The Magna Carta of Humanity

Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

Os Guinness

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830847167
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

In these stormy times, voices from all fronts call for change. But what kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul?Cultural observer Os Guinness explores the nature of revolutionary faith, contrasting between secular revolutions such as the French Revolution and the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel. He argues that the story of Exodus is the highest, richest, and deepest vision for freedom in human history. It serves as the master story of human freedom and provides the greatest sustained critique of the abuse of power. His contrast between "Paris" and "Sinai" offers a framework for discerning between two kinds of revolution and their different views of human nature, equality, and liberty. Drawing on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Guinness develops Exodus as the Magna Carta of humanity, with a constructive vision of a morally responsible society of independent free people who are covenanted to each other and to justice, peace, stability, and the common good of the community. This is the model from the past that charts our path to the future."There are two revolutionary faiths bidding to take the world forward, " Guinness writes. "There is no choice facing America and the West that is more urgent and consequential than the choice between Sinai and Paris. Will the coming generation return to faith in God and to humility, or continue to trust in the all sufficiency of Enlightenment reason, punditry, and technocracy? Will its politics be led by principles or by power?" While Guinness cannot predict our ultimate fate, he warns that we must recognize the crisis of our time and debate the issues openly. As individuals and as a people, we must choose between the revolutions, between faith in God and faith in Reason alone, between freedom and despotism, and between life and death.

1

I WILL BE
WHO I WILL BE

THE GREAT REVELATION

PRINCIPLE 1: FREEDOM REQUIRES AUTHORITY

“In the beginning” is always the key. As the seed, so the flower. As the acorn, so the oak. As the sketch, so the portrait. As the embryo, so the human being who rises to play their part on the grand stage of life. But most of all, and in a manner that underlies all other beginnings and all other developments, as our ultimate belief, so our vision of humanity and the meaning of the universe and existence itself. Nothing short of that is how the Bible and the book of Exodus introduce the inescapable primacy, authority, and centrality of God for human life, for living—and for freedom. The Sinai Revolution in freedom begins with God, and this insistence is decisive. Where you stand and where you start is how you see what you see and whether you are likely to succeed or fail in your enterprise. That, at least, is where Sinai and critical theory agree, though the standpoint and the starting point for each one are completely different, and the differences make a world of difference.

Yet not so fast, for controversy flares up right there. Simply to mention the word God is to invite the most vehement objections today. The response of Paris and its heirs is instinctive and implacable. Unquestionably, they say, the Enlightenment has superseded any rational belief in God once and for all—unless anyone wants to entertain a private belief that has no relevance for public life. Voltaire, the epitome of the French Enlightenment, famously attacked the Catholic Church before the French Revolution with a slogan, Écrasez l’infâme! (Crush the loathsome thing!). His skepticism turned hatred flamed out into his signature watchword that he repeated hundreds of times. He was followed by others in their turn, such as the young English aristocrat, poet, and would-be revolutionary Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Yet here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinite Eternity blast me, here I swear that I will never forgive Christianity! Oh how I wish I were the antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native hell, never to rise again.1

In the same way, the philosophe and encyclopedist Denis Diderot bluntly declared that the French would never be free until “they strangled the last king with the guts of the last priest.”2

Such militant hostility flared out of the radical wing of the French Revolution from its beginning. Atheism, anticlericalism, de-Christianization, and open animosity to the church and God blazed out together in the fires of the insurrection, and in turn they reinforced the wider social and economic grievances and outrages and led to what became the laicité or strict separation of church and state, which is now a characteristic feature of France’s political system. Such militant animosity toward God (God is dead) and toward religion (the opiate of the people) is a recurring motif in the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. It has marked the revolutionary faith of left-wing political movements ever since and still does. But it is a choice that needs to be reexamined in the light of reason.

