The move to uncertainty. . .

Whether you like it or not, the characterization of the orthodox and catholic faith over the ages was certainty and clarity.  While there were moments of confusion, the remarkable scope and progress of Christianity was built upon a profound certainty about the world, the Creator, the reason for evil, the location of death's source, morality, and the objective nature of truth.  In creed and confession, the Church laid before the world this clear and confident vision of the reality we encounter around us and in us.  More than this, it was shaped by the overwhelming mystery of God's love manifest in His Trinitarian identity, the reason for our own existence in His image and by His design, and the redemption of the world through His Son in flesh and blood.  As modernity began to be established from the Enlightenment through Humanism and into the so-called scientific age, the world has been left with less and less certainty and clarity.  In the place of these there is only confusion.

When in modernity we assign error to some parts of God's Word (or at least its possibility), we are left with the confusion of which parts of God's Word are in error and which are not.  When evolution became the defining rationale for why everything and each of us exist, it left us without a plan or purpose and life became random, spontaneous, and unpredictable.  When life itself was no longer sacred, we lost our own sense of value and identity and any protection afforded us.  Everything became tenuous and tentative -- even desire and gender.  Our culture of victims left us without justice, without punishment for the evil doer and therefore the corresponding honor and value assigned to virtue.  Our society seems to love this ambiguity because it leaves a gaping whole where order once stood and it has been replaced with power.  Now everything has to do with power and those who wield it and those who bestow it.  

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why many of those younger are in search of Church that does not look like a social organization or religious club but one that actually expects and builds upon transcendence and constancy as the marks of authenticity along with the traditional marks of the Church.  In any case, the progress toward uncertainty is untenable and ultimately destructive of everything it claims to order and preserve.  By removing morality and order and replacing it with the judgment of the moment and normality with exception, we are left where we are now -- in a crisis mode of division and contempt that has no possibility of reconciliation -- nor does it seem to want this.  In place of these structures, power and control are all that remain.  So that is where we are at now -- fighting over who is in power and who controls the structure.  While this is obviously true of the world and government and society, it is no less true of what remains of religious structures as well.  Everything cannot be true or there is no truth and everyone's opinion cannot be held in the same esteem or there is only error.  If life has value only because we assign it then we can reassign that value at any time and for any cause.  If truth is defined by the individual and lives within the boards those individuals assign to it, it forsakes the very essence of what it means to be truth.  If marriage and family have no definition or order to them but are constantly being remade and remodeled to suit the times, they are not institutions but merely the tools of the powerful used to remodel society until the only thing that matters is power.

Open the hymnal.  Read the catechism.  Listen to the Scriptures.  These are words of certainty and clarity from which our whole social order and our values come and are reflected.  But unless we are willing to identity and hold to these changeless values and orders, we have nothing of substance or hopeful for the world.  It is for this reason that Church cannot marry the spirit of the age or she will be a widow in the next generation.  Or worse, she will be a chameleon who changes everything to reflect whatever opinion or thought she is sitting upon at the moment.  If that is the case, better a widow then a promiscuous Church which insists it is all good.  When that happens nothing is good -- not even God.  This might just explain why those raised nearest these changes are suffering such anxiety, depression, and PTSD.