While Revelation reminds us that the global church is not made up of a particular family or blood type, it should also remind local churches that they are not mere affinity groups united by racial or socio-economic factors.
At its best, the local church will reflect at least some of the beauty and diversity of the global Church. Indeed, the melting of homogeneous worship can only mean the Spring of Pentecost is here; the King is summoning his peoples. To be sure, Christians need to conserve the order of Genesis 1, but not at the expense of progressing toward the order of Revelation As people of the Resurrection, our mission is to call a dying, fragmented world to live on the right side of history.
Said differently, maturity is found by going to the future, not the past. Today, the pulpit assumes a lesser place on the ship of society, but our message to the Earth remains a vital part of our calling.
But, this would miss the flow of the biblical story. It is the faith of those called by God to join in on a grand restoration project, but, unlike our rose-colored glasses, the path of this restoration is not found in turning back the clock but by Him making all things new.
Shane Morris Glenn Sunshine. Online Courses Colson Fellows. Contact Us. Colson Center Store. Skip to content. Speaking of explosions— then came Nietzsche and announced the death of god , advocating for a world where humans live in accordance with the will of self-perfection. Of course, there was Dostoyevsky warning that in a world without God, everything is allowed —but nobody listened.
The idea that we can all be reasonable and supplant traditional Judeo-Christian ideas with things like tolerance and compassion is a vestige of the Enlightenment mentality.
Unfortunately, this idea ignores the dark side of the Enlightenment hope: the French and the Communist Revolutions. The juxtaposition between the American Revolution and the French Revolution demonstrates the contrast between the strains of Enlightenment thinking. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
The Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free in the first case; the guillotine and , dead in the latter one. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. Romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning.
The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity. The individual virtually disappeared in each of these domains.
Individuals were only valuable as members of the collective: as sources of the general will, to be embodied in the unified culture of the state; as members of economic classes, who could unite to overthrow the nature of humankind itself; as citizens to be cultivated by the state, their expertise to be placed in service of the greater good.
Writing n Being and Nothingness , Sartre notes that humans are alone in a chaotic, meaningless world and, thus, are both condemned to be free and responsible for everything they do. Greek philosophy and Judaist religious thought believed that man, like a clock, has a clear predefined purpose. An important disclaimer for our readers: this is a conspiracy theory , which anyone who has actually read the books of these people would probably already know: for a start, the Frankfurt School of Thought critiqued both capitalism and Marxism.
Anyway, you know where this is going: Shapiro firmly believes that these thinkers have questioned the foundations of Western society, just like all those people analyzed in chapters 6 and 7.
In the conclusion of The Right Side of History , Ben Shapiro suggests that it is through our children that we need to start returning to these values.
Your Life Has Purpose. You Can Do It. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your Civilization Is Unique. And our common cause is a civilization replete with purpose, both communal and individual, a civilization that celebrates both individual and communal capacity. Before the advent of Judaism, people were nothing more but playthings of the gods, i.
Meanwhile, the Greeks devised an interesting idea of their own. They realized that this omniscient and omnipotent Being must have used some laws to create the world and that these laws can be deduced from careful observation of the world. When these two seemingly irreconcilable views of existence came together and meshed through the rise of Christianity—the Western civilization was born. So why are we on the verge of throwing it all away?
Hundreds of police officers were required to protect his speech. What was so frightening about Shapiro? He came to argue that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas; that we have let grievances replace our sense of community and political expediency limit our individual rights; that we are teaching our kids that their emotions matter more than rational debate; and that the only meaning in life is arbitrary and subjective.
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