Freeeeeeedom?

Between the Christian and the liberal democratic tradition there must always be some element of enmity. What either understands as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage.

– David Bentley Hart, In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (2009), p. 90-91

I really like this quote. Freedom is an extremelly important idea for the Christian. In Paul’s great letters it is often one of the main ways he explains the gospel. We have been set free from fear, oppression, death, slavery to all sorts of powers, harmful ways of living and thinking. Most importantly, we have been set free to love and know God. 

Freedom is also an extemely important idea for the liberal democratic tradition, and your average joe-the-plumber living contently within that worldview. Freedom means that you can do anything, go anywhere, and develop your own life plan. You are free to come up with what you think is most important and let that orientate your life, perhaps even spend all your life chasing after it.

And here’s the animosity. The Chrisitian thinks any freedom that doesn’t free you to know and love God is not really freedom at all. The average liberal democrat (i.e. most contemporary western people) thinks that any freedom that tells you what to do and comes loaded with a conception of the good is not really freedom.

Play me off, Bob… 

Faith & Scepticism

“We walk by faith, not by sight”

– 2 Corinthians 5.7

In the Ancient world, there was a school of philosophy called scepticism. This word didn’t quite have the same connotations of pessimism, laziness and doubt as it does today. Rather, it meant someone who was first and foremost an inquirer, an investigator. They wanted to know the truth, and were trying to hunt it down.

Ancient sceptics thought that as you investigated an issue, you would turn up good reasons for one idea, and then good reasons for an opposite idea. As you tried to find the truth of the matter, you were confronted with two incompatible options, each which seemed as good and reasonable as the other. And so it turns out that we never have reason to commit ourselves one way or the other. We suspend judgment. We adopt a detached and uncommitted attitude to whatever the issue was.

If this is the case – how did sceptics think they could find their way around life? How can we commit ourselves to beliefs? How did this not paralyze them?

Sceptics thought that all that is available to us is to ‘live by appearences’ or ‘live by sight.’ That is, they thought that just because they cannot commit themselves to something 100% doesn’t stop things appearing to them in a certain way. Being rationally uncommitted or ‘on the fence’ doesn’t do away with other desires that help us get by – habit, desire, want of approval, fear of the law, basic needs, social enculturation and so on.

Paul told the early Corinthians Christians (who were, to point out the terribly obvious, Ancient Greeks) to live by faith, not by sight. Could he have meant: because we know God in Jesus, we have a kind of certainty that the sceptics were right to point out is never available to humans otherwise. Therefore, we don’t need to settle for living by sight like the sceptics prescribed, but can have a kind of certainty that can motivate and direct us through all sorts of desires, fears, needs, cultures, and laws?

Dogmatism, Anathema Theories, and the ‘Handmaiden of Theology’

A friend recently introduced me to an article by the Australian philosopher Bruce Langtry. Langtry is also a Christian, and in a brief piece attempts to sketch ways in which Christianity and philosophy may come together and come apart. Here is a quote I agree with:

The intellectual vice of dogmatism enters in only when one is unwilling to subject one’s beliefs to critical scrutiny, and when one is in principle closed to the possibility of abandoning one’s beliefs in the light of good objections. But there is no reason why a Christian must or should be dogmatic in this sense.

– Bruce Langtry ‘A Christian and a Philosopher’, The Briefing #121, p.7

I totally agree with this statement, and I suspect Saint Paul would too. Paul seemed open to abandoning his faith in the light of good objections. He wrote ,’If Christ has not been raised [from the dead] our preaching is useless and so is your faith…If only for this life we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.’ (1 Corinthians 15.14, 19) If someone could convince Paul that Jesus did not in fact rise from the dead, then he says he would not be a Christian.

However, I like this statement less:

Certain philosophical theories are incompatible with Christianity. For example, cultural relativism is the doctrine that moral statements correspond merely to the conventions of a particular society and possess no universal validity. We Christians must reject cultural relativism at many points, for example, in what we say about God’s nature and about sin.

