In 2006, I left BreakPoint to become
president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy (IRD). The IRD was part
of the Mainline Protestant renewal movement, and my first summer at the IRD
included trips to three national denominational meetings: the Presbyterian
Church USA (PCUSA) General Assembly, the Episcopal Church (TEC) General
Convention, and my own Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) General Assembly.
At the PCUSA and TEC meetings I saw
first-hand how, in contrast to Christians through the ages, the liberal
denominations have substituted feelings for facts, passions for authority, and
sentiment for reason. Their belief seems to be that if they “create space for
dialogue,” emote, and vote, they can determine the New Revised Standard Version
of God’s truth by Roberts Rule’s and simple majority — and Christian orthodoxy,
their own confessional documents, and dissenters can all pound sand. (I should
add that there were and are good, solidly orthodox dissenters who are still
fighting the good fight in those groups. They are courageous men and women who
deserve our prayers — and invitations to attend RCIA.)
The impact of the first two meetings sank
in as I flew between TEC’s General Convention and my own PCA General Assembly.
I was reading Dutch theologian and
politician Abraham Kuyper’s discussion of “the sovereignty of the individual
person” and the individual conscience before God in his Lectures on Calvinism
when a conversation began in the row behind me. Two women who did not know each
other discovered that they had both been volunteers at the TEC General
Convention. “Were you there,” asked one, “when Katherine Jefferts Schori was
elected presiding bishop?” The General Convention had elected Schori, one of
its few female bishops, to lead the denomination.
“Oh, yes I was there and it was
wonderful,” replied the other. “Couldn’t you just feel the Spirit?”
“Yes, yes. I felt the Spirit.”
Hmm, I thought, here we have “the
sovereignty of the individual person” writ large. I was not encouraged.
Katherine Jefferts Schori’s theological
positions are troubling, to say the least. In her inaugural sermon as presiding
bishop-elect, she announced, “Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation
and we are His children.” No doubt many in attendance including the women in
the row behind me thought this creative, panentheist, gender-bending was
wonderfully profound. In truth, it is self-evident gibberish and heretical
gibberish at that. Yet, there were at least two women who “could feel the
Spirit.”
I arrived at my own General Assembly
sobered. What, I asked myself, is keeping our thoroughly orthodox denomination
from voting to affirm same-sex marriage, ordain practicing homosexuals, and
rewrite or reject the doctrine of the Trinity? (Live issues at the PCUSA and
TEC meetings)? What will keep us on the straight and narrow? The PCA’s
Westminster Confession is already an edited version of the original. What was
keeping us from doing more editing? (Good news: They removed all the
anti-Catholic “whore of Babylon” references that were in the 1646 Puritan
original.)
I could only come up with one answer: the
good will of a converted clergy. And while that is a truly marvelous thing —
something for which we should praise God — it also struck me as a very slender
reed on which to hang the future. Given the right provocation, the PCA could,
claiming the guidance of the Holy Spirit, make radical changes in Christian
doctrine to accommodate the spirit of the age just as surely as the PCUSA and
the Episcopalians have.
How long, I began wondering, can the PCA,
any other Protestant group, or for that matter Protestantism in general
maintain orthodoxy in a post-modern world? Protestantism began with a strong
nominalist streak (cf. Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism),
and what is post-modernism if not nominalism on steroids? The seeds of its
destruction were inherent in the Protestant system from the beginning as
historian Brad Gregory argues in his book The Unintended Reformation: How a
Religious Revolution Secularized Society.
Every individual Protestant and every
Protestant denomination — really just a collection of (more or less) like-minded
individuals — claims the authority to interpret the Bible and define doctrine.
But the buck has to stop somewhere. In the final analysis, the buck either
stops with me and the like-minded group I have chosen to join (and can choose
to leave) — a very scary prospect — or it stops with a Church that actually has
the authority to decide, an authority given to her by God.
