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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   32573 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Without getting too biographical, I work in a Christian field with a heavily Chinese population, and I find there's something very clarifying in the way people born and raised in non-Christian cultures receive the gospel. It forces you to think a lot about culture, nationality, Christianity, and the interactions between them all. Nowhere does the gospel obliterate or destroy the base culture - instead, I prefer to think of it in similar terms to C. S. Lewis, where the gospel refines and enhances whatever praiseworthy, God-given elements exist in the base.

In Mere Christianity he uses metaphors of light and salt for the way that the gospel enhances individual personalities:

Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply "In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else." But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)

And then in That Hideous Strength he applies something like this to nations. He has the idea that every nation or culture has what he calls a 'haunting', the hint of its redeemed self, and these hauntings are naturally all different. The only one he names is Britain's, which he calls 'Logres', but he goes on:

“You’re right, Sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England — no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.”

“But this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very round-about way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.”

“It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble. “You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised — some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two Saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China — why, then it will be spring.

Now we might quibble the specific details, or go back and forth about what the real essence of Britain or France or China is, but I wouldn't want to get bogged down on that. Probably Lewis and his characters are struggling to express something very rich and complicated. But I have found this idea helpful in the past.

And in that light I interpret people like Inazo Nitobe, or Yuan Zhiming, however clumsily or even incompetently, as trying to articulate the divine haunting of Japan or of China, and in that way find not only themselves, but also their entire peoples in God's plan of salvation.

(And it should probably be noted that the latter quit his ministry and asked forgiveness after a rape accusation, so I'm including moral as well as intellectual incompetence.)

In Revelation 21:24-26, we are told, of the New Jerusalem, that "the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it", and that "people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations". I'd like to believe that every nation has its own particular glory, its own particular honour, and that as part of the world's salvation, all of these will be brought to the altar before God.

I love this, thanks for sharing. Very curious about your work now, if you want to DM.

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