Over 500 years ago an Italian Friar named Luca Pacioli wrote a book on accounting titled, “Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry, and Proportions”. In it he recorded and further developed the dual accounting system used in Venice during the Italian Renaissance. To this day Luca Pacioli’s work is what accountants everywhere use to balance the world’s books. We can never underestimate the impact the Catholic Church continues to have on Western culture because of how they spent their money during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond. The reason you can use QuickBooks and it works is because some local Italian parishioners gave their tithe dutifully a few hundred years ago.
Whether or not the money the Catholic Church collected throughout much of Western history has been given freely or through compulsion can be argued ad infinitum. What did Europe experience as a result of the massive amounts of tithe money the Catholic Church accumulated since the establishment of Parishes around the 9th century? Advances in the arts and sciences that changed the world. As Thomas E. Woods puts it in his book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization , “One can scarcely find a significant endeavor in the advancement of civilization during the Middle Ages in which monks did not play a major role”. Does the tithe still have this kind of impact on civilization?
The commonly accepted idea that there is some sort of division between secular and sacred pursuits has helped drive the tithe dollar away from the arts and sciences in the last two hundred years. Accepting this dualistic concept results in one of two approaches on the part of most churches, they either try to insulate themselves from secular culture or just go head to head by offering an alternative sub-culture. The Church does not have to participate in culture, or even combat culture, because when people of faith decide to give their hard earned money to artists and scientists once again the Church will be the one creating culture.
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Hi Stuart, Interesting thought. I’ve been ruminating over your statement that “The commonly accepted idea that there is some sort of division between secular and sacred pursuits has helped drive the tithe dollar away from the arts and sciences in the last two hundred years.”
I toured The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, a couple summers ago. It was quite an experience being in this formerly communist country, looking at art from the period you just wrote about. It was almost all religious; pictures of God, of the return of the prodigal, of Christ in His healings and passion, and of the patriarchs and the prophets.
The next day at church, I met Alexi Sergeiev who happened to be one of the curators of that very museum. He joined us for an excursion that afternoon. I asked him how he came to be a Seventh-day Adventist and his story was quite moving. But it all started when he requested that the communist government obtain a Bible for him. “I felt I could not understand the art unless I understood the stories and the passion behind it.” They agreed and got him one but with very stern warning that this was a dangerous book and they did not want him to spend much time with it.
Alexi was enthralled with the stories and later the exhortations. He found an anchor point in the values of the Bible and believed them to be based on objective truth. He says that that shift in values saved his life. I asked how, and he said that after the fall of Communism, the economy and people’s behavior became very chaotic, and to abbreviate a long story, he and his wife lost their life savings. She taught communist philosophy at the university there. She had opposed his conversion though they had continued living together (with three other families) in their tiny flat. Now with her cherished political system gone and all their money stolen, she had little to cling to for sanity’s sake. She in fact lost sanity and died.
I asked Alexi how his new values saved his life and he said, “I had come to believe that the things around me are not as permanent as they seem, so losing them was a disappointment, but not a devastation. There is something better that I cling to, and it can’t be taken away. Also, I had learned that love is real and that treating others as Jesus would brought me greater happiness than my money had. And, THAT they couldn’t take away, either.”
The reason I’m telling this story is that there was a power of conviction in the art of that Christian era. Just as that same power lives in your art. I could see sending tithe to those kinds of ventures. They added beauty and meaning to lives then, and as I learned a couple summers ago, they have continued to do the same down through the ages. I think most of that has been lost over the last 200 years. Contrast “The Gleaners” with “The Scream” (or whatever that surreal terror is called”.)
Art used to be the product of a thinking and aesthetically-gifted person who took the thousands of inputs of light and sound and then chose to create a window that opened onto what he or she saw as truth. They created art that reflected faith. Today, with the rejection of objective truth, art has followed the philosophical descent into existentialism and nihilism and become largely self-centered and faith-less. Sometimes it seems that modern artists are daring us to psychoanalyze their tortured id or ego… not a very uplifting venture for me.
Looking beyond art, the Christian dualistic stand on good and evil, and its belief in law and consequence set the stage for the modernist, positivist thinking that made science possible. All the early scientists were theists or deists. But science too has become largely human-deifying and God-denying. Even though it retains the tools of scientific method, it has almost entirely thrown out the values and principles that created them. And worse, its constant production of data and its denial of anything it can’t manipulate, obscures the kind of moral reflection that could turn its data into wisdom.
It would be hard for me to send tithe money to either art or science in its present condition. If either of them come to a place where they no longer stand in haughty opposition to God, I might reconsider.
On the other hand, I do promote either art or science today that seems to reveal a glimmer of hope in transcendence and shows some acknowledgment of a divine being that surpasses our understanding. Perhaps that’s what you meant, when you wrote “when people of faith decide to give their hard earned money to artists and scientists once again the Church will be the one creating culture.” But I think pouring tithe into art and science in its current state will only enable it, not convert it. The prodigal son had to come home, Dad didn’t keep sending him money orders. So I would more readily agree with “people of faith giving their hard-earned and divinely-directed money to artists and scientists of faith…”
This is probably exactly what you meant, but I thought I’d give you my reflection on how I read what you wrote.
As always, I believe in your ministry, and I value your artistic gift.
though my ending comments could have been taken in different ways you did understand my intent, as you said “hard-earned and divinely-directed”…
however… as I have thought about it more my only caveat would be… some one has to do something in order to effect change
the artists and scientists of the renaissance were far from perfect and there could easily be arguments made as to why the tithe ought not to have gone to certain recipients
there seems to be an open handedness to God the more I learn about Him and His ways and part of that is us acting out His grace to others… the divine-direction I believe that is there at all times to spread righteousness as all of us work in the garden