Renaissance E-Book

Os Guinness

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Logos Bookstores' Best Book in Christianity and Culture Honorable Mention, Best Book of the Year from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore We live in dark times. Christians wonder: Are the best days of the Christian faith behind us? Has modernity made Christian thought irrelevant and impotent? Is society beyond all hope of redemption and renewal? In Renaissance, Os Guinness declares no. Throughout history, the Christian faith has transformed entire cultures and civilizations, building cathedrals and universities, proclaiming God's goodness, beauty and truth through art and literature, science and medicine. The Christian faith may similarly change the world again today. The church can be revived to become a renewing power in our society—if we answer the call to a new Christian renaissance that challenges darkness with the hope of Christian faith. In this hopeful appeal for cultural transformation, Guinness shares opportunities for Christians, on both local and global levels, to win back the West and to contribute constructively to the human future. Hearkening back to similar pivotal points in history, Guinness encourages Christians in the quest for societal change. Each chapter closes with thought-provoking discussion questions and a brief, heart-felt prayer that challenges and motivates us to take action in our lives today.

Leseprobe

The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times

Os Guinness

www.ivpress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web:www.ivpress.comEmail:[email protected]

©2014 by Os Guinness

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website atwww.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

“An Evangelical Manifesto” is copyright ©2008 by the Evangelical Manifesto Steering Committee. Used by permission.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images: wallpaper design: Gold and Red Sunflower Wallpaper Design by William Morris. Private Collection. The Stapleton Collection. The Bridgeman Art Library.

swallow: © NNehring/iStockphoto border illustration: © Electric_Crayon/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9657-8 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3671-0 (print)

DOM

and to Jenny,

whose faith and prayers

outweigh my feeble words by far.

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones.

He caused me to pass among them round about, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley; and lo, they were very dry.

He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, You know.” Again He said to me, “Prophesy over these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.’

Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones, ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter you that you may come to life.

I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the LORD.’”

So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone.

And I looked, and behold, sinews were on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them.

Then He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life.”’”

So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.

Ezekiel 37:1-10

Revive thy Church, O Lord, beginning with me.

St. Augustine, 5th century

I cry, I cry, and I cry again. The religion of Christ, the true faith, has fallen so low that it is an object of scorn not only to the Devil but to Jews and Saracens and pagans. . . . These keep their law as they believe it, but we, intoxicated with the love of the world, have deserted our law.

St. Gregory, 11th century

The sort of men who now live cannot stand anything so strong as the Christianity of the New Testament (they would die of it or lose their minds), just in the same sense that children cannot stand drink, for which reason we prepare for them a little lemonade—and official Christianity is lemonade-twaddle for the sort of beings that are now called men, it is the strongest thing they stand, and this twaddle then is their language they call “Christianity,” just as children call their lemonade “wine.”

Søren Kierkegaard, 19th century

Verily there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy and schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is to play Christianity.

Søren Kierkegaard, 19th century

Anxious yet not disconsolate, we stand to one side for a moment, as contemplative bystanders to whom it has been granted to witness these great struggles and transitions. Oh! It is the magic of these struggles that whoever observes them must also enter into the fray!

Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th century

How many times has civilisation, by which I mean a state of society where moral force begins to escape the tyranny of physical forces, climbed the ladder of Progress and been dragged down?

Winston Churchill, 20th century

At least five times . . . the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.

G. K. Chesterton, 20th century

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and the

Ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lose all conviction, and the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 20th century

The task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity.

Reinhold Niebuhr, 20th century

Sometimes I even think it is already too late. At any rate, if by the mercy of God we are to have some further breathing space, if He does grant us another chance to build up a new European civilisation on the ruins of the old, facing all the time the possibility of an imminent end to all civilised life on this globe, Christianity has a tremendous responsibility.

Emil Brunner, 20th century

It is hard for those who live near a Bank

To doubt the security of their money.

It is hard for those who live near a Police Station

To believe in the triumph of violence.

Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World

And that lions no longer need keepers?

Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?

Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments

As you can boast in the way of polite society

Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?

T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” 20th century

There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness.

Etienne Gilson, 20th century

In proportion as a society relaxes its hold upon the eternal, it ensures the corruption of the temporal. All earthly civilizations are indeed corruptible and must one day perish, the pax Britannica no less than the pax romana, and Christendom no less than Babylon and Troy. But if most have perished prematurely, it was largely as victims of their own proud illusions. And if our Western civilization is to prove more durable, it can only be in the strength of this more chastened estimate of its own majesty and this knowledge that “here we have no continuing city.”

