Neither birds in cages nor those with broken wings are free to fly. Nor will removing the cage of a bird with broken wings bring it its desired freedom; the wounded bird will be left an easy prey for its foes. 

-Westerholm, Understanding Paul

“Think outside the box.” “Free to explore.” “Dreams soar on the wings of imagination.” Etc. Much of the rhetoric of our society emphasizes the individual. I have even heard an instructor talk about the effectiveness of letting kids pick their own rules for the classroom (but steering how the kids make their “own” rules).

Hence, it’s not surprising that among the common objections to Christianity is the notion that it is restricting. 

To this sentiment I have found a refreshing response by Stephen Westerholm in his book, Understanding Paul.

We do not live in a value-neutral world where we are free to decide what is best for ourselves. The world – by divine wisdom – has been given an order that is good, promoting our life and well-being. Human freedom amounts to the power people have to choose their response to the divinely created order. We can respect and celebrate and live in harmony with it by being… reverent toward God: a course of life that is “righteous” and “wise”…Or we can refuse to recognize any good that we ourselves do not define and that does not have us as its focus – thus defying the order in which we cannot help but live.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction. -Proverbs 1:7

“The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word “mystery” lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say (as nominalists, in contrast to Aquinas, seemed to want to say) that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are endlessly comprehensible and expressible. Not darkness, but too much light is what we encounter here. That irritating conversation stopper, “it’s a mystery,” doesn’t mean that we have nothing further to say but that we can’t say enough about the matter in hand. The mysteries of faith are so far-reaching in their meaning and so breathtaking in their beauty that they possess a limitless—that is to say, literally an unending and inexhaustible—power to attract and transform the minds and hearts, the individual and communal lives, in which they are pondered, digested, and, ultimately, loved and adored.” (J. Augustine Di Noia)

(HT: Wesley Hill)

“Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.  For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it it written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’  Where is the one who is wise?  Where is the scholar?  Where is the debater of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of what we preach [i.e. the message about Jesus crucified] to save those who believe…And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony [or 'mystery'] of God with lofty speech or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, in order that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:17-2:5)

The obvious follow-up question: did Paul actually practice what he preached?  In another context altogether Charles Cranfield provides indirect confirmation for Paul’s single-minded committment to the breathtaking content of the gospel, over and against the showy form it might be delivered in, as he carefully weighs the literary merits of Paul’s greatest letter:

“As far as style is concerned, the epistle shows considerable variety.  The style varies with the subject matter.  Quite often it approximates closely to the style of the Hellenistic diatribe.  Sometimes it is the style of liturgical utterance or of the solemn confession of faith.  Sometimes there are resemblances to Jewish Wisdom, sometimes to the manner of Jewish biblical exegesis such as we find in some of the Qumram texts, sometimes to the rules of the Rabbis.  There is nothing to suggest familiarity with classical Greek literature…and there is little, if any, evidence of the concern for literary grace for its own sake which is characteristic of classical Greek prose.  John Chryostom recognized that it was no use looking for the smoothness of Isocrates, the majesty of Demosthenes, the dignity of Thucydides, or the sublimity of Plato in Paul’s letters, and admitted Paul’s poverty and the simplicityand artlessness of his composition; and Gregory of Nyssa speaks of Paul as adorning his sentences mone te aletheia ['only for the truth'].

For the most part the real grandeur of Romans as a piece of literature derives from its content and from the sincerity, directness, and personal involvement of the author.  At the same time, it would be quite incorrect to assume that the epistle is totally devoid of literary elegance; for it affords clear evidence that Paul knew the various figures of speech of the rhetoricians and that it came naturally to him to make use of them from time to time…But these things are used by Paul unselfconsciously, not as ends in themselves but as natural means to the forceful and compelling expression of what he has to say.  It is the content that is all-important.  And it is to this concentration on the content of what has to be expressed and subordination of outward form to it that at any rate some of his anacolutha [broken syntax in sentences] should be attributed.” (C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans 1-8, ICC, pp. 25-26)

“Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart”

–Unknown

Of late, I’ve been (trying) to keep up with a discourse on the voluntary/involuntary nature of faith.There has been an intellectual interplay of arguments, thoughts, and propositions, all aimed to answer whether faith is voluntary or involuntary. I suppose one could accuse me of taking a cop out and choosing to evade the question, though I wonder if the question is the correct question to ask in the first place.

