Gospel Conversations Reimagined: Musings on Secularization and the Unraveling of Authority
This Series of Stories is meant to lay a foundation for a narrative approach to meaningful gospel conversations informed by Four Prominent Features of Faithful Recontextualization, which I introduced in this post. Today I reflect briefly on Bright’s context and then introduce some facets of our secular age to reinforce the need for faithful recontextualization.*
In a previous post I note that the US was predominantly Protestant in the mid-twentieth century, and that Bill Bright’s passion for evangelism was, in part, informed by a survey taken with over a thousand college students on scores of campuses in the 1950s. Strikingly, most of the students surveyed claimed the Protestant faith but did not know God loved them or that he had a plan for their lives. This one fact, perhaps more than any other, compelled Bright to develop Four Spiritual Laws. In addition, he firmly believed leaders around the world were eager to hear the good news and that most people were interested in hearing a gospel presentation.
Granted, the success of Four Spiritual Laws lends veracity to Bright’s claim, but why was it so appealing to believe in God in 1951, while in 2021 many find belief in God implausible and even preferable?
Philosopher Charles Taylor describes the twenty-first century as secular and pluralistic—an age in which Christianity has been displaced from the default position and now competes with myriad religions, philosophies, takes, or “spins”[1] on life in which Westerners consider belief in God implausible—even unimaginable.
According to Taylor, secularization is not the absence but the presence of belief. He posits that, while secularization exists within an “immanent frame”[2] in which theistic belief has been displaced from the default position, secularization also creates a new set of faith assumptions or conditions of belief about history, identity, morality, society, and rationality. He describes this secular age as one of contested beliefs with a plurality of belief options. “A spiritual super nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.”[3]
Lesslie Newbigin adds depth of insight here:
If the mastery which is given to man through the process of secularization is not held within the context of man’s responsibility to God, the result will be a new slavery; if the dynamism of ‘development’, the drive to a new kind of human society, is not informed by the biblical faith concerning the nature of the Kingdom of God it will end in totalitarianism; and if the secular critique of all established orders isn’t informed and directed by the knowledge of God it will end in self-destructive nihilism.[4]
Sociologist Philip Rieff adds an important layer to this discussion and points out the “vacuous sacred center” in today’s culture. He warns “… a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.”[5] Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile assert that a threat of meaninglessness lurks beneath the breakdown of traditional authority.[6]
One significant difference between Bright’s twentieth century context and today’s is the breakdown of moral authority, which is increasingly apparent in popular culture today. Daily we hear cries against injustice and in favor of equity and fairness. Regularly we are subjected to what some define as “morally reprehensible,” but who holds the moral plumb-line? Who determines near-consensus moral standards and who is to say that the same standards apply in every situation? No doubt, recent events in America alone have laid bare civil and human atrocities, but as noted earlier, the way forward is not promising, especially without a sacred center.
The twenty-first century affords followers of God new challenges and fresh opportunities to recontextualize our approach to meaningful gospel conversations. Without a robust theological framework that rests on the True Story of the Whole World and a confidence in the one true God—Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer—we will be hard-pressed to engage with relevance. The Four Prominent Features of Faithful Recontextualization, I suggest, provide riverbanks for a way forward.
*Portions of this post are taken from: Monaco, Cas. “Bill Bright’s (1921–2003) Four Spiritual Laws Reimagined: A Narrative Approach to Meaningful Gospel Conversations For An American Twenty First Century Secularized Context,” PhD Diss, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Wake Forest, NC, 2020.
[1] Taylor, in A Secular Age, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 550, uses this term to describes a particular way of looking at and understanding immanence or secularism, for example, “as a way of convincing oneself that one’s reading is obvious, compelling, allowing of no cavil or demurral.” James K. A. Smith, in How Not to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 96, provides helpful definitions and descriptions for Taylor’s concepts. Here Smith describes the secularist “spin” as “the denial of contestability [and] the refusal to recognize secularity3. Secularist spin fails to honor and recognize the cross-pressure that inhabitants of our secular age sense.”
[2] Taylor, in Secular, 542, defines “immanent frame” as a constructed social space that holds instrumental rationality as a key value, where time is secular (this world). The immanent frame “constitutes a ‘natural’ order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one.”
[3] Taylor, Secular Age, 300. Previously, Taylor argued that the spiritual super nova is the result of the third stage of contemporary secularity (p. 299).
[4] Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966), 39.
[5] Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, vol. 1 of Sacred Order/Social Order, ed. Kenneth S. Piver (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 13.
[6] Craig Van Gelder and Dwight J. Zscheile, in Participating in God’s Mission: A Theological Mission for the Church in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 47.
