Modern antinomianism is worse than that

Antionomianism: from the Greek anti (against) + nomos (law).

The prevailing spirit of the age has, for the last fifty years at least, been antinomian. It is impatient with the constraints of law. Eric Hobsbawm—no Christian and no reactionary—in his The Age of Extremes recognised that our period, since the 1960s, has been distinct in that people have little sense of obligation to obey rules. This was and continues to be a key feature of the Sexual Revolution. In fact one might say that antinomianism is what drives the forward pressure of the Sexual Revolution: every time the last constraint is broken, you run up against a new constraint and so you have to break that, too.

Since the Church has of late been utterly unable to inoculate people against the spirit of the age, antinomianism now marks the culture within the Church, as well. The canon lawyer Edward Peters recently pointed out one example:

http://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/antinomianism-in-high-places-is-still-antinomianism/

But all debates within the Church since the ‘60s have been marked by this hostility and impatience towards law.

All this is common knowledge to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. People today resist being told what to do, by the moral law or by positive human law.

But modern antinomianism is actually much worse than this.

The dislike of moral law and positive law is the leading edge of our antinomian age: this is where the attack on law begins. But the beating heart of the zeitgeist is the hatred of the ultimate law: modern antinomianism is fundamentally the hatred of Reality.

Reality, What Is, The Way Things Are—this is the ultimate law, the final constraint. After all social mores and positive human law have been stripped away, Reality stands there ready to teach you a lesson. It works the other way, too: Reality is the ground of all morals and law, so as long as Reality stands, they cannot completely fall.

Postmodernism, gender theory, and queer theory have in the academy become so hegemonic that it seems the agreed-upon philosophy of highly educated people today is that Reality is a social construct. Therefore, it can be changed, mainly by changes in language. But that is only the most clear and un-hidden expression of the hatred of Reality.

Peter Kreeft speaking about women and the priesthood, said that advocates of women ordination who reject the fact of sexual difference, “reject this fact, and therefore usually facts in general.” He was profoundly right. And it’s more general than that: wherever antinomianism appears today, you will find people impatient with Reality itself.

This is very bad—much worse than mere rebellion against human law, which is sometimes necessary, or against moral constraint, which is perennial. But to reject Reality itself is to reverse the fundamental priority of all the religions and philosophies which have civilized mankind up to now. These all took it for granted that the aim was to live in conformity with reality. To reject Reality itself is not even sub-Christian: it is the definition of the diabolic state of mind. It shows that the spirit of our age is simply Satan.

That antinomianism has so deeply infect the Church is terrifying, because it is the mark of Satan and his angels. And it is not curable by human means.

You cannot argue with antinomians. How could antinomianism be argued against? What would you appeal to? All argument requires some shared premise: if a person simply rejects Reality, what is left? The only cure for antinomianism is the cure for alcoholism: hitting bottom. If a person reveals themself as an antinomian—that is, as dishonest—then you can only let them get bashed around by Reality until they realize that their way of life is insane. But they may not: like Satan, they may simply become more and more hardened in their anger and resentment that What Is Is.

“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”