For a very long time, in most of the world, Obedience has been prized as a Christian virtue.
Indeed, in practice, obedience is often the primary virtue; in the sense that obedience to God, the locally-dominant Church, and legitimate secular authority was instilled and enforced as the basis for all else.
I say "primary" virtue; because the absence of such required obedience was often deemed sufficient sufficient to trump any other virtues or distinctions. Much might be tolerated - but disobedience was not.
Thus; to become and remain a full-member of most serious Christian churches (i.e. not-liberal-mainstream churches) typically entailed the convert adopting a lifestyle of Conscientious Obedience to complex requirements.
Such a requirement of Conscientious Obedience is not restricted to Christianity; but on the other hand, Christianity is the only religion that defines itself as rooted in Love, and which aims at the eternal afterlife of a Heaven rooted in Love, and with individual humans retaining (and enhancing) their individuality through resurrection.
And in the Heavenly state (if the IV Gospel is to be believed); resurrected individuals work with God and Jesus Christ - not as obedient servants, but in a familial participation in a co-creation.
In a nutshell; Jesus want friends, not servants.
(In a nutshell: God made divine creation, and did so as a consequence divine love; but it is by Jesus that we were each enjoined to live by love as individual persons, and through Jesus that this was made fully and eternally possible by resurrection into Heaven.)
What this means is that Christians are supposed - proximately as well as ultimately - to be creative.
"Creative" in the sense of actively living-from their own selves, in alignment and harmony with God.
This entails that the traditional and long-term emphasis on Obedience as a core virtue of Christianity is mistaken; it is a fundamental misrepresentation of what is required.
Instead of Obedience; Christians should be striving for Creativity (properly understood). In other words; Christian ought Not to be merely obeying, not merely to live by following instructions, not merely to subordinate his will to the will of another.
Indeed; a Christian should not aspire primarily to "serve" anything or anybody; not other individual humans, not human groups, not the church, not humankind; and not (even) God nor Jesus Christ.
Because if Christians are to fulfil God's vision of creation, fulfilled by Jesus; then Christians should be aiming to be more creative; and creativity is first of all "endogenous": it is generated from within.
As well as coming endogenously; for creativity to be genuinely creative, it needs to be in-harmony-with divine creation...
So we could say that the desired creativity is generated from Love: love of-God, and also love of "fellow Men" - which I take to mean love of "divine creation".
And therefore such individual creativity is from its origins aligned-with divine creation.
In sum: the traditional and inherited idea of Obedience as central to Christian living is wrong.
Some kinds of obedience do indeed have a secondary and expedient ("means to an end") role in this mortal life - but obedience is not a primary virtue for Christians; and it is wrong for Christians to aspire to the negative intention to subordinate their "selves" to any external will.
Instead; Christians ought to aspire to the positive goal of encouraging their inner-generated creativity; an "overflowing" from each individual person's Love of God and of Divine Creation.
All this happens because true creativity originates in love. It is by love that personal thinking and activity which originates in the uniqueness of each individual; is also, by its nature and origin, harmonious with divine creative intent.
NOTE: The conflict between creativity and obedience can be seen in the life and legacy of Jesus Christ himself - as well as many of the great "genius" Christian innovators who followed over the centuries.
The recurrent pattern is one of a highly creative, individualistics, and disobedient founder; swiftly having his work reduced to a system of instructions to which obedience is required. The unique and personal gets reformed into just-another variant of institutional, generic-religion. Inner and individual creativity is displaced (and suppressed) by an external social-system demanding conscientious obedience.
Two of many possible examples are St Francis of Assisi - whose individual and creative innovations were institutionally-incorporated into monastic and university structures - even during his lifetime. And more recently Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet - whose extraordinarily fertile, wild and free, inner-derived personal creativity - crystallized into a prescriptive and obedience-focused, extremely-conscientiousness-demanding, social system.
What needs to be borne in mind is that conscientiousness (which is, roughly, a personal disposition and aptitude to obey external demands) is reciprocally opposed to the highest forms of publicly-recognized individually-generated creativity as seen in genius.
The Head Girl is an anti-genius!
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