It is easy when you are disenchanted with your own age to imagine that a time machine would solve all of your problems. Aside from a few choice discoveries, antibiotics and indoor plumbing to name a couple, I think that I could manage just fine without most of what the modern age has produced. But such thoughts do nothing to help me figure out how to live in the time I have been placed.
A more instructive exercise is to consider how our century would look to wise Christians of the past. Imagine if we had a time machine and brought forward three Christians from different centuries, allowing them a week to immerse themselves in modern life, and then gathered them together for a discussion over dinner, what might we learn?
Let's choose for the journey St. Augustine (fourth century), Martin Luther (sixteenth century), and C. S. Lewis (early twentieth century). This trio offers us the advantage of seeing our own age at varying distances. For maximum culture shock, I am transporting these men to Southern California. (If any reader is nosy and wants to know how we conquered the language barrier, the seven-year old Sunday school girl from the future who was thoughtful enough to send her time machine back to me also sent me some translation pills. She said that she didn't know how they worked, but that they were a lot better than the old kind that made everybody dream in Pig Latin afterwards.) Also, I have snatched each man away well on in his career to offer us the most wisdom possible.
After assuring our distinguished travelers that they would be redeposited at the same time and place where they were taken from, each man agreed to be part of the experiment. St. Augustine was intrigued and said that this undertaking confirmed some of his opinions on the nature of time. C. S. Lewis found it amusing that we grabbed him while he was searching his wardrobe for a coat. And Martin Luther thought that one of his princes had kidnapped him yet again to keep him out of enemy hands. We boarded our guests in a rented house overlooking the beach, and told them that they could be chauffeured anywhere they wished, and could spend their time as they saw fit. After a week we all agreed to meet to discuss their findings.
Our conversation took place at the Five Crowns, an English country restaurant in Newport Beach, which I had chosen to compensate for the lack of cultural depth they encountered during their visit. We taped the following exchange after our plates had been filled with prime rib, and our glasses with hearty burgundy. (Don't sneer. CURE was picking up the tab, so I was on a tight budget!)
St. Augustine: This has truly been a most confusing week. Human invention has changed the world in so many ways. The preacher in Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. In your world, I wonder if there is anything old. Most of the people are as old as most of the houses, and I don't remember seeing even one graveyard during the entire week. People are not reminded of their mortality. And without seasons, your world has a false timelessness about it. The comfort was that despite the changes, I was able to use the time profitably. I found a church in which to say my prayers in the morning, and the university library had a book called a Bible concordance which made the whole journey worthwhile. Just wait until I get back to write another treatise against the Pelagians! No wonder I haven't seen any Pelagian churches in this city.
Martin Luther: As a Christian, I must say you are living in an evil age. This is a city the devil would love for men to live in. It is a city where all necessities and pleasures are available, but nobody knows of Christ. Like St. Augustine, I found myself able to use the time well, however. This world would be a great place for any Christian who could keep himself from getting too caught up in the whirl.
C. S. Lewis: I agree with my colleagues in that I find myself having mixed feelings about your time. I have not come so far to visit. Even in my time, I had an inkling of where the culture was headed, and I see that I was correct. Some things are worse than I would have imagined. But there are some hopeful signs as well.
Ritchie: Like what?
Lewis: Like the current popularity of myth. Early twentieth century England was so dominated by rationalism that most children grew up imaginatively starved. I just watched the Star Wars trilogy and loved it. Your cinema may be connecting the current generation with those who have gone before in ways that were not possible in my time. To a child acquainted with Luke Skywalker, a tyrant will look like someone to fight against any odds, not someone to appease and grovel before. I do worry that people are forgetting how to amuse themselves by reading. But myth from the cinema is better for the imagination than the petty everyday life drivel that many in my generation were reading in their youth.
Ritchie: Already I can see that you men spent your weeks very differently. St. Augustine tried to use his week like any other week, in prayer and study. From what you have said and other discussions, I take it that Professor Lewis spent much of his time walking the streets and taking in movies and videos. He also read a stack of novels. And Dr. Luther, how did you spend your time?
