A look at the soul of our nation and our own souls in these two articles. Dr. James Davison Hunter analyzes the state of our fractious society, and Dr. Esther Lightcap Meek probes the workings of our soul for forgiveness.
James Davison Hunter offers a clear-sighted analysis of contemporary life in America, not just cultural or political life, but all of life, and of the sad, downward spiral of nihilism which many have embraced (“Culture Wars: The End Game”, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2024, pp. 20ff).
Tribalism, hatred, the desire to annihilate or at least cancel everyone who disagrees with us, the struggle for power and influence, and the inability to discuss anything with those who do not agree with us—this is where we have allowed ourselves and our nation to come in this first quarter of the 21st century. Citing Nietzsche and his doctrine of ressentiment, Hunter writes, “What is new aboutressentiment in America is not only its ubiquity but also its insatiability, its desire for a purity that cannot abide the existence of the other.” A sense of injury and victimization drives the various tribal groups to ratchet up their rhetoric and violence to silence and destroy everyone who disagrees with them.
We have seen plenty of evidence that this analysis is correct. Hunter does not despair, however. Instead, he sees us as all participating in a common culture, a pathological one, to be sure, but one which, he believes, can be a starting-point for us to begin finding a new path. He asks, “How on earth can we regain a vision for an authentically humane political order?” The first step is the hardest: To stop seeing our political opponents as the enemy to be destroyed by every available means.
But how can that happen? Hunter doesn’t ask that question, but I suspect he realizes that such change as he seeks requires a heart change from beyond this world by a Power acting solely out of grace to keep people from destroying themselves and their civilizations. To stop hating our opponents and regarding them as enemies, we will need the power to love them as we love ourselves. That power cannot be conjured by the human will, overburdened as it is by mere self-interest. We need revival, true heart change, and churches full of believers who will stop choosing sides in the culture wars and instead will embrace God’s call to unity and charity as our defining emblems.
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What is forgiveness and how can it be achieved? That’s the question Esther Lightcap Meek investigates in the Winter 2004 issue of Comment (“A glimpse of a farther world, pp. 16ff).
Forgiveness, Meek argues, is a form of knowing, and all knowing operates “from-to”, from one condition of knowing to another. All true knowing is therefore oriented to the future and not bound to the past. What makes forgiveness so difficult is that the past was truly injurious, and the injuries are not easily overcome.
To achieve forgiveness a vision of a different future is required: “Forgiveness, too, involves…the coming into being of a farther pattern, a larger reality, which catches up the older, splintered one within it and transforms it.” Forgiveness involves the exchange of words: “Forgive me; I apologize.” “I forgive.” But it does not stop there. “Forgiveness is something more than the verbal transaction. It coincides with our being caught up with the gracious inbreaking of a farther, more deeply pattern of reality.”
What Meek could have said more plainly is that we in the Christian world need a clearer, more compelling, and more expansive vision and experience of the Kingdom of God. Only by looking forward—in a seeking mode, Kingdom-seeking—can we allow past injuries to go by the wayside and embrace one another in a new and larger, more transformative pattern of being. As she says, “forgiveness isn’t so much a transactional repair of an old world. Rather, it is a glimpse of a more profoundly coherent new one. It is as we eventually come to feel ourselves at home in this new world that we experience the forgiveness given and received.”
Yes, we need a fresh, Biblical, frank, and frankly daring vision of the Kingdom of God and what it means to seek this as the defining priority of our lives. Absent that, not only will resentment, hurt, broken friendships, anger, jealousy, and fear continue to thrive within the Body of Christ, but a host of other ills will go unresolved as well.
T. M. Moore
