Gender dysphoria paper (650 words)

C H A P T E R 2
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Christ Against Culture

1. THE NEW PEOPLE AND “THE WORLD”

The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall consider is the one that uncompromisingly affirms the sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects culture’s claims to loyalty. It seems to be both logically and chronologically entitled to the first position: logically, because it appears to follow directly from the common Christian prin ciple of the Lordship of Jesus Christ; chronologically, because it is widely held to be the typical attitude of the first Christians. Both claims are subject to question, yet it must be conceded that the answer was given at a very early time in the history of the church, and that on the surface it seems to be logically more consistent than the other positions.

While various New Testament writings evince something of this attitude, none presents it without qualification. The first gospel contrasts the new law with the old, yet contains very explicit statements about the Christians’ obligations to be obe dient not only to the code of Moses but also to the requirements of the leaders of Jewish society.1 The book of Revelation is radical in its rejection of “the world,” but here the problem is complicated by the persecution situation in which Christiam

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find themselves. Among the other writings, the First Letter of John contains the least ambiguous presentation of this point of view.
This little classic of devotion and theology has been treasured by Christians for its profound understanding and beautiful statement of the doctrine of love. It achieves the simple sum mary of Christian theology: “God is love,” and the equally concise formulation of Christian ethics: “Love one another.” It presents in their inseparable relation and in fugue-like manner the three themes of love: God’s love for man, and man’s for God, and brother’s for brother. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us. . . . “Ve love because he first loved us Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love
one another. . . . If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar. . . . No man has ever seen God; if we love one another God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. . . .
He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. “2 The central interest of the writer, however, is quite as much the Lordship of Christ as the idea of love. Indeed, Christ is the key to the whole kingdom of love, for ” in this the love of God was made manifest among us, that
· God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him”; and “by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the breth ren.”3 The Christ who makes human love for God and neighbor possible by his demonstration of the greatness of God’s love for man, the Christ who loves men to the point of laying down his life for them and who is their advocate in heaven, is also the one who requires what he has made possible. The writer of I John insists on obedience to the commandment of Jesus Christ
2 I John 4, vv. 10-12 combined with vv. 19-iw.
i Ibid., 4:9; 3: 16.

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no less than on confidence in the love of God.4 The gospel and the new law are here thoroughly united.5 Hence God requires two things: “This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.”6 The dual commandment of love of God and neighbor, which the writer well knows,7 has here undergone a certain transformation as a result of the recognition that the first movement of love is not from man to God but from God to man and that the first requirement of the Christian life is therefore a faith in God that is inseparable from the believing acceptance of Jesus Christ as his Son. It is exceedingly important for the First Letter of John that Christians be loyal to no merely spiritual Christ but to a visible and tangible Jesus Christ of history, who is, however, not only the Jesus of history but the Son of God, inseparably united with the unseen Fath,er in love and righteousness, in the power to achieve and the authority to command.8 With these two themes of love and faith in Jesus Christ, other ideas, such as those of the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Spirit and of eternal life, are closely connected; nevertheless these two define the Christian life; no one can be a member of the Christian fellowship who does not acknowledge Jesus as ,the Christ and the Son of God and who does not love the brothers in obedience to the Lord.

This succinct statement of the positive meaning of Christi mity is, however, accompanied by an equally emphatic nega tion. The counterpart of loyalty to Christ and the brothers is the rejection of cultural society; a clear line of separation is
4 Ibid., 2:3-1 1; 3:4-10, 21 -24; 4: 21; 5: 2-3.
5 Dodd, C. H., The ]ohannine Epistles, 1946, p. xxxi. 6 I John, 3:23.
7 Ibid., 4: in.

8 Cf. ibid., 1: 1-3; 2: 1-2; 2:22-24; 3:8b; 4:2-3, 9-10, 14-15; 5: 1 -5; cf. also
Dodd, op. cit., pp. xxx-xxxvi; 1 -6; 55-58.

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drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world. Save in two instances9 the word “world” evidently means for the writer of this letter the whole society outside the church, in which, however, the believers live.10 The injunction to Chris tians is, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.”11 That world appears as a realm under the power of evil; it is the region of darkness, into which the citizens of the kingdom of light must not enter; it is characterized by the prevalence in it of lies, hatred, and murder; it is the heir of Cain.12 It is a secular society, dominated by the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life,” or, in Prof. Dodd’s translation of these phrases, it is “pagan society, with its sensuality, super ficiality and pretentiousness, its materialism and its egoism.”13 It is a culture that is concerned with temporal and passil1g values, whereas Christ has words of eternal life; it is a dying as well as a murderous , for ” the world passes away and the lust of it.”14 It is dying, however, not only because it is con cerned with temporal goods and contains the inner contradic tions of hatred and lie, but also because Christ has come to destroy the works of the devil and because faith in him is the victory which overcomes the world.15 Hence the loyalty of the believer is directed entirely toward the new , the new society and its Lord.
The “Christ-against-culture” position is not set forth here in its most radical form. Though love of neighbor has been inter preted to mean love of the brother-that is, the fellow believer
9 I John 2:2; 4: 14.10 Cf. Dodd, op. cit., pp.
27, 39-45.

11 I John 2: 15.
12 Ibid., 5: 19; i : 6; 2: 8-9, u; 3: 1 1-15.
1s op. cit., p. 42.

141 John 2: 17; cf. 2:8.
15 Ibid., 3: 8; 5:4-5.

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-it is also taken for granted that Jesus Christ has come to expiate the sins of the world, which probably means in I ]ohn the expiation of the sins of all men, regarded more or less indi, vidually. Though there is no statement here that the Christian is obliged to participate in the work of the social institutions, to maintain or convert them, neither is there any express rejec tion of the state or of property as such. Doubtless the end of ” the world” seemed so .near to the writer that he found no occasion for counsel on these points; all that was required under the circumstances was loyalty to Jesus Christ and to the brotherhood, without concern for the transitory culture.

Similar, though less profound, expressions of the same atti tude are to be found in other Christian writings of the second century, while Tertullian stated it in radical fashion. The best loved books of the time, such as The Teaching of the Twelve, The Shepherd of Hermas) The Epistle of Barnabas� and the First Epistle of Clement) present Christianity as a way of life quite separate from culture. Some of them are more legalistic than I John, setting forth the meaning of Christ’s Lordship almost solely in terms of the laws given by him or in Scriptures, and regarding the new life under divine mercy more as a reward to be earned by obedience than as free gift and present reality.16 But whether grace or law is emphasized as the essence of the Christian life, in any case it is life in a new and separated community. The idea which is common to second-century state ments of this type is the conviction that Christians constitute a new people, a third “race” besides Jews and Gentiles. So Clement writes, “God, who seeth all things and who is the ruler of all spirits and the Lord of all flesh . . . chose our Lord Jesus Christ and us through him to be a peculiar people.”17 As 16 Cf. Lietzmann, H., The Beginnings of the Christian Church, 1937, pp.

261-273.

11 l Clement lxiv, i; cf. Epistle of Barnabas, xiii-xiv.