Let me first say what doesn’t bother me about this, so that I’m not misunderstood. It is not that Langtry switches from a tolerant stance to a dogmatic stance; that at one moment is saying that Christians shouldn’t be dogmatic, and then at the next he is saying that there are views Christians can never endorse. I don’t think this second statement interferes with his earlier one about freedom from dogmatism. You can, of course, reject viewpoints thoughtfully and fairly without being a dogmatist – philosophers do this all the time.

What bothers me about this second statement is the way philosophical theories can cloud the message of Christianity, and can sneak their way into the centre. Since when was the message of Christianity: ‘that moral conventions are not merely the conventions of a particular society and possess universal validity’? Since when was Jesus concerned about cultural relativism? I thought he was on about the Kingdom of God being near.

This approach to Christianity and Philosophy carves the intellectual world into good and bad theories – good theories which explain and justify Christian belief; bad theories which are incompatible with Christianity or which call it into question. The picture seems far too simplistic to me, and rejects outright the possibility of the anathema philosophical theories calling into question the theories which the Christians happen to hold onto.

This approach mistakes theories which people formulate as an attempt to articulate their Christian belief with their Christian belief itself – they mistake their theories for gospel truth.

Imagine you are a Nineteenth-Century British Evangelical who is quite sure, though you have never really looked into it, that it is good and proper for women not to vote. Are you ever going to read John Stuart Mill’s The Subjugation of Women and think that it could have anything of value to tell you? Probably not, since it would most likely fall into the anathema philosophical theories camp.

I suspect that the reason something like this view gains any force is because many Christian philosophers and theologians think that the only purpose of philosophy is to help theologians to do their job – to clarify concepts and provide forms of reasoning. That is, it has no particular contribution to make, outside of how it can be helpful for theology. Langtry says something like this when he says:

Insofar as theology has this broad scope, it cannot avoid philosophy…Theologians have little option but to use philosophical premises in developing their theological theories…Theologians must have recourse to philosophical arguments.

In the same magazine another writer, Phil Dowe, writes:

Studying philosophy…can teach you to think logically. It can train you in the art of convincing people with reasons. It can unlock for you…the way people think.

– Phil Dowe, ‘Philosophy? You Mustn’t Be Serious?’, p.8

If your conception of the proper purpose and function of philosophy is limited to ‘helping theology do it’s job’, then it makes sense to divide the intellectual world up into good and bad theories. But what if philosophy is much more than this? Christians try to listen to scientists for reasons other than it will help them do theology, Christians often listen to political commentators and art critics for other reasons than it will help them do theology, Christians often listen to educational and medical theorists for reasons other than it will help them do theology – why is philosophy then mostly only thought of by Christians as being worthwhile and helpful insofar as it will help you do theology?

This, of course, begs far more questions than it answers. But don’t all good blog posts…

On Money and Privacy

We are fascinated with privacy. Gossip magazines, stories about dual identities and secret affairs, and TV shows like Lie to Me and Big Brother disclose this fascination of ours pretty obviously. There is something alluring about the possibility of a secret identity, a secret relationship, secret passions, a secret past. At the same time there is something comforting, warm and even liberating about a secret place, a secret hobby, a secret dream, a secret song, a secret ability –  a secret thought-life which is not open for others to critique, question, probe or trample all over.

But is this a good thing? I realise this is a pretty broad question to throw up – is privacy in all instances and at all times an excellent or a harmful thing? – but it’s an important question. What reactions do you immediately have to it?

A friend has recently introduced me to the prose of Joan Didion. She is a brilliant writer, penning some real insights about human nature and American life. Writing in the 1960s, she has this to say about America’s fascination with millionaire Howard Hughes:

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the west, trailing a legend of desperation and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favourite people and our favourite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted…That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that…There has always been divergence between our officials and our unofficial heroes. Hughes is the last private man, the hero we no longer admit.

-          Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), p. 71-72

In this excerpt Didion suggests that the reason Americans made a hero out of Hughes was because he was a symbol of complete freedom. Legends circulated that he would buy up entire hotels for just him to use, that he would buy movie stars to only work in his movies, that he would pay a barber large amounts of money to be standing-by 24/7 in case he ever wanted a haircut. His money and his power were the means to mobility and privacy. This is both an interesting suggestion about why money and power (often thought to be materialistic ends in themselves) are so valued, and also a dark suggestion about what desires may actually drive human beings.  A suggestion that there is something destructive embedded within the American dream.

