Seek My Face

The above gives us a vantage point from which to comment on contemporary culture. It seems that the desire to seek the face of God remains with us in the sciences and the arts. Of course it is not known as such, (although Les Murray dedicates his collected poems to the glory of God) man is now the measure of all things. Personal ambition, technological progress, the common good, money and power are now the gods that are served. This is what happens when God is declared dead and gone; smaller more petty gods inhabit the place and we are worse off than we were before our misguided dash for freedom. What we have left is the habit of the search torn from its foundation and its reason. That is why, among the great works of art that we are still able to produce, we are swamped by art in the service of the gods of our time, the sitcom, the game show, the action movie. In science we have the cult of individual genius elevated to celebrity status by the Nobel prize.

It is time that we realize that secular humanism is just another ideology and a deficient one at that. Cultures rise and fall according to the adequacy of their core ideology. The rise of the West has now overreached its origins and now has less and less reason to be. Its decline may be seen in the lives of its celebrities, in the shallow hedonism of its youth and the despair of the drug culture.

The burning question is whether a recovery of a robust tradition that holds the promise of ordering our lives aright is possible. We are caught between the "God on our side" language of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair's publicist's pronouncement that "we do not do God". There is an irrational objection by the rationalists to the serious exploration of our theological roots. If we were talking about ethnic religion, Buddhism, Islam or Hinduism this would be seen as plain prejudice. But because it is our heritage and we think that we have outgrown it, serious public discussion or education is forbidden.

A return to Christianity is not as simple as adopting another ideology. The fragmentation we see around us will not be healed by a piecemeal approach, by selecting bits of the tradition, like pastoral care, for example. Neither may we use the tradition for our own ends, as if the tradition is some kind of therapy. The most radical step that we have to take is the de-centering of the human person, we must understand that God will deal with us and not the other way around. For a people who have been brought up believing the lie that they are the center of their own lives this is a big move. The way forward involves discipline and training and the dismantling of the popular ideology of the person. The only place that this can be done is in the church. Here we confront another problem. The church has been so weakened during the last 400 years one wonders if it is up to the task. It is fair to say that for most churches the salvation of the individual is at the center. Any idea that the church's role is to order the whole world of human activity has been lost to a much smaller horizon. We simply do not believe that the truth of the gospel, although weak in the world, is the world's salvation.

If faith is necessary then it is here in believing that the truth will shine through the diluted theology, the bad preaching, the fundamentalism, the liberalism and the faltering congregations.