Work it with sweat long enough and you’ll discover that there’s a certain stubbornness in the land, in the stones buried deep under fields, in the roots that reach for water long after the well’s run dry. It’s the same stubbornness you find in old truths—truths that don’t shift when the wind changes or bow when the crowd passes by with new banners, new slogans, and new certainties. But we live in an age that mistrusts anything older than yesterday. The spirit of the age—a sleek, restless thing—wants everything fast, light, and easy to carry, like a phone you can slip in your pocket.
Modernists and post-modernists carry this spirit like it’s gospel. They’ve set themselves to the task of dragging Christianity out of the deep soil where it’s been rooted, shaking off the clods, pruning away the bits that seem too rough, too strange, too hard to explain to their clever friends. They speak of aggiornamento—an Italian word that rolls off the tongue like fine wine—meaning “bringing up to date.” Updating. As if faith is an old house that needs new wallpaper and maybe a skylight to let in more fashionable light.
To them, the ancient Church is a relic, beautiful in the way an old shipwreck is beautiful—interesting for historians, maybe, but not seaworthy. The creation story? Too naive. The Virgin Birth? A poetic flourish. The Resurrection? A metaphor, surely. They peel back the layers, not to find depth but to flatten, to make everything thin enough to slide neatly under the microscope.
But there’s a cost to this kind of progress, though they rarely stop to count it. Strip away the mystery, the poetry, the raw, bone-deep wonder of it all, and you’re left with something brittle—something that crumbles when real life presses in with its griefs and aches and unanswerable questions.
Old Stones and Living Waters
The ancient Church wasn’t afraid of mystery. It drank deep from it, like a man at a well after a long pilgrimage. The old prayers, the old hymns—they weren’t written to be clever or relevant. They were carved out of awe, out of fear, out of the strange hush that falls when you realize you’re standing on holy ground.
When they read the Scriptures, they didn’t skim the surface looking for “life lessons.” They read the way a farmer reads the sky—looking for signs, for patterns, for the turning of the seasons. Genesis wasn’t just a story about how the world began; it was a key that unlocked the deep chambers of the heart. Adam wasn’t just the first man; he was every man. The garden wasn’t just a place; it was a lost homeland, still burning in the corners of our memory.
But the modern mind likes things clean and clinical, bifurcated and laid out like a disassembled engine. It treats Scripture like a specimen—pin it down, label it, explain it. The Passover becomes a cultural tradition. The manna in the wilderness? Maybe an unusual type of fungus. The waters parting in the Red Sea? A rare tidal phenomenon. But when you explain everything, you empty it. The wonder leaks out through the seams.
The Illusion of Progress
Modernism wears the mask of progress, but it’s often just a more polished form of forgetting. It tells us we’re smarter now, that we’ve outgrown the need for myth, ritual, and reverence. But look closer. Beneath the buzz of technology, beneath the glow of screens, there’s a hunger—a hollow place that no amount of information can fill.
We’ve mapped the genome but lost the language of the soul. We’ve built cities that scrape the sky but find ourselves lonelier than ever, surrounded by noise but starving for meaning. We’ve made the world smaller, faster, more connected, but where does a man go when his heart breaks? Where’s the app for that?
The early Christians didn’t try to make the Gospel relevant, and they didn’t water it down to fit the spirit of their age. They stood firm, stubborn as a cliff face, even when the empire came for them with crosses and lions. They didn’t need to make the message attractive; the truth carried its own weight, its own wild, untamed beauty.
The Weight That Holds
There’s something to be said for weight. A boat needs ballast to keep from capsizing. A tree needs deep roots to stand when the wind rises. And a soul needs truths that are heavier than itself—truths that don’t shift with every new fad, every clever TED talk, every passing storm of opinion.
The Resurrection isn’t just a hopeful metaphor. It’s a stone rolled away. It’s an empty tomb. It’s the raw, shocking reality that death doesn’t get the last word. The Virgin Birth isn’t a quaint story for Christmas cards. It’s the scandal of the Infinite breaking into the finite, God slipping into our skin, fragile as a newborn.
These aren’t ideas to be updated like software. They’re anchors. They’re the deep wells we return to when life’s surface dries up.
The Choice Before Us
So here we are, caught between two spirits: the spirit of the age, sleek and fast-moving, always chasing the next thing, and the Spirit of God, ancient and new, whispering through burning bushes and empty tombs, through bread and wine, through the ache in your chest that nothing else can satisfy.
The question isn’t whether Christianity needs to be updated. The question is whether we’re brave enough to admit that we need to be rooted. Not in the shallow soil of the latest trends, but in the deep ground where old truths grow—truths that don’t shift when the wind changes, truths that hold, even when everything else falls apart.
Because in the end, it’s not the spirit of the age that will last. It never does. It rises, it fades, it’s replaced. But the Word remains. A stone buried deep in the earth, solid and sure, long after the topsoil has blown away.
