The Chronicle of an Undeception

The Chronicle of an Undeception    

            "The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values."

                                                                                                George Will

 

I.  The Tragic Vision of Life

            I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties.  In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was "get back to the land to set my soul free."  I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame.  By 1968, I had the whole world figured out.  I knew the cause of every evil -- America -- and I knew the solution to every problem -- freedom and tolerance.

            If truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing.  I knew how to posture, but not how to stand.  I knew how to protest, but not how to protect.  I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn't know morality.  I knew about peace, but I didn't know enough to fight for it.  I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn't know about self-sacrifice and self-control. 

            Worse still, I didn't even know myself.  I didn't know what Socrates knew about me -- that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long I remained blissfully unaware of it.  I didn't know what St. Augustine knew about me -- that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket.  St. Augustine also knew this about my soul:  No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God.  I didn't know what Edmund Burke knew about me -- that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not.  The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.  Most importantly, however, I didn't know that I was Everyman.  When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.     

            Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision.  I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-gratifying, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left.  Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence.  It was not.  It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time. 

            Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator.  And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, that to build is hard, and that to preserve is hardest of all. 

            But it was worse even than that, because my fellow dissidents and I were blind to the most obvious truths, especially to what Russell Kirk and others have called the tragic vision of life -- the profound realization that evil is not something “out there,” it is something “in here.”  The tragic vision of life arises from the fact that we are flawed -- deeply, desperately, tragically flawed -- and we cannot be trusted.  We are broken at the heart; our defect is life wide and soul deep.  Though we are capable of reason, because of our selfish passions and our moral weaknesses we are rarely reasonable.  We ourselves are what is chiefly wrong with the world.  We are this planet’s most malignant and enduring ailment.  We have our dignity, to be sure, but we have our horror as well.  I can tell you this:  I did not wake up until I met the enemy face to face.  I met him in the mirror.  We all do. 

            I had to learn to stare squarely into that face in the mirror, into the face of hard, fallen reality, and not to flinch.  I did not, in fact I could not, comprehend the tragic vision of life until I learned that the problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human problem.  Once I examined with care and honesty the habits of my own heart and those of my dissident friends, I learned that C. S. Lewis was right:  to be one of the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve is both glory enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to lower the head of the highest king.  I am a human being.  That is my wealth; that is my poverty. 

            Before that undeception, I was like all other cultural and political liberals.  I had fallen prey to what Jeane Kirkpatrick identified as the error of misplaced malleability.  I thought that human institutions could be reshaped at will to fit the plans already existing inside my head.  It cannot be done.  Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously intractable.  Apart from the grace of God, human nature cannot be fixed, no matter how badly it needs fixing.  I finally learned that my deepest need was not more freedom.  I needed the grace and guidance of God.  Until I understood that, I remained shamelessly superficial.

            I had to put my insipid and airy romanticism where it belonged, on the burgeoning junk pile of the fatally flawed and conclusively overthrown fantasies to which the human mind seems continually to give rise.  Not romanticism but religion, not Byron but the Bible, not poetry but Paul, not Voltaire but virtue, not trends but tradition, not idealism but ideas, not genius but grace, not freedom but faith could cure me.  I had to exchange Wordsworth for the Word and revolution for repentance.  Thus, while some of the things I valued were useful and good, they were not properly fundamental.  I had to put first things first.

            The tragic vision of life humbled me.  From it I learned that it was not my prerogative to invent wisdom and virtue.  That had already been done.  My responsibility was to listen to the One who invented them and to those whom He taught.  Wisdom and virtue, I had to learn, were not born with my generation, or with Rousseau's, or Matthew Arnold's, or even Eugene McCarthy's.  I had to learn in the last half of the twentieth century what was already old news even in the days of Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, who wrote,             

                        Stand at the crossroads, and look,

                        and ask for the ancient paths,

                        where the good way lies;

                        and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6: 16).

Wisdom is found by walking the "ancient paths."  Those "ancient paths" led through the wilderness, through the sea, even through the valley of the shadow of death, and not through Berkeley, not Columbia, not the Village, not Watts, not Haight-Ashbury, not Altamont, and not Woodstock. 

            The tragic vision of life also taught me that order is the most fundamental of all political and social needs.  Because it is, I learned that the police are not pigs.  They never were, and are not now, an occupying army intent upon destroying my freedom.  Quite the opposite; imperfect as they sometimes are, the police are the guardians of freedom and the paid protectors of life and property.  In the line of duty, some of them even died for me, and for you.  The tragic vision of life taught me that you cannot reject authority -- whether civil, familial, cultural or divine -- and yet live in an orderly world.  When you “off the pigs,” (of whatever sort) you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the rules, to live outside authority, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Enforceable law and law enforcement are requirements of the first rank.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law, freedom is impossible.  As Dean Clarence Manion observed in the very last line he wrote before his death in 1979, “a society that is not held together by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.”  

            When is freedom not enough?  Every time truth and righteousness are at stake.  In a fallen world, that is almost always.  Freedom must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, love and revelation.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”  When I learned that, I stopped being a libertarian.  Freedom, furthermore, is an incomplete concept.  Whenever someone insists upon freedom, you must ask "Freedom to do what?"  You must ask that question because freedom, like tyranny, has its unintended and unforeseen consequences, some of which are colossally vile.  In passing, I name but one -- abortion. 

            From the tragic vision of life I learned that you have to do what is right whether it suits you or not.  In the sixties, we hardly did anything that did not suit us.  I also learned that the enemy is not the CIA, not the FBI, and not the GOP; it's the NEA, NOW, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, DNC, WCC and NPR, indeed the entire grab bag of alphabetized, leftist, subverters of culture, of tradition, and of revelation.  I learned that those who deprive themselves of the wisdom of western tradition are no more free than a baby left alone by its parents to do as it pleases.  I learned that politics is not about equality, but justice; that personal action is not about freedom, but righteousness; and that sex is not about pleasure, but love and privilege and posterity. 

