Political
ideas do not appear in a vacuum. They
are the outgrowth of theology. The same
is no less true of the political ideas espoused by folks in the States: Their origins lie quite firmly in the
heretical theology of the Protestant Reformation. And this goes a long way toward explaining
why the Holy American Republic and its political ideas have caused so many
problems in the world. Dr Vladimir Moss
writes of Protestantism,
Luther’s
reported words – “Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other” – represent
the essence of his creed and of his revolutionary challenge to the whole of
Western Christendom. For by placing his individual conscience above every
authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical, he undermined all authority,
replacing it with the most individualist kind of anarchism. Of course, he also
appealed to Scripture, to the Word of God. But this was a diversion: by making
every unaided individual believer the interpreter of Scripture, he effectively
undermined scriptural authority also. Scripture, the written word of God, was
only a seeming authority, a fig-leaf to hide the real authority, the believer’s
self-will. The only authority left was the naked ego…
This
is what we may call Protestant rationalism; it was born in the soil of Catholic
rationalism, which consisted in placing the mind of one man, the Pope, above
the Catholic consciousness of the Church, the Mind of Christ. Protestantism
rejected Papism, but did not reject its underlying principle. Thus instead of
placing the mind of one man above the Church, it placed the
mind of every man, every believer, above it. As Luther himself
declared: “In matters of faith each Christian is for himself Pope and Church.”[2] And so Protestantism, as
New Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) put it, “placed a papal tiara on
every German professor and, with its countless number of popes, completely
destroyed the concept of the Church, substituting faith with the reason of each
separate personality.”[3]
As
Frank Furedi writes, “His defiant stand, would eventually provide legitimation
for disobeying all forms of authority….
“Did
Luther really hurl the legendary words – ‘Here I stand, so help me God, I can
do no other’ – at his accusers? In a sense it does not matter. Luther did not
merely assert the authority of individual conscience to justify his own
actions: he advanced a compelling case for the value of people being able to
act in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. In so doing his
argument implicitly called into question the right of external authority to
exercise power over the inner life of people.
“The
distinction that Luther drew about the nature of authority represented an
important step in the conceptualisation of a new limit on its exercise.
His Treatise on Good Works (1520) asserted that ‘the power of
the temporal authority, whether it does right or wrong, cannot harm the soul’.
This idealisation of the soul and its protected status from external
authority encouraged European culture to devote greater interest in individual
conscience and eventually to endow the self with moral authority.
“In
helping to free the inner person from the power of external authority, Luther’s
theology contributed to the weakening of the very concept of external
authority, including that of divine authority [my italics –
V.M.] The freeing of the inner person from the power of external authority
restricted the exercise of absolute authority in all its forms. ”[4]
Though
the Protestants bemoan the moral degradation around them, the flouting of the
authority of the Scriptures or the Constitution, the ascendancy of LGBT rights,
etc., if they are honest, they will admit that they have only themselves and
their theology to blame. Their teaching
that every man is ‘Pope and Church’ undermines all authority, as was pointed
out above. So when a man or woman claims
the right to love someone of the same sex; or when a federal district judge
chooses to overturn a lawful Trump executive order; and so on, they are only
following the example set by the Protestants:
‘It is the conviction of my conscience versus your claims to authority’.
But
let us see what else lies behind the ideology of Americanism:
What
gives the Protestants this boldness, this extreme self-confidence in the
infallibility of their own conscience and their own reasoning? The answer lies
in another characteristic and fundamental doctrine of Protestantism,
predestination. It was their belief that they were elect and saved that gave
the Reformers the boldness – more exactly, the extreme folly – to raise their
minds above all established authority.
. . . Salvation, consciousness of election,
consisted of the turning of the heart towards God. A man knew that he was saved
because he felt, at some stage of his life, an inner satisfaction, a glow,
which told him that he was in direct communion with God. Cromwell was said to
have died happy when assured that grace once known could never be lost: for
once he had been in a state of grace. We are not dealing here with the mystical
ecstasy of a recluse: we are dealing rather with the conscience of the average
gentleman, merchant or artisan. What gave him consciousness of election was not
the painful scrutiny of his works, for the preachers never tired of telling him
that none could keep the commandment, that ‘we cannot cooperate with any grace
of God’ unless there is ‘a special spirit infused’. It was the sense of elation
and power that justified him and his worldly activities, that gave him
self-confidence in a world of economic uncertainty and political hostility. The
elect were those who thought they were elect, because they had an inner faith
which made them feel free, whatever their external difficulties.
“Philosophically,
the argument is circular. But Calvinism did not exist primarily as a
philosophical system. It gave courage and confidence to a group of those who
believed themselves to be God’s elect. It justified them, in this world and the
next… ‘Men, who have assurance that they are to inherit heaven, have a way of
presently taking possession of the earth.’”[6]
--Ibid.
Here
is the reason why Americans feel they can do as they please in the world: They have been predestined to world
leadership by God; they have the special Gnostic ‘inner feeling of assurance’
that God has chosen them as a special people for a special work. And they have not been shy about ‘taking possession
of the earth.’
Thankfully,
Dr Moss offers a corrective to the Protestant errors he has touched upon in his
essay:
“But
is not conscience truly infallible?” one may object. “Is it not, as the
expression goes, ‘the eye of God in the soul of man’? And as such, will it not
always indicate to us the truth?”
Conscience
is indeed the eye of God in the soul of man. And if a man’s soul is purified to
reflect the light of God, then his conscience will always reveal to him the
truth. But the tragedy of the human condition is that man’s soul is very often
– usually – not purified from the passions that hinder the pure light of God
from entering the soul; so that when a man thinks he is following his
conscience and God he is in fact following the fallen desires of his heart, of
which the prophet says: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked; who can know it? (Jeremiah17.9).
That
is why Holy Scripture itself forbids the individual interpretation of
Scripture: as St. Peter says, “No Scripture is of any private interpretation” (II
Peter 1.20). Our understanding of Scripture, as of all theological
subjects, must be tested and corrected in accordance with the conciliar mind of
the Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy 3.15),
to which alone is given the promise of infallibility. The holy apostles and
Fathers of the Church were unanimous in their understanding of the faith
because they were free from passion and trained in obedience to the Mind of
Christ as manifested in the Church. The Protestants, by contrast, have split
into a myriad of warring sects precisely because each individual Protestant is
permitted to understand the faith in his own way with no conciliar authority to
guide and correct him. They have made gods of their minds, with the result that
they have fallen into the abyss of idolatry. Thinking to see clearly with the
eye of their darkened consciences, they have fallen into a pit from which it is
very difficult to escape until they recognize their blindness. For, as the Lord
said: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your
whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will
be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how
great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6.22-23).
--Ibid.
In
the Light of the True Faith of the Holy Orthodox Church, the political
landscape would appear quite different to those living in the States. For their sake and for the sake of all the
peoples of the world who have been battered and bruised and bloodied because of
her arrogance, we hope they will ‘recognize their blindness.’
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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