Meaningless Morass, Part III

Two-Heeled Achilles

In his book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg gives us a history of the concept of “social justice”.  It first entered the lexicon of the West in the middle of the nineteenth century, courtesy of the Roman Catholic moral theologian, Luigi Taparelli.

Taparelli was concerned to resist the statist view of reality, where there are only two entities that count–the individual and the State.  He argued that human beings are social creatures.  The individual is necessarily involved in more social institutions–more communities–than just the State.

These intermediary associations act as both bridge and buffer between the individual and the State.  The associations of “lower society” maintain their own autonomy . . . . Taparelli introduced the phrase “social justice” as a way to emphasize that much of the important stuff lay outside the realm of the State.  It had nothing to do with redistributing wealth (never mind fighting for gender equity).  Taparelli thought of and employed social justice in a completely different way that (sic) almost everyone, Catholic and otherwise, does in contemporary society.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.138.]

Just as “liberalism” back in the eighteenth century indicated the maximisation of individual liberty against the Leviathan State, yet today its meaning has been subverted and taken over by proponents of soft-state-despotism, so with the concept of “social justice”.
  In the hands, hearts, and minds of the Progressive movement in the United States, “social justice” has become “an empty vessel to be filled with any and all leftist ideals, and then promptly wielded as a political bludgeon against any and all dissenters”. (Ibid., p. 142).

Herbert Croly, the founding father of modern liberalism, writing in the early part of the twentieth century expressed it very clearly:

The idea of individual justice is being supplemented by the idea of social justice.  When our constitutions were written, the traditions of English law, the contemporary political philosophy and the economic situation of the American democracy all conspired to embody in them and their interpretation an extremely individualistic conception of justice–a conception which practically confided social welfare to the free expression of individual interests and good intentions.  Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare not as an end which cannot be left to the happy harmonizing of individual interests, but as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realised.  Society, that is, has become a moral ideal, not independent of the individual but supplementary to him, an ideal which must be pursued less by regulating individual excesses than by the active conscious encouragement of socializing tendencies and purposes. [Cited by Goldberg, op cit., p. 143f.]

Society (aka, the State) must impose social justice, and that efficiently.  That is the first Achilles Heel of the modern idea.  But worse, no-one has any limits as to what the concept can be shaped and twisted to resemble.  What is “socially just” in the end amounts to nothing more than a social realisation of what anyone, or a particular pressure group, happens to consider good.  For the Nazi, social justice is achieving and maintaining the supremacy of the white ethnicity.  For the feminist, it is the provision of ubiquitous free abortion clinics.  For the beauty pageant contestant it is the achieving of world peace.  For the Marxist, it is achieving an operational egalitarianism–from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, and so forth.  So catholic, so diverse, so variable, so inclusive as to be devoid of precise definition.

This Achilles of social justice at first glance appears a mighty warrior.  But he is a peculiar miscreant.  He has two heels, both fatal.  Social justice promotes and legitimises a Leviathan-like State with no limits to withstand its power.  It also is a meaningless concept.  It includes everything, and therefore means nothing.

Taking Offence at God

Exposing the Inner Man

Some Christian churches have long ago decided they would worship God, not as He is and revealed Himself to be, but they would worship Him as they want Him to be.  And what they want God to be is someone who minces around their lusts.

A recent piece in The Blaze provides a case study.  The hymn writers in the example are faithful; the denomination concerned is not. 

Why Is a Major Church Denomination Banning Famed Hymn ‘In Christ Alone’ From Its New Song Book?

Jul. 30, 2013 11:43am  
Billy Hallowell

It’s no secret that the Presbyterian Church (USA) — which is different from other branches of Presbyterianism — collectively takes a more liberal approach to theology. Most recently, the denomination is gaining attention for its rejection of the hymn, “In Christ Alone.” Rather than including the song in its new hymnal book, PCUSA axed it — an action that may leave some faithful believers scratching their heads.

After all, the song is robust with Christian themes of hope, strength and Christ’s dying on the cross. So, why would the PCUSA turn its back on it?

Here’s why: There’s one, key line in the third stanza that created a barrier — and debate: “Till on that cross as Jesus died/the wrath of God was satisfied.”

Originally, the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song (PCOCS), the body that oversees music for PCUSA, asked the song’s authors, Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, to allow them to change the words to “as Jesus died/the love of God was magnified,” as described by Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, on First Things.

The songwriters’ response? No.

So, with the authors doubling down on wanting the original wording kept intact, the committee voted nine to six to axe the song from the hymnal. Apparently, it is this invoking of “wrath” that has the liberal denomination less-than-content with the inclusion of the original lyrics.

