Scriptorium Daily
The worst cases of this in the modern intellectual climate are the secularists who cannot read a book like the Bible with the sympathy my traditional Christian students give Homer. They are so afraid of us that they cannot understand us.
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Christian civilization is conservative. We always act to conserve the best of the past while moving forward to our next millennium of history.
Christian civilization is fundamentally Christian! The pillars stand, not because we have not thought about them, but because they have stood so much thought. The doctrines of the Church do not endure and receive respect from us because they are hidden, but because they are massive and hard from weathering blows without a scratch that make the assault of a Hitchens or Sam Harris almost amusing if it were not so sad.
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The same was happening in theology. A careful, thoughtful dialog had to take place between new science and theology, but the modernist would have none of that. All of theology had to bow the knee to science. It was true in all the human fields of knowledge. All literature had to conform to modernist ideas and many schoolchildren were left as deprived of their cultural heritage as if the moderns had simply burned the books.
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The fundamentalists wanted to keep the best of the past, but like all traditional Christians were happy to use the tools of science. They wanted movies, radio, and faster presses. They did not like the use to which the science they have developed was being turned by their ungrateful intellectual children.
It was the modernist who was the real fundamentalist, a kind of intellectual fascist. It was he that wished to supplant and replace everything immediately with the “up to date.” He ignored books and ideas that did not fit his model. It is the fascist who demands that everything that does not exalt the powerful of this age be discarded.
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We can develop orthodoxy, but as a living body of truth that stimulates, humbles, and leads to a tension between what is revealed and what seems true today. This tension cannot be finally settled in this life. In fact, it is that provocative tension that has made Christianity so fecund and so able to weather all intellectual storms.
Christianity is always confident and conservative, because it knows (based on experience and reason) that it is going forward. It will be around. The fearful, the fascist, the fundamentalist in the modern sense sees the future as a howling chasm against which he must protect himself and the fragile shell of civilization. It is a brittle and hopeless task, but oddly it is a task in which the best ally is the very traditional Christian they fear. (more)
