The last article of this name argued for a certain relationship between faith and culture. I want to give a few examples of that relationship here, which I hope will make my meaning, at least, clearer.
The point of contact between faith and culture is the nature of the human person. Who we are must define what we believe about the world and how we believe we must live in it. For this reason, the essence of culture must be seen as a search for the meaning of human life, not as a set of comfortable, colloquial, but ultimately arbitrary means of arranging its details. Faith, too, is a search for the meaning of human life, but it is a search defined by the authority of the One from whom that meaning is received, whose agency moves totally beyond the range of human power. There is a natural dialogue, therefore, between faith and culture. The first is a vision from outside ourselves which (for that reason) can provide a sure ground for life; the second moves from such a vision about human nature and attempts to protect it and celebrate it.
Many things that are “cultural” are almost entirely unrelated to faith. I think most people who have experienced different cultures have realized that it does not objectively matter which foods one eats. Subjectively it might matter a great deal; but that has more to do with taste and upbringing than with your actual humanity. Otherwise, all the people who eat cheese would be demonstrably happier and better than all the people who do not. Well, perhaps that is a bad example. Cheese is very good. Anyway, the goodness of cheese is not at all like the goodness of eating: all people must eat, but one may very well go through life without eating cheese (as difficult as this hypothetical may be to imagine) without it, presumably, affecting his happiness, virtue, or existence.
That is the part of culture I am not talking about. I am talking about the parts of culture that imply far-reaching philosophical claims about the human person. One does not have to look very far to find these. There are negative examples and positive examples. Negative examples include things that are forbidden, such as selling a man into slavery or eating human flesh. These are culturally taboo because we hold certain beliefs about human life which are incompatible with such acts. If a stranger wandering through a foreign country discovered that slavery and cannibalism were perfectly acceptable behaviors there, he could quite correctly infer not only that those people do not hold to our values, but in fact believe in their opposite. The very definition of those acts belies indifference to the question of personal dignity: one either believes in it or one does not.
Positive examples include things that are encouraged, like marital fidelity or humility. Humility was not always understood to be a virtue. Marital fidelity did not always imply monogamy. It would be foolish to judge that these are by-the-by specifications, like whether or not it is appropriate to wear a hat indoors, or whether or not pasta ought to be rinsed. They are bulwarks which define a specific vision of the meaning of a man’s life, in one case as it relates to his neighbors, and in another, to his wife.
Now, the question of the previous article centered around an academic criticism of Christianity which has become popular in recent progressive theology. The criticism, briefly, is that certain aspects of Christianity are not actually Christian, but derivatives of the Mediterranean cultures in which Christianity underwent its childhood. Imposing those derivatives on everyone else for the rest of history is neither really Christian nor (to use a scary word) ecumenical. Real Christianity must be discovered by a process of “de-culturalization” so that it can become truly compatible with genuine culture throughout the world.
The above examples of connections between faith, which regards, fundamentally, what precisely it means to be human, and culture, explode this theory. It is simply impossible to “de-culturalize” Christian faith because culture always exists relative to faith, whether the Christian faith or something else somewhat opposed to it. To ignore this fact solves nothing, illuminates nothing. A great number of very difficult questions arise from this point, but the central one of great importance today is the thesis of Relativism. Simply put, how are we do organize interreligious dialogue if Christianity keeps making claims to universal truth? How can anything be judged quite fairly if Christendom must ultimately be the judge? But the only way Christendom can be stripped of its advantage and be made to play away from its own turf is if the dialogue should be set up somehow without reference to truth. And so this is what the Relativists have done. To say that something is “true” now means only that it is being analyzed from a restricted point of view. There is value in this, certainly, but only the value of knowing what other people think. “Jesus rose from the dead” is in every way equivalent to “It is important to me that I think that Jesus rose from the dead.” Whether or not he did rise from the dead becomes a rather meaningless and unrelated question.
The uncomfortable thing about Christianity is that it does not abide relativization. It makes quite pointed claims about the value and meaning of human life which are either true or false, and which therefore cannot but be the standards of culture. From outside the perspective of faith, this means that if a Christian thinks that it makes no difference whether or not what he believes is strictly speaking true, then he has (in a certain loose sense) stopped being a Christian—or at least stopped acting like one. This is characteristic of Christians: there are other religions were it does not matter much what one believes, and very different reasons are given for living in a certain way. From within the perspective of faith, Christianity’s refusal to relativize its system of values means that it continually discovers all things relative to the Creed. To approach abortion or polygamy or cannibalism or murder objectively as a Christian means approaching it as an evil, because it flies in the face of everything that the Christian believes about human existence. But culture always necessarily makes value judgments about those very issues when it evaluates relevant behaviors: therefore faith is the true heart of culture, the vitality that makes culture more human, and thus the reality that culture must continually return to if it is to respond to the complexity of modern life. Of course, only the craziest academics are worried about the possibility of Christendom importing the concepts of murder and cannibalism to maiden cultures in their innocence. Most of these types are too short-sighted to see how deeply Christian all good culture is. They tend to argue more about issues that sound more explicitly Christian, like the belief that one Palestinian holy-man should be considered divine over and above all other holy-men, or that we must let ourselves be slowly and painfully killed rather than give up the belief that the number three has something mysterious to do with God, or that God’s people really have anything to do with the little old man in a white hat in Rome. Surely Christian belief can be what it truly is, perhaps even more than before, if belief in these little regional details should be finally discarded as cultural expressions? Surely marriage can be ended—? Surely it isn’t really the body of Christ—? But Christians believe in truth: the whether-or-nots of the Church’s dogma are not expressions of Mediterranean opinions, but of the nature of reality. And Catholics will continue doing silly things for the rest of time, like refusing to eat meat on Fridays and waving their hands in the shape of Roman execution machines, just to prove to the Relativists that they mean business.
