The Ground of Civilisation

Hell Hole of the South Pacific Waits in the Wings

Human civilisation is skin deep.  It can only be sustained in a society by a majority of families who live, believe, and practise the values of a civilised society in their homes and communities. This reality was caught most powerfully by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The law, its enforcement agencies, the rules and institutions of state, the courts, the schools, and the institutions of trade and commerce–all these can only continue to exist in any society by warrant of a majority of civilised families. After all, the law and justice are intangibles, grounded in ideas and concepts believed and respected in the heart of a community.  

We have had yet another illustration of these truths.
  In Northcote, a teenage miscreant preyed upon a single older woman outside a supermarket, attempting to snatch her bag.  Such crimes had been systemic in the area over recent days.  A mother of six, who was accompanied by two of her younger children, went to the aid of the attacked woman.  Lucy Knight (pictured below) was, in turn, struck by the criminal, fell to the pavement, and fractured her skull.  The criminal ran off to a waiting car and was driven away.

Police released CCTV images of the bag-snatching suspect near Northcote’s Countdown Supermarket. Inset, Lucy Knight.

Mrs Knight has undergone emergency surgery and is now in a stable condition.

Michael Dudley, 21, works at a takeaway shop nearby and was there when the drama unfolded.  “I was coming out of Countdown and I heard a struggle behind me,” he told the Herald last night.  “I turned around to see a swinging arm. Then the lady fell, she went down really fast and hit her head on the concrete. I saw the young kid take off down the carpark and I started to chase him.”  The youth got into a car that Mr Dudley said was waiting for him. He saw a woman in the driver’s seat. [NZ Herald]

Now this may be a small, insignificant incident in the “grand scheme of things”.  But it is not.  Society and civilisation are made up of, and sustained by, thousands upon thousands of such deeds of goodness and courage.   Reactions to evil like Mrs Knight’s are instinctive and spontaneous.  As a mother of six children she no doubt has devoted her life to the care of others who by nature are vulnerable.  Others.  We are reminded of how William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, sent out a telegram asking for donations to support the work of the Army.  The telegram has only one word: “Others”. Upon such values, civilisation is built and sustained.

No doubt Mrs Knight reacted instinctively and courageously because these values are engraved upon her heart and mind.  She responded without thinking.  She is a truly civilised person.  She represents the essence of the only way a society can maintain justice, truth, respect, honesty, gentleness, generosity, and thoughtfulness.  Without such values of the heart being inculcated in families, society disintegrates into a hell-hole. 

Destructive Hyperbole

Groping in the Fog

The office of ContraCelsum has been shaking over the past few days with bouts of belly laughter–which is, as we know, the best medicine.  We have been told in harridan-esque tones that we in New Zealand have a “rape culture”.  Well knock us down with a feather duster.  We didn’t see that one coming.

A rape culture.  What on earth is that?  Whence its origins?  Where is it to be found?  Does it come from from a particular ethnic group or immigrant ethnicity that just happens to sanction rape as part of their legal tradition?  Apparently not, because no particular ethnic, nor cultural group has been identified by the protagonist as having a culture of rape.  It’s not a valued or traditional practice in British culture, Irish culture, Australian culture, or Chinese culture as far as we are aware.  Some may have said Indian culture celebrated rape in some circumstances, but recent legal cases against rapists in that country weaken that argument.  We are also aware that honour rapes take place in Islamic societies with the objective of removing shame from a family or village or town.  We grant that comes pretty close to an actual culture of rape. 

But in New Zealand?  So far, no evidence exists of such cultural practices here.  Thus we have no idea what is meant, or being referred to.
  Clearly, rape occurs.  But last time we checked it was a crime and people are still getting arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned for rape.  So, hardly a culture of rape, then. 

What then can be meant by the allegation that a culture of rape exists in New Zealand?  Take a parallel.  Theft occurs in New Zealand.  Does that entitle us to conclude that there is a culture of theft in this country?  Are there ethnic and cultural groups which value the purloining of other people’s property (presumably those outside the cultural group)?  Not to our knowledge.

But maybe there are groups which in their cultural practices and engagements encourage rape and prize it as an achievement?  Yes, there are.  We call them gangs, criminal gangs.  But what is all the fuss about?  We have known that for decades.  The criminal gangs also have a culture of violence in general, and of theft, drug production and distribution, and so forth.  Thus far, the protagonist is stating the mundane, if she is referring to the Mongrel Mob and Black Power when she asserts that there is a culture of rape in New Zealand. 

What then is meant with this denunciation of New Zealand having a culture of rape?  Granted there is a criminal element which has, and will, commit rapes.  But to decry a “culture of rape” is as empty and void of significance as to allege that we in New Zealand have a culture of theft, or brawling, or drunkenness–which is to say that some people steal, brawl, or get drunk.  But we somehow get the impression that our protagonist does not have criminal gangs or criminals in general in mind when she speaks of a “culture of rape” in New Zealand. 

No, that’s clearly not what is being meant, at all.  What then?  How about a definition:

Violence does not occur in a vacuum. There are very real reasons why sexual assault is happening in our country every day.  This is because our society normalises, trivialises and in both obvious and subtle ways condones rape. This is called rape culture.

So, the culture of rape refers firstly to society normalising rape.  “Normalising” means making something the ordinary, everyday experience of life.  Like breathing or shopping at the local food store.  Do we really regard rape as common and plain and everyday-ordinary as breathing and shopping?  Really?  What planet is this person from?  Last time we checked, the police do not arrest people for breathing or shopping at the supermarket.  Rape is a criminal offence precisely because we do not normalise rape.

As for trivialising rape, as is alleged, this too is a nonsensical claim.  Society would be guilty of trivialising rape if it regarded it as no more significant than playing a game of marbles on the sidewalk.  Similar observations could be made about the claim that New Zealand society condones rape.  Which society?  What people?  We have lived in New Zealand for a long time and have never, ever found that to be true.  Name one civic leader, one academic, one church leader, one politician, one magistrate, anyone who has stood up to claim that rape is OK, it’s holy, just, and good.  We cannot think of one, past or present.

But the allegation is that New Zealand society condones rape in obvious ways–that is, right-in-your-face ways.  This is such a bizarre claim that hilarity is the only appropriate response, once the amazement ebbs.  It’s like asserting that the moon is obviously made of green cheese.  Only a wag or a comedian would make such a statement–and of course the audience would know it was being conned or set up.   

But, says the protagonist, we also condone rape not just in obvious ways, but in subtle ways.  What ways might they be?  Who knows.  They are apparently so subtle that only the cognoscenti can detect them.  In which case, they can be ignored.  We believe that such outlandish, extreme, emotive, and meaningless allegations about rape actually achieve what what they portend to protest against.  Such nonsense trivialises  and makes ridiculous what is a capital crime.  If everybody does it, who cares at the end of the day.  It’s of no import nor significance.  That’s the inevitably destructive and damaging outcome of such extremist, nonsensical, inflated, exaggerated claims. 

The protagonist has “proved” too much.  Mockery awaits all who weave and traffic in such miasmal foggings. 

The Cultivated Man

Learning from Paul not Plotinus

The great theologian, Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) once wrote:

Culture in the broadest sense is the purpose for which God created man after His image . . . [which] includes not only the most ancient callings of . . . hunting and fishing, agriculture and stock raising, but also trade and commerce and science and art.

We are accustomed to think of culture as that which is distinct from science, and which refers to music, literature and fine art.   The Biblical framework is much, much broader when it comes to culture.  From the dictionaries, it appears that the word “culture” first came into English in the mid-15th century from Old French, from Latin cultūra  a cultivating, from colere  to till.
  It also had a broader application from around the same time of “cultivation through education”.  Culture as the intellectual component of civilisation came into the language from 1805. 

Always, however, cultivation and culture was association with religious faith.  The word “cult”, meaning not a deviant form of a religion, but the system of religious worship has the same Latin root, colere.  In the Scriptures and the Christian faith, culture maintains this broad meaning and application, as reflected in the quotation from Bavinck above. Culture is the work and activity of cultivating the creation and it embraces all lawful and moral human activity in the world. 

The poet W B Yeats captured the moral component of culture when he wrote:

 “For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.” [William Butler Yeats]

The “cultivated man” is the sanctified man.  On the sixth day of creation, man received his calling to be immersed in cultivation.

Until the sixth day, God has done the work of creation directly.  But now he creates the first human beings and orders them to carry on where he leaves off: they are to reflect his image and to have dominion (Genesis 1:26).  From then on, the development of the creation will be primarily social and cultural.  It will be the work of humans as they obey God’s command to fill and subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 295.] 

 Christians sometimes go astray at this point.  They divide their existence into two spheres: the sacred and the secular.  The latter they share with all men, non-Christian and Christian alike.  The sacred, or spiritual they share with Christians alone.

This notion owes more to Plotinus than Paul.  This world is above all God’s.  He created it out of nothing; He sustains it and all that is in it.  Man is His co-regent, His co-creator, His co-cultivator.  Unbelievers do this out of ignorance and in spite of their rebellion.  They serve Him unconsciously and do His bidding still.  Believers are to work at developing and subduing the creation, conscious that they are God’s servants, doing His bidding, and acting as His co-regents, co-creators and His co-cultivators.  

Sin introduces a destructive power into God’s created order, but it does not obliterate that order.  And when we are redeemed, we are not only freed from the sinful motivations that drive us but also restored to fulfill our original purpose, empowered to do what we were created to do: to build societies and create culture–and in doing so, to restore the created order. (Ibid.)

As we engage in our vocation and many avocations we co-labour with Unbelievers and remain thankful that they are there.  We could not cultivate the world without them.  We are too few.  Eventually, however, Christians will greatly outnumber Unbelievers as the nations are discipled unto Christ.  For the present we are thankful that all men still do His bidding.  But the cultural works of Unbelief are never good enough; they are always incomplete and inadequate because they are not self-consciously done to the glory and praise of the Creator.  