A couple days ago, I tried to clear through some boxes filled with snippets of high school. During my shuffles down memory lane, I came across a sheet of paper from summer 2008. On such a page, there was a quote that particularly struck a chord with me. It relates love to playing the piano (I remember getting the guys who were piano minors at camp that year to agree to have this cheesy quote on our shirts–see above for quote).

In light of the ruminations that take place in one’s time of solitude, such as the summer, I think it’s worth applying this quotation to our faith. In many ways, playing the piano does demand playing by the rules; the correct notes, the correct rhythm, the correct balance, the correct tempo, endless hours of practice, memorization, performance, repetition, and, all too often, it takes only a couple of careless lapses of time for the finesse to slacken. Yet, it is within the confines of these “rules,” that the performer reaches a place to truly flourish and play music. Oddly enough, the rules enable the freedom.

Similarly, rigorously engaging with one’s beliefs is important. Reading the Bible is important. Standing on solid theology is important. Thinking about how to live one’s life as a “light and salt” is important. In a similar, but different way, facts are important, and reason has its place in the world. However, I have noticed within myself a wearing. I can only take certain abstract and often verbose thought trains for so long, before I grow simply exhausted.

Because the truth is, the rules will never get you there. Only Christ will get you there. This may sound even more abstract, but I think that’s the beauty of the Christian faith. There is so precious little that we as humans are capable of before our Creator.

There is a passage in Mark that often resonates with me:

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

-Mark 9:24 (KJV)

Personally, I feel that asking whether faith is voluntary or involuntary seriously misses the point. The question itself implies a non-existence of God; that is, it implies that God is not involved in the faith of a man. I see the question as peripheral, because the answer to the question provides only minimal advancement, and serious detour. If faith is voluntary, it seems to follow that man is in perfect control, whereas very few ever feel completely in control of anything. If faith is involuntary, it seems that something else exercises control over, and I struggle to answer what this “something else” could be. I consider it a detour, because I feel that it strays from the root of the issue: that is, “Does God exist?” After all, what is the fundamental difference between voluntary/involuntary belief? If belief is voluntary, well, voluntary belief is based on something, since belief is very rarely based on nothing. If this belief is involuntary, this “involuntary belief” is still the result of something, namely that which might be the influences in one’s life. Which also comes down to be a sort of voluntary belief, since such influences and their reliability is questionable and inconsistent at best, and at some point there is a leap of faith (not in the religious sense, but even in a practical sense. e.g. a lot of things can go wrong when I choose to sit on a chair that looks sturdy. It may be a mirage, it may be rotten, it may be broken, it may be a number of things–but at some point, I will probably just choose to get over my thoughts and sit in it. One could say that my belief that most chairs that appear to be sturdy are sturdy is “involuntary,” but it seems to me that it is oddly voluntary, just as “voluntary” belief is oddly involuntary) …and the cycle seems to go ’round and ’round…

Returning to the passage from Mark, Charles Spurgeon has interesting insight into this passage:
“What was his discovery? Why his discovery was  that he did not believe—and that is where the real difficulty lay. When did the man make this discovery? When he began to believe! Is it not a very singular thing that as soon as ever he had a little faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, he discovered the great abyss of his unbelief? “Lord,” he said, “I believe, but, oh, I do also disbelieve so much that my unbelief seems to swallow up my belief!” Until a man receives faith, he may think that he has it—but when he has real faith in Jesus Christ, then he shudders as he thinks how long he has lived in unbelief—and realizes how much of unbelief is still mixed with his belief! …While men have no faith—I repeat what I said just now—while men have no faith, they are unconscious of their unbelief, but as soon as they get a little faith, then they begin to be conscious of the greatness of their unbelief! When the blind man gets a little light into his eyes, he perceives something of the blackness of the darkness in which he has been living—and so you must be able to say from your heart, “Lord, I believe,” or else you will never be able to pray, as this man did, “help my unbelief.” Even a small measure of faith is necessary to discover the great measure of the unbelief.”

