CHRISTIANITY AND THE GOOD OLD DAYS

If you venture to criticize modern society, it will usually be assumed by your fellow moderns that you do so because you idealize the past.  You must belong to the “fings ain’t what they used to be.” and, “It wasn’t like that in my day!” brigade.

     This may be true of a Conservative, but it is not true of a Christian: eternity, rather than the past, is the criterion by which Christianity judges the present. 

     For the Christian, there have been no unequivocally good old days since the days in the Garden of Eden – in whatever sense you interpret that period – and even then the command to subdue the Earth was forward-looking and developmental. 

     If you want what I would call the horizontal view of history, you must look to the Classics.  There you find the three Ages – Golden, Silver and Bronze – with the most virtuous era the one furthest in the past.  The modern equivalent – and exactly opposite in its conclusions – would be Utopian social evolutionism: in which, by definition, the present is better than the past; and, by definition, the future will be better than the present. 

     Real Christianity – with its awareness of human sin in every age – has never been idealistic in this way.  Real Christianity has inclined to what I would call the vertical view of history.  That is to say the divide is not between one age and another, but – at any point in history – between one mindset and another.  The sort of thing I mean is exemplified in Augustine’s City of God:  two communities, co-existing through time; one with its focus on the Kingdom of Heaven, the other on the Kingdom of the World.  Augustine probably got the idea from the parable of the wheat and the weeds growing together until the final harvest; or perhaps from the Book of Revelation, in which the People of the Lamb are in conflict with the People of the Beast until the Last Judgment brings a final parting of the ways. 

     What are the relative proportions of each group?  My guess is that the numbers of each are pretty constant through time, whatever the appearances might be.  Although the Eighteenth Century was nominally ‘Christian’, the percentage of actual believers was probably about the same as it is now.  In our own aggressively-secular age when there is no point in being a Christian – and much disadvantage – unless you genuinely believe, there are probably more genuine believers than the secularists would care to admit.  But who is genuine and who is not – at any point in history – is not for us to judge. 

In one sense, Christianity has something in common with both the Classics and Utopianism.  Like the lamenter for the lost Golden Age, the Christian looks back to what humanity has lost through the Fall.  Like the social evolutionist, the Christian looks forward to the future: although belief about what that future will be, and how it will come about, shows the inhabitants of Augustine’s two Cities at their most irreconcilable.