The Impulse of Power Formative Ideals of Western Civilization

The Impulse of Power Formative Ideals of Western Civilization

This is the best new book I have read this year. Kelley is by no means a new author but this is a more sweeping work revealing the author's keen grasp of the philosophy of history and particularly of Western civilization.

Kelley positions the roots of Western civilization in the Homeric and Platonic world of ancient Greece, but unlike many Christians and previous generations and today will brook no compromise with this "enlightenment paganism" as a valid expression of culture. He shrewdly observes that today's increasing calls for a return to the medieval synthesis of Christian and classical civilization is misdirected: "Should we accept the argument of those who wish to restore the displaced ideals represented by the medieval synthesis of Christianity and Humanism? Can such salvage operations succeed? Is it possible to remake Western civilization on the same basis from which it first sprang up? If so, why should one accept that it will turn out better the second time?" Kelley's answer is unequivocal: "There are but two options available: that which comes from God and His revealed Word, or that which arises from man's sin-darkened imagination" (pp. 16-17).

Kelley observes Plato's attempt to depersonalize the pagan religion of the Homeric era, replacing the gods of ancient Greece with an abstractionist rationalism whereby the entire universe would be explained by recourse to human reason: "[I]t was more than just a struggle between science and religion. Their [the Greek philosophers'] interest was to shift the locus of ordering power from the gods to the mind of man, so that the mind of man becomes the source of order and is able to govern reality according...

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...enant-breaker, than man, the covenant-keeper" (p. 309). Man's only hope for cultural reclamation is explicitly Biblical Christian culture.

This is a reverent, learned, profound, and penetrating work that probably will not get the widespread recognition it deserves. The evangelicals and fundamentalists are too anti-intellectual to take it seriously. The Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are too ecclesiocentric not to be offended by its full-Biblical foundation. Even the Reformed, from whom it should get nothing but praise, may ignore it since it would require of them a greater responsibility than they are willing to undertake. But it is a great book nonetheless, and it deserves wide reading. One recommendation: I wish the author had brought the work up to the present period by addressing the issue of postmodernism, the leading ideology of today's Western elite.