            Those things and more I learned from the tragic vision of life.  I commend them to you.  They taught me that in many ways the sixties were twisted and misshapen.

            The sixties are over, and it's a good thing.  The sixties were a bad idea, if for no other reason than because the sixties had no ideas, only selfish desires hiding behind the shallow slogans and freelance nihilism emblazoned on psychedelic bumper stickers, slogans like “I dissent, therefore I am.”  The only things about which we were intellectually modest in the sixties were the claims of objective truth.  We seemed unable to wrap our minds around even the most obvious ideas.  We seemed unable to realize, for example, that you cannot raise your consciousness until you have one.  The sixties were perhaps the most unconscious decade in centuries.  It was a time of suffocating intellectual mediocrity, from which our nation has not yet recovered. 

II.  Sixties Redivivus  

            I can imagine a student reading these remarks and wondering, "This all might be well and good, but what does it have to do with me?  I wasn't even alive in the sixties."

            My answer is simply this:  While the sixties are over, they are not dead, not by a long shot.  They live, indeed they thrive, not only in the White House juvenocracy (which is tragic enough), but in the faculty lounges and endowed chairs of nearly every college and university in the United States.  Tenured faculty members everywhere have traded their tie-dyed T-shirts and their bell bottom jeans for a cap and gown, if not a cap and bells.  Those faculty members are the entrenched purveyors of an unexamined and indefensible hand-me-down Marxism, and of what Allan Bloom called nihilism with a happy ending.  They have become paid agents of the very colleges and universities they once tried to burn to the ground, and not because they gave up on the dreams of the sixties.  What they failed to do as protesters they have succeeded in doing as professors.  Quite possibly they have done it to you, because the entire teaching profession, from the pre-kindergarten level to the post-graduate, has become a political captive of the cultural left.  Like roving street gangs prowling the halls of academe, power hungry bands of leftist professors everywhere have instigated countless institutional turf wars, most of which they won.  They succeeded in burying the accumulated wisdom of the ages in the name of learning; in overthrowing academic freedom in the name of tolerance; in stifling debate in the name of openness; in exalting egalitarianism above all other ideas in the name of equality; and in segregating and tribalizing the university, the nation, and the culture by gender, by age, by religion, by race, and by sexual preference, all in the name of unity.  The schools and colleges that hire and then tenure them commit academic treason.  I simply remind you that any intellectual community that is unwilling or unable to identify its enemies cannot defend itself.  David Horowitz was exactly right:  Those who cherish free institutions, and the culture of wisdom and virtue that sustains them, must stand up boldly against the barbarians already inside the gates.

            Because the sixties live, this decade has become irrational, ignorant, and morally illiterate.  If the sixties were majestically self-indulgent, this decade is perhaps the most self-congratulatory decade our nation has ever seen, and not because we have succeeded where all other generations have failed, but in spite of the fact that we have failed where all other American generations have succeeded -- in learning to learn, in learning to work, in learning to listen, and in learning to worship.  This is a decade determined to ignore, if not belittle and malign, beauty, truth and goodness, three things most moderns foolishly believe are in the eye of the beholder.  Our decade is the sworn enemy of revelation and of righteousness.  If the threefold mantra of the sixties was "tune in, turn on and drop out," that of today is comprised of that earlier mantra’s four silly children, four sentences that no thinking man ever permits himself or herself to utter in the face of a moral challenge, sentences like: "Everything is relative," “There is no right or wrong," "There are no absolutes," and “Who's to say?" 

            If you cannot now figure out why belief in those four sentences is the death of learning and of virtue, then perhaps for that very reason you can understand why I spend nearly all my time and energy as a professor and as a writer defending the ancient liturgy of the enlightened mind -- that right and wrong are matters of fact, not matters of feeling; that without God there is no good; that justice is not equality; that new is not necessarily better; and that relativism, secularism, and pragmatism are not the friends of truth and goodness.  The denizens of modernity probably do not realize and probably do not care that they are the befuddled and bedeviled lackeys of designer truth, of made-to-order reality, and of ad hoc morals making.  If you follow them, you walk into the night without a light and into the woods without a compass.  I want to tell you as plainly as I can that their vision of academic tolerance lacks intellectual virtue.   It dilutes the high cultural inheritance of the past with the petty and insupportable leftisms of the present.

            A moment ago, I imagined a student that might be wondering about the relevance of my semi-autobiographical musings.  I also can imagine someone thinking that all I’ve done since the sixties is simply to change sides in the culture war that rages around us.  To think so, however, is to assume that flower power and Christianity are morally equivalent and that hippies rank equally with saints, two false assumptions that, if you make them, show just how much a child of the sixties you really are.  

            I have often wondered why today feels like a sixties renaissance.  I discovered the answer to that question in a college cafeteria and in conversations with some of my students’ parents. 

            First, the parents:  I have often noticed my students saying and thinking the same sorts of things their parents say and think when I speak with them.  Such things happen because the acorn seldom falls far from the oak tree.  That fact is more than a little significant because the parents of today’s college students were probably the young men and women of the sixties.  Many of the responses my students learned to give to life are responses they learned from their parents.  More often than not, those responses are the stock responses of the sixties.  In one way, of course, that is good; I want my students to learn all the truth they can from their parents.  But insofar as my students’ responses mimic the responses of the sixties, they too must learn the lessons I had to learn.  They must come to understand, with all the clarity and courage they can muster, the truth of the tragic vision of life:  We are, every one of us, morally defective, ethically twisted, and spiritually broken.  If my students fail to come to that realization and to act upon it, both they and their world shall suffer. 

