Confessing into the Chasm of Modernity

A Philosophical Blueprint for Christian Progressivism

Confessing into the Chasm of Modernity

What It Means to be a Confessing Church in the Modern Era, and Why it Matters

By Cole Niles

Introduction

In 2021, the World Communion of Reformed Churches held a writing competition with the following thematic prompt: “Ecumenism from the Margins: Confessing a God of Life in a World Fallen Among Thieves.” I decided to write on this prompt – not for that particular contest (it had already long past by the time I heard of it), but for Dr. Smit’s class on the Confession of Belhar.

The prompt intrigued me to no end for reasons I, frankly, had a hard time describing even as I wrote the paper. Perhaps it had to do with the implied ecumenical longing, this desire to reconcile the fractured limbs of the Church itself. Maybe it was the phrase “World Fallen Among Thieves”, and the unavoidable bedlam that ensues from such loaded language. But after pondering it for the better part of five months now, I finally understand what drew me to the prompt: the notion of confession itself. What is confession? And why confess at all?

Confession proves to be a rather foreign concept to the modern mind; the very nature of confession implies a boldness and bravado that we in modernity instinctually recoil from. Nevertheless, we Christians use the word “confession” quite a bit. Of course it’s been used from the Church’s very inception in regards to things like the creeds, which serve as statements that distinguish the parameters of Christian orthodoxy. However, especially here at Princeton, the term confession holds a bit more weight because of its role within the Reformed tradition. At the Reformed tradition’s genesis, Protestantism became inextricably linked to the emerging notion of self-autonomy, which resulted in a theological heritage wherein many confessions of faith were made. It turns out that Protestants take that label – “Protest-ants” – quite seriously. The very etymology of the movement may as well be a license to protest just about anything at all. And how does that happen? Through writing confessions, of course. So yes, while all of Church history is technically speaking confessional, one would be remiss no to mention the Reformed tradition’s rather special liking to the concept of confessing the faith as a form of protest.

But what might the Reformed tradition protest? Well, the Reformed Church traditionally confesses against the powers of spiritual (and subsequently oftentimes political) tyranny. It’s what Luther and Calvin did during the Reformation itself; Barth and Bonhoeffer later did the very same in the specter of Adolph Hitler (In fact, when one speaks of the “Confessing Church” as a proper noun it is nearly always in reference to supporters of the 1934 Barmen Declaration, which opposed Nazism on the basis of Christian faith). Even our very own Dr. Smit, the subject of these very musings, confessed alongside the other architects of the Confession of Belhar in opposition to South African apartheid.

But what did they confess? And why? Does confession even make sense in the 21st century? Here today, I make it my task today to take up the question of what it means to be a “confessing” Church in the modern age; moreover, I want to make a case for the value of confession itself as we trudge through modernity’s ever increasing moral obscurity. Perhaps Christian confession itself can save us from the billowing cloud of moral, social, and spiritual melancholy that currently bursts at the seams of modern America.

The Billowing Cloud of Modernity

The modern age has stripped the Church of much of its authority; and from a secular point of view, it’s happened with good reason. For the vast majority of humans on earth, the Christian church has proven itself time and time again to abuse such power at a wider societal level. Nonbelievers often possess either passive contempt or outright disdain for Christian institutions, as the Church itself has, historically speaking, so often become a bulwark for the hateful and complacent. In some sense, Christians cannot necessarily disagree with these critiques, nor can we really blame them for giving up on the institution of the Church.

However, the chasm that was left in response to the church’s failures has only grown with time, replacing a flawed system with… well nothing, really. With the Enlightenment we witnessed a shift in how we understand knowledge – in the West truth became totalizing, and by necessary extension, colonial. In some respects we have David Hume to thank for that, what with his proclivity to endow his own philosophical processes with the claim of universality; this unsurprisingly resulted in his subjectivity within 18th century Britain to be translated as “how the world should be.” Such an abrupt shift left much of the world feeling estranged from engaging in philosophical inquiry at all, as appeals “universal truth” became a method of domination. Philosophy itself was beginning to become unintelligible.

