John, thank you so much for your very kind welcome. When I hear things that I have written, read out aloud like that, I’m quite shocked. I thought I was a nice guy. Those are kind of rough sentences you read. I’m very delighted and I’m very honored indeed to be with you. You folks are in the trenches. You are on the front lines, and I salute you. I know how hard it is. You have one of the toughest jobs in the world, and if you don’t do it right, we in the church are going to sink. More than that, I think our culture is going to sink, too. So I’m very, very happy to be here.

The one thing that’s always been a small puzzle to me about this pastor’s conference is why you deliberately choose to meet here in the middle of the Arctic. Now, given the time of year that it is, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to go to Bermuda? Maybe even better yet, go a little bit further south. How about the Cayman Islands? You can talk theology while you snorkel. But there’s no hope of that, so I need to get on with my business.

The Love and Holiness of God

What I want to do in the sessions I have is to give you a brief summary of the holiness of God in one case and the love of God in the other, and then I’m going to be trying to think with you about their intersections with church life today.

Now, I do so as you might well imagine, because I am convinced that these great themes — indeed the reality of God as holy and as loving — rests too inconsequentially upon us. It doesn’t have weight, it doesn’t have saliency, and it doesn’t have the power to wrench our lives around the way it should. So that’s what I’m going to be exploring tomorrow. Tonight, I’m actually going to begin to lay a basis for this, although you may not recognize it, and my title is “The Gospel Alternative.”

Now, the title is unintentionally tricky because it could mean two things. And this is why God has mandated committees in the church so that people don’t make mistakes like this. Because if I had shown this title to our elders, board of elders in my church, it wouldn’t have taken two seconds and somebody would’ve said, “What do you mean?” And of course I could mean two things. I could mean the gospel as an alternative to something else, or I could mean (as indeed I do) something else as an alternative to the gospel.

What I’m going to try to develop for you is a way of looking at this culture, as indeed I believe we should, as an alternative way of believing. Our culture has within it for the moment I will say a gospel. It is a gospel which is an alternative way of believing and looking at the world, and it is a formidable opponent to the biblical gospel.

Another Gospel

Now of course, it is true that in the New Testament, those who have believed the biblical gospel are called believers and those who haven’t are unbelievers. But there is another sense in which it is also true that everybody is a believer. What distinguishes us one from another is the object of our belief and what distinguishes us is whom we are serving and worshiping. Now is this not Paul’s point also in Romans 1? You’ll remember in Romans 1:23–25 he speaks about this exchange which has taken place. In Romans 1:23 he speaks about exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images. So the object of worship is now shifted from God to these images. And then again in Romans 1:25, he speaks of the exchanging the truth of God and exchanging the God of that truth for something that is completely false.

So there is a kind of surface idolatry that Paul is talking about here in these images that are set up that are handmade and worshiped. But there is a more profound idolatry which is also at work here in which the self becomes the center of the person’s new universe and replaces and displaces the creator.

Now, as I was flying to Minneapolis, increasingly I felt quotations from Jonathan Edwards coming upon me, with more and more intensity and urgency, and I resisted them until this moment. In his treatise Charity and Its Fruits, Edwards is reflecting on what in fact Paul is talking about here. What happened when we fell? And he says that human beings as sinful, shrank as it were into a little space, circumscribed and closely shut up within itself to the exclusion of all things else. God was forsaken, fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired in himself and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. So the human soul, which had been large, grew small, it contracted, and it now became dominated by its own interests.

Paul Tillich used to talk about people, all people having ultimate concern. And he was half right. But what he omitted to say and what we would want to say is that this infinite concern, this infinite interest, this infinite appetite under the circumstances of sin in which we live now seeks to satisfy itself in what is finite.

Sin is an infinite passion which seeks to satisfy itself in a finite objective. More than that, it is an infinite passion which seeks to find its satisfaction in the self. So what we have here, I believe in Romans 1, what Paul is describing for us, is really a perverse upside down religion. It is the religion of the self, but it is a religion which is as devout as the worship of the creator had been. We should not have any doubt at all that the self has the power to rearrange our universe and to draw everything into its orbit, a power which is quite as great as any god.

A Growing Weakness in the Church

Now that in a few quick strokes is what I think Paul is talking about in Romans 1. And shortly what I’m going to try to do is to describe to you the ways in which as I understand it, our contemporary culture is giving its own unique exposition of Romans 1.

