originally published 7/1/1999

Sociologist Craig Gay, author of The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist (Eerdmans, 1998), speaks of the charge that Christianity is an otherworldly religion. It is the otherworldliness of Christianity that has brought much redemption to the social structures of the world by valuing people based upon their value in another world, not based on property and power. Gay goes on to explain how much Christian doctrine in the modern era has been marked by a desire to control the world. This control seemed so successful that the Church in the West has been tempted to think that there is not another world which should define our reality. This interview was originally published on Volume 38 of the Journal and was, until now, only available on cassette tape.

12 minutes

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Transcript of Feature introduction

Because the introduction to this Archive Feature touches directly on the mission of Mars Hill Audio, we’ve decided to share the text of it with our listeners:

In the first chapter of the apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he describes the gospel he preaches as something regarded by his Gentile contemporaries as foolish. The wisdom of God appeared to be nonsense to those who professed a love of wisdom, a philosophia.  One of the several editorial goals informing the production of these tapes is the pursuit of a better understanding of the specific maneuvers whereby our culture, late 20th century North American culture, has come to regard the wisdom of God as folly. What is it about the shape of our culture, not just its professed ideas but the actual way we live, that makes the Christian message seem implausible, even to those who profess to believe it?

To my knowledge, the term “plausibility” does not appear in the Scriptures. It is nonetheless a very useful term, drawing attention to the fact that we believe things or disbelieve them from within a framework of understanding. A word that the Bible does use that alludes to the same idea is “worldliness,” a condition condemned throughout the New Testament and, by implication, the Old Testament as well. Theologian David Wells has observed pithily that ”worldliness is what makes sin look normal . . . and righteousness seem odd.” Worldliness, in other words, makes righteousness seem foolish or implausible.

Craig Gay, who was trained as a sociologist, also uses the term worldliness to describe a framework of understanding. Gay is now an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Regent College, and in a recent book, he takes issue with the conventional assumption that worldliness is a term best applied to describe the succumbing to certain personal moral temptations. He suggests that the essence of worldliness is the sustaining of an interpretation of reality that essentially excludes the reality of God from the business of life. “It is possible for us,” writes Gay, “to imagine our world in such a way that we ignore the real reality of God’s gracious presence within it.”

Not only is it possible: it is virtually inevitable. Many aspects of what sociologists call modernity, which informs our social, economic, political, and cultural institutions, carry the seeds of a practical atheism. Craig Gay’s book is called The Way of the Modern World: or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist. In the introduction he defines the thesis of the book so: “One of the most consequential ideas embedded in modern institutions and traditions and habits of thought is theological. Stated bluntly, it is the assumption that even if God exists, he is largely irrelevant to the real business of life. Contemporary society and culture so emphasize human potential and human agency and the immediate practical exigencies of the here and now that we are for the most part tempted to go about our daily business in this world without giving God much thought.”

Gay goes on to say that practical atheism is a temptation uniquely plausible in contemporary culture because of ideas and assumptions embedded within modern institutional life. His book looks in turn at institutions often unambiguously defended by conservative Christians, including democracy, science and technology, and industrial capitalism.

What these and other modern institutions have in common is the proud assumption that human beings have the power to control reality by rational-technical means. Furthermore, the ends and the means of good lives are defined only in terms of this world, without reference to God or the fully redeemed world that is to come. Given such a culture, Craig Gay thinks that Christians shouldn’t be overly sensitive to the charge of being “other-worldly.”

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