In his essay called “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”, Wendell Berry accuses Christian church of the insulting indifference that it expresses towards the whole world. While the church claims to be merciful and forgiving, it chooses to ignore all of the issues that are relevant for the modern society. Things like war, rape and murder the Church explains with the fact that God sends people obstacles that they are able to overcome. Instead of engaging into the fight with crime, the church hides behind the doctrine of acceptance. Berry is also outraged with the fact that Christians tried to establish friendly relationships with both conquerors and merchants. Throughout the human history, the church has been a rich institution, and it preferred to keep in touch with anyone who was willing to invest in it. Instead of focusing on social issues, the church often preferred to be unjust and to keep quite in order not to interfere. During the Middle Ages, the church was extremely corrupt and could highly affect all of the choices made by the government. Nowadays, the church and the politics are far apart. The church has its own life: people celebrate certain days and discuss certain issues. The conclusion is always the same – to accept, forgive and move on. This paper explains why Berry’s point of view is relevant in today’s society and tries to respond to him with the help of other theologists’ opinions. It also mentions the way the Bible views the world and a person in the society, and the way it teaches people to deal with evil.
So, how does the Bible view the world? In the Bible, the world is full of sin and the church is the only institution that is able to save people from that sin. Once people acknowledge the church and believe in Jesus, they will be saved. According to the church dogmas, every single pleasure carries a sin, and so things like acting, being in the media, eating, and enjoying bodily pleasures are considered to be from Satan. The church is pretty strict when it comes to restrictions; in order to be closer to God, people have to sacrifice a lot of things. Sacrifice probably is the key word when we’re talking about the Christian church. Without a sacrifice, people are not able to experience the pain that Jesus had experienced for them. The book called “The Ladder of the Beatitudes” gives a detailed analysis of the main rules of Christianity. One of the most important chapters is called “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me” (Forest 78) This line encourages Christians to stand all the evil that is falling on their heads because only through patience will they obtain the blessing of Jesus. Sometimes, of course, it is a useful way of thinking because it teaches people to forgive and let go. But sometimes it is also harmful because it claims that people shouldn’t fight the evil but rather accept it.
In order to talk about Yeager and Stassen’s opinions, let us first look into the work of another scholar whom they criticized. They essentially criticized Niebuhr for being extremely radical when it came to Christ and faith. To him, like to almost all of the Christians, the nature of Christ is unquestionable. He is half human and half divine, and there is just one story of His origin. As a result, Christ is placed far above other human beings, despite the fact that He is partly a human too. People worship Him without any feeling of relatedness, because He is so much greater than them. In ancient religions (e.g. Slavic and Northern paganism), people considered themselves to be children of their gods. Thus, the relationship between them was much more intimate. People could relate to their divine parents and make their personalities more distinct. In Christianity, people consider themselves slaves of God and His Son. This creates a wide border between the two, and the understanding of the nature of Christ gets blurred. According to Yeager and Stassen, Niebuhr’s view of Christ is blurred due to his conservatism. For Niebuhr, the nature of Christ is hidden and disclosed, and thus, Christians are not able to connect to him. For Niebuhr, Christ is “love, hope, obedience, faith, and humility” (15-27). The key word here is obedience. In order to understand the reasons for the church’s indifference to the outside world, let us explain the concept of obedience first.
In religion, the definition of obedience is pretty straightforward: “to obey or not to obey the Lord God. This has been and is the crucial question for every human being. Obedience as opposed to disobedience is a life-and-death issue. God has given humankind the innate power of choice: the choice of obedience leads to God's promised blessing of life; the choice of disobedience leads to curse, judgment, and death” (biblestudytools.com) I have already mentioned the book called “The Ladder of the Beatitudes”, which encourages people to except the evil and forgive it. Perhaps, the best example of obedience in the Bible is the example of Abraham who agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac, because God demanded him to do so (Genesis 22:1-19). For the modern reader, such obedience might seem wild; this is not obedience, we say. This is the absence of love! But for Christians, there is nothing more important than love for God, and even the attachment to one’s children cannot be compared to the attachment to God. If we look closer at the situation with Abraham, we can realize how horrible it was; he had to literally cut his son’s throat just like he did with sheep and goats. Someone who has children is not able to understand how Abraham could even consider killing his son for his faith. However, in Christianity and Judaism, this was considered a sign of Abraham’s endless love for God. With this in mind, we can understand why Christians remain so indifferent to things like rape, murder, and other social issues. If Abraham was ready to kill his son for God, there is nothing wrong with other victims, because without the evil we wouldn’t be able to see the good.