George explains: Those who treat the wrath of God as taboo, whether in sermons or hymns, stand in a long lineage too, one that includes Albrecht Ritschl, Faustus Socinus, and the unnamed revisionists in the second century who followed the heretic Marcion. According to Tertullian, they said that “a better god has been discovered, one who is neither offended nor angry nor inflicts punishment, who has no fire warming up in hell, and no outer darkness wherein there is shuddering and gnashing of teeth: he is merely kind.”

The lure of such a gospel is unmistakable—it explains why neo-Marcionism (God’s wrath in the Old Testament, his love in the New) is still flourishing today not only in popular piety but also among guilded scholars of religion. Why do many Christians shrink from any thought of the wrath of God?

R.P.C. Hanson has said that many preachers today deal with God’s wrath the way the Victorians handled sex, treating it as something a bit shameful, embarrassing, and best left in the closet. The result is a less than fully biblical construal of who God is and what he has done, especially in the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ.

Earlier this year, Dr. Mary Louise Bringle, chairwoman of PCOCS, explained the two sides of the debate in detail in an article for the Christian Century. Her perspective offers up additional explanation surrounding how both sides felt, internally, about the matter: People making a case to retain the text with the authors’ original lines spoke of the fact that the words expressed one view of God’s saving work in Christ that has been prevalent in Christian history: the view of Anselm and Calvin, among others, that God’s honor was violated by human sin and that God’s justice could only be satisfied by the atoning death of a sinless victim.

While this might not be our personal view, it was argued, it is nonetheless a view held by some members of our family of faith; the hymnal is not a vehicle for one group’s perspective but rather a collection for use by a diverse body. Arguments on the other side pointed out that a hymnal does not simply collect diverse views, but also selects to emphasize some over others as part of its mission to form the faith of coming generations; it would do a disservice to this educational mission, the argument ran, to perpetuate by way of a new (second) text the view that the cross is primarily about God’s need to assuage God’s anger.

The final vote was six in favor of inclusion and nine against, giving the requisite two-thirds majority (which we required of all our decisions) to the no votes. The song has been removed from our contents list, with deep regret over losing its otherwise poignant and powerful witness.

The Ugly Leftist

How Happy is That Man . . . 

Chris Trotter, arguably New Zealand’s most prominent left wing columnist/theoretician, has recently written the following:

I once concluded an editorial in the NZ Political Review with the following observation:

“There is a paradox here. Conservative political culture, whose raison d’etre is the preservation of social inequality and economic exploitation (not to mention the institutional violence these things create and upon which ruling class power rests) tends to produce individuals of considerable personal charm and genuine liberality. While radical culture, which sets its face against the violence and injustice of entrenched privilege, all too often produces individuals who are aggressive, intolerant and utterly indifferent to the suffering which their relentless quest for justice causes.
“In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.”

Somewhere there must be an algorithm that delivers the best of both worlds.

I’m still looking.  (H/T Kiwiblog)

Apart from Chris’s continuing quest for  the Holy Grail–for which we wish him bon chance–what are we to make of his observations?
  Firstly, the habitual character of left-wingers.  Are we really to believe that they have imbibed more longer and deeply from the glass of human depravity?  Yes and no.  The Left are idealists; they are ideologically imprisoned in a peculiar, false world view.  Their ideology is that evil is extrinsic and structural, arising out of the economic and social systems in which we live and move.  Change the system and the structures, and all will be put to right. Utopia will be realised.  Exploitation will cease.  Justice will roll down like a river.  Equality will break out.  The lion will lie down with the lamb–or more accurately, the lion will become the lamb.  We will all be lambs. 

So the Leftist has no responsibility to treat people well in a day-to-day, neighbourly sense.  He cannot, while the present system of unjust exploitation remains intact.  No-one can.  But change the economic system and it’s a completely different ball game.  Economic determinism means that the individual will be transformed into a new creature by the new economic system.  Thus, the ideology trumps all individuals.  The Leftist loves mankind in the abstract, but obviates him as concrete particular.  The individual is a mere cipher.  The one who really loves mankind will focus like a laser upon throwing off the present economic exploitative system: then the newborn lion-lambs will emerge.  We will all be changed.  The needs of the many outweigh the need of the one. 

The Leftist is thus free to trample upon any individual who crosses him, who gets in the way of his version of the freight train of dialectical materialism.  Any individual who stands in the way of this version of progress, who dares to demur–be warned.  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.  The Leftist is one of the last teleologists standing: the means are truly justified by the glory of the end.

