The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (16 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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Indeed, the whole notion of rulership and political power is being redefined. God makes a covenant with the second king of the Jews, David, promising that his line will reign forever—a promise that Christians believe is fulfilled by Jesus Christ, descendant of David, who affirmed that his “kingdom was not of this world” (Jn. 18:36). But God never promises protection for David’s sons (cf. 2 Sam. 12:10–11), or for Jerusalem. No earthly dynasty should the people expect. Quite the reverse: David’s grandsons split the kingdom into Israel in the north (falling to the Assyrians in 732 BC) and Judah in the south. Then God sent the prophet Jeremiah to warn Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, to surrender to the Babylonians, or the city would be overrun. The king and his advisors declined, thinking that the Temple built by David’s son, Solomon, would be their talisman, their charm. They reversed the relationship of trust: if God wanted to save His Temple, He had to save them to do it. But the true temple of God is in man’s heart, as Jeremiah had tried hard to teach. So the armies of Nebuchadnezzar ravished Judah, leading thousands of Jews into slavery in Babylon, and razing the Temple to the ground. “How doth the city sit solitary, that was so full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations,” cried Jeremiah (Lam. 1:1).
It’s fascinating to note what the God of Israel is
not.
He is not one god among many. He is not a god tied to a particular city or even culture (the prophets will see God, not Israel, as the ruler of all peoples). He is not a god of nature. He is not personified more than is necessary to make sense of his deeds to a half-barbarous people. We hear nothing of any amours or private life. He decides, but we never stumble upon him worrying, pondering, or reasoning with himself. His right arm is strong to save, but we never hear of his bending it, or cracking his knuckles. He does not move from place to place, like Hermes delivering messages from snowy Olympus. He forbids his people to carve any images of him, lest they confuse him with the power-broking kings around them, or with the beasts. The people are informed not that he looks like them (only with curly locks and a perfect torso), but that
they
resemble
Him.
He has made them in
His image and likeness,
and that cannot be a physically imaginable resemblance.
not.
He is not one god among many. He is not a god tied to a particular city or even culture (the prophets will see God, not Israel, as the ruler of all peoples). He is not a god of nature. He is not personified more than is necessary to make sense of his deeds to a half-barbarous people. We hear nothing of any amours or private life. He decides, but we never stumble upon him worrying, pondering, or reasoning with himself. His right arm is strong to save, but we never hear of his bending it, or cracking his knuckles. He does not move from place to place, like Hermes delivering messages from snowy Olympus. He forbids his people to carve any images of him, lest they confuse him with the power-broking kings around them, or with the beasts. The people are informed not that he looks like them (only with curly locks and a perfect torso), but that
they
resemble
Him.
He has made them in
His image and likeness,
and that cannot be a physically imaginable resemblance.
Who is this God? The revelation strikes like a thunderbolt. He is the God Who Is, beyond specification. He’s not simply a maker, a muddler of slush and soil, who takes some always-existing stuff and molds it into trees and birds and people. He
creates
, because he wills it. Recall the scene in the Sinai, when Moses approaches the burning bush that is not consumed (Ex. 3). When God speaks to him from that bush, Moses asks him his name, something understandable, something to define or limit. The reply shatters expectations: “Tell them that I AM WHO AM sent you.” God does not say “I am the God of fire,” or “I am the God of the mountaintop,” or “I am the God of the sea.” He says, “I am the God who essentially
is.
” To put it in philosophical terms, as later Jewish and Christian thinkers would do, God is Being itself. The Jewish translators of the Septuagint (the Old Testament rendered into Greek in the second century BC) struggled with the name that transcends names.
Ho on,
they rendered it,
The Being
, the One whose nature it is
to be,
and in whom all things that exist have their being.
creates
, because he wills it. Recall the scene in the Sinai, when Moses approaches the burning bush that is not consumed (Ex. 3). When God speaks to him from that bush, Moses asks him his name, something understandable, something to define or limit. The reply shatters expectations: “Tell them that I AM WHO AM sent you.” God does not say “I am the God of fire,” or “I am the God of the mountaintop,” or “I am the God of the sea.” He says, “I am the God who essentially
is.
