Category: Worldview (Page 4 of 5)

The Godless French?

September 8, 2015 / Trent / 2 Comments

skeeze / Pixabay

I recently heard a pastor refer to France as a spiritual wasteland, and this wasn’t the first time I had heard this.

Twenty-one of our students went to France this past spring break and I asked them if they found this to be true. They agreed that French culture is very secular. Very few people in France go to church, and they don’t really talk, or even think, about God. They have beautiful churches, but the students observed large gift shops in two of the most beautiful churches they visited, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur.

But, they also saw evidence that perhaps the French aren’t as spiritually dry as we might think, and that they are, in some ways, expressing some aspects of honouring the Creator better than we do.

French Food: Celebration of God’s Good Gifts

The most obvious example for the students was the French approach to food. The French value food, so when they eat, they take their time. A meal is not a mere biological necessity between work and an evening Bible study. The meal is one of the most important events of the day. The students said, “Even their fast food is slow.”

And meals aren’t just about the food. They are very much about the conversation that takes place over the meal. The French enjoy nothing more than great food with good friends. Here, restaurants try to maximize the number of seatings in an evening by carefully moving diners from the appetizer to the bill as quickly as possible without them feeling rushed. In France, you and your friends are expected to enjoy each other’s company for hours. If you want a bill, you have to ask for it. If you have a table, you have it for the night.

Rather than serving groceries in the same store that also sells underwear and motor oil, the French have rows of small, independently owned specialty stores. Each only sells one thing–cheese, meat, pastry, bread, fish, vegetables. The idea is that if you specialize, you can better ensure the quality of your wares, and the resultant meals will be a lot more enjoyable.

The French don’t believe in God, hence the appellation “godless,” but they treat many of his gifts with the utmost respect. They take the good gifts of God and treat them as the treasures they are.

Our culture conceived of Kraft Dinner which sells for $1.27 a box and takes less than 10 minutes to make and even less to consume even if we include the time it takes to offer a prayer acknowledging God’s gustatory providence.

I will not choose which approach is better, to love the gift but ignore the giver, or to love the giver, but disparage the gift. It seems to me that loving both would be the ideal.

This post was previously published at http://insideout.abbotsfordchristian.com/

The Elimination of Sins Arising from Hatred

April 6, 2014 / Trent / 0 Comments

pixel2013 / Pixabay

Hatred, a disease?

We haven’t been able to eliminate the scourge of hatred, so perhaps we’ve been looking at it all wrong.

In “Finding A Cure for Hate” Jennifer Yang reports on a University of Toronto initiative that looks at understanding and preventing hatred by “treating it as a public health issue.”

Experts from a variety of fields discussed the problem of hate, “touching on everything from Hitler to 9/11 to the Rwandan genocide.”

The meeting was initiated by U of T associate professor Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, who “likes to think of hatred as a disease or mental disorder.” His idea is that people “are not born with hatred, [rather] they acquire it from the environment, just as people are exposed to bacteria or second-hand smoke.”

Hatred, biological?

Not everyone is on board. Although not at the conference, had he attended, British neuroscientist Semir Zeki, a professor at University College London would have disagreed with Abuelaish. He believes hatred is a part of our biology–put there by evolution: “We would not have had this capacity to hate to the degree that we have — and all humans have it — if it had been a negative evolutionary force. It would have petered out.”

No Human Responsibility

I find it interesting that both of these approaches to hatred completely remove the responsibility for hatred from humanity.

If it’s a product of Nature, then we can blame it on evolution. If it is a result of Nurture, then we can blame it on the environment.

The scariest part of all this is the next bit–where the logical solution to hate is the controlling of the environment; my question is, “Who will have the control?”

Both these perspectives take the responsibility for hate away from the one who hates.

William Blake does not:

A Poison Tree.

