God save us everyone,
Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns?
For the sins of our hand
The sins of our tongue
The sins of our father
The sins of our young
And when I close my eyes tonight
To symphonies of blinding light...
Like memories in cold decay
Transmissions echoing away
Far from the world of you and I
Where oceans bleed into the sky
Whatever one's opinion of their musical style or lyrical content, one cannot deny that to listen to Linkin Park's new album A Thousand Suns (FYI: contains profanity in some tracks) is to hear the cry of today. The progression of post-modernism and the fragmentation of American culture is reaching an inevitable zenith. The album sounds like a simultaneous shout of resistance and cry for help, with a undercurrent of doubtful hope. The sky is dark and getting darker, but the rising wind both brings the sound of thunder and blows away the stagnant air.
This coupled together with the recent release of William Gibson's Zero History, the third book in his post-9-11 series (another example of a perhaps more intentional attempt to capture the current zeitgeist: Gibson has stated that he no longer writes about conjectural future scenarios because the future has already arrived, and writing a story set in our present time conveys much the same sense that future-fiction did in the past: The present is changing so quickly that it writes like the future...). Those together and some other things have me thinking about where our culture is going.
We are all familiar with the rants about the decline and fall of the American superpower, which is beginning to look more and more like a foregone conclusion. (certainly a conclusion our government seems already to have both made and brought about, though one can argue about forces behind mere national governments from both a spiritual and a political/economic perspective)
I would argue that our national consciousness is moving to a point beyond that, however. Our relation to the rest of the world has never been our greatest concern anyway, but now we are beginning to wonder who we ourselves are. While stereotypically untravelled, enough Americans have gotten out into the world to notice that we are neither the most modern society, nor the most traditional one, but occupy an increasingly unsatisfying position in between, with a diminishing sense of identity and increasing disconnectedness.
It seems we are a nation of contradictions; having lost the benefits of our former cultural identity we are now defined by its negative elements: a culture of individuality without the rugged resourcefulness of our predecessors, a culture of capitalism which has all but lost its work ethic and concept of hard-earned profit and fallen prey to the lowest common demoninator of hedonism and dependency, a culture in which 70-80% of us profess to be Christians but prayers were banned from schools decades ago and now quietly taken off our money while books about vampires or mass deceptions perpetrated by the church fly off the shelves, and multitudes of churches will soon disappear with the last remnants of their aging congregations.
However, that contradiction is inexorably resolving itself, or perhaps I should say the internal contradiction is tearing an unsustainable culture into its coherent fragments. If you live in a beautiful patchwork quilt while training your children to believe that all patches are the same, that there is no quilt as such, and that the stitching can be ignored as irrelevant, you must not expect your home to endure.
In a way, I will be glad to see the contradiction resolve. I greatly dislike unstable situations artificially propped up past their point of survivability. When we define a given cultural institution, convention, or situation as good, we sometimes forget that it is always a function of time. Some institutions cease to be good, and should then cease altogether. Let what is false fail. If we as the body of Christ really wish to be light to the world, we should open our eyes and see how dark that world really is, and how desperately in need of a Savior. Looking at students today in America (and in many other parts of the world), one may see a strangely paradoxical combination of apathy and cynicism mixed with a curiosity and openness, unrestricted by both conventional morality and hypocrisy and having little tolerance for either, all moving at ease among (and by means of) the technological innovations that increasingly define our society. Yet behind it all there really is a desperate cry for love, relevance, and ultimate meaning which is beginning to break through. In a sense, this generation of youth/students is more open than any recent ones before it, if one is willing and able to abandon many previous forms and methods, while demonstrating love and speaking truth. But so few are able to do so.. we become attached to our own methods and ways of doing things, or those ways we inherited, confusing them with the truth and love they were in their own time developed to convey, or else finding in these familiar forms our own worth, and thus being unwilling to forsake them lest we find ourselves irrelevant in the tides of history as well.
But relevance is no longer something that can be maintained by effort, like a swimmer treading water in a moving stream. Change is no longer something that alters what is normal; change is the new normal.
We must learn to live and minister in such a world that is constantly shifting, learn to adopt external changes quickly and easily as they happen and when necessary, while sticking steadfastly and tirelessly to the Truth we have received. The gospel in its full revelation in Jesus Christ is 2 millenia old, and has not lost an ounce of relevance or credibility, while the Christian music of even 10 (5?) years ago is old enough now to have already passed far beyond the unacceptably dated phase into nostalgia. This should tell us something about our strong points...
Gospel: always relevant. External cultural forms: flying by in the wind.
And the wind is blowing ever stronger these days...
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