Whatever the achievements of the Christian mission in the past, today we honestly face a double failure: the failure to achieve any substantial “victory” over the other great world religions, and the failure to overcome in any significant way the prevailing and the growing secularism of our culture
Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The thread that weaves together all the content on this blog is the idea that the socio-cultural context that we inhabit–and we take for granted–is changing and the Church must be a light to the world during the upheaval that we are witnessing. Just as the Church Fathers spoke and wrote using the language of their day, so too we as the Church in the twenty-first century much speak and write using the language of our day. This does not mean we seek cultural relevance. This emphatically does not mean that we attempt to make the Gospel relevant for a culture that is in constant flux–the Gospel is always relevant for all generations, even the use of the word “relevant” is problematic. However, Orthodox Christians should not be speaking Greek to Americans. We also must not preach a romanticism of the past–yes, it may be interesting to ponder the ramifications of the return of the Eastern Roman Empire or Holy Russia, but that does not bring twenty-first century postmodern people into the fold.
Today the Church must contend with invasive secularism. We live in a post-Christian society. We are the “diaspora”. Even if we lived in one of the traditionally Orthodox countries, secularism is a threat, more so for countries in the West, especially those in North America.
The quote above is quite scathing for the contemporary Church. Why is it that Christianity seems to be on the loosing side of the battle? And how do we fulfill the missional mandate of Christ in an age indifferent to religion?
In his 1979 work titled The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard opens with this assertion:
[…] the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”
What is the nature of this alteration? When society changes does that de facto mean that knowledge changes too? Pointing to technological proliferation, Lyotard continues:
It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images (via media). The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation.
What, then, is the nature of this alteration of knowledge? Why is it that, echoing Charles Taylor’s question–whom we will discuss more later–a person living in the Middle Ages finds it inconceivable to not believe in God and a person alive now finds it almost impossible to believe in God?
Our Inherited Condition
For the purposes of this post, I will stay away from statistics. Numbers don’t accurately reflect persons. It’s a danger to try to cram people into well demarcated categories. There are usually varying opinions of what people believe. If we attempt to force people into groups, then we are in danger of playing the pernicious Us vs. Them game, or we play the role of Procrustes. If you are interested in some numbers please check out my video that shares the same title as this post here.
Fr. John Behr was asked about the obstacles that the Church faces in today’s culture. The first one was that we as a society went through modernity, but the Church did not. This means that the world has been shaped by modernist values such as science and rationalism. Yet, the Orthodox Church has not gone through modernity, meaning our beloved Tradition is still pre-modern. There are attempts at modernizing the Church….this is something that will often cross paths with the purposes of the blog. Before this is misconstrued and someone sounds the alarm, I am not in favor of modernizing the Church.
For those of you who see no issue at all with the Age of Reason and the Scientific
Revolution–after all they brought us out of an age of superstition and gave us things like vaccines and smartphones–a quote from Douglas Murray will shed some light on the problem:
We may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is its absence. A new religion is being created as we speak by a new generation of people who think they are non-idealogical, very rational, past myth, past story, and who think they are better than they’re ancestors yet never even bothered to study their ancestors
Now Murray is an anomaly, he considers himself a Christian atheist. Ultimately, he doesn’t believe in God (or is at least agnostic about it) and also sees Christianity as the foundation for Western civilization. If our society doesn’t bolster the Judeo-Christian worldview and instill the mythic framing that it conveys, then this is inevitably the detriment of the West. For Murray, then, Christianity is a socio-cultural belief system that shaped the West as we know it, and we must continue to preserve and pass this down to future generations. What he says may be confusing to many, so let’s not get held up here, what one should get from the above quote is that the upcoming generation thinks that they are rational and non-ideological, and they believe that they have moved beyond myth and story (one can also insert here tradition and custom). Notice though that he claims that they have not even acquainted themselves with the past, yet they reject it wholesale. This is an observation that I have heard from multiple people, including people in various camps.
This is the result of society going through modernity. This is the cross-pressure or tension that is felt with many that hold traditional religious beliefs. The Orthodox Church teaches and practices a pre-modern faith but the language that contemporary people speak, the very grammar that we use to structure our thoughts and utterances has gone through the sieve of high modernity. As I’ve mentioned before, the ancient, biblical and cosmic language that shaped our ancestors is nearly lost.
Risking verbosity I will provide some of the dominate beliefs that have restructured society into what one will call “modern.” Many of these I offer a brief explanation (and some commentary), we will go deeper with some (if not all) of these in later posts.
Individualism
Authority shifted away from institutions such as the Church and monarchies to the autonomous individual. The belief of the rational individual becomes the foundation for societal structure and the body politic. Echoing the ancient Greeks, many of the rationalist philosophers during the Enlightenment era taught that if people are rational creatures and if they are instructed in philosophy and virtue then they will make good decisions. Diverging slightly from the Platonic idea, thinkers like John Locke believed that all men are equal, or that all are endowed with reason, this is grounded in Christian anthropology, that all men will stand before their Creator and give an account. For Locke and company, this is a law of nature, self-evident and binding on all people. From Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions; for men being all workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely side Maker…
To Americans this sounds entirely reasonable and truthful because these ideas are the same espoused by the Founding Fathers, and they have been promulgated by our founding documents. Moreover, Locke also wrote theology, and his thought, along with Thomas Reid, had incalculable influence on Protestantism in North America.