This was the crucial issue, settled finally
as I read in Blessed John Henry Newman’s argument by inference in his Apologia
Pro Vita Sua. In light of the evil brought by original sin, he wrote, the
Catholic Church’s infallibility is “a provision, adapted by the mercy of the
Creator, to preserve religion in the world, and to restrain freedom of thought,
which of course in itself is one of the greatest of our natural gifts, and to
rescue it from its own suicidal tendencies” (p. 220).
It is those suicidal tendencies of freedom
of thought that are killing the Protestant Mainline and infecting
Evangelicalism. This is Protestantism’s Achilles heel and without the authority
of the Catholic Church, the dissolution will continue. Given that state of
affairs in Protestantism, it is wise, as Newman knew, to opt out of “private
judgment” into the security of the Catholic Church.
I have two good friends in my Greek
language class. One is a Russian lady and the other one is an Ukrainian lady. Whenever
I see them being happily together, it gives me joy and hope that the Prince of
Peace (Eph.2:14) is indeed among us in the midst of all these difficulties and
tragedies. Whether you are an Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic, Ukrainian or
Russian, I love you sincerely and dearly. You are a precious child of God in
Christ and your being is so precious and sweet. Also Slavic Christian spirituality
and piety is an unmeasurable treasure for humankind. May God bless you and your
beloved ones abundantly.
"The Church, though dispersed
throughout the world... having received [this faith from the Apostles]... as if
occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points
[of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and
she proclaims them, and teaches them and hands them down with perfect harmony
as if she possessed only one mouth. For, although the languages of the world
are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the
Churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down
anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the
East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been
established in the central regions of the world" (St Irenaeus, Adversus
Haereses,1, 10, 1-2).
У меня есть два хороших друга в моем
классе греческого языка. Одна русская леди, а другая украинка. Всякий раз,
когда я вижу, что они счастливы вместе, я радуюсь и надеюсь, что Князь Мира
(Еф.2: 14) действительно находится среди нас среди всех этих трудностей и трагедий. Будь вы православный или греко-католик, украинец или
русский, я люблю вас искренне и нежно. Вы - драгоценное дитя Божье во Христе, и
ваше существо так драгоценно и сладко. Также славянская христианская духовность
и благочестие - неизмеримое сокровище для человечества. Пусть Бог обильно
благословит вас и ваших возлюбленных.
У мене є два хороших друзів у моїй грецькій мові. Один - російська леді, а
інша - українська леді. Всякий раз, коли я бачу, що вони щасливі разом, це дає
мені радість і надію, що Князь Миру (Еф.2: 14) дійсно є серед нас серед усіх
цих труднощів і трагедій. Чи є Ви східною православною або греко-католицькою,
українською чи російською, я люблю вас щиро і дорого. Ти є дорогоцінною дитиною
Бога в Христі, і твоє буття так дорого і солодко. Також слов'янська
християнська духовність і благочестя є незмінним скарбом для людства. Нехай Бог
благословляє вас і ваших улюблених.
Students at New York University protest for
immigration rights, but symbols of other causes are on display. Students today
clamor for "safe spaces" and engage in identity politics. How did we
get here?(source)
Jordan Peterson on Derrida and Cultural
Marxism
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life, p. 187-189.
Postmodernism and the Long Arm of Marx
These disciplines draw their philosophy
from multiple sources. All are heavily influenced by the Marxist humanists. One
such figure is Max Horkheimer, who developed critical theory in the 1930s. Any
brief summary of his ideas is bound to be oversimplified, but Horkheimer
regarded himself as a Marxist. He believed that Western principles of
individual freedom or the free market were merely masks that served to disguise
the true conditions of the West: inequality, domination and exploitation. He
believed that intellectual activity should be devoted to social change, instead
of mere understanding, and hoped to emancipate humanity from its enslavement.
Horkheimer and his Frankfurt School of associated thinkers—first, in Germany
and later, in the US—aimed at a full-scale critique and transformation of
Western civilization.
More important in recent years has been the
work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, leader of the postmodernists, who
came into vogue in the late 1970s.
