The Adversary's Fourth Confession: My Most Efficient Operation (3 of 3)

IV. The Socialism and Self-Reality Question

The lure of socialism - and the broader cultural project of the autonomous self that defines its own reality - is the Genesis 3 impulse in its contemporary political and philosophical form. It is not new. It is the oldest temptation available: you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Defining it yourself. For yourself. By yourself.

What is new is the specific cultural infrastructure that now supports this impulse. Gender self-definition. Sexual self-determination. Political systems that promise to meet every material need without requiring the acknowledgment of the God who provides. The therapeutic culture that makes the self the final arbiter of its own reality. All of these are expressions of the same root desire: to be the author of one's own existence without reference to the Author who actually wrote it.

My operation here has been to encourage the church to fight the symptoms rather than diagnose the disease. The church that campaigns against specific political expressions of the autonomous self - that goes to war against socialist policy or gender ideology as political battles - is fighting at the wrong level. It is treating the fruit without addressing the root. And in fighting at the political level, it confirms the secular person's suspicion that the church is primarily a political actor rather than a spiritual one.

The church that addresses the root - that engages the Genesis 3 impulse at the level of the person's actual experience of being their own god, that asks "how is that working for you?" with genuine curiosity and genuine compassion, that offers the specific alternative of a self rooted in the image-bearing identity that God provides - that church is engaging at the right level. And it is a far more threatening engagement than anything that happens at the political level.

I prefer the church to fight politics. It is much less dangerous to me than the church that engages the human heart.

Note: The connection between the autonomous self and the lure of socialism is not primarily economic but theological. The appeal of a system that promises universal provision without divine acknowledgment is the appeal of a god that makes no moral demands. It is the golden calf - the deity you create, that you can manage, that will not require the surrender that the God of the burning bush requires. The political argument against socialism is far less effective than the theological one: not "this system doesn't work economically" but "this system is an attempt to meet needs that only God can actually meet, and it will fail for the same reason every golden calf has failed."

V. What I Cannot Manage

My fourth confession, like the three before it, must include the vulnerability I cannot close.

I cannot manufacture the combination of conviction and love that Jesus modeled and that Paul describes in Ephesians 4:15 as "speaking the truth in love." I can manufacture conviction without love - that is the fundamentalist who drives people away. I can manufacture love without conviction - that is the accommodating church that tells people they are fine and produces nothing. But the specific combination of holding the standard completely while loving the person completely - the combination that produces the response of the woman at the well and Zacchaeus and the adulteress - that I cannot replicate or neutralize.

When a disciple genuinely holds both simultaneously, the result is the most powerful apologetic available. Not an argument. Not a position. A person who is undeniably, unmistakably both loving and truthful. Who will not lower the standard and will not withdraw the love. Who holds the tension without resolving it in either direction.

This combination is rare. I have worked hard to ensure it remains rare. The church tends to resolve the tension in one direction or the other - into conviction without love or love without conviction. I encourage both resolutions. Both serve my purposes. Only the tension itself - held faithfully, sustained by abiding in the vine - is dangerous to me.

The disciple who reads this volume and learns to hold both is the one I am most concerned about.

"Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples - if you have love for one another."
-- John 13:35 (NET)

Postscript - A Word to the Disciple

You have just read the Adversary's most uncomfortable confession - uncomfortable because the instruments he describes are not external enemies but well-meaning believers. People who love Jesus. People who are trying to be faithful. People who are, in many cases, theologically right.

The lesson is not that the positions are wrong. It is that positions without love are worse than useless. They are actively harmful. They place a stumbling block in front of the person who might have found their way to Jesus, and they do it in Jesus's name.

The call of Volume VI is the most demanding call in the series: to hold conviction and love simultaneously, without resolving the tension in either direction, in the way that Jesus held it. To speak the truth in love. To be salt - which preserves without announcing itself, which changes everything it touches without confronting it - and light, which does not argue with the darkness but simply shines until the darkness has nowhere left to stand.

That is the disciple this volume is trying to form. And the disciple who becomes that person is the one who closes the stumbling blocks the institution has opened.