Christianity, conservatism, and the tyranny of the present

The Fourth Discourseman

Our age has a uniquely modern understanding of time. How we view the world around us, how we tell our own stories, how we grapple with social and ethical issues – all these are infected with what I want to call “the tyranny of the present”, the assumption that what is modern is best, that what is now upon us is the standard of what is true, and that – perhaps most insidiously – the labours and loves of our forbears have been leading, purposefully, to the establishment of this one moment, this now.

At one level this is a Christian (or more accurately, a bastardised form of a Christian) conception of time. Prophetic fulfilment, unfolding revelation and the notion of redemptive history undermine any concept of history as cyclical. And in our creed there is one great telos for all history: the day of the Lord, the second coming of Christ, the final denouement of all that is, as we know it. As the atheist philosopher John Gray observes, any secular notion of history as progress is dependent on this eschatological perspective, rebranded and rehashed as a form of whiggism. The telos has changed, but none of the teleological has been lost.

In fact, it has probably been augmented. For even in the biblical worldview, which plants us so firmly in the latter days of the world, time has a repetitiveness to it. There is nothing new under the sun. The human heart has not changed. We are still building Babel; the nations still rage against the Lord’s anointed. Patterns of spiritual rebirth and apostasy are the markers of contemporary history as much as in the affairs of times gone by. Not so in the new civic religion. In the anthropocentric worldview, man himself is the ultimate telos, such that nothing – at least as we consider the human heart – is to be left unchanged beneath the sun. Human nature must move on; indeed it cannot stay still, and to suggest as much is to call into question the whole telos of Western Babel-building.

That is why Christianity and conservatism so often seem to go together. The God-centredness of the worldview of the Bible is incompatible with the tyranny of the present. Ours is but one age among many, all of them equal before God; at least in the sense that all will stand before his judgment-seat, expecting no partiality. The God who is outside time is the true telos, not one particular age, and certainly not our own. That is why the Bible so often stresses a rootedness in the past, a continuity with the ways of our forbears: “Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.” (Proverbs 22:28) Or in the words Yahweh spoke by the prophet Jeremiah:

Stand by the roads, and look,

and ask for the ancient paths,

where the good way is; and walk in it,

and find rest for your souls.

(Jeremiah 6:16 ESV)

That could not be further from our cultural milieu today, when the old paths are seldom trod. We might expect as much from a world that has benighted itself with the godlessness of contemporary secularism. But all too often the church has accepted its teleologies. That is of course a criticism of Christian “progressivism” – either in its more liberal guises, or in the subtler forms of evangelical progressivism, found, for instance, in repeated attempts to present the Bible as a textbook of Christian feminism. But it is also a criticism of much of the so-called “conservatism” of our day. Either side of the Atlantic, conservative-minded Christians seem ignorant of the fact that their notion of “how things were” or “time immemorial” is as historically-situated, and was once as new, as the “progressive” stances they so vehemently rail against today. The teleology, in fact, is the same; they are simply further back in the narrative, preferring the slow-paced epic to the rumbustious novel.

That is not the conservatism that is at the heart of Christian thinking. Rather, the biblical worldview entails a radical reconceptualisation of time. Our own age is not the centre of the narrative, just as we are not the centre of the world. At the heart of both is the God who is outside of time, the one to whom and for whom we exist and were made. And so, worshipping the Ancient of Days, we walk in his ancient paths.