God has made a world in which what we do matters. True Christianity draws us to more human lives, enmeshed in earthly things, and hoping for the resurrection of it all.
There is a conflation drawn in these various traditions, that you have tapped into eloquently: a conflation which states that because our salvation is not contingent upon action, our actions must not matter. But, true salvation, I would argue, is an effect which will naturally emit its cause to the world. That is, that our salvation is not held hostage by action, and thus we will not act out of desperation to save ourselves. But, a part of being welcomed into salvation is that Christ has lavished His irresistible grace upon the sinner, and they will respond by falling in love with Christ. Love being not merely a feeling (though I think D.A. Carson lays out a convincing argument in his book “Love In Hard Places” that the affectionate side of love is still important), but also a manner in which one structures their life according to what they desire most. Those who are saved, who love God, will act out that love. Furthermore, we are called to make disciples of all nations. As you have pointed out through Bonhoeffer’s articulation of the penultimate.”If you don’t attend to the penultimate things, you may not even have the right or the opportunity to speak about the ultimate things.” I find myself pondering this sentiment often. I think of how often the life of following Christ involves delving into matters which appear, at first glance, trivial. Because in order to love people, we must meet them where they are, and where they are is often quite boring, or seemingly detached from things ultimate. But, the seemingly trivial has real implications. What is trivial to me, is life altering to someone else. That is, that in order to love people, we must take up what matters and affects them, because the gospel is transmitted through life together. And life together is often painful, sacrificial, boring, monotonous, and unpleasant.
Most of all, part of loving Christ is to love what He loves. He would not enter into our brokenness if He saw this world as trivial and futile. It is clear by His interest in salvation for people on this earth, that what is done here matters to Him. Because He exercised the salvation of the world, in the world, among people. And in the course of His life here He attended to their pain.
All of this rambling to say....I really enjoyed this post!
Thanks for this, Ian. Especially, "I think of how often the life of following Christ involves delving into matters which appear, at first glance, trivial," and the sentences following. That's it!
As someone currently undergoing conversion, I can't comment with knowledge on the theology, however, as I read the post, I kept thinking to myself: what about love?
I think of it this way: being concerned only with my salvation is simply another form of self-obsession. This is not authentic death to self. This is not real love of Christ. In loving Christ I give myself over to his will which is made most manifest in forbearance, in my willingness to suffer and hold the suffering of the world that I may love and move again and again and again as I fail toward love. The whole New Testament seems to me alive with calls to loving action as fruit of the spirit. Any turning away from love in nihilism, is not God's will but rather my own fear, self-concern, sloth, and resignation.
Anyway, that's one naive take -- though sometimes naivete is helpful :)
That was a fantastic article! The one thing I would say is that I do think that God is the ultimate source of meaning, and so without him eventually you lose all meaning. That being said, years ago, I went through a meaning crisis while embracing the Christian faith for many of these exact points.
Human beings have never been, are not, and will never be atemporal. Given that we experience time, however construed, by brute fact of our nature—be it in the pristine, fallen, or glorified state—to denigrate any moment of our existence is to make the whole of it absurd. We may look forward to the future and reflect on the past, but we can only ever live in the present. In this sense, nothing lasts, not even a particular instance of heavenly bliss. For a moment to be meaningful—if any moment is meaningful—it cannot rely upon persisting. To say that a moment is not meaningful because it doesn’t last, then, is to misunderstand the nature of both man and meaning.
This is part of the temptation to flatten salvation into something altogether inhuman. If the choice of a moment, usually viewed as meaninglessly ephemeral, can be made into the kind of cause which immediately precipitates a persistent effect, then it can become the engine of meaning for the duration of what would otherwise be totally purposeless. This trades a lifetime of meaningful—though not persistent—moments for a single Ozymandian Übermoment and, in so doing, belies a misunderstanding of the nature of God’s redemptive work and His purpose in so doing. I will save the catenae of prooftexts and merely ask why it is that more focus is placed on what God did than why, despite the fact that most of the Bible is God and His prophets and apostles castigating the complacent for their willingness to rest upon the laurels of His work, rather than doing likewise.
