COVID-19 as the End of the Modern World? Part One: Reconsidering Soteriology
Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash
By Clement Yung Wen
The former chaplain of the US Senate, Richard Halverson, is famously known to have once quipped:
In the beginning, the church [in Jerusalem] was a fellowship of men and women centering on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.
What Halverson was implying through such a saying, of course, was that wherever Christianity has historically taken root, it has always had the tendency of being inordinately influenced by its surrounding local context and culture’s tendencies and sensibilities. Admittedly, Halverson’s point may be overly superficial, especially when we consider the seemingly providential fact that certain necessary developments in Christian orthodoxy have been dependent upon these very “moves” from Jerusalem to Greece to Rome and so on. In the fourth and fifth centuries, for example, the early ecumenical councils (e.g., Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, Chalcedon 451, etc.) from which most Christians in subsequent times and places have since derived their basic commitments regarding Christology and trinitarian theology were actually imperial events institutionally initiated by the Roman Emperor, in which what was discussed and debated was thoroughly dependent upon Greek philosophical terms and categories. Even so, what I want to suggest here is that Halverson’s observation is one that fruitfully represents a way of thinking that is worth revisiting as we consider the future of Christianity and the church in the twenty-first century, both amidst and, Lord-willingly, post our local and global bout with COVID-19. Along such lines, I specifically want to spend some time reflecting on the question of whether some of our pre-COVID evangelical expressions of Christian faith (which we too often surely took for granted) had unconsciously been overly influenced by certain contextual features of the “modern world” that we lived in. I say “lived in” in the past tense because I suspect that the COVID event very possibly represents the (at-long-last) true symbolic beginning of the end of the modern world—a “modern world” that “postmodernism,” despite its name, was never able to fully supplant (many still even questioning whether it would be more appropriate to describe the twentieth-century philosophical and cultural mood as “late modernism” instead of “postmodernism”).
The End of the Modern World
As something of a required caveat, notice that I said “the end of the modern world” rather than “the end of the world” (as some apocalyptically-minded Christians have been overenthusiastically positing—sadly, often out of a misplaced fear of Christ’s return and the supposed events surrounding it as opposed to a more healthy and rightful exuberant hope regarding Jesus’ future ushering in of the Kingdom of God at the end of time). Nevertheless, because “no one knows the day or hour” (Mt. 24:36), and because, scripturally speaking, we’ve actually already been formally living in the so-called “last days” since the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (cf. Acts 2), truth be told, only time will tell whether Jesus comes again within some of our lifetimes or whether, relatively speaking, in the grand scheme of things, the late Richard John Neuhaus’ suggestion that “we might very well be the early church” turns out, in historical actuality, to be the factual truth in retrospect. Put another way, while it’s hard to know for sure whether COVID-19 is meant to be a bona fide “sign” that “the end of the world” is upon us, it seems quite certain that what’s happening at present is representative of “the end of the world as we’ve known it.” Without getting into detailed specifics, even a cursory look around at how the often-taken-for-granted institutions of modernity are having trouble coping with the socio-political, economic, and cultural developments that the current pandemic has brought about, heavily influenced, or utterly exacerbated suggests that we are, in many ways, on the brink of entering a “brave new world” (of course, not exactly as Aldous Huxley imagined it in his 1932 novel of the same title, but “brave” and “new” certainly seem to be appropriate descriptors of the somewhat dystopian “world” that we appear to be on course for).
A Tipping Point
The positive and negative effects of the massive social and geopolitical changes and disruptions that have erupted over the past year and a half, both domestically and abroad—most of which, largely “thanks” to the modern invention of social media, were already brewing prior to COVID but found their tipping point in the excessively charged political environment given us by the pandemic (e.g., the COVID-induced circumstances which contributed to the event of George Floyd’s tragic death—an irreversible turning point for an already racially polarized America; or the COVID-induced circumstances which contributed to the permanent governmental adjustments made in Hong Kong in response to the plethora of public protests there, to name just two examples)—these effects, for better or worse, are here to stay and be furthered. And yet, what a place like the “United” States of America will look like when there’s no longer a semblance of a shared national narrative has caused many to wonder if an institution like democracy will be able to retain its modern form of coherence, assuming it’s able to remain as an institution at all. Whereas the corporate workplaces and universities of the physically well-to-do globalized modern world seem more than ever to eventually be destined for the gnostic existence of cyberspace (now that our forced experimentation with such an existence amidst the pandemic has unprecedentedly accelerated the way), the thoroughly modern age of international travel and tourism seems at the same time to be transitioning into something much more chastened in demand and restricted in policy. In these regards, the unifying impulse of our previous modern world towards a type of “global citizenship,” which has always been bolstered while at the same time ironically subverted by a push for diversity and multiculturalism, and which began showing tribalist signs of strain pre-COVID through events like Brexit, will probably grow even more ambivalent as we move forward into the post-COVID era. Meanwhile, the “modern” invention of social media will paradoxically continue in its course of helping its mother, modernity, “dig her own grave” (I’m adapting here from the Peter-Bergerian “gravedigger” hypothesis of Christian author, Os Guinness). More of course could be said about all this, but the above represents a few of my humble predictions for the long run.
