New Orthodoxy

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

--William Butler Yeats

To say that we live in the ‘post-Christian’ era is simply to acknowledge what we all know to be true: that Christianity has ceased to be the dominant cultural narrative in Western Culture.  While we may not know exactly when this came to be, the dis-establishment of Christianity is now almost complete.

            But our culture has also been living with a fiction that it can exist without an over arching narrative, that it can live without a cohesive set of principles to unite it together. We call this disbelief in truth ‘postmodernism’ and it’s failure has nearly been complete.  People are now beginning to realize that if society is going to function, there needs to be a common consensus on at least a few important truths. 

            In fact, societies have always lived with an ‘orthodox’ narrative, one that has shaped and framed the debates that occur in broad popular culture. Often times these ‘orthodoxies’ are in place long before they become the dominant culture.  They work at a popular level and become something like the air people breathe.  Often times, without knowing it, it creeps within the minds of people and expresses itself in popular culture.  There is usually no huge Council that affirms the truth of a particular worldview, until the worldview is firmly in place.

            For instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans had long abandoned the worldview of the old gods long before it was replaced with Christianity.  The medieval world had long abandoned the ancient cosmologies before they were replaced with more modern sciences. 

            Today the same principles are at work.  Societies are in constant states of change.  As Christianity has been dismantled as the dominant story, the new Orthodoxy has been coming into being.  The weaknesses of the Church have been exposed and exploited and ultimately the Christian answer was found wanting.  It took nearly two centuries to displace Christianity on many different fronts.  Biblical criticism, philosophical relativism, exposure of the sins of clergy and lay alike, and an advancement of scientific knowledge have all worked together to demonstrate to Western Culture that Christianity did not work.

            The vacuum that has existed  for the last fifty years has hardly worked any better and we are now at last seeing the failure of the postmodern project.  The fatal flaw for postmodernism is that it simply doesn’t work.  You cannot say that “all truth is relative,” but then act as if there are absolutes.  For example, if everything is permissible, then the more extreme cases of murder and exploitation are permissible.  But no modern ethicist can possibly say that and culture will not accept this.  We may be fine with murdering our babies in the womb, but there is no way that killing five year olds is ever morally permissible.  Thus our modern world has been living with a hypocrisy that it has not wanted to own up to.  It was almost as if we were saying, ‘everything is permissible….that we want to be…,” but we ignored the larger philosophical implications of such logic.

            But at last, we are beginning to see the New Orthodoxy emerge from the ashes of postmodernism.  The following is a brief sketch of some of the major overtones of this New Orthodoxy, as I have seen it.  Remember that is just a sketch.  The New  Orthodoxy has not yet been completely or authoritatively recognized, but there are some of the themes that will be.  This is also not an attempt to evaluate the right or wrongness of these positions, but merely to describe the position.  Bias is certainly inevitable, but not intended.

Explicit Atheism. In the Renaissance, God was relegated to the place as a ‘watchmaker’ who may have created the earth, but surely had  nothing to do with the day to day operation of the earth.  Jesus was taken off the throne so that he may take his seat among the great moral teachers of mankind.   The supernatural was scientifically outlawed and turned into fables and  myth.

Today the underlying assumption in Western Culture is not that God is not involved…it is that He does not exist.  Atheists at one point were the minority and only a brave few would dare to suggest that God does not exist.  Today, all of science, physical and social, operate under the presupposition that God does not exist. People have become increasingly hostile towards the religious people.  Modern books hold the titles of God is Not Great, The God Delusion, and Is Christianity Good for the World.  Social scientists do all they can to explain religion as a part of religious anthropology. 

Religious people of all faiths are mocked and ridiculed and the sacred has become profane.  It is only a matter of time before the majority of the world will have ‘moved on’ from belief in God and to make sure that it believes in only scientific and rational things.

Religion is viewed as evil and a (or in some cases, the) cause of all evil in the world.  From something as innocuous and benign as a “COEXIST” bumper sticker which subliminally suggests that religion causes all war.  No  mention is made of the millions who have died in atheism’s name.

