TOTAL DEPRAVITY, OR ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE

My pastor, Bill Bess, always says that every Presbyterian elder ought to have at least one good sermon in his/her head. He followed up on that by asking me to preach on Biblical models of economics today. For better or worse, here is my potentially one (good or bad) sermon.

A Sermon Prepared for the First Presbyterian Church, Havana, Florida, June 4, 2011, by Mark Isaac, Ruling Elder, substituting for Bill Bess, Teaching Elder.

I was born in a home for unwed mothers. Before you crank-up your sympathy, my parents were married. Like many of the GI Bill generation, they bought a house in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, and my Mom’s doctor believed that the best obstetrics facilities in the area were at the Home of Redeeming Love, a home for unwed mothers run by the women of the Free Methodist Church. The facility was already in transition (my birth certificate reads Deaconess Hospital) but the history of the Home of Redeeming Love, stretching back decades, is fascinating. The women of the Free Methodist Church founded and ran the facility for young women who had no access to good natal care because the shotgun didn’t fire and they were abandoned by their families. Initially out in the country, the women of the Church plowed the fields to raise crops both for the Home and for sale for cash.

The story of the Home of Redeeming Love is illustrative of part of the so-called Social Gospel movement in American Protestantism. Although we toss around terms such as “old time religion” we often forget that by 1900 the mainline Protestant churches, including the Presbyterian Church, were heavily influenced by a century of German theological rationalism and materialism. Biblical concepts such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ were viewed as campfire fables invented by church leaders who were decades removed from Jesus of Nazareth. Now if your theology strips out all of the supernatural components of the New Testament, what is left of Christianity? Well one thing that is left is the body of teachings of Jesus as a guide as to how we ought to conduct our daily life both personally and in our communities. The latter focus became a dominant theme of the American and British Social Gospel throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Among the good results of the Social Gospel were institutions such as the Home of Redeeming Love, the Salvation Army, the YMCA and YWCA, and countless hospitals. (By the way, the American Economics Association was founded as part of the social gospel movement).

But the Social Gospel broke into two strands. One stressed what Christians could do directly to lift the burden of off those who were suffering (the Home of Redeeming Love) and the other stressed what Christians could do to get the federal government to accomplish similar ends. The best example is the famous Methodist Board of Temperance and Prohibition. Temperance was a program of the community helping individuals make good choices; Prohibition was the drive to use the federal government to make those choices by force. In many American Protestant churches, the Prohibition branch eventually won out. (Our own Presbyterian denomination purged our seminaries of traditionalists. Interestingly, these traditionalists, branded with the nickname “Fundamentalists” not only disagreed with the modernists with regards to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, they also believed that it was none of the church’s business to enlist the government to tell a man or woman that they could not settle down with a pleasant single-malt Scotch before bedtime.)

By the 20^th century, although alcohol Prohibition was eventually deemed a failure, many of the major Protestant denominations bought into the idea that the government is the primary agency for caring for the poor. This has been codified by our own General Assembly, and no year goes by without some agency of the PCUSA weighing in on minimum wages, health care, smoking, and so on and so forth. Our stated clerk even recently took sides in the partisan fight over collective bargaining in the State of Wisconsin.

If we are going to talk about what economics means in terms of Heaven on Earth, we need to go back and find out more about what the Old and New Covenants were teaching before, during, and after Jesus’ ministry.

First, there is no question that in the Old Testament there is a dual recognition of the right to private property and the responsibility of the owners of that property to act justly and to care for the poor. In the former category are the prohibitions against stealing, against moving boundary markers, and the parts of the law code dealing with damages done to the property of others. In the latter category are the tithing requirements, the various debt forgiveness passages, the commands for honest weights and measures ,and numerous restrictions against unjust lending practices, especially to the poor.

Leviticus 23:22: And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner. I am the Lord Your God.

When we get to the Acts passages, there are some interpreters I have heard, and you probably have too, that suggest that the early church moved in a different direction, abolishing private property. This is clearly not the case. In the the Ananias and Sapphira story, Peter makes clear that the land was theirs to sell or not. This story is about the sin of lying to the community. What is suggested is that the Jerusalem church was a diverse collection of both wealthy individuals and people whom we might consider refugees, living in a world of violent oppression, in which the order of day to day life was clearly in peril. In this world, the wealthy people sold their property to provide funds to care for the poor. “They gave to anyone as he had need.” However, note that, as we will see in a minute that this does not mean some kind of Stalinist/Maoist collectivization of all among all: it becomes clear that “the poor” refers to groups such as widows, and, I suspect, orphans.

I wonder where they got this idea of caring for the poor?

