Tag Archives: Christian ethics

The Problem of Church Squatters (Part Two)

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Today I’d like to share with you my reply to the distressed lady whose letter I posted in part one of this series on the problem of church squatters. If you have not read the previous post, please take a look at it before you read my reply.

Reply to a Distressed Lady

Dear Sister:

Forgive my delay in replying. I wanted to think carefully about what to say. I am not facing the problem you describe, and as you pointed out, I cannot simply tell you what to do. But I offer my thoughts in hope that they will help you discern the Lord’s will.

First, I want to write about my reactions as I read your letter.

Sadness, Anger, and Joy

I read your letter with a mixture of sadness, anger, and joy. I was overjoyed that you have not been deceived by clever arguments or intimidated by the self-confident majority into giving up Scripture’s clear teaching and the church’s traditional doctrine on marriage, family, and sex. You do not need me to teach you anything on this subject. I will simply say: Be confident. You are right.

I was saddened to hear that your church home has been invaded and occupied by squatters and deceived into abandoning clear apostolic teaching. Many believers know that affirming and celebrating LGBTQ+ relationships is wrong, but I’m not sure everyone realizes how wide it opens the doors to other evils. It rejects the created order and, therefore, denies the wisdom of the Creator (Romans 1:18-32). The distinction and complementarity of male and female are so obvious and basic that to erase them you must deny the very existence of a divinely intended created order. Created human nature becomes a realm of raw material to be reshaped according to human desires. The heavens can no longer declare the glory of God. The moral law possesses no authority to forbid idolatry, lying, murder, adultery, and theft. Not only must affirming- and celebrating-churches ignore the natural moral law, they must ignore Scripture’s moral teaching; for Scripture affirms all the elements of the moral law, intensifies them, and sets them into relation to Jesus Christ (On this theme, see J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide.) For these new Gnostics, God becomes utterly irrelevant to the moral life. They substitute human subjectivity and autonomy in the place of natural and divine law. The inner self becomes an idol and the true object of worship.

I am angered by your elders’ and pastors’ efforts to justify this decision from Scripture, thereby compounding immorality with heresy. Their interpretations of Scripture are so implausible that I find it difficult to accept that they believe them. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone offer these new interpretations in what seemed to me a sincere spirit of obedience (For my analysis of these arguments, see my book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living). It’s always part of an effort to evade the force of Scripture’s teaching. Squatters by their actions show themselves to be thieves and liars. And that makes me angry.

What to Do?

Churches are always mixed bodies of saints and sinners. In almost any church you visit, it is likely that there are secret unbelievers and immoral people sitting in the audience. Those traditions that attempt to purge the church of every sinner tend to do more harm than good by their heavy-handed interrogations. They forget Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). If you attempt to pull up all the weeds you will damage the wheat. Wait until the end and the Lord will separate the two. You don’t need to leave a church just because it contains secret fornicators, idolaters, and doubters. There are no pure churches.

No church possesses and teaches perfect doctrine. For 2,000 years, the church has conducted internal debates about worship, food, predestination, the atonement, the sacraments, church offices, and many others. You don’t need to separate from a church with which you disagree on a point of doctrine as long as that doctrine does not contradict the gospel or the Christian way of life. Scripture is unambiguous about many things but not all. How do the sacraments work? What does Scripture mean by election and predestination? Should the church organize itself in a presbyterian or episcopal or congregational way? Churches that claim to teach the whole doctrinal truth and nothing but the truth often engage in fights, purges, and divisions. You must follow your conscience.

However, when a local church or a denomination comes to be led by people who teach heresy, things become more complicated. Though your church affirms and celebrates LGBTQ+ relationships, apparently it tolerates you and others who disagree. So, you are not being forced to choose between violating your conscience or giving up your membership. You will have to examine your conscience before God.

In examining your conscience, I don’t think there is one set of questions you should ask. Our consciences have a way of speaking to us even when we don’t ask questions of them. They can warn us not to rationalize our lack of courage or ignore our hypocrisy or justify our sloth. They can counsel us against being used by the heretics to minimize the seriousness of their errors.

Another often overlooked factor comes to mind. If you are not a leader, a teacher of the faith, or in contemporary terms, an influencer, you may have less of a responsibility to break from your church even if it teaches a heretical doctrine, that is if there are some redeeming aspects to the church. Remember Abraham’s discussion with God about how many good people it would take to save Sodom from destruction (Genesis 18). If by staying you do not contribute to the spiritual downfall of others, you may not bear the guilt of the false doctrine taught by your church. You have to think about that.

