This last month, one of my sons performed a recitation at school from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and it got me thinking (dangerous).
As many of you know, one of the most productive religious revivals of the last two hundred years occurred at Oxford University. Initially, this spiritual movement resulted in the conversion of a few hundred. Now it touches millions of lives around the world. Unlike the Methodist and Pentecostal revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, where people glowed in the dark or rolled around on the floor, it was a revival of Christian thought.
The Oxford converts formed a community that launched its members into the intellectual stratosphere. Seventy years later, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Dorothy Sayers, J. R. R. Token, Michael Palanyi, Charles Williams and many other less known writers continue to influence not only Christianity but secular culture as well. Nonetheless, I don't think we would tolerate a community like theirs today. Unbelievers wouldn’t like them or their ideas, of course. But a great many believers wouldn't either, to tell the truth.
Intellectual life is at low tide in the American Evangelical Church at the moment. We seem to have little patience for serious conversation. We are still here. We still breathe and eat. But we have gradually cocooned ourselves into a gated community where we ignore most of the global changes going on around us. Not much science makes it in here and hasn't for some time now. Nor literature. Nor philosophy. And, increasingly, not much theology either. American Evangelicalism is often a world of group think and clichés, where the price of community is conformity and where happiness is often purchased at the price of remaining in a state of intellectual adolescence.
In a word, we have become like the hobbits in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, an insular community of simple-minded people who don’t know there’s a war going on. And if we listen to the village gossip going on at Gaffer Gamgee’s Ivy Bush Tavern, we hear amazing and revealing things:
“My nephew was raised in this very church by good parents. Then he went off to college. Now he believes the earth is billions of years old; can you believe that? Our pastor took him for a game of golf and lunch but it didn’t help. Maybe it’s not a good idea to send our kids to college!”
“That nice young man wants to become a pastor. Naturally, he wants to study the Bible, which is good, but he will need to understand how the real world works if he plans to be successful. So I told him to study marketing and management. He can study the Bible on his own.”
“I love our church. The pastor talks about sports and things I can relate to. The service keeps your attention and best of all—you’re out in an hour!”
Meanwhile, the culture's pressing questions about sexual identity, addiction, human origins, global warming, mass killings, and urban sustainability are met with clichés, sneers and, ultimately, by silence. Not only are we uninformed by modern perspectives on such things, we have lost historical Christian perspectives that might have added our unique voice to the discussion. We have become so alienated from our own past in fact, that perhaps few things are as alien to us now as historical Christianity.
We do not notice that little children are growing up in a house without answers. We seem unaware that we have been amusing them with the same mindless fare we have been feeding ourselves. Except for our neat electronic gadgets, the world stopped evolving for us somewhere about 1870; before the likes of Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Max Plank; before the discoveries of continental drift and DNA; before globalization and the Internet; before Christians stopped having much to add to the disciplines of human society; before the great Oxford revival that could still renew our understanding of biblical faith if we would actually pay attention to it.
Maybe, like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins, it’s time for us to leave our hobbit hole and tidy garden. Maybe it’s time for us to go on a grand and glorious adventure.
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