On Democracy and Forms
June 03, 2005
Wherever possible, I always like to bring to attention fine examples of particularist protestants still struggling to hold onto a real tradition. It is likely a doomed effort, of course, but even so, it is necessary and laudable (even in its unsympathetic and dangerous forms) as one more check on the unrestrained tide of therapeutic deism that sweeps over the whole of the Church, in all Her forms. In the latest issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal, the delightfully recalcitrant and unapologetically paeleo-calvinist letter of Pantagruelist D.G. Hart, Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio responds to a letter he received from a listener urging Myers to get on board with the new science of church growth and outreach exemplified by Rick Warren’s purpose driven church and the Willow Creek Association. Myers’s thorny reply is worth quoting at length:
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By not reflecting on the sources and significance of modern cultural changes before adapting the shape of the Church’s ministry, you run the risk of adding momentum to disordering cultural forces. … If the Church is going to get serious about cultural disorder, then its leaders are going to have to resist the temptation to accommodate that disorder in the interest of church growth. Such accommodation is exactly what I believe the models which you accept as unproblematic have done. … This is one reason why it grieves me to hear people talk about the Church being “market-driven.” I don’t thing most cultural institutions should be market-driven, not the arts, education, journalism, entertainment, or government. The democratizing spirit assumes that there are no higher points of reference for establishing the shape of cultural institutions than the will of a majority. As [Richard] Weaver argues, it is the abandonment of belief in transcendentals that leads to the assumption that cultural institutions should be democratized. … In addition to adding momentum to a broad cultural disorder, the populist reordering of Christian life documented by [Nathan] Hatch committed the Church to the abandonment of conventions that were essential in its own life, especially (but not exclusively) a high view of the continuity of orthodoxy, of ecclesiastical authority, and of the role of the sacraments. Nineteenth-century Christian movements, following the prevailing winds, introduced new levels of subjectivity and individuality into Christian life; no wonder Harold Bloom could conclude that the dominant religious belief in our country is Gnosticism with a Christian veneer. … As a result of Christian capitulation to the spirit of the age in the early nineteenth century, the period Hatch describes is the launching of an age of privatized, often gnosticized Christianity that we still inhabit. It is the period during which American Christians allowed dominant social and cultural institutions to be shaped in accord with the dictates of modernity … [and] amounts to the secularization of the Church. … I know that you and many of your colleagues [at Saddleback and Willowcreek] are eager to preserve a core of theological content, while adjusting forms to fit changing fashions. But I believe that you underestimate the ways in which forms are expressions and conduits of beliefs and of the affections and sensibilities that precede belief, not to mention the extent to which forms have intrinsic meaning and significance. … For believers in the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity and the resurrection of the body, forms cannot be treated lightly. It is a set of modern assumptions that allows us to assume that form and content can be so easily detached. … The assumption that all forms are neutral is itself not a neutral assumption. We are called to a way and a life as well as to truth. Our convictions are sustained and made plausible by the forms of experience. Ideas do not just have consequences; they also have antecedents. Our ideas are held in place by what Weaver calls our “metaphysical dream of the world,” our intuitive sense of the way things actually are, and that pre-cognitive, instinctive sense is sustained in large measure by the forms of everyday experience.
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Just so. It warms this unreconstituted and ancient soul to hear the democratization of culture put down and the eternality of forms praised. The last quoted paragraph even puts me in mind of one of tNP’s original texts: “Liberalism’s ideas have consequences–from widespread divorce to mass marketing to spaghetti interchanges–but those consequences also shape ideas, reinforcing the frame of mind that gave birth to them. They break our ties to imagination, to craft, to the land, and to the shop, so that our cities and pastures alike are blighted. Because we have repeatedly bowed at the altar of convenience, we are isolated from the very things that would feed and nourish our imagination.” Perhaps Myers has been attentive to this humble effort. Certainly our ideas have the same antecedents.
This is On Democracy and Forms in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Toiletology | Next: Evangelical Lacunae | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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