Derrida described his own ideas as a
radicalized form of Marxism. Marx attempted to reduce history and society to
economics, considering culture the oppression of the poor by the rich. When
Marxism was put into practice in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and
elsewhere, economic resources were brutally redistributed. Private property was
eliminated, and rural people forcibly collectivized.
The result? Tens of
millions of people died. Hundreds of millions more were subject to oppression
rivalling that still operative in North Korea, the last classic communist
holdout. The resulting economic systems were corrupt and unsustainable. The
world entered a prolonged and extremely dangerous cold war. The citizens of
those societies lived the life of the lie, betraying their families, informing
on their neighbours—existing in misery, without complaint (or else).
Marxist ideas were very attractive to
intellectual utopians. One of the primary architects of the horrors of the
Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, received a doctorate at the Sorbonne before he
became the nominal head of Cambodia in the mid-1970s. In his doctoral thesis,
written in 1959, he argued that the work done by non-farmers in Cambodia’s
cities was unproductive: bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing to
society. Instead, they parasitized the genuine value produced through
agriculture, small industry and craft. Samphan’s ideas were favourably looked
upon by the French intellectuals who granted him his Ph.D. Back in Cambodia, he
was provided with the opportunity to put his theories into practice. The Khmer
Rouge evacuated Cambodia’s cities, drove all the inhabitants into the
countryside, closed the banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all
the markets. A quarter of the Cambodian population were worked to death in the
countryside, in the killing fields.
Lest We Forget: Ideas Have Consequences.
When the communists established the Soviet
Union after the First World War, people could be forgiven for hoping that the
utopian collectivist dreams their new leaders purveyed were possible. The
decayed social order of the late nineteenth century produced the trenches and
mass slaughters of the Great War. The gap between rich and poor was extreme,
and most people slaved away in conditions worse than those later described by
Orwell.
Although the West received word of the horror perpetrated by Lenin after
the Russian Revolution, it remained difficult to evaluate his actions from
afar. Russia was in postmonarchical chaos, and the news of widespread
industrial development and redistribution of property to those who had so
recently been serfs provided reason for hope. To complicate things further, the
USSR (and Mexico) supported the democratic Republicans when the Spanish Civil
War broke out, in 1936. They were fighting against the essentially fascist
Nationalists, who had overthrown the fragile democracy established only five
years previously, and who found support with the Nazis and Italian fascists.
The intelligentsia in America, Great
Britain and elsewhere were severely frustrated by their home countries’
neutrality. Thousands of foreigners streamed into Spain to fight for the
Republicans, serving in the International Brigades. George Orwell was one of
them. Ernest Hemingway served there as a journalist, and was a supporter of the
Republicans. Politically concerned young Americans, Canadians and Brits felt a
moral obligation to stop talking and start fighting.
All of this drew attention away from
concurrent events in the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, during the Great
Depression, the Stalinist Soviets sent two million kulaks, their richest
peasants, to Siberia (those with a small number of cows, a couple of hired
hands, or a few acres more than was typical).
From the communist viewpoint,
these kulaks had gathered their wealth by plundering those around them, and
deserved their fate. Wealth signified oppression, and private property was
theft. It was time for some equity. More than thirty thousand kulaks were shot
on the spot. Many more met their fate at the hands of their most jealous,
resentful and unproductive neighbours, who used the high ideals of communist
collectivization to mask their murderous intent.
The kulaks were “enemies of the people,”
apes, scum, vermin, filth and swine. “We will make soap out of the kulak,”
claimed one particularly brutal cadre of city-dwellers, mobilized by party and
Soviet executive committees, and sent out into the countryside. The kulaks were
driven, naked, into the streets, beaten, and forced to dig their own graves.
The women were raped. Their belongings were “expropriated,” which, in practice,
meant that their houses were stripped down to the rafters and ceiling beams and
everything was stolen. In many places, the non-kulak peasants resisted,
particularly the women, who took to surrounding the persecuted families with
their bodies. Such resistance proved futile. The kulaks who didn’t die were
exiled to Siberia, often in the middle of the night. The trains started in
February, in the bitter Russian cold. Housing of the most substandard kind
awaited them upon arrival on the desert taiga. Many died, particularly
children, from typhoid, measles and scarlet fever.