For me, however, things are very different. I could not remain in attendance and fellowship with the church you describe. Because I have a responsibility to be a teacher of God’s people and have done so for over 50 years, my continued presence would tend to minimize the seriousness of its heresy. Perhaps my silence could even be used to justify it.

I have not told you what you should do. But I hope these thoughts will help you gain perspective. Above all, examine your conscience in prayer before God. May God give you courage to do what is right and the peace to live with your decision.

In Christ,

Ron Highfield

The Problem of Church Squatters (Part One)

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The following letter is a composite of concerns that many different individuals have shared with me over the past few years. I believe it expresses the feelings of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of faithful Christians. I was provoked into writing this post by a note from a lady who happened to read something I had written. The letter below incorporates the concerns voiced in her letter but the wording is my own.

Letter from a Distressed Lady

“Dear Professor Highfield:

I am writing to ask for your prayers and your advice. As you know, my husband (now deceased) and I have been members of First Avenue Church for over 60 years. We joined as a young couple, and now I am old and widowed. We served this church in the teaching ministry, the finance ministry, the hospitality ministry, and many others. We attended every service and generously supported the work financially. We weathered every storm and never once seriously considered leaving. All of this to say, I am not one to leave a church over a minor disagreement with the leadership or a personal offence. But something has happened that has placed me in a very distressing situation that must be resolved one way or another.

A year ago, the leadership of our church—a board of men and women elders—decided that our congregation will officially and publicly celebrate LGBTQ+ identities and relationships as equal morally and spiritually to marriage between male and female. The church had been moving in this direction for many years. First there was silence in the church’s public teaching. Then there arose low key advocacy by some individuals and small factions. They faced no strong push back from the leadership. As a next step some aggressive advocates of LGBTQ+ identities and relationships aspired to and were appointed to the leadership team. Soon—I hardly know how it happened—the leaders and the pastors announced that our church was now an LGBTQ+ affirming church.

A minority of us, mostly older, asked the elders and pastors how they could justify this change when it so clearly contradicts the explicit teaching of the Bible. They assured us—quite condescendingly I thought—that the Bible did not really condemn modern forms of loving LGBTQ+ relationships; it condemns only violent and abusive relationships. We objected that we had been reading the Bible all of our lives and have never noticed any ambiguity in its teaching about sexual relationships and marriage. The elders and the pastors replied that lately the consensus of the best Bible scholars supported the new interpretation. With this retort, we realized that no objection would induce the church elders and ministers to reconsider their decision.

I am now an old lady. I don’t have the will or energy to fight. I feel that the church I loved for 60 years (my home!) has been invaded by squatters. They entered uninvited, made themselves at home, took charge, and before we could do anything to stop them, they changed the locks and forged new deeds.

What should I do? Am I wrong to stay to facilitate the good activities of First Avenue? Or, by staying am I giving tacit approval to its heresy? Should the faithful abandon such churches to their fate of decline and certain death? Should I take a stand and witness boldly to the truth? On the other hand, there still remain a few older members to whom I minister. They don’t support the changes but stay because their roots are so deep in that community and leaving would be so traumatic. And I have some longtime friends sympathetic to the changes who would be hurt if I left because of my disagreement with them. Would it be right to leave them?

What should I do? I realize that you can’t simply tell me what to do. But at least I need some perspective. Please reply.

Sincerely,

A Distressed Lady

Next Time: My reply to the distressed lady.

Christianity and the Social Order (Part 6)

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In part six of our series, we are finally ready to address the questions “May Christians argue in the public sphere of a secular state for their preferred public policies? If so, how?”

Inescapable Limits

We are born into already existing societies with long traditions of culture and civilization and finely-woven networks of relationships negotiated over the centuries. There is no possibility of creating a society from scratch. I see no way to escape history and dream up, much less construct, a completely rational social and political order. We do the best we can do where we live and when. I live in the United States of America on the eve of its 250th anniversary. As a citizen, I have access to the means other citizens have to influence public policy. But how should my Christian faith and Christian moral convictions affect the range of policies I support and how may I argue for them? And how may I exercise these rights while taking care not to misuse Jesus’s and his apostles’ moral teachings, given to individual Christians and the Church, by claiming his authority for my public policy preferences?

