Perspectives on the Lord’s Supper

A Twilight Musing

A Lutheran friend of mine recently visited our church on what happened to be the once-a-month Communion Sunday. This was the first time she had participated in a “low-church” Communion service, and she was shocked and taken aback by the comparative casualness with which the elements of the Lord’s Supper were distributed and partaken of. The bread was tiny squares in a tray to be picked up with the fingers, and the grape juice (not wine) was in tiny plastic cups set in a tray, and both elements were passed down each row. I gave her some whispered explanation of these procedures during the service, and after the service she pursued the conversation further. “I couldn’t believe we were passing the Blood of Christ down the row,” she said. Her own Lutheran way of having Communion was much more formal, with communicants going up to the altar rail to partake from special wafers and a shared cup of wine (not grape juice), both held by an officiating clergyman or his assistant and presented to each communicant. Underlying her reaction was the Lutheran conviction that the bread and the wine, though not physically changing into the Body and Blood of Christ (as Catholics believe), are nevertheless invested with the mystical Presence of Christ.

All of this led me to some consideration of the differences between “low church” and “high church” customs of worship, particularly in regard to the Lord’s Supper (the common “low church” term for it), or Eucharist (most usual “high church” designation). Evangelicals may be seen as typifying the “low church” end of the spectrum, and Catholics as representing the other end. I think that the contrast between the two can be understood in reference to Paul’s recap of Jesus’ establishment of the Communion service and the Apostle’s comment on the church’s observance of it in I Cor. 11:17-34.

In Jesus’ words of institution, He made statements and gave commands. The statements were, “This is my body which is for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The command in regard to both of these statements was, “Do this in remembrance of me.” In general, I think, the low church approach to the Lord’s Supper emphasizes the command, and the high church approach emphasizes the two statements concerning the elements. The low church focus is on the clearly understandable, intellectually uncomplicated instruction, whereas the high church takes Jesus’ two statements as the primary and most basic truth in understanding the act of Communion. To put the contrast another way, the low church interpretation and practice centers on the rationality of the command, whereas the high church focuses on the mystery of Christ’s supernatural Presence in the elements used in the observance. So we can see how the variance in modern observances of the Lord’s Supper reflect these two kinds of starting points in understanding its meaning and significance. High church communicants regard Communion as a mystical experience; low church communicants see it as primarily carrying out the command to remember.

What are we to say about the relative validity of these two approaches to the meal that we all see as one of the required corporate observances of the church? When presented with two poles of perceived truth, it is usually best to see the strengths of each of them and see how they can perhaps be complementary to each other and not merely an endless source of argument. As one who grew up in a low church setting, I appreciate that an informal observance of the Lord’s Supper has a sort of leveling effect, with minimal distinction between those who administer the elements and the rest of the congregation. This may be seen as practicing both the letter and the spirit of Paul’s instructions in I Cor. 17 that the Supper must show no distinction in the status or wealth of those who participate, for to partake in that manner would show that we “despise the church of God” (v. 22). At the same time, I have noticed over the years the hazards in the low church approach to the Lord’s Supper. In most evangelical Protestant congregations, it gets deemphasized by practicing it only once a month, or even once a quarter. On the other hand, even when it is observed weekly, the time and effort put into preparing for a meaningful presentation of it in worship tends to become secondary to other elements of worship, particularly the sermon.

There is no gainsaying the deep seriousness with which the high church participates in the Communion, or Eucharist, and Evangelicals need to observe and learn from their expectation that communicants will experience a special kind of connection with Our Lord as they partake of the bread and the wine, which Jesus Himself said are, in some sense, to be regarded as His body and blood. The chief danger in the high church practice is that to one extent or another it divides the laity from the people who administer the elements. This difference is most stark in churches in which only priests can officiate for a Eucharist, since they alone are empowered to speak the words by which the substances of the Supper are turned literally into the Body and the Blood of Christ.

I came away from the discussion with our guest about the Communion at our church with a renewed conviction that our congregation needs to have a deeper respect for the Lord’s Supper, manifested in the way it is prepared for and presented. In the absence of an established liturgy that typically uses set prayers and comments on the Communion to put it in context, Evangelical churches need to make sure that the planning of any service in which the Lord’s Supper is to be observed provides for sufficient time and a lead-in that show understanding of and respect for what is being done. High churches can profit from understanding that the observance of the Supper referred to by Paul was probably a gathering in a home, with all of the informality that would be expected in such a setting.

Since Communion is meant to testify to our unity in Christ as we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (v. 26), it behooves us to seek for common ground that brings together all of us who observe it in honor of Christ. If we eat and drink without humility before each other and without discernment of our Master’s Presence, we are “unworthy” and risk eating and drinking judgment on ourselves (vv. 27-34). Let it not be so among us.

Any Questions? Jude 3 Project Interviews Dr. David Baggett

Recently, Dr. David Baggett was interviewed by Cameron Hodge of the Jude 3 Project. Hodge asks some tough questions about some of the most difficult moral issues facing Christians today. You can find the interview here.

Image "Any Questions" by Marcello Maria Perongini.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.6: Directly Effective Commands

The final item on the list of five types of prescription is “directly effective commands.” These are still a species of divine prescription, a species of revealed will and not yet disposing will. But unlike the species we’ve considered so far, they do not need to have any language-using human recipient. God says, “Let there be light,” and there is light. It’s tempting to say it’s not a command at all, but that’s too fast. The importance of the Genesis account here is that we are told that God accomplished creation through speech, in Greek logos. For Christians this suggests the role of the Second Person of the Trinity in creation, and John 1:1-3 takes up this suggestion, with explicit reference back to the first chapter of Genesis.

The idea of effecting something directly by commanding it may seem strange. But it’s not unique to the original creation. When the Psalmist says (Psalm 85:8), “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful,” he is imagining God saying “Shalom,” “Peace be to you,” as the Lord says, for example, to Gideon in Judges 6:23. When God pronounces peace on us, that is a directly effective command, and a work of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps the sense in which creation by directly effective command is a “communicative act” is attenuated. It might be a communication either within the Trinity, or to angelic beings, or to potential (but not yet actual) human recipients, or perhaps the implication of the doctrine of creation by speech is just that the creation is in principle intelligible. In any case, there is still the significant distinction to be made that this last kind of command, unlike precept and prohibition, does not presuppose the existence of human recipients and does not imply sanction or punishment for failure to comply. It’s important to see that this category of prescription nonetheless places creation in the category of something commanded. The claim of Ch. 4 is that God’s commands that produce our obligations are themselves constrained by the human nature that God created, but that this does not take us outside God’s commands to something else constraining God. Rather, God creates by command and sustains creation by command, and then commands us with one of the other types of divine prescription in a way that is consistent with that creative command.

We can now collect together these results and say that a divine command that generates obligation is a prescription with which the person commanded is not permitted not to comply, and a prescription in which there is an internal reference, by the meaning of this kind of speech act, to the authority of the speaker, and to some kind of condemnation if the command is not carried out.

Image: By Chris Light - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59628755

The Unsafe Lion

Two encounters with Aslan, the Great Lion in the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, serve to illustrate the idea that meeting this being (a Christ figure) is risky business. The first instance is in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the Pevensy children are having a meal with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. In the course of their conversation, the Beavers speak of Aslan and are questioned about him by the children. Told that he is a lion and not a man, and is moreover the Great Lion, son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, Susan asks, “”Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” To which Mrs. Beaver replies that indeed, any sane person would tremble in his presence. “’Then he isn’t safe?’ Said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver . . . . Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’” Later, when children do meet Aslan, they finally come to understand that joining his cause means leaving behind their conventional ideas of safety.

Another “dangerous” encounter with the Great Lion is in The Silver Chair, when the girl Jill is left alone with Aslan after she has foolishly endangered her companion Eustace and inadvertently forced a premature separation between them. She finds herself suddenly very thirsty, and when she discovers a stream to drink from, the Lion is between her and the water. She stands there terrified of what the Lion might do if she goes to the water, but increasingly tormented by thirst, so that “she almost felt she would not mind being eaten by the Lion if only she could be sure of getting a mouthful of water first.” When Aslan invites her to come on and drink, she responds, “Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” When he says, “I will make no promise,” she is nevertheless desperate enough to come forward and drink. It is a risky step that results in her being in a frame of mind, after she has drunk, to be corrected and instructed by Aslan.

These and perhaps another half-dozen or so of Narnia meetings between Aslan and humans or sentient animals demonstrate the mixture of terrifying presence and gentleness that these meetings entail. They may be taken allegorically as parables of our relationship with God. Coming into His presence is entirely on His own terms. We have no right nor power to make demands or cut deals. In the Gospels, Jesus Himself challenges people who hear His call to respond in ways that seem contrary to prudent regard for safety and security. He called Peter, Andrew, James, and John to abruptly leave their nets (for James and John even to abandon their father) and become “fishers of men” with Him (Matt. 4:18-22). He chided some who wanted to tend to reasonable business, like saying goodbye to loved ones or burying one’s father, before following Him (Luke 9:57-62). He called Matthew to get up from his profitable, if disreputable, tax-collecting table and join Jesus’ itinerant, dusty band of disciples (Matt. 9:9). Jesus set a severe standard overall for being His disciple: one must forsake father and mother and all possessions, if these interfere with following Jesus (Luke 14:-33, 18:18-33). The Master concludes that “any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 18:33). Serving this Master entails the paradox that “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39). According to human wisdom, walking with Jesus is unsafe at any speed.

But on the other hand, serving Christ with the abandon He asks of us is a risk well worth taking, for at the core of the risk is trust in God’s justice and mercy and in the sure hope that He will always be faithful to His promises.. Since God will not waver in turning our holy recklessness into great gain, casting our lot with Him is the “sure thing” that earthly gamblers are always looking for. A prime illustration of this is the passage in Hebrews where the writer speaks of the faith of Abraham, who gave up his homeland to start out for a destination only vaguely represented to him by God; who accepted the promise of the Lord to give him a son from whom a great nation would, even when his wife was barren and both of them were advanced in age; who, in the face of all common sense and human feeling, proceeded to obey God by sacrificing his only son, the son of divine promise. These “foolhardy” actions were to human eyes extremely risky, but they were based on the words of a God so great that there was none higher by whom He could swear (Heb. 6:13-18).

And we also, heirs to the modeling faith of Abraham, “we who have fled for refuge . . . have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf . . . “ (Heb. 6:18-20). To come back to Mr. Beaver of Narnia, “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’” Paradoxically, then, He is to be both feared and trusted.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.5: Counsels

Another speech act on the scholastic list is “counsel.” God can use imperative sentences to give us advice, instruction, or invitation. What is the difference between command in the narrow sense and these other speech acts? The most salient point of difference is that commands generate obligation, and there is standardly some expectation of condemnation if the command is not carried out. With advice, this is not so, though there may be an expectation of adverse consequences. This is a point emphasized by Stephen Darwall, who talks about the accountability internally contained within a second-person demand, and we’ll return to this shortly.

Traditionally Roman Catholic moral theology teaches that there are three “evangelical counsels,” or “counsels of perfection”: poverty, chastity, and obedience. The idea of counsels as a separate category of divine prescription seems right. Jesus tells us to be perfect as our Father in heaven in perfect. If this is a command, does it not follow that, when Jesus says to the rich young man, “If you wish to be perfect, go sell,” this is also a command, a command to carry out the means to the commanded end? Here Hare makes some distinctions. First, the difference between perfect (confusingly) and imperfect duties is helpful in seeing that the command to be perfect is in a certain way indeterminate.

Consider Kant’s examples in the Groundwork, where the duties not to lie and not to commit suicide are perfect, and the duties to help others and develop one’s talents are imperfect. The difference is that in the first case you are in a bad situation, you have an inclination to do some act to get out of it, and the perfect duty intervenes to stop that particular act. In the second case you are in a good situation, you have an inclination not to do anything to remove yourself from it, and the imperfect duty intervenes to tell you to do something, although it does not tell you what in particular to do. But, while this distinction goes some way toward explaining the imperative “Be perfect,” it is not enough. It captures the indeterminacy of how the imperative is to be carried out, but it doesn’t explain the way in which “Be perfect” gives us an ideal. The word “ideal” here does not imply that we are given merely an ideal, in the sense that the prescription is to be regarded as itself unattainable, and the realistic goal is not attainment but merely trying to be more like what is prescribed. Christian doctrine standardly sees Jesus as giving us in his own life a model for what perfection would be like. This has to be qualified by what Ch. 1 said about the uniqueness of each person’s perfection. But the Name into which we’re called to live is not merely what we should try to reach, or get closer to reaching; it is our destination. Imperfect duties do not all give us ideals in this way, though they give us indeterminacy about how they are to be realized. Thus “Eat more spinach” would meet the criterion for the prescription of an imperfect duty, but it does not give us an ideal.

What more do we need to say in order to capture the special nature of the prescription to be perfect? One point is that the calling towards our own perfection, which is itself a perfection of the common nature “humanity,” is continued in the next life. But obligations do not continue in the next life. Why is this, and what does it tell us about the nature of obligation? Here again Kant is useful to the extent that he sees that God does not have obligations, since God does not have any contrary inclinations that have to be disciplined, and the same is true of finite holy beings. In the case of both perfect and imperfect duties, the prescription is most often to do something other than what inclination is prompting one to do. But the process of sanctification and then glorification is one in which the inclinations come to be more and more in line with duty, so that there is less and less disciplining to be done. Kant did not think that we humans can ever be holy, but he did not give good justification for this claim within either the theoretical or the practical use of reason. It is better to say that there is a call to be holy, and that in this state we would no longer be under obligation. This suggests that even in this life, where there are competing inclinations, the call is to become somebody who does not feel resistance that has to be overcome. This makes the term “obligation” inadequate for what the call (unlike the command) creates.

There is another feature of obligation that will be more central when we discuss the nature of authority in the next section. Obligation is accountability to someone. But there are different types of accountability. Accountability brings with it the envisaging of a sanction of some kind for non-compliance, even if it is only the sanction of blame. Darwall puts the point by saying that accountability makes blame for non-compliance “appropriate,” and quotes Pufendorf, who says, “An obligation forces a man to acknowledge of himself that the evil, which has been pointed out to the person who deviates from an announced rule, falls upon him justly.” But, for calls and counsels, there is not the conceptually implied envisioning of condemnation and punishment. We can still be answerable, but not accountable in the sense that there’s a sanction in the offing. We are supposed to move from the fearful whip to a relationship of love and generosity in our relation with God.

