Few potential accusations can strike fear into the hearts of enlightened moderns as devastatingly as the charge of being “narrow-minded.” Bighearted tolerance and open-minded liberalism are very much in vogue in the public arena. These qualities are regularly equated with intellectual virtue. Christians, on the other hand, are frequently and derisively mocked as narrow – admittedly, sometimes with ample cause.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) had another interpretation, one opposed to every secular intuition and instinct. This uncompromising Puritan – who today, regrettably, is written off and emembered only for the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”1 – labored to demonstrate that the essence of narrow-mindedness was actually on display in the increasing tendency of Western culture to marginalize God from every area of human existence.2 God was rarely denied outright by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, but He nevertheless was removed from the center of reality in all fields of inquiry. This cataclysmic shift was regarded by Edwards to be a profound tragedy, one that he lamented and fought against his whole life:

“Tis a strange disposition that men have to thrust God out of the world, or to put Him as far out of sight as they can, and to have in no respect immediately and sensibly to do with Him. Therefore so many schemes have been drawn to exclude, or extenuate, or remove at a great distance, any influence of the Divine Being.”3

As Michael McClymond has pointed out, “[F]or adherents of the moderate Enlightenment, a little religion was a good thing. Yet Edwards abhorred moderation in religion…He was the self-appointed apostle to the spiritually indifferent.”4 Allen Guelzo has argued that Edwards was “the most consistently unsecular thinker in American history.”5 Such sentiments do not, I suspect, possess much allure for contemporary readers who are comfortable with spirituality in small doses and who tend to agree with Yeats that the best lack all conviction. By that measure, Edwards comes down to us through the ages as the devil incarnate.

So it would be easy to dismiss Edwards’ challenge with a flippant, casual wave of the hand when he indicts the modern mindset as inherently narrow-minded. I plead with you to resist that urge. A respectful yet critical consideration of a perspective of pure “otherness” – even if ultimately rejected and deemed ridiculous – is a healthy experience for most of us occasionally to endure. As C. S. Lewis has so poignantly urged, it is actually we moderns (naturally prone to “chronological snobbery” as we are) who need such counterintuitive perspectives most desperately:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions…. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books…. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.6

Just such an old book is Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue. Published posthumously in 1758 along with The End for Which God Created the World (together called the Two Dissertations),7 True Virtue is Edwards’ most renowned philosophical work. In 18th-century debates on ethical theory, the Enlightenment’s decentralization of God took the shape of distancing Christianity from moral virtue. The stunning implication was that, perhaps for the first time in human history, it became theoretically possible for people to be good without reference to God. Edwards, however, would have none of it; he insisted upon a teleological ethic grounded in God’s purpose in creating the universe, rather than human happiness or social flourishing considered in isolation from that design. God’s goal in creation – namely, the relational extension to human beings of His own trinitarian glory – determines from the outset the nature and scope of true virtue in human society.8

Edwards’ decision to cast his treatment of ethics within a teleological framework was a stroke of genius, for it allowed him to include far broader considerations than most “freethinkers” of his age. If God created human beings with the primary function of knowing and loving Him, then to be “good” must be defined in light of that divine intention and never autonomously.

A basic example may help to flesh out the intimate connection between “purpose” (teleology) and “goodness” (virtue): a broken can opener may still prove useful as a defensive weapon against a burglar or for banging a nail into the wall. Nonetheless, if the tool is no longer able to actually open cans, it is not a “good” can opener. Think now of the creation story in Genesis 1. When God concludes His opening work by declaring all of His creation “very good”, the thrust is that everything in the cosmos was once fulfilling its original function. But to fall out of line with one’s design is, by definition, to cease to be “good.” Therefore, before we can decide what makes a human being “good”, we must first discover – in Wendell Berry’s phrase – what people are for, if anything.9 And if Edwards is on target and human beings exist to participate in the knowledge, love and delight that flow mutually between the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, then to exclude such “religious” criteria from any ethical discussion is irreducibly narrow-minded:

Hence it appears that these schemes of religion or moral philosophy, which, however well in some respects they may treat of benevolence to mankind, and other virtues depending on it, yet have not a supreme regard to God, and love to him, laid in the foundation and all other virtues handled in a connection with this, and in a subordination to this, are no true schemes of philosophy, but are fundamentally and essentially defective… It may be asserted in general that nothing is of the nature of true virtue, in which God is not the first and the last; or which, with regard to their exercises in general, have not their first foundation and source in apprehensions of God’s supreme dignity and glory, and in answerable esteem and love of him, and have not respect to God as the supreme end.10

In The Nature of True Virtue, Edwards engages the leading philosophical trends of his day on their own ground and in vivid fashion makes a compelling case for this simple, blunt proposition: any human behavior whatsoever that ignores God’s goal for humanity cannot be good in any ultimate sense. There are, at the last, no truly virtuous unbelievers to be found in the world. If Edwards’ hunch on the centrality of God is vindicated, it can shed enormous light on the many biblical passages that make such drastic claims (consider Genesis 6:5, 8:21, Psalm 14:1-3, 53:1-3, 58:3, 143:2, Proverbs 20:9, Ecclesiastes 7:20, 9:3, Isaiah 64:6, Matthew 19:17, Romans 3:9-20, etc.).

However, Edwards is also keenly aware of this objection: the moral conduct of those who ignore or reject God’s design for their existence often seems less than evil and sometimes even praiseworthy. From the standpoint of Christian theology, this is the classic problem of the “virtuous pagan.” Edwards does not deny outright this common observation – in fact, he labels such secular virtue “secondary beauty” – but neither is he convinced that it contradicts his main point. How can that be? I have found three striking, complementary illustrations in his writings that have achieved coherence in the midst of seeming contradiction. The first illustration employs the dynamics of the marriage relationship to elucidate the matter: “Let a woman seek to give all the content to her husband that may be, not out of any love to him, but only out of love to another man, he abhors all that she doth.”11 The imagined scenario is one in which an adulterous wife acts charitably and affectionately towards her spouse in all of their intimate moments spent together in the private life of the home. Crucially, the illegitimate affair is still unknown to her husband as he contemplates her acts. From a narrow point of view, all of these “good works” (perhaps cooking a meal, complimenting her husband, buying him a gift) are praiseworthy. However, from the largest, widest perspective (that is, the real one), our perception changes radically: she acts benevolently towards her husband only so that he will not suspect her affair with another man. This illicit liaison is what she chiefly treasures and is unwilling to forsake. No longer viewing her individual actions with tunnel vision, we concur with Edwards: once the knowledge of the wife’s overarching motive (protecting the cherished affair) is gained, the husband will despise everything that she does. All of her good works have become as filthy rags.

A second hypothetical scene: a charismatic military leader is addressing his troops with fierce passion and tender care as they prepare for imminent warfare. With a lengthy track record of faithfulness and service to his men – often fighting on the front line himself and making every personal sacrifice conceivable – the leader authentically communicates his deep love and appreciation for his comrades. No false note is hit. He means all that he says. His men, in turn, would unhesitatingly lay down their lives for their captain; to them, he is a hero, the embodiment of courage and integrity. Once again, with this (narrow and limited) insight into the situation, our hearts are stirred and our evaluation is positive. This man is “good” in all that we have opportunity to witness. Now back up. This man is further revealed to us as a brutal, merciless rebel who has revolted against the true king of the land – a king who protects his people and acts with wisdom and justice in his reign as all prosper under him. Furthermore, his motives are malignant: he desires riches and power for himself, not for the good of others. He is spurred on by an inordinate hatred of the king, deeply jealous of the love and loyalty the people of the land have for the rightful monarch. He tortures those who oppose him and burns villages to the ground with inhabitants still trapped within the torched buildings. Again, we are compelled to reevaluate our initial perception: what initially seemed like moral goodness from a narrow perspective has turned out to be absolutely repugnant, once all of the relevant facts are taken into account. We were once narrow-minded, but no longer; once blind, we now see. Finally, bring to mind your favorite childhood song. To be tangible, I’ll assume you have conjured up something from U2’s The Joshua Tree. Hearing the cherished melody stirs up nostalgic memories of years gone by. The rhythm and the lyrics combine to move your spirit in a way that only a beloved piece of music can. In this moment so narrowly conceived, beauty soaks into the depths of your being. Yet – back up now and take the larger picture in, one last time. This individual tune, which in isolation pulsates with energy and harmony and joy, actually turns out to have been intended by the composer to play an integral part in a larger performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41. The song, beautiful with reference only to itself, loses its initial luster; moreover, given its interconnected location within the overall symphony for which it was designed, it actually becomes a disruptive, anarchic force of disharmony that conspires against the whole.12 It doesn’t fit. And thus, it has become worthless and no good. For the person whose ear is in tune with the flow of the entire performance, this individual song is painful to hear and impossible to appreciate or enjoy.

In a universe in which the God Who has made Himself known in Jesus Christ is the source and goal of everything that exists, we cannot pursue morality (or business, or mathematics, or art, or sex, or government, or happiness, or anything) without reference to Him. If we do, we will have become narrow-minded in the process, for any attempt to exclude Him will necessarily disregard the most important part of the narrative, the most relevant fact for consideration. The beauty and goodness which we believe mark our lives can only be evaluated as such when we take the narrow view, the contorted perspective that blocks out the most significant part of our existence. Human “virtue” apart from the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ is spiritually equivalent to the morality of the adulterous wife, the greatness of the selfish rebel leader, and the loveliness of the disharmonious song that disrupts the grand symphony. Once all of the relevant facts are taken into consideration, what once impressed us in our ethical ignorance now returns to us as broken, revolting and hideously deformed. John Piper summarizes The Nature of True Virtue by asserting that we are “infinitely parochial” if we embrace everything in creation but forget our Creator.13 Jonathan Edwards’ essential contention, then, is this: whatever “secondary beauty” may exist among those who have chosen to rupture the harmony of God’s creation song by singing their own tune in a different key,14 the best of this fallen human conduct apart from Christ will turn out to be, upon closer inspection, mere honor among thieves.

The Nature of True Virtue thus provides a daring philosophical explanation of Paul’s claim that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). But Edwards does not abandon us to the gloom of our misery in Adam, starkly bitter and real as it is. Creation is regained through the redemption of Christ, and God’s goal for His image bearers is being restored within this new humanity. C.S. Lewis was fond of referring to this phenomenon as the most important kind of evolution: the redevelopment of God’s image within the community of sinners who embrace His Son.15 What will it look like when the task is finished? I’ll leave that piece of imagination to Edwards:

By these things it appears that a truly virtuous mind, being as it were under the sovereign dominion of love to God, does above all things seek the glory of God, and makes this his supreme, governing, and ultimate end: consisting in the expression of God’s perfections in their proper effects, and in the manifestation of God’s glory to created understandings, and the communications of the infinite fullness of God to the creature; in the creature’s highest esteem of God, love to God, and joy in God, and in the proper exercises and expressions of these…. And that temper or disposition of heart, that consent, union, or propensity of mind … which appears chiefly in such exercises, is virtue, truly so called; or in other words, true grace and real holiness. And no other dispositionor affection but this is of the nature of true virtue.16

[1] “Identifying Jonathan Edwards with ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’ is like identifying Jesus with the woes against Chorazin and Bethsaida. This is a fraction of the whole, and it is not the main achievement.” John Piper, God’s Passion For His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), p. 83.

[2] I will define “narrow-mindedness,” quite simply, as any way of thinking that refuses to take into account all of the relevant facts for a given situation or theme. Accordingly, there can be varying degrees or levels of narrow-mindedness, depending on how significant the ignored data are.

[3] Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971), p. 53.

[4] Encounters With God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 108.

[5] Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), ix.

[6] “On the Reading of Old Books”, in God In The Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 202.

[7] “Edwards intended these dissertations to be published together. The one is the mirror image of the other; the ‘end’ for which God created the world must be the ‘end’ of a truly virtuous and holy life.” Paul Ramsey, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8: Ethical Writings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 5.

[8] God’s intra-trinitarian glory is defined by Edwards, via John 17, as the knowledge, love and joy which are shared eternally between the Father and the Son, communicated through the Spirit. In creation and redemption, God’s

overarching purpose is to “extend” this reality to human beings, who participate in God’s own life through the Spirit as they behold God’s beauty in the face of the Son.

[9] Edwards explicitly draws this link between teleology and goodness: “[T]he true goodness of a thing (as was observed before) must be its agreeableness to its end, or its fitness to answer the design for which it was made. Or, at least, this must be its goodness in the eyes of the workman. Therefore they are good moral agents whose temper of mind or propensity of heart is agreeable to the end for which God made moral agents.” The Nature of True Virtue, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8: Ethical Writings, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 558-59.

[10] The Nature of True Virtue, p. 560.

[11] Miscellany 676 in Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 18, The ‘Miscellanies’ 501-832, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 236-37.

[12] “Yet if such benevolences, however attractive in themselves, are out of tune with the great symphony of God’s love that animates the universe, they are ultimately discordant, rather than truly beautiful.” George Marsden, Jonathan

Edwards: A Life, p. 469.

[13] Piper, p. 108.

[14] For a breathtaking narrative depiction of this idea, see the creation story at the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.

[15] See the final chapters of Mere Christianity, especially “The New Men.”

[16] The Nature of True Virtue, pp. 559-60.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor tries to explain what in particular accounts for this presumed difference between America and Europe. At least one of the reasons, Taylor suggests, that may account for the difference is America never had an ancient regime in which a hierarchical social order was given legitimacy by the church. Also at work may be the different role of elites in determining general attitudes toward belief and unbelief. For example, the skepticism of academic elites in British society had more effect in England because elites have more prestige in British society than elites in America.

Taylor suggests that the primary reason for the American difference is due to the development of a common civil religion that allowed Americans, as well as immigrants in America, to understand their faiths as contributing to a consensus summed up by the motto, “E pluribus Unum.” This is in marked contrast to Europe where religious identities have been the source of division either between dissenters and the national church or between church and lay forces. But in America religious difference is subordinated to “one nation under God.” Religious people in America may find they are in deep disagreement about abortion or gay marriage, but those disagreements are subordinated to their common loyalty to America.[1] But that subordination also includes their faith in God; that is, whatever kind of Christian (or non-Christian) they may or may not be, their faith should be in harmony with what it means to be an American.

Taylor observes that this difference also accounts for the respective attitudes Europeans and Americans have toward national identities. Europeans generally are quite reticent about national identity. That they are so Taylor attributes to the experience and memory of the First and Second World Wars that devastated Europe. He observes that war, even wars that seem “righteous,” now make most Europeans uneasy. But that is not the case with Americans. Americans’ lack of unease with war may be, Taylor suggests, because they wrongly think there are fewer skeletons in the American closet when compared to the European closet. Yet Taylor thinks the reason for the American support of war is simpler. “It is easier,” Taylor observes, “to be unreservedly confident in your own righteousness when you are the hegemonic power.”[2]

I have no doubt Taylor is right to think America’s unrivaled power in the world gives Americans a sense of confidence about our role as the “world’s policeman,” but I think Taylor does not make articulate — to use one of Taylor’s favorite words — the relationship between American civil religion, our assumption that we are a “religious nation,” and why war for most Americans is unproblematic.[3] War is a moral necessity for America because it provides the experience of the “Unum” that makes the “pluribus” possible. War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.[4] World War I was the decisive moment because it was that war that finally healed the wounds caused by the civil war.

This is well documented by Richard Gamble in his book, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. Gamble provides ample evidence to show how liberal Protestants justified the first World War as redemptive for the nation and church. For example, Lyman Abbott, a well known progressive Protestant who had sought to reconcile Christianity with evolution, argued that America as a Christian nation must be willing to be self-sacrificial in service to other nations. Therefore America rightly opposed “pagan” Germany because Germany is a society in which “the poor serve the rich, the weak serve the strong, the ignorant serve the wise.” By contrast America is a society of “organized Christianity” in which the “rich serve the poor, the strong serve the weak, the wise serve the ignorant.”[5]

Harry Emerson Fosdick, the exemplification of Protestant liberalism, went so far as to suggest in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1919, that the returning troops would present a special challenge to the nation and the churches. He argued that the soldiers would have learned the meaning of self-sacrifice through the experience of the war. Moreover they would have experienced the potential of cooperative action through the regenerative power of devotion to a higher cause. Accordingly the returning soldiers would challenge reactionary views of society and the church because they would expect to remake the world to which they returned to correspond to the lessons they learned from the war.[6] War, in short, was seen as the laboratory for more egalitarian social policies advocates of the Protestant social gospel so desperately tried to achieve.

Christianity and democracy in America were and continue to be, through the experience of war, inextricably linked. Thus Arthur McGiffert, the president of Union Theological Seminary, argued that religion was necessary “to promote and sustain democracy.” Religion, according to McGiffert, had to dispose of its “egoistic and other-worldly character” by becoming socially responsible. “The religion of democracy” he warned, “must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation, and must cease to impede human progress by turning the attention of religious men from the conditions here to rewards elsewhere.”[7] Such was the lesson to be learned from war.

I call attention to how Americans understood the theological and moral significance of World War I because I think we fail to appreciate what Taylor identifies as the American civil religion if we do not take the American understanding of war into account. For example, Taylor observes that the traditional American synthesis of “civil religion” associated with a non-denominational Christianity with a strong connection to civilized order is still, unlike its British counterpart, in its “hot” phase. That it is so, however, has everything to do with the American experience of war as constitutive of the substance of our civil religion.

The significance of war for American civil religion can be missed even by political theorists as insightful as C.B. Macpherson. Macpherson identified two versions of liberal democracy, which he argued shape American democracy but are in conflict with one another. The first form of liberal democracy is one in which a capitalist market society is assumed to be compatible with democratic processes. This form of democracy, no matter how modified it may be by the rise of the welfare state, remains dominant — particularly in America. It has, of course, been given renewed theoretical legitimacy with the development in American political science of various accounts of balance of power models between groups.

The other version of liberal democracy Macpherson associates with John Stuart Mill’s attempt to moralize liberalism by arguing that a liberal society must be one in which all the members of the social order are equally free to realize their capabilities. From Macpherson’s perspective, liberal democracy, particularly the democracy of the United States, has tried to combine both forms of liberalism.[8] Thus at times “liberal” means the stronger can dominate the weak as long as they follow market rules, while at other times it means the attempt, usually through state agency, to achieve freedom for all to develop their capacity. As a result American politics cannot help but appear incoherent as different and contradictory policy alternatives are put forward in the name of “freedom.”[9]

For example, the right of abortion is defended in the name of an individual’s right to have control over her body, but it is still assumed that laws against suicide make sense in the name of preventing harm. Moreover, that portions of the American society think it legitimate to appeal to their religious convictions to address such issues is seen by some to be a threat to the consensus that makes America work. Thus Taylor’s observation that even though the Protestant character of the original American civil religion has been broadened to include “all faiths” or “no faiths” there is still a strong “religious” character to American public life. That such is the case is confirmed by the very existence of secularist and liberal believers who seek a more secular America.[10]

I have no doubt that Macpherson is right that both forms of liberalism shape American life, but the tension between them can go unnoticed exactly because America is so wealthy and has the common moral experience of war. Of course it turns out that wealth makes war necessary. Yet Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy. From such a perspective, September 11 was absolutely necessary for the moral health of the republic. That America must fight an unending war against terrorism means Americans have a common enemy that unites us.

If I am close to being right about the place of war for sustaining the American difference I find that as a Christian I wish America as a nation was more “secular” and the Christianity of America was less American. Put differently I wish America was more like Europe. For I fear the Christianity of America, a Christianity that from a European perspective seems vital, is not capable of being a political challenge to what is done in the name of the American difference. In short, the great difficulty is how to keep America, in the proper sense, secular.

In order to elaborate this observation, I think it helpful to call attention to Mark Lilla’s important new book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. Lilla begins his book by giving voice to a sentiment raised after September 11, 2001 and occasioned by the Bush presidency. They simply cannot believe what they thought had been left behind has returned. Lilla observes he had assumed that battles over revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, divine duty and common decency had been relegated to the scrap heap of history. So “we,” that is, people like Lilla, “find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”[11]

Lilla seeks, therefore, to do nothing less than to defend what he describes as the great separation, that is, “to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms without appeals to divine revelation or cosmological speculation.”[12] Lilla understands this separation to be an extraordinary achievement because political theology is a “primordial form of thought” which for millennia provided the well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and shaping moral lives. In the West Christianity was the source of political theology even though the political theology Christianity represented could not help but create political societies that were and are inherently unstable. The instability is the result of the Christian presumption that they are at once in the world but not of it. For example, Christians have always had trouble making sense of an empire they accidentally acquired.[13] Lilla argues it was Hobbes who found the way, after a millennium of Christian political theology, to discuss religion and the common good without making reference to the nexus between God, man, and the world. He was able to do so because Hobbes, anticipating Feuerbach, had the wisdom to turn questions about God into questions about human behavior; to reduce that behavior to psychological states, and then to portray those states as artifacts of desire, ignorance, and the material
environment.[14]

For Hobbes the gods are born out of fear of death, poverty, and calamity; but Hobbes knew better than to try to deny such fear. Rather he focused fear on one figure alone, the sovereign. Such a sovereign,
Hobbes called him an “earthly God,” could ensure that his subjects should fear no other sovereigns but him. No longer would there be a tension between church and crown because now the sovereign would make clear that salvation depended on obedience to himself.

Lilla thinks Hobbes’ great achievement, this great separation which is crucial for the art of living in a liberal democratic order, is secured by three developments. The first is the intellectual separation made possible by the scientific revolution in which a now-mute natural world is separated from its creator. As a result investigations of nature can be separated from thoughts about God. Secondly, the crucial distinction between the public and the private is developed, relegating religious convictions and practices to the latter. To be sure, Lilla acknowledges, Hobbes made the sovereign responsible for public worship, but not for actually mounting an inquisition to determine if citizens actually believed “Jesus is the Christ.” Thirdly, perhaps less obvious but equally consequential, is Hobbes’ argument for separating academic inquiry from ecclesiastical control. Thus one of the achievements of Hobbes’ project can be seen in theology’s becoming, as it has in modernity, but another academic discipline relegated to divinity schools.[15]

Though Hobbes is often thought to legitimate a violent understanding of politics, that is, human existence as a war of all against all, Lilla argues that Hobbes is actually trying to limit the violence that is unleashed by political theology. For when war is undertaken in the name of God there can be no limit to killing because so much is allegedly at stake. That is why human beings who believe in God commit acts in war no animal would commit. Animals kill only to eat and reproduce, but humans fight to get into heaven.[16] Hobbes, on Lilla’s reading, is the first great realist in international affairs. After Hobbes, war at least has the potential to be humanely limited because it can be fought for selfish
reasons.

Lilla suggests Locke and Hume provided softer accounts of Hobbes’s Leviathan but in doing so they remained fundamentally Hobbesian. Like Hobbes they wanted to protect modern man from the superstition and violence associated with political theology by developing liberal habits of mind. In particular, Locke thought it possible and necessary to liberalize Christianity itself, which Lilla suggests bore fruit in the work of Rousseau, Kant, and Protestant liberals such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. Yet Lilla judges the attempt of Protestant liberals to ground religion in human experience to be a failure because:

It failed to inspire conviction about the Christian faith among nominal Christians, or attachment to Jewish destiny among nominal Jews. Once liberal theologians succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.[17]

Such is the dilemma of Christians in America. Just to the extent Christians try to be “political” by playing by the rules set down by “the great separation” they cannot help but become unintelligible not only to their neighbors but, more importantly, to themselves. I think this helps account for the strident character of the rhetoric of the religious right in America. Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the religious right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism. The religious right makes a fetish of this or that belief, e.g. the substitutionary account of the atonement; they think is the hallmark of Christianity, but by doing so they play the game determined by the great separation, that is, Christianity has become primarily a matter of “belief.”

Yet secular people in America fear the religious right. They do so because they think that the rise of the religious right and Islam threaten the “great separation.” Thus Lilla ends his book reminding those who are like him committed to Hobbes’ great achievement that they are the exception. They cannot expect other civilizations to follow the path of the West. But according to Lilla the West has made the choice to protect individuals from the harms they can inflict on one another in the name of religion. It has done so by securing fundamental liberties and by leaving the spiritual destinies of each person in their own hands. In short, Americans have chosen to keep our “politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.”[18]

But Lilla’s account of the great separation does not explain how a country allegedly shaped by Hobbes and Locke is, particularly in reference to war, a nation which understands itself in religious terms.[19] Americans are said to be the beacon of hope for all people, requiring sacrifices for the good of the world. In short, Lilla does not explain why it is very hard to keep the secular secular in America. Once the church has been relegated to the “private” it turns out the nation takes on the language of the church. It is not Christians and Muslims that challenge the great separation, but rather it is “America.”

