Category: Culture

“It seems to be the fact that a new way of life or a new view of Reality is felt intuitively before it is comprehended intellectually, that a philosophy is the last product of a mature culture, the crown of a long process of social development, not its foundation. It is Religion and Art that we can best see the vital intention of the living culture….

The Greek statue must be first conceived, then lived, then made, and last of all thought. There you have the whole cycle of creative Hellenic culture. First Religion, then Society, then Art, and finally Philosophy. Not that one of these is cause and the others effects. They are all different aspects or functions of one life.”

Christopher Dawson
Enquiries Into Religion & Culture — pg. 99, 100

1.) I probably would take exception to Dawson’s claim that ‘not one of these is cause.’ I would insist that theology is cause. “As a man thinketh in his heart so he is.”

2.) The inuitive precedes logically the intellectual for the same reason the ontological precedes the epistemological. Epistemological explanation is the apparatus used in order to communicate what has been ontologically impressed upon us by God. It is a old argument about which is prior to the other but as long as we insist that the two correspond I agree that the intuitive precedes the intellectual expression. Michael Polanyi, in his works teases out this same idea.

Economic Fascism — The Mega State is in bed with Mega Corporate America. The only things these people argue about is who gets to be on top.

http://www.thinkbigworksmall.com/mypage/player/tbws/23088/1157575

Government Looking to hire retarded lawyers as a way to fill quota system.

Please no jokes on how looking for retarded lawyers is redundant.

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/justice-department-seeks-applicants-mental-retardation/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zia-zoANZw

Keep in mind as you watch the above that the woman that Obama is speaking about was 41 when she died of breast cancer. Then keep in mind that the Obama Administration has clearly stated that women under 50 do not need breast exams.

http://www.abc2news.com/content/square_off/default.aspx

John Lofton stands against buggers pushing their …. er, um … agenda on the US Military.

“There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”

John Witherspoon
Presbyterian Minister / Educator / American Founding Father

I lifted this quote from a piece

http://www.americanvision.org/article/i-refuse-to-be-comforted/

written by Bojidar Marinov. It is a piece I wish I would have written and really should be read by all Christians but especially those who use the doctrine of God’s sovereignty to cancel out the doctrine of our responsibility to the commands that issue forth from our High King Jesus Christ. As Bojidar notes, there should be no comfort found by or for a people who try to use God’s sovereignty as blanket to cover the ongoing sin of their refusal to contend for the crown rights of King Jesus.

However as good as that article is — and it is great — I want to take this quote in a slightly different direction. I have, for what seems like an eternity, said that there are two ways for Christian culture to die. These two ways are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture can die both from the inside out or it can die from the outside in. Just as a tree can die both because it has become rotten at its core — only to find that rot move outward — or because the tree has become rotten in its extremities — only to find that rot move inward, so Christian culture can rot from the inside out or from the outside in. This unwavering conviction is one reason why I have struggled so mightily against the dualism of R2Kt for I see it as a rot virus that will kill what remains of our Christian culture (and very little remains) from the outside in.

Christian Cultures that rot from the inside out are cultures where the Theology, from which they draw their life, is untended and neglected. The the character of sin, the absolute necessity of redemption, the doctrines of grace, the Sovereignty, Transcendence, and Immanence of God, the Lordship of Christ, The work of the Spirit in sanctification are ignored and so one form or another of the rot that is Humanistic idolatry where man is large and God is small begins to infect the Church and as the Church is the fountain from which a Christian culture drinks its theology the whole culture begins to share in the rot. God sends a leanness into its soul.