So how should we understand the rich young man passage? One possibility is as a singular precept, according to which he had to give up his wealth. But another possibility is that Jesus is showing him that there is much more than the commands of the second table of the Ten Commandments, or than any commands in the narrow sense of “command.” There is a call to a destination beyond this life, treasure in heaven.

Here’s an example of a divine counsel. A person with tenure at a secular university is asked to consider leaving tenure to teach at a religious college. He considers there is an invitation here, a call that will in God’s providence bring blessing, even though it is hard to justify compliance from a common-sense point of view. He senses that for him to offer his heart to the Lord means to accept this invitation. On the other hand, he does not have the sense that there is something wrong with his current place of employment, or that he has some kind of obligation to go.

God’s prescriptions to us are often counsel of this kind. If we were to attribute emotions to God, we would say God was disappointed when we decline, or not as happy as God could have been, and not that God was angry. But this is anthropomorphic language. Perhaps an ingredient in the picture is that a call is often accompanied by a gift. The refusal of the call is in such a case the refusal of the gift, and an appropriate human response to the refusal of a gift is disappointment.

Why do you have faith?

One day at lunch, my wife asked me, “Why do you have faith?”— meaning, of course, “Why do you have faith that the Christian message is true, and that you should continue to follow it?” Peter instructs us to be ready to give an answer to that kind of question, but I had to pause a few seconds to come up with a concise, focused reply: “Because I need to.” However, that conciseness conceals a great deal that lies behind it. One can identify a variety of contributing elements that can flow into that core, short answer. One is cultural influence. Those who grow up in a theistic culture will usually have a predisposition for some kind of faith, and those who are nurtured from birth in a Christian family are more likely to be Christian believers. Another element is temperament. Some people are led to faith by an emotional experience, and they continue to live in faith because it supports them emotionally. For others, it might have been a path of weighing the arguments of the Christian message, and they continue to find intellectual fulfillment in studying the Word of God. A third element is the experiences of a believer after an initial commitment to walking with Christ. Has the person grown through challenges to his or her faith? This last line of response is the most important, I think, for the question is not addressed merely to the present state of one’s faith, but is also an inquiry as to how the person got to the faith he now holds. A full answer to the question requires some attention to the person’s “journey of faith.” By what stages has one arrived at the kind of faith that he now holds?

My own journey of faith began as I grew up in a devout Christian household. My father was a lay elder, and nightly prayer was faithfully observed (the “family altar” it was called) with all on their knees. I was a Bible reader from at least the age of 8, and I made a profession of faith and was baptized when I was 9. I went to church 3 or 4 times a week, including youth group. In my teen and early college years, I seriously considered being a preacher or a youth worker, but I finally settled on majoring in English, thinking to teach in high school so I could be a self-supported missionary. As I approached my last two years in college, my English professors encouraged me to go to graduate school. When I graduated with my B.A., my wife and I went off to begin my graduate work at the University of Washington, where I encountered for the first time the kind of secular thinking I had been protected from at Abilene Christian College. I went through a couple of years of angst, trying to accommodate my belief in the God of the Bible to the rationalism and materialism assumed by the faculty and many of my fellow students. This experience marked my transition from childhood faith to one forced to deal with the intellectual complexity of believing.

When I finished my graduate work in 1965, I took a position on the faculty of the newly established University of Michigan-Dearborn, at the age of 28. For approximately the first half of my 36 year career there, I was able to tap into the needs of a growing campus, contributing administratively to the creation of new structures to accommodate the expansion from an institution of fewer than a thousand students to an eventual 6,000 or more. During this period my Christian convictions were a sort of curiosity to most of my colleagues, but not a source of any great difficulty. The faculty and staff were fairly close-knit until the academic units began to multiply and we were pulled apart by growth. Eventually, academic and political factions were the rule, and when these factors merged with social changes growing out of the restless ‘60s, particularly the militancy of homosexuals, I increasingly became a target for my publicly stated conservative religious convictions. To these disruptions of professional relationships were added ruptures in church relationships, the two kinds unrelated to each other but both contributing to the painful recognition that my best intentions in interacting with others were not sufficient to prevent those relationships being broken. In the same time period I also had to accept that my professional ambitions were not going to be realized to the extent I had envisioned. In addition to all of this, our church life became unstable, and for the first time Laquita and I considered churches outside the denomination in which we had grown up. Out of this perfect storm of challenges and changes, we began a period of redefining who we were as members of the Body of Christ, and I had to consider a faith that not only went beyond generally accepted intellectual boundaries, but one that transcended the insecurities of friendship and got past conflict within the church.

The resolution of these experiential challenges to my faith came through a deeper understanding of the church as family and of my personal relationship with God. I had to realize that the definition of who I am doesn’t depend on the impression I make on others, but on discovering God’s definition of who I am. I suppose it boiled down to God undermining my self-created security so that I was forced toward humility. When I was in my childhood and young adult faith, I saw myself as a sterling example of a “good boy,” conforming to and exceeding the expectations of both my natural and my spiritual families. In my graduate and early professional years, I had an image of myself as one bravely standing up for my faith in spite of the opposition of my colleagues. But when long-cherished friendships crumbled in both academic and church settings, I had to face the possibility that somewhere along the line, I might have made some really bad choices. The faith that emerged out of that struggle was based on the grace of God, not my own attempts at perfection. My sense of self-worth had to be reestablished through confidence (faith) that I have value because God loves me.

The final stage of my faith development was also born out of difficult personal circumstances, but this time of a sort that brought Laquita and me face to face with an evil that had to be endured more than explained. We had two adopted daughters (mother and daughter biologically) who both developed a genetically transmitted malady called Huntington’s Disease, which is irreversible and fatal, progressing through ten to fifteen years of steady deterioration in mind and body. God called us to be direct caregivers to both of these beautiful daughters over a period of years, beginning when the older daughter was 25 and we were in our mid-fifties. Because the older daughter (Cynthia) was already symptomatic when the younger one (Rachel) was born, we were the newborn’s parents from the beginning of her life. But we knew God had called us to this complex task before it became complex. At first it was agreeing to adopt a child (Cynthia) whose possible “handicap” seemed relatively remote and theoretical when we brought her home. Years later, when she was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, it helped enormously to remember that taking care of her was a task assigned to us by the Lord. That confidence was confirmed over the years of our care for her, during which both our need and His faithfulness were beyond what we could have imagined at the time.

Now, nearly 50 years since we adopted Cynthia, God has brought us through not only Cynthia’s illness (she died at age 42), but He has enabled and blessed us to raise Rachel and to be her direct caregivers during the first years of her own illness. (She was diagnosed with the juvenile form of Huntington’s Disease four years ago, when she was only 18; she has just recently been placed in an adult foster care facility, after it became clear that we were no longer able to give her the 24-hour a day attention that she needs.)

From this last stage of experience, we have learned a level of faith that has been absolutely necessary to our survival as care-givers. We understand better now why God waited until Abraham’s old age to give him the supreme challenge to his faith, the order to sacrifice his only son. We are told that, although Abraham knew God could even raise his child from the dead, he did not know how God would actually make this preposterous demand come right. Abraham knew only that God had been absolutely faithful up to that point, and he was willing to trust that although he didn’t see how, God was at work in this situation, and in His sovereign power and provision, He would bring it to His glory and honor. In the same way, Laquita and I have been so faithfully sustained in all that God has called us to do that we can look beyond the mystery of the moment and be assured that as God has been the Perfect Provider in the past, He will continue to be so, to His glory, in the present and future.

This is the journey that explains how my short answer to Laquita’s question about the foundation of my faith was, “Because I need to—because I have to.”

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.4: Permissions

Another kind of speech act that characteristically uses an imperative tropic is “permission.” A permission is not a command because, if a person is commanded, he is permitted to comply but he is not permitted not to comply. If a person is permitted, he is permitted both to do the thing and not to do it. An illuminating comparison is with necessity and possibility. God permits me if God does not command me not to, in the same way that what is possible is what is not necessarily not the case. But the comparison is not exact. In the cases we’re interested in, permission is not simply the absence of a prohibition, or negative command. When God permits Adams to eat of the fruit of all of the other trees in the garden, God expresses consent to this eating.

In the cases we’re interested in, there needs to be a mental act of permitting, not just the absence of the mental act of prohibiting, and there needs to be a speech act. God’s speech acts of permission express a divine mental act, but to explain what mental act, we need to return to the scholastic distinction between God’s revealed and God’s disposing will. The revealed will is a type of antecedent will (a divine will antecedent to our willing), and the disposing will is a type of consequent will. Regarding the consequent will, Ockham says that it is that by which God wills efficaciously in positing something in being, but in antecedently willing from eternity that a given created will should act in a certain way God does not determine the created will to act in that way. So, even though everything that happens is in accordance with God’s consequent permissive will, it is not necessarily in accordance with God’s antecedent will. Most of the divine prescriptions we have been considering should be taken as expressions of God’s antecedent will.

But now we need to make another distinction, within the antecedent divine will. Consider tragic cases in which there does not seem to be anything good to do. The classic case is hiding a Jew in the Second World War and lying to the Nazi officer at the door. Rather than saying it’s never right to lie, Hare says it’s better to say that lying in such a case can be the least bad thing to do. But does this mean that God permits it? If so, divine permission seems to be different from divine command, where God’s command is said to select which good things to require. If we allow the existence of tragic cases (as experience seems to compel), we should say that God may command saving a life in a case where this requires and God permits a lie. We should then distinguish the antecedent revealed will in the Ten Commandments, which give prohibitions (and thus negative obligations) that are not absolute, from the antecedent divine permission that may be revealed to a particular person in a tragic situation. It’s better to call this prescription “permission” than “command,” because it may still be necessary to repent of the lie, even though it was the least bad thing to do.

Hare finishes this section with a more ordinary example of a divine permission. A person has been going to a church for eight years, and has been happy there, though recognizing that the congregation is not well integrated racially. Then one day he takes an African-American friend to church, and realizes that she is the only black person in the room, and he starts to hear the whole service with different ears. After the friend has left, he is overcome with a sense of grief while driving on the highway, to the point that he is unable to drive and pulls over to the side. Then he hears as it were a voice in his head telling him that it’s all right for now to go on worshiping in that place, with those people he is fond of; but that there are some changes there that need to be made. This he interprets as a divine permission. Divine permissions are very often in situations where human defect has made a mess of things, but obedience is still possible even though purity is not.

Wisdom, Old and New

I have often been struck by the two kinds of wisdom portrayed in Proverbs, both represented in the first chapter.  In vv. 1-19, the writer presents the motif of a parent instructing a child in the principles of right and sensible living, admonishing the child “to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity” (v.3).  Then, in vv. 20-33, Wisdom is personified, warning those who will not listen to her that she will “laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you” (v.26).  Chapter 2 and the first 13 verses of chapter 3 go back to the practical advice to heed the parent’s counsel and live wisely; but 3:14-20 is another rich personification of Wisdom, this time with connections to the very Person of God and the creation of the world.  From there through chapter 9, the speaker alternates between practical advice and the words of personified Wisdom, in addition providing contrast between the idealized femininity of Wisdom and the alluring dangers of the Loose Woman of the flesh.  The book then concludes with the well-known “Worthy Woman” in chapter 31, in whom all of the practical virtues are fully realized, in contrast to the Loose Woman warned against in earlier chapters.

In view of Solomon’s being regarded as the major writer and probably the compiler of Proverbs, the structure of the book may be seen as a reflection of the ironies of his life.  First, the frequency with which sections and individual verses depict a father addressing a son seems not to have been matched in the life of Solomon’s own son, Rheoboam, who turned out to be a fool.  Not only did he ignore his father’s instruction, after Solomon’s death, he was unwilling to listen to the advice of his older counselors and opted instead to do as he was advised by his young companions.  His disastrous reign may well also show that he paid more attention to his father’s apostasy from God in his later life than to his wise teachings in his prime.  Indeed, Solomon didn’t follow his own advice to beware of the lure of godless women, since he allowed his many foreign and pagan wives to turn his heart away from God (I Kings 11:1-8).

The common-sense wisdom Solomon set forth in Proverbs was not reinforced by dedication to the deep Wisdom of God, personified in several places, but particularly and most thoroughly in Prov. 3:13-20 and 8:1 through 9:12.  Solomon reports faithfully what the Lord revealed to him as a result of his early commitment to serving God in humility (I Kings 3:5-14), but he turned out to be the preacher who didn’t live according to his own divinely inspired words.  When he was old, he grew unfaithful to Lady Wisdom and forsook her for the kind of woman described in Prov. 7: 21-23: “With much seductive speech she persuades him; with her smooth talk she compels him.  All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or a stag is caught fast till an arrow pierces its liver; as a bird rushes into a snare; he does not know that it will cost him his life.”  In the book of Ecclesiastes, we have the voice of the jaded, cynical old King Solomon, who has had everything the heart could desire on earth, but now finds himself saying, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”  His wisdom at this point serves merely to show the shallowness of all he has striven for.

In the New Testament, the humanistic wisdom articulated by Solomon is seen as a potential stumbling block to hearing and accepting the deeper wisdom of God.  Jesus at one point thanks His Father that through his parables heaven’s wisdom has been hidden from the worldly wise and revealed to the simple and unsophisticated (Matt. 11:25).   He also tells parables depicting wise and foolish characters: the wise man builds on a rock, the foolish man on sand; the wise virgins bring enough oil in their lamps, the foolish ones run short; the foolish farmer builds bigger barns, only to die the next day.  But the application Jesus intends is not merely that builders should choose a proper foundation, nor that those keeping night time vigil should make sure their lamps don’t run dry, nor that prosperous farmers should be cautious about building big barns.  Rather, He is teaching the larger, deeper lesson that we must see things from God’s perspective and be attuned to how He wants us to order our lives.