In order to combat this estranging chasm, Enlightenment philosophers provided a solution: Total submission to some systematic principle as a methodology of discerning truth. Shifts toward intellectual certainty thus paved the way for the rise of Christian fundamentalism – a simplistic, black and white depiction of the otherwise flabbergasting mystery we call faith. Many wonder how fundamentalism grew so prominent in the 20th century, but to me it seems an inevitability for these exact reasons. The gambit of modernity meant that we now played by the Enlightenment’s rules. Truth became conflated with technical certainty, which tragically (albeit somewhat unsurprisingly) tore faith itself away from the church as an institution. No longer were churches holistic centers for spiritual wellbeing; No, they had become laboratories which housed in extreme detail all of the insecurities of Christian faith in relation to modernity’s questions. Moreover the Church failed miserably at answering those questions of meaning, because we now had to situate our answers within either the realm of Kantian logical reasoning or Humean expressivism. The bedrock of religion – mystery itself – was stripped away from us, which rendered our questions not only unanswerable, but even somewhat silly. Nevertheless we marched onwards, hoping that we could prove our moral confidence scientifically. Just maybe, we thought, the collective pit in humanity’s stomach could be resolved like a math problem.

As a result, the church has become a fiction in most people’s minds. We cling to the faith because of some rationally deduced form of Enlightenment reasoning about the scientific nature of creation, or the historical assuredness of Jesus’ resurrection. This plunges us even further into our own crude confidence in “our” truth (or at least it calls itself truth), with no real purpose for why we should be Christian outside of some complicated rigmarole about how our religion wins the global argument on which one is “correct”. It’s all stale, enumerated, and painfully far gone from what the Church has always promised to provide: unadulterated (and often nonrational) hope.

It's for this reason that the global body of Christian confessors, oddly enough, may hold answers for the conditions of modernity. At its best, the confessing Church can dignify the faith in a healthy way to engage modernity’s challenges; It’s highly localized within a tradition (by this I don’t mean physically local, but insofar as it operates within a similar theological-linguistic framework), which allows us to provide a contextual reorientation of ancient faith into a new environment. The tradition of Church confession allows for the coloniality of most post-Enlightenment Western expressions of Christianity to be avoided while still giving a full-hearted account for the faith. Bearing witness with a confession of faith thus holds the advantage of accepting the conditions of our subjectivity, while not stripping the Gospel of its strength when we boldly confess it.

So then, we’ve discussed the problem of modernity and the problem it poses to the Christian faith; from here I will discuss the nature of confession as a theological-historical concept, as well as the potential value of confession as a method of understanding.

Why Confess at All? The Logic of Confession

It would seem as though, if I were to stick to the prompt I described in the introduction, a large part of our task here would be to identify those whom we might reasonably call “thieves”; and while I intend to expand on that very theme as this essay goes on, I must be careful right now in defining what it is not before I continue. To do so is a difficult task, to be sure. One would think that, as a church intent on protecting the unity of its existence and essence, throwing around accusations of “thievery” should probably be reserved for those teachers, movements, and moments that represent a clear and substantial departure from anything that we may be able to call “historical Christianity”. Then one must be extremely careful in defining “historical Christianity” so as not to endow their own tradition with some special knowledge that the rest of Christendom has so clearly missed the mark on. No, one must be very careful to find that “historical Christianity” is far more vast and perhaps inclusive than one might like to believe at the outset. Truly “historical Christianity” is global, multiethnic, and must account for all those theologies that were never dignified enough to sit at council-tables wherein “historical Christianity” was supposed to have been developed. “Historical Christianity” demands that a symphony of radically different voices build themselves to the same magnificent crescendo, a tune that one might reasonably call “the Gospel”. Regrettably, we have not always understood the Church in such a way. For most of Christian history (and human history, for that matter), those in power have deemed those without it “thieves” – an accusation obviously wrought with inaccuracy, prejudice, and simple hatred. That’s why, when I discuss the term “thieves” here, I take extra care not to maintain that loathsome legacy.

I would also be remiss if I did not at least mention the unique context wherein we find ourselves answering this question as well. In the year 2022, American culture is defined, at its core, by iconoclasm. In fact, one could even say that such a concept has become the cultural status quo, and to the call upon grammars of veneration itself has become perhaps the chief of American sins. Reverence has fallen way to protest, which seems to have left America possessing paper-thin ideological frameworks to engage its issues with. “Tradition” is a bad word in our times.

Now, I know I sound rather old-fashioned in phrasing this point as I just now have, so I must be careful to tread lightly in what I am about to say. I am not saying that this distinctly American shift is good or bad – I merely require to mention it as it relates directly to the form of argumentation that I will be taking up; that is, calling upon a tradition in order to critique the modern moment. My task becomes harder here in the United States than it would be in, say, Japan – a place defined by appeals to tradition. But this reality is precisely why we must dignify the logic of tradition itself in order to access the power of confession.

