Not 'Multicultural Diversity' but 'Cultural Transformation': A Christian Reflection on Culture

 

As the Western world shifts to embrace a post-Christian culture, we might pause to remember from what we were delivered when Christian faith first took hold of pagan antiquity.  For this, we might quote someone at the beginning of Christian witness in the Roman Empire—the apostle Paul—and someone writing at the end of pagan rule in the early 4th century—Eusebius.  If we wanted to play with the language of today, we might say that Christianity ‘cancelled’ the cultures of the Graeco-Roman world; but that would not be quite accurate.  Christians were persecuted and murdered during those first 300 years, but the Church steadily grew.  They witnessed to the culture and could not have cancelled it even if they wanted to do so.  Only once the first Christian emperor, Constantine, began to pass laws and favour the Church did any power come into play against pagan culture.  By that time, many, many people had embraced Christianity.  Today’s cancel culture, on the other hand, is all about power: the take-over of social and political institutions—even Christian denominations.  The new masters are eager to use power to cancel past culture and to institute something else—something post-Christian.  While so-called Christian culture was not really ‘Christian’ in far too many ways, whatever was in the manor house yesterday is at the guillotine of cancel culture today.

So, first, what did Paul say about the culture or cultures of the Roman Empire and beyond of his day?  In Romans 1.18-32, he defined Gentile culture as a rejection of the Creator and a rejection of His creation.  The Creator is rejected by a culture that turns to idols—manmade gods.  The creation is rejected when people turn to unnatural passions—homosexuality.  God responds to this rejection of Him by turning humanity over to a debased mind, and all variety of sins stream in.  Such is the argument of this short passage, which in many ways repeats arguments in Judaism (Wisdom 13-14).

From the time of Paul to Constantine, the Church slowly grew through its amazing testimony despite incredible persecution.  Eusebius—our second Christian commentator on Gentile culture—looks back on this 300-year history in his Ecclesiastical History.  Thirty years into Emperor Constantine’s reign, Eusebius produced an oration in praise of Constantine.  In it, he celebrates the cultural change that he had witnessed in his lifetime.  Some excerpts from the great Church historian’s oration will be given here.[1]  It is eerie to consider the characteristics that Western culture increasingly shares with the culture Eusebius celebrates as being overcome in his day, by God’s grace.

Noting that Christ’s incarnation functioned to save us from our sinful culture, Eusebius characterizes the culture of the ancient world in the following ways:

·       A Culture of Sexual Perversion: ‘… advancing still more rapidly in the career of impiety and folly, they deified their own evil passions, which it behooved them to regard with aversion, or restrain by the principles of self-control. Their very lust and passion and impure disease of soul, the members of the body which tempt to obscenity, and even the very uncontrol in shameful pleasure, they described under the titles of Cupid, Priapus, Venus, and other kindred terms’ (XIII.2).  Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, perversions have just continued to develop.

·       A Culture of Demonic Spirituality: ‘To the evil spirits themselves which lurked within their statues, or lay concealed in secret and dark recesses, eager to drink their libations, and inhale the odor of their sacrifices, they ascribed the same divine honors’ (XIII.4).  Now, any spirituality other than Christian spirituality is considered worthwhile.

·       A Culture of Human Sacrifice: ‘For what can be a greater proof of madness, than to offer human sacrifice, to pollute every city, and even their own houses, with kindred blood? Do not the Greeks themselves attest this, and is not all history filled with records of the same impiety? The PhÅ“nicians devoted their best beloved and only children as an annual sacrifice to Saturn. The Rhodians, on the sixth day of the month Metageitnion, offered human victims to the same god. At Salamis, a man was pursued in the temple of Minerva Agraulis and Diomede, compelled to run thrice round the altar, afterwards pierced with a lance by the priest, and consumed as a burnt offering on the blazing pile. In Egypt, human sacrifice was most abundant. At Heliopolis three victims were daily offered to Juno, for whom king Amoses, impressed with the atrocity of the practice, commanded the substitution of an equal number of waxen figures. In Chios, and again in Tenedos, a man was slain and offered up to Omadian Bacchus. At Sparta they immolated human beings to Mars. In Crete they did likewise, offering human sacrifices to Saturn. In Laodicea of Syria a virgin was yearly slain in honor of Minerva, for whom a hart is now the substitute. The Libyans and Carthaginians appeased their gods with human victims. The Dumateni of Arabia buried a boy annually beneath the altar. History informs us that the Greeks without exception, the Thracians also, and Scythians, were accustomed to human sacrifice before they marched forth to battle. The Athenians record the immolation of the virgin children of Leus, and the daughter of Erechtheus. Who knows not that at this day a human victim is offered in Rome itself at the festival of Jupiter Latiaris?’ (XIII.7).  Western culture has made the freedom to abort the unborn (even to the moment of death) and more recently to end life (euthanasia) a ‘right’.

