the harvard ichthus » Volume 1, Issue 1

In some ways, it’s not hard at all to find God at Harvard. You can find him down by the river, where our houses are named after the old Puritans—Mather, Dunster, and Winthrop. He’s in the Yard, too—the old University motto, “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” is emblazoned right on top of Johnston Gate, reminding us that whether we like it or not, our college is dedicated to “Truth for Christ and the Church.” Matthews Hall is covered with crosses, and Memorial Hall is built like an old Gothic cathedral. And, of course, there’s a church sitting right in the middle of it all, complete with clergy, morning prayers, and Sunday services. God, it seems, was here long before any of us were, and has no intention of leaving anytime soon.

But although the old man upstairs may have built himself into our campus architecture, it’s often difficult to see how he matters in our everyday lives. While some students here seem to have him all figured out, for most of us the question is much more difficult. If you grew up in a devoutly Christian home, you might have gotten the impression that knowing God has something to do with not drinking, not smoking, not swearing, not having sex, and generally NOT doing a lot of things. If you grew up in a less religious home, you probably weren’t really sure what knowing God meant—if it meant anything at all, it meant taking care of poor people and living a good life, but then, since lots of atheists and agnostics did that as well, it was hard to tell what difference it made. And of course, if you grew up in a religious tradition outside of Christianity, you received a completely different set of preconceived notions about God, and have your own struggles about how best to know and serve him (or her). One of the largest problems we face is that God means different things to different people. It’s hard to know just who God is, and even harder to know how he matters to us, or why we matter to him.

The way we live doesn’t help, either. Most of us worked our tails off in high school in order to get into Harvard, and now that we’re here, we’re still working our tails off in order to get into the best law school, med school, or i-bank. No matter how we were brought up, there just isn’t a lot of time to think about God—it’s all we can do to keep up with our homework, our extracurriculars, and to try to have a little fun once in a while too. And so, given all the difficulties involved, many of us simply give up. It’s simply so much easier to stop asking these sorts of questions, and to either believe, by default, what we were brought up believing, or to conclude that there are too many problems with religion to have faith in anything, choosing instead to float along in a sort of comfortable agnosticism. After all, there’s a problem set due tomorrow, and a party tomorrow night, and why does any of this matter in the first place…?

The Harvard Ichthus exists to change that attitude. We believe that religion is something entirely serious, requiring the complete energy of one’s mind, and that the choice of and devotion to a religion is the most important choice any of us will ever make. Religion is nothing less than the framework by which we live our lives, whether we choose to follow Jesus, Adonai, Allah, someone or something else, or nothing at all. We at the Ichthus are Christians—we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that He died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday, and that He is the answer to the problems of our broken world. We believe this so strongly that we are not willing to put our faith upon a shelf or take it for granted—we want to think about it critically, and talk about it with whomever will listen. The Ichthus is a journal of Christian thought, written by people who endeavor to apply that faith to every aspect of their lives—to think Christianly about biology, psychology, mathematics, physics, history, philosophy, economics, political science, art, music, poetry, literature, film, relationships, marriage, careers, beauty, truth, and love. We are not interested in proselytizing; we are interested in discussing, and we hope that people of all faiths, and of none, will join with us in the discussion. We are interested in searching for Veritas—Truth—and in putting that Truth into practice in our everyday lives. We might be right, and we might be wrong, but we are searching for something that we can hold on to. We are a journal for searchers, and we invite you to join us in our search.

Jordan Hylden ‘06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

The Real Losers of Locke v. Davey

Joshua Davey — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:59:34 +0000

On February 25, I lost a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. It was the final word in a lawsuit I filed over four years earlier, and the end to my legal challenge of a Washington state law that prohibits state college scholarship funds from going to students majoring in theology. I was not just any plaintiff, however; I may be the first person in the history of Harvard Law School to have been party to a Supreme Court case while a student. As Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree noted, it is difficult to be the first of anything at the law school, and my participation in the case has made for an interesting and unique first-year law school experience.

But as disappointing as the loss was to me personally, and as much as I had hoped to win and believed in my cause, I am convinced that I am not the real loser of Locke v. Davey. Certainly, I was the losing party, and at seven justices to two, the vote was one-sided. And there is no doubt that the personal cost was substantial. I gave up nearly $3000 in scholarship money on principle; the court’s decision in February means I will never see any of that money. Despite this, however, one could fairly argue that things did not turn out so bad for me. I still graduated college with honors. Indeed, I am now studying at Harvard Law School, and will likely have countless opportunities available to me upon graduation. So the loss of the Washington Promise Scholarship hardly seems to have ruined my future; indeed, inasmuch as this case helped me decide to pursue a legal education in the first place, one might say that despite the outcome I have come out ahead. But this is not true of everyone who had a stake in the outcome of my case. When the Supreme Court failed to take a stand against religious discrimination by requiring Washington State to treat all its citizens— even its religious ones— equally, many people lost much more than I did.

The story of my case began in 1999, when as a senior in high school I was awarded a Washington Promise Scholarship, available to all Washington students who qualified on the basis of academic merit and financial need. The scholarship was to last two years, could be used at any accredited school in Washington, and was worth the cost of an average community college tuition in the state of Washington. I had long intended to pursue a career in the ministry, and with this in mind, I enrolled at Northwest College in Kirkland, Washington, declaring a major in theology. I would use the funds from the scholarship to help me achieve my educational and career goal.

In October of my freshman year, I encountered a major obstacle to my plan; the financial aid director of my college informed me that I was not eligible to receive the Promise Scholarship funds because I had chosen to major in theology. Washington’s constitution, like those of over thirty other states, prohibits the appropriation of any public funds for religious instruction. This left me with a choice: change my major and keep the scholarship, or forego the scholarship in order to keep my major. I chose the latter. I had come to college to prepare for a career in the ministry, and to change my major simply to receive the scholarship would have been wrong. Instead, I sued the governor and a number of state education officials for violation of my constitutional rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, and equal protection under the laws. While I lost in federal district court, I won on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, whose judgment was reversed by the Supreme Court in their recent decision.

The Supreme Court’s decision was not merely a loss for me, but also for anyone who cares about the religious freedom our Constitution was designed to protect, which has now been seriously eroded by Davey. Indeed, the protection of individual religious liberty was a major motivating factor behind the First Amendment, which provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These two clauses are two sides of the same coin; the establishment clause prohibits the government from impinging upon free exercise, while the free exercise clause demands there be no government-sponsored religious establishment. The result of the interplay of these two clauses should be a government which acts neutrally toward religion, favoring no one religious group over another, nor non-religion over religion.

Under this interpretation, states like Washington would be free to establish public benefits programs like the Promise Scholarship and determine the criteria for participation. States could require that the scholarship only be used at public schools, or they could limit the scholarship to specific majors (e.g., nursing, education, engineering) that it has an interest in encouraging people to study. But if states choose to make the scholarship generally available, qualified persons should not be rejected on religious grounds. States should not be permitted to discriminate between religion and non-religion, among various religions, or among various sects of one religion. This sort of religious discrimination exhibits not neutrality, but hostility toward religion. It is to single out religious individuals and institutions for disfavorable treatment.

After the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, it is clear that it is constitutionally permissible for states to establish these sorts of religion-neutral benefit programs. In Zelman, the constitutionality of a Cleveland school voucher program was challenged by several groups claiming that the inclusion of religious and parochial schools in the program was unconstitutional. Clearly, taxpayer funds were routed to religious schools as part of the program; the vast majority of the private schools that participated were religious. Despite this, the Supreme Court ruled the program constitutional in what has been rightly called the most important education decision since Brown v. Board of Education (1). Crucial to the constitutionality of the program is the private choice involved. The tax money that ultimately finds it way to religious and parochial schools as part of this kind of voucher program does not travel directly from the state to the religious institution—which would be unconstitutional—but rather passes through the hands of the parents first. It is the parents, after receiving a voucher, who make the decision as to whether it will go to a secular or religious school. Thus, Zelman is a perfect example of indirect government funding of religious organizations and institutions, a type of funding that is perfectly constitutional.

It is my position that such indirect funding of religious individuals or institutions in public benefit programs is not only constitutionally permissible, but constitutionally required where the benefit program is generally available based upon religion-neutral criteria. This was my contention in Davey, though it was not upheld by the court’s decision. This is the view, however, that comports with most people’s sense of fairness; it just does not seem right that individuals should be excluded from government benefit programs because of their religious affiliation (2). It is also a view that comports well with case law, which has repeatedly rejected religion as an appropriate basis for government discrimination in a wide variety of contexts (3).

Many individuals, however, do not it see it this way; rather, they believe that the establishment clause requires the government to engage in active discrimination against religion, and that failing to do so amounts to establishment (4). Under this analysis, the guiding principle behind church-state relations is not neutrality or fairness, but rather active disfavoring of religion by the government. One popular argument in favor of this view is that it is unjust to require taxpayers to fund any religious activity with which they might disagree, even if that funding is indirect. Indeed, this was the primary justification given by the State of Washington in my case for its law preventing any state scholarship funds from going to students majoring in theology. The problem with this argument is that if we are to embrace it as a starting point in deciding what sorts of activities ought to be funded by the state, we are left with very little to guide us. If I am Roman Catholic, I might object to the inclusion of contraceptives in the health plans of state employees, which are of course paid for by taxpayer funds. If I am Muslim, I might object to state-run liquor stores. If I am an observant Jew, I might object to the state conducting any business on Saturdays. If I am an evangelical Christian, I might object to the secularism that is embodied in public education in the United States. And if I am a libertarian, I might object to there being much of a government at all. The point of each of these examples, of course, is that the state engages in all kinds of activities with which some taxpayers disagree, despite the sincerely held objections of those taxpayers. There is simply no way for the state to be sensitive to the consciences of its taxpayers such that none of them is forced to pay for a program with which he or she does not agree. Indeed, any efforts to enact a system of taxation in which taxpayers could allocate their tax funds based on conscience would doubtlessly end in disaster. In order for the state to function, taxpayers surely cannot be exempted from paying taxes simply because they disapprove of some of the ways those funds are spent.

Logically, then, one would expect that those who advocate active governmental disfavoring of religious individuals and organizations would likewise be opposed to federal financial aid programs, including Stafford Loans, the GI Bill, and Pell Grants (5). To be consistent, they would have to demand that government employees not devote their salaries to any religious purposes, as these salaries are paid by taxpayers (6). It is impossible for me to see how there is any meaningful difference between a scholarship going to a student wishing to study theology or a voucher going to a parent who wants to send their child to a parochial school and a government employee who faithfully contributes to his or her church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious organization. In each of these cases, taxpayer funds go to religious individuals or organizations indirectly, channeled through individuals who have discretion over how those funds are used.
Thus, it would seem that unless one is willing to commit to the idea that the state must curtail the liberty of its employees such that they cannot commit any of their taxpayer-funded salary to religious purposes, one must reject the notion that the state ought to engage in active disfavoring of religion in order to comply with the Establishment Clause. Quite the contrary, it would seem that in order to ensure equality and prevent the state from intruding on the liberties of its citizens in the name of preventing establishment, a policy of equal treatment ought to be adopted. Zelman has already told us that such an equality regime is constitutional; Davey tells us that it remains optional. So who loses, then, under Davey? Religious individuals and religious organizations. Because states are permitted to engage in active disfavoring of such persons and institutions in the name of protecting taxpayer conscience, religion is a basis upon which states may engage in discrimination sanctioned by the law.

Perhaps the biggest losers after this decision are America’s schoolchildren, and insofar as these individuals represent the future of this country, the nation itself. Public education in the United States is in a serious state of decline. Especially among minority groups, dropout rates remain high and graduation rates unsatisfactorily low. Students in the United States consistently perform worse then their counterparts in other industrialized countries in math and science (7). This is despite the fact that, in the past twenty years, annual per-student expenditures have increased some forty percent, and total educational expenditures some sixty percent (8). That the public schools of this nation are failing ought to be obvious to anyone who has attended one; I myself was educated entirely in public schools, and recognize many deficiencies in my own education. Competition introduced through parental choice and school voucher programs will almost certainly improve this situation. By giving parents a choice in deciding which schools their children will attend, failing public schools will be forced to improve or suffer a decline in enrollment and consequently funding.

Who would benefit from this kind of state-sponsored, religion-neutral public benefits program? Religious families, certainly. While many religious parents already elect to send their children to private schools for reasons of faith or conscience, parental choice programs would incentivize such choices. Rather than allocating religious parents’ educational tax dollars for public education from which their children receive no benefit, such programs would permit the taxes that parents already pay in support of education to go toward the education of their own children. Middle class families would certainly benefit from such a parental choice program as well. Many such families already engage in “school choice” by choosing to live in neighborhoods with good public schools (9). A parental choice or voucher program would lessen the need to move and thus the competition for housing in those few neighborhoods lucky enough to have a good public school. It would make choosing a private school an economically viable choice for many of these families. And the competition such programs create would serve to increase the quality of all the schools involved, making relocation on the basis of school quality alone unnecessary.

The class of families who would most benefit from school choice programs, however, are those with low incomes, many of which belong to minority racial or ethnic groups. These families often lack the financial resources necessary to relocate to more expensive neighborhoods with better schools, as well as the time, education, and finances necessary to home-school their children (10). The result of this dilemma is that these parents have no choice but to send their children to the local public school, which, in low-income areas, is often a failing one. Thus, these children will not have the educational opportunities afforded those lucky enough to attend better schools. This educational disadvantage translates into lower paying careers, higher rates of incarceration, and higher rates of familial dissolution among the children of these parents, thereby perpetuating the problem. The solution to this cycle, in which the children of low-income families are educationally disadvantaged and often become low-income parents themselves, is parental choice in education supported by some sort of voucher program. Such a program would have tremendous potential to eliminate the lingering ill effects of the many historical injustices perpetrated against minority racial and ethnic groups.

Again, under Zelman, such a program is clearly constitutional. If I had won in Davey, these programs would have been far easier to establish in many states, because those states would not have been permitted to exclude religious schools from participating in school choice programs. Unfortunately, no school choice program is likely to succeed if religious schools are denied participation; the fact is that there are few non-religious private schools. Any voucher program which excludes religious schools is far too limited to achieve its purpose, and limiting such a program to public schools would fail to introduce the competition that is necessary to improve the quality of education in all our schools. The big losers of Davey, then, are those who stand to benefit from parental choice and school vouchers in states which currently prohibit and taxpayer funds from going—even indirectly—toward religious education.

