As an unofficial member of “Weird Christian Twitter,” I had kept up fairly well with the onslaught of pastoral sex scandals this past summer. It was only a peek into an otherwise quite active stream of controversy over how abuse cases had been handled (or just ignored) by prominent evangelical leaders, from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and from John MacArthur to Doug Wilson. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve walked with friends devastated by these revelations, through their grief and disillusionment to healing. Other friends succumbed to despair and joined the mass exodus from the church. Influenced by Richard John Neuhaus’ attitude from the days of the exposure of abuses in the Catholic Church, I’ve counseled everyone to drag every last article of dirty laundry out into the light and burn it away like a cancer. So I expected to open Mike Cosper’s The Church in Dark Times and read about what I already knew: a slew of bad behavior followed by fear-fueled cover-ups. What I got was something quite different, far more profound, and surprisingly refreshing.
If Mike Cosper isn’t a household name for you, you might recall a little podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hillhe created. I’m being sarcastic, of course; the podcast garnered 2.5 million downloads in just two months after its release in June of 2021, and there’s no way to calculate how many more have listened to it over the past three years. The podcast series made Mars Hill founder Mark Driscoll more famous for being an ego-driven scoundrel than he had been formerly admired for his hyper-masculine, megachurch version of Americana Christianity. Cosper seems to have spent the last few years synthesizing all he’d learned with his love for philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor. He writes ready with both a diagnosis and a treatment plan for a fragmented and at times tormented church. But Cosper has no interest in treating mere symptoms. He wants to get right down to the root of the problem, and this journey will take us from the trial of Galileo Galilei to the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, and from the spiritual wrestling of Job with God to—I kid you not—the literal WWE. While Cosper’s wide range of historical and artistic references may give the reader a bit of whiplash, the payoff is definitely worth the initial puzzlement.
Cosper’s thesis is puzzling at first because he’s placing our current struggles in the American evangelical church in the much larger context of a faith that has always had to fight the temptation to absorb the priorities and worldview of the surrounding culture. So this is no screed against modernity. Cosper is not interested (nor am I) in living at a time before antibiotics. But the struggle to separate what is essential to our faith from what is accidental in our culture will, I presume, be a perennial one. When Galileo looked through that telescope and could see with his own eyes that the church was wrong about the arrangement of the cosmos, the old mystery and awe began to be replaced with a sense of total comprehensibility. Science, technical solutions, and a narrow materialism replaced the richer and more varied world of the medievals.
Thus, the modern world was born, one in which the right theory and some slick planning would smooth over the messy vicissitudes of life. Cosper uses the term “ideology” to describe this totalizing mindset, this “one-thing-ism,” as Jonah Goldberg would say. He appeals to Arendt, who “describes ideology as an -ism that can ‘explain everything and every occurrence and deduce it from a single principle.’ Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process, and do this by processing every fact and every event through their own internal logic.” Needless to say, this is dangerous for several reasons: It not only flattens and simplifies the world in ways that are plainly false, but its simplistic account of everything can inflict a false comfort of comprehensibility to a world more and more devoid of our older, communal sources of meaning. Emerson said that “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and the danger arises when the ideology serves to justify almost any act. Cosper quotes Solzhenitsyn’s claim that Shakespeare’s villains could rack up no more than a dozen bodies because they didn’t have ideology. Only ideology can justify mass killing, because only ideology can make what is obviously evil into something good in service to its utopian goals. Thus, all the Mars Hill elders but two could “resist the temptation do what is right” to protect the church and its leader from criticism. After all, wasn’t it doing so much good for God? You wouldn’t want to ruin that, would you?
