A couple of weeks ago, I began a series on the Benedictine Rule, as it might be, lived out in ordinary life. Last week, I mentioned that the roots of the rule are a life structured around prayer, Bible study, and work. In a monastery, there’s almost always an opportunity for physical labor by many people. There are also a number of tasks that require intellectual labor. For example, in the Middle Ages, many monks worked in the fields while others copied manuscripts. The key was finding work appropriate for each member of the order. This week, I am focused on Christian action and the work we do day by day in the name of Christ.

One reason for this week’s focus is how Kathy and I spent the last few days. Beginning last Thursday and until yesterday evening, we were in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our first reason for being there was primarily a conference held by a local Presbyterian Church called “MexEd.” MexEd is an annual conference sponsored by churches that participate in what is known as the AMO program in Mexico. A second reason for being in Oaxaca was that this very same church is a leader in what is called “MoviPres,” which involves a movement of indigenous churches to strengthen Presbyterian churches in Mexico.

Feeding Children in Love through AMO

AMO. is an acronym for “Feed My Lambs” because in Romance languages, including Spanish, the verb “amo” means “I love.” The AMO Program is designed to cultivate a classically informed Biblical worldview, Christian mindset, Christian imagination, and Christian conscience in children ages 6-14. The founders of AMO desired to create a curriculum that would restore the heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind relationship between parents and children in the classroom and a unified experience of community love, education, and character formation focused on strengthening families and helping children, many of whom are in poorer countries develop the character and abilities to achieve success in life.

Moving Churches into Action through MoviPres

MoviPres began in the Presbyterian Church of Mexico and is a training vehicle by which local churches, presbyteries, and higher governing bodies in Mexico can be trained to share the gospel and grow. One of the things that first attracted me to MoviPres is that the strategy is very similar to that recommended by Crisis of Discipleship: Renewing the Art of Christian Disciple-Making [1]and embodied in a book that Kathy and I wrote entitled Salt and Light: Every Day Discipleship. [2] When I first read the curriculum produced by MoviPres, I could see that they had designed an excellent strategy for the disciple-making situation in Mexico.

Our church in San Antonio began developing a relationship with The AMO Program many years ago. In recent years, our partners have introduced us to MoviPres. We were in Mexico partially because MoviPres has agreed to help strengthen churches along the border inside the United States in South Texas, and we needed to work out some details concerning how we might go about this.

Four Long Days

On the first day, we toured the lovely city where the conference would be held. Located in the mountains south and east of Mexico City, Oaxaca is part of one of the poorest areas in Mexico. Nevertheless, the city is beautiful, and the climate is lovely at this time of the year. (It was 100° in San Antonio while we were gone and about 77 degrees at the high in the mountains where we were. It rained every afternoon for just a few minutes before evening came when the temperatures were usually around 60 degrees.) We rapidly discovered that the architecture was beautiful, the food was terrific, and the people were friendly and happy to explain their culture and heritage.

The highlight of the first morning was touring the “Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán,” the most famous church in Oaxaca. There is also a lovely Cathedral located in the city’s central plaza. The Santo Domingo church has Roman Catholic heritage, stunning architecture, and dramatic inlaid pillars and statutes. For this part of the day, our hostess was a delightful young woman, Majo, who received a scholarship from Biblicus Mexico, which I will discuss later, and who studied in South Texas, where she also worked and engaged in mission.

The Conference and Meetings

In the late afternoon, we met with our hosts to plan a conference in South Texas sometime this fall or next spring and to work out some details that had become confusing. This meeting, as well as the conference, was held at Amor y Proclamación Presbyterian Church. What a comparison there is between the ancient and lovely architecture of the Catholic churches and the simplicity of Amor y Proclamación, which meets in rented facilities that used to be a nightclub. The people in the church have worked tirelessly to reconfigure the building as a church and educational facility.

 Around 5:00 in the evening, the conference began. Around 100 lay people from all over Mexico, but mainly from the south of Mexico City, attended the meeting. They were there to learn how to start or expand an AMO program in their church and understand their culture better.

There were four kinds of speakers during the conference, which lasted two full days, morning until night:

• Speakers concentrated on the cultural situation in Mexico and much of the world.
• Speakers that concentrated on the theory behind AMO.
• Speakers that gave practical discussions concerning how to begin and operate an AMO program.
• The church pastor who sponsored the mixed event is also the president of MoviPres.

