Category: Theology

2.) All social orders must have transcendence in order to operate. They can choose either from a transcendent, transcendent (the God of the Bible) or they can create an immanent transcendent. Of course, an immanent transcendent is a contradiction but when a transcendent, transcendent is rejected then something must serve in its place. What happens with an immanent transcendent is that something subjective (usually the State as seen in history) is inflated with a pseudo objective transcendence so as to become that reality against which all other realities find their point of reference in order to find definition.  When this happens the social order, as a whole is in transgression against the first commandment.

3.) Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of this in history occurred during the Soviet Show Trials of the 1930s. In that setting Stalin put on trial Communists who had been with Lenin during the success of revolutionary Marxism. They were the old lions of the revolution; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and  Radek. These men went into the kangaroo court show trial where their guilt was predetermined. Though innocent, they pled guilty to the charges of treason brought against them. Now, many have offered that the false admission of guilt was due to threats against family members of the accused by Stalin. However, the accused knew that Stalin was no man to keep his word. No, their admission of guilt was because they believed the State was God (the transcendent, transcendent). They had based their whole lives as revolutionaries upon the premise that the State was God. Now, the State (their God) was insisting they were guilty and being true believers they confessed to the guilt that their God said was theirs. If your God says your guilty, you are guilty whether you think you are or not.

4.) In this phrase “because being and meaning are both identifiable in terms of the state,” means that if and when the state becomes a social order’s transcendent, transcendent then the state becomes the arbiter of being and meaning. If you are a chameleon, then whatever color you are placed in as a background becomes the standard by which you know what color to turn to. In the same way when men make the state the transcendent, transcendent they play the chameleon to the state. All being and meaning are determined for the individual in the social order by the state in its metaphorical coloring.

5.) All of this is why Socrates chose to drink the hemlock as opposed to be banished by the state. Death was a better choice then to lose one’s being by being banished from one’s meaning maker.

6.) When this kind of situation obtains then reality becomes increasingly inverted. As Rush notes above, Liberty becomes tyranny and tyranny becomes liberty. We are seeing this in our culture. Reality is being set on its head. Men are women, and women are men. Marriage has no stable meaning and can include all kinds of permutations. Theft by taxation is called “paying your fair share.”

7.) Touching this statement by RJR; “it (the state) becomes the priestly agency of its own total power,” communicates that the tyrannical state playing the transcendent, transcendent not only will claim the authority of “King,” but also will exercise the power of “Priest.” This means that the state will mediate its own “salvation” to those living in the social order. Now, because everything is upside down in tyrannical orders as described this means that what is called “salvation,” will indeed be “destruction.” For example, playing the role of Priest, mediating salvation, the current tyrannical state in the West as said; “in order to be saved we need to import millions of third world people into our lands. This will give us more cheap labor.” However, in the mediation of this salvation, the West is being destroyed. Bureaucrats who work for the state often play this role of priest for the state.

8.) All this proves that a God or god concept is inescapable. All this proves that Atheism is a myth. All men take either the God of the Bible as God or they embrace a false god. There is no such thing as someone or some culture who.which has no god.

9.) When RJR uses this phrase; “salvation is a metaphysical unification of all being,”  Rush is talking about humanist salvations. Humanist salvations require uniformity of all. This is due to the fact that all godheads must have unity. If the state is the god in the social order then all in the social order must be one with the god of the social order. Unification of all being is necessary. This truth explains why Rome persecuted the Christians who would not pinch incense to Caesar. In their refusal to pinch incense to Caesar they were committing treason inasmuch as that refusal was a denial of the metaphysical unification of all being.

 Preface;

The below piece is by Dr. Winston McCuen. He asked me to post this. I post it as a thought piece for my readers. There may well be matters in this essay that I would have phrased differently. There are questions of clarification that I would ask Dr. McCuen. However, I thought the piece to be a quite valued essay that could provoke thoughtful interaction.

Also, Dr. McCuen has added great value to Iron Ink with his often brilliant comments as supported by a rich treasury of quotations from sources that most people aren’t exposed. Agree or disagree with Dr. McCuen I consider him brilliant, as I do many of those who I am privileged to call “friend.”

Dr. McCuen also lives in a state (South Carolina) that I was privileged to reside in for 11 very formative years. I almost always sense a bond with people I meet who are from South Carolina.

