Guardrails, Why America needs Religion

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George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, warned the new nation about a variety of potential developments. He warned against consistent foreign entanglements as he recognized the danger in excessive military commitments. He also was extremely concerned about the power of political parties, as he saw them as detrimental to healthy political discourse and public decision making. He was convinced that both of these issues would hamper the nation’s potential for growth. To him, choosing the right course in these areas would be essential to the future of a healthy, vibrant, and prosperous American democracy.

Yet he gave a third warning that has proven even more significant than the aforementioned. Washington offered a piece of advice about religion that is seen as increasingly controversial in America’s current political climate. He called religion and morality “indispensible supports” of “political prosperity”. He believed that they represented the primary foundation on which a free society must be built. Moreover, he was concerned about attempting to sustain national morality without religion as its chief guide. He said, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”[1]  He warned Americans about accepting the kind of ethereal and non-specific morality that is commonly promoted today. Furthermore, his successor, John Adams asserted that “The constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[2] Both gentlemen, along with most of the nation’s framers, recognized the potential instability of a society built on mutable and secular definitions of morality. They recognized that this phenomenon would require the government to play a greater role in the lives of its citizens. If people were unable to exercise self-government, the state would necessarily need to compensate.

America’s recent cultural shift towards secularism threatens the foundations of a free society whose survival depends on a consistent, collective, and self-constraining moral ethos. Freedom itself is predicated upon the notion that individuals have the ability to erect moral boundaries that protect them from the destruction of themselves and others. For the nation’s founders, this was the only path to true liberty. As we can clearly see, our nation’s current incarceration rates (we have the largest prison population in the world) and heavy dependence on governmental social services to counter deficiencies in individual and family behavior (the nation’s largest employer is the federal government), are clear results of this dynamic. We also bear the unenviable distinction of leading the world in cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol use, in addition to having the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world. Furthermore, only a handful of places in the world, all developing nations, have higher rates of gun violence than the US. Leaders of every community must understand the crucial role that faith can play in solving these dilemmas. Yet much of America’s current culture sees religion’s role as ancillary at best, and antithetical to American progress at its worst. However, religion’s critics have no viable alternative solutions to changing the culture of selfishness, despair, and irresponsibility that is at the core of issues like violence, out of wedlock births, and drug use. Unless leaders recognize this truth, they are in danger of working to destroy the very nation they claim to defend. As Washington reminded us about religion and morality… “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”[3]

A vibrant religious community has the power to protect the nation from itself. Working at a college on Chicago’s Southside, I am often asked about the causes behind the violence in our city. While a variety of factors play a role, including economic circumstances, access to weapons, and media images, violent behavior is ultimately an internal issue. When people act violently, out of frustration or aggression, these choices represent individual rather than collective decisions. Consequently, while our efforts to impact vulnerable communities from a collectivist, institutional perspective are laudable, they are only as effective as our ability to reach the individual heart and mind. There can be no external change without internal change.  I have witnessed, firsthand, the power of individual transformation on a community. I have seen a number of men who were involved in gang activity, drug use, and promiscuous sexual behaviors change their lives when faced with the power of the Christian message. Many of these men, after beginning with an individual conversion experience, have gone on to transform their families and the greater community as well.

A prosperous American democracy requires the guardrails that religion, piety, and the subsequent protected family life provide. Without them, we are headed for the same abysmal fate as the Romans. The Roman Empire’s demise was self-imposed and largely the result of embracing an immoral political and social ideology.  Unless we acknowledge the distinctive role that the faith community can play in promoting values like sacrifice, peace, delayed gratification, humility, and responsibility to family and community, America’s demise will be similar. Changing the political discourse to respect the historic position of religion in free societies, and understanding its unique place in solving our current dilemmas, is America’s only way forward. Just as George Washington recognized this, we would be wise to do so as well.

 

[1] George Washington’s Farewell address, New York Public Library, 1935. pg. 105; 136. Courtesy of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History & Genealogy, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

[2] The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With A Life of the Author by Charles Francis Adams, Volume IX, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1854.

[3] George Washington’s Farewell Address. 

Evangelicals have a morality problem

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The question of Christian “morality” or “ethics” is a deeply challenging, even troubling topic for Evangelicals, and indeed, for the entire Christian tradition. In the biblical / theological nexus of Law and Gospel, “morality” as such does not appear. The Mosaic Law (Torah) was to be received in its entirety not in parts, thus, the misnomer of a portion called: “moral law”. The text presents the problem of sin, not of immorality, to its hearers. Since the Bible is so often accused of imposing strict moral norms, is moral reform compatible with the Christian mission (e.g., Mt 28:16-20)? If not, what is the status of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, the Epistle of James and Paul’s apostolic counsel? Jesus is notable for intensifying Jewish ethics, but not in the way that the strictest sects of Judiasm did. Since the Bible is filled with moral teachings and warnings – how does this connect with the moral teachings of other systems and societies?

In historic terms, morals are a matter of setting personal and social boundaries, habitualizing oneself to respectful behavior with the expectation of rewards or punishments. As the apostle Paul knew all too well, the state values morality, indeed is only properly constituted according to moral norms (and is therefore profoundly interested in the connection between morality and political stability; cf., Ro 13:1-7). But political “stability” is also an end in itself where a community or state quickly develops tremendous resistance to moral correction or advancement, e.g., the modern declaration of the essential immorality of slavery or of mortal combat. While slavery and lethal violence have been justified for millennia, advancements in morality (to which Christianity has contributed much) make impossible any scenario of including such institutions within the sphere of moral goods. Morals help to define a civilizational goal but they also are a measure of how institutional authorities exercise their power. This includes the aristocratic construction of social status with different levels and kinds of honor: some are by station or caste moral superiors over many moral inferior whose work and activities are all oriented to their superiors. The famous dictum, “know thyself” from Athens, was originally understood to mean “know thy place” – with all the moral submissions and obligations attached to one’s station in society. Indeed, the subtext of Plato’s Republic is a morality for Greece modeled upon his vision of the cosmos. Morality and cosmology are closely tied in the public imagination and why religion is invariably enlisted to the task of creating a moral society. Under such circumstances. the inculcation of morals is an invariably coercive enterprise. In “traditional” societies, morality was / is the particular written and unwritten code of behavior and attitude (e.g., piety, reverence, patriotism, shame and honor). In traditional worlds, what is “moral” for a nobleman is not equivalent to what was “moral” for a soldier, for a commoner, let alone for a slave. The privileges and boundaries of station dictate the moral acts expected of one. At the point of moral reform, traditionalist reformers hearken back to an imagined historic norm but in so doing, fail to live up to real moral advancement in the present. On the other hand, the temptation of moral progressives is perhaps to fail to live up to the benefits of the moral tradition: moral sensibilities that  are in principle a matter of virtually permanent agreement cross-culturally and anthropologically.

