The society has changed. Before the 50′s, people transitioned straight from childhood to adulthood. But a radical change happened, which to my notion hadn’t happened ever before for thousands of years: a youth culture emerged. People no longer went straight to small adults, but rather stopped over as youth. Now this has had many implications since then, but the one I’m interested today is tradition. This change in society had a dramatic impact on how tradition was transferred to the next generation. Before, the traditional values of the parents were easily transferred to the younger generation, but now the youth culture got in the way and severed the link. Infact, it was actively trying to do so with young rebel attitude.
The introduction of youth culture was the outroduction of tradition.
Religion can be both tradition and personal. There is nothing wrong with traditional faith, we human beings tend to approach the whole faith-issue quite variably. But since tradition seems to be the outbound trend, the church needs to look more into the personal, pietistic faith. Now this is not without its problems. When faith gets more and more pietistic, it also gets more and more personal issue. And thus the personality starts to color the faith more and more. To a certain point, its not a bad thing. But after that point the faith starts to be generated from one’s own head – thus not being objectively true. In the end it most probably has very little stuff inside, just some general notion of a vague god and perhaps some wishful thinking of some vague afterlife. Its quite common to hear people say: “I have my own faith” these days.
But we cannot all be right.
There might be 6 billion views about the truth, but there is only one truth. Only one state of how things actually are. I don’t believe there is such thing as a relativistic view – meaning that people would think there are multiple truths. Relativistic thinking is invoked, when we want to hold to our own truth, but we aren’t ready to discuss it with others. Its a lazy, cozy way of not having to test our faith. When we say: “well that might be true for you, but this is true for me.” we actually say, that “I dont really have the guts to talk about these religious issues with you, its much cozier to just let the matter be”. Thus, religion needs to have a source from outside of us. To my view, its the Bible and an actually living God.
Now one might argue, that after a person goes through his/her teenage years and transitions into real adulthood, he/she also starts gaining those traditional views. That might be so, but a sharp look at our modern society tells us, that the tradition they get is a seriously watered down version. Society as a whole is slowly moving away from tradition. We have switched our position from backwards looking to forward looking. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter where we look to – both can be good. But our new view certainly does change things.
So how do we get a faith, which is both anchored to the truth outside us, and anchored to the heart and mind inside us? That is the question we need to start answering.