It seems like my life has had a theme recently. The sermon this week was another good one. An oldie, but a goodie, if you will. We were reminded that God is always other-oriented in love, and that God’s intention is to bring unity, while the devil works for separation, and that these facts are the basis for all Christian morality: in our marriages, in our friendships, in all our relationships.

Christianity is a very relational religion, isn’t it? I was talking with someone after church about how there are people-oriented people and task-oriented people. But the primary task that Christianity asks of us is to love others the way God loves us, the way Christ loves us. To always privilege love over separation. To always privilege the other over ourselves. And to do it non-abstractly.

It is the opposite of our current cultural training. Look first to your own interests. If you can believe it, I actually know someone who has articulated his relationship theory in terms of the free market: I get something I want out of it, so does she, like in economics where a free, bargained-for exchange leaves both parties thinking they’ve given something of lesser value and gotten something of greater value. Someone out there actually thinks this is a feasible relationship model! Needless to say, he won’t find anyone until he gives that up. Or if he does, they’ll make each other very unhappy and have no access to what is sanctifying about the sacrament of marriage.

In fact, Christian ethics teaches us that the opposite is actually the way to be successful. Give everything! Expect to take a loss! Older couples who are interviewed about what made their marriages successful talked about the importance of remaining friends, and about how bad it is to think of marriage as an exchange, to think of what you deserve. Every day, you have to give 100%. Christian morality is other-oriented. Unity-oriented. For my money, marriage is the best training we can have in Christian ethics. (Not if you’re a free-market spouse, of course. But if you are trying to do it God’s way.)

The whole Christian outlook on life rests on this truth about God’s personality. When we don’t live accordingly, we are denying our God.

The sermon at my church today was about how the Christian is called to love, especially because we should know that we are loved by God without deserving it. In turn, we are called to love the people in our lives although they don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves it! Irrelevant. The Christian message is one of unity, commitment, and caring for others. We don’t really get to choose which people God asks us to love. Our only choice is whether to love them or abandon them.

It’s easy to talk the talk. But what does this mean in your life? Whom has God asked you to love?

It’s not about you.

Love, that is. Love isn’t about you. This is possibly the most important truth that Christianity has to offer our culture’s idolatry of romantic love. So, internet world, listen up.

Someone said to me recently “we have different interests.” He said it as though it meant something. Of course we have different interests: even in a marriage, spouses have different interests. Love is the decision, the choice, to put someone else’s interests above your own. Simple! Hard to do. But simple.

Nobody deserves our love. Nobody! If this man is waiting to love someone until that love suits his own interests, he will never love anyone. He will feel physical attraction, infatuation. But that is a selfish love and nothing to do with Christian ethics.

I’ve been told it is very hard for men to understand the significance of marriage before they’re in it. Married men insist it is about companionship and friendship. Unmarried men have no idea why that matters. Having separate interests is always going to be part of the game. I’d argue that marriage is the best way humanity has to accommodate those separate interests. But “looking out for number one” is the poisonous morality of our age, and it does not lead to love.

Love isn’t about you. Love is all about others. My heart breaks to watch a friend labor over whether he should be with someone: he can’t find the confidence he needs to marry a girl, because he can’t know that it is objectively, absolutely, what he wants. But it never will be. No person can be! His love for her can’t be about him. As long as it is, he won’t find peace.

I have been there, and I wish I could tell this guy about it. I remember being paralyzed by my fear of committing to someone who is imperfect. One day, though, I realized that all my thinking was about me and my own fears and desires.

As long as we go looking for a love that fulfills us, we will find nothing but doubt and we will end up hurting the very people we should be loving. I learned it the hard way. Hopefully, dear reader, you won’t have to.

How do we know we are living a tragedy? How do we tell whether we are sinning? How do we know what God is trying to tell us? This is not an exhaustive answer, but it is a true one.

