“The Left has now won, and Leftism is an auto-immune disease. It has nothing to do with any of the diseases of paganism. It is completely and wholly a reaction to Christianity.”

In an article on the Trinity House blog, he makes some helpful observations concerning the ability of humanity to turn anything into rebellion against God — including many of the blessings of Christianity.

Victimhood and the Gospel

The texts of Christianity have been slowly at work, under the power of the Holy Spirit for 2000 years now. If we could be magically transported back into the world of two millennia ago, modern Americans would be shocked at the cruelty of that world. There was no concern for the victim. Now things have reversed, and it is necessary to shroud oneself in the garb of victimization in order to have any aura of moral respectability. One can see satanic cleverness in the evolution of the modern world. As the victim has been rehabilitated, it is now possible to exploit very old fashioned possibilities from that position. The Gadarene madman of the modern world might have been able to use his life and experience as a platform for new acts entirely unknown to antiquity.

Fredrick Nietzsche, from a profoundly anti-Christian perspective, spoke of a “transvaluation of values.” His claim was that Christianity universalized and further developed what he saw as the perversions of Hebrew “slave mentality” and morality.

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Image by Doug Hayes (I think)

Hence are we called atheists. And we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of righteousness and temperance and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity. Justin Martyr (103-165), First Apology VI

I should like to propose a thesis that may seem somewhat unlikely for a Christian theologian: namely, that the atheists are right.

Or, at least some of them are. Insofar as they contend against the existence of God, or attack the authenticity of the Bible, or pit faith against reason, I would say they are badly mistaken.

But there is another form of atheism, which Professor Merold Westphal of Fordham University calls ‘the atheism of suspicion’. This form of atheism is represented by the works of those great nineteenth and early twentieth century figures Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and to some extent Darwin (or at least, his descendants). The work of these scholars serves to expose the bad conscience of much religious belief.

They were less interested in evidence than in motives. In their different ways they believed that they could undermine belief in religious propositions by showing that believing often served less than pure ends. As Westphal puts it, “Its target is not the proposition but the person who affirms it, not the belief but the believer.”

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The view that the death and resurrection of Christ purchased back for us the innocence (and innocent world) of Genesis 1 seems extremely childish to me now. How did we miss the fact that the Old Testament is filled to overflow with deaths and resurrections, personal, familial, national and imperial? There was no death before sin, but the scenario deliberately set up by God in Genesis was to bring Adam to a point of making a wise judgment. He was to crush the head of the serpent. In a sense, he was to kill death. His obedience would guarantee future life, but his obedience itself was a form of death. Obeying God is a daily dying, but as Paul understood, it was a dying so that there might be rejoicing on the other side. Obedience is a death that makes a judgment call to purchase, nay, miraculously create, new life. The original creation was set up, wound up, to go somewhere better, to be something greater.

Peter Leithart gave some lectures on the writings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 2008:

In Rosenstock-Huessy’s view, the once-for-all event of all once-for-all events is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

“The crucifixion and the last judgment would not be known today as everyday occurrences in our lives if they had not occurred one-for-all with terrific majesty.” The whole experience of death and resurrection is something that Jesus plants into human history, and then reproduces in countless ways.

“In the crucifixion, with the accompanying darkness, the rending of the curtain in the temple, etc, that which is to happen finally has happened once already. For the faithful, the second coming of Christ as judge really began with His first coming. The crucifixion judges us all because we know that we would have behaved like Pilate or Gamaliel or Peter or Judas or the soldiers. The last judgment will make known publicly what those who have died with their first Brother already experience daily: that our Maker remains our Judge.”

Because of what Jesus’ death and resurrection bring into human history, this is the beginning of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “the Christian era.” It is a new epoch of human history. It is an irreversible epoch of human history. Once the Christian era begins, you can try to leave it, but you are still borrowing what it provided for you. You still remain, he says, “a man of Jesus.” You can either resent the fact that Jesus is your Master, as Nietzsche did, or you can submit to it and be content with being “Jesus’ man.” Those are the only two options in the Christian era.

But it is the once-for-all event of the cross which has made possible the experience of repeated deaths-and-resurrections in life. Rosenstock-Huessy is not just talking about the resurrection of our bodies from the dead. He does believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus and of humanity at the last day. But he says that the death and resurrection of Jesus, planted into humanity, makes death and resurrection a daily occurrence for men, and a civilisational occurrence in the history of the world.

How is death and resurrection a daily occurrence? One premise that is found all the way through Rosenstock-Huessy’s work is that life means vulnerability, life means suffering. To live means to experience shock, to experience failure. Human beings are always being torn in pieces. We are always being torn apart. We always have conflicting demands placed on us. People place conflicting demands on us. Our own conscience places conflicting demands on us. And many of these conflicting demands are equally valid and yet we have to make a choice. So we are constantly faced with these kinds of existential crises.

