Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Christianity

Sex Laws: Do They Pass the Reality Test?

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If you know me, you know I’ve got an anti-authoritarian side. This is temperamental first and only then morphs into ideology. I noticed this about myself in my late teens. Because of that, I typically found myself siding w/libertarian in most areas of political theory. But I knew, even in high school, that pure anarchy wasn’t reasonable because even at the level of neighborhoods, people with short time preferences or low IQs would just live in chaos in a society bereft of deep organizing mythology as is our own. But I’ve never been sure just how far a modern society can or should go with respect to regulating individual morality outside of contracts and violence.

I’ve recently gained insight as I’ve revisiting Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: The Works of God and reading Camille Paglia’s Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Paglia is a libertarian, Jenson is a social-realist of the sort that, if he tweeted, would be banned from Twitter (I mean, it’s difficult to describe how much “bad talk” Jenson makes…Paglia too, but from a different angle entirely).

Both of books were published around 2000. Here is a quote from each, exemplifying their points of view with respect to sexual law-making:

My libertarian position is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian. (No Law in the Arena, Paglia)

We may get at the matter so: sexuality is the reality test of the law…Where law fails its reality test, it is indeed but a product of dominance…A sexually anarchic society cannot be a free society. For no society can endure mere shapelessness; when the objective foundation of community is systematically violated the society must and will hold itself together by arbitrary force. Nor is this analysis an exercise in theoretical reasoning; it merely points out what is visibly happening in late-twentieth-century Western Societies. (The Works of God, Jenson)

Two authors of above average intelligence see the opposite modes of legal reasoning as necessarily totalitarian!

Interestingly, Paglia revels in the “objective foundation of community” insofar as she sees the masculine and feminine archetypes as the result of evolution and necessary. She even chides the political left for failing to realize that the Christian right is concerned to preserve the inviolability of reproduction as the locus of argument in sexual ethics. She even says that the nuclear family will work (as an enforced social unit) “in a pioneer situation” where everybody is preoccupied w/survival and passing on wisdom to children.

Every emotional fiber of my being tends toward Paglia’s idea as I just prefer to leave people alone and let them do what they will and to be left alone in turn. But the fact of the matter is that the laws on the books tend to have the psychological effect of translating into assumed moral norms (I suspect that most of OT case law functioned this way in practice). And so having unenforced laws in favor of the traditional family unit, even from a utilitarian, evolutionary standpoint makes sense.

The idea that laws and the philosophical justification behind them need a reality test is absolutely the case and a law that accommodates, promotes, and is based on the reproductive necessities of the species is about as real as it gets.

Did Jesus come to make bad people good?

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A common evangelical slogan, which I think comes from a Ravi Zacharias sermon is:

Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good, he came to make dead people live.

While I think I agree with the main point of this phrase (Christianity is not merely morality), I usually hear it said in a way that contradicts everything the New Testament says about morality. For instance, Paul says that we’ll be judged for everything we do (Romans 14:12). Jesus says to do good works (Matthew 5:14-16). Peter says to add virtue to your faith (2 Peter 1:3-5).

If we define good person carefully, based on the western tradition of moral philosophy we get something like what Dallas Willard gives us here:

The morally good person…is a person who is intent upon advancing the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, in a manner that respects their relative degrees of importance and the extent to which the actions of the person in question can actually promote the existence and maintenance of those goods.

A good person then:

  1. Is intent upon advancing the good of human life such as health, sustainable pleasure, beauty, knowledge both physical and philosophical, romance, family cohesion, showing honor and gratitude to whom it is due, and so on.
  2. Aligns their intentions to advance those goods with respect to which of those goods are most important and most appropriate in various circumstances.
  3. And focuses their efforts upon the goods that he or she can actually accomplish (a math genius who is awful at being with people should avoid hospital visits).

Now, look at these New Testament passages about why Jesus came:

Titus 2:11-14 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, (12) training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, (13) waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, (14) who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Romans 8:3-4 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, (4) in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

1 John 4:9-11 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. (10) In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (11) Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

These few passages should suffice to show that Jesus came to transform our character from evil weakness to strong goodness.

The Foolish Atheist

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Bruce Charlton comments on an atheist who didn’t follow his folly far enough:

Dawkins is a good example of one who refused to follow his path of excess to the palace of wisdom; because he was not even aiming at wisdom; he refused to persist in his folly, hence he remained a fool rather than becoming wise.

Two examples. The book Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) was an exercise in distraction, a non sequitur in response to the century-plus of observations that If natural selection were indeed regarded the ultimate truth, Then art, poetry, morality, science (including natural selection) and much else are invalidated.

(This is a fact; because all our feelings, indeed all our knowledge is revealed by the assumption as merely the side effects of adaptations to enhance reproductive success. For example, if natural selection is primary; the theory of natural selection destroys its own validity; all scientific theories being merely side-effects of the process of enhancing differential reproductive fitness.)

