The local paper a few years back published an article by a retired pastor who made a startling point. At least I thought it was startling. Which is ironic, since one would have assumed his argument to be altogether obvious.
He began by citing statistics of declining church attendance, then offered this curious explanation: people don’t actually know what the gospel says or what the church stands for. That’s because, these days, Christian doctrine is rarely explained much less discussed, even in our churches.
What one finds instead is a glossing-over of the difficult parts of biblical and doctrinal claims. Pastors either avoid the subject or re-interpret it.
One obvious weakness to this approach is that the public already has some familiarity with biblical and doctrinal claims. If you go to church, you hear scripture read every Sunday. But even if you don’t attend, you have at least a passing awareness of Christianity’s basic teachings.
The words and concepts, in other words, are “out there.” Yet if the church doesn’t define or explain them, the culture will, and not to good effect.
In my years of teaching Bible studies, there’s one such biblical/Christian doctrine that really seems to flummox people: Christ’s Second Coming.
We are trained, naturally enough, to dismiss it. After all, we’re living 2,000 years since Jesus’ crucifixion. And the early Church’s predictions of Christ’s imminent return proved false. Besides, whether Christian or not, we swim in modernist waters, where progress and its corresponding belief that history is moving inexorably toward perfection holds sway.
But by rejecting the Second Coming, we’re faced with a few problems. One is that history alone must satisfy humanity’s deepest primordial longings for perfection. History is tasked with nothing less than building the “Kingdom of God” here on earth.
Over the last few posts, I’ve discussed the problem of liberalism, in both its classical and progressive form. In short, it seeks to “liberate” the individual from family, church, tradition, nature, time, place, history, as well as all local, character-forming communities and institutions. All are seen as oppressive.
The idea almost seems to make sense. As Patrick Deneen writes: “Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy. It attacked inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles, and abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for openness based upon choice, talent, opportunity, and industry.”
Inherited power was unfair – and ineffective. A new aristocracy would be based on science, reason, and merit, and, notably, would be accessible to all (in theory, at least).
John Locke, one of the main architects of classical liberalism, had argued, however, that two types of people exist in any society, the “industrious and the rational” and the “querulous and contentious.”
The new aristocracy would be composed of the former, those Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy,” whose position would be based on merit.
These extraordinary individuals, the most educated, the most creative, the most adventurous, even the most powerful, freed from the rule of custom, would transform society according to the Enlightenment’s incipient promise of perfectibility.
As in the old system, there would still be inequities. But the indignities, resentments, and anger caused by the gap between high and low, successful and ineffective, rulers and ruled, would be offset by the promise of ever-increasing material prosperity for every member of society.
The irony, of course, rarely discussed, is that the creation of this new aristocracy has produced over time the same inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social positions as the one it replaced. In fact, one might argue, it’s even worse.
Thus liberalism, in significant ways, has failed. What we’re seeing in our world today is ample evidence of that basic fact.
Then again, it was bound to fail. For it replaced the very pre-modern institutions and sentiments that make democracy viable, substituting a disembodied theory for the very real, everyday customs that shaped and molded character, virtue, self-restraint, and responsibility. And it replaced the basic human need for community with a radical individualism constrained only by the impersonal, overarching state.
One might reasonably ask, then, should we chuck it all and go back to pre-modern times? Of course, to ask the question is to answer it. Not only is it an impossibility but it clearly would be of questionable value.
Is this a contradiction? I don’t think so. For one thing, despite all its weaknesses, liberalism has produced much good. To go back would make no sense.
But here’s the kicker. Neither feudalism or liberal democracy (or any other political system) can or will ever satisfy the deepest human longings. At best, any and all political configurations or secular belief systems serve as regents, as a substitute until the King returns. They have neither the truth nor the moral authority to command the full allegiance of the Christian.
In 1 Peter 2:9, it reads: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…” To many this seems preposterous, if not triumphalistic, and thus dangerous. To believe this seems self-righteous and arrogant.
But it is, instead, a reminder to a people who have been “called out of darkness into [God’s] marvelous light” to work out their salvation, as Paul says, with “fear and trembling.” It is a reminder of the Christian’s task: to prepare for the return of the King, and in so doing obtain, ultimately, absolute perfection.
The human urge for perfection is real. And it must be satisfied. In the church, the sinner learns what it means to be truly “liberated” from the works of darkness, and to cultivate a new sense of self that grows in love and truth, learning how to be forgiving, kind, generous, and, yes, just.
When you factor this into the political equation, what greater benefit to our culture than to have those who seek Christ’s goodness participating in it?
America has been called an experiment. But for all its historic novelty, it is instead a people. It contains the strains of various ways of being, some worthy, some not. But it is not purely an ideology, not some rationalistic, fundamentalist idea, but our home, however provisional.
And it is not the church of Jesus Christ, no matter its historic influence. For the church is that place where we make the most of the time we have here on earth in the hope-filled expectation of God’s kingdom to come, which shall at the last purify our ever-wandering and yearning souls.