Slouching towards the Post-Legal Society (Introduction: “The Beast”)

Cultural Marxism:  From show trials to no trials

If property is the proverbial nine points of the law, it is not surprising that Marxism, its frontal attack on property having stalled out (NB: ideology aside, we all like our “stuff”) would have eventually gotten around to launching a second front against law itself.  The total annihilation of law never succeeded with Communism Classic (Stalin’s version), since the Soviet state needed a judicial apparatus to highlight its superiority to “bourgeois law” …not to mention providing a half-way house on the way to the Gulag.  The nightmare of totalitarianism having been quietly put aside, if not entirely exorcised, we have emerged into the glaring, and presumably lawful, light of the Global Village.  Or have we?

Today, the legal “reforms” of the (allegedly) defunct Soviet state are held to be little more than antiquarian curiosities.  However this does not mean that “bourgeois law” a.k.a., classic legal principles of the Civil and Common law, have triumphed throughout the world.  Rather, the struggle against law has gone underground, or rather above ground and hidden in plain sight.  It dares not risk exposing itself, and therefore avoids clear opposition to the institution which makes civilization possible: Objective Law.  Since it eschews both thesis and antithesis, running for the dense cover of ambiguity, it must be tracked like a beast…by locating and examining its spores.  We know not what it is, but like W. B. Yeats, we can at least pose the question…

And what rough beast, its hour come at last

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

But at least we have a track, where the beast has digested large swaths of civilization’s foliage and left us a species-specific excrement where form has been neatly reduced to matter.   If we can track the down the spoor-dropper, perhaps it can be slain.  Or perhaps not.  But at least we may come to know who, or what, our adversary is.

Antinomianism

We must pick up the beast’s trail in the foothills of religion, and especially false religion.  The journeyman tracker will think that we have found the beast itself, and with a gleeful cry of “Antinomianism! Antinomianism!” presume that they have him treed, when in fact it is just a spoor, albeit very a significant find.  Actually the beast has moved on to an entirely different part of the forest, since the “true” false region of today is not a religion at all, but science, or rather scientism.

However there are enough who still believe in ersatz-Christianity to cloud the contemporary scene with a subtle contempt for law.  This is an Oedipal Christianity in which the God of Law is slain by the Son of Love, a doctrine preached by a vague figure named Jesus something or other.  Scientifically this is supposed to be Yeshua ben Yosef, but it really doesn’t matter, since this ersatz-Christianity has been purified of all but universal truths which all good natured people ought to be able to agree to.  Among these is that law is mean and should be dispensed with in favor of good will.

Yeats was assuming that the reader of his poem knew that he was talking about the “Antichrist.”  However if we get too hung up on the idea of the Antichrist being an ugly, brutal, beast then we are likely to be deceived.  Granted, there are many cults which like to dress up in spandex costumes, going about sporting horns and tridents.  They may even enjoy frightening middle-class people on Halloween and sundry sabbaths with their clownish antics.  But this is all an exercise in misdirection.  Such cultists may be “anti-Christs” but not the final beast who arrives at the end of history. The real threat to our spiritual well being doesn’t come from avowed nihilists who dance around impersonating a cartoon Satan.

The real threat comes when the world-system (what the Bible calls the “Aeon”) proceeds to abolish law in favor of a “higher morality.”  In today’s virtue-signaling pseudo-saints we see a harbinger of the real Antichrist.  The real Antichrist will not look evil or demonic, in fact the real Antichrist will try to resemble Christ to  whatever extent that might be possible.  After all, Christ did transpose law-abiding to a higher abiding in Him.   Call that a “higher morality” if you will.  However the “higher morality” of the Antichrist will not be based on fear of the Creator, but fear of the creatures.  Specifically, it will involve fear of the Human collective, a fear that will initially manifest itself as virtue-signaling, but in fact will rest upon appeasement of human (and ultimately demonic) lusts.