The problem of morality comes to the fore at the points of authority, community and emotion. Moral authority carries with it the presumption of respect for it. Moral authority is embodied in leaders and regular members and responsible others within a particular community. But the history of law also shows that much legislation over time is necessary to provide protection of individuals and minority communities from mistreatment by majorities and capricious authorities. Moral communities invariably practice what is often termed “tribal morality” because of insider interests. This is where moral emotions are tested – and often found wanting. The most stunning example is racism and the historic connection with institutionalized slavery. For American evangelicals in the centuries prior to the Civil War, some of their most notable theologians defended the enslavement of the “black race” as original to the human order and, as Mark Noll points out, continues to disturb certain believers who are confident that the Bible condones slavery. It is conspicuous that evangelical abolitionists came to despair of evangelical slaveholders and their supporters. By the 1830’s many had come to the realization that the capacity for empathy that would lead to emancipation and equal recognition was nil. For generations, the interpretation of the “northern aggressors” was a godless immorality. Was the conflict merely a case of one tribal morality pitted against another? If one hearkens back to an earlier time to provide a basis for “moral reform”, one must be extraordinarily careful about the full testimony of history reveals about moral sentiments.

Evangelicals, like any other Christians, may fall into moral compromise, even bankruptcy, but their reform is not achieved through some reinvigoration of moral duty to state or society. Like the crisis that prompted the Barmen Declaration in 1934, which declared the church’s obligation solely to the Lordship of Christ, Evangelicals must be ever attentive to the clarion call reject any other “lord” or moral order. Evangelicals are called to heed “the whole counsel of God” of Word and Spirit through Christian living and faithful decision-making. The so-called Noahite law (pertaining to righteous Gentiles), the Mosaic law and sapiential texts all instruct in righteous living for Jews and Christians. As the discipline known as Comparative Ethics demonstrates, there is broad interreligious agreement as to what constitutes general moral norms (cf., C.S. Lewis’ favorite among his publications: The Abolition of Man, 1943). The pursuit of righteousness is far more than the achieving some kind of public morality. Like Roman piety, and Constantinian assimilation of Christianity, Western morality does not exist apart from codes of conduct or rational traditions that seek to define the limits and obligations of human action vis-à-vis other human beings and the self. The Reformers often acknowledged what they called “civic righteousness”: pagan virtues that accomplished much for state and people. But Evangelicals are troubled by this morality precisely because it goes against the righteousness that God requires founded upon “saving grace”. In this context, religious morality is seen as the greatest impediment to the sola fide and sola gratia of their principles. How can they answer the call to repent of the “filthy rags” of their righteousness (cf., Is 64:6) and then be told that it is of highest importance in civic life?

Ethics, morals, values, character, virtue, even etiquette, along with the ambiguities of the human condition, its history of violence and its unjust and deceptive ways, all make the question of morality problematic. Human beings often find themselves acting immorally while they are seeking to enforce or inculcate morality. Nothing illustrates this dilemma better than “Just War Theory”. Like all moral arguments, just war theory must contrast evil action with moral action. Whatever action is moral, is therefore an intrinsic “good”. But war as the collective action of killing can never be an intrinsic good. It even defies reason when it is contested as a “relative good”; e.g., in the case of defending innocent victims. But war exacts a rapacious toll on both populations and others as two sides engage each other in violent combat. The morality of militarism would have it that war is a moral good in terms of achieving manhood in personal discipline and the values for which one should be ready to die. Although self-defense is a right and a necessity, the means toward that end are never good as such. But self-defence is not the positive morality we are likely thinking about at this juncture. 

Suffice it to say at the outset, Christianity’s mission is not a moral one, it is far greater. If the separations with liberal Christians in the 19th and 20th centuries were about the reduction of Christianity to morality, the separations to come will be conservative Christian who have done the same thing. After World War II, one of the enervating declarations by some leading missional Christians was that the immoralities of East and West were equally bad. Of course rationalization based upon fewer tens of millions violently killed has no virtue in it. Indeed, many contemporary political theologies find it difficult to morally account for the 20th century. Still, there is a justified preference for the larger outcomes: the end of European fascism and communism. The contemporary rivalries over democracy and its economic forms within a cosmopolitan framework is exceedingly better than the second third of the last century.

Virtually every branch of the Christian tradition asserts that the human was permanently marred in the sin of Adam. Although the Catholic tradition is emphatic about sin, once committed, unavoidable apart from grace: non posse non peccare, the Augustinian tradition and its intensification in the Reformation in its main theologians saw predestination by grace alone as the necessary antidote to the incapacitation suffered by humanity in the fall. One cannot save oneself, only God can and has done so in Christ quite apart from any religious sacrifices or gifts. Indeed, it is this very nexus: gospel vs. religion which for centuries slowly contributed to the separation of state and religion for many evangelicals. Whatever “moral reform” meant, they did not believe in it. Only spiritual regeneration would do and that, by various means of the Spirit and the Word, but particularly through mass revival and the work of missionaries. It is often overlooked, that for Calvin, Geneva was not at all the missional goal, it was rather all of France, if possible, converting to the gospel.

Christian conversion has always been extoled above the political and moral calls for reform. One particularly interesting moment very early is found in Origen’s Contra Celsus. At a key point in his arguments with the posthumous work of Celsus, Origen refuses to offer philosophical arguments for Christian truth: there are none worthy of the one true God; instead, he offers what he describes as an argument from human transformation: 100 wicked men who have been turned to righteousness through following Christ. Thus, from very early time, particularly the church prior to imperialization, there was a conversionist / missionary mandate that cut every which way: not only to convert the pagans to Christ, but also to bind the church to this principle and none other, within the nations of the world.

Paul is convinced that life in the Spirit accomplishes the far more than morality, let alone the law, in vital faith. One passage the exemplifies what he means is Romans 12:1-2, a favorite with evangelicals on the “renewing of the mind”. Being a “living sacrifice” makes one “acceptable” to God. But the renewal of the mind makes the will of God “acceptable” to the believer. This reciprocal reasonableness between the believer and God is highly indicative of what Christian living (rather than morality) is about. Moral constraints and boundaries are real but they are not about the living and the freedom of the Christian that Luther, in perhaps his most important book, describes. Just as coerced faith is not faith, so also coerced obedience is not moral. Only voluntary obedience is moral; only voluntary and faithful embrace of the will of God makes doing God’s will possible. The great question in the scripture is not a moral one but a human one – what is the virtuous human being and how do Jesus and the apostles answer? If there is to be morality, it must be the result of pure intention. This intention must come from the new birth and the desires that emanate from it.

There are numerous, highly evocative passages in the NT conveying its moral vision. One of the most significant is from Paul in Galatians 5. Here, the twin principles are freedom and love in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are set free from sin and for love – when we are governed by the Spirit. Christian love encompasses all virtues and all commandments; indeed, love exceeds where obedience is too frail. For sure, that love is commanded requires careful unpacking. When Jesus claims that all the law and the prophets are to be reduced to the love command: love God with all one’s being and neighbor as one’s self, there is no relationship that is excluded from love as its guiding principle. But the love command has been derided in the context of moral and ethical debate. Love does justice but cannot be allowed to eclipse it; but does love not “cover a multitude of sins”? And then there is the matter of self-love. Love establishes its own way through Christ’s teachings that moral rule making cannot achieve. Paul focuses on the commandments of the revealed law but regards training in it as only a preparation for love. Luther, one of the great Augustinians of Christianity, too radically disjoined “law and Gospel”. Calvin, while much indebted to Luther, perceived that all revelation is grounded in the gracious God and therefore that the Gospel is the principle of all creation and redemption. At the level of church and state, both of them saw its role through a “magisterial” reading of Paul’s relative bond with the state as laid out in Romans 13 since God is the true sovereign of all. That said, however, it is clear from Paul’s view of faith that among human beings, the greatest source of sovereignty is the Holy Spirit governing and guiding the individual human conscience. All this happens of course in community but it cannot happen apart from each and every person’s conscious awareness and responsibility to think and to act.