Reason, Tradition, and Moral Law

Christianity’s moral vision is not utterly unique and other worldly. Indeed, it includes extraordinary virtues, behaviors, and attitudes that cannot be legislated by a state. But it also includes the common principles and moral rules that make human society possible. Peace, order, and justice are Christian as well as universal human values. Christianity prohibits murder, stealing, lying under oath, rape, and many forms of violent, anti-social acts. In arguing for policies that operationalize these basic social rules, Christians don’t need to appeal explicitly to Jesus’s teaching or the kingdom-of-God vision. We can appeal to practical reason, common moral sensibility or a common sense of decency. Moreover, in the USA Christians can appeal to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in legal arguments. Appealing in this way to practical reason we can be more persuasive to the public many of whom do not share our Christian faith. If we appeal to the authority of Jesus to support a policy that could have been supported by practical reason, we may unintentionally leave the impression that the rationality of the policy depends on faith in Jesus. Non-religious people may inadvertently be given an excuse to dismiss the proposal as religiously based. Additionally, such a strategy may provoke needless debates among Christians about the meaning of Jesus’s teaching for public morality.

Christian Realism

We can debate what virtues and vices may realistically be institutionalized in law. As examples, one can make some excellent rational arguments against drunkenness, divorce, fornication, adultery, pornography, and many other destructive behaviors. But society as a whole may not be convinced that making such behaviors illegal is worth the trouble. Even if we limit our arguments to those that can be supported by practical rationality and argue from moral principles recognizable by all people, we need to be realistic about how much restraint on their lust and greed people will tolerate. People welcome laws against murder, robbery, kidnapping, and theft, that is, laws that protect their persons and property. They can see the rationality of traffic and zoning laws. But they resent laws that restrict what they perceive to be their liberties. As we discussed in the previous essay, Christians should know that the kingdom of God cannot be realized in its fulness by human effort. I do not believe that it is our duty as Christians to impose morality on society beyond that necessary for the continuance of civilization. To attempt this is to risk becoming unnecessarily obnoxious to the general public.

Christianized Reason

If Christians need to limit their public policy arguments to practical reason and constitutional law, what difference, then, does being a Christian make in a person’s political involvement? In my view, something like the following may specify that difference.

Christians are being transformed into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18) and liberated from the powers of sin, death, and the devil (Romans 8:1-3). The Holy Spirit places the love of God in their hearts, and they are animated by the hope of the glory of God (Romans 5:1-4). Christians are called to live extraordinary lives, and they have been given the resources to do so:

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator (Colossians 3:5-10)

If they use the gifts they have been given, Christians can be liberated from irrational passions and habitual vices that obscure reason’s proper functioning. Christians may perceive the goodness and rationality of a policy that people blinded by bad habits and irrational passions cannot see. Even if Christians limit their public policy arguments to practical reason understandable by all, the policies for which they argue and the strength of their arguments will be affected by their Christian experience and faith. Christian citizens may be able to help non-religious citizens see what they could not otherwise see because of social pressure, passion, and habit.

Christianity and the Social Order (Part 5)

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In part four of our series on Christianity and the Social Order we explored how Christians will by their existence and day-to-day activities indirectly influence this order. In part five we will pursue the question of whether or not, given the inner nature of Christian faith, some public policies are to be preferred over others. This issue needs to be clarified before we can address the legitimacy of Christians attempting to influence the social and political order directly.

An Introductory Reminder

Many Christians take for granted their right and duty, guided by their faith, to exert through political means a moral influence on the social world in which they live. The only debatable issues are what policies, parties, and candidates are most likely to shepherd society to be more like the kingdom of God envisioned by Jesus. They vote, make campaign contributions, place political stickers on their cars, and run for office—all without asking themselves whether Jesus’s moral teachings warrant or even permit their efforts. I designed this series to examine this unexamined presumption.

Christian Preferences for Public Policies

Believers live in many different forms of political order. It is possible to be a Christian in any of them. My question here is this: beginning with the inherent nature and logic of the Christian faith, are certain public policies to be preferred over others? We are not yet ready to ask whether or not Christians—as individuals or as the institutional church in reliance on Jesus’s teaching—may attempt to influence the state to institutionalize their preferred policies.

The Kingdom of God

Christianity envisions a perfect community, which serves as the ideal by which it measures all other communities, including the church. Jesus taught us to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). For Christianity, the ideal society involves universal justice, peace, unity and love of neighbor and love of God grounded in unanimous acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as Lord. Paul explains that the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus aims at Christ’s universal lordship:

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:10-11).

