Notes on The Art of Christian Piety
January 1, 2025
“The knight,” says C.S. Lewis, “is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. The man who combines both characters – the knight – is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.”
For Lewis, the essence of the medeival virtue of chivalry was the seemingly impossible coexistence of a gentleman and a warrior within the same man. The knight was fully both; he was not two men within one like some kind of schizophrenic, nor was he a walking contradiction with a great capacity for cognitive dissonance. He was fully both, harmoniously; each part of himself was in consonance with every other part.
The Philosphers and the Prophets both recognized the essence of real manhood as this consonance of traits. Plato advocated training the youth in music, gymnastics, and geometry, to naturally balance the tendency of men to track towards their own innate tendency to be effeminate, brutish, or bookish. Aristotle claimed the best age for men was their middle years, as they have both the risk tolerance of the youth and the wisdom of the elderly. King David, perhaps better than any other except Christ himself, exemplified the chivalric ideal; he was a brutal warrior (1 samuel 18:7) and yet a brilliant poet (Psalm 72), a powerful ruler and yet a humbly pious man. The Bible commands magistrates to bear the sword to punish the wicked (Rom 13:4), and yet be nursing fathers to their people (Isaiah 49:23), a phrase which denotes the tender, intimate, personal care that an infant needs, as well as the strong protection and providence that a father must embody to keep the wolves away. And Christ, of course, is the ultimate example in all these things; He is the lion-lamb, the God-man, the healer-king, the friend of sinners, and all the rest.
Christian piety must be composed in a man with a view to a similar harmony. Piety was the chief virtue of Rome, exemplified in the duty Virgil’s Aeneas paid to the gods, his family, his nation, and his destiny. Christian piety has the same form; only the matter changes. The Christian man by his very existence is a dual citizen with dual sets of duties, one to the heavenly kingdom wherein he is seated with Christ (his duty to God), and one to the earthly kingdom where he lives during his earthly life (his duty to his family, nation, brothers, and so forth).
The disenchantment of our world today leads Christians to two basic errors regarding duties in these realms. One error is to seperate the realms, amplifying the heavenly duties by diminishing the temporal ones. The other error is to make the two realms the same, diminishing the heavenly duties by collapsing them into earthly duties.
The first error is the error of Pietism. These are Christians who are “so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good”, who neglects their earthly duties by disconnecting them from their heavenly ones. These Christians compartmentalize their Christian life and their secular life, resulting in two sets of unrelated duties. Their Christian faith relates only to spiritual realities such as justification; it has no bearing on the education of their children, or the role of their governors, or the laws of their societies, or their marriage, or the way they administer their household, or their own personal obedience to the Law of God.
The opposite error doesn’t seem to have an accepted name; it’s merely a tendency I’ve observed and even saw in myself for a while. These are Christians who often hold to postmillennialism, theonomy, or some other elements of neo-reconstructionism. These Christians deny the twofold aspect of Christ’s reign, conflating his redemptive reign over the spiritual kingdom with his providential reign over temporal affairs. In other words, the kingdom of Christ is spiritual and physical, but its tangible aspects are the most important ones. Duty to God is equated with temporal duties and outward engagement of the kingdom of God with the world. Kingdom progress is equated with earthly manifestations of the kingdom’s work. Spiritual duties are diminished and considered too “inward focused” and pietistic.
For example, paedocommunionists (those who believe that unconfirmed children should partake of communion) neglect the explicit heavenly command regarding the sacrement to inwardly and upwardly focus as they examine themselves and discern the body of Christ, and are instead encouraged to “look around” as the congregation partakes. The supper, to them, is only secondarily about inward discernment of heavenly realities (faith, repentance, etc.); it’s primary focus is convenantal (i.e. temporal, for every covenant with man exists in time). This conflation of heavenly citizenship with earthly participation, I believe, makes a Christian too earthly-minded.
