The Church After 2020

By Joel D. Lawrence

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

[This is the second 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 Church’s Conformity

At the end of World War II, living in the ruins of another apocalyptic time, a young French sociologist and theologian named Jacques Ellul set himself the project of looking at the world from amid the ashes of that great inferno. Ellul wanted to understand the ideological commitments that shaped the West, the society that proclaimed itself the most advanced in history but used that progress to build weapons that destroyed millions of lives. Why had the West taken this course? What were the ideological commitments that led to World War II? And how were those ideologies still structuring the pattern of his age?

But as a follower of Jesus, Ellul was also intent on understanding the way that the church has been conformed to the pattern of the age. In the introduction to his 1948 book, Presence in the Modern World, Ellul says, “I had to write a short and simple little book about the presence of the Christian in the world of today.”[1] Ellul pursued this joint sociological and theological project over the next forty years, writing over fifty books and one thousand articles on the social structures of the modern world, the underlying commitments of our time that shaped the world, and the church’s conformity to the modern world.

In these lectures, I am engaging in a mini-Ellulian project, sketching the pattern of our age and the church’s conformity to that pattern. We began this project by exploring three threads of the pattern that dominate our age: First, the political anthropology of Western liberalism, which defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals and shapes society based on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own self-determined ends. Second, the enchantments of mammon, the financial dominance of our age, created by the need for self-interested humans to acquire resources to secure their autonomous lives, a reality that reveals that mammon is, at its essence, power. Third, the age of anger, in which vast numbers of people in our world today are disillusioned by the fact that the promises of Western liberalism have not been delivered.

The task before us today is to reflect on the church’s conformity to the pattern of the age, investigating how these threads have captured the church, misshaping our presence in the world.

But before we turn to this task, I want to give a reminder of the overall context of these lectures: a call to a vision of the pastor theologian. It is my conviction that the key to the renewal of the church is a renewal of the identity of the pastor as pastor theologian. Over the past two centuries, a deep chasm has opened between the church and the academy. While I have no doubt that there must be a vibrant academy, I also have no doubt that the divide between church and academy has been unhealthy for both and that both are weakened when they are distant from, and even suspicious of, one another.

The primary problem is that this division has situated theology in the academy rather than in the church. In the mind of most Christians today, when they think of theology they think of the academic production of theology. I experienced this personally when I was leaving a full-time, tenured position as a professor of theology to become the senior pastor of a local church and was asked by a friend, “Are you sad that you’re no longer going to be a theologian?” This question makes the issue clear: pastors are not viewed as theologians, and because of this, theology is viewed not as the living font of ecclesial life but as a discipline for academic specialists. But for much of the church’s history, pastors were her primary theologians. Irenaeus and Augustine were bishops; Calvin and Luther, parish pastors. Barth’s theological revolution took shape as he pastored the people of Safenwil, Switzerland. Bonhoeffer’s theological vision of the church’s renewed relation to the modern world was formed as he pastored expats in Barcelona and children in Berlin. These great theologians engaged in the theological task that arose from and was intended for the church’s life in the world.

A key reason for the conformity of the church to the pattern of the age is that pastors are not the theologians of the church. To free the church from its capture, we need pastor theologians who will give their hearts and minds, and yes, even their lives to understanding our conformity and shaping the theological imagination of our congregations against the imaginative formation of the age. The year 2020 made it clear that the church is not immune to these ideologies but conformed to them. That the church looks little different from the world, that the church is divided along partisan political lines, that the anger of the age has infected the church, reveal our conformity to the pattern of the age.

The Pattern Of The Church’s Conformity

So let’s turn now to the work of understanding how the church has been conformed to the pattern of the age, beginning first with conformity to the political anthropology of Western liberalism.

