I’m now a bi-weekly contributor to OnFaith, a sort of inter-faith dialogue webzine. Here is my first column.
The other day I was browsing my Facebook newsfeed when I came across this article: “50 Reasons This Generation Can’t Get Its Sh*t Together And Actually Shouldn’t.”
Because I’m a sucker for linkbait—and because I’m at the tail end of “this generation” (Millennials)—I clicked.
As I read I resonated with many of my generation’s “reasons”: I, too, am “following [my] passions rather than a steady paycheck;” ditto for “choosing passion rather than pats on the back;” double-ditto for “dreaming bigger rather than sleeping longer.”
But as I continued reading I sensed this interesting theme weaving its way through my generation’s fifty reasons. See if you can spot it from these examples:
9. We’re learning new languages rather than interpreting old ones.
27. We’re inventing rather ingesting everything they throw at us.
31. We’re reforming laws rather than conforming to them.
39. We’re trying new foods rather than following our mother’s recipes.
The theme? The old is bad, the new is best.
Or, to coin an overused cliché: Out with the old, in with the new
the present
the innovative
the…progressive.
In the intro the author herself acknowledges this theme: “We’d rather not sit around, complying with the rules and ideals that have been handed down for generations.”
And therein lies the number reason why my generation of Christians can’t get its spiritual stuff together.
The problem is what scholar Timothy George calls “the imperialism of the present.” What does he mean by this?
He tells the tale of how people once believed we were at the center of the universe, that the whole of reality pivoted around our tiny speck of dust. While Copernicus popped that bubble, we have still have an overinflated sense of time, our time.
“We still place ourselves, our values, our worldview at the center of history,” George says in Reading Scripture with the Reformers, “relegating whole epochs to the Dark Ages or pre-Enlightenment culture. Thus, the Christian past, including ways earlier generations of believers have understood the Bible, becomes not so much something to be studied and appropriated as something to be ignored or overcome.” (23; emph. added)
He’s right. We do; we are.
Rather than rediscovering and retrieving what the vintage Church has believed and how She has behaved, we’re reimagining both.
Now, the Bible is merely viewed as a collection of human conversations about faith and life, rather than an authoritative guide to both, breathed by God Himself.
Now, amongst a sea of alternative gods, Jesus isn’t worshiped as the only one true God, but merely the highest, deepest embodiment of the character of God.
Now, the cross isn’t the butchers block upon which Jesus was willingly slaughtered to do something with our rebellion, but merely the highest, deepest expression of a life of love.
Then there’s hell, which is now merely a collection of really bad human acts on earth, rather than an experience people will endure post-judgment.
Towards the end of the first century a church leader named Jude gave a number of young Christians some words we need at the turn of the twenty-first:
contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. (Jude 3)
My generation of Christians, rather than ignore old belief in favor of new ones—as we’re so inclined to do with everything else—struggle to preserve what the vintage Church has believed about faith and life.
Because it’s only in going backwards that our generation of Christians will truly move forward in it’s spiritual journey.
