ON PIETAS
I am old enough to remember when preachers promoted piety—particularly those whose vocabulary had been formed by reading 18th century evangelists like John Wesley or George Whitfield. In the old days people believed in the meanings of words, and they stuck with them. And if a person didn’t understand a word, you defined it for them. And if he didn’t like its meaning, you’d try to help him see the value of the word anyway. Imagine that. I can recall when people changed their minds about the word piety. Younger men began to prefer younger sounding terms. The word devotions was popular. Later, more sophisticated people preferred the term spiritual disciplines. Publishers really ran with that for a while. But folksy youth pastor types liked Quiet Time, QT for short. There has been something of a downgrade here, even with spiritual disciplines. Can you detect it? Words retain an aftertaste, even when the old meanings are lost. Originally, piety said something like a mode of life. QT is for your to-do list.
Now, religion is another word that has fallen out of favor. The Latin root, religio, means to bind. Is it any wonder that the apostles to popular culture now insist that “Christianity is not a religion; it is a relationship”?... As wonderful as a personal relationship with Jesus is, the people that show the most enthusiasm for it do not give much thought to all the things that have to be in place in order for it to be possible. Take the Bible, for instance, or the sacraments, or the creeds, or even prayer. All of these things must be in place before you can even imagine having a personal relationship with Jesus... No, you cannot reduce Christianity to a relationship; it is bigger than that. Religion really is a better word than relationship for describing what it is.
While losing words is a big problem you don’t actually need to lose a word to lose a meaning. You can obscure it by the subtle misuse of a word. And over time a new meaning can actually overshadow the original. It can even contradict it. You can see this with the word freedom, for example. Once it meant taking care of oneself. Now it means making other people support your choices.
What we are left with today is heart religion, because now the heart is the only place Jesus can be publicly acknowledged to live.
[The] original Gnostics taught that the physical world was made by a clumsy and malevolent god, and that salvation consists in escaping from his creation by coming to know your true spiritual self. While most people are not Gnostics in this sense, Gnosticism-lite is pretty common. Gnosticism-lite cannot see how the physical world can communicate spiritual truths. Instead, spiritual insight is found within the garden of the heart.
Here’s the scene as described by Bernard Knox, Director Emeritus of Harvard’s Center for Hellenistic Studies, “After realizing the fighting was no longer of use, that Troy was doomed, [Aeneas] carried his father, Anchises, on his shoulders out of the burning city, holding his son Ascanius by the hand, with his wife, Creusa, following behind.”... While they would have admired the picture, I don’t think that this is what the preachers of my youth had in mind when they talked about piety. They talked about Bibles, and notebooks, and being alone with God, preferably in the woods on a summer day. So, what were the Romans thinking of when they called this piety? Here’s Bernard Knox again, The word pius does indeed refer, like its English derivative, to devotion and duty to the Divine; this is the reason cited by Poseidon in the Iliad for saving Aeneas from death at the hand of Achilles. And in the Aeneid he is always mindful of the gods, constant in prayer and thanks, and dutiful in sacrifice. But the words pius and pietas have in Latin a wider meaning. Perhaps the best English equivalent is something like “dutiful,” “mindful of one’s duty”—not only to the gods but also to one’s family and to one’s country.
[The] idea conveyed by the word pietas was not unique to the Romans. For example, Greeks had a word that had almost an identical meaning, and in Acts 17:23, the Apostle Paul used it to commend the Athenians. It is a form of ευσεβεω, and that word means, “to act reverently towards God, one’s country, magistrates, relations, and to all whom dutiful regard or reverence is due.”10 What should impress us about both words is their comprehensive nature. They didn’t promote a withdrawal from the world; they did just the opposite. That’s because people didn’t divide the world into religious and nonreligious categories. For people in the first century the world was a cosmos, a sacred order; and it was filled with other beings, some of whom were people, while others were gods. And you owed them. Piety paid its debts.
[We] practice something novel in the history of the world, what we call the “separation of Church and state.” Romans would have considered that impious. In fact, Romans believed pietas justified their right to rule the world. Here’s Cicero, the great orator and politician in the Roman Senate, making the case: . . . who, once convinced that divinity does exist, can fail at the same time to be convinced that it is by [divine] power that this great empire has been created, extended, and sustained? However good be our conceit of ourselves, conscript fathers, we have neither excelled the Spaniards in population, nor Gauls in vigor, nor Carthaginians in versatility, nor Greeks in art; but in piety, in devotion to religion [sed pietate ac religione], and in that special wisdom which consists in the recognition of the truth that the world is swayed and directed by divine power, we have excelled every race and every nation.
