Latest American Creation Post

The following is the second part of my last post but also is in response to Jon Rowe's great post about some of my thoughts about Christianity:When I first started commenting on Ed Brayton's blog people blasted me hard because some of what I was saying sounded like Conservative Christianity. Once they realized I was different it stopped. Why do so many like Ed Brayton and Jon Rowe rail against the Christian Right? 


They feel that many of the backwards people that are associated with it are trying to derail progress toward the next step in creating a modern world. I think they now see that some of us "Christians" are with them. I think what many of them fail to see is that there were many "Rational Christians" at the time of the Founding that fought the good fight for progress in their day. Those that fail to see this want to label the American Revolution as a "secular" event. I think they do this at their, and possibly our, own peril.



For the record, I do think it is important to understand what a "Christian" is, or was, to see the impact Christianity had, or did not have, on bringing us into the modern world. But I think the real questions that will put this "Christian Nation" debate into its proper frame are:



Which Christian ideas, if any, helped bring us into the modern world?



And



Which Christian ideas, if any, helped try to derail us from progressing toward the modern world?



I think that these ideas can be broken down into two general different views of God. One is the "Augustine view" and the other I like to call the "Locke view".



I think the Augustinian influenced Christian ideas are based on a view of God as not being concerned with the material world, sees man as totally depraved, and arbitrarily decides who goes to heaven and hell. Those whose ideas are shaped by that view will usually tell people that God really wants us humans to very little here because "His Kingdom is not of this world." I think the the Locke influenced Christian ideas are based on a view of God as being concerned with the material world and emphasizing the value of man, even though we are tainted by sin, because man is made in His image. Those whose ideas are shaped by this view of God usually tell people that God cares about the here and now just as much as heaven or hell because, "Jesus asked the Father to bring heaven to earth."



It was the same thing when Neo-Confucians took over China from the Buddhists. It had become a "Dark Age" because so many of the Buddhists became convinced that the material world was evil and the key to life was to escape it. The Neo-Confucians(I read most of this is a HS textbook so this is a broad but I think true statement) said that this world did matter and the key to happiness is to participate in it. This shift in thinking gradually led to a "golden age" in China that was written about by Marco Polo.



I think we see the same shift of thought that leads to a "golden age" in Western Civilization during the Enlightenment. If one looks at the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment I think the biggest thing that changed was hope that man could create a better world and be "happy". For some it was a secular world. For others this meant God's "Millenial Kingdom" coming to earth. Marx spoke of a Utopia. Modern "New Agers" are looking for a "New Age". Hitler was trying to take man to our next evolution. I think we also see the effects of this shift in thought much earlier in both the French and American Revolution. Jefferson wrote about this strange idea of the "pursuit of happiness" that found no place in the world of the "Divine Right of Kings" where all that mattered was obeying him to "please" God.



With that said, I think the Enlighenment was a Christian influenced movement if we are going to say Locke started it. I think it produced the two Revolutions mentioned above. One was a secular and perhaps atheist Revolution. The other was Christian in my view. One threw out Locke's theology(See my post from July on Locke) from what I have read. The other seems to me to have kept it.



Whether if we American's kept Locke's political theology is true or not is going to be my thesis as I pursue my master's degree. That is, if the Declaration of Independence was a Christian interposition based on a thread of theology that went from the Scholastics to Hooker(I think it was Hooker)during the English Civil War to Locke and then to the Founders. To do this I will have to research if the Founders were educated in this political theology, understood it, and applied it to the DOI.



I think Gary Amos makes a good case that the ideas behind the Declaration were part of the thread of Christianity I am talking about. What I think he is missing is if the Founders were educated in this political theology. We know that Madison was educated along these lines but he did not really have that much to do with writing the DOI. I guess I am going to find out about the rest as I study this.



In response to the whole discussion about what I like to call "salvation theology", I am not to sure what this has to do with the political theology used to found the nation. I think David Barton got us all of on the wrong track as far as a frame for this discussion. I understand that Jon wants to make sure that Barton does not distort the History to win his modern political battle. I think Jon does a good job at that. But I also think it is time for the frame of this discussion to shift away from Barton and his "lies" and toward the road TVD has been trying to take it for a while. I am convinced it is the right road. I think the central figure is John Locke and his political theology.



For those who are interested in a theological discussion more about salvation, I wrote a blog post Titled "The Myth of Genesis One" on my blog at www.theking25.blogspot.com about the creation story in Genesis being a allegory that those interested can read it if they want to. Since Jon brought it up, I will say here that if I am right about Genesis then all bets are off about dogmatic views of original sin and evolution. Arguments for eternal damnation start to weaken as well. Nonetheless, as Tom has stated many times, this is a History blog. The only reason to bring the theology up is how it relates to the History. But, as I have stated too, History only matters if it can relate to the issues we all struggle through in the here and now.



