It cannot be denied, but outward accidents conduce much to fortune; favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion fitting virtue. But chiefly, the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands. Faber quisque fortunæ suæ [Every one is the architect of his own fortune], saith the poet. And the most frequent of external causes is, that the folly of one man is the fortune of another. For no man prospers so suddenly as by others’ errors. Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco [A serpent must have eaten another serpent before he can become a dragon]. Overt and apparent virtues bring forth praise; but there be secret and hidden virtues that bring forth fortune; certain deliveries of a man’s self, which have no name.
Pastors and Secular Power
Richard Baxter saw the dangers of cozying up to political power. Ministers of the gospel, if they aren’t careful, will not only sacrifice original thought but also Biblical truth in order to avoid being ostracized, mocked, or disagreed with. Social media has made this quite apparent in the current year. For instance, as the pro-life position has become more and more subject to mockery, fewer Christians are publicly affirming it. I can think of two anti-political pastors (Greg Boyd and Josh Porter) who are “anti-political” as an expression of theology. So, they don’t really talk much about opposing abortion (as a matter of principle one should stay out of politics), but both were happy to engage in making fun of Trump and his voters on Twitter. I suspect that these strategies are more to appeal to people of a left-leaning political slant. And in fact, I’ve known many pastors personally who have taken a similar approach to ministry: mocking openly anybody in their churches that the political left finds distasteful.
Sadly, most positions are held by most people as a matter of tribalism rather than as a matter of truth. This state of affairs ought not to be, but it is. As an aside, tribalism is a human default. The primary difference between the Christian and non-Christian tribes is that our chieftain (Jesus) commands us to put truth as our top loyalty (he is the Truth). So there’s a sense in which Christians should have the most disagreements (as seeking the truth entails argument) and the most unity (as we applaud the honest search for truth). Anyway, here is Baxter’s prescient commentary on our own time:
I would not have any to be contentious with those that govern them, nor to be disobedient to any of their lawful commands. But it is not the least reproach upon the Ministry, that the most of them for worldly advantage still suit themselves with the party that is most likely to suit their ends. If they look for secular advantages, they suit themselves to the Secular power; if for the air of Ecclesiastical applause, then do they suit themselves to the party of Ecclesiastics that is most in credit. This is not a private, but an epedemical malady. In Constantine’s days, how prevalent were the orthodox! In Constantius’s days, they almost all turned Arians, so that there were very few bishops at all that did not apostatize or betray the truth; even of the same men that had been in the Council of Nice. And when not only Liberius, but great Osius himself fell, who had been the president, or chief in so many orthodox Councils, what better could be expected from weaker men! Were it not for secular advantage, or ecclesiastic faction and applause, how could it come to pass, that Ministers in all the countries in the world, are either all, or almost all, of that religion and way that is in most credit, and most consistent with their worldly interest?Among the Greeks, they are all of the Greek profession: and among the Abassines, the Nestorians, the Maronites, the Jacobites, the Ministers generally go one way. And among the Papists, they are almost all Papists. In Saxony, Sweden, Denmark, &c. almost all Lutherans: in Holland, France, Scotland, almost all Calvinists. It is strange that they should be all in the right in one country, and all in the wrong in another, if carnal advantages and reputation did not sway much: when men fall upon a conscientious search, the variety of intellectual capacities causeth unavoidably a great variety of conceits about some hard and lower things: but let the prince, and the stream of men in credit go one way, and you shall have the generality of ministers too often change their religion with the Prince in this land. Not all, as our Martyrology can witness, but the most. I purposely forbear to mention any latter change. If the Rulers of an University should be corrupt, who have the disposal of preferments, how much might they do with the most of the students, where mere arguments would not take! And the same tractable distemper doth so often follow them into the Ministry, that it occasioneth the enemies to say, that reputation and preferment is our religion, and our reward.[1]
References
[1] Richard Baxter and William Orme, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, vol. 14 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 198–199.