This latter emphasis on the New Covenant understanding of wisdom is articulated most clearly in I Cor. 2 and the Epistle of James.  Paul’s initial words in I Corinthians disavow any interest in worldly wisdom (1:17) and he  goes on to show how the Gospel message embodies truths that fly in the face of human wisdom:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. (1 Cor. 1:20-24)

Here we have a new definition of the relationship between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of man, and a distancing of God’s deep wisdom from mere human wisdom, even the special human wisdom given to Solomon by God.  For wisdom is no longer just following practical common sense, but the full meaning of the deep wisdom presented in Lady Wisdom in Proverbs.  Under the New Covenant, the full experience of God’s deep Wisdom comes through our “life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (I Cor. 1:30).

This is the backdrop of the description of heavenly wisdom given in the Epistle of James:

Who is wise and understanding among you?  By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.   But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not  the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.  For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.  But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason,  full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and  sincere. (James 3:13-18)

Thus, with both Paul and James, the contrast is not between earthly wisdom and foolishness, but between earthly wisdom and heavenly wisdom.   In this, they flesh out Jesus’ praise to the Father for using the veil of the parables to reveal His deep truth to people who are not worldly wise.  And the deepest truth of all is that all practical wisdom, even that embodied in the book of Proverbs, is transcended by the “foolish” wisdom of the crucified Christ.

Image: By Luca Giordano - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15883941

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.3: Prohibitions:

A prohibition is a command not to do something. Neither prohibitions nor precepts need to have imperative sentences for their expression. Grammatically indicative sentences can communicate prohibitions (“Spitting is forbidden.”) Imperatives are, however, a typical form of expression for both. We can issue a warning and in a broad sense a prohibition (“Don’t go too close to the edge.”) There’s a narrow sense in which warning and prohibiting are different, though, and Hare suggests the difference resides in the presence (in prohibiting) or absence (in warning) of an internal reference in the nature of the speech act to the authority of the speaker, and to some form of condemnation envisaged for failing to comply.

Examples of prohibitive commands will be like examples of preceptive commands, except in the negative. But there will often be a positive command going along with the prohibition. In experience, sometimes the negative has the focus, sometimes the positive; perhaps with God’s commands it’s more often the negative. Socrates reported that his voice only told him what not to do. But there may be positive implications of prohibitions. The Heidelberg Catechism, to take just one example, acknowledges that the second table of the Ten Commandments consists almost entirely of prohibitions, but it insists that there are positive correlates to all the negatives, and that they are equally enjoined.

Examples of prohibition are easy to find, but the attribution to a divine source will often seem indicated only when the prohibition is unexpected or unusually vivid. The restriction comes from our own natural caution, not wanting to ascribe to God what could be just our own mental processing. But as with precepts, there’s no need to posit that we always perceive the divine source, or that God always uses extraordinary means of revelation, so that God’s prohibitions may in fact be much more frequent than we are inclined to credit.

Here is an example of a prohibition. A person has found his sibling difficult, and decides finally to send her a book, which he thinks will do her good. At the time of sending it, he hears a still small voice in his head telling him that this is a bad idea. But he ignores it, and puts the book in the mail. Somehow, the book gets lost and is never delivered. At this point, the voice in his head gets more insistent, telling him to leave well enough alone. But he’s stubborn, and buys another copy of the book, and sends it off. This time, the book is delivered, and it’s a disaster. He and his sibling have a row, after she has read the book, which very nearly destroys their relationship. He realizes that he had in fact known all along that God was telling him not to send it.

Image: By Fritz von Uhde - http://www.neumeister.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47654827

Vote Your Conscience

Editorial

“No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless [. . .]; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.” – William James, “The Will to Believe”

In an episode from season two of The Good Wife, the central character’s law firm has to decide whether to sue someone accused of a horrific sex crime. Evidence for a strong case eventually mounts, and it looks likely that they could win the potential suit.

But there’s a rub. The accused man is someone who has done a great deal of good in Africa. For his promotion of women’s rights and justice for the underprivileged there, he is about to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is known throughout the country for this humanitarian work, which has done much good for many people. Pursuit of the case against him could very well permanently undermine the advances gained by his efforts. At least that’s the argument put forth by the man’s wife when she pleads with the firm not to pursue the lawsuit.

The episode makes an illuminating case study in which a moral conflict arises between doing the virtuous or dutiful thing, on the one hand, and promoting the best consequences on the other. This is, of course, a well-known dilemma that often pits deontologists—those who emphasize the rightness or wrongness of the action itself—against consequentialists—those who determine the rightness or wrongness of an action based on outcomes.

Sometimes, such as in the episode described above, doing the dutiful thing would seem well-nigh certain to produce bad consequences overall, whereas other times aiming to maximize utility would call for an intrinsically unjust action. Such conflicts have been the fodder for many an amusing and engaging ethics debate in philosophy classrooms.

The strictest deontologist would suggest that avoiding horrific consequences never justifies violating a particular moral rule. No number of lives saved, for example, could validate torturing the child of a terrorist. But not every rule is nonnegotiable. We’re rather inclined to think that, in the aforementioned episode, bringing the wrongdoer to justice would be the right thing to do.

What about lying to protect Jews during the Holocaust when a German soldier comes to the door? Kant was notorious for insisting that there are no legitimate exceptions to lying, but one could question this conclusion based on Kantian principles themselves. For example, on the basis of what maxim is one considering the lying? Some maxims are universalizable, while others aren’t, so which is it?

The present point, though, is more about this question: What do we do when doing the right thing would be harmful overall? What would a teacher do, for instance, if on the eve of graduation she discovers that a senior has egregiously cheated, a senior with a full scholarship to a prestigious university? Or choose another example when doing the right thing seems unlikely to yield the best outcome.

This is a question neither for the strictest Kantian nor the strictest consequentialist. Most of us, however, fall somewhere in between, and rightly so. And so most of us will likely encounter a scenario where doing what we are convinced is right will not likely produce good results. It may even produce a bad one, or at least contribute to it. In such cases, what should one do?

This is no mere academic exercise, because many people are currently struggling with this very question in the upcoming presidential election. I’m thinking particularly of conservatives who can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump, but they are no less opposed to his competition. Such conservatives are finding themselves under increasing pressure to capitulate and support Trump despite their deep reservations.

Popular arguments along these lines come from evangelical leaders like Eric Metaxas who sees Trump as “the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion.” While Metaxas says that Christians “must” vote for Trump, Robert Jeffress does him one better, attributing to pride rather than conscientious principle the motivation for any Christian withholding support for Trump. And here, too, Jeffress points to the probable outcome of such abstention: “I think it would be a shame for people to allow Hillary Clinton four or eight years in the White House.”

Such arguments leave many conservatives who cannot support Trump genuinely perplexed as to what to do. Despite their conviction, do they have an obligation to vote for the one they, or others, consider the lesser of two evils?

To be clear, we’re not taking a position on whether they’re right about Trump’s (or HRC’s) candidacy, but simply pointing out that this sort of dilemma is a real one for many. We would, though, like to offer these specific voters some perspective on this situation.

Radical consequentialism might sanction a vote for one of these two nominees, but we submit that such voters should not support either candidate. The often-repeated refrain, that a non-vote for one candidate is positive support for the other, should hold no water for such individuals. If someone thinks that voting for either candidate is impossible to do in good conscience, we submit that they should refrain from voting, or should vote for a third candidate they can support. The right course of action in such a case, without consideration for the electoral outcome, is to withhold support for either Trump or Clinton.

Both voting for a third candidate and abstaining from voting altogether are potentially legitimate, available alternatives. On occasion we are genuinely forced to choose the lesser of two evils, when, for example, no third option is available. But that is not the case in this year’s election. This is no either/or situation, without remainder. The remaining options provide a way to preserve the courage of one’s convictions and resist the pressure to outsource one’s conscience. The worst case scenario would entail refraining from voting altogether.

To reiterate, this analysis is predicated on the assumption that the prospective voter thinks that voting for either leading candidate would be wrong for them. They should, to our thinking, follow their conscience, and either refrain from voting or vote for a third candidate. Admittedly, doing so may result in, or at least contribute to, a bad outcome. But allowing that consideration to, well, trump would represent a tacit acceptance of an objectionably consequentialist approach to ethics.

Someone might say that it’s not the bad consequence per se that they wish to avoid, but the deontological values that would have to be sacrificed in that case. Their aversion to contributing to such an outcome, then, is more than consequentialist. That’s fine, but if they think that those values are enough to warrant voting for, say, Trump, then they are not the focus of this analysis. However, those who think it would be wrong to vote for either should vote for neither.

One more brief consideration is germane to people of faith in particular. Usually when we do work in moral apologetics, we start with clear cases of moral right and wrong, good or evil, and invite our interlocutors to locate our shared moral ground. From there we can search for what best explains such obvious moral truths. But there’s another way to do moral apologetics using dilemma cases such as the type we’ve been discussing.

Suppose we’re confronted with some really horrible choice between two evils. Either the choice is forced, or it’s not. If it’s a forced choice, the action in question may well produce bad consequences, but still may be obligatory, in which case it ought to be done despite the (at least temporally) bad outcome. That’s a case where choosing the less bad option is permissible. If the choice is not forced, but there’s a viable third alternative, then that option ought to be chosen, despite that it, too, may not contribute to a good overall outcome, or even might contribute to a bad one. We submit this election is just a case for some, and the third option is either a good third candidate or not voting at all.

But what the believer can hold onto in either contingency is faith in a good God who will ensure ultimate good ends and the embrace of justice and peace even when we, owing to our finitude and limitations, are unable to contribute to or effect them on our own. Producing the best outcomes isn’t always our responsibility, but we can rest assured it is Someone’s.

Necessary, but not Sufficient

A Twilight Musing

In philosophical writings one reads of proofs or segments of evidence that are “necessary but not sufficient,” which I take to mean that a substance or idea or argument has several constituent parts, all of which, in the right proportions and quantities, are necessary to complete the whole.  Water consists of 2 units of hydrogen and one of oxygen.  Each unit is necessary, in correct proportion to the other, but not sufficient in itself to be called “water.”  There are also some interesting biblical passages and stories that illustrate this principle.

For example, when the Rich Young Ruler came to Jesus asking what he must do to have eternal life, and Jesus answered that he should obey the commandments of God (particularly the Decalogue), the Young Ruler replied that he had done so from the time of his youth.  Jesus then delivers the answer that turns him away: “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21).  All of the Young Ruler’s  good works were necessary (though we might question whether he was as good as he thought he was), but not sufficient to make him a part of God’s kingdom.

Similarly, Jesus faults the Scribes and Pharisees for trying to be righteous through minute attention to the command to tithe.  Jesus says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.  These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.  You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Matt. 23:23-24).  James makes much the same point in his discussion of faith and works: “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’  Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works” for “faith apart from works is useless” (James 2:18, 20 [my italics]).  As Abraham’s faith was manifested by his putting Isaac on the altar and taking up the knife to slay him, and Rahab’s was shown by helping God’s spies to escape, so all who express faith must complete faith by obedient works.

But as shown by the insufficiency of the virtuous works of the scribes and Pharisees, good deeds without faith are also insufficient for pleasing God.  Both faith and works are necessary, but neither apart from the other identifies us as children of God and members of His kingdom.  In the Old Testament, the prophets often pointed out the insufficiency of ritual obedience to make a wayward people right with God, as in Amos 6:21ff.  (See also Is. 1:10ff.)

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them.  Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of them I will not listen.  But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

How, you will say, is this to be applied to our modern situation?  I think of the frequently heard comment of people questioned about their religious identity: “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” by which they usually mean, “I believe in a spiritual reality that transcends the surface meaning of the material world, but I don’t thereby feel required to accept a personal God or to be a participant in any religious organization.”  Certainly we as Christians see some sense of supra-material spiritual reality as necessary to knowing God, but it is not within itself sufficient to bring us to God.

But the application can be closer to home.  In what ways do we Christians try to turn “necessary” things into “sufficiencies”?  Good Christian fellowship is a necessary part of being a church, but it isn’t sufficient to be the whole reason for attending services, nor is the absence of fellowship that “meets our needs” sufficient reason to forsake the assembly.  I Cor. 13 presents a number of activities that are necessary to Christian character (generosity, willingness to die for Christ, powerful use of spiritual gifts), but they are insufficient virtues if not embedded in love.  Tolerance, compassion, and social justice are both necessary characteristics of Christian living and commonly held secular principles, but when they are made sufficient within themselves, they are often given precedence over adherence to God’s commands and His Truth.

Ah, yes, Truth, which together with Beauty and Goodness constitute a traditional metaphysical triad that evokes the only Reality wherein each of its parts is sufficient to be counted as the whole: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Three-in-One and the One in Three.       Those who have seen the Son have seen the Father, for in the Son “dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 1:9, KJV).  The whole of John 14 is devoted to Jesus’ assurances to His disciples that He is in the Father and the Father is in Him, and that after Jesus is gone from the earth, the Holy Spirit will be the new Presence of the unified Son and Father, functioning as Comforter and Teacher for the disciples.  Embracing the Light of the Holy Spirit banishes the darkness of our poor attempts to find sufficiency in anything but God Himself. The best antidote to substituting any part for the whole is submitting wholly to the total sufficiency of God’s love and grace, wherein we can integrate the parts of our lives.

Image: Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler By Heinrich Hofmann - Riverside Church, New York, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14265296

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.1.2: Precepts

The first of five scholastic distinctions when it comes to forms of God’s revealed will was precepts, which, in a broad sense, tell people to do something. Precepts can include warning, admonishment, and exhortation. For present purposes we can focus on just one kind of precept: commands that generate obligation. Roman Catholic theology teaches that a precept is universal and necessary for all to obey under threat of eternal damnation for disobedience. Hare prefers to say divine commands that generate obligation can be singular, and although they contain internal references to God’s authority and some kind of divine condemnation or chastening for disobedience, this is not necessarily eternal damnation.

