“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”
― Mencken and NietzscheA firm faith of this kind changes even this present life completely. It enables you to live quite differently, with more meaning, more responsibility, with greater involvement. In fact it enables you to live in accordance with the standard of this Christ. With his proclamation, the way he lived, and his fate, he became the standard for those who believe in him; the standard for those who believe in him; the standard for their relations with their fellow human beings, with society, and above all with God. To put it briefly, for believers the true man Jesus of Nazareth has therefore always been the real and clear revelation of the one God; his Messiah, his Christ, his image and his son.
But it is in this very way that he is a truly human being, the true human being. Through his proclamation, his behavior, his whole destiny, possible for me provided a model of being human which, if we commit ourselves trustingly to it, enables us again and again to discover and to realize the meaning of our own being human, of our freedom, of our life; in our own existence and in living with our fellow human beings. Confirmed by God in resurrection, he thus represents for us the enduring, reliable, ultimate standard of what being human means. What has surely become plain in recent theological disputes is that Christology, or a theory about Christ, may be important, particularly for theologians and bishops, but faith in Christ and discipleship are the essentials. Being a Christian is the important thing. And it is he who makes that possible for me - he, the Christ of God who is identical with the historical human being, Jesus of Nazareth.
So that is how I would answer the question, Where do I get my Christian commitment from? I know what I can rely on, what I can hold on to, because I believe in this Christ Jesus. Bit in saying that I am also faced with the question which must not be passed over under any circumstances. What does all this mean in practice?
If you read his other work, you would immediately find that, far from being a Christian chauvinist, Hans Kung has expressed deep respect, not only for what we might consider the Jewish tradition - the religion of Jesus after all and of Paul and the rest of his earliest followers - a Roman or Syrio-Greek or Samaritan here and there, as well. He also has spoken highly of the great Islamic tradition, as much indebted to the Mosaic faith as Christians are. And he's said good things about other religious traditions and, as in the passage I went through yesterday, he's even expressed respect for atheists. So this passage is not primarily an encouragement to conversion, unless you are going to consider it an encouragement to conversion of professed Christians to the central figure they claim to follow.
He presents what's in it for Christians to accept, to choose a real conversion to the faith of Jesus, my political analysis in a - thanks be to God - a pluralistic country which is losing its way needs to present the case of what's in it for non-Christians to have the large percentage of the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Australia, etc. to have Christians ACT AS IF THEY REALLY BELIEVE THE MORAL TEACHINGS OF JESUS.
I have mentioned that I once scandalized the mostly non-Christian, mostly college-credentialed, mostly secular lefty members of what was, then, a large blog community when I said the worst thing about prohibition was that it didn't work. The reaction I got you'd have thought I proposed putting a manger scene on public property!
But what if a city, a state, a country, managed to achieve total and complete sobriety, total non-consumption of alcohol? All of the accidents associated with alcohol use would not happen, the violence due to alcohol use wouldn't happen, the neglect of children, the illness that comes from even casual use of alcohol, the terrible consequences of alcoholism, including all of the above and the terrible declines into death that come with alcoholism would not afflict such a polity as managed total sobriety. The 75 to 80% of police work which now involves dealing with the effects of alcohol would be dedicated to stopping other crimes or the number of police needed would be radically reduced.
But as the period of prohibition in the United States shows such total sobriety turned out not to be possible in a world where other places were entirely willing to provide people who wanted to drink, organized crime handling the importation and distribution and making of alcohol. The results of total illegalization of alcohol turned out, in the real world, to have unacceptable consequences, much as the total illegalization of drugs does.
But what if a majority of people chose, on their own not to drink? What if a single family chooses not to drink? A good number of those benefits would come with that and, most relevant to my addressing this section of Kung's book, the neighbors and others would experience the benefit of having totally sober neighbors, totally sober drivers on the roads, in their schools, providing them services, etc. too?
What would the benefits to non-Christians be if all or even a majority of those who profess Christianity really did ACT OUT THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS?