Yet Lilla’s sense that Hobbes’ achievement may be threatened is widely shared by others in America. For example in his book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life, Anthony Kronman sounds themes very similar to Lilla. The
university, as Lilla suggested, is the key agent for sustaining the great separation. According to Kronmen it was, of course, true that the early universities in America would have been shaped by Protestant piety. But after the civil war, Kronmen argues, universities in America were organized to be institutions to sustain a secular and humanistic account of life. Students would be initiated into a secular humanistic way of life through reading the great texts of the Western tradition. Through such reading students would learn “that it is possible to explore the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way even after its religious foundations have been called into doubt.”[20]

This perspective supplied the grounds for those in the humanities to believe they had the competence and the authority to lead students in a disciplined study of the human condition in order that they might pursue their own personal search for meaning. Such pedagogy assumed that no fixed conception of the end of human life or a single right way to live can be sustained. For according to Kronman there simply is no “vantage point we can ever occupy from which our lives can be seen as a whole.”[21] Secular humanism does not require that God be rejected or even thought to be irrelevant to life as long as such judgments are left to the individual.

Kronman acknowledges that death is the most determinative challenge that confronts the secular humanist. “We all die, and know we will, and must adjust ourselves to the shadow which the foreknowledge of death casts over the whole of our lives.”[22] Yet death also forces us to recognize that whatever meaning life may have depends on us. Accordingly, life for the secular humanist is self-contradictory. For the secular humanist seeks to abolish the limits that give their longings meaning, that is, they seek to be in control, yet in the attempt to seize control they come to recognize that without the limits they seek to overcome the ends they seek could not exist.[23]

Sounding very much like Lilla’s account of Hobbes, Kronman argues that religion, drawing on our fears, seeks to have us revalue the limits of life by accepting those limits as an occasion for gratitude rather than rebellion. The smug cosmopolitan and secular observers of the rise of this religious revival think this development to be shallow and mindless. Kronman thinks such an attitude fails to recognize that the problem is not the death of God but the death of man. It is the task of the university to be the church for the rebirth of a humanism that is more honest and honorable than any religion can offer.[24]

Kronman’s understanding of secular humanism assumes what Lilla calls the great separation, thus confirming Lilla’s contention that the university is the crucial institution to sustain liberal social orders. Yet Kronman fears that the secular university has lost its way by becoming a research university beset by the demands of the politically correct. I certainly think the humanities have lost their centrality in the modern university, but I think that loss is due much more to the humanism Kronman advocates. For once the “great separation” is accepted then a Hobbesian world cannot be avoided, that is, a death determined world committed to the defeat of death. In such a world the university cannot help but become the home of technologies designed to increase our power over fate.

Such a world, and the universities that serve it, must go to war in an effort to defeat those forces in the world that threaten our security. Americans are determined to live in a world of safety even if we have to go to war to make the world safe. That project is often justified, and this is Kronman’s list, in the name of ideals of individual freedom and toleration; of democratic government; of respect for the rights of minorities and for human rights generally; a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life; the acceptance of the truths of modern science and the ubiquitous employment of its technological products as aspirational goals all should want. According to Kronman “to be openly opposed to any of these things is to be a reactionary, a zealot, and obscurantist who refuses to recognize the moral and intellectual authority of this ensemble of modern ideas and institutions.”[25] I have little doubt that Kronman believes this, but that he does so means he simply cannot see what the rest of the world sees, namely, that this is an ideology for a culture of death.

Kronman and Lilla are to be commended for their willingness to advocate secular humanism as a moral, educational, and political project. They simply seem to assume that the secular humanist will be more peace loving. But I find it hard to find any evidence that would support such a conclusion.

By calling attention to Lilla and Kronman I hope to have helped us see that if we as Christians are to begin to reclaim the political theology required by the truthfulness of Christian convictions we will need to begin by doing theology unapologetically. In particular that means Christians must reclaim theology as a knowledge central for the work of any university worthy of the name “university.” That will require, at least in America, a recovery of the church as a polity capable of challenging the presumptions that the state is the agency of peace. In short, if the analysis I have tried to develop concerning the American difference is close to being right, it should make clear that a commitment to Christian nonviolence is the presumption necessary for the church to reassert its political significance.

In Veritatis Splendor John Paul II claimed that there is an inseparable connection between truth and freedom which if broken results in totalitarianism. America is a society built on the assumption that freedom must precede truth. Therefore America is presumed to be the alternative to totalitarianism. However, if my account of the American difference is correct I think that presumption needs to be reexamined particularly in light of the way war sustains American political life.

________________________________________________________________________

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.b522-527.

[2] Taylor, p. 528.

[3] For Taylor’s emphasis on the significance of being articulate for locating our lives morally see, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 92-107.

[4] I develop this account of war in my essay, “Sacrificing the Sacrifices of War,” Criswell Theological Review, 4, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 77-96. The significance of the civil war is crucial in order to understand the liturgical significance of war in American life.

See. For example, my essay, “Why War is a Moral Necessity for America or How Realistic is Realism?” Seminary Ridge Review, 9, 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 25-37.

[5] Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003), p. 155.

[6] Gamble, p. 211.

[7] Gamble, p. 214.

[8] C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 1.

[9] Thus Alasdair MacIntyre’s now classic description in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) of the inability in liberal societies to know what might count as an argument.

[10] Taylor, p. 528.

[11] Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the
Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 3.

[12] Lilla, p. 5. Charles Taylor, in a very interesting review of Lilla’s book, argues Lilla’s understanding of political theology fails to do justice to the natural law justifications of early modern thought that did not appeal directly to revelation or to premises drawn from revelation. Taylor observes Lilla’s argument depends on his view of political theology suggested later in his book that a genuine secular politics presumes a mechanistic understanding of the cosmos. Taylor, thus, challenges Lilla’s presumption that“the great separation” has ever been quite the achievement Lilla assumes. Taylor’s review is in the “Immanent Frame” sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.

[13] Lilla, pp. 42-45. Lilla observes that although Christianity “is inescapably political, it proved incapable of integrating this fact into Christian theology. The political organization of medieval Europe, tottering on that theological ambivalence, could not have been more perfectly arranged to exacerbate the conflict inherent in all political life…Perhaps if Christianity had seen itself as the political religion it really was, presenting the pope as an earthly sovereign with full authority over secular matters, some bloodshed could have been avoided. But living as a Christian means being in the world, including the political world, while somehow not being of it. It means living with a false consciousness.” (p.86) Lilla associates this instability in Christian political theology to the dialectic between transcendence and immanence at the heart of the incarnation. For such an astute reader of Barth it is surprising Lilla fails to understand that what is meant by such a dialectic must be Christologically determined.

[14] Lilla, p. 88.

[15] Lilla, pp. 89-91.

[16] Lilla, pp. 84-85.

[17] Lilla, p. 248.

[18] Lilla, pp. 308-309.

[19] See, for example, Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

[20] Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up On the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 74.

[21] Kronman, p. 34.

[22] Kronman, p. 76.

[23] Kronman, p. 232.

[24] Kronman, p. 243. Kronman is more than ready to declare that any “religion” at some point must demand a sacrifice of the intellect because a religion finally insists that at some point thinking is not adequate to questions of life’s meaning. So every religion in a basic sense must be fundamentalist because the answers it is prepared to give to life’s questions are anchored in its own convictions. (pp. 198-199.) Kronman does not supply the necessary philosophical defense of his understanding of rationality.

[25] Kronman, pp. 172-173.
________________________________________________________________________

Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University with a joint appointment at Duke Law School. He was named “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001.

I pose this hypothetical scenario (hereafter referred to as the “murder scenario”) to introduce some of the most difficult questions a Christian can ask: Is killing ever justifiable? Are Christians called to be absolute pacifists who reject killing under any circumstance? In our times, questions such as these are much more than fodder for abstract theological speculation; Christians living in a violent world have had to answer them time and time again. The United States’ recent decision to begin military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq was largely predicated upon Christian formulations of just war theory;[1] based on current geopolitical tensions, the United States may well have to determine whether yet another conflict would be justifiable.

Any discussion of this issue must center around the proverbial just war (or, in the case of the man who must decide whether or not to kill the murderer who has broken into his neighbor’s house, the “just killing”) — the war of good against evil, fought for noble reasons. Country A goes to war with country B because country B seeks to destroy country C; because country A fights solely (or primarily) on behalf of an otherwise defenseless third party (country C), it fulfills the ius ad bellum,[2] and its declaration of warfare is just. A just war, simply put, would be a selfless war — even a loving war — an action performed on behalf of another.

Note that there is a difference between “just wars” and “just killing.” The former concerns a societal or corporate commitment to killing, ostensibly for noble purposes; the latter concerns an individual’s killing another individual for ostensibly noble purposes. In my mind, the two are inseparable; if war can ever possibly be just, then individual killing must also be just, and vice versa. Thus, I will consider the questions of just war and just killing interchangeably.

Admittedly, a few different considerations come into play when pondering each of these questions. For example, calculating the potential consequences of entering into a war can be exponentially more difficult than calculating the potential consequences of perpetrating an individual act of killing. There is also the problem of understanding how personal Christian ethics translates into social, or political, Christian ethics. The New Testament constantly addresses the issue of how persons should behave and rarely addresses the issue of how governments or societies should behave. Finally, it is not entirely certain that war can be construed simply as an aggregation of individual killings. However, because these lines of thought are peripheral to the fundamental question about whether killing is ever right, I will ignore them for the time being.

Note also that I will focus primarily on acts of killing and not on violence in general. I am not sure whether anyone has seriously advanced the position that all violence is always wrong. As a crude but illustrative example, I do not believe that any pacifist would refuse the opportunity to slap Hitler if doing so could have prevented World War II. This thought experiment leads to interesting questions about how categorically different killing is from non-lethal violence — but these are peripheral questions.

At first glance, Jesus’ commands call for a categorical rejection of killing and of all violence. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says, “for they will be called sons of God” (Matthew v. 9). “Resist not the one who is evil” (Matthew v. 39). “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew v. 44). “All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew xxvi. 52). Such commands are not unique to the Gospels; in his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans xii. 21).

The writings of the pre-Augustinian Church Fathers may appear, if possible, even more definitive. Athenagoras, a second-century Athenian philosopher who converted to Christianity, asks, “How, then, when we do not even look on [at the violence in the Coliseum], lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death?”[3] Justin Martyr, another second-century Christian, claims, “[W]e who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ.”[4] Similarly, Tertullian states that “the Lord, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.”[5] Hippolytus believed that Christians could not enter military service: “The catechumen or faithful who wants to become a soldier is to be rejected, for he has despised God.”[6] Perhaps most definitively, Lactantius, a Christian who lived in the early fourth century, writes:

For when God forbids us to kill, He not only prohibits us from open violence, which is not even allowed by the public laws, but He warns us against the commission of those things which are esteemed lawful among men. Thus it will be neither lawful for a just man to engage in warfare, since his warfare is justice itself, nor to accuse any one of a capital charge, because it makes no difference whether you put a man to death by word, or rather by the sword, since it is the act of putting to death itself which is prohibited. Therefore, with regard to this precept of God, there ought to be no exception at all; but that it is always unlawful to put to death a man, whom God willed to be a sacred animal.[7]

Significantly, then, the early Church Fathers, direct heirs of the apostle’s teachings, were strongly opposed to violence and killing.

However, almost all of these biblical and patristic excerpts refer to violence perpetrated against one’s own enemies (or in the case of Lactantius’ quotation, the death penalty). None of them even address the possibility of a just war or any war fought for selfless reasons. Importantly, Jesus’ command to “resist not the one who is evil,” occurs within a condemnation of vengeance: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also [emphasis added]” (Matthew v. 8-39). Likewise, Paul’s exhortation to the Romans to overcome evil with good follows instructions against vengeance and retaliation (cf. Romans xii. 14-21).

The earliest Christian communities were religious minorities whose existence was often threatened by persecution. For them, discussions of violence almost invariably focused on violent persecution of Christians and appropriate, non-violent Christian responses. In fact, they believed their non-violent resistance would only strengthen them, as evidenced by Tertullian’s famous line “Semen est sanguis christianorum”[8] and Origen’s pronouncement that “the more that kings, rulers, and peoples have persecuted them everywhere, the more Christians have increased in number and grown in strength.”[9] (And indeed, two of the most famous modern and successful examples of advocates of pacifism and non-violence, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, both operated within circumstances of minority non-resistance to majority aggression — in other words, conditions remarkably analogous to those in which the first Christians operated.) Because of this fact, it is not entirely clear that the statements against violence and killing in the New Testament and patristics represent a categorical and universal rejection of violence and killing. They certainly represent a condemnation of aggressive violence and even of violence in self-defense (as Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts, among others, clearly demonstrates) — but I am not sure they say anything much about hypothetically “just” violence, as in the murder scenario. (It is helpful to remember also that the earliest Church Fathers had little conception of anything resembling a Christian state, and thus probably no tangible idea of a Christian collective capable of selflessly defending some other group of people.) One exception I found was a passage from Origen: “Perhaps also the so-called wars among the bees convey instruction as to the manner in which wars, if ever there arise a necessity for them, should be waged in a just and orderly way among men [emphasis added].”[10] Furthermore, he goes on to say that Christians, though they cannot themselves fight, can pray “on behalf of those who are fighting in a righteous cause, and for the king who reigns righteously, that whatever is opposed to those who act righteously may be destroyed!”[11]

Beyond these brief excerpts from patristics, some passages in scripture bear mentioning. In the eighth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (and again in the seventh chapter of Luke’s), Jesus commends a centurion for his faith without criticizing him for his military position. In Luke iii. 14, when a group of soldiers asks Jesus what they should do, he advises them not to extort or threaten people and to be content with their pay. More crucially, in the tenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, a Roman centurion named Cornelius becomes a Christian; in the entire chapter, there is no indication that Cornelius ever resigns his post.

To understand Jesus’ interactions with soldiers, it is useful to consider his interactions with prostitutes, adulteresses, or otherwise “sinful” women, because the relations between soldiers and violence and between these women and sexual immorality are analogous. In each of Jesus’ main interactions with such women — in Luke vii. 36-50 (with the sinful woman who anoints him), John iv. 1-26 (with the Samaritan woman who was an adulteress), and in John vii. 53-viii. 11 (with a woman caught in adultery) — the wrongness of each woman’s sexual sin is clear.12 No such clarity exists in Jesus’ free interactions with soldiers; Jesus never condemns their occupation as inherently wrong, as one would have expected if he were an absolute pacifist.[13] In the case of the Roman centurion whose faith Jesus commends in the Gospel of Matthew, the fact that he is a military man appears almost irrelevant; his profession does not overtly affect the substance of the passage at all. If the claim is that war is always wrong, it seems strange that Jesus would make no light of a warrior’s trade. It is even stranger that Jesus’ sole advice to a troupe of soldiers in Luke iii would be to avoid extortion and ingratitude over wages; at the very least, if a group of prostitutes had asked Jesus, “What should we do?”, I cannot imagine that he would have counseled them merely to be content with their pay. (Augustine argued for his theory of just war from this very same passage.)[14]

“What then shall we do?” Can war ever be a part of the Christian ethic? In my opinion, no definitive conclusion concerning absolute pacifism (the position that all killing is wrong) can be reached solely from the biblical passages directly related to violence.[15] However, I cannot agree with the position of the pacifist.

We should remember that the Christian ethic is simple: “The entire Law is fulfilled in one word: Love your neighbor as yourself ” (Galatians v. 14). Love your neighbor — and of course, love your enemies (cf. Matthew v. 44, Luke vi. 27).[16] The strength of this principle, the Golden Rule, lies partly in its abstractness; morality is not reduced to adherence to a set of rules, but becomes instead a fundamentally spiritual and emotional commitment. But it is not always simple to answer the question, “What does it mean to love my neighbor?” What, for instance, does loving one’s neighbors and enemies entail in the murder scenario? Am I truly loving my neighbor’s children if I let them die at the murderer’s hands? Am I truly loving the murderer if I kill him before he can kill anyone else?

Scenarios such as this one do not exist merely in the realm of imagination; for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a famous twentieth-century German theologian and pacifist for at least a part of his life, famously became involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Indeed, World War II is the archetypal just war – and Adolf Hitler the archetypal villain — for those who are opposed to pacifism.[17] Many millions more people would have died had no one resisted Hitler and the Nazis (or so the argument goes); thus, it was just to wage war against Nazi Germany. Appeasement and non-resistance could then be as destructive as war itself. In the words of the Land letter:

How different and how much safer would the history of the twentieth century have been had the allies confronted Hitler when he illegally reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 in clear violation of Germany’s treaty agreements? It is at least possible that tens of millions of the lives lost in World War II might not have been lost if the Allies had enforced treaty compliance then instead of appeasing a murderous dictator.[18]

The inference is that the Christian ought to act in such a way as to minimize the number of deaths, even if that entails acts of war.

One fundamental tension that seems to emerge between the pacifist and non-pacifist is a clash between consequentialism (the belief that consequences of actions affect their moral status) and moral absolutism (the belief that certain actions are right or wrong regardless of context or consequence). The absolute pacifist would eschew the crude moral calculus of determining whether or not a certain killing is justifiable and instead simply hold that killing is wrong no matter how many lives could potentially be saved. It is this apparent fact about pacifism — its non-consequentialism — that leads many to reject it as idealistic and naïve.

Of course, this entire line of reasoning presupposes a certain view of history that not all pacifists would share, a dysteleological and unguided view of history in which God is relatively inactive; in such a world, “[w]ar does not determine who is right — only who is left.”[19] But what if God constantly acted in history? Had the Allies surrendered to Hitler, would God have somehow intervened? Such appears to be the opinion of many pacifists (who would otherwise be forced to concede the very real possibility of Hitler’s conquering Europe); for example, in his book Will the Real Heretic Please Stand Up, author David Bercot argues that the Pax Romana — a long period of relative peace for the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. — came as a result of the pacifistic principles of the earliest Christians. But while it is true that God often protected His people (the Israelites) in the past, it is challenging to extract from scripture the position that non-resistance would act as an absolute guarantor of divine protection; the ancient Israelites always fought to protect themselves, and the martyrdoms of Stephen and other early Christians directly contradict that claim.

It seems, therefore, that the position of the absolute pacifist is not entirely tenable for the Christian. Jesus’ prohibitions of violence were not simple categorical rejections of violence, but condemnations of vengeance, retaliation, and hatred; Jesus’ interactions with soldiers give no indication that he saw all warfare and killing as abominable; and even the anti-militaristic Church Fathers do not seem to have been unanimous in a plenary denunciation of all violence. Chesterton once said, “Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”[20] And I think war, with all the hellishness surrounding it, can easily become a false devil (though it has just as often become a false idol). Killing itself is not the sin; oppression, rage, coercion, selfishness, cruelty, and lack of empathy are the sins. There is undoubtedly a strong correlation between killing and these sins — but it is not a necessary connection.

This does not mean that the non-pacifist is out of the woods. He still has to demonstrate some means of differentiating between just and unjust wars (and, by extension, between just and unjust killings). The Land Letter offers several criteria, including the intent of the aggressor, the authority of the aggressor, proportionality, and others. These all appear reasonable enough, but it they are much more Ciceronian than biblical in their extraction. And even if they are all sufficient criteria, how is the Christian to analyze them for wars that are inevitably complex and unpredictable? To return to a very contemporary example, would the writers of the Land Letter still maintain that the Iraq conflict was justified, knowing what they know now? Even if wars could be justified in the abstract, can Christians ever know enough about the consequences of a given war to know that it is justified? As a non-pacifist, I am not convinced that I could ever have sufficient knowledge to begin a war. (Importantly, this difficulty does not arise to nearly the same degree when considering just killings, for which the different possibilities and consequences are much more apparent.) And even if I could have such knowledge, what grants me the authority to make such a decision? In whose hands should such a decision be? These questions do not have simple answers.

Furthermore, the non-pacifist must not confuse his rejection of pacifism with a wholesale justification of violence. Even if absolute pacifism does not hold, the bloodstained past (and present) of the Christian world speaks to a remarkable shift in Christendom away from the peace-loving (though not necessarily “pacifistic”) zeitgeist of early Christianity and of Christ himself. Judging by our history, Christians have lost sight of that fact, and have grown much too fond of war. But Jesus still said the peacemakers, and not the warmongers, would be blessed (cf. Matthew v. 9). And without question, the aim or τελος of Christianity is true peace; the prophet Isaiah (among others) tells us that the nations “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” in the last days (cf. Isaiah ii. 2-4). War and killing may sometimes be required, but they can never be loved.

I believe that Christians should reject absolute pacifism. I believe that Jesus’ actions and teachings are compatible with some form of just war theory. But I also believe we must do so with caution, with much reflection and prayer — remembering that our true “struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians vi. 12). In the end, we will only arrive at the truth through repentance and regeneration: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans xii. 2). If we seek first the Kingdom, then we have already won our battle.

________________________________________________________________________

[1] One main example of this is the so-called “Land letter.” In 2002, some prominent Evangelical leaders, including the then-chairman of Campus Crusade for Christ, co-signed a letter to President George W. Bush that asserted their theological support for Bush’s “stated policies concerning Saddam Hussein.” According to the letter, the proposed Iraq conflict would “fall well within the time-honored criteria of just war theory as developed by Christian theologians in the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D.”

[2] “justice to war,” the set of criteria which determine the justifiability of engaging in war. This is contrasted with ius in bello, the set of criteria concerning the conduct of the war itself.

[3] Athenagoras, Legatio Pro Christianis (c. 177 A.D.), Chapter XXXV. Interestingly, Athenagoras seems to consider the possibility of a just execution in the same chapter of Legatio Pro Christianis. I am not certain of his exact meaning; he could mean a legal execution — one performed according to Roman law — or he could mean a morally justifiable execution. If the latter, he explicitly sanctions capital punishment.

[4] Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima (c. 156 A.D.), Chapter XXXIX

[5] Tertullian, De Idolatria (early 200s A.D.), Chapter XIX

[6] Hippolytus, Traditio Apostolica (c. 215 A.D.), Chapter XVI.11

[7] Lactantius, Divinae institutiones (311 A.D.), Book VI – Chapter XX

[8] Tertullian, Apologeticum (197 A.D.), Chapter L. “The blood of Christians is seed [of the Church].”

[9] Origen, Κατα Κελσου (248 A.D.), Book VII – Chapter XXVI

[10] Origen, Κατα Κελσου (248 A.D.), Book IV – Chapter LXXXII

[11] Ibid., Book VIII – Chapter LXXIII

[12] The authenticity of the third passage, traditionally known as the Pericope Adulterae, is in dispute. However, for purposes of this essay, I will assume that it is authentic.

[13] I specify Jesus’ “free interactions” with soldiers because his interactions with soldiers after his arrest are obviously of a very different character.

[14] Augustine, Contra Faustum (c. 400 A.D.), Book XXII.74

[15] We can, I think, conclude that scripture nowhere expressly rejects the possibility of just killing.

[16] G.K. Chesterton once quipped in the Illustrated London News, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

[17] I am not committing myself to the position that the Allies’ involvement in World War II was just, only offering it as a useful illustration to consider.

[18] R.D. Land, Letter to President George W. Bush (2002)

[19] Unsourced comment attributed to Bertrand Russell

[20] G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News – September 11, 1909

________________________________________________________________________

J. Joseph Porter ’12, a Philosophy concentrator living in Quincy House,
is the Features Editor of The Ichthus.

New forms are beginning to take shape.
Once occupied minds are activating.
People are waking up
The insurgency is alive and well…
We are building up a new world.[2]

In the last few minutes before sunset on July 10, 2008, a brilliant golden-red light infused the gymnasium at Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish in Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, a decidedly remarkable group of people had gathered together: Catholic Workers from scores of Catholic Worker communities. Hundreds had traveled from across America and the world to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Catholic Worker movement. After an afternoon of smaller panels on a range of issues, everyone had joined together to collectively discuss “what the Catholic Worker has to say about the making of peace, and what do we need to do now?”[3] In those early days of July 2008 — as the American Presidential campaign began to heat up and anxieties ran high about military action against Iran — this conversation took on special gravity for a movement grounded in nonviolence. After the three panelists had opened with impassioned expositions of Catholic Worker peace efforts, the conversation shifted to open discussion. Individuals began to line up at the microphone.

