Congress should:
You would rather live in America than in Laos or Zimbabwe. This isn't
because Whites are superior to Asians or Africans.
You would rather live with Asians in Hong
Kong than stand in line for four hours with a bunch of Caucasians in
Moscow waiting to buy a quart of milk, and you would rather spend a week
at an all-black Southern Baptist Church camp than a week in a Soviet
Gulag, being tortured
by white atheistic communists. It is because Western Civilization is
better than Eastern Civilization. Western Civilization is better than
Buddhist Civilization or animist tribalism.
And this is because Western Civilization is Christian Civilization.
The Old Testament Prophet Daniel predicted the destruction of the
ancient imperial world, and the inauguration of a new world order under
Christ.
Daniel 2 31
“You, O king, were
watching; and behold, a great image! This great image, whose
splendor was excellent, stood before you; and its form was
awesome. 32
This image’s head was of fine gold, its chest and arms
of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33
its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. 34
You watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which
struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in
pieces. 35
Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold
were crushed together, and became like chaff from the summer
threshing floors; the wind carried them away so that no trace of
them was found. And the stone that struck the image became a
great mountain and filled the whole earth.
36
“This is the dream. Now we will tell the interpretation
of it before the king. 37You,
O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has
given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory; 38
and wherever the children of men dwell, or the beasts of the
field and the birds of the heaven, He has given them into
your hand, and has made you ruler over them all—you are
this head of gold. 39
But after you shall arise another kingdom [s] inferior to yours;
then another [t], a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule
over all the earth. 40
And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as
iron breaks in pieces [u] and shatters everything; and like iron
that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush
all the others. 41
Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and
partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength
of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with
ceramic clay. 42
And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron
and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong
and partly fragile. 43
As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with
the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just
as iron does not mix with clay. 44
And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up a
kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall
not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and
consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. 45
Inasmuch as you saw that the Stone [a] was cut out of the
mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron,
the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold—the great God
has made known to the king what will come to pass after this.
The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.” |
Notes - Geneva Bible, 1599
By gold, silver, brass, and iron are meant the Chaldean,
Persian, Macedonian [Greek], and Roman kingdoms, which would
successively rule all the world until Christ (who is here called
the stone) himself comes, and destroys the last. And this was to
assure the Jews that their affliction would not end with the
empire of the Chaldeans, but that they should patiently await
the coming of the Messiah, who would be at the end of this
fourth monarchy.
Daniel leaves out the kingdom of the Assyrians, which was
before the Babylonian, both because it was not a monarchy and
general empire, and also because he would declare the things
that were to come, until the coming of Christ, for the comfort
of the elect among these wonderful alterations. And he calls the
Babylonian kingdom the golden head, because in respect of the
other three, it was the best, and yet it was of itself wicked
and cruel.
(s) Meaning, the Persians who were not inferior in dignity,
power, or riches, but were worse with regard to ambition,
cruelty, and every type of vice, showing that the world would
grow worse and worse, until it was restored by Christ.
(t) That is, those of the Macedonians will be of brass, not
alluding to the hardness of it, but to the vileness with regard
to silver.
(u) That is, the Roman empire will subdue all these others,
which after Alexander were divided into the Macedonians,
Grecians, Syrians, and Egyptians.
(a) Meaning Christ, who was sent by God, and not set up by
man, whose kingdom at the beginning would be small and without
beauty to man's judgment, but would at length grow and fill the
whole earth, which he calls a great mountain, as in Dan 2:35.
And this kingdom, which is not only referred to the person of
Christ, but also to the whole body of his Church, and to every
member of it, will be eternal: for the Spirit that is in them is
eternal life; Ro 8:10.
|
Western Civilization is not Greco-Roman civilization. Rome
fell.
Western Civilization is Christian
Civilization.
Athens or Jerusalem?
Is America a Christian nation? Are the American ideals of
"equality before the law" and "the rule of law"
products of Christianity, or are they products of "the
Enlightenment," which restored principles of the Empires of Rome
and Greece, lost during the Christian "dark ages"?
On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 10:43:35 -0700, Libertarian Party Congressional
Candidate Joe Cobb
wrote:
| "The philosophy of the
ratifiers of the Bill of Rights" does not lie in their view
of supernatural powers or the long-traced connection between the
philosophy of individual rights, which they espoused, and
natural law ("the higher law"). As Jim Powell
points out in his masterly book, The Triumph of Liberty
(New York: Free Press, 2000), perhaps the first voice in favor
of the higher law was Cicero in republican Rome. He was
not a Christian, and the Greco-Roman pagan religion was not
constructed around the idea of a "law giver" as the
Mosaic religion is.
The truth of a higher law,
identified by F.A. Hayek in Law, Legislation and Liberty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) is
essentially the concept of "the rules of just
conduct," which the Greek philosophers identified as "nomos."
The fact that the monotheistic religions absorbed
this idea is no surprise, but it is completely wrong to say the
monotheistic religions invented it. |
The idea of an "Enlightenment" is wrong on all counts. The
Christian middle ages were not devoid of Greco-Roman influence. In fact,
Athens pervaded the middle ages. Thomas Aquinas is well known for his
efforts to synthesize Aristotle and Christ. Medieval Christians were
converts to Christ from Rome, and brought Rome into the Church. It was
Christian scholars who preserved the writings of the
"classical" age.
But there were some parts of Rome that could not be synthesized into
Medieval Christianity.