Christians long for the coming kingdom and would prefer that it come sooner rather than later. However, I can detect no reason to think that Jesus or the early church expected the kingdom of God to be realized in its fulness through ordinary political means—war and legislation. It will be God’s work and will arrive only at the end of history when God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Christians should of course prefer that all people freely embrace the values of the kingdom, and in living as light in the world and preaching the gospel, they work toward this end. Given the nature of the kingdom, however, Christians should know better than to attempt to establish the kingdom by political means.

State Church

It seems to me that no Christian should want the state to establish Christianity as the official state religion. Many evils flow from such arrangements: religious persecution, widespread hypocrisy, and the politicization of doctrine. But I think the most basic Christian arguments against church establishment are that the individual act of faith must be free and Christian behavior must arise from sincere love. Legal coercion or worldly advantage are destructive of faith and love.

State Persecution

I don’t see how a Christian could prefer to live under a state that is actively hostile to Christianity. We are called to endure persecution if we must, but we are not obligated to seek it. Surely it is better from a Christian point of view to live in a situation where we can believe and practice our faith freely and share it with others without fear of state persecution.

Freedom of Belief and Practice

The logic of Christianity supports neither coercing people to practice Christianity nor persecuting them for doing so. It seems rather that Christians should rejoice to live within a society where one is free to practice Christianity, some other religion, or none at all.

Next: May Christians argue in the public sphere of a secular state for their preferred public policies? If so, how?

Christianity and the Social Order (Part 4)

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In the first three parts of this series, I argued that Jesus and his apostles addressed their moral teaching to individual believers, not to institutions. I examined three different ways people attempt to apply this moral teaching to the social/political order and pronounced them all failures. Does Jesus’s moral teaching, then, have no relevance to the order and conduct of society? Must Christians keep to themselves and “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60)? Or, is there a way Christians can participate in political society without distorting Jesus’s moral teaching?

No Easy Task

I acknowledge that this is a difficult and controversial subject. I have no illusions that I can resolve issues that have been debated since the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire. Additionally, Christians find themselves living in vastly different societies in every country and among every people in the world. I cannot presume to understand their situation well enough to answer their questions. They must think through their own situations. My thought is stamped with the fact that I was born in the United States of America and have lived there my whole life. The best I can do is methodically think through the question, given my experience. Perhaps I can shed a little light even for those who live in other nations.

Indirect Influence

Unavoidable

The first thing on which to get clear is that Christians cannot avoid having some influence on the society in which they live. To live in a society, we will have to participate in the market place and the workplace. We will relate to the state, at least passively, by abiding by laws and regulations, paying taxes, and many other ways. We will interact with family, neighbors, fellow workers, store clerks, doctors, and many others. As those shaped by the moral teachings of Jesus—if we truly are his disciples—even our ordinary interactions with people will witness to our faith. People will notice our “good lives” and perhaps ask why we live this way (1 Peter 2:12). And some may awaken to the moral law written on their hearts long buried by social corruption.

Good Works

We will exert influence not only by being law-abiding, peace-loving and helpful people but by doing good things beyond what we must. Jesus explained to his disciples:

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:14-16).

From the beginning, Christians have engaged in ministries to the poor, widows and orphans, founded hospitals, build schools, helped with famine relief, and braved plague-ridden cities to care for the dying. Christians don’t do these things to exert social and political influence; yet by displaying true virtue they gradually, indirectly transformed the moral ideals of whole cultures.  And these moral ideals gradually influenced the laws, order, and policies of nations.

Evangelism

Jesus imposed on his disciples a mandate for evangelism. Jesus said,

 All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you (Matthew 28:18-20).

As is obvious from these words, evangelism combines the call to believe the good news, to be incorporated into the church and to adopt the way of life Jesus had taught his disciples. Evangelism speaks a message to the world: repent, believe, receive baptism and learn how to live as a disciple of Jesus. Even though the evangelistic message is not a direct attempt to influence social policy or the individual morality of the general public, it may have an indirect influence toward those ends. The evangelist aims to convert people to Jesus Christ and won’t be satisfied with “making the world a better place.” Nevertheless, the good news of Jesus and the call to a life of high morals may indirectly have this effect.

Next: In part five, we will ask if some political orders, systems of laws and social policies are more compatible with Christian faith, morality and practice than others. If so, can a serious disciple of Jesus actively seek to bring about the order most compatible with Christianity?

Christian Ethics is for Christians!

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In this essay we continue our study of Christian ethics in which we attempt to reclaim Christian moral teaching from political opportunists. In the previous essay I listed five ethical principles that do double duty as conclusions and guiding principles of this series. Today we will address the first two:

  • Jesus and the apostles address their moral teaching to individual persons; not a single line is addressed to an institution.
  • The only entity capable of moral dispositions and actions is the individual human person.