The first speaker, an elderly woman who did not give her name, addressed a shocking challenge to the gathering: “What if Iran decides to come after us first, then what? We’re annihilated and that’s the end of it?” The question lingered in the air, charging the room with an unexpected tension. People glanced to one another and to the panel, palpably distraught. The silence, though only a few seconds, felt infinite.

Then — suddenly — someone cried out in a clear, deep voice from the audience: “Forgive ‘em!” The audience broke into loud, sustained applause and cheering. The tension dissolved instantly into a joy whose core reality is relief at having passed an important test. This question and response sparked a sprawling, lively discussion of differing views of the movement’s political future. A common conviction animated all those who rose to speak: For Catholic Workers, the practice of politics, within and beyond the movement, not only can — it must — be nonviolence at all levels of human society.

This refusal of violence poses a radical challenge to the dominant logic of modernity as it understands politics and social movements. While it is one thing to articulate a theory of nonviolence, it is quite another — many argue an inevitably failing thing — to practice nonviolence as the basis of politics and a social movement.

The existence and success of the Catholic Worker represents a riddle in modernity. For over 75 years and in over 200 communities, it has been an American social movement built around this outlook. Today, the contemporary Catholic Worker represents the single most sustained, widespread, and ongoing American social movement of nonviolence.[4]

There are three central areas of Catholic Worker daily practice — community, work, and faith. The interrelation of practices transforms the meaning of each individual practice. These transformations culminate in the archpractice of nonviolence, whose underlying logic is moral unity. All this amounts to what I call an “alternative logic of modernity,” which coheres and sustains the success of the movement at all levels. Yet, before engaging the heart of this argument — and the experience of the contemporary movement — I must provide the project’s historical backdrop, theoretical frameworks, and orientation to where it intervenes in current scholarship.

The Catholic Worker began at a moment of great crisis for modernity and a crisis in the life of an individual. Dorothy Day, a journalist involved with the interwar Greenwich Village Left scene and a recent convert to Catholicism, reached a point of despair when she covered the a massive march of unemployed individuals on Washington, D.C. in 1932. Witnessing the severity of material inequality in Depression America, she felt unable to reconcile her old Left passion for radical social justice and her new religion’s antiquated teachings on social change. Praying in the National Shrine, she returned to New York City to meet, for the first time, Peter Maurin — a wandering French peasant mystic.[5] The two soon began publishing The Catholic Worker newspaper, fusing American radical thought with Catholic theology. Almost unintentionally, Day and Maurin began welcoming homeless people to stay in their makeshift apartment. This became the first Catholic Worker community. The community rapidly expanded into a soup kitchen and a larger house. Soon communities began to appear in other American cities, spread by the newspaper or individuals who had stayed at the New York Worker.

World War II, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the use of nuclear weapons posed a series of challenges to the nascent movement’s nonviolence on scale far beyond the possibility of Iranian war feared by the first speaker at the 2008 National Gathering. In each case, the majority of the movement embraced redoubled advocacy for nonviolence.[6] During the 1950s Civil Air raids in New York City, anti-nuclear activism became even more central to Catholic Worker resistance under the charismatic influence of Ammon Hennacy.[7]

By the early 1960s, the movement had already been opposing American intervention in Vietnam and deeply engaging in the emerging Civil Rights movement.[8] In the late 1960s, Daniel and Philip Berrigan initiated the first acts of ultraresistance with the Catonsville Nine burning of draft files and, a few years later, founded Jonah House as a “community of resistance” with Liz McAllister.[9] In the 1980s, ultraresistance would produce the Plowshares movement.[10] Workers stood among the first (and few) to publicly oppose the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and emerged as some of the most committed voices against torture by American forces in Guantanamo and CIA “black sites” during the second Bush Administration.[11] Meanwhile, Plowshares actions have continued, with the latest occurring in New Zealand in April 2008.[12]

Today, as historian Dan McKanan notes, the movement is as strong and vibrant as ever in terms of sheer numbers of communities and range of activity.[13] The unofficial movement website, Catholicworker.org, lists 209 communities — 190 in the US and 19 abroad.[14] These communities engage in a diverse array of work. While the movement began with mostly Roman Catholics, Workers have come always (and increasingly) from a broad range of faith traditions.

During this time (1933- 2008), other movements, ideologies, and groups rose and often faded away within the American Left and America generally: the International Workers of the World, the Communist Party, Civil Rights, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, the United Farm Workers, Students for Democratic Society (new and old), several anti-war movements, queer liberation, and alter-globalization campaigns. But the Catholic Worker has remained, variously influenced by and influencing many of these movements with a deceptively simple and small witness.

The Catholic Worker movement represents a rejection of the dominant logic of modernity. By “the dominant logic of modernity” I mean the process Max Weber calls “disenchantment” that increasingly regulates the interactions of self and society through rationality in capitalist, liberal, industrialized societies such as the United States.[15] In this thesis, I concern myself primarily with the way the dominant logic of modernity shapes understanding of political action and, thus, social movements. The core strategy of this politics is “moral compartmentalization,”[16] and the primary tactic is “legitimate violence.”17 The contrasts between these two logics, with an emphasis on the Worker’s critique and alternative to the dominant logic, provides the theoretical framing for the rest of the thesis, manifesting itself differently against the practices of work, community, and faith.

Tactics: Violence v. Nonviolence

Contrasting this primary tactic of violence with the archpractice of nonviolence throws into sharpest relief the contrast between the two logics. The dominant understanding of politics — and the warning against those who seek to replace its violent means with nonviolence — finds one of its most famous expressions in Weber:

Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes… The decisive means for politics is violence… He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence. The genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love… This tension can at any
time lead to an irreconcilable conflict.[18]

In this passage, Weber culminates his assertion that one must choose between the “irreconcilably opposed maxims” of the “ethic of ultimate ends”[19] and the “ethic of responsibility.”[20] For Weber and the dominant logic of modernity, a politics whose means are not ultimately violent is not politics at all. However admirable an “ethic of ultimate ends” can be for some to embrace, this ethic “must go to pieces” on any political question because political efforts, even for “‘good’ ends” inevitably involve violence.[21] Because of this, Weber warns those who embrace an “ethic of ultimate ends…above all things…should not talk of ‘revolution.’”[22]

A Weberian analysis of politics cannot make sense of the Catholic Worker as a political option or as a social movement. Any nonviolent project cannot be a social movement because social movements are political. Social movements must have as their ultimate telos seizing or influencing state power to achieve social change, engaging in actual or structural violence. A social movement without a telos in achieving such violence can never “win.” Yet the Worker movement speaks of specifically nonviolent “revolution”; this chorus of Catholic Workers “speaking of revolution” can be summarized most famously in Day’s statement in the early 1960s that “[t]he greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?” It is a revolution that transforms the very meaning of politics in modernity.[23] Through such efforts, the Catholic Worker seeks to overcome the “abysmal” gap between a nonviolent ethic and political change, which Weber thought unbridgeable — the “ultimate Weltanschauugen clash.”[24] But from within the dominant logic of modernity, the possibility of a nonviolent politics seems closed. To activate this possibility, an individual or group must begin to dismantle the moral compartmentalization that legitimates forms of violence.

Strategy: Moral Compartmentalization v. Moral Unity

In the dominant logic of modernity, moral compartmentalization is the central moral-cognitive strategy with which individuals and social structures rationalize violence and inequality. Economic theorists, building on Weber[25], coined the term “moral compartmentalization” to develop a framework that brings the normative claims of morality into a mode of analysis that is quantifiable, “values-free,” empirically verifiable, and objective.[26] Understanding these theoretical re-expressions as distilled evidence of a general social psychology pattern in modernity reveals the core logic of moral compartmentalization.

Economist Timur Kuran asserts that modern social life has produced a tremendous level of “moral overload” through the embrace of liberalism.[27] The goal of economics and sociology, for him, is to find a way to “alleviate” this inevitable byproduct of modernity. He offers several strategies, focusing on moral compartmentalization, which “[restricts] the values relevant to each of many contexts.”[28] Importantly, Kuran posits moral compartmentalization as a laudable strategy for processing moral overload. He writes:

If the individual can learn to consider two values applying to separate contexts, he may lessen, even eliminate, his guilt… For example, he must enjoy financially motivated work in settings where his operative moral drive is monetary gain; likewise he must enjoy religious activity in settings where he feels morally compelled to worship.[29]

Kuran argues this strategy must expand beyond the individual level into a social ordering of values: “For moral compartmentalization to work, the society’s public discourse must separate the issues that generate moral clashes…it [must partition] human activities into spheres governed by distinct moralities.”[30] These “spheres [of] distinct morality” make possible the legitimatization of varying levels of violence in different areas of social life.[31]

The witness of the Catholic Worker movement has much to teach participants and scholars of the broader Left, America, and social movements. However, current scholarship largely fails to perceive and articulate these points of tension. I argue that this failure is not one of mere neglect. The alternative the Catholic Worker movement presents to the dominant logic of modernity is also a destabilizing challenge to the reigning paradigms of the field that might logically study it: Catholic Studies (and religious studies generally) and studies of the American Left (including scholarship on Left social movement theory and Leftist intentional community.)

Catholic Studies, as a scholarly field, strives to examine all issues — especially cultural productions of Roman Catholics — “through the lens of the Catholic intellectual tradition.”[32] Scholars have pigeonholed the Catholic Worker movement as adequately and completely describable as a form of “Catholic radicalism” and as simply an expression — usually an aberrational one — of Roman Catholicism in America. This simplification marginalizes discussion of “non-Catholic” elements of the movement, such as its deep roots in the American Left. These methodological biases and their attendant conclusions have critically impaired understanding of the movement. These problematic simplifications have been transmitted to studies of American Left social movements where the Catholic Worker movement would be best incorporated.

Scholarship on American Left social movements is virtually silent on the Catholic Worker movement. For example, in A People’s History of the United States — the definitive work of Leftist social movements in America — historian Howard Zinn does not mention the Catholic Worker once. This omission cannot be ascribed to mere ignorance.[33] He does briefly mention the ultraresistance of the Berrigan brothers, but renders this as a part of a “general revolt” in the Catholic Church and a “small” subcurrent of American society overall, rather than connecting it more substantially to wider Left anti-war activism.[34] He subsumes the resistance of the Berrigans into a Roman Catholic framework, even though ultraresistance involved non-Catholics. This suggests that he builds from the conclusions found in Catholic Studies and religious studies scholarship.

Such silences and misinterpretations can be best explained as a confluence of a facile acceptance of the conclusions of Catholic Studies and religious studies scholarship already discussed and two deep biases within scholarship of the American Left.

First, there is a widely recognized anti-religious bias of scholarship of the Left. Self-identified Leftist scholar Cornel West offers an incisive critique of this phenomenon, writing “most Leftist intellectuals and activists” within the West have displayed an “excessive hostility” towards religion, derived from “Enlightenment prejudices.”[35] These “hermeneutics of suspicion” have kept large strands of Leftist scholarship from “[taking] religion seriously.”[36] While this bias enters into many studies of the American Left — including Zinn’s — this alone cannot account for the absence of the Catholic Worker. Zinn is sensitive to the role of religion in some social movements, such as abolitionism and Civil Rights. There is something else about the Catholic Worker — at a more fundamental level — that renders it invisible to scholars of Leftist social movements.

The Catholic Worker destabilizes the dominant paradigm of social movement theory — derived from the dominant logic of modernity described above. Social movement theorist Lawrence Goodwyn, in his seminal study of Populism, articulates a paradigm of reading social movements that identifies four steps in movement-building:

(1) The creation of autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize…“the movement forming” (2) the creation of tactical means to attract masses of people…“the movement recruiting” (3) the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis…“the movement educating”…(4) the creation of an institutional means where by the new ideas…can be expressed in an autonomous political way — “the movement politicized.”[37]

Goodwyn argues all four of these steps must be observed to interpret a social dynamic as a “movement.” In the American context, abolitionism and Civil Rights fit easily into the paradigm, culminating in the legislative victories.[38]

The Catholic Worker movement provides ample evidence of the first of Goodwyn’s four “stages” in the formation, spread, and sustained existence of over 200 communities incubating an alternative logic of modernity. Catholic Workers — individuals and individual communities —have supported or even led campaigns with concrete political goals (e.g. the Witness Against Torture). However, no efforts to create a Catholic Worker party, place Workers in positions of state power, or put the stamp of the movement on national legislation have ever been made. This situation is not accidental, but intentional. The Catholic Worker movement’s non-achievement of the fourth goal — “the creation of an institutional means where by the new ideas…can be expressed in an autonomous political way” — is a rejection of the telos and means of dominant social movement theory and practice. But, they provide an alternate telos — radical transformation of society towards greater equality.[39] From this alternative, the Catholic Worker derives logic profoundly different from the dominant logic of modernity.

The Catholic Worker defies the narratives of the major scholarly disciplines that could provide a site of study. The very destabilization and confusion generated by the movement within and between these disciplines indicates the challenge it poses to the dominant logic of modernity as a movement. A more comprehensive understanding of the movement requires the destabilization of disciplinary boundaries around the Catholic Worker. But this destabilization begins with the correction of the error common to most of the flawed scholarship: A regrounding in actual lived experience of contemporary Catholic Worker-inspired communities.

I return to National Gathering Peace-making Panel, where Claire Schaeffer-Duffy offered this articulation of the interrelation of the Catholic Worker practices of community, work, and faith, sparking the question that opened the Introduction:

The beauty, the genius of [the Catholic Worker movement] is that…from its very inception, it’s realized and practiced a…fundamental way of making peace… They embraced the outcast, the poor, the disregarded, the enemy… [T]hey did this by living with them, learning their stories, sharing these stories with others, even taking their side… They included wholeheartedly the excluded ones… Who merited that categorization changed over time, but always Catholic Workers made it their business to attend to the ill-considered, the unpopular… Christ not focused on a single issue or party…a Christ for the whole human person. This willingness, however fumbling…to embrace the outcast, is the first movement toward peace…. It really goes to the root…for we know that violence requires walls…reducing the other to an anonymous, one-dimensional entity…less than human.[40]

[This is my message:] [Keep] knowing the outsider, keeping the doors unlocked, crossing the borders…making friends with those we are told are our enemies…people we are asked not to consider… We know this is not easy; people are segregating themselves more and more… The country is at a point where violence is part of our national DNA… It’s deep within us, this idea that we are people that have to have the Bomb, have to have the walls. The way we can break this is to be faithful in a subversive, defiant way…if it’s an us-them reality that we’re in, let us go to the “them.”[41]

More than any other expression, these words convey for me the beating heart of the contemporary Catholic Worker movement: an interrelation of the practices of community, work, and faith, culminating in an archpractice of nonviolence and moral unity. This is the alternative logic of modernity the movement offers as a challenge to the dominant understanding of politics and social movements grounded in moral compartmentalization and powered by violence.
________________________________________________________________________

[1] Auden, “In Sickness and In Health” 112

[2] The Flobots, “We Are Winning”

[3] “Panel on Peacemaking,” Recording by author

[4] O’Gorman and Coy 267-268

[5] Day, The Long Loneliness 186-189; Day, Loaves and Fishes 3-12; Miller 33-78; Piehl, Breaking Bread 3-25

[6] Day, The Long Loneliness 295-307; Day, Loaves and Fishes, 71-95; Miller 154-201; Piehl, Breaking Bread 189-204; McNeal 26, 37, 41-42 67-68

[7] Day, Loaves and Fishes 166-187; Miller 216-302; Piehl, Breaking Bread 210-216

[8] Miller 79-81, 302-351; Piehl, Breaking Bread 216-239

[9] McNeal 173-213; Polner and O’Grady 195-352. “Ultraresistance” refers to the dramatic nonviolent actions that characterize the Berrigans’ protests against the Vietnam War through creative, nonviolent destruction of government property.

[10] The Plowshares movement, started in 1980 and heir to the ultraresistance tradition, carries out nonviolent property destruction of American military weaponry (especially nuclear-related.)

[11] Laffin, “Resistance Update” 4-5; “About Witness Against Torture”
WitnessTorture.org

[12] “STATEMENT OF THE WAIHOPAI ANZAC PLOUGHSHARES” April 30, 2008

[13] McKanan 2, 7-8

[14] Catholicworker.org, Accessed November 18, 2008. It is important to note, however, that no process or structure exists to make a community “officially” a Catholic Worker community. Furthermore, some communities close for various reasons without notifying the site or the movement at large. Thus, no site or scholarship can immediately or comprehensively take into account every such community change.

[15] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 139

[16] Kuran 254

[17] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 78

[18] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 121, 125-126

[19] For example, a categorical commitment to nonviolence.

[20] A pragmatic, ends-means driven logic, backed up by force. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 120

[21] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 120-121

[22] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 120. By “revolution,” he means aspirations to social change.

[23] I hasten to emphasize again that this radical transformation is neither unique nor original to the Catholic Worker—Garrisonian Abolitionism, Gandhi’s Indian independence movement, and Kingian Civil Rights all represent social movements based on this alternative logic of modernity. However, unlike these examples (with the possible exception of Kingian Civil Rights) the Catholic Worker still exists in the contemporary day and far less has been written on it.

[24] Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 117

[25] Weber foreshadows the notion of moral compartmentalization, writing: “We are placed into various life-spheres, each of which is governed by different laws” (Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” 139.)

[26] Kuran 231-267; Ben-Ner and Putterman 3-73

[27] Kuran 238

[28] Kuran 254

[29] Kuran 254

[30] Kuran 255

[31] For example, the American legal principle based on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids most uses of the military domestically, but poses no threat to its use outside of America.

[32] “Welcome to Catholic Studies!” Website of St. Thomas University, Center for Catholic Studies. Accessed November 20, 2008. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/undergraduate/default.html. St. Thomas University, claiming “the oldest and largest program” of Catholic Studies, describes this field as “a study of the Catholic intellectual tradition as a whole and how it shapes our understanding of politics, psychology, history, science, literature, theology and other aspects of
contemporary culture.” (http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/about/default.html, Accessed November 20, 2008.)

[33] He is clearly aware of the movement, as he includes writings of Dorothy Day in an anthology of nonviolent writings he edited (Zinn, The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace 47-53.)

[34] Zinn, A People’s History of United States 488-490, 538

[35] West, 372-375

[36] West 374-374

[37] Goodwyn xviii

[38] In the case of abolitionism, the 13th-15th Amendments. In the case of Civil Rights, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[39] In this way, the movement is unequivocally Leftist.

[40] Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Recording by author

[41] Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, Recording by author
________________________________________________________________________

Paul Nauert ‘09 is a Social Studies graduate from Dudley House.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate (1259)

I. TO BE OR NOT TO BE

“Why,” asks Leibniz, “is there something rather than nothing?”[1] This question is not unique to Leibniz; Baron Rees of Ludlow, an English astrophysicist and current president of the Royal Society, echoes Leibniz’ words: “The preeminent mystery is why anything exists at all.”[2] According to Rees (who is not a theist), “Such questions lie beyond science…they are the province of philosophers and theologians.”[3]

With the blistering pace of scientific progress over the past two centuries, however, many have posited (often aggressively) that Leibniz’ question has no answer. Victor Stenger, a physicist and prominent atheist at the University of Hawaii, expresses this view bluntly: “The universe is an accident.”[4] It has no explanation.

It should be noted that the central tenet of this etiological nihilism – namely, that the universe is fundamentally causeless – is not, strictly speaking, a scientific statement, but a philosophical (or, if you prefer, meta-scientific) one. Science can only answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” with subdued silence. Consider C.S. Lewis’ words:

The laws of physics, I understand, decree that when one billiards ball (A) sets another billiards ball (B) in motion, the momentum lost by A exactly equals the momentum gained by B. This is a Law. That is, this is the pattern to which the movement of the two billiards balls must conform. Provided, of course, that something sets ball A in motion. And here comes the snag. The law won’t set it in motion. It is usually a man with a cue who does that. But a man with a cue would send us back to free-will, so let us assume that it was lying on a table in a liner and that what set it in motion was a lurch of the ship. In that case it was not the law which produced the movement; it was a wave. And that wave, though it certainly moved according to the laws of physics, was not moved by them. It was shoved by other waves, and by winds, and so forth. And however far you traced the story back you would never find the laws of Nature causing anything.

The dazzlingly obvious conclusion now arose in my mind: in the whole history of the universe the laws of Nature have never produced a single event. They are the pattern to which every event must conform, provided only that it can be induced to happen. But how do you get it to do that? How do you get a move on? The laws of Nature can give you no help there. … [T]he source of events must be sought elsewhere.[5]

Given a certain set of initial conditions, scientists can generally predict with impressive precision what will happen. But they cannot explain the initial conditions themselves.[6]

It is impossible to ignore the implications of such an assertion: Either so-called “Why?” questions are (as Stenger proposes) unanswerable, or their answers will be of the non-scientific variety. This essay primarily concerns itself with the non-scientific answers to these questions.

II. PRIMUM MOVENS[7]

Given the two horns of the dilemma – either fundamental questions cannot be answered, or they must be answered non-scientifically – it is not difficult to see why non-theists, especially non-theistic scientists, go so far as to say that there cannot be an answer to Leibniz’ question. After all, many who do answer it do so by postulating a First Cause – and once we invoke a First Cause, we cannot help but sound suspiciously religious in our thinking. Indeed, philosophers and theologians have formulated several arguments for the existence of a creative[8] God based on the existence of a First Cause. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes one variation, the Kalām[9] cosmological argument, in the following manner:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.[10]

St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle (whose ideology may not have been strictly theistic) also postulated what were essentially cosmological arguments.

Though these cosmological arguments may be useful, they do not address the true source of the conflict. They are too physical to be truly metaphysical, for they are couched in spatiotemporal reasoning and dependent upon certain interpretations of the universe’s beginnings. In particular, Aquinas’ and Aristotle’s versions both define causality in terms of motion; Aquinas’ First Cause is the primum movens,[11] and Aristotle’s is the τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ[12] (“something which moves without being moved”). Because both arguments are based on motion, they are limited; they hinge upon a non-eternal universe.[13] If the universe is infinitely old – if it has always been – we can hardly invoke a primum movens to explain its existence. Something more is needed. This “something more” is Gottfried Leibniz’ argument from contingency.

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON

What is contingency? Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss distinguish between contingent entities and necessary entities in the following manner: “A contingent proposition (or being) is one that possibly, in the broadly conceptual or logical sense, is true (or existent) and possibly is false (or nonexistent). A being is a necessary being (or has necessary existence) if and only if it is necessary that it exists.”[14] For example, “A bachelor cannot be married” is a necessary truth because it is, by definition, impossible for a bachelor to be married, but “George Washington was the first president of the United States of America” is a contingent truth because someone else hypothetically could have been the first president.[15]

According to Leibniz, contingent truths (and, by extension, contingent things) must have explanations: “[W]e can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise…”[16] This idea is known as the principle of sufficient reason, or causal doctrine, and it forms the linchpin of Leibniz’ argument from contingency. In Leibniz’ mind, reality is a “series of contingent things”[17] – things which do exist but could have not existed – and this “series” of contingencies must be rooted in a necessary (non-contingent) cause, the source of all things, an ens causa sui:

Now, all of this detail implies previous or more particular contingents, each of which again stands in need of similar analysis to be accounted for, so that nothing is gained by such analysis. The sufficient or ultimate reason must therefore exist outside the succession of series of contingent particulars, infinite though this series be. Consequently, the ultimate reason of all things must subsist in a necessary substance, in which all particular changes may exist only virtually as in its source: this substance is what we call God.[18]

Without some necessary being that “[bears] the reason for its existence within itself,”[19] there cannot be a complete explanation for the existence of contingent beings; and if a set of contingent beings cannot be exhaustively explained, they cannot exist. But we know that contingent beings exist, and consequently a necessary being must exist.

Because Leibniz distinguishes between “reasons” (explanations for truths) and “causes” (events which precede and lead to other events), his argument from contingency does not hinge upon a non-eternal universe. Instead, Leibniz’ argument depends only on the aforementioned principle of sufficient reason and the contingency of the universe.

That the universe is contingent seems relatively uncontroversial; the fact that modal logicians speak of possible worlds at all implies that the actual world is not the only possible world, which itself implies that the actual world is not necessary.[20] But even the contingency of the universe is by no means uncontested.

