God's Movement in the Twenty-First Century

In an increasingly post-Christian society, many of our wisest pastors and teachers keep saying that we must learn to live as keepers of the mystery. We don't need to shout the gospel louder than competing messages so much as we need to learn to be quiet in a noisy nation. Quietness and stillness must nourish our actions, words and songs. "Teaching about Christ begins in silence," Bonhoeffer told the students in his 1933 lectures on the doctrine of Christ. "The silence of the church is the silence before the Word. "6 The man or woman in Christ lives in reference to a new center. Christian thinking and acting emerge from encounter with Jesus Christ, which brings the crusading ego to stillness before the Word. "You are fed up with words," Thomas Merton said, two decades after Bonhoeffer's death, "and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. "7 In fact, I don't think this sounds like heresy at all. It sounds like the honest observations of a Christian who has grown tired of all the trivial spiritual talk.

The philosopher Max Picard wrote in his meditations on solitude, "In the modern world the individual no longer faces silence, no longer faces the community, but faces only the universal noise. "8 Sometimes it seems as if we prefer the noise. I can say for sure that this is the case for me. The noise feels comforting; the noise shields us from difficult and demanding truths. But the Scriptures teach us a different lesson. "Be still, and know that I am God," the psalmist says (46: 10). The psalmist! Be still and know.