Don’t be self-indulgent and allow yourself to operate like a six-year-old.
When I describe the stages of human moral development, I’m offering a frame of reference. It’s a working model of how things tend to go. So when I say a child of six is a true believer in the social rules she has learned, that does not keep her from reverting to a previous stage of moral development. She might still be defiant, but in her better moments, it will drive her nuts when some adult contradicts her simplistic definition of reality.
That variability in personal resolve is part of the Fall. It’s why so very many adults cannot spend much time operating at an adult stage of moral development. Some never get there in the first place.
In The Road Less Traveled, Dr. Scott Peck referred to four stages of human moral development. They are connected to cognitive development, but don’t track precisely. So at age 5, kids begin modeling outside the family circle, but it takes another year to fully develop the capacity for embracing social convention. Those two stages on different scales are related, but it’s not always precisely correlated. Our discussion of human development is a series of interconnected models, useful for academic discussion, but not a full reflection of reality. Human nature is simply too complex and variable.
That is as it should be, in a certain sense. Our expectations and program for moving forward in this life must reflect that variability. The single greatest flaw in any planning is not making room for natural variations. You can find a wealth of examples in government policies. Uniformity is cheap and easy, but real humans are a train-load of work. Simply mandating a set of subcategories into which humans are then slotted is not kindness; it’s just an excuse to enlarge the bureaucracy. The underlying mistake is aiming at some particular outcome. Having an objective is inherently evil because of how it forces procedure to deny humanity.
God says the fundamental goal of human government will always be social stability. It’s not an achievement, but a never-ending chore. It’s all about the process. Lord knows, you’ll hear the phrase often enough from apparatchiks, but it’s an Orwellian abuse of language. The whole point of the Law Covenants is providing a particular atmosphere, a context in which God can show His glory. Attempts to restrict His glory by ignoring His guidance is the primary reason human governments don’t last very long.
One of the biggest failures of Western Christianity is assuming the church is not a human organization. They want so very much to have Heaven on Earth — a blasphemous and filthy desire in itself — that they insist the visible organization must be considered special. God said He had two witnesses on the earth: ritual worship and social regulation. He characterized it as priest and king. No part of this is reflected very well in Western history, because our definitions of the terms are radically wrong. Church as a human activity is a form of government in the sense it is tasked with upholding an atmosphere in which God is glorified. Priest and king were supposed to work together; church and state are inseparable in God’s eyes.
That doesn’t mean one should have priority over the other. The two are regarded as separate sources providing the means to God’s glory. They must play nicely together in their own division of labor. In Western Civilization, it’s not possible. In Western minds, the fundamental definitions of each demands that one must dominate, with each serving their own different god. What no one wants to hear is that the god of the West has always been Satan in one form or another. That is, the god of the state is the state, and the god of Western Christianity is nothing like the God of the Bible. The Pharisees and Judaizers won, and the Western church serves a false god in the sense of having defined Jehovah in utterly false terms.
And only in a silly Western mind does that mean we must fight those institutions.
Let’s try a lesser example: If I tell you Microsoft is evil, that doesn’t mean you sin by running Windows on your computer. So if I tell you the US government is evil, you still need to observe the New Testament pattern of trying to avoid conflict with whatever government asserts worldly authority. King David did plenty of stupid stuff, too, so even those regimes that are held up as models of moral probity will never be Heaven on earth.
Tension and imperfections are the nature of this world. Get used to it. Demanding things get all nice and sweet for more than a few moments at a time is where we get stoners and mass murderers.
The biggest mistake is simplistic absolutism as a guide to how we operate in this world.
