Throw The Bums Out

United we stand. Divided we fall.

U.S. citizens are in a "throw the bums out" mood. There seems to be a lot of anger about the "broken system." The economy is not the only thing broken. Congress is broken. Families are broken. Our country is divided.

What's "the fix?"

Vishal Mangalwadi, in Truth and Transformation, wrote: "Roots of corruption go deeper than individual leaders and regimes. Dethroning leaders or smashing 'the system' rarely does lasting good...Ultimately it is our inner life─our assumptions, values, worldview, desires, emotion, and attitudes─as well as our relationships, that need to be transformed." 

Such inner transforamtion, Mangalwadi contends, only happens when people embrace the Truth revealed in a book that the West no longer takes seriously: the B-I-B-L-E. 

Allan Bloom was a professor at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. He was not a Christian. Yet, in his book, The Closing of the American Mind, written in 1987, Bloom put his finger on our problem:

"In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united the simple and the sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and—as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible—provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the whole is lost.”

 

Our division is the natural consequence of the loss of "the book." While we may question Bloom’s assertion it was “inevitable” that the biblical vision of the order of the whole of things would disappear, it has. Today, a vision "for the whole of things" is confined to the four walls of certain churches, and the private lives of certain individuals.

Our system is broken. Could this be the consequence of the loss of a vision for “the order of the whole of things” that Bloom said "the book" once provided?