The World After 2020

By Joel D. Lawrence

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

[This is the first 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, Dallas, Texas, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.]

Lament For A Conformed Church

Over the past few years, we have seen our world broken open. Early in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic began to wreak havoc across the globe. In only a matter of weeks the virus spread to the ends of the earth, bringing in its wake death, illness, fear, and division. In May 2020 George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, unleashing weeks of peaceful protests and violent disturbances, placing urgent questions before America: questions about racial injustice and how we tell history, about the divergent experiences of citizens and the nature of policing, indeed, about the very nature of American society. Then, in November 2020, the results of the presidential election catapulted the country into a cauldron of conspiracy and political violence, becoming a propellant for the weakening of confidence in democratic institutions.

Of course, challenging times are not new. Societies throughout history have faced the upheavals of war, disease, revolution, and ethnic disputes. But in the twenty-first-century United States, these events came as a shock: Wasn’t the most powerful country in history immune to such disruption? How could we fall prey to a plague? Hadn’t our wealth and technology promised us protection? The confluence of COVID-19, racial injustice, and political division have been truly apocalyptic, by which I mean revelatory: they’ve revealed the fissures of society and the instability of life in a globalized world.

In all of this I have sighed a deep lament. A lament for the racial history of the United States. A lament for the millions who have lost their lives to COVID. A lament for the political discord disfiguring our society. However, as a pastor theologian, the primary focus of my lament is not for society at large but for the church. The church is fragmented; denominations are torn apart; and congregations are strained. Political partisanship, our history of racial discord, and the fear of losing cultural power are placing great strains on the body of Christ. We are hurting. There is anger. There is mistrust. This is a time for the church to engage in critical self-examination. We have difficult work ahead. To meet the need of the moment, we must go deep, exploring the root causes of the illness infecting the body of Christ. To do this, we must ask, What did 2020 reveal about the church?

There’s no simple answer to this question, of course; there are many reasons the church is sick. But I do believe there is a spiritual reality that is central to answering this question: The church is conformed to the pattern of the age.

In Romans 12, Paul exhorts the church in Rome to resist conformity to the pattern of the age. Through this encouragement, Paul calls the church to walk by faith, not by sight, to live according to the unseen rather than the seen. For Paul, the pattern of the age is the seen, a product of the heart in rebellion against God. It is the political, economic, and cultural structures that arise when humans live independently of God. The pattern of Romans 12 is rooted in the rebellion of Genesis 3.

I’ve titled this lecture series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age.” I am convinced that the church must do the challenging work of identifying the pattern of our age and discerning our conformity to it. And I am convinced that this work must be rooted in a renewed vision of the pastor as a pastor theologian. This generation of pastors is called to shepherd the church through the upheavals of societal change, as millions are leaving the church and Christianity is no longer viewed as a viable plausibility structure. Pastors are searching for ways to connect people to the church, but the church’s loss of credibility in the culture makes this seem like a losing battle. Many Christian leaders have responded by scolding the culture, condemning the world for being the world, and fighting to maintain power to shape a “Christian” society. Others have given up and followed the path of accommodation, reinterpreting Christian doctrine so that is acceptable to the culture.

These disorienting times have led to an identity crisis for pastors: Who are we? Are we CEOs? Psychologists? Podcast hosts? Are we celebrities? Social activists? Cruise ship directors making sure everyone is having a good time? The lack of a clear pastoral identity has led to pastors being, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “a quivering mass of availability,”[1] responding to the various expectations of our congregations but not ministering from a clear pastoral identity. Given a vocation, pastors end up doing a job, catering to the demands of late-modern Christianity.

The church needs a vanguard of pastor theologians to courageously shepherd the church to be conformed not to the age but to Christ. By pastor theologian, I don’t mean smart pastors who hide out in their studies reading Aquinas in Latin. Rather, I mean pastors deeply shaped by a theological imagination who minister out of the core identity of theologian. As they do this, pastor theologians are enabled to see the pattern of the age and to shepherd the church against that pattern. This work may not look “successful.” It may not build large buildings. It may make it harder to meet the budget. But if we are going to confront our conformity, pastors must again be the church’s primary theologians, equipped to reframe the theological imagination of the body of Christ.

My purpose in these lectures is to explore the dual task facing the church after 2020: First, to confront our conformity to the pattern of the age, and second, to encourage the vision of the pastor theologian. We cannot talk about the pastor without talking about the pattern, and we cannot talk about the pattern without talking about the pastor. For the church today, these are interconnected and must be addressed in relation to each other.