Those who imagine that they may treat this life with contempt ought to consider Jesus’ words to the servant who merely buried the talent in the ground. If that was the just outcome for flippancy, should we expect clemency for malicious malfeasance?
Those who use sovereignty as a fig leaf for apathy or complacency might have it worse than even those who appeal to the coming judgement, for at least the former are not using the Lord’s name in vain or poking their nose into the Triune counsel of God to filch some garbled excuse for their attempt to abandon the moral agency and responsibility that even animals, to a degree, possess. Even the animals, however, do not possess the temerity to blame God for their cowardice and sloth.
The strangest aspect of the American Christian political theology is that it frequently laments the status quo and succumbs to nostalgic swoons, but nowhere near as frequently as the British church of previous centuries actually engages in the process of trying to fix the problems it identifies. It seems that the American church perceives itself much more as a special interest group lobbying the state than as a social institution which might take on the tasks itself.
I would argue that the doctrine of justification by faith just kicks the can down the road and makes the word “faith” into a theological term of art freighted with a question begging gloss that can’t bear the weight that Hebrews 6, the book of James, or even Paul’s “the obedience of faith” place upon it once we attempt to make use of the clarification to do the normal science of living a life worthy of the Gospel, working out our salvation with fear and trembling, running, with perseverance, the race marked out for us, etc.
I think it is sufficient to show that the doctrine of justification by faith, as far as it is true, is true in the infinite and mysterious counsels of God and not a helpful existential balm or bur. My father believed in God and knew much of the Bible better than most seminary professors. He struggled to love wrong and belligerent people and became complacent in his own life. In the end, he fell morally and took his own life. I defy anyone to tell me how the doctrine of justification by faith would have helped him see that his unwillingness to love others, rooted in his distraction from his own sin, was the direct cause of his feeling distance from God and a gnawing uncertainty about being loved by Him. In fact, every Christian I know—almost all of whom made zero attempt to confront him in his sin, reach out to my mother for support during his affair, or even notice that they weren’t attending a church at the time—fell over themselves to assure his surviving family that, although his death was tragic, he was with God now.
This isn’t an esoteric debate about phraseology: it is life and death. If the only possibilities in your counseling toolbox are to deny or affirm someone’s eternal state, you, like a world leader with his or her finger on the big red button, is likely to do nothing in order to avoid WWIII. What my father needed was to be told to mortify his own sin, to love his neighbor as he wished Christ to love him, and to put more effort into obeying what he did know about the Bible than trying to tie more phylacteries to his head. Instead, he got ignored and then baptized with the only discipleship most modern Christians receive: a eulogy that claims to know the mind of God and pays little head to the fruit He said would give us our best indication about that person’s life—a measure we are encouraged to use on ourselves more than others, so that we might repent and bear fruit in keeping with it. Personally, I think it added insult to the injury of being totally absent when hope still remained for him.
The "please write a shorter comment" error message when trying to post it as a single submission was a gentle way for Substack to say that I had the lost the plot on what constituted a comment on the work of another 🤪
The Bible tells us that God put good works in us before the foundation of the world, that it is for these good works that He saves us, that He has given us His Spirit to know and to do these works for our good and His glory, and that those who do not walk according to the Spirit are not of God, so even the idea that one could be “saved” and not do works is unbiblical and, perhaps more plainly, just really fucking stupid. What possible purpose would God have for carnal Christians? Vessels of wrath, vessels of mercy, and vessels of ambivalence? It seems that Jesus spits out the lukewarm and even rejects those who cast out demons in His name; what possible explanation can there be for including fruitless trees—which He says will be cut down and thrown into the fire—in the sheep and not the goats? I think your reference to Turretin distills the objection into an edifying argument.
I will only add that the Colloquy of Regensburg demonstrates how close Protestants and Catholics came to reproachment, with the impasse being Eucharistic theology, not justification.
The fact that we use the image of hymns being sung while the trains rolled on to the camps as a parable of the complicity of inaction tells you how inadequate the view is that we may carry on like livestock on the Ark while the world drowns. We are not livestock, we are not on the Ark, and God has promised not to destroy the world by flood until the day when He does so by fire. Being vaguely in line with what God has done at some time and hoping to be saved by means of a plea of ignorance might be one of the most deeply infuriating kinds of intellectual negligence.
