Faith, Hope and Secularity
6.1 The Gospel gives us secularity
The blessing of God calls us to service. God gives us the office of servant. Our vocation is to promote all the creatures of God and hold out to them the freedom, the responsibility and the universality that belong to high status of man. It is this call to serve, which has motivated the West by giving us a vocation to minister and serve, and so work for whoever we encounter including lower than ourselves, and thus follow our Lord down the long course towards maturity and self-mastery.
Christian public worship forms the habits of public speech. Through it we may learn how to say no, and so resist the more hysterical demands of the current regime. Without public discussion and some reference to the customs, common law and sources of our culture, and thus some reference to the gospel, no one can tell us what to think. No one can shut us up. No one can restrict our freedom of movement. It is right that we resist proliferating regulation, confiscation and arbitrary arrest. There is not one law for the rich and one for us. We insist that there is just one law, the same law for all. At bottom that law is grounded by the law of God. With this basic understanding that we must refer to our conscience, judge for ourselves and resist the unlawful exercise of state power, Christians uphold the secularity of the public square.
We are confident that we can persuade and convince one another, trust one another and trade with one another, and when relationships fail, we can restore them through reconciliation. It is only this confidence that sustains a functioning economy in which people can make new discoveries, take initiatives, create enterprises and employ people. No one can confiscate what we have worked for, so you can provide for your own nearest and dearest. Universal confiscation means universal demotivation: no one will work, for no one will bother.
In this Christian conception, our economy as an aspect of our shared, more or less self-regulating public square. We are not dependents of the government. Government is not required to be the universal mediator. Those who govern us are public servants, who are accountable to us. We are not children, or wards of court, and the government is not our parent or probation officer. Until recently this political culture of consent, and self-regulation has been so dominant that for many it has seemed natural, remained unchallenged, and gave us the years of economic growth. Now it is clear that this secular public square only for as long as there is deliberate public effort to cherish what is good and to defend it from envious and angry people who would like to see it destroyed.
Western modern secular culture is good. It values individual responsibility and individual freedom, and for this reason we say that it is superior to all rival cultures. It takes everybody seriously, and encourages us to consider everyone as a free moral agent, not as a child, or a servant, or an animal, not as an unclean, untouchable non-person. This dignity is inalienable, even despite great evil, it cannot be utterly lost. It says that everybody is a person and nobody is a non-person.
It is Christianity that creates secularity. Only Christianity insists that there is a free and open public space in which all political and pragmatic issues can be examined. Christianity says this because it insists that each person is a public agent with their own critical faculties. It insists on individual conscience, which means that each person can judge, for themselves. Each of us can judge where authority really lies; we can decide for ourselves the truth of the rhetoric of the corporations and institutions and the claims of the current regime. Our ability to judge improves as we undergo the long apprenticeship of Christian discipleship.
Christianity teaches that there is freedom of speech, and it is the public practice of free speech. On behalf of the powerless we make our petitions to the powerful, and we appeal over the heads of powerful to God. Every Sunday in full sight of the political nation we meet and declare that God is the true authority, and the sole source of political authority. We not only say this but we sing it, in unison. All of us, the great and the small, sing it in harmony, so that this single message is given by the united Christian community to the political nation. We tell them that the powerful are accountable to God and to all men, and that they must humble themselves and serve the nation, and thus that there may be no tyrants and no totalitarianism.
Christianity has created the independent legitimacy of authority and of law. Each of us, and all of us together, regardless of God religion and religious authorities are free agents. We make our public and political contribution on whatever grounds we wish, and we offer our justification of our belief and action to our community. Religious authorities have no authority over those outside that particular religion. There is clear space between everyday civil life and religious membership and belief. This doctrine about the legitimacy of the secular sphere, and all the practices of publicly giving an account that justifies our political decisions, is entirely dependent on the teaching of Christianity. Christianity is ‘faith’, that is believed, freely and voluntarily. Christianity is intrinsically anti-totalitarian. It repudiates all autocracy and theocracy. In the Christian tradition, to say ‘God told me to take this decision for you all’ is never an adequate response. You have to give reasons that appeal to that society’s shared understanding of public good, and so find pragmatic ground that you share with people who do not share your faith.