Let’s start with some examples of speech acts using imperatives that are precepts in the broad sense, but not commands that generate obligation. 2 Thess. 3:15 says, “Count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.” Brothers don’t have authority over each other simply as brothers. This is true also of warning, which is another way to translate the same text. Someone can warn me of a danger without having any authority over me. In some cases of admonishing and warning, there is authority presupposed, and in some cases not. The same is true with exhorting. It is false that all uses of the imperative to tell someone to do something (precepts in the broad sense) have internal reference to the authority of the speaker. Consider Psalm 84:8: “O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O God of Jacob.” These are imperatives used for the “precative” speech act of entreating. We obviously do not have authority over God.

When God admonishes or warns or exhorts, it might seem that there must be an internal reference to God’s authority in the meaning of the speech acts, but this is not the case. Consider the remarkable passage (Deut. 29-30) in which Moses gives his last address to the people of Israel, including the divine exhortations that the author calls “the words of the covenant,” which culminate in the prescription, “Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30:19). Is this prescription a command? Hare thinks the passages suggests not. God is, properly speaking, exhorting them; setting before them two options, and urging one of the two. The relation in which they hear the command and obey is the goal they will obtain through this choice.

To explain this further, we need to see more clearly the relation between command and covenant. Deut. 28-31 is a form of covenant that is reciprocal, in the sense that it involves both God’s promise of life and the people’s required obedience, and it mentions punishment by God for disobedience. Not all divine covenants are like that. The covenant after the flood is self-imposed by the deity; the covenant with Noah and his sons is also a covenant with every living creature, and doesn’t seem conditional on the living creatures endorsing it somehow; the covenant with David seems to be promissory rather than reciprocal. In the case of the words of the covenant in Deuteronomy, the commands (in chapter 12-26) precede the promise of life, but that doesn’t mean that obedience to them precedes the making of the covenant. As Scotus says, to love God requires us to repeat in our wills God’s will for our willing, and such a repetition is obedience. In the same way, entering the covenant is entering into a relation that is expressed, on our side, by obedience. God becomes our God and we become God’s people. If this is right, it means that the divine commands that have internal reference by the meaning of the speech act to God’s authority may be within a covenant, but they also may not be. Covenants with a particular people are not the only way that God’s commands generate obligation.

There are other imperative sentences, ascribed to Jesus, that are not commands generating obligation. Jesus says in Matt. 11:28 “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Surely this is more like an invitation than a command. The same is true of much of the biblical language of “call,” which belongs to counsel rather than command. The connection between command and call is important; as Hare puts it, following Barth, the call is the point starting from which we are obedient. The command is to lead a life worthy of the calling (Ephesians 4:1), but the calling itself is not exactly a command; it is, when answered, the context of the command. Hare proposes that we say that “command” (in the narrow sense) has internal reference to authority as part of the meaning of the speech act, with some kind of condemnation envisaged for failure. When God calls and invites, the speech act is not itself, by its meaning, tied to authority or condemnation for failure (though Hare isn’t denying that the God who calls and invites us is also authoritative).

To make the discussion less abstract, Hare wants to give an “inner prompting” concrete example of a prescription. He notes, first, that Evans makes a list of nine ways God can communicate prescriptions to us: scripture, natural law, the magisterium of an ecclesiastical body, specific commands of God to an individual, examining our natural inclinations, listening to our conscience, teaching from other humans as God’s requirements, teaching from other humans who do not recognize them as God’s requirements, and human social requirements such as legal obligations, family obligations, and obligations of other socially defined roles.

The example Hare gives is of a graduate student who feels prompted late at night to go visit a nearby friend. Suppose he does, and his friend is horribly depressed and desperately needs encouragement. Why take the voice or prompting as a divine voice prior to obeying it? Hare offers some pointers: the voice didn’t present itself as a construction of his own imagination. He recognized the voice as one he had followed in the past, and it had told him the truth. The voice was unshakeable, silencing objections. Following it yielded peace. Afterwards, he had the additional reason that he discovered the voice was telling him to do something unexpected that turned out to be good. None of this, of course, is a final demonstration of the claim that it was God’s command; mental hospitals are full of people who could say these sorts of things about inner voices. But this is at least a brief account of the phenomenology involved.

Two Calls to Peter

A Twilight Musing

Peter was called twice from his fishing by the Lake of Galilee to follow Jesus (Lk. 5:1-10, Jn. 21:1-19). The first time was full of hope, promise and excitement, a new beginning for a man who had lived a rough life (“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”); Jesus said to him and his partners, James and John, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” The second calling was to a Peter much chastened after his overconfidence in his own strength and ability had led him into actually denying that he even knew his Master. And this second call was much more ominous than the first, promising that his answering Jesus’ call to “feed my sheep” would result in his martyrdom. The parallels between these two accounts are striking. In each case, Jesus comes unexpectedly into Peter’s life while he is fishing, advising him and his companions to cast their nets once more, even though they have been repeatedly unsuccessful in catching any fish. As a result, they catch more fish than they can haul in. In both instances, there is dialogue between Peter and Jesus that ends in a call by Jesus for Peter to follow him. But there is also a big difference between the two calls Jesus gives to Peter, and only a Peter who had been brought up short by his insufficiency within himself could have responded to the second call.

Peter, like all strong and outgoing personalities, had to learn the hard way that his strong points were also his weak points. He could be insightful and spiritually informed, as when he was the only one of the disciples to answer Jesus’ question about who people thought He was with an explicit, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). But he could also be dense and uncomprehending, even to the extent of rebuking Jesus when He told the disciples that He was going up to Jerusalem to be put to death (Mark 8:31-33). Throughout Jesus’ ministry Peter was recognized as the leader of the disciples, and Jesus repeatedly singled him out in ways that anticipated his taking a leading role in the early church; nevertheless, in the midst of his boldness was a blindness to his faults, as in his boast that he would die to defend Jesus, followed shortly by his triple denial that he even knew Jesus. Peter had some hard learning to do between the first call of Jesus and the second.

In the following poem, I have depicted the enlightened Peter, looking back on His time with Jesus.

Sacrifice, Not Martyr
(Matt. 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, John 13, 18, 20, 21)

How glorious it seemed to me,
To die for Jesus.
And so I shall,
But not for my glory.
His story, not mine, defines my death.

He knew
My peril as prey of Satan,
And prayed for me;
But His warning found no place
To pierce my pride.
I turned aside His words,
And plunged headlong into the trap
The Enemy had set for me.
In the Garden I was ready,
Sword in hand, bold for battle!
But the Master stayed my hand
And healed the man I struck.
Disarmed and cowed,
I fled.

Following from afar,
Defenseless now for the real assault
(For I could not shift to the plane of His example),
I stood by the fire to observe,
Hoping yet to save Him from Himself.
And then those questions—
Pointing to me as one of His.
But none of His I proved.
Oblivious to my sin,
I betrayed Him from within.
And then His gentle gaze
Drove home cock’s crow,
Soul-piercing sound
That brought the bitter tears.

That purging, though,
Was not the end,
For Him nor me.
As Thomas touched His wounds
And healing found therein,
So I was also called anew
Beside Genessaret,
When one last time He supped with us.
Not my boast this time
Was focus for His words,
But gentle probing of my love for Him.
Profounder death he called for then
Than sword could bring:
Living sacrifice to serve His sheep,
And glory at the end,
When God would send
His cross for me.

Elton D. Higgs
July 1, 2014

Image: The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew by  Caravaggio

Debate: "Morality Does not Need God"

On Wednesday, May 21, at the University of Waikato, Dr. Ron Smith and Dr. Matthew Flannagan debated the resolution, “Morality does not need God.” Flannagan is the co-author of Did God Really Command Genocide. You can find the video of the debate here.   

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2: What is a Divine Command? Introduction and Section 2.1.1: “Prescription in General”

“Divine command” is the standard term in the literature, but God addresses us in all sorts of ways that are, in a broad sense, prescriptive, but are not, in a narrow sense, commands. A mnemonic device was used by scholastics for remembering the varieties of God’s revealed will. The revealed will is, first, distinguished from the disposing will, which is what God actually brings about. Here are the components of the scholastic learning device: “gives precepts to,” “prohibits,” “permits,” “counsels,” “fulfills.” We can call these five types of prescriptions “precepts,” “prohibitions,” “permissions,” “counsels,” and “directly effective commands.”

Let’s start with prescription as a genus, in contrast with a description. Anscombe noted that desire is satisfied when the world comes to be in conformity to it, whereas a belief is true when it is in conformity to the world. The same distinction can be made between prescriptions and descriptions. A prescription is satisfied when what is prescribed occurs, while a description is true when what is described obtains. If the fit fails, we might say, in the case of prescription or desire, it is a problem for the world; in the case of description, it is a problem for the mental act or belief.

It’s no accident that this difference between prescription and description mirrors that of desire and belief. We have prescriptions in our language as a family of speech acts because we want to be able to express desires or will in a certain way. (This is different from how Aquinas thought commanding is an act of reason but not of the will, though the will can receive the command.) Writers after Aquinas, such as Scotus, often use a more robust notion of the will, and it became more natural to think of the will being the locus of commanding. In Scotus, the will already contains a ranking of the affection for justice and the affection for advantage, where the affection for advantage is an inclination towards one’s own happiness and perfection, and the affection for justice is an inclination towards what is good in itself, independently of any relation to oneself. A more robust conception of the will can be found even in later Thomists like Suarez.

We have imperatives because we want to be able to express our desires. We want to be able to effect change in the world, to make it fit our desire, by communicating the desire. This isn’t quite what John Austin called the “perlocutionary force” of an utterance, namely, what the speaker is intending to bring about through speaking. For God commanded Abraham to kill his son without intending to bring it about that Abraham obey the command. So it is not necessary, in order to have a fully functioning command, that the person giving the command intend that the addressee carry it out. This is an outlier, though, and generally we have imperatives as a grammatical form in our language because we want to be able to effect changes in the world through the communication of our desires.

Imperative sentences can have four different positions within it: the positions of (a) addressee, (b) subject, (c) action, and (d) recipient. A singular imperative sentence is one in which the term in at least one of the positions is singular. A universal imperative sentence is one in which the terms in all the positions, including the subject position, are universal. Proverbs are often like this, but they leave the term in the subject position unspecified. (a) The addressee is the person to whom the imperative is addressed. (b) The subject is the person commanded to do the action (which may not be the addressee, as in “John, Andrew is to take the package tomorrow to Marybeth,” a third-person imperative). In second-person cases, the addressee and subject are the same. Another example of a third-person imperative is God’s command at the beginning of Genesis: “Let there be light.” This is what Hare calls a “directly effective command,” where God effects the result just by commanding it. It is a prescription in the broad sense, but not a command in the narrow sense in which commands generate obligations. (c) The action is what is commanded (and there may be multiple sub-positions within the action position). (d) The recipient is the person or object to whom the action is commanded to be done (and there may be both a direct and indirect object).

The example of the Ten Commandments raises a complex exegetical and theological question about whether the prescriptions to “you” are just to the people of Israel, or to all human beings. Perhaps the right thing to say is that they are initially given to the people of Israel (both in addressee position and in subject position), as part of the covenant (see Deut. 9:4-6, Exod. 34:28), but that they are eventually intended by God to be commandments given to all human beings. If this is right, we have an example of what was a singular imperative becoming a universal imperative. (“The people of Israel,” despite containing many persons, functions as a singular term because it makes reference to a particular region of space and time.) Later in the book Hare will argue that, for a command to produce a moral obligation, it is necessary that at least the term in the action position be universalizable, but that this is not necessary for the terms in the other positions.

Ordinary logical relations such as entailment and negation apply to prescriptions as much as descriptions. R. M. Hare (John Hare’s father) tried showing this by making another distinction, between what he called “phrastic,” “tropic,” and “neustic.” The phrastic is the content common to a command like “Andrew is to take the package tomorrow to Marybeth” and the prediction “Andrew will take the package tomorrow to Marybeth.” We can say that this content is the state of affairs of Andrew’s taking the package tomorrow to Marybeth. The tropic is the mood indicator, distinguishing indicative (or declarative) from imperative and thus distinguishing statement from prescription. We’ve been discussing speech acts having the imperative tropic. The neustic is the sign of assent to the combination of phrastic and tropic. When the teacher says in a class, as a philosophical example, “The cat is on the mat,” she withholds the neustic. Using this new vocabulary, we can say that the phrastic can be the bearer of the same logical relations in both imperative and indicative sentences, and we can talk about “satisfaction conditions” for imperatives in the same way we talk about “truth conditions” for indicatives.

The example of a command is only one kind of use of an imperative. Sometimes “command” is taken for the sake of convenience to cover a whole family of speech acts, but this chapter uses “prescription” as the name for the family, and reserves “command” for the narrower sense in which commands generate obligation (and, by extension, “directly effective commands”). Some of the other members of the family of prescription are admonitions, exhortations, warnings, invitations, and calls. There is no need for present purposes to divide the whole family into species by genus and difference. But it is important to distinguish certain members of the family from each other, since God can do many of them, and what God is doing in one case is different from what God is doing in another. In all of them, though, the use of the imperative suggests that God wants to effect change in the world by the communication of the divine will.

Drinking the Cup

A Twilight Musing

“Let’s sit down with a cup of coffee (or tea) and chat a while.” That’s a common invitation of people in our society, since partaking of a cup of something is associated with relaxed fellowship together. It has been so from ancient times, although the contents of the cup until modern times was wine, rather than a brewed hot drink. There are about 65 occurrences (by my count) of the word “cup” in the Bible, and it is striking that 55 of them have some sort of symbolic significance, while only ten of them have an entirely literal meaning, and in most of those the literal cup is in the context of a larger purpose or moral lesson. For example, when Jesus commends the giving even of so little a thing as a cup of cold water to honor Him (Mark 9:41), the cup has a significance beyond itself. When Jesus accuses the Pharisees of giving more attention to cleaning the exteriors of their literal cups than to spiritually cleansing themselves, the literal quickly fades into the symbolic. Why this preponderance of symbolic meanings in the figure of a cup in Holy Scripture? I think it is because what we imbibe is inherently associated with our relationship to God and to our fellow humans. What we drink, depending on our choices, can be a part of wonderfully satisfying fellowship, or it can be terrible in its consequences.

