October 17, 2012 - Modernity Notes

Today began the first "Wednesday classes" of the school year! So excited! It was fun (what school isn't???) and I got plenty of notes. The class is on Modernity and it's EXTRA exciting because a great deal of what every other class we've taken before through George Grant has been leading up to this class. Sooo excitement all around! Enjoy!


Sarah Bacon - October 17, 2012

Christendom’s Ancien Regime:


“For the Enlightenment revolutionaries, the civilization of Christendom was dismissed as the Ancien Regime. They were determined to pull down its great monuments as a prequel to what they imagined to be a New World Order. And thus was Modernity birthed, or rather, unleashed.” - Christopher Dawson

Vocabulary:
adiaphora - indifferent; indifference.
patristic - of or pertaining to the fathers of the Christian church or their writings.
hegemony - leadership; predominance
Huguenot - a member of the Reformed or Calvinistic communion of France in the 16th and 17th centuries; a French Protestant.
ideology - the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group
regicide - the killing of a king
mercantilist - mercantile  practices or spirit; commercialism


Much of the Ancien Regime grew out of Augustine’s worldview and the manifesto of the book he wrote: The City of God. There were many facts that lead up to, and carried out, the beginning of Modernity from the transition of the Ancien Regime: Christianity. The Enlightenment sought to pull down the glory of God and build up the glory of man. To annihilate the old world order and to then rebuild it into a New World Order.

Images are the language of the laymen. Many people today don’t read...and if they do read then it is trash that they read. Throughout the ages it has been the idea of images and imagery that have driven the people. Images stand in contrast to word. Christians are called to be people of the word and even Christ was called The Word. The media can influence our minds powerfully and manipulate our thoughts.

30: Jesus was crucified
70:Jerusalem was sacked and destroyed...completely torn down
100: The Patristic era began with Clement
280: Antony founded sancus discendi...universities. If there had been no monasticism then there would have been no universities...they were the direct outgrowth of the monks.
315: Athanasius stood  contra mundum...against the world. When it came to Christ and his finished work and outpouring of grace by way of imputation it was the only ground for faithfulness and faith.
325: First Church Council was held at Nicea and they finally supported Athanasius.
395: Theodosius divided the Roman Empire because he believed it had grown too large to be appropriated
428: Augustine’s City of God was published paving the way for hundreds of Christians to be gathered together with a manifesto.
476: Emperor Romulus Augustulus was ousted
503: Ideas of Monasticism made it West and the Benedictine Rule was confirmed.
537: Hagia Sophia (built by Justinian) was dedicated to Constantinople. The sacking of Hagia Sophia spurred the Christians to finally take action.
610: Mohammed had ecstatic visions in his long wanderings around and on Mount Hira which then lead to the struggle with Islam and Christianity (also Judaism).
640: Alexandrian Library was burned to the ground by Muhammad's successor Omar and his hoard.
711: Europe was invaded and occupied by Muslim armies crossing over the straights.
732: Charles Martel who was a sheriff of a sort pushed back the Muslim armies back and prevailed at Tours.
800: Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel, was crowned in the West in what was soon called the Holy Roman Empire..
1054: The Christian East and West divided and sundered so they no longer had communication or connection with each other.
1095: Urban II called for a Holy Crusade.
1099: Crusaders recovered Jerusalem establishing a series of kingdoms which are now Israel and parts of Turkey today as an outpost of Christianity. Within 200 years, each of those kingdoms were swept away and taken over.
1163: Notre Dame was completed in Paris and dedicated.
1167: A collegium was established at Oxford when several monastic tutors took under their care some students who were then taught the great ideals of Christianity and history.
1215: The Magna Carta was sealed by King John which gave the nobles several rights and privileges. But it created a precedent for freedom in the years after.
1250: Thomas Aquinas launched scholasticism which was to bring the wisdom of recent Christian together and give way for logic which he hoped would lead to heaven on earth.
1294: The Babylonian Captivity began in Avignon and dashed that last hope of heaven on earth. Then followed a series of destructive assaults..
1320: The Arbroath Declaration was signed.
1337: The First Hundred Years War began.
1347: The Black Death swept across Europe.
1374: Gerhard Groote founded the Brethren of Common Life Schools which was based off of the Augustinian monastic ideals. A notion of great reading, writing, and logic.
1378: The Great Schism divided the Western Church with multiple popes.
1415: The Council of Constance was held to try and stamp out one of those little Reformed movements. Jan Milic had raised up disciples and established some great works and now they sought to get rid of that. .
1457: The Articles of Prague were published establishing a Protestant reformation..
1510: Erasmus published his Institutes on the failing of the Church in the West and how it needed to be reformed. He left a great legacy behind him.  
1515: Raphael submitted plans for the Vatican that ultimately brought the need to raise funds for this new cathedral.
1517: Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses in Latin on the church doors at Wittenberg in direct opposition to Tetzel's indulgences. He didn’t anticipate that people would translate the Latin into many other languages and print them to send them out. It was viewed more than any other book or pamphlet ever.
1559: Calvin released the final edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion which was said to be as instrumental in the shaping of people for the next generations as The City of God.
1560: Knox, a follower of Calvin, secured the Scottish Reformatia Ordo: the order of Reformation for Scottish focusing on sound doctrine, worship, and ecclesiology.
1571: The Battle of Lepanto was won by Don John and saved the whole Western world from the Muslims and the Islamic world.
1636: Harvard was founded with nine students.
1643: The Westminster Divines began to meet in the Jerusalem chamber in the Westminster Abbey in London.
1644: Lex Rex was published by Samuel Rutherford which stated that the law came before the king and that the king cannot have absolute total rule over the people which laid place for freedom for the people.
1741: Jonathan Edwards preached his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon and continued to preach it at least 17 times in different places. It’s considered the best-selling sermon of all time.
1789: The Terror of the French Revolution began and ultimate the ascent of Christendom was interrupted and the beginning of Modernity began.