Other religions are not ‘faiths’ in the sense that Christianity is ‘faith’. They are complete packages, comprised of cult, worldview, legal system and morality. They deny any free space in which, on the territory they control, people can stand outside and independently assess them, on shared pragmatic, non-religious, grounds of a common good. There is no secularity, no separation of religion from politics in any other rival cult. Criticisms of Christianity are made from entirely Christian-derived moral standpoints and presumptions. The haters of Christianity may never know how Christian their challenges are; the fury they direct to Christianity perhaps expresses their own intuition that they are unable to escape the deep logic that Christian culture has revealed, for it is the gravity that holds us all. There will be public discovery of truth, and an anticipation of this true judgment occurs in every event of public worship.
The Church is the assembly that states publicly stating that the powerful answer to God and answer to us. The powerful are not above us, are not unaccountable, and so do not hold the authority they claim. The Church declares that the authority of powerful is given to them by God, but it remains God’s authority. They serve us and must respond to us. In Christian worship we intercede for them and so remind them that they are our servants. Simply by doing this, publicly and weekly over many hundreds of years an accumulation of expectations has built up to become this culture that we now refer as ‘secular’.
Christianity creates secularity. The practices of self-examination, judgment and reconciliation create the public square in which many voices can be heard and in which challenges are made. Christianity is the practice of affirming the dignity of all, of talking back to the powerful, and of listening to and repeating the words of the otherwise voiceless. Christianity is the set of practices that create civility. It is that creates tolerance, and gives us our ability to be patient with people who disagree and even with those who have no patience for others, for the arrogant and those in a hurry to impose their way. It is the means by which we endure the arrogant, to a degree. Christianity is the practice of allowing the slow publicly examination and processes of the law and administration of justice to take place. Christianity is civilisation.
But our political class decided that secularity comes from rejection of Christianity. This is the big mistake that has resulted in the creation of the monster state and the loss of all our liberties. The monster state is the god of the present age. Its liturgy announces that it is secular, which means that it originates in itself (which is of course meaningless, since nothing is source of itself) and so does not originate with God. The liturgy of the present age and current regime is just a flow of rhetoric. It refuses to give an account of itself so it offers no credo. A creed is a statement of what everybody does not believe, what is not accepted and understood to be too obvious to need saying, so it a refutation of the received wisdom. It sets out the grounds on which we refuse the rhetoric of the powerful, and challenge the refusal of the powerful to justify their power. Their rhetoric declares that everything is agreed, that this agreement is a given of nature, that only morally inferior people would question. Whether or not their claim is made explicit, it rules out the possibility of questioning and challenging, which makes it impossible to see that our interests are not the same as those of the political class, that their interests are to control us and prevent us from seeing that this is what they are doing. Our claims, recited publicly in our worship, reveal that their claims are not made public, but are kept in concealment, for this is what their power rests on.
Christianity is a complete departure from the closed cycle paganism that once gripped the continent of Europe. It has initiated a course of cultural development powered by the continuous participation in the liturgy in which man is exalted as the creature of the God of Israel, from which all forms of manliness and sociality and social mobility have follow. Generation of elites have attempted to get the lid back on, and resume control and recently seem to have got upper hand and at last achieved the re-paganism and paralysis of Europe
Christianity is all that keeps a society open and fluid. Input from the Christian community prevents the build-up of resentment that might overflow into violence. By insisting on the possibility of reconciliation Christians voices reduce tensions and allow the boil to be lanced. Christians name the pressures which cause such tensions and helps to make them seem less threatening and unmanageable. Christianity encourages a slow and gentle social mobility. People can be moved out of a public position without suffering public shame. The impulse to take revenge is weakened by Christianity. It promotes the consensus that truth is supreme, and that free speech and public challenge lead to agreement about the terms of a change of personnel and policy. Those who are replaced do not usually start threatening journalists and juries or resort to revenge.