But the New Orthodoxy claims atheism as it its creed.

Extreme feminism The New Orthodoxy has no place for maleness in it.  Being male is seen as a disfunction.

Older cultures have always viewed that there is a unique existence in being male.  While in some cultures, men unjustly dominated women, there was always something different about being a man.  Men were supposed to live up to the traditions of honor and courage and to act in a way to protect the family from foreign powers.

We can debate all day whether this is right or wrong, but what is important is that in the New Orthodoxy, men are to be the second class citizens.

In our popular culture men are declared to be imbeciles.  Fair depictions of courageous men are few and far between.  Even in a children’s book series like the Bernstein Bears, men are seen as incompetent and must wait for the Mother Bear to fix everything.  Political columnist Maureen Doud recently wrote a book entitled Are Men are Necessary? in which she gives a negative answer to the question.

What is it about men that must be replaced? In the New Orthodoxy, we must emasculate any image of men as heroes, or of men as providers, or of men as protectors.  These images, in the New Orthodoxy’s wisdom, has only led to war and violence and imprisonment.

In the Lord of the Flies, we see the complete de-evolution of men from a working society to a group of savages killing each other.  William Golding, the author of the book, could not conceive of the same thing happening to a group of young girls, for the female mind would work together and build a society and work towards a solution.

And so we see the elimination of anything ‘masculine.’  Our heroes are becoming effeminate men who recognize that women are almost always right.  Or, the heroes are becoming women who act in ways that men used to.  With the rise of homosexuality, we see the decline of the traditional role of men.

The New Orthodoxy embraces the female as the ideal for society and we must do the same.

Aligned to the Left.  The era of conservatism in the West is over and the political Left has won the battle.

The 2008 Presidential Election has been heralded, rightly so, as a watershed moment.  This moment, above any other demonstrates the defeat of the conservative movement as any real force in American Politics.

In the past, differences of politics were cast in light of political conversation.  Today, one’s morality is tied up with one’s political stance.  Rush Limbaugh is seen by many as an evil man because he advocates for a free market economy.  Thomas Sowell is misguided at best and manipulated at worst.  Even political moderates such as President George W. Bush are seen as evil and hateful men.

Those who have aligned to the Left are seen as heroes and people who have overcome injustice.  For example, Bill Ayers, a man linked to bombings in the Pentagon and other public buildings, is heralded as a hero for standing against the conservative mainstream of America.  Even today, the Boston Bomber, has his face plastered on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in an attempt to ‘hear his side.’

We see this alignment taking place everywhere in our culture.  In popular culture, the villians almost always wind up being white business men who want to make a profit by killing either an endangered animal or tree or just innocent people.  

The causes of the Left are seen as moral and just.  Many of these causes see the increase of government power in order to ‘level the playing field’ or to ensure equality.  The advocates of limited government are seen as hateful people who are only self-interested and self-motivated and must be defeated for the sake of civilization.

A Warning  The time of the New Orthodoxy is upon us and I think that it is high time that we recognized this. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen.

But there is always a warning to behold.

Whenever there is an Orthodoxy, there is always heresy.  Heresy is almost always the teaching against orthodoxy.  And wherever there is heresy, there is always an effort to rid the culture of the stench of heresy.  Because Orthodoxy always carries with it the lure of power and of authority.

To my dismay, I look up on Church history and see the efforts to stamp out heresy.  The Nazis, too, attempted to eradicate heresy.  Stalin, Mao, the Spartans, the Shi’a, the Sunni, Che and all others have attempted to rid the world of heresies.  Always with violence and always with prejudice.

And so, we have the beginning of a New Orthodoxy, and I will pray that it’s reign will be peaceful.  But if the shadows of history teach us anything, along with a New Orthodoxy come the “re-education” camps to beat the heresy out of the people it holds sway over. 

Road to the Cross:Killing Plants

The "Road to the Cross" is a series of Lenten Devotion to encourage and to give hope to people as they follow Jesus and prepare to remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on Easter.

^ESV Mark 11:12 On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. ¹³ And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. ¹⁴ And he said to it, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." And his disciples heard it.