I will begin this lecture by exploring the pattern of our age: What are the ideologies and commitments that shape our era? How have they come to form the pattern of the age? In the second lecture, we will explore the church’s conformity to the pattern, examining how the past few years have revealed the church’s capture. Then, in the final lecture, I will conclude with a vision of a non-conformed church rooted in the ministry of pastor theologians, women and men called to courageously and joyfully shepherd the church in the difficult days ahead. So, let’s turn to the threefold pattern of the age.

The Threefold Pattern Of The Age

The Bible warns us against “the wisdom of this world” (1 Cor 1:20–25) and “things that are seen” (2 Cor 4:18). These phrases describe habits of heart and mind that form the dominant ideas and commitments of the world in rebellion against God. In other words, they describe the pattern of the age. While there are many threads that make up the pattern, in this lecture, I will focus on three that are intertwined and have powerfully shaped our age: (1) the political anthropology of Western liberalism, (2) the enchantments of mammon, and (3) the age of anger.

So, let’s begin with the very safe and totally noncontroversial theme of politics.

Thread 1: Political Anthropology

At its base, politics is anthropology—a vision of how to best organize human society according to human nature. Adrian Leftwich notes, “Politics is a universal aspect of human behavior and may be found wherever two or more human beings are engaged in some collective activity.”[2] So politics is not fundamentally about parties and poll booths, parliaments and policies, but about people, about being human. All political theories, whether socialism, liberalism, monarchism, communism, or anarchism, are rooted in a vision of human nature. Different societies have adopted different political visions because these societies have a particular understanding of what it means to be human, which gives rise to a particular way of ordering society. Because of this, if we are to understand the pattern of our age, we must understand the anthropology at the heart of the Western liberal order.[3]

According to political philosopher Patrick Deneen, liberalism began “as a wager that political society could be grounded on a different footing.”[4] This wager was made because, at the dawn of the liberal era, the political structures of the medieval world were crumbling. Many no longer accepted the medieval vision of the world with kings and priests as divinely ordained rulers. Philosophers envisioned a new way to order the world that would liberate humans from arbitrary rule. For these thinkers there was nothing inherent in monarchs that made them more suitable to rule, nothing more moral in priests giving them authority. Politics needed a new foundation, not based on divine revelation or divine right but on a new vision of humanity.

To understand this vision I will analyze the work of three original developers of the liberal tradition: Thomas Hobbes,[5] John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Of course, Western liberalism is far more complex than these authors and has developed in different directions in the centuries since they wrote. But by looking to the foundation of the tradition, we can see elemental features of the Western liberal political anthropology that continue to form the pattern of our age. In doing this we can go below the partisan debates of left and right to the core vision of humanity that shapes the fundamental political anthropology that animates our society.

To develop their new political vision, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau engaged in a thought experiment. The experiment was to imagine humanity in the state of nature to discover, in the words of David Runciman, “what it is to be human in a pre-social setting.”[6] The idea was that, by imagining humanity prior to the formation of government, they could discern the true nature of humanity, freed from the accretions of the medieval tradition, and so find a better foundation for government.

Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes was the first to engage in this thought experiment. Writing during the English Civil War, Hobbes sought to create a system of government that could counter the societal instability that burst into a pitched battle in his day, resulting in the beheading of Charles I, “God’s ordained,” by Cromwell’s forces, who believed God had ordained otherwise. In Leviathan, Hobbes offers a vision of humanity in the state of nature.[7] For Hobbes, life in this condition was not pretty; it was “poore, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”[8] and “a warre . . . of every man, against every man.”[9] Hobbes declares that the state of nature is a life of continual conflict, in which humans live in perpetual fear because humans in the state of nature are inherently vulnerable. To defend against this vulnerability, humans left the state of nature in order to form associations for self-protection. Seeking security, humans create structures of protective association, thereby giving government its basic purpose: to keep the peace.

Hobbes labeled this new governmental authority Leviathan, a title that gives insight into his anthropology. As Alan Ryan states, “‘Vainglory’ is the most important emotion in Hobbes’s political theory; in the Book of Job, Leviathan is ‘ruler over the children of pride,’ and Job provides both the title and the moral of Hobbes’s masterpiece.”[10] For Hobbes, as the children of pride, humans are by nature self-interested individuals. We gather into political associations because we dwell in a fearful world.[11] We don’t live in political associations by nature, but living in nature was too frightening, too nasty, too brutish. So, we associate to protect. The driving political question for Hobbes, then, is: How can we, who are by nature self-interested individuals, live in society with as much individual freedom as we can, while also gaining the necessary protections from other self-interested humans?