Challenge and Confrontation are inevitable, and so is unpopularity. If you take the risk of adopting the gospel as your working theory, you will attract hostility. People will take offence at you, in ways which you regard as insignificant and mistaken, but they do so with such seriousness and umbrage that it becomes clear that something deeper is going on. A great deal of our society, and of our own individual selves, is built on envy, deception, hatred and the desire to control. Humanity and civility are thin and brittle. Under the surface there is rage and venom. A great deal is at stake. Their power over you is what at stake for them. They have convinced themselves that their identify depends on putting you in your place. They can only operate on the basis of their superiority and your inferiority. They are the enforcers of a new class society, which will grow to become a special of castes separated by function and status in a steep hierarchy, in which most of us will be drones which they can move in and out of economic activity in their service. This is the pagan society. Paganism is extreme violence. It works on the basis of an upper class keeping lower class powerless, spell-bound by the constant theatrical performance of media and social media.
Modernity as heresy, fake gospel, and the return of paganism
Our political class gospel has long believed that Christianity is essentially about equality. Equality is the kernel, and it is their job to remove the husk to reveal man this kernel. But though equality is a fundamental, it cannot be removed from Christianity, for no part of the gospel is husk, and no part is dispensable.
The gospel is the message that cannot be separated from the voice pronouncing it. The gospel is the voice of a person speaking to us, and in expectation that we respond and reply. This voice is relayed by the church which it creates and which is a manifestation of it. All the sounds of creation are over-tones of this voice. All creatures are the resonance of God speaking to us and enabling us to speak back, to him and to one another. The communication of creation is largely encrypted and concealed from us until amid this cacophony we hear the single voice of Christ addressing us.
The gospel is Christ himself. He is it. It is him. This message is this person. The gospel is information about Christ only while Christ makes himself present and available to us. He is the data that he gathers and shows us. He shows it only to those who are ready to consider it; to those who are not ready, no data is available. The gospel is about truth which we can examine and freely accept or reject, because this truth is this person, and this person offers make himself present while offering his account of himself. The truth cannot be separated from this person who introduces himself to us, and who can accept or reject us. He is as free in this encounter as we are, for he is as much a person as we are. He is not simply a set of information or an inert object which we can stand in judgment over without ourselves being judged. We may consider him as he is able to consider us. We may approach him or take leave of him as he can approach us or leave us. He makes himself available to us, but equally he can turn and vanish, and we are unable to recall him and make him appear. He can be appealed to, but he cannot be commanded. The person and the information about him are indivisible.
But this does not suit those who do not seek Christ. They want to create a gap between Christ and information about Christ so that, by mediating this information, to them they can make themselves indispensable to others. They want to gather obedient servants. They want mastery but have no wish for self-mastery. They don’t want to submit themselves to any apprenticeship in the self-mastery of Christ. They don’t want to be servants of the one true master. They want to build their own empire so seek power from some other source. They want to rule, but all the while their passions rule them, and their envy and resentment, their fear and their fury are their god. They want glory, but manage only self-deception. They inflict damage on the gullible, and misery on themselves.
As long as they can say that Christianity is essentially about equality, or about anything else, some self-appointed elite is in charge. When the person, whose voice the gospel is, is set aside as the husk to reveal some abstraction – such as equality – as its kernel, the political class is in business. This division of the indivisible gospel into kernel and husk, inner truth and outer disposable wrapping gives them the status they crave. The self-promoters are in power. They have a job to do, which is to advance that equality. Everyone is equal, except they themselves who must impose this equality from above, an endless task, that requires ever-greater powers, making increasing demands on us and devising new tests for our compliance. They must advance their goal by promoting their authority, so that all public discourse becomes about them, this priesthood that raises itself beyond accountability. The pursuit of equality serves the narcissism of a ruling class that we should have capitulated to. They promote their agenda as though they required our consent yet impose it on us who withhold that consent. They know that we know it is nothing more than a disguise for their own power over us. This generality, this message about some non-personal and anti-personal concept – equality – is the vehicle for their endless self-promotion and our subjugation. Then the advocates of equality, the clergy of this cult and enforcers of the current political agenda, are caught within the trap of their own construction. We see this paradox and contradiction: they promote themselves into first class and demote us to second class in order to be rid of this very distinction of class. The political class itself is the evidence that denies what it propounds. Its very existence is refutation of the message which is its sole justification. The superiority that their message of equality gives them is proof that message is invalid because it represents a contradiction and is therefore untrue. The tension they feel but cannot express is what enrages them, and motivates them to take out their fury on us. They have spiked themselves on this hook, yet we must be punished for it. They are trampling on us because they are wrecking themselves by the pride that prevents them from confessing what they have done. They are deceived, but no one has deceived them: they have done this to themselves.
