A Sacred-Social Order

The Claim

According to Its Kind

From the first chapter of Genesis, God orders creation so that life reproduces “according to its kind.” Discipleship carries that pattern forward. Through it, humanity learns to recognize God’s claim on human life and what that claim means for how we live with the rest of creation. Disciples are not made by passing on information. They are made by passing on a life ordered by God.

Citizens of Heaven, Residents of Earth

A sacred-social order is the arrangement of a community’s life around an authoritative moral standard that is not a human creation. It forms people less through argument than through patterns: the rhythms, rituals, institutions, and rewards that make a way of life feel normal.

The church continues to be misdirected by earthly things when we are citizens of heaven. The forces and conditions identified in the overview are not new pressures requiring novel responses. They are the latest shape of an old problem, the gravitational pull of earthly formation on a people whose true citizenship lies elsewhere.

What’s needed is a set of meta-commitments, a framework, and a counter-field whose practices counteract earthly sacred-social orders (Phil 3:1-21). Resisting these orders can’t be passive. It must involve the development of an oppositional way of life that is not anti-culture, but substantive enough to cultivate an embodied understanding of what it means to live in a Christian sacred-social order. This sacred-social order involves:

Every sacred-social order, including the ones Christians build, takes shape across a common set of domains. Adapting Kevin Flatt’s work, we identify eight. In each one, the question is the same: whose pattern are we living by?

Eight Domains of Sacred-Social Order

That is why the church’s failures in any domain eventually show up as failures of formation.

“Sacred-social orders rest on the conviction that there is an authoritative moral standard that is not a human creation but that transcends human authority…and to which human life must conform.”Adapted from Kevin Flatt, Secularization, Social Order, and World History.

The Inconspicuous Order

It is easy to assume that the church is being seduced by something obvious. As Christians, we often battle over specific issues, but we adopt the underlying dynamics that the surrounding culture assumes. We are not ruled by the obvious, but by the inconspicuous patterns by which we live without sufficient thought. Every domain carries a pattern. The question is whether it is God’s or one we’ve borrowed from the world.

The obvious challenges are not where a sacred-social order does most of its work. Its real power lies in the assumptions it has already made about what counts as success, wisdom, and a life worth living. These and many other ideas are the air we breathe.

Living within the realm of a rival sacred-social order can make it difficult to recognize when we are making compromises. Compromise involves a splitting of allegiances between God and something or someone else. When the church accepts the rival order’s assumptions so deeply that it no longer sees them as assumptions, we become more susceptible to compromise and begin to succumb to the forces and conditions of society.

These forces (assimilation, fragmentation, and transaction) and conditions (inversion and amplification) tend to operate beneath the level of doctrine and belief. They occupy pre-reflective territory where our sense of how the world works is formed and our instincts are trained. For instance:

• Assimilation makes cultural stories seem more complete than they actually are.
• Fragmentation makes sectarian loyalty seem like fidelity.
• Transaction makes institutional preservation seem like stewardship.
• Inversion makes a given interpretive system more authoritative than Scripture.
• Amplification intensifies the culture’s forces so that they become more difficult to resist.

The Christian sacred-social order disrupts the inconspicuous patterns of the world by requiring deliberate participation in rhythms, rituals, and practices that run against the world’s assumptions. The church that doesn’t recognize culture’s formation is far less likely to be conformed to the image of Christ. The Thinking Christian framework is intended to provide a structure that will allow God’s people to recognize the inconspicuous forces pressing in on us through the cultivation of unreserved loyalty to God’s reality, a theological sense of the way the world works, a way of reasoning rooted in our relationship with the Triune God, and a deliberate method for discernment.

The goal is not to start a war with the world, but to situate ourselves within a Christian sacred-social order so that we are well prepared to engage in the true struggle “not…against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).