Greco-Roman philosophy was homosexual and fascist.
- • The word "Fascism"
comes from a Roman symbol of authority
- http://home.uchicago.edu/~janie/fasces.htm
-
- • Homosexuality and anti-Christian immorality were
pervasive in the Greco-Roman world
- Biblical
Sources of Western Sexual Morality
http://www.visi.com/~contra_m/cm/features/cm07_leithart.html
This philosophical conflict has long been described as the conflict
between Jerusalem (Christianity) and Athens (the Enlightenment).
Undergirding American capitalism and American prosperity are "family
values" which are antithetical to Enlightenment thinking.
America's Founding Fathers drew from the Bible and Christianity far more
than they drew from Rome. Clinton Rossiter notes
that even when they mentioned Rome,
The Roman example worked both ways: From
the decline of the republic Americans could learn the fate of free
states that succumb to luxury.
|
The
"classical" philosophers and
political thinkers of Greece and Rome had
little influence as well. It is important that
we pause to remember that the whole concept of
"representation" is a distinctively
Biblical concept and "representative
government" is an inheritance from
ancient Israel through the Reformation. It is
not in any sense borrowed from Greece or Rome
as we are so often told. Russell Kirk makes
this observation:
Representative
government did not exist, nor was even
thought of in ancient civilizations. In the
city-states of the Hellenic and the Roman
epochs, a free government was one in which
the citizens -- or at least the principal
men among them -- could assemble in a forum,
debate public concerns, and vote as
individuals. In neither republican Rome or
imperial Rome was any attempt made to
"represent" the far-flung
provinces or even to represent Italy; for
during the Republic the government was
carried on by the Senate, an aristocratic
self-perpetuating body; and during the
Empire by the emperors, their power
virtually absolute. (America's British
Culture, p. 48)
This is not to
say that we have gained anything from the
history of Greece and Rome, but it is to say
that we have gained little positive from their
history (other than what not to do) and we
have gained next to nothing from the
philosophies of these so-called
"classical" civilizations. Most
leaders in this country had fair acquaintance
with the most prominent classical authors.
But, as Russell Kirk points out, "from
such study the American leaders of the War of
Independence and the constitution-making era
learned, by their own account, chiefly what
political blunders of ancient times ought to
be avoided by the Republic of the United
States." (Ibid., p. 98)
The
Founding Era and Christianity, Steve
Wilkins |
|
|
Dinesh
D’Souza adds,
| Though
the American founders were inspired by the examples of Greece
and Rome, they also saw limitations in those examples. Alexander
Hamilton wrote that it would be “as ridiculous to seek for
[political] models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome as it
would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and
Laplanders.” In The Federalist Papers, we read at one point
that the classical idea of liberty decreed “to the same
citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next….”
And elsewhere: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates,
every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” While
the ancients had direct democracy that was susceptible to the
unjust passions of the mob and supported by large-scale slavery,
we today have representative democracy, with full citizenship
and the franchise extended in principle to all. Let us try to
understand how this great change came about.
A New Morality
In ancient Greece and
Rome, individual human life had no particular value in and of
itself. The Spartans left weak children to die on the hillside.
Infanticide was common, as it is common even today in many parts
of the world. Fathers who wanted sons had few qualms about
drowning their newborn daughters. Human beings were routinely
bludgeoned to death or mauled by wild animals in the Roman
gladiatorial arena. Many of the great classical thinkers saw
nothing wrong with these practices. Christianity, on the other
hand, contributed to their demise by fostering moral outrage at
the mistreatment of innocent human life.
Likewise, women had a very
low status in ancient Greece and Rome, as they do today in many
cultures, notably in the Muslim world. Such views are common in
patriarchal cultures. And they were prevalent as well in the
Jewish society in which Jesus lived. But Jesus broke the
traditional taboos of his time when he scandalously permitted
women of low social status to travel with him and be part of his
circle of friends and confidantes. |
|
In fact, it might be said
that the "Enlightenment" represented an attempt to
repudiate the Medieval synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens by
rejecting everything Christian and focusing only on the
totalitarian, sado-masochistic, secular and homosexual
aspects of the "classical" world. Enlightenment
ideals are transforming the modern world of Christian
civilization into the "post-modern" world of
tyranny and mass death. |
|
The rest of his article shows that it was Christianity that
transformed the ancient world into the modern world.
Everything that was good about classical philosophy had been set
forth centuries earlier, in "the Law and the Prophets."
The Greek idea of nomos was preceded by several centuries in
the Hebrew concept of Wisdom, which undergirded King
Solomon's advice to his son in the book of Proverbs, notably chapter 8,
in which Wisdom speaks throughout:
14 Counsel and sound judgment are mine;
I have understanding and power.
15 By me kings reign
and rulers make laws that are just;
16 by me princes govern,
and all nobles who rule on earth.
- The Hebrew Republic
by E.C. Wines
- • pdf
- • review
- • at
Google Books
- Here is the origin of
"Western Democracy," not the
elitist-slave societies of Greece and Rome.
|
|
|
Similarly,
Proverbs
29:4
By justice a king gives a country stability, but one who is
greedy for bribes tears it down.
Proverbs
29:14
If a king judges the poor with fairness, his throne will always
be secure.
. . . and in other political verses too numerous to mention, verses
which are "Hayekian" to the core.