However, Christian cultures can also rot from the outside in. Now keep in mind that I’ve noted that these two are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture that rot from the outside in are those cultures where the the life of the culture (its theology) for some reason isn’t moving out to the extremities in order to nourish them and give them life. On one level the Church is fine because it continues to affirm and care for its theology. However Christian theology at the same time becomes abstracted from everyday life to the point that people in the Church eventually can’t see the application or connection between things like a conscience not in bondage and temporal property, or the connection between religious liberty and civil liberty, or, to give a more fundamental example, the connection between the Lordship of the King Christ and the necessity for limited and decentralized governments. When it is no longer possible for the core of the culture to send its nourishment out to the extremities of the culture because of the inability to make proper application, the extremities begin to whither and that withering eventually begins to move to the core and the whole culture begins to rot. As I have said repeatedly this is the danger of all Christian theologies that want to posit culture and faith as independent and unrelated phenomena. There are Christian theologies that encourage that Christian theology should not bear on the public square. Such theologies ensure rot from the outside in because if the public square (the tree’s extremities) can not be informed by Christian theology it will be informed by some other pagan theology and as that pagan theology gains in strength in the extremities of culture it will eventually work inward to infect the institution that produces the theology that informs the culture so that core of the culture and the extremities of the culture theologically correspond so that both are thoroughly rotted.

This is the kind of rot that Witherspoon is warning against. We cannot find sanctuary in our Churches and leave the cultural extremities to their rot and not expect that eventually the rot will work its way into our sanctuaries. Christian people live and swim in the culture and if that culture in which they are swimming is not spring fed by a Christian theology then what will happen is that Christian people, will, with exceptions, begin to reinterpret the Christian faith in light of the theology that they are constantly drenched in during the week.

Christians must mind their theology. Both in its theory that bolsters the concrete and in its application praxis where the dots are connected between the orthodoxy and the orthopraxy. Currently we are not doing so well either in theory or in praxis and so we are in danger of rotting from both the inside out and the outside in.

“The liberal thinkers and statesmen who were the makers of the nineteenth century civilization regarded religion and culture as entirely independent phenomena. Religion was entirely a matter for the individual conscience and it had nothing to do with social and economic life. But the resultant secularization of culture which took place throughout Western Europe in the nineteenth century brought its own nemesis. It led to the discredit of a religion that had no power over social life and of a culture that had no spiritual sanctions. It found at once its logical conclusion and its refutation in the yet more radical secularization of life characterized by the Marxian philosophy. While Liberalism had pushed religion on one side, Communism eliminated it altogether and thus prepared the way for the complete re-absorption of the individual in the social organism, while at the same time it transformed the social organism into an economic mechanism.

Christopher Dawson
Enquiries Into Religion & Culture — pg. xviii

1.) It is a myth to think that one can separate religion and culture. However, what the nineteenth century did was to insist that Christianity (this is the religion that Dawson is referring to) could be confined to the individual while culture could get along quite well uninformed by the Christian faith. What actually was happening, was not the secularization of culture, but rather what was happening was the incremental and subtle moving of culture to a different religious foundation besides Christianity. The liberal statesmen and thinkers of whom Dawson mentions — most of whom doubtless were not epistemologically self-conscious about what they were doing — could not have succeeded with their task of positing Western culture on a different faith/religious foundation if they had been explicit about their intentions. Consequently, the justification for the cordoning of Christianity off to a private individual realm that was compartmentalized from culture was advanced in the name of constructing a more equitable public square through the pursuit of secularizing it (i.e. — moving it off its Christian foundation) so that conflicts of faith would be kept out of the public square.

2.) Such an endeavor is ultimately futile. Just as Christian ethics can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel those ethics away from the Christian Theology that supports and informs those ethics, so a Christian culture can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel a culture away from the religion/theology that informs it. The attempt to both move culture off of its Christian base in the pursuit of “secularization” and to expect the retention of the stability that was characteristic of that culture when it was firmly pinioned on the Christian religion is akin to the attempt to move a water fountain off of a well that gives potable water in the pursuit of a alien polluted well while retaining the expectation that the polluted well will be fine since the water fountain has always previously issued potable water.

