The American Church is more secular than you think

Popular preaching seems to offer a salvation only available on earth. How can we move our language to represent a world beyond the immanent frame of secularism?

This “Cut for Time” post is material that didn’t fully make it into the final version of my sermon, “Let Not Your Hearts Be Troubled: Heaven and National Fear.”

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We are inundated with pastors contrasting the ways of secularism with the ways of the church. It’s mostly helpful and necessary. But what has happened, I have noticed, is that our language still sounds secular. We understood secularism so as to critique it, but we neglected to see how we almost unknowingly adopted it.

Secularism refers to a world with little-to-no reference to God, religion, and transcendence. Our existence is one where there is no heavenly vision, no eternity, and no Holy One on a throne. For nearly all of human history, this has not been the case. It is now. We live in Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame,” where everything is here, now, and immediate. All of life is empirical, physical, cultural, or society and our imagination for what could be is wrapped up inside what we can currently see and understand.

I have noticed that Western Protestant preaching is stuck in this very world. We are a heavenly faith with very earthly preaching. The gospel of Jesus is being reduced to a kind of “here and now salvation” that includes benefits only inside the immanent frame. We have shrunk back from the beatific vision and become a people who desire to practice the way of Jesus without any idea of where that way might be going (it’s headed to heaven, fwiw).

I have called this “one-world Christianity,” wherein the believer’s only understanding of the “good” the gospel can do is any good that’s right here on this earth and in this world. Discipleship is self-improvement and healthy living, social justice is all we could ever offer the poor, and prayer and fasting and sabbath help me live a balanced, mediated life of “good.”

But Christianity is a faith that says this is not the only world that exists. “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus says (John 14:2). And he’s preparing that space for us to inhabit (John 14:2-3) and he himself is the route there (John 14:6). Our preaching in America is increasingly focused on developing a kind of life that is situated well within the strictures of modern existence. For us, our faith has become a way of living in the world when it has always been a way of living in two worlds simultaneously. The Kingdom of God is the very overlap between heaven and earth. Live in Christ Jesus is one that keeps us firmly planted here while stretching our very existence “above,” which is the very direction to where Paul tells us to place our minds (Colossians 3:1-4).

Popular preaching seems to offer a salvation only available on earth and for earth. It’s about a way of living, a rule of life, a way that Christ benefits you now. Don’t get me wrong: Jesus does give you tons now. But the promise of the gospel is rooted in its heavenly future. Without eternity, without an understanding of the human being in light of heaven’s glory, there is no gospel. We preach good news that this is not the only world to gain comfort. We seem to have lost words like heaven, eternity, the Second Coming, the judgement of the living and the dead.

The great hope of those suffering for the sake of Christ or enduring hardships of many kinds is that heaven awaits, the evil will be judged, and the cross and Spirit are sufficient to comfort us in our troubles. This is a vision of “two-world Christianity”—where the Kingdom of Heaven is arriving on earth and will one day be brought to bear in fullness. “Already-but-not yet” is how many Christian preachers talk about this “inaugurated eschatology.” But we seem to place a ton of emphasis on how we can bring the kingdom “already,” while we ignore the “not yet” part.

This led me to create this slide to try and show the biblical terms that are currently being abandoned for other secular terms.

Now look at the “One-world Christianity” column and ask yourself: does Jesus Christ need to be crucified and raised for me to do any of that? The answer is no. But in the two-world vision of Christian life…the cross and resurrection are absolute necessities. We cannot have the power and reality of the Holy Spirit in the church to make us more like Christ Jesus without the triumphant and wild work of God through the gospel.

I understand our desire to get more creative about our preaching and teaching language, but the answer is not to abandon the biblical terms, but to dive more deeply in them. Year ago, I stopped hearing preaching with the terms “sin” and “repentance.” I think this is because we are afraid of coming across as “fire and brimstone.” But by abandoning these terms and replacing them with others, we’ve made massive category errors. The term “sin” is necessary. We have no other language for the cancerous power of death, the pollutive energy that eats away life and causes us the pain we experience daily. There’s just no other word for it. We will have to define terms, use metaphors, and make many explanations for the appeal of a two-world Christianity, but I think it’s worth it because, after all, it’s true.

Jesus Christ was not crucified and raised for us to provide a vision of life that a secularist can give. He was crucified and raised to bring us the “power and wisdom of God;” it is the “foolish” message that “shames the strong” and “makes wise the foolish.” This is all 1 Corinthians 1. It’s a preposterous message that should not aid the secularist—it should alarm them and save them.

Make no mistake: the good news of the gospel is not that this world can be better. It’s that another world exists and is crashing into this one through the message of the cross. A new way of existence is arriving through Jesus—eternal life! This is a quality of life so profound that it will last forever and nothing can take it away. It can not only survive this world, it can thrive in two. Heaven and earth are unionized in the hearts of the believers. It’s a miracle so profound only God can do it and only our weakness can bring it to bear upon our life. It’s also a fantastic message to preach. I wish I heard it more.