Conversation Part III: Morality - Theistic, Christian and Otherwise

(continued from previous)

The conversation on the moral superiority of religion vs. atheism is in a way not interesting to me. If that argument were a horse race, mine would still be in the stable, biding his time, thoughtfully munching hay. As I've tried to say, I don't think being religious or having faith is itself any kind of virtue precisely because I do not recognize any strict epistemological dichotomy between faith and reason. (This is why I always gag when I hear someone lauding 'people of faith' in the political realm. The grouping 'people of faith' is beyond vacuous. What a stupid category of people to be in favor of.)

The only reason I pick up the gauntlet here is because the 'new atheists' so consistently seem to hold the opposite view in that they portray having religious faith in general as an inherently morally dangerous enterprise and thereby not holding such beliefs as inherently morally superior. (This is especially so for Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, Dennett is much more sophisticated as is perhaps to be expected.) They do this without significantly distinguishing between different religions based on the content of their teachings and without distinguishing between actions taken by nominal believers that utterly contradict the tradition's teaching (hypocrites) and those taken in response to agreement with the broadest streams of the tradition.

At the same time that they do not deign to actually engage the content of the traditions they lump together, they speak from a perspective which is impossible to define and, as I will argue, is unable to defend its own moral standing on the same grounds it criticizes the theistic worldview. So we have a group of people speaking as if from a moral high-ground which they are completely unable to give a reasonable defense for holding, denouncing another group that, however in-credible you find its basis, at least has very specific internal reasons for holding its moral perspective. This confusion is why my horse is out of the barn. I am not out here to win the argument between theism and atheism or religion and secularism, but to significantly reframe it.

First I will describe how materialist or secularist assumptions do not entail a morality. Second, I will revisit the case of the morally hypocritical atheist. Third, I will consider some secular sources of morality and look at how the materialist's own assumptions interact with his moral beliefs. Fourth, I will attend to an important mistaken conclusion from the case for morality depending on something transcendent. Fifth, I will return to the case of the one inherently dangerous element that can attend secular morality.

It is of course very common for philosophers or theologians to speak analogically of 'height' or 'transcendence'. The secularist or materialist worldview on the other hand is a flattened perspective. The strict materialist or secularist is one who insists on understanding everything immanently and thereby cuts off the possibility of appealing to any external criteria. The mechanism of flattening a worldview comes in re-description. The materialist points to a perceived dimension of height or transcendence and reduces it to another, immanent, level of explanation - for example the biological, political, psychological or economic. Viewing everything flatly doesn't change what counts as morality, it redescribes behavior previously thought to be moral on another, amoral, level.

So not only is there no longer recourse to terms like God to defend desirable criteria, anything substituted for God is either itself a transcendental term, belief in which is equally or even more inexplicable, or, if it is truly immanent, fails to be able to provide criteria able to qualitatively assess the immanent world.

I propose that for the word morality to have any meaning, the morals must actually represent something really real, not merely an appearance of one thing that is really just some natural epiphenomenon.

The atheist employing the idea of morality derived from universal human feelings or common sense is missing the fact that flattening the world into two dimensions has removed the possibility of morality even being a useful word. The flat world is the world reduced of its transcendent dimension which is the dimension ideas like morality lived in. In the flattened world, morality is no longer really right or wrong - who could have the authority to say so? - it is just whatever the interest group or species with the power to do so defines it as. If we're going to start down the road of reductionism, we should have the courage to follow through to its logical conclusions unless compelled otherwise.

The game of reductionism is a dangerous one, its sword really is two-edged. If one starts with an assumed naturalism or materialism in order to say that all kinds of religious phenomena are just expressions of various natural phenomena, fine. But to be consistent one has to be able to swallow the conclusion that human morality, all of it, is just a chimera as well. If one dislikes that conclusion and knows of some other way of coming up with a basis for morality, I'm more than willing to listen. But beware, as Hitchens mentions in his book (and then ignores the implications of): nobody has been able to come up with a logically convincing and consistent secular basis for morality at least since David Hume pointed out the impossibility of bridging the gap from is to ought. As in, these are the facts; therefore, this is or is not as it should be. No pile of facts is big enough to constitute a single qualitative judgement on the rightness or wrongness of any other fact. If you can't provide a foundation either, then you have to admit that with respect to morals the theist and the atheist are on exactly the same ground relative to one another.

