Christopher Rush
Two quotations form the foundation of this lecture:
Cicero: “Just as a field, even if it is fertile, cannot bear fruit without cultivation, so also a spirit without culture.”
Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Before you go running off and influencing culture, (in that totally enthusiastic way you have of doing things people tell you to do) perhaps it would be helpful to understand culture a little better. The words “cultivation” and “culture” come from the same German and Latin roots of agriculture: what translator Gerald Malsbary calls the “repetitive, persistent, and loving care of the farmer” (Pieper 51, n. 1). From this origin, “culture” gains a sociological sense, being applied to refining a person’s character, primarily through education. In the nineteenth century, the term takes a larger scope, forming the basis for understanding a social group as an entity, especially in terms of its potential or ideals. “Culture” becomes a different idea in the twentieth century with the rise of various anthropological studies, losing its original meaning in favor of a defining attribute of people groups and their ability to understand and communicate symbolically. Now, “culture” in lay terms is a loose amalgamation of many of these definitions, often used interchangeably for “society” or “value system,” depending on the context. For our purposes here, I shall use “culture” predominantly (and admittedly loosely) to mean “a group’s unique identity,” especially in the sense of a people grouped together by distinguishing commonalities. I’ll probably also make some self-serving remarks about the superiority of one kind of culture over another, for the purpose of convincing you that what I am saying is true and worth believing by you.
Cicero’s quotation and Malsbary’s explication remind us that work is fundamental to both the cultivation of agriculture and the proper enculturation of the human spirit. Tilling a garden and becoming a fuller, better person require effort, time, and practice. Yet, we must remember that work is not the defining element of these tasks. It is necessary and important and valuable, but work is not the goal. The basis for culture is not work, as Josef Pieper reminds us, but leisure.
Pieper’s leisure, as some of you know, is not “leisure time” to sit around watching Thundarr the Barbarian while stuffing yourself full of circus peanuts. Leisure is not just “down time” so you have more energy to get back to work so you can work long and hard to earn money so you can afford the next season of The Transformers and more circus peanuts. We, as individuals and members of a culture, do not rest so we can be more productive later. Work and leisure are integrally connected, but in the opposite way most people think. Please do not misunderstand me. We are not just “working for the weekend.” Work is not something we just “have to do” so we can afford goofing off time. We work so we can be at leisure. Genuine leisure, the foundation of every culture, is the freedom to know and understand reality accurately, primarily for the purpose of accurately understanding and worshipping God.
Obviously the world’s culture has no desire to experience leisure accurately. As Pieper says, “Leisure cannot be realized so long as one understands it to be a means, even as a means to the end of ‘rescuing the culture of [our world].’ The celebration of God’s praises cannot be realized unless it takes place for its own sake. But this — the most noble form of harmony with the world as a whole — is the deepest source of leisure” (58). As you can probably tell, my approach today for you in confronting culture is not exactly to go out and do something. We have heard several messages this year about the various ways that you can make a difference in the world — and those have been great, especially the ones that can be done from the comfort of your own home without requiring too much time and effort out of you. I’m sure you found those the best and most exciting ways to influence the culture (especially without having to go out and get infected by it. After all, why be “in and not of” when you can be neither?).
I digress. My message today for you is that, while doing things are important and indeed, as James says “faith without works is dead” — I certainly agree, we cannot neglect the importance of first knowing and understanding the culture. It is good to rebuild homes, supply food, and inoculate against diseases. But, frankly, we must remember that those must be secondary, ultimately. What better good can we do for people than to help them think accurately about reality? What is more important than knowing truth? And that is the main point for today. Everything we do, both in knowing our culture and in knowing the culture we are going to change, must be aligned with serving truth.
