The End of Christianity

From The ediTor The eNd oF chrisTiANiTy Piotr J. Małysz Christchurch W hen I stumbled on “The Church,” while on a recent visit to Christchurch, my attention, as I looked around, was eventually and inevitably drawn to the crucifix hanging over the bar. My immediate, initial reaction was offence, a sense of scandal, indignation. “They should have taken that down!” I thought to myself. “There is no longer any place for it in this decommissioned and repurposed church building. And certainly not as the cherry, the crowning adornment, over all the gin, vodka and bourbon.” Since then I have returned to this image time and time again. It has haunted me. And upon reflection, my offence has given way to the realization that it comes rather easy to be scandalized on God’s behalf. But perhaps Jesus doesn’t mind at all. After all, He hung much worse: at a site of many an execution, between two thieves, with taunts and jeers relentlessly hurled at him, only adding insult to injury. Jesus hung outside the gates—in the midst of the world. He hung subjected to the gaze of the prurient and the indifferent. Surrounded by those closest to Him who had lost their faith, hoping at best for a body to anoint, stave off its de- composition, and hold on to a bit longer. Jesus hung much worse, did He not? It is we who make of the cross a religious and transcendent symbol, something glittering, sublime, and otherworldly. Saving God from embarrassment. Sparing Him the world’s assaults. Enchanting His work before it hits the ground too hard. And yet, there, in the old church—a church in retreat before market forces and the barrage of intoxicated laughter, no longer cocooned in our pieties and pretense, no longer sheltered, no longer powerful enough to be incensed—there still hangs the body of God! Once again, closer to us than we know. In our midst. In the midst of sinners who know not what they do. God’s body—unnoticed. Ignored. Just as before. Or perhaps met with a smile, a shrug. A crucifix, now truer to what it exhibits, truer than ever before. “Perhaps,” I thought, “some drunk, some hapless person will lift up his or her eyes—and they will see! See Him as He sees them . . . So let Him stay there. The Lord certainly doesn’t mind.” No, He does not. He never has. And that’s love, love divine, excelling our pieties, indignations, and all attempts to save Him. And, yes—forgiving even those. The Christian civilization has for two centuries been fighting not to die, and in this consists its moving and heroic agony. 6 Winter 2022 Christendom My continuing reflections found an additional, broader and deeper, context in La fin de la Chrétienté, the most recent volume to have come from the pen the French Catholic philosopher and political theorist Chantal Delsol (b. 1947).1 To be sure, recent years have witnessed a flurry of publications attempting to make sense of, or just wringing hands over, Christianity’s precarious late-modern situation. I can think of Tomaš Halik’s The Afternoon of Christianity, which appeared in the original Czech in 2021, the same year as Delsol’s La fin; or in Poland, the work of Tomasz Terlikowski focusing specifically on the troubled condition of Polish Catholicism, with Terlikowski’s most recent Wygasanie: Zmierzch mojego kościoła (Toward Extinction: The Twilight of My Church, 2023); or on this side of the Atlantic, David Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate (2022). But it pays off to zero in on Delsol’s work. It treats, in however necessarily cursory a manner, Christendom’s demise against the backdrop of the moral and ontological dimensions of its rise.2 What strikes me about Delsol’s work is a quiet and humble optimism that emerges when Christianity must finally confront, having no other choice but to live up to, its true nature. The tenor of the work is anything but finger pointing or circling the wagons, which generally are the standard fare on our shores. For Delsol, there is a summons brought to light amidst the ashes of Christendom’s erstwhile glory. In what follows, I wish to engage Delsol’s perspective and offer some critical reflections that seek to extend it. Right off the bat, Delsol does not sugarcoat. “The Christian civilization”—the titular Chrétienté—“has for two centuries been fighting not to die, and in this consists its moving and heroic agony. Its roots are ancient enough to have led it, at first, to believe that it is entitled to a sort of immortality—does it not, after all, bear a stamp of transcendence? It then came to consider itself, just like some graybeards, to be too ancient to die” (9). Things have, to be sure accelerated, since the middle of the 20th century but this acceleration is only the foreclosure of self-deception, affecting Christendom’s resuscitators, rather than some sudden revolutionary turn. What is the Christian civilization that has come to an end? Delsol defines Chrétienté as “a civilization inspired, ordered and guided by the church” in a way that generates a system of organic connections between Christianity and broadly understood culture and politics (9-10). What emerges from this is “a way of life, a vision of the boundaries between good and evil” (9-10). Christendom, in other words, “is a profound structure, a far-reaching mesh, with a lasting influence on legislation and mores” (38). On Delsol’s account, “[i]t is this very authority, and even dominance over legislation and mores, which fell apart in the second half of the 20th century” (38). In its broader scope, the “history [is one] of defeat, where everything was violently contested, but where nothing has been saved, not even that which is of the essence” (17). For Delsol, this loss of the essential constitutes a crucial point of her argument. There is, and never has been, and never could have been, any love lost between Christendom and modernity. “It is the destiny of the Christian civilization irremediably to hate modernity because the latter rejects the foundational principles of that civilization: truth, hierarchy, authority, constraint” (17). In place of those, modernity puts forth “denial of original sin,” and insists on “the freedom of an individual, the sovereignty of reason, and democracy” (18). Delsol sees the symbolic beginning of Christendom in the Battle on the Frigidus (A.D. 394), in which the emperor Theodosius defeated the Frankish-backed Western usurper Eugenius, as well as in the removal, on Theodosius’ orders, of the altar of the goddess Victory from the Roman Senate. This, we may point out, despite the fact