Changed From Glory Into Glory: The Liturgical Formation of the Christian Faith

Worldview

For the purposes of this discussion, I will define religion as composed of two parts, the first of which is worldview. ¹ A worldview consists of a set of assumptions a person holds about reality; it is a lens through which he understands and interprets everything around him. James Sire has provided a helpful and influential definition of worldview:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being. ²

Several elements of this definition are relevant to the present discussion. First, central to this definition of worldview is that it is “a fundamental orientation of the heart.” In fact, David Naugle has suggested that what philosophers today call “worldview” is essentially equivalent to the biblical concept of the “heart.” He argues, “As the image and likeness of God, people are animated subjectively from the core and throughout their being by that primary faculty of thought, affection, and will which the Bible calls the ‘heart.’” ³ In both the Old and New Testaments, the idea of heart refers to “the central defining element of the human person.” ⁴ Naugle observes,

In Hebraic thought the heart is comprehensive in its operations as the seat of the intellectual (e.g., Prov. 2:10a; 14:33; Dan. 10:12), affective (e.g., Exod. 4:14; Ps. 13:2; Jer. 15:16), volitional (e.g., Judg. 5:15; 1 Chron. 29:18; Prov. 16:1), and religious life of a human being (e.g., Deut. 6:5; 2 Chron. 16:9; Ezek. 6:9; 14:3). ⁵

Likewise in the New Testament (NT), “the heart is the psychic center of human affections (Matt. 22:37-39; John 14:1, 27; 2 Cor. 2:4), the source of the spiritual life (Acts 8:21; Rom. 2:29; 2 Cor. 3:3), and the seat of the intellect and the will (Rom. 1:21; 2 Cor. 9:7; Heb. 4:12).” ⁶ Thus, while the philosophical concept of worldview is a relatively recent development, “what the heart is and does in a biblical way is what the philosophers were getting at unconsciously in coining the term ‘world-view.’” ⁷ A worldview is not primarily a set of ideas or beliefs; rather, it involves the innate inclinations at our core.

This leads to a second important characteristic of worldview: a worldview is a set of assumptions about the basic constitution of reality. Since worldview is not primarily stated beliefs but rather an orientation of the heart, these assumption about reality are not usually stated or held explicitly; rather, they become formed within us often without any conscious intention. Another word for this is what philosophers have called the moral imagination—the “eyes of your heart.” ⁸ Everything we encounter filters through and is interpreted by this inner image. Sire provides eight helpful questions that form the presuppositions that lie at the core of our worldview:

What is prime reality—the really real?

Third, it is the heart orientation of a worldview that “provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” The inner image of the world formed within us—our moral imagination—interprets reality and thus affects how we evaluate and respond to what we encounter. It is what motivates and moves us to act in certain ways within the various circumstances of life. This is why the Bible commands, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23). As Naugle suggests,

From a scriptural point of view, therefore, the heart is responsible for how a man or woman sees the world. Indeed, what goes into the heart from the outside side world eventually shapes its fundamental dispositions and determines what comes out of it as the springs of life. Consequently, the heart establishes the basic sic presuppositions of life and, because of its life-determining influence, must always be carefully guarded. ⁹

Theology

Broadly speaking, I am defining theology as how we intentionally answer the questions Sire provided above that form the assumptions at the core of our worldview. What we believe about the nature of reality, the purpose and meaning of life, the basis of right and wrong, and most importantly our beliefs about God form our theology. Theology and worldview are, therefore, very closely related—they both involve answers to the same sorts of questions and they both fundamentally influence the way we live. The difference I am drawing between them is that the assumptions that form worldview are fundamentally subconscious and unsated, while the beliefs that form theology are consciously affirmed. Theology is fundamentally propositional, while worldview is affective. Theology is usually more deliberately developed than worldview, often explicitly taught and based on sacred documents, which for Israel and Christianity, of course, is the divine revelation found in Scripture.