Can we know that other worlds possibly exist? Positing other possible worlds could conflict with a deterministic understanding of the universe that would allow for only one possible world, given certain “laws of Nature” and initial conditions. If everything that happens in the universe is determined from the beginning – if, as Darwin said, “[e]verything in nature is the result of fixed laws”[21] – how can other hypothetical worlds be possible at all? And if other worlds are not possible, is our world necessary and not contingent?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that few things are as arbitrary – as contingent – as the initial conditions and physical “laws” of our bizarre universe. Consider fundamental physical constants. John Baez estimates that there currently exist twenty-six arbitrary fundamental constants in the Standard Model of physics.[22] For example, the fine-structure constant α, which characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, is approximately 7.297 x 10^-3. Is there justification for the belief that this constant must be what it is, rather than, say, 8.297 x 10^-3? If not, then the fine-structure constant is contingent. It is not 7.297 x 10^-3 of necessity; it could be any real number. If this is the case, then the fine-structure constant, and thus the entire Standard Model of physics, is contingent and not necessary.

But what if our current understanding of physics is incomplete?[23] Perhaps there exists some Theory of Everything which would explain even the allegedly “fundamental constants.” Even if there were such a theory, it would still be as contingent as the fine-structure constant, because other Theories of Everything would be just as plausible as the actual one.

Furthermore, none of this would even begin to explain why the initial conditions of the universe are exactly what they are. Why did the universe begin with x amount of initial matter and energy instead of y? A Theory of Everything could hypothetically tell us how exactly a universe of x matter and energy would behave; it still would not be able to explain why the universe began with that exact amount of matter and energy.[24] Put another way, the exact structure and composition of the singularity which began our universe preceded the existence of time itself; as something which was true, so to speak, “before” time, it cannot be contingent upon physical laws which govern how reality operates within time.

IV. QUO ERRAT DEMONSTRATOR?[25]

Leibniz’ invocation of a contingent universe is not, however, the main point of dispute with his critics; according to Alexander Pruss, “in the Cosmological Argument [Leibniz' argument from contingency] it is the invocation of the PSR [principle of sufficient reason] that gives the most difficulty to the contemporary philosophical atheist.”[26]

Interestingly, the principle of sufficient reason was not widely (if ever) contested until recent centuries. (As recently as 1847, Schopenhauer listed it as one his laws of thought.)[27] However, contemporary analytic philosophy has increasingly called it into question.

Why is the principle of sufficient reason so criticized today? Pruss says that “there is a developing consensus in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion that once one grants the PSR [principle of sufficient reason], the Cosmological Argument [Leibniz' argument from contingency] for the existence of God is sound. … At the same time, the PSR is widely denied in analytic philosophy circles. One reason for the denial is simply this developing consensus together with the wide-spread denial of the existence of God: ‘The PSR can be used to prove the existence of God,’ the argument goes, ‘but there is no God, and hence the PSR is false.’”[28] While he admits that this is not the only argument, I must agree with him that many people, rather than rejecting God after rejecting the principle of sufficient reason, reject the principle of sufficient reason because they are unwilling to accept God.

Pruss believes that the theistic defender of the principle of sufficient reason has two alternatives: “[T]he theist would do well either to try to justify the PSR or to make-do with a weakened version of the PSR.” He either must argue for the principle of sufficient reason or modify it in some fashion.

V. A NEW ARGUMENT

In this essay, I will not attempt to defend the principle of sufficient reason as articulated by Leibniz (though I believe it is ultimately defensible);[29] instead, I will delve into two arguments based on modified versions of the principle of sufficient reason. One, the “new cosmological argument,”[30] is predicated on a weak principle of sufficient reason (W-PSR); the other is predicated on a restricted principle of sufficient reason (RPSR).

Pruss and Gale’s “new cosmological argument,” based on the weak principle of sufficient reason, posits a being who, “although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists…[is] just powerful and intelligent enough to be the supernatural designer-creator of the exceedingly complex and wondrous cosmos that in fact confronts us.”[31] Their argument is “intended to appeal to an atheist who is willing to accept that even if there were a brute fact, i.e., a true but unexplained contingent proposition, the brute fact would be something that could have an explanation.”[32]

They begin by defining possible worlds. According to Gale and Pruss, “A possible world is a maximal, compossible conjunction of abstract propositions. It is maximal in that, for every proposition p, either p is a conjunct in this conjunction or its negation, not-p, is, and it is compossible in that it is conceptually or logically possible that all of the conjuncts be true together.”[33] In other words, a possible world is a coherent collection of propositions in which any proposition p is either affirmed or denied. Each possible world has a Big Conjunctive Fact. “The Big Conjunctive Fact for a given world comprises all the propositions that would be true if this world were to be actualized.”[34] It is the set of all propositions that would be true in a certain world.

Necessary propositions (such as “2 + 2 = 4”), by definition, are true in all possible worlds, and thus every world’s Big Conjunctive Fact will include them.[35] Because all possible Big Conjunctive Facts share the same necessary propositions, necessary propositions “will not serve to individuate or distinguish between worlds.”[36] The set of necessary propositions in each possible world is identical. Therefore, each Big Conjunctive Fact is uniquely individuated by all the contingent (i.e., non-necessary) propositions contained within it, or by its Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. In the same manner, “[a] possible world is uniquely individuated by its Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact.”[37] Simply put, two possible worlds cannot share identical Big Conjunctive Contingent Facts (and, by extension, Big Conjunctive Facts).

For example, “2 + 2 = 4” (a necessary proposition) will be true in every possible world. But “George Washington was the first president of the United States” (a contingent proposition) will not be true in every world; in some possible worlds, Thomas Jefferson (or Clint Eastwood or Paris Hilton) will be the first president of the United States. Thus, every possible world is unique because every possible world has a unique set of propositions.

After this exposition, Pruss and Gale present the weak principle of sufficient reason: “[F]or any proposition, p, if p is true, then it is possible that there exist a proposition, q, such that q explains p.”[38] (Compare this to the strong principle of sufficient reason, which states that, for any true proposition p, there necessarily – not possibly – exists a proposition q that explains p.) Everything possibly has a reason.

In “terms of a possible worlds semantics,” the weak principle of sufficient reason can be restated: “For any proposition, p, and any world, w, if p is in w’s Big Conjunctive Fact, then there is some possible world, w₁, and proposition, q, such that w₁’s Big Conjunctive Fact contains p and q and the proposition that q explains p.”[39] To simplify, for any proposition p, there must exist at least one possible world which contains p, another proposition q, and the affirmed proposition that q explains p.

Let A be the set of all true contingent propositions, or the actual world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. So “George Washington was the first president of the United States” is in A, but “Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the United States” is not. Let B be the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact of the possible world w₁ that contains A and its explanation.

By the weak principle of sufficient reason, we know that A possibly has an explanation; however, we do not know (yet) that A does, in fact, have an explanation. To demonstrate that A has an actual explanation, we must prove that the possible world w₁ (which contains A and its explanation) is identical to the actual world in which we live.

Remember that every possible world has a unique Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact; each will have a unique set of responses to propositions such as “George Washington was the first president.” Given this principle, we will have established that w₁, the world which contains A‘s explanation, is identical to our world if we can show that B, w₁‘s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, is identical to A, our world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. We can prove this in the following way:

Recall that every possible world is maximal. Then A, the actual world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, contains either q or not-q, but not both. B, w₁‘s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, must by definition contain within it A. In addition, we have chosen w₁ such that B contains q. Now assuming that A contains not-q results in a contradiction. If A contains not-q, then B must also contain not-q because B contains A. But we have supposed that B contains q, so B does not contain not-q. So A must contain q. Therefore, there exists a proposition q that explains A, the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact of the actual world. There exists an explanation for every true contingent proposition.

“What kind of proposition is q? … q is either a personal explanation or q is a scientific explanation,”[40] because a scientific explanation would simply be an impersonal explanation. Gale and Pruss claim that “[i]t cannot be the case that q gives a scientific explanation of p.”[41] Therefore, “q is a personal explanation.”[42]

“Since q is a personal explanation, q will explain p in terms of the intentional action of either a contingent or a necessary being.”[43] It is intuitive (and demonstrable) that q must report the intentional action of a necessary being, not a contingent being:

[I]f it did [report the intentional action of a contingent being], there would be in the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact a proposition reporting the existence of the contingent being in question. But q itself is not able to explain why the contingent being it refers to exists, since a contingent being’s intentional action evidently must presuppose, and hence cannot explain, that being’s existence.[44]

A contingent creator would require further explanation, making q insufficient.

Therefore, “q reports the intentional action of a necessary being.”[45] In other words, there exists a being who has intentionally actualized our universe. This being, though not necessarily synonymous with the theistic God, is free, intelligent, and powerful enough to have created it.[46]

There exist a few objections to this argument, which Gale and Pruss address, but the main objection is that the weak principle of sufficient reason begs the question. Gale and Pruss are highly critical of this objection:

Our atheistic opponent might have been willing initially to grant us this premise, but after it is seen what results from this acceptance it no longer will be granted. The opponent might charge W-PSR [the weak principle of sufficient reason] with begging the question. When confronted with a valid deductive argument for the existence of God, the atheist can always charge one of its premises with being question-begging. The problem with this facile move is that it lays the foundation for charging every valid deductive argument with begging the question in one or more of its premises.[47]

The weak principle of sufficient reason posits only that explanations are possible. Thus, to reject the weak principle of sufficient reason is to assert dogmatically that it is necessary that certain contingent propositions do not have explanations. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Atheism is indeed the most daring of dogmas…for it is the assertion of a universal negative.”[48]

VI. THE RESTRICTED PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON

Of course, there are other objections both to the weak and to the strong principle of sufficient reason. Pruss considers the

interlocutor who finds the PSR [principle of sufficient reason] very plausible, but who is unable to consent to the PSR because she thinks there are serious counterexamples to it. For instance, she might think that random quantum mechanical phenomena cannot be explained. Or she might be a libertarian who thinks that although one might explain why Smith died by saying that Jones freely chose to kill Smith, one cannot in turn give an explanation for why Jones freely chose to kill Smith: the availability of an explanation would undermine the freedom. … Such an interlocutor would accept the PSR either if the apparent counterexamples could be taken care of or if there were some way of restricting the PSR in a way…that would move the apparent counterexamples beyond its scope.

The position I am imagining is a quite reasonable one if there are counterexamples to the PSR. The PSR does very much appeal to us. The ordinary person has a very strong intuition that it is true. In the case of a principle like this, when faced with counterexamples that one cannot refute one would like to restrict the principle in some plausible way to get around the counterexamples. It would be irrational to dismiss the principle entirely.[49]

He then proceeds to restrict the principle of sufficient reason, using the libertarian objection (essentially, that free will is incompatible with the principle of sufficient reason) as an example:

If we accept this line of reasoning, then we have a very natural way to restrict the PSR: … If p is a true proposition and possibly p has an explanation, then p actually has an explanation.

…

[T]he RPSR [restricted PSR] immediately takes care of all the counterexamples that present propositions that cannot have an explanation.[50]

From this principle, a simple argument can be formulated for the existence of a necessary causal being:

Let p be the claim that there exists at least one contingent being. Then, possibly p has an explanation. Hence, by the RPSR, p in fact has an explanation. Since the agency of a contingent being cannot, without vicious circularity, explain why there exists at least one contingent, it follows that the explanation of p invokes the agency of a necessary being which is a first cause.[51]

This line of reasoning is similar to Pruss’ previous arguments.

But it is not the only argument that can be made with the restricted principle of sufficient reason. Pruss asks us to imagine our world’s Big Contingent Existential Proposition (BCEP), which he refers to as p. This BCEP, or p, is the collection of all true propositions of the form “r exists”: “Bill Clinton exists and Napoleon exists and Bucephalus exists…” for each actual contingent being.[52]

Imagine a world, Ghost-World, containing all the contingent beings that exist in our world (e.g., Bill Clinton, Napoleon, etc.). Imagine that Ghost-World also contains “an infinite number of contingent and powerful ghosts,” such that one unique ghost created each contingent being that exists in our world: “Ghost g₁ created Bill Clinton and ghost g₂ created Napoleon and ghost g₃ created Bucephalus…” for each being.[53] If Ghost-World possibly exists, then p (our world’s BCEP) is possibly explained. Because p is possibly explained and is true, it is actually explained.

That the ghosts from Ghost-World possibly explain p does not mean that they actually explain it: “[I]f there is a possible explanation, there is an actual explanation, but nothing is said about whether the two are the same or not, as indeed nothing should be said, since a given proposition might have one explanation in one world and another in another.”[54] The ghosts prove that p has an explanation, but that does not mean that they are p‘s explanation.

From here, Pruss continues much like he did before:

Now, the explanation of the existence of a concrete contingent being involves the causal efficacy of another concrete being. Thus, the explanation of p must involve the causal efficacy of at least one concrete being. Moreover, the beings whose causal efficacy is invoked in the explanation of p cannot all be contingent. For then these beings by explaining p end up explaining their own existence. However, neither the individual existence of a contingent being is self-explanatory nor is the existence of a bunch of contingent beings self-explanatory. Thus, the explanation of p must involve the causal efficacy of at least one necessary being, a first cause.[55]

We have seen this before: Because contingent beings cannot explain themselves, there must be a necessary being whose existence explains p.

VII. DENIAL

At this point, it will be helpful to consider the implications of denying the principle of sufficient reason (and its variations).

I can easily grant that the existence of God is a boggling prospect to consider. Karl Barth, perhaps the most famous theologian of the twentieth century, said, “God is inconceivable.”[56] God Himself proclaims as much: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”[57]

But however incomprehensible God (and religion) may be, He is certainly no less incomprehensible than the claim that the universe self-created or appeared ex nihilo. The idea that our orderly, intelligible universe (capable of sustaining conscious life, no less) arose spontaneously is flabbergasting. “It is absurd for the [atheist] to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”[58]

Consider what atheism is – not the affirmation of a philosophy, but the negation of one. It is incomplete. If someone asks me my name, “not Peter” is not an adequate answer; in the same way, atheism in and of itself is not an explanatory philosophy. In fact, by necessity, it denies that the universe has any sort of explanation; it is not merely non-explanatory, but almost counter-explanatory.

Suppose that you woke up one day to discover a Lamborghini on your driveway, leading you to believe that a criminal stole it and was forced to abandon it there. You would probably not be overly surprised if your neighbor said, “I disagree with you; I don’t think it was a criminal. Maybe someone in your family won it and wanted to give it to you as a gift.” If he were to suggest this alternative, the two of you could reasonably discuss exactly how the Lamborghini came to repose on your driveway. But if your neighbor told you he did not believe that there was, in fact, an explanation for the Lamborghini’s presence on your driveway, you would probably be astonished.

This, essentially, is what the atheist generally does – not just for a Lamborghini, but for the entire universe; he denies the very possibility of an explanation.

Pruss believes that position should not be maintained:

Finally, observe that someone who thinks that perhaps there are some contingent entities that could not have a cause, for instance the realities that undergird the lawfulness of laws of nature, should still accept a modified version of the argument that shows the existence of an immaterial cause for the aggregate of all material entities. To see this, instead of enumerating in our explanandum p [the aforementioned BCEP] all contingent beings, just list all the material ones. Plainly, each material being can have a cause, and as before there can be an explanation of p. Thus by the RPSR, there is an explanation of p. Since the existence of a contingent being is to be explained causally, at the pain of vicious circularity, this explanation must involve the causal efficacy of an immaterial being.[59]

Essentially, restricting the restricted principle of sufficient reason even further does not detract from the argument.

VIII. BY FAITH, NOT BY SIGHT[60]

Many people, unwilling to decide between theism and atheism, opt for agnosticism – a beast quite unlike the other two. In a sense, agnosticism concerning God is perfectly justifiable. After all, it is impossible to consider such a weighty question as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” without experiencing a profound sense of awe – and this awe reveals, not our grandeur and wisdom, but our puniness and our ignorance.

Therefore, the modern agnostic asks, how can you know that God exists? For that matter, how can you know that you exist? What is existence? Can reasonable people not disagree? Or, as Pontius Pilate asked Jesus: “What is Truth?”[61]

This is not mere existential conjecture; ironically, philosophy has given us a proof that certain knowledge is impossible. There is no perfect epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Hans Albert considered this fact through what became known as the Münchhausen-Trilemma:

1. If we attempt to justify certain knowledge with other knowledge, we must justify the justification with a further justification. This leads to an infinite regression.
2. We can attempt to justify with circular reasoning, but circular reasoning does not justify.
3. We can speak of “self-evident” truths, but since these cannot be proved, they cannot be certain.[62]

Of course, a “proof” denying the existence of certain knowledge cannot itself be certain: “Il n’est pas certain que tout soit incertain.”[63] This skepticism has profoundly impressed our modern rational and emotional consciousness. How is the theist to answer it?

One important point to make is that self-evident truths, though not provable, are inescapable. Perhaps I cannot “know” that “2 + 2 = 4,” but I also cannot avoid believing it. The classical Muslim philosopher Avicenna highlighted this fact somewhat graphically: “Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.”[64] It is one thing to claim that you do not believe in “absolute truth”; it is quite another actually not to believe in it.

There exists a popular and egregiously false notion that we have substantial control over our beliefs – as if, by saying that we do not believe in absolute truth, we can actually not believe in it. “My religion,” people often say, “is a personal choice,” as if we can choose whether or not to believe in God or Jesus Christ or gravity or, for that matter, Santa Claus. But our beliefs are not switches that we can turn on or off at will; they are complex responses to our experiences, our thoughts, and our emotions.

If people cannot control their beliefs, why bother with arguments for the existence of God? The answer is that, though people cannot control their beliefs directly, they can control their exposure to information and experiences that affect their beliefs. Polemarchus asked Socrates, “Can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen?”[65] We must, as Horace suggests, dare to know.[66]

Another important point to notice is that agnosticism is a statement of knowledge, while atheism and theism are statements of belief. And of course, people believe many things without knowing them. In fact, if certain knowledge is impossible, then everything that we believe is also something that we do not know. In the same way, I can be classified as an agnostic theist; though I do not epistemically “know” that God exists, I certainly believe that He does.

If belief exists without knowledge, what is justifiable belief? How can we say that certain beliefs are “better” than others? If we are truly committed to pursuing the Truth – as our institutional motto, Veritas, boasts we are – we will be committed to exposing ourselves to as much experiential and rational information as possible.

Can my “agnostic theism” be reconciled with what the New Testament writers say about faith? According to Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, “[F]aith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”[67] At first glance, the two seem incompatible. But they can be reconciled – if we make the extremely important distinction between epistemic certainty and what I call “spiritual certainty.” Faith is not epistemic certainty – perfect, “rational” knowledge of God’s existence – but spiritual certainty – a perfect trust in a loving Father.

If Faith is mere epistemic certainty, it is indistinguishable from fideism.[68] This, unfortunately, is how many people would define faith. They would agree with Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”[69]

But Faith is not primarily a matter of “reason.” Faith does not come from cosmological arguments; instead, Faith comes from “hearing the message … [which] is heard through the word of Christ.”[70] Faith is experiential; after all, Jesus told his disciples that they would know the Truth if they held to his teaching.[71] The obedience does not spring from the Faith; Faith springs from the obedience. And what teaching are we commanded to obey? We are commanded to love the Lord our God and our neighbor.[72] There is no such thing as faith without Love: “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.”[73]

Based on their erroneous understanding of Faith, skeptics have lambasted Christianity’s supposed emphasis on unjustified belief. They do not understand that Faith entails emotional trust manifested in action: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? … Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.”[74] James’ words are meaningless unless Faith is, not merely rational belief, but a spiritual assurance in God’s love and sovereignty.

IX. THE PERSON AND THE IDEA

Arguments for and against the existence of God, though useful, must by their very nature reduce Him to something which He (putatively) is not: an idea. The God of Christianity is not an idea; He is a person.

This is the fundamental difference between the religious and the non-religious. It is anathema to the non-religious mindset that the Ultimate Cause of the universe is personal. For this reason, deists, who believe in an impersonal God, identify much more with agnostics and atheists than they do with theists.

Consider the hypothetical case of a person who believes that God exists, that Jesus is the resurrected Son of God, and that the Bible is God’s message to mankind. Is such a person necessarily a Christian? Absolutely not! For such a person could believe that God gave us the Bible as a sort of hoax to trick us into thinking He loved us.

To be a Christian is not to believe that God, once upon a time, said He loved Mankind. It is to believe that God, now and forevermore, actually does love Mankind – to the point that He Himself became a man to die for Man. A Christian cannot only believe that God has said things; a Christian must also believe that God meant what He said. Christianity is not belief in an idea, but trust in a Person – and the particular trust that we place in our Creator we call Faith.

Most people who reject the idea of God have never truly experienced the person. (Perhaps even most people who accept the idea of God have never truly experienced the person. Tolstoy speaks of “confessing Christ in words and rejecting Him in reality,”[75] and the pandemic hypocrisy and – even worse – apathy prevalent in Christendom lead me to believe that he was far from alone.) They have never truly attempted to regard Him as a living (in the truest sense of the word), emotional, loving being.

This almost inevitably leads to unbelief – for the Christian God, if considered only as an idea, is relatively stale and unappealing. “I exist,” He thunders, “and if you believe this and perform certain actions, you will receive a reward.” He is then a being indistinguishable from a cosmic employer who provides a product in exchange for our services. This understanding of Christianity (and, indeed, of religion in general) is hopelessly impoverished. To understand Christianity, you must seek to understand the person (or, technically speaking, persons) God claims to be.

X. THE BEAUTIFUL TRUTH

If you are looking for faith in Christianity through “reason” and evidence, you will be hard-pressed – not because Christianity is not grounded in reason and evidence, but because Faith is the fruit of walking as Jesus did. “We live by faith, not by sight”[76] – this, because the Christian does not (primarily) seek to understand God as he does a mathematical theorem, but to know Him as he does a friend.

It is not enough for the non-believer to say, “I do not believe in God the idea, and so it is impossible for me to know God the person.” How you feel about God the person will invariably affect how you think about God the idea; the one cannot be divorced from the other. And if you have never experienced God, and have never sought to obey Him, you will probably be bewildered by the mysticism, ritual, and emotion inherent in almost all human manifestations of religion.

This understanding of God will probably require a commitment few people, even religious people, have ever undertaken. Our Lord warned us of this himself: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”[77]

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”[78] Christianity is not a checklist of beliefs and promises, but a radical lifestyle – and thus, to test it requires one to test not only Christianity’s tenets, but also its impact on one’s personal life.

It is dishonest to pretend that the primary divide between atheists and Christians is philosophical. For the most part, people do not believe in the Christian God because they cannot believe in modern American Christian religiosity; they are unable to reconcile religious hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and inertness with Jesus’ promise of “life to the full.”[79]

C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”[80]

The Christian way of looking at the world may be utterly different from your own. But I urge you, at the very least, to consider it. I have attempted to demonstrate in this essay that Christianity (and religion in general) can have a “rational” basis; I hope this will encourage you to investigate it further. Read some books by Christian scholars; talk to Christians on campus (or to me); be willing to hear their side of the story. Above all else, do not pretend Christianity is an emotional crutch for feeble-minded people. It is a religion that has informed and inspired some of the world’s greatest thinkers – Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Planck, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Heisenberg, and others. It is a religion that has transformed lives in a way nothing else I know can. For me, it is and ever will be the Beautiful Truth.[81]

Pilate’s famous question, “What is truth?” now rings from every corner of contemporary American culture, if in fact the question is asked at all.  In many cases, the very idea of truth is no longer regarded as important or “relevant” to daily life.[i] A number of factors have contributed to this seismic cultural shift, most of which are beyond the scope of this paper.  One in particular, however, is the dichotomous characterization of “objective truth” and “communal understandings.”  That is, the rather obvious insight that all beliefs are culturally conditioned has led many to conclude that there is no such thing as “objective” truth that is independent of our limited and biased cultural perspectives.[ii] A Christian response to this intellectual and cultural challenge must defend the existence and accessibility of objective truth.  This paper attempts to do so by taking a few steps backward from the sound bites of popular culture to freshly appraise the nature of propositions in general and, from that standpoint, to consider some distinctions between true and false propositions.  The intention is not to replace, but to build upon classical understandings of objective truth in such a way that we discover new resources to usurp, co-opt, and derail postmodern critiques of this essential, God-given gift.

