As a result, Adam and Eve are removed from God’s Sabbath presence, and an angel is set on the east side of the garden to guard the way to the tree of life. And here history East of Eden begins, and political organization, intended to be the ordering of the world under the Sabbath rule of God, begins to take shape as East of Eden politics. By East of Eden politics, I mean the ordering of the world by self-oriented, autonomous humanity, organizing the world according to our self-referential knowledge. According to Andrew Goddard, “The world today . . . is not God’s good creation of life, love, and freedom in which humans in communion with God mediate his presence in the world. It is the counter-creation of rebellious human beings and the powers bearing the marks of its rejection of the Creator.”[10]

This East of Eden political reality takes shape in Genesis 4, focused on the figure of Cain.[11] In this passage, Cain murders his brother, inaugurating the violence of self-assertion in history. God confronts Cain and pronounces a curse, declaring that Cain will be a “restless wanderer on the earth” (Gen 4:12), no longer dwelling under God’s Sabbath rule but now asserting his own self-rule over his own life. History becomes Cainite as Cain builds a city. This city, Enoch, built in the land of Nod east of Eden, is the symbol of the new political ordering of the world marked by the rebellion of humanity. Cain, knowing his vulnerability, now builds for himself a city for protection, secured by his own resources, power, and initiative.

Nod means wandering, and so we have the irony: declared by God to be a wanderer, Cain rejects God’s judgment by refusing to accept the consequences of his rebellion and instead chooses to settle in the land of wandering. According to Jacques Ellul, Nod is the nowhere land, the counterfeit Eden.[12] Eden was to be a place of security, of peace, of settlement in the presence of the Lord, where humans are provided for by him in his Sabbath political realm. Nod and its city Enoch is the place of counterfeit settlement, of humanity endeavoring to secure peace and security for itself through its own autonomy. We see in this that the pattern of the age is the human attempt to mitigate the effects of human rebellion against God, to create for ourselves the conditions that we have lost by rejecting God as our Sabbath Lord.

And it is here, in the East of Eden attempts to create a secure social reality, that life becomes deeply insecure and history becomes Hobbesian, the war of all against all. Living outside the Sabbath rule of the Lord, humanity must build our own structures and consolidate our power to secure what we lost. Having lost the Sabbath presence of the Lord, we must now form the world through our autonomy. This is the tragedy of the world East of Eden—we have lost Sabbath because we have rejected God. But we long for Sabbath. We know in our souls that we are restless wanderers on the earth. We fear our vulnerability, and so we work to ensure our own security through our own efforts. However, we find in this another tragedy. In pursuing security, provision, and protection for ourselves, we create an insecure, unequal, and dangerous world. As Hobbes saw, we gather into associations for the sake of protection, but so does everyone else. These self-interested associations of protection create an unstable, unjust, violent, and perilous world. The great tragedy of life East of Eden is that the more we strive to secure our lives, the more insecure the world becomes.

One of the great strengths of Western liberalism is that it recognizes the reality of humanity in our fallen condition.[13] As those in rebellion against God, we are self-interested. As those in rebellion against God, we are autonomous. In our sinful condition in life East of Eden, we are individuals who pursue our own needs and work to secure them. In this Hobbes is, in my estimation, the most honest political philosopher of them all. He knew the human condition. He saw the inherent instability of life in a political world dominated by competition for power. His error was that he located this in the state of nature. But what we find in Genesis 1–4 is that there is no such thing as the state of nature. It is a fiction of the philosophers. Instead there is the state of creation (Sabbath politics) and the state of rebellion (East of Eden politics). Hobbes rightly saw that society was deeply competitive. Rousseau rightly saw that humans in society are prone to vanity and injustice. Locke saw rightly that we need to create laws to protect our property. They built a political system that recognized this vision of humanity.

The Church As Sabbath Presence

It may be that Western liberalism is the best system possible for organizing society East of Eden. It may be that this is the best we can do to keep the passions of the self-interested human heart in check. It may be that Western liberalism, which has brought wealth (mammon?) to many is the best we can hope for. It may be that, East of Eden, there is no better way. But what Western liberalism cannot do is describe for us the world of Genesis 1–2, the world of Sabbath as intended by God, as created by God. This means that Western liberalism cannot reveal humanity as created by the Lord; no East of Eden political ideology can. So who can? Who can be a demonstration of humanity as intended by God?

