Here is an excerpt from “We the Fallen People” by Robert Tracy McKenzie (p. 54 Kindle edition).
Accepting, though not celebrating, the truth that we are essentially selfish creatures, the Framers thought of the maintenance of free government as a tightrope walk between the evils of anarchy and despotism. When government is too weak, the outcome is reminiscent of when “there was no king in Israel” and “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That description of anarchy from the Old Testament was a decent summation of government under the Articles of Confederation, as the Framers reckoned it.
But history taught that anarchy couldn’t exist indefinitely. John Jay warned that the resulting insecurity of person and property would tempt “orderly and industrious” individuals “to consider the charms of liberty as imaginary and elusive.” The “disgust and alarm” among responsible citizens would “prepare their minds for almost any change that may promise them quiet & security.” By 1786, rumors were reaching Mount Vernon that “even respectable characters” were speaking of a “monarchical form of government without horror.” The country “was apt to run from one extreme into another,” George Washington worried. Eventually Americans would exchange liberty for despotism as the price of order and safety.
And as it turns out, we’re selling away our birthrights of freedom - and not even getting the “quiet order, safety, and security”! All we’re getting is the despotism. Esau at least got a decent meal for his birthright! We sold our souls for the world, and didn’t / won’t be getting even a fraction of that! It’s amazing that entire political parties today, even with the benefit of reading the Framers and venerating them, can still be so ignorant of the very things that those same Framers could see so clearly 200 years ago already!
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. … The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
I just finished “We the Fallen People” … here is yet another excerpt from the last chapter of that.
As Jonathan Leeman observes in his wonderful book How the Nations Rage, “most of the political questions citizens face today are biblically unscripted.” Scripture tells us much about the heart of God—the Lord loves justice and mercy, grace and truth—but it doesn’t spell out how to infuse those values into public policy in a twenty-first-century democracy.
In a similar way, the Bible tells us much about the human heart—it testifies to human fallenness, most notably—but it doesn’t specify how to make allowances for our sinful nature in order to craft an effective constitution or promote a flourishing democracy. Questions such as these can’t be answered unequivocally by biblical precepts. They require the application of biblically informed wisdom, and that means we’re inevitably going to disagree about them. But we can disagree without being divided, without effectively excommunicating brothers and sisters in the faith who don’t arrive at our conclusions. And so, while I’m going to make the strongest argument that I can for the recommendations that follow, I’m not going to imply that if you disagree with me you’re apostate, heretical, or in the grips of demonic possession. I hope you’ll return the favor.
One caveat before we proceed: what follows is not a road map for Christian political success. I’m not remotely interested in trying to craft such a strategy. No offense, but our recent efforts to wield political influence have done less to Christianize politics than to politicize Christianity, and I want no part of that.
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy (pp. 267-268). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.
“Helen Mirren once said: Before you argue with someone, ask yourself, is that person even mentally mature enough to grasp the concept of a different perspective. Because if not, there’s absolutely no point.”
Yes. Or, on the other hand, am I comfortable enough to entertain the possibility that the other person may be right; or at least to mentally absolve them of ill will in the case that they are mistaken.
Chesterton seems to have anticipated Iain McGIlchrist’s Hemisphere hypothesis by a country mile. The bean counting left hemisphere when forced to run the show after injury to the right hemisphere tends toward schizophrenic symptoms. When it is the other way around a person loses the ability to speak for a while but doesn’t suddenly mistake his wife for a hat or other such extreme disfunction.
In just about every society, those who are not rich, famous, or at the top carry an undue stigma—some degree of guilt and shame for their lesser status. The unspoken assumption is, You are surely wrong and at fault because you belong to the wrong subgroup, have no wealth, do not work hard enough, or have not made it to the celebrity list. And yet the Bible breaks this pattern by preferring the barren wife, the forgotten son, the enslaved Israelites. Those in the remnant carry the mostly hidden truth forward despite—or probably because of—their rejected or marginal status. It is a loser’s script leading from Sarah to the Israelites and all the way to Jesus, but neither group—Israel or Christianity—ever really wants to play the part. We preferred Zionism and Christendom.
Rohr, Richard. The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (pp. 34-35). Harmony/Rodale/Convergent. Kindle Edition.
I wonder if one reason why we have so effectively wrecked and misinterpreted Jesus is that we needed to prove he was the Son of God or the Messiah or a miracle worker before we let him speak as a prophet. As artists have done in paintings over the centuries, we made Jesus conform sequentially to Jerusalem, Rome, Greece, Europe, and America, placing him in native costumes and reaffirming whatever worldview happens to resonate with us.
Once we took away the prophetic Jesus’s counterintuitive message and his countercultural critique, he became the personal possession of every nation’s biases, shadows, and preoccupations—hardly worthy of being Lord of the entire universe. Jesus ended up as an outsider in the eyes of Judaism, a theologian to educated Greeks, a competing warrior for Rome, a conquistador for the New World, a proper evangelical preacher for right-wingers everywhere, a white capitalist ally for the good old USA, a “best friend” for the therapeutic class, a harmless and optional teacher for many liberals, and the founder of a strange cult of innocence (“I am not a sinner”) that almost no one can really live up to. Anything but a universal Christ for all of us broken sinners. And now people are leaving, no longer willing to drink this old wine.
Rohr, Richard. The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (pp. 150-151). Harmony/Rodale/Convergent. Kindle Edition.
I think Rohr was actually being considerably too charitable in how some of those mentioned groups have remade Jesus. To at least one of those groups, Jesus’ teachings are now an untenable embarrassment. According to at least one leading representative of that group - Jesus’ mention of the “least of these” only occurred once in scriptures, and therefore can be written off as perhaps not so important. …And so begin the excuses about how “Christians” in the U.S. need not heed what Christ lived and taught. If I was a younger person curious about faith and that was my first exposure - I would walk the other way. If that is what being “Christian” looks like, then best to look elsewhere for truth.