Two years ago I wrote that we may be seeing the first signs of what could be a new cultural renaissance in Italy. In March 2006, the Catholic News Agency reported that “a significant number of Italian lawmakers, politicians and intellectuals, led by the president of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera and including such individuals as Italy’s Culture Minister, Rocco Buttiglione, presented a manifesto in which they attribute the confusion and fear in Europe over Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism to ‘a moral and spiritual crisis’ that prevents the continent from finding ‘the courage to react.’”

The article went on to say that “the manifesto, endorsed by more than 70 different leaders in government, trade unions and universities, states that the West is ‘under attack from the outside by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism’ and is ‘incapable of responding to the challenge.’” 

The authors of the manifesto argued that “Europe is sick.” They pointed out that “the birth rate continues to fall, as well as [Europe’s] competitiveness, unity and action on the world scene.  It hides and denies its own identity and thus fails to provide itself a legitimate constitution of its citizens.”

The document also argued for the “better integration of immigrants” (In other words, assimilation into Western culture) and defends the right to life “from conception to natural death.” Additionally, these leaders affirmed that the natural family is the foundation of society, and marriage and argued that it “must be protected and differentiated from any other type of union or bond.” Ultimately, these leaders acknowledged that continued commitment to radical secularism, moral ambiguity, and postmodern tolerance will form the basis of Europe’s ultimate demise.

Apparently, this anti-secular, conservative momentum has continued to build in the two years since. This past month, voters in Italy overwhelmingly re-elected pro-life conservative former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The LA Times reported that “the margin of Berlusconi's victory, in which he and his allies gained indisputable control of both houses of parliament, also suggested a stinging condemnation of the left…”

Already, Berlusconi’s administration has proposed new laws restricting abortion, an issue which featured prominently in the election. Berlusconi has also called on the United Nations to approve a worldwide moratorium on abortions. Acknowledging this pro-life trend, Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint recently reported on Italy’s Giuliano Ferrara, a former Communist who now edits a conservative newspaper called Il Foglio, “the Sheet.” Colson writes, “Ferrara used his paper and talk show to advocate a moratorium on abortion and ‘to call attention to the value of life.’”

Colson adds, “This is not the first time Ferrara has bucked conventional secular wisdom. His paper has also supported the Catholic Church on matters like bioethics, relativism, and the decline of the Christian faith among Italians—this despite the fact that Ferrara is an atheist. While Ferrara insists that he is a ‘nonbeliever,’ other Italian politicians, as Britain’s New Statesman put it, ‘have been eagerly declaring their Christian credentials.’”

Colson continues, “According to the publication, this eagerness is a response to what it calls the ‘crucial change’ in Italian life since 2001: ‘the collapse of every grand political idea.’”
This “crucial change” began with a small group of cultural leaders who rose to oppose Italy’s cultural and spiritual decline, which is precisely the point I made two years ago. This has always been the impetus for long-term cultural change. Throughout history it has been small groups within societies that have initiated and produced real cultural change.

Pitirim Sorokin, the noted Harvard sociologist, observed in his study of social history that within hedonistic cultures a “temperate and creative minority” can arise. As a result of the “creative minority’s” commitment to virtue and chastity there naturally follows an increase in their creative output that affects various spheres of culture such as “religion, non-materialistic philosophy, non-hedonistic and non-sensual ethics, and the fine arts.”

In other words, a competent moral minority can, in fact, produce sustainable cultural change. For example, prior to the Italian Renaissance (14th-15th centuries) there was a steady decline of sexual morality, marriage and family beginning in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless there remained a small but “virtuous” class of intellectual elites whose creative productivity increased while the surrounding culture declined. These cultural shapers ultimately laid the foundations for another minority of intellectual elites that would initiate the Protestant Reformation followed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This produced the intellectual, scientific, political and economic revolutions that established the preeminence of Western cultural achievement.    

In every instance, positive cultural progress and, in some cases, reversal of cultural decline was produced by a small minority who had the insight, wherewithal, and courage to act in contradiction to the cultural drift toward immorality and the resulting creative stupor. This point was strongly reinforced by Randall Collins, The Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Collins argues in his book, The Sociology of Philosophies that over the course of 3,000 years of history only about 500 thinkers have been at the center of world civilization.

Many of these were men and women of faith who, choosing to live in obedience to God, resisted the values of their culture while pressing the truth of Christ into every area of life and culture. These Christians were counter-cultural in virtually every way as well as intellectually competent in their respective spheres of influence. These two must go hand in hand in order to impact culture. In doing this they were able to establish a Christian cultural consensus that shaped Western culture for centuries.