The church can. We are called by our Lord to be the unique community that is called through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit to represent the seventh day. Therefore, the church is called to be a nation that doesn’t share the common objects of love of the pattern of the age, that doesn’t give our hearts to the things of the age. We are called to be the Sabbath presence on earth, not engaged in the war of all against all but a holy people, living under the Sabbath reign of God, a people who by the Spirit are being freed from East of Eden striving.

We are called, not to protect our own self-interested autonomy, not to be divided by the worldly markers of Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female, rich and poor, Black and White. We are called to be a just society because we are the Sabbath society who rests in God’s peace, who trusts in God’s provision, who shares in God’s bounty with all in our Sabbath community. We are called to be united not by national citizenship or the goals of fleeting nation states but by gathering around Jesus the Christ, the Sabbath one of God, who didn’t live as a self-interested autonomous individual but instead lived in obedience to his Father, who was the last Adam, who obeyed where the first Adam rebelled. He didn’t live according to the knowledge of good and evil but according to the word of his Father. He didn’t exercise his right to protect himself through the powers East of Eden but told his disciple to put away his sword.

We are the body of this Christ, called to be the Sabbath nation on earth, declaring to the world East of Eden that there is a different way, the way of the Lord and his Sabbath politics. We have this vocation. We have the word of God. We have his vision for humanity and the world. And we have the Spirit, who frees us from our conformity to the pattern of the age and makes us a light that shines in the darkness.

Conclusion: The Pastor Theologian And The Pattern Of The Age

And we have pastors, women and men called to shepherd the church to be faithful witnesses of the Sabbath rule of God. But we are too often failing in the calling. We have become conformed to the pattern of the age, given our hearts to the ideologies of the wisdom of the world, captured by a political vision that is not our own, by the enchantments of mammon that demonstrate our trust in ourselves, by the age of anger that reveals we are believing in promises not given to us.

There are no techniques that will lead us out of our conformity to the pattern of the age. There are no ready-made programs we can purchase that will free us from our capture. There are no marketing firms that can design a slick campaign that will guide the church through the tests of our time. We have become too dependent on these tools, too trusting in techniques and programs that promise to solve our problems and grow our churches.

So what is to be done? There is deep, fervent, and courageous theological work to be done, and this must be done by the shepherds of the church—by pastor theologians. The church needs pastors who minister out of the core identity of theologian, whose whole selves are given to the task of shepherding the church in her theological mission. The church needs pastor theologians whose imaginations are fired by a vision of God, allowing them to see through the pattern of the age. The church needs pastor theologians who will patiently and graciously shepherd teachers, plumbers, and doctors whose lives are shaped by the imaginative framework created by the pattern of the age to see instead the world that has been punctured by the cross. The church needs pastor theologians whose preaching reframes the world theologically and re-narrates for our people in ways that counter the vision that has shaped our visible world.

Will you be a pastor theologian? Will you be a servant of God’s church? Will you courageously and joyfully give yourself to the mission of shepherding the Sabbath people of God out of our conformity to the pattern of the age so that we might truly be the Sabbath presence of God on earth?

Notes

1. The list is long, but perhaps most prominent is Christian social commentator and author Rod Dreher, whose Twitter feed in mid-2022 was filled with praise for Orbán.
2. See Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (New York: Random House, 2021).
3. Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 3.
4. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them (New York: Crown, 2021).
5. On the left, we see this confidence in God’s progress in the world in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, whose Christianizing the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1912) connected the advance of left-leaning causes to the inbreaking of the kingdom of God. On the right, we see this in the rise and influence of the Moral Majority, who believed it was the church’s job to utilize politics for the sake of moralizing society, which is the means of God’s advance in history.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the NIV.
7. The book that comes closest to engaging this vision is Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017). In this work, Brueggemann outlines the economic implications of the Sabbath as a means of calling Western Christians to resist the formative effects of acquisitive capitalism. I am grateful for Brueggemann’s insight, as it takes us closer to the biblical theology of the Sabbath than do many of the spiritual formation works. However, I believe that we don’t fully grasp the biblical vision of the Sabbath unless we explore its political dimension and the implications of this for our discipleship.
8. Scott Hafemann, “Work as the Divine Curse: Toil and Grace East of Eden,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 2.1 (2015): 9.
9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 103–10.
10. Andrew Goddard, Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul (London: Paternoster, 1996), 86.
11. My understanding of Cain is indebted to Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, trans. Dennis Pardee (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 1–9.
12. Ellul, 3.
13. See Robert Tracy McKenzie, We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), who argues that the founders of America had a clear vision of human fallenness and built the United States governmental structures in view of the sinful condition of humanity.