When I was a kid, we often would travel to Pennsylvania during summer vacation. The reason is that my father’s ancestors had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1721, settling eventually near Reading. Generations lived in the area. And though my father was born in New York City and grew up mostly in Philadelphia, his mother’s sisters still lived in Bethlehem.
One of the things I remember most vividly about those trips was the lush green cornfields that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. It was quite a change from suburban Connecticut.
But the most extraordinary sight, hands down, had to be the Amish. We’d see them riding along the side of the road in their black horse-drawn buggies, impervious to the rush of traffic which, or so I imagined, zoomed around them with no small amount of annoyance, if not imperiousness.
How strange they looked, the men with long beards, suspenders, and large straw hats and the women in flowing dresses, mostly black, with white embroidered headdresses and matching white aprons tied around front. It seemed like a different planet.
And not an especially appealing one, I must say. They viewed the world I lived in as a place to be avoided. They had chosen to remove themselves from its malign influence and to adhere instead to the values of the Bible, as they understood them.
They hewed closely to what is written in 2 Corinthians 6: “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? ‘Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,’ says the Lord.”
Come out from “the world,” my world, in other words. For as it says in 1 John 2: “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
My problem was that I kind of liked my world, at least most of the time. Their vision just seemed too dark, too extreme. Then again, the world I grew up in was a friendlier place where Judeo-Christian values still had cache, not that I gave much thought to such things at that age.
Nonetheless, the America of the 50s and early 60s was a world where pastors routinely offered prayers of invocation at public events. The church had a seat at the table. It was a place where, as Martin Copenhaver puts it, the culture “tipped its hat” to the church.
But that all changed. As a case in point, in the last church I served, just before I retired, we ended up in an unwelcome lawsuit with the town over their sudden objections to our memorial garden, where the cremains of various loved ones had been interred since 1989.
Ironically, when the garden was first planned and established, town officials fully embraced the idea. Yet in just 25 short years, church and state relations in our historic little Cape Cod town had gone from felicitous to downright adversarial.
In a sense, the “world” had turned on us. Then again, our biblical writers might reasonably ask: “So you’re surprised by this”?
Yes, we are surprised. As Americans, we have been blessed with a remarkable history. Those who first immigrated to these shores were heavily influenced by fundamental Judeo-Christian truths, as well as their mother country’s sophisticated repository of settled law, honed over centuries, an impressive intellectual and literary tradition, and a shared sense of what constitutes a humane society – all of which was reflected in our founding documents and thus, historically, albeit imperfectly, in our culture as well.
The biblical world was not so blessed. Ancient Israel, for most of its history, had labored under the foreign domination of Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and finally Rome. The earliest Christians practiced their faith under the boot of Roman persecution. For them, the “world” was not a friendly place.
Moreover, the Old Testament insisted that the “world” is literally under the power of Satan, and only the hoped-for Messiah could establish the kingdom of God here on earth.
The early Christians, including the New Testament writers, accepted this view. However, they believed Christ had established a “beachhead” on hostile foreign territory. Within the church at least, Christians could get a foretaste of what was yet to come in full, as they awaited Christ’s promised return. Only then would “heaven on earth” be established, by God and God alone, and not, it’s essential to note, human agency. In the meantime, they sought to cope as best they could with this otherwise intractable “world.”
Adding to their rejection of the “world” was the fact that they also believed Christ’s return would occur within their lifetimes. When it didn’t, and after Constantine established Christianity in 321 A.D. as the official religion of the Roman Empire, the church embarked on its tenuous, danger-fraught relationship with the “world.”
Fast forward to today. After centuries of accommodation with the “world,” Americans no longer consider the “world” as a problem much less in opposition to the gospel. This applies, largely, to the modern church as well.
As I see it, there are roughly four basic stances the American church has taken regarding the “world” today. This is not a definitive list and the four categories tend to intermingle and cross-reference one another.
The first is that of unalloyed naivete. Historically, Americans, Christians or no, have been good-hearted, generous, trusting, optimistic, and prone to assume the best in people. It is almost inconceivable to most Americans that the “world” might actually do the things it does. We wouldn’t do such things, so how could others? It just doesn’t compute.
The second approach to the “world” closely resembles the first. It is that form of Christianity carrying on the hopes of the early Social Gospel movement which began roughly a century ago. Here the church sought to embrace secular culture in an effort to Christianize it, seeing it as the vehicle through which society can be transformed into something more closely resembling the gospel. Over time, however, the difference between the church and culture has faded. The two have become virtually synonymous, a distinction without a difference, and not in a good way.
The third ecclesiastical approach to the “world” is a bit less noble, if largely unconscious. This approach, I’m afraid, has more to do with ego than changing society. It might best be understood as the attempt by today’s clergy to reclaim their seat at the cultural table, a seat lost somewhere back in the mists of the late 1960s.
It is a quixotic quest to reclaim membership in Coleridge’s Clerisy, that group of intellectual thought leaders whose influence directed society toward its better angels.
To this end, it seems little more than a vanity project to attain status within the gentry class, a class which, ironically, no longer has any use for them. These clergy types are, in effect, a group of “wannabe” elitists who wish to be seen as educated and enlightened, up-to-speed on all the latest intellectual fashions as proof of their good taste and acceptability. Please like us, in other words. The gospel takes a back seat.
The last approach to the “world” is one where Christians sense that something in our culture has gone horribly wrong. Yet they choose not to think about it or engage it. These are what one might call “principled Christians.”
They readily admit things “out in the world” are increasingly problematic, if not alarming, but believe that to investigate the specifics necessarily leads to a spiritually dark place, one best avoided. Better to keep one’s soul intact. And just hope things work out, somehow.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to this approach. But ultimately, I reject it, believing that the duty of the church in the “world” is to lift up those aspects of the culture that honor Christ while calling out the ones that don’t. Sticking one’s head in the sand is not helpful. Nor is worshiping inside a high-minded bubble.
In the introduction to a new collection of selected writings by the late British philosopher Roger Scruton, its editor, Mark Dooley, shares a conversation he had with Scruton shortly after he, Dooley, had retired from a career in journalism.
“When I remarked,” Dooley recalls, “that it was a relief to be able to devote all my energy to writing about philosophical and spiritual matters again, Roger replied: ‘Yes, I suppose it is, but writing about the issues that confront us is the work that must be done.’”
That seems about right.
So while I’m not quite ready to sign up for the Amish way of life, I have come to appreciate their thinking in ways not possible in my youth. For the biblical concept of the “world” has taken on new meaning for me. I no longer dismiss it as a dark and fanciful ancient myth, or the refuge of self-righteous, narrow-minded Fundamentalists, but simply as reality, as true today as it ever was.
Theologically, the simplest biblical definition of the “world” corresponds to any of the ways we humans organize society that reflects not God’s providential will, but our own. And because we’re sinners, but yet made in the image of God, our success in this venture is necessarily mixed, at best.
After all, the oldest and greatest, and thus most common human temptation, by far, is our desire to be gods ourselves. To run things our way. With predictable results.
That’s just life, here, East of Eden.