The “parasitical” kulaks were, in general,
the most skillful and hardworking farmers. A small minority of people are
responsible for most of the production in any field, and farming proved no
different. Agricultural output crashed. What little remained was taken by force
out of the countryside and into the cities. Rural people who went out into the
fields after the harvest to glean single grains of wheat for their hungry
families risked execution. Six million people died of starvation in the
Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, in the 1930s. “To eat your own
children is a barbarian act,” declared posters of the Soviet regime.
Despite more than mere rumours of such
atrocities, attitudes towards communism remained consistently positive among
many Western intellectuals. There were other things to worry about, and the
Second World War allied the Soviet Union with the Western countries opposing
Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. Certain watchful eyes remained open, nonetheless.
Malcolm Muggeridge published a series of articles describing
Soviet demolition of the peasantry as early
as 1933, for the Manchester Guardian. George Orwell understood what was going
on under Stalin, and he made it widely known. He published Animal Farm, a fable
satirizing the Soviet Union, in 1945, despite encountering serious resistance
to the book’s release. Many who should have known better retained their
blindness for long after this. Nowhere was this truer than France, and nowhere
truer in France than among the intellectuals.
France’s most famous mid-century
philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was a well-known communist, although not a
card-carrier, until he denounced the Soviet incursion into Hungary in 1956.
He
remained an advocate for Marxism, nonetheless, and did not finally break with
the Soviet Union until 1968, when the Soviets violently suppressed the
Czechoslovakians during the Prague Spring.
Not long after came the publication of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which we have discussed rather
extensively in previous chapters. As noted (and is worth noting again), this
book utterly demolished communism’s moral credibility—first in the West, and
then in the Soviet System itself. It circulated in underground samizdat format.
Russians had twenty-four hours to read their rare copy before handing it to the
next waiting mind. A Russian-language reading was broadcast into the Soviet
Union by Radio Liberty.
Solzhenitsyn argued that the Soviet system
could have never survived without tyranny and slave labour; that the seeds of
its worst excesses were definitively sowed in the time of Lenin (for whom the
Western communists still served as apologists); and that it was propped up by
endless lies, both individual and public. Its sins could not be blamed on a
simple cult of personality, as its supporters continued to claim. Solzhenitsyn
documented the Soviet Union’s extensive mistreatment of political prisoners,
its corrupt legal system, and its mass murders, and showed in painstaking detail
how these were not aberrations but direct expressions of the underlying
communist philosophy. No one could stand up for communism after The Gulag
Archipelago—not even the communists themselves.
This did not mean that the fascination
Marxist ideas had for intellectuals—particularly French
intellectuals—disappeared. It merely transformed. Some refused outright to
learn. Sartre denounced Solzhenitsyn as a “dangerous element.” Derrida, more
subtle, substituted the idea of power for the idea of money, and continued on
his merry way. Such linguistic sleight-of-hand gave all the barely repentant
Marxists still inhabiting the intellectual pinnacles of the West the means to
retain their world-view. Society was no longer repression of the poor by the
rich. It was oppression of everyone by the powerful.
According to Derrida, hierarchical
structures emerged only to include (the beneficiaries of that structure) and to
exclude (everyone else, who were therefore oppressed). Even that claim wasn’t
sufficiently radical. Derrida claimed that divisiveness and oppression were
built right into language— built into the very categories we use to
pragmatically simplify and negotiate the world. There are “women” only because
men gain by excluding them. There are “males and females” only because members
of that more heterogeneous group benefit by excluding the tiny minority of
people whose biological sexuality is amorphous. Science only benefits the
scientists. Politics only benefits the politicians. In Derrida’s view,
hierarchies exist because they gain from oppressing those who are omitted. It
is this ill-gotten gain that allows them to flourish.