Having broken through the firewall of law (whether we choose to call such formal restraints law, culture, morality, ethics, or whatever) the direct confluence of collective human lusts and fears will create a Democracy of Desire.  Initially such a state of affairs may not seem ugly to behold.  It may even appear to be morally beautiful.

A beautiful beast.

 

How Churchmen are changed into Ducks

George Whitfield (1714-1770)

Among the more formidable characters in church history is George Whitfield (sometimes spelled Whitefield but pronounced without the “e”) the preacher who spread a Calvinistic variety of Methodism in colonial America.  You must understand that at the time Methodism was, as the very name indicates, a methodology and not a sect.  It was Whitfield’s aggressive preaching method, not to the taste of some, which had such a tremendous effect on forming the unique spirituality of early America.

His odd looks (he was cross eyed) and forceful rhetoric must have convinced many that Whitfield  was more an angel than a man.  It was related that he could pronounce a word as neutral and exotic as “Mesopotamia” in such a way as to draw tears from his audience.  For some this was sorcery, but for others it was salvation, and the crowds that he was able to gather were a mighty tributary in that powerful river of revival which we call America’s Great Awakening.

Like his rival in preaching the good news, John Wesley, Whitfield was a life long clergyman in the Anglican church.  Oddly enough, this evangelist with Tory sympathies earned the esteem of freethinking Benjamin Franklin, and the two struck up a friendship which lasted throughout their mature lives.  None the less, it is hard to imagine Whitfield, who died five years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, throwing in his lot with the founding fathers.  For Whitfield being an Anglican was not a doctrinal affirmation, and indeed he despised most of what today would be called “Anglican theology.”  For him, membership in the established church was just the normative state of being born into the British branch of Christendom.  In the Whitmanian view, the established church didn’t get you into heaven, but you couldn’t get out of the established church.  A questionable deal, but a deal nobody could refuse in Britain or its colonies.

To Whitfield’s amazement, many of the Americans whom he had converted on matters spiritual in the 1740’s were loath to join his church, preferring to form into autonomous assemblies, notably Baptist associations.  Whitfield sighed, in reference to the immersion of his converts, “It seems that my fledglings have become ducks!”  From our modern perspective this seems odd as well, why would someone get evangelized by a preacher from one denomination and then go out and join another denomination?  Why did the Whitfield Christians “become ducks”?

Erastianism

To begin with, “denominations” in our contemporary sense didn’t exist, although there were already a multitude of sects.  What did exist was a passionate clash of opinions over ideological and theological issues which today seem obscure and unimportant.  A key word in these debates was “Erastianism” which dropped out of our household vocabularies a century and a half ago and has not been missed yet.

However, unless we know how this “Erastianism” could get people hot under the collar (both clerical and lay collars) we wont understand how churchmen became ducks.  Fortunately there is a term of  recent coinage which conveys much the same meaning to modern ears.  Among libertarian, Constitutional, and conservative circles “statism” has become the contemporary opprobrium of choice for what the colonists called “tyranny.”  Today we can define Erastianism as “statism applied to church governance”, or church-statism.  Keeping that in mind, and equipped with a Bible in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, we are well underway to unravel the ecclesiastical conundrums of 18th century America.  We know what the outcome was, the rise of the Methodists and Baptists and the decline of the Anglican/Episcopalians.  Was this due to the vagaries of demographics or was there some underlying principle working itself out in the lives of Christian men and women?

Going back to the mid-18th century British America, one must keep in mind that Erastianism was not just a theory but a practice.  Take the colony of North Carolina as an example.  The Church of England was established as a public institution, essentially an arm of the state.  Did this mean that those early Tarheels were enthusiastic Anglicans?  Hardly!  In fact the region was largely unchurched during its early history.  None the less a system of church vestries (lay committees) was established paralleling the civil administration, and all subjects were required to pay taxes to maintain this apparatus.