The liberal/conservative has a different view.  The individual is more important than the system.  This leads to an ethical frame where individuals tend to be more respected, appreciated, and liked.  Human beings are respected right down to the level of their own individual choices.  Sometimes people make stupid choices and face bad consequences.  Sometimes people make sound choices and face bad consequences.  Either way, no-one is really morally and ethically enslaved to an economic system.  If someone is making an effort to do the right thing, he or she warrants help and encouragement.  If someone is not making an effort, they can be challenged and encouraged to do so.  The underlying presumption is the greater worth and dignity of a human soul, regardless of the socio-economic system.   The worth of the one is greater than the (abstract) worth of the many.

But are liberal/conservatives better people than leftists?  Trotter recounts from  his experience that tends to be the case.

In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.  

But on another level we demur.   It is true that liberals (in the Lockean sense) and conservatives (in the Burkean sense) place a far greater primacy upon the importance of individual human beings.  They remain deeply suspicious of a centralisation of rule in any hands.  Power and authority, therefore, must remain decentralised.  Government, therefore, must be limited.  Freedom of both individuals and civil corporations and associations must be preserved and defended–otherwise Leviathan will re-emerge.  Such a world-view tends to cherish the idiosyncrasies of human beings and their societies and corporations.  It is a world-view with a sense of humour.  Tolerance is its hand-maiden.

But without the meta-narrative of the Holy Scriptures and widespread devotion to the Living God and His Christ, Lockean liberals eventually devolve into secular liberalism which deifies the state and worships a re-emerging Leviathan.  And Burkean conservatives devolve into an idolatrous worship of what has been and is, rather than a reverence for the Lord of the Covenant and the providential Ruler of the past, present, and future. And so it has come to pass.

Leftists are just further down the road to perdition.  Without Christ, liberal/conservatives are fast followers.  They will get there soon enough. 

On the contrary, how happy is the man who makes the Lord his trust.  His love and devotion to mankind will abide–within the enabling restraints and constraints of the law of his Lord.  Leviathan consequently remains chained.  It’s the only way he can be kept at bay.

Letter From Australia (About Liberal "Christianity")

Studied irrelevance

Liberal Christianity is merely unbelief dressed up. 

Peter Barnes

Normally one looks to the New York Times for wisdom in the same way that one might look for gold in a rubbish dump – it may be there, but it will take a lot of digging, and the prospects of success are not great. Yet, on 14 July, 2012 the Times published an article by Ross Douthat on ‘Can Liberal Christianity Be  Saved?’

Douthat referred to John Shelby Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and noted how the Episcopal Church in the USA had essentially followed Spong’s lead, and transformed itself from being a rather sedate pillar of the WASP establishment to being a selfconsciously progressive body in terms of its beliefs and its ethics. Yet the result has not been life but death.

As Douthat writes, “if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed”.
There is hardly a lunacy that the Episcopal bishops have not embraced, from blessing homosexual liaisons to proclaiming that our stewardship of the earth demands that we not reproduce ourselves. Indeed, there may well be secular liberals out there who would be embarrassed by the weird combination of Pollyanna and Peter Singer that gets passed off as the Christian gospel these days.

Responding to the recent dispute over the Sydney Anglican marriage vow where the wife professes  submission to the husband, broadcaster Mary Kostakidis pontificated in a Spong-like fashion: “The writing is on the wall for the church in the West; unless they (sic) get with the times, they’ll become increasingly irrelevant.”

There is nothing new in this approach. Lloyd Geering, an apostate Presbyterian in New Zealand, states: “Christianity… needs to be seen not as something eternally fixed but as an ever-changing and developing process. The modern secular world is all part of that evolving process.” Actually, the liberal denominations have done a good job of getting with the times and so becoming irrelevant.

When theological liberalism or modernism emerged as a dominant force in the second half of the 19th century, not everyone could have guessed its direction. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it: “With a revolution,
as with a novel, the hardest part to invent is the ending.” We now have more idea of the ending – it is banality
at best and rank unbelief at worst.

Recently I was exposed to what liberal theology means in practice when it comes to prayer and devotions. A
university chaplain read a story about a little grape stem that was glad to be alive, but could only survive the wind and snow when another grape stem called to her: “Here, reach out … hang on to me.” After some hesitation, the grape stem agreed, and finally learnt the lesson that strength comes through sticking together with other grape stems. At the end of the reading, I wondered whether anybody else was as embarrassed
as I was. We were all meant to be deeply moved, no doubt, but it was a struggle to remain silent and not laugh.

