The Contradictions of Liberalism (a practical demonstration and an impractical rant by an orthodox rebel)

First of all, read this article. Read all of it. It is short, sweet, and thoroughly infuriating.

With all due respect to that article's author (who I have no reason to doubt is a fine young woman), and with apologies to my more sensitive readers (and my mother), but that sort of stuff pisses me off. Seriously. I've dealt with it before, and I didn't find it very pleasant or amusing back then either. And now, after all that's happened? It's just even more aggravating.

In response to that article, I want someone to please explain something to me:

Why is it that "conservative Christians" are the only ones who "live in a bubble"? Do liberals not live in bubbles? Bubbles of socialism and skepticism as well as twisted views of "tolerance" and "equality"? Are they incapable of delusions or deceptions? Are they the only free-thinkers and open-minded ones left in the whole world? How can that be? Is not the article itself a close-minded, condescending assertion about conservative Christians?

Why is it that "conservative Christians" are the only ones who work "through fear, discrimination or a movement farther" down the political extreme? Do liberals not incite fear about nasty conservatives and their supposed backward-thinking ideas and inevitable fascist ends? Do they not discriminate against those whom they deem (in their infinite wisdom) to be intolerant bigots? Is not the article itself a discrimination against conservative Christians, and is it not a call to a movement farther left?

And why (someone please tell me WHY?) is it that when "America speaks" it is the Christians who need to "listen"? If Christians are supposed to "be listening to Christ, and the Bible above all else," then why are we supposed to "listen" to America? Since when does a nation, any nation, determine and decided the contours of our Faith? Since when does a culture, any culture, dictate to us what it is to be Christ-like? Did not this same Christ say that His true disciples are those who do the will of His Father (Matt. 12:47-50) and not the will of their current nation/culture?

It's fallacious. Blatantly and ridiculously fallacious. The whole article, the whole line of reasoning, the whole thing is a ludicrous and laughable contradiction, a contradiction wrapped in condescension feigning humility, so that we'll swallow it easier, like a spoonful of sugar helping the arsenic go down. I only ask why they ask me to accept such poison, but I doubt I'll ever receive an adequate answer.

Thank you. Good night.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Extremist (The Six Shades of Sin, Part II)

"Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning [so] that they may pursue strong drink; [who] continue until night, till wine inflames them! [...] they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of His hands." Is. 5:11-12

Immoderation has always been misunderstood mainly because moderation is misunderstood. Moderation is often associated with a puritanical sense of abstinence, which it was never meant to be. It was never meant to be about abstinence but balance. This is a fact as old as human thought: the virtuous life is the point between extremes. For example, courage is not an extreme passion or pursuit but rather a moderate one. Cowardice and recklessness are the extremes, and thus they are the vices. Love is moderate; lust and apathy are the extremes. In short, moderation is not the life of a dullard or bore. On the contrary, it is the adventurous life, a perilous and precarious walk on the edge of a knife, the maintaining of a precious balance between two equal yet opposite points of mania. Such an endeavor calls forth the best from us, for as Chesterton put it, "There is an infinity of angles by which one falls but only one by which one stands." Any fool or weakling can go mad; it is easy to be insane, to be extreme. Sanity is the true struggle and spectacle. Vice can only be a sputter; virtue alone can be a song.

That virtue requires real struggle and adventure is the thought behind the ancient notion that evil was not only fundamentally wicked but also fundamentally dull. It takes the easy way out, settling for a lesser post. Much to the chagrin of popular perception, the evil life is ultimately lackluster because it is a stunted life. It always leaves something out. Rather than maintaining the healthy and powerful balance between caution and action (which we call courage), they succumb to either one extreme or the other, leading either the sedentary life of endless caution or the chaotic life of endless action. Likewise, rather than maintaining the healthy and joyous balance between restraint and pleasure (which we call love), they grow weary of the effort and slide into either joyless apathy or joyless lechery. In either case, they do not have love.

The immoderate life, the joyless, dull, inconsequential life, stems from one source: "they regard not the work of the Lord." Like all sin and all its insanity, the immoderate life is the life that disregards God. Is this any wonder? God is the supreme picture of sanity, of balance, of rigorous and living order that knows no extremity and therefore knows no ennui. In His trinitarian dance, we see His balance: Father begetting, Son creating, Spirit proceeding. Give and take, surrender and acceptance, obedience and love without confusion or division, nor dominion or neglect. The balance is perfect, the dance is tight, and thus the Being is One. Likewise in the Incarnation, we see the same balance: neither humanity dissolved into deity nor deity subsumed into humanity, but rather both gloriously preserved in hypostatic union, neither nature lacking or dominating. Both are maintained at the absolute fever-pitch of their intensity, and the God-man is One. God is the Great Sanity against all of our myriad madness. Both in His character and His actions, He proves how consistently we fall short of the glory of His moderation.

When God's people were not His people and did not know Him, He gave them an identity through a religion; but when that religion turned into dead formalism and meaningless rite, He broke their religion (Is. 1:10-15) and spoiled their identity (Is. 5:1-7). When Messiah came, He continually frustrated and bewildered both His enemies and His friends, for they could only conceive of Him as either this or that when He was both this and that. He was both conqueror and conquered, the breaker and the healer, the judge and the victim, the poor and the king, He who was dead and yet lives. The sanity of God frustrates our every plan, for our world is a ship of fools and the lunatics run the asylum. Sanity is only insanity to the insane, and moderation is only a threat to the extremist.

