Navigating Cultural Shifts: The Church's Enduring Mission

I believe in trying to see continuities and how one thing leads to another, and how there aren't such dramatic breaks as we often think there are. And now, in my extreme old age, I'm becoming a chopper because I think we today live in a moment where Western civilization's history has changed from what it's been for fifteen hundred years. And we live in a cowardly new world. [00:03:11]

Christianity has had a legal and cultural position of dominance and leadership. And whether people were actually Christians or not, they almost all believed in God. They almost all believed there was an afterlife. They almost all believed there were moral absolutes. And, in general, they mostly believed the moral absolutes of the Bible were the real moral absolutes. [00:03:59]

And now, in the last five to ten years, what do we see? We see a cultural consensus that if you criticize homosexuality, if you criticize marital infidelity, if you criticize premarital sex, if you criticize anything transgendered, you are a bigot, you are guilty of hate speech. And you know, that's true on Fox News as much as it is anywhere else. [00:06:31]

And our society has been remade, and we have to get used to being a minority, which brings us right back to the first or second century of Christian experience. And what we have to insist is we are a respectful minority, we are a cooperative minority, in so far as we can be, but we are an uncompromising minority in saying, "We have a right to speak the truth that our God has revealed to us, and you do not have a right to shut us up." [00:07:27]

I think it is the rapidity of it. It's been in the works for a while, but we had a lot of borrowed capital of our Judeo-Christian worldview, whether that was sincere, visible sainthood or not, it was a Christian worldview. There was a lot of borrowed capital for that to cover its long slow death. Now that borrowed capital is being used up and we are seeing it. [00:09:10]

And the time I go back to is the collapse of Rome. And so, we go back to the early couple of centuries, and we see a hostile culture, and we see a hostile environment. And everything about Christianity is out of step with the Roman world. And so, we see persecution. Then we have Constantine, and we are not going to get into whether that was a genuine conversion or not, but there was something different post-Constantine. [00:10:27]

And then, we have our good friend Augustine. And he goes and writes a book. And the first page of that book, it's a very long book, it's almost as long as your Russian novels that you like, "All the empires that on this world do totter," and that would include Rome, that would include Babylon, that would include Medo Persia, Greece. He starts off with that perspective, and he says, here is the city of God, here is the city of man, and we know that God is sovereign, we know that God has His destiny for the city of God, and that is our hope as Christians. [00:11:38]

We have to revive the arguments for these things. We are committed to the proposition that there is a God and that He has spoken. And we have wonderful resources to defend the Scriptures as the revelation of God. And the world is going to sneer at us over a lot of these things but we have resources to challenge those sneers and say, "You may sneer all you want but how are you going to answer these claims and these challenges and these arguments in defense of our position?" [00:13:00]

I think the main thing we need to tell people, and I think this is true especially for youth, first of all, let's acknowledge the challenges they are facing. They are so unlike the challenges we faced as youth. So, let's be very sympathetic to the voices that are coming at them. It's a barrage of an anti-Christian, almost anti-human even, worldview. So, let's have some sympathy for them. [00:15:42]

And they can attempt to suppress the truth, but it's a vain attempt. And what will happen is the truth will pop up. Now, I know this isn't a very good image but, you know, the image of the, you know we have the beach ball in the pool, and you try to sit on it, you know to keep it underwater, and then your weight shifts, and the beach ball pops up? That's how I liken this. [00:17:00]

I think we need strong patterns to teach our children in particular in the local church. My own conviction, I'm sorry if I offend you, but I get to leave soon, our children ought to be in church with us. They shouldn't be in a children's church. Our children should not be able to remember a time when they weren't, Sabbath by Sabbath, in the church worshiping with the church, and part of the church, and knowing people in the church who are a different age from them. [00:18:58]

We need to establish a pattern that the church is a priority; it's not an option. It's not an occasional experience; it's our weekly experience. We organize our life around it. And in, I just think establishing those patterns of attendance of worship, of study, we ought to have good catechetical instruction for our young people so that they learn not only the stories of the Bible, but they learn the pattern of truth. [00:19:41]