You are reminded of Bonhoeffer and I am reminded of Lewis. If there is a strength that Lewis has over Tolkien, it is how well he depicts the ordinary glory of life in even a magical realm. The Beavers in Chronicles of Narnia, the entirety of The Horse and His Boy, and the absolute iridescence of his description of man in The Weight of Glory--There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption—all give us reason not to look at any part of creation without grasping the deep magic coursing through it.
Jesus makes clear that not handling something as banal as money well will keep God from bequeathing spiritual things to you. Proverbs speaks about the vineyard that one must tend; sluggishness in tending said vineyard cannot be made up for by prayer, sacrifice, or service to the poor: it requires work on the vineyard. Cain’s sacrifice was rejected for precisely this reason: it was not what God had required. I often tell my oldest daughter that God, her teachers, and we, her parents, want her to do what was asked, not what other good thing she thought up because she would rather do that. Our society, intoxicated by the any benefit fallacy, see no grounds for correcting actions that aren’t, in themselves, bad. God has no such qualms—see Nadab and Abihu, Moses and striking the rock, and Saul’s sacrifice when Samuel was late.
Nor did Paul attempt to ignore the Greek gods when evangelizing the Greeks. God, after all, sends His rain on the just and the unjust and it is the Logos who Is Truth in, with, and under the light of men’s minds. Theological debates often resemble the disciples’ question to Jesus about whose sin made the blind man blind or Job’s friends’ inquiries into how Job had transgressed to suffer so.
“Unfortunately, many a professing Christian does not act as though God exists”: and so I would say that they don’t really believe that God exists. After all, what we believe is borne out by what we think, say, and do, not just what we would answer on a survey about the subject. If you said that you believed someone was coming to your house tonight to rape your wife and you were found dead asleep at sundown, I know few people who would accept that you both believed the man was coming and that you love your wife.
Somewhat less viscerally, I would like to argue that “living in accord with our divinely-designed human nature” is a lot more like the wisdom literature and Peter and John before the Sanhedrin than it is the Institute for Better Living Principles. In other words, it is living as Jesus lived, not becoming a carpenter or writing white papers about how we must all enter the trades. This is harder and is less possible to institutionalize, but discipleship in the context of a church that takes its community seriously should provide plenty of support and opportunity in the endeavor to work out the vicissitudes of life for the good of one’s neighbor and the glory of God.
I wholehearted agree that “the Christian who can’t see [that the things God created are good] is less of a human for that fact”, but do not slander the Puritans without reading Cotton Mather and seeing that this is a perennial, not Puritanical, problem—Jonathan Edwards was Postmillennial, after all!
Here is where we part company: 1. it is impossible to talk about this world without God, given that all of the goodness one encounters is a manifestation of His perfections, grounded in Him both for being and for attributes and accidents; 2. Paul says that if we have hope in this life only we are to be pitied above all men and that the reasonable alternative is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, meaning that the Christian life is pointless without God; and 3. meaningful moments do require that we persist. In this sense, eternal life is a perquisite to this life having meaning, even if the meaning of this life is not grounded solely in it. It is because we live forever that we can begin to do so now, for the finality of a death from which there is no resurrection would genuinely permeate life under the sun with a chill that would stop our hearts, just as Ecclesiastes opines.
A couple of points although I wholeheartedly agree with the essence of your essay.
Protestant/Evangelicalism, at least in recent centuries, has conflated justification with salvation and the terms of each. Justification provides the formal, juridical basis of salvation, but salvation is an ontological reality. The terms of Justification is ethical perfection in the fullest sense of that word, which is achieved through substitutionary atonement through Christ alone. But the terms of salvation is a faith, as defined by James, that survives unto the end. This faith does not have to be perfect, merely existing and scrutable. Practicably trusting in the merits of Christ's assertions, counsels, warnings, and promises are the instrumental means by which that salvation (perseverance) unto the end is achieved (Luke 6:46-49).