At its finest, a confession of faith will not be so self-righteous as to think itself correct in and of itself. Rather, good confessions will serve as a correcting force to the world it inhabits. It will find itself actualized in the ancient tradition of Christian faith, passed down in conversation with human history and the study of theology. Finally, it buds its petals at some moment wherein a piece of that ancient truth has itself been lost.

I say all of this to drive home the point that, while it may be our impulse to correct the past, that’s not exactly the point of confession. Confession in its purest form is a theological reorientation, not a theological revolution. We must not be so short-sighted to think ourselves better than our Christian forefathers, the very ones who passed down the faith to us.

But just because something is not a theological revolution does not mean it cannot be revolutionary in our times. In fact confession is revolutionary in that we are re-remembering the past as a form of protesting the present. Christians are not creating some new reality. Instead we recover that ancient truth which has been lost in the muddied bog of human history. Our confessions will not be knee-jerk reactions to the contemporary world, then, but serve as corrections to some modern addendum in the catalog of thought. We are bringing our earnest truth of old to fresh ears and eyes who may have never heard it in the first place, or forgotten it altogether.

In this sense the Christian faith can be iconoclastic in its rejection of modern iconoclasm. To venerate anything in an iconoclastic culture is, itself, iconoclastic. Calling upon the historical tradition of old can be powerful, then, as a way of recovering the truth of Christianity while forcing it into contact with the modern moment – such contact brings about true change.

Appeals to tradition can be effective means of revolution because modern American liberalism (philosophically speaking, of course, not politically) is no longer even borne of revolution; revolution topples the order. Modern liberalism, almost by definition in America, cozies up to the status quo; it swears that it revolutionizes the world when in reality it has become a sort of institution in and of itself. That institution is currently defined by individual autonomy and market capacities, which – when transmuted onto an entire population – become a never-ending ouroboros of self-exaltation and economic growth. It’s no wonder, then, that the onset of modernity thus corresponds almost directly with the death of reverence as a virtue. Nothing remains sacred because believing in sacrality itself has become the newest form of cultural sacrilege. Any virtue that ties itself to a timescale exceeding that of, say, 300 years, has been rendered invalid.

I hope the reader will be reassured that I mean none of this in any overtly political sense; nor do I mean to attribute any malice either, although I still find the whole cultural moment rather hard to navigate. No, I simply maintain that the “revolutionary spirit” that the modern world wishes so desperately to call upon for its iconoclasm is no longer actually revolutionary in America; In fact, I would argue that the promise for progress exists most powerfully not in Enlightenment principles, but in the Christian tradition itself – a tradition tethered to the past’s language of human flourishing, but with eschatological, forward-looking realities baked in. That eschatological, forward-thinking dimension is why the Christian faith will always be, in some sense, intensely progressive, even while still maintaining a likewise intense regard for tradition.

Bold statements may be carefully reasoned within the Christian tradition before being utilized to effectively locate modernity’s insufficiencies – when those steps have been taken, a confession of faith may arise. The implication of confession, then, is that a proper understanding of the Gospel itself challenges to the modern world – from the cultural to the political and economic. But before one can access these Christian critiques, one must first commit themselves to the value of historical Christianity as a tradition in order to access the language of its argumentation. In fact, confessional documents rely implicitly on this sort of appeal to tradition as a method of justifying their validity.

That justification lies not in some logical fallacy of saying what’s older must be ipso facto “good” – far from it, in fact. There’s a reason traditions matter, and it’s not just for the sake of their continual existence. In fact traditions finds value in the interconnected web of shared premises and language passed down through time; in the case of Christianity, these premises are meant to narrow the scope of the argumentation to those who find themselves in the Christian story. So then a tradition can be seen as a lineage of thought from which we are able to internally critique the system itself. As Catholic moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “The act of utterance become intelligible by finding its place in a narrative” (After Virtue 210). Thus we call upon traditions so as to situate the grammars and intelligibility of our critiques within a certain narrative so that those who speak the same “language” may be able to cohere the argumentation. That “language” is, for our purposes here, Christianity! The tradition is not valuable simply because it’s old, but because it’s given its adherents a philosophical architecture and language to discuss new issues within a coherent mental framework.

