Feature
Spiritual Bread & Culture
The Evangelization of Society Can Benefit from the Spiritual Vision of Christopher Dawson
by Daniel Matthys
It is often said that Christians should engage the culture that surrounds them. This seems to be a laudable aim. If Christians are to remain true to the biblical mandate to evangelize, then this evangelization must have a broadly cultural as well as a personal aspect. If the Christian faith is truly universal, then it must embrace all aspects of human life and experience—public as well as private. In short, Christianity cannot be confined to an artificial sphere of personal belief but must claim as its natural domain the arts, values, ideas, beliefs, and interests of society at large.
The problem seems to be that in spite of a conscious desire among Christians to engage in a cultural apostolate, their efforts do not appear to be yielding much fruit. Few believers would claim that contemporary society is becoming more and more Christian. Rather, the "culture warriors" of our day appear to be fighting a long retreat against an increasingly secular society.
In these times, many of the claims and sensibilities of Christianity have become archaic to our cultural discourse. In most settings, it would sound strange to frame a conversation in terms of sin and redemption, faith and despair, or even in acknowledgment of the existence of objective truth, beauty, and goodness. But this situation is not due so much to the fact that the spiritual dimensions of life are being rejected as that they are being ignored. Even the so-called new atheists are arguably as estranged from mainstream culture as are devoted Christians.
Broadly speaking, society is equally uncomfortable with both the explicit rejection of God and the explicit acceptance of him. God's existence and his nature, though fundamental queries of the human heart, are not questions that, by and large, people today are comfortable airing in public. They are not the concerns that preoccupy them.
Spiritual or Earthly?
The concerns that have replaced God in our society are at least as old as the New Testament. They are encapsulated in the three temptations delivered to Jesus during his forty days of fasting in the desert. They also sit at the center of the parable of "The Grand Inquisitor" told by Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. "These questions," these "brief human sentences," says the Grand Inquisitor to Christ in the parable, express "the whole future history of the world and of mankind." He then poses this challenge to Christ: "Do you know that more centuries will pass and men of wisdom and learning will proclaim that there is no such thing as crime, that there is therefore no sin either, that there are only hungry people?"
This challenge strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. Are we essentially spiritual beings? Or are our spiritual yearnings secondary to our essentially earthly nature? "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread," says Satan to Christ. Christ refuses, saying that man does not live by bread alone. But the Grand -Inquisitor responds to the quest for heavenly bread by asking, "What will happen to the millions who are too weak to forgo their earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly?"
The Grand Inquisitor also sees Christ's response to the other two temptations as an upturning of human priorities. Christ's refusal to accept Satan's offering of the kingdoms of the world and his refusal to prove without a doubt his divine identity are both at discord with the apparent needs of humanity.
The offer of political power over the whole world would include power to assuage its evils and sufferings. The aspiration to such power—even to the extent of establishing a one-world government—remains prominent today. Much of the rationale behind organizations like the United Nations is that large-scale government bodies can bring the full organizational power of humanity to bear against the world's problems. Likewise, for God to offer incontrovertible proof of his existence appears, to the Grand Inquisitor, to be the most logical request humanity could make. If God would only prove to us his existence, we could accommodate ourselves to his will.
But the Christian way, as the inquisitor sees it, is to ignore these questions, these basic needs. In their place, man is offered "heavenly bread," the very existence and need of which are in doubt.
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