Learning from the Past

I've been reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is truly a literary masterpiece. His style of writing is beautiful. He spent twenty years perfecting his language in that book. It takes a while to break through the time barrier posed by the idioms of his eighteenth century day and it is also a good idea to read the foreword so that you may correctly identify this student of Voltaire's cynicism wherever it might pop up, but, like Shakespeare's work, once you've read a few dozen pages, you have no problem understanding the author. This book has some interesting findings to share with modern day Christians. Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome largely on the rise of Christianity, which on first glance suggests the religion as a poor choice for an empire. However, according to him, the Christians of ancient Rome followed the teachings of Christ much more closely than we do now. Even by Gibbon's time the Protestant reformation had introduced the concept of a 'holy' work ethic to enable the rise of the middle class around which our whole modern capitalist society is structured. Christianity will not weaken America the way it weakened Rome because it is not the same Christianity. It has been reformed to fit neatly into our world by the belief that he who works hard and is careful with his money demonstrates virtue by doing so. This is quite a radical departure from the words of the Lord who said give no thought to what you should eat. Isn't the need for food largely why people apply for jobs? And with so much middle class culture dictated as fashion trends, doesn't that clash with the words of the Lord who said give no thought to what you should wear? As for the Roman empire, the Christians of that time rejected it as evil. They avoided the sacrifices to pagan deities and may have also been reluctant to go to war. They rejected the bloody arena games and brutal punishments on which their strong empire had been originally founded. In short, they became a people who were too nice to sustain an empire. I can't argue with the fact that we have made life better for ourselves at least in this world by not following the teachings of Christ too closely. I only pray that we have not compromised our fortunes in the next world by taking this step. April 24: I thought about what Jesus said about giving no thought to what we should eat or wear last night and I hope I don't offend anyone by saying I think he overestimated us. Jesus had so much faith in God that he could make food appear out of nothing and he seemed to think we could do the same. He would often invite his disciples to perform a miracle before he did it himself. It is quite typical for a person to think that his abilities are commonly shared. While the Lord is perfect, he did appear to us as an entirely vulnerable human who was capable of error. So maybe it's okay not to follow this teaching from the Gospel of Luke too closely, as is the case with our popular work ethic.
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