Conservatism and Christianity are not synonymous

Too often no distinction is made between the so-called Religious Right or Conservatism and Christianity. Sometimes this mistake is committed even by well-meaning Christians! Tragically, the confusion is as fallacious as it is common. 

The truth is that biblical Christianity is no more conservative than it is liberal. Precisely as neither of these worldviews reliably reflect the message taught and embodied by Christ. 

We err when we fall into the common trap of confining Christianity to contemporary socio-political narratives of any age. This risks the dreadful mistake of reading the bible through prevailing sociological lenses rather than interpreting the flow of history and its contents through the prism of biblical truth.

Before we venture further, it is useful to clarify a few key concepts. 

Defining Conservatism is a tricky affair, not least for its nebulous nature. It has morphed from era to era since its origins that are traceable to that Irish intellectual of renown, Edmund Burke. 

Indeed, it cannot be anything but amorphous, as it is subject to ceaseless redefinitions from epoch to epoch, according to evolving generational values. Its essential character is, however, a yearning for the preservation of supposedly propitious but waning cultural, political or economic structures. These are usually perceived by incumbent groups, as threatened by emergent contemporary values or previously marginalised social strata. 

Biblical Christianity, on the other hand, from antiquity, has had a tenuous relationship with prevailing culture. Its claims have been a perennial thorn to contemporary orthodoxy across the ages, from the crucifixion of Christ, to the days of the persecution of the early church by the Roman Empire, until now. 

This acrimonious relationship is owed to the audacity of its claims. They issue an unyielding and visceral challenge to all of us. 

Chief among these is the assertion that there is such a thing as truth or objectivity and that neither individuals nor society are the owners thereof. 

Truth by its very nature is exclusive, confrontational and not a little threatening, even when proclaimed by the meekest and most powerless in society, as the church most certainly was at its infancy. 

Mary the Queen of Scots, who was revealingly called "Bloody Mary", reputedly said, “I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe”. Whose sole and chief weapon being the transcendent truth and the invisible yet immanent power thereof.

Likewise, it is with good reason that the press has always been unsettling to authoritarian regimes who rightfully tremble at the very real yet indecipherable threat of what is true, even at the peak of their military powers.

Truth is exclusive in that it proclaims that not all ideas and the actions that flow from them are equal. Some are right and deserve commendation while others are wrong and are worthy of judgement. This raises the ire of individuals and societies who wish to reserve their presumed prerogative to be the ultimate arbiters of what is good and evil. 

The confusion of conservatism with Christianity, as mistaken as it is, has historical reasons. 

Since the Enlightenment, there has been the observable trend in societies whose frame of reference derives from Western tradition and thought, to unhinge themselves from the perceived strictures of Biblical truth. 

This is against the backdrop of cultural Christianity that held unremitting sway over Europe and its antecedents for well over a millennium following Constantine the Roman Emperor’s decriminalisation of Christian worship in the AD313 Edict of Milan. 

Cultural Christianity, very crucially, is not to be confused with biblical Christianity. It is descriptive of the existence of a general consensus in a cultural setting that (superficially) embraces biblical claims and values. 

This consensus need be neither specifically nor personally applied. In fact it is usually vague, contradictory and inchoate enough to seamlessly coexist at times, with the reign of cultural ideas, practices and norms that are in direct conflict with biblical truth. A good example is slavery, racism, apartheid, among other forms of hatred that have at sundry times coexisted with ostensibly Christian social settings. 

In other words, rather than embracing the Lordship of Christ and the primacy of His truth, cultural Christianity merely enthrones Christianity as the politically correct worldview of the day, even while its truths are simultaneously trampled, and sometimes used to justify the unjustifiable. 

The departure from Cultural Christianity has gained snowballing momentum over the decades. Recently, it seems to have reached a tipping point such that a new decidedly anti-Christian consensus is now threatening to capture the cultural centre that was for centuries the preserve of cultural Christianity in some places. 

This poses an existential threat to the beneficiaries of receding social, economic and political power structures with which cultural Christianity was deeply interwoven. A new and uncertain era beckons for their purveyors.

Biblical Christians need not join them in weeping for what was at times an affront to Christ and his gospel.

Even the prospect of resurgent persecution need not unsettle Biblical Christians. After all it was Christ who said “a slave is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also”. (John 15:20)

Who knows, this shaking may be a godsend for a church that has gone flaccid under the soporific shade of cultural Christianity.

Marriage is not for children

Marriage is not for children. I have found this wise and solemn counsel, given to me during my courtship, most pertinent and not a little true. 

There are countless reasons for this and one of them is the inveterate selfishness that exempts none of the progeny of Adam. This includes those who may imagine themselves a rare exception to this rule. In fact, the risk of unwittingly succumbing to its specious charms is particularly pronounced for them, given their ignorance of its dark workings in them. 

Some of may have a stronger grasp of this reality, but even that is not good enough to deliver from its sinister powers. I for one have found this to be among my primary difficulties. 