Jesus and Matthew 6:33
Matthew 6:33:
Now, see first the kingdom of God and its righteousness and these things will be added to you.[1]
Introduction
Everybody wants to be happy and every good wandering philosopher tries to tell them how to do it. Matthew 5-7 is Jesus’ summary treatise on human happiness or how to live an honorable life.[2]
Like all teachers on human happiness, Jesus tackles the relationship between possessions, necessities, and human happiness. He counsels people to seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness as a first priority in order to cure the anxiety one might have over the future acquisition of food or clothing.
Jesus neither trivializes these needs, as he says to pray for them later in the sermon, nor does he make them absolute sources of happiness or honor as many did in his era. Instead, he says that seeking God’s kingdom and its righteousness will suffice for happiness as well as for the acquisition of the goods of the body.
How can this be so?
Psychologically
On the psychological level, what Jesus is doing is telling people that if they focus upon what they can definitely change, they will not worry. Why is this? Jesus knew one of the great insights of the human mind. You can generally only focus on one thing at a time. If one is focused upon the purposes of God and gaining righteous character, then anxiety (the constant churning of unhelpful and negative thoughts) will slowly cease to be a persistent reality in the human mind.
The other psychological aspect Jesus exploits here is that he tells people to focus on what they can do. The kingdom of God, in the sense used here, appears to mean “the people of God and his purposes for them.” So for Jesus to say to seek the kingdom of God means for people to be busy about accomplishing the commands of God, particularly, the commands which pertain to the wellbeing of other Christians. The second thing Jesus says to seek first is ‘its righteousness.’ That means that character that befits a citizen of God’s kingdom. In other words, seek to become the kind of person who is disposed and poised to act righteously. One has no control over the weather, the crops, the clothing market, etc. But one does have control over their character. By putting people’s minds on the things which they can accomplish (with God’s help, of course), Jesus is helping people to gain an internal locus of control. To have an internal locus of control is to live with a sense that you choose how you handle the world around you and are not by necessity merely the outcome of the events around you. The research is clear that people with an internal locus-of-control struggle less with anxiety.
Materially
Jesus observes that for those who seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness “all these things” will be added. Here he clearly means the goods of the body (clothing, food, human resources in general). But how will they be added? Are we to believe that Jesus is making a promise of miraculous intervention for all do are good enough? I don’t think so. Jesus was aware of the martyrs, Job, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Instead, I think Jesus is making a general claim about the nature of virtue. If you have a good relationship with God’s people and possess righteousness, you’ll generally get what you need. Jesus knew there were exceptions, the Old Testament speaks of them. He also never taught people to expect routine divine protection from harm, he even taught that often, the righteous may have to die for righteousness’ sake. So it appears that here he speaks of the general results of having virtuous habits. Here are the components of “righteousness” according to the book of the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish work which approximates Jesus’ thought world quite nicely):
And if anyone loves righteousness, Her [lady wisdom] labors are virtues; for she teaches temperance and prudence,
justice and courage;
nothing in life is more profitable for men than these. [3]
For those who love righteousness as taught in the Hebrew Bible, wisdom works in them even the four virtues of pagan morality: justice, courage, temperance, and prudence. And while the righteousness of the kingdom of heaven is colored by Jesus’ specific teachings, there is really no reason to suppose that it was no longer seen as an all-encompassing virtue by Jesus or the gospel authors. And besides, “nothing in life is more profitable for men than these” is quite similar to what Jesus was saying.
If somebody have the righteousness of the kingdom, they essentially are growing in the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and prudence and they can find ways to acquire their needs, stay out of trouble, avoid
Not least, as I hinted at above, people who seek first the kingdom of God, will find themselves in a community of people who will help them through their trials.
