Manhood: More on Boundaries

We try to bring the lies of this world into the light and examine them as lies. This is no small task. Our society doesn’t simply make competing claims, but spitefully drowns out alternative ideas.

Worse, it is hardly monolithic. There is nothing wrong with using the tools of social science — based entirely on the academic concept of justified generalizations — to deal with common elements of our daily experiences. However, you can’t really make good use of those generalizations until you recognize their limits. As you struggle toward the redemption of God’s personal revelation of Himself to you, everyone you encounter will naturally offer some measure of resistance to your struggle. You should never completely trust any one, not even the guy in the mirror. Just so, don’t rely on everything I write as your guide. See through my humanity, too. Truth is not objective, but the Person of God; your experience will be unique to you.

This is the reason I emphasize you knowing your own domain. God as Sovereign grants to you a unique calling and authority to act in His name. You are accountable to Him and no one else. It may be hard to discern from how I write at times, but I don’t hold you accountable to my ideas and my teaching. I spill all these words in an effort to help you look past me to see God alone. But I can easily point to others who write such words and mean something entirely different. Chances are you can discern that at some point in your journey. I can’t count how often I’ve encountered folks who use that kind of language but still assume I cannot depart much different from their own brand of spirituality without entering in their minds the territory they label as “unchristian.” Thus, they kept hammering me to conform to their narrow vision.

The secular world does something similar. You’ll get all this blather about being a unique individual, but you damn sure better conform to their vision of uniqueness and not depart from their imaginary boundaries. There is no place in Western social mythology for a direct encounter with God Almighty (or whatever some people imagine performs the function of deity). Everyone has to bow before some priesthood or another. Even the language of “priesthood of the believer” excludes believers who don’t enter the correct priesthood. Radical individuality is always defined by someone somewhere who isn’t you. However they define it, at some level the community imagines it owns you — ranging between the local dominating official of whatever institution confronts you, all the way out the state and even global governments. There will always be some imaginary objective standard in their minds, and everything they say presumes you already accept that notion.

That’s the basis of shaming language. “You don’t want to be uncivilized, do you?” Substitute any number of manipulative terms for “uncivilized” and you get the picture — racist, homophobic, greedy, etc.

The best defense is: “Call it what you like, but I know what my God requires of me, and you aren’t Him.” You don’t have to know it in some imaginary final sense, only that you are certain of where His boundaries are for you at any given moment. You should assume boundaries will shift with the context. You should also realize that there is a lot of variation of things demanded of you that you can afford to surrender because they don’t actually deny the boundaries. God will tell you in that moment what matters to Him, and everything else is just a matter of exploiting the context to His glory.

Don’t let someone use their imaginary standard of consistency against you, either. This thing is alive. In a very real sense, what was right yesterday is wrong tomorrow. Right and wrong cannot be defined by human reason (ref. The Tree of Knowing Good and Evil), but by the character of a living God in the context. It is self-consistent on a higher level that human reason cannot handle. All you have to remember is that you see no inconsistency, and sorry about anyone else who rejects your faith.