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Harnack has summarized the beliefs of these early Christians,. they were persuaded that “1 ) our people is older than the world; 2) the world was created for our sakes; 3) the world is carried on for our sakes; we retard the judgment of the world;
1. everything in the world is subject to us and must serve us;
1. everything in the world, the beginning and course and end of all history, is revealed to us and lies transparent to our eyes;
1. we shall take part in the judgment of the world and ourselves

enjoy eternal bliss.”18 The fundamental conviction, however, was the idea that this new society, race, or people, had been established by Jesus Christ, who was its lawgiver and King. The corollary of the whole conception was the thought that whatever does not belong to the commonwealth of Christ is under the rule of evil. This came to expression in the doctrine of the t”·o ways : “two ways there are, one of life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the two ways.”11) The way of life was the Christian way. It was expounded by the rehears ing of the commandments of the new law, such as the command ments to love God and neighbor, the Golden Rule, the counsels to love the enemy and not to resist evil; certain injunctions drawn from the Old Testament were, however, also included. The way of death was described simply as the vicious course of life, so that the plain alternative was to be either a Christian or a wicked man. There seems to be in this Christian ethic no recognition of the fact that in a society where gospel rules are not acknowledged some rules are nevertheless in force; and that
is Harnack, A., Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 1904, Vol. I, p. 302; cf. Gavin, Frank, Church and Society in the Sec ond Century, 1 934, which draws a picture of primitive Christian life-chiefly on the basis of Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition-as dominated by the sense of its “corporate and social quality.” “It was as if to say that the proudest boast of the believer was that he was a ‘member.’ His most essential quality was that he ‘belonged.’ ” P. 3; cf. pp. 5, 8.
19 The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, i, i; cf. Barna bas, xix-xx; Shepherd

(if Hermas, Mand, 6, i.

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l!S there are virtues and vices in the domain of Christ so there are also virtues and vices relative to the standards of non-Chris� tian culture. The line was sharply drawn between the new peD’ ple and the old society, between obedience to the law of Christ and simple lawlessness; though some concession to the presence of divine government in and over cultural institutions is to be found in Clement’s prayer “that we may be obedient to thy almighty and glorious name, and to our rulers and governors upon the earth.” He recognized, as he goes on to say, that ” Thou, Master, hast given the power of sovereignty to them through thy excellent and inexpressible might, that we may know the glory and honor given to them by thee, and be sub. ject to them, in nothing resisting thy will.”20

The most explicit and, apart from New Testament writers, doubtless the greatest representative in early Chris!ianity of the “Christ-against-culture” type was Tertullian. One must hasten to add that he does not wholly conform to our hypothetical pattern, but demonstrates traits that relate him to other families and types. He is a Trinitarian who understands that the God

Vho reveals Himself in Jesus Christ is the Creator and the Spirit also; but within that context he maintains the absolute authority of Jesus Christ, “the supreme Head and Master of [God’s promised] grace and discipline, the Enlightener and Trainer of the human race, God’s own Son.”21 Tertullian’� loyalty to Christ can express itself in such radical terms as th’! following: “Christ Jesus our Lord (may he bear with me a moment in thus expressing myself!), whosoever he is, of what God soever he is the Son, of what substance soever he is man and God, of what faith soever he is the teacher, of what reward soever he is the promiser, did, whilst he lived on earth himself

20 I Clement Ix, 4-lxi, 1.

21 Apology, chap. xxi. This and the following quotations are taken from the translation of Tertullian’s works in Ante-NicRnP. Fathers, Vols. III and IV.

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declare what he was, what he had been, what the Father’s will was which he was administering, what the duty of man wa� which he was prescribing.”22 In every case the primary Chris� tian reference is to Christ “as the Power of God and the Spirit of God, as the Word, the Reason, the Wisdom and the Son of God,” and the Christian confession is, “We say, and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under . . . tortures we cry out, ‘We worship God through Christ.’ “23 With this concentra tion on the Lordship of Jesus Christ Tertullian combines a rigorous morality of obedience to his commandments, including not only love of the brothers but of enemies, nonresistance to evil, prohibitions of anger and the lustful look. He is as strict a Puritan in his interpretation of what Christian faith demands in conduct as one can find.24 He replaces the positive and warm ethics of love which charaeterizes the First Letter of John with a largely negative morality; avoidance of sin and fearsome preparation for the coming day of judgment seem more impor· tant than thankful acceptance of God’s grace in the gift of his Son.

Tertullian’s rejection of the claims of culture is correspond· ingly sharp. The conflict of the believer is not with nature but with culture, for it is in culture that sin chiefly resides. Tertul lian comes very close to the thought that original sin is trans, mitted through society, and that if it were not for the vicious customs that surround a child from its birth and for its artificial training its soul would remain good. The universe and the soul are naturally good, for God is their maker, yet “we must not consider merely by whom all things were made, but by whom they have been perverted,” and that “there is a vast difference
2s The Prescription Against Heretics, chap. xx.
28 Apology, xxiii, xx.
2′ Cf. Apology, xxxix, xlv� De SPectaculis; De Corona; On Repentance.

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between the corrupted state and that of primal purity.”25 How much corruption and civilization coincide in Tertullian’s thought is partly indicated in the reflection that Christ came not to bring “boors and savages . . . into some civilization ;
but as one who aimed to enlighten men already civilized, and under illusions from their very culture, that they might come
to the knowledge of the truth.”26

It becomes more evident when one notes what the vices are that he condemns and what the worldliness is that the Christian is required to shun. The most vicious thing, of course, is social, pagan religion, with its polytheism and idolatry, its beliefs and rites, its sensuality and its commercialization.27 Such religion, however, is interfused with all the other activities and institu tions · of society, so that the Christian is in constant danger of compromising his loyalty to the Lord. Tertullian{ to be sure, rejects the charge that believers are “useless in the affairs of life,” for, he says, “we soj ourn with you in the world, abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other places of commerce.” He even adds, “We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffick ings-even in the various arts we make public property of our works for your benefit.”28 This, however, is said in defense. When he admonishes believers his counsel is to withdraw from many meetings and many occupations, not only because they are corrupted by their relation to pagan faith but because they

25 The quotation is from De Spectaculis, ii. For the doctrine of the natural goodness of the soul see Apology, xvii, The Soul’s Testimony, and A Treatise on the Soul, chapter xxxix of which speaks of the corruption of the soul through customs; but cf. chap. xli.
26 Apology, xxl.
21 On Idolatry; Apology, x-xv.
2s Apology, xiii.

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require a mode of life contrary to the spirit and the law of Christ.

So political life is to be shunned. “As those in whom all ardor in the pursuit of honor and glory is dead,” writes Tertullian e ven in defense, “we have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings; nor is there aught more entirely for eign to us than affairs of state.”29 There is an inner contradic tion between the exercise of political power and Christian faith. Military service is to be avoided because it involves participation in pagan religious rites and the swearing of an oath to Caesar, but chiefly because it violates the law of Christ, who, “in dis arming Peter, unbelted every soldier.” How “shall the son of peace take part in battle when it does not become him even to sue at law?”30 Trade cannot be prohibited with equal rigor, and there may even be some righteousness in business, yet it is scarcely “adapted for a servant of God,” fox apart from covet” ousness, which is a species of idolatry, there is no real motive for acquiring.31
When Tertullian turns to philosophy and the arts he is, if anything, more drastic in pronouncing prohibitions than he is in the case of the soldier’s occupation. He has no sympathy with the efforts of some Christians of his time to point out positive connections between their faith and the ideas of the Greek philosophers. “Away,’ he exclaims, “with all attempts to pro� duce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic and dialectic composition. We want no curious disputation after possessing Jesus Christ With our faith we desire no further belief.”32
29 Ibid., xxxviii. Elsewhere, in chap. xxi, Tertullian remarks that “Caesars too would have believed in Christ, if either the Caesars had not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been Caesars.”
30 On Idolatry, xix; De Corona, xi.
31 On Idolatry, xi.

s2 Prescription Against Heretics, vii� ApoloifY, xlvi.