What Jesus provides in His death and resurrection is not just the idea that these experiences lead to life, but the reality that these experiences of being torn, of suffering, and dying and putting away the old are gateways to new life. The cross becomes the gateway to renewal. That is the reality that Jesus planted in human history.

In 1946, in “The Christian Future,” Rosenstock-Huessy describes a time in his own life some twenty years earlier when he felt like he was experiencing the cross. He writes, “I felt that I was undergoing a real crucifixion. I was deprived of all my powers, virtually paralysed, yet I came back to life again a changed man. What saved me was that I could look back to the supreme events of Jesus’ life and recognise my own small eclipse in His great suffering. That enabled me to wait in complete faith for resurrection to follow crucifixion in my experience. Ever since then it seemed foolish to doubt the historical reality of the original crucifixion and resurrection.” That is an interesting existential argument for the resurrection: “I am convinced of the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection because I know what it’s like to die and rise again.”

This is the possibility opened for us by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Death ceases to be something to be avoided, something to be bypassed, something to be ignored. Instead, death becomes something to be anticipated and accepted as something that has a positive value for life. The death that he is talking about is a death to anything that has gripped us, any form of life that we have been living (such as an earlier occupation, or an earlier stage of life such as singleness, divorce, or death of a spouse). All these can be embraced as pathways to new life instead of as things that bring an end to your life.

One of the ways in which Rosentock-Huessy expresses this is in Christianity’s capacity to slough off old gods through Jesus’ revelation of the living God in His death and resurrection. The living God is not the God who is timeless but the God who endures through death — through every death, every epoch of history — into new life.

By “gods,” he means any power that dominates us, any power that poses to us a question of life and death. But Jesus shows us that we can die to these gods and still have new life. He says, “By learning to anticipate the inevitable end which the pagan fights off, man has robbed death of its paralysing gloom. Anticipating the worst, he can bury his dead in time. A pagan was ready enough to die physically for his family, temple, guild, nation or race, but these he held to be immortal and therefore without flaw. He could not admit the necessity of letting them die when the time had come, hence all went down together.” What Christianity reveals is the possibility of giving up even these deepest loyalties, these temporary “gods,” and still hoping for something new.

You might devote yourself for a considerable period of your life to the pursuit of money. It dominates you. You do what your pursuit demands you to do. What happens when there is a financial crisis? Can you find a new life on the other side of that. Rosenstock-Huessy says, Christianity says, “Yes, you can! There is life on the other side, beyond the death of the old god, the life of the living God who endures all crises, all death-and-resurrection experiences.”

Anticipating death is one of the particular virtues of Christian civiliation. The civilisation is not set up to keep death at bay, but rather its pattern of life is set up to anticipate death and to embrace deaths of various sorts in recognition that those deaths are going to lead to resurrections.

“Christianity is not a decadent worship of death for its own sake, (as someone like Nietzsche would say) but the discovery that including death in life is the secret of the fullness of life.” Monks and hermits, for example, die before their deaths. They die to their families, they die to any pursuits they might have had outside of the monastery, but their existence proves that death is an essential element of living. In fact, death is its sharpest ingredient. Any father, manager or teacher has to practice resignation and let the young learn by doing things he could do better himself. That’s a kind of death, for he knows that one day he must die and they must take his place. That is anticipating death. Christianity gives us the assurance that this is possible. If people don’t anticipate death, then the various tearings in life make us vulnerable to all kinds of evils. [1]

Some more thoughts:

This is the essence of Covenant succession, and this generational succession was built into the Creation. The genealogies matter. Adam, as father, manager and teacher, was to anticipate death, not ignore it or avoid it. He was to pass sentence, avenge his “church” and execute judgment upon sin for the sake of his future offspring — embodied in the Mother of all Living.

The sentence was death. Adam was to administer the curse delegated to him by God upon the serpent. Adam himself was to bring both death and life into the world through this wise judgment. But Adam failed. The Bible gives us a Messianic line from Adam to Jesus. The same test is played out over and over, in persons, families, nations and empires — and even Covenants. All bodies, all Tabernacles, wax old and pass away, and so do the old gods, the old satans.

But the living God is always doing something new. He implants Himself into the history. Israel sins and God gets torn up over it. Yahweh makes Himself vulnerable, a Tabernacle, a house designed to die. Yahweh tears Israel up and then brings her out of the grave, but, unlike Adam, He understands that this can only be accomplished if He goes through it with her.

As a new Adam, Jesus brought death and life into the world — death for the serpent, and life for us. But we are not sky-watching, heaven-pining pietistic gnostics. The ascended Jesus is still, by His Spirit, Emmanuel: God here with us.