The symbolic references to drinking a cup are wide-ranging and multifaceted. In some places it signifies a fullness of blessings, as in Ps. 23:5; but by contrast, it is also used as a symbol of the administration of God’s wrath (Ps. 75:8, Rev. 14:10). In the institution and subsequent observance of the Lord’s Supper, partaking of the cup together is an act of deep fellowship between believers and a mystical union with Christ (Lk. 22:20, I Cor. 11:25). But immediately after the Last Supper, Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane praying, "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup [of suffering] pass from me” (Matt. 26:39). I think some spiritual benefit can be derived from a more detailed consideration of these four categories of figurative uses of “cup” in Scripture: the cup of blessing, the cup of wrath, the cup of communion, and the cup of suffering. The first two reflect the relationship between humans and God under the Old Covenant, and the second two deal with how that relationship becomes closer and more profound under the New Covenant.

The best known passage using the cup as an image of blessing is in Ps. 23:5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” This is a summation of the Great Shepherd’s care and protection over His flock, so great that it overwhelms the speaker’s expectation and comprehension. Ps. 116:13 says, “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord” in response to “all His benefits” (v. 12). But more often mentioned, especially in the prophets, is the “cup of horror and desolation” (Ezek. 23:33) or the “cup of staggering” (Zech. 12:2) which God administered in judgment to rebellious Israel or another wicked nation. The underlying message of these passages is that God holds people accountable, and blesses those who obey Him and punishes those who do not, especially His own covenant people. God is merciful and will forgive when people repent of their evil, but the frequency with which He found it necessary to pour out His cup of wrath indicates that dependence on law-keeping was a precarious way to walk with God. The promise of the coming of the Messiah speaks of a more lasting covenant, one planted in the hearts of God’s people (see Jer. 30-33, esp. 31:31-34). But the New Covenant established through the Messiah would involve a radically new kind of cup to drink from.

A short time before Jesus “set His face toward Jerusalem” for the fatal last journey of His life, James and John came to Him requesting that they be granted “to sit one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory” (Mark 10:37). To which Jesus replied, “Your do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” (v. 38). When they presumptuously and ignorantly assured Him that they could, it was clear that they had no inkling of the cup of suffering from which Jesus asked the Father to deliver Him as He agonized in Gethsemane. It is not surprising, then, that none of the disciples realized the full meaning of Jesus’ words when He instituted the Lord’s Supper.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." (Mark 14:23-25)

None of the disciples understood what Jesus meant by His blood being poured out for many, nor that a New Covenant would be established through the shedding of His blood. But when they began to partake of the Lord’s Supper after the Day of Pentecost, when the New Covenant was activated and the Church was established, they were reminded constantly in partaking of the Supper together that the cup of blessing they had drunk with Jesus in that Upper Room was symbolic of the cup of suffering that He alone could drink on the cross. For every Christian observing this holy feast since the Day of Pentecost, drinking of the sacramental cup is a recognition that we are participating in His death by dying to self so that we can be alive with Him. As Paul puts it in Romans 8:10, “If Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness”— the righteousness of Christ provided through the shed blood that we symbolically drink in the cup of the Lord’s Supper.

This is a grave and serious matter, as Paul makes clear in his recap of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in I Cor. 11:27-29.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

But in this act of gravity, we also look forward to the joy and assurance of His coming again. Until then, the cup of blessing and the cup of suffering are coupled in the Lord’s Supper, looking forward to that time to which Jesus referred when He said He would not drink again with His disciples until they are together in the final Kingdom of God, where we will celebrate the great wedding feast of the Lamb as His spotless bride, the perfected Body of Christ, the Church (Rev. 19:6-8).

The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism: The Victory of Christian Virtue (Part 5 of 5)

Chapter Three

The Victory of Christian Virtue

In Chapter One, it was argued that for a particular worldview to be compatible with virtue ethics, it has to meet two kinds of criteria. First, it must be able to account for teleology of persons and the world. Second, it must have a view of man that allows for the narrative unity of a single human life.  Chapter Three will demonstrate two claims. First that experience and reason confront the Buddhism with facts that are difficult to explain away; these same facts naturally flow from the Christian worldview. Therefore, Christianity provides a better explanation for the nature of reality and human persons than Buddhism. The second claim is that Christianity can accommodate a virtue view of ethics.

The Foundations of Christian Ethics

The Nature of God

Any account of Christian ethics must begin with God. In Christian thought, God is metaphysically necessary: “The existence of God is a first truth; in other words, the knowledge of God’s existence is rational intuition. Logically, it precedes and conditions all observation and reasoning.”[1] Further, he is the “infinite Spirit in whom all things have their source, support, and end.”[2] God is defined as the greatest conceivable or maximally great being. As such, he is said to possess all great making properties, like moral perfection and ultimate value.  By definition and ontological necessity, God constitutes the good of Christian ethics.

As a maximally great being, God exists with certain attributes. Strong divides the attributes of God into two categories: the absolute or immanent attributes and the relative or transitive attributes. The absolute attributes are those attributes that God possesses without reference to anything else. God possesses life, personality, aseity, unity, and moral perfection as ontologically necessary properties.  The life that God possesses is not biological life, but rather mental energy. He “lives” as a personal being, possessing “the power of self-consciousness and self-determination.”[3]  God, then, is fundamentally and necessarily a unified, conscious, and rational person who possesses libertarian free will. In addition, he constitutes the ultimate ground of all value and moral objectivity.

The Nature of Man

The imago Dei explained  

As a free being, complete within himself, God chose to create mankind in his image:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”[4]

While the Bible does not specifically explain the nature of the imago Dei, Erickson argues that there are at least six facts that can be inferred from what the Bible does say.  His first five facts explain that the image of God is something bestowed freely by God, without reference to any trait or merit within man, and that all humans possess the image equally. Each of these facts is vitally important to ethics, and the application of ethics in particular. However, his sixth point is especially important to demonstrating that Christianity meets the requirements of virtue:

“The image refers to the elements in the human makeup that enable the fulfillment of human destiny. The image is the powers of personality that make humans, like God, beings capable of interacting with other persons, thinking, and of willing freely.”[5] Essentially, possessing the imago Dei is what makes human beings persons; the absence of which makes animals merely animals.

J.P. Moreland has argued that as the imago Dei relates to persons, there are five principle parts: consciousness, free will, rationality, the soul, and objective moral values and the intrinsic value of a human being. If Christianity is true so that people are, in fact, created in the image of God, then there ought to be facts about human persons that are difficult for other worldviews to explain away. This provides an excellent opportunity to offer an apologetic toward Buddhism and a fuller explanation of what constitutes the imago Dei and how it is relevant to Christian ethics.

The recalcitrant imago Dei: human persons and the failure of Buddhism[6]

One of the criticisms made of the virtue view of Buddhism is that it is motivated for some reason other than obtaining an honest interpretation of the Buddha’s ethics. Some Buddhist virtue ethicists even openly admitted that they had ulterior motives.[7] It was suggested that Keown was a kind of “revisionist.” This raises an important question: Why would someone want to reinterpret the Buddha in favor of a virtue ethic? The answer seems to be that a theory of virtue ethics makes better sense out the world than the theories that the Buddha taught. While the insights of the Buddha are tremendous, they are nevertheless out of step with what human beings can know by experience and reason. In particular, Chapter Two pointed out that a virtue view of ethics was guilty of ignoring or distorting truths about the nature of a human person and the moral quality of reality. There are recalcitrant facts about the nature of man and morality for Keown and other Buddhist virtue ethicists. These are facts about the sort of world human beings find themselves in as well as the sort of lives they experience, facts about the apparent narrative unity of the human life and the teleology of the world in general. Specifically, the Buddhist will have trouble explaining the five parts of a person who possesses the imgao Dei.

Consciousness

Moreland argues that “mental states require a subjective ontology–namely that mental states are necessarily owned by the first person sentient subjects who have them.”[8] According to Moreland, there are five states of consciousness and each is expressed in terms of a subject/object relationship.  A sensation is a state of awareness. One might have the sensation of “seeing red,” or “feeling pain.” A thought is a “mental content that can be expressed in an entire sentence.” “All fire trucks are red,” is a thought and so is “My favorite fruit is apples.” A belief is a “person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are.” A desire is a “certain felt inclination to do, or experience certain things or avoid such.” And finally, an act of will is a “choice, an exercise of power. . . usually for the sake of some purpose.”[9] The states of consciousness do not constitute some conventional person nor are these states aggregates of a whole. Instead, the five states are all properties of a mind (mental states), which is a unified whole and indivisible. Moreland further suggests that there is an I that stands behind and above these various states so that they belong to a particular individual: “the first person perspective is not a property persons have, it is the thing that persons are – centers of a personal kind of consciousness.”[10] On this point, Moreland agrees with Strong:

Self-consciousness is more than consciousness. This last the brute may be supposed to possess, since the brute is not an automaton. Man is distinguished from the brute by his power to objectify self. Man is not only conscious of his own acts and states, but by abstraction and reflection he recognizes the self which is the subject of these acts and states.[11]

Moreland’s view of consciousness as mental states stands in contrast to the Buddha’s.

The Buddha believed that there are five aggregates that constitute a conventional person:  form

(rupa), sensation (vedana), perception (sanna), mental formation (sankhara), and awareness[12]

(vinnana).   The last four of these aggregates are mental states,[13] similar to the ones utilized by Moreland, although the Buddha is clear that these mental states do not belong to anyone. An unnamed monk, in a dialogue with the Buddha, argued that human persons mistakenly assume that one of the skandhas might be identified as the self.[14] Later in the discourse, the Buddha explains that each of these assumptions is unfounded. The Buddha asks the monk concerning each of the skandhas, “Is this what I am?” The monk responds, with Buddha’s approval, “No, lord.” There is no unified self; there is only an aggregate of parts with an illusion of self.

However, the idea that a person is merely a collection of parts does not solve the problem that Moreland raises. For example, the Buddha suggests that awareness or vinnana is the “awareness of sensory and mental objects.”[15] But awareness, as a mental state, requires necessarily a subject and an object. There must be a subject who experiences awareness of a particular object or state of affairs. The other aggregates (with the exception of form which merely describes the physical body) have the same requirement. Perceptions will require both a “perceiver” and an object to be perceived.  Formations (sankhara), which are “a range of mental responses to objects,” also require a subject/object relationship.[16] By formulating the aggregates, the Buddha has not solved the problem of the I standing over and above the aggregates. Instead, he has merely described the conscious states that an I possesses.  Further, it is not likely that the doctrine of “no-self” and a belief in the aggregates as mental states can be held simultaneously. The only option would be to either affirm that a conscious self exists over and above the aggregates or that the five aggregates are not describing mental states.  The juxtaposition of the “no-self” doctrine and the strong sense of the reality of self creates a tension within the Buddhist worldview to such a point that the language employed must be understood as either being only conventionally  true (there is a self) or ultimately true (there is no self).

Besides the subject/object problem implicit within the aggregates, there is a kind of cosmological problem. How could consciousness arise when reality is fundamentally empty, non-personal, and lacking any causal powers? A monk asked the Buddha this question directly:  "Lord, what is the cause, what the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of form? What is the cause, what the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of feeling... perception... fabrications... consciousness?"[17] The Buddha responded:

Monk, the four great existents (earth, water, fire, & wind) are the cause, the four great existents the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of form. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of feeling. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of perception. Contact is the cause, contact the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of fabrications. Name&-form is the cause, name-&-form the condition, for the delineation of the aggregate of consciousness.[18]

According to the Buddha, consciousness arises as result of a material cause (earth, water, fire, and wind) intersecting with particular conditions, the reality of dependent origination. While the

Buddha refrains from metaphysical speculation, there is nevertheless another tension in Buddhism at this point: how does consciousness arise out of reality as the Buddha understood it?

The answer is not clear. Consciousness, for Buddhism is a recalcitrant fact.

The unity of human life (the soul)

If mental states are something possessed so that there is an indivisible I over and above them, then another issue presents itself: the concept of a substantial soul.  Moreland argues against naturalism, but his point can easily be adapted to a Buddhist view:

I. I exist, as does a particular arrangement of skandhas associated with me.

II. I am not identical with the skandhas associated with me.

III. I am not identical with any single skandha (like vinnana, for example).

IV. I do not have any proper part which is not part of the skandhas

V. Therefore, I have no proper parts: I am altogether simple entity.

The Buddhist would likely find (III) and (IV) uncontroversial. There would be no ultimate I to be identical to a set of skandhas and whatever an I is, it would consist totally of the skandhas. Clearly, there would a problem with (I). But, if Moreland is right about mental states necessarily requiring a “subjective ontology,” then (I) should be acceptable even if there is protest. If (I) makes it through, then so do (II) and (III). If there is a “subjective ontology” that possesses the five skandhas, then it follows that a person is not identical to the skandhas.  The result is that the self is an “immaterial, non-extended substance”[19] that has no necessary relationship with the skandhas. This would explain why “we have very strong, deep intuitions that we are enduring continuants even though we undergo various changes and… experience part replacement.”[20]

The Buddhist faces a problem here: if there is a self that exists over and above the skandhas, that self would, presumably, not be conditioned by the laws of dependent origination or karma since it stands outside the space where those laws would have causal powers. The self would create a kind of dualism within Buddhism: there is what is unconditioned and without self (nirvana) and there is the unconditioned self. To explain these phenomena, Buddhism would need to develop a doctrine of the soul. The apparent necessity of an unconditioned self, enduring over time, and being metaphysically simple, the apparent necessity of the soul, creates another recalcitrant fact for Buddhists.