There is a delicious irony to Didion’s suggestion. America secretly admired a man who has complete privacy, because it would not be publicly polite to admit that you actually value and desire privacy above all things. America secretly admired the man who had the means to live completely secretly.

Perhaps contemporary fascination with promiscuous NRL players, outspoken radio personalities, adulterous politicians, and idle hedonists like Paris Hilton, is generated from that same place as America’s fascination with Hughes.

Christianity has bad news for those who would chase all their life after ‘personal freedom, mobility, privacy’ as the greatest good in life. And it has a word of warning to those of us who love our privacy a little too much:

The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later.  (1 Timothy 5.24)

…Either way, they appear. Privacy is in fact, a myth. Don’t romanticize it, let alone secretly chase after more and more of it.

Ethics With a Telescope

The distinction between flesh and spirit in not dualistic but eschatological. Paul’s contrast between flesh and spirit is not between matter and mind but between the old, fallen humanity of Adam and the new humanity of Christ. ‘Flesh’ refers to the fallen humanity; ‘spirit’ to the redeemed, eschatological humanity which has already taken shape in Christ and begins, through the Spirit, to take place in those who are being conformed to his image, when and as God pleases.

– Colin Gunton, Act and Being (2002), p. 114

This brief remark from Colin Gunton crystallizes a point which is of great importance in Christian ethics, and which ultimately sets it apart from other ethical systems. Ethics is often discussed in the New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul, in deceptively simple terms of choosing between actions of the ‘flesh’ and actions of the ‘spirit’ (e.g. Romans 8, Galatians 5). What this means is not that there are earthy, physical, sweaty, dirty and all-too-human actions on the one hand and lofty, heavenly, blissful, pure and divine actions on the other, and that therefore ethics is somehow a matter of trying to be less human and more like God.

Rather, what it means is that ethics needs to tell a story. Christian ethical systems, Christian ethical decisions, Christian ethical reasoning and Christian ethical prescriptions need to tell a story about God, Jesus, humanity and – crucially – the future. It needs to tell a story about two different ages, a story about the difference between the past and the future. It needs to tell the story of what human life was meant to be like, and what, because of God’s acting in Jesus, it will one day be like. This is the context in which these terms ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ find their meaning, and to rip them out of this serves only to obscure things.

Christian ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan is helpful in continuing this thought, arguing that this dichotomy brings a simplicity to ethics, and can be utilized as a decision procedure. He writes:

The final question is whether this life, this act, this character, belong to the renewed and transformed world which God is bringing into being…In the light of that question, the issues of morality which are as complex and diverse as the created world which gives rise to them are reduced to a stark and awesome simplicity. We can speak of the simple choice for or against God’s new creation, the simple alternative of a broad way and a narrow way, the straightforward either-or opposition of sin and virtue.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 259-260

Against Individualism in Ethics

And so Saint Paul continues, ‘I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or a clanging symbol. I may have gifts of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing.’ (1 Corinthians 13.1-2, NEB). In reading these familiar words we must be alert to the context of discussion in which they are situated: the greatest achievements which Paul thinks meaningless without love are gifts of the Spirit, vocations, particular callings to which one is summoned individually, which will distinguish this man’s service from his neighbor’s and will mark his history out as a unique and personal history. It is not that Paul deprecates the individual and personally distinctive; it is not that he suspects all striking manifestations of it a secret hypocrisy.

His point is simply that a life considered solely as the fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working-out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession, ‘Jesus is Lord’, so the variety of forms of life are unified within a common form of life according to God’s order, the life of love.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 222

Individualism is a pretty attractive idea. We tend to admire people who manage to achieve some sort of individualism against the odds. We admire people who think for themselves, who refuse to be defined by the society or tradition they are a part of. Rogue figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust (or Elizabeth Bennet) insist on not fitting into any predefined role society may have had for them, and of not letting any group, institution or one perspective tell them who they really are, or tell them what they ought to aspire to. As Samuel Coleridge once said, heroes invent the terms and categories by which their life will be judged.