 

Evangelicalism in Parallel Universes

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It is almost time for the first round of responses for question #5, and I still haven’t weighed in on question #4. That’s not because I’m indifferent. On the contrary. I just don’t know what our conversation is really about. I’ve read all the responses regarding “evangelicalism and morality” at least once; most of them I’ve read more than once; some I’ve read several times. I’m still baffled. Many of my fellow participants appear to be living in a world that resembles the one I know in some respects but is also quite different—as if in one of those parallel universes we hear so much about these days.

Wyndy Corbin Reuschling, for example, offers “reflections on how ethics tends to be viewed and practiced in evangelical contexts,” based—she tells us—on her “own location in evangelical contexts, such as churches, seminaries and mission organizations, over the last 35 years, and as an academically trained Christian social ethicist.” And yet, in conclusion, she sees fit to pronounce that “evangelicals need to concern themselves with more than just matters of sexuality and the unborn.” I’m wondering what parallel universe this message comes from. It sounds remarkably like the imaginary world of evangelicalism that we encounter so often in the media.

In the real world, and for both good and ill, evangelicals—like all human beings—are making choices all the time, in every sphere of life, choices that are morally freighted. Consider, for instance, my Uncle Ed—my mother’s younger brother, who was born in China to missionary parents, came to the United States when he was roughly eight years old, and grew up in Southern California. Around 1960, he and his wife (my Aunt Ardith) and their children left Los Angeles for a tiny town in Northern California, where he pastored a small church (for nearly fifty years) and taught and directed music at the public high school.

I liked riding with Uncle Ed in one of the old station wagons he invariably drove, even though I was often car-sick as we negotiated the curves on mountain roads. He was exceedingly generous in carrying on conversations with a talkative boy as if with another grown-up. But there were trade-offs. You never knew how long a day you were in for. Whenever Uncle Ed noticed a driver pulled over, with signs of car-trouble or some other problem, he would stop to offer his help.

Hmm. Looks like the fuel pump. Uncle Ed offered to take the driver to the nearest town where a replacement could be purchased at a reasonable price. (That might be an hour and a half away—but no worries.) And if the driver wasn’t a pretty confident do-it-yourself mechanic, Uncle Ed would install the new part himself. Extra money? He didn’t have any. But his time, his know-how, his good will: those he would share with a total stranger.

In his open-handed, unforced helpfulness, Uncle Ed was at once exceptional and typical of many evangelicals I have known. Not all evangelicals, needless to say, are so open-handed. (I am far more leery of strangers, and far more protective of my time, than my uncle was.) But an almost reckless generosity, taking many different forms—adoption, for example—is one of the most striking moral traits of the evangelical world I’ve known over the course of a lifetime: our friend Karen Lynip’s decades of literacy work in the Philippines, our friend Arne Bergstrom’s work in disaster relief (Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo . . . ), my wife Wendy’s years as a hospice volunteer.

Even more remarkable—to me, at least—is that the men and women (especially the women!) who practice this God-inspired open-handedness rarely talk about it. It’s almost as if they have read and absorbed certain passages in the gospels so deeply that they would be loath to draw attention to what they are doing.

Such generosity, of course, is not an unmixed blessing. We’re all familiar with instances in which blundering evangelicals have ended up doing more harm than good—in part from a failure to take account of the moral complexity of our choices. And it’s not my intention, in any case, to replace an absurdly negative stereotype of “evangelical morality” with an absurdly idealized view. Hardly.

I’d love to have a real conversation about evangelicalism and morality. But conversation between parallel universes isn’t so inviting.

 

Evangelicals and Human Dignity

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Evangelicals and Human Dignity

The idea of human dignity is on hard times these days. The work of the President’s Council on Bioethics under the guidance of Leon Kass, MD, provoked bioethicist Ruth Macklin to brand human dignity a “useless concept.” Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker even assailed the notion of dignity as a “stupidity” in a screed he wrote for The New Republic. Preserving a robust notion of human dignity seems to me to be a task worthy of evangelicals in the 21st century.

After all, both the Bible and the Church affirm that Jesus of Nazareth is both fully God and fully human. What do we learn from the person of Jesus about what it means to be human? How does our Christology inform our anthropology? First, we learn from the physician Luke, among others, that Jesus was born of woman. Although his conception was miraculous, as far as we can know his gestation was like that of all other human babies. For instance, we know that his mother Mary carried him in her womb from conception to birth. There is no reason, then, not to assume that, like every other human being, Jesus began human life as an embryo. In addition, Luke informs us that the angel Gabriel told Mary to name her baby “Jesus” when she was only six months pregnant. Just as today, naming was an important ritual. Jesus seems to be treated as a person even before his birth. We know that Mary was pregnant with Jesus when her cousin Elizabeth was six months pregnant with the son later known as John the Baptist. Again, except for the nature of his conception and his naming, Jesus’ early development appears to be normal. Then we read in “And while they were [in Bethlehem] the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the Inn” (Luke 2:7).

So, we can infer several important truths about human anthropology on the basis of biblical Christology. First, our humanity begins in utero. We are human beings from conception. This is not surprising given what we now know about genetics. We inherit 23 chromosomes from our mothers and 23 from our fathers. When those chromosomes combine through fertilization, at least one (twinning could occur) genetically unique human being is conceived. Second, we are embodied human beings from conception. That is, even though not fully developed, the early embryo is an organic, carbon-based living human organism. Embodiment plays a central role in both Christology and anthropology since, like Jesus, from conception throughout eternity we will enjoy an embodied existence. There is no other way to be human than to be embodied. The church acknowledges Jesus’ embodiment—and our own—each time we feast at the Lord’s Table in communion.

This anthropology is consistent with what the rest of Scripture teaches. When God created humanity he made Adam “a living being” (Genesis 1:24) with a material body (cf. Psalm 90:3; 103:14). Human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, were made in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). The imago Dei is not what humans do, but who humans are.

Moreover, the Bible teaches that human beings are unique among all other created beings. For instance, only human beings are imagers of God. We learn from Genesis 9, that being imagers of God brings unique obligations. Animals may kill and be killed for food (Genesis 9:1-6a), but “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his image” (Gen. 9:6, emphasis added). Animals may be killed for human sustenance, but human beings may not be killed without just cause. Unjustifiable killing is a violation of the special dignity vested in human beings by God himself. The imago Dei is, therefore, the foundation of the doctrine of the sanctity, or sacredness, of every human life. In summary, every human life is to be received as a gift from the sovereign Creator, treated with reverence and respect, and should not to be harmed without biblical justification.

