The brief picture of 21st-Century culture presented in previous posts describes some of the aspects of the world we live in today. It is not our father’s world and it will change before another generation can understand it. A Christian living in the 21st Century should see the world through the biblical worldview and the eyes of God. This is what you will see:
-
- No omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God as Creator of Universe
- No absolute truth
- Certain sins against God being protected and promoted
- Absence of rites of passage
- Youth is exalted
- Family is no longer dysfunctional but dissolved
- Everything has become a means with no end
- Life is the ever-present “now” with no thought of a future
- Life is a “now” experience with no commitment or responsibility
- Things are not made to last long
- Image is all-important; substance does not matter
- Fraud, fakes, and deception
- All views are tolerated except the Christian view
- Tolerance means acceptance
- All religions contain truth for their adherents
- To insist that Jesus Christ is the only way to God is to be exclusive
- To be exclusive is to be intolerant
- To be intolerant is the greatest cultural sin
- To be tolerant of opposing views is being disloyal to personally held views
- Sin is an offense against the person rather than an offense against God
- No all-encompassing story that gives meaning to the world and our life in the world
We have moved from the belief that everyone has an equal right to their own opinions, to the belief that everyone’s opinion is equally right (unless it disagrees with mine). Everyone determines what is right for themselves. Everyone is their own god. Everyone is a fool (Psalm 14:1).
Twenty years ago we talked in terms of “floating anchors.” The things that held society together and that anchored one’s life to their history and identity were no longer secured to anything. Today the anchor rope has been cut at the boat. There are no anchors wanted. Society is adrift with no destination in mind.
The folly of this 21st-Century culture is that there is no foundation to one’s life. There is only an emotional freefall. There is no family, no love, not even a faithful friend to land on before you reach the total despair of suicide. When the music stops there is silence—nothingness, hopelessness, despair, death. With no music, the body has no life because the human spirit has already been killed. It died when God died.
In thirty years the youth of today will be middle-aged. They will have no choice but to continue on with the culture they created and with what they have been doing. They have no traditional family, traditional religion, or traditional culture to return to.
The Enlightenment in Europe had two effects on Western culture that concerns us here. One was to remove religion from government and public life, thereby establishing a secular culture. The second effect on Western culture was to establish science as the main source of knowledge. The Enlightenment prompted the independent American colonies to add the First Amendment to its new Constitution which prohibits the government from making any law “regarding the establishment of religion,” and prohibits any action of law that favors one religion over another.
Because of those two effects of the Enlightenment on culture, Post-Enlightenment philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche made this famous statement that “God is dead!” He was not saying that God once lived but now is dead. He never believed that God existed. He was saying, that society no longer needed a mythical god to explain things and to give moral standards. Science had become the explainer of things and the human conscience had become the arbiter of personal morality.
Nietzsche was right about the state of Western culture but wrong about God. Another thing Nietzsche got right was his view of the future. Many Enlightenment philosophers, like Immanuel Kant, were optimistic about the future. In his essay, “Beginnings of Human History”, he writes about a contentment that moral beings should have: “Contentment with providence and with the course of human things as a whole, which do not progress from good to bad, but gradually develop from worse to better, and in the progress nature herself has given everyone a part to play that is both his own and well within his powers.” That was the spirit of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche came about one hundred years later and saw something different. In his intellectual autobiography, Ecco Homo, he wrote, “The notion of politics will then completely dissolve into a spiritual war, and all the configurations of power from old society will be exposed—they are based on a lie: there will be wars such as there never has been on earth.” He was right about the wars as WWI and WWII came in the next fifty years. He was also right about a spiritual war. He thought it centered on politics. It does appear to be centered on politics today as governments continue to pass laws protecting and promoting things that God calls sin. But that is only one physical manifestation of the spiritual war. The Christian knows that the real spiritual war is for the souls of human beings (see Ephesians 6:12) and it is being played out in every realm of culture.
I have tried to describe the world we live in here in the 21st Century, the world that Christians are in but not of (John 17:16); the world and things in it that we are not to love (1 John 2:15). It is impossible to predict what the world will be like at the end of the 21st Century if the Lord tarries. Current culture has no trajectory. What has been described will not apply to, or be the culture of, the small minority that still holds to the Judeo-Christian worldview and who live in obedience to the truths of the Bible. Christians must be prepared to live like a remnant in a culture that has repudiated the foundations of our faith and is at war for our souls.
************************
What we share as Christians that the 21st-Century Western culture does not offer:
Absolute truth
A Christian family where we are secure and all on the same page
A binding set of morals
Forgiveness
Real reality
Acceptance
Peace in soul and spirit
True freedom
No fear of death
A sure hope for the future
These are our tools for living the victorious life we have in Christ as the spiritual war rages against us in this 21st Century.
“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3). The answer is given to us in verse 1: “In the Lord I take refuge… Flee like a bird to your mountain.” “He [the Lord] has set his foundation on the holy mountain” Psalm 78:1.