Essentially, one must reason this way in order to successfully adopt evolution and maintain a humanitarian and theistic worldview:

  1. If natural selection is the ultimate truth, then art, poetry, morality, science, and all endeavors of human beings are invalid.
  2. Human endeavors are valid.
  3. Therefore, natural selection is not the ultimate truth.

Anyway, read Dr. Charlton’s post. It’s great.

Is the author of Job an unreliable narrator?

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The literary device of an unreliable narrator may make an appearance in Job. The literary device is essentially when a narrator presents reality in a way that contradicts the logic of the narrative. Some unreliable narrators could be crazy people like the narrator of Fight Club, deceitful gods as in Aristophanes’ Frogs, in the Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s Joker unreliably narrates his life story two or three times in the film. The narrator of Job present two versions of Job’s status before God. He presents a contradiction as though it was a straight presentation of things. But the stories logic perhaps only allows for one of the claims to be true. The author unreliably narrates, perhaps, to bring the reader further into the story. I’ll show you where below.

There’s a Christian song that repeats, “You give and take away.” We were singing it in church and I suddenly recalled that in the book of Job, right after Job says that the LORD gives and takes, the narrator says “Job did not…charge God with wrong.” Here is the passage:

Job 1:20-22 ESV Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. (21) And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (22) In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

And yet, when the LORD confronts Job toward the end of the book, the LORD says that Job did not sin, but he does accuse Job of charging him with wrong:

Job 40:1-2 ESV And the LORD said to Job: (2) “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.”

Later in the story, the LORD says that Job spoke rightly concerning him (Job 42:7). The question, of course, is where? Where did Job do so? Either Job was a faultfinder or not. The story says both.

But in Job 42:3, Job admits that he darkened counsel by speaking without knowledge.

If the Job is wisdom literature and its point is to use a story as a vehicle for a philosophical discussion and to obliquely make a particular philosophical argument then it makes sense for the book to be like a riddle. Jesus used riddles, Socrates asked questions, Pascal used apparent paradoxes.

Indeed, part of gaining wisdom is learning to understand the riddles of the wise (Proverbs 1:1-7). And the book of Job, by presenting multiple voices (in the characters and in the narrative), is a riddle.

I think that the author wants the reader to decide between voices.

At least one Biblical scholar has made a similar argument:
“The Unreliable Narrator of Job” by James Watts. He takes things in a different direction entirely, by claiming that Job is making a literary statement by critiquing the concept on an omnicient narrator with his instantiaion of an omniscient character.

Dallas Willard on the Beatitudes

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Dallas Willard‘s understanding of the Beatitudes:

It will help us know what to do—and what not to do—with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. That should be the key to understanding them, for after all they are his Beatitudes, not ours to make of them what we will. And since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens. How, then, do they develop that theme?

In chapter 4 of Matthew we see Jesus proclaiming his basic message (v. 17) and demonstrating it by acting with God’s rule from the heavens, meeting the desperate needs of the people around him. As a result, “Sick folk were soon coming to be healed from as far away as Syria. And whatever their illness or pain, or if they were possessed by demons, or were insane, or paralyzed—he healed them all. Enormous crowds followed him wherever he went” (4:23–25 LB).

Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position in the landscape—“up on the hill” (Matt. 5:1 BV)—where they could see and hear him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance to the crying need of those pressing upon him. Rather, in the midst of this mass of raw humanity, and with them hanging on every word—note that it is they who respond at the end of the discourse—Jesus teaches his students or apprentices, along with all who hear, about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.

I believe he used the method of “show and tell” to make clear the extent to which the kingdom is “on hand” to us. There were directly before him those who had just received from the heavens through him. The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now this individual, who was “blessed” because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus’ heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why in the Gospels we only find him giving Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.

And so he said, “Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”

Or, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.” This, of course, is the more traditional and literally correct translation of Matt. 5:3. The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty. But today the words “poor in spirit” no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear. Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praiseworthy condition. So, as a corrective, I have paraphrased the verse as above. No doubt Jesus had many exhibits from this category in the crowd around him. Most, if not all, of the Twelve Apostles were of this type, as are many now reading these words.

(Willard 99-101)

This is a fairly persuasive interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. It is certainly a Biblical teaching, in the sense that in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Paul makes it clear that the gospel is for lowest of the low. But is it what Jesus/Matthew means to say? I’m not as sure as I used to be. Since the Sermon on the Mount is a presented as Jesus’ moral system, it makes sense that it would start with Jesus’ description of happiness. If I were Lutheran, I would take the “blessings” of the beatitudes as promises for believers. But the problem is that that genre of saying and the Greek word it begins with is almost always used to speak of virtues that naturally lead to specific consequences. The major counter-example is Luke’s version of the SoM in Luke 6, where the traits of the blessed are negative traits.