It is a holy thing to dig ditches and drive buses.  It is high culture in action.  Knowing this fills the life of the Christian with a sense of great dignity, purpose and holiness.  All of life is sacred; no part is secular.  The six days of labour are just as holy and devoted as the seventh–even as it was in the very beginning. 

As we contemplate the year to come, let us be thankful that God has called us to another year of holy labour and service to Him.  Let us be thankful that God has called us to be cultivated men and women.

Growing Up–Or Not

“Youth Culture” is an Oxymoron

For my generation, peer anxiety was experienced only physically.  If a group were gathered in the hallway, on the playground, or on the bus ride home, we did not wish to be excluded from it.  But adolescents today are wired to one another “twenty-four seven” as they say.  Adolescents today can be excluded (or feel they are excluded, which is as bad) not only from physical gatherings, but also from electronic gatherings  They can be left out of IM, text messages, MYSpace, Facebook, cell calls, YouTube videos, and so forth.  They never really leave their adolescent friends or adolescent gossip to meet adults; they are imprisoned in an electronic society of adolescents, condemned and consigned to the social equivalent of Lord of the Flies.  As Mark Bauerlein puts it [in his book, The Dumbest Generation]:

Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.  Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact.  Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or speace wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms.

Biblically, the goal of youth is to leave it as rapidly as possible.  The goal of the young , biblically, is to be mature.  “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”  (I Corinthians 13: 11)  Biblical wisdom literature encourages the young to respect and emulate their seniors, not rebel against them.

My generation tragically rejected such wisdom, and appears incapable of perceiving or repenting of its own unbiblical paedocentrism.  We think, perhaps sincerely (though dull-wittedly), that we are “concerned for youth”, when we are actually concerned to preserve the cultural abnormality of youth culture . . . . and erroneously believe that we cannot minister to the one without embracing, condoning, or promoting the other.

. . . . To “reach” the young by propagating youth culture would be analogous to Jesus’ “reaching” the rich young man by giving him money.  Money was part of that particular sinner’s problem, part of the reason he needed to be reached.  Extended adolescence is part of what our youth need to be delivered from. [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), pp. 160-162.]

Pop Contemporaneity

A Prisoner in a Dark Place

There have been plenty of warnings about the dangers of ignorance of one’s heritage and history.  George Santayana’s aphorism is notorious (“those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it”).  In our recent experience tyrants have arisen deliberately attempting to remake the past exert greater control over a compliant population in the present (think Soviet and Eastern European Bloc communism).  We see it before our eyes as Islamic fundamentalists attempt to obliterate the cultural heritage of former civilisations in order to exert more extreme and complete control over their subject peoples.

The Scriptures are replete with injunctions, exhortations, and warnings not only not to forget the past, but also to reckon with it, and live in terms of it.  In the past, God’s people see revealed His faithfulness to them; they also see the outcome when a generation arises which forgets what has gone before and what He and our forbears have respectively done.  It is our duty to observe, learn, and act appropriately.

Unfortunately and dangerously there are many modern Christian confessions which glory in a studied ignorance of the past.
  For these Christian existentialists it is all about the “now” and experiencing God in the present.  They are like children.  We have to reckon with this grave reality: the Christian religion is as old as the world itself.  Believers who do not reckon with this and embrace it constantly are left ignorant of God and His will and are prisoners of every changing whim and fancy.   Such Christians are governed by the newspaper and the TeeVee, not the Scriptures.

T. David Gordon drives this reality home:

The Christian religion is old, like it or not.  It is not a new thing: it is two thousand years old in its current form, and its roots in the religion of Abraham and Moses go back almost another two thousand years.  And it will continue to be here until history concludes at the return of Christ.

Christianity is not monogenerational, nor is it monocultural; it transcends generations and particular cultures as a global religion.  Similarly, it is communal, not individual.  We once confessed belief in “the holy catholic church, the communion of saints”, but this would require acknowledging the existence of a many-generational communion of followers of Christ.  As our athletes remind us: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.” [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010),  p.91f.]

This reality with which we have to deal sets Belief apart from Unbelief.  The modern world has gloried in its rootlessness.  Christians glory in history and eschatology: in that which was, and is, and shall be.  We salute and glorify the God who “was, and is, and is to come”, the God Who lives before “all time, and now and forevermore”.  This grounds us in the warp and woof of His elect people throughout all time.  It is with this consciousness of the past, the present, and the future that we live now.  

The sensibilities of pop culture and those of Christianity are almost entirely opposed to each other, and when we attempt to force Christianity into the constraints of an individual-affirming, consumerist, monogenerational, immanentistic genre, it simply won’t fit.  Inevitably, the content is shaped by the form into which it is put, and the message becomes a casual, consumerist “Hey, what do you think about this?” rather than a call to “repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). (Ibid.) 

Can We Prepare Our Culture to Receive the Gospel?

[A powerfully prophetic call from J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) for intellectual engagement in the culture as a means of pre-evangelism–Ed. Hat Tip: Justin Taylor]

We are all agreed that at least one great function of the Church is the conversion of individual men. The missionary movement is the great religious movement of our day. Now it is perfectly true that men must be brought to Christ one by one. There are no labor-saving devices in evangelism. It is all hard-work.

And yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel.
It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel.

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.

Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. . . .
What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassioned debate.

So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity. . . . What more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience—what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error?

—J. Gresham Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” in What Is Christianity? And Other Addresses, ed. Ned Stonehouse (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), pp. 162-163; emphasis added.

>Sea Change?

>Risible Claims

German Chancellor, Angela Merkel has pronounced the death of multi-culturalism in Germany. Well, maybe not the death, but she has argued for its death penalty.

This may be significant. After all, it is Germany and Germany has been a cesspool of simpering progressivist nonsense ever since the guilt imputed to the nation in the wake of the Nazis. Be welcoming to all. Never, ever discriminate or distinguish. Inclusivity is fundamental to human decency. Soft despotic socialism is necessary to prevent any possibility of alienation by any group so as to foster extremist bitterness–and so on.

One of the secular policies promulgated to ensure inclusivity has been multi-culturalism–the recognition and protection of all cultures and sub-cultures and sub-sub-cultures. All have equal rights to exist and to be protected (and funded and supported). Now Angela has concluded that multi-culturalism is a failure in the reich. Not only that, she has tied Germany to Christian cultural values (choke, choke). She has declared that “if you don’t like it, lump it. Leave.”

Germany’s attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country’s immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values. Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

“Multikulti”, the concept that “we are now living side by side and are happy about it,” does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin. “This approach has failed, totally,” she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values. “We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here,” said the chancellor.

It is clear that Islamic immigrants are within in the purview of her remarks.

“Subsidising immigrants” isn’t sufficient, Germany has the right to “make demands” on them, she added, such as mastering the language of Goethe and abandoning practices such as forced marriages.

Merkel spoke a week after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which they pledged to do more to improve the often poor integration record of Germany’s 2.5-million-strong Turkish community.

Even the Turkish Prime Minister reprimanded Islamic immigrants in Germany for forming ghettos.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul, in a weekend interview, also urged the Turkish community living in Germany to master the language of their adopted country. “When one doesn’t speak the language of the country in which one lives that doesn’t serve anyone, neither the person concerned, the country, nor the society,” the Turkish president told the Suedeutsche Zeitung.

“That is why I tell them at every opportunity that they should learn German, and speak it fluently and without an accent. That should start at nurseries.”

We agree with Merkel that multi-culturalism will always fail. In effect, multi-culturalism is a paternalistic elitist doctrine that proceeds on a suppressed premise that culture and religion are a superficial phenomenon that, in the final analysis, are unimportant or trivial. All cultures can, therefore, be tolerated and welcomed and accepted because they are irrelevant to one’s core being and essential humanity. Culture, therefore, is regarded as being in the same category as race, which it is not. Race and sex do not determine how people think, feel and act.  Culture does.  Culture informs one’s behaviour and beliefs: it conditions one’s acts and identity in both public and private.  To suggest that race is in the same category as culture is an informal logical fallacy of category confusion.

This is a major blunder and misrepresentation of what makes up a human being. At the driving formative heart of a human being is his intellect, emotions and the will. All three are conditioned and shaped by culture, and culture is nothing more than religion externalised. Race (that is, genetics) makes no distinct formative contribution whatsoever. Race may be skin deep. Culture is definitely not. True multi-culturalism, when applied in the public sphere, leads inevitably to the trivialisation of all cultures, except the culture of progressivism or secular humanism. It is a bold attempt to one set of cultural beliefs and values over all other cultures and beliefs, relegating and trivialising them in the process.

However, we suspect that Merkel is pandering to her political constituency. Her appeals to Christian values are disingenuous. Germany has been at the forefront of a secular humanistic subborning of the Christian faith ever since the Enlightenment. To claim that Germany draws upon and reflects Christian values is risible.

>A Real Family

>The Importance of Intergenerational Consciousness

“But by far the most important channel of transmission of culture remains the family: and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate.  Now the family is an institution of which nearly everybody speaks well: but it is advisable to remember that this is a term that may vary in extension.  In the present age it means little more than the living members.  Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an advertisement depicts a large family of three generations: the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents and one or two young children.  What is held up for admiration is not devotion to a family, but personal affection between the members of it: and the smaller the family the more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalised.  But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote.  

“Unless this reverence for past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community.  Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programmes.”   

T. S Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (London: Harcourt, Inc., 1948), p.116

>Universal Culture

>A Universal Culture Depends on a Universal Religion

T.S. Eliot:

. . . in the relations of any two cultures there will be two opposite forces balancing each other: attraction and repulsion. Without the attraction they could not affect each other, and without the repulsion they could not survive as distinct cultures; one would absorb the other, or both would be fused into one culture. Now the zealots of world-government seem to me sometimes to assume, unconsciously, that their unity of organisation has an absolute value, and that if differences between cultures stand in the way, these must be abolished.