It was good for us to hear the diverse ways it is possible for you to benefit and improve culture, don’t get me wrong, but the cultures that those improvements make are only a part of the totality of the culture at large. There is a larger, more fundamental component to reality that we have heretofore mostly ignored: intellectual culture. Do you know the nature of the postmodern intellectual world? This is the world into which you will be going and living your day-to-day lives. Many of you are under the erroneous impression that because you are going to be working with your hands all the days of your lives, or because you are going to be singers, engineers, or generous fillers of frypods, that you don’t have to pay any substantial attention to the intellectual culture. The world of poetry, the world of ideas, that’s fine for some — but that’s not real. Those of you who believe that are, no offense, “brimming over with wrongability,” as Arnold Rimmer would say. I say again, most of you will soon be moving body, mind, and soul into a postmodern Western world, a world shaped more by intellectuals than by common day laborers. The subcultures of advertising and entertainment, in both of which you will be very involved, the subcultures of politics and social institutions (at least, what will be left of them by the time you graduate) are all very much influenced by the postmodern intellectual world. It doesn’t matter if you are going to a Christian college, a utilitarian college, the workforce, the armed forces, or staying at home: the culture out there has been and is being shaped by the postmodern intellectual culture, a culture you must understand in order to effectively influence it.
English philosopher and intellectual conservative (a redundancy, I know) Roger Scruton reminds us of a handful of the many creators of the intellectual Postmodern culture:
there is the neo-Marxist approach of Fredric Jameson; the structuralism of Roland Barthes; the post-structuralist theory associated with Michel Foucault; there is feminist criticism, either in its staid American version typified by Judith Butler or in the flamboyant and anarchic vision of Luce Iragaray and Julia Kristeva (who also adds a Marxist and a structuralist flavour). There is the “Deconstruction” of Jacques Derrida, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard, the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt, the post-colonialism of Edward Said, the New Pragmatism of Richard Rorty (5).
If you do not know the work of these people, you do not know the nature of the intellectual culture into which you are headed. We do discuss a fair amount of these thinkers in 12th grade Bible class, to be sure, but not everybody. (You wouldn’t listen if we did, anyway.) The point is that culture is shaped by ideas, and the ideas that are shaping the culture out there are as diverse and irrespective of truth more virulently and unabashedly than ever before in the history of the world. You are not going to effect much change in the culture if you do not know the nature of it. “A spirit without culture,” said Cicero, “will not bear much fruit,” and that culture is the hard work and effort required to be a Christian intellectual aligned with truth, for only an alliance with the absolute standards of truth, right, and wrong, explained in part through the Word of God and fully indwelt in the character of Our Savior, will the effort of education and intellectual pursuits bear such fruit for which the intellectual Postmodern culture is dying and begging and desperately demanding.
This leads to a somewhat challenging but insightful quotation from English scholar Christopher Dawson, author of several books on cultural history, including this from Religion and Culture:
What then are the conditions which made a fruitful cooperation between religion and culture possible? On the one hand, the assertion of the absolute transcendent spiritual claims of religion must not be interpreted as a denial of the limited, historically conditioned and temporal values of culture, and on the other the forms of a particular culture, even when they are inspired or consecrated by a religious ideal, must not be regarded as possessing universal religious validity (qtd. in Schall 1).
Father James Schall, professor of government at Georgetown University, provides an excellent explication of Dawson’s idea concerning culture’s dependency on religion:
In the Dawson citation, the great English historian of culture and religion is concerned to show the existence of absolute transcendent religious claims, valid for all cultures. The denial of such claims risks the very meaning of our common humanity with its destiny. Yet, the expression of such positions will be made differently from time to time, from place to place. In acknowledging such different expressions of the same truth, Dawson seeks to preserve the relative “autonomy” or legitimacy of different cultures and languages. A valid freedom exists but not on the basis of approving everything no matter what is proposes. Dawson did not deny that universal standards remained. In these truths, all men share even if, because of a freedom that includes the possibility of rejecting the truth, anyone is capable of rejecting them. The fact that some or many deny universal propositions does not necessarily argue against their truth, any more than the fact of murder implies its licitness (10).