As in all monarchical church-state systems the organization was pyramidal.  Yet, curiously, within British North America this was a truncated pyramid.  Above the vestries and the occasional parish priest, there were no high church officials.  North Carolina, and all other colonies (mostly outside New England) where Anglicanism was established, reported to the Bishop of London.  This led to a curious ambivalence on the part of the colonials.  Some persons, of an Episcopal persuasion, were eager to have cathedrals and bishops established on American shores.  They blamed the crown for foot-dragging on this issue.

Another, and presumably larger, party was heartily glad that the bishops had not yet arrived.  Their fear was that the crown was scheming to impose a hierarchy on the colonies, a hierarchy which would coerce believers in matters of doctrine and impose heftier church taxes.  This was a major item of contention among the colonists in the run up to the revolution, and the fact that it was not directly mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is, like the dog that doesn’t bark, rather a testimony to the seriousness of the issue than the contrary.  It was, like slavery, one of those issues that divided the Founders at a time when it was crucial to present a united front against the crown.

Voting with their (webbed) feet

Keeping these things in mind, perhaps it is easier to understand why the fruits of the Great Awakening, sparked by the evangelism of Anglican priests, did not redound to the Established Church.  Again, taking North Carolina as our example, there are records of a great increase in the membership of Baptist assemblies, while the Established Church remained largely a bureaucratic skeleton.  Converted by the Spirit (through the preaching of Whitfield, Wesley et al) the rustic colonists saw no need to perfect their salvation through works, where the “works” in question were attendance on the ceremony and obligations of local established parishes.  Moreover, such were were added on top of (prior to the revolution)the “work” of paying the church tax…that is regardless of one’s belief, atheist, dissenter or whatever.

Really, Whitfield ought not to have been surprised, for the Spirit was working through his eccentricities, not his Anglicanism.  The crowds swooned at his uncanny words such as “Mesopotamia”…I know not whether they would swoon at “Mother England.”

We too should cry when we hear the world “Mesopotamia”!

These things are of interest to me since I am persuaded by a kind of Calvinistic Methodism myself.  Albeit that I am only a Calvinist in supposing that all people are sinners, while my Method has little in common with that of the Wesley brothers.  Rather, the method consists in this, that (at least under ceterus paribus conditions, a.k.a., all things being equal) freedom is a good thing and coercion is wrong.

Now today in Christendom (or rather post-Christendom) we are no longer so clearly divided into and Established Church and Dissenters.  However the same perennial urges resurface under different guise.  Thus today we have Liberal churches and Conservative churches.  In both these “denominations” there are churches and individuals who seek to become an Establishment.  Both seek to establish a church-state, albeit according to a different view of what the proper function of the state might be.  The liberal churchmen, and churchwomen, want to be the altruistic cheerleaders of the journalistic-academic-welfare-health complex, while the conservatives want the church to be an official apologist for the military-industrial-banking complex.

However there is always a remnant which has been granted the wisdom to understand human folly.  Among the greatest of follies is what has been called “the tyranny of good intentions.”  This is when we try to force something good on someone.  If we try to force Christ on someone we get the Inquisition.  If we try to force “democracy” (a problematic concept in itself!) on a people we get…well, we get something like the contemporary Middle East, a region in constant turmoil where two thousand year old Christian communities are today on the verge of extinction.

It is we, not Whitfield’s auditors, who should weep when we hear that old name for Iraq and its neighbors…”Mesopotamia”!

Yet through the gloom of it all, let’s remember that Jesus loves us.  I’m afraid I may have increased the gloom by throwing a heavy theological tome at your head.  But at least I warned you…

Duck!

 

 

Christian Anthropology Pt. 5 The Anthropological basis of knowledge

A Recapitulation

To summarize what has be said in the discussion, let’s pose the same content in the form of questions and answers.   First, do we live in an impersonal universe?  No, we live in a personal universe.  Next, do we live in a persistent chaos inhabited by multiple personalities?  No, we live in a created order authored by a creating Personality.  If so, can we know this creating Personality directly?  No, we can only know this Personality analogically using categories immanent to our own being and applying them to the Creator Being.

