Several months ago, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy delivered a speech defending her commitment to the West, which she described as “a civilization born from the fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian values.” In a similar, earlier vein to Meloni’s speech, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained that her conversion to Christianity was motivated by an increasing awareness that “the Judeo-Christian tradition…is the story of the West, warts and all” and that Christianity alone provides the “ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity” and the “doctrine to fortify us against [the West’s] menacing foes.” I welcome with gratitude Meloni’s spirited defense of the West and Ali’s thoughtful explanation of her conversion, but I fear that both share in common an increasingly widespread misperception regarding the source of the West’s relative greatness and why it is worth preserving. During my recent years of study at Oxford I was surprised to see how frequently similar lines of thinking to Meloni and Ali were advanced and accepted. For example, I almost never encountered any critical challenges, even in secular quarters, of Tom Holland’s Dominion thesis, namely, that all of the West’s best legal and moral ideas were uniquely owed to Christianity and the way in which Christian thought had built upon earlier Jewish and Greco-Roman tradition. Even Richard Dawkins seemed to join this chorus when, early last year, he proclaimed himself to be “a cultural Christian.”
And while, on the one hand, I appreciated the intellectual acceptance of the idea that Christian thought was on to something when it has extolled the pursuit of justice, peace, human dignity, generosity, and selflessness, on the other hand, I began to grow concerned that there was also something rather pernicious afoot. That is, I perceived that certain intellectuals and politicians across the West were, whether wittingly or not, advancing the notion that Christianity’s greatest contribution to the West lies in its moral and ethical tradition—a tradition that could be strip-mined and blended with certain notions of Greek philosophy and Roman law to create a robust, politically-minded Christianity that can be drawn upon to denounce and defeat radical Islam, socialism, and other (genuine) threats to Western civilization. What Ali, Meloni and others seem to suggest is that a Christ-less Christianity is presently warranted; a Christianity that will allow the West to retaliate against its enemies without encountering a bloody cross, and the man upon it, obstructing its path.
But against such I must contend that it was not Roman law, Greek philosophy, or even Christian values or tradition that made the West great.
Rather, what has made the West great, in any sense, was the Church. The Church that, despite the many flaws of its members, constantly told the Western peoples of the love and grace of God for them that was displayed in the Christ-event. The Church that reminded the West, even amidst its own brokenness, that it is the kindness of God that leads to our lasting repentance. The Church, where the lordship and divinity of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed for the last two millennia, has served as the conscience of the West—continually challenging it to rethink its legal and philosophical presuppositions and its understanding of right and wrong.
In his invaluable essay, Heritage and Decay, Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers a consonant perspective. For Bonhoeffer, the Church, that is, the community of faith “ruled by the word of Jesus Christ alone” and which mystically constitutes “the body of Christ” is, and has been from its beginning, “the true unity of the West.” Bonhoeffer foresaw in his time that “[t]he West is about to repudiate its historical heritage” and “has turned away from Christ after knowing him” intimately. Presently, certain factions in the West are attempting to reclaim their historical heritage, but in a manner that detaches their moral and political heritage from the personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord that fostered such beneficent moral and political developments. This is why it was crucial to Bonhoeffer, in the years to come, that the Church in the West “must bear witness to Jesus Christ as living lord” and “stand in the middle of the dissolution of all that exists,” as “protector” of the true “heritage of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, but above all” as a herald of “the miracle of God in Jesus Christ ‘yesterday, today, and forever.’”
After all, it was Roman law that enshrined the legal concept of patria potestas, which gave the male head of household the legal right to treat each member of his household as his personal property and to dispose of them as he pleased. It was Roman law that erected no legal barrier against the exposure of infants until 374 AD, when the emperor was persuaded by the witness and teaching of the Church to do so. It was Greek philosophy that taught that a human’s value was determined, not by his status as a precious creature rendered in God’s very image, but by his utility to his society and his place in the social hierarchy. It was Greek philosophy, across its many schools, that considered slavery, abortion, adultery, domestic violence, sexism, and infanticide to be practices of little to no moral concern. As the writings of the early Church reveal, Greek philosophers and Roman lawyers despised the weakness of Christians and their “naive” obsession with kindness, compassion, and neighborly love. To these men, in the words of Roman historian Suetonius, Christians were naught but a “class of men given to a new and wicked superstition,” who fully deserved to be despised. These same philosophically minded men were confounded, offended, and disgusted by the Christians who saw in a legal Roman crucifixion a symbol, not of criminality or failure, but a glorious demonstration of a triune God’s redemptive love for the world. Indeed, it was not until the early Church began to put its love for its Lord into service by caring for orphans and widows, sharing generously with their fellow Christians, rescuing exposed children, and tending to others that Greco-Roman society saw as worthless, that we can even begin to speak of the type of an ancient community that us moderns would care to belong to.
Moreover, against those who advocate for a Christ-less Christianity, the Scriptures bear witness that God’s moral law is not meant to be a means of self-justification, self-righteousness, or political gain. As Luther (and Paul long before him) brilliantly saw, the moral law is meant to crush us and serve as a “ministry of condemnation.” The moral law serves to constantly reveal our profound brokenness and depraved hearts. The moral law teaches us that we cannot meet the moral demands of a holy and righteous God—but for Jesus Christ. The moral law is something we can only bear under the yoke of Christ, because it is he who carries the load for us. Keeping the moral law requires a freedom that only the grace of Christ can provide and a supernatural strength that only the Holy Spirit can deliver. It requires a radical transformation of our hearts. A radical transformation that only love for a loving God can bring about.
