Category: Culture

Theology & The University

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

General Carl Von Clausewitz
German war theoretician 

As RJR notes in the quote below the same is true of Theology and all other disciplines. Every other discipline that can be named among the Humanities is just the continuation of theology by other means. This is why Theology was once understood to be the Queen of the Sciences. Our forbears understood that conclusions arrived at in the other humanities were only as good as the theology from which they were drawing.

Indeed, this understanding of Theology as the “Queen of the Sciences” is where we get our whole idea of “University.” The word “University” etymologically derives from the idea of “the whole,” or “the aggregate.” The idea was, in the midst of the various multifaceted disciplines offered and studied at a University there was a “Uni” that bound all the disciplines together. That “Uni” in “University” is Theology. Without theology as “Queen of the Sciences,” one no longer has a “University” but only a “Multiversity.”

The fact that we have given up Christian theology as “The Queen of the Sciences” goes a long way towards explaining the irrational age which we inhabit. Since we have no unifying glue to hold us together all that is left is the bizarre and the irrational.

Consider also, how modern Western man’s habit of compartmentalized thinking also is derivative of the refusal to have Christian theology be the “Queen of the Sciences.” Modern man is schizophrenic. He is a centripetal being. There is nothing that keeps him from the most strange and queer contradictions in his life. For example, modern man will, at one and the same time, espouse evolution and then turn around and attend church on Sunday. Modern man will complain about the Government and then keep on voting as if his vote will change what it has not changed for over a century. Modern man will see the modern woman for the feminist being she currently is and yet will still propose marriage. Modern man is a contradictory mess and that is largely accounted for, by the fact that he refuses to take Christian theology as the “Queen of the Sciences.”

What is interesting, though despite all the above being true, is that theology is an inescapable category, which means, that when man flushes Christian theology as the “Uni” in his “University” he doesn’t by doing so get rid of theology. Instead, he embraces something else has his theology. Marxists embrace Economics as their theology. Many moderns embrace “Science” as their theology, not realizing that that Science is only as good as the theology it is pinned upon. Cultural Marxists have, perhaps more insightfully than the rest, chosen culture as their theology. (More insightfully, I offer, because of the tight nexus that exists between culture and theology.) The point is that one never completely evacuates some kind of theology as the adhesive that is the sticking agency for something that passes as a pastiche of coherence for all the particulars.

As an aside all of this underscores again why R2K is such a stupid incoherent theology, arguing as it does, that there is no such thing as Christian law, or Christian Education, or Christian culture, etc. R2K strips Christianity of its fixative social order functioning and replaces it with the irrationality of a social order based on a “natural theology” that has only successfully existed when Christianity has dominated the culture.

Sociology, Literature, Psychology, Anthropology, Economics, Law, … all of it is just so much the continuation of theology by other means. If and when people ever come to grips with that truth, it will make conversation a good deal easier.

We end with the great Rushdoony making the same point.

“An abstract theology is only formally or technically systematic. Systematic theology must of necessity deny because God is sovereign, that there are any neutral facts or any areas of neutrality. All factuality is God-created and God-governed and interpreted. All facts are therefore theological facts, and every area of life, thought, study, and action is a theological concern.

Education, politics, science, the arts, the vocations, the family, and all things else, are theological concerns. A theology which does not involve itself in every area in terms of the sovereign God and His infallible law-word cannot be systematic: it is only abstract.”

 

Patriotism, Flag Waving & Allegiance

“We salute one flag and that is the American flag. And we’re going to make sure the American flag gets the respect it deserves, alright? … Patriotism will be celebrated in our cities and taught very, very strongly to our children.”

Donald Trump
Thank You, Tour
Hershey, Pennsylvania

“The territorialization of the patriotic sentiment has its modern roots in the political state that emerged in the Renaissance, but it was not brought to high intensity until the French Revolution. Then it was that the idea of France, ‘one and indivisible,’ became the mainspring, working through Jacobin decree and military successes in the field, of what think of as modern nationalism and patriotism.

Patriotism, as we have known it for nearly two centuries has been inseparable from war and revolution. Each of these forces, destroying or diminishing as they have the more ancient ties of race, locality, religion and kinship as effective allegiances….”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 58

Many have been those who have opined that Trump ran upon a “civic nationalism.” But the question has to be asked, at least, what kind of Nationalism does Trump envision. Though I consider myself a Nationalist, I recognize that not all Nationalisms are created equal. The kind of Nationalism I envision is a grass roots nationalism that grows up out of allegiances that are more fundamental to an allegiance to the nation that is just the consequence of those former and prior allegiances.

There is a Nationalism that exists that is posited on the destruction of the allegiances I consider primary. Allegiance to religion, race, people group, locality, clan and kin are the bedrock allegiances that when existent create natural loyalty and allegiance to the nation. However, there is a patriotism that we might call “un-natural.” Un-natural because it reverses the process and is built top down. The demand is for the patriotism to the Fatherland without a prior patriotism to the former allegiances mentioned. This kind of nationalism absolutizes the nation-state and so seeks to destroy all other allegiances and patriotisms in favor of allegiance to the Father-land. This is the kind of nationalism that finds children being encouraged to report on their parents. This is the kind of nationalism that expects ministers to read their Bibles through the flag.

