Man is to face the world not with humble obedience but rather with creative activity. Even the experience of communion with God comes into the world as an act of creativity; for the once-revolutionary asceticism has turned into the conservative guardianship of the past.
- Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act
Thoughts:
- Some Christians have extolled the necessity of humility and obedience in light of everything that has transpired since 2020. The logic driving this line of thinking stems from the conviction that man has strayed too far from God, mostly through pride and disobedience. The only way to right this errant course is through humility and obedience. Man has to stop thinking so highly of himself and begin to listen to God once again.
- Fair enough, but I very much doubt that a steady diet of meekness and thinking oneself to be unimportant coupled with passive law-obeying will lead anywhere good in this time and place. For starters, man is important, but his importance is only evident if he is aligned with God. A hubristic, arrogant, non-God aligned man is an evil buffoon, but a self-effacing, self-deprecating God-aligned man that remains trapped in a mindset of humility and obedience without striving for creativity may very well become a spiritual dead end.
- Repentance and asceticism were the bedrock of sainthood when Christianity was still new - when a humble, obedient, repentant, ascetic consciousness was indeed heroic and revolutionary, especially when pitted against older forms of consciousness. Repentance and asceticism are still necessary, but they they must now lead to creativity. Repentance and asceticism alone cannot overcome the world; only creativity can.
- Humility and obedience to external secular and religious authorities is no longer spiritually viable. This is not accidental and it very much appears that Divine Wisdom has revealed itself here. Obedience must be internal; it must emanate from within, from the communion of the Divine Self and the Holy Spirit.
- Obeying God is no longer simply a matter of following scripture, churches, ceremony, or dogma. Humility is no longer simply a matter of belittling before God. Obeying God involves becoming that which God wants us to become - and we should not be timid about what God wants us to become.