Students tell me that one year a male professor appeared before a Duke freshman physics class dressed in a red dress with matching red shoes and purse. He proceeded to give a 40-minute physics lecture to an astonished class. A little while into the lecture, a student had the temerity to ask: "Professor, what's with the dress, the shoes, and the purse?"

The professor said, "I'm glad you asked. I was beginning to wonder what it would take to shock you people. We will learn in this class that there have been few foundational discoveries in physics in the last three or four decades. Most of the really interesting discoveries made in physics were during the 1920s, the '30s, the '40s. Why have there been no more momentous leaps in physics since then? My theory is that it's the sort of people we're attracting to physics. We get people in physics who like physics because they think we know something, that we can explain things, that we've got explanations and definitions. People like that won't make many discoveries. I'm out looking for people with some imagination, people who come into a physics class expecting to be shocked, planning to be surprised."

To me this story illustrates that we are entering a period in which there is a crisis of secularity. For a long time now we've talked about the "crisis of faith." How can modern, scientific, positivistic people believe the crisis of faith? Now increasing numbers of people—many of them not of our faith—are saying that there is a kind of crisis of secularity. The grip, the hegemony of the secular over modern life, may be ending. And that makes a difference for how we preach.

When did the modern world begin? Many say that it began when a young, Parisian student named Rene Descartes became impressed by the social chaos of his native France. In the 17th century Descartes realized the social order was in chaos. Many of the trusted sources of certainty were losing their hold. "Mother church," the nation—these traditional sources of power and insight seemed to be failing. And he began an intellectual project in which he looked at all the received wisdom that had been given him about why meat spoils, why the stars move as they do, and why something dropped from a large height falls. "I doubt"—this is how he thought about these things. Don't believe something just because it's what your mother told you, just because it's what you received growing up in the village, just because it's what the church has taught. Doubt it. And in doubting, he swept away centuries of received wisdom. "I doubt." Cut things down to that which we can know. And what is that which we can know, that which we can taste, touch, see. "I think, therefore I am"—the great Cartesian slogan. "I doubt"—everything swept away. Thus the modern world was begun.

For there's one thing Descartes reasoned that you can't doubt: the existence of the doubter. I doubt. I doubt that this is a proper explanation for this. I doubt, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am. And thus was the modern way of knowing born.

Where the I, the self, is the sovereign of the universe, the I stands in sovereign judgment upon everything that it sees. It makes up its own mind. Descartes felt that the way to know about something is through something he called "reason", objective knowledge. The way to know about something is to strip yourself down of all your prior conceptions and prejudices and traditions. Strip yourself down and look at the world objectively. That's the way you'll know things for sure. In a chaotic world where many sources of wisdom were being swept away, it seemed that the one thing that could not be doubted was the existence of the one doing the doubting. The sovereign I now stands in judgment upon all experiences and phenomena that go on in the world. And thus was the modern way of knowing born.

And you notice some common characteristics of this. First as we said, all knowing begins with me. "I"—I think therefore I am. Reason for myself. Think this thing through for myself. Another characteristic of modern knowing: detachment. The way to know about something is to step back from that something, to be objective. This is what some have called the development of the onlooker consciousness, in which modern people become onlookers of the world. Not people involved in the push and the pull of everyday experiences, but people who step back from that experience.

Isn't it interesting that the American way to wisdom is to take you at about age 19 and sever you from your parents and your neighborhood and your tradition and your church. We take you and send you to college. We put you in the university. We detach you from your context. We put you with a bunch of strangers for four years. And after we get you detached from momma and daddy and tradition and the church and God and anybody else, we give you a degree and call you educated. This is a wise person who is detached from the maximum amount of potential attachments. The development of the onlooker consciousness.

And I'll bet that even as I've been describing this modern way of knowing, you're probably saying to yourself, Objective? Who says objective? Is there such a thing as objectivity? I know there's no way for me to walk into a college classroom and say, "Now class, I'm going to teach this subject in a completely objective manner. I don't want to do anything to you in this class. I'm just going to put out some information. I'm going to share with you some data. And then you can make up your own mind about it. I'm not trying to put the make on you. I'm not trying to do anything to you in this class." Students would start dropping the class like flies. They'd say, "How perverted is this person? Why would he be teaching? I mean, here's a reading list, here's a curriculum; of course he's trying to do something to us. He just doesn't know what he's trying to do to us. There's no such thing as objective knowing. Everybody starts from somewhere."

