The Exorcism of Christ
“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136
I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.
Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?
Eastern demonism and western unbelief are essentially the same thing—nothing, futility, vanity. Which would mean that, once you cut through the crap, the solution is the same—the gospel. When the deceptive veneer is pulled back (or the vanity bubble is burst), the nihilism of Europe (and to a slightly lesser degree, America) is the demonism of India. Yet these are “nothings” coated in very different lies.
Apostasy as Defense
Old Covenant history was a sequence of “lunges and parries” with God on the defensive for a helpless Israel among idolatrous pagan cultures. Under the New Covenant this has been reversed. Western apostasy is thus not a lunge but a parry, a human(istic) exorcism of a constantly invading gospel. The “just so” stories of the atheists in lab coats are an opiate for a culture haunted by the Law of Moses and the Love of Christ. Christ is the One seeking to possess, and it is now the nations who are helpless, despite appearances. When He is cast out, in the words of Peter Hitchens (regarding the Soviet Union), there is left “a howling void.”
Yes, there is a sense in which a Christian culture without Christ is an entirely new species, but it probably has similarities to first century Judaism, the first truly godly culture to suffer the onslaught of the Spirit-filling gospel of Christ. The Temple might contain no images but the Temple itself has become the image. For the Herods, the desolate house was a Temple built for God but vacated by the Spirit. The first century Ichabod began at Pentecost. The Roman Ichabod began with the early Reformers. In our own culture, the vacated Temple is the institution of the state.
But a spiritual vacuum cannot remain so forever. When Christ is cast into the wilderness, He returns with greater power.
Death of the Multi-Culti
I’m making my way through Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. Published in 2006, it’s a little behind in its history, but prophetic in its observations. Steyn speaks of the “death of the multi-culti.” Demographically, the West has exercised its democratic right to extinction:
“The modern western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect, except its ability to reproduce.”
He traces the economic problems of Europe back to demography, low reproduction rates, a loss of the will to survive. The West has become what he refers to as a “soft culture.” Its loss of what Friedman calls “self-definition” has made it vulnerable to the “hard culture” of a very self-defined Islam. [2] A failing demography can be traced back to a failure of faith. Behind culture there is cultus. Christendom, now vacant, is not imploding. Its shell is becoming host to another faith.
The multi-cultural experiment began in Christian nations because true multiculturalism is only possible in an eternally self-defined and culture-defining Christ, where baptism means a deliberate leaving behind of heredity. [3] The secular square was never self-sustaining. It was always the front porch of a tolerant Christian church. Only Christ can gather all men. Only the Spirit of God can unite the nations. A multi-culture can only ever live under the defining shade of the Christian cultus. If Christ is exorcised from the culture, the seat of a central, animating cultus is left vacant, vulnerable to whichever cultus of the cultures allowed in is the most self-defined. And the secular square of the West has no defense against the virus of Islam. Islam is a counterfeit of Christianity. Like Christianity, its agents hide in plain sight, their operations are cell-based and decentralized–franchized–and their cause easily crosses all social and cultural boundaries.
A multi-culture can survive under the cultus of Christ, but a multi-cultus is impossible in the long term. There must be singular animating principle, or “spirit.” In the West, this began under Constantine, whose “conversion” of Rome gave it a longevity sourced in God. [4]
Surely, God will not destroy His own house, the house of Christendom? He has done it before. And based on these past occurrences, recorded in Scripture, He does it for two reasons:
1) The knockdown is for the purpose of building a bigger house; and
2) He builds the bigger house out of the invading hordes, as He did from the time of Daniel to the time of Constantine. Centres of Islamic power are already falling like dominoes. It is always in the nature of Israel to die for the world, to create a “holy place” in which God can work. [5] The Church is constantly called to get out of its comfort zone and expand.
It is most certainly not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it, and in a way Mark Steyn cannot even imagine. We live in exciting times.
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[1] Bag out: to criticize (Australian slang)
[2] See Friedman’s Outline.
[3] See An Atheist Gets Baptism.
[4] See Peter J. Leithart’s Defending Constantine.
[5] See Out of the Eater.
