Christian Resolutions for a Good Life: How to become a Saint

This is in response to Henry Oliver's post (https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/aiming-at-something-noble-resolutions) and follows his main thoughts. Times are certainly changing at a faster pace and we've certainly found that many ideas have fallen flat on their face in historical record time. A question is certainly why have these new moral movements failed and even more so, why are we more unhappy and why do we feel like there is a bustle of energy but there is no flourishing or there are increasingly many dead-ends.

If it could be humored, it'd be nice to look back to the Augustan era of literature at the start of the 18th century. Printing presses lost a censor of the monarch and became more privatized. This ended up causing more information, from anyone about anything, to sit alongside others. The police were actually led by a leading robber who managed to cultivate an information war that required him to successfully find robbers, many of who he led. Even more similarly to today's age, everyone couldn't trust each other and became extremely political. That and satire and irony made the focus of most works of art then. It's obviously worth asking what exactly caused this and you'll have many different interpretations from economic, political, a view of human nature even psychological trauma. We have many viewpoints, especially since then, but why are we repeating this then and more so why don't we have an answer?

During the age of Romanticism in the 19th century there are a lot of changes happening where monarchy just can't fit in or address new issues. Slowly over the century language changes where condescend, officious, pontificate, patronize and even revolution etc changes from having an aristocratic structural reference to something more sarcastic. The romantics viewed this as no issue to them because they saw a universal truth in nature which could be grasped from experience. They preferred aesthetics and thought the sublime touched on something beautiful and timeless rather than something hedonistic or even time-wasting or subversive, for good or bad, as we may see it today. The romantics didn't care for the industrial age as they thought it took away from our experience and nature with mass-production and all that but the industrial age advanced and people took hold of societal structures failing but also the ones that can, and did, change the world and they had technological advancements to prove them right.

The people that followed the romantics were called modernists and they separated meaning from experience, which for a Christian shouldn't be entirely inaccurate, and they would start from experience and extend their experience into a societal structure (e.g. I am a Pole therefore I am Polish or the Polish state which is the romantic development and the reasons for all the liberal, Marxist and even nazi and fascist concepts) and then tried to reduce universal concepts into the structure, instead of seeing them as immediately graspable as the romantics, but argued it would fail (postmoderns just argue you can't extend into the societal structure because you get caught in a matrix that prevents actual connection but that we necessarily can only try to extend ourselves like that). From modernists you get the “new man” theories like masculine Judaism/Christianity, the new Soviet man, the fascist and nazi men etc. These “new man” concepts were meant to reduce universal concepts like goodness, ability etc into their societal structures.

So there was a lot of energy in developing these new ways to help people grow and develop but they can obviously only be temporary. Masculine Christianity is obviously an addition to Christianity whereas Christianity in itself already solves the meaning and experience “gap” that is modernism. You see it to a degree in chivalry much like you see Buddhism to a degree in samurais. You see fulfillment and ability in the saints and in any Christian sanctifying. Christianity has no is-ought etc gaps because it relies on actively giving up our experience for a higher one.

2 Corinthians 4:18: as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Galatians 5:22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Romans 13:3: For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval,

By Christ we have direct access to these virtues which grant us new eyes. We don't, and are not supposed to, reduce these into man-made institutions which inherently fail. We are fallen man in sin. This sinful nature causes us to create idols that we ourselves don't have the eyes to be able to see until we sanctify more. It can be egotism, fear, love of money, lust, power in ways we have blocked off or have no conscious access to but they direct our lives and when confronted about them we rightly deny there's any issue because worshipping our idols have become so much a part of us even though we know they blind us and we know they inhibit us. These idols enslave us.

Leviticus 25:42: For they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.

Romans 6:22: But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

The Israelites had to enslave themselves to God to be free from the idols of live child sacrifice, which Romans and Greeks simply viewed as odd, etc. Paul says the same thing: we have to enslave ourselves to God in order to be free and more fulfilled. By getting rid of the idol of us and our experience we remove a big idol (if not the biggest). We can easily check what is an idol by whether it's a listed work of the spirit.

Romans 1:25: because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

God sees us how we are intended to be like a parent or teacher sees how their child or student is intended to be. What we view as growth is ways we are intended to be. Through intension God sees past the issues or idols which hold us down and sees us by love (agape). Love inherently lets us see into another human and see them completely. No other marriage works and no other relationship is as fulfilling and as we remove idols and maintain focus on God we manage sanctification.

1 Corinthians 13:13: So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Viewing anyone outside God's love is viewing someone, some event or something through an idol. Any confusion happens in history when we view people outside agape or even worse hate.

Hebrews 11:1: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Sanctifying not only gives us new eyes and fulfillment, it's an order from God and it's one that has outlasted any disaster or man-made institution.