During a lecture in my undergraduate, Dr. Cherith Nordling from the University of St. Andrews came to give a ‘bonus lecture’ in my New Testament Survey class. I remember the lecture came at a time when my curiosity about the Kingdom of God had reached an all-time high. I forgot what exactly she lectured on, but I do remember it was something characteristically subversive to the staunchly conservative classroom—so I figured there would be no better place to ask the question I had been brooding over. When the Q-and-A time began, I apprehensively raised my hand—skinny kid, center front row of the two-hundred plus class. I had written down my question just in case all the eyes burning into the back of my head caused me to forget.
I asked, “How do you define the present Kingdom of God, and what is our part in it?”, and I’ll never forget the brevity of her answer. She paused for a second, and then said with keen resolve,
“Take Jesus seriously and look at what He did.” The classroom went silent, and I was a little taken off guard. I thought, like probably everyone in the room, ‘of course I take Jesus seriously’. She followed this up with, “The Kingdom of God is not Americana. It’s not privilege. God is not absent when you are suffering. And as for your part in it: humility with fearlessness.” I was floored. I wrote down those words as they rang in my head. For that classroom full of young evangelicals in Chicago, no words could have been more apt.
The trouble was, we all thought we knew what the Kingdom of God was. Not because we had ever heard any real substantive teachings on it, but because we had inherited a vision of it from the way our families and friends lived—i.e. the way they arrived at a way to life. That classroom may have professed certain correct doctrines about God’s “economy” or “dispensations” or maybe even His “Kingdom”, but I would be surprised if more than five of those students seriously thought of the Kingdom of God as their way to life. Their way of arriving at life probably was closer to their degree, the approval of family, the securities acquired by income, maybe eventually the respect of being a church leader. For all of us, our way to life is in the direction of the thing we hope for, the good we anticipate in the future and for which we, as Paul so aptly said, run the race for the prize (1 Cor. 9:24). This hope, this thing we treasure and run for, shapes more than just our plans, it shapes our actions, our characters, our desires, and our identity.
Something our western, post-enlightenment institutions (whether school, government, or church) have failed to recognize is that feeding people information will not change them. Even in terms of gaining new vision, information is only a small percentage of the process. The assumption, again, comes from the faulty theory that the human being begins from him/herself and that we can autonomously make objective decisions. Our choices, and thereby the rest of ourselves, are based on a foundation of desires. Maslow had it right, to a point, that our chiefest desire has to do with becoming a realized self—above all things the human being craves an identity. What changes a person is what they value, and what they value determines their identity. Jesus’ wisdom applies, that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matt. 6:21).
Contrary to the modern salvation myth, arriving at a realized self with a deep and sound identity does not come of isolating and differentiating yourself from others. In fact, to the Christian mind (and admittedly to many classical philosophies) the individual human identity is informed by other humans. From the moment we are born, we are learning what is valuable from our parents and applying that value to ourselves. We then imitate and conform our identities to other people who value the same things. Consequently, we form ourselves around a collective identity (ironically, today, in our quest for individual distinction). We have a people, a tribe, a body of “like-minded” people who shape each other’s values and, subsequently, their identities. This is nothing new or sinister, it is fundamentally part of being a human being and something God intended for our good. It is how our families and our churches are meant to cohere and grow, based in testimonies which give significance to values which, in turn, shape our identities or characters.
Recent studies in neuroscience are discovering that this “identity consciousness” is fundamental to human growth and development. Not only in long-term cases, but every moment of every day. In fact, your brain is making decisions based on who you are and what you value more quickly than you can consciously process.
Psychologist Jim Wilder discusses the neurological data behind this “human identity center” in his book, Rare Leadership. Basically, in the human brain there is, what is called, a fast track and a slow track. The slow track is where cognitive reasoning happens, while the fast track thinks faster than you are cognitively aware of. It’s closer to a reflex than to what we commonly think of as thinking. For example, imagine you’re sitting in a classroom waiting for the teacher to come in. When she enters she walks to the chalkboard and writes her name and begins to discuss how the class will be conducted. Two things happened when your teacher walked in. 1.) You heard her voice, registered what she said, maybe you read her name on the chalkboard. This all happens in the slow track of the brain. The second part of what happened actually happened before you knew it was happening. 2.) You instinctively registered her appearance, and if you’d met her before you would have immediately recognized her face. This is happening in the fast track of the brain, which is informed more by habits, experiences, and relationships than by data and conscious cognitive processes.
