Which is Witch? Discerning Halloween

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Matt

As Halloween comes around once again, it has inspired the usual debate over whether it is appropriate for Christians to take part in such a distinctly pagan festival.  Inasmuch as Halloween celebrates communion with dark powers, Christians are obviously obligated to avoid it.  But to what extent does it still do so?  Is it OK to take part in these non-Christian traditions around us?

As I’ve written before, most debates regarding tradition end up being dominated by two opposite points of view that are each too shallow to grasp the issue.  One side argues that symbols have an absolute meaning that one cannot simply wish away while the others insist symbols are meaningless in themselves–they carry only the meanings that we, as individuals, choose to place in them.  When applied to Halloween, it usually goes something like this:  A) Halloween is a pagan holiday and it is wrong for Christians to ever celebrate it vs.  B)  Pagan roots don’t matter because contemporary Halloween is utterly harmless fun.

Both points of view are far too narrow to really grapple with symbols.  Each side is right in a way and wrong in a way.  After all, the meanings of symbols are fluid, and can be given by human action.  However, the meaning is nevertheless real and is very rarely intentionally given by us as individuals.  Consider the cross.  Before 33 A.D., wearing a decorative cross around one’s neck would be like wearing an electric chair.  The gravity of Christ’s atoning death, however, filled the symbol with new meaning that radically alters the way we understand the old.  No Christian would use it as a symbol merely of torture and death, but of redemption and atonement.  Of consider the swastika.  It has a history far more ancient than Nazism, but the gravity of what happened in Germany completely overshadows anything it symbolized before.  No Westerner would use it for it’s old meaning, and no amount of pleading that “it means something different for me personally” by a white man would change its current meaning.  The traditionalists are clearly wrong about a symbol’s meaning being absolute, but the other side is just as clearly wrong about symbols being meaningless without individual consent–we inherit the meaning, we do not usually get to create it ourselves.

Bringing this back to Halloween, we see two things.  First, the meaning of the holiday can change from its pagan roots, whether by a profound event or simply by the slow grinding of the years in a nation where witchcraft has been far on the periphery.  Second, it doesn’t just mean costumes & candy simply because that’s all we want it to mean.  So what does the holiday mean now?  Unfortunately, there is no flowchart or scientific process to answer this question definitively.  We are left to observe and discern.  Furthermore, the answer may be different from place to place and time to time.  Just like a swastika will have a different meaning in Germany than in India, Halloween may be different in your town than mine, and might be different in another decade.  At the very least, though, we can lay down some points to guide our considerations.

How is the holiday being used in your area?  Does the local high school have a popular Wiccan teacher who uses the holiday as an opportunity to promote her religion?  When you think on the Halloweens of the past few years, do you primarily remember the vandalism?  Are mystic religions that incorporate Halloween into their own spirituality common in your community?  In such cases, Christians would be well advised to not take part in the festivities.  On the other hand, if the celebration is primarily about carving silly faces in pumpkins, soliciting treats from neighbors, and dressing up as Luigi rather than Lucifer, it’s probably ok.

Does the celebration itself involve wrongdoing?  Despite cultural differences in their expression, right and wrong do have absolute touchpoints that we return to for guidance.  For example, one of the most important moral obligations Christians need to consider for Halloween is chastity.  Like most aspects of our culture, its celebration is becoming increasingly sexualized.  While a man can go into a store and choose from costumes like “doctor,” “policeman,” or “monk,” women get to choose from “sexy nurse,” “sexy policewoman,” or “sexy nun.”  Obviously, the latter are unchaste.  This places a disproportionate burden on women when obtaining an acceptable costume, but those are simply the challenges given to us, no matter how unfair they may be.  Likewise, other forms of celebration that involve destruction, gluttony, or other harm to our neighbors must be avoided.  Furthermore, if these things have become the main point of Halloween in your community, it would be wise to avoid even the appearance of evil by participating in an otherwise innocent way.

Does it bring out morbid fascinations in you or your children?  As the old saying goes, he who studies evil is studied by evil.  Is your participation in Halloween spurring a dangerous interest in the occult?  Do you find yourself excited mainly by those costumes which celebrate blood, gore, and death?  These are not interests that should be indulged.  Are your kids scaring people by shoving fake guts in people’s faces or do they just yell “boo” or put a spider on a pillow instead?  Some of these are more innocent than others, and it is your responsibility to discern which is which.

The real dangers in situations like these come when Christians become either too rigid or too shallow to prayerfully and thoughtfully consider whether there is danger or not.  We risk stifling Christian freedom and creativity by simply assuming that Halloween’s roots make it forever off-limits.  On the other hand, we risk corrupting ourselves and our children by blithely assuming it’s all fun and games so long are there aren’t orgies and human sacrifices at your own party.  So choose wisely when you consider whether to celebrate Halloween, but be sure to actually choose.  If we let the choice be made for us, we might not like where we end up.

Posted in Culture, Ethics, The Modern Church, Tradition | 1 Comment

Haters Gonna Hate? Claiming _____ are not Christians.