            Second, the cafeteria:  I often notice my students echoing some of the things they hear their teachers say.  When talking with students in the cafeteria, for example, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’m not in the cafeteria at all; I’m in a faculty meeting.  I say so because I frequently hear the clear and unmistakable intonations of my colleagues’ voices, but coming from other people.  Sometimes I even hear my own voice.  Again, that’s good; I want college students to learn all the truth they can from their professors.  But here’s the rub:  Like me, many of their teachers were children of the sixties; and like me, many of those professors have made only an incomplete break with the mistakes of that era.  From their other professors and from me, my students have gotten many of their ideas.  Like my students themselves, their ideas have parents.  Worldviews and attitudes, just like the people who have them, show marked family resemblances.  For that very reason, I often want to ask my students this question:  From where do you imagine your rampant relativism and your not-very-carefully-hidden contempt for authority arise?  In most cases, when I consider asking such a question, I already know the answer -- from the sixties and from the people (like me) who reached their emotional and intellectual maturity at that time.

III.  Undeception Redivivus? 

            Here’s my point:  If you believe in the sixties, or if you believe in today, you believe a lie.  As I did, you need an undeception.  In order to get it, you need to go back well beyond the sixties, back to a wisdom that is older than time.  You need to go back to God and to the wisdom that spoke this universe into existence.  You need to go back to the God who made you and redeemed you.  Real answers are found nowhere else.

            It should not surprise you when I tell you that, if you do what I suggest, you shall meet energetic and determined opposition, sometimes even from those who call themselves the friends of God and of tradition.  As Socrates observed long centuries ago, most men do not take kindly to the preacher of moral reform, to the pursuer of the good.  There is no telling, he said in the Gorgias, what might happen to such a man.  But do not let that stop you.  Do it anyway.  Do it because you need it; do it because it is right; and do it because it ought to be done.  Your task will be difficult.  It's always easy to be a modernist; it's always easy to go with the spirit of the age.  But in the face of the world's downward slide you must be vigilant, strong, perceptive, and courageous.  The world needs people like that, people unafraid to turn around and walk back into the light.  Our world needs people like that more now than perhaps it ever has because everywhere you look the adversary culture of the sixties has become the dominant culture of today. 

            Our cultural patrimony is being embezzled from under our very noses.  If you think of yourself as a Christian, or as a conservative, or as both, the view from here is haunting:  We don’t own the public square; we don’t own the media; we don’t own the arts; we don’t own the sciences; we don’t own the arena; we don’t own the marketplace; we don’t own the academy; we don’t own anything.  We don't even own the Church.  It’s all owned by the sixties.

            Therefore, if, as I did, you find yourself an unwilling or unwitting child of the sixties, I invite you, I exhort you, to turn with an open mind and an open heart to the prophets and apostles in Scripture and to the great poets and sages outside Scripture.  They are your only liberation from modernist thralldom and from slavery to your own fallen desires.  (Did you know that you can be a slave to your own will?)  Put yourself on a quest for eternal truth, and never give up until you find Him.  

            While you are on this quest, you must always remember that most of the powers that be are of no help to you.  Those who loved the sixties own today.  The left still hates America, and it still hates what made America possible:  faith in God, the sacredness and inviolability of the family and of life, individual responsibility, local and limited government, and traditional morality.  The leftists of today are the enemies of heartland values.  They want you to keep quiet.  They want you to sit meekly in the corner of the room, hands folded and mouth shut.  They want you to be nice.  They want the friends of beauty, truth, and goodness to speak only when spoken to and, when they do speak, to speak only those things that offend no one.  That they have offended you seems not to matter.  They want you to stick to the script.  They want you to keep your views to yourself and to act as if your views were not true, indeed as if there were no truth.  That's what political correctness -- Or should I say political cleansing? -- is all about. 

            Consider it for just a moment:  What kind of man or woman would you be if you let yourself be controlled by the empty criticisms of the rootless left, and what kind of world would you be creating for those who came after you if you neglected to restore realism to human thought and turned your back on the only thing that can make you content even in dungeons, even in slums, even in the face of death?

            My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion, that you make yourself a devotee and guardian of the wisdom of the ages, that you become the sworn enemy of nonsense in all its forms, and, most importantly, that you become the faithful and ardent friend of God.  Then, and only then, can you be free. 

            What has been given you as a heritage you must now accept as your quest.  If you wish to be wise, you must learn to learn from your ancestors.  You must learn to make peace with the wisdom of the ages and with those who gave it, regardless of their sex, their race, or their ethnic background. You must do so because wisdom and truth are not gender based, race based, or nation based. They are thought based, and thinking is very hard work.  Knowledge is not parochial.  It is not the private property of any race, any gender, any era, or any ethnic group.  It belongs to those determined to get it, to those who seek it resolutely and who will not be denied, no matter how difficult the circumstances arrayed against them.

            In that light, I invite you today to make one of the most important choices of your entire life:  Which will you have, truth or rest? 

            You cannot have both.  

           

What's Wrong with Pornography

         What’s wrong with pornography?  Let me count the ways:

         (1) Pornography is sin.  It injures your soul and it injures your relationship with God.  Nothing worse can happen to you.  But that doesn’t mean you will feel it.  You might not feel it because your conscience can become so seared and insensitive that even greater and greater evils leave no impression upon it.  If your conscience is not pained by pornography, do not conclude that you have a clear conscience.  You flatter yourself.  Your conscience is not clear but scarred and benumbed.

         (2) Pornography is addictive.  Like drugs to the body, pornography leads to enslavement of the psyche.  You require a fix, and your fix needs to be more and more potent in order to deliver the desired effect.  In order to get it, you must slide deeper and deeper into the abyss.   The deeper you go, the more disfigured you inwardly become.  Pornography addiction is to your soul what methamphetamine addiction is to your body:  It is the hideous “after” to a more beautiful “before.”   Or, to change the comparison, perhaps you have seen the grotesque disfigurement some persons endure when, by accident or by criminal intention, acid is thrown in their faces.  For your soul, pornography is the acid.  Part of the ugliness of the pornography-soaked soul is its unnatural enslavement.  Contrary to its making, the addicted soul is not free; it is in chains.  You must never think you are free just because you do what you want whenever you want it.  After all, you can be a slave to your own desires, in which case they have you instead of you having them.

