In the 1970's, when I went to seminary, the important book to read, or at least become aware of, was The Shape of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn observed that science moved forward by holding on to established patterns of thought until a critical mass of contradictory data was attained, forcing a shift in the operative paradigm. This insight got applied to culture generally, and of course to the Church. We started talking about being in the midst of a "paradigm shift." An influx of new data was challenging old orthodoxies everywhere.
I had actually been exploring this idea since college, having read books like The End of the Modern Age by philosopher, Allen Wheelis. We were moving away from a culture defined by the values and structures that have been in place since the Renaissance/Reformation/Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution, which we called "Modernity." And we were entering... something else, as yet undefined. It was beginning to be called "post-modern," for want of a better term.
Maybe growing up in a suburban New Jersey I found to be oppressive had something to do with it, but I have always been deeply frustrated with Modernity. The theology of Karl Barth inspired me because he consciously and intentionally broke with this ruling "liberal" consensus after witnessing the horrors of World War I. That civilizational exercise in breathtaking murderous cruelty and stupidity revealed the emptiness and venality of Modernity as a whole, forcing many to reassess that whole paradigm and start exploring different ways of living. Gradually, many started to notice the pervasive substructure of violence and injustice that held Modernity together, manifest in slavery, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and a lot of other corrupt institutions, rooted in greed, gluttony, lust, anger, fear, and expressing a basic narcissistic nihilism.
The former main-line Protestant churches had hitched themselves to the Modernity paradigm early. Indeed, they are largely indistinguishable from it. The Reformation itself was not the recovery of a pure and true Christianity, as it thought of itself, but rather an expression of Christianity thoroughly flavored, colored, and permeated by the values and practices of the new paradigm forming and congealing in the 16th-18th centuries. To put it bluntly, Protestantism was geared to appeal to a new market, that of middle-class, property-owning, white men, who did not want to be told what to do by either kings or bishops. Indeed, they wanted to figure out things for themselves and held all communities in suspicion. They were about "freedom," for themselves. Thus, getting on board with the latest new thing, and being market-driven and customer-oriented, is part of the Protestant DNA. In other words, Protestantism tells itself it is all about following Christ, when in reality it is about following the market.
Now that Modernity is in crisis, what happens to the churches, not to mention all the other institutions, that based themselves on this way of thinking and acting? Obviously, we need a paradigm shift! It seemed reasonable to assume that we need to get on board as soon as possible with whatever the next thing will be. This search for the new paradigm has been a characteristic of life in the church for my entire 40-year career.
Fifteen or so years ago, I got excited about something called the Emerging Church Movement. This was an attempt to get ahead of the curve and anticipate the kinds of changes that were already happening in culture and society, and begin to retool the church according to what we saw beginning to, well, emerge. Most EMC founders came out of evangelical churches. I think they, consciously or not, followed the pattern of the Reformers in setting out to hear and apply the gospel anew. That was exciting! But I worry that there was also a pull to conform to the cultural patterns they saw beginning to take shape.
The more conventional and institutional churches were thinking along much the same lines, obsessing about the need for "adaptive change" and so forth. Indeed, we came practically to fetishize change itself, celebrating every "new thing" and expressing vast impatience with anything perceived to be old or traditional.
What we did not question, or even really recognize, is the wisdom of letting culture define the church in the first place. What if we do manage to retool the church to fit into the next civilizational paradigm? What do we do when that turns out not to be the Kingdom of God, or even a measurably better life for most people, but just another in a succession of expressions of Empire? What if all these secular civilizational regimes are just successive temporal expressions of the same Empire, going back to Egypt or Assyria or whomever, and now passing through another of the major revolutions Phyllis Tickle observed happening every 500 years or so? What if we are just hitching ourselves to the new boss, without understanding that it is, as Pete Townsend predicted, "same as the old boss"? Or, for all the explicit rejection of Constantinianism and Christendom that is going on, what if we are simply making deals with the next emperor?
I remember being very hopeful about some evolutionary visions of this paradigm shift, like Spiral Dynamics or the philosophy of Ken Wilber. These models remain instructive in many ways. I still listen to many who see a great spiritual advancement on the horizon. Hopefully, that's true. Certainly, many more are on spiritual paths of various kinds than 50 years ago.
However, the succession of disasters we have had to deal with over the last few years, from the misguided and failed Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to the Great Recession, to the rise of neofascist Trumpism, to our inability to do anything positive about the climate crisis, to the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ukraine War, might lead us to lose confidence in whatever new paradigm might be emerging.
Maybe this is just a rough patch and progress will resume. Maybe this just means the paradigm shift was never going to be easy, that it would, as with all such transitions, meet strong resistance and retrenchment from those most invested in the old order. Or maybe the next paradigm will not be the clear leap forward into a new world of justice, equality, and peace that we are hoping for.