An example

A friend of mine with great powers of rationalization once took a personality test that told him he was a type that thought of himself as logical, but that he actually sometimes acts on strong, non-rational senses of obligation to certain conclusions or ideas, even when they are wrong, using logic as a tool to justify himself. (I was not surprised!) He came to me, concerned that this explained away his Christian faith.

“What if,” he said, “I’m only Christian because when I was younger (before I was Christian) I had a strong sense that promiscuity was bad, and I felt a duty to follow that moral sense into Christianity, or Christianity validated what I already thought?”

This is the answer I gave him: His reasons for believing are affirmed by his many discussion partners. That is, he talks about it freely, and he responds to good arguments when he hears them. His faith is not unexamined, and reasonable people agree with his reasons.

The place in your life where you can be almost certain there’s trouble is the place where everyone around you, among your respected Christian advisors and especially the people who know you really well and love you, think that you are doing something problematic. If you are committed to an attitude or a course of action that nearly everyone thinks is wrong, or harmful, it may be worth a second look. You might be rationalizing.

My poor friend does have something like that in his life, but he scoffs as soon as a conversation moves in that direction. I think he may have rationalized away the test itself in this instance, which is fitting, ironic, funny, and tragic.

A helpful list

Now, I know that it is hard to see out from our sin. Here is a short list of red flags to help you explore. Where in your life do these touch you?

You might be rationalizing or allowing sin if…

…if a lot of the people around you agree that your actions aren’t good. If you hear the same observation over and over. (Hearing something over and over may also be a good sign God is asking something of you in a positive sense.)

…if you’re drifting away from your good friends and seeking out others who affirm your choices, even if they are less suited to you as friends or peers.

…if there’s a part of your life where you won’t take your own advice.

…if you become defensive or try to end the conversation when people want to talk about it.

…if you are hurting others but you think your own happiness justifies it.

…if you think you are the exception to the rule (e.g., you aren’t like other gamblers, other drinkers, all those other people using dating websites)

Again, the list isn’t exhaustive. But we ought to know that we can shield ourselves from unpleasant truths and that we can become very practiced at it.

Why it matters

Stepping out of sin requires consciously identifying it. It requires an intentional re-direction of the will, which will not be achieved simply by praying, “God keep me from sin” or “God grant that I stop being sinful.” Nope. You’ve got to know you were sinning and turn from it. Nobody said it was easy. God will help us and work with us; after all, he wants us to succeed, but see my last entry for how imperative it is that we actually get in the boat God sends us.

This is part of why Catholics think it is a good idea for people to confess to a priest and do penance. It requires you to examine yourself and to articulate what is wrong. You have to face it. Then, the priest assigns you some task to set things aright, not in the world, but in yourself. Responding with action is a tool, a way of helping a sinner achieve that intentional re-direction of the will.

I know someone who offers a lot of short prayers that God keep him from sin, and give him guidance, but the poor guy is one of the most adrift folks I know these days. God has given him guidance, but God’s guidance requires things of him. Bleh, who wants that? Instead, this guy prays, and assumes that if God doesn’t come down and physically re-direct him or change his emotions for him, he’s free to wander in any direction he chooses.

But that doesn’t work, apparently. The stuff above does! It’s how I figure out my own sins. And addressing them requires work for me just like it does for everyone else.

Apparently a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics argues that infanticide is no different, morally, from abortion, and that therefore it should be permitted. I’ve only read about it on other sites, and at this point all of their links to the Journal and the article itself are dead. I couldn’t find the article on the Journal’s website, either. But read about it here.

The basics of the argument seem to be that a baby is no more a person than a fetus. The authors call babies “potential” rather than “actual” persons. The article seems to have generated some controversy and also death threats against the authors, who insist they are participating in an academic discussion of ethics and not recommending policy. I think that’s probably fair, and for my part, I’m sorry not to be able to read about their understanding of personhood.

It occurs to me that progressives sometimes seem very retrograde.