The main speaker, Eric Tucker, is a professor of philosophy in Florida who was a missionary in Mexico for many years. Eric was born in Michigan and raised in Mexico. Throughout his life, he has lived and worked in various parts of Latin America, spending more time in Latin America than in the US. His doctorate is in Intercultural Studies with a minor in Adult Education. He teaches various courses, all related in some way to ethics, including Professional and Healthcare Ethics, Business Administration, World Religions, Organizational Behavior, Leadership, Managing Cultural Diversity, Service Learning, and other Honors College courses. His focus is teaching students to grow in love with learning and develop their unique abilities and calling. He discussed the barriers to transmitting Christianity and basic moral principles in contemporary society, particularly the academic and political culture prevalent in Mexico and Latin America. He stayed in our hotel, and we became friends. He was quite good.

The second speaker is the woman who runs the AMO program not just in Mexico but for most of Latin America and the Caribbean. Francelia Chavez de McReynolds helps with our church’s various ministries in Mexico and works full-time with AMO. She and her husband, Chris, live about half the year in South Texas and half the year in Mexico. Raquel Cahuich, a scholarship recipient from another program our church has sponsored called “Biblicus Mexico,” spoke on the challenges of curriculum design in Mexico. Finally, and most impressively, a group of women in charge of AMO programs all over Mexico spoke about various parts of the challenges in starting and maintaining such a program.

I want to stop momentarily to describe this particular group of speakers further. As I’ve already said, all the speakers were good; some were highly educated and competent. This last group of speakers was, to me, the most impressive. Most of them spoke with few or no notes. Some of the talks were as long as 45 minutes. Each woman was open, frank, informative, highly intelligent, and fluent. I was sitting there most of the time wondering if most American churches could field such a robust speaking group of laypersons! It was, for me, the most inspiring part of the conference.

Our host for the conference is a very unusual and talented person. Trained as a medical doctor, a profession he continues to practice, Rev. Josias Luna took off time in midlife to come to the United States and study theology. Upon his return to Mexico, he planted the church Amor y Proclamación. Rev. Luna and his wife, Elizabeth, introduced their congregation to AMO in 2012. Josias and Elizabeth established the program in Oaxaca and enrolled to become certified AMO trainers in Mexico several years later. Today, they are leaders in the AMO program in Mexico.

The Lunas are a wonderful couple, and they hosted us for dinner the last evening after their exhausting leadership of the conference. The Lunas experienced growth as they emphasized Biblical, Christian education in their family. The couple recruited a team and shepherded its practical implementation in the church. After twelve years of successful discipleship in their family and church, they are on the Amo training faculty, instructing classes to form other Spanish-speaking AMO teachers.

Kathy and Mexico

Through the efforts of my wife, Kathy, we have been able to develop friendships and ministry partners throughout Mexico. She spends endless hours on the telephone and the computer coordinating various ministry opportunities of our church in Mexico. This trip was the beginning of new initiatives and the completion of older mission objectives.

Why I Wrote This

I began this blog discussing Saint Benedict and the structure of monastic life. Contemporary churches often focus on teaching. Pastors spend most of their time teaching. This leads inevitably to the church’s focus on transmitting biblical knowledge and theology. After many years of ministry, I’ve come to the view that the purpose of the church is to embody Christ in a local community. The pastor’s purpose is to draw people into discipleship in the church so that they may reflect Christ in their everyday lives. This inevitably involves a lot of work.

Mission occurs every day, wherever we are and in whatever we choose to do. The question is, “What kind of mission am I doing?” The rhythm of prayer, study, and work is essential as we transmit the love of Christ into the world that so desperately needs it. For many years, I have followed a kind of rule of life that divided my day into prayer, exercise, study, and work. In retirement, I’ve tried to keep roughly the same balance, though I now have more time for exercise than was possible while practicing law or engaged in ministry. The only difference is that I don’t get paid for most of my labor!

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] G. Christopher Scruggs, Crisis of Discipleship: Renewing the Art of Relational Disciple-Making Revised and Expanded version (Richmond Virginia: Living Dialogue, 2024).

[2] G. Christopher and Kathy Scruggs, Salt & Light: Every Day Discipleship (Collierville, TN: Innovo Publishing, 2024).

Last week, I dealt with the description by Alisdair MacIntire of Western Civilization as invaded by the New Barbarians and waiting for a kind of “New St. Benedict.” Naturally, many Christian writers have taken up the call. I’m not immune from this temptation. MacIntyre has warned that he does not mean this to be taken in a narrow or fundamentalist way. This week, I will continue with this blog, primarily taken from my book, Path of Life, as we investigate how we got into this situation in the first place. [1]

Christians in Early 21^st Century America

Alisdair MacIntyre begins his book, After Virtue, with a story. [2] “Imagine,” he says, “that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.” He goes on to describe an environmental disaster that is unfairly blamed on the scientific community. After riots, acts of violence, deaths, and destruction, a “know nothing” party takes control and abolishes the teaching of science in schools and universities. The remaining scientists are imprisoned. After some time, there is a change in public mood, and a few leaders attempt to restore and revive the scientific community, though hardly anyone remembers exactly how science was practiced. All that remains are fragments of the outstanding achievements of the past.