Essentially, just because the postmodern intellectual culture denies the validity and very existence of truth, let alone absolute truth, does not actually negate the necessity of truth as the only fundamental source of revivification for a failing society. E. I. Watkin knew this over seventy years ago, when he wrote in his 1932 work Catholic Art and Culture, “Without a living religion a culture perishes and disintegrates like the human body when the soul has departed” (qtd. in Schall 8). The postmodern intellectual culture needs the religious, i.e., Christian, adherence to truth brought by you — yes, it needs your help in restoring the material infrastructure of buildings, health, and food, but more importantly it needs intellectual and spiritual restoration with reality.
The reason Postmodernism has taken such a hold, unfortunately, is because Christianity has ceded the intellectual, political, and cultural ground. As Mark Noll states in his work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind” (3). This is, in part, why Summit Christian Academy exists, to counter the recent trend of main-stream American Christianity that has seen the persistent withdrawal from culture. Pastor Kenney spoke of this at our inaugural chapel. In his day, organized Christianity ignored kairotic cultural events and intellectual movements, and that dis-association has led us to where we are today. With the gaping abysm of what intellectual Christianity used to fill in the cultural mentality, denial of absolute truth, relative morality, sexual licentiousness, and self-actualized utilitarian social interaction have taken hold.
Scruton clarifies why the decline of authentic Christian intellect in America has allowed the postmodern usurpation to infect the intellect of society, even to the point of destroying culture:
A common culture is a form of membership, and the high culture that has grown from it perpetuates the memory of that membership and exalts it into something natural, unchangeable and serene. When religious faith declines it becomes difficult for intellectuals to believe that they really belong to the same community as ordinary people. Their claims to priesthood have been exploded, and their isolation in academies sets them at an impassable distance from the ordinary church-going people whose idea of adventure is to go out and mow the lawn (16).
Christianity no longer fits in the intellectual culture of Postmodern America because it has given intellectual culture into the hands of the relativistic philosophers; isolationism has bred isolation. Again, we no longer know the nature of the conflict. We do well to remember the simple truth: “Knowing is half the battle.”
Schall encourages us in the importance of regaining intellectual domination in the conflict of cultures, the importance of knowing the nature of culture before trying to make it something else. Work, you recall, is the means to restore culture — work is not the goal or meaning of culture. Work and leisure must both be sufficient and intrinsically valuable. Genuine culture is an intellectual enterprise worthy of itself:
There is nothing so abstract about human intelligence that it does not seek some incarnation. Yet, the tradition of “leisure” as the basis of culture, the Greek idea of things worthy for their own sakes, things of play and of solemnity, are expressions of the abundance, indeed the superabundance of things. [Yves] Simon puts it well: “What is needed to have the fullness of culture is something more, something that in some way is above necessity, is independent of need, and is fulfilling no laws except perhaps its own.” Cultures do need to stand the test of philosophy and revelation.
We need, therefore, to know the “form” of what cultures are. This “knowing” is very demanding intellectual exercise, the “work,” as it were, of intelligence, the effort to know what even “things that can be otherwise” are. But though we must live, eat, and prepare the land, itself an effort of increasingly practical intelligence and not sheer drudgery, we are open to infinity, even in this world and in this life (21-22).
Schall’s words return us to where we started: that the intellectual problem can best be solved by a renewed Christian culture, a renaissance of intellectualism aligned to truth.
T.S. Eliot defined culture as “what makes life worth living,” says Mark Henrie (12). The intellectual culture of leisure, the worshipful lifestyle, is why we work, and, in part, makes life worth living as an intrinsically valuable mode of existence. The aesthetic, artistic, intellectual heritage we have as inheritors of Western Civilization is as rich a cultural investment any being could hope for. Scruton elaborates on the connection between the Western artistic culture and the Christian intellectual heritage so prevalent until the comparatively recent abnegation of the evangelical mind:
Western art and literature shares the enquiring spirit of the common culture upon which it broods. It is not a vehicle for religious or political propaganda, and even when presenting a Christian cosmology, like Dante in The Divine Comedy, or a vision of Christian redemption, like Bach in the St. Matthew Passion, it uses a lingua franca that assumes no specific religious belief. As Santayana once pointed out, the greatest poet in the English language, [Shakespeare] whose plays used to form the core curriculum in English studies, nowhere reveals the colour of his religious beliefs or even whether he has any. His works are reflections on the human condition which can be understood and enjoyed by anyone.