John Baillie, 20th century

The Roman Empire was faced by the same vital problem as Europe today. Its relatively high standard of material civilization had become a source of vital degeneration rather than of social progress. The life was passing out of the old City-State and its institutions, and in its place there had arisen a standardized cosmopolitan mass hedonism. The State-provided pleasures of the baths, the circus, and the amphitheater gave the majority the luxuries that had formerly been the privilege of the few, and compensated them for the loss of civic freedom and honor. The citizen need no longer be a soldier, for he could pay the peasant and the barbarian to serve as mercenaries and he need no longer work, for that was the business of the slaves. And so the land decayed and the cities multiplied, producing everywhere from the Atlantic to the Euphrates the same pattern of social life—a leisure state in which the Mediterranean peoples gradually lost their vital energy and became sterile and senile.

Christopher Dawson, 20th century

Can this miracle be repeated in a world that has for the second time grown cold? Can the Word of Life once more enlighten the darkness of a civilization that is infinitely richer and more powerful than that of pagan Rome but which seems equally to have lost its sense of direction and to be threatened with social degeneration and spiritual disintegration?

It is obvious that the Christian must answer in the affirmative. Yet on the other hand he must not look for a quick and easy solution to a problem on which the whole future of humanity depends.

Christopher Dawson, 20th century

Contents

1 Our Augustinian Moment

2 Grand Global Tasks

3 Unnecessary, Unlikely, Undeniable

4 The Secret of Cultural Power

5 The Dynamics of the Kingdom

6 Our Golden Age Is Ahead

Concluding Postscript

Introduction to An Evangelical Manifesto

An Evangelical Manifesto

Grateful Acknowledgments

Notes

Name Index

Praise for Renaissance

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

1

Our Augustinian Moment

Can it be that after two thousand years “This too shall pass” is finally being written over the Christian faith too? Is the Christian church finished and the Christian faith headed for the great museum of history, as the enemies of the faith now charge and certain trends in the West now seem to indicate?

“Great Pan is dead,” Plutarch once wrote, describing the lament of passengers sailing along the west coast of Greece. The god of shepherds and flocks had died, and the Christian faith had triumphed over paganism. But now the church’s critics are returning the compliment. From Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous cry “God is dead” in the late nineteenth century to the strident claims of the “end of faith” from the new atheists in the early twenty-first century, we hear it announced again and again that the best days of the Christian faith are over. It too is nearing its end in the advanced modern world it has helped to create.

Are the current defectors from the faith prescient, then, and are we who have stayed merely diehard partisans of lost causes and sinking ships? Has modernity finally done what no enemy or persecutor has ever succeeded in doing and reduced the authority of the Scriptures to a shifting weather vane and the church to babbling impotence? And if the church is in such a sorry state in the advanced modern world, is this the hour for the final triumph of atheism, or for a victorious thrust in the resurgence of Islam? Will the now-vibrant church in the Global South fall into captivity in its turn when she too faces the challenge of modernity, so that the devil’s triumph is complete?

These questions come together with a sharp question for Christians in the global era: Can the Christian church in the advanced modern world be renewed and restored even now and be sufficiently changed to have a hope of again changing the world through the power of the gospel? Or is all such talk merely whistling in the dark—pointless, naive and irresponsible?

Let there be no wavering in our answer. Such is the truth and power of the gospel that the church can be revived, reformed and restored to be a renewing power in the world again. There is no question that the good news of Jesus has effected powerful personal and cultural change in the past. There is no question too that it is still doing so in many parts of the world today. By God’s grace it will do so again even here in the heart of the advanced modern world where the Christian church is presently in sorry disarray.

But of course that answer cannot just be stated baldly and left there. That would be a cheap and tinny triumphalism. The affirmative answer deserves a deeper explanation and a corresponding way of life. Any solid response must be as considered as it is confident, so that in what is genuinely a dark time for the church, our trust in God and in the gospel may be a warranted trust and not a whistling in the dark.

“At least five times,” G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.”1 The great Christian author’s point is true, and a witty and bracing reminder for the downhearted. Yet we must also be sure that we understand why it is true, and why we can live and work with rock solid confidence in the gospel and confidence in the possibility of a genuine Christian renaissance however dark the times. But first let us lift up our eyes to the horizon and consider the extraordinary moment in which we live, and the full challenge it represents.

Christian Civilization?

The great aerial combat known as the Battle of Britain proved to be one of the turning points in World War II. It began on June 18, 1940, and before and after the battle Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, gave two of his most famous speeches. The speech after the battle included the famous tribute to the airmen, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The speech before the battle is even more famous and is known today by its last five ringing words, “This was their finest hour.”