” To put it in philosophical terms, as later Jewish and Christian thinkers would do, God is Being itself. The Jewish translators of the Septuagint (the Old Testament rendered into Greek in the second century BC) struggled with the name that transcends names.
Ho on,
they rendered it,
The Being
, the One whose nature it is
to be,
and in whom all things that exist have their being.
Now this revelation made all the difference in the world. It allowed the Jews and Christians to view creation as God’s handiwork, while holding him infinitely superior to that creation. Because there is nothing more fundamental than Being, it taught them that God is the maker of laws both moral and natural, who need not submit to some overarching Fate.
It may needle the intellectual elites, but it is historically unassailable: by showing that the universe was ordered and not arbitrary, the God who revealed Himself to Abraham—the same God worshipped by Christians—cleared our way for the farthest reaches of pure science. Yet since God is a Person and not a force, a Being who loves, and not a bundle of physical laws, the Jews and Christians could never look upon that ordered world as distant and amoral. The revelation opened their imaginations to a God whose very limitlessness allows him to be intimately present everywhere, at all times, embraced by all things, working mysteriously in all lives. Their insight into that immanence in turn helped them to bridge the chasm between the particular and the universal, this man and mankind, this moment and all of history. And the revelation was, as Christians believe, made flesh in the person of Jesus, and dwelt among us.
Which leads us to several politically incorrect considerations, as we shall see.
“Empower yourself!” say the voices of the World, because the World bows down before power and scorns the weak. The Hebrews would have done so too, if they’d had their history and worship all their own way. But God consistently reveals that He is no idol tangled up with human authority. Rather He shows that man is most Godlike when most humble; for God “humbled” himself, for love, to create a universe he did not need.
So He makes Adam and Eve in His image and likeness: they are
already
like God, divine in their intelligence and their dominion over the physical world. They would remain in God’s favor, would remain most like God, if they would remember to acknowledge gratefully that He is God and they are not. When they eat of the forbidden fruit, violating the minimal condition of their vast and kingly freedom, they not only seek to be gods; they mistake what true divinity is. They seek to be not like God, but like god, like man’s petty imagination of what a god is: a being who does as he pleases, and makes everyone else do as he pleases, too. They do not humble themselves. They humiliate themselves; they sever themselves from the giver of life, and subject themselves to death, whose greatest terror is nothing other than the emptiness of separation and alienation. But God (not god!) has mercy upon them. He utters a mysterious promise of redemption and clothes them with skins to protect them against the cold.
already
like God, divine in their intelligence and their dominion over the physical world. They would remain in God’s favor, would remain most like God, if they would remember to acknowledge gratefully that He is God and they are not. When they eat of the forbidden fruit, violating the minimal condition of their vast and kingly freedom, they not only seek to be gods; they mistake what true divinity is. They seek to be not like God, but like god, like man’s petty imagination of what a god is: a being who does as he pleases, and makes everyone else do as he pleases, too. They do not humble themselves. They humiliate themselves; they sever themselves from the giver of life, and subject themselves to death, whose greatest terror is nothing other than the emptiness of separation and alienation. But God (not god!) has mercy upon them. He utters a mysterious promise of redemption and clothes them with skins to protect them against the cold.
That is the fundamental narrative of Scripture: weakling man falls in envy of what he mistakes for power, and God the almighty saves him through those whose strength man has overlooked.
God accepts the sacrifice of the younger brother Abel, who offered his lamb with a full heart, but rejects the sacrifice of the brooding, envious Cain. It is from the younger and weaker twin Jacob, not the hunter Esau, that God will raise a great nation, and their old father Isaac, blind in more ways than one, cannot see it. That same Jacob will rouse envy among his sons when he favors the young dreamer Joseph. They throw their brother down a well and sell him into slavery. But from the slave Joseph will come their deliverance when, years later, they must travel to Egypt to barter for grain during a famine. God will choose Moses to deliver His people from bondage, a man in exile from Egypt for homicide. Moses, a stutterer, pleads at first that someone else be sent. Yet this same Moses will be hailed as the greatest of the prophets.