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Matt

Predictably, comments made by Rev. Robert Jeffress concerning Mitt Romney–specifically that Romney is a Mormon and therefore not a Christian–have inspired charges of that most severe and nebulous crime of the 21st century:  hate.  After all, Mormons have (recently) begun marketing themselves as just another Christian denomination.  Who is Rev. Jeffress or anyone else to tell them otherwise?  It’s clearly “discrimination” seeing as how it quite explicitly recognizes a difference between two things: Mormonism & Christianity.  Is not discrimination the core of “hate”?  Is it not then hateful to define Christianity in a way that excludes someone who claims the label?

In light of the accusations of hate being flung about like so much monkey dung, perhaps the better question for all of the professional hate-haters is this:  does saying it is hateful to define Christianity in an exclusive way actually define Christianity in an exclusive way?

Here is the thing:  Christians rightly deny that the followers of Jospeh Smith are Christians because they explicitly deny the core teachings of Christ.  They are, for example, polytheistic, claiming that God is one among what will ultimately be many, and that in time each Mormon patriarch will become a god as well.  Indeed, the Christ they follow is not the real God-man whom Christians worship.  He was not an eternal person of the Triune God, but was simply one of God’s multiple created sons who became a god himself.  Furthermore, Christianity is concerned with Christ receiving, in our stead, the punishment that each of us deserves for the evil we do and are (a free gift which we receive through faith).  Mormons, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with a progressive deification of each man which they achieve through right living.  Both a Mormon’s God and his relationship to that God are entirely different than a Christian’s.

As a Christian, I therefore perceive that these teachings are entirely contrary to my religion.  If I publicly recognize this by stating that Mormons are not Christians, what then are you saying if you respond by accusing me of hate?  You are saying that things like Trinitarian monotheism and a substitutionary atonement are most definitely not essential to Christianity.  They are, however, quite obviously essential to my religion, and you have no grounds to tell me otherwise.  You have therefore just defined Christianity exclusively.  By accusing me of hate, you have told me that I am not really a Christian.  As soon as your accusation left your lips, you just hoisted yourself on your own hateful petard.  You have, in fact, done the very thing which you have claimed is hateful– you were just being either ignorant or blatantly duplicitous when you did so.

Of course, the accuser might be both.  Consider, for example, this stunningly “hateful” piece on CNN.  He admits right out that he doesn’t know much about Mormon teaching and does nothing else to indicate that this statement was mere modesty, so ignorance is a given.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t take him very long to move on from quoting Jeffress’s “hate-filled language” to putting scare quotes around “Christian” when referring to those who actually believe what Christ taught about salvation being through Him alone.  Indeed, the entire remainder of the piece is about how Mormons are more Christian than Christians are.  The author seems quite comfortable sorting out the real Christians from the fake ones despite his ignorance.  Why then should he condemn others for doing the same thing–particularly when they might be more informed than he is?

In the end we all seem to agree that it’s both good and necessary to draw lines around Christianity.  So let’s dispense with the meaningless charges of hatred.  Instead, let’s actually look at Christ–who He is, what He did, what He taught us–and try to draw the lines well instead of poorly.

Posted in Apologetics, Heresy | 2 Comments

Let’s Remain Pure. Oops, We’re Having Sex!

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Matt

An upcoming article in Relevant magazine is making the blogosphere rounds already (e.g., CNN & First Thoughts).  It would seem that multiple studies are indicating that despite all efforts by the Church, most young Christians simply are not waiting until marriage.  This should be saddening, but it should not be particularly surprising.

The middle-class American coupling system has two basic imperatives:  1) Do not get married until you are established in a career (which itself must follow receipt of both a high school diploma and bachelor’s degree).  2)  In the meantime, one should date–spend copious amounts of time alone with members of the opposite sex selected primarily on the basis of physical attraction for the purposes of enjoying romantic feelings and having fun together.  Gee, I wonder what kind of fun they’ll have?  Christians should not be surprised that adding a third imperative, “don’t have sex until you’re married,” makes little difference in the outcome.  No matter how well it’s put or how many purity rings it’s accompanied by, it’s still like saying “run straight at that concrete wall without stopping” and then adding “but don’t hurt yourself.”  If it actually works, it’s a fluke.  In the same way, sheer willpower is simply no match for the entirety of one’s biology and culture when resisting sexual temptation.

Though this reality has lead the secular world to suggest that Biblical rules about sexuality are obsolete and should be discarded in the face of modern sexual culture, faithful Christians need to embrace the opposite conclusion:  modern sexual culture is obsolete and should be discarded in the face of Biblical rules about sexuality.

I’m not suggesting Christians spend more time complaining about sex on TV or condom distribution in school (not that these aren’t legitimate complaints).   I’m making the more radical suggestion that Christians need to start questioning the two basic coupling rules of American culture instead of teaching them to their children.  With respect to the first rule, the typical rite of K-12->college->career->marriage needs to be rearranged or rethought so that marriage can come earlier.  For example, given the increasingly shrinking return on investment provided by higher education, it seems increasingly foolish that it should be allowed to categorically delay marriage.  With respect to the second rule, dating has proven to be a very poor method of finding appropriate spouses.  Sexual chemistry is great, but it is not the only important feature of a lifelong marriage.  It also tends to hide those other features from sight.  Other cultures in history have had other coupling methods; perhaps we should begin looking at these and adapting them for our own use.

