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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

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

No Such Thing as a Non-Institutional Church

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Matt

When religion in general and Christianity in particular catch flak from the culture, everyone other than hardcore atheists generally make exceptions for personal spirituality. The problem, we hear, is really organized religion–the institutional church–not religion or church as such. Many Christians, particularly the young and hip emergent types, embrace this criticism. Creeds, doctrines, teachings… these are all “Churchianity” and should generally be avoided due to their divisive nature. Authentic, unorganized, and non-institutional Christianity allegedly eschews doctrine and focuses on personal experience. People can argue about facts, but not about about a personal relationship with Jesus.

The big problem here is that this doesn’t really describe any personal relationship I’ve ever had. If somebody asks me questions about my wife, for example, I generally answer with specifics. If somebody asks me her name, I don’t say, “Well, I personally call her Rachel, but I’m not going to limit her by saying she has a name.” If somebody asks me what she does for a living, I don’t begin by saying, “Well… let me tell you what she does for me, but I’m not going to put her in a box by telling you any facts.” If I did talk about my wife that way, people would be liable to think she was just a figment of my imagination; that’s not the kind of relationship we have with real people. Those with mental faculties cannot have a personal relationship that dispenses with those faculties. Those who can know relate to someone real in a way that depends on knowing. If Christ really exists, then we must relate to him in the same way.

Thankfully, we can know that he does because he really did take on flesh 2,000 years ago and actually taught us about himself–teachings that were written down by his disciples. The corollary of this is that all Christians have a personal relationship with the same person–one who is himself rather than no one in particular. That means we have something in common, including facts described in the Church’s creeds, doctrines, & teachings, and relate to each other on this basis. True, these include things that some Christians disagree about, but the authentic way of handling such disagreements is by arguing. If somebody tells me my wife’s name is Susan, I’m going to tell him he’s wrong and, if necessary, point to the evidence. If he persists in being wrong, I may dismiss him as crazy, but I’m certainly not going to dismiss the idea that she has a real name for the sake of peace. Likewise, we should by no means dismiss what Christ has really taught us no matter how uncomfortable it is to argue with those who are in error. And if it is we who are in error, we’ll only find out if someone takes the trouble to argue with us. Peace is not so valuable that it causes us to reject truth.

Surely, a Christianity that consists merely of believing a set of facts is not the real thing. In avoiding this, however, we must not imagine that a Christianity that avoids facts is any more real. When Peter declared that Jesus was Christ, the Son of God, that same Jesus really told him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt 16:17-19). The Church is institutional because Christ quite literally instituted it. It is real. Any non-institutional church one belongs to is not the Church, and any unorganized religion one adheres to is not Christianity.

Posted in The Modern Church, Theology, Tradition | Leave a comment

Practical Sovereignty

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Matt

Christians often hear that God has a plan for our lives, and rightfully so. Psalm 139 tells us, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” Ephesians 2:10 tells us, “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” But what does this mean for us practically speaking? While it seems quite obvious that this reality should offer us comfort in the bad times and move us to gratitude in the good, Christians begin to step on shakier ground when they begin to evaluate whether they are indeed conforming to God’s plan for their lives. But does the latter logically proceed from the former?

You can see this situation in a variety of popular evangelical behavior. For example, many Christian singles believe that God has foreordained a specific person–a kind of Christianized soulmate–for them to marry. There’s a certain truth to this–marriage, being such a key part of human life and serving our neighbors, is surely a concern of God. Those of us who are married should therefore give thanks for what God has ordained and provided for us; those who still seek to be married should have hope that the Lord will one day provide. Or take, for example, our careers. Many Christians have tried to seek out the one job that is God’s will for how we ought to serve our neighbors and provide for our family. Again, this is a key part of our lives that, one would think, would be the concern of a God who loves us. Once again, God’s plan means that those in established careers can take the opportunity to give thanks, and those searching for a way to be productive can have legitimate hope that God is in charge and has something prepared for them.

However, this realization of God’s sovereign plan is also frequently misused when Christians look to it for guidance. For example, it seems that many singles stop asking whether potential mates would make good spouses and instead start asking which of these people is “the one.” When troubles arise in a marriage, some spouses begin asking whether they actually married “the one” or whether they somehow deviated from God’s plan. When job satisfaction wanes, we begin asking whether we have wasted our lives by somehow missing what God was directing us to do–as though he didn’t quite speak loud enough for us to hear. Students picking their majors or recent graduates searching for their first job are often afraid that they might pick the wrong if they aren’t careful. After all, the plethora of choices available in the modern world can seem paralyzing if we approach it with the certainty that one and only one of them is the one God wants.

