Musings from the road less traveled…

I recently read an article written by a former teacher of mine at Regent College, Dr. Bruce Waltke. One thing you could count on in Dr. Waltke’s class was the occasional digression that cut to your heart. I honestly spent more time repenting in tears in his Old Testament Theology class than I have done in any church service ever! His spiritual perspicacity is legendary, but this description of the morass of contemporary philosophy shows him to be equally insightful as a critic of the times:

 [U]nlike the biblical sages, postmoderns have drawn the perverse conclusion that there are no moral absolutes by which to evaluate social behaviour. According to their philosophy of knowledge, human beings must own up to the reality that they can no longer speak of values; they can only speak of the evaluations of others. In their view, no culture is better than another. Their darkened minds have now thrown Western civilization over the cliff of possessing values into a freefall that must inevitably end in death. Postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism and moral equivalence have now filtered down from our media, universities and government to the general public. And we are seeing the pernicious wages of such theories. For the first time in Western civilization marriage is no longer defined as between a man and a woman and fruitless cohabitation of any form is tolerated. Those wages are also paid in the Western nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel. The devil is always on the lookout for the moral relativism that signals a latter-day Faust, and it seems he is finding eager recruits amongst some prominent spokespeople in the West. ¹

 We live in desperate times. As a recovering dispensationalist I refuse to default to a “last days” complaint, yet even a cursory look at the state of affairs in this world provides a strong temptation to return to that old theology. One thing seems probable, however; if these aren’t the last days of all the earth, they may well be the last days of Western civilization as we know it. And for those entirely cocooned in a self-reinforcing belief in Western superiority, it might as well be the end of the earth.

 The death of Western civilization holds significance for the Church since it can be argued that the Judeo-Christian revelation built Western civilization. By the same token then, the dissembling condition of Western civilization would reflect the failure of the institutional church of our time. The gates of hell cannot prevail against God’s Church, yet hirelings have made a mess of the institution representing it today.

 These are interesting times and this is a sobering moment. We have paid a high price for losing the vision of “being in the world but not of the world.” By relegating faith exclusively to the province of the spirit we lost the world; by consigning our faith to the affairs of this world, we lose our relationship with God. We need to recapture both our life in the Spirit and life in this world. We need faith for God to equip us to live in this world; we need the knowledge of the holy to live in the world without being of the world. We need a vision of God so that we might see people and events through His eyes, and obtain a compassion that equips us to deny ourselves and love others. We need to become like those old-time saints who “could pray heaven and earth together.” Let us not wait. Let us pray for the Church, for our nation(s), and for God’s will to be done.

¹ Bruce Waltke, “Honouring Regent’s Philosophy of Education,” Crux, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer, 2007, p. 10.