Unfortunately, we don’t have a public Christian intellectual elite which is re-understanding Creation and its Lord-Creator by way of courageous and honest responses to what is known from various fields of human exploration and speculation. We have a Christian intellectual elite more inclined to try to fit new knowledge into old schemes. We have ecclesiastical leaders more inclined to accept whatever understanding of this world is offered up by an increasingly non-Christian or even anti-Christian West.
Let me put that aside and speculate upon what has been true in some crisis periods of Christian history and what will have to be true again if Christianity is to recover and rebuild itself, that is, rebuild the pilgrim Body of Christ in its entirety—a Christian civilization with a healthy sacramental Church at its core.
First, we have to recognize the strangeness in the words of Christian pastoral leaders from the local level right up to some popes and leaders of other major branches of Christianity.
- Christianity is simple, just live it. [Or some similar formula], but
- That stuff about the Trinity and the one Person and two natures of Christ is just beyond anything the human mind can deal with. Return to above item…
So which is it. Do we have a simple Christianity with handwaving about the core beliefs of traditional, Apostolic Christianity? Or do we have a Christianity in which some have to seriously grapple with understanding the Trinity and the one Person and two natures of Jesus Christ?
The second is true. Without the Trinity and a sophisticated understanding of the totality of Jesus Christ, we of the West seem to either return to being Indo-European pagans or we become gentle and befuddled social-workers of a sort.
And yet there are few—even among the population of Christian intellectuals—who can deal directly with those sophisticated issues. Even some excellent, Bible-centered Christian theologians are at their best when they can rely upon still plausible understandings of the more difficult parts of understanding Creation and its Lord. Unfortunately, there seem to be a fair number who overestimate the plausibility of established Christian ways of understanding Creation and its Lord, who think that the ways of thought of Augustine or Aquinas or Bonaventure can be taken as foundations for viable worldviews.
Darwin and Einstein, evolutionary biologists and geneticists, quantum physicists and physical cosmologists, technologists and political philosophers, poets and musicians, have pretty much showed us that Creation is a lot different place than even the best of premodern scientists and philosophers and theologians and poets thought. It’s time for a reformation of the Christian understanding of God’s work as a Creator. Its time for a refoundation of Christianity and of a Christian civilization.
Rather than trying to refound Christianity by the simple and simpleminded designs of social-justice warriors, we need a Christian intellectual elite to build a new understanding of Creation and the God who is the Creator and still Lord of Creation. If all were to go very well, unlikely considering that we’re now starting from a general state of confusion on the part of nearly all Christians, then the poets and musicians and theologians and novelists and politicians could simultaneously start their work of implementing a good reunderstanding of Creation and its Lord even as that reunderstanding were still in early stages of development.
New Christian cultures could start growing, maybe to feed into a new Christian civilization some generation not too far away in what we can pray will be a better future than we seem determined to make possible.