The practice of abortion is not something new. We tend to think of obstetrics and gynecology as shiny new science, but people have been having babies for a very long time. And, sadly, abortion is not new. 

Old Testament Judaism prohibited abortion. Only one biblical text has been used to argue to the contrary, Exodus 21:22-25. There Moses is giving an interpretation of the laws about the treatment of slaves. In verse 22 he describes a case in which two men are fighting. In the course of their struggle, they accidentally hit a pregnant woman, causing harm to her unborn baby. Some texts interpret the harm as a miscarriage, others as a premature live birth. The way this argument goes is, if a miscarriage was the result of the fight and a fine (v. 23) not death (a life for a life) is required, then it seems clear that unborn human life does not have the same value as someone already born.

There are good textual reasons to understand Moses to be describing a premature live birth. First, the Hebrew word yeled is used for what comes from the womb following the fight. This word is never used except for a child who can live outside the womb. Another Hebrew word, golem, means “fetus,” and is only used one time in the Old Testament (Psalm 139:16). Furthermore, yatza, the verb that refers to what happened to the child after the injury to the mother, ordinarily refers to live births (Gen 25:26; 38:28-30; Job 3:11; 10:18; Jer 1:5, 20:18). The word normally used for miscarriage, shakol, is not used here (cf. Gen 31:38; Exod 23:26; Job 2:10; Hos 9:14). Finally, even if the text were referring to a miscarriage, it would not necessarily indicate that an unborn child is of less value than one who is already born. Note that this hypothetical case refers to an accident. The men did not mean to harm the child. Most societies, including ancient Jewish society, recognized that manslaughter should be distinguished from premeditated killing. This does not imply a distinction in the value of the life that was taken but in the culpability of the one who took the life. Wanton premeditation requires one sort of penalty, in this case death, manslaughter another. Cities of refuge were established (cf. Numbers 35:6) for those who committed less heinous crimes. More literal versions translate Exodus 21:22: “When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined . . . (ESV)” Others interpret the meaning of the clause, “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury” (NIV).

In Psalm 139, David speaks vividly to the nature of unborn human life. In his lofty psalm, David exults both in God’s omniscience and omnipresence (vv. 1-12). In verse 13 he celebrates God’s intricate involvement in his own fetal development: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” The word kilyah is used to refer to the “inward parts” (literally, reins or kidneys). In Hebrew poetry the inward parts were typically understood to be the seat of the affections, the hidden part of a person where grief may be experienced (Job 16:13), where the conscience exists (Psalm 15:7), and where deep spiritual distress is sometimes felt (Psalm 72:21). God formed David’s deepest being. He wove his body or “colorfully embroidered” him in his mother’s womb, so that he was “fearfully and wonderfully made” (v. 14). In light of this reality, David’s confession in Psalm 51:5 that he was a sinner from conception offers abundant testimony to his belief in personhood from conception, since only persons can be sinners.

In Ps 139:16, David refers to God observing “unformed substance.” David uses the word golem—used only here in the Old Testament—to suggest that God’s knowledge reached even to his earliest development in utero. No wonder the Hebrews found abortion and infanticide morally reprehensible.

Later in the history of God’s people, God’s judgment fell on those who killed the unborn. Elisha wept when he foresaw the crimes of the king of Syria who would “kill their young men with the sword and dash in pieces their little ones and rip open their pregnant women” (2 Kings 8:12). And Amos prophesied against the Ammonites because they “have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border” (Amos 1:13).

These texts doubtless inform the non-canonical Jewish wisdom literature that further codified the Bible’s view of abortion. The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (c. 50 B.C.-50 A.D.), said, for instance, that “a woman should not destroy the unborn in her belly, nor after its birth throw it before the dogs and vultures as a prey.” Included among the “wicked” in the apocalyptic Sibylline Oracle, were women who “produce abortions and unlawfully cast their offspring away” and sorcerers who dispense abortion-causing drugs. Similarly, the apocryphal book, 1 Enoch (first or second-century B.C.), declared that an evil angel taught humans how to “smash the embryo in the womb.” Finally, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus wrote that “The law orders all the offspring to be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus.”

Contrast these injunctions with the barbarism of Roman culture.  Cicero (106-43 BC) indicated that according to the Twelve Tables of Roman Law, “deformed infants shall be killed” (De Legibus 3.8). Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD) spoke of those whom he said “offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or  moan” (Moralia 2.171D). According to an inscription at Delphi, because of the infanticide of female newborns, only one percent of six hundred families had raised two daughters. European historian W. E. H. Lecky called infanticide “one of the deepest stains of the ancient civilizations.”

Against this horrific backdrop, the Hebrew doctrine of the “sanctity of human life” provided the moral framework for early Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide. For instance, the Didache (c. 85-110), sometimes called “The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles,” commanded, “thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.” Another non-canonical early Christian text, the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 130 AD), said: “You shall not abort a child nor, again, commit infanticide.” Additional examples of Christian disapprobation of both infanticide and abortion can be multiplied. In fact, New Testament scholar Michael Gorman has argued that the New Testament’s silence on abortion is due to the fact that it was simply beyond the pale of early Christian practice.

Christians did not merely condemn abortion and infanticide, however, they provided alternatives, adopting children who were destined to be abandoned. For instance, Callistus (died c. 223) provided refuge to abandoned children by placing them in Christian homes.  Benignus of Dijon (3rd Century) offered nourishment and protection to abandoned children, including some with disabilities caused by failed abortions.

In summary, the witness of Scripture and the testimony of the early church is that every human being, from conception through natural death is to be respected as an imager of God whose life has special dignity in virtue of his or her relationship to the Creator. The doctrine of human dignity is written into the warp and woof of biblical faith.

Morality Should Be All Bible, All The Time – And No, I’m Not Kidding.

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I’ve got what some will consider an outrageous suggestion for Evangelical institutions: the Bible should be consulted more, not less, where norms for human behavior are at stake. The self-defeating American anti-abortion movement is a good example of what can happen when the Bible serves as a limited, narrow set of rules, disregarded when an issue isn’t “covered.”

No Biblical passage mentions voluntary abortion. Generally in the ancient world, the practice provoked disapproval but no serious efforts at prevention. Even in such patriarchal societies, men did not picture themselves stepping into the very intimate realm of a pregnancy in progress, and they were sensitive to ways their own disproportionate power could turn on itself.

In the Greek tragedy named for her, Medea gets away with killing her own young children to punish her husband when he insists on discarding her in favor of a well-connected young bride. Medea’s speech on the hardships and injustices of women’s lives, along with her husband’s repellent, con-artist pragmatism, helps show her as fairly sympathetic.

On the Roman literary scene is the poet Ovid’s persona, preaching at his mistress as she fights for her life after a self-induced abortion. But it is legally impossible for a citizen, like the speaker, to acknowledge an illegitimate child, let alone be forced to take any responsibility for one, and he doesn’t bother to mention what the pregnancy might have meant for the future. Probably even contemporary readers would have choked on the impregnator’s gall. Real courtesans, for certain, would have laughed at “moral” arguments against abortion, and according to the satirist Juvenal, married women obtained abortions at will if they could afford them. Juvenal doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t hint at anyone’s being able to do anything about it.

