The liberal gospel is that we are all the same and that we should all be the same. It demands the equalization of access and experience. This is a gospel of natural rights that says that no experience should be denied any of us, and that we should all be able to experience everything directly for ourselves. We should not have to experience anything at second hand through the mediation of other people.
But Christians can afford to be more relaxed than this about what we are able to experience. We can admit that it is fine to enjoy most things at second hand, and we say that enjoying experiences through other people, rather than first hand, is real and valid enough. We can say this because we insist that other people cannot be substituted for. We cannot replace other people, we cannot be them. We live through other people, and they live through us, and this of course requires that we are properly ordered one to another. This ordering by which we can be with other people is given to us – it is not a work of our own. Our Lord hosts us, provides us with these other people and orders us one to another. By giving his order to us, even imposing it on us, he makes it possible for us to be together and to participate in one another’s experience.
The Christian faith says that good order makes for a good life, which means a life lived together with others. For the sake of this good order, the Christian life is ordered and can even admit to being hierarchical. The Christian faith identifies what is good, it searches for those skills, capabilities and virtues that enable us to identify with increasing accuracy what is good. It promotes what it calls discernment, or judgment (or insight, taste, sensibility). It praises excellence, and it gives recognition to those who are best, and who are best able to lead the rest of towards what is good. So the Christian faith is intrinsically about excellence. Excellence is a nice word for it, while is elitism a less pretty word for it – but the same thing is meant. Christianity is intrinsically elitist – it confesses a Lord and it involves us in following those apostles and disciples who can pass to us the order and authority of this Lord.
Yet the greater part of the leadership of my (Anglican) church does not believe in leadership. It is elite that declares that all elitism is wrong (though elitism is intrinisic to excellence) and denies that it is itself an elite. It holds its authority in order to stop anyone else (those it calls conservatives or fundamentalists) from doing so.
Our church leadership, the liberal clergy, is in a state of confusion about what it wants. It decides that the gospel is too complex for its hearers and sets about simplifying it down to inclusivity and equality of opportunity. But the simplification and falsification of the gospel represented by the agenda of inclusivity brings unending confusion. There is no way of answering the question of how we shall make everyone equal without taking the powers of an elite.
There is also no way of answering the question ‘equal to….what’? What is the criterion and measure to which we are going to equalize everything?
They dislike the thought that one is better than another (better taught and discipled in the Christian life, for instance). But there is no way around this, and confusion will reign until the leaders of our civilisation are prepared to re-admit the idea that not everything is the same as everything else, and that the differences between people are themselves gifts.
Christianity theology now stands alone in the Humanities for the case that difference and otherness means order and hierarchy, and for the truth that there is no particularity or uniqueness without difference, and there is no difference without order. Christianity stands for that order and reason that, by God’s grace, will make us happy to share one another’s experience without wanting it exclusively for ourselves, and to participate in one another without trying to absorb or replace one another. The grace of God will make humans of us yet.
