In the Scriptures, there is a recurring theme of humans doing what they will detached from God, and when they do, it ends in disaster.  It is the unifying idea in the Book of Judges.  In the Book of Judges is summarized in the statement, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25 NKJV).

This idea can be termed “worship of the will.”  There is actually one instance where this phrase occurs in the New Testament.  In Colossians 2:23, when speaking about the false teachers [who were teachers of Gnosticism, which was a blend of Platonism and Christianity], the Apostle Paul wrote, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence” (NRSV).

The Greek word which is translated as “self-imposed piety” in that verse is ethelothreskeia.  It means worship that is prescribed by one’s will thus not being objective.  That pattern of will-worship continues today, but unlike then, it has become the defining factor of Western thinking and behavior.

Photo by Rosemary Ketchum

Worship of the Will

Today, this bizarre idea has led to the average Western person thinking that the road to the most happiness is the one where we do whatever we feel like doing.

I remember I saw someone on television say something to the effect: “I can say whatever I want whenever I want to whomever I want.”  For the most part, this person was only applying the idea of the Worship of the Will, even though to an extreme degree.

While some may feel disgusted at what he said, he is only following the predominant principle which has come to define Western thinking and behavior.

What is interesting about this principle is that all past experience even up to the furthest reaches of history has shown us that this way of thinking DOES NOT work, and it does not work anywhere for that matter.

Imagine if at work I showed up when I wanted to, not when I had to.  That would not lead to the most happiness but to total loss.  If I were a student, and I didn’t show up to school, even if they didn’t impose truancy laws, it would still lead to my loss because I will not have a learned a thing, and today’s world increasingly requires all people to be educated.

Self-Mastery

On the other hand, Christianity promotes a virtue which can be seen as the polar opposite of the Worship of the Will, and that virtue is self-mastery.

In the famous verse about the fruit of the Spirit it lists this virtue, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things” (Galatians 5:22-23 NRSV).

The word for self-controlin this verse is enkrateia.  Enkrateiadoes not mean self-control in the way most of us would understand it today.  This can be illustrated from a typical scenario.  Let’s pretend we are with someone, and that someone says something very offensive and we hold ourselves from cussing him out or hitting him.  We view that as self-control, but that is not what is meant by the word enkrateia.

The word enrkateia was highly developed among the Greco-Roman world at the time the Apostle Paul was writing.  It was seen as one having full power over himself or herself so that they could successfully be virtuous consistently.  It was the ability to choose the good and refuse the bad.  It was seen as the height of virtue and the source of all other virtues.  In Plato’s Republic, Plato lays out how one can achieve this self-mastery, and that is by using one’s mind to control one’s instincts and urges so that they are ordered by the rational mind and not the mind ruled by the instincts and urges.

We know how we ought to think and behave as Christians.  That is understood with our minds.  Plato further explained that this can only be built by habit, and then habit becomes our nature.  We need to get into the habit of bringing to mind what our faith teaches on certain behaviors like peacemaking, modesty, and goodness when we are faced in situations where we must make decisions so that the teachings of Christ and the Church would come up like a light in front of us when we are faced with these decisions and that we would use that light to choose rightly in order to glorify the Lord. Otherwise, we will allow our instincts and urges to rule us; simply, we will do what we feel like doing even if it should not be done.

There are three examples of how the Worship of the Will has changed our society (for the worse).

Examples of the Worship of the Will 

Cohabitation:

I once asked someone who was cohabiting why they did so.  This person had previously been married.  That person answered that they cohabited because “I want to be with someone because I want to be with them, not because I have to be with them.”  So I wondered to myself, why did people get married then?  It is because they wanted to be with someone, not because they had to be.  So, I realized that the person had no justification for cohabiting other than this is what they wanted.

It made me think more about the subject, and of course I realized that money had played a large factor for both that person and they person they were living with.

On the other hand, I have heard from others who cohabited that they did so to see if they were compatible before marriage.  They said it would allow them to know the other person and learn how to deal with problems.  Such ideas were seductive because of their potential to help a couple avoid issues in the future.

So, I decided to read the academic literature on the phenomenon.

Even though the sources I read were not written within the framework of the Christian tradition, as I read, I found Christian teachings about love and marriage and the blessings that flow from them being confirmed.

Click here for a brief articlelinking to studies if you are interested in a starting point to read about this phenomenon.

In this above article, it summarizes research by Scott Stanley and colleagues.  That research mentioned how people in relationships stay together for one out of two reasons: love or cost.