It’s my guess that the Bible elides voluntary abortion because of similar circumstances, which dictated that women be left some reproductive leeway we could actually place under the heading of “privacy.” I think it’s unfortunate that, now that modern law, politics, medicine, and social relations make it necessary for us to have public policy on abortion, we can’t both honor that elision and imitate what the Bible’s inspirers and authors normally did when they expressed opinions and made decrees: look at where their society was, weigh the general principles of their tradition, and strive to construe on that basis what was in accordance with God’s will. Jesus Himself didn’t balk at outright change in ancient law, as when, for humane reasons, He banned divorce on any grounds but the wife’s adultery.

Notably, he didn’t make a rule for an ideal society, one in which the trauma of divorce shouldn’t ever be necessary, but for the way things were: men were hard-hearted, and not even He could change that, so women needed better legal protection. I believe He would have been revolted at the sanctimony of certain hard-line abortion opponents, who parade, as an argument for their views, their own large, comely, prospering broods and sometimes their prowess at special-needs childcare that would ravage poor or troubled families; and at the same time such pundits decry government-funded social services, progressive taxation, fair-employment law, and a great deal of other help for bringing pregnancies to term and bringing up children. This is the type of hypocrisy Jesus denounces in high-level Jewish clerics of His day: they are (they claim) pure and holy, but only because they can afford it (as it’s very expensive to become and remain ritually correct), and they both grind down the poor and oppress them further on the pretext of their lack of purity and holiness.

But all around, we need to return to the Bible in framing a response to abortion, starting with terminology. The book itself, carefully read within our present-day context, is the best source for what “life” and “murder” and “child” and other concepts mean, and how to respect these concepts. But self-aggrandizing Evangelical leaders have instead taken the lack of specific discussion of voluntary abortion as a license to declare whatever is convenient to them and, very disappointingly, have not met with significant opposition within their own and allied churches.

Abortion as a recent contentious issue started not from Biblical interpretation or any other religious impetus but from an electoral strategy, by which Richard Nixon secured many more Catholic, Southern, and Evangelical voters for the Republican Party. It was mainly in the role of politicians that figures such as Jerry Falwell opposed abortion. The highly artificial, thoroughly extra-scriptural origin and development of anti-abortion thinking in America are reflected in conclusions no sane modern religious community would reach in reading their holy book and construing it to help them in faithful lives.

Around 50% of fertilized human embryos perish and are flushed out with menstrual blood within two weeks of conception, usually due to gross abnormalities and without the mother knowing that sperm has penetrated an egg and cell division has begun. It is not medically possible, if in the first place it were to be desirable, routinely to “protect life from the moment of conception” and bring to term millions of infants with major organ systems absent or unable ever to function. These beings flat-out do not have the physical means to live; to place them in the same category as a viable late-term fetus whose spine a doctor severs makes no sense.

Early religious and legal definitions of fetal “life” centered on “quickening” and “ensoulment,” long after conception. The medical counterparts, however, the first perceptible fetal movements and the full development of the brain to allow pain and other sensation, are usually several months apart. There is merit in various opinions on when we can refer to a full human being with rights, but the moment of conception as a criterion has neither a meaningful history nor any intellectual or moral content.

History provides a lot of evidence for something else: a simple, inherited, written law can function not at all like a source of backwardness and oppression. It is, in fact, usually the opposite. A critical step in the establishment of legal rights in Rome was the posting of the Twelve Tables of the Law as bronze plaques in a public place. Now everyone who was literate could read the law, and no one could secretly change it, and a long age of public interpretation and application began. The Jews acquired their written Torah (= “Teaching”), including a body of laws, in an era when national upheavals had made questions of social justice very pressing, and all boys and now most girls raised within Judaism ceremonially comment on scripture to mark their full membership in the community. It is an ordinary thing for the commitment to a text to appear in proportion to the responsible freedom in interpreting it.

The problem isn’t that the Bible has moral authority that it’s proper to apply to all of life. The problem is that processes for studying and adapting the Bible have been taken away from us, and so aggressively that many people see the fault in the Bible itself: the book makes religious leaders behave like that. No, they behave like that, in defiance of what the book inherently is and most of what it says.

As We Go Forward…

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          If evangelicals are truly a “people of the book”, then divine revelation has to be central to any kind of ethics that uses the word “evangelical” as an adjective.  To put my cards on the table, I believe Christians are God’s covenant people in a way that affirms high continuity with God’s promise to Abraham to have a people for Himself (taking into account the progress of revelation), which means that I see in Scripture a consistent divine intent that God’s people receive and respond to revelation (hearers and doers of the Word).  None of this means the task of ethics is simple; many books have been written with various approaches proposing or modeling how one traces the trajectory from divine revelation to ethical decision making. It is a challenging task because of a range of questions, including those related to bridging contexts and determining not only the proper interpretation of texts but also the relevance of texts to our contemporary setting.  Though this particular issue itself is sufficient as a topic, I want to direct our attention to two other issues that I think are indicative of challenges in the present and future.  

 

            First, though evangelicals clearly have concerns about ethics, there remains an ongoing bifurcation between ethics and the domains of biblical interpretation and systematic theology.  While it might seem obvious that ethics flows from our interpretation of the bible and the ongoing task of systematics, there is a disconnect that one can see on display in seminary curricula.  I make no claim to have surveyed every seminary, but what is evident in the layout of many M. Div. curricula is that there are a sequence of courses in biblical interpretation and systematic theology and then a single course in ethics that is a requirement but almost seems like it is in a world separate from the bible and theology.  No one has to take my word on this alone; I invite all readers to survey seminary curricula to see what’s out there.  In the ongoing discussions of the future of seminaries, perhaps one area of improvement could be to better integrate ethics into classes that mainly focus on exegetical and doctrinal concerns.  I know all professors have to make choices about what to include and exclude in the limited number of class hours allotted, but I think weaving ethics into the curriculum will yield leaders (particularly pastors) better able to bring Christian beliefs to the terrain of everyday life.

 

            Second (and last), there is the big question of “who decides what counts as important ethical issues?”  Ever since my time in seminary, I have found it interesting to observe what has been included or not included in the ethics texts produced by evangelicals and others.  It makes sense that some texts will address issues that emerge from the contemporary context (e.g. bioethical issues continue to raise questions, not just matters such as cloning but more radical issues such as transhumanism) and that some perennial concerns will appear (e.g. divorce, war, etc.), yet I found it very interesting and also disturbing that few texts addressed racism as an ethical issue (there are some evangelicals that have included this, but they are not the majority).  Racism is only one glaring example, but it leads me to ask with Miguel De La Torre in the book Ethics From the Margins: Who gets to frame the ethical conversation?  Who gets to say what counts and what gets “airplay”?  I ask this not to swing the pendulum in one direction and completely change the conversation, but to expand the conversation and to challenge us to consider what ethical challenges face those whose voices are either muted or ignored.  In some cases this means considering how “perennial” issues have dimensions that are magnified in the lives of those off our radar and in other cases it means surveying the metaphorical ethical landscape to see if those on the margins are asking ethical questions that we have ignored or haven’t recognized.  Perhaps we can frame the question this way: how do we do a better job of recognizing the ethical concerns in front of us, especially when the ethical questions are raised by those who are not in power or those who tend to be invisible to us?  There is a great opportunity here for evangelicals to lead the way, but we have to recognize the ways we are myopic in vision and captive to tendencies that enable us to disregard those on the margins.  