A pious Christian man must avoid either ditch. He must be a work of art; a diligent worker of his duties in both earthly and heavenly realms. He is both heavenly minded and earthly-diligent; a force to be reckoned with both in private prayer and in the civil agon, prudentially ordering his family’s life and earthly business to leave an inheritance for his children, yet always keeing his eyes on heaven and remembering that he will one day die.
Ben Dunston’s article “The Rutherford Option” on American Reformer demonstrates how Samuel Rutherford exemplified the harmony of Christian piety in a single man. Rutherford was a relentlessly hard worker, constantly studying, writing, ministering as a pastor, visiting the sick, and otherwise being an utter whirlwind of prudent industriousness. His work Lex, Rex butressed the political theoretic foundation that men like John Locke and the American Founding Fathers built the greatest nations in the world upon. Yet Rutherford was also intensely heavenly minded. Rutherford’s dying words the last few days of his life are moving. Among the many yearnings and praises he sang of Christ on his deathbed, his ultimate disposition was this:
I renounce all that ever He made me will or do as defiled or imperfect as coming from myself. I betake myself to Christ for sanctification as well as justification.
They key to avoiding either ditch is to properly understand the nature of earthly and heavenly duties, and their relationship. Heavenly duties have earthly components, and earthly duties point to heavenly ones. The earthly realm is haunted by the heavenly one, and a thin veil seperates the mere appearances of this world from the weighty realities of eternity. This is reflected even in the structure of the Law of God itself. The Law’s two do not neatly lie along the lines of earthly and heavenly. Our first table duties to God are generally oriented towards the heavenly, yet no one can claim obedience to them without earthly obedience. You cannot remember the Sabbath day, a heavenly duty to remember the rest that we have obtained in Christ, without actually resting from your earthly works. Likewise, though the second table laws are generally oriented towards man, their ultimate fulfilllment is heavenly. The whole law is a reflection of the nature of God, and any transgression of or lack of conformity unto the law is a false testimony about his nature. Human contemplation of the Law leads us to the attributes of God, from where they ultimately derive. Adultery is wrong, so God is faithful. Murder is wrong, so God is life itself. And ultimately, the second table commandments are truly conformed to not only in the outward appearance of obedience, but in the inward disposition and actions of the heart. It is the spiritual which counts for obedience to the law, not only the physical.
Of course, Christian piety is not only related to obedience to the law; a thing which, due to our sin nature, we can never fully accomplish. Any obedience to the law that we attempt, we must do in faith, trusting that God will be gracious and merciful to accept our feeble and halfhearted attempts at conformity to His standards. Faith is necessary for us to be willing to risk obedience, and not have our conscience continually afflicted with doubts as to whether God will accept what we do. We must even take heart that our measure of faith need not be great in order to be accepted by God; a mustard seed’s amount will do (Matt 17:20). When our faith is feeble and weak and we cry, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24), God even accepts that cry as an exercise of faith. Faith is the chief element of Christian piety. It is the theme of the whole Bible; those who trust in God are saved. We trust God for our justification in Christ by faith. We petition Him to deliver us from evil in faith. We work in faith that God will accept our works by grace. We ask Him “give us this day, our daily bread” in faith that He does, and will. Even prayer itself, the scandalous idea that God will listen to us lowly, feeble sinners if we speak to Him, is “the chief act of faith”, as Calvin says.
Christian piety thus appears to be a bit of a twofold paradox. The first paradox is that piety relates to duty, and duty relates to works, but faith renounces the value of all works before God, trusting in His works alone. This first paradox is resolved in Christ. He is the lynchpin of Christian piety; without renouncing our own works and trusting in His works, we cannot claim true Christian piety at all. Any duty we espouse to God, man, country, etc. is always incomplete and tainted with sin unless we first acknowledge the worthlessness of our attempts at piety apart from Christ. Our duties to God apart from Christ are not duties at all.