Without then, further ado, I give you Dr. McCuen exploring the causation of the Fall.

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A Reformed Christian, Leibniz lived and wrote a century and a half after John Calvin, and being very learned and very well-read, would certainly have imbibed the Frenchman’s Institutes and been acquainted with its central points.  And arguably the most salient teaching of that work was Calvin’s moral and metaphysical insight that true wisdom for man can come only from man’s coming to know himself by honest and humbling comparison with the one and only true (Triune) God.

By suggestion and by implication, then, Calvin argued, and Leibniz later agreed, that the ancient Greek exhortation to “Know thyself” (gnothi seauton) can be fulfilled only by orthodox Christian faith and by recourse to Christian revelation about the nature of God and man.  And from that revelation we find that the great differences between man and God are both moral and metaphysical. 

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These two types of being, man and God, creature and Creator, are profoundly different in their ontic natures and yet lovingly connected by the Creator.  And certainly, one of the most obvious and salient aspects of man’s “aboriginal imperfection and weakness” is man’s finitude of both body and spirit, as compared with infinite and omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent God, in His three Persons. 

Finite man, in his freedom of will under God’s sovereign will, is at liberty by God’s predestinating decrees to focus on self instead of on God; and, as we shall see, it was precisely by and on this narrow avenue of mental focus, endemic to man, that man initiated his sinful self-separation from God.  Infinite God, in contrast, is able to “focus” on or see completely and through all things, including Himself and all of His creation, all at once, in a manner therefore far beyond finite man’s ability to comprehend.

Finite Eve, the weaker vessel, was beguiled by the Serpent, the fallen and evil archangel Satan in disguise, and then finite Adam, because of his natural affections for his specially-created mate and helper, and by his natural or endemic limits of thought and attention and focus, inclined toward joining her in the sinful partaking of the forbidden fruit.  And, because of his priority in creation and headship over Eve, and because of his headship over the rest of creation — excluding the angels, who were created by God as His messengers to man — all creation fell and was corrupted upon Adam’s sinful and disobedient partaking of the fruit, and death entered into the world.  

Infinite God created a vast (to man) but ultimately limited creation consisting of finite things.  

By a deep mystery far beyond the comprehension of limited or finite man, God created creation ex nihilo, or out of nothing; that is, from no pre-existing materials — unlike, for example, Plato’s demiurge in his creation dialogue Timaeus.  The Christian metaphysician Leibniz explains in detail in his Theodicy and elsewhere how created things are necessarily finite and not infinite things.  

But created man, because of his very finitude, is not merely limited in his focus and attention and range of vision, both physical and mental, but is also radically limited in his capacity to receive the things of God.  This limited receptivity, or limited ability to receive or to take in all manner of good things from a perfectly good and great God, combined with his limited focus, are, again, anthropological-metaphysical conditions that made possible Adam’s turning away from God and toward self and the forbidden fruit. 

Man before the Fall cannot be justly and accurately charged with sinful pride, since the corruption of pride (or any other corruption) did not yet exist in man.  Man can however be “charged” with limited mental and physical vision and focus.  But to so charge him would be to sinfully condemn him for possessing a nature that God Himself had declared “very good.”  Man’s original nature was therefore pure or uncorrupted yet susceptible to fall by its finitude, and the Fall occurred by man’s free but errant willing.

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Following Leibniz, we agree that the world that God, the only perfect Being, created is the best of all possible worlds.  Being perfectly good and perfectly great, God freely chose to create the best of all possible creations. And the world or creation He created consists of necessarily finite or limited things, including finite and limited man at its center.  And the ultimate purpose for which God created was for His own glory, and not for the sake of all or of any part of creation, including man.  And this last point is one that fallen and self-centered man tends to forget, just as man forgets, as the Westminster Standards remind us, that the first aim of created man is to glorify God. But man after Adam, again by his limited focus, seeing only his origin from proximate parents, becomes forgetful of his first parents and of their direct and divine creation.

Before creation, before the beginning of the world, God fore-decreed or fore-ordained and therefore of necessity fore-knew how all would proceed in creation, from its beginning until eternity-after, when the reprobate are in hell-everlasting separated from the Lord and when the elect are in heaven-everlasting in joyful communion with the Lord.  

