The Air We Breathe – 11/1/2023
For many generations now, most people share a common understanding of concepts like humanity, history, freedom, progress, kindness, and equality. These concepts are grounded in the Christian worldview, although they are embraced by most non-Christians, too.
This is the thesis of Glen Scrivener’s 2022 book, The Air We Breathe: Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality.
For example, equality: For most of human history, rigid moral hierarchies (with graded privileges) were the norm. Now we want to root out inequalities everywhere.
Compassion for the poor or disabled was once considered to be weakness, but now a virtue. Consent (sexually) used to be irrelevant. Powerful men possessed those whom they pleased; now, that’s abuse. Education was a luxury, now a necessity. Freedom has historically been for the privileged few, with slavery widespread and multitudes restricted by class. Freedom now is an unalienable right.
Scrivener: “An older goldfish swishes past a couple of small fry. “How’s the water, boys?” he enquires. “Water,” they ask. “What’s water?”
In the West, the author argues, Christianity is the water in which we swim, or rather, Christianity is the air we breathe, unseen and all-pervasive. Our values, our goals, our hopes and dreams, have been distinctively shaped or at least influenced by what Jesus of Nazareth did, and continues to do through His followers.
Even if someone is not a Christian, in the West he is constrained by the Christian view of equality: each individual has equal moral standing, regardless of race, gender, wealth, etc. This is a Christian view grounded in man’s creation in the image of God. Men, women, slaves, free, rich, poor . . . we all stand accountable before God in need of salvation through Jesus Christ. As sinners, our attitudes should begin with humility.
Joseph Henrich coined the acronym W.E.I.R.D. to describe modern Western values: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The roots are Christian. Most of the world, through most of history would heartily agree that ‘weird’ is the right term.
Consider the roots of the Gospel. We see the cross as a symbol of redemption and salvation even for the lowly. Its inventors, though, the Romans, saw the cross as degradation, worthlessness, torture, and unrecoverable loss. Tacitus called it “the extreme penalty.” The crucified body was tossed away as garbage, to be eaten by dogs and birds.
Crucifixions were public spectacles, like hangings were in more recent eras. Crucifixions were offered as ‘half-time’ entertainment in gladiatorial games. A crucifixion was an ‘un-person-ing’ and a warning: Do not go the way of this wretch.
A Gospel – “good news” – that put the Creator on a cross willingly, guiltless, sinless, and as a substitute for our justly deserved judgment . . . that was ridiculous, foolish, as Paul put it. That each of us, then and now, deserved what Jesus suffered – and more because the wrath of God was more than physical – required awesome humility and repentance. Every sinner must see his just reward as on the cross that the Lord Jesus took in our place. Righteousness could only be imputed, it could not be earned. This was incredibly radical stuff!
In a typical Roman’s eyes, or to most of the Greeks on Mars Hill, Christ was necessarily a loser, “his worshippers fools and his religion a perversity. If Roman citizens could not bear to have the name of the cross on their lips, what sort of God would show up as its victim?”
On the matter of justice, Scrivener observes, ancients believed that justice was the enforcement of inequality. Of course the nobles and the wealthy should not be held accountable to the same standards as the peasants and the slaves! This is precisely the reverse of our modern concept of justice, which derives from our moral equality under God’s laws.
Slavery in ancient times was woven into the economy, politics, and religion. But the New Testament equates slave and free in God’s eyes, and in each other’s eyes, too. Over the next few centuries after the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, minds and hearts changed, cultures changed, everything changed. Yes, history is still messy and ‘Christianity’ was warped and derailed in many ways . . . it still is . . . but the moral air we breathe has been transformed dramatically.
As Scrivener relates, “Now the idea of humble sacrifice has gone from shameful to glorious. Now we consider equality, compassion, freedom, and all the WEIRD values this book explores as obvious.”
During COVID, former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption declared, “I don’t accept that all lives are of equal value.” It was a TV debate regarding the damage lockdowns would do to the young, in contrast with the elderly’s risk to viral exposure. Well, outrage ensued. “Who are you to put a value on life?” asked an opponent.
Now, if Plato had heard Sumption’s declaration, he might have thought, “Just what is the debate about exactly?” The father of Western philosophy would think it trivially obvious that lives are of unequal value. Women, men, Greeks, barbarians, free, slaves, rich, poor, wise, foolish . . . of course some are more valuable than others and so should enjoy proportionate privileges!