If parental choice and school voucher programs are poised to revitalize primary education in the United States, why do so many states retain a rule prohibiting the appropriation of any tax funds for religious education, when under Zelman such a rule is clearly not required by the Federal Constitution? One important reason is that teacher’s unions, which have a strong incentive to preserve the status quo, are well funded, well organized, and politically influential (11). These unions, and the politicians and school boards they control, are essentially the “education establishment,” and enjoy what amounts to a virtual monopoly over education in the United States (12).

Furthermore, this establishment enjoys statutory or constitutional backing in many states in the form of Blaine Amendments. These laws, adopted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant measures, expressly prohibit any state funding of religious education, whether direct or indirect (13). It was Washington’s Blaine Amendment that prevented me from receiving the Promise Scholarship; forty-seven states in total have Blaine Amendments or similar provisions in their constitutions or statutes (14). In many of these states, parental choice and school voucher programs face tremendous legal obstacles because of the these anti-religious laws.

While Davey had the potential to seriously weaken or even eliminate the Blaine Amendments, the Court’s opinion unfortunately leaves them intact. Legal challenges to these discriminatory laws will now have to continue state-by-state, both through litigation and constitutional amendment. These legal challenges have great promise of success, but will not have the benefit of a national precedent clearly rejecting religious discrimination in public benefits programs. Accordingly, it is clear to me that even though I lost before the Supreme Court of the United States in Locke v. Davey, I am not the biggest loser in this case. Those who really lost are those whose religious freedoms have been eroded, and those whose educational opportunities will suffer because of the Court’s sanctioning of ongoing religious discrimination.

1. Clint Bolick, Voucher Wars 189 (Cato Institute 2003).
2. See Eugene Volokh, Equal Treatment is Not Establishment, 13 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol�y 341, 346 (1999).
3. See Id. at 367-71 (discussing the Supreme Court�s repeated rejection of religion as a basis for excluding individuals and institutions from generally available government programs under Free Speech, Free Exercise, Establishment, and Equal Protection clauses).
4. See Id. at 342.
5. Id.
6. See Id. at 342-43.
7. See David Salisbury and Myron Lieberman, Keeping the Nation at Risk, at http://www.cato.org/research/articles/ salisbury-030425.html (Mar. 14, 2004).
8. Adjusted for inflation. See Id.
9. Marie Gryphon and Emily A. Meyer, Our History of Educational Freedom: What It Should Mean for Families Today, Cato Policy Analysis No. 492, 14 (2003), at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa492.pdf (Mar. 14, 2004).
10. Id.
11. See Bolick, supra note 1, at xiii-xiv.
12. Id. at xiv.
13. Gryphon and Meyer, supra note 9, at 15.
14. Bolick, supra note 1, at 204 n.5.

Joshua Davey is a first-year student at Harvard Law School.

Love and Marriage?

Bronwen Catherine McShe — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:58:33 +0000

Whatever else it signifies for American society, the rise of the same-sex marriage movement evidences the cultural-historical triumph of the idea of the love match. From the time of Romeo and Juliet, starry-eyed couples have combated social expectations and economic constraints and won definitive victories for romantic ideals in modern times. This is particularly the case in our own country, where we believe that nothing should stand in the way – not economic status, not region of origin, not religion, not race or ethnicity – of true love.

Pioneers that we are, we have come to what seems the final frontier, pushing to enshrine once and for all in our marriage laws the pure ideal of the love match – freeing marriage even from definitional burdens relating to the natural, normal, and best arrangement for the procreation and rearing of children. Marriage is not essentially about children, we now cry. Nor is it about the basic complementariness and drawing-nigh of the two sexes. It is about love, pure and simple – about the sacred bonding between an “I” and his “Thou,” and no one should have the right to discriminate based on the sameness or difference of I and Thou’s gender.

Opponents of same-sex marriage who nonetheless accept the status quo of no-fault divorce and chronic use of contraception should consider the relation of all these things to the love-match ideal. Couples often divorce when the passion leaves, or when they want to find truer, better connections with other individuals. And they often contracept to keep their marriages free for a time from the sobering effect of having children; something they believe would detract from the exclusive enchantments of their lives together.

Same-sex couples make a strong case when they beg the question, How is the love of a homosexual couple less worthy of legal sanction than the many ultimately loveless matches of heterosexual couples who end up in divorce court? The same-sex marriage movement seems merely symptomatic of long-running trends in our cultural view of marriage as based on the will and whim of the persons involved. American society, after all, long ago abandoned the conception of marriage as a life-long commitment, tied to children and based on the natural partnership of men and women (“for better, for worse, till death do us part”). It was traded in for a new model based simply on mutual romantic attachment (call it “love”) and convenience, “freed” from childbearing, childrearing, or long-term commitment if such was the will and desire of the married parties. If same-sex couples are vexed to see granted special protection in law, it should not be surprising. Our current model is hard to distinguish from theirs.

There is a great deal of hypocrisy, therefore, among those who embrace liberal divorce laws and contraception because they view marriage as primarily about the couple’s desires – and not about the procreative fruitfulness of a more selfless kind of love – and yet oppose same-sex marriage. This is not to say, however, that such people need to abandon the love-match ideal that has triumphed in modern times. Rather, by questioning it, they should identify what is good in, and proper to, the freely chosen and socially unburdened love of a man and a woman united in marriage. They need to wrestle with whether aspects of of their understanding of romantic love and its prerogatives may actually be opposed to a true ideal of married love. It is worth considering whether our current cultural understanding has contributed to the weakening of the institution to the point where same-sex marriage is even considered plausible.

As a way of aiding such reflections, a brief tour through the history of Western marriage law will be helpful. It will also be consoling, and perhaps inspiring, to those of us who, while troubled by recent cultural developments, nevertheless believe the best marriages are based on true love, without primary reference to social, political, and economic ends.

There is magnificent historical irony in the fact that we romance-minded moderns veritably owe our entire legal culture of protecting and forwarding marriages based ultimately on the free will and consent of the marrying parties to the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Yes, we owe the triumph of the love-match ideal in our marriage laws in large part to that bogey-man of bogey-men which modern myth-makers would have us believe was hopelessly hung-up sexually and preached that sexual relations in marriage should be as mechanical and passionless as they should be abundantly fruitful.

This is truly ironic given the way the same-sex marriage debate has been framed by supporters as a matter of separation of Church and State, in part because of the incorrigible tendency of opponents to quote all the familiar Bible verses about Adam and Eve (“and God didn’t create Adam and Steve!”). The very underappreciated fact is, however, that from the time the Roman Empire fell until well into modern times, Roman Catholic jurists and canon lawyers were engaged in an epic struggle with feudal and civil authorities over the regulation of marriage contracts, with the Church standing as the constant champion of marriages based on the free consent of the man and the woman and, wherever possible, on the Christian ideal of mutual love and devotion to one another. Powerful families, and the common-law and civil courts which served their interests, frequently contested ecclesiastical courts on what constituted marital consent. They were accustomed to contract marriages based on the consent of the fathers or of the families of the bride and groom, not on the consent of the bride and groom themselves – who, in many cases, particularly in noble and royal circles, were infants or small children when betrothals were made.

Church lawyers consistently and energetically opposed such customs and opposed the guiding principle that marriages should be based on the will of the families, rather than on the free will of the man and woman involved. The medieval Church was so committed to upholding the free will of the man and woman against the opposition of familial, social, or economic interests that she generally recognized as sacramental and binding marriage unions that had been entered into clandestinely, even without a priest officiating or any witness present. Because of the evidentiary difficulty such recognition created when a man or woman contested the fact of his or her alleged clandestine marriage, the Church formally declared in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) that a priest must officiate for the Catholic sacrament of holy matrimony – a sacrament which to this day is understood, however, as conferred by the spouses on one another through their profession of vows and through their consummation of the union.

By the early modern period, the medieval Church’s ideal of the freedom of a man or woman to marry or not to marry a particular person of their choice was being honored in many law courts throughout Europe. In particular – and relevant to our own situation – the championing of marriages based on the consent of the man and woman by Catholic canon lawyers and, in the same legal tradition, by Anglican ecclesiastical jurists, informed heavily most English jurisprudence concerning marriage, which was a crucial foundation for American marriage law. Though we have come to speak of “civil marriage” as a secular and quite distinct phenomenon from “sacramental” or “church” marriages, such a dichotomy – at least in historical terms – is a false one.

The best present-day proof of this is the fact that in America, as in England, ministers of religion are vested with the powers of justices of the peace, requiring only a license, and not a separate civil ceremony, for their “sacramental” or “church” weddings to be recognized in law. This is not the case in European countries affected by the Napoleonic Code civil, which, in express hostility toward the historic Catholic legal tradition, declared marriage to be a “civil contract only” and refused to recognize religious wedding ceremonies of any kind as bearing any legal force. (It may be a commentary on the effects of the two systems that while divorce has become more common in Anglo-American society than in continental Europe, extramarital affairs are looked upon with far less social stigma in Europe, perhaps because the idea of marriage’s sanctity with its call to fidelity – its natural affinity with the religious aspirations of most individuals and communities – was deliberately and systematically undermined by the continental civil law revolutions after 1789.)

As we see from this brief tour through legal history, our modern ideal of the love match has not merely been fostered by the individualistic and romantic longings of the American people. Rather, it been fostered by our legal codes which are – very specifically where marriage is concerned – firmly rooted in the ancient Christian legal tradition.

Accustomed as we are to view and assert rights and ideals in a cultural-historical vacuum, as if their supposedly inalienable nature is simply self-evident, many of us will be inclined to shrug at the debt we owe to the medieval Church for the modern ideal of marriage based on love and freedom. We need greater awareness of the historical genesis of such ideas, however, and not tear them from their principled roots, if we are to defend and maintain them vigorously on solid ground. An unalienable right, a term from old property law appropriated by modern philosophy, should be indicative of a tangible reality – it should possess a rootedness in the contexts and principles from which it draws life, nourishment, and the force of law. In the confusion of a morally and culturally relativistic climate, where ideas come and go as cheaply as mass-produced consumer goods, it is all the more imperative that we go in search of the roots of cherished principles such as love and free choice.

It is no accident that the idea of marriage based on love and free choice sprang forth vigorously from the Catholic Christian context. In Scripture, marriage is described as an image of Christ’s union with His Church – a union based on His freely given love for humanity, the love that brought Him to Calvary even though He had the power to avoid suffering by taking on our sins. Christ’s perfect love for the Church demanded His free choice, His consent to be the Bridegroom. And in turn, the Church’s spousal love for Christ would not be love – the giving over of ourselves to Him and the opening of ourselves up to God’s plan for new life within ourselves and for the generations to come – without our free choice and consent to follow Him.

In the Catholic tradition, freedom and love are united in the person of Christ, and since marriage is one of the states of life to which many Christians are called, this unity of freedom and love are essential to the ideal of Christian marriage. As early as A.D. 866, Pope St. Nicholas I declared, “let the consent alone of those suffice concerning those whose union there is question,” and that marriages were “in vain” where a bride and groom were forced to marry one another against their will by their families or by other compunctions. Such words were echoed by many later popes, including Innocent III in 1198, and by Church councils, such as the Council of Florence in 1439, where “mutual consent expressed by words in person” was defined as “the efficient cause of matrimony,” and where the sacrament of matrimony itself was defined as “the sign of the joining of Christ and the Church according to the Apostle who says: ‘This is a great sacrament.’” That marriage signified “the indivisible union of Christ and the Church” – an indivisibility sealed by Christ’s loving self-sacrifice, was defined at Florence as the reason for the “indivisibility of marriage,” a primary “good” of marriage understood as central to its nature. The phrase from Genesis that the “two become one flesh” has been understood by the Church to speak to a real unity, not a mere metaphor, which was made clear by Christ Himself when He said “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” In accordance with this principle, the Church has held to this day, against the hostile winds of popular beliefs and expectations, that divorce – especially when desired simply because a couple has grown tired with one another – is contrary to Christ’s law of love as expressed most perfectly in His faithful endurance of the Passion.

The Christian ideal of love in marriage is not about the passions felt during the enchanted honeymoon period, but rather is embodied in willful endurance in imitation of Christ. For just as Christ endures his Passion precisely for the sake of His Bride, the Church, each spouse must sacrifice his or her life for the good of the other rather than spend it on his or her own transient wishes and desires. Christ looks at those who witness and effect His Passion with a love that only desires to see the good in them and which offers them chance after chance of experiencing the joys of His divine life united to God. Contemplating this, a husband who is growing tired, vexed, or even disgusted with his wife is called to look at her with Christian eyes of love – seeing as for the first time her dignity as a special creature of God, as a beloved daughter of the Christ who gave His life for her, and as a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. The same is true for a wife growing tired, vexed, or disgusted with her husband. Christian love – in marriage as in every state of life – is not about the preservation of good feelings but about the example of self-sacrifice that is the source of humanity’s true joy: the joy for which our nature, capable of such love with Christ, was created.

Just as Christ’s sacrifice is not the end of His story but rather the true beginning of ours, the Christian conception of love in marriage is built upon the hope of new life – hope for the growing faith of the husband and wife, and hope in the plans God has for their family, both physically in the procreation of children, and spiritually in the increase the family might give to the life of Christ’s Church. Christ chooses to suffer the Passion so that all men and women might share in His resurrection. Likewise, men and women enter the bonds of matrimony fully aware of that unseen hardships will undoubtedly come, but trust in each other and in God that they are doing something beautiful for Him by bringing into the world new sons and daughters that will share in their life and in the unending life of Christ. It is with such sublime thoughts in mind that the Church prohibits couples from thwarting the fruitfulness of the marital act. For again, like divorce, contraception is contrary to the law of love that is in its sacrificial nature life-affirming and life-giving.

The medieval Church, in championing marriages based on the consent of the man and woman involved, could not have done so vigorously without constant reference to the sublime and indeed intimidating conception of marriage as a life-long image of Christ’s self-sacrificing union with the Church. It was the gravity of the calling of marriage that demanded that men and women enter into it by their own free will. The Christian call of spousal love and of bringing new life into the world as increase for Christ’s Kingdom was not to be forced on unwilling parties.

Nor was it to be diminished by marriage laws whose primary aims were social, political, or economic ends not centered on the nature and dignity of the marriage calling that rightfully could be embraced only with the full human freedom of the man and woman involved. As Pope Pius XI put in 1930, “Although marriage by its nature was instituted by God, nevertheless man’s will has its own role, and a most noble one it is.”

