Christian Education as a Cognitive Minority (Part 3)
CARL E. ZYLSTRA
You don’t need to be a Christian to have “debauchery” be the first word association that pops into your mind when you hear the term “pagan.” It’s just one of those couplets that wouldn’t make any sense if you tied a word like “debauchery” with any of the theistic terms like “Christian,” “Jewish,” “Buddhist,” or “Muslim.” It’s just part of the package.
And early Christians knew it. Steven Smith’s survey of “Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac” doesn’t mince any words. He approvingly quotes Kyle Harpers’s historical survey in “From Shame to Sin,” where he observed “sexual morality came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world”.
Or as Will Durant expressed it when describing the incorporation of Christian thought into the foundations of Western law, “In the extreme legislation against sexual irregularities, we feel the influence of a Christianity shocked into a ferocious puritanism by the sins of pagan civilization.” Reforms included firm penalties against (especially male behavior in) rape, adultery, homosexual activity, and other forms of bacchanalian expression. We might be forgiven for thinking that the early “puritanism” that accompanied the Christianizing of western culture could almost be considered a 6th century version of the #MeToo movement.
So, as outlined in the preceding installments in this series of blogs, and given the repaganizing of thought and culture currently engulfing the remnants of Western civilization, it ought not to be any surprise that views of human sexuality are once more at the center of the renewed culture wars. Or to put it into the terms that we’ve been using in this series of essays, a truly Christian cognitive minority will embody and express a view of human sexuality simply incomprehensible to the dominant culture – and which the dominant culture will at best marginalize if not downright seek to suppress.
But once again, that ought not to surprise anyone whose world view is formed on the basis of the ancient scriptures. You can’t get past the first chapter of Genesis without dealing with human sexuality, including the explicit insistence that the binary nature of human sexuality is essentially the divine image as expressed in human creation. It’s sometimes overlooked that the phrase “male and female he created them” is an appositive to the immediately preceding phrase, “in the image of God he created him.”
Even more serious, and often overlooked, is the apologetic nature of the creation account, written after the Exodus from Egypt. The Torah found its canonical expression as a clarification of what made the people of Yahweh different from the people of Egypt where they had spent the last few centuries. And Genesis 1 declares that the key to understanding who they are begins with understanding human sexuality as a reflection of the divine nature. It further makes clear that such a reflection of the divine character in binary human sexuality will be expressed, not in temple worship or other pagan sexual celebrations, but within the exclusive binary relationship of marriage, or as the Genesis account continues, “Because of this, a man leaves his father and mother and is grafted together with his wife so that they become one flesh.”
Genesis goes on to describe how difficult living out that relationship really is. Abram is called to leave his pagan land and pagan ways (“our ancestors worshiped other gods beyond the river”). But when he does so, he immediately runs into problems standing up for his exclusive marriage to Sarai under the pressure of pagan sexual practices in Egypt. Similarly his fellow émigré Lot runs headlong into the destructively unbridled sexuality of pagan Canaan. From that point on Sodom becomes a foil for biblical living throughout the rest of scripture. And you have to try pretty hard to convince yourself to insist that the reason Sodom is condemned throughout the New Testament – all the way from Christ in the gospels to the book of Revelation – was because of their lack of hospitality rather than because of their embodiment of the pagan sexuality which the people of the true God were called to resist.
Perhaps confronting the rise of the new paganism today also helps us understand the Apostle Paul’s vigorous remonstrance against non-binary marriage sexuality as he begins his summary of Christian thought in the book of Romans. It is not because as an unmarried man, the Apostle was projecting his sexual frustrations onto the church. Quite the contrary, Paul is doing nothing more than reviewing the principles enunciated in Genesis 1 and updating them in terms of God’s redemptive work over the centuries even as human rebellion against the divine design grew as well. We should never overlook the fact that just as Genesis was written as an apology against the Egyptian and Canaanite paganisms, so the letter to the Romans is an apology against the cultured paganism of his day centered in Rome.
Without getting too detailed in outlining the building blocks of Western thought, notice that it’s not just writing to the Romans where Paul updates this sexually developed apology. He also covers it when writing to Corinthian Greeks. I Corinthians 6, with its strong and well-known condemnation of non-binary sexuality, is followed immediately by chapter 7 where the expression of binary sexuality in marriage is celebrated and even commanded in quite explicit terms (together with an almost offhand comment that even unmarried people like him can still honor connubial sexuality as well).
There’s probably no need, among readers of this forum, to cover all the ways that the New Testament picks up that theme of binary human sexuality as reflection of the glory of the creator -- except to remind ourselves that marriage as established in Genesis becomes expanded in the Apostles’ writings as a celebration of Christ and his church. The New Testament makes clear that the division between Greco-Roman paganism and biblical-shaped communities again runs right along the fault line of human sexuality.
Nor do followers of this blog need reminding of the numerous contemporary ways that fault line is revealing itself today. These topics have become prominent, if not dominant, subjects of discussion pretty much everywhere educators gather – whether those educators are Christian or not.
The key question this new environment raises for those dedicated to Christian education is simply this: Will we follow Moses, Abraham, Christ, and the Apostles in shaping our educational communities in keeping with the biblical pattern of human sexuality that glorifies the Creator who established it and the Savior Lord who redeemed it in his body, the church? Or will we choose rather to follow Lot and see once whether we can’t maybe keep our principles intact while still joining in the celebrations of the pagan city, hoping against hope that, unlike Lot’s experience, our children may survive?
Life as a cognitive minority may not be easy, especially the closer we get to the conflict zone of human sexuality. But thus it has always been. We have had about 1500 years of privilege here in Western Culture where Christian thought was certainly considered viable if not dominant. And those who lived by its principles were usually not only tolerated but also applauded.
But, as Robert George observes in his introduction to Smith’s work, today “the neo-pagans are in no mood to be ‘accommodating’.” He quotes Mark Tushnet from Harvard Law School who triumphantly declared, “The culture war is over. They lost. We won.” As a result, in George’s words, “Christians and others who dissent from progressive orthodoxy can expect the ‘hard line approach.’”
Yet as this series of commentaries has observed, that’s nothing new. Such has always been the prevailing sentiment in most ages and across most of the world. Rather, it is the last millennium and a half of Western Civilization that has truly been an island, both geographically and historically.
Still, notably, none of the Scriptures were written in the context of that Christianized Western culture – or anything remotely resembling it. Consequently, it is exactly those ancient writings from which Christian educators who serve amid the imploding debris of today’s paganizing western thought can now draw the insights, the examples, and the courage necessary to shape Christian educational institutions and practices governed by a truly biblical worldview.
This is not a conflict that Christian educators would have preferred or chosen. Yet here we are. At minimum, no one ought to doubt, in Steven Smith’s terms, that the Culture Wars which began in Egypt, Canaan, Babylon, Greece and Rome and over the last 2000 years spread to the ends of the earth, truly have now arrived also “on the Potomac.”
Carl E. Zylstra previously served as president of Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. A highly respected educator, he is the current vice-chair of the IACE Board of Directors.