The thing about pietas that you can’t miss is its social character. It didn’t isolate you; instead it bound you to everything else. It was the glue of the world: things divine and human things, matter and spirit, the past and the future, [and] the generations.
ON COSMOS
Paul and his Roman audience didn’t see the cosmos in the same way that Carl Sagan did. The cosmos was more than matter in motion for them. It was an ordered thing—the largest order of them all. That’s what the word actually meant. It included everything, even invisible things. And it also housed microcosms—little orders that depended on and reflected the larger one. If they didn’t, they couldn’t exist.
With the gods of antiquity, order was called for so that the gods could have a suitable place to live. This captures a valuable insight that is reflected in the Latin word for house—the word domus. Not only is that the root of the word domestic, it is also the root of the word dominion. In the same way, the cosmos is like a great house, one that is divinely ordered.
First, we lost the cosmological basis for the household. Then we lost its economic basis. And now the biological basis is being deconstructed through technology and gender-bending word games. In a world where you can order sperm from a catalog, and it is possible to have three biological parents, can father and mother or male and female mean anything normative?
People once believed that the cosmos was a crowded place, filled with everything from sprites to archangels—a grand, towering structure reaching up and out of sight. And there we were, in the middle of it all. It was an ennobling place to live. But today most of us think of the cosmos as empty space. In our minds it has become somewhat like Detroit—a vacant city, crumbling all around. The old gods are long gone, and even Christians have a hard time believing in angels. And when it comes to Jesus, He lives with us inwardly, in the garden of the heart.
The cosmos has a future. There will be a new Heaven and a new earth. Elements of the original cosmos will carry over, and that is really good news because the redeemed are included in what gets carried over. We live by the light of tomorrow’s sun, and that sun is the Lord God (Rev. 22:5). This is the basis of our piety, the substance of our daily duties.
ON HOUSEHOLD CODES
I never gave the New Testament household codes much thought until I noticed how scrupulously people try to avoid them. That’s when I began to suspect that they could be indispensable... I suspect that [the household codes] embarrass most pastors in the Western world. They are terribly undemocratic, and in the language of our day, they’re definitely sexist and classist. Most contemporary commentators inform us that the codes were a concession to the prejudices of the time. Just why Paul should do this when he could instigate a riot just by showing his face, people don’t care to discuss.
Biblical scholarship sure isn’t what it used to be. At its highest levels it is entirely captive to feminists and their allies. I can recall when they began to assume their chairs at various schools. At first things were not too bad. They had their opinions and you had yours. Now you’re not allowed to have yours. There is a tendentious character to their research. The goal isn’t so much to discern the meaning of a text, but instead to uncover hidden agendas. Some have labeled it the hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutics is the practice of interpretation. And there are different schools of thought when it comes to how to go about it. The hermeneutic of suspicion assumes the worst about people, especially when it comes to the role of ancient texts in antiquity. Instead of demonstrating that someone in the past was preoccupied with securing his own interests at the expense of others, it assumes he was... any defense that is proffered by others that is based on the exigencies on the ground is just kicked aside as rationalization. Some scholars go along with this because they’re afraid to lose their jobs. But many scholars are not so pusillanimous: they enjoy pillorying the dead.
[The] real problem people have with the household codes: they don’t believe that the sacrifices that they call for are worth making. They don’t believe that households serve a higher purpose than the personal goals of the individuals that live in them.
What we really need is a recovery of a way of life. The codes outlined a way to order our households so that they can serve as microcosms of the largest order of them all... Our households need to recover what made them strong in the past. And to do this you must have a man of the house and a code to guide him so that he can order his house.
In the Ten Commandments the command to honor parents implied the duty to care for them in their old age. This isn’t a matter of debate. Commentators as far back as you can go all agree.
Today an inheritance is whatever is left in the bank when your parents’ assets are liquidated and the bills are paid. Most people do not inherit a farm, or an apartment building, or a business. But in old-fashioned households, property bound the generations together. No wonder honoring parents made for a long life; when you served them you served yourself—and hopefully your children would do the same.
