I will begin this week by continuing a thought I presented on Saturday. I encourage you to read that post as it will help make sense of this one. I wish to address the questions of why do cultures change, and how should these changes be understood in light of a holistic biblical worldview.
To begin, I will re-quote an article from the WSJ from Peggy Noonan that she wrote last summer. In this article, she wrote:
From Peggy Noonan
This Is No Time for Games
Ronald Reagan wouldn't be playing 'Targeted Catastrophe'
But there are other reasons for American unease, and in a way some are deeper and more pervasive. Some are cultural. Here are only two. Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee. That's because they were born in one place—the old America—and live now in another. We're like immigrants, whether we literally are or not. One of the reasons America has always celebrated immigrants is a natural, shared knowledge that they left behind everything they knew to enter a place that was different—different language, different ways and manners, different food and habits, different tempo. This took courage. They missed the old country. There's a line in a Bernard Shaw play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession": "I kept myself lonely for you!" That is the unspoken sentence of all immigrants toward their children—I made myself long for an old world so you could have a better one.
But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.
So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, 'Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture—relatively innocent, and boring—could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies—all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. And there isn't less bad parenting now than there used to be. There may be more.
There is so much unease and yearning and sadness in America. So much good, too, so much energy and genius. But it isn't a country anyone should be playing games with, and adding to the general sense of loss.
So how should a Christian respond to these observations? First, we must acknowledge that people do feel this way. These feelings of alienation are real. Yet, we must not give into the cultural stupidity that says we cannot critique or correct another's worldview of opinions. In a gracious manner, it is possible to tell someone that while they might feel or think a certain way, they might want to consider a different alternative. I would suggest an alternative informed by a Christian worldview.
What does a holistic biblical worldview say about cultures and our recognized feelings that our culture is changing (for the worse)?
First, cultures rise and fall according to how closely they mirror the created good. In the beginning God created all things, including humans, to reflect the purpose, direction, and unity to and with the will and character of God. As a result, God created culture to reflect the goodness, love, kindness, and wholeness of God. As a culture or an individual come closer to the character of God and to their created good, they reflect a wholeness and beauty that is winsome, healthy, and good. As a culture or an individual drift away from their created good, they reflect disharmony, anger, dis-ease, and evil. In other words, our behaviors, our cultural decisions, and our art that reflects our culture are not neutral: they clearly reflect and express the direction of our culture.
The reason for our ability to drift away from our created good is what the Bible describes as the Fall of humanity. With the Fall, every element of human personality is infected by the tendency toward evil. This does not mean that humans are totally evil! It means that we have to be on guard against our own tendency toward sin and away from our created good.
Often these movements toward sin and evil seem so natural to us. What they are is our fallen nature speaking! The problem is that the more fallen humans we have making decisions, the greater the tendency to move away from our created good. If there is not a check on this tendency, soon what is wicked is declared good and what is good will be declared evil. I suggest that this is perhaps the best definition of worldliness that I can think of! At this point, the culture either has revival or it is lost to internal decay and eventually invasion of some sort.
Is this where we are in the West and in every culture that is infected by our particular brand of worldliness? We either pray for and look for revival, of we hold on for the downward descent?
Perhaps.
At the very least, we can dispel one of our cultural myths that has become pervasive and I would say malignant. It is right, just, good, and proper to critique another's worldview and the opinions of others! Of course we should do so with love, but we must do so.
Why? Love demands it. To love another means to wish for and actively work for their best. Surely love does not mean we hope to hasten their death, depravity, and dis-ease! With love and in love, we should point to a greater hope and joy than this inwardly curved worldliness of the West. We should point to a world and a worldview shaped by the understanding that there is a God and we can know Him!
What does this mean for right/wrong, just/unjust, or fairness/unfairness? God created the world to operate in justice, righteousness, and truth. Such virtues are reflections of the character of God. The standard is the character of God and He has revealed this character in the person of Jesus and in the Word of God.
Thus, we can and should decide the rightness, healthiness, and good of each cultural and individual choice. Those that drift away from their created good should be lovingly and graciously told about the beauty and wholeness of our created good. They might reject it. That is not our problem. It only becomes our problem when we, through out inaction, allow our culture to tell us we cannot even mention the truth for fear of lawsuits. It becomes our problem when our culture codifies wickedness as good and good as evil.
Are we there yet? Not quite, but we are getting close. As believers, we need to lovingly point ourselves, our friends, neighbors, and culture to something better than this disordered, evil and unseemly cultural place in which we find ourselves.
The good news, no great news, is that we have something better to offer. We have the gospel. The gospel is more than a personal means of salvation. It is God's redemptive work into the world including our struggling culture.
By God's grace, tomorrow I will finish this brief foray into cultural criticism by describing how the gospel addresses our entire culture and how it offers hope for restoration.
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