Most of our decisions are not made, as we’d like to think, in the slow track of the brain. Most of our decisions first filter through relational, personal, identity-centered realities which are then processed cognitively. Based on your first look at your teacher you might immediately wonder if you’ve met her or if she’s the kind of teacher you think you’ll agree if. (As an aside, this could be one reason why it can be very hard for certain people to be trained out of thinking in terms of racial profiling. It happens through fast track habits even before they can reasonably think.)
Typically though, before making any decision big or small, we process data through the filter of: what kind of person we know ourselves to be and the kind of person we value or admire and want to be like. This is nothing new in the long history of analyzing human thought. You’ve heard it said before, “you’re the sum total of your five best friends”, but even more deeply this goes into the formation of our Christian character. When Jesus came proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God, he utilized a teaching method used during that time in second temple Judaism known as the Rabbinical teaching model. Our western ideas of mentor and apprenticeship are very similar.
It is a natural human process, when faced with a problem, to ask oneself “what do my kind of people do when faced with a similar problem”. We do this instinctually even before rationally working through the problem. By this we understand that humans learn how to live and develop character, not primarily by the facts that we know, but by the kinds of people we watch and value. This discovery is nothing new in the long history of analyzing human thought. You’ve probably heard it said before, “you’re the sum total of your five best friends”, but in an even deeper sense this identity process profoundly influences the formation of our Christian character.
For that classroom of young evangelicals to have seriously made sense of what Cherith Nordling said about the Kingdom of God that day, there would have had to have been a relational experience of the reality of the Kingdom in their lives. It could not stay in the realm of definitions, doctrines, and verse numbers—like any other real thing that we value and base our lives around, relational knowledge is essential for true knowledge of the thing itself. Most likely, the students present had known someone who was living out of the life of Christ in the Kingdom of God—they’re more common than we realize, I believe—but they could never relationally identity with that person. The reason being, like I said before, nine times out of ten what we value prohibits us from even beginning to base our identity on the Kingdom of God. Our identity is being informed by another set of values, even if we cognitively refute those values, our fast track is busy at work orienting our identities around these values. I think Cherith Nordling hit the nail on the head. What we see in others and we value by default today is Americana.
Americana and the Mother of Religion
The term, Americana has gone by the wayside in our modern vocabulary, but it’s meaning is alive and well. What is typically meant by Americana is, “the American way”, or flatly the summation or essence of American culture—quickly becoming western culture in general since the 1960s. That is the reason Americana is one of the most apt and subversive words to bring up in contrast with the Kingdom of God. It runs to the marrow of the modern condition—dealing surgically with the psychology of the western church in that dangerous limbo where we’ve come to believe secularism and church-life can overlap. Americana can almost be described as the mother of the two spheres which get most of the limelight in these sorts of discussions. What we popularly know as: “secularism” and “religion”.
In an interview about his award-winning book, Dominion, historian Tom Holland deconstructs the popular western dichotomy of secular and religious by drawing our attention to the turn of the eighteenth century. The point of Holland’s book and body of discussion is arguing that western culture, specifically secularism, is not the product of Greek, Roman, or even Persian influence, but uniquely one of a Judao-Christian world-view. Interestingly, Holland is a self-proclaimed atheist, though he does more than just tip his hat to Christianity in forming the modern world. He makes the point that what we call “religion” today is a term invented near the turn of the eighteenth century, basically to describe whatever is not secular. Secularism he describes as a uniquely humanist scheme to retain Christian values without retaining the Christian God.
In the middle ages, Holland explains, the word “religion” would not have any meaning to anyone, let alone people of eastern religions such as Hinduism and Islam. To the mind of the middle ages and prior, the world itself was religious. Nothing in life could be disassociated from a folk concept of supernature and divinity. What fragmented this worldview in the west, and which has led to near global secularization today, was the west’s distaste for the Christian God, but it’s love for the Christian values.