that Theodosius had previously chosen both a Christian Lutheran Forum 7 deacon and a non-Christian philosopher as tutors for his sons, believing it to be important that his successors should receive a well-rounded education in the cultures, religions, and languages of all their subjects.3 Yet the symbolic dimension is not quite as important in this case. The ground had been primed long enough—just as in the case of the late-modern However providentially directed, all human creations, even those carried out in the name of God, are only that, human creations. reversal we are now facing—for the final gestures to surprise only the staunchest deniers of reality. No less a figure than Tertullian (d. A.D. 240), who in his Apologeticum demanded only that Christians be given a fair and informed treatment by the Roman authorities, outlined a program of what was to take place. In Ad nationes, Tertullian frankly admits: It is therefore against these things that our contest lies— against the institutions of our ancestors, against the authority of tradition, the laws of our governors, and the reasonings of the wise; against antiquity, custom, submission; against precedents, prodigies, miracles—all which things have had their part in consolidating that counterfeit system of your gods [quae omnia adulterinam istam diuinitatem corroborauerunt].4 8 Winter 2022 What for Tertullian had been a programmatic vision seemed, by the time of Theodosius, to be destined for an abiding success. In the nearly millennium and a half that followed, few might have realized that, however providentially directed, all human creations, even those carried out in the name of God, are only that, human creations. “Together with the rise of the Christian world, Christianity, which like all religions is an immortal reality (a handful of believers is enough for its survival), created a Christian civilization, an ephemeral thing, subject to times and fashions, and eminently fragile—mortal” (28). Christendom’s demise has certainly met with anything but resigned acquiescence. But, as Delsol sees things, the attempts to save what remains have been misplaced. They seem to fall into two broad categories. Some live off gloomy prophecies identifying the fall of the West with the fall of human civilization; others inadvertently fall in line with the project of modernity. The first group includes fascist corporationism (not to be confused with Nazism, which yearned for the return of ancient paganism). Here, as in the thought of Henri Massis (1886-1970), a “revolution of order”—a moral revolution alone able to stem the tide of modern barbarism—warrants temporary dictatorship. Immoral acts may be committed for the sake of morality’s undisturbed future reign. As the course of the 20th century shows, spilling well into ours, these sorts of political project, from Europe all the way to South America, have continued to pose a great temptation for the church, perhaps even to the point of the latter nearly losing its soul. William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist speaks to this quite well in the context of Pinochet’s Chile.5 The second category comprises society-reconquering visions, put forth, on Delsol’s account, by Catholic intellectuals such as René de la Tour du Pin (1834-1924), who advocated for a recovery of the medieval spirit via legislation based on Christianity and natural law. For Delsol, such proposals are nothing but a strand within the great utopian dreams of modernity. Even the turn from faith to ritual, discussed in France in the 1920s and 1930s, only feeds into a progressing paganism. Gesture is all that matters. One could perhaps mention in this context the turn to “tradition,” characteristic of many quarters of Christianity in our present day. There is nothing counter-cultural about it; it rather falls within the broader, societal loss of confidence in the future and turn to the tried and tested, being of a piece with rustic and artisanal aesthetic, the 1920s Deployed in this way, as a paradise of sorts, tradition hovers somewhere between a pious desideratum and blatant ideology. kitchen décor, and the ubiquitous Edison-style light bulbs. Its modernity is betrayed, further, by the fact that it generates communities of affinity, predicated on a foundational act of choice on the part of the individual, rather than the desired communities of kinship.6 All this quite apart from the fact that, deployed in this way, as a paradise of sorts, tradition hovers somewhere between a pious desideratum and blatant ideology. world,” she, therefore, cautions. “Christianity’s rule is already now being replaced—not by nothingness or tempestuous chaos, but by forms well known from history, more primitive and more rustic. Following the fall of Christendom, we do not see the reign of crime, nihilism, extreme materialism, but rather stoic morality, paganism, and an Asian-type spirituality” (90). Yet our reflection must go beyond even this insight into the late-modern condition. There are still more depths to probe before we, as late-modern Christians, are able to speak to our world. “The Church” in Christchurch, New Zealand Disenchantment? What, then, is left in the wake of Christendom’s crumbling all around under modernity’s relentless assault that manifests itself even in Christendom’s attempts at self-defense? “Christians believed for a long time—and many of them still believe this—that they can be replaced only by atheism, nihilism or the two together, that is, that which is negative, bringing with itself only darkness and chaos. In this way, one can consider oneself irreplaceable” (90). By contrast, the novelist Andre Malraux (1981-1976), Delsol notes, prophesied that the 21st century would be a religious one. Christians are prone to celebrate this statement because it strengthens their resolve to resist—whenever religion is mentioned, they necessarily hear Christianity. But this conclusion does not follow. More importantly, what emerges in Christendom’s wake is not the threatened bogeyman of atheism. The disenchantment of the world does not mean the reign of atheism and all-powerful rationalism. On the contrary, the gods abound and fare all too well. And so, the alleged disenchantment of the world must itself be disenchanted, if we are to understand Christianity’s late-modern predicament (3233). We must disabuse ourselves of the compulsion to re-enchant the world as panacea to our ills. Today’s world finds its enchantment in itself and has no need of Christendom to furnish it (101). The celebrated