What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.[i]
The culture of the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s was hedonistic, immoral, and degenerate, and the emergence of new artistic movements added to the malaise. We find today some of those same elements in full flower in our media driven culture. The collapse of the economy in 1929 ushered in a Great Depression. Unemployment, crime, and despair rose sharply. We find echoes of that in our own economy with rising unemployment and undisciplined crowds occupying city centers with mixed approval and disapproval from the rest of us.It was during the early 1930s that Bonhoeffer, in a lecture given at the University of Berlin, said the following:
“The old world cannot take pleasure in the Church because the Church speaks of its end as though it had already happened--as though the world had already been judged. The old world does not like being regarded as dead. The Church has never been surprised at this, nor is it surprised by the fact that again and again men come to it who think the thoughts of the old world--and who is there entirely free from them? But the Church is naturally in tumult when these children of the world that has passed away lay claim to the Church, to the new, for themselves. They want the new and only know the old. And thus they deny Christ the Lord.” [ii]
In the Church of today the “children of the world that has passed way lay claim to the Church, to the new, for themselves. They want the new and only know the old. And thus they deny Christ the Lord.” That denial is clear, specific, and oddly self-righteous. They tell us that Jesus is only a way for Christians, and that other ways are of equal or greater value. They tell us that the acceptance of Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour is a Western Heresy, being obviously ignorant that Eastern figures like St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught the same “heresy.” They tell us that we must accommodate to the culture of the world. For them the Church is the not the salt of the world, but the world is the salt of the Church. A new thing has emerged. In the past history of the Church, heretics left the church and attacked it from without, but now the heretics stay in the Church and attack it from within.[iii] Integrity would demand that they leave the Church that in fact they hate, but they are driven by selfish ambition and the lust for personal power over others. We are in the midst of a spiritual warfare that is increasingly less and less subtle.
The solution is not cowardly flight, but courageous fight. Once more we need to strongly embrace the declaration, “I will live with integrity.”[iv] Rather than cringing with fear at the accusation that we are narrow minded (the insult being that we are Fundamentalists) we must with boldness declare that there is an objective Truth, the universal Tao, and that moral and ethical standards have an eternal origin and value.
Once more we must confess that not only do we believe in Jesus Christ as an intellectual proposition, but that we have in fact undeniably met him, and him alone will we serve.
No comments:
Post a Comment