This latter point, much of Protestant/Evangelicalism seems to have missed, although it is implicit in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. It is premised upon another doctrine which has been missed: the biblical or Hebrew comprehension of natural law (and moral realism). The existing understanding of natural law within Protestant circles is epistemological, moral law inscribed on the heart. Scriptures implicitly, yet incontrovertibly, rejects this understanding (Hebrews 8:8-10). For if in the New Covenant, that which is new and unique and unlike the covenant that came prior, law is inscribed, then it cannot have been inscribed before. Moreover, any honest and competent student of world history knows that the Protestant Doctrine (in Westminster and London Baptist confessions) is nonsense.
The Hebrew/biblical doctrine of natural law is that it is out there, like gravity, whether we know it or not. Natural Law is ontological and discerned through its consequentialist repercussions ("works of the law" Romans 2:14), just like the laws of gravity. We are judged only upon the basis of the subset of laws that we know, largely through natural epistemological means in places not familiar with Scriptures.
I think your problem in accepting this truth is your firm commitment to the Westminster Confession. But I do not see how can successfully by a natural theologian and relevant in this age without this correction.
Finally, Paul never appealed to the Greek audience through law, but through the truth of God. You can test that out. Unlike the Jews and Romans, the Greeks did not subscribe to the intrinsic validity and merit of the laws. (Yes, on the philosophical fringes, some were looking for an intrinsic basis.) The validity of law was premised upon the lawful and hierarchical authority which promulgated the laws (legal positivism). It is the reason why Paul could make a moral/legal argument in the Epistle to the Romans. As to the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul could make a covenantal argument because the province of Galatia is in the heartland of the old Hittite kingdom and empire, who were known for their suzerain covenants or treaties. As a historical rule of thumb, ideas have a habit of enduring in the same locale for hundreds and thousands of years.
Hey John - sorry I didn't respond to your very thoughtful comments previously. They coincided with an out-of-town trip.
On natural law, I appreciate the ontological emphasis. I'm not sure how whether it excludes the epistemological. For example, Aquinas and the Thomists strongly emphasize that the natural law includes almost everything about how God created the world; the motion of objects is subject to the natural law, all of nature is - in theologian Steven Long's words - *theonomic*. At the same time, Protestantism did place an emphasis on moral knowledge, conscience, etc., in its use of natural law - though people like Richard Hooker strongly retained the ontological emphasis, I believe. The Protestant epistemological sense of natural law may come to a head in Kant's ethics. But I also see it in the first chapter of Lewis's Mere Christianity. We all have an inchoate sense of morality, Jonathan Haidt's modules of moral thought, leading us to accuse others and excuse ourselves, etc.
But I think it's correct to emphasize the extent to which we need to look outside ourselves ("empiricism," in my sense) to see the natural law. I see Louise Perry's Case Against the Sexual Revolution as an example. People need to see the worldly consequences of living otherwise in order to have their consciences pricked and to return to what (I would argue) they already know inchoately.
That all humanity has a faculty of judgment, which includes a faculty for ethical judgment, is not in dispute. The question is whether that faculty in the natural man has been filled with moral content (or even a bootstrap of moral content which seems to be where NNL is going). Those, subscribing to natural law on an epistemological basis, get into trouble defending themselves against the anthropologists and the historians, and increasingly the sociologists.
Without the Law there is no Grace. The many nations with the American experiment in particular seem to have totally abandoned the Law. It doesn’t take a rare gift of prophecy or more than basic understanding of history to see that judgement is needed.
JPeterson and others revealed that many who have been dispossessed of the Law do thirst for it.
Modern Judaism is not “the first half of Christianity.” That’s American evangelical crock. The religion of Judaism interprets the Torah completely differently and believes in the authority of the Talmud.
Yes, people thirst for the law! I meant the turn of phrase about Judaism and the first half to simply refer to the true teaching of the Old Testament, theologically "the Law." But I would say that modern Judaism still acquaints people with the moral obligations of the natural law, however imperfectly.
