The transition from a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither did not happen overnight, of course. It came in fits and starts, amid confusion and sometimes conflict. A longer view indicates that it came in two basic stages, however.
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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