disenchantment of the world has itself been disenchanted. The end of the Christian civilization is not followed by atheism or nihilism, but by new myths and new ideas. Neither civilization, nor morality comes to an end with Christianity. They only orient themselves differently and follow other paths. We experience neither a descent into hell, nor a total loss of what humanity creates. . . . The New Age will be one of wisdom and paganism, necessarily rediscovered after the rejection of transcendence (35-36). To not be self-deceived about one’s importance is, for Delsol, a precondition to finding a genuinely Christian voice in today’s world. “Let us stop believing that only we can bestow meaning on the Normative inversion This is where the category of inversion—both normative and ontological—comes into play for Delsol. The modern world is founded on an inversion of the world of Christianity, which itself constituted an inversion of the world it had inherited from antiquity. Interestingly, in late antiquity, it was Christians who saw themselves as modern, whereas paganism was viewed by them as conservative and lingering on the margins, less and less in step with the times. The use of paganus to denote a country bumpkin, as opposed to the urban modernus, is attested in the writings of Augustine, Marius Victorinus and others from the turn of the 5th century (58). To begin with the normative inversion of today, it is nothing short of what Delsol calls a “triumph of morality” (127). She notes that moral systems and religions—precisely with the exception of Judeo-Christianity—are not ordinarily birthed together. In ancient polytheistic worlds, morality comes from society and has an entirely human origin: it comes from customs and traditions. The state is morality’s guarantor (106-7). Today the situation Lutheran Forum 9 seems to be formally the same. Western civilization is transitioning from one moral paradigm to another, making use of post-modern democracy to accomplish this transition, with moral messages relentlessly bombarding us and making demands upon us from TV screens. (77). Contemporary Westerners aligning with Eastern spiritualties or religions, such as Buddhism, do not take over their morality, but only their spirituality (which they often identify with personal development). Their own morality comes from the state, just as was the case with ancient pagans, where the gods demanded rituals and sacrifices, but where only the state demanded justice (108). What is this late-modern morality? In the first place, it is grounded in the fundamental fact that, as J.-F. Lyotard noted, the post-modern man no longer believes (67-68). The beliefs which once formed the basis of moral principles have vanished; and so, for modern humans, there’s no reason to hold on to the vestiges of old customs (75). Such dissonance is bound eventually to force a reconciliation between widely-held convictions and reality (in the form of laws, customs, morals). What is interesting in this context is how late-modern morality comes to view the individual. There is a tension here to which Delsol does not quite attend, but which merits further reflection. On the one hand, not surprisingly, we witness a loss of traditional holism, which always placed the common, the institution before the individual (73). Now the individual, with his or her choices, becomes the center and focus of moral decisions. But this, curious- 10 Winter 2022 ly, is accompanied by an undermining of the individual. A world freed from metaphysics (I take this to imply, among other things, a hierarchy) becomes aestheticizing and simultaneously moral, Delsol observes (135)—moral in an aestheticizing sort of way. This plays itself out in the moral hegemony of solidarity and equality (134), construed in a post-colonial and decolonizing manner. Delsol calls this emergent mor- The celebrated disenchantment of the world has itself been disenchanted. The end of the Christian civilization is not followed by atheism or nihilism, but by new myths and new ideas. Neither civilization, nor morality comes to an end with Christianity. al regime of today—humanitarianism. Rather than nihilism, it is a therapeutic morality directed at individual wellbeing but without any anthropological vision (64). In this, she notes, the modern sentiment is curiously parasitical on secularized Christian gospel, trading as it does in recycled evangelical virtues of community and love—recycled because shorn of truth. From a material perspective, the normative inversion affects both individuals and the entire social architecture, which incorporates morality, laws, habits and customs. After all, “children are still raised more by their epoch than by their parents” (46). Despite its parasitical, or perhaps only palimpsest-like nature, the inversion, Delsol insists, is truly an inversion. What was once considered evil is now viewed as good, and vice versa. Shameful behavior has come to be praised, while erstwhile admiration is turned into rejection (43). Delsol offers a brief overview of the reversed social attitudes to homosexuality, abortion, divorce, suicide (mors voluntaria)—all formerly stigmatized; as well as colonization, torture and war, and pedophilia (the latter three seen formerly, of course, not so much as moral per se but as necessary evils to be suffered, but today only as unqualified evils to be denounced and relentlessly exposed) (67). The church itself, Delsol notes on several occasions, is not immune to the inversion. Clerical attitudes to society have undergone a radical shift from domination to pangs of conscience and feelings of guilt (38). In brief, Christianity, as a religion of transcendence, is not finding itself replaced by communist utopias but by the care of post-evangelical humans, a hyper-care even, shorn of cultus and transcendence (130). Ontological inversion What subtends the moral inversion is, as we have implied, an ontological inversion. Modernity has witnessed a revolution concerning fundamental ontological choices—choices that have to do with the significance and place of humanity in the universe, the nature of the world and of the gods (83). What is believed to be the case inexorably adds up to an entire world, which then structures a corresponding moral universe. As Delsol puts it, “[w]hat creates a civilization is not truth—they all claim its possession—but faith in the truth. That faith alone guarantees the temporal durability of fundamental choices/decisions” (83-84). Loss of all-embracing confidence, or its placement elsewhere, is