Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

You may recognize the title above as alluding to the 1967 movie with Spenser Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier, in which a daughter stretches social acceptability at the time by bringing home her black fiancé to meet her parents. The experience is awkward for mom and pop, because their theoretical racial tolerance is put to the test by a live challenge. A new guest for dinner brings with him or her the potential for the hosts finding out things they would just as soon ignore.

In his book The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey observes that when Jesus was invited to a meal, He often defied “all rules of social propriety” (p. 150). Even at the ones where he didn’t either offend His host or associate with questionable people, He caused a stir. At the marriage feast in Cana, he astounded the master of the meal with the wine He made out of water. The first time He visited Mary and Martha for a meal, He had to set Martha straight about putting meal preparation ahead of listening to Jesus. After His resurrection, Jesus joined two disciples on the road home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Concealing His identity, He remonstrated with them that they should not be puzzled either by their Master’s death or by eye witness reports that He had subsequently been seen alive. They invited Him home for dinner, and they must have felt rather silly when He opened their eyes “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:30-31, 35) to know who He was.

In two instances Jesus went home with disreputable people and their companions (Matthew and Zacchaeus, both despised as tax-collectors), and was roundly criticized for the company He was keeping. The Master put down those observing Matthew’s feast with the observation that if one wishes to be a spiritual minister, one goes where the need is greatest, to “those who are sick” (Luke 5:31). And of the “sinner” Zacchaeus, He says that sharing a celebratory meal together is quite appropriate when salvation comes to the house of a repentant “son of Abraham,” for “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10).

But Jesus’ most scathing and confrontive remarks occurred when He was invited home by prominent Pharisees. These hosts and their guests were called out for their elitist self-righteousness in showing contempt for those Jesus saw as the primary targets for His compassion and ministry. Such challenges were often followed by parables that underlined His lessons to His fellow-diners. When He was the guest of a ruler of the Pharisees (who invited Jesus in order to catch Him in word or deed), He obliged them by openly healing a man on the Sabbath (Luke 14:1-6). Then followed three parables, the object of which was to show that God’s social order and evaluation of people is quite contrary to the way humans exalt themselves at the expense of others.

On another occasion, he was at table as a guest of a Pharisee named Simon, and during the meal a woman of ill repute came in and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, a kind of public intimacy that was regarded as scandalous, causing His Pharisee host to say to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). Knowing Simon’s thoughts, Jesus poses a question to him under the guise of wanting to know his opinion about a hypothetical situation; but the Master uses it to make an incisive point: that one’s ability and motivation to love God are measured by the person’s acknowledgment of his deep need and by the corresponding realization of God’s generosity in meeting that need. Moreover, Jesus points out that Simon has failed in hospitality by not providing for Jesus’ feet to be washed, in contrast to this poor woman who resorted to tears and hair as instruments for washing Jesus’ feet, and then added the tribute of applying ointment to His feet afterward. Thus are the tables turned on the censoriousness of Simon and his fellows.

The most poignant occasion where Jesus challenged those He was eating with was just before His death, in Bethany. During the meal, a woman (John’s account says it was Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus) comes in with a vial of precious and expensive ointment which she applies to both His head and His feet (to conflate the accounts: John 12:1-7; Mark 14:1-9). The critics are quick to say that this was an extravagant gift that more appropriately could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus sees the woman’s act quite differently, and actually prophesies that because she has anointed His body beforehand for burial, “what she has done will be told in memory of her” John 14:9).

Sometimes people fantasize having a meal with Jesus, perhaps not anticipating that it might not be an entirely comfortable experience. When Jesus ate His last meal with His disciples, He gave them a disturbing lesson in humility by washing their feet, and He told them some other things that they didn’t understand at the time. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we are challenged to recognize His presence in the wine and the bread, as if He were there in the flesh; and if we fail to do so, it will be to the peril of our spiritual and physical health. In the book of Revelation Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me’ (Rev. 3:20). This invitation comes at the end of Jesus’ plea to the church at Laodicea to realize that they are morally destitute and blind and need to receive healing from the Lord, to accept His discipline. So when He comes in and eats with them, their communing together will be both humbling and gratifying. If we presume to ask Jesus to dinner, just remember that inviting Him to our house doesn’t mean we know exactly what we will experience when He arrives. It’s worth the risk, though.