A curriculum centred on the high culture of Western civilisation will inculcate just the kind of self-critical distance that we associate with the Enlightenment. This does not mean that it cherishes the open mind or is hostile to religious commitment. It is a culture that aspires to universality, and to the widest possible understanding of and sympathy with the human condition (13).
We are now starting to find a solution to the problem of the postmodern intellectual culture: the shared intellectual heritage of Western civilization. This might seem somewhat contradictory, in that most postmodern philosophers (admittedly an oxymoron) deny the validity of “Western Civ.” in favor of multiculturalism. However, the intrinsically valuable works of art and literature, many of which we study at Summit, do provide a valid entrée into the intellectual discussion, perhaps even more than quoting Bible verses out of context and without sufficient exegesis — if a postmodernist will not converse about Paul and John, perhaps they will at least engage in discourse over Homer and Shakespeare — and if not Homer and Shakespeare, break out your knowledge of Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Marquez, Mann, Kafka, Borges, and Solzhenitsyn.
You can probably tell where I am going with this. If you have no idea who Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Marquez, Mann, Kafka, Borges, and Solzhenitsyn are, you should learn. Obviously this is after you have become thorough adept at the classics: Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Aurelius, Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pascal, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Bacon (Roger, Francis, and Clerval) Shakespeare, etc., etc. Then become adept at the modern authors: Keats, Pirandello, Yeats, Arnold, Belloc, Dryden, Burgess, Auden, Austen, Lewis, Pieper, Weaver, Kirk, Chesterton, Sayers, Barfield, Postman, Williams, Wise, Newman, etc. Then read everyone on the summer extra credit reading lists, see my list of 10 books you should read before college, and sign up for the critical reading elective next year. Also, start reading some recent authors who combat postmodernism: Raymond Tallis, George Grant, Roger Kimball, Michael Polanyi, Christopher Dawson, James Schall, and then read the people they cite throughout their works. Then, when you need a break from reading, watch the few intellectual shows that will help you think: Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Stargate SG-1, Deep Space 9, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Red Dwarf, and, of course, most importantly, Babylon 5, primarily to become familiar with the key thoughts and ideas that make us what we are.
The main way you can prepare to combat the dilapidated intellectual culture is to become, yourself, intellectually cultured. Schall tells us “Both man and nature, it seems, were designed to be completed by human knowledge and active work” (9). If you want to be a valuable, worthwhile human being, let alone an effective culture changer, you do have to work hard. One of Schall’s influences, great Catholic thinker A.G. Sertillanges, makes the systematic approach to becoming a better intellectual almost embarrassingly clear in his outstanding work The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods.
It would take a while to summarize Sertillanges’s book — besides, you should all read it for yourself — but allow me to highlight some of his essential points in how to become an intellectual person. First, organization: Sertillanges advocates simplification of life and work space, solitude, and silence. It is difficult to get good at anything surrounded by distractions. As a brief aside, Sertillanges does not address the postmodern notion of multitaskers, most likely because he could not foresee anyone being so irrational as to think that it would be possible to do more than one thing well at once. Please don’t take this as a personal attack, but if you are a person who thinks that you are good at multitasking, what that means in reality, is that you are good at doing more than one thing poorly simultaneously. Don’t be proud of being such a person. Perhaps, be a little more like Charles Emerson Winchester III: do one thing at a time, do it very well, and then move on. If your activity is not worth your full time and attention, is it really worth doing at all? Returning to Sertillanges, he then encourages the proper spirit of intellectual work: including ardor in research, concentration, proper breadth of outlook, and the right sense of mystery, acknowledging that no matter how intellectual one gets, there is always more to be learned. The longest section of his treatise, preparation for work, is certainly the most practical. His commentary on reading is instructive and worth examining time and again, but he does make the point of being selective in the reading you do. Becoming knowledgeable about the diversity of the world of literature and writing is important, he admits, but life is short — to commit to something important enough as becoming an intellectual is requires sacrifice. You won’t have time to read everything — no one in this room feels the pain of that idea more than I do. Selectivity is important in order to make what we read and who we become meaningful. Once you have decided the primary focus of your reading life, make what you read a significant part of who you become.
