For Christian Civilization - and Civilized Christianity
My Reaction to Paul Kingsnorth's First Things Erasmus Lecture: "Against Christian Civilization"
Too many things are elided in Paul Kingsnorth’s Lecture for First Things, “Against Christian Civilization.”
In his lecture, Kingsnorth argues that the recent arguments by Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Douglas Murray for Christian civilization in the face of perceived civilizational collapse involve contradiction to the teachings of Christ. While Christ condemns greed, these thinkers sanction Western capitalism. While Christ cautions against ambition and teaches humility, these join with Oswald Spengler in commending the Western “Faustian spirit” of masculine aggression and conquest.
Kingsnorth commends instead a radical Christianity, committed to the sacrificial practice of the teachings of Jesus, without the attempt to grab the reins of civilizational power in the name of Christ.
Kingsnorth effectively articulates the perennial view of radical Christianity, that which has motivated the monastic stream of Catholic Christianity and the radical Reformation stream of Protestantism. According to this stream of theological thought, grace - the teachings of Christ, the new Commandment - abolishes nature - the orders of human life, family, property, and state.
However, Kingsnorth comes to this conclusion because his category of civilization includes in it too much, and his category of nature, too little.
“Civilization,” for Kingsnorth, includes the attempt to wield power for one’s own and other’s good - the essence of human action. His condemnation of human civilization as constituted by the seven deadly sins therefore confuses action to obtain and use property, motivated by love, with greed. The like for other human motivations.
“Nature,” for Kingsnorth, excludes our organization into civitae, the polis. Nature is the environment relatively untouched by human action. Action must be limited to that of the more peace-loving Native American tribes. Man is not a political animal, but something less, a pre-agricultural, and therefore, nomadic and tribal animal.
Yet Christ affirmed that he did not come to abolish the law - the representative of the Old Testament and the created orders of human nature and society it sanctioned (Matthew 5:17).
While he commanded those who would be his companions in his earthly ministry to abandon their possessions, he also taught them to exercise shrewdness, urging them to imitate a dishonest manager: “For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:8-9)
John the Baptist, preparing the way for Christ, did not urge soldiers to abandon their profession but to refrain from abuses: “Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what shall we do?’ And he said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.’” (Luke 3:14)
Kingsnorth is correct to emphasize the radicalism of Christ’s New Commandment in contrast to the old. Yet he is wrong to think that the new abolishes the old. The two remain in tension.
Theologian Emil Brunner describes:
“As Creator, God requires us to recognize and adjust ourselves to the orders He has created, as our first duty; as Redeemer, as our second duty, He bids us ignore the existing orders, and inaugurate a new line of action in view of the coming Kingdom of God.”
Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative
The Apostle James captures this: “One of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2:16-17)
Ironically, in order to obey this commandment, one must wield power and wealth for the good of others. Inattention to cultivating the virtues of civilization will render one incapable of the sacrifices grace requires. These sacrifices presuppose material success, as grace presupposes nature. They are no less necessary for that fact.
What we need is not the end of Christian civilization, and a “wild Christianity” in the midst of its ruins. We need civilization that is truly Christian.
A Christian nationalism that brashly desires to impose on Western secular people the faith they recently rejected is itself uncivilized, uncouth, and un-Christian.
The solution - very broadly - is truly Christian civilization and truly civilized Christianity.
We need to understand, for example, how Christians of various levels of wealth and status can live out the Christian faith, navigating the tension between grace and nature, between our second duty and our first. This will require both GDP and holy foolishness - “self-disadvantaging meaningful sacrifices” as Tanner Gesek recently put it.
It should also be said that many of us have experience with the kind of Christianity Paul Kingsnorth extols. In one version, its ideal is that we all become impoverished missionaries to impoverished countries.
What it lacks is a vision of how to be a Christian in a Western nation. In so doing, it encourages a kind of escapism. After all, virtue is easy if it can be attained by changing ones environs.
How to be a Christian in the midst of civilization - that is the question, and it is one that Kingsnorth’s rejection of civilization evades.
Theological Epistemology Course
If you enjoy considering the question of how Christianity intersects with nature and civilization, you’ll be interested in my online course, Theological Epistemology. Topics include the relationship between faith and science, revelation and reason, Athens and Jerusalem.
In the most recent lecture, I considered the theological case for fideism - the view that faith and reason are opposed to each other. Fideism is partner with the radical view of grace and nature that Kingsnorth espouses.
The Theological Case for Fideism
The main two views in theological epistemology are the fideist view and the rationalist view. The fideist view rejects natural theology and the use of reason or natural knowledge as a basis for faith. The rationalist view defends natural theology. You can guess which side I’m on.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you remind us that grace perfects and does not destroy nature. Thanks to generations of Protestant readings of Paul, we in the West tend to read the word "Law" as referring only to the commandments given Moses on Sinai, and not the entirety of the Torah. We forget that the Torah includes Genesis. Torah was at work, and is at work, in the birth and movement of planets and the turning of seasons as much as in the moral law: indeed, the latter is a reflection and outworking of the former, in accordance with the Divine nature. The Torah is inescapably social, revealing a cosmos which is ordered, hierarchical, interdependent and thus, in a sense, patent of "civilisation" at every level.
Good thoughts. FYI, you might want to make it clearer that the command to soldiers to forego extortion was given by John the Baptist, though certainly it would be hard to believe that Jesus would have disagreed with John’s practical instructions about what repentance would involve.