I was at a meeting once. We were discussing the relationship between the church and higher education. Someone had been given a speech about the movement of the church out of higher education in this century.. This person said, "Well, you know, when you think about it, the church begins with certain ideological commitments. The church begins with certain preconceptions, certain non-negotiable insights. And you've got the university, which on the other hand is free and open inquiry, and searches for truth wherever it may lead. I think it's only natural that you're going to have conflict between the church and the university. I think it's amazing that we've had so little conflict when you consider that the church is sort of closed and committed to this and you've got the university that's free and open."

I sat there thinking, How do I begin telling this person how dead wrong she is? There's no such thing as beginning "free and open." Everybody begins somewhere. We all speak English. We all accept certain evidence. We don't accept other evidence. There is no such thing as free thinking. Free thinking would be insanity. How do I explain to this person that everybody starts from somewhere. Everybody's standing somewhere, is located in some history, some tradition. Then I remembered, wait a minute, the person that just said this is my president.

So I let it slide. We went onto something else. But this is an example of the arrogance of the modern way of knowing, which presumes that somehow it is possible to get stripped down, detached, objective, to stand in sovereign judgment on the facts.

We saw this demonstrated in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. The first Sunday of Lent that year, I preached on sin. I told the boys and girls that I'm so glad that Lent, the season of sin and the cross and judgment occurs this year during the O. J. Simpson trial. Because most years I've got an uphill battle, convincing you that you're totally depraved. When you look at that trial, you see one of the dumbest ideas anybody ever had, and you can blame it on people like Thomas Jefferson, godless and the secularist that he was. Who in the world ever came up with the notion of trial by jury? The notion that you can take twelve ordinary people off the street, and they have the training to render a fair judgment is one of the stupidest notions humanity has ever gotten. The notion that anybody is capable of rendering a just verdict is a strange idea—but of course it's a nice, modern idea. All you do is bring someone in and say, "Now we'll lock you in a motel room for six months and not let you watch TV. Then we're going to give you the data, we're going to give you the facts, just the facts. And then you will render an objective, fair, dispassionate judgment. Strange idea.

I saw a survey that said something like 70 percent of all white Americans thought O. J. Simpson was guilty. Something like 65 percent of all black Americans thought he was not guilty. Hey, we're all looking at the same data, right? There's no such thing as objective, detached knowing.

My friend Richard Lischer in his book on Martin Luther King and his preaching noted that in the mainline denominations, in the predominately white church, when we want to understand the Bible, we're taught to step back from Scripture. Get back from it. Look at it. Dissect it. Try to put it in its original context. Get some distance between you and the text before you can make judgments about it. Generally the tradition in the African American church, of which Martin Luther King was a part, said if you want to understand the Bible, get into it. Step into the text. Not out of it. Put on the text. Try it on. Put yourself in the story. See, two very different ways of understanding. One, is an example of the modern Enlightenment secular viewpoint. The other is not.

In high school biology, we have strange ways to understand a frog. First, we kill the frog. Then we split it open, tear it apart, label all its parts. That explains the frog. Any other questions?

But we did kill the frog.

Well, yeah, this is the way we do it. It's the onlooker consciousness, the person who steps back and stands in judgment on reality.

There are many modern American people who are now saying that it's odd that in this way of knowing we did not learn more about the world, but we learned more and more about less and less. The world did not broaden with a modern world view, but it shrank.

Every year at commencement, I'll sit at the podium. When somebody gets a PhD, they print the subject of the PhD dissertation in the commencement program. I like to read those during the ceremony. The Foreign Policy of Albania from June 1950 until July of 1950. Some poor soul has spent six years of her life working on that. And the president stands up and says, "These people have done independent, significant scholarly research." I always want to say, who gives a darn? Nobody will ever read that stuff. More and more about less and less. Reality gets chopped up into very small pieces. This is the modern way of knowing. You get things down to the smallest cell, the smallest atom, the smallest nucleus, and then you understand. No wonder modern people wake up and say, "My life seems terribly fragmented, separated. I didn't learn more about the world. It's like I'm living in less and less of it." Or as one of my students said a while back, modern American people have psychological problems because that's the only type of problems that we're permitted to have. We've lost a language for having any other, more significant problems.

My last church was a blue collar, Methodist-type church. Some plumber would come in and tell me he's depressed. I said, "Well, why do you think you're depressed?"

"I'm kind of compulsive, neurotic. I'm obsessive, I'll admit it."