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In Socrates’ daimon he discovers an evil demon; the disciples of Greece have for him nothing in common with ” the disciples of heaven”; they corrupt the truth, they seek their own fame, they are mere talkers rather than doers. In so far as he must con cede the presence of some truth in these non-Christian thinkers, he believes that they deriYed their insights from the Scriptures. The stain of corruption pervades the arts also. Literary erudi tion, to be sure, cannot be wholly avoided, therefore “learning literature is allowable for believers”; but teaching it must be discountenanced, for it is impossible to be a professor of litera ture without commending and affirming ” the praises of idols interspersed therein.”33 As for the theater, not only the games with their levity and brutality, but tragedy and even music are ministers of sin. Tertullian seems to delight in his vision of the last judgment, when the illustrious monarchs who had been deified by men, the wise men of the world, the philosophers, poets, and tragedians, along with play-actors and wrestlers, will groan in the lowest darkness or be tossed in the fiery billows, while the carpenter’s son thfly despised is exalted in glory.34

The great North African theologian seems, then, to present the epitome of the “Christ-against-culture” position. Yet he sounds both more radical and more consistent than he really was.35 As we shall have occasion to note, he could not in fact emancipate himself and the church from reliance on and partici pation in culture, pagan though it was. Nevertheless he remains one of the foremost illustrations of the anticultural movement to be found in the history of the church.

33 On IdolatryT x.
34 De Spectaculis, xxx.
:s;.; Cf. Cochrane, C. N., Christianity and Classical Culture, 1940, pp. 222 ff.,
227 ff., 245 f. For further discussions of Tertullian’s ethics see Guignebert, Charles, Tertullien, Etude sur ses Sentiments a l’Egard de l’Empire et de la Societe Civile, 1901, and Brandt, Theodor, Tertullians Ethik, 1929.

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11. TOLSTOY’S REJECTION OF CULTURE
We shall not undertake to describe how this motif in early Christianity was developed in the monastic movement, with its withdrawal from the institutions and societies of civilization, from family and state, from school and socially established church, from trade and industry. Eventually, of course, many sorts of monasticism arose and some of the varieties occupied positions quite distinct from those of Tertullian and the First Letter of John. Yet the main stream of the movement, as repre sented for instance by the Rule of St. Benedict, remained in the tradition of exclusive Christianity. Whatever contributions it t”l-lentually made to culture, including the recognized social re ligion, were incidental byproducts which it did not intend. Its intention was directed to the achievement of a Christian life, apart from civiJization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts. Prot estant sectarianism-to use that term in its narrow, sociological meaning-has given the same sort of answer to the question of Christ and culture. Out of the many sects that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, protesting against the worldly church, both Catholic and Protestant, and seeking- to live under the Lordship of Christ alone, only a few survive. The Mennonites have come to represent the attitude most purely, since they not only renounce all participation in politics and refuse to be drawn into military service, but follow their own distinctive customs and regulations in economics and edu cation. The Society of Friends, never as radical, represents the type less adequately; though the family resemblance can be noted, especially in connection with the practice of brotherly

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love and the abstention from military service. By and large, however, the modern Quaker shows greater affinity to the op posite attitude in Christianity, the one which regards Christ as the representative of culture.36 Hundreds of other groups, many of them evanescent, and thousands of individuals, have felt themselves compelled by loyalty to Christ to withdraw from culture and to give up all responsibility for the world. We meet them in all times and in many lands. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they did not attract much attention, for most Christians seemed to believe that another answer to their problem had been finally established. But there was one man who in his own way and under the circumstances of his own time and place stated the radical position as vehemently and consistently as Tertullian. That man was Leo Tolstoy. He is worth our special attention, because of the great/and dramatic manner in which he presented his convictions in life and art, and because of the pervasiveness of his influence in West and East, in Christianity and beyond it.
The great crisis Tolstoy met in his middle years was resolved,

after many painful struggles, when he accepted the Jesus Christ of the Gospels as his sole and explicit authority. Noble by birth, wealthy by inheritance, famous by his own achievements as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he yet found him self threatened in his own life by the meaninglessness of exist ence and the tawdriness of all the values that his society esteemed. He could not rise from this despair into tranquillity, and from the full stoppage of life into new activity, until he recognized the fallibility of all other authorities and acknowl edged the teaching of Jesus as inescapable truth, founded on
sa The best discussion, within the compass of one work, of the ethics of medieval and modern sectarianism is to be found in Troeltsch, E., The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, 1931, pp. 328 ff., 691 ff.

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reality.37 Jesus Christ was for Tolstoy always the great lawgiver, whose commandments were in accordance with man’s true nature and with the demands of uncorrupted reason. His con version centered in the realization that what Jesus had really done was to give men a new law, and that this law was based on the nature of things. “I have understood,” he writes in de scribing the great change in his life, “Christ’s teaching in his commandments and I see that their fulfillment offers blessedness to me and to all men. I have understood that the execution of these commandments is the will of that Source of all from which my life also has come. . . . In its fulfillment lies the only possi bility of salvation. . . . And having understood this, I under stood and believed that Jesus is not only the Messiah, the Christ, but that he is really the Saviour of the world. I know that there is no other exit either for me or for all those who together with me are tormented in this life. I know that for all, and for me together with them, there is no way of escape except by fulfill ing those commands of Christ which offer to all humanity the highest welfare of which I can conceive.”38 The literalness with which Tolstoy interpreted the new law, as found particularly in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and the rigorousness of his obedience to it, made his conversion a very radical event. In the little book entitled What I Believe or My Religion he relates the story of his effort to understand the New Testament, and of his release from struggle when he at last discovered that Jesus’ words were to be literally interpreted, with all ·ecclesiastical glosses on the text eliminated. Then it became clear that Christ’s commandments were a statement of
1. Cf. Preface to “The Christian Teaching,” Vol. XII, pp. 209 ff. of The Tolstoy Centenary Edition, London, 1 928-37. (This edition will hereafter be cited as Works.) Cf. also “A Confession,” Works, Vol. XI, pp. 3 ff.; “What I Believe,” Vol. XI, pp. 307 ff.
1. “What I Believe,” Works, Vol. XI, pp. 447, 448.

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God’s eternal law, that he had abolished the law of Moses, and had not come, as the church inclined to say, to reinforce the old law or to teach that he was the second person of the Trinity.39 Tolstoy believed that he was interpreting the gospel faithfully when he undertook to summarize this new law in five definite injunctions. The first commandment was: ” Live at peace with all men and never consider your anger against any man justi fied. . . . Try in advance to destroy any enmity between your self and others that it may not flame up and destroy you.” The second: “Do not make the desire for sexual relations an amuse ment. Let every man have a wife and each wife a husband and let the husband have only one wife and the. wife only one hus band, and under no pretext infringe the sexual union of one with the other.” The “definite and practicable third command
ment is clearly expressed: Never take an oath to anyone, any
/

where, about anything. Every oath is extorted for evil ends.”

