The message is more than the medium
The message is more than the medium

Summary/Abstract: The now-dominant culture of the contemporary West took shape as the result of a rupture from the Christendom established by St. Constantine the Great (A.D. 272-337) and by St. Justinian the Great (A.D. 483-565). The heirs of Paris, the heirs of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution, now stand critically over against the heirs of Constantinople. They embrace commitments to a robustly secular public forum and public space within which the popular media invite all into a lifeworld structured around taken-for-granted expectations that are not simply post-traditional and post-modern but are set against the commitments of Orthodox Christianity. It is a post-Christian culture with a moderately anti-Christian animus. Secular expectations regarding liberty, equality, and human dignity have reconstituted the significance of sexuality, reproduction, ordinary life, dying, and death, placing them within a discourse that marginalizes Christian concerns, eliminates mention of Christ in public, renders immanent all reference to the transcendent, and eliminates all reference to holiness. This culture either ignores the question “who do you say that Jesus is?” or it answers by denying that He is the Messiah, the Second Person of the Trinity. This paper will explore this clash of cultures by showing how their incompatibility involves more than a clash of values, but a collision of foundationally different views of reality.

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