In conclusion, Christians, competent in their faith and possessing a comprehensive biblical view of life and reality, must rise to challenge the cultural trends toward secularism, moral ambiguity, and the stupefaction of culture. We, once again, must become cultural leaders capable of exercising the tools of reason and persuasion, not political coercion, if there be any hope of reversing the deleterious effects currently unfolding in American culture.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

In J.I. Packer’s 1973 classic Knowing God, he pointed out that “ignorance of God—ignorance both of his ways and of the practice of communion with him—lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today.” The ignorance to which Packer refers is that of theology. Our calling is to know God and if we deny that responsibility then we deny what it means to be Christian.
 
I think many in the American church know God in the same way they know the President—they know some facts about him, where he lives, what he does, etc.—but they do not have a relationship with him. This could be described as a cultural theology but a biblical theology is more akin to the relationship between a child and a good parent. The child in this sense has a much more intimate knowledge that, through time and maturation, reveals the loving nature of the parent. Experience only confirms this knowledge and this produces trust, which in turn fosters obedience.

Others may take very seriously the study of the President and his office, its history, legal powers, etc. but this is only theoretical since this knowledge exists apart from any relationship with the person who is President. For many, this is their approach to theology; it is only theoretical knowledge that often serves to “puff up” and make people intellectually proud.
 
A proper biblical theology, that every follower of Christ should pursue, is one which seeks to know the character and nature of God as revealed in Scripture so that they may live in a way that pleases Him. There is a practicality to theology that produces relevant wisdom for living in the real world. How can one successfully live in the world without knowing about the One whose world it is and who runs it?

In John 17:3, Jesus provides the best definition of theology – he equates knowledge of God (which is theology’s ultimate goal) with Eternal Life. Here Eternal Life is not our merely our experience after death, but a life lived now qualitatively different to our old lives and the lives of those around us. A life we do not yet fully experience but one which mirrors the depth to which we know God; the greater our knowledge of God, so the more abundant is our experience of Eternal Life.
In recent weeks I have tried to offer critical analysis and a thoughtful theological response to Christendom’s collapse and the lingering influence of the Constantinian system. Many were challenged and responded with recognition that these are relevant and serious questions that must be considered if we seek to recover a biblical understanding of the Gospel and the mission of the church. Others however responded in ways that reveal a lack of reliance upon proper theology and instead rely on personal feelings or culturally induced ways of thinking, which they attempt to validate by selected proof texts.

For example, this comment which appeared on ChristianPost.com:
 

This response demonstrates a less-than-thorough “proof-text” theology, designed to support their assertions rather than a systematic approach to theology, which considers the whole of Scripture. The fact is to “be in Christ” as conveyed in 2 Corinthians is to be participating already in the new creation, which includes “one new man” or humanity as the original Greek proclaims in Ephesians 2:15.  To deny the corporate or “communal” nature of the church (the visible Body of Christ) and Christ’s call for unity is to ignore the essential teaching of Scripture. In Paul’s epistles, it is abundantly clear that the Christian life is about being incorporated into a new humanity. As Christians, we become members of the body of Christ.

However, as C. S. Lewis points out, in individualized Western culture, we hear Paul’s teaching about our being members of Christ in precisely the wrong way. For many Westerners [and apparently the critic above] a “member” is a person who merely belongs to something like a debating club or a political party. The member in this sense is a collection of individuals who happen to have joined the organization. But Paul uses “member” in an organic sense. We are members of Christ in the same way that the eye, ear, hand, and foot are members of the body.

I use this illustration to demonstrate how our failure to develop a coherent and systematic theology affects our ability to live as faithful followers of Christ. This person, because of their inadequate theology, remains for now, resolute in their individualism and thus will not submit to the biblical admonitions to do otherwise. Because they lack theological protection (armor) from the culture, modern individualism has, for them, replaced biblical community as the medium responsible to demonstrate the attractiveness of Christianity. This means that each individual is required to be a perfect practitioner of the faith, whose performance is meant to elicit admiration and the question “Why?” from co-workers, relatives and friends. However, the individual inevitably fails at some point and thus Christianity is seen to fail. By holding hands and living as disciplined congregations, we have a much better chance of offering an attractive alternative to the prevailing culture.

This point was recently reinforced by Dr. Dudley Woodberry, professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller Seminary. Dr. Woodberry’s research, spanning nearly 16 years, sought to understand what factors were involved in Muslims coming to faith in Jesus Christ. One of the most essential factors he identified was “When Christ’s love transforms committed Christians into a loving community, many Muslims [identified] a desire to join such a fellowship.”

Does theology matter? It does when you consider that poor theology leads to a less than adequate understanding of what it means to be Christian, which in turns leads to a less than adequate witness of the Gospel.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

For more than five decades, self-proclaimed experts and so-called sexual reformers, beginning with Alfred Kinsey, have worked to advance the belief that there are no public consequences to private sexual behavior. And Americans, for the most part, have bought into this notion, proving what Lenin said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth!”

