Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 49:4 (Dec 2006)
Article: Cultural Pessimism In Modern Evangelical Thought: Francis Schaeffer, Carl Henry, And Charles Colson
Author: James Alan Patterson

---

JETS 49:4 (December 2006) p. 807

Cultural Pessimism In Modern Evangelical Thought:
Francis Schaeffer, Carl Henry, And Charles Colson

James A. Patterson*

Shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger delivered a sermon in which he spoke bluntly about a “dictatorship of relativism” that was poised to hurl the West into a new “Dark Age.” George Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul II, soon drew comparisons between the newly-elected pontiff and St. Benedict of Nursia, the father of European monasticism who labored valiantly to help preserve Western civilization in an earlier period of cultural crisis. As if to ratify this connection between two Benedicts, Weigel invoked the intriguing conclusion to Roman Catholic ethicist Alasdair Mclntyre’s After Virtue:

[I]f the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds of hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.1

Whether or not the “dark age” theme represents an accurate portrayal of the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some key Catholic thinkers obviously have not hesitated to use it in their analyses of the moral condition of the present era.

The cultural pessimism of Mclntyre and Ratzinger, moreover, suggests a broader context for understanding the fairly widespread propensity in modern evangelical thought to employ images of death, decline, and darkness when describing contemporary Western civilization. In particular, widely-read American evangelicals like Francis Schaeffer, Carl F. H. Henry, and Charles Colson regularly lamented the moral and cultural decay of the West, which they regarded as an undeniable verity of life in the current age. Since such gloomy views are probably shared by many Christians of varying stripes (as well as by some non-believers in the general population), the pessimism of these three evangelical leaders cannot simply be dismissed as idiosyncratic or marginal.

* James Patterson is professor and associate dean of the School of Christian Studies at Union University, Jackson, TN 38305.

JETS 49:4 (December 2006) p. 808

At the same time, the negative cultural images that Schaeffer, Henry, and Colson used appear to have functioned in a distinctive mode that was rooted in the problems and prospects of American evangelicalism during the second half of the twen...

visitor : : uid: ()