The Christian in a Secular Age

Abstract

For Wight, the age in which he lived was “a transparent moment in history,” a time of great peril for Christianity and for all Christians.² Faith had been abandoned and assailed: for the first time since Constantine’s conversion of the Roman Empire, secularism and “paganism” were dominant. This perception of unparalleled crisis dominated all of Wight’s writings on religion and marked his work on history, politics, and international relations. It prompted him to bear public witness to his faith, to assume the mantle of the Christian intellectual—though, at times, he thought himself unworthy of such a vocation. It did not, however, make him a “pessimist,” as many have charged, for as Wight himself observed, “no Christian can be an ultimate pessimist.”³

The Apostolic Age found it necessary to insist that faith without works is of no avail. Our age shows the contrary phenomenon, unprecedented since the Roman Empire, of works without faith.

Martin Wight¹