But before taking this up, I want to suggest to you that it is our failure to understand this religion of the self that we carry in ourselves and which is exhibited all through our culture, our failure to see it with clarity, that is contributing much to the weakness of the evangelical church today.

I’m going to return to this in both of my addresses tomorrow, and I’m going to try to look at it from a number of different perspectives. But the fact of the matter is that we have a choice which is stark and it is clear. It is a choice between two gospels, and one centers in Christ and his death and is focused on God and his character, and the other gospel which I’m shortly going to be describing for you, is a counterfeit gospel that centers on the self and is focused in on techniques and the abundance of our world. And because these two gospels are not entirely clear and the one takes over and uses parts of the other, I believe the trumpet in the evangelical world today is sometimes sounding a very unclear note.

The Presenting Problems of Modernity

So now what I want to do, what I mean to do is to take this upside down religion in our culture, this religion of the self, and what I’m going to try to argue for you is that it really does have its own doctrine of regeneration. Not only that, it also has its own secular priesthood. And that is why it is formidable. It is in a real sense aping the gospel of Christ. You know the old observation that if Christ is the answer, what was the question? And if this gospel is the answer, what is the problem that it is responding to?

Now, this is difficult to describe in a few words because I don’t want to flatten out the complexities of life. People are not the same. They don’t experience the world the same. They don’t have the same problems. They don’t experience those problems with the same intensity. Indeed, many people would like not to think about any problem at all in themselves or anywhere else.

You may recall that this was Kierkegaard’s complaint about the great majority of people. He asked, “What is the ordinary person like?” “Well,” said Kierkegaard, “the ordinary person is just a spectator at life’s drama. They’re not actors in it.” The ordinary person, the average person, lives out his or her life in a routine way. Life meets them as an odd mixture of the pleasant and the unpleasant. But they want very much not to think about it. They don’t want to think about good and they don’t want to think about evil.

They don’t have great moments of despair and they don’t have great moments of joy and exhilaration. They live in a flat, shallow, routine kind of world and they themselves live a threadbare, even, borrowed existence. They are living out in themselves the conventions and the expectations that others have of them. Kierkegaard said, “They are like this peasant who’s gone out for the night and become inebriated. And so he goes home singing at the top of his voice in this alcoholic haze, swaying on his cart. And you could say that he is driving his cart home, but in actual fact the horses are taking him.”

Now, much of what Kierkegaard saw and described has continued today and indeed even intensified, and television probably has had a large hand in that.

The Emergence and Breakdown of the Modern Self

However, beginning in about the 1960s, psychotherapists and psychologists began to see a new kind of person. The pains and the confusions of the modern self began to gel into a new and discernible pattern. As people came to reflect upon it later, they identified the symptoms of narcissism, and Christopher Lash would go on and write a book about the way in which our entire culture is showing the symptoms of narcissism. As a matter of fact, Freud had seen one or two of these and had decided that he simply would not attempt to treat them because they were impenetrable to analysis, he thought. But by the 1960s they were everywhere. And in a way the narcissist has become the typical post-modern personality.

So what’s this person like? Well, this person is typically fearful of making binding commitments. They always want to keep their options open. They’re not comfortable depending upon anybody. They have difficulty expressing gratitude or loyalty. What lies behind this, it now seems to be agreed, is that within these people there is a pervasive sense of emptiness. They’re often chronically bored and restless. You may have seen a couple of these in your study. They want instant gratification, but without emotional commitment. They often have an exaggerated sense of self-importance. They feel betrayed if they get insufficient attention. They have fantasies about having great power, or great beauty, or great success, and they become enraged when they are criticized or when their sense of entitlement isn’t met.

There have been a lot of people who have been writing about the slow and painful breakdown in the modern self. In fact, in the current edition of “Modern Reformation,” there is a little essay on a rock band whose new CD called “Blister Soul” has apparently just come out and I quote some of the lyrics:

There’s a smaller place you go where there’s hardly any sound, where the deals have all gone sour and the house of cards comes down. And the damage is costly; it’s beyond all dollars and cents. You can’t measure it with graphs and charts or any instruments. Yeah, the thing we cannot speak of, the secret we all know, oh, this blister soul.