Eight Meals Jesus was invited to:

• Wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11) • First meal with Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) • At the house of Matthew (Luke 5:27-32) • At the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36-50) • At the house of another Pharisee (Luke 14:1-24) • At the house of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-9) • Later meal with Mary and Martha in Bethany (John 12:1-7; see also Mark 14:1-9, Matt. 26:6-13) • On Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35)

Image: By Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen (circa 1504–1559) - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7439391

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.3.2: Three Puzzles:

We end with three puzzles about the four Barthian constraints, that we are individual centers of agency, in time, free, and language-users. The first puzzle is about why beings like us in these four ways could not bind themselves morally without bringing in God. Darwall in The Second-Personww Standpoint raises this objection to Pufendorf’s theory that “moral entities” (such as obligations) are produced through God’s “imposition” of his will in commands. Darwall first offers an objection from Cudworth: “It was never heard of, that any one founded all his Authority of commanding others, and others’ Obligation or Duty to Obey his Commands, in a Law of his own making, that men should be Required, Obliged, or Bound to Obey him.”

Hare thinks Scotus solved this problem earlier, but now he adds that Pufendorf has the same solution, seeing justification of obedience to God terminating in something that does not itself need justification. For Scotus, the principle that God is to be loved is known from its terms, and therefore does not require any justification from any antecedent principle. We know that God is to be loved, and so that God is to be obeyed, just by knowing that God is the supreme good. Pufendorf also takes God’s authority as not needing justification. Darwall interprets Pufendorf as trying to justify the principle that we ought to obey God by deriving it from an antecedent principle that we owe gratitude to our benefactors, but Pufendorf takes divine sovereignty as already granted, and is interested in showing that we have no reason to question it, if hesitations should arise. Pufendorf takes God’s authority as not needing justification. Lipscomb makes this point in an article in which he uses the distinction between justifying and explaining a requirement. Like Calvin, Pufendorf is giving us a double motivation for obedience, but he’s not justifying. As several commentators have noted, Pufendorf could not use gratitude, which he regards as an imperfect duty, as a justification for God’s right to demand obedience, which he regards as a perfect duty. Rather, he regards God’s authority as axiomatic, in the same way mathematics has axioms or first principles, which “merit belief upon their own evidence.”

Darwall then objects to Pufendorf that, by acknowledging that God’s command presupposes our competence as free and rational responders, he has in fact undermined the need for bringing in God at all in understanding moral obligation. If we can already form such a community ourselves as mutually accountable free and rational persons, a Kantian “realm of ends,” appeal to a divine sovereignty is unnecessary. But Darwall does not see that the relevant competence here is the competence to bring about what Kant calls the highest good. In the Groundwork Kant introduces the notion of a kingdom of ends because he has an important point to make: the kingdom of ends has a king. The sovereign can only be God, because only God is without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to the divine will. Korsgaard prefers to talk about a “republic of all rational beings,” but Mackie is more accurate when he says “but for the need to give God a special place in it, [the kingdom of ends] would have been better called a commonwealth of ends.” If Chapter 1 is right, the kingdom needs a sovereign who can bring about the highest good, the union of happiness and virtue, which is the end given us by morality itself.

Kant agrees that we belong together with God in a kingdom of ends, but he also holds that God is superior to us because God runs this kingdom, and judges us according to whether we live by the laws of this kingdom. When we think about rightness and wrongness, we’ll think in terms of a court, and the consciousness of an internal court in the human being is conscience. The judge has to be considered as a figure outside the individual, because he has to be pictured as having qualities that are inconsistent with being human at all. Kant says pointedly that this pictured judge may be actual or not, but must be conceived as one who scrutinizes hearts (a role humans can’t play) and who imposes all obligation (this is God’s role as legislator) and who has all power to give effect to his laws (this is God’s role as executive). Kant is conceding here that, even though I can entertain within myself the thought of what an actual God would prescribe and the verdict that an actual God would reach, and I can repeat in my own will the legislating and the verdict, I cannot repeat within my own will the omnipotent supervision of the world.

This shows what kind of equality we do and don’t have with God. We humans do have, on this picture, equal membership in the kingdom of ends with God. We, like God, make the moral law; in our case we make it by making the law a law for us. This is what Kant means by “autonomy.” He does not mean that we create the law. We will in our wills what God wills for our willing. The answer to the first puzzle, in Kantian terms, is that the realm of ends needs a sovereign.

The second puzzle about the Barthian constraints is whether there are constraints from the limits of our understanding on what God can command. Adams takes a robust, common-sense approach: Normally communication between human beings requires using words how they’re understood. In communications between God and us, though, we have to be careful about assuming that God does not say to us what goes beyond our current understanding. Barth defends an account of language according to which the same words do not mean the same things used by us and by God, but God enables us nonetheless to understand God’s language by the gracious sending of the Holy Spirit. Hare suggests, more modestly, that some distance between what God means and what we understand is at least congruent with, if not required by, our freedom and our being in time. Sometimes Jesus’ words may have been a bit unclear to his followers. God reveals enough about destinations (which he sees clearly but we only see glimpses of) to keep us going, but does not reveal the whole thing, because God is respecting our need to work out how to live. Kant puts this by saying that God did not intend us to be marionettes that could be manipulated by pulling their strings. Here’s an analogy: we may use the word “cherish” in our wedding vows without understanding what it involves until much later.

