God In A Box

We Moderns are familiar with Nietzsche stating that "God is Dead", and in this statement we implicitly understand that there is not a "cosmic order" to things. I would venture further into our modern worldview and speculate that we modern Christians have done something far worse than kill God. We have placed God in a box.

The modern Christian Church has done a good job marketing to culture. We generally have good praise bands, excellent overhead projections to follow the words to worship on, practical, entertaining teaching, and well thought out verbage for post modern psycho analytical thought to assist in the teaching (read sarcasm here). However, for all of this the Church is still missing something of great importance. We are missing the culture. When the church doors open on Sunday morning our Theology is left in the pew and lies forgotten until Wednesday evening.

The result is a seperation between the sacred and the secular. No longer is it God's creation, but a fallen world that Christians are not to involve themselves in. And why should we? According to modern evangelical thought, the world is ending soon any way. Accordingly, there is not a clear Theologically driven desire to engage the culture via music, art, politics, business, movies, etc, etc. Sadly, what follows is children raised in Christian homes who are schizophrenic. Not sure of what Truth is, these children, the post-moderns, live in a constant state of confusion trying to decipher what is Truth, reason, or just plain emotion.

Perhaps this is most obvious to many of those who watched the President's State of the Union Address and are following the "already heated" race to 2008. The issues that confront us today, are no different than the issues that confronted us many years ago. What is different is the manner in which we approach these issues. Instead of looking at global warming (thanks, Bryan), Islamofascism, and social issues critically, we view them emotionally.

I ran across the following paragraph while reading Wind, Sand, and Stars, a novel by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. "Every week men sit comfortably in the cinema and look on at the bombardment of some Shanghai or other, some Guernica, and marvel without a trace of horror at the long fringes of ash and soot that twist their slow way into the sky from those man-made volcanoes. Yet we all know together with the grain in the graineries, with the heritage of generations of men, with the treasures of families, it is the burning flesh of children and their elders that, dissipated in smoke, is slowly fertilizing those black cumuli". Written in 1939, Exupery's words are an example of how we can fear losses in combat and argue the "just war theory", yet abort babies and participate in euthenasia. We look at hardened professionals trained to deal in death and destruction as victims and ignore the most helpless among us. Likewise, we cry for every woman to have her equal rights, yet we demean her in every possible way with rampant, ever available pornogrpahy. And we wonder why post-modern children are schizophrenic?

Exupery finishes his thought with a sound answer. One that we sacred/secular bi-polar Christians may wish to heed: "The physical drama itself cannot touch us until some one points out its spiritual sense."