treacherous friends
In a post back in December I was having a wee think about the weak and exploited state of the church, and now I've just rediscovered the draft of a post following up on that. Here it is polished up and up-dated a bit - a train of thought sparked off by Jeremiah saying about the church, "all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies." (Lamentations 1:2.)
There are several one-time friends which might be identified, which have turned traitor on the church since they used to be friends.
One friend which the church used to have is the state. You used to be able to expect the state to support the work of the church in things like general morality and law and order, say. But not any more, not when the government doesn't care about morality, and is in fact at the forefront of introducing things like super casinos and twenty-four hour licencing for pubs, and neglecting to support the traditional two-parent family, and lying to us about going to war. Not when law and order becomes a matter of unchallengable control orders, and attempts to restrict freedom of speech through legislation like the "glorification" of terrorism law, and implicit intentions to hold us all accountable to the state (forgetting that it's the state who should be accountable to the people, not the other way round).
Another friend to the church could have been technology. In a time of instant mass communication, for example, it should be easy to transmit the gospel message far and wide - reaching far more people more easily than they did when the printing press was invented, and publishing was a laborious, lengthy procedure. Instead, this technology gets put to use for things like entertainment - for surrounding you wherever you go with music and images and print which are hardly supportive of a wholesome environment - hardly productive of thoughts on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report.
The third friend would be science and learning. Whatever you learn, in a world that God created, if it's not something about God himself, then it's something about what he has made. So in the hard sciences, you're only finding out about how the created world works; in history you're only looking to see how providence has unfolded; and in psychology you're only coming to understand about how fearfully and wonderfully made we are ourselves as human beings. But, treacherously, scholars in every field prefer to use their scholarship as a reason not to believe in God, and not to go to church, and in general, they tend to use these advances in science and learning to disparage even the idea of a designer.
If these friends were still with us, like they were in the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth, maybe we wouldn't be in such a solitary and desolate situation now.
But you also have to wonder - maybe part of the reason why the friendship of these sources has drained away is because the church for her part didn't treat them right either - when they started to promote their tendencies to forget the ultimate authority and ultimate wisdom, she should have stuck to her guns and held on to the absolutes, instead of watering down her critiques to suit their tastes and letting their mistakes seep into her own doctrine and practice, muting her proclamation of the gospel. It's not an excuse, but in a way it's no wonder really if they were disappointed and turned away.
There are several one-time friends which might be identified, which have turned traitor on the church since they used to be friends.
One friend which the church used to have is the state. You used to be able to expect the state to support the work of the church in things like general morality and law and order, say. But not any more, not when the government doesn't care about morality, and is in fact at the forefront of introducing things like super casinos and twenty-four hour licencing for pubs, and neglecting to support the traditional two-parent family, and lying to us about going to war. Not when law and order becomes a matter of unchallengable control orders, and attempts to restrict freedom of speech through legislation like the "glorification" of terrorism law, and implicit intentions to hold us all accountable to the state (forgetting that it's the state who should be accountable to the people, not the other way round).
Another friend to the church could have been technology. In a time of instant mass communication, for example, it should be easy to transmit the gospel message far and wide - reaching far more people more easily than they did when the printing press was invented, and publishing was a laborious, lengthy procedure. Instead, this technology gets put to use for things like entertainment - for surrounding you wherever you go with music and images and print which are hardly supportive of a wholesome environment - hardly productive of thoughts on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report.
The third friend would be science and learning. Whatever you learn, in a world that God created, if it's not something about God himself, then it's something about what he has made. So in the hard sciences, you're only finding out about how the created world works; in history you're only looking to see how providence has unfolded; and in psychology you're only coming to understand about how fearfully and wonderfully made we are ourselves as human beings. But, treacherously, scholars in every field prefer to use their scholarship as a reason not to believe in God, and not to go to church, and in general, they tend to use these advances in science and learning to disparage even the idea of a designer.
If these friends were still with us, like they were in the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth, maybe we wouldn't be in such a solitary and desolate situation now.
But you also have to wonder - maybe part of the reason why the friendship of these sources has drained away is because the church for her part didn't treat them right either - when they started to promote their tendencies to forget the ultimate authority and ultimate wisdom, she should have stuck to her guns and held on to the absolutes, instead of watering down her critiques to suit their tastes and letting their mistakes seep into her own doctrine and practice, muting her proclamation of the gospel. It's not an excuse, but in a way it's no wonder really if they were disappointed and turned away.
posted by cath at
4:51 pm
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