As my good friend Peter Lawler would say, “studies show” that students who believe in a “harsh, punitive, vengeful, and punishing” God are less likely to cheat on a test than are non-believers or students who believe in a “loving, caring, and forgiving” God. Members of this last group, from what I can tell, are most likely to cheat.
So “moralistic therapeutic deists” are more likely to cheat than the spawn of Christopher Hitchens, who are more likely to cheat than Calvinists. Right?
Is there any way I can use this information when I grade my finals? Different levels of surveillance perhaps?
And what about those who believe in a just and merciful God?
April 21st, 2011 | 8:36 pm
Attitudinal surveys lead to platitudinal results.
April 21st, 2011 | 8:42 pm
A judge can’t be both 100% just and 100% merciful. “Mercy” means a lessening of what should be the rightful punishment. Justice is giving the rightful punishment.
April 21st, 2011 | 8:48 pm
Those reasons are so impersonal. We love God because he is holy and deserves it. Who wants to be embarrassed in front of the one they love?
April 21st, 2011 | 10:18 pm
“A judge can’t be both 100% just and 100% merciful. “Mercy” means a lessening of what should be the rightful punishment. Justice is giving the rightful punishment.”
Well, after 2000 years, Christian theology actually has come up with an answer to this devastating refutation, so we will actually still be around tomorrow. (Actually, I think they figured it out within the first century.)
The judge can be both 100% just and 100% merciful if He figures out a just way to take the punishment Himself, in order to show mercy to those who initially earned it.
April 21st, 2011 | 11:39 pm
“A judge can’t be both 100% just and 100% merciful. “Mercy” means a lessening of what should be the rightful punishment. Justice is giving the rightful punishment.”
I would not presume to tell God what He can and cannot be.
“The judge can be both 100% just and 100% merciful if He figures out a just way to take the punishment Himself, in order to show mercy to those who initially earned it.”
Vicarious atonement doesn’t do it for me. In Eastern Christian theology, Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is not to propitiate a wrathful God, nor is it to pay off some insurmountable debt to God, but rather to ransom mankind from bondage to sin and death. Death, not God, is the Enemy.
April 22nd, 2011 | 12:18 am
“A judge can’t be both 100% just and 100% merciful. `Mercy means a lessening of what should be the rightful punishment. Justice is giving the rightful punishment.”
But that’s not the classical Christian concept of God. That concept requires, as Tom Morris puts it, “that God has the greatest possible array of compossible great-making properties, not that he have all great-making properties.” This means that God is the being who has the best collection of great-making properties that any being can possibly have, not that he has every possible great-making property one may think of. For example, choosing good over evil is a great-making property, but being necessarily good is also a great-making property. Yet, no being can both have the ability to choose good over evil and necessarily always choose good (i.e., not have the ability to choose good over evil). Thus, these are not compossible great-making properties, for no being can have both of them together. Consequently, the fact that God ìlacksî the ability to do evil, does not count against his moral character.
Thus, God cannot be 100% just and 100% merciful, but he must be the being in which justice and mercy are compossibily actualized at their highest level.
April 22nd, 2011 | 1:03 am
[...] Oh, Now I Understand – Joseph Knippenberg, First Things/First Thoughts [...]
April 22nd, 2011 | 2:23 am
Death, not God, is the Enemy.
Is inimical necessarily a symmetric relationship? Suppose sin made us hostile towards God, and made us perceive God as our enemy, even though He is not? Much as, say, my children often perceive me as an enemy, whereas I do not consider them my enemies at all, and know that I am not theirs.
This is usually where someone tells me one of (a) to stop making it complicated, or (b) to stop saying things I don’t really understand. :-)
April 22nd, 2011 | 4:00 am
@Francis Beckwith: Nice explanation. You might add—or at any rate, I would add—that the highest degree of justice and mercy is determined by the good. Depending on the situation, having mercy might result in a greater good than preserving justice (and vice versa).