Logically, from a secular viewpoint, you can make a strong case for Plato’s view. Only under the Christian perspective, with each man, woman, child, slave, etc., made an eternal soul in the image of God, is equality of a life’s value a moral imperative.
Scrivener: “What we see are differences. What we seek is equality.” But you cannot find the equality your conscience yearns for in DNA sequences or IQ tests, or in anything physically measurable.
How are we to be valued? By the chemicals that comprise our bodies? By our projected life’s wages? We know that our worth must transcend the physical, the economic. We know this because God, the God described in the Bible, is real and is the Personal Foundation for our present being and for our eternity. It is frankly impossible for one to imagine how he might cease to exist some day. No, we know that we are souls that transcend our fragile bodies and we yearn for our heavenly Father to welcome us home. At age 71, such thoughts rise in poignancy.
Ancients would choke on the idea that male and female are both and equally made in God’s image, and will reign in God’s restored world. Maybe a king might be so destined. But a peasant (born again) in India? A factory worker (born again) in Milwaukee? Indeed.
On the other hand, consider our accountability. Our world is messed up and deteriorating rapidly. The Bible is clear – that’s our fault! Our willful and heinous sins, from Adam to you and me, are the root cause of Earth’s fallenness, the earthquakes and hurricanes, the diseases and wars, the crimes and the broken families. We are to blame . . . but . . . God delivered the Gospel, the ultimate good news, for sinners, from Adam to you and me. Upon individual and willful repentance and faith in Jesus, we are reborn into God’s family, and He is preparing a new home for us, New Jerusalem, and eventually a New Earth for us to enjoy dominion over, ‘wherein dwelleth righteousness.’
Regarding the air of compassion, Plato and Aristotle believed that defective newborns should be abandoned in garbage dumps or drowned in rivers. Infanticide was legal under Roman law. The oldest known treatise on gynaecology included a section, “How to Recognize the Newborn that is Worth Rearing.” If not, expose it to die in the elements and try again.
Why so harsh? Raising a disabled child was inconvenient. This, of course, is the dominant reason for abortion, then and now. With ultrasound and other techniques, it is more convenient than ever to opt for abortion. It is the Christian worldview that fights against the murder of the unborn. Note that the most wicked activists and politicians in this country work to legalize the slaughter of infants if they survive an attempted abortion.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) explained the worldview connection: “Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection.” I get it. If evolution is how we got here, if matter is everything, if God is not there and we are not souls but merely clods of matter in motion, then choose convenience.
Nietzsche again: “Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life.” So, Christianity is the enemy of ruthless convenience. Well, thank you, Friedrich. We affirm your accusation.
In the Roman world, John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world . . .” – was strange, ridiculous. That God would send His Son as a sacrifice . . . crazy. That’s why Paul calls the Gospel foolishness to his culture. The Romans already had a ‘son of God.’ Caesar Augustus, their emperor, was also called ‘Lord,’ ‘Saviour of the world.’ Julius Caesar’s claims to divinity included killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million. Caesar boasted about that; it was evidence of his godhood.
Yet the Christians proclaimed that the essence of God’s love was God’s son on a Roman cross, with arms outstretched to His enemies, offering forgiveness. Jesus came to serve, not to rule . . . not the first time, that is. But He will judge and rule when He returns.
Now, servant leadership is so common as to be a cliché. Christian elders are termed ‘ministers,’ the equivalent of ‘servants.’ In the UK, cabinet members are called ‘ministers.’
Historian William Lecky argues that the viciously bloody gladiatorial games were finally outlawed by Christian influence. Similarly, Christians produced the end of exposing / killing infants by exercising sacrificial love to the poor, the sick, and the abandoned. This was not simply a matter of legal victories; rather, the preaching and practice of the Gospel changed hearts, minds, and culture.
I’ll comment that most of the moral protest and efforts of American Christians in my lifetime seem to have focused on legalities. Modern Christians have woefully neglected Gospel preaching and personal witness. They seem, rather, to enjoy building megachurch campuses and watching the show.
Scrivener turns to the issue of sexual consent. He cites the case of predator Larry Nassar, who abused at least 265 girls over decades as team doctor for USA gymnastics. One of his victims pleaded with the judge to impose the maximum possible sentence to send the message that the victims were worth everything. Nassar received multiple sentences totalling 100 to 200 years.
Scrivener: “How much is a little girl worth? We want to answer, ‘Everything.’”
