Wanting the Fruit While Severing The Root
Contemporary America is attempting something amazing: the creation of an autonomous free floating value matrix, which can be traced directly back to Christianity, while simultaneously severing the taproot which provides said values.
I posted this on Facebook - it elicited a very lengthy and eloquent response from my childhood friend, Andy Tait. You can read it on my Facebook page. Andy says that "the modern west began when ties to Christianity began to fray". He gives a lengthy explanation of a variety of advances that have taken place as church and state began to separate.
This has been of particular interest to me over the past 5 years. I have been studying a lot of the cultural changes happening in the West. The person who has helped me the most is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He has written with the greatest insight and comprehension on the pivot, the West has taken from theism to secularity. See A Secular Age, Sources of Self and The Malaise of Modernity.
Andy gives very specific examples of human progress when severed by religion. But, what I want to address is the basic beliefs that the majority of people in the West carry within them subconsciously.
Here are just a couple:
1. Human Rights - the majority of people in the West believe in fundamental universal rights - right to education, food, clothing, shelter, security, etc. But, this belief is indefensible from a strictly atheistic, scientific worldview. Why would random products of time+chance+matter have rights to anything? Who gets to decide? The Christian worldview teaches that all human beings are created with inherent dignity as a result of being the conscious creation by God. Creatures that in fact reflect back the image of God.
2. Importance of Relationships - Every thinking person is cognizant that meaning in life is constructed primarily through the relationships of intimacy and love we have with others. Again - why is this so? If we are random acts of blind evolution - why in the world world does love become the ultimate good? Wouldn't it be power or brute survival? The Christian worldview teaches that Ultimate Reality is a triune community of relationships - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - the Trinity. Out of this flows the primal desire for connection with others in relationship and community. It is hard wired in every human being.
There are a myriad of other trajectories that trace back to the Christian worldview:
-Material world is good and important - which gave rise to physical science
-forward trajectory of history (history is not just cyclical or fated)
-human beings as free moral agents
-holistic understanding of human beings - human beings have interlocked systems - mind, emotion, physical - no longer Greek or Gnostic views of human body
-both political and legal systems can be traced back to the Magna Carta - it is inconceivable to envision England and America emerging into what they were without that primal document.
Western culture is living off the fruits of the Christian Worldview - but due to hyper-individualism, the belief in science and technology as savior, rampant relativism and a diluted Christian faith, she is jettisoning her roots. In place of the Christian world view, we are constructed a multi-faceted, dynamic secular narrative.
Time will tell how this will play out.
I posted this on Facebook - it elicited a very lengthy and eloquent response from my childhood friend, Andy Tait. You can read it on my Facebook page. Andy says that "the modern west began when ties to Christianity began to fray". He gives a lengthy explanation of a variety of advances that have taken place as church and state began to separate.
This has been of particular interest to me over the past 5 years. I have been studying a lot of the cultural changes happening in the West. The person who has helped me the most is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He has written with the greatest insight and comprehension on the pivot, the West has taken from theism to secularity. See A Secular Age, Sources of Self and The Malaise of Modernity.
Andy gives very specific examples of human progress when severed by religion. But, what I want to address is the basic beliefs that the majority of people in the West carry within them subconsciously.
Here are just a couple:
1. Human Rights - the majority of people in the West believe in fundamental universal rights - right to education, food, clothing, shelter, security, etc. But, this belief is indefensible from a strictly atheistic, scientific worldview. Why would random products of time+chance+matter have rights to anything? Who gets to decide? The Christian worldview teaches that all human beings are created with inherent dignity as a result of being the conscious creation by God. Creatures that in fact reflect back the image of God.
2. Importance of Relationships - Every thinking person is cognizant that meaning in life is constructed primarily through the relationships of intimacy and love we have with others. Again - why is this so? If we are random acts of blind evolution - why in the world world does love become the ultimate good? Wouldn't it be power or brute survival? The Christian worldview teaches that Ultimate Reality is a triune community of relationships - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - the Trinity. Out of this flows the primal desire for connection with others in relationship and community. It is hard wired in every human being.
There are a myriad of other trajectories that trace back to the Christian worldview:
-Material world is good and important - which gave rise to physical science
-forward trajectory of history (history is not just cyclical or fated)
-human beings as free moral agents
-holistic understanding of human beings - human beings have interlocked systems - mind, emotion, physical - no longer Greek or Gnostic views of human body
-both political and legal systems can be traced back to the Magna Carta - it is inconceivable to envision England and America emerging into what they were without that primal document.
Western culture is living off the fruits of the Christian Worldview - but due to hyper-individualism, the belief in science and technology as savior, rampant relativism and a diluted Christian faith, she is jettisoning her roots. In place of the Christian world view, we are constructed a multi-faceted, dynamic secular narrative.
Time will tell how this will play out.
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