Thousands of years ago, unwanted children were exposed after birth, left in garbage dumps to die. Abortions were also accomplished by means of drugs, which are mentioned now and then in ancient sources. Armchair philosophers wonder whether humanity progresses morally as time goes on. We’d like to think that we better ourselves as a species, that our ancestors were more primitive, less enlightened, while we, on the other hand, are “watching the world wake up from history.”

Well, there are some landmark developments to point to. One of them is the beginning of Christianity. The early Christians had enormous respect for life, in a culture in which people were fed to animals as entertainment and infants were abandoned in dumps. Early Christians made a practice of saving and adopting these exposed infants. And one of the earliest Christian “how-to” documents (the Didache at 2.2) states that no Christian shall kill a child, whether already born or by an abortifacient. Yup.

Progressives, as it turns out, despite calling themselves progressive, are thousands of years behind the times.

I am at a loss for words. Read this article.

When the Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, N.Y., left the Episcopal Church over disagreements about what the Bible says about sexuality, the congregation offered to pay for the building in which it worshiped. In return the Episcopal Church sued to seize the building, then sold it for a fraction of the price to someone who turned it into a mosque.

. . .

“We can’t sell to an organization that wants to put us out of business,” said Bishop Jefferts Schori, who added that her job is to ensure that “no competing branch of the Anglican Communion impose on the mission strategy” of the Episcopal Church. Indeed she has no complaint with Muslims, Baptists or barkeepers buying Episcopal properties—only fellow Anglicans.

Alright, I’m a bit behind the news because I don’t read it. But I’m told that during the November 2nd election, Oklahoma issued a referendum to its citizens on a proposed amendment to Oklahoma’s constitution which would prohibit Oklahoma courts from considering international law or Sharia law. Muneer Awad, the executive director of Oklahoma’s branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filed a lawsuit claiming that the amendment violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A federal district court judge issued a temporary restraining order on the certification of the results of the referendum, and a hearing on the matter is scheduled to begin today. A quick survey of web-based news sources produces all sorts of opinions, the best of which is on National Review Online. 

Read Muneer Awad’s argument. It’s not boring the way you’d think a legal memorandum would be. The gist of Awad’s argument is this: Awad claims (and I will trust him) that any state action hoping to avoid running afoul of the Establishment Clause must not fail any of three criteria: “State action should have (1) ‘a secular purpose,’ (2) a ‘primary effect’ that ‘neither advances nor inhibits religion,’ and (3) no tendency to foster ‘an excessive government entanglement with religion.'” 

(1) I guess some of the designers and supporters of the proposed amendment have said that they intended it as a means of preserving the Judeo-Christian founding principles of the United States. At first glance, that does sound a bit sectarian and not so secular. But their intentions aren’t actually part of the amendment. Oklahoma’s constitution will not say “Oklahoma shall be a Judeo-Christian state.” Awad notes that courts have considered the intentions of legislators in determining whether the legislation is truly secular. But if we validate their argument (by arguing with it) that they are protecting an essentially Judeo-Christian government, then the whole centuries-long existence of the United States is an unconstitutional state action.  

He quotes legislators expressing fear of the “looming threat of Sharia law.” Hold onto this point. They aren’t afraid of Islam, but Sharia law (at least in this circumstance). Sharia is surely an important and intrinsic part of Islam, but the conflation of the two is confusing.

(2) Does this prohibition inhibit religion? It inhibits the ability of Muslims to seek legal enforcement of religious doctrine from secular courts. Consider the following totally uncontroversial illustration: I used to be in a nonprofit organizations clinic at a law school. Clinics aren’t quite like other classes; we work with clients. Our clinic had three lawyers who watched us and signed off on all the drafting and document filing we did and all the legal advice we gave. I was in divinity school at the time, so I got some of the more religious organizations. I drafted bylaws that said “The board of directors shall be guided by the Holy Spirit.” The clinic’s lawyers like to tell funny stories about clients who want to put in their organizing documents that directors shall “walk in the ways of the Lord.” The lawyers laugh, “That’s totally unenforceable in court. No judge is going to say anyone is or isn’t walking in the ways of the Lord.” Are those reluctant judges inhibiting someone’s religious practice? 