Luther: Since I knew that I was returning home soon, I did not feel that anything that I could do for your world would accomplish more than anything I have already done. What I have written I have written. I spent some time in my room in prayer each day, but beyond that, I set out to enjoy myself. I went to a music concert one night that was particularly good. A performance of Handel's Messiah. I spent another day touring a printer's shop to see how the work had changed. With all of the advances, jobs were still running late. And as you well know, I spent every afternoon with you and Dr. Lewis at Hudson's Grill drinking beer. There is one thing I need explained to me before I go mad, though. I thought that in my day the church had sunk as low as it could go. I was wrong.
St. Augustine: That is disturbing. What did you find?
Luther: I visited a monastery where the Papacy has given up every pretense of being Christian. From the outside, the monastery looked like the one place where everything had stayed almost the same. The monks had shaved heads and chanted like all monks do. Their robes were orange, but that was no shock. (After a few centuries they might want to wear a new color.) But it was when I walked inside that I could see that something was terribly wrong. There was no crucifix at the front of the chapel. The monks sat in front of a giant gold statue, and I couldn't tell if it was supposed to represent Jesus or the Virgin Mary or…
Ritchie: Dr. Luther, I think that was a Buddhist monastery, not a Roman one.
Luther: Who are the Buddhists? A new sect? Were they those people you said broke off from Zwingli's bunch after the Reformation?
Ritchie: No. Those were the Baptists. The Buddhists are an old pagan religion.
Luther: Thank heaven! So why did they use the word monastery? Don't the pagans have a word of their own?
Ritchie: There is probably a Chinese word for such a place, but they want people to understand what it is, so they choose the closest equivalent in English.
Luther: What an evil perversion of language. Don't people realize what that kind of thing does? Before my time, the gospel was lost to the church for centuries because of the improper translation of one Greek word that you in English translate "repentance." It could happen here too. If the Buddhists can call their religious place a monastery, what is to keep some other pagan group from using the word "church"?
Ritchie: They do it all the time.
Luther: And Christians don't protest? What are those outside of the church to think if they hear the same word applied to Christians and pagans? They will think that all religion is the same. It is confusing enough when you share these words with heretics. You need to win this word back!
Ritchie: You're right, of course, but I think it's hopeless. We can't outlaw their use of the word. To get back to the subject, however, I wanted to find out what you three men think of our popular culture.
St. Augustine: I still do not understand the term. You use it like our word "civilization," but a little differently.
Luther: I don't understand your use of the term either. I thought you wanted to know what we thought of your world because our insights might help the church.
Ritchie: That is what I had hoped. But I wanted to know what you thought of our novels, our movies, our music. It seems like the two of you kept as clear as possible from them. Only Dr. Lewis appears to have spent his time in a way helpful to the topic.
Lewis: In my time, the word culture was used to describe the elevation of taste. To speak of popular culture would have been nonsense. To be popular means to lower taste. I had no interest in taste as such. I happened to love literature, and wanted to help people to enjoy books. I knew they could do this better with good books than with poor books. Your use of the word culture is that of the anthropologist. Am I right in thinking that you wish to use the products of popular culture as a means of understanding the spirit of the age?
Ritchie: Yes. That is exactly what I wanted to do. But you are the only one who immersed yourself in popular culture in a way that allows me to find anything out.
Lewis: You are wrong on that point. Dr. Luther made an insightful observation about your culture, and you missed it because you were looking for a narrower kind of insight. Dr. Luther's comments on the misuse of language are perhaps as telling as anything he might have observed in a twentieth-century film or novel.
Ritchie (outflanked): You're right, of course.
St. Augustine: It surprises me to think that just because I spent most of my time in a library you think I was away from your world. At every moment, I was intensely aware that I wasn't in my own.
Ritchie: I apologize. I suppose I had a preconceived idea about what I wanted to learn from you before we came together.
Lewis: Most of my students come to study under me in the same condition. It is common enough, but real learning can happen when that is overcome.
Luther: It is true that I didn't read a novel. A new type of writing demands a lot of concentration, and I was busy enough learning how to do day-to-day tasks. Television is different, so easy to watch. It is the most surprising invention your age has produced. But it reminds me of the printing press. It took a genius to invent it, but any blockhead can spread nonsense with it. A few days ago I was watching one of your so-called afternoon talk shows and I was astounded. There was no order to it at all. Some idle women sat on a stage and bickered with one another. Then I found out that one of them was a man dressed as a woman, but before I had the chance to look at the man carefully to see whether it was so, the show's host said they would be back after some messages. This was followed by an even more surprising scene. A singing cleanser bottle danced into a bathroom where it was joined by a chorus of singing toilet bowls. Now, I think that you have improved on plumbing since my time, but dear Mary and All Angels, I don't want to listen to toilets sing!
