Conscience is the spiritual, supernatural principle in man, and it is not of social origin at all. It is rather the perversion and confusion of conscience that is of social origin.
- Nikolai Berdyaev
- Nikolai Berdyaev
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I referred to the passage below – excerpted from Berdyaev’s Slavery and Freedom -- in yesterday’s post concerning the difference between spiritual freedom and free will. I refer to it again today to highlight the critical difference between authority and the will to authority (bold added).
Christ was a free man, the freest of the sons of men. He was free from the world; He was bound only by love. Christ spoke as one having authority, but He did not have the will to authority, and He was not a master. Berdyaev touches upon a vital point. Though Jesus occupied no formal position of authority during his life, he spoke as one having authority. What kind of authority did Jesus possess? Well, I would call it the authentic kind – the internal kind that is aligned with God. The kind of authority that addresses the spirit and illuminates souls. The kind that connects with people internally and moves them from within. The kind that invites and draws people toward it. The kind that seems familiar when encountered. The kind that does not seek to dominate but bows down to the lower and encourages it to raise itself upward. The kind that can speak without uttering a word. The kind that identifies potential and inspires that potential to move upward. The kind that radiates love. Very few discussions about the necessity of authority ever care to mention the kind of authority Jesus possessed. The fact that Jesus did not aspire to any form of temporal authority – that he displayed no will to authority -- is also conveniently overlooked. More to the point, distinctions between authentic authority and the will to authority are rarely, if ever, made. Jesus did not have the will to authority because he understood that the will to authority entails rule, domination, and compulsory unity. He understood that he could only disclose his Truth in freedom and not through the will to authority, which suffocates both freedom and thought. He rejected the temptations of Miracle, Mystery, and Authority because he knew these temptations of religious authority are temptations toward the Anti-Christ. Christ neither manipulated nor coerced. He did not take up the will to authority because he did not want people to bow down before him as an external, formal authority. He wanted – and still wants – people to follow him in freedom of conscience, in creativity, in free spirit. He wants people to follow him through love. Christ demonstrated that freedom always enjoys primacy over the will to authority. He knew that external authority in and of itself never convinces anyone of anything – that real conviction – the conviction to follow him – would have to come from within, and that this conviction would have to believe in the collaboration between one’s innermost self and God. But by all means, let’s focus instead on debates about whether some corrupt prime minister truly enjoys a mandate from heaven, or whether we should bend the knee to evil when it commands good, or how society would self-destruct if we didn’t have authority, or how obliged we are to obey a police officer, and all the rest of it. All very pressing and relevant, I’m sure. Following up on a previous post, in which I supported the orthodox idea that a Christian’s first vocation should be to follow Jesus, I would like to dedicate a little time expanding upon what this vocation means from a Romantic Christian perspective.