I said, "Where did you get that language. Who told you that kind of stuff?"

That's the only language we've got left to describe our lives when they become mysterious to us. A lot of people are chafing under the confines of the modern worldview. It's not enough anymore.

I went to a funeral a few months ago for a 19-year-old who starved herself to death. As we're coming out of the funeral, a person said to me on the way to the parking lot, "Well, you know why this happened, don't you?"

I said, "No, I don't. Why did this happen?"

He said, "We now know that you have anorexia because you have young women who inappropriately attach themselves to a father figure, and then when they reach the ambiguities of puberty and they're unable to deal with these ambiguities, they just starve themselves to death."

And I said, in a loving pastoral way, "That is about the most perverted, sickest, stupidest thing that I have ever heard. How dare you? A vibrant, 19-year-old, a life at its prime destroyed, and you stand here in the parking lot and explain it to me? Is there no limit to the arrogance of you people? Could we just sit quietly for a moment and ponder the mystery that a fellow human being would rather destroy herself than live here with us? Let's just be quiet."

A lot of us are getting sick and tired of explanations that don't explain. And meanwhile, the world gets more and more narrow. People keep showing up and saying, "You know, something else is going on in my life that cannot be reduced. I have problems that are more interesting than just merely 'physiological adjustment problems.'" The secular world is relentless in its reductionism, in its pigeonholing and its categorization and labeling. That world, I think, is ending. Its hegemony over thought is giving way to a search for thinking which is deeper and broader and can do more justice to the thickness of human experience. Forgive a Christian preacher for being sort of excited about that, because we work out of this ancient book, and we're always told "You have a big problem because you've got this ancient book, and it's pre-scientific, and you can't find a telephone mentioned in it." You've got these modern, critical, skeptical people.

Secularity tended to be skeptical and critical of everything but its own secularity.

Well, now people are willing to discuss something more than the modern. It's a great opportunity for us. I don't think we ought to spend too much energy worrying about speaking to secular people. For one reason, it's rare to run into them—a truly godless person these days. You run into a pagan, but it's hard to run into a really godless person, particularly at the university. You go to a party somewhere, and you run into someone who's had something to drink, and he comes up and says, "I went to church as a kid. I suppose we all go to church as children, but I've got my PhD now. I think that religion is not about rituals and going to church. It's mostly about living with your fellow man and trying to do right."

And I say, "You know, that is so profound. Did you make that up yourself, or did you get that from somewhere? Somebody give me a felt-tipped pen; I want to write this down. You must be some kind of genius or something. Come up with that yourself?" God, give me patience.

This minister was telling me the other day about a Presbyterian minister who was on a plane with someone. Sat down on the plane, and the plane took off, and he kind of leaned over and introduced himself. And the minister said, "What do you do for a living?"

And he said, "I'm an astronomer at University of Southern California."

"That's great."

"So what do you do?"

"I'm a Presbyterian minister."

And the astronomer said, "Well, you know, I don't go to church, but I think religion is just basically about loving your neighbor."

And the Presbyterian minister said, "Well, you know, I don't study astronomy much myself, but I think astronomy is basically summed up in Twinkle, twinkle little star / How I wonder what you are."

A marvelous ally in speaking to the crisis of secularity is Scripture. We're privileged to work out of the Bible, the Bible that specializes in assaulting various worldviews. It also assaults the secular, which I prefer to call paganism rather than secularity. That image of Paul there in Acts 17 when he comes to Athens. He starts out by saying, "People of Athens, I perceive that you're very, very religious." You know, they think that he's flattering them or something. But that's about the worst thing that a Jew can say about somebody else. You are really religious. You will bow down to anything if given half a chance to bow down to something. I've traveled a good bit in the Mediterranean, and I'd say that since I've been in Athens, I've seen more gods per square foot than I have seen in any town. You've got a god for everything—sex, war, money. You've even got a god outside of town that's an unknown god. You're ready to bow down, you've got the altar ready, and the minute that someone discovers the name of it you'll bow down to that too.

I think that's a nice model. I think it's okay to mock secular pretentions.

The Bible, not having participated in the modern world and its delusions and reductionisms, can be a marvelous thing. It's such a wonderfully disordered, messy, rich, thick book. I mean, there are people who've probably been working out of it for forty years who are still shocked by it on Sunday mornings, surprised. I preached eight sermons on one text. Then I go back to that text again and see something else in it being revealed. It's thick. There's just impenetrable layers and options of it. And that's wonderful.

