Just Church (5)

Last week, we started to work on the question of how it has come to be that the church is being invaded from inside by the “nice lady” types, Christians who claim to be helping us move toward a better, godlier more Christian way of doing church, but who are actually directing us to something very different. We ended up talking about the Tower of Babel incident from Genesis.

Even back in that very first book of the Bible, the natural human inclination toward this kind of strange ideology is spelled out. Nothing unexpected, nothing new, nothing out of keeping with human nature from the dawn of time is really involved here. So in a sense, we should have seen it coming: but we don’t, because every time it recurs it seems to be clothed in different language and circumstances.

Seeing through the new facade is important. When we can identify and name the delusion that’s being foisted upon us in the name of “Social Justice”, we are less likely to fall for the old tricks again. So what I’m aiming to do in this chapter, as well as ensuing sections, is to provide you with just enough of the philosophical background of Social Justice ideology so that you can recognize it and know how to refute it. On the way, I will briefly mention a few highbrow philosophers; just enough to help you locate the roots of the error. I promise not to drown you with details here. But if you need more information, you’ll know where to look.

Chapter 2: From Among Your Own Selves (continued)

Three Key Features

1/ Collectivism

Let me suggest three things. Firstly, the story shows that when human beings reject God, the first thing they look to in His place is collectivism.

Why that? Well, it’s very natural. You see, we’re all rather small and mortal, aren’t we? And life, even at its best, is rather difficult. All of us would like to see things get better, but none of us alone has much power to make the changes in the world that we would like to see. If we have already rejected any appeal to God to help us, but we aren’t content to accept our fate as a mere given, to what can we look in order to increase our ability? The natural assumption becomes that if one person cannot change things, maybe many people can. In fact, maybe it may even take all the people to really change things.

So the common goal of global unity is born. Human beings tend to believe that what one person cannot achieve, we can all achieve by unifying. If the alternative is to leave things as they are, it doesn’t seem a very good alternative. So we naturally gravitate to the belief that more is better; that getting everybody together will produce good things that being alone or in smaller groups simply cannot. In the collective is our hope.

2/ Ideology

But if you want everybody to get together, you will need to give them some reason, some common project and goal, some common belief system that can incentivize them to commit to unity as long as we need. So the second innovation of godless mankind is a thing called ideology.

By committing everybody to a common ideology, we glue them together and achieve the solidarity that will make our goal attainable, or so we believe. But people are irritatingly inclined to scatter; so it must be a powerful ideology, not a mere idea or whim, and if necessary, we must spread it through strong propaganda and, when expedient, compel it through physical force as well. We see this again on the plains of Shinar: the common project is making the tower, and the goal will be “making a name for ourselves” and increasing our power until “nothing becomes impossible” to us. We shall be gods ourselves, making our own terms of life and controlling the world according to our human will.

As a sub-point, we should also consider that within this ideology is a very important feature: it needs a projection-forward of history, a story about the future, a prophecy. Any Babel project has a vision, and some set of people who can credibly claim to have “read” where the future is going to go, and to cast a vision before the people of how it is destined to work out in a way they can desire. At Shinar the vision is of a unified humanity that will not, as God intended, scatter over the face of the earth and steward the creation in God’s name; rather, it is of a consolidated humankind, freed from the plans of God, empowered by human ambitions. They are sure “nothing [will be] impossible” then; they can do what they want when the future comes. There are no limits. History will reveal this utopia, if only the people can see it now. The whole world will live as one, united in their self-claimed freedom and delivered from service to God. Who knows what wonders will then come to pass? They will be bound together by their allegiance to, and proximity to, the tower.

But the tower has always puzzled me. If the only building materials available are “bricks and mortar”, the resultant structure is certain to be very compositionally limited; and by reason of that is not going to be very high either. This is not the age of steel girders or even flying buttresses; the building technology is really primitive — so primitive that each stage of the tower is going to have to be wider than the one above, and the total height of the structure is going to be limited by the tensile strength of the bricks and mortar. That means it’s not going to be a building anywhere near as high as even our modern skyscrapers, let alone something that “reaches to heaven”.

We actually know what kind of a building it probably was. Even today, on the plains of Shinar, we find such structures. The most famous, perhaps, would be the ziggurat at Ur of the Chaldees. The base of it is still there, and we know how these things were made. They were roughly pyramid-shaped, wider at the base than at the top, but with staged platforms all the way up, a house or platform at the top, and a central staircase leading up to the top. It must have been very impressive to be standing on the plain at the foot of this staircase, at night, with lights travelling up and down in the hands of the various priests and officials ascending and descending, and with the whole astrological panoply of stars as the background. Very impressive indeed — but not anywhere near as tall as the heavens. And the ancient people cannot have failed to realize that. They lived on a plain, but they had surely seen mountains; and the ziggurat structure would have been dwarfed by any of these. At least vertically, such a structure could come nowhere near to reaching “heaven”.