Slowly but surely, the group attempts to restore science as a discipline, but it isn’t easy. No real scientists are remaining to lead the effort. There are no remaining university departments of physics, chemistry, biology, and the like. Only fragments of the body of past scientific literature remain. Although some of the theorems of science remain known to scholars, they are disconnected and incomplete. Therefore, they memorize parts of the remaining literature, debate the meanings of specific theories, and attempt to teach children elementary principles of science. Unfortunately, what they are doing does not in any way resemble science.

Then MacIntyre makes his point: Moral thinking in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is in just such a condition. From the beginnings of moral inquiry until the Enlightenment, a form of life dominated Western Europe, and a significant body of literature illuminated and analyzed that way of life. Over the past 300 years, the foundations of Western civilization and culture have been eroded in a period of growing skepticism.

What is sometimes called “Judeo-Christian Culture” forms the historical foundation of Western life and thinking, but the reality of this culture is far more subtle and complex than its name implies. Jews and Christians were profoundly impacted by various cultures of the ancient world and, most importantly, by that culture we sometimes refer to as “Greco-Roman,” the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. For example, the writers of  Biblical wisdom literature were deeply impacted by the broader culture of the ancient Middle East, especially Egypt. They, in turn, were affected by other cultures with which they came into contact. By the beginning of the Modern World (circa 1492 A.D.), Medieval culture was already in contact with, and impacted by, Muslim culture. A portion of what we call Greco-Roman literature was mediated to the West by Islamic sources. The culture of the Far East has deeply impacted modern culture. All of this impacted the development of Western Culture in profound ways.

Attack on the Judeo-Christian World-View

Over the past 300 years, that way of life and body of literature has been attacked, questioned, ridiculed, distorted, forgotten, diminished, and shattered. All we possess today are fragments. We continue to use expressions from the past, but we no longer have a practical comprehension of much of this long history, so we have largely lost the actual practices to which the theories referred. The way of life formed by our history has slowly disintegrated. This is true in secular culture. Worse, it is true among Christians. We use the language of faith, but too often, we think, will, choose, and live based on the secular world around us.

Nowhere is the problem of a loss of cultural heritage more apparent than in the church. Church members and leaders often use the traditional language of Christian faith, life, and morality. Still, that language has lost its connection with the concrete reality of their day-to-day lives. Their lives and ours are often formed by the values and lifestyle of a culture increasingly alienated from its roots.

For example, most Christians understand that one of the Ten Commandments prohibits adultery and that marriage is in some sense sacred. Pastors preach sermons on the subject. Members attend Bible studies where the principles are espoused. Guest speakers and cultural commentators speak and write about family values. Christians often send their children to Christian schools where traditional ethics are taught, sometimes too forcefully. Yet, studies show that American Christians have affairs, divorce, and dishonor marriage in pretty much the same way as non-Christians.

Many young people are frankly nonchalant about the Biblical teaching concerning pre-marital sex. As a pastor, I can testify to what young people will say and admit to in a safe environment. Publicly, they mouth the principles of traditional morals—especially in front of their parents and religious leaders. Privately, they find their way around them—or ignore them altogether. They do this because the moral world they truly inhabit is formed by the cultural world in which they live and breathe every moment they are not in church or Bible study. While they know the language of Judeo-Christian culture, they no longer inhabit and live out the reality of it.

Sex is not the only area in which Judeo-Christian culture no longer meaningfully impacts social behavior. Pre-modern societies usually regulated, and perhaps even overregulated, economic life. There was an attempt to regulate economic life so that the rich and poor could live together without one party taking undue advantage of the other. For example, the limitation of interest rates through usury laws was based on religious and moral concerns. Late modern and post-modern societies, capitalist and socialist, have tended to exclude religious and ethical considerations from business and economic policies. The result is that many Christians and Jews employ in their business lives strategies that the Bible and their respective traditions expressly or implicitly condemn.

There is something deeply mistaken with how modern and post-modern people fail to internalize Scripture, the truths of the Christian faith, and the way of life they imply. Even when Christians memorize the foundational texts of the Christian tradition, they often have ceased to express and control the realities of everyday life. On the theological left, the words of Scripture do not have objective content; they express religious feelings. On the theological right, the words of Scripture express a proclaimed inerrant content, an infallible truth that is often mentally accepted but does not impact behavior. In neither case does it seem that these words end up “written on the tablet of the heart” (Proverbs 3:3).