always earthshattering. For Delsol, the modern spirit is characterized above all by impatience with time, a weariness of transience, and hence a search for a home in space. She contrasts this with a Christian hope-filled celebration of the world’s impermanence, as expressed, for example, in the 2nd-century Epistle to Diogenetus. In the section dealing with What was once considered evil is now viewed as good, and vice versa. Shameful behavior has come to be praised, while erstwhile admiration is turned into rejection. the manners of the Christians, the letter’s author, a self-avowed “disciple of the apostles,” writes: They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all.7 By contrast, the modern condition finds some of its intellectual underpinnings in the vitalist philosophies of the 19th century, which see the “world as enchanted in itself,” and so also, as possessed of an energy and yielding a meaning in its own right. “Our Western contemporaries no longer believe in anything that is beyond this world, in any transcendence. If they imagine another world which they may at some point inhabit, it is distant planets accessible by supersonic rockets. The meaning of life must, therefore, be found in life itself, and not beyond it, where there is nothing. The sacred is here” (99). This attitude ought to be seen as the ontological basis of the regnant de-colonializing moral sentiment, with its broad sense of solidarity. And precisely as such, it must be seen also as the source of the modern sacrum in the form of what Delsol calls ecologism and views as nothing short of late-modern Western religiosity. “For the ecologism of today there exists no essential distinction between the human and other living beings, or between the human and the entirety of nature which humanity inhabits without dominating over it in any way” (100). Following the reign of God, the subsequent Enlightenment reign of man, there now comes the reign of nature. Here Delsol draws attention to the non-obviousness, non-naturalness, hence fragility, of monotheism. What was once regarded as a supremely rational conclusion par excellence is, in fact, a construct that requires repeated confirmation and main- tenance via recourse to revelation, faith, inner wisdom (87). Freed from its constraints, human love turns to nature, giving rise to its own liturgies, dogmas, and catechesis. Ecologism calls for, and brings with itself, the acceptance of all that which was once rejected by the all-powerful Enlightenment individualism: personal responsibility, sense of debt against future generations, duties to the community. “And so it now is that, in the name of this immanent and pagan religion, we again accept Christianity, as a religion of transcendence, is not finding itself replaced by communist utopias but by the care of postevangelical humans, a hyper-care even, shorn of cultus and transcendence. all those inalienable dimensions of existence which were erstwhile noticed and practiced by Christianity” (103-104)! This is where the new moral significance of solidarity—unlike the older sense of the priority of the common and the institution over the individual—comes to undermine the individual. Together with pantheism on the religious plane, democracy on the social plane, there arises, on the individual plane, an unspoken (to be sure) affirmation of mediocrity. The time of history-making personalities is over. Nietzsche’s last man has appeared, and with him Lutheran Forum 11 a tapestry of aestheticized humanity organically connected to its environment. And, as Giorgio Agamben notes, the maintenance of the bare life—life in its biological dimension—has become the last great project.8 Christianity without the Christian World Although late-modernity inverts the moral and ontological commitments of Christendom, its relationship to Christianity on Delsol’s account is a complex one. She hesitates between the images of parasite and palimpsest. Just as Christianity once took over pagan It now is that, in the name of this immanent and pagan religion, we again accept all those inalienable dimensions of existence which were erstwhile noticed and practiced by Christianity. temples, so also modernity has come to inhabit Christian morality and anthropology, deploying and adapting those in its own distinct ways. Ultimately, Delsol lays much of the blame for our late-modern predicament at the feet of Christianity. Christendom was for Christianity more of a temptation than a promise, more of a protracted fall than a sure salvation. It was all predicated on a massive overreach. Christianity wanted to express reality, whereas on this earth reality can only be interpreted, Delsol notes (153). She invokes the 4th-century Roman senator 12 Winter 2022 Symmachus, one of the last eloquent defenders of the declining paganism, who argued that truth is too great to allow for only one path toward it (119).9 This, for Delsol, does not mean that truth is non-existent or relative but rather that one must maintain a posture of humility in face of the real (167). And that means grateful receptivity rather than mastery. Christianity has too often been tempted to rationalize the truth and enshrine its rationalizations in dogmatic constructs. We must not give up on the truth, but we must also understand that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “truth is not a process of exposure, which does away with the mystery, but a revelation, which does justice to it.”10 This holds especially for Christian Truth. To be sure, some Christians are not ready to give up on the vestiges of Christendom. Its allure proves too great and its demise feels like a dizzying step into a void. As a result, they now find themselves forced to resort to natural law and other extra-Christian arguments in defense of their “traditional” morality. Delsol remains skeptical of such attempts: “the fate of those condemned by history is gradual radicalization, the loss of the most competent defenders, and in the end, through a fated development, becoming just like the description deployed by one’s adversaries” (63). Christian morality, at any rate, is not a “natural, universal, or reasonable morality,” but, as Paul-Louis Landsberg argued (1901-1944), “a manifestation in life of a paradoxical revelation.” Christians have no monopoly on describing natural law (127). If we believe in natural law, Delsol concludes, we shall seek it in our concrete everydayness where we are called to live our Christian lives.11 Ultimately, Delsol wishes to conclude her discussion on a hopeful