***

Could the modern understanding of marriage based on a veritably sacred view of the consent of the two persons have arisen outside the Catholic Christian context which gave it life in the Western legal system, nourished it, and gave it the force it today enjoys as an unquestioned principle of civil jurisprudence? Could it have arisen from a context in which the only ends of laws were regarded to be the this-worldly goals of political, social, and economic order and prosperity, with no reference to the sanctification of persons who are asked to freely choose to follow Christ in the state of life to which He calls them, and to a life of willful, committed self-giving guided by the law of love which He incarnated in His life, death, and resurrection?

Such questions may be startling and strange to most Americans who are accustomed to assert values such as free choice, consent, and even love the same way they assert unalienable rights as “self-evident” in a kind of philosophical and cultural-historical vacuum. It is precisely in moments like the present, however – when in the name of rights and values such as the centrality of love to married life, an unprecedented challenge is being mounted against the very definition of marriage as human beings have always and everywhere understood it – that we must face the realization that cherished rights and values cannot be adequately identified or defended in a vacuum. We see instead that they are defined, championed, and challenged by historical actors with moral agency guided, as we are, by current and reactive modes of thinking.

These modes of thinking – perceptions of the nature of human beings, their individual dignity, their social orientation, and the ultimate purpose of their lives – can either derive from a coherent view of reality and show consistently the greater significance of values such as love and freedom in marriage, or from a hodgepodge of historically-rooted but dissonant principles bound together only by a mean, ideological impulse.

Such an impulse seems to be at work in our current marriage culture which values the love and free will that can bring couples together, but does not value the fullness of married love that freely chooses to honor its sworn vows and to bear the responsibilities of marriage “for better or for worse” until death. We have a dissembling and fleeting view of freedom in American culture – we fear the commitment that making a real choice for something actually involves, and thereby we distort freedom by disconnecting it from its real end, which is a fuller human life lived for one another and for God.

The ideological impulse is at work as well in a marriage culture that is enamored with the idea that those who marry lovingly and freely share their life with one another and bring each other to personal “fulfillment,” but is at the same time repulsed by the idea that always proper to such spousal sharing and personal fulfillment is the fertility of their union – the spilling over of their love and their life into the miracle of bearing children. We have a stingy view of love in American culture – we fear its natural fertility, and thereby distort it into the selfishness which is truly the opposite of true love.

Finally, the ideological impulse is at work in a culture that allows the same-sex marriage movement to gain lasting traction, but more as a secondary effect or symptom of the fundamental ideological problems just described. The same-sex marriage movement is based on the principle that human freedom involves the right to redefine such a fundamental human relationship as marriage; that a society’s definition of marriage has no formal relationship to the immutable divine law of life and of love which itself gave life to our largely still unquestioned convictions about the fundamental goods of marriage. And the same-sex marriage movement is based on the principle that fertility is unimportant to the spousal relationship; that the sexual bond is oriented exclusively toward the two acting persons and not toward a love that can transcend the couple and spill over to participate in the divine plan for the creation of new life.

Certainly there are those who will balk at the claim that same-sex couples – along with contracepting couples and divorcing couples with no grave reason for their separation – are violating by their actions the very ideal of love that our culture elevates as the only real necessity of a good marriage. Such people have every right to present arguments in defense of their conception of married love and its relation to the higher goal of the fulfillment of human life. They may reject the view presented here, one centered closely on the person of Jesus Christ, as itself a mere problematic ideology. But perhaps with a better understanding of the Catholic Christian historical foundations of the ideals and legal principles they take so much for granted, they will not wish to reject that view without giving it the further hearing it deserves in our conflicted society.

Bronwen Catherine McShea ‘03 is a first-year student at Harvard Divinity School.

Right and Wrong: God, Law, and the Secular State

Paul F. Niehaus — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:57:13 +0000

Christians may believe in the same God, but they do not agree about the proper way to apply God’s standards in the modern state. Another way of saying this might be that they do not agree about politics. The phrase “religious right” has achieved common usage in politics. There is also a religious, and a Christian, “left.” Opinion polls show significant heterogeneity of opinion on political views among Christians in the United States. (1) The labels “left” and “right” do not adequately represent this heterogeneity, but their use at least illustrates that diversity of opinion exists.

We are interested not in the fact that Christians disagree about politics, but rather in the ways that they reason to their conclusions. How do we judge what is right and what is wrong? What are the appropriate Biblical foundations for political conclusions? Intuitively, one might think about political issues by comparison to ethical ones. One Christian might notice that prostitution is sinful and reason that it should be illegal. Another Christian might notice that Christ commanded us to give generously to those in need, and reason that the government should provide for the poor.

This example illustrates that the same kind of thinking can lead to political positions on both the “right” and the “left.” We want to reemphasize that our interest here is with the “kind of thinking” and not with the positions. The thinking in this example centers on the relationship between sin and the law. Prostitution is sinful, hence illegal. More subtly, it is sinful for a rich man not to help the poor, so the government effectively requires that he do so. In both cases, sinfulness implies illegality. Is this reasoning valid? Should a Christian who thinks this way extend the reasoning to all sins? Should cursing be illegal? What about lustful thoughts?

We have thus arrived at the following question: which sins should be legal, and which sins should be illegal? This question matters because it follows from a line of reasoning that is intuitively appealing. This question was also a starting point for another influential Christian political commentator, Thomas Aquinas (below). We propose to take up this question and to identify Biblical foundations for answering it.

Thomas Aquinas takes up the question of sin and the law in the Summa Theologica: “does it belong to the human law to repress all vices?” Aquinas believes that the purpose of human laws is to lead men gradually to virtuous living. Since all men are sinful, human laws do not forbid all vices, “but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others.” Aquinas draws an analogy between these criteria for lawmaking and the parable of the wineskins. (Matt. 9:17) A sinful citizenry can be seen as an old wineskin which would burst under the pressure of strict laws – the new wine. (2)

To give Aquinas his due would require more space, but clearly he takes a pragmatic approach. Aquinas would ban those vices that are grievous and harm others. This seems practical, but Aquinas does not show that it follows from an understanding of God’s nature. We do not discount pragmatic considerations – surely God’s will is pragmatic in the strongest sense of the word – but human pragmatism is not an accurate guide to God’s will.

We want to address the question of sin and the law with explicitly Biblical methods. In doing so, we must avoid the pitfall of “proof-texting.” Such an approach would look through the Bible for individual passages which address the topic at hand, and use them as proofs. For example, Christian scholars Ronald Nash and Eric Beversluis debated economic policy with repeated references to Old Testament passages about justice. They disagreed sharply on the interpretation of Exodus 22:26-27: “If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body…” Beversluis uses this passage to argue for state provision of necessities. Nash accuses Beversluis of proof-texting, and also argues that “if Exodus 22 contains a list of duties for any just state, then one must conclude that the contemporary state has a duty to execute witches, sex perverts, and idolaters.” (3) This is rhetorically effective, but hardly puts to rest the question of economic entitlements. Instead, it opens a Pandora’s Box of other, more daunting questions. Should the modern state execute idolaters? If not, why? Surely we need a broader understanding of the context in which these laws were given. It is precisely the lack of such a systematic framework that limits the Nash-Beversluis debate.

What we want, then, is a way of thinking about justice that is Biblical, not because it rests on Bible verses, but because it rests on an understanding of the Bible as a whole. Thus we will begin our argument by discussing the authority of Scripture, and why understanding “the Bible as a whole” is possible. (4) We will then present Biblical evidence showing that in this modern age God is still concerned with the laws of nations, even though the New Testament scarcely touches on legal matters. This leads us naturally to an examination of the Old Testament law. We will place a special emphasis on the Law as a covenant, as one part of the covenant-history between God and man. From the covenantal form, we will infer that Biblically just laws should respect the moral capabilities of a nation’s citizens.

We end our discussion of the Old Testament law with a comment on the practical considerations involved in “translating” ancient policies into modern ones. We then turn forward to the New Testament for a brief consideration of the Church – the new form of God’s kingdom which replaces the political state of Israel. We see the Church taking responsibility for some areas of sin which were the domain of the state under the Old Covenant.

Also, for reasons that will become clear below, we provisionally define justice to be that which is in accord with the will of God.

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

As Christians, we take the Old Testament as authoritative. We will discuss reasons for taking this view because it is basic to our study. But more generally, we urge anyone reading about justice in the Old Testament not to shy away from reading, understanding, and applying any portion of the text. This view seems harmless enough until the text under consideration says something unpleasant, and then it binds: “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.” (Ex. 21:17) Indeed, as Nash pointed out, the Mosaic law prescribes the death penalty for a broad range of crimes. Some Christians find these passages anachronistic. How could the “God of the New Testament” possibly give such instructions? Could this be the revealed Word of the God who became incarnate in Christ Jesus, the God who told us to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us? And thus, could these texts have any authority over Christians?

From Scripture the resounding answer to these questions is yes. Paul writes, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) The Scripture which served as a common reference for Paul and Timothy was that of the Jewish people, our Old Testament. And its quality of being God-breathed implies not only usefulness for the stated purposes, but essential identity with the breath, or Spirit, of God. So Jesus can say, “The words I have spoken to you are Spirit, and they are life” (Jn 6:63), and, consequently, He can say to His Father “Your word is truth” (Jn 17:17).

The life and teaching of our Lord confirm the authority of Scripture. As Millard Erickson points out, Jesus’ repeated disputations with the Pharisees contain criticism of their interpretation of Scripture, but with underlying recognition of its authority. (5) He told his disciples, “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matt. 5:18) The Christ who taught us to love our enemies is also the Christ who held the Old Testament law to be authoritative. The “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament” are identical and inseparable.

This would seem to leave no room for a “pick-and-choose” reading of Scripture. Such a reading selects and emphasizes passages that fit with the reader’s preconceptions and desires, while excluding or de-emphasizing passages which are a source of discomfort. Why might we be tempted to adopt such an approach? First, because the Bible’s normative teaching may conflict with our innate sense of right and wrong. Second, because even though we accept the Biblical truth we may feel embarrassed to express it or act on it publicly.

Both temptations must be resisted. Quite simply, where the Bible explicitly contradicts our own views, we are wrong and the Bible is right. To think otherwise would deny God’s authority and reduce the study of Scripture to an exercise in self-validation. Similarly for the opinions of our peers; we know that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight” (1 Cor. 3:19) and that “the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:25) so that in faith we consider Scripture the higher authority.

We will proceed with the understanding that the Old Testament law is authoritative. If any part thereof seems an embarrassment, we remember Christ’s words: “If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:38) We are looking for a notion of justice of which the Father would approve, and so we must rely on His words. As for those passages that give us pause, the inquiry into moral capabilities which follows may help us understand them.

T HE GOD OF JUSTICE

At the outset we posed the question, “Which sins should be legal, and which should be illegal?” We now rephrase this question slightly, to read, “Concerning which sins does God want us to make laws, and concerning which sins does He not want us to make laws” (leaving open the possibilities “all” and “none”). Although this may seem a trivial rewording, it forces us to focus on Biblical evidence about God’s will rather than on human intuitions.

Jeremiah 18 makes it clear that God cares about the conduct of nations and kingdoms that are only under common grace, that is, nations and kingdoms not in a special redemptive covenant relationship with God. Jeremiah 18:1-10 reads as follows:

“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the LORD came to me: ‘O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the LORD. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.’”

God’s word to his prophet makes it clear that God judges all nations and kingdoms according to their behavior. It is worth note that God speaks in universal terms: “a (i.e., any) nation or kingdom,” not Israel only. It is also worth note that God sets no temporal constraints on this activity of divine judgment. Abraham called God “the Judge of all the earth” just before He judged Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 18:25), God was still “Judge of all the earth” in Jeremiah’s day, and He is still so today. He judged Sodom and Gomorrah for their behavior then, He judged nations and kingdoms in Jeremiah’s day, and will continue to do so until the end of the age. Nothing in the New Testament contradicts or supercedes this theodicy, for reasons which will appear below. To sum up with regard to Jeremiah 18, however: God judges nations in the flow of history, and He judges them for their behavior. Good laws can encourage good behavior, of course, and had Israel obeyed God’s laws, it would have been a testimony to the nations. (6) But, after all, the way to avoid divine judgment as a nation is not simply to craft good laws! Rather, God considers the heart and soul of a nation, so to speak: He weighs the hearts and souls of the people who make up the nation. And God is no fool. He can know the hearts and souls of people both because no one can keep such things hidden from God (Heb 4:13), and also because people make their hearts known by their words and deeds (Matt 12:33-37, 15:19-20). So, on the basis of such manifest proofs, i.e., on the basis of behavior, God judges the nations of the earth.

Anyone who carefully reads the Old Testament and the New Testament will soon notice that the New Testament does not have much to say about God’s dealing with nations within history. The reason lies in the form of God’s Kingdom in each Testament.

The New Covenant form of the Kingdom is different from the Old Covenant form. The New Covenant form of the Kingdom is the church, and so the New Covenant has a more focused emphasis upon individuals in their relationship to God and in the church, rather than upon kingdoms or nations. On the other hand, the Old Testament, in which the form of the Kingdom is a nation state, has much more to do with nation states. God judges a nation (Egypt) in order to liberate His people. He judges nations (“the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites” Gen 15:18-20) in order to establish His Kingdom in Canaan, and throughout the history of Israel, from the Judges period through the United Monarchy until the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria and the fall of the Southern Kingdom to Babylon, we find God dealing with his Kingdom in terms of the nations and kingdoms round about, and we find him judging those nations and kingdoms as well. The Old Testament form of the Kingdom means that we see God dealing with that Kingdom, and with other kingdoms in relation to it, as a matter of course. So we most naturally turn to the Old Testament to learn what God has to say about Himself and His standards vis-à-vis “a [any] nation or kingdom” (Jer 18:7).

As we saw from Jeremiah 18, God judges nations according to their behavior. So, it behooves a nation to behave well. That is, it is good for a nation if its people have good values and, presumably, good laws that reflect and maintain them. In a democracy, we have unusual freedom to make or change our laws. So, in a democracy such as ours, laws may change considerably as the character of the people changes and the people seek to frame laws in keeping with their character. If the character of the people is improving, this is good. If their character is growing worse, however, it is bad.

How can we know whether a people’s character is good or bad? Since God has given us His word, which is truth (John 17:17), we can determine this from the Bible. We can apply that knowledge to what we observe in the character of a people. Moreover, since God has given laws for the Old Testament form of the Kingdom (a nation state), we can study those as prime examples of good laws.

