Human Beings in the New Systems

In the absence of Judeo-Christian morality and Greek teleology, each of these visions offered a shining, exciting new purpose to humanity. The philosophy of the American founding represented the apex of a philosophy that could provide all four elements of meaning necessary for the building of a civilization: individual purpose and communal purpose, individual capacity and collective capacity.
 
But romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning. The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity.
 
The individual virtually disappeared in each of these domains. Individuals were only valuable as members of the collective: as sources of the general will, to be embodied in the unified culture of the state; as members of economic classes, who could unite to overthrow the nature of humankind itself; as citizens to be cultivated by the state, their expertise to be placed in service of the greater good.
 
And human beings did find meaning in the new systems. But the new systems of thought, unchecked by the old morality, unconstrained by the willingness of single individuals to stand up to the collective, could only end one way: in blood. The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Religion's Response to Modernization

Secularization is almost a synonym for modernization. It is that aspect of modernization that produces the values of secularism, by which he means "the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevancy of God."
 
These developments affect all persons, Christians and unbelievers alike. They have great power to shape the consciousness of those within society. In so doing, they have created an atmosphere in which unbelief seems natural and belief seems odd. Yet the church seems blissfully unaware of this condition, like the proverbial frog in the kettle. While this is a time of great peril, Wells believes that it is also a time of great opportunity. In the providence of God, times of reformation in the church's life frequently come out of times of disorder and chaos. God often tears down before he builds up, and this may be one of these times.
 
Unfortunately, religion, evangelical Christianity in particular, is not responding very well to this challenge, in Wells' judgment. He opened No Place for Truth with an account of the first day of his systematic theology course, in which a student complained after class about having to take systematic theology, which so obviously had no bearing on his future ministry. This sets the discussion of the entire book.
 
Wells points out that theology has generally been comprised of three elements:
 

(a) The confessional element - is the body of beliefs the church has inherited and holds, which crystallizes into doctrine.

(b) The reflective element is the church's endeavor to understand the meaning of being the recipient of God's Word in the present age. This in turn must proceed down three avenues. It must be biblical theology, covering the whole of Scripture and establishing the connections among the different parts. It must be historical theology, surveying the history of God's working in the church in the past. This will give the church the ballast necessary to assimilate the spiritual benefits of the past and to relativize the present with its pretentiousness. It must also be contemporary theology (although Wells does not use these terms), relating the content of the confession to what a given period considers normative.

(c) The third element is the cultivation of a set of virtues grounded in the first two elements. It is a matter of the church obtaining the wisdom that comes from basing its practice on its beliefs.'

 
The evangelical church has, however, been strongly influenced by the forces of modernization and has done poorly at carrying out these tasks of theology. Wells says, "As the nostrums of the therapeutic age supplant confession, and as preaching is psychologized, the meaning of Christian faith becomes privatized. At a single stroke, confession is eviscerated and reflection reduced mainly to thought about one's self." The pastor seeks to pattern the pastoral office and function in terms of the two roles that the culture most admires: the manager and the therapist. This is what theology is reduced to: reflection in the academy and practice in the church.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Spiritual Vagrants in the Modern World

The transition from a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither did not happen overnight, of course. It came in fits and starts, amid confusion and sometimes conflict. A longer view indicates that it came in two basic stages, however.
 
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
 
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
 
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Modernity is the Consequence of Modernization

By modernization, Wells means the process by which, for the sake of manufacturing and commerce, our society is organized into cities. This process results in the rise of modernity's values. He says, "In this context, the term modernity refers to the public environment created largely by urbanization, the moral etiquette, style of thought, and relationships of which are shaped by the large, impersonal structures that fill it."
 
The effect of this modernization is to create two separated spheres, the public and the private. The one world is defined by personal relations, and is made up of small, insulated islands of home, family, and personal friends. The other is defined by the functions within the capitalistic machine. In this great system of production and distribution, persons are valued not for who they are or what they believe or hold as values, but for what they do. In this realm, in fact, personal relations may actually be a hindrance, since much efficiency depends on being impersonal. This anonymity also works against accountability. The worker is disengaged from any sense of responsibility for the product manufactured, any accountability to the ultimate consumer of the product.
 
This urbanized modern workplace not only undercuts accountability, but it also has a similar effect on the cogency of religious belief and morality. Because of the wide range of worldview, cultural and ethnic difference, and personal values found in such close proximity, the values of each inhabitant have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator in order to eliminate antagonisms among the competing views. And when the public life is divested from the private world, it becomes connected instead to the machinery of the technological age. There also is a strong orientation to the future, as persons are "forced to anticipate and adapt to the oncoming change. "
 
In this modern society, the centers of culture have nothing to do with geography. Rather, they are involved with "a number of large, interlocking systems that form the structure of society." These are, for example, the economy; the political government (world, federal, and state); the universities that generate and disseminate knowledge; and the mass media, which do the same for the images by which we understand ourselves.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Modernization and the Issues

Modernity has been hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of God's truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume, perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension too noticeably or noisily on others or into the public square.
 
The right of each individual to his or her own private thoughts and beliefs is held to be both axiomatic and inviolable. So it is that the particularities of evangelical faith - the things that make it different - are dissolved. Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe - so long as I keep those beliefs from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy. So it is, as John Cuddihy has suggested, that civil religion is always a religion of civility: the edges of faith are rounded off, the angles softened.
 
Modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds - commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology - and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.
 
Worldliness is a religious matter. The world, as the New Testament authors speak of it, is an alternative to God. It offers itself as an alternative center of allegiance. It provides counterfeit meaning. It is the means used by Satan in his warfare with God.
 
Worldliness, as we have seen, is that set of practices in a society, its values and ways of looking at life, that make sin look normal and righteousness look strange. It is the view of the world that puts the sinner at its center and relegates God to the periphery.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Costs & Benefits of Modernization

The benefits of a modernized world are obvious and innumerable. Modernization has liberated us from the provincialism of small towns, opened the world to us, linked us to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world. With our technological achievements we have made our world more comfortable, in some ways safer, certainly more productive. In this century alone we have come close to doubling our life expectancy. We have enlarged our knowledge of the world, secured freedoms once only dreamed of, expanded rights, opened the doors of education, lifted hopes, and mightily multiplied our prosperity.
 
But in order to enjoy these manifold benefits, we have had to pay some stiff costs. Modernization has also blighted our lives by cutting our connections to place and community, elevating our level of anxiety, and greatly diminishing our satisfaction with our jobs. It has spawned pervasive fear and discontent. It has contributed to the breakdown of the family, robbed our children of their innocence, diluted our ethical values, and blinded us to the reality of God.)° It has made us shallow. It has made its empty.
 
Those who thought that affluence could be made to compensate for or offset the drain on the human spirit that modernization has exacted were sorely disappointed. While we now bask in relative plenty, the very means of amassing that plenty - the reorganization of our world by the processes of modernization - has diminished our soul.

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.