The theist operates upon a morality consistent with his worldview which is itself largely based on faith, the atheist operates upon a morality he has no rational basis for but takes to be correct based on faith. The atheist cannot provide a rational defense of the reality of his morality given his metaphysical views for exactly the same reason that the theist cannot coerce belief in the ground of his morality. The theist has at least the luxury of being internally consistent in his views, the atheist does not, and the discomfort of this leads to all manner of logical abuse.

This amorality of materialism is where my point of the impossibility of a morally hypocritical atheist originates. We've agreed, atheism as such, has no moral content and I am happy to add that neither does theism. What morality a theist holds comes from the character of the god he believes actually exists. The work is done on the level of faith that God exists. But once this is believed, the basis for morals, for good or ill, is firmly in place. The atheist believes himself to be 'neutral' or without any faith commitments as regards the existence of any gods. I don't buy it, but for the sake of argument, fine - he has no faith in regards to the existence of God or gods. He still hasn't explained how he could begin to defend morality from its detractors or conjure up a particular moral perspective, let alone one from which to denounce the theist from.

(Another hypothesis might be that one could just be a hypocritical human being. I have no idea what this would mean. The (biological?) definition of 'human being' implies no morals in and of itself. For example, let's say I'm a human being that just happens to enjoy rape and murder. But those are such value-laden terms! Let's try to be more neutral and objective. Really I just like (or rather am programmed) to spread my genetic material and get rid of competitors for successful completion of such. Perhaps this behavior is part and parcel of being human like it is for so many other purely biologically determined species. After all, we don't speak of bacteria committing rape or wolves murdering. They're just animals being animals, the perfectly flat biological definition of which rules out morality or immorality. For me to be hypocritical in my actions, I would have to hold some further belief about humanity that entailed that the forceful spreading my genes and disposing of rivals was wrong. If I don't believe any such thing then maybe I just have a different idea of humanity than someone who does. Such a one would either need to convince me that their idea of humanity is the right one or else how true morality can be derived without any tradition-based view of humanity.)

Frankly I find the solution of morality coming from 'human solidarity' to beg as many questions as it attempts to answer. I am not convinced humans have such an inborn idea of solidarity with their species. My evidence for this is strictly empirical. Even if they did though, this would not necessarily constitute morality. At most I could go along with the human animal having an evolved sense of protection of its own extended kin network or tribe; one protects and cares for those sharing one's own genetic material. But this is not morality anymore than it would be for any other species. A Water Buffalo protecting her calf from a pack of Lions might look noble to you and me (because we're anthropomorphizing), just as the human mother going without food to feed her child might bring tears to our eyes. But come on, set the sentimentality aside for a minute and let's really follow the skeptical rabbit hole all the way down. If morality is just nature's way of tricking the individual organism into caring about the next generation and the genetic community's survival more than its own, then we have not yet found something that could rightly be called morality.

For another way of showing why secular alternative sources for morality are not logically compelling, allow me to illustrate how reductionist skepticism of religious morality works just as well on secular morality by translating a paragraph intended to dismiss the specificity of religiously derived morals. I will put the original vocabulary in parentheses and my suggested substitutes in brackets.

"To invoke a (heavenly)[common-sense secular] morality you must be specific in your judgments. If (God)[reason or conscience] told you this or that action is unethical, be prepared for an answer that will get you no where close to justice. (God)[Reason] tells you its wrong? Well (he)[it] tells me it's right. This is the kind of relativism we keep (out of)[in] real courtrooms for a reason. You can swear on the (Bible)[human solidarity or the categorical imperative] (or not), but the moment you pull it to your side to defend yourself you will be very quickly dismissed." [Because why in the world should anyone else care if you think one should feel solidarity with the species or only act in a way that one could consistently will that everyone followed a similar course of action. What if they happen to think that that's perfect nonsense and choose to (unhypocritically) act in whatever way they please?]

My belief that reductionistic worldviews do not have sufficient criteria to muster any morality whatsoever is the reason that secular humanism - so proud of its morality - is, and always will be, so utterly unappealing to me. Philosophically it contains all of the 'weaknesses' of Christianity and nihilism without the consistency of either. Secular humanist thinkers who attempt to defend morality are, in my view, just sentimentalists unwilling to give up the ghost. The only philosopher's doubt who gives me pause is the nihilistic laughter of a Nietzsche. If there is no God then there really is nothing.