There is a conflation drawn in these various traditions, that you have tapped into eloquently: a conflation which states that because our salvation is not contingent upon action, our actions must not matter. But, true salvation, I would argue, is an effect which will naturally emit its cause to the world. That is, that our salvation is not held hostage by action, and thus we will not act out of desperation to save ourselves. But, a part of being welcomed into salvation is that Christ has lavished His irresistible grace upon the sinner, and they will respond by falling in love with Christ. Love being not merely a feeling (though I think D.A. Carson lays out a convincing argument in his book “Love In Hard Places” that the affectionate side of love is still important), but also a manner in which one structures their life according to what they desire most. Those who are saved, who love God, will act out that love. Furthermore, we are called to make disciples of all nations. As you have pointed out through Bonhoeffer’s articulation of the penultimate.”If you don’t attend to the penultimate things, you may not even have the right or the opportunity to speak about the ultimate things.” I find myself pondering this sentiment often. I think of how often the life of following Christ involves delving into matters which appear, at first glance, trivial. Because in order to love people, we must meet them where they are, and where they are is often quite boring, or seemingly detached from things ultimate. But, the seemingly trivial has real implications. What is trivial to me, is life altering to someone else. That is, that in order to love people, we must take up what matters and affects them, because the gospel is transmitted through life together. And life together is often painful, sacrificial, boring, monotonous, and unpleasant.
Most of all, part of loving Christ is to love what He loves. He would not enter into our brokenness if He saw this world as trivial and futile. It is clear by His interest in salvation for people on this earth, that what is done here matters to Him. Because He exercised the salvation of the world, in the world, among people. And in the course of His life here He attended to their pain.
All of this rambling to say....I really enjoyed this post!
Thanks for this, Ian. Especially, "I think of how often the life of following Christ involves delving into matters which appear, at first glance, trivial," and the sentences following. That's it!
As someone currently undergoing conversion, I can't comment with knowledge on the theology, however, as I read the post, I kept thinking to myself: what about love?
I think of it this way: being concerned only with my salvation is simply another form of self-obsession. This is not authentic death to self. This is not real love of Christ. In loving Christ I give myself over to his will which is made most manifest in forbearance, in my willingness to suffer and hold the suffering of the world that I may love and move again and again and again as I fail toward love. The whole New Testament seems to me alive with calls to loving action as fruit of the spirit. Any turning away from love in nihilism, is not God's will but rather my own fear, self-concern, sloth, and resignation.
Anyway, that's one naive take -- though sometimes naivete is helpful :)
Thank you Joel.
“God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.” —Voltaire
Interesting article.
That was a fantastic article! The one thing I would say is that I do think that God is the ultimate source of meaning, and so without him eventually you lose all meaning. That being said, years ago, I went through a meaning crisis while embracing the Christian faith for many of these exact points.
Comment Part I
Human beings have never been, are not, and will never be atemporal. Given that we experience time, however construed, by brute fact of our nature—be it in the pristine, fallen, or glorified state—to denigrate any moment of our existence is to make the whole of it absurd. We may look forward to the future and reflect on the past, but we can only ever live in the present. In this sense, nothing lasts, not even a particular instance of heavenly bliss. For a moment to be meaningful—if any moment is meaningful—it cannot rely upon persisting. To say that a moment is not meaningful because it doesn’t last, then, is to misunderstand the nature of both man and meaning.
This is part of the temptation to flatten salvation into something altogether inhuman. If the choice of a moment, usually viewed as meaninglessly ephemeral, can be made into the kind of cause which immediately precipitates a persistent effect, then it can become the engine of meaning for the duration of what would otherwise be totally purposeless. This trades a lifetime of meaningful—though not persistent—moments for a single Ozymandian Übermoment and, in so doing, belies a misunderstanding of the nature of God’s redemptive work and His purpose in so doing. I will save the catenae of prooftexts and merely ask why it is that more focus is placed on what God did than why, despite the fact that most of the Bible is God and His prophets and apostles castigating the complacent for their willingness to rest upon the laurels of His work, rather than doing likewise.
Those who imagine that they may treat this life with contempt ought to consider Jesus’ words to the servant who merely buried the talent in the ground. If that was the just outcome for flippancy, should we expect clemency for malicious malfeasance?