I have personally found Nikolai Berdyaev’s insights on this subject to be enlightening, particularly this short passage from Slavery and Freedom (bold added): Christ was a free man, the freest of the sons of men. He was free from the world; He was bound only by love. Christ spoke as one having authority, but He did not have the will to authority, and He was not a master." The passage immediately raises the question of how Jesus was a free man, and why He was the freest of the sons of men. The freedom Berdyaev alludes to here is spiritual freedom, and it has nothing to do with the contemporary “liberal” understanding of freedom as limitless choices, zero restraints, and endless indulgence of passions. Limitless choice, a lack of restraint, and self-indulgence are not conducive to being “free from the world” -- of having overcome the world. On the contrary, it reveals a deep-seated servility to the world – a slavish giving in to lower passions and external forces, which is then touted as the manifestation of a powerful internal will impressing itself upon reality. Such an understanding of freedom is certainly not “bound by love”. Christians often equate spiritual freedom with free will – that is, the potential to make the right choice among choices. Most Christians tend to regard the potential of making a right choice as spiritual freedom. Once the right choice is made, the individual has freed himself from the slavery of the wrong choice. He has used his free will to “will” the right thing into being. Within this context, it could then be argued that Jesus’s freedom was the result of a pristine record of always making the right choice and willing that right choice into being. This conceptualization sorely misses the larger dimension of the kind of spiritual freedom Jesus epitomized. Jesus’s freedom was not the result of perfected free will – more specifically, the ability to always choose right over wrong; good over evil. What made Jesus the freest of the sons of men was not His ability to choose, but His ability to fully align himself with God’s creative purposes -- an alignment that allowed Him to overcome the world and live His true, divine nature. This alignment expanded his freedom and rendered the question of choices irrelevant. William Arkle is among those who understand this often overlooked aspect of freedom. In his A Geography of Consciousness, Arkle notes: What freedom of choice really means is the ability we must develop to sense the whole of the situation in which we are involved, both in our own nature and in the world around us, and then take the best course available. Freedom is not in choosing, it is in seeing the irrelevance of choice. The vocation to follow Jesus is a divine invitation to everlasting life, but it is also a call to freedom – the freedom to overcome the world, live by our true natures, and participate in the creation of the world. From the perspective of free will, the vocation to follow Jesus presents itself as a need to make a choice among many choices. From the perspective of spiritual freedom, the vocation to follow Jesus should free us from “the need to choose” by raising our awareness of what is best and correct to such a level that other options are not even considered. Spiritual freedom is the sort of freedom in which we no longer have to debate whether something is good or evil. We no longer have to consider whether we made the right or wrong choice. We attain a level of awareness in which we just intuitively recognize and know the best course of action. Once we know the truth, it sets us free. Christ does not coerce us toward this intuitive awareness. Instead, he invites us toward it through love. As William Arkle explains (bold added): To become free-will individuals in this involved world is much harder than we think. In fact freedom is not what we really want. What we really need is fulfillment. Freedom of choice should not exist except in unimportant matters. Real freedom is freedom from the need to choose by being fully aware of what is best and correct. I stumbled across this SNL sketch from the early 1980s the other day, and it brought back fond memories of my first and only prior viewing of it when I was a teenager. The premise of the sketch is rather weak -- Carl Lewis agreeing to race a wheelchair-bound old man about to be healed by "the world's greatest faith-healer", Reverend Jimmy -- but the comedic brilliance of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo transcend the lame premise and raise the sketch to a higher level of humor. The best part for me has to be Joe Piscopo's reaction upon hearing Carl Lewis's hubristic and profane declaration that he, Carl Lewis, can "run faster than God . . . I am in the process of drafting a series of posts that elaborate on why I believe the Altar-Civilization model of traditional/conventional Christianity is no longer viable. The posts will focus on a number of crucial themes, among them authority, obedience, the common good, conscience, the Divine Self, and freedom.
