If we are going to save our civilization, then we need God. But it may not be the God that we think.
Deicide of the West
By: Isaac Willour
Jesus Christ left us with some real problems.
The system of thought He promulgated lasted far longer than His earthly lifespan. From its humble beginnings in the Middle East to the largest religion in the world, Christianity has been used to drive history in both good and evil directions. The principles of Scripture have been weaponized by all types of individuals to justify their actions.
There was a time not so long ago when both slaveholders and abolitionists alike rallied their followers with a Bible in hand; Scripture has proven persuasive enough that even those we realize as evil can point to chapter and verse for moral justification. However, this does not mean that Scripture is morally ambivalent. Despite what its detractors have claimed for the past 2000 years, reading Scripture in proper context provides a clear moral vision. The God of the Bible is an entity of both justice and mercy, even when that balance is difficult for the finite mind to realize.
But to take the ideas of divine morals and human responsibility and apply them to a world where good things do not always happen and where darkness often reigns can be an even more treacherous road. It requires an ability to discern morality within two separate frames: morality sufficient to stand before God and morality sufficient to stand before society. Going down this road, we must be eminently careful not to confuse the two. There is a gap between the Christian idea of morality and the social idea of morality, and its existence has not always been realized properly.
Forcing people to accept religious morality to stand before society cannot end well. People are not basically good. This aspect of our humanity means that putting the enforcement of strictly religious principles in the hands of an imperfect government is more likely to result in tyrannical top-down legalism than a well-functioning Christian society. We cannot hope to make society better by the forceful application of all Biblical principles via governmental force.
But a degree of social morality still must exist. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line we have decided that social morality doesn’t have to exist; that personal freedom is all that is necessary for a free society to function properly. Those that hold this idea point to history as their calling card. Looking at the excesses and abuses of organized religion can, at its surface level, make a case for social morality being immaterial, determined solely by subjective standards of acceptability as opposed to real moral principles and deviation. It’s easy for us to believe that social morality doesn’t matter because attempts at social morality have failed in the past. The fact that those attempts have consigned millions to the grave should imbue us with a sense of proper caution when it comes to understanding the degree of social morality that is enforceable.
It’s easy for us to treat the failings of organized religion as the failings of morality itself. In an age where government fails and individuals betray, why should we ever place faith in such as these? Perhaps it would be easier that we let it all go. All that is required of us is that we take care of those that depend on us and place as little reliance upon others as we can possibly muster, and all will be well.
When darkness falls, it will not be enough to stand up and resist as isolated groups. It will take a greater sense of social morality, a collective understanding that something is actually wrong to all of us. If we want to be able to brand evil as such and fight it together as a community, we have to re-reconcile ourselves once more with the idea of God. If we are going to save our civilization, then we need to understand God; but not to the extent that we may think.
The aspects of God that must be realized for society to function in its proper way are not historical. His taking on of human form, ministry in the Judean wilderness, and murder by a Jewish-Roman coalition . Are we saying that the God of the Bible is unimportant? No. As religious individuals, we believe that the God of the Bible exists, both as a matter of logical implication and historical evidence. But one can be a productive member of society and not recognize God's historical acts.
What we don't get a choice in recognizing are God's moral aspects. His historical work may not be recognized or accepted, but His existence as an omnipotent entity holds the physical universe in sway and His character provides a catalyst for the moral universe.
It is the moral God whose deicide we have fashioned. We've sacrificed God on the altar of the idea that morality is determined by whose mouth speaks it. We've replaced God's precepts with humanist alternatives. We’ve replaced inherent human value with racial gradations. Instead of equal treatment, tied to a sharing in the divine image, we’ve created a system where the value of one’s speech, expression, even life, can be arbitrarily determined by the ideological mob, artificially created by culture , or appallingly negated by the heckler and the censor. We've taken the moral God, misrepresented his actions, disavowed his principles, and crucified him. It seems to be a pattern.
We need God back. Because it turns out we’re pretty awful at playing the part ourselves. Forget the God of the Bible, the one that reaches out to His fallen creatures, effectually calls them, and redeems them through the process of salvation. We can’t even act the role of God as he is most basically understood. We have unplugged from the matrix, only to find that we cannot even play God at a beginner level. Because we’re not naturally good; none of us. It’s almost as if all of us are too evil to even begin to replicate divine morality. Or, in other words, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. If you search hard enough, you may find that in a book somewhere.
The ideas that have built the West do not work in a version of the world where we replace God, the real God having been killed, dismembered, and stuffed in a dumpster. They also do not work in a version of the world where we shove every aspect of Christian religious observance down the throats of the non-religious, along with a WWJD bracelet and a God’s Not Dead movie to boot. They work in a world where we accept the God of the moral argument. That understanding of God is what can re-imbue us with a sense of social morality. Without that basic understanding of the concept of God, we can go absolutely nowhere except down the dark street of relativism, humanism and ultimately, despair.
Throughout our country’s storied history, we have realized that forcing religious observance on those who do not wish it doesn’t work. It has hollowed out our faith, emptied our churches, and lowered so-called Christian culture to infantile and vapid ignorance, both of our own faith and the way that we are then to translate that faith into action. This is not the right path, but neither is the one we are on now. In attempting to balance God’s perfection with human imperfection, we’ve dismissed God as a concept altogether.
This is the deicide of the West; the abandonment of God as a step towards pursuing a warped understanding of our own happiness. This message may seem dark and depressing, because it is; it’s tragic and hard. We killed God.
We tossed out the source of meaning and purpose for humanity in one of the greatest mistakes of the past 10,000 years of our existence.
Let us use this moment. Let us take this moment and learn from it. It doesn’t have to be the end of civilization. It’s just another thing we know isn’t going to work. We’ve gone too far. We killed God. But, luckily for us, He happens to haven risen from the dead before.
Isaac Willour | Unapologetically Unafraid
This article was originally published on Isaac WIllour's blog.
It can be found at: https://unapolonafra.wixsite.com/asylum/post/deicide-of-the-west
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