Derrida famously said (although he denied
it, later): “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—often translated as “there is nothing
outside the text.” His supporters say that is a mistranslation, and that the
English equivalent should have been “there is no outside-text.” It remains
difficult, either way, to read the statement as saying anything other than
“everything is interpretation,” and that is how Derrida’s work has generally
been interpreted.
It is almost impossible to over-estimate
the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of
categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be
drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power. Biological
distinctions between men and women? Despite the existence of an overwhelming,
multi-disciplinary scientific literature indicating that sex differences are
powerfully influenced by biological factors, science is just another game of
power, for Derrida and his post-modern Marxist acolytes, making claims to
benefit those at the pinnacle of the scientific world. There are no facts.
Hierarchical position and reputation as a consequence of skill and competence?
All definitions of skill and of competence are merely made up by those who
benefit from them, to exclude others, and to benefit personally and selfishly.
There is sufficient truth to Derrida’s
claims to account, in part, for their insidious nature. Power is a fundamental
motivational force (“a,” not ”the”). People compete to rise to the top, and
they care where they are in dominance hierarchies. But (and this is where you
separate the metaphorical boys from the men, philosophically) the fact that
power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only
role, or even the primary role.
Likewise, the fact that we can never know
everything does make all our observations and utterances dependent on taking
some things into account and leaving other things out (as we discussed
extensively in Rule 10). That does not justify the claim that everything is
interpretation, or that categorization is just exclusion. Beware of single
cause interpretations—and beware the people who purvey them.
One
thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in
the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the
Lord, and to enquire in his temple. Psalm 27:4 (picture)
with English subtitle
"At this
point, a last question must be asked: can the Ladder, a work written by a
hermit monk who lived 1,400 years ago, say something to us today? Can the
existential journey of a man who lived his entire life on Mount Sinai in such a
distant time be relevant to us? At first glance it would seem that the answer
must be "no", because John Climacus is too remote from us. But if we
look a little closer, we see that the monastic life is only a great symbol of
baptismal life, of Christian life. It shows, so to speak, in capital letters
what we write day after day in small letters. It is a prophetic symbol that reveals
what the life of the baptized person is, in communion with Christ, with his
death and Resurrection." Benedict XVI, General Audience, John Climacus, 2009 (source)
The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Saint Catherine's Monastery
The fact
that the top of the "ladder", the final steps, are at the same time
the fundamental, initial and most simple virtues is particularly important to
me: faith, hope and charity. These are not virtues accessible only to moral
heroes; rather they are gifts of God to all the baptized: in them our life
develops too. The beginning is also the end, the starting point is also the
point of arrival: the whole journey towards an ever more radical realization of
faith, hope and charity. The whole ascent is present in these virtues. Faith is
fundamental, because this virtue implies that I renounce my arrogance, my
thought, and the claim to judge by myself without entrusting myself to others.
This
journey towards humility, towards spiritual childhood is essential. It is
necessary to overcome the attitude of arrogance that makes one say: I know
better, in this my time of the 21st century, than what people could have known
then. Instead, it is necessary to entrust oneself to Sacred Scripture alone, to
the word of the Lord, to look out on the horizon of faith with humility, in
order to enter into the enormous immensity of the universal world, of the world
of God. In this way our soul grows, the sensitivity of the heart grows toward
God.
Rightly, John Climacus says that hope alone renders us capable of living
charity; hope in which we transcend the things of every day, we do not expect
success in our earthly days but we look forward to the revelation of God
himself at last. It is only in this extension of our soul, in this
self-transcendence, that our life becomes great and that we are able to bear
the effort and disappointments of every day, that we can be kind to others
without expecting any reward.
Only if there is God, this great hope to which I
aspire, can I take the small steps of my life and thus learn charity. The
mystery of prayer, of the personal knowledge of Jesus, is concealed in charity:
simple prayer that strives only to move the divine Teacher's heart. So it is
that one's own heart opens, one learns from him his own kindness, his love. Let
us therefore use this "ascent" of faith, hope and charity. In this
way we will arrive at true life.
Benedict XVI, General Audience, John Climacus, 2009 (source)