Mark 10: 17-22. And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him. “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good-except God alone. You know the commandments: Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.” “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing. Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in Heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

It is at this point that I wish to turn to a Presbyterian Pastor who gets remarkably little attention in these days: John Calvin. We Presbyterians don’t like to talk much about Calvin. Look around any large city and you’ll see Presbyterian Churches happy to advertise their aerobics classes and high school pancake breakfasts. Putting a lot of John Calvin on the church marquee probably wouldn’t be good for attendance. But we must, at this point, confront a key part of our Reformed Faith: which has been tagged with the horrible phrase “The Total Depravity of Mankind.” The doctrine of the Total Depravity of Mankind most certainly does not mean that we are all sociopaths, incapable of doing good, even sacrificial things. It means something completely different. What it means is that there is no part of our lives that we can put in an imaginary box and say “I do not sin in this part of my life.” It means that even when we are doing what we think of as “good” we remain subject to sin.

I John 1: 8-10 : “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess ours sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

So let us see the operation of sin in the economics of the early church:

Acts 6: 1 – 7: “Now in these days when disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the Twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said: “it is not right that we should give up preaching the word to serve tables. Therefore Brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of Wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit; and Philip, and Procurus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus a proselyte from Antioch. These they set before the Apostles, who prayed and laid their hands upon them.”

As Calvinists, we can see the operation of sin even in this most noble of institutions: the distribution to the poor. Either the Hebraic Jews really are discriminating against the Greek-speaking Jews, or the Greek-speaking Jews are bearing false witness against the Hebraic Jews. It doesn’t matter, because in midst of this sin God works His will and the church office of Deacon is born, ordained with specific responsibility to care for the poor.

Now it would be nice to continue on with the evolution of economic institutions in the early church in Jerusalem. But we simply don’t know more, because the Christian Church in Jerusalem was decimated with Jerusalem’s destruction by Rome.

Instead, we turn to a different early Christian tradition: the churches begun by Paul and the other church-planting apostles around the Mediterranean. And we see here something new:

Acts 16: 13- 15 And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and spoke to the women who had come together. One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatria, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshipper of God.

When we read the popular history of the Roman Empire, we see very little of merchants, traders, and manufacturers, what we would call the “Middle Class.” Rome was ruled by landed oligarchs and a major source of its “wealth” was plunder from military campaigns. In the midst of this were people who did the ordinary: making goods, trading, etc.. It is important to note that these people were not the respected merchants of Geneva or Amsterdam. Even though trade and manufacturing could provide what was probably a good standard of living, only a few of these folks would be candidates for the Roman Senate: they were equally likely to be slaves, freed slaves, women, illegitimate children of the agricultural or military class, or people living in or emigrating the flyover provinces: The Oklahomas and Nebraskas of the empire. Recent scholarship, which might embarrass some Christians inclined towards liberation theology, suggests that outside of Jerusalem, Christianity became a religion that spread primarily through this proto-middle class of merchants, traders, and artisans. What we continue to see are short but repeated references in Pauls’s letters to his congregations raising money for the poor ---perhaps the poor in the local community but also perhaps the relatively more oppressed Christians in Jerusalem. This suggests that the economic system in Jerusalem, described in the earlier Acts passages, was probably some kind of survival system that was sustainable only with subsidies from the Mediterranean churches, and thus not exported elsewhere in the early church. There’s little reference to this kind of survival communalism in the churches of the epistles.

I hate to say it, but in terms of the Bible, that’s pretty much where we stop. The problem for us is that there’s simply no transition theology to a capitalist world in which the church has ceded to the government the office of primary care for the poor. I suspect that most of you in the congregation today are like most of my students: you cannot conceive of a world in which the Presbyterian Church renounces the government as the primary office of care for the poor. You can’t imagine lines forming to plow fields for unwed mothers. We are like the Jews after the time of the Judges, who, against God’s warning, have merged the identity of God’s people with the coercive power of a centralized government. I suspect that the Home of Redeeming Love, now Deaconess Hospital, is well entwined with Medicare, Medicaid, and so forth. In this, I believe we have before us a very good model for the decline of the Presbyterian Church , the UCC, the Episcopal Church and so forth. If your theology has rejected the supernatural and simply focused on the government as the agent of the material, once that social agenda has been accomplished in the New Deal and the Great Society, what need is there to be a Presbyterian on Sunday morning? The answer from the collapse in our membership from 4.25 million to 2 million in my adult lifetime says that the answer is “not much.”

At the risk of being repetitive, our scripture from Acts demonstrates a fundamental paradox of our Reformed faith: we are called to do good, to bring the Kingdom “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” But we must bathe ourselves in the humility that, acting with the best of intentions, we might “miss the mark,” what the Bible calls sin. Therefore, in a world in which our government educational system does a good job for the well-off but a horrible job for the poor, in which the government has been completely ineffective in preventing a dramatic rise in children born out of wedlock (what the Bible would certainly consider fatherless children or “orphans”) I cannot imagine that the Old Testament prophets wouldn’t be screaming that we are differentially hurting the poor and most vulnerable of our society, that we as a society will suffer the consequences of this sin, and that we ought to be thinking about doing something different. I personally believe that the model for this “something different” can be found in the earliest Calvinist communities in Switzerland, but that is a story for another sermon.