John Locke. The next thinker we will explore, John Locke, also envisioned humans in the state of nature to define a new way to organize political society. Ryan says, “Locke begins from the premise that men are born free and equal, neither possessing authority over anyone else nor owing allegiance to anyone else.”[12] For Locke, the condition of humanity in the state of nature is that of autonomous, equal individuals, without allegiances to one another or a broader community.[13] In contrast to Hobbes, Locke didn’t believe that the state of nature was a condition of solitary fear; for him, the state of nature is a social state, but one in which there is no formal government in place to manage that sociality. What shapes human life in the state of nature are the laws of nature; therefore, Locke believed that humans could live together in the state of nature without the constant warfare suggested by Hobbes.

Locke’s claim that humans are born free and equal “is shorthand for the claim that political arrangements are artifices constructed by human beings for human purposes, and that the rights and duties they bring with them must be justified by those purposes.”[14] In other words, humans emerge from the state of nature to build artificial structures that serve the goals of independent, autonomous individuals whose allegiance is to themselves. At the heart of Locke’s anthropology is the notion of “life, liberty, and property,” declaring that humans must be free as self-interested individuals to protect their life and goods, and that government is legitimate when it protects our claims to property.[15] For Locke, government is limited to the protective work that allows humans to operate freely according to their own self-interest.[16]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The final thinker on the state of nature we will investigate is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s account of the state of nature is different from Hobbes’s: for Rousseau, humans in the state of nature were happy, independent foragers, living a nearly paradisiacal life. Humanity did not live in social groups and would only come together from time to time for the purposes of procreation; otherwise, humans in the state of nature were free to live as they pleased. But, as the population increased, humans began to bump into each other and claim private property, so creating the need for governmental structures that brought humanity out of the simplicity of the state of nature. At the beginning of Book Two of A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau writes: “The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘this is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the . . . founder of civil society.” He then asks, “How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species who, pulling up the stakes . . . should have cried to his fellows: ‘Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!’ ”[17]

This is why Rousseau famously declares, in the first line of Of the Social Contract, “man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”[18] The natural condition of humanity is independent freedom, but the claims of private property have placed humans in the chains of political structures and laws to protect our claims on property—claims that create the competition, violence, and vanity of society. Government is the tragic necessity of humans who can no longer live in the state of nature. The goal of politics, then, is to mitigate the denial of individual freedom inherent in civic society by organizing according to the general will, the mystical will of the people that reflects our individual wishes.

Liberalism’s Vision of Political Anthropology. My purpose in exploring these early thinkers of the liberal tradition is not to determine which vision is best. The purpose is to see the anthropology on which the Western liberal political vision is built. What emerges from these writings, despite their differences, is a vision of humanity that has shaped the pattern of our age and become the wisdom of our world. According to Carl Trueman, “The essential dynamics of the modern understanding of the self are . . . already in place . . . by the late eighteenth century.”[19] What is this vision?

The basic commitments of the Western liberal political anthropology define humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals, whose liberty is the freedom to determine our own lives. The Norwegian political philosopher Tage Lindbom writes, “In the ideological doctrine that we call liberalism, human identity is founded exclusively on the individual. Liberalism thus rests on an atomistic conception of the human being.”[20] He goes on, “Liberalism is propelled by rational and sensual individualism . . . and is controlled by self-interest.”[21] Yale Professor of Law Paul Kahn similarly describes the liberal account of humans as “an autonomous subject who applies reason to individual choices.”[22]

The autonomous, self-interested individual is the bedrock of liberal political theory and a defining feature of the wisdom of our age. The next theme of the pattern I investigate, the enchantments of mammon, follows directly from this political anthropology.

Thread 2: The Enchantments Of Mammon

It is no coincidence that a new way to organize economic relations arose alongside Western liberal anthropology. Defining humanity as self-interested, autonomous individuals, liberalism expresses the goal of human life as self-fulfillment or, more familiarly, “the pursuit of happiness.” It was inevitable that this political anthropology would yield a powerful financial system that shapes the pattern of our age. Patrick Deneen writes, “The endless quest for self-fulfillment and greater power to satisfy human cravings requires ever-accelerating economic growth and pervasive consumption.”[23] As such, the liberal political anthropology ushers in “the enchantments of mammon.”