note, seeing Christianity’s late-modern predicament more in terms of an opportunity than a dead-end. Christian thinking and Christian morals have been freed from functioning in Christendom’s shadow and can now come to light as speaking for themselves and thus as speaking and serving the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. “Our task,” Delsol concludes, “is not one of society making where ‘the Gospel rules nations’ but rather, in the words of Saint-Exupéry, ‘a gentle march toward the source’ ” (170). As for We must not give up on the truth, but we must also understand that “truth is not a process of exposure, which does away with the mystery, but a revelation, which does justice to it.” Christendom—good riddance! Delsol’s conclusion is plain and honest enough: In its claim to establish itself as a civilization, Christianity ultimately gives rise to a monstrous avatar, which is both its alter ego and its mortal enemy. As a matter of fact, postmodernity is probably both a rejection of Christian rule (a rejection societal laws) and a taking up again and adaptation of Christian principles (social egalitarianism, and philosophy of care). It opposes Christian civilization but not Christianity as such (161). To see postmodernity not as a mortal enemy but as itself a project of re-purposing Christianity—of drawing Christianity out of Christendom’s Babylonian captivity—is not an easy thought to grapple with. One may feel threatened by the fact that, for example, the truth of human rights is a vestige of the transcendental dogmas of Christianity, and, consequently, see the discourse of human rights as a brazen hijacking.12 But one may also see in it all an opportunity to breathe the Christian spirit/Spirit into the form and, in doing so, bring it to life. Bring it to life not as Christendom but as vibrant Christian communities that, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “testify to the world that it is still the world, namely, the world that is loved and reconciled by God.”13 What are rights, after all—asks Hannah Arendt—if they are not mutually recognized and returned, if they are not given in a lived togetherness?14 Or, we may ask, what is solidarity without the mutual bestowal of significance, even extraordinary significance? As Delsol sees it, “today’s church is embarrassed by the Christian civilization as authority and as constraint and aspires to other forms of existence” (147). This is hardly a defeat but—liberation. whether, in purely human terms, Christendom ever was as triumphant, or whether it is only its ruins that lure us by their largerthan-life twilight. Or to put it differently, is it true that the Christian civilization has been dying around us only in the past two centuries under modernity’s assault, or has it perhaps always been fighting off a native rigor mortis? For Athanasius of Alexandria (d. A.D. 373), the abandonment of traditional religion, and the silencing of the pagan oracles, and The Christian Civilization? above all the en masse transformation of morals, as the masses convert to Christianity, all constitute an important proof of Christ’s resurrection: Delsol sees Christendom as Christianity’s alter ego—a tempting mode of self-realization by winning God a space in the world and, in the end, winning the entire world for God. Christendom, on her account, is a human way of assuring and measuring the success of the Christian message in order to bask in its triumph, to have some of it rub off on one. Christendom’s glory is ultimately only the glory of human achievement. But even here one wonders Where Christ and his faith are named, there all idolatry is purged away, every deceit of demons refuted, and no demon endures the name but fleeing, only hearing it, disappears. This is not the work of one dead, but of one alive, and especially of God. since the Savior works so many things among human beings, and daily in every place invisibly persuades such a great multitude, both from those who dwell in Greece and in the foreign lands, to turn to his faith and to obey his teaching, would anyone still have doubt in their mind whether the resurrection has been accomplished by the Savior, and whether Christ is alive, or rather is himself the Life? . . . the adulterer no longer commits adultery, the murderer no longer murders, the unjust no longer grasps greedily, and the impious is henceforth pious . . . For where Christ and his faith are named, there all idolatry is purged away, every deceit of demons refuted, and no demon endures the name but fleeing, only hearing it, disappears. This is not the work of one dead, but of one alive, and especially of God.15 Athanasius then adds later, in a section seeking to refute the gentiles: For formerly the whole inhabited world and every place were led astray by the worship of idols, and human beings regarded nothing else but idols as gods. Now, however, throughout the whole inhabited world, human beings are deserting the superstition of idols, taking refuge in Christ, and worshipping him as God, and through him they know the Father, of whom they had been ignorant.16 There is much post-Constantinian triumphalism in Athanasius’ words and perhaps not a small amount of wishful thinking—even if the bishop himself had every reason to be dejected by the emperors’ policies against him. Nor is this to detract from the fact that Christianity was certainly gaining honest adherents who found themselves, in however halting a way, transfigured by its message of God-in-Christ “for us and for our salvation.” But as the anti-pagan riots in Alexandria, instigated in A.D. 391 by the city’s bishop Theophilus demonstrate, it took a concerted effort to browbeat the Lutheran Forum 13 city’s traditionalists and render defunct their still-thriving temples. Christians triumphantly parading through the streets withPriapic phalluses was perhaps innocuous enough; the looting and destruction of the ancient Serapeum, with its imposing library, a far more serious matter—both events attesting to the painful convulsions in which the Christian civilization was actually born. We gain a much more realistic perspective on how things stood in the middle of the 4th century from senator Firmicus Maternus’s De errore profanarum religionum, which was written around A.D. 346. Maternus, an erstwhile astrologer and new convert to Christianity, addresses his treatise to Constantine’s sons, Constanti- We say we worship God, yet we obey the devil. us II and Constans. With all the zeal of a neophyte, he calls on the “most holy emperors” to