Ritchie: I agree that those afternoon shows are mindless, but the singing toilet bowls were not part of the show, but part of a commercial, a break in the normal program where a product is sold.
Luther: I am familiar with the practice. We had something similar in our church services under the Papacy. It was a bad idea then, and it's a bad idea now. But what I found troubling was not that people would watch the program, or even the commercials. What concerned me was that everyone takes the discussion seriously, as if a moral question had received thorough treatment. I overheard some people on the street discussing the program I had watched. The young man said that he thought that the cross-dresser was born with a problem and wasn't responsible on that account. I remember the cross-dresser claiming he was born that way, but I don't even remember a bad argument being made that we aren't responsible for inborn inclinations. I wrote a whole book, The Bondage of the Will, to defend the idea that we are responsible for such things. My opponent, Erasmus, wrote a feeble treatise in reply, but he at least argued his case. In your time, nobody even has to offer the semblance of an argument. A bare assertion made on television settles the matter.
St. Augustine: I wonder if I was too quick to rejoice in the fact that the Pelagians are gone. I hadn't realized that the world could do worse than fight over the truth. People may actually reach a point where they no longer even ask the question of what it means for man to be morally responsible before God.
Lewis: I wouldn't be so hasty in my conclusions, gentlemen. People in any age are often careless when judging matters that do not concern them directly. But when a modern is wronged, he becomes a moral philosopher. If the cross-dresser on the show stole a car from the young man Dr. Luther mentioned, the young man would tolerate no nonsense from him about an inborn tendency to steal.
Ritchie: Do you think television is harmless, then?
Lewis: No, but I wonder if the greater danger is not in what it does, but in what it causes to be left undone. Books are not being read on account of television. Nor are they being written or published. Silence becomes rare. So does conversation.
St. Augustine: What I noticed was how rude people are to each other on television. And I hear people being rude to each other on the streets.
Luther: What I observed was that when someone on television is insulted by another, he fails to react. The insult is made for the sake of humor, not to portray character. The insults do make me laugh, but I fear that people will emulate what they see. They may find that when they try out the insults on their friends that the reaction is different from what they saw on television.
St. Augustine: Maybe television teaches people to receive insults as well as give them. When I first watched a comedy, I thought that the insulted character was a pious Christian who refused to return evil for evil. Then I learned that the whole situation was created for the sake of comedy. Since then I have seen people on the street receive the insults the same way as the characters on television. What was once an act of high character is now done for trivial motives. A pious Christian receives an insult because a holy God is watching. A modern man receives an insult because bored people are watching.
Lewis: These changes in culture slip by, and I would venture to guess that nobody notices them. Such observations require time and reflection. As people become busier, they have less time for reflection, and all of the institutions that were created to support and shelter such fragile practices fall into disuse.
St. Augustine: He that hath little business shall become wise, says the Wisdom of Solomon. I agree with Dr. Lewis. Nations would have gone to war to acquire the treasures I found in the university library, but it stands unused. I was also surprised that such a wonderful collection of books is housed in such an ugly setting.
Ritchie: This surprises me, since you are known for having been somewhat of a puritan. People expect you to prefer a bare-bones approach to things. After all, you weren't known for favoring ostentation.
St. Augustine: Those external matters mean little to me, but there is the matter of proportion. The sacramental bread is just as holy in a wooden bowl as in a gold one. And I would prefer it to be in a wooden bowl rather than see the poor neglected. But if everyone is eating out of fine golden vessels at home, more is demanded of us at church unless we are to be charged with despising God. The university library would be a suitable building for another time or place. But when your bank buildings and businesses have marble walls, your libraries should have marble walls. I know what your culture values when I compare the adornment of churches with the private homes I have visited.
[I look over and see Professor Lewis lighting a cigarette.]
Ritchie: I'm sorry, Dr. Lewis. You can't smoke in here. It's against the law.
Lewis: Smoking is illegal in your time?
Ritchie: Only in public buildings.
Lewis: You didn't tell me this place was a government restaurant.
