Christian civilization is nearly unique in preserving the literature of its great rivals.
The Byzantine Christians preserved in all periods the confidence to have school children begin their educations with Homer. They could do this, because they were not afraid of children comparing the Iliad with John’s Gospel.
The Western Church could read Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy with little worry that it did not directly cite proper Christian doctrine. They made it one of the “best sellers” of the most deeply religious ages of the world precisely because of its classical patrimony. They were a confident, young civilization. They were not afraid of the old Roman world, because they lived in the better Gothic one.
In flower Christian civilization is confident. It does not approach a text, any text, with fear. When we read Dawkins, Dennet, or best of all Hitchens we try to empathize with those writers. Are they right? How can we charitably read them? What can we learn from them? It is the same way we have (at our truest) always approached those who disagree.
Against this we have the fearful reader who hunts through every book for heresy or bad ideas. The heresy hunter with his burning pyres is not the child of the Christ who would render to Caesar the things that were Caesars. The inquisitor (in the modern sense) lacks confidence that God can defend Himself without human power. If books are not burned, then they will infect us!
The worst cases of this in the modern intellectual climate are the secularists who cannot read a book like the Bible with the sympathy my traditional Christian students give Homer. They are so afraid of us that they cannot understand us.
So a clever man like Hitchens cannot read the Genesis story with sympathy, bringing up sophomoric objections to it, let the bad Torrey freshman who writes: “Why Jehovah is Better than Jove” at the end of Homer. If we read the atheists we cannot understand how such clever folk as C.S. Lewis, Al Plantinga, or J.P. Moreland manage to get anything out of the Bible. They are afraid, of us, of the future, perhaps just afraid of death and the undiscovered country that all men will come to at last.
Christian civilization is conservative. We always act to conserve the best of the past while moving forward to our next millennium of history.
Christian civilization is fundamentally Christian! The pillars stand, not because we have not thought about them, but because they have stood so much thought. The doctrines of the Church do not endure and receive respect from us because they are hidden, but because they are massive and hard from weathering blows without a scratch that make the assault of a Hitchens or Sam Harris almost amusing if it were not so sad.
Has humanity really fallen from the robust classicism and wit of the arch-heretic Arius to the drunken cocktail banter of some of the latest secular writings?
Against Arius, Christian orthodoxy endured with courage, against Hitchens orthodoxy can afford pity. The fundamentals will not fall to the modern fundamentalist.
The poor English word “fundamentalist” has been so misused (like “gay” and “cult”) that it no longer has its old meaning. Now it means those who are afraid and retreat to comforting old platitudes . . . like modern secularist’s rewriting nineteenth century village-atheist books in fear of the religious revival sweeping the world.
That was not what the original folk who called themselves fundamentalists had in mind. They were annoyed and angry at being robbed more than afraid of losing.
The old fundamentalists were trying to conserve the best of the past against the barbarians who would have sacked and looted the Faith and replaced everything. Go to any city where their architectural equivalents won and you will see gutted downtowns where everything splendid from centuries of organic growth and change was replaced quickly by “splendid new modern forms.” These are, of course, mostly unbearable.
The same was happening in theology. A careful, thoughtful dialog had to take place between new science and theology, but the modernist would have none of that. All of theology had to bow the knee to science. It was true in all the human fields of knowledge. All literature had to conform to modernist ideas and many schoolchildren were left as deprived of their cultural heritage as if the moderns had simply burned the books.
Sadly, when their thoughtful criticisms were mocked and ignored the thoughtful early Christian fundamentalists (like R.A. Torrey) were replaced by a new more modernist breed. They lacked the confidence and courage to patiently argue and outlast the critics and became too much like them. They retreated, but only briefly. After all, Biola was built, lost confidence for a bit, but rapidly (in the lifetime of its first students) became a liberal arts college. The Bible they loved kept them from fear, long term intolerance, or the fundamentalism (bad modern sense)of modernism.
The fundamentalists wanted to keep the best of the past, but like all traditional Christians were happy to use the tools of science. They wanted movies, radio, and faster presses. They did not like the use to which the science they have developed was being turned by their ungrateful intellectual children.
It was the modernist who was the real fundamentalist, a kind of intellectual fascist. It was he that wished to supplant and replace everything immediately with the “up to date.” He ignored books and ideas that did not fit his model. It is the fascist who demands that everything that does not exalt the powerful of this age be discarded.
No Christian society, however debased, can ever whole heartedly worship human power, because Our Lord forbids it. We cannot assume that our generation has a lock on the Truth, because the Fall makes us humble.
We can develop orthodoxy, but as a living body of truth that stimulates, humbles, and leads to a tension between what is revealed and what seems true today. This tension cannot be finally settled in this life. In fact, it is that provocative tension that has made Christianity so fecund and so able to weather all intellectual storms.
Christianity is always confident and conservative, because it knows (based on experience and reason) that it is going forward. It will be around. The fearful, the fascist, the fundamentalist in the modern sense sees the future as a howling chasm against which he must protect himself and the fragile shell of civilization. It is a brittle and hopeless task, but oddly it is a task in which the best ally is the very traditional Christian they fear.
It is the Church triumphant that will guard science best long term against religious extremism. It is Biblical Christianity that will safeguard great books in service to the Great Book. It is Christianity, with the Incarnate Word, that will refuse to reduce men to machines. We will preserve and learn from even the sad secularists (as we endure them), because they too are created in His image.
It is good to be a Christian.