Holland uses British colonized India as a microcosm of this theory. When the British Nation came to India, it found a fragmented and chaotic system of disintegrated folk religions. What prompted the British to invent the term “Hinduism” to describe all these mini-religions is their seeming similarities to Christianity: having a priest-like sect, having a form of sacred scripture, having similar rituals, and so on. The Indian people did not have a concept of something outside religion. They, like the medieval Europeans, saw supernatural reality woven throughout all of human experience. Holland says, “Although the British did not convert India to Christianity in the same way the Spanish converted the Mexicans to Christianity, nevertheless when the Raj ended, when India became independent it became independent as a secular state, that’s written into the constitution. And this reflects a kind of assumption that….the secular is an unproblematic term, that everyone’s had this notion of the secular, but they haven’t! And this is increasingly being pointed out by Indian scholars….that the process of Christianization happens in two ways: it happens through conversion, and it happens through secularization.”
It can probably be said that India has its own version of Americana today because it has the same cultural foundations. A colonial protestant upbringing leading into a secular adolescence, propagating the humanist philosophy of retaining Christian values and ejecting the Christian God. Secularism is more liquid than solid in this way, and can be difficult to trap in a simple definition, mainly because it is the water we swim in as modern westerners. It’s this familiarity the modern west has with secularism that makes it such a deadly weapon against the Church. Like an odorless gas, we see the results of it long before we are certain it’s actually there. For the past hundred and fifty years, secularism has had a more Christian flavor than many Christians would care to admit, because it’s in the agenda of progressive secularism to retain Christian values without God, or as Mark Sayers has put it, “the Kingdom without the King”.
This ties into our discussion earlier about the human identity center in a diabolical way. Because our secular culture is, in effect, a sibling of reformed Christianity evangelicals naturally find it hard to separate themselves. People, organizations, and nations who do not confess Jesus as Lord still do things and teach values which we actually do agree with—and this because they are pulling from a culturally protestant heritage. As a result, well meaning evangelicals find little grounds to stand on as a separate entity from secularism and consequently become engulfed and assimilated. We become, even as we preach and teach against it, identified with a philosophy of Americana which subverts the deepest value of the Kingdom of God—life from the King Himself, new life in Jesus Christ.
God is Dead, So Who is King?
But if the Kingdom of God is not this, if it is not Americana—meaning progressive humanist secularism, then what is it? It is uniquely the Kingdom with the King—the body of collective and individual life ordered under the will of the Father through Jesus Christ. When Friedrich Nitche coined his provocative phrase, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”, he was not speaking to the body of believers who still believed in a very living God, he was speaking as a prophet of secularism, describing the new and hopeless task of humanity: to rule God’s Kingdom for him, to take the mantle on themselves and build a world with all the benefits of Christ’s Kingdom, but without the King to infringe upon them. In more ways than one, secularism is a tower of babel western civilization has been building for two hundred years, only this tower is a systemic idea. If the biblical tower of babel was your local shopping mall, secularism is Amazon.com.
It’s for this reason secularism has penetrated so deeply into our churches. It’s not a new thing. Like I said above, it’s a sibling of the reformation church. It’s sweet to our Christian mouths because we can taste the similarity between it’s values and ours. We don’t choose to blur the lines, it happens naturally, and for most of secularism’s short history it has been a benign problem for the church. The chief concern has been the fanciful modernist idea that science, that monolithic icon of progress, contradicts what it calls “religion”, when in fact true Christianity has only opposed “science” when science has taken up the charge for secularism. Outside of this artificial front line of “religion vs science”, a covert invasion has been happening behind lines.
On the surface, it would appear that secularism’s secret invasion into our churches has been lucrative for the church, if you pay attention to church-growth statistics. Being relevant to secular society has been an indispensable tool for keeping people in the seats. But something is metamorphosing in secularism which is causing churches built on Americana to squirm.
What the church has long thought of as a stalemate has turned out to be a siege. The voice of secular culture is drowning out orthodox faith as Christian scholars are losing their credibility in the public square—that is, unless they conform their value-set to match the secular agenda. Gender fluidity, abortion, and higher education are topics, to name a few, on which the orthodox Christian voice has almost completely lost influence. Younger generations hemorrhage from our churches in favor of adapting Christianity to their own ‘spiritualities’, or dismissing their parent’s faith altogether. As secularism leads the charge against social injustices, it leaves in its wake it’s own evolved set of values which is a warped copy of the Christian ethic.
