Pax Occidental
My wife and I watched a movie yesterday afternoon. It was bad. Do not rent it if you haven’t already. American Beauty is perhaps one of the more perverse and downright awful films to come out of Hollywood in recent years, yet it reflects many issues plaguing current middle-class life. Mid-life crises, cut-throat business competition, adultery, lust, sex scandals, urban espionage, heterosexuality, pederasty, sham marriages, teenage angst, homosexuality, lust, unfulfilled dreams, drug abuse, broken homes, lust and of course, the compulsory New Age “everything-is-going-to-be-alright-and-your-gods-will-overlook-sin-vice-and-the-trampling-of-Yahweh’s-Glory-in-his-eikons” afterlife theodicies.
In other words, 1 Corinthians 6.9-10.
If the film is a commentary on life in the Contemporary Western World, then unfortunately the next-door neighbour homo-hating Marine in the film stands in as the forces of overbearing conservatism, which condemn “the other” without realizing the perversity that lurks within its own ranks. Even when it is exposed, instead of reimagining itself as one no different yet resisting the evil that lurks within, it lashes out with violence in condemnation. This is how many people without the church imagine those of us who are within; and this is generally the image that came to my mind of Christians before I became one.
Emperor Trajan, in his reply to Pliny the Younger writing on the ongoing persecutions, wrote this regarding the Christians: “They create the worst sort of precedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age.” Does this in any way sound familiar?
I was reading the Latourette text for my course in Church History from Pentecost to the Eve of the Reformation (BT663), and as I read two pages I found that I wasn’t getting a picture of the first century Mediterranean region; rather it read more like a commentary on the “fields white unto harvest” that lie before the Church as it prepares to take the Gospel into the 21st century, and specifically the challenges and pitfalls that await us. This picture became even the more clear when I came to the sentence which read “Confidence in man’s ability and reason was shaken…” The text:
[Read “Western Economic Hegemony” for “all-inclusive empire” and “Modern Mainline Protestantism” or "Contemporary McEvangelicalism" for “local religious cults.”]
“Important also was the religious and moral hunger which characterized much of the populace of the basin of the Mediterranean [Global Community] in the centuries in which Christianity was having its early [latter-day] development. The formation of an all-embracing empire promoted the decay of the local religious cults of the several states and cities that were brought within the inclusive political unity. To be sure, many were maintained as a matter of custom or civic pride, but the heart had largely gone out of them. Then, too, the advancing intelligence and moral sensitivity of the times cast doubt upon the stories of the gods. Many of these were both incredible to an educated mind and offensive to the morally sensitive. The gods were not as good as the best men of the period and could command respect only if the stories about them were treated as myths and allegorized. The age had in it much of moral corruption. Yet it also had consciences which revolted against the excesses of the day. …
“Augustus and his successors had not solved the basic problems of the Mediterranean world [Global Community]. They had obscured them. For what appeared to be a failure in government they had substituted more government and government was not the answer. Confidence in man’s ability and reason was shaken. … Moreover, there was a groping towards some kind of theism, towards a unifying principle or deity which could bring cohesion and in the confusion yield an inkling of a universe which would correspond to the political and economic unity which the Roman Empire had brought to the Mediterranean world.
(Latourette, pg. 22-23)
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