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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