When the Gospel Feels Too Small: Tom Long on Atheistic Anxiety

It's always a joy to speak with Rev. Dr. Tom Long, one of the most trusted voices in contemporary preaching. In this clip we reflect on an insight from the late Rev. Dr. Edmund A. Steimle. Our conversation centers on Steimle’s Advent sermon, High Road in the Wilderness (Episode #4212), and on how all of us, preachers and everyday Christians alike, respond when God seems silent.

Drawing from Isaiah 40, Steimle names the tension between our deep spiritual longing and the quiet of God’s voice. Tom expands that theme so beautifully, naming the “atheistic anxiety” that creeps in when we try to fill God’s silence with our own certainty. It’s a timely reminder for anyone walking through seasons of doubt, change, or cultural turmoil.

Transcript

Rev. Dr. Tom Long
When I heard Steimle say that in the sermon, I thought about American Christianity and how it has an impatience about it.

Rev. Dr. Katie Givens Kime
Yes.

Rev. Dr. Tom Long
It wants God to speak now, and always, and every day. And when God chooses to be silent, then we have to make up a God that speaks. And when we make up a God that speaks, we end up with an idolatrous form of Christianity.

In fact, Steimle wrote in a chapter he contributed to in an edited book called Preaching the Story. He quoted a British theologian, R. E. C. Brown, who said, “For almost every preacher, there comes a time when the gospel seems too little to go on. And when the gospel seems too little to go on, then we begin to preach a strength that we have manufactured, and it is a form of atheistic anxiety.”

And so I think Steimle is lining up that experience of the silence of God for the people to whom Isaiah spoke, and the silence that we are experiencing in the middle of our turmoil now from God. God is not speaking with banners across the sky to tell us what to do or how to be. But God will speak and act, but in God’s own time and in God’s own way.

Explore the Full Sermon

Explore Rev. Dr. Edmund Steimle’s full sermon from Episode 4212 >>>