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears

Night and morning with my tears,

And I sunned it with smiles

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright,

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine –

And into my garden stole

When the night had veiled the pole;

In the morning, glad, I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

I’m sure folks over at the U of T have honorable intentions, but by removing responsibility for hating from the human agent, I fear that they will do a lot more harm than good.

Is Atheism a Religion?

December 14, 2013 / Trent / 0 Comments

Bill Maher sure doesn’t like it when religious people say that atheism is a religion.

In one sense, Maher is right; atheism is not a religion. Atheism doesn’t have any explicit rituals or holy texts, nor does it believe in a deity. When Maher restricts his definition of religion to “this looney stuff” he can safely declare that “atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sex position.”

Atheism is a Religion

But if we were to broaden the definition of religion to something like–people who have faith in something that can’t be proven rationally. Well, then it would be a little more legitimate to declare Maher a religious person because atheism is based on a belief that cannot be proven. It requires a leap of faith to accept the claim that the whole of reality is strictly material.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”There is no belief that does not begin with a claim that cannot be proven rationally–even the belief that matter is all their is. #atheism #AtheismisaReligion” quote=”There is no belief that does not begin with a claim that cannot be proven rationally–even the belief that matter is all their is.”]

Maher claims it is only “idiots” who stand in the “grand intellectual tradition of ‘I know you are but what am I?'”–those who assert that atheism and theism are “two sides of the same coin.” But this isn’t exactly true. Fredrich Nietzsche, who on the continuum between idiocy and genius makes geniuses look like idiots, said exactly this.

If you watch Maher, you know that his ideal is an aggregate of equality, freedom of speech, science, democracy, etc.

Nietzsche would lump Maher and the Christians who drive him crazy into the same category. He said that, just like religion, the rationalism and scientific optimism celebrated by Maher, is another attempt to set up an ideal to which we might aspire.

There is nothing wrong with belief in meaning. Nietzsche said that human beings have a hard time flourishing without something to believe in. So it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

There are some pretty distinct lines between his “evidence-based belief” and my “faith-based malarkey” but it is not helpful to draw lines that don’t really exist.

Progressive Liberal Optimism

December 8, 2013 / Trent / 1 Comment

Eddie Izzard’s show is hysterical and historical. “Force Majeure,” gets a lot of laughs at the expense of the Religious and the Nazis.

When it comes to religion, Eddie Izzard is not as bad as many in the popular media. He’s not nearly as bitter so there’s more comedy than mockery. He also distinguishes between different types of religious people: the ones that do charity and the ones that are ignorant bigots.

Izzard’s understanding of history is quite clear: in spite of some setbacks here and there, we are moving upward and that is the important thing. One of the major setbacks was the Nazis, but they were merely an interruption in the upward trend.

In the Q&A after the show, a fan asked Eddie if he’d be changing any of his Nazi material when he toured Germany in the coming year. He said that this wouldn’t be necessary. He believes that the German people are like us and that Hitler kidnapped Germany for 12 years. Once the Nazis were removed the German people could get back onto that upward trajectory.

The Modern View of History

This interpretation of history is very popular–it is the modern story. Mankind is basically good and freedom is the goal of history. Over the last 500 years we have been gaining freedom–first from the Church, then from the monarch, then slavery, then God. In the 20th century, freedom spread through the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and it continues through all sorts of sexual freedoms.

For many, this optimistic view of history has filled the gap created by the loss of religion. There is an almost supernatural faith in humanity to achieve its utopian ideals. Like all supernatural faiths, this one too offers a type of salvation.

One of the problems with Izzard’s view is that it divides people into them and us. The “them” is the religious bigots or the conservative. The “us” is progressive and open-minded. It is the latter group that is responsible for the upward trend in history, and the former group that is largely impeding our progress.

I don’t fault Eddie. We are all guilty of “them=bad/us=good” thinking now and again (all the time?).

But it is wrong.

The line that divides good and evil is not between people but within people.