But why are such attitudes in error? If there is a divine plan, shouldn’t we seek to conform to it? We certainly should try to conform inasmuch as we know what the plan is. The reality, however, is that we are usually ignorant. What we really know about God’s will, we know from Scripture; that is where He has promised to speak to us, and we can be certain of finding Him there. Scripture, however, doesn’t name names with respect to God’s plan for each of our lives. It provides no script for us to follow. Because of this, those desperate to follow God’s plan often try to find such a script by searching where God has not promised to be. This comes in a variety of forms, but perhaps the most common is to look for God’s will in our feelings. When we really want something and it makes a lot of sense to us, we think that this must be God’s will for our life. However, this technique and others usually do not find a plan–they invent one; and tellingly, these plans quite often lead to bitter disappointment. What is more, searching for God’s will outside of Scripture often invents plans that override what He does specifically tell us–for “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure” (Jer 17:9). Indeed we should seek to live out God’s plan, but paradoxically we cannot live out God’s plan by means of following His plan–He has not made that option available to us.

So how then does this divine plan work out practically? If it’s so inaccessible that it cannot tell us what to do, how is it accessible enough to provide comfort or to incline us towards gratitude? The answer is that God works out this plan in His normal manner: He works through means. He feeds us, but He uses the farmer and grocer to accomplish this. He forgives and instructs us, but He uses His pastors and Scripture to accomplish this. In the same way, He gives us things like spouses and jobs, but He uses our actions, good judgment, and decisions to accomplish this. In hindsight, therefore, the answer to whether our spouse or job is “the one” is always “yes”1. What has happened to us is God’s plan. We cannot stymie Him through our own mistakes. For this reason, we give him thanks when we do receive good things and are comforted when we do not. In advance, however, there is never an answer to whether a person or job is “the one.” Our willing participation in His plan is in doing what has been given us to do–making good, Godly judgments informed by Scripture and then carrying out those judgments. As the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do” (9:7). And so we trust in God’s providence, not because He has given us precise instructions in advance that we can follow, but because He has told us generally how to live and promised that all will work together to good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28).

So by all means, love God and your neighbor in all the ways that God has instructed you through Scripture. Even when we refuse to do these things (and we all often do), remember that we still participate in His plan just as Pharaoh did; we merely do so in sinful opposition to Him instead of in loving submission. We should therefore not evaluate our actions or situations by comparing them to an imperceptible plan but by comparing them to Scripture. Instead, we seek to follow Him where He genuinely leads, and trust that He is watching over and guiding us as we navigate those details that He has not seen fit to fill in.

————————————–

1:  Just to clarify, this does not mean we can never leave our job.  We must not leave a faithful spouse because a lifelong commitment is precisely what marriage is.  This is not, however, what employment is (if there’s ever any doubt, just read out the pre-employment paperwork you have to sign).  Therefore, choosing a career is, itself, a vocation that God gives to us from time to time.  But, while we normally only have the vocation of selecting a spouse once, we may have the vocation of choosing a job many times.  Wanting to change jobs, however, does not mean that we previously made the wrong choice with respect to God’s plan.

Posted in Ethics, Theology | Tagged | Leave a comment

What Difference Would Gay Marriage Make to You?

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Matt

Debates over gay “marriage” regularly spawn rhetorical questions like this.  What difference would it make to your marriage if the law began to refer to certain homosexual relationships as marriages?  It would mean so much to so many without harming anyone–it certainly sounds like a winning proposition.  So who does it hurt?  Why is it a big deal?  The problem with this particular rhetorical question is that it can indeed be legitimately answered–it shouldn’t be rhetorical at all.

Consider the following analogy:  What difference would it make to your car if all shoes were reclassified as cars?  After all, there are some superficial similarities between the two.  For example, with both shoes and cars, you put your feet in them, you traverse distances by means of foot motions, both have rubber tread on the bottom for the purpose of gaining traction while moving, etc.  If, for some reason, people had their heart set on the change, what would it hurt?  Would calling shoes “cars” have any impact on your car?  One might initially answer no–after all, it’s the shoes that are being reclassified, not the cars.  But our society treats cars in a particular way–a way that would have to be extended to shoes inasmuch as that is possible.  Inasmuch as that is not possible, either shoes or cars would have to change.  For example:

  • All new cars are required to have airbags, which leaves us with two options:  either all new shoes have to be equipped with airbags or the airbag regulation has to be dropped.  Since the former is absurd to implement, we would have to go with the latter as a matter of simple practicality.  This makes no difference to my car, but it will make a difference to every new car that rolls off the assembly line.  What’s that?  The lack of regulation doesn’t forbid including airbags in cars?  Sure, somebody could make cars with airbags if they wanted, but corporations notorious for cutting cost at the expense of consumer safety can hardly be trusted to do so out of good will.  This ubiquitous safety feature could become a luxury only for the rich.
  • Pedestrians have the right of way when crossing a street–a regulation that exists for their safety.  After the change however, those we now think of as pedestrians would become fellow drivers.  They could no longer be allowed this special protection.  What’s that?  You say the special protection could still be offered because some cars are less vulnerable to collisions than others just because they happen to have steel frames and crumple zones?  Sorry, but that would be discrimination.  That’s exactly the sort of thinking the reclassification was intended to forbid.
  • We have gas mileage standards for cars and are always looking for ways to improve them.  After the reclassification, however, there would suddenly be a type car which everybody already owns (even if they’re old clunkers) that don’t need gas at all.  Why then should we allow these environmental monstrosities that only get 60 mpg?   What’s that?  You say some cars are far superior at long-distance transportation compared to others just because they happen to have an engine and wheels?  Once again, you’ve begun to discriminate, and this cannot be allowed.  If we started having special rules for shoes or cars, they wouldn’t be considered the same thing at all.  Separate is not equal.

The list could go on until imagination runs out of gas, but a pattern should begin to emerge.  A strict reclassification would force us to reconsider everything about how we think of cars.  In many ways, the cars we have would not be affected–they would stay the same simply out of inertia–but future cars would be far different.  In other ways, our current cars would be affected because so much about how society treats cars would have to change.  The very idea of “cars” would be watered down and consequently, that idea would take a very different place in our society.  The same will be true if same-sex liasons are reclassified as marriages simply because both happen to include things like orgasms and ongoing companionship.

This effect is not merely theoretical; it is already evident among those who consider the eventual reclassification to be a foregone conclusion.  Consider this article in the New York Times from last year.  It reports on the way homosexual relationships tend to work in contrast to heterosexual marriages–specifically that half of homosexual couples have no expectations of sexual fidelity.  In fact, it says that unfaithful homosexual relationships actually last longer than faithful ones.  The article goes on to explain how this will help the institution of marriage to “evolve” even among heterosexuals by casting off unrealistic expectations of faithfulness.  Now, one could perhaps argue that this “evolution” is a good thing (although I certainly would not), but that judgment is not my present point.  What is very clear, however, is that calling same-sex liasons “marriage” will certainly change marriage for everybody.  What is more, the very people asking the rhetorical question know that it will–as the article points out, many try to hide this reality precisely because it could undermine their goal of legally reclassifying their relationships as marriage.  Open “marriages” may exist among heterosexuals, but they are highly peculiar–expectations of fidelity are normal.  It appears that “normal” means something very different in homosexual relationships.

In order to classify these kinds of relationships as marriage, the term will need to be watered down enough to make fidelity an arbitrary choice–something that will change how people treat the institution.  For example, when a husband gets the seven year itch, society has typically recognized it as a temptation that comes and goes and needs to be borne in the meantime.  However, if fidelity is only arbitrarily a part of marriage, then it would be just as legitimate for society to interpret the same situation as a wife unnecessarily repressing her husband’s natural desires.  After all, fidelity is only her chosen preference; why should her mere preference become such a burden to someone she supposedly loves the most?  It seems relatively clear that such a change in attitude will lead to a change in behavior.  The jilted spouse is no longer allowed to feel violated or betrayed; she must be made to feel guilty instead, for she had unreasonable expectations.  And so the victim becomes the villain.  Like orthodoxy, when fidelity becomes optional, it eventually becomes proscribed.

According to the popular theory, when a thing evolves, it usually evolves into something other than what it was before.  “Helping” marriage to evolve is no different.  We need a more honest conversation–one in which those who support the legal reclassification of same-sex liasons as marriage openly recognize the effects of what they propose rather than hiding behind rhetorical questions.

Posted in Apologetics, Chastity, Ethics, Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Incarnate Value: A Case Study on Tradition

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Matt

A few months ago, in the hype surrounding Prince William and Kate’s then-upcoming marriage, a story emerged that Prince William would choose not to wear a ring–apparently because he just doesn’t like jewelry.  Boundless posted about it, and the predictable comments that followed trod the well-worn path of nearly every argument I’ve witnessed concerning tradition.  On the one hand, you have the traditionalists.  They perceived that something was wrong with the choice, but because they could not articulate that perception (and perhaps did not understand it), they came off as saying that tradition should always be followed simply because it is tradition.  If you follow it, you’re morally correct, and if you do not, you are morally wrong.  On the other hand, you had the modernists who deemed that tradition was completely arbitrary and therefore could be dismissed for any reason–or no reason at all.  The ring, they said, is just a piece of metal.  It is a morally irrelevant ritual, and the only thing that makes the ritual symbolic of commitment is a choice to see it that way.  Since that choice is purely personal, there is absolutely no basis for moral judgment whatsoever.

