Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
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# How Should We Then Live

2023-09-24 Books Faith 1k words

Rating: 6/10
Amazon Link: click here
TL;DR A summary of the rise of Western civilization and philosophy, from the time of the Greeks through the modern era, with an attempt to explain how the change in our moral character has influenced the rise and fall of nations, and lead to our current predicament.

“How Should We Then Live” attempts to summarize how Western society arrived at the pickle we’re in, using the lense of the development of Western thought and philosophy. It does an okay job, but fails to provide any substantial suggestion for how to resolve it. The core premise of the book is that “Man, beginning from himself and proceeding only with himself, can never achieve anything like lasting peace or happiness.”

The journey begins at and passes through the Greek philosophers, how that thought dominated through the early church, which came to dominate western society and to create a society with freedoms intertwined with charitable ideas and semi-righteous laws; the rise of humanism and its infiltration of that same church and society, and its eventual hollowing out of the structures that had been created. It follows through the reformation where the authors obvious explicit protestant bias shows in vivid colors (which to me invalidate some of the scholarly character of the work), but he does make good points about how protestantism was a rejection of humanism in the church. I think “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” provides a much better education on this series of events, though many readers might get lost in the sauce with that volume, so opting for this one is okay. Just be aware yoiu’re getting a very brief overview of a very large swath of history that is really only being presented to set up the rest of the points further in the book.

The book’s serious contributions, I think, don’t begin until chapter 6. The author makes a valiant fight against the idea that protestant reformers hated art, going to great lengths to show how much the arts flourished in the lives and hearts of various reformers. The author makes a very strong case for the idea that the American, French and English revolutions could never have occurred had it not been for protestantism, something that seems obvious in hindsight but which I never really considered until now. He draws parallels between the Amerrican revolution andn the “bloodless revolution” in England as similar, while pointing out the incredible difference in the French revolution that followed, which contradicts a common idea that the American and French revolution were similar. Through his lense, they’re wildly different, the French revolution being a product of the romantics and humanists, devoid of the core structures that provided the ethical frameworks of the American and English revolutions. He carries this chain through to the various totalitarian regimes, illustrating how their attempts to produce utopian society without love for God at the center ultimately lead to destruction and misery. But all this has been covered before - “LIve Not by Lies” gives a better treatmnent, I think, though the one presented here is probably more approachable for some people.

The most impressive contribution of this book, I think, is between chapters 7 and 10 where the author discusses the history of the modern sciences, and makes the case that it would not have been possible for modern science to exist without the framework of Christianity. Not just talking about the funding provided by the Roman Catholic Church, but rather the entire worldview provided by the Christian faith that says the world was created by a rational God who presented his work (which adheres to His specific laws) to be investigated and discovered and brought under dominion by man, His special creation. He references numerous famous scientists who, even if they were not Christians themselves, openly admit that the Christian worldview enabled the very scientific process through which they operated, because it provides for the idea of (among other things) absolute truth which can be discovered. He proceeds to discuss the development of the cult of science, the new priesthood, and what has happened to science now that the Christian worldview has been replaced - how you no longer have a body that is good at producing revelations based on observation (of course there are some who still do - but we’re speaking broadly here), but rathher you get a field where you excel at deriving whatever conclusion you wwanted to get in thef irst place from the data you gather to support whatever social statement you want to make. This is an important topic that I don’t think gets talked about enough: the corruption of the sciences by a new psudo-scientific cult who idolize “the science” without actually loving the scientific method and without accepting the source of objective truth, God himself.

The frustrating thing, to me, is that the author never answers the title of the book: How shall we then live? He does answer it, in a certain way, but it is (to me) altogether unsatisfactory. I was hoping to see some concrete examples of how to reject modernity and adhere better to the tenets of the Christian faith in the modern world, but all we get is “Accept the Bible as the ultimate source of truth and live the way Jesus said”. And really, “Accept the Bible as the ultimate source of truth” is the bigger thrust. I mean … The author isn’t wrong. But did we really need to read 12 chapters to be told that? Perhaps someone who is less entrenched in their faith will have a revelation, and this will be useful to them, but for me this was kind of a “Well, duh” moment, without a lot of additional substance I was looking for. As the author is fond of saying throughout the book, “the particulars” were not well served.

Overall it’s a decent read. If you have a chance to pick it up from your library, give it a go, but I doubt I’d pay cover price for it.

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