More than a few thinkers seem to presuppose a philosophy which ranges from Neoplatonism to a Manichaean dualism as a necessity to any advanced culture. For them, culture in such a sense is a product of tension between two kinds of being or two aspects of being. In addition, it is sin, although rarely so labelled, that adds color and meaning to life and culture for all too many thinkers. Leo Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with this sentence: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” As a student, I recall hearing this sentence cited again and again as a fundamental truth. Virtue and happiness, it would appear, are boring; sin and unhappiness are exciting. But Tolstoy’s sentence can as easily read, “Unhappy families are all alike; every happy family is happy in its own way.” In either case, it does not say much about life, but it says much about the writer.
The tension idolized by such neo-Manichaeans does not create cultures: it destroys them. It confuses issues and leads to a flight from basic issues and conflicts to imagined ones. It can also lead to a surrender, if flesh or matter is divided from mind or spirit, in that one aspect can be surrendered as incapable of resisting the power of the other. It can also lead to quietism, as one surrenders hope of victory in favor of a withdrawal from conflict into spiritual exercises.
Much of evangelicalism is today incapable of creating a culture. It either surrenders to the world, or flees from it, or both. In the 1950s, I spoke to a group of evangelical students at a major university. The meeting actually began and continued, until I spoke, with the singing of childish preschool choruses, such as “This little light of mine.” After I spoke (I had been suggested as a speaker, and none knew me), the group, unwilling to recognize the division between a Christian view of education, science, and culture, and fully committed to accepting the rank humanism and atheism of their studies and ignoring all conflict, happily revived itself by singing more choruses. Such people can build large neo-evangelical churches, but they cannot establish a Christian culture.
We have also the opinion of W. H. Auden that Christianity as such cannot establish a culture: I sometimes wonder if there is not something a bit questionable, from a Christian point of view, about all works of art which make overt Christian references. They seem to assert that there is such a thing as a Christian culture, which there cannot be. Culture is one of Caesar’s things. One cannot help noticing that the great period of “religious” painting coincided with the period when the Church was a great temporal power.174
Auden has impeccable credentials as a yahoo. First of all, he identifies culture with various art forms, such as painting, a true mark of the parasite and the collector, who can only see some
manifestations of a culture, never the culture itself, and identify the fruit as the roots. Second, Auden manifests his rootless, anticultural bent in a homosexual poem.175
Culture is not a product of artistic activities but of ideas and faith; it is the social and material consequences of religion. The reason why many peoples in the early centuries chose Christianity as their religion was a pragmatic one: Christianity could provide a workable social order. Because of the law-nature of biblical faith, order is inherent to it, and this was recognized by the barbarians.
Much later, in the Icelandic saga of Burnt Njal, this same pragmatic preference appears:
The Christian men set up their booths, and Gizur the White and Hjallti were in the booths of the men from Mossfell. The day after both sides went to the Hill of Laws, and each, the Christian men as well as the heathen, took witness, and declared themselves out of the other’s laws, and then there was such an uproar on the Hill of Laws that no man could hear the other’s voices.
After that men went away, and all thought things looked like the greatest entanglement. The Christian men chose as their Speaker Hall of the Side, but Hall went to Thorgeir, the priest of Lightwater, who was the old Speaker of the law, and gave him three marks of silver (This was no bribe, but his lawful fee) to utter what the law should be, but still that was most hazardous counsel, since he was an heathen.
Thorgeir lay all that day on the ground, and spread a cloak over his head, so that no man spoke with him; but the day after men went to the Hill of Laws, and then Thorgeir bade them be silent and listen, and spoke thus: “It seems to me as though our matters were come to a dead lock, if we are not all to have one and the same law; for if there be a sundering of the laws, then there will be a sundering of the peace, and we shall never be able to live in the land. Now, I will ask both Christian men and heathen whether they will hold to those laws which I utter?” They all said they would.
He said he wished to take an oath of them, and pledges that they would hold to them, and they all said “yea” to that, and so he took pledges from them.
“This is the beginning of our laws,” he said, “that all men shall be Christians here in the land, and believe in one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but leave off all idol worship, not expose children to perish, and not eat horseflesh. It shall be outlawry if such things are proved openly against any man; but if these things are done by stealth, then it shall be blameless.”
By all this heathendom was all done away with within a few years’ space, so that those things were not allowed to be done either by stealth or openly.
Thorgeir then uttered the law as to keeping the Lord’s day and fast days, Yuletide and Easter, and all the greatest highdays and holidays.176
The saga has reference to the meeting of the Althing in AD 1000. It was preceded by some conflict, including some aggressive acts by Christian leaders. After the very strongly Christian settlement, paganism continued in Iceland, despite the official Christianity. Why, then, here and elsewhere, the surprising shift in religion? In some cases, the Christians were easily massacred and eliminated, but in other cases, despite the deeply imbedded and continuing paganism, Christianity was adopted when it could have been suppressed.
