One of the foundational temptations for us as we consider our forms of social organization is the temptation of thinking that we are unique, and that no one has ever been in the soup we are in. Globalization, the Internet, micro-chips, frankenfood, and wireless hot-spot coffee shops all make it impossible for us to even conceive of a “mere Christendom.” To talk that way, I am told, is to exhibit my delusional side.
But our problem is actually as old as it gets. Our deracinated rootlessness is an off-the-rack K-Mart problem. There is nothing new under the sun, the preacher says, but especially not this.
When C.S. Lewis wrote of “men without chests,” he did not discover this phenomenon by googling it up on his iPhone. When Yeats wrote that “the center cannot hold,” he did not come to this conclusion in a sports bar with fifty television screens going, with the volume turned down on all of them so that we could hear the U2 song that was blaring over the crowd. If he had, it would have been appropriate, but he didn’t. Cultural decadence is something that has happened routinely to civilizations for millennia, and it is a sign of our cultural narcissism that we are somehow surprised by it happening to us. The surprise is not sincere, it is not honestly come by. Somebody really ought to read a book.
“In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community’s life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce each other, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power. Decadence is a falling off, a falling apart from a previous unity” (Sanders, The Deep Things of God, pp. 109-110).
Gerontology is the study of how people age, and the people who are hyperventilating over our cultural dissolution really need to be informed that there is a body of work on cultural geronology that extends over many centuries, and what we are confronting now is nothing new. And this means that what we need to do is exactly what every other culture that has come apart at the seams has needed to do, and that is to believe in Jesus.
We dress differently than did the Elizabethans, and we publish books differently than did the ancient Jews. We fly through the air, and the Babylonians didn’t. We eat better than did our great grandfathers. We can go down our roads a lot faster than Julius Caesar could go down his roads. But this does not change the fact that our hollow men are remarkably like the hollow men of old, and that our forgiven men act remarkably like Abraham did.
Jesus did not tell the Church to disciple the nations until the invention of the microchip, and to troubleshoot some sort of accommodation after that. Jesus did not say to preach the gospel to every creature until they start hooking cameras up to the grid in order to televise everything. He did not tell us to baptize the nations until the rise of the nation/state, that glorious phrase for some that trumps all obedience, and to then retreat to the baptism of individuals, if that. Jesus did not say that all men would be drawn to Him until people with magenta hair dye and multiple piercings started to get gigs on reality television shows. Our problem is not globalization, for pity’s sake. Our problem is unbelief, and it is a very boring and ancient form of unbelief. We are about as unique as a pint of salt water a hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii.
So here is an appeal to the hollow men. The reason for that culture-wide internal ache and the resultant bizarre antics on the public stage, is that you don’t know God. And the reason your sages, philosophers, wise men, statesmen, and late night jesters can do nothing to make sense of what is happening, but flail instead, is that you don’t know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. The reason you point helplessly to the invention of the latest whatsit as the cause of all our troubles is that you are fighting the Holy Spirit’s work of convicting us of sin, righteousness, and judgment.
You have not acknowledged that the Lord Jesus was crucified in the public square by the authorities, and it is far too late to be hushed up now. A central part of the difficulty in trying to hide what He did is that He came back from the dead, and not in a corner somewhere, and then He told His disciples to be talkative about what happened. That resurrection, and the proclamations of it, cannot be hushed up either. Jesus is therefore the Lord of heaven and earth, which makes Him Lord over all our cultural corrosions. His Word tells us what to do about them, and it tells us what not to do about them.
So our leaders are not standing at a unique crossroads — this has happened many times before. The decision they need to make is a simple binary one — either to believe in Jesus or not. And the fact that large sections of the Church would be panicked if they did is not an illustration of a high water mark in theological development. It simply means that the cultural corrosions of unbelief have not left the Church unaffected.