In addition to wise reading, Sertillanges provides helpful ideas on memorization and the management of memory. With the recent inventions of the Interweb and personal computadores, more and more people seem to think that, since it is so easy to access information these days, there really isn’t any point in memorizing too much. I know you recognize immediately the total asininity of such a notion, believing that memorizing things is not necessary because you can just “google it” (what a great adulteration the Internet is doing for our once majestic language) or “look it up” when you need it. Remember how totally stupid you felt when you realized you didn’t have any of your friends’ or families’ phone numbers memorized the last time you switched cell phones? This just in: speed of information access is not making people any smarter. Owning a cell phone and having access to the Internet is not making you a better person.
Sertillanges next talks about the importance of note taking, classifying notes, using notes (you should really check that part out), putting all that preparation into creative output, and, finally, the importance of living. Just as Telemachus learns that epic heroes are not made in the classroom and must put his newfound heroism into practice, Sertillanges reminds us (and me) that the intellectual must keep in contact with life, its trials and joys, and know how to relax and enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Relaxing and enjoying the fruits of labor returns us to our second foundational quotation for this lecture, Psalm 46: 10 — “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” Becoming an intellectual is hard work, but it is worth the effort. But effort, remember, is not the end goal — culture is founded on leisure, leisure done rightly. The authors and ideas I rattled off moments ago are intrinsically valuable, to be sure, but what most of them have in common (and what the postmodernists are desperately lacking) is their allegiance to truth. Genuine art is aligned with beauty; genuine philosophy is the love of wisdom, which is also the active search for truth, for what is; Paul instructs us that knowledge without love and truth puffs up, as Proverbs reminds us genuine wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.
The command “Be still and know that I am God” is not just a palliative for stressful circumstances and busyness, as in “okay, I just need to relax and let God take care of my problems.” That’s not what this verse is saying. I could be mistaken, but I am pretty certain that Psalm 46:10a has two injunctive verb parts: 1) be still, 2) know. “Knowing that God is God” is not permission to “call it a day.” This is an active knowing, providing Biblical support for the cultivating efforts of intellect leading to the cultivation of the soul. Leisure, the basis of culture, the command “be still,” is the setting for worship: leisure is not “recharging your batteries” time for more work later, though Sertillanges wisely notes that rest time used effectively is necessary for the intellectual life. A good night’s rest can be an act of worship, if done rightly and for the right reasons. Leisure is for worship. Why else should we “be still”? What can be more important in this life than an accurate knowledge of who God is leading to a proper worshipful response, followed by an accurate understanding of who we are, the nature of reality, and how we are to live? As noted above, without restoring the proper intellectual culture of an accurate Biblical mind, all you are doing is cosmetic work — and plastic surgery never does any good for the health of the organism. Why become an intellectual? What is the purpose of reading all those authors and more? To align yourself with truth. Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is the Word made flesh, the logos who pitched his tent and dwelt among us. Truth has become incarnate. Truth is intellectual. Jesus is not the pathos made flesh, though he had feelings and expressed them accurately and appropriately at all times. The answer to Lorien’s question, which came first the word or the thought behind the word is simple for the Christian — in the beginning, the word and the thought was. The Incarnate Christ is language, thought, communication, and, essentially, truth. Why must the intellectual be aligned with truth? The pessimistic, meaningless postmodern intellectual culture inherited from its Enlightenment forebears demonstrates the alternative, and, frankly, it’s not working.