Dancing in the Streets

Here is a very thoughtful piece from the Huffington Post on the question "How Should Religious People Respond to Bin Laden's Death." I always appreciate the thoughts of Albert Mohler, and I think that his comments, near the end of the article, do a better job than I could of marking my own thoughts.

Hope.

This academic year at the FSU Wesley Foundation we had full-court coverage of the Bible. Beginning in the fall we learned about Act 1: The creative process and the declaration that God saw everything created as "good". Then, we learned about Act 2: The serpent spins a story that causes Adam and Eve to believe God is holding out on them. The Fall. Finally, we learned about Act 3: The longest of all the acts this is the story of redemption. Since The Fall we can see through the law and prophets how God worked to bring His people back to Him. On Sunday we celebrated the culmination of Act 3, the ressurection. The theme this year for Easter was HOPE. Not some wishy-washy, "Gee, I hope this turns out well." Not some "wishing upon a star". Not flimsy. The hope we have in Christ is sturdy and doesn't disappoint. Because He loved us and because His love can transform our hearts and minds we have hope. Let's hope for a better world.

***On a personal note I feel the need to tell more hopeful stories in my class. Reports of failure in compassionate activities abound and serve as warnings about what not to do. However, success is also instructive and far more hopeful. 

Good Friday

Last night at Maundy Thursday service, Pastor Bill Bess reminded us of the instructions in the Old Testament for the Passover supper to be held as though in haste for departure, so he organized a quickly moving service with sparse readings and words of institution. The topic of his homily was a contemplation on the grief of the disciples on Good Friday at losing a friend to a torturous murder.

And, I suspect I'm probably being repetitive from posts over the past couple of years, but if it is Good Friday it must be time for Jesus Christ, Superstar!

Maundy Thursday

The Wesley Foundation is an odd and austere gray block building, students nicknamed the church, "the bomb shelter". It was built in the 1970s and designed for the very service we attended tonight: Maundy Thursday. On the exterior, the sides of the building are sloped to mimic the Cup of the Covenant. Meanwhile, the interior contains a focal stage perfectly sized for a long table with seating.

Each year our pastor delivers a message in the fellowship hall and we walk into the chapel, which is lit only by candles. The table is filled with half-eaten Passover food and represents where Jesus and his disciples had celebrated Passover. On this night the Jewish people remember the bitterness of slavery and the greatness of the God who brought them out of Egypt. We are invited to the table to reflect. Walking up and seeing the symbolic half-eaten food we remember the bondage of the Jewish people but also the spiritual bondage of sin.

Our mood is somber as we consider the weight of what happens next in the story. Jesus endured betrayal and Jesus knew his death was necessary to free us from sin, but, he suffered under the weight of that knowledge. (without the comfort of his friends). Then, tomorrow we will remember that Jesus loved us to the very end.

We inherit a great story. The story of God's redemption for everyone. I pray our hearts would be softened and prepared for Good Friday and Easter.

A broken heart

A fount of tears

Ask and it will not be denied

A broken heart love's cradle is

Jesus our Lord is crucified

Let us never allow this story to become hackneyed and stale but always stir our souls.

Truth or Consequences?

The Association for Private Enterprise Education annual meetings had a refreshing number of discussions about the variety of voluntary activities. To use one of my favorite overly simplistic lines, the opposite of government coercion is not the market; the opposite of government coercion includes all voluntary activity, of which market processes are only one example. Speakers such as Elinor Ostrom, Deirdre McCloskey, and George Ayittey spoke on variations on this point in plenary talks, and those discussion continued into several individual paper sessions.

On the other hamd, after returning from the conference, I picked up an article in First Things entitled "The Emancipation of Avarice" by Edward Skidelsky. Anyone who reads this blog would understand why I was attracted to such a title. The topic of the paper is one that I find exciting for Christian economists to debate. Unfortunately, I found the argument of the paper jumbled. About midway in his article, he critiques Mandeville and the Parable of the Bees. If you recall one of my earlier posts criticizing Mandeville, you can imagine I found common cause with his criticisms. But then he seems to draw a direct, if not actually straight, line from Mandeville through Adam Smith and into all of modern economics for what he calls its emphasis on consequentialism. I'm not sure I buy this. (Smith's recent biographer, Phillipson, puts much more distance between Mandeville and Smith, and Skidelsky goes right to the Wealth of Nations, without visiting The Theory of Moral Sentiments. ). But let's stick with the issue of morality, economics, and consequentialism here. Suppose the civic leaders of a nation take Skidelsky to heart to study the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas and Agustine...to "express an aspiration to mold people's characters, to make them less greedy, more generous, and so forth." Further suppose that, steeped in such high philosophical idealism, they enact rent controls, minimum wages, and raise the tax on capital gains to 80%. Is it morally deficient of the consequentialist economist to pound home the empirical reality that these efforts very likely help well-to-do teenagers at the expense of inner city minority workers (minimum wage), create an appropriable property right that benefits mobile jet setters who can sublet their apartments at market rates, all the while degrading the quality of housing serving the poor (rent controls) and end up with the wealthy paying fewer taxes (very high capital gains tax rates)? Doug and I have discussed at length the reverse question: what is the moral position of someone who looks only at their own intrinsic motivations and refuses to discuss the consequences of their actions?

