Lux Lucet

In his landmark 2006 essay “The Religious Wars of the 21^st Century,” John Robbins noted that “The West has been in collapse for more than a century.”  This may surprise some people, as it is popularly supposed that the collapse really didn’t begin until the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960’s, but Robbins places the beginning of the collapse back into the 19^th century.  Why is Western civilization collapsing?  The answer, as Robbins tells us in his Forward to Gordon Clark’s book A Christian View of Men and Things, is, “the West is disappearing because Christianity, on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared in the West” (11). 

Adds Robbins, “the collapse of the West can be viewed as the collapse of the attempted Thomistic synthesis of human philosophy and Christ, and the West’s fatal choosing of non-Christian philosophy, not Christ. What happened first in the academy happened later in the legislatures and on the battlefields of the world” (12).

Practice always follows theory.  But most practical Americans are opposed to studying theory, supposing that theory is dry stuff suitable only for ivory tower geeks.  But as Robbins noted elsewhere, the ivory tower is civilization’s control tower.  Our actions are always based on some prior intellectual idea.  If we see the world through the lens of truth, that is, if we apply a Christian view of men and things to our circumstances, our actions will be very different from those who view the world through the lens on non-Christian philosophy.  Christians vote.  Non-Christians riot and burn down cities to get their way.   

If Christians are to have any chance of preserving something of Western Civilization, they must first understand what it is and where it comes from.  One would not expect the secular educational establishment to tell their students that their civilization began with the 16^th century Protestant Reformation.  Such a thing cannot be admitted by our schools, for then it would require teachers, professors and administrators to stop suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, confess their sins and turn to Christ.  Apart from an act of God, this they cannot do.  Indeed, it seems as if teachers and professors in the 21^st century have been given over by God to a debased mind, “to do those things which are not fitting.” 

What one would expect is the Christian churches would teach believers the Christian origin of Western Civilization.  But this they largely fail to do as well.  Perhaps this is in part because most Christian teachers today were trained in secular educational institutions and have absorbed, perhaps unwittingly, the anti-Christian assumptions of those schools.  This author has much sympathy for such persons, has he himself has had to unlearn many false ideas he picked up during his time in public schools and universities. 

But with that said, it is imperative that churches and Christian educational institutions teach their members and students that the civilization they inhabit, Western Civilization, is not the product of pagan Greece and Rome, but of the Protestant Reformation. 

Christ and Civilization

Where does one go to study the connection between the Protestant Reformation and Western Civilization? One could hardly find a better place to start than John Robbins’ compact and highly readable booklet Christ and Civilization.  The actual text is only forty-four pages, so it can be read in a single sitting.  But it is a profound book.  In it, one can see that when Jesus said, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” he had in mind not only spiritual freedom from sin and death, but political and economic freedom as well.

The Reformation began, as Robbins tells us, by Martin Luther’s rejection of the contradictory statements of the church fathers and church councils.  For Luther, the 66 books of the Bible were the sole standard of truth.  According to Luther, “nothing except the divine words are to be the first principles of Christians; all human words are conclusions drawn from them and must be brought back to them and approved by them.”

Robbins tells us, “By recognizing that a text – the 66 books of the Bible breathed out by God, as 2 Timothy 3:16 said – is the Christian axiom, Luther’s insight resulted in revolutionary changes in all of society” (40).  These changes began first in the churches.  “Reformed churches came under the rule of law, rather than the rule of men.  That law – the written Word of God in its entirety [n. b. Luther and the other reformers were not a fundamentalists, they believed and taught the whole counsel of God] – was public, permanent, unchanging, self-interpreting, and intended to be understood and believed by all Christians” (40).

But the Reformation did not just change the churches.  Writes Robbins, “The revolution first accomplished in the churches could not be confined to them, but quickly spread to civil governments.  Not only was there a reduction in the power of churches in Protestant societies, but a reduction in the size and scope of civil government as well.  For example, Steven Ozment reports that ‘when the Reformation was consolidated in Rostock in 1534, it brought not only an end to the privileges of the clergy but also government agreement to reduce its own numbers by about one-third’ and to submit to a detailed annual accounting” (41).  Robbins also quotes Karl Holl, a German professor of Church History at the University of Berlin.  Holl wrote, “it was the Reformation that first set a rigid limit to the absolute power of the state” (41).

Christianity limits the authority of civil government to its Biblical role of punishing those who practice evil and praising the good.  Beyond these two things, civil government has not legitimate authority.

Another important Christian political idea to come out of the Reformation was the separation of church and state.  Writes Robbins,

The Reformation recognized Christ’s distinction between God and Caesar (a distinction that has been denied or blurred in ancient, medieval, and modern societies, both East and West), and separated the institutions of church and state.  The state does not receive its authority from or through the church – in Romans 13, Paul taught that civil governors received their authority directly from God, not from the pope – and the church does not receive its authority from or through the state (43).

Recognizing the limits placed by God on civil government is the solid ground on which Christians in the West can push back on the seemingly endless intrusions by civil government into their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens. 

Just as the Reformation revolutionized the church and civil government, so too did it lead to radical changes in the economy.  Writes Robbins,

It was the nations most affected by the Reformation that ended slavery and serfdom first, not merely because they recognized the freedom of the Christian man and the priesthood of all believers, but also because they realized that all men, Christian and non-Christian, are created in the image of God, and that no man is naturally the inferior or superior of another.  The Reformation caused a revolution in thought about the dignity of work, and work became a calling; good works became those tasks done in pursuit of one’s vocation – not counting beads, lighting candles, or buying indulgences.  The result was a spurt of economic activity that transformed Protestant countries, making them the most prosperous, inventive, and powerful nations on Earth (43).

Robbins goes on to note that it was common knowledge that the economic differences between Protestant and Catholic nations was due to their different religions.  Capitalism – the economic system of the Bible in which individuals and groups are permitted to own property of all sorts and dispose of it as they see fit – is the economic system of the Bible.  But Roman Catholic economics is a system of government interference – interference is the word used by Roman Catholic economic writers themselves – in the free market.  Put another way, Roman Catholic economics is fascist.    

Closing Thoughts    

This coming Saturday, October 31, Christians will celebrate the 503rd anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.  For on that day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, kicking off the Reformation.

Winston Churchill once said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”  It has been this author’s hope that this brief look back at the Reformation and how it gave rise to Western Civilization will spur Protestants to see more clearly how much even Bible believing Protestants have forgotten, or perhaps never learned, about the intimate connection between spiritual freedom in Christ and political and economic freedom, the serious danger we are in at the present, and the path we must take if there is any hope of repairing the wreckage we have made of our heritage.    

If there is to be any hope at all for restoring Western Civilization in the United States and other nations of the West, that hope is going to come from the nations’ pulpits, not politicians, for ours is a spiritual problem, not a political one. 

We desperately need a new Reformation in the West.  That Reformation must begin, as did the original one, with the recognition that the Bible Alone is the Word of God and the preaching of the Gospel of justification by belief (faith) alone.  Christians must once again learn the lesson that the Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth, and that all truth, not some truth, is a gift of God.  Christians must learn that political and economic freedom are not the product of non-Christian philosophy but are part of the whole counsel of God found in the 66 books of the Bible alone.

Those who learn these lessons will be, as John Robbins noted, “the bearers of civilization in the twenty-first century and the heirs of eternal life in the age to come.”  

Pages: 1 2