Col. 1:16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
Romans 11:36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things…
“We think that all faithful thinking has to be theological. But most things, to truly understand them, require non-theological analysis. That’s not to say that they are outside God but that the topics of the theological discipline cannot adequately explain/analyze them.”
Dr. Stephen Wolfe
“An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine spotted it immediately in a comment he made to me soon after seeing the movie (Gibson’s ‘The Passion of Christ’) himself and dismissing the charges of antisemitism as preposterous. ‘It’s all a put on, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘None of the guys claiming it’s antisemitic really believes that. It’s really just a question of power. That’s all.’
It is indeed a question of power because entirely apart from the theological, historical, and aesthetic merits of the Gibson film is the question of controlling the public culture, the way of life that defines American society and establishes public standards by which behavior, discussion, and thought are regulated. You probably do not have to accept Christopher Dawson’s view that ‘a living religion always aspires to be the center round which the whole culture revolves’ to grasp that religion is invariably a powerful force in defining a culture and that it is no coincidence that the words cult and culture both derive from the Latin cultus. The religion a society accepts—publicly, regardless of what its members privately believe—is what defines its morals and its patterns of what is and is not legitimate.
The angry controversy about (the movie) ‘The Passion’ is about which cultus will define American culture, and the conflict over the movie is a struggle for cultural power, for what Antonio Gramsci called ‘cultural hegemony.’ Rabbi Jacob Neusner has remarked that Auschwitz has replaced Sinai in the religious sensibilities of many modern secularized Jews, and the bitter and hysterical war against Mel Gibson represents a further attempted displacement—that Auschwitz replace Calvary, that Christianity itself as Americans understand and accept it be defined and regulated by contemporary Jewish standards and those cultural hegemons who enforce them.”
Samuel T. Francis
I run these these three quotes, from Scripture, Wolfe, and Francis, together in order to demonstrate how mind bogglingly jejune Wolfe is to insist. “that to understand most things requires non-theological analysis”, by providing a Samuel Francis quote regarding a film. Francis’ quote, using theological analysis gets to the center of the meaning of Mel Gibson’s film as well as why it was so vehemently resisted.
Secondly, contra Wolfe and R2K, with their agreement on the Natural Law model of the world, there is no understanding of any reality apart from the usage of theological analysis and categories. I promise you any analysis that Wolfe does on anything is riven with theological assumptions and a-prioris. The theological assumption that is incipient in Wolfe’s quote above is that God is not needed in order to understand many aspects of reality. Wolfe is presuming that man can understand many aspects of reality in the context of completely discountenancing the God of the Bible. Autonomous man, can, starting only from his own reality, and as the measure of whatever he is analyzing, come to the truth of whatever he is analyzing. You cannot understand the depth of the depravity of Wolfe’s quote without using theological categories to analyze his and its depravity.
Thirdly, what is odd about Wolfe’s quote when compared with the Francis quote is that Francis, who was not a Christian at the time he wrote this piece from which the quote comes, was not a Christian while Wolfe professes Christ. Here we have a case where the children of darkness are wiser than the children of the light.
I do accept Dawson’s view on religion and it is only Wolfe’s religion that could force him to not accept Dawson’s view on religion that religion/theology is the center around which all culture orbits. If we don’t do analysis on anything via theological categories then all that is left is doing analysis via humanistic categories, which, ironically enough, ends up being its own theological analysis.
Wolfe went on to describe anybody who disagrees with his quote above as doing the worst of worldview thinking. Keep in mind that Natural Law theory is inimically hostile to worldview thinking. It is only “natural” that a Natural law aficionado like Wolfe would say such a thing.
Dawson is correct. Religion/theology is the center around which all revolves and since that is the center than all is an expression of the religion/theology around which it revolves.
All the denials and vituperations of the Stephen Wolfes and the R. Scott Clarks of the world, who do not agree that everything must be analyzed using theological categories, no matter what else they might disagree on, will not change that.
