For all missionally committed orthodox Christians in the West, Rod Dreher has written the money quote of the decade:
They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.
You can find the rest of the article here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sex-after-christianity/
What Dreher has written is nothing less than one of the most succinct and perceptive descriptions of American culture as well as important clues to the apologetic behind Truro's missionary strategy. To "fight cosmologically" requires a way of reading scripture that puts a premium on how we live as "male and female in his image." This embodied scriptural community is precisely what we are building through our alliance with Don Renzo Bonetti and St Joseph of Bovolone, Italy.
Is the difference between the moral struggle and the cosmological struggle part of what Paul was referring to in Ephesians 6:12?
ReplyDelete"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
I read the Dreher article. It's main shortcoming, in my mind, was the undertone that Christianity in America is essentially an idea, or set of ideas, or cultural framework, [or ...] . Perhaps it is, but if so, as such, it is doomed in any case.
ReplyDeletePaul's Christianity successfully infected and reformed the Greco-Roman world of class, power, sensuality, and oppression not on the power of his 'ideas' but in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our challenge, it seems to me, is to keep ourselves in submission to and empowered by the God who indwells with us as the Holy Spirit, while also remembering that politics matters, the political framework matters, the expression of law in humanly written codes matters, the policing and adjudication of the law matters, et cetera.
The problem in politics is the temptation to power. The challenge for culturally conservative Christians is to engage politically, but not according to the way of the world, but according to the way of the Lord.