The daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes

Image: Shelby Steele

The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group—especially the charge of inferiority—and yet the group no longer has the excuse of oppression. Without oppression—and it must be acknowledged that blacks are no longer oppressed in America—the group itself becomes automatically responsible for its inferiority and non-competitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility. Thus, inevitably, there is a retreat from freedom. No group that has been oppressed to the point of inferiority is going to face the realities of new freedom without flinching. Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this is a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.

Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (pp. 67-8)     

God pours out the bowls of wrath upon America

“And the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea; and it became blood as of a dead man; and every living soul died, even the things that were in the sea” (Revelation 16:3).

Moses wrote that “the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11). Consequently, when the life is gone, decay and rottenness set in until one returns to the dust from whence he came. This is the irrevocable judgement of God from the very beginning (Gen. 3:19). Likewise, when the spiritual quality of a society decays, like a sea of coagulated blood from dead men, it putrefies and rots, issuing a foul and obnoxious odor. Eventually it returns to the unseen (Sheol, Ps. 9:17); this, too, is by the judgement of God. Consider Sodom, the Canaanites, Israel, Judah, and all the rest of ancient nations; when, due to spiritual decay, they were no longer fit to continue, God removed them. A society abandoned to idolatry and its consequent morals, as was the Roman Empire of John’s day, is spiritually dead. In such a society, morals decline to the lowest level; the family collapses, schools breed anarchy and rebellion, business ethics are forgotten, entertainment becomes base and sordid, and printing presses exude smut and filth, until the whole is strangled in its own death blood and suffocated by its own stench. Our society too must listen to the trumpet warnings before God pours out the bowls of wrath.

Homer Hailey, The Book of Revelation: An Introduction and Commentary (p. 328)  

Whether faith is infused into man by God?

It is written (Ephesians 2:8-9): “By grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves . . . that no man may glory . . . for it is the gift of God.”

Two things are requisite for faith. First, that the things which are of faith should be proposed to man: this is necessary in order that man believe anything explicitly. The second thing requisite for faith is the assent of the believer to the things which are proposed to him. Accordingly, as regards the first of these, faith must needs be from God. Because those things which are of faith surpass human reason, hence they do not come to man's knowledge, unless God reveal them. To some, indeed, they are revealed by God immediately, as those things which were revealed to the apostles and prophets, while to some they are proposed by God in sending preachers of the faith, according to Romans 10:15: “How shall they preach, unless they be sent?”

As regards the second, viz. man's assent to the things which are of faith, we may observe a twofold cause, one of external inducement, such as seeing a miracle, or being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith: neither of which is a sufficient cause, since of those who see the same miracle, or who hear the same sermon, some believe, and some do not. Hence we must assert another internal cause, which moves man inwardly to assent to matters of faith.

The Pelagians held that this cause was nothing else than man's free-will: and consequently they said that the beginning of faith is from ourselves, inasmuch as, to wit, it is in our power to be ready to assent to things which are of faith, but that the consummation of faith is from God, Who proposes to us the things we have to believe. But this is false, for, since man, by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace.


Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (II-II Question 6)