Laurence Auster on the "Babylonian Impulse" vs. the Biblical Doctrine of Nations
Embryo Parson Posted on Sunday, February 7, 2016 at 05:03PM When I was in seminary I belonged to a Christian apologetics and activist organization called Christian Research Associates. One of the things I developed for the organization was a lecture on the New Age Movement that analyzed the movement historically and theologically. In the course of my research, I happened upon a number of sources pertaining to the spiritual and social meaning of the Babylonian ziggurat, both to the ancient Babylonians and to modern occultists who have made use of it in their writings. The text of Genesis 11: 1-9 is the account of prototypical ziggurat - the Tower of Babel - as interpreted theologically by its Hebrew author.
I have referred to the beliefs and activism of certain New Age liberals, modern humanists, and political elite with respect to the creation of a one-world government as the "Babylonian Impulse", hence my use of the term in the title of this blog entry.
Several years ago I was pleased to find that the late traditionalist conservative writer Laurence Auster was thinking similarly about the Babylonian Impulse, as evidenced in a two-part article he wrote for Front Page Magazine entitled, How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism. For those of you unfamiliar with Auster, he was a Jew who converted to Anglican Christianity (Episcopal Church), and later to Roman Catholicism, whose writings focused mainly on immigration and the heresy of multiculturalism.
Yes, I say the "heresy" of multiculturalism, because as Auster shows in this article, and as these writers have opined, multiculturalism stands in opposition to the biblical doctrine of nations, the center of which is arguably the Genesis text cited above. God means to keep nations separate. In the Genesis text, the borders are linguistic; in other biblical texts, the borders are physical, and nothing about the New Covenant or the catholicity of the Church changes any of this.
As indicated by the title of his article, Auster's focus is on liberal Christianity, which of course is a fellow traveler with New Age liberals, modern humanists, and the political elite. But Auster turns his sights on the Church of Rome as well, because of its irresponsible -- and yes, heretical -- multiculturalism. Here is the salient section of the article about the Babylonian Impulse:
The above thoughts lead to a surprising conclusion. Most liberal Christians today affirm that creating culturally diverse societies is the moral, Godly, and just thing to do—the more diverse, the more just and Godly. But if it is our purpose to discern God's purpose, doesn't it seem far more likely that God would oppose the creation of multicultural, majority-less societies? He would oppose them, first, because they rob human beings of the stable cultural environments and the concrete networks of belonging that are essential conditions of personal and social flourishing; and, second, he would oppose them because they lead to unresolvable conflict and disorder. In opening America's borders to the world, our political leaders are not following any divine scheme, but are indulging an all‑too‑human conceit: "We can create a totally just society," they tell themselves. "We can stamp out cultural particularities and commonalities that have taken centuries or millennia to develop. We can erect a new form of society based on nothing but an idea. We can ignore racial and cultural differences and the propensity to inter‑group conflict that has ruled all of human history. We can create an earthly utopia, a universal nation."
All of which brings us to the biblical account of Babel. The comparison of multicultural America to the Tower of Babel has become such a cliché in the hands of conservative columnists over the last 20 years that a true understanding of this parable has been lost. Indeed, as I will show, the conservative, or rather the neoconservative, understanding of this parable is the exact opposite of its true meaning.
As told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the human race, in a burst of arrogant pride, attempts to construct a perfect human society purely by their own will—a tower "with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." Mankind hopes that this one‑world society will prevent them from being divided into separate societies. But this is not what God wants. "The Lord came down to look at the city and tower which man had built, and the Lord said, 'If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.'" God does not want man to build a universal city, because that would lead man to worship himself instead of God. So God confuses—that is, he diversifies—men's language so that they cannot understand one another, and then he "scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."
It becomes clear that the Tower of Babel is not, as neoconservatives have often said, a multicultural society which breaks down because it lacks a common culture based on universalist ideals. On the contrary, the Tower of Babel represents the neoconservatives' own political ideal—the Universal Nation. And the moral of the story is that God does not want men to have a single Universal Nation, he wants them to have distinct nations. "That is why it was called Babel," Genesis continues, "because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth." But that's not all. Having divided men's language into many different languages, God does not want these many languages to co‑exist in the same society: "And from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."
Thus God rejects the universal society, where the whole human race lives together speaking the same language, and he also (implicitly) rejects the multicultural society, where the whole human race lives together speaking different languages. God wants the human race to belong to a plurality of separate and finite societies, each with its own culture and language. This providential system for the organization of human life allows for the appropriate expression of cultural variety, even as, by demonstrating that human things are not absolute, it restrains and channels man's self-aggrandizing instincts.
And this view of mankind is not limited to the Book of Genesis, as a supposedly primitive account of an early, tribal period of history when mankind presumably needed a more rudimentary form of social organization. If we go from the first book of the Bible to its last book, The Revelation of John, we find, to our astonishment, that God's plan still includes separate nations. In Chapter 21, after the final judgment on sinful humanity has occurred, after the first heaven and the first earth have passed away and a new heaven and a new earth have appeared, after the holy city, New Jerusalem, has come down out of heaven, a dwelling for God himself on earth, and after the total transformation of the world, when even the sun and moon are no longer needed to light the city because the glory of God is the light of it, and the Lamb is the lamp of it, even then
... the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it....
And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.
In the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city, there are still distinct nations, and kings of nations, and these are the glories of humanity which are brought before the throne of God, and there transfigured in the light of Christ. Mankind, following the end of the world, is still providentially constituted of separate nations, which give it its character and distinctiveness, even as, for example, our earth is constituted of separate continents, islands, mountain ranges, and valleys, which give it its shape and its meaning. The physical earth is not a homogenous mass consisting of nothing but "equal" individual particles, and neither, in the biblical view, is mankind.
Very sound ethno-theology, this. We need to stop shying away from it for fear of being called "racists." The Church is to evince more courage than that.
For the full article:
How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism (Part I)
How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism (Part II)
Reader Comments (4)
Very well written, but rest assured the typical liberal will call this racism. As a matter of fact anything with which they disagree will be branded ..........RACISM!
The Marxist experiment rides on the assumption of the inevitable progress of history (apparently, there is such a thing as being on its "wrong side") - that the old institutions and hierarchies and distinctions must therefore be dissolved for the New Human to take their place. Frightfully similar to the Fascist Übermensch, that. But what do you expect when children are barraged with the merciless doctrine of the Malleability of Man's Nature. New-Darwinian anthropology, Marxist political theory, and the technological salvation of the Information Age combine to ensure the permanent death grip of the Enlightenment's rending of Faith and Reason.
Yours is a sane, traditional, common sense approach to race and national identity under the light of the Gospel. It will be derided and misunderstood on the mere fact our current grammar no longer supports the idea of hierarchy and distinction ... that's a lost art of thinking 20th century man successfully swept under the carpet (thanks in no small part to the Ressourcement fellows and the Spirit of Vatican II crowd.)
Hi there,
Just a little qualifier. Laurence Auster unconverted from Anglicanism just prior to his death and died a Roman Catholic.
Thanks, Stefano. I for one don't blame him.