This ideological offensive, which gained traction during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, led to the erosion of all prior social and legal boundaries, which restrained sex to monogamous marriage. This exclusive union—which strictly limited the acceptable relationship for sex and esteemed the traditional family—was reinforced through the stigmatization of sex outside of marriage and the criminalization of certain acts.

Historically, most states in the US had legal prohibitions against adultery, often called “crimes against marriage,” which were designed to protect marriage by punishing those who jeopardized the family by seeking sexual satisfaction beyond their spouse. Virtually every advanced civilization has had some form of prohibition against adultery. Granted, these have not always been evenly applied to both husband and wife including within Christianized cultures, despite the fact that Scripture equally condemns both male and female offenders.

Today, the enforceability of criminal sanctions for adultery is problematic in light of Supreme Court decisions since 1965 relating to privacy and sexual intimacy. However, this right of privacy never existed until Kinsey asserted that there were no public consequences to private sexual behavior.

Similarly, most states had laws against fornication, which criminalized sex between unmarried persons. In 2001, Jesse McClure was convicted under Georgia’s fornication law. When McClure was 16, he was caught having sex with his girlfriend in her bedroom. The girl’s mother reported the incident to her daughter’s probation officer, who then brought charges. McClure was ordered to pay a $200 fine and write an essay explaining why he should not have engaged in sex. Instead, he wrote that it was not the business of the court to know why. As McClure told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Invading personal privacy just isn’t right.”

In 2003, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out McClure’s conviction. Chief Justice Norman Fletcher wrote, “The government may not reach into the bedroom of a private residence and criminalize the private, noncommercial, consensual sexual acts of two persons legally capable of consenting to those acts.”

ACLU attorney Catherine Sanderson, who represented McClure, insisted the issue is again one of privacy and therefore, “no longer does the state have any say in regulating private sexual activity between consenting persons of legal age.” Journalists and others heralded this as a “great victory” for civil liberties calling such laws “relics of a Calvinist past,” “a stupid law,” and “ancient” -- the implication being that we will all be better off now that we can legally have sex with whomever we want!

While only a handful of states maintain fornication and adultery laws on the book, none actually enforce these statutes and most people today would likely regard any attempt to do so as ridiculous. But are they right? Are there, in fact, no public consequences to any private sexual behavior? If there are, does the individual’s right to privacy trump the greater good of society?

First, our right to privacy does not extend to any and every consensual behavior. For example, one cannot evade conviction for the possession and use of illegal narcotics on the basis of using them in the privacy of one’s own home. Illegal drug use has enormous societal consequences in both human and economic terms. Therefore, it becomes an essential role of government to intervene [over and against the right to privacy] in effort to preserve and promote public safety and well-being among its citizenry.

Secondly, contrary to the propaganda of the last five decades; there is recent data which demonstrates there is in fact a public consequence to certain private sexual behaviors. In first-ever research, a scholarly study, entitled The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and All 50 States quantifies a minimum $112 billion annual taxpayer cost from high rates of divorce and unmarried childbearing. This amounts to more than $1 trillion in taxpayer expense over the last decade that is directly attributable to marital breakdown and out-of-wedlock births.

“These costs are due to increased taxpayer expenditures for anti-poverty, criminal justice and education programs, and through lower levels of taxes paid by individuals whose adult productivity has been negatively affected by increased childhood poverty caused by family fragmentation,” according to Ben Scafidi, Ph.D., one of the study’s authors and economics professor at Georgia College & State University.

Add to this, the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease among all other industrialized nations, the highest rates of teen pregnancies, the largest producing and consuming nation of pornography, the highest rape rates, and more than 40 million abortions since 1972 and one must be willfully blind to suggest that there are no public consequences to any private sexual behavior.

By first accepting sexual activity outside of monogamous marriage, the legal and social structures, which served to protect and promote marriage were either weakened or eliminated. As sex was increasingly separated from marriage, marriage became less and less necessary. Alternative family forms such as single-parent, cohabitating and most recently same-sex came to be merely modern family “options” equal to the traditional two-parent family. I understand that single-parenthood is a pervasive reality, and that these single-parents are working as hard if not harder than any other parent to raise and care for their children. So, I am not denigrating these families by asserting that the traditional family is superior. The two-parent family is by every objective standard, both today and throughout history, the best possible arrangement. I’m sure most single-parents would be the first to agree.

Suffice it to say, divorce and out-of-wedlock birthrates all skyrocketed as society separated sex from marriage, demonstrating there is a devastating public consequence (or cost) to private sexual behavior, apparently more than $112 billion a year!

As God’s called people we are to demonstrate the reign of God. This is a significant area in society where we can begin to act as a redemptive influence by living under God’s rule related to sex and the family. Of course this means that Christians stop divorcing at the same or greater rate than those outside the church. It means that Christians stop cohabitating, that they remain chaste until marriage and that Christians stop “struggling” with pornography and actually flee sexuality immorality—three vices within the church that are near equal in scale to those outside the church!  If we do this then we can proclaim that Christ changes us!