If these zealots are of the humanitarian type, they will assume that this process will take place naturally and painlessly: they may, without knowing it, take for granted that the final world culture will be simply and extension of that to which they belong themselves. Our Russian friends, who are more realistic, if not in the long run any more practical, are much more conscious of irreconcilability between cultures; and appear to hold the view that any culture incompatible with their own should be forcibly uprooted.

The world-planners who are both serious and humane, however, might–if we believed that their methods would succeed–be as grave a menace to culture as those who practise more violent methods. For it must follow from what I have already pleaded about the value of local cultures, that a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all. We should have humanity dehumanised. It would be a nightmare. But on the other hand we cannot resign the idea of a world-culture altogether. . . .

(W)e must aspire to a common world culture, which will yet not diminish the particularity of the constituent parts. And here, of course, we are finally up against religion . . . . Ultimately antagonistic religions must mean antagonistic cultures; and ultimately, religions cannot be reconciled.

T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, pp. 135,136

>Peter Hitchens–Part VII

>Spending Moral Capital Can Result in Spent Moral Capital
Atheism and Apologetics – The Rage Against God
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The next chapter of Peter’s book is chilling. He describes the last days of the Soviet Union and the years he lived there, along with his experiences as a journalist in Mogadishu.

The take away point from this chapter is found here, and it is a point that the church in the West — evangelicals particularly — need to learn. We need to learn it down in our bones.

I saw no particular connection, at the time of my return to religion, between faith and the shape of society. I imagined it was a matter between me and God. The atheist Soviet Union, where desecration and heroic survival were visible around me, began to alter that perception. Mogadishu accelerated the process (p. 92).

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0310320313&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Cultures are religions externalized, as Henry Van Til put it. Cultures, the way we
live, arise out of cultus, the way we worship. Scripture teaches, from beginning to end, that we become like what we worship — and all men worship something or someone. There will be, therefore, a religious shape to every society. That shape will reflect the true religion or it will not. If it does not, then the shape of that society will be bent and twisted. And we live in a time when many professed Christians are fighting (via principled irrelevance) for a bent and twisted society for their great grand-kids to grow up in.

You cannot have Christian culture, Christian values, long term, without Jesus Christ. The central vanity of the secularists (and the Christians aping them) is the vanity of imagining that values they inherited from a time when Christ was honored are values that they themselves possess — like magic! — even though they cannot give a coherent account of how to get those values from the time and chance cosmos that they say we evolved ourselves into.

It is as though the prodigal son, while buying drinks on the house, imagined that the money he was throwing around was money he had earned all by himself, or that it was money that was his “innately,” conveniently forgetting that he got it all from his father.

>The Hundred Years War

>Humanitarianism and Its Wars

Simon Schama’s doco on Henry VIII played recently on Sky. He traced the gradual descent of Henry’s reign into the murderous and tyrannical. The Divine Right of Kings (or, of governments in general) has always been a pernicious doctrine; it necessarily spawns great evil. Henry was no exception.

Human rights doctrines are equally pernicious and tyrannical. It is not an exaggeration, nor is it drawing a particularly long bow, to argue that Human Rights doctrines have produced the fifty years war of the United States and the West (and counting). Now, of course, Henry and his ilk had a justification for capriciously executing all and sundry who crossed them. The Divine Right of Kings asserted that the king was the avatar of God and therefore carried absolute authority. To resist the king was to impugn the dignity and being of God Himself. All resistance to Henry was implicit blasphemy.

Human Rights doctrines assert that Man is the ultimate and highest being–at least in their modern secular form. It is apt to name this approach the doctrine of humanitarianism–that is, the ultimacy of humanity. Man’s glory and honour must not only be respected, but protected. The duty of all governments is to defend the honour of mankind. Those who oppress or harm human beings impugn the glory and dignity of all. Those who harm other human beings are committing blasphemous acts. Thus, it is not at all surprising, that nations in the West have felt compelled to go to war against other nations which were believed to be violating human rights. The upshot has been a complete bloody mess.

In a recent article in World Affairs, entitled Saviors & Sovereigns: The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism, Mark Mazower reviews the unseemly spectacle.

On November 9, 2001, George W. Bush created a new public holiday—World Freedom Day. The United States, he explained, would lead the global fight for “liberty, freedom and the universal struggle for human rights”; it would try to help the “more than two billion people” still living under repressive regimes. The idea that America could, or should, do this had informed a certain kind of Washington mind-set throughout the Cold War. But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. They unfurled the banner of humanitarianism and, righteously, scorned the cowards and skeptics who wanted to keep America’s powder dry.

Mazower suggests there are signs that going to war to defend human rights is becoming unfashionable, and cites President Obama’s less “hawkish” tone. We believe this is nonsense: humanitarianism will not stop its wars until Human Rights doctrines are rejected. Obama continues to conduct its wars. Afghanistan has become part of the humanitarianism cause: American armed force is now being employed to “nation build” in that country. Humanitarianism remains firmly in place as a governing doctrine of the Republic.

Humanitarianism is implicitly absolutist, whilst hopelessly confused. This is a very dangerous combination. It creates happy hunting ground for populist manipulating politicians, hucksters and charlatans.

A pair of seminal scholarly articles from the early 1980s, influential on both left and right, offer a starting point: in these, Columbia University professor Michael Doyle argued that democracies were inherently peace-loving. The gratifying implication was that American security and international peace would both be served if existing democracies banded together and—perhaps—if they helped democratize the rest of the world as well.

The Balkans became the “theatre” where this doctrine was first played out.

At the time, the intellectual case for taking on Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo was being hammered out by no one in more public detail than by Michael Ignatieff (academic and current leader of the Canadian Liberal Party). In the aftermath of Bosnia, he had mused that the task of the contemporary intellectual was to defend “the universal against the violence and closure associated with the tribal, national, and ethnic.” Somewhat diffidently, he called for a defense of Western universalism as the alternative to tribalism. He did not dissent from the West’s right to intervene abroad on humanitarian grounds; his test was whether a breach of human rights threatened international peace.

Human Rights doctrines lead naturally into the ideology of humanitarianism, which, in turn leads the West to attempt to impose democracies on other nations–for their own good. Humanitarianism assumes that lying just beneath the surface of all oppressive and tyrannical governments are people who are true believers in Human Rights theology. Ironically, the more interventions occur, the more obvious it becomes that this is just plain flat-out wrong.

At least as worrying was the thought that the “ordinary people” in whom the intellectuals placed their hopes might not exist as imagined. Were they natural democrats? Not according to those who argued that even Yugoslavia’s descent into turmoil had been the product of mass nationalism and the political failure of less divisive movements. Radovan Karadzic and Franjo Tudjman were not tyrants, it was said, but the voices of a popular, deeply nationalistic general will, or the beneficiaries of the collapse of a one-party state and the democratization that followed. Soon, the idea that a “civil society” was waiting to be born in every dictatorship started to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

It is important to grasp that the doctrines of humanitarianism and interventions to punish human rights abusers is not a recent post-World War II phenomenon. It, like the Divine Rights of Kings, has been held for generations throughout Europe and the West in general.

The idea of humanitarian intervention was not a late-twentieth-century invention, of course. William Gladstone’s foray into Egypt more than a century earlier bore all the hallmarks of the idea, and one could go farther back. The re-emergence of the idea in the 1990s was the latest flourishing of a distinctive form of Western liberal thinking about global affairs. If liberal values were the only true values, then the West’s power and prestige should be deployed to promote them. And not merely to promote them, but to save suffering humanity from the excesses of that other Western invention, the idea of state sovereignty. With the United States in the ascendant after 1989—and a public culture steeped in the horrors of the Holocaust and the sinfulness of inaction in the face of evil—the temptation has been to elevate intervention to a general principle. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 2008, through their mass violations of human rights, many states lost the presumption of innocence that entitled them to claim sovereignty. The cosmopolitan conscience must trump the autonomy of the evildoing dictator.

Knocking off a dictator is the easy part. Winning the “peace” is an entirely different matter.

Toppling dictators might staunch the worst human rights abuses. But the same Western public opinion that welcomed their fall blanched at the years, billions of dollars, and (Western) lives spent to build democratic institutions from scratch. Well before the election of Barack Obama, the drain on military resources posed by Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the fragility of the new institutions in Bosnia and Kosovo, suggested that we should be wary of imperial projects.

Human cultures and civilizations are incredibly thick with nuances, significances, and meanings. In the end they reflect the prevailing shared religious beliefs of human beings within a culture. Western Human Rights humanitarianism is no exception; it is nothing more, nor less than an imperialist, absolutist attempt to impose its own culture and religion upon other peoples of the world.

This, of course, is not to say that all cultures are equally moral or holy or sanctified. Many are deeply degenerate–and the West, sadly, falls into this category. But it is to say that regime change does not mean culture change. Holding elections does not mean changes of heart and world-view. Cultures can only change for the better (or worse) from the inside out, from new patterns of love, courtship, marriage, child rearing, family worship, work, and labour–and so forth. These are not the things that the West can speak authoritatively about any longer.

And the rest of the world knows it.

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>Christianising Political Culture

Douglas Wilson

I recently received a good set of questions about Christian political activism from a gentlemen I met at the Desiring God conference, a man engaged in the noble work of Christian activism. Since the questions have broad relevance for many others, I thought it would be good to attempt to set forth my answers here, with many thanks to my unnamed correspondent.

The questions are set up by pointing to different things about Christians and their relationship to the realm of politics that I have said on my blog.

First:

As Christians look at their options, we need to fix this in our minds: there is no political solution to any of this. Politics is no savior — politics must get saved… So what should Christians who love their country do? Pray that God would raise up an army of preachers, preachers of the gospel. Pray that they would have a high view of God, a high view of His grace and His law, a modest view of themselves, a backbone, and an open Bible (1/23/09).

