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Tuesday, July 14, 2020

The Text-Idol in Religion and Politics

Justice Thomas makes some statements in his opinion in Chiafalo v Washington that reveal something about the nature of Americanism.  While he agrees with the judgment of the majority, that State legislatures do have the ability to tell presidential electors how they must vote, he nonetheless critiques the justification underlying their ruling.  A big part of that critique is their straining the words of the text of the uS Constitution to arrive at their conclusion.  He says,

The Court appears to misinterpret Article II, §1, by overreading its language as authorizing the broad power to impose and enforce substantive conditions on ap­pointment.

 . . . the Court’s attempt to root its analysis in Article II,§1, seems to stretch the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text.

 . . . Thus, even accepting the Court’s strained reading of Article II, §1’s text, I cannot agree with the Court’s effort to reconcile Washington’s law with its desired theory.

In short, the Constitution does not speak to States’ power to require Presidential electors to vote for the candidates chosen by the people. The Court’s attempt to ground such a power in Article II’s text falls short. Rather than contort the language of both Article II and the state statute, I would acknowledge that the Constitution simply says nothing about the States’ power in this regard.

It is here that we confront the reality of what Americanism is:  It is the incarnation of Radical Protestant Reformation theology in the sphere of politics.  The fetish of these Protestants for the written word of the Bible gives birth to a similar obsession with the written text of political constitutions.  Word-by-word exegesis/analysis/examination of the religious and political texts is crucial for them.  This same over-heated zeal for ‘textualism’ that so irks Mr Justice Thomas is what is on display by the majority in Chiafalo (and also in the Bostock ruling).

Americanism is, therefore, not the Golden Key that unlocks the secrets to good government that have been hidden from mankind during all the days of his sojourn on the earth.  It is simply the form of government that conforms to the temperament of a certain sect of Protestantism.

And as the low-church Protestant approach to the Bible is not the correct approach, we must likewise question its approach to political law.  The Orthodox priest Fr John Whiteford says of the former,

A key question to consider at the beginning here is whether Protestants discovered an approach to Scripture, beginning in the 17th century, which is essential to properly understanding the Scriptures? If this were true, that would mean that for most of Church history, people were not really able to to properly understand the Scriptures. And that is an assumption which no right-believing Orthodox Christian could possibly accept.

When speaking about Protestants in general, it is necessary to make generalizations that are not going to be true to the same extent in every case, but generally modern Protestant biblical scholarship attempts to do the same thing with interpreting Scripture that Protestants attempt to do with Church history. They assume the Church became corrupt over the course of its history, and so it is necessary to leapfrog over the centuries and reestablish (more or less) the early Church. When it it comes to interpreting the Bible, they argue that we have to make that same leap, and get back to the understanding that prevailed when the Scriptures were written, in order to properly understand them. But the problem is, absent a time machine, we can only go back to the first century, in a sense, via the living Tradition that connects us with that time and with the apostles and saints of that time.

How do we know what St. John meant in his Gospel? We of course start with the text, but we then look to those whom he taught, and then to the Church as whole which received his teachings, and preserved them. We do not believe that the connection we have with St. John and the preservation of his teachings is either tenuous, or only partially reliable -- we believe the Church to be an infallible guide to what St. John meant.

Protestant scholars approach the Gospel of John like a crime scene investigation, or an archaeological dig, where they have to piece together fragmentary evidence, and then try to put together some sort of a plausible hypothesis about what to make of it. This, however, would only be true, if the Scriptures were not really the inspired word of God, and if the Church was not really the pillar and ground of the Truth. The Church understands the Scriptures because it knows the authors, and it is guided by the ultimate author of the Scriptures -- the Holy Spirit.

We also have to understand that Protestant methods are not neutral "technologies." They are methods that come with theological assumptions... assumptions which we generally do not share. If they were neutral technologies we should expect to see consistent results from their use, but in fact what we see is that they are used to produce speculative and subjective scholarship that is all over the map -- the likes of which would make the most speculative Freudian psychoanalysts blush, and shame the worst Gnostics the Church has ever encountered in its history.

--'Orthodox Biblical Interpretation and Protestant Biblical Scholarship’, http://orthochristian.com/116449.html

Do you see how the Protestants view the Holy Scriptures?  For them, they are like a lump of lifeless matter, like a stiff, dead body, to be examined, dissected, and broken down into their constituent elements with the chemist’s and coroner’s tools of steel cutting blades, tubes and flasks of glass, and burning solvents.  Likewise, Protestants view political law as a rigid, unbending corpse that must be scrutinized ever so meticulously in order to be rightly understood and followed.  Yet neither conforms to the views and practices of Orthodox Christians throughout history.  The Orthodox remember, to paraphrase the Lord Jesus, that law was made for man, not man for the law.  Orthodox kings have at times put aside the cold letter of the political law in order to show mercy to criminals, and Orthodox bishops have the authority to bend canon law when situations require it.

The American/Protestant view of law reminds one of what the Lord says in His denunciation of the scribes, etc.:

[23] Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment [i.e., justice], mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
[24] Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

--Gospel according to St Matthew 23:23-4.

Southerners have for too long been captive to the American view of law.  But there is another, older strand of thought here at the South that is more in keeping with the Orthodox view, which sees law as an organic historical development, a body of traditions that is quick and warm and to which we owe some paternal devotion and love, not merely the scientist’s stone-hearted, disinterested, detached glare.  It is a view akin to what the Holy Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians:

[2] Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men:
[3] Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

--II Corinthians 3:2, 3.

It is this older view that will help the South avoid the excesses decried by Justice Thomas when deciding questions about political laws; and by the Lord Jesus in questions concerning religious laws.

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For those who are interested, this is a good podcast covering the errors of sola Scriptura:

https://jaysanalysis.com/2020/07/10/the-orthodox-view-of-scripture/

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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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