Rethinking our customs must go deeper than the typical practice of accepting our culture wholesale and then trying to slap a “no ding-ding before the wedding ring” sticker on the side of it.  The evidence is in; this approach has failed.  There is therefore no excuse for harming the next generation by perpetuating it.  This is no small task, but it is nevertheless the task given to us. The solution Paul provides to sexual temptation is marriage (1 Cor 7:2), so we ought to work to make marriage available to the tempted.

Here the objections begin to fly among those protestants who misunderstand Sola Scriptura:  “The Bible doesn’t tell us how to get married–only that premarital sex is wrong!  It’s legalistic to tell young men and women that they shouldn’t date or that they should get married sooner!”  It is true enough that the Bible doesn’t provide a flowchart for coupling.  Nevertheless, that doesn’t preclude us using our Biblically-informed brains to provide assistance for navigating this part of life.  Such navigation is what culture and tradition are for in the first place–they are tools to help us live life well.  Christians know (or at least should know) that living well entails living chastely and decently.  If our customs have become a hindrance to this end, then parents are morally obligated to reject them and attempt to provide better customs for their children.  Stubborn insistence on disproven methodology is pure foolishness–something that is explicitly condemned in Scripture (see, for example, pretty much the entire book of Proverbs).

There are any number of ways to appropriately couple.  Nevertheless, an infinitude of appropriate ways does not imply that no inappropriate ways exist.  Identifying and rejecting such ways is not legalism; it is wisdom–something I encourage Christian parents to both pray for and practice.

Posted in Chastity, Culture, Ethics | 2 Comments

When Science Isn’t the Best Method

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Matt

Although science does have it’s worshipers–those who see it as the absolute high point of existence from which all good things proceed–most people recognize it as one tool among many.  It has been extremely useful to humanity in many respects, and we would never want to discard it.  Nevertheless,  some tasks are quite simply beyond its capabilities.

Take, for example, everyday affairs like art or romance.  Common experience will show that these are not the results of science and science is not our guide in participating.  Those who try tend to be rather unsuccessful.  Neither poetry nor romantic love is cooked up in a laboratory by following a complicated formula.  Anyone who treats his loved one as mere matter and chemicals that follow certain laws has a relationship akin to that between two computers rather than two people.  Likewise, there is no scientific, step-by-step process to creating art.  The artistic merit of the Mona Lisa may be embodied in the arrangement of paint molecules on canvas, but it is not reducible to it.  One cannot simply replicate the results by following the same process the way the scientific method demands.  The common thread is that while science is quite effective at analyzing & describing mechanics and chemistry, not all of human experience is reducible to mechanics and chemistry.

The same thing holds true in more “high-minded” academic endeavors as well.  Take, for example, epistemology–the branch of philosophy which studies knowledge and how we know.  In the early 20th century, there was a philosophical movement called logical positivism which held that because science is the only place real knowledge is produced, the job of epistemology is merely to describe science.  The end result was a philosophy based on the idea that a statement is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified–if it can, in principle, be observed by our five senses.  At this point, logical positivism declared most other branches of philosophy obsolete.  In ethics, for example, right and wrong are not empirically verifiable, and so become meaningless terms.  What then is left for ethics to describe?  Logical positivists held that when a person says “it is wrong to murder,” all they are really saying is the imperative: “don’t murder me!”  They aren’t saying anything about murder per se, they are just giving a command.  Ethics, they held, should therefore be located in the study of the brain mechanics which cause people to want to not be murdered (psychology)–philosophy should be involved only inasmuch as it regulates the language that scientists use.

Understandably, logical positivism died a relatively quick death.  Most people are quite aware that “don’t murder me” is quite different from what they mean when they say “it is wrong to murder.”  All logical positivism proved was that science was completely incapable of accurately describing what they were saying.  Even in academia, the bastion of silly philosophies like this, logical positivism is pretty much over.  Although it still has its holdouts, most people recognize that it is incoherent and that incoherence is to be avoided.  By it’s own standard, the statement “a statement is only meaningful if it can be empirically verified” is not meaningful.  The very core of logical positivism cannot be empirically verified.

This isn’t to say that science couldn’t be somewhat helpful for issues like romance or ethics.  These things do, after all, involve people who themselves are mechanical and chemical.  Mechanics and chemistry, however, are not the whole of people.  To assert otherwise is to make a philosophical claim that is not only unverifiable by the same science in which all trust is allegedly placed, but also severely truncates human nature.

Another Application

This “limitedness” of science is also important for Christians to remember on issues that are more commonly considered its domain, such as the origins of life, the universe, and everything.  Science has quite vocally determined that the events recorded in Genesis are simply impossible to reconcile with the evidence.  Many Christians, in pursuit of the laudable goal of intellectual integrity, have therefore decided that Genesis cannot be read as history.  According to a recent NPR interview, this is increasingly common even among conservative Christians.  Their hermeneutic is determined by the conclusions of the scientific method, and they determine Genesis to be poetry or some other form of highly figurative literature.  But what if the scientific method is not the right tool for this particular job?