         (3) Pornography objectifies others.  Rather than remain themselves, rather than remain creatures for whom real love might lead us to sacrifice ourselves if the need arises, they become sub-persons whom we sacrifice to our own selfish and perverted ends.  We reduce the very creatures whom God has made His picture and His partner, and who therefore are the proper objects of His love and ours, to a mere means to our personal pleasure.  In our minds, they shrink from the lofty and privileged status of God’s image to a sub-human apparatus for our desires and corruptions, to which they are sacrificed.  They shrink from end to means, from human creature to equipment.

         (4) Pornography injures you and your spouse.  It sets up false expectations both of body and of action as if, in order to be acceptable, one had to look and act in a particular way or else to fail.  Rather than learning to love and value your spouse and yourself as you really are, false and unreasonable expectations intrude and, with them, come dissatisfaction, disappointment, self-recrimination and loathing, indeed sexual dislocation of every sort.  What was meant to be the great privilege of sexual intimacy between spouses is now the mere occasion of false expectations, frustration, and anger.  Rather than learning to love what and whom you have, you come to despise them and to desire what you have not.  You miss the great blessing Chesterton articulated:  Having sex with only one woman is an exceedingly small price to pay for being able to have sex at all.

         I easily could go on to name other tragic consequences of pornography.  The list is long with calamity:  disease, impoverishment, emotional destruction, broken families, and broken lives.

         Don’t be a fool.  Don’t go there. 

Natural Law, Unnatural Law, and Unnatural Lawyers

         Before you start pontificating about natural law and its alleged lessons, you’d better consider all the ways that nature is now unnatural.  You’d better know the difference between nature as created and nature as cursed.  You must understand the difference between what nature is now and what nature ought to be, once was, and will be again.

         All any natural law advocate has ever seen is unnatural or sub-natural nature.  Further, the natural lawyers need to understand that they themselves are unnatural, that they universally are fallen, wicked, sinful, and rebellious.  They are unnatural and wicked creatures reasoning on the basis of unnatural nature in order to tell us about real natural law, as if, despite all their incapacities and habitual immoralities, natural lawyers were objective, disinterested, and reliable on the point.

         I’m not convinced.

         The natural law crowd does not know and therefore cannot articulate the difference between natural nature and unnatural nature, whether in themselves or in the world at large.  Those differences are perhaps unimaginable.  Those differences are something akin to the difference between ancient Eden and the Arabian desert.  Such differences are depicted in the eschatological image of the lion lying down with the lamb.   Shockingly, and to us quite unnaturally, the lamb will not be inside the lion when it happens.  That future version of nature and our contemporary version of it seem to operate quite differently.   The details of that difference we do not know.  Natural lawyers have never seen nature not under a curse, nature unburdened.  They have never seen themselves not under that debilitating and burdensome curse.  Apart from God telling them, they cannot know and do not know what real lessons real nature might teach, if any, and how those lessons differ from those supposedly taught now by a cursed nature and by the unnatural lawyers who fancy themselves able to speak for it.

         When unnatural lawyers explain the “laws” of unnatural nature, they do so in a tendentious and highly selective manner.  They do not tell you for your instruction and imitation that nature is vicious, that it is “red in tooth and claw,” that its law is normally to kill in order to live.  They do not tell you that nature is doomed, that it is winding down to a cold, motionless, amorphous mass at a low temperature, that in the end all stories reduce to precisely nothing.  That is, they do not tell you that natural law is murderous and nihilistic.  Rather, they want to use nature to teach the things that they want it to teach, not what it actually does teach, if it teaches anything all.

         In nature as it is, the law is either to kill or be killed, even though the natural lawyers will not teach you to live in that brutal fashion, and would be appalled if you seriously undertook to do so.

         Indeed, even if living things in nature escape being killed, they still die.  In other words, selfish predation and both individual and cosmic nihilism are the order of the day, even if the unnatural lawyers don’t recommend that you live accordingly.  Unnatural lawyers publicly trumpet natural law while ignoring or rejecting much of it.  They often alter it to fit their own agenda.  With regard to the real laws of contemporary nature, they are what they despise others being with regard to positive law:  They are legal and judicial activists.  They push their own truncated agenda onto the law and subjugate the agenda of nature’s current constitution to it.  The so-called natural law advocates are unnatural, indeed anti-natural, if by “natural” we mean “nature as it ought to be and used to be,” and not “nature as it is.”

         If unnatural nature as it now is “teaches” anything, it “teaches” serial marriage and abandonment, not simply monogamy.  It “teaches” us to devour our young, not just to nurture them.

         If you want to know real right and real wrong -- and you should -- then you need to go to God’s Word, not to the current workings of a cursed and therefore unnatural natural order or to the self-aggrandizing and twisted mental gymnastics of unnatural lawyers.    

Deep Sin, Deeper Grace

         I’m so selfish and sinful that even when I tell God I love Him it normally means little more than I’m happy with the circumstances of my life.  As long as things keep going smoothly, as long as He does what I wish, as long as He does things my way, I call it love.  But when the road gets rocky, or the way gets too steep for my comfort, I rebel.  My affection wanes.

         But not really.

         If that’s what my heart means by love for God, then it wasn’t affection for God in the first place, and it couldn’t really wane.  It wasn’t love for God; it was love for me.  It was self-love all along.  It just masqueraded as piety.  Real piety, real affection for God, isn’t a masquerade.   If my expression of love for God were born of real piety, it would be rooted in His character, the shattering and bracing character found in Christ, Who upends the idols of my mind and of my impiety, and Who drives them from the temple of my heart with a whip, if that’s what it takes.    If I am really to love God, I must love the One revealed in Christ, and not in the conformity of His gifts to my desires.  My desires, after all, might sometimes be the worst thing for me.  If so, God’s goodness and love would set them aside in order to give me what I need, not what I want.