April 22nd, 2011 | 10:20 am
Punishment that leads to repentance is both just and merciful.
April 22nd, 2011 | 11:10 am
Yes, well, Stuart, that’s why there’s an Eastern theology and a Western theology then, I guess. Not more than one of us is correct.
April 22nd, 2011 | 11:58 am
Two authors I have found helpful about the relationship between justice and mercy are Josef Pieper and Miroslav Volf. Both note that it is not that justice is impossible to combine with mercy, but that justice is impossible to combine with justice. Perfect justice, once one person has sinned, will destroy the whole world. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, leaves us with a planet of blind gummers. Justice instrinsically leads beyond itself. Strict justice is unjust. It demands mercy of its very nature.
April 22nd, 2011 | 9:12 pm
I would say that those students who say they believe in a “loving, caring, and forgiving God,” and who yet cheat, actually don’t believe in such a God, but rather in a God who is permissive, and really quite uncaring, as apparently their God doesn’t care if they cheat.
Regarding those students who don’t cheat, I assume in part, because they believe in a God who is “harsh, punitive, vengeful, and punishing” I wonder if Jesus would say to them something like, “If you look at a test and in your heart you desire to cheat, you have already committed the cheating.” In other words, the restraint of the desire to cheat is not enough. God wants transformed hearts that would find the idea of cheating repulsive, as it would undermine the beauty of God’s creation, and particularly the creatures made in his image.
So, in the end, both groups are to be indicted, and in the end, if any one finds life it will be because God shows mercy, which provides the foundation upon which they would learn to genuinely hate cheating for the sake of God’s glory and love.
April 23rd, 2011 | 7:19 am
The setup of the “cheating” was a bit bogus. You actually had to take steps to avoid “cheating”. In fact, you had to react fairly quickly in a situation in which you would normally have time to think, in order to prevent the “cheating” from being forced upon you. That’s not normal cheating, on a test, or in life. Essentially the finding is that one group of people was better at resisting an almost overwhelming temptation that required fighting off not merely the impulse to cheat but coercion to do so; it wasn’t a good comparison between those who are, and are not, likely to cheat in realistic situations. Does that really tell us anything meaningful?
April 23rd, 2011 | 7:20 am
And who approves studies like this, thinking that there is anything meaningful to be learned in such a situation?
April 23rd, 2011 | 1:19 pm
“A judge can’t be both 100% just and 100% merciful” — well, not a human one.
This is in fact something St. Anselm devoted a good deal of thought to, and he provided some good reasons to think that in God’s case, when one works through the right perspective on these admittedly tangled and demanding matters, one can arrive at seeing the compatibility between divine mercy and divine justice.
An early stab at this problem my part: “Mercy and Justice in Saint Anselm’s Proslogion” http://t.co/XRjJQ7O
Cur Deus Homo also contains directly relevant discussions, as do some of Anselm’s Letters and his treatise De Concordia
Of course, any human justice will at best approach to and participate in, and thus be only partly compatible with, mercy
April 24th, 2011 | 9:07 pm
What is the purpose of justice?
What is the purpose of mercy?
As we live in a country that has a legal system and not a justice system, I’d suggest most Americans have been trained to have a rather skewed view of justice (equating it with punishment or equality). And as Anthony said, our culture has also confused permissiveness with mercy.
Could it not be that justice and mercy ultimately can strive toward the same goal? What if the aim of each in God is the rectification of wrong. Mercy toward one brings about shame, repentance, and transformation. Many can think of a time in life where the disappointment of a loving parent stung more than any punishment/grounding/fine.
Justice toward another seeks to rectify or restore us from the wrong done. The difficulty in this life being that we can never achieve restoration for certain offenses (rape, murder, etc.). God is not so limited, and Jesus assures us the persecuted are blessed greatly in heaven. Perhaps this imbalance in our sinful world is the reason Jesus reinforced God’s Old Testament emphasis on “mercy, not sacrifice”.
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