If one accepts these assertions then a number of important correlative theses obtain.  First of all ethics is the key to metaphysics, not the other way around.  Second, anthropology is the master science, on the one hand, in preference to physics, and on the other, in preference to theology, or more precisely theosophy.  This latter proposition requires some elaboration, since it might scandalize religious minds who are only looking at the proposition superficially.  If we state that anthropology precedes theology and perhaps excludes theosophy altogether, are we not setting up Man as a higher object of devotion than God?  Bear in mind that that purpose of this series of essays is to distinguish Christian Anthropology from Humanism, which entails disentangling what we know from what we worship.  Therefore, the analogical knowledge of God via anthropology is being distinguished from heretical forms of gnosis.  In other words, we are comparing different methods of knowledge rather than different kinds of being.  Paul called the royal road to knowledge which travels through Christ the “epignosis” which is Greek for “full knowledge.”  This orthodox, mediated, gnosis contrasts sharply with the unmediated gnosis of the heretics.

To “Grock” or not to “Grock”

A contemporary reader confronted with a phrase like “the unmediated gnosis of the heretics” is probably wary of getting dragged into a discussion of the Manacheans, Valentinians, Basilideans and other exotic species of ancient philosophers.   On the other hand, readers of Eric Voegelin are apt to be prejudiced (either for or against) a usage of “Gnostic” which is only too broad and contemporary.  Yet, heretical gnosis, in the sense intended here is both perennial and specific.  There was a huge influx of this kind of thought in the third quarter of the last century (typically referred to as “the sixties”) and its influence persists into the present day.

If we want knowledge of God without availing ourselves of a mediator, then we are in a severe predicament.  We must “break through” into a plane of Being which is altogether superior to our own level of existence.  This is the task which the advocate of “unmediated gnosis” feels to be almost, but not quite, beyond the capacity of human endeavor.  This “not quite” qualification on the otherwise total impossibility of transcendental knowledge, is usually claimed on the basis of some secret path which leads to heaven’s back door.  In “the sixties” this kind of a path typically either involved drugs or yoga or some combination of both.  In one specimen from the period’s literature an Earth man who had been raised on Mars by aliens was capable of breaking through at will onto the level of ultimate reality.  The experience was called “grock” or “grocking.”  Even in a period when it was thought that intelligent alien life was likely to be living on Mars, a human being raised by Martians was clearly a rare breed, an exception that proved the rule that transcendental knowledge is impossible for all but a few…an elite.

Being an elite project, unmediated gnosis always begins with great conviction and sincerity.  There is nothing feigned about it, yet is has a short shelf life and is quickly replaced by cheap imitations.  During and after the sixties, the entheogens (literally “god-engendering pharmaceuticals”) of the drug researchers were gradually transformed into recreational drugs, and the yoga of the sages was adulterated and marketed as a physical fitness program.  Few ever “grocked” and those who claimed success as often as not returned from their altered state with tales of nightmares rather than paradise.  The pioneers continued to market their enlightenment experience, but of course they were advocates in their own cause.  For the rank and file “ecstasy” gradually lost its original meaning of transcendence and came to mean the optimization of pleasure through peak experiences.

The Christian, and indeed Human, case against Hyper-Eroticism in any form, stripe, or color!

Today’s Secular Nihilism is fueled by Hyper-eroticism at the popular level

It started with the heterosexualists,  now its the homosexualists, but it won’t stop there, pederastry, human/machine sex and intra-species sex are on their way to a local community near you!   Lions and tigers and bears, O my!

Let’s back up a bit.  Let’s go back to at least the Hugh Hefner era of American culture, when people discovered that promiscuity and infidelity were as “cute” as a Playboy bunny.  Secular heterosexualists squandered their right to feel moral outrage at any further form of erotic deviation once that critical line had been transgressed.  After a few nanoseconds of moral hesitation, Christians followed their secular brethren.  Today its called “fifty shades of grey.”