Allow me just to anticipate another common objection before it's made. It is often said that the theist who argues for the dependence of morality upon a worldview including a certain kind of God as I do (or at least some other kind of transcendental principle), is demeaning humanity and himself. The argument goes that humanity had morality before religion - people knew it was wrong to kill before they had the ten commandments (Though if it were really such universal common sense, then why would it still happen so much?) - and that further it is scary to assume that any particular theist would be out raping and pillaging if only he lost certain of his beliefs about God.

It is important to see why this misses the point completely.

I do not think that I would go out and commit a whole slew of abominable acts if I woke up tomorrow completely lacking in faith. I would probably continue in largely the same behavior I do now based upon what I have been taught is right and wrong (some of which very well might be wrong). The difference is that I would no longer have any rational reason for committing moral acts and refraining from immoral ones. I would still believe that rape and murder were wrong but I would no longer have any reason why they were.

The fallout of the above is that while both the Christian and the materialist atheist can be moral, and both probably will have some type of morality, the Christian must be moral, while the materialist's flattened worldview makes morality optional, a commitment of faith not derived from his more fundamental commitments. This means that materialist atheists or any others who assume their own neutrality must give up their presumably privileged position from which they adjudicate the morals of others.

So again we come around to the point of a certain danger inherent in secular morality. I am not reneging on my point of the moral neutrality of theism vs. atheism in general. The danger of secular morality is not that it doesn't have any morals, or has worse morals, but in its utter confidence in their rightness; its perceived lack of faith. Faith seeks assurance, secular moral reasoning seeks, and too often thinks it has found, certainty. This is why (at least three of) the 'new atheists' sound so like fundamentalists to much of even their atheistic audience. They are so unabashedly confident in the way that only one who believes his ideas derive from reason alone can be. (Atheist fundamentalists largely share a philosophy of knowledge with their Christian cousins. Fundamentalism in Christianity has not to do with the doctrines believed but in how one thinks those beliefs are arrived at; not with what is believed but how those beliefs are held. Orthodox Christians have been around for millenia, fundamentalists are a very modern phenomenon and, to my mind, are basically heretics.)

The Christian may take decisive action, but if she is thinking Christianly, she must do so in fear and trembling. She may err greatly, but if she is a Christian, she is aware of this possibility just about better than any, called so often as she is to repent for past mistakes. If she continues to consciously err in disregard of her professed beliefs then she is a hypocrite and should be named as such. The strict materialist as we have seen cannot be called a hypocrite if he denies the reality of any morality. But if he does feel a moral calling, the secular moralist, if he fools himself into thinking he has banished faith and proceeds by the pure light of reason, will come to his conclusions without-a-doubt and will proceed without caution. Woe to those who get in his way!

This goes to the point about the dangerous confidence of a nation like America. I don't necessarily disagree with defenses of the pleasures and privileges of living in America. The point I was making didn't have to do with life in America, but the life of America and Americans on the rest of the world. The Roman empire was undoubtedly a fine place to live too, if you were a citizen. But I hardly think the Romans patting of themselves on the back for the height of their civilization went over that well with those unfortunate enough to be labeled barbarians. The confidence of America in its status as such a great (the best!) place to live is why it has been so damned confident spreading its wonderful way of life to places like the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Central America and Iraq, countries and civilizations whose "thanks but no thanks" isn't very readily listened to. "No," says America, "You don't understand how great it is to be an American. Just try it!"

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Conversation part II: Present and Future Focus in Christianity

(continued from previous)

For the sake of the current discussion we'll call the two elements of the Christian tradition under consideration by the shorthand of present and future focus. The present focus is the spirituality of everydayness, the cultivation of moment-by-moment awareness. It includes both the consider the lilies stuff and the validation of finite historical human life itself. The future focus is eschatology, the orientation toward an ultimate end stuff.

Now when I talk about this as a strand within Christian thought, I don't mean the kind of strand that can be pulled out and employed on it's own. Pulling one strand out, any more than hypothetically, unravels the whole thing. (If you follow the metaphor, this is precisely what I take secular culture to have done: pulled out of traditional cultures the elements that it liked while ignoring their overall context. To switch metaphors, I take the ethics of secularism to be a kind of plucking of religious fruit which ignores the roots necessary to actually produce this fruit in the first place.) So, though the strands of Christian teaching can be talked about to some extent independently, they are always interrelated and when separated from one another completely, snap, so to speak. Perhaps it would have been better to speak of the sides of coins which are much more obviously just different angles of the same reality.