Marriage augments this problem largely out of our ignorance of the human condition, including our own. We enter this most hallowed of institutions believing that, at last, we have found decisive if not final rest from the perennial existential ache of being born, raised and located in an imperfect world, with all its individuated distresses. Finally, we hope, we will so unreservedly love and be loved as to forever banish the primordial loneliness that assails us from birth, into the sea of forgetfulness. 

The realisation that this person, the erstwhile embodiment of our earthly hopes, is in fact hopelessly incapable of satisfying this eternal ache, is enough to plunge us into a state of disconsolate despair. To the marginally more enlightened, the despair stems from two places: the jarring realisation that not only will they never receive this type of love from their spouse but that they themselves are in reality hopelessly incapable of giving the same!

Having come to this devastating pivot, many despair of the entire enterprise and flee to the brimming divorce courts, with hopes of making a timeous midcourse correction. With the eternal hopefulness of the human heart being the way it is, out they go with glee into the world of the newly single, only to begin the dismal cycle all over again. Some three and four, others even as much as five times and more!

The selfish conception of love as defined by the world in which we are born, that we must all painfully unlearn, predictably places self at the centre of its universe. I must be loved, I deserve to be happy etc. Whereas the portrait of the purest version can be found eternally inscribed on a lonely cross. Where the person most deserving to be loved ever to live, suffered humiliating rejection whilst demonstrating love in its truest essence: giving His life for a broken, helpless and undeserving beloved to the point of death and beyond. According to this antithetical narrative, everything about genuine love is demonstrated to always be about the beloved never the lover. 

Those born of woman find this logic not only completely foreign, but the ultimate offence, because it spells the dreaded denial of self. But with that death follows a resurrection that is simply inconceivable, except to the eye of faith. For the believing are ever aware of the towering silhouette of their Saviour, who says: 

“I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains [just one grain; it never becomes more but lives] by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces many others and yields a rich harvest.” John 12:24

In the beginning God...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1)

 

The entirety of the human experience is located within the parameters of space and time. All the thinking, doing and being humanity has ever done has occurred within its limits.

Without time it is impossible even to think! Every chain of the neurological impulses that constitute a thought is sequentially linked. That linear sequence is necessarily chronological.

Albert Einstein describes time as the mechanism that allows for the sequential rather than the simultaneous occurrence of events. These events in turn occur inescapably in the setting of space.

Space and time are an inseparable cosmic union known as “spacetime”. Our ideas about God are necessarily subject to the only ecosystem conceivable to us – the spacetime continuum and all its contents.

This ecosystem has rules, such as a necessary beginning for everything. This is because within this framework everything must have a beginning because the cosmos itself had a beginning, as the cosmologist Georges Lemaître confirmed.

Because this framework is all we know, we are prone to ask, “Does God not have a beginning?” As though He is subject to the rules of the construct He created.

The very first verse of the bible introduces a God who exists outside the bounds of this construct. He existed before the beginning. That is, the beginning of time. Indeed, He caused the sequential unfolding of cosmic events that time facilitates and measures. 

The bible leaves arguments for or against the existence of God for the preoccupation and amusement of those so inclined. He merely introduces Himself as the one who predates the beginning, whose Being requires none of our permission.

This is mindboggling, considering what we have discussed about time.

This implies that God did and does precisely what seems impossible to us. That is to think, relate and even create, independent of time. We shouldn't be surprised. After all He is God!

This leads me to the conclusion that our capacity to reason will ultimately fail to lead us to the God of the bible precisely because our reasoning occurs unavoidably within the confines of a framework that God is exogenous to. That is the space-time continuum and all its 'laws'. These laws being merely the order that God decided to impose upon the universe.

This renders our quest for the true knowledge of God by means of our unaided intellects stillborn. To that end we are only capable of making gods in our own image, as we have done for time immemorial.

The God who inhabits eternity must reveal Himself to us. The revelation must occur in our essence or spirits, which then informs our emotions and intellects.

Our intellects allow us to make sense of the revelation and to articulate it. Through our emotions we feel the overwhelming grandeur of its profundity.

The revelation must necessarily stand up to the rigours of logic but that is usually not enough.

Our capacity for faith is necessary because ultimately, we must choose to embrace its contents as true, with faith itself being the originating, essential and sufficient evidence.

After all, even the most lucid evidence is not exempt from the ubiquitous spectre of willful doubt.

There is a sense in which we ultimately believe what we want to believe. To that end we always find whatever it is we are looking for, including as the case might be, the supposed non-existence of God.

This is particularly true if the biblical portrayal of our hearts is understood. Which is: our problem is not that we cannot conceive of the existence of God but that we are profoundly troubled by the implications of His existence and are therefore inclined to reject it.

In other words, our quest for personal sovereignty is well served by the proposition that God does not exist, to the point of framing and clinging to any narrative that is consistent with that preference, for no other reason than it being our preferred state of affairs.

The openness to believe, in turn, is the surrender of that quest and is only possible through a self-authenticating dynamic that is deeply personal and occurs through the initiative of the living God who seeks genuine communication with His estranged offspring.