Thomases and Henries

Maggie's Farm pointed to a new website, Idlepost, where I found this rumination on Henry II, Thomas à Becket, Henry VIII, and Sir Thomas More:
Let me be plainer. The Covenant is not a collectivist arrangement. It is actually the opposite of a collectivist arrangement, and was so from the beginning. The true Christian teaching stands in anticipation of, and opposition to, the ideals of that “Reformation,” which worked themselves out as a spiritual as well as contractual relation between the People and the State (exalted in “Americanism”). The Covenant is instead with persons, both vertically in their relations with God, and horizontally in their relations with each other: cor ad cor loquitur. To love God and to love thy neighbour: that is the whole teaching. Everything follows from that.

6 comments:

Grim said...

Good piece.

Eric Blair said...

But it's wrong. Amazingly so.

james said...

I like his site.

douglas said...

Have you time to expand on that, Mr. Blair? I'd be interested in hearing the expansion of that. It's well written, I'm not sure I'm totally with it, though.

Texan99 said...

The author has put his finger on the central conflict between freedom and obedience, and the problems it creates in people trying to work out how to live with each other's different views of the the obedience owed to God vs. temporal authorities. "Render unto Caesar" is a very difficult lesson, as is the tension between Christ the Lamb and Christ the Sword-wielder.

I've always been drawn to C.S. Lewis's view, that fallen man is to broken a vessel to hold safely too much power over his fellow creatures--which doesn't mean for an instant that our duties to God and each other are less than absolute, no matter how we might thirst to be free of them.

Eric Blair said...

First thing: the schism that split Christendom wasn't Protestants vs Catholics (and even there he gets that wrong, because Luther kicked that stuff off in AD1517, and Henry VIII didn't do his thing until 20 years later, and if he'd managed to properly bribe the pope, it wouldn't have happened at all) but rather it was the split between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Catholicism in AD1047.

Second: His redefinition of the old testament convenants is pretty much "It means what I want it to" not what it actually says.