A third puzzle is that the model of a human command suggests that the recipient has to be able to recognize that she has been commanded by the commander. Is this necessary for accountability? Hare thinks it is not necessary even in the case of human commands—as when various rules in place can be authoritative without our knowing who signed off on them originally. In any case, it’s true about divine commands that their audience may not know their origin. God, in the divine legislative authority, promulgates the commands, but those to whom they are promulgated do not necessarily know that it is God who has promulgated them. This is a version of the doctrine of general revelation. Even if people do not know God is the author, they can still be accountable to what has been revealed, and they can still have obligations. They may even have a sense of being commanded without knowing who it is that is commanding them. We can receive divine commands in the words presented to us by people we know, or even people we don’t know. Nathan played this role for King David. Allowing for this sort of divine communication requires discretion and discernment, and it’s possible to get it wrong, but the answer to the third puzzle is that the people who receive divine command don’t always know that it’s divine command they are receiving.

In sum, this chapter tried to do three things. First, it gave a general account of prescription, and then distinguished five different kinds of divine prescription, giving examples of the main kinds. Then it isolated one kind, divine command in the narrow sense that generates obligation and that’s tied to the authority of the commander, and it discussed what “authority” means here. Finally, it mentioned some features of our own agency and God’s that follow from God’s commanding us, and it discussed in a preliminary way some puzzles about these features.

What’s Really New?

A Twilight Musing

We Americans are fascinated with all things new, largely because both the word and the idea of “new” are at the center of promoting products, from cereals to automobiles. I heard just this morning in a newscast (as you can see, the word is even embedded in the media) a report about how Apple can get away with marketing a new iPhone every couple of years: people want and eagerly await the next new thing, especially in communications technology.

The assumption of the superiority of the new is also deeply woven into the fabric of modern Western thought. It is intricately connected to the idea of progress, undergirded both by ever-expanding scientific and technological knowledge and by the application of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to human social development. Arising out of these elements of thought is the rather arrogant assumption that the present age is by definition more advanced than any that has preceded it, merely because it is the latest. This is the state of mind described by C. S. Lewis as “chronological snobbery.” In this context, it’s not surprising that modern theological opinions are considered superior to old ones. If doctrines and moral standards clearly stated in the Bible conflict with modern, enlightened, “scientific” understandings, then we must cast the old aside and embrace the progressive new.

However, the God of the Bible is actually the source of all things new—is, in fact, the only source of the New. The conflict is not primarily between the old and the new in a chronological sense, but between mankind’s “new” and God’s “New.” God demonstrated the archetypal New when He “created the heavens and the earth.” No such thing had ever existed before; it was unique, completely original, and God “saw that it was good.” When sin corrupted this perfect new world, God provided a lesser but sufficient way for the human race to survive on earth until God’s redemption of the fallen world could be worked out. For Adam and Eve, newly banished from the Garden, He balanced the penalties of pain in childbirth and painfully tilling the ground for food by providing them garments and promising that the Serpent who had deceived them would one day be bruised (fatally and finally, it is implied) by one of their offspring. (See Gen. 3:14-21.) We now know that the “offspring” referred to was Jesus Christ, Messiah and Incarnate Son of God, whose heel was bruised by the Serpent Satan when Jesus died on the cross. But before the culmination of that divine plan in the Incarnation, there was a very long period of progressive New Things, beginning with the purging and purifying of the earth through the Flood; the calling of Abraham to be the father of God’s nation, Israel; the institution of a Covenant with that nation, based on the Law given to Moses; the blessing of Israel with a land to live in; the apostasy of the nation leading to their being exiled from that land; and their return from exile to rebuild Jerisalem and the Temple. Thus, over long years, the way was prepared for the coming of God’s Son, the Newest Thing ever seen.

Jesus’ appearance in the world marked the creation of a New Adam, a being who, like the original creation, was unique and without precedent. The first Adam was created from the earth, and God breathed into his physical form the breath of life; but the Second (or New) Adam sprang from the very Spirit of God and was only temporarily clothed in a perishable body (see I Cor. 15:45-49). When Jesus arose from the grave after being struck to death by Satan, He became the source of a New Covenant, established through the shedding of His perfect blood to remove forever the curse invoked on mankind because of sin. With this New Covenant came a New definition of the people of God. No longer was His people merely physical Israel, but a unification of Jew and Gentile into “one New Man” (Eph. 3:15, my caps, and so throughout), so intimately identified with Christ as to be referred to as His Body. The people of God are made up of all those who have accepted Jesus as Lord and have experienced the transformation from death to life, putting off the “old self” and being “renewed” so that we can “put on the New Self” (Eph. 4:21-24), which is actually Christ in us (Col. 1:27). As Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20-21). All of this is preparation for our being ushered into the New Heaven and New Earth with which God will replace the flawed universe in which we now dwell. (See Is. 65:17-18; II Pet. 3:11-13; Rev. 21:1-8.)

