Watching our Culture Die

My friend Randy Breen asked me to respond to this article, so I offer these thoughts. https://thegospelside.com/2016/10/03/watching-our-culture-die-where-the-secular-culture-went-wrong-and-what-christians-can-do-to-help/

Since Randy specifically included me in his request for responding to this article, I’ll give it a shot, even though a few days late. As I suspect he guessed, I’d present something of an alternate perspective, without actually arguing with the piece itself. My sense is that in an effort to make a single point, the article is just too brief to deal with the many nuances that surround the questions to which it speaks.

I would suggest that western civilization is not based on a single narrative but on a rich blend of narratives, not all of which have Christian or even biblical roots. For example, without a  doubt, Greek/Roman and Nordic mythologies inform much of the self-understanding of western civilization. Rather than seeing the Christ narrative as the defining story of western civilization, I see it as the defining narrative of the Church which has had a significant impact on western civilization. Part of understanding what is happening with western civilization in our time requires recognizing that for a host of reasons the Christ narrative is so radically countercultural that even at the height of Christendom and the appeal of the US as a “Christian nation” (which really took the form we recognize today in the Cold War to distinguish the US from godless communism) its broad acceptance was in a version watered down to be more polite and less threatening.

Just within the last few days I wrote about how we who seriously want to follow Jesus are, always have been and always will be exiles. Jeremiah 29:4-7 gives some guidance about how to live as exiles. http://nstolpewriting.blogspot.com/2016/10/sent-into-exile.html Last year I wrote about why I am more concerned about the spiritual health of the Church than the religious landscape of the country. http://nstolpewriting.blogspot.com/2015/05/i-am-more-concerned-about-spiritual.html I hope that by juxtaposing some of this sort of thinking with the article Randy posted with prompt deep and prayerful thought. I’ve written about these sort of things quite a bit and posted at http://nstolpewriting.blogspot.com/ . Norman Stolpe

An additional thought in a somewhat different direction. Cultures and civilizations are always fluid and in transition. There is no “normal” state to “go back to.” We cannot find an ideal moment and freeze it in perpetuity. I just turned 70 and my wife, Candy, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. We are in the process of discovering and living this next transition of our lives, and though we have some guidance, the path is not totally clear. I have been aware for several years, and the recent musical “Hamilton” brought it up again, that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had radically conflicting visions of what this then new nation was to become. Jefferson saw an agrarian society with wide open spaces, and for all of his words about “all men being created equal,” the pragmatics were based on a landed aristocracy who defined what happened for everyone else. Hamilton saw an industrial society full of inventive people creating new ways to build a shared economy. Though Jefferson prevailed at the time, Hamilton’s dream came closer to the reality. As Jefferson saw that happening, he wrote of his fear that such a country would not survive long but collapse and the dreams of liberty be lost. Such tensions and transitions occur at every juncture of history, including our own. The 1950s were not utopia, especially for those who were left out of the post-war suburban boom.

From a theological perspective, I see our human insistence on seeking an idealized stable state is a built in longing for the Kingdom of God that comes by being made in the image of God. However, I see our efforts to create that stable state ourselves as a doomed idolatry akin to the Tower of Babel. Faith calls us to supreme and sole loyalty as citizens of the Kingdom of God who aspire to be God’s agents of peace and justice, righteousness and mercy in every human society, civilization and culture until the King himself comes.