Worldview and theology interact dynamically. On the one hand, our fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality affect the kind of theology we are willing to accept; sometimes the worldview a person has inculcated early in life will make accepting certain theological propositions more difficult unless he is willing to adjust his worldview. On the other hand, as we consciously develop a theology, that theology can begin to reform our worldview, especially if we are aware of conflict between our worldview and theology. This lies at the root of Jesus’s command, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me” (Jn. 15:1); he was commanding his disciples to change the orientation of their hearts through a change in belief.

Like worldview, our theology fundamentally affects how we live. As A. W. Tozer famously stated, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” ¹² However, if a conflict does exist between our worldview and our theology, and we are unaware of that conflict, at the end of the day, our worldview is more fundamental. Tozer continued, “The most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” ¹³ In other words, we may consciously say we believe certain things, but if we have not worked to change the orientation of our hearts to reflect our stated beliefs, our heart’s orientation is what will ultimately determine how we live.

Religion

Everyone has an implicit worldview—a fundamental orientation of the heart expressed in assumptions about reality, and most people have an explicit theology—conscious beliefs expressed in stated propositions. The combination of worldview and theology is what I suggest constitutes a religion. Expressed in this way, all people have a religion, whether they acknowledge it or not. Even atheists have a religion; their worldview consists of an assumption that only matter is real, combined with a theology that denies the existence of God. This produces an atheist religion that affects everything about how they live and interact in society.

Thus, while believers and unbelievers may sometimes hold to similar assumptions about the nature of reality, since their theologies are fundamentally different, biblical religion and nonbiblical religion are always antithetical to one another. The Bible teaches that stark enmity exists between God and the world, between belief and unbelief. There is no neutrality between God and the world, a disparity articulated clearly in passages such as James 4:4 and 1 John 2:25:

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Biblical religion, on the other hand, involves the formation of a worldview and theology in accordance with the Word of God. Conscious belief in the truths of Scripture—most importantly, what it teaches about God’s purpose for his creation, the reality of sin and judgment, and forgiveness found in the atonement of Jesus Christ—reorients the believer’s heart toward God, motivating him to live in accordance with God’s will for his glory.

Discussions of worldview, theology, and religion can often seem abstract and irrelevant to the practical issues of life, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our underlying assumptions combined with our beliefs—our religion—affect everything about us: what we value, where we find meaning and purpose, how we interact with others—everything concerning our life in this world.

Culture

This idea of culture is one of the two elements I am considering under the broad umbrella of liturgy. ¹⁶ The English word “culture” finds its Latin roots in discussions of the cultivation and care of livestock and crops. It was first used metaphorically to describe differences between groups of people, similarly to how we use it today, no earlier than 1776. ¹⁷ The idea progressed through several different uses over time. It first narrowly denoted what Matthew Arnold would call “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” ¹⁸ what we today might call “high culture.” But as early as the mid-19th century, anthropologists began to use the idea to designate all forms of human behavior within society, not limited to high culture, including what we might today call “folk culture” or “pop culture.” British anthropologist Edward Tylor is credited for the first influential use of the term in this way when in 1871 he defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired as a member of society.” ¹⁹

In other words, as it is used most commonly today, “culture” refers to the common behavioral patterns of a group of people—their “liturgy”—including their arts, language, customs, and rituals. It is this anthropological understanding of culture as the totality of human practices in a society that has become the predominant use of the idea among Christians and non-Christians alike. Adopting the anthropologist’s definition of culture is not a problem for Christians—indeed, it may be a helpful category in studying the way humans behave as members of their society, but we must make sure that Scripture informs that understanding. The parallel idea in Scripture to anthropological notions of culture is that of social behavior, something about which the Bible has much to say. For example, when addressing the matter of behavior, New Testament authors admonish Christians to “be holy in all your conduct” in contrast to the “futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Pet. 1:15, 18). They also identify human labor—both the act and what it produces—as the object of God’s judgment (Rom. 2:6) and as an honorable endeavor that can lead unbelievers to “glorify God” (1 Pet. 2:12). ²⁰