Our purpose acknowledges God’s aims in providing laws for His people. God gave laws in order to accomplish (at least) two things: to supply a body of legal standards and constraints, just as laws do in any state, and to provide a lesson in justification, namely, that no one can be justified by works of law. The history of Israel, which was one of repeated covenant breaking and judgment, strongly suggested this latter truth. But the Sermon on the Mount established it beyond all doubt. Now, as we acknowledge these facts, we also purpose to accomplish something different on the basis of the Mosaic law.

COVENANT HISTORY

We look to the Mosaic law as an example, or possible standard, of just laws for a just secular state. This law was given in a covenant that constituted a state (ancient Israel). But the Mosaic Covenant was one of a series of five major covenants in the Old Testament. God used those covenants to forward His plan of redemption, and also showed thereby that he is a God of covenants.

God’s first covenant was the Adamic Covenant, which God enters into with Adam and Eve, making them rulers over earth (Gen 1:1-2:3). (7) When His vassals break that covenant, God graciously reconfirms their ruler status (part of the significance of clothing them, Gen 3:21), and gives them the promise of the “Protoevangelium” (Gen 3:15). He also carries out the death penalty upon them, as He must in order to be true to His covenant curse (Gen 2:17b) and consistent with His own holiness and truth.

As sin abounded on earth, God pronounced judgment upon all humanity. He spared only Noah (who was righteous and “walked with God,” Gen 6:9) and his family. Once that judgment was over, God made a covenant with Noah (Genesis 9). That Noahic Covenant was a re-creation covenant, i.e., a reestablishment of the Adamic covenant, as the repeated terms indicate (Gen 1:28-29 // Gen 9:1-3). The Noahic covenant thus gave humanity a fresh start, as it were, with God as Suzerain over a humanity called to live in obedience to him.

But humanity chose not to do so. That choice, of course, was a sum of myriad individual choices made by increasing numbers of people over many years. Through sin people lost the knowledge of God and degenerated into polytheism with its invariably concomitant sexual sins (cf. Rom 1:20-32). Out of such a polytheistic context God called Abram (Gen 12:1-3, cf. Josh 24:2). God made a covenant with him, and that covenant was the genesis of the two great covenants that are most familiar to us.

The Abrahamic Covenant anticipates both the Mosaic covenant and the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, as Genesis 15 makes clear. It anticipates the Mosaic covenant and the Exodus from Egypt by declaring that the Lord would lead Abram’s descendants out of the land that oppressed them (Gen 15:13-14) and back to the promised land to dispossess its inhabitants (Gen 15:18-21). It anticipates the New Covenant which would replace the Mosaic covenant, because God Himself makes the passage between the sacrificed animals (Gen 15:17). Normally in ancient near eastern treaties, the vassal would make that oath passage (cf. Jer 34:18), which symbolized the punishment to befall the vassal should he break the covenant. In Gen 15:17, however, God in theophany (“a smoking firepot with a blazing torch,” Gen 15:17) makes that passage. By doing so, He symbolically declares that He will take the punishment for any covenant-breaking by Abram and his seed. And Christians are Abraham’s seed: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3:29). So, the Abrahamic Covenant anticipates both the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant which replaces it.

After the Mosaic covenant there is one final, major covenant in the OT: the Davidic Covenant (2 Sam 7:1-17). But the Davidic Covenant does not replace the Mosaic; only the New Covenant does that. The Davidic Covenant, rather, is a special covenant focused on the royal Davidic succession, which eventuates in Christ. David himself did not mediate a new covenant with new laws and a new form of the kingdom for all of God’s people. Only Jesus did that. Rather, David himself was still under the Mosaic Covenant, and paid for violating it when he committed adultery with Bathsheba.

MORAL CAPABILITY

Now that we have embedded the Old Testament law in covenant-history, we are prepared to assess the significance of the covenantal vehicle for law-giving.

The essence of a covenant is mutual agreement. Before the covenant binds, everyone must consent to the terms. Subsequently, the justice of a person’s actions in the context of the covenant is a function of their conformity to the standards of the covenant. Thus, as we saw above, David was judged and punished under the Mosaic covenant; Israel’s repeated dalliances with idolatry and sexual immorality were judged and punished under the same covenant. God’s punishment was just because it was prescribed by the covenant. We have taken great pains to cover all of covenant-history because taken as a whole it illustrates this pattern consistently. Humans agree, implicitly or explicitly, to terms. When they violate those terms, God punishes them either directly or through his agents. When they fulfill those terms, God rewards them. God fulfills his promises, binding himself to the terms of the covenant, faithfully executing everything he committed to do. Neither punishment nor reward is arbitrary because both are established by the covenant.

Thus, when we start to think about laws established by covenants, we might hear echoes of the secular contractarian tradition. Social contract theories rest on an idea that is intuitively appealing: it is fair to hold people accountable to terms to which they have already consented. (8) But any secular contract can at best be an imperfect reflection or partial embodiment of the truth, which is God’s will. (9) Any merit attributable to social contract theories is the result of their imperfect reflection of truths that God has revealed through the use of the covenantal form. One of these truths is that God’s historical interaction with us is on terms to which we consent.

Since God is almighty, it might seem that human consent to a covenant is a mere formality. Perhaps no one would use the word “exploitation” due to its negative connotations. But in the sense that exploitation involves agreements that are formally voluntary but in reality coercive because of an imbalance of power between the parties, the covenants seem strong candidates for the label. Where does a greater power difference exist than between God and man? Yet we have seen that in the Abrahamic covenant God symbolically assumes the role of the vassal rather than the suzerain, playing the weaker part. More generally, through the entire sequence of covenants, evidence for coercion is entirely lacking. At the landmark events in God’s historical work, the human parties involved were free to say “no”.

God’s covenant dealings with His people through Moses and Joshua illustrate this truth. Moses challenged Israel to choose God and His law: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Dt 30:19; cf. Ex 19:8). Joshua likewise challenged them, “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD” (Josh 24:15; cf. 1 Kgs 18:21). (10) The people in both cases chose the LORD. Afterwards, when citizens were punished for their individual crimes, and when Israel as a whole was punished for its collective misbehavior, the punishment was not a response to their fallen, sinful condition (in which all people participate, Rom 3:23), but a response to sins they chose to commit – sins that violated the covenant they had elected to enter.

As we observed, God did not punish Israelites for their sinful condition, but for covenant-breaking sins (which we might call crimes) under Mosaic law. But even those specified sins (or “crimes”) implied the deeper and more pervasive sinfulness of people. The New Testament affirms the same. Christ repeatedly used the construction “you have heard that it was said / but I tell you” to distinguish between the sin (as defined by the Mosaic law), and the underlying sinful motivation (not addressed by the Mosaic law). Moreover, the law of Moses judged covenant-breaking sins during one’s lifetime. But all sin is ultimately judged at the final judgment. The writer to the Hebrews observes that “anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.” (Heb. 10:28). This is legal punishment, within time. He then says, “How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:29) This is final punishment, at the end of time.

In sum: the Old Testament law, though one of its chief functions was to illustrate to humanity the unattainability of God’s high standards, still did not cover all sins. This justifies the question we posed: “concerning which sins does God want us to make laws, and concerning which sins does He not want us to make laws?” It also suggests that all sins is the wrong answer; legal penalties should not be attached to sins simply because they are sins. How then can we distinguish among sins? We have seen that God’s actions with respect to law and punishment are uniformly consistent with his will that human beings be capable of making meaningful moral choices – having what we will call “moral capability.” Based on this observation, we propose that the laws should be consistent with God’s general pattern of giving human beings the capability to make meaningful moral choices.

We need to be quite clear about what is expected from this principle. We do not see it as a sufficient basis for lawmaking. We do see it as necessary to thinking about Biblical justice. It is founded on a very basic observation about God in his role as lawgiver and as the final judge between right and wrong. And the capability principle has strong implications for the nature of just laws.

Take the case of murder. From a Biblical standpoint, murder is sinful because God does not will it, and this because we are each made in His image. In addition, to allow murder would run against our principle of moral capability. Murder is a willed choice made by the murderer, but it robs the victim of significantly greater moral agency. Therefore, the capability principle suggests that penalties attached to murder are just deterrents. They restrict would-be murderers slightly in order to preserve the capabilities of potential victims – the capabilities to choose right and wrong, the capability to choose God.

We previously looked at a Mosaic law proscribing the death penalty for those who curse their parents. Cursing at parents is still sinful today. But, setting aside the nature of the penalty, should cursing one’s parents be illegal today? To ban such cursing would unambiguously reduce the moral capabilities of children. Thus the presumption under the capability principle is that legislation which penalized cursing would be unjust. This does not contradict the fact that cursing was illegal in ancient Israel; indeed nothing in the Old Testament law violates our criterion precisely because that law was explicitly and entirely accepted by Israel at Sinai.

According to the traditional Biblical interpretation, homosexual intercourse is sinful because it contradicts God’s express intent that sexual relations should be between married men and women. Is legal circumscription in this case just? Again, prohibiting homosexual acts would unambiguously reduce the moral capability of the citizens. The presumption under the capability principle is therefore that legislation penalizing homosexual acts would be unjust. For the reasons just discussed, this does not contradict the fact that homosexual intercourse was a mortal crime in the Old Testament law.

The above examples suggest that the legislative process matters for the justice of the outcomes. We agree. A full treatment of process and moral capability is beyond our present scope. We do observe in passing, however, that the covenantal process sets a very high bar of unanimous consent. (11)

We want to emphasize that the moral capability, “the capability to make meaningful moral choices,” which we discuss is not a Christianized notion of “freedom.” First, the secular concept of freedom suffers from competing definitions, making it somewhat nebulous. Second, freedom as the absence of coercion, which we might call a baseline definition, diverges from the moral capabilities we are discussing in important ways. Consider my handicapped neighbor; we live under the same state and enjoy the same legal freedoms, but I am far more capable. In particular, imagine that we both witness an assault in progress. I must decide whether or not to put myself at risk and intervene. My handicapped neighbor is not capable of intervening, and so is not put to the same test. I must make a decision which will be either right or wrong; my neighbor is not capable of making this decision. In this sense I am more capable of right or wrong than he is, and this is the moral capability of which we speak. It is generally true that the mere absence of coercion does not imply that a man is capable of making significant moral decisions. (12)

The distinction between capability and “freedom” also matters on theological grounds.
Our emphasis on moral capabilities is based on the whole Biblical evidence of God’s actions vis-à-vis mankind. This is not an argument for Christian freedom based on the ontological concept of free will. Free will is a controversial idea because of seemingly contrary evidence for predestination. Rather than engaging this higher theological question, we want to stress the Biblical evidence that God always offers his people a choice to obey him or to disobey.

MODERNIZING POLICY

We have explored the pertinence of covenant-history to a political question: concerning which sins does God want us to make laws, and concerning which sins does He not want us to make laws? We wish to close on a pragmatic note. Identifying a sin as one that the law should proscribe is a first step. There remains the question of how to proscribe a sin. What actual, measurable behaviors should be legally required or prohibited? How should the law be administered? What penalties should apply?

We saw earlier that the only detailed discussion of laws in the Bible is the Old Testament law, and that the reason for this has to do with the form of God’s kingdom. Thus, we may wish to use the Old Testament law as a guide to actual policies. The law does go far beyond listing illegal sins; it states detailed policies to govern economic, social, and religious life. Unfortunately, the Old Testament law is far removed from our times. As a result there can be sharp disagreement between Christians about how to translate ancient policies into a modern ones.

An example should illustrate the issue. Land policy was a cornerstone of economic policy in Israel. When Israel first occupied the land of Canaan, God divided the land between them, each family receiving an allotment. Families were free to sell their land, but the sale was not to be temporary – every fiftieth year was to be a Year of Jubilee, when land would return to its original owners. With Ron Sider, we note that “modern technological society is vastly different from rural Palestine” (13) and that “it is the principle, not the details, that are important today.” (14) Modern agriculture, which makes possible the support of large modern populations, depends on efficiencies of scale that can be achieved on large farms but not on small ones. If all the land in America were redistributed and we all became small farmers, we would either starve or produce only enough for a rather mean and miserable life. In fact, without concentrated ownership of land the world would probably look like what Thomas Malthus anticipated. (15)

It is indeed the principle and not the detail that is important today. In this example, Sider argues that the principle at stake is that of “equality of opportunity.” To us, such adoption of secular political language seems distracting. (16) We can instead interpret the jubilee rule in terms of capabilities. We have argued that God is concerned with people’s capability to make morally significant choices. Economic capabilities matter precisely because their exercise requires moral decision-making. In ancient Israel, control over land increased one’s moral capabilities, because one could do good or bad things with land. On the other hand, when a man refused to fulfill his charitable obligations to his destitute neighbor, the neighbor’s capabilities would remain severely inhibited. The jubilee rule ensures that each generation is capable of making morally meaningful economic choices, choices with real consequences attached, all without mortgaging the capabilities of future generations. A modern-day analogue to the jubilee rule should do likewise; it should increase the moral capabilities of the least well-off. But in a modern economy, access to a good education might be more relevant than owning forty acres. It is this sort of analogizing that we call “modernization.”

Policies have many aspects, only some of which are functions of the times. In our example, we established that Israel had a welfare policy, and that the good which it provided – land – might not be the best choice for a modern welfare policy. But the good provided is only one aspect of Israel’s welfare policy. There were other important aspects that must not be accidentally altered – or even worse, consciously manipulated – during “modernization.” As Sider points out, “jubilee affirms not only the right but the importance of private property managed by families who understand that they are stewards responsible to God.” (17) We have developed a principle of moral capabilities that emphasizes precisely these values: the capability to make private moral choices, and answerability to God for the actual choices made. A welfare policy today should reflect these values regardless of what good it happens to provide.

This means that one cannot decide that welfare is “just” and then treat the question of which kind of welfare is “best” as secondary. Rather, arguments about the justice of modern welfare policies must take the details into account from the outset. Another way of saying this is that efforts to “modernize” Old Testament policies cannot be separated from the application of the basic Biblical principles already discussed. Without expressing an exact position on welfare, we will affirm that policies that expand the choices of welfare recipients are more just than those that restrict choice and encourage dependency. This is the case not because the recipients of welfare are necessarily sinners who must be cajoled into shaping up, but because their moral capability matters as an end.

STATE AND CHURCH: AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

God punished David for his adultery, but adultery is not a crime in our secular state. The reason for this difference between ancient Israel and the United States is not merely historical or cultural: it is more fundamental than those categories would imply. Some matters now are, properly, the province of the secular state, and some are not. Some are the province of the form of God’s Kingdom on earth, which is the church, and some are not. When the form of God’s Kingdom was the state of Israel, then those things which were properly the business of a state and those which were properly the business of God’s Kingdom coincided, for the obvious reason that the form of God’s Kingdom was a state.

