For many Christians in America, author Aaron Renn’s “negative world” hypothesis sums up their experience of living in a culture hostile to Christianity. Even if recent trends like surging Bible sales, a possible slowdown in Christianity’s decline, and a few celebrity conversions indicate that it is not all bad news, there is an enduring feeling of a culture less open to Christianity.
In a negative world, Renn’s call to believers is to find “a different approach from the strategies of the past.” This has led some within evangelicalism to draw lines in the sand. Like certain plants that turn inward when affected by blight in cold weather, surviving in a strange and distorted form, there is a danger that Renn’s posture to the cool winds of the negative world could lead to insularity.
I want to advocate an alternative, which draws on the historical riches of God’s community and Word. Pastor Tim Keller called such a posture “gospel centrality,” which he embodied through his ministry at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, where I now serve as senior pastor at its downtown location.
Gospel centrality is an approach as old as the early church, which blossomed in some of the harshest cultural climates of church history not by turning in but by turning out. It requires Spirit-filled hope alongside clear gospel convictions—an approach that works in every world, positive, neutral, or negative. And it’s an approach that I continue to see bearing fruit in New York City today.
Gospel centrality advocates a particular mode of gospel engagement. Renn and others have criticized this approach as “triangulation” or “third-wayism,” saying that Keller’s middle-of-the-road approach to tribal partisanship may have worked in a neutral world but is no longer fitting for a negative one. Renn proposes instead that evangelicals should “have a firm resolve as to what they believe to be true and then have the courage to speak it clearly.”
Amen to resolve, amen to (gospel-centered) courage, and amen to truth. However, the gospel is not just the truth—it’s the message of the one who is “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
Merely proclaiming truth without extending grace leads to moralism. Various cultural thought leaders like Jordan Peterson, for example, who claim to be “culturally Christian,” are great at proclaiming truth.
But cultural Christianity is not to be confused with the transformative gospel of Jesus Christ.
Proclaiming grace and truth is the approach that gospel-centered churches hold to. It is the approach that Keller articulated in response to Renn’s (and others’) critique in 2022. It is a posture found in Scripture (1 Cor. 1:18–25) and championed by Augustine and Abraham Kuyper. It is the age-old conviction that all of our deepest questions find their resolution in Christ.
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In gospel centrality, Jesus first confronts us with the truth (that Renn rightly wants us to proclaim). Then Jesus comforts us with grace (which seems lacking from Renn’s approach), with forgiveness, and with the acceptance available through his death.
Finally, Jesus shows how this confrontation and comfort is uniquely resolved in his life, death, and resurrection. First, by his living a perfect life of grace and truth. Second, by his dying for our lies and our lack of truthful living so that we might both realize the seriousness of our sin and the grace of God’s salvation.
Grace without truth tends toward relativism. Truth without grace may be provocative but quickly sours into condemnatory moralism and excludes those who fall on the wrong side of the line.
But the uniquely compelling grace and truth of Jesus Christ has the resilience to stand against culture’s untruths and beckons those who have turned away to return to God.
D. A. Carson similarly articulated the central importance of the gospel when he wrote that it “ought to shape everything we do in the local church, all of our ethics, all of our priorities.” Only then can gospel renewal start to happen.
In his book Life in the Negative World, Renn lists the proclamation of the gospel as one of his aims—and when he and I spoke recently, it was clear that he cares about seeing people come to know Christ. But the gospel does not seem central to his priorities in the way Carson describes.
Instead, the three-world framework of positive, neutral, and negative seems primarily concerned about the church’s standing in culture. Renn’s arguments thus orbit around critiquing “wokeism” and the triumvirate of race, gender, and sex rather than centering how people are responding to the gospel.
Renn pinpoints the shift from a neutral to a negative world in 2014 with the rise of wokeism. However, sociologists of religion present an alternate view, arguing that spiritual attitudes shifted much earlier, back in the late 20th century. As Robert Wuthnow wrote in 1998, reflecting on the previous decades, “The transformation of American spirituality poses new challenges for the public life of the nation as well as for individual lives.”
Ethical shifts in race, gender, and sex are certainly significant. I engage with these issues frequently from the pulpit myself, because the gospel does too. But the gospel is not just one concern among many for the church. It is the central concern and the transforming power that makes all things new.
Gospel centrality shapes not just the mode of our engagement but also the character of our engagement.
One of the strongest parts of Renn’s book is its emphasis on the importance of obedience to Christ, in both its clear-sighted call to personal obedience—recognizing that this may be particularly difficult when it comes to sex and gender issues—and its insistence on the support of the church community to make this possible.
However, obeying Christ and his gospel is more than just living out certain challenging ethical stances in culturally hot areas. It is also a call to faith that goes deep and changes our hearts in the formation of our characters.
Unsurprisingly, secular thinkers are realizing the benefits of a Christian ethic, particularly in contrast to the broken promises of secularism.
Consider journalist Louise Perry’s bestselling book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, where she advocates for the Christian sexual ethic. Think of the voices coming out of Silicon Valley arguing for the Christian philosophical framework when engaging with technology. Observe the increasing number of people who, like Elon Musk and even the New Atheist Richard Dawkins, call themselves “cultural Christians.”
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But being culturally or ethically Christian is not the goal of gospel centrality. The Pharisees were equally hot on a call to be moral. And like the throng of those calling for an end to winsomeness or “third-wayism” today, the Pharisees also urged a more strident approach.
Jesus repeatedly rebuked them for their lack of mercy, compassion, and love, because an emphasis on truth without a corresponding emphasis on grace dangerously leads to self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and fear.
The world does not need more anxious presences shouting across the divide, even if the words they are shouting may be true. The culture at large is hungry for a different character in our approach.
In my context in New York City, we recently hosted a course designed for those investigating or doubting Christianity. The overwhelming feedback from attendees was how much they appreciated not only the proclamation of the gospel’s grace and truth but also the character of the course’s environment as a whole, which relies on patient and gracious conversations with Christians.
This aligns with a 2022 Barna report that describes the top six values that Gen Z is searching for in evangelism: judgment-free listening, mutual understanding, calm and natural conversation, words matched by action, healthy disagreement, and safe relationship.
Of note is how much these values overlap with the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–23).
It is faith, hope, and love, after all, that will remain (1 Cor. 13:13). For all his talk about the negative world, Renn himself has wondered if it may already be changing, perhaps even coming to an end. Whether this is the case or not, what will never change is the gospel and its call to godliness.
Gospel centrality—that which confronts and comforts us, holds grace and truth together, and transforms us to be more like Christ—is still, as ever, compelling and attractive to a generation hungry for conviction. That’s because it is God’s work, not ours.
Whether we continue in this current negative cultural mode or enter one that becomes more receptive to Christianity, our posture should be the same as it has been since the beginning. Such an evergreen approach has led to renewal throughout the church’s long history. May the Lord do so again.
Pete Nicholas is senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church Downtown in New York City and author of A Place For God: Timeless Questions for Our Modern Times, Five Things to Pray for Your City, and Virtually Human: Flourishing in a Digital World. Pete is married to Rebecca, a surgeon, and they have two boys.
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