What constitutes a proposition?  What are its fundamental building blocks?  The current philosophical dialogue about propositions typically describes them in terms of three factors: their content, their ‘aboutness’ or intentionality, and their truth value.[iii] The central argument of this paper is that the standard analysis fails to notice another key building block: that is, that all propositions have relational character.[iv] In this paper I adopt what I hope is a distinctively biblical approach to this analysis of propositions, proceeding in a particularist fashion, establishing the case from the clearest, paradigmatic examples, then broadening the argument to include all propositions, and finally suggesting some of the important ramifications that are subsequently entailed.

To begin we must define our terms.  How should we understand the meaning of the phrase “relational character” as it pertains to propositions?  I suggest that this includes at least the following factors:

(1) Propositions are always known by a person.  To describe this as a feature of the proposition itself, rather than about the knower, we could adopt as shorthand that every proposition is “known to exist.”  Both are true: the person knows about the proposition and the proposition is known to exist by the person.  This is at odds with a view of propositions as ‘things-in-themselves,’ as if they existed independently of personal awareness, like stand-alone Platonic Forms.[v]

(2) Propositions always have relational impact.  No proposition exists which does not affect some person in some way.  While we should recognize that different people respond to the same proposition in different ways, this confirms the more basic insight that all propositions always have some type of relational impact and this is due to their relational character.

The relational impact of a proposition needs to be considered in two distinct ways.  First, and more important, is the normative impact that a proposition ought to have upon a person.  The scope of a proposition’s normative impact will need to include everything from the appropriate impact when it is first considered to the kind of impact it ought to have if firmly rooted in a person’s worldview.[vi] Second, there is the factual impact, which is a description of the relational impact a “particular proposition in fact has for a particular person (or particular class of persons).”[vii] The difficulty of actually specifying the normative and the factual relational impact of a given proposition should not dissuade us from recognizing these features as constitutive of propositions in general.

(3) Whether propositions are discovered (e.g., through an individual observing the galaxies through a telescope) or shared (e.g., when a husband discusses his feelings with his wife), the impact upon the person who learns of the proposition’s existence depends upon the relational climate in which the person learns of the proposition’s existence. That is, if the astronomer learns of the existence of a new star in the relational climate of knowing and experiencing the love of God, the impact upon the astronomer is quite different than if God’s love is not currently part of the astronomer’s relational climate.  More clearly, the propositions expressed when a husband shares his feelings with his wife will have widely varying impacts depending upon the relational climate that exists between the two of them, the relational climate of the wife in regards to people other than her husband, and most importantly, based on the type of relationship she has with God.  So we should say that propositions not only affect the relational atmosphere in which their existence is discovered, but that the pre-existing relational atmosphere is an essential element of understanding the relational impact of the proposition.  This is a primary reason why different people respond to the same proposition in different ways.

To summarize: by saying that propositions ‘have relational character,’ we understand that to mean that all propositions are known to exist by a person, have relational impact, and that their impact is affected by the relational environment in which a person or community becomes aware of their existence.  That is, propositions are “resonant.”[viii] A symphony offers a useful analogy.  The composer’s score is given expression through the orchestra’s performance.  As the music rises in the air, the notes resonate according to the venue’s acoustics.  God’s creation is represented by the score.  The music, as a harmonic, multi-dimensional portrayal of the score, symbolizes the propositions we use.  The place’s acoustics, as the context for the music, provides an analogy for the significance the relational environment has upon us when we consider propositions.

The paradigmatic case of all propositions being known to exist is God’s omniscience.  God is one being, and three persons, in light of whom we understand personhood itself.  God is also the only being who has awareness of every proposition that exists, including the content, aboutness, truth value, and resonance of each proposition, as well as how that proposition is related to other propositions and each person who is aware of it.  He is an unrivaled appreciator of fine music and the keenest observer of every jarring note.

Within his omniscience, a distinction can be drawn between God’s knowledge of himself and God’s knowledge of His creation.  In regards to His knowledge about Himself, God’s omniscience is temporally coexistent with his very being.  He knows everything about himself at every moment that he exists.[ix] However, it seems to make sense to say that His attributes are logically prior to His knowledge of them; His knowledge of who He is does not determine His attributes; rather, His attributes determine what He knows about Himself.  But when it comes to propositions about and within His creation, then His knowledge of all these propositions is both temporally and logically prior to the creation’s existence.  In addition, His knowledge of all creation is to His glory, both in that He knows everything, and also in that every part of Creation is a reminder to Him of His own greatness in creating, sustaining, and redeeming all that He has made.[x]

When we contrast this with how persons within His creation become aware of propositions about God or an aspect of His creation, we see that our awareness is both temporally and logically secondary to the existence of both.  The similarity is that in learning of the existence of various propositions, we are doing nothing more than “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”[xi] Part of the relational impact these particular truths should have, then, is humility: both our capacity for knowing and our knowing itself are derivative of the God who made us and the creation in which we live and learn.  At the same time, the same observation provides motivation to learn more about the Creation: it is to our glory to search out a matter, to think the same thoughts God does![xii] It is marvelous to realize that as we learn about more propositions, we become more like the God who made us.[xiii]

A further ramification of this perspective is that it amounts to a denial of a naturalistic worldview.  Whether we are studying the atomic structure of iron or the inner workings of the human brain, there is no impersonal area of inquiry.  It is a fiction to think that there exists nonpersonal facts that are detached from any relational significance.  This universe is not a lonely, empty combination of matter and energy, but a personally fashioned, fully understood work of art.  Everything about this world is known by God and was designed by Him to have a relational impact on those who discover His creation’s various features.

One way of categorizing all that exists in this creation is to consider that which exists as special revelation and that which exists as non-special, or general, revelation.  I believe we should understand the propositions of special revelation to have “living resonance” and the propositions of general revelation to have “common resonance.”

The propositions of Scripture are quite unique.  First, and again starting from the perspective of a Christian worldview, these propositions are themselves God’s Words.[xiv] Therefore, “we cannot say that every passage of Scripture conveys the truth, but we can say that every passage is inerrant, i.e., never affirms in matter of fact what is false.”[xv] We are taught, furthermore, that these words are “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12 NIV).  The divine truths of Scripture have the relational quality of “living”!  The words of God have in themselves the creative power to impact the very core of the human personality.  Furthermore, we should understand that their relational impact is maximal because we are taught that God’s words do not return to him empty, but accomplish the purposes He intends for them to accomplish (Isaiah 55:10-11).  And thirdly, the Scripture teaches that God’s design, by which His words accomplish their purposes, is connected to the relational environment in which they are received.  For instance, in Genesis 3, we see that the words of, conversely, Satan and God, have very different effects dependent upon the relational contexts in which they are spoken.[xvi] Most emphatic here are Jesus’ words: “If you abide [inhabit, live] in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:31-32, ESV).

When we consider propositions that describe God’s Creation-an artistic work that was spoken into existence[xvii]-there are two fundamental types of propositions to describe: those that are true and those that are false.  Both types have a common resonance, inclining us either towards or away from the Creator, depending upon whether a given proposition is true or false.  The word resonance means “the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating” or, when used figuratively, “the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.”[xviii] I find the word resonance appealing, first, because of the suggestive implications of the Creation being spoken into existence and the aural origin of the word.  Secondly, and more applicably, my suggestion below is that true propositions are an echo of the Creator’s voice, but false propositions are an echo of Satan’s voice.  Thirdly, while the relational character of propositions can at times be carefully specified, still, even in those cases there remains an evocative and suggestive element to this part of a proposition’s fundamental structure.  For these reasons, I suggest identifying the relational character of propositions that are about general revelation in terms of their “common resonance.”

As concerns the true propositions of general revelation, these are first and foremost similar to the propositions of special revelation, which are paradigmatically true statements.  The creation is God’s means of showing to all humanity His invisible attributes.  So, to the degree we accurately describe His creation, these truths are God’s means of communicating to us His nature.  In that sense these propositions are an echo, mediated through the things of this world, of God’s original speech, which generated the created order.  To return to the symphonic analogy, the propositions are an individual’s or group’s means of expressing the Creator’s original score.  These propositions are meant to have relational impact upon us; primarily, to lead us into a worshipful relationship with God.[xix] A true understanding of the creation also contributes to the flourishing of human individuals and societies.[xx] On the other hand, to the degree that we accept or communicate propositions that are false, we suffer and perpetuate the effect of the Fall, imitating Adam, who was influenced by the original deceiver, Satan.[xxi] The relational influence of ignorance and lies is to lead us away from the God of truth.[xxii]

The relational climate in which these propositions are learned affects whether or not their truth will be suppressed or accepted.  The relational climate includes the human element,[xxiii] the demonic element,[xxiv] and, most substantially, the influence of the Holy Spirit.[xxv] It is worth exploring whether or not the resonance of propositions becomes “deeper” or “stronger” as we move from propositions about, say, abstract mathematical truths to descriptions of nonliving matter to plants to animals to humans to human societies.  Another question for further research is to inquire into what kind of hierarchy Scripture and reason might establish for propositional resonance on these and other matters.  How might we compare, for instance, the resonance of academic discourse on poetry versus poetry itself?

At this point we have surveyed the structure of propositions, both of special and general revelation, examining their resonance in terms of propositions being known and having varying relational impact in light of the relational climate in which they are learned.  In each of these cases, we have considered the relational character of propositions from both the perspective of the knowers, especially of God and of humanity, with some consideration of Satan as well.  But what is the significance of this structure?  What difference does it make to suggest that propositions have resonance?

First, the relational significance of understanding the truth about propositions themselves is to lead us to praise the God who understands this world and invites us to do the same.  If, in fact, propositions do have relational character, then to know this is to discover something wonderful about God’s world.

Second, there are considerable implications for epistemology.  For instance, Alvin Plantinga’s ground-breaking work on knowledge, in which he defines knowledge as warranted true belief, specifies four conditions for a belief to have “warrant”: “warrant…is a property or quantity had by a belief if and only if (so I say) that belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the truth.”[xxvi] The relational character of propositions, as described above, entails that “a congenial epistemic environment” is as much an individual matter as it is a communal one.[xxvii] This understanding of propositions should lead to research that considers which relational environments are more or less conducive to the attainment of warrant, and therefore, of knowledge.[xxviii] Epistemologists therefore need to become intensely concerned with environments.  Further research should explore the immersive nature of total environments: facebook, myspace, SecondLife; opera, movies, concerts, art installations; the classroom, a political rally, business meeting; a church service, Bible study, a service project.  In these endeavors, cross-pollination with the fields of psychology and sociology are likely to be of use to philosophers.

Understanding the relational character of propositions opens up insights into other elements of a proposition’s structure.  For instance, we could begin to understand the aboutness, or intentionality of propositions (which is specifically considered under the topic of “correspondence”), with new insight in certain domains.  For example, when a person speaks truth, say, a case of honest self-disclosure, the proposition’s content corresponds to its referent, the internal state, but we also notice that the proposition’s relational character corresponds to the integrity of the speaker.  But when a person speaks a lie, say, a case of fraudulent self-disclosure, the proposition’s content lacks a referent in the person’s internal states (or past), but at the same time, the deceitful resonance of the proposition still matches the person’s deceitful character.[xxix] To give another example: when a great truth of the physical world is discovered (e.g., E=MC²), there is a fittingly great resonance to the truth (what a sublimely beautiful creation!).  When a lesser truth is discovered (e.g., a relatively minute fact about an ant’s antenna), the proposition may have lesser resonance.  These and many other connections between the various components of a proposition’s structure (or of an interconnected web of propositions) are worth more consideration.

These philosophical investigations ought to lead to extensive, ‘popular-level’ results.  In some cases, all that is needed is for philosophers to think carefully about the wisdom currently disseminated in other fields.  To take one example, Haddon Robinson’s classic volume on preaching, Biblical Preaching, is sprinkled throughout with instructions that clarify the proper fit between sermon content and sermon delivery.  At one point he writes, “If you shake your fist at your hearers while you say in scolding tones, “What this church needs is more love and deep concern for one another!” the people in the pew will wonder whether you know about the love you are talking about.”[xxx] Why is this the case?  Because the propositions themselves have a relational character to them which is at odds with the person who is, in some form or another, sharing these ideas to a certain audience.  The relational dynamics quickly become very complicated.  Philosophical reflection on the relational character of various types of propositions might generate practical results for preachers, public speakers of all types, advertising, web development, and all other forms of communication.

Other fields of study could also benefit.  For instance, to the degree that our churches separate orthodoxy from orthopraxy, we risk running afoul of the essential orthopraxis that we now see is inherent to the very structure of orthodoxy.  The relational character of truth, especially when we speak of Christian doctrine founded upon God’s revelation, should correspond with its intention, promoting love that brings glory to God.  This partly illuminates why Paul was concerned that Timothy and the churches he served “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth.”  The church itself, as living people serving a living God, is to serve as a pillar and buttress of truth, both in the living message it proclaims and in the message their corporate decisions affirm.  The implications of this run into every dimension of church life, from our service to and with the poor, to the quality of our evangelism, to the fervency of our prayer meetings.  What is the correspondence between the living Word and our lives?  To what degree does the integrity of our lives facilitate knowing truth?  Does this facilitate understanding knowledge formation as an essential part of our sanctification, as individuals and as communities?[xxxi]

In academia, the rediscovery of the relational character that propositions have creates delight and wonder in all of our studies.  Because it has resonance, truth has depth and mystery.   Therefore, we cannot pretend that it can be known only in strictly formal and logical terms.  Rather, because of its inherent connection to personality, truth is emotionally colorful.  So, for instance, “2+2=4″, like all mathematical truth, testifies to the design of the creation which God the Designer has fashioned.  It is not a sterile point, but evocative.  “2+2=4″ is a joyful, pleasant, delightful, wonderful, worship-inducing truth.  A child’s glee in understanding this simple expression offers us wisdom.  Or, to return to an earlier point, there is something marvelous in knowing something that God knows.  It is as if He has let us in on a secret about his world, an older brother who is sharing His perspective on reality, allowing us into His inner circle.  To take another example: it is like singing along with our favorite artist as we drive down the road.

The apologetic significance of the preceding discussion plays out on many levels.  Beyond the many implications suggested above, perhaps the most direct application is to bring an ancient, but fresh voice, into our culture’s contentious discussion about the very concept of truth and meaningful communication.  In this relational culture, attempting fresh, biblical thinking on propositions and the nature of truth is of the utmost importance.  We need to let God’s living word resonate within our hearts and minds until we gain a clearer perspective on the world he has made.  Along these lines, the identification of a relational element to the structure of propositions explains much of the postmodern desire for experiences and genuineness: there is a hunger and thirst for contact with reality as it is.  Recognizing that lively descriptions of the world are fundamentally designed to express the world as it is-not just in a cold and technical manner, but to do so in a dynamic and colorful manner-may attract ‘postmoderns’ to a new appreciation of propositional truth.  This same understanding is of value for bridging the gap within the church between ‘emerging church’ pilgrims, who at their best are trying to journey towards Jesus within the context of loving communities that generate habits of faithfulness, and guardians of the traditional church, who at their best are seeking to not only conserve valuable orthodox expressions of the faith, but express these truths in new and creative ways.  A greater appreciation for the resonance of truth speaks for and against both communities, challenging each to understand God’s living instructions as a true word that is to find expression in our communal and individual lifestyles.

Whether these ideas are true or not, and whether or not this paper persuasively argues for their truth, our final hope for productive apologetic engagement is the Living Word, Jesus Christ.  He is at the center of God’s score and the most beautiful music wafting through the air.  May the Holy Spirit open our ears, soften our hearts and loosen our limbs, that we might begin to freely dance together to His song.

Bibliography

Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman, Bold Love.  Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993.

Carson, D.A. The Gagging of God.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.  <http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>.

Accessed 7/25/2008

Craig, William Lane and J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian

Worldview. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003,

“Dictionary,” Version 1.0.2., Copyright 2005 Apple Computer.

Plantinga, Alvin, “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”

<http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/article_advice.php>. Accessed 7/23/2008

—, Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.

The Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.

Robinson, Haddon. Biblical Preaching.  Grand Rapids

[ii] Ibid. 90-91.

[iii] For an excellent summary treatment of these issues, see Craig, William Lane and J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003, p. 130-153.  The burden of this paper is to establish and explicate the importance of a fourth essential component of rightly understanding propositions: their relational character. The technical term I have coined for this aspect of propositions is “resonance.”

[iv] I submit that one possible reason for this neglect has been the failure to bring a distinctively Christian and biblical worldview to bear upon the analysis of propositions in and of themselves.  As Plantinga advised in his decisive “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Christian philosophers have been too captive to the reigning paradigms current in the esteemed, but secular, centers of philosophy. (Plantinga, Alvin, <http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/article_advice.php>. Accessed 7/23/2008).  In many ways, this paper is an attempt to philosophically articulate and defend concepts which are more common, and even taken for granted, in the fields of theology, sociology, psychology, business, advertising, public communication, journalism, and the arts.  For instance, the psychologist Dan Allender mentions in a book on love that “Knowledge is always personal and relational.  Every fact we learn, imperceptibly, sometimes dramatically, affects our inner world and the universe of relationships” (Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman, Bold Love.  Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993, p. 266).

[v] I suspect that part of the reason for this is that the printed medium facilitates thinking of propositions as having independent existence outside of personal awareness (perhaps due to a confusion over the difference between sentences and propositions).

[vi] That is, perhaps a particularly important and complicated formula in physics has as its normative impact: a) upon initial consideration, wonder and amazement, b) after acceptance, deepened wonder and amazement, and c) for physicists, should become a rather significant part of their worldview, but for non-physicists, remain relatively peripheral.  But for no person should it become an ultimately important proposition.

[vii] Personal correspondence with Dr. Larry Lacy.  The distinction between normative and factual relational impact was suggested to me by Dr. Larry Lacy, who has been an invaluably wise, insightful, and generous mentor.

[viii] I distinguish between a proposition having “living resonance” or “common resonance” depending upon whether the proposition is of special or general revelation.

[ix] The full description of God’s nature is the greatest song, worthy of singing for eternity (e.g., Revelation 4:9-11).

[x] These are truths which the Psalmist recognizes, e.g., Psalm 92:5.  Cf. Col. 1:16-17.

[xi] The fuller quote, attributed to Johannes Kepler, reads “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God”

[xii] Proverbs 25:2.

[xiii] This is especially the case to the degree those propositions are also true.

[xiv] As the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states, “We affirm that what Scripture says, God says.”  (<http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>. Accessed 7/25/2008).  Cf. 2 Timothy 3:16.

[xv] The Gagging of God, 166.  Again, to quote the Chicago Statement, “We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.” (<http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>. Accessed 7/25/2008).  Cf. Isaiah 65:16, John 17:17.

[xvi] Cf. Matthew 23, Luke 4:24-30, John 17:21.

[xvii] Genesis 1:1-2:3.

[xviii] “Dictionary,” Version 1.0.2., Copyright 2005 Apple Computer.

[xix] Romans 1:18-25, Acts 17:24-29.  We have many paradigmatic examples of how an understanding of this world leads to a deepened relationship with God in Scripture (e.g. Psalm 104, 148, or the prophetic understanding of natural events, as for instance throughout the book of Jonah with a storm, whale, bush, and worm).

[xx] E.g., 1 Kings 4:19b-34, 10:14-29.  Conversely, 1 Kings 11:1-13.

[xxi] E.g., Genesis 3, Romans 5:12-21, John 8:44, 1 John 2:4.

[xxii] E.g., Psalm 26, Proverbs 1:20-33, Jeremiah 9:3, Acts 3:17, 17:30, Ephesians 4:18, 1 Peter 1:14-15, 2:15.

[xxiii] E.g., Psalm 1, Proverbs 27:27.

[xxiv] E.g., Mark 3:22-27, Ephesians 6:21.

[xxv] E.g., John 3:5, 6:63, 14:16-17, Romans 8:23.

[xxvi] Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 204.

[xxvii] It is interesting that a great deal of the publications on epistemological matters are self-consciously focused on knowledge as an individualistic enterprise, but contain dozens if not hundreds of footnotes referencing the ideas and contributions of other people.  The clear context in which knowledge formation within the field is occurring is a relational one, and therefore not an individualistic one, and that ought to be a clue as to how important communities are for understanding any individual’s formation of knowledge.  The community of epistemologists, and their topics of epistemological discussion, ought therefore to give far greater priority and attention to the importance of community within epistemology itself.

[xxviii] This type of environmental research would be a consideration of what Plantinga refers to as a “cognitive minienvironment” (Warranted Christian Belief, 157-161).  He suggests that given a “favorable cognitive maxienvironment” (e.g., a world much like ours), “there can be minienvironments for a given exercise of our faculties, in which it is just by accident, dumb luck, that a true belief is formed, if one is indeed formed.  A true belief formed in such a minienvironment doesn’t have warrant sufficient for knowledge, even if it has some degree of warrant.  To achieve that more exalted degree of warrant, the belief must be formed in a minienvironment such that the exercise of the cognitive powers producing it can be counted on to produce a true belief” (WCB, 161).  What kinds of relational environments can be ‘counted on’ to produce true beliefs about God?  What epistemic deductions can we make from, say, John 17:20-21, about the appropriate relational environments for true belief formation?  Part of the suggestion of this paper is that a loving relational environment is conducive to believing that ‘God loves me’  because of the congruence or match between that proposition’s relational character and the relational environment in which it is learned.

Dr. Larry Lacy informs me that William Wainwright’s book Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomena to a Critique of Passional Reason explores some of these themes.  He also suggests, “One connection I see between this concept of a normative resonance and the project of doing “research that considers which relational environments are more or less conducive to the attainment of warrant, and therefore, of knowledge” is as follows.  If proposition P, because of the content of P and because of the relevant truths about the person who considers P or the person who comes to believe P, entails that the person ought to do something or seek to adopt a certain attitude and that action or seeking to adopt that attitude “cuts against the grain” of the person, then that person will be more likely to repress the truth” (personal correspondence, July 31, 2008).

[xxix] Cf. Matthew 12:33-37.  Primary examples of this correspondence can be found in reflecting upon the nature of the Trinity, as three persons of complete holiness, relating to one another with complete love, sharing between themselves all truth, as one God.  On the other hand, there is the example of Satan, a Deceiver who constantly lies.  Again, reflecting on this might, for instance, increase our wonder at the beauty of the person of Jesus Christ.  As we consider John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (NIV), we see the person of Jesus identified as the Word.  In both His personhood and in His words there is a fullness of truth, which is to His glory, and therefore is conducive to our worship.  A further question: how does the relational character of propositions explicate our understanding of Richard Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony?  Aid juries as they evaluate witness testimony?

[xxx] Robinson, Haddon. Biblical Preaching.  Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001, p. 204.

[xxxi] As Matthew 22:37 clearly indicates that it is.

“It is not in human nature to be indifferent to political power; and if the price men have to pay for it is the sacrifice of friendship, they think their treason will be thrown into the shade by the magnitude of the reward. A man, then, who has shown a firm, unshaken, and unvarying friendship…we must reckon as one of a class the rarest in the world, and all but superhuman.”
- Cicero, De Amicitia, Ch. 17

“God is supremely lovable in Himself, in as much as He is the object of happiness. But He is not supremely lovable to us in this way, on account of the inclination of our appetite towards visible goods. Hence it is evident that for us to love God above all things in this way, it is necessary that charity be infused into our hearts.”
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II Q. 24 A. 2.

While today the vague term “friendship” has been largely relegated to the confines of positive psychology, it was once a weighty subject considered by the most incisive and influential minds in history. Before sociologists invented the study of “interpersonal relations” and business gurus contrived the skill of “networking,” philosophers pondered the intrinsic significance of having friends. Aristotle, Cicero, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, contemplated how friendships can exist to make life more pleasant, sometimes to serve our interests, and, most importantly, to nurture the soul. Even in our everyday lives, we can sense that friendship is more than a product of similar interests or common opinions. There is something special about our best friends, and our desire to find such trusting relationships is rooted in the profoundly social nature of the soul. Our real friends are sometimes those who provide the least material advantage to us; indeed, their fidelity and moral like-mindedness can produce the most enduring and satisfying friendships.

Our attitude towards friendship affects the culture and political environment in which we live-how do we choose our friends? Do we keep them for long? How loyal are we to them? These are all questions that ultimately shape our views regarding the aims of our public and private lives. Are we alone together, living for ourselves while building transient networks of contacts that can help us, quid pro quo, to get where we want to be as individuals? Or is there something inherently valuable about a friendship that makes a social life worth living for its own sake?

Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas meditate on such queries, and each proffers his own unique answer. The following essay provides an analysis of each thinker’s views on friendship, and how these theories on friendship have evolved. We will move from an examination of the concord in Aristotle, to the potentially insidious common friendship in Cicero, culminating in a discussion of the supreme friendship of caritas in Aquinas. My aim is not to treat exhaustively the issue of friendship, but to demonstrate the moral seriousness of discussing friendship, and how pursuing friends in virtue and infusing our friendships with caritas can profoundly affect political life.

Let us begin with Aristotle, who devoted more time on friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics than any other subject, and clearly influenced both Cicero and St. Thomas.

Aristotle and the Establishment of Friendship Through Justice

Aristotle extols the great value of friendship in society, arguing that it is “especially necessary for living” (1155a4-17) and is “the greatest of external goods” (1169b8-10). However, to facilitate our discussion of friendship in politics, we should recognize that Aristotle differentiates between “perfect friendship” founded on virtue (1156b8-9), and relatively inferior forms of friendship that more commonly exist. The latter include friendship for the sake of pleasure and friendship for the sake of utility (1157a30-1157b5). The objects of these types of friendship do not exactly involve the other individual, but rather the “incidental” (1156a10-19) pleasure or utility that that person can offer. This contrasts with the object of true friendship, which is loving the other person for “what he is” (1156a10-19); it is for the sake of his or her virtue (1157a30-1157b5). Therefore, utilitarian and pleasuring friendships are not friendships in an “absolute sense” (1157a30-1157b5). Yet they are still friendships for Aristotle because they “resemble” true friendship (1157a30-1157b5). As in the case of virtuous friendship, each party seeks what it believes to be a “good” from the other person. In addition, true friendship also possesses both utility and pleasure although they are derived from virtue in its case (1158b4-11).

These various forms of friendship manifest themselves in dramatically different ways, and each consequently has a unique effect on politics. We ought to focus first on utilitarian friendships, which most pertain to the daily operation of the state. According to Aristotle, friendships for utility exist between those who “seek what is to their advantage” (1156a26-30), and when the advantage ceases, so does the friendship. This makes utilitarian friendships capable of change and rapid disintegration. Such friendships are not destined to last long and are sometimes “easily dissolved’ (1156a19-24) because one does not have an infinite ability to offer one’s usefulness. Since the personal element is not a fixture of this friendship, companionship and even “agreeability” can be extracted from the relationship (1156a26-30). There is something distinctly callous about this form of friendship, since it does not require treating our fellow men with kindness, as long as mutual advantage is ensured. Indeed, utilitarian friendships do not require the virtue of amiability.
Despite its shortcomings, utilitarian friendship has much to offer politics. A political alliance between states, for example, is a fundamental part of international relations (1157a20-30). Politicians often ally to exchange votes, as well. For instance, a representative from Idaho might receive a yea vote for a potato farming subsidy from a California congressman who would receive a vote for his coastal environment bill in return. Such friendships may exist for a very brief time period, and can have little to do with a personal relationship. Friendliness between the congressmen may increase the likelihood of an alliance, but it is not necessary. If the California representative had to pass the environment bill for his constituents, and it required the Idaho congressman’s vote, the man from California would proffer a friendship of utility. The lack of a requirement for amiability allows for a utilitarian friendship between good and bad men (1157a16-20) who might not otherwise get along. Indeed, the object of the strictly useful relationship has little to do with the individuals themselves.

Political friendships for utility are not only possible between exchange-seekers, but they also exist between those who have an agreement of interests. In Aristotle’s theory, this is called concord (1167a26-29), which is an especially political classification of friendship. He says that the “citizens of a state are in concord when they agree on what is useful and vote for the same measures, and work together to achieve them” (1167a26-29). All of Aristotle’s examples of concord pertain to politics, such as the agreement of citizens that “public officials should be elected, or that they should become allies of the Spartans” (1167a29-1167b2). These cases do not regard the personal virtue of the Spartan leaders, and it is unclear how there is any personal involvement in the concord of support for popular election. Evidently, the utilitarian, political friendship of concord can still retain an impersonal character.

Even in the first chapter of Book VIII, Aristotle mentions the political significance of concord in one of the most important passages on friendship and politics in the Ethics. He argues that “states, it seems, are maintained by friendship; and legislators are more zealous about it than about justice” (1155a22-26). However, the friendship to which Aristotle is referring in the passage is not the perfect friendship of virtue (which is strikingly rare (1156b24-25)). Instead, it is concord, which can be encouraged and spread throughout the polity. He further confirms that “legislators most of all wish to encourage concord and to expel discord as an enemy of the state” (1155a22-26). Thus, concord is an important form of friendship that facilitates the operation of politics and “maintains” the polity.

Aristotle’s statement, cited earlier, about friendship’s relationship to justice is somewhat surprising, since friendship seems too personal a matter for a public government to support more strongly than justice. Yet as we have seen, concord and utilitarian friendship do not require a harmony of personal qualities or pleasantness, as virtuous friendship does (1157b33-1158a1). The state would simply be encouraging individuals to compromise and agree on matters useful to their existence. It is important to note that after abstracting friendship from personal considerations, Aristotle brings friendship under the purview of politics. We see this in the examples of utilitarian friendships of exchange (state alliances, political deals) and through concord-neither type needs companionship or even amiability. It is worth mentioning that if men sustained the non-essential virtue of amiability in utilitarian friendships, vicious discord would be less likely to emerge. A prior habit of agreeableness would be averse to great contention. In this manner, friendliness can assist politics. However, political matters alone do not appear to promote a lofty sort of friendship.

According to Aristotle, friendship requires politics because it cannot arise without the prior foundation of justice. At the beginning of his treatise on friendship, Aristotle directly addresses the relationship of justice to friendship. He argues that “if people are friends there is no need of justice” (1155a26-28). This indicates that justice precedes friendship- as long as friendship exists, justice does as well. This explains Aristotle’s next statement, in which he observes that “what is just seems to be especially favorable to friendship” (1155a26-28). Later in Book VIII Aristotle reinforces the argument that friendship is founded upon justice. He states that “to ask how…friends in general…ought to live together is the same as to ask how they ought to be just” (1162a29-33). Justice sustains friendship by advising the ways in which it is practiced. So in order to have friends, we must understand justice and how to establish it; otherwise, besides our emotions, we will not have a guide to how we should act as a friend. Therefore, justice is a prerequisite of friendship. This is why friendship cannot exist in tyrannies-”where there is little justice, so there is little friendship” (1161a30-31). Insofar as politics helps to establish justice, politics makes friendship (even the virtuous sort) possible.

Yet Aristotle still insists that justice alone is not enough to satisfy the needs of mankind. Indeed, “just men need friendship” (1155a26-28), which is the “greatest of external goods” (1169b8-10). Even men who are completely content with their virtue still require a friend. This need appears to derive from the social nature of mankind (1169b16-22), and the urge to share one’s “goods of fortune” with one’s friends (1155a4-17). This sort of friendship goes further than the mere need for justice in any friendship-it is for the sake of the virtue in each person and involves friendliness and mutual affection. This most excellent friendship may originate through justice, but it moves beyond politics in its existence. Aristotle also argues that the virtuous want to learn from other virtuous men to further perfect their own virtue (1169b28-1170a4). Aristotle applauds the value of a community of good men who can together satisfy the need for social interaction, virtue, justice, and friendship.

This is a way in which Aristotle’s “perfect friendship” can influence the polity. Virtuous individuals can congregate to improve one another’s virtue and this will not only provide for a more united virtuous state, but it will facilitate friendship. It certainly does not mean that each man will be friends with every other man or that they will hold things in common. Indeed, those “who have a host of friends… seem to be real friends of no one” (1171a13-17). But it means that more men of virtue will attain the greatest of goods, contributing to their happiness. This community of virtue and friendship acts as a model for the rest of society that observes the acquisition of such happiness and looks to have it for itself through virtue.

For our later comparison with Aquinas, we should note that Aristotle imposes a condition that even the most virtuous of men in this community cannot be friends with God. This is because friendship ought to be founded on a “kind of equality” (1157b33-1158a1). Although this equality can be proportional, friends cannot be so separated in virtue that they have little in common and do not come to love each other because one significantly lacks virtue (11589a33-36). Aristotle believes that man’s separation from God is too excessive for any friendship to exist between them-the gods “greatly exceed men in good things” (1158a36-1159a3). Even if men wanted to be friends with God, they would not even expect to do so; God would not want to be friends with them due to their “great difference in virtue” (1158a36-1159a3).

As a result of this analysis, we can see that Aristotle closely entwines the spread of justice with the acquisition of an even more important good: friendship. He considers common friendships, such as concord or utilitarian friendships, to be highly beneficial for the maintenance of the polity. However, they lack a standard of intimacy, as friendliness is not even required for political friendships. Nevertheless, amiability can contribute to more lasting concord and civic friendship. The ideal for Aristotle is virtuous friendship, which involves forces that transcend politics and justice, such as mutual affection. Aristotle also suggests that the virtuous learn from other virtuous men and perfect their own virtue by their friend’s example. Such a community of virtue can have a highly beneficial effect on the polity.

Cicero and The Problem of Politics for Friendship

In De Amicitia, Cicero describes two primary types of friendship-”common friendship,” and “true and complete friendship” (De Amicitia 6). Cicero begins his treatise by discussing true friendship, which he defines as between “good men” (5) who are in “complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual good will and affection” (6). This sort of harmony of interests may remind us of Aristotle’s concord, although for Cicero true friendship is a concord of virtue; it is not an agreement on a political agenda. Cicero comments on the importance of virtue, saying that without it, “friendship is impossible” (27). Thus, true friendship is similar to Aristotle’s description of perfect friendship, which exists between virtuous equals.

This complete friendship is extremely rare and is sparked by a “natural impulse,” or an “inclination of the heart combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love” (8). This appears to be a more powerful version of Aristotle’s “goodwill,” which he considers to be the “beginning of friendship,” although not friendship itself (1167a3-12). The natural inclination does not derive from a utilitarian calculation about the goods which one can receive from one’s friend. Indeed, the hidden gift of friendship is that if one does not desire the innumerable benefits accrued through friendship, and simply loves the friend for his own sake, he will attain the greatest good in the friendship itself and in its incidental advantages. Like Aristotle, Cicero observes that friendships founded on utility do not last long, since the end of that benefit would dissolve them.

Cicero makes no mention of justice in the initial formation of true friendship. It is more of a “natural” tie of virtue between two individuals that is mutually recognized. However, Cicero introduces a “preliminary trial” (17) stage in the formation of a friendship. While friendship originates with a natural impulse, it must be sealed by judging the virtue in one’s friend. This judgment is obtained by testing a friend’s “firmness, stability, and constancy” (17) of virtue. While we may see virtue in them, it may not last for very long and so we must establish a “tentative friendship” (17). It seems almost contradictory that Cicero states later in De Amicitia that we “must satisfy [our] judgment before engaging [our] affections” (22). What happened to the natural ties of affection that create friendships? Cicero stipulates that while the natural impulse should begin a friendship, we can only fully commit our affection and become friends when the trial period is complete. It is important to note that this stage is not meant to be a calculation of virtue in the other person. It is instead a confirmation of virtue. This means that in the natural impulse stage we can instinctively love at least some virtues in another person. Cicero beautifully describes this process: “when Virtue has reared her head and shown the light of her countenance, and seen and recognized the same light in another, she gravitates towards it, and in turn welcomes that which the other has to show” (27). Again, despite some striking similarities in De Amicitia to Aristotle’s Ethics, justice is not first calculated to determine what is due to a friend. We are instead intuitively drawn to the light of virtue in another person, without politics.

Although politics is not necessary for Cicero’s friendship, as it is in Aristotle’s theory, it still provides a useful test of virtue in the confirmation stage of friendship. Indeed, the effects of politics at least in part provoke Cicero’s doubts about complete friendship. He observes that “true and complete friendship… [has] existed between a select few who are known to fame” (6) and that “in all history there are scarcely three or four pairs of friends on record” (4). The greatest temptation to disintegrate a friendship is likely responsible for the rarity of true friendship: the desire for political office. Cicero recognizes the deep hunger for power that lies within each individual:

It is not in human nature to be indifferent to political power; and if the price men have to pay for it is the sacrifice of friendship, they think their treason will be thrown into the shade by the magnitude of the reward. This is why true friendship is very difficult to find among those who engage in politics and the contest for office (17).

Cicero mentions earlier that men undergo a transformation upon entry to political office-they “despise their old friends: devote themselves to new” (15). Friendships disappear and new ones are made for the sake of the advantage they give the politician. Party politics, to take another example, produces an “alienation of feeling” and tends to break down friendship (21). In the “best men” the most “fatal blow to friendship… was a rivalry for office and reputation” (10). Politics simply tends to produce animosity between individuals. The rarity of those who can avoid this is evident in Cicero’s question: “where can you find the man to prefer his friend’s advancement to his own?” (17). A person who can do so is “one of a class the rarest in the world, and all but superhuman” (17). Clearly Cicero does not consider politics to facilitate friendship; instead, it tends to ruin them.

Even some of the friendships that exist in politics are harmful to the state. These sort of friendships fall under the heading of “common friendship,” which can be a source of “pleasure and profit” (6). They are not founded on virtue, as this classification is similar to a combination of Aristotle’s types of friendship for utility and pleasure. Indeed, as in Aristotle’s description of utilitarian friendship, bad men can be commonplace friends (12). Good men can certainly participate in “ordinary friendships” (21), but politics threatens the stability of them, as well. Common friendship is not sustainable and can even come to harm the polity. Indeed, friends are necessary in order for conspiracies or any other wicked scheme to be put in motion (12). In this sense, friendship in the form of collusion can be a vehicle of evil that brings down the republic.

This analysis illustrates the importance of true friendship, which is founded beyond politics and through virtue. If a virtuous friendship is to survive, it must be superior to the deleterious effects of politics and so strong in its virtuous foundations that no quest for power can destroy it. In other words, the finest form of friendship must reside independent of political forces, and remain free from its vicissitudes. Of course, virtuous friends can still engage in the affairs of the state and impress their union of virtue upon the polity. They can also act as a guiding example of virtue for others. But politics does not produce this friendship, virtue does.

Cicero is clear that friendship is consequent to virtue. He mentions this several times, including twice in his conclusion: “it is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship…Make up your minds to this: Virtue (without which friendship is impossible) is first; but next to it, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is Friendship” (27). The failure of virtue allows politics to corrupt friendships. Virtue is not vibrant enough when conspiracies are able to doom the life of the republic. When virtue survives, friendship survives. The virtuous respond so well to seeing virtue in one another that according to Cicero they are naturally attracted. Thus virtue is the last best hope for mankind in politics, and in Cicero’s words, “next to it, and to it alone,” is friendship.

Aquinas and Caritas: The Answer to Cicero and Aristotle

Aquinas develops three primary types of friendship in his theory-affabilitas, virtuous friendship, and caritas. Virtuous friendship receives a conspicuously scant treatment in Aquinas’ writing, especially if we compare it to the treatises of Aristotle and Cicero. This is likely due to Aquinas’ discovery of the even greater friendship of man for God. Unlike any other form of friendship, charity acts as a central influence upon friendship, politics, and virtue.

In Cicero’s estimation, the predicaments of politics made virtuous friendship extremely tenuous and rare. We concluded in our analysis of De Amicitia that for such true friendship to exist, the virtue established between friends must transcend politics in order to be insusceptible to its temptations. But Cicero does give us an example of such transcendent virtue, he merely encourages “firmness, stability, constancy” of virtue in general (17). His comment that true friendship can only survive if friends are “all but superhuman” appears to be an admission that he cannot provide the complete formula for maintaining true friendship. This need for an “almost divine” friend appears to presage Aquinas’ caritas as a solution for the fragility of friendship. Indeed, caritas is distinctly above politics in its origin, as it is a “friendship of man for God” (23.1). This powerful relationship unites us to His happiness (23.1, 23.3) and is the most excellent of all the virtues (23.6). As we will discover, caritas provides the missing element of Cicero’s virtuous friendship.

Through addressing Cicero’s concerns with caritas, Aquinas also solves one of Aristotle’s prevailing uncertainties. As James V. Schall argues, Aristotle was unsatisfied with the conclusion that gods cannot have friends. Schall explains that “if friendship is in fact the highest perfection of the rational creature, then it makes the First Mover something less exalted if it cannot have this perfection” (Schall 1989). He observes that Aristotle leaves “the question unresolved, thinking the problem insoluble” (Schall 1989). But Aquinas enables the friendship of man for God with the Thomistic conception of grace. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that friendship with God “surpasses our natural faculties” (24.2) as humans. Indeed, men possess a natural limitation on their ability to love God “on account of the inclination of our appetite towards visible goods” (24.2). This is not due to our “perfect nature” as created by God, but “corrupted nature,” by which man tends to follow his “private good” rather than to love God (I-II 109.3). Aquinas maintains his consistency with Aristotle’s reasoning about our natural capacity: “it is evident that the act of charity surpasses the nature of the power of the will” (II-II 23.2). However, Christian theology gives us an opportunity to become friends with God. Thomas argues that a power “superadded to the natural power” is necessary for friendship (23.2). This additional force must derive from God because caritas brings us to the everlasting happiness that only God can give us. It is an “infinite effect” (23.2) and so must come from an infinite power. This is why Aquinas calls Him the “author of charity” (23.2).

The force that is “superadded” to our nature to give us caritas is the grace of God by the “infusion of the Holy Ghost” (24.2). Such an infusion is a “gratuitous gift” (24.2) from God, and so charity depends on the “will of the Holy Ghost” (24.3). However, the Holy Ghost is not able to simply make us love God (23.2). Charity is a voluntary action, which is partly what makes it so “meritorious” (23.2). We must choose caritas out of our own desire to love God. Thus, caritas requires the deliberate exercise of one’s will in conjunction with the infusion of the Holy Ghost to perfect the nature of one’s love for God.

Before discussing its relation to virtuous friendship, we should identify how the virtues relate to caritas. Aquinas considers charity itself to be “more excellent than all the other virtues” (23.6). It is even superior to faith and hope, which aim to receive something from God, rather than to actually “rest in Him” (23.6). Caritas gives us the “ultimate and principal good for man” (23.7)-the goodness of God and everlasting happiness (23.6). Since “virtue is ordered to the good,” for a virtue to be “true” it must be ordered to a “true” good, such as the “welfare of the state” (23.8). But even a “true virtue,” considered for only earthly objectives, is “imperfect” as it is not “referred to the final and perfect good” that is charity (23.8). This is the reason Aquinas calls caritas the form and the end of other virtues- it “directs all other virtues to its own end” (II-II 23.8). Thus the virtues become manifestations of the pursuit of charity, since they are directed to caritas.

Consequently, caritas is crucial for the pursuit of virtuous friendship. Unless one desires a friendship founded on “imperfect” virtue, one should have a friendship for God and order one’s virtues to that ultimate good. Virtues are indeed “informed” by caritas and “draw their sustenance and nourishment” from it (23.8). Therefore, a virtuous friendship is nurtured and strengthened by caritas, the greatest virtue that perfects all other virtues. Even justice must be considered with caritas as an end for it to be “true justice” (23.7). Thus virtuous friendship ought to be infused with caritas to bring it closer to “true” friendship.

Aquinas implicitly demonstrates this connection between virtuous friendship and caritas. In fact, he analogizes what was once perceived as the greatest friendship (by Aristotle and Cicero) to man’s friendship for God (23.1). He writes that friendship must be founded on a communication between the two friends. Since there is a communication between God and man, “inasmuch as he communicates His happiness to us,” we can be friends with God (23.1). The mere association of virtuous friendship with caritas implies Aquinas’ esteem for earthly friendship in virtue. Aquinas also analogizes the scope of both forms of friendship. He argues that just as someone ought to love all those belonging to his friend (23.1), that person also should love all those belonging to God, which is a feature of caritas. Perhaps these analogies demonstrate Aquinas’ understanding that the virtue of caritas already lies within that “perfect friendship” (114.1) between humans.

In turn, caritas endows a great benefit upon friendship, strengthening its bonds with the infusion of the Holy Spirit. As we have seen, corrupted nature gives man an “appetite towards visible goods” (24.2) and private interest (I-II 109.3). Cicero recognized that this problem was prevalent in politics and found no specific remedy to mend the friendships dissolved by it. But Aquinas provides the solution in caritas. The grace that enables the friendship of man for God “cures” the desire for private advantage (109.3). And when such caritas is “infused into our hearts,” our corrupted proclivity for visible goods fades away (II-II 24.2). When we experience the greatest good for man in the enjoyment of God we are not so desperate as to abandon it for inferior earthly gains. Charity perpetuates itself. Once we have it, out of our love for God we want others to have charity as well and experience a love and friendship for God (25.1-2). As long one still has caritas, it is difficult for a friendship to end. Thus, caritas purifies the virtue in virtuous friendship, and disables the political temptations that can provoke its destruction.

Caritas not only maintains friendships, but it also helps create them. Indeed, our love for God can manifest itself in our love for our neighbors, even sinners (25.1), who we love for God’s sake (23.2). In a significant change, Aquinas extends Aristotle’s definition of virtuous friendship to include all those who “belong” to our virtuous friend (23.1). This network of friendship was not a part of Cicero’s or Aristotle’s theory. It is apparently an effect of caritas’ example on our earthly relations. If we view our fellow-men, who “belong to God” (23.1) as friends for the sake of our friendship with God, we should love our personal friends’ associates, as well. It would be highly beneficial for society’s cultivation of virtuous friendship if men have this mentality. It not only spreads virtue in the polity, but it also increases the concentration of happiness as friendship proliferates.

Caritas also has a positive effect on the development of affabilitas. Indeed, the love for fellow-men is a reason for the friendliness exhibited in affability (114.2). Thomas credits Aristotle with the definition of “friendliness, which consists merely in outward words or deeds” (114.1). Aristotle in fact proposes a very similar version called “amiability,” which consists of “communicating with others in an amiable manner” (1126b28). Aristotle is careful to distinguish between actual friendship, which involves mutual love, and friendliness which can extend to those we do not love (1126b22-26). Aquinas, however, more closely associates friendliness with friendship because according to him “every man is naturally every man’s friend by a certain general love” (114.1). So friendliness is a manifestation of man’s love for fellow man. Here we see the effects of caritas on affability. The “general love” that produces friendliness is the love that comes from a friendship with God. Thus friendliness can be considered an outward expression of charity.

This caritas-influenced affability assists politics by promoting a pleasant environment that is conducive to enacting justice. It facilitates a stable order in society that is favorable to the transfer of goods to those who deserve them. Indeed, it is easier for someone to be sympathetic to giving a person his due if that person is already friendly towards him. Since friendliness is applicable to everyone, it also coordinates with justice’s objective of establishing equality amongst everyone (58.2). Thus, friendliness is advantageous for politics, in that politics pursues justice.

But in what way does politics promote friendship? In chapter seven of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle compares the order of equality and excellence in justice and friendship (1158a29-33). Aquinas builds on this analysis in his Commentary on the Ethics by proposing a specific relationship between justice and friendship-justice makes friendship possible. Unlike friendliness, virtuous friendship cannot exist between “widely separated persons” (CE 1632). As a result, equality, namely of virtue, is the first condition necessary for friendship (CE 1631). How can we realize this equality so we can have friendship? Thomas’ answer is through justice. Indeed, friendship must “use an equality already uniformly established… When equality exists the work of justice is done” (CE 1632). Thus, in the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas explicitly argues that justice promotes equality, facilitating friendship between equals. This is why Thomas writes: “equality is the goal of justice and starting point of friendship” (CE 1632). Thomas also states that “political science” pertains to the justice necessary for friendship (CE 1725). Even friendliness can be assisted by justice so that we know when friendliness is due. Indeed, Thomas mentions that there are situations when it is “necessary to displease [someone] for some good purpose” (114.2). Furthermore, friendliness should not be applied equally to all people, but to “all in a fitting manner” (114.2). Justice is able to determine what is “fitting.” As mentioned above, we should acknowledge that for this justice to be “true justice,” it must be for the end of caritas. In contrast to Cicero, Aquinas observes that politics exerts a nurturing influence on both friendship and friendliness.