The Christian concept of "logos" was found in the
Septuagint, the 3rd century BC Greek translation of the Old Testament,
and the baton was passed to John who wrote that this Wisdom existed
before the foundation of the earth (John
1:1) -- certainly predating the Greeks.
- The idea that Western Civilization came from Greco-Roman ideas is
a myth. See Gary North's essay, "Greek Mythology: The Myth
Of Classical Politics."
- http://freebooks.entrewave.com/freebooks/docs/html/gnbd/appendix_e.htm
It's certainly true that some philosophers in
the Greco-Roman tradition warned against the excesses of power, and
America's Founding Fathers often quoted them, as did John Calvin and the
Puritans, but on the whole it was a debauched slave-state, and the
Founders more often referred to Rome as a warning of what would happen
if America abandoned its
Biblical quest to be "a
City on a Hill":
Clinton
Rossiter: The Religious Foundation of Government
Thomas Paine quoted the Bible (1 Samuel 8) in
his revolutionary pamphlet against British Monarchy, Common Sense.
Tyranny violated a higher law, he said. When Samuel warned Israel of the
consequences of seeking a king "like all the nations," he
spoke around the year 1000 B.C., and had not "absorbed"
anything from Greece or Rome. (Plato wrote his blueprint for tyranny
around 360 B.C.)
For libertarians to reject the Hebrew-Christian logos in favor of
Greek philosophers is truly suicidal. Plato's Republic is a
blueprint for dictatorship, while the Bible is a sustained critique of
messianic Statism and a blueprint for anarcho-capitalism.
John Lofton has compiled
some telling quotations from scholars in a previous -- more Christian --
century. What follows is from his essay:
And make no mistake about it. Regardless of what you’ve heard
regarding the alleged greatness of the ancient, Greco-Roman,
pre-Christian world, there was no real, true freedom and/or liberty
during this era. None. In his book The
Ancient City: A Study On The Religion, Laws And Institutions Of Greece
And Rome
(1889), Fustel de Coulanges spells out in detail the darkness of this
Christless world:
The citizen was
subordinate in everything, and without any reserve, to the city; he
belonged to it body and soul. The [pagan] religion which produced the
State, and the State which supported [this] religion, sustained each
other; these two powers formed a power almost superhuman, to which the
body and soul were equally enslaved. There was nothing independent in
man; his body belonged to the State and was devoted to its defense.
For example, Aristotle and Plato incorporated into their ideal codes
the command that a deformed baby son was to be put to death. And in his
“Laws,” Plato says (and this sounds very familiar today): “Parents
ought not to be free to send or not to send their children to the
masters to whom the city has chosen [for their education]; for the
children belong less to their parents than to the city.” And in
ancient Athens, a man could be put on trial and convicted for something
called “incivism,” that is being insufficiently affectionate toward
the State! Coulanges says (emphasis mine):
The ancients,
therefore, knew neither liberty in private life, liberty in education,
nor religious liberty. The human person counted for very little
against that holy and almost divine authority called the
country or the State…. It is a singular error, among all
human errors, to believe that in the ancient cities men enjoyed
liberty. They had not even the idea of it.
Commenting on our
Lord’s God/Caesar distinction, Coulanges says:
It is the first
time that God and the state are so clearly distinguished. For Caesar
at that period was still the pontifex maximus, the chief and
the principal organ of the Roman religion; he was the guardian and the
interpreter of beliefs. He held the worship and the dogmas in his
hands. Even his person was sacred and divine, for it was a peculiarity
of the policy of the emperors that, wishing to recover the attributes
of ancient royalty, they were careful not to forget the divine
character which antiquity had attached to the king-pontiffs and to the
priest-founders. But now Christ breaks the alliance which paganism and
the empire wished to renew. He proclaims that religion is no longer
the State, and that to obey Caesar is no longer the same thing as to
obey God.
Christianity …
separates what all antiquity had confounded…. It was the source
whence individual liberty flowed…. The first duty no longer
consisted in giving one’s time, one’s strength, one’s life to
the State … all the virtues were no longer comprised in patriotism,
for the soul no longer had a country. Man felt that he had other
obligations besides that of living and dying for the city.
Christianity … placed God, the family, the human individual above
country, the neighbor above the city.
Because of this hideous tyranny, it is no surprise that self-murder
(suicide) was so rampant in the ancient world. As Dr. Gerhard Uhlhorn
tells us in his The
Conflict Of Christianity With Heathenism
(1899):
Heathenism ended
in barrenness and sheer despair, and at last the only comfort was that
men are free to leave this miserable world by suicide. Patet
exitus! The way out of this life stands open! That is the last
consolation of expiring heathenism.
And he quotes Seneca, who said that “the aim of all philosophy is
to despise life,” as saying, concerning the suicide option:
Seest thou yon
steep height? Thence is the descent to freedom. Seest thou yon sea,
yon river, yon well? Freedom sits there in the depths. Seest thou yon
low, withered tree? There freedom hangs. Seest thou thy neck, thy
throat, thy heart? They are ways of escape from bondage.
To which Dr. Uhihorn adds:
Can the
bankruptcy of Heathenism be more plainly declared than in these words…?
With what power then must have come the preaching of this word:
"Christ is risen! The wages of sin is death: but the gift of God
is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
And in a little noticed and seldom quoted passage from Democracy
in America, Alexis de Tocqueville says:
The most
profound and capacious minds of Rome and Greece ... tried to prove
that slavery was in the order of nature and that it would always
exist. Nay, more, everything shows that those of the ancients who had
been slaves before they became free, many of whom have left us
excellent writings, themselves regarded servitude in no other light.
