Christ Against Culture

-"uncompromisingly affirms sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects culture's claims to loyalty"

Part II. Tolstoy's Rejection of Culture

Monasticism "its attention was directed to the achievement of a Christian Life, apart from civilization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts Mennonites The Society of Friends many groups copelled by loyalty to Christ to withdraw from culture and to give up all responsibility for the world

Tolstoy Sin/evil is cultural not individual
-Devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a oposition to the institutions of culture
-"Every phase of culture falls under this
-The state and Christian faith are incompatable for the state is based on love of power and the exiercise of violence,, whereas the love, humility, forgiveness, and nonresistance of Christian life draw it completely away from political measures and institutions.
-No Interim function by the state The arguments of such Christians as Paul who contend that the state performs an interim function in restraining evil does not appeal to Tolstoy who sees the state as the chief offender against life.
-NonparticipationAgainst its evil there is no defense except complete nonparticipation and nonviolent striving for the conversion of all men to peaceful, anarchic Christianity
-Churches are equally far removed from the Christianity of Jesus. Tolstoy regards them as self-centered organizations that assert their own infallibility, servants of the state, defenders of the reign of violence and privilege, of inequality and property, obscures and falsifiers of the gospel.
-Christ did not found them and comprehension of his doctrine will not reform but will “destroy the churches and their significance”
-Attack on economic instiutions believed property cliams were based on robbery and maintained by violence
-subdivision of labor thought a means by which privileged people such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingment
-Turned against philosophy, and the sciences and arts
-Philosophy leads us no farther than the knowledge that all is vanity
-Like John 1 in praise of love and rejection of flesh
-Like Tertullian in attack on social institutions
-Like monks in withdrawl into a life of poverty
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