But we really need to go back further in time than the Great Cultural Stumble of the 1960s.  I must indeed confess that this writer has been a great stumbler, and now is a less than great stutterer trying to not to expurgate (only Christ can do that!) but rather to explicate the dangers of hyper-eroticism.  The teachings which we have tossed down the memory hole regarding the dangers of sex to human rationality and social relations are recorded in the Bible, and even in pagan writings which pre-date the New Testament.

The Wisest among the Pagans understood that Eroticism was sub-Human and needed to be excluded from any definition of the Human essence

Although sexual liberationists rail against the Judeo-Christian tradition, the prohibition of sundry sex practices is not unique to the Scriptures.   Pagan societies world-wide have suppressed eroticism and channeled sexual energies into narrow institutional forms.   The world view of pre-Christian anti-eroticism found rare but concise expression in the works of Aristotle on the soul.

Aristotle saw the soul as a hierarchy of functions with rationality (the defining human essence) at the top.  Next was the animate level, the source of will, drive, and locomotion.  Below this is the vegetative level, the level of growth, nutrition, and reproduction.  Sexuality is an attribute of this level, two down from the top!

One hears, “Don’t be a mere animal and give in to your sexuality!” Yet in Aristotle’s scheme this gives the sexual instinct too exalted a place.  A bit of observation will show that old Greek was on to something.  Consider how animals change their temperaments during their “rutting season” and  how they become something “beside themselves” driven into an instinctual pattern of behavior.

But the objection is made that Human Eroticism is more than natural sex.  It involves the aesthetic imagination, moral obligations, and other noble traits.  Should we not celebrate sexuality is a premier quality of our humanity?  This has been a mainstream view since the rise of Humanism in the European Renaissance.   Post-Christian neo-paganism has striven to glorify eros in a way that the original pagans like Aristotle would have found foolish.

Which brings us back to the question: What is the authentically Christian view of eroticism?

The Christian View of Eroticism:  Always Dangerous, Potentially Evil

Sexuality is an inescapable aspect of embodied existence, but this doesn’t mean that it is morally neutral.  One benefit conferred by the doctrine of the Fall is that we need not concur with the (psudo-) Enlightenment view that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”  We can be critical of nature.

Human eroticism, precisely because it adds an imaginative/aesthetic component to gross sexuality (which is passive and sub-animate to begin with) creates a lever for spiritual seduction and manipulation by non-human forces and entities.  What these non-human entities might be is a subject of legitimate debate.  At the very least, the impersonal propagandistic and commercial forces of the modern world are constantly accessing this lever into the consciousness of countless individuals through the instrumentality of the mass media.

Scripture explicitly refers to the invasion of human souls by preternatural entities.  However in general we only see the outcome of these cases, as with the exorcisms performed by Jesus recorded in the Gospels.  Due to the economy of scripture, we do not have vast tomes of material on demonology and the etiology of psychic disturbances within its covers.  We are expected to read scripture as “chapter headings” related to outcomes, and then infer the antecedent causes.  Once we habituate ourselves to making such inferences whole new worlds open up, for we are reading with the “common sense” of the Apostles, not the impoverished “common sense” of modernity, let alone the rank nonsense of post-modernity.

For the Apostles, the wisdom of Aristotle was child’s play.  But both the Apostles and Aristotle would have concurred that erotic play is not a form of childish innocence.  It is play in the garden of good and evil…and after the snake shows up, just evil.

Concluding (and I think quite Scientific) Postscript

This is not to say that whatever people do in the privacy of their bedroom, whether it be straight or gay, happy or sad, will necessarily drag them down into the maw of hell.  Rather it is collective malady, for what is uniquely abominable in the dialogue of contemporary civilization is the contention that sexuality should be the core identity of every human being.  This  erotic Anthropology, with its implicit definition of the species as that with “the most intense and creative expression of sex” soon flips to its antithesis, a carnal race in thralldom to machines or alien spirits.  This is not the species that was intended by God to have dominion over nature.  It is just old Adam, coming to the end of his weary tether.