Luther: He has gotten me hooked on the things, and I won't be able to find them when I get home. He is a naughty boy who deserves to be disciplined.
[Luther shakes his finger at Lewis.]
St. Augustine: He doesn't look like a boy.
Luther: I am more than four centuries his senior. That makes him a boy to me.
Ritchie: Dr. Luther, there are Christian groups who do believe that smoking is a sin.
Luther: Who? The Buddhists?
Lewis: No, the Anabuddhists. [We laugh, although St. Augustine's might have been a courtesy laugh. I don't think he understood the joke. He had been suspicious of Lewis and Luther all week. We silently resumed eating for a few minutes since all of our prime rib meals were getting cold.]
St. Augustine: I have been watching CNN for the last few nights. What amazes me is the interest that people take in things that occur so far away.
Luther: In my time, when the Holy Roman emperor was in another country, we forgot all about him and got on with our work. In your time, your interest in your president is different. He commands attention whether he is doing anything significant or not, just because he is an important figure. Someone local might be the real hope or the real danger, but you direct all your attention to the president. I think that people who feel insignificant feel a sense of power when they can watch the powerful. They believe that someone has the power to change the shape of human life for them.
St. Augustine: I think our host's expectations of how we would have spent our time support your thesis, Dr. Luther. It has occurred to me that he sees the three of us as major figures, as past Christian nobility, who would have a strategic vision of the world and modern life and how we could overhaul all of it, as if we created heaven and earth.
[My three guests have a hearty laugh at my expense.]
Ritchie: No, I don't think that at all. But all three of you did interact with the culture of your day. You offered Christian counsel on a variety of cultural topics. St. Augustine, you wrote a treatise on music. Another church Father, Tertullian, even wrote a work titled "On the Dress of Women." When we discuss these specific topics, larger issues relating to an overall sense of life always arise quickly.
St. Augustine: True enough. I am just worried that you take your own position in the world too seriously. I have learned from the Christians I have met in your time that they tend either to be completely unaware of the issues at stake in the world around them, or if they are aware, seem to think that they command a degree of control or influence that they do not have. Most people are unaware of the state of civilization, or as you call it, culture. But those who are aware seem to want to save the whole culture without contributing to it. In the new book area of the library I saw all these books on the decline of education, but I wonder if anyone is being persuaded to teach. We aren't called to be spectators in a drama of doom, but faithful Christians.
Ritchie: We are a consumer culture, and cultural criticism is consumed like anything else. It can be seen as another form of entertainment.
St. Augustine: I understand. Some of that is true in any age. In my time, after a good fiery sermon, the hearers would be convinced that Rome had been cleaned up, until they headed back to their homes. I recognize this from my own time.
Luther: You asked earlier about popular music. I have a strong background in music, but I can't make sense of your popular music. People's ears must have changed over the centuries. So many people seem to be convinced that modern music is good music. Could I alone be right in thinking that there is something wrong with it? Am I alone right when everyone is wrong? Now that sounds like the question the devil throws at me regarding the gospel. I'll stand alone for the gospel, but not for my musical opinions.
Ritchie: Does anyone else have an opinion on the music?
Lewis: The popular music is headed in the same direction I saw it going in the late thirties. The same cynicism is combined with the same poetical trend toward intentionally ambiguous or secret meaning. It is as difficult to be certain of the meaning of any line of REM's Michael Stype as it was of T. S. Eliot.
Ritchie: Would you compare the two men in terms of talent?
Lewis: I would not begin with that question. The popular music of my day was never as well crafted as the best poetry, nor was it intended to be. What strikes me more deeply than questions of morality or quality is what such an approach tells about the culture that creates and listens to it. Meaning has become a private enterprise. There is no public meaning to these songs. This is a greater break with popular music of the past than any change in style.
Ritchie: What should a Christian artist do in such circumstances?
Lewis: A small minority will probably choose to ignore modern innovations in favor of more traditional forms. Some artists, however, probably have backgrounds and training, not to mention strong inclinations, that lead them to produce modern music. To them I would suggest that a broad familiarity with the past may even prove to be a way forward. Perhaps they can see what kinds of past innovations were significant for the long haul, and in so doing be better able to spot those trends which are worth following. They would then avoid those which are mere whims of fashion. I am not a musician, but that is my suggestion.
Ritchie: That method did prove helpful to you in your own field. Your books still sell, while the trendy theologians of your time have almost been forgotten.