It is just this understanding of culture as the behavior of people in society that ties in to our foregoing discussion of religion. As we have seen, our religion—worldview combined with theology—determines the patterns of our behavior—culture. As Roger Scruton notes, culture is “a shared spiritual force which is manifest in all the customs, beliefs, and practices of a people”; it is “a demonstration of a belief system.” ²¹ This follows closely T. S. Elliot’s classic argument that “no culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.” ²² Culture flows out of and reflects the religious commitments, beliefs, and values of a people group, and it does so as it is cultivated over long spans of time. The very term “culture” illustrates the long-term, progressive cultivation of something over time, influenced and nurtured by the environment in which it grows. Cultural forms are natural products of the environment in which they were nurtured. All cultural forms, then, are expressions of value systems, and thus, culture is not neutral—it is fundamentally religious. And like worldview, the development of cultures occurs usually not deliberately or consciously. We simply go about our lives, interacting with other members of society, producing practical tools, and creating art, unaware of how our worldview is affecting everything that we do.

Conversely, just as religion is what forms culture, so cultures influence the formation of religion, especially for people or societies that do not intentionally shape their religion and its underlying worldview based on conscious theological beliefs. In fact, as I noted earlier, most people’s worldviews are formed without intentional reflection, and the dominant influence for the formation of a people’s worldview is their cultural environment. The implicit assumptions embedded in the core of cultural behaviors form and shape the worldview of the people participating in those cultural behaviors, typically without intentionality or even awareness. Thus, as James K. A. Smith has emphasized in recent years, culture is liturgical, being comprised of rhythms and routines that embody religious values and have power to form those values into those who participate in them. ²³

Cultus

Yet there is a second element within the broader concept of liturgy, actually the more common use of the term—public worship. While λειτουργεῖν was originally used to describe all sorts of social works, what I have called “culture,” it later came to refer specifically to public works of worship to God, primarily due to its use in the “Septuagint”. ²⁴ The “Septuagint” translators deliberately chose this term to uniquely denote the formal service of the priests on behalf of the people of God, and they used it almost exclusively for that kind of work in contrast to other public patterns of behavior. This use of the term set the standard for the years to come, and this is how we typically use the word liturgy today, to refer to corporate worship.

Here, too, there is a relationship to the Latin root for the word “culture,” which originally denoted the cultivation of plants and animals. The term “cultus” grew from this original Latin source alongside “culture” and referred to the public acts of worship performed by a religious community. Sigmund Mowinckel provided this helpful definition of the original meaning of the word:

Cult…may be defined as the socially established and regulated holy acts and words in which the encounter and communion of the Deity with the congregation is established, developed, and brought to its ultimate goal…a relation in which a religion becomes a vitalizing function as a communion of God and congregation, and of the members of the congregation among themselves…the visible and audible expression of the relation between the congregation and the deity. ²⁵

Like theology, cultus is more deliberately formed than culture. Religious communities establish rituals, ceremonies, artistic expressions, and other sacred acts in ways that express and nurture their religion. Yet here, too, there is often an unconscious interplay between cultus and culture. Often people’s worship becomes shaped and molded by the common culture around them. Likewise, the cultic acts of a dominant religious community within a society can have a significant impact upon the cultural behaviors of that society.

Liturgy

Both of these behavioral patterns, culture—the general patterns of a society’s behavior—and cultus—the patterns of a religious community’s worship, are encompassed under the category of liturgy. These are practices that have formed over time within a community that both reflect and form underlying religion (worldview + theology).

Worship in Scripture

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments lay the necessary foundation for understanding these categories for the Christian religion and for evaluating everything that happens in subsequent church history. In its earliest chapters, the Bible establishes the nature of worship as communion with God in his presence and on his terms such that he is magnified. ²⁷ Adam and Eve’s fall into sin was essentially failure to magnify the worthiness of God to be their master and bring him glory, and thus, it was a failure to worship him acceptably. This broke the communion they enjoyed with God and propelled them out from the sanctuary of his presence. Sin prevents people from drawing near to God in worship; it prevents human beings from doing what they were created to do. However, worship is possible through a sacrifice, the vicarious, substitutionary atonement of the Son of God. Sacrifices in the Mosaic system pictured this kind of atonement, but they were unable to “make perfect those who draw near” (Heb. 10:1). But the sacrifice of Christ can perfect those who draw near. Thus, those who repent of their sin—their failure to worship—and put their faith and trust in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on their behalf are saved from separation from God and enabled once again to draw near to him in worship.