From Enlightenment to Modernity

What went wrong? The story Alystair MacIntyre tells is a hidden retelling of the story of the modern world. There was a time when what might be called Judeo-Christian faith and ethical practices and theories stemming from the works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas dominated Western life. The majority of people were Christian, at least in name. The Roman Catholic Church, the monastic orders, and the teachers of the nascent universities in Europe were dominated by the thinking of these great teachers. Yes, there were doubters. Yes, there were other traditions. However, the Christian faith and the ethics of Aristotle, as modified by Thomas Aquinas, reflected an intellectual and moral consensus.

This societal consensus deteriorated during the Renaissance (1500-1600) and Reformation (1517-1648). The Renaissance was a time of rediscovery of the classical Greek tradition. It also laid the foundations for the Reformation’s convulsions. The Reformation was a time of Biblical renewal in faith and morals, but it was also the beginning of the modern questioning of authority, secular and religious. Then, in the 1700’s, the “Enlightenment” began. The Enlightenment was a time when Western Europe discovered the power of human critical reason (Descartes), the method of science (Newton), skepticism towards authority (the French “Philophes”), and belief in human progress (the scientific and industrial revolution).

A central feature of the Enlightenment and the Modern Age has been rejecting tradition, religious institutions (especially the European Roman Catholic Church), and any kind of knowledge that cannot be “proved” by human critical reason. The result has been a loss of the social and religious foundations for moral and ethical reasoning. Although our society is a scientific and technical marvel, it is culturally, intellectually, ethically, morally, and spiritually impoverished—with all the human suffering and damaged lives that the word “poverty” implies.

From Modernity to Post-Modernity

“What does this have to do with me?” some may ask. The answer is simple: the world we live in was created, for better and for worse, by the upheaval of the Enlightenment. We see the wonders of technology and the results of the scientific method. All of us experience the benefits of modern medicine. We all understand the benefits of industrialization and the dramatically increasing living standards. The benefits and progress of the Modern Age have been enormous.

Just as we all experience the benefits of the Modern Age, we also experience its limitations. With the successes of the scientific method, people began to see that method as applicable to all knowledge—and forms of knowledge, such as religious and moral beliefs, that are not susceptible to scientific proof, were often ignored or scorned. With the successes of science and technology, people began to believe that all the problems of human society could be solved by science and its application to human problems.

With the advancement of human society’s material aspects, people began to believe that material progress, often visualized in scientific and industrial terms, was both inevitable and potentially unending. Science and human reasoning, when applied to the problems of human life and existence, would continue to improve human life and provide a final consummation of the human heart’s yearning for meaning, purpose, health, prosperity, goodness, truth, and beauty.

Perhaps most importantly, critical reason, the very center of the Enlightenment project, began to attack the foundations of society itself. It attacked all moral claims and all claims for truth. With the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers, the principles of the Enlightenment began to be attacked first in the Apartments of philosophy, then in departments of literature, and finally in popular culture as a whole.

The Post-Modern World

Then came the tumults of the Twentieth Century. Two Great Wars, one ending with the use of a weapon that made possible the destruction of civilization, cast doubt upon the inevitability of progress. The destruction of human civilization became as realistic an alternative as its continued progress. The myth of progress and the hope of a human paradise created by science and human reason began to die.

Although scientific innovation continued at an accelerated pace and the standard of living improved in Western Europe and America, people remained the same. Although industrial society continued to develop, socio-economic inequities and environmental degradation troubled many people. Amidst the wealth of the West, doubts and anxiety plagued many people. Much was gained due to the Enlightenment and the Modern Era, but much has been lost.

Until recently, the moral skepticism of intellectual and cultural elites, which emerged during the modern period, impacted only a few people. The moral tradition of the West formed the majority of people. With the increasing importance of the media, the moral values of the few have become the moral values of the many. We now live in a society without consistent and widely accepted personal morality and behavior norms. The results of this phenomenon can be found in every city, town, village, church, school, and neighborhood in America.

Most observers believe that the human race is entering a period that, for now, takes the name “postmodern.” In a way, the name reflects uncertainty concerning the positive aspects of our new cultural environment. All the term “postmodernism” connotes is that the postmodern world is after the modern world. In some ways, we can’t see what the postmodern world is or will be like in the future; we only know that the modern era is over. What is to come is unclear.

The pillars of the Enlightenment were (1) confidence in human critical and scientific reason, (2) a faith that human reason, and especially the scientific method, would usher in a kind of Golden Age in which many of the world’s most vexing problems were once and forever solved, (3) a belief in a universal morality discernible by reason alone, and (4) hostility towards tradition, traditional forms of life, and traditional religion.

