Christian China as Benevolent China
November 25, 2009
I am increasingly taken by the madness of a Christian and communist China.
How would the two authorities coexist? The state and the church. The solution, perhaps, is an oath of office for church and state where it is affirmed that all people throughout the world are to be considered and treated as family. The church must be content to admonish all people to consider each other as family (and therefore, for example, to work hard) and to provide a conscience to the state, a public conscience. The church must be fundamentally Paulian in that there are absolutely no laws whatsoever except the law of neighborly and family love (for example homosexuality can be promoted as a control of population, if that is expedient (to use Paul’s word). The state of China must concur and dedicate itself to this world benefit by proving the power and success of a (now inspired) commune.
I think the Chinese could pull it off, make a success out of communism, which was always then correct except it was materialist. The Chinese could prove that Christianity is not an opiate by having the church be the spur and force in the work effort for Chinese and universal love. Perhaps China is not misnamed, and rather prophetic. Perhaps it is the center. And all it might take, I am wondering, is a good dose of Christian fervor and zeal, but cleansed of all the antique elements and brought totally up to date.
The Chinese might do what the West cannot, namely salvage the Christian religion (as Kant as been described) and make it the Moral Religion, one that is infused with spirit and expectation (and why it should be chosen over the Unitarian approach of cold rationality).
If the Chinese could pull this off then they would find great attraction throughout the world and much support. And the Americans would be dazed and perhaps awakened to the universal benefits of independent thinking with regard to Christianity, and where Paul might also be accepted as the measure of the modern Christian. I suppose the nearest we might expect would be a unity with the Roman Catholic where the entire teaching would focus on a communal salvation and it is left to the individual to seek personal salvation according to his conscience, and so where there would be no definition of morals, for there all people are equal (possessed of the same and single Moral Law). The church would derive its pronouncements from the moral law, and not from any other source.
I’m sure Kant would approve of all this. The church would be universally accepted as the voice of conscience (but not conscience itself) and would promote moral conduct, e.g., doing one’s duty to the neighborhood or family. It will strengthen this moral goal by inspiring stories and the testimony of the witnesses.
The final goal of the church should be the fashioning of a world which is fit for the Son of God by being fit for all children, including therefore the Son of God. Let Jesus return as a child, and be raised by a perfect world just as he was originally raised by a perfect woman.
America sometimes sounds like the thief who has been robbed of what he himself stole, and declares that since he stole something first it is his. Because America has, in its ignorance (of the market consequences), utilized the earth’s resources unrightfully (from a moral perspective, not a market one) and has been hooked on that for a long time, it is necessary that the other peoples be willing not to use those same resources so that American can avoid the pain of withdrawal.