At the Edge

and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.  Romans 12:2 NASB 1995

Not be conformed – Paul’s exhortation might just be shy of impossible for us.  Two thousand years of Western misinformation and misdirection have pushed our civilization so far from the Jewish community of the first century that there just might be no way back.  It’s not all our fault.  Great forces and colossal mistakes shaped our world, a world where the exile of God meant the collapse of the foundation of Western society.  Douglas Murray, no religious believer for sure, nevertheless recognizes what happened when the certainty of the Bible was ripped asunder.

“Yet in the nineteenth century that source received two seismic blows from which it never recovered, leaving a gap that has never been filled.  The effects of the wave of biblical criticism that swept through German universities in the early nineteenth century is still being felt two centuries later.  When Johann Gottfried Eichhorn at Göttingen began to treat the texts of the Old Testament with the same scrutiny that would be applied to any other historical text, it had an effect that is still rarely acknowledged.  Europe had knowledge of the great myths, yet the Christian story was the continent’s foundational myth and as such had been inviolable. . .  It was not just that the investigations of the German scholars had discovered fresh routes of scholarship.  Trying to keep the Bible watertight from criticism failed not because the questions raised in the heads of the German higher critics were unique to them, but because they were questions that had occurred to many people.  Now they had been voiced and the Bible was henceforth up for critical inquiry and analysis like any other text.  Pulled apart by historical comparisons, questions of authorship and questions of fallibility, the generation of believers after Strauss would have to find a new accommodation with these discoveries.  Some pretended these changes had not occurred, were not relevant, or had all been answered before.  But much of the clergy began to realise that a fundamental shift had occurred and that they must shift too. . .  It was joined in 1859 by the other part of the double-whammy to the Christian faith, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.”[1]

“It was simply the first wholesale explanation for the world we inhabit that had no need for God . . . the Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer: containing great truth, but not truth itself.”[2]

“ . . . the process described above meant one thing above all: Europe had lost its foundational story.  And the loss of religion to Europe did not just leave a hole in the moral or ethical outlooks of a continent, it even left a hole in its geography. . . the church, placed at the heart of the community. . . Where faith still exists it is either wholly uninformed—as in the evangelical communities—or it is wounded and weak.  In very few places does it retain the confidence it had in former times, and none of the trends favour these outposts.”[3]

“What else did these conflicts and the clash of ideologies destroy?  If not the last vestiges of religion then certainly the last refuge of the idea of a merciful God.”[4]

“ . . . in most places it has become possible to acknowledge that the culture of human rights, for instance, owes more to the creed preached by Jesus of Nazareth than it does, say, to that of Mohammed.  One result of this discovery has been a desire to become better acquainted with our own traditions.  But whilst opening up a question, it does not solve it.  For the question of whether this societal position is sustainable without reference to the beliefs that gave birth to it remains deeply relevant and troubling in Europe.”[5]

“ . . . how long can a society survive once it has unmoored itself from its founding source and drive?”[6]

“It is not possible for a society to survive if it routinely suppresses and otherwise fights against its own origins.”[7]

I’m afraid Murray is right.  The society we have enjoyed, the one produced by our ancestors through blood, sweat, and tears, committed as it was to the centrality of faith and the Bible, is no longer the centerpiece of our civilization.  God has been in exile for a long time, and the icing is off the cake.  What’s left is molding at a rapid pace, unfit for human consumption.  The human rights movements have deteriorated into deliberate exacerbated conflicts of ego.  The economics of open borders has become an invitation to exploit without consequence.  The Church is a sidelined, irrelevant two-kilometer square country pretending the world hasn’t passed it by.  The culture is so saturated with a cult obsession of social acceptance that no real dialogue occurs.  And truth is whatever is the flavor of the month.  Banality, presupposed prosperity, and the right of aggression are the hallmarks of a society in serious decline.  Right where we are.

Paul’s solution only seems to work if the world is coming to an end.  That’s what he thought.  His brand of non-conformity means leaving our identities behind, those things that have made us who we think we are.  Religion is somewhere in that mix.  Maybe we can walk away from it all.  Maybe not.  But if we can’t, then andralamousia is probably our fate too.

Topical Index:  Douglas Murray, andralamousia, not conformed, exile, civilization, Romans 12:2

[1] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 210-211.

[2] Ibid., p. 211.

[3] Ibid., p. 213.

[4] Ibid., p. 220.

[5] Ibid., p. 262.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 305.