Free will

The concept of free will creates another tension in Buddhist thought. In one of the most important suttas, responding to the question, “What is dependent co-arising?” the Buddha said,

From birth as a requisite condition comes aging and death. Whether or not there is the arising of Tathagatas, this property stands — this regularity of the Dhamma, this orderliness of the Dhamma, this this/that conditionality. The Tathagata directly awakens to that, breaks through to that. Directly awakening & breaking through to that, he declares it, teaches it, describes it, sets it forth. He reveals it, explains it, makes it plain, & says, 'Look.' From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death.[21]

From the dependent co-arising of things come “dependently co-arisen phenomena.” These phenomena are the complex conjunction of several “lines” of dependent co-arising and result in events like birth, becoming, craving, and so on. [22] The Buddha summarized his teaching on causality by saying that “Where this is present, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises. When this is absent, that does not come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases.”[23] The Buddha extended this kind of causality uniformly to explain “the evolution and dissolution of the world process…plant life… and [even] to human personality.”[24] However, the Buddha is said to be able to break this chain of causation so that he is free from the cycle of rebirth. This assumes that the Buddha is able to enact “top-down” causation, and that he is significantly free from prior causes.  In short, the Buddha possesses a form of libertarian free will.[25]

Once again, there is tension within Buddhism.  The Buddha has explained the universe in fully deterministic terms so that every effect has, at least theoretically, a detectable cause. The Buddha also wants to maintain that he and others like him are sufficiently free to break the chain of causation. However, he provides no means by which this is possible. Persons, in particular, are not a good candidate for the sort of top-down causation that is required as persons are themselves an aggregate of parts reacting according to the laws of karma and dependent-origination. The apparent existence of free will establishes another recalcitrant fact for Buddhism.

Rationality

Buddhism faces a similar problem with the idea of rationality. The Buddha taught that the world was arranged in a rational way so that causes have predictable effects; he had a kind of process metaphysics. His teaching represents a “framework of thought that hinges on the ideas that sentient experience is dependently originated and that whatever is dependently originated is conditioned, impermanent, subject to change, and lacking independent selfhood.”[26] The Buddha consistently emphasizes that reality is a rational place in his teaching on Right View.  A disciple named Kaccayana Gotta asked the Buddha, “What is right view?” The Buddha said that

This world is supported by (takes as its object) a polarity, that of existence and nonexistence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one.[27]

Clearly, there is a twofold assumption here: first that reality is a fundamentally rational place and second that human persons are rational themselves so that they are able, at least potentially, to apprehend reality as it is. However, the Buddha does not provide reasons as to why reality and human persons would be arranged in just this way. Thomas Nagel suggests that the fact that humans have the ability to reason is only possible under two sorts of circumstances: either “we can reason in these ways because it is a consequence of a more primitive capacity of belief formation that had survival value when the human brain was evolving” or “the universe is intelligible to us because it and our minds were made for each other.”[28] In Chapter Two, it was shown that the sort of teleology presupposed Nagel’s second option is unlikely on the Buddhist view. Presumably, then, the Buddhist would have to accept some sort of naturalistic (naturalistic in the sense that it would arise out of the impersonal laws of dependent co-arising and karma) mechanism as the origin of rationality. But Nagel says that this answer is “laughably inadequate” and it would still not explain why reality itself is a rational place. In addition, Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalistic accounts of rationality are self-defeating; it seems likely that his argument would stand against Buddhist forms of naturalism.[29] Thus, once again, the Buddhist faces a recalcitrant fact.

Objective moral value and intrinsic human value

One final area of tension in Buddhism concerns the nature of morality and the intrinsic value of human persons. The ethics of Buddhism are “thought to be objectively true and in accordance with the nature of things.”[30] The dharma defines good and evil so that

Of paths, the eightfold is best. Of truths, the four sayings. Of qualities, dispassion. Of two-footed beings, the one with the eyes to see.  Just this is the path — there is no other — to purify vision. Follow it, and that will be Mara's [the demon of corruption and desire]  bewilderment.[31]

This objectivity of ethics in Buddhism led Velez de Cea to conclude that Buddhism has characteristics of moral realism because “certain external actions are unwholesome or wholesome.”[32] As moral realists, Buddhists believe that “moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right.”[33] A statement like “murder is wrong” is objectively either true or false.

Karma serves as the foundation of moral value: “For the Buddha, the moral order of the universe is contained first and foremost in the doctrines of kamma and rebirth.”[34] Given its lack of belief in a personal God, it seems fair, then, to characterize Buddhism as “atheistic moral realists” who “affirm that objective moral values and duties do exist and are not dependent on evolution or human opinion, but they also insist that they are not grounded in God. Indeed, moral values have no further foundation. They just exist.”[35] The trouble here is that it is difficult to understand how moral values could exist independent of persons. Craig and Moreland suggest that the idea may be incoherent and that “Moral values seem to exist as properties of persons, not as mere abstractions.”[36]

If moral values can exist as an abstraction that only raises another question: how is it that an abstract moral foundation would have any relevance to human persons? Even if moral value could exist as an abstraction, it would not provide moral obligation. The only way persons could be morally obligated to a set of values is if those values were grounded in a person: “A duty is something that is owed… But something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as duty in isolation.”[37]

Related to the existence of objective moral value is the intrinsic worth of human beings.

The value of the human person is often taken to be self-evident in Buddhism. For example, the

Dalai Lama begins Ethics for the New Millennium by stating that the proper goal of ethics is the “great quest for happiness,” a fact that “needs no justification and is validated by the simple fact that we naturally and correctly want this.”[38] According to the Dalia Lama, the natural and correct desires of human beings define what is valuable. Such a view seems to presuppose that human beings are, in fact, incredibly valuable. Keown points out that “compassion (karuṇā) is a virtue that is of importance in all schools of Buddhism” and that the Buddha serves as a primary example of this when he decided to delay returning to nirvana in order to teach others the dharma.[39]However, if persons only exist in the conventional sense, it is difficult to see how some ultimately impersonal, dependently arising, arrangement of parts could be said to possess intrinsic value. Further, given the questionable nature of the Buddhist moral universe, conventional persons may not be able to be moral agents in the first place. Thus the existence of objective moral values and duties, as well the intrinsic value of human beings, is also a recalcitrant fact for Buddhism.

These facts, the nature of consciousness, the soul, rationality, free will, the existence of objective moral values and duties, and the intrinsic value of human persons, are features not easily explained within the Buddhist worldview. However, these truths are central and fundamental to the Christian worldview. Alvin Plantinga makes this very point:

What is it to be a person, what is it to be a human person, and how shall we think about personhood? …The first point to note is that on the Christian scheme of things, God is the premier person, the first and chief exemplar of personhood. God, furthermore, has created man in his own image; we men and women are image bearers of God, and the properties most important for an understanding of our personhood are properties we share with him. How we think about God, then, will have an immediate and direct bearing on how we think about humankind.[40]

God, as a unified, conscious, personal, rational, and ultimately valuable person, created man in his image. Man possesses these same traits, though to a different degree, because he is essentially made in the imago Dei. Given the Christian doctrines of God and man, it has been demonstrated that it can ably accommodate the necessary components of virtue: the narrative unity of a single human life and an explanation of teleology in man and the world.

Christ: The Ideal Man and Savior of Virtue

Aristotle argued that the good for man was to live a certain kind of life, a life characterized by the development and practice of the virtues. The driving question behind his ethic was, “What kind of person should I be?”  The ancient Israelites had an answer to this question: “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy (Lev. 19:2).” Their “basic moral doctrine is the imitatio Dei, to be like God as much as is humanly possible.”[41] They were to do this by following God’s commandments. Primarily, the ethics of the Hebrew Bible were deontological. They were obligated to obey God in light of who God is and what he had done for them.  While the character of God provided the standard of right actions, it did not constitute the

good for man in the Aristotelian sense. However, with the incarnation of the Son of God, the ethics of the people of God shifted: “Christ is the Word made flesh, the perfect revelation of the Father, which means that, to the Christian, God is most perfectly revealed in a person, not a set of commandments or any written or spoken words, although Jesus says he comes to fulfill the law, not to destroy it.”[42] The absolute center of Christian ethics is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

One of the key texts on Christian ethics was written by Paul in his letter to the Ephesians.

Paul’s purpose in writing was to convey that God had begun “cosmic reconciliation” through his Son, Jesus Christ.[43] Given this wide scope, Ephesians is a good place to look for what is fundamental to Christian ethics. In the first three chapters, Paul explains the role that the individual, the church, and himself has within the plan of God for the world. In chapter two, Paul explains that the individual is “saved by grace, through faith.” Salvation is not given according to an individual’s actions, but because “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Here Paul affirms that people have both intrinsic value and a teleogy. They are intrinsically valuable because they are “a product God’s making (αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα).” They possess a telos because they were made with a purpose: “created in Christ Jesus for good works (κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς). On the basis of these realities, Paul formulates his Christian ethic throughout the rest of the book. But, Ephesians 4:22-24 is especially relevant: “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds;  and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

In these verses, Paul teaches that the Christian life is a process of putting aside sinful habits and attitudes, replacing them with habits and attitudes that are reflective of who God is. This dynamic component also corresponds to Aristotle’s ethic.[44] Aristotle taught that the moral life did not consist merely in performing right actions, but also in becoming a certain kind of person through the development of character. Through this development, one can reach his telos.

The process of sanctification in Christianity is similar: “sanctification is a teleological concept. More specifically, sanctification involves the growth and transformation of oneself and one's character toward a partially determinate picture of the human good or end.”[45] But what constitutes the telos of man in a Christian context? While not answering this question directly, Paul nevertheless provides the answer as he concludes his thought in 5:1-2: “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

When Paul provides an example of the end goal of this process of sanctification, he says that Christians should “walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us.” According to Paul,

Christ is the moral exemplar, the ideal man, and Christians should model their lives on the life of

Christ. The Christian answer to the Aristotelian question, “What sort of person should I be?” is

“You should be like Christ.” The gospels provide the fullest picture of the mission and life of Jesus Christ. According to Hauerwas, the key ethical feature of the life of Jesus was that he “did not direct attention to himself, but through his teaching, healings, and miracles tried to indicate the nature and immediacy of God’s kingdom.”[46]

The Aristotelian virtues were realized largely within a political context. The virtues were those goods that enabled the ideal kind of society, and individuals within that society, to flourish. Both Aristotle and Christianity agree on the social nature of human beings and that “human wellbeing and flourishing occur in various relationships where life is shared and common goods are realized.”[47] Aristotle argued that only within relationships between people of a certain class, gender, and social status can one achieve eudaimonia. Virtue was attained through relationships with people like one’s self.  However, in the Christian context, the kinds of relationships that allow moral development are the kinds of relationships found within the kingdom of God – relationships between God, the individual, and the kingdom community.

While Aristotle required a group of like individuals for moral growth, Christian ethics emphasizes the difference between God and man.[48] Moral development occurs when a person exists in right relationships, not only with other human beings, but also with God himself (Matt. 22:36-40). Jesus demonstrates how these relationships should be worked out when he “comes to initiate and make present the kingdom of God through healing of those possessed by demons, by calling disciples, telling parables, teaching the law, challenging the authorities of his day, and by being crucified at the hands of Roman and Jewish elites and raised from the grave.”[49] Jesus demonstrated that the ideal life is characterized by obedience and love for God as well as sacrificial love for other human beings, especially human beings that are considered unworthy of that sacrifice. This is why Jesus is the human paradigm of virtue; “he realized our full human potential. He resisted selfish temptations, identified with the weak and oppressed, made love his motivation and guide, responded in love to both friends and enemies, was obedient to God (even to death), and found self-fulfillment in relationship with God rather than in autonomy.”[50]

Reuschling makes an excellent point here:

Jesus himself is the exemplar of the virtuous life. It might be easy to attribute the virtuous life to Jesus based on his divinity. Yet the virtues that Jesus taught were demonstrated in the life he lived through his humanity and in his social and personal interactions. It’s Jesus’ humanity that gives us the window through which to view the quality and shape of a life that pleases God. Jesus did not just teach about the virtue of mercy. Jesus was merciful. Humility was not an abstract idea in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus himself was the model of humility. Jesus did not present theories of justice. Jesus was reconciling, securing justice and righteousness as marks of shalom.[51]

Conclusion

A Christian ethic of virtue, then, is well founded and superior to a Buddhist virtue ethic. The Christian worldview provides the necessary foundations, an account of teleology and the narrative unity of human life, while Buddhism does not. Christianity does more than merely allow for a theory of virtue ethics. It provides a rich, substantive, and attractive theory of virtue. The Christian account affirms what we all we want to affirm and know intuitively: that human life is immensely valuable and that we were meant for some incredible good. Jesus Christ provides the fully realized example of the human telos that affirms these intuitions and calls humans to the good for which they were originally intended. By contrast, the Buddha asks men to deny a substantive good and even the commonsense understanding of themselves in order to achieve the extinguishing of life:

Delight is the root of suffering and stress, that from coming-into-being there is birth, and that for what has come into being there is aging and death. Therefore, with the total ending, fading away, cessation, letting go, relinquishment of craving, the Tathagata has totally awakened to the unexcelled right self-awakening, I tell you.[52]

In stark contrast, Jesus declares, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”[53] Jesus affirms what the Buddha denies, which is they very essentials of virtue. Therefore, I invite the Buddhist virtue ethicist, who correctly wants to affirm the goodness and value of human life, to identify with Christ, who, “in his full humanity and solidarity with us, became what we were created to be: the image of God.”[54] The good life does not consist in the extinguishing of it, but in entering into the Kingdom of God, conformed to the image of his Son.

[1] Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for

the Use of Theological Students (Philadelphia: Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907),  52.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 251.

[4] Gen 1:26

[5] 158  Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983), 532.

[6] 159 This heading is adapted from Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure

of Naturalism

[7] 160  James Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” in Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, ed. Damien Keown (Richmond: Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 17.

[8] James Porter Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (London: University of Nottingham, 2009), 20.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 133.

[11] 164  Strong, Systematic Theology, 252.

[12] 165  Typically, vinnana is translated as consciousness. However, this translation is not consistent with what is usually meant by consciousness, “the totality of conscious states of an individual.”

[13] 166 Peter Harvey, “Theravada Philosophy of Mind and the Person,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 265.

[14] 167  Maha-punnama Sutta: The Great Full-moon Night Discourse, trans. Thanissaro Bhikku,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.109.than.html

[15] Harvey, “Theravada Philosophy,” 266.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Maha-punnama Sutta: The Great Full-moon Night Discourse

[18] Ibid.

[19] Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 120.

[20] Ibid., 115.

[21] Paccaya Sutta: Requisite Conditions, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.020.than.html.

[22] Kalupahana, Buddhism as Philosophy, 29.