The basic point within my overarching thesis rests on the following observation: Traditionally- and conventionally-minded Christians are wittingly or unwittingly using the external aspects of Christianity -- tradition, doctrine, scripture, etc. – to rationalize or justify their spiritual passivity and inertia, or to hide, obfuscate, deny, justify, or rationalize the total or near total forsaking of internal spiritual responsibilities, chief among them, the first Christian vocation to follow Jesus. They also fall into the trap of misusing tradition and the teachings of church fathers to forsake personal discernment, override conscience, and derail the active alignment of the Divine Self with Creation and God’s creative purposes. For the most part, I will utilize traditional sources to support my thesis – the idea being that the witting or unwitting abuse of tradition can be easily revealed by referring to tradition itself. In this particular post, I will cite the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Contrary to what many presume, the observation noted above does not boil down to the total and outright rejection of Christian externals. It is instead a rejection of the abuse of Christian externals like tradition, doctrines, scripture, etc. As such, it should be a matter of great concern to traditionally-minded Christians and unconventionally-minded Christians alike. In this post, I will focus on the matter of obedience to authority – specifically the commands exemplified by passages like Romans 13. Though the traditional path to salvation via churches, scriptures, doctrines has never been a guaranteed, failproof way of attaining salvation, Christians could more or less rely on the traditional path to guide them toward that goal, which helps explain why practices such as obedience to external authorities, as exemplified in Romans 13, are regarded as high virtues toward which all Christians should strive. The problem within the message of Romans 13 lies within the assumption that political, civil, and religious authorities emanate from God and, thus, more or less aim to align themselves with Creation and God’s purposes to promote and defend rights, freedom, and the common good. The command to obey external authority generally works for Christians if and when the governing authorities adhere to the precepts outlined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (bold added): 1897 "Human society can be neither well-ordered nor prosperous unless it has some people invested with legitimate authority to preserve its institutions and to devote themselves as far as is necessary to work and care for the good of all." By "authority" one means the quality by virtue of which persons or institutions make laws and give orders to men and expect obedience from them. 1898 Every human community needs an authority to govern it. The foundation of such authority lies in human nature. It is necessary for the unity of the state. Its role is to ensure as far as possible the common good of the society. 1899 The authority required by the moral order derives from God: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment." 1900 The duty of obedience requires all to give due honor to authority and to treat those who are charged to exercise it with respect, and, insofar as it is deserved, with gratitude and good-will. Pope St. Clement of Rome provides the Church's most ancient prayer for political authorities: "Grant to them, Lord, health, peace, concord, and stability, so that they may exercise without offense the sovereignty that you have given them. Master, heavenly King of the ages, you give glory, honor, and power over the things of earth to the sons of men. Direct, Lord, their counsel, following what is pleasing and acceptable in your sight, so that by exercising with devotion and in peace and gentleness the power that you have given to them, they may find favor with you." “Insofar as it is deserved” is a key point within 1900, and it immediately raises the question of how Christians should act if the governing authority strays from or intentionally opposes the moral order derived from God. Well, this is where things get interesting (bold added): 1901 If authority belongs to the order established by God, "the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens." The diversity of political regimes is morally acceptable, provided they serve the legitimate good of the communities that adopt them. Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed. 1902 Authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. It must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a "moral force based on freedom and a sense of responsibility": A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence. 1903 Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, "authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse." 1904 "It is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the 'rule of law,' in which the law is sovereign and not the arbitrary will of men." As we can see, Christians are not obligated to bend the knee to an unjust king. Quite the opposite. Further on, the Catechism concentrates on the issue of parental authority and civil authority. Once again, the points outlined do not condone a blanket acceptance of the dictum in Romans 13 (bold added): 2232 Family ties are important but not absolute. Just as the child grows to maturity and human and spiritual autonomy, so his unique vocation which comes from God asserts itself more clearly and forcefully. Parents should respect this call and encourage their children to follow it. They must be convinced that the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus: "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." When it comes to following Jesus, even parents must be disobeyed! 