On “Biblical Morality,” Cognitive Psychology, and Narrative Ethics

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“But is it biblical?” My Wheaton College friends and I would query each other in the dorm with this question. We were being mischievous; reacting in jest to the seeming evangelical obsession with “biblical morality”—and to the assumption that “biblical morality” was uniform, universal, and simple. But if it’s just a matter of reading it off the page, why are there so many debates and disagreements among Christians?

We’ve got Christian pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Christian capitalists and anti-capitalists. Christians for intensive ecological care and Christians for mostly unregulated economic production. We’ve got Christians against gay marriage, Christians for it, and Christians somewhere in between. We could go on in on. But the point is: In each of these cases, we can find Christians who claim biblical support and who insist their view reflects “biblical morality.”

At a more abstract level, we find Christians who emphasize holiness, purity, and separation, and Christians who prefer compassion, nurture, and inclusion. We have Christians who gravitate toward authority and hierarchy, and Christians who lean toward equality and democracy. Aren’t all these concepts in the Bible? What gives? So how—and why—and on what basis should we choose which moral impulses should lead us?

The interesting question is, and one that cognitive psychology is increasingly pressing upon is, how much does conscious choice and rational reflection play into our moral preferences? The answer they give: far less than we think. Much of our moral preferences and behavior are responses of intuitions and affective preferences, many of which were lodged into our brains long before we learned to speak. We enter human existence with a pre-formed moral architecture, which is mollified, shaped, and confirmed or challenged through the process of human development and socialization.[1]  

If morality is at least, in some sense, a product of evolution (or if its building blocks are) and if our moral responses comprise a combination of internal, emotive reactions and a developmental process of socialization, then this raises a number of interesting questions about “biblical morality.” Not only might we be quicker to reflect on our own moral preferences and impulses, but we might also slow down and think about how our biology and our social context impacts our interpretations of the Bible. I’ve seen a number of blog posts recently on the phenomenon of “cherry picking” the Bible to support our preformed moral preferences. We all cherry pick to some degree, but the more we are aware of the various factors undergirding and motivating our cherry picking, the greater will be our capacity to responsibly reflect on our biblical interpretations and moral conclusions.

Perhaps the best antidote to an unreflective, entirely intuitive moral structure is intentional exposure to alternate biblical interpretations and moral perspectives. As a white, male, American Christian, I ought to read and listen to perspectives on Scripture and morality from Christians and others who occupy contextually different perspectives on morality. This intentional exposure doesn’t force me to change my perspective nor does it require epistemic or moral relativism; it does, however, remind me of the possibility that I might not be in possession of the absolute truth. I might not have the correct “biblical” interpretation, and I certainly don’t have the only or final word on a complex, moral issue.

The mere recognition that morality has a basis in biology does not automatically lead to epistemic relativism, to atheism or to a reductive naturalism. It simply means that the brain and the body, as God’s creational gifts, function as instruments of moral behavior. The biological, evolutionary, and social influences on morality do not undermine its importance nor do they suggest that intuitive or inherited morality cannot or should not be altered to conform to God’s will. It does suggest that we should spend some time and effort considering not only what God’s will is, but how best to conform to it.

To point toward an answer, perhaps the most psychologically natural approach to nurturing a moral life (i.e. Christian discipleship and spiritual formation) is through story and symbol. This is convenient, since the Bible is chock-full with both. In this respect, I think narrative ethics (e.g. Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon) holds the most promise for Christians and church leaders who desire to have and to commend “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). I find compelling McClendon’s description of the task of narrative Christian ethics: It is “the discovery, understanding, and creative transformation of a shared and lived story, one whose focus is Jesus of Nazareth and the kingdom he claims—a story that on its moral side requires such discovery, such understanding, such transformation to be true to itself” (Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, pg. 330).

Christian narrative ethics builds on the scientific understanding that all human beings inhabit a moral universe and come “pre-loaded” with moral impulses, leanings, and aversions. We acquire and alter those moral impulses through hearing and experiencing impactful narratives. Through evangelism and Christian discipleship, we invite people into the story of Jesus Christ, which has past, present and future ramifications for understanding what “morality” is and ought to be. To be a follower of Jesus is to seek the mind of Christ, to seek justice, holiness, to love with a sacrificial love, and to anticipate the coming kingdom of God in which human morality will happily submit and conform to the absolute holy, loving, will of God. In the interim, as individuals (shaped as we are by biology and everything else) and as communities of believers committed to following Jesus together, we are invited to think and pray very hard for discernment in navigating the moral universe and in constructing and reconstructing together (the moral structures we inhabit. We ought to have moments of intentional, serious reflection and self-criticism, being open handed about what we think we know to be the case and being willing to be led by the Spirit, shaped by the life of Christ, and impelled by the coming Kingdom, as we follow the Spirit and Scripture toward “biblical morality.”

 

[1] Here I am indebted to Jonathan Haidt’s essay, “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion,” in The Believing Primate, eds. Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 278-291. Thanks to my colleague, Adam Johnson, for pointing me this direction.

Can Evangelical Ethics Become More Evangelical?

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Allow me to start with reflections on how ethics tends to be viewed and practiced in evangelical contexts.  These observations are made based on my own location in evangelical contexts, such as churches, seminaries and mission organizations, over the last 35 years, and as an academically trained Christian social ethicist. Starting with these observations will help locate my responses to the important issues raised in the discussions this month on “Evangelicalism and Morality.”

While evangelicals may claim that the Bible is authoritative in ethics, how Scripture’s authority actually applies to making moral judgments is another matter.  My hunch is that most evangelicals view the Bible as a rule book or moral manual of sorts for making ethical decisions.  The hermeneutical difficulties of this approach should be obvious. Not only is this approach to Scripture’s role in ethics reductionistic, it also reflects an understanding that ethics is simply making decisions or following rules. This is related to the tendency in evangelical contexts to conflate ethics with apologetics, so that defending the right thing becomes the right thing to do. The Bible in this method functions as a collection of a bunch of position papers on select topics, ones that are perhaps important to evangelicals but few others.  It’s quite easy in my view to make universal moral statements about how things should be, and then lob them from pulpits and podiums, often quite shrilly.

But this is not the task of ethics.  Ethics does not start with the bad behavior of others.  Ethical reflection, responsibility and response start with us, with who we understand ourselves to be in light of God’s call and purposes, what we ought to be about and care about, and how we ought to live.  Moral formation is about learning to live more coherently, with integrity if you will, between what we profess to be true and living truthfully in all areas of life. This is a much harder task than the lobbying for various moralisms for it requires an on-going, honest self-examination of our lives over the course of our lifetime in open conversation with Scripture, Christian community, and with eyes wide open to the realities of our world. Christian moral formation and growing in our ethical sensibilities are concerned with who we are, how we live and what we actually do. I suggest, therefore, that moral formation and the development of character (should) go together given the learned, practiced and concrete dimensions of both. Equal attention and importance must be given to who we are, what we believe about what is “good, true, noble and just” and how act.