While I would understand why a secular onlooker would counsel the religious believer to just develop certain aspects of religion and ignore others (because this is precisely what he has done) the Christian cannot understand this as any more than being told to try and run faster by hopping on one leg.

Given these two distinctive strands of Christian teaching, we turn to some common criticisms and problems they are alleged to lead to. Many would argue that a person is at great risk of abdicating her everyday responsibilities to the extent that she gets caught up in mystical ideals of living in the moment, and to the degree that she thinks about the afterlife, she will ignore the needs of life around her. Notice that in both cases the Christian is criticized for the same thing: a lack of focus on the material, 'real' world around them.

The way that these criticisms apply to the instance of the clergy is instructive here. On the one hand, religious leaders are regularly criticized for being too otherworldly, talking about heaven and saving souls when people are hungry and dying. On the other hand, the criticism is most often paired with the reasoning that they do this in order to secure power and amass wealth in the here and now. So which is it, are the clergy too focused on this world or the next? Is Christianity to be blamed equally because it produces people both like St. Francis, the preacher to birds, and people like St. Dominic, the heresy hunter? Which one is the real Christian, neither, just one of them, or both?

Now obviously I would share anyone's disgust with any member or class of the clergy that would use talk of afterlife to extend their own material advantage. Take the most egregious examples: a Priest pocketing money from indulgences sold to the poor in order to shave years off Purgatory, baptisms in the New World used as justification for immediately killing the 'Christian' savages and conveniently taking their land, or just the charlatan televangelist tricking people out of their disposable income. These are our textbook cases of abuse of Religious privilege or authority.

So the question becomes: are these individuals too focused on their present lives, or are they too focused on heaven such that they allow themselves to commit such heinous actions in this then-devalued present life? But this is exactly the wrong question to ask.

On the one hand, it seems clear that these clergy are paying all the attention in the world to the present. They show clearly by their actions, that though they might hypocritically preach about the next life, this life is the only one that really matters to them. (It's hard to imagine even the most cynical atheist sincerely alleging my exemplars to be acting out of the true sense of Christianity. The whole point of being a hypocrite is that one's actions belie one's convictions.) On the other hand, seen Christianly, they are obviously not paying enough proper attention to their present life. Our wayward Christians do not need to tone down one part of Christianity and crank up another part, they need to practice Christianity! The answer is not to take a balanced approached to this life over against eternity, as if these were two different substances to be taken in equal measure, but focus on both lives, or aspects of life, rightly.

What we've been calling putting too much focus on one's present life or the afterlife is really not an error of where one is looking but in how one is looking. It's a qualitative not a quantitative error. One must not look to this present life as an end in itself but rather as a participation in and preparation for the next just as one must not look to the next life as an escape from this life but as a fulfillment and redemption of its beautifully created intentions.

Christian perspective then is bi-focal, it is properly focused simultaneously both on the creation around one and the eschaton toward which that creation yearns. Again, the question is not over which world one is looking to but what one sees the world as. If one sees the earth as creation then it is impossible to devalue it. When one looks at human beings who, though sinners and fallen, are fellow creatures they will be seen as image bearers of God. And one who viewed his fellows as such would be utterly incapable of committing the acts our exemplary hypocrites are guilty of. It's a little harder to learn to see this way than to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it can be done.

Now, when I mentioned above that our hypocrites can be seen, regardless of what they profess, as acting based on the assumption that this world is all there is, I'm not saying that their clearly immoral behavior is the only way of acting based on that assumption. There are plenty of examples of saintly types among atheistic folk too. But I'm curious on what particularly secular grounds an atheist can both tell the clergymen that it is wrong to do what he is doing, which he probably knows, and why. In other words, without disingenuously resorting to the authority of the believer's tradition, on what grounds other than personal preference could the atheist tell the clergymen, or a fellow atheist for that matter, that his actions were as despicable as we believe them to be.

My advice to the mis-behaving Christian is quite simple: act like a Christian. Christianity has plenty of reason for opposing all of this loathsome behavior and absolutely no reason for supporting it. The actions we criticized happen not because of, but in spite of the individual in question's Christian belief, if in fact they have any. The atheist could similarly tell the immoral atheist to act more atheistically. What could that possibly mean? Again, I'm not saying that atheism necessarily leads to immorality, but I honestly don't know how it could ever oppose it other than arbitrarily. Christians have no problem finding grounds to criticize the hypocrisy of their fellow believers and to tell them that they lack the right quality of behavior. And that is a good thing! What resources does atheism have for assessing correct and incorrect qualities of another's behavior, Christian or not, in the first place? The question is: can one be a morally hypocritical atheist?