They take what is living, the person within whom and from whom life grows, and break this life up into generalities or abstractions. They turn what is living into what is dead. They then force what is living into the confines of what is lifeless. They attempt to cram life into some dead husk, so that they may give themselves the task of seeming to make it alive again. That is their trick and their performance, by which they make themselves the living master animating the dead object. They are faking life.
‘Christianity’ is simply Jesus Christ, the person who has given us this as his name. He is living, and what is alive, is so because he gives it the life that is solely his to give. He is himself and not part of any generality. He introduces himself and makes himself known; if he did not, we would have no knowledge of him at all. He is not part of a larger phenomenon. No generality takes us any distance towards him. He is through and through the person he is. He is sheer life, and no lifeless or finite husk can communicate him to us. At no point is he anything less than this person, this particular identity he reveals to us, and which he continues to extend to us and by which we have life of our own. He is all life. We can capture nothing of him with any lifeless tool of our own. Without him, we cannot grasp him or gain any knowledge of him. Without him, we have no continuing, living knowledge of one another or of ourselves. Our life comes to us from him, and so our knowledge of one another, and even of ourselves comes to us, from him. We can know ourselves truly only as he gives life to us and as he reveals to us simultaneously himself and ourselves, the two of us together.
The West is the product of Christianity. It is the accumulation of habits and attitudes of those nations which, over many centuries, have been immersed in the gospel. Christianity is the house that Christ built. It is the house, considered apart from Christ, as though Christ were absent from it. Though the inheritors of the West, the moderns may say that Christ has been removed from it, and is now even barred from it, and insist that the house remains the same without him, or is even much improved without him, yet it is still the house that Christ built. It is the covenant that he extended to us. It is the edifice he raised in order that we should be protected from the savagery of the forces that would otherwise rage against us.
But Christ is not absent, and certainly cannot be pushed out, from the place he built for us. Within this household he keeps himself inconspicuous, passes unnoticed by us, giving it the maintenance that keeps this house serviceable. Though we wreck it, he restores it and so the building survives. This house is the work of generations who heard that gospel and passed it on, and who learned a civility, that made it possible for us to live together in large societies. Over centuries we developed a division of labour and long supply chains that have united the world into something like a single household, in which the wants of multitudes are met by the minimal efforts of multitudes, working in ways that harmonise, to satisfy the needs of those multitudes and keep them content.
Whatever the West has learned about humanity and civilisation is Christian. It was the gospel that brought into being this civility and humanity. But they are a dead-end if we imagine that they will continue without Christ. Christ only appears to be absent to us, who snatch and grasp, because he willingly cedes place to us. He allows us a place in which we can be without him, a secular sphere. The truth is that this place does not exist without him for it is the product of his work and his patience. There is no place without him, but only places in which he has made himself imperceptible, a servant so anonymous as to be unnoticeable. The source of this orientation to a shared humanity of the West is simply is the Christian gospel. And since the West is nothing but this hope of becoming civil and humane, we can say that the origin of the West is the gospel. Western culture is Christian culture. Christianity creates the modern world. It not only created once, but it creates and recreates it now, and when its public contribution is denied and prevented, the world stops being modern and crumbles away into something else. That something is not a culture, because it is not able to promote growth, but is merely a rubble made up of fragments alternately adopted and discarded in an attempt without logic or coherence to validate the ongoing deracination and dispossession and so justify the power of the powerful and the powerlessness of the disempowered.
