Modernity: The Worldliness of Our Time

The ways in which modernity has influenced and even altered human values and priorities are many and complex, and those who attempt to ellucidate such findings are like fish trying to tell other fish what it's like to be wet. Of course, fish are supposed to be wet, and human beings are supposed to have values and social customs (in a word, culture); but while being wet is no sin for a fish, being a worldly human being is. Thus, the many human cultures through time and around the globe will give manifold expressions of their fallenness (in addition to God's image in which they are still made, though fallen), and discerning such fallen expressions is both difficult and necessary. In his book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, David Wells explains just how central this discernment of one's culture is and why it is so important if we are to understand the ways of unbelief and fight against them (p. 28ff):

The central issue I am seeking to deal with in this book [is] the relationship between Christ and culture. Is modernity one issue among many with which Christian faith must be engaged, or is it the issue that is encountered in every aspect of the modern world? Contemporary evangelicalism has, for the most part, assumed that modernity is simply one issue among many that may require some thought from time to time, that it is not a pervasive reality intruding on virtually every aspect of the inner life of faith. It is quite natural that evangelicals should adopt this view, because they typically think of culture as neutral and no more a carrier of implicit or explicit values than are the clothes that they wear. From time to time, modernity may raise its head, like atheism and humanism, and then the faithful must rise to denounce the danger, but for the most part modern culture seems a safe place in which to practice faith.

…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.

Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, thinking processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.
Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.

As if to anticipate his skeptical readers’ response, Wells then addresses those who are eager for a simple, straightforward answer to the challenge that modernism, as he’s presented it, poses for Christian faith:

Too often the quest for answers is driven by impatience, by a refusal to do the hard work in taking the measure of the problem first. Answers assembled apart from such work tend to treat symptoms rather than the disease; they are often little more than management techniques, mere Band-Aids. Those whose instincts are most in tune with modernity will be most inclined to rush to these sorts of solutions, because it is precisely these sorts of techniques that the modern world most prizes. The modern mind will be quick to conclude that evangelical faith is faltering because it is not efficient enough, for example, or because it is not appealing enough, because it has not adapted itself adequately to the inner needs of those in the modern world.

Then comes his conclusion and what Wells sees as the root of the problem for evangelical faith today and, implicitly, how we are to regain our vibrant and biblical heritage for the good of the modern world as well as the nations:

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common. (bold mine)

In hearing his criticisms of modernity, it is important to recognize that Wells is not so naive as to think we just need to return to the "good old days" of the pre-modern world. Rather, salvation is to be found in God and his Word, whatever the century. No, we don't need time machines; what we need is discernment: the kind of "spiritual insight that comes with Christian wisdom." (p. 55)

There is nothing wrong with organizational wizardry or public relations or television images ... per se. The problem lies in the current evangelical inability to see how these things carry within them values that are hostile to Christian faith. The problem, furthermore, lies in the unwillingness of evangelicals to forsake the immediate and overwhelming benefits of modernity, even when corrupted values are part and parcel of those benefits. What is plainly missing, then, is discernment, and this has much to do with the dislocation of biblical truth from the life of the church today and much to do with the dying of its theological soul.

It is not our embrace or employment of that which is new or that which works that is here condemned, but rather our uncritical embrace and our naive employment of the new and what works. In doing so without discernment, we unwittingly expose ourselves to their vices as much as to their virtues.