Theologically
Theologically, it’s important to note that Proverbs teaches that:
Riches profit not in the day of wrath: but righteousness delivereth from death.[4]
And for Jesus, no need of mankind was more desperate than the need to know God. And so the central aspect of human happiness here is that those who enter into the kingdom of God and receive righteousness from Jesus Christ will survive the day of wrath.
Final Thoughts
To seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness first, in my mind, implies that it should be a first priority and driving motivation for our actions but also a temporal one. In our day we should begin with prayer for God’s kingdom to come, forgiveness from sins, and help to do his will. This is why the Christian practice of beginning the day with Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer is so crucial for Christians today. Without this discipline, we’re so likely to rush off into the day and seek anything but God’s kingdom or his righteousness.
References
[1] Kurt Aland et al., Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th Edition. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), Mt 6:33, “ζητεῖτε δὲ πρῶτον τὴν ⸂βασιλείαν [τοῦ θεοῦ]* καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην⸃ αὐτοῦ, καὶ ταῦτα πάντα προστεθήσεται ὑμῖν.”
[2] The word in Matthew 5:3-10 translated ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’ carries with the connotation of ‘those who are in this state are honorable.’ Matthew 5:3 could be translated, “How honorable are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
[3] The Revised Standard Version (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1971), Wis 8:7.
[4] The Holy Bible: King James Version., electronic ed. of the 1769 edition of the 1611 Authorized Version. (Bellingham WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1995), Pr 11:4.
On the power and perils of free-will
You probably have a lot of excuses. I do. Sometimes science gives evidence to support them. Especially when it allegedly contradicts free will. But you do have free-will. This means that your character is your fault and you have to deal with it.
Origen, an ancient theologian, thought that since God had offered the grace of the gospel to all, every Christian must take responsibility for his entire spiritual state. For him, purity is essential to God’s nature, but it is only coincidental to human nature and must be attained and maintained consciously.
Now it is certain that by the dragon is understood the devil himself. If then they are called opposing powers, and are said to have been once without stain, while spotless purity exists in the essential being of none save the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but is an accidental quality in every created thing; and since that which is accidental may also fall away, and since those opposite powers once were spotless, and were once among those which still remain unstained, it is evident from all this that no one is pure either by essence or nature, and that no one was by nature polluted. And the consequence of this is, that it lies within ourselves and in our own actions to possess either happiness or holiness; or by sloth and negligence to fall from happiness into wickedness and ruin, to such a degree that, through too great proficiency, so to speak, in wickedness (if a man be guilty of so great neglect), he may descend even to that state in which he will be changed into what is called an “opposing power.”[1]
On the other hand, of course, Origen would also say that we cannot take credit for personal moral/spiritual purity because it is from God’s grace.
His point of view is similar to that of St. Peter. Peter tells us that God gave us everything we need for life and godliness so that we might partake of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:3-4). Peter then says that the only Christian way to live to add all of the virtues to our faith (2 Peter 1:5-8). Peter goes on to tell us that some false teachers who have left the faith, even denied the Lord who bought them (2:1). In other words, they rejected his atonement for their sins. By so-doing, he says, they have become worse than they were before they knew Christ (2:19-22).
Free will is too weak alone to help us attain to God’s glory, this is why it must be enabled by his grace. But if it is used to deny God’s grace, there are few depths of depravity to which it cannot plumb.
References
[1] Origen, “De Principiis,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Frederick Crombie, vol. 4, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 259–260.
The Case of Evolution and Education
Too long won’t read:
In my experience, evolutionary theory holds a weird pride of place as the litmus test of a good education in common conversation. When one is discovered to be religious, they are often asked, “but you believe in evolution…don’t you?” Darwinian theory and its modern permutations have their uses, but those uses are not practical for young people. On the other hand, learning basic home economics, learning about nutrition, gardening, andexercise in biology, how to read, basic civics, and logic.
Actual thing:
When it comes to the theory of evolution by natural selection I find myself in a weird place. As far as the technical aspects of the theory goes, it explains things. On the other hand, it is a theory that is so reflexively considered to be the height of contemporary education that people go into conniption fits if somebody thinks it is false or claims to not understand it.
