The Holy Spirit and the Post-Christendom West

Nov 01st, 2015 0 Comments

by Leonard Allen - 

It mostly hasn’t hit us yet that we are living in a post-Christendom culture. The cultural status and power that Christianity in America held from about the 1850s to the 1960s is virtually gone.

In Christendom, the church occupies a central and influential place in society; after Christendom, it gets pushed to the margins, out of the place of power. And that’s where we find ourselves now—more and more at the margins.

So let’s be clear: Any sort of Christian establishment has definitively ended. As David Bentley Hart put it recently, “we now live in the time after Christendom, among the rapidly vanishing fragments of its material culture, bound to it by only a few lingering habits of thought.”

Christianity’s loss of cultural power in America is waking us up to the reality that we are in a missionary situation in our own culture. And this is forcing us to rethink our mission, our theology, and our priorities.

http://www.lipscomb.edu/bible/blog/faculty-voices/2015/11/1/the-holy-spirit-and-the-post-christendom-west