St. Augustine (to Lewis): So you aren't shocked by contemporary music?
Lewis: Not at all. The desire to shock always leads in the same direction, and after a fairly short time, everyone is bored. I could already see Dionysian motifs showing up in music, along with unbridled sensuality. What inevitably came with it was a bored audience.
St. Augustine: l wonder if it isn't the existence of the church that keeps these movements alive.
Ritchie: How so? I would think that it would be one force in the culture headed in a different direction.
St. Augustine: In my time, the pagans were also rather bored by sensuality. Most of them settled into routine lives, without moral restraint but also without passion. It was those who were reared in the church who were different. They were reared with hope. They were taught to recognize an infinite desire inside themselves. The pagans had usually all but extinguished that feeling. When a Christian did turn away from the faith, he had all of that desire to turn to the world. Once he got over his shame, you would see no more frenzied spectator in the gladiatorial games than a lapsed Christian. Maybe the same is true of your music.
Ritchie: It is an intriguing idea, but one I don't know how to evaluate.
Lewis: I am surprised at the staying power of these forms. I hear that some of these songs on the radio are more than thirty years old. I would have thought they would be forgotten overnight. It makes me wonder whether a shallow culture can become deeply rooted, or whether there might be more powerful forces at work.
St. Augustine: Demonic forces?
Lewis: Perhaps they play a role, but I had something else in mind. You spoke of desire earlier, and I wonder if the staying power of modern music is not in the beauty of its form, but in a promise it makes to fulfill a desire that cannot be fulfilled by anything earthly. I used to believe that the Dionysian symbolized only lack of restraint. I have changed my mind. It represents transcendence to those whose spiritual tissues are thirsty for it.
Ritchie: The song "Dreams" by the Cranberries may have gained some of its popularity on that account. If it is false transcendence, should we tell people to shun the music?
Luther: I myself have no inclination to listen to it, as I have said, but prohibition doesn't work. If you are right about the music, it is like the use of religious images in the churches. Some radicals of my day thought that they could make better Christians out of people by toppling statues of the Virgin Mary and burning crucifixes. All they did was create a big ruckus and make people superstitious in the other direction, thinking that the images, and not their wayward hearts, were the problem. If they really believed that God was there for them, they would forget the images in due course. The music will be the same. The contact with the transcendent that the music promises needs to be preached as being offered by God in Word and Sacrament.
St. Augustine: People in my age were often wrong about religion, but everyone sought a world beyond. In your world, music could either be seen as a false religion, or a reminder that there is another world, depending on whether people can see beyond it.
Lewis: Hard-headed sensible people always believe that mankind can do without a world beyond, and whenever they push it away in one area, it comes back full force in another.
St. Augustine: Dr. Luther sees danger in prohibition as a Christian stance, and that is a new position I have never heard argued. Is there a danger in going the other direction?
Ritchie: I think so, even when the attempt is sincere. I remember when I was in college reading an angry evangelical author who was out to fight the cramped pietistic spirituality he had seen in so many of the people he grew up around. Now this writer did me the great service of convincing me to cut down on the frenetic Christian activity I was involved in so that I might have time to spend in my vocation as a student. But in addition, I was somehow given the impression by his book that watching unrated foreign films at the local art theater was a back-door approach to the pursuit of sanctification.
Lewis: Ah yes. John Milton's error. The verse "to the pure all things are pure" is quoted to secure the license to expose oneself to anything.
St. Augustine: It completely ignores those passages which say that certain sins are unmentionable. How a steady diet of perversion can be justified as entertainment for Christians is beyond me.
Ritchie: Yet I don't feel like I can go back to the old way of shunning all culture that isn't Christian.
Lewis: Of course not. You have been presented with the false antithesis between culture as the devil's playground and culture as a sacrament. Pope Gregory found a mediating position that avoids both extremes. Culture is a tool we are to use for the sake of the gospel.
Ritchie: You had better watch bringing up popes in front of Dr. Luther.
Luther: Not at all! Gregory was the last of the good bishops of Rome. Besides, my exposure to your century suggests that there is stiff competition for the title of antichrist between the bishop of Rome and other ruling bishops of other churches. It requires wisdom in any age to distinguish Christ from antichrist.