The problem I have with this is that the theory really is quite complicated and deals with such a high level of abstract reasoning about so many high non-abstract fields of empirical inquiry that it really is very difficult for almost anybody to understand who has not spent a tremendous amount of time in the field.
I say this based on conversations with biologist friends as well as based on email correspondence with a professor of evolutionary psychiatry. Some of these people have also pointed out to me the relative unimportance of evolutionary theory for the process of gathering and interpreting data about organisms and trends in ecosystems.
One microbiologist told me that most biologists he knows seem to misunderstand what evolution by natural selection actually entails. So, then, here’s my beef with the current state of play regarding the theory: a great deal of people graduate from high school without the ability to read proficiently. What’s the point of teaching an advanced scientific theory that is, by any metric, harder to understand than basic reading (seriously, read this post using basic game theory to explore the evolution of compassion)?
There is very little obsessive push, that I’m aware of as an educator make sure that misunderstandings about the ancient world or the Medieval and Renaissance are corrected. Yet, in high school, I was taught that the ancients believed in a flat earth until the time of Columbus despite the fact that every cosmological discussion from that era (religious or not) assumed or explicitly required that the earth be spherical.
The point being that simply because something is true is not typically considered a good enough reason to demand that everybody knows it when they graduate. We don’t do that with Optics, Economics, the Canons of Rhetoric, how to use a soldering gun, exercise science, etc. Yet, when a highly technical meta-theory that requires input from game theory, physics, statistics, economics (of resources), chemistry, genetics, paleontology, cellular biology, and advanced skills in inductive and deductive logic comes along…that is just like totally necessary for people to learn.
Personal experience
The only time knowing about evolutionary theory and the authors who write about it and the finer points of the theory has every helped me is when people who found out I was a Christian wanted to make fun of me for believing the earth was 6000 years old (which I don’t). So the greatest benefit I’ve received is rhetorical one against a group of people who saw me as a place holder for an ideology with which they disagreed. In almost every case, btw, I’ve discovered that my reading about the topic is deeper and broader than the person (whom I’ve usually barely known) attempting to make fun of me when they find out I attend church Sunday morning. I suppose another benefit might be the rich experience of learning for learning’s sake.
I question the value of accruing facts for human flourishing. Evolutionary theory helps my biologist and agricultural engineer friends to do their work, but it is doubtful that having a hamfisted and outdated understanding of Darwinian theory provides any value for the average person outside of the intelligentsia (seriously, do we make people understand assembly language so that they can use computers?).
It seems like the better method is to say, “the state of play in biology when this text book came out was x, y, z because of evidence a, b, and c. As new evidence comes along or new ways of interpreting that evidence are produced, you can expect that our understanding will change. Now on to taxonomy, cellular processes, dissections, human anatomy, and applications to basic health and self-care.” The kind of help that a biology class could provide if basic data on human nutrition, exercise, and well-being were provided as well as tools for further research would be so useful. Learning what scientists said about Darwinian theory when an eight year old text book was being written is so much less useful.
Hedonism, Love, and Goodness
The things that shape who we are and how we think are pluriform and sometimes mysterious. This is especially so in the age of the internet stuff that may disappear forever after you read it. Every once in a while, the Internet sends it back to you.
Around 2008-2009, I was quite depressed. And while I was still known for being a social butterfly at work and school, and many people even called me for advice (I remember distinctly two women with doctorates in psychology contacting me for relationship advice), I was languishing. There are probably three main reasons for this:
- Many of my friends had moved away, gotten married, or achieved opportunities I had never managed.
- I worked between 3-5 part time jobs to pay for grad school at any moment and so I got very little exercise or sun light. My academic nature and lack of sleep made it easy to substitute books for exercise. I also couldn’t afford a gym membership anywhere except a giant mega-gym that operated like a night club and prohibited squats, chalk, and grunting.