The ancients didn’t see it this way. Once you bought a slave, you could do as you like to her, or to him. Also, prostitution was an open, prominent industry. “A quick visit to the nearest brothel (and they were everywhere), would set you back the price of a loaf of bread.”
Christians created the very concept of sexual abuse. The idea would be nonsense to the freeborn Roman man, who had an unquestioned right to the bodies of lower-class women, children, slaves, and prostitutes. It wasn’t abuse; it was merely use.
The ‘Jesus revolution’ was far different from the 1960s sexual revolution. The latter sought to remove taboos around female sexuality. The former imposed restrictions on men. The 1960s said, ‘Women can be as free as men,’ while the New Testament teaches, ‘Men must be as restricted as women.’ Furthermore, social and psychological science has finally caught up with biblical morality, discovering that a faithful, lifelong, marital relationship enables better sex, better physical and mental health, a longer life, and far more happiness.
Why is this so? God designed reality and so He gives us principles whereby we can successfully live. Marriage joins two people whom God has joined together. What we do with our flesh has a strong spiritual component. It matters to God and facilitates our relationship with Him. Casual sex and easy divorce are anathema to the reality of how God designed human beings. 1 Corinthians chapter 7 teaches a stunning mutuality and equality regarding male and female in marriage. 1 Corinthians chapter 13 defines love in a way that is totally foreign to most of the world throughout most of history, but now . . . it’s simply the air we breathe.
There is a long-documented history of the Christian roots of universities. Oxford, for example, stood on its motto, “God is my guiding light.” Sadly, the moral and philosophical decline of the West’s universities is due to Marxist scheming and influence that has not been sufficiently resisted.
On politics, consider the “rights” of citizens. If individuals possess rights, then rulers cannot have unlimited powers. The biblical principal is revealed in 2 Samuel 23:3 – “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” The King is neither God nor a god; rather a man, subject to God’s judgment. Be warned, tyrant!
The modern foundations for rights-centric democracies were laid down in the Middle Ages: separation of church and state, human rights, just war theory, just and constrained rulers, rule by law. These concepts all have Christian roots and are not in sync with the history of those parts of the world with scant Christian influence. Scrivener particularly points out that the so-called Enlightenment’s emphasis on man’s reason (apart from God) did not lead to freedom. Atheism and Communism are the perpetual enemies of freedom.
The Christian roots of science, affirmed by many secular scholars, are grounded in God’s free choice. He could have deemed planetary orbits to be triangular, for example. There is no way the universe must be. God’s freedom to create the world’s dynamical patterns – physical laws that we are free to discover – motivates our desire to explore. Philosophers of science use terms like “intelligibility” and “comprehensibility” to marvel at the fact that we are actually able to figure out the patterns; for example, the inverse-squared law for gravitational and electromagnetic forces.
Because we believe that God is not capricious (as opposed to Islam), we anticipate order in the universe, so that orbits work the same today as they did thousands of years ago, and that hydrogen spectra have the same physical cause in a far away galaxy as they do in a laboratory in Albuquerque. Albert Einstein: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . .The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”
God, indeed, designed our brains so that we could explore His works and glorify Him. Psalm 104:31 – “The glory of the Lord shall endure forever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works.” And God wants us to share in appreciating His works. Cats, dogs, and chimps cannot so share. If evolution were true, and we are mere survival machines, our truth-seeking abilities would be suspect . . . and we would not have the innate capacity to doubt our own conclusions. (Doubt, testing, and verification are logical and essential elements of science.) Scrivener observes that properly done science must take human fallibility, including agendas and biases, into account.
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman insisted that the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. Then there are the disastrous ‘science’ fiascoes of the COVID experience, including the rush to develop dangerous vaccines without adequate testing, the deliberate lies of scientists in public health organizations, and the suppression of data regarding masking, natural immunity, and adverse vaccine reactions . . . which continue to this day.
Why is there moral outrage about phony, life-threatening science? On a Christian worldview, outrage is appropriate. To the Marxist, or Nietzschean, or wokist, though, truth is defined by the established narrative; it’s all about power.
The modern heroes of science (such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton) loved God and yearned to discover His mighty works. They believed science was possible because God was the Creator of all. Newton, for example: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an Intelligent Powerful Being.” Despite the world’s complexity, they believed that God created the human mind fit for the task of understanding God’s works.
On http://imo-europe.com/googlef91182d245885077.html liberty . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence, 1776.)