         I find it so humiliating.  Even in my moments of spontaneous outbursts of alleged affection for God, it’s sometimes nothing more than my pleasure at having reduced God to my Cosmic Errand Boy.  Even after years of faith, my best moments are still just echoes of the first sin, displacing God and putting myself in His place.

         Selfishness goes so deeply down into our hearts that we can never cut it out, never fully set it aside, not in this life.  None of us has plumbed the depth of our own evil.  We cannot.  We cannot because evil isn’t simply what we do; it’s what we are.  I’d have to shed myself before I could shed my sin.  Under every layer of my sin lies another layer deeper down.  If I could peel the onion down to its last layer, I’d still find sin, and when I’d discarded that last remaining layer, my sin would be gone, and so would I.

         I need a new me.  We all do.  That’s what God provides, and that why He provides it.  Regeneration means a new you. Regeneration means you are born again and that new life is given you.  In that new condition, you finally can alter your fundamental orientation.  By God’s grace, and only so, can you look at God’s character rather than at your own circumstances in order to see Him as He really is.  You do it by looking to Christ, by spending time with Him, by listening to Him talk, by watching Him work, and thereby learning in Him what God is really like.  You learn that God is not the magic genie who grants your wishes.  God is the One revealed in Jesus.  To know Jesus is to know God.  To see Jesus is to see God (John 14: 9).  To love God properly and well is to relate to Him in the way the Son relates to the Father.  There is no better way.  There is no other way (John 14: 6).

Philosophy in Peril

It seems to me that the best philosophers begin (or ought to begin) with two basic principles, one from Socrates, one from Aristotle:  Know yourself, and ask the right preliminary questions.

If philosophers actually followed these two rules, they would realize that these two principles meld into one.  If those philosophers asked whether or not they were capable of pursuing knowledge of God, and if they knew themselves well enough to understand the radically debilitating effects of sin on the human mind and heart, they would see that knowledge of God is beyond their reach.  They would know that they do not know and cannot know.  They would see that, even if the world outside us were a perfect revelation of God, our understanding of that revelation would inevitably be twisted, truncated and self-glorifying, and that in our narcissistic frenzy we would turn nature from a window for seeing God into a mirror that reflects only our own sinful selves and our own wicked doing.   They’d realize what they do not realize now:  Apart from revelation and a radical regeneration of our very selves, we are hopelessly adrift in a sea of divinely omnipotent fact with no compass, no North Star, and no rudder.  We sail in ever-decreasing circles that spin tighter and tighter in upon ourselves.  If they really knew themselves, and if they asked the right preliminary questions, they would realize the abject foolishness of considering themselves and their thoughts the measure of Heaven and earth.  But in their current condition, this knowledge is beyond them.  They do not know, and they do not know that they do not know.  They are blind to their blindness. 

In other words, the problem with combining philosophy and God begins with the philosophers.  That problem can be fixed or transcended only by God.

I have yet to mention Satan, a supernatural deceiver posing as an angel of light against whom, apart from Christ, we have no defense.  He is an enemy intent upon driving us from the Bible, not to it, and driving us from Christ, not to Him.  He is an enemy who remembers what was done to him by the Bible in the hands of the One Who inspired it (Matt. 4: 1-11).  He is an enemy determined to convince us of what we are already too willing to believe, namely that we are able to get to God without God, as if we did not need Christ to know God, and as if we were gods ourselves.  Philosophers believe the Liar and his lies precisely because they do not acknowledge him and his works.

Remember:  You are most likely to become an unwitting agent of the enemy you neither recognize nor admit -- and philosophy does not recognize or admit the Devil and his doings.  His self-appointed task is to blind the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor. 4: 4), Aristotle included.  At that task he is an unquestioned expert.  Against him we are no challenge.  Satan fights unremittingly against eternal life, which is knowing God and His Son (John 17: 3).  Never forget that philosophy is ill-equipped to resist Satan.  It has not the tools necessary for the task because those tools have been removed from philosophy's armory at the outset:  Philosophy permits no Bible in its work and no word from Christ.  Philosophy has yet to come to grips with demonology and its own undefended exposure to relentless and colossal evil, against which only the blood of Christ prevails. 

When Homosexuals Tell You They were Born that Way: A Response

Because we are fallen by nature, the fact that something is natural to us, the fact that we are born with it, is not a moral justification.  Indeed, the fact that something is natural to natural-born sinners seems a good reason to suspect it, not support it.

If, for example, someone is born a pedophile or a sexual sociopath of some other sort, that fact is neither an exoneration nor an excuse to let their preferred activity proceed unabated, much less to endorse it with government protection.  Sex is too important and too powerful a thing to leave to our fallen nature.  It needs redemption too.  It needs to be transformed and domesticated or else by it we will ruin ourselves and others.  It takes only a moment to notice the pathetic litany of misery, betrayal, disease, guilt, conflict, and death that sex has scrawled across human history.

We all are born pagan, and our sexual desires, like everything else about us, desperately need the redemptive and transforming grace of God.  It's not what we are born that is the measure of good and bad, but the things that God wills us to be once we are born again, the things into which He is re-creating us, that show us the direction we ought to go.  The measure here is the mind and character of Christ, into whose image we are being transformed, and not what proclivities we have at birth.  We are duty bound to stand with Him.  When we see Him either endorse or practice things like homosexual activity and homosexual marriage, then we can endorse it too.

Until then, when it comes to sexual sin, we must tell ourselves and others what He told the woman caught in adultery:  “Go and sin no more” (John 8: 11).