I don’t know much about figs.  Figs are kind of icky looking fruit and apart from a Fig Newton, I don’t know if I’ve eaten one.  Which makes we wonder about this passage of Scripture: What exactly does Jesus have against figs? (This video is the sum total of my fig knowledge)

In following Jesus, we have learned that some things just don’t make sense.  This is perhaps one of the weirdest things that Jesus does in his whole ministry.  Walking on water we understand, feeding the 5000 seems like a no-brainer, and even the harshness of the cleansing of the temple is alright by us.  But the fig tree?  It wasn’t even the seasons for figs!!!

To understand this, I think we have to get to the heart of the matter of what Jesus is doing.

Have you ever had a crush on someone?  Remember that feeling of looking at them as they passed by and you caught a whiff of their perfume?  You used to think that person was perfect.  They never did any wrong and you knew that once you got to know them, everything was going to be perfect…..and then you actually got to know them.  And you realized that they were…human…and imperfect.  They had bad breath and pimples and odd bodily smells.  Their personality was nowhere near as perfect as you knew it was…and you realize that the dream you had was so much better than the person standing in front of you.

Or have you ever had a vision of getting the perfect job?  You knew that once you got that job, life was going to be soooooooooooo easy.  You would be living the dream…for real! Only to realize that once you had the job, things weren’t perfect and nothing seemed to be going plan.

That’s the sort of thing that is going on here…but it’s much bigger than that.

In this last week of Jesus’ life, Jesus acts more symbolically and that is true of the fig tree.  In the Hebrew Bible, the fig often times represents Israel in its relationship to God.  For instance, in Jeremiah, we read, 

“When I would gather them, declares the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine nor figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered, and what I gave them has passed away from them.” Jeremiah 8:13 ESV

It seems that Jesus is building on this OT passage and enacting it out.  Instead of finding figs on the tree, Jesus finds none.  Just as God expected to find good things in Israel, he found none. And that is the point of this passage and the point of the miracle.

Israel was created to be God’s light to the nations.  They were supposed to exemplify the way of the Lord and the teachings of God.  They were supposed to be a model of what a perfect society could and should be.  They were supposed to take care of the poor and the widows and the orphans.  They were to lead the world into the way of peace and prosperity and most importantly, they were to be the place that reconciled the nations to God.

And none of it happened.  Instead of setting the example, they followed the ways and traditions of the world around them.  They exchanged their God for a king and followed him off to war.  They embraced an uber-capitalist ethic that oppressed the poor and the widows and the orphans.  Instead of reaching out in grace and peace to the nations, they scorned them and went to war with them.  The world increased in violence and hatred and racism and poverty.   Jeremiah continues, “we looked for peace, no good came, for a time of healing, but behold terror.” (8:15)

So when God finds no figs in them, it is not surprising, for they had departed from the way of the Lord.

Jesus finds the same thing when he enters into Jerusalem. Jerusalem was to be the city of peace and reconciliation.  Jesus found a city of violent and opportunistic people.  Cursing the fig tree reveals the truth about the people of Jerusalem—that they are fruitless, barren, and void.

We have to remember that even as much as Jesus loves us, the road to the cross bears judgment. It bears judgment against some lifestyles, attitudes, and actions.  The things that come into conflict with God’s kingdom are demonstrated to be what they are: empty vessels and fruitless trees.  Jesus curses that lifestyle no differently than he cursed the fig tree.

We in the church and on the road to the cross should not take this lightly.  The things that were important to God in the past are still important to Him today.  As James puts it, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:27).

The lesson we learn from Israel is to care more for our neighbor and their welfare than our own. Violence and greed are not the way of the Church, peace is, and yet we do not hear this from the voice of the church.  Instead, we hear the message of greed, to get all we can in the time we have.  We shy away from taking care of the poor, because that is the path of the liberals, and we concentrate more on how to get money than to give it away. 

There is a reason that this weird miracle happens, and there is a reason that the road to the cross stops right at the cursed fig tree.  It is so we might stop and pause and consider how we resemble this fig tree.  But the road to the cross continues on….