There is today a remarkable candor about the emptiness and the brokenness and the pain of the modern person, this secret place within people where all the deals have gone bad, this place which is falling apart, the place which is empty and painful.

Significant Changes in Our Thinking

Now, this is a pervasive phenomenon and it prescribes what indeed the problem is. So if this is the problem, what now is the gospel in our contemporary world? Well, the gospel which has emerged, has followed upon a series of absolutely profound transitions which have happened in the 20th century. And let me very briefly tick them off for you as I have tried to crystallize them. Here are the massive transitions which have occurred, and they’re all in our language and understanding.

Values Over Virtues

First, in the 20th century, we have moved from talking about virtues to talking about values. Now, virtues in the last century were the virtues of character. They were things like goodness, honesty, integrity, courage, and fortitude — those kinds of things. And when parents trained up their children and indeed spoke to one another, they talked about these virtues and the importance of these virtues for life. People in the 19th century carried character references in which an employer would write about the person’s virtues and this character reference would be kept in their pocket and it would be shown to people with pride. Today if you write a character reference like that, you’ll get sued.

What happened was that the language contracted. It went from virtues to virtue (singular), and the virtue was simply about sexual matters. So towards the end of last century the societies for the suppression of vice were not trying to suppress dishonesty; they were trying to suppress prostitution. And when it was said that a woman had lost her virtue, they weren’t saying that she had become a liar. It had a sexual meaning. It went from virtues to virtue, which became a thin and very narrow matter, and now it has become values. And values are nothing more, very often, than personal preferences.

Personality Over Character

So that’s the first change that happened. And that tied into a second massive change which has occurred. We have gone from valuing character to valuing personality. The change you can date very precisely. There has been a very interesting study done on advice books, giving advice to people about living. And the change is just dramatic and overnight. In the 19th century, people were talking about character and they were talking about virtues. Character is either good or bad. But when you come to talking about personality, you’ve got another language entirely. Personality is charismatic, it is attractive, it is dynamic, or it is dull and so forth. And with this change came an entire new way of thinking — thinking about developing and exploiting personality for one’s own gains.

The Self Over Human Nature

So we went from virtues down to values. We went from character to personality. We have now also gone thirdly from talking about human nature to talking about the self. Human nature is something that is common to all human beings. It is what is constituted by the image of God in all people. The self today it is thought is my own unique perception of the world, my own unique set of feelings and understandings, my vantage point from which I look out on things which is nobody else’s. So in moving from talking about human nature to talking about the self, we have now fed into the individualism which is so rife in our society, and I’m going to pick up this theme tomorrow.

Shame Over Guilt

Finally, we’ve moved from talking about guilt to talking about shame. Now, guilt is the violation. It’s what comes from violating an objective norm — a norm, whether it is God or a moral principle which is outside of ourselves. Shame, at least as it’s being talked about in psychological and particular psychoanalytic literature today, is simply internal embarrassment with no violation of norms entailed, and all shame therefore can be treated by counseling and should be treated by counseling it is argued. So we now have the almost total secularization of the problem of guilt.

The Bottom Line

Now think about those four changes, and I now come to the bottom line and I’m going to then begin to develop our secular gospel. What is the bottom line? The bottom line is that once we thought in a moral framework, that moral framework where there was virtues and vices and character and guilt. And when we thought in a moral framework we thought about being saved. Today we think in a psychological framework. We think about values and self and shame, which is simply an internal sense of embarrassment. And the ultimate liberation is to be entirely shameless.

When we are thinking in the psychological framework, we’re not thinking about being saved, but we’re thinking about being inwardly relieved and pleased. I feel almost as if the plates beneath the earth’s surface, the plates beneath our culture have shifted dramatically.

The Gospel of Modernity

So these things being true, what is the answer to the person who aches, who’s filled with emptiness, perhaps with boredom, with insecurity, who suffers from all of the unbelievable stresses and anxieties of our time? Well, the answer is that there is a gospel here. The gospel actually may have a number of different parts. It is not a single gospel, but it is all of the ways in which people attempt to reach some sort of self-transformation. It’s all of the ways in which people try and believe that they actually can make themselves anew. It is all of the ways in which people think that they can actually experience themselves differently tomorrow from what they do today.

