When I was a ministry student at Oklahoma Baptist University, studies in Western Civilization were a very big thing. It was a major course of study that occupied something close to a quarter of our entire undergraduate course load. By the same token, we were all required to take at least one major course that awakened our awareness of what Western Civilization was not.
I suppose the 1970s was a time when academia across the US had a thing for pointing out a vast lore of non-western civilizations and history. This showed up in philosophy classes, which was a significant part of my ministry curriculum. You could say it was an emphasis for missions preparation. One of my professors was deeply into pointing out western biases. At the same time, our Church History classes made us aware of how the growing institutionalization of Christian religion contributed a great deal to the birth of Western Civilization.
We were taught to have serious doubts about what passes for morality in the West.
Apparently that’s not a thing in Christian education any more. If you pick up a copy of older Bible commentaries from the 1960s and 1970s, you’ll probably find a strong background in comparative civilization studies. If you examine more recent materials from the past two decades, it appears this emphasis is gone. It’s not as if the Biblical Studies folks aren’t aware of the differences between ANE and western thinking, but that there seems zero effort to evaluate the West from a biblical philosophical perspective.
They know about it, but it never occurs to them to use it, much less favor it.
I’ve been looking through commentary materials written since about the turn of millennium, and this is what I keep running into. I’m not saying it’s bad scholarship, but that it’s weak. Granted, there is a bit of silly pro-western cheer-leading. I consider that the default for people who don’t know better. The only reason such a thing is possible is due to the lack anything countering it.
I’m sure some of it can be blamed on the invasive feminism that helped to drive me out of the mainstream church life. Genuine Red Pilled masculinity is quite rare in the mainstream. Indeed, churches that seem to embrace the Red Pill are marginalized by the feminist mainstream. Nobody seems to notice that the thesis of the Red Pill outlook is easily the single best explanation for some of what shows up in the Old Testament. The ancient Hebrews were quite Red Pilled.
To be honest, I don’t expect this to change. That is, I am utterly convinced that the mainstream cannot be better informed, reformed, or in any way steered back onto a biblical path. I believe the window for repentance on that has closed, along with a raft of other issues that call for repentance. Instead, I am convinced that it will require an apocalypse of some sort that destroys the current mainstream along with the civilization on which it is founded. They must “hit bottom”, as it were.
A few individuals, many who pass through a personal apocalypse, have hit bottom and are embracing the truth. It seems the Lord always keeps a righteous remnant who do not bow the knee to pagan influences. You couldn’t get anyone in the mainstream to admit that Western Civilization is pagan. Thus, Bible Commentary materials will never give it a thought; they will generally promote the West, even if only passively.
