It’s not easy to get students to see outside themselves and the culture they inhabit.  Our experience conditions us to love what who we are.  This is natural, and even Biblical to some extent.  But of course many other great cultures exist/ed and studying History can shake us up and force us to confront ourselves anew.

That’s why I treasured the comment of one student years ago when we looked at the work of the Renaissance genius Brunelleschi, who advanced the science of perspective,

built the first dome in the western world since the Pantheon . . .

and entered the sculpture/engraving contest for the doors of the Florence baptistry . ..

among other things.  After taking all this in, one student remarked, “Boy, we suck,” which delighted my ears to no end. He understood that in many ways, our civilization has a long way to go.  I don’t love Renaissance culture, but clearly they had enormous achievements in important areas, and we justly remember them for it.  They put their time and money into innovating things beautiful and useful, things that have blessed succeeding generations for more than half a millennium.

What about us today?

I came across this Marginal Revolution post from a few weeks ago, where Tyler Cowen makes the point that India’s latest Mars mission cost less than Gravity, Hollywood’s latest space movie.  At various points in the history of the west different inspirations have taken hold.  At one point we built cathedrals, at other times we sailed the seven seas, or all wanted to speak French.  We had inspiration and aspirations.  This is where we spent our time, energy, and money.

The world will little remember Transformers: Age of Extinction, or Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides despite the fact that they cost $325 and $378 million respectively.  On balance it appears we put our money, our dreams, into merely entertaining ourselves.  We’re not, praise God, quite at “bread and circuses” yet, but the trend should concern us.

And given what I witnessed Sunday, we can’t even make good Super Bowl commercials anymore.  I miss the good ol’ days (exhibit ‘A’ below).

I realize it won’t shock anyone to say that Paul McCartney in his heyday was a great songwriter.  But listening to a few different songs recently made me realize that McCartney fails to get credit for his skill with the bass guitar.  The Beatles could write songs, yes, and they could sing.  But they wouldn’t have earned their reputation as one of the great all-time bands if they lacked genuine skill on their instruments, and McCartney is no exception.

McCartney’s father had a musical career largely playing show tunes and bouncy, playful big-band numbers, and McCartney has this sunny whimsy in his personality.  I think Lennon grew to resent this side of McCartney — the side that led him to write songs like, “When I’m 64,” and “Penny Lane.”  Lennon wanted “to rock” and saw songs like this as wimpy, soft, and (heaven forbid) “square.”  Lennon of course had a playful side too (i.e., “I am the Walrus”) but used it to destroy conventionality (“I am the Walrus”), not to write fun sing-along numbers.  Lennon loved to destroy — not always a bad thing.

But I’m convinced that McCartney’s whimsical side led him to take some risks with his bass playing at crucial moments.  First off, we can note that he could play a generally solid and fluid bass line, with “Hey Jude” as a good example. You can actually hear the bass line in the version of the song on the Love album — listen around the 3:06 mark:

But I have two examples of his playful side coming out in his bass playing:

Here is “Dear Prudence,” where the bass carries the song, especially from the 1:04 mark onwards:

While The Social Network I got re-exposed to “Baby You’re a Rich Man” (the song gets used expertly right at the end of the movie).  Especially in the chorus’ from about the half-way point of the song onwards, McCartney really unwinds the bass and spices up the song beautifully

The lesson perhaps for the Lennon’s of the world (more absolutist than most) is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Perhaps we could also say that certain skills or tendencies that annoy us in one way might have unexpected benefits in other ways.

When I first heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring I failed to be impressed.  I knew something of what I thought Stravinsky tried to accomplish, to make something “primal,” but felt that the orchestra may not have been the best tool for that purpose. Besides, I tended to hear jumbled nonsense.  Years later I thought again about the piece and admired it a bit more (but not that much more) when I perhaps gained greater understanding of what Stravinsky might have intended in relation to the end of the Victorian era (something I speculate on in this post).

When The Bad Plus, a jazz-rock piano trio and probably my favorite musical group, decided to play the piece I raised an eyebrow.  True, they had covered other 20th century classical pieces to great effect, but I didn’t really like the “Rite of Spring” all that much.  It didn’t seem like a piece open to reinterpretation or rearranging, and if they did not do this I feared that they would simply play the score rote with a drum beat over top.  Add to that, what ultimate spiritual significance could the piece have?  If Stravinsky hearkens back to a pagan past, could it be considered a historical reflection?  Or if he meant to contemporize the concept, to what extent could I “buy in” with a pagan message?