There aren’t good religious people (Izzard’s charitable Christians) and bad religious people (opponents to freedoms sought by the LGTB)–they are all bad. Christians aren’t less evil than Muslims–news out of Central African Republic is evidence of this. Atheists have to accept Stalin and Hitler as theirs, and Christians have to accept the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades as things that Christians did.

Because the human soul is divided, human flourishing will not inevitably increase over time.

The 20th century alone provides ample evidence of exactly this–incredible medical and technological advances, on the one hand, two devastating world wars on the other. The United Nations was born and so was the Atomic Bomb. The Olympics and the Holocaust. Civil rights and Abortion. The music of the 60’s and the music of the ’80s.

Humans are capable of tremendous good, so we may again have another Mandela, but unless we recognize that the true impediment to human flourishing is the evil that lurks in every human soul, we will again face evils as great as any we’ve encountered in human history.

The solution to our plight is not for everyone to become a progressive liberal. It’s to deal with the evil that exists within all humanity.

Doing the Dishes and the Gnashing of Teeth

October 21, 2013 / Trent / 3 Comments

chefkeem / Pixabay

When my kids were younger they had chores—one of which was doing the dishes.

It should have been as simple as everyone taking a turn on a rotating basis, but was never that simple.

Lacrosse games or ballet practices meant that somebody would miss their turn. To ask another child to take care of it resulted in anguished lamentations. These were even louder if the prospective dishwasher could conjure up a scenario where this debt might not be repaid. Then there was the was wailing and gnashing of teeth over the unfairness of having to do dishes on a night when we had a roast, as opposed the other night when a sibling had only to contend with the remains of a meal of bread and soup. Sometimes I got so sick of it that I just did them myself.

Grudging Obedience

I wouldn’t have been any happier if I had their silent obedience either. It certainly would have been quieter, and possibly less frustrating, but it wouldn’t have lead to their happiness, and in my better moments what I wish most for my children is fulfillment regardless of the circumstances.

The problem in both of these responses, wailing lamentations or grudging obedience, is that doing the dishes is seen as a duty. The idea of duty or obligation or requirement is set in opposition to happiness and joy. For my young children, happiness and joy could only be achieved by doing what they wanted as opposed to what they had to do. My kids put freedom first.

All this was a long time ago. My children have all grown up. The great thing now is that when they come over for a meal, they joyfully do the dishes. It’s the same activity, but their attitude is completely different.

What accounts for this difference? Surely, it’s maturity. They’ve lived away from home and know how much money and work it takes to put a delicious meal onto the table.

But it’s more than maturity; the most important thing for them is no longer freedom from duties and obligations, but a relationship with me, their parent. I cook for them a delicious meal because I love them and they wash the dishes because they love me.

If we think that Freedom is more important than anything else in order to live the good life (read more here), our focus will usually be hostilely directed toward those things which limit one’s freedom, and those who seemingly impose duties, obligations, responsibilities.

This creates resentful people.

If relationship is more important than freedom, our focus will be lovingly directed toward other persons who we love.

It’s obvious which leads to greater joy and happiness–fulfillment.

Biblical Basis of Fulfillment

It’s all there in Deteronomy 10. The writer implores God’s people to

¹² . . .walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, ¹³and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good.

Obedience certainly restricts our freedom, but washing the dishes after a good meal is a loving and joyful response to a great meal prepared for you in joy and love, and it’s all for our own good anyway.

My kids were miserable when they were focused on the duty and they are happy now that they are focused on the relationship. God wants what’s best for his people, and it turns out that is obedience.

Not Simply Obedience

But it’s not simply obedience.

Simple obedience is for the simply religious, and they are miserable. It’s joyful obedience that God is after and that will be a blessing to us. In verse 16 of the Deuteronomy 10, it says

Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.

Circumcision was a duty for the people of God and if they understood it only as an obligation, they’d be stiff-necked. God certainly didn’t want disobedience, but silent and grudging obedience wasn’t any better; he wanted their hearts so that we can flourish.