In his book of that name, Eugene McCarraher argues that finance has taken on the function of religion in our age.[24] He argues that the common story about the secularization of the West is misleading. This story, first articulated by Max Weber, states that humanity has moved from living in an enchanted world of God, Satan, angels, and demons to a secular, material world.[25] McCarraher accepts that belief in God, angels, and demons is difficult for modern humans who live, in the words of Charles Taylor, as “buffered selves” under a bronze lid that cuts off transcendence as an option.[26] But McCarraher argues that secularization is best understood not as the elimination of religious affections but as the redirection of religious affections. While others have made this observation, McCarraher convincingly demonstrates how our religious affections have been directed toward finance. In doing this, he shows that liberalism’s emphasis on self-interest is not merely a political notion but also an economic notion, because a different economic structure is essential for achieving the goals of the Western liberal self.[27] Autonomy declares a vision of humanity that must secure itself through the accumulation of goods, and so the West has become enchanted with mammon.

But to fully understand the West’s enchantment with mammon, we must see the underlying relation of mammon and power. Mammon is not merely material stuff. The self-interested autonomous individual needs power to fulfill her potential and actualize her self-created ideal. In Leviathan, Hobbes defines power as the capacity “to obtain some future apparent Good,”[28] or, as Alan Ryan puts it, “the capacity to control future events.”[29] As self-interested individuals, we have an idea of who we want to be and how we want to live, a vision of the future we envision and define as good. To secure that vision, we need power and money, material stuff, which becomes the instrument of power to secure the life we desire. The comedian and social critic Dave Chappelle captured this clearly when he said, “Money is the fuel for choices. Money gives me choices.”[30] In saying this, Chappelle identifies the inner logic that connects the liberal vision of humanity and the enchantments of mammon—to be ourselves, to be autonomous individuals, we must be free to choose the direction of life that we have determined for ourselves. To do this, we need to accumulate resources that enable us to secure our future; in other words, we need power. The modern world is so deeply enchanted by mammon, so dominated by religious affections for finance, because it is the sacrament of power—the visible form of the invisible power we need to actualize our self-created vision.

The convergence of liberal anthropology and the enchantments of mammon are central to the pattern of our age. Both promise freedom and happiness. But in the world today, a new pattern has emerged, the final thread we must investigate. We are living in the age of anger.

Thread 3: The Age Of Anger

In his 2017 book Age of Anger, Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra set out to answer the question, Why is everyone so angry? Of course, anger has been ever-present in human history, but in our time anger is everywhere, cutting across social strata, geography, and culture. To answer the question, Mishra traces the expansion of the liberal order, showing that everywhere liberalism gains ascendency, it leaves divided societies with a minority who benefit from the vision of liberalism and a majority who become its victims.[31]

According to Mishra, one of the fundamental liberal beliefs is “that the human goods achieved so far by a fortunate minority can be realized by the ever-growing majority that desires them.”32 So, as liberalism advances, it makes promises to those who would adopt its vision: your life can be about your happiness as you define it. Liberalism believes that this political and economic progress is inevitable, and it is the role of democratic nations to be the means of this missionary advance. However, Mishra shows what happens when reality sets in, and it becomes evident that, for the vast majority, liberalism will not keep its promises. He asks, “Can the triumphant axioms of individual autonomy and interest-seeking . . . work for the majority in a crowded and inter-dependent world?”[33] For the vast majority, the answer seems to be no. Having been made promises, a reservoir of anger opens in the gap between promise and reality, and it is this anger that has spilled across the globe today.[34]

We see this dynamic at work in American society, in which everyone feels like they are losing. White working-class people, having lost the security that came with steady employment, pensions, and unions, blame the liberal elites or immigrants who, in the minds of these workers, are stealing their promise of prosperity and security. At the same time, liberal elites feel they are losing the promise of liberalism to red-state republicans who, in the mind of the elites, insist on denying the self-interested freedoms of others by imposing their morality on society. Many African Americans, who have historically not been autonomous but enslaved victims of the dominant society’s self-interest, believe societal structures favor White people—a stance that causes a reaction from working-class Whites who don’t in any way feel privileged exactly because they themselves feel like losers and so deny the notion that they have privilege.

This anger fuels the passions around a political culture that feels like a zero-sum game in which our self-interest, our self-defined future, is being lost. Everyone feels like they are losing. Everyone is angry. Everyone is engaged in what McCarraher calls “the endless combat of wills that defines the capitalist order.”[35]

Conclusion

I began this lecture with a lament. A lament for the condition of the church in the late-modern world. As a pastor theologian, I am deeply concerned that the church is conformed to the pattern of the age. Today I have offered a sketch of that pattern, of the ideologies and commitments that shape the thoughts and desires of the world we inhabit. I would like to report that the church is free from this pattern, that the church has been obedient to Paul’s exhortation not to be conformed to the pattern of the age. But I cannot.

