Letter #168: Set Free for Freedom
Did he stutter?
Dad,
I’ve had a couple occasions recently to reread George Washington’s Farewell Address, a true classic of American political rhetoric. Apparently Hamilton helped him write it, but the nobility of sentiment is all Washington’s. And there’s a passage where he says something that maps pretty neatly onto everything we’ve been saying about the church and the individual.
The American form of government, says Washington, is “the offspring of our own choice.” The people entered into it with eyes wide open, after copious public dispute and at considerable cost. So the Constitution “has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty.”
This rebel warrior, who felt positively obligated to break England’s unjust rule, proceeded to insist on obedience to legitimate government. Not because he had changed his mind about the right of revolution, but because he believed the states had settled on the rules that could best protect and facilitate liberty. Breaking these rules would mean not exercising freedom but destroying its foundations.
In a similar vein, you write that we insist on God’s capacious mercy “not in spite of the Gospels and the Creed and the traditional rituals,” but “because of them.” I think this must be what it means that Christ “has set us free for freedom.” His life defined the parameters within which it became possible, knowing justice, to practice love. To warp those parameters in the name of love would be a contradiction in terms.
Leftists willfully and disastrously misunderstand this kind of reasoning when, for instance, they cite the suffering of impoverished refugees as reason to topple America’s borders—as if it were possible to benefit even the worthiest immigrants by dismantling the very country they seek to enter. But conservatives are prone to an inverse error: we sometimes forget that we love the laws because they guarantee our freedoms, not the other way around. If your obsession with the letter overrides your devotion to the spirit it upholds, the exercise becomes pointless.
Likewise I find it very suspicious when orthodoxy turns into an elaborate network of escape clauses for getting out of taking Jesus seriously on the subject of forgiveness. Recently on X I suggested that a mercy which extended to the very hands that nailed God’s to the cross might also, in fact, be on offer to Hunter Biden. I was assured that no indeed, Christ’s mercy for his tormentors extended only to those “who know not what they do,” whereas Hunter knew full well what he was up to.
In a pig’s eye. Love mounts the cross so as to fling His arms wide. There would be no point in doing so otherwise. Our insistence on footnoting this, his most dramatic and unambiguous gesture, flies in the face of everything he said again and again he meant to do. He didn’t hedge or stutter. Nor should we.
Love,
Spencer
DonkeyHotey, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
 | A guest post by
|
I have to admit, I'm a little lost on this. You provoked a response in the "X-sphere" by suggesting some kind of comparison of God's mercy with the mercy that was shown by the president to....Hunter Biden? Thereby placing President Biden in the role of....God? Certainly, God may have mercy on Hunter. Left to think it over for a minute, one must assume He will and hopes He does. But that was never the complaint about pardoning the first son. The complaint wasn't "show no mercy." The complaint was, "you and your party were merciless in trying to convict the former and now future president--and you claimed that he was a "liar." Well, in the midst of all of this, saying that Hunter was "improperly prosecuted" (he wasn't) and that he's a "victim" (he isn't)--is just a bigger lie, especially after the press fawning all over the president (and itself) when he said he would not pardon his son for the crimes for which he was convicted. Am I too far afield here?
I fully agree with the fact that God’s mercy and forgiveness is open to all who request it with a contrite heart. If there is anything clear in my mind, it is that God insists on our free will, no matter how much it may harm us, just as a parent allows the toddler to stumble and fall when learning to walk.
I was on Jury Duty on one occasion and several potential jurors got excused because of the admonition that they should not judge. As I have argued before, we have no say on whom God will forgive, and it is indeed none of our business, but holding someone accountable to civil or criminal misdeeds is another matter. The death penalty is a struggle for me, but in the terms of justice on this earth, I believe there are rare circumstances in which it may be applicable, but overall, I believe that there are too many uncertainties to use it under most cases. This is a break with the RCC’s teaching, but one on which I am willing to argue.
Many scholars note that sheltering in God’s wings mentioned often in the Psalms is a foreshadowing of Christ’s outstretched arms on the Cross, meant to encompass all who would have his mercy. Salvation is undeserved, but also not forced. Each must choose, and to not “choose poorly”.