- I was lovelorn. During this time period, I fell in love, really hard, with two women. And because of that I felt like I had lost every ounce of the charm that had helped me make friends and ask girls on dates effortlessly before that. It was like I developed a speech impediment or a sudden physical handicap when I communicated with either of these women.
Essentially, because of certain failures of courage, mindset management, and personal care, I found myself ignored by women right during the stage of my life in which I had subconsciously decided to get married.*
Now, during this time, I had gotten really into reading Hans Balthasar, and I read his book Love Alone is Credible.
I searched online for any commentary on the book and found a quote on a blog [utterly devoid of theological interest in the academic sense], lost to the sands of time, “Never compromise on love. It’s the only thing that isn’t bullshit.” I’ve since found the blog through a retweet of the quote with a link to the 2008 post. It’s a great quote (the other material from the post varies in quality), and while the author clearly means erotic love, the point still stands. But, as any depressed person would do, I read other another post from the blog. The other post I read was about the author’s personal philosophy. That was relevant, since I was a seminary student working at a corporate coffee shop and therefore talking to atheistic armchair philosophers all the time. The author advocated a godless hedonism:
Imagine you had incontrovertible proof that there was no afterlife. No supernatural entities. No heaven or hell. No otherworld. No reincarnation. No forevermore.
No second chances.
Imagine there was no moral accounting after death of your actions on earth. No supreme being to judge your soul’s worth on the scale of divine justice. No reward or punishment. No appeal to omniscient authority in matters of good and evil.
There was only the endless black void at the moment death. The infinite silence. A complete surrender of your consciousness as the last pinprick of light extinguishes. All your thoughts, your feelings, your sensation, your memories… you… wiped away clean to merge with the great nothing.
How would you live? Given this proof of the finality of death, and of the expectation of nothing once dead, what is your personal philosophy?
-@heartiste
His answer to the thought experiment is this:
My answer to the philosophical question I posed above is hedonism. It is the only rational conclusion one can draw faced with the premises I presented. When there is no second life or higher power to appease; when our lives are machines — complex misunderstood machines cunningly designed to conceal the gears and pulleys behind a facade of self-delusional sublimation, but machines nonetheless — grinding and belching the choking gritty smoke of status-whoring displays in service to our microscopic puppetmasters… well, there can be only one reasonable response to it all. It makes no sense to behave any other way unless you never questioned the lies.
-heartiste
My own answer to the thought experiment is that if I try to imagine the world without meaning he described (advocated?), I come up blank. Why? If love isn’t bullshit, then there is meaning beyond the chemical soup and system of mechanical pulleys and levers he imagines us to be.
Indeed, if love bears the marks of a single aspect of life that isn’t bullshit, isn’t a lie, and is worth pursuing, then the matter of meaningless matter must be questioned. Is life actually meaningless or is this feeling of melancholy a salve for my own conscience? Perhaps the lie is that we’re just machines of no consequence in a heartless universe. If love isn’t bullshit, it’s implied that love is true and if truth is real, then perhaps beauty and goodness are real, too. This is an important implication, for if truth, goodness, and beauty are real, then it is perhaps the case that pleasures beyond the reach of mere physical pleasure exist. Pleasure is a good, but what happens when the intellect attains to beholding goods beyond the mere stimulation of dopamine and serotonin? And what of beauty? Love entails beauty. If there is transcendent beauty, enjoying it may require that we move beyond the mere act of feeling momentary pleasure.
Ultimately, if it’s true that love really isn’t bullshit, then the meaningless universe is opened to the possibility that there is meaning in the universe rather than artificially imposed upon it by our illusory consciousness (if you’re conscious of your consciousness being illusory, what is what of what?).
Love truly is not bullshit. And neither is the cosmos.
*Note: After I went through a fairly rigorous period of trying to improve myself, I did end up getting married and love, indeed, is not bullshit.