Gene Edward Veith has written a wonderful open letter to encourage pastors, as we wage war on the front lines of today’s cultural and spiritual battles. I particularly found his summary of the morphing of competing ideas to Christianity very helpful (with a little bit of rearranging of the points on my part):
“Modern and postmodern ideas and practices that have challenged Christianity have been taken to ever greater extremes. But some have been pushed so far that they are coming apart or morphing into something new. The arts seem to be at a creative dead end, rehashing their past and running out of new ideas.
Science was thought to have banished the mysteries of existence, but now it is showing the universe to be more mysterious than ever. Technology is performing wonders, but in giving us virtual reality and virtual relationships, it is undermining actual reality and actual relationships. Society has become an assemblage of isolated individuals, under a polarised and dysfunctional government, broken families, and cultural malaise. One of the few areas of agreement is that we need to recapture a sense of community.
The Sexual Revolution has brought on the #MeToo movement. Prominent individuals who bought into the 1960’s line that “sex is no big deal,” are learning that sexual morality is important after all. Feminism, which insisted that women are no different from men, must now contend with transgenderism, with men insisting that they be accepted as women. The LGBT movement, after winning same-sex marriage, now says that gender identity and sexual attraction are fluid.
Education would eliminate the need for religion, some people thought, but today progressive educational theories are failing dramatically, with classical Christian schools and homeschools consistently outperforming them. Universities that were once bastions of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry are now centers of censorship and indoctrination.
Environmentalists fight climate change and warn against a coming apocalypse, but some are welcoming that apocalypse, advocating the extinction of the human race. All sides forget that human beings are also part of nature and thus subject to natural law.
Despite the prevailing view that reality is nothing more than a construction that we can deconstruct and reconstruct at will, the objective reality that is God’s creation will always—eventually—assert itself. Christians can be confident that they have reality on their side.”
Another way of summarising what he is saying is that the revolution always eats itself. In the end the prodigal son discovers that the pigs do not make for good company. The life he has chosen is neither coherent nor sustainable.
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