2.5—The Legacy of the West (15 min video)

Transcript

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In this final lecture for this week, we’re gonna take a look at another broad topic. And I’m simply gonna call this section the Legacy of the West. And I really found an influential author, somebody that I mentioned at the very beginning of this lesson. I found a very influential author in the character of Vishal Mangawati, the modern day Indian writer who’s also a believer. He’s the one that of course talks about how the Bible is the soul of Western civilization. And it’s interesting what Mangawati says in his great book on the book that made your world about the Bible. He says that culture’s value of the word and a culture’s value of what it really sees as important can often be seen in music itself. In fact, he talks about the unique nature of Western music and of music that was written either for the church or for areas that are not part of the church.

He talks about how it was written distinctively for pleasure in a way that you don’t often see with Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim text, which he often compares to being some form of mantra or chanting that was designed to kind of help you escape yourself and not really focus on the beauty of who God is and the world that he has made.

So he sees music as intrinsic, as something that’s at the very heart of the scriptures. In fact, it’s curious that both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in their different worlds, Lewis with Narnia and Tolkien with Middle-earth, both used music as a means for which the world was actually created.

Music has always been seen as something essential to the way that God has made things. something essential to himself, it would seem. So, Mungawati picks up on that idea. He also, throughout his book, talks about several distinctives of the West. And remember, we’re talking about the West as really being this idea of cultures based upon the revelation of the scriptures, based upon the gospel message itself.

So we’re not limiting it to a certain people or limiting it to a certain geography or a certain time period. It’s much more timeless than that. But he points out several features of what the West or what this kind of biblical understanding brought to the parts of the world that it spread out to through things like colonialism, which we’ll talk about colonialism later. The making of colonies had certain positive effects. It also had very real negative effects, such as the belittling of afforded people or the use of slavery or exploitation. Those are things you can’t ignore. But while we’re not going to ignore those, I actually want to focus on what or how the West thought differently. This is something that we also need to think about and talk about, which is not really acknowledged as much anymore. Number one, Mungawati said that the West brought with itself logic. It understood that God has revealed himself logically in creation. It understood that the scriptures are themselves logical. They actually make sense. While there are difficult passages, of course, and you sometimes have to compare a difficult passage to a simpler passage, one that’s more clearly and more able to be understood, they’re still logical. They still go together in a logical manner. He’s an orderly god who has made an orderly world. And so Mangawati says this is not normally thought of. Often if you could just kind of think that there are gods or forces that kind of randomly rule the world or kind of manage the world based upon their own whims, such as what you see for example in the ancient myths of Greece and Rome and Mesopotamia and pretty much every other culture, then you don’t really believe there’s any kind of logic or system to how the world is governed. But if you actually do believe in a sovereign God who is still ruling over a fallen world and that he himself is the logos, which is what Christ is referred to as, he’s the word, which is where we get the word logic from, then you believe that that world is actually orderly and that world can therefore be properly studied.

This is also curious because Mungo Wade actually talks about the difference between libraries. He talks, for example, about how things like printing presses, especially movable type printing presses, were created by the Chinese and the Koreans centuries before they ever came to Europe.

He also talks about how some of the greatest libraries were in places of Asia. But he points out that whereas Christian monks use the libraries to better understand the truth and copy them so that others could benefit in the same way, he said that Buddhist monks who often had these rotating libraries in which they could have this marvelous device where they could rotate the library and the entire shelf would move to you.

You get the book you want. It’s a pretty awesome idea. But he said they actually rotated the libraries eventually as a means to meditate to the white noise created by the rotation. In other words, we have this curious disconnect where we see this in other cultures. We talked about it in the American history with the Mesoamericans who invented the wheel, but used it as a religious device and did not use it for any kind of tool or to aid in work.

They preferred to have slaves do the work without the use of a wheel or, for that matter, a wheelbarrow. That’s the kind of thing where you see there’s this disconnect between truth and knowledge and then actually applying it. Mangawati points out that’s a distinctive thing that comes out of the scriptures when they are properly seen. Secondly, Mangawati points out that Christianity, or this biblical view of the world, it views all life as sacred, all human life as sacred, that is.

It views all human life as being equally made in the image of God and as being equally fallen through the nature of sin. And so it views essentially that there is no person too small to care about. There is no person too little to see as an actual person. This again is not common when you study history. When you look at other cultures that do not approach things from a biblical point of view, human life is cheap. In fact, the value of human life is often based upon the size of your bank account or your fortune or the power that you control.

Third, Amungawadi points out that in this biblical view that the West brought with it, they had a concept of the fall. They had a concept that all men are equally fallen and that men at their core cannot actually be trusted. They actually do need to be governed. they actually do need rulers and they actually need written laws that even the rulers have to follow. Fourth, he points out that the West brought with it an idea of incarnation, an idea that God is not completely separate from his creation.

He’s not just out there somewhere. He actually becomes a man. He actually shares in the sufferings that we share in and he actually obeys perfectly all the way through death and a torturous death at that.