Another problem brought up in this regard is the idea of religious action resulting from obedience to a call of some sort. We are fine with people being religious up to a point, but we don't like even the structural possibility for someone to hear a calling to some kind of radical life or action. We are worried about someone obeying if they believed, like Abraham, that God was commanding them to sacrifice their son.

My understanding of the Christian faith and Christian ethics means that this possibility cannot be ruled out. The nature of Christian faith means that one's ethical commitments are in a sense 'open ended,' that is, structurally open to include following through on something one does not fully understand. This leaves one open to undertaking heroic and selfless actions, but I acknowledge that there absolutely is the danger of also doing great evil. Those who have sincerely believed that God commanded them to do something vary from Moses leading his people to freedom and Jesus laying down his life for others, to Spanish inquisitors and 911 hijackers.

Enlightenment rationality tried to solve the problem of religious violence stemming from faith and obedience by advocating a mode of deafness to voices other than one's own conscience. But the danger of deafness is just as great as that of listening to the wrong voice. I would submit that it does not solve the problem of humanity's proclivity to commit evil and could even exacerbate it.

The reason it does not solve the problem is that the call one is deaf to could just as easily be that of the orphan or the widow and the voice of reason or conscience one follows can just as easily self-justifyingly lead to evil as that of a false god. The reason it could be even worse to blindly follow reason is that the follower of reason does not believe himself to be following anything and is thus even more confident and certain that his actions are just than the believer. The Christian believer who acts on faith knows that he can err, even that error is likely, and he thus should be more willing to question his motives. Doubt of course is the correlate of faith, not its opposite. The actor who believes his actions are wholly derived from reason has no reason to doubt his conclusions. These are the people we must watch out for.

Just think of all the wars that have been justified by serving the greater good, freeing those under dictators and burning villages in order to save them. The advocates of these wars probably believed just as strongly that their cause was just as the terrorist believes he is doing God's will. And the victims of secular wars are just as dead as those of religious wars. I also believe it is no coincidence that the two most dangerous empires of the 20th century, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., are nation states wholly founded on enlightenment philosophies of progress and justice which they believed were neutrally derived from reason. [1]

The problem with hearing any 'voice' whether one believes it's God or conscience, is one of discernment. And this is really the point all the way back to my original post on wrestling with a sense of vocation: the work of discernment is hard. It can be as tiring as wrestling with angels, or devils. This is what the apostle meant when he said that one must test the spirits to see if they are of God.

1. This is a paraphrase of Stanley Hauerwas from Resident Aliens

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Conversation on the Christian View of Sacrifice, the World & Eternity

(The following is part of a conversation with a friend wherein I try to answer his objections to my earlier post as to the place of self-sacrifice in Christianity.) [1]

We are going to talk about two seemingly separate strands within Christian thought. On the one hand there is the strand that underwrites or encourages a kind of sacred awareness of the present. You know, "consider the lilies", and all that jazz. A lot of people these days make this kind of insight into the entirety of their spirituality (they also seem to prefer to find their source material in the East, though I think the reason for that has much more to do with faddishness – it takes one to know one - than with what the tradition actually makes available) but most would have at least a sentimental appreciation of that kind of teaching whatever their background.

Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, is not one of these. He finds this type of advice to be positively immoral. I take it that this criticism stems from the perspective that the line of thought represented would lead to a type of resignation toward life, a lack of ambition or direction or maybe motivation to make things better for oneself and one's fellows here and now. This would be basically the old Marxist criticism that religion has the effect of getting people to not notice and attempt to better their circumstances. (This is not a bad criticism in itself, in that this is how religion, including Christianity, is in fact used by cultures and many, if not all of the powers that be. But this is not to say that since a tool can be misused we should discount its intended function.)

On the other hand, there are obvious, deeply held reasons for Christians to care about the shape of their lives. The best expression of this other strand of thought was probably made best by one of those mean old nasty Church fathers that people are so fond of lambasting, St. Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. What this means to me is that God delights in what we delight in, and is joyful at what we are made joyful by. But note that like for the human parent in regards to their child, it does not mean that whatever gives us pleasure for the moment gives him pleasure. More about how this comes about below, but basically if the Christian anthropology is right, that we are creatures first and foremost, then, while this knocks us out of the running to be gods – all our own little centers of universes - it gives us a very elevated position vis a vis random bits of purposeless matter. If we are creatures, then we are created for a purpose, and if we have a purpose, we should find it and live it full force.