The fourth commandment destroys ” the stupid and bad” social in which men live, for simply, clearly, and practically it says: “Never resist the evildoer by force, do not meet violence with violence. If they beat you, endure it; if they take your possessions, yield them up; if they compel you to work, work; and if they wish to take from you what you consider to be yours, give it up.” The final commandment, enjoining love of the enemy, Tolstoy understood as the “definite, important, and practicable rule . . . : not to make distinctions between one’s own and other nations and not to do all the things that flow from making such distinctions; not to bear enmity to foreign nations; not to make war or to take part in warfare; not to arm oneself for war, but to behave to all men, of whatever race they may be, as we behave to our own people.”40 Through the
39 Ibid., pp. 353 ff., 370 ff. .
40 Ibid., pp. 376 f., 386, 390, 392 f., 398, 404. Cf. “The Gospel in Brief,”

Works, Vol. XI, pp. 1 6.!l-16:;.

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promulgation of these five laws, Tolstoy believed, Christ had established the kingdom of God; though it is clear that the iaw of nonresistance was for him the key to the whole.
As in the case of other examples of this type which we have considered, the counterpart of such devotion to the command ments of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the
institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man’s present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain
blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identifi cation of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only. Moreover, Tolstoy seems to have little understanding of the extent and depth to which culture enters into human nature. Hence he can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and to live a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ.
Every phase of culture falls under indictment. Though state,
church, and property system are the citadels of evil, philosophy and sciences and arts also come under condemnation. There is no such thing as good government for Tolstoy. ” The revolu tionaries say: ‘ The government organization is bad in this and that respect; it must be destroyed and replaced by this and that.’ But a Christian says: ‘I know nothing about the governmental organization, or in how far it is good or bad, and for th e same reason I do not want to support it.’ . . . All the state obligations are against the conscience of a Christian: the oath of allegiance.

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taxes, law proceedings and military service.”41 The state and Christian faith are simply incompatible; for the state is based on love of power and the exercise of violence, whereas the love, humility, forgiveness, and nonresistance of Christian life draw it completely away from political measures and institutions. Christianity does not so much make the state unnecessary as sap its foundations and destroy it from within. The argument of such Christians as Paul who contend that the state performs an interim function in restraining evil does not appeal to Tolstoy, for he sees the state as the chief offender against life.42 Against its evil there is no defense except complete nonpartici pation, and nonviolent striving for the conversion of all men to peaceful, anarchic Christianity.

Though the churches call themselves Christian, they are equally far removed from the Christianity of Jesus. Tolstoy regards them as self-centered organizations that assert their own

infallibility; servants of the state, defenders of the reign of violence and privilege, of inequality and property; obscurers and falsifiers of the gospel. “The Churches as Churches . . . are anti-Christian institutions,” utterly hostile in their “pride, violence, and self-assertion, immobility and death” to the “hu mility, penitence, meekness, progress and life” of Christianity.43 As in the case of states, reformation of such institutions is wholly inadequate. Christ did not found them, and comprehension of his doctrine will not reform but will “destroy the churches and their significance.”44 To this theme, as to the criticism of the state, Tolstoy returns again and again. The church is an invention of the devil; no honest man believing the gospel can remain priest or preacher; all the churches are alike in their
41 “The Kingdom of God Is Within You,” Works, Vol. XX, pp. 275 f.
42 Ibid., pp. 281 ff.
43 Ibid., p. 82.
44 Ibid., pp. 69, 101.

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betrayal of Christ’s law; churches and states together represent the institutionalization of violence and fraud.45
Tolstoy’s attack on economic institutions is equally intransi

gent. His own effort to renounce property while yet retaining some responsibility for its administration constitutes part of his personal tragedy. He believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and than most monks, he turned even against the subdivision of labor in economic society, It seemed to him to be the means by which privileged persons, such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher than workingmen, or that their con tribution to society was so great that it compensated for the harm they did by overburdening manual workers with their claims. The first supposition has been exploded by Christian teaching about human equality; the contribution made to so ciety by the privileged is dubious when it is not patently mischievous. Hence Tolstoy urges the intellectuals, as well as landlords and military men in society, to stop deceiving them selves, to renounce their own righteousness, advantages, and distinctions, to labor with all their power to sustain their own lives and those of others by manual labor. Following his own principles, he aJtempted to be his own tailor and cobbler, and would have liked to be his own gardener and cook.46
Like Tertullian, Tolstoy also turned against philosophy and
45 Cf. “The Restoration of Hell,” a remarkable little fable in which the re establishment of the reign of evil on earth after Christ’s victory is explained particularly by the invention of the church. The devil who invented it explains to Beelzebub, “I have arranged it so that men do not believe in Christ’s teaching but in mine, which they call by his name.” Works, Vol. XII, pp. 309 ff. Cf. also “Religion and Morality,” “What is Religion?” “Church and State,” “An Appeal to the Clergy,” in the same volume.

46 “What Then Must We Do?” Works, Vol. XIV, pp. 209 ff., 269 ff., 311 ff.

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE

the sciences and arts in which he had been nurtured. The first two are not only useless, because they fail to answer the funda mental questions of man about the meaning and conduct of life, but are bad because they rest on falsehood. The experi mental sciences devote great energies to confirm a dogma that makes the whole enterprise false, namely the dogma that “mat ter and energy exist,” while they do nothing to ameliorate man’s actual life. “I am convinced,” writes Tolstoy, “that a few cen turies hence the so-called ‘scientific’ activity of our belauded recent centuries of European humanity will furnish an inex tinguishable fund of mirth and pity to future generations.”47 Philosophy leads us no further than to the knowledge that all is vanity; but “what is hidden to the wise and prudent is revealed to babes.” The common peasant who follows the Sermon on the Mount knows what the great and wise cannot understand. “Special talents and intellectual gifts are needed, not for the knowledge and statement of truth but for the invention and statement of falsehood.”48 The artist Tolstoy could not make quite as complete a break with the arts. He at least made a distinction between good art and bad. To the latter category he consigned all his own iormer work, save for two small stories, all “genteel” art designed for the privileged classes, and even Hamlet and the Ninth Symphony. But he allowed a place for an art that was a sincere expression and communication of feel. ing, that had universal appeal, was comprehensible by the masses of men, and was in accord with Christian moral con sciousness.4’9 Hence in so far as he did not devote his great literary talents to the writing of homilies and tracts on non-
47 “What I Believe,” Works, Vol. XI, p. 420; cf. “A Confession,” Vol. XI, pp.
23 ff.; “On Life,” Vol. XII, pp. i2 f.
4s “Reason and Religion,” Works, Vol. XII, p. 202; cf. “A Confession,” Vol.
XI, pp. 56 ff., 73 f.
49 “What Is Art?” Works. Vql. XVIII. t>p. 2�� !!.