In this sense then the confession must not be called upon as something for the world to adhere to, but rather something that belongs to the Church. The confession utilizes the internal grammar of the Christian faith in order to make some point that may be comprehended by those within the faith. It may be witnessed (and almost certainly critiqued) by the world, but it exists first and foremost as a witness to the Church to then ingest as a body and then translate into embodied action.

So then, to recap: Christian confessions remain important because they rest in accordance with the historical church (a term I use in the broadest possible sense) and specifically call upon the tradition of constant reform in order to reorient the Christian world back to the Gospel in a way that has been “lost”. Those critiques are empowered by the faith of the Christian to resign themselves to a certain “language”, that is, a tradition, which then provides us coherent frameworks wherein we are able to critique new movements such as, for our purposes today, American modernity.

What has been lost, then, in American modernity? What, in the present church (and perhaps even through time), has the body of believers forgotten? How has the theological perspective of the church been altered, or even misunderstood, from the confessions that we have held to for thousands of years?

Depravity and the Confidence to Confess

To qualify the term “thievery” further: More than any specific person, I think that “thievery” should be understood as a biproduct of the fallen human condition. Theological thievery does not always require the conscious rejection of Christian faith, but in actuality usually subverts the Gospel rather slowly, and without conscience awareness that the shift is even happening. Thus, in order to be properly Reformed, we must be properly vigilant in our evaluation of the Christian tradition itself to locate where and when depravity may have led theological movements. We are quick to assure ourselves that depravity exists within the modern church, but far less capable of remembering such facts when discerning two thousand years of Church history. While many have contributed to the tradition, no one is above such depravity.

So then the confessing church must have an intentionality to our critiques steeped in a deep understanding about human nature’s proclivity toward sin. We must be patient and thoughtful in our critiques – not elevating our own position, or any other, to the perspective of divine revelator. Yet, if the doctrine of depravity is to be applied fairly, we must treat both ourselves and other Christians – even our Christian forefathers – with a very high degree of skepticism on account of human depravity.

Whereas I may have lost the progressives earlier, I can feel myself losing the conservatives now. “What happened to the sacrality of the tradition?” they may ask, and rightfully so! Here I must double-down that the tradition itself is the sacred thing, and while we may revere certain figures within the tradition, the story of Christianity itself subsumes all such pieties. We may revere such Christian figures in relation to their contributions and examples within the tradition while maintaining a skepticism of such things. This skepticism is not borne of the Enlightenment and its mathematical demands, but of a strong commitment to the doctrine of human depravity, a mainstay within the Reformed tradition. On this point I will have perhaps lost the Catholics and Orthodox – but maybe I still have the ear of the Protestant reader.

I don’t bring up depravity so as to cast doubt on the sum of Christian history; rather, I mention it as a call to extreme vigilance to locating ourselves within that story. We are the Church in the very same way that those before us were, so we must be, as the best of them were, profoundly patient and thoughtful in our critiques. Only then do those critiques become bold and empowered – the result of genuine spiritual wrestling and not modern self-righteousness.

The effect of being too impatient in our confessional proclamations is that we fall into the aforementioned iconoclasm of the modern age. Our brashness leads to shortsightedness, which leads to a rejection of the Christian tradition’s validity itself. If one cannot place their critique within the historical Christian witness, then the critique itself risks becoming merely a product of the current age. For this reason, confessors must not let go of the historical Church’s witness, with its web of interconnected premises and grammars, for the imprudent temptations of the modern world. To do so would be to exchange one tradition for another.

Likewise, however, the other extreme is just as crucial. To hold too tightly to the status-quo foregrounds a stagnant, dying church. This church will become, as it tends to fall victim to, complacent in the face of shameful theology. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this point with striking clarity in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, wherein he lambasts the “white moderate” for their inability to access the power of critique in the face of dire evil. This evil masqueraded as “theologically sound” Christianity during the civil rights movement, of which most white American theologians were, at the time, either in favor of or complicit with. Such misuses of Christianity’s name utilized objective moral claims to the faith so as to baptize their own renegade theology.