Rationalism, Empiricism and the Scientific Revolution
Reason and science have eradicated religion from the public sphere, therefore, relegating it to private belief, mere opinion. The origins of this can easily be traced to Rene Descartes (whom we will discuss more in the near future), but one can also look to Francis Bacon’s inductive method, and, if we follow Charles Taylor’s thought process, the divide between fact and belief, science and religion goes back to the humanism of the Renaissance. Theologically, Schmemann traces the origins to the shift in sacramental thought centered on the Eucharist during the eleventh century and climaxing in 1215 A.D at the Fourth Lateran Council.
For our current purposes, we will look to Francis Bacon. He was very critical of medieval science, which in his mind was too Platonic, meaning they worked from highest-order propositions downward. Bacon thought that science should start with observation and work upward, i.e. the inductive method. Through scientific investigation man could be illumined. From his The Interpretation of Nature:
If man could succeed not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature–a light that should…illuminate all the border regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge…that man would be the benefactor indeed of the human race–the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities
This is very different from patristic anthropology that defines mankind as priest. Bacon’s doctrine is the antithesis of the apophatic and ascetic tradition of the Church Fathers, which teaches that man through ascetic discipline and by the grace of the Holy Trinity will arrive at knowledge of God, Who is ultimately unknowable.
Classical Liberalism
Classical liberalism, also known as capitalism, has reduced persons to consumers, and interactions are nothing more than a transaction with possible pecuniary value. Often connected with capitalism is democracy (in all of its varied forms), which has accentuated the individual’s right to live and work and belief whatever they want to as long as it doesn’t violate common law. In hindsight, as we’re seeing the unraveling of many republics and democracies around the world, these are not a guarantee for equality before the law so much as a way of subjecting the law with the pretext of majority rule, now every person’s opinion not only matters but it is beyond reproach.
The flip-side to democracies and capitalism is socialism and communism. Which for now I won’t get into because the foundation of North American society was not constructed on these ideologies, but I do want to point out that all of these systems are modern systems–albeit, some can be traced back to Plato and even further to Athenian democracy birthed by Cleisthenes–but their latter iterations are thoroughly modern and their purpose is to create an utopian society.
Evolution
I wish to stay clear of most science because the Church has never dogmatized for or against any scientific belief. However, evolutionary theory has had an irrevocable impact on what we believe about ourselves whether we accept or deny it. Evolution teaches that human beings have survived through millions of years of natural selection. Reduced to evolutionary processes, the human person is denuded of meaning. If we are just the result of struggle and survival, genetic mutations and selection, then we are devoid of any transcendent meaning. If we can prove physicalism is true, that meaning can emerge out of physicality, then meaning is still arbitrary because it is contingent upon temporality.
Will to Power
If creatures are a product of survival then everything can be reduced to volition–or the will to power. As Nietzsche wrote: “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” Will to power in conjunction with the notion of progress, which is essentially the extraction of a philosophical system from scientific theory, has shaped modern discourse. The end result is social Darwinism, the dangers of which are evinced by the atrocities of the twentieth century. History is moving forward, progressing, what is in the past is inadequate and inefficient. Futurology is the consummation of forward movement–the march of history and the self-apotheosis of humanity.
Technology
Technology has only exacerbated the problem with hyperconnectivity. Now a world full of neurotic people can be in constant contact with each other. The “global village” of Marshall McLuhan has come true. McLuhan employs biblical language to explain his concern with the ubiquitous and all-encompassing electric technology.
Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language…Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity.
A prophetic voice calling out in the desert, McLuhan wrote this in 1964 in his famous Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Only if he lived to see social media and smartphones, what he would say. These technologies provide each person with the ability to create their own community with very little real obligation to one another. Everyone participates in an act of self-creation; we are simultaneously Frankenstein and creature. And we interact with other virtual creatures. Baudrillard was correct: we’ve entered a period of simulation, where the simulacra precede the real, we live and move and have our being within a hyperreality–and the real itself is a desert.
Education
The classic liberal arts–rhetoric, logic, grammar–are no longer taught in school, people are raised in a system that has devalued the ability to truly articulate what we think and unable to dialog with opposition. Grammar is taught, but it is reduced to sentence structure, it is not taught that it is the foundation of all learning, that logic, which is how to think, and rhetoric, which is how to communicate, is built upon grammar. The postmodern person often finds these suspect, and thinking is reduced to whimsy and feeling. We’ve become overly sensitive, emotional centers of consciousness that are married to our ideas. So when an idea we believe is challenged, we feel like we’re under attack. And this is not just the “young people,” this inadequacy rears its ugly head across generational barriers. One of the things that has created the conditions for this is the aforementioned type and application of technology.
Conclusion
What we are left with is a world bereft of the spiritual, the transcendent. God’s presence is seen as more of an absence, or He is pushed to the periphery, which is way further than the deists pushed Him. The sacramental view of the cosmos is nearly lost and the scriptural story we all indwell has had many sections redacted by science and rationalism. This is our post-Christian condition. How we got to this point we will examine more in upcoming posts. I hope to take us on a journey from the end of the Middle Ages to the present, albeit in a rather hasty and truncated manner. There is too much to discuss about the history of ideas, inevitably this blog will loose its direction if we dwell too long on how we got from there to here. Moreover, we will discuss how the Church can respond to our culture.
