Hate Mail - Continued

IT IS IMPORTANT to go back to something I'd planned on being what I posted this week instead of what I have, continuing with Luke Timothy Johnson's fine lecture on the paradoxical nature of Christian freedom, focused on the letters of Paul.  I think his short conclusion to his lecture says pretty much everything, especially noting what he said we should be shocked at.   Remember this is my transcription of the video, so it is probably not exactly as he would have written it out.

I have a very short conclusion.  

Catching even a glimpse of the paradoxical character of Christian freedom should cause us, today, to consider our conformity or our lack of conformity to the sort of discourse that many of us have allowed to dominate our lives, unaccustomed as we are to seek our true identity not in political or social allegiance but to the truth of the Gospel.

We have reason to pause over our casual ascription of sin to social systems without acknowledging the deeply resistant power of the flesh and sin within each of us as individuals.

We have reason to be shocked at the premise that human freedom comes from the writing of laws, even constitutions rather than the presence and power of God's Holy Spirit.

We have reason to be stunned at the way The Good News recognizes rights but regards them as secondary and relative.  

Above all we have reason to be stimulated to think hard about the ways in which freedom for which God has freed us might be of service to others and their interests rather than our own.

Where I would part company with Luke Timothy Johnson is in the assertion that rights are secondary but only if by "secondary" you mean not to be asserted and struggled for and won, the experience of human beings is that asserting that will inevitably lead through centuries and millennia of those rights being deferred.  

They might be considered secondary to their greatest use, which is found in his last sentence, not least of which is that the only safe and real means of being fully free politically, the context of "rights," is through those being used to secure them and their benefits universally.  Benefits experienced and lived materially, socially, legally and spiritually.  Perhaps a really egalitarian democratic United States arising, however seemingly improbably from the libertarian catastrophe we are in now will show how to make both real, finally.   Though it's well worth considering how they could be considered secondary to their greatest use because their existence is necessary to their support of their use for the good of others.   Perhaps it's better to say that they don't gain their full good until they are used to that end.

I think in that you will find a more ample and succinct foundation for a "more perfect union" than the secularizing constitution framers  did.  I have noted before that when that intellectual giant (though entirely fallible man) Thomas Jefferson was coming up with an apologetic  justification for the American colonies declaring their independence from Britain, that quasi-deistic materialist man of "enlightenment" fashion found he had no choice but to explain the existence of rights and a right to freedom as an endowment from God.  I followed Marilynne Robinson in noting that it would be hard or impossible to come up with a purely secular statement of that as found in the Declaration of Independence, issuing it as a challenge to any atheist or even conventional devotee of political secularism to give us the language of such a declaration.  No one tried.

I said and still say that it is impossible to come up with a durable and effective statement of anything like rights or freedom or, in fact, the possibility of freedom and rights without rejecting a materialistic framing of human existence because there is absolutely nothing within atheism or materialism or even namby-pamby conventional secularism that isn't, in the end, a flabby and self-destructive assertion of freedoms and rights.  I find the character of all officially atheist and materialist regimes as deadly, enslaving dictatorships to be unsurprising due to that, I find the weakness of secularized societies in maintaining egalitarian democracy, especially in the face of pressures and dangers to be most fully understandable in their rejection or ignoring what I've put in the last two sentences of Luke Timothy Johnson's lecture.  The present day secular orthodoxy of not only the legal and judicial establishment has certainly not been any more careful or attentive to the necessities or benefits of egalitarian democracy than the representatives in the Federal government or many of those in the various states.  

Of course you can point to the "white evangelicals" the "traditional-catholics" and others who voted for Trump from an allegedly Christian point of view.  I would point out that it should not miss your attention that Luke Timothy Johnson was addressing an audience at a Catholic college, introduced by faculty from that college and that his critique of the widespread mischaracterization of Christian freedom and its associated holdings is most fairly read as an internal critique.  His handling of the deeply disturbing language of Paul and even of Jesus in terms of the enslavement of human beings shows how deep that internal critique is.  If that has ever happened on as deep a level in atheist, materialist or secular handling of these issues with the result being that there is something wanting in our understanding of those as self-jepoardizing as their fundamental ground-floor holdings of belief, I'd like to see it because I never have seen those, certainly none that come away with holding that human beings are capable of freedom and that there is such a thing as inalienable rights that are universally and equally the possession of every human being.  The problem of trad-catholics and white Bible-thumpers and their ilk is that THEY GO FOR THE TRAPPINGS OF CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT EVER ENTERTAINING THAT THEY ARE "TO BE OF SERVICE TO OTHERS AND THEIR INTERESTS RATHER THAN" THEIR OWN.  That the enlightenment founders rested their efforts on something to be regulated on the basis of what was sloganized "enlightened self-interest" without the Biblical moral wisdom of egalitarian good will and charity might usefully be seen as the basis of where America as a "democratic experiment" went totally wrong.  And there is no way you'll ever get past self-interest on the basis of atheism, materialism or secularism.  Even secular expressions and explanations of acting in the public good comes down to self-interest and that's never enough to really work in the long run throughout a large society or even a small one.  The language of civil rights in even the secularists can never seem to manage without some paraphrase of Scripture or theology.  I think there's a reason that even they have to look to it to find the right words, just as Jefferson the deist had to cite God in explaining a right to freedom from royal oppression.  That's where it always has to come from, an assertion that those come from the one who made us as we are.  Show me the language if you think it doesn't.