2233 Becoming a disciple of Jesus means accepting the invitation to belong to God's family, to live in conformity with His way of life: "For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother." Parents should welcome and respect with joy and thanksgiving the Lord's call to one of their children to follow him in virginity for the sake of the Kingdom in the consecrated life or in priestly ministry. THE AUTHORITIES IN CIVIL SOCIETY 2234 God's fourth commandment also enjoins us to honor all who for our good have received authority in society from God. It clarifies the duties of those who exercise authority as well as those who benefit from it. Duties of civil authorities 2235 Those who exercise authority should do so as a service. "Whoever would be great among you must be your servant." The exercise of authority is measured morally in terms of its divine origin, its reasonable nature and its specific object. No one can command or establish what is contrary to the dignity of persons and the natural law. 2236 The exercise of authority is meant to give outward expression to a just hierarchy of values in order to facilitate the exercise of freedom and responsibility by all. Those in authority should practice distributive justice wisely, taking account of the needs and contribution of each, with a view to harmony and peace. They should take care that the regulations and measures they adopt are not a source of temptation by setting personal interest against that of the community. 2237 Political authorities are obliged to respect the fundamental rights of the human person. They will dispense justice humanely by respecting the rights of everyone, especially of families and the disadvantaged. The political rights attached to citizenship can and should be granted according to the requirements of the common good. They cannot be suspended by public authorities without legitimate and proportionate reasons. Political rights are meant to be exercised for the common good of the nation and the human community. The Catechism then shifts to the duties of the citizen (bold added): 2238 Those subject to authority should regard those in authority as representatives of God, who has made them stewards of his gifts: "Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution.... Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God." Their loyal collaboration includes the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms of that which seems harmful to the dignity of persons and to the good of the community. Even here, the Catechism advises against inertia and passivity, and instead encourages the voicing of “just criticisms” of anything that works against human dignity and the common good – more generally, against God’s divine purposes. The Catechism then explicitly expounds upon this duty in later passages, to the point of condoning armed resistance if certain conditions are met: 2242 The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community. "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." "We must obey God rather than men": When citizens are under the oppression of a public authority which oversteps its competence, they should still not refuse to give or to do what is objectively demanded of them by the common good; but it is legitimate for them to defend their own rights and those of their fellow citizens against the abuse of this authority within the limits of the natural law and the Law of the Gospel. 2243 Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well-founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution. The Catechism then proceeds to outline “The political community and the Church”. What the Catechism notes here is quite revelatory, especially within the context of current world circumstances: 2244 Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain pre-eminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man's origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Church invites political authorities to measure their judgments and decisions against this inspired truth about God and man: Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology. Since they do not admit that one can defend an objective criterion of good and evil, they arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows. 2245 The Church, because of her commission and competence, is not to be confused in any way with the political community. She is both the sign and the safeguard of the transcendent character of the human person. "The Church respects and encourages the political freedom and responsibility of the citizen." 2246 It is a part of the Church's mission "to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it. The means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances." I refer to all of this because I believe – or to put it more exactly, it has become blatantly obvious – that the vision of man and his destiny espoused by all institutions is now totalitarian and satanic in nature. Moreover, they have, indisputably, arrogated to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny. In addition, the Church leadership – and the leaderships of nearly all Christian churches – have refused to pass moral judgments against this totalitarian power, thereby neglecting their mission to “safeguard the transcendental character of the human person”. Regrettably, religious authorities have largely aligned themselves with the assault against “the fundamental