If the majority of Christians acted and voted out of the teaching to do to others as you would have them do to you, egalitarian democracy would be the result.
If they acted and voted from their obligation to do to the least among us, the poor, the sick, the widowed and orphaned (and those roles translated into modern lives) the prisoner, the alien among us, as we would to God, the welfare state would put every single one created out of secularism to shame in their stinginess.
And those are only two of the major teachings of Jesus which, if they became the guiding principles in the lives of those who profess Christianity and they determined the way they voted and - lest it be forgotten, those so elected governed the country - the transformation in the lives of the non-Christians living in such a country would be all for the better.
Imagine if those much mentioned "evangelicals" who voted for Trump, who voted for the Bushes, who voted for Reagan, imagine if the right-wing Catholics who voted for them had voted in line with the actual teachings of Jesus FOR A PRESIDENT WHO, AS WELL LIVED AND GOVERNED ACCORDING TO THOSE TEACHINGS, how much better the lives of countless non-Christians would be.
The sins of the Christians, in their jillions, are a result of not living their lives, of not choosing their leaders, of not governing themselves according to the teachings of Jesus, the man they, in their profession of faith claim to believe is everything from the ultimate authoritative voice to a co-equal part of the triune God of the trinity. Imagine what history would have been like if all, or even most Christians actually acted according to the teachings of Jesus.
I think there is everything in it for non-Christians to have Christians really believe and really ACT AS IF they really believed in Christianity. I DON'T THINK THAT HAVING CHRISTIANS ACT AS IF THEY REALLY BELIEVE IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, RELIABLY, UNLESS THEY DO REALLY BELIEVE IT. But that is the responsibility of Christians making that choice to really believe in it*,
The imagined alternative in secular, a-religious, anti-Christianity produces a world which is a brothel governed by gangsters.
I think there is no one who best confirms my political analysis in this area is probably the most honest and developed of atheist philosophers, the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche. Read this passage from The Genealogy of Morals remembering that he despised democracy and socialism, which he noted were both heirs of the Christianity that he, as so many a modern secular, would be lefty, hated above all.
An investigation of the origin of Christianity in the Roman world shows that co-operative unions for poverty, sickness, and burial sprang up in the lowest stratum of contemporary society, amid which the chief antidote against depression, the little joy experienced in mutual benefits, was deliberately fostered. Perchance this was then a novelty, a real discovery? This conjuring up of the will for co-operation, for family organisation, for communal life, for "Cœnacula" necessarily brought the Will for Power, which had been already infinitesimally stimulated, to a new and much fuller manifestation. The herd organisation is a genuine advance and triumph in the fight with depression. With the growth of the community there matures even to individuals a new interest, which often enough takes him out of the more personal element in his discontent, his aversion to himself, the "despectus sui" of Geulincx. All sick and diseased people strive instinctively after a herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural necessity the strong strive as much for isolation as the weak for union: when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their Will for Power, much against the wishes of their individual consciences; the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with positive delight in such a muster—their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the instincts of the"born master" (that is, the solitary beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation. There is always lurking beneath every oligarchy—such is the universal lesson of history—the desire for tyranny. Every oligarchy is continually quivering with the tension of the effort required by each individual to keep mastering this desire. (Such, e.g., was the Greek; Plato shows it in a hundred places, Plato, who knew his contemporaries—and himself.)
So, obviously, his preference leads to a Trumpian view of life, not the one following the teachings of Jesus would.
P.S. I read that and remember the heroine of so many a current would-be lefty, Emma Goldman adored Nietzsche for his destruction of morality, and, unlike them, she had certainly read him. They haven't even read her.
* The ridiculous idea that we believe anything automatically, volition not being involved is exactly that, it is ridiculous. I think it has led many people to lose their faith when they expected that magical, automatic experience to just somehow happen. I think it is what Mother Teresa misunderstood that led to her long, reported dark night of the soul that, interestingly, her continued activity didn't seem to back up.
No comments:
Post a Comment