The second paradox is that the proper response to our renouncing all our duties is to lean into them harder. We do this not because our works count for our justification before God, but because we love God Himself. Our wholehearted trust in God is what drives us towards actions that demonstrate that trust. In faith we cry to God, which is the first act of Christian piety. God responds to us by changing us, enabling us to love Him, trust Him, and obey Him, thus deepening and widening our piety. Grace restores nature. Grace preceeds obedience. This is the pattern of the Covenant of Grace in scripture. By grace God rescued Israel from Egypt, and then bid them to obey His law. By grace Christ died for our sins, and bids us, “if ye love me, keep my commandments.” When a man is accepted before God, washed of all his sins forever, given a new heart, and adopted as a son of God, he is as dangerous as a dead man; he has nothing to lose. He is accepted before God judicially. He is impelled from within by the Holy Spirit to love and serve God for the rest of eternity. His mind is renewed. His affections are realigned. He has nothing to fear.
Christ cuts down every incumberance we have to obey God and bestows in us a powerful restoration enabling us to do so. We work, not because our lives depend on it, but because our lives are already secure. The great saints of history toppled Satan’s strongholds, built civilzations, and went to the ends of the earth to save souls and extend the heavenly kingdom of Christ because they considered hearing “well done, good and faithful servant” from the God they love worth more than their own lives. Their heavenly mindedness brought about the greatest accomplishments the planet has ever seen, as well as the smallest ones. A Christian husband is an image of Christ in his marriage. A Christian father is an image of God the Father to his children. A Christian Prince is an image of Christ to the nation he rules. The heavenly reality of Christ’s kingdom and work cannot be divorced from our own earthly labors as husbands, fathers, slaves, magistrates, and citizens, for Christ is the living law for all these things. Our heavenly assurance of eternal life makes any risk calculable, even risk of total ruin to the point of death. There is no downside to obeying Christ.
It works the other way too. Earthly things point to heaven. When even pagans condemn murder, adultery, theft, covetousness, and other matters of the Law, they must logically conclude that there is a Lawgiver who dictated this Law. This is what the apostle means when he says that the eternal attributes of God are seen through what has been made. “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse…” (Rom 1:20). This world is enchanted with the truth of heaven. The natural is typological. Marriage has many temporal benefits and purposes, but the ultimate one is to image Christ and the Church. Family life, by the same token, ultimately images the cosmic order of God’s world. Even deficiences and corruptions of nature lead the mind to posit heavenly realities; wicked kings lead us to believe in the existence of good kings, and of the good kings, there must be a King of Kings. Even if our earthly fathers are good, they are yet imperfect due to sin, and our souls long for a Perfect Father. There’s way too much to get into here. The Book of the World was never meant to be written down, but it was meant to be read and obeyed. We Christians ought not to be like the pagans, who “…when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21). Instead, we should take great care to ensure that we obey the implications of our earthly duties in the heavenly realm.
The central pastoral concern of the Christian church today is the recovery of Christian piety. Worldly Christians will not be equipped to endure the intellectual, physical, and spiritual challenges required to rebuild Christendom, yet neither will Pietistic Christians have the earthly piety to make the necessary investments in this world to lead men into the heavenly kingdom. We need men who imitate the piety of their forefathers, impelled by a strong sense of duty both to God and man. Some men will have a temperament that lends itself to one realm or the other. Some men are diligent in prayer and Bible study, but neglect their childrens’ education or inheritance. They should be encouraged in the earthly aspects of Christian piety. Other men are extremely productive builders and makers, but don’t tend to their family’s spiritual state, are neglectful of prayer, or consider that they’ve done enough as a father by providing for their family’s material needs. They should be reminded to orient themselves and their actions to heaven. Ultimately, the cultivation of Christian piety is a pastoral work of art; the melding of two sets of duties into one man. It’s a difficult task, but one that will be necessary for the recovery of Christendom and the growth of Christ’s kingdom.
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