Even today God's holy sanity bears witness against us. We who are caught up in the seemingly endless euroclydon of American Christianity often find ourselves tossed about with wave upon wave of doctrines or fads or movements or agendas or politics or some other unholy alliance between the Christian Faith and a fleeting element of American culture. We hear the siren calls every day as we walk a hairline between an array of Scylla's and Charybdis's. To remain moderate in such an environment is to live a life on the edge, but it is on the edge where we find God, and make no mistake: it is God who we must desire if we are to live moderately. It cannot be out of duty or drudgery but out of love, love for God and His Christ, for all that they are and all they have done and are doing and will do. God must be the highest, our all in all, with every thought or plan or scheme or desire or inkling or good intention made captive to the glory and supremacy of His sweet moderation. That is what it means to live moderately: not to wallow in prudery, but to every day, bit-by-bit and step-by-step, dance the dance of God, where all things find their place, and all of life is consumed into the holy harmony of His fullness.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Void (The Six Shades of Sin, Part 1)

"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there is no place [left], [so] that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." Is. 5:8

God had taken care of His people (vs. 1-2). He had protected them , nurtured them, and built them up. But they had not brought forth the "good grapes" of "judgment" and "righteousness" (vs. 2, 7). Instead, they brought forth "wild grapes," which Isaiah categorizes around six "woes" that God speaks against His people. Each of these "woes" points to a specific type of evil that Israel had been infected with, evil that any and all people (whether they be a believer or not) can be infected with. The first one (vs. 8) deals with greed.

It has been said that it is lonely at the top. The real truth of that statement is often missed. If it is lonely at the top, then those who seek the top want to be alone. They want silence and solitude, an absolute severance from all others. That is the diabolic root to the bloom of greed. Those who are greedy (whether for material possessions, or fame and popularity, or even religious status) are driven by a fundamental narcissism. They desire what they desire because they deem themselves and no one else worthy of it. They desire the top because they alone are fit to have it. Consequently, others mean very little to them. Even those who are greedy for attention or affirmation or affection care little for those who give it. They care only about the attention or affirmation or affection, which means they only care about themselves. So greed is not an over-accumulation of things (as if "things" were the problem). Rather, it is a void, a vacuum, a yawning abyss whose insatiable limits can never know peace. In old fantasy stories, this was the essential theme of dragons: not merely a monster, but a greedy monster, locked away in their lonely mountain, sleeping forever with their treasures, never spending but always slaying. Greed is the teeth in the darkness and the fire in the belly, and there is no grace for those who stand between it and its precious.

God's people ought not to be marked by greed, but we too have had our fill of it. Whether it is the greed for material prosperity that arrogantly presumes upon God's goodness, or the greed for strict moral adherence that arrogantly misreads God's righteousness, we can be and have been and even now are marked by the same basic narcissism. American Christianity is especially guilty of this. Our national religion is not Christianity, but rather the bastard child of Christianity and either the American dream or some perceived "golden age" of America's past. Both are erroneous, and both produce (among other things) greed. Greed for things, and for God to give us things, and for Him to bless our getting of things. Greed for the "good ol' days" of the 1950s or the age of the Puritans or whatever mythical pseudo-history is currently in vogue in the Bible Belt. We desire success and security. We desire social status and acceptance. We desire pious posturing or political revolution. We desire fads and movements and parties and agendas. We desire all these things like wine, but we do not desire God like wine. We do not desire Him at all.

In whatever way we choose to go, we invariably break the two greatest commandments: we do not love God nor do we love others; they are both equally means to our own ends. God is the sugar-daddy of our private dreams and desires or the poster child for our private notions. He is the scarecrow deity of our private fields, meant to keep others away while we plant our private seeds. Likewise, others become stepping stones or tally marks for our private projects and goals, or else they become impersonal points of comparison for our own private piety. They are mere tools in our hands to till our private lands, lands that stretch for miles. Secure in our separation, we can never allow anyone in for their own sake. Especially not others. Especially not God.

In C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, Hell was depicted as a paradoxically contracted place where people tried their hardest to ignore and separate themselves from each other. The worse a damned soul was, the farther and farther it would go to isolate itself. Separation and isolation: those are the key doctrines to the divinity of Hell, the very heartbeat of the diabolical will, for the diabolical will always desires the top, the peak, the lonely mountain (Is. 14:13-14). There is a reason that American Christianity is often seen as (at best) a joke, or (at worst) a threat to its very enterprise. It is because this diabolical will, this endless, living void and vacuum, has taken root at our very foundations, and those foundations will crack under the strain. They are already cracking. How many more prosperity preachers or relativistic revolutionaries or ecumenical compromisers need to come and make the New York Times best-seller list before the whole hollowed-out edifice comes crashing to the ground?

If we are to avoid (or at the very least survive) the collapse of American religion, then we must return our hearts, our lives, and our worship back to the true center: God. God must be everything to us; not His blessings or gifts or approval, but Himself---His beauty and glory and holiness. He must be the Lord and King of our lives, and His heavenly vision must take hold of every inch of us. We must return to the greatest commandment: to love the Lord our God above all other loves because He is God, and from that fundamental love there will spring forth a life of love for all (Matt. 22:37-38; John 21:15; I John 4:7-11). That is the cure for our diseased desires: a turning away from ourselves and turning outward towards both the God who loves us and the people that He has given us to love. We must fight the corrupt centripetal energy of our American religion with the holy, centrifugal fervor of the spirit of Christ, who made Himself nothing (Phil. 2:5-7), submitted all to the will of the Father (Luke 22:42), loved to the end those who were His (John 13:1), and gave Himself as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012