Truth, Sertillanges reminds us, “steadies and strengthens us; it gives us delight; in its company we are consoled for our own shortcomings and those of others; its discovery is a reward, its manifestation a noble vengeance on days of contradiction.… Every truth is life, direction, a way leading to the end of man” (250, 13). Truth is truth, regardless of its packaging: the shepherds knew to look beyond the accoutrement of the stable. You must read those authors so you know what mankind has to say, then you will have something to say. You study — study — the Bible so you know what God has to say, then you will have something to say. All the while, you, as an intellectual, must be aligned with truth. The reason the postmodernists don’t have much of anything to say is because they are not aligned with truth — they deny its existence then hypocritically expect you to believe them and what they are saying is true. You, as a Christian intellectual, must be aware of what little they have to say so you can, like Jesus, reach people where they are, and, not being content with that, engage them intellectually, bringing them into the light of Incarnate Truth, to be changed into conformity with Jesus.
“By practicing the truth that we know,” says Sertillanges, “we merit the truth that we do not yet know” (19). Doesn’t Jesus’ parable of the faithful servants support that? The first two who lived rightly with what they had were rewarded with more. The Christian intellectual must submit “to the discipline of truth. This submission to truth is the binding condition for communion with it,” Sertillanges instructs us (130). Truth demands uncompromising dedication from you.
Prompt obedience is what invites it to visit us. To this sacred meeting we must bring a respectful soul. Truth will not give itself to us unless we are first rid of self and resolved that it shall suffice us. The intelligence which does not submit is in a state of skepticism, and the skeptic is ill-prepared for truth. Discovery is the result of sympathy; and sympathy is the gift of self.…
Yielding ourselves up to truth, and formulating it for ourselves as best we can but without any criminal infidelity, we perform an act of worship to which … God will respond by … communing with our soul. In that, as with everything, self-will is the enemy of God. This submission implies humility (130, 131)
reminds Sertillanges. “Intellectually, pride is the father of aberrations and of artificial and pretentious productions” — what better description of the postmodern intellect that says truth (which doesn’t exist) is created by every reader and thinker? In contrast, says Sertillanges, “humility is the eye which reads in the book of life and in the book of the universe” (131).
“Profound work consists in this,” he continues, “to let the truth sink into one, to be quietly submerged by it, to lose oneself in it, not to think that one is thinking, nor that one exists, nor that anything in the world exists but truth itself” (133) and then one is ready to be still and know that God is God. “To love truth ardently enough to concentrate on it and so be transported into the universal, into what is, into the heart of abiding truths, is the attitude of contemplation and of fruitful production.…
“Do not then discourage this spirit if it visits you, driving it away in favor of some artificial and external form of work,” he cautions (133). Don’t you dare say “I don’t have time to think, I must get out there and do something!” Return instead to the intellectual, contemplative spirit that allows for the proper intellectual worship in leisure.
Sertillanges mirrors the wisdom of Clerval Bacon when he notes that “The more precious an idea is, the less it matters where it comes from. Train yourself to indifference about sources. Truth alone has a claim, and it has that claim wherever it appears. As we must not swear allegiance to anyone, so still less must we disdain anyone; and if it is not expedient to believe everybody neither must we refuse to believe anyone who can show his credentials” (135). That is why we read Aristotle, Shakespeare, Lewis, and Huxley. Truth is truth whether it is Miranda’s brave new world or Bernard’s.