Much ink has been spilt over the years on the influence of individualism in American culture, and the particular ways in which individualism informs religious piety and practice. This has also impacted how evangelicals tend to view the moral life, equating ethics with growth in personal piety, fostering a misconception in my view that if one is “right with God,” then one will be right about everything else. This emphasis on the individual as both the target and source of change (i.e. “saved” people will “save” society) contributes to a constructed divide between personal and social ethics.  This impacts how evangelicals tend to use Scripture in ethics and analyze social issues which are often viewed merely as the extension of personal problems or individual moral failures, ignoring the systemic, contextual and historical roots of many social ethical issues.

This has resulted in two evangelical ethical practices.  One, we may read the Bible simply as a source for growth in personal piety while ignoring the very social dimensions and contexts of Scripture, and the moral issues found on its pages:  violence, rape, ethnic pride, tribalism, schisms, economic injustice, abuses of political and religious power, exploitation of others, greed, grabbing and abusing the land, among others. We’re not quite sure what to do with these realities recorded on the pages of our sacred text. Sadly, these issues tend not to raise our moral ire even though it’s difficult to read the Prophets and come out unscathed about our religious, economic and political complicities in the various injustices and oppressions in our world today. Two, while purporting Scripture’s authority in ethics, in actual practice, evangelicals tend to rely on other sources as normative for making moral judgments which often mirror the moral assumptions and reasoning of political ideologies, in either conservative or liberal forms, based largely on individual rights, libertarian freedom of the self, and judicial notions of justice as reward or punishment.

Is it possible for evangelical ethics to actually be more evangelical based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Given hope is a key Christian virtue, I still and must affirm, “Yes!”  What needs to change in our moral orientation and commitments for this to happen?  Perhaps starting with the Kingdom of God as the source of our moral vision will combat the tendency to link the moral vision and ethical sensibilities of the people of God with any one nation, such as the United States.  The development of moral vision should not be an individual task, nor should it be the task of a local congregation or broader denominational community. These are contexts for embodying moral vision but not the source of moral vision. Given the demographic, gender, class, racial, ideological and global segregation of most evangelical churches, I fear moral vision birthed within these limitations would tend to reflect the particular self-interests, economic assumptions, political proclivities, and personal preferences of those “at the table” making these determinations. Instead, starting with the Kingdom of God based on the trajectory of Scripture and embodied as Gospel would enable evangelicals to be the counter-cultural agents they purport to be but sadly are not. We need to be less concerned with making (forcing?) the United States to be Christendom and direct our attention to helping the Church become more Christian.

Evangelicals also need to confront their moral selectivity and myopia.  If the Kingdom of God is the source of our moral vision, then there is nothing outside the purview of God’s concern.  In other words, evangelicals need to concern themselves with more than just matters of sexuality and the unborn. Evangelicals need a stronger prophetic streak in our ethic, in line with the Scriptures we purport to obey, that challenges injustice in its many forms, and the competing calls for our loyalties and allegiances, even the ones by which we are privileged.  Starting at these points may help our ethic become more evangelical as the good news of God’s reconciling justice for all creation.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evangelicals and Ethics: Renewing Evangelical Morality

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Throughout my reflections so far, I have sought to think through the issues from a renewalist perspective informed by pentecostal and charismatic experience and spirituality. As I take up our topic today, however, such an approach does not seem to provide as many springboards into the discussion as it has heretofore. What difference does a renewalist set of commitments make for thinking about evangelical ethics and morality?

The big question before many evangelical communities, of course, has to do with that of homosexuality. A few evangelicals are now saying that this no longer is the watershed issue that divides evangelicals from non-evangelical perspectives. Others continue to hold the traditional view that biblical injunctions against homosexuality are not context-relative and that they should be subordinated to other scriptural motifs. A growing number of those who might identify themselves as being in the “evangelical middle” are attempting to find ways to talk about the issue uncompromisingly while simultaneously reaching out to and including homosexuals meaningfully within the community of faith.

My approach ties in directly with central elements of contemporary evangelical missional praxis. More precisely, as I indicated in a prior blog on evangelical witness in a pluralistic world, I believe that there are multiple modalities of witness – i.e., proclamation, dialogue, works of mercy, and social justice, for instance – with and through which evangelicals ought to point and bear witness to the living Christ. Similarly, I think, the options for evangelical responses on this issue of morality in general and homosexuality in particular invite thinking on multiple missional fronts.

First, of course, I remain unconvinced by biblical interpretations that attempt to “explain away” the putatively “hard texts” on homosexuality. At this level, I remain a kind of evangelical exclusivist and cannot in good conscience, condone homosexual relationships. Some of my fellow evangelicals, however, go beyond such reticence to polemicize against homosexuals and their communities – a place to which I cannot go. My concern is how to be honest about our convictions on the one hand but yet be nurturing as faith communities on the other hand.

What do I mean by the latter aspiration? My point, as I made in earlier weeks, is that our actions speak louder than words. The point is not to endorse behaviors that are considered unscriptural but to demonstrate the love of God in palpable ways following the footsteps of Jesus. What kinds of missional practices, then, reflect the way of Christ in this regard?

I can think, for instance, of a multi-tiered approach to missional interaction with homosexual persons. One might be parallel to how a previous generation of missionaries responded to the issue of polygamy in especially the sub-Saharan African context. While, again, there were many types of responses, one of these suggested that rather than breaking up existing families, we had to be prepared for the long haul and simply invite converts to Christ not to perpetuate such relational ties into the next generation. It may be that our response to homosexual couples, in specific instances involving children or other tenuous relational realities, might embrace a similar approach, albeit one that insists on monogamous fidelity, at least for the present time, even while working with those involved in a pastorally sensitive way to explore the meaning of holy living and faithful discipleship for such persons seeking to growth in the grace and knowledge of God in Christ.

Preferably, another line of response might be to counsel consideration of a celibate vocation. Human beings have all kinds of inclinations, many of which we are well advised to control, rather than satisfy. Surely not all are called to celibacy, but perhaps these can be adopted for a season while we work through the issues in prayer and in the midst of supportive congregational environments. Some evangelicals who admit of having homosexual attraction are providing leadership in thinking through and talking about such as viable options for Christian discipleship, and exemplary models – for all Christians, not just for those with certain sexual orientations – are only now beginning to emerge.

My point is that blanket rules and prohibitions without loving ecclesial practices in response do not proclaim the gospel effectively. Spirit-filled mission and ministry, even to homosexual persons, will be sensitive to the many factors that may complicate matters, and be willing to express the hospitality of God variously albeit without condoning homosexual activity. There ought to be many different ways in which the people of God and the fellowship of the Spirit can minister the good news of Jesus Christ to those who desire to be disciples even while struggling with homosexual desires. Increasingly, it also appears that human sexual desires exhibit the malleability and plasticity across the human lifespan well documented in other aspects of human cognition. This raises powerful questions about how to minister in light of that which is not yet, but yet may be, or is, but yet will soon pass away.

