“Stockholm Syndrome” is a psychological pathology in which a person held in an environment of intense isolation and abuse becomes so confused and disoriented as to locate his own identity with his abuser. This disorder of the soul hit the network news in the eighties, when kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst participated with her SLA captors in some notorious crimes, brandishing a weapon. She had been so brainwashed that she didn’t remember who her real enemies were.
People are adaptable creatures. Looking back on some historical atrocity, I assume a attitude of judgment. ‘How could they do that? How could so many people be so depraved, deluded or terrified as to participate in that horror?’ Why didn’t anyone refuse to cooperate?’ or, ‘Why didn’t enough people refuse to cooperate?’
“Normal” people don’t do things like that, I think. There must have been something wrong with them.
But “normal” is merely what prevails within a particular frame of reference. And people have short lives and shorter memories. Normal is what everyone expects. It is normal for teenagers to have sex. It is normal for pregnant teenagers to kill their babies. It is normal for wives to leave their husbands and for fathers to neglect their families. It is normal for parents to abandon their children to professional babysitters—and grown children return the kindness.
Money and Power are the gods of the age, and their devotees sacrifice in marble temples on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. Vast markets thrive on lust, exploitation, fraud, selfishness, and envy. Every day in teeming cities people dream up schemes for getting and spending other people’s wealth. And because these things are normal, they must be all right.
I’m encouraged to pursue a job where I create no real value, improve nobody’s life in a tangible way, and do no ultimate good. (Can you even call it work?) If I’m any good at it, I get a competitive salary, a company car, and a fat bonus at the end of the year. This child of the Covenant is climbing the ladder at Pyramid, Inc. (The Biggest Thing Since Babel). Lord, deliver us from Pharaoh, but not yet—the free fish and cucumbers are to die for.
There must be something good about this setup or it wouldn’t exist. Sure, some people are winning and some are losing, but deep down the world must be as it should.
I am a Christian, but I don’t understand how what I believe about God has anything to do with the world I live in. Actually, the world I live in has nothing to do with God.
My heart has been taken captive by the world. Without another point of reference, I begin to see things as the world does. I know I belong to another place, but I’ve never been there. I think it must be a lot like here—without the things I don’t like, of course.
I’m a pretty good person (considering my circumstances!) and God can’t hold my moral failures against me—I’m only human. In this way also I think like the world.
The world takes advantage of my innocence. But we’ve been together so long, I’ve come to think it’s my only friend. It pours me a poison cocktail and I drink it like wine. I sear my own conscience devising clever apologetics for the world’s Darwinian economics and wage slavery.
To the brainwashed, all things are pure. This is why naiveté is so dangerous—all things are not pure. Sin has done a pretty effective job establishing impurity as the status quo. And what God has cursed, let no man call blessed.
Sounds hopeless. How can anyone get free? There is a cure for Christian Stockholm Syndrome, and it’s called God’s Word. It sets its readers free from the ethical imprisonment the world holds them in. There is one sovereign Lord over all. By the light of Scripture we revel in His glory and see the world as He does.
The world is the enemy of righteousness; it suborns justice; it hates the Chosen People.
It can go to hell.
* Christian singer Derek Webb’s latest release is called “Stockholm Syndrome.” It inspired this essay.
An Essay
Ethics are External Expressions of an Internal Life
Ethos is not an internal condition of the soul. A person cannot be ethically virtuous, nor can virtue be created in him through ethical conditioning. Rather, ethics are the internal life of the individual as externalized; as expressed in relation to others. Ethics could be defined as internal moral virtue applied to a person’s relationships and dealings with other persons. Thus, ethics, as opposed to virtues, become instantiated precisely at the moment that a person reaches out to another person.
Ethical Systems Define Communities
An ethical system practically defines the boundaries of human interaction in a given community. Ethically speaking, a community comprises many persons living together in the same ethical space. This is one characteristic of a community: there may be geographical and historical parameters to consider as well.
But of course the question immediately presents itself: Who or what sets the ethical rules within a community?
Different communities approach this task in different ways. The exact forms of ethical behavior vary from community to community, as well as the way they are set. This has a lot to do with how, and for what purpose, the community is constituted. Although an ethical system defines the ethical space of a community, the ethical system itself is given its dimensions by the self-existing character of the community, in the same way that personal ethics are interpersonal instantiations of personal virtues. As communities change, their ethical norms change as well.
Jesus Christ Creates Christian Ethics
Now for the community known as the Church, one would expect that the Person by whom it has been created, and for whom it exists, would have something to do with creating its ethical space. And this is precisely what we discover in the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ–the Sermon on the Mount being possibly the keystone of his ethical teachings. The Gospels are brimming with Christ’s ethical instructions and His endorsements and interpretations of the Law of Moses.