There is a modern cult, but there is no modern culture. Left to itself, and considered in isolation from its source in Christianity, modernity is no culture, but a force of compulsion. Liberalism without the culture, practices and virtues of self-restraint does not stay liberal. It is not a course of persuasion, which either does or does not persuade you, which you may or may not find convincing for yourself. It is not aimed to gain your conviction and consent, but only to enforce your conformity. It wants homogeneity. It wants to extract you from the culture that formed you and from the relationships that give you your identity. It wants to put you, your relationships and culture through the blender, to produce a homogenous human existence, with no one standing outside it to judge it on criteria extrinsic to it. Modernity is the demolition of culture. Whatever this anti-culture encounters, it dissolves.
The gospel offers a set of guides and limits that may enable you to grow, and over the long term may enable a society to grow, from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, from helplessness to self-reliance and self-mastery. Christianity is therefore an account of the possibility of human growth. It is a culture because it cultivates; by it we may become cultivated, educated, self-controlled, civil and liberal. There can be no modern culture. Whatever is modern is a derived from Christianity, and is a deviation and ultimately a departure from it. Modernity cannot prevent itself from disintegrating into the struggle for power by irreconcilable groups, until there is only childishness, rage and savagery.
You were born into this political culture. Though you may not be aware of its source in Christianity, it is still your mindset. Though you may disown that culture and despise Christianity, you have no other language in which you can even describe what you hate. Above all things you want to leave this Christ-derived culture behind, but you are unable to do so because it alone manifests that logic which allows you to think. This is the world you were given. You cannot live, think or speak except in the world given to you. The more you reject, the more you find that you are surrounded by the deepest imperatives that this Christ-derived culture has set you. It has given you this will, and your will is directed to the good; the more you attempt to destroy this orientation towards what is good, and do what is evil, the more clearly the good remains out of your reach, untouchable and indestructible.
Modernity is of course an attempt to take control of Christ without allowing him to take control of you. It is an attempt to make a relationship that is unilateral, in which we take what we want, and discard what we don’t. We refuse to allow ourselves to be formed and matured through this relationship. We do not acknowledge that he has the maturity and independence that we desire, and that we may receive it from him, and hold on to it only through continued relationship with him. It is the claim that we are already mature and immutable, that we are already gods. It is to reverse and falsify the relationship, which really depends on the authority and generosity of Christ.
Without the gospel, people beg to have their responsibility taken from them so they can remain children. They demand that their rulers provide everything for them, make their choices for them and become authoritarians. This is the paradox of modernity. The upslope of modernity is all about individual aspiration and striving towards freedom; the plateau is all about the enjoyment of freedom through the amplification of choice, with smugness standing in for virtue, and the patronising of whichever groups you identify as not yet enjoying the same freedom as yourself; the downslope, however, is all about committing governments to the project of first of replacing cultural freedom with a small set of individual moral freedoms, and it is the surrender of (basic, constitutional) freedom in order to secure (peripheral, cultural) freedom and then being overwhelmed by the vista of cultural freedoms receding away from you, then despair and then the rush to oblivion.
The Church came first. Then came the nation under one law, then the government. The state emerges out of the public life and service empowered by Christian discipleship. It is Christian discipleship that makes us willing to participate in this service that is public, our readiness to acknowledge one law and to submit to the obligations and penalties of that law. We have willingly taken these conventions to be ours and we acknowledge that we members of this nation, that is, we acknowledge that these people are our equals and our fellows and that we do not wish to live without them or apart from them, that they are our neighbours. We consent to this, and only thus as implication, to the government that upholds the law that protects the culture shared within this nation, and so to the state. We commit ourselves to this nation, and thus to its self-government, in freedom. This freedom and this consent are possible because we are witnesses of the gospel. First comes the gospel, the discipleship and community of witness, the Church, that bears it to the nation, and then comes the public service, that create government and a state. The gospel raised us up out of coercion, compulsion, and vendetta, into freedom, in which we give our consent to one another and so become members of a nation.
