When the Oracles Fell Silent: A Response to Critics
Readers of my two recent blogs have raised the objection that Christianity is not unique, but that other ancient philosophies possessed similar or identical values that the earliest Christian thinkers could simply have absorbed by the 1st century. Interestingly, they also claim that future philosophies could one day appropriate Christianity’s advantages, and then supplant it in the same way Christianity supplanted those that came before it.
Gladly do I grant that Christ, being the Word, had qualities which were appropriated into several ancient cultures before His incarnation in Bethlehem. Richardson’s Eternity in Their Hearts contains plenty of examples. Moreover, in the blog, I have Athanasius himself confessing,
He had not hidden Himself out of men’s sight, nor given the knowledge of Himself in one way only; but had, on the contrary, unfolded it to them in many forms and by many ways.
It could be argued that these primitive forms of the heavenly message were too yielding and too incomplete. But, following Feuerbach, one might say, did not the Stoics teach that man was not born for his own sake, but for the sake of others, for love? That the world was to them one city, and men its citizens? And did not Seneca, in his sublimest sayings, extol love, clemency, humanity, especially towards slaves? Others could, no doubt, point to founts of indigenous tribal wisdom. All are no doubt there, and all perfectly correct.
Consider, however, the fate of the much-vaunted Roman tribunus plebis, or tribune of the people.* The egalitarian ideals from which it sprung were unquestionably noble, and indeed, the office predated Christ. But (and the irony must be appreciated), Marx was also correct when he pressed that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” As such, it quickly became clear that the tribune ideal, however good and true, was no match for Imperial might. Eventually, the office, deprived of its once revolutionary power, ended up being dragged along year after year in the Emperor’s wake like some desiccated corpse.
It was only when the gospel arrived, was made manifest, and then reincarnated into witnesses and sent out two-by-two, for instance, that a full-bodied culture-and-values metanoia-type transformation entered the world. This very often inspired a sea change en masse as, what would have been mere doctrines named “new creation”, theosis, Imago Dei, and the like were demonstrated powerfully and well able to penetrate the cultural malaise (see Acts for copious examples).
In this way did the gospel go to the core of the human heart — and found there, cob-webbed and forgotten, its own majestic likeness. As Hart suggests, and as argued in The Lovers and The Search series, the gospel is God’s ultimate response to a longing in humanity that had — like the woman’s coin in Luke 15 — been cruelly suppressed and scarcely voiced for ages.
At the tail end of the previous entry I willingly grant that no one is in debt to Christ (at least not in the legal sense) for the liberties and benefits that the majority of humanity enjoys today: “The epochal movements of the Renaissance and the Reformation had given a secular and man-centered focus to human interests and aspirations, while modern science had established a framework of naturalistic and empirical norms of inquiry.” (Feuerbach)
Nevertheless, all will one day be unable to deny that God was their source, catalyst and guide.
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian who gained some measure of notoriety when he took the rich to task at Davos for riding 1500 private jets to hear David Attenborough warn of the climate crisis (and for avoiding taxes). A review of his new book, Humankind, which seeks to dismantle the concept that people are basically bad, a la Augustine and Hobbes, contains a section that is very telling. It indicates, yet again, that the premise in When the Oracles Fell Silent is true:
Humankind is the story of a fall from grace. Back when we were hunter-gatherers, we roamed peacefully in the Garden of Eden; then we enclosed a square of land, called it our own, invented property and settled down to defend it, wars began and our innocence was lost. Somehow, we have to find our way back to the Garden… There’s even a section called The Other Cheek. Bregman may say he’s an atheist, but this is an intensely Christian work, isn’t it?
He laughs and admits: “In many ways, it is. I couldn’t help myself, writing the epilogue, thinking about what the rules for life could be if you held this [benign] view of human nature. I found myself quoting the Sermon on the Mount over and over again.”
In the meantime, Nietzsche has, rather prophetically, warned about what happens when society untethers itself from its source. Any society. I live in East Asia, where many of Christ’s ideals have arguably already soaked into the ground through the preached gospel as well as indirectly through economics, science, literature, music, political pressure , and so on. There is simply a host of vehicles along which human purpose and affirmation can travel. Native academics have even called for the country to explicitly Christianize; they’ve seen the vacuums still remaining in society and the cliffs the nation might fall from (a repeat of the 20th century experience would be nightmarish). One even admitted that Christianity was a religion already indigenous.
Yet, right now, governmental authorities are actively trying to disconnect the Chinese from this grace, her true gift, which was designed to be, in Abrahamic fashion, given back to the world. This is wreaking havoc with average Chinese sensibilities in surprising ways.
In summary, it need hardly be said that, in our modern world, to be human is to be Christian. This didn’t occur in any imperial or colonial fashion — the instances that was attempted didn’t produce good, or lasting, fruit — usually two or three generations sufficed to prove such a petty foundation untenable.
Rather, as mentioned in the article, Christianity’s modus operandi, perhaps its raison d’être, is the pure and unrelenting application of love, and especially for the forsaken. And no matter what name you give it — The Tao, The Way, Man’s Inalienable Rights, The Indomitable Human Spirit, Christian — the Rose of Sharon will, in Shakespearean terms, smell as sweet.
In the end, Jesus of Nazareth is both the root and stem of human dignity, and, as D.B. Hart observed, “Once the world has been seen in this way, it can never again be unseen.”
MUGGERIDGE: We look back upon history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling. Revolutions and counterrevolutions. Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back upon my own fellow [British] countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I’ve heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.
I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind. England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.
Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ.
N E X T → Strangers In a Familiar Land
When the Oracles Fell Silent, Part 2 ← P R E V I O U S
* Elected officials who acted as a check on the authority of the senate, and held the power of ius intercessionis to intervene on behalf of the plebeians and veto unfavourable legislation. The powers of the tribunes were severely curtailed during the constitutional reforms of the dictator Sulla in 81 BC. Although many of these powers were restored in further reforms of 75 BC and 70 BC, the prestige and authority of the tribunes had been irreparably damaged. In 48 BC, the senate granted tribunician powers to the dictator Julius Caesar (tribunicia potestas, powers equivalent to those of a tribune without actually being one), who used them to prevent the other tribunes from interfering with his actions. In 23 BC, the senate granted the same power to Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, and from that point on it was regularly granted to each emperor as part of their formal title. Though the tribunes continued to be elected, they had lost their independence and most of their practical power. The office became merely a step in the political careers of plebeians who aspired to a seat in the senate. (from the Oxford Classical Dictionary)