I assume that most of my readers are familiar with the full range of the New Testament. Given this assumption, I will not take the space to document every instance of moral teaching in the NT. Nevertheless, in preparation for this essay I reread the four gospels and the letters of Paul just to make sure that my memory served me correctly.

Jesus

Jesus teaches his disciples about many things: the character of God and providence, the coming kingdom of God, and sincere religious practice. Included in his teaching are what I am calling moral teachings, that is, how we ought to act. The Sermon on the Mount serves as a convenient summary of Jesus’s moral teaching. Among the moral imperatives in that section of Matthew are:

  • Don’t get angry or insult your neighbor.
  • Don’t harbor lust.
  • Don’t divorce.
  • Don’t swear an oath.
  • Don’t take revenge.
  • Love your enemies.
  • Don’t worry. Trust God.
  • Don’t love money.
  • Don’t judge others.

Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus teaches his disciples to:

  • Forgive others.
  • Love their neighbors.
  • Purify their hearts from all hypocrisy.
  • Be humble and serve others.
  • Don’t seek honor from others.

Perhaps no other statement expresses the heart of Jesus’s moral teaching better than Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” This command comes at the end of the section wherein Jesus insists, against the universal human inclination, that we ought to love our enemies. The moral actions Jesus commands can arise only out of a character assimilated to the character of God.

Paul

Paul’s writings deal centrally with the necessity in the first decades of the church of clarifying how trust in Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah and Lord relate to the Law and how Jewish and Gentile believers can be united in one body. But Paul unmistakably continues to teach his converts—especially gentile converts—the moral vision embodied in the Law and the prophets as interpreted by Jesus. We can see this fusion clearly in Romans 13-15, Galatians 5, Ephesians 4 and 5, Philippians 2, and Colossians 3. But I am especially struck, however, by 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul, like Jesus, connects outward actions to the most intimate depths of the heart. God wants our souls! If we fail here, we “gain nothing” (v. 3).

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

This description reminds me of Jesus’s statement in Matthew 5:48 “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In 13:10, Paul even uses the same word “perfect” or teleios to describe the state in which everything is as it should be.

The Individual Christian

In my rereading of the NT, I could not find a single moral imperative addressed to the state as it existed in that day (the Roman Empire) or any hypothetical state. There are no moral instructions about justice or love or mercy directed to public or private institutions composed of nonbelievers or a mixture of believers and nonbelievers. The NT does not read like Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics or Grotius or Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau or Hegel or Rawls. Nothing resembling public policy advocacy can be found. When the NT speaks to the world, it says “Repent and believe the gospel.” And even then, it speaks only to individuals, for only individuals can repent or believe. Moral instruction follows conversion.

Indeed, the NT speaks about the church as an institution but only in descriptive terms. When Jesus or Paul or John presents moral instruction to the church it is always addressed to the community not as an abstract institution but as individuals of one mind and heart.

When you consider Jesus’s and Paul’s inextricable linkage of moral action with the depths of the inner person, it becomes clear why the NT addresses its moral teaching to individual persons only. Institutions don’t have hearts. They can’t believe. They can’t love.

Why, then, do so many clergy, politicians, intellectuals, and others, quote Jesus and the apostles as if their moral teaching could be applied directly to the political order or organizations composed of atheists, adherents of other religions, and nominal Christians? Can this practice be justified?

Next Time we will examine three ways people apply Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching to public institutions and attempt to justify particular public policies.

Pearls, Pigs and Politics: Reclaiming Christian Ethics

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6 “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces” (Matt 7:6).

 7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory… 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit (1 Cor 2:7-14).

A New Series

Today we begin a new series. I think I know the general direction and the destination, but I don’t know the exact route. I am guided by the conviction that much of what passes as Christian moral teaching today is really political ideology in religious disguise. That is to say, instead of helping individual believers understand how they ought to live as disciples of Jesus in an idolatrous culture, teachers focus on social/political issues and invoke the teaching of Jesus—and selectively the Old Testament and apostolic teaching—to support particular public policies. Instead of speaking of faith, hope and love, they instruct us about social justice. Instead of calling us to personal responsibility and repentance, they blame the social order for our sins and sufferings and call for political change. In short, they prefer to change the world than change themselves.

In this series I want to challenge this social/political distortion of the gospel and return Christian ethics to its proper subject: the individual person’s character and actions in relation to God and neighbor.

