Christianity and the History of Culture

An excerpt from "Christianity and the History of Culture" | Christopher Dawson | From Chapter 2   of The Formation of Christendom

The history of Christianity is the history of a divine intervention in history, and we cannot study it apart from the history of culture in the widest sense of the word. For the word of God was first revealed to the people of Israel and became embodied in a law and a society. Secondly, the word of God became Incarnate in a particular person at a particular moment of history, and thirdly, this process of human redemption was carried on in the life of the Church which was the new Israel--the universal community which was the bearer of divine revelation and the organ by which man participated in the new life of the Incarnate Word.

Thus Christianity has entered into the stream of human history and the process of human culture. It has become culturally creative, for it has changed human life and there is nothing in human thought and action which has not been subjected to its influence, while at the same time it has suffered from the limitations and vicissitudes that are inseparable from temporal existence.

Now there are those who reject this mingling of religion and history, or Christianity and culture, since they believe that religion is concerned with God rather than man, and with the absolute and eternal rather than the historical and the transitory. We certainly need to recognize how important this aspect of religion is and how man has a natural sense of divine transcendence. And we know from the history of religious thought that we do actually find religious men of this kind--men who seek to transcend human nature by the flight of the Alone to the Alone, in the words of the Neo-Platonist philosopher, and who find the essence of religion in the contemplation of pure being or of that which is beyond being.

But this is not Christianity. Although Christianity does not deny the religious value of contemplation or mystical experience, its essential nature is different, it is a religion of Revelation, Incarnation and Communion; a religion which unites the human and the divine and sees in history the manifestation of the divine purpose towards the human race.

It is impossible to understand Christianity without studying the history of Christianity. And this, as I see it, involves a good deal more than the study of ecclesiastical history in the traditional sense. It involves the study of two different processes which act simultaneously on mankind in the course of time. On the one hand, there is the process of culture formation and change which is the subject of anthropology, history and the allied disciplines; and on the other there is the process of revelation and the action of divine grace which has created a spiritual society and a sacred history, though it can be studied only as a part of theology and in theological terms.

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Comments

[LJ]

"If, however, we accept the Barthian principle, the complete nonexistence of any natural channel of understanding between God and Man, it is difficult to see how such an act of faith can be elicited except from those who already possess some kind of faith."

Since becoming Catholic, and before I even focused on the formal theology, I have found myself contemplating that great mystery, the Incarnation with increasing wonder and awe. I am beginning to realize that it is a very Catholic place to start, and it is perhaps also the most critical area of truncation in the Protestant theology that I knew, as though there was some fear or aversion to exploring the implications of God becoming man, beyond the minimum required for salvation. And, (simplifying, of course) once those requirements were met for the "ticket" to heaven at some future date, as some Evangelical popular train imagery tells us, the need to more deeply understand the Incarnation is gone. Whereas the Catholic path is communion with God, right now, through the incarnate Word made present, and moving forward into ever deeper communion and the wider and deeper implications of the Incarnation itself. As Dr. Scott Hahn would put it, it is the difference between contract and covenant.