Now there are so many ways in which people are seeking to achieve this. Take for example, simply a simple matter like style. Style is the commerce in appearances. Style is the surface that we create for ourselves. And it is not simply a matter of taste. It can also be for some people a way of either transforming themselves or indeed even hiding themselves. And given the internationalizing of our culture, we today now have a rich palette from which we can paint the kind of people we want others to see that we are. The stylish person can borrow from across the entire social landscape. Indeed, we can even borrow contradictory images, one writer says, “looking like a Duchess one week and a murder victim the next.” Style can hijack the idiom of the astronauts or poach from the ancient pageantry of Guatemalan peasant costumes.

Or take something even more seemingly inconsequential. Take the matter of hair. This too can be drawn into the matter of self-construction. Grant McCracken in a book called Big Hair — I read widely — has a very interesting subtitle: A Journey Into the Transformation of the Self. And he goes on to say that the many styles in the world of hair represent a map of many, if not most, of the possible selves in the culture. And if all goes well with the hairdresser, each look is a new opportunity for the client’s transformation and self-discovery. If you doubt that, look carefully again at Paula Jones.

Two Great Healers

However, although there are these other options and possibilities, Philip Cushman in a book called Constructing the Self, Constructing America suggests that today we have two preeminent healers in the culture, and this is a very important question he raises. If you know who the healers are in any culture, you know what the disease is that the people think they need healing for. If you know the cure, you know what the diagnosis has been. He argues — and I think I find the argument persuasive — that our two preeminent healers today are psychotherapy and advertising.

Now he doesn’t develop this very far and he doesn’t develop what I think is the most interesting aspect of it, that here we have a counterfeit doctrine of regeneration, which is at work. It’s a regeneration on strictly secular auspices, this recovery, this renewal of the postmodern self, which happens either by technique in one case or by purchase in the other and neither requires the grace of God or the death of Christ. But I believe it is a gospel. I believe it is the most formidable opponent to the biblical gospel today.

The Matter of Psychotherapy

So let me take up these two, these two healers in our time and then I’m going to give a fairly brief response to them. First, I take up the matter of psychotherapy. I don’t have in mind here and he doesn’t either professional psychologists and psychiatrists talking to clients in their offices. That is not what’s in view. What’s in view rather is the way in which the psychological way of thinking about life escaped from those professional offices and entered our culture and is now promoted by a massive business of self-cure.

It has become a kind of secular spirituality. It’s a secular spirituality that bears within itself the techniques for self-transformation. It is providing the way in which we today in this culture process, think about, and seek to find remedies for all of the aches of the self with its emptiness and its boredom and its rages and its insecurity and its hopes and its hopelessness.

It’s a secular spirituality that, as you know, came to cultural prominence in the 1960s with the encounter groups. It continued in the 1970s with the flood of self-help literature which filled the air with words like “self-image” and “self-esteem” and “the real self” and the “ideal self” and “self-realization” and “self-discovery” and so on. And now it has become almost institutionalized in the recovery groups of the 1990s. There is not a human malady for which there is not a recovery group. I have a list of several hundred of them. Among these you’ll find debtors anonymous, emotional health anonymous, fundamentalists anonymous, grandparents anonymous, messies anonymous, pills anonymous, spenders anonymous, and impotence anonymous. It is to these groups that baby boomers in particular have flocked to try to find the healing of the self.

Now, a number of the early popularizes of the spirituality had either been reared in or at least had had contact with liberal Protestantism. They found the older Freudian discussion about dark, twisted, instinctual drives, and they thought it was very uncongenial. They settled for a much more benign view of human nature. Carl Rogers would be a good illustration. Carl Rogers, as you may know, was reared on the idealism of the YMCA, and as Christopher Lash observes, he found Freud’s pessimism as revolting and incomprehensible as his spiritual forebears had once found Calvinism.

Presuppositions of Secular Spirituality

This new secular spirituality has some very simple presuppositions to it. First, that you can find the self. Second, that it is basically benign. Third, that it has within itself, as does the body, its own powers of healing. And fourth, other people are a threat (or can be a threat) to its reality. Now I imagine that you will have talked to some people who believe this, you might have talked to a spouse whose wife or husband no longer meets their needs so the other person has become a threat to their self. You may have talked too to people who have come to think that a moral restraint is an impediment to their personal growth.

