The first Christendom has been disassembled. Unbelief and its attendant paganisms now hold the West in their pitiless thrall. The decisive tipping point seems to be located around the middle of the nineteenth century. What is surprising is how swiftly the shift occurred. In the first half of the century "everyone" was Christian in the UK and the US. Even non-believers hastened to assure everyone that whilst they did not accept orthodox Christian doctrine, they still believed in a god (which they spelled "God" to convey the notion that their deity was in the same ballpark as the God of orthodox Christianity.) Suddenly, it all changed. Within a few short decades secularism, materialism and atheism became fashionable, acceptable and dominant. How this abrupt change occurred and its deeper causes are matters of considerable curiosity.
James Turner, in Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) presents a diagnosis of how this pervasive change occurred. Turner teaches modern US intellectual history at Notre Dame. His central thesis would be surprising to many: Unbelief was caused by religion.
". . . religion caused unbelief. In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him. If anyone has to be arraigned for deicide, it is not Charles Darwin but his adversary Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, not the godless Robert Ingersoll but the godly Beecher family."This is a momentous hypothesis. If true it implies that the decline of Christendom was caused first and foremost by the Church itself becoming unfaithful to the Living God. The Church entertained false or distorted or idolatrous beliefs, causing the culture as a whole to flip into secularism and Unbelief. A further implication would be that the evisceration of Christendom and the hegemony of Unbelief must be seen as a divine judgment upon God's people. Solomon tolerated idols; his kingdom and descendants came under their control and worshipped them, to the eventual destruction of Israel and Judah four hundred years later.
Ibid., p. xiii
That would be the bad news. The good news would be that this would imply the recovery of Christendom in the West lies in the hands of God's people. If we have fallen under a covenantal curse the Bible makes clear that the reversal and removal of said curse is only by way of repentance and returning to greater faithfulness. God is both gracious and longsuffering. When we repent and return, He will hear, receive, and once again, bless.
The worst of all possible outcomes would be for God's people in the West to remain brutishly ignorant of what their forbears and fathers have done. This would eventually consign us to deeper darkness. It would also be very dangerous. God has already made clear that in the end He will cut off the unfaithful generation, then begin again. All of humanity was wiped out, apart from Noah and his family after one hundred and twenty years of warning (Genesis 6:3). God began again with Noah. When the children of Israel turned to idols in the desert, God's minatory declaration was that He would wipe them all out, and start over with Moses. Only Moses's intercession prevented that outcome. (Exodus 32:7-14) When Israel, in its final apostasy, crucified the One whom God had made both Messiah and Lord, God cut off the house of Israel and began again with the Gentiles (Romans 11:1-24).
In this and subsequent posts, we will endeavour to summarize Turner's argument and evidence. If the argument is true and sound, the implications for the God's people who yet remain in the West would be portentous. We would urgently need to understand what it was our forefathers did which was so compromising and faithless. Then we would need to repent and change, lest God begin again with someone else.
We had better get this right.
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