The following
article, The Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the
Symbols of Moral and Cultural Decay, was first published on The American Vision.
How many of you are aware of the number of churches that
have been vandalized in France? How often do the media report crimes against
Christians and their places of worship? Almost never. We don’t know if the
Notre-Dame fire was an accident or deliberately set, but we do know that
there’s been a lot of anti-Christian acts taking place in France, Europe, and
places like Nigeria and China that are reminiscent of the lead up to the French
Revolution:
Countless churches throughout Western Europe are
being vandalized, defecated on, and torched. In France, two churches are
desecrated every day on average. According to PI-News, a German
news site, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons,
statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17% increase
compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered— meaning
that such attacks are only going from bad to worse.
*****
Who is
primarily behind these ongoing and increasing attacks on churches in Europe?
The same German report offers a
hint: “Crosses are broken, altars smashed, Bibles set on fire, baptismal fonts
overturned, and the church doors smeared with Islamic expressions like ‘Allahu
Akbar.’”
Another
German report from
November 11, 2017 noted that in the Alps and Bavaria alone, around 200 churches
were attacked and many crosses broken: “Police are currently dealing with
church desecrations again and again. The perpetrators are often youthful
rioters with a migration background.” Elsewhere they are described as “young Islamists.” (Sovereign Nations)
The Cathedral of
Notre Dame has seen a lot of history, not all of it good. The recent fire is a
wake-up call, even if it was an accident. Islamists see the fire as validation
of their religion. Bill Muehlenberg, who lives in Australia and has a keen eye
for moral shifts wrote the following:
Will Macron and other
European leaders all start wearing Christian crosses in solidarity with the
French Christians? Will Muslims also wear crosses to show their support for
their grieving Christian friends? Hmm, I won’t hold my breath on any of these
things.
He was comparing
this non-response to the response to the government of New Zealand after the
mosque massacres where the Prime Minister and other government officials wore
head scarfs in solidary with the Islamic community.
Churches have been
singled out because they stand for a transcendental moral authority that binds
individuals and governments. Attacking Christian places of worship is similar
to raising a fist against God. These are what the Bible describes as
“high-handed sins” (Num 15:28-31). They can’t attack God directly, so they lash
out at symbols representing Him. It might mean burning a Bible, submerging a
cross in urine, or defacing an altar in a church.
Another way
high-handed sins are expressed is by defacing God’s image bearers by mocking
God’s creation design. The body is a symbolic temple. Same-sex sexuality
defiles that temple. It is a high-handed sin.
The Enlightenment
philosophers of the eighteenth century turned the famed Notre-Dame Cathedral
into a secular church devoted to “reason.” “In their view miracles and other
phenomena not explained by natural laws and reason were mere superstitions.”
Reason was elevated to god-like status. “Europe disintegrated because the
goddess of Reason, whom the French revolutionaries placed, in the shape of a
Parisian streetwalker, upon the altar of Notre Dame….” became a God-substitute.
She was “carried shoulder‑high into the cathedral by men dressed in Roman
costumes.”
On November 10,
1793, a civic festival was held in the new temple, its facade bearing the words
“To Philosophy.”
The National Assembly passed
a resolution deliberately declaring “There is no God;” vacated the throne of
Deity by simple resolution, abolished the Sabbath, unfrocked her ministers of
religion, turned temples of spiritual worship into places of secular business,
and enthroned a vile woman as the Goddess of Reason.
The church of Notre
Dame was reconsecrated to the “Cult of Reason.” Reason, not revelation, ruled.
While these philosophers were not all atheists, they reasoned as if God did not
exist. For them, reason was “a law unto itself, as though man’s mind were
self-sufficient, not in need of divine revelation. This attitude commonly leads
people to think that they are in a position to think independently, to govern
their own lives, and to judge the credibility of God’s word based on their own
insight and authority.”
The calendar was
changed in a deliberate attempt to unlink history from the redemptive work of
Jesus Christ. The Revolutionary Calendar began with a New Year One.
This was a
self-conscience change since all Western calendars were based on the birth of
Jesus Christ – “In the Year of Our Lord” (Anno Domini, AD). While
the academic world has started with a New Year One (see the film Rosemary’s
Baby), they have reoriented the calendar by replacing BC (Before Christ)
with BCE (Before the Common Era) and AD with CE (Common Era), all designed to
have the same effect.
While the Cathedral
has no religious significance in and of itself since God does not dwell in a
man-made structure, it acts as a symbol. To burn it is to strike at God with
unrelenting fury, a sort of man-made hell.
Victor
Hugo’s 1831 novel, “Notre-Dame de Paris,” published in English as “The
Hunchback of Notre Dame,” informed
readers about the building’s decrepit condition.
The book helped spur
significant overhauls from 1844 to 1864, when the architects
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc redid the spire
and flying buttresses.
Rebuilding the
structure did not solve the real problem. A magnificent edifice in and of
itself has no transforming authority or power. Jesus said as much:
“Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, you hypocrites. You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear
beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every
kind of filth. Even so, on the outside you appear righteous, but inside you are
filled with hypocrisy and evildoing (Matt. 23:27-28).
The Cathedral of
Notre-Dame is a magnificent structure, but all the money being donated to
rebuild it won’t fix Europe’s spiritual problem. The following is from the
satirical site The Onion, and it’s spot on:
“We will come together as a
nation to reconstruct Notre Dame, no matter the fundamental irrationality of
imbuing mere man-made structures of stone and wood with any sort of deeper
meaning in an existence where entropy is the only universal truth.”
Continue
reading The Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the
Symbols of Moral and Cultural Decay …
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