A woman wants to give birth to a shark.

The prophet C.S. Lewis once wrote:

My point may be clearer to some if it is put in a different form. Nature is a word of varying meanings, which can best be understood if we consider its various opposites. The Natural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural. The Artificial does not now concern us. If we take the rest of the list of opposites, however, I think we can get a rough idea of what men have meant by Nature and what it is they oppose to her. Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature’ in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers’ is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer’ them. We are always conquering Nature, because`Nature’ is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own `natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

There is at least one fundamental tension between the thinking of some Austrian economics and some libertarian political philosophy, and classical Christian social thinking. Consider this excerpt from von Mises’ magnum opus, Human Action:

When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people’s aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow’s will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic.

Mises stands within a long tradition of thinkers assuming Hume’s separation of value and fact, a repudiation of the premodern tradition (in which Christianity finds itself) which said there was such a thing as an objective good and evil for human action, and that it could be known by everyone. In participating in the modern tradition, Mises assumed the modernists’ rejection of formal and final causes in the world, and so left humanity without any objective good purpose toward which it was intrinsically directed. What is left in the vacuum is bare will, and perhaps the passions, to which Hume said reason was always a slave. Certainly, there is no objective good that can be rationally discovered by all people of good will.

And, of course, Mises and likeminded Austrians (and libertarians) are not alone amongst the economic and political schools of today in holding this view of ethics and human nature. But they are all clearly in opposition to Christian doctrine at this point.

Jamie K.A. Smith wrote on twitter the other day:

We’re told that social constructionism has no resources to stop injustices like racism. But how did moral realism fair in that regard?

I want to briefly discuss where I think this is wrong. Firstly, it is true that people merely professing to be moral realists has not created heaven on earth. This should not be a big surprise to Christians, who believe in original sin, total depravity, and the persistence of indwelling sin in the lives of even regenerated people. But at the same time, I don’t notice that social constructionists, people who believe that all value and meaning is the creation of communities, have become morally perfect either. Except, perhaps, in cases where they have redefined their sin to be righteousness “for their community”. But the rest of us, I think, may not be persuaded. And certainly, communities that believe there is no objective right and wrong could easily, and indeed have, been quite evil and unjust.

Secondly, if the question is: “which view, considered in the abstract, provides more motivation to be good?”, then I think it is moral realism, not social constructionism, that has more resources available towards reaching that end. This is for one main reason. The communities of moral realism and social constructionism can both discipline their communities toward achieving the good and stopping injustices, for moral realist communities are still communities. But only moral realists can offer a principled argument for why people outside of their own community also ought to stop committing injustices. Social constructionists can only offer bare commands or invitations to those on the outside, while moral realists can do both of these things, and provide reasons why others should stop being racists, etc.

Thirdly, social constructionism is, at bottom, a kind of cultural relativism. And when cultural relativism goes missionary, when it tries to recruit from the outside or shape the outside world in its image, it is essentially being Nietzschean. Since it can have no objective right to do this (since, in its own view, there are no such things), any attempt to condemn others for things it considers wrong, or to enforce rules against such behaviour, is an act of sheer will-to-power. There is no trans-communal standard of justice that could make such an act warranted, since there is no trans-communal standard of justice. So it is merely one community trying to impose its will on another, for no more fundamental reason than that the community wishes to do it. At base, it must reduce all moral outrage to socially constructed arbitrary value preferences, and so to wish or will.

Ed Feser concludes his book Aquinas with the following comment about the relation between the Angelic Doctor and modernity:

In both its metaphysical and theological commitments, Aquinas’s system of ethics is, like the rest of his philosophy, obviously radically at odds with the assumptions typically made by contemporary moral philosophers. But the main difference may lie in something other than a disagreement over this or that particular ontological thesis or argument for God’s existence, in basic ethos rather than intellectual orientation. The spirit of modern moral philosophy is perhaps summed up best in Kant’s famous characterization of human beings as “ends in themselves” and “self-legislators.” This sort of talk would sound blasphemous and even mad to Aquinas, for whom God alone, as the “first cause and last end of all things,” could possibly be said to be the source of moral law and an end in himself. (ST I-II.62.1, as translated by Pegis in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas). For Aquinas, we are not here for ourselves, but for the glory of God, and precisely because this is the end set for us by nature, it is in him alone that we can find our true happiness. And it must be emphasized that, as with the other themes we’ve explored in this book, he takes this conclusion to be a matter, not of faith, but of reason itself.