Thus, Aquinas addresses the uncertainties of Aristotle and Cicero with caritas, which not only becomes the most important form of friendship, but also a central inspiration for all forms of friendship and virtue. According to Aquinas, politics helps establish friendship and friendship improves politics. This relationship is propelled by the friendship of man for God. Caritas is the end of true justice, and justice allows friendship to exist. In this manner, charity ultimately enables friendship. The friendship of caritas also directly affects the state by inspiring true justice. Charity arouses affabilitas’ “general love,” which facilitates justice and the beginning of true friendship. Through friendliness, charity indirectly promotes friendship and justice. Furthermore, caritas is the end of true virtue which comprises virtuous friendship. Charity solidifies and protects virtuous friendship by tempering the insidious political forces that Cicero describes. And by suppressing the temptations of political affairs and promoting true virtue, charity directly ameliorates politics itself.

Our friendship with God originates above politics and is a central force that sustains and elevates the best pursuits of virtue, friendship, and politics. Most importantly, caritas gives us eternal happiness so that we rest in God, which is the greatest good we could ever receive.

Intersections of Sex and Faith at Harvard

In June 2006, an organization called “True Love Revolution” was founded at Harvard College, the first of its kind to “promote respectful and open-minded discussion of issues relating to abstinence, sex and marriage.” Though True Love Revolution is a non-sectarian organization, it was founded by two devoutly Catholic seniors at the College, both of whom wanted to provide a forum for discussing abstinence as a reasonable and healthy sexual choice for college students. To many students and individuals outside the College, the message of True Love Revolution seemed fairly benign: why not have an organization that advocates thoughtful discussion of many different sexual activity options? Other students were offended by the implicit messages of the organization, however, explaining that “the very name TLR essentially invalidates the relationships of sexually-active, non-married couples, as if to suggest that abstinence is the only way to find true love.” Indeed, in many conversations with Christian and non-Christian friends alike, individuals expressed similar concerns over what they perceived as the subtle judgment implicit and inherent in many of True Love Revolution’s slogans such as “Why Wait? Because you’re worth it,” feeling that “advocates of ‘true love’ overstep the mark when they preach the value of personal decisions to the everyone on campus.”

The ideological debate surrounding True Love Revolution’s founding and core values reflect the complex socio-religious dynamic at Harvard, especially in relation to issues surrounding religion and sexuality. There are no fewer than eight active Christian fellowships currently active at Harvard and at least as many student organizations related to sex and sexuality. However, despite the large number of students associated with either or both of these types of student organizations, there is little overlap or discussion between these groups. Though True Love Revolution is an officially non-sectarian group, many of its members are devoutly Christian. TLR is thus one of the only examples of a group representing an implicit connection between these two types of organizations at Harvard. And while TLR provides a forum for pro-abstinence people of all faiths to discuss the secular sociological, psychological, and relational effects of premarital sex, its non-sectarian nature limits it from deeply engaging with the theological underpinnings of the pro-abstinence argument to which many of its members ascribe.

The disconnect between Christian fellowships and sexuality-related groups on Harvard’s campus reflects a larger issue in the lives of many young Christians at Harvard struggling to find ways to relate their faith and beliefs to their opinions about and experiences with sex and sexuality. Indeed, for many Christians at Harvard, premarital sex is a very difficult topic to discuss with Christian friends, within their fellowships and churches, and especially with Christian leaders, because different Christians’ beliefs about the acceptability of premarital sex, as well as their adamancy about the rightness of their beliefs vary widely. Even when premarital sex and sexuality are discussed openly, many young Christians only seem comfortable discussing the issues in theoretical terms, fearing that their own personal practices and experiences may be judged harshly by peers and leaders.

This divide is certainly not unique to Harvard Christians–it is a debate that permeates virtually every Christian community in America, and one that is rooted in much larger theological disputes. Some Christians believe, as theologian L. William Countryman argues in his book Dirt, Sex, and Greed that, “the Bible takes sex more or less for granted and does not explicitly lay out a theological or philosophical understanding of it…sex, in other words, is not central.” Others, however, take the opposite view. As evangelical religious historian Lauren Winner explains, “the bottom line is this: God created sex for marriage, and within a Christian moral vocabulary, it is impossible to defend sex outside of marriage.” Though Winner herself takes a much more nuanced approach to the issue, Pat McLeod, one evangelical leader at Harvard explains that, “evangelicals have demonized this issue, because it’s one of the few issues that they feel like really can separate Christians from the world–that we have a different sexuality.”

McLeod and many other evangelicals at Harvard disagree with this prevalent evangelical approach arguing that, whatever their beliefs may be about the morality of premarital sex, it is not a uniquely grievous sin and should not be framed as such in evangelical communities; yet, many of them cite the tendency in many evangelical communities to make one’s sexual decisions the defining factor of what it means to be a Christian. Indeed, it is clear from the many arguments throughout American churches and courtrooms over issues such as same-sex marriage, abstinence-only education, and family planning that many Christian communities do believe sexual politics should be a priority. As a result, tensions generally run very high in Christian arguments about sex and sexuality.

In her article “Protestant Views of Sexuality,” religious sociologist Letha Scanzoni stresses the crucial denominational distinctions that exist in modern-day Christianity. In distinguishing mainline Protestant and evangelical sexual philosophies, Scanzoni explains that, “most evangelicals agree…that sex is not something evil, but is a good gift of God… that God has provided guidelines in Scripture for the use and expression of human sexuality, but warns of its abuse…[and] that Biblical norms do not support premarital sex.” In contrast to predominant evangelical sexual doctrines, Scanzoni explains that most mainline Protestants move beyond sex as either procreative or unitive (i.e. creating a permanent emotional bond): “Mainstream theologians, Biblical scholars, and ethicists are likelier than many evangelicals to rethink matters of sexuality…Some have concluded that ‘there is no biblical sex ethic…The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period’.”

Thus while evangelical sexual philosophies, for the most part, still do not approve of premarital sex, many mainline Protestant denominations have become very accepting of the practice. These denominational doctrines are, for many young Christians, one of the most influential factors in shaping their own sexual ethics. As a result, the challenge of facing differences in Christian doctrines can be a major source of tension in the spiritual, social, and personal lives of Christian young people.

The Debate Over the Bible

We can trace many of the disparities in sexual ethics back to foundational differences in hermeneutical analysis and disagreements about the proper role of the Bible in Christians’ lives today. In the particular arena of sexual ethics, the debate among Christians over how Scripture should be read into modern American Christianity has become increasingly bitter and divisive.

On the one hand, the predominant mainline Protestant perspective–supported by many mainline Protestants and some evangelicals–argues that the New Testament sexual strictures are written to a culture whose societal structures are extremely different from our own today. They argue that it therefore seems truly implausible that the same moral laws that applied to first century societies are meant to apply in the most literal sense to us in the twenty-first century. For example, slavery is condoned in the New Testament, yet we no longer believe it is acceptable simply because the Bible suggests that it is. Furthermore, in a more general sense many of these Christians argue, as Harvard Chaplain Countryman does, that:

Sexuality like every other important aspect of human life, should be clearly related to the center and goal of that life, the reign of God. The life of the world to come, characterized by a joyful reverence and love, is already the standard by which our growth in faith and hope is measured in this life…If the reign of God is central, to be sure, other things can no longer make that claim. Sex, in other words, is not central–nor is knowledge, wisdom, money, power, success, security, one’s job or family or marriage, even oneself. None of these things is wrong, in and of itself. They become wrong only at the moment when they become ultimate goals for us.

Countryman summarizes well the arguments of the many Christians who believe that premarital sex is really not a black and white issue for Christians. While they recognize and believe that the Bible lays down moral guidelines for how Christians are meant to treat one another, they also argue that the gospel liberates Christians from endlessly toiling after legalistic means of spiritual purity and cosmic worth. In light of the freedom the gospel provides, these Christians believe that it simply does not make sense to continue to read the Bible as a set of binding ethical laws. Therefore, while they believe that Christians should pursue Christian ideals of love, respect, equality, and mutuality in all of their relationships, they do not believe that the Bible’s literal moral stipulations on sex are the sole way Christians can genuinely pursue those relational ideals.

On the other hand, the predominant evangelical argument, supported by many evangelical and some mainline Protestants, claims God designed sex and sexuality in a specific way at the beginning of the Bible and that humanity’s ideal existence originates from the way in which God created humans in the first place. As evangelical pastor and Harvard Chaplain Russell Schlecht explains As evangelical pastor Schlecht explains:

We are built foundationally upon the pre-existent word of God…so this then sets the terms for God’s engagement with the world, and then our engagement with Him. He is the one who is initiating, and we are merely responders to the pre-existent word, so the creation comes out of that and all of the mandates come out of that as well…I quite obviously have a high view of scripture… So when God sets the terms for what relationship is between him and man and between man and man, that is our default. So God then has said that it is not good that man should be alone, and then he creates woman out of man, and the very first, not formalized necessarily, “marriage” exists, it is exclusive at that point. And essentially from that you have flesh added to the bones of what marriage looks like, what sacred order is, as God-law comes and essentially adds form for us to adhere to, in the fallen state of the world.

Because of our relationship to God, Schlecht argues, Christians must understand all human interactions including sexual relationships, in light of how God initially created humanity and human sexuality. Furthermore, Schlecht and similar Christians argue that the Bible, and traditionally orthodox interpretations of the Bible, areis really the only connections humanity has to an understanding of God’s divine intentions for the world. Even if those intentions seem foreign to our present society’s belief systems or our personal experiences, Christians must prioritize what the Bible implies is the most ethical way of handling life’s situations. The underlying question in determining personal ethics thus becomes whether Christians are going to contextualize away all biblical dictates that do not agree with their personal reasoning, desires, and current understandings of the world. Evangelicals like Schlecht contend that Christians should contextualize passages, but not at the expense of dismissing literal meaning within the Bible’s sometimes confounding moral direction. Therefore, while they do not generally argue that properly ordering one’s sex life is the most crucial aspect of a Christian’s existence, it is an arena in which they believe God lays out a clear, if complex, picture of His intentions for humanity over the course of the Bible. Thus, if Christians desire to follow God wholly, they should bring all aspects of their lives in line with biblical norms.

Christians agree that the Bible provides a vision of humanity’s relationship to God and shows the moral and spiritual purpose of humanity’s temporal existence. Yet mainline Protestants argue that the Bible is still a profoundly historical document and Christians must re-evaluate many of the literal rules and guidelines put forth within the context of modern understandings of science, psychology, and personal autonomy. Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants argue that Christians cannot pick and choose which guidelines to follow on the mere basis of our current understandings of the world, as they believe the Bible presents an over-arching truth that is applicable regardless of which era we are living in. Thus, while both of these Christian groups claim to believe in the moral authority of the Bible in modern society, they have very different conceptions of how the moral and ethical structures present in the Bible should interact with the modern world.

The Relationship of Theological Differences and Moral Debates

This theological divide over the moral authority of the Bible is problematic for Christians on both philosophical and practical levels, and is certainly a worthy topic of discussion. Yet, one glance across the headlines of many American newspapers announces clearly that these are not the issues currently gripping America’s Christian communities. As theologian Miguel De La Torre argues in Lily Among the Thorns,

Believers are no longer divided over issues of doctrine, but rather over issues concerning sex. Once upon a time, questions about issues such as transubstantiation…tore the church apart, spawning new denominations. Today, such doctrinal issues have been replaced by questions concerning women’s autonomy and the type of sex one can engage in. Few sitting in the pews properly know their denomination’s Christological doctrines, but they do know where their church stands on premarital sex, homosexuality, and the ordination of women.

While I argue that the debate among Christians about the morality of premarital sex is a microcosm of a much larger theological and hermeneutical divide over the correct relationship between Scripture and modern society, these key differences are not what most Christians are debating. In fact, the arguments that are taking place in modern Christianity have almost nothing to do with these important theological divides–instead, many Christians focus on relentlessly arguing about specific sexual practices and politics. And the debate is bitter indeed.

Perhaps by virtue of Harvard’s liberal intellectual environment in which students and leaders alike must learn to respond to a myriad of different perspectives, the extreme factions of this argument become somewhat more muted at Harvard. For example, evangelical leaders at Harvard tend to adopt gentler pastoral techniques in discussing sexuality, and are careful to emphasize that while premarital chastity is important it is also theologically unsound and unwise to suggest that chastity determines a Christian’s moral or spiritual goodness any more than any other ideal. Yet interviews with students at Harvard suggest that outside of Harvard’s ivy walls other evangelicals continue to demonize sex as a dangerous force that must be reigned in and limited by strict puritanical dictates in order to “protect society from the destructive nature of an unchecked sexuality.”

Despite their comparatively moderate views, Harvard’s evangelical leaders and students alike recognize the fractures within their Christian communities resulting from black-and-white messages presented by some members. They lament the fact that throughout much of evangelical Protestantism the spiritual significance of sexual purity is so overblown that few people feel that they can talk openly about struggles they may be having with sex and sexuality. In many evangelical communities, almost no other moral issue is discussed as exhaustively and negatively as sexual ethics.

Thus, while many of the evangelical leaders and students at Harvard strive to explain their pro-abstinence in terms of pursuing love, respect, and relationship in the way they believe God intended, they recognize that many evangelical communities legalistically focus on avoiding sin and keeping oneself pure, implicitly ostracizing those in their communities who do not live up to the unbearably high standards.

On the other side of the spectrum, while the mainline Protestant leaders at Harvard are accepting or even encouraging of premarital sex, they ground their beliefs squarely in biblical conceptions of love, equality, and grace, and encourage students that they lead to take decisions about sex seriously and pursue those ideals in every realm of their relationships. Yet, mainline leaders and students express concern about young Christians in their communities whose questions and concerns about the Bible’s role in their sexual and relational decisions may go unanswered. Some mainline churches, Rev. KingHarvard Episcopal Chaplain Reverend Ben King explains, are so invested in giving individuals freedom and choice that they do not recognize that many young Christians today may actually want specific moral direction from their religious communities on matters of sex and relationships. As a result, in some mainline Protestant communities, young Christians receive very little specific moral direction and have a very limited conception of the ways in which their leaders argue the Bible is meant to guide them in their moral decisions. As one student interview demonstrates to a less extreme degree, for some mainline Protestants, personal reason and experience become at least as influential as anything the Bible has to say. Thus, for some mainline Protestants, the Bible is only considered authoritative when it agrees with one’s pre-conceived moral norms, and any moral direction the Bible could provide is almost entirely mitigated by one’s own personal choices.

While the interviews I conducted with individuals at Harvard make clear that very different socio-religious and relational problems result from the imbalanced theological arguments touted by some members from both evangelical and mainline Protestant communities, the underlying cause behind these community ruptures is the same: by focusing on surface level disputes about what sexual behaviors should be allowed, Christian communities have allowed much of the theological basis for their beliefs to become extremely oversimplified or fall away entirely. While both groups claim that they know the “correct” approach to determining God’s will for today’s world, neither faction’s position is theologically-grounded enough to make that claim. As a result, neither group is adequately recognizing or addressing the social, relational, and cultural problems that result from their arguments.

Finding the Common Denominator

In spite of underlying theological and sociological divides, the Harvard Christian community has the potential for these debates to take on a very different character than they have in much of Christian America. First of all, all the evangelical and mainline Protestant Harvard leaders, and even many of the students, express well-developed theologies in support of their arguments about premarital sex. Even more interestingly, despite their different conclusions about whether premarital sex is acceptable for Christians or not, virtually all of these Christians explained that their beliefs are rooted in the same two basic theological concept: pursuing love, respect, and equality in their relationships with others, and attempting to demonstrate God’s love to the world. Therefore, although their ultimate decisions about premarital sex are different, many of the philosophical and theological bases of their beliefs lend themselves to common social projects.

Indeed, while most of the interviews began by discussing the social, spiritual, and theological reasons behind their differing beliefs about premarital sex, by the end of the interviews, virtually all of the Christians from both evangelical and mainline backgrounds were in agreement on the ways in which this and other social issues have taken on undue importance in American Christian communities. As one student explains, in words representative of many of his peers,:

If you were to make a list of doctrines and teachings and ideas that are central to Christianity and that are as nearly universal among Christians as you can think of. And then if you were to make a list of the ideas and issues that get the most attention within the Christian community–that are most debated, most spoken about–I think you would find not a lot of overlap…[For example] compare [the number of scriptures condemning homosexuality] to the number of scriptures about love, or about forgiveness, or about social justice, or about attending to the needs of others, or any number of things. How many things get much more mention within the Bible than homosexuality? A lot. How many things are mentioned by Jesus more? All of them–anything that Jesus ever said got mentioned by Jesus more in the Bible than homosexuality. The same is true of premarital sex…I think it’s an issue that gets way too much attention when we’ve got bigger work to do.

Though this student’s beliefs about premarital sex deviate from those of some of his peers, many Christians of divergent views nonetheless agree that the Christian community’s inordinate focus on sexual politics issues is not right. Reflecting on prevalent evangelical perspectives, Pat McLeod explains that, “We’ve made this one of the distinguishing things…But we don’t want to go to things like pride…Or our consumerism. Or any of these other things which are perhaps more deathly than our sexual promiscuity…so I think that’s problematic too.” Schlecht also agreed that, while he believes there is a need to discuss sexual issues more in the Christian community, it has to happen in a way that accepts and loves people rather than ostracizing them, regardless of their beliefs or practices. Throughout the interviews, Christians at Harvard emphasized the importance of prioritizing the unifying Christian theologies of love and justice, rather than focusing so much attention on the physical practices that distinguish Christians from one another.

Certainly, the divergences of opinion about premarital sex represent genuine and important theological and hermeneutical divides between different branches of Christianity. Indeed, Christian communities would serve their aims well by discussing those theological differences, as Christians should know why they believe what they claim to advocate and because those differences are at the heart of many divides in current denominational and political debates. Yet, there is a theological common denominator–prioritizing the importance of following Jesus’s two main commandments: love God and love thy neighbor. If Christians at Harvard are able to remember these common goals, perhaps they will be able to honestly discuss the theological divides separating American Christianity, while still working together to achieve greater goals in the world.

Now, as a graduate student, I’m used to being interested in many things that the average person neither cares nor ought to care about; it goes with the territory of academic study. But lack of interest in the unity of the church is more significant than a simple disregard for theoretical or historical minutiae. Our current lack of interest in matters ecumenical betrays a fundamental assumption: that the unity of the church, the real communion of Christians with each other in bonds of prayer, fellowship, shared institutions and shared worship, is an optional feature of the church, a desirable but not essential add-on to the life of the Christian community – in classical terms, something that is part of the bene esse of the church, rather than its esse, its “well-being”, and not its essential being. I would like to argue from my own Roman Catholic Christian perspective that our common conversion to greater oneness in Christ is a crucial part of our collective discipleship, not because it would “be nice”, nor only because it pragmatically would be of assistance in the mission of the church, but because responding to Christ’s prayer that we might be one as he and the Father are one (John 17:21) is, or ought to be, a central aspect of our life in Christ. The first essential is a theological argument for the centrality of ecclesial unity to the Gospel, and then, by surveying quite briefly some of the history of the ecumenical movement, I will suggest where we have been, where we are now, and where the Holy Spirit is leading us.

Communion and Salvation

Being in communion of faith, life, and witness with other people is not a secondary or accidental aspect of our relation with God in Christ, but an essential part of that relationship – there is no part of our life with God in which we are not simultaneously living that life with others. One can find the starting point for this understanding in Jesus’ statement that the greatest commandment (singular) is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Cf. Mark 12:29-31 and parallels). This connection between faith and ethics, between communion with God and communion with humanity, goes deep down within the Christian church’s history, and has been developed and nuanced in numerous ways. The theology I’m going to outline here is based on the work of an ecumenist, theologian, and priest named Jean-Marie Tillard.1

A starting point for understanding how the restoration of our relationship with God entails the restoration of our relationship with each other is the Genesis story of humanity’s creation and our fall into sinfulness. Whether we look at the first creation story’s description of humanity created as “male and female,” as a “them,” or at the more fanciful story of Eve’s creation to be a companion to Adam, Genesis points to the fundamental theological insight that the human being is a homo socialis, a being created in relation to God and to others. And, in the following chapters, we see what happens when the relationship with God is broken in humanity’s disobedience: blame and recrimination shatter the original community between Adam and Eve, and the further effects of the disruption lead to brother killing brother, culminating in the confusion and enmity of Babel. In these very rich texts, at least one major motif is that relationship with God and relationship with others are immutably linked. Part of what it means to be human is that one’s relations with others are causally related to one’s relations with God. The story of God’s covenant with Israel is therefore a love story about the restoration of both.

And so when we as Christians look to Christ, to his life, teaching, death, and resurrection, we should expect that restoration of humanity’s relationship with God in Christ to have a dramatic effect upon our relationships with others. One can see this in the radical table fellowship of Jesus in the Gospels, in his eating with sinners and tax collectors, in his conversations with a Samaritan woman, a Syro-Phoenician woman, and a Roman centurion. After Christ’s death and resurrection, the church very quickly saw itself as fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy that all nations would come streaming toward Zion; Pentecost reverses Babel by bringing the diversity of nations together in Christ, speaking all languages; and the Letter to the Ephesians sees in the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in Christ the prototype of the reconciliation of humanity with itself: “But now in Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far off have been brought close, by the blood of Christ.” (Eph 2:13) And again, in 1 Peter, “Once you were a non-people, and now you are the People of God.” (2:10) Examples in the Scripture, in the practices and liturgy of the early church, and in the writings of the first seven centuries of the church could be multiplied to fill the remainder of this essay. Communion with God and communion with others are intimately related, and there is an ordering, a causality: reconciliation with God causes reconciliation with others, not the reverse. We should be on guard against tendencies toward the absorption of the personal in the collective here; we all, but sometimes especially my own Roman Catholic tradition, can benefit from Martin Luther’s emphasis that salvation is always pro me in addition to being pro nobis.

But without exhausting our understanding of salvation, the Scriptures and the church’s tradition strongly support the idea that an essential aspect of salvation is the reconciliation of human beings with each other that results from our reconciliation with God in Christ Jesus. You cannot have one without the other, and, in this understanding, as personal as your relation to Christ is, it is never an exclusive relationship. The corresponding relation to others, to the community of those who are also in Christ, goes all the way down to the roots. The church, the reconciled community of those who were once enemies, of those who were once a “non-people,” can be the concrete way the Reign of God breaks into our lives, into our experience.

Ecclesial Division: The Great Countersign

Numerous events of the history of the church and of our own experiences call this ideal vision into question; we often fail to be the reconciled and reconciling community that we’re called to be. Here in Boston, the moral failings of our Roman Catholic communities in response to clerical sexual abuse ring in our ears as a great stumbling block for many to see the church as a community of salvation, as a gathering of those being brought closer to God. We know the familiar counter-litanies of Christian believers’ failures in the Crusades, in the pogroms, in wars throughout the centuries, in the conquests of Spain and of the Americas. Even taking into account the historical complexities of all these events, it’s hard not to look at them and be reminded that the church is a community simul justus et peccator, to use Lutheran language; a “pilgrim people,” to use the language of the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council.

And yet despite the gravity of these historical failures to live up to our collective calling, one of the most significant, longstanding, and spiritually deadening ecclesial realities is the continuing division of those who claim the name Christian. From the earliest divisions of the fifth century up through modern times, the division of the community whose communion is supposed to be the sign and instrument of communion with God is the great countersign to our claim to find salvation in Jesus Christ. The move from “See how these Christians love each other” to “See how these Christians fight each other” has been a recurring obstacle in our response to Christ.

The earliest foundations of the modern ecumenical movement can be found in the missionary congresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; missionaries from (mostly mainline Protestant) churches had found their attempts to preach the Gospel to all nations hampered by their own lack of cooperation and by their mutual condemnation. The people to whom they preached pointed to the inherent contradiction of Christian division: how, they asked, are we to believe that in your church God is reconciling humanity to God and to itself, if you aren’t even reconciled with yourselves? The concrete stumbling block of competing, sometimes hostile, missionary societies undermined the message being preached. This and other pragmatic concerns, such as the ability to organize relief work and other financial assistance more effectively, and the ability to collaborate on political and social issues with a unified Christian voice, continue to motivate much ecumenical endeavor today.

But the theology of the church as the place in which humanity is reconciled to God and to itself points to the deeper motivation for ecumenical striving to realize the unity of the church: unity is not primarily to be desired for its effectiveness, it is to be desired because it is what God intends for God’s People. To be one as Christ and the Father are one: that is a major axis of the reality we call salvation, and the starting point for all true ecumenical endeavors is to realize that unity is a good because it is given by God, not because it is more helpful to our projects. And, as given by God, unity is, at its core, a grace, a gift, and not an accomplishment. All of our efforts to restore that unity have the quality of discipleship, of faithful service dependent upon God’s grace. But rather than being an addendum or an appendix to our Christian life, the call to Christian unity is at the very core of the working out of our salvation.