So at the end of the day, sometimes I have to forget the rules and tune out the arguments. I have to humble myself and come before the Lord. And ask…and believe. And I can do this, not because I’m actually “forgetting the rules” or “choosing to forego reason, logic, and intellect,” but because all of those faculties that God has given me frees me to come before him and just believe.

The only (glaring!) weakness is Dodd’s unfortunate relegating of Romans 9-11 to the status of an ’excursus’ from the letter’s main theme of the revelation of God’s righteousness, rather than (rightly) the actual climax of that manifestation in keeping His promises to Israel, albeit in highly unexpected fashion.  I can feel the great wrath of N. T. Wright as I read that sentence, and tremble beneath it.  Notable imperfection notwithstanding, however, I encourage you to take up and read Romans all through, once more afresh, in the light of these reflections from Dodd, and to see what new insights you might gain as you do so:

“There has been much discussion whether [the righteousness of God] is for Paul an attribute of God, or of men saved by God; whether, that is, the Gospel reveals the fact that God is righteous, or communicates to men a righteousness of character which is divine in origin.  No doubt it does both of these things.  But the key to the problem is to recognize that in Paul’s religious vocabulary the term righteousness stands, not only for a moral attribute (as in ordinary English, and Greek, usage), but also (in accordance with Hebrew usage) for an act or activity.  When he says, therefore, ‘God’s righteousness is revealed,’ he means that a divine act or activity is taking place manifestly within the field of human experience–whereas much of His operation is inscrutable and mysterious (11:33).  Paul’s background here as everywhere is the Old Testament…

A judge or ruler is thought of as ‘righteous,’ not so much because he observes and upholds an abstract standard of justice, as because he vindicates the cause of the wronged; his righteousness is revealed in the ‘justification’ of those who are the victims of evil.  In the faith of Judaism the ultimate act of vindication is the work of God…in the developed thought of the prophets, this sense of ‘righteousness’ as an act of vindication is still maintained…The Hebrew word always carries with it the idea of the victory of right…

The vindication of right involves a real righteousness of the people on whose behalf it is wrought.  Thus the ‘righteousness,’ or act of redress, has for its ultimate issue, not only a people delivered from wrongful oppression, but a people delivered from their own sin, a ‘righteous’ people in our sense.  But always ‘righteousness’ is not primarily an attribute of God or of His people, but an activity whereby the right is asserted in the deliverance of man from the power of evil…In all probability the familiar beatitude, ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ contains the same meaning. For an English reader, as for a Greek reader, of the Gospels, that suggests ‘those who ardently desire to be good’; but, in accordance with Old Testament usage, the original Aramaic beatitude would naturally mean ‘Blessed are they who ardently desire the vindication of right, the triumph of the good cause’—the same people, in fact, who are referred to in Luke 18:7: ‘Will not God see justice done to His elect who cry to Him by day and night?’

Now, in the prevailing thought of Judaism in the two or three centuries before Christ, it was assumed that in this present age the cause of right is in eclipse.  Althought ‘the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men’ (Dan. 4:17), yet for reasons best known to Himself He permits evil powers to hold sway.  But in the good time coming–’the Age to Come’–the arm of the Lord would be bared for the discomfiture of evil and the establishment of good.  Then His ‘righteousness’ would be revealed.  That was where Paul stood as a Pharisee.  The Gospel which he proclaims as a preacher of Christianity is that ‘the righteousness of God is revealed.’  The Age to Come has come, and the great vindication of right is taking place before our eyes.  The present tense of the verb is all-important: it would be even better rendered ‘the righteousness of God is being revealed,’ for the Greek present is primarily a tense of continuous action.  The revelation, as we shall see, is not yet complete; but it is real and even now in process.