Therein lies the sting of Aquinas’ challenge to modernity. [192]

Brett and Kate McKay have concluded a series of posts on the concept and practice of honour in Western civilization, from the Greeks until present day. It’s quite lengthy, and unless you have a whole afternoon or morning to spend, you probably won’t be able to read it in one sitting. But I think it’s worth giving the time, even if spread out.

Manly Honor: Part I — What Is Honor?
Manly Honor: Part II — The Decline of Traditonal Honor in the West, Ancient Greece to the Romantic Period
Manly Honor: Part III — The Victorian Era and the Development of the Stoic-Christian Code of Honor
Manly Honor: Part IV — The Gentlemen and the Roughs: The Collision of Two Honor Codes in the American North
Manly Honor: Part V — Honor in the American South
Manly Honor: Part VI — The Decline of Traditional Honor in the West in the 20th Century
Manly Honor: Part VII — How and Why to Revive Manly Honor in the Twenty-First Century

They begin with honour in the Greeks, noting that even that far back there were two versions of honour: an external performance-based idea, and an internal conscience-based one. These two views have co-existed and worked out in different ways through history. In their last post, they suggest that some social honour code, with correlative social shaming, is highly valuable, and suggest some ways individuals could try to restore this practice, which has largely been abandoned.

At the same time, they don’t present a totally rosy picture of honour. They note throughout their series that there were good and bad sides to the practice of honour, and I would agree with them on that point as well. If as individuals, as the church, or as a culture, we want to restore respect for honour, we need try to preserve the good in the idea without allowing the negatives to return. This may not be easy, but the arguments McKay makes in his last post are convincing enough to me that I think it is worth trying.

It’s also noteworthy that scripture assumes some recognition of honour and shame is right:

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12)

“You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:32)

“He raises up the poor from the dust;
he lifts the needy from the ash heap
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,
and on them he has set the world.” (1 Samuel 2:8)

“Both riches and honor come from you, and you rule over all. In your hand are power and might, and in your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all.” (1 Chronicles 29:12)

“Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:5)

“Honor the Lord with your wealth
and with the firstfruits of all your produce;” (Proverbs 3:9)

“Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty,
but humility comes before honor.” (Proverbs 18:12)

“It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife,
but every fool will be quarreling.” (Proverbs 20:3)

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:21)

“to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life;” (Romans 2:7)

“Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.” (Romans 12:10)

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

“I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers,” (1 Corinthians 6:5)

“Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.” (1 Corinthians 15:34)

“He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” (Colossians 2:15)

“and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.” (Titus 2:8)

“wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.” (Jude 1:13)

One of the characteristic vices of the modern (postmodern?) world is ignorance. This may seem counterintuitive: aren’t we the smart ones? Didn’t we land someone on the moon, build the Internet, develop industrial agriculture? But intelligence in one area does not preclude ignorance in another, as anyone who has met a dumb-smart-person can testify.

And one area where the modern world is woefully ignorant is in the area of ethics. What I mean to say by this is: the modern world is living on the borrowed capital of its premodern predecessors. When it issues moral condemnations, it is presuming a metaphysical foundation that, in every other way (religion, philosophy, science, etc.) it has willfully discarded.

Let me attempt to provide an illustration. If there’s anything that modern activists don’t like, it’s violence. Well, what is violence, exactly? Let’s do a little detective work. (more…)

It is easy for evangelicals to lose sight of political meanings inherent in many Christian doctrines, I think. One such example is the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Of course, evangelicals who have studied theology will want to affirm this teaching, but not all of them have reflected exactly on what it means for something to be penal at all. This is a lesson I learned from studying the work of Oliver O’Donovan on political theology and philosophy. Here’s a helpful quote from his work The Ways of Judgment:

We propose as our thesis, then, that punishment is best understood as a judgment enacted on the person, property, or liberty of the condemned party. The following comments help to explain this.

