Mark Shiffman, one of our friendliest rivals or least rivalrous friends at Front Porch Republic has posted some important reflections on Christian personhood and limited government. Here’s a major take-away:
Over the course of the history of “Christendom” the consensus of limited government has been developed and maintained by the fact that the communion of personhood which constitutes the human transcendence of the state’s purview is sustained and publicly acknowledged in practices belonging to “civil society” (i.e. non-state practices and institutions). That consensus is now disappearing, because the practices that cultivate and sustain our experiential awareness of our transcendent personhood are ceasing to shape our souls.
This is very well said in my view, and for that matter, just plain true. The trick embedded in this formulation is a fragile dialectic between transcendence and immanence, religion and politics. Liberty depends upon “personhood” understood as grounded in a personal God who absolutely transcends the political realm (and its “civil religion”); but at this same time this ground must be “public acknowledged” — it must be anchored in beliefs and practices that are shared by and authoritative for an actual community. ”Civil Society” is the apparently simple name that we use for this fragile dialectic which holds together the beyond and the concretely authoritative.
And that belief, and the authority that comes from it and demands for a limited government, is fast fading as the US becomes more and more secular. Secularism is all about “the us” or “the me” while Christianity is all about “Him”. Us / me is about the selfish, the Him is the exact opposite and a recognition that there is a more powerful AND more knowledgeable than ourselves.
Once again, with Progressives continuing to “pull out the bricks” and create the holes of “our wall of civil society”, how long is it before there is a total collapse? When there is no recognition of traditional shared values and philosophy, how can our wall’s foundation hold firm? If you lose the most pivotal point, that there is something more important than ourselves and that we are made in His image, that dichotomy of “sovereign citizen” vs The State, there is only The State that is left. Hasn’t history told us the horrors that have come when that happens?
(H/T: Postmodern Conservative)