Of course, on moral issues, we ought not to be fixated on one of these (like homosexuality) to the neglect of others related to the breadth of the lifespan. Beginning and end of life issues are no more or less important than war, immigration, poverty, medical accessibility, and disability. Yes, evangelical voices crying out on behalf of the unborn, of the elderly, of the disabled, etc., are important, especially in those cases when such persons lack the capacity for self-advocacy. However, again, it is not just asserting what the Bible says but finding ways to live out the gracious love of God in Christ for the world that is important. Spirit-filled witnessing means both speaking the truth in love and living the love of God in truth. 

My own theological work has been most focused on the lives of people, including children and infants, with disabilities. Impairments touch people across the life-span. Sometimes, people with disabilities can be and have been effective self-advocates. All too often, however, they are the most vulnerable, whether because of poverty, lower social status, or impairing conditions which inhibit self-agency and self-expression.

There are so many very different types of issues to discuss when thinking about evangelicals and disability. By and large, the important pieces are in place: a theological anthropology that recognizes all persons as created in the image of God so that there is no discrimination due to impairing conditions; an ecclesiological vision that see all people across the spectrum of abilities as members of the body of Christ; and an understanding of ministry that is motivated to demonstrate the love of God to people with disabilities and their families and to meet their needs. Unfortunately, however, these ideals are not sufficiently realized in our churches, congregations, and communities of faith. Due to inaccessible buildings, structures, and ministries, too many pastors still think that there just are not that many people with disaiblities in their communities when their churches are signaling to the latter that they are unwelcome. Ministry-wise, sometimes acts of charity degenerate into a demeaning paternalism, albeit unconsciously on the part of otherwise good-meaning Christians. Theologically, in my renewal tradition in particular, the emphasis on divine healing often leaves people with disabilities feeling that they do not belong; how can the church continue to minister the healing message of the gospel while recognizing that salvific healing may or may not always include, in the present life, physical cures, and while communicating the message of divine acceptance so that people with disabilities do not internalize the unintended mssage that they are second-class citizens in the church?

The witness to the gospel is at stake. May evangelicals filled with the Spirit of Jesus (and all evangelicals ought to be so filled!) continue to live out the good news in ways that reflect not just a dogmatic morality but a missional ethic that renews hope, inspires love, and anticipates the coming reign of God. Amen.

What Would Jesus Like?

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In the 1990s, evangelical reflection on morality was a simulacrum of Joseph’s amazing technicolor dreamcoat.  Only, evangelicals sported the psychedelic colors on wrists instead of backs.  For during this time, the first and greatest moral interrogative was “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD).  

The number of parodies to which the WWJD fad has now been subject undoubtedly suggests to some that the turn of the last century represents the nadir of evangelical reflection on morality.  This conclusion, while tempting, would be hasty.  For the social media revolution has unleashed a formative cultural icon that threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral deliberation among evangelicals: the Facebook “Like” button.   

In 1989, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) delighted moviegoers with their Excellent Adventure.  Their academic foolishness notwithstanding, Bill and Ted illustrated a capacity for human(e) reflection by “philosophizing” with Socrates.  Granted, their attempt to offer existential wisdom on the human condition (“Dust…wind…Dude.”) is hardly the stuff of philosophical legend.  But the rudiments of the Socratic dictum (“The unexamined life is not worth living.”) are there nonetheless.  

Almost 25 years later, it is worth wondering.  Were Socrates to come again (in a telephone booth, of course) would he find reason on the earth?  A quick perusal of any social media platform suggests that the prospects look grim.  For the unexamined status statement is apparently worth liking.  

With respect to morality, the danger that the Like button presents rests in its formative effects.  For starters, the Like button reduces everything to which it is attached to consumer preference – an object of appetitive desire.  To “like” something is to signal a preference lower than intellectual assent or moral conviction.  It is to express mere taste or personal preference.  At best, it signals a fleeting allegiance to an unspecified vibe.  

To employ the Like button (as for example, nearly half a million of the over 25 million viewers did for the “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” video on YouTube) forestalls meaningful conversation about moral matters.  Such silence follows from the internal logic of the Like button itself.  If my moral convictions are merely matters of taste (like my preference for Coke over Pepsi), then what I “like” requires neither rational deliberation nor defense.  Why think?  Just click.

Beyond the obstruction of inquiry, the Like button conditions its users to think of moral conviction as a kind of personal accessory – a way of constructing an identity.  In the techno-consumer society we inhabit, we accessorize to say who we are.  By aligning ourselves with moral perspectives expressed in cyberspace, we use morality as a way of expressing our present profile.  And in so doing, we trivialize moral conviction.

Even more worrisome, however, is the fact that treating morality as a mere expression of one’s persona, as the Like button does, fundamentally subverts the relationship between morality and the individual seeking to live a moral life.  Historically, orthodox Christian belief has been committed to a transcendent understanding of morality, construed as a “Way” to which one ought to conform.  This is, for example, the explicit structure of The Didache – one of the earliest Christian documents expressing the shape of the moral life.  And as C.S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man, it is arguably the predominant understanding of morality, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or pagan, before the advent of modernity.  

But the world of the Like button turns this way of thinking on its head.  No longer is morality a transcendent order to which we seek to conform; it is rather a digital drop-down menu from which we select our status.  Instead of seeking pre-existing moral norms that necessarily bind us, we click to create motifs that define us.  And our self-definition has all the contingency of whim.  For we remain attached to particular stances only as long as we continue to feel as though they authentically express who we are at any given moment.  

In a sense, the Like button in social media is the sacrament for the religion that sociologist Christian Smith has identified as defining the present generation: “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  It is a religious stance in which “feeling happy” is the first principle and how one “feels” is the epistemological lens through which everything is assessed.  Of course, Smith’s work does not apply uniquely to evangelicals (rather to U.S. teenagers, generally).  However, as another noteworthy Smith has recently observed, sacraments such as the Like button are embedded in larger, “cultural liturgies” in which the evangelical world is immersed (see James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom).  

Evangelicals should take seriously the formative effects of the prevailing cultural liturgies.  For if the foregoing analysis is right, the overwhelming effect of the liturgies of social media is not to the good.  Rather, they threaten to erode the very foundation on which deliberation, conversation, vision, and formation are built – namely, the assumption that the moral fabric of reality is ontologically prior to the volition of the individual.

This is reason enough for thinking that despite its inherent limitations, the WWJD bracelet, when compared with the liturgies of social media, is a step in a salutary direction.  For starters, the interrogative mood, together with the implied dominical authority, suggests a posture of submission that is the beginning of moral formation.  To be sure, the bracelet is an accessory.  But the content it expresses, while truncated, does not accessorize.  For when properly applied, the WWJD bracelet does not permit the wearer to use the fruits of inquiry as a means of self-expression (except perhaps in choosing a neon color).  Rather, what Jesus would do in a given situation becomes a “Way” to which the faithful evangelical must conform.  Philosophically speaking, as morally formative liturgical acts go, snapping on a bracelet seems superior to clicking a mouse.  Perhaps the renewal of evangelical reflection on morality looks more like a rosary than a blog.