Precipice

Anne is away, and I am reading the prophet Jeremiah. Maybe not a good thing to do alone. Anyway, one theme is clear in the prophet: because Israel rejected God as their father and lawgiver, God turned them over to other gods, including the gods that they worshipped in their syncretistic religion. I hate being so simplistic, but that's how things work.

If the demographics hold, Europe will have a Moslem majority within twenty-five years. She has rejected the God of the two testaments and opted for secular humanism. The England of Richard, Magna Carta, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Milton, Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Charles II (the merry one), and the Glorious Revolution, is awash with minarets. According to the cardinal rule of secular democracies (“we are the world”) she has welcomed the wolves in with the sheep, and cannot make the philosophical shift to stop the flow. Secular democracies are suicidal. But, according to Jeremiah, that is how things work.

What about the United States? The shift from the God of the two testaments to secular humanism is obvious, but the demographics aren’t quite as bleak. It’s possible that a new series of 9/11’s could force us to compromise (remember “peace with honor?”). In our new openness to welcome all gods, we may find ourselves ruled by one of them.

Of course the exegetical question of parallel arises. Is the United States the new Israel, or do Jeremiah’s warnings apply only to the church? I am still working on that one. The culture founded by the early Puritans was certainly self-consciously Christian. How much their covenant with God is still binding is a debate that may never end. My guess is that God does not as easily change His mind about agreements as we do.

There remains the question of the church as a parallel to Jeremiah’s Israel. This is dangerous ground, because I am a fallen man, given to being far too critical, and it would be easy to single out Catholics, liberals, dispensationalists, or somebody else I choose to dislike to blame for the fall of good old fashioned Calvinistic Americanism. That is too simplistic.

On the other hand, there are sins in the church. The church failed twice to stand for racial equality in our culture. Rosenstock stated somewhere that the humanists in America have out-humanized the Christians. This is true. The church in our culture has been a keeper of the status quo rather than a forerunner into new territory. There are also the prevailing sins of legalism and division that I wrote about in the series on Decadence and the Word (Dec 2009).

But I don’t want to go on a witch hunt for some specific wickedness. What troubles me is that the church--at least the “conservative” church--does not seem to be in a repentant mood. She is angry at losing hegemony culturally and politically. She is pointing the finger at the secular powers and blaming them for the dawning precipice. She doesn’t seem to be able to face the future without fear. Introspection has been drowned by eschatological escapism. I have a couple of responses to this:

1) Things change. In the Old Testament, when empires changed, when invasions occurred, the “sun was darkened, the moon turned to blood, and the stars fell from heaven.” Every few hundred years fault lines appear in history and things crack and heave, and an era ends to give way to a new one. God and history don’t mingle too well with comfort.

2)The church is in the center of God’s heart and all of history revolves around her. Events take place for her sake. Hard times and the collapse of eras strengthen her. When the lights come back on in a culture, the church always shines the brightest. And each time she is more humble and wiser. I love the story of T’ruth, the genetic turtle girl in Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction work The Rediscovery of Man. She guards and nurses the wisest man in the world in a time of storms and chaos, until he is needed again. She wears two crossed pieces of wood around her neck, and is a follower of the forbidden religion of the God Hung High. An allegory: truth guards wisdom until it is again needed by the world. That’s the mission of the church in history, and that, my friends, is exciting.