The West – Authentic Hope for Answers

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

We live in a global village: news is broadcast to our phones as it occurs, wherever in the world it may be happening. The influence of Western thinking still touches the corners of the globe. But people in the majority world need to be informed by those of us in the West who see the bankruptcy of Western scientific philosophy, that the West, dominated by secularistic thinking that ignores the God of creation, is not the best.

There is hope of an upturn in Western thinking, however, as the hopelessness of atheistic philosophy becomes more and more apparent, bringing in its train all kinds of moral, social, and mental ills. A better story is being sought, though the passing falsehoods of relativistic atheism still hang in the air we breathe and sadly infect lands further away. People in those lands should realise: the West is not the best. To those who look from afar thinking that the West is Christian, I would say that the general life-style of the masses in the west is godless, not Christian. True, there are many Christians in the West, and in past ages they have gone throughout the world proclaiming the Gospel; but as their influence in society waned in the West, vain and futile godless philosophies have risen to supplant the Christian consensus.

This state of affairs is due to change, however; the West needs a revival of Christianity, and believers need to regain the confidence to proclaim afresh the life-enhancing truth of the Gospel. This Gospel message speaks of world history in four stages:

First, Creation. God made all that is, and he declared his creation “good”. There was no fault in his working: he made man and woman to reflect his own nature as they were made in his likeness. He made them in relationship with himself where they found deep joy and fulfilment.

Second, the first couple turned away from God’s will, expressed in his commandment. Thinking (as many still do today) that they knew better than God what was right and wrong, they chose to disobey, and in doing so their nature – human nature – became twisted, corrupted, sinful. Banished from enjoying close and friendly relationship with their Creator, they founded their social order independently of God, even antagonistic to his will. All the people of the world suffered from that original perversion; all are born sinners, out of fellowship with God – indeed, under his holy displeasure.

Third, God set in motion his major opus – the salvation of lost men and women. Beginning with revealing to Abraham promises that through his posterity all the world would one day be blessed, God spoke to men of old through the prophets until finally his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was born, an incarnate human revelation of God. Jesus grew up to teach God’s truth and ultimately to give his life for the redemption of humankind. Thanks to his atoning sacrifice, as the Gospel is proclaimed throughout the world, millions find, through faith in him, the forgiveness he promised and new life, eternal life, in renewed friendship with God.

The fourth stage is still to come, foretold by the prophets whose predictions of the first coming of Christ proved true. Jesus himself revealed that at the end of the age he would come in glory to judge the world in righteousness, ushering his believing flock into eternal life, and punishing the unrighteous with the just penalty that is their due.
Throughout the world, this Gospel message gains believers who escape that ultimate judgment. Will you be among them?

Clive Every-Clayton

Tag: The West

The west is changing

The west is not the best