Thinking about this I recalled a story of G.K. Chesterton in his “Father Brown” stories (I cannot remember which one) where one of the characters has a spiritual transformation by witnessing a person devote themselves to an umbrella (I think) on a ship lost at sea.  He realized that such a person, though crazy, had more spiritual insight about God than his own vague vanilla theism, for the crazy man at least understood the nature of devotion and sacrifice.

The law clearly serves as a preparation for the gospel (Gal. 3:24), but we can wonder to what extent certain elements of pagan religion had their roots in anything beyond the revelation of creation (Rom 1:21).  The Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Norse all have myths about a dying and rising god.  Nearly all pagan religions involved notions of propitiation.  Perhaps this is one reason why Gentiles can directly bypass Judaism and go straight to Christ.  They too had a tutor.  Some early church fathers, notably, Eusebius, wrote about how paganism could be a praeparatio evangelica — a fancy word for “preparation for the gospel.”

Stravinsky’s own walk of faith had its ups and downs.  Raised in the church, he walked away from the faith in his later teens, returning to Christianity for good only in his early 40’s.  He wrote the “Rite” during his sojourning period.  But during this period he apparently did not slip into vaguely religious cant.  With the “Rite” he stayed connected to the crucial truths about death and life. Perhaps the “Rite” served as his own praeparatio evangelica

On Paul’s missionary journeys we generally see three classes of people: 1) “Ensconced” Jews, 2) “God-fearers,” or Gentiles who had converted to some kind of Judaism, and 3) Standard pagans. The “God-fearers” responded the best of these three, but the pagans responded better than the lifelong Jews.  No doubt many reasons exist for this, but one simply might have been complacency.  Perhaps living far away from the temple might have distanced them from the notion of sacrifice, of the need for life to come from death.  For all its faults the pagans still believed enough to offer sacrifices, and perhaps this opened them up to the truth of the gospel.*

So, back to the Bad Plus.

This is a great recording.  The fact that we have just two instrumentalists, and one of them a bassist, gives the music a more spare and earthy feel.  Dave King’s drumming roots the music far more to the ground than and orchestra could.  For me, this is a recording of the “Rite” that makes the music make sense and gives it the power Stravinsky no doubt intended, and for me at least, never achieved.  Here below is an excerpt of the last movement (Bad Plus fans will note their own personal exclamation point in the form of the end of their own song “Physical Cities”).  Normally I hate it when people say, “You have to listen to the whole album to get the full effect.”  In this case I think it true, but this gives one a good entry point.

Having experienced the prelude, we can now experience an “A.D.” reality, with a conductor who marvelously looks like he might have just arrived from a sacrificial dance (try pausing it right at .06 to see some wild hair).  A Merry Christmas to all . . .

*In his essay, “Christianity and Civilization,” historian Arnold Toynbee makes this very point.  I include a portion of it here . . .