Ethical Principles

Below are some principles that will guide our discussion. I will have to unpack and defend them, but for now I want to assert them for your contemplation.

  • The only entity capable of moral dispositions and actions is the individual human person.
  • Jesus and the apostles address their moral teaching to individual persons; not a single line is addressed to an institution.
  • Christian moral teaching presumes the unity and inseparability of our highest religious duty (to love God) and our highest moral duty (to love neighbor); loving God takes priority.
  • Christian moral teaching demands that the dispositions of the soul and external actions dwell in harmony in the good and right.
  • The believing church—understood as a community of persons not as an institution—should endeavor to embody the perfect community of the Kingdom of God in this world.

The Journey

I hope you will walk along with me as we explore this subject. I am afraid I will have to kick a few sacred cows, step on a few toes, and deflate a few delusions along the way. But my goal is to discern and explain the way of life taught by Jesus and his apostles.

Christian Stoic or Social Justice Christian?

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The Stoics

Like all philosophical schools in the ancient world—Platonists, Epicureans, Academics, et al—the Stoics sought the truths, attitudes and conditions that would facilitate a good human life. They observed that such negative emotions as fear, desire, and anxiety are generated by thoughts about attaining or avoiding that over which we have no control. Clearly, these negative emotions are incompatible with the good life. The best life is one of undisturbed contentment with the gift of existence in our inner being wherein we are always in the immediate presence of good things that cannot change. For the Stoics, there is only one thing and one place over which we have control, that is our own free will. It is the only thing that we can have purely by willing it. The external world, including our bodies, operates under other laws over which we have no immediate control and to which we must adjust. And the free will of other human beings is completely beyond our control because it is totally under their control. To banish negative emotions, we must refrain from desiring to control that over which we do not have immediate and total control. Stoics determine to accept the flow of the events that happen in nature as their lot. These external events cannot threaten or even touch the inner world of free will unless we allow it to do so.

Social Justice Christians

There is a kind of Christian ethics that in effect proposes that we ought to remain in a state of discontent and outrage until we right every injustice done in the world. And because we cannot accomplish such radical changes in the world by appealing to the free will of others by doing good, speaking truth, and setting good examples, these same Christians resort to using force: intimidation, insults, rudeness, disruption, legal action, and, yes, even violence.  Apparently, these social justice Christians think that the coming of the kingdom of God depends on our human efforts to establish their ideal political order that includes everybody, believers and non-believers, saints and sinners. They turn the Stoic understanding of a good human life inside out. What matters most are the external conditions of life: equal access to bodily pleasure, equality of material goods, equality of social respect, and equality of external freedom. Because this level of control over the external social, political, and natural order is impossible, these social justice Christians ensure that everyone is angry, unhappy, fearful, and offended all the time. Not a happy life.

The Christian Stoic

There are, of course, great differences between Stoic metaphysics, cosmology and theology and the Christian view of God, creation, salvation, and providence. Jesus’s teaching concerning God’s providence and against the need for anxiety, however, bears some resemblance to the Stoic doctrine of limiting our concern to the place where we have immediate control, our free will. Jesus tells us to trust and align our wills with God’s will. Also, neither in Jesus’s teaching nor in the rest of the New Testament is there the slightest hint that Jesus’s disciples ought to seek to remake the world into a social justice paradise by political means. That day is an eschatological hope dependent completely on God’s power. To attempt to control the world in the name of God in a way only God can produces only tyranny and rebellion. The only community in which there is a little hope for an approximate realization of the kingdom ethics taught in the Sermon on the Mount is the church, that is, the community of those truly converted to Jesus Christ in their inner being. But history demonstrates that this kingdom community has never become a concrete reality even in the church, the community divinely commission to become such. Much more is it a vain dream that it will be realized in a society of the unconverted!

What is the Christian Stoic to do? First, we must understand that apart from God’s grace in the Holy Spirit our free will is not free in the most radical sense, that is free to know and love the true God above all things. Only God can make God present to our minds so that we can know and love him in this way. But given God’s grace, we can love God in return for his love for us. In loving God above everything else we live free from anxiety about all those things over which we have no control. Moreover, we know that the God who loves us possesses power to control all things for our good.

Christian Stoics know they cannot right every wrong and transform the world into a social paradise. This task is not under their power and therefore is not their job. Their main job is, with the help of God’s grace, to allow themselves to be transformed into the image of Christ. From that transformed inner world they can turn outward to do good, speak truth, and love neighbor and enemy. God may use their good works and words to transform others.

