Current Editorial
PAST EDITORIAL....
"The End of Christendom" - 14.4 - 1997
The biggest fact in the history of the Church in the 20th century has been the great rebellion against Christianity, and the dissolution of Christendom. There were signs of its dissolution in the 18th century, a real counter attack in the 19th century, but the 20th century has seen the steady erosion of the centuries- old consensus among people of European origin, that to take part in European civilization ("Christendom") involved being Christian in some sense. (There were exceptions of course, especially among the Jews, but that is what they were -- exceptions). The vicious persecution of the Church in Revolutionary and Republican France, in Stalinist Russia, in revolutionary Mexico, in Bismarck's and Hitler's Germany, all declared openly what is also present in less violent forms in other western countries -- the complete autonomy of the secular realm, which finds a threat in the sacred as defined especially by Christianity. Only when Christianity is relegated to the private and subjective realm -- only, that is, when it has been completely neutered -- can it be tolerated.In the main, there have been two major reactions to the dissolution of Christendom. One, the fundamentalist, has been to deny the secular world any role at all -- an exercise that requires a considerable faculty for self-delusion. The other, typical of the mainline churches, and certainly of the Anglican Church of Canada, has been to join the secular world in turning against the heritage of Christendom.
Seminarians are now taught that Christendom was a Bad Thing. The Holy Ghost apparently slipped up big time when he infused the grace of conversion into the Emperor Constantine (c.312 A.D.) Christendom is blamed for the distortion and perversion of authentic Christianity, and the great liberal project of our time is to recover the authentic Christianity of the pre- Constantinian Church (particularly with the eschatological orientation towards God's kingdom allegedly obscured and even lost after Constantine's conversion) in everything from liturgy to ecclesial government to evangelism, and most certainly in the area of dogma. After all, the great definitions of the Christian faith, beginning with the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. summoned by and presided over by Constantine himself, belong to Christendom!
Thus the interest in Gnosticism and other early Christian heresies (as promoted, for instance, by Elaine Pagets) as authentic alternative forms of Christianity. (It was in contemporary liturgies, however, that I first encountered this attack on Christendom. A distinguished professor of liturgics instructed my seminary class in the history of Christianity, in which the pre-Constantinian Church was simply equated with the post-Christendom Church of today, with the BCP losing out, of course, since it belonged to the Christendom Church of the intervening period.)
Of course, out knowledge, of the ante-Nicene, pre-Constantinian Church is rather sketchy, and what we do know about it suggests that the early Church's teachings and practices were rather fluid. This is not a problem for the mainline church's crusaders against Christendom, however for the other prong of their response to secularization has been the search for relevance to contemporary culture. The result, epitomized in contemporary liturgy, for instance, has been an antiquarian veneer over a thoroughly secularized content: eucharistic prayers that are Antiochene in structure, and feminist in content. In ecclesiology, we have revived the thoroughly primitive, Biblical language of the "people of God", but the content it is given comes from contemporary democratic politics. We talk of "covenant", but the content comes from contemporary business management theory. Something of the same perspective seems to have affected the current revival of evangelism.
This response has some glaring difficulties. As historical analysis of Christendom, and the effect of Constantine's conversion on the Church, it is often dubious. (For example, the liturgists used to teach that the eucharist was the only public liturgy of the early church, with the offices rose to prominence to provide for Christendom's mass of nominal Christians. Such a perspective, for instance, seems to underly the BAS with its virtual destruction of the offices as early usable forms of public worship. Unfortunately, in 1986, the year after the BAS was published, the Jesuit scholar Robert Taft published his study of the office in the early church, showing it to be a popular and established form of worship along with the eucharist).
As analysis of the needs of contemporary society, it is superficial: the neo-paganism of post-Christian society cannot simply be equated with the paganism of pre-Christian society. Despite the new age's antiquarian flirtations with the Mother Goddess, for instance, the focus of such spirituality is less the fertility of the natural realm than it is the infertility of the technological realm. Post-Christian neo-paganism arises out of Christianity, and cannot be understood apart from its Christian origins.
Above all, as a strategy to maintain the Church's authentic identity, the destruction of the Church's heritage from Christendom has been an utter failure. Since Christendom, with all its faults (and glorious successes), far from being a distortion of early Christianity, actually arose out of pre-Constantinian Christianity (one might almost be so bold as to argue it was an inevitable development), the attack on Christendom has essentially been the Church's attack on itself. Far from reviving the early Church's eschatological orientation towards God's coming kingdom, the mainline churches have been marked by a secularizing orientation towards the kingdoms of the world.
I suspect that what lies behind this strategy is the notion that we can somehow finesse the anti-Christian secularization of western culture by some technique. So for instance, the particular temptation of evangelism is the idea that somehow we can find a method of evangelization that will "work" in contemporary culture: the problem is not of course in finding methods of evangelization that "work", the problem is finding a working method that evangelizes---that is, that inculcates an authentically Christian identity. It is not clear that evangelistic efforts have recognized or fully met the challenge of integrating converts into the Church's life. Certainly some thoughtful evangelical commentators (J.I. Packer, David Wells, Mark Noll) have worried about the thinness, the superficiality, of much contemporary evangelicalism.
Diagnosis of what is wrong is easier than prescription of what will make things better: still, I rather doubt that any method or technique will allow the Church to do an end-run around contemporary anti-Christian secularity. The current rebellion against Christianity has roots much too deep to be dealt with in so superficial a fashion. The world that has defined itself as simply secularist must discover for itself the limits of the secular before it can be open once again to the Christian sacred. (The Solar Temple and the Heaven's Gate cults, with their bizarre mix of science fiction and religion, show the secularist world that irrational superstition rushes in when secularization clears away rational religion).
This does not mean that the Church's mission is to lurk behind locked doors, waiting for Judas to hang himself so that we may emerge and announce "we told you so". The Church must engage in the secular world's own debates about the relation of secularity to the sacred as defined by Christianity. Surely this will involve (as the journal First Things so often calls for) a return of Christians to the public realm, not simply in moralistic crusades nor in pressure group politics either. Surely this will involve a genuine return to roots, a thoughtful, and not merely positivistic appropriation of the whole of the Church's tradition. Surely it will involve a new investment by Christians in education and social reform.
Fundamentally, however, the Church's best service is simply to maintain its own tradition -- the tradition it inherits from Christendom -- in the most thoughtful and prayerful ways possible. Yes, Christendom is in decided retreat; hostility to Christian faith is growing, but our problems are not to be met by discarding the heritage of Christendom. We do not address the problems of the contemporary world by adopting that world's hostility to its own roots in Christianity. +
A note on our Editor:
The Rev'd Gavin Dunbar was Rector of the Parish of Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia, and now serves as an associate priest in the parish of St. John's, Savannah, Georgia.
He is the editor of the Anglican Free Press, and past Vice-President of the Nova Scotia / PEI branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and a former instructor at the Atlantic St. Michael's Youth Conference. He has written and lectured extensively on a range of topics, and has many god-children.