Keep Calm and Incarnate
Reading, or should I say more honestly, perusing, the book The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society by Murray Jardine, I felt I was shifting from reading a book of history to one about political theory, then one on economics, and then on consumerism, then philosophy and another on theology, even a bit on scientific principles, and urban planning, and then a shift again to postmodernism and neoclassicism. “Man!” I thought, “This guy is well versed in so many subjects.” But the underline current that ran through his entire thesis was how western humanity is in the grip of a crisis of how humans, with their creative capacities to change the world, morally handle this capacity that is manifested through the technology that they are able to “speak” into existence. He states, “Western societies are suffering from severe moral confusion because we cannot make moral sense of our technological capacities; premodern ideas about how people should live were based on the idea that humans are part of unchanging God-given natural order, and we now realize that we can change our environment.”[1] Yet this freedom to create was not always evident to humans. For without this understanding, this revelation – that humans were created in the image of God and could, like God, create – humans were not free to create and therefore could not change their environment.[2]
Jardine takes us through the evolution and crisis of modern technological societies, setting the stage for how we have arrived at the current situation. Then, within Christianity he finds the formulation of a solution that would rescue us from the crisis. He goes extensively into the Ancient Pagan world describing the myths of such societies and the orality and human condition of such societies as a way to establish a comparison with the world before and after Christianity. With the entrance of Christianity the world changed as never before, so much so that Jardine refers to this transformation on the scene of humanity as “The Cosmological and Anthropological Revolution of the Biblical Narrative.”[3]
Thinking back to last week’s reading by Hunter, though we learned many ways how not to change the world, we learned that the faithful presence of Christians in and among society is a constant opportunity to affect and infect others with the love that transcends all and can bring about positive change. Jardine takes the opinion that the Western civilization is ultimately exhausted having destructive tendencies that will eventually bring about the annihilation of the society. His suggestion is to build local communities that “can eventually bring about a new social and political order, recalling that such a new culture will not bring about heaven on earth, but only allow for the survival of humanity long enough for God to complete his purpose.”[4]
Jardine understands, as both Hunter and Douthat did in their books, that the modern world is “ultimately a distortion of the political and social order implied by Christianity, and that this distortion is the direct result of failures on the part of Christianity.”[5] And as Miller and Cavanaugh, and to some degree Heath and Potter showed that, “The consumer economy and its expressive individualist culture are thus the primary concrete embodiments of the modern moral crisis.”[6] With all these indictments against Christians, what is a modern day Christian to do with all of this? Evade being a consumer, stay home and make your own bread? Don’t enter into politics, do not attempt to change the world, try to live a Christian presence in a post-Christian nation that suffers from moral failure knowing that our concept of freedom in the West is ultimately nihilistic? With all these things one would want to simply “stick head in sand and wait for return of Jesus.” But as the called – the ecclesia of God – we are called out to be different, to be change agents, to be ambassadors. We must be willing to walk with confidence that the word of reconciliation that has been entrusted to us is the most moral change agent this world has ever seen. Truly it is a cosmological and anthropological revolution. So my alternative response to “head in sand” would be a more radical approach. My reply bubbles up with a statement that could be put on a t-shirt, like the many I saw when visiting England – “Keep Calm and Incarnate.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.