. . . In this Catholic form of the Church, I see two fundamental institutions, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Hierarchy, which are indissolubly welded together by the fact that the priest, by definition, is the person with the power to perform the rite. If, in speaking of the Mass, one may speak, without offence, with the tongues of the historian and the anthropologist, then, using this language, one may describe the Sacrifice of the Mass as the mature form of a most ancient religious rite of which the rudiments can be traced back to the worship of the fertility of the Earth and her fruits by the earliest tillers of the soil. (I am speaking here merely of the mundane origin of the rite.) as for the hierarchy of the Church in its traditional form, this, as one knows, is modelled on a more recent and less awe-inspiring yet nevertheless most potent institution, the imperial civil service of the Roman Empire. The Church in its traditional form thus stands forth armed with the spear of the Mass, the shield of the Hierarchy, and the helmet of the Papacy; and perhaps the subconscious purpose –or the divine intention, if you prefer that language– of this heavy panoply of institutions in which the Church has clad herself is the very practical one of outlasting the toughest of the secular institutions of this world, including all the civilizations. If we survey all the institutions of which we have knowledge in the present and in the past, I think that the institutions created, or adopted and adapted, by Christianity are the toughest and the most enduring of any that we know and are therefore the most likely to last –and outlast all the rest. The history of Protestantism would seem to indicate that the Protestant act of casting off this armour four hundred years ago was premature; but that would not necessarily mean that this step would always be a mistake; and , however that may be, the institutional element in the traditional Catholic form of the Church Militant on Earth, even if it proves to be an invaluable and indispensable means of survival, is all the same a mundane feature which makes the Church Militant’s life different from that of the Kingdom of Heaven, in which they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the angels of God, and in which each individual soul catches the spirit of God from direct communion with Him –‘like light caught from a leaping flame,’ as Plato puts it in his Seventh Letter. Thus, even if the Church had won a fully world-wide allegiance and had entered into the inheritance of the last of the civilizations and of all the other higher religions, the Church on Earth would not be a perfect embodiment here on Earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church on Earth would still have sin and sorrow to contend with as well as to profit by as a means of grace on the principle of ?Ueae iUeio, and she would still have to wear for a long time to come a panoply of institutions to give her the massive social solidity that she needs in the mundane struggle for survival, but this at the inevitable price of spirituality weighing her down, On this showing, the victorious Church Militant on Earth will be a province of the Kingdom of God, but a province in which the citizens of the heavenly commonwealth have to live and breathe and labour in an atmosphere that is not their native element.

The position in which the Church would then find herself is well conveyed in Plato’s conceit, in the Phaedo, of the true surface of the Earth. We live, Plato suggests, in a large but local hollow, and what we take to be the air is really a sediment of fog. If one day we could make our way to the upper levels of the surface of the Earth, we should there breathe the pure ether and should see the light of the Sun and stars direct; and then we should realize how dim and blurred had been our vision down in the hollow, where we see the heavenly bodies, through the murky atmosphere in which we breathe, as imperfectly as the fishes see them through the water in which they swim. This Platonic conceit is a good simile for the life of the Church Militant on Earth; but the truth cannot be put better than it has been by Saint Augustine.

“It is written of Cain that he founded a commonwealth; but Abel –true to the type of the pilgrim and sojourner that he was– did not do the like. For the Commonwealth of the Saints is not of this world, though it does give birth to citizens here in whose persons it performs its pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom shall come–the time when it will gather them all together.”

This brings me in conclusion to the last of the topics on which I am going to touch, that of the relation between Christianity and progress.

If it is true, as I think it is, that the Church on Earth will never be a perfect embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven, in what sense can we say the words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven’? Have we been right, after all, in coming to the conclusion that –in contrast to the cyclic movement of the rises and falls of civilizations– the history of religion on Earth is a movement in a single continuous upward line? What are the matters in which there has been, in historical times, a continuous religious advance? And have we any reason to think that this advance will continue without end? Even if the species of societies called civilizations does give way to a historically younger and perhaps spiritually higher species embodied in a single world-wide and enduring representative in the shape of the Christian Church, may there not come a time when the tug of war between Christianity and original sin will settle down to a static balance of spiritual forces?

Let me put forward one or two considerations in reply to these questions.

In the first place, religious progress means spiritual progress, and spirit means personality. Therefore religious progress must take place in the spiritual lives of personalities –it must show itself in their rising to a spiritually higher state and achieving a spiritually finer activity.

Now, in assuming that this individual progress is what spiritual progress means, are we after all admitting Frazer’s thesis that the higher religions are essentially and incurably anti-social? Does a shift of human interests and energy from trying to create the values aimed at in the civilizations to trying to create the values aimed at in the higher religions mean that the values for which the civilizations stand are bound to suffer? Are spiritual and social values antithetical and inimical to each other? Is it true that the fabric of civilization is undermined if the salvation of the individual soul is taken as being the supreme aim of life?

