The Freedom of the Good/ Leithart IV

Many times Christians fall into the idea that the Bible presents us with a list of do's and don'ts. While it most certainly does, it does not reduce to this. And it conveys the entirely false impression that dos and don'ts operate in the same manner. They do not. But because we speak that way, abusing language, we end up tending to think it as well.
For instance, it is entirely possible for even the most blatantly "modernistic" Christian to come up with at least a couple of absolute don'ts (total negatives or absolute evils). The less modernistic Christian could think of perhaps two or three hundred. We call this someone's code or ethos, usually. The very words conjure up thoughts of prohibitions (or as Leithart would say, interdictions or anti-remissions).
Leithart, while properly rejecting the idea that Constantine be constrained by a simple list of dos and don'ts made up by peasantry or by modern theologians, is guilty (I think) of refusing to allow Baptistdom (or Christianity/Churchianity) the same privilege. This is to say that while Kantian categorical imperatives are easy to construe or lay down in the negative (Thou shalt not...), the Holy Spirit gives birth to the new Creation whose law is love and who is really free. The options of the person of good will, oriented towards the God Who is Light, are greatly enhanced. A good man is hard to find, but when you find him, you will find that he may choose to sacrifice or he may not, that he may choose to sacrifice himself for one person or for many, and that he may choose to sacrifice himself out of many possible ways. No one tells an American soldier laying down his life for God and country how to die. Not even his officer. No one tells a martyr which tribe to lay down his life for. No one tells a confessor who is tortured how far his suffering must last. No one tells the one who loves whom to love and how.
We may tell someone to love in a basic sense, and enjoin him to do so to his basic circle of society. Beyond that is the territory of the Spirit. Beyond that is where Christ is walking to and fro, going about the earth to see what mighty works of love and suffering He can endure.
So to bring this analogy to full circle, if Baptist and Methodist circuit riders wear themselves out in the saddle of mules and nags evangelizing the frontier while Presbyterians are too busy worrying about preaching in defense or in favor of a Civil War over slavery, the heretical Christianity sects deserve to triumph over Christendom, just like John Knox earned Scotland with his famous prayer "Lord give me Scotland, or I die". The blood of the martyrs and the aches of the saddle-weary circuit-riders are the seed of the Church. Christianity stole a march on Christendom, Mr. Leithart. Nothing could be more seemly than the old dictum that those who suffer win.
Until Christendom recovers her martyrs, Christianity will continue to dominate America and the world, in conjunction with liberal democracy. That's what 2000 American soldiers have died for in Iraq. Their blood will argue strongly with God. Whatever their theology.
Intellectual and liturgical cultures or mini-cultures often forget that the beautiful and the good are not identical in the vale of tears.