But there were two sentences earlier in the speech that caused no comment at the time, but set off a lively debate after the war. What Churchill said was this: “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.”2

When the war was over, a spirited conversation took place between many of the world’s most distinguished Christian thinkers, and several of them cited Churchill’s words in the opening words of their essays and books. The conversation included the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, the English historian Christopher Dawson, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner and the Scottish theologian John Baillie. Curiously, a similar debate had broken out after the terrible disaster of World War I, but that debate had been about civilization itself and most of the participants had no personal interest in the Christian faith. The earlier debate included such eminent intellectuals as Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee and Clive Bell.

After World War II, the debate was expressly Christian and the issue was Christian civilization and the making of a distinctively Christian culture. Had the victors really shown themselves to be that “Christian”? To what extent did past eras of civilizations merit the term Christian? In what sense is it right for any civilization to call itself “Christian,” or to be called “Christian” by others? And what were the prospects of restoring Christian culture and civilization in the future?

Seventy years later, that debate and those questions gain an added urgency from the fact that the forces of barbarism are growing uglier by the day, not only externally but internally—from the rising tide of Islamic violence, the degenerating decadence of post-Christian Western secularism, and the evident impotence and disarray of the Jewish and Christian ideas and institutions that once inspired and shaped Western civilization.

To be fair to the eminent thinkers in the original debate, they were interested in practice and not only theory, and with their historical awareness and sense of responsibility, they ranged far further afield than mere ideas. Jacques Maritain and Christopher Dawson were influential in the thinking that lay behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the rise of what later became the European Union, as well as the revolutionary ideas that changed the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II. Among the practical projects spawned at that time were the Moral Re-­armament in Protestant circles, Opus Dei in Roman Catholic circles, and the Sword and Spirit in ecumenical circles. But regardless of the merits or otherwise of these initiatives, it is their debate over the core ideas of Christian civilization and culture that is so fascinating and instructive now.

With the benefit of hindsight more than half a century later, two things in their conversation stand out across the years. On the one hand, the participants clearly felt, with an intensity that has faded, to our loss, that all civilization is essentially fragile. To live in a civilized manner is an achievement that is only a thin veneer covering the rougher grain of human nature that can be exposed with a terrible suddenness. Barbarousness always lurks at some level underneath. Call the problem “original sin,” as theologians have from the record of the Bible; call it the “crooked timber” of our humanity, as Immanuel Kant and Isaiah Berlin did; call it “dissonance in human form” as Nietzsche did; or call it “man’s smudge” on the world, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins did.3 But it means that all civilizations, whatever their momentary grandeur, have an ultimate flimsiness that is paper thin and cannot hold back the barbarism.

View Washington, DC, from the heights of Capitol Hill and ponder the lessons of all its statues, symbols and sayings. The self-proclaimed “capital of the free world” shows off nothing but an assured impression of power and permanence, and certainly nothing to suggest that American power and freedom will not last ten thousand years. Even Henry Kissinger, for all his vaunted realism and historical understanding, wrote, “At the dawn of the new millennium the United States is enjoying a preeminence unrivalled by even the greatest empires of the past.”4

Yet view Rome from the Palatine Hill, the civilization so admired by the American founders, and the lesson is starkly different. Lying there before your eyes in the “eternal city” are the vestiges of long-gone kings, the remains of a once-proud republic, the bleached stone bones of an empire that strode the world of its time like a Colossus, and even the scattered remnants of the Egyptian and Greek civilizations that preceded Rome. Little wonder that Christopher Dawson wrote in a letter after the Second World War that all the events of the past years had convinced him “what a fragile thing civilization is, and how near we are to losing the whole inheritance.”5

On the other hand, for all the brilliance of the post-war debaters, the depth of their discussion, their hopes and the practical initiatives they spawned, it is also clear that we today are even further from restoring Christian civilization than they were then. As will become clear, this book is emphatically not an argument for “Christian civilization,” let alone Western civilization. My supreme concern is the first term rather than the second, and therefore the church rather than the civilization. But it is a point of fact that in many, if not most parts of the Western world, what was still left of the Christian foundations of the West have collapsed or are collapsing. The Christian church is on the defensive almost everywhere. The Christian faith is derided among the thought leaders of our societies, and now we are told it is being abandoned in droves—even if many of the defectors are not really atheists or even agnostic, but in limbo between the characteristic halfway houses of “believing without belonging” or still “belonging without believing.”