Very few men have been as well acquainted with a Christless Christianity as William Wilberforce. He was deeply concerned with those who made “it their chief object to inculcate the moral and practical precepts of Christianity” whilst neglecting to lay “the grand foundation, of a sinner’s acceptance with God” and to show “how the practical precepts of Christianity grow out of her peculiar doctrines, and are inseparably connected with them.” Thus, in his timeless Real Christianity, Wilberforce labeled this moralistic Christianity a “fatal error,” for he saw only insensibility and folly in those who considered “Christian morals as distinct from Christian doctrines.” Against these sophistic moralists, Wilberforce pleaded for a return to the origins of the Christian faith, to “the Cross of Christ” and a reliance on “the Grace of God alone” to “receive from above a new living principle of holiness.” To those who taught that holiness could be “obtained by their own natural unassisted efforts,” he passionately urged the “disclaiming with indignation every idea of attaining” holiness other than that contained in “the Gospel of Christ.” Wilberforce insisted that the Gospel is, at essence, the good news that holiness does not precede our reconciliation to God, but rather, follows from our reconciliation to God through faith in Jesus Christ and in Christ’s promise to impart his perfect righteousness to us. This was, to Wilberforce, “a point which can never be too much insisted on.” Indeed, as Wilberforce helps us to see, to think that we can extricate Christian mores and ethics from Christianity and the worship and love of Christ is as foolish as thinking that we could remove an udder from a cow and keep on milking it.
For God is not to be mocked. Christianity’s mores and ethics, despite their objectivity and universality, cannot be appropriated to serve a strictly political or social end. The Scriptures reveal again and again that we cannot fulfill the moral law on our own—the only way to the Father is through faith in the Son. We cannot hope to approach God apart from faith in Christ—no matter how hard we follow after Sisyphus. Thus, to seek a Christ-less Christianity, for whatever reason, is to seek only a means of self-justification and tribal-justification. A means of asserting ourselves over and against our enemies. This is ultimately perverse. It is so because it is such justification that wholly blinds us to our profound need for the grace of Jesus Christ. It renders us hypocrites, who demand that our enemies keep the law, while we continue to violate it ourselves in secret. This is a godless, dangerous act and those who take this path very much risk hearing the words on that Great Day, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”
In his insightful and provocative lecture, Against Christian Civilization, Paul Kingsnorth expresses a similar concern to mine. He writes of those who seek “a return to something called ‘Christian civilization’—regardless of whether the Christian faith is, in fact, true.” But his proposed alternative is, surprisingly, the rejection of civilization altogether. Kingsnorth writes that “this God of ours has an ambivalent relationship to humanity’s earthly power structures,” and at “no point does he enthusiastically embrace them.” According to Kingsnorth, all of Jesus’ “teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.”
But is this really so? Must we choose between a Christ-less Western civilization and following Jesus? Does Kingsnorth’s quasi-Rousseauian perspective adequately account for biblical passages such as 1 Samuel 16, Psalm 22, Isaiah 45, Acts 17, Romans 13, 1 Peter 2, and Revelation 21? Does it sufficiently account for the words of Jesus to Pilate, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above”? To all these questions, I answer with an earnest “no.” Instead, again drawing upon Bonhoeffer, I answer that there is a via media for the faithful to walk in our day. With Bonhoeffer, I marvel “at human civilization,” and see within it “an authentic order instituted from above” that has largely contained tyranny, anarchy, chaos, and “the forces of rebellion.” Civilization is precisely what Bonhoeffer called it — “a miracle.” A miracle that demonstrates that human history possesses a Christ-centric structure.
Thus, there is a path that embraces fidelity to Jesus Christ first and foremost, that does not seek to weaponize Christian morality nor to exclude Christian participation in civilization, but rather permits us to see that Christ seeks to preserve human civilization, including the West. To bring a biblical and Christ-centric perspective to bear upon history (as Augustine so masterfully does in City of God) is to see that Christ has worked, and is working, through the Church and the nations of the world to constrain the evil and egotistical forces that threaten the peace, justice, and other civilizational goods of humanity. We can see that Christ desires for all humans to accept his salvific grace before his return, and, accordingly, he intends that human civilization, as it takes form in the world’s interconnected societies, be maintained through the pursuit of justice and peace, to facilitate the Gospel’s proclamation by his Church. A government’s proper utilization of coercive power to restrain evil and facilitate justice creates a space in which there is sufficient peace and order for the Church to sound out Jesus’ redeeming love to each member of each political community. This is a view of civilization, and the West, that finds no dissonance with Jesus’ Lordship.
But perhaps I am mistaken regarding the trust I, and many others, place in Jesus and his divinity. Perhaps, as Foucault taught, there is no more to humanness and humanity than endless, tribalistic struggle for power. Indeed, if Jesus was not God’s only begotten and resurrected Son, then those who live by the moral vision of the Scriptures “are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19), for we have denied ourselves the opportunity to wring the utmost pleasure and power out of life. But if Christianity is true, as the resonance between our innate sense of morality and the teachings of the Scriptures do rightly suggest, then its greatest treasure and gift to the West, indeed to the world, is personal and communal redemptive encounter with its namesake. Therefore, the West does not need a Christ-less Christianity nor civilization-less Christianity. It needs now only what it has always needed—Christ himself.