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resistance and true religion, he produced parables and stories such as “Where Love Is There God Is” and ” Master and Man.” Tolstoy of course no more conforms completely to our type than any other great individual conforms to a pattern. He is like the author of I John in his praise of love and his rejection of the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” He is like Tertullian in the vehemence of his attack on social institutions. He is like the monks in his personal with drawal into a life of poverty. But he differs from all these in his relation to Jesus Christ, for one finds in them a personal devo tion to a personal Lord which is strangely lacking in Tolstoy. For him the law of Christ is much more significant than the person of the lawgiver. Maxim Gorky has remarked that when Tolstoy spoke of Christ there was “no enthusiasm, no feeling in his words, and no spark of real fire.”50 The writings in gener�l bear out that judgment. Moreover, Tolstoy shows little under standing for the meaning of the grace of God manifested in Jesus Christ, for the historical nature of Christian revelation, for the psychological, moral, and spiritual depths of both cor ruption and salvation. Hence he was more of a legalist than even the legal Tertullian. Yet in modern history and under the conditions of the modern culture of which he was in part a product, Tolstoy remains a clear-cut example of anticultural
Christianity.51
It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the type. De. l>Cribed one after the other they would constitute a very diverse group, including Eastern and Western Catholics, orthodox and sectarian Protestants, millenarians and mystics, ancient and me dieval and modern Christians. Yet their unity of spirit would also be apparent in their common acknowledgment of the sole
50 Gorky, Maxim, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1920, p. 5.
51 For full descriptions of Tolstoy’s life and works see Aylmer Maude’s Life

vf Tolstoy and Ernest J. Simmon’s Leo Tolstoy.

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authority of Jesus Christ and the common rejection of the pre vailing culture. Whether that culture calls itself Christian or not is of no importance, for to these men it is always pagan and corrupt. Neither is it of first-rate significance whether such Christians think in apocalyptic or in mystical terms. As apoca lyptics they will prophesy the early passing of the old society and the coming into history of a new divine . As mystics they will experience and announce the reality of an eternal hidden by the specious temporal and cultural scene. The signif icant question to be asked about Christians in this respect is not whether they think historically or mystically about the king dom of God; but rather whether they are convinced of its nearness and are governed by this conviction, or whether they think of it as relatively remote in time or space and relatively ineffective in power. Neither are the differences between Protes
tants and Catholics decisive. Monastic characteristics reappear

in Protestant sectarians; and a Lutheran Kierkegaard attacks the Christendom of post-Reformation culture with the same in transigence that marks a Wiclif’s thrust against medieval social faith. Various and diverse though these men and movements are, they give a recognizably common answer to the problem of Christ and culture.
1. A NECESSARY AND INADEQUATE POSITION
It is easy to raise objections to this solution of the Christian dilemma. Yet intelligent Christians who cannot conscientiously take this position themselves will recognize the sincerity of most of its exponents, and its importance in history and the need for it in the total encounter of church and world.

Half-baked and muddle-headed men abound in the anticul· tural movement as well as elsewhere; doubtless hypocris? flourishes here too. Yet the single-heartedness and sincerity oi

6G CHRIST AND CULTURE
the great representatives of this type are among their most at· tractive qualities. There has been a kind of Kierkegaardian “reduplication” in their lives, for they have expressed in their actions what they said in words. They have not taken easy ways in professing their allegiance to Christ. They have endured physical and mental sufferings in their willingness to abandon homes, property, and the protection of government for the sake of his cause. They have accepted the derision and animosity which societies inflict on nonconformists. From the persecutions of Christians under Domitian to the imprisonment of Jehovah’s

Vitnesses in national-socialist Germany and democratic Amer ica, such people have been subject to martyrdom. In so far as Christian pacifists in our time belong to this group-not all of them do–their sufferings will seem to themselves and others to be more evidently due to obedience to Jesus Christ than is the case when a Christian soldier suffers and dies. Part of the appeal of the “Christ-against-culture” answer lies in this evi dent reduplication of profession in conduct. When we make it we seem to be proving to ourselves and others that we mean what we say when we say that Jesus Christ is our Lord.
In history these Christian withdrawals from and rejections
of the institutions of society have been of very great importance
.
to both church and culture. They have maintained the distinc
tion between Christ and Caesar, between revelation and reason, between God’s will and man’s. They have led to reformations in both church and world, though this was never their inten tion. Hence men and movements of this sort are often cele brated for their heroic roles in the history of a culture which they rejected. ‘What Montalembert said of Benedict of Nursia applies in one way or another to almost all the great representa tives of exclusive Christianity: “Historians have vied in prais ing his genius and clear-sightedness; they have supposed that he

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE

intended to regenerate Europe, to stop the dissolution of society. to prepare the reconstitution of political , to re-establish public education, and to preserve literature and the arts l

firmly believe that he never dreamt of regenerating anything but his own soul and those of his brethren, the monks.”;:;2 Doubtless the individualistic ideal of soul-regeneration is not an adequate key to the attitude of radical Christians; but neither is the hope of social reform. In social reform they ac complish what they did not’ intend. Second-century believers who had no interest in the rule of Caesar prepared the way for the social triumph of the church and the conversion of the pagan world into a Christian civilization. Monasticism even tually became one of the great conservers and transmitters of cultural tradition; it trained many great ecclesiastical and po litical leaders of society; it strengthened the institutions from which its founders had withdrawn. Protestant sectarians made important contributions to political customs and traditions, such as those which guarantee religious liberty to all members of a society. Quakers and Tolstoyans, intending only to abolish all methods of coercion, have helped to reform prisons, to limit armaments, and to establish international organizations for the maintenance of peace through coercion.

Now that we have recognized the importance of the role played by anticultural Christians in the reform of culture, we must immediately point out that they never achieved these re sults alone or directly but only through the mediation of be lievers who gave a different answer to the fundamental question. Not Tertullian, but Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, and Augustine initiated the reformation of Roman culture. Not Benedict, but Francis, Dominic, and Bernard of Clairvaux ac complished the reform of medieval society often credited to
52 De Montalembert. The Monks o.f the West, 1896, Vol. I, p. 436.

68 CHRIST AND CULTURE

Benedict. Not George Fox, but William Penn and John Wool man, changed social institutions in England and America. And in every case the followers did not so much compromise the teachings of the radicals as follow another inspiration than the one deriving from an exclusive loyalty to an exclusive Christ. Yet the radically Christian answer to the problem of culture needed to be given in the past, and doubtless needs to be given now. It must be given for its own sake, and because without it other Christian groups lose their balance. The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the world and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death. The movement of withdrawal and renunciation is a necessary element in every Christian life, even though it be followed by an equally necessary movement of responsible engagement in cultural tasks. Where this is lacking, Christian faith quickly degenerates into a utilitarian device for the attainment of per sonal prosperity or public peace; and some imagined idol called by his name takes the place of Jesus Christ the Lord. What is necessary in the individual life is required also in the existence of the church. If Romans 13 is not balanced by I John, the church becomes an instrument of state, unable to point men to their transpolitical destiny and their suprapolitical loyalty; un able also to engage in political tasks, save as one more group of power-hungry or security-seeking men. Given Jesus Christ with his authority, the radical answer is inevitable; not only when men are in despair about their civilization, but also when they are complacent, not only as they hope for a kingdom of God, but also as they shore up the crumbling walls of temporal so cieties for the sake of the men who might be buried under their

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE 69
ruins. So long lS eternity cannot be translated into temporal terms nor time into eternity, so long as Christ and culture can not be amalgamated, so long is the radical answer inevitable in the church.

