Human beings will never adapt to “post-truth”. Our inbred discernment recognises that Truth must exist. Truth is indispensable in human relationships as well as any serious reflection. No-one can live without the concept and the reality of Truth.

So now the West, at one time so insistent on the search for Truth, is at a crossroads. Having sought by human reason alone to find Truth and build a wise world-view, it has had to admit its failure. It has descended into post-modern hopelessness, unable to find meaning, value, or any balanced wisdom about human identity.

The West is confronted with increasing desperation because of this terrible inability of godless Reason to find valid and authentic answers to our fundamental questions about life and everything. But change is in the air: finally, public intellectuals in the West are coming to a surprising conclusion. They are looking again at Christianity and coming to realise that it alone lays the proper basis for any understanding of our human reality, dignity, and value. Only Christianity with its revealed Truth can meet both our intellectual and our heart needs for real meaning. If one leaves God’s revealed wisdom aside, the result can only ultimately be confusion.  Only the Maker’s revelation has the total wisdom to guide our paths into the way of real human fulfilment. Thinkers are now coming to envisage this source of Truth with positive hope.

This renewal in biblical truth is documented by Justin Brierley in his informative book, “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God”. He says that “the stories we have been telling ourselves in the last several decades have been growing increasingly thin and superficial.” But turning to Christianity, some “have found themselves drawn to a story that made sense of their deepest longings and desires”. This is the “better story” that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, led by Jordan Peterson, is opening up to.

One who has discovered that story is Charlotte Gauthier. On reading some theological books from a previous era, she testified, “I found an intellectual Christianity that I could respect. In my arrogant atheist days, I assumed I’d come up with questions that had never satisfactorily been answered before. I was wrong”.

While the West is beginning to reawaken to Christianity’s Truth, the Majority world has been very wise in resisting the sea-change in lax morality that, having invaded the West, would overflow to pervert the rest of the world with its godless permissiveness. The Majority world should continue to reject the bankrupt influence that has only bred hopelessness in the West.

It is not perhaps surprising that missionaries now come from the vibrant communities in the Majority world to bring renewal to the West. They are welcome, for they can contribute to the revival of western church life. Their biblical faithfulness, their passion and enthusiasm, will help overcome the decadent influence that has been infiltrating some churches in recent years. They will help our western churches to return, humbled and contrite, to the former paths of righteousness, once well-trod by those gone before us. They can bring us back to the Biblical faith – which, ironically was brought to them by missionaries from the West when the church was vibrant in its vision for taking the Gospel to the whole world. 

Clive Every-Clayton