Of a whirlwind, a breakdown, and a rock.

Professor Ian Hunter is an Anglican. Yet, we are presenting his analysis of the present "spiritual state" of Canada as part of the millennial preparations asked for by Pope John Paul II. The Holy Father emphasizes the necessity of "purification of conscience," or in other words, the need for examining our communal conscience. Where are we going as a community and what can Christians do to change the course, we don't like where we are heading? We must prepare ourselves with regular prayer first. Yes. But after that, what?

In our March issue, Professor Hunter contributed the insightful article "Supreme Court usurps Parliament," Catholic Insight, pp. 16-22.

Editor

On November 11th each year, most of us stand respectfully silent for one minute of remembrance. We remember fathers or uncles or grandfathers who six decades ago fought a war in part at least to preserve democratic ideals against tyranny. But when we look around in Canada today, what do we see? Do we see the realization, or the degradation, of those ideals? Do we see stability or do we see breakdown? It seems to me that we owe it to two generations--the previous generation and the next generation--to take a critical look at ourselves and our nation, and to make an honest appraisal of what we have become.

In the last two decades we were warned: I mention only the voices of Malcolm Muggeridge and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both repeatedly warned us that we were on a false path, a path whose destination was not stability but breakdown and chaos. We did not listen. Today there is much evidence that such prophetic voices were right; that we have sown the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. What is that whirlwind? Let me try to sum it up in seven broad categories:

Seven symptoms

(1) A breakdown of the metanarrative:

A metanarrative is a primal myth or story that tells us who we are. Our metanarrative used to begin with the Book of Genesis, with man attempting to comprehend where he came from, whither he goeth, the knowledge of good and evil, why life is as it is; it ended with the revelation given to John, on the island of Patmos, who saw the heavens open and a new Jerusalem descending.

The metanarrative of Christendom has today been replaced by a metanarrative based on science, materialism, and rationalism. I cannot overstate the importance of this point. The metanarrative shapes who we are, what we believe, what we aspire to be, and what is our vision of truth.

A recent survey revealed that only 40 per cent of adult North Americans know which biblical figure delivered the Sermon on the Mount. A bare 30 per cent of teenagers can recount the Easter story. On the Tonight Show a group of American university students were asked to name one of the Ten Commandments; the only student to respond said: "Freedom of speech?"

The generations of Canadians who preceded us, who built Canada and who fought her wars, were shaped by the biblical metanarrative. We no longer are.

(2) A breakdown of national cohesion:

It has been reported that only one out of four public school students, two out of four high school students, can name the Prime Minister and the ten provinces of Canada. Most university students cannot name the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial; this in a country where expenditure on public education is counted in the tens of billions. In other words, the rudimentary understanding required for exercise of civic responsibility is no longer present.

(3) A breakdown of neighbourhoods and communities:

We see today "gated" communities; private policing; we now spend considerable sums of money on private security systems in order to feel safe in our own homes. We spend large sums on jails, reformatories, and penitentiaries. Have these expenditures made us safer, more secure? Do our prisons and reformatories, in fact, reform?

4) A breakdown of authority:

Would anyone contend that the authority of parent, teacher, priest, judge etc. has not been eroded? Gradually we are realizing that without a moral authority, society can have no civic, legal, or any other kind of authority. Is this a new problem? Twenty-seven centuries ago the prophet Micah described his times in these words: "In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 17:6). It is not that similar times have not been lived through; it is that such times usually precede disintegration and collapse.

(5) A breakdown of family life:

Surely I need not cite statistics on divorce; teen pregnancy; single-parent homes; abortion rates. This point is so obvious as to require no elaboration.

(6) A breakdown of public education:

I allude here to children preyed upon by schoolyard gangs; to schools that do not know what to teach or how to teach it.

Note, please, this is not just a characteristic of public schools. In his most recent book, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, William F. Buckley, Jr. investigated 12 private Catholic schools in the USA; of those Catholic schools, Buckley writes: "...this much is absolutely plain: there is today another God, and it is multiculturalism" (p. 37).

As for the universities, to put it politely, they are a shambles, dominated not as they like to claim by teaching, research and scholarship, but by political correctness, rock bottom morale, and widespread mediocrity.

Let me give you one tiny illustration. Last fall I taught a course called "Trials that Shaped Civilization" for the University of Western Ontario's Continuing Education Department. The Department made no inquiry into my qualifications to teach this course, nor into my knowledge, if any, of the subject matter. Their only requirement was that I complete a form certifying that I had read, understood, and would comply with the University's equity policies on racial and sexual harassment.

