How Should We Then Live

Strategizing for Life in The Negative World

Living in The Negative World

How should we then live? The famous title of Francis Schaeffer’s book sums up an increasingly pressing question for the western Church today. This question was the focus of a talk I recently gave at my local church. The purpose of the event was to discuss in long form Aaron Renn’s “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” article in First Things magazine. Without going into too much detail here about Renn’s model, it essentially seeks to explain the marked shift in our culture’s attitudes towards Christianity, and how this divides the American church past and present. He does this by presenting his “three worlds”: the “positive world” (pre 1994), the “neutral world” (1994-2014), and the “negative world” (2014-present). To Renn, these worlds are defined by their attitude towards Christianity. In the positive world, attitudes towards Christianity were generally positive, being known as a church goer was a “status enhancer”, people wanted to hire you or vote for you, it gave you social capital. In the neutral world, the attitudes towards Christianity shifted to a more neutral posture. Christian morals were seen as one option in the free marketplace of ideas, one of many choices in the pluralistic landscape. Being a Christian was neither a status enhancer nor a social negative. And today in the negative world, the attitudes towards Christianity are becoming increasingly hostile, being known as a traditional Christian could lead to losing friends, clout, or even getting fired from your job. This essay is a synopsis of the talk I gave and will assumes two things: 1. that Aaron Renn is generally correct, we are here now, welcome to the negative world, and 2. this is worth discussing, and that yes, sin has always been present in every culture and Jesus promised we would be hated for our faith, but there are unique ecclesiastical challenges in our time that must be addressed. 

My story is like a lot of people’s story. I was rather apolitical when I was a kid, I went to church but did not engage in many deep theological discussions. I attended a progressive university and had a difficult time applying my education in the real world. Then in 2020, I watched the world change (Covid, BLM, LGBTQ) and had a difficult time making sense of these massive cultural transformations unfolding before my eyes. This led me to discover a book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” by Carl Trueman. I read this book cover to cover and wanted to talk about it with anyone who would listen. This year the company I work for has decided that the SOGI (sexual orientation, gender identity) agenda (now New Jersey state law) will become a core part of the organization’s identity and mission.  And because collecting people’s information is a part of my job, this directly impacts me, and I am being compelled to employ the fashionable jargon-du-jour “what is your sex assigned at birth?” and “what is your gender identity?”.

In the negative world, Christian’s will need to open their bibles and rediscover two biblical virtues, 1. the fear of God, that leads to true courage and 2. wisdom, that leads to prudence. Second, Christians will need to recover a theology of the body and better understand the power of language in our strange new world. Lastly, the church will need to start considering how to build an off ramp for people by crafting a coherent, biblical worldview and becoming a real gospel community.

The Fear of God

Scripture is littered with the phrase “the fear of God” or “the fear of the Lord”, it is literally everywhere. But what does it mean? When we talk about “fear” biblically, you can think of fear in two ways: subservient fear (slave/master), or familial fear (love and reverence for a father figure). Here the focus will be on rediscovering a familial fear of God. I will attempt to define the fear of God as “a loving, primary reverence to who God is and what He says” or “living for an audience of one”. There are three things we find in scripture about the fear of God that can help us: the fear of God is foundational, it is the beginning and end of wisdom, and as the fear of God grows in us, we develop a true courage.

I heard a story once of a woman who took the SAT on a scantron where you fill in the little holes for each answer. The test took hours, but she was feeling great, right up until she arrived at the last question only to find there was no space for an answer. She panicked as she discovered she never answered question number one. So, although she may have got every question correct, because she started in the wrong place, she failed. This story speaks to the foundational nature of the fear of God. If we do not start there, we are lost before we begin. This is seen in scripture as well, Proverbs 9:10 says “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. And later in Ecclesiastes 12:13 “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man”. The fear of God bookends all biblical wisdom, the fear of God is the alpha and omega of wisdom in scripture.

As we grow in the fear of God, we can and must develop true courage. David Powlison in his book “Suffering” explains this well

“Grace teaches you courage. When God says, ‘fear not’ His aim is not that you would just calm down and experience a relative absence of fear. He does not say ‘Don’t be afraid. Everything will turn out ok. So, you can relax’ Instead He says ‘Don’t be afraid. I am with you. So, be strong and courageous’ Do you hear the difference? The deep waters have not gone away. Troubles still pressure you. The opposite of fear is courage, not unruffled serenity. Fearlessness is courageous in the face of fearsome things. It carries on constructively in the midst of stress that doesn’t feel good at all. Courage means more than freedom from anxious feelings.”  (emphasis mine)

“The opposite of fear is courage, not unruffled serenity”, Powlison is helping us see that as the world presses in on us, and makes impossible demands, we should not seek relief by pursuing an absence of fear and anxiety. The negative world can present as a hegemonic force, demanding full compliance. At some point, Christians may need to simply say “No”. But when we live for an audience of One, we know He is with us and helps us in real time. We can lean into the promises and presence of God in a world that hates us and becomes increasingly hostile towards us, we can have real courage. Listen to a line from the hymn Amazing Grace, “twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved”. God’s grace teaches us that a familial fear of God relieves the subservient fear of man and our world. And if we are going to fear God and have courage in the negative world, then we are going to need a deep and abiding wisdom to know how and when to do so.

