Beyond the Modern Age: An Archaeology of Contemporary Culture by Bob Goudzwaard

Author:Bob Goudzwaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2017-05-02T18:30:16+00:00

Should there be a relationship between these two propositions? Advocates of the death of God see the resurgence of religion as a great danger of our time. However, as Girard perceptively notes in words reminiscent of Rieff, debates on the death of God and man

remain theological at bottom, and by extension sacrificial; that is, they draw a veil over the subject of vengeance, which threatens to become quite real once again, in the form not of a philosophical debate but of unlimited violence, in a world with no absolute values. As soon as the essential quality of transcendence—religious, humanistic, or whatever, is lost, there are no longer any terms by which to define the legitimate form of violence and to recognize it among the multitude of illicit forms. The definition of legitimate and illegitimate forms then becomes a matter of mere opinion, with each man free to reach his own decision. In other words the question is thrown to the winds. . . . Only the introduction of some transcendental quality that will persuade men of the fundamental difference between sacrifice and revenge, between a judicial system and vengeance, can succeed in bypassing violence.79

The resurgence of religion today cannot simply be written off as a return of fundamentalism.80 Philip Jenkins’s seminal work, for example, has demonstrated the legitimate public concerns of much resurgent Christianity in the Majority World. This chapter has sought to show that religion remains a legitimate and vital concern amidst the crisis of modernity and that in the healthiest possible ways the resurgence of religion and our crisis ought to be connected. Thus, rather than speak of the death of God, we invoke the biblical image of the living God, an image found in both the Old Testament and New Testament.

The final chapter of Mouw and Griffioen’s Pluralisms and Horizons is titled “Under an Open Heaven.” They assert that “real unity can only come from a source that transcends the bounds of human society.”81 Such a source is the living God, and Mouw and Griffioen evoke practices for today in the context of our eschatological yearning for the heavenly city:

This yearning, in turn, makes us bold to join others in the larger human quest for a healthy public arena, in the hope that on that journey too, we will experience those mysterious and surprising inklings of a larger kind of love that can take concrete shape—even in the midst of our highly pluralistic here-and-now—in the new forms of citizenship and community.82

In order to move in this direction Christians will self-critically need to reject—and repent of—the Balkanization, bowdlerization, and patronization of their faith. The first two are the real dangers—dangers to which Christians in the West repeatedly succumb. The issues we have raised in this chapter are at the heart of the crisis of modernity, and they are issues that Christians need to engage with in depth. We need intensive discussion, a body of literature, and numerous examples of good practice if we want to be taken seriously in the debates about the great challenges of our day.

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