Christian Stoics refuse to be unhappy because the external world does not submit to their control. We have come to know that our primary task in life is purification of our own souls. That in itself is a dauting task and the work of a lifetime.

Is Liberation Theology Christian?

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I am taking a break from my essays on higher education to ask, “Is Liberation Theology Christian?” A few years ago, I would have answered this question, “It depends.” Perhaps that was because I knew it only from books. But now my first impulse is to say “No!” because I find myself surrounded by “liberation” theologians, and I know firsthand where they are coming from. It does not matter what they focused on in graduate school—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology or practical theology—everything is about liberating the oppressed. They’ve multiplied like rabbits. It seems that within the past 10 years, every theology graduate program in America decided that the only subject worth studying is oppression and liberation. Everybody is a social ethicist and a political activist. And you advance your academic career by discovering new classes of oppressed people and ever more subtle ways oppressors oppress their victims.

Before I go further into my complaint, I should probably define liberation theology. Liberation theology is a general term for any system of theological thought that privileges “liberation” as the lens through which it views all the topics usually studied in Christian theology. It evaluates every theological utterance by its tendency to oppress or liberate some group of people. There are no neutral theological statements! Everything is political, and everyone has an agenda. The purpose of liberation theology is to critique theologies that justify oppression and construct theologies that justify the efforts of designated oppressed groups to liberate themselves. It is not to listen to the word of God, repeat it to the church, and obey it.

What kind of oppression does liberation theology have in mind? Not sin, death, and the Devil! These three are the classic oppressors of humankind from which traditional Christianity sought liberation through the gracious saving action of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In liberation theology, the oppressors are human beings and the social structures they create. Liberation theologians work to expose and critique the capitalism, patriarchy, white racism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, etc., that they see permeating American society. Liberation theology focuses on political liberation. And it draws on the socio-political analysis of Karl Marx and his contemporary followers often called neo-Marxists. They divide the world into the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes. It’s a very simple analysis of a very complicated world. And from this simple analysis liberation theologians derive a simple theology that divides people into good and bad, guilty and innocent based on group identity. The oppressors can make no defense and the oppressed can give no offense.

What gives these liberation theologies the appearance of being Christian? The simple answer to this question is that they argue that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ always took the side of the oppressed. Liberation theologians select such prooftexts as the Exodus story, some of Jesus’s statements, some of his interactions with the poor and rich, and a few other isolated statements in the Old and New Testaments. They sprinkle these quotes within an already complete system of social and political thought derived from Karl Marx and lead the reader to leap to the conclusion that the whole system springs from the essence of Christianity. But Christianity is completely superfluous to the doctrine. It is added to tickle Christian ears and, frankly, to deceive them.

Why do I say that liberation theology is not Christian? (1) Read any liberation theology you please—feminist, Black, womanist, gay, queer, and Latin American—and you will always find that the subjective experience of these groups is considered a divine revelation as authoritative, if not more so, than Scripture. No reading of Scripture, no matter how obvious to the ordinary reader, will be allow to subvert the “truth” of the subjective experience of oppression. But in any theology worthy of the designation “Christian,” Scripture must be acknowledged as the norm of all theological doctrine and ethics, and to reject this norm is to cease to be Christian. To continue posing as Christian is to lie and deceive. (2) Liberation theology selects one theme within Scripture—liberation—and subordinates everything else to it. Liberation theology does not therefore present the fulness of the gospel or the apostolic teaching; and this distortion through omission is a textbook definition of heresy.

“Dignitas Infinita” (Infinite Dignity) A Recommendation, Part Three

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In this post I will conclude my reflections on the just released declaration of the Roman Catholic Church’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on “Dignitas Infinita” (Human Dignity). Below is the outline of the document. Today I will address the bolded point #4.

Presentation

Introduction

1. A Growing Awareness of the Centrality of Human Dignity

2. The Church Proclaims, Promotes, and Guarantees Human Dignity

3. Dignity, the Foundation of Human Rights and Duties

4. Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Conclusion

Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Under this heading Dignitas Infinita addresses several violations of human dignity:

poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, marginalization of people with disabilities, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence.

In each subsection, the Declaration draws on the theology of human dignity articulated in sections one and two as well as the secularized form stated in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). [For this story, see the first essay in this series.] In my view, these abuses of human rights fall into two classes, although a few embody elements of both: (1) abuses wherein individuals or groups violate the inherent dignity of other individuals or groups; (2) abuses in which individuals violate their own dignity sometimes encouraged or aided by others.