[A] household ordered by the household code in Ephesians reflects the rule of Christ.
Let’s admit it, submission can be very disagreeable no matter who the man is; even when he is the image of the invisible God. But submission is required. It is always required. Every human institution in the history of the world has been held together by it... [But] you can’t build anything on rebellion. Submission will eventually be called for: armies can’t win without submission, and football teams can’t score without submission, and children can’t learn math without submission, and businesses can’t make a profit without submission. We can be honest about it, or we can try to hide it—this is life. And it is true for the house of God, and for the households we live in.
ON CHRISTENDOM
Heaven had not come to earth; that civilization had its faults, its sins—but on the scale of relative goods, it was the best there ever was. But it was destroyed by a new way of seeing. No, the invention of the telescope didn’t destroy that civilization. Atheism should get the blame for undermining it—atheism, that way of seeing that doesn’t see. Atheists tell us that there is no intrinsic meaning to things because there is no God to give them meaning.
First we lost the gods, then we lost the one true God, and now we’re losing ourselves. We’re dying.
What becomes of people when they turn away from the light? They deform. Things lose proportion; little things swell grotesquely, while other things that were meant to be large and vigorous, shrivel. At least the old pagans had things to focus their minds upon; today we stare into the void.
One of the things that conservatives should conserve is the belief that history has a Governor. As awful as things can be, Someone is ordering things to their given ends. Even the age that we live in serves a purpose in the great scheme of things. This means that we are the true progressives.
ON SLAVERY
Western civilization did not invent slavery. It can’t even claim to have perfected it. The only claim that Western civilization can make when it comes to slavery is that it is the first civilization that figured out a way to live without it.
There were two sources for slaves: debt and displacement. Debt is fairly easy to understand. Sometimes people need things that they can’t pay for, so they borrow what they need and promise to pay the debt back later. Later arrives, and they can’t pay for one reason or another. What to do? A lender could forgive the debt, that’s true. But if he does that, he has effectively paid the debt himself. What if he doesn’t want to, or simply can’t forgive the debt for one reason or another, what then? If the debtor put up no collateral, then the lender must put the debtor to work.
returning to displacement, apart from man-stealing—something condemned in the Old Testament, by the way—people could be displaced in a variety of ways: warfare, natural disaster, pestilence, the death of a father, and so on. When these things happened relatives would take you in, ideally. But what if they couldn’t, or just wouldn’t?.. Just try to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who has lost everything. Your choices might be beggary, crime, or being taken into a household as some form of servant, either on a temporary basis, or permanently. Which would you choose?
Xenophon condemned the harsh treatment of slaves... even Aristotle could longingly speculate about a world with robots, and other forms of automation, that would make slavery obsolete.
GUERILLA PIETY
Christians have been given suits of armor and they are duty-bound to fight for the household of God. But like Christians in the first century we are hopelessly overmatched on the ground. The principalities continue to rage against the Lord of the Cosmos. Their inhuman machinery menaces us, particularly in the West. The state continues to grow and centralize, technology tracks us (and increasingly it is used to manipulate us), progressive multinational corporations standardize us and commodify us, popular media seek to indoctrinate us and addict us, and state-run education and healthcare are eliminating private rivals so as to make us ever more dependent on government largess. All of these things and more are arrayed against us. In spite of all of these things, Christ has already won. He is our Lord and we are engaged in a long obedience. We wrestle with His enemies.
Word and sacrament serve as a stairway to Heaven, as well as a virtual time machine. When believers worship they rise to heavenly places where they are seated with the risen Lord. They are also sent into the past to sit at the feet of the prophets and the apostles, and they are also flung into the future, where by faith they dimly discern, as though a glass, a day when all things will be done on earth as they are in Heaven.
[Fight] the good fight. Go home, build a house, and if you do it in the right way, you will give the world a glimpse of things to come. There is nothing more terrifying to the principalities than this. Because in the end, the principalities will bow and confess the Lordship of Christ, and if your house is ordered well, it is a reminder of that glorious day (Phil. 2:10–11). And, as hard as it is to imagine, when, at the end of the war for the cosmos, the tribunal for war-crimes is impaneled, you and I will have our seats behind the bench (1 Cor. 6:3).
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