Each of these pillars of Enlightenment thinking crumbled under the pressure of the wars and violence of the 20^thcentury, the terrible suffering inflicted by the ideological regimes of Nazism and Communism, and the perception that Western Capitalism is itself a kind of ideology that has destructive impacts on the environment and local cultures. Philosophically, the critical posture of philosophers from Nietzsche to the present, and especially the advocates of what is sometimes called “deconstructionism,” further undermined a belief in universal reason and morality. Culturally, the growth of education and the rise of what is sometimes called “multiculturalism” further relativized almost any imaginable moral or religious system or belief. [3]

Back to the question, “What does this have to do with me?” Although few of us ponder the deep religious and philosophical issues raised by modern culture, we live in the boiling social and cultural cauldron of its results. Many of our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up in rural communities. Our parents and grandparents built great industries and the cities their growth required. Today, all over the world, many people live in giant metropolises. Most of us live in relatively large cities. Some of us live in great conglomerations of cities, including New York-Washington, Houston-Dallas-San Antonio, and the San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Diego corridors.

Most of us do not live near relatives, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in close-knit extended families. Let’s listen to or watch the media. We see it played-out lifestyles deeply at odds with not only traditional Judeo-Christian lifestyles but also profoundly at odds with the cultural traditions of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or almost any other traditional cultural norm. Day after day, the popular media, driven by advertising, promotes a culture that is deeply materialistic, deeply romantic, deeply sensual, and (despite its claims to reasonableness) deeply unreasonable. Those who work in social service agencies, churches, and other religious areas see daily the impact of our shared culture on the lives of ordinary people.

For a long time during the Enlightenment and much of the Modern world, losing contact with a tradition of faith and morals did not devastatingly impact culture. Ordinary people continued to go to church or synagogue. They grew up with their character formed by the saga of Israel, Christ, and the Church. They read Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Romans and Greeks.” People knew the old songs and old stories. They lived in a world formed by a heritage that began when God appeared to Abraham and Socrates walked the streets of Athens. Though intellectual and cultural elites had long ago given up the faith that formed them, they were still formed by the heritage they rejected.

With the advent of modern media and the pervasive impact of movies, television, and the internet, all this has changed. Another story—a story deeply incoherent but filled with seductive images of wealth, power, violence, and pleasure—forms the character of not just a few but of the many. We now live in the aftermath of that cultural and moral disaster, a disaster precisely like the one MacIntyre describes. At best, we live among the fragments of a cultural past. Most of us live among its bombed-out ruins, like survivors of the great bombings of the Second World War in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan.

Our life among the ruins of Western Civilization breeds rootlessness in many different ways. It is the author’s conviction that the deepest need of our culture is to reconnect with the traditional wisdom of the ancient world. This does not mean that we must jettison or reject the accomplishments of the modern world. It does not mean retreating into a pre-modern culture. It means reaching deep beyond and before Modernity into the cultural traditions from which the modern world emerged to recover the best and most important part of what has been lost. In the West, this involves reaching deep into the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular roots of our culture found in the culture of Greece and Rome. Under the cultural conditions of the West today, it also means reaching into other cultures’ wisdom and moral traditions in the quest for knowledge and moral truth.

A Return to Leslie Newbigin

This is where I return to Lesslie Newbigin and his book, Proper Confidence. [4] In Proper Confidence, Newbigin outlines the importance of Benedict for Western history. Born into that period we called the “Dark Ages,” Benedict created an order that modeled a form of Christian life appropriate to an agricultural and primarily rural economy, forming one of the bedrock institutions of the Middle Ages. In the process, as his monasteries spread all across Europe, the population of Europe was given a visual, embodied example of the kind of society that Christians could flourish in. In addition, the network of monasteries, Benedictine and otherwise, allowed Christian civilization to spread throughout Europe.

Benedict was not a revolutionary. He built upon the work of others who had preceded him, particularly Pachomius, John Cassian, and Augustine. Here is how Newbigin describes his achievement:

The Benedictine rule, with its balanced combination of prayer, manual work, and study was firmly based on the Bible. At the center of the life of each community was the continual reading of the Bible, both in study and in the worship of the community. The biblical story came to be the one story that shaped the understanding of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. In the constant remembering of the great events of creation and salvation through the liturgical year, in the popular drama of the streets, and in the pictures that surrounded the congregation as they gathered for worship, it was the story that was their mental framework, the story that defined human life and its meaning and destiny. [5]

When Alistair McIntyre invites us to await the coming of a new Benedict, I don’t think he’s inviting us to wait for the return of St Benedict and the conversion of Western civilization to a pre-modern state. Unlike in Benedict’s Europe, most people today do not live in ruled areas or engage in agriculture as a way of life. More and more frequently, people live in cities today, and the world population is centered in great metropolitan areas of such size and complexity that would have been unimaginable even a century ago.