·       A Culture of Social Discord: ‘All nations, whether civilized or barbarous, throughout the world, as if actuated by a demoniac frenzy, were infected with sedition as with some fierce and terrible disease: insomuch that the human family was irreconcilably divided against itself; the great system of society was distracted and torn asunder; and in every corner of the earth men stood opposed to each other, and strove with fierce contention on questions of law and government’ (XIII.9).  American culture, in particular, is seething with discord.  A ‘Critical Race Theory’ has even been trotted out of the Marxist closet to foster divisions along racial lines.  Claiming to highlight racism, the theory is itself racist through and through.

·       A Culture of Hostility: ‘… with passions aroused to fury, they engaged in mutual conflicts, so frequent that their lives were passed as it were in uninterrupted warfare. None could undertake a journey except as prepared to encounter an enemy; in the very country and villages the rustics girded on the sword, provided themselves with armor rather than with the implements of rural labor, and deemed it noble exploit to plunder and enslave any who belonged to a neighboring state’ (XIII.10).

·       A Homosexual Culture: ‘Nay, more than this: from the fables they had themselves devised respecting their own deities, they deduced occasions for a vile and abandoned life, and wrought the ruin of body and soul by licentiousness of every kind. Not content with this, they even overstepped the bounds which nature had defined, and together committed incredible and nameless crimes, “men with men (in the words of the sacred writer) working un-seemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due”’ (XIII.11).  The spokespeople for Western culture cannot affirm LGBTQ+ sexual identities and practices that are contrary to nature fast enough to prove their newly discovered superiority over our previous culture.  Such deviancy against nature does not stop with sexuality as every opportunity to wage war on nature is enthusiastically engaged, such as denying the humanity of the unborn, altering DNA, insisting on transgender men participating in women’s sports.

·       A Secular Culture: ‘Nor did they stop even here; but perverted their natural thoughts of God, and denied that the course of this world was directed by his providential care, ascribing the existence and constitution of all things to the blind operation of chance, or the necessity of fate’ (XIII.12).  It may be surprising to hear someone from the 4th century say this, but he does, and where this may have been a factor then, it has certainly been a characteristic of Western culture for several hundred years already.

·       A Godless Culture: ‘…believing that soul and body were alike dissolved by death, they led a brutish life, unworthy of the name: careless of the nature or existence of the soul, they dreaded not the tribunal of Divine justice, expected no reward of virtue, nor thought of chastisement as the penalty of an evil life’ (XIII.13).  While many held this view in antiquity, it is a characteristic of Western culture. The connection between belief about life after death and the society that is self-centred and pleasure-oriented was as true in antiquity as it is today.

·       A Culture of Lawlessness: ‘… some living in the practice of most vile and lawless incest with mothers, others with sisters, and others again corrupting their own daughters. Some were found who slew their confiding guests; others who fed on human flesh; some strangled, and then feasted on, their aged men; others threw them alive to dogs….’ (XIII.14).  By ‘lawlessness’ is meant living against God’s Law.  Our culture today, like the Roman culture, is a culture full of laws.  Yet we live against God’s Law.

A Christian like Paul the Apostle or like Eusebius of Caesarea did not consider cultures ‘good’, let alone equal.  Some were better in one way, some in another, but all cultures are human views and practices that do not have enough of God.  This also goes for the Christianized culture of the West—a culture that leaned toward Christian values but never quite reached them.  Even so, it was a culture that represented a triumph in many ways over the even worse pagan cultures of antiquity, as Eusebius says. 

Our postmodern culture celebrated the overthrow of a monocultural West.  Eschewing the very notion of ‘truth’, it championed the notion of localized and constructed truth—relativism.  This meant, in turn, that diversity was itself a value.  Late postmodernity still speaks this way, but for some time now it has rejected Christian culture as well as some other, non-Christian aspects of Western culture.  In other words, ‘diversity’ now means a favouring of certain groups over others, an ‘inclusion’ of some while others are ‘cancelled’ and excluded.  The old value of ‘equality’ in the period of Western modernity has become the new value of ‘equity’, a favouring of some over others to establish somebody’s made-up notion of social justice.

A Christian understanding of culture, however, is that, no matter who’s it is, it needs transformation.  As Eusebius said, we humans have made a mess of things, and we need the incarnation of Jesus Christ to transform our cultures.  The solution is not multiculturalism—God help us!  Nor is it the ‘cancel culture’ of today.  It is not Critical Race Theory that trashes some imaginary construct called ‘whitism’ in the name of attacking racism—only to be repressively and angrily racist itself.  Paul captured the Christian view of culture and the solution in Christ in a remarkable letter to Titus.  Towards the end, he says:

For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3.3-7).

