Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 5

So was Berlin right to charge Christian hope for the end of history with closet determinism? Are the theist claims of an all-provident God, a known future, and human freedom finally in the last analysis compatible?

For some Christian thinkers the key was to focus on the very question of final things. After all, what might a Christian eschatology have to offer? The biblical pattern of a good creation, a human fall into rebellion and subsequent decay, a redemptive history of covenants with Israel, culminating in the atoning work of Christ and Church, and leading up to a final consummation suggests a directional pattern and outcome to human history. Josef Pieper, while sharing the view that Christians cannot know the future, insisted nonetheless that human beings have a quality of "being-directed-toward-the-End," in which the chaotic events of history become understandable. Not every theologian or philosopher of history agreed.

For Karl Löwith, the promised future is a radical inbreaking into history and at the same time, a future hope not yet seen. The violence and contingency of history has no real discernable direction precisely because the future cannot be inferred from the past; it is a divine, mysterious promise not a human, rational pattern . Eric C. Rust and Carl Michalson concurred. For Rust, outside God's revelation in Christ, "history is generally a realm of meaningless chaos and frustration," while for Michalson, there can be no significant history since Jesus: "Christ is not the eschatological event because he will enter history at some moment of time but because when he appears in history, history comes to an end in its old form and the last, the eschatological age begins."

A divine destiny, some insisted, did not translate into a discernable pattern for human history in general. Jean Daniélou, however, would have us synthesize this eschatological double story. While there can be no progress beyond Christ who is "the culminating and final innovation" of history, yet to separate out secular and sacred history is to declare Christ as less than Lord of history. The Christian mission, he insisted, is not simply "to teach the word to individuals of all countries; it is to evangelize the civilizations . . . so that Christianity may find its appropriate and authentic expression in the idiom of every racial community."

The promised apocalypse, for Pieper, is both the end of history and the promise of a new eternal state which strictly speaking lies beyond time. Only in a willing commitment to martyrdom can the Christian truly understand the legitimacy of human action in history, not as a gnostic who denies the value of creation, but as one who "contains both affirmation of creation and readiness for blood-testimony; only the man who combines in himself this affirmation and this readiness will retain the possibility of historical activity." Martyrdom denies the cultural relativism of historicism. It is a commitment to the future. Eschatology, he felt, does not remove the call to human freedom and to responsible action.

To summarize, the debate about history, in trying to address questions of civilization and Christian culture, had to consider

1. how much one could say about the inner workings of history, as well as the moral nature of its events;
   
2. needed to answer the claims of the historicist persuasion on a number of levels;
3. had to consider questions of freedom and determinism and of idealism and materialism, especially the question whether some aspect of historical normativity still allowed for human free choice;
4. had to explore what a spiritual realm might say to human freedom;
   
5. had to ask what biblical eschatology had to say to the shape of history.
   

In particular, they needed to consider whether the eschatological promise of the gospel had anything to say to the national and cultural concerns of the average historian. For all its pledges of Christian faith, this was not a conversation with an easy consensus, nor I suspect should it have been, for they were seeking to hold together a number of tensions, as well as answer destructive claims from a number of directions. In my next post I will consider what this debate, then, has to teach us, as well as explore briefly how it relates to Christian personalism.

Can There be a Christian Culture?--Part 4

In light of the threat to stable meaning and ethics that historicism brought, one of the urgent needs was for Christian thinkers to account for human choice in a meaningful way. Are human beings really free? Can they make decisions and choices that are meaningful in any way that the average person could point to? Thinkers, again, took different directions. Some looked to raise human beings above the material and social world, offering two levels of existence. They were faced with trying to bridge the Kantian divide between the material and moral worlds.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, condemned the modern attempt to master the historical process as sin and hubris; nonetheless, he looked to a kind of self-transcendence of history in which the repentant person’s heart is given "agape power" from on high, rising with the promise of Christ from the edge of history. For Niebuhr, who seems to finally deny the reality of a resurrection of the body or an afterlife, this transcendent freedom is somewhat limited: "Man, in both his individual life and in his total enterprise, moves from a limited to a more extensive expression of freedom over nature. If he assumes that such an extension of freedom insures and increases emancipation from the bondage of self, he increases the bondage by that illusion." Niebuhr by reducing the claims of Christianity to existential "heart" truths rather than real claims about the actual universe actual created a kind of ghostly neather-world. Niebuhr was no gnostic, but neither was he finally looking to a real eschaton.

Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev went even further, seeing history not as a material but as a metaphysical work. Memory, being essentially non-material, points to the spiritual quality of human culture and its final eternal destiny. As such, a philosophy of history is to teach that the historical process is not “something that is alien to us, that is imposed upon us, that crushes and enslaves us.” As I've observed in another post, Berdyaev's personalism gave way to a real gnosticism.

Others, rather than posit a kind of two-tier world, embedded human responsibility within historical patterning itself. According to Herman Dooyeweerd, societies have religious ground motives that propel them along. What others identified as laws or forces of history are really God-given norms which can be obeyed or rebelled against with consequences: "Historicism . . . is the fatal illness of our 'dynamic' times. There is no cure for this unwholesome view of reality as long as the scriptural creation motive does not regain its complete claim on our life and thought." Dooyeweerd held that as long as historicism acted as a relativizing poison, anything like God-given norms could not be easily seen, but that did not mean they were not there,

For Brunner, too, human freedom is only true freedom when it acknowledges its dependence upon God. Human attempts to be autonomous from their Creator end in slavery. A “false liberalism,” which believes itself the ego-driven creator of reality, and “false determinism,” which robs human beings of any real creativity or action, both ultimately deny God’s existence. Yet this freedom was always to be bounded by the action of God in history.

For many Christian thinkers, the Incarnation of Christ was central to resolving the tension between destiny and freedom, for Christ made present what God promised for the future. For Eliot, as Dawson noted, religion is what gives spiritual freedom because “it alone brings man into relation with a higher order of reality than the world of politics or even culture.” While Eliot also believed in a more vertical world where eternity penetrates the world of time, he would not reduce that world to anything less than an incarnational one.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, too, recognized in Christ the concrete universal. Human freedom is a gift of God’s freedom, a locale for human action, yet “this space belongs to Christ,” and Christ’s incarnation as a human being and by extension in his people, “generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations” in which his meaning may be imparted.

For each of these thinkers and writers, then, Christ in some manner freed people from the material relativism and determinism of history, but they differed significantly on how to conceptualize that salvation. What they did agree on was that Christians must navigate between the twin dangers of complete egotism and pure determinism.

Theological Reflections on Moving

A very interesting set of personal and theological reflections by Gilbert Meilaender on changing homes and cities after 18 years: "Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving."

Here's one typical paragraph:

"I now realize that I had forgotten one little matter-what we call the doctrine of creation. Wholly apart even from any work-related questions, over eighteen years one carves out a life in a place. Except in the most extreme of circumstances, I suspect that it doesn't even particularly matter whether that place is generally perceived as desirable. It becomes home, the place where one is located. One walks certain routes, enjoys certain trees, recognizes certain people. We have doctors and dentists, grocery stores and shopping malls, baseball fields and banks, churches and schools. All become deeply embedded in a pattern of life. As Dr. Johnson is supposed to have claimed to refute Berkeley's idealism by kicking a stone which turned out to have its matter quite securely in place, so moving after eighteen years is a refutation of any supposition that our self is not in good part a body located in space and time."

But, really, the whole piece is worth pondering.