The Nonexistent "Good Old Days"
As I have previously written, our convictions on political or other questions may seem like they must be a different category from our faith convictions, but that's not automatically true. Our convictions are naturally intertwined and jumbled together, and if we aren't constantly being intentional about acting on those convictions we know rationally are most important, other convictions will instinctively rise to the top of the heap and become the guiding principles which really determine our behavior, regardless of what we'd claim.
One of my hobbies is geopolitics, and I'm fascinated by how abstract issues like metacultural worldview interplay with practical realities like the geographical distribution of valuable resources. (Without oil dollars, would Islam have continued to secularize after the Ottoman Empire dissolved?)
Given how all these phenomena are interdependent, it's not surprising that one can find parallels to some problems in the way we think about church, in the way we think about politics. In the U.S. I grew up in a conservative environment, and a constant refrain among Conservatives in those days was "getting back" to the good days when America was free, patriotic, prosperous, morally upright, God-honoring, etc. etc. (My own current views on this sort of thing aren't the point of this post, but suffice to say I am neither in lockstep with nor in rebellion against that upbringing. Mostly I think conservatism as a movement is an entirely ineffective way to accomplish the goals of conservatives, like trying to steer a car via the brakes.)
However, while one can point to specific ways in which each of those cultural qualities may have been more true at given times and given places in the past as compared to now (few would dispute that things have gotten pretty chaotic in recent years), at the same time, being intellectually honest requires admitting that there has never been a time when one could describe all of America in glowingly positive terms. There have always been unacceptable problems and rampaging controversies. There weren't any good old days, just different good things in those days vs. the good things we have now. Whether you prefer that good to this good may be an interesting and profitable discussion, but it's not only misguided to simply assume "everything was better before," even the Bible weighs in and says to hush.
Never Getting it Right
The same is true of the Church. The Church has never operated with safety wheels on or guard rails up. In the earliest era of the Church, congregations planted by apostles themselves openly engaged in behavior that would shock the sensibilities of not only any church but any decent person. (They did this partly because they confused what it meant to be counter-cultural, thinking basic human moral rules no longer applied to them now that they had a new identity in Christ.) Tradition states that in 325AD, Old Saint Nick found it necessary to impart the the loving hand of correction upside Arius' lying head at a church council. We laugh and meme about it now, but imagine if we managed to hold a church-wide ecumenical council now and it was interrupted by one pastor striking another in the face. The World would laugh for weeks and concern-bloggers would extrapolate every possible aspect in which this revealed the Church's deep failings.
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| Observe the technique: Grasp the left hand of heresy and counter with your right. |
There is some evidence to suggest the Arias-punching story is entirely apocryphal, but certainly deep controversies have wracked the Church from its earliest days, and in later times when the Church had accrued much political power to itself, wars followed. Like the fallacy of the elusive glory days of free and virtuous America, the Church has been getting serious things wrong for as long as it's been a Church, but to suggest that this delegitimizes the Church demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Humanity is fallen and sinful. Anything we remain involved with over the centuries is partly a trainwreck in historically slow motion, we just like to pretend the brief moments of clarity or smoothness are the norm, like a poor athlete who has one great game and convinces himself it reflects his true average skill.
Today, seeing so many problems with the Church, many hasten to express their particular brand of condemnation. Older believers fear the Church won't survive being inherited by these tradition-eschewing millennials. Young believers believe the Church may not escape the non-leadership of their inauthentic and dispassionate elders. Right-leaning believers fear the Church will confuse social justice for the gospel, Left-leaning believers fear the Church has irrevocably tied itself to the Republican party. You could go into any Christian subculture and find people convinced the Church is headed in the wrong direction for exactly those reasons that are celebrated by some other subculture.
Whether well-intentioned or simply virtue-signalling, these concerned commenters all seem to forget that the Church survived the early heresies and persecutions, the Fall of Rome (at the time, truly the end of the world as far as much of the Church was concerned), the Great Schism, the Reformation (another even greater schism), Modernist reinterpretations, prosperity preachers and false prophets, etc. In every age, the Church has been beset by dangers any particular one of which could have destroyed it. Except, of course, that Christ already promised Peter that the Gates of Hell would not overcome the Church. God does not keep the Church from error, but He keeps it.
The Church through the Eyes of Sauron
Obviously, a local church or the Church in an area can be more, or less, healthy. Every believer must seek to maintain the health of their own spiritual life, and we seek it corporately as well, as individual members of one body. If the cells of a body are unhealthy, the body will be unhealthy, and on the other hand a body with healthy cells can harm them en masse by engaging in unhealthy behaviors. There is a micro and macro scale from which we can consider the health of the church.