Ritchie: Dr. Luther, you and St. Augustine are two of the most influential men in the history of the church. Your influence can even be seen in the shape of modern secular society and the family. Are you able to see some of the results of your work today?
Luther: What I see is something great achieved that is in the process of being lost. During my career, we were trying to place the family on a new footing. Everyone thought you had to be a monk or a nun to be saved. We rejected that belief. I can see from your movies and on your streets that our assumptions were widely accepted as the norm. But now the family is dying. I am both cheered and grieved. To know that your endeavor made a difference for centuries is a dream come true. But I have now seen my dream in its death throes.
St. Augustine: Your world is less pagan than ours, yet more immoral. I would hardly have guessed that God would allow a society to decline like this and yet survive. He must be accomplishing something unguessed. This must be the most immoral age since the flood.
Lewis: Speaking of my own age, I would say not, although perhaps from your gentlemen's perspective, our host and I come from the same age.
Luther and Augustine (together): You're dressed the same!
Ritchie: I am dressed up. And as for Professor Lewis, the only reason nobody is staring at him and his out-of-date suit is that they can't pull their eyes off of you two!
Lewis: Why this suit is out-of-date in my own time, as my fellow faculty members are so quick to remind me. But back to the subject, the early part of the century was no golden age. Sexual morality was a little better. But there are other concerns. It was a wonderful thing this week to walk past a university and see a full generation of youth alive on the campus. I have seen young men of two generations die. Something is right about seeing people live.
St. Augustine: You aren't saying that you just want them alive and don't care how they live, are you professor?
Lewis: Certainly not! The decline in sexual morality is a scandal. But there are other sins. And I wouldn't be taken for a pacifist. But if you knew how mass warfare could devastate a continent, you might see the age you are visiting as an improvement, in some ways, over another age.
[The dessert tray is carried over to the table by Holly, our waitress.]
Holly: Is anyone ready for some dessert?
[Orders were taken after Holly gave explanations of the choices. She was surprised to be asked what chocolate was. St. Augustine chose the pear torte, since he knew what a pear was. Luther chose the lemon cake for the same reason. Professor Lewis, knowing more about twentieth century cuisine, chose English Trifle.]
Ritchie: Gentlemen, dig in.
Luther: St. Augustine, you seem to have retained your fondness for pears you did not pay…
St. Augustine: What's that? Oh, my. I forget that a writer's words are so well remembered by his readers.
Lewis: I am surprised by your mundane dessert choice, Dr. Luther. Whatever happened to "Sin boldly"?
Ritchie: Dr. Lewis, I was surprised you didn't order Turkish delight.
Lewis: I didn't see that offered as a choice.
Ritchie: That's because they have improved on it by creating Snickers bar pie.
Lewis: My friend Owen Barfield used to call the idea that anything from the present was superior to anything from the past chronological snobbery.
Ritchie: He had never had Snickers bar pie, now, had he?
Lewis: And you will never know the pleasures of the table as they were known in the Edwardian age. Poor lad.
Ritchie: Before we adjourn, I was wondering if each of you could offer some parting comments on Christianity and culture.
St. Augustine: Don't forget the heavenly city. Your civilization may be replaced by another one. Rome fell and was followed by other empires. The world will survive whether or not your society survives. Don't take the matters of this world so seriously.
Luther: I agree with Augustine on the priority of the heavenly city over the earthly, but I think that God wants us to spend much of our time laboring for the sake of the earthly city. What I think is always in danger of getting lost is that we do this for the neighbor. How is my neighbor helped by my cultural effort? If my labor secures for my neighbor a natural gift from God, this is a good thing. I suspect that your age has fallen back into the ways of thinking that characterized things under the papacy. People want to know if this or that is allowable, and allow and forbid the strangest things. If they understood the command to love the neighbor, they could pursue legitimate callings with an easier conscience.
Lewis: That is a very important point. I would want to remind people to be broad readers of authors who lived before their own time. No past age was a golden age, but human folly changes over the centuries. You will recognize the mistakes of past ages easily. But through the eyes of the past you might see your own ages folly more easily as well. Aside from this, the books that survive tend to be worthy of survival.
Ritchie: Gentlemen, I thank you for joining me in this discussion of modern culture. I hope this type of conversation becomes more common as Christians learn to discuss their culture in the light of past Christian wisdom.
[Here the tape ended.]