Christianity makes culture. It cultivates people who aspire to be masters of themselves, who are able to live from, and be content with, what they produce for themselves. Christianity made us a cultivated people, formed by the discipleship that evolved into a culture over so many hundreds of years. Our culture and our high view of one another and the law that protects them, have given us an economic development, a standard of living and technology far beyond what our ancestors knew. It is the culture that has generated this economic development, and this technology and standard of living. But that economic development and standard of living are not stable. They depend for their continuation on the culture that generates them. That culture is not stable. It depends on the discipleship that generates that aspiration to self-mastery that arrives with the gospel. Our culture is nothing but Christianity. That culture continues when it allows itself to be refreshed by the public speech of Christian worship, and it dwindles and hollows out when it does not. Our development and a standard of living are products of Christianity. Without the public witness of the Christian community, this culture of human dignity, and this aspiration and achievement that it has empowered disappears. When that witness is given, though the standard of living, the technology and economic development may disappear, the aspiration does not. As long as we welcome the gospel, the hope and dignity remain.
6.3 Christian worship and witness
Christian worship is public proclamation of the truth about power. In their public worship the Christian community challenges those who make excessive claims to power.
The fundamental act that establishes human freedom, and with this freedom, establishes humanity, is that we defy the powerful. We do this by declaring that the powerful are responsible and accountable, to us and to all, and that they are answerable to God just as we are. No one is morally above us or out of our reach. Every power-holder must hear the appeal we make and heed the warning we give. We insist that there is truth and justice, and there are long-developed codes which enable us to say what is good and just. These codes are given to us in Christian teaching and in the culture, morality and law that that have developed through each nation’s reception of that Christian teaching. The fundamental act that establishes our freedom is the gathering and worshipping of the Christian community created by this revelation and formed by this teaching. This community is making a public stand. It demonstrates and manifests what is true, good and right.
The Church states the limits of the claims of the powerful to determine what is true. When it fails to convince them of these limits, the powerful place themselves above what is true, so the truth is no more than whatever they state, and there are no other authority or criteria for discovering what is true. But more than that, the Christian assembly not only state what is true, but they manifest and demonstrate it in their own gathering, which is always a reconciliation and integration of what was previously fragmented and partial. As former antagonists are brought face-to-face, and as they remain publicly together in peace, they are an enactment and the embodiment of that reconciliation and truth. The proximity to one another in which they stand itself indicates the depth of this reconciliation, and the truth of the claims they make. Moreover, they not only say what is true, that God reconciles all opposites, but they say it together, so one voice does not dominate while the many are silent, but all voices are heard. Moreover, they do not merely say this, but they sing it, and so they harmonise, each adjusting their words and tone to blend in with and so complement the singing of the others, to amplify and affirm what their leaders say and sing, and so their voices together represent the harmonisation of creation, the arrival of order and transformation from disorder.
Christian worship is the public chanting of the truth that no elite is absolute or untouchable. Every leadership is answerable to God. It can be challenged, dethroned and replaced. The least significant members of any society can combine to proclaim this truth in public, and so warn their leaders of the limits of their authority. Our leaders are on sufferance. God is the ultimate authority: all other authorities are mandated to serve the common good. They are given authority only in order to subordinate themselves to our well-being. Authority comes through service, and is lost when that service is withheld. We tell them that have no authority to serve themselves or to weaken us by their endless confiscations and predation. This is why elites hate the gospel. The hatred that motivates them becomes central to the education promulgated by the educational institutions when they are taken over by the state, until it becomes the universal worldview of that society. The elite teaches every grade of state employee to express contempt for the gospel until disdain for our culture becomes second nature, even to those who are most despised by that elite.
Elites are interested in power, and pursue other goals only as they serve to increase its power. All pursuit of power without limit is pagan. It is the gospel that sets out the limits. Western conceptions of the desirability of goals other than power, such as truth, goodness and beauty, come from the gospel, and were learned through the worship and witness of the Christian community. Christians are often not well regarded by our political class. It does all that it can to belittle Christian witness and the community that proclaims it in public.
Their effective paganism can be kept within limits, and the political class can be kept honest, only by the implicit reprimand of the propositions sung in the public square by the Christian community. Christian worship is this public service of declaring the limits of power. Those who, driven by their own desires, pursue power give lip-service to the culture derived from the gospel, and take on Christian identities in order to promote one another within the hierarchy. For such people that it is the hierarchy that is the Church, and that if they hold the hierarchy, they hold the Church. But it is not so.