If someone argues that Aristotle believes that enacting rent control creates a virtuous citizen in a virtuous society, then I would argue that either a ) Aristotle is wrong b ) the person who interpreted Aristotle is wrong, or c ) I have a very different concept of virtue. Does that mean that I must necessarily be a consequentialist? I don't know. I do know that Skidelsky seems to support government intervention "to erect safeguards against the powerful human tendency to rapacity." But he has no model of public choice, except where, earlier in the essay, he admits that "In complex, fractured societies, any attempt to rule through direct moral exhortation can lead only to tyranny."

Lenten Reflection II

The Lenten season is a time of preparation and truly for me this season has been a difficult one filled with a variety of temptations: pride, judgement, and lust to name a few. Mark's quote from Hebrews in the previous post is very comforting. To know that our Savior can sympathize with our struggles means Jesus is better able to meet us exactly where we are at.

One thing that I've been pondering is joy. When Easter comes around I do not want to manufacture joy; but, I know because of the magnitude of what is being said that there is cause for genuine joy. Will I be surprised by joy? Is joy able to be generated? Then, I thought, if joy is a fruit of the spirit then it must be birthed from intimacy with God. So I believe the question I need to ask myself is whether the Lenten season is drawing me closer to God.

Wednesday, March 16

"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives."

I John 1:8-10

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

Hebrews 4:15-16

Lenten Reflection

The Lenten season is sobering ---"From ashes you have come to ashes you shall return". The Lenten season is honest --- "God have mercy on us." From contemplating our mortality to recognizing our deviations from God's ways this season is, like Mark said, "A time of spiritual preparation".

My reflection today is about obedience. Few people like being told what to do. Obedience does not seem fun and poses the danger that it can quickly morph into legalism. However, from recent readings it is clear that obedience is supremely important. In fact, it seems to Christ that obedience in Him is tantamount to love.

"Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me."(John 14:23 - 24)

You are my friends if you do what I command (John 15:14)

Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD?
To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. (1 Samuel 15:22)

Here are my thoughts. First, I need to know what Jesus taught. This means I need to do a better job of reading the Bible and really soaking in the wisdom of Christ. Second, I need to act those teachings out. I think for acting out his teachings we need honesty with ourselves and discernment.

March 9, 2011

The Gospel message is full of passages warning against spiritual luke-warmness and wishy-washy commitments. We are exhorted to let our yeses be "Yes" and our nos be "No." Unfortunately, to the matter of Ash Wednesday and Lent, modern Presbyterians usually respond with a loud "Maybe."

John Calvin was not a fan of Lent because he thought that the church had moved its emphasis, which he believed should have been as a time of spiritual preparation in recognition of both Moses on Mount Sinai and Jesus in the Wilderness. That's why I like churches which orient their Lenten calendars around thinks like new-member study groups, and so forth.

I thought that in that regard I might use the Lenten period to relate, with minimal commentary, what to me seem to be central passages of the Bible. So, here's my contribution for today. It is Mark 8: 34-36 (from the English Standard Version):

And he [Jesus] called to him the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? What can a man give in return for his life?"

Minimal comments: 1 ) This passage comes immediately after Peter has recognized Jesus as the Messiah, but then Peter begins to negotiate with Jesus that he, Peter, not Jesus, knows best about how to organize the life of the Messiah. Jesus responds with "Get behind me, Satan." 2 ) The same greek word is used for "life" and "soul" and denotes breath or intrinsic life force or spirit, not bodily, medical "life."

Final Jeopardy! (I)

"A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. And he said to them, 'The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.' "
------Luke 22:24-26

FINAL JEOPARDY ANSWER: This change in Jeopardy! rules is a favorite among economists because it demonstrates how people respond to changes in incentives.

FINAL JEOPARDY QUESTION: What was the end of what economists call "linear payoffs?"


Indeed, the popular game show JEOPARDY! is famous to economists because of a change in the rules between the Art Fleming and the Alex Trebek versions of the show. In the original version, contestants who had positive winnings at the end of all three rounds won that amount of money. In economics, that is called a linear payment scheme. In the new version, only the winner is paid the monetary value of their nominal winnings. In economics jargon, this latter is called a "tournament" payment scheme. A typical prediction in economics is that contestants facing FINAL JEOPARDY will behave in a more risk-loving (and therefore exciting) fashion if only the winner gets a monetary prize. Research that I've conducted with Duncan James of Fordham University demonstrates the general accuracy of the tournament model.