Nevertheless, we have much to learn from St. Benedict. I suggest that whatever emerges amidst the ruins of modern civilization will have a monastic look. Prayer and meditation will sit at the foundation of life. The value of manual labor will be reestablished, especially as artificial intelligence does many tasks previously done by intellectual laborers. Finally, the great religious traditions of the world, if they can learn to work together, we’ll have a place. For Christians, this means that the Bible’s story of God, who is both wisdom and love, will sit at the center of the life recommended by our new St. Benedict.

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] G. Christopher Scruggs, Path of Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014).

[2] Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 2^nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 1.

[3] For a Christian introduction to Post Modernism, see Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Irvine, CA: Crossway Books, 1994).

[4] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Disicpleship (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans 1995).

[5] Id, 13.

This week, I return to one of my earlier books for this blog every so often. Almost everything I have written was published initially as part of this blog, but the precise chapter I will be visiting was written before I had a blog. The reason it’s on my mind is because twice in the last week, people have mentioned Alastair McIntyre’s After Virtue to me, which has been a very important book in my intellectual growth. [1]In one case, a professor was talking to me about his students. He began to speak about most of his students’ characterological and emotional issues. His statement to me was something like, “Every new class seems to be more dysfunctional and to have more difficulty conceiving of any kind of a disciplined moral life. I think it has to do with our educational system and how it has abandoned the teaching virtues over the last century. This is not just true in the United States, but worldwide where Western civilization has been important.” The second person with whom I spoke was interested in a comment by Leslie Nubin that Saint Benedict reacted to the decline of the Roman Empire and the institutional corruption of the church to create a new way of life that could penetrate the largely rural Europe of his day. I was thinking about the rule of Saint Benedict and its meaning for us today.

A New St. Benedict?

Near the end of After Virtue, MacIntyre cryptically speaks of the end of Western Civilization as we know it and of a “new dark age” in which we now live. This New Dark Age is characterized by a loss of faith in truth and the reality of spiritual and moral values. Its results are seen in our societies’ pervasive spiritual and moral decay and the loss of confidence in our institutions. MacIntyre ends his book with no answer, only a general direction in which Western culture might go:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of virtues was able to survive the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time. And, it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict. [2]

In this short conclusion, McIntyre gives just a clue as to our predicament and the probable way Western society might escape the New Dark Age.

Benedict of Nursia (493-547) lived at the end of the Roman era when the world was moving from one cultural milieu to another. The classical world was over. The culture created by Greece and Rome had burned itself out. What we call the Fall of Rome ended a long period of decay as the classical world came to its political, intellectual, moral, and religious end. During Benedict’s lifetime, Western had already entered a dark time of cultural dissolution and decay.

There are many parallels between Europe at the time of Benedict and our culture. We also live at a juncture in history. The modern world is over. Something different is emerging, a culture we call post-modern, but it is too early to tell precisely what this new culture will be like.

Amid this turbulent period—St. Benedict created a rule and a form of life that gave order to Catholic monasticism. [3]The achievements of St. Benedict and the other Roman Catholic reformers who created the culture of the Middle Ages were not revolutionary. Benedict believed in the truth of orthodox Christian faith and the adequacy of the morality of the Bible and the Christian tradition. His task, unlike that of the new barbarians among us, was not to create a “new religion,” “new morality,” or “new society,” but to establish the religion, morality, and society of the pre-modern world upon more secure intellectual and practical foundations. Benedict was the inheritor and protector of a tradition.

Fundamental to St. Benedict’s program was that the church and society of his day could not be renewed without a visible picture of what a renewed society might look like. The medieval orders were a kind of embodied picture of what could be—of what the Roman Catholic Church could look like and what a wise society built on the foundations of Christian faith and practice might look like. The monks lived out their notion of what a renewed Christendom might look like.

The Medieval orders were primarily a way of life structured through an institution (the order and monastery) where individuals found meaning and a place in a society where spiritual values lay at the center of human life. Their days were punctuated by work, worship, and rest. One can critique the success of the orders in achieving their program, but at least they attempted it. For countless people within and without the orders, they were the source of a life with meaning and purpose devoted to God, truth, beauty, and virtue.

A Life Structured Around Scripture

Benedict, like the Protestant Reformers after him, shaped a way of life structured around the Bible and the story of the Bible. Protestants often critique the Catholic orders as “unbiblical.” This prejudice cannot survive a day of living in a community structured by reading Scripture and worshiping God. A renewed Western Civilization that does not spring from a renewed commitment to a life structured around the Biblical story and Christian faith is unlikely to impact our culture in a powerful and lasting way. At the center of any life lived by indwelling the Christian story is the figure of Christ, the Word and Wisdom of God revealed in human flesh for all to see.