If you look at the petitions against intelligent design that have cropped up in academia, the cornerstone of the arguments is methodological naturalism.  Science is in the business of offering explanations for what we see around us.  Methodological naturalism is a rule that says these explanations can only be naturalistic in nature–they must consist only of mechanics which we empirically observe in the world around us.  In short, when offering a scientific explanation, one must act as though matter is all that there is.  This isn’t a completely useless rule:  it provides a check on superstition by protecting the study of mechanics from non-mechanical interference.

This makes good sense in operational science because scientists typically have no good reason to suspect that a poltergeist is interfering with their experiments.  However, this does not make good sense on the science of origins because we do have good reason to suspect that a deity was supernaturally involved in creation.  If a material state is actually the result of a supernatural act, science would be obligated to substitute a false naturalistic explanation for the true supernaturalistic explanation.  The method itself would ensure incorrect results.  If there were multiple such occurrences on a large scale, it would not take long for science to get very far off track in its explanation of the cosmos.  If Genesis gives a Christian no reason to think that God was repeatedly supernaturally involved in the creation of the world, he hasn’t simply determined that it uses figurative language, that it is poetry, or even that it is myth.  He has determined that it is false from top to bottom.  But even the nonreligious have reason to suspect supernatural intervention.  It is not uncommon for atheists to talk about the “illusion” of design in nature–that the world deceptively looks like it was designed.  Science cannot determine whether that appearance is truly deceptive or not–it can only assume that it is.

So what does that mean about discovering the truth about how the world came to be?  At the very least, it means we need a different method of investigation.  Someone more intelligent and creative than I might be able to come up with something satisfactory; but I am skeptical that it could offer the same consensus afforded to “water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.”  The process might even involve science in a substantial capacity, but science cannot be afforded the final word in the matter.  No matter how good of a hammer you have, it is not good at cleanly cutting a board in two.  If a carpenter who only uses his hammer declares that cleanly cut boards are impossible, nobody blames the hammer.  Furthermore, those who say the carpenter is in error are not necessarily anti-hammer and are not saying that the carpenter does not know how to use a hammer; they merely say the carpenter is being too narrow-minded to give a definitive answer on the subject of cleanly cut boards.  Likewise, science may be good and scientists may be good at it, but that does not mean they know how the world came to be.  Until such time as a better process is developed, I think the secular world needs to get used to being ignorant.

Posted in Apologetics, Science | 1 Comment

Patriarchy and Sexist T-Shirts

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Matt

It seems J.C. Penny recently caused a small controversy with a rather ill-conceived t-shirt design.  The shirt, apparently targeted at schoolgirls, reads “I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me.”   Their website attached the following blurb to their product:  “Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.”  Quite understandably, cries of sexism were raised.  Why the shirt is inappropriate should be obvious, so I instead found myself asking why J.C. Penny thought it would be a good idea to sell this shirt.  The trite but true answer is because they think there would be sufficient demand for it among young girls (and, by extension, the parents who pay for it).  This, however, raises a far more interesting question:  where does such demand come from?

The usual explanation for sexism in society is leftover structures and attitudes from a less civilized age.  We are told that human society used to devalue women as a matter of course because it was patriarchal;  and although we have come a long way, there are still many remnants of this patriarchal system that need to be rooted out.  However, the more I thought about it, the less sense this explanation made.  I tried to imagine the kind of tween girls in America who would wear this, and certain groups were conspicuously absent.  I could not, for example, picture a traditional Muslim family buying this shirt for their daughter.  I could not imagine a Mormon family doing so.  I could not imagine a highly conservative evangelical family doing so.  In short, the most patriarchal segments of American society were among the last I could imagine wanting to pay for a shirt like this.  Wherever the desire for this shirt comes from, it is most certainly not the patriarchy.

I could be wrong, but I very much doubt  that many parents of any stripe really want their daughter to express this kind of attitude.  If they own the shirt then, it is probably because the parents are more-or-less absentee on such choices–they tend to see their job as trying to provide what their children want rather than shaping what they want.  It’s a pretty common attitude nowadays for parents to want to be an affirming friend rather than a loving authority.

So where does this attitude come from?  Well, probably a lot of places, but one of them strikes me as being the most ironic:  feminism.  As Gloria Steinam put it in recent HBO documentary, “Feminism starts out being very simple. It starts out being the instinct of a little child who says ‘it’s not fair’ and ‘you are not the boss of me,’ and it ends up being a worldview that questions hierarchy altogether.”  Like most of Critical Theory’s bastard offspring, feminism has severe issues with authority–something the aforementioned conservative segments of society are quite comfortable with.  In short, Steinam described a very childish attitude, and childish attitudes aren’t particularly useful in helping children grown into something more.

