October 19, 2008
"The Church is on the firing line..."
...This new age will have the merit of discarding that hypocrisy by which the modern world evoked the forms, without the substance, of Christianity. In so doing, the post-Christian man will have to come to terms with the fact that to live without Christ is a hard choice with serious, even brutal, consequences.Posted by John Weidner at October 19, 2008 05:49 AM
The believer too will be faced with the increasingly inescapable realization the faith itself is a hard choice. On the one hand, this brave, new, post-Christian world will have little place in it for him. On the other hand, he will discover in all their fullness the demands his faith makes upon him, when he has to live it without the external affirmations afforded him within a Christian culture. He may indeed discover for the first time, as Guardini suggests, what it really means to be a Christian....
.....At the same time, it may well be that "the massive failure of Christendom itself", as Percy puts it, is already creating the only conditions, in the West at least, within which a genuine renewal of faith can take place. During a conversation I had with Walker Percy a few months before his death, he commented that, in his judgement, the Church is in a better position today than she has been in centuries. He thought the identification of culture and faith was disastrous for the Church in many ways.
He cited Kierkegaard's observation that it is almost impossible to become a Christian in Christendom. That is, people within a Christian culture are inclined to believe they automatically become Christians simply by virtue of having been born into that culture. Today people can see that no such identification exists and that a choice must therefore be made. He believed a new consciousness is emerging; and thus, the realization that the Church and the culture are at odds is a key, perhaps even the key, element of this new consciousness. As a result, the Church is on the firing line and that, as Percy saw it, is exactly where she properly belongs....
-- From The Church and the Culture War, by Joyce A. Little, 1995
John, quoting Little, writes:
"He thought the identification of culture and faith was disastrous for the Church in many ways."
Bingo! Ding*ding*ding*ding*ding*ding
It's been no less disastrous for the culture and society as well. When culture and society are somehow seen as godly because of their identification with the Church, then by extension the ungodly things that cultures and societies do come to be seen as godly simply by association.
I think that's how we got to this awful state of affairs in our political life, John. We consented, by our silence, in the creation of Leviathan because it "must be OK"-- surely such a monster can't enslave us because this is a Christian country, after all. Or so the reasoning has gone.
Posted by: Hale Adams at October 18, 2008 11:01 PMAs I see it, Christians can only be Christians as individuals. The state cannot be Christian. Nor can the culture. Even the Church has trouble being Christian. This is the link you have overlooked, John, between Christianity and libertarianism. They are not incompatible.
Posted by: Alan Sullivan at October 24, 2008 06:35 PM(Just got back from a weekend trip)
"Christians can only be Christians as individuals."
I don't think that is true. (And of course Tertullian famously said, "No one can be a Christian alone.")
But Christian countries and cultures have certainly had some mixed results.
The problem is, where do virtue and morality come from? I have yet to see any convincing argument that any man-made mechanism can generate them.
They don't work unless they possess Authority. Authority derived from the gods or perhaps the long-ago god-like ancestors. (I recommend this post, on the subject of authority.)
I think that we are currently coasting on an inheritance of virtues and morality from a Christian culture plus the authority of near-deified founders. (And, surprise, surprise, what do Leftists attack?)
Libertarianism is just relying on this stock of virtue as though it were something like sunlight, that shines no matter what we do. I think this is a catastrophic mistake, and that the supply is dwindling, and we are spending our capital, without replenishing it.
Posted by: John Weidner at October 26, 2008 03:15 PM