Frazer answers these questions in the affirmative. If his answer were right it would mean that human life was a tragedy without a catharsis. But I personally believe that Frazer’s answer is not right, because I think it is based on a fundamental misconception of what the nature of souls or personalities is. Personalities are inconceivable except as agents of spiritual activity; and the only conceivable scope for spiritual activity lies in relations between spirit and spirit. It is because spirit implies spiritual relations that Christian theology has completed the Jewish doctrine of the Unity of God with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological way of expressing the revelation that God is a spirit; the doctrine of the Redemption is the theological way of expressing the revelation that God is Love. If man has been created in the likeness of God, and if the tue end of man is to make this likeness ever more and more like, then Aristotle’s saying that ‘man is social animal’ applies to man’s highest potentiality and aim –that of trying to get into ever closer communion with God. Seeking God is itself a social act. And if God’s love has gone into action in this world in the Redemption of mankind by Christ, then man’s efforts to make itself liker to God must include efforts to follow Christ’s example in sacrificing himself for the redemption of his fellow men. Seeking and following God in this way, that is God’s way, is the only true way for a human soul on Earth to seek salvation. The antithesis between trying to save one’s own soul by seeking and following God and trying to do one’s duty to one’s neighbour is therefore wholly false. The two activities are indissoluble. The human soul that is truly seeking to save itself is as fully social a being as the ant-like Spartan or the bee-like Communist. Only, the Christian soul on Earth is a member of a very different society from Sparta or Leviathan. He is a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and therefore his paramount and all-embracing aim is to attain the highest degree of communion with, and likeness to, God Himself; his relations with his fellow men are consequences of, and corollaries to, his relations with God; and his way of loving his neighbour as himself will be to try to help his neighbour to win what he is seeking for himself –that is, to come into closer communion with God and to become more godlike.

If this is a soul’s recognized aim for itself and for its fellow souls in the Christian Church Militant on Earth, then it is obvious that under a Christian dispensation God’s will will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven to an immeasurably greater degree than in a secular mundane society. It is also evident that, in the Church Militant on Earth, the good social aims of the mundane societies will incidentally be achieved very much more successfully than they ever have been or can be achieved in a mundane society which aims at these objects direct, and at nothing higher. In other words, the spiritual progress of individual souls in this life will in fact bring with it much more social progress than could be attained in any other way. It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. This is the meaning of the fable in the Old Testament of Solomon’s Choice and of the saying in the New Testament about losing one’s life and saving it.

Therefore, while the replacement of the mundane civilizations by the world-wide and enduring reign of the Church Militant on Earth would certainly produce what to-day would seem a miraculous improvement in those mundane social conditions which the civilizations have been seeking to improve during the last six thousand years, the aim, and test, of progress under a truly Christian dispensation on Earth would not lie in the field of mundane social life; the field would be the spiritual life of individual souls in their passages through this earthly life from birth into this world to death out of it.

But if spiritual progress in time in this world means progress achieved by individual human souls during their passages through this world to the other world, in what sense can there be any spiritual progress over a time-span far longer than that of individual lives on Earth, and running into thousands of years, such as that of the historical development of the higher religions from the rise of Tammuz-worship and the generation of Abraham to the Christian era?

I have already confessed my own adherence to the traditional Christian view that there is no reason to expect any change in unredeemed human nature while human life on Earth goes on. Till this Earth ceases to be physically habitable by man, we may expect that the endowments of individual human beings with original sin and with natural goodness will be about the same, on the average, as they always have been as far as our knowledge goes. the most primitive societies known to us in the life or by report provide examples of as great natural goodness as, and no lesser wickedness than, the highest civilizations or religious societies that have yet come into existence. There has been no perceptible variation in the average sample of human nature in the past; there is no ground, in the evidence afforded by History, to expect any great variation in the future either for better or for worse.

The matter in which there might be spiritual progress in time on a time-span extending over many successive generations of life on Earth is not the unregenerate nature of man, but the opportunity open to souls, by way of the learning that comes through suffering, for getting into closer communion with God, and becoming less unlike Him, during their passage through this world.

What Christ, with the Prophets before Him and the Saints after Him, has bequeathed to the Church, and what the Church, by virtue of having been fashioned into an incomparably effective institution, succeeds in accumulating, preserving, and communicating to successive generations of Christians, is a growing fund of illumination and of grace-meaning by ‘illumination’ the discovery of revelation or revealed discovery of the true nature of God and the true end of man here and hereafter, and by ‘grace,’ the will or inspiration or inspired will to aim at getting into Him. In this matter of increasing spiritual opportunity for souls in their passages through life on Earth, there is assuredly an inexhaustible possibility of progress in this world.

Is the spiritual opportunity given by Christianity, or by one or other of the higher religions that have been forerunners of Christianity and have partially anticipated Christianity’s gifts of illumination and grace to men on Earth, an indispensable condition for salvation –meaning by ‘salvation’ the spiritual effect on a soul of feeling after God and finding Him in its passage through life on Earth?

