There are some who will place the analysis of history by Oswald Spengler in opposition to the analysis provided by Arnold Toynbee, Professor Toynbee being chief among them. I would judge both men right given the vantage point from which they each view the subject, the Newtonian Spengler contemplating the surface, the Heisenbergean Toynbee mining the interior. My ability to make such a judgment is, admittedly, an anility. Nevertheless, my confession made, I shall proceed to address the issue given according to Toynbee.
With some consideration it may be generalized that great civilizations reach their last incarnation as a universal state enabling the rise of a universal religion which in turn allows the civilization to pass away and simultaneously to pass on at least something of itself to its successor. In this sense the great religions have provided a future oriented thrust for society at a time when the enduring and seemingly all encompassing civilization is reaching its end. Conversely, when the civilization to which the great religion has given parental nurture begins to enter a time of crisis that same religion tends to act more as a brake than a forward thrust. Thus, some of us become bewildered as to how so great a force of life can become so great a deterrent, and while the historian may calculate the role of Christianity in the transition from Greco-Roman civilization to Western civilization, we with the poet Yeats must ask what beast moves itself through the desert to Bethlehem to be born.
As with any generalization, exceptions must be noted. The ecclesial entity is not a homogenous set, nor is its actions, nor its passions.
There remains in the ecclesial entity its founding forward thrust. In our times we have witnessed liberation theology, the varied strivings of “death of god” theologies, the explosion of knowledge in the understanding of the historical and cultural milieu of scriptures and dogma, all part of a continuing flow of growth from the ancient attempts to de-Judaize the Christ event, to the attempts to Hellenize it, philosophize it, scholastize it, and most lately to socialize it within the understandings of the movements of the enlightenment.
There is, however, the other side of the coin to consider, and with every passing crisis, it is a side that grows in power and influence. The forward thrust is countered with a fervid atavistic fascination. This is the failing hope that if only we could bring back the good old days (although they never really ever existed) we can save the day. In the phrase “we can save” the problem is revealed.
Papal domination was the atavistic deformity resultant of a thwarted conciliar movement of a dying feudal society. Biblical fundamentalism and literalism are the deformities resultant of the thwarted growth instincts of the enlightenment. The liturgical movements of the nineteenth century are the wistful fancies of an age shadowing itself in a never-was Gothic to escape the blinding light of growing democratic and materialistic energies.
Today the church faces those same atavic powers made more potent with each passing success. Their claim is to stop the secularization of religion, to uphold the foundations of faith from corruption. And their defenders are adamantine in their arguments and warfare. But, they, not the adherents of the forward thrust, are the cancer within the body ecclesial, and for three reasons. First, religion exists to consecrate the secular, and Christianity has created Western Christian and post-Christian society. With its propensity toward scientific study, humanistic values, material growth and development it is and remains an incarnation of Christian faith. There is no case of the church against the world here, for the world of the west is the church and vice versa. Dogmas and rituals aside, the two are merely two aspects of one faith, even if that faith needs be clarified on both sides from time to time, as is the case with any entity not in possession of perfection. Second, dogmatic formulations are precisely that, formulae, and not being mathematical, are subject to the linguistic and cultural mutations of time and place. Peter and John comprehended the experience of the divine power potent in their teacher in terms of their religious expectations and their templic ritualizations. Paul began the process of de-Judaizing those formulations, and placing them in the language of the gentiles to whom he preached. The sacrificed lamb became the god-man, and philosophers and theologians ransacked the ideas of the Platonic schools to find terminologies to describe the existence of the god-head and Jesus’ relation to and within it. When in the thirteenth century some began to add Aristotelian terms to the equation, their efforts were met, as had been their predecessors’, with furor and flurry. And so it was with the enlightenment, with romanticism, pietism, quietism, materialism, socialism. And as with the need for dogma to speak in the words of the times and places, so it is with morals. Third, any conscious and purposeful attempt to go back in time to a mythic ideal is fantasy become psychosis.
Growth is not and never has been about holding onto the past. Growth is the outcome of facing the challenge of the present, comprehending it, and finding a successful response that allows the adaptation and the integration of the entity into the time and circumstances of its present as a moment pregnant with its future.
It is my befuddlement with this juncture of the situation that sometimes leads me as much to prayer as to sarcasm. The day-dreaming recalcitrant conservatives proclaim and hold their position with all the force that hell-fire and damnation can secure. Those who would step into the future tread so lightly that they are scarcely to be heard, and fail, for whatever reason, to scale the heights and cry out that “He is not there”! I do not know why the archaic dogmatic and ethical pronouncements encoded in their fossilized Hellenic philosophical terms hold such power over so many strong minds. I do know that the way forward is never the past. The cross is the central moral symbol of the Christian faith. It is the definitive statement that no matter the shame or the loss, humanity is not without hope. All life and property, all reputation and hope hang on that gallows, and on it all is and must be given up, lost, save that “whose power working in us” can and does transform death into life, and the corpse does vanish into its transcendent, “a life giving spirit”.
The body ecclesial claiming the heritage of Jesus Christ cannot lift up its hands and condemn its own society, its own child, its own world as an entity bent on no more than material growth and political correctness, it cannot throw up its hands and surrender to those who would forever rehearse the past, it must stand, tall and firm, and shout out from the heights: the mission is not to the past, but to the world, the program is not a book, but a living and life-giving Spirit. Until we come to that land of promise, God ever goes BEFORE us for-us.
We can talk and discuss until the end of time. But to what end, the endurance of institutions? Christ Jesus died. Dare his ministers do the same? Dare his church the same? Dare we risk all for the sake not of ourselves and our comfort but of our vocation? Peter left Rome during the Neronian tirade to keep himself for the continuance of his mission. On the road he encountered Jesus making his way to Rome with a cross in tow. Peter understood. He could save himself and his mission only at the price of Jesus Christ. Whether or not Jesus asked “quo vadis”, it was understood, and Peter went back to die.