Conformity To Liberal Political Anthropology

To see how the church’s conformity to liberal anthropology took hold, we need to again look at the roots of Western liberalism. In his book The Unintended Reformation, Brad Gregory writes about the historical process through which the church was brought under the control of the state. Prior to the Reformation and early Enlightenment, the idea that God ruled through the church and the state was agreed upon by all; the debate was around which power, the church or the state, had ultimate earthly authority, a debate symbolized by the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

But the post-Reformation period ended this debate. According to Gregory, following the doctrinal disagreements and societal upheavals of the Wars of Religion, political authorities seized the opportunity to exert power, evidenced in the legal principle of cuius regio, eius religio, established at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This phrase, which translates to “whose realm, their religion,” meant that the political ruler would determine the religion of a realm. While ostensibly keeping the notion of the church and state sharing authority, this settlement began the process by which the state would gain supremacy over the church.[2] It is in the context of the states’ assertion of priority that the Western liberal political anthropology developed. According to Gregory, “The ‘wars of religion’ prompted dramatic innovations in political thought that, beginning most clearly with Hobbes, rejected the idea that had been at the heart of politics for well over a millennium—that a ruler’s principal obligation was to protect and promote God’s truth as the foundation that made possible shared Christian life in fidelity to Jesus’s commands.”[3] These early liberal thinkers saw the political structures of Christendom descend into the chaos of war and so devised a new way to shape civil society that would not be susceptible to religious sectarian instability.

To do this, they built new political structures on the foundation of a new anthropology. In this vision of humanity, the government would protect the rights of all to worship as they choose in private but bracket the role religion plays in the public operations of the state. In this settlement, which Mark Lilla calls “The Great Separation,”[4] faith becomes not a comprehensive narrative of the world but a privatized affair in which individuals choose how to worship and who to associate with, making faith “one wedge in the pie of an individual life.”[5] The result of this, says Gregory, is that today, “Whether in Europe or North America, our respective sovereign states dictate what individuals and institutions can and cannot do in exercising religious faith,”[6] a situation that he calls, with a nod to Immanuel Kant, “religion . . . within the limits of the state alone.”[7] To keep the peace, the liberal tradition invested great power in the state with a clear program of placing the churches under the constraints of the state. In many ways, the Western church has benefitted from this: we are free to worship as we wish, free to gather as we choose. But there is a dark side of religious freedom, which is playing out today and reveals how the church is conformed to the Western liberal anthropology.

We can see this in how, in the modern state, Christianity is easily instrumentalized, viewed as a means of producing virtuous citizens for liberal states. The great separation means that Christianity must prove itself to be “useful” to the goals of the state by providing general virtues like loyalty, duty, and sacrifice. Generalizing morality, Christianity is seen as valuable insofar as it produces obedient citizens who support the efforts of the state.[8] By this, the church is easily turned to national ends, making the church a servant of the ideologies of the state.

Through this the Western liberal vision of the self-interested individual formed the church’s vision of freedom. Subtly the liberal ideal of the free autonomous self came to shape the church toward pursuing its own self-interest in society. The church made a bargain with the state: we will provide support to national aims, even declaring those aims to be divinely ordained, and the state will give us freedom. But this freedom was defined as the liberal vision of self-interest, leading the church to a factionalized and competitive posture toward society by becoming committed to protecting our own interests. Subtly the church becomes a faction of the democratic apparatus, pursuing our vision of society through the competitive practices of Western liberalism. In doing this, the church is shaped to pursue the power of the state for the sake of protecting our religious freedom and self-interest.