Nearly every debate I’ve seen over any particular tradition ends up along these lines, which is unfortunate, since neither point-of-view is rich enough to really evaluate traditions.  We all know traditions are not moral absolutes, for the latter often demand that we violate the former.  We are allowed to question and, at times, reject them.  At the same time, however, relegating tradition and physical matter to mere symbols with only subjective meaning–in a way in which “merely,” “just,” and “only” are the key words–leads to a highly impoverished view of life which cannot take the world around us seriously.  Instead, I’d like to use this ring issue as a case study in which we examine tradition as a kind of incarnation of moral value–a way in which higher things become enfleshed.

The issue surrounding the wedding ring is all about marital fidelity–a commitment to be entirely faithful (including, but not limited to sexual fidelity) to one’s spouse.  If someone refuses to wear this ring, does that really indicate a rejection of marital commitment?  The answer, I think, is “probably.”

Commitment does not exist in abstraction anymore than humans exist in abstraction–both exist when they are incarnate in the world around us.  For example, if someone punched you in the face, would you accept the excuse that they didn’t really punch you they merely punched some bits of flesh and bone belonging to the real you that you happen to be rather fond of?  After all, we’re more than just flesh and bone, right?  While humans may be more than just flesh and not all flesh is human, we nevertheless are flesh.  It is in precisely this way that wearing a wedding ring is commitment.  Abstract commitment is no commitment at all just as an abstract human isn’t really a human.  Both must be incarnate.  Wearing a ring is marital commitment and a refusal to wear one is a rejection of the same.

But you say “our commitment is incarnate in our actions!”  Indeed it is, but in which ones?   In resisting temptations to divorce and other forms of adultery?  Certainly; if you don’t have that, you don’t have commitment at all.  Nevertheless, bare-minimum commitment is hardly what a spouse looks for.  It would be like eating only when you’re about to starve.  Sure, it’s “enough” in a purely mechanical sense, but that’s precisely the point:  why would a sane person want to reduce it to a purely mechanical sense?  Likewise, why reduce commitment to the mere mechanism of only inserting tab A into slot B rather than into slots C-Z?  In engineering, it is said that perfection in design is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away (while still leaving the essence of the design intact).  It should be obvious, however, that life is deeper than just an engineering problem.  It is not all about tolerances and extremes–it is about living well.  Practicing commitment only when it is being tested to its breaking point is foolishness.  Rituals like wearing a ring give one the chance of making his commitment incarnate even when one is not under assault–to nurture it to withstand those breaking points when they do come.

But you say, “what about people who are allergic to metal, or those who work in a machine shop & have serious saftey concerns, etc?  Are they therefore less comitted?”  Certainly not, any more than someone who has lost an arm is any less human as a result.  Nevertheless, they clearly suffer an injury.  Whether it is mild or severe is up for debate, but it is an injury to commitment to be unable to participate in a key cultural ritual that enfleshes commitment.  A wise person in such a situation would make an extra effort to compensate for the injury by making commitment incarnate in different ritual.  On the other hand, only a fool would arbitrarily take deprivation upon himself for trivial reasons.  Rejecting a ring because one doesn’t like jewelry is akin (in kind, but certainly not degree) to cutting off an arm because one doesn’t like meat.  A sane person who actually does such a thing surely has a deeper reason than simple distaste.  Maybe this reason is good; maybe it is bad.  What we can be certain of, however, is that there is a reason.

But you say, “there are lots of ways to ritualize commitment!  A ring is just one among thousands–each one as good as any other.”  This is true as far as it goes.  Likewise, a person can become incarnate in an infinite variety of ways (skin tones, hair color, height, strength/weakness, intelligence/stupidity etc), but it’s always a combination of particulars which were handed over by those who begat their offspring.  In the same way, meaningful ritual is begotten by those who came before and handed over into the care of their successors.  There are certainly other ways in which commitment could become incarnate than wearing a ring; different cultures have produced an abundance of options.  Nevertheless, the ring was an incarnation that the prince’s culture handed over to him.  It is not merely a little piece of metal or a symbol that he willfully rejects, but an incarnation of commitment that he already posessed.

Perceptive readers will notice that none of this means that tradition and ritual ought never be changed–the key point of contention in the typical argument.  What it does mean is that changing such things is neither trivial nor meaningless–something implied by every commentator who described wedding rings in a way that hinges on “just” or “merely” or “only”.  We are not really in a position to appropriately judge the prince either guilty or innocent.  “He doesn’t like jewelry” is a reason he gave that the media picked up on, but is unlikely to be the whole story.  Those who assign him guilt make themselves into judgmental busybodies, but recognizing the real (not symbolic) meaning of wedding rings that he rejected is not the same thing as a guilty verdict.  Nevertheless, those who assign him innocence by means of shutting their eyes to real meaning impoverish themselves.

Posted in Ethics, Tradition | Leave a comment