The Western Classics Are Still Doing Their Job

I recently watched an interview with David Denby, author of The Great Books. Denby is a journalist and film critic and not conservative or religious. He talks about the multiculturalist and feminist attack on the Western classics as "a white oppressive Euro-centric tradition." He said that when you got to the reasons behind their attack, it all has to do with failure to do failures to do justice as with racism and slavery.

Thus it was a failure of equal rights. Denby points out however, that these notions of equal rights come from the West. They are grounded in the belief that each of us has a soul worth developing and saving and representational government for all. He says, "They criticized the courses [in classical literature] in terms they got from the courses or from the culture itself." He adds, ironically, that this shows the books have done their job.

What's Wrong with Only Doing Evangelism and not Politics?

In his Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Wayne Grudem has a nice summary of Alvin Schmidt's work on Christian influence on the state. He also does a nice job critiquing the "do evangelism not politics" view represented by John MacArthur:

Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protection to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women's feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public [Christian] schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.

During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of "erring" Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.

In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes note that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders .... The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of the racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.

There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function. These foundations for British and American government did not come about as a result of the "do evangelism, not politics" view.

Schmidt also argues that several specific components of modern views of government also had strong Christian influence in their origin and influence, such as individual human rights, individual freedom the equality of individuals before the law, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state....

Therefore I cannot agree with John MacArthur when he says, "God does not call the church to influence the culture by promoting legislation and court rulings that advance a scriptural point of view." When I look over that list of changes in governments and laws that Christians incited, I think God did call the church and thousands of Christians within the church to work to bring about these momentous improvements in human society throughout the world. Or should we say that Christians who brought about these changes were not doing so out of obedience to God? That these changes made no difference to God? This cannot be true.

MacArthur says, "Using temporal methods to promote legislative and judicial change ... is not our calling--and has no eternal value." I disagree. I believe those changes listed above were important to the God who declares, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (amos 5:24). God cares how people treat one another here on earth, and these changes in government listed above do have eternal value in God's sight.

If the Christian church had adopted the "do evangelism, not politics" view throughout its history, it would never have brought about these immeasurably valuable changes among the nations of the world. But these changes did happen, because Christians realized that if they could influence laws and governments for good, they would be obeying the command of their Lord, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10) (Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Zondervan, 2010, 39-51).

Leithart's Defending Constantine points out that Constantine was the first Greco-Roman ruler to recognize the church as its own distinct polis, as Augustine would later distinguish the city of God and the city of Man. This distinction was completely lost on pagans who had worshipped their emperor as a god and assumed that Rome was sacked in 410 because the gods were angry that they weren't getting their sacrifices.

Prior to the Christianization of the empire, there was no distinction much less separation of state and religion. Leithart shows that the pagan Roman Empire was drenched in sacrifice to the Roman gods from top to bottom. Today, modern pagans want to use this Christian distinction between church and state to silence the church in the world at large. Shouldn't this get us talking politics again?

Chesterton on Beckett

Priceless Chesterton:

WHEN four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself 'sub judice'. The kings were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. ~GKC: What's Wrong with the World.

Stark Reality

The Rise of Christianity:  How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force .... by Rodney Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stark brings the eye of a sociologist to the secondary literature on early Christianity. His chapter on life in ancient Antioch is eye opening in terms of realism and Christian transformation of the Greco-Roman world.

Stark was confessedly a cultural Christian at the time, and is now calling himself an independent Christian. As such, he gets some things wrong but is on the right track. The work is invaluable, if for no other reason than it infuriates secularists, who think that human rights came from evolution and are sustainable apart from their real basis.


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A Tribute to C. S. Lewis or Jack's Hagiography

Jack's Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis by Douglas H. Gresham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as Gresham's autobiography Lenten Lands, which has much more about Gresham's relationship with C. S. Lewis, his stepfather. In this work, Jack is the hero and Mrs. Moore the villain, but Gresham tries to be understanding of the villain. Mrs. Moore is Jack's adopted mother who he cares for because of a promise he made to her son Paddy during WWI. Warnie, Jack's brother, plays the main supporting role and Gresham and his mother Joy Davidman are a part of the latter years of joy, pain, and struggle, but also victory in Christ.

The biography is a tribute to Jack, who, Gresham says, lived out his Christianity better than anyone he's ever known. The one inconsistency with this is that Jack seems almost incapable of tough love. I got the overwhelming impression that the demanding, self-pitying Mrs. Moore needed some gentle rebuking and firm resistance. But the only person who ever properly stood up to her, in Gresham's pages, was her daughter Maureen. After Maureen married and left the Kilns, she reappears once to tell her mom to back off and give Jack a rest, as he was convalescing in the hospital from exhaustion. Warnie and Jack's friends couldn't understand why Jack always gave in to her incessant pettiness. Whenever pressed, Jack told Warnie to "mind his own business." This also sounds like a failure to make oneself accountable. Warnie was a struggling alcoholic and, rather than intervene, Jack seems to have minded his own business.

That said, Jack does press on patiently and admirably. His sense of duty inspires. One also gets the sense that if it weren't for the inklings and his students Jack would've crumbled. Friendship is a powerful means of grace in Jack's Life, but there is little here about those relationships. This is not as surprising however, as how little there is about Jack's relationship with Gresham's mother and with Gresham himself. Mrs. Moore and Warnie have the most ink next to Lewis himself. I couldn't help feeling cheated.

I've read numerous biographies of Lewis and the Inklings, and this is perhaps the best on Jack's life in the trenches of WWI and his trials with Mrs. Moore. It is wonderfully accessible as it is written on about a fifth grade level and is usually brief, plain, and to the point. Gresham has many wonderful insights into things like Jack's nightmares and Lewis's love and care for his property-the kilns. This is a good place to start with understanding Lewis, but I recommend moving on to Gresham's Lenten Lands, George Sayer's Jack, Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, and Diana Pavlac Glyer's The Company They Keep.


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The Problem with the Sovereign Self

Sometimes post modernity is an amplification of modernity. For instance, both take for granted the sovereignty of the self. In modernity the self could know all. In post modernity, the self has to be more modest. Reality is too slippery, so let it go slip-slidin'-away. It's a beautiful destination right?

Right, except there are no standards for beauty except what the individual likes. So this leads me to the sovereign self of post modernity. The self is sovereign not because it can fit the universe into its brain but because it can remake the universe in its own image. That is as long as it doesn't run roughshod over someone else's sovereign self. So we live for pleasure in splendid isolation. Not too comforting is it?

Christianity has a unique opportunity to say to the modernist that we can reliably but not exhaustively know the world, and, to the post-modernist, that skepticism is not the final answer. This is because we are created by the Logos, in the image of the Logos, and thus our reason and senses were made to know the world. So we can say yes to certainty AND humility. Reason is made to know the world of God's natural and special revelation through the senses. Thus, the self is not sovereign but is its true self under God in Christ.