A book for serious times

A couple of years ago, I read a powerful book that has continued to challenge me. It’s called Serious Times by James Emery White, a pastor and former president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It's a book that has two primary points -- it explains what kind of world we live in and what we can do about it.

The first part is a historical overview of the forces that shaped our current world. In the Middle Ages a spiritual worldview dominated, only to be replaced during the Renaissance by a focus on this world. Then the Enlightenment came along with its stress on reason and empiricism.

White says our modern world has been shaped by secularization, pluralization, and privatization. Its secularization is the tendency to live life without much regard for religion. The pluralization of our society offers a huge number of faith options, a divine supermarket of sorts. Finally, privatization has created a huge gap between the public and private beliefs of an individual -- no religious faith is allowed in the public square.

What have these three things brought us in today's world? White ticks off four results. First, there's moral relativism in which everything is simply a matter of taste; there are no true rights and wrongs. Secondly, we now have the autonomous individual who is independent from all authority. In addition, we now have narcissistic hedonism characterized by the pursuit of pleasure and affluence. Finally, there is reductive naturalism claiming that nature is all there is.

These four currents in our world have not produced better human beings. Instead we now have a crisis in values, we lack vision, we have empty souls, and we feel unhappy with what we perceive to be an inadequate human experience; we know there should be more to life.

We live in a postmodern world, according to White. Modernism is exhausted. All is opinion now with no objectivity, no universal knowledge. The media shapes how we think. Texts are now deconstructed, allowing the reader to create the meaning. There is a reaction against rationality; spiritual ideas are more prominent.

Most of us understand this is the world we are part of. But instead of just complaining about where we are, White seeks to have us become players rather than observers of the situation. His second half of the book talks about things we must do to impact our society and possibly change it from the destructive course that it is on. I will use the next blog to talk about his solutions.