A New Normal
While the “modern” apologists amongst us will tell me that I’m overreacting and over-projecting because “modern science will ultimately find a way to save the day” (e.g., through vaccination, even if such is “distributively unjust” in the eyes of the have-nots), for the record, I should mention that I don’t mean to sound alarmist, nor do I want to give the impression that I think scientific innovations aren’t to be welcomed and celebrated (especially at such a time as this). I’m simply seeking here to describe what I’m sure many of us have quietly thought but haven’t had the words to adequately express over the course of the last year and a half. For example, many of us have asked the question of whether things will ever get back to “normal” (a word by which undoubtedly is meant “modern life as we knew it prior to COVID”). In answer to this question, it has generally been acknowledged that some sort of “new normal” will emerge from this episode of our world’s history, even if it remains to be seen what the extent of this “new normal” will be in terms of continuity and/or discontinuity with what we knew of modern life before COVID. My own suspicion, if you haven’t been able to tell, is that the discontinuities with regard to things like the political and economic order, remote work and education, and the challenges associated with international travel and “global citizenship” will ultimately come to overshadow the ever-fragile continuities as a post-COVID, truly “post-modern” world that is built upon many of the “grave-digging” technological advances given us by the modernity which preceded it increasingly comes to take concrete shape. But even if I am wrong with regard to these long-term suppositions, the very fact that our world has (for a short time) been experiencing these phenomena amidst its battle with COVID is enough to occasion deep reflection about whether or not our pre-COVID default theological and ecclesiological constructions (namely, within the evangelical tradition) were broad enough to accommodate the emergency situation—for shouldn’t a thoroughly truthful and thus fully healthy theology and ecclesiology be able to accommodate anything we might face in reality? And if not, shouldn’t we move as much as possible towards something that more adequately can, since only such would be more healthily truthful?
Three Main Points
In this vein, there are three doctrinal loci that I finally want to now begin drawing our attention to, which I believe are especially ripe for deconstruction unto reconstruction as we “observe the times” with the aim of offering some much needed “contextually-birthed” correctives to our “diachronically-universal” grasp of Christian truth. While much of what follows has already been said by me and others pre-COVID, the salience of the pandemic ought to help bring such critically constructive insights regarding our evangelical understanding of Christian faith and practice into sharper focus. The three themes that we will briefly be redressing, then, are: (1) our individualistically-oriented forensic understanding of salvation that has been unfortunately overemphasized to the neglect of other arguably more important aspects of the gospel; (2) our unhealthy “American” penchant for transforming church into a consumeristic “enterprise” that “abstracts” pastoral ministry and discipleship away from that which is genuinely relational and therefore personal (cf. the above citation of Halverson); and (3) how these first two misguided trajectories carry reductionistic implications concerning how we understand the question and true significance of what it means to be human beings. Put somewhat differently, there are at least three theological threads which are in need of “new normals” as we move further into the post-COVID (i.e., truly “post-modern”) twenty-first century: (1) soteriology, (2) ecclesiology, and (3) anthropology. Due to space limitations, we will treat soteriology here in part one of this article and ecclesiology and anthropology in parts two and three.
Our Doctrine of Salvation
(1) Soteriology. When Martin Luther’s recovery of the doctrine of justification against the works-based excesses of the Catholic church in the sixteenth century didn’t reform the whole of the church as Luther originally intended, but instead accidentally split the western church into the great Christian traditions of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (the latter of which our contemporary evangelical tradition stems from), a new direction for soteriology was forged that was needed at the time in order to counter the insidious corruptions of Rome’s selling of indulgences. For Luther, salvation’s most important feature was that a righteousness “outside of us” in Christ was once-and-for-all imputed to us as individuals through God’s grace when we put our faith in Christ and in his work on the cross (an event in which our sins were first imputed to Christ so as to result in a “blessed exchange”). Sadly, however, especially in the hands of Luther’s successor, Philip Melanchthon, this new direction of “justification by faith alone and grace alone” eventually evolved into a formulaically flattened conception of salvation in which the judicial metaphor of a heavenly courtroom became the central motif by which our salvation as individuals came to be referred. Under this metaphor, the problem of our sin before a Holy God became legally resolved through a “forensic declaration” of our righteousness by God (on the basis of Christ’s imputing of his righteousness to us), and importantly, it was precisely this “forensic declaration” that was said to absolve believers from the eternal condemnation that their sins deserve.
