The Sacred Canopy
The term "sacred canopy" was coined, by Peter Berger, who
wrote a book of the same name.
The idea of a sacred canopy is that the worldview of a
group of people, nation, or culture is shaped by a certain
set of common assumptions which give order and meaning to
life. These assumptions include views of science, economics,
religious and secular authority, political rights,
etc...
For example, in the 1400's, Galileo challenged the
commonly held view that the earth was at the center of the
solar system and, when his scientific observations proved
correct, he threatened not just a scientific beliefs of the
day but the religious belief system as well, for the Church
held that the Earth was at the center of the Creation.
Galileo's observation so threatened the Church and its
official teachings that his scientific discoveries became a
threat to the authority, power, and control of the Church.
He was threatened with excommunication for his "heretical"
views, and he recanted and denied his scientific discoveries
in order to "save his eternal soul," or so he thought.
Nevertheless, Galileo's discovery set the world
unalterably on another path, and eventually his views would
come to be widely accepted. A revolution of a worldview
always begins with the destruction of commonly held
assumptions about the meaning of the world, life, and truth.
This revolution in thinking initially fragments society
because people no longer operate under a common belief
system &emdash; this destruction of cultural assumptions is
called a "rending of the sacred canopy."
A book by Jeremy Rifkin, called the EMERGING
ORDER, outlined the paradigm shift that occurred during
the period preceding the Reformation: the plagues caused
people to question the religious leadership and competence
of the Catholic Church and the priesthood Both pious and
impious alike died in the plagues - so it seemed like the
Church had lost the ability to interpret the events taking
place in the world with any degree of moral or divine
authority. It had certainly lost the ability to preserve
order in the world. At the same time as this crisis of
confidence in the Church and its authority, there was an
economic shift away from the feudal system, where the
majority of people were serfs - tenant farmers who could not
own land. The new economic engine of the culture were the
merchant guilds, who. through professional trade schools,
created a middle class with an economic power base and
personal freedoms. Serfs were basically slaves who did what
they were told and who could not choose their destiny. But
the new economic freedoms of the rising middle class now
allowed people to question their place in the world and to
take responsibility for their own destiny.
All these situations created a climate where the issues
of faith incited by the Reformation directly affected the
majority, who were now yearning for some personal security
with God. The people were ready for that revolution from a
scientific, economic, political, and religious
standpoint.
A major rending of the Sacred Canopy in the United
States, and in the Christian world in general, began during
the 1800's with the growth of the acceptance of Darwinism
and the theory of Evolution. The concept of a 7 day Creation
began to be challenged from a scientific theory. As
challenging and threatening as Galileo's observations were
to the Church of his day, Darwinism did as much or more to
undermine the authority of the Church, because it seemed to
directly contradict the teachings of the Bible. By the early
1900's, the rending of the Canopy was about complete, for
major sectors of the Church began to discount the truth of
God's Word and began to deny its validity not just from a
scientific perspective, but also from a theological and
moral perspective. The great fundamentalist/ modernist
controversies are over that very issue.
What has happened in the process is that the Word of God
has been relegated to a questionable status. When it lost
its authority in the Church, it lost even more authority in
the culture at large. Religion began to be considered a
matter purely of personal and PRIVATE concern, and of
questionable worth at best, but certainly of no value in the
legislative and political structure of society. And as the
culture began to discount the Bible as having any relevance
or bearing on society, the Christian heritage and moral
foundation of the social contract had to be rejected and
cast aside. A new Humanism, not based upon superstitious
religious beliefs but upon scientific principles of logic,
reason, and empirical observation, was put in its place. One
tent came down, religious beliefs, and up went another,
SCIENCE. Science and a scientific understanding of the world
now provided a new sacred canopy under which all the
people's of the world could safely dwell, in mutual
tolerance and acceptance; free of superstition, ignorance,
and religious fanaticism.
Rifkin goes on to suggest that we are entering a similar
period of rending of the sacred canopy because the priests
of this age, the scientists, no longer have the answers we
need. Iin fact, they seem to part of the problem (nuclear
weapons, nuclear wastes, and environmental pollution from
chemical wastes were all created by scientific advances in
the field of industrial technology). The scientists are
helpless in the face of the great moral dilemmas of the day
and can not solve the health problems we created through our
technology. And science cannot seem to solve the violence in
our streets. So, just as the Church did in former times,
they are losing their moral authority and ability to
interpret meaning and order for this society. And our
culture is beginning to look for other sources of authority
to answer the great questions facing us about the meaning of
life.We desperately want an new Sacred Canopy, under which
we will find security, warmth, and comfort.
There has been a rise in religious questing for truth,
but often that quest ends in New Age religions, because the
traditional denominational Christian thinking seems to have
become outmoded. With the widely held assumptions about
evolution, the Bible seems to be inadequate as a means of
explaining the world from a scientific standpoint. And
although the culture no longer trusts scientists, the basic
belief in scientific materialism and empiricism still
provides a bedrock for the thinking of modern
© 1994, Jefferis Kent Peterson
Center For Biblical Literacy
"Love the Lord with all your....mind."
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