Don’t Throw Away The Gifts You Have Been Given
January 13, 2021
In our weekly church study, we are working through Bruce Shelley’s work, Church History in Plain Language. It is, as the title indicates, an accessible introduction to church history.
In a recent study, we considered the explosive growth of the early Church. In 300 years, the Christian faith went from Jewish sect to imperial religion. The nature of the expansion of the Church is a fascinating discussion and one that is beyond this article. One critical factor to point out, however, is the distinctive way the early Christians lived. Theirs was an ethic of love.
In antiquity, there was nothing like Christian love. The prosperity of the Roman empire was enjoyed by a few. Most people lived a subservient, hand-to-mouth life. In the words of Thomas Hobbes, life for most of the Roman empire was nasty, brutish, and short.
Mortality was real. Famine, storms, crop failure and blight could wipe out food production and entire populations. Not only were people threatened with death from natural events, they themselves were perpetrators of evil. Mothers and fathers abandoned newborns on roads. Strangers and pilgrims were susceptible to exploitation while traveling in foreign lands. Evildoers abused orphans and widows. Prisoners were practically abandoned in prisons which were veritable death chambers. It was expected that marriages would be open to infidelity.
Yet, Christianity appeared as the Light of Christ shining in a dark world and brought a true revolution of life and society. Tertullian’s remark of what pagans thought of Christians is true: “see how these Christians love one another.”
And not only did Christians love one another. They loved the world because God had loved the world. Christians built hospitals to care for the sick, orphanages to tend to abandoned children, schools to promote Biblical literacy, and cemeteries that would bury the dead with dignity. In time, the Church would build the university, develop science, and be the guardians and keepers of the flame of civilization. Of all the populations of Rome, Christians had compassion, honesty, integrity, and loyalty.
In our day, there is passing agreement that these values are good. But note that these values and virtues did not arise out of nowhere. They were the result of the Christian faith practiced by the early Church, dissipating the darkness of pagan barbarism and bringing the dawn of human civilization. The virtues of human civilization, as we know it, are inconceivable apart from the Christian faith.
What we have in the West for the past 1500 years is the triumph of Christianity. However stained and sinful were the expressions of its Christian faith, the Church had worked out the ethical and societal implications of Christian love. The Church articulated in a living way the need for sexual chastity (whether inside or outside of marriage), the dignity of work, the sacred nature of life and property, the blessing of children, the respect of neighbor, the necessity of the rule of law, and the boundary of just wars. The Christian faith was a small lump of leaven that in time leavened the entire batch of flour. We live in Christ’s world. But it is no stretch to say that we live in a Christianized world, too.
This was the case up until about five minutes ago. Consider what is happening in the West. For many decades now, western societies have been renouncing the Christian faith as well as all the implications of the Christian faith, societal and otherwise.
This is the evil of decadence. Decadence is not always so graphic as blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars in one night in Las Vegas. At its foundation, decadence is living off and enjoying the goodness of the past, taking it for granted, refusing to defend it, and finally denouncing it as evil.
We are a decadent society. We can enjoy being fat and sassy because of the work of our forebears. But we neither acknowledge nor appreciate their labors to secure the material prosperity, political freedoms, and Christian knowledge we now enjoy. In fact, we are (willfully?) ignorant of their work. If we are knowledgeable of their contributions, we’re embarrassed by them, or worse. We cannot be bothered to lift a finger to defend the things that make for civilization and true human culture— economic productivity, marriage with children, rational human discourse, rule of law, impartiality before the law, the sanctity of human life, self-government, and limited government over against tyrannical encroachments of the state with corporate oligarchic interests.
This is the hypocrisy of decadence that works against the Christian ethic of love. We are only able to critique patriarchy because men built this country, and created a civilization out of the wilderness that was North America. We have the luxury of denouncing “hetero-normativity” because one man and one woman bore us as their children. We denounce pro-lifers as anti-abortionists yet we can do so because, strangely, we’re alive. As Reagan once quipped, “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.” We are able to denounce the racism of our country even while in our lifetime a black president and black vice-president have ascended to power, and while anti-racists justice workers enjoy book publishing deals and boutique professorships at prestigious schools. We denounce Western civilization as evil yet we enjoy countless of its fruits.
Of course, all of this comes back to God. Man’s problem is not merely man-ward and horizontal. It is, in its fundamental nature, God-ward and vertical. We hate fathers and authorities because we hate God. We hate the past because we hate God. We hate what we’ve been bequeathed because we hate God. And we hate every reminder of God. Our decadence is seen in that, while enjoying the blessings God has given to us, we denounce God, and insist on calling these blessings “evil.”
As Christian apologists of yesteryear would say, atheism presupposes theism. Cornelius Van Til once observed a little girl slapping her father’s face while sitting on his lap. Van Til thought this was precisely what an unbelieving culture does to God. It is the creature rebelling against his Creator all the while dependent upon Him for all things. There is no true atheism.
The love of the Father brought life out of death in Jesus Christ. The love of the Father shed abroad in the hearts of His Church does the same. Christian love marries, procreates children, builds homes and communities, and creates civilization. But sin is parasitic and decadent, a destructive and counterfeiting force that pulls down and degenerates all that it inhabits. It cannot possibly build. It does not know how to build because it refuses, by its very nature, to live in the light of Christ.
It’s been said repeatedly: “hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, and soft men make hard times.” There’s a lot of soft men in our soft times. But you, Christian man, be a hard man. Do not be decadent. Do not be soft and lax. Do not throw away the gifts given you by your Father in heaven and your Christian fathers, around the world and especially in this country. Do not be ignorant of those things you take for granted. Defend the things that make for a robust Christian faith which, as it turns out, make for human civilization. Such is the ethic of Christian love.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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