God’s New is obviously glorious and benevolent, greatly to be desired and joyfully to be embraced. And yet, as I indicated above, we in this fallen world easily fall prey to the glittering temptation of the temporal new. Scripture has many examples from which we can profit in this regard. One of God’s repeated accusations against Israel was that they went after “new gods” and “forgot the God who gave [them] birth” (Deut. 32:17-18). The jaded old man whose voice we hear in Ecclesiastes is so satiated with his pursuit of the ephemeral “new” that he concludes “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9-10). And he is right, for what is under the sun is not God’s New, but mankind’s flawed new. Nevertheless, God is at work in His people of every age providing spiritual renewal in the midst of our weariness. Inserted into the middle of the book of Lamentations (3:22-24) we find the beautiful affirmation: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’" In Isaiah 40:31, those who “wait for the Lord” are promised that they will “renew their strength” and “run and not be weary . . . walk and not faint.”

Nevertheless, perverse beings that we are, we not only are easily lured by the glitter of the world’s fleeting “new,” we often are frightened and threatened by God’s ‘New,” even though he makes it readily available to us for the asking. But to receive God’s New, we must put off the old that would hinder us from growing in our walk with Him. I once wrote a New Year’s poem that expresses this ambivalence, and I present it here by way of conclusion.

A Reluctance for New Wine

The fabric of threadbare hope

Stretches toward year's end.

Pieces of frayed ambition extend

To cover the old wineskins

That many disclaim But few set aside.

Like children clutching tattered dolls,

We hug in vain security

The rags of the past,

Because in some degree

They are accommodated to our wills.

The outworn selves we cling to

Can be our own

The more as time goes by:

We patch and mend In order to possess.

The New Stirs something deep within—

But I would not willingly admit it.

--Elton D. Higgs (Dec. 31, 1977)

Image: "Beginning" by Uzzaman. CC License. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.3.1: Six Implications of Our Being Commanded by God

This discussion is taken from Barth’s discussion in Church Dogmatics III/4. From the premise that God gives commands, we can learn, first, that we and God are different; we are not, that is to say, part of God. This is because commands are not addressed to oneself, except in an extended sense in which one is treating oneself as another.

Second, commands are given to responders of a certain kind; those who can obey. This is explained in the four points that follow, called subsequently “the four Barthian constraints.” One, the commands are given to centers of agency, to responders whose obedience consists in acting and living in a certain way. These are individuals, though we can speak in an extended sense about the agency of collectives. This point about the nature of the responders is one Ockham relies on in his discussion of the question of whether God can command us not to love God. His view is that the command to love God, though its content is possible in itself, is pragmatically incoherent (a practical consideration) because it can’t be disobeyed; this is because to disobey it is already to love God. Recall that loving God entails obedience. See Ockham, Quodliberal Questions III.14. A content can be non-contradictory in itself, but contradictory as commanded. A content can also be non-contradictory as commanded, but contradictory as commanded by God. See Lucan Freppert’s The Basis of Morality according to William Ockham, who argues that this view is different from that of Scotus discussed in ch. 1.

Two, commands are to centers of agency whose obedience consists in changing how things are, or in resisting change. So they are in time, since, as Aristotle says, time is either change itself or the measure of change. They have to persist, in order to be obedient, through the hearing of the command to the obeying of it. Three, commands are given to free beings, in the sense of beings who are not under external causation in their obedience. Four, the responder has to be part of a language community. Commands are standardly addressed to the responder in language, and language is a communal enterprise.

So we and God are different is the first implication of our being commanded by God; the four Barthian constraints are the next four. All of those have been points about human beings. The sixth point is about God:

If God gives us commands, and the function of commanding as a speech act is to change the world through the agency of the responder to whom the command is addressed, and if the command is an expression of the desire that the world change in this way, then we can attribute something like desires (in the broad sense) to God. More usually, theologians would say God has a will. Again, that we have a God who commands is distinctive of the Abrahamic faiths, and distinguishes them from, for example, Aristotle’s religion. Since God’s creation is also a command, it’s reasonable to say that command is the characteristic fashion by which, in the Abrahamic faiths, God relates to us, either by creating or by telling us how to live inside creation. Behind this difference with Aristotle is an even more significant one. God is not, for Aristotle, in a personal relationship with us, but the Abrahamic faiths make our relation to God personal, and mediate that relation by God’s command to us.