Back in 1937, H. Richard Niebuhr criticised this liberal and rather vacuous view of Christianity which he  summarised as “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”. There was a time when liberal Christianity appeared progressive. Now it has surely run its course, and its doctrinal and ethical emptiness has become obvious to all, even
some writers for the New York Times.

The main problem is, of course, that liberal Christianity simply parrots what the world already thinks it knows and believes. The same buzz words are there in both groups: tolerance, not judging, being inclusive, acknowledging that we are all on a journey, we all belong to faith groups, what this text means to you, sharing our insights. Finally, it has all collapsed, and we can see that the emperor has no clothes, only platitudes.

In his Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C. S. Lewis commented that “Liberal Christianity can only supply an ineffectual echo to the massive chorus of agreed and admitted unbelief ”. That about sums it up: liberal Christianity is only unbelief dressed up in some Christian words. It is revelation without the Bible, life without the Holy Spirit, and salvation without Christ. It speaks of God but does the work of the devil.

Peter Barnes is editor of AP (Australian Presbyterian Magazine)
.

Letter From the UK (About Liberal Bishops)

A day of judgment for liberal bishops

By Damian Thompson
Religion  
Last updated: October 12th, 2012
The Daily Telegraph

Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a “blood-crazed ferret”. He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His new book is called The Fix: How addiction is invading our lives and taking over your world.

The riches of liberal Anglicanism (H/T the Bad Vestments blog)

From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph

The strangest thing happened last week, though few people noticed it. America officially ceased to be a Protestant country. According to the Pew Forum, the percentage of Protestants has dropped to 48 per cent, down from 53 per cent in 2007. That’s a huge shift.

But, before Catholics start punching the air, let me point out that the percentage of Catholics has been flatlining for years at 22 per cent. The big jump is in unaffiliated Americans, including atheists – up from 15 to 20 per cent. These “Nones”, as pollsters call them, are laying waste to the religious landscape of the United States. And Britain.

Here’s the question that intrigues me. Once the old, routine churchgoers have died off, and now that “None” is the default position for liberal-minded young people, what will the churches of the future look like?
We’re beginning to find out. More to the point, the clapped-out Anglican and Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world are finding out, too – and it’s giving them nightmares.

Those youngsters who once went to church out of obligation are now spending Sunday mornings in the supermarket or the gym (body worship is a flourishing faith). That means that the only young people in the pews are true believers who really want to be there.

If you’re a “go-ahead” bishop, vicar or diocesan bureaucrat, this is a scary development. You’ve spent your career reducing the hard truths of Christ’s teaching – such as the inevitability of the Last Judgment – to carbon-neutral platitudes. Suddenly, the 20-year-olds in your flock are saying: no thanks, we’ll take the hard truths. Eek!

In the Church of England, young evangelicals are embarrassed by the thespian agonising of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. If there’d been a hand-wringing event at the Olympics, he’d have shattered all records.

In the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales, the disconnect is even more stark. Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy. (Remember Jack in Father Ted? You get the picture.)

Also – and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to report this – the Vatican has pulled a fast one by appointing two new diocesan bishops, Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and Philip Egan of Portsmouth, who are in tune with conservative youngsters rather than an English Catholic bureaucracy run by crypto-Marxist megabores trained in the public sector.

Bishop Egan has only been in his post for a few weeks, but already he’s been telling orthodox young Catholics what they want to hear: that they should adore the Blessed Sacrament, advertise their faith by making the sign of the cross, and even keep a rosary handy in the car. Cue barely suppressed shrieks from the old guard in Portsmouth, whose “director of liturgy”, the composer Paul Inwood, writes cod plainchant decked out in the harmonies of a 1970s cocktail lounge.

None of this should surprise us. When religions come under attack, they attract believers who invest in their more dogmatic, countercultural teachings – and who deliberately raise the degree of tension between themselves and society. There are few things more countercultural today than Bible-based evangelicalism or strictly orthodox Catholicism. For decades, Liberal bishops have droned on about how they wanted to draw young people back to church. But I don’t think this is what they had in mind.

 

The Left’s Social Contract

Do We Have a Deal for You!

The NZ Labour Party appointed a new leader late last year.  The faithful are still trying to work out what’s inside their new package.  Blogger Dim Post has been adding his speculations to the mix, in a piece entitled Back to Basics. 

He writes:

I thought Shearer’s interview was a bit insipid – but he did say one thing that gave me a little hope about his ‘Ides of Mars’ speech this week, which was a reference to the Social Contract. Maybe I’m being wildly optimistic here, but it could be pretty smart for Shearer to go back to the very principles of left-wing political philosophy, and simply make the argument that we’re a society of people with obligations towards each other – in contrast to the right-wing view-point in which we are a competitive market-place with no responsibility to each other outside of inter-party transactions.