All the great
writers of antiquity belonged to the aristocracy of masters, or at
least they saw that aristocracy established and expanded before their
eyes. Their mind, after it had expanded itself in several directions,
was barred from further progress in this one; and the advent of Jesus
Christ upon earth was required to teach that all members of the human
race are by nature equal and alike.
The historian Arnold Toynbee saw, accurately, the great failing of
the ancient Greeks, that they “saw in Man, ‘the Lord of Creation,’
and worshipped him as an idol instead of God.” And this rejection of
the true God —- which similarly threatens modern Western civilization
—- led to Hellenism’s breakdown and disintegration. Rejecting
Gibbon, Toynbee says neither Christians nor barbarians destroyed the
Roman Empire; they merely walked over a corpse.
And in his book Religious
Origins of the American Revolution
(Scholars Press, 1976), Page Smith points out:
The American
Revolution might thus be said to have started, in a sense, when Martin
Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg. It
received a substantial part its theological and philosophical
underpinnings from John Calvin’s Institutes
Of The Christian Religion
and much of its social history from the Puritan Revolution of 1640-
1660, and, perhaps, less obviously, from the Glorious Revolution of
1689.
Put another way,
the American Revolution is inconceivable in the absence of that
context of ideas which have constituted radical
Christianity.
The leaders of the Revolution in every colony were imbued with the
precepts of the Reformed faith.
Indeed, he adds, in early America, the Reformation
left its mark on
every aspect of the personal and social life of the faithful. In the
family, in education, in business activity, in work, in community and,
ultimately, in politics, the consequences of the Reformation were
determinative for American history.
As remote or repugnant as Puritanism may be to some, Smith says “it
is essential that we understand that the Reformation in its full power
was one of the great emancipations of history.” He says the passage in
the book of Micah about “every man…under
his vine and under his fig tree” was “the most potent expression
of the colonist’s determination to be independent whatever the cost,…having
substantial control over his own affairs. No theme was more constantly
reiterated by writers and speakers in the era of the Revolution.”
F. D. Roosevelt, Address at Dedication of Great Smoky Mountains
National Park. September 2, 1940 Public Papers of the Presidents,1940,
Item 92
There is, moreover, another enemy at home. That enemy is the mean
and petty spirit that mocks at ideals, sneers at sacrifice and
pretends that the American people can live by bread alone. If the
spirit of God is not in us, and if we will not prepare to give all
that we have and all that we are to preserve Christian civilization in
our land, we shall go to destruction.
Labor Day Radio Address. September 1, 1941 Public Papers of the
Presidents, F. D. Roosevelt, 1941, Item 97
On this day—this American holiday- we are celebrating the rights
of free laboring men and women. The preservation of these rights is
vitally important now, not only to us who enjoy them—but to the
whole future of Christian civilization.
Gary North
GREEK MYTHOLOGY: THE MYTH OF CLASSICAL POLITICS
Leviticus: An Economic Commentary on the Bible, Appendix E
Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics 1994.
http://freebooks.entrewave.com/freebooks/docs/html/gnbd/appendix_e.htm
The
Biblical Source of Western Sexual Morality
"I
concur with the author in considering the
moral precepts of Jesus as more pure, correct,
and sublime than those of ancient
philosophers."
Thomas Jefferson to Edward Dowse on April 19,
1803
"As much as I love, esteem and admire the
Greeks, I believe the Hebrews have done more
to enlighten and civilize the world. Moses did
more than all their legislators and
philosophers."
John Adams
"By renouncing the Bible, philosophers
swing from their moorings upon all moral
subjects. . . . It is the only correct map of
the human heart that ever has been published.
. . . All systems of religion, morals, and
government not founded upon it [the Bible]
must perish, and how consoling the thought, it
will not only survive the wreck of these
systems but the world itself. 'The Gates of
Hell shall not prevail against it.'"
Benjamin Rush to John Adams, January 23, 1807.
Social
Order: Morality or Socialism? |
|
|
Civilization
and the Protestant Reformation
Christianity
and History
The Critics
of Christ
U.S.
Constitution Found to be Unconstitutional
The Rise, Fall, and
Renaissance of Classical Liberalism-Part I
A Philosophical
Self-Portrait
Christian
Civilization Medieval Perspectives for Today . . .
Christianity
and Civilization
Decentralized
Christian Civilization - NRA
Old Truths
Have Not Passed Away
Reconciliation
Press Online - News and Articles Christian Civilization
IMPRIMIS,
May
1995, Vol. 24, No. 5
"A
New Vision of Man: How Christianity Has Changed Political
Economy"
by Michael Novak*
Author , The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
One of the 20th century's greatest
religious writers, Michael Novak, addresses the relationship between
religion and economics. He argues that Christ revolutionized the human
conception of the political economy in at least seven important ways.
This presentation was prepared for a
July 1994 seminar in Crakow, Poland on "Centesimus Annus and the
Free Society," and for a November 1994 seminar sponsored by
Hillsdale's Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar, "God
and Man: Perspectives on Christianity in the 20th Century."
