Unintended Confirmations

One of our fundamental teachings here is that God’s character pervades the whole universe. Regardless of apparent facts, you won’t really begin to understand reality until you characterize it on some level as a living thing itself. On some level, reality itself is dynamic, and any perceived entropy is the result of moral blindness.

While human morality is going downhill as we approach the end point of God’s patience, you might be surprised to find that virtually nothing that shocks the conscience today is all that new. There is abundant evidence on a mere human level of understanding that this stuff ebbs and flows and is often simply hidden from popular perception. So we end up having to discard our notions about just what it is that will trigger the final judgment of our Creator, recognizing that it’s nothing you and I could possibly understand. What the Bible does reveal are symptoms of decline. The cause is something more fundamental and less overt, something which reason alone is simply not sufficient to discern. Human depravity is not exactly cyclical in itself, but it’s more a matter of what we notice.

Thus, John’s book of Revelation is not actually about events, but fundamentally about types and trends.

There are distinct boundaries written into human nature, just as they are in the rest of Creation. There are any number of myths about how far Creation can be adapted by human intelligence, as well as myths about how concerted effort could eventually change human nature itself. We are both the pinnacle of Creation and very much a part of it. Fundamental to our fallen nature is rejecting the Fall. So you’ll run across any number of reasonable-sounding theories about where the human race could go if only we make a few adjustments. But that’s been tried and failed repeatedly in history. A primary example is the Tower of Babylon.

Not as proof, but we cite such things as symbolic examples that illustrate the truth. Truth becomes self-evident if your heart can make itself heard over the programmed cacophony of fallen human imagination. We see it in recent history and we can see it at work today on multiple scales.

If you read much at all about Scientology, never mind whether there is any truth in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and related theoretical work, you realize that the organization currently has hit the wall. Efforts to control and regiment in minute detail all outcomes is unraveling. Statistics are hard to pin down because of organizational secrecy, but one gets the impression there are growing waves of defection and the membership numbers are suffering. The income streams are threatened by the church’s inability to avoid negative publicity. Whether or not it’s about the money might be subject to debate, but there’s no doubt the organization as we know it would cease to exist without the vast property holdings.

Indeed, many defectors argue that the real power of Hubbard’s teachings are buried behind the courtship of celebrities and relentless doctrinaire pushing of failed projects. That a significant portion of the membership is unaware of the inner workings is manifestly obvious. My point is that the organization as a human entity has reached the failure point in part because it ignores the limits of human tolerance, both among members and outsiders.

You might have noticed their lawyers aren’t fighting nearly as hard today as they have in the past. There was a time they were able to intimidate the IRS into making a deal over their tax exempt status, but these days they seem unable to sustain the protracted avalanche of legal pressure against even small private organizations, not to mention local and state governments.

Lots of cults have come and gone during my lifetime. We’ve already seen the rise of numerous major splits and splinter groups in mainstream religious institutions, as well. Some of you may remember the Anglican Church not long ago shifted official policies about ordination and lost whole congregations, and rival hierarchy offices that undercut the old geographical structures with parallel identities. The traditional leadership offices are losing their claim on legitimacy. The older organization was already in steep decline, but the splinter groups are often quite active and growing. This is one step away from total separation, and the euphemism for this is Anglican Realignment.

Historically we recognize the Anglican Church as the first successful organizational departure from the Roman Catholic Church. That is, Anglicans were “protestant” only in being out from under the Roman Pontiff, but otherwise hardly that different in terms of how things are done. Of course, over the centuries the two have drifted farther apart. Meanwhile, the Roman Church still suffers from splintering. Ignoring protests from any significant identifiable minority, or simply failing to accommodate them, guarantees schism, regardless of whether one considers them justified. Today in Brazil a significant splinter group of bishops and priests are demanding a return to conditions prior to Vatican II. They are partly reviving a previous splintering that claimed the name of Pope Pius X; their current label is “The Resistance.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we have any number of notorious American Catholic nuns demanding even more liberal reforms. One has to wonder just how little it would take for a complete split of American styled Catholicism from the Roman hierarchy, with so very much passive resistance to the ancient traditions already boiling beneath the surface. This stands against the background of a very shaky federal grasp on the states and any number of rising resistance movements.

In each case, you could as a member of the organization pretend that there is something sacred at work, that God is on one side of the debate or another. You could insist that any failures are simply the work of the Devil. Try to convince outsiders if you can, but you’ll likely run into a skepticism and even cynicism that you are lying, that it’s mere propaganda.

From a secular point of view, it would be very easy to get lost in analyzing all the details. We can’t predict the point of failure until we get much closer to it, when the people involved finally decide they can’t go any farther. That’s my whole point here: When leadership refuses to recognize that people have hard-wired limitations in their adaptation to demands from the system, the system will surely dissolve. When it does, internal pressures can be sufficient to cause explosions of some sort.

And to what do people turn as their instinctive safety net when all Hell breaks loose? It’s always some form of tribalism. That simply demonstrates how we are wired. But if you embrace that truth and go back to discover God’s revealed form of human government, you’ll find that no shepherd-led social structure ever fell apart.

It’s not that we are any better. Our only claim is that we never expected much in the first place. When any human activity starts down the path of organization, there is a fundamental moral fabric at work that you cannot ignore. Ignore that and your efforts are doomed. Embrace that and you at least won’t have to worry about internal failure. There are plenty of organizations in this world I consider evil to varying degrees, but they persist purely on the grounds that they remain tribal in structure.

Humanity continually confirms the Word of God, despite itself.