Those who use sovereignty as a fig leaf for apathy or complacency might have it worse than even those who appeal to the coming judgement, for at least the former are not using the Lord’s name in vain or poking their nose into the Triune counsel of God to filch some garbled excuse for their attempt to abandon the moral agency and responsibility that even animals, to a degree, possess. Even the animals, however, do not possess the temerity to blame God for their cowardice and sloth.
The strangest aspect of the American Christian political theology is that it frequently laments the status quo and succumbs to nostalgic swoons, but nowhere near as frequently as the British church of previous centuries actually engages in the process of trying to fix the problems it identifies. It seems that the American church perceives itself much more as a special interest group lobbying the state than as a social institution which might take on the tasks itself.
I would argue that the doctrine of justification by faith just kicks the can down the road and makes the word “faith” into a theological term of art freighted with a question begging gloss that can’t bear the weight that Hebrews 6, the book of James, or even Paul’s “the obedience of faith” place upon it once we attempt to make use of the clarification to do the normal science of living a life worthy of the Gospel, working out our salvation with fear and trembling, running, with perseverance, the race marked out for us, etc.
I think it is sufficient to show that the doctrine of justification by faith, as far as it is true, is true in the infinite and mysterious counsels of God and not a helpful existential balm or bur. My father believed in God and knew much of the Bible better than most seminary professors. He struggled to love wrong and belligerent people and became complacent in his own life. In the end, he fell morally and took his own life. I defy anyone to tell me how the doctrine of justification by faith would have helped him see that his unwillingness to love others, rooted in his distraction from his own sin, was the direct cause of his feeling distance from God and a gnawing uncertainty about being loved by Him. In fact, every Christian I know—almost all of whom made zero attempt to confront him in his sin, reach out to my mother for support during his affair, or even notice that they weren’t attending a church at the time—fell over themselves to assure his surviving family that, although his death was tragic, he was with God now.
This isn’t an esoteric debate about phraseology: it is life and death. If the only possibilities in your counseling toolbox are to deny or affirm someone’s eternal state, you, like a world leader with his or her finger on the big red button, is likely to do nothing in order to avoid WWIII. What my father needed was to be told to mortify his own sin, to love his neighbor as he wished Christ to love him, and to put more effort into obeying what he did know about the Bible than trying to tie more phylacteries to his head. Instead, he got ignored and then baptized with the only discipleship most modern Christians receive: a eulogy that claims to know the mind of God and pays little head to the fruit He said would give us our best indication about that person’s life—a measure we are encouraged to use on ourselves more than others, so that we might repent and bear fruit in keeping with it. Personally, I think it added insult to the injury of being totally absent when hope still remained for him.
I'm tempted to write the literary equivalent of "Get a room" - Get a Substack, sir! You're a highly talented writer!
The "please write a shorter comment" error message when trying to post it as a single submission was a gentle way for Substack to say that I had the lost the plot on what constituted a comment on the work of another 🤪
Comment Part II
The Bible tells us that God put good works in us before the foundation of the world, that it is for these good works that He saves us, that He has given us His Spirit to know and to do these works for our good and His glory, and that those who do not walk according to the Spirit are not of God, so even the idea that one could be “saved” and not do works is unbiblical and, perhaps more plainly, just really fucking stupid. What possible purpose would God have for carnal Christians? Vessels of wrath, vessels of mercy, and vessels of ambivalence? It seems that Jesus spits out the lukewarm and even rejects those who cast out demons in His name; what possible explanation can there be for including fruitless trees—which He says will be cut down and thrown into the fire—in the sheep and not the goats? I think your reference to Turretin distills the objection into an edifying argument.
I will only add that the Colloquy of Regensburg demonstrates how close Protestants and Catholics came to reproachment, with the impasse being Eucharistic theology, not justification.
The fact that we use the image of hymns being sung while the trains rolled on to the camps as a parable of the complicity of inaction tells you how inadequate the view is that we may carry on like livestock on the Ark while the world drowns. We are not livestock, we are not on the Ark, and God has promised not to destroy the world by flood until the day when He does so by fire. Being vaguely in line with what God has done at some time and hoping to be saved by means of a plea of ignorance might be one of the most deeply infuriating kinds of intellectual negligence.