PC Myth: Jesus Was HomelessJust as the Devil uses scripture for his purposes, liberal presidential candidates use Baby Jesus to justify their big-government programs. Only they’re not always scripturally sound.This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child”—or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it.But the point is: The Christmas story isn’t about affordable housing.Mark Steyn
, “Children? Not if you love the planet,” Orange County Register, December 14, 2007
The Lord sends Samuel to anoint one of Jesse’s sons as the next king of Israel. The seven eldest troop before him, but on none of them does the Lord’s favor rest:
But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. (1 Sam. 16:7)
Finally Samuel asks Jesse if that is all the sons he has. Jesse replies, almost as an afterthought, that he does have one more, a mere lad tending the sheep. So David comes forth, ruddy and handsome, and Samuel anoints him. Not that everybody took that anointing seriously. After all, the king Saul was still alive and crowned. And when Saul led his armies against the Philistines and their great warrior Goliath, none of the Israelites dared to take the giant on. But David, still too skinny to wear armor—with his brothers grumbling and wishing he were back home—steps forth with nothing but a sling, some smooth pebbles from the brook, and his boyish and bold faith in God. Those prove to be enough.
God’s favor rests with the lonesome Elijah, a mountaineer of a prophet, inveighing against the citified fertility cults of Baal, practiced by King Ahab and his consort Jezebel and everyone who is anyone. He chooses Amos, a dresser of sycamore trees, to march before the King and the wealthy brokers at the Temple and announce that the Lord does not desire holocausts, but rather justice and mercy, and compassion towards the poor. A Homeric hero might “buy” the favor of a god by promising some great roasted heifer, and a sleek marble temple, and a gilded statue, but God hates such things. He is not the plaything of the powerful. “All our righteousnesses,” cries the prophet Isaiah, “are as filthy rags,” that is, as
menstrual
rags, made unclean by our weakness; “and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (64:6).
menstrual
rags, made unclean by our weakness; “and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (64:6).
Instead, God’s true servant will give himself utterly, for God and for others. He will be despised by the world; they will reckon him of no account; they will abuse him, will seek his life: “He is brought as a sheep to the slaughter” (Is. 53:7). He will cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1), yet God will not “suffer [His] Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10). For “the stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner” (Ps. 118:22), and though young men may faint and warriors fall, “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Is. 40:31), because before the Lord even the great nations, the bustlers, the almighty oppressors of this world, are “as a drop of a bucket” (Is. 40:15).
Let not the cynical secularist attribute this marvelous
realism
, this refusal to bow before political greatness, to the envy of a weakling people. Weaklings too strut and boast. But the Jews, in their own chronicles of Judah (ignoring the schismatic northern kingdom of Israel, whose rulers were beneath their notice), sum up the doings of some of their mightiest kings thus:
realism
, this refusal to bow before political greatness, to the envy of a weakling people. Weaklings too strut and boast. But the Jews, in their own chronicles of Judah (ignoring the schismatic northern kingdom of Israel, whose rulers were beneath their notice), sum up the doings of some of their mightiest kings thus:
“And [Rehoboam] did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the LORD” (2 Chr. 12:14).“And [Jehoram] wrought that which was evil in the eyes of the LORD” (2 Chr. 21:6).“[Ahaziah] also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab: for his mother was his counsellor to do wickedly. Wherefore he did evil in the sight of the LORD” (2 Chr. 22:3–4).
Even the great Manasseh, who reigned for fifty-five years, no small accomplishment in a nation of intrigues and assassinations, is evaluated not according to worldly glory or leading economic indicators or political skill, but according to a standard that both judges the world and transcends the world: “But [Manasseh] did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel” (2 Chr. 33:2).
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