Wisdom

What is wisdom? An article from Christianity.com was helpful for me, “Knowledge deals with information and intellect. Reasoning and experience add to what we know. Wisdom enables us to take that knowledge and make proper judgments and decisions. Skillful application of knowledge demonstrates wisdom.” (emphasis mine). Wisdom in the negative world knows how to skillfully apply God’s truth to our cultural context. Rediscovering God’s wisdom leads to prudence and the ability to make prudential judgements. A few years ago, self-described conservative Christian (I’m resisting sneer quotes) writer David French got himself into some trouble when he said that drag queen story hour was “a blessing of liberty”. And his argument was essentially (I’m paraphrasing) that if Christians wield state power to cancel drag queen story hour, then maybe the government will wield state power to cancel Sunday morning church services, also arguing that DQSH is protected speech under the first amendment. My response to French’s argument is that we as Christians can make a critical and categorical distinction between drag queen story hour and Sunday morning church service; one of these leads to human flourishing and one does not. One is good, and one is evil. We can say that. When we elevate the ideal of pluralism above all other values and then detach it from a higher sacred order, we lose the ability to make prudential judgements about what is good and what is evil. This is a bad strategy for Christians in the negative world. Listen to Isaiah 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light, and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter”.  Using God’s word, we can know what is good and what is evil, and we can make wise, prudential judgements in applying God’s truth to our life.

One final caution on courage and wisdom. Courage without wisdom is only noise. One negative world strategy seen from conservative-leaning Christians is a “bravery for bravery’s sake” strategy, as if God’s wisdom is best applied in dunking on twitter or owning the libs. There is certainly a time and place for skillful and strategic mockery of the negative world’s transgressive pieties. But courage divorced from wisdom is also a bad strategy. It is ultimately counterproductive and fruitless. We should hold equally to these two virtues as we move into the negative world. Courage without wisdom is noise, but wisdom without courage can lead to a paralyzing cowardice. The negative world will make demands of our inner life, our hearts and minds, and we will need equal doses of courage and wisdom. Notice that the negative world not only targets our inner self, but also sets its crosshairs on the body and the outer life.

A Theology of The Body

A key feature of the negative world is that it is hostile to the body. What does this look like? Today we see a new brand of Gnosticism that I am calling “Therapeutic Gnosticism”. The old Gnostic heresy tore the person into two: dissociating body and soul. It elevated the spiritual and denigrated the material. This is a broad over-simplification but for the sake of this conversation, essentially Gnosticism says, “soul good, body bad”. Today what we see is the same old gnostic heresy, (dissociates body form the soul, over-emphasizes the soul, harms the body) but with new therapeutic packaging.  The clearest example of this is seen in transgenderism. There is a documentary by the title “I am Not My Body”. The filmmaker Jessica Savano said, “I know I’m not my body, I’m a spiritual being”. Classic Gnosticism.  But consider the language today surrounding transgender surgeries and medical interventions, “life-saving, gender affirming care”. If you look at postoperative pictures or hear stories from “de-trans” individuals (people who got sex change surgeries and later regret it), it is the stuff of nightmares. But in our culture, this barbarism gets saturated in euphemistic and compassionate language. One can begin to see how the old Gnosticism has simply hijacked virtuous language and coats itself in a new therapeutic gloss. Abortion is another good example, Anne Hathaway famously said on The View that “abortion is another word for mercy” and “abortion is reproductive destiny”. How triumphant. On the other hand, you will hear that a fetus is just a “clump of cells” as if it is just some goo or snot, void of any human value or personhood. So, there is a clear emphasis on the inner feelings of the mother, and a clear de-personing of the baby’s body, all of it couched in this new, shiny therapeutic language. And because of the internet, the growing number of subcultures where Therapeutic Gnosticism is manifest are legion. How can we recapture a Christian worldview that places a higher value on the body?