While I would grant a lot of ground to criticisms made of the failure of Christians in general to live this rightly, I would still want to argue that, for the Christian at least, there will be times where the search for self-fulfillment commonly understood or the call to follow one's bliss will have to be denied. It is incoherent to imagine a Christianity that does not call for genuine sacrifice.

But the beauty of the Gospel is that precisely insofar as we follow through on the sacrifices we are called to make we will find ourselves more than fulfilled. Everyone knows the appropriate verses here: to lose is to find, to be last is to be first, so on and so forth. This is somewhat paradoxical but not that hard to grasp really. At bottom this just means that we are to deny a certain shallow self-fulfillment in the name of a greater, truer one. Everyone has basic experiences of this: to earn the satisfaction of finishing a marathon, one has to do a lot of painful training and preparation.

So it is not really a matter of pitting fulfillment of the self against sacrificing the self for others. Christian teaching rejects the idea that satisfying human needs is a zero-sum game. The truth is that we are actually not in competition with one another for happiness. To serve the Other really is to serve God, not in some loosey-goosey metaphorical sense but actually, factually to do something for God – "whatever you do for the least of these…" It's obvious that if anything in the Christian story is true, then this would mean finding our true meaning in life. If God is God, and created the world and us, then doing what we were made to do would be nothing if not the most glorious, blissful, joy-filled life possible. The problem is, it doesn't always feel this way. (Obviously, as I write this and try to act based upon it, I rarely if ever feel fulfilled making whatever daily sacrifices I'm called to perform.) So instead of trying to shave the corners off the square peg of our selves to fit into the round whole we were made for, we go around creating our own square holes to fit ourselves into. But the fit is never quite right.

And this dynamic of winning by losing goes to another objection that is often made against Christianity, by others and even by myself at times. It can be alleged that Christian teaching is just advocating a kind of delayed egotism. Indeed, sadly, sometimes individual Christians absolutely are guilty of reducing Christianity in this way. They would make the Christian life and the expectation for the afterlife a mere transaction where the person trades some unpleasant business here and now in order to reap the great payoff by and by. (The unpleasant business here and now can fall into the traditional category of 'works,' but faith itself, when taken to be a kind of unpleasant epistemological state to have to be borne for the time-being, fulfills the same role.)

This mistaken tendency is related to another that would have the incarnation of God in Jesus as a kind of mysterious disguise used to trick the fair-weather friends and attract only the true believers. This version would make Jesus' ascension and glorification as a kind of pulling-off-of-the-mask 'gotcha' moment where the enemies of God realize their mistake, weeping and gnashing their teeth while the disciples happily exclaim "Ha, I knew it all along!"

But this cannot be right. Christians believe that in Jesus, precisely through his earthly life, emptied of glory, full of suffering, destined for death, God himself is most fully revealed. The incarnation is not something to get past to see God (except insofar as we need to get past our mistaken expectations of who God should be) it is the very picture where God has most clearly shown what he is like. God is with us, in pain, in suffering, in life and in death. Christ's resurrection, ascension and glorification is God's ultimate seal of approval on creaturely, physical embodiment and the kind of self-giving, self-emptying way of being in the world that Jesus exemplified. It is not rewarded with an altogether different kind of life, it is shown to be the kind of life that imitates God himself and participates in his plan. Ultimately to live the kind of life Jesus lived, to the extent we are able, though it seems to be swimming against the stream of culture or human nature or whatever, is really to be going in line with how God intended things, to be going 'with the grain of the universe.'

Therefore Christian teaching is not that selflessness is a temporary state of affairs, a test to pass in order to be rewarded with an ultimate self-centered paradise. The Christian faith teaches that selflessness is ultimately how we were made to be (even the doctrine of the Trinity shows this: not even God exists for himself alone, but always in self-giving for an-Other.) And thus this is how we are destined to be if we are ever to be what might be called joyful but is better named blessed.

{…Kevin, wiping sweat from his brow, steps down from the pulpit…}



1. A good deal of credit for this conversation - the opportunity to wrestle with things, not the longwindedness with which I do it - goes to my interlocutor who will here go unnamed.

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