The Bible assumes that if you're going to learn anything, it'll probably be not by delving deeper into your ego or stripping you from your prejudices—as if you could—that most good knowing comes as a gift. Grace. If you see anything worth seeing in the world, it's this revelation, a gift. It's also fair to say that the Bible assumes that all-knowing has some kind of thickness about it, if you'll use that word. It's a kind of largeness. And we don't like that.

I've come, for instance, lately just to appreciate that the very form of Scripture says something, just the form of it, the way it is. Jesus never answers any questions. Time and again they'll ask him a question, and he comes back with a story. And the story doesn't seem related exactly to the question. And then he tells the story, and he rarely, if ever, tells you what the story is supposed to be about. "Jesus, should we pay taxes or not?"

Jesus: "Who's got a quarter?"

"Here's one."

"Whose picture is on it?"

"George Washington."

"Well, then give it to him. I mean, if he likes that stuff so much to put his picture all over it, then let him have it. But you be really careful; don't you give anything to Caesar that belongs to God."

"Okay…should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

It's a typical moment. It's thick.

I was talking to a wonderful Muslim the other day who's been investigating Christianity. He decided if you want to know about Christians, you ought to go where they worship. And they pick a big church to worship in because they must be doing it right if they're so big. So he goes to Willow Creek because he lives in Chicago. And I said, "Well, how was it at Willow Creek?"

He said, "It was good. They had a good talk, and they had some good music."

And I said, "What did you learn about Christians?"

And he said, "The sermon was entitled 'What Jesus Would Say to Rush Limbaugh.' "

And I said, "Wow, what would Jesus say to Rush Limbaugh?"

And he said, "The preacher said something like 'Rush, you've been given marvelous opportunities for communications. You should use these opportunities well.'"

And I said, "Well, Omad, write this down. Here's the first thing. All Christians don't see this stuff the same way. Okay? I can think of other things that Jesus might say to him. Why don't you write this down. Christians are not all on the same wave-length. We read this stuff differently. Write that down, all right?"

And he noted that if you want to know who Christians are, he's seen people falling down, he's seen people raising arms, he's seen people throw stuff in worship, he's seen people sit there and never move for an hour. And they're all Christians.

And I said, "Well, all right, it's a mess, but there are those of us that love it."

I tell you my point, my little point, is the Bible itself produces that. There's a kind of richness there. There's a thickness there. I don't know anywhere in the Bible where there's four spiritual laws about anything."

It's as rich as life itself. And one of the great things about being a preacher is that you get to keep coming back to this stuff. And a lot of the function of Scripture is not to tell us anything, I mean, not to explain, but to do something to us. To entice us into a world that is rich and diverse, thick. Maybe to draw us into a relationship.

He wants you to follow him. It's an adventure. And it's doing something to you that will change your life. It's a different way of knowing.

The good news is we are entering a period in which the old, modern worldview is loosing its grip. People are wandering and exploring. We ought to be there to say to them, "Is the world too flat for you?" Okay, we can help you with that. Is your life an impenetrable mystery to you? We'd love to talk about that." Secularity, our old enemy, is in big trouble.

I was talking to this Lutheran pastor in Philadelphia, and she said that suddenly these young adults start showing up in the church. She asked, "Now what would you all like to do?"

And they said, "We'd like to have Bible study."

"Okay."

She said to me, "I decided that we'd study the book of Acts because it's about the church, it's a way of getting these people in the church, finding out what's going on." So she said, "I had the first Bible study, and I said, 'Now, people, in our Bible study we're going to be meeting angels. Okay? There's going to be some faith healings. There'll be visions. We're not going to get hung up on that. We're not going to worry about that. Because these were ancient writers trying to express some great truth through these primitive means. So we will be interested in talking about what is the meaning of this more than worrying about that."

About the third week into this Bible study with these young adults, Philadelphia, PA, she said to them, "Hey look, if any of you have had a vision or you've personally experience miraculous healing, if you've met God face to face, keep it to yourself, would you? We don't have time to go into any more of that stuff."

She said, "Here I came out to proclaim the gospel to these skeptical, narrow, modern people, but by the time I got out of seminary, there weren't any more modern people left. There are all these people who are interested in the weird, and honored the strange, and just loved the mystery. And that's great."

William Willimon is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. He also is editor of Pulpit Resource and the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching (Westminster John Knox) and author of Undone by Easter (Abingdon).