amputate and destroy pagan practices “by the most severe laws of your edicts, lest any longer the wretched error of this belief defile the Roman world, lest the wickedness of this custom grow strong, lest whatever rules upon the earth any longer attempt to destroy a man of God.”17 For Maternus, the emperors’ providence-appointed role lies precisely in the exercise of the sword on Christianity’s behalf: [God] commands not to pity either the son or the father, and through the loved members of a spouse, he thrusts the vindicating sword. He also 14 Winter 2022 persecutes the friend with lofty severity and all the people are armed for breaking up the bodies of the sacrilegious. Also, for whole cities, if they shall have been detected in this evil deed, the deaths are determined.18 Maternus has a ready, medicinal justification for his forced conversion program. An effecive medicine must taste bitter, only to be praised later. A mind captured by the fault of weakness always desires the aids of sickness and, rejecting the medicine, has contempt for the doctor, spits out the remedies of medicine, and also hastens his own destruction with great haste. Now if the severity of the sickness gets worse, they search for a stronger medicine and on behalf of the safety of the man, the anxious medicine makes itself stronger. Harsh foods and strong drinks are forced upon the unwilling, and if the disease becomes stronger, fire and also a sword are applied. If a man, having been restored with sanity and safety comes to himself, no matter what he involuntarily endures by the fault of a sick body, he confesses that all of this was done on behalf of his own safety by the judgment of a sound mind.19 Some one hundred and fifty years following the Battle on the Frigidus, things seemed hardly to have improved. They might have gotten worse! Writing in the A.D. 440s, Salvian of Lérins—a contemporary and associate of Vincent, John Cassian, and perhaps even St. Patrick, all of whom were connected with the Lérins Abbey—paints a rather dispiriting picture of the Christian society of the Roman West in the middle of the 5th century. His De guberna- tione Dei is, on the one hand, an eloquent defense of divine providence. Over against widespread doubt of God’s involvement, Salvian argues that God is neither negligent nor indifferent. God is to be seen at work precisely in the barbarian raids on the once magnificent and prosperous cities of Gaul—yet not as One who seeks their destruction but as One who withholds the judgment the people actually deserve. In doing so, God is recalling His people, forcefully no doubt, to live up to their Christian identity. In this context, Salvian’s work presents, on the other hand, a detailed description of the social conditions and customs in his day. And those are a The world and the masses are and always will be un-Christian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in name. far cry from a Christian ideal: “the Lord’s commandments are never obeyed by us, and are practically reversed.” Salvian goes on to elaborate: It is certain that not only those who seek after worldly pomp and pleasure, but even those who abandon worldly ties, do not fulfill these requirements. They who apparently renounce their wealth do not do so in such a manner that their renunciation seems complete. They who apparently carry their cross carry it in such a way that they receive more honor in the name of the cross than pain in the sufferings of Christ.20 The picture gets progressively gloomier—and surprisingly gloomier given that “there are no longer pagan princes nor persecuting tyrants.” Christians are not being martyred for their faith. “Our God is content that we serve Him in peace, that we please Him by the very purity of righteous deeds and the holiness of an unsullied life.” And yet “almost our whole life is a shipwreck. Everyone lives in such great wickedness that there is hardly a Christian who is apparently not being shipwrecked continuously.”21 God commanded us to love one another, but we mutilate each other in mutual hatred. God commanded that all contribute to the upkeep of the needy, but almost all plunder the goods of others. God commanded all Christians to keep their eyes pure, but how many are there who do not roll about in the mire of fornication?22 Even the church is nothing but “an exasperator of God”: what else is the whole assemblage of Christians but the bilge water of vice? How many will you find in the Church who are not either a drunkard or a beast, or an adulterer, or a fornicator, or a robber, or a debauchee, or a brigand or a murderer? And, what is worse than all this, they do all these things almost unceasingly. . . . among all Christians it is the general norm of holiness to be less corrupt than others.23 Salvian does not mince words: “We say we worship God, yet we obey the devil.”24 In addition to being seriously concerned about the spiritual condition of the allegedly Christian society of his day, Salvian is also worried about how the invading barbarians perceive the Christians of the Roman West who are resolutely “handing over the name of the Lord to the blasphemy of the barbarians.”25 To give just one example, among the barbarians fornication is a crime; “with us a distinction and an ornament.”26 In all this, “Christians are worse because they should be better.”27 To make matters worse still, many of the barbarian tribes, it should There emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, an ineffective peacepact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of the resurrection. be noted, were by that time also largely Christ-followers, though of the Arian stripe, as opposed to the Nicene Christianity by then clearly on the ascendant within the Roman Empire. This is what puzzles Salvian. Though they are heretics, their lives are beyond exemplary. “Almost all barbarians, at least those who are of one tribe under one king”—Salvian is discussing the Vandals and the Goths here—“love one another; almost all Romans persecute each other.”28 Things have actually gotten so dire that the poor, the widows, and the orphans, many of them educated, “seek among the barbarians the dignity of the Roman because they cannot bear barbarous indignity among the Romans.” And so, “they prefer to bear among the barbarians a worship unlike their own rather than rampant injustice among the Romans.”29 In all this, the church remains silent. “[E]ven the Lord’s priests do not resist the violence of wicked men.”30 All in all, the Vandals and the Goths are far more godly: “in