At the height of the ten years of the French Revolution, the Jacobin faction and their supporters laid waste to whole regions of France, such as the city of Lyon and the Vendée. They directed the brunt of their ruthless hate against the clergy no less than the long, pitiful procession of royals, nobles, and hapless others in the horrific denouement of the Great Terror of 1793. (“Terror is the order of the day,” it was proclaimed, though ironically the period was also known as “the republic of virtue” because of the moralizing speeches of Robespierre as a “virtuous terrorist.”)3 Historians have described the terror as “social revenge in action.”4 Many of the victims were innocent, guilty only of being the heirs of their ancestors or members of their profession. But regardless, they were all manhandled roughly toward the steely embrace of the razoir nationale (the “national razor” of Madame Guillotine and her bloody “Mass for the masses”).

To be sure, the French revolutionaries appealed to positive ideals such as reason, liberty, and nature, but it was always to serve their fight to the death against the church and God. The negative outbreaks of anti-Christian animosity were widespread and brutal. Churches were ransacked and priests butchered. Joseph Fouché, a Jacobin military commander, ordered the removal of all crosses and statues from graveyards across France, and to repress the hope of the resurrection he decreed that cemetery gates must have only one inscription, “Death is an eternal sleep.” The climax of the revolutionary atheism was the famous “Cult of Reason” (Culte de la Raison) in November 1793. It was Europe’s first state-sponsored established atheistic religion and the first attempt in human history to stamp out religion and religious practice altogether. Churches across France were commandeered and transformed into temples of Reason, the most important being Notre Dame in Paris. The inscription “To Philosophy” was carved over the door of the cathedral, a flame burned on the high altar to symbolize truth, and a provocatively dressed woman was enthroned as the goddess of Reason. The next year, in 1794, Citizen Robespierre replaced “the Cult of Reason” with another civic religion for the new secular republic, “the Cult of the Supreme Being.”

Was such militant atheism accidental or central to the French Revolution and to the revolutionary faith that has exploded from it? Alexander Solzhenitsyn had no doubt that it was central to Marxism later (and we might add, to today’s progressive left radicalism that is so close to it).

The world has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.5

Antifa protesters who burned Bibles in the Portland riots in 2020 and Black Lives Matter protesters who marched down the street in Charlotte, North Carolina, chanting “F--- your Jesus” were lining up with a long tradition. With such bitter animosity toward religion at the heart of the revolutionary left, is there any question that any reference to God, to Sinai, or to the importance of faith for freedom would be scorned if not dismissed from the start? Standpoint theory, however, rightly requires that we state where we come from.

A KEY TO THE PRESENT MOMENT

These old details from the story of the French Revolution are anything but dusty, and they need to be taken seriously. They provide an important key to understanding the present crisis in America, and they bear on the present story in several ways.

First, the anti-Christian and antireligious hostility of the French Revolution is a reminder that requires a candid confession from Christians. If Jews and Christians are called to be witnesses to God (Is 43:10), whether Christians behave as Christians affects whether others will believe what they say. All too often, Christian behavior has flatly contradicted Christian beliefs. The church has deserved many of the attacks made on it and its stands in public life. Christians have betrayed their Lord, dishonored their faith, and brought down the attacks on their own heads—and never more so than in their shameful treatment of God’s people, the Jews. Far too often, through the centuries, the church has been the major casualty of its crimes and follies. It has asked for the way it has been rejected. Can anyone dispute, for example, that the European church in the medieval, the late medieval and the Renaissance ages was both horribly corrupt, egregiously oppressive, and a mainstay of the wider systems of injustice? It was stained indelibly by the excesses of the Inquisition, the evils of the persecution of the Jews, and such horrendous notions as “error has no rights.” Almost all that was done wrong in these centuries was blessed in the church’s name. Who could believe in God if he was the author of such monstrosities?

Lord Acton’s dictum that “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is justly famous, but people forget that it was written in the context of discussing his own church. Had the Hebrew prophets been alive during the Renaissance or in the reigns of Louis XIV and XV, they would doubtless have been the first and the most outraged to excoriate the many evils of Christendom, the shameless corruption of the clergy, or earlier on the brazen succession of secular princelings that were the ostensible “vicars of Christ” and purporting to walk in “the shoes of the fisherman.” What was true in France and Russia, and thus the backdrop of the French and Russian revolutions, was also true in the American South, and thus the backdrop of today’s anti-Christian antiracism in America.