This is the theme which is developed in the course of the epistle. First, the need for such a revelation is displayed in a somber picture of the world under the dominance of sin, bringing its terrible retribution.  This [the revelation of God's wrath in 1:18ff] is not yet the revelation of righteousness, though it is preparatory to it.  Next we have the righteousness of God displayed in ‘justifying’ His people, i.e. in putting them in the righte before Him ( Rom. 3:21-4:25).  Then it is displayed in the ‘salvation’ of men from the power and dominance of sin (Rom. 5-8).  Then, after an excursus which seeks to justify the ways of God with men (Rom. 9-11), we have, finally, the revelation of His righteousness in the living of a good life by the people He has saved (Rom. 12-15).  Thus Paul finds in the Gospel of Christ the answer of history to the aspirations of the prophets after a decisive assertion and vindication of right against all evil in the world of men.  The life and death of Jesus Christ, His resurrection, and the creation of the Church through His Spirit, constitute a decisive Act of God, an objective revelation of His righteousness.

The meaning, therefore, of the phrase ‘God’s righteousness is revealed,’ might be given by some such paraphrase as this: ‘God is now seen to be vindicating the right, redressing the wrong, and delivering men from the power of evil.’” (C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, pp. 9-13)

“For the early Christians the knowledge of the world began with the knowledge of God, and God could be known only in faith…Natural law is a minor tributary in Christian antiquity.”  (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, pp. 161, 321)

Today most western Christians tend to place great weight on the possibility and importance of evidential apologetics.  That God’s existence and nature can be seen and known and proved through appeal to the created order seems both intuitive and biblical to us.  Thus we love the ontological argument, the argument from design, the fine-tuning of the universe, etc.  Yet I have found myself slowly moving away from an earlier optimism I possessed for both the usefuleness and the centrality of such argumentative strategies.  Like most long, slow fades away from one’s prior convictions, I find myself unable to give voice to many of the concrete, particular reasons that have prompted me over the years toward a more Barthian perspective on so-called “natural theology.”  But I have been enboldened in my stance of late by finding a much older predecessor than Barth to point to in my defense. 

Blaise Pascal, in his one-of-a-kind Pensees (every Christian should read this), repeatedly pulls the rug out from under those who would put their faith in evidential, rationalistic “proofs” for God’s existence and excellence.  To paraphrase Paul, if anyone had a reason for confidence in the flesh (i.e. the ability of reason to work its way up to God unaided), it was Pascal, the legendary philosopher and mathematician.  Yet he intentionally came to forsake this attractive pathway to the divine, as I believe the passages cited below demonatrate. 

What accounts for Pascal’s diminished view of creation’s inherent ability, apart from the gospel, to win over the minds and hearts of human beings to the reality of God?  I think the impetus for Pascal’s rejection of natural theology can be divided into two categories: ruin and revelation. 

First, because human beings are prone to futile idolatry and darkened in both mind and passion, the testifying witness of the created order is not so much absent, as ineffective.  Yes, the world cries out the glory of the eternal God, as Paul writes in Romans 1:18-32.  Yet in that same passage he also contends that sinful, twisted humanity inevitably distorts, corrupts and suppresses the silent speech of the heavens (Psalm 19).  I find this to be spectacularly true in personal experience.  Human beings on their own, from a million distinct vantage points in life among which the only common ground shared equally is the sin resident within each biased observer, cannot in actual practice come to know God through wisdom.  At best, nature can render us inexcusable, but it cannot enlighten us as long as we remain autonomously aloof from the God who unceasingly beckons to us through the gospel and the church.  As Camus pointed out in The Myth of Sisyphus, no one has ever yet died for the ontological argument.  Nor should they have.  But thousands have died for Christ.  And they should have; such decisions will be publicly vindicated on the last day.