Moreover, things that happen in the world and that we consider to be serious issues are not always so in Christianity. For example, Catholic Church thinks that women are initially inferior to men and doesn’t want to change its opinion on this question. Throughout history, the church has been terrorizing women for the initial sin that Eve was found guilty of. However, the church seems to forget that Adam was also involved in committing the sin and never happened to stop Eve or argue her point. All the evidence against Adam is somehow omitted. When Christianity came to Rome, the status of women immediately lowered. This is what Rodney Stark says about the divorces in Rome: “Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a women were seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her”. However, if a woman wanted a divorce, she had to bring her father or whomever “owned” her to the court. (235) We can clearly see that women were considered to be properties of men; they belonged to their fathers before they got married, and after marriage, they belonged to their husbands. In Christian Rome, women were able to own the property and do the “manful” business, but they had to be “supervised by men.” Such an insulting attitude towards women continues during the middle ages, when all the beautiful women were burned because of their appearance. They were killed without any trial if someone told on them and accuse them of witchcraft.
Yeager and Stassen, two theologists who looked into the works of Niebuhr, would agree with the fact that Christian church is often somewhat disconnected from the society. The theologists believe that the church is the servant of the society, and thus, it should not only be focused on forgiving others’ sins, but also on helping others prevent those sins. In fact, they believe that people, including the believers, are not able to exist in isolation, because only from the community do we get out knowledge. They would definitely agree with Berry’s point of view as their literary work proves that his theory is right. Many people go to the church in order to believe that the world is still alive and that people haven’t yet lost all of their kindness and compassion. People come to the church because they seek an inner peace; they want to be healed by escaping the pressure of the modern society. But what do they encounter in the church? Every day, the priest is reading chapters from the Bible, and in each of those chapters there are so many social issues that are considered just fine. Women are being discriminated and slavery is shown like something normal. Of course, many of those things are a part of history and thus, cannot be omitted. But as we live in the modern world, the church has to focus on the modern problems as well. Yeager and Stassen would agree that although we have to remember and appreciate our history, we cannot ignore things that are relevant for us today. Many people come to the church to make it easier to go through the obstacles that they’re experiencing. Those people don’t want to hear how wrong and sinful it is to divorce, for example. They don’t want to hear that their destiny is to be with someone they no longer love. They don’t want to hear that the goal of their lives is to accept and forgive someone who is no longer interested in them or even more, who cheated on them. All they want to hear is that their lives will change for better and that there is nothing that cannot be overcome. They also want to hear that they can still be happily married again with someone who truly deserves their love and care. Of course, the church doesn’t accept divorces. It is, in my opinion, one of the biggest issues, because it shows how little understanding the church has when it comes to human relationship. The same goes for the abuse of women; I have already introduced the article that mentioned how man treated the raped women in the Christian Rome. Although it is not vocalized anymore, the church stays indifferent to such things. Yeager says that “Church is the servant of the world” (124), but it never seems to be such in the reality.
In his work, Niebuhr introduces a taxonomy, where he talks about the relationship between Christ and culture. One of the ideas that he introduces says that Christ transforms culture. Where the help of Christ, culture can be saved from the decay that it is experiencing. He claims that Christ and culture are strongly tied together, although they don’t always agree. The Christian church seems to exclude culture from its little world that remains behind the church doors. There are many reasons for it: the church considers the modern culture to be sinful and corrupt. The church seems to never be satisfied with the way people behave, however, it never does anything to invest into the ethical development of the society. The believers rarely take part in demonstrations or protests unless they are connected with the church. They seem to be hiding from things that are happening in the world and claim that all they can do it is to pray for people’s strengths. Prayers were proved to help, but sometimes actions are also needed in order to show their compassion. Another reason is the fact that the church is excluded from the government and from the life of the country. The government finds it harmful to let the church interfere with its conservative dogmas. However, is the church developed and democratic approach and demonstrated its ability to engage in and the problems and help sort them out, I am sure that the government would except its help. After all, it doesn’t matter if we believe in God or not, or what God or gods we believe in. We are all outraged and hurt buy the problems that our children and ourselves have to face. And as a society that belongs neither to the church nor to the government, but to the world, we are able to fight the evil that we encounter on the everyday basis. To achieve that, each of us has to work on something little: the church has to open its eyes and face the fact that if we except all the evil that happens in the world, the world will just be destroyed. It should also develop a more democratic approach and open its heart to all the genders and sexual identities in order to judge every person fairly based on the good and bad things that he or she has done. And people should stop being so focused on faith and atheism and concentrate on the problems that concern all of us equally. Once we look around and see each other and acknowledge each other’s existence, we will be able to develop care and compassion for each other.
Works Cited
Forest, James H The ladder of the Beatitudes. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1999.
"Obedience - Definition and Meaning, Bible Dictionary." Bible Study Tools. Web. 05 May 2016.
The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1989. Web. 5 May 2016.
Stark, Rodney. "Reconstructing the Rise of Christianity: The Role of Women." Sociology of Religion 56.3 (1995): 229. Web. 5 May 2016.
Stassen, Glen Harold, Diane M. Yeager, John Howard. Yoder, and H. Richard Niebuhr. Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture. Nashville: Abingdon, 1996. Print.