Those white moderates certainly believed in the portion of this essay that discusses our careful discernment in such matters. However, it would seem that they were petrified by their own fear of being wrong to progress into confessing anything at all. This fear allowed for bolder voices to proclaim a racist Gospel – one of segregation, and which stripped the dignity of Black people in America. Frozen by their own potential to misunderstand the Gospel, white moderates quietly knelt before pastors whom valued church “unity” over the dignity of their black brothers and sisters. The “unity” these pastors spoke of served to disenfranchise the downtrodden that Jesus boldly lifted up, and the white moderate could not bring themselves to take bold action. Immobilized by modernity’s lack of theological certitude, white Americans did not confess when the time had come.

The confessing Church can only be called such when it uses its voice. The Church derives its power from the fact that it can speak boldly about such matters, but only does so with careful discernment. A statis confessionis must thus be carefully discerned, but once carefully discerned, boldly proclaimed.

This discernment process is never easy. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “It is impossible therefore to define the boundary between resistance and submission in the abstract. Faith demands this elasticity of behavior. Only so can we stand our ground in each situation as it comes along, and turn it to gain” (Letters and Papers from Prison, 74). It may strike the reader (as it did me) a bit ironic to see such nuance from Dietrich Bonhoeffer; He was a resolute man who was himself involved in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Surely many Christians among him considered such action to be radical and reactionary at that time.

But with such assurance of his patience, we can understand Bonhoeffer’s decisive action in new light. Regardless of one’s position on violence itself (I myself am a pacifist), there is something admirable about the faith of a believer who feels so compelled to action that he was willing to act – to not be paralyzed by fear, even when he holds such processes of discernment in such high regard. For Bonhoeffer, such decisions must be carefully evaluated, but once realized, carried out in fullness. From him we learn one of the mysteries of faith itself: it prescribes our inability to be absolutely sure of our decisions, but empowers those very decisions nevertheless. Bonhoeffer’s process of discernment can perhaps become a model for how we become a confessing Church.

If we become paralyzed in our critiques of the church, we do a disservice to the Church that God has called us to be a part of. When we bite our tongue about the shortcomings of the Church’s witness, we do not honor it in the way it demands. This is the promise of the ever-reforming church: That, as a member, we become brave enough to shatter the world “as is” for the world “as it should be”. This task is especially hard in modernity, an age which has brought about the cataclysm of certainty itself. Regardless, our task remains the same as those before us: Protect the Gospel from those who bastardize it.

It may be worth pointing out about now that Jesus himself held nothing on earth above criticism. It’s easy to see how modern Christians would be incapacitated by the authority of religious leaders; meanwhile, Jesus took them on in his own day. Not only that, he situated his critiques within the Jewish Scriptures – the tradition of the faith. This shows us that Jesus was not iconoclastic to the tradition itself, but to the figureheads of the tradition; and, while many Christians understand it differently nowadays, his goal was not to usher in a wholly new religious order, but to reorient the faith to a new context. Jesus never “starts” Christianity – he simply reforms Judaism in such a manner that its practice looks entirely different.

The prophets of the Old Testament as well as the Apostles operated with similar certitude. So too did those who put forward the very first creeds, as well as those who led churches throughout Christian history. Martin Luther possessed this revolutionary spirit, the ability to speak truth to power, in the same sense that Martin Luther King Jr did. St. Francis of Assisi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and countless Christian leaders through time possessed that very same spirit – filled with faith and empowered by the Holy Ghost – to reject the ways of the world and imagine the Christian reality differently by returning to the heart of the faith. Not all of those people are part of the “Reformed” tradition – in fact most are not. But they share the spirit of confession nonetheless. To be part of the confessing church is to hold to the Gospel so tightly that one refuses to hear its name improperly used.

In light of this fact, we must acknowledge that for the Church to confess is, in a sense, an act of hope. Confession presupposes something about the nature of theological progress – that things can be better; that we do not currently possess the perfect message of the Gospel in its entirety, but must be in constant evaluation of what the Gospel entails. Jurgen Moltmann said that “Hope alone is to be called ‘realistic’, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught” (Theology of Hope, 25). Here Moltmann speaks to a wider point: To confess is to live into the hope of the Gospel; to trust that the Christian faith can answer the questions plaguing the world, and that things can get better. Becoming a confessing church requires, more than anything else, hope.

So then hope is the bulwark of confession itself. Why should we hold such hope at all? Well, biblically speaking, the resurrection of Christ promises us that the reality of the world – most powerfully witnessed in Christ overcoming the grave itself – is not as powerful as hope itself. Throughout human history death has been the ultimate expression of finality, but that notion implodes in light of the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection pushes us to ask… what if death itself is a farce?

