As John Calvin wrote in his helpful little Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, “Nothing is more difficult than to forsake all carnal thoughts, to subdue and renounce our false appetites, and to devote ourselves to God and our brethren, and to live the life of angels in a world of corruption.” And to make matters even more complex, we not only have to live in this dangerous fallen world, but we have to work in it (1 Thessalonians 4:11), serve in it (Luke 22:6), and minister in it (2 Timothy 4:5).  

By the thirteenth century, the West’s idealistic wars against a fearsome Islamic threat had failed ignobly; its stagnating economy had cast a pall of depression across the once prosperous and thriving land; its national and political leaders reveled in pomp, circumstance, and internecine rivalry while their subjects cowered in poverty, fear, and injustice; and the church’s spiritual authority was marred by the flaming vices of perversity, carnality, and avarice.  No wonder then even the most pious men tended to press into brash, adventurous superstition or retreat into timid, monkish isolation.

Sound familiar? It should. High Medievalism, for all its obvious differences, is so like our present circumstances that historian Margaret Tuchman’s famous description, “A Distant Mirror,” may be more apt than ever. Indeed, the rise of a “New Monastic Movement” among young, urban, evangelical hipsters in recent days, is a reminder to us that we are not so different from our barely-remembered ancestors as we might suppose.

But, as understandable as this impulse to run for cover in this time of uncertainty, distrust, and crumbling cultural stability might be, it is hardly a Scriptural response.

G.K. Chesterton once asserted that our world is simultaneously an ogre’s castle which must be stormed and a cottage in the wood to which one might return after a long day’s labor where a welcoming fire and a filling meal await.  Life in this poor fallen world, he said, is both a battle and a refuge; it is at the same time a dangerous enterprise and a restful repose.

In other words, he recognized that the world we live in, work in, and serve in is fraught with paradox—which of course, is a supremely Biblical idea.

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