In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments

by David Bentley Hart

We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good.

Life, for the early Church, was spiritual warfare; and no baptized Christian could doubt how great a transformation - of the self and the world - it was to consent to serve the God revealed in Christ, and no other.

It is, rather, a qurban, literally a "drawing nigh" into the life-giving presence of God's glory. Israel's God requires nothing, he creates, elects, and sanctifies without need; and so the Atonement offering can in no way contribute to any sort of economy; it is instead a penitent approach to a God who gives life freely, and who not only does not profit from the holocaust of the particular, but who in fact fulfills the "sacrifice" simply by giving his gift again.

Christ's whole life was a reconciling qurban: an approach to the Father, and a real indwelling of God's glory in the temple of Christ's body, and an atonement made for a people enslaved to death; in pouring himself out in the form of a servant, and in living his humanity as an offering up of everything to God in love, the shape of the eternal Son's life was already sacrificial in this special sense; and it was this absolute giving, as God and man, that was made complete on Golgotha.

The full implications of this probably became visible to Christian philosophers only with the resolution of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies, when the subordinationist schemes of Alexandrian Trinitarianism were abandoned, and with them the last residue within theology of the late antique metaphysical vision of a descending scale of divinity mediating between God and world - the both of them comprised in a single totality.

Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world's mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.

The Christian God has taken up everything into himself; all the treasures of ancient wisdom, all the splendor of creation, every good thing has been assumed into the story of the incarnate God, and every stirring towards transcendence is soon recognized by the modern mind - weary of God - as leading back towards faith. Antique pieties cannot be restored, for we moderns know that the hungers they excite can be sated only by the gospel of Christ crucified.

The gospel of a God found in broken flesh, humility, and measureless charity has defeated the old lies, rendered the ancient order visibly insufficient and even slightly absurd, and instilled in us a longing for transcendent love so deep that - if once yielded to - it will never grant us rest anywhere but in Christ.

To have no god but the God of Christ, after all, means today that we must endure the Lenten privations of what is most certainly a dark age, and strive to resist the bland solace, inane charms, brute viciousness, and dazed passivity of post-Christian culture - all of which are so tempting precisely because they enjoin us to believe in and adore ourselves.

Modern persons will never find rest for their restless hearts without Christ, for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity; and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy.

And the most important reason for the greater - if not spectacular - fecundity of the United States appears to be the relatively high rate of birth among its most religious families (the godless being also usually the most likely to be childless). It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity.

For, stated simply, against the withering boredom that descends upon a culture no longer invaded by visions of eternal order, no civilization can endure.

Which is why one could argue that American religion found its first genuinely native expression during the great age of revivalism. The two Great Awakenings, early and late in the eighteenth century, the spread of evangelical Christianity throughout the southern states, the sporadic but powerful western revivals - all of these contributed to the larger synthesis by which contemporary American religion was fashioned.

Most of us, for instance, rarely have cause to reflect that some of the variants of America's indigenous evangelical Christianity, especially of the "fundamentalist" sort, would have to be reckoned - if judged in the full light of Christian history - positively bizarre. Yet many of its dominant and most reputable churches have - quite naturally and without any apparent attempt at novelty - evolved a Christianity so peculiar as to be practically without precedent: an entire theological and spiritual world, internally consistent, deeply satisfying to many, and nearly impossible to ground in the scriptural texts its inhabitants incessantly invoke.

But, when one considers the most liberal forms of mainstream American Protestantism, it is not even obvious that one is any longer dealing with religion at all, except in a formal sense.

In his indispensable book, The Next Christendom (2002), Philip Jenkins remarks that the effect of mass immigration from the global South and Pacific East to the United States in recent years has been, in fact, to make America a more Christian nation. And the Christianity that is being imported from these parts of the world is, to a great extent, very conservative in its most basic moral precepts and metaphysical presuppositions. And, throughout the developing world, the Christianity that is growing most exuberantly (with, as Jenkins demonstrates, a rapidity that beggars the imagination) is in many cases marked by the New Testament charisms: prophecy, exorcisms, glossolalia, visions, miraculous healings.

Many within the languishing denominations of the affluent North, until they are similarly shaken from the slumber of their ignorance, are simply unprepared for the truth that, in the century ahead, Christianity will not only expand mightily, but will increasingly be dominated by believers whose understanding of engagement with the non-Christian or post-Christian world is likely to be one not of accommodation, compromise, or even necessarily coexistence, but of spiritual warfare.

AN IRONY that attaches to these reflections is that many of the forms of Christianity entering America from the developing world are in a sense merely coming home. The Christian movements that have had the most prodigious success in Asia and the global South are arguably those that were born here and then sent abroad: revivalist evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, even the charismatic movement within Catholicism and certain of the mainstream Protestant churches.

Either the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits. That the former view is philosophically incoherent is something of which I am convinced; but, even if one cannot share that conviction, one should still be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh.

This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only a belief that we possess an actual nature, which must flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented. This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plenitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which - in the deepest reaches of our souls - we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end - even if it be our own power of choice within us - is a form of bondage. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.

The consummation for which we should long, if we are wise, is that ultimately we shall, in St. Augustine's language, achieve not only the liberty enjoyed by Adam and Eve - who were merely "able not to sin" (posse non peccare) - but the truest freedom of all, that of being entirely "unable to sin" (non posse peccare), because God's will works perfectly in ours.