This is the first of three posts on this topic that I hope will do three things. First, argue that Jesus was critical of any transformation of life into inter-personal tournaments. Secondly, I'll give a personal example of the trap of tournament thinking. Thirdly, I hope to reiterate Doug's post below about the importance of understanding fairness and justice issues in non-market allocation.

For the first purpose, I opened with the Luke story... one of the good examples where Jesus warns us against viewing life as a tournament in which we receive utility from rank or status. Another example would be Matthew 20 in the parable of the workers in the field, who were bothered not simply by whether their own wages were just, but also for the relative comparisons between themselves and others.

There is plenty to be said about the direct dangers of money or power, but without any doubt Jesus warns us against treating life as a tournament in any aspect: monetary, political, or in our faith. Jesus is saying that he who dies with the most toys wins nothing, and that coming to Christ before someone else is nothing at all like Michael Phelps beating someone else to the buzzer.

(I guess it's a bad coincidence but an instructive lesson to me that this post arrives the day before that ultimate American tournament: Super Bowl XLV or whatever its Roman Numeral is this year, and only a few days after I posted on Facebook the exciting news that FSU was ranked "#1" on college football signing day.)

Suppose Three Professors Were Working on A Railroad Track....

This is one of those references I will make with only a little comment. In today's Wall Street Journal, Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution at Stanford wrote about why academics seem to be so out of touch with Main Street. He writes, in part:

"Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.

Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning. These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions.... Such exercises may sharpen students' ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government."

My Phantom, It's Sir Charles God, the Notorious Litton*

In a recent issue, First Things magazine ran an article by Ron Rosenbaum that discussed moral sense and evil. The focus was on sociopaths, serial killers, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and the like. The central question seemed to be whether or not a person who was a true sociopath could be consider to be evil if he had no conception that what he was doing was wrong.

I enjoyed reading the article but I found the discussion somewhat confusing because the question drifted from the one above to one more like "Do I commit evil if I think I am doing good?" I believe that this is a distinct question. Genesis says that mankind obtained a sense of the difference of good and evil by disobeying God and eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of goodness and evil. If there indeed is such a thing as a sociopath who can not process any concept of good and evil (either in his own thoughts or in reference to society's norms) then such a person has a remarkable cognitive mutation that sets him apart from the normal model of humanity described in Genesis. (I'm not an expert on the topic of whether such people do or don't exist). But, it's an entirely different matter to talk about doing evil because we convince ourselves that what we are doing is moral and right. Indeed, this self-rationalization is all too human.

When we ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we disobeyed God and sin came into humanity. No part of our being is separated from that sinfulness, not even our post-Fall sense of goodness and evil. Thus while we all (perhaps except sociopaths) have a moral sensibility, that sensibility is not God's; it is our own and it is corrupted. Certainly people sometime make choices that they are aware (correctly) are or may be morally suspect. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this very clearly when he decided to join the murder plot against Adolf Hitler. But, how many more times do we sin when (because?) we have convinced ourselves that we have the moral high ground? We see that Jesus knew that addressing this self-rationalization was part of his message of salvation: Yes, you believe that your brother has wronged you. Forgive him anyway. Or, as interpreted by Paul: Yes, this other person has wronged you not once but many times. Don't keep track of those wrongs. Sometimes it will the case that the other guy HAS wronged me; maybe in other cases it is self-deception. But it is all a warning that it is God, not we, who knows the true measure of good and evil.

The paradox of this is that our moral sense may be imperfect when compared to God, but it is not nothing. Most of us are not sociopaths, nor do we live in the amoral surroundings of the kill or be-killed struggle for survival in the animal kingdom. But I believe that among the actions of the Holy Spirit are: 1) Changing our utility function (what we want to do), and 2 ) refining our moral sense to give us a better idea of what God things is right and wrong. Maybe these are the same thing, but I think that they may be different.

In the year in which Inception became such a big hit, I realized in all the media discussions that I have a strong tendency to what is called lucid dreaming. I tend to remember many of my dreams, and when I wake up and I realize I've been dreaming I can sometimes decide whether to rejoin that dream as I go back to sleep. Last night, perhaps because I was thinking about writing this post, I had the strangest continuing dream in which I was an international forger of rare documents, on the run from INTERPOL. What the authorities didn't know was that I enjoyed the chase for for its own sake, and after I pulled off the forgery job, I always returned the originals, so I never profited directly and there would never be any evidence to stand up in court. In reality I don't even draw well, much less have any conscious desire to forge rare documents. I don't even know what documents would be rare, and I think I would enjoy being a fugitive from INETRPOL less than almost anyone I know. What this dream made me think about is this jumble of what we are capable of doing, what we may be inclined to do, and how this interacts with our imperfect sense of right and wrong. This is why the Bible tells us that we are different than other animals, and why the Bible is a story that tells us how God wants this strange interplay to turn out in the end.

