Methinks John Carroll is onto something big. If you don't know who John Carroll is, go here, as Rod Dreher can fill you in on Carroll's Big Idea -- contained in this book -- over on Crunchy Con.Once you've been briefed, I can relate a couple of thoughts Rod's post sparked in the Imperial Brain.
And the Mighty Favog's take on this begins in three . . .
Two . . .
One . . .
START.
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IT SEEMS THAT WESTERN CULTURE has gone off the tracks in two significant ways simultaneously. Secular humanism basically posits that we are our own end and make up our own morality, if indeed the collective concept of morality is possible at all.
Without any "eternal vision" to guide us, there really is no reason to behave well -- to work and play well with others. I think this is clear even from a purely behavioralist perspective: Absent eternal reward and punishment, why should we behave well, whatever "well" might be? Absent any trancendental truths, or deity to enforce them, who has the authority to make the rules, anyway -- much less enforce them?
Then everything quickly devolves to "might makes right," and anything is permissable in creating the "might" to enforce your individual concept of "right."
But even among those of a trancendental mindset -- those who believe man is created in the image of God -- over the past 500 or so years, we more and more have gone from a self-concept of being "in the image of God" to that of being a god . . . or resembling a God whose image we created just the other day to suit our own purposes.
This, I think, ties right into what Carroll is saying about churches failing to draw upon 2,000 years of Jesus stories for our defining narrative. Since the life, Passion and resurrection of Christ, Western civilization has had this narrative of who we are, where we fit into The Story and what our job is here on earth. And the Christian story dovetails into the Hebrew narrative going back almost 6,000 years.
So despite this 6,000-year collective memory of Who We Are, Why We're Here and What We Must Do, for the past few hundred years we've been trying to "reimagine" the whole shebang when it hardly was necessary.
AND WHEN YOU GET to Carroll's questioning of traditional Christianity resorting to mere doctrine, it is easy to see his point about doctrine's ineffectiveness in combating a new "tradition" that solipsistically references nothing higher than the individual.
I'm just spitballing here, but perhaps what needs to happen is to start answering questions and challenges with even bigger questions. Wonderfully Jewish, eh?
For example, instead of just automatically reverting to a recitation of doctrine, we need to rediscover the "why" behind the doctrine, leading to the big question of "What does it mean to be made in the image of God -- what are the responsibilities we bear from being made in the image of God?"
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