This Scripture-based theology formed the worldview of God’s people and shaped both biblical culture and cultus. Everything about the Hebrew religion, a combination of a God-entranced worldview with theology derived exclusively from his self-revelation, affected their lives. Nothing was “secular” for faithful Israelites—whether they were rearing children, working in the fields, defeating their enemies, or singing songs of praise, everything was done as unto the Lord and in response to their covenantal relationship with him. They did not consider their culture separate from their religion; indeed, their culture flowed from their religious commitments; it was to be holy, set apart from the world. As McCune explains, “In ancient Israel the civil and religious arenas were combined in the theocratic polity, in effect a union of church and state. The Law governed every aspect of the people’s lives including the social sphere.” ²⁸ God had created humankind to “worship and obey,” and thus, God’s people were to be a realization of that purpose in everything they did.

In fact, God established cultic rituals and festivals for Israel as “memorials,” that is, covenant renewal ceremonies wherein the people would reenact God’s work on their behalf and be thus continually formed by it. For example, when God founded the annual Passover observance, he proclaimed, “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations, as a statue forever, you shall keep it as a feast” (Exod. 12:14). In calling this feast a “memorial,” God meant more than simply a passive remembrance of the first event of Passover; this is clear by the fact that the Hebrews were meant, not merely to recount the event of the first Passover, but to actually reenact the event. In so doing, the people of Israel for generations to come would not only remember the facts of the Exodus from Egypt, they would be formed by the event as if they had been there themselves as a means to renew their covenant with God. God explains this later in verse 24 of Exodus 12: “You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’ And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.”

God uses the same root word when he commands, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God” (Exod. 20:8–9). God intended this weekly “memorial” to reenact his own rest on the seventh day of creation: “For in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (v. 11). By establishing this weekly routine for his people, God was ensuring that they would regularly renew their covenant with him (Exod. 31:12–17), enjoy communion with him, and be set apart for him alone. This principle of memorial applied to every Sabbath and to each of the holy days, festivals, and solemn assemblies of worship in Israel.

Fifteen hundred years later, while celebrating the Passover memorial himself, Jesus Christ established a new ordinance, complete with a carefully prescribed liturgy, and commanded his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19). This ἀνάμνησις—this “remembrance”—is an active reenactment of the death of Christ on behalf of his people in such a way that Christians are shaped by the act. Each of these examples serves to illustrate the point that biblical liturgies reenact God’s work for his people and thereby form his people’s theology and their worldview—their religion.

But it is also important to recognize that many of the general worldview assumptions of even pagan people were shaped by their nearness in time to the creation of world and God’s self-revelation. Most people in ancient times, for example, believed in the existence of a spiritual, transcendent reality beyond themselves and interpreted the events of everyday life in relation to that ultimate reality. Quentin Faulkner calls this worldview “World-consciousness” and notes, “among world-conscious peoples, religion manifests itself in three primary aspects: in myth (content and teachings),” what I have called “theology,” “in ethos (behavior and morals),” what I have called “culture,” “and in cultus,” public worship. ²⁹ This recognition will become important for recognizing the seismic shift in worldview that takes place later in the 18th century.

Thus, the fundamental relationship between biblical religion and liturgy is clearly apparent in Scripture. What should be apparent is that the essence of worship is itself the language of the gospel—a drawing near to God in relationship with him made impossible because of sin that demands eternal judgment, yet restored through the substitutionary atonement of the God-man for those who place their faith in him. The gospel of Jesus Christ makes worship possible. The gospel—the good news of Christ’s death on our behalf—is a call for people to return to the reason for their existence; it is a plea to accept the simple truths, repent of failure to worship God aright, and call out for forgiveness.

