Riverwood Presbyterian Church

For a visual representation of this concept: Edvard Munch’s famous lithograph The Scream (link below) shows the loss of human identity in a world of what could be either madness or irrelevance.

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f4/TheScream.jpg/250px-TheScream.jpg

As far as how we got here goes, I’d assert that a major (though certainly not the only or primary) contributor was the devastation of World War I. WWII gets all the press, but WWI was absolutely devastating.

I was an English major in college, and I was always fascinated by the literature from that era and the years leading up to WWII. It was as if the sheer futility of the trench warfare and the utter devastation that it produced in Europe simply caused the whole of Western Europe to give up on Christianity in a short time span. What filled the void intellectually was existentialism, nihilism, and relativism.

Here in the US, though, we’ve had a more slow-motion process in this direction. Smaller scale events than WWI, such as the cold war and threat of nuclear attack, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, etc., seem to push folks further into believing that there’s no God, there’s no sense to anything that’s happening, nothing really matters, etc.

In both the US and Europe, though the church has been unable or unwilling to respond to this intellectually. In Europe, the church is established with the governments, and is politicized and sclerotic. The churches are built, the money comes in from the Government. So there’s little incentive for anyone to care.

Here, the church is more chaotic and, in a lot of ways, market-driven. It seems to me that, especially as demonstrated by the rise of the mega-church, and the intellectually inexplicable phenomenon of Joel O’Steen and his ilk, American churches have decided to respond by providing an escape. Almost as if Christians don’t have to worry with all that - we just come in to church, sing our little praise songs over and over, listen to feel-good fluff sermons, and love Jesus.

As for how we fix this, the monstrous first hurdle is getting the church to acknowledge that this a problem that needs an explicitly Christian response. I suspect that most churchgoers would have little idea of how to respond to this anyway, and little appreciation of the biblical examples of how God has worked in ways that were senseless at the time to man, but eventually clearer. A good example of this is Job, probably my favorite book of the old testament, and one roundly ignored by most Christians today, I suspect, because they don’t like the implications of it.

But in the end, it’s hard work intellectually. And, unfortuately, until the Church (collectively) decides that Christianity is not merely emotional response, I see little hope (humanly speaking) of the status quo changing.

I feel so sorry for the many young kids I see for whom life has created this outlook, or Void of outlook. I remember painfully a time of feeling this myself. I entered college with questions, and my college experience, particularly my classes in the fields of art, science, and religion, cemented my greatest fears…that life was without meaning. I think had I continued in this path and God had not intervened, I would have committed suicide…having seen no reason for anything. How sad the world and life are apart from acquaintance with the one, true, overarching reality of God…and all that His existence implies.