Considering the history of the world, to claim that equality and human rights are “self-evident” is audacious. This truth is resonant only to the heart, mind, and conscience tuned to a biblical worldview. Ancient civilizations knew nothing of the kind. Scrivener suggests that slavery is a stronger candidate for a universal ground to civilization. “Rights are weird,” he notes, “nonsense on steroids,” as characterized by philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
The source and ground for the idea of unalienable rights is the Christian faith, specifically that we are all souls made in God’s image, and stand equally before Him, both accountable and redeemable, via perfectly equal standards.
What about slavery? “Abolition was not an Enlightenment movement.” It was entirely a Christian initiative, both in England and in the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries. How ironic is it that the leftists in the West, who damn our history of slavery (as do we), especially hate Christianity, the source and bulwark of human freedom? But modern Marxists (or wokists) are either genuine or practical atheists, with no moral ground at all to criticize slavery . . . and no motivation to fight for freedom, either, as shown horrifically in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet empire, and yet today in China, North Korea, and Cuba.
On progress . . . In ancient cultures the past was seen as better than the present. In the past resided heroes and gods. The only way forward to the ancient Greeks was down, although it was possible that we might cycle around again. The Hindu grand narrative invokes cycles going back into eternity.
The Bible, however, portrays an arrow pointing onwards and upwards through history, with unique events enroute, such as the deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, the coming of the Messiah, and above all, the 2nd coming of Christ and a New Heaven and a New Earth in our future.
The Marxist (or wokist) strives to establish utopia on Earth, administered, of course, by their own privileged elites. Urban America is presently suffering the consequences. “Progressives” have a truly dark vision of a godless, secular future. Their attempts at utopia since the beginning of the 20th century have resulted in the misery and deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Do they admit error? No. Adolf Hitler was once asked what was the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity.
His answer did not include his own rise to power. Rather, he opined, “The coming of Christianity.” Continuing, “This filthy reptile [Christianity] raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no use for a fairy story invented by the Jews.”
This sentiment is still shared by Marxists, wokists, academics, and corporate elites.
What was the basis for the judgments in the trials at Nuremberg (1945-46)? Why did the Allies insist on prosecuting the Nazi leaders for their atrocities in WW2? Didn’t the Germans have their own culture? Aren’t all cultures equally valid? Doesn’t might make right? What standard could be used for judgment?
The Nazis were prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.” But “humanity” was present on all sides of every issue. Some humans ruthlessly gassed the Jews and some, at great risk, hid and rescued them. Humans both lost the war and won the war. Himmler, a defendant, stated that he was “but a part of this world.” Goebbels admitted that the Jew is a man, but the flea is also an animal. To the evolutionist there is no intrinsic moral difference between man and flea.
In short, there is no transcendent justice to condemn Nazism, unless you are immersed in the atmosphere of Christianity. The Allies couldn’t go so far as to invoke God, but their moral outrage relied on the Western public’s acceptance of biblical morality. The Allies depended on the air we breathe.
Progress is doomed to disintegrate, according to biblical prophecy, during the Tribulation, under the rule of the Antichrist. But progress will reignite when Jesus returns. Can’t wait.
Hopefully, we’re close. Under modernism and postmodernism, it was understood that, as the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “without God . . . all things are permitted.”
Now, under post-postmodernism, anti-Christians have discovered that they love preaching, they love moralizing, they love finger-wagging. Accordingly, the most virulent judgmentalists are the woke cancel-culture sociopaths. Social media magnifies and supercharges outrage. Getting offended gives many a cheap high. And they want everyone to know just how angry they are! The world is now filled with woke evangelists.
Scrivener observes that the heart of this new zealotry lacks what Christianity features – above all: forgiveness. Sin against almighty God and forgiveness is immediately available via humility and confession. Offend a Christian and the true Christian is obligated to forgive you, even unto seventy times seven. Offend a wokist, though, and you’re doomed for life. Who wants to live in that world?
Psalm 130:3 . . . If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
God is omniscient and eternal, yet He promises to forget sins when we repent. Psalm 103:12 . . . As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.
Scrivener has much more to say. I recommend his book. His final advice is, To the “Won”: Be Weird. If you’re a genuine born again Christian, embrace it. You’re on the (future) winning side of history. As for today, and every day, be a witness, speak up, be salt, be light, share some Gospel truth, hand out a tract . . . even if you get some grief. Your Lord will appreciate it.
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com