This is what Christians are called to do as we make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19–20). When Christians preach the gospel, they are proclaiming the worthiness of God to be praised, the inability of sinners to draw near to a holy God, and the forgiveness that is possible through faith in Christ’s atoning work. But corporate worship also proclaims the gospel, not that the sermon and hymns will necessarily always be explicitly evangelistic, but in the act of corporate worship itself. Corporate worship is the public acting out of the spiritual realities of worship; it is a dramatic recreation of drawing near to God through Christ by faith. Christian worship therefore forms worshipers into those who will live out their Christians faith each day of their lives.

Early and medieval Christianity

The Christian Faith after the close of the NT Scriptures evolved from this basic religious and liturgical foundation. ³⁰ Medieval worldview in general did not shift from that of ancient times: people believed in the reality of the immaterial, and they believed that this immaterial reality was what was truly real. The spiritual and material functioned as a unified whole, meaning in this life finding its source in the ultimate reality of the spiritual world.

What changed over time was the dominant theology, both for good and for ill. Positively, as Christianity spread to become the dominant force in the West, the unstated assumption that a spiritual world existed became defined in explicit theological terms of Christian Theism. Medievals believed that all things “live and move and have their being” in the Creator who “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). This did not mean everyone was truly Christian—there was plenty of immorality, unbelief, and corruption, even within the Church. Yet the dominant Christian imagination of the Middle Ages was to consider everything as part of a unified harmony governed by God, regulated by his law, and intended for his glory. C. S. Lewis helpfully described the medieval worldview: “Every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one’s mind back to the Model as a whole.” ³¹

This religious perspective of the Middle Ages significantly affected both culture and cultus. Culturally, a transcendent Theistic worldview became the crucible in which rich artistic endeavors flourished. The Church itself became a sort of conservatory of the arts, many of the greatest artists of the period being churchmen who created art as a means to picture the divine and nourish the soul. Even the folk art of the period flourished in this environment that Faulkner called “World-consciousness.” ³² In a sense, culture and cultus interacted in ways very similar to the golden age of ancient Israel.

Negatively, however, late Medievals began to understand the relationship between the material and immaterial world sacramentally, that is, they believed that experiencing God came as a result of physical things—sacred places, rituals, relics, and ceremonies. ³³ This was a considerable shift from the spirituality of early Christians who believed the reverse, that knowledge and meaning in the physical world came as a result of knowing God. In other words, earlier Christians began with transcendent reality rooted in God and moved from that basis toward an understanding of particulars in the material world. ³⁴ Late medieval scholastic theologians, most significantly Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) began with the particulars and worked toward the universals. ³⁵ This subtle shift from the Christian realism of early Christianity turned seismic with other theologians, such as William of Ockham (1285–1347). While Aquinas still taught that meaning in the material world finds its source in the nature of God himself (as early Christians had as well), Ockham argued that meaning in the world existed based on the will of God; thus, truth, morality, and beauty are not intrinsic. ³⁶ This way of thinking eventually led to the nominalism of the 18th century and had considerable impact on culture and the church.

Reformation

For both religion and liturgy, the 16th and 17th centuries saw the beginnings of fragmentation. What for hundreds of years had been cultural and liturgical unity flowing from the dominance of Christian religion began to splinter, paving the way for a fundamental shift in worldview.

Theologically, of course, this period was a time of significant reform. The Protestant Reformers, and even counter-Reformation Roman Catholics, consciously emphasized a return to ancient beliefs and practices. The dominant worldview of the 16th and 17th centuries remained fairly consistent with what had come before, but fractures began to appear. As in the past, subtle changes in underlying worldview were both for good and for ill. For both theological and cultural reasons, this period saw a gradual shift from a dominant emphasis on community to a focus on the individual. Positively, this created a deep appreciation for the value of human dignity and forced people to consider whether they had a personal relationship with God through Christ or if they were simply trusting the Church for their salvation. Negatively, this eventually led to an overly optimistic view of what humanity could do on its own, elevating the individual above all else, including community and even God. ³⁷

