THE DEMISE OF CHRISTENDOM

Covenant Thinklings: You just don't get it!

"Christendom" is a specific historical term that refers to the post-Constantine alliance between the church and the state that helped create the medieval period and Western Civilization.

This actually my focus of study, both in the masters in Latin American Studies, and now in my research in the History department. All of Europe was part of Christendom, but since the reformation, the Protestant wing has moved away from Christendom more rapidly than Catholicism and has been more susceptible to secularization. My study of Spanish “counter-reformation” Catholicism in Latin America is basically the study of the last desperate battle against modernity by medieval Christendom, resulting in bloody violence, especially in Colombia, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, right up to Vatican II in 1962.

Alan Hirsch, in The Forgotten Ways, is using “Christendom” in a slightly different way than we do in the field of Latin American history. He is defining Christendom as a “Christian” civilization where the Church is at the heart of the public sphere and is all encompassing. In such a paradigm, the attractional model of “going” to church makes more sense. In a post-Christendom, post-modern paradigm, incarnatonal mission is essential. That’s what I am attempting to do at the university campus…they don’t come to us (the church) so I am going to them and living the kingdom in their midst, in the hopes that they will be persuaded to surrender their lives to Jesus and commit to follow him with one another.

While a valid argument can be made that Christendom saved the Roman Empire, and ultimately created Western civilization, secular history, especially of the post-modern deconstructive kind, is not very kind to the excesses of the Christendom model. Despite glowing examples of Christ breaking in throughout the medieval period in the monastic orders and the rich mystic tradition, for the most part, Christendom was about elite force and domination. I don’t need to review the history of the crusades, the popes, and colonialism here.

Hirsch views Christendom at best as a “systems story” at the core of the ‘modern’ church that has outlived its usefulness. At worst, it is a sort of viral cancer that constantly pulls us back into Greek dualism, paternal hierarchies, and the Cathedral-attractional model of post-Constantine Roman Christianity.

Ok…now I have gone on too long. Has any one in here read any of the books by James Thwaite?