[S]ince Christ’s personhood was displayed most forcefully in his sacrificial death, even the death of a Christian civilization may exhibit instances of Christian witness and hold out the hope of resurrection.
It is in this light that one ventures to assert that, for the Christian or Christian-formed outlook, civilizational decline is always ironic. Although it betokens separation and therefore evil, for the personalist perspective separation is always secretly outplayed by further personification and further unification since, from the outset, the only fullness of unity lay in manifold self-expression and the only hope of return to the One lay in linking the fullness of this self-expression—which may well be fully achieved in disintegration—back to a loving unity with the One itself.
In the light of this ironic attitude, the post-Christian project of liberalism can appear only to be parody. The very idea of grounding security upon the isolated individual could have occurred only to people emerging from a personalist legacy, however much they have subverted its real truth. Similarly, the idea of founding order upon disorder is a parody of the message of the Cross.
. . . The personalism of theophanic character taken as displaying the transcendent absolute, or God, is much more individualistic than individualism, and so can outplay it. The self-immolation of the Cross is much more disintegrating than decadence and so can also outplay it through the enactment of total self-sacrifice, self-giving, and self-surrender. The self-assertion involved in expressive giving (even to self-destruction) is much more freely expressive of “right” than are rights themselves, and much more acceptable, since the genuine personal gift must, by definition, cohere with every other gift, whereas a “human right,” being only by definition a self-assertion, might not. A house built upon the sand of antagonism, even regulated antagonism, is doomed to fall, but no authentically different reality really stands against anything else. Hence Christianity, perhaps unlike any other creed, has nothing ultimately to fear from release: Deeper than every jolt lies the confirmation of benign recoil. That is the core of the Christian metaphysical trust in the nonultimacy of ontological violence, the ultimate peaceability of being or reality as such.
In one sense, the message here is simply not to give up, but to retain hope in the face of the most extreme-seeming disaster. But in another it is to have trust that the Christian process is still elaborating and unravelling itself. If no other civilization after ours is in prospect, then that may indeed be because Christianity is the final civilization. There can be no further disclosure of the divine after that of simply the human as such, at the cosmic center: No rationalism or materialism can overtake it without a dualistic denial of the centrality of the symbolic and the liturgical and their mediation by feeling in human historical existence. Jesus removed our interpersonal, social, symbolic, and gift-exchanging existence away from their being embedded in political and purchasing power. He demanded instead that they be embedded in the social and then subordinated to the social and interpersonal as much as possible.