(a) Punishment is judgment, in saying which we presuppose all that has been said about judgment up to this point: it is an act of moral discrimination, that pronounces upon a preceding act or existing state of affairs to establish a new public context. A rational act of condemnation, it is neither irrational, like impulsive revenge, nor inactive, like reflective disapproval, but an “expressive act” or “communication.” It is not a private act, but an authorized act undertaken in the defense of the order of society, an act of social definition. When we speak of God’s own “punishing,” we are speaking of his judgment within the quasi-political context of his covenant faithfulness. Divine punishment is executed, as in Jeremiah’s prayer, bemishpat ”with judgment” (Jer. 10:24), and so is contrasted with God’s absolute wrath, which will “bring me to nothing.” It is God’s disclosure of himself as our good, revealing the truth of our wrong. For this reason Christians have always found it necessary to speak of divine punishment in connection with the Atonement, for the Atonement is the supreme demonstration of God’s covenant-faithfulness.

(b) Punishment is judgment enacted, not an additional act subsequent to judgment. The misconception of punishment as an “extra,” a level of retaliation that goes beyond the enactment of justice, is encapsulated in the negative sense of the adjectives “punitive” and “vindictive.” It may possibly derive from the medieval theory of penitential satisfaction, which distinguished between satisfaction for reatus and satisfaction for culpa as two successive levels of punishment; or it may merely be a recurrence of the same intellectual mistake, which is to treat aspects of an action as though they were incremental: as though the unlawfulness of the offense and the lawlessness of the offender were two different things that had to be set right in two successive ways. The judge punishes when he sentences or awards damages. The punishment is not something else that must be done as a supplement to the judgment; what follows the giving of the sentence is merely the carrying out of the sentence. (107-8)

The fact that all punishments are communications can explain why it is right to say God would “wink at sin” if he did not punish it in some way, for this would also be an act that communicated something, namely, that God did not think sin was serious enough to cause serious pain in response as a communication of how evil the sin was. Further, this explanation of punishment as communicative act explains how divine punishment can simultaneously be divine self-revelation: by communicating how wrong wrong really is, it inversely shows how far from the true good of all creation, God, sin really is.

Mike Bird recently put up some reflections on homophobia up on his blog. I enjoyed it so much, I’m reposting it in full here.

In my next response to James Crossley’s allegations of “homophobia,” I thought I would narrate two stories, two experiences with gay men and women, which have shaped my perceptions and pastoral approach to homosexuality.

Story One: Violent Homophobia.
In a previous life time, I was a soldier in the Australian Army. One evening my section was on a boys night out on the town in Sydney, doing bit of a pub crawl. I was not a heavy drinker, so I was the only sober one in the group by 9. 00 p.m. In one of our excursions across a park, several of us walked passed a couple of gay men innocuously holding hands as they strolled through the park. As they walked by, however, one of my group (the highest ranked member in fact) began yelling all sorts of hateful things interspersed with vicious expletives at them. He pushed his way over towards them as the couple quickly hurried their pace. Sensing the potential for fruitless violence at two innocent citizens, I grabbed my superior (and let it be known that this guy was built like Sylvester Stallone in his 80s physique) and dragged him back towards the group, fortunately a few other guys stepped in to help me. Eventually the drunken aggressive man desisted from his attempted attack and rejoined us on our walk. It was a vivid experience, one I’ve never forgotten. I felt sorry for that couple who could not even walk down a public park after dark without fear of physical attack due to no more than holding hands. From that experience I can say that I believe homophobia exists, it is real, it is based on nothing more than prejudice without reason, and it is morally wrong … and I say this as a Christian, one who tries to follow Jesus by loving my neighbor, even my gay neighbors walking down the street.

