Francis Berger
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To Renounce the Responsibility of Personal Discernment Is to Renounce Christ

9/4/2022

5 Comments

 
The comments on yesterday's post have made one thing explicitly clear to me as a Christian -- the era of rejecting the responsibility of personal discernment is over.

Christians can no longer obfuscate this responsibility behind scripture, or abandon it through doctrines, or neglect it by appealing to supposedly higher virtues, or veil it in rituals, or unload it onto external authorities, or hide behind obedience, or appeal to things like God's omnipotence. 

Any motivation to evade the responsibility of personal discernment today is fundamentally un-Christian and/or anti-Christian.

It is fundamentally un-Christian and/or anti-Christian because it opposes and works against love, freedom, honesty, creativity, repentance, and countless other Christian virtues. 

A while back, I encapsulated my understanding of Christianity by augmenting a passage from Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov (augmented parts in bold): 


Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely into heaven, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, and with free heart actively choose resurrection and everlasting life, having only Thy image before him as his guide.

A key part of this encapsulation is the movement away from rigid ancient law to a free heart that decides for itself what is good and what is evil having only Christ as a guide.

This is the essence of personal discernment within a Christian context. Without that essence, Christianity is not Christianity but a religion of ancient rigid law. 

Dr. Charlton summed it up well in a comment from yesterday's post: 


We are being forced to make personal discernment - and if we refuse to take up this responsibility, then we have rejected Christ.

Put another way, personal discernment is no longer optional. Rejecting the responsibility of personal discernment is tantamount to rejecting Jesus. 

Another commenter, Daniel F., offered the following on the topic: 


Trusting that one's individual discernment is in alignment with God's will is of course incredibly difficult, and one does not make these decisions lightly, but the overall principle as a core attribute of true Christianity is obvious.

Daniel is correct about the difficulty, which helps explain why so many Christians shirk the responsibility of personal discernment in favor of anything that promises to relieve them of that "burden". Unfortunately, the world is full of Grand Inquisitors who are all too eager to take on that "burden" in exchange for surrendered freedom and, ultimately, the damnation. 

The responsibility of personal discernment has become the sine qua non of Christianity. Renounce that and you renounce Christ. It really is that simple.  
5 Comments
Hoyos
9/5/2022 00:03:04

It’s funny, one of the bad arguments Catholics use against Protestants (which does not say anything about whether is true), is that we are relying on “personal judgement”, whereas they are on the far more solid ground of relying on the fathers, tradition, etc.

However what makes this a bad argument is that they are using their own personal judgement in affirming all of those things!

I’m still a small o orthodox Christian, I believe in the Bible, the creeds, at least see great value in tradition, perhaps something more. But I know enough to know that conscience is key, even Aquinas says so. Just because some men may abuse it or that it’s subject to sin like everything else makes no matter.

This is all weird to me because I would have thought this basically obvious and traditional Christianity. It’s not like we’re in some sort of radically new situation in this regard, the church starts off being attacked by false authorities, has heretics, false teachers, etc. from the very very beginning. The idea that the highest leadership can get it damningly wrong should be obvious, the legitimate authorities of the day failed to recognize the Messiah when He came. I wonder if that’s what it will be like at the Second Coming in some regards, that the highest leadership will not recognize Him a second time.

Reply
Francis Berger
9/5/2022 20:28:11

@ Hoyos - It's been my experience that Christians often abuse the Bible, creeds, traditions, doctrine, etc., to hide or rationalize their own personal failure of conscience/responsibility. Dostoevsky really had his finger on this pulse in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Brothers Karamazov.

As is the case with everything, motivation is key. If a Christian approaches scripture, tradition, creeds, etc. with good motivations, then he will access much wisdom, comfort, and truth in these things. However, if he approaches these aspects of Christianity with bad motivations, he can utilize them for less than noble purposes.

Reply
Daniel F
9/5/2022 09:27:01

I should qualify, or clarify, my comment now that I have had a chance to read over the portion Francis quoted.

I should have said that trusting one's discernment _can be_ difficult. And the difficultly often lies, not in the initial act of discernment itself -- more often than not if one listens to one's conscience quietly and with focus, the "right answer" is crystal clear -- rather it is in ignoring all of the noise, social conditioning, distractions, financial, career and peer pressures, and other influences that tend to dampen that inner voice.

The best example to show this may be in one of the comments by Scoot in the Orthosphere blog that prompted Francis' response in the first place: To wit, from the beginning, it was in fact quite clear to Scoot what the right thing to do was; and it was only as things played out that it became more difficult -- more painful in terms of personal sacrifice -- to follow that voice of conscience.

For those practiced in the discipline of following a path of truth and discernment, the initial act of discernment is often not difficult; following through on it, however, can be for a myriad of reasons. But it is a discipline and habit that must be developed and reinforced over time.

Reply
Francis Berger
9/5/2022 10:52:42

@ Daniel - Thanks for that! Your elaboration is spot on.

Reply
Daniel F
9/6/2022 03:24:56

Thank you, Francis. I'm glad you appreciated my comment and perspective.


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