New Evangelizers Post: The Long Defeat and Final Victory

     

UPDATE - LINK FIXED

 

I have a new article up at NewEvangelizers.com.  

JRR Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings once wrote: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

Note here that he attributes this seemingly pessimistic view on his Roman Catholic faith. Tolkien tells us that Catholicism views human history as the “long defeat.”

As I have gotten older, the truth of this sinks in. Though I think everyone begins to feel this way with age. The sunny days of youth are idealized and the younger generation begins to cast off the values that served as the solid foundation for our own lives. It leaves us feeling unmoored from the world, as if the culture is moving away from us and beyond us to the point where we begin to feel irrelevant.

We can feel this in politics, the popular culture, and even in our local communities. But we especially see this in how our society treats our faith. We are told that we have lost the the next generation on things like abortion, same-sex “marriage,” drugs, materialism, and atheism. Society, it seems, has evolved and we are told we too must evolve or die.

Pope Benedict XVI once wrote that in the modern world, the believer feels more and more like the outcast. He tells the story of a traveling circus that catches fire, so one of the clowns goes to the local town to scream for help. Seeing him in his clown outfit, the townsfolk think he is joking and begin to laugh. The more emphatically and emotionally he pleads for help, they laugh all the more. Pope Benedict said that this is how many modern Christians feel when trying to share the faith with the modern world.

And notice that Tolkien’s view is completely at odds with the modern notion of progress. There is a notion out there that even as we jettison the old religious traditions that somehow we will, through our technology and our politics, achieve an undreamt of utopia.

Of course CS Lewis pointed out that this idea of the inevitability of progress is a myth. He wrote in The World’s Last Night that , “The idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience. “ But this myth must be kept in place in order for us to “move beyond” the Christian faith.

Christ Himself warned us about this future. He told His disciples, ““If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’[a] If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. “ (John 15:18-20)

Jesus was not a Utopian idealist. He even told His followers that “The poor you will have with you always.” (Mark 14:7) Fallen human nature can have a gravitational pull on the souls of men, whereas the life of grace requires us to swim upstream, to go against the tide.

In many ways, you can see how Tolkien was right.

God makes the world. And what follows?
-Adam and Eve fall
-Cain kills Abel
-everyone becomes sinful but Noah
-the tower of Babel
-Sodom and Gomorrah
-Jacob steals the birthright
-Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery
-Hebrews build the golden calf
-Moses strikes the rock twice
-Saul tries to kill David
-David becomes an adulterer and murderer
-Solomon commits idolatry
-Civil war in the kingdom
-the Babylonian Exile
-the Roman occupation
-Christ is condemned to death by His own people and crucified by the Romans

And the book of Revelation tells us of the tribulations that are to come.

But we should not despair.

Remember the entirety of Tolkien’s quote. “History” is the long defeat.

But Christians look beyond history into eternity.

And that is where we will find final victory.

You can read the whole article here.