One advantage the patriarchal have is a worldview in which it is their duty to tell their daughters that some things aren’t good for them–exercised authority is a normal part of everyday family life.  On the other hand, if there’s no way women are/aren’t supposed to be or no one who has the authority to help describe that way for a young child, then parents have little recourse beyond trying to tell their daughters what they supposedly really want.  Supposed wants, of course, are a flimsy justification for denying wants that are actually being experienced, and any child knows this.  Perhaps the market for shirts like this can be partially explained as a more day-to-day expression of the same dynamic that caused more radical parents to want to raise their child without a gender.  There too, radical gender theory lead parents to impoverish their child by refusing to take a deliberate role in a key part in his upbringing.  The parents do their best to impose nothing and whatever the child wants becomes king.  In those terms, then, it’s not altogether cryptic why a child would prefer pretty much anything–including looking pretty–to doing homework.

Whatever social & psychological dynamics lead tween girls to want to wear shirts like this in the first place, Steinam’s brand of feminism leaves our daughters defenseless against them.  Patriarchy does not.  But wouldn’t a patriarchal upbringing reduce young women to objects whose only place in society is to look pretty and breed?  Obviously not, otherwise the patriarchal segments of society would love this shirt–and yet they seem to be very much among the sort who wouldn’t buy it.  It may be that patriarchy is prone to certain problems and mistakes, but it may also be that in the end, feminism is worse for women than patriarchy.

Posted in Culture, Feminism | 1 Comment

When Movies Aren’t Bloody Enough

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Matt

So the other night, I finally saw The Crow, the 1994 cult-classic starring Brandon Lee.  I found myself rather disappointed with the film by the time the credits began to roll.  Given how the typical complaint is that movies like this are too violent and bloody, I was surprised to find that my disappointment was due to the movie not being nearly bloody enough.

To briefly recap the plot, the movie begins with Eric Draven (Lee) murdered and his fiancee, Shelly Webster, beaten, raped, and left dying the day before their wedding.  We later learn that they were victimized in order to scare the community that they were trying to rally together against a group of thugs.  According to the opening narration, some wrongs are so great that a soul cannot rest.  In such cases, the crow that ordinarily takes the soul to the next world instead brings it back to Earth, nigh-invincible, until things are set aright.  The returned Draven therefore proceeds to systematically kill each of the men involved in the crime in ways that are both brutal and slightly thematic (the druggie is drugged to death, the pyromaniac is burned, etc).  In short, the horrible men die in horrible ways.

So why weren’t these mildly poetic executions satisfying?  Now, I’m not the sort who prefers to dismiss retribution because it has no utilitarian justification (e.g. because justice can’t bring people back from the dead.)  Leaving wickedness unanswered because the answer is unhelpful to us is nothing more than dismissing victims as unimportant.  The punishment should fit the crime because it is a public corroboration of the value of what was destroyed.  The point of retributive justice isn’t merely to punish and vindictively make sure that bad things happen to bad people, but to recognize and demonstrate the value of those harmed in the injustice.

Shouldn’t I, then, have been pleased that justice was served and the villains got what was coming to them?  That’s just the problem;  they didn’t get what was coming to them.  The punishment did not fit the crime.  Visually, the movie is quite impressive, and the audience is treated to brief flashes of the couple’s life together before their murder.  The filmmakers were quite effective in communicating that the villains destroyed not only a couple of lives and a chance at happiness in an otherwise bleak world, but an embodiment of values like love, marriage, family, and community.  Does scaring the criminals for a few minutes before violently killing them really balance this out?

Earthly justice is only a shadow of the real thing; it cannot expiate all wrongs.  “An eye for an eye” is clearly not ultimate justice because you can only execute a serial killer once.  None of us is capable of making up for all the harm we have done to others, so it is no surprise that earthly justice cannot force such a redress.  We can only expect so much out of it.  Setting aside concerns about the distinction between revenge and retribution, I might see some satisfaction when Benjamin Martin finally kills the man who killed his sons in The Patriot or when Frank Castle utterly destroys the man who murdered his family in The Punisher.  These characters were ordinary men going as far as ordinary men can go in the pursuit earthly justice.  But The Crow wasn’t just earthly retribution carried out by a normal human being–the heavens sent back a magical juggernaut to right a great wrong.  Was this really the best the heavens could manage?  It is precisely here, where even killing doesn’t hit the mark, that Hell begins to make a kind of sense.

As many people point out, eternal torture of bad people merely because that’s what bad people deserve is unhelpful at best and sick & twisted at worst.  It is far more sick and twisted, however, to simply shrug off evil–to dismiss a young couple’s rape and murder by saying “it happens; we’ll do out best to avoid a recurrence.”  On one hand, Hell doesn’t make anything better;  on the other hand, dispensing with Hell for the guilty is treason to the innocent.  It is precisely this dilemma that tortures Ivan in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:”

It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’!  It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how?  How are you going to atone for them?  Is it possible?  By their being avenged?  But what do I care for avenging them?  What do I care for a hell for oppressors?  What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured?”

The solution to Ivan’s dilemma is found in the Cross.  The forgiveness offered by Christ is free and boundless, but it doesn’t make light of the sin.  God does not diminish our neighbors by shrugging off the evil we have done against them.  Instead, he punished it to the fullest.  However, in order to save us, the punishment fell on God Himself when Jesus Christ took our place before the judgment seat.  Every last evil deed has been atoned for–we, as victims, were not dismissed.  At the same time, however, we, as the wicked perpetrators, were not punished, but forgiven.

