My position is a weak one. But the question is: why?<\/p>\n
Paul is clear that \u201cthe foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men\u201d (1 Cor. 1:25). God works through the weak and the simple.<\/p>\n
That is, God preaches the cross.<\/p>\n
But preaching the cross sounds, of course, like a dodge. It\u2019s good cover for a position that is inherently weak. It\u2019s a good ploy to claim that a position\u2019s weakness is a mark of its own virtue. That kind of move is Rhetoric 101.<\/p>\n
On this account, Jesus\u2019 followers have to preach the cross because Jesus lost. They killed him. The Romans won and the empire, with hardly a hiccup, rolled on.<\/p>\n
More, it\u2019s impossible these days to read Paul\u2019s claim \u2014 that \u201cthe preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God\u201d (1 Cor. 1:18) \u2014 without immediately wincing at the thought of Nietzsche\u2019s rejoinder.<\/p>\n
For us, Paul\u2019s claim is unavoidably entwined with Nietzsche\u2019s often painfully accurate critique of Christianity as a tradition that casts people as victims, valorizes weakness, wallows in pity, and lives on resentment. Christian thinking that valorizes the weak is, Nietzsche claims, saturated with a \u201cslave morality.\u201d It\u2019s a system of thought built for slaves to keep them enslaved. Christianity isn\u2019t liberty, it\u2019s a self-serving justification for our lack of it. Christianity is smoke and mirrors deployed for the sake of either taking advantage or excusing it.<\/p>\n
Nietzsche\u2019s critique has bite. It\u2019s always tempting to just agree with him and retire from the field.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sympathetic to anyone who chooses to get off the bus at Nietzsche\u2019s stop. Bless you, I say, as I squirm in my own seat every time that same stop comes back around.<\/p>\n
But if I don\u2019t get off here, if I\u2019m convinced that Jesus and Paul have got hold of something crucial in their defense of weakness that Nietzsche doesn\u2019t see, then I\u2019m left with a dilemma.<\/p>\n
Granted that, on Jesus\u2019 own terms, our position is weak, the question is: why?<\/p>\n
If my position is weak and looks foolish and is hard to justify, is this because my position is weak and foolish and (by any reasonable standard) unjustifiable? If my position looks weak, doesn\u2019t it probably look weak because it is<\/em> baloney?<\/p>\n Or, if my position is weak and looks foolish and is hard to justify, is this because I\u2019m on the right track? Is this because I\u2019ve connected, in some small part, with what Jesus and Paul were themselves after?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s withhold judgment for a moment.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to let both these possibilities sit because, to be safe, self-deception should be my default assumption. Its undertow is strong. Decisions like these are ripe for self-deception.<\/p>\n If my position on Mormonism takes its own weakness as a virtue, then it is only fair that my honest working assumption should be that this position is, plain and simple, an act of self-deception. I\u2019m too scared or too comfortable or too privileged or too lazy or too invested to come clean and see the truth. Self-deceived, I adopt a slave morality and then rationalize like crazy from there.<\/p>\n Now, granted, this may well be true. Certainly, it\u2019s the simplest explanation. And, certainly, it\u2019s most soundly in keeping with what I know about myself: I am, myself, weak and afraid. I should have gotten off the bus with Nietzsche but didn\u2019t because I was chicken. And now I\u2019m tangled up in escalating feedback loops of dubious, pseudo-philosophical, paper-thin rationalization. The emperor has got no clothes.<\/p>\n This may well be true. Even likely.<\/p>\n In fact, it may well be true because it feels <\/em>false (even to me) to think that, of the two options, my position is weak because that weakness is (surprise!) actually<\/em> a virtue in disguise.<\/p>\n It\u2019s too convenient by half. It smells like dead fish.<\/p>\n But still.<\/p>\n Still.<\/p>\n If I sit still and I\u2019m really<\/em> trying to be honest, I would also have to say that it would feel even more <\/em>false to deny that something bigger than me, something truer than me, something better than me, is at work here in all this Mormon weakness: in all this Jello, all these manuals, all this hypocrisy, all this self-congratulation, all this politics, all this confusion, all these pews, all these meetings, all these visits, all these faith promoting rumors, all these bureaucracies, all these failures, all these scriptures.<\/p>\n At least in my case, denying this weakness, denying that this weakness is in fact exactly what Paul claims that it is \u2014 the power of God made manifest \u2014 smells even fishier. Denying it\u00a0would be even less honest.<\/p>\n The smell of self-deception is, while pungent in the first case, even stronger in the second.<\/p>\n At least in my case \u2014 and you, without exception, must think and act and speak for yourselves and in your own names when weighing this in your own hearts \u2014 self-deception is an ever greater risk\u00a0were I to deny what has, to redemptive effect, repeatedly shown itself to me in all this Mormon weakness. I know what I’ve seen. And I know God knows what I’ve seen.<\/p>\n In my case, denying that God is at work in this Mormon weakness would itself be too easy. Too convenient. Too simple. It would itself be an act of self-deception.<\/p>\n No decision about this will be simple. No decision will be clean. You risk various measures of self-deception either way. But a decision still has to be made. And responsibility for the consequences of this decision, with all of its foreseen and unforeseen costs and rewards, will have to be borne. And you won\u2019t bear the costs alone.<\/p>\n Is my\u00a0decision unjustifiable? Yes. But the other seems even more so.<\/p>\n I love Nietzsche and I wave and smile whenever I see him. He has a beautiful mustache. And each time I see him, I fidget in my seat and worry that he\u2019s right and that I\u2019m just deceiving myself. And each time I see him, I admit that he may well be.<\/p>\n But, in the end, for my part, it\u2019s the pressing likelihood of even deeper kind of self-deception that keeps me on the bus.<\/p>\n I don’t stay because I’m oblivious to self-deception. I stay because I’m keenly tuned to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My position is a weak one. But the question is: why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31932"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31939,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31932\/revisions\/31939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}