Class One: Violations of the Dignity of Others

In this class we can place poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, surrogacy, marginalization of people with disabilities, and digital violence.

As I said above, the Declaration draws on the biblical anthropology common to the ecumenical church. But it also wants to speak to those more at home with the secular language of human rights. Except for surrogacy—in which the genetic child of one couple is artificially placed in the womb of another woman, carried to term, and surrendered to the genetic parents—Western secular societies also view the items on this list as violations of human rights and dignity. The declaration condemns surrogacy as violation of the dignity of the birth mother and the child. Both parties as persons of infinite dignity should not be made the objects of a commercial transaction. Children should not be for sale. As for the other abuses of human dignity in Class One, many societies that formally condemn these violations overlook them in practice.

Class Two: Violations of One’s Own Dignity and Borderline Cases

In this class fall abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence. I will make comments on abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, and sex change.

Abortion is a grave offense against the dignity of the mother and the destroyed child. Abortion is most often justified as the prerogative of the woman, who supposedly has a right to control her own body. Ironically, this assertion appeals to the very principle of infinite dignity under discussion in the Declaration. It perverts an objective, ontological characteristic into a subjective, arbitrary right. And of course, the child is treated as a non-person that possesses no dignity or rights. However, the legitimate right to control one’s body has in view only violation and coercion by another person. But in relation to God, the Creator and one’s ontological dignity as the image of God, no one has a right to use their body as they wish; it is just as wrong to violate one’s own dignity as it is to violate another person’s dignity. Moreover, a woman carrying a child is not dealing merely with her own body. She is responsible to the Creator for the life of another. To treat her unborn child as a disposable thing is a grave violation of human dignity and an offense to the divine Giver of life. It not only robs a human being of life, it also sears the conscience of the mother. Additionally, it involves the assisting medical personnel in serious sin. The Declaration quotes Pope St. John Paul II:

Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. […] But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior, and even in law itself is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake (Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae (25 March 1995), no. 58).

Advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide often appeal to the concept of dignity as if human dignity consisted of autonomy and independence. But identifying dignity with independence robs dignity of its inherent and ontological status and makes it dependent on a quality that can be lost, gained, or augmented. Suicide, whether self-inflicted or assisted, is not asserting one’s dignity but violating it. Like life itself, human dignity is a gift of God. No one has the right to destroy it.

Gender theory, which makes gender—an infinite scale of gradation of male to female characteristics—completely independent of biological sex. Gender, not biological sex, becomes central to one’s identity. Instead of embracing our God-given bodies as foundational to our personal identities, gender theory disengages personal identity from the created structures of reality. As the Declaration points out,

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

Attempting to change one’s sex through surgery or hormone therapy rejects God’s creative will. It mutilates and destroys the body, which shares in the dignity of the image of God. For the image of God applies not to the soul alone or the body alone but to the union of body and soul. Pope Fransis asserted that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created” (Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (19 March 2016), no. 56).

Reflections on Dignitas Infinita

I hesitate to make any comment that sounds like a criticism. For this document is a brilliant and timely piece of practical theology. Allow me respectfully to make two observations that could be perceived as mild criticisms. (1) Like many Papal documents, Dignitas Infinita attempts to bridge the divide—or at least engage in dialogue—between Christian theology and ethics and secular anthropology and ethics. The Declaration’s several references to the UN Declaration on Human Rights (1948) witnesses to this desire. Hence the Declaration betrays an interest in influencing public policy at national and international levels. But the demarcation between what can be known about human beings’ nature and destiny through reason alone and what can be known only in faith in divine Creation and the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not clearly drawn. Hence many arguments, especially those concerning surrogacy, abortion, gender theory, and sex change seem less persuasive, because it’s not clear to which norm the document is appealing: to a self-evident natural law that can be known by reason alone or to norms grounded only in faith in divine revelation.

(2) My second mild criticism derives from the confusion described in the first. The concept of dignity, that is, infinite dignity, makes sense only within the biblical framework; for apart from a relationship to God nothing about humanity can command infinite respect. When cut loose from its grounding in Christian faith, dignity loses its precise meaning and can easily be perverted into the autonomy of the self. The moral force of assertions of human dignity is very persuasive when applied to respecting other people, but in application to oneself they become subject to confusion. The concept of dignity, then, needs to be supplemented with a concept of obligation to God. We are obligated to the Creator to be thankful and respectful of his gift of ourselves, body and soul, and the bodies and souls of others.