Movies like this can provide some legitimate satisfaction because they depict the same thing that earthly justice is meant to depict–an image and shadow of heavenly justice and a reminder that we are under authority.  Heavenly justice, however, requires a higher standard–one which is met by the Cross rather than the Crow.

Posted in Culture, Gospel, Law | Leave a comment

The “Virtue” of Moral Uncertainty

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Matt

The idea that if God is dead, then anything is permitted was really only briefly popular back in modernism’s heyday.  Science’s inability to discern value in any objective or universal sense lead more honest materialistic philosophers to conclude that there is no moral value in the way most people think of it–only personal preferences.  Thankfully, that idea never caught on among the masses, but many so-called intellectuals were proud of being able to scale the lofty heights of reason where they could see that there’s not really anything wrong with murder;  it’s just that most people don’t particularly want to be murdered.  If the masses couldn’t quite catch on, well… that’s why they’re the masses.  Many elites, on the other hand, were quite eager to be set free from outdated notions of their behavior being judged to be good or bad.

But that was modernism.

Many postmodernists, on the other hand, still maintain the absence of any objective moral value, but nonetheless seem quite eager to judge and be judged.  At least they are eager to be judged morally good–being judged morally deficient still seems to rankle them.  This is why, in many discussions involving morality and religion or belief in the divine, such individuals are quick to point out that people have done horrible things in the name of their beliefs in objective value.  The examples of holy wars, terrorist attacks, witch hunts, and discrimination are familiar enough.  If these people weren’t so darn certain about what was good, then they would never have been motivated to do such great harm.  If nothing has any worth, then nothing is worth killing for.

And so, you find many people espousing the virtue of moral uncertainty–that uncertainty leads to better behavior than moral convictions do.  In short, these meek and modest folk have nothing of moral importance to preserve, and so they will never go to harmful lengths to preserve it.

Now philosophically, this is garbage.  The observant reader will be quick to notice some very obvious assumptions about moral atrocities that precede any talk of uncertainty.  Any such conversation will quickly reveal that these uncertain folk seem quite certain indeed that crusades and witch hunts are actually bad.  In fact, the entire case rests on all participants in the conversation agreeing that some kinds of behavior are better and worse than others.  The reason so few people do notice these underlying moral certainties is that they are so certain of them that questioning them would never even show up on their radar.  One could simply make a case that witch-hunts were fantastic in order to see how quickly their professed moral uncertainty evaporates.

While it’s helpful to recognize the incoherence and hypocrisy underlying this talk of moral uncertainty, it’s also worth investigating its other key deficiency: the myopic focus on grand atrocities.  While they make for memorable stories, most of the day-to-day harm we encounter really has nothing to do with moral certainties.  For example, I was recently told about a hospital visit at which a partially paralyzed man needed someone to move him from his bed to a wheelchair so that he could leave.  When the time came, the attendant nurses seemed to keep finding reasons to be temporarily elsewhere.  When they could not help being present, they began to insist that the driver of the medivan that would take him home would do the transfer (when their policy has always been not to perform transfers).  In the end, his wife was forced to transfer him all by herself, while the trained nurses gave faux cheers for “showing them how to do it properly.”  Were these nurses all members of some new cult whose deity forbids diligence in doing their jobs?  Probably not.  More likely, they just wanted to avoid doing an unpleasant task.

And it is there that we find the cause of most evil deeds: somebody wanted what the evil deed would provide them.  Moral certainties, after all, are not the only motivating factors in the human psyche.  People are murdered because somebody wants them dead.  People are raped because somebody wants them raped.  People are deprived of their property because somebody else wants that property.  These are not the work of supposedly archaic certainties; they are simply the work of everyday desires.  Moral certainties, on the other hand, actually hedge these very desires in order to prevent evil.

It is here that the confidently uncertain will crow that they’re not the kind of people who wants to do terrible things in the first place.  Shortly thereafter, the accusations typically begin:  “And just what kind of person are you that you need rules to keep you from doing evil?  Do you want to rape?  To murder?  Is it only your belief in God that’s holding you back from your depraved longings?”  And so the confidently uncertain once again slip up and reveal their underlying certainty that some things are simply wrong.  After all, they seem quite smug at not being the kind of person who wants to do wrong things.

Of course, people who believe that are either being deeply dishonest with themselves or have led very sheltered lives.  Don’t get me wrong;  if you ask anyone whether they want to commit murder, they will say no.  Of course they don’t!  They don’t have to spend time calculating whether or not they would be better off if they commit murder; they simply know that murder is evil and don’t want to be evil!  Nevertheless, the fact that murders continue is proof enough that the desire to murder also continues.  The reason for this is that we have conflicting desires.  We can simultaneously want to treasure and protect our significant other and want to smack him/her upside their head when they’re wronging us.  We can want to be diligent workers and simultaneously want to spend an hour using Facebook at the office.  Honest self-evaluation will corroborate this.  When you’ve lived life a little bit, you learn that desires aren’t black & white, but are merely shades of gray.