But being a member of Christ’s Body does not depend on adherence to ethical rules.
Christianity is Not Defined by an Ethical System
Christ’s ethical teachings can only apply to those who are actually members of the true Christian community, those who are truly within the fellowship of His Kingdom. And one cannot insinuate himself into the Kingdom by means of works and moral behavior. Christ said of these:
On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matt. 7.21-23)
This is a terrible warning to those who are content to behave as Christians outwardly without true devotion to God.
In a similar passage, the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats from Matt. 25, Jesus reproves those who observe religious piety without showing His love to those around them. These hypocrites reverence the idea of Christ, and even derive earthly comfort and assurance from it, but have none of His Spirit dwelling inside them. Christ demands obedience, but given as from His children, not His vassals.
Knowledge of Christ Comes Through Faith Only
It is not through membership in a church or participation in religious activities, nor through initiation into religious mysteries and theology, that Christ is truly known. He can be known only by those to whom He has made Himself known. This knowledge of God comes through faith, which is the sole means of achieving a true knowledge of the Holy—and this gift of faith is acquired and exercised in secret and in silence.
Christian Ethics Come From Knowledge of Christ
This is not to say that the person with true faith is unknown to others. On the contrary, it is impossible for such a true faith to remain silent or without good works. Public religious expression and good works flow from faith as naturally as breathing. But faith comes first. And well it should, because if ethical behavior is the external expression of an internal life, Christian ethics proceed from a heart that has become one with Christ—become actually a member of His mystical body, which, of course, is the true Church.
No Individual Lives Outside of a Community
But the discerning reader has already noticed a problem with the definitions given at the beginning. If ethics are the outward expression of something internal and inherent to an individual, yet ethics are particular expressions of specific communities, then there must be a characteristic of the human person that cannot be separated from a particular community of place and time.
Absolute ‘ethical independence’ is shown to be an illusion, as personal ethics, whatever they are, are defined by something inherent to a person that connects him to something outside of himself. It may be a family or a local community or a religion. For a Christian, it is Christ and His Body. Ethics are a phenomenon of something else that comes before them. They do not exist independently.
Christians are Dead to Communities of Place and Time
Christ often warns that those who join His body will become alienated from other communities. “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matt. 8.22). “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother . . . And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matt. 10.35-36), are two of many instances in the Gospel of Matthew alone. The one who follows Christ is, in fact, “dead.” He has ceased to be a member of the communities that previously required his ethical allegiance. Those who live to God are dead to the world. And this poses a difficult ethical problem, if the Christian is (to the world) a dead person who for some reason is still living among us, so to speak. Martin Luther was right to shift the focus of Christian ethical behavior away from Law and rest it solely on Love; for, if he is actually dead, the Christian is certainly not bound by the human laws of his time and place. Christians act toward others and obey man’s laws because they are guided by the law of Love. This love and obedience does not legitimate ethics and law-abiding as things that are good in themselves, but only in so far as these actions are in accord with the ethical teachings of Christ.
Persecution is Ethical
If we view Christianity in this way, as a religion that actually rejects and replaces the ethics of the communities in which it appears, we begin to understand why pagan societies feel so threatened by the Christian faith, and why they resort to vicious persecutions in a vain attempt to bring reform to their threatened ethical systems and save the fabric of their civilizations. Ethical systems demand that what opposes them be suppressed. But neither ethics nor society, nor persecution and sword, nor pleasure, nor pain, nor life, nor death, can ever separate us from the love of Christ.
Abraham’s actions in making ready to sacrifice Isaac were not in harmony with modern ethics—or even, it is likely, with his own ethical inclinations—but they were carried out by a love and faith that overcame even parental affection and the patriarch’s hopes of a great cultural legacy.
Ethical Systems Contain Nothing of Christianity
No community exists because of its ethics. A community exists first, and its ethics emerge as a phenomenon of its particular existence. So too with Christianity. The ethical structures that are called “Christian Moral Values” or “A Christian Nation” or “Christian Conservatism” or “Christian Socialism” are different things entirely from Christianity; they do not even share a boundary line with it. All they have in common is the reflection of some outward characteristic—an ethic—that Christianity produces, yet they are entirely based on this ethic itself as a first principle and so they depart entirely from what it actually means to be “Christian.”
It is vain for a person who is not “In Christ” to attempt to live within the Christian community by mimicking Christian ethics, and it is murderous to a church to allow it to be constituted around ethics, instead of around the Person and saving work of Christ Himself. It is murderous because it does not “discern the Body,” destroying and replacing it with an inferior construct.