No amount of Orwellian wordsmithing or semantic engineering can obfuscate the beauty and simplicity of the Christian view of the person. Listen to Catholic podcaster Matt Fradd,

“We are body soul composites; each being equally a part of who we are. You don’t have a body, you are your body. If your body wasn’t you, I could never slap you. If my daughter’s body wasn’t her, I couldn’t kiss her goodnight. [If we are not our bodies, then] to kiss your child goodnight would merely be to manipulate the husk that is not you and press it against the husk that is not them. It is precisely because we are our bodies that we should have reverence for the body, because the body expresses the profound mystery of the person” (emphasis mine)

Fradd is trying to help us recover the Christian anthropology. Another way to say this is the body is a symbol of the soul. The body is a representation of the soul. The body is an expression of the soul. In the Christian worldview, body and soul are interdependent, not independent. Therapeutic Gnosticism wants to pit one against the other, but Christianity reconciles one to the other. And it matters what we do with our body. I was struck by a film I recently saw called “A Hidden Life”. The film is based on a true story of a Christian German farmer named Franz Jagerstatter, who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler during WWII. A few times during the film, people would try to persuade him to reconsider his stance, trying to save his life. In one unforgettable scene, his lawyer pleads with him (I’m paraphrasing) “just sign the paper, just raise your arm and heil Hitler, just say the words. You do not have to believe it in your heart or in your mind. But just say and do these things and you’ll be free!” Franz looks at his lawyer, smiles and says, “I’m already free”. The point is Hitler knew the profound effect that controlling people’s language and behavior would have on their conscience, and so did Franz. Hitler knew if he could get people to raise their hand and say the words over and over, that it would trickle down into their hearts and minds. And Franz refused. I am not comparing the negative world to Hitler’s Germany. I am making a point about the methods of compliance that cultural totalitarians employ. There is a reason why they compel behavior. It has a cascading affect to the inner person. There is also a reason they compel both the use of new language, and the redefining of old language.

Language

Another key feature of the negative world is that through the use of language, the burden of proof has shifted. It is no longer the radicals having to explain and defend themselves to traditional thinkers, it is now the traditional thinker on their back foot having to explain and defend their views to the radical. We are mainstreaming the marginal. A lot of this is done through language. Consider the word TERF. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”. It is a pejorative slur, usually directed at feminists who are critical of gender ideology (women who believe, like most people through human history, that men cannot become women and should not be in women’s sexed spaces). Do you see how this word shifts the burden of proof? The women who hold beliefs about sex and gender common throughout all human history are the “radicals” today. Or consider the word homophobia. Have you ever wondered why the “phobia” is attached to the end of the word? The “phobia” functions to irrationalize the opponent, the traditional religious thinker. As Christians of course we acknowledge that actual homophobia exists, there are violent, abusive people that hurt same sex attracted people simply because they are attracted to the same sex. However, we also need to see how these words are weaponized in a new way to irrationalize traditional religious thinking.

We are in a war of words; and what we see in the negative world is ideological warfare. The negative world battlefront is one of the meaning of words and symbols. Which is why the big questions today are “what is a woman?” or “what is a person?”. It is also why there is so much debate over flags and what they symbolize or represent. This is precisely why, if I could remove one phrase from the English language, it would be “that’s just semantics”. Semantics is the study of meaning, and if there was ever a time to dive headfirst into the meaning of words, it is today. Reformed Christian writer Kevin DeYoung says, “we are using the same words but from different dictionaries.” In our conversations we need to start defining our terms. We also need to start asking semantic questions. In this war of words our two greatest weapons are questions of etymology (origin, meaning) “what is marriage?” and questions of teleology (design, purpose) “what is marriage for?’. We can continually point to the meaning of words and the design, purpose, and function of those words in order to help people rebuild a Christian worldview.

Judith Butler, one of the pioneers of queer theory, recently gave a talk where she described almost exactly this point; that since more LGBTQ people have come out and are using new language and behaving in new ways, that this is “changing our reality”. To be sure, I agree. Language and behavior have enormous power over our conscience, but of course there is a fundamental difference in Butler’s and my worldview. Judith Butler is an excellent postmodernist, so “real” is only what we can see, construct socially, or perform. In her worldview, there is no Creative Intelligence, no upper-case Reality, no natural law or moral order to the universe, or what CS Lewis describes as “The Toa”. Judith Butler is correct in pointing out that this is a war over defining reality. But who has the authority to define reality? And who will bring that truth and reality to our confused world?

One Anotherness

The church needs to build an off ramp for the negative world. And recovering a true “one anotherness” in the church will be critical in our efforts. Christ answers the question of how people will know, “by this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” John 13:35. To begin building this off ramp, the church must focus on two things simultaneously: 1. crafting a coherent biblical worldview (gospel doctrine), and 2. becoming a real community (gospel culture). The church must craft a biblical moral vision that is embodied both in the way we treat one another and in clear doctrinal teaching. The church must become a real community, confessing sin to one another (in a culture of shame and darkness), praying for each other (in a culture of loneliness and need), forgiving one another (in a cancel culture), disagreeing in love, (in a divided and outraged culture). Imagine the power of a gospel culture on display, what a massive opportunity is before us. I have heard it recently said that “Christianity is the new punk rock”. As the negative world becomes the new established order and forces compliance to its sanctities, it will drive people out in different directions seeking relief. Where will they go?

