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 Phœnicians 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.
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