Perhaps a historical illustration will help me make the point. I’ve gone this far in these lectures without mentioning Dietrich Bonhoeffer; it’s time to remedy that. As a Bonhoeffer scholar, I am often asked what we can learn from Bonhoeffer’s life.[9] Usually this question is framed around his actions in the conspiracy against Hitler in the late 1930s and 40s when he served as a double agent in the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Agency, feeding information from the military conspirators to the British government. People ask: Did he do the moral thing? Is it ever ethical to lie? While these are interesting questions, I don’t believe that Bonhoeffer’s actions in the 1940s are most informative for us today. Instead, I believe that the most helpful part of Bonhoeffer’s story is found in the mid-1930s, prior to his involvement in the conspiracy to kill Hitler. During this time, as the Nazis rose to power, Hitler moved to appoint bishops who would be Nazi functionaries with the goal of unifying the Protestant churches as a single Pro-Nazi church. Many pastors rejected this move as a violation of the Lutheran tradition of the two kingdoms, in which the church and the state were viewed as the two hands of God, each with its own sphere of autonomous authority.

The pastors who resisted the Nazi takeover formed the Confessing Church. In 1935 this movement published the Barmen Declaration, a confessional statement of their resistance to Hitler’s pursuit of authority over the church. But many pastors who joined the Confessing Church were also members of the Nazi party. The Confessing Church resisted the Nazi takeover of the church, arguing for the freedom of the church vis-à-vis the state, but many were proponents of Nazi ideology. The Confessing Church’s goal was to maintain ecclesial freedom, but it did not condemn the falsehoods of Nazism. In fact, many Confessing Church pastors believed that Hitler was God’s instrument to restore the German nation to its proper place in the world order and so would serve the church by building a strong society that would, in turn, strengthen the church. The Confessing Church was focused on its own freedom, its own societal position, its own self-interested autonomy. But as Karl Barth put it in 1935, “For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart.”[10]

For Bonhoeffer, the failure of the Confessing Church was deeply disturbing. It revealed a church accustomed to power, to its authority in society, and to the benefits of a social structure that privileged the church’s role in culture. The church’s failure to look beyond its own self-protection, to take up the cross of Christ through a costly discipleship, was a sign to Bonhoeffer of a deeply compromised church. Rather than serving the suffering, rather than inhabiting a cruciform position in the world, the Confessing Church was intent on protecting its position in society. This experience was the impulse for two of Bonhoeffer’s best-known works: Discipleship, which calls the church to follow Christ into the powerlessness of the cross, and Life Together, which calls the church to understand its unique way of being in the world, a way that must be freed from the triumphalism of a church protecting its own position.[11]

In invoking this example, I want to be clear: I don’t think the United States of 2022 is Germany of 1935. But there are lessons we can learn from the history of the Confessing Church. The Great Separation creates a pattern in which the church, adopting the liberal vision of humanity as self-interested, becomes focused on its own self-interest and defending its own societal position. Believing that its freedoms are God-given, the church turns to a protectionist mode, working to secure a culture in which we are free to live our faith without persecution, electing politicians who will protect us and advance our interests in society.

Over the past decade, many in the evangelical church have experienced the shock of a society moving further into post-Christianity and challenging the church’s sense of freedom. Many in the evangelical church have responded by doubling down on their demand for their own freedom and looking to defend their own position in society. This response is completely in line with the logic of the Western liberal political anthropology, in which self-interested autonomous individuals need power to secure their own freedom. The danger of the self-interested church can be seen more fully as we turn to her conformity to the second ideology of the pattern of the age, the enchantments of mammon.

Conformity To The Enchantments Of Mammon

Having defined humanity as self-interested autonomous individuals, the liberal anthropology ushered in an economic anthropology. If humans are to strive for self-fulfillment, then we must secure the resources for ensuring the future we envision for ourselves, leading to the enchantments of mammon. As the church has adopted the Western liberal vision of humanity, so has the church become enchanted with mammon.

