The Absolutely Urgent Necessity to Persuade, Part 1

 “We cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against God and bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”      (2 Corinthians 10:5)

                It is an underlying, though implicit, assumption of our time that the foundations which ensured the multitudes of blessings our society has enjoyed up to now, will continue refreshing and refurbishing our civilization’s driving force into the future.  This expectation applies not only to our deliberations over earth-focused governance, but also to the state of our hearts and minds with respect to the Kingdom of God.  These challenges are interconnected.  This faulty view assumes that the successful principles from the past can spring from out of either anywhere or nowhere, when in fact they can only be expected to arise from that kind of source which has both the rational potential (wisdom) and energizing power (the Holy Spirit) to inspire within us the moral, rational, and spiritual principles that are necessary for living together in harmonious community.  The reason is that the human exchanges required to achieve this social goal are highly-complex. 

One of the firmest laws of science in the realm of physics is the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics which holds that all physical entities and the interactions between them are cooling off, wearing out, and/or becoming increasingly random when limited to their own resources.  Yet even so, this propen-sity also applies to civilizations, societies, and individuals.  Note the following social observations:

               “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our nation was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is totally inadequate to the governance of another.”[1]

               “What reason do we have to suppose that our civilization, in contrast to civilizations which have preceded it, will endure?  The person who has not faced this question is hardly alive.  That many different ways of life have flourished and have then declined is beyond contradiction.  Consequently, there is no high probability that the fate of our civilization will be different—unless….  The precise character of this ‘unless’ is of such importance as to attract and to hold our best thinking…It is our most urgent question.”[2]

               “Civilization is hideously fragile, you know that; and there’s not much between us and the horrors beneath, just about a coat of varnish, wouldn’t you say?”[3]

               “Where did the doing without God end but in the undoing of man through the anger of God?”[4]

Our nation in recent decades has been divided politically almost exactly 50/50 percent.  Yet in our day, the means of publicly seeking desired outcomes in social governance is rapidly shifting away from changing people’s minds to fixating on strategic manipulation.  With the exception of just a few commentators on radio and television, I fear that many conservative spokespersons either cannot or will not articulate the intellectual foundations which undergird conservativism.  Others weaken the same message by distancing themselves from any necessary connection to our Maker and Redeemer.[5] 

You may have access to my entire document at my website: www.christianityontheoffense.com/ articles

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[1] President John Adams, to the Massachusetts Militia on October 11, 1798, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102

[2] Elton Trueblood. The Company of the Committed. (Harper and Brothers, 1961), p. 2

[3] C.P. Snow. A Coat of Varnish. (Scribner’s, 1979).

[4] Augustine, The City of God. (Image, 1958), p. 543.

[5] Russel Kirk. The Roots of American Order. (Regnery Gateway, 1991), pp. 462,3. Referring to Orestes Brownson, Kirk wrote, “Justice requires…the authority of religious truth…Without authority vested somewhere, without moral principles that may be consulted confidently, justice cannot long endure anywhere. Yet modern liberalism and democracy are contemptuous of the whole concept of moral authority.”