The Competing Gospel of the Modern World

The Competing Gospel of the Modern World

The first problem, we recall, is that the church has colluded with the legacy of the Middle Ages, proposing going to heaven as the ultimate goal and an angry God as the problem to get around. The second is that modern culture has operated with a split-level universe, and in attempting to cope with this, the church has often merely colluded with it. The third, and I think the greatest, problem standing in the way of any understanding of what the first good news was actually about is found in a huge claim that dominates Western culture to this day. This is the belief that world history turned a vital and defining corner not with anything that happened in the first century but with something that happened in the eighteenth…