Bring Back the Greeks

I have a talk on modernity and mission in which I try to diagnose the challenge of modernity and lay out a strategy for an effective encounter between our Western, modern context and the gospel. Here is a brief descriptive list of the steps in this missionary strategy:

1. Bring back the Greeks. Learn philosophy. Learn to ask and answer with the sophistication of Plato and Aristotle the great questions about the nature of being, truth, goodness, and beauty and about the nature of a truly good and human life. The gospel provides answers to questions that are not being asked.

Recently I had a philosophical encounter. I was picked up by a Lyft driver at the local airport. I had on my clericals and the driver asked me what I did for a living. I said I was a priest. What is that? But what do you do? Then, do you mind if I choose the music? I said, your choice. He chose very rank and vulgar rap. I am a child of the ’60s and thought I couldn’t be shocked, but I was wrong. When we got to my destination, I said, do you think the men singing those songs are happy? There was absolute silence and stillness. I could see my driver was really thinking. Finally, he said, I know that one guy is happy because I saw the video and he had 20 women around him. Oh, I said, is that happiness? Will it be happiness in five years, in 10, in 20? More silence. More stillness. My friend was thinking. He was thinking about a question to which the Christian faith has profound answers. It was an effective missionary encounter. He had been left with a question that has the power to draw him toward Christ. Bring back the Greeks. Study philosophy. The synergy between Greek rationalism and the gospel is not a disposable accident of history but the providence of God. See Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg speech.

2. Pursue a radical Christocentrism. Resist the temptation to make Jesus Christ an ancillary to some other and greater good. The prosperity gospel is one example of this. Jesus the bearer of a purely political agenda, whether of the left or the right, is another. Jesus Christ is not the means to some other end. He is the Alpha and the Omega.
3. Cultivate holiness. Our proclamation must have not only the form of godliness but the power thereof.
4. Save beautiful churches. People are still drawn to cathedrals and beautiful churches, and a performance of Messiah will still fill a church in the midst of the secular city. The path to God through beauty is a path that has a particular appeal for moderns who are being choked by the ugly and the banal.
5. As part of paving the path to God through beauty, there is a need to inhabit and transmit Christian culture. The church needs to reach out to the cultures she is trying to evangelize, but the church is a cult with a culture and has its own art and architecture and music and literature. In the past, the task of the transmission of this culture could be shared with schools, universities, museums, and concert halls. The transmission of the high culture of the church needs to be an increasingly important part of our Christian formation.
6. Pray the Great Thanksgiving. Modernity is characterized by the posture of grievance. There is about modernity more than a hint of the world-weariness and cosmic disgust of ancient Gnosticism. Modern utopians regard the world as we find it odious and beyond redemption. It must be all wiped away so that the new will arise. The world is to be escaped rather than blessed in thanksgiving. Counting blessings is a fundamental Christian spiritual discipline, and one with a healing power for modern angst. A joyful and grateful people are the proper carriers of the good news of the gospel.
7. Be disarmed and disarming. The peaceable kingdom is not brought about by the violence of men but by the nonviolence of God. The means of evangelism and mission must be consistent with the sacrificial love of the cross. Love returned for love is the aim as we invite others to know the love wherewith we are loved. Scorn and dismissive rhetoric are counter-evangelical. Moralistic hectoring of all forms is a kind of violence.
8. Foster a Christocentric ecumenical witness. On the missionary frontier, denominational divides are counter-evangelical. Lesslie Newbigin has rightly pointed out that we cannot tell men and women that there is one family of God and do so credibly from a divided platform. The only principle that can mend ecumenical division is an ecumenical Christocentrism. Ecumenical proclamation of mere Christianity will have missionary power in an increasingly tribal modernity. The ecumenical challenge is now as much within churches as it is between churches.
9. Cultivate Marian spirituality. The signature song of modernity is “I Did It My Way.” Mary is characterized by attention to Scripture, suppleness in the hands of the Holy Spirit and an openness and surrender to God’s way. Mary is the antidote to the modern sickness of the autonomous self-run riot. Her disappearance from the iconography and spirituality of many churches is a symptom of accommodation to modernity and the recovery of her presence as the spirit of a church that says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” is essential for a church that can feed and nurture its children and be faithful in the face of a world that rejects her Lord.
10. Aim for transcendent liturgy. Transcendence is in God’s hand, but we can prepare for it and aim for it. Dostoevsky says that low ceilings are bad for the soul. Modern people seldom look up. Liturgy that by God’s grace opens the doors of heaven has a converting power. When any kind of evangelism and Christian education was prohibited in the Soviet Union, people were still converted by coming in from the gray Soviet street to a liturgy full of light, beauty, mystery, and life.

I close with a passage from the late ecumenical theologian Robert Jenson in his essay “How the World Lost Its Story.”

One of many analogies between postmodernity and dying antiquity—in which the church lived for her most creative period—is that the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence. … The church so constituted herself in her liturgy. … The classic liturgical action of the church was not about anything else at all; it was itself the reality about which truth could be told. … In the postmodern world, if a congregation or churchly agency wants to be “relevant,” here is the first step: It must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life. In the postmodern world, all else must at best be decoration and more likely distraction.