| |
CHURCH-STATE separation is a basic principle in modern society. Under this principle, how will Christianity blend in the public realm? The answer is through Christian culture.
Both the concept and the actual existence of Christianity and the modern public realm are definite, but what is "Christian culture"? If answered according to the broad definition of culture, Christianity as a religion is a culture per se, then, is the concept "Christian culture" not a superfluous coinage? However, if Christianity is taken as a religious entity centred around church and believers, then there, indeed, exists a "Christian culture" derived from that centre, e.g. the Christian art forms such as Christian music, architecture, etc. Nonetheless, in addition to the genres of material objects such as Bach's arias and murals in the Sistine Chapel, Christian culture also exists in the mental disposition of immaterial subjects, e.g. humility and fraternity. These traits still keep a direct and tangible connection to Christianity. But more cultural mentalities derived from Christianity are becoming more centrifugal, so much so that their connection to Christianity is not recognisable, for instance the concept of "rationalisation" described by Max Weber as the core of modern social production and all communications. So, disclosing and tracing back to the Christian origin of these immaterial Christian cultures have become specialised research work for academia. In order to illustrate the relationship between "rationalisation" and Christianity, Max Weber produced the renowned work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.(1)
These immaterial Christian cultures such as "rationalisation", in their modality, are not only different from Christianity, but also different from narrow-sense material Christian cultures that are directly affiliated with Christianity; nevertheless, it is they who have formed the main frame of the relationship between Christianity and the modern public realm.
From the historical evolution perspective of the modern world, since the modernisation that happened several hundred years ago in Southern and Western Europe was shouldered by the subjects who believed in Christianity (including Catholicism, the same as Luther's Reformation, the Catholic reforms in Southern Europe also became the beginning of modernisation), Christianity, in the historical course of adapting to or pushing forward modernisation and vice versa, and criticising or standardising the modernisation, gradually formed a twofold functional relationship with modern public society.(2) Of course, the relationship between Christianity and modern public society could be direct: the Pope's speeches and discourses on worldwide phenomena, such as environmental protection, war holocaust, abortion and cloning technology, are the examples of Christianity's direct interference with the modern public realm. But due to the constraint of the modern world fundamental principle, i.e. church-state separation, the interference that Christianity as a religion extends into the modern public realm is extremely limited. Nevertheless, it does not mean that church-state separation is not important to the modern world. "Then repay to Cæsar what belongs to Cæsar and to God what belongs to God" (Lk 20:25). "My kingdom does not belong to this world" (Jn 18:36). The basic separation stance that Christianity held towards the existing world from the beginning is not passive at all. The messianic hope fulfilled by Christianity makes the world dualistic and leads the modern world into the linear and progressive tempo-spatial view, which looks forward to the future. This tempo-spatial view, up to today, still is the deepest and the most fundamental frame of subjects that dominates the technical renewal represented by Microsoft and the competition to move...
[ End of sample | Please purchase the magazine for full articles ]
1. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, 1904.
2. See You Xilin's article (Chinese version), “Jidujiao duiyu zhongguo
xiandai de shuangchong yiyi”, Hong Kong, in Jidujiao wenhua
pinglun, 2003 Autumn, and the English version, “Christianity's Dual
Meaning in Chinese Modernisation”, An der Schwelle. Gesellschaft und
Religion im Transformationsprozess Chinas, Bonn, 2005; Sino-Christian
Studies in China, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.
|
