Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 180:718 (Apr 2023)
Article: The Church After 2020
Author: Joel D. Lawrence

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The Church After 2020

Joel D. Lawrence

Joel D. Lawrence is President of the Center for Pastor Theologians in Oak Park, Illinois.

* This is the second article in the three-part series “The Pastor Theologian and the Pattern of the Age,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 1, 3, and 4, 2022.

The Church’s Conformity

At the end of World War II, living in the ruins of another apocalyptic time, a young French sociologist and theologian named Jacques Ellul set himself the project of looking at the world from amid the ashes of that great inferno. Ellul wanted to understand the ideological commitments that shaped the West, the society that proclaimed itself the most advanced in history but used that progress to build weapons that destroyed millions of lives. Why had the West taken this course? What were the ideological commitments that led to World War II? And how were those ideologies still structuring the pattern of his age?

But as a follower of Jesus, Ellul was also intent on understanding the way that the church has been conformed to the pattern of the age. In the introduction to his 1948 book, Presence in the Modern World, Ellul says, “I had to write a short and simple little book about the presence of the Christian in the world of today.”1 Ellul pursued this joint sociological and theological project over the next forty years, writing over fifty books and one thousand articles on the social structures of the modern world, the underlying commitments of our time that shaped the world, and the church’s conformity to the modern world.

In these lectures, I am engaging in a mini-Ellulian project, sketching the pattern of our age and the church’s conformity to that pattern. We began this project by exploring three threads of

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the pattern that dominate our age: First, the political anthropology of Western liberalism, which defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals and shapes society based on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own self-determined ends. Second, the enchantments of mammon, the financial dominance of our age, created by the need for self-interested humans to acquire resources to secure their autonomous lives, a reality that reveals that mammon is, at its essence, power. Third, the age of anger, in which vast numbers of people in our world today are disillusioned by the fact that the promises of Western liberalism have not been delivered.

The task before us today is to reflect on the church’s conformity to the pattern of the age...