If this were so, then the innumerable generations of men who never had the chance of receiving the illumination and grace conveyed by Christianity and the other higher religions would have been born and have died without a chance of the salvation which is the true end of man and the true purpose of life on Earth. This might be conceivable, though still repugnant, if we believed that the true purpose of life on Earth was not the preparation of souls for another life, but the establishment of the best possible human society in this world, which in the Christian belief is not the true purpose, though it is an almost certain by-product of a pursuit of the true purpose. If progress is taken as being the social of Leviathan and not the spiritual progress of individual souls, then it would perhaps be conceivable that, for the gain and glory of the body social, innumerable earlier generations should have been doomed to live a lower social life in order that a higher social life might eventually be lived by successors who had entered into their labours. This would be conceivable on the hypothesis that individual human souls existed for the sake of society, and not for their own sakes or for God’s.But this belief is not only repugnant but is also inconceivable when we are dealing with the history of religion, where the progress of individual souls through this world towards God, and not the progress of society in this world, is the end on which the supreme value is set. We cannot believe that the historically incontestable fact that illumination and grace have been imparted to men on Earth in successive installments, beginning quite recently in the history of the human race on Earth, and even then coming gradually in the course of generations, can have entailed the consequence that the vast majority of souls born into the world up to date, who have had no share in this spiritual opportunity, have, as a result, been spiritually lost. We must believe that the possibilities, provided by God, of learning through suffering in this world have always afforded a sufficient means of salvation to every soul that has made the best of the spiritual opportunity offered to it here, however small that opportunity may have been.

But, if men on Earth have not had to wait for the advent of the higher religions, culminating in Christianity, in order to qualify, in their life on Earth, for eventually attaining, after death, the state of eternal felicity in the other world, then what difference has the advent on Earth of the higher religions, and of Christianity itself, really made? The difference, I should say, is this, that, under the Christian dispensation, a soul which does make the best of its spiritual opportunities will, in qualifying for salvation, be advancing farther towards communion with God and towards likeness to God under the conditions of life on Earth, before death, than has been possible for souls that have not been illuminated, during their pilgrimage on Earth, by the light of the higher religions. A pagan soul, no less than a Christian soul, has ultimate salvation with its reach; but a soul which has been offered, and has opened itself to, the illumination and the grace that Christianity conveys, will, while still in this world, of the narrower opportunity here open to it. The Christian soul can attain, while still on Earth, a greater measure of man’s greatest good than can be attained by any pagan soul in this earthly stage of its existence.

Thus the historical progress of religion in this world, as represented by the rise of the higher religions and by their culmination in Christianity, may, and almost certainly will, bring with it, incidentally, an immeasurable improvement in the conditions of human social life on Earth; but its direct effect and its deliberate aim and its true test is the opportunity which it brings to individual souls for spiritual progress in this world during the passage from birth to death. It is this individual spiritual progress in this world for which we pray when we say ‘Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven.’ It is for the salvation that is open to all men of good will –pagan as well as Christian, primitive as well as civilized– who make the most of their spiritual opportunities on Earth, however narrow these opportunities may be, that we pray when we say ‘Thy Kingdom come.’

A 9th grader recently asked a great question as we recently wrapped up our study of the Roman empire.  “Suppose that we could freeze Augustus (a great political genius) at the peak of his abilities and power and have him live forever. Would Rome still have eventually collapsed?”  The question immediately grabbed me, for it touches not just on Augustus, not just on Rome itself, but on the idea of decline and death in general.

We can look at this question in a number of ways:

• We can imagine Augustus as a hypothetically perfect ruler who never makes mistakes.  But other Roman mortals would make mistakes, and these would eventually bring Rome down.
• Or we can see neither Augustus or his fellow Romans as perfect.  But led continually by Augustus at his peak, the Romans would always be able, at minimum, to tread water and never sink, despite whatever mistakes and sins they commit.
• Or we can see the question as a musing on the whether or not decline has any purpose in a grand theological sense.  Supposing the near-perfection of Augustus and his fellow Romans, would God still “want” Rome’s decline?

I will speculate on this third option in hopes that it will cover the first two.

