"The main things are the plain things and the plain things are the main things." This was a truism I first heard when I started listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Gentle readers, if you haven't heard this amazing Scotsman preach, please check him out. He can be heard on Christian radio stations all over. If you can't find him that way go to the website truthforlife.org and listen online. He has made that statement many times when advising his listeners on the most reliable way to interprate Holy Scripture. Having left the Episopal Church ("ECUSA") a few years ago, I have witnessed first hand what happens when any church or denomination drifts from the plain Word of God.
That truism of interpretation is also my approach to the U.S. Constitution as well, which is ironic when you consider that many of its framers were Episcopalians. I do not equate the Constitution with Holy Writ, but I do believe that in the manner it was set forth, it was inspired by God. I believe that our Maker's hand was involved in its construction and like scripture it lives for all ages. That notion is not the same as the notion that it needs to be "evolving" to reflect the times, or else it can easily become a mirror to a lot of ugliness. The methodologies to interpret both scripture and the constitution are similar, and likeness have similar outcomes. I am both a constitutional and biblical fundamentalist, the plain way it has been written is the way it should be read. Today, the enlightened approach suggests otherwise and their approach is to re-write the plain word to fit their own desires. I see that interpretation has having lead to the same types of errors and problems because it is the same type of persons doing the interpretation.
For me the main distinction between Holy Scripture and the Constitution is that the Bible must trump the Constitution because the basic tenets of the Constitution flow out of the framers understanding of the Bible. This is approach in my life, but as a lover of the liberties that this country once believed, neither do I believe my understanding should be mandated by law. To do so is also a violation of God's own principle of free will, in which our faith and trust and love of Him comes freely from the heart and not by mandate. However, when the Supreme Court of the United States started making its interpretations out of a stance that is essentially anti-biblical, we became cut off from the root out of which our country grew and prospered. In so many of its rulings over the past 40+ years, they have codified the process of telling this country that we are to base our national life on the exclusion of God.
We have now become a society which enshrines the notion that we are to have freedom from religion, which is plainly not what the Constitution says or means. What we are really claiming in freedom from God, which is as old as Adam and Eve and the fall in the Garden of Eden. It actually predates them in the rebellion of Satan. It is the ugly perversion of free will, the ultimate and yet disasterous expression of the self. It says that I, the creature, demand such absolute freedom from my Creator that I expect to be endowed with all of His attributes, His power and His glory. Once I have taken them to myself that which is His by His nature, then I will kill Him. The problem in this scenario is that no creature can kill its Creator unless the Creator lets him. The other problem is that this type of creature confuses God's absence for His death.
And that, is what we have been doing systematically in this country for decades, we have been trying to claim God's power as our own and to eradicate Him from our national will and conscience. We have also had a problem learning lessons from history and are deaf and blind to the parallels to other civilizations that have risen and fallen to our own. We live in the times of perpetual adolescence, in which we arrogantly and foolishly believe that we're going to be the ones that finally beat the odds. So it is not surprising that at this time in history we most strongly manifest an arrested development. As an aging Baby Boomer, I see it far too much in my contemporaries, that unwillingness for people in their 50's and 60's to grow up and take responsibility. Too many cling to the notions born in the 1960's and which have been proven wrong countless times. They are still protesting the war in Vietnam, even if it's just on a metaphorical level. They are emotionally and often intellectually stuck in the late teens or early 20's, which is consistently the time in one's life that we are most foolish and foolhardy.
It not so much that the inmates are running the asylum, but rather the teenagers have been left with run of the house. They have the keys to the liquor cabinet and the family car, and access to all of the credit cards. While Obama is not in the strict sense a Baby Boomer, he is surrounded and influenced by them. For the majority of those in public life, it's all about decrying the wisdom of the past, the true wisdom of our parents and grandparents. We never really grew up; we got stuck in the place of "ah ha!" realization that our parents were flawed and imperfect and made mistakes. We were too busy pointing to and laughing at the nakedness of a drunken Noah, we missed our obligation as sons and daughters to cover him.
We have lived our entire lives gleefully breaking the 4th commandment; we have not honored our fathers and our mothers. We have peopled this country with now a third generation, as many Boomers are grandparents, with those who are fundamentally immature and who will strive to stay that way. We have not reached the point of another old truism: "When I was 17 I knew I was so much smarter than my father, but when I was 25 I was surprised how much the old man had learned." We refuse to look beyond the folly of those who have gone before and to incorporate into our lives their wisdom and their understanding of the basic and fundamental truths.
