The next chapter of Clapp’s book, “Tradition and Progress,” correctly identifies one of the central tensions in American life. “The United States considers itself at once the most traditional and the most modern and progressive of Western — or any other — countries” (v. 63). We are far more religious than any other industrialized society, and “traditional values” are a selling point for us in political campaigns, school selection, and more. We are far more suspicious of hard leftism than our European cousins are. At the same time, we appear to be a country willing to try anything once, and all our products are, or promise to be, new, improved, faster, sleeker, and so on.
Clapp astutely captures and illustrates this tension by pointing to all the train songs that country music produces, apparently without any effort at all. Country music is fiercely conservative and traditional, and yet one of the icons of country music is that fire-breathing dragon of the Industrial Revolution, the locomotive. “Right here, then, we encounter the irony of the simultaneous American embrace of both tradition and progress. Country music is considered highly traditional music, and train songs are at its heart” (p. 68).
I have felt this tension personally for many years. By this I do not mean that I have merely acknowledged it as a debating point that somebody made, but rather that I have felt it in my bones . . . every time I hear that lonesome whistle moan. Well, actually, trains don’t enter into it in a big way, but the tension between tradition and progress most certainly does. I have been up to my neck in trying to reestablish the medieval Trivium in classical and Christian schools, have been an advocate of confessional Christian worship of a medieval Protestant stripe, and have fought for years in defense of the “permanent things,” hating all forms of postmodern incoherence and relativism. At the same time, I am very much at home in the world of laptops, blogs, digital music, and the creative destructions wrought by free people and free markets. The static conservatives (“don’t change anything“) really do seem mossbacked to me. The cheerleaders of change (“change everything, just because we can”) seem on the other hand to have completely lost their minds. And the tension can only be embraced, enjoyed, and resolved, as I see it, by a robust Calvinism that refuses to usurp the prerogatives of the triune God.
Clapp complains about the idolatry that usurps “prerogatives Scripture and tradition assign only to God” (p. 78). Exactly, but there is a fundamental question that Clapp (and others who worry about the dizzying pace of change around us) appears to be missing. Suppose “we” look at all the things that are unfolding around us — globalization, demo-capitalism, rock and roll, the Internet, and all the rest of it. The issue is not whether we approve or not. The issue is not whether social critics might have something to say about this or that. The issue is what we shall do when the discussion is over — shall “we” (whoever “we” are) decide to “do” something about it? Where is the brake, and can we even reach it? Are we allowed to reach it? Where is the accelerator, and can we reach that also? The answer to all these questions is no. All this change is the result of the sum total of our actions as individual humans, but there is no lawful decision-making apparatus available that will enable us to do the slightest thing about it. Any attempts to create such an apparatus will only create various despotisms, and will not achieve their declared aims. Imagine an agency created by the United Nations dedicated to solving the problem of the sun rising in the east — the consensus among scientists these days being that it would be better to have it rise in the north. The end result of creating such an agency would not be a sun coming up over Canada, but it would result in a bunch of human beings regulated, enslaved and hassled to death. As C.S. Lewis notes somewhere, the power of men over nature is not really power over nature — it is the power of some men over other men, with nature (or the name of “nature”) as the instrument. This is the design behind all the global warming hooey. The point is not to change the climate, cooling it down. The point is to change the political climate, warming it up to those temperatures well-favored by internationalist power monkeys.
The same thing applies to every form of social engineering. If someone declares that globally bad things are happening because a bunch of individuals are doing something that the law of God grants them every right to do, the claim of a “crisis” is being used to justify intervention, which is to say, it is being used to justify despotism. I grant that deists of an Adam Smith type do not have an adequate theological justification for their “invisible hand.” But Calvinists do. God the Father, maker of heaven and earth, governs all things. We are to do what He has given us to do, and aspiring to the throne of Deity is not one of them. There is no way that we can step in, stay His hand, and say “what do You think You’re doing?” Nebuchadnezzar knew better than that, at least after his madness. If we attempt to step in we will only dislocate things further, and will be descending into that great king’s madness.
This means that at a certain level we are required to simply watch what God is doing. We are to exercise dominion within our assigned areas, defining what we are to do in accordance with His Word, fighting off encroachments of our liberty, and we are to avoid all attempts to tyrannize over our fellows, however pressing the justifications created by “crisis” might seem.
And this is what creates the tension we began with. We are to hold onto what God told to hold onto. We are to live up to what we have already attained. We are to strengthen what remains. We are build our lives on the law and on the testimony. We are to work hard. We are to show mercy to the poor. We are supposed to marry girls, not guys, unless we are girls, in which case, we are to go the other direction. We are to beget and bear children, and not chop them up into little pieces. We are to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and create the sort of home that would not embarrass us if the prophet Isaiah, or Malachi, or the apostle Paul miraculously showed up for dinner.
At the same time, because we are not in charge of what happens when the planet earth finds itself inhabited by six billion people, all trying to make a living, we attend worship (because God uses our worship to steer the events of world history), we pray for the nations, we cultivate expertise with any and every tool not prohibited in Scripture, we send out missionaries and church planters, and we follow the global developments with interest. We welcome the future because God is doing remarkable things — using the current set-up to do so. The tension exists between the past we are called to be faithful to, and the future where God is calling us to go. And only the God of the Bible can resolve that tension. It is our responsibility to trust Him as He does so.