[23] 176  Ibid., 66.

[24] Ibid., 30.

[25] 178  Moreland, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei, 50.

[26] Noa Ronkin, “Theravada Metaphysics and Ontology,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.

[27] 180  Kaccayanagotta Sutta: To Kaccayana Gotta (on Right View), trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.015.than.html.

[28] 181  Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75.

[29] See Plantinga’s “Naturalism Defeated,”

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/naturalism_defeated.pdf

[30] Keown, A Short Introduction, 25.

[31] Maggavagga: The Path, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.20.than.html

[32] Velez de Cea, “The Criteria of Goodness,” 134.

[33] 186  Geoff Sayre-McCord, “Moral Realism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2007). Par 3.

[34] 187

Gowans, Buddhism, 29.

[35] 188  James Porter Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 492.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 83.

[38] The Dalia Lama, Ethics, 5.

[39] Keown, A Short Introduction, 30.

[40] Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers (1984): 6.

[41] Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 316.

[42] Ibid., 316.

[43] D. A. Carson,  Ephesians: New Bible commentary : 21st century edition (4th ed.) (Downers Grove, Inter-Varsity, 1994), 134.

[44] Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics: The Promises and Pitfalls of Classic Models of Morality (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 117.

[45] 198  Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington: Georgetown University, 1996), 72.

[46] 199

Stanley Hauweras, “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom,” in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University, 2001), 117.

[47] Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics, 116.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Hauerwas, “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom,” 119,

[50] Kovak, The Christian Case, 80.

[51] Reuschling, Reviving Evangelical Ethics, 123.

[52] 205 Mulapariyaya Sutta: The Root Sequence, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html

[53] John 10:10

[54] Kovak, The Christian Case, 80.

Ambiguous Nakedness

A few months ago, I alluded to the following poem:

“And they realized they were naked . . . .”

(Gen. 3:7)

What mystery was shrouded

By the fig leaves of our forebears?

Primordial tailors,

Their hands’ first fallen craft

Was born of shame,

The name of sin but freshly formed.

Why that immediate, desperate need

To cover their suddenly secret parts?

Their hearts alone have known

Both nakedness with innocence

And clothing worn in guilt.

For us, their heirs,

Only cloaked desire

Mingled with pain.

                                                     Elton D. Higgs

                                                     Oct. 1, 2009

In speculating about what life in the Garden of Eden was like before the Fall, we can only project the other side of the coin from the present state of evil that we know all too well.  Of course, we have the picture of the eternal state in Rev. 21 and 22, in which there will be no death, no disease, no sorrow or weeping, no environmental disorders to disrupt and destroy life.  But what is the flip side of the evils attendant on our sexual desires?  We must assume that Adam and Eve’s becoming “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) meant that their relationship before the Fall involved sexual intercourse.  The perfection of their sexual intimacy seems to have been symbolized by their uninhibited, shameless nakedness (Gen. 2:25).  It is also significant that the first consciousness of their changed state after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit was that “they knew they were naked” and felt compelled to cover up their genitals.  The first victim of lost innocence was the unalloyed enjoyment of sex.

It’s also interesting that Adam and Eve’s recognition of their nakedness had immediate spiritual consequences, causing Adam to hide from God (Gen. 3:10).  Surely it was not merely his physical nakedness that Adam didn’t want God to see, but at a deeper level, he was not able to endure God’s looking at the nakedness of his now-corrupted soul.  God Himself makes the connection between the two levels of being unclothed: “Who told you that you were naked?  Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” (Gen. 3:11).  Adam would not have known he was physically naked had he not first exposed himself spiritually by his disobedience to God.  The easy pleasure of walking with God in the Garden gave way to the agony of feeling Yahweh’s searching eyes.  The protection of innocence had been permanently torn away.

Among the judgments God pronounced on Adam and Eve and their progeny were two things relating to the couple’s  new-found knowledge of their nakedness (which was, by extension, a painful awareness of sexual vulnerability).  First, He made pain a part of child-bearing and declared that wives would be dependent upon their husbands and be ruled over by them.  Secondly, God provided clothing of animal skins for Adam and Eve to replace the crude fig-leaves they had sewn together for themselves.  Herein we see God on the one hand administering severe discipline to the fallen couple, and on the other showing His mercy and provision, giving symbolic assurance that though they had foolishly and perversely thrown aside the beautiful and unproblematic existence God had given them in Eden, He was still with them, if in humility they accepted God’s judgment and submitted to His commands.  Even in the face of the painful consequences of their sin, they could recover some of the beauty of the innocent nakedness they had experienced with God before they fell.

What might be some instruction we can take from these observations?  First, the sexual communion that came naturally to Adam and Eve in the Garden now has to be worked at by men and women in the fallen world.  The nakedness that they took for granted has to be re-embraced by married couples as a wholesome part of their experience and cherished as a mark of the intimacy that God intends for those who are committed to each other in covenant relationship with Him.

Second, the emotional bond that must have been natural between Adam and Eve is challenged in our fallen state.  God’s decree that a wife is to expect and accept dependence on her husband and be subject to him is very problematic, especially in our egalitarian society.  This dynamic is reinforced in the New Testament (Eph. 5:22-33), of course, so how is a spiritually committed but enlightened couple to work this out?  In the Ephesians passage, the wife’s submission is balanced by the husband’s sacrificial care, and Paul refers back to what Genesis says about the initial relationship between Adam and Eve, that they were to “become one flesh” (v. 31).  For this to occur in the fallen state, the woman has to resist using sex to gain power, and the man has to resist using his power selfishly.  Each must work at respecting and enhancing the other.

As reflected in the last lines of the poem above, sexual desire in fallen humankind is experienced ambiguously as “cloaked desire / Mingled with pain.”

Married couples need to realize that although physical and spiritual nakedness with each other is risky, it can be joyful, too, if undertaken with the assurance that the God who disciplines is also the God who redeems.  God is able and willing to use our ambiguous nakedness as an avenue to tasting even in this vale of tears a bit of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

Image: By Thomas Cole - Unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=182975

TThere Ain’t Nothin’ Like Love

The title above reflects a sentiment that has for centuries been ubiquitously expressed in the popular songs and literature of Western societies.  But the "love" referred to is associated much more with Cupid than with God.  Love as the world defines it has to do overwhelmingly with the exhilarating whirlwinds of sexual attraction and desire, whereas God's love, magnificently presented in I Cor. 13, addresses the totality of human experience.  After 1 Cor. 12, on the misuse of God's gifts of the Spirit, Paul launches into a concise, almost poetic meditation on Transcendent Love (agape), saying, "I will show you a more excellent way" than the petty competition to prove who is most spiritual (1 Cor. 12:31).

He begins his beautiful poetic-prose meditation on Divine Love with a comprehensive catalogue of spectacular spiritual gifts that are of no profit without the enabling grace of that Love.

If I speak in the tongues of me and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but I have not love, I am nothing.  If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.  (I Cor. 13:1-3)

No humanly willed virtue, nor even the exercise of a divinely granted gift has significance within itself, but can draw its value only from being grounded in the Love of God.  The carnal Corinthians have been emphasizing uses of their gifts that draw attention to themselves, but Paul wants to show that no matter how spectacularly "successful" they are in the exercise of their gifts, that success is empty unless its purpose is to be a transmitter of the transcendent Love that Jesus showed supremely in His death on the cross.

How are we to recognize this love that trumps the most notable good deeds that can be imagined?   Paul follows up on his astounding statement by (1) giving a down-to-earth picture of what Love does and does not do and (2) showing that of all virtues, only Love endures past this world into eternity.  The characteristics of Love are catalogued in verses 4-7.  The first two items are overarching, comprehensive qualities (patience and kindness) that rule out six specific negative behaviors and cultivate a vital positive one.  The six negative behaviors are all self-centered and injurious to others: arrogance, rudeness, selfish insistence, irritability, resentment, and fault-finding. The vital positive behavior generated by patience and kindness is rejoicing in truth.  This might not seem at first to be so very important, but it springs from a key attitude of the Christian mind, that is, seeking and embracing truth even when it is painful to know and accept, in contrast to cherishing falseness and error when it is to our advantage.

The statement in verse 8 that “love never ends” begins Paul’s assertion that the day will come when all of our experience of God, even faith and hope, will be folded into His Love, just as the Son will one day, at the end of God’s work with this world, yield back to the Father the authority given Him through the Incarnation, so that “God may be all in all”  (I Cor. 15:28).  Faith and hope in that day will find all that they looked forward to has become eternal reality and they will no longer be necessary.  But Divine Love, which is the very nature of God, will never find its limits, for it will continue forever to be the quality that binds all beings together in a fellowship that will never be broken.  All purposes since the Creation of the world have been leading toward the participation of God’s children in that state of Eternal Love.  We will then know truly that “There ain’t nothin’ like love.”

The Possibility of Virtue in Christianity and Buddhism: Interpretations of Buddhist Ethics (Part 4 of 5)

Interpretations of Buddhist Ethics

Utilitarian or Virtue Ethic

There are two primary interpretations of Buddhist ethics: utilitarian and virtue.[1] Keown is quick to point out that Buddhist ethics will not fit neatly into any one category in Western ethics. However, Buddhist scholars see many benefits to interpreting Buddhist ethics in Western categories. Western ethics provides a highly developed vocabulary and conceptual framework that was never developed in Buddhism. Because of this, there is a strong tendency to identify Buddhism in terms of Western ethical theories, even if there is not complete congruence.

It is relatively uncontroversial that Buddhist ethics is teleological, at least to a certain point. While scholars agree that Buddhist ethics is aimed at the goal of nirvana, what is controversial is whether the means to that goal are morally good. One of the key issues in this debate concerns the nature of nirvana. Those holding a utilitarian view understand nirvana in a straightforward way: it is the desired end in light of the circumstances. It is a place of peace and rest, an escape from suffering. Those holding the virtue view believe that nirvana is similar to the eudaimonia of Aristotle and that it constitutes the telos of man.

The Utilitarian Interpretation

The ethics of utilitarianism, broadly speaking, could be summed up like this: "Good actions are those actions that are instrumental to pleasure; evil actions are those actions that destroy pleasure." If the means to nirvana are merely instrumental, then Buddhist ethics is a kind of utilitarian ethic, where the “good exists in pleasure" and the means to that good are not important.[2] Only the consequences count in terms of moral evaluation. Good and evil only exist relative to the predefined goal. While utilitarian kinds of ethical systems are objective in the sense that they provide objective criteria for evaluating good and evil, these systems are not objective in the ultimate sense, meaning that utilitarian systems are not able to give an objective account of what is ultimately good or valuable. Generally, the end is decided based on what the community already counts as valuable or good in itself.[3] As such, utilitarian forms of ethics are, at some point, transcended. They require a prior account of what is valuable or morally praiseworthy so that the goal selected is not arbitrary. This is exactly the condition in which many scholars have found the teaching of the Buddha.

One proponent of this view was Winston L. King, who held that Buddhism "aims at goals which completely transcend the ethical and always places its ethics in that transcendent context."[4]  The Dali Lama himself seems to share the instrumental view. For example, he seems to suggest that an act like stealing is not wrong in itself, but wrong because of the resulting consequences: “As a result of stealing, one will lack material wealth.”[5] Those holding this view take the Buddha’s classifications of the criteria within the Path, wisdom (panna), the virtues (sila), and concentration (samadhi), in a straightforward way. The virtues of the Path (right speech, right action, and right livelihood) are said to be made possible with wisdom (right view and right intention). By having wisdom and virtue, the monk is able then participate in the

“higher” order goods of the Path, the development of concentration (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration) that leads to nirvana.[6]

If ethical practice is merely the means by which one overcomes the suffering of this world, then, at the moment suffering is overcome, the practice of the virtues is obsolete.  In the sutta entitled “What is Purpose?” the Buddha explicitly addresses the reason for practicing the virtues:

Thus in this way, Ananda, skillful virtues have freedom from remorse as their purpose, freedom from remorse as their reward. Freedom from remorse has joy as its purpose, joy as its reward. Joy has rapture as its purpose, rapture as its reward. Rapture has serenity as its purpose, serenity as its reward. Serenity has pleasure as its purpose, pleasure as its reward. Pleasure has concentration as its purpose, concentration as its reward. Concentration has knowledge & vision of things as they actually are as its purpose, knowledge & vision of things as they actually are as its reward. Knowledge & vision of things as they actually are has disenchantment as its purpose, disenchantment as its reward. Disenchantment has dispassion as its purpose, dispassion as its reward. Dispassion has knowledge & vision of release as its purpose, knowledge & vision of release as its reward. In this way, Ananda, skillful virtues lead step-by-step to the consummation of arahantship.[7]

In this text, the Buddha never mentions that the purpose of practicing the virtues relates to an inherent value in doing so. Instead, the virtues are practiced because they “lead step-by-step to the consummation of arahantship,” which is nirvana. Once nirvana is achieved, then there would no longer be a purpose in practicing the virtues: "The highest life seems to be a complete escape from, or transcendence from, the ethical sphere."[8] Having achieved nirvana, terms like “moral” and “non-moral” no longer have any meaning.[9] The Reverend Saddhatissa also held this view, as he explained when outlining his two guidelines for understanding Buddhist ethics: “In the first place, according to Buddhist and other Indian thought, the highest state is one that lies beyond good and evil. In the second place, according to Buddhism there is no break between the moral teaching and that which pertains to the ideal state.”[10]

Given the instrumental nature of the virtues, they cannot be ultimately good: the “virtues are not sufficient in themselves. On the one hand, to be virtuous is not the ultimate goal of life… If there is any goal, it is freedom.”[11] They are described in a simile taught by the Buddha himself, like a raft that is to be abandoned once one has crossed the river:  “for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping.”[12] They are only valuable insofar as they enable one to reach the goal of the ethical pursuit, nirvana.

The Virtue Interpretation

The outline of Buddhist virtue

Besides the utilitarian interpretation, the other major view is that “the virtue ethics tradition is the Western tradition most congenial to the assumptions and insights of Buddhist ethics.”[13]  Virtue ethics is also aimed at a goal, the good for man, which is objectively the best and most proper pursuit of mankind.  Good actions, or virtuous actions, are good because they correspond to and participate in the good for man.[14] Keown suggests that a utility view is a mere caricature and that a proper understanding of Buddhism will show that the Buddha has much more in common with Aristotle than John Stuart Mill.

