Morality, Religion & Philosophy: April 2005 Archives

Commenter extraordinaire Ben Bateman deconstructs relativism in the comment thread of my earlier post about evil.

Mark: You seem to be using a weird liberal rhetorical device. Driving home, sometimes all I can get on the radio is Alan Colmes, and he does this all the time:

"You say X. But other people say Y. So how can we know?"

The implication is that we can't really know anything until everyone with expertise on the subject holds to a single view. This is impossible, of course, for anything but the most basic of logical truths, so it amounts to the claim that we can never really know anything. It thus amounts to a species of relativism.

As with all types of relativism, this argument is a weapon rather than a belief. For example, I have never heard a liberal say: "Sure, I think that taxes should be higher. But some conservatives disagree. So who really knows?" No, it is always the conservative belief that must dissolve into relativistic mud at the mere hint of a contrary liberal belief.

Mark puts up a good fight and the comments are better than my post, so go read them.

Many non-believers -- and indeed many Christians -- may not understand how the papacy relates to protestants, but the Baptist Press has a brief and informative explanation.

Amid expressions of appreciation for the conservative moral views of Joseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal who was elected as the 265th pope of the Roman church, various evangelical leaders reiterated their disagreement with Catholicism’s papacy from a biblical standpoint.

“Evangelicals do not find any biblical warrant for the office of the papacy or the elaborate structure of the Roman Catholic Church,” Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., told Baptist Press.

“Further, the Catholic system's emphasis on merit, works salvation and veneration of Mary and the saints are issues that those committed to ‘sola scriptura’ could never endorse or affirm,” Akin continued. “While we can appreciate the moral stand on life and marriage of the papacy, we will resolutely maintain that our High Priest is Jesus Christ in whom we have direct access to the true and living God.”

There's scripture in the article to back it all up.

I think the language in this AFP article claiming that the new pope "intervened in the 2004 US election campaign" is pretty disingenuous. When then Cardinal Ratzinger ordered bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters he wasn't attempting to affect anything as mundane as the presidential election -- he was addressing a religious issue that was highlighted by the publicity of the political climate. The cardinal didn't change the Catholic Church's position on abortion, he merely pointed out that the existing position should be applied in a certain way within that particular extremely public context. There's nothing out of place about a religious leader teaching others about how his religion applies to practical, real-life situations. As I wrote in my earlier post: politics should stay out of religion, but religion has every right to get involved in politics.

Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent article up at City Journal about "The Frivolity of Evil". He worked in hospitals and prisons in Britain for 14 years and claims to have dealt with scores of thousands of perpetrators and victims of evil and violence.

Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature. ...

There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. ...

There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.

I suggest you read the whole essay, as it's quite compelling. I've written about total depravity before, and I think only someone incredibly naive could possibly believe that mankind, or any individual, is "basically good".

(HT: Wretchard.)

I hardly have to surf the web anymore... since I started my new job my readers have been sending me more links than ever! The link to the Opus V from Harry Winston Rare Timepieces comes from John, and the "personal time robot" -- as some commenters are calling it -- certainly looks cool. For $137,000, it had better.

So my question is this: is it morally acceptable for a Christian to own such an extravagant item? Couldn't excess money be used in ways that honor God more? That leads me to wonder if there's a moral limit to how much money Christians should spend supporting theirselves and their families. Are vows of poverty necessary, or can Christians own property and enjoy their wealth to some limited degree? Or is the degree unlimited, so long as the Christian gives 10% to the church? Is it simply a matter of "giving this much is acceptable, but giving more would be better"?

Solomon teaches in Ecclesiastes that we should enjoy the fruits of our labor, and he was fantastically wealthy, but then he was a head of state and most of his wealth belonged to the government, not to him personally (except that's how kings worked back then). Also, Ecclesiastes is largely about the futility of life, not the glory of wealth. Many influential Christians have been wealthy, but Jesus wasn't and neither was Paul, nor any of the apostles as far as I'm aware. As Charles Foster Kane famously remarked, "You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man."

There's nothing wrong with wealth, but there are certainly some wrong ways it can be used or wasted.

Following up on my first post about obeying laws we don't like, John MacArthur has a two part teaching on "Submission to Civil Authority" (and part 2). MacArthur is possibly the foremost New Testament scholar of our time, and I think his positions on this issue are spot-on. He talks about all the whys and wherefores, but I'll quote the part that is probably most difficult for modern Americans to accept: submission to unjust governments.

A.To Unjust Authorities

Believers are to submit to "every" governing authority, even unjust ones. God's Word specifies that there are unjust rulers.

1.Isaiah 3:1-2, 8--"The Lord God of hosts is going to remove from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support, the whole supply of bread, and the whole supply of water; the mighty man and the warrior, the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder.... For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their actions are against the Lord, to rebel against His glorious presence." God judged the nation because its rulers were evil.

2.Daniel 9:11-12--"All Israel has transgressed Thy law and turned aside, not obeying Thy voice; so the curse has been poured out on us, along with the oath which is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against Him. Thus He has confirmed His words which He had spoken against us and against our rulers who ruled us, to bring on us great calamity; for under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what was done to Jerusalem." The Hebrew phrase translated "rulers who ruled us" literally means "judges who judged us." Because the rulers were evil, God judged them.

3.Micah 7:2-3--"The godly person has perished from the land, and there is no upright person among men. All of them lie in wait for bloodshed; each of them hunts the other with a net. Concerning evil, both hands do it well. The prince asks, also the judge, for a bribe." Micah lived in an evil society that included corrupt judges, so he pleaded for God to execute justice (v. 9).

4.Romans 13:1--"Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities." In Paul's day corrupt judges presided over the trials of persecuted believers.

Although many rulers were unjust in those days, God's people were not to take matters into their own hands. Instead they were to trust God, who has the sovereign right to rule as He pleases. Robert Culver wrote, "Churchmen whose Christian activism has taken mainly to placarding, marching, protesting, and shouting might well observe [Paul] first at prayer, then in counsel with his friends, and after that preaching in the homes and market places. When Paul came to be heard by the mighty, it was to defend his action as a preacher ... of a way to heaven (see Ac 26:1-32; Ro 1:9-10)" (Toward a Biblical View of Civil Government [Chicago: Moody, 1974], p. 262). If believers are persecuted or imprisoned, it should be for preaching righteousness, not defying civil law.

There's a lot more, and MacArthur discusses what submission means, how we do it, and why we do it, so if you're curious I suggest you read the rest of his lesson before jumping all over me.

Which raises some interesting questions, such as, what about the American Revolution? In Why Government Can't Save You, MacArthur writes:

Over the past several centuries, people have mistakenly linked democracy and political freedom to Christianity. That's why many contemporary evangelicals believe the American Revolution was completely justified, both politically and scripturally. They follow the argumentation of the Declaration of Independence, which declares that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are divinely endowed rights. Therefore those believers say such rights are part of a Christian worldview, worth attaining and defending at all costs, including military insurrection at times. But such a position is contrary to the clear teachings and commands of Romans 13:1-7. So the United States was actually born out of a violation of New Testament principles, and any blessings that God has bestowed on America have come in spite of that disobedience by the Founding Fathers.

Possibly so. I'd have to give the matter more thought than I can devote now, but MacArthur's position is certainly worth contemplation.