Earlier I referenced Jacques Ellul and his project of understanding the ideologies that shape our world. One of the themes in Ellul’s work is to position the supposedly material things of the “secular” age in the context of the biblical teaching on the principalities and powers, the rebellious forces that stand behind the visible world. In his book Money and Power, Ellul offers an important treatment of mammon, beginning with a key observation: “Scripture seldom looks at money from a monetary standpoint.”[12] In saying this, Ellul wants to position money in its cosmic context, making the case that mammon is not merely money. He says that when we are talking about mammon, “we are talking about something that claims divinity . . . , [which] reveals something exceptional about money. . . . What Jesus is revealing is that money is a power.”[13] Notice he doesn’t say, as the old adage goes, “money is power.” He says that money is a power. Jesus is pointing to the reality that mammon, like all the powers, is a self-acting, autonomous agent working to entangle human souls. Ellul drives this point home by personifying mammon, capitalizing the word and using the pronoun “he” when referring to Mammon.

As a spiritual power, he (Mammon) competes against God for our worship. This isn’t simply a warning against misusing money. According to Ellul, when Jesus says that we can either serve God or Mammon, “[Jesus] is not using a rhetorical figure but pointing out a reality. God as a person and Mammon as a person find themselves in conflict.” Mammon is not neutral, material stuff; Mammon is a counterfeit god. Ellul goes on to say, “Jesus describes the relation between us and one or the other the same way: it is the relationship between servant and master. Mammon can be a master the same way God is; that is, Mammon can be a personal master.”[14]

As the church, we rightly warn against serving Mammon. But the danger of Mammon’s enchantment is his ability to ensnare, not merely through the material stuff of money but as a power—through the promise of power. As a counterfeit god Mammon works to capture the human heart, as did the serpent of old. In doing this Mammon makes us believe we can order our lives according to our own autonomous selves and can acquire the power necessary to secure the life we desire.[15] He tempts us to rely on ourselves while capturing us in the illusion of power. So while money is a danger to the church, the deeper means of our conformity is our enchantment with Mammon, our temptation to worldly power, by the powers of the age that create the pattern of the age.

I propose that the church’s conformity to the enchantments of Mammon is most clearly seen in the quintessential American heresy: the prosperity gospel. When we hear “prosperity gospel,” we probably think of preachers on the Trinity Broadcasting Network who wear slick suits and have even slicker hair. In this version of the prosperity gospel, which we could call the financial prosperity gospel, people are promised bodily healing and financial success by means of “planting seeds,” giving money to preachers and ministries who will pray for our blessing. The financial prosperity gospel is crass and rejected by the great majority of theologians and pastors. But the financial prosperity gospel is merely one manifestation of the more deeply rooted American prosperity gospel.

The American prosperity gospel is the false theological idea that the church will dwell in a culture in which we are safe to live out our faith and that we won’t face persecution.[16] After all, the founders of America fled religious persecution to establish a place for the free exercise of religion. For 250 years, the majority church in America has been in a position of power and influence in the culture: our sexual ethic was reinforced by the culture, the history we learned was our history, and pastors were pillars of the community. The American prosperity gospel trained the church to expect the world to be a basically supportive place in which we will find favor. We’ve come to expect authority to shape the culture toward Christian moral ends so that the world would be safe for living out our faith.

The American prosperity gospel has trained us to pursue the power we need to secure our own vision of life in the world. It has trained the church to believe that persecution is a sign of something gone wrong and that God will protect us from maltreatment. Through the American prosperity gospel, the church has become enchanted with Mammon, enchanted with seizing the power we need to be free, to be authoritative in the broader culture, to have a world in which our ethic is affirmed, or at least not resisted by the culture around us.

Our belief in the American prosperity gospel is why the past decade has been so disorienting for many in the evangelical church. As the culture moves away from us, the church has been fighting to hold on to its power. Fearing the loss of what we believe is God’s promise to us, the church has grown increasingly defensive, turning more toward Mammon—power—as the means of our defense. Fearful of losing our position in society, fearful of losing our way of life, the church has become ensnared in the third thread in the pattern of the age: the age of anger.

Conformity To The Age Of Anger

The age of anger has not stopped at the church door. Social media has become the site of many an angry battle between Christian soldiers, marching as to war. Why is the church so angry?