Human flourishing is not about freedom, nor is it about fulfilling religious obligations, it’s about relationship.

Made for Freedom?

October 12, 2013 / Trent / 2 Comments

Free-Photos / Pixabay

When I got married, I was no longer free. I couldn’t play League of Legends whenever I wanted. I couldn’t eat chicken wings in bed. I had to tell my wife that I was going down to the store to get a jug of milk.

But I don’t mind. Not at all.

I’m not sure why exactly. It’s not because I’ve somehow gained more than I’ve lost–it’s more like I’ve gained what I lost as well as gained what I’ve gained. It doesn’t really make sense but that’s the way it is.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think that this sort of counterintuitive accounting occurs when anyone is in a good relationship.

A. C. Grayling recently presented the first of eight “Fragile Freedoms” lectures on CBC’s Ideas. In it he said that there is no possibility of “living the good life” if one is not free.

Grayling, along with most other modernists, would be right if human beings were made for autonomy. But what if we weren’t primarily made to be free? What if we were made first for something else?

Made for Relationship?

What if we were made for relationship? Not just in marriage, but in friendship and family, and not just with people but with animals and even the physical world.

The Biblical story suggests human beings are made to be in relationship, first with their Creator and, after, with everything else. We were made to be the objects of God’s love. He says through Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (31:3). Suppose we were made to receive and the to return his love and to spread it out to the rest of the creation?

If this is the purpose for which we were made, freedom is still a very important part of who we are. Love is impossible without freedom. There is no possibility to love someone if there is no freedom to reject their love. It’s all there in Genesis 1-3. Humanity was created for relationship with God (and with each other and with the world). We had a choice and chose to reject God’s love. This didn’t change our purpose, just our ability to fulfill it.

So who is right about human nature? The modernists like Grayling or those who adhere to the Biblical view of man?

There is a simple test: Who experiences more fulfillment in life? The person whose freedom is expressed through relationships or the one whose relationship is subordinate to his freedom.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Who is more fulfilled? The person whose freedom is expressed through relationships or the one whose relationship is subordinate to his freedom.” quote=”Who is more fulfilled? The person whose freedom is expressed through relationships or the one whose relationship is subordinate to his freedom.”]

In my experience, freedom is best enjoyed in the context of relationships, even though you surrender it most of the time. I think this is a universal experience when we are talking about “good” relationships. Those who insist on freedom first will be able to eat chicken wings in bed, but they won’t have anyone who cares that they stepped out for a jug of milk.

The Modern Worldview

September 21, 2013 / Trent / 0 Comments

Lesslie Newbigin’s book, Foolishness to the Greeks, changed my life. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics, but by reading this book I came to realize that I was looking at the world through some very thick and tinted lenses. Everyone looks at the world through the metaphorical spectacles of a worldview.

Competing Worldviews

There are competing worldviews in the West, by which I mean Europe and North America. One of the dominant ones has been around for a while–the Modern story. This may be in the process of being replaced by the newer “Post-Modern” story. Another worldview that has been around much longer is derived from the Bible. Although very different, we in the West look at the world through a weird blend of all three.

If you are going to understand the glasses through which you are view yourself and the world, you need to begin by understanding the basic characteristics of each worldview which is tinting the lenses by which you look at everything.

In our culture, all our glasses are being strongly tinted by modernism. The roots of the Modern worldview are in the 18th century, the Enlightenment. While it took some pretty big hits in the 20th century, many of the ideas which characterize this perspective are with us today.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”To understand the glasses through which you are view yourself and the world, you need to begin by understanding the basic characteristics of each worldview which is tinting the lenses by which you look at everything. #worldview ModernWorldview” quote=”To understand the glasses through which you are view yourself and the world, you need to begin by understanding the basic characteristics of each worldview which is tinting the lenses by which you look at everything.”]