When we speak of God “wanting” something we immediately enter the delicate waters of His sovereignty and our free will.  Without commenting on this too much, we can safely say that God uses sin and evil to accomplish His purposes — and His main purpose is to save mankind at all times and places from their sins.  Many, for example, turn to God in the midst of suffering.  Does this mean that God wants us to suffer?  Again, it depends — He could prevent it, but often chooses not to because He knows suffering is always a key ingredient in Christian discipleship. The suffering we experience may be a direct result of our sin, the sins of others, or perhaps have no direct connection to sin at all (i.e. the Book of Job). In this latter case, God asks that we submit to a mystery we cannot understand.  The history of God’s people gives volumes of evidence for all of these. Might we say the same holds true, then, of nations and empires?

In the Greek world there existed Nemesis, who punished pride, and Tyche, who distributed blessings and “misfortune” throughout for purposes unknown to men.  In other words, suffering in the Greek cosmos might result from sin and it might not.  The Medievals pick up on this notion and see “Lady Fortune” as one of God’s agents in the world to work His purposes.  A person’s rise and fall might have something to do with their virtues or sins respectively, and thus teach him some lesson.  Or it might have another, unseen purpose, and the “lesson” from these events may or may not have anything to do with a person’s sin at all.  Perhaps a person’s rise and fall was just something they, or the people as a whole, needed to experience, either to prevent them from falling into pride (God disperses the people at the Tower of Babel not so much because of their existing pride but to prevent their future pride — the division of languages is a mercy), or for some other unknown reason.

Nebuchadnezzar’s famous dream in Daniel 2 touches on the same question.  God gives Nebuchadnezzar a vision of the rise of fall of many kingdoms, and Daniel tells us that,

“Your Majesty looked, and there before you stood a large statue—an enormous, dazzling statue,awesome in appearance.  The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.  While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.”

This dream strikes me not as one of judgment (unlike in Daniel 4), nor one of warning (as was the dream Joseph interpreted for Pharaoh).  Rather, Daniel just describes simply the way things will be.  And the purpose of this rising and falling is not so much to judge sin, but to shine the proper attention on the everlasting kingdom to come.   Babylon’s fall is simply part of God’s plan to redeem mankind, and one not connected directly to their sin.  Can we extrapolate this idea to other nations not mentioned?  Indeed, surely any nation or kingdom could be judged at any time for their sins, but such is not God’s way, it seems.  We must be careful in wishing too much for God’s justice, lest we get it. Perhaps the mystery of His sovereignty is a safer place to reside.

Regarding the student’s question then, I think we can answer in the negative.  Even if Augustus ruled perfectly and Romans lived more or less righteous lives, God works in ways to prevent us from getting too attached to any particular earthly order.  Understanding the redemptive power and purpose of suffering then, forms a necessary foundation for understanding History itself.

When we lose this perspective on life death becomes something to cheat — death grows more menacing than even God intended, for He means suffering and death prepare us for new and fuller life, not as a mere termination of life itself.  But this truth stands in jeopardy today.  We see young people delaying marriage, we see abortion perhaps largely because of fears and suffering that come with raising a child,* and we see the expansion of legal suicide — death without suffering.  Refusal to accept our finitude, then, brings more death, not less.

Such are the lessons of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

Dave

*The traditional marriage ceremony clearly stands as a death-new life ritual, especially for the bride.  She, the spotless sacrifice (she wears white) gets led to the altar.  She walks down the aisle, led by the father, to the altar.  “Mary Smith” is “sacrificed,” but she arises again to new life as “Mary Jones.”   The Christological implications of His Church as the bride are obvious.  We too must die so that we can become new creations, and we too receive a new name.  “I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it,” (Rev. 2:17).

Similarly, anyone who has been a parent can testify to the death of an old way of life that arrives with our bundles of joy.  And of course, it is the woman again who images for us most profoundly the death-new life ritual as she gives of her body for her children.

Gender roles are not absolute in every sense.  But when we alter the genders involved in marriage we obscure a gift of revelation from God, we destroy an image of salvation.  Perhaps too, not having this truth as the foundation for marriage has led to the rise of divorces.  Modern notions of marriage make it about personal fulfillment — the marriage will enhance and fulfill you as the individual.  But in reality marriage is instead about imaging and living death-new life in Christ. Marriage involves a kind of death to an old way of life (for both husband and wife), which leads to new life and new creation.  But unless a seed dies, it cannot bear fruit.  Again, it should not surprise us if failure to understand what God’s purpose for us in marriage leads to failure and frustration in marriages everywhere.  Marriage should kill part of our old lives, and we should not panic when we see this taking place.