Paul’s solution to an enslavement to passions and pleasures and a practice of malice, envy, and hate was not cheering on the great diversity of such cultures.  Cultures needed Jesus—every one of them.  The solution was not a multicultural diversity of the world’s cultures in the Church, but the incarnation of Jesus in the world to transform cultures.

As our culture goes in the opposite direction, once again embracing paganism, our calling has changed as Christians.  Whereas once we might have hoped to change culture, as Eusebius over-excitedly thought was happening in his day, our role is now to be the counter-culture of the Church, transformed by the 'goodness and loving kindness of God our Saviour', as Paul says.  The darker the night falls on the earth, the brighter shines the light of Christ.  Quit celebrating cultural diversity; start celebrating Christ, the light who has come into the world to shine in our darkness.



[1] See Eusebius, The Oration in Praise of the Emperor Constantine XIII, in Nicene-Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson (1890); online: https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1819-1893,_Schaff._Philip,_3_Vol_01_Eusebius_Pamphilius,_EN.pdf.

The Boldness of Christian Prayer

 

The boldness of Christian prayer lies not in any merits of our own or in that of others but wholly in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Nor does it lie in some working up of faith on our part where God is held to the mat and forced to honour our requests because we have garnered such faith.  Indeed, such a false understanding of faith involves a ‘work of faith’ that therefore falls to our own merit and has its object on our request rather than a faith in God that acknowledges Him as the author of every good and perfect gift (James 1.17).  Our confidence is not in ourselves but in God.  We know that God is our Heavenly Father.  He wants us to come to Him, to make our requests before Him known (Philippians 4.6).  James encourages us to ask God for what we need, though with right motives (4.2-3). Our access is not through human merit but through Christ Jesus. For this reason, we traditionally pray in His name.

Where did the idea of praying to dead saints come from in early Christianity?  There is nothing to support this practice from the Old Testament or Judaism.  There is nothing of the sort in the New Testament or earliest Christianity.  The practice of praying to the dead is rather an example of the pressure of the culture on the Christian faith.

Greek culture practiced offerings to the dead that involved requests for help.  This was a longtime practice of the culture, and cultural practices that involve honouring ancestors are not easily changed.  The 5th century BC playwright, Euripides, provides an example.  The character, Helen, says:

Hermione, daughter, come out in front of the house! … Take these libations and my hair offering in your hands. Go to the tomb of Clytaemestra and around it pour out the milk and honey mixture and the foaming wine. Then stand on top of the grave mound and say, “These libations are a gift to you from your sister Helen. She was afraid to approach your tomb for fear of the Argive multitude.” Then ask her to show a kindly spirit to me, to you, and to my husband, and also to these two luckless ones the god has ruined. Promise her all the funeral offerings it is appropriate to make for a sister (Orestes 112-123).[1]

We may certainly speculate that later beliefs—again, with no Biblical support—about the holiness of martyrs and remarkable individuals granting them some higher status among the dead contributed to the veneration of the saints and prayers offered to them.  A theology of superabundant merits also supported prayer to the saints.  Yet here we simply note that a time-honoured, pagan practice was continued in the Graeco-Roman world despite its unbiblical origins.  The pressure of cultural practices presses hard against true faith.

We have, however, a far more wonderful truth in Holy Scripture.  We have no need of seeking out someone’s merits to gain a hearing before God.  Encouraging his disciples to pray, Jesus spoke of the kindness and generosity of God:

Luke 11:8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Moreover, we have access to God through Jesus Christ, not through dead ancestors—no matter how saintly they might have been.  Paul says God realized His eternal purposes in Christ Jesus our Lord

in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him (Ephesians 3.12).

Through Christ, our high priest, we go directly to God with our prayers, as the author of Hebrews says:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4.15-16).

Later, the same author encourages his readers that

we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water’ (Hebrews 10.19-22).

We need no merits of our own to gain access to God.  Indeed, we would never have such access were it dependent on our merits.  As Paul, the author of Hebrews emphasizes that our access is through Jesus Christ.  Because of His sacrifice and His alone, we can approach the holiness of God with our prayers.  No one else cleanses us from our sins.  No sacrifice is needed.  No merit of others is wanted.  No deceased ancestors or spiritual powers stand in our way.  We have Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12.2).  Through Him and Him alone we have access to God.  As Paul affirms, having been justified by faith,

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God (Romans 5.1-2).

Our boldness in prayer lies in the assurance of Christ’s work and the character of God.



[1] Euripides, Euripides II: Electra, Orestes, Iphigeneia in Taurica, Andromache, Cyclops, trans. A. S. Way (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

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