Escaping the Malaise of Modernity

The opening chapter of Samuel Parkison’s ‘To Gaze Upon God’ — a work of theological retrieval for evangelicals on the beatific vision — makes a striking argument.

Parkison states that all Christians throughout history have agreed that the beatific vision — seeing God face to face — is what makes heaven heaven, it is our blessed hope. But evangelicals in the last couple centuries have largely abandoned the term, though thankfully, many have not abandoned the idea. For example, John Piper’s ministry has hammered home the idea that seeing and savouring Christ is the chief delight of the soul; C.S. Lewis’ vision of “further up and further in” forever in Aslan’s country is similar, and so on.

But then Parkison takes aim at what he calls the “fundamentalist-biblicist” approach to the Bible as fatally compromised by the spirit of the Enlightenment. “Tradition, according to the Enlightenment, is a straight jacket, confining the would-be liberated intellect to immaturity.” Sola Scriptura, he argues, was never meant to be a rejection of the “confessional, catechetical, and liturgical life” that is shaped by the wisdom of past generations.

“The contemporary antipathy for tradition that often accompanies fundamentalism and a biblicist approach to theology did not come from sola Scriptura; modernity and the Enlightenment are to blame for this aberration form historic Christianity.”

This is a bold statement. And we are only at page 6. He goes on to argue that we have been largely cut off from our historical inheritance as Christians by this Enlightenment turn, this promise of intellectual maturity that turned out to be more like the journey of the prodigal son. Seeking self-fulfillment and freedom, we’ve ended up as a culture and in much of the evangelical church at a dead end, wondering what went wrong.

In this context of modern confusion, the idea of the beatific vision “touches a nerve within the soul; a nerve for which the post-Enlightenment imagination does not even have a category.”

And here is the conclusion he drives home to conclude the section:

“The way we escape the malaise of modernity is not by embracing individualistic biblicism, for individualistic biblicism is stuck in that very same malaise. The way forward is first the way backward. We must correct our course, and theological retrieval is the way to do this.”

I find myself resonating with this line of argument, though Parkison puts a very sharp point on the matter. One of the challenges here is that not every Christian or lay leader or pastor can be (or *should* be) doing this work of retrieval. There are SO many other good things to give ourselves to.

But I am convinced we do need a broad movement within evangelical Protestantism that consciously works to retrieve the best of the small-c catholic tradition, the ‘Great Tradition’ that forms the central core of Christian belief (including philosophical substructures) in such a way that is accessible and digestible for 21st-century believers of all kinds. Thankfully, there is such a movement already underway.

I’m looking forward to what I’ll find in pages 8-214 of this book, and maybe I’ll have more to share. I expect this book will be intellectually stimulating and, more importantly, spiritually edifying.