Discerning The Times: Grasping The Perspective of Philip Rieff

Our Preaching Team here at Harderwyk recently produced a podcast on the outstanding book “Being the Bad Guys by Stephen McAlpine.  The subtitle says it all: How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn’t.  McAlpine is Australian, so his ministry context is a bit different than ours, but only that it may be “further along” down the path of post-Christian culture.

 It’s a great book: very readable and full of insights.  I’ll leave the podcast to your judgement.

 I do want to make available a passage from McAlpine’s book because of the helpful way it summarizes a particular perspective that is gaining support.  You can read about Philip Rieff and his work in authors like Charles Taylor and Carl Trueman who dig deep into “third culture deathworks.”  But no one has presented a summary of his thought that is clearer and more understandable – not to mention applicable to the life of a disciple of Jesus in these times – than the following:

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Come and Buy

Two decades or so ago, there was excitement among evangelists and those involved in the missional church movement that the world was returning to a pre-Christian period in which claims of the gospel would be seen afresh - removed from all the traditional cultural associations. I attended meetings in cafe and pubs which discussed the new world we were facing and the opportunities it presented. Our strategy for church planting and evangelism was based on a conviction that postmodernity had leveled the playing field. The Christian faith was now one of many competing spiritual claims in the public square.

Philip Rieff, an American sociologist, had described much of the pre-Christian world as “first culture”: a world of many competing gods that were tribal in their allegiances and demands. First culture was not evangelistic. Each God and his or her worshippers kept to their own patch.

“Second culture”, Rieff argues changed things. Second culture was monotheistic and evangelistic. Christianity broke down tribal barriers with its commitment to equality across sexes, races and social divisions. It swept the first cultural away.

Now, with the eclipse of second-culture values in the West, we thought we were returning to the first culture – effectively, a pantheon of gods. So, the strategy was clear. Christianity would set up a stall alongside everyone else in a free market. And we were confident that, given the chance to offer our wares alongside everyone else’s, our products would be more compelling. All we had to do was to strip away the detritus of Christendom that had built up over the centuries - the overt institutionalism, the push for temporal power, the alignment with economic structures that fueled greed, and the less-than-attractive liturgical forms. The pure and simple claims of Christ could be presented and examined without prejudice by a culture just waiting for some good news. Churches sprang up in households and pubs across the West, ready for an influx of new enquirers.

But that tactic has not worked. Too often, those people who began this new movement ended up more like the people in the pub than the people in the pub ended up like Jesus. Often this was led from the top, as early mission leaders such as Rob Bell moved from a stated theological humility to walking only be classed as heretical viewpoints.  .  .  .

.  .  .  The reason this happened is becoming clearer. What we are experiencing now is not a return to pre-Christianity but a move forward to something new: a post-Christian reality. It is what Philip Rieff labeled “third culture”. First and second cultures have something that third culture does not possess: a spiritual or transcendent order that gave shape to the social order. People related to God or the gods through social and cultural structures in which temples and other holy locations, families and households, liturgical calendars and seasons all pointed to realities beyond themselves. The patterns established on earth were exactly that patterns of something transcendent.

Third culture rejects this spiritual reality. The third-culture world is hermetically sealed off from anything transcendent and recognizes only horizontal identity constructions, not vertical ones. Here is where meaning is determined, and here is where authority lies. It is ours to construct and deconstruct.

 Simply put, when we decided we were headed back to a pre-Christian world view of the world which would give us the kind of hearing we had back in the early centuries, we misread the data. Unlike the first culture, this third culture is highly evangelistic and actively hostile to second culture values. It has features and inbuilt bugs that render it resistant to many of the tactics employed in pre-Christian days that we were confident would work again.

  

We'll Take It From Here

Secular cultural commentators have read the data better than Christians have. In his book The Madness of Crowds, British author and commentator Douglas Murray, who is gay and an atheist, says that we have been living through “a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all of our grand narratives have collapsed”. But, of course, nature abhors a vacuum. Murray goes on to say this: “Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose”.

 Even an atheist such as Murray recognizes that we are facing a new religion - one built on commitment to individual autonomy and celebration of personal authenticity at any cost. It is a new religion that finds ultimate meaning in the self, to counter the gospel that finds ultimate meaning in God and his King, Jesus Christ.

 From Being the Bad Guys by Stephen McAlpine, pp. 24-28

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Here is a compressed summary of Rieff’s perspective from his obituary in The Guardian:

Rieff's five-stage view of history is now reduced to three: a first, pagan world embracing Plato and aboriginal life; a second, religious world from Judaisim to Islam; the third world is the current mess, which has lost that order he calls "vertical in authority". - CLICK HERE for the entire obituary.  

 

To learn more about Philip Rieff and his thought, I would suggest:

CLICK HERE for the Wikipedia Article on him.  It is brief, but interesting 

CLICK HERE for his New York Times obituary

CLICK HERE for A Theological Sickness unto Death: Philip Rieff’s Prophetic Analysis of our Secular Age.  Published in the theological journal Themelios and posted by TheGospelCoalition.org

 

Resources

Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks (University of Virginia Press, 2006)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007)

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway , 2002) – CLICK HERE for the Amazon link