The Last Western Men
CS Lewis gave an address in 1955 entitled “The Old Western Man.” He referred to himself and others as “dinosaurs." Lewis was both enough of an observer and a scholar to see that the world and worldview in which he was nurtured was passing away.
Lewis had lived long enough to know that it wasn’t merely the old western man that was disappearing. The church of England and the particular form of evangelical Anglicanism that he represented was already in a state of almost complete collapse. His book, Mere Christianity, which had animated a generation of English Anglicans, had transported very well to the American evangelical context of the time. But it’s vision of orthodox Christianity was not sustainable in England after World War II. Evangelical orthodoxy simply could not initiate or sustain a revival of Christianity in the England of the 1950s or indeed up until today.
Far longer lasting and far reaching are Lewis's narrative works. Like the works of J.R.R. Tolkien at the other Inklings Lewis’ narrative works do not describe a world of orthodox practices and morals. They do not even mention God or name his Son. They do not offer a theological justification for Christianity. Instead, they invite the reader, and later viewer into fictional worlds based on the fundamental principles of God’s engagement with creation and of human nature. Orthodoxy becomes what Lewis called the “deeper law” that shaped the outcomes of creaturely action in these fictional universes. And this is an orthodoxy that can speak to many times and in many cultures.
Louis could imagine a world before the Fall, and thus ask us to enter into into a moral universe not built on the assumption of sin. Lewis could imagine a world after the flood in which its purgative effects succeeded, and thus invite us to understand a moral universe without the need for further witnesses to God’s righteousness. In creating these fictional worlds of Perelandra/Venus and Mars he could see the noetic covenant and the laws of Mount Sinai not as the roots of our moral universe but as the branches from those roots in a particular world.
The eternal love of the triune God rather than the historically conditioned needs of human societies was the creative source of his fictional worlds.
Unfortunately contemporary acolytes of Lewis too often claim the dross of doctrine and law rather than the gold of an orthodox understanding that God’s love is ubiquitous, while human sin and the provision for it is both temporally and geographically local. Rather than addressing the contemporary context the deep law, the law of God’s providential love, they have chosen to defend the structures of Christendom in all its fading glory and fossilized bones. In doing so they, not a changing culture, have turned Lewis and his peers into dinosaurs.
Lewis could imagine a world in which fawns and centaurs, those half-creatures of fantasy were redeemed unchanged but fulfilled by this deep law. Tolkien imagine dwarves and elves and men and halflings and wizards and orcs within God’s providential love. Some Christians can’t even imagine a world in which God’s love accepts transsexuals as they are.
What Lewis did not recognize, or perhaps recognized by placing his bets on fantasy stories, was that the problem of the passing of Christendom is not merely the rise of secularity, or even a modern understanding of the world shaped by atheism, materialism, and evolutionary theory. It is not merely that the tide has turned and the sea of faith is receding (to the dismay of Matthew Arnold.) It is that the language through which faith recognizes and expresses itself has changed. People no more speak the faith language of Christendom than they speak the Latin of the church fathers.
So it isn’t that sea of faith has receded. Rather faith has escaped from the inaccessible redoubts of the medieval worldview and increasingly inaccessible bulwark of modernity.
This isn’t merely a matter of losing Christian terminology and the slow forgetting of classical theological reasoning. The grammar of faith, its internal logic, has changed. We no longer understand our relationships one another and with the transcendent in terms of beliefs locked within in a dogmatic structure created by the laws of logic. Ours is not the faith of arguments and propositions creating a coherent framework within which to locate specifically Christian belief. It no longer gazes in longing to find its place amid the cycles and epicycles of a theology systematically engineered according to its own internal logic but increasingly out of touch with narrated experience human becoming.
As importantly our grammar of moral reflection and expression is no longer shaped by rigid rules for human behavior and static definitions of sin and righteousness. Like orthodox theology, orthodox ethics finds itself in a Ptolmaic dilemma of having to create ever more complex justifications, epicycles within epicycles to prevent its unbending rules and definitions from being not merely incredible, but actually destructive. The problem isn’t isn’t just the content, or even its fundamentally flawed assumptions. The problem is that orthodox ethical reasoning is a language incomprehensible to contemporary persons.
Ours is the grammar, the logic of narrative. It is a grammar in which consistency is incoherent without authenticity. It is the grammar of characters in action rather than characteristics in static relation.
This isn’t merely true of our self-understanding. It is true of our understanding of God. The character of God revealed in Jesus Christ compels us, as it did his first followers, to worship. The characteristics of God as detailed in systematic theology neither compel us to worship nor are necessary to our faith in Christ. In this new grammar the phrase "God is love" means nothing. The phrase "God loves" means everything so long as it is seen enacted in the great drama of the unfolding world. So imitation of Christ’s actions, his story lived out moment by moment in specific situations is ethically compelling, while all attempts to reify those actions into unchanging rules universally applied are incomprehensible.
Aristotle’s Poetics is a far better guide for the modern preacher/theologian than his Organon.