Culturally, the 16th and 17th centuries can be characterized by a renewed interest in ancient documents and traditions—“Ad fontes!” was the cry of the day, finding expression both in the study of the humanities and classical Greek and Roman literature and the translation of Scripture from its original Hebrew and Greek into modern vernacular. ³⁸ But this was also a period in which a culture that had for a long time been cultivated within a united Christian environment now began to give way to splintering culture influenced by competing value systems. As Brad Gregory notes, “Because Christians disagreed about what they were to believe and do, they disagreed about what the fruits of a Christian life were.” ³⁹

Liturgically, while disagreements concerning worship theology and practice created irreconcilable division between various theologians and their adherents, largely the cause of denominationalism following the Reformation, much about the essence of worship among these dispirit groups remained consistent and unified. Each group maintained a focus on worship in their primary gatherings, a worship that was characterized by reverence and intentional faithfulness to Scripture, though what this faithfulness required sometimes differed. ⁴⁰ This common understanding of the nature of worship, despite many disagreements concerning particular practices, allowed these groups to unify in several different respects. For example, although Luther promoted the liberal use of psalms and hymns in worship, ⁴¹ Zwingli prohibited music altogether, ⁴² and Calvin limited singing to psalms without instrumental accompaniment, ⁴³ all three Reformers agreed concerning good music’s spiritual benefits and cautioned against the degenerating influence of some music, ⁴⁴ and groups springing from these early Reformers shared their songs across denominational lines. Additionally, while each of the Reformers reshaped their liturgies to greater or lesser degrees in response to Roman Catholic abuses, most post-Reformation denominational groups traditionally preserved a similar shape to their worship services. ⁴⁵

Enlightenment

While the Reformation saw changes in Christian theology and cultus, the 18th-century Enlightenment led to fundamental shifts in worldview and culture. What is critical to recognize is that the difference between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worldview, theology, culture, and cultus is not simply change of degree but fundamental change in kind. What has occurred since the 18th century is the creation of what David Bentley Hart calls an “imaginative chasm between the premodern and modern worlds. [Modern] human beings now in a sense inhabited a universe different from that inhabited by their ancestors.” ⁴⁶ The elevation of reason and science over faith—known as “The Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason”—was, in the words of Abraham Kuyper, “the expulsion of God from practical and theoretical life,” ⁴⁷ what Rod Dreher describes as “the decisive break with the Christian legacy of the West.” ⁴⁸ The position that the church had enjoyed as the dominant influence over all of culture in the West was over. Kuyper poignantly described the ultimate goal of this period:

Voltaire’s mad cry, “Down with the scoundrel,” was aimed at Christ himself, but this cry was merely the expression of the most hidden thought from which the French Revolution sprang. The fanatic outcry of another philosopher, “We no more need a God,” and the odious shibboleth, “No God, no Master,” of the Convention;—these were the sacrilegious watchwords which at the time heralded the liberation of man as an emancipation from all Divine Authority. ⁴⁹

As Faulkner notes, each of these emphases have always been somewhat inherent in the world-conscious worldview of Christianity, but in healthy measure. However, “the appreciation of human individuality grew steadily stronger in the wake of Renaissance humanism. Among its many effects were a rise in the estimation of private, individual worship as over against cultic worship (which is always communal in spirit) and a corresponding slackening of the indispensable requirement for full participation in cultic events.” ⁵⁴ He further explains, “The cult places God at the absolute, unrivaled center of consciousness. When the consciousness of God as the center is dislodged by a focus on the human self as the center of interest and concern, then the cult is inevitably transformed.” ⁵⁵

