Regaining communion of love
On this Reformation Day, it is right and just to hope and pray for the reconciliation of all Christians into one body, and to ponder the unintended consequence of those hammer falls against the church door at Wittenberg.
After many bloody battles that deeply stained our faith, the secular state arose to bring peace. Five centuries later, it is clear that secularism and the state are not innocuous – they can become a quasi-religious system for beliefs and actions.
Oddly, this topic has fascinated many Canadian thinkers, likely due to the ultramontane Catholicism that survived in Quebec well past the French Revolution but was finally undermined by the Quiet Revolution. George Grant, Marshall Mcluhan and Charles Taylor have written of the secular and technological effects on the Christian world; while it is impossible to properly discuss all their thoughts, they agreed that secularism seeks “perfectibility” in man and nature.
Here of course is both the source and the summit of what Taylor calls modernity’s malaises: bluntly put, neither man nor nature is perfectible. Christian orthodoxy declares that the created order can only be perfected by God’s grace. Indeed this was the very issue at the heart of the Reformation itself: one cannot buy a way into heaven, but must instead have a sincere conversion of the heart; man cannot be saved and perfected by his own power or works alone.
It’s impossible to overstate how deeply this cornerstone of divine revelation and human experience has been rejected as secularism and the state evolved. Because the great leaps in science and brave new systems of government proved repeatedly that immutable truths of the past were incomplete or inaccurate, it was believed that man’s very nature could be changed.
We live in the twilight of this quasi-religious belief; it started as theories of evolutionary and economic determinism, but ended up manifesting in policies of eugenics and collectivism, causing the death of millions. Friedrich Nietzsche predicted this outcome in his “God is dead” melodrama. With Christian morals absent, man would seek new beliefs, regardless of brutality.
Ultimately, the Reformation unleashed a miasma of rootlessness, which has become the undercurrent of Western culture. This feeling is part of human nature, due to the loss of Eden – the prescription for which was the “Kingdom of Heaven” the medievals sought. But for the last five centuries, with Christendom broken, any cure has been sought and the feeling disseminated to all of society. Simply observe how fiercely questions of identity are debated by many today.
Thus, the secular state has become the indispensable mechanism of our lives; it’s traditional role of law and order, trade and commerce, have been supplanted by provision from birth to death and even the carving out of “safe spaces” for every identity.
In short, the colourful tapestry of Medieval Europe with one pope and many principalities is now a dull grey of modern architecture with one all-powerful state and many districts offering lifestyles based on “values.”
Christians cannot turn back the clock. And indeed they shouldn’t want to, insofar as the Reformation was a necessary corrective to corruption of the faith. But believers must be wary of the secular state and the amount of power it’s gained in historically religious or private areas. Furthermore, treating it as an inanimate object or disinterested body of apparatchiks is naive; the legacy of martyred believers around the world proves the secular state is not our friend.
Christians must find ways to regain the communion of love that should unite all of us, as Christ himself says in the Gospel of John. I’d argue those same chapters also address issues of identity, rootlessness, perfectibility, and purpose – words that ought to be preached from pulpits once again: Our Lord is preparing a true home for us, and his example is to be our order of life.
Christians cannot turn back the clock. And indeed they shouldn’t want to, insofar as the Reformation was a necessary corrective to corruption of the faith.