Because of this truth, the Christian is afforded the opportunity to live differently, with a “renewed mind” (Romans 12). Those suffering under the weight of nihilism will see the status-quo as predictive of the future; the Christian does no such thing. Christianity allows us to proclaim all things as possible! The vision of a New Earth affords us the ability speak of a more perfect world, and the resurrection of Christ shows us how much power resides in that vision. If we believe that Christ rose from the dead, is it really so unfathomable to think that Christ might bring about justice in his Church here today? Why are we so unbelieving to think that our present conditions constitute our reality more than the resurrected Christ does?

The confessing church must refuse nihilism’s advances as such. The confessing church confesses because it is overflowing with hope that the collective mind of believers can be transformed and pushed into a new understanding of the Christian message.

Christian Thievery

So who are the modern thieves of the Christian church? At long last I will attempt to engage the concept directly. If pressed to describe the phenomenon, Christian thieves should perhaps be most accurately described as those spectral forces which slowly eat away at the very heart of the Gospel – those who deny the power of hope itself. They are, simply put, theological nihilists. They may confess with their mouth, but deny in their heart that Jesus Christ has the power to save. Nihilism’s form is quite elusive; It simmers at the surface of our world, bubbling quietly, only consuming a culture once it’s too late. These ghastly formations of the heart are thieves if the word has ever meant anything at all.

In modernity it seems that these thieves’ favorite form of temptation is none other than complacency, which is where we turn our attention now. The industrialized North has in large part transitioned from a sustenance-based-culture to a leisure-based-culture, and with this shift has come a difference in attitudes toward both religion and politics. Both disciplines are no longer seen as necessary components to living a full life, but existing institutions which an individual can voluntarily participate in as if a social club.

In Christianity, this means limiting one’s involvement in the church for the sake of personal choice; “I don’t feel affected anymore”, seems a common thread in this uniquely contemporary (and shall I even say American?) phenomenon. Of course this statement locates the Church’s value in your relationship to it, not in the Church in and of itself. It’s a uniquely modern formulation, and one that without a doubt hurts the Church’s future prospects. Church is leisure for those who do not feel they need the spiritual nourishment it offers, thus loses its value.

In politics, perhaps surprisingly, the same is true! Widespread leisure has reduced the role of one’s political activity to more of a hobby than a duty. “I don’t get into politics” is the common statement in this regard. But of course there are massive implications in this statement. Firstly it reduces politics to a game that provides no real-world repercussions. Now, this statement may be true for the person uttering such a sentence (in fact it is almost necessarily true for them to say such a thing, as they speak from a position of immense privilege), but treating politics as such is a grave error for the sake of those on the underside of society. Nevertheless, many people lock themselves in gated communities so as to never actually have to look the downtrodden in the eye. If they did, they would be required to reckon with the fact that their political inaction does actually affect, and hurt, certain people.

Thus their leisure makes politics an expendable aspect of their life, which implicates the downtrodden, too, as expendable. Complacency sets in at this point because, with their material circumstances being more than sufficient, they can now exist apart from God, as well as those whom Jesus called the “least of these” in Matthew 25:40.

Those who were left behind in the transition from sustenance to leisure require both faith and politics in order to get through the day. The church, as well as the ballot box, are not expendable aspects of their existence, but tied intimately to their very survival. It’s for this reason that so often wealthy white Americans feel as though they can “transcend” the religious and political spectrums. What a waste of oxygen! Can one’s privilege be more embarrassingly exposed? To say things of this sort is to succumb to the precepts put forward by your class status; to accept the flourishing within your own life while patronizing the necessary methods of existence used by those who were not so lucky.

In interrogating modernity, I rooted my arguments in philosophy; When speaking of hope, I spoke theologically; Now (if you cannot tell) I am explicitly political, because the spirituality and political dimension are to be evaluated in conjunction with one another –inexorably linked by their necessity for survival. The Enlightenment dislocated this unity, of course, with the notion that religious institutions could ever be severed from the practice of politics. “Don’t bring religion into it”, I hear. Absolutely not, I say – not as a religious nationalist, but as a deeply religious human who will engage my political action with every fiber of that reality. Such political action will never resemble Right-wing Christian conservatism, but it will likewise never resemble liberalism either. It’s a progressivism rooted in the Christian tradition, one that rejects the nihilism of these two aforementioned systems in favor of hope.