To which the question arises, that’s good, but is that all? No, there is more.

And this leads to the final observation. The world is a messy place. Christians who want the lordship of Christ to be openly acknowledged have two options — they can detach or engage. If they detach, they are following the anabaptist option — in order to build the pure city out in the open spaces somewhere. But if they engage, then they are signing up to try to steer something, as opposed to building it from scratch.

This means that those who want to engage have two choices again — do you want to latch on to the liberals and try to steer them, or latch on to the conservatives and try to steer them? Given those options, you could look at both helplessly, and decide to go back to the Hutterites. If you try to steer the liberals, or the conservatives, the chances are better than even that you will be the one steered (and used). That has certainly the pattern over the last century or two.

But a large part of this is explained by the practice of the Christians (who showed up to steer) agreeing to leave all their divinely inspired maps at home. That might account for the problems. But what if we brought our maps this time? (4/20/09)

So my correspondent was correct to surmise that I believe there is something Christians could do in the meantime. I believe Christians “who want the lordship of Christ to be openly acknowleded” should engage. I do want Christians to be at the center of the solution as a “salt-and-light” transforming influence, with their “divinely inspired maps” in hand.

But then I said this:

In short, Horton is up against a paradox, and there is where the last difference comes in. The most effective way for the church to transform the culture outside her walls, discipling the nations, is to quit being a lobbying agency. The fastest way to change the nations is to quit trying to. (9/20/09).

It is at this point that my correspondent confessed himself confused, and I don’t blame him. He said:

So now I’m confused: There is no political solution, so we should just pray; but we should engage biblically (which at times might look a lot like, well, lobbying — if in our engaging we try to persuade the magistrate to understand and do what’s right); however we should do so without actually lobbying and without really trying to… ?

He then went to assume charitably that I had all this straight in my head (which I think I do), but then went on to ask some specific question to help get that harmonization out into public view. So here goes:

1. Based on Scripture, how do you think Christians should participate in civil government in this constitutional republic that God has ordained for this nation? What does obedient, Christ-exalting, biblical Christian citizenship look like?

I believe that individual Christians should be engaged as God has gifted, called and led them. I believe that the Church should concentrate on being the Church — Word and sacrament — with the proviso that preaching and teaching the Word includes equipping the saints for works of service (Eph. 4:12) in whatever lawful occupation they might happen to be in — in the military, in some grotesque corporation, as a aide to the governor, as a lobbyist, as a retail merchant, as the director of a pro-life counselling center, and so on.

In short, I make a distinction between the mission of a vibrant and reformed Church, and the mission of the countless Christians who are members of that Church. The Church does the work of the Church, part of which is equipping individual Christians to labor for the extension of the Kingdom.

2. What should be the motivation for such participation?

The motivation should be the spread of the gospel and excellence in every lawful vocation, and all in the name of Christ.

3. What should be the objective?

The objective of the Church is to occupy until the Lord comes, discipling the nations, baptizing them and teaching them obedience. The center of this is worship. Individual Christians who are living faithful lives out in the world are those who extend the influence of any church that is doing what it ought to be doing.

4. How can [an activist] para-church ministry appropriately assist and encourage the Church to obey its calling in this area?

I would say through publication of what you have learned through hard study and even harder experience. Provide training for those individual Christians who are called to do what you are doing, which should be (hopefully) a supplement to what they are learning on the Lord’s Day, instead of being a replacement for it.

With all this in mind, I would therefore offer three bits of advice, encouragement and counsel to those Christians who are in the trenches of political activism.

First, be avowedly and openly Christian and evangelical. This falls under the heading of “bring the maps this time.” Don’t fight for “traditional values” or for the sentiments of your “faith community.” Don’t be a lobbyist for any kind of vanilla bleh. Go through a process that the secularists will attempt to describe as “radicalization.” Connect everything to the Lord Jesus Christ. The secularists will see this as bloodythirsty fanaticism, and the only way to get them to shut up on that point would be to change your name to Abdullah and start shooting actual people. Then they would pipe right down and would stop rushing to judgment. But since you can’t do that, just settle down and wait for the slanders.

Second, if it is pro-life activism or opposition to the ongoing normalization of sexual perversions, then keep on keeping on. Do this because it is the right testimony to offer a lost and decaying world. God has called you to be faithful, which may or may not be successful. As these things go, earthly success will only come if God grants a great reformation to the church, such that you get reinforcements. But whether He does that in our era or not, it is still the right thing to do. Faithfulness looks successful sometimes (Heb. 11: 33-34) and sometimes the first appearances don’t make it look that way (Heb. 11:34-38). But the important thing is to be approved by God. He is the one who issues the only well done that ultimately matters (Matt. 25: 21, 23).

Third, if it is Christian activism outside those sorts of “big E on the eye chart” issues, then we need to study and learn. There are many areas where well-meaning Christians have gotten involved in politics in ways that are inconsistent with a Christian world and life view.

Here are some areas where (in my view) we have almost as much to learn as the secularists do. We are still hunters and gatherers on these grasslands, and so we have no business telling anybody else how to build a city. We don’t know. To be specific, I believe that evangelical Christians have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to the issues of economics (free grace means free markets), the difference between defensive and aggressive war (the latter of which is a great engine of avarice), the distinction between sins and crimes, and the illegitimacy of pillaging taxpayers to fund our versions of compassion.

Many Christian activists sold their souls during the Bush years, and now that the wickedness of Obama is upon us, they are having trouble getting them back again. And it is hard to fight with any vigor when your soul is gone.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 2nd December 2009

>The Culture Wars, Round VI

>Genuine Culture Wars Rising Again in the West

For two centuries or more, Unbelief has triumphed in the West. We have been living in a post-Christian world. For most, Christianity is no more than a vague cultural memory, something that once was, but has now passed away.

But it will not stay that way forever. For the Lord is always at work smashing the idols in the minds of their subjects—one by one. The false gods of the Church leaders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were broken by world wars. Yet Church leaders desperately clung on to them. They hardened their hearts. They still wanted to prove to the world that they, too, believed in the sovereignty of rational man. They preached a “compliant” god, who would always change and adapt and be whatever unbelieving scientific empirical research said he ought to be. Because of their treachery, Unbelief in the culture grew stronger and stronger. Why wouldn’t it, when even the Church leaders disbelieved.

But gradually, the true Culture War has broken out again. It has become more overt. It is now far more clear that the issue of conflict is between those who believe in the sovereignty of the Risen Lord, and those who believe in Man as god. A growing army of Christian believers understand the issues and understand that their fathers were false prophets.

Moreover, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Risen Lord will win this battle. But how? The triumph of Jerusalem over Athens will not come by the sword or by force. It will come as large numbers of people repent of their sin and turn to the Lord Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. But what will lead them to come? The Scripture leaves us in no doubt.

Firstly, the false gods always end up being shattered. This means that there will emerge a widespread, growing conviction that man really is wicked and that the thoughts and intentions of his heart are only evil continually. It will become increasingly obvious that the ratiocinations of the mind of fallen Man are not to be trusted. People will realise that Unbelief is always grinding an axe. It always begs the question. It always has an agenda. It will become clear that Unbelief has always been deeply and bitterly prejudiced. Unbelief has always assumed from the outset that the God of the Bible does not exist. Unbelief may entertain the possibility that some gods may exist–and it will endeavour to tell us how, what, and when they do. But one thing it will always emphatically maintain is that the God revealed in the Scriptures most certainly does not exist.

As the rationalistic idols are shattered, more and more people will come to be epistemologically self-conscious. They will see Unbelief for what it is: the carefully nurtured cant of enmity against God Himself, cloaked with reasonableness. People will come to see this as sinuously serpentine, the deep subtlety of the Accuser of old. What particular means the Lord will use to bring this conviction upon any society in particular is not clear, but it always involves letting us see man as he really is, man in the fruit of his folly, man with his vain hopes dashed.

Our modern age has glorified Man as few have before. It is likely that the smashing of the idol will involve God showing us the ignobility of Man in new and extreme ways. Unbelief will be shown up to be foolishness, eventually becoming deeply offensive and distasteful as a consequence.

Secondly, the stronger wickedness and Unbelief become, the weaker they turn out to be. Evil is self-destroying, self-defeating, self-immolating. Abortion is an unmitigated evil. Yet it is the wicked who kill their own. They exercise vengeance upon their own seed, thereby culturally weakening Unbelief, cutting it off at its roots. Homosexuality is sinful. But it is sterile, unable to reproduce itself. Homosexuality is self-negating, self-destroying. Materialist man, swelling with pride in his technological prowess, becomes a global-warming obscurantist whose drive to protect material reality leads to enforced impoverishment and economic decline. Evil integrates into the void of cultural impotence.

Thirdly, as the idols are smashed, the sound of the Gospel preached will be heard once again. As bruised and battered souls seek refuge in churches they will hear once again of Christ the Lord, not through the treachery of a Fosdick, but the fidelity of a Spurgeon; not the false god of a Norman Vincent Peale, but the faithfulness of a Wesley. And people will look to Him and will be saved. This is how the Culture War will be won. There is no other way.

An imperative in this endeavour is that the Church must give up its fawning love-affair with this world. It must no longer seek respect in the Academy in the vain attempt that it will somehow win a favourable hearing. To be sure, the Academy needs to be spoken to, not ignored. But the method is to be apostolic; it is to bring the polite but firm confrontation of a Paul to the philosophes and intellectual magpies of the Areopagus.

A second imperative is that the Church must not persist with this constant craving to be liked and respected by the world of Unbelief. How this has damaged Jerusalem! How we all—believer and unbeliever alike—have paid for this folly! The Lord God said, “I will put enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent.” Many professing Christians retort, saying, “No thanks. I am going to remove that enmity so the seed of the serpent no longer dislikes me and other Christians.” Christ made it very clear: if we are not prepared patiently to endure the “scorn and mockery” of Unbelief which so troubled Brunner we are not fit to be His disciples. For He endured it and remained jealous for the Name of God. He expects nothing less of us.