It won’t be easy to do, either in our own personal practice or in our address to others.  But that is our obligation

Petrarch vs. Aristotle on Natural Theology

Before proceeding to talk about God on the basis of his own reason, unaided as it was by Scripture, by Christ, or by regeneration, Aristotle should have said what Petrarch said:

“But what can I know or say about all these things, unhappy sinner that I am, dragging about with me the ball and chain of my iniquities? . . . I profess that I am not fit for it, and as much as it is greater, so much narrower, indeed, is my mind, filled with vices.  [Although] nothing is impossible to God; in me there is total impossibility of rising, buried as I am in such a great heap of vices.”  (Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher, pp. 76, 87).

Petrarch asked, not playfully, “can there be a wider field, a vaster ground for talking, than a treatise on ignorance and especially on mine?” (Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance,” p. 47).

When it comes to knowing God, Aristotle should have asked such a question, not playfully, and found in the answer good reason not to write what he did about God.  But he was too ignorant of his own ignorance to notice his shortcoming and its attendant impossibilities.  “Reason advises me to keep silent,” Petrarch said (Petrarch, “On his Own Ignorance,” p. 49).  It would have said so to Aristotle too, had he listened.

To Charles Williams’ poetic question, “Over all altars and all roods/What solitary spirit broods?” the philosophers have no answer.  Or, if they do, that answer is wrong.

Big Government vs. Big Business

From some quarters, you hear a lot about the evils of big business.  You hear a lot about the evils of big government from others.  While the two sides might not sound like it, they’re complaining about the same thing:  human nature.  In their myopia, the two competing sides focus merely on different manifestations of the same problem, not on different problems.

That’s why it’s hopelessly naïve to think that giving more power to government to control big business can work.  If big business requires oversight, regulation, and restraint, so does big government, and for the same reason:  Human nature cannot be trusted and everyone has it, whether they work for big business, big government, both, or neither.

We all are what C. S. Lewis called "the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve," which means we come from a long line of inveterate sinners.  It’s a deep-seated moral defect we pick up from our parents and pass on to our children.  Look in the mirror, friend, and see what’s wrong with big business and big government.

We all are morally debilitated, and the worse we are the less we know it.  We all are driven by fallen appetites, and those appetites are wickedly self-seeking and predictably self-aggrandizing.  While we might be capable of reason, because of our wayward appetites and our natural acquisitiveness, we are rarely ever reasonable.  No, you are not an exception.

Human nature doesn’t magically transform into something virtuous when it gains financial or political power.  Neither financial success nor elective office turns us into saints.  We are still ourselves.  We can’t be trusted to do what’s right just because we won the game of business or the game of government.  Rather, winning those games gives our sin freer reign to acquire its wicked desires.  Winning neither creates nor cures those desires.  Greed, for example, is not a motivation merely for those in the marketplace; it’s also a motivation for those in government, who lust after power, notoriety, fame, sex, and, of course, money.  Nevertheless, the champions of the free market and the champions of big government continue to see their side as the solution rather than seeing the common human nature lurking behind both sides as the problem.

Human nature is a fallen force, a force that requires constraint by another force.  But if the force you employ to check human nature is human nature as well, you have not solved the problem.  You merely transferred it.  You press down on the pillow in one place, business, and it bulges up in another, government -- because it’s the same pillow.

But, sadly, it’s our only option:  a fallen force fighting itself.  We have but one pillow, one nature.  Therefore, the solution, if that word is not too wildly optimistic, is always going to be imperfect.  But it’s the best we can do.  We can’t succeed by backing one team or the other; we must cheer both, which means that no matter what happens, we win and we lose.

First, cheer for this:  Cheer for greater competition in the marketplace, which is always the consumer’s best friend.  Competition leads to better products, better service, better selection, and better prices because those who don’t compete go out of business.  They must compete for your dollars or fail.

In other words, human nature in government can best check human nature in the marketplace not by regulation but by maintaining a free and open entry into the market and, with it, greater competition.  Government’s task is to keep open the doors of marketplace entry, and to keep shut the doors of fraud, deceit, and theft.  Government’s task is not to pick winners and losers, and not to bail out some or to relegate others to financial oblivion.  The human nature at work in government does best to check the human nature in the marketplace (1) by keeping open the entry gates that existing businesses want closed, (2) by thwarting crooks, and (3) by maintaining sound currency -- none of which is the same as either ganging up on the winners or taking sides with them. 

Second, cheer also for this:  Cheer for a government that is not a marketplace commodity, paid for by the highest bidder.  Ironically, perhaps, that’s done best by letting money flow freely.  Just as we check the excesses of human nature in the market by keeping the doors of entry open, we check the excesses of human nature in government by keeping the doors of political donation open for all contributors to all candidates.  Because it is literally impossible to regulate and to calculate all political donations effectively, and because trying to do so will serve only to discourage the honest donor and reward the insidious, the very best we can do is to open wide the doors of political contribution and to work for the fullest possible disclosure of those contributions.  Let folks give whatever they wish to whomever they wish.  Just let them do it in daylight, which, as we know, is a disinfectant.

Daylight lets you see.  You can see what others are doing.  They can see you.  When everyone knows what everyone else is doing, everyone can act in ways they perceive to be the best possible, always under the scrutiny of others.  For example, when Acme Corporation sees that Bravo Corporation gave X dollars to candidate Smith, Acme can respond accordingly by giving money to candidate Smith too, or by giving money to candidate Jones, which ever serves Acme's purposes best.  Either way, the intended effect of Bravo’s money is softened and shrunk.  Other money has done it.

Human nature sees to it that competing corporations always work for their own advantage by trying to shape the pillow to their liking, generally intending to set at naught the efforts of their competitors, who do the same.  In the full light of day, both sides see that they are investing mountains of money in order to fund an ongoing standoff.  They might not want to do so, but they must, which is good because it keeps the playing field as even as can be managed.  They will do so because they are human beings, and human beings are self-seekers.  They will find a way to invest their money to fullest effect.  They don’t regulate themselves.  Human nature can’t do that.  They offset themselves.  Given who we human beings are, both in government and in business, it’s the best we can do.

