With regard to modernity, the reason I didn’t elaborate is because it’s such a huge topic. I’ll try my best to give an outline but I promise it will be oversimplified. As I indicated in my previous comment, Dr. Guinness is great on many things; his analysis of contemporary Western society’s (general) rejection of the Gospel, that is, the Christian faith, being predicated on the ugly collective actions of the American Religious Right and the general association of evangelicals with embarrassing political projects and means to achieving those ends is not one of those things.

In brief, modernity can be characterized as the post-Christian “culture,” that is, the ideas, practices, artifacts and institutions embodying modern (as in postmodern or modernity, not the synonym for contemporary) ideas. It is a specifically post-Christian phenomenon in that it did and could only have arisen after medieval Christendom and it is essentially Christendom without the trinitarian God.

As such it maintains, on the surface, many beliefs that Christians share (as heresies often do) like the value of human life, belief in purpose and meaning, justice, etc. but all in not quite in the same way and often quite distorted because God is no longer in the equation. This makes it difficult for Christians to articulate the parts they believe to be good. The ideas, practices and institutions look the same, but the core has been taken out and this has implications for these ideas, practices and institutions. One of the questions for Christians in modernity is how to go about criticizing it without confusion.

It’s politico-economic form is liberal democratic capitalism, which cannot be characterized simply as “good” or “bad” for the aforementioned reasons. It arose, as always, from the good intentions of the “relief of the human estate,” that is, pain and suffering of the common man. This form of governance presupposes a Hobbesian/Lockean anthropology of rational individualism fundamentally anti-Trinitarian, a Cartesian form of epistemology that began with Man and excluded God and revelation, and Baconian empiricism which eventually fragmented knowledge into “facts” (real knowledge) and “values” (fake knowledge). All these things were originally done by at least nominally Christian men who did not reject God, but (wrongly) believed they were serving him rather than laying the groundwork for His de facto elimination.

The power of modernity is technology, both material and immaterial (technique, bureaucracy), by which the control of man over nature is attempted in greater and greater measure without regard for limits. Its life-blood is unrestrained Growth; its mythic narrative by which it legitimates itself is “enlightened” Progress.

It is characterized by the exaltation of speed, power, and emotion in popular culture; mobility, both social and spatial; rational abstraction; the privatization of the Gospel; thoughtless acceptance of all new technologies; human reductionism; depersonalization by statistic; cheap energy, cheap food, cheap entertainment; Bigger is Better; technocratic experts; moral and aesthetic emotivism; the obese and yet, somehow, simultaneously malnourished poor and bulemic rich living less than a mile away from each other with no personal interaction whatsoever; Taylorism; greed and usury, or what usury even is for that matter; above all, the implausibility of the Gospel.

Modern society rejects the Gospel because the Gospel is implausible for people who live in modernity. It is implausible for those who live in modernity because modernity itself–the ideas, practices, artifacts, institutions in which we live, move, and grow that are shaping us and what we can even imagine to be plausible–was formed in the displacement of the trinitarian God revealed to us in Christ.

There is still cultural “memory,” preserved by the Church, by which society is not collapsing, some “capital” left over from ages past, but it is being depleted and increasingly is reaching the stage of mere incomprehensible taboo, after which it will be discarded, and the Church is not doing very good of a job restoring itself at the bloody fountain of the Spirit and the Word and in the testimonies of the historic Church.

Perhaps the only hope for the Church in the West is a bad depression waking us up from our fooling around with our highly advanced bread and circuses. I am not spared in that criticism.

Well, that turned out to be more of a rant than I wanted, but there you have it, Jeff.

Perhaps I’m the only one, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on “what’s really going on in modernity’s rejection of the Gospel.” It seemed like an interesting question to explore. Please forgive me if my informal manner offended.

Don’t leave us hanging, bro. What do you think is going on with that? – Jeff Doles

Who is the “us” on whose behalf you’re speaking?

If it’s just you, why the smug bemusement?

Besides, just about every form of Christianity coming out of the Reformation held to a form of church discipline. The Reformed were the best at this practice in which the Table of the Lord was fenced off from the wayward person so that they were cut off from the source of grace. Even the Anabaptists who did not believe there was any grace at all in the sacraments, believed in the ban, which meant that a wayward person could be set outside the community. So, is this a way of manipulating the grace of God?