While there are several scholars who interpret Buddhism as a virtue ethic, Damien Keown’s work is regarded as the most developed. Most other accounts of Buddhist virtue take him as foundational.[15] Keown suggests that there are four points of convergence between Buddhist ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics: the goal of ethics, the general psychology of each system, the particular psychology of moral choices, and the desire for the good.[16] Essentially, Keown is making two kinds of claims: (1) reality has certain moral properties (2) human beings, as agents within a moral reality, possesses a certain moral psychology. Since Keown’s discussion of moral psychology is primarily concerned with categories unique to Aristotle that are not directly relevant to this thesis and given his own statement that “the discipline of ethics only requires that one individual can be distinguished from another… to pursue the issue of ultimate ontological constitution of individual natures in this context is to confuse ethics with metaphysics,” only his first contention will be examined here.[17]

Key to (1) is the claim that nirvana is intrinsically and essentially good so that it serves as the good for man in a way similar to eudaimonia in Aristotle’s thought:

Nirvana is the good, and rightness is predicated of acts and intentions to the extent which they participate in nirvanic goodness. The right and the good in Buddhism are inseparably intertwined. If an action does not display nirvanic qualities, then it cannot be right in terms of Buddhist ethics whatever other characteristics (such as consequences) it might have.[18]

Keown takes it as being self-evidently true that nirvana constitutes the good for man: “Whatever else nirvana is, it is indisputably the summum bonum of Buddhism.” [19] Keown strongly emphasizes the difference between nirvana in this life and nirvana after death and narrows his discussion to accommodate only nirvana in this life.[20] In general, those holding to a virtue view of Buddhism draw some important limitations to their interpretations.[21]

Another key feature of Buddhism as a virtue ethic is the relationship of nirvana to the practices that the Buddha taught. While other interpreters of Buddhism, like King and Saddhista, understand the Buddha as teaching that the Eightfold Path reveals a hierarchal structure of practices, with moral virtue as merely the first step and meant to be discarded once it is mastered, the proponent of the virtue view disagrees. Instead, all practices taught by the Buddha are meant to be understood as equally important. If moral virtue is placed first on the list, it is not because it is a  merely a stepping stone to more advanced practice, it is because moral virtue constitutes what is foundational for other practices so that to cease practicing the virtues is to fail at all other practices. Moral virtue is both a means to then end of Buddhist practice and the foundation of it.

Moral practice exists on the same continuum as nirvana so that nirvana is not a transcendent, amoral state, but moral practices participate in and constitute nirvana. As Keown says, "In both Aristotelian and Buddhist ethics, an action is right because it embodies a virtue which corresponds with and 'participates' in the goal of human perfection."[22] Even though he disagrees with the virtue interpretation, Kalupahana nevertheless agrees with Keown on this point: “Ultimate freedom [nirvana] is above the world, like the lotus that rises above the water without being severed from its root in the water.”[23] Moral practice is not merely a means because moral practice constitutes the good for man, nirvana. 

Further, the means of attaining nirvana is inherently good because “it is the only way to secure the utility sought. But for consequentialist views of morality like utilitarianism, no means can have inherent value.”[24]This is an important distinction because, according to virtue ethics for an act to be considered virtuous, it must both be good in itself, regardless of the consequences, and participate in the final good.

A Critique of Buddhist Virtue

The point of this critique will be to test for the criteria established for virtue in the first chapter: any worldview that wants to accommodate a virtue view of ethics must have an explanation of teleology in the world and the narrative unity of a human life.

The Problem of Teleology

G. E. Moore claimed that one cannot move from observations about the world to conclusions about what constitutes the good.[25] Empiricism cannot be the foundation of a moral theory. Those guilty of this have committed the naturalistic fallacy, which is to “conflate the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’”[26] However, a virtue view of Buddhism seems to make precisely this move.

The Buddha was one the world’s finest empiricists. In fact the Buddha’s teachings are entirely based on his observations and experience. It was a result of his observations about reality that he formulated his Four Noble Truths–truths which were confirmed through his own experience and the experience of his disciples: “Monks, I have known two qualities through experience: discontent with regard to skillful qualities and unrelenting exertion. . . From this heedfulness of mine was attained Awakening. From this heedfulness of mine was attained the unexcelled freedom from bondage.[27]

The challenge that Keown and other virtue ethicists face here is the challenge of understanding the Buddha’s empiricism as teaching robust metaphysical concepts like eudaimonia and intrinsic goodness. In other words, they want to understand the Buddha as arriving at an “ought” from an “is.” Keown suggests that nirvana is sufficiently similar to Aristotle’s eudaimonia so that nirvana can be said to serve as the human good just as Aristotle’s eudaimonia does.[28] To make his point, he describes eudaimonia as being “desired for its own sake; everything else that is desired is desired for the sake of it; it is never chosen for the sake of anything else.”[29] He concludes that the same criteria can be applied to nirvana so that nirvana constitutes the good for man just as eudaimonia does. According to Keown, the fact that nirvana is desirable explains its role as the good for man.

However, the fact that eudaimonia is desirable is only part of the reason why Aristotle saw it as constituting the good for man. According to Aristotle, the first and most important claim about the good for man was not a claim about its desirability, but teleology: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit is thought to aim at some good.” Given this teleology, Aristotle continues his argument: “If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.”[30] Aristotle’s argument rests on a metaphysical reality: human beings, like all other things, have a particular end or function. There is, in fact, a telos for all things. Given this fact, Aristotle uses observation about desires and their objects to arrive at eudaimonia as the appropriate goal for man. Keown does not have a means of explaining a telos prior to defining nirvana as the good for man.  The result is that Keown works backward, making observations about reality and then formulating metaphysical truths. Sallie King explains the problem:

There seem to be two non-reducible foundations of morality: (1) natural law, the Dhamma (conditionality); and (2) an empathetic, caring, compassionate response to the suffering of sentient beings; empathy, caring, compassion, fully manifest in Buddhas, are implicit in the whole enterprise of Buddhism. The first foundation, the claim that conditionality and interdependence universally characterize samsara, Buddhist thought extensively strives to demonstrate (though, of course, whether or not it succeeds is a separate issue). The second, the perception that suffering is bad, Buddhism assumes, but few would probably want to challenge this assumption. It is the second foundation—the assumption that suffering is a problem and the caring response to that problem—that takes us from is to ought, from metaphysics to ethics.[31]

Aristotle is making a distinction between eudaimonia and what is ontologically good that Keown does not. While equating nirvana with eudaimonia Keown argues that “Nirvana is the good, and rightness is predicated of acts and intentions to the extent which they participate in nirvanic goodness. The right and the good in Buddhism are inseparably intertwined.”[32] However, “Aristotle identifies eudaimonia with the highest human good of human flourishing, but not with the moral domain of the good.”[33]  What Keown conflates, Aristotle keeps separate and by doing so, Aristotle avoids committing the naturalistic fallacy. What Keown needs to avoid this trap is to provide an explanation of nirvana as the good for man and the pursuit of nirvana as being morally his telos. He must provide a metaphysical account of both the existence of a moral domain and human teleology prior to formulating his ethical framework.

Another problem faced by a virtue view of Buddhism is an interpretive one. The Buddha described reality as it is and made recommendations about changing aspects of that reality in light of the circumstances. However, to understand the Buddha as introducing metaphysical concepts like “the good for man” in the Aristotelian sense seems to be more the result of idealization and eisegesis than an honest reading of his teachings. In one famous example, the Buddha is questioned by one of his disciples regarding the nature of the soul, the universe, and nirvana. The disciple wanted a statement by the Buddha on each of these subjects, but the Buddha responded by reminding his questioner that he has left such statements undeclared on purpose. They are undeclared because they “are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me.[34]

The Buddha explains what he has declared and why:

And what is declared by me? 'This is stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the origination of stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the cessation of stress,' is declared by me. 'This is the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress,' is declared by me. And why are they declared by me? Because they are connected with the goal, are fundamental to the holy life. They lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, selfawakening, Unbinding. That's why they are declared by me.[35]

Given these statements by the Buddha, it seems like an anachronism to read concepts like teleology and “the good for man” into his teaching. However, Keown suggests this is not the case.

Providing man with a telos might solve the is/ought problem since possessing a telos means having a certain purpose, direction, and design. However, the telos brings up other difficult metaphysical questions. In particular, if a person has a function, design, or purpose, such a claim seems to presuppose a personal agent that can bestow such qualities. However, Buddhism does not allow for such an agent or any other means of accounting for teleology in human beings. Further, it seems completely foreign to Buddhism to suggest that there is a “good for man” in the Aristotelian sense. Without an adequate account of teleology present, the virtue view of Buddhism fails the first criterion established in chapter one. This leaves the criteria of the narrative unity of the human life.

The Problem of Unity

The concept of the self is critical to any account of ethics. This is a point that even Buddhist scholars appreciate. For example, Jones beings the New Social Face of Buddhism by asking, “What is the self?” and “Who am I?” to which he responds, “These are the questions around which the whole argument of this book revolves.”[36] In virtue ethics, the nature of the self is even more important since it is an agent centered ethic: “in any account of virtue ethics, the self must play a prominent role.”[37] However, Keown seems unwilling to define and engage the nature of the self in his argument for Buddhist virtue. He limits the scope of his argument to nirvana in this life[38] and then adds that “I do not address directly the problem of the apparent albescence of a moral subject in the light of the no-self (annata) doctrine. It seems to me that Buddhism provides sufficient criteria for personal identity to allow the identification of subjects within the moral nexus.”[39]

This seems like a strange omission give the importance of the conception of self to most other forms of ethics.  Why would Keown put such a crucial issue aside? One clue comes from the suggestion of Whitehill, who himself takes a virtue view of Buddhism. Whitehill calls Keown a “revisionist.”[40] Whitehill himself does not seem particularly interested in understanding historical Buddhism in its context, but rather as a means for expanding Western ethical “horizons.” [41] Perhaps Keown is motivated by reasons other than understanding the Buddha in his own context. Given the discussion of the no-self doctrine earlier, there is apparently no possibility for understanding a human life as a unified whole.  All language regarding the self is mere convention, not referring to any substantive “person.”

Buddhist scholars who are willing to comment on the nature of the self paint a picture that is not compatible with MacIntyre’s requirement of narrative unity. Persons are only “persons” in terms of convention and not substance. They are a collection of parts, loosely associated with previous arrangements of other parts. This leads Siderits to conclude that, in light of the Buddhist no-self doctrine, “I should continue to identify with the past and future stages of this causal series. But I should not do so as the hero of the story that is my life.”[42] But it is just such an identification that is necessary according to MacIntyre. As a result, Buddhism fails the second criteria for a virtue ethic: the narrative unity of a single human life.

Notes:

[1] Siderits, Philosophy, 77.

[2] Julia Driver, “The History of Utilitarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University), par 3.

[3] 114

Goodman, Consequences, 23.

[4] 115  King, In the Hope of Nibbana,  4.

[5] 116

Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho and Donald S. Lopez, The Way to Freedom: Core Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism (India: Indus, 1996), 100.

[6] David J Kalupahana, Ethics in Early Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaiì Press, 1995), 93.

[7] Kimattha Sutta: What is the Purpose? trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an11/an11.001.than.html

[8] 119  King, In Hope of Nibbana, 30.

[9] Harvey, Introduction, 44.

[10] Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics, 4.

[11] Kalupahana, Ethics, 72.

[12] 123 The Middle Length Discourses, 229.

[13] 124

James Whitehill, “Buddhism and the Virtues,” in Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, ed. Damien Keown (Richmond: Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 17.

[14] Rosalind Hursthouse, "Virtue Ethics," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2010), par. 6.

[15] Whitehill, “Buddhism,” 18.

[16] 127

Keown, Nature, 195-222.

[17] 128  Ibid., 19.

[18] Ibid., 177.

[19] Ibid.,199.

[20] Ibid., 19.

[21] For example, Whitehill limits his interpretation by suggesting that his virtue interpretation is only for the sake of building bridges between Eastern and Western ethics, and not necessarily an attempt to offer a straightforward rendering of Buddhist ethics.

[22] Keown, Nature, 50.

[23] Kalupahana, Ethics, 86.

[24] 135 Damien Keown, “Karma, Character, and Consequentialism,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24 (1996), 346.

[25] 136  Michael Ridge, “Moral Non-Naturalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2010), par. 9.

[26] Christopher Ives, “Deploying the Dharma: Reflections on the Methodology of Constructive Buddhist Ethics.,” The Journal of Buddhist Ethics 15 (2008): 25.

[27] 138  Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta: The Shorter Instructions to Malunkya, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu,

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html

[28] 139  Keown, Nature, 197.

[29] 140  Ibid.,199.

[30] Book I, Nichomachean Ethics.

[31] Sallie B. King, “From Is to Ought: Natural Law in in Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Phra Prayudh Payutto,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 2 (2002): 284.

[32] 143  Keown, Nature, 199.

[33] 144 Abraham Velez de Cea, “The Criteria of Goodness in the Pali Nikayas and the Nature of Buddhist Ethics,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 11 (2004): 129.

[34] 145 Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ken Jones, The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action (Boston: Wisdom, 2003), 2.

[37] 148  R. Scott Smith, Virtue Ethics and  Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003),  145. 

[38] 149  This move seems arbitrary and unsupported by the Buddha’s early teachings. The Buddha did not draw

a sharp distinction between nirvana in this life and nirvana without remainder. However, Keown’s distinction is so great that he divorces his ethic from the ultimate goal of Buddhism, nirvana without remainder. Why would he want to do this? The answer seems to be, as argued later, that Keown is revising Buddhist teaching to be compatible with a virtue ethic.

[39] 150  Keown, Nature, 19.

[40] Whitehill, “Buddhism,” 19.

[41] 152  Ibid., 17. “My purpose in this chapter is to speculate about the optimal, future development of Buddhism

in the West.”

[42] Siderits, Philosophy, 77.