Since, now, God has seen fit to ordain His Kingdom in the form of the church universal, which is a transnational entity, it is also true that He has Himself ordained a separation of church and state. Some governments may try to emulate a theocracy, but any such efforts are misguided. The church, and only the church, is or can be the theocracy today.

God’s division of these kingdoms – His Kingdom on the one hand, and the kingdoms of this world on the other – opens up the question: over what does God’s Kingdom (the church) properly have jurisdiction, and over what do the kingdoms of this world (the secular states) properly have jurisdiction?

One fundamental division of jurisdiction appears to be as follows: the secular state has jurisdiction over crimes, as crimes; the church has jurisdiction over sins, as sins. So, the state must define what is criminal and determine what punishments are appropriate for criminal actions, and the church possesses the advantage that God has defined what is sinful and has prescribed how the church should deal with cases of sin (e.g., Matt 18:25).

Another division of jurisdiction has to do with contracts and contractual relations in civil life. The state has jurisdiction over many kinds of contracts within its own boundaries, from business agreements to international treaties. The church, on the other hand, has no jurisdiction in such matters. Yet the church does have jurisdiction in some areas of contract. The church can choose, for instance, to remove a minister from office because of some egregious sin (which could be viewed as a “breach of contract” with God, serious enough to require his or her removal from office). Historically, the church also had jurisdiction over marriage (biblically understood as a covenant, or contract) and divorce, since marriage is based on God’s created order for human beings (cf. Matt 19:8-9). We argue that marriage and divorce should always be the domain of the church and not the state. But today through civil unions, marriage licensing, etc., church and state are very tightly intertwined. The ideal New Covenant division, in which the church administers marriage while the state is restricted to endorsing legal partnerships, will be hard to attain. (18)

CONCLUSION

We began with the fact that Christians may worship the same God, but do not agree about the proper way to apply God’s standards in the modern state. We raised for ourselves the question, “Which sins should be legal, and which should be illegal?” Christian thinkers have offered answers to such a question, but the answers have not been satisfactory. That is so because they are based more on human reason and commonsense than on the Bible (e.g., Aquinas), or have merely used the Bible as a source of proof-texts in support of a certain view (e.g., Ronald Nash and Eric Beversluis).

We required an answer to the question that is Biblical, not merely in that it cites Bible passages, but in that it is drawn from an understanding of the covenant-history between God and man: in short, God’s entire method of working in history.

In pursuit of our answer, we rephrased the question to read: “Concerning which sins does God want us to make laws, and concerning which sins does He not want us to make laws” (leaving open the possibilities “all” and “none”). Although this was a trivial rewording of the original question, it forced us to focus on Biblical evidence about God’s will, rather than on human intuitions.

We saw, in light of Jeremiah 18, that God certainly has preferences about laws in a secular state, although ultimately behavior is the basis for His judgment of the nations. We also saw that good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust are ultimately only ways of describing things that accord or do not accord with God’s will.

We also saw that the Old Testament has more to tell us about matters of law and the state than does the New Testament, which is so because the form of God’s Kingdom under the Mosaic Covenant was a nation-state. We noted also that, although the form of God’s Kingdom differed in the New Testament, Jesus still affirmed the fact that the Old Testament is God’s revealed word – thus leaving no room for “pick and choose” exegesis.

We reviewed God’s covenant-making throughout the Bible, so that the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant which replaced it could be understood in their proper perspective. The Bible does not contain multiple examples of lawgiving, but it does contain multiple examples of covenants. We established a principle that applied in all of the covenants: that God’s requirements (or “laws”) are given to people who are free to reject them. That is, God always gives humans moral freedom. Such was the case in the original, Adamic or Creation Covenant, and such has always been the case.

The freedom to make moral choices is something God has built into us. It is part of being made in his image. Laws in the state should reflect that reality. Thus murder and theft should be illegal because they rob the victim of capabilities to make morally significant choices. On the other hand, viewing pornography or having homosexual intercourse should not be illegal, because in these cases the laws would only further restrict the capability of the individual to make meaningful moral decisions.

The form of God’s Kingdom is a further, important determining factor when we consider laws and the state. God’s New Covenant has established a new form of the Kingdom; namely, the church. The church is not a state, and so it has no jurisdiction over crimes. So, for example, the church cannot impose religion or forms of worship on the state. On the other hand, the church, not the state, should have the authority to declare a couple married or divorced, since marriage is an institution founded by God (although today, with the existence of such institutions as civil unions, marriage licenses, etc., church and state are very tightly intertwined).

Finally, we considered the issue of the “modernization” of Old Testament laws, and argued that we should look to understand and apply the principles, rather than the letter, of the Mosaic laws.

Sin is sin and is abhorrent to God; the question we have tackled here is which sins should be subject to legal penalties. God is the judge of nations; whether a sin is legal or illegal, the church is called to work to reduce it, to encourage the people of every nation to live in accord with God’s will. This matters because God will judge nations that transgress egregiously (Jeremiah 18)

Accordingly, there is no need to develop some secularly-inspired limit on the scope of Biblical truth, e.g. restrict the Bible to our private lives but in public promote a secular notion of “democratic liberalism.” On the other hand, there is also no ground for trying to make our nation into a theocracy, as God has ordained that the form of his Kingdom now is the church universal. What we can do is better understand how Old Testament law can guide us in crafting laws for our nation that please God. But that can probably only happen – and perhaps should only happen – when such laws arise out of the moral conviction of the people.

1. See, for example, ongoing polls by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Recent data are available at http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/religion-politics.pdf.

2. See Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Prima Secundae Partis, Question 96, Article 2. Available online at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/.

3. Ronald H. Nash, A Reply to Beversluis, in Economic Justice and the State. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1986. p. 61.

4. We reject several approaches to OT and biblical material which militate against the possibility of biblical theology – against the possibility, that is, of “understanding the Bible as a whole.” Positions rejected include classic literary or “higher” criticism (the “Documentary Hypothesis”), pentateuchal form-criticism (Gattungsgeschichte) as practiced by Herman Gunkel and his followers, rhetorical criticism as practiced by , e.g., Robert Polzin, and deconstructionism and reader-response criticism as practiced by, e.g., David Clines. We consider that all of these approaches are fundamentally antisupernatural in their philosophies, as is evidenced by their consistent rejection of biblical miracles and biblical claims to revelatory status. For further reading that adduces evidence and argument against some of the above-mentioned approaches, cf. Umberto Cassuto, The Documentary Hypothesis (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1941), R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), and Duane Garrett, Rethinking Genesis (Christian Focus, 2003).

5. Erickson, Millard. Christian Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000. p. 228.

6. E.g., Dt 4:6-8, where Moses says of God’s laws, “ Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?”

7. For evidence of the covenant nature of Gen 1:1-2:3, see Jeffrey J. Niehaus God at Sinai (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).

8. Or in the theory of Rawls, to terms to which they would in principle consent, were they deprived of information about their specific situation in life.

9. One salient difference between a social contract and a Biblical covenant is that, as we next discuss, a covenant can in no sense be understood has an agreement between equals who each individual seek their own ends.

10. The same invitation appears in Pr 8:7-11: “My mouth speaks what is true, for my lips detest wickedness. All the words of my mouth are just; none of them is crooked or perverse. To the discerning all of them are right; they are faultless to those who have knowledge. Choose my instruction instead of silver, knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.”

11. A related passage is 1 Samuel 8:11-17, in which God warns Israel of the danger of concentrated political power.

12. In making this distinction between freedoms and moral capabilities, we are indebted to philosopher Amartya Sen, who argues forcefully for a similar distinction. See, for example, Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Sen suggests that the concept of “freedom” that is most relevant is that of “freedom as capabilities.” The difference between his terms and ours is the following: Sen refers to capabilities as “functionings” in general, while we are interested only in a subset, in what we have called moral capabilities.

13. Sider, Ronald. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. : W Publishing Group, 1997. p. 75.

14. Ibid, p. 76.

15. Sider provides a second example of mistaken focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law; see his discussion of interest rates, p. 76.

16. Equal opportunity is a highly-charged catch-phrase, and not well defined. John Rawls has argued forcefully for a distinction between “equality as careers open to talents” and “equality as equality of fair opportunity,” and says even of the latter that “offhand it is not clear what is meant, but we might say that those with similar abilities and skills should have similar life chances.” (A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999. p. 63.) Amartya Sen has criticized this notion as too tolerant of arbitrary accidents of birth. Sider comes closest to providing a definition when he speaks of “an equality of economic opportunity up to the point that [every family] had the resources to earn a living that would enable them not only to meet minimal needs of food, clothing, and housing but also to be respected participants in the community.” (p. 69)

17. Sider, p. 71

18. This division bears directly on the current hot-topic issue of homosexual marriage, but is important for thinking about the chronic issue of divorce as well. C.S. Lewis thought that the same division would be the just, Biblical response to divorce. He argued that marriage as defined by the state should be quite separate from Christian marriage, that everyone should be aware of the distinction, and that the reason for this is that many citizens were not Christian and should not be compelled to behave as Christians. See Mere Christianity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. p. 112.

Jeffery J. Niehaus, Ph.D., is a Professor of Old Testament at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. His son, Paul F. Niehaus‘ 04, is an Applied Math and Economics concentrator in Dunster House.

Utmost and Highest: The Life and Biblical Hermeneutic of Oswald Chambers

Jeffery David Dean — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:56:20 +0000

Don’t be clever; do be careful. Don’t be controversial; do be consecrated. Don’t be conceited; do be concentrated. Never choose a text, let the text choose you….When a text has chosen you, the Holy Spirit will impress you with its inner meaning and cause you to labor to lead out that meaning for your congregation.” (1) With words such as these, Oswald Chambers instructed students at his Bible Training College, and, while the implorations may seem unremarkable for a twentieth-century Holiness preacher, the story of how the words came to be spoken and to be published is remarkable, indeed. If ever a story embodied the ideals of Holiness Christianity, that life most certainly was Oswald Chambers’.

As early as his childhood, Oswald Chambers was believed to be called by God into some form of ministry. His brother Franklin once said that young Chambers’ prayers were such a joy to hear that members of the family would sit with ears pressed to the door of his bedroom, just to listen in on the five-year-old Chambers’ conversations with God. (2) Born next-to-last of eight children, Chambers grew accustomed to service within the household, as well as to personal reflection and intense spiritual introspection inside his soul. This introspection was intensified when the Chambers family moved to London from Aberdeen, Scotland, so that Reverend Clarence Chambers—Oswald’s father—might accept a position as the Traveling Secretary of the Baptist Total Abstinence Association. (3) In London, Oswald often found himself inspired greatly by the art and architecture; he composed numerous poems decrying Londoners’ ability to walk casually by their works of art and never stop to gaze in awe. Further, Chambers often found himself sitting and sketching those same landmarks of London: his passion for drawing continued until he declared to his parents a desire to attend the National Art Training School. After a struggle with his parents, and with his father maintaining that Chambers should take on practical work to help support the family, Oswald matriculated at the Training School in 1893. (4)

Simultaneous to the emergence of Chambers’ artistic talents was the burgeoning of his passion for God. He began attending the Rye Lane Baptist Chapel in London at age sixteen, and following a revival given by C.F. Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, he accepted Christ as his personal Savior that same year. He often reflected nostalgically on this time at which he said himself to be “born again” at his baptism. Even at this young age, Chambers was noted for always insisting upon discovering the practical application of the texts studied in his church Bible courses; though now living in London, the Scottish proclivity toward pragmatism would never be dispelled in Chambers. (5)

A third lingering aspect of Chambers’ life began while attending Rye Lane Baptist: he met and fell in love with Miss Chrissie Brian. The two began exchanging letters often during their teenage years, and this exchange continued even after Chambers moved from London to Edinburgh to attend a two-year arts program at the renowned University of Edinburgh. The separation from Chrissie and his family was exceedingly difficult for Chambers, but he was convinced that God was calling him to reclaim the world of art for Himself. He expressed this sentiment in a goodbye letter to Chrissie on April 22, 1895:

“Whom shall I send to proclaim the salvation of the aesthetic kingdom, who will go for us?” Then through all of my weakness, my sinfulness and my frailty my soul cried, “Here I am, send me.” I would as soon drown myself as undertake such a work unless He was with me, unless He called me, unless He sent me. Jesus Christ is my Savior, my Master, He is the hot coal from off the altar that has touched my soul, my eyes, my ears, my mouth—and I must. Pray for me. I do not know how this is to be done—but there is something wrong, else Christians and art, music and poetry would not in their training be so opposed to Christ….Again I say, I do not know how this is to be accomplished, but if God calls, God will guide and I know that this kingdom shall become the kingdom of His Son. (6)

Yet, despite an early confidence of God’s call, Chambers began to waver in his assurance that God’s desire was for him to reclaim the world of art on behalf of Christ, and he began to feel as though he may instead be called to church ministry. His journal entries from his time in Edinburgh reflect pleasure in his artistic work and lessons, but a lack of assurance that the Holy Spirit was driving his endeavors is evident: “No man by mere high human wisdom would dare undertake a step for Jesus’ sake unless he knew that the Holy Spirit has directly spoken to him; and until He comes, I shall not go.” (7) As he wrestled ever more with the possibility of ministerial calling, he spent many hours on long walks in the Scottish hills, praying and imploring God to show His will. After the most agonizing of such nights, Chambers returned to his room to find an unsolicited brochure for Dunoon College—a tiny Bible College held in the living room of a small town minister in Dunoon, Scotland. Chambers accepted this as a sign of God’s will for his life, and he soon felt himself to have no choice but to enroll at this school:

How can I dabble in art, pleasing my own artistic sense when that burdening cry of the human is ever rising, “What must we do to be saved?” “Who will show us any good?” How can I think of artistic comfort and high self-culture when the Voice of Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus constrains me to go and preach the gospel? Oh it is not my worth, my ability, my talents, it is God that impels me. (8)

Chambers clearly was beginning to feel as though his life would amount to little in God’s eyes unless he answered to God’s very specific plan for him

At Dunoon, Chambers found himself under the tutelage of the Reverend Duncan McGregor, an old Scottish preacher who endeavored to train his students through personal experiences rather than through books and lessons. McGregor was often known to say, “My aim is not sending forth ministers, but men with prophetic fire—men who cry, ‘Give us souls, or we die!’” (9) Chambers was not accustomed to this method of trial by fire, having previously studied under world-renowned professors in Edinburgh, but he warmed to it quickly. He wrote to Chrissie in 1897, “It is surely better for young men to be taught and personally influenced by godly men long in the work than to be crystallized to clear cold cultural concerns in a University curriculum.” (10)

Yet the torment in Chambers’ soul had in no way subsided. In fact, his time at Dunoon only intensified the tumultuous questioning in his heart regarding God’s call on his life. After graduating from Dunoon, Chambers accepted a position there as a professor of philosophy. He engaged with many students during his tenure, as well as continuing to learn from Reverend McGregor. Most challenging for Chambers, however, was a lecture given by a guest minister, Dr. F.B. Meyer, who spoke about Baptism of the Holy Spirit and the futility of the Christian life without it. Chambers was greatly troubled by these words, and he immediately began to pray that God would fill him with His Holy Spirit. But, instead of the spiritual power and peace promised by Meyer, Chambers was immediately confronted by the most difficult emotional challenges of his life. For four years, he grew increasingly cold and cynical. He spurted off angry letters to the local newspaper about his own artistic superiority. He positioned himself in key leadership positions in his local church. He even severed ties with Chrissie.