The Main Ideas in the Modern Worldview:

1. Human reason is the source of truth; the light, in Enlightenment, is Reason. Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes really got this idea going and it has stuck with us. They trusted in reason to be the arbiter of truth (Read “Fact versus Truth“) albeit from different starting points. Bacon used reason to take him from observation of particular phenomenon to universal principles, and Descartes saw the human mind as the final authority in understanding reality. Although they approached it from different angles, both trusted reason to lead to the truth.
2. Reality is material. There is nothing that transcends the material world, or, if there is, it has no relevance to one’s life. In other words, there is no such thing as the supernatural, only the natural. This idea is called materialism or naturalism. If human reason is the source of truth, then Bacon’s approach, called empiricism, will help us to discover the truth. This only works in the natural world, but since nothing else is real, there is no problem.
3. The individual is of primary importance. In the modern worldview, human reason is autonomous. So also is the individual whose motto has become, “You’re not the boss of me!” Our history is one of emancipation from those who would curb our independence: kings and queens, God and the church, communism and socialism, and tradition and social conventions. Our free economies and liberal democracies are testaments to our individual autonomy. One source of this idea is Rene Descartes whose “I think therefore I am” not only grounded truth in the reason but in the reason of the individual.
4. Faith in Progress. Humanity is on an upward trajectory. Because of human reason and its offspring, science and technology, Modernity places a lot of faith in progress. It has long believed that we need to get rid of silly superstitions and religious beliefs. Reason rather than religion will allow the human race to continue up the road toward perfection and science and technology will solve the problems that we face.
5. Categories and more categories. Because human reason is only autonomous if the world is only material, the modern mind establishes and defends boundaries between categories. There are many. Here are a few: mind/body, natural/supernatural, material/spiritual, immanent/transcendent, public/private, rational/emotional, fact/value, reason/faith, knowledge/belief, sacred/secular and objective/subjective.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 ways in which the Christian Worldview is different than the Modern Worldview. #Worldview #ChristianWorldview #Modern Worldview” quote=”5 ways in which the Christian Worldview is different than the Modern Worldview.”]

Main Differences between the Modern and Christian Worldviews

The Biblical worldview differs significantly with the Modern worldview on each of these points.

Human reason is part of God’s good creation, but it has also been distorted by sin, so it cannot be completely trusted.
Obviously, the Biblical worldview is not materialist or naturalist because it proclaims a transcendent God who is the source of objective realities like The Good, The True and The Beautiful.
The communal nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit challenges the idea that those created in the image of the triune God ought to be understood first as an autonomous individual.
God’s Grace and not man’s ability will be the cause of any progress we experience in this world, and that’s only if we surrender to Christ because he’s the only one that can deal with our real problem–SIN.
Christ, who is wholly God, became wholly human and yet did not surrender any of his divinity; this alone presents a challenge to the clean categories so loved by the Modern mind. An honest reading of the Bible will blur many of the other boundaries between the other categories held so dear by modernism.

The problem is, the Biblical worldview and the modern worldview are not kept distinct. Our glasses are tinted by both of these (and other) contradictory worldviews.

A Christian Worldview?

September 14, 2013 / Trent / 0 Comments

msandersmusic / Pixabay

The term “Christian worldview” is often used, but not always understood.

Too often, people think that if you simply believe the Bible, oppose abortion and avoid R-rated movies you have a Christian worldview.

OK, this is a bit of a caricature, but my point is, Christians often have a far too superficial understanding of worldview.

Even Nancy Pearcy’s book Total Truth, which is a book about worldview, begins with the story of Sarah, a Christian woman who works as a counselor in a Planned Parenthood Clinic. Pearcy explains this incongruity:

Sarah’s story illustrates how even sincere believers may find themselves drawn into a secular worldview–while remaining orthodox in their theological beliefs (32).

Although Sarah’s story may illustrate what Pearcy says it does, it does not help readers to understand the depth at which we hold worldviews–Christian, Secular or whatever.