Konstantin Kisin is a public figure and atheist who was captured by the new atheist movement (Chris Hitchens, Richrd Dawkins etc.) has started asking some really good questions. In a recent interview with Carl Trueman, Kisin said,

“The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?”

Kisin is pointing to an enormous opportunity for the Western Church. The negative world is causing unprecedented harm and damage, are we prepared to welcome them into a real gospel community that preaches clear gospel doctrine?

A word of caution. What gets in the way of the “one another-ness” we are looking to build? Two things come to mind, 1. a general lack of clarity and clear biblical teaching, and 2. a right/left divide, or what I will call a paradigm/person divide.

To experience true one anotherness, the church will need to revisit and settle on primary doctrines so that the secondary doctrines have a footing on which to be debated. Rallying around the essential issues of our faith will give us the stamina to appropriately disagree and sort through the secondary issues. For example, if we cannot agree on the inerrant and exhaustive nature of scripture, debating a challenging issue like headship will feel petty and irrelevant. I also see this lack of clarity with cultural issues. For example, when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, I heard Christian pastors express how “complicated” and “nuanced” the issue is, with no deeper explanation. Of course, most people can agree that the hard edges of abortion can be incredibly complex and nuanced (ectopic pregnancies, genetic abnormalities, assault etc.). But as Christians, we should also be able to agree that some things about abortion are not complicated at all (the routine, systematic killing of innocent unborn lives is clearly wrong and should be strongly opposed). In the negative world, the demand for clarity outweighs the supply. And this lack of clarity creates unnecessary confusion and division. Now more than ever we need clear biblical teaching that addresses these disorienting cultural problems.  

Another thing that gets in the way of one anotherness is a right/left divide, which I would argue is better understood as a paradigm/person divide. What I mostly see are surface-level reactions on both sides. On the right I see a visceral reaction to the world’s paradigms “transgenderism, YUK!” and on the left I see a therapeutic reaction that is person-focused only “we just need to love them”, neither of these having a deeper moral rootedness. We need less strong feelings, (on both sides) and more of a grounded, calm articulation of a coherent biblical worldview. Doing so will enable us to deconstruct the world’s paradigms, while not missing the individuals that need to hear the gospel. For example, intersectionality is a legal paradigm that says one person can have multiple layers of oppression that intersect in their life and identity (if you are a woman, you’re oppressed. If you are a black woman, you’re more oppressed). As Christians we can acknowledge this paradigm has some merit to it, if someone is poor, their life may not be as difficult as someone who is both poor and disabled. But on the ground, what ends up happening is that intersectionality fashions a very postmodern, truncated list of identity markers in a clear hierarchy (at the top, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation). So, I work at an office where people call looking for talk therapy. One day, I got two calls, one from a gay black woman, but she had a cell phone, an email address, a job, a car, and a family who supported her. I received another call from a straight white male who was a veteran, his wife had died and he lived alone, he was not good with technology and did not have an email address. He also had a hard time getting around. In my scenario, which caller is more marginalized? If I strictly follow the dogma of today’s intersectionality, I may be tempted to pick caller number one. But when you consider the individual and the particular need, clearly the second caller is more marginalized. The world’s intersectionality paradigm can blind us to marginalized people that do not fit the typical script of intersectionality. Do you see what we must learn how to do? We need to develop the skill of critiquing the world’s paradigms, while meeting individuals in their unique stories.

In the negative world it is important for Christians to read the room and to know what time it is. Also, to recognize that we are not talking about status quo theological quibbles in the church today. The prognosis is dark. And the leftist capture of most of our major American institutions is polluting and destabilizing the church. The scope of this new orthodoxy’s dominion over our cultural imagination is chilling. This does not mean that Christians should be motivated by fear or outrage. Quite the opposite. As Christians, we are to be motivated by hope. Christ is King. As we strategize and consider our approach in the negative world, there are many simple, core Christian principles ready to serve us. As the Church rams against the gates of hell, we must ask ourselves what methods and weapons are we to use? As we approach scripture, it is always striking how beautiful and simple the list is: read and memorize scripture and know it deeply, pray with and for each other as often as you can, bring your family to church and worship together, cultivate life and a home and lead your family spiritually, catechize your children. The most aggressive and effective weapons are these seemingly simple and ordinary Christian practices, that when unleashed, are packed with extraordinary and unimaginable power.