Make no mistake. The troubles facing the Christian church in the West do not mean for a minute that the post-Christian forces in the West have triumphed for long. On the contrary, the West as a whole is in crisis, for the present moment has falsified the utopian Enlightenment hope that secular progressives placed in history. Could humanly directed history replace heaven as the vehicle of human progress and provide the guarantee of human desires for freedom, justice, peace and global order? The returns are now in after a century or two, and the contradictory facts are clear.

The West has beaten back the totalitarian pretensions of both Hitler’s would-be master race in Germany and Stalin’s would-be master class in the Soviet Union. But it now stands weak and unsure of itself before its three current menaces: first, the equally totalitarian, would-be master faith of Islamism from the Middle East; second, the increasingly totalitarian philosophy and zero-sum strategies of illiberal liberalism; and third, the self-destructive cultural chaos of the West’s own chosen ideas and lifestyles that are destroying its identity and sapping its former strength.

Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they. They are merely parasites on the Jewish and Christian beliefs and ideals that made the West the West. Progressive leaders in the West can no longer describe a future that is considered progress—except in the gee-whiz terms of technology. Nor are they any longer the unrivaled leaders of the world to take the future anywhere, and those rising to rival them show scant regard for Western progressives and their ideals. And in the process of their abortive bid to replace the Jewish and Christian ideals of the West, the post-Christian liberals have often shown themselves to be highly illiberal. Drinking deep of postcolonial guilt and espousing the philosophy of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” they have cozied up to Islam in attempt to rout the vestiges of Judaism and the Christian faith that still stand in their way. And in the process they are fast abandoning as “illusions” Jewish and Christian ideals such as human dignity, freedom and personal responsibility that were once considered essential to liberalism and progress.

None of these five brief paragraphs tells the whole story of the Western crisis, and the story is far from over. But it highlights how that post-war conversation now appears to have all the marks of a “sunset debate.” Just as the sun is most glorious and most colorful as it sets, so many debates have a dramatic intensity precisely because the topic in question is disappearing from view and beyond recall. And so it might seem after a cursory reading of this remarkable post-war discussion about Christian culture and civilization.

Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their own circles. At first, they disregarded God. Then they deliberately desecrated Western tradition and lived in ways that would have spelled disaster if they had been followed more closely. But now in the early twenty-first century, their movement from disregard to desecration to decadence is going mainstream, and the United States is only the lead society among those close to the tipping point.

Soon, as the legalization and then normalization of polyamory, polygamy, pedophilia and incest follow the same logic as that of abortion and homosexuality, the socially destructive consequences of these trends will reverberate throughout society until the social chaos is beyond recovery. We can only pray there will be a return to God and sanity before the terrible sentence is pronounced: “God has given them over” to the consequences of their own settled choices.

To Change the World

Both those earlier post-war debates came back to mind recently when a similar discussion broke out in the English-speaking world, set off by such books as James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World and Andy Crouch’s Culture Making. Can Christians really change the world? Are they doing so today?

On one side were the optimists, some serious, some almost blithe. For a generation now, countless Christian leaders and writers had liberally sprinkled their speeches, sermons and books with phrases such as “making a difference,” “leaving a legacy,” “transforming culture” and “changing the world.” (One Christian university in the United States proudly trumpets the slogan, “Where world change begins,” and a recent term of address in some Christian audiences has been “My fellow world-changers!”) But for every thousand who have used the phrases as self-evident, there have been few who asked whether such change was actually happening, and why and how they believed that it could.

On the other side were the sober, if not the sour, realists. They rubbed in the fact that, for all the talk, the highly touted “world change” was simply not happening. Some even argued that it could not happen, considering the way the speakers were pursuing the notion. Unless Christians learned to have a better grasp of how ideas influence culture, all the well-intentioned talk of Christian ideas, a Christian mind and “thinking Christianly” would produce nothing but hot air and disillusionment.

My own position is strongly on the side of the former, though with a stiff dose of the realistic understanding of the latter. As St. Paul tartly reminded the Christians in the great cosmopolitan city of Corinth, the good news of Jesus does not come in words only, but in power. It has a proven record of being the greatest people-changing and world-changing force in history. “The thought of Christianity was to want to change everything,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard. “Twelve men united on being Christians have recreated the face of the world.”6 Indeed, that transforming power is at the heart of the genius of the West, and a direct gift of the gospel with its emphasis on life change. In Christopher Dawson’s words, “Western civilization has been the great ferment of change in the world, because the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal.”7

But that transforming power is precisely what must be understood all over again, re-experienced and demonstrated once more in our time. The dynamism of the gospel and its relationship to culture must be understood and lived out on its own terms, whatever the challenges today. If the critics and the cynics are to be proved wrong, God’s work must always be done in God’s way to see results that are worthy of God’s reality and greatness. The present moment is urgent, and there is little time to lose.