By living in obedience in these areas we can once again advance the establishment of social and legal structures that promote and protect marriage as the only acceptable relationship for sex. This is not mere moralizing on the part of simple “religious folk” but the answer to a pressing social problem that, as the evidence demonstrates, has enormous human, social and economic costs.

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.

At the conclusion of my series on the Church in Post-Christendom, I argued that demonstrating the reign of God [or gospel] within a distinct community may be the American church’s greatest challenge to its mission.

I further stressed that this community, in which diverse people, locally and generally, are united by a common love for Christ and each other, is an essential witness to the in-breaking reign of God. In essence, the nonappearance of this “community” renders our acts of service indistinguishable from any other and our proclamation of Jesus shallow and without basis.

What hinders this community is NOT a weakness of the institutional church and its leadership but rather the radical individualism of its members. This is not simply a matter of concern over sporadic church attendance or mediocre participation in the church potluck dinner; this is a central underlying principle, which nullifies the witness of God’s people and opposes the redemptive mission of God!

Observing the ascendency of radical individualism, Charles Taylor, the acclaimed philosopher and author of Sources of Self pointed out that over the course of the last two centuries “our sources of self-identity have shifted from the external and transcendent to the internal and subjective experience of the individual.” In one sense, as modern societies advanced beyond the necessity of community for shear survival, we gradually and naturally began to transfer our dependency from other people and the local community to technology and ubiquitous governing structures. As our need for other people in order to survive diminished, and as means of transportation and communication evolved; we were less and less bound to our local communities. The bonds of connection and the sense of shared identity were weakened and our reciprocal responsibilities toward others began to evaporate. As an example, for those of you who live in the larger cities; consider how often you see a stranded motorist on the freeway in which hundreds if not thousands of people will pass by without the thought of offering aid. Such a thing would be incomprehensible to those living with this sense of shared identity.   

Again, this is not a problem unique to the church in America; it is a fundamental problem within American culture as a whole. For Christians, the problem arises when we fail to recognize the worldly nature of this condition and blindly incorporate it into the church. This would be akin to the church in Corinth trying to assimilate their former pagan practices into their new Christian life and worship. By not subjecting ourselves and the culture from which we spring to biblical scrutiny; we are essentially doing the same thing, which in turn makes us less distinguishable from the world around us. Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of the definitive book on the collapse of American community points outs:


This is a stinging indictment of the American church by an outsider, demonstrating that we clearly live in the presence of a watching world – a world that longs for that which only Christ can give, whether they realize it or not.  And, one of the things all human beings need and long for is love and acceptance by their fellow human beings. We want to belong and when we do; this is community! This innate longing emanates from our imago Dei and its absence exists because of the Fall. It is for remedy that Christ’s victory and reign serves, and it is His body, the church, in which the firstfruits of this redemptive work should be seen.  

I am quick to add that this witness-bearing community is not inwardly focused and separate from the world but rather it represents a distinctly different way of living through which the church serves, and engages the world. In addition to local Christian communities expressed in and through the local church, there is also the larger “community” represented by all followers of Christ from various traditions and denominations, which at present is sadly and deeply divided.
As if the present diminution of community were not bad enough, we as a culture appear to be descending further into an almost hyper-individualistic sense of “community.” An example of this can be found in the phenomenon of social-networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace that have gripped the next generation in particular.

Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of Culture Magazine, Felicia Wu Song, Ph.D. makes the point:


I would add that many Christians likewise view the community of God’s people as merely one of their many “systems of friends, contacts, and acquaintances” from which they can obtain the benefits common to networking. Dr. Song adds that these sites are not a causal force in this condition but merely “reflect and reinforce the basic dispositions toward networked individualism.”  

So, let me ask you: If Christians living within a distinct community is an essential witness to the mission of God, and because so many of us seem unwilling to surrender the independent self, and since our present understanding and expression of this community falls painfully short; what can we do to remedy this situation?

Clearly, this problem is enormously complex and deeply embedded in our collective psyche. I don’t claim to know the solution (I have some ideas) but I think we the church, by God’s grace, can through prayer and reflection turn our greatest challenge into what could be the church’s greatest opportunity: the recovery of distinctly Christian community.

So, I am asking you: What practical steps can churches and individuals take to foster and promote a healthy, distinctively biblical, and witness-bearing community? Share your ideas HERE

© 2008 by S. Michael Craven

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S. Michael Craven is the founder and President of the Center for Christ & Culture. The Center for Christ & Culture is dedicated to renewal within the Church and works to equip Christians with an intelligent and thoroughly Christian approach to matters of culture in order to recapture and demonstrate the relevance of Christianity to all of life. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org

Michael lives in the Dallas area with his wife Carol and their three children.