We’re probably all familiar with the boring materialism and utopian scientism of the Marxist university faculty set. Cosper covers this phenomenon briefly, then moves on to the ways that the disenchantment of modernity works its way into all the nooks and crannies of our institutions. The performative megachurch movement, with its hubristic claims to change the world, thought it could use the science of marketing to build the church of Jesus. More than just a gaggle of narcissistic leaders, the whole system fell for the idea of creating this or that “formula for success,” as though we were mixing medicine in a chemistry lab, not making disciples out of wretched sinners. This is where Cosper introduces Arendt’s most famous claim, her devastating and controversial observation that most complicity with horrific evil is actual buffoonery. She was shocked to discover that Eichmann simply repeated a series of clichés and seemed to believe sincerely that he had faithfully served the noble Nazi cause. He was no movie star villain, and neither are the pastors and congregants who downplay abuse and shuffle offenders under the rug. They are simply banal.
To be clear, Cosper is not drawing moral equivalents here. That’s not the point. Rather, he’s identifying the modern tendency to demystify and level the complex realities of human life in ways that always come crashing down because they simply do not accord with reality. He contrasts this tendency with Job’s journey, which captures how odd, expansive, and surprising human life can be. While his friends try to explain what’s happening according to their one-for-one, karmic conception of God’s justice, Job actually wrestles with God, refusing to say something he doesn’t believe and demanding an explanation for his suffering. While God reprimands Job for his self-righteousness, He also commends him for his commitment to the truth and to their relationship with one another.
At the same time, God condemns the ideology of Job’s friends, who can’t admit of a bigger God with a universe of purposes beyond our understanding. Job may have sounded more disrespectful by challenging God, but it’s Job’s prayers that will gain mercy for his friends, because only Job was willing to enter the fray with God, to stand alone against the crowd and present himself with honesty. Job also receives the most precious of gifts: not the restoration of his wealth or his new quiver full of children, but to be able to say, after chapters and chapters of God’s declaration of His incomprehensible glory and might, “At first I had only heard of you, but now I have seen you” (Job 42:5).
In the end, Cosper appeals to this kind of formative experience with God as the key to liberating us from our modern slavery to ideology and the resulting banality of our evil acts and institutions. The only sense we can make of so many of our pressing questions in this life is that God himself is our reward, that His presence and goodness make life good even when bad things happen to good people. Fortunately, there’s no marketing formula for grasping such a thought and getting it deep down into our bones, at least not any beyond the old standbys of silence, solitude, worship, and beauty. Every person’s engagement with these will look a bit different, and we’ll be bad at all of it on our first attempts!
So Cosper’s treatment for what ails us is all very messy and unkempt. But only these spiritual disciplines can release us from the mind-numbing effects of ideology, which convinces us that our complicity with evil is somehow the right choice. These disciplines create space in our lives for God to do something both remarkable and unassuming: make us into who we essentially are—bearers of the divine image—when we deeply imbibe God’s unfathomable love for us. This kind of humble confidence allows us to stand firm on our convictions when we feel like we’re all alone, to take the road less traveled, and to let go of fears about outcomes and trust that God is active, whether we see it or not.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, Cosper argues that the Christians who experience such deep unity with this infinite, powerful God also seem to be most uniquely themselves. Like Jesus, their trust in God makes them relaxed. He quotes the message Dallas Willard heard from God: “Don’t worry about your audience, but about whether you have something to say.” A tendency to relax into trust in God has the opposite effect of what one might expect. Like Eugene Peterson, with his tiny church and his beautiful poetry, well-formed disciples do not become passive but, rather, truly active in doing things that are genuinely creative and lasting.
I agree with Cosper: Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction will be serving the church centuries beyond Girl, Wash Your Face. (Remember that one, or have we already forgotten it?) There’s not a thing wrong with a good marketing plan for your toothpaste company, but for Pete’s sake let’s make our work of discipleship in the church something completely different. Let’s form our life together in a way that honors the majesty, transcendence, hiddenness, and incomprehensibility of our awesome God. A people formed in this way will not be tempted to “trust in fast horses” (Isa. 30:15–16) but will be strangely and bafflingly fearless because He is our strength and our shield (Ps. 18).
At a time when we are sorely tempted to latch onto another source of personal identity, or to be distracted by crisis and confusion, or simply give up on our pathetic, bedraggled church, it’s such a gift to know how we got to this difficult moment and how we can escape its logic and boldly participate, instead, in the divine, upside-down logic of the kingdom of God.