For centuries, scholars and laymen have studied the Bible's impact
on our religion, politics, education, and culture, but very little
serious attention has been devoted to its impact on our economics. It
is as if our actions in the marketplace have nothing to do with our
spiritual beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth. My aim
here is to demonstrate how Judeo Christianity, and Jesus, in
particular, revolutionized the political economy of the ancient world
and how that revolution still profoundly affects the world today.
I wish to propose for your consideration the following thesis: At
least seven contributions made by Christian thinker, meditating on the
words and deeds of Jesus Christ, altered the vision of the good
society proposed by the classical writers of Greece and Rome and made
certain modern conceptions of political economy possible. Be warned
that we are talking about foundational issues. The going won't be
entirely easy.
Be warned, also, that I want to approach this subject in a way
satisfying to secular thinkers. You shouldn't have to be a believer in
Jesus in order to grasp the plausibility of my argument. In that
spirit, let me begin, first, by citing Richard Rorty, who once wrote
that as a progressive philosopher he owes more to Jesus for certain
key progressive notions, such as compassion and equality, than to any
of the classical writers. Analogously, in his book, Why I am Not a
Christian, Bertrand Russell conceded that, although he took Jesus
to be no more than a humanistic moral prophet, modem progressivism is
indebted to Christ for the ideal of compassion.
In short, in order to recognize the crucial contributions that the
coming of Christ brought into modern movements of political economy,
one does not have to be a Christian. One may take a quite secular
point of view and still give credit where credit is due.
Here, then, are the seven major contributions made by Jesus to our
modern conceptions of political economy.
To Bring Judaism to the Gentiles
From Jerusalem, that crossroads between three
continents open to the East and West, North and South, Jesus brought
recognition of the One God, the Creator The name this God gave to
Himself is "I AM WHO AM" , He is, as opposed to the
rest of us, who have no necessary or permanent hold on being. He is
the One who IS; other things are those who am, but also are not. He
is the Creator of all things. All things that are depend upon Him.
As all things spring from His action in creating them, so they depend
upon Him for their being maintained in existence, their "standing
out from" nothingness [Ex + sistere, L., to stand out
from].
The term "Creator" implies a free person; it suggests
that creation was a free act, an act that did not flow from necessity.
It was an act of intelligence, it was a choice, and it was willed. The
Creator knew what He was doing, and He willed it; that is, "He
saw that it is good." From this notion of the One God/ Creator,
three practical corollaries for human action follow.
Be intelligent. Made in the image of God, we should be
attentive and intelligent, as our Creator is.
Trust liberty. As God loved us, so it is fitting for us to
respond with love. Since in creating us He knew what He was doing and
He it, we have reason to trust His will. He created us with
understanding and free will; creation was a free act. Since He made us
in His image, well ought we to say with Jefferson: "The God who
gave us life gave us liberty."
Understand that history has a beginning, and an end. At a
certain moment, time was created by God. Time is directed toward
"building up the Kingdom of God...on earth as in heaven."
Creation is directed toward final union with its Creator.
As many scholars have noted, the idea of "progress," like
the idea of "creation," are not Greek ideas , nor are they
Roman. The Greeks preferred notions of the necessary procession of the
world from a First Principle. While in a limited sense they understood
the progress of ideas, skills, and technologies and also saw how these
could be lost, in general, they viewed history as a cycle of endless
return. They lacked a notion of historical progress. The idea of
history as a category distinct from nature is a Hebrew rather than a
Greek idea.
Analogously, as Lord Acton argued in the essays he prepared for his
History of Liberty, liberty is an idea coincident with the
spread of Christianity. Up to a point, the idea of liberty is a Jewish
idea. Every story in the Bible is about a drama involving the human
will. In one chapter, King David is faithful to his Lord; in another
unfaithful. The suspense always lies in what he will choose next.
Nonetheless, Judaism is not a missionary religion; normally one
receives Judaism by being born of a Jewish mother; in this sense,
Judaism is rooted in genealogy rather than in liberty. Beyond this
point, Christianity expanded the notion of liberty and made it
universal. The Christian idea of liberty remains rooted in the liberty
of the Creator, as in Judaism. Through Christianity, this Jewish idea
becomes the inheritance of all the other peoples on earth.
Recognition of the One God/Creator means that the fundamental
attitude of human beings toward God is, and ought to be, receptivity.
All that we are we have received from God. This is true both of our
creation and our redemption. God acts first. We respond. Everything is
a gift. "Everything we look upon is blessed" (Yeats).
"Grace is everywhere" (Bemanos). Thus, offering thanksgiving
is our first moral obligation.
It is difficult to draw out, in brief compass, all the implications
for political economy of the fact that history begins in the free act
of the Creator, who made humans in His image and who gave them both
existence and an impulse toward communion with their first breath. In
this act of creation, in any case, Jefferson properly located (and it
was the sense of the American people) not only the origin of the inner
core of human rights: "...and endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, including...."but also the
perspective of providential history: "When in the course
of human events..." The Americans were aware of creating
something "new": a new world, a new order, a new science of
politics. As children of the Creator, they felt no taboo against
originality; on the contrary, they thought it their vocation.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
When Jesus spoke of God, He spoke of the communion of three persons
in one. This means that, in God, the mystery of being and the mystery
of communion are one. Unlike the Greeks such as Parmedides, Plato,
and Aristotle, who thought of God or the Nous as One,
living in solitary isolation, the Christian world was taught by Jesus
to think of God as a communion of three. In other words, the mystery
of communion, or community, is one with the very mystery of being. The
sheer fact that we are alive sometimes comes over us at dusk on an
autumn day, as we walk across a corn field and in the tang of the
evening air hear a crow lift off against the sky. We may pause then to
wonder, in admiration and gratitude. We could so easily have not been,
and yet we are, at least for these fragile moments. Soon
another generation will take our place, and tramp over the same field.