Not that every part of our world participates in this new grammar of faith. Theological schools are notoriously conservative. Scholars with a decades long investment in classical theology and philosophy are not only reluctant to give up what they have mastered, they insist that their students be equally indoctrinated before being allowed to take up the mantle of teaching.
Church bureaucracies are equally conservative. Their power is gained, maintained, and perpetuated by their control of doctrine and law. A United Methodist bishop, DS, or pastor knows that mastery of the Book of Discipline is far more necessary to a successful ecclesial career than dwelling in the story of God with Creation that is the beating heart of scripture. From very early in their careers young preachers learn that the masters of their fate will quiz them on dross and grow suspicious if their words glint with gold.
And, to be fair, these schools and ecclesiocracies serve constituencies equally unchanged, or better resistant to being changed, by the outworking of God’s providence and human freedom. Just as the bishops and nobles of the Ancien Regime saw only revolt against the established order of God when the peasants claimed their power, so many contemporary American Christians resent and resist that which breaks their hereditary privilege. Who can blame them? Leaving a legacy feels a lot like dying. So we tend to insist that generation after generation of preachers conserve our sense of a privileged place in God’s unchanging order. Until those preachers enter into and are equally invested in that order.
It is quite hard to remember that the law written on human hearts, with all of their frailties, is the only law God gives.
So the reinforcing of the current order with laws inscribed in stone is not a sign of perseverance, but of an approaching collapse. When the old nobility gathered on their landed estates while the riotous crowds controlled the streets of Paris it wasn’t a consolidation preceding a restoration. It was the last gasp of a dying world. And the same is true in the United States as chiliastic Christian movements gather in their megachurches and anxiously await God's restoration of the established order. We have not yet learned to be still.
Of course the entire world isn’t dancing on the bones of the last western men. There are Christians and cultures different those I dwell in. Ever since Pentecost Christians have spoken in many tongues, both within their hearts and minds and in their witness to their neighbors. If we are those who narrate our faith with our lives, for us to tell a story that includes the condemnation of other stories and constructions of faith will hardly be good news. It is hard to feel warmly toward those whose understanding of God’s providence excludes us and our friends. But Jesus says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Thus it is good to remember that we, like they, are incapable of understanding much less emulating the wideness of God’s mercy.
We have our task, those who live in the legacy, but not the world, of the last western men. And it is to tell our story of a world so animated and guided by that “deep law” that our neighbors, not least the fawns and centaurs, the halflings and the dwarves, and of course the humans will be drawn into that story of love. And other worlds that are not ours?
From: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
"And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth-a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.
But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles' eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.
"Come and have breakfast," said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice.
Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted.
"Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?
"Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door into Aslan's country is from your own world."
'What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?"
"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb."
Lewis had lived long enough to know that it wasn’t merely the old western man that was disappearing. The church of England and the particular form of evangelical Anglicanism that he represented was already in a state of almost complete collapse. His book, Mere Christianity, which had animated a generation of English Anglicans, had transported very well to the American evangelical context of the time. But it’s vision of orthodox Christianity was not sustainable in England after World War II. Evangelical orthodoxy simply could not initiate or sustain a revival of Christianity in the England of the 1950s or indeed up until today.
Far longer lasting and far reaching are Lewis's narrative works. Like the works of J.R.R. Tolkien at the other Inklings Lewis’ narrative works do not describe a world of orthodox practices and morals. They do not even mention God or name his Son. They do not offer a theological justification for Christianity. Instead, they invite the reader, and later viewer into fictional worlds based on the fundamental principles of God’s engagement with creation and of human nature. Orthodoxy becomes what Lewis called the “deeper law” that shaped the outcomes of creaturely action in these fictional universes. And this is an orthodoxy that can speak to many times and in many cultures.
Louis could imagine a world before the Fall, and thus ask us to enter into into a moral universe not built on the assumption of sin. Lewis could imagine a world after the flood in which its purgative effects succeeded, and thus invite us to understand a moral universe without the need for further witnesses to God’s righteousness. In creating these fictional worlds of Perelandra/Venus and Mars he could see the noetic covenant and the laws of Mount Sinai not as the roots of our moral universe but as the branches from those roots in a particular world.
The eternal love of the triune God rather than the historically conditioned needs of human societies was the creative source of his fictional worlds.
Unfortunately contemporary acolytes of Lewis too often claim the dross of doctrine and law rather than the gold of an orthodox understanding that God’s love is ubiquitous, while human sin and the provision for it is both temporally and geographically local. Rather than addressing the contemporary context the deep law, the law of God’s providential love, they have chosen to defend the structures of Christendom in all its fading glory and fossilized bones. In doing so they, not a changing culture, have turned Lewis and his peers into dinosaurs.
Lewis could imagine a world in which fawns and centaurs, those half-creatures of fantasy were redeemed unchanged but fulfilled by this deep law. Tolkien imagine dwarves and elves and men and halflings and wizards and orcs within God’s providential love. Some Christians can’t even imagine a world in which God’s love accepts transsexuals as they are.