It’s true that God’s will and God’s command can diverge, as in the famous case of Abraham and his son. When they do, are we bound (according to DCT) by God’s will or by God’s command? We should hold ourselves bound by the command, taking it as an expression of God’s will, but this assumption can, in certain cases, be overridden by another command.

Image: By Wolfgang Sauber - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42826104

Unexpected Consequences

A Twilight Musing

The dramatic confrontation in John 8, between Jesus, an accused woman, and the Scribes and Pharisees who were her accusers, turned out quite contrary to the expectations of both the woman and her accusers. The catalyst for this complete reversal was the piercing words of Jesus directed at the accusers: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” This saying has borne the fruit of many a reference to someone’s being disqualified from “casting the first stone,” referring to the vulnerability of those who self-righteously indict others. It’s fairly easy to picture the accusers drifting away one by one, since their leaving is described in the passage. But since we have no information about the adulterous woman’s departure from Jesus, we can only imagine it, and I have tried to do so in the first of the two poems below. The strongest set of inferences to be drawn about the woman from this passage is that when she was hauled by the Scribes and Pharisees before Jesus, she must have feared for her life; and that after the episode she felt great relief at departing not only physically unharmed, but spiritually delivered. Like so many who encountered the Master, He had more to give than she knew how to expect. But I have gone beyond those reactions on her part to postulate how she felt at having now not only to continue living, but to redefine what it meant for her to live after Jesus told her to “go, and from now on sin no more.”

Depicting what the defeated and deflated accusers must have felt as they left is of course from a perspective quite different from the woman’s, and I have attempted that in the second poem below. I have assumed that shock and wounded pride would have been at the core of their feelings and thoughts, but I have also hinted at the possibility that there may have been a glimmer of acquired self-knowledge. Common to both poems is astonishment at the unexpected outcome of the encounter.

Reprieve (John 8:3-11)

Out of the circle of death I walk, Alone at the center when I came, Alone with Him when I left. Bereft of hope, I stood accused By all but the Teacher. Accusers became the accused, Standing, stones in hand, triumphant In night-time raid and dawn indictment, Then melting away in single shame, Till none remained when the Master looked up. Only when He spoke did I meet His eyes, Full of beautiful severity. As ugly the sin as it was before, But condemnation gone! Reproach was swallowed up In “Go, and sin no more.”

No backup plan for being stoned, I walk toward home to find my way again. Old way of life must now be buried, As--rising from forgiveness— His love replaces carnal lust. Unjust escape from penalty say those Who hide behind the Law, But blissful boon to her who heard The quieter voice Replacing heartless rage.

Convicted (John 8:3-11)

We slink away, heads hung in shame, With tongues and hands disarmed By flash of sin reversed; Not one of us had conscience clear Enough to start the slaughter. We came to trap him in his words, Yet our words became our snare. He turned on us the double-cutting sword Of Law-based righteousness, And bleeding now we leave the field, Our cleverness in ashes.

Image: Vasily Polenov "A Depiction of a Woman Caught in Adultery" Public Domain. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 2, “What is a Divine Command?” Section 2.2, Divine Authority:

To understand God’s authority, we have to proceed by analogy, recognizing limitations in the application of accounts of human authority. The term “authority” in its use within human life is a “thick” value term, like “polite.” Thick value terms take up the criteria for their application into their meaning, and combine them unstably with the evaluation, and the result is that with most such terms it is possible to find cases where the criteria are approximately met, but the evaluation is the opposite of the usual. To say that a person has authority is usually to express approval of the way she exercises power. But it is also possible to say that a person has wrongful or too much authority. What, then, is rightful authority?

As with most value terms, we need to distinguish objective and subjective uses of the term “authority.” In the subjective use of “value,” I can’t sincerely say that something is a value for me unless I value it. But in the objective use of “value,” there can be values relevant to my choices that I don’t acknowledge. Two qualifications are needed here, before we apply it to the case of “authority.” The first qualification is that objectivity does not require independence of human beings as a whole; it requires independence of the preferences of the person to whom the value applies. A medical treatment can be good for a person whether he recognizes it or not. John McDowell has argued convincingly that most of the values we operate with are relative to human dispositions in general, and that this does not mean they are not objective. The second qualification is that, according to the “prescriptive realism” outlined in Ch. 1, the full-orbed value judgment using the term will always express a subjective state, though this does not impugn the objective reality of the value properties picked out in the judgment. The consequence is that, when a person makes this kind of value judgment, there will be a “value” in the subjective sense, an acknowledged pull towards some good or away from some evil together with an endorsement of that pull, but the objective value can be there whether it’s acknowledged in such a judgment or not.

