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The Church Resurgam?

The Church Resurgam?

By John Thomas
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
March 30, 2015

The mainstream Christian Church in the West has declined and disintegrated because of its failure to confront, and defeat, materialism. It will inevitably continue to decline if it does not turn, and reverse that failure; simply going on in the same way -- as C. S. Lewis said of any error -- is no good, it must retrace its steps, correct its essential mistake, and only then move forward again. In recent times it has behaved as though movements of faith, revivals, evangelistic crusades and courses, and immersion in vernacular language and popular culture, can on their own turn the tide, as though the dominating climate of thought in which the Church operates can somehow be ignored, just like a goldfish may swim round and round in a bowl, choosing not to notice the fact that the bowl is sitting in a vast desert - and the tropical sun is beating down upon it.

At its beginnings, the Church confronted the pagan society of its day head-on, uncompromisingly. The price of that uncompromising opposition was very great for those in the front-line of the struggle -- they suffered hideous deaths; but the prize was very great, and theirs was the way to win it. In our own time, Western Christianity has compromised, accommodated, and complied with this-worldly values to the extent that in many areas, as we have seen (in such denominations as the Anglican churches in north America and Britain), much of the Christianity there (or rather it is post-Christianity) is at times barely distinguishable from the secular materialism (or maybe we should say paganism) which currently rules (so-called Liberalism, in reality, involves compliance with the status quo, not opposition to it).

At root is the disastrous idea, vigorously championed by many church leaders a few decades ago, that being identified with secular society was the way to gain its respect and acceptance - the idea that 'modern people of our present world, mores, and culture, can also be people of faith' - and, as a consequence, we would see the Church's numbers increase (it was considered that we must "let the world set the agenda", by many theologians in the post-war decades); in fact, identification with the materialist worldview, and this-worldly values, has been the surest way of seeing the decline accelerate; the opposite of this "identification" was actually what was needed. As Nancy Pearcey puts it: "It is a common assumption that, in order to survive, churches must accommodate to the age. But in fact, the opposite is true: In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture. As a general principle, the higher a group's tension with mainstream society, the higher its growth rate." 28 But the Church, today, should not be opposing materialism, and its foundation, in order just to swell numbers, but because materialism is factually inaccurate, and ethically wrong.

How might the Church go about resisting ideological domination? Above all, this task has to be implemented forcefully and with total conviction. Two or three decades ago there was the naïve view that there was a community of good people -- some of whom might be humanists and atheists - all of whom had the "best interests" of people at heart (whatever they were), and that it was right and proper that Christians (who, it was thought, might have much in common with these good-men-and-true) should work with them; the result of this naivety was that the Christians were duped, and the militant atheist establishment which we now know -- and suffer from -- came into being. 29

Too much of the churches' leaderships still exist in the twilight of this thinking, so that defence is weak-kneed (we have all read theologians and church leaders who begin by telling us what brilliant scientists certain of the militant atheists are -- rather than exposing them for the mountebanks they very often are); such people seem somehow to have missed the truism that the best form of defence is attack.

We can be thankful that our military authorities do not employ church leaders as generals, since so often they disastrously expose their flank in many ways, almost wilfully so at times. Countering evolution/ism is indeed very important -- but not by presenting Biblical/specifically-Christian counter-ideas, which will not impress non-Christians at all, or by over-identification with any specifically-scientific ideas, such as Intelligent Design, which most of us do not truly understand, and therefore cannot defend; let Christian scientists do that. 30

Evolutionism's soft under-belly is its innate morally-disastrous implications and results. Christians have no need, initially, to devise a specific way of understanding the exact manner of God's creation of everything, with which it might be replaced; when repairing your shed, you cut out the rotten wood first, before making exact measurements for the sound replacement piece.

Arthur Schopenhauer is reputed to have written that "All truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third it is accepted as self-evident"; perhaps the falsity or erroneousness of a presently-unquestioned idea proceeds by the same stages, and that the questioning of evolution/ism, which is currently ridiculed and violently opposed (or simply proscribed), will eventually be accepted, its falsity being self-evident; after all, nothing is more naïve - as suggested above - than thinking that today's ideas (however strongly they are defended and held to be true) will be thought to be factual or credible in centuries to come.