The Depth of Worldview

Here’s an illustration that I think better illustrates how deeply worldviews are held and the conflict between a Christian and a “Secular” worldview.

I’m teaching Grade 9 Humanities this year so I started reading the textbook. I think it’s a standard textbook for Social Studies across the province. I didn’t get beyond the first page and I knew that this year I would be teaching a lot of worldview in my class. Two sentences in the introduction to the first chapter entitled “The Early Modern Age” grabbed my attention.

They present a worldview that is completely contrary to a Biblical one.

Here’s the first sentence:

Sometime around the year 1500, Europe began to experience profound changes in its political, religious, social, economic and intellectual life. As a result of these changes, European history began to enter a new era–the Early Modern Age.

This is the second:

All civilizations experience a kind of evolutionary change in their histories.

The significant word here is “evolutionary.” The popular use of the term “evolutionary” connotes a positive change. The Free Online Dictionary captures the developmental aspect of the word when it defines evolutionary as “A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form.”

Together these sentences suggest that humanity is moving toward a better world and that the Early-Modern Age was a significant step in that direction. Many people in our culture accept this without batting an eye. This is their worldview. And it’s held far more deeply than the idea that reproductive freedom is good or bad or whatever.

It is true that there were a lot of changes going on in Europe around the year 1500. It is also true that some things have improved over the last 500 years–transportation, for example, is much faster than it used to be. But is it true to say that our civilization has improved just because some aspects of it has?

A survey of the last hundred years–with two World Wars, one Great Depression, the nuclear arms race, ecological disasters, new and deadly diseases–provides a lot of evidence to the contradict the idea that things are getting better.

So why does the textbook make this claim?

They make it because it is true within a certain story.

Grand Stories–Metanarratives

No claim (or “fact,” thing, event, person) means anything until we place it into a story. This is why human beings always tell stories — we are always seeking meaning.

All stories, whether myths or movies, share some common elements. They always have a protagonist, a person who strives for some goal. This quest drives the story toward a meaningful end. Stories also have conflict because there are always antagonists, that is, a person (or people or a force) that impedes the protagonist in the fulfillment of his or her purpose.

Two stories concern us here: the so-called “secular” story and the Christian story.

The Secular Story

In the secular story, the dominant myth in our culture, the protagonist, humanity, is on a long quest for autonomy (freedom from authority). The antagonists in the secular story oppose human freedom. These are monarchs, God and the church, communism, fascism, socialism, tradition and social conventions. Many of these villains and monsters have been vanquished and only a few remain.

Because my grade 9 Social Studies textbook has placed the events following 1500 into this Secular story, it can claim that we have experienced evolutionary change in our history.

This is the dominant story in our culture, but it isn’t the only one.

The Christian Story

The Christian story says that humanity will find fulfillment only in the presence of the loving God who made him. Sin and Satan, the antagonists, thwart humanity at every turn, but the hero of the story has come to find us and will bring us home (actually, bring home here). This is the meaningful end of the Christian story.

When you consider civilization from this story, change has not been evolutionary–civilization has not improved because we have come no closer to dealing with our basic problem. Freedom, according to this story, is a good thing, but Sin causes us to make GOOD things into ultimate things. This inversion is, in essence, to make Freedom, into a god, a false god, an idol. Freedom is a good thing, but it is not the ultimate thing.

Textbooks and Stories

The secular story, or worldview, is foundational to my entire grade 9 social studies textbook and most of the other textbooks used in schools all over North America.

And it’s not just textbooks; it’s the worldview upon which the whole curriculum is built. And it’s not just in schools, this story is reinforced by popular culture. We are inundated with this story, and it is a powerful story.

When we consider the people who have fallen away from the church, I don’t doubt that many they left to seek autonomy–they wanted to do what they wanted to do and not have anyone or anything restrict their freedom. This is not necessarily a choice freely made, but one that makes sense because of warming toward the secular story.

