Plowing in Hope

Over the years, having been introduced to the fine works of the "Southern Agrarians", Richard M. Weaver, Wendell Berry, Victor Hanson, and others, I have arrived at a greater appreciation of the connection between working the land with one's own hands and the health of body and soul.

But, in addition to the writings of confirmed agrarians, the Christian faith has a long tradition of thoughtful scholarship on this very subject. A comment to the previous post ("Did I Accomplish Anything Significant Today"), by "Eric", triggered my memory in this regard. Eric links to a reflection he wrote not long ago that expresses ideas similar to my own in the previous post. Eric's post is on a site by the name of Sensus Divinitatis Publishing, with which I was perviously unfamiliar, but the Latin phrase sensus divinitatis--"sense of divinity"--refers to a deep-seated moral awareness or sense of God. The Protestant John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, called it "natural instinct, an awareness of divinity", and the Catholic St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, referred to it as "a law" that the Creator has "written on the tablets of the heart". 

I recommend reading Eric's thoughtful reflection, not because it is similar to my own post, but because he touches briefly on a modern expression of Protestant thought on human culture and work. He mentions David Hegeman's Plowing in Hope:Towards a Biblical Theology of Culture, which I read some time ago. While I do recall differing with a few of Hegeman's conclusions (e.g, his rejection of the monastic ideal of celibacy reflects a common misunderstanding), I thought his work was the best modern expression of Protestant thought I had read on this subject (Henry Van Til's The Calvinistic Concept of Culture is also an insightful modern contribution from the Protestant Reformed tradition). Hegeman's Plowing in Hope is a significant contribution to the subject faithful to the tradition of John Calvin, Groen van Prinsterer, Abraham Kuyper, and others of the Reformed tradition. 

Kuyper (a Dutch philosopher, theologian, and politician) and Pope Leo XIII were contemporaries and both approached subjects like labor, poverty, wealth, class, and the state as fundamentally theological issues. Kuyper was strongly influenced by a German Catholic philosopher by the name of Franz Xaver von Baader, who emphasized that social power is not exercised by the individual human person, nor by an aggregate of individuals, but rather when humans form themselves into social organizations like family, church, or political groups. Kuyper went on to make a profound impact in the Netherlands and beyond (particularly on the American Founding Fathers) by formulating the concept of "sphere sovereignty", which advanced the idea that every social institution is "sovereign in its own sphere". At about the same time, Leo XIII was concretizing the similar Catholic concept known as "subsidiarity" (in his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum).

While the Catholic and Calvinistic traditions do not lead to the same socio-political conclusions, both do lead to the conclusion that the concept of culture is rooted in theological considerations. Man, created in the image of God, is mandated to forge his place in the world by the work of his own mind and hands, in conformity to the law "written on his heart". And the result is "culture". Man needs to create gardens out of jungles, because by doing so he fulfills, in part, his cultural mandate and witnesses, in part, to what it means to be human. We plow in hope that one day the creation we work with our minds and hands, though now blemished and overrun with thistles--like our souls, will once again be a garden.