moments of crises [they] demand help from God and call their prosperity the gift of God.”31 Some of the most vivid, memorable—even if horrid—descriptions that Salvian offers are those of people’s behavior when cities like Carthage or Trier found themselves under barbarian attack. And yet what was attacked was hardly Christian civilization. Salvian asks somberly: “Therefore, what can the prerogative of a religious name profit us? That we call ourselves Catholics? That we brag we are the faithful? That we despise the Goths and Vandals with the reproachful title of heretics, when we ourselves live in heretical depravity?”32 An even longer interval of time seems to have made little difference, either. We may in this context invoke Martin Luther’s statement in his 1523 treatise On Temporal Authority. When Luther speaks about the sword wielded by temporal authority for the sake of extracting external righteousness, what often goes unnoticed, or rather ignored, is that he does not speak of a pluralist society like ours but of a society that sees itself as profoundly Christian, a society deeply entrenched in Christendom. And yet Luther’s judgment leaves no room for optimism: “the whole world is evil and . . . among thousands there is scarcely a single true Christian . . . the world and the masses are and always will be un-Christian, even if they are all baptized and Christian in Lutheran Forum 15 name. Christians are few and far between (as the saying is).”33 Chantal Delsol may very well be right: Christendom is only Christianity’s alter ego, and the Christian civilization a façade no longer worth holding on to. But she may also be right that what we are dealing with is even more serious than that: a “monstrous avatar” that, for all its achievements, may in fact stand in the way of the gospel. More so perhaps than its secularized remains! This is certainly a disturbing thought, at least for those of us who see much good in the history of the Christian tradition.34 Perhaps Karl Barth put his finger on much of the problem. The gospel is not constrained by, or dependent on Christendom. It is also the salvation of it and of the best within it. But if that is the case, then even the Christian civilization stands under judgment, for, in the end, the only thing we must not be ashamed of is the gospel, and nothing else (Romans 1:16). If anything Christian (!) be unrelated to the Gospel, it is a human by-product, a dangerous religious survival, a regrettable misunderstanding. For in this case content would be substituted for a void, convex for concave, positive for negative, and the characteristic marks of Christianity would be possession and self-sufficiency rather than deprivation and hope. If this be persisted in, there emerges, instead of the community of Christ, Christendom, an ineffective peace-pact or compromise with that existence which, moving with its own momentum, lies on this side of the resurrection. Christianity would then have lost all relation to the power of God. Now, whenever this occurs, the Gospel, so far from being removed from all 16 Winter 2022 rivalry, stands hard pressed in the midst of other religions and philosophies of this world.35 The Kingdom of God In a brief talk, from 1932, concerned with the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against two Christian temptations.36 The first is rather obvious. It is the propensity toward otherworldliness, especially as that which instantly solves all down-to-earth struggles—only not. In this, it exempts one from taking, and wrestling with, reality seriously. The afterlife will right all wrongs and reward all the rights. The second, less obvious tempta- To pray, “Thy kingdom come,” is to inhabit the gift of reality while leaning into the patience of God. tion is what Bonhoeffer calls “pious, Christian secularism”—“the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the Earth.” What this temptation fails to take seriously is God in the concreteness of God’s work. The essence of pious secularism is the presumption of representing—indeed, having to represent—God’s cause, “our readiness to earn God his right in the world.” Its exponents, though Christian, are curiously Godless. Yet, comments Bonhoeffer, “[w]hoever [in this way] evades God in order to find the Earth does not find the Earth as God’s Earth; he finds the jolly scene of a war between good and evil, pious and impious, which he kindles himself—in short, he finds him- self.”37 Bonhoeffer concludes his talk with a discussion of order and miracle, both proceeding from God, both—in a creative tension— manifesting His providential presence and active care. To pay attention to those is to be attuned to the kingdom of God as God’s own work. This means that to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” is not to bless one’s own Christian-civilization building as an implicit attempt to save the absentee God in the world or the save the world for God. It is not even to pray for the church as if it were Christendom’s down payment. Rather, to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” is to inhabit the gift of reality while leaning into the patience of God; for God’s patience, “the time of salvation” (ii Corinthians 6:2) is nothing other than the time given for the gift of the real, which God himself bends toward His coming kingdom. The end of Christendom has now come. We can no longer deceive ourselves about the meaning of the world and our role in its destiny. Nor can we any longer rely on props of our own making to prepare the way for that destiny. Yes, the end of Christendom may be here. Yet what its coming has actually revealed is the true end of Christianity—which Christianity must now confront, having no other choice but to live up to it. “God’s kingdom,” as Luther puts it, “comes on its own without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come to us.”38 It is not for us to determine how it ought to, priding ourselves on doing the dirty work for God. All we pray for is “God’s Holy Spirit, so that through his grace we believe his Holy Word and live godly lives.” But that means living in the messiness of life, which is not beneath God’s many-splendored truth, and in the secular as it, too, longs for the Spirit’s life and embrace. The end of Christianity is to find your salvation in the Good News of God for us—here. On the Cross of Golgotha. On the crucifix seemingly—and by all accounts!