Sociology is perverted when it becomes a positive religious science. This happens when we get “missional” syllogisms. Here’s a contemporary one: If people have stopped going to church because they are more at ease with screens than people, then we need to offer them church on a screen. The idea is that if we get our sociology right, we can adapt—and then they will believe! Or, at least, “then we will have new church members.” In this way, unhelpful ­arguments unfold: if we speak in this language (and not that); if we offer these services; if we re-arrange these relationships; if we refashion this or that institutional context; if we talk about this and not about that—then unbelief will turn to faith. Or then at least unbelief will shed its filthy clothing and reveal itself as hidden religiosity.

I cringe as I think of the many clergy conferences, “missionary” workshops, and seminary faculty meetings I have attended where this line of argument has been superordinate. But the underlying assumption is false: Unbelief has no socially distinctive causation. “They will listen and not hear” (Jer. 6:10).

— Ephraim Radner, “Speaking of Unbelief”, First Things, August 2022

I applaud the author for assaying this topic. Eager clerics loaded up on modern methods of persuasion set aside what scripture says about belief and unbelief in favor of the bright and shiny theories of Science! After all, if these methods can manage to sell pop tarts and “sex change” operations, imagine what good they can do for the Almighty. The modern materials for disciple formation are rife with stuff of cognitive this and motivational that, often with a dash of “miracle of sharing” apostasy that teaches the “revelation” that true miracles are mythic fibs crafted to incite a particular response. As one friend of mine firmly puts it. children’s stories. (I’m not getting very far with that one.)

The modernist cleric judges success as butts in theater in the round worship chairs and fat tithers drawn to the cleverness of Leninist rewrites of the miracles of Jesus or promises of have their best life now. This weakened, ephemeral, or even fictitious Jesus lacks that discomforting authority that sours the mood of the rights-happy modernist, who recognizes more genders than there are people. The modernist Jesus hews much closer to Marx than to the Lord of the Gospels. But somewhere behind and before the tens of thousands of doctrinal splinters and the untold fortunes gained by sowing doctrinal division, there is the Truth. And the acceptance that there is the Truth somewhere behind all of the calumny and confoundment means that true success for a cleric is right teaching and right worship, not empty assurances that sin is merely weakness or Hell is not even a place and it is empty.

Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain:and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ, whom he hath not raised up, if the dead rise not again. For if the dead rise not again, neither is Christ risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain: for you are yet in your sins. Then they also that are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

Saint Paul, 1 Cor. 15:12-18

Apostate clerics are worthy of our scorn for the flocks they lead astray, but also our pity. For it is written:

Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven. And he that shall receive one such little child in my name, receiveth me. But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.

Matthew 18:4-7

The Modernist understands that he is at the pinnacle of an evolutionary journey, as each generation, delving into the stuff of the world, comes to a fuller and richer understanding of the world we live in. And this pattern shapes their expectations as they approach scripture, which they see not as Divine revelation but, in their quaint anthropocentric/narcissistic way, as an example of ancient thinkers working through the concept of the divine. Myths sparking left and right. And myths is an interesting word, because some of the most egregious modernists are our German friends, and where anglophones hear “myth” and think fiction, or lie, the German sense of the word is that a myth carries an underlying truth. In a classic example, they, skeptics and modernists in general, and those 19th Century German “historical Jesus” proselytizers, loudly and confidently dismissed Pontius Pilate as a myth. If Pilate had lived we would know about it, they proclaimed. As if the historical and archeological record was so complete that the very notion of his existence could be firmly ruled out. And then, in 1960, a plaque from a First Century public building proclaimed its erection by one Pontius Pilate. And the Germans and their fellow travelers quickly changed the subject. Or, if you prefer, the narrative. Remember Pilate’s question to Jesus? “What is truth?”

To the modernist, the notion of Divine revelation is beyond the pale. Why, those First Century Galileans were the hicks of their time. Not intellectual sophisticates like the Greeks, or even the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The notion that an Ancient of Days, even granting the absurd existence of such, would work through such is unimaginable to the elite intellectuals, German or otherwise, of modernist society.

To close, I leave you this final insight from earlier in Ephraim Radner’s excellent article:

I’m a great fan of sociology. Had I not become a theologian, it might well have been my academic field. But from a theological perspective, sociology’s value is mostly negative. At its best, the discipline functions as a secular “hamartiology.” This clunky Hellenic neologism refers to the “science” that outlines the contours of human sin. When it comes to religious belief itself—let us call it “faith”—sociology has little to tell us except what it looks like when faith frays and unravels; that is, what happens when sin gets the upper hand, and Satan roams to and fro upon the earth.

May the Maker of all things bless and keep each and every beloved one of you. Have a happy Lord’s Day.