Anarchism & The Eternal

Anarchy is a defiant cry for the eternal. It is a longing to experience a higher order rather than disorder. The distrust and dissatisfaction with human authority, characteristic of the anarchist philosophy, is rooted in angst. It is the outworking of a tension between what is perceived as possible for the human experience and what has been prescribed as the final authority. 

The trouble comes when the anarchist is unable to conclude to his own satisfaction, any certainty beyond the world we see. The mounting frustration leaves him with no other choice than to turn inward and trust in his own imperfect self to attain to a utopia-like society which can never come about through human means.

The anarchist is correct in his suspicion that human governance is a failed or at best, imperfect (yet, I would add, necessary) enterprise. But in my view, the anarchist's conclusion of total self-reliance or lawlessness is misguided and fatal. 

A third option, and perhaps the only sustainable resolve for the anarchist's distrust of authority and inner turmoil is a genuine encounter with the Transcendent; i.e. Jesus Christ. For upon the shoulders of Jesus rests a government beyond human religion or politics; a government not founded upon the sword but founded upon sacrificial love. And only love is above the law as even the apostle Paul declared when he said, "against such there is no law."  (Galatians 5:23)

But followers of Jesus are not above the law nor opposed to the institutions of human government. Followers of Jesus are submitted to the highest law, the law of love. 

My teenage years were spent as a self-proclaimed anarchist, littered with various vandalisms and social disruptions to make my point. But my adult years have taught me that my distrust of authority was partly the tension of my own coming of age and also a thin guise masking a cry for the governance of love. 

Authority, whether parental, governmental or ecclesiastical, enforced without love only creates rebellion. And in the most paradoxical way, I've come to believe, what most rebels want is permission.