On the other hand, if Sharia expressly permits or demands an action, and Oklahoma law prohibits it, then that might amount to inhibiting religion. For comparison, see the whole huge thing with the Roman Catholic church and canon law and child abuse. The Muslims aren’t the only ones with a legal code that sometimes competes with our secular legal system. For what it’s worth, I think I might be fine with a constitutional amendment that says Roman Catholic canon law doesn’t carry legal weight in our courts. 

(3) On the other hand, sometimes legislatures do actually codify the canon law and church polity of certain denominations. What do you all think of that? Government entanglement with religion is unavoidable to the extent that government must at some points touch religion, if only to say, “this is our boundary.” But how is allowing judges to consider Sharia law not more government entanglement in religion?

Let’s go back to the difference between Islam and Islamic law. In a separate part of his memorandum (page 19), Awad asserts that “because Muslims comprise a class ‘characterized by [an] unpopular trait,’ namely their adherence to Islam, the burden the Sharia Ban places on them reflects a ‘special likelihood of bias on the part of the ruling majority’ that the Court may review closely.” Is this really all about Muslims? Maybe. Is adherence to Islam an “unpopular trait”? By the numbers. Is it possible that seventy percent of voting Oklahomans are a biased ruling majority? Maybe. We should be ready to protect unpopular minorities. But is this really all about Muslims?

Or is it about law? 

Courthouses sometimes try to display the Ten Commandments. But no court will try to enforce the commandment against covetousness. Courts will enforce a prohibition on murder, but not because it is in the Ten Commandments. And if Sharia says we shouldn’t murder, the courts won’t allow murder just to avoid agreeing with Sharia.

What is the source of law in the United States? Legislatures. Judges. Administrative agencies. These people write out particular laws. But what legitimates our laws? We have to wade back into those Christian principles. (Eeek! Put on some rain boots, you don’t want to get this religious mess all over your shoes.) Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) The Christian religion came about under a government (in some ways, a fairly secular one), and Christian teaching acknowledged the legitimacy of this non-Christian government (Romans 13:1-7). The New Testament recognizes that in some sense the “Prince of this world” is not God. Mankind has been left to govern itself. The laws of the United States may be based on Judeo-Christian principles or morality, but they are the laws of men, not of God. That’s probably the most foundational of our Judeo-Christian (read, honestly, “protestant Christian”) “founding” principles. The very first thing we acknowledge is that these are the laws of men.

Islamic law may simply be inescapably at odds with this understanding of law and human society. Islamic law is a legal code given by God himself, through the Koran and Mohammed. Islam had its beginnings in military territorial conquest. It never set out to be a religion existing beneath a secular government. And that tension is apparent in nearly every secular nation where sizable populations of Muslims reside. Once more, just for good measure, just to make sure I’m tarring everyone with the same brush, remember Roman Catholic canon law. Remember all the to-do about Kennedy and whether he owed his allegiance to Rome or to the American people. 

The United States is a pluralistic nation no matter what aspect of it you are measuring. Different political parties, different ethnicities, different religions. Democracy is a compromise. Governance is “bottom-up” before it is “top-down.” But then, of course, all those laws we men create are turned back upon us. No man is above the law; we live under rule of law. But how can law rule in any just way if everyone gets his own corpus of laws? Or if we divide up citizens by religion and declare that they must live under different laws? (Should we put on our equal protection hats for a moment?) In an earlier post of mine, I offered that two omnipotent beings cannot logically coexist. Neither can two separate legal systems, or two opposing laws.

