Photo credit: Aaron Monarrez @ Unsplash
I am writing today from home on St Simon’s Island GA, where we are recovering from the effects of Hurricane Helene. We suffered power outages for several days, and tornados wreaked death and destruction in communities north of us. But we were spared the most devastating damage done by the storm in Florida and Western N Carolina—especially in places like the Florida Gulf Coast, Asheville, Black Mountain, and Chimney Rock. Please consider donating to Anglicans who are responding to this tragedy with financial aid and much needed supplies to those who are homeless and without power or water. You can find information and donation links through ARDF here and here. Please also check your own diocesan website to see if there are any local efforts to send aid to those in need of relief.
Hurricane Helene reminds us that we live in a very broken and fallen world, a negative world,” in which even creation itself groans (Romans 8:19-21) through the natural disasters that wreak havoc in our lives. “Life and Death in the Negative World” was the theme of the 2024 Touchstone Conference I registered to attend in Chicago but was unable to due to the storm. Before we lost power I was able to zoom into the opening address by Aaron Renn on “Principles for Living in a Negative World.” Renn is the author of the book, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture (Zondervan Reflective, 2024). “The Negative World” is the post-Christian, post-Christendom culture in which we live, where the influence of the Church is marginalized by prevailing world views hostile to the Christian faith and any objective truth beyond the self.
We are in fact closer to Babylon than we are to Jerusalem. For several years now the American Anglican Council has urged our readers through our articles and our Daniel Declaration and accompanying videos to view our own culture here in North America through the same eyes as Daniel did while in Babylon. Here are the Seven Principles that Renn shared and which are in keeping with Daniel and his companions’ posture in Daniel 1:
1. Don’t fall prey to RESSENTIMENT:
The Oxford dictionary defines Res-sen-ti-ment as “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement.” In our negative world in which feelings reign supreme, Renn observed that this attitude of ressentiment is the dominating narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power, from a sense of inferiority or woundedness. Outrage against an identified injury becomes a source of identity for those who feel, however rightly or wrongly, that they are victims of that injury. By contrast, we as followers of Jesus Christ find our identity IN Him (see Ephesians 1). Jesus calls us to overcome evil with good rather than participating in ressentiment, however rightly or wrongly we feel injured or marginalized by our own culture. In fact, the Bible and the Great Tradition of the saints call us to have and demonstrate joy in the midst of suffering, even persecution.
2. Do not try to TURN BACK THE CLOCK:
No doubt Daniel and his companions faced the same temptation we face: to go back to what we remember lovingly about our nation, our culture, and our own family lives. It is a biblical imperative to anchor ourselves in what is historically GOOD. But this can be taken too far if we try to recreate a time that no longer exists. Daniel 1:2 reminds us that it was God himself who delivered Israel into the Babylonian captivity. God was still in control. Daniel’s captivity as a cultural, moral, and theological minority was the will of God. He lived into the culture into which God called him without compromise. So must we. God has us here, in this culture, at this time, for a reason, and that is to be the Church at its best, sharing the transforming, healing, saving love of Jesus Christ as winsomely and courageously as we can.
3. Do not become a prisoner of the post-WW2 consensus that Democratic liberalism is the ultimate virtue.
As a student of Political Theory and democratic institutions, this was the most challenging principle to me. I am a firm believer in a republican form of government with constitutional checks and balances. I am a child of that Post-WW2 consensus for which the Great Generation fought a world war and sacrificed much. But Renn’s point is that even the American system of government is not commended as sacred in the Bible. There are many effects of the “possessive individualism” that runs through our American government and culture that are at odds with what the Bible calls us to do in caring for the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. As followers of Jesus, we need to discover what the Bible says about these matters and apply what it says evenhandedly.
4. Do not remain wedded to the strategies of the immediate past:
This too was a challenging principle. Renn pointed out that the North American Church over the last 25 years adopted various strategies in engaging our culture, which include the “culture war strategy” (organize politically to gain power and defeat unbiblical actions abetted by the government), the “seeker-sensitive strategy” (appeal to peoples’ “felt needs” and organize worship and preaching around those needs), and the “cultural engagement/urban Christian strategy” (shift the focus to the needs of the city). I participated in every one of these strategies. I agree with Renn that the culture war strategy was right “because there are times when you need to stand up and fight,” just as we see Daniel doing when he refuses to eat at a non-kosher king’s table (Daniel 1:8). But since our culture is frequently changing, often for the worse, no one strategy can address the challenges. We must take the culture we face as it is and adapt what we do best in ways that are biblically-faithful, courageous, and resilient.
5. DO THINK “eschatologically”:
Eschatology is a theological word for the end times. Renn says we must think and preach and disciple in terms of the end-times. In other words, we need to remind people that our faith is not just fire insurance! Our faith in Christ means that on this side of glory we will do our best to make the Secular City as much like the City of God as we possibly can. To borrow an analogy from the Church fathers, from the Epistle to Diognetus: “What the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world…The soul is enclosed in the body, but it holds the body together; and though Christians are detained in the world as if in a prison, they in fact hold the world together.” (Epist. Diogn. 6:1-10) As others have pointed out, we need to hold before our culture the vision of the goodness of God’s creation, including our own human dignity, and the end of the biblical story, when God’s good creation will be restored more glorious than ever before.
6. DO THINK about the new possibilities opened up in the Negative world:
How can becoming a minority in an increasingly hostile culture be something good? As Renn observed, back in 1950s American Christendom it was very possible to be a “cultural Christian” by simply going to church just as everyone else did at that time. It was a kind of “least-common-denominator Christianity,” acceptable to all and frequently overlapping the ideal of good citizenship. Those days are long gone. As we have seen throughout history, when Christianity becomes a dissenting minority, the Church has the freedom and courage to look clearly at the cost of discipleship and call people to a real life in Jesus, life in the Church, no matter how costly that life may be. In other words, the Church may continue to diminish in size, but it can and will grow in faithfulness and witness. And for that reason…
7. DO BECOME more culturally confident!
If Christianity is true, we should be supremely confident. We see this cultural confidence in Daniel, in his public witness and his private prayers in Daniel, chapter six. He lived just as he was called to, and he was supremely confident that God would rescue him when needed. He wasn’t afraid of being scorned and persecuted by the ruling elites; neither should we. We are NOT in a “going out of business” sale! We know the end of the story, and its best summed up in the words of Revelation 21:3-5: “No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.”
