Exile

What if Naturalism (by which I mean Darwinian Naturalism) is the tribe from the East sent to judge God's chosen people for years of unrepentant, oppressive absolutizing and power-mongering? Just as Assyria and Babylon were the inevitable consequences of Israel's disdainful rejection of the Lord, so too we Western Christians find ourselves being captured and led into exile.

Do you not find it to be so? Look about you and see. Religious thought is no longer acceptable in the public sphere. Religious claims to truth are no longer valid; science is Omni-Science. We are in exile. And keenly do we feel it. But more like a child crying 'unfair!' because our toy megaphone has been violently taken from us. Some of us sulk in the corner of the school yard; some of us cry to our Mothers. Most of us, or at least the most publicly visible, get mad, continuing to yell and scream madly, megaphone or no. This indeed sounds pity-able and unjust, until we realize we are the bully on the playground who is being suffered by the other children no longer.

We must recognize the cause for our being overthrown, captured, and discarded. We ought to consider the possiblity that our current exile is in part (the part that matters most) the chastisement of the Divine Hand. Certainly there are some who have done this, who are doing this, for the Lord in his mysterious faithfulness always provides a remnant. Would that you and I would be that remnant. We must repent to the Lord and change how we treat the world, not merely because we are being treated cruelly, but because we are pierced and stricken with the pain and remorse of our own acts of betrayal and hard-heartedness.