*Today's title reference is to that famous movie villain who enjoyed the thrill of being chased by the bumbling Inspector Clouseau: Sir Charles Litton, the notorious Phantom of the Pink Panther series.

He Is Risen

It seemed to me that the day after Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection, was a good time to return to the discussion of modernism and Christian faith. If there is any part of Christianity that would seem to be a unifying reality for followers of Jesus, it would have to be Easter morning and the empty tomb. But, in fact, Easter is at the heart of a divide that has plagued the Protestant denominations for a century. In the early part of the 20^th century, the “essentialist” position in the Presbyterian Church (what was called the Fundamentalist position by its detractors) was epitomized by Gresham Machen who asked in his book Christianity and Liberalism “What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture?”* The centrality of the debate can be found in our beliefs about Christ’s death and his resurrection, and how those beliefs are shaped by the forces of rationality. As Machen continues: “It is this problem which modern liberalism [what I have called “modernism” in these blogs] attempts to solve. Admitting that scientific objections may arise against the particularities of the Christian religion --- against the Christian doctrines of the person of Christ and of redemption through his death and resurrection --- the liberal theologian attempts to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting the ‘essence of Christianity.'” Machen continues on in the text to argue that Christianity is more than a moral way of life. He argues that to be a Christian has, from the very beginning in a room in a place we now call the Middle East at a time we now call Pentecost, required that a Christian assent to a historical message, “He is risen,” and that Christians connect that resurrection to a death that was not a failure but a “triumphant act of divine grace.” One thus sees the two core “essential” elements for Machen: Jesus’ atoning death and the historical reality of the resurrection. The essentialists typically included three additional points; the virgin birth, the reality of Jesus’ miracles, and a belief the Bible is the “infallible rule of faith and practice” for the Christian. It should be noted that Machen’s emphasis is on the infallibility of the Bible for faith and practice; he specifically acknowledges that a Christian may see “errors” in the text as long as they share a common central truth, “the redeeming work of Christ.”

So what did the Modernists argue against the essentialists? A standard reference is “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” by Harry Emerson Fosdick (whom I introduced in previous posts). Fosdick also zeros in on the importance of science in that day and age: “Science treats a young man’s mind as though it were really important.” He notes that there are “multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and their Christian faith in another.” He despairs of the “penitent shame….that the Christian Church should be quarreling over little matters when the world is dying of great need.” According to Fosdick, a Fundamentalist insisted that a Christian must believe in: 1) the historicity of certain miracles, especially the virgin birth; 2 ) “that the original documents of scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer,” and “everything there ----scientific opinion, medical theories, historical judgments, as well as spiritual insight --- is infallible.” 3 ) a “special theory” of atonement, “that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated diety and makes possible for welcome of the returning sinner,” and 4 ) “that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here.” In contrast to such narrow-minded Fundamentalism, Fosdick calls instead for an “intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty loving church.” Elsewhere, biographer Robert Moats Miller quotes Fosdick as rejecting the idea of Jesus’ physical resurrection (“Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet", p. 411).

It’s worth noting that the core disagreement between these two men, each one of them famous American pastors, is clear. Machen never argued for what Fosdick characterized as a “dictation” theory of the Bible, and Machen was most certainly not a believer in dispensationalism (Jesus coming upon the clouds….). There is no doubt that the core of their disagreement is on two things: “Was Jesus’ death an atonement for sins?” and “Was the resurrection a historical reality beyond some kind of spiritual enchantment of some of the early apostles?” Ultimately it was Machen, not Fosdick, who was expelled from the “intellectually hospitable, tolerant, liberty loving” Presbyterian church.

The world, much less than the United States, has changed a great deal in 90 years. It would seem as though this debate would be settled. But that presumption is wrong, and I will discuss more as to how the debate continues when I next post on the Veritas Forum debate on the resurrection of Jesus, which I recently had the privilege of moderating here at FSU.

* You can find Machen’s book online at reform ed.org. Fosdick’s sermon is available many places on the web.

Movie Musing

Sue and I recently watched The Bicycle Thief. What a powerful movie. What is instructive about it is that it demonstrates the poverty that Europe (in this case Italy) suffered in the couple of years immediately after World War II. This can be immediately contrasted with another picture of post-war Italy, only about a dozen years later, La Dolce Vita, where Italy is portrayed as a land of sports cars, glamour, and partying.

There are two things that I take away from this comparison. First, it is truly remarkable how quickly Europe was able to recover economically. The downside of this miracle is that we in the West believed that something like the same model of external aid and intensive capital re-development was also the way to bring the rest of the world out of poverty. As William Easterly points out, this was a false analogy, one that has proven to have tragic consequences. Economic "recovery" for a developed country from a war is not the same thing as economic "development."