A central component of the church’s conformity to the age of anger is rooted in our acceptance of the promises of Western liberalism. Having adopted the Western liberal political anthropology, the church has come to expect God’s blessing of prosperity, success, and authority. The anger in the church is a result of the fact that over the past two decades many in the church have come to feel that they are losing what they’ve been promised. We built churches that catered to self-interest and preached sermons that promised Western liberal life, but in so doing we failed to call people to take up the cross.

As the culture moves away from the church, many have responded with an angry defensiveness. The church is filled with anger because we have come to believe that our inheritance has been stolen, that the promises of God have been thwarted, that our claim on success and influence has been taken away. We are seeing churches seething with anger, anger directed toward brothers and sisters in Christ, anger directed toward the culture around us, because too many are convinced that the freedoms promised by Western liberalism are promises made to us.

The anger in the church is a sign that our expectations don’t belong to the promise of the gospel. In the rest of this lecture, I want to begin to lay the groundwork for a vision of a non-conformed church by reflecting on the church’s calling to be a unique culture. As the church, our mission to represent a different rule, our mission as ambassadors of another nation, centers on the fact that we are to have different common objects of love than does the pattern of the age.

Common Objects Of Love

In his book Common Objects of Love, British theologian Oliver O’Donovan suggests that communities are formed by shared commitments of love. O’Donovan borrowed this notion from Augustine, who defined a community as “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”[17] In other words, people become a “we” through a shared commitment to love certain common objects that shape the way we understand the world and our place in the world. O’Donovan writes, “What is holy in ancient Israel—the Sabbath, the temple, the land—at once organizes and structures the people as a political society and discloses the universal divine purpose for the world.”[18] The common objects of love are the “representative objects, representative persons, representative histories, and representative ideas [that] constitute the central core of the society’s common way of seeing the world and living in it.”[19]

O’Donovan’s description of common objects of love reveals a deep connection between tradition and identity. No community can endure without tradition. For O’Donovan, “the essential thing about tradition is that it creates social continuity.”[20] Tradition is the process through which the common objects are passed on over time, forming the necessary foundation for the perpetuation of a society. Without an agreed-upon tradition, it is impossible for a community to have shape, a sense of what makes us “us.” From this, the common objects of love also form the shared identity of a community. O’Donovan observes that “common objects of love generate common self-understanding.”[21] Who are “we”? What unites us as a social community? The common objects of love perform this function and set social groupings apart from one another. These objects are language, practices, moral customs, symbols, a shared historical narrative, and revered figures in that narrative. All of these, along with myriad other objects of love, give a community its identity and its understanding of its purpose in the world.[22]

O’Donovan’s vision of the common objects of love gives us insight into the church’s attachment to the pattern of the age. Having set our hearts on the common objects of Western liberalism, the church has become separated from the common objects of love that ought to unite us. Much of the division that we have seen in the church in the late-modern world is caused by our adoption of ideologies given to us by the structures of the Western liberal political, economic, and cultural order. Having adopted these structures as the means of our engagement with the world, and thinking that we can use them for the sake of the church’s mission, we end up shaped by them, and so the church, rather than offering a vision to the world of another way, a community shaped by the common objects of love of the kingdom, has become stuck in the unimaginative factional combat of a world-conformed Christianity, the trench warfare of a church captured by the pattern of the age.[23]

Conclusion

The year 2020 revealed our desperate need for a Spirit-renewed imaginative vision of the church’s presence in the world, a way of being engaged that is not dependent on the world’s common objects of love. This is where the joy-filled and theologically vibrant mission of the pastor theologian is critical. As those called to shepherd our people to a faithful witness to Christ and so out of conformity to the pattern of the age, pastor theologians are placed in a critical interpretive position. As congregations are divided, as this division creates anger toward other followers of Christ and toward the world, as political affiliation becomes a way of deciphering another’s salvation (“You can’t be a follower of Christ and vote for ___”), pastor theologians must confront our own and the church’s adoption of false common objects. We must clarify that the promises we have received as followers of Christ are not the promises the world around us has received. The common objects of love that have spread across the globe—autonomy, self-determination, liberal freedom—are not the common objects of love the church is called to share. As such, the common objects of our age have created a vision of what to expect from life that is at odds with the vision contained in the common objects of Christianity, which form the church into a society called to live with and for, but not be conformed to, the broader society.