Let us be clear upon this. There will always be Unbelief, no matter how tenuous it may become, prior to the Final Advent of our Lord. The best circumstances in which Unbelievers could possibly live in this life is in a world and culture which predominantly respects the Lord and His Word. Blessings upon blessings will be upon such a land, as indeed the Scripture promises.

In the blessing of God’s people, Unbelievers shall also receive blessing. If we truly want Unbelief grudgingly to appreciate and respect the City of Jerusalem the only way forward is to stand unashamedly and unreservedly upon the rock of God’s holy Word. For if we are ashamed of God, He will be ashamed of us. But if we honour Him, He will honour us.

If we have a true love for mankind, let us be sure of this: as God pours out His Spirit and blesses His people, Unbelief itself will increasingly share in the good gifts of God.

Thus, if there is to be any hope for the West, genuine Culture Wars must break out afresh. There are no short cuts. We must go back to the mistakes and sins of our fathers and repent of them and correct them. It will be a hard fight from here. But our Risen Lord is amongst us as Captain of the Lord’s Host. In the end, Pharaoh and his riders He will cast into the sea.

>The Culture Wars, Round V

>The Church “Repents” and Promotes a New Orthodoxy

We have been discussing the decline and fall of Christianity in the West. We have argued that the seeds of the the ignoble crop were sown during the Enlightenment. The Church, to curry the favour of Unbelief, began to speak more about Reason, about progress, about society, and about Man. The Church tried to find a common neutral ground to discuss these matters with Unbelief–and that ground was autonomous human reason, which would judge, measure, and assess all things and determine truth for itself.

The Church entered a Faustian pact: it agreed that if God were true and if the Bible were to be believed both had to be grounded upon and authenticated by human reason. It therefore sought to “prove” the reasonableness of God before the bar of fallen man and his sinful ratiocinations.

It was a faithless enterprise from the beginning. Seeking the respect and approbation of Man, the churches dishonoured God. Lusting after the wisdom of this world, the nineteenth and twentieth century fathers despised and were embarrassed by the “foolishness” of God–as Paul ironically describes it (I Corinthians 1: 18ff).

The overthrow of Christendom in the West occurred very, very quickly–although it had been building gradually for decades. Like the frog in the pot, the influence of unbelief had been gradually rising, until suddenly it killed the faith–at least its hold over the wider culture. What was left was an empty shell. Into that vacuum rushed a militant atheistic rationalism. The belief in the Mind of Man being the measure of all things, including God, had won the battle (although, as it would subsequently turn out, not the war.)

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the United States, for example, saw itself as a Christian country. It believed it was going to lead all of mankind into a world-wide Christian triumph. It was common to hold that the United States as a nation was in the vanguard of global Christendom. But by the 1920‘s the veneer of a false Christianity had been stripped away, and the nation was rapidly and overtly turning from God. In 1924, H. L. Mencken would remark: “Christendom may be defined briefly as that part of the world in which, if any man stands up in public and solemnly swears that he is a Christian, all his auditors will laugh.” Walter Lippmann, also in the 1920‘s, would write: “irreligion of the modern world [is] radical to a degree for which there is, I think, no counterpart.” (Marsden, p.3)

How did the fathers of the Church in the West respond to the wars and the deaths and the growing apostasy from the Christian faith in the twentieth century? Did they repent? Yes and no. The twentieth century witnessed a strange development in the Church in the West. There arose a “school” of theologians termed the Neo-orthodox. In particular, the two Argonath who sought to hold back the tides of Unbelief were Swiss: Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.

These two and their followers sought to reassert the transcendence of God. They tried to rescue Him from the morass of war and degradation. Their response to the culture wars was to attempt a grand Dunkirk-like manoeuvre and withdraw God right off the planet, banishing Him to Mars. Since God was so great, so “other”, so transcendent He was beyond our understanding and comprehension and must not be thought in any way relevant or related to Belsen’s ovens.

But Barth and Brunner and their followers still clung to one idol above all others. They continued to believe that the ultimate ground of truth was human Reason: in the end, God and His revelation had to be judged by Man. What was true was that which was reasonable to men, whether Believers or Unbelievers. No matter how much Brunner railed against “autonomous reason” he could not help but demonstrate over and over that pagan rationalism was alive and well in his own heart.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his discussion of Adam as the first man. He begins by agreeing that the rationalists and Unbelievers were right.

This whole historic picture of ‘the first man’ has been finally and absolutely destroyed for us to-day. The conflict between the teaching of history, natural science, palaeontology, on the origins of the human race, and at of the ecclesiastical doctrine, waged on both sides with the passion of a fanatical concern for truth, has led, all along the line, to the victory of the scientific view, and to the gradual but inevitable decline of the ecclesiastical view. Upon the plane of empirical research, whether that of history or of natural science . . . no facts have been left which could support the Augustinian ecclesiastical view of the historical “first man”, or which could prove that the empirical origin of the human race was to be sought on a specially elevated plane of spiritual existence.
Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt, [London: Lutterworth Press,1939], pp. 85,86 (Emphasis, ours)

Autonomous reason still lived, and Brunner bowed down before it. Adam and Eve did not exist—the Bible was engaged in mythical reconstruction—because empirical research said so. Alas, there were “no facts” which supported the biblical account. Imagine that. No facts! What Brunner has not realised, whilst clutching his idols of rationalism and empiricism to his bosom, is that once you grant autonomy and objective rationality to Unbelief at just one point, it will rapidly assert its claim over every point. There is a driving, relentless logic in this. If one particle of the creation is beyond the direct control of God, in principle all of the creation is beyond His control. This logic becomes turbocharged when the Mind of man is considered to be independent and objective, able to test whether God exists or not. For if we can actually determine for ourselves whether God exists or not, then all reality lies at our feet. Man is the master of all things, subject to none. Either God is true and every Man a liar, or Man determines what is true which means that the God revealed in the Bible cannot possibly exist. There is no other alternative.

Brunner shows that all along he is in the same camp of the nineteenth century fathers who had conceded that human reason was a reliable and infallible authority, untouched by sin, and that Man had, therefore, a right to put God in His place—or more accurately, in the place Men would prefer Him to have.

Brunner goes on, even more revealingly:

The pitiable comedy which is produced when theology claims that a ‘higher, more perfect’ human existence of the first generated existed in a sphere not accessible to research, as it retires before the relentless onward march of scientific research, should be abandoned, once for all, since it has for long provoked nothing but scorn and mockery, and has exposed the message of the Church to the just reproach of ‘living in the back of beyond.’ . . . . The ecclesiastical doctrine of Adam and Eve cannot compete with the impressive power of this scientific knowledge.
Brunner, pp.86,87

Well, we can’t have scorn and mockery. They mocked the Christ, but doggone it, they are not going to mock us. If Unbelievers are upset at the teaching of God’s Holy Word about creation, we had better jettison the Bible. If the “relentless onward march of scientific research” has “proved” that Adam and Eve could not have existed, then that’s it then. Naturalistic, autonomous scientific knowledge is “impressive.” The Bible cannot compete with it. Clearly the Bible is wrong, Unbelief is right, and autonomous reason is the ultimate judge of truth and of the gods.

This rubbishy defalcation was hailed by many Church authorities and fathers in the previous century as Christian! No culture wars here. Only wolves in sheep’s clothing. And the wolves were feeding, gnawing the ossified bones of a bankrupted false faith. Now we know why Christianity has declined in the West. Now we can undestand why the Lord has given us over to the dominion of the idols our fathers nursed and not-so-secretly worshipped. Does not the Lord warn that this is exactly what He will do to an idolatrous and unbelieving people.

What, then, did our wonderful new “orthodox” theologians do with the Biblical doctrines of Adam and Eve, Paradise, and the Fall? Ah, well, you had to realise that underneath all those myths and primitive notions there was a kernel of timeless truth. There was “real content” underneath all those childish and naive formulations. And what is this “timeless truth”? Well, says, Brunner. Actually Genesis teaches us “idealistic evolutionism” and that man is opposed to his divine origin. (p.87,88).

Whew. Thank goodness for that. At least there is something that can be salvaged from the wreck of primitive childishness in the Bible. Idealistic evolutionism–whatever that is. And a revolt against our divine origin. By mid-century, these were the broken reeds which the Church in the West was desperately leaning upon to try to survive and win some respect back from Unbelief.

Oh, but hold on. What does the “relentless onward march of scientific research” say about the idea of “idealistic evolutionism” as an “explanation” of man’s divine origin? Oh. Empirical science has gone on to explode idealistic evolutionism as yet another myth. There are apparently no facts to support it either. (A cursory review of evolutionist literature shows that it reserves its most scornful disdain for those who propound theistic evolution–as Brunner does. In seeking to stop the laughter and the mocking of Unbelief, Brunner adopts a false position which makes it all the more raucous.)

And what about God Himself? Sorry. Relentless empirical scientific research provides not one fact for God either. So there we have it, Dr Brunner. If you grant credence to autonomous rationalism at one point, it will go on to assert the non-existence of the Living God at every point. But, since you have already conceded that Unbelief is authoritative, you cannot protest its conclusions at any point along the line. A false and vain prophet you have proved to be.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the West was already substantially post-Christian. The Church fathers of that era were aiding and abetting this development with all their strength. But despite the judgements of two World Wars and many other horrors in the century that followed, the Church continued to bow down to the idol of human reason and insist that God be subject to Man’s infallible dictums. The Church meanwhile, according to these false prophets in the West, must mince and step, and seek some place, some room, which it could claim for its own. The Church in the West long ago gave up the true Culture Wars and ran the white flag of cowardly surrender up the pole.

