I have long had the thought that Christianity is a good religious basis for a civilization IF people don't take it literally. Medieval Christianity was grafted onto a Germanic barbarian culture which, like the Roman one it replaced, was patriarchal and realistic. It lived by blood, soil and violence. The Christian knight embodies the balance.
The Christian monk shows the safety-valve: take the serious practitioners and wall them off where they can't do any harm. Recently I found a discussion at a righty site which said much the same thing: to function societally, Christianity needs to be in tension with a powerful non-Christian force. Otherwise its unreal otherworldliness is destructive. Was it ever possible to imagine social utopias before Christianity?
But there is a difference between a natural non-Christian force and a derivative post-Christian force. Secular liberalism is definitely not a healthy counterbalance to Christianity. It is in fact a kind of denatured Christianity, all morals and the fanaticism of universalist pretensions, without the essential limiting factors of a recognizable God and a dense doctrine and mythology, a cancerous utopianism without the religious barrier between this always-fallen world and the only heavenly next. When, as now, it is ascendant, it does not balance Christianity but infects it and dismantles it.
The English Dominicans' site shows the problem:
The assumption that universal equality is across-the-board the natural and desirable condition. The feminist reduction of this story to sex abuse. Talking in the voice of a proprietor/participant/debtor of "our own society" about "the vulnerable" who must not be asked "to stoop low".
The assumptions are pure liberal progressivism, not Christian tradition.
The Christian monk shows the safety-valve: take the serious practitioners and wall them off where they can't do any harm. Recently I found a discussion at a righty site which said much the same thing: to function societally, Christianity needs to be in tension with a powerful non-Christian force. Otherwise its unreal otherworldliness is destructive. Was it ever possible to imagine social utopias before Christianity?
But there is a difference between a natural non-Christian force and a derivative post-Christian force. Secular liberalism is definitely not a healthy counterbalance to Christianity. It is in fact a kind of denatured Christianity, all morals and the fanaticism of universalist pretensions, without the essential limiting factors of a recognizable God and a dense doctrine and mythology, a cancerous utopianism without the religious barrier between this always-fallen world and the only heavenly next. When, as now, it is ascendant, it does not balance Christianity but infects it and dismantles it.
The English Dominicans' site shows the problem:
The book of Ruth offers, then, a rich commentary on the difficulties that surround doing what is right in a world twisted by ethnic, economic and gender inequality. Yet when we view this book in the context of the whole canon of scripture, a deeper significance emerges. Matthew's gospel includes Boaz and Ruth in the genealogy of Christ himself. Even in the midst, then, of the moral ambiguities and struggles that arise in situations that have been complicated by sin, God is still able to further his plan of salvation. Ruth the Moabitess, the pagan, in desperation married Boaz and became a member of God's people at least partly through a kind of sexual coercion. She herself would no doubt have admitted that this is not the ideal way to go about finding a husband, yet God used this marriage to prepare his people for the coming of his Son the bridegroom. For Ruth, entry into the people of God was fraught with risk and humiliation. For us it is a gift, the fruit of Christ's marriage to the Church. Ruth had to stoop low to enter the promise, we must not ask the vulnerable of our own society to do the same.
The assumption that universal equality is across-the-board the natural and desirable condition. The feminist reduction of this story to sex abuse. Talking in the voice of a proprietor/participant/debtor of "our own society" about "the vulnerable" who must not be asked "to stoop low".
The assumptions are pure liberal progressivism, not Christian tradition.
2 comments:
Which means what for groups like Protestants, which don't have monks/nuns/sisters/friars? Do some denominations within Protestantism provide more or less the same "Purity Conservation" function (Quakers? Unitarians? Amish?)? Do Mainline Protestants do this simply by imploding, leaving only a hard core of activists and "immigrants" from lower class Protestants and gay/divorced Catholics?
Some combination of the above?
The real problem is not with Christianity itself but with Protestantism, which has always been the dominant version of Christianity in American and which is now the politically and culturally dominant version of Christianity throughout the Western world.
Whereas Catholicism grew up out of soil of pagan philosophy and flourished in pagan empires, republics and kingdoms, Protestantism, coming as it does via Hussitism, Lollardy and Catharism ultimately from Gnostic Zoroastrianism, is pagan in its very seeds.
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