To follow Jesus is not to be given the promise of individual autonomy. Christ doesn’t promise us a greater degree of control over our lives but instead promises us the loss of control as we are called to lay down our lives for him. Christ doesn’t promise us freedom as Western liberalism defines it—the freedom to define our own selves—but instead promises that if we seek to gain our life, we will lose it. Because of this, the church is called to embody the contrast between the promises that have created the pattern of the age and the promises inherent in our call to follow Jesus.

The age tells us that we will flourish as self-interested, autonomous individuals who have entered a social contract to protect our self-interest and exercise independent rule over our lives through the accumulation of resources that increase our worldly power. It declares that human freedom lies in pursuing our self-determined ends. But the gospel declares that we are created to be a self-surrendered, dependent community who lives under the rule of YHWH, and that human freedom lies in being radically dependent on YHWH as he reigns as Lord of our lives. The divergences between the vision of our age and the vision of the gospel of what it means to be human reveal fundamentally different common objects of love. As the church, the common objects of love that are to shape our identity should confront the affections, desires, and strivings of the political anthropology of Western liberalism, the enchantments of mammon, and the age of anger.

In my final lecture, I will conclude with an alternate vision of what it means to be human, rooted in the first four chapters of Genesis. Out of this vision arises a call to pastor theologians to courageously shepherd our flocks to live according to the fundamental common object of our faith, the cross of Christ. It is the calling of this generation of pastors to lead this work.

Notes

1. Jacques Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, trans. Lisa Richmond (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), xvii.
2. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012), 154.
3. Gregory, 162.
4. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 55.
5. Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 164.
6. Gregory, 131.
7. Gregory, 131.
8. We see this, as an example, in Robert Wuthnow, Why Religion is Good for American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
9. For those unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer but interested in pursuing more understanding of his life and thought, I recommend Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Vintage Books, 2015); and Joel Lawrence, Bonhoeffer: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2010).
10. Karl Barth, quoted in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 437.
11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).
12. Jacques Ellul, Money and Power, trans. LaVonne Neff (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 74.
13. Ellul, 75.
14. Ellul, 76.
15. This reminds us of Hobbes’s definition of power that I cited in my first lecture: the ability to control the future.
16. I first developed this thinking on the American prosperity gospel in Joel D. Lawrence, “After Sapiens: Preparing the Church for the Evolutionary Future of Humanity,” Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 6.2 (2019): 13–22. Some of the material in this section is from that article.
17. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2017), 637.
18. Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community, Stob Lectures 2001 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 31.
19. O’Donovan, 32.
20. O’Donovan, 32.
21. O’Donovan, 28.
22. One reason that Western liberalism is in crisis is that it is fundamentally a tradition-dissolving ideology. If we are autonomous self-creators, then tradition is by its nature a barrier to self-fulfillment. Emphasizing the individual inexorably breaks down the shared beliefs that give meaning to a community. Union then becomes centered on shared affections and desires, nothing that ultimately transcends the self. American culture is experiencing this today: our society is losing agreed-upon common objects as each person is trained to be his or her own object of love.
23. This points to the theological-imaginative leap we need to make as followers of Jesus. The incarnation doesn’t take us out of the world; it calls us to be engaged in the world. But our calling to be engaged is not to be on the world’s terms, not to be according to the world’s common objects of love. We are stuck in political polarization because we have come to accept the pattern of the age, the cultural common objects of love, as the means of our engagement with the world.