Christendom’s Presuppositions


Contents:
Creator/Creature Distinctions - we need to understand ourselves in the world in terms of this distinction in both matter and spirit. We’re not made of the same stuff that God is made of nor of a chain of being. He is the one who is ultimately sovereign and was the one at the beginning of time who decreed that the world be made with simply the sound of His voice. God is transcendent. There is a clear line between our sovereign God and everything else.

Imago Dei / Vox Populi - We are made in the image of God. Some would assume that since we are in the image of God that we are able to speak with the voice and power of God. But because of our distinction we know that this cannot be true. Man is fallen.

Ante Bellum / Post Bellum - Man is scarred and marred. There is a huge distinction between when before man fell and after man fell.

Realities:
Independence/Sovereign Providence - Man is not independent. We have a sovereign God who organizes and someday all men will bend their knee and look to God for all things, praising and glorifying Him. We cannot seek to be independent because it will lead to our ruin since we are flawed and sinful.

Autonomy/Covenantalism - We cannot be autonomous with God ruling over us. Our feelings and experiences are tainted by the fall and our great overwhelming sin nature. We are bound to God with checks and balances where we are responsible to and for someone else. This is done by grace of God to us. There is interdependence.

Antithesis/Adiaphora - things can be clearly defined be antithesis...it isn’t some shade of gray. There is a world of black and white...you cannot be in the middle. You are either good or bad. There is no indifference. If God is for something then He is obviously against something else. We must be the same.

Consequences:
Righteousness/Infidelity - We can live in the righteousness of Christ covering us so that we are literally in Christ. Or we can walk out from under that cover where we live apart from Christ and infidelity. If we seek to be on our own we are bound to fall hard, but if we actively seek out Christ and His righteousness then we are bound to succeed. What God works within us, He also works out. He places the desire in our hearts and then applies it to our whole life.

Reformation/Revolutionary Tyranny - We can either conform to God’s holy Word and seek to reform the world for God’s glory or we can force them to be what we want with revolutionary tyranny. We can either joyfully submit to God and His law-word or we can be the immature revolutionary always seeking to deny the existence of an ever-present God.

Metaphysics/Materialistic Centralism - We can follow on God’s ethical standards and His holy providence for us or we can focus on the things around us. There is a harmony of spirituality and materiality. When we fight wars for the continuance of Christianity, we use weapons...those weapons are both spiritual and material. Material so we can literally hold it and spiritual because we have dedicated it to God. There is no break in the harmony of spirituality and materialism until death.