You are reminded of Bonhoeffer and I am reminded of Lewis. If there is a strength that Lewis has over Tolkien, it is how well he depicts the ordinary glory of life in even a magical realm. The Beavers in Chronicles of Narnia, the entirety of The Horse and His Boy, and the absolute iridescence of his description of man in The Weight of Glory--There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption—all give us reason not to look at any part of creation without grasping the deep magic coursing through it.
Jesus makes clear that not handling something as banal as money well will keep God from bequeathing spiritual things to you. Proverbs speaks about the vineyard that one must tend; sluggishness in tending said vineyard cannot be made up for by prayer, sacrifice, or service to the poor: it requires work on the vineyard. Cain’s sacrifice was rejected for precisely this reason: it was not what God had required. I often tell my oldest daughter that God, her teachers, and we, her parents, want her to do what was asked, not what other good thing she thought up because she would rather do that. Our society, intoxicated by the any benefit fallacy, see no grounds for correcting actions that aren’t, in themselves, bad. God has no such qualms—see Nadab and Abihu, Moses and striking the rock, and Saul’s sacrifice when Samuel was late.
Nor did Paul attempt to ignore the Greek gods when evangelizing the Greeks. God, after all, sends His rain on the just and the unjust and it is the Logos who Is Truth in, with, and under the light of men’s minds. Theological debates often resemble the disciples’ question to Jesus about whose sin made the blind man blind or Job’s friends’ inquiries into how Job had transgressed to suffer so.
“Unfortunately, many a professing Christian does not act as though God exists”: and so I would say that they don’t really believe that God exists. After all, what we believe is borne out by what we think, say, and do, not just what we would answer on a survey about the subject. If you said that you believed someone was coming to your house tonight to rape your wife and you were found dead asleep at sundown, I know few people who would accept that you both believed the man was coming and that you love your wife.
Somewhat less viscerally, I would like to argue that “living in accord with our divinely-designed human nature” is a lot more like the wisdom literature and Peter and John before the Sanhedrin than it is the Institute for Better Living Principles. In other words, it is living as Jesus lived, not becoming a carpenter or writing white papers about how we must all enter the trades. This is harder and is less possible to institutionalize, but discipleship in the context of a church that takes its community seriously should provide plenty of support and opportunity in the endeavor to work out the vicissitudes of life for the good of one’s neighbor and the glory of God.
I wholehearted agree that “the Christian who can’t see [that the things God created are good] is less of a human for that fact”, but do not slander the Puritans without reading Cotton Mather and seeing that this is a perennial, not Puritanical, problem—Jonathan Edwards was Postmillennial, after all!
Here is where we part company: 1. it is impossible to talk about this world without God, given that all of the goodness one encounters is a manifestation of His perfections, grounded in Him both for being and for attributes and accidents; 2. Paul says that if we have hope in this life only we are to be pitied above all men and that the reasonable alternative is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, meaning that the Christian life is pointless without God; and 3. meaningful moments do require that we persist. In this sense, eternal life is a perquisite to this life having meaning, even if the meaning of this life is not grounded solely in it. It is because we live forever that we can begin to do so now, for the finality of a death from which there is no resurrection would genuinely permeate life under the sun with a chill that would stop our hearts, just as Ecclesiastes opines.
A couple of points although I wholeheartedly agree with the essence of your essay.
Protestant/Evangelicalism, at least in recent centuries, has conflated justification with salvation and the terms of each. Justification provides the formal, juridical basis of salvation, but salvation is an ontological reality. The terms of Justification is ethical perfection in the fullest sense of that word, which is achieved through substitutionary atonement through Christ alone. But the terms of salvation is a faith, as defined by James, that survives unto the end. This faith does not have to be perfect, merely existing and scrutable. Practicably trusting in the merits of Christ's assertions, counsels, warnings, and promises are the instrumental means by which that salvation (perseverance) unto the end is achieved (Luke 6:46-49).
