Very Little Stones
Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
So I have said more than once that secularism is on its last legs. Where do I get off saying that? Why that pronouncement?
There are a number of ways this argument can be made, but allow me to point to just a couple. These indicators are not my own private claim to be able to see the future, as though I had a crystal ball, but rather indicate which way I see certain important currents running. The things I am pointing to do not seem to me to be disputable, and it also seems obvious to me that they are highly significant.
First, the anemic response of the secularists to the idea of sharia law has been quite striking. For example, consider the various accommodations to forms of sharia law that have been made around Europe. And through recent years, when that has been pointed out here, the laughter and the poopooing has been quite patronizing. "That couldn't happen here, you boob." And then this imam, at Ground Zero no less, pops up and wants to put a mosque there, and does so as an advocate of sharia law.
Now I know there is sharia law and there is sharia law. There is the chopping off of hands and death by stoning, on the one hand, and spiritiual jihad against eating too much cheesecake on the other. Given how human beings generally spread themselves out across a range of opinions, it is not surprising that some advocates of sharia law are not as whackadoodle as others. But this distinction is one that secularism, back in its robust and virulent phases, would have been incapable of making. This is the kind of distinction that secularism can make because it is in the process of unraveling.
Think back to the days of the Christian Reconstructionists. Think of Ezekiel One-Tooth, living on his theonomic compound somewhere in the Ozarks, unbending a little, in order to argue that the biblical requirement of death by stoning could actually be met by a firing squad, for what are bullets, he asks, but "very little stones?" Meets the requirement, he says. And then put alongside him a moderate theonomist, a scholar and careful thinker like Bahnsen, say. Do you think that as many secularists would be rushing to praise the "moderation" of Bahnsen the way they are defending this particular imam? To ask the question is to answer it. No, what is happening is that self-confidence is draining clear out of secularism, as can be seen in their inability to take a clear, public stand against the encroachments of militant Islam. The pathetic European attempts to dab around the edges of this problem, by trying to ban burkas, for example, are a day late and a Euro short.
The second reason I would like to offer for considering secularism a spent force is that the devil is moving from opposing Christendom across the board to a more nuanced stance of supporting and advancing some forms of it. This will require greater development, but here is the outline of it.
When the Church crosses the boarder between "outside and persecuted" to "inside and influential," that border crossing does not mean that the devil has gone into retirement. He does whatever he can to prevent the formation of Christendom in the first place, but then, when it looks as though we are going to get ourselves a Christendom regardless, he is concerned to manage what kind of Christendom we get. It was altogether a good thing that Constantine converted, and there was nothing bad about how the persecutions of the Church ceased. Three cheers for all of it. But the spiritual war continued on, unabated.
Anybody who thinks that the apostle Paul would have had us put up a big "mission accomplished" sign at that point is seriously mistaken. Once we have Christendom, which the devil opposed, are there forms of it that provide him with a great deal of scope to continue his work? You bet.
And I have seen, in recent years, arguments from Christian scholars that, if adopted in the context of a renewed Christendom, would present a really big problem. In fact, they would be a problem in just the same area where people have accused Constantine. The idea is that Constantine wanted something to prop up the existing order, and not something that would transform the existing order. Leave aside for the moment whether the accusation against Constantine is true. It is a plausible accusation nonetheless. "Let's get Jesus to help us to succeed in what we were already trying to do." In a similar way, those Christian thinkers who want the lordship of Jesus Christ acknowledged in public affairs coupled with a continuation of soft socialism (e.g. Wright, Cavanaugh) are wanting something that cannot be. And when they get the former, what they want with regard to the latter will be completely undone. For someone like Eusebius, someone like James Madison turns out to be something of a let down. Oh, well, I would say.
Another area of danger is found in those who urge an accommodation between postmodernism and the Christian ideal of community (e.g. James K.A. Smith). Leave aside for the moment that no one is really postmodern if they are not postDarwinian . . . more like Henry Morris than Brian McLaren. What is passing for postmodern these days is simply a rearguard action, trying to preserve certain customs in "our faith community." Which is not what Jesus told us to do. Jesus, if you recall, told us to go out into all the world in order to impose our metanarrative on all those other little, unbelieving narratives, and to do so in quite a triumphalistic fashion.
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