Second, from the divine side of the ledger now, reason is not the chosen avenue by which God has appointed human beings to come to know him (1 Corinthians 1-2).  And at the bleark prospect that charges of fideism might be laid at my feet, let me state plainly here that I do believe reason is indispensable to knowing God.  But I do not believe it is primary.  The gospel, as both Origen and Edwards argued, has its highest and most proper proof within.  The beauty, power and goodness of the gospel flows from the story of Jesus itself, and not from any external standards, criteria or logical forays into that story by disinterested outsiders.  In hindsight, reason confirms the legitimacy and coherence of our faith in a thousand ways.  Yet reason was not, is not, and never will be our trailblazing pioneer into the knowledge of God whose prowess receives eternal adulation .  For by God’s own design, the world did not come to know the God of wisdom through wisdom, but rather only through the foolishness of what is proclaimed.  That is, the only true God only comes to be known through the heralding of the unbelievable message that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of all, having accomplished our salvation through his triumph over sin and death.  For Pascal, then, such a gospel necessarily has enormous epistemological implications.  If the God who saves us that way is the God we are talking about, then the process of knowing Him does not take essentially place through our own efforts and ability.  Knowledge of God is created, sustained and consummated according to the Spirit, and not according to the flesh.  Such a claim is not irrationalism, but simply the recognition that the knowledge of God does trade in goods that are fundamentally beyond the reaches of reason’s ambitious arm. 

Stanley Hauerwas provocatively argued in his Gifford lectures that Karl Barth–that fiercesome, caricatured enemy of all “arguments for God” which find their origin in isolation from the very gospel they seek to defend–actually turns out to be the natural theologian par excellence, because he starts with Jesus and is only then willing to look at the world.  Only from a tentative, humble committment to Jesus, assuming his story as my own story, can I then inquire of creation and see that it sings of the God who made it with any sense of certainty and coherence.  From any other position, creation will either seem to me futile and ruthless, or else to belong to a god other than the one that the gospel tells me of.  As Calvin famously put it, the Scriptures provide us with the reading spectacles we must wear if we hope to read creation rightly.  Otherwise God is still there, but we will not see his handiwork in proper focus. 

Hauerwas even argues that Thomas Aquina’s famous “proofs” for God’s existence in his Summa are not, as so often thought, actually proofs at all.  Instead, they are (in historical context) intramural attempts from within the community of faith to help Christians who already believe to understand how rational their faith indeed is.  Whether this is a justified reading of Aquinas I am in no position to decide, but I do find it to be utterly persuasive as an interpretation of what my experience (when I am most honest with myself) has been with arguments for God, as well as of the proper role of the gospel itself in creating and sustaining within us a knowledge of God that is Christ-centered through and through.  Which, of course, is the only kind of knowledge of God there really is in the universe. 

I leave you now to ruminate upon Pascal, and encourage those of us who have come to know God in Christ to only depend upon “arguments for God” in derivative, secondary ways.  What should we do with all the time on our hands we now find freed up?  Proclaim the Story.  And then live the Story together.  Nothing persuades the human mind and satisfies the human heart so much as when those things are done well, in conscious dependence upon the grace of God.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

#3: “‘Why, do you not say yourself that the sky and the birds prove God?’  No.  ‘Does your religion not say so?’  No.  For though it is true in a sense for some souls whom God has enlightened in this way, yet it is untrue for the majority.”

#189: “We know God only through Jesus Christ…All those who have claimed to know God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to offer…In him and through him, therefore, we know God.  Apart from that, without Scripture, without original sin, without the necessary mediator, who was promised and came, it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality.  But through and in Christ we can prove Christ’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality.”

#190: “The metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake.”

#406: “We have an incapacity for proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome.  We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.”

#417: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ.  Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.  Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.”