It is an inevitable answer; but it is also inadequate, as mem bers of other groups in the church can easily point out. It is inadequate, for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated. Man not only speaks but thinks with the aid of the language of culture. Not only has the objective world about him been modified by human achievement; but the forms and attitudes of his mind which allow him to make sense out of the objective world have been given him by cul ture. He cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his so ciety as though they were external to him; they are in him though in different forms from those in which they appear in the leaders of culture. He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rej ecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and beliefs have taken up residence in his mind. If Christians do not come to Christ with the lan guage, the thought patterns, the moral disciplines of Judais.m, they come with those of Rome; if not with those of Rome, then with those of Germany, England, Russia, America, India, or China. Hence the radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which ostensibly they reject. The writer of I John employs the terms of that Gnostic philos ophy to whose pagan use he objects.5� Clement of Rome uses semi-Stoic ideas. In almo�t every utterance Tertullian makes
sa Cf. Dodd, C. H., op. cit., xx, xxix, xlii, et passim.

70 CHRIST AND CULTURE

evident that he is a Roman, so nurtured in the legal tradition and so dependent on philosophy that he cannot state the Chris tian case without their aid.54 Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth centu1y Russian who partici pates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as con sciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they can not reject because it is a part of them. They can withdraw from its more obvious institutions and expressions; but for the most part they can only select-and modify under Christ’s authority
-something they have received through the mediation of society.

The conservation, selection, and conversion of cultural achievements is not only a fact; it is also a morally inescapable requirement, which the exclusive Christian must meet because he is a Christian and a man. If he is to confess Jesus before men, he must do so by means of words and ideas derived from cul
ture, though a change of meaning is also necessary. He must use
,
such words as “Christ” or “Messiah” or “Kyrios” or “Son of

God” or “Logos.” If he is to say what “love” means he must choose among such words as “eras/’ “philan thropia” and “agape_,” or “charity,” “loyalty,” and “love”-seeking one that comes close to the meaning of Jesus Christ, and modifying it by use in , context. These things he must do, not only that he may communicate, but also that he may himself know whom and what he believes. When he undertakes to fulfill the demands of Jesus Christ, he finds himself partly under the necessity of trans lating into the terms of his own culture what was commanded
54 Cf. Shortt, C. De Lisle, The lnfiuence of Philosophy on the Mind of Te1- tullian, and Beck, Alexander, Roemisches Recht bei Tertullian und Cyprian.

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in the terms of another, partly under the requirement of giving precision and meaning to general principles by adopting speci fic rules relevant to his social life. What is the meaning of Jesus’ statements about the Sabbath in a society which does not celebrate such a day? Is it to be introduced and modified, or left aside as a part of an alien, non-Christian culture? What is the meaning of praying to a Father in heaven, in a culture with a cosmology differing radically from that of Palestine in the first century? How shall demons be cast out where they are not be lieved to exist? There is no escape from culture here; the alter native seems to be between the effort to reproduce the culture in which Jesus lived, or to translate his words into those of another social . Furthermore, the command to love the neighbor cannot be obeyed except in specific terms that involve cultural understanding of the neighbor’s nature, a:nd except in specific acts directed toward him as a being who has a place in culture, as member of family or religious community, as na tional friend or enemy, as rich or poor. In his effort to be obe dient to Christ, the radical Christian therefore reintroduces ideas and rules from non-Christian culture in two areas: in the government of the withdrawn Christian community, and in the regulation of Christian conduct toward the world outside.
The tendency in exclusive Christianity is to confine the com mandments of loyalty to Christ, of love of God and neighbor, to the fellowship of Christians. Here also the other gospel re quirements are to be enforced. But, as Martin Dibelius among many others has pointed out, “the words of Jesus were not in t.ended as ethical rules for a Christian culture, and even if they were applied as such they were not sufficient to supply an an.. swer to all the questions of daily life.”55 Other helps were needed; and they were found by early Christians in Jewish and.
55 Dibelius, Martin, A Fresh Approach to the New Testament, p. :n9.

CHRIST AND CULTURE

Hellenistic-Jewish popular ethics. It is remarkable to what ex tent the ethics of second-century Christianity-as”summarized for instance in The Teaching of the Twelve and the Epistle of Barnabas-contains material extraneous to the New Testament. These Christians, who thought of themselves as a new “race” distinct from Jews and Gentiles, borrowed from the laws and customs of those from whom they had separated what they needed for the common life but had not received from their own authority. The situation is similar in the case of the monas tic rules. Benedict of Nursia seeks Scriptural foundation for all his regulations and counsels; but the New Testament does not suffice him, nor does the Bible as a whole; and he must find, in old reflections on human experience in social life, rules by means of which to govern the new community. The spirit in which both Scriptural and non-Scriptural regulations are pre sented also shows how impossible it is to be only a Christian without reference to culture. When Tertullian recommends modesty and patience, Stoic overtones are always present; and when Tolstoy speaks of nonresistance, Rousseauistic ideas are in the context. Even if no use were made of another inheritance besides that derived from Jesus Christ, the needs of the with drawn community would lead to the development of a new culture. Invention, hum.an achievement, temporal :. ealization of value, organization of the common life-all must go on in it. When the dogmas and rites of social religion have been aban doned, a new dogma and a new ritual must be developed, if religious practice is to go on at all. Therefore monks work out their own rituals in their monasteries, and Quaker silences be come as formalized as masses; Tolstoy’s dogmas are as confi dently uttered as are those of the Russian church. When the state has been rejected, the exclusively Christian community has necessarily developed some political organization of its own;

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE 73
and has done so with the aid of other ideas than those derived from the injunction that the first shall be the servant of all. It has called its leaders prophets or abbots, its governing assem blies quarterly meetings or congregations; it has enforced uni formity by means of popular opinion and banishment from the society; but in any case it has sought to maintain internal , not only generally but in a specific way of life. Prevailing prop erty institutions have been set aside; but something more than the counsel to sell all and give to the poor has been necessary, since men had to eat and be clothed and sheltered even in pov erty. Hence ways and means of acquiring and distributing goods were devised, and a new economic culture was established.
In dealing with the society which he regards as pagan, but from which he never succeeds in separating himself completely, the radical Christian has also always been required to take re course to principles he could not derive directly from his con viction of Christ’s Lordship. His problem here has been that of living in an interim. Whether exclusive Christians are escha tologists or spiritualists, in ei�her case they must take account
of the “meanwhile,” the interval between the dawning of the
new of life and its victory, the period in which the tem poral and material has not yet been transformed into the spiri tual. They cannot separate themselves completely, therefore, from the world of culture around them, nor from those needs in themselves which make this culture necessary. Though the whole world lies in darkness, yet distinctions must be made be tween relative rights and wrongs in that world, and in Christian relations to it. So, Tertullian writing to his wife advises her to remain a widow if he should die first. He disclaims any motive of jealousy or possessiveness, for such carnal motives will be eliminated in the resurrection, and ” there will at that day be no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us.” She is to re-

74 CHRIST AND CULTURE
main a widow because Christian law permits only one marriage and because virginity is better than marriage. Marriage is not really good but only not evil; indeed, when Jesus says ” ‘They were marrying and buying’ He sets a brand on the very leading vices of the flesh and the world, which call men off the most from divine disciplines.” Hence Tertullian counsels his wife to accept his death as God’s call to the great good of a life of continence. But thereafter he wrote a second letter in which he gave the “next best advice,” to the effect that if she needed to remarry she should at least “marry in the Lord,” that is, marry a Chris tian and not an unbeliever.56 In the end one can find in Tertul lian a whole scale of relative goods and evils in his estimation of s in man’s sex-life in the interval before the resurrection. Compared with virginity, marriage is relatively evil; a single marriage in a lifetime, however, is relatively good as compared with second marriage; yet if the evil of second marriage does take place, marriage with a believer is relatively good. If Ter tullian were pressed he might concede that if there were to be marriage with an unbeliever, a monogamous marriage would still be a better wickedness than polygamy; and even that in a dis ed world polygamy might be relatively good compared to wholly irresponsible sex relations.
Other illustrations of the necessity for recognizing laws rela tive to the time of the interim and to the existence of a pagan
:mciety can be found in the history of Friends who are con cerned that since there is a vicious institution of slavery slaves should be treated “justly”; and since there is buying and selling a fixed-price policy should prevail. One thinks, too, of Christian pacifists, who, having rejected the institutions and practices of warfare as wholly evil, yet seek to have armaments limited and
56 “To His Wife,” (Ante-Nicere Fathers, Vol. IV); cf. also “On Monogamy”; “‘Or! Exhortation to Chastity.”

