How To View These Times

Perhaps by co-incidence, this essay appeared today. 

Then again, maybe it's not co-incidence.

...The world, I think, does not suffer from a lack of vision. If it suffers from anything, it is from too many visions that are not true to reality. I have often wondered about the passage in John’s Gospel that reads: “To hate me is to hate my Father. Had I not performed such works among them as no one has ever done before, they would not be guilty of sin; but, as it is, they have seen, and they go on hating me and my Father” (15:23-24). No words could be stronger. 

The disciples are warned that they will be hated just as Christ was hated. They are not, to be sure, to return hatred for hatred. But they are not forbidden to wonder about the depths of this hatred of the divine being as it is manifested against them....

...No one who hates the Son or the Father sees God. What they hate are the works “performed among them.” These “works” are designed to instruct and teach men what they are. What we are from the beginning, in nature, is better for us than any alternative vision we might concoct for ourselves to explain what we are and what our individual destiny is. In this sense, we can speak of a “hope beyond its sight.” The premise of Christian civilization that modern secularism, with ever increasing urgency and force, is busy ejecting from the public order is this: Final human happiness is not found in this world.

All alternate visions insist that it is in this world. We are our own instruments in finding or establishing it. The Son and the Father are actively “hated.” In explaining and showing man what he is, it is necessary to acknowledge that what is best for us is not what we make for ourselves. It is what is given to us....

And how is this hatred manifest in our time, or perhaps in any time? It is presented in terms of “rights” and “dignity.” It is utopian in character. It claims to institute social justice and equality. It systematically rejects any stamp of man’s divine origin. What is said to be man’s nature, his need to distinguish, as something already in being, what is good from what is evil, comes to be hated. We must rid ourselves of things in man said to be of divine origin. The state is the instrument not of a common good, but of a transformation of man so that nothing of his ultimate origin or destiny can attain public profession....

...beyond our “sight,” we have “hope.” “Light” has pierced the “darkness.” Yet darkness and hatred, in fact, are freely chosen because many, if not most, reject the work of the Father who is seen in the Son. We refuse this “light” by insisting that we have “rights” to make ourselves as we want to be, not what is really best for us to be....

Many who claim Christianity hate the Father and Son, preferring utopian 'rights' and 'dignity,' which reject nature--that is to say, they reject ontology, to substitute their own.  It's not new.  Cain, too, hated, and attempted to re-make the world to accord with his own vision.  He claimed "dignity" by murdering Abel.

This is the world.  Christians who are cognizant are "in it" but not "of it."  Woe to those who think and do otherwise.