{"id":122968,"date":"2023-09-15T14:08:03","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T18:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=122968"},"modified":"2023-09-15T17:41:52","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T21:41:52","slug":"cc-mac-loftin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=122968","title":{"rendered":"(CC) Mac Loftin–A better response to the decline of the Christian West"},"content":{"rendered":"

What if, instead, we followed Certeau in insisting that \u201cthe plural is the manifestation of the Christian meaning,\u201d that the truth of Christianity is not a fragile artifact to be clung to and defended but something waiting to be made? Certeau reveals the will to self-preservation as a betrayal of Jesus\u2019 call. \u201cThe response which it allows cannot remain moored, tied to a delimited space of the call, nor can it be confined to a (social or historical) site of the event. . . . It always has to take risks further on, always uncertain and fragmentary.\u201d Self-styled defenders of Christendom take themselves to be protecting tradition, but in Certeau\u2019s cutting words, they reduce tradition to \u201ca (perhaps beautiful) museum, a (perhaps glorious) cemetery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To cling so tightly to the beloved and familiar is to be like Peter on Mount Tabor, striving in vain to nail down the ephemeral. Instead, Certeau urges us to be like Jacob at Bethel:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Always on the move, in practices of reading which are increasingly heterogeneous and distant from any ecclesial orthodoxy, [Jesus\u2019 call] announced the disappearance of the site. Having passed that way, it left, as at Bethel, only the trace of stones erected into stelae and consecrated with oil\u2014with our gratitude\u2014before departing without return.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the foreseeable future, Christians will be tempted on all sides by jeremiads on the disappearance of \u201cour way of life.\u201d Right-wing nationalists will warn that all the traditional arrangements of family, culture, property, and faith are fading away, transforming into something new and strange. Progressive and mainline leaders will warn that their denominations will die out if they are not made to accommodate the appetites and prejudices of the market. This chorus may well be right. Christianity\u2014at least Christianity as we in the West have known it\u2014may very well be in its last days. But Christians should reject the temptation to rage against the dying of the light, whether by weaponizing state power against those bringing change or by cozying up to the rich and powerful and well-connected. Permanence was never our calling.<\/p>\n

In a late work, Certeau describes the Christian mystic as one \u201cwho cannot stop walking and, with the certainty of what is lacking, knows of every place and object that it is\u00a0not that<\/em>; one cannot stay\u00a0there<\/em>\u00a0nor be content with\u00a0that<\/em>. Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it. It makes one go further, elsewhere.\u201d The loss of the traditional and familiar is certainly a cause for mourning, as the death of anything cries out to be mourned. But\u2014having consecrated these passable forms with our gratitude\u2014we must allow our mourning to pull us forward, elsewhere, on toward the unknown. We as Christians are called to have faith that while our wanderings will bring risk and danger, we might also find grace in being altered by what comes, in listening with attention to the incomprehensible words of the strangest stranger as perhaps the word we have been listening for.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

I have a new essay up at @ChristianCent<\/a>. It\u2019s on the rightwing (and mainline) anxiety over the decline of the \u201cChristian West,\u201d and a theological argument for why we should actually embrace its impermanence. https:\/\/t.co\/3z9McQxyws<\/a><\/p>\n

— mac loftin (@mac_lof) September 13, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n