It’s an incredible idea that you again don’t find fully in any other culture. A fifth Mangawati says or he points out that the West brought with it an idea of grace, an idea that we cannot earn our own salvation and that this actually creates an incredible amount of freedom because instead of having to make certain that we always say the right things or we avoid saying certain things, which is kind of how most modern liberalism works.

If you say the wrong thing, then you’re sometimes done for life. Christianity has this understanding that people are sinners. Christianity has this understanding that people are going to make mistakes and it looks for repentance more than it looks for perfection. Six, what Mongolwadi points out is he points out that in Christianity in the West, you have heroes who recognize this idea of repentance. They recognize that what makes them a hero is the fact that they actually can show their own frailty and their own weaknesses. Seventh, Mungawati points out the value of justice in the ways of the scriptures. The fact that corruption is something that is normally fought and normally seen as something that needs to be fought in a biblical worldview or even in a culture that has experienced a biblical worldview at one point in time.

In fact, he goes on for pages and pages about how corruption is kind of normal in the parts of India that he has regularly visited.

India is trying to fight this actively in many ways, but it’s still common in other parts of the world to have to bribe someone just to do their job or to get them to avoid arresting you or harassing you in some other way.

Eighth, he points out that the West brought with it an incredible technology. This really goes back to the point I made with logic in the sense that the West understood that technology had a unique purpose. Technology was there to help alleviate the effects of the fall. So whether we’re talking about a machine, whether we’re talking about an easier way to spread information such as the internet, whether we’re talking about modern medicine, all of those things are designed to get rid of effects of the fault, or I should say to lessen them.

You can’t fully get rid of those things. But they’re designed in the case of the machine to make work easier, to make it more productive. They’re designed in the case of the internet to make information more readily available and to minimize ignorance. They’re designed in the case of medicine to preserve life itself. These are all things that Christendom So Christendom, for example, took Chinese inventions like the clock, like the wheeled plow, like the movable type printing press, or like gunpowder, or it took the mathematics of India and it really saw incredible tools there, it respected them, and it used those things.

It really used them and applied them in a way that wasn’t seen in the rest of the world. It’s curious that the Chinese always used gunpowder, at least initially they used it primarily for fireworks, whereas Christians saw that as a way to actually assist in just warfare.

Now of course gunpowder can be misused, but that’s another topic. Ninth, he says that one of the things that the West in this biblical worldview brought with it was the whole concept of a limited government, or what we might call “lex rex,” where the law is actually the king. And so So it brought with this whole idea that this temporary world that we live in, the shadow lands as C.S. Lewis called it, it’s just that. It’s temporary. This is not our final resting point. And so whoever has authority, whether it be a monarch, whether it be a leader of a town, whether it be a pastor, whether it be a teacher, whether it be a parent, whoever has authority, They’re essentially stewards over a part of God’s creation for a very limited amount of time. Tenth, Mangawati points out that the West brought with it a very thorough view of science. The fact that God had made certain natural laws, the fact that the world is orderly, the fact that the world was created good, the fact that science requires both wisdom, properly testing things, and also humility.

Being able to recognize that you may not know something. Being able to recognize that we have a lot still to learn. That’s really what the scientific method is all about. Recognizing that we don’t know everything and we have to test it and then have our test verified by others to see if we’re even on the right track to truth. Eleventh, Mangawati points out that the West and the biblical worldview brought with it a value of the family itself, a value of giving promises, a value of making vows, a value of marriage between a man and a woman, a value of children themselves as being seen as actual blessings and not just being seen as something that takes up the expense of the household.

Going along with this idea, he even points out how the West brought with it an incredible work ethic. It brought with it not just diligence and labor, but the whole idea that careers are actually vocations. Finally, he points out, 12th, that the West brought with it an idea of compassion, an idea of just showing mercy and just freely giving wealth and resources to others.

Now do we see all these things perfectly? Of course not. But this is always what made the church successful. When the church cared less about its own rights and was freely giving with its resources and freely recognized the incredible benefits of remaining faithful to family, that’s when it had an incredible effect and incredible growth wherever it went within the world. That really is the legacy of the West that has as its soul the scriptures. It goes beyond any type of national boundary. It It goes beyond any type of racial or ethnic division. It goes beyond any kind of denominational division we may have seen in something like the 30 Years War. It’s something much, much bigger than that because it’s something that reveals God’s character in itself. I’ll end with another quote by Comminius to help us understand the real legacy of the West. This is kind of Comminius’ final charge to us. He says, “Conduct yourself humbly so that man is not ashamed to return to simplicity, having abandoned pride. Conduct yourself freely by removing the shackles with which even the educated allow themselves to be tied, fervently and with joyful mind, for there is nothing more important than embalming the human race with light.

That’s a beautiful picture. Courageously, so that the fervor manifests continually, uninterrupted and increasing, like a river which grows in strength as its flow distances it from the source, unanimously so the dissipated endeavors brought together may give life to a permanent work of the future, and peacefully, since light is a truly delicious thing, which must be liberated from all coarseness.

I have lit the torch, and I am passing it on to you. Brighten up your torches, and let them shine a thousand times brighter.