That is our great liberty. This readiness to accept truth brings so rich a reward that it would tempt even avarice itself, if the avaricious thinker did not imagine it wiser to sit guarding his own coffers. We like to believe that we possess everything, that we are capable of everything, and we give but an inattentive hearing to the voice of others. We make a few favored exceptions, men or books; they have our ear and afford us inspiration. Now in reality there is inspiration everywhere; the breath of the Spirit fills the valleys just as it blows upon the mountaintops. In the meanest intelligence is a reflection of infinite Wisdom, and deep humility is able to recognize it…. Wherever the God of truth has left something of Himself, we must eagerly welcome it, venerate it religiously and utilize it diligently. Where the eternal Sower has passed, shall we not gather in the harvest (135-36)?
“It is intolerable pride to try to force truth into our personal mold, and it ends in stupidity” (211). “Seek the approval of God; be intent only on truth, for yourself and others,” (213) and you will be ready to be still and know that God is God.
The measurement of success in the intellectual life is how closely we are aligned to Truth incarnate, Jesus Our Savior, for only in the proper understanding of reality, the reality created by and for Him, can we effectively help the redemption of that creation. What the postmodern intellectual culture needs, even more than it needs a refurbished infrastructure, is the restoration of intellect from Christians who know God is God because they can be still and can discern truth from folly. It is time to move beyond “daily devotions.” I do not want to sound presumptuous or abuse my position from the lectern, but I have serious doubts that God is terribly pleased by casual Christians who read the Bible a few verses at a time, feel good about it, and then move on with their day as if nothing really happened. Perhaps the reason so many chapel speakers this year have made the point that it is time for Christians to stop having Bible studies and start getting out into the world and doing things is because too many Christians have no idea what real Bible study is. It is time to take Psalm 46:10 seriously: be still and know that God is God. Study the Bible, and then read Ryrie, Schaeffer, Lewis, Spurgeon, Chafer, Walvoord, Zuck, Fleming, McCloud, Smith, Catron, Moody, Darby, Thiessen, Ironside, Rushdoony, Stott, etc., etc. I can give you more specific lists if you really are serious about becoming and being an intellectual Christian who can effectively change culture and, more importantly, worship God. For that is what this life is truly about. If you really want to worship God, you have to know who he is. He is logos — the word, the truth. Postmodern intellectual culture — more accurately, anti-intellectual culture — can only be combated through the truth of the Christian logos, leading to redemption.
Schall reminds us that this now-alien Christian culture “needs to be expressed and made living on no other basis than it is true. Leisure is the basis of culture. So is truth. So is freedom. So is work. So is worship. We seek to know the things that cannot be ‘otherwise.’ But, on finding them, we strive to express them in ways that are closer to why the birds sing unnecessarily wondrous songs than to our self-creation of a world based on an arbitrary will that sees nothing but itself and sees all things simply as diverse and relative” (22). We work to be at leisure, we are at leisure so we can worship. We worship best and most accurately — most meaningfully — when we know who God is. That knowing takes time and effort, the most rewarding, most important effort you can give in your life. Then you can be an effective culture changer; then can you be still.
“Just as a field, even if it is fertile, cannot bear fruit without cultivation, so also a soul without culture.”
“Be still and know that he is God.”
Works Cited
Henrie, Mark C. “Culture: High, Low, Middlebrow, and Popular.” Ingersoll Symposium on “The Importance of Culture.” Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC. 15 Oct. 2004. ISI Lectures. 8 Feb. 2009 <http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/henrie10-15-04.pdf>.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Gerald Malsbary. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998, 1948.
Schall, James V. “Culture is Never Neutral.” Ingersoll Symposium on “The Importance of Culture.” Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC. 15 Oct. 2004. ISI Lectures. 8 Feb. 2009 <http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/schall10-15-04.pdf>.
Scruton, Roger. “Culture Matters.” Ingersoll Symposium on “The Importance of Culture.” Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC. 15 Oct. 2004. ISI Lectures. 8 Feb. 2009 <http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/scruton10-15-04.pdf>.
Sertillanges, A.G. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Trans. Mary Ryan. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998, 1946.
This essay is adapted from a chapel address given May 15, 2009.
Redeeming Pandora 