A short summary of some aspects of changes in the Western world follows. I especially recommend “The God That Did Not Fail” by Robert Royal for a discussion of how religion and democracy are intertwined.
- Greece and Rome - most of the authority structures don’t seem much different from many other societies, with the exception of democracy. You can read the wikipedia article for more details, but these societies limited the vote to males, and sometimes gave the wealthy more “votes” than the less wealthy. I’ll not explore this in detail, but it seems that a fairly good case can be made for the “separation of church and state” (NOT the exclusion of religion from the public square) being a distinctively Christian inference (see Royal’s book mentioned above).
- Pre-Reformation - as Christianity waxed and paganism waned, the separation of church and state began to become more clear. However, both authority structures remained centralized.
- Reformation - here we see a clear separation of church and state begin to emerge, along with a movement toward more decentralized authority structures in both church and state. Although technological changes and the creation of large amounts of excess wealth contributed to the consolidation of small states into large nations through the 19th century, the fact that messages could not travel faster than a ship or horse meant that large nations had to allow a certain amount of decentralization.
- Modern - the skepticism of Kant & Hume mentioned earlier, along with Darwin’s naturalistic explanation for species, began to undermine the traditional foundation of authority in the West…the Bible and the created order it describes. Marx/Lenin’s Communism and Hitler’s Fascism were two influential experiments that built on these new foundations and altered traditional God-individual, family, religious, and governmental authority structures. Outside of the West, my impression is that their effect was more in degree (by providing justification for more extreme forms of totalitarianism) since the non-Western world did not have a concept of “all men created equal”, even in non-Western ”democracies.” In the democratic West (e.g., US and Europe), radical individualism and radical egalitarianism began to emerge. Radical individualism takes the biblical “all men created equal” and elevates its to the point of asserting that the individual is supreme. As a result, biblical authority structures (God, family, church, and to a lesser degree, government) began to be attacked. Radical egalitarianism takes the same “all men created equal” and argues that there should be no difference between individuals. The defense of biblical structures was often lukewarm, especially beginning in the 60’s. Secularism attacked the individual’s obligations to God and to others, radical feminism attacked the traditional family, radical political theorists attacked the rule of law (e.g., the idea of a “living constitution”) and expressed utopian notions about the limits of government, and higher biblical criticism (which began in the 1800’s) provided a basis for asserting that the text was merely a human creation with no unique authority.
- Postmodern - though this is perhaps better characterized as late or hyper modernism, its emphasis on socially constructed and relativistic “truth” is at odds with traditional modernism’s utopian vision of scientific rationalism and empiricism yielding total and objective Truth. Postmodern conclusions include: male/female is not biological but sociological, that the family is defined by coupling not children, that the church is a spiritual community with no objective standards, and that all traditional structures that exercise authority simply reflect longstanding patterns of oppression that need to be de-constructed conceptually and literally. Not all these conclusions are held by all postmoderns, but they should provide some perspective on what makes postmodernism distinctive.
Next, I’ll review authority as seen from the individual, family, church, and government perspectives.
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