Three Models of Ecumenism

Concretely, what does ecumenism look like? It might help here to look at three models of ecumenical relation
to other Christian churches that show where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we might be going. The examples I’m taking will be from my own Roman Catholic Christian tradition – not because we’ve been better or worse at ecumenism, but because that’s the tradition I know best. (It’s also good ecumenical manners to take negative examples from your own tradition, rather than comparing the best practices of your own church with the worst practices of another.)

The first model can be called the “Come Home to Momma” model; it was the dominant model of relations between different churches for most of the history of Christian division. This extended quotation from Pope Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos, his response to the beginnings of the ecumenical movement among Protestant Christians (whom he refers to as “pan-Christians”), gives a good example of what this model entails:

Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? [...] These things and others that class of men who are known as pan-Christians continually repeat and amplify; and these men, so far from being quite few and scattered, have increased to the dimensions of an entire class, and have grouped themselves into widely spread societies, most of which are directed by non-Catholics, although they are imbued with varying doctrines concerning the things of faith. This undertaking is so actively promoted [...] it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring
sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed. (§4)

[T]he union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. (§10)

Comparable examples from the teachings and practice of other Christian churches could easily be found. At the heart of the model is an assumption that ecclesial division results from the unqualified error of the separated churches in relation to one’s own community; the only way forward to ecclesial unity is for the “erring sons [and daughters]” to come home to Mother Church. If we imagine the life of the Christian church as a highway, starting with the apostles and heading toward the final Reign of God, this model looks at each division of the church as an exit ramp heading off into a dead end; the only option for Christians who have left the main highway is to stop, put the car in reverse, and get back to the one true Church of Christ.

Now, we should not underestimate the fact that there’s an important insight at the heart of this model: Christian communion is not simply a matter of good intentions, but of shared relationship in one faith. The desire to avoid interpretations of the Christian faith that would undermine its truth is important, and it would be a false ecumenism that dismissed any doctrinal differences as irrelevant to Christian unity. Some ecclesial divisions have divided the body of the church from real, and dangerous, “dead ends,” e.g. forms of Gnosticism that attempted to separate the Christian faith from its Jewish origins, or Arianism’s claims that Christ was not fully divine.

But ecclesial divisions are almost never that simple, and often are complex events influenced by numerous political, historical, cultural, and sociological factors – and by the continuing influence of human sinfulness upon the church. An honest assessment of the history of Christian division notes how the goal of maintaining the Christian church in its faithfulness to Christ is often complicated by misunderstanding, by struggles of power between ecclesial leaders, and by gaps of knowledge between different parts of the church. The “come home to momma” model of ecumenical relations fails to address the culpability of one’s own community in the divisions of the church. Furthermore, the divisions of the church were not frozen in time, and the new insights into the faith that were at the roots of the schism were developed, nuanced, and brought to fruition in the lives of other communities. These new insights are gifts for the other churches. For example, my own Roman Catholic community would not be the church it is today without our Protestant sister churches’ emphasis upon the primacy of Scripture. Similarly, the liturgical movement in the twentieth century that revitalized the Mass within my church also assisted Protestant churches in reclaiming regular practice of the Lord’s Supper as a shared ritual of Christian faith. Treating the emphases and particular treasures of other Christian churches as a dead end in the church’s journey closes off these possibilities for mutual enrichment, for mutual openness to how the Spirit has remained faithful in spite of our divisions.

A growing awareness of the inadequacies of this model led to a second model, a model of mutual dialogue, toleration, and interrogation. This model calls for conversation between Christian churches, mutual cooperation on practical matters of shared concern, and dialogue to encounter the other churches honestly and without the stereotypes or assumptions of the past. The Decree on Ecumenism (1964) of the Roman Catholic church’s Second Vatican Council expresses it in this way:

The term “ecumenical movement” indicates the initiatives and activities planned and undertaken, according to the various needs of the Church and as opportunities offer, to promote Christian unity. These are: first, every effort to avoid expressions, judgments and actions which do not represent the condition of our separated brethren with truth and fairness and so make mutual relations with them more difficult; then, “dialogue” between competent experts from different Churches and Communities. At these meetings, which are organized in a religious spirit, each explains the teaching of his Communion in greater depth and brings out clearly its distinctive features. In such dialogue, everyone gains a truer knowledge and more just appreciation of the teaching and religious life of both Communions. In addition, the way is prepared for cooperation between them in the duties for the common good of humanity which are demanded by every Christian conscience; and, wherever this is allowed, there is prayer in common. Finally, all are led to examine their own faithfulness to Christ’s will for the Church and accordingly to undertake with vigor the task of renewal and reform.

It is sometimes difficult for those of us coming of age at the beginning of the twenty-first century to appreciate how dramatic a change this was from the past practice of the Christian churches. One hundred years ago, regular conversation and dialogue between, for example, Catholics and Protestants, was not only improbable; from the Catholic side, extended theological conversation, never mind shared prayer or worship, was quite literally impermissible. Obviously at the level of day-to-day life, the American experience involved far more ecumenical interaction than the experts of the day might have preferred, but a Roman Catholic theologian writing in “a student journal of Christian thought” such as this one would have been seen as a radical move.

With the beginnings of the formal ecumenical movement, that began to change. Christians began to have dialogue with their fellow Christians in different churches on a regular basis at a number of levels. “Uniting churches,” like the United Church of Christ in this country, attempted to put into institutional form their shared sense of the deeper unity of the Christian church. Attempts were made to increase opportunities for common prayer, common faith-sharing, common Bible study. Practices like these that are a common part of our shared Christian life at Harvard today were considered relatively radical just forty years ago.

While it is obviously a good thing that decades of ecumenical conversation have helped to dispel so many of our stereotypes about each other and to appreciate each other’s gifts of the Spirit in the living out of our Christian lives, there are a couple of difficulties with this model of ecumenism. Both of these difficulties with this model are further reinforced by the fact that it resonates strongly with the discourses of tolerance in North American culture today. The first is that attention to being faithful, to being true to the message of Christ, is in danger of falling by the wayside in such a scheme; an ecumenism worthy of the name must avoid the slippage from an appreciation of legitimate difference to a full-fledged ecclesial relativism.

But the second danger is perhaps more worrisome; to return to the image of the highway, this model of ecumenism envisions the different churches as different lanes on the same highway. There is an optimism that we’re all headed in the same general direction, but there are still jersey barriers between our churches. The question is this: is this the fullness of unity that Christ desires for the church? There are good reasons to be suspicious of our ability to be the church perfectly before reaching the end of the road, so to speak, but there is a real danger of stopping short at the point in which we tolerate each other, even recognize each other mutually as Christians, but remain content with our divided lives as the closest we can come to being one, to being God’s single people in the world. When my colleagues and contemporaries tell me that they don’t see why ecumenism is all that important, they sometimes reflect a wider complacency that sees the occasional ecumenical Thanksgiving service and a Bible study during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity as sufficient – this is surviving off the crumbs of ecclesial unity when we ought to be feasting together on rich bread.

The third model of ecumenism that I’d like to propose- what many theologians and ecumenists are arriving at as the only feasible model for ecumenical unity today – builds upon the achievements of the ecumenical movement over the past fifty years, but then calls for continuing prayer, striving, and conversion to greater unity among Christians. It refuses to be satisfied with ecclesial unity “on the cheap”- ecclesial unity that would disregard the need to be faithful to the Christian life as we have interpreted it in our distinctive churches. In such a community, there would be space for the different traditions to recognize each other as legitimate ways of being church, and for acting practically on the basis of that recognition – sharing ministers, sharing worship, sharing institutions, and sharing in one mission to the world. To call upon the highway analogy once more, in such a vision the different lanes of the churches merge, but instead of returning to a narrow, one-lane road, they retain their distinctive histories, theologies, and traditions, now in a larger context that allows for greater sharing of gifts, wider theological conversation, and real unity of faith, life, and witness.

Being polite to one another, occasionally cooperating with one another, praying together when and where we can – these are all good things. But this third model of ecumenism suggests that simply being polite to one another is not enough. It is not only a pragmatic question of the church’s effectiveness; it is not enough because it fails to live up to the vision of unity in Christ that the church is called to make real in human history. We need each other to learn from each other, to challenge each other, to share our gifts and insights with each other. But we need each other to be brothers and sisters, not acquaintances. To show forth that unity in Christ is strong enough for a church in the Baptist lane, a church in the Orthodox lane, a church in the Roman Catholic, to recognize each other in their particularities as brothers and sisters, as fully Christian, and as possessing particular graces and charisms – this would be an unparalleled sign of the real power of Christ to reconcile Christians to God and to each other in a divided and broken world.

It should come as no surprise that this kind of ecumenism is also far more messy and more difficult than the other two; it is much easier to ignore the call to mutual conversion by denying the claims of another church to be legitimately Christian or by maintaining a system of mutual toleration that doesn’t really challenge your vision of the church. The demands to be faithful and to be honest in conscience before Christ and before your fellow Christians must prevent the slippage into any easy relativism. But in the careful sifting of what elements of our ecclesial lives are necessary to the church, rather than an idolatrous privileging of the status quo, we are called to greater conversion to the unity to which Christ challenges us. As a gift of God, Christian unity is a grace, and so prayer, “spiritual ecumenism,” as Pope John Paul II called it, is the foundation for all of our efforts to make our unity visible in the world. Such conversion is never easy, because it threatens the identities we have given ourselves with the identity that our God is trying to give us. But to be one in Christ, to value our particularities without idolatrously clinging to them, to love our sisters and brothers without betraying our fidelity to Christ – this is the demanding, messy, thankless, and urgent task of ecumenism.

For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God
for the salvation of everyone who believes: for Jew first, and then Greek.
Romans 1:16 (NAB)

One night in mid-January, my roommate was walking back into Harvard Yard. As he passed through Boylston Gate, a man lounging against it called out to him: “Do you know about Jesus Christ?” My roommate, surprised, responded affirmatively but didn’t stop walking. The man started walking beside him, continuing his questions: “Do you know him as your personal savior? Have you accepted him into your heart so that you can have eternal life? Have you?” He was walking right next to my roommate, their shoulders bumping every few steps, and my roommate mumbled a few vague replies. The conversation was cut short, but he remembered it and complained to me about annoying Christians when he got back to our room later that night.

This is the kind of experience that makes people resent Christianity: pushy insistence on salvation, blindness toward others’ discomfort, and an arrogance that one is right and no one else is. No one wants to be associated with a religion like that, and this is why people roll their eyes at you when any hint of Christian absolutism comes up. After all, haven’t we realized by now that religion isn’t something you can convince anyone about? Non-Christians think it is high time that we stop trying to force our beliefs down other people’s throats and accept the fact that other religions and beliefs are just as valid as Christianity.

This attitude reflects our cultural commitment to diversity, respect, and tolerance: cardinal virtues on both the Harvard campus and in the nation’s broader intellectual climate. In our pluralistic society atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and believers from other religions all live side-by-side. Within this heterogeneous fabric, proposing that everyone should believe in Christianity seems presumptuous in the extreme. A popular argument is that religious pluralism exists because it is not possible to find the “one true religion,” only a religion that best fits an individual’s personality and cultural background. My goal is to demonstrate that this is unjustified and to separate the sociological fact of religious pluralism from the philosophy of religious relativism that usually accompanies it.

Religious Relativism as a Model for Religious Truth

Religious relativism is a dangerous philosophy for religious truth. As Cardinal Ratzinger stated in the Declaration Dominus Iesus: “The Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle)” (sect. 4). Justifying pluralism by adhering to religious relativism denies the possibility of absolute truth claims in any religion under the assumption that absolute truth claims do not allow co-existence with other religions. Instead of being a means of finding truth, religion becomes a mere tool for taking care of peoples’ spiritual needs in a way that fits their personality and upbringing. This makes perfect sense to many people, but it comes at a price: no tradition can claim absolute and universal truths.

There are several different models of relativism that are used to justify pluralism, and each is a comprehensive understanding of what religion is and how it relates to truth. Each model necessarily excludes other models, but they all have the common fundamental assumption that religions cannot make a claim to absolute truth. In fact, one prevalent model denies that objective truth exists at all. This is an extreme statement about truth, and when pressed most people will admit that they don’t hold to it. After all, such a statement would undercut empirical science and bar the possibility of truth in everything from research in cell biology to particle physics.

The most common relativistic model states that religion cannot make claims about objective truth and that religion is unable to encapsulate the ultimate nature of the universe. The closest that religions can come to objective truth is in their shared ethical teachings: love your neighbor, avoid attachment to material goods, recognize that the ultimate reality is love or compassion. I have heard people state that since these basic teachings are the real fruit of religion there is no need for organized religions. This is poor reasoning, however, because each tradition produced those fruits after long periods of teaching, practicing, and searching for the truth, supporting their findings with corresponding beliefs and grounding them in a theological framework. Claiming the right to circumvent organized religions prevents a person from seeing that teachings are rooted in the traditions they come from: really knowing a spiritual truth is a product of participating in that tradition. Saying that “God is love” without providing any reason why is logically unsupportable. The mistake of seeing universal truths and spiritual teachings as a kind of meta-religion is that people are free to pick and choose what precepts they desire without regard to how they correspond. Each individual becomes their own religious system. One need only think of the well-documented celebrities who claim to be intensely spiritual, but only practice the parts of religions which are convenient for them.

In contrast, absolutism states that religious claims have universal and objective truth; religions make statements about the nature of reality, and each religion frames a comprehensive understanding of the world. Ironically, religious relativism asserts its own universal claim by denying religious absolutism. It removes absolute truth from religions and places absolute truth in its own model instead. Relativism claims a clear vantage point from which it surveys all religions and declares them to be limited.

In general, models of religious relativism that acknowledge the existence of a transcendent reality understand Christianity as one of many equal religions. Each religion leads to the same God or Ultimate Reality, just by different paths. Spiritual practice, religious observance, and adherence to a religious tradition feed a person’s growth and awareness, whether they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish. Marcus Borg, a liberal Christian theologian, espouses a version of this viewpoint in his book The Heart of Christianity. He deems the “many paths” analogy too simple because it makes religions seem overly similar. Instead of paths, he uses the analogy of a home, a place where you grow to maturation; and he insists that “we do not need to feel that our home is superior to every other home in order to love it” (224).

This relativism is appealing because it allows us to treasure what we know and still feel comfortable celebrating the diversity of our pluralistic culture. However, even though it does recognize a sort of truth in religion, it is only a limited truth that cannot expand beyond the borders of a particular faith. Nothing in them can be taken literally, and their claims are more about a vague spiritual reality than about how we should understand the workings of the world and God. A claim that Jesus is fully God and fully man, for instance, could not be understood as actually identifying Jesus’ nature, because there are other faiths who think of Jesus as just a man. From this it is understood that Christianity is not literally true because other faiths would be wrong. Instead, it is seen as an expression of the Christian reverence for Jesus-it is circumscribed so that religious relativism can comfortably place it alongside other faiths.

The Absolutist Interpretation of Christianity

I discuss here only a few key beliefs of the Christian faith, but these few illustrate that alteration in the absolute nature of Christian doctrine makes the whole structure collapse. Even though pluralists such as Borg are comfortable with a lack of absolute truth in Christianity, I am not. For those who seek to know the truth, it is not enough to find a practical or good religion-it should also be a true one. For instance, adopting belief in the gods of Valhalla might strike me as particularly inspiring, but that belief wouldn’t be an attractive option unless it held objective truth. Worshipping gods that don’t exist just isn’t appealing. Our basic human intuition is to seek truth, and we press on to find out about the nature of reality, not just arbitrary opinions. While this section discusses the claims of Christianity in an absolutist interpretation, I do not argue here for accepting these claims. What I do argue for is that if they are true at all, then they are absolute.

The distinctive aspect of Christianity that sets it apart from every other major world religion is that it centers around a person and not a set of teachings or doctrines handed down from a great teacher or prophet. There are certainly many teachings in Christianity, but without the person of Jesus Christ they would all fall short of the goal of Christian life-direct, personal access to God. This is why the doctrine that God was incarnate is essential, because it means Jesus bridges the gap between God and creation: the two came together in Jesus, and for the first time since the Fall humanity was able to have a personal relationship with God. Because of the basic inadequacy and sinfulness of human beings, it was not possible for them to be intimate with God without Jesus. Where we are sinful, limited, and fearful, God is perfect, transcendent, and loving. The incarnation meant that God came to us because we could not go to God. If it is not true that Jesus was fully God and fully man, then he could not serve as the mediator that Christians believe we all need. As an event in history, the incarnation needs to be true for any of the other Christian claims about humans relationship to God to be true. Abandoning this belief therefore amounts to undercutting the entire Christian plan for salvation.

The centerpiece of this divine plan is that God and humanity were reconciled by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross-the sins of humanity carried a penalty that was paid for by Jesus, who because of his perfection was able to carry the full weight of that penalty. This is a familiar teaching, but it is certainly not anything less than a claim to absolute truth. If Jesus’ crucifixion actually accomplished the reconciliation of humankind and God, then we now have access to God in a way that wouldn’t be possible without Christ’s sacrifice. Saying that the crucifixion is meaningful for Christians but not for Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists is absurd, because the teaching is that it was done for all mankind. Saying that it was a reconciliation only intended for those that it reconciled is circular-it is clear that if Christ’s death actually had an effect in the world, then it was an effect meant for all humans.

This is why the alternative possibility is that Jesus Christ died, but didn’t accomplish any reconciliation. Religious relativism supports this because Christ’s universal sacrifice can’t be true in an objective sense if it didn’t affect all of humanity in a totally unique way. The denial of Christ’s universal effect amounts to a rejection because there is no middle ground-it either occurred or it didn’t.

The view that the crucifixion didn’t accomplish a reconciliation between God and man is not completely unacceptable to a some believers. It means a rejection of the salvific work of God, but there are people who do not believe that any salvific work was necessary in the first place. If the fundamental problem is not the inability of man to be in relationship with God but rather his ignorance of how to be in relationship with God, then the crucifixion and resurrection could be seen as a metaphorical guide to the death and resurrection that is necessary in the spiritual life (Borg 216). Of course, this a much larger topic, but it is enough to point out that when the truth of the Christ’s crucifixion is lost, our understanding of the rest of the Christian faith has to change as well.

This absolutist understanding of the Christian faith is traditional, and for good reason. These truths of our faith all fit together to provide a complete picture of God’s plan for humanity, and they cannot be altered arbitrarily or limited in their scope. Another teaching relevant to this discussion is that since God’s work through Jesus was universal, Jesus is the sole source of salvation. This is made clear in John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (NAB). Also, it is explicit that Jesus’s followers have a mission to evangelize, as stated in the Great Commission, Matthew 28:19-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (NAB). Both of these teachings reference the beauty and fullness of Jesus’ identity. John 14:6 attests to his uniqueness and excludes the possibility of other paths to God. The Great Commission reflects the desire of God for his saving love to be known by all-he refuses to be limited to a specific people or place, and claims the whole world as his territory. This makes sense: if Jesus is all he claims to be, then everybody deserves to hear about the beauty, love, and redemption he offers to us.

Understanding Christianity and Other Religions

Surveying these doctrines can be uncomfortable once we put them in context with other world religions. In our pluralistic environment at Harvard it seems arrogant, insensitive, and backward to claim that Christianity contains absolute truths, especially the doctrine of exclusive salvation through Jesus Christ. In fact, the insistence on absolute truths makes it all too easy to see every Christian as a fundamentalist, like the man who scared my roommate. The beliefs I advocate for should be seen as the framework for a complex, perceptive, and compassionate theology, not as hammers with which to pummel others. Absolutism does not limit Christianity to fundamentalism, and part of its core is a comprehensive understanding of how it relates to other religions.

There is a well-defined theology surrounding this that can be read in documents like the Declaration Dominus Iesus, John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio, and others. The starting point for any discussion of the status of other religions is a full understanding of the universal salvation that Jesus provides. This universal salvation is available to everyone who ever lived, in any time or place. Even when a person has no knowledge of Jesus, his grace is still available to them. Many fundamentalists would resist the idea that someone can be saved without explicit belief in Jesus Christ, but I believe this is not consistent with the universal desire of God, “who wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). Jesus Christ is the single mediator who accomplishes our salvation for us, but Christian teaching holds that this mediation works through a variety of means in different religions and cultures. This makes sense, because God would not allow someone to be lost because of their historical and cultural situation. He is powerful and resourceful enough to reach toward every person who has ever been born, but “always consistent with the principle of Christ’s unique mediation” (Dominus 14). We do not know the specific way that the Christ’s mediation operates in other religions, but we do know that it is Christ’s work and no other’s. Other faiths would no doubt disagree with this since they understand salvation to work through different paths.

John Paul II says in Redemptoris Missio that the grace of Jesus “enlightens [people] in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation” (10). This situation is composed of all the particulars of their life and faith. This was phrased eloquently in the Vatican II Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions. She looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life, those rules and teachings which . . . often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men” (662). Thus Mahayana Buddhism’s teachings on compassion, Islam’s devotion to prayer and admirable aspects of other traditions are valued as “rays of Truth” that point toward Jesus. Christians should not stop short at respecting these rays of light, but “acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral goods” that they find in other religions (663). Because other religions possess genuine spiritual and moral goods, they need to be celebrated and promoted-not ignored because they come from different traditions.

Critics of the Christian faith often do not see that many Christians find value in other religions. This is likely due to the unfortunate mistakes of Christian missionaries throughout history, including today. Gavin D’Costa offers one extreme example in his account of the declaration made in 1513 by a Portuguese explorer named Martin de Encisco. The declaration briefly summarized the history of the ancient world, the life of Jesus Christ, the institution of the papacy, and the granting of South American lands to Portugal. The whole tract was read in Spanish or Latin to natives who had no ability to understand, and afterward the natives were considered Portuguese subjects (D’Costa 136). This is not spreading the Gospel, but subjugation. We can no longer ignore other religions and cultures in our pluralistic environment and the deep disrespect and antagonism toward them still carried by some Christians poisons interreligious dialogue and evangelization.

Believing in the value of other religions while maintaining that there are absolute truths helps Christians to be more unified with the human family and to see others not as heretics or idolators, but as brothers and sisters who are seeking the same truth. This doctrine is perfectly in accord with the best values of pluralism: respect, tolerance, and diversity. What it leaves behind is the religious relativism that reduces every religion to a limited or incomplete expression of truth, unable to make universal claims. Maintaining belief in absolutism is actually preferable for interreligious dialogue, because it allows Christians to communicate the depth of their faith in a genuine way, being honest about what they believe and its implications.

Believing in the value of other religions while maintaining that there are absolute truths helps Christians to be more unified with the human family and to see others not as heretics or idolators, but as brothers and sisters who are seeking the same truth. This doctrine is perfectly in accord with the best values of pluralism: respect, tolerance, and diversity. What it leaves behind is the religious relativism that reduces every religion to a limited or incomplete expression of truth, unable to make universal claims. Maintaining belief in absolutism is actually preferable for interreligious dialogue, because it allows Christians to communicate the depth of their faith in a genuine way, being honest about what they believe and its implications.

Calling others to Jesus Christ and respecting their religions are not mutually exclusive: they should be seen as organically related. Christians who want to respect others may do so to the extent that they stop making invitations to learn about Jesus out of fear they will be seen as offensive. Rather than risk alienating someone, Christians prefer to keep their mouths shut about the nature of their belief in Jesus. However, once we come closer to Jesus in lives of prayer, it becomes more and more impossible to make any kind of separation between our lives and what we believe. Then, Christians can fearlessly praise what is good in others while still sharing the call to discover the fullness of truth that is in Jesus. These are conversations that happen over time and that require a deep level of understanding, and the worst service Christians can do to Jesus is to speak as Martin de Encisco did-with overbearing arrogance and no chance of being understood. Essentially, the Gospel has to be lived out, and from this it can be shared in a way that takes into account all that is unique about an individual.

If people are offended by invitations to discuss Jesus, Christians should not press them. Yet Christians are called by the conviction of their hearts to make that invitation, and to make it repeatedly. The deep joy that is felt through knowledge of Jesus cannot help but overflow and become an invitation in both action and word. At the same time, all expectations about conversion should be left by the wayside. In the end, the Christian faith affirms the universal love of God for all people, and Christians simply have to trust that those who never discover the full representation of living truth continue to seek it in a different way.