Because of this, we must ask: What if “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the vision of humanity on which it is built, does not easily accord with “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me?” What if the church’s being in the world demonstrates a deeper commitment to mammon than to the foolishness of God? What if the anger of our age has formed the church more than the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ?

These questions need theological answers, and providing these answers is central to the pastoral task of our time. On Thursday I will address the church’s conformity to the pattern of the age and begin the positive task of sketching a vision of a nonconformed church shepherded by pastor theologians.

Notes

1. Stanley Hauerwas, quoted in William H. Willimon, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), 60.
2. Adrian Leftwich, ed., What Is Politics? The Activity and Its Study (London: Polity, 2004), 3.
3. By “liberal,” I’m not referring to liberal Democrats versus conservative Republicans. I am referring to the political philosophy that gives rise to Democrats and Republicans. In these articles, when you hear liberal, don’t think Democrat; think the underlying political philosophy that shapes Western political visions.
4. Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 1.
5. In reality, Hobbes is best defined as a proto-liberal. His vision of government is not in line with what later liberal visions proposed. For Hobbes, a sovereign, either a monarch or a parliament, should have absolute power. In this sense Hobbes is quite illiberal. But his anthropology, his vision of being human, was a vital step in the development of the liberal tradition.
6. David Runciman, “Rousseau on Inequality,” February 2, 2021, Talking Politics: History of Ideas, podcast audio, https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas-series-two.
7. Alan Ryan says, “Hobbes’s science of politics begins with an account of human nature.” On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (London: Norton, 2012), 421.
8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 186.
9. Hobbes, 185.
10. Ryan, On Politics, 428.
11. It’s important to note that, for Hobbes, the selfishness of humanity is not to be understood as sinful. It is simply nature, the need that humans have to take care of ourselves. However, this need creates the violence of the state of nature, a violence that creates the need for a ruler that has absolute authority, the authority necessary to protect against the violence of natural life.
12. Ryan, On Politics, 460.
13. Ryan, 461. Locke’s philosophical vision was the most influential on the founders of America, and his vision of the independent individual has deeply shaped American society and visions of government. It is also important to note that the tendency of American Christians to resist any form of collectivism and to adopt a vision of the individual human is rooted in the American Christian mindset that has been formed by the Lockean influence on the writing of America’s “sacred” documents, a mindset that brings with it the dangers of a vision of being human that is very American but not very biblical. This danger will be explored in lecture two.
14. Ryan, 461.
15. Ryan, 462.
16. The debate between classic liberalism and modern liberalism is not a debate about the fundamental nature of humans but about the government’s role in securing the liberty of the individual. Classical liberals insist on a small state to maximize human self-interest. Modern liberals insist on the need for a larger state mechanism because they view classical liberalism as serving only the interests of the elite few at the expense of the many. Because of this, the government must have expansive powers to ensure freedom for all. The classical liberal response is that the larger the government grows, the less free we are. The point, though, for the purposes of this paper, is to see that classical and modern liberalism operate on shared, common political anthropology. For all the debate between conservatives and liberals, the foundational anthropology is held in common.
17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 109.
18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings, ed. Christopher Bertram, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 10.
19. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 129.
20. Tage Lindbom, The Myth of Democracy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 40.
21. Lindbom, 39.
22. Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 11. Of course this doesn’t mean that there is no vision of society in liberalism, but it does mean that society is a continual negotiation of atomistic individuals determining how to organize their autonomous freedom with each other.
23. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 40.
24. Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019).
25. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965).
26. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 38–39.
27. Here we touch on a debate that quickly moves beyond the scope of this essay: whether the political precedes the economic, or whether the economic precedes the political. One of the major contributions of Karl Marx was to look at history, not as a sequence of historical-political events and nations but as a sequence of economic structures and relations. In his view politics was the ordering of economic relations, and so political ideologies arose from prior economic relations. History, then, is best understood as driven by economics rather than by politics. See David Runciman, Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas (London: Profile Books, 2021), 98–100.
28. Hobbes, Leviathan, 150.
29. Ryan, On Politics, 431.
30. Dave Chappelle, interview by David Letterman, Late Night with David Letterman, June 10, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6RZ41p-42o&t=3s.
31. On this, Deneen writes, “A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equality . . . and . . . expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual denigration, and undermines freedom.” Why Liberalism Failed, 3.
32. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 27.
33. Mishra, 28.
34. For more on this, see Joel D. Lawrence, “Pastoring in the Age of Anger,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 9.1 (2022): 49–58.
35. McCarraher, Enchantments of Mammon, 166.