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In Eden, man’s finitude did not lead to sin and Fall so long as man committed no covenant-breaking act of will.  But direct violation of the express command of the Lord by Adam led to the Fall into corruption and to man’s self-inflicted alienation and estrangement from God. 

Near the end of his Theodicy, in a striking and brilliant passage, Leibniz says:  “…among older writers the fall of Adam was termed felix culpa, a fortunate sin, because it had been expiated with immense benefit by the incarnation of the Son of God:  for He gave to the universe something more noble than anything there would otherwise have been amongst created beings.”  So, without the Fall, there would be no glory for God as Savior and Redeemer.  But in this best possible world, as fore-chosen and created by Perfect God, there is. 

And so God, having created man, knows all that is to be known about man’s good, and about all other things.  But because of his finitude and imperfection, man, in Eden before the Fall, was able to mistake what was truly good for himself, and for his helpmate.

As the philosopher Rousseau (1712-1778), following his master Plato (424BC?-347BC?), notes in his Social Contract, all men, including vicious men, want what they consider to be good, but all men do not know what is truly good.  Seeing that Eve his helpmate had transgressed, Adam joined her in sin and precipitated thereby the systemic corruption of all of nature, including himself.  Had Adam refrained from sinning, after Eve’s transgression, no Fall would have occurred at that point.  But in the physical presence of Eve, and out of immediate proximity to God, Adam sinned. 

Again, in Theodicy, Leibniz illumines deeper truth:  “There is always a prevailing reason which prompts the will to its choice. … The will is never prompted to action save by the representation of the good, which prevails over the opposite representations.” So infinite and perfect God, in His willing, adheres always to what is truly good, and indeed, to what is best.  But finite and imperfect man, according to the grace God dispenses to the particular man, wills either what is truly good or what merely appears to him good. 

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For centuries, before Calvin and Leibniz, Christian theologians had struggled to explain the Fall.  Calvin, in the Institutes, in his brilliant and systematic and definitive discussion of the Biblical doctrines of election and reprobation, grapples with the difficult and recondite subject of the ultimate and proximate causes of the Fall. 

A century and a half later, Leibniz, influenced by Calvin, Plato and others, introduced metaphysical concepts and categories like finitude and infinitude to explain the Fall.  Specifically, Leibniz employed the Platonic insight that evil is privation, or the absence of being, and inferred from that that finitude, being by definition existence that is limited, involves an absence of being or dearth by which moral evil may enter into the created world (but not, significantly, into the infinite God).  

By creating a world of finite existents or beings, the Lord, to His glory, could derive or draw evil out of good, and then He could, by further interwoven pre-designing that far-surpasses human understanding, generate a good (the best possible world with its best possible outcomes) out of that evil.  Well-versed in Scripture and in the Western philosophical tradition, including the Scholastics, Leibniz supplied the critical metaphysical categories and insights to give definitive explanation, so far perhaps as human capacity allows, into the central proximate cause of the Fall, with the ultimate cause being God’s pleasure.  

Metaphysical evil is lack of being, and lack of being is the root cause of moral evil.  God is pure act, and man is a combination of act and potency or potential.  But God, in this world, according to His plan, allows some potency to be thwarted away from healthy and full actualization, as in the Parable of the Sower, where grain seed falls on hard ground. 

Calvin and Leibniz agreed that depth and clarity and accuracy about the causes of the Fall, to the extent humanly possible, are essential to undergirding Christian orthodoxy and to combatting heresy.  Being pious and faithful men, the overarching object of their theological and philosophical inquiries was to fulfill their duty, using the prodigious and extraordinary gifts they were given, to give all glory to God. 

When we reflect on God’s Providence as His Plan for this, the best possible creation, we see that without human finitude and the consequent Fall of man, there would have been no need of a Savior and Redeemer for His elect.  Without this best possible creation and best possible world, the glory to God would have been less. But God, being perfect, and encompassing all perfections, created that particular creation and world that, most befittingly, would give Him the most glory. So let impious men with their benighted and puny minds sinfully dispute with the perfect Triune and with His true followers and cavil as they will, and then let them consider how all their wicked impiety was, from before the beginning of the world,  made by Him a part of His perfect and best plan.

Dr. Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of Bill and Anne McCuen.