Roots and Origins

The Power and the Glory

The questions, Who are we, and where did we come from? are always pertinent.  The most potent cultures are those which have a long lineage faithfully recorded, analysed, critiqued, and learned.  In this sense the most potent is the Christian culture because of the length of our lineage and the rigour with which it has been recorded, passed down, and reflected upon.  Not that there is no room for improvement in this regard, but the reality abides that the Christian faith is a historical religion, steeped in history, genealogies, kingdoms, and records--which Christians are expected to know and meditate upon perpetually.

We refer, of course, not just to the post-Ascension era, but to human history from the Creation and Fall onwards up to the present.  In this sense the Christian faith is unique.  We regard Noah and Abraham as our forbears, our fathers.  Moses is our great redeemer, a faithful forerunner of the incarnate Divine redeemer.  David is our king, a lesser messiah before his greater Son.  We are citizens of the restored Davidic Kingdom (as Christ is David's greatest son, and the kingdom has been given to Him, Revelation 22:16).  These references are not mere images or metaphors.  They are historical, literal, and prophetic realities.

The modern secularist culture knows little of these realities.
  Moreover, it has no meaningful history of its own.  It's memory and heritage struggles to go back beyond a century--and even then the memory is of things somewhat irrelevant.  We have seen the recent upsurge in interest in World War I and II.  Attendance at memorial services is rising, even while the ranks of veterans are thinning with age.  The oft repeated explanation is that younger people are wanting to know where "they have come from" and what the deeds of their forebears were.  This hunger is a vague echo of God Himself, Who has manifested Himself to mankind through our fathers, over centuries of redemptive history.

But interests in personal lineage aside, there is little understanding of these great and terrible events as they bear upon the progress or regression of Western history, or of how Western history takes its place in the meta-history of the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, of how Moses is the great forerunner of Western civilisation, and of how all Western history is part of the meta-history of Christ and His Kingdom, established that the entire world might eventually be redeemed (John 3:16).

Consequently, secularist history is pretty thin.  This thinness testifies, in turn, to the brittleness of modern culture.  It has few roots, and a dimly seen heritage.  This can generate a reactionary response--a deep longing and an unthinking, irrational fear of losing anything from the past.  There is abroad now a desire to make everything in the past sacred.  To preserve all.  To hallow it as holy heritage.  To lock everything into a freeze-frame photograph and resist all change or development.

Here is one prosaic example:  Auckland City has an active "heritage" movement--over 60 interest and lobby groups, by some counts. They are upset that the local city council has rejected their insistence that all older houses in the city be subject to a protection, heritage order.

Heritage campaigners are dismayed by the rejection of a council proposal to protect pre-1944 character housing areas.  The Auckland Unitary Plan Independent Hearings Panel rejected the council proposal for a pre-1944 damage control overlay in the proposed Unitary Plan as "unnecessary". . . . The panel says based on the evidence submitted, the pre-1944 buildings are not deserving of historic heritage scheduling or inclusion in a special character area.

"There is also no evidence to show that they are at any significant risk of demolition or relocation or that the areas where there are pre-1944 buildings are at risk of losing their character," says the panel in an interim guidance decision.  Sally Hughes from the Character Coalition, an organisation made up of 60 heritage and community groups, says this has come out of the blue and has left many heritage campaigners deflated.  She says the Character Coalition had lobbied for the pre-1944 demolition control and has spent a lot of time and money presenting and providing evidence for its inclusion.  [NZ Herald]

This particular heritage campaign is focused upon residential dwellings.  In particular the objective is to prevent the demolition of older houses and the rebuilding new ones on the same site.  The word "heritage" is significant.  It is a desire to preserve the past as an inheritance for Auckland city.  We understand the desire--which is far more than a superficial nostalgia.  It is an echo of what it means to be a human being, made in God's image.  The past is indeed our inheritance.  But the essence, force, and power of the past does not reside in preserving 60 year old residential housing.  Recording it, to be sure.  Maintaining some specimens and examples, certainly.  Such social history is valuable, particularly and most critically when it is related back through recording and narrating the consequences of the invocation, "Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  But to study and meditate upon the past by locking us all into it is  folly indeed.

Modern secular heritage campaigners unknowingly testify to the human race's yearning to understand, remember, and invoke the past.  "Roots" is a powerful cultural motif.  It reflects a desire to experience the lineage and power of our present existence.  Sadly, for the secularist, these things are faint echoes of a far deeper truth--a more blessed reality, which they do not see.  In fact, the times--past present and future-- belong to Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

When we come to understand and accept that His genealogy--stretching back through millennia--is also ours, we catch our first glimpse of the glory and power of Christendom.  The struggles and travails of the present day then become "a small thing".