Problems with Our View of Salvation
While this analogy continues to hold immense value for us when it comes to illustrating one aspect of what it means to be saved, several problems occur when it becomes received as the only or even primary aspect of salvation that functionally matters. John Calvin picked up on this when he, fearing that the Lutheran overemphasis upon justification might lead to antinomian living, [2] purposely placed sanctification in front of justification in his treatment of salvation in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. More recently, because evangelicalism’s typical “crucicentrism” (i.e., a primary focus on Christ’s work on the cross) has historically been heavily funded by an unhealthy overemphasis upon the Lutheran doctrine of justification in conjunction with Calvin’s “penal substitution theory” of atonement (as influenced by Calvin’s own training as a lawyer), it makes sense why many evangelicals have had difficulty articulating the salvific significance of Christ’s resurrection (which I would contend is actually more important for our salvation than Christ’s death). It is perhaps for this very reason that the word “salvation” (when narrowly defined as consisting only or primarily of “justification by faith so that we as individuals can go to heaven”) easily becomes conceptually separated from God’s continuing work of “redemption” in both our lives as well as our world.
Union with Christ
For in fact, this active redeeming work is something that, by the grace of God and through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are soteriologically called, energized, and equipped to participate in by way of the relationally-grounded fullness (as opposed to “legally-formulaic flatness”) of our “union with Christ”—the reality of “union with Christ” being in actuality a much more fundamental soteriological category than those like the justification, sanctification, and future glorification that derive from it. One significant advantage of this type of “redemptive” interpretation of “salvation” is that it is more capable of moving beyond the myopic individualism of the “legal views,” as such “redemptive” accounts saliently frame the root issue of sin’s consequences as directly being about “broken relationships” rather than (strictly speaking) about “broken laws.”
Law vs. Relationship
After all, whereas emphasis upon “broken laws” has often led to the conceiving of so-called “spiritual” living along the misdirected lines of what the late Dallas Willard incisively called “gospels of sin management” (cf. his 1998 book, The Divine Conspiracy), the emphasis upon “relationships” rightly conceptualizes “salvation as being filial before it is forensic” (to borrow a phrase from the Christian East), thereby fittingly privileging salvation’s positive side of adoption (along with all its benefits) rather than its negative side of justification. In addition, in that all reality finds its ground of being in the Triune God who is relationship, it only makes sense that salvation be seen as being centered upon relationship over and above all else, especially since it is relationship that constitutes personhood. In this regard, I’m most happy with those who have proposed that salvation consists of four redeemed relationships by way of our participation in Christ—namely: (a) our redeemed relationship with God; (b) our redeemed relationships with other people; (c) our redeemed relationship with ourselves; and ultimately, (d) our redeemed relationship with all of creation. This emphasis upon the positive side of our participation in Christ—that is, our participation in the Son’s Sonship to the Father that allows us to be the adopted children of God the Father, in Christ, by the Spirit (who is the Spirit of adoption [Rom. 8:15])—means that we can now begin to live, even in the present, in the light of our newfound filial identity, out of which we are enabled to continually live into the four redeemed relationships mentioned above in an “already, but not yet” way. By focusing on the positive and not only negative side of salvation, then, we naturally find ourselves seeking to live into the eschatologically redemptive fullness and trajectory of the new life that the cross and resurrection of Jesus gives us. In other words, by virtue of being children of God at the level of our identity, we begin to live into and out of our redeemed future even now in our present lives.
Adoption & Justification
As I say this, I take solace in the fact that, scripturally, the idea of our justification by faith is mentioned only in Paul’s occasioned letters while the theme of adoption is found throughout the entire New Testament, including in Paul (a fact that sheds insight into where the soteriological center of gravity ought to lie if forced to choose between these two themes). Further, the historical fact that justification only became prominent in the guilt-based cultural trappings of the Christian West also connotes to me that justification ought not to be seen as the “end all, be all” of what it means to be saved (as evangelicals have so often spoken of it)—particularly when we observe the shame-based and fear-based cultural tendencies of various other contexts (cf. Jayson Georges’ 2014 work, The 3D Gospel).
The Importance of Theology
In closing this first part, then, I trust that the question of why the above correctives matter amidst our COVID and post-COVID world will become clearer when we begin relating these thoughts to our reconsiderations of ecclesiology and anthropology in parts two and three of this series. For now, I simply mention here at the conclusion of part one that: Because a reductionist soteriology primarily concerned only with our individual legal standing before a Holy God isn’t comprehensive enough to redemptively engage with all of historical reality as we know and experience it (e.g., just think of our bout with COVID-19 and the socio-political and cultural developments that have come from it, as depicted above), we need something that is. Along such lines, the four-fold relational sketch for salvation briefly introduced here has such constructive potential, especially since how we theologically (and not just formulaically) conceive of salvation directly impacts not only how we live our lives in accordance with its breadth of vision, but also what we believe about the church’s essence and role in the world, and perhaps even more importantly, how we understand our own humanity as creatures made in the image of God. To these topics, we will turn our attention in the next installment…
Notes
[1] Soteriology is the doctrine of salvation.
[2] The idea that since we’re saved by faith we no longer need to keep any moral laws.
Rev. Dr. Clement Wen currently serves as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at China Evangelical Seminary in Taiwan. Prior to earning his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (2015-2019), he was Youth Pastor at the Chinese Bible Church of Maryland in the USA from 2010-2015. He is the son of the late Dr. Yinkann Wen, former president of KRC board of directors. Clement and his wife, Tracy, have two boys, Ethan and Micah.