Relocating To Elfland

For those who care about such things (and shouldn’t we all?), today marks the 1600th anniversary of the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths.

Muslims understand what many Christians do not: that to answer the question “What time is it?” is to define the history of the world; and that to impose one’s answer to this question is to shape the destiny of the world. For over a century, the world has set its clocks by a tower in a former center of Christendom; will it soon be setting its clocks by a tower at the center of worldwide Islam (article here)? Symbolic victories are victories, make no mistake about it; and the one religion on the planet with a serious program for world conquest (since Christendom went all soft and pluralistic) is set to pull off a coup.

“Who can say that Christianity has had the time to translate the totality of its contents into institutions? I have the impression that instead we are still at the beginning stages of Christianity.” (Rémi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, p. 22)

Okay, history of western civilization in a few paragraphs. Out of the basically tribal cultures and conflicts of the ancient near east, there eventually emerged four great world powers: Babylonia, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. These are the four great empires which together composed the mighty image of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2; they appeared as four beasts in Daniel 7; and they appeared in late form as the beast out of the sea in Revelation 13.

The unified message of the prophets and apostles is that when Christ stripped principalities and powers on the cross, rose from the dead as the Son of God in power, and ascended the holy hill of Zion to sit at the Father’s right hand, the messianic kingdom of God was inaugurated, and all rule and authority and power and dominion have been put under His feet. The mighty image of Daniel 2 was toppled once for all, never to rise in power again. The terminus of the dominion of Nebuchadnezzar’s image was the collapse of Rome around A.D. 476.

There has not since the fall of Rome been a world-dominating pagan power. Two great religious powers have vied for conquest of the world: the power of Christendom, and another power which arose out of the Arabian desert in the mid-eighth century – we know it today as Islam. These two religious powers are still locked in combat for the souls of men and nations, and will likely be so for many years to come. But noteworthy is that Islam is essentially a perversion of Christianity – it was fashioned in part from the revelatory material of Christianity and Christianity’s ancestor, Judaism. Christ still has His enemies, but they have arisen from within the pale of His kingdom; the ancient powers that once stood without are gone forever.

What about the so-called Enlightenment, the “power” of secular humanism, which has eaten away at the vitals of western Christendom? This whole ideology is a parasite on its host. It is incapable of sustaining civilization, because it acknowledges no deity, goodness, truth, or beauty transcending the individual self. Lacking even the risible gods of paganism, it remains unstable as water and will not excel. It will in time be relegated to the dustbin of history.

I should probably be glad comments are not open after writing something like this. . . .

Here is the December 1, 2009, debate between Daniel Pipes and Wafa Sultan at the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. An illuminating exchange.

Listening to Wafa Sultan, I was reminded of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (see www.khaledhosseini.com), one of the more moving works I have ever read.