We experience wonder at the sheer fact: At this moment, we are. And
we also apprehend the fact that we are part of a long procession of
the human community in time; and that we are, by the grace of God, one
with God. To exist is already something to marvel at; so great a
communion is even more so. Our wonder is not so much doubled; it is
squared, infinitely multiplied.
This recognition of the Trinity is not without significance for
political economy. First, it inspires us with a new respect for an
ideal of community not often found on this earth, a community in which
each person is separate, distinct, and independent, and yet in which
there is, nonetheless, communion. It teaches us that the relation
between community and person is deeper and richer that we might have
imagined. Christians should not simply lose themselves in community,
having their personality and independence merge into an
undifferentiated mass movement. On the contrary, Christianity teaches
us that in true community the distinctness and independence of each
person are also crucial. Persons reach their full development only in
community with others. No matter how highly developed in himself or
herself, a totally isolated person, cut-off from others, is regarded
as something of a monster. In parallel, a community that refuses to
recognize the autonomy of individual persons often uses individuals as
means to "the common good," rather than treating persons as
ends in themselves. Such communities are coercive and tyrannical.
Christianity, in short, opens up the ideal of catholicity which has
always been a mark of true Christianity. Katholike means all of
humanity, the whole human world. In this world, persons, and even
cultures, are distinct, and have their own autonomy and claim on our
respect. E pluribus unum. The many form one; but the one does
not melt the many into the lowest common denominator. The many retain
their individual vitality, and for this they show gratitude to the
community that allows them, in fact encourages them, to do so. Person
and community must be defined in terms of each other.
The Children of God
In Plato's Republic, citizens were divided in this way: A
few were of gold, a slightly larger body of silver, and the vast
majority of lead. The last had the souls of slaves and, therefore,
were properly enslaved. Only persons of gold are truly to be treated
as ends in themselves. For Judaism and Christianity, on the contrary,
the God who made every single child gave worth and dignity to each of
them, however weak or vulnerable. "What you do unto the weakest
of these, you do unto me." God identified Himself with the most
humble and most vulnerable.
Our Creator knows each of us by name, and understands our own
individuality with a far greater clarity that we ourselves do; after
all, He made us. (Thomas Aquinas once wrote that God is infinite, and
so when He creates human beings in His image, He must in fact create
an infinite number of them to mirror back His own infinity.) Each of
us reflects only a small fragment of God's identity. If one of us is
lost, the image of God intended to be reflected by that one is lost.
The image of God reflected in the human becomes distorted.
In this respect, Judaism and Christianity grant a fundamental
equality in the sight of God to all human beings, whatever their
talents or station. This equality arises because God penetrates below
any artificial rank, honor, or station that may on the surface
differentiate one from another. He sees past those things. He sees into
us. He sees us as we are in our uniqueness, and it is that
uniqueness that He values. Let us call this form of equality by the
clumsy but useful name, equality-as-uniqueness. Before God, we
have equal weight in our uniqueness, not because we are the
same, but because each of us is different. Each is made by
God after an original design.
This conception of equality-uniqueness is quite different from the
modern "progressive" or socialist conception of equality-sameness.
The Christian notion is not a levelling notion. Neither does it
delight in uniformity. On the contrary, it tries to pay heed to, and
give respect to, the unique image of God in each person.
For most of its history, Christianity, like Judaism, flourished in
hierarchical societies. While recognizing that every single person
lives and moves in sight of God's judgment and is equally a creature
of God, Christianity has also rejoiced in the differences among us and
between us. God did not make us equal in talent, ability, character,
office, calling, or fortune.
Equality-uniqueness is not the same as equality-sameness. The first
recognizes our claim to a unique identity and dignity. The second
desires to take away what is unique and to submerge it in uniformity.
Thus, modern movements such as socialism have taken the original
Christian impulse of equality, which they inherited, and disfigured
it. Like Christianity, modern socialist movements reject the
stratification of citizens into gold, silver, and lead, as in Plato's
scheme. But, since they are materialistic at root, their traditional
impulse has been to pull people down, to place all on the same level,
to enforce uniformity. This program is inexorably coercive, unlovely,
and depressing.
Compassion
It is true that virtually all peoples have traditions of compassion
for the suffering, care for those in need, and concern for others.
However, in most religious traditions, these movements of the heart
are limited to one's own family, kin, nation, or culture. In some
cultures, young males in particular have to be hard and insensitive to
pain, so that they will be sufficiently cruel to enemies. Terror is
the instrument intended to drive outsiders away from the territory of
the tribe. In principle (though not always in practice), Christianity
opposes this limitation on compassion. It teaches people the impulse
to reach out, especially to the most vulnerable, to the poor, the
hungry, the wretched, those in prison, the hopeless, the sick, and
others. It tells humans to love their enemies. It teaches a universal
compassion. It teaches people to see the dignity even of those who in
the eyes of the world have lost their dignity, and those who are
helpless to act on their own behalf. This is the
"solidarity" whose necessity for modernity Rorty perceives.
