in hoc saeculo = “in this age” (Ephesians 1:21)
It was the Greek thinker Heroclitus who so famously said that “Nothing is constant, except change.”
The age we live in is one of great transition. Culture has become much more fluid, much more diverse, much harder to define. And like the proverbial river, one can never step into the same culture twice.
While once there was a time when hard and fast boundaries existed between the sacred and the secular, now the brittle walls of the “secular city” have crumbled (for better or for worse) with the rest of modernity. The result is a “post-secular” world, where there is no longer such a distinction between the sacred and profane, between the “real” and the “spiritual.” There is, as the song goes, “no line on the horizon.”
The end result is an age awash in conversation. The ancient Greeks had the agora – a central meeting-place in which ideas and philosophies were discussed, where Luke writes that the thinkers of the day “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21)”
In the present world, the agora has stretched beyond the boundaries of the physical world, and into the virtual one. Now, communication exists through cell phones, social networking sites and text messaging. The blog becomes a perfect way to speak into this type of culture, and a still more perfect way to follow Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s admonition that we learn to “speak in a secular way about God.”
The purpose of this blog, then, is simple: to address various cultural issues from a theological perspective, and to communicate truth and meaning in hoc saeculo – in this age. It is truth that is fundamentally incarnational – bringing sacred truth into the everyday realities of an ever-changing culture.
“Thorns Compose” are words borrowed from an old hymn that celebrates the act of God becoming human and submitting to public death on our behalf. My hope is that this Savior is made more vividly real through the interactions represented on this blog.
Welcome to the journey.