It is precisely here that moral certainty helps to cut through the chaos.  If we consistently resist the urge to harm another, it is because we are certain that it is wrong to do so.  If our desire to harm another is perpetually weak, then it is because we have trained it to be weak.  If, on the other hand, we have a hard time choosing whether or not to harm our neighbor, it is because we have nothing apart from desire itself to decide which contradictory desire we will follow.

But what about those grand atrocities committed in the name of lofty ideals?  What can hedge against them?  The answer is clearly not uncertainty.  Even if people were capable of being morally uncertain, unleashing a flood of everyday mayhem is hardly preferable to occasional grand atrocities.  Furthermore, such mayhem seems fertile ground in which the grand atrocities will mature.  The answer, instead, is to be certain about the right things.  The fact that even the uncertain don’t seriously argue about whether rape and murder are really wrong suggests that we already have a common framework with which to evaluate moral principles.  Rather than dishonestly pretending to be uncertain to feed our egos, perhaps we should put that framework to use and learn what is right.

Posted in Apologetics, Ethics | Leave a comment

Presidents, Submit to Your Husbands?

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Matt

It’s been a long time since I last posted, but somehow I’m still ending up with two (real) posts in a row about Michelle Bachmann’s theology. At the recent GOP debate, she was asked whether, as president, she would submit to her husband as Paul instructs her in Ephesians 5:22. Her answer was along these lines: what Biblical submission means to her and her husband is “respect”–she respects her husband, and he respects her. You can see a video clip here. I’m not particularly interested in politics, but neither do I want to pass up a chance to comment on a public question of Christian ethics. So once again, we find ourselves asking whether or not Michelle Bachmann’s theology is on-target.

Being that Biblical submission tends to chafe modern women very badly, there is no shortage of attempts to explain what submission “really” means to soften it up. Most, however, can be dismissed by a very simple & straightforward test. Go back to Ephesians where Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord. Now take their explanation of submission and apply it back to submission to the Lord. Is it still accurate? If not, then it’s not a good explanation. Applying it to this case means we ask ourselves this: does our submission to Christ merely mean that we respect him and that he respects us? Not so much. Clearly, this isn’t really an adequate explanation–particularly with respect to the clear attempt to equalize the two parties.

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing but sympathy for Mrs. Bachmann for continually being asked ridiculous questions like this. The audience seemed to agree that she shouldn’t have to put up with it, and answers to gotcha questions are almost never well-formulated. So I don’t blame her for her answer. Nevertheless, there is no use pretending she met the occasion with keen Biblical insight, and it’s worth noting that this same occasion presents an opportunity to parse the ethical implications of submission with respect to a wife who is also a president.

So let’s look at the situation in light of the doctrine of vocation–callings from God to serve our neighbors in particular roles. First, we should recognize that people typically have multiple vocations at the same time. A man can be a husband, father, employee, friend, neighbor, citizen, and more simultaneously. Second, a woman’s obligation to submit to her husband comes from her own household vocations of wife and mother. The office of president, on the other hand, is not under the authority of the office of husband. By way of analogy, consider an employee and his boss. The employee is under his boss’s authority only because of his vocation as an employee. For that reason, the boss has no business telling his employee how to carry out his other vocations (e.g., telling him how to raise his children). Likewise, a husband would have no business telling his presidential wife how to run the country.

This is not, however, the end of the story. The temptation now is to turn this distinction into an airtight separation. It would be much easier and more comfortable to be able to say that Mrs. Bachmann can simply ignore her husband and refuse to submit if he tells her how to carry out the office of president. Unfortunately, that does not really capture the reality of the situation, so the temptation must be resisted. Michelle the wife and Michelle the (hypothetical) president are not two different people. Consider another analogy:  because Jesus–one person–was both God and man, we can legitimately say that God died on the cross even though that death proceeded from Christ’s human nature. In a similar way, we can legitimately say that the president must obey her husband even though the obligation arises solely through her vocation of wife.

So what then does the distinction really mean? Does it offer U.S. citizens any protection against a domineering first gentleman? Let us return to the example of a boss. The distinction between vocations means that he has no business telling his employee how he should manage his family. Nevertheless, he still has a strong influence over that very thing. For example, if he tells his employee that he must to work late to finish a project (a legitimate exercise of his authority), he is most certainly influencing how the employee manages his family. Furthermore, unless a higher authority intervenes or the professional relationship is terminated, he is quite capable of misusing his authority to force his employee to live a certain way outside of the office. The wrongness of such an endeavor does not render the boss’s authority null and void. In the same way, even though it would be quite wrong of Mr. Bachmann to tell his wife how to run the country, he still could, and she would still be obligated to obey (provided he were not telling her to sin.) After all, submitting only on condition of mutual agreement is not submission at all.