This sort of language sounds very innocent, but I can tell you it is more radical in terms of this society than anything that you’ll hear in any of the militias. Because what it does is to sanctify the rights of the self and to charge malice to anybody who obstructs them. And there is no way, no way that any society can survive this kind of thing. That is a stream of psychotherapy that has been loosed in our culture. Let me go to the other side of this, to advertising.

The Matter of Advertising

All ads, as you know to some degree, are doing two things. On the one hand, they are providing information about the product and on the other hand they’re providing reasons for you to buy it. Now it’s a second of these things that I have in mind here. What advertising does is to promote the idea that having intensely private, satisfying experiences is what life is all about. This is the worldview of advertising.

So they offer up goods for purchase, but what is going in that transaction is also a lifestyle. They’re offering up a vision of life and the vision is this, that the pursuit of the good life is really about the pursuit of the good things in life. So how are they going to get us from here, when we don’t have the product or service, to there when we will have the product or service? Well, they’ve become very skilled indeed at exploring and exploiting the senses of inadequacy that people have, that we are not as beautiful or as good-looking as we would like, that we are not as successful as we would like, that we are not as important as we would like, that we don’t have the status that we would want, and that we are not as likable as we would wish. So then they offer a product. And there is no question if you look at the ads carefully, that there are unmistakable redemptive themes that you will see in those advertisements.

The gospel of the secular age is this: that to have is to be and to have not is to be damned. One thinks, for example, of the outdoor buddies in the Old Milwaukee ads who sigh to one another that it doesn’t get any better than this. This is the ultimate moment, isn’t it? Let me ask you, how many ultimate moments have you had recently? Probably not many. But you can have an ultimate moment like that. It really doesn’t get any better and this, never, nowhere, ever. Not even in heaven does it get any better than this. And you can have this now for the price of a few beers.

Or think of Sustacal. Now, I’m really, really getting close to the bone with some of you, I know. This is a mixture of nutrients for the aging, for those who know that youth has slipped away and it’s never going to be retrieved, and to probably have their moments when they think that youth really is wasted on the young. So what’s the answer? It’s obvious. The answer is Sustacal. As you know from those ads, it shows two apparently retired couples, one chipper and vibrant and the other flat and funless. And the difference is Sustacal. Sustacal can’t add years to your life, but it may add life to your years. And initially when it came out it said it will add life to your years. Then no doubt their lawyers got to them.

The Priesthood of Our Prosperity

These ads even ape the revivalistic practice of giving testimonies. These are secular messages of regeneration. Before the product was bought, there was only defeat, despair, embarrassment, apathy and boredom. And after the product was bought, everything was different and life was filled with happy and endless prospects. Our advertisers really have become the priesthood of our prosperity. They are as devout in their service of the good things in life as pastors should be of the good life. They’re not simply selling products; they are selling life. They are, in a quite literal sense, selling the more abundant life.

So in an odd sort of way, our cultural psychotherapy and our advertising are both rowing down the same stream. They’re both addressing the same needs. It’s the means which are different. In the one case it’s psychological technique. In the other case it’s a product. But they both speak to the same ache within, to the fog of confused intentions, to those who are empty and deserted and who long for strength and direction, and they say, “We can give it to you and we can restore your sense of self-assurance and self-satisfaction.”

A Benign Inner Self?

So what does one say to this? Well, I think we need to begin by asking, why does this seem plausible to people? Because it really does. This is the only gospel that many, many people hope in. So why does it seem plausible? Well, I think it seems plausible because of the fundamental assumption here that human nature is benign. In other words, we have lost our capacity in this culture to think morally about life and to think of ourselves as moral beings.

Twenty-five years ago, Karl Menninger wrote his famous book, Whatever Happened to Sin in which he argued that whereas before we used to talk about all of our moral disorders under the language of sin, but in the 20th century this had changed. Some of what we used to describe as sin had simply become crime, and much of what used to be called sin had now become disease. And what remained between what had been co-opted on the one side as crime and the other side as disease, what remained in the middle where you could legitimately use the word sin, had become small, narrow, and inconsequential.

