Is the combat against Egalitarianism a matter of battling against a doctrine that affects salvation? Is the battle against Egalitarianism a battle waged in favor of a doctrine of the first order?
Egalitarianism is Christological heresy since if there is no distinctions among peoples as peoples the necessity for Christ to be born of the line of David, of the tribe of Judah is implicitly denied. Egalitarianism would have to say it didn’t matter what people Jesus belonged.
Egalitarianism is theological heresy because in the claim that all men are the same is the eventual inescapable outcome that man and God are likewise the same.
Egalitarianism is anthropological heresy since it denies the distinctions that God Himself makes between men and women and as between the nations.
Egalitarianism is soteriological heresy since implicit in the claim that all men are equal is the parallel claim that all men can be equally saved by other gods equal to Christ. Show me a consistent egalitarian and I’ll show you a universalist.
Allow me to posit that an Egalitarian who refuses to repent of his Egalitarianism can no more be saved than an Arian who refuses to repent of his Arianism, or can no more be saved than someone who refuse to repent of his insistence that we are not saved by Christ alone. Opposition to Egalitarianism is opposition to a teaching that, if allowed in the Church, would abominate the Church.
Great article
Thank you Don!
Good to hear from you. I trust all is well.
Blessings,
Bret
Egalitarianism is also, as various anti-modern thinkers have noted, a NIHILISTIC doctrine. “Everything is equally meaningless” is the ultimate levelling position it finally reaches, if it only dares to think logically.
As Benjamin Wiker put it:
https://archive.org/details/worshippingstate0000wike/page/192/mode/2up?view=theater
“All these reductionist views, including even the seemingly anti-democratic ones, such as Nietzsche’s, have a leveling effect. They destroy any natural hierarchy, undermine any notion that there is anything better or worse than anything else in our purposeless cosmos. All these views are therefore helpful to liberalism as tending to level any standard or limit that might infringe on our “right” to pursue any end we desire. Liberalism thus embraces a version of democracy, a notion of equality, that ultimately rests on nihilism. All notions of intrinsic order or nobility that would define and limit the human will are considered to be tyrannical, dismissed as hypocritical masks for self-interest. At bottom, there is nothing but the self-interested will.”
And more specifically, this sort of sinister egalitarianism was an inherent part of the materialistic pantheism of Baruch Spinoza, who played a very big part in launching the radical Enlightenment movement with his worldview of atheistic determinism:
https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.2093/page/n59/mode/2up?view=theater
“We freeze when we read in his ‘Ethics’ that nothing could be or should be different from what it is; that all things are equally perfect, all actions equally good, because all are equally necessary, even as no mathematical theorem is more perfect than another.”
And it was this egalitarian nihilism that startled the readers of Spinoza from the very beginning:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=Mau9wgEACAAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA231#v=onepage&q&f=false
“One tract stressing the huge impact of “philosophy” on Denmark, En Grønlaenders Beskrivelse over Kiøbenhavn [A Greenlander’s Description of Copenhagen, 1771], is strikingly mild in condemning the unbelievers in Copenhagen who had “torn themselves from and denied all religion,” convinced the world has existed as it is since all eternity. These, explains this anonymous text, adopt as their hero a certain Dutch Jew called Spinoza who, in a thick, tedious book of metaphysical Latin, attempts to “prove all of nature is only one substance and that all Nature’s parts are only just so many modifications of it, so that all that one sees in the whole of nature, is equally as divine, as royal, as grand, so that the writer and his pen are equally important, both just modifications of nature’s whole.”83”
And Gary North observed that this egalitarian nihilism was an inherent part of Marxist worldview as well – all natural phenomena being ultimately equally meaningless:
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/pdf/marx_religion_of_revolution.pdf
“With Engels we find some of these themes made explicit. His discussion of the eternal cycle of matter is illuminating. Matter, he wrote, is in eternal motion, “a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter … is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes.”165”
The conservative British poet Sir Richard Blackmore satirized Spinozist pantheism, and its levelling, egalitarian implications, in this manner:
https://archive.org/details/poeticalworkscon00blacuoft/page/96/mode/2up?view=theater
“The Spheres of ether, which the world enclose,
And all th’ apartments, which the whole compose;
The lucid orbs, the earth, the air, the main,
With every diff’rent being they contain.
Are one prodigious aggregated God,
Of whom each sand is part, each stone and clod!
Supreme perfections in each insect shine,
Each shrub is sacred, and each weed divine.
Sages, no longer Egypt’s sons despise,
For their cheap God, and savoury deities!
No more their coarse divinities revile!
To leeks, to onions, to the crocodile,
You might your humble adorations pay,
Were you not Gods yourselves, as well as they.”
Truly, Spinoza was a great prophet of “the god of this world,” literally so, for in his doctrine the world WAS God, “Deus sive natura.”
Wiker again:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=U5DmAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false
“God isn’t above creation or above history; he IS creation, he IS history. In direct contrast to Christianity, an immaterial God never became flesh. For Spinoza, all flesh (that is, all matter) always was and is God.
The implications of Spinoza’s pantheism are far-reaching. First of all, Spinoza collapsed creator and creature, destroying the essential distinction introduced at the very beginning of the Bible. Pantheism makes a god of this world and thus completely undermines the entire Judeo-Christian understanding of reality that flows from the creator-creature distinction in Genesis. Removing that creator-creature distinction allows for a reintroduction of pagan animism and idolatry, the worship of the divine in creatures. Spinoza’s “monism” was a radical rejection of the First Commandment.”
And C.S. Lewis for his part noted:
https://www.basicincome.com/bp/pantheismcertainlyis.htm
“Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the orenda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an “all-pervasive spirit.” It is immemorial in India. The Greeks rose above it only at their peak, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle; their successors relapsed into the great Pantheistic system of the Stoics. Modern Europe escaped it only while she remained predominantly Christian; with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza it returned.”