Political Dualism - Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, September 04, 2010
We are discussing mere Christendom as a construct for civilization. Since we have been here before, it is, more accurately, a construct for a renewed civilization.
How is this necessary? C.S. Lewis once famously observed the wishful thinking of unbelievers.
In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful (The Abolition of Man).
Notice that Lewis is talking about a collection of people, a culture, a society. We do this, and still expect to find that. We cut down our trees, and we wonder where the apples all went.
We must come to recognize that the true and living God is the giver all of all good gifts. If it is good, He gives it. If He didn't give it, it isn't good, and we shouldn't want to keep it. When believers argue against the idea of Christendom, the form of the argument usually goes something like this. "If we honor God in this way, won't these bad things follow?"
Now I am quite prepared to acknowledge that when a society dishonors God through pretended honor, then horrific things follow. That would be bad, and we shouldn't do it. But then the argument comes back again -- well, then, is it worth the risk? But this question places us in the position of arguing that our only two options as a society are gross hypocrisy and overt rebellion. Surely, that can't be right . . . but maybe that's just the preacher in me talking.
So, then, God is the giver of good, and it is the responsibility of man, in his collective capacity, to recognize this appropriately. We bow our heads over the Thanksgiving turkey, but it is also necessary for the president to say, on behalf of all of us, that we are grateful to (the true) God for His kindness. It is never fitting for us to skip that part, or to negate it through hypocrisy. God has poured out His goodness upon us.
"If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" (Matt. 7:11)
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (Jas. 1:17).
God is truly kind to us all, and nothing bad can come from us honoring that kindness, and giving glory to God for it. Find me a place in the Bible where the people are urged to keep God far away from their thoughts, and to make sure that if a freeling of gratitude creeps over them, to make sure to express it in the privacy of their own homes, or in a suitably zoned house of worship. As the prophet Jeremiah might have said, if confronted with folly on as high an order as this, "Give me a break."
In order to keep our culture from unraveling, from coming apart in tatters, we need to acknowedge Jesus. It is because of our refusal to acknowledge Jesus that the demons of postmodernism have come to haunt our halls of learning. Postmodernism is simply ancient sophistry, nothing more and nothing less. It is great at popping the balloons of arbitrary Platonisms, but after the fun of doing that, the floor is covered with little bits of spent balloons, and there is nothing left to do except start the orgy.
So our society must have Jesus. And if we honor Him, then we can have other good gifts -- gifts that are currently slipping from our grasp. We must have Jesus if we want science and reason. Yes, I know that many contemporary Christians have added their voices to the current clamor against science and reason, but this is just a function of such Christians getting hoodwinked by sophists. That's what sophists do best. Simple Simon went to the fair, and simple Christian goes to the deconstruction workshops at the teachers' convention.
Another gift we must continue to lose unless we learn to honor Jesus is the gift of soap, here used as synedoche for personal and cultural cleanliness. When Jesus leaves the region, it is not long before the unclean spirits return. Just as deaf and dumb spirits render the afflicted deaf and dumb, so filthy spirits render the afflicted filthy. One of the consequences of our culture's slide away from the true faith has been a marked rise in Christians making their peace with various forms of uncleanliness -- in food prep, in personal hygiene, with tattoos, in dumping litter, in sexual practices, or how they keep their living rooms and yards. And before someone rushes to offer the counter-example of enviro-activism, it should be said that such environmentalism is often just a feel-good compensatory move. There is frequently an inverse relationship between how clean the environmentalist wants the mountain streams to be and how clean the environmentalist himself is. I went to one of the very first environmental "teach-ins" at Ann Arbor, and walking out of the colliseum afterwards I was struck by how trashed the place was.
Jesus. Reason. Soap. Mere Christendom.
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