"We're trying to save Western civilization"

AFEW CENTURIES AGO a father across the pond might justly have relied on Yale or Harvard, or beloved Oxford, to form his son in the ways of God; to make a civilised man - that is, one not in bondage to the things of the world, or the whims of the fallen body and soul, but ordered, amiable, devout. As Thomas Sowell has astutely noted, we are only ever one generation from the barbarians conquering, for we bring the barbarians in every time we have children. Man remains fallen, even when a babe; “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps 51:5). There is little more melancholy, but important, than this! Break the chain, fail to graft them in, and the whole thing, as Burke has warned us in his ‘contract of the dead, living and unborn’, falls apart.

Yet now Yale turns out Queer Theorists, and Harvard produces Businessmen; Oxford, in this generation, has produced both a male prostitute and a murderer; that is, “the enemy is within”, and he’s got a piece of chalk in his hand, and tenure in his back pocket. And he is busily inducting men and women into the ranks of the damned (certainly the damned ignorant).

An American theologian named Douglas Wilson represents one of the best hopes of this not proving fatal, for he - despite his wild protuberant beard and doughty Anglophile nature - is no barbarian, but the equivalent of a Roman legionnaire standing forthrightly against them.

His (relatively) new University, New Saint Andrews, in Moscow, Idaho, teaches the lost youth of the world, adrift in oceans of grot and ignorance, how to get home, and not disgrace themselves before the cloud of witnesses about us in this life, nor disappoint the Creator in the life to come. That is, it teaches them the most important thing of all: how to, in the words of that most noble Westminster Catechism, “glorify God and enjoy him forever”.

It is an authentically Trinitarian education. God, Christ, the Holy Ghost - order, authority, creativity; majesty, judgement, renewal; mercy, redemption, comfort - Father, Messiah, Spirit direct every focus, govern every principle, inspire every element.

Christ, whom God pleased to fill all in all, is at the centre of their devotion; the students are at his feet; and graduates fluent in the ways of Latin, Greek, the Church Fathers, the Psaltery, Classic Apologetics, Reformed Theology, the Holy Scriptures and English Literature are regularly produced.

It is, as Wilson puts it, a campaign to save Western civilisation; and how! Students go about clad in the gowns Cambridge shamefully threw off in the 70’s. Fellows teach in the small tutorials New Universities scorn in favour of depersonalised lectures to audiences of 500+. Books can be bought from the campus pub.

But this is not the extent of his ambition. He has other spears, trained just as lethally over the hearts of those who have done Christendom damage. And to this end he writes. He has two books out this year: ‘A Primer on Worship’ and ‘Heaven Misplaced’. We have been lucky enough to get early copies, and in the coming weeks shall look at both in turn.

This week: the Primer. In the meantime, have a look at Wilson's excellent blog: Blog & Mablog