I do believe that Machen saw clearly the consequences of the choices being made a century ago.

To speak today about a necessary relationship between knowledge and piety or of an inevitable correlation between culture and Christianity is to invite an inarticulate but heartfelt resentment.

If you speak to most people about raising the level of worship, you will get tepid agreement and adamant resistance: the problem is the other guy. And when you pursue the issues with them beyond the point of generalities, they get very skittish. One group thinks you just want to lose the guitar and the drums in favor of the organ and the piano. They never ask if a solution might lie in choosing Parkening's guitar over Dino's piano. No, that would require some spine-chilling thought.

Another group knows deep down that what you really want is not a functioning liturgy, you want the harpsichord and baroque violin, or even worse, the lute and the gamba. No one has ever thought to ask me if I would prefer J.S. Bach performed on a kazoo or Ron Hamilton performed on the organ at Alkmaar.

And don't even get us started on chant!

And because we cannot speak intelligently to the merits of the liturgy of the past, the argument dies out and the battle resumes. There is no way some people will worship to the chant, and should that ever prove to be the remedy, they will swear off all remedies. If it's not less-Bach-and-more-rock, then it's less-rock-and-more-schlock.

Speaking intelligently about these things is the problem. Attaching a cultural significance to any of our preferences just cannot be done.

Religious leaders have achieved the "spiritual and intellectual indolence" Machen described. If several generations have not known what he calls "the desire to know and the love of beauty", what is left that is worth the pursuit? If you don't want understanding and beauty, what will you settle for?

For my part, I am going to suggest that all there is to pursue is a secondary virtue. In the case of fundamentalists, it would be doctrinal purity and separation; in the case of evangelicals, relevance and a pretext of "reaching the lost". [As though there is any evidence of success behind that strategy.] In short: unreliable indicators of spiritual vitality. Whether we look at Majesty Hymns or "Rush of Fools", we all know something is broken; we just don't want our side to bear the cost of repairs.

Evangelicals know that orthodoxy is not a claim they can make, and they also know that orthodoxy is not worth the bloodshed it will require. I've seen no credible response to Wells, but when will the ETS ever find the pencil and paper to write one?

Modern culture is a tremendous force. It affects all classes of society. It affects the ignorant as well as the learned. What is to be done about it? In the first place the Church may simply withdraw from the conflict. She may simply allow the mighty stream of modern thought to flow by unheeded and do her work merely in the back-eddies of the current.

That indeed has been our choice. We have the fundamentalist eddy, the neo-evangelical eddy, the "missional-model" eddy, the "attractional-model" eddy, the seeker-service eddy....

How's that working out for us, folks?

Tell me something: if a cultural alien came to your door and asked for ten examples of Christian culture, what would you show him?

Or would that be one of those things there's no point talking about?