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE
certain weapons banned. Count Tolstoy’s daughter has told the story of her father’s tragedy, which was at least in part the trag edy of an exclusive Christian whose responsibilities did not allow him to escape the problems of the “meanwhile.” For him

�elf he could choose the life of poverty, but not for wife and children, who did not share his convictions; he did not want the protection of police, and did not need it; but he was a member of a family that required the guardianship of force. So the poor man lived on his own rich estate, unwillingly and with ambigu ous responsibility; the nonresister was protected against mobs even at his death. Countess Alexandra relates a story that pre sents the problem dramatically, and indicates how even Tolstoy needed to recognize that conscience and the rule of right lay their claims on man in the midst of bad institutions. Since he had renounced property but remained bound to his /family, re� sponsibility for the management of the estate fell on his wife, who was poorly equipped for the task. Under her inadequate supervision, incompetent or ” dishonest stewards allowed the property to fall into general dis . A horrible accident oc curred as a result of maladministration-a peasant was buried alive in a neglected sandpit. “I seldom saw father so upset,” writes his daughter. ” ‘Such things can’t happen, they can’t happen,’ he was telling mother. ‘If you want an estate you must manage it well, or else give it up altogether.’ “-07

Stories of this sort, which illustrate the adjustments of radical Christians to a rejected and evil but inescapable culture, can be multiplied; and they delight their critics. But surely the de light is premature and unfounded, for such stories only under score the common Christian dilemma. The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the
57 Tolstoy, Countess Alexandra, The Tragedy of Count Tolstoy, 1933, p. 65·

tf. pp. 161 – 165, and Simmons, op. cit., 631 ff., 682 f. et passim.

CHRIST AND CULTURE
radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world. Sometimes the contradictions are quite explicit in their writings; as in the case of Tertullian, who seems to argue agftinst himself on such subjects as the value of philosophy and government. Often they are implicit, and come to expression only in contradictory con duct. In either case the radical Christian confesses that he has not solved the problem of Christ and culture, but is only seek ing a solution along a certain line.
1. THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

There are indications in the Christ-against-culture movement that the difficulties the Christian faces as he deals with his di lemma are not only ethical but theological; and that ethical solutions depend quite as much on theological understanding as vice versa. Questions about divine and human nature, about God’s action and pian’s, arise at every point, as the radical Chris tian undertakes to separate himself from the cultural society, and as he engages in debate with members of other Christian groups. Four of these questions with their radical answers may be briefly sketched here.
The first of these is the problem of reason and revelation. There is a tendency in the radical movement to use the word “reason” to designate the methods and the content of knowl edge to be found in cultural society; “revelation” to indicate that Christian knowledge of God and duty that is derived from Jesus Christ and resident in the Christian society. These defini tions, then, are connected with the denigration of reason and the exaltation of revelation:58 Even in I John, the least extreme
58 The opposition of reason and revelation to each other in this manner is of course not confined to members of the Christ-against-culture movement. Chris tians who take other positions than the radical one in political or economic matters may adopt the exclusive attitude in dealing with the problem of knowledge.

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE 77

of our examples, something of this contrast appears, in the op� position of the world of darkness to the realm of light in which Christians walk; and Christians are said to know all things be cause they have been anointed by the Holy One. Tertullian, of course, is the stock example in history of the position that sub stitutes revelation for reason. Though he did not say, “I believe because it is absurd,” in the sense in which that statement is usually ascribed to him, he did write, “You will not be ‘wise’ unless you become a ‘fool’ to the world, by believing ‘the fool ish things of God.’ . . . The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is

absurd [prorSU:S credibile est) quia ineptum es] . And He was

buried and ro�e again; the fact is certain, because it is impossi ble.”59 But it is not so much the vigor of this confessJon of belief in the common Christian doctrine that makes him the great exponent of the antirational defense of revelation, as those at tacks on philosophy and cultural wisdom to which we have previously referred. A similar attitude toward cultural reason is to be found in many monastics, in the early Quakers arid other Protestant sectarians; it is characteristic of Tolstoy. Human reason as it flourishes in culture is for these men not only inadequate because it does not lead to knowledge of God and the truth necessary to salvation; but it is also erroneous and deceptive. Yet it is true that few of them find the rejection of reason and the acceptance of revelation in its stead sufficient. With Tertullian and Tolstoy, they distinguish between the simple, “natural” knowledge that the uncorrupted human soul possesses, and the vitiated understanding that is to be found in culture; furthermore, they tend to make a distinction between the revelation given by the spirit or the inner light, and that
59 On the Flesh of Christ. ch. v.

CHRIST AND CULTURE

which is historically given and transmitted through the Scrip tures. They cannot solve their problem of Christ and culture without recognizing that distinctions must be made both with respect to the reasoning that goes on outside the Christian sphere and to the knowledge that is present in it.

Secondly, the question about the nature and prevalence of sin is involved in the answer to the Christ-and-culture question. The logical answer of the radical seems to be that sin abounds in culture, but that Christians have passed out of darkness into the light, and that a fundamental reason for separation from the world is the preservation of the holy community from cor ruption. Some of them, for instance certain Friends and Tol stoy, regard the doctrine of original sin itself as a measure by means of which a compromising Christianity justifies itself. The tendency is-and here these men make an important contribu tion to theology-to explain in social terms the inherit�nce of sin among men. The corruption of the culture in which a child is reared, not the corruption of its uncultivated nature, is re sponsible for the long history of sin. Yet this solution of the problem of sin and holiness is found, by the exclusive Christians themselves, to be inadequate. For one thing, the demands of Christ for holiness of life meet resistance in the Christian him self; not apparently because he has inherited culture, but be cause he has been given a certain nature. The ascetic practices of the radicals, from Tertullian to Tolstoy, in dealing with sex, eating and fasting, anger, and even sleep, indicate how great their awareness is that temptation to sin arises out of nature as well as culture. More significant is their understanding that one of the distinctions between Christianity and secularism is just this, that the Christian faces up to the fact of his sinfulness. “If we say we have no sin/’ writes John, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Tolstoy comes clo.;e to the same funda-

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE 79
mental idea when he addresses himself to landowners, judges, priests, and soldiers, asking them to do one thing above all, to refuse to recognize the lawfulness of their crimes. To give up the land and to abdicate all advantages is a heroic act; “but it may be,. as is most likely, that you have not the strength. . . .