#429: “This is what I see and what troubles me.  I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness.  Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety.  If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith.  But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state, where I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, she should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, they should be completely erased; that nature should say all or nothing so that I could see what course I ought to follow.  Instead of that, in the state in which I am, not knowing what I am not what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty.  My whole heart strains to know what the true good is in order to pursue it: no price would be too high to pay for eternity.”

#449: “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the center towards which all things tend.  Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything…And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by reasons from nature either the existence of God, or the Trinity or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that kind: not just because I should not feel competent to find in nature arguments which would convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge, without Christ, is useless and sterile.  Even if someone were convinced that the proportions between numbers are immaterial, eternal truths, depending on a first truth in which they subsist, called God, I should not consider that he had made much progress towards his salvation.

The Christian’s God does not consist merely of a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements.  That is the portion of the heathen and Epicureans.  He does not consist merely of a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of years to those who worship him.  That is the portion of the Jews.  But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him.

All those who seek God apart from Christ, and who go no further than nature, either find no light to satisfy them or come to devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator, thus falling into either atheism or deism, two things almost equally abhorrent to Christianity.”

#463: “It is a remarkable fact that no canonical author has ever used nature to prove God.  They all try to make people believe in him.  David, Solomon, etc., never said: ‘There is no such thing as a vacuum, therefore God exists.’  They must have been cleverer than the cleverest of their successors, all of whom have used proofs from nature.  This is very noteworthy.”

One passage in particular that has taken on an utterly different twist for me on account of this narrative strategy, as I quietly ask the end to explain the beginning for me, is the strange saying of Jesus recorded in Matthew 11:11-12 and Luke 16:16-17.  You know, the part about how the kingdom of God is apparently taken and entered by those who are violent.  Many a scholar has tried to evade the awkward reality that Jesus seems to praise and commend those who do violence here.  Nonetheless those who are willing to employ force here are clearly the “good guys.”  They are not those who wrongfully persecute Jesus’  peaceful followers.  Is Jesus then suggesting terrorism?  Is this typical religious rhetoric for militaristic domination and expansion?  Should we see images of planes crashing into skyscrapers as we listen to Jesus’ words? 

Of course not.  Throughout the Gospels (and the NT at large), military images and warfare language are consistently employed in subversive fashion.  Jesus’ disciples are to be violent–but only in that they are to so value the kingdom that they are willing to cut off their own hands or gouge out their own eyes if these cause them to stumble.  They are to “conquer” (in the language of Revelation) by laying down their lives and refusing to return evil for evil.  They are to hate with all of their own being–but the object of their hate is their own lives in this age, in comparison to the coming of God’s restored reign in a new heaven and a new earth in the world to come.  And so on, and so on. 

I am comforted that many other Christians throughout history have understood that the gospel turns such traditional religious expectations upside-down–a logical necessity given the way God chose to accomplish our redemption through Jesus’ “strange triumph” on the cross.  Consider this passage from Jonathan Edwards, on how the good soldiers of Jesus Christ manifest their “boldness” as they enlist in his army:

“But here some may be ready to say [in light of JE’s argument that meekness is a central Christian virtue]: Is there no such thing as Christian fortitude, and boldness for Christ, being good soldiers in the Christian warfare, and coming out boldly against the enemies of Christ and His people? 

To which I answer: There doubtless is such a thing.  The whole Christian life is compared to a warfare, and fitly so.  The most eminent Christians are the best soldiers, endued with the greatest degrees of Christian fortitude.  It is the duty of God’s people to be steadfast and vigorous in their opposition to the designs and ways of such as are endeavoring to overthrow the kingdom of Christ and the interest of religion.  But yet many persons seem to be quite mistaken concerning the nature of Christian fortitude.  It is an exceeding diverse thing from a brutal fierceness, or the boldness of beasts of prey.  True Christian fortitude consists in strength of mind, through grace, exerted in two things: in ruling and suppressing the evil and unruly passions and affections of the mind; and in steadfastly and freely exerting and following good affections and dispositions, without being hindered by sinful fear or the opposition of enemies.  But the passions that are restrained and kept under in the exercise of this Christian strength and fortitude, are those very passions that are vigorously and violently exerted in a false boldness for Christ.  And those affections that are vigorously exerted in true fortitude are those Christian holy affections that are directly contrary to them.  Though Christian fortitude appears in withstanding and counteracting the enemies that are without us; yet it much more appears in resisting and suppressing the enemies that are within us; because they are our worst and strongest enemies and have greatest advantage against us.  The strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more than in steadfastly maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable world…

