The essence of Christianity is to love one another, to have compassion, not to judge, but to forgive, to accept – no? Applied to politics, the implication seems obvious: unlimited tolerance, equality of lifestyles, etc: in a word, extreme liberalism.
What’s wrong with this picture? Everything, conservatives will say, and they will have a point, but let’s try to sort this out more carefully, like good postmoderns.
Consider the famous story in the Gospel of John of the woman taken in adultery. Jesus evades the trap the woman’s accusers are trying to set for him by writing something on the ground (??) that pricks the conscience of the accusers. He invites any of the accusers who is without sin to cast the first stone. Then, when there are no takers, he tells the woman that he does not condemn her, and then instructs her to “go, and sin no more.
I do not propose an exegesis of this passage (though you, reader, are welcome to try), but merely to address its liberal reception in political-philosophical terms.
The heart of the problem, it seems to me, is this: political-legal order necessarily includes a moral-cultural dimension, and Christianity necessarily stands ambivalently in relation to this natural (and changeable, relative) moral-political authority.
Every society imposes (mostly implicitly, through honor and shame, and corresponding “dogmatic beliefs” – Tocqueville, eventually linked with material incentives and punishments) an authoritative morality. The upholding and enforcement of this morality (for it must be upheld, and thus, in various ways, enforced or incentivized) necessarily involves the pretension that some are “without sin,” that is, morally competent to judge others.
Christianity stands ambivalently towards this socially-politically enforced morality. One the one hand, Christian morality will always overlap with a society’s morality, and will reinforce that morality as commanded by God. Robbery and adultery are crimes, and they are sins, too. On the other hand, Christianity will tend to relativize any particular moral-political-cultural authority as a whole. Christianity elevates the individual as a child of God above the authority of the community and points up the transcendent preciousness of the individual in contrast with the transience of the political community.
The trouble is, this Christian transcendence always risks undermining its own meaning: it tends to dissolve its conventional (moral-cultural-political) basis, and thus leaves moral commandments floating in meaningless space, and thus, not only without social sanction, but, at the limit, without coherence or even meaning. The notion of “sin” depends upon the prior notion of “crime.” Evil depends upon bad.
But the transcendent notions of sin/evil also tend to undermine the immanent notions of crime/bad. All political morality is relative and questionable from the standpoint of transcendence. It can be understood as functional relative to a worldly economy that regulates our mortal necessities. Christianity is in the business of drawing us beyond such worldly economies. Sexual norms and definitions of “family,” historians and anthropologists tell us, vary over time with social and economic conditions. There are reasons why adultery (just for example) used to seem so heinous, and now appears (or perhaps is supposed soon to appear) as trivial, even incomprehensible as a crime/sin. (Substitute other norms governing sexuality if this analysis seems hard to credit.) Christianity and historicist anthropology seem to agree on relativizing morality – or at least much of it.
The problem is, though, that, in relativizing political morality, Christianity is always at risk of undermining its own moral basis, and thus its own practical meaning. For the projection of another world depends upon a grounded sense of this world.
TO BE CONTINUED
Monday, December 10, 2012, 2:18 PM
December 10th, 2012 | 5:14 pm
Can you spell gobbledegook?
There is so much wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to begin. So, lets start at the beginning. The essence of Christianity is as you said, but is love God first, love others as self (Mt. 22:37). Having neglected the first command, everything else falls apart. You have essentially begun as a liberal and ended up confused.
December 10th, 2012 | 5:34 pm
Continue!
(Good to see you back at it, Ralph.)
December 10th, 2012 | 7:32 pm
Patience is also a virtue, Phillip. Take a deep breath, and see if you can follow the line of reasoning I’ve just started to develop. Or, for short and easy answers, just stay with what you’ve got, if it works for you.
December 10th, 2012 | 9:51 pm
As I understand this blog, this is as very insightful analysis:
“The problem is, though, that, in relativizing political morality, Christianity is always at risk of undermining its own moral basis, and thus its own practical meaning. ”
Which, for me, raises the question I’ve been putting to my Democrat-Christian acquaintences: How can a “Christian” be a registered/card carrying member of the Democrat Party considering the Party’s position on abortion?
December 11th, 2012 | 8:54 am
Phillip is right that as to the essence “question,” the answer is NO. No church father or reformer would have said, “yes, that’s the essence.” And even if the question were changed to “the practical moral essence of Christian teaching,” the answer would remain no.
And as Ralph knows better than anyone, as shown in his excellent book on Calvin’s politics, a key barrier to thinking that his statement conveys the essence of Christian moral practice, and especially that one should apply it directly to politics is that Christianity does have some political teachings. It gives a reason for the governing authorities holding a sword, and for leaving the things of Caesar to those authorities. These teachings turn out, as Ralph shows in his book, to be harder to apply than meets the eye, but still.
So, why is Ralph setting things up this way? That, Philip, is the question. A lot is going on in that “seems obvious” he slips in there.
