Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

Session 3 Modernity, Post-Modernity, and the Church Today

It’s a Hard Time to Decipher, Ain’t It? Recent social and anthropological theory has moved away from a vision of a given culture as a unified whole. Instead, it distinguishes structural and improvisational dimensions at work in any given cultural setting. With regard to life in the United States, for example, consider the many terms that could claim to define the current cul tural climate: individualism, privatism, modernism, postmodernism, pluralism, secularism, subjectivism, multiculturalism, cynicism, populism, consumerism, narcissism, entertainmentism, violent, politically correct, ritually incompetent, post-Christendom, and becoming intimatized, politicized, and bureaucratized. Each of these terms identifies an important feature of modern North American culture. The sheer number of these and related descriptions calls the attentive student of culture to resist simplistic analyses.

~ Robert Webber. Music and the Arts in Christian Worship . 1st ed. Nashville: Star Song Pub. Group, 1994, p. 185.

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I. Movements of the Church in the 17th and 18th Centuries

A tragic and bloody time, a strange and foul stew: Oliver Cromwell initially desired to negotiate with Charles I, but became infuriated at the king’s untrustworthiness, later insisting on the king’s trial and execution. As lord lieutenant of Ireland, he led a campaign there in 1649, and as captain general and commander-in-chief he defeated the Scots at Dunbar in 1650. He dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653, and was offered the crown and title of King of England in 1657, but refused. His son Richard, who became lord protector of England after Oliver’s death, was deposed in 1659 by a military coup, and in 1660 the monarchy was restored with Charles II taking the throne. The persecuted Christian movement known as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, grew rapidly in England during Cromwell’s rule; even William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, became a Quaker. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, befriended Cromwell. When the Puritan movement within the Anglican Church split into the Presbyterian and Independent, Cromwell became an Independent.

~ William J. Federer. Great Quotations. St. Louis: AmeriSearch, 2001.

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