Even without a Christian civilization, Christianity remains a holy thing, but it would be a little thing.
Partly because of a bad bargain that various Christian traditions made in coming to the United States, dominated after the War Between the States, by a liberal, non-Creedal form of Protestantism, Catholics and Orthodox and Lutherans and other sorts of sacramental, maybe Sacramental, Christians act as if having forgotten about the dependence of a complex religion upon the entire context in which we live. As Jews learned over the centuries in which they had to live in the civilizations of others, mostly Christian or Islamic, a people who held on to such a rich and complex faith had to retreat to a `ghetto’ in which they raised their children and protected their more `innocent’ adults by providing a more complete environment. It takes a great effort, most often combined with a sophisticated intellectual outlook, to be a sacramental Christian in a Western Civilization which is desacralized. The West is most certainly not paganized; it is desacralized. From the Christian viewpoint, this is far worse because the people of the West no longer even have a sense of the divine or even a primitive pagan sense of spiritual beings. It’s harder to talk with desacralized people than with paganized people about even the nature of truth—even the existence of truth, let alone specific beliefs or speculations about important matters.
The language and concepts used to discuss and explore and teach and carry out politics, culture, mathematics and science, and everything else are all explicitly desacralized in the modern West. Too many Christians, some of them very devout indeed, think to paint holy colors upon our desacralized civilization, even upon our violently barbarian sports, and think to have baptized what is not compatible with the Body of Christ.
To be Christian is to prepare ourselves to be part of the Body of Christ, prepare ourselves to share the life of Jesus Christ and His Father and Their Spirit. To do that is to learn how to properly use and enjoy the world and all it contains. Our modern school systems and our religious school systems have de-emphasized memorization of traditional texts, including the Bible, and those empty spaces in the minds of children have been filled with the life-stories of morally disordered figures from the sports and entertainment industry, with morally disordered or even evil lyrics, with knowledge of some disordered collections of facts and urban legends about the genetic foundations of sexual orientation and other matters which are far more complex than Catholic apologists, professional and amateur, imagine.
The world, indeed—the entirety of Creation, is far more complex than Catholic apologists, professional and amateur, imagine.
I wish to respond an intelligent and interesting post by Razib Khan, a geneticist born into a Muslim family who is now an atheist. Khan is interested in theology and history, a good match for a geneticist in this age when there is much exploration of the ancient genes found in long-buried corpses and the ancient genes found in each and every one of us. In particular, he has written a number of good posts on what we might call “Christianity in the real world,” among many good posts on similar issues.
Khan’s post is: Institutional Religion Needs Institutions. This short essay begins:
It is a common assertion to state Christianity helped maintain the continuity of Classical civilization down to the Medieval era, through the “Dark Age” of Europe after the Fall of Rome.
This wouldn’t be my assertion, though I am a practicing Sacramental Christian currently in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, as one who advocates the view that the Church Herself is but an organ, an all-important central organ to be sure, in the Body of Christ, I would assert that Western Christianity became so successful and so powerful just because the Church was willing to build upon the foundation of Roman Classical (`pagan’) Civilization and then worked hard to maintain what eventually became a very complex `hybrid’ civilization and to support massive rebuilding efforts following times of trouble. In modern times, the Churchmen seem to have not inclined to do anything of the sort (except for Joseph Ratzinger and a few others) and the Roman Catholic Church seems not to have the resources of creative energy and imagination to maintain or rebuild a civilization; it is different from but similar to the situation of the Germanic tribes which conquered much of the regions north of the Alps inhabited by Romanized Celts and soon discovered they didn’t understand and couldn’t care for that which they had conquered. Western Christians have turned themselves into peoples semi-alien to the Western Civilization they inherited; they have no other civilization and are barbarians, however good they are at matching a wine with each course of a banquet.
Unfortunately, most Christians have only a vague belief in the Body of Christ, largely because even members of Sacramental Christian churches are largely corrupted by modern ideologies of radical individualism. Even Sacramental Christians think the Eucharist to be but a symbolic joining of individuals into nominal communities.
Khan makes another good point but, in my opinion, misinterprets it when he writes:
What I would suggest is that complex human phenomena, such as Christianity, are not reducible down to abstract sets of ideas in terms of how they manifest themselves in our world. That is, Christianity is only marginally about the Athanasian Creed, or even the sacrifice made by the Son of God, from a naturalistic perspective. Rather, the religion includes a broader set of institutions and folkways which derive from the culture at large (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church is the “ghost of the Roman Empire”). Additionally, it also expresses common human intuitions about the world and social relations.
While disagreeing with Khan’s claim that the creeds are marginal to Christianity, disagreeing more strongly that “the sacrifice made by the Son of God, from a naturalistic perspective” is marginal to Christianity, I would support the general thrust of this claim. In the next paragraph, Khan brings matters to a tight focus: “[A]s a complex cultural phenomenon, Christianity is conditional on complex culture.” Without that “complex culture,” better still—civilization, Christianity is a bound to be a sect of small communities with most being perhaps underground communities. That’s not what God wanted Christianity to be, not just because He desires many to be His friends, wishes many to share His life, but also because the Body of Christ is the point of it all. We individual human beings are saved as part of that Body and not as a small or large gathering come together on a voluntary or contractual basis.
From another direction, we should also consider the question: Is a limited, mortal creature suited for life without end, life shared with God? In all honesty, the answer is, “No.” If we accept God’s promise of salvation, we must remember first that this salvation was promised to some tribes of Semites, Hebrews, as members of the people of Israel and then to all the friends of Jesus Christ as members of the Christian Church, however God Himself defines either the “people of Israel” or the “Christian Church.”
We will be able to tolerate life without end just because we, first, will retain our own minds but also share the minds of great scientists and historians. We will retain our own hearts but share the hearts of spiritual giants. We will retain our own hands but share the hands of political reformers and carpenters. By way of becoming more fully members of the Body of Christ in Heaven, `points’ on the `manifold’ which is the Body, we can also share the mind and heart and hands of Christ and, through Him, share life with His Father and Their Spirit. It is only a complete, unified, and coherent civilization that can become the true Body of Christ, with the Church playing a central role. If the Church were the entirety of the Body of Christ, we would be destined to become “church ladies” of television comedy fame; that would be a fate which would lead most human beings, male and female, to pray for the end of time.
Near the end of the essay, Khan writes:
What is true for Christianity is probably true for many complex human ideas and institutions that we think are here for good. The reality is that complexity of thought and contingency of logic are dependent on the surpluses generated by a a highly developed economy and centralized state.
Khan’s claim has enough truth in it that I’ll leave it unanswered in intellectual terms. In fact, the only possible answer is a strong, confident response by Christians, a response which leads to an understanding of the world in terms of Christian revelation. Elsewhere, and often, I’ve argued that such an understanding, expanded to cover all of Creation, is the true foundation of a civilization—ideally, a Christian Civilization, a new phase of the mortal life of the Body of Christ.
By responding properly to God’s Creation, in light of our Christian belief, we will build a new Christian civilization.