I read recently that the average North American University student has a vocabulary of 3,000 words; by comparison, Shakespeare's plays employ a vocabulary of 30,000 words.

(7) A breakdown in law:

Since this is the theme of my Dominion Chalmers lectures, published under the title Three Faces of the Law: A Christian Perspective (1996), I shall not reiterate what is said there (see review in Catholic Insight, October 1996, p. 20).

A deeper malignancy

These seven symptoms I have enumerated are just that, symptoms. Underlying these symptoms is a deeper pathology, a malignancy, which unless properly identified and treated will eventually destroy the patient. What is that underlying malignancy? Call it original sin to express it theologically; call it human perversity to express it historically; call it a breakdown of natural law to express it legally. Each explanation strives to express the same underlying notion: that without a conception of the Good, of God, then the triumph of evil is assured.

Who is responsible for our plight? This question reminds me that the London Times once invited its readers to respond to the question: "What's Wrong with The World?" The most succinct and honest response was this: "Dear Sir: I am", and the letter was signed "G. K Chesterton." This is true. As I shall touch upon, the courts bear a part of the blame. No doubt television and the mass media bear great responsibility. But Dr. John Stott, Rector Emeritus of All Souls, Langham Place, and the most influential evangelical voice within the (Anglican) Church of England, lays the major blame squarely at the door of the institutional church. He writes: "When any community deteriorates, the blame should be attached where it belongs: not to the community which is going bad but to the church which is failing in its responsibility as salt to stop it going bad. And the salt will be effective only if it permeates society...."

Now I acknowledge that what I have said so far will seem to many of you a bleak picture. But it is reality, at least it is reality as I perceive it. At this point, people naturally want solutions. I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that I have no solutions, no magic bullet to offer. But I have something better, not a solution, but a promise. A promise made, not yesterday, or last year, or this century, or even during what is still called, in antediluvian circles, Christendom. It is a promise as old as recorded time, a promise of God Himself. And, as Woody Allen might say: "If you can't believe God, then whom can you believe?"

The central event of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch, is the deliverance of Israel from captivity in Egypt. The Book of Exodus tells of the liberation of a nation from bondage, thirteen centuries before Christ was born. That nation, Israel, was no sooner liberated than it experienced a breakdown every bit as serious as what today we see in Canada. When Moses despaired of the people, and of his capacity to lead them, God made a promise; you will find it recorded in the book of Exodus, Ch. 17, v.6. The text says: "You will find me waiting for you there, by a rock in Horeb."

No linguist am I, nor biblical scholar, but here is a fascinating point. Horeb, in the Old Testament, is the alternate name of Mount Sinai. So God says: You will find me waiting for you on Mount Sinai. Now what happened on Mount Sinai? As we all know, it was on Mount Sinai that God delivered to Moses the first codified law, the primal law-the ten commandments. The Book of Exodus also twice calls Mount Sinai "the mouth of God" (Exodus 3:1; 4:27).

So, first we have the promise: "Go forth and you will find me waiting for you, by a rock in Horeb." And waiting not with empty hands, but with laws fit to govern a society; a society that, like ours, was visibly breaking down. May I commend this text to you as having some relevance to our current Canadian discontents?

Change or breakdown?

Now, of course there are some people who deny that the signs I have enumerated are symptomatic of breakdown. They say: "This is just change, and change is essential". The notion that human beings, as individuals, necessarily change or evolve into better and better people is now recognized as baloney- nonsense on stilts in Dr. Johnson's felicitous phrase--by any thinking person who casts an eye over the daily press; but the collective concept--that our society is evolving, and therefore all change is progressive--remains deeply rooted. Hence to change anything, whether it be the education curriculum or the church's liturgy or hymnals, is per se to improve it.

The patriarchal family is in shambles: well, good riddance to it. The abortion rate in Canada now exceeds 110,000 annually; well, that's a price we're prepared to pay for a woman's right to choose. I recently watched a program on CBC Newsworld "celebrating" the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada's Morgentaler decision, striking down our abortion law. At the CBC this does not produce a program called "Lament for a Nation", but rather a celebration. Our universities substitute courses in "gender studies", and now "queer studies", for the classic disciplines; that's called "curriculum reform". The Scriptures, and two thousand years of Christian tradition and teaching, are by some of the churches stood on their head; well, that's called making the church "inclusive". What I call a breakdown of cultural cohesion, the government of Canada calls "official multiculturalism". And so on.