This leads to the question – what is the opposite of individualism? If the Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House who leaves and slams the door is a heroic individual, what would we say of the Nora that stayed?

The quote above from O’Donovan suggests that the opposite of individualism need not be ‘conservatism’, ‘submissiveness’, ‘resignation’ or ‘ordinariness’. He suggests that the opposite of individualism is seeing your life not as the subjective expression of a unique take on life, but as the subjective expression of something universal. If individualism is the subjective expression of the particular, the contingent, the unique, the self-constructed then it’s opposite is the subjective expression of the universal, the fixed, the necessary, the received. Construing things this way shows that it is not the moment of subjective ethical expression which is under threat, but the source of this expression.

O’Donovan argues that all Christian ethics needs to be an expression of love. Christians are free to perform ethical action and engage in ethical reasoning and to still call what they are doing Christian so long as it seeks to be an expression of love, particularly the kind of love that God displayed on the cross. The person who speaks in tongues of angels, does so from love. The person who prophesies, does so from love. The person who lives in faith, does so from love. The Christian who buys only Fair Trade chocolate, does so from love. The Christian who befriends someone who is utterly different to them, does so from love. The Christian who takes a position on abortion, war, torture or sexual ethics, does so from love.

This quote from O’Donovan draws attention to an important and unique characteristic of Christian ethics. Christians hold that the ethical life has a certain shape – the life of love. Amongst all the complexity and subjectivity of contemporary life Christians hold that ethical living is living which is built on and shaped by a particular non-negotiable – love. Henry David Thoreau once said that living well, living ethically, is a matter of ‘dwelling as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ Christianity replies, there is only one channel. Life which aspires to fulfill a personal destiny is vacant abstraction, and morally speaking is neither here nor there. Life which attempts to embody something universal, is good.

To many, this idea of subjectively expressing something universal is much more attractive than subjectively expressing something of your own making. Which idea are you more attracted to as the task of ethical living?

Ethics and Reality – Part 2: Thoreau and Paul’s Reply

There is an alternative to Hume’s critique, which is the insistence that we cannot help but be morally affected by the world in which we live, and the more we give ourselves over to feel and see the moral dimensions in life, the more we will see that ethics and reality are inextricably linked. I’ll unpack this response through some obtuse statements from Henry David Thoreau which seems to echo Paul’s ethics of the New Testament. Thoreau wrote:

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and the night…It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep…To be awake is to be alive. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Thoreau suggests that there is a particularly spiritual time of day when reality seems closer, or perhaps when we are closer to reality. He calls this morning because it suggests coming out of a darkness; coming out of a state of resignation, non-engagement and withdrawal, to experience reality in a fresh way. New Testament scholar Tom Wright explains the ethical thought of Paul in a similar vein. In explaining Ephesians 5.14 which screams, ‘Awake of sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Messiah will give you life’, Wright says:

In other words: it’s time to wake up! Living at the level of the non-heavenly world around you is like being asleep; worse, it’s like that for which sleep is a metaphor – it’s like being dead. Lying, stealing, sexual immorality, bad temper and so on (Paul lists them all in a devastating short passage) are forms of death, both for the person who commits them and for all whose lives are touched by their actions. They are ways of sleeping a deadly sleep. It’s time to wake up, he says. Come alive to the real world, the world where Jesus is Lord, the world into which your baptism brings you, the world you claim to belong to when you say in the creed that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead. What we all need from time to time is for someone to say, ‘It’s time to wake up! You’ve been asleep long enough! The sun is shining and there’s a wonderful day out there! Wake up and get a life!’ — Tom Wright, Surprised By Hope (2007), p. 265

The common link between Wright’s remarks on the ethical thought of Paul and Thoreau’s cryptic words is the theme of being awake. They liken acting morally in the world to being awake and experiencing reality, and allowing that reality to affect and change you. It’s interesting to note that this kind of language was employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement – calling Americans to wake up to the immorality around them, to throw off the sleep of the past.

This is not so much a reply to Hume, as offering a different picture of how ethics and reality may be related. But do you find either more compelling? Do you think that a deep knowledge of reality, possibly including a deep knowledge of humanity, society, science and God, would have necessary ethical implications? Or do you think that ethics is something totally separate?