Update: notice I say “the church, as we know it” meaning it will look differently than it does now)
I have written many posts on the impact of the economy in relation to the fall and decay of Western society. Yet, the economic unraveling due to just plain old rampant fraud and excessive debt (though of course all a quantum size larger than man has ever known) is a symptom of something that is brewing in our culture at a much deeper level.
We are secularizing at a rapidly expanding rate. This secularizing has produced a moral crisis now in this country that is affecting everything, including the economy. Our character as a people is corroding, our morality is rusting and in fact poisonous.
As a result a culture who doesn’t stand on the pillars of the dictates of Scripture, even the most fundamental issues of morality that are necessary for societies to stand, eventually falls from within and descends into 1) chaos, and out of the chaos emerges some form of authoritarianism.
Since we are such an individualistic society, it is assumed that personal moral corruption to a great degree (on issues such as sexuality, what I do with my money, divorce, etc) remains private and doesn’t affect other people. Yet the dirty little secret is moral corruption is interconnected with the way we do everything else, public and private.
This immorality has spilled into the economy with both and consumer and corporations corrupting from within. And as a result, we have things like Enron, the financial crisis in 2008 caused by personal corruption of people taking on too much debt, aided and abetted by lenders who fraudulently and illegally created mortgages for people they did no checking on. And now we have the robo-signing scandal where lenders, having no documentation with which to foreclose on non-paying debtors, simply created the documents out of thin air.
How did we get to this point? This corruption didn’t happen over night, it had its start somewhere. And the place it started was in a rejection of God in the Christian worldview given to us in Scripture. Reject that, and it’s only a matter of time before things unravel or turn authoritarian, which is the default style of earthly government when anarchy ensues of some type.
To get an understanding of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going , particularly as it concerns the church in America and the West at large, watch this conference from this year at Ligonier ministries entitled Christless Christianity. In particular, watch this session entitled A Gnostic Gospel.
In addition, this talk (MP3) by Ravi Zacharias is really good on The Loss of Truth. This is part 1 so I’ll add part 2 soon.
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Updated:
Here is part 2 of the Ravi Zacharias talk (MP3).
eastlandgrl
interesting, thanks