One’s position on abortion is not a worldview–worldview runs much deeper–but your position on the issue of abortion is dictated by your worldview. So will be your position on other issues that are, at their core, about human freedom.

I’m still using that textbook though, because discerning worldviews is one of the objectives of this and every other class taught at my school. I worry for the Christian kids who aren’t in a school that is deliberate about exposing the competing stories in our culture. And I also worry about the kids who are, because the secular story seems so true, because we are immersed in it.

I take more than a little comfort in the fact that none of the competing stories ring so true as the one where sin is the antagonist and the end is being reunited with the One who gave us every good thing–including Freedom.

Hierarchy and the Windows of Prague’s Cathedral

August 22, 2013 / Trent / 0 Comments

St. Vitus has a commanding view of the city of Prague. This Gothic structure is visible from all over the city since it stands within the castle complex situated on top of the highest point in the city.

Getting into the service was a little bit of a trick because church officials stood at the door so as to prevent tourists from entering the church before mass, while at the same time allowing worshipers to pass. We fell into both categories, I suppose, but we entered unimpeded because we approached the door with the confidence of a parishioner. Others more hesitant were refused and had to wait in the long line until noon when the last mass was over and the camera-toting tourists would be let in.

This was the oldest of the cathedrals in which we worshiped on this trip to Europe; parts of the structure date back to the 14th century. The age of the church facilitated a connection to the medieval worshipers who also looked up into these same ceiling vaults.

The whole service was, of course, in Czech, so I had no chance of getting anything out of the sermon. Instead, I studied the stained glass windows that rose far above the old priest who was delivering the homily.

The Windows of St. Vitas

The highest and most central figure was God the father embracing his crucified son. Beneath these figures were smaller haloed saints and kings. All these figures were attended to by angels which were arranged according to their heavenly status. Beneath these were even smaller images of priests and nobles. From my position in the pew, I looked up to them all. The windows reinforce the worshipers’ correct place in the hierarchy of the universe.

This idea–the idea that human beings have different value–is alien to us today. We’ve been taught that “all men [and women] are created equal” and wage war against any notion of the inherent superiority of one individual over another.

Not so in the medieval world. Mankind was seen as higher than the animals and the rest of the created order, and a lower being than the angels. God, as creator and savior, was sovereign above them all. No living human beings could be measured against the greatness of the saints who came before, and no ordinary human could be compared to the greatness of one’s king.

The people who lived in the medieval world, those who built this cathedral, accepted this hierarchical nature of reality. An appropriate response to those above oneself is awe and solemn respect, and this beautiful window would have evoked this response.

The Loss of Hierarchy

We are no longer as capable of experiencing the same sort of awe and solemn respect as our ancestors because there is no other self that is inherently superior to my self.

Living in a medieval society which reflected the hierarchical view of the universe was often a restriction of freedom. But at the same time as they restricted, these orders also gave meaning to life and the idea that some occasions warranted pomp and ceremony. This idea is natural to a people who understand that the universe is full of things greater than themselves.

Although it is hard for us to understand, those honoured through pomp and ceremony in medieval society did not think of themselves in a self-important sort of way; they were living in obedience to the structure which undergirds the universe.

We sometimes struggle to understand the occasions of pomp and ceremony.

The Silliness of Pomp and Ceremony

I recently heard a person who had only recently moved to Canada express incredulity over the reaction of many Canadians (and of course the English) to the recent birth of a son to William and Kate. He couldn’t understand what makes this birth any more special than any other? The same question would likely be asked of royal weddings and coronations.

The overwhelming expression of joy over a royal birth or other special events in the life of the English royalty is a vestigial response to a world that understood the relationship between hierarchy and awe, and the relationship between awe and ceremony. Perhaps, the more peculiar we find this behavior, the flatter our world is.