Of course, anyone who questions evolution/ism and materialism is denounced as "attacking science" -- or some such bluster. In fact, the attempt to question, and open minds, can only liberate; real science - truly free enquiry - is in captivity also; it has sadly become the servant of ideology, its results politically determined (the notion of anthropogenic global warming is a case in point).

But the commitment to materialism is very strong, and its proponents very well-resourced and powerful; the struggle will be long and bitter, and mankind's perpetual hubris will always ensure that it continues to exist, and is perennially defended in some form -- some people desperately want it to be true, as we have seen (Note 3).

Christians must realise that being gentlemanly debaters, while a defensible approach a century ago perhaps, is no use now. But, fortunately, there exists not only the kind of weak leadership and apologist that I have referred to; forty or so years ago, "the faithful few fought bravely", as the hymn has it, and they were only a few. 31

Today, however, we are hopefully wiser, less easily duped, and many more Christians are coming forward to apply the skills of their particular areas of knowledge where it is needed. But all of us are important, and absolutely everybody ineluctably must make the fundamental decision of which side of the fence they choose to stand on; you can't stand on both, appealing though the idea may sometimes seem to be.

There is another factor, today, of immense importance. This is the inevitable decline of mainstream Western Christianity and its succession by Christianity from what was called the Third World. This is not the place to recount the demographic decline of white Western peoples and nations, and the rapid growth of Christian communities in Africa, South America and Asia, but Philip Jenkins's vast array of demographic statistics can leave us in no doubt that in the very near future, Christianity will be a "southern" affair -- and perhaps (as his historical sections suggest) it really always was. 32

Many orthodox Christians and churches in north America are needing (as suggested above) to move to authorisation and accreditation from Southern leaderships and episcopal authorities, as their own abandon the Christian faith; but the "new" Southern authorities will only retain their present fidelity to orthodox Christian truth if they resist Western materialist infection when it (inevitably) spreads to them. Turning south, in itself, is not the permanent answer, resisting materialism is; anything else is unworthy of those who gave all, and suffered (and give all, and suffer, right now) for the sake of Truth. 33

This article is a chapter excerpted from Christianity and Materialism: The Church, and the World, in Western Society and is available from Twin Books website -- www.twinbooks.co.uk

FOOTNOTES

28 Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth. Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2004, p. 261.

29 We glimpse something of this ambience, perhaps, in the early pages of Honest to God. John Robinson writes: " ... many who are Christians find themselves on the same side as those who are not. And among one's intelligent friends one discovers many who are far nearer to the Kingdom of heaven than they themselves credit." (John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God, London, SCM Press, 1963, p. 8). Being part of the "Kingdom of heaven", and being on the "same side" (?) as Christians, seem to be something not requiring belief in God's existence (or existence of non-material reality), or any personal decision to believe and trust in Jesus Christ. In reality, the supernatural having become an embarrassment, such people are only left with a fuzzy, but agreeable, purely-this-worldly set of ethics.

30 Naturally, the militant atheists will tell us that ID is not science -- but, of course, because they have been careful to define the word "science" in their own terms (as necessarily purely materialist) they will be right. They will say that there are no real scientists in any universities who believe in ID, or doubt the truth of Darwinism (and no papers published by such people in "refereed" journals (refereeing has on occasion been challenged and discredited)) -- of course not, since such people have been hounded out by the materialist's thought police; this language might seem very extreme - but many on the inside assure us that this is not so, as is quickly seen by viewing the film (referred to above, Note 9) Expelled. No Intelligence Allowed (2008), hosted by Ben Stein (needless to say, the mainstream media, and scientific institutions have done their best to rubbish the film, which had considerable box-office success).

31 C. S. Lewis has already been referred to, and an especially honourable mention must go Harry Blamires (The Kirkbride Conversations. Six Dialogues of the Christian Faith (1958), The Christian Mind (1963, 1965), A Defence of Dogmatism (1965), The Post-Christian Mind (2001), New Town (2005), and others).

32 See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford etc., Oxford University Press, rev. ed., 2007.

33 One indicative development in recent years is the emergence of the GAFCON movement. The Global Anglican Futures Conference held an event in Jerusalem in 2008, and another in Nairobi in 2013; these led to what is now the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. This movement, which stresses Biblical orthodoxy and truth to authentic, original Christian beliefs, is essentially an African initiative, though supported by orthodox Anglicans in the West.

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