Those who stay together because of love are doing so out of their own freedom; nothing is constraining them to stay together.  But those who stay together because of cost are doing so because they are constrained; they would lose money (such as on increased rent if one becomes single). Even though they may not have started cohabiting solely because of costs, those who cohabit because of cost, (which is the majority of those who cohabit) if they get married, have more domestic problems, violence, strife, and the marriages often end up in divorce compared to those who did not cohabit before they married.  On the other hand, those who spent the whole of their relationship before marriage without cohabiting, had less of these problems after marriage on average.

When we step back and view this phenomenon from the Christian worldview about purity before marriage, it becomes clear that those Christians who are dating and then engaged for a long time without cohabitation are together freely without obligation, which is true love.  When they marry, it is also not because of obligation.  This is because they made the decision to marry after a long time being together.  On the other hand, when a couple begins cohabiting two months after dating, there is no confirmation that they truly love each other but they are reaping benefits (economic and other) that best come after people have chosen to freely love someone else with the purpose of marriage in mind.

It is amazing that when one takes this into consideration that what people thought was freedom (namely the Worship of the Will and its application in cohabitation) is nothing more than forcing yourself into situations which it would be undesirable and costly to get out of.  But those Christians who preserve themselves pure before marriage have shown that they love each other freely with no constraint other than true love.

Further, when people cohabit before marriage, then what’s the point of getting married?  What is different?  The essence and quality of marriage is destroyed by cohabitation. All it becomes is an extension of cohabitation, and cohabitation is nothing more than a parody of marriage. It is a chimera dressed up in appealing clothing.  The true commitments and challenges of marriage are not there; it is a limbo state between being single and being married.  It appears good at the beginning but the disasters that come from it are delayed.

Marriage, on the other hand, is sanctification and transformation.  One’s life is now set apart from what it was before.  Life has changed abruptly, but it was intended through the courtship of the man and woman who got married.  Life is not meant to continue as it was before the two got married in the same way that once a person becomes a Christian, his or her life no longer resembles the life he or she lived before.  Marriage is an image of repentance, conversion, and sanctification. This is so because the man is a symbol of Christ, and the woman is a symbol of the Church. And just like in order for Christ to save humanity, He became human, He is no longer only God, but now also Man.  Also, the woman is like humanity which has rejected the ways of the world to become the Bride of Christ.  The woman has left her former life to be joined to her bridegroom.

Abortion:

Abortion is another example of the principle of the Worship of the Will taken to its logical conclusion.

The current abortion debate began in the 1950s and 1960s when abortionists tried to get congress to pass laws to legalize abortion.  They set forth their arguments appealing to science to demonstrate that babies are not alive in the womb until a certain period of the pregnancy.  Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the molecular biological revolution happened, and it was demonstrated that the fertilized egg cell has unique DNA (different than the mother and continues with the fertilized egg cell, and which is the same DNA that directs cells after the baby is born), so it was big blow to the abortionists trying to use science to support their views because now scientific knowledge stood against their arguments, so they changed their antics.

They appealed to the untouchable principle of the worship of the will.

“It’s the right of the woman to do what she wantswith herbody,” goes their argument.

When this became the appeal, this trumps science because this principle is the foundation of modern secular western thinking.  To deny that we can do whatever we want is to deny the foundational principle which is now guiding the thinking and behavior of the West.

No doubt a woman has the right to do what she wishes to her body assuming it is not harmful, but a baby in the womb is not the woman’s body.  She is carrying that baby’s body in hers.  That is a fact, and at that point she is doing something to someone else. Yet, in Western Civilization, science and the truths it communicates is secondary; worship of the will is the first principle. That is why such an argument that abortionists put forward wins followers.

The Lawmaking Process:

Western Law is based on the principle of the dignity of the individual.  This is so because of Christianity’s influence.

However, it has begun to change.  People have realized that with democracy they can vote for whatever they want and the only true restraining factor is the will of the people.  This is why countries like the Netherlands have legalized drugs and prostitution.  This reality that we now live in where countries are legalizing immoral behaviors and ways of life would have formerly been considered a joke at best and a dystopian novel at worst in the past.  These things are now considered rights in order to secure happiness and a good way to provide tax revenues to the governments that allow them.

Such is the stupidity of the civilizations we live in, but it is all because they are guided by the principle of the worship of the will.  They are following that principle faithfully.  The result of such a principle taken to its final conclusion is one where society does not function due to fear of offending other and this conclusion is due to a prior event which is that relationships are destroyed because people cannot learn to sacrifice for the ones they love or the ones with whom they work in pursuit of something objective to one’s self.  This is all because they have forgotten to practice self-mastery, that is enkrateia.

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