So, yes I am trying revive Locke's theological case for Libertarian thought. This is because I do believe in a Millenial Reign of Christ. I am not sure what it will look like but I think "liberal democracy" will have a whole lot to do with it. The problem is that what our government is spreading in the name of "liberal democracy" is nothing more than old European statism and it is slowly taking us on our way back to the "serfdom" we were in before the birth of the Modern World that Cato Unbound has been analyzing the origins of and was the subject of the original post by Jon in this exchange. (See Jon's post on Kuzinski's essay below for the link to join the discussion) (Also see Hayek's book titled "The Road to Serfdom")



This return to "serfdom" was exactly the thing that the Revolutionaries in France and America fought to keep from happening. One group threw out the baby with the bathwater and rejected God in the process. That movement fizzled out and ended with the Congress of Vienna. Oh and lest we forget, the European Statism that was re-established at the Congress of Vienna was based on the Augustinian authoritarian view of God that lead to the doctrine of the "Divine Right of Kings". Those jerks were counting on one thing to keep their collectivist civilization alive:

That all the "serfs" would listen to the Gregg Frazer(I am not saying he supports the Divine Right of Kings because I know he does not I just want people to know why I debate his so hard on this issue) like dogmatic views of Romans 13 and fear burning in hell so much that we would all sit and take it. Not me! How about you?



But, Braytonites, as we fight back lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater and blame God for fools that use his name to enslave people. Lets also keep in mind the two questions I posed to try and re-frame this debate. I challege all the "Cultural Warriors" to come up with answers for these questions:



1. Which Christian Ideas, if any, helped bring us into the modern world?


2. Which Christian Ideas, if any, tried to derail us from progressing toward a modern world?



If the level of discussion is going to be raised where I think it needs to go it is going to take more than reading one book and calling David Barton a "liar" to do this. Dr. Frazer feel free to jump into this if you want as well and help us define what are and are not "Christian Ideas". More to come.....

The Myth of Genesis One?

Last week I wrote about light and darkness and Genesis 1 and would like to continue on that theme in this post. After watching "Mission Impossible II" and "Unbreakable" in the last few months, this theme has been on my mind. In both movies, there is reference to ancient Greek and comic book myths that explore both tragedy and hope along with good and evil as represented in the contrast between light and darkness. These movies seem to hint at the hypotheses that good cannot be understood without evil and that the oral and written traditions of the ancient world seem able to teach us about both.

The main difference I have seen between cultures that emphasize oral rather than writtentraditions is that oral history seems to exaggerate to prove a point. This is essentially what the Samuel L. Jackson character says about comic books in "Unbreakable". He states that the super-heros are an exaggerated form truth handed down to teach us something. More specifically, of truly gifted people that fate, karma, or god has put on earth for some noble reason. His mission in life is to find the hero so he can learn about himself as the villain. Somewhere along life he became convinced that the weakness that caused him to break bones at the drop of the hat was a sign that someone else was out there with superhuman strength;

the super-hero.

He spent his life trying to create one disaster after another to find Mr. "Unbreakable"; thus finding purpose in his life. He thought his purpose was to be the evil in the world that would make clear the good. This is no different than the first few chapters of Genesis in my mind. It seems to me that perhaps centuries of church scholars have been wrong about Genesis in that they miss the purpose of the book. In my opinion, the purpose is either to provide a precise written history of creation, the origins of man, and the fall or it was to put into written form the oral traditions of the East about creation, the origins of man, and the fall. If it is the former, then much of the commentary on this book misses the original intent: To use exaggerated language to prove a point.

Perhaps it is much like the Renaissance art forms of Idealism and Realism. As the following quote seems to indicate, the more idealized(less literal) art gets the more the sublime is emphasized:

"The closer artists came to the High Renaissance art the more classical, monumental, and ideal figures became. Famous paintings in the High Renaissance had grandeur, idealism, and soft rendering of details. Some artists too became interested in the immediacy of the moment or how things looked in an instant of time. This led to an interest in the sublime, man fighting against man, good against evil to the death, and the action of the moment with all its expressions."

Sublime means the quality of greatness and would seem to point to perhaps the purpose of Genesis was not to record history but was a story much like a Greek myth designed to paint a snap shot of a moment to prove a point: That God is great. This line of my reasoning began in a post-modern type church meeting where one of the leaders of the meeting got up and stated: "Face it friends Genesis and Adam and Eve are myths." Not myth in the modern sense of lies but myth in the sense of oral tradition with the purpose of making a point. I rejected this at the time but a while later began reading the blog of a man named Henry Neufeld who is a friend of a man named Ed Brayton who blogs at Dispatches on The Culture Wars at www.scienceblogs.com. He had studied the history of it and had come to the same conclusion. I was more open but still rejected this idea.

Then, when I had thrown out all the assumptions embedded in the form of Christianity I had been taught and began to think for myself, I watched these two movies and it finally clicked:

The whole point of the first few chapters of Genesis seeks to contrast the darkness from the light! This line of inquiry has led me to go back and read Thomas Aquinas and I started with his writings on the existence of God.

Guess what? People asked the same primary question back then: If God is everywhere and God is good how does evil exist? Maybe it is just like the comic books. Maybe evil has to exist to show the good. Maybe the villain has to has to show himself for the hero to be seen? I realize these presuppositions in this last paragraph that need to be explored but more on that next time....