Interplanner
Well-known member
One of the founders of the Frankfuret School of Transformational Marxism, Georg Lukacs, talked about "Abolishment of Culture." Lukacs knew that Christianity had created a dominant culture in the West which made the individual important and that culture saw each individual as being unique, to be honored as such.
Marxism had to get rid of that Christian - and family based - culture which made the individual outstanding, and replace it by a collectivist group oriented culture. Marxism - Transformational Marxism - had to reduce the spiritual power of the Christian Gospel in order to bring in a collectivist group-centered culture.
Lukacs probably had a better understanding of how the doctrines of Christ in the Protestantism of the 19th century created a culture which encouraged individuals and honored them more than does Catholicism.
What effect has dispensationalism had upon the emphasis of the dominant culture on honoring of the individual?
Here is a quote that is more specific about the ideas of Transformational Marxist Georg Lukács (1885-1971): http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html
"Lukacs identified that any political movement capable of bringing
Bolshevism to the West would have to be, in his words, "demonic"; it
would have to "possess the religious power which is capable of filling
the entire soul; a power that characterized primitive Christianity."
They go on to say that "What differentiated the West from Russia,
Lukacs identified, was a
Judeo-Christian cultural matrix which emphasized exactly the
uniqueness and sacredness of the individual which Lukacs abjured. At
its core, the dominant Western ideology maintained that the
individual, through the exercise of his or her reason, could discern
the Divine Will in an unmediated relationship. What was worse, from
Lukacs' standpoint: this reasonable relationship necessarily implied
that the individual could and should change the physical universe in
pursuit of the Good; that Man should have dominion over Nature, as
stated in the Biblical injunction in Genesis. The problem was, that as
long as the individual had the belief—or even the hope of the
belief—that his or her divine spark of reason could solve the problems
facing society, then that society would never reach the state of
hopelessness and alienation which Lukacs recognized as the necessary
prerequisite for socialist revolution."
Does present day dispensationalism have the "the religious power which is capable of filling the entire soul" that Lukacs talked about?
for what it is worth, the life of the D'ist churches that I knew when I was young was vibrant enough, even if it had no clear connection to the complicated doctrinal thoughts. They had that kind of power. But people are not always rationally connected or connecting what they believe to what they do. I don't find any similar spiritual power hearing about Israel winning the 6 Day War. They do.
I think for some of them it is a solution to the gap which modern atheism and uniformitarianism have created in our minds between the Bible and ordinary reality (hence the 1st question about anyone mentioning prayer, church, Christ is 'are they religious?'--ie, operating in a completely different epistemological world from ordinary reality).