The Process of Maturity, Salted With Fire

Mark 9:

47 If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out. It is better for you to enter into God's Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire, 48 'where their worm doesn't die, and the fire is not quenched.' 49 For everyone will be salted with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, with what will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Sometimes it can seem like the world is mostly divided between flippant, irresponsible jerks who seek conflict, and overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people who do not. One can see why society would prefer the latter over the former, and it's natural for people to drift into the latter category over time. We get beaten down by life, broken, and come out, not with new wisdom, but with the inability to cause trouble. But this can be taken for wisdom.

Liberalism is about taking what's messed up about people and using it to disable them so that they can live in harmony. It assumes that you can't have the really good thing, not reliably, so you have to get people using a messed-up substitute that's more effective in the here-and-now. A liberal thing to do would be to break people's youthful pride (and their self-respect, their hope, their true personhood) through some kind of process of exposing them to things that overwhelm them and break them down. I don't think anyone consciously designed the process of maturity in our culture, but it almost seems like the kind of thing designed by a liberal theorist to keep people effectively docile (no matter how sad they might get over the status quo). Let people go off into the wilderness without education and support, and let them lose their taste for seeing things for themselves. Then they can be nominally free, free to speak, write, assemble, etc., while "magically" not using that freedom to attack the state or set up a rival to the secular order.

Yet, Jesus sees value in "fiery salt" keeping us living at peace with each other, and Jesus does not seem like the kind of person who would want us to end up mutilated or debased for the sake of peace. Salt is a good thing in Jesus' point of view. So can we distinguish between Jesus' salt and our culture's alternative to salt?

One possible difference is courage. Neither flippant, irresponsible jerks nor overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people have courage in a defining way. In general, we know things through their fruits. So what is the fruit, in you and your life, of the "brokenness-wisdom" (or the thing that could be mistaken as brokenness-wisdom)?

It's possible that what makes something salt is how things turns out. If you are broken but then go on to be fertile, then the fire became salt. (For the sake of the metaphor, salt is something that preserves and flavors.)

The secular order is not all bad, and Jesus didn't come to set up a kingdom on earth to replace it. The fear of religiosity that political people had in setting up liberalism does not have to be borne out. Religion does not have to be the cause or excuse of war, even ardent religion that puts God ahead of political, cultural, human-based things-to-be-trusted or objects of allegiance. So there doesn't have to be an overt conflict between Christianity and a this-worldly social and political order, and to an extent, there can't be for Christianity to really be true to the prince of peace. Perhaps Christianity can only be allowed to be supreme in the unofficial, non-established culture when it learns to not use any kind of coercion to establish itself, leaving coercion in the hands of the secular government.

But having said all that, the secular culture that liberalism helped set up does mire some people in hopelessness and discouragement, and turns people away from loving God. There is work to be done to combat the damage done to us either by liberalism, or some less-intentional, evolved culture of maturing. Culture is not just what we say, but also how we live and what happens to us. We each have a part to play in how maturing works in our society, and if maturing worked better, we would be better able to seek God, and better able to make society better.

How can we help people mature? It's good to respect younger people. Also, it is good to not tempt young people, but rather to anti-tempt them.