You’re simply wanting to sever the workings of grace from the sacraments
Not at all. I think that the connection being made between them is an improper connection.

The sacraments are the primary but not the exclusive dispensers of grace. If you read any of the medievals like Aquinas or Bonaventure, they all say that the grace of God can come to a person apart from the sacraments. In fact, this is precisely how it comes to an adult convert. Thomas even says that an adult convert does not have to be baptized in water; he only has to have the intention to be baptized. So, the thief on the cross did not have to be baptized in water to be “saved.”

You’re simply wanting to sever the workings of grace from the sacraments, which I think even Reformed folks would have a problem with.

I don’t agree with Catholicism on every point and I am not a Catholic, but I want to understand the Catholic perspective as best as I can. I don’t think that makes my take idealized. Surely charity demands that we seek to understand before we criticize.

We really must stop with these caricatures of one another or we will never have genuine dialogue.

Once you make the move to some form of synergism, then sola scriptura must function in terms similar to the way Catholics and Orthodox understand authority.

Secondly, you won’t find much reference to justification in Anabaptist works from the 1500s. Instead, the emphasis is on regeneration and the new birth. Anabaptists came out largely because of ecclesiology not soteriology. Following Zwingli, they rejected sacraments and the authority of the institutional church.

Finally, even justification by faith alone takes on a different nuance once synergism is factored into the equation. One then postulates an initial justification and a final justification. Final justification is based on works because it is connected to the continued cooperation of the individual with the Spirit’s sanctifying activity. Just read Wesley here, but ironically, even Martin Bucer postulated a final justification.

Finally, the Catholic doctrine of grace is not all that convoluted in my view. It is centered upon regeneration where grace is simply the power of the Spirit at work through the bestowal of a habitus at baptism. The focus on regeneration is akin to the early Anabaptist focus. The difference is over ecclesiology and sacraments.

It is only with an overemphasis on justification as a forensic idea (thanks to Melanchthon) that grace gets redefined solely in terms of mercy and then primarily refers to the non-imputation of sins and the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness. But this notion of grace must be squared with the notion of grace as the power of the Spirit.

Don’t leave us hanging, bro. What do you think is going on with that?

I agree, I think, with much of what he says in this interview, especially with the over-emphasis on national politics (or should I say under-emphasis or non-existence of non-national political cultural engagement) characterized by “the Religious Right.” There was much ugliness, hubris, hypocrisy and foolishness in what was done.

But I don’t think any Christian generation was spared from such sin, and I think it’s grossly unfair and inaccurate to say:

America never had that problem because of the genius of the First Amendment until the rise of the Religious Right and the culture wars, and you can see that in the educated classes, a steadily rising equivalent of the European repudiation of religion climaxing in the new atheist. We have created the monster we dislike, and it’s our fault.

First, I do not think he appreciates the extent to which contemporary media, with its general secular disdain for religious “fundamentalists” (i.e. devout folks), amplified and projected the excesses of the Religious Right across the globe. Would that the media have covered the good that the Religious Right did as much as the ill.

Second, one only needs to look at the early 20th century Christian progressive movement in national politics–which gave rise to women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the federal income tax, and Prohibition (remember the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union?)–to see that Guinness’s implication that the First Amendment somehow saved American from mixing church and state matters until the Religious Right messed things up in the culture wars. Such a reading is woefully inadequate and misses the fact that the mixing of politics and religion in America has happened more often than not. The point of the First Amendment wasn’t even to “separate” religious issues from state issues but to prevent the federal government from over-ruling the establishment of religion by states and localities; state churches, after all, already existed at the time of the Constitution’s passage and were not abrogated until states individually did so at their own discretion.

Lastly, I understand the sentiment behind not alienating people by a lack of sophistication, but the new atheists are doing more damage to the cause of atheism than most Christians could dream of doing in their lifetime. Just ask the leading literary critic in England and author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution, the eminent Terry Eagleton if you don’t believe the Orthodox (as in the ecclesial body, in case there is more confusion) juggernaut David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies.

I find there is much to agree with, but I really don’t think Guinness is getting to what’s really going on in modernity’s rejection of the Gospel.