Secondly, in comparing the two movies we see that the return of material prosperity, if anything, has led to a society that is less spiritually mature. Which of these people do you believe are closer to the Kingdom of God?

Breaking Out of "Limited Morality"

Jesus smashes the boundaries of sympathy and love for our own community when he tells the story of the Good Samaritan and asks, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robber?" Because Jesus destroys boundaries with regularity ---the word parable (think parabala) is derived from the Greek Word "bolo" which means "curve ball", we may take for granted how each story is so exceptional and bursts with meaning. This question of who we view as our neighbor and worthy of our sympathy is of increasing interest to economists.

Beginning with the research of Nobel Prize winner Douglass North economists studied institutions (think of them as rules of the game, legal and/or social) and how they shape incentives to action. Because morality informs the institutions that seem desirable development economists have sought to grasp how morality develops and to whom we show our moral sentiments: cooperation, trust, sympathy, etc.. With all the failed attempts at developing countries you can see this research as seeking to understand what kinds of institutions like property rights, decision rules, etc. will stick in these different cultures.

Specifically, Guido Tabellini has been an important contemporary figure in this discussion and presents two kinds of morality: limited and generalized morality. Basically, limited morality is moral behavior that is acted upon within a strong kinship network but doesn't exist outside of that network. Generalized morality exists within and outside of the kinship network.

Our Economics and Moral Sentiments group discussed today how people apply morality differently to different settings (institutions). For example, someone acts one way in church but another way at the mall or sporting event. Different contexts yield different morality for the same individual. But, I couldn't help but thinking this is not the case for the mature Christian. In every environment they seek to hold fast to the teaching of Christ. Who is my neighbor? Not merely my family and friends. Who should I love? Everyone, even my enemies. Journeying with Christ requires my morality to be consistent, not changing upon every whim.

Perhaps this maturity comes not because Christianity (discipleship not conversion) is not a change merely in my ethical outlook but the acquisition of a new identity. The end goal of this new identity is expressed beautifully by Paul in Galatians 2:20. Admittedly, this is sometimes scary and other times just seems too difficult, but this is the kind of curve ball we should come to expect from a God who can love even us.

Cooperation is Natural

Earlier this week the NY Times published an article "We May Be Born With an Urge to Help". The article is based on Michael Tomesello's book Why We Cooperate which argues that children display helpful behavior prior to any parental training to prime such behavior. Moreover, Tomesello finds that this desire to help is not enhanced by rewards. This would seem to be a signpost towards nature of man. Is man inherently good, evil, or both? This presents an interesting theological question (which they do not come close to answering I think).

I had to give some thought to it before I felt like I really understood what was at play in the cooperation and helpfulness: TRUST.

What we believe about other people is enormously important. Children will trust another adult, even if that adult is not their parent, but, a stranger. Children have faith in other people. Because they have not experienced a deterioration in trust or faith in others they do not act strategically in how they help others. Instead, they just recognize a need and act in a helpful way.

I think this provides some insight into the verse, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven" -Matthew 18:3

What holds us back from helping? Lack of trust? Judging Attitudes? Fear of being rejected?

Writer's Block?

It's not because I haven't been thinking about the blog that nothing has appeared recently from me. Indeed, I have two topics that I have been trying for days to form into a post. One of those is the conundrum of the role of community in Christian life. There is no doubt that we are called to live in community. Many people much more able than I (such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together) have written about Christians and community. In addition, it seems that the Christian response to losses in the advantages of community is a popular topic right now.

But, the problem is that Jesus rules out some of the most popular vehicles for forming community, such as social identity (the parable of the Good Samaritan) and private advantages to community building (see Mark 9:33-25). I have been stuck on what to write, and yesterday my Pastor, Bill Bess, preached a sermon on Mark 9 in which he discussed this same problem in the concept of a community without boundaries. So, I still haven't figured out this riddle, but I hope to return to it.

The second topic I've wanted to write about is the powerful and humbling passage from the lectionary two Sundays ago. Finally I've decided that there's no commentary that I can write that adds anything to the text itself, so I've just decided to repost it here (this is copied from the PCUSA lectionary service):

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

13Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. 14But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. 15Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. 16For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. 17But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.18And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

4:1Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? 2You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

7Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

More Purpose

This past Sunday our pastor preached a sermon filled with purpose --the timing of which could not have been more appropriate given my last post on meaning and purpose. Specifically, he talked about "work" and the idea of a "calling" to work.

Before the Fall Adam worked in the garden. Thus, work happened even amidst perfection. After the Fall however we are told that work becomes painful and toil isn't always a delight. God had always intended for us to work though, to grow things and be fruitful.

Linked to the action of work is the concept of vocation. We talked about the word vocation (that comes from the Latin word "vocari" when means "calling") and how many of us believe that we do not have a calling --regular people just have jobs. What a misconception! First, we are not regular people, we are a New Creation. Secondly, while it is true that there may be a few people who have vocations others would recognize as going down in the history books as a calling that is not equal to saying, "your position does not matter to the world," or, "Because you're going to fill one of special positions God does not want to fill your life with a calling."