In short, freedom of entry and competition are your friends not only in the marketplace but in the public square too.  Keep it free; keep it open.  Let everybody press on the pillow.

But let's say you still want to regulate political donations.  then think of this:  If you wish to limit or even to ban corporate donations, remember that corporations are comprised of human beings, sometimes very many of them, and all of them like you.  Like you, none of the human beings who run the corporations, or the millions who own stock in them, ought to be deprived of their right to political speech and political action, which is what donating is.  Just like we must not try to regulate the number of words, statements, or actions you invest in political causes, we must not regulate the number of dollars you invest, which are political speech and action too.

And if you think that politicians will effectively work to block donations to politicians, you aren’t paying attention.  Human nature dictates that the selfishness rampant in government will never ban corporate donations to government.  It cannot be done.  Even if it could, it would not be fair or good.

Put it this way:  You need as little government control in the market, and as little market control in the government, as possible.  Domination of either business by government or of government by business is not how you get it.  You get it by freedom.  You get it by letting folks pursue their own best interest in response to other folks doing the same thing in the full light of day.

Human nature won’t let you get any more delicate or precise than that.  

"The Forgiveness of Sins" (part 3)

This is the third and final installment of our explanation of "the forgiveness of sins," as articulated in the Apostles' Creed:

          God does not treat sin the way we do.  To forgive sin is not to ignore it or to play it down.  For God to forgive sin is to take it upon Himself, much the way creditors must pay for every outstanding debt owed to them but which they elect to cancel.  Thus, the cost of the bad loan is borne, though not by the borrower.

          In other words, from the creed we learn yet another thing about "God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth:"  He forgives.  Our Maker is our Redeemer.  God does not excuse sin and He does not condone it.  He judges it.  The sentence He passes upon sin is a sentence He Himself has borne.  God brooks no compromise with evil.  He eradicates it root and branch, and at high cost to Himself.  He deals with it the only way a righteous God can -- judgment.  But because He loves us, this judgment He has taken upon Himself.  In the mirror of human redemption, therefore, we see two faces reflected -- God's and our own.  He is high, pure and loving; we are sinners in need of rescue.  Were God not merciful, we would be utterly undone.  Our redemption is the proof that God is love and that we are sinners, yet beloved. 

           Our forgiveness is based upon the saving work of God in Christ.  It rests upon the death of Jesus on our behalf.  It costs us nothing; it cost God everything.  The forgiveness God offers us is free, though it is not cheap.  That is, it was provided for us by Christ.  He saved us by his righteous life and atoning death.  He paid our penalty, providing for us what we, of ourselves, could never have provided.  God puts Himself in the place of the sinner.  He died so that we might live.  Mercy is free to us though not to God.  It is purchased at the price of God's Son, whose life was the ransom paid to redeem a race captive to evil.  He is the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1: 29).  The forgiveness of sins demonstrates that in the battle between love and evil, love is stronger.  Love has wrestled with sin, has engaged it in mortal combat, and won.  Once we accept this free gift of grace, however, we are to give ourselves fully to God, not in order to be redeemed, but because we are redeemed.  This is gratitude, not achievement.

           Repentance is not the same as regret or as the desire to escape punishment.  Desperately desiring to escape the punishment of sin is natural, but it is not repentance, only fear.  We are to repent of our sins, not merely to fear their consequences.  If we fear impending punishment and employ that fear as we ought, we repent of, and flee from, our sin.  Our flight from evil toward God is good, and is made possible partly by the fear instilled within us by divine judgement.  But if we permit our fear of punishment to loom so large in our minds that we see nothing else, if it prevents us from truly repenting, then the good has become enemy of the best.  For sinners, repentance is best. 

           In the New Testament, "repentance" (metanoia) means literally to have an after thought, to think again, to reassess one's actions.  Put differently, repentance is a U-turn, an about-face, a radical change of heart regarding one's sinful actions.  To wish to have God's forgiveness without this renunciation of things contrary to God, without this about-face, is impudence.  It is to play a nasty and dangerous game with the grace of God.

           To confess means, literally, to speak along with, or to agree with, someone.  To confess one's sins is to say about them what God says about them, to agree with Him that those sins are indeed evil.  To confess is to admit that you have done something wrong and to take responsibility for it.  You must own your sin.  Forgiveness depends upon the sinner being forgivable, that is, being in a condition where the remission of sins does no harm, a condition that sees sin as sin.  Were God merely to forgive sins indiscriminately, that is, without regard to the moral condition of the sinner, He would do us great injury, not great good, for He would be undermining, perhaps even obliterating, the difference between sin and virtue, for He would be treating them as if they were the same.  But this He does not do.  He requires us to confess.  If we confess our sins, the Bible says, God is faithful and just and will forgive us for our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1: 9).  But confess we must.  

           Finally, we must be forgiving if we are to be forgiven.  That is, we believe that God forgives sin; we believe that we ought to grow to be like God.  We too must be merciful.  He who would withhold forgiveness from his brother cannot expect to receive it from God, as Jesus Himself taught (Matt. 5: 7; 6: 14-15).  The possibility of forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with the desire, indeed the responsibility, to be forgiving.  Only the forgiving can be forgiven, for only they really believe in forgiveness.  To paraphrase something said centuries ago by the English poet George Herbert, he that cannot forgive others destroys the very bridge over which he himself must pass if he is ever to reach Heaven.

          But here is good news:  If you repent, if you confess and forgive, God will forgive you.  He will pardon your offenses and never call them to mind again (Jer. 31: 34).  Or, to return to the words of William Merrill, "If you want with all your heart to be rid of sin, and to live in the beauty of holiness, I declare to you that nothing can keep you from that great joy and success of overcoming; for God is merciful and gracious, long-suffering and tender" (Merrill, The Common Creed of Christians 138).

