This week it was my turn to lead the Roots & Growth time after church. This is our fledgling attempt at doing Church education. What we’ve begun with is an overview of some of the common points of doctrine, devoting an hour each Sunday to discussing a given topic. An hour is a painfully short time to try to introduce something like the Trinity, but it has to start somewhere (it just occurred to me that if I were George Steiner this parenthesis would only include the name Zack de la Rocha). But hey, people have been eager to participate, and that’s an exciting thing to see. Being a part of this has got me thinking alot lately about Church Education. I’m all full of ideas about how the church can begin to cut down the dichotomy between the academy and itself, but I’m not quite ready to say anything constructive about that yet. I know that many of you who stop by this blog have occupied yourselves with the same problem at one time or another, so consider this a solicitation of comments in regards to how best to approach the form and content of teaching in the church.
The following is something I put together to guide our discussion. We basically just read the thing and stopped to discuss each section. Not too creative, I know, but the discussion did end up going pretty well, if you judge that by people having both a lot and also pretty insightful things to say. The topic given to me to discuss this week was Christian Life. I could have taken this in a few different directions, but I chose to focus on ethics. Here is what I came up with. (And by the way, I certainly welcome any critique of my understanding/engagement with Aristotle and Kant, but do keep in mind that this is meant as an introduction, not as an extensive evaluation).
Introduction. When we talk about “Christian Life,” what we are doing is reflecting on what it means for us as humans to respond to the work of God in all aspects of our lives. Humans are complex beings, yet as complicated as we are, there is no part of our lives that God does not seek to reconcile and make into a new creation. “Faith seeks understanding,” but it can’t stop there. Faith also seeks expression in friendships, work, politics, sexuality, emotions, art, etc. In these places we ask the question, “what does it mean for us to be faithful to God in this particular aspect of lives?”
Christian Life is a response to the grace of God. It is an acting-out of our thankfulness to God for the grace that he has shown us. This is definitely the case in all of Scripture, but it shows up most clearly in the structure of Paul’s letters. Paul characteristically begins his letters with a doctrinal section, where he always takes the subject of the work of God on behalf of humanity in Jesus Christ. After this theological reflection on just what was taking place in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Paul then moves on to draw some conclusions about how this should affect the way we life our lives. The transitions read like this:
:Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer you bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.” (Romans 12:1)
“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” (Ephesians 4:1)
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5)
“So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:6-7)
Christian Life is obedience to Jesus Christ. Living out our faith in Jesus doesn’t just mean “doing the right thing,” as if this were obvious to everyone, or that our faith just gives us new energy and optimism to help us do better what we are already doing. Faith in Jesus is much more revolutionary and dangerous than that. Since Jesus is our Lord, we can have no other lords. The final word can only be whether or not we have been obedient to him. Obedience to Christ is not found in a set of rules, but is rather embodied in Christ himself. To obey Christ is to imitate him. And the Bible tells us that imitating Christ isn’t about wearing sandals, making friends with fishermen, not getting married, or any of the other peculiarities of Jesus’ life, but that we are to imitate him specifically in his cross. Following Jesus is not an ethereal idea, but is played out in concrete and cross-shaped submission of our will and desires to the people around us. Following Jesus means loving each other with the same self-giving love that Jesus poured out upon us at the cross.
“If anyone wants to come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24)
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 4:32-5:2)
Christian Life is lived in witness to worldly patterns of life. The fact that our old standards of figuring out right and wrong are not the final word for us anymore, and introduces difference, and thus conversation, between the church and the world as to how we are to think about what “the good life” is.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle held that the standard for right and wrong, “the good,” is whatever is most effective for making you and the people around