Works Cited:

Willard, Dallas The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God(Harper Collins, 1997)

Is Venting a Good Strategy for Overcoming Anger?

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Everybody gets mad and everybody likes to vent their anger.

It just feels great to yell, say something awful, or even break something. Some people might read that sentence and make fun of the whole thing. But, there is a great deal of music of various genres dedicated to lashing out in anger. Even country songs exist about destroying people’s trucks, etc. Legal literature goes into great detail about the relationship of anger to intent. And a great deal of people approve of angry outbursts as a form of positive expression.

Anger may start as a sudden shock of personal offense and instantly move to the deep desire to be avenged, to return insult for insult, or to visit destruction upon a whole tribe for the injury of one personal friend or confidant. Dallas Willard defines anger as a “response towards those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof.” 

Of course, not all anger is bad. In fact, anger can be a very good thing. Richard Baxter wrote in his Christian Directory, “It [anger] is given us by God for good, to stir us up to a vigorous resistance of those things, which, within us or without us do oppose his glory or our salvation, or our own or our neighbour’s real good (Baxter, 290).” There are times when it is morally wrong not to be angery because the goods of human existence are being misappropriated for evil ends, people are being abused, the truth is being impugned, or God’s honor is being obscured by idolatry.

The problem with the cluster of coping practices called venting is that there exists a long and apparently clinically honored pedigree in their favor. Freud rather stupidly thought that practicing self-control led to pent up anger. Lorh et al argue in, The Psychology of Anger Venting and Empirically Supported Alternatives that Do No Harm,** that the common practice of giving psychological patients venting practices like punching pillows, yelling, tearing magazines, etc is actually normalizing the negative anger response. Then, “the good feeling that accompanies venting anger is likely to reinforce the venting and violence. People often mistake their enjoyment of these aggressive acts as a beneficial or therapeutic outcome (Lorh 2007, 56).”

This makes sense. Aristotle basically described the human person as a collection of habits. Freud preferred the notion that we’re really bundles of neuroses and that any good habit is you develop is really a repression of some deviant behavior that is actually better for you.

Aristotle’s way of describing human beings makes more sense to me, and it anticipated better research thousands of years in advance. Lorh, again,

“When people are highly aroused, they may not think much about their behavior and its consequences. Instead they revert to what they have learned to do (or what is permissible) in similar situations. If a person has learned to react to frustrating events by venting (e.g., hitting something), it may make little difference whether the object is animate or inanimate.”

(Lohr, 62)

The observable reality was not lost on Richard Baxter (who lived prior to Freud, statistical analysis, or Baumeister) when he wrote:

Direct. V. ‘Command your tongue, and hand, and countenance, if you cannot presently command your passion.’ And so you will avoid the greatest of the sin, and the passion itself will quickly be stifled for want of vent. You cannot say that it is not in your power to hold your tongue or hands if you will. Do not only avoid that swearing and cursing which are the marks of the profane, but avoid many words till you are more fit to use them, and avoid expostulations, and contending, and bitter, opprobrious, cutting speeches, which tend to stir up the wrath of others. And use a mild and gentle speech, which savoureth of love, and tendeth to assuage the heat that is kindled. “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” And that which mollifieth and appeaseth another, will much conduce to the appeasing of yourselves.

Richard Baxter, William Orme, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, vol. 3 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 296.

If you learn to control your tongue and your body when you cannot turn off your feelings, then eventually your passions will follow the habits of your body. This is not necessarily true without the context of a broader system of life with time for contemplation of the Scriptures, prayer, service to the poor, trust in Jesus Christ to forgive those who wrong you, etc. But, it is true and replicable enough that a study of several populations of people who practiced venting or different versions of reflection upon frustrating circumstances (either alone or with a group) has shown that without religious context, a reflective approach to anger is much better than a venting one. If you wish to read the rest of Baxter’s chapter on anger it is available here (its a pdf, so scroll down to page 284).

Conclusion: Anger is a problem-solving reflex and should be treated as such. Venting by punching, yelling, or being morose simply trains us in bad habits, but looking for specific problems to solve turns anger into an energizing force for good.

*I have no idea if this kind of thing is common knowledge. I learned about it helping somebody write a research paper about corporate liability in cases of poorly tested medical equipment. Is there a guilty mind when shortcuts are taken with knowledge of the potential effects of those short cuts (the common sense answer is yes, but the legal answer might not be so clear)? But to determine that I had to read about intent in several other sorts of cases.

**Lohr, Jeffrey M., Bunmi O. Olatunji, Roy F. Baumeister, and Brad J. Bushman. 2007. “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANGER VENTING AND EMPIRICALLY SUPPORTED ALTERNATIVES THAT DO NO HARM.” Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice 5