Judging the tree by its Fruit

So how is one to choose between these two views of modernity? How choose between Hunter's jeremiads and the pollyannic voices--as common within the church as outside it--who tell us that every day in every way we are becoming a better, more tolerant, more caring society? Obviously each of you must make up your own mind. But I say to you this: "You must judge the tree by its fruits. A good tree brings forth good fruit." Ask yourself whether the signs I have been talking about are signs of stability and creativity; if you honestly conclude that they are, then truly I have nothing more to say to you.

If you look at the fruits as poisoned, if you see breakdown and conclude that the night is far gone, then I return to the promise which God made to Moses: "You will find me waiting for you, by a rock, in Horeb."

Four things I find in this text.

First, a promise that we are not abandoned. This is good news. This is gospel. However precarious the social order, however deafening the sound of collapse, of chaos, there remains reason for hope. We are not forsaken. By a rock in Horeb, I will meet you, says our God.

Second, however aimless and random events seem, in fact they move inexorably towards a person and a place. There is a place. By a rock in Horeb. And there is a presence. The creator God. That is a Christian view of history. Of His-story-- God's story. When I was young, my father used often to quote the American nineteenth-century poet, James Russell Lowell:

Careless seems the Great Avenger,

History's pages but record

One death-grapple through the ages,

'Twixt old systems and the word.

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne,

But that scaffold sways the future,

And behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above his own.

Third, our text promises that in the right place we shall find God. In other words, our search is not for a new ideology or a new political party; our search is for God. At all times in human history this has been true; sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine said: "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

Finally, it is only after we make our way to the right place, and only after an encounter with God, only then are we fit to receive laws. Not to make laws but to receive them. On Mount Sinai, on Horeb, God did not strike a parliamentary committee, or invite the Law Reform Commission of Canada to make recommendations. He handed down to Moses a code of law, Natural Law if you like, which must shape and inform positive law if positive law is to be effectual.

In other words, law schools, and law reform commissions, and governments in Canada, have got the process backwards: law cannot be drawn up, shaped and reformed, from the top down by human dictate. The law is more than legislated rules. Positive law derives its validity from an encounter with natural law, from interaction with the source of all law. Incidentally, this is not a novel idea. Two and a half millennia ago, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus recognized the same truth when he wrote: "All human law is nourished by one law, which is divine."

If we take seriously these four lessons that I have drawn from the text in Exodus: "You will find me waiting for you there, by a rock in Horeb", how would things be different?

The difference

Well, the first point is directed to me more than to anyone else, and it is to be more hopeful. By temperament I am inclined to despair, to being overcome by the immensity of problems, to be cynical or scornful or simply to give up, rather than to seek Christian solutions. This is not a Christian outlook, and I must pray for an increase of faith.

Maurice Boyd used to say that the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is fear. As God increases our measure of faith, our fear should diminish. This does not mean we should become pollyannas, convinced that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but rather that we should retain a deep, settled, inner conviction that God never quite abandons us to our folly.

To confuse the stability of society with the vitality of the Christian faith, or even with the strength of the church, would be to commit the error that Stanley Hauerwas has called "Constantinism". Historically the faith has thriven in times of adversity, and the blood of martyrs has rightly been called the seed of the church. Also, it is worth noting that all of Jesus' Kingdom parables have one common element: God's Kingdom always comes with what Philip Yancey calls "resistible power". In other words, there is no coercion. Yancey writes: "[The Kingdom] is humble, unobtrusive, and co-existent with evil".

How easy it would be in times of stability to accept the pretensions of earthly authority; as it is, we can see the ship of state shorn from its moorings, listing badly, if not already submerged. It is in such times that the light of Christ shines more clearly for those who have eyes to see. Nor do I suggest that Christians should hearken back to some golden age of faith when it was easier to be a Christian. Even assuming there ever was such a time, God has deigned that we should live at this time, in this place, and it is here and now that we must let our light shine.

Nor do I suggest that we should be so paralyzed by the symptoms of breakdown that I have enumerated that we fail to see good news. The best news today, I think, is that this is a moment of unparalleled opportunity for ecumensim--I do not mean the kind of ecumenism that the World Council of Churches often seems to represent: a lowering-down of Christian doctrine until the soggy mush left over is indistinguishable from secular humanism.

Ecumenism

No, I mean rather the kind of ecumenism represented by Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the movement founded by Charles Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus. I mean the Christian intellectual revival, exemplified by the American monthly periodical First Things. I mean the conviction, expressed as often by Protestants as by Catholics, that so long as that holy and righteous man, Pope John Paul 11, occupies Peter's seat in Rome, all is not lost.