We think that paragraph sums up the simplistic ideology of the left.
  The fundamental principles of left-wing philosophy–which, to be fair, dominate the airwaves, the Commentariat, and virtually all political parties in the West–are here displayed.  Well done. “We are a people who have obligations towards each other”  It is the philosopher’s stone of modern secular left-wing thought. 

Equally simplistic is the characterisation of the “right” as believing that we (that is, society) have no responsibility to each other, outside of inter-party transactions.  Thus does the Left paint the Right as without soul, being mercenary and materialistic, having no regard for humanity as living beings.  Left = good guys.  Right = anti-human bad guys. 

It’s not surprising that  the Left is often characterised by high moral dudgeon and a loathing of the Right.  It’s not unexpected that the Left’s speech is usually tinged with moral condescension and paternalistic self-righteousness towards those they believe they are defending. “We know what you want.  We know what’s good for you.”

 Neither is it unexpected that narrative of the Left is often quasi-religious.  They regularly speak as if they were saving the have-nots from oppression, redeeming them from human degradation, and delivering them from a state akin to slavery.  It explains why so many untaught Christians have a reflexive predilection to the Left. 

Let’s focus upon the charge that the Right believes that mankind has no obligations to fellow human beings apart from those implicit in (economic) transactions.  We suspect that Dim has in mind here the views of the secularist Libertarians.  There is a philosophical provenance to his allegations if that is indeed the case.  Deriving from Locke there is a long tradition of political philosophy which declares that private property and property rights ought to be the fundamental if not, exclusive focus of society and particularly the state. 

At this point Locke was simply wrong.  Basing an entire political philosophy upon the obligations flowing from the commands, Thou shalt not steal, and Thou shalt not covet, is itself simplistic reductionism.   It does, however, lend credence to Dim’s charge of the Right being mercenary, focused exclusively upon commercial transactions. 

For our purposes today, however, Locke’s positions help us focus on the issues.  Simply put, the Left argues that everyone else in society has an implicit title to all our worldly goods that trumps our own.  This is what the Left would call its Social Contract.  It lays upon us “social obligations” to each another.  Like Locke, the Left sees these obligations primarily through materialistic eyes: all of us have obligations to relinquish our property and possession in favour of those who do not have them.  Its Social Contract authorises the State to enforce these obligations through the involuntary expropriation of the taxation system.

It’s at this point we need decide, To which Social Contract we are going to cuddle up?  Both are focused almost exclusively upon property (a point which Dim has chosen to overlook).  The Left’s Social Contract  overrides private and personal property rights, giving the State rights and powers of expropriation. It authorises the State to engage in “legalised” theft to satisfy the covetousness and envy of others.  The Right’s Social Contract defends the property of all, protecting them from envy, covetousness, and theft whether direct from fellow citizens or indirectly through the mechanisms of government. 

Both Left and Right have strong commitments to social obligations, albeit diametrically opposed.  (Dim’s charge that the Right does not believe in social obligations is either a gratuitous slur or ignorant, or both.)  The Right believes that we, society have a social obligation to prevent (and punish) others attacking and taking what belongs to us.  The Left believes that we, society has an obligation to ensure others are empowered through the ballot box and the mechanisms of government to take and expropriate from us what they want.  The fundamental duty of government is to ensure that this is accomplished through the appropriate application of force so that the “exchange” is peacefully done. 

Thus the secular Left and Right can be characterised as being concerned primarily with material substance and property.  The Left argues that all men are obliged to relinquish our property in favour of the others, giving them a higher property right to what we possess.  The Right argues that all men are obliged to keep their hands off what we lawfully possess. 

If we ask, Which Social Contract more closely approximates the declarations of the Ten Commandments? the answer is immediately clear. 

At this point the untaught Christian may object thus: the Ten Commandments essentially give us negative obligations (thou shalt not . . .); what about the positive commandments to love God and our neighbour?  Surely, the Left’s Social Contract take these obligations far more seriously.  Yes, but no.  All Christians are positively commanded to do what we can to help our neighbour and our brother when we see them in need.  But we are forbidden to expropriate property from someone else to meet our neighbour’s need.  And that is what the Left’s Social Contract does.  Two wrongs never, ever make a right. 

When Nathan went in to confront David over his sin, he told a parable that involved just such an expropriation by a powerful third party, forcing someone else to meet a perceived need.  The Social Contract of the Left, utilising the power of the State to expropriate from some to redistribute to others,  implicitly endorses such evil, calling it good.