The force of the new religion as a law power was clearly recognized by the pagans. Just as the American Indian recognized the superior value and power of the white man’s gun and was quick to adopt it, so the barbarians recognized the power of the Christian faith and were ready to utilize it for pragmatic reasons. In the 1940s, I was told by American Indians that the white man was superior because of the Bible religion, but they were unwilling to adopt it because they recognized that the white man was abandoning it for evolution, which must mean greater power. Superior power is readily desired, and Christianity’s cultural force has been a major missionary factor, in that various peoples have been attracted to the faith because of its ability to order and motivate society.
Christian faith has material and social consequences when it is true faith, when it obeys God’s words. This is the repeated statement of Scripture, as witness not only all of Deuteronomy 28 but also Leviticus 26. In Leviticus 26:3-21, we are told,
If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give you peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish my covenant with you. And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of the new. And I will set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye shall not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.
176 George Webe Dasent, trans., The Story of Burnt Njal (London, England: J. M. Dent and Sons, [1911] 1944), 184- 85.
But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant: I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you. And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits. And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.
Certain things stand out very clearly in this declaration. First, God declares that He will capitalize the people that obey Him. This capitalization will include a variety of things, natural and social. He will bless His people with peace and safety, both necessary ingredients to the prospering of a culture. Their enemies will be scattered and defeated; internally, they will be free of problems from criminals and from the depradations of wild animals. Rain shall be abundant and helpful, and the harvests very rich and bountiful. Above all else, God will Himself tabernacle among them and make them His people.
Second, God declares that He will decapitalize a disobedient people. By bad weather, poor crops, wild animals, enemy nations, drought and much else, He will strip them of “the pride of your power” and leave them weak and impotent in the face of their problems. Clearly, such judgments radically decapitalize a country and shatter its culture.
Culture is an act of faith and the application of standards and ideas to the disciplines of life and to life itself. When a culture denies its faith, it also negates its life and practice. Unless it adopts another and a viable faith, it commits suicide. The humanism adopted by modern culture has had the capital of Christian civilization, but this capital is rapidly disappearing. Modern civilization is as a result in crisis.
Third, the basic capital of any society is in the realm of faith and ideas, and, inescapably, because man is a unit, his faith and ideas have very practical consequences: they create a culture. God declares that this premise of all stable culture is to “walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments” (Lev. 26:3). When men deny God, they thereby deny themselves also, and finally have nothing, because apart from God all things collapse into meaninglessness and void. In the nineteenth century, the poet Edward Rowland Sill saw the collapse of faith as the “Infirmity.” In a poem by that name, he wrote:
What is the truth to believe,
What is the right to be done? Caught in the webs I weave
The bright wind flows along,
Calm nature’s streaming law, And its stroke is soft and strong
As a leopard’s velvet claw. Free of the doubting mind,
Full of the olden power,
Are the tree, and the bee, and the wind,
And the wren, and the brave may-flower. Man was the last to appear,
A flow at the close of the day; Slow clambering now in fear
He gropes his slackened way. All the up-thrust is gone,
Force that came from of old, Up through the fish, and the swan,
And the sleak king’s mighty mould. The youth of the world is fled,
There are omens in the sky, Spheres that are chilled and dead,
And the close of an age is nigh. The time is too short to grieve,
Or to choose, for the end is one: And what is truth to believe,
And what is the right to be done?177
Because the faith that established truth and right and wrong was gone, Sill felt that “the close of an age is nigh.”
Fourth, while God declares that a strict causality, in the form of rewards and punishments, will prevail with respect to His law, there is also more than that, the personal factor, His covenant: God declares, “I will... establish my covenant with you.... And I will set my tabernacle among you” (Lev. 26:9, 11). It is always the totally personal God with whom we have to reckon. Culture is not a product of causality and the world of animals. Ants, baboons, and bees all have very interesting and divinely ordered lines; their worlds manifest the order which is God’s handiwork. Progress, history, and culture are, however, beyond them, nor can they establish civilizations. These are products of persons created in the image of God and products of their relationship, explicit and implicit, with the sovereign and omnipotent God. Behind the basic capital of faith and ideas are persons, and, supremely, the personal and triune God.
Any philosophy or theology which tends to depersonalize the world and man will to that extent inhibit and destroy the development of culture and civilization. Materialism, naturalism, idealism, Neoplatonism, Manichaeanism, Monophysitism, Arianism, and other like ideas tend either to depersonalize or divide reality, or both in some cases, and, to that degree, there is an inhibition on the growth of culture. Only as we see the unity of creation under God, and recognize that behind all causes is the totally personal cause, the sovereign and triune God, can culture, the expression of personality in practical and immediate forms, flourish and express man’s cultural mandate. A false or deformed doctrine of communion means a deformed community and culture.