So what does all this mean for a Christian president/wife? Would her husband really be governing by proxy? The answer to this question is a very practical one: he governs only if he is an immoral & power-hungry micromanager. If a woman has such a husband, she would be well-advised to not run for president. But what about the voters? Should they be worried enough about Mr. Bachmann to refuse to vote for his wife? Once again, the answer is quite practical: if you don’t trust a candidate’s good judgment about her own husband, you probably don’t trust her good judgment enough to vote her into a high office in the first place.

Posted in Ethics, Feminism, Politics | 4 Comments

Comment Spam

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Matt

This blog tends to get much more spam than legitimate comments. Some of it is easy to spot (prescription drugs, porn, etc). Other comments are a little more ambiguous. For example, highly generic comments of admiration about the post, while tempting to consider genuine, are most likely spam. As such, they get deleted with the rest.

So, you have my apologies if I deleted a legitimate comment of yours along the way. For future reference, making the comment clearly refer to the post will make it much more likely to get approved.

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Breaking News: Lutherans not Fond of the Papacy

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Matt

It’s not often that Lutheran theology receives so much media attention. As a former member of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was, by an act of journalistic aggression, publicly associated with a politically unfortunate point of theology–that the Pope is the very antichrist described in Scripture. WELS, along with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (my own denomination) and many other Lutheran churches around the world, adhere to the Book of Concord–the Lutheran Confessions. These confessions explicitly refer to the office of the papacy as the antichrist–they use that very word. Nevertheless, while Ms. Bachmann has been desperately seeking distance from that confession to protect her candidacy, I think a Lutheran who faithfully adheres to it could honestly say “no” to a reporter asking whether he thinks the pope is the antichrist.

As usual, whenever a reporter discovers the existence of religion for the first time, it’s not a pretty sight. Being fundamentally ignorant of real theology in most cases, reporters’ understanding of terms will typically come from pop culture. When most people think of “antichrist,” they think of a hate-filled and demon-possessed child who brings misfortune to everyone around him or an influential man with barely concealed devil-horns who knowingly serves Satan and is intentionally manipulating the world towards destruction. The Confessions do not call the Pope the antichrist in such senses. Lutherans believe the pope is the antichrist inasmuch as he improperly places himself in Christ’s place and declares that salvation comes through obedience to Rome rather than through faith in Christ alone–inasmuch as he opposes Christ’s Gospel. In a context where only soundbites are admissible (and shame on the journalist industrial complex for demanding this), I think it is entirely honest and more straightforward to answer, “No, but I think the Pope ultimately works against Christ by making salvation a matter of works rather than grace. In the confessions, the word ‘antichrist’ does not mean what you think it means.” Unfortunately, Ms. Bachmann instead chose to deny her confession in favor of political expediency. I can’t say that speaks well of her character, but nevertheless, the only real story here is that Lutherans strongly disagree with Rome on important theology. In other news, a local man woke up, ate breakfast, and went to work.

There is, however, a larger issue here: namely, the interaction between theological beliefs and politics. How should the former influence the latter? That’s the thing about people who believe their religious confession is actually true: they necessarily think that other religious confessions are wrong where they contradict their own. What is more, they openly act accordingly. There’s simply no way around this. A confessional Lutheran is going to disagree with a dedicated member of the church of Rome on key points of theology. A conservative Baptist is going to disagree with an Anglican. For that matter, any believing Christian will disagree with any Muslim who takes his own religion seriously. If any of the above are honest when the subject comes up, they will disagree openly.

What then of political peace? Does this then mean that genuine believers should never hold office because they contradict the deeply held beliefs of so many of their constituents? You can be sure that anyone in the chattering classes who sees this situation as a legitimate political scandal would answer yes. Religious beliefs, they think, should not darken the door of political decisions. Of course, politics is simply public wrangling over the common good, and those whose religious beliefs have nothing at all to say about the common good probably don’t think their religion is actually true. Assuming that we actually allow religious believers to participate in politics, how could a Lutheran adequately represent a Roman Catholic constituent given their disagreement?

The answer, I think, depends on how many pertinent political decisions depend on the pure teaching of the Gospel. For instance, Lutherans and Rome disagree on whether Christians meritoriously contribute to their own salvation. However, I don’t see a big debate over whether the US government will purchase indulgences on behalf of the poor or whether it will use post proclamations of anathema in public buildings against everyone who believes in salvation by faith alone. Far more common, I think, are debates over whether it will seek justice for the murder of the unborn, whether it will endorse promiscuity in its schools, and other issues on which Lutheran and Roman theology tend to lead to similar conclusions.

So there are important differences, to be sure, but are these differences really a problem for Roman Catholic voters? Perhaps to some, but those Roman Catholics who believe that the Pope holding both swords means that the United States government should submit to papal authority don’t seem to have any prominent candidates at the moment. Perhaps even they would be willing to vote for a Lutheran who sought a public good broadly informed by Christian moral teaching until such a candidate comes along.

Hey, that gives me an idea. Maybe voting will help to resolve this tension between theology and politics that journalists like to highlight. If a person’s theology means they will behave in a way that a voter deems contrary to the public good, maybe that voter should vote for somebody else. What we don’t need, however, are ignorant reporters manipulating public opinion in order to create a set of politically “off-limits” beliefs.

Posted in Lutheranism, Politics | Leave a comment