“Authority” has been distinguished from mere “power” by the fact that a person or thing that has authority properly influences me, whereas a person or thing that has power merely influences me. This distinction comes from Butler, but it isn’t yet adequate. Not all properly exercised influence is authority, because influence can be merely causal, and not all authority is properly exercised. We need a distinction between power and authority that appeals to the idea that the person with authority gives (by commanding) reasons of a certain kind for compliance to the person over whom she has the authority. But the term “reasons for action” is itself value-laden, and this can again give rise to confusion. We can’t simply define “authority” in terms that make it always by definition true that the person who exercises it does so legitimately.

In the tradition of all three Abrahamic faiths, God has authority as sovereign. But now we need to make the distinction between “objective authority” and “subjective authority.” God is sovereign, and in this sovereignty God has both of these kinds of authority. God has objective authority for everyone, whether they acknowledge it or not. But subjective authority is what the subject acknowledges as authoritative, and so God has subjective authority only for those who acknowledge it or consent to it. We can further distinguish God’s sovereignty by functions, by analogy with human sovereignty, like the distinction into legislative, executive, and judicial functions. God makes the law by commanding it, and runs the kingdom in accordance with that law, and judges all human beings, whether they have acknowledged God’s authority or not, by their compliance to that law. In all three cases, God has objective authority but may not have subjective authority. There is circularity here. God has rightful authority because God’s commands give us the reasons that we ought to have, and we ought to have them because God’s commands have authority. But the circularity is not vicious, because the chain of justification terminates in the principle known from its terms that God is to be loved and hence God is to be obeyed.

We can say that, when God commands something by legislative authority, implemented in God’s executive and judicial authority, there is an objective reason for obedience from the union of wills (divine and human) that is both expressed in such obedience, and that is good in itself. In terms of God’s executive authority, in Kant’s language God is the sovereign of the kingdom of ends, of which we are mere members. The sovereign is a completely independent being, without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will. An example of what this means is that God can put us next to the people God wants us to help. We can call this the “principle of providential proximity,” which can be helpful in overcoming the despair that comes from seeing the scale of the world’s need as compared with my own pitiful resources. It’s not always obvious whom one has been placed next to; it might not be simply geographical. And it’s not simply that God sees better than we do what the reasons are, and transmits them to us; rather, God’s choices actually create or produce the reasons. God puts me next to the person I am supposed to help, and I am to see being placed next to her as preparing me for a divine command to pay special concern to her interests.

God’s judicial authority gives me a reason because I am accountable to God. This is true independently of whether I acknowledge this authority. A rival view is Murphy’s position that God does not have this objective authority over those who have not acknowledged it, but that one is required in reason to subject oneself to God’s rule, because there is decisive reason so to do; to fail to subject oneself is to be guilty of practical irrationality. But Hare thinks such an account can’t accommodate the traditional view of all three Abrahamic faiths about God’s judicial authority even over the non-believer. Dodsworth makes this point well, relying on Darwall.  Being given practical reasons to perform actions constitutes neither authority nor accountability. An account of God’s authority needs to make reference to the fact that, when we fail to obey God’s commands, this makes us rightly liable to God’s rebuke and punishment, as in the first Psalm. This is true for believers and unbelievers alike.

When God makes a promise to us or makes a covenant with us, is God obligated to comply with it? Scotus is useful here. He makes a distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power (which God exercises within an ordinance divinely established). An agent can act in conformity with some right and just law in accordance with his or her ordained power. When that upright law—according to which an agent must act in order to act ordinately—is not in the power of that agent, then its absolute power can’t exceed its ordained power in regards to any object without its acting disorderly or inordinately. But God can’t act otherwise, so that he establishes another upright law, which would be right, because no law is right except insofar as the divine will accepts it as established. So God is acting within the divine ordained power by keeping promises, but it’s always possible for God by the absolute divine power to establish a different upright order. God’s obligation thus does not, we might say, go all the way down. God is unlike us in this respect.

The Messiness of Power

A Twilight Musing

My wife and I recently watched “Gods and Generals,” a movie about the American Civil War. It is a very rich and thought-provoking portrayal of some of the commanders on both sides of the conflict, whose comments on war are profound and sobering. Both sides had idealistic justifications of their resorting to war, but the wisest men among them also realized that war is, at best, an evil used to combat an even greater evil, or to achieve a goal whose good outweighs the terrible price of war in human life and resources. At one point, Robert E. Lee is shown saying, “It is a good thing that war is so horrible; else we should grow to love it too much.” Lawrence Chamberlain, a Northern commander who gained fame for his company’s heroic defense of a key hill in the battle of Gettysburg, explained to his brother Thomas that war is an extreme form of coercion, and only the moral necessity of ending slavery could have motivated him to leave the quiet halls of academe to engage in the directed chaos of war. No thinking person is ever easy with organized slaughter, however worthy the cause behind it.

