When people look at trends in society, especially their relationships with history, it’s common to point out times when similar things happen over and over. This is sometimes captured by the statement that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.1 Beyond that, various people have suggested that history proceeds through cycles, that similar behavior happens over and over, regardless of the political situation. It would seem that such cycles occur in varying situations because human nature itself is constant, so that large groups of humans will inevitably follow similar behavioral patterns.
For those who seek to make improvements to human society, it seems these cycles need to be addressed. But any attempt to break out of them would run into the same issue of unchanging human nature. Regardless of the social and political systems that we come up with, they don’t change our nature. And without a change to our nature, there will always be a tension drawing societies back to the same behavior.
This tension between rules to govern our behavior, and a nature that is opposed to those rules, is captured in Scripture in the tension between the Law and the Spirit. An illustration of this is pictured in the comparison of the rich young ruler and Pentecost.
When the rich young ruler asked how one saves oneself, Jesus used him to illustrate the impossibility of what the man was asking. Yet Jesus concluded by stating that what’s impossible with man is possible with God. We’re left hanging, wondering what might make that possible. The ambiguity is resolved at Pentecost when we see people doing the exact thing that Jesus had said was impossible. The impossible was made possible by the arrival of the Spirit.
It may be that history continues to illustrate this since it can be argued that the biggest sustained societal moral advances have come about as a result of Christianity. That our Western ethics that value each individual basically stemmed from Christianity. Widespread health care and education, helping end slavery, although complex issues, all seemed to be at least partly fueled by the faith.
However, such societal changes seem less driven by Christianity any more, and I keep wondering: What’s changed?
I touched on this in my previous essay, and will continue to ponder the question in future posts. Fundamentally, though, I think the problems are primarily spiritual, which implies that the solutions that we need to seek are spiritual, too.
- Variously attributed to Edmund Burke, George Santayana, or Winston Churchill.
Exploring Antioch 