Christ Ruins (and Reclaims) Everything

For at least the last year or two, two Englishmen have been fighting in my head. Well, maybe “fighting” is too strong a word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my brain has been hosting a “lively discussion” between two visions of what Christianity might be in and for the world in the twenty-first century. These visions are not entirely incompatible with one another; there is significant overlap, to be sure. But they are different enough to cause some tension. And it’s a tension that I feel as one tasked with leading a church in these strange times.

The Englishmen squabbling in my skull question are likely not a surprise to regular readers of this blog. They are Tom Holland and Paul Kingsnorth. The former is a historian and host of the wildly popular podcast The Rest is History; the latter is a writer, activist, and cultural commentator. They are around the same age (early-mid 50’s) and both came of age in the vaguely secular, nominally Anglican 80’s. Holland was formed in Christian institutions but became an agnostic in young adulthood. Kingsnorth barely set foot in the church, being turned off by the faint whiffs of Christianity that he picked up in school.

Both have come to faith in middle age. Sort of. Kingsnorth had something of an existential crisis which led to a robust conversion experience where he was baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church (he tells his conversion story in a beautiful article called The Cross and the Machine, which remains among my favourites) . Holland’s “conversion” was more gradual and owed itself more to his work as a historian than any blinding moment of spiritual insight. In his research on the ancient world, he was struck by just how different the world was before Christianity came along. His magisterial book Dominion outlines his historical appreciation for the Christian faith that gave birth to the West and all its values, the world he loves and perhaps took for granted.

Holland, to my knowledge, has not yet been baptized or openly professed Christian faith (although he sure seems close). He has become a representative of what many are calling “Cultural Christianity.” Holland is one of a growing number of intellectuals who are seeing that the cultural legacy of Christianity (human rights, care for the weak, freedom of conscience, democracy, assumptions about the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, etc.) is something worth cherishing and preserving. They see a very ugly and merciless culture (or cultures) emerging and long to return to the values produced by the Christian West. But some can’t quite bring themselves to embrace the whole package.

Kingsnorth, on the other hand, has fully embraced Christian faith, if of a somewhat unusual kind. While the path to Eastern Orthodoxy and other high church expressions of faith is certainly a well-travelled one these days, his choice of the Romanian Orthodox Church remains somewhat atypical. He didn’t want the tepid Anglicanism of his homeland. He wanted something ancient, mysterious, demanding, even weird. And he has been quite critical of the “cultural Christianity” I’ve identified with Tom Holland. His recent Erasmus Lecture was entitled “Against Christian Civilization,” and, well, it was. While acknowledging the basic cultural reality that makes the “cultural Christianity” argument seem so plausible and attractive to many, he asks a bracing question: “What does the culture we are associating with Christianity have to do with Jesus or his teachings?”

Here’s how he puts it:

What we are really hearing about, then, when we hear talk of defending or rebuilding ‘Christian civilisation’, is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its endgame. It is the idol of material progress—the progress which has shredded both culture and nature—which is causing such grief everywhere. ‘Christian civilisation’ is not a solution to this—it is a problem which is part of it. And when actual Christianity is proposed instead, the response is so often the same. Oh yes, that’s all very well, you fundamentalist—but what practical use is that?

And the answer is: none. Christianity is impractical. Impractical, intolerable and awe-ful, in the original sense of that word. It is terrifying, and it is designed to kill you. This is because the values of God and of the world are inimical, as we are repeatedly told by Christ and all the saints. This, surely, is the beautiful mystery at the heart of this thing. God is not mocked. His wisdom is foolishness to the world, and vice versa. What this means to us is that fighting our ‘civilisational war’ in the name of Christ will fail, and catastrophically, because Christ does not fight wars other than those that go on in the heart.

Bracing stuff, to be sure. At times, Kingsnorth sounds more Anabaptist than Orthodox!

So, yeah, these two guys have been going at it in my head for a while. On the one hand, I find Holland’s historical analysis enormously persuasive. I think very few people in the Western world understand how deeply Christian their implicit ethics and assumptions really are. We cannot imagine a world other than the one Christianity has (imperfectly) delivered to us, nor do we have any sense of how much will be lost when we fully and finally leave it behind. We are profoundly ignorant of and ungrateful for the world Christianity has given us. I know that Western culture is imperfect, that it has been greedy and rapacious, wildly inconsistent, and unfaithful to Christ in countless ways. But the alternatives seem truly terrible to me (alternatives that we see every day in the punitive incoherent moralisms of the progressive left and the power-hungry nationalisms of the far-right). I’ll take even a flawed vaguely Christian culture over its replacement contenders any day of the week.

And on the other hand, I cannot disagree with Kingsnorth’s critique of “cultural Christianity.” Jesus is impossible to read as a placid guarantor of modern liberalism or capitalism or even democracy. His teachings are too radical, too subversive, too weird and confusing. Again, Kingsnorth puts it provocatively in a recent piece:

Christianity is, and always has been, a radical counter-culture. God’s wisdom, as St Paul tells us, is foolishness to the world, and we see this in the teachings of Jesus. Giving away wealth we have worked hard to earn; allowing our enemies to mock or strike us; leaving our homes and families behind for a promise of paradise instead; refusing violence; loving our neighbours and enemies; understanding that our true neighbours may not be our own kin but strangers or foreigners—none of this makes sense on an everyday level. But it is no good claiming that such instructions are somehow ‘not to be taken literally.’ We surely have to take God incarnate at his word – and then figure out what it means for us in our lives. However that plays out, it seems clear to me that there is no way to live such teachings at the centre of a worldly culture. This is why Christians have always been outsiders—even when ‘Christianity’ was nominally in power…

Sometimes I think that if there’s one person we Christians really can’t stomach, it’s Christ. He ruins everything.

Indeed.

I have no neat and tidy solution here. The Englishmen continue their quarrel in my head. I suppose if I were to attempt to find some common ground, some livable space in the tension between “Christian culture is good and desperately worth preserving” and “Christian culture cannot be squared with the teaching and example of Jesus” it would be in the realm of anthropology. Tom Holland and Paul Kingsnorth have both written eloquently about the need for the recovery of a Christian understanding of human nature. We are all sinners in need of grace. When we begin to demand perfection of one another, when we forget forgiveness, when the possibility of redemption is closed off, we create ugly, trivial, and merciless cultures that are utterly unworthy of preservation.

I am, at heart, an incurable existentialist. No matter how we might wrestle with the cultural component of how the Christian story has made its way in the world (and how it should), I think every human being comes to a point in their life where they must stare down the deep questions that are asked of us. Who am I? Why do I exist? What is good, true, and beautiful and what might justify these things? Is there meaning to this imperfect and inconsistent story? Can I be forgiven? Can all that has gone wrong somehow, against all odds, be made right?

How we answer these questions will, of course, have implications on the kinds of cultures that we embrace and create. It will also have implications for how we live in the tension between what should be but is not yet.