The Faith was banished from creation and nature; then from society and the public square; then from children and the schools, now increasingly it is being banished from family life. Now it is even being proscribed from speech, thought, intents, motivations. Unbelief is relentless. It will leave nothing to those in the West who have decided that God and His Word are not to be trusted as infallibly authoritative in all things.

This is where the post-Christian West has stayed ever since the nineteenth century. It is like being in a time warp, while the Living God passes it by. We cannot resist jumping right into our present day to illustrate how the Christian West continues to bow down at the feet of rationalistic humanism. At his recent speech at Notre Dame, President Obama, a professing Christian no less, answering his critics over his strong support of abortion, said this:

For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It’s no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule — the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. The call to serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth.

Ultimately, all religions boil down to one. They are really all the same. Underneath, implies Obama, all religions actually serve and worship Man. It is Man who is the ultimate reality. This is is the “law” that binds all people both Believers and Unbelievers together. All religions are worthy and tolerable insofar as they genuflect to Man. This is the great apostasy of our fathers—and it is alive and well in the West today.

President Obama, as a professing Christian, truly walks in the paths of the Western Church fathers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a true son of the post-Christian idolatry of the West. He is in the train of the false prophets. He follows in their footsteps. He, like they, long ago decided to fraternize with Unbelief. He, like they, long ago looked into the face of Unbelief, and found his own reflection. And he, like they, secretly called that reflection, god.

>The Culture Wars, Round IV

>The Church Makes Itself Irrelevant to the West

Historians have told us that the twentieth century represented the bloodiest and most lethal hundred years in all of known human history. But the wonder is not that in the past hundred years, the world saw the bloodiest century in its history to date, but that it was not more so. Most of the bloodshedding was European in origin and course. So much for the coming new Age heralded at the end of the nineteenth century. And the bloodletting is likely not over. It will not cease until the West swallows its vaunted pride and returns humbly, once again, to the Prince of Peace. We fear that unless that happens, the twenty-first century may well turn out to be more bloody still.

But the faithlessness of our fathers, on the one hand, and the willing promotion of the gospel of peace, prosperity, and plenty for all, on the other, meant that when the apocalypses of the Great War, the Depression, Nazism, and Communist totalitarianism did come, the West doubly rejected the Church and the Christian faith. “You Christians promised much—but you lied,” was the reaction.

The twentieth century was ushered in with a false Gospel of optimism and progress, underpinned by the idolatry of Enlightenment rationalism. Shailer Mathews, Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, aptly represented the new false faith. According to George M. Marsden,

In Matthew’s view, human religious experience provided the data for the scientific study of religion. The Bible, accordingly, was not a source of facts or true propositions about God, but “a trustworthy record of a developing experience of God which nourishes our faith.” Similarly, the doctrines of the church were the products of group religious experience.

Christianity “Is the concrete religious life of a continuous ongoing group rather than the various doctrines in which that life found expression.” The goal of the modernist (Mathews’s term for “modern, up-to-date Christianity”) was “to carry on this process of an every growing experience of God.”
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 177

God is to be found and known not through the Scriptures, but through the growing understanding of believers as they experienced God through Nature or society. For Mathews, and most of the Church in the West,

the needs of modern society, which after all is where God is found today, should therefore properly set the agenda for Christians. The principle that God was immanent and revealing himself in the modern world, was at the heart of the modernist impulse.

. . . The answer was above all a moral and a practical one. [“Christianity”] brought a “full moral life” which was impossible without God. Ultimately it introduced “goodwill” which, “though never fully realized, is of the nature of God, and is the law of progress, the foundation upon which human society can safely be built. . . .”
Ibid., p. 177

This is the “Gospel of the Enlightenment” in a nutshell. God is banished and made irrelevant to the universe; therefore Nature is substituted for god; reading the “Book of Nature” enables us to see and know this god. As we live a moral life, we will co-operate with the law of the progress of Nature, and society will become better and better. Man, Nature, and god are now to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. This had now become the accepted, mainstream “christianity” of the West. It mattered not in what particular denomination or ecclesiastical system you were found. All imbibed deeply from the trough of the new religion of Man.

That is why thousands upon thousands of people lost their faith in the trenches. Their faith all along, it seems, had not been in Christ, but in Man and his wondrous glory. When Man began tearing up the place, their so-called faith in Christ—Whom they foolishly believed would continue to bless them while they worshiped at the altar of human rationalism, made their compromises with the world, and nursed their embarrassment and shame of the Son and His God and Father—their “faith” collapsed. Their christ had merely been their servant to warrant their forlorn hope to be able to live coseted privileged prosperous lives. When “he” failed them, they rejected him.

It was not the evil they witnessed that led millions to turn away from God. They had already stopped actually believing in the Living God. But they used the pretext of evil to make their Unbelief justified. Christ, if He was true, and if He existed, had allowed the evil to happen. In other words, in their heart of hearts, these so-called Christians really believed that human kind did not deserve what was happening at Verdun and the Somme. This, more than anything else, showed that they were more jealous over Man than the Living God. They did not believe in their own sinful wretchedness. They, underneath it all, really did believe the crapulous Enlightenment doctrines of man’s goodness and perfectibility through sweet reason. They did not see Verdun or the Somme as a divine judgement upon them; they turned it into a judgement upon God.

Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Church came to be ruled, led, and dominated by false prophets, whose screech was “peace, peace”, but there was no peace. Those faithful prophets who instead spoke of the glory of the Living God, of man’s depravity and proclaimed Christ alone as the Saviour of man through his blood shed at Calvary—these were deemed by the Church to be foolish antiquaries, madmen, extremists, primitives, fundamentalists, and simplistic uneducated rustics. The West preferred to believe the false prophets, because their message was what the entire community had come to believe in any event. The inate goodness of Man. The inevitability of progress. The identification of society as their god.

However, when their message of humanistic optimism was proved to be a terrible lie by the Great War, the Great Depression, the tyranny of the Soviets and the Facists, and the Second World War, and their aftermaths, the population in general became yet even more sceptical of the Church.

Now, looking back, how stupid, venal, foolish, and profoundly unfaithful were those preachers, theologians, teachers, and church leaders who counseled common cause with Unbelief, who sought to make the faith acceptable to the other side; and who craved and curried the favour and intellectual approbation of non-Christians. How treacherous were those in Jerusalem who sought to conduct the great Culture War by fawning obsequiousness and unconditional surrender. How insidious and serpentine was their embarrassment over the Risen Lord, the Living God. One is reminded of the words of our Lord: they have already had their reward, and it has been in this life.

Yet, their curse lives on even to our day. It is a singular phenomenon that scepticism, atheism, and materialism were turbo-charged as a result of the two world wars. How did that happen? Why did not these terrible conflagrations turn people back again to God? For many professing Christians who had been fed by their false shepherds upon the lie of humanistic optimism, the horrors of the wars shattered the veneer of their false faith, exposing only the actual scepticism and atheism underneath. The god of whom they had once heard and in whom they had once believed was obviously false—the horrors of war had proved it beyond doubt. Atheism and the lust for material comfort was the reflex position. It was all that was left or could be salvaged.

We did not deserve the suffering of the Somme, they said. These horrors proved only that God did not exist. The Church had spoken falsely of a glorious world about to come. It was all a lie. But what was not a lie was that Man is the master of all things. If I can decide for myself that God does not exist, then to all intents and practical purposes, I am a god. Nietzsche was right. Let me now be honoured and glorified with trappings appropriate to my status. Prosperity in this world is my right.

Like Pharaoh, the plagues that fell upon the West throughout the twentieth century have only served to harden Unbelief, and make its hold more vicelike. But, also like Pharaoh, this has set the West up for an even more devastating judgment to come.

>The Culture Wars, Round III

>Culture Wars: Sold Out by False Prophets

The optimism of the Victorian period was pervasive. Darwin was believed to be right. The latest version of mankind was the biggest and the brightest and the best that civilisation had ever seen.

Right across the Western Church leaders and teachers agreed that mankind was entering a new, glorious age where technological and economic advancement was a harbinger of moral and social and ethical progress. The Church, in order to “keep up” came to believe it had to adopt, if not subject itself to the rationalistic questioning spirit of the Age. The Church, to maintain an audience, and to keep the respect of Unbelievers, had to agree with their basic premises. The desire for respect, and the intent to win a hearing led the Church to sell our her Lord, to sacrifice Him on the altar of human autonomy and the exaltation of human reason.

If you cannot beat them, join them was the unspoken wisdom of nineteenth century Church fathers. Many now “wanted a Christian religion that would share joyfully in all the good and beautiful things of the world and enthusiastically correct the faults and defects of society.” (L. Praasma, Elect from Every Nation, [St. Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press], p.23). Social progress became conterminous with the Kingdom of God. The Church joined with Unbelievers of every stripe: Marxists, environmentalists, idealists, peace activists, trade unionists. They would join with these and co-labour with these so that together the Church could be in the vanguard of those entering the new promised land. This would preserve the Church’s existence.

As a corollary, Church leaders and teachers began to teach that it was essential to doubt, if not flat out disbelieve the historic Christian faith. To maintain the credibility of the Church and the faith it had to demonstrate that it fully embraced the critical rationalism of the Age (which, after all, was the secret to prosperity and the bright future of Mankind). The best the more faithful could do was assert that Christianity and the Gospel was probably true, which was to say it was possibly false.

The first step to maintain the relevance and acceptability of the Christian faith was the urgent task of “separating” the essential truths from their historical packaging. So, miracles were embarrassing to the scientific rationalistic mind, but the “essential truths packaged within” the Bible’s account of miracles were immediately relevant to the Age if they were unpackaged and re-communicated to continental romantics, German idealists and English empiricists and the like.

The “miracles” were just a literary device of a primitive age to teach us wonder at life, the possibility of a new beginning, the belief in being able to make a quantum leap forward in human progress—and on, and on. The miracles were thus historical literary devices—a kind of cosmic metaphor. Nineteenth century Church leaders were no longer looking over the parapet at an Unbelief as an enemy. Once they had done that and seen Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin as Goliaths to be slain. Now they were running across no-man’s land shouting “we are with you!” Goliath had won and Israelites were rushing to become Philistines.