When the World As We Have Known It Has Gone

Like ants on the vast floor of the Grand Canyon, none of us can see far enough and high enough to truly know where we are in the surging course of history. Only God knows. My own best assessment is that we are in a time of momentous transition, for we are living in the twilight of five hundred years of Western dominance of the world. From the rise of the intrepid Portuguese explorers who first circumnavigated the world, through the Spanish, French, Dutch and British empires, right down to the “American century” and unacknowledged American empire, the West has recently been the strongest civilization in the world of its time, and for better or worse has imposed its will on much of the rest of the world.

To be sure, the West is still powerful and the United States is still the world’s lead society, and it is Western ideas and forces, such as capitalism, science and technology, which are now shaping the globalization of the entire world. But five hundred years is a mere blink of an eye, and those powerful forces are now running on their own, with no Western moral thinking to guide them. For at this juncture, the West has cut itself off from its own Jewish and Christian roots—the faith, the ideas, the ethics and the way of life that made it the West. It now stands deeply divided, uncertain of its post-Christian identity, and with its dominance waning in the global era.

With the newly awakened ancient powers of China and India on the rise, the Middle East in convulsions, and the long-­slumbering continent of Africa stirring with new promise, the days of unquestioned Western dominance are numbered. In a universe billions of years old, and compared with civilizations that lasted for thousands of years, five hundred years of dominance is a small achievement anyway. But even on our smaller human scale, we can recognize the old age that is dying, but not the new one that is being born.

We are at a truly Augustinian moment, for St. Augustine died in north Africa with the Vandals at the gates, and he had lived through the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in A.D. 410, the date that is the most celebrated milestone in the decline and fall of Rome’s Western empire after eight hundred years of Roman dominance. As St. Jerome wrote famously, if melodramatically, “The light of the world was put out and the head of the Empire was cut off.”8 Surely, it was widely felt, the end of all things was at hand.

Augustine’s privilege and his challenge was to trust God and live faithfully at such a time of turmoil, breakdown and distress, and to articulate a vision of the kingdom of God that could form a pathway to cross the dark ages between the collapse of Rome in the West and the centuries-later rise of Christendom.

Thus in many ways St. Augustine throws more light on our age than Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and all our noisy new atheists combined. In Dawson’s estimate, “Augustine was no mere spectator of the crisis. He was, to a far greater degree than any emperor or general or barbarian warlord, a maker of history and builder of the bridge which was to lead from the old world to the new.”9

Or again we might say that we are at a Daniel-like moment, for Daniel and his three friends faced a challenge unlike that of most of the Jews before them. The world as the Jews had known it for hundreds of years from Joshua onward had gone. Not since the captivity in Egypt had Jews been strangers in a strange land as they found themselves when defeated and deported as exiles to Babylon in the sixth century B.C.

Yet for Daniel and his friends, there was to be no nostalgic sighing, and they did not join their fellow Jews who were famously reluctant to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Their task was to be faithful to God at the highest levels of the greatest empire of their day, when exile and the destruction of their homeland had torn them savagely from the world that they had known. That old world had gone, so Daniel was in Babylon and not Jerusalem, his rulers were pagan and not Jewish, his frame of thinking was the course of history and not just God’s covenant with Israel, and his source of God’s disclosure were dreams, visions and symbols and not just the plain authority of “Thus says the Lord.”

What does our moment of transition to a post-Christian West mean for us? In the fullest sense, only God knows. In terms of the past, we can see that the world that our parents and grandparents knew has gone forever—in terms of both the dominance of the West and the unrivaled status of the Christian faith in the West. For some parts of that changed situation, we can only say good riddance because of the manifest sins of the West; and for the better parts that are no more, it is idle merely to lament. It is certainly sad to face the reasons why we have become post-Christian in the West, but at the same time it is encouraging to see that we are also in a post-Western Christian church, a worldwide church that is now global and growing, and can no longer be identified simply with the West. After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.

It is true that much of the drift and defections from the Western churches is a welcome and much-needed paring away of wood that has long gone rotten. When, for example, Unitarian voices are trumpeting the fact that many of the so-called religious “nones” should now identify with them, that says little except that we live in an age of doubt, disillusion and disaffiliation, which naturally prizes what has been described as “the faith that you go to when you don’t know where to go to.”