This latter point, much of Protestant/Evangelicalism seems to have missed, although it is implicit in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. It is premised upon another doctrine which has been missed: the biblical or Hebrew comprehension of natural law (and moral realism). The existing understanding of natural law within Protestant circles is epistemological, moral law inscribed on the heart. Scriptures implicitly, yet incontrovertibly, rejects this understanding (Hebrews 8:8-10). For if in the New Covenant, that which is new and unique and unlike the covenant that came prior, law is inscribed, then it cannot have been inscribed before. Moreover, any honest and competent student of world history knows that the Protestant Doctrine (in Westminster and London Baptist confessions) is nonsense.
The Hebrew/biblical doctrine of natural law is that it is out there, like gravity, whether we know it or not. Natural Law is ontological and discerned through its consequentialist repercussions ("works of the law" Romans 2:14), just like the laws of gravity. We are judged only upon the basis of the subset of laws that we know, largely through natural epistemological means in places not familiar with Scriptures.
I think your problem in accepting this truth is your firm commitment to the Westminster Confession. But I do not see how can successfully by a natural theologian and relevant in this age without this correction.
Finally, Paul never appealed to the Greek audience through law, but through the truth of God. You can test that out. Unlike the Jews and Romans, the Greeks did not subscribe to the intrinsic validity and merit of the laws. (Yes, on the philosophical fringes, some were looking for an intrinsic basis.) The validity of law was premised upon the lawful and hierarchical authority which promulgated the laws (legal positivism). It is the reason why Paul could make a moral/legal argument in the Epistle to the Romans. As to the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul could make a covenantal argument because the province of Galatia is in the heartland of the old Hittite kingdom and empire, who were known for their suzerain covenants or treaties. As a historical rule of thumb, ideas have a habit of enduring in the same locale for hundreds and thousands of years.
Hey John - sorry I didn't respond to your very thoughtful comments previously. They coincided with an out-of-town trip.
On natural law, I appreciate the ontological emphasis. I'm not sure how whether it excludes the epistemological. For example, Aquinas and the Thomists strongly emphasize that the natural law includes almost everything about how God created the world; the motion of objects is subject to the natural law, all of nature is - in theologian Steven Long's words - *theonomic*. At the same time, Protestantism did place an emphasis on moral knowledge, conscience, etc., in its use of natural law - though people like Richard Hooker strongly retained the ontological emphasis, I believe. The Protestant epistemological sense of natural law may come to a head in Kant's ethics. But I also see it in the first chapter of Lewis's Mere Christianity. We all have an inchoate sense of morality, Jonathan Haidt's modules of moral thought, leading us to accuse others and excuse ourselves, etc.
But I think it's correct to emphasize the extent to which we need to look outside ourselves ("empiricism," in my sense) to see the natural law. I see Louise Perry's Case Against the Sexual Revolution as an example. People need to see the worldly consequences of living otherwise in order to have their consciences pricked and to return to what (I would argue) they already know inchoately.
That all humanity has a faculty of judgment, which includes a faculty for ethical judgment, is not in dispute. The question is whether that faculty in the natural man has been filled with moral content (or even a bootstrap of moral content which seems to be where NNL is going). Those, subscribing to natural law on an epistemological basis, get into trouble defending themselves against the anthropologists and the historians, and increasingly the sociologists.
Wonderful, much-needed essay. I’ve had this idea but struggled to put it into words. Thank you!
Without the Law there is no Grace. The many nations with the American experiment in particular seem to have totally abandoned the Law. It doesn’t take a rare gift of prophecy or more than basic understanding of history to see that judgement is needed.
JPeterson and others revealed that many who have been dispossessed of the Law do thirst for it.
Modern Judaism is not “the first half of Christianity.” That’s American evangelical crock. The religion of Judaism interprets the Torah completely differently and believes in the authority of the Talmud.
Yes, people thirst for the law! I meant the turn of phrase about Judaism and the first half to simply refer to the true teaching of the Old Testament, theologically "the Law." But I would say that modern Judaism still acquaints people with the moral obligations of the natural law, however imperfectly.