Taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10.5)

Vision
The Good Society
How do societies make progress? That is, how do they mature, become fruitful and prosperous, and continue to produce benefits for succeeding generations?

According to Arnold King, writing in the Spring 2016 issue of National Interest, social progress is realized not from the top down, under the leadership of political or cultural elites (“Cultural Intelligence”); but for a society to flourish, it needs to practice what Mr. King refers to as cultural intelligence, especially in the two foundational institutions of family and marketplace.

Mr. King insists that progress in society “tends to arise from the evolution of decentralized trial-and-error processes more than from grand schemes launched by planners and revolutionaries.” He explains that “knowledge embedded in social norms and practices is vast compared to the knowledge of even the brightest, most educated individuals.” This is why institutions, comprised of many people, need to be free to draw from traditions, ideas, and practices throughout a culture, past and present, to discover what works best to allow them to flourish. Top-down agendas discourage such free-ranging experimentation, preferring instead uniformity and conformity in social and cultural practice.

Mr. King observes that the trend today is for the dominant social institutions – education and the media, in particular – to advocate a top-down approach to social organization, and to support a progressive view of government as the best means to that end. Such a government involves regulation, intervention, and other kinds of control, together with the bureaucracy to support these efforts.

In such a setting, the moral and cultural preferences of those who hold political power define the standards for social life, and everyone in the social order is expected to get in line.

But openness to culture, in all its forms, and the freedom to experiment and explore varieties of cultural experience, provides access to more ideas, better knowledge, more fruitful competition, and a legacy of progress for the generation to come. The practice of such cultural intelligence allows social institutions to discover for themselves what values, norms, resources, and tools allow them to flourish and mature. Mr. King insists that, instead of centralizing social and cultural life in the halls of government, to enforce a one-size-fits-all mindset and praxis, we should be promoting a wide range of cultural ecologies.

Christians are not immune from the power of the progressive political agenda. But we deceive ourselves if we think that fighting fire with fire is the best way to allow our believing communities to flourish. If we don’t want to have our faith redefined and reconstructed by the spiritus mundi, we need to stop thinking that a different government is what we need to preserve our freedoms and values. Instead, we should be leaning into the Word and Spirit of God, and our vast cultural and theological heritage, to create a true and powerful countercultural ecology embracing every aspect of life. Such an ecology, scattered throughout the social order, can, by the force of its beauty and the evidence of its joy, survive and flourish, even though the progressive paradigm in which it exists as an ecological environment must ultimately fail.

This is not to excuse us from political involvement. It is, rather, to take a more long-term, generational approach to ensuring that the Kingdom of Christ will continue to come, expand, and flourish.

This is what Bonhoeffer was trying to do in Nazi Germany, the record of which effort he outlined in The Cost of Discipleship, Ethics,and Life Together. He saw the tragedy of the national socialist agenda, and the capitulation of the established church. He called on believers to rediscover their roots in Scripture and the Christian tradition, and to bond together as new communities – new cultural ecologies – to weather the storm of Naziism.

We need efforts of Christian cultural intelligence like this today, efforts that will, by their distinctively Christian praxis, indomitable hope, and manifest fecundity, demonstrate an all-things-new moral, cultural, and social order, and command the kind of prestige that encourages disillusioned secularists to take another look (cf. Mic. 4.1-8).

For reflection
1.  How does your church prepare its members for Kingdom living through culture?

2.  To what extent, and in what ways, is a Kingdom cultural ecology visible in your community?

3.  Is your practice of “leaning into the Word and Spirit of God” sufficient to prepare you for living and leading for Christian cultural intelligence? Explain.

Next steps: What would a Kingdom ecology look like in your community? Which aspects of community life would you expect to be influenced by such an ecology? How might such an ecology come into being? Talk with some Christian friends about these questions.

Kingdom vision begins with a clear and compelling vision of Jesus Christ, exalted in glory. Order a copy of our book, The Kingship of Jesus, and begin enlarging your vision of the coming of Christ’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven (click here to purchase).

We depend on the Lord for the needs of The Fellowship of Ailbe. This means we come to Him daily, asking for His help in giving us wisdom to know His will, strength and skill to do it, and the resources we require for each day. As for this last, we understand that God intends to support our ministry from within the ranks of those who are served by it (Ps. 20.1-3; Rom. 15.26, 27; Gal. 6.6).

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