"The Forgiveness of Sins" (part 2)

          Near the beginning of his famous Confessions, St. Augustine said to God, "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

           St. Augustine said so because he learned from personal experience and with great difficulty that no matter where one looked, no matter how hard one tried, nothing in this world can satisfy the human heart except the God Who made it -- not money, not fame, not power, not privilege, not excitement and not prestige.  Our chief problem seems to be that we have not yet learned what Augustine knew centuries ago.  We insist on looking for love and joy in all the wrong places, in all places but the one where they can actually be found, namely in God.  That failure is sin.  We have not yet learned what Blaise Pascal knew -- there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart, though we try foolishly to fill it with everything but God, always to our disappointment and injury.

         Sin, we fail to realize, results in the fragmenting of our hearts and minds.  The one who breaks the law is broken.  You do not break the immutable law of righteousness that governs the universe, you break yourself against it.  As Plato understood, because of the destructive effects of our own wickedness upon us, the horses that draw our heart's chariot now pull in different directions.  We are, so to speak, drawn and quartered by our own sin, though that has not persuaded us to pursue it with any less ardor or glee.  Sin is an employer for whom we all work and by whom we all get paid.  The payment we receive for our sin is death (Gen. 2: 15-17, Rom. 6: 23).  In other words, your sin has issued a death warrant bearing your name.  That warrant will be served.

         Nevertheless, we take sin lightly, as if it were unimportant, as if it would not eat alive both we ourselves and all those we love.  We even maintain our own pet sins, as if evil could be safely or routinely domesticated.  But to see sin as it really is, to see it in all its horrific ugliness, we need to see it as God sees it.  To do so we need to look carefully at the cross of Christ, at the death of the One Who made us and redeemed us.

         Imagine, if you will, that you are the proud and happy parent of a beautiful infant, whom you love.  Imagine further that one morning you entered the child's room only to find it lying in its crib, cold, motionless and blue, a snake curled up upon the child's small dead chest.  How much would you hate that snake?  That's how much we ought to hate sin, and that's a faint hint of how much our Heavenly Father hates sin, which cost Him the life of his only Son.  The passion of Jesus Christ expresses with eloquent pathos what God thinks of sin.  So does Hell.  The crucifixion of his only Son and the punishment that awaits the unrepentant are proof that God takes sin seriously.  They are evidence of what one theologian called the uncompromising severity of sin.  Still, in our self-deluding foolishness, we imagine that sin can be winked at, that it can be passed off as inconsequential or unimportant.  We tell ourselves that one or another particular sin is no longer of consequence because it was committed long ago, as if the mere passing of time were the cure for wickedness.  Not clocks ticking but Christ dying atones for sin.  That atonement can be appropriated only by faith, not by waiting.

          The more you sin, the more likely you are not to feel its sting, and the more likely you are to become oblivious to its approach.  Thomas Carlyle was right:  The best security against sin is to be shocked by its presence.  In that light, we leave ourselves utterly unprotected.  If you cannot feel sin's approach, you cannot arm yourself or ready yourself against it.  If you no longer feel pangs of conscience once you commit sin, you strip yourself of the remorse that makes you determined not to repeat your mistakes.  Without that determination, you sin all the more.  Thus, because it is morally debilitating, sin breeds sin.  The ancient Jewish Talmud puts it like this:  Commit a sin twice and it will no longer seem to you a moral crime. 

          Because He is completely pure, and because not to punish sin is to condone it, God cannot and will not say of our sin that He shall simply let bygones be bygones.  He does not shrug his shoulders and sigh to Himself about how boys will be boys.  He either punishes sin or forgives it.  There is no other way.  As a result, each of us stands in desperate need of mercy and grace.  We stand in need of the forgiveness of sins.  In the New Testament, to forgive sins means to cover them, to send them away, to blot them out.  Forgiveness entails both the absolute putting away of sin and the reinstatement of the sinner.  In the words of Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Forgiveness of sins means liberation from everything which divides us from God and therefore from a fulfilled and free life" (Pannenberg, The Apostles' Creed, p. 160).  Here we see why Christianity is a religion of joy:  It restores sinners to the filial relationship they ought to have had with God.

         The cure for sin is not moral reform, as important as that might be, but forgiveness, mercy, grace.  Forgiveness means that Christ has taken our place, that He has stood in our stead and received the punishment we deserved.  If we attach ourselves to Him by faith, his death in our place permits us to go free.  Our punishment has been paid.  But rather than turning to Christ in faith, too many people seek to deal with sin in a way that does not deal with it at all.  They seek to assuage their feelings of guilt but do nothing actually to rid themselves of the sin that spawns it.  They seem not to realize that most people feel guilty because they are.  All too often, such persons want badly to alleviate the symptoms of their disease but not the disease itself, as if the cancer in our souls would miraculously get better if only we ignored it, as if not going to the doctor were a form of therapy.  But sin is a real wickedness; it requires a real remedy.  That remedy comes only from the great Physician of our souls.  That remedy is the grace of God in the death of Christ.  Foolishly, however, rather than availing ourselves of the only antidote to evil, we flock to the secular messiahs of our age, the psychologists and psychiatrists who can lighten the feelings of guilt but not the guilt itself.  They drug the conscience instead of quickening it.  They cover sin instead of healing it.

          We seem not to realize that the pains of sin, our pangs of conscience, are a great grace.  We flee from them; we seek to rid ourselves of them by any imaginary means that presents itself rather than the only way possible.  To rid ourselves improperly of the pangs of conscience is to infect ourselves with a deadly disease without symptoms.  If you have no symptoms, you fail to realize you are sick.  If you fail to realize your sickness, you do not go to the doctor.  If you do not go to the doctor, you receive no medicine.  Without medicine, you die.