Is The Sea of Faith Coming Back In? Or is it a Spiritual Tsunami?

A lot has been said about the sea of faith coming back in. Christianity seems to be getting a second life (resurrections and all that!) in the West.  Books and podcasts abound.

The term “the sea of faith” comes from the 19th century poet, Matthew Arnold, who in his poem, Dover Beach, made this observation:

Arnold’s take on the world was that not much was going to be left to believe in, except perhaps, you and I. The You Do You movement had its roots surely in the Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

But as the likes of Justin Brierley have documented (and we see it in the returning to faith of major intellectual figures around the world), the immanent frame of the materialist world is proving to be less than satisfactory. Turns out that people are seeking meaning and purpose in life, not just experiences and white goods.

Brierley’s excellent book and podcast, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, documents the shift away from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and their almost crowing rejection of the supernatural, to a stand which, if not entirely accepting of faith, is a little more humble about the presuppositions of modernity.

So Christianity is making a comeback. Despite the decline in church attendance. Despite the fact that the institutions of the West are still hostile.

But here’s the rub: the returning sea is not so much an even-spread, metronomically moving clear ocean of Christian creeds and confessions, a return to evangelism the old way, and a wide-eyed curiosity about two ways to live.

No, the returning sea is more of a tsunami, a crashing, rushing, tangled mess of spiritual flotsam and jetsam, churned along and dragged into the early 21st century shore as a result of seismic changes in our culture, our ideologies and our failed attempts to create a vision of life that is worth loving sans God.

It’s a mess that is being sucked back into the spiritual vacuum of the West, and it’s dragging with it all sorts of foreign and exotic objects that many Christians in the West are ill-equipped to deal with.

If you are a Christian leader and you are waiting for the 1950s to come back so that you can get everyone to church one again, then you are in for a shock.

If you are a Christian who thinks that the devil’s main game in this next onrushing tsunami is to convince everyone in the West that he does not exist, then you are going to be swept away by the current.

That was the old West. Turns out, like in so much of the rest of the world, that the devil’s main game will be to convince naive, young Westerners with no Christian knowledge at all, that his main game is to give you power. That he’s not all that bad. That he’s been misunderstood.

As someone said to me this very morning, sitting watching the ocean on a warm Western Australian morning, wherever you find a cross, you’ll find a pentagram lurking nearby.

If you think that you can give people the sensible, and immanently-framed alternative to the secular frame, then you are as locked into the secular frame as the secularists.

The spiritual tsunami is going to require much more robust Christian frameworks and deep foundations than the modernist project that seems to have affected so many church settings. The deep pragmatism of church growth. The lame moralism of sub-biblical modern evangelicalism. The quiet and not so quiet rejection (whether actively or passively) of the unseen realm.

All of that will be swept away by the roaring spiritual needs and spiritual wash of the oncoming tsunami. We are already living in a world in which ostensibly sensible and educated Westerners are turning to all sort of crazy stuff that we thought had long been laid to rest.

Tarot. Psychic readings. Dabbling with spiritual forces that are way darker than we could imagine. People are aching for something transcendent. Anything transcendent. And that’s the problem.

The lack of guard rails in our culture due to the loss of the Christian framework should caution us that this tsunami will rack up a body count, just as surely as the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami did.

While the water did a lot of damage back on that day, it was the flotsam and jetsam; the huge dislodged trees, boulders, cars, buildings, that destroyed people’s bodies.  One blow to the head and it wouldn’t matter if you were a beginner swimmer or an Olympian, you were dead.

And the devil will be pretty happy with that.  Dip your toe into the swirling sea of faith, he’ll purr. Just a bit lower. Lower. Now you’re waist deep. How’s that feel? Next minute…

Churches are going to find that many of those bodies eventually wash up on their shores. And they are going to have to have a strong gospel response that is grounded in something more than the immanent frame if they are going to be of any help to people.

This is not to say that we are supposed to just go with the “woo-woo”, so to speak. One of the defining features of the early church as the clear waters of the faith carved there way through the ancient world, was how the gospel dispelled superstition.

Not by merely presenting a sensible, materialist alternative to the crazy stuff. But by presenting a risen and ruling Christ, a Holy Spirit who was both powerful and intimate, and an energy that broke the chains of the darkness that held the ancient world spellbound.

And while churches and Christians will find themselves confronted by the obvious spiritual forces of this coming tsunami, they must not forget that the ordinary means of grace, the Word, the prayers, the meal, the gathering, are deeply spiritual and enlivening activities.

The great irony to me is that exactly the same time that evangelicals have lowered the barrier to entry in church to the point that it looks almost rational and sensible to join, – in fact it looks just like joining anything else – people are craving for something beyond those things. Not less than them for sure. But more than them.

That’s why my word of the year for 2025 is “Transcendence”.  People are looking for it. Anywhere and everywhere. And the incoming tsunami will be more than happy to provide it outside the parameters of the church. At the cost of their eternal souls of course. And often at the cost of their mortal bodies along the way.

I have much more to say about this, and write about this, and if “Transcendence” is my word of the year in 2025, then expect it to pop up in my blog posts and podcast.

But let me leave here today with this: the roar you hear returning to the forlorn still-damp sands of the West, may well herald a time of gospel fruit for the church such as we have not seen in a couple of centuries. But don’t expect a metered, measured tide of clear blue water.

Expect, rather, a churning, foaming, flotsam-and-jetsam-laden  tsunami that has the capacity to destroy as many people as it saves.

More on this later.