— out of place at The Church. The Lord certainly doesn’t mind. He never has. And that’s love, love divine, excelling our pieties, indignations, and all attempts to save Him. And, yes— forgiving even those. We, too— yes, even we—must lift up our eyes—and we will see! See Him as He first saw us, while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), and continues to see us, and see us through to His own end, the kingdom. LF Endnotes 1. Chantal Delsol, La fin de la Chrétienté: L’inversion normative et le nouvel âge (Paris: Cerf, 2021). Page references to Delsol’s work will be given in the text in accordance with this edition. The translations are all mine. 2. For a massive and painstakingly historical account, one might turn to Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, 300-1300 (New York: Knopf, 2023). 3. This did not prevent the Eastern emperor Arcadius, in particular, from being a zealous, even intolerant Christian and a disastrously mediocre, impressionable ruler. 4. Ad nationes, II.i.7 (cited by Delsol on p. 52). The English translation comes from Ante-Nicene Fathers 3:129. 5. William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1998). 6. According to Zygmunt Bauman, what characterizes late modern communities is that they are held together by bonds of affinity. Affinity, to be sure, boasts “the intention of making the bond like that of kinship,” but, even as it works assiduously to cement it, affinity can never quite shrink from keeping some options open. See Bauman’s Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 29. 7. The English translation comes from Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:26-27. Delsol quotes a part of this passage on p. 56. 8. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 75-77. 9. “Ergo diis patriis diis indigetibus pacem rogamus. Aequum est, quicquid omnes colunt, unum putari. Eadem spectamus astra, commune caelum est, idem nos mundus involuit. Quid interest, qua quisque prudentia verum requirat? Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum” (Relationes III.10). 10. “Wahrheit nicht Enthüllung ist, die das Geheimnis vernichtet, sondern Offenbarung, die ihm gerecht wird.” In Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 31 (trans. altered). Quoted by Delsol on p. 122. 11. On the problematic character of the concept of natural law in relation to the torah, from a historical perspective, see Yonatan Adler, The Origins of Judaism: An Archeological-Historical Reappraisal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 217-221. 12. On the generosity of Christianity, which allows its ideas to be secularized for the greater good of all, see Eberhard Jüngel, “Zur Verankerung der Menschenrechte im christlichen Glauben,” Günter Nooke et al. (eds.), Gelten Menschenrechte universal? Begründungen und Infragestellungen (Freiburg: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 2008), 166-79. 13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Christ, Reality, and Good,” Ethics [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 6] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 63. 14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harvest, 1958), 290ff. 15. Athanasius, On the Incarnation [Greek Original and English Translation], trans. John Behr (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s, 2011), 115 [§30]. 16. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 151 [§46; cf. §47] 17. Julius Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanarum religionum [§16], trans. Richard E. Oster, Jr. Unpublished Master of Arts thesis, presented at Rice University, 1971 (available at https://hdl. handle.net/1911/89943). 18. Maternus, De errore, §29. 19. Maternus, De errore, §16. 20. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei III.3; The Writings of Salvian, the Presbyter, trans. Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1962), 73. 21. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei III.4-5 (75). 22. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei III.9 (83). 23. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei III.9 (83-84). 24. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei V.3 (131). 25. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei IV.18 (122). 26. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei VII.6 (193). 27. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei IV.19 (123). 28. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei V.4 (133). 29. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei V.5 (135-136). 30. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei V.5 (135). 31. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei VII.9 (197). 32. Salvianus, De gubernatione Dei VII.11 (200-201). 33. Martin Luther, On Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed; in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1962), 91. 34. One such appreciative account is René Girard’s in I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), esp. 137-181. 35. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: OUP, 1933) 36-37 (emphases added). 36. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth,” Berlin: 1932-1933 [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 12] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 287. 37. Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come!” 288. 38. Martin Luther, “Small Catechism” [Lord’s Prayer, Second Petition]; Robert Kolb et al., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 357. Lutheran Forum 17 L U TH E R AN F O RU M V ol . 56, n o . 4 W inter 2022 The Forum NoTebook LeTTers To The ediTor ecumeNism 2 From The ediTor The End of Christianity Piotr J. Małysz On the Way to Full Communion: Thinking about Christian Unity from Liturgy A Statement from Seminar on the Way North American Academy of Liturgy 43 6 oLd TesTAmeNT sTudy From The AssociATe ediTor Islam and Christian Witness in the City Joshua Hollmann 18 47 New TesTAmeNT sTudy PoeTry Sacred Call Tom Schaefer Mercy is Eternal: Exegetical Reflections on Psalm 102 David Luy 23 “Give Us … Bread!” in the Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer Robert Holst 51 hymN Easter Morrow Gracia Grindal chrisT ANd cuLTure 24 “But He’s Done So Much Good!” Scott Geminn 59 TheoLogy Theological Aesthetics in Twentieth Century German Protestantism Charles M. Howell 27 sermoN On the Day of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption (August 15) Samuel Dambrowski (1577-1625) 35 Please send editorial correspondence and manuscript submissions to: [email protected]. All Bible quotations from the esv unless otherwise noted. 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