The days immediately following Easter are usually a period of interior peace for believers, but also mystery. The Resurrection’s afterglow, of course, but also a lingering question, especially this year as wars and civic unrest trouble the whole world. “The strife is o’er,” as in the hymn, set beautifully by Palestrina. Jesus has conquered sin and death. But why, then, does so much “strife” – and sin and death – continue?
A good question, but God’s answer is clearly different than what we expect. Even in Jesus’ day, some followers “went away” because He didn’t restore the earthly kingdom of Israel. In fact, within a few decades, the Romans obliterated – literally, not as in current presidential rhetoric – Jerusalem and Israel.
The God of the Bible works in time and through people, as we see in both the Old Testament and Church history. Despite its contemplative dimension, Christianity is not Hinduism or Buddhism or postmodern “spirituality,” which can exist anywhere, just anyhow. Christianity, too, deals in the Spirit, and preeminently. But also in the flesh, the “world,” and everydayness. Which it shapes, slowly, or not, over generations.
God could, like some tryrant, impose peace on the world. But to do so, He would have to abolish free will, the very possibility of sin, and therefore also of love. And that, we know, He chose not to do.
Instead, the Gospel must be preached and make it’s ways in the hearts of fallen human beings. Against all human odds, over time, a Word carried by a few fishermen, tax collectors, seemingly random disciples, here and there, converted the greatest empire in existence and large parts of the rest of the world.
The great age of missionaries – the sixteenth century – was also the hard century of the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion. As in many human things, turmoil and conflict can also produce daring and resolve. The Jesuits of that age were, simultaneously, the greatest Catholic educators in Europe and evangelizers to the whole world.
It hardly needs saying that we need something similar today. Desperately. Most of the talk about the New Evangelization and synodality revolves around the mission to formerly Christian peoples. That could be a good thing, properly managed.
But it can’t be managed if the evangelizers don’t believe in the urgency of God’s message to all peoples. A sentimental niceness towards the Other isn’t enough. Even Jesus grew impatient about the process: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:29)
Our Western civilization has talked itself into idiocy. It lost its soul in the materialistic pursuit of knowledge and power. And now realizes its spiritual poverty and hopes to save itself via machinery and AI.
So what are we to do? Two things. Understand what has happened, and pursue – with intelligence and energy – reversing what needs reversing.
Carl Trueman’s The Desecration of Man, which officially appears tomorrow, is a scintillating guide to both. His title echoes The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s penetrating little study of how, already in the 1940s, we were – via false logic and psychologizing tendencies – doing away with many of the things that make us human. But in Trueman’s reading, we’re now doing something much worse.
Lewis was responding to errors. Trueman says we have moved on to desecration of the good and the holy – and our own humanity. We hear all the time these days of transgression of established norms and practices as something good and bold. But the whole process has gone so far that transgression itself has become a kind of establishment, to the point that there’s almost nothing left to push against.
In Trueman’s telling, it was Nietzsche’s “Madman” who first saw what had happened. Western people thought they could do away with God and still keep the “good” Christian values, a “humanism” based on nothing. That began to percolate in our very notions about the world and ourselves through various channels, creating what several thinkers have identified as a “social imaginary” in which we can’t even see what we are any longer except for a jumble of desires and impulses – and “complexes.”
It’s no wonder that our secular states and cultural institutions turned toxic. Even some Christian churches these days have joined in human desecration. (For me, it hit home when I heard a lady pastor at a church service intone, “O God of pronouns. . .”)
Trueman proposes three responses to this crisis: Creed, Cult, and Code. His arguments deserve to be read in their entirety for their wisdom and practicality, but briefly:
By Creed, he means the historic creeds, with their propositions about God the Father and Creator, the Son, and Holy Spirit, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and final judgment. The articles of the Creed reveal truths about God, but also about us. We are created, in His image, and therefore free to love, but not radically to re-create ourselves (the trans movement being the most extreme current instance of that deviation).
All those articles also need to be embodied in Cult, which means informing what we do in Masses, weddings, funerals, and other devotions as a “worshipping community.” That may seem obvious enough, but Trueman notes that when you find yourself in a world that has “lost its story,” as the Protestant theologian Robert Jensen once memorably put it, the Church has to become a world in which that story, God’s and man’s story, can be told again.
Finally, there’s Code, which is akin to the renewal of public space, the “cultural Christianity” that even non-believers like uber-atheist Richard Dawkins recognize as urgent. Trueman shows that it must be much more than that, starting with incremental, person-to-person, explicitly Christian acts, which seems minimalist. But: “We should remember that one man with only twelve friends to help him focused on the local two thousand years ago and his movement wound up reshaping the whole world.”
In a word, we need Re-Consecration, the return of God – and, therefore, us.