In the name of compassion, Christianity tries to humble the mighty
and to prod the rich into concern for the poor. It does not turn the
young male away from being a warrior, but it does teach him to model
Himself on Christ, and tires to become a new type of male in human
history: the knight bound by a code of compassion, the gentleman. It
teaches him to learn, to be meek, humble, peaceable, kind, and
generous. It introduces a new and fruitful tension between the warrior
and the gentlemen, magnanimity and humility, meekness and fierce
ambition.
A Universal Family
Christianity has taught human beings that an underlying imperative
of history is to bring about a law-like, peaceable community, among
all people of good will on the entire earth. For political economy,
Christianity proposes a new ideal: the entire human race is a
universal family, created by the one same God, and urged to love that
God. Yet at the same time, Christianity (like Judaism before it) is
also the religion of a particular kind of God: not the Deity who looks
down on all things from an olympian height but, in Christianity's
case, a God who became incarnate. The Christian God, incarnate,
was carried in the womb of a single woman, among a particular people,
at a precise intersection of time and space, and nourished in a local
community then practically unknown to the rest of the peoples on this
planet. Christianity is a religion of the concrete and the universal.
It pays attention to the flesh, the particular, the concrete, and each
single intersection of space and time; its God is the God who made and
cares for every lily of the field, every blade of grass, every hair on
the head of each of us. Its God is the God of singulars, the God who
Himself became a singular man. At the same time, the Christian God is
the Creator of all.
In a sense, this Christian God goes beyond contemporary conceptions
of "individualism" and "communitarianism." With
18th-century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke,
Christianity sees the need for proper attention to every "little
platoon" of society, to the immediate neighborhood, to the
immediate family. Our social policies must be incarnate, must be
rooted in the actual flesh of concrete people in their actual local,
intimate worlds. At the same time, Christianity directs the attention
of these little communities toward the larger communities of which
they are a part. On the one hand, Christianity forbids them to be
merely parochial or xenophobic. On the other hand, it warns them
against becoming premature universalists, one-worlders, gnostics
pretending to be pure spirits, and detached from all the limits and
beauties of concrete flesh. Christianity gives warning against both
extremes. It instructs us about the precarious balance between
concrete and universal in our own nature. This is the mystery of
catholicity.
"I Am the Truth"
The Creator of all things has total insight into all things. He
knows what He has created. This gives the weak, modest minds of human
beings the vocation to use their minds relentlessly, in order to
penetrate the hidden layers of intelligibility that God has written
into His creation. Everything in creation is in principle
understandable: In fact, at every moment everything is understood by
Him, who is eternal and therefore simultaneously present to all
things. (In God there is no history, no past-present-future. In His
insight into reality, all things are as if simultaneous. Even though
in history they may unfold sequentially, they are all at once, that
is, simultaneously, open to His contemplation.)
Our second president, John Adams, wrote that in giving us a notion
of God as the Source of all truth, and the Judge of all, the Hebrews
laid before the human race the possibility of civilization. Before the
undeceivable Judgment of God, the Light of Truth cannot be deflected
by riches, wealth, or worldly power. Armed with this conviction, Jews
and Christians are empowered to use their intellects and to search
without fear into the causes of things, their relationships, their
powers, and their purposes. This understanding of Truth makes humans
free. For Christianity does not teach that Truth is an illusion based
upon the opinions of those in power, or merely a rationalization of
powerful interests in this world. Christianity is not
deconstructionist, and it is certainly not totalitarian, Its
commitment to Truth beyond human purposes is, in fact, a rebuke to all
totalitarian schemes and all nihilist cynicism.
Moreover, by locating Truth (with a capital T) in God, beyond our
poor powers fully to comprehend, Christianity empowers human reason.
It does so by inviting us to use our heads as best we can, to discern
the evidences that bring us as close to Truth as human beings can
attain. It endows human beings with a vocation to inquire endlessly,
relentlessly, to give play to the unquenchable eros of the desire to
understand that most profoundly restless drive to know that teaches
human beings their own finitude while it also informs them of their
participation in the infinite.
The notion of Truth is crucial to civilization. As Thomas Aquinas
held, civilization is constituted by conversation. Civilized persons
persuade one another through argument. Barbarians club one another
into submission. Civilization requires citizens to recognize that they
do not possess the truth, but must be possessed by it, to the degree
possible to them. Truth matters greatly. But Truth is greater than any
one of us. We do not possess it; it possesses us. Therefore,
humans must learn such civilizing habits as being respectful and open
to others, listening attentively, trying to see aspects of the Truth
that they do not as yet see. Because the search for Truth is vital to
each of us, humans must argue with each other, urge each other onward,
point out deficiencies in one another's arguments, and open the way
for greater participation in the Truth by every one of us.
In this respect, the search for Truth makes us not only humble but
also civil. It teaches us why we hold that every single person
has an inviolable dignity: Each is made in the image of the Creator to
perform noble acts, such as to understand, to deliberate, to choose,
to love. These noble activities of human beings cannot be repressed
without repressing the Image of God in them. Such an act would be
doubly sinful. It violates the other person, and it is an offense
against God.
One of the ironies of our present age is that the great
philosophical advocates of the Enlightenment no longer believe in
Reason (with a capital R). They have surrendered their confidence in
the vocation of Reason to cynics such as to the post-modernists and
deconstructionists. Such philosophers (Sophists, Socrates
called them) hold that there is no Truth, that all things are
relative, and that the great realities of life are power and interest.