The timeless insight of G. K. Chesterton (from The New Jerusalem, hat tip to Peter Reed, boldface is mine):
And in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amount of mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world symbolised by London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a question of controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I went by Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demand for Nationalisation. And quite apart from the merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired. It is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cut across each other. The employers talk about “private enterprise,” as if there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to “nationalise” the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the Government, or even to nationalise the nation. The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly; the Socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers and state officials; which is logically a strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose. My own sympathies are with the Socialists; in so far that there is something to be said for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism. But the point is that when there is something to be said for one thing, it is now commonly said in support of the opposite thing. Never since the mob called out, “Less bread! More taxes!” in the nonsense story, has there been so truly nonsensical a situation as that in which the strikers demand Government control and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy. The mob howls before the palace gates, “Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume more despotic powers”; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, “Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?” There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere.
Some people seem to think that what is known as Calvinism, that is, the structures and doctrines of Protestant theology, which were in large part shaped by the French Reformer Jean Cauvin, is an artificial construction on Christianity, dreamed up in authoritarian Geneva.
Today is the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth.
It was John Calvin who in large part helped to sum up the teachings of the Reformed faith, which Luther and others, in departing from Rome, had begun to preach, but had not quite brought together in harmony. Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion became the new standard for doctrine that is founded directly on Scripture, not speculation or philosophy. Calvin’s primary concern was the glory of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit; in the work of redemption, which is to say, the Gospel.
C.H. Spurgeon, the English Baptist preacher, had this to say about his Calvinist doctrine:
It is no novelty, then, that I am preaching; no new doctrine. I love to proclaim these strong old doctrines that are called by nickname Calvinism, but which are truly and verily the revealed truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus. By this truth I make my pilgrimage into the past, and as I go, I see father after father, confessor after confessor, martyr after martyr, standing up to shake hands with me . . . Taking these things to be the standard of my faith, I see the land of the ancients peopled with my brethren; I behold multitudes who confess the same as I do, and acknowledge that this is the religion of God’s own church.
Elsewhere Spurgeon summarized what doctrines this true religion consists of:
I have my own opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what nowadays is called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else. I do not believe we can preach the gospel if we do not preach justification by faith without works; nor unless we preach the sovereignty of God in His dispensation of grace; nor unless we exalt the electing unchangeable eternal, immutable, conquering love of Jehovah; nor do I think we can preach the gospel unless we base it upon the special and particular redemption of His elect and chosen people which Christ wrought out upon the cross.
Protestants of all stripes, and probably Catholics as well, owe much to the labors of Calvin and the other Reformers in making the Word once more preeminent in Christian theology.
THE VOW
“Forsaking all others”—
Not a hope, or a dream
This promise won’t sever
In payment for love.
Determining statement!
It closes behind it
Loves loved and remembered,
In darkness complete.
But think of the freedom
In bonds freely chosen:
No slavery of passion,
No canting regret:
For memories forgiven
Have lost all their power
To hurt, or to hinder
This promise we meant.
PCS 06/08/2009
The California Supreme Court ruled today on an omnibus challenge to the validity of the California constitutional amendment that was introduced by referendum and ratified in November, restricting the legal definition of marriage in that state. The Court affirmed the constitutionality of the measure. read more…
Pros:
- Impartiality; promotes adherence to traffic laws.
- Possibility for institutionalized lenience.
- May have effect of reducing penalties for traffic violations.
- Ought to necessitate anonymity.
- Could boost local revenue.
- Can relieve inappropriate role of police as revenue agents.
Cons:
- Justice depends on how they are implemented.
- If not regulated, potential for intolerable strictness.
- Police enforcement allows for common-sense lenience.
- Information-sharing practices raise significant privacy issues.
read more…
1 Corinthians 10:1-22
10:1 For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. read more…
Dissent is important to us, both as students at Patrick Henry College, and as conservatives in the political sphere. The world is becoming ever more politicized. Government and politicians feel they have a mandate to do more and more—and they welcome the opportunity to expand and consolidate their own personal political power. Conservatives who oppose this expansion are always accused of being uncritical of the status quo because they think it should not be changed. Conservatives may often be riled into a defense of the status quo, but the fact is they see the problems as clearly as progressives, or more clearly. They do not, however, think that positive change is as easy, or that the solutions are as clear or politically-achievable as progressives would lead people to believe, and they are in fact critical of the politicized mindset that turns every problem into a ballot or legislative issue. They recognize that the progressive agenda will create more problems than it solves. The conservative person, to borrow from William F. Buckley, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” If history is indeed moving in a certain direction, the conservative recognizes the pain this path will lead to if pursued hastily, seeks to slow it down and directs it toward a less reckless course. read more…
From his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.”
Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other. read more…
