One of the issues in my work is that I have to retrain and recertify. This has led to me going to my College congress, and waking well before dawn as I am 2.5 hours behind my home and body clock. (Yes, there is a state in Australia with an odd time zone. Australia is weird).

Many people think Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians are the same. We are not. We are all children of the British Empire, and we have common interests[1], but we are not the same.

We are in nations. There is nothing wrong with being in a nation or of a tribe. But in Christ we are not merely of a tribe, we are of Christ. And the kingdom that we belong to in Christ has yet to come. We are in exile, and this world is not our final home: it is against Christ and all his works.

1 Peter 1:17-23

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

We are exiles. We have always had opposition, without the church and within. But we have done wonders, collectively, because we lived in fear of God. We respected the creation and acted, imperfectly as always, to glorify God. Fred is not a brother, but he is not stupid, and he writes:

Catholicism in particular has combined spiritual concerns with a strong intellectual bent. The Christian interest in questions of origin and destiny and man’s purpose produced profound thought from the Church Fathers to C. S. Lewis. Today consideration of such matters as death and meaning are held to be in bad taste. Insensible of the wonder and strangeness of existence, we watch Seinfeld reruns and congratulate ourselves on not paying attention to that, you know, like, religious stuff. We live under a sort or Disneyland Marxism and descend ever deeper into complacent ignorance.

And so I see attempts to dismiss Christianity as a mere add-on or style having nothing to do with the achievements of Christendom. This is historical illiteracy. Read any of the thinkers and authors from late Roman times on until recently and you find that they took their faith seriously, that it created their mental worlds. Augustine, Newton, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith more recently, and in the United States, the Puritans, Quakers, and so on. Many of these were men of high intellect. Their casual dismissal by professors of sociology is in the nature of monkeys throwing books from a window.

The Renaissance in its entirely was an expression of Christendom. Whether you are a Christian–I am not–isn’t the point. And no, Christians were no more moral than anyone else. Popes catted around like any man does who has the chance. Yet the civilization produced wonders.

We have lost this memory. We forget that we are not here for our own pleasure and our own good. That we dress for others: that we live for others. Any parent knows this. Those who say that we can create our own destiny forget this: that we were created good, and when we fell (and we all have fallen) then the same creator redeemed us with his blood.

And the world will destroy all the beauty we have done, if it can get rid of that pesky gospel. It is not time to argue against how we are made, or the flaws we have to deal with. It is time to glorify God during this exile.

For those who honour God, God himself will honour.

1. The common issues are keeping the trade lanes open, being loyal to the Queen, and keeping the Communists, French and American Lawyers out.