Thus, despite being ordained in 1899 and outwardly seeming to be in peak spiritual condition, Chambers was struggling greatly in his own personal “dark night of the soul.” He was increasingly convicted by the hypocrisy evident in his life—by the disconnect between who he seemed to be and whom he knew he really was. But a speaker at Dunoon College cited a verse that Chambers began to carry as his own: “And you must be sure to ask Him why this came.” Chambers began begging God to show His purpose and make His grace and Holy Spirit known, but a year went by with little answer from above. (11)

Around this time of desperation, Chambers was asked to preach at a revival in Dunoon. Though he felt himself unfit for the task, he accepted the request and delivered a rather lackluster sermon. Much to his surprise, forty individuals came to the altar to dedicate their lives to Christ at the invitation. Chambers was greatly shocked and troubled by this—he wondered why his words had been so efficacious when he had such little confidence in his own ability to preach them. The Reverend McGregor rebuked him for his frustration, and reminded Chambers that he had asked for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Chambers realized then that, despite no glorious moment of revelation by which he knew himself to have received tongues of fire, the baptism of the Holy Spirit had indeed come at the same moment in which Chambers felt himself most useless and worthless with respect to God’s call. According to biographer David McCasland, “Chambers never looked back on this spiritual experience at Dunoon with the smug satisfaction of having ‘arrived.’ Instead…, he spoke of it as a new beginning; a gateway instead of a goal.” (12)

Thenceforth, Chambers was fully devoted to his calling as a minister of God under the authority of the Holy Spirit. He traveled through America, Japan, and England on a voyage that circumnavigated the globe. On this voyage, Chambers met Miss Gertrude Hobbs. The two fell in love and were married only a brief time before opening the Bible Training Center together in London.

The importance of Oswald’s marriage to Gertrude and the relationship of their marriage to Oswald’s future ministry cannot be overstated. Gertrude, whom Oswald affectionately called Biddie, had often been quite ill as a child, and thus had taken up shorthand to amuse herself while confined to her bedroom. She honed her skill to such an extent that she could not listen to Chambers’ sermons without taking accurate shorthand transcriptions of them. These transcriptions would later play a great role in the story of Oswald Chambers’ ministry.

In September of 1915, Chambers was called into service in Zeitoun, Egypt, where he served as a YMCA chaplain. He delivered countless sermons day and night, and he worked diligently upon the arrival of Biddie and their young daughter Kathleen to transform the dilapidated YMCA camp into a comfortable place of rest for the soldiers. Countless men devoted their lives to Christ as a result of Chambers’ compassionate zeal.

Chambers’ ministry was not to last long, however. Having suffered from a recurring lung disorder as a child, his health was never ideal. The desert climate did not agree with him any more than his intensive work schedule, and he soon was stricken with appendicitis. He died on November 15, 1917, of complications resulting from an emergency appendectomy. Despite Biddie’s wishes that he be buried as quietly as he had lived, the soldiers from the camp insisted on burying Chambers with full military honors at the British Military Cemetery in Old Cairo, where he continues to rest today.

Soon after, Gertrude returned to England. Devoted to Oswald even after his death, she refused to allow her husband to be forgotten, despite the somewhat inauspicious circumstances of his ministry. She immediately went to work with her notes, and after three years of labor, compiled and edited the final selections for a piece she entitled My Utmost for His Highest—her husband’s personal motto. Nowhere in the book did she tell the story of her hours taking notes and her years spent typing sermons. In fact, the world only discovered that My Utmost for His Highest—the most popular devotional guide in history—was written posthumously when an article to that effect was published in Christianity Today in 1974! (13)

* * *

Chambers’ life may seem unremarkable—indeed, were it not for his sermon collections, we would have undoubtedly long ago forgotten his name. But understanding Chambers’ life is essential to understanding his work—Chambers continually emphasized the need for one’s words to be congruent with one’s actions. Chambers truly did live out what he preached, and that is in fact his ultimate message to us: that we are not called to live partly for Christ, or even mostly for Christ. We are to give our utmost.

Approved unto God, a collection of Chambers’ sermons, begins with a talk entitled “The Worker’s Spiritual Life,” in which Chambers divulges his high opinion of scripture: “The mere reading of the Word of God has power to communicate the life of God to us mentally, morally, and spiritually. God makes the words of the Bible a sacrament, i.e. the means whereby we partake of His life, it is one of the secret doors for the communication of His life to us.” (14) Yet despite believing fully that the text was the instrument by which God spoke to mankind, he warned against the improper use of it: “Never use your text as a title for a speculation of your own; that is being an impertinent exploiter of the word of God.” (15) Rather, he says, “Let the text get such hold of you that you never depart from its application.” (16) But how is this holding to take place? Chambers claims only through constant mediation on the text’s message:

Our Lord wants to give us continuous instruction out of His word; continuous instruction turns hearers into disciples. Beware of “spooned meat” spirituality, of using the Bible for the sake of getting messages; use it to nourish your own soul. Be a continuous learner, don’t stop short, and the truth will open to you on the right hand and on the left until you find there is no problem in human life with which the Bible does not deal. But remember that there are certain points of truth Our Lord cannot reveal to us until our character is in a fit state to bear it. The discernment of God’s truth and the development of character go together. (17)

Thus we see that Chambers believed fully that the preparation of the minister is infinitely more important than the preparation of the sermon. He quotes 1 Timothy 4:14, which reads “Neglect not the gift that is in thee,” before expounding the importance of the minister’s reliance on the Holy Spirit for guidance: “In immediate preparation, don’t call in the aid of other minds; rely on the Holy Spirit and on your own resources, and He will select for you.” (18)

Here we see a glimpse of the struggle with which Chambers dealt while studying in Edinburgh. He was a talented artist—so talented as to be selected by the crown for a royal tour of the great art of Europe in hopes of becoming an artist of the Empire. Yet he came to realize that his plan to minister to the aesthetic realm was a plan devised of his own resources, and not through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, though Chambers’ relationship to Chrissie Brian had been a happy one, and though their compatibility and long relationship led many to believe they were secretly engaged, Chambers knew God had not called him to that relationship. They would have been happy together, but Chambers’ sermons would never have been recorded, Biddie never would have published My Utmost, and the Christian realm would never have been given its most beloved devotional guide. To claim these occurrences were the actions of the Holy Spirit is in no way logically verifiable, but Chambers would have readily accepted them as being from the Hand of God.

Despite his assurance that the Holy Spirit was the true minister of the pulpit, Chambers endeavored to steer his students away from styles of Biblical interpretation that were not devoted to personal holiness. He exhorted them:

Don’t be clever. Never choose a text, let the text choose you. Cleverness is the ability to do things better than anyone else. Always hide that light under a bushel. The Holy Ghost is never clever. In a child of God the Holy Spirit works as naturally as breathing, and the most unostentatious choices are His choices. Unless your personal life is hid with Christ in God, natural ability will continually lead you into chastisement from God. When a text has chosen you, the Holy Spirit will impress you with its inner meaning and cause you to labor to lead out that meaning for your congregation. (19)

This passage illustrates Chambers’ belief that any effort of ministry not called upon by the Holy Spirit is invariably doomed to failure.

Additionally, Chambers asked his students to be careful to discover spiritual truth for themselves with their own relationship to God, and not to just rely on the text for answers. He begged them not to be controversial, for “The spirit that chooses disputed texts is the boldness of impudence, not the fearlessness born of morality. Remember, God calls us to proclaim the Gospel….Never denounce a thing about which you know nothing.” (20) He exhorted his students to be concentrated on the Gospel—to be true “workmen” for God. He called upon his students to never be conceited: “Conceit makes the way God deals with me personally the binding standard for others. We are called to preach the Truth, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and we get decentralized from Him if we become specialists.” (21)

Most importantly, Chambers implored his students to be consecrated: “Never forget who you are, what you have been, and what you may be by the grace of God. When you try and re-state to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, you give God a chance to pass that truth on to someone else through you.” (22) He explained the possibility of this consecration in his passion for personal holiness by the sanctification of the Holy Spirit:

The doctrines of the New Testament as applied to personal life are moral doctrines, that is, they are understood by a pure heart, not by the intellect….My spiritual character determines the revelation of God to me….The Gospel of the New Testament is based on the absoluteness of revelation, we cannot get at it by our common sense. If a man is to be saved it must be from outside, God never pumps up anything from within. As a preacher, base on nothing less than revelation, and the authenticity of the revelation depends on the character of the one who brings it. Our Lord Jesus Christ put His impress on every revelation from Genesis to Revelation.

This passage, based on what we know about Chambers’ struggles with faith in Dunoon and his ministry thereafter, leads us to see that his hermeneutic, like that of most twentieth century Holiness ministers, was largely New Testament Biblical in nature. Like Paul, Chambers saw ministers as passing on the Good News they had received in an accurate way. The litmus test, Chambers felt, was the personal testimony of the minister: Was his message of salvation from sin exemplified in his life? If not, then his message was of no importance and may be ignored. If so, then his message is the hope for relief from the existential woes of life and must be believed and passed on at all costs.

However, we do see a bit of a confusion regarding the authority of scripture. Journal entries record admiration for the fundamentalist ministers whom he encountered in America, but Chambers never considered himself to be a fundamentalist. He never pronounced the text to be inerrant, and his plea that ministers avoid controversial passages seems to imply a belief that either the text was inaccurate or that the accuracy therein could not be understood by mankind. Furthermore, he speaks of the revelation in terms of Jesus Christ, not in terms of the words of the Bible: Chambers often clearly delineates between the “word” and the “Word.” While his beliefs were certainly evangelical, Chambers never actually referred to himself as anything more than a Scottish Christian.

Chamber’s hermeneutic, then, seems to be one in which the text is merely the mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit. Such a belief necessitates the idea that the text is, in the words of the Catholic theologians, “deaf and dumb” outside of the influence of the Spirit’s power. Thus, one who has not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit will receive nothing when reading the text except the earliest broken accounts of two religions in the Middle East. One who has received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, however, will receive the Word of God and His plan for the reader’s life.

Thus, Chamber’s hermeneutic delineates mankind into those who are under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and those who are not. Furthermore, the delineation can be seen with respect to the personal holiness of the individual interpreter. That is, those who preach the Gospel and live the gospel are to be praised. Conversely, those who use the Gospel and never allow it to change their lives are the greatest threat to Christianity.

Though Chambers’ standards for personal holiness and his insistence upon the actual day-to-day influence of the Holy Spirit may seem pre-modern and illogical, the fact that My Utmost for His Highest has grown to become one of the most important books in Christianity outside of the Bible itself may speak to something higher than modernist logic. That Chambers gave up a promising career in art, a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart, and the possibility of gaining renown in the academic world seems lamentable. That he died in the Egyptian desert, leaving his wife and young daughter no means of support, seems even worse. But that his life and words have managed to be a vessel for the Holy Spirit to speak to millions since his death indicates that the utmost sacrifice on the part of Oswald Chambers may have indeed reaped the highest reward of God.

1. Chambers, Oswald. Approved Unto God. The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers. Gertrude Chambers, ed. Grand Rapids: Discovery House Publishers, 2000. p. 13

2. McCasland, David. Abandoned to God. Grand Rapids: Discovery House Publishers, 1993. p.27

3. Ibid. p. 29.

4. Ibid. pg. 42.

5. Ibid. pg. 37.

6. Ibid. pg. 41.

7. Ibid. pg. 51.

8. Ibid. pg. 59.

9. Ibid. pg. 67.

10. Ibid. pg. 70.

11. Ibid. pg. 86.

12. Ibid, pg. 85.

13. Wirt, Sherwood E. “Oswald and Gertrude Chambers: Their Utmost for His Highest.” Christianity Today.

June 21, 1974. pg. 17.

14. Chambers. pg. 5.

15. Ibid. pg. 7.

16. Ibid. pg. 7.

17. Ibid. pg. 11. Emphasis mine.

18. Ibid. pg. 11.

19. Ibid. pg. 13.

20. Ibid. pg. 13. Emphasis Chambers’

21. Ibid. pg. 13.

22. Ibid. pg. 13.

Jeffery David Dean ’06 is a Religion concentrator in Adams House.

Gay Marriage: A Moral Imperative

Stephen Dewey — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:55:53 +0000

As one who has grown up immersed in a strongly Christ-centered family and community, I find that I exhibit the tendency to adhere to the received, orthodox Christian tenets I absorbed during that time. At the same time, I have a faith that I can call my own, which is entirely personal in origin, and which is based on just that: faith, my faith, which I deeply feel and which is the expression of my understanding that I ultimately need God, that I need Him to love me and help me, that I need Him to do the same for others, and that all of us need Him to hold the world together and ultimately to redeem it. My walk in faith is defined by reconciling Christian principles with the faith I know. Christian principles are the basis of that faith, for without the Gospel I would have no knowledge of Christ’s redeeming power and His love for mankind, nor could I trust in it or feel it. And my faith, now established, is a lens through which I now look at those same principles.

I say this because I fear that I and many other Christians have had the misfortune of leaving our knowledge and our faith in separate categories. If “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), why do we treat the written Word as separate from the living Word? The two are one and the same, and it is fruitless to consider the one without the other. One literal message of the Gospel, for example, is to give sustenance to the needy (e.g. Mark 10:35-45). This is just an objective command. But unless this practice cultivates a loving and generous heart, it is worthless, for Christ’s greatest commandment with respect to other humans is to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). Christians’ responsibility to add faith to their knowledge can be illustrated using the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30). Just as the master gives money to his servants to protect but also wants them to invest it to make a profit, Jesus gives us commands and examples about bringing people out of degradation, but would also have us use those commands to develop our own convictions about the importance of doing so. This is the point of all of Jesus’s acts of healing and generosity on Earth. Moreover, all of the most forceful Christian moral movements have worked towards this goal, including the anti-slavery movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the work of inner-city black churches and Christian missionary-aid workers today. People with non-straight orientations currently suffer from all the aspects of ostracism, dehumanization and social poverty that Christ condemned, and many are struggling with HIV/AIDS. Countering these evils is a necessity for all who would live by the convictions of their faith in Christ.

