There is a submerged bronze statue of Jesus Christ seventeen meters deep in the Mediterranean Sea. Unbeknownst to its creator, Guido Galletti, the statue, Christ of the Abyss, is an allegory for the present day church, which too is submerged in a different sort of way, under a sea of historical ignorance bred by historical indifference. When it comes to church members, they know very little, if anything at all, about their history. And the very things they do not know are the very things that are needed to create a faithful and healthy church.
Generally speaking, the modern day church has never really understood what the church is about. They read little of the Bible, uncomfortably claiming it is divinely inspired while giving preference to Netflix. And they have certainly read little of the Christian classics: Augustine’s Confessions, Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word, Calvin’s Institutes, Luther’s Bondage of the Will, Edward’s Freedom of the Will, Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Jesus Christ, not to mention Hodge, Warfield, Machen, Chesterton, or Lewis. They do not know its history: the two hundred plus years of persecution at the hands of Roman Emperors, Constantine, the rise of the Roman Catholic Church, Scholasticism, the Reformation, Puritanism, The First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and the profound difference between the two.
The average member of the average church in the average town is simply unable to enter into intelligent conversation about what Christianity is and what a Christian is. A corollary to this is often a profound misunderstanding of what the Christian Worldview should think about justice, law, war, welfare, history, economics, or stem cell research. To fill this void, church members often superimpose their political preferences as a placeholder (or worse, a substitute) for a Christian Worldview. They have lost the whole idea of being the church in the first place, of thinking and feeling Christianly.
Another corollary: If the Christians of the twentieth century were too buttoned up, formulaic and governed by traditions of their own making, the Christians of the twenty-first century have overreacted and become too casual, governed by pugnacity toward tradition and holding firm on one law, namely, their life will follow no laws. As such, the modern
day church has little clue of the worshipful-instructional value that something like liturgy provides. Quoting the Apostles Creed doesn’t go well with the kick drum. And so the urgent question becomes, do twenty-first-century Christians actually know enough Christian truth to form a worldview that can self-correct when it overreacts?
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