And yet, in another sense it was designed to do just that. For we know how the ziggurats were used. Carved into their sides, visible even today, are the gods these early people chose to worship in place of the one true God. The ancient Babylonians called them “The Seven Sages”, and had legends that said these demi-gods would come to them in their occult ceremonies and give them new knowledge and power. The Babylonians regarded their relationship with such beings as their claim to national supremacy over all other nations. They alone were the people who communed with the gods, they said; and they alone had the technologies that only the gods could bring down.

3/ Technology

This brings us to our third element toward which human nature gravitates when men have rejected God: technology. Call it “power”, if you prefer. Or even call it “magic”. The secular sociologist David Noble has observed the ancient link between technologies — human inventions — and religious and occult aspirations of various kinds. Whereas technology offers man physical power, magic and occultism offer him metaphysical power; and both were combined in the thinking of ancient man to a degree that is quite unexpected to modern secular people. In any case, the goal is the same: the increasing of human power until dependence on God is no longer necessary. This is an old dream, an old aspiration, and an old folly.

You might wonder why appealing to a variety of demi-gods was any better for the people on the plain of Shinar than simply relying on the one true God. But you should notice that polytheism has a particular feature; one that Socrates, among others, noted long ago: that is, the various gods give different kinds of benefits and orders, have different preferences, and have different aims. Thus, human beings are able to negotiate with them in ways and to a degree that they simply cannot do with a God who possesses a singular nature and disposition. The religious relationship in polytheism is one of bartering for human goals with beings of powerful but limited scope; and in a subtle way, this returns control of the agenda to human hands. Find the right formula for placating the relevant god and you can get what you want so that, unlike the Hebrew God, who cannot be accessed or manipulated in these sorts of ways, mankind again gets an increase of power. And, of course, if, as the ancient Babylonians boasted, their special knowledge and technologies came from these occult forces, then man gets additional physical power as well.

In Summary

For our purposes, let our comments on ancient man stop there. We have enough. We know that very early in human history, we see God-rejecting mankind resorting to three strategies to achieve his goals: collectivism, ideology and technology. Once we have these, we can move forward very quickly, picking up relevant cases through history that repeat the same pattern. We see it in Nebuchadnezzar’s famous statue of gold, created to defy the vision the Lord sent of a human empire that could not last, or we see it in the boasting of the Assyrians in 2 Kings 18, or the complaint of Habakkuk. But we also see it in the later empires of man, from the Greeks to the Romans, to Napoleon’s dreams of a unified Europe, to the aspiration for a thousand-year Reich in Germany, in Soviet ambitions for world domination, the Cultural Revolution in China, and now in the lofty dreams of the Great Resetters of today, as well. All of these have used the intersection of collectivizing, ideological indoctrination and the application of technology as the pillars of their imperial plans. Truly, there is no new thing under the sun.

To understand simply: if you ever want to know what godless mankind is up to, go and look to the intersection of collectivism, ideology and technology. That is where his aspirations will be focused. For there is no alternative but to return to God and submit, and that he will not do.

A Closer Look at the Ideology

But in our story, let us leap forward over all that. We need to stop briefly in 18th century Germany, with a fellow named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was a philosopher who had many things to say on many topics, most of them written in language so dense the ordinary reader cannot even penetrate it. But we take only one key idea from him. It’s the idea that history itself has a goal, a momentum, an intention, a direction, a teleology. For Hegel, history is like a “god” itself; it has a plan already in mind, so to speak, of where we humans are going. History is “progressive”, and progresses toward particular lofty spiritual goals, goals already readable and knowable by very smart men like Hegel himself.

So we need no talk of any “plan of God”. History itself has purposes and direction. It will take us from where we are to the next phase of our evolution when the time is right; and we need not worry that it will fail to do so, because it is governed and guided by spirit — by which Hegel understood a kind of geist or spiritual potential that inhabits and motivates history through human beings. All one has to do is to coordinate one’s own actions, and everybody else’s as well, with the natural, progressing flow of history, and things will work themselves out as they should. The trajectory is already set.

This belief that certain “smart men” could read history and know in advance what its patterns and direction were was taken up barely half a century later by a famous fellow by the name of Karl Marx. Marx was a Hegelian, but one that did not believe in things like “spirit” or geist as agents of the future. He regarded himself as a strict Materialist, meaning somebody who believes that only physical things are real. But he did believe that history has its own story and direction, and he, Karl Marx, was the very man who could read it and tell you what it was going to be.