If it could be shown that living according to a non-straight orientation keeps people in a state of degradation, then it would follow that Jesus would want people to deny these orientations. But by no means can such an assertion be proven with scripture. The oft-quoted passage of Romans 1:24-27 states that homosexuality is connected with the moral decline of humanity, and from this Christians derive the notion that homosexual acts and thoughts should be discouraged today. Yet many forget that this passage is part of a thematic overview of the decline of man, which is described in much greater detail in the opening chapters of Genesis. Here, the story of Adam and Eve paints an overwhelmingly clear picture of the connection of heterosexual sexuality with humanity’s decline. Adam and Eve ate the fruit given them by Satan in violation of God’s wishes, and immediately “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Genesis 3:7). It was only the result of Adam and Eve’s sin that they even had a heterosexual drive that would make them aware of their sexual characteristics. Sex until that point could only have been pleasureless and absent of a heterosexual drive, or they would have had to cover themselves earlier. Moreover, the gender traits that some assert make males and females necessarily “complementary” are in fact punishments as a result of the fall: the tendencies toward female subordination and male bread-earning are created in Genesis 3:16-19. Procreation in Eden is itself doubtful, since Eve was not given her name (“mother of all the living,” Genesis 4:20) until after the fall. Yet as modern humans we do not condemn heterosexuality; we recognize sexuality as a mortal condition, yet we celebrate our humanity, our healthy enjoyment of physical pleasure, and the romantic relationships that sex engenders. Condemnation of other orientations based on their connection with the moral fall of man overlooks our lenience toward heterosexuality, and implies that we should avoid romance and sex altogether.

We do not do so, and for good reason. Adam and Eve’s human response to their downfall is to create a family, “with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 4:1). Cain worked the fields and Abel tended the sheep to provide for their parents. The family is the social unit that enables humanity to survive the dreadful state of decay in which it currently finds itself. Sex, to the extent that it helps form a family, is good. Only heterosexual couples can reproduce, but sexual attraction facilitates the romantic bonds that encourage any two people to start a family, and sex helps keep the family together once it is created. Those who believe in the sanctity of the family are absolutely correct; their failure is in their false assumption that heterosexuality is uniquely blessed.

Stephen Dewey ’07 is a Government concentrator in Wigglesworth. He welcomes comments at sdewey@fas.harvard.edu

“There’s Something Missing Here”: A New Testament Scholar Reflects on The Passion of the Christ

Ellen B. Aitken — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:54:49 +0000

In 1 Corinthians Paul claims that he “decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). Indeed throughout Paul’s letters, the earliest Christian documents that we possess, Jesus Christ crucified and raised occupies a central theological place as the lynchpin of Paul’s understanding of humanity’s relationship with God. Paul demonstrates no knowledge of what we think of as the “life” of Jesus; rather the “gospel” for Paul is the proclamation of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Paul, however, is not interested in the crucifixion of Jesus for the purpose of displaying Jesus’ bravery, heroism, innocence, or humility. Paul, like most early Christian writers, emphasizes the death of Jesus because of what he understands as its consequences for the building of community. This aspect is most clear in 1 Corinthians, where Paul makes it clear that how his audience “imitates” Christ, that is, Christ crucified, is through the way they behave toward one another in community and particularly how they gather for worship and for the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 10–14). The Christian community, behaving in mutual love toward one another, with special responsiveness to the needs of the weakest members, gathers for the common meal and thus “proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). At every turn, Paul connects the centrality of Jesus’ death to the formation of community. Life “in Christ” is predicated upon baptism into Jesus’ death (Rom 6:3) but this new life entails incorporation into a community of brothers and sisters living in the Spirit, freed from the domination of sin and death, and awaiting the consummation of God’s purposes (Romans 6–8). The focus is not on the individual, but on a people gathered around the memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

A similar dynamic is at work in the stories of Jesus’ suffering and death contained in the four canonical gospels. Each gospel, in its own way, foregrounds a story about Jesus not to provide a biography of Jesus (how much more we would want to know!), but to express what it entails to be a people gathered in the name of Jesus and what it means to “follow” Jesus. Throughout each gospel, we find indications of the concern for the formation of community; we might think, for example, of Matthew’s portrait of Jesus as a teacher of how to settle disputes within the community (Matt 18:15–19). It is the traditions about Jesus’ passion, however, that function particularly to provide a foundation for common life. In Mark, for instance, all three predictions of the passion (8:31; 9:31; 10:33) work toward a definition of discipleship not only as “taking up one’s cross and following Jesus” but as a life of profound self-giving service toward one another.

The passion narratives themselves, beginning with the account of the meal that Jesus shared with his disciples (and in John with the footwashing), display their understanding that Christian community is established upon remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus. We see this aspect most evidently in the Gospel of John where the cross becomes the focal point for the creation of the Johannine community when, on the cross, Jesus gives the mother and the beloved disciple (who is emblematic of John’s church) to each other (John 19:26–27). This moment is not so much one of Jesus’ personal concern for his mother, as it is highly symbolic of the nucleus of the gathering of those who abide in mutual love. Similarly, Jesus’ dying breath becomes in John the occasion for providing what the circle of followers needs: the phrase translated in English as “he gave up his spirit” (John 19:30 NRSV) in the original Greek also means “he handed over the Spirit,” precisely that gift promised to the disciples earlier in this Gospel to enable them to continue to abide in Jesus’ love (John 14:15–17). All of the resurrection stories, moreover, emphasize either the presence of Jesus’ followers at the empty tomb or their encounter with the risen Jesus. They do so because the gospel writers understand, as does Paul, that God’s purposes in raising Jesus from the dead are made evident in communities that live in accordance with this risen life, empowered by a love that is stronger than death.

What do these reflections have to do with Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ? Very little actually, because it is precisely this concern with community that is missing from the movie. In other words, what is central to Paul and the evangelists about Jesus’ passion and resurrection is lacking here. The movie begins not with the Last Supper or the footwashing, but with Jesus agonized and bereft in the Garden of Gethsemane. It ends, with its ever so brief resurrection scene, neither with the appearance of the women and the other disciples at the tomb nor with any encounter between the risen Jesus and his followers but rather with a somewhat more ethereal Jesus in complete isolation. Here there is no command to proclaim the resurrection, to make disciples (Matt 28:7, 19), or to forgive (John 20:23). There is no instance of reading scripture with one another or eating a common meal, as in Luke 24, when the disciples perceived the presence of the risen Jesus among them. There is no re-incorporation of Peter, following his denial, as John 21:15–19 relates the risen Jesus doing. The movie has also stripped away from Jesus’ suffering and death all of the aspects whereby the evangelists demonstrate the formation of community through Jesus’ passion. Jesus dies, but his breath does not convey the Spirit to his followers; an unnamed male disciple (we do not know he is the beloved disciple) agrees to take care of Jesus’ mother, but it is, to my eyes, a matter of expedience rather than a moment with consequences for the future of people abiding in Jesus’ love as it is in John’s Gospel.

I stress these points not only to emphasize the distance between Gibson’s movie and the New Testament writings about Jesus’ passion but also to elucidate the spiritual dead end offered by the movie. I have heard a few people say that they have been “moved” by the film: the question that properly follows such a statement asks, “moved to what ends?” or “moved to do what?” Throughout the history of Christian spirituality, meditation on Jesus’ passion and death has been encouraged as a means to nurture compassion within our hearts. Compassion begins perhaps as an act of empathy with Jesus’ sufferings, but then flowers in our compassion for the profound sufferings of others, our sisters and brothers throughout the world. Contemplation of Jesus’ passion in prayer thus deepens our awareness of our commonality; it broadens our consciousness of our connectedness one with another both in our need for God and in the movement of divine compassion toward all creation. The ways in which the story of Jesus’ passion and resurrection is shaped in scripture serve to remind hearers throughout the centuries that life lived following Jesus crucified and risen is a life lived in loving generosity toward one another, toward friend and stranger, and that such a life reveals divine love.

The Rev’d Dr. Ellen B. Aitken is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Harvard Divinity School and an Episcopal priest.

Overcoming the Wall: A retrospective on Pink Floyd

Dustin Saldarriaga — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:54:21 +0000

In March of 1973, Pink Floyd released what would become one of the most popular albums in the history of rock and roll. Dark Side of the Moon was Floyd’s epic album that, for the first time, truly highlighted the musical and lyrical talents of David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright. Through its psychedelic sound and powerful lyrics, Dark Side of the Moon has today sold twenty-nine million copies and holds 15X platinum status. However, the release of Dark Side of the Moon found most listeners unaware of the band’s struggles that led up to the album’s release, and of the loss that would affect the band throughout its entire career.

Five years before the release of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd was largely under the leadership of friend and musical innovator Syd Barrett. Barrett assisted in initially instilling into the band the psychedelic sound prominent in Dark Side of the Moon and other albums. Unfortunately, Barrett’s innovations came at a large cost as he increasingly became affected by an addiction to acid. The fact that Barrett was schizophrenic added to the rapid deterioration of his mental state caused by drug abuse. As Barrett’s actions became increasingly erratic, the quality of both Floyd’s albums and concerts fell. Pink Floyd was eventually left with no other choice but to replace their good friend and pioneer. As the band would sometimes recall in later interviews, Barrett’s dismissal occurred when the band simply did not pick him up for practice one day. Ironically, the passive way in which Barrett was dismissed and forgotten that day resembles the following decades of the artist’s life—decades lived in solitude reinforced by schizophrenia and depression. Barrett currently lives as a recluse in Cambridge, England, and avoids any contact with people who remind him of his past. After his dismissal from Pink Floyd, his own childhood friend, David Gilmour, replaced him. Gilmour would become the leading voice in Dark Side of the Moon and a primary contributor, along with Roger Waters, to the band’s success.

Although these struggles and others were a large influence on the music of Dark Side of the Moon, it was not until the release of Wish You Were Here about three years later that the band explicitly voiced their feelings toward Syd Barrett. “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” a twenty-minute tribute to Barrett, revealed the band’s emotion through lyrics such as: “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. Pile on many more layers and I’ll be joining you there. And we’ll bask in the shadow of yesterday’s triumph, and sail on the steel breeze.” Pink Floyd calls Barrett to “Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!” While recording this song, the band noticed a man sitting and listening just outside the recording studio. As later interviews would reveal, no one recognized the man, who had removed all the hair from his head and face. To everyone’s surprise, Syd Barrett, whom the band had not seen since his drug-induced mental breakdown seven years before, had mysteriously arrived at the exact moment that the band began recording their most heartfelt tribute to him. The sight of the unrecognizable man who had been a leader and best friend caused Pink Floyd to later recall the experience as one of the saddest in their lives. In a 1975 interview with Nick Sedgwick for the ‘Wish You Were Here’ Songbook, Roger Waters recalled, “When [Syd] came to the Wish You Were Here sessions—ironic in itself, to see this great, fat, bald, mad person—the first day he came I was in f—ing tears.” In the same interview, Waters, in response to a question concerning the album’s sadness, responded, “I think the world is a very, very sad f—ing place.” This perspective would be a primary influence in Floyd’s music for years to come.

For Pink Floyd’s bassist, Roger Waters, the strong emotions resulting from the loss of Barrett would be apparent in many of the lyrics he would later write for Pink Floyd. In the ‘Wish You Were Here’ Songbook interview, Waters noted Barrett’s role in his lyrics by stating, “He’s just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how f—ing sad it is—modern life.” Yet the loss of Barrett was not the only primary influence in his lyrics; the loss of Waters’ father in World War Two and increasing frustration resulting from life as a megastar, which became apparent when Waters spat in the face of a fan at a concert in Montreal, were beginning to come to the fore of his music. Simultaneously, Waters was gradually moving upward as the band’s primary writer and leader. About four years after the release of Wish You Were Here, the culminating emotions of Roger Waters were made evident in the music and lyrics of another Floyd megaseller—The Wall.

While Dark Side of the Moon is today’s nineteenth highest-selling album of all time, The Wall, released in 1979, stands as number three with 23X platinum record status. The album’s popularity is reflected in the fact that it is not difficult to find someone who is able to recite the anthem “We don’t need no education” and declare, “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” But these catchy tunes easily distract the listener from the true focus of the album—the isolating and self-destructive life of a rock and roll star. In an interview with Matt Resnicoff, titled Roger and Me – The Other Side of the Pink Floyd Story, Roger Waters explained the album’s success by stating, “The reason The Wall is a good record is because it’s an honest autobiographical piece of writing of mine.” Although Waters wrote lyrics for The Wall as an autobiography, he also largely focused on the example of Syd Barrett as a ‘fallen star.’ As an ‘epic’ rock album, The Wall, in its entirety, tells the story of a struggling rock star, to whom the album refers as Pink, from his childhood through his success and, finally, his depression. Thus, because Pink’s experiences directly reflect those of both Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, The Wall contains songs that explicitly describe the struggles Waters and Barrett so desperately sought to escape throughout their lives. In the album, these struggles and the resulting sadness and emptiness cause Pink to move toward the only mode of escape he knows—the construction of a wall around him to shield himself from the rest of the world.

Waters begins his story on The Wall by recalling several powerful influences in his life, beginning with childhood. Waters, who lost his father in World War Two, continually lamented his father’s death and questioned the existence and necessity of war. In “Another Brick in the Wall, Part One,” Waters sings, “Daddy’s gone across the ocean, leaving just a memory—a snapshot in the family album. Daddy, what else did you leave for me?” Waters also expounds his own feelings toward the war in “Goodbye Blue Sky:” “Did you see the frightened ones? Did you hear the falling bombs? The flames are all long gone, but the pain lingers on. Goodbye, blue sky.” Additionally, Waters also recalls the role of an overbearing mother in the lyrics of “Mother:” “Momma’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true. Momma’s gonna put all of her fears into you. Momma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing. She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing. Oh babe, of course Momma’s gonna help build the wall.” The most recognizable line from the album—“We don’t need no education”—refers to Waters’ scarring memory of his childhood education.