This new commission is also a succession, a new history, a new conquest. Jesus has a lot to teach us along the way as He makes us as wise concerning good and evil as He is. And He is building an entire worldful of such people, a civilisation of self-sacrifice, passing sentence upon death, with death, until death is destroyed. As Christians become more and more “epistemologically self-aware,” obedience-as-Covenant-tool becomes the foundation of civilisation, the process of resurrecting the nations, until the Church itself is the Mother of All the Living. This is the postmillennial hope. [2]

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[1] Biblical Horizons conference lectures are available from www.wordmp3.com
[2] On the Roman church’s failure to understand this process, see Prisoners of the Future.

Last night I watched a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox on 5 of Dawkins’ theses from his book The God Delusion. Lennox (who recently visited Australia to speak at the Easter Convention here in Katoomba) was delightful and made some strong statements. Dawkins was, to me, surprisingly earnest. But I did see in Dawkins’ responses to Lennox support for the observations of David Bently Hart that I read in a recent post by Justin Taylor. The new atheists are not the same as the old atheists:

David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), reviewing 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, laments:

How long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for? . . .

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any. . . .

I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

You can read the whole thing at First Things. He goes on to examine the “anecdotal enthymemes” of Christopher Hitchens, and later argues that “The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche.”

It might irk many to hear it but Judaeo-Christian morality is a foundation stone of Western democracy and, before we pull it out, perhaps we should ponder its strengths as well as its weaknesses. Because the West still hasn’t found an answer to the questions Friedrich Nietzsche’s fool posed in 1882.

Nietzsche wrote of the lunatic “who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around, just then he provoked much laughter.

“Why did he get lost?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone away on a voyage? Or emigrated?

“Thus they yelled and laughed.

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

“Whither is God,” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? Were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this Earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?”

Nietzsche was an atheist. But he was honest enough to know that declaring God dead opened the horrifying prospect of having to rethink morality. He knew he had removed the keystone on which the West was built.

Our society rests on the assumption of moral absolutes: right, wrong, good and bad. That is based on the belief that there is an objective truth and from that firm foundation we can judge good and evil. Our society rests on the presumption of God.

Remove God and you hurl us into chaos: none of the comfortable assumptions remain and the entire basis of society has to be reinvented. Or you could just live a lie.

Nietzsche was courageous enough to take on what he saw as the superhuman task of trying to define morality in the absence of God. Most atheists never even imagine the question. Most have never confronted the reality of what the death of God means to the West.

We made the laws that govern our society on the Judaeo-Christian assumption of a righteous God, and we still behave as if there is one even though many no longer believe it.

We now live in a moral halfway house. When we face moral questions today we are deeply uncertain of how to proceed, because we have erased the baseline.

…but slack on Creation.

“What’s so great about Christianity? D’Souza gives this question a book-length answer, exploring Christianity’s effect on government, science, philosophy and morality, while answering the objections of atheists along the way. He also gives a warning: most of the West is living on the inheritance of the Christian culture handed down to it by previous generations, but the secular worldview is slowly eating away at the best things Western culture offers. In a mostly masterful apologetic for Christianity, D’Souza shows that Christianity is intellectually reasonable and produces positive results in the cultures that adopt it, and that atheism is unreasonable and produces worse results than even Christianity gone wrong. However, D’Souza’s position on creationism is a major flaw in an otherwise superb resource…”

“…This hostility to religion exists in spite of the fact that most of the rights that the secularists hold dear have their origin in Christianity. D’Souza shows that Western civilization owes its survival to Christianity, and that ideas such as limited government, religious tolerance, human dignity and equality, and individual freedom all have explicitly Christian origins. Western culture also owes much to Christianity; the great works of art, music and architecture were overwhelmingly influenced by Christian themes, even those created by people who rejected the Christian faith. Many secularists want to leave Christianity behind while keeping the benefits it has had on Western civilization, but D’Souza echoes Nietzsche’s warning: Though some of the values built on Christianity seem to have taken on a life of their own, they are still inextricably tied to their Christian foundation; if that foundation is removed, the values that were built on that foundation will inevitably vanish as well.”

“…He is wrong about Irenaeus, who accepted a literal interpretation of the days of Genesis 1. D’Souza may have misunderstood Irenaeus’s view that the six (literal) days of creation were types of six thousand-year periods which made up the totality of human history. That is, each Day of Creation corresponded to (but was not equal to) one thousand years of subsequent Earth history, and the seventh day of rest corresponded to a future Millennium. For this to work, the days had to be literal—and Earth history had to be only a few thousand years.

Augustine and Origen did not interpret the days of creation literally, but they also were against interpreting the days as long periods of time. Instead, they believed that the days must be instants, because God’s commands would have been obeyed immediately; they did not think it could be as long as a literal day. Both of these explicitly stated that the Earth was only a few thousand years old at the time they wrote, and strongly denounced long-age ideas.”

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