What is complacency’s relationship to nihilism, then? Once we become complacent, that complacency inculcates a sort of nihilism that hardens our capacity to hope, because we no longer possess any need for it. For all intents and purposes, nihilists usually have everything they “need”, materially, and their complacency becomes a privilege of sorts. From here they begin to find reasons, any reasons at all, not to trust in any form of political action.

Now you may think at this point I am speaking about the “post-Christian” west; and to be sure, as I have stated above, I see liberal modernity as a culture flawed beyond repair. But remember, confessions belong to the Church first and foremost. For that reason, this critique is equally meant for my beloved home of Texas and the rest of the Bible Belt. I confess to the most vocal portion of the Christian west, those Christians who say they believe in the Gospel of Christ but deny its power in lived existence (2 Timothy 3:5). I confess to them because I have seen, time and time again, nihilists put in high positions of power within their churches only to preach from the pulpit a gospel of despair.

How can a pastor in Dallas believe in the power of a resurrected Christ, but not to change the unjust political systems of our time? How can one regard the resurrection of the dead as imminent, but submit to the yoke of nihilism in relation to reforming criminal justice systems? Or poverty prevention? Or anything at all? Why does nihilistic fear drive every political decision in a country that claims to be the bastion of Christianity? Fear is the byproduct of nihilism, begotten of complacency, a byproduct of leisure. And America adores its leisure.

Of course, the United States is not the bastion of Christianity; that’s only what the Christian nationalists say. In reality, America is the bastion of the Enlightenment. It was borne of autonomy, not the Bible; brought up under the ever-so-elusive name of Freedom, not Christian love. The United States would cease existing without Enlightenment individualism; meanwhile it has gone on quite swimmingly without Christianity for a while now, and will continue to do so for some time. The Bible will always remain a sentimental relic of America’s Christian past, but make no mistake: it’s the Constitution that will forever be written on American hearts.

Nihilism is the Enlightenment project’s bitter conclusion: that we are not, in fact, gods, and thus must submit to the chasm of our unknowing accordingly. What we do not know will, in fact, kill us; so we might as well sulk in our newfound insignificance to cope with our lack of divine abilities. The thieves to the Gospel sing this tune daily. They usually hide in plain sight, shooting down hope at every turn for the sake of “rationality” or “practicality” – placeholders for their eschatological denial. They even obscure the ideology behind out-of-context Bible verses. These thieves are called Evangelicals. Methodists. Presbyterians. Of course, these titles don’t protect against the raging power of nihilism; the beast eats away at the soul in the very same manner, regardless of denomination. It’s ecumenical in that way.

This is the hope of the Reformed tradition: In understanding the world’s depravity, perhaps we can speak boldly into the abyss of 21st century nihilism with clarity and confidence, even if not certitude. Perhaps we can become a witness to the Gospel of hope, the one that raises the dead to life, in light of the chasm of modernity.

That means boldly proclaiming that life is worth living; that there is indeed a purpose to all of this. We are not simply floating through space – specks on the proverbial dirt ball – but in fact cherished by the very same Creator that stitched together the clouds in the sky! In this world, the destitute are given hope – their pain is not the end of their story. To prove it to them, we the Church protest and petition the governments of the world on their behalf. We do this not for the sake of their individual rights, but because they are truly, truly loved by God, and all of creation deserves to participate in the fullness of life and joy that God gives us. Everything on Earth is part of God’s magnificent redemption.

The vitality of Confession comes from its twofold understanding of depravity and hope: First, the confessing Church maintains an absolutely radical commitment to the doctrine of depravity as a means of identifying the problems with the world; Second, it maintains an even more radical hope that depravity is no match for God’s power. Adherents will take seriously the brokenness of the world, and even more seriously their ability to change such brokenness.

The chasm of modernity is an empty cave, but it beckons us to yell something. If we yell something, it will echo. So what will we yell? I don’t know, exactly, but I reckon it should sound something like this: Hope is real, and it’s good too. Jesus is risen; He is with us in our plight. Evil can be overcome, and in fact it will with God’s help. How foolish is it for us to be shackled to nihilism when the eternal promise of God’s love is on our side? How foolish it was for us to ever think otherwise?

Works Cited

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. SCM Press, 1971.

Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version: Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books. Collins, 2007.

King, Martin Luther. Letter from Birmingham Jail - California State University, Chico. https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. UNIV OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, 2022.

Moltmann, Jürgen. Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Fortress Press, 1993.