The Left’s Grand Inquisitor and the Tea Party

David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog.com ^ | June 11, 2010 | M. CATHARINE EVANS

[Rhonda Robinson]

Jim Wallis, rebound spiritual adviser to President Obama, recently called for “dialogue” in his Huffington Post piece, How Christian Is Tea Party Libertarianism. Quick to seize the moment after Rand Paul, a libertarian, chimed in on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wallis must have spent a few hours on this clownish, but self-revealing attempt to suggest that the members of the Tea Party in their support of limited government are Bad Samaritans.

After reading the article, similarities between Wallis’ argument and Dostoevsky’s “ The Grand Inquisitor” chapter in The Brothers Karamazov leapt right off Arianna’s Post.

The prescient novelist hit the nail on the head when it comes to men like Wallis.

In the fictionalized version of the temptation of Christ by the Inquisitor, Ivan tells his brother:

They have no such great cleverness…Perhaps nothing but Atheism, that’s all their secret. Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, that’s his secret.

Wallis the preacher might disagree with Ivan but graciously allows for “the reality of sin in all human institutions” and thus the need for government control.

[FrankR]

yet another leftist attempt to redefine and villify the TEA party movement...ignore them.

[loveliberty2]

"Wallis the preacher might disagree with Ivan but graciously allows for “the reality of sin in all human institutions” and thus the need for government control.

And where, pray tell, does the "preacher" find the persons to run and administer the government who are without "sin"? Why is it that he believes some imperfect persons in positions of power in government will make better or more virtuous decisions than all the other imperfect persons they control?

[Oceander]

And where, pray tell, does the "preacher" find the persons to run and administer the government who are without "sin"? Why is it that he believes some imperfect persons in positions of power in government will make better or more virtuous decisions than all the other imperfect persons they control?

Exactly!

That is the core, irreconcilable flaw at the heart of all liberalism, and it renders the entire project irredeemably false. Liberalism simply cannot answer that question, which means that the sole justification for their actions and their policies ends up being naked aggression, nothing more, nothing less - certainly not the highminded rationality liberals have deluded themselves into believing they still possess.

Precious few liberals/leftists are willing to admit as much; Mao was one of the few exceptions, who more or less admitted that all the flowery language about rights and justice and merit were mere window-dressing, meant to camoflage the ugly truth that, for communism, socialism, and all species of thought that are similar to liberalism, "power flows from the barrel of a gun."

[Louis Foxwell]

It remains manifest that those who believe themselves morally superior are the vilest creatures in Dante’s hell.

[Oceander]

Indeed.

[mcswan]

The Grand Inquisitor goes on to mock Christ for the free will inherent in His message.

"But let me tell Thee that now, to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst? Was this Thy freedom?"

I have used this scene as the basis of more than one sermon. Wallis, as usual, is way off base. Any system that subordinates the free will of the individual to the larger purposes of the state - laying our freedoms at the feet of government for the common good as percieved by elites - is profoundly un-Christian.

[loveliberty2]

Thank you for you concise summary!

America's Founders, understanding the imperfection of human nature and the tendency to abuse power, framed a government of enumerated, separated, limited, checked, and balanced powers to curb that tendency.

What's more, the document that framed the government demanded in Article V that only the People, through the Constitution's own prescribed process, could alter the limits and curbs on that power.

Those, like Wallis, who look to imperfect persons, elected or appointed to positions of power in government, to be the arbiters of rights and liberties, are misguided at best. At worst, they find status and prominence for themselves by thinking they are part of the "political power elite."