A Christian manifesto II : the conflict.

I have a feeling this is going to be hard work.

The problem I'm having is that my perception of history and law in Northern Europe (he includes north America) differs from Schaeffer's. It's VERY early days in the book yet, but I look back at the manner in which laws have been applied and people have actually *behaved* while living under those laws, and have made the judgement that while the people may have had a memory of Christianity (his expression) and the laws been based in church thinking, the times were evil and the manner in which society function under those laws was as fallen and evil as anything today. His view appears to be that society was a better place because it had laws based on Christianity, and that because people had at least a remembrance of Christian things, society was less bad.

There's a side of me that wishes it were so simple. Christian laws = good, humanistic laws = bad.

It's almost true, except that some of those laws, and particularly the manner in which they were applied was frequently callous, brutal, cruel and destructive.

The thing is, ordinary citizens were not typically kind, generous, well balanced individuals, but instead were typical of people today. Possibly the biggest difference is that people these days are more open & less repressive, more aware of their own value and less inclined toward conformity, and particularly more open and comfortable with sexuality instead of being inclined to discretion and secrecy.

It's got me working back into my own thinking "have I become liberal?", but the answer is a definite NO! However I am a product of post-WWII freedoms and social patterns, and have been shaped by them whether I have embraced or rejected them. I have to keep going back to the bible to attempt to find a baseline, but scripture needs careful interpretation, to ensure I don't spin it to my own world view. Schaeffer was a product of an earlier, very different age, and inevitably it will have shaped his thinking. That doesn't mean that either of us are wrong, but we may be coming at things from very different perspectives.

It's a little Rumsfeldian: there are things I know I don't know and things I don't know I don't know etc.

There is a cop out clause, but it's one I'm reluctant to use: life by the Spirit or death through the law. Looking back at those earlier times with a more 'christian' society I can see that the law, while of itself good, brought death to the society that could not live by the spirit. In this respect I can see that the humanism that is trying to colour every shade of modern life is an attempt to cheat death and pretend that everything is good. To borrow a quote found by a friend (Phil Loseth) on facebook:

Post-modern theology:
"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”
H. Richard Niebuhr

So society tries to deny the sin by hiding the law. Of course it won't help but having a good law won't save them either. The only way society will live is if they do it by the Holy Spirit, and how will they do that etc etc.

This post was NEVER meant to be this long!