And his stress (really over-emphasis) upon the way Christianity “relativizes” civic moralities is an interesting rhetorical choice also. I don’t like it, and Ralph knows that many wise people, especially from Thomistic traditions, such as Robert George, have plenty of reasons not to like such a formulation. C.S. Lewis wouldn’t like it either.
I for one, look forward to how he is going to develop this, and am very pleased to have Ralph again contributing his meaty philosophic posts to pomocon, if that is what this portends.
December 11th, 2012 | 9:10 am
With the understanding that I’ll cheerfully and willingly retract my objection pending the next portion(s?) of this post, I have to disagree with what you claim is the essence of Christianity: “to love one another, to have compassion, not to judge, but to forgive, to accept.” These are rather results (and sadly only occasional ones at that) of Christianity, not the essence.* The essence of Christianity has to do with Christ- his Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Where we had offended God by sinning against Him, Christ came, lived perfect a perfect life, and took our sin and our punishment on himself on the cross. He then showed his victory over sin and death and the finished nature of salvation by rising again from the dead.
When all of these are held as the essence of Christianity, some of the transcendence and airy abstract that you suggest (rightly!) can confuse and distract dissipates. Jesus was a real, physical person, who died a real death and who rose from the dead with a tangible body. Obviously there are transcendent issues at work here as well -quite important ones at that- but Christians who keep this at the center of their faith can’t escape the earthy, immanent components of the religion.
*Disclaimer: Or did you mean that these are the essence of what most Americans perceive as Christianity? If I missed that point I’m happy to withdraw my comment and offer my total agreement.
December 11th, 2012 | 10:14 am
I’m afraid I’m simpathetic with Mr. Ross’s response to Mr. Hancock’s essay. At least as far as this first installment goes. The Christianity he is talking about is a very specific sort, that though influential, is not Christianity in any authentically doctrinally sound sense.
Typical accounts of the history of theology note that the focus of theology dramatically shifted with the influence of Kant. Whereas theology was treated properly as the study of God, knowledge of whom we gain through his revelation, after Kant, especially with the Kantian theologian Schliermacher, theology becomes a subdivision of anthropology. It ceases to be the study of God, since in a Kantian epistemology true knowledge of the neumenal is beyond us, and thus theology is demoted to merely the study of man’s search for God.
Hancock’s critique of Christianity is really of Kant and Kant’s influence on Christianity, particularly it’s Liberal German variety first formulated by Schliermacher.
Doctrinal Christianity understands that Christian love is simply the expression of the spirit of God’s law and not at odds with his Law. In Kant, God’s law is unknowable, and so any notion of law is reletavized into “what’s true for you and what’s true for me.”
Doctrinal Christianity affirms the importance of civil order, it’s institutions and its laws as order enforcing instutions over man, as clearly formulated in Augustine’s treatment in City of God. With Kant, Christianity has no purchase on our civil institutions since everyone has their own Christianity.
Doctrinal Christianity doesn’t reletavize moral-political-authority but understands ethics as establishes in a clear teleology grounded in a moral order established by God in His creation. To the extent political institutions acknowledge and obey this order they will prosper, to the extent they fail to acknowledge it they will whither away. It’s true Christian’s are first and foremost citizens of the Kingdom of God and are, as it were, visitors of this temporary Kingdom, but our charter is to be salt and light in this world which entails political as well as personal obligations.
Kant on the otherhand imposes what is really a gnostic structure of religiosity, everyone has their own right to what they believe and how they want to believe it, but since it is all relative, it has no purchase on public affairs and so is properly limited to the transcendant having minimal application to moral-political reality.
I would recommend to Mr. Hancock that if he would like to better differentiate these two versions of Christianity he would do well to read J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism.
http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Liberalism-John-Gresham-Machen/dp/1115666274/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355238607&sr=8-1&keywords=Christianity+and+Liberalism
Machen was a 20th century Presbyterian who did battle in theological circles in American Presbyterian instutions which in his time were becoming increasingly dominated by this particular brand of Christianity. The book is a classic on its topic and would be worthwhile reading for any Christian or Commentator on Christianity.
December 11th, 2012 | 2:27 pm
Friends,
I thought it would be fairly obvious that my abrupt statement of “the essence of Christianity” was meant to represent an all-too-common view, one that I plan to address, and of which I plan to show the poverty. It may be, though, that addressing it is, for me, a more involved, subtle matter than it would be for many of you. Radical transcendence is not an easy beast to tame. Watch for continuation.
December 11th, 2012 | 7:12 pm
That story about Jesus writing in the dirt always reminds me of the story of Archimedes writing in the dirt in Plutarch’s “Marcellus”. Archimedes didn’t care to look up from his writing in the dirt when the invading Roman soldiers confronted him, and they killed him!
I wonder if writing in the dirt had some special significance to ancient people; I suppose it means “I don’t care what you’re up to” now too
December 12th, 2012 | 11:56 pm
Interesting post. I liked best how this post pointed out that some ideas of Christian transcendence can undermine their own meaning. It was also interesting, and I had to agree, that Christianity is ambivalent to the social moralities that exist.
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