Can we genuinely - by making wise and responsible lifestyle choices - fight The System, and thereby work incrementally towards a Good, a Christian, world?
The true and ultimate answer, the answer from Jesus Christ, is: No, we cannot.
(Also; even if we could truly make a better this-world by our choices; that would never be enough - that could never suffice.)
I mean the very common notion that we essentially affiliate with either good or evil by our material actions, by our lifestyle choices - choosing the best from those available (e.g. by actions such as voting, buying, selling, joining, resigning etc).
This "Activist Assumption" is absolutely false, because based on false premises. The real question is qualitative - not quantitative - and All available and possible choices are evil-complicit*.
It was, perhaps, (nearly-) always thus, but we need only consider the situation as of here-and-now.
The global totalitarian system is evil by intent and design, and it is inescapable, and we all (every person, everywhere) depend on it for survival.
Our actual situation is analogous to that of a chattel slave who lives or dies at the whim of an evil master. The "qualitative" choice is to be compelled to do what the master commands, or die.
Yet a slave can be a Christian, and plenty have been, because (no matter what he is compelled to do in order to stay alive) the slave can choose to want salvation.
And That is what matters decisively.
The slave is only damned if he wants that which his evil Master is telling him to want.
The war of this world is a spiritual war. Therefore it is ultimately about attitudes, aims, desires, motives and suchlike; it is about what we inwardly affirm and what we inwardly reject.
When we support an evil agenda, we have chosen to join with evil and its purposes.
Actions may be compelled on pain of death - or suffering too great for our powers of resistance. But whatever the actions; it is that inner act of "wanting" that damns us; not our actions.
In sum: the Activist Assumption is false, because it regards the core problem and task of of life as being some version of "How to make this-world a better place". This is, and perhaps always has been, the commonest understanding of "the purpose of life". But, for one who desires most to follow Jesus to resurrected eternal life; the core problem and task of life is different.
*The question is actually a sub-set of the Jesus versus Pharisee debates: The Pharisee assumption that sin is quantitative and thus something that can be avoided or usefully diminished by focusing on, and avoiding, a list of special sins.
But the assumption of Jesus Christ is that qualitatively all Men are "sinners" (ie. all Men fail ultimately and always to align our will with God and divine creation), and all Men sin innumerable times in innumerable ways.
For Christians, therefore, the proper question is not how to avoid sinning, but how to attain salvation (how to join the side of God and divine creation); despite that no Man ever has, or ever will, avoid sinning frequently, and without any possibility of stopping.
Note: This post is edited from my response to a question from commenter "Jack Pixley".
2 comments:
Would you agree the answer to the question “Can I personally live a more Christian life?” is always yes? Seems so to me, as well as the more correct question to ask as long as the answer is understood to be spiritual not necessarily material. Else God would not sustain our mortal lives further.
Relates to my recent reflections on virtue and “habit.” I’ve known many people who are “quantitatively virtuous” for long periods, measured in decades, usually motivated by child-rearing, who at some point seemingly turn off the virtue spigot and become everything they urged their children not to be. And this is not merely a weakening of will but an actual endorsement of vice. Clearly one can “repeatedly do” the correct thing quite a lot and not have it “stick” inwardly. I find it persuasive although harder to prove that the opposite at least can be true- that one who repeatedly engages in vice *can* inwardly reject it. There just isn’t a formula for any of this stuff I think.
@Mia - I think we need to separate salvation from theosis. Salvation is qualitative - - a matter of "wanting": either we are a Christian, or not - although this can (and often does) change over time.
What you are talking about could be termed theosis, or sanctification/ deification/ exaltation - becoming more like God wants us to be. I think of it as including creating (positively and actively) and learning (negatively and reactively).
At bottom it is about *loving* - God and "fellow Men" (which I am interpreting more widely as divine creation); but loving isn't easy to grasp as an aim. Perhaps it is something which we need to make the *priority* - value highest, against competing possibilities.
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