When Kings Take Counsel Together
The World May Not Rule Itself Without Christ
The wars of the last century dealt the myth of progress a deadly blow. Moral order disappeared in puffs of musket smoke in Europe, then in mushroom clouds over Japan. The West, contrary to popular opinion, did not win the Cold War that followed. Rather, it lost its democracies to a military-industrial complex into which it imported fascist war criminals. It lost the foundations of domestic order to sexual revolutionaries. It lost its universities to socialist revolutionaries. And now it is succumbing, as N. S. Lyons has argued, to a managerial revolution in which nothing is to elude the scrutiny of the bureaucrats. It is succumbing, as I have argued, to a “public health” revolution in which the individual good disappears into some putative common good determined at a planetary level by the Controllers against whom Chesterton and Huxley and Lewis warned us. A totalitarian plutocracy, backed by a pantheon comprising Secularism, The Science, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change and other deities, is assuming control of everything from money to medicine to movements of peoples and goods. They are the mighty in the land, the arrogant whom Asaph envied:
They are free from common human burdens;
they are not plagued by human ills.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
From their callous hearts comes iniquity,
their evil imaginations have no limits.
They scoff, and speak with malice;
with arrogance they threaten oppression.
Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
and their tongues take possession of the earth.
Therefore their people turn to them
and drink up waters in abundance.
They say, “How would God know?
Does the Most High know anything?”
(Ps. 73:5–11)
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Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University in Montreal. His recent books include Ascension Theology, Desiring a Better Country, Theological Negotiations, and 1 & 2 Thessalonians in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.
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