Recently I noticed an impassioned and occasionally profane article in which the writer suggested that American Christianity has wandered so far that the Church just needs to die and be resurrected. ("I'm excited the North American church is dying.") because they feel it's too far gone to be redeemed, too confused with cultural elements, etc. This, for the article writer, is somehow connected to Supreme Court decisions and how we're not like those awesome Christians of 165AD who buried pagan people too, not only their own, but instead we judge people on social media. Or something. (It's an impassioned but somewhat disjointed and not entirely coherent piece of writing)
This kind of zealous self-flagellation springing from a comparison of the sad modern church we can actually look at vs. certain high points of church history has some basis in simple ignorance or naivety, like someone who compares themselves to someone else's social media profile and forgets there is a real, flawed person behind it. But there's also a kind of perfectionism or OCD that leads people to continually despair and condemn the Church and want to throw the whole thing out and start over, which is both impossible and undesirable. "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off" is a command to individuals in their pursuit of holiness, however, not to the Bride of Christ. Schisms are direly unfortunate amputations, not a healthy purging of specific or regional churches who were weighed in the scale (by whom?) and found wanting. We don't want pieces of the Church to die; we want them nursed back to health if necessary.
C.S.Lewis, in his incredibly insightful Screwtape Letters, mentions--via the sarcastic viewpoint of one demonic tempter advising another how to lead his human "patient" astray--how easy it is to be unimpressed by the Church manifested in a particular place and setting:
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided...
Lewis' description here, from the viewpoint of the Enemy, is accurate in its details (unimpressive aspects of a particular church service), the lie is in the attitude. It's not so much seeing wrongly, as seeing selectively and drawing selective conclusions. It's easy to do this when considering the Church.
At the risk of over-Inkling, an example from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is apt here as well: there is a point where Denethor, the stoic leader of Gondor, is revealed to have been led astray by Sauron. He has been using a magic seeing-stone to spy on Sauron, who is unable to stop him but can influence what he sees to some extent. Sauron therefore guides Denethor to see Mordor's strongest armies and most impressive defenses, and prevents him from noticing any problems and weak points. This results in Denethor, though continuing to go through the motions of his duty, internally giving in to despair, convinced Sauron is too strong to ever be defeated.
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| What you see depends on where you look, or are persuaded to look |
When, with the desire for a healthy Church, we consider the Church's many problems, the Enemy may not be able to deceive us entirely. But he can influence where our gaze falls, and he can undermine our attitude.
Looking at an American Church which is taking the gospel all over the world, that feeds the homeless and helps the poor daily, that is constantly bringing the same truth to the world in new and creative ways (that is in fact of identity the Bride of Christ, flawed but redeemed), and concluding that the whole thing should die as soon as possible so "the real Church" can somehow emerge, based on your particular ideas of what that should look like, is to be looking at real problems but doing so with the attitude of the Enemy, who also wants the Church to die and doesn't mind if you think you have godly motives in agreeing with him.
Cultural Christianity is Good if the Church is Healthy
The "North American Church," the Church in general, should not die, and will not die. God will keep a remnant for Himself even in situations much direr than the onslaught of sloth, leaderlessness, personal distraction, and nihilism we face in 2017.
The Church doesn't handle peace and affluence well; the Church is Antifragile, growing mostly through testing and adversity. This has indeed led some people to understand growing hostility to the Church in American culture to be a blessing in some ways. But two important facts must be acknowledged here:
1) Times getting tough for the Church doesn't mean "Cultural Christianity" will die. Cultural Christianity is an unavoidable aspect of Post-Christian cultures, or even subcultures--Taiwan has a problem with Cultural Christianity even in its small and culturally marginal church. Cultural Christianity may eventually more or less die if America really moves very far away from its roots, but for a long time before that it will look like the culture calling something Christianity which is not. That's already been true for a while.
2) The decline of Cultural Christianity does not translate to a healthier Church. A culture that respects God is not a bad thing. Yes it's bad when people think they are Christians because they go to Church, but no church with strong biblical teaching and a healthy discipleship culture is going to have lots of its members thinking they are Christians simply because they show up.
Rather, it's a blessing to a culture to recognize God as the God they accept or reject, and a barrier to the gospel when that recognition is lost. "Do you believe in God" or "Does God Exist" is not a culturally meaningless question in America the way it is in Taiwan. God ought to be glorified, ought to receive respect, and even the lip service of the world is a recognition of His glory, though an unreliable one that does them no good unless they are in relationship with Him. Even the rocks will cry out, and in the presence of the Church, even a sinful worldly culture will testify to the truth by its specific refusal of it. (Like those Atheists who don't realize what they're really saying when they insist they don't believe in "God," meaning the God of the Bible)
The presence of the Water of Life will naturally begin to make the air humid, and then people will feel less thirsty when the air is less dry; it's an inevitable process that can be seen in the history of Great Commission efforts throughout the world.
The decline of Christianity in the culture means many things for the Church, but it does not follow that the Church will suddenly become more devout just because the culture stops recognizing God or knowing the basic terminology of the gospel in a cultural way. It's foolish to have less scriptural understanding in the culture as a hoped-for situation, let alone that the Church will implode somehow. The Church has always struggled, and it's always been bigger than you.