I don’t know which kind of patriotism Trump is touting but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this kind of “patriotism” talk concerns me. Trump talks about local, local, local. I like that. But is he really going to give us a patriotism that devolves power from DC so that the local can be genuinely local again and so worthy of plights of fealty?

If he does so, I’ll be the first to congratulate Trump.

Nisbet and McAtee on “Professional men of Knowledge”

“Who, we are obliged to ask, looks with respect any longer to the professional man of knowledge: whether scientist or scholar?

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 110

Nisbet goes on to explain why this is so. This is so because the putative “wise men” for so many generations have disappointed and let us down. People have gotten wise to the con that the “Professional men of knowledge” pulled for so long. For a couple generations now these men have been all hat and no cattle.

In my environs, I see this most commonly among the clergy. The clergy was once accepted as the “professional men of knowledge” par excellent. This is rightfully no longer the case for those who are not simpletons or groupies.

The clergy has shown themselves too often to be vacuous hacks whose expertise is more akin to the kind of expertise one finds in those who have made a career of building McDonald franchises or in the skill one finds in Shamans among animistic peoples.

Clergy as “Professional men of knowledge?” That is almost as incongruent and ridiculous as the idea of Psychologists as being “Healthcare providers for the mind,” or “Friends of the Court” as being “Friends of the family.”

And so, we must each, on our own, go to the well of knowledge, and labor to be our own “Professional men of knowledge,” because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that we are going to find Professional men of knowledge in this culture.

__________

* = This is a post where I am speaking of general truths as opposed to universal truths. I acknowledge that there remain solid clergy out there. I just am convinced they are a minority.

Symbol Change

Judges 6:5 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order.

Studying the book of Judges right now and in Judges we see how unfaithful Israel had built altars to Baal as opposed to previous generations who had erected altars to “I AM” thus communicating who the people and the land were being given over to. I was struck with the importance of those altars as symbols and declarations of ownership.

When we tear down old symbols and replace them with new symbols we are, like the Israelites of old, giving ourselves, our children and our land over to different gods. The tearing down of a flag or a monument and the raising of a new flag or new monument is a significant happening. What you are witnessing is the gods being changed out.

In the last 100 years, we have seen quite a bit of this. When you do any reading on the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of Communism you note that the Communist went whole hog on this very point. They not only tore down Churches. The Communists changed those Churches usage from houses of worship to places where pigs were housed. The Communists changed the Churches from places where the soul could find relief to latrines where a different kind of relief was found. The Communists after the revolution went on a rampage tearing down old symbols and erecting new ones. Out with the old God. In with the new gods.

When the Soviet Union fell the process was reversed. I clearly remember many scenes of statues of Stalin and Lenin being pulled down by cranes. When “Desert Storm” was finished one of the clearest images of victory was the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein.  Out with the old god. In with the new gods.

Now in our country, we have been experiencing the very same thing. First, it was the Confederate flag desecrated and hidden away. Recently, I read a longish piece on how it is the Gadsen flag that has been determined as “racist” and no longer can be tolerated in the public square. Statuary of our ancestors is being removed in favor of the ancestors of an alien and strange people. Out with Christianity. In with the new gods.

Whenever you find this happening you are witnessing a religious attack on the people. Where this religious attack is successful you are witnessing a people being conquered. In the book of Judges, the people had been conquered by Baal as witnessed by all those new altars built to Baal. In Czarist Russia the Christian Russians had been conquered by the Jewish Bolsheviks as witnessed by removal of their Christian Churches. Today White Western Christians are being conquered by the enemies of Christ and the evidence of that is the removal of our symbols in favor of the symbols of our enemies.

The old West — The West of Christendom — is under siege and most Christians aren’t even aware that they and their undoubted catholic Christian faith is under attack.

The Work of Social Atomization

The common error was to believe that if the individual were liberated from the smaller organic groups he would be set free. But in actual fact, he was exposed to the influence of mass currents, to the influence of the stage, and direct integration into mass society. Finally, uprooted, the individual became much less stable.
 
Jacque Ellul
Propaganda; The Formation of Men’s Attitude
 
 
1.) Most men are chameleons. They will blend into their socio-cultural background. Strip man of the Institutional covenantal backgrounds of a decidedly Christian family, community, and church, and man will not cease to be a chameleon. Instead, man will begin to blend into the larger pagan background of the pagan state, the pagan media-cultural complex, and the pagan legal framework.
 
Paradoxically enough, the Atomization of man that Ellul chronicles here does the yeoman work of creating mass man.
 
2.) On the issue of the uprooted individual becoming much less stable, I would contend that this is creating a kind of social insanity. Social sanity requires the kind of stability of which Ellul laments the loss. This kind of stability requires long established community and familial infrastructure, customs and routines that are inter-generational, and a sense of place. All those have been largely lost.
 
The uprootedness (the social insanity) that we often see in our social order can be directly traced back to the loss of our organic groups.
 
3.) However, this uprootedness serves the interest of the heathen state
 
An unstable and uprooted people are not likely to have the foundation or moral capital upon which to rebuke and resist the tyrannical state. It is a net positive for the usurpatious state to uproot and destabilize its citizenry because in doing so there is job security for the bureaucratic class.