The United States is a secular government. Every religious person has to deal with that fact, and it isn’t straightforward for any of us. So that nonprofit organizations legal clinic warns clients that certain of their bylaws will not be enforced by any court of law, and if we want to make covetousness illegal, we can write letters to our legislators until they write us such a law, and then it will be law–not because it’s in the Bible, but because our democratic process made it so. 

Refusing to honor Sharia law in secular courts has nothing (well, ahem, almost) to do with Islam. That “looming threat” isn’t quite Islam, but the erosion of a secular legal system which exists to extend the same legal protections to Muslims, Christians, Atheists, and everyone else.

One God:

 

We all worship the God of Abraham

 

A question for adherents to any of the world’s monotheistic religions: Do you believe that we are all worshiping the same God by different names? 

A lot of people say “yes!” Allah is just God in a different language, not the name of a different god! That much is true, and I’d love it if everyone could get past that particular elementary hurdle. In a way, because Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all claim that there is only one God, they cannot be worshiping different gods. 

Monotheism is a doctrine of God which states that there is only one God, or, put another way, that God is one. That subtle difference in phrasing is meant to highlight the idea that if there is only one God, that being, since it is absolute, cannot be a predicate. Or put another way, there isn’t a man-made definition of “God” and we’ve only found one being which fits that definition, but rather God precedes any descriptions, being God first and described second. As my favorite professor of Medieval Theology puts it, “We know there is a type of thing which we call a dodo, and at some point in history there was only the last dodo left. One dodo. monododoism? But, there isn’t a type of thing which we call God, of which there is only one.” Rather, the singularity of God is a predicate to God’s existence.

Anselm of Canterbury suggests that God is “that than which nothing greater can be imagined.” Logically, then, God must be one. First, imagine a being as great and as powerful as you can, say an omnipotent being. (Nothing is more powerful than an omnipotent being.) Now, add a second one. Two omnipotent beings? Nope. It’s logically impossible (sorry Star Trek, I don’t buy the Q). Each being’s power is bounded by the other being’s power. So, anything worth being called “God” would have to be unique. 

If God exists, there can be only one. If there can be only one, then all monotheistic religions are, in a sense, worshiping the same being. 

On the other hand, it may be contended that this one being has whatever particular attributes it has and those who know it according to those attributes know the being, and everyone else knows only a fantasy. If I say the One True God has red hair and you say the One True God has black hair, and the One True God in fact has black hair, then you worship the One True God, and I worship nobody. There is no such being as the one I imagine (a One True God with red hair).

Not One God:

I want to try out an analogy. I’d love feedback.

I argue that a religion may be defined as a system of beliefs and practices which aims at conquering, somehow, the problem of evil in the world, whatever that evil is understood to be. We will allow that, for the most part, religions are internally consistent. They make sense on their own terms. One such term common to most religions is that of exclusive possession of absolute or salvific truth. The claims we make about God affect the ways we interact with God and pursue “salvation.”

The Analogy:

Imagine we are playing an arcade game: one of those where we throw little basket balls at a distant hole. Imagine that there is a partition between us and the hole, so that we cannot see it. Imagine that we have a choice of objects of different shapes and sizes to throw at it. Only one type of object will fit into the hole; and when we pay for the game, we must choose a type. The hole is of a definite size and shape.

I believe the hole is big and circular, so I choose to throw beach balls at it. You believe the hole is small and square, so you choose to throw little blocks at it. We agree there is a hole beyond the partition. We believe in the same hole.

But in some ways, we don’t believe in the same hole, and our beliefs about the hole cause us to act in different ways, because winning the game depends on throwing the appropriate shapes at the hole. We believe in different holes. Our differences matter a great deal.

Someone will come along and say, Why can’t there be a hole big enough to accommodate all the things we might throw at it? All analogies have their failings. But that isn’t what I’m discussing above. I am discussing three monotheistic religions, each of which claims exclusivity. There is a separate argument to be had between universalist pluralists (such as Buddhists) on the one side and all exclusive religions (whether or not they are monotheistic) on the other. Another day.