The Most Ironic the Most Likely
Miscellaneous Musings in the Secular Age
I initially started this Substack newsletter to provide a forum for thinking through the causes and outcomes of our present secular age. Because I cannot unburden myself from the pastoral impulse, I always want to find how believers in Jesus Christ, our Lord, can live faithfully during such phenomena. Moreover, I believe our late unpleasant social conditions present new occasions to present the gospel of Christ. Indeed, I couldn’t think of a better time than now. I urge any and all who are reading to turn from their sins and receive the resurrected and reigning Lord and Savior of the world, Jesus of Nazareth, who is fully God and fully man.
In the midst of all this, I have recently thought about other possibilities within this long-coming but newly-emerged cultural framework referred to as the secular age (Postmodernity being a philosophical underpinning to the practical outworking of culture). I have had more time for reading and reflecting on readings than I have had in a long time. However, this luxury is financed by an encroaching morbidity. I will talk about that more later, and in an appropriate forum, but for now, let me just say that the thorn in the flesh appears to be firmly implanted in the central nervous system’s autonomic functions, now including newly arrived unwanted illegal aliens in the bilateral hemisphere of what Hercule Poirot called the “little gray cells.”
Back to the topic. I believe that there are clear examples already and biblically grounded expectations for more grace in the garbage. To put it precisely, “Where sin abounds, grace abounds more” (Romans 5:20).
We should expect that in the secular age, we will see an increase of ungodliness triggering an inevitable expansion of remarkable, if not miraculous, signs of God’s transforming presence. The Nephilim (Genesis 6:1-4; Numbers 13:32-33) might have been the first malevolent geneticists, but in that diabolical intrusion into the human race, the ark of salvation was constructed. Perhaps you recently heard Elon Musk (for whom I am praying that his undeniable genius of Hebrew lineage might be saved) say that he believes he stumbled upon a new Occam’s Razor, that is, a maxim composed by observing a repeating natural phenomenon. He proposed that “that which is the most ironic is the most likely conclusion.”
In his case, he sought to provide an open-source platform to compete with Google, saving the world from a centralized hegemonic platform. Thus, the nonprofit “Chat GPT” was born. However, Musk continues, as he fell out with his cofounder, who eventually became the unrivaled governor of this new open-source artificial intelligence platform, he saw the thing that he had intended as a nonprofit alternative become an extraordinarily robust profit-making creature more than capable of overriding its founding charter. So, the most ironic thing about his involvement in artificial intelligence is that it turned on him. He says that it did.
So, let’s jump from that real example to what we see out there, and what we can expect. The greatest irony in all of human history is the cross. God created human beings who turned on Him, and as He sent His only begotten Son into the world to save them, they killed Him. They did so on the timber harvested from trees that He created. And as they cursed Him on the cross, He looked down upon them and said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). His dead body was sealed in a borrowed tomb, and He was raised to life on the third day. That event is more than irony and far higher than any paradox; it is a miraculous transaction and exhibition of the sovereignty of God so that the thing that sought to destroy Christ became the very thing that demonstrated and secured His ultimate victory. Christ saves us by using the very things we construct to deny Him or evade Him to cause us to believe and grow closer to Him. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a clear demonstration of love moving through the thin membrane that separates this realm from the heavenly realm, to restore paradise and secure fellowship. That, I believe, is the overarching divine power at work as we enter the secular age. The most influential variable is not man but God. The most amazing transformation is the one that God works in the midst of evil.
As I was thinking about this, I was reading through Mark Noll’s excellent book The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (UNC Press, 2006). Dr. Noll, whom I met some years ago when I invited him to present lectures at the graduate school where I presided, is one of our finest scholars. I value his observation of history and its possible lessons when he writes:
“Warfare—and the more cosmic the better—has sometimes been the mother of theological profundity. As a prime example, more than a millennium of European history was decisively influenced by Augustine’s City of God, a book prompted by the brooding of Roman colonials over the sack of the eternal city. A surprisingly large number of other great theological enterprises also received critical impetus from the tumult of war. Aquinas, for one, was spurred to his monumental labors against the backdrop of the 13th-century theological and military conflicts with Islam. John Calvin published successive editions of the Institutes of the Christian Religion directly in response to conditions created by the French civil wars of the mid-16th century. Many of the theological standards of the Reformation era—including the Lutherans’ Augsburg Confession, the Catholics’ Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, the Helvetic Confessions of the Swiss Reformed churches, the Scots’ Confession, and the Westminster Confession of the English Puritans—arose directly out of armed, as well as doctrinal, controversy.
If cataclysmic military conflict displayed a direct role and produced theology of high quality for intellectual elites, it also sometimes produced profound Christian reflection among the people at large, especially in hymns that, though arising from specific circumstances of wartime devastation, nonetheless feature compelling general commentary on the nature of existence under God” (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, 15).
I believe that we will also face not only an intellectual but possibly actual wartime in the coming years. We might witness a spiritual and theological revival the likes of which we have never seen before. While works of darkness increase, the undeniable presence of God will brighten the charcoal skies with brilliant wonder. It could even be the season that great divines such as Martyn Lloyd-Jones foresaw, namely, a revival of global proportions that has the effect of reaching many souls from the physical Israel (a notion that Saint Paul never rejected even as he preached that the true Israel was a spiritual reality). We can also expect a resounding return of biblically sound, theologically rich, and poetically beautiful hymnody. There are relatively few examples in the so-called contemporary Christian catalogue that compare in quality and universal acceptance by the Body of Christ in history to the works by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley. But we can expect such hymnody to arise once again. Again, the price of such glory may be faithful living in the midst of Babylon. And suffering.
So, as they say, all is not lost. God’s victory in the world is never in doubt. Christ has secured the beachhead and guaranteed the liberation of humanity from the clutches of Satan and the devices of our own making. We may not recognize the place where we live any longer, but we may be surprised to see the reality that we have always dreamed of.