The truth is that no one can understand today’s militant animosity of secularists toward Christians without appreciating a stubborn fact that Christians must ponder deeply: The phenomenon of Western secularism is unique in history, but its leading cause is its revulsion against corrupt and oppressive state churches in Europe. Secularism stands as a parasite on the best of Christian beliefs and a protest against the worst of Christian behavior. That same implacable secularist hostility to the Christian faith is blazing again today, not least in America, where it was once considered foreign, and it crucially affects the way any Christian proposal will be heard. A church unworthy of its faith in God will always blight the appeal of its message and stand as the main roadblock to anyone open to considering her faith in God. Confession, the willingness to acknowledge our sins and go on record against ourselves, is essential to Christian advocacy—and humility—today.

OUR CUT-FLOWER CIVILIZATION

Second, the same anti-Christian and antireligious animosity is a window into the current crisis of Western civilization. In The Will to Power, the notes published by Nietzsche’s sister after his death, Nietzsche argued that “the time is coming when we shall have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years.”6 Nearly a century and a half later, many more would say the opposite—the West is paying for the loss of its Jewish and Christian roots. Until 1789 it was commonplace and historically accurate to describe the West as a “Christian civilization,” regardless of whether any nation had a formally “established church” or not. After the First Amendment in 1791, for example, there was no established church in the United States at the federal level, but there is no question that America understood itself as part of Christian civilization and no less so than Europe.

Many who made such claims about Christian civilization were prominent Christian spokespersons, so their assertions can be heavily discounted for their bias. In 1920, for example, Hilaire Belloc wrote that “the Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith” (by which he meant strictly Catholicism and not even Orthodoxy or Protestantism).7 Others, such as US Presidents Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could hardly be described as Christian spokesmen, yet they routinely referred to “Christian civilization” on numerous occasions as a noncontroversial reference. Historically, Western civilization owes much to the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans, but the West outgrew the Mediterranean world, and it was the Christian faith that was decisive in founding first Europe and then the wider West.

Today, such claims would be dismissed instantly. They are controversial at best and reactionary and prejudiced, if not worse—a “dog whistle,” it is said, for “White privilege,” “Eurocentrism,” “racism” and “colonialism.” The cultural revolution of the 1960s has triumphed, and the “long march through the institutions” has succeeded. Famously, the European Union refused to acknowledge its Christian roots at the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, and even in America ideas and attitudes that were at the heart of the French Revolution have ousted ideas and attitudes at the heart of the American Revolution. The infamous cry of the Stanford protesters in 1987 has become the mantra of many in the educated classes of the West. “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!”

Needless to say, what matters is not the label “Christian civilization,” but the substance of the beliefs behind it. What is to become of notions such as human dignity, human freedom, and human rights if the Jewish and Christian truths that once made them powerful are abandoned? What will happen as our world becomes not only post-truth but post-rights? Ever since the 1930s critics such as Malcolm Muggeridge have charged that left-wing intellectuals in Europe were cutting off the branch they were sitting on. Nowhere is that more consequential than over human rights. Human rights are the direct reflection of our views of humanity, but with no foundational basis for human dignity, we have moved from what was once considered the natural rights of the Universal Declaration to the antinatural rights of abortion and euthanasia, and are now moving to the transnatural rights of transgenderism and the eugenics of tomorrow. The folly of cutting off the branch is now true of the West as a whole. The West has become a cut-flower civilization. It is living off the whiff of an empty bottle, and the pretense that we can count on everything staying the same as before is wearing dangerously thin. For a culture that was once literally God-given, in the sense that its ideas flowed from its faith in God, to jettison that faith cannot but be consequential.8

There is no more important alliance at this hour than between Jews and Christians, for the strength or weakness of the Bible in the West is the key to the survival of the West. As Rabbi Heschel said to Christian...