Gospel Bearings

Feeling worried about the state of culture and society? Feeling distressed by the political and social messes all around us? You (and I) need Gospel bearings!  Pessimistic About The Future? You Need Gospel Bearings by Trevin Wax

Pessimism is surging.

George Orwell’s dystopian tale, 1984, is the bestselling book at Amazon. (I think Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a dystopian vision that better captures the dangers of our current moment, but alas, it’s only #71.)

Meanwhile, some of the wealthiest people in the world are building bunkers and prepping for doomsday scenarios. The New Yorker covers these efforts in great detail. Apparently, New Zealand is the place to ride out the cultural apocalypse.

Christians aren’t immune to the waves of pessimism in our country.

Recently, I was talking with an older Christian who was both encouraged and distressed by some of what he was seeing take place politically in the initial days of the Trump administration. He was appalled at the celebration of abortion and the vulgar words and signs at the Women’s March that took place just after the Inauguration.

“The gap is so wide,” he said, referring to conservative Christians and so much of society. “I guess I just feel hopeless for our country these days. I’m becoming a pessimistic old man.”

My response? “You’ve got to snap out of that.”

It’s one thing to be weary of earth and self and sin, to be sad at some of the developments in our time. Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus said. Christian tears are real, and necessary, for those who feel the weight of the world’s evil.

But it’s another thing to allow that pessimistic posture to become your default. An overly pessimistic view of the world leads to a defensive posture. A defensive posture leads to defensive decision-making. We start making decisions based on maintenance rather than mission. Holding on to what we have holds us back from moving forward in faith in the power of the gospel.

The gospel blows up pessimism. If you truly believe the Word of God has authority—that it will accomplish God’s purpose and will not return empty, if you truly believe that God has a church and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it, then you fortify yourself for spiritual battle, not for surviving a spiritual siege.

In This Is Our Time, I call the pessimistic approach “a decline narrative.” It’s the idea that the world is getting worse, no matter what we may do. We see decline narratives in society on both the right and the left. Yuval Levin shows how liberals believe we have fallen from the heights of the 1960s, whereas conservatives feel like we have fallen from the heights of the 1950s or the 1980s.

In the church, we are tempted to scour the annals of church history looking for the pinnacle of better times, from which we have fallen and now must reclaim. Perhaps it’s the early church, the Golden Age of the ecumenical creeds, the Reformation and Puritan era, or the revivals of North America. Whatever point in time we pick, we contrast ourselves to our ancestors and feel as if we’ve fallen from those heights. The world, and too often the church, is getting worse, we say.