When Christians set out these limits, they are reviled. It is their job to continue this public witness of our weekly event of divine worship, unperturbed by opposition and marginalisation. It is all that that elite can do to create other groups and voices that offer accounts in which the elite is unquestionable, and the Christians are not worthy of an audience, too intellectually disreputable or socially inferior to be allowed to participate in the public square.
All ideologies are imitations, and reductions, of the gospel. They invert it, so that the movement towards reconciliation and re-integration goes into reverse, and pushes us into antagonism and mutual distrust. When each of us is persuaded to identify ourselves with some minority that believes itself disadvantaged, resentments grow, and the unity of a national community is lost. Such fragmentation and sectarianism are intended to dilute and distract from the sense of obligation to one another which sustains a nation, and keeps that nation an articulate people, able to resist the excessive claims of its political class. The single public truth insisted on by that faithful Christian community says that the elite is accountable to the whole nation, that we can all be full members of it, and that no government interventions are required to sustain our public national life. The state is a function of the public service of a society. Society is prior to the state. The state with its ideology can pass away, and society will remain. No elite is absolute. All rulers will pass away. When all else has passed away, God will remain, and those who acknowledge him will remain with him.
The elite purposefully creates and promotes other communities that offer alternative messages, perhaps with similar language, perhaps with similar religious conceptuality. They create narratives to be repeated by those believe that the elite will reward them for it. Social climbers will adopt the system that offers advancement, believing that if they are loyal to the regime, the regime will be loyal to them. Those who do not accept the Christian premise that God only promotes all men and is judge of what is true, are endlessly gullible.
Public speech is a Christian practice. Reasoning in public is a Christian practice. Or more simply, free speech and public reasoning are what Christianity is. Public reason simply is Christianity. In all our public speech we insist that we are dealing with this or that specific person, and these persons can speak and discuss and argue and reach agreement, with us. It denies that at bottom we have to do with a something, something or other. It insists that we have to do with persons, who may be like us but are not us, and that they are as free as we are. Christianity is solely about some person, this one and that one. The guarantor of each particular person is himself a person. Christ is that person.
Christianity says that there is public speech and public reason because there is this one person who insists that we give him account of ourselves, and that we respond with our account by responding to him. This means that we acknowledge that he must be responded to, that he will not go away and leave us alone. The gospel tells us that this person appeals to us through every person we meet, such that everyone we meet represents Christ’s call to us. Everyone appears before us we meet is there as one instalment of Christ’s approach to us. Despite their own obliviousness and even resistance to this, they are all transparent to Christ, and we are transparent to him as we meet and hear and respond to them.
Christianity is simply Christ. The gospel is this person who calls us and waits for us to respond and to say who we are. As we respond, we are obliged to admit that we are positioned and identified by persons other than ourselves, and so we are identified by a tradition and history. We do not simply imagine or create the context in which we live and speak; many other persons, past, present and future, make up the historical location that gives us our identity. All these are redeemed by the prophets, apostles and witnesses that Christ sends us, who reveal him to us, and make us ready for life with him within his holy community. Jesus Christ calls us all together here to respond to one another, and to him. Without him bringing us all before one another, there are no other persons, no persons at all. All existence is simply Christ’s demand that we respond to him and them. Christ is the only existing thing. With him, there is existence. Without him, there is nothing, no existence at all. Christianity offers the hope of becoming a mature, independent person. Christianity is simply this one specific person who insists that we are all persons just as he is. He insists that we hear and respond to the summons that all other persons make to us, and that we receive every one of them as members of his body. Christ is the source and basis, underwriter and guarantor that there may be public speech, that everyone can make themselves heard, and there is public reason, in which everyone can, and must, give an account of themselves and have that account examined, tested and affirmed by all others. With all those he presents to us, we can receive his self-mastery and make it our own, so it is both his and ours. Each of us must allow all others to be our judge and to be our companions and so be content to share life with them. Christ enables us to become masters of ourselves, and so freely able to commit to and serve one another. He calls us to become, and remain, truly persons and truly human.