So we have come to an ironic pass. The children of the Enlightenment
have abandoned Reason, while those they have considered unenlightened
and living in darkness, the people of Jewish and Christian faith,
remain today reason's (without a capital R) best defenders. For
believing Jews and Christians ground their confidence in reason in the
Creator of all reason, and their confidence in understanding in the
One who understands everything He made , and loves it, besides.
There can be no civilization of reason, or of love, without this
faith in the vocation of reason.
The Name of God: Mercy
Christianity teaches realistically not only the glories of human
beings , their being made in the image of God , but also their sins,
weaknesses, and evil tendencies. Judaism and Christianity are not
utopian; they are quite realistic about human beings. They try to
understand humans as they are, as God sees them both in their sins and
in the graces that He grants them. This sharp awareness of human
sinfulness was very important to the American founding.
Without ever using the term "original sin," the Founders
were, in such documents as The Federalist, eloquent about the
flaws, weaknesses, and evils to which human beings are prone.
Therefore, they designed a republic that would last, not only among
saints, but also among sinners. (There is no point in building a
Republic for saints; there are too few of them; besides, the ones who
do exist are too difficult to live with.) If you want to make a
Republic that will last, you must construct it for sinners, because
sinners are not just a moral majority, they are virtually a moral
unanimity.
Christianity teaches that at every moment the God who made us is
judging how well we make use of our liberty. And the first word of
Christianity in this respect is: "Fear not. Be not afraid."
For Christianity teaches that Truth is ordered to mercy. Truth is not,
thank God, ordered first of all to justice. For if Truth were ordered
to strict justice, not one of us would stand against the gale.
God is just, true, but the more accurate name for Him is not
justice, but rather mercy. (The Latin root of this word conveys the
idea more clearly: Misericordia comes from miseris + cor ,
give one's heart to les miserables, the wretched ones.)
This name of God, Misericordia, according to St. Thomas
Aquinas, is God's most fitting name. Toward our misery, He opens His
heart. Precisely as sinners, He accepts us. "At the heart of
Christianity lies the sinner," Charles Pιguy wrote.
Yet mercy is only possible because of Judgment. Judgment Day is the
Truth on which civilization is grounded. No matter the currents of
opinion in our time, or any time, may be; no matter what the powers
and principalities may say or do; no matter the solicitations pressing
upon us from our families, friends, associates, and larger culture; no
matter what the pressures may be , we will still be under the Judgment
of the One who is undeceivable, who knows what is in us, and who knows
the movements of our souls more clearly than we know them ourselves.
In His Light, we are called to bring a certain honesty into our own
lives, into our dealings with others, and into our respect for the
Light that God has imparted to every human being. It is on this basis
that human beings may be said to have inalienable rights, and dignity,
and infinite worth.
Jesus, the Teacher
These seven recognitions lie at the root of Jewish-Christian
civilization, the one that is today evasively called "Western
civilization." From them, we get our deepest and most powerful
notions of truth, liberty, community, person, conscience, equality,
compassion, mercy, and virtue. These are the deepest ideals and
energies working in our culture, as yeast works in dough, as a seed
falling into the ground dies and becomes a spreading mustard tree.
These are practical recognitions. They have effects in every person
and in every moment of life, and throughout society. If you stifle
these notions, if you wipe them out, the institutions of the free
society become unworkable. In this sense, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice
once wrote, "Our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
They do not presuppose any Supreme Being. They presuppose the
God of Judaism and Christianity. And not only our institutions
presuppose these realities. So do our conceptions of our own identity,
and the daily actions of our own lives. Remove these religious
foundations from our intellects, our lives, and the free society , in
its complex checks and balances, and its highly articulated divisions
of power , becomes incoherent to understanding and unworkable in
practice.
For the present form of the free society, therefore, we owe a great
deal to the intervention of Jesus Christ in history. In bringing those
of us who are not Jewish the Word that brings life, in giving us a
nobler conception of what it is to be human, and in giving us insight
into our own weaknesses and sins, Jesus shed light available from no
other source. Better than the philosophers, Jesus Christ is the
teacher of many lessons indispensible for the working of the free
society. These lessons may be, and have been secularized , but not
without losing their center, their coherence, and their long-term
persuasive power.
But that alone would be as nothing, of course, if we did not learn
from Jesus that we, all of us, participate in His life, and in living
with Him, live in, with and through the Father and the Holy Spirit in
a glorious community of love. For what would it profit us, if we
gained the whole world, and all the free institutions that flourish
with it, and lost our own souls?
[1]
Michael Novak, former U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Commission
of the United Nations, currently holds the George Frederick Jewett
Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise
Institute in Washington, D.C.
He is the author of a dozen books, including: The Catholic
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, This Hemisphere of
Liberty, Freedom with Justice, The Spirit of
Democratic Capitalism, and Belief and UnBelief.
The Polish Solidarity movement and the Czech underground studied
translations (often secretly and illegally) in the 1970's, as did
members of pro-democratic movements in South Korea, Chile,
Argentina, Venezuela, and the Philippines, and China in the 1980's.
Pope John Paul II's Centesimus Annus, published in 1991, is
widely regarded as having been influenced by Mr. Novak's writings,
and in her memoirs former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
noted that they "proved the intellectual basis of my approach
to those great questions brought together in political parlance as
'the quality of life.'"
In May of 1994, Mr. Novak was awarded the Templeton Prize for
Progress in Religion.
Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly
speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.com)
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