In this terrible period of defalcation and compromise, fighting the cultural war meant defecting and joining with the “other side”. The overwhelming motivation was to gain the respect of Unbelief and unbelievers. “If we show them we can be relevant, they will accept us and listen to what we are saying,” was the pervasive undertone. It was an age of fawning obsequiousness to idolatry. It is still with us, in large part, although less so. It is more difficult to be fawning and obsequious when the wolf has bared its teeth, and they are bloody.

But in those days, the pressing need was to show that the Church cared about those who had thus far missed out on the great economic leap forward of the industrial and mercantile revolutions. Yes the new Age was indeed dawning, but we need to offer a helping hand to oppressed labourers, to the poor, to the sick, and to the indigent. Then the Kingdom’s glory will truly come. This, the leaders said, was the essence of Christianity.

J Gresham Machen, true Gospel warrior, captured the essence of how the Church generally had capitulated, and fawningly deserted to Unbelief, in a letter to his mother, written on November 14, 1914, after attending church:

Last Sunday I heard Dr Parkurst on Madison Square. The interior of the church building is characterized by a certain rich magnificent simplicity, and the music seemed to me the finest church music I have ever heard. The whole service was possessed of perfect unity . . . . the sermon was exceedingly stimulating. There was not a touch of Christianity in it . . .
Praasma, p.34. Emphasis, ours

Two years later (March 14, 1916), he wrote:

In the afternoon I heard Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick has great vogue—especially, I believe, among college men. And he is dreadful! Just the pitiful modern stuff about an undogmatic Christianity.
Praasma, p. 35

This, more than anything else, led to a decline in church attendance in the US and right across the West. When idolatry and unbelief began to be preached, churches emptied out. By 1900, in London churchgoing had reduced to just 16 percent of the population. It has not improved. In Germany, on the eve of World War I, just four percent of the population was attending Church on a regular basis. Of course, the percentage of “Christians-on-wheels” was far higher: that is, people who came to church only in a pram, a wedding car, or a hearse. But the reality was that already, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the West had already become post-Christian.

The decline of the Christian faith and the entering into a post-Christian era was not a twentieth century development. It was a nineteenth century malady. That century was the most overtly consistent expression of the rationalistic Enlightenment seen to date. That century made Enlightenment rationalism the established religion of Europe. Everybody, Christians and non-Christians alike all came to sing from its hymnbook.

But the fruits of this new paganism were yet to appear and ripen. Europe entered the twentieth century in a blaze of optimism and self-glorification. The New Model Man was no longer crawling: he was walking. In a few short years, he would no longer be walking, but striding—and then strutting. Then the bloodletting would begin.

>The Culture Wars, Round II

>The Triumph of Unbelief in the West

The Christian faith declares that all power and authority belongs to the risen Lord Jesus Christ. His authority embraces all reality: both material and immaterial realms; all nations, all cultures, and all societies. He is the Alpha and Omega. The past, the present and the future are His and He is their Lord. Consequently, all Unbelief—wherever it be found—is doomed to fail. Resistance is not only futile, it is evil.

Of course, to Unbelief it does not seem this way. Non-Christians would insist that they are on the winning side, that the Christian faith is a relic of a by-gone ignorant and superstitious age. They would point to the triumph of Enlightenment rationalism in the West, the decline of belief in Christ, and the ebbing of His (mythical) Kingdom. They would refer to the decline of influence of Christian beliefs and of the Christian Gospel everywhere in the West. And they would have recent history on their side. They will find no argument here—at least as far as the West is concerned (the Southern Hemisphere being another story).

Christians, however, see the long run very differently (as you would expect). To Christian eyes, the post Christian, pagan West appears like an outpost of Unbelief across the centuries and generations. It is like a primitive tribe which is celebrating because, with its spears and clubs, it has fought off an enemy scouting party, unaware that just over the ridge sit a division of M1 Abrams tanks about to unleash. Or, to change the figure (with apologies to Byron), the Believer knows that the might of the Western Gentile, unsmote by the sword, shall melt like snow in the glance of the Lord.

But Christians also know that the decline of the faith in the West did not come about by accident. It is Jerusalem, and the Church within her walls, that is largely responsible. And for this we weep and mourn, and like Daniel of old, confess the sins of our fathers in praying for the restoration of Jerusalem. It is we in Jerusalem who have been unfaithful and so the Lord has made us face the consequences. The strength of the post-Christian pagan West is a story of the infidelity of Jerusalem, not a story of the merits or powers of Unbelief.

By the end of the nineteenth century our fathers had decided that Christianity, if it were to prosper, needed modernising to make it more relevant to the world around it. This meant taking up the concerns and aspirations of the surrounding culture and joining with them.

The nineteenth century ended in Europe amidst a blaze of glorious optimism. Universal peace and prosperity was about to break out upon mankind. Progress was inevitable. Unending prosperity was just around the corner. The response of the Church, in general, was to agree. The so-called triumph of Man and of human reason meant that Man could now exercise control over God and His Christ, and His Bible. Modern Man could see flaws, faults, mere imaginations, and prejudices in the Bible that rude and crude scholars could not see before. “Scientific” criticism had exposed all kinds of errors and weaknesses in the Bible. Just as all now needed to be subject to Reason and rationalistic criticism, Christianity was no exception.

Unbelief triumphed in the West in the nineteenth century because of the defalcation of the Church. The critical point of the apostasy was to agree with Unbelievers that human reason was the ground of all truth, and that God needed to be subject to it. “Fair enough”, said the Church—and in so saying, parroted the reasoning and speech of Eve when she had turned away from God. Did God really say that? and, Do I agree with it? was at the heart of sin in the Garden. It was also at the heart of the sins of the Church in the West at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Church had agreed with Unbelief that if God and the Bible and the Christian faith was to have any credibility and integrity at all, it had to be made reasonable to fallen men. For human Reason had become the measure of all truth and reality in the community at large. The leaders and teachers of the Church concurred–and so exchanged the Living God for an idol.

The apple had not fallen far from Adam’s tree.

>The Culture Wars, Round I

>Phony Culture Wars

The rubric “culture wars” has entered our lexicon. In vulgar parlance it refers to the clash between the world-view or social vision of the Left versus the Right. Rudely put, the social vision of the Left is for a society organised around and cascading down from the prior rights of the collective, the state, and the community. The Right’s social vision is a society cascading down from the prior rights of a human individual, and, therefore, voluntary groups and free associations.

The conflict is pretty much total in the sense that confrontation between the two views is experienced right along the entire front of human activity. We, however, view this conflict as one between members of the same family. In an estranged family, it is not uncommon for the members to disagree on practically everything—but members of the same family they inescapably remain. In the vulgar use, the term “culture wars” must definitely be written in lower case. In the end, the conflict between Left and Right represents a mere disagreement, and a relatively minor one at that. Describing it as a “war” is certainly colourful, definitely emotive, but nothing more than a hyperbolic figure of speech.

Consider the deeper level of pervasive agreement between these two camps. Both presuppose from the outset that the Living God does not and cannot exist. Both assume the final authority of Man in determining truth, meaning, together with the goals, motives, and standards of existence itself. Both presuppose the ultimacy of chance and that in the final analysis meaningless wins. Any “gods” or “higher powers” there may be have their existence only by warrant of human reason. Both agree the “rational” is the real. Both deny the existence of infinite ethical values. Both camps are therefore moral relativists, with all ethics being nothing more than an expression of mere preference, not in any sense a reflection or application of an absolute, eternal value. Both agree that meaning is what Man says it is.

Therefore, in our view the culture wars are phony. They resemble the stage managed conflicts of the WWF, or Survivor. They provide entertainment value for the credulous. But anyone who seriously believes the disputes, the fights, and the wrangles are genuine is a sucker. As soon as it dawns on the punter that the conflict is stage managed and choreographed, the lustre goes.

But that does not mean that genuine culture wars do not exist. They do. It is just that the front lines and the trenches are in a different place. The real culture war exists between those who believe and know for sure that the Living God is, and those who have presupposed that He cannot be and that Man is the ultimate self-determiner of all things. And what a war it is! It embraces the heights of heaven and the depths of Sheol.

The ascended Lord commands and demands that everything in heaven and upon earth, even every thought and intention and act of every human being, be subject to Him. Unbelieving Man asserts that if any god were to exist, it would only do so if it were subject to the dictats of human reason–which is to insist that Man remains sovereign over all deities and “higher” powers. This is a religion the Devil endorses and encourages with all his might and main. It is the religion he subtly preached to our first parents and to which they became the first converts.

Since culture is nothing other than an outward manifestation of human thoughts, words, and deeds, particular cultures are either predominantly subject to Him or they are not. Those who do not believe in Christ, reject His reign. They are rebels. They resist, resent, and ultimately hate the idea that all that they are and all of their being must be subject to the risen Lord. Everything that they do manifests this committed rebellion.

Although forced by the exigencies of being a feeble and severely limited creature to act in particular ways, they wish it were not so. If God makes them breathe or eat or reproduce or clothe their children they insist that it is not He, but they who are in control. This is the precise point of thermo-nuclear fission in the cosmic culture war. Who is Lord? The Unbeliever insists that Man is the measure of all things, and mastered by none. The Believer insists that the Lord Jesus Christ is the measure of all things and Master of everything.

Because the Lord Jesus Christ is the Lord of all lords and King of all kings, He has something to say about everything. And what He says is infallibly true and bears totalitarian authority. There can be no neutral ground between the lines. Because literally there is no square inch of creation, no sub-atomic particle of reality, no instant of time, that is not controlled and ordered and commanded by Him there cannot be any “middle ground” between Belief and Unbelief, as if there were some place Christ’s realm was not operative. You are either for Me, or against Me, He said.