What Lewis did not recognize, or perhaps recognized by placing his bets on fantasy stories, was that the problem of the passing of Christendom is not merely the rise of secularity, or even a modern understanding of the world shaped by atheism, materialism, and evolutionary theory. It is not merely that the tide has turned and the sea of faith is receding (to the dismay of Matthew Arnold.) It is that the language through which faith recognizes and expresses itself has changed. People no more speak the faith language of Christendom than they speak the Latin of the church fathers.
So it isn’t that sea of faith has receded. Rather faith has escaped from the inaccessible redoubts of the medieval worldview and increasingly inaccessible bulwark of modernity.
This isn’t merely a matter of losing Christian terminology and the slow forgetting of classical theological reasoning. The grammar of faith, its internal logic, has changed. We no longer understand our relationships one another and with the transcendent in terms of beliefs locked within in a dogmatic structure created by the laws of logic. Ours is not the faith of arguments and propositions creating a coherent framework within which to locate specifically Christian belief. It no longer gazes in longing to find its place amid the cycles and epicycles of a theology systematically engineered according to its own internal logic but increasingly out of touch with narrated experience human becoming.
As importantly our grammar of moral reflection and expression is no longer shaped by rigid rules for human behavior and static definitions of sin and righteousness. Like orthodox theology, orthodox ethics finds itself in a Ptolmaic dilemma of having to create ever more complex justifications, epicycles within epicycles to prevent its unbending rules and definitions from being not merely incredible, but actually destructive. The problem isn’t isn’t just the content, or even its fundamentally flawed assumptions. The problem is that orthodox ethical reasoning is a language incomprehensible to contemporary persons.
Ours is the grammar, the logic of narrative. It is a grammar in which consistency is incoherent without authenticity. It is the grammar of characters in action rather than characteristics in static relation.
This isn’t merely true of our self-understanding. It is true of our understanding of God. The character of God revealed in Jesus Christ compels us, as it did his first followers, to worship. The characteristics of God as detailed in systematic theology neither compel us to worship nor are necessary to our faith in Christ. In this new grammar the phrase "God is love" means nothing. The phrase "God loves" means everything so long as it is seen enacted in the great drama of the unfolding world. So imitation of Christ’s actions, his story lived out moment by moment in specific situations is ethically compelling, while all attempts to reify those actions into unchanging rules universally applied are incomprehensible.
Aristotle’s Poetics is a far better guide for the modern preacher/theologian than his Organon.
Not that every part of our world participates in this new grammar of faith. Theological schools are notoriously conservative. Scholars with a decades long investment in classical theology and philosophy are not only reluctant to give up what they have mastered, they insist that their students be equally indoctrinated before being allowed to take up the mantle of teaching.
Church bureaucracies are equally conservative. Their power is gained, maintained, and perpetuated by their control of doctrine and law. A United Methodist bishop, DS, or pastor knows that mastery of the Book of Discipline is far more necessary to a successful ecclesial career than dwelling in the story of God with Creation that is the beating heart of scripture. From very early in their careers young preachers learn that the masters of their fate will quiz them on dross and grow suspicious if their words glint with gold.
And, to be fair, these schools and ecclesiocracies serve constituencies equally unchanged, or better resistant to being changed, by the outworking of God’s providence and human freedom. Just as the bishops and nobles of the Ancien Regime saw only revolt against the established order of God when the peasants claimed their power, so many contemporary American Christians resent and resist that which breaks their hereditary privilege. Who can blame them? Leaving a legacy feels a lot like dying. So we tend to insist that generation after generation of preachers conserve our sense of a privileged place in God’s unchanging order. Until those preachers enter into and are equally invested in that order.
It is quite hard to remember that the law written on human hearts, with all of their frailties, is the only law God gives.
So the reinforcing of the current order with laws inscribed in stone is not a sign of perseverance, but of an approaching collapse. When the old nobility gathered on their landed estates while the riotous crowds controlled the streets of Paris it wasn’t a consolidation preceding a restoration. It was the last gasp of a dying world. And the same is true in the United States as chiliastic Christian movements gather in their megachurches and anxiously await God's restoration of the established order. We have not yet learned to be still.
Of course the entire world isn’t dancing on the bones of the last western men. There are Christians and cultures different those I dwell in. Ever since Pentecost Christians have spoken in many tongues, both within their hearts and minds and in their witness to their neighbors. If we are those who narrate our faith with our lives, for us to tell a story that includes the condemnation of other stories and constructions of faith will hardly be good news. It is hard to feel warmly toward those whose understanding of God’s providence excludes us and our friends. But Jesus says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Thus it is good to remember that we, like they, are incapable of understanding much less emulating the wideness of God’s mercy.
We have our task, those who live in the legacy, but not the world, of the last western men. And it is to tell our story of a world so animated and guided by that “deep law” that our neighbors, not least the fawns and centaurs, the halflings and the dwarves, and of course the humans will be drawn into that story of love. And other worlds that are not ours?
From: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
"And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth-a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.
But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles' eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.
"Come and have breakfast," said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice.
Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted.
"Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?
"Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door into Aslan's country is from your own world."
'What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?"
"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb."
Comments
Post a Comment