Competing narratives of the Church’s Fall
In a very stimulating post today Halden offers a reflection on two different narratives of Christian decline. One, associated with Hauerwas and others, attributes it to the Constantinian capitulation of the Church. The other (which I think is more diffuse – O’Donovan and Milbank are rather different) is with the modern turn to the individual, and away from Christendom sociality. There’s a lot to ponder there, not least that in many respects Hauerwas’ story has theology following social change, and Millbank’s tends to have social change following a philosophical corruption.
However, I think I want to protest both. I never feel more post-modern than when presented with a grand historical narrative of some Fall from pristine Christian purity. Life is always more complicated than that, and such sweeping claims lose the grit and grime embedded in the grain of thick historical description. They also ignore one of the few consistencies of human observation: that things are always worse, and today’s youth particularly so. It was so in Hesiod’s time, and has apparently been getting worse ever since.
The other thing I would note is that neither of the theologians’ narratives are those of popular discourse. In the latter the Fall either occurs somewhere around the writing of Revelation and the “clearly’ inferior argument about orders of ministry in 1 Clement. Or else it happens, like every evil, in the 1960s, when
Sexual intercourse began …
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.1
It is, perhaps, as good an example of the gulf between theology and popular religion that neither notice the other’s narratives of Fall. And that’s another story and another fall.
Notes- Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis [↩]
September 13th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Sentiments about the insolence of youth and how things were better in the old days were swirling around the culture as I was growing up in the Arkansas in the sixties. But my high school History teacher posted the Hesiod quote or one similar to it and I well remember the relief it brought to this sensitive heart and it must have helped to form in me a scepticism of conservative crankiness and a constant vigilance that I not be the same.
September 15th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I am actually researching the data related to this. You really do have to examine secularization theory rather than these grand narrative collapses that don’t make all that much sense when looking at the big picture. Stark, Berger, Wuthnow, Taylor, Martin and others present a much better and more data drive understanding of this process.
Moreover, in the US it is a bit different since it is clear that fundamentalism has made a powerful reactionary balance to secularization elsewhere. Moreover, church attendance has averaged about 40% for a long time with a few spikes in between. Clark Roof, Chaves, and Greeley and Hout argue these features very well. So it’s hard to look at just theological changes like these without looking at actual behavioral change as well.