If you want to comprehend the law, the best place to start is with the fictions. Fictions are the soul and conscience of the law, and without fictions the law would be empty. If you doubt this, consider this concept: “a corporation is a person”, pure fiction, and yet this is at the heart of commercial law. Next consider these equally ridiculous fabrications of the law: that there is such a thing as “a reasonably prudent man”, such a thing as “proximate cause”, such a thing as “constructive delivery”, or even such a thing as “master-servant liability”. These are all mere fictions, created by courts and judges to fill in the gaps of fairness and equity in order reach a pre-conceived result which seems fair to the general sentiment of the times. So my advice to young lawyers and law students is always this: learn the fictions first, it is all in the fictions.
Similarly, as for the gospel, it is in the paradoxes that the message really lives and endures. He who would lose his life will save it. The first will be the last. To be born again requires death of the self. The wondrous and deep nature of these paradoxes allow us to see ourselves at a distance and grasp the Lord’s gentle teaching, guidance and corrections in a deeply personal, yet honestly objective, way. They allow us to see ourselves as the Lord Jesus sees us, while still standing before our very own personal mirror.
The paradoxes are almost always scandalous, and perhaps the most scandalous of all is the paradox of servant hood: that one will become great through humility. This concept that greatness is derivative of small things, and that the diminishment of greatness of one kind leads, paradoxically, to greatness of another kind, reveals to us, incredibly, the fault line between the things of the world and the things of God’s kingdom. The close corollary to this is yet another deep paradox, that service in the kingdom leads, necessarily, to radical freedom in the world.
At a recent legal ethics seminar a brilliant academic compared and contrasted the progression of lawyer advertising in the past with the more modern and recent “marketing” tactics of the blogosphere. Lawyer advertisements have always been considered at least mildly tacky, viewed askance and with suspicion, especially by the more snobbish and gentrified members of the bar who claim that law is a profession, or perhaps even a monopoly of the family. The course materials in the seminar included a disciplinary opinion about a lawyer who, about a century ago, had the sheer audacity to publicly advertise his ability to obtain “discreet divorce” for his prospective clientele. In response to his stroke of marketplace genius, he received a heavy-handed ethical sanction and disbarment from the highest court of Illinois because his ad “undermined the wholesome fear of public opinion”, and was therefore, antithetical to the ethical practice of law. Wholesome fear of public opinion compels, of course, that every divorce should be notorious.
This “wholesome fear” is, of course, neither a fiction nor a paradox. It is quite true, and quite real, and it is the seed of snobbery and enslavement. A man who is totally bound to public opinion, is bound indeed, and a man who is not so bound is the freest man in the cosmos, free to the point of being able to be scandalous, yet not insane.
Our Lord, no matter how one reads the Gospel, clearly had no wholesome fear of public opinion; even modern theologians acknowledge this aspect of Jesus, “historical” or not, bead color or not. In lieu of that kind of fear, Jesus had the only really wholesome fear, which was the fear of God, a rather huge and significant distinction. The Everlasting Man was many things, but above all, He was a respecter of God, and a dis-respecter of snobbishness and the idle fears of man. He held out his utter lack of fear for public opinion equally to the religious and the agnostic, the rich and the poor, the snob and the simpleton. "Fear of public oinion" did not motivate, or even effect his views, and yet he cared and loved more deeply than any.
Historically, advertising for discreet divorce was scandalous because of the fear of the opinions of man at that time. Nowadays, the opinions of man about this particular subject are quite different than they were in Illinois at the turn of the century, but the biblical position that God hates divorce was never based on public opinion, rather it is based simply on objective truth and objective love.
The newest fears are not fears of discreet divorce, they are fears of inequality and intolerance. Just as at one time the biggest insult to a man’s honor who had broken the unwritten code of all gentlemen and abandoned his wife and children for another, younger version, was to call him a “womanizer”, the biggest insult now is to call a man a bigot. One “wholesome fear” has given way to yet another “wholesome fear”, and so it goes. Call me an adulterer if you must, but please do not say I am intolerant, homophobic, racist, Islamaphobic, or phobic de jure. Phobic in this sense of course means fear, not really hate anyway, yet in the modern lingo, fear is hate. Of course, under the new healthy fear of modern rubric and enlightenment, those who fear God, hate the most, just as those who share the new wholesome fears of men, apparently, love most as demonstrated by their tolerance except, of course, for the unenlightened intolerant. I suspect this is why “bullies” draw their universal ire and deserve summary death. Yet, as long as there is testosterone there will be bullies, and there will also be leaders to correct, teach and show the bullies a more excellent way, even to the point of being bullies themselves.
The new wholesome fears always carry with them the latest intellectual enlightenments, the greatest sense of elitism, and always, educated snobbery and a new kind of intolerance. Wholesome fears of men always replace and supplant the only really and truly wholesome fear: the fear of God. The swings between the wholesome fear of man and the wholesome fear of God is the story of history, and indeed, American history. So many once came here out of a wholesome fear of God. Later the wholesome fear became Pharisiacal, and it devolved and degenerated to a wholesome fear of man’s laws without understanding that in the fiction of the laws one can always find kindness, redemption and even mercy. The up and down cycle of one fear pushing out the next is indeed the history of social and intellectual thought. We have of course reached, just about, the limit of that cycle now. It has settled in on a specific kind of tolerance which is the end of all tolerance; for real tolerance means we are all quite different, objectively so, but we can nonetheless love in spite of our differences. Today’s new fear “tolerance” means precisely the opposite: we are all the same, all equal, and because of this we cannot love, but we must merely coexist. This new tolerance is the tolerance of not being able to think and not being able to speak anything which might be even remotely considered intolerant, even when the statements may spring from a wholesome fear of God rather than the “wholesome fear” of public opinion.
As we drift to this new secular elitism as a nation, we should not be unhappy or even worried. It is during these times indeed, which the Lord does His best and most glorious works. History bears this out. In times when the world is or seems adrift in the “wholesome fear” of public opinion, our Lord stands and points to the one truly wholesome fear. “Whom then shall I fear?”, indeed- certainly not the unwholesome public fears of man…”fear the Lord, you his Godly people, those who fear the Lord will have all they need”. Ps. 34 v. 9. Amen. ©Free Anglican Press
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