In other words, why should we trust the new paradigm, whatever it is, to be significantly better than the old one? I mean, the new paradigm is being developed by the same class of leaders in business, politics, economics, science, technology, and so forth, who developed and led the old one. They are largely motivated by the same concerns for making money, having influence, and being famous. So far, is the new civilizational paradigm coming from people who are significantly more wise, psychologically integrated, spiritual, selfless, humble, compassionate, and self-aware? Or is it still mainly white men, even if many are "woke"?
Einstein once famously said that problems cannot be solved by the same mindset that created them. Has our mindset changed that much?
Looking at some of the charts describing and contrasting the old paradigm with what appears to be coming, a lot of it looks very exciting! But it always does, I suspect. I mean, we are intrigued by the new anyway. Forecasts by 17th century optimists were also very rosy: freedom and prosperity everywhere! Capitalism, science, and democracy will save the world! Colonialism brings enlightenment! Progress! We were still being fed this propaganda as recently as my school days. And for 500 years it did work very well... for rich white men. With some necessary, limited trickle down over time to others. But for still others, including Africans, indigenous peoples, and the planet? Not so much.
Now we're being assured that block-chains, robotics, advanced batteries, electric vehicles, and DNA sequencing will liberate us. Really? The manifestation of Empire that really seems to be "emerging," as distinct from the blissed out predictions of the Age of Aquarius, does not look like much of an improvement over the paradigm that is passing away. So far, better technology has mainly led us over the cliff of ecological catastrophe. Will even better technology have any different result? Indeed, will we have time to find out before the climate crisis demands our full attention? There is a reason why science-fiction writers who peer into our future have trouble squeezing out anything not utterly dystopian.
Our human tendency towards egocentricity, expressed in imploded and imbalanced personalities, means that we will continue to make decisions based on fear and anger applied in violence and lies. We will continue to be tribal (the more recent word is "identity" driven) in the worst sense of that word. If anything, our 500 year sojourn into individualistic materialism has only made this situation worse. I suspect that the average European peasant in 1500 had a far more sophisticated level of spiritual awareness than the most highly educated people today. We have zero evidence that the new paradigm will be any more humane, just, beneficial, or wise than the old. Humans will find a way to use their wealth and power to do bad things, even in some new "teal," "Integral" age.
There is hope, though. The Christ-tradition has strong, if habitually ignored, bones. It is inherently anti-Imperialistic. The New Testament is not content simply to advocate for a new and improved Empire. It awaits a new heaven and a new earth, which is to say, the revelation of a creation above, beneath, and within the creation, which we humans can't perceive because of our strong tendency towards egocentricity (which Empire both aggravates and seeks to control).
The characteristics of the Kingdom of God are antithetical and toxic to Empire, and they include: deep democracy, radical equity/equality, and true freedom/justice under the sovereignty of the Creator Spirit. We can tell we are calcifying into another version of Empire when power and wealth are congealing among a few, and the biosphere is being degraded. Remember that the whole point of Empire is the destruction of creation. While the meaning and mission of God's Kingdom is the emergence of the Beloved Community throughout creation.
The Christian Scriptures are not written by or for those at the top of any society who set the civilizational agenda. They take the perspective of the people at the bottom, beginning with the motley band of slaves who get liberated from the Egyptian Empire; and they are fulfilled in Jesus, a teacher and healer who is executed for sedition by the Roman Empire. The Bible is inherently and constitutionally opposed to any and every Empire that plows ahead over ordinary people and communities in its drive to make a few individuals wealthy and powerful.
Jesus does not have us focus on how well the successful are doing. He turns our attention on the ones we inevitably require to pay for all this "progress" with their own blood, labor, tears, land, dignity, and lives.
The question for the Church now is not about adaptation to the emerging new civilizational paradigm. Rather, it concerns how we witness to the good news within this current upgrade of Empire? How will we necessarily make use of new languages and institutions, but also how will we stay faithful to God in spite of and in resistance to a new regime? More importantly, how will we adapt to God's Word and will in changing times?
I have emphatically to affirm that attempting to go back to some earlier version of the same damned Empire is the worst option. That is the conservative reflex, to restore the church of 1956 or the Medieval period, or the Byzantine Empire, or whenever. It's all just Empire in different historical guises.
We don't need a new Christendom.
And we don't need to exhume an old Christendom.
We need to be about living into the Reign/Commonwealth of God.
This has to mean that the Church attends first to Detox. We have to get Empire out of our heads by addressing our egocentricity. Second, we have to get Empire out of our societies by instituting polities of justice and love, inclusion and equality, compassion and humility. In other words, repentance, metanoia, living into a new way of thinking, and thinking into a new way of living.
I do think we can get to a civilization that values and teaches those virtues, that sees itself as a network of communities, where all are loved and accepted, with an economy based on sharing, where the Creator is worshiped in infinitely different ways, and creation is respected. The Church is the place where this has to start. It is supposed to be the representative anticipatory community of God's reign/commonwealth. That is our mission.
In other words, we have to follow Jesus together.
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Rev. 2