This fundamental shift in worldview resulted in new theology, first in the form of Deism, a drastically secularized portrait of the relationship between God and man. ⁵⁶ But while early Enlightenment philosophers were Deists, affirming the existence but impersonality of God, by the 19th century, the dominant worldview shifted to pure naturalism. ⁵⁷ The rational basis for explaining the world in purely natural terms without the need to acknowledge a Creator was Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) 1859 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Man was now understood to be a machine, his actions the product of chemical reactions, with no inherent morality or value at all. This naturalist evolutionary explanation also spread to other philosophical disciplines, such as anthropology and its insistence upon the value-free nature of culture. ⁵⁸ For example, the father of British anthropology, Edward Tylor, applied Darwin’s evolutionary theories to the way people behave in different societies, formulating a conception of the idea of culture that continues to this day. Even religion, in this theory, is merely one aspect of culture that has simply evolved in human societies. ⁵⁹

A final stage in the evolution of secular theology could be described as pluralism, which D. A. Carson describes: “Any notion that a particular ideological or religious claim is intrinsically superior to another is necessarily wrong. The only absolute creed is the creed of pluralism. No religion has the right to pronounce itself right or true, and the others false, or even (in the majority view) relatively inferior.” ⁶⁰ What is prized mostly greatly in modern society is self-expression and pleasure, fueled by the growth of commercialism as the driving force of economic life the cultural result of the Industrial Revolution. The growing dominance of the secular religion has produced an increasingly hedonistic society, perhaps reaching its tipping point in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, notable results including the national legalization by the Supreme Court of abortion in 1973 and of same-sex marriage in 2015 as well as the normalization of transgenderism in recent years. Charles Taylor describes the present culture well:

Everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. People are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content. ⁶¹

Post-enlightenment Christian Faith

By the mid-19th century, western society had been forever changed. As the secular culture moved further and further away from the traditional beliefs and practices of Christendom, Protestant churches were faced with a dilemma—continue to cultivate their historic worship traditions, and risk becoming increasingly alien compared with the rest of culture, or reject the church’s traditions and adapt to the culture to remain influential. Christianity’s cultural influence was increasingly diminished, and as the surrounding culture plunged into popularized secularism, the church’s traditional forms became foreign.

The problem is that Christians have not always recognized these emerging values and assumptions, unknowingly adopting them as they embrace what they consider to be neutral aspects of secular culture. In short, many Christians do not recognize secularism to be the religion (worldview + theology) that it is. As Rod Dreher notes, instead of recognizing and resisting the increasing secularization of the West, many Christians succumbed to it, having placed “unwarranted confidence in the health of our religious institutions.” Dreher offers his proposal, not just because the culture is so bad, but because Western Christianity is so bad. He continues, “The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves.” ⁶² He observes that most professing Christians in America have identified their Christianity with being American and have adopted what was more accurately described by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005 as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. ⁶³ The core theology of many evangelicals today can be summarized by the following beliefs:

A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

Others have also described the effects of the secular religion upon Christianity. David Wells has assessed the effects of modernity and postmodernity on Christianity in a thorough manner like few others. He argues that, as a result of the increasing secularization of the west, theology in the church “has become dismembered” such that confessional beliefs (theology) have been divorced from the cultivation of virtue manifested in holy living (culture). Wells argues, “theology is disappearing…in the sense that while its articles of belief are still professed, they are no longer defining what it means to be an evangelical or how evangelicalism should be practiced. At its center there is now a vacuum into which modernity is pouring, and the result is a faith that, unlike historic orthodoxy, is no longer defining itself theologically.” ⁶⁴ In a later book, Wells described the result of the disappearance of theology as “the weightlessness of God.” ⁶⁵ Building from Wells’s critique, Michael Lawrence well describes the state of many churches today:

The church has become enamored with business practice and psychological method. Her leaders are expected to be CEO’s, not pastor-theologians. The church’s public gatherings are designed to be events that appeal to the outsider, rather than assemblies that give corporate expression to our identity as the people of God. And our habits of thought tend to be shaped more by polling data, the blogosphere, and the image-driven nature of television than they do the Bible. The thoughts of God and his glory, our nobility and depravity, and this world’s value and transience—thoughts that shaped and characterized the minds of previous generations of Christians—rest lightly, if at all, on the church today. ⁶⁶