Although fighting a “just war” is the most graphically focused example of “messy” power to maintain a larger ideal, every exercise of power in a fallen world involves moral ambivalence. There are many less charged situations in which we humans are faced with the necessity of determining how to use power or authority so that it is an instrument more for good than for evil. Actually, this difficulty has its roots in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. If it is true that Satan, as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, was led astray by his lust for more power, it is easy to see the temptation of Eve and Adam as a seduction into the exercise of their wills to gain more power. So far as we can infer, the prelapsarian world required no conscious exercise of power by mankind, except to rule over non-sentient nature according to God’s commission. Jahweh’s overall power insured the order of the universe, and until humans were confronted with the apparent attractiveness of increasing their power by eating the forbidden fruit, there was no thought or desire to go beyond the established order. With the eating of the forbidden fruit, the use of power by human beings became problematical at best, and disastrous in its potential.

That is why there are so many cautions in Scripture about the use and exercise of power, and why the final, restorative consummation of all things through God’s sovereign power is preceded by His sweeping away the flawed and risky world of human power. But in the meantime, we have no choice but to engage, guided by the Word of God, in the application of power and our responses to it. The core of all moral instruction within God’s Covenants, Old and New, is that we govern our relationships with one another by turning our wills toward applying the principle of love, rather than trying to control others. The Law of Moses repeatedly addresses ways that the strong must act with gentleness and compassion toward the weak and the disadvantaged, not misusing power to oppress and exploit the powerless. At the same time, rulers of God’s people are expected to use their power to administer justice and to enforce the observation of God’s laws.

Some of these general principles of just governance are spoken of in the New Testament, as in Rom. 13:1-7, where Paul legitimizes even secular government as instituted by God to maintain good order and to punish evil-doers. However, the New Covenant pays more attention to the obligation of Christian citizens to submit to established governmental powers, and even to pay taxes to them willingly. This spirit of submission is even more radically presented in instructions about personal relationships between believers. The foundation is laid in the Gospels, which show the heart of Jesus, the Son of God, to be with the most vulnerable people of society. However, His ambitious disciples were not quick to pick up on this emphasis, and He had to instruct them that if they wished to be great (that is, in a position of power), they must learn to be servants (see Mark 10:42-45). He exemplified this lesson in washing the feet of His disciples just before he was tried and sent to the cross (John 13:1-17); as He said to them then, “You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (vv. 13-14).

This admonition is reinforced in the epistles. Paul admonishes the Ephesians to submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21) and then proceeds to speak of submission in particular relationships: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord” (5:22), followed by a call to husbands to subordinate their own welfare to the care and enhancement of their wives (vv. 25-33). Children are to honor and obey their parents, but parents are also admonished not to exercise their power in ways that are not consonant with “the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (6:4) and therefore merely provoke their children to anger. Church leaders are held responsible for disciplining false teachers and those who would disrupt the Body of Christ, and church members are to respect those who have spiritual authority over them (I Tim. 5:17-21). But these leaders are also admonished to exercise their authority gently and by example, not by “domineering over those in your charge” (I Pet. 5:1-3).

All of us who have experienced much of life can testify that it is often problematic to exercise power, even by divine assignment; and that submission to authority must always be ready to discern when that puts us into conflict with God’s clearly revealed moral laws. But there is no escape in this fallen world from making decisions about the responsible use of and response to power, and no escape from the messiness of doing so. With the best intentions I may anger my children unnecessarily, or fail to encourage my wife, or do something unfair to an employee. And if I’m on the receiving end of the exercise of power, it’s not easy to submit to someone with whom I disagree, or to someone who is not showing concern for my welfare.

All of this highlights the fact that the only way to have peace of mind about either exercising power wisely or submitting to it willingly is to recognize that both the power-wielder and the one who submits to power are answerable together and individually to the Lord of all. It behooves us, then, to conduct ourselves with humility, recognizing that the grace either to submit to authority or to exercise it for good has to come from the One to whom we must all submit. Until we reach that place where God takes back all power to Himself and delivers us from the ambiguity of using tainted power to achieve imperfect good, we persevere in trust that He will empower us with discernment.

Image: "Throne" by R. Panhuber. CC License. 

Introduction and Summary of David Baggett’s and Jerry Walls’ God and Cosmos: Chapter 1, “Alone in the Cosmos”

In their previous book, Good God, David Baggett and Jerry Walls defended their theory of theistic ethics. Their theory grounds rightness in Divine commands and goodness in the Divine nature. In this second book, God and Cosmos, they aim to address competing secular ethical theories and show that they ultimately fail to provide an adequate account of the full range of moral phenomena in need of explanation. Instead, God and cosmos together best explain the moral phenomena (hence the title). Their methodology is to begin with various moral data, and then look at the explanations to see which best explains the various data. In short, they advance a cumulative abductive moral argument for God. In doing so, they assume moral realism, the view that objective morality exists. Whether moral realism is true will be addressed in another book to be published. God and Cosmos is rich in philosophy and many philosophical terms; in my summary, I will try to simplify it to be more accessible to the lay reader and highlight the main points.

