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Faith In Secular Times: How to Repent of God in Order to Follow Christ
I sometimes bend over backward to find ways in which faith can still be relevant in our secular post-Christian society (just as I bend over backward to understand why I bend over backward.) I write from a Western-Europeans context. However, just having lived in the USA for the past 8 years or so, gives me a good grasp of the situation there as well. What I propose in this essay is applicable to the North American context as well, even though the USA is patently more religious than Europe.
The Christian god, as the god, the god who stands behind worldly affairs as the ultimate authority, has been erased. It has become completely meaningless. The god is now only a triangular eye on the dollar bill, a grey beard on an ancient painting or a character in a satirical cartoon. At first, it was kind of scary: Let’s see if there’s going to be lightning from the sky! But there was no lightning. Nietzsche’s madman warned that the foundations of the world had come unhinged with the death of god. Two world wars later, it turns out things are quite okay.
Rather, it appears that it doesn’t matter too much whether people believe in god or not. We see this at the individual as well as the communal level. Apparently, people are quite capable of being good citizens without god. During World War II in the Netherlands…