Much post-modern criticism has been levied on the foundational texts of Western civilization. In its most infantile form, it critiques a society created by “Dead White Men.” This, of course, ignores the facts. The “Children of Abraham and Sarah” and the writers of the Old Testament were Semites. The “Eastern Fathers” were not European and included women and men. Augustine was North African. The body of literature they created is a culturally diverse text.

To reconstruct a stable and wise Western world in Europe and America, it will be necessary to recover the foundational texts of Western culture and add new texts of wisdom as time goes by. In the face of multiculturalism, it will even be necessary to reach deep into the wisdom literature of other cultures and incorporate their wisdom into our thinking. Most importantly, any new Benedict must recover the Bible and its language in such a way that it becomes written on the hearts of contemporary men and women.

A Life Structured Around Worship

The monastic life was and is structured around worship. The monastic day is structured around the “hours” and the regular worship, not just weekly but throughout the day. For Western civilization to recover a sense of the Holy and of human relationship with the Holy, it will have to recover a desire for worship and for a life that finds its structure and meaning in regular cycles of worship involving families, local religious bodies, and even larger communities of faith.

Secular culture has resulted in a society in which the Sabbath, a day set aside for worship and rest, is a thing of the past, practiced by a few dedicated souls. What used to be “Holy Days,” in which families gathered to worship and celebrate the foundations of their faith, have become, even for many Christians, days to eat and drink to excess and watch sports. Such a culture soon forgets the sanctity and the holiness of family life.

A Way Recognizing the Moral Nature of Life

Modern culture is rapidly proving the intuition of the ancients that a society without a moral and ethical center must inevitably disintegrate into political, economic, and cultural chaos. Much of our culture is built upon a false exaltation of “individual choice” and a failure to see the reality of personal wisdom and virtue. To say that wisdom, faithfulness, justice, equity, sobriety, and other values are fundamental values is to say they have existence and potency whether or not any particular individual accepts or recognizes them. It is to say that there is something like a natural law operative in the world—a reality we cannot ignore without consequences.

C. S. Lewis speaks helpfully of this law in his book Mere Christianity:

The Moral Law, or the Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behavior in the same way the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the behavior we call bad and unfair is not exactly the same as behavior we find inconvenient, and in fact may even be the opposite. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you want to call it, must somehow or another be a real thing—a thing that is really there and not made up by ourselves. [4]

Lewis goes on to point out that there is more than one kind of reality. The reality of truth, beauty, and goodness press in on us whether we recognize it or not. [5] The moral universe presses upon us whether we recognize it or not. We cannot safely ignore it without pain to ourselves and the dissolution of our society.

To say that anything is real is to say that it exists independently of our subjective perception and impacts the quality of life of those who come into contact with it. It is in this exact way that wisdom and foolishness operate. Those who cease to see the difference between wisdom and foolishness, righteousness and wickedness, or virtuous and lewd behavior cannot make the decisions necessary to achieve a happy and whole life. Those who cease to feel that the wisest course of action will be revealed to them by the practice of the virtues are left without the ability to react to the moral nature of the universe, which, in fact, presses upon us all.

A Way of Life Involving Order

The Benedictine renewal involved orders that followed rules that resulted in a particular way of life. The way of life the members of the Benedictine order thought they were recovering was the Way of Jesus as they understood it. Any recovery of ordered life in the postmodern world will likely be accompanied by people banding together to embody a different way of life than common in our society.

Modern readers of the Rule can be put off by its detail concerning the structure of daily life and the relationships among monks. It is helpful to recognize that Benedict was reacting against the disorder not just of his society but of the monastic orders themselves as he created the Rule. The Rule’s success is proof of its power and importance as a kind of pattern with the power to order human life wisely.

The historic Way of Wisdom provides one avenue for ordinary people to explore in their daily lives to discipline themselves to find a better and more satisfying way of life than that urged upon us by the media and by the cultural arbiters of post-modern society. A rediscovery of the value of faith, tradition, and traditional ways of ordering life would result in persons from many parts of the Christian tradition re-thinking and re-ordering their lives in many ways. A Christian re-discovery of the wisdom tradition would almost certainly cause other traditions to rediscover their own wisdom resources. There may, therefore, be not so much a need for one new St. Benedict as for many. What is certain is that the excessively individualistic and excessively disordered structure of contemporary society does not provide a viable path forward.

A Way of Life Founded in Family

Recovery of a wise and healthy culture in the West cannot be accomplished without a renewal of the basic unit of society. It has been pointed out that families in the West, especially families in America, are notoriously weak. Without strengthening family life, it is difficult to imagine that community life can be strengthened in the West, especially in America.

Our capacity to live in community is formed in the first community we are a part of. If wisdom literature is correct concerning the crucial role of the family, then the most basic renewal that is needed is in the family’s life. The new St. Benedicts among us will have to find ways to express a wiser and more orderly way of life in the context of concrete human families.