rights of man and the salvation of souls.” This puts Christians -- particularly Catholics -- into an extremely awkward position. Does this mean the priests have not been anointed by God? Does this the priests can no longer deliver the Sacraments or that Sacraments delivered by such priests are illegitimate? Does this mean Christians should leave their churches? I think the all of those questions can be answered in the negative as long as Christians remain focused on the first vocation to follow Jesus and not obey anything that opposes that. And by the first vocation to follow Jesus, I am referring to believing on Jesus, following his image as a guide to determine good from evil, and accepting his gift of everlasting life. Tradition is secondary to that. At the same time, Christians should not stumble over themselves to excuse or rationalize the behavior of their church leaders. Accepting that the priests and bishops are imperfect and fallible is one thing -- excusing them for willingly and glaringly aligning with totalitarian evil is another thing entirely. In light of these considerations, the kind of obedience exemplified by passages like Romans 13 is inadvisable. More to the point, that sort of obedience is dangerous and, potentially, spiritually fatal today, as Dr. Charlton noted in a comment to one of my previous posts (bold added): The current situation is - it seems - unprecedented in world history. I mean a world and all major institutions aiming purposively and strategically against God and creation (including nature). In other words, the global rule of demonic evil. This ought to be obvious to any Christian, however the institutional churches are included in this strategic evil. Those who refuse to make personal discernment will therefore be led to obey those who are active agents of the demonic agenda. As we see all around us... Christians who insist on the primacy of obedience to externals today open themselves up to the risk of obeying the active agents of the demonic agenda, as personified by the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Understandably, this is a bitter pill for Christians to swallow, but it should by no means be despair-inducing. On the contrary, it should inspire us to concentrate on the first vocation of every Christian to follow Jesus internally and to weigh the subsequent externals of our faith against the primacy of that vocation. This first vocation requires us to focus intensely on conscience, freedom, and the Divine Self, which I hope to address in future posts connected to this theme. Note added: According to the Catechism and other sources, Christians are required to follow moral rulings issued by unjust rulers. However, they are in no way obligated to obey an unjust authority issuing immoral laws that oppose God's moral order and the dignity of man. On the contrary, Christians are duty-bound to disobey such tyrants, right up to engaging in armed resistance. The problem is most Christians are extremely confused about what constitutes opposition to God's moral order and man's dignity! Today at From the Narrow Desert, Wm Jas introduced us to the world's most racist toothpaste. Ah, the joys of living in a foreign country! William's post about Darlie toothpaste immediately made me think of one of Hungary's "most racist products" -- a line of cough drops called . . .  Some claim that Negro cough drops do not allude to people of African descent, but to the Latin word nigreos, which means "black". This kind of makes sense because the original Negro cough drop is black. Hence, Negro is supposed to be a reference to a color, not a person. As in color-color, not skin color. Actually, the Negro cough drop is named after its inventor, the Italian confectioner, Pietro Negro, who was not a negro, but an Italian -- you know, one of them olive-skinned motherXXXXXX's. Of course, the word negro was still perfectly acceptable a few decades ago. For example, when I was kid, I remember seeing public service announcements on television for an organization that called itself The United Negro College Fund. The United Negro College Fund still exists, but the organization has pulled a Kentucky Fried Chicken kind of acronym-ization on its name and now refers to itself simply as the UNCF.
Yo! Did I just put KFC and the UNCF in the same sentence? I must have unconscious bias issues, for real. Better sign me up for some unconscious bias training. Getting back to Negro cough drops, the product is marketed as "the throat's chimney sweep", which helps explain the image of the chimney sweep on the upper left of the package. As everyone knows, chimney sweeps are also quite black -- not black as in black people, but black from soot, you know, from the dirty chimneys. The black on Hungarian chimney sweeps -- who are mostly white, except for the Roma ones, but we won't go there in this post -- is not intended to be offensive, it just sort of happens, you know, because of the job, which is definitely not racist. Anyway, the innocent origin of the product's name is lost on most foreigners. Case in point, the American rapper Curtis James Jackson III -- more popularly known as 50 Cent -- who in 2012 found the cough drops offensive enough to photograph and post on some social media site or other. Fiddy also mistook the chimney sweep on the package for a stylized image of a hanged black man. Yikes. So much for taking Fiddy to the candy shop . . . The “there is nothing intrinsically wrong about _____” position is a common tactic that Smart Boys on the Internet love to employ when they refuse to address an argument but want to make it look as if they are.