Fundamentally, there is a distorted view of God at the heart of such a line of thinking. Possibly we view God as having scarce resources and only being able to have impact on the world through people who we view as important. For example, we had a really great development economist fly in earlier this year to talk about the condition of Africa. But, as he was about to leave and get on the plane he was somewhat scared to fly, a woman here at FSU told him "[Do not worry], You're not going anywhere. The universe isn't through with you." There was a notion that he was called to do great things. But, I wonder, if she saw herself the same way.

The goodness of God is such that I'm not sure we can even fathom the extent of His calling on our lives.

Finally, whatever we do, we do it to the best of our ability. One of the very best portions of the sermon was the idea that my work (and your work) could be a form of worship. I spend much of my day at work and if I learned to worship God in my work and the way I conduct myself and motivate my life what more purpose, joy, and love could be found!?! There is so much possibility.

What Just Happened?

“And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him ‘Then who can be saved?’”

I am fascinated by this line from the story of the rich young ruler. It comes just after Jesus has just made his “camel through the eye of a needle” analogy. Most of the commentary I have read about this goes in one of two directions: 1 ) The disciples’ eyes were opened about salvation through faith; or 2 ) the disciples were culturally conditioned to believe that the pious wealthy and elite were most likely to enter the Kingdom, and thus astonished by Jesus’ remarks. I think the second explanation just doesn’t make sense, and the first is on track, but doesn’t go far enough.

Starting with the second idea, I mean I know the Gospels present the disciples as somewhat dim bulbs, but the idea that they could hang around Galilee and with Jesus for most of his ministry and still assume that the wealthy had an inside track to salvation strikes me as dubious. James (2: 6) probably depicts the gut reaction of the common people of the time (the “poor”) when he says “Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court?” And the story of the young ruler occurs late in the Gospels, so the disciples would have had to have been in a coma for a couple of years not to have heard Jesus’ constant message (through explicit statements, parables, choice of disciples and repeated confrontations with the elite) that the least were going to be first in line for the Kingdom.

The argument about salvation through faith is more credible, especially when the story begins with the ruler asking “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Undoubtedly, part of Jesus message is that we can’t achieve our salvation by what we “do.” However, I believe that there’s more to the disciples reaction than this.

Imagine that the disciples indeed had soaked in Jesus' message about the last being first, and had heard his attacks upon money-changers and the religious elite. Now ask yourself, “What just happened?” Jesus and the disciples are not in Galilee (they are crossing between Judea and Trans-Jordan). So here is Jesus, an unorthodox, itinerant rabbi, somewhat akin to a rural Alabama preacher walking the streets of the Hamptons, whose message is one of woe to the powerful and comfort to the poor and afflicted, when suddenly a rich young man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks him for spiritual advice. In the day of Jesus, this by itself is astonishing. And furthermore, when Jesus answers him “You know the commandments ….” The young man does not argue with or attempt to engage Jesus in tricked conversation. He accepts Jesus statement. I think that what astonished the disciples is that they were thinking “This is the jackpot. Jesus is finally getting his message through to the most important people in society. They finally get it. If we can walk into Jerusalem with this man as the new face of Jesus’ ministry, there is no stopping us.”

As usual, Jesus did what confounded his disciples. Rather than signing the young man on as his “outreach minister to the Hamptons”, he adds to the demands for salvation, sends him away, and then seemingly dismisses his chances of salvation, saying that they were worse than a camel passing through the eye of a needle.** For me, this then explains what the disciples said: ““And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him ‘Then who can be saved?’” To me, they were saying to Jesus: “We don’t understand. This is what your entire ministry has been about: the humbling of the wealthy and self-righteous into a life of faithful observance of the Law. If you are not satisfied with this, what will you be satisfied with?” And Jesus answers them “All things are possible with God.” (And then, completely in character, Peter gets his nose out of joint and begins a rant of self-justification: “WE have left everything and followed you.”)

So, yes I think that the story is one about salvation not being through works, but I also think we have to be careful that we don’t fall into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the trap of “cheap grace.” To me, the whole meaning of this interchange is not that salvation through faith requires less of us, but rather that it requires more. There is nothing we can do as followers of Jesus that will gain our salvation by a finite amount of our efforts. But this means that at every point, Jesus will say to us, “But I require more.” Of course we will fall short, and it is then that we must realize that, solely through God’s grace and not through our own merit, Jesus has died for our sinfulness. As a consequence, we should not be satisfied, but instead we must want to offer more.

** One of my pastors was of Middle-Eastern ancestry, and he suggested that the phrase had a double meaning. The “eye of the needle” was a city gate intended to allow entry only to people on foot, and the absurd picture of a rich man riding a camel loaded with possessions trying the enter through the eye of the needle would have been instantly recognized in that time.