A Way of Life Founded in Community

During one of America’s recent political conventions, one person was reported to have said, “Our national government is all we have in common.” With due respect for our national government and its leaders, this statement expresses a deep problem with our society. Nation-states are essential, but they are no substitute for families, local communities, and what sociologists call “mediating institutions,” such as churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, private associations, and other local institutions. National governments are no substitute for neighborhood associations, townships, cities, and other local community forms. It is essential that people feel connected to their local community. While no one belongs to all of the possible institutions of local community life, everyone can be happy for their participation and that of others in all of them. A renewed Christian way of life will be founded on the deliberate nurture of communities at all levels of society.

A Life Formed in a Rhythm of Labor and Rest

In much of contemporary society, work has supplanted God, family, and community as the center of life. Especially among the successful, work and its accompanying status and benefits have become idols. In America, success has become the ultimate goal of too many in business, government, the media, academia, and almost all institutions of life.

St. Benedict and his followers created a way of life in which worship, work, community, and rest all find a place. Work is important. In working, human beings fulfill the command to act as stewards of creation and perfect the world entrusted to their special care and nurture (Genesis 1:28). Work is a natural outgrowth of worship. Still, in overworking, we demonstrate a lack of balance that increasingly warps our full humanity.

What is needed is a recovery of the notion of a rhythm of labor and rest. Sabbath-keeping can be essential to this recovery, but it is not enough. A rest day is no substitute for a rhythm of worship, family life, community involvement, work, and relaxation. A renewal of Western culture cannot be accomplished without a renewal of a proper relationship between work and the rest of life.

A Way of Life Founded on Truth

Lesslie Newbigin’s book Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth contains a powerful critique of contemporary society and an analysis of its roots similar to the one presented in this chapter. [6] Newbigin speaks about how modern society distinguishes between the public world of scientific facts and the private world of religious and moral truths. Newbigin encourages Christians to have the confidence to proclaim the gospel not just as a truth among many truths but as The Truth—a truth embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He writes this:

But when the Church affirms the gospel as public truth it is challenging the whole of society to wake out of the nightmare of subjectivism and relativism, to escape from the captivity of the self turned in upon itself, and to accept the calling which is addressed to every human being to seek, acknowledge, and proclaim the truth. For we are that part of God’s creation which he has equipped with the power to know the truth and to speak to praise of the whole creation in response to the truthfulness of the Creator.” [7]

In the end, any notion of wisdom requires an idea of truth. To embody the spiritual and moral order of the universe in times of trouble, we must believe in the reality of such an order and, in humility, seek to understand it and adjust our lives to its demands. We will not take any path with confidence and personal commitment, even the Path of Life, unless we believe it will take us to the place we desire to go—to the wise, happy, and fulfilled life.

The post-modern critique of Enlightenment thinking often reduces all claims to truth as bids for power. This critique is sometimes levied against the church and Christian faith. The critique may be valid as to some past actions of the church and Christians, but it cannot be levied against the Christian faith in its essence. The Way and Truth Christians proclaim is the way of the One who came to serve and not be served and rejected worldly power as a temptation (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45).

For Christians, a renewal of our culture requires a willingness to serve a culture that is often dismissive of our values and hostile to the lifestyles we practice. The days are long gone when we might achieve cultural change by some act of a non-existent “moral majority.” What is now needed is the hard work and diligent ministry of a wise minority. A renewal of wisdom cannot be legislated; it can only be encouraged. [8]

In the end, the notion of truth that we are called to embody, transmit, and defend is a truth that our society will find almost impossible to understand—it is a truth that can only be known in a community of self-giving love formed in the image of the One who was Truth lifted on a Roman Cross for all the world to see—in the form of a first century Rabbi. It is a truth found in a single person and an indissoluble unity with self-giving love. This personal truth desires to be in relation to every human being that we proclaim.

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Alistair McIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

[2]  Id, 263. This portion of the blog comes from the final chapter of my previous work, Path of Life (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014).

[3] See, Benedict of Nursia, Rule of St. Benedict in English, Timothy Fry, ed. Collierville, MN, 1982). There are many translations, interpretations and commentaries on the Rule for those who are interested.

[4] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London, England: Collins Fontana Books, 1952), 28-29.

[5] Id.

[6] Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids, MI & Geneva: William B. Eerdmans and WCC Publications, 1991).

[7] Id, at 13.

[8] Perhaps the fundamental mistake of the movements of the 1960’s, left and right, was the notion that true cultural transformation for the better can be accomplished through legislation and the power of the nation state. This was an especially mistaken approach for Christians. The One who resisted the temptation to rule the kingdoms of this world and who chose instead to die on a cross works primarily not in overt power but in self-giving service to the world.