But to recognize the truth as a truth and avoid lying about it is a thing you can always do.” The truth they must confess is that they are not serving the common good.60 If the greatest sin is the refusal to acknowledge one’s sinfulness, then it becomes impossible to make the line between Christ’s holiness and man’s sinfulness coincide with the line drawn between the Christian and the world. Sin is in him, not outside his soul and body. If sin is more deeply rooted and more extensive than the first answer of radical Christianity indicates, then the strategy of Christian faith in gaining victory over the world needs to in clude other tactics than those of withdrawal from culture and defense of new-won holiness.

Closely connected with these problems is the question· about the relations of law and grace. Opponents of the exclusive type frequently accuse its representatives of legalism, and of neglect ing the significance of grace in Christian life and thought; or of so emphasizing the character of Christianity as a new law for a select community that they forget its gospel to all men. This much is true, that they all insist on the exhibition of Christian faith in daily conduct. How can a follower of Jesus Christ know that he is a disciple if his conduct in love of the brothers, in self-denial, in modesty, in nonresistance, and in voluntary pov· erty does not distinguish him from other men? The emphasis on conduct may lead to the definition of precise rules, concern
i:or one’s conformity to such rules, and concentration on one’s own will rather than on the gracious work of God. As we have
60 “The Kingdom of God Is Within You,” Works, Vol. XX, p. 442.

So CHRIST AND CULTURE
noted, I John combines grace and law, and emphasizes the primacy of that divine love that alone enables men, in response. to its great attraction, to love both God and neighbor. Tertul lian, however, is in all respects, more legally minded, and so are many of the monastics, against whose “works-righteousness” Protestantism then objects. Tolstoy represents the extreme, since for him Jesus Christ is really only the teacher of the new law, since this law is statable in precise commandments, and since the problem of obedience may be solved by summoning up within oneself the resident power of one’s good will. Mated with such leanings toward legalism, however, one finds in Ter tullian, monastics, sectarians and even Tolstoy reflections that Christians are just like other men, needing to rely wholly on the gracious forgiveness of their sins by God-in-Christ, that Christ is by no means the founder of a new closed society with a new law but the expiator of the sins of the whole world, that the only difference between Christians and non-Christians lies in the spirit with which Christians do the same things as non. Christians. “Eating the same food, wearing the same attire, hav� ing the same habits, under the same necessities of existence,” sailing together, ploughing together, even holding property together and fighting together, the Christian does everything with a difference; not because he has a different law, but be. cause he knows grace and hence reflects grace; not because he must distinguish himself, but because he does not need to dis tinguish himself.61
The knottiest theological problem raised by the Christ against-culture movement is the problem of the relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Chris-
61 Tertullian, Apology, xlii; cf. Tolstoy; “Kingdom of God,” Works, Vol XX,
PP· 452 ff.

CHRIST AGAINST CULTURE

dan community. Some exponents of radical Christianity, such lS certain sectarians and Tolstoy, regard the doctrine of the Trinity as having no ethical meaning, and as the corrupt in. wention of a corrupt church. But they cannot escape the prob lem with which it deals and they try to solve it in their own way. Others, such as the author of I John and Tertullian, belong among the founders of the orthodox doctrine. The positive and negative interest of these strongly ethical and practical Chris tians in the problem and its solution indicates that Trinitarian ism is by no means as speculative a position and as unimportant for conduct as is often maintained. Practically the problem arises for radical Christians when, in their concentration on the Lordship of Christ, they seek to defend his authority, to define the content of his commandment, and to relate his law or reign to that power which governs nature and presides ov�r the des tinies of men in their secular societies. The extreme temptation the radicals meet when they deal with these questiom is that of converting their ethical dualism into an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is easily combined with a suspicion of nature and nature’s God; their reliance on Christ is often converted into a reliance on the Spirit immanent in him and the believer; ultimately they are tempted to divide the world into the material realm governed by a principle opposed to Christ and a spiritual realm guided :Jy the spiritual God. Such tendencies are evident in Tertullian’s Montanism, in Spiritual Franciscanism, in the inner light doctrine of the Quak ers, and in Tolstoy’s spiritualism. At the edges of the radical movement the Manichean heresy is always developing. If on the one hand this tendency leads exclusive Christianity to obscure the relation of Jesus Christ to nature and to . the Author of na ture, it leads on the other to loss �f rnntact with the historical Jesus Christ of history, for whom a spiritual principle is substi·

CHRIST AND CULTURE
tnted. Hence George Fox’s radical reform of a Christianity that had compromised, as he thought, with the world, was connected with an emphasis on the spirit that led in some parts of his movement to the virtual abandonment of the Scriptures and the Scriptural Jesus Christ, and the enthronement, as man’s supreme
authority, of private conscience. Tolstoy substitutes for the Jesus Christ of history the spirit immanent in Buddha, in Jesus, in Confucius, and in himself. Why radical Christians s]lould be so subject to the temptation of a spiritualism that leads them away from the principle with which they begin, namely Christ’s authority, is difficult to fathom. Perhaps it is indicated that Christ cannot be followed alone, as he cannot be worshipped alone; and that radical Christianity, important as one move ment in the church, cannot itself exist without the counter weight of other types of Christianity.

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

2

?

Christ

A

g

ainst

Culture

I.

THE

NEW

PEOPLE

AND

“THE

WORLD”

The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall

consider

is

the

one

that

uncompromisingly

affirms

the

sole

authority

of

Christ

over

the

Christian

and

resolutely

rejects

culture’s claims to loyalty.

It seems to be both logically and

chronologically entitled

to the first position: logically, because

it

appears to follow directly from the common Christian prin

ciple

of the Lordship of Jesus Christ; ch

ronologically, because

it is

widely held to be the typical attitude of the first Christians.

Both

claims are subject to question, yet it must be conceded that

the

answer was given at a very early time in the history of the

church,

and that on the surfac

e it seems to be logically more

consistent

than

the

other

positions.

While various New Testament writings evince something

of

this attitude,

none presents

it without qualification.

The first

gospel

contrasts

the

new

law

with

the

old,

yet

contains very

explicit

statements

about

the

Christians’

obligations to be obe

dient not only

to

the code

of Moses but also to the requirements

of

the

leaders

of

Jewish

society.1

The

book of Revelation is

radical

in

its rejection

of “the world,”

but here

the problem

is

complicated

by

the

persecution

situation

in

which

Christiam

4

5

C H A P T E R 2
?
Christ A
g
ainst Culture

I. THE NEW PEOPLE AND “THE WORLD”
The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall
consider is the one that uncompromisingly affirms the sole
authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects
culture’s claims to loyalty. It seems to be both logically and
chronologically entitled to the first position: logically, because it
appears to follow directly from the common Christian prin ciple
of the Lordship of Jesus Christ; chronologically, because it is
widely held to be the typical attitude of the first Christians. Both
claims are subject to question, yet it must be conceded that the
answer was given at a very early time in the history of the church,
and that on the surface it seems to be logically more consistent
than the other positions.
While various New Testament writings evince something of
this attitude, none presents it without qualification. The first gospel
contrasts the new law with the old, yet contains very explicit
statements about the Christians’ obligations to be obe dient not only
to the code of Moses but also to the requirements of the leaders of
Jewish society.1 The book of Revelation is radical in its rejection
of “the world,” but here the problem is complicated by the
persecution situation in which Christiam

4
5