Is God disappearing from American culture and the church?
The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God of Scripture certainly cannot be vanquished by mankind, but in his new book “The Disappearance of God: Dangerous Beliefs in the New Spiritual Openness” (Multnomah), Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. shows how God is practically disappearing from the lives of people in a postmodern culture.
“Has God disappeared?” Mohler asks in the preface. “The tragic reality is that we are living in an age that is marked by so much spiritual and theological confusion that the God of the Bible has largely disappeared from view—replaced by less imposing deities that are more amenable to the modern mind.
“In one sense, we are witnessing the result of secularization and the evaporation of biblical theism from our public life. To this we must add the privatization of truth and the fact that millions of Americans claim a divine right to their own spiritual cocoon and belief system. As the song suggests, Americans now lay claim to their ‘own personal Jesus.’ This personal view of Jesus Christ may well bear little or no resemblance to Jesus as He is revealed in the Bible.”
The church, Mohler argues, through doctrinal and practical compromise, often allies itself with the culture, further pushing the biblical truth about God and His Gospel into a position of eclipse.
“A rescue from this predicament would appear more hopeful but for the fact that the church has, in large part, apparently joined the revolution,” he writes. “Theological fads and fashions dot the American religious landscape, and far too many Christian churches flirt with doctrinal disaster.”
Mohler examines a number of challenges facing both the broader culture and the church in chapters on:
· The disappearance of sin and the assault on the doctrine of hell
· The Emerging Church
· Liberalism and atheism
· The rise of a post-Christian age in the United States
· The demise of church discipline
· The closing of the postmodern mind
· The urgency of expository preaching as the answer to cultural and theological challenges
Mohler challenges Christians to think clearly and biblically about these and related issues facing the church.
“God has certainly not disappeared,” Mohler writes, “but the belief that He has sets our present challenge squarely before us. We will soon find out whether this generation of Christians is up to the challenge.”