As Western Christians have entered the twenty-first century we have faced a crisis of exilic proportions. Brueggemann argues that we are facing the end of our known world. His post-modernistic contention is that the Enlightenment resulted in a monopolistic concentration of power in a white, Western, male world and in dominating models of economic, political and technological control. Consumer capitalism is the result. This power and these controls are now being judged and transformed by the rise of Third World nations, the emergence of Islam and a variety of liberation movements. We are witnessing the end of modernity and scientific positivism and with it “the end of Enlightenment modes of certitude and certain patterns of political domination”.
Lesslie Newbigin has argued that post-Enlightenment thought made a distinction between the public world of certifiable facts and the private world of personal values where pluralism reigns and people are free to follow their preferences. Religion, including Christianity, has been consigned to the private world of values and has not been granted a public hearing, as it is not objectively verifiable. Newbigin argues that “Christianity in its Protestant form has largely accepted relegation to the private sector” in order that it can believe and do what it chooses (and within this sphere can experience growth) but that, by doing so, it has surrendered the crucial field, the claim that Jesus Christ is Lord of the whole world.
As a result, an increasing process of secularization has occurred within the West with Christianity being dethroned from the dominant position that it held at the end of the Medieval period. In Christendom, the Church was the Empire. Church and State were fundamentally merged. From Constantine to the end of the Medieval period, Christendom was the paradigm in which the Church operated. From the Reformation through the Enlightenment to Modernism, Christendom came under increasing threat. It has been gradually dismantled both by movements within the Church (precipitated by the Reformation and the beginning of churches within the Church) and those outside (such as the split between public and private worlds noted by Newbigin). Enlightenment thinking questioned the historical validity of central Christian doctrines, developed alternative ‘scientifically verifiable’ means of explaining the origins of species, positioned Government as the central means of meeting social/welfare needs, and created a consumer culture of aspiration and progress. The result is that for many in the West “God is dead”, “Man has come of age” and Christianity is dead in the water.
Despite this, Brueggemann believes that the Church has bought heavily into Enlightenment thinking. He argues that, “Rational theological method has led to a tight system of certitude that purports to be absolute” and that “Historical criticism has sought validation in facticity behind the text”. Perhaps in these ways the Church has been fighting for the public platform, that Newbigin believes it has abdicated, but fighting on the terms of the dominant culture. Brueggemann sees the Church as emmeshed in this dominant culture and as fatigued and close to despair.
In terms of how the Church feels, these views may not be so dissimilar and there are similarities in that each are concerned with monopolies of power. From each perspective, the world the Church confronts internally and externally is one of pluralism and post modernism and, essentially, we don’t know how to react. We are at a point where “What had once been clear simply was not clear any more”. John Drane has commented on the Church of England, “It’s almost as if we know that we can’t bring Christendom back, but we can’t think of any other model on which we can be Christian – so better to pretend that we’re not really too Christian anyway”. As Church, we face the joint ending of two major systems of thought and power within Western culture. Mark Heard, in describing our predicament, claims that if God is generally believed to be dead then we are, and behave as, the orphans of God:
“Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate,
beating our wings against the walls of this place.
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof,
in choosing to believe the unbelievable truth.
They have captured our siblings and rendered them mute.
They’ve disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots.
We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths,
and we’re out in the streets with a lump in our throats.
We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod.
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God.”
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Mark Heard - Treasure Of The Broken Land.
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