In this context, I was interested to read the words of a Baptist seminarian following the Pope's visit to Cuba; speaking from a denomination which once considered Catholicism apostate, this Baptist seminarian said: "The Pope has done everything right; he has challenged Castro to the very limit. Fidel no doubt has his plans. But this much I know: God has his plans, and the Pope is His instrument for opening Cuba to the gospel of Jesus Christ." Not coincidentally Pope John Paul 11 has written that the kind of ecumenism I am talking about "stands at the very heart of Christ's mission".

We worship a God who promises to make "all things new". We must remember that it was from the detritus of an expiring Roman civilization that God brought forth the Christian millennia, whose legatees we are.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am convinced that the problem of Canadian Protestant churches is theological. Churches that have nothing definite to say about revealed truth, churches that do not unashamedly spread the good news of redemption from sin, of a God both of love and of judgment, are churches that have no convincing reason to go on existing. They have ceased to have any claim on the attentions of a distracted culture.

The New Testament Book of Jude is so small as to be almost unnoticeable: it fits on a page, contains only one chapter, 25 verses. But verse three speaks a powerful word to our age; it says: Join in the struggle in defence of the faith, the faith which God entrusted to his people once and for all.

This verse tells us several important things. It tells us that the Christian faith is not our creation. The authorized King James renders this passage "the faith once delivered to the saints". Delivered, not discovered. What is that faith? In one sentence it is that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. Or as the British theologian P. T. Forsyth succinctly summed it up: "The Gospel descends on man; it does not rise from him. It is not a projection of his innate spirituality. It is revealed, not discovered or invented. It is of grace, not works. It is conferred, not attained. It is a gift to our poverty, not a triumph of our resources."

The third verse of Jude also tells us that we are trustees of a faith; trustees have a duty to pass the inheritance on to the children and grandchildren. This Christian faith, Jude declares, must be defended, or else we shall have nothing left to pass on, and we shall have failed in our duty as trustees.

But, most important, Jude was not writing of those who would destroy the faith from without, but from within. The Christian church has always had less to fear from enemies without, than from destroyers within, those who within its precincts deny its creed.

A recent survey of Canadian Protestant theological colleges revealed that only 24 per cent of their faculty are prepared to teach their students that Jesus Christ is Saviour and Lord. The moderator of the United Church of Canada has repeatedly denied the two cardinal tenets of the Christian faith: the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ. An Anglican bishop's recent book denies Christ's unique claims, putting Christianity on an equal footing with other world religions. What are we to do in the face of such apostasy? Should we give up on the institutional church?

I am often tempted to say "yes", and for extended periods of time have lived outside the church. But I suspect that our duty is not to abandon but to seek the renewal of the church from within--at least until the church itself has become openly apostate. It is difficult to say when that point is reached. But it is worth remembering that when St Paul wrote to the Corinthians he was writing to a church rent asunder by factions; Paul condemned its doctrine, its leadership, its open immorality, but he still addressed it as " to the church of God which is at Corinth" (1 Corinthians 1:2).

Perhaps the Book of Jude has the best answer for us: it says we are not responsible for moderators and bishops. We are responsible only for ourselves and those whom we can influence. If we ourselves are not prepared to affirm the Incarnation then we have no claim to call ourselves Christian. As Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote: "We and the Incarnation stand or fall together: to abandon or repudiate its circumstances, as set forth in the New Testament, is tantamount to tearing up the title deeds of a property and inviting in the squatters and the demolition men."

At the end of his life, Muggeridge also wrote that in the years to come Christians would have to "lash themselves to the reality of Christ ... as, in the old days of sail, sailors would lash themselves to the mast when the storm blew up and the seas were rough."

Law

In what has already been an unduly discursive talk, let me turn briefly to my own professional discipline, the law. I believe that an important aspect of our contemporary malaise lies in the cutting off of positive law from natural law. At the rock in Horeb, God delivered the law--the ten commandments. Now I recognize that the ten commandments may not sort out mortgage obligations, or may not correctly order the priority of creditors on a corporate bankruptcy, but I am convinced that if we drain positive law of its Judeo-Christian heritage, what we shall be left with are rules of straw, rules insufficient to govern a nation of pygmies. The common law which Canada inherited from England was suffused with Judeo-Christian principles; to the extent that we have sought to extirpate those principles from our law, we have foundered.