Chapter 1: Alone in the Cosmos

Naturalism or materialism is the idea that the physical world exhausts reality. This view is held by many intellectuals. In this chapter, Baggett and Walls discuss naturalism and its history. They start a historical sketch all the way from the ancient philosopher Thales. Their brief sketch is meant to make three points.

The first point is what they call the deflationary fallacy. This fallacy is when one attempts to co-opt and appropriate a thinker (or insight) to the cause of one's worldview, despite compelling counter evidence. For example, some might cast the stoic philosophers as allies of naturalism. But this is difficult because their ethical thought was bound up in their theology as seen in many of their writings.

The second point is to highlight the diversity among secular thinkers. While Baggett and Walls generally use words like "atheistic," "secular," and "naturalistic" interchangeably, they note that there is a need to disambiguate at certain points. For example, an ethical realist who believes that there is no God may believe that moral facts are not reducible to natural facts. He is an atheist and secularist, but not a naturalist. This is an example of the diversity among secular thinkers. One significant set of atheists, who stand in the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche, thinks that the death of God results in having no objective morality. The result is moral nihilism where there is no God and no objective morality. Another significant set of atheists think instead that without God, nothing much changes at all. On such a view, objective morality still exists. They however disagree upon which secular ethical theory is correct. Various secular theories need to be addressed differently. In this book, Baggett and Walls aim to address a range of different theories which affirm objective morality (and, again, will address those who deny objective morality in a later book).

The third point they wish to bring out is a third option beyond theism and naturalism. Their salient example is Thomas Nagel's account. Nagel thinks that naturalism is bound up with problems, yet he remains an atheist, resisting theism, by offering another alternative. In his book, Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that various features of the human condition - value, meaning, cognition, consciousness, agency - are beyond the ability of naturalism to account for. In finding an adequate explanation of value, Nagel divides the question into the constitutive issue concerning what value is all about and the historical question of how it could come about that we could recognize objective value and be motivated by it. Nagel opts for a nonintentional teleological (purposive) explanation. He writes that "these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them." So Nagel thinks objective morality exists, yet naturalism cannot ground it, and yet he resists resorting to theistic foundations.

Nagel's recurring theme is also that the mind must be central to the story of reality, something that somehow guided the process form the start. However, Nagel is skeptical about theism for a few reasons. First, Nagel rejects theism because it does not seem to be a live option for him. He says while others may find it so, he has not been blessed with the sensus divinitatis (a sense of the Divine). Second, in finding an adequate explanation, he is committed to antireductionism and that certain things cannot be explained as merely accidental. The most important is "the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unified everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles." Nagel thinks that accepting the Divine mind as the stopping point leaves the explanation incomplete. Theism on his view "amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hang together is of a certain type, namely intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates, except what is found in the results to be explained." He further thinks theism and Cartesian dualism (the view that there exists a non-physical mind and physical body) fail to achieve a single natural order. For example, by appealing to miracles, one attempts to explain features of the world by appealing beyond the world. Hence he thinks that theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world and fails to explain intelligibility from within the world. The only kind of theism that Nagel may accept is a non-interventionist one, where God created the world in such a way that it was henceforth self-sustaining and self-regulating.

Baggett and Walls offer a few replies. First, the fact that Nagel himself does not personally have a sense of the Divine is no evidence against theism. There is still the question of whether the arguments for theism are good ones. Second, Baggett and Walls argue that theism can meet Nagel's aesthetic bias in favor of an integrated worldview. They note that C. S. Lewis himself seemed to have anticipated such an objection, where people find miracles intolerable. The reason why they find it intolerable is because "they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent." Lewis agrees with the aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview but points out that the problem is taking nature to be the whole of reality. If God is real, then miracles still fulfill the aesthetic constraint. Lewis also addresses the concern that miracles are irregularities or arbitrary interventions. He says that if miracles have occurred, it is because they are the very thing this universal story is about; it is where the plot turns. Atoms, time, and space are not the main plot of the story. So miracles are not arbitrary or ad hoc interruptions. Lastly, Lewis also argued that if naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our convictions that nature is uniform. But if theism is true, then it is plausible that our convictions are generally reliable, yet it also entails that miracles are plausible and are part of our world alongside the uniformity of majority of events. So theism can meet Nagel’s aesthetic constraint for an integrated worldview, and Nagel’s rejection of it is premature.

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.