The church had responded to this, in some cases, by adopting what is called a ‘social gospel’, which has historically promoted the Christian’s responsibility to reform social institutions and expose injustice, though doubtlessly sharing power with secular activists. In response to the social gospel, many well meaning Christian scholars have combated this advance of secularism into the church by attacking social justice itself, and the poor and disenfranchised are caught in the crossfire. This is only one example of the internal ripping and tearing happening in our churches due to the divergent direction of the secular ethic, not to mention matters of wage inequality, sexuality, education, personal freedoms, political reform, etc.
In the song “2020 AD” by Christian rock band, “As Cities Burn” the chorus repeats: “Has it gotten out of hand yet?” referring to this same situation, as if the church is not sure when to break off and when to adapt to secularism. Toward the end of the song, the chorus is punctuated by the words, “cut it off!”. But for many of us in the mainline western church, ‘cutting it off’ is unthinkable. A dozen or more reasons to persist in close proximity to secularism spring immediately to mind: I’m too saturated in the culture to change, or if I seperate myself from secularism, isn’t that like saying I’m better than them?, or if I cut myself off from culture, won’t I loose my mission field?.
You will find every one of these questions is an evasion of the truth because, whether we like it or not, we ourselves are changing the longer we remain in secularism’s company. Pornography is an excellent microchosm example of this slow infection. More and more Christian men and women find themselves at the mercy of this vile addiction which the church condemns and the secular sphere either rationalizes or blithely encourages. Though these churched and educated people may condemn pornography with their mouths, and even wish in their hearts to stop, they are not equipped to overcome their passions and when told by popular psychology that it would be bad and unnatural to suppress their desires, they naturally gravitate toward the line of secularism without even being aware. They have put undue value in their vice and reap an identity based on it which would be unthinkable to cut off—it would be like cutting off a hand or, somehow, one’s own self-hood!
Reflect this kind of psychology on the way we educate, the way we entertain ourselves, the way we find jobs, the way we think about politics, and you can see the subversive inside-out takeover of secularism in the church. We can carry on like this with the best of intentions, justifying and downplaying the severity of systemic sin, or we can “take Jesus seriously”, as Cherith Nordling said. We can do what the Apostles, Jesus, and the prophets of the Old Testament repeatedly called the people to do when they did not know where to turn, to repent (Gk. Metanoia meaning literally to turn or change your thinking).
When we repent, we cognitively state that the thing we had been putting value in is, in fact, worthless. We “turn” and cognitively place value in Jesus and His Kingdom—but this will be a fruitless exercise unless you take the necessary measures to retrain the fast-track of the brain, like we discussed earlier. Unless we intend to do this, we will never know a repentance leading to change. We will simply apologize but never be free of an identity wrapped up in deception and untruth. As our creator, Jesus understands the fast track of the brain and the relational nature humans share in common. As such, Jesus intentionally taught His followers how to begin the process of retraining the fast track of their brain—an activity transcending their own cognitive abilities. Jesus called this process, “the easy yoke” (Matt. 11:30).
The Easy Yoke of Jesus
In Matthew 11, we find Jesus teaching as He often did—explaining the inverted nature of the Kingdom of God and exhorting those unwilling to leave their comfortable disbelief to repent. He ends His teaching, as we have come to expect, with a call for people to turn from sin and follow Him. But His wording catches us off guard. He says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28–30). In the Rabbinical teaching method which Jesus took part in, the term “yoke” was a metaphor for the Rabbi’s teaching—the specific rules and restrictions placed on the disciple. Moreover, a “yoke” was a wooden harness used to fasten two oxen together for ploughing.
It’s important not to jump over any detail in this passage. We may immediately want to know what we have to do based on Jesus’ words—or else, we’re immediately on guard in case some kind of works-righteousness comes leaking through, stealing from what Jesus did for us. The yoke is not a new set of “Laws” like the Law of Moses—it’s not a checklist or formula that outputs righteousness. It’s also not something we are passive in and which Jesus is going to do for us. It is a new and organic way to life with Jesus. Like any yoke it has weight, it has demands, it is work—but then why does Jesus call it “easy” and “light”? Simply because we are not beginning from ourselves, it’s not all on us, indeed it could never be. We are fastened together with Jesus.