The directest and surest way in the world to make a right judgment of what is a holy fortitude in fighting with God’s enemies, is to look to the Captain of all God’s hosts, and our great Leader and Example, and see wherein his fortitude and valor appeared, in His chief conflict, and in the time of the greatest battle that ever was or ever will be fought with these enemies, when He fought with them all alone, and of the people there was none with Him.  He exercised His fortitude in the highest degree that ever He did, and got that glorious victory that will be celebrated in the praises and triumphs of all the hosts of heaven throughout all eternity. 

Behold Jesus Christ in the time of His last sufferings, when His enemies in earth and hell made their most violent attack upon Him, compassing Him round on every side like rending and roaring lions.  Doubtless here we shall see the fortitude of a holy warrior and champion in the cause of God in its highest perfection and greatest luster, and an example fit for the soldiers to follow that fight under this Captain.  But how did He show His holy boldness and valor at that time?  Not in the exercise of any fiery passions; not in fierce and violent speeches, vehemently declaiming against the intolerable wickedness of opposers, giving them their own in plain terms: but in not opening His mouth when afflicted and oppressed, in going as a lamb to the slaughter, and, as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, not opening his mouth; praying that the Father would forgive His cruel enemies because they knew not what they did; not shedding others’ blood, but with all-conquering patience and love shedding his own.  Indeed, one of his disciples, that made a forward pretence to boldness for Christ and confidently declared he would sooner die with Christ than deny Him, began to lay about him with a sword: but Christ meekly rebukes him, and heals the wound he gives.  Never was the patience, meekness, love, and forgiveness of Christ so gloriously manifest as at that time.  Never did He appear so much a Lamb, and never did he show so much of the dove-like spirit as at that time. 

If therefore we see any of the followers of Christ, in the midst of the most violent, unreasonable, and wicked opposition of God’s and his own enemies, maintaining under all this temptation, the humility and quietness and gentleness of a lamb, and the harmlessness and love and sweetness of a dove, we may well judge that here is a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” (Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, pp. 277-79)

E. Michael Jones’ (a Catholic moral critic) provocative book, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, suggests one possible answer to me.  The book itself is a somewhat untidy, yet always memorable mishmash of (on the one hand) bold, unapologetic critique of the moral poverty of the intellectual elite of the modern West, and (on the other hand) of wildly unjustified exaggerations of the centrality of out-of-control sexual lust in the shaping of the social climate of the modern age.  Indeed, there is much to disagree with in what is argued in the book, as well as in the way it is argued.  By no means do I endorse the full sweep of Jones’ ultimately reductionistic ideology here.   Yet the overly shrill and alarmist tone of the author should not become an excuse to brush away the sizeable kernel of truth found within his nonconformist critique of the ethical underpinnings of modern secularization. 

What is Jones’ argument?  Picking up where Paul Johnson left off in his controversial book Intellectuals—that is, with empirical documentation of the numbing regularity with which the most grievous sorts of sexual promiscuity have occurred in the lives of so many influential thinkers[1]—Jones proceeds to contend that behind most of the deep structures of secular unbelief in the West lay a simple, inconvenient explanation.  An astonishing pattern recurs again and again in the lives of the men and women who have contributed the most to the cognitive shape of modernity.  Having first given themselves over to habitual violation of God’s moral law (which is indelibly printed upon both creation and conscience) in their sexual practices, such people inevitably go on to devise philosophical systems of thought which seek to implicitly justify, in hindsight, the moral legitimacy of their preferred lifestyles.  Here is how Jones puts it:

“There are ultimately only two alternatives in the intellectual life: either one conforms desire to the truth or one conforms truth to desire.  These two positions represent opposite poles between which a continuum of almost infinite gradations exists…Sexual sins are corrupting, [but] the most insidious corruption brought about by sexual sin, however, is the corruption of the mind.  One moves all too easily from sexual sins, which are probably the most common to mankind, to intellectual sins, which are the most pernicious…

Put more generally, the idea can be formulated thus: the intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker.  In order to apprehend truth, which is the goal of the intellectual life, one must live a moral life.  One can produce an intellectual product, but to the extent that one prescinds from living the moral life, that product will be more a function of internal desire—wish fulfillment, if you will—than external reality.  This is true of any intellectual field and any deeply held desire.  In the intellectual life, one either conforms desire to truth or truth to desire.  In the first instance, the importance of biography is negligible; in the second instance, it is all-important…

Lust is a common enough vice, especially in this age.  The crucial intellectual event occurs, however, when vices are transmuted into theories, when the ‘intellectual’ sets up shop in rebellion against the moral law and, therefore, in rebellion against the truth.  All the modern ‘isms’ follow as a direct result of this rebellion.  All of them entail rationalization.  All of them can be best understood in light of the moral disorder of their founders, proponents, and adherents.” (E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, pp. 11-16)

I find it impossible to disregard this idea altogether.  My observation of how other people tend to process the interpretation of their own histories, my appraisal of the self-deceptive dynamics at work in my own experience of sexual selfishness, and my understanding of the Scriptures[2] all combine to testify to the accuracy of Jones’ contention.  I would demur from Jones’ conclusion that sexual sin lay behind all moral stupidity garbed in elaborately constructed philosophical systems, but I am convinced that this happens with surprising frequency in this present evil age.  Consider some strongly collaborating testimony to this unpopular theory from a primary source: 

“I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently, I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.  Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless… The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning – the Christian meaning, they insisted – of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.” (Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, pp. 312, 316)

So perhaps one sense in which sexual sin is more terrible (ala 1 Corinthians 6) is not that it constitutes a more heinous offense against God than, say, pride or gossip or selfishness do.  Rather, might it not be that sexual sin is singled out because it is more dangerous to those who choose to participate in it?  Jones has put forth a daring piece of argumentation, based on much indisputable evidence, for just such an interpretation.  What if sexual sin was especially liable to blind us from honest self-examination, and to harden us to the point that we are unable any longer to perceive and approve of the most beautiful moral goods in the universe?  What if it is in fact that case that only the pure in heart will see God?  Then it would seem that we can never be too hasty to listen to Paul’s recommendation: “Flee from sexual immorality, for every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”  The danger in delaying from obedience here is more serious than we can ever possibly imagine.

“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

“How, may it be asked, do we know that Paul is not describing an ideal Messianic figure, rather than an historical person?  To this I will reply with another question.  Where will you find in the Messiah of prophecy or apocalypse the moral character which Paul attributes to Jesus as Messiah?  Admittedly the general attributes of righteousness and obedience to God are inherent in the Messianic idea.  But humility, meekness, gentleness, agape, forgiveness of enemies–where are these?…Paul’s account of Jesus as Messiah, while it corresponds to the one essential point in the Messianic idea without which Messiahship is meaningless–that the Messiah is the divinely appointed Head of the people of God, and the bearer of His Kingdom to the whole world–in all other respects represents the Jewish Messianic idea reversed.  The Messiah should have exhibited the attributes of power and dominion on earth; instead, He ‘took the form of a slave’.  He should have united Israel under His sway; instead, He was rejected by Israel.  He should have vindicated the Law; instead, He died under the curse of the Law as a malefactor.  The phenomenon of a ‘cruficied Messiah’ was a ‘scandal’ to the Jews.  It could not have come from anywhere except out of history.” (pp. 66-67)