Story Two: The Ultimate Homophobia.
Back in 2002, just after it was announced that Rowan Williams was going to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, I led an ecumenical Bible study among a group of Christians from the Army. I remember vividly the small group in question: A fiery Lutheran warrant officer, a meek Pentecostal girl from transport corps, a liberal Catholic logistics Captain, and a softly spoken nominal Anglican lady working for the DoD. When we got to the subject of Rowan Williams and his views of sexuality, well, the conversation heated up, like a furnace. The Lutheran warrant officer earnestly made the point that the Bible condemns homosexuality, the liberal Catholic rebutted that sexuality is genetically innate and cannot be helped so one should not oppose it, the nominal Anglican lady said that gay people make great friends and are great at helping you decorate your house, while the Pentecostal girl just sat there quietly not saying anything. Well, the conversation, now argument, got hotter and hotter. Despite my best efforts to moderate the tone and change the subject, it just got worse. It turned into a yelling match with the Bible-bashing Lutheran trying to shout down the liberal Catholic on the one side and the nominal Anglican lady adding her two-cents every so often. The poor Pentecostal girl sat their very quiet, staring catatonically at the floor, wisely avoiding the melee. Right before I was gonna yell “time out children, time to go home,” all of a sudden the Pentecostal girl loudly interjected with these words, “I used to be a Lesbian but Jesus saved me.” Right after that there was a silence you could cut with a knife. The Lutheran, the Catholic, the Anglican, and the poor Bible study leader, had nothing to say. What do you say to that? How do you follow that up? The young girl was engaged and a few months later was married and last I heard she was living a joyous heterosexual marriage with her new husband. In her story, homosexuality was something that she needed to be saved from, Jesus saved her from it, and she remained grateful for the transformation that had taken place in her life. But I want to say that her story is the greatest homophobic epic that can ever be told. In her story, it is possible, indeed actual, for some (note the qualifier) gay men and women to be changed and transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, homosexual men and women can be liberated, rescued, and saved from homosexualilty … that is their testimony, not mine. Now I know that the reasons why people have same-sex desires are complex and range from biology to upbringing to sociology to psychology. I do not believe that the Pentecostal girl’s story would necessarily be true of all homosexual men and women. I don’t think homosexuality is a disease much less something that can be cured. Some Christians with same-sex desires struggle with it for all their lives (just as heterosexuals can struggle with certain desires and behaviors). I know that there are many ex-gays, but I also know that there are many ex-ex-gays too. My point is that I have heard the testimony of men and women who consider themselves saved from homosexuality. Moreover, their words constitute the greatest act of betrayal of the gay-cause, the greatest act of treachery in gay-rights, and the greatest attack on efforts to deny that same-sex desires can change in people. In our secular and pansexual culture, ex-gay Christians are the worst and most vile homophobes in the universe because they announce that Jesus saved them from homosexuality and the Holy Spirit transformed them and empowered them to live a holy life without it. Though society may call them homophobes, I am not ashamed to call them my brother or sister.

Jeremy F. Hultin’s The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment is definitely worthy of the adjective “interesting”, if nothing else. Rather than write a review proper, I want to point out a few noteworthy facts he brings to light, and engage a little bit with his interpretation of Ephesians and Colossians.

Some notes:

1. He notes that the Old Testament itself is basically silent on the ethics of obscene speech. This is not to say that it approved of it, but just that it makes no explicit comment about it. (113-4; 121)

2. At the same time, the OT on the whole is euphemistic. (114) If nothing else, this reflects that the Bible writers would, on the whole, think that obscene language was, well, obscene, and should be avoided.

3. But in addition, Hultin notes that the Talmud in several cases said that certain biblical words should be substituted with more polite terms. (115) In a parallel way, rabbinic literature in some cases suggested replacing statements that were inauspicious: so curses of Israel would be read instead as curses of the enemies of Israel. (116)

4. In keeping with this general sentiment, rabbinic literature often used euphemistic terms. (117)

5. There are, however, exceptions made. Some rabbis said that foul language could be employed towards idols (b. Megillah 25b; 117-118). Some rabbis also suggested that nasty expressions could be used against idolaters and persons of ill fame. (118) (more…)

Newsweek ran a provocative article by Andrew Sullivan today, “Christianity in Crisis”. Because Sullivan addresses so many important issues in one place, it provides a helpful occasion to lay out what I see to be the problems with his overall vision of the Christian faith and its relation to politics, as well as my own preferred alternative.

Sullivan’s Argument:

Sullivan believes, like many do, that we have entered a time of religious crisis in our society. Roman Catholicism has (he says) discredited itself in its many child abuse scandals, and evangelicals have turned into a fearful bunch, trying to hide from the real world in ghettoes of imaginary construction and behind real threats of violence to the other. Further, both have become concerned with things that Jesus either did not mention (homosexuality and abortion), and have ignored things he was concerned with (the problem of divorce, celibacy in light of what he believed to be the immediate end of the world). Sullivan believes there is a rise in atheism and “spirituality”, and that this expresses an awareness in our society that our current situation characterized by emptiness, distraction, and warring is not good enough, and that we want some kind of fundamental spiritual change.   (more…)