Now if you are a reader of “Newsweek,” you will have noticed about an edition or so back where there was a cover saying, “Are we all crazy?” It noted that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists all the possible mental disorders, listed 60 in 1952, 145 in 1960, and 410 in 1994. So what Karl Menninger described 25 years ago has only accelerated. The language of sin for people today simply has lost its descriptive power. It’s not because the word doesn’t mean anything, but because we can’t think morally. Not only so, but the God who gives reality to sin at least by opposition has disappeared off the screen for most people today.

Andrew Delbanco in his book writes that by 1900 it was impossible to reattach the word sin to its original sense because the target of the violation of God was gone. And today in America only 17 percent of people define sin in relationship to God as a violation of his character, his law, and his will.

The Judgement Already Here

So we have reached the point that was brilliantly depicted for us by the French existentialist Camus in his book The Fall. The central character in this book is a Parisian lawyer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Clamence. When the book begins, this lawyer is an upright man. He does not take bribes. He works sometimes for the poor and he’s rather pleased with his righteousness. But one night an event was to happen that would change his life forever. He was coming home from having been with his mistress and he had to cross a bridge to get to his home on the left bank. As he walked over this bridge, he passed a woman who was looking into the water. He had only gone a few steps beyond her when he heard the sickening thud of her body striking the water. There were a few faint gurgles and cries as she was swept downstream and then he heard no more.

He stopped and thought about it for a little while and then decided he would tell no one and he’d put it out of his mind. So he thought that he had, and he went home. But what then happened was that guilt began to curdle in his soul and he had these terribly uncomfortable thoughts coming to him that perhaps he could have done something to save this woman. He put the thoughts out of his mind immediately and yet they kept intruding. It got so bad that there came a time when he wouldn’t even cross bridges because it conjured up this horrible inward sense. And he says that he felt the need to confess. But to whom do you confess? He said, “When religion was flourishing, you could go to the priest, but now there is no one to confess to.” He says, “Our faces are dirty, but we have no soap, and all we can do is wipe one another’s noses.” And he says, “You don’t have to wait for the judgment which is coming; the judgment takes place every day.”

That’s exactly what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1. Twice in that chapter he speaks about the way in which God has given us over to the judgment of our own sins. This is not simply cause and effect in the moral world. No. This is wrath. That’s exactly what Paul says it is. If you open your ears and listen, you will hear the rumble of God’s wrath in our culture. We have reached this point too, where as postmodern people, we weep over our sins but there is no one to whom we can confess and we cannot say, as did David, “Against you and you only have I sinned.”

A Golden Opportunity

However, I see in this a golden moment and these golden moments don’t come along very often in a culture. It’s golden, partly because Christian faith today, the biblical gospel, really does not have a serious competitor except the one I’ve been describing. But the one I’ve been describing has so many internal critics that it is like a piece of cheese that is full of holes. Postmodern writers today are speaking about the loneliness and the emptiness and the fraud of the modern self with a power and a clarity and a forcefulness that is sometimes a rebuke to us in the church whose own descriptions are so much more insipid and so less clear in their understanding.

But there is a piece which is missing in all of this analysis which is being done about the modern person. There is a piece which is missing in this jigsaw puzzle of meaning. And the missing piece is so large that without it the picture is obscure. You don’t know what the jigsaw puzzle is about. And that large missing piece is the one that you and I have. It is our understanding of this world as being a moral place and human beings as moral beings, corrupted for sure, but responsible before God. And whatever help recovery groups can bring, they cannot bring this deep help that people need. People today can stuff their spirits with CD players and sleek cars and they can distract themselves, but that emptiness within is simply relentless.

It seems a long way to have come from Elijah’s day to our own. That day seems so different. Imagine those priests of Baal, those wild, crazy people cutting themselves and working themselves up into a frenzy, these wild superstitious ideas about the world. The casual modern seems so different from this with a superior sound system, access to the world through the net, Paine and Webber working tirelessly on Wall Street, Gucci shoes, a nice car outside, or the not so casual modern with 20 voicemails, 41 emails, a credit card with too much debt, stress levels that are unsustainable, and frequent bouts of depression.

These two worlds seem so different and yet they’re joined at the same point that there is a choice to be made between serving Yahweh and believing the gospel, and on the other side, the paganism then which has continued into its postmodern forms today. The greatest religious competition in America today is not between Protestants and Catholics, or between charismatics and non-charismatics; it’s between these two competing understandings of salvation. One is a secular version; one is a biblical. One revolves around the self; one centers on Christ. One we do for ourselves; the other we have to have done for us. This is the great competition of our time.