Here’s an example: A: Gluttony is a sin. B: You are suggesting that eating is a sin, but eating is not intrinsically sinful. There is nothing wrong about eating in and of itself. Here’s another one: A: The birdemic peck mandates are immoral. B: Are they? I don’t see anything intrinsically immoral about mandating pecks. It doesn’t take a genius to understand what the Smart Boy is doing. By widening the scope of the argument from the specific to the general, the Smart Boy aims to obfuscate his unspoken agreement with the original argument and bury it beneath the avalanche of “the larger subject”. This diversionary tactic puts the other party in the “debate” on the back foot. It draws the person making the argument away from the original argument and propels them toward the much broader but essentially irrelevant "larger subject". If the other party takes the bait, he will have to address the supposed morality of everything within the scope of the “larger subject”. Instead of arguing the finer points of the specific argument, the other party will inevitably have to argue about the subject in general. Once the Smart Boy has lured the other party away from the original specific argument, he can liberally apply anything contained within the “general subject” to the debate, thereby further clouding, diluting, and confusing the original specific argument. For example, instead of permitting the other party to focus on the immorality of the contemporary birdemic peck mandates, the Smart Boy will lead his counterpart to consider the “moral” and successful peck mandates of the past. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. To sum up: The problem with the “there is nothing intrinsically wrong about” tactic lies in its “intrinsic” insincerity. Instead of sincerely tackling the specific argument, the Smart Boy artfully expands the argument, thereby shifting the focus away from the specific argument and avoiding it entirely. If the other party engages with the tactic, the Smart Boy can make it look like he has addressed the specific argument without actually having had addressed it at all. As I have already noted, concealment is a big motivation behind “there is nothing intrinsically wrong about”. The Smart Boy wants to minimize or obscure his tacit agreement with the original argument by diluting it in the broth of the “larger issue”. Whenever I encounter the tactic, I inevitably consider motivation. Needless to say, the motivation I discern is rarely sincere or good, which is why I tend not to engage with Smart Boys who state that "there is nothing intrinsically wrong about . . ." To continue the theme from yesterday's post, Daniel F has provided an insightful qualification and elaboration of where the difficulties in personal discernment lie (bold added):
I should qualify, or clarify, my comment now that I have had a chance to read over the portion Francis quoted. I should have said that trusting one's discernment _can be_ difficult. And the difficultly often lies, not in the initial act of discernment itself -- more often than not if one listens to one's conscience quietly and with focus, the "right answer" is crystal clear -- rather it is in ignoring all of the noise, social conditioning, distractions, financial, career and peer pressures, and other influences that tend to dampen that inner voice. The best example to show this may be in one of the comments by Scoot in the Orthosphere blog that prompted Francis' response in the first place: To wit, from the beginning, it was in fact quite clear to Scoot what the right thing to do was; and it was only as things played out that it became more difficult -- more painful in terms of personal sacrifice -- to follow that voice of conscience. For those practiced in the discipline of following a path of truth and discernment, the initial act of discernment is often not difficult; following through on it, however, can be for a myriad of reasons. But it is a discipline and habit that must be developed and reinforced over time. I fully agree. As I mentioned yesterday: Daniel is correct about the difficulty, which helps explain why so many Christians shirk the responsibility of personal discernment in favor of anything that promises to relieve them of that "burden". Unfortunately, the world is full of Grand Inquisitors who are all too eager to take on that "burden" in exchange for surrendered freedom and, ultimately, the damnation. Unfortunately, Christians often turn to, look for, and erroneously identify that "burden relief" in Christianity itself -- in scripture, tradition, and theology. They then resort to abusing scripture, tradition, and theology to rationalize, obscure, or unload the responsibility they have shirked -- id est, the failure of following through on the initial act of personal discernment. Why does this matter? Well, to reiterate the main point from yesterday's post: The responsibility of personal discernment has become the sine qua non of Christianity. Without the responsibility of personal discernment, Christianity is not Christianity. Without the responsibility of personal discernment, Christianity is not possible. The comments on yesterday's post have made one thing explicitly clear to me as a Christian -- the era of rejecting the responsibility of personal discernment is over.