Fortunately there is a different way.  Paul allows us a spouse, “lest we burn.”  Jesus goes even further and exalts the way of the eunuch.  Usually this is interpreted as a plea for celibacy, although a few such as Tertullian have hypothesized that Jesus was a non-sexed being.  Thus, whatever else he might have been, Jesus was not “hot” according to the usage of contemporary slang.  Not “hot” but managed to do quite a lot!

Can we go and do, or rather not do, the same?

The answer of course,  is a resounding “No!”…without the aid of the Holy Spirit.  But with Him, anything is possible.

 

 

Just One Dose of the Holy Ghost Ain’t Good Enough For Me!

Well, its gloating time for all those rationalists, atheists, secular humanists, and (most obnoxiously) tepid liberal Christians. “You see, once you abandon the standards of the conventional consensus naturalism…’tis but a swift and well oiled slope down to abject madness!”

I plead guilty…not to madness, but to being “well oiled”…or, if not adequately anointed yet, at least having an earnest aspiration for the anointing of the Holy Spirit. I have nothing to say to any of the above mentioned categories of persons. To do so would be to indulge in the endlessly looping squirrel cage of classical apologetics. Rather, I freely admit with the presupositional apologists that one of the two parties is mad, and only God knows which.

But I have plenty to say to fellow evangelicals, Catholics, and orthodox Christians (either big or small “O”). As we slouch towards Pentecost, its time to wake up and smell the coffee…or to use the Biblical image, the oil. Its time to let the Holy Spirit be our teacher of wisdom and our guide, letting go of all prejudices based on sensory sciences and mental constructs. More explicitly, it is time to understand that Christianity has a quantitative dimension as well as a qualitative dimension.

This always comes as a bit of a shock. An intelligent sister in the faith, when I mentioned the matter responded as follows.
“You said qualitative didn’t you?”
“No I said quantitative.”
“I don’t think I heard you correctly…surely you mean qualitative.”
“No, certainly Christianity has a qualitative dimension, but it also has a quantitative dimension…there is a filling of the Holy Spirit and it is both according to different kinds and also different degrees of fullness as well.”

When we exit the world and enter the people of God it is a qualitative jump to be sure. It is like Dorothy being translated from Kansas to Oz. But once we get to Oz we find that the initial sensation of ascending into invincibility quickly dissipates. We know that there is an “all powerful wizard” who will certainly defeat the forces of evil (forces which we were blissfully unaware of when we were still in Kansas) and we also have an inkling that His powers are already inside of us. However to actualize those powers we need to constantly keep traveling in the right direction.

This is not to say that progress in the Spirit is measurable, and neither does it necessarily merit the bestowal of sainthood (in the Vatican’s sense), or knighthoods, apostolic offices or sundry browny points. More like the hazy and winding “yellow brick road” than any straight Kansas highway, the gifts of the spirit are incommensurable against any standard of worldly value. None the less there are degrees, and this is what drives to distraction modern minds which are prejudiced by abstract constructs like homogeneity and equality. Equality is good doctrine in the area of political rights, but nature is not obliged to follow the principles of human law. Well then, still less is the supernatural under any such obligation!

Moderns and post-Moderns who idolize this kind of abstract uniformity would rather be (for all practical purposes if not in name) Unitarians or Binitarians, than acknowledge a Third Person in the Trinity who dispenses gifts in an asymmetrical manner. And apart from this prejudice (and that’s all it is) they adduce a rather stronger argument when they say that recognizing degrees of gifts creates problems in the church. Yes, it certainly does…especially over questions of authority. But just as differing degrees of knowledge is better than no knowledge at all, so disputed authority is better than no authority at all. These disputes have been a brewing and a stewing for well nigh two thousand years…which shows that authority is an essential rather than an accidental characteristic of the church. These issues simply have to be grappled with. Yet, even though believers are nearly driven crazy in the process, its a far preferable crazyness than that which grips “the world.”