Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
Christianity has gone out of favour. It no longer holds the place it once did within society. There’s no expectation you will be Christian. Christianity is often seen as the odd religion, an old-fashioned religion or a superstition whose time has passed.
It’s now fashionable to take on an Eastern religion or a mix of New Age philosophies or to develop your own boutique religion, however bizarre.
Then there’s the impact of evangelical neo-atheists peddling their no-God wares. It’s becoming hip and seen as intellectually honest to be an atheist, and to criticise religion—any religion, and particularly Christianity—as something like a “virus of the mind” (Richard Dawkins’s description).
The Bible no longer has the respect it once did. Any authority it had is often rejected out of hand—and considered not helpful for real life.
Postmodernism has challenged a Christianity that had settled comfortably into a modernist way of thinking (developed in the late 19th century) despite both Darwin and Marx being influential in its philosophy and its assumption there is no compassionate, all-powerful God.
Not all modernism is anti-Christian, however, and neither is all of postmodernism. Postmodernism with its rejection of objective truth (meaning that truth is found within you), though, is a direct challenge to the Bible and the claims of Jesus.
The power of secular media and Hollywood to take a mostly anti-Christian message—particularly an anti-Christian lifestyle message—to almost every person on earth needs to be added into this mix.
So, how do we respond?
Almost 1800 years ago and living in a pagan world, Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage (d 258), told his flock, “We must labour not with words, but with deeds.”
Here is our response: being Christian. It’s that simple, and that difficult.
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