Are Not Mutually Exclusive
There is a famous scene in the gospels where the Pharisees try to trap Jesus. In an attempt to nail him for heresy they get a lawyer to ask him which of the commandments is greatest. The thought process behind the trap is that no matter what response Jesus gives they will nail him. By making a judgement call on which commandment is best he will be degrading the others. So they put him on the spot (Matthew 22:34-40).
But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Not only does he answer the question but he does not allow himself to be trapped.
He responds by referring back to the idea of Mt. Sanai. That being the mountain where Moses literally hiked up to the heavens to receive the law from God which he faithfully relayed to the people below. This is the idea of the vertical (Heaven) and the horizontal (Earth or World). Jesus says you should love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. He then says that you should love your neighbor as yourself. He sums up his response by saying that these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. He is explicitly saying that this is the underlying meta-principle on which all the commandments rest.
This exercise addresses the atheist that makes the claim that they do not need faith and a religious tradition because they abide by a set of personally defined principles. These principles can be likened to the ten commandments. They might be derived from their life experiences or from their family or a combination of both. Lets assume that these principles were put together without contradiction and that the common thread that binds them together is that they are all good. So what is the underlying meta-principle that unites them as good? This is the question that Jesus answers.
When he says that you should love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind he is stating that you want to be oriented towards the highest conceivable good. This means that you make the decisions of your life by striving to do good. Whatever that might be. This is your initial proposition. What follows is the moral component, or the golden rule. That you should treat other people as if they were as good as you were and vice a versa. That is the underlying two dimensions that gives rise to all other necessary commandments.
It is with this spirit that puts god, the divine above all else, and that unites us with all other people. This is the common psychology that unites Christian and the monotheistic religions more broadly. These underlying two dimensions can be seen symbolically by Mt. Sinai in the old testament and by the cross in the new testament.
As an atheist if your principles are coherent, then there is a meta-principle that unites them. The religious tendency would be to discover that commonality and to define how you should conduct yourself in relationship to it.
The problem with this personal approach is that it is one dimensional and even that dimension is not shared outside of yourself. You miss out on the vertical dimension which is shared amongst the group. The idea is that the well constituted polity has two dimensions. There is the vertical element which gives the organization its common aim. For Christians this is God and the idea here is that the divine represents the highest possible aim. This vertical element unites the people with the transcendent. In a basic governing hierarchy this would be represented by the Kings fealty to God. The King himself is subordinate to a set of shared transcendent principles, and so is everyone else. This is the vertical dimension. The horizontal dimension provides you with a way in which to conduct yourself so that you can engage in repeated acts of altruism with other people. This shared morality defines right from wrong and builds in acts of charity that provides for the welfare of the community.
You need both dimensions because on occasion you might fall astray because you might adopt the mindset that you should just go along to get along. That you should conduct yourself the way that other people want you to conduct yourself. While this is usually true we have seen very recently that the exception is when everyone else loses their collective minds and everyone goes crazy. To avoid mass formation psychosis you need that relationship with the vertical.
Now you might push back and say that the people that run the structures that connects the people to the vertical, the religious institutions, often go crazy too.
This is absolutely true, and it is a perennial problem. This is why it is a mistake to view religious institutions as only a consequence of tradition. The institution is run by humans and humans are corruptible which tends towards corruption. However, the checks and balances are found within revelation itself. For example, the tradition of the Israelites in the Old Testament goes corrupt in the form of a corrupt King. But the prophets standup to the King by pointing out that there is a divine order that he is violating. Over and over when the Kings are corrupted all hell breaks lose until the leaders reorient themselves towards the vertical.
This is more obvious today than ever. To see how the Catholic Church was corrupted you can read Paul Williams book, Operation Gladio. If your interested in breaking news corruption you can look into what Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano has to say. This is not to pick on the Catholic Church, all existing religious structures are susceptible to institutional takeover. This can be seen in the East as in the West with the many Protestant denominations.
The next logical question might be how do we then tell the false prophets from the true prophets?
The answer to that is that you will know them by their fruits.
For example, If your institution is taking large donations from wealthy families under the condition that they choose who runs the place then that might be a red flag. Or if some individuals decide to break from tradition to support a strategic geopolitical goal then that might also be a red flag, or more appropriately, a rotten apple.
This is where I think the more decentralized nature of the Eastern Orthodox Church proves most resilient. The idea of progress, in the Western sense of the word, is foreign to the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox are determined to remain loyal to the past, to maintain a sense of living continuity with the Church of ancient times. This is best summed up at the start of the eighteenth century, by the Eastern Patriarchs when they said:
“We preserve the Doctrine of the Lord uncorrupted, and firmly adhere to the Faith He delivered to us, and keep it free from blemish and diminution, as a Royal Treasure, and a monument of great price, neither adding any thing, nor taking any thing from it.”
This idea of living continuity is summed up for the Orthodox in the one word, Tradition. “We do not change the everlasting boundaries which our fathers have set,” wrote John of Damascus, “but we keep the Tradition, just as we received it.”
Tradition, is most commonly understood to signify an opinion, belief or custom handed down from ancestors to posterity. Christian Tradition, in that case, is the faith and practice which Jesus Christ imparted to the Apostles, and which since the Apostles’ time has been handed down from generation to generation in the Church. But to the Orthodox Christian, Tradition means something more concrete and specific than this. It means the books of the Bible; it means the Creed; it means the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils and the writing of the Fathers; it means the Canons, the Service Books, the Holy Icons – in fact, the whole system of doctrine, Church government, worship, spirituality and art which Orthodoxy has articulated over the ages. Orthodox Christians of today see themselves as heirs and guardians to a rich inheritance received from the past, and they believe it is their duty to transmit this inheritance unimpaired to the future.
(The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware p.190)
So for the Orthodox, if prominent members of the church begin to exhibit signs of corruption they are easily identified because they will be openly compromising their beliefs by breaking from Tradition.
Now the true atheist will say that they are reticent to give up their idiosyncratic belief system in order to accept divine revelation in the form of a handed down tradition. This sentiment would make you protestant in the most fundamental sense of the word. Now you might claim to have access to some personal pool of intuition that can steer you in the right direction. This gets back to the earlier point about only pocessing one dimension rather than the preferable two shared dimensions. This intuition of yours, to the degree that it is a reliable source is going to be structured so that it facilitates your ongoing interactions with other people in the best possible manner. So it would be arguable that it is not as peculiar to you the individual as you might originally have thought. It is subject to its own Logos or internal logic.
So now you must ask yourself if your internal Logos is a better guide than the Christian Logos, the word of God?
At the extreme we have the example of Socrates whose internal voice told him to offer himself up to the mob as a sacrifice. This may be a rare occurrence and God help us when it does happen. However, in today’s world of constant change and “progress” if you are not firmly rooted in the vertical, tradition, then you will be at the mercy of modernity. You will be like a ship without a rudder and without an anchor driven by the winds of chance and the circumstances of others. Hopelessly lost and adrift in the sea of modern madness.
If you found this article interesting and would like to share a comment with me, please feel free to reach out to me directly via my personal email at (drew@drewredifer.com).
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