Just before this section Jesus says some puzzling jargon about the Father and the Son and how the Son reveals the Father, a monumental theme in the gospels. What happens when the Father is revealed to humanity? Our eyes are opened, we see through the haze, we see along the sunbeam like I mentioned in a previous chapter. Essentially, we see reality as it really is. Now look back at what Jesus just said, He tells us to learn from Him, to watch Him, follow Him, imitate Him, because when we look at Jesus we see someone who is living with clear eyes in the real world. However, watching is not enough to create a changed character. The kind of learning Jesus wants us to engage in with Him is far more hands-on.
Jesus seriously intended us to live the way He lived in every way. This is very hard for many Christians today to swallow, but it is the simple truth of Jesus’ teaching. We are meant to be His disciples—a word which has all but lost its meaning in contemporary Christianity today. To be a disciple means to be a master in training, what we would call in the west an apprentice. The apprentice watches the master, learning day in and day out from how the master lives, works, rests, and handles problems. An apprentice understands that they don’t know the craft, it’s not something that will just dawn on them, they have to learn from the one who knows it. They can’t just look like the master and talk like the master, they have to become like the master, and this takes time and effort. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck had this to say about this kind of transformation,
There are many people I know who possess a vision of [personal transformation] yet seem to lack the will for it. They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy shortcut to sainthood. Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints. …[They need to] face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle. (M. Scott Peck).
So, we must knuckle down and join Jesus in the yoke. To many of us, this alone will feel like dying, with all the self-denial and feeling foolish. You may have to change some life decisions, rethink future plans, intentionally begin changing entrenched life-style habits. Friends and relatives might start to think you’re becoming strange. Christian friends might be concerned you’re falling into some kind of works-righteousness because you’re acting on Christ’s yoke. Jesus foresaw this kind of effect in the chapter prior to Matthew 11 (Matt. 10:34–42). The key to it all is the yoke itself. You are joined together with Christ in a real, dynamic relationship.
Our trouble as Christians in matters of following Jesus tends not to be, what we call, grace vs works (by which we usually mean forgiveness vs effort). The trouble is that we find it very hard to believe that we can have a real, active relationship with Jesus Himself—and that is exactly what the easy yoke is. It is an apprentice relationship with Jesus as our master. For most of us in modernity, it is far easier to let yourself be apprenticed to the voices, behaviors, and personas of secularism and Americana. However, these ways never end in the kind of rest Jesus offers, a fact evidenced by the rampant anxiety, discontent, and fear we see characterizing the world today. If we wish to join Jesus in that true rest, if we really want to follow Him, if we want to know Him and be known by Him, we must start by laying aside the yoke which says we must do it on our own. We must break that yoke before it breaks us, and instead take up His yoke—choose to follow in His steps.
Naturally, this will look different for every person as each person’s life in union with God will do very different things wherever they are. We must remember, throughout all this process of retraining our minds to fall in-step with Jesus that God has a greater plan in mind than our individual deliverance alone. His mission is world-wide, and it begins with small groups of like-minded individuals being trained in the way of Jesus’ easy yoke. It will feel like trying to walk on the ceiling at first, everything will feel upside-down. But as you apply effort, as you train your thinking in conformity to Jesus’ easy yoke, your identity will transform. As your identity transforms, you will be surprised by how natural and easy living a Christ-like life will become, afterall, it was never meant to be hard. The process will look different for everyone, but no different than the kinds of things you read about in the lives of the Apostles in Scripture or the lives of devout and holy men and women in Church history. They prayed in their bedrooms, they gave up their worldly ambitions, they fasted, they put distance between themselves and the influences of the world, they served the poor, but above all, they lived with Jesus yoked alongside them. What resulted of their lives speaks for itself—they could not have been working alone.
This easy, humble, joyful, fearless reality with Jesus is the habitat of the Christian, and it is present wherever you are with Christ, doing the will of God. This is God’s world-wide mission, infecting the world with heaven through the hearts and lives of individual believers gathered into communities of faith and good works. As we grow in this kind of Christ-likeness we should not be surprised that we actually become better, our desires change, our hopes change, our values align with Christ’s organically, like a deep wound healing over. The more this happens among individuals the more its influence spreads, the more the healing becomes noticeable on a wider scale, the more the earth begins to appear more like heaven (Matt. 6:10). This global healing is what Jesus came to begin—it is the Kingdom of God.