The clearest illustration of the extirpation of the Judeo-Christian tradition from our law is that subject which decent people strive to avoid thinking and talking about: abortion. For centuries English common law prohibited abortion. In its 1988 Morgentaler decision the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the criminal code abortion prohibitions; today, Canada is unique among countries in the Western world in having no legal restrictions on abortion. In Canada today abortion is legal, for any reason or for no reason, until the moment of live birth. The Morgentaler decision is an egregious example of the Supreme Court radically uprooting our moral tradition.

Abortion is not the only example of Canadian Courts refusing to accept the natural law roots of legislation. But the abortion issue goes to the heart of our legal system because it asks the fundamental question: "Who belongs to the human community? For whom do the protections of the law exist?"

The vacuum created by the Supreme Court's striking down of the abortion law in Morgentaler has brought us within one judicial vote of endorsing doctor-assisted suicide in the Rodriguez case. And two of the majority judges in Rodriguez, Laforest and Sopinka JJ, are no longer on the Supreme Court. The aged, the infirm, and the mentally vulnerable, no less than the unborn, have reason to wonder what sort of law it is that regards certain lives as expendable. And given the disposition of Canadian courts, where shall they turn for protection?

One reason that a secular mindset has triumphed in Canadian law--indeed in Canadian public life generally--is that Christians, whatever their denominational adherence, seem to be embarrassed to publicly declare their allegiance. If, greatly daring, they do venture to put forward a Christian point of view, they often do so in enlightenment language; they seek to make the transcendent ordinary; they accept the secular terms of reference as set by their opponents, and then wonder why the debate seems already lost.

My friend Rev. Victor Shepherd once wrote that in life there are two camps: the "pine, whine, and decline" camp; or Isaiah's camp. You will no doubt characterize my remarks tonight as belonging to the "pine, whine and decline" camp. So be it. But to conclude, let me cast a glance in the direction of the other camp, Isaiah's camp.

Isaiah's camp takes us back to where I began, with the Pentateuch, and words first addressed to Jewish slaves in captivity: "Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable" (Isaiah 40:28).

The prophet here does not patronize his people. He does not offer sentimental bromides, or a three-point Christian program of action. He does not jolly them along by saying: "Cheer up, things are not as bad as they seem". He does not decry pessimism. He does not even hearken back to better times in the past. He does none of those things. Instead, he directs the people's attention away from themselves, and their genuine predicament, to God. Don't you know? God does not grow weary, no, never. His understanding is unsearchable. His ways past finding out.

Pagan days

The situation, I believe, is as I have described it. The post-Christian--or "pagan" might be more accurate--era is upon us. Well these are the times we are fated to live through. And let us not be pious about it; by my own repeated sinfulness I contribute to this pagan culture. Our Christian witness, such as it is, seems to fall upon stony ground. So be it. We can do nothing about how our words are received; we can do something about our resolve to speak them clearly, in love and in truth, whenever the occasion permits. The hearing we receive in an alien culture is hostile; we are disdained or mocked. Well, this is not new. St. Paul told the Corinthian church that people "are so blinded by the god of this passing age that the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the very image of God, cannot dawn upon them and bring them light" (2 Cor. 4:4).

And so, finally, I have reached the image and the words I should like to leave with you: the image and the words of the patronym of my own church, Saint Paul. The image is this: Of a man beaten, scourged, and stoned, times without number; driven out of communities; slandered and vilified; twice imprisoned; three times shipwrecked, once cut adrift on the open sea. Paul wrote: "I have been constantly on the road; I have met dangers from rivers, danger from robbers, dangers from my fellow-countrymen, dangers from foreigners, dangers in town, dangers in the country, dangers at sea, dangers from false friends." (2 Cor. 11: 25-27)

What an experience of the world St. Paul had, in a man deeply conscious of his past as the chief persecutor of the new way, conscious in the present of a thorn in the flesh that will not leave him, conscious daily of being a sinner in need of forgiveness. A prophet to an unheeding world. Living in such a time, what lesson did all this suffering, indifference, mocking and adversity teach St. Paul? Simply this lesson: "I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor tribulation nor peril, nor nakedness nor the sword, nothing in the world as it is or in the world as it shall be, nothing in all creation, can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

If this be not a hope for the next millennium, a hope for Christians to live by--and to die by--then truly I know not what the word hope means. Thanks be to God.

This article was originally a talk delivered at St. Peter's Basilica in London, Ontario on May 18, 1998. Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, London, ON.