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by Adrian Sobers
“My kingdom is not from this world.” – John 18:36
In The Evangelical in the Secular World, Hudson T. Armerding wrote, “One of the problems that besets today’s society is its rootlessness.
It has deliberately severed connection with the past, rejecting what has gone before as anachronistic or irrelevant.” His article is now over fifty years old having first appeared in the April 1970 edition of Bibliotheca Sacra.
Armerding’s words still resonate and today we pay an even heavier price for this rootlessness, not only on our streets (no details needed), but also in our scholarship (especially monetary policy and political economy). It is not only our streets that need cleaning, but also our scholarship. (But that’s another story.)
“Informed evangelicals”, wrote Armerding, “should realistically recognize that individual salvation and its concomitant behaviour will not bring about the long-term redemption of society”. Therefore, we are “obliged to confront the secular world with a different view of history that in no uncertain terms responds to the question, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’”
This favourite question of scoffers through the ages (2 Peter 3:3–4) helps us to distinguish between secular (commonly understood), and secular (properly understood). Jesus gave us a glimpse of the latter in the parable of The Dishonest Manager (Luke 16).
Jesus divided humanity: “The children of this age [Latin saeculum] are more shrewd in dealing with their generation than are the children of light”. For Jesus, there are those who belong to “this age”, and those who belong to an age to come (“children of light”).
Armerding’s rootlessness is tied to the diminishing of the Christ-idea from our collective memory. If there is one thing humans have mastered, it is the art of forgetting. The Old Testament is largely the story of Israel forgetting, then promising to remember and return to God; only to forget again (Hosea 11:7).
Forgetting is in our DNA, and we have forgotten (daresay, fatefully so) that secular is better thought of in terms of span of time.
Secular, secularity, and secularization are not secular in origin. Their logic is grounded in pre-Christian Latin words that refer to a span of time.
We need to recover this logic. As David Lloyd Duesenberg (The Innocence of Pontius Pilate) explains, “It is not ‘pagan’ but Christian law, not civil but canon law, not modern but medieval law that first innovates on the Latin word saecularis to give us saecularizatio.”
Secular commonly understood is a legal-political product of Enlightenment thinking, a foundation on which the Apostles of Reason promise to build a god-free (which is to say, godless) Utopia. Secular properly understood, by Jesus and Paul, is an age to be freed from.
In one of Paul’s earliest letters, he explains the significance of Jesus’s death, namely, to free us from the secular (“this age”). “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age” (Galatians 1: 3–4).
In 2 Corinthians 4:4 he says, “the god of this world [Latin, saeculum] has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Jesus and Paul think of the saeculum “this age/world” as where the glory of God is not recognized.
To be secular (properly understood), is to be a fundamentalist concerning things material/temporal, at the expense of the immaterial/eternal; namely, our soul. One of Paul’s most oft-quoted verses should be quoted even more in light of this. In Romans 12:2, Paul urges believers–in the London, New York, and Paris of his day–to “not to be “conformed to this age [Latin, saeculum]”, but to be “transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
Contrary to what we tell ourselves about the supremacy of reason, the brain is lazy. Roger Martin (A New Way to Think) reminds us that the brain is more of a gap-filling machine than an analytical machine. It takes noisy, incomplete information from the world and fills in the missing pieces based on past experiences.
Our minds love automaticity more than anything else; and especially more than conscious consideration. And it is not so much that we fill the gaps, but the speed at which we fill. Psychologists call it process fluency (good marketers call it a cash cow).
Since the brain is lazy and thinking is hard work, we gravitate more easily toward loving God with all of our heart and soul (slogans and the familiar); but Jesus included mind in the list (Matthew 22:37). The renewal of the mind God calls us to is a hard, lifelong process. But called we are.
Douglas Moo (The Letter to the Romans) cites N. T. Wright on this renewal: “If the ekklēsia of God in Jesus the Messiah, in its unity and holiness, is to constitute as it were its own worldview, to be its own central symbol, it needs to think: to be ‘transformed by the renewal of the mind,’ to think as age-to-come people rather than present-age people.”
Another useful clarification from the African bishop St. Augustine: Jesus did not say, “But now my kingdom” is not here, but “is not from here.” Jesus’s kingdom is here to the end of this world-age (saeculi). At the end of said age, Jesus’s distinction in Luke 16 will become crystal clear when the harvesters, well, harvest.
The only thing that can free us from the secular commonly understood, is to first reclaim, and be freed from the secular properly understood by Jesus and Paul.
We cannot be age-to-come people and present-age people. We will hate one age and love the other, we will hold to one age and despise the other. As it is with God and mammon, so it is with this age and the next.
Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on matters of social interest.
