The Church in Dark Times, Mike Cosper. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587435737) 2024.
Summary: Understanding and resisting the evil that seduced the evangelical movement, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt.
Mike Cosper has both experienced and closely studied how leaders and their followers abuse power, embrace ideologies contrary to the gospel, and often act with cruelty toward those who question. He left a church with such a leadership culture. And he chronicled the ministry of Mark Driscoll in the podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. In this book, Cosper tries to understand how people of good intention were corrupted. And he articulates “practices of resistance” for those who do not want to repeat this history but resist it.
There are a spate of books that have been written on this topic. What sets Cosper’s book apart is his use of the thinking of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who studied Hitler’s totalitarianism. However, in opening, he is quick, invoking Godwin’s Law, to deny an attempt to equate churches with Hitler. Nevertheless, the embrace of aspects of a totalitarian and authoritarian vision can inflict great harm. As he notes, “one can fall far short of [Hitler’s] monstrous achievements and still land squarely in hell.”
He begins with Arendt’s treatment of ideology, a story of everything that exchanges the gospel of grace for an iron logic. He uses Driscoll’s masculine ideology as an example, with its sweeping thesis that the church has failed to reach a generation because it lost all the men. To challenge Driscoll was to not be “man enough.” And this opened doors to spiritual abuse. Ideology proposes grandiose visions of changing the world through a particular leader or movement of leaders. An example Cosper gives is Bill Hybels and the Willow Creek movement.
The problem with ideology is that we bend reality and morality to ideological ends. It has meant exchanging the humility of redeemed disciples for the implacability of the fight. Authority is abused to attain spiritual goals. Often, we tend to look for moral monsters as a result. Instead, what we find is a banal form of evil, as Arendt did in studying Eichmann. Very ordinary people give little thought to the evil system they support. Likewise, church leaders often collude and close ranks against dissenters, not out of principle, but simply loyal conformity.
But how might we resist ideology and authority? Cosper turns to a Seattle native of another generation for help. Eugene Peterson never led a big congregation. He eschewed bigness for the pastoring of people. Rather than casting visions, he was more concerned to see how God was already at work in lives. Out of all this, Cosper arrives at three “practices of resistance.” First he encourages solitude and thought. Second he advocates storytelling and culture making–reflecting Dostoevsky’s idea that “beauty will save the world.” Finally he advocates worship that reminds us of the bigger story of God within which we live.
Cosper goes deeper than some in exploring the dynamics of authoritarian and ideologically captive churches. If nothing else, he introduces many to Hannah Arendt as a prophet for our time. The practices he commends make sense for resistance. They may not win the day in the sense of persuading people to repent from subverted ideologically driven churches. Rather, they sustain faithful witness to the gospel. Solitude and thought bring discernment. Storytelling and culture making point to the good, true, and beautiful gospel. And worship reminds us that as communities, we are God’s dwelling places, caught up in God’s cosmic plan to redeem all things. As dark as our times may be, the real destiny is not one of making one country great but extending God’s love to a world for which he died and will one day return to as king.
Cosper speaks unsparingly about the dark times facing evangelical churches within our cultural landscape. But he offers hope from the only sure source Christians have ever known-the risen and returning Christ. Many talk of speaking truth to power. Mike Cosper preaches the gospel of Jesus to every false ideology. What other hope and what other answer can we offer to dark times?
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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