Christians can no longer obfuscate this responsibility behind scripture, or abandon it through doctrines, or neglect it by appealing to supposedly higher virtues, or veil it in rituals, or unload it onto external authorities, or hide behind obedience, or appeal to things like God's omnipotence. Any motivation to evade the responsibility of personal discernment today is fundamentally un-Christian and/or anti-Christian. It is fundamentally un-Christian and/or anti-Christian because it opposes and works against love, freedom, honesty, creativity, repentance, and countless other Christian virtues. A while back, I encapsulated my understanding of Christianity by augmenting a passage from Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov (augmented parts in bold): Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely into heaven, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, and with free heart actively choose resurrection and everlasting life, having only Thy image before him as his guide. A key part of this encapsulation is the movement away from rigid ancient law to a free heart that decides for itself what is good and what is evil having only Christ as a guide. This is the essence of personal discernment within a Christian context. Without that essence, Christianity is not Christianity but a religion of ancient rigid law. Dr. Charlton summed it up well in a comment from yesterday's post: We are being forced to make personal discernment - and if we refuse to take up this responsibility, then we have rejected Christ. Put another way, personal discernment is no longer optional. Rejecting the responsibility of personal discernment is tantamount to rejecting Jesus. Another commenter, Daniel F., offered the following on the topic: Trusting that one's individual discernment is in alignment with God's will is of course incredibly difficult, and one does not make these decisions lightly, but the overall principle as a core attribute of true Christianity is obvious. Daniel is correct about the difficulty, which helps explain why so many Christians shirk the responsibility of personal discernment in favor of anything that promises to relieve them of that "burden". Unfortunately, the world is full of Grand Inquisitors who are all too eager to take on that "burden" in exchange for surrendered freedom and, ultimately, the damnation. The responsibility of personal discernment has become the sine qua non of Christianity. Renounce that and you renounce Christ. It really is that simple. Over the past week or so, I have considered writing an addendum piece to my Altar-Civilization is Over post from a month or so ago -- you know, the one that got me branded as an Enemy of Christianity.
Lucky for me, I no longer need to write that post because a fine fellow named Scoot over at the Orthosphere has done an absolutely bang-up job outlining exactly why the Altar-Civilization model is finished. Granted, that wasn’t his intention, but hey. Allow me to present the first paragraph of Scoot’s penetrating post (bold added): The virtue everyone loves to hate is obedience. Obedience is easy when it is easy, but there’s a common misconception that having a bad authority exempts us from the duty of obedience. As the late great Zippy Catholic used to say, it is a fallacy of modernity to confuse the question of which authority is just with the question of whether authority in general is just. There’s a fundamental truth hiding behind this misconception that we as fallen humans are often afraid of: That all authority comes from God. Not just good authority – all authority. Got that? All authority comes from God. And yes, that includes authority that is openly and blatantly opposed to God and Creation. Simply put -- we are obligated to obey evil with humility because . . . uh . . . that's what God wants. Any refusal to obey evil authority demonstrates a lack of obedience to God. Oh yeah, and a lack of trust in God, who might be trying to teach us a lesson. Kristor is quick to emphasize this point in a comment: The thing that it is hard for us to understand about Omnipotence and his Providence is that *even the evil that evil men do* redounds at last to our all joint and universal salvation. All that we need do to take advantage of this fact is to ally ourselves to that salvation. How? Dunno. Just do it. Get on with it, in fear and trembling, lest you muck it up by your own foolishness. He’s right. That is difficult to understand. Look, I could go on and dissect the entire piece, but I don't see much point in it. If what Scoot and Kristor are pushing at the Orthosphere these days resonates with your understanding of Christianity, then by all means, knock yourself out. But I wonder, if we are obligated to obey all authority, including evil authority, then what purpose do reactionary sites like the Orthosphere serve? After all, if obedience to all authority, including evil authority, is part of God’s Omnipotence and Providence, then Christian Reaction against anti-Christian, evil authority is nothing more than blatant rebellion against Divine Omnipotence and Providence. Why bother writing anything at all? Why not just become passive and inert and rest assured that everything is in God’s Omnipotent hands? To sum up: If Christians are obligated to obey the Altar because the Altar is God, and the Altar bends the knee to an unjust King, and the unjust King is opposed to God and is openly working to destroy civilization and ensure the eternal damnation of everyone, then the Altar-Civilization Model of Christianity Proper is finished, and serious Christians must – and I mean must -- begin looking elsewhere for their salvation. If you happen to disagree, then by all means “stay on the path”. You are free, after all. |
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April 2025
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