What is the Church to do in a society that has no interest in history. Inside the Church, the historicity of Jesus is always in full debate. But in modern society, the attitude to history works against being attracted to it.
An engine of the imagination of the Church is that the bizarre reality of Jesus occurred. This is one key component of its existence. But modern society is not interested in history. It is a testament to the stability, security and confidence in our modern technological, economic and scientific achievement. For the last 200 years history was important, creating a nostalgia for some perfect past while industrialization, mass emmigrations, urbanization, social, intellectual and political flux was everywhere.
The prejudice against the past feeds the dismissal of Christianity as mere myth, a story, and it competes in a world with too many stories through the media, and the post-modern, non-linear, music video editing style used in movies that now distorts even the easy connectedness of narrative. It is like our connection with story is being corrupted to prevent us further from thinking coherently. The most important job in media today is not the ‘talent.’ It is the video editor, whose job is to distort, jolt, cajole the most number of images in the fastest, weirdest way to fool our cynical, advertising-savvy critical suspicions. In this way we are entertained by overwhelming our minds.
What is the Church to do with this anti-coherence that is the foundation of post-modern humans? The freedom to pick-and-choose, create one’s own meaning from so much more than was ever available before?
It represents the conflict in the Church of what mind culture is, married to wisdom. It represents the evolution of the Protestant Reformation from the simple Biblical debate. Actual history, story, married with non-linear wisdom, spirit, poetry.
If the Church can see it in itself, will it see it in society? Can it gain new meaning of itself from it? And then will it help it?
God is All. The question has always been how do we make the wholeness of God within us, and in society as well? The mind continues to develop in weird ways, always changing and evolving, right now in ‘post-modernism.’ The Church perceives the history problem. The continuity, the wholeness of the story and spiritual reality, and society’s lack of reference points that was integral in previous incarnations of civilization.
In a way, the Church feels free of its past. Without being an integral part of the political apparatus, or even referenced on ‘values’ questions, the spiritual has broken slightly more free of its bonds with the apparatus of civilization. How does it use this new-found freedom? It has broken away from its history somewhat, just like society has. This is a macro view, a wisp in the perception of the Church as a whole. But it is there. The more we focus on it, the more we can build on it.
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