The Malaise of Modernity

In The Malaise of Modernity, philosopher Charles Taylor suggests there have been significant consequences to this shift from the medieval vertical to the modern horizontal understanding of humanity and society. He says we have lost “a heroic dimension to life. People no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for” (4). Another consequence is we have become more self-centred “which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society” (4).

We Christians have a problem in that we tacitly embrace the modern, flattened view of the universe, except we retain one aspect of the older view–God retains his position at the top. The rest of the hierarchy has been disassembled, and with it we’ve lost much of our capacity for awe, and pomp and ceremony no longer make much sense. If this is the case, are we not missing something as we approach the throne of God in worship?

The cathedral is a celebration of another view of the universe. It’s not necessarily a true view of the universe, but we’ve got to understand that the modern view isn’t true either.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The cathedral is a celebration of another view of the universe. It’s not necessarily a true view, but we’ve got to understand that the modern view isn’t true either. #church #worship” quote=”The cathedral is a celebration of another view of the universe. It’s not necessarily a true view, but we’ve got to understand that the modern view isn’t true either. “]

The vast internal spaces overhead and the beautiful stained-glass windows begin to evoke the sense of awe that would have powerfully affected the experience for those who first worshiped in this space. What my experience in the cathedral in Prague did, was give me a hint of my capacity to experience my own smallness and, consequently, awe for He who is so much greater than myself.

The Idea of the Holocaust…

June 27, 2013 / Trent / 0 Comments

When I was in high school, I was fascinated with World War II. I took a class on World War II and I guess my fascination continued into college because I majored in history and I took another course on World War II. I watched all 26 episodes of the World at War series (1973–74) on PBS several times.

The thing I remember most clearly was the face at the end of the closing credits. The face was gaunt and mostly shadow. Deep dark shadows filled the hollows of the eyes and cheeks—especially the eyes. It was a haunting face, especially with the music and the flames which accompanied it. I never turned off the TV until I saw it. I think it was the face of a person from a concentration camp.

The other thing I remember about that show was the episode called “Genocide.” This episode ends with the implementation of the “Final Solution.” It was the first time I saw the bulldozers. You know, the ones that were pushing heaps of emaciated bodies… The episode ended with the music and the flames and the face.

Baffled by the Holocaust

I’m not sure exactly what the attraction to World War II was all about. Part of the draw could have been something like a fourth grader being interested in dinosaurs. But I think a lot of it stemmed from puzzlement. I watched the shows and read the books to try to find something to help me make sense of it all. Episode 20, “Genocide,” only increased my confusion and fascination.

I now think that this confusion was rooted in the gap that existed in my own mind between the idea of the Holocaust and the physical reality of the Holocaust. Knowing and thinking are not the same thing. I had ideas about the Holocaust, but I didn’t know about it.

The Anne Frank Museum didn’t bridge the gap. Maybe that’s the museum’s fault; it works so hard to create a universal significance that the particularity of young girl is lost. Perhaps it’s my problem because I universalize everything.

From Thinking to Knowing

Then I went to Dachau. Dachau bridged the gap. It was the prototype on which all the other camps were based. Intending to spend a couple of hours; my wife and I stayed for more than six.

It was at Dachau that I realized that concentrations camps weren’t built out of ideas like racism, anti-Semitism, National Socialism, evil, hate or the scapegoat mechanism.

Dachau was built out of concrete, barbed wire, and wood.

I know that doesn’t sound like much of a revelation, but it is! Before that visit, the Holocaust was an abstract concept; that day it became concrete. The men who ran the place were made of flesh and blood and their boots wore out the tile in the interior hallways. The prisoners were defined by an iron gate that I strolled through. I stood where they stood for roll call on freezing winter mornings in thin, striped, tattered uniforms.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The ovens at Dachau were not just an atrocity; they were also brick and mortar. ” quote=”The ovens at Dachau were not just an atrocity; they were also brick and mortar. “]

When the idea of the Holocaust is linked with the physicality of Dachau, it becomes real in a profound way.