3.) When Dawson mentions a degraded culture that has “no spiritual sanctions” it reminds me that cultures are always covenantal. One of the characteristics of covenant is that there are always sanctions for violating the covenant. The culture that resulted from the shift to “secularization” is a culture where the spiritual sanctions have not so much that the spiritual sanctions no longer exist but rather the spiritual sanctions have changed so that the new covenant resulting from the putative secularization are sanctions that just the opposite of what they had previously been. Now, since the sanctions have drastically changed it may look like that the culture no longer has “spiritual sanctions” when looked at with the expectation of the sanctions of the previous culture but one can be sure that some sanctions still exist. As one obvious example of what I am getting at, two generations ago homosexuality in the culture of the West received the spiritual sanction of being ostracized. Two generations later if one expects those same spiritual covenantal sanctions to exist one might say that the culture no longer has spiritual sanctions. However, as I said, the spiritual sanctions haven’t gone away but rather now the spiritual sanctions fall on those who expect spiritual sanctions to fall on homosexuality. Culture is inevitably covenantal. It has spiritual sanctions. When you move the culture from one religion to another religion the covenant changes with that movement and the spiritual sanctions do likewise.

3.) Note that the point that Dawson is making is that nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen were embraced a dualism that divorced religion from culture. It is interesting that the R2Kt proponents w/ their Escondido Hermeneutic contend for the very same dualism as the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen that Dawson refers to. Likewise both the Escondido Hermeneutic and the doctrine of the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen insist and insisted on a religion that is and was restricted to the individual conscience that has nothing to do with social and economic life.

4.) Don’t miss the powerful point that Dawson makes when he tells us that the result of creating a dualistic culture where Christianity is grossly privatized what arises is a new theology (Marxism) that will overcome the previous dualism in favor of a religion (some variant of socialism) that will provide a unify integration point that will provide cohesion for all of society and its culture. The danger here of course is that Marxism is a corporate humanism that provides not a unifying but rather a Humanistic Unitarian integration point that allows for no diversity as the Christian faith does. What this means is a savage Borg-like ugly sameness that is impressed upon all individuals in the societal hive. This is the guaranteed eventual result of the dualism that is offered by the Escondido Hermeneutic. If Christianity will not inform all of life then some other pagan belief system will provide the integration point that will inform the totality of a society and culture.

1.) Co-opt the Christian church and faith so that it teaches a faith system that is still called Christianity that is inimical to a freedom loving people maintaining the desire to remain free.

2.) View the Constitution as a living document and in doing so completely eviscerate the 9th and 10th amendments as well as the whole notion of separation of powers. This is achieved via Judicial and Bureaucratic fiat.

3.)Eliminate all competing zones of societal sovereignty. Rid family, church, academia, and other parallel institutions of their ability to legislate their respective realms independent of the State.

4.) Criminalize the individual who has been taught critical thinking skills. Attack this individual and his inalienable rights through fiat laws (see #2) that lead to perpetual harassment.

5.) Attack and eliminate the whole notion of private property through confiscatory taxation, inflation of the money supply, and excessive regulation. Consistent w/ this wage unremitting war against small businesses and grassroots entrepreneurs.

6.) Seize complete control of the education apparatus of society and turn them into temples that indoctrinate the state religion in the pupils.

7.) Elect a new citizenry by encouraging illegal immigration and by so reducing the bar for qualifying for Citizenship that the nation is populated by easily controlled illiterate and the uneducated aliens. This also has the salutary effect of diluting the influence of the native born educated Americans and aids w/ achieving #1.

8.) Destroy, by the devaluing of the currency the private financial institutions that have funded the greatest production and accumulation of prosperity the world has ever known. Destruction of the financial institutions can also come be direct seizure or by forcing upon them money policies at which they would have naturally recoiled.

9.) Embrace some form of socialism by putting in place command and control economic policies which yield redistribution (and so destruction) of wealth. This is achieved by destroying the currency and replacing it w/ a new currency or by revaluing the existing currency.

10.) By way of embracing international law, international treaty and executive fiat destroy national sovereignty.

11.) Steer foreign policy and military might away from National interest, putting them at the service of international interests and globalism instead.

12.) Seize ownership of weaponry from the citizen, or make their ownership of weaponry a non-factor, or so dispirit the citizenry that they are not willing to use their weaponry to resist tyranny.

13.) Place people in bondage to their hedonistic lifestyle so that in order to maintain their hedonistic lifestyle they will acquiesce to the promise of the State that it will augment their hedonistic lifestyles through governmental fiat. If successful people will then call their government augmented hedonistic lifestyle “freedom.”

14.) Keep the citizenry in debt. A people in debt will not resist a government that gives false promises to relieve debt.