The real culture war, then, is between Christ and those whom He has redeemed and called as His people, on the one hand, and those who remain fighting a hopeless, desperate rearguard action against Him, on the other. But in this war, no quarter will be given, nothing will be uncontested, nothing will be left to Unbelief. It is this infallible and relentless certainty that lends urgency and passion to the merciful cry to Unbelief and unbelievers: “turn to Me, turn to Me, for why would ye die, O house of Israel.”

In the series of posts to follow we will endeavour to trace, in general outline, how this great culture war has played out in the West over the past one hundred years. We will do this in an attempt to gain some insight into what contribution we need to make in our generation. Like our fathers of Issachar of old, we seek an understanding of the times so that we might understand better what we ought to do.

>Where has That New World Order Gone?

>The Time of the West Seems Over

Remember back to the days of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Remember how politicians spoke grandiosely of a “Peace Dividend”? US President Bush(Sr) proclaimed the beginning of a New World Order. Things were going to change. Humanity was entering a new era.

Forgive us, but we are finding the proclamation of a New World Order passe these days, since hardly a month goes by without some political leader or other declaring yet another one. The latest is Gordon Brown, who in his career has probably pronounced about twenty of them, declaring at the conclusion of the recent G20 meeting that–yes, you guessed it–the world had just entered another New World Order.

Well, actually, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes had already pronounced that nothing was new under the sun. It is not surprising, then, that the New World Order turned out to be pretty much like an Older World Order. The second verse has proved remarkably like the first.

We came across the following prognostication by the late Samuel P Huntingdon the other day–written in 1995, but speculating on what we might be facing in the next few decades. Apparently he was not convinced about “New World Order” rhetoric.

Modernization has generally enhanced the material level of Civilization throughout the world. But has it also enhanced the moral and cultural dimensions of Civilization? In some respects this appears to be the case. Slavery, torture, vicious abuse of individuals, have become less and less acceptable in the contemporary world. Is this, however, simply the result of the impact of Western civilization on other cultures and hence will a moral reversion occur as Western power declines?

Much evidence exists in the 1990’s for the relevance of the “sheer chaos” paradigm of world affairs: a global breakdown of law and order, failed states and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world, a global crime wave, transnational mafias and drug cartels, increasing drug addiction in many societies, a general weakening of the family, a decline in trust and social solidarity in many countries, ethnic, religious, and civilizational violence and rule by the gun prevalent in much of the world.

In city after city–Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Shanghai, London, Rome, Warsaw, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Bogota, Washington–crime seems to be soaring and basic elements of Civilization fading away. People speak of a global crisis in governance. The rise of transnational corporations producing economic goods is increasingly matched by the rise of transnational criminal mafias, drug cartels, and terrorist gangs violently assaulting Civilization. Law and order is the first prerequisite of Civilization and in much of the world–Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Middle East–it appears to be evaporating . . . .

On a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possible descending upon humanity.
The Clash of Civilizations, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 321.

Nearly fifteen years on, Huntingdon’s prognostication appears to be coming true. For a while the world “united” around the Coalition of the Willing in an effort to combat terrorism. The coalition fell apart over the war in Iraq.

The global balance of power is now definitely shifting. The West is in decline. Debt has progressively enslaved it to the creditor nations. In turn, debt in the West has been an inevitable outcome of welfare entitlement rights, which have cut through the moral fibre of Western nations with deadly force. The culture of welfare entitlement rights, universal throughout the West, has sliced through savings habits relentlessly (why save when someone else will provide for you). When savings evaporate, dependence results. It has also fed a culture of instantaneous demand gratification and an expectation of the omni-competence of government to solve each and every problem.

The Western liberal-academic complex has championed this pseudo-culture and bludgeoned the West into subjugation with its pagan human rights philosophies being propagated at every opportunity.

But inner spiritual subjugation inevitably transmutes into external subjugation. So the West is increasingly dependant, first upon its own governments, and then upon creditor nations, which fund their governments. Influence and power wanes correspondingly. Western powers, including the US, are simply unable to afford their military any longer. It is impossible over time to satiate rising welfare entitlement demands and the costs of global military superiority at the same time. Powers like China are now at the cutting edge of military research and technology. Normal service is resuming.

Huntingdon’s description is likely to prove remarkably accurate. But will it result in a Dark Age? For some it will. It would be a Dark Age for a globalist or an internationalist or someone who genuinely believes in the rectitude and possibility of a “New World Order”. But the decline of the arrogant self-righteous West is not a bad thing in itself. After all, the humanist Western Enlightenment bequeathed to the world the Reign of Terror, two world wars, the Age of Colonialism, Western imperialism, the idolatry of nationalism, National Socialism, the African slave trade, Communist dictatorships, the United Nations, and statism. Only the deeply prejudiced would mourn the passing of its bloody global hegemony.

In the coming phase, nations and governments would do well to mind their own business, return to basic principles, be friends with all, enemies of none, and adopt a foreign policy of strict, armed neutrality. Meanwhile for the covenant people of the Living God, the future remains bright. As Western idols come to “lie broke in the Temple of Baal” we expect people will be freed from their thrall.

It is through the vale of suffering that a rebellious people will finally return to the God of their fathers.

>In Memoriam

>The Significance of Samuel Huntingdon

On the 24th of December, 2008 Samuel P Huntingdon died. He served as one of the great political theorists of our generation. It is impossible to sum up adequately the contribution of such an intellectual in a few short lines so we will restrict ourselves to commenting upon some aspects of his work that have made a profound impression and for which we will remain thankful and indebted.

Huntingdon’s theories stirred great controversy in modern liberal academic Athens. True, he was one of them—but he was like another branch of the family that no-one really wants to talk about. A great deal of modern Athenian thinking is deterministic in some way or other. Men are seen as behaving in a certain way because they have been shaped or conditioned to behave that way. External factors are seen as governing human behaviour. Huntingdon was clearly a determinist: but his particular take on what determined human action and behaviour was offensive to most of his generation.

The most pervasive deterministic theory in Athens today is marxism and its socialist derivatives. Here, human action is shaped and conditioned by economic forces and conditions. Crudely put, marxism asserts that if someone is well fed and clothed relatively comfortably he will be a happy chappie. The solution of all the world’s problems, then, lies in ensuring that everyone is fed, watered, and clothed. Socialism sees that all the wars of the world, all the crime in the world, is over material goods and their ownership: if we ensure that everyone has an adequate and a “just” distribution of material goods, nirvana will break out.

The second most pervasive deterministic theory in Athens is the liberal-democratic theory. This particular form of determinism is the darling of the right-wing, of the neo-conservatives, of the libertarians, and their fellow-travelers. The idea is that if you just give people a taste of political liberty and freedom, it will result in significant improvements in their society, growing prosperity, respect for law and order, reduction in crime, and so forth. Here, a political order of liberty and freedom to be and do determines the well-being of man and society.

It was “neocon” determinism that helped persuade the US to invade Iraq. If Saddam were to be toppled and the Iraqi people given a taste of political freedom, the transformation of that country into a modern western liberal democracy complete with economic prosperity would be the eventual result.

Huntingdon was a more profound deterministic thinker than most of his generation. He rejected the reductionism of his “economic man” opponents and argued instead that human action is determined by cultures and that cultures are very complex, deeply rooted, visceral—and above all, shaped by religion. It is his insistence upon the power of religion that was so offensive to modern materialists–whether marxists or neocons. He argued that the clashes and wars to come would be fought not between communism and capitalism, nor between the tyrants and the democrats, but between opposed civilisations—in particular, the clash between Christianity and Islam.

He wrote:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

And again:

In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.

Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

Huntingdon was writing this in the 1990’s, long before 9/11, in his famous “Clash o f Civilisations” paper in Foreign Affairs, later expanded into a book. After 9/11 he achieved for a time the status of a prophet.

One of the distinctive features of his work is Huntingdon’s rejection of meta-history, or the idea that mankind is part of a cosmic plan of some kind. He refused to see in the United States a manifest destiny for the whole world; he argued instead that the US was a the product of a unique set of historical circumstances, unlikely to be replicated elsewhere. Attempts to “export” the US as a political and economic system were therefore doomed to failure.

He argued, and was hated for it by the liberal Left, that immigration should be restricted in the United States. A nation cannot cohere, he reasoned, without a common culture. It is culture that is the fundamental determiner of human society. Without a common culture, a nation will break apart. When the New York Times argued that the US historically had been built upon immigration, he replied that US immigration up to the mid-twentieth century had been predominantly Christian, and therefore shared the same attributes of US culture itself.

Huntingdon was wrong in rejecting meta-history; but he was right in rejecting any possibility of a coherent meta-history from within humanity itself. Had he understood the Christian faith better, he would have discerned that indeed the human race has a meta-history, but that it belongs not to man but to the Man, Christ Jesus, our Lord to Whom the Father has granted all authority and power.

Huntingdon was wrong in asserting the determinism of culture, but was right in stressing that mankind is powerfully conditioned and shaped by deeply held cultural beliefs, manifested in particular religions—whether truthful or idolatrous—and that these influences are far more powerful in shaping nations and society than a western liberal education or food in the belly. However, culture is deeply powerful but not ultimately deterministic, since when the light of the glory of God shines upon a people, they come from darkness to light.

Cultures are ultimately religious—yes, Huntingdon was right in this—but by the power of the Spirit of God, people can and do change from Unbelief (whether of the Islamic or modern secular Athenian liberal stripe). When their religion changes, their culture changes. But the change must come from God, not from men. Men are weak and their hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Only God can change the hearts of men through the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation.

We mark the passing of an Athenian giant. He was an embarrassment to many in that City. He was not liked amongst the effete liberals nor the gung-ho neocons. But his estrangement from parts of that City tells us more about Athens than it does about Huntingdon. We salute you and mark your passing from the sight of mortal men, with respect.