Column
Mortal Remains
Foundational Error
Why Pascal Rejected the God of the Philosophers
Irf a state declaration wishes to bring endowments by the creator into consideration, it cannot rightly do so apart from revelation of his character through nature and special revelation. A nation that defines God to its own ends, even if these ends have good names, has established itself in idolatry. No rights of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness are found in nature, for in that sphere they are subject to the contingencies of embedded laws that know nothing of them. Nor are they found in the revelation of a gracious God who gives life to man, lays the ways of life and death before him, grants him the liberty to choose between them, and desires his eternal happiness, for in this revelation these do not appear as rights, as though man has a claim against his Creator or powers subject to him for the lack of them, but rather as gifts that God grants betimes of his grace and kindness, and may be withheld for reasons of his own. He does not give these as inalienable rights, but may in justice and for the love of man not only grant, but withhold any or all of them. Any religion claiming a basis in divine revelation that denies this denies itself; any state that claims to transmit them in his name acts beyond its powers and in contradiction of his character.
A nation may be rightly established before God in the proposal to pursue the justice and righteousness in which it expresses the will of God that men be granted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the highest degree conducive with that will. It cannot, however, bestow the gifts of his grace, much less make them, or recognize them as inalienable, but can only make its prayer for them by obedience to divine law.
A nation may, in other words, declaratively establish its political identity by affirming that it seeks these goods for its citizens in a constitutional imperative to establish justice and righteousness among them in accordance with the will of God. It cannot, however, even to the most desirable of ends, create a Creator that does not exist. Nor can it, in the name of the Creator, seek to establish life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness abstracted from what the Creator has already made known about these things, for apart from this particular knowledge of his law they all become corrupted: the pursuit of happiness, as the most powerful of these desires, will turn life to death and liberty to bondage by means of the freedom it claims as an inalienable right.
The Fruits of Mistaking Gifts for Rights
The bitter fruits of a root as old as the Republic itself are becoming ripe in our generation, where the crumbling of a national consensus based on Judeo-Christian belief about the desirable ends of human society as expressed in the Constitution has given rise to a confusion of tongues on what is meant by the rights it grants, now veering ethically to a previously unthinkable -Hexennacht of license. The right to life, previously thought to apply to the unborn child and embodied in laws that punished abortion, is now vested in the mother and subject to her convenience. The right to liberty has metamorphosed into public and private acceptance of sexual perversion and confusion, enforced by the courts and police power. And the pursuit of happiness has become the acquisition of wealth and power for their own sakes, apart from consideration of the moral responsibilities these were once understood to entail- and this not just in the notably wealthy and powerful, but, more significantly, in the lives of the merely prosperous and influential who fail to recognize themselves as such because they are not supremely so (that is, the middle class), and who are apt to blame the very wealthy for faults they possess to the same or greater degree.
Toleration of the forces of social disintegration is directly related to the severance of the definition of constitutional rights from meanings consensually -understood in the past by the light of revelation shared by Jews and Christians. So the nation falls into increasing chaos and vulnerability from having in the first place mistaken a revocable gift of God for an enduring political right, subject in the last to definition apart from his word, and now not just by philosophers, who have the luxury of making theories for whose results they are not obliged to pay. •
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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