With each scarring experience, Waters, as shown through Pink, places another brick in his wall. Repeatedly throughout the album, Floyd chants, “All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.” Gradually, Pink becomes numb and indifferent to the world around him. During the next stage of Pink’s life, as revealed in the song “Young Lust,” he attains rock star status and is able to temporarily stifle his sorrows with sex as he sings: “Will some woman in this desert land make me feel like a real man? Take this rock and roll refugee. Babe, set me free. I need a dirty woman. I need a dirty girl.” But Pink’s excitement is short lived, and the following song on the album, “One of My Turns,” reveals Pink’s thoughts in the words, “Day after day our love turns gray, like the skin on a dying man. And night after night we pretend it’s all right. But I have grown older, and you have grown colder, and nothing is very much fun anymore.” Pink’s mental deterioration only accelerates from this point in the album. His struggles eventually push him into a state of isolation as he bids farewell in “Goodbye Cruel World.” Pink’s determination for isolation reveals that his wall is almost complete.

However, Pink does not yet fall into complete hopelessness. “Hey You” is a beautiful song that reveals the protagonist begging for help from someone “outside the wall.” He cries, “Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone? Open your heart. I’m coming home.” Sadly, before Pink finds consolation, the narrator reveals, “But it was only fantasy. The wall was too high, as you can see. No matter how he tried he could not break free, and the worms ate into his brain.” Since the release of The Wall, Waters has revealed in several interviews that “the worms” signify decay, thus further underlining his emphasis on isolation as leading to deterioration. Thus, at the finish of “Hey You,” Pink still remains in a state of isolation, behind his self-constructed wall.

Pink does not end his attempts to escape from his pain at the end of “Hey You.” “Comfortably Numb,” which is told through the eyes of a person attempting to rehabilitate Pink before a concert, portrays the drugged Pink as almost at the point of unconsciousness. The song alludes to the early days of Pink Floyd and their lost leader, Syd Barrett. The initial words of the narrator reveal Pink’s mental state and also reflect Floyd’s earlier references to drug abuse in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond:” “Hello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?” Pink is apparently able to at least think, if not speak, as he recalls his childhood and his current state: “The child is grown, the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.” In the album, Pink does partially recover from his drugged stupor and goes on to play a concert. However, he does not escape his own self-inflicted torture. He continues to live behind his wall and attempt to carry his suffering on his own shoulders. The album concludes with the consideration of those outside Pink’s wall who have attempted to break through to him: “And when they’ve given you their all, some stagger and fall. After all, it’s not easy banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.” In a 1979 BBC and Radio One interview with Tommy Vance, Waters described the conclusion of the album and its relationship to his own life and the lives of its listeners: “That is the completion of the wall. It’s been being built in my case since the end of the Second World War, or in anybody else’s case, whenever they care to think about it, if they feel isolated or alienated from other people at all, you know, it’s from whenever you want.”

Thus, at the close of The Wall, Pink does not reach a conclusion. He is still suffering and isolated, and no closer to relief. This observation directly reflects Waters’ own life and also that of Syd Barrett. At the conclusion of the album, Pink Floyd merely diagnosed the problem, without finding a solution. Thus Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, as reflected by Pink, find themselves in the position defined earlier by Waters: “[Syd is] a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how f—ing sad it is—modern life.”

Interestingly, the primary focus of Christianity is on exactly this—man’s inability to cope with the struggles of life. A component of Christianity much more significant than the legalistic component so frequently focused upon today is that which focuses upon the role of Christ. Christ simply asks to share the ‘heavy burden.’ As a result, man may experience the unparalleled freedom that forgiveness allows. Although Roger Waters and Syd Barrett sought refuge in many places, including drugs, sex, and isolation, one option they never once explored was that of Christ, who continually promised to relieve their burdens and allow relief. Christianity is not primarily obedience to various rules and laws, but instead is the ability and willingness to acknowledge that there is something larger than this world and our problems. The most significant part of this story is that this something—this God—specifically wants to share in carrying the weight of our daily lives, because He knows we cannot do it on our own.

Dustin Michael Saldarriaga ’06 is a History concentrator in Cabot House.

The Da Vinci Con

Adam Hilkemann — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 04:53:25 +0000

The Da Vinci Code. By Dan Brown. Doubleday, 2003.

You have probably read The Da Vinci Code. Or, if you haven’t, you almost certainly know someone who has. Only a few months ago, the book rocketed to the top of the national bestseller lists, becoming so popular that for a time even the boy wizard from Privet Drive seemed like a distant memory. Its popularity, however, was not due to its masterful writing or its sharp social commentary—because really, although the book’s plot is exciting in a cliffhanger, made-for-TV-movie sort of way, it isn’t all that good. Its popularity was a result of its conspiratorial creation of an alternative history of the Christian Church—perhaps, Dan Brown hinted to us, Jesus wasn’t who our Sunday School teachers made him out to be. Maybe he was married! Maybe Mary Magdalene was his wife! And maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t God after all! These suggestions form the core of Dan Brown’s book, and were shocking enough to sell millions of copies. But why, one might ask, were these suggestions enough to made The Da Vinci Code a number-one bestseller? Aren’t there plenty of people around who deny that Jesus was the Son of God? Why don’t their books become number-one bestsellers? The simple answer is that their books just aren’t as exciting as Brown’s—Steven Pinker denies that Jesus is the Son of God too, but no one (except the odd Harvard student) is going to take How the Mind Works with them to the beach. Brown’s accomplishment was to popularize an alternative history of the Christian Church in a way no one before him had managed to do. For the last thirty years or so, a group of scholars and pseudo-scholars have busied themselves constructing an alternative history of the Church, in which Jesus is not God, and in which the principal activity of the Church for the last two thousand years has been to purposefully mislead millions into thinking that he was, all the while suppressing the real truth somewhere in the secret archives of the Vatican. The problem with this is that it simply is not true. Dan Brown, and the scholars and pseudo-scholars upon whom he relies, have constructed an alternative Church history based upon ancient Gnostic texts that is almost completely spurious. Brown begins his book by hinting that it is all somehow “based on a true story,” when in reality, The Da Vinci Code has about as much historical merit as the last installment of Harry Potter.

The Christian Church, according to Dan Brown, began with Jesus of Nazareth. So far, so good—but of course, there’s a catch. Dan Brown’s Jesus was a good but relatively normal man who had no pretensions to deity. He was a good moral teacher, and no one thought him to be anything more. He was a family man, too—he married Mary Magdelene, found work as a carpenter and traveling preacher, and had a couple of kids. His striking moral teaching attracted a group of followers, who persisted in keeping his memory and words alive after his early and tragic death. But after a few hundred years, things turned nasty when the scheming Constantine decided to convert to Christianity in order to use it for political ends. Constantine immediately convened the Council of Nicaea in order to remake Christianity in his own image—he picked out four Gospels that made Jesus out to be not just a good moral teacher, but God incarnate. He got rid of the notion that Jesus was married, set up a patriarchal authority system, and gave Mary Magdalene and all other women second-place status. The real truth about Jesus had to be suppressed, so Constantine shoved all of the accurate writings about him under the rug. A few daring souls took it upon themselves to preserve the truth, and so founded organizations like the Knights Templar and the mysterious Priory of Sion to keep alive the true teachings of Jesus. They, of course, were ruthlessly persecuted by the Church, whose foremost goal for the next sixteen hundred years was to guard and propagate what basically amounted to Constantine’s big fat lie. It all makes for quite an interesting and appealing story—indeed, as long as there are still people who watch The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries, there will be people who will buy into Dan Brown’s version of Church history. But those people will be seriously deluded, as there are significant problems with Brown’s research.

First, and most problematic, is Brown’s dismissal of the biblical Gospel accounts in favor of more obscure Gnostic texts. Brown is not alone in doing this—in recent years, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up around the rediscovery of old Gnostic writings, or as they are now more popularly known, the “hidden gospels.” Philip Jenkins, among other scholars, has pointed out the problems in their position. Gnosticism, in the time of Christ, was a reasonably well-known dualist philosophical and religious movement which espoused that all matter is evil and only “spirit” is good. Enlightenment, in Gnosticism, was attained only when rational thought was interrupted, as all thought was tainted by the physical body (seen as evil precisely because it was physical). In such moments of interrupted thought, hidden knowledge was revealed. Some Gnostics, as a result, placed emphasis on orgiastic rituals as a means for interrupting rational thought. Additionally, Gnostics believed the genders to be equal, not because women were intrinsically good and worthy of respect, but because both female and male bodies were equally evil physical vessels. Like any other religious movement, Gnostics created texts to propagate their teachings, notably for our interests the so-called Gnostic Gospels. The Gnostics did not particularly care if they were historically accurate, as it did not matter to them whether or not the history of the evil, physical world was correctly recorded. They were primarily intended to communicate Gnostic teachings by piggybacking on the popularity of Christianity. To that end, they debunk Jesus’ divinity (as his teachings contradicted Gnosticism), make Jesus out to be a Gnostic teacher, and emphasize the role of Mary Magdalene (playing the role of the female goddess, important to certain branches of Gnosticism). These writings were never sanctioned by the Church, as they clearly were fabrications put together years after the events occurred. However, they are what Brown uses as the foundation for his alternative Church history. Clearly, Brown’s use of these texts is extremely problematic for his historical project.

Second, to make his version of history plausible, Brown not only has to make use of spurious Gnostic texts, but also has to discredit the accepted biblical accounts. To do so, he declares that Jesus was not believed by early Christians to be divine, but instead was declared so by Constantine centuries after the fact for political reasons. This assertion is patently false, and verges on the ridiculous. Even the most liberal scholars believe that the majority of the New Testament was written from the years 50-100 A.D. (1) In Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians alone we find the terms “Lord Jesus Christ” and “Christ Jesus” appearing fifty times, which was well understood by his readers to be a proclamation of Jesus’ divinity (2). Paul makes quite clear that he understood Jesus to be God throughout his letters, and his belief that Jesus was God was shared by all the earliest Christians; no biblical scholar will refute that this is so. Brown’s assertion, then, is not only false but also deliberately misleading. It is a matter of historical record that the earliest Christians believed in Christ’s divinity, and Brown is being nothing but deceptive.

Additionally, there is little evidence of a debate between different Christian ideologies until the second century (3). That is to say, the Gnostic gospels were written well after the canonical books. The early Church leaders Iraneaus, Tertulian, and Eusebius all agreed that the four canonical Gospels should be included in 180, 190, and 300 A.D. respectively (4). All of this took place before the Council of Nicaea in 325, where the four Gospels were agreed upon by a vote of at least 210 to 2 by hardened local preachers who were accustomed to persecution by Roman emperors and not in the least likely to bow to Constantine’s will (5). Moreover, we have 5,465 copies, 50 of which are complete, of the New Testament dating before 325 A.D. with only a few minor textual errors (6). We do not have that kind of textual certainty for any other book from the ancient world: the only other book to even come close is Homer’s Illiad, for which we have 644 copies, only one of which is complete before 1250 A.D. (7) Given the massive evidence in favor of the New Testament’s early composition and textual accuracy, we can only assume that Brown has deliberately turned a blind eye to history.

Once we have arrived at the conclusion that the Gnostic gospels are historically spurious, and that the New Testament provides us with an accurate picture of what the earliest Christians believed about Christ, there is little left standing of Brown’s argument. However, Brown’s claims do not end with Constantine; he goes on to postulate the existence of a vast and powerful secret society called the Priory of Sion which, like the Knights Templar before them, has kept alive the truth about Jesus Christ. According to Brown, the Priory of Sion is a real organization that has existed since the time of the Crusades and has included figures like Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci. The New York Times, however, reports that the real Priory is a “tiny, harmless group of like-minded friends formed in 1956,” created by an anti-Semitic outlaw named Pierre Plantard, who was helped by an accomplice to manufacture documents placing the Priory well back into the 1100’s (8). This has also been documented by the BBC and even admitted to by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the pseudo-historical book on which Brown heavily relies) (9).

The Knights Templar are named by Brown as the historical predecessor of the Priory of Sion. According to Brown, they kept alive the truth about Jesus until they were brutally massacred by the Vatican under Pope Clement V in 1307 with the help of King Phillip IV of France, in an attempt to destroy the secret knowledge that they held. This claim, like the others, is simply false. Brown first demonstrates his ignorance of history by referring to “the Vatican,” when the papacy at the time had been moved to Avignon, France. Furthermore, he is wrong in claiming that Pope Clement V was responsible for the Knights’ demise. The papacy at the time was weak and dominated by King Phillip IV, who in 1307 burned about 120 French Knights Templar at the stake for political reasons. The real Knights Templar were in fact wealthy and powerful, but not nearly as exciting as Brown makes them out to be.

And so, in the end, we have clearly seen that Brown’s construction of an alternative Church history is based upon a web of historical inaccuracies, and is on the whole really quite ridiculous. Indeed, it is hardly even scholastically interesting to dismantle his arguments—the entire project is something like taking a historical sledgehammer after a gnat. If this is so, then, why is it necessary to even bother? Unfortunately, it remains necessary to point out Brown’s egregious inaccuracies because he insists upon their truth. On his very well-visited website, he maintains that his argument is “too well documented and significant…to dismiss.” He states that his “information is anything but new” and implies very heavily that although his book might be fictional, the alternative Church history upon which it is based is not. Students of history may laugh at Brown’s wild conspiracy theory, but for millions of less educated people who have read The Da Vinci Code, his assertions are no laughing matter. Undoubtedly, many faithful Christians have been disturbed by Brown’s novel—Christianity is a foundational part of many people’s lives, and the notion that one’s faith is based upon a web of lies can be deeply troubling. The point of this review, of course, was not to prove or disprove the truth of Christianity. The take-away lesson is much simpler than that: the acceptance or rejection of Christianity, just as with any other faith, is a gravely serious endeavor that requires the complete energy of one’s mind. Thoughtful people should weigh carefully all the evidence both for and against Christianity before they come to a decision. If one ultimately decides against the Christian faith, however, it should most definitely not be on account of The Da Vinci Code.

1. Olson with Miesal 1
2. Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way (London, Oxford Press: 2002) 80-81.
3. Olson with Miesal 1
4. Killeen
5. Olson with Miesal Part 2 of a Special Planet Envoy Critique of The Da Vinci Code” updated 2003, <http://www.envoymagazine.com/planetenvoy/Review-DaVinci-part2-Full.htm> (cited 16 Apr 2004).
6. Killeen
7. Killeen
8. Miller
9. Miller

Adam D. Hilkemann ’07 is a History concentrator in Wigglesworth.