As our culture becomes more secularized, as Christian faith becomes more remote, the very great temptation that besets us all is to try to reduce that faith so that “we can meet modern people on their own terms.” But what we mean so frequently is so that we can take bits and pieces of their own gospel so that ours won’t be such a stark alternative.

What I’m suggesting to you is exactly the opposite. That as our culture becomes more secularized and as Christian faith comes more remote and as people’s lives unravel as they are, it is the truth of the gospel that they need to hear undiminished and unvarnished. They need to know (winsomely for sure) that they have no cards to play before God. That the only thing that they contribute to their salvation is the sin from which they need to be redeemed, and that nothing, nothing at all comparable to the work of Christ has ever been done anywhere. It is unique. They need to hear these things clearly, winsomely, and powerfully. So may God help us all to preach this gospel. Amen.

Questions and Answers

What would be the best way for us to answer a parishioner who came to us and said, “Well, given this critique of advertising, is it wrong for me to work in advertising? And if I were to work in that industry, how should I go about doing this?”

Well, I’m inclined to answer that almost the same way that Paul answered in 1 Corinthians 5, that if we cannot have contact with unbelievers, then we will have to simply leave this world. Now the problem is that this is a corrupt place where we work and live. You simply have to make a prudent judgment as to whether your participation in a particular profession or business or line of work is contributing to that corruption.

There is a difference between producing something that is being involved in the manufacturing and distribution of something inherently evil like pornography. There’s a difference between that and producing something which is not inherently evil in the same way but might be used in ways that I wouldn’t use it. So maybe that’s a distinction that someone would have to make. If you invest money in the stock market, I mean there’s no knowing where that money goes and what it promotes. I’m ready to go to heaven. It’ll solve all these questions.

In some ways, the greatest struggle is not to present the biblical gospel against the gospel alternative in the world, but it’s when the gospel alternative has been Christianized in the church and then to present the biblical gospel against that.

I thank you for that observation because that is going to be my theme tomorrow, and I was just laying a little foundation here, so I’ll pick that up tomorrow.

Could you perhaps speak to the language of needs that we hear so often in the church, and how it relates to some of this foundation that you’ve laid?

I’m going to do that tomorrow too, but I actually am going to say a little bit about it now. This is really a perplexing thing because I don’t think there is any doubt that life today is extremely hard psychologically. I’ll try to develop this a little bit tomorrow. When people come into our churches and sit in the pews, I think you can guarantee that the most real, the most intense things on their minds are going to be their mortgage, their children, their marriage that is falling apart, the insecurity in the job market, and so forth. Those are the things that are going to be sitting there demanding their attention. And you can’t brush that off and say that this is inconsequential, not real. It is real for those people.

However, we need to put this in perspective. We have shifted from thinking morally about life, which gives a certain set of criteria about what’s important, to thinking psychologically about life. And when that transition takes place, you get an entire set of needs which are now judged to be overwhelming and which overwhelm the earlier considerations about character and about God and so forth. So let me try to pick that up tomorrow and if I don’t satisfy you, you can come back.

In the church, we are getting swept along with the expectations and the demands of life that are common to all other people, and therefore, we don’t have time to communicate with one another and within families and so on. So what’s the answer?

Well, I wish there was a clean answer to that, but I don’t think there is because I think as I will try to explain tomorrow, life is much more difficult today. It has benefits that are marvelous, but there are tremendous internal costs in terms of anxiety and stress. By every measure these things have gone up. Depression is rising almost exponentially. So part of this is inescapable.

However, if you want an answer to it, it’s not a clean answer. But I would suggest that if Christians would lower their material expectations for themselves, they might secure more peace and time than they have. Now this is not always the answer and sometimes there are some families to survive that really do need both parents to work. But our appetites for things and for the amenities of life and for fancy vacations are simply enormous. Many people are exhausting themselves, simply trying to satisfy them. And many of those expectations are almost unconscious. We are, as Kierkegaard said, living out the expectations and the norms of those around us and simply fitting into that pattern. So there has to come a time, I would say, when every Christian couple needs to ask what’s important to them and what they can give up and what can they stop doing in order to secure the things that are more important.