Measuring religious decline is a tricky business.  How can we measure abstract ideas, principles, and so on?  Well, one helpful guide is to try and see if anything makes a move to displace an idea.

Some interesting but disheartening stuff from Marginal Revolution confirms that politics may be so divisive because politics is becoming a new religion.  By that I mean, politics is becoming the bell-weather by which many make their most important decisions.

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”

To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).

Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

These findings remind of Toynbee’s words,

A crushing victory of Science over Religion would be a disaster, for if Science succeeded in expelling the Higher Religions from the human heart, she would not be able to prevent the lower religions from taking their place (Matt. 12:43-45).

We need not call politics part of the “victory of Science” per se to see the similarities.

If we continue the trends outlined in the study above, politics will become almost tribal, and little will then separate us from barbarism.  De Tocqueville’s fears about the tyranny of the majority may then come fully home to roost.

The two greatest (in my opinion) theologians of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, had different visions of political life for Christians.  Augustine believed the “City of God” operated along different lines than the “City of Man.”  While Christians can potentially live at peace with the City of Man, the two really have nothing to do with each other.  Christians should not fool themselves into thinking that they can accomplish meaningful redemptive acts operating within the City of Man.  He writes,

When these two cities began to run their course by a series of deaths and births, the citizen of this world was the first-born, and after him the stranger in this world . . .

Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, (Genesis 4:17) but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above, although here below it begets citizens, in whom it sojourns till the time of its reign arrives . . .

And again,

. . . it has come to pass that the two cities could not have common laws of religion, and that the heavenly city has been compelled in this matter to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently, and to stand the brunt of their anger and hatred and persecutions, except in so far as the minds of their enemies have been alarmed by the multitude of the Christians and quelled by the manifest protection of God accorded to them. This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. Even the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisition of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can be truly called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God.

Aquinas saw more hope for integration of the Christian and political life.  With Aristotle, he saw governments as natural to life together.  We would still have something akin to government even if we lived without sin, for government is mainly about rightly ordering our life together, just as God rightly orders the orbits of planets.

Aquinas and Augustine complement each other in some parts and appear exclusive in others.  Their visions of government differ fundamentally, but the Church can take counsel from both.  Perhaps the model we adopt should depend on the context.  Augustine wrote in the waning days of the Roman Empire when a stark contrast between pagan and Christian could easily be seen.  Official power in Rome came with all the necessary attendant pagan trappings.  Rome dedicated itself to earthly glory.  In this environment more spiritual and even physical separation of Christians from government might be warranted.

Aquinas wrote in a much different time, when the overwhelming majority of people accepted key Christian doctrines and exceptions.  Some kings and nobles may not have been Christians themselves, but the hypothetical possibility of applying Christian principles to governance existed.  Thus, Christians could “use” the state more effectively and with less spiritual risk in his day.

We should ask which of these two contexts most fits our current situation.*

I recently attempted to read Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks.  After Book III or thereabouts I put in down in frustration.  I just could not keep up with all of the Hingest’s killing the Umvold’s marrying the Griselda’s.  I got lost in the maze.  I mentioned my frustration to a colleague and superior medievalist.  He replied along the lines of, “Of course those parts are confusing — Gregory doesn’t care about politics.  He’s really interested in what’s happening with the Church.  That’s where he focuses his attention and does his best writing.”  With this insight I plan on trying Gregory again sometime.

The time may have arrived for the American Church to follow Gregory’s lead, not just for our sake, but for the sake of those around us.

*We should think that Augustine preached a withdrawal from civic life altogether, or that he advocated for Christian “holy huddles.”  Rather, I see Augustine advocating an approach that would help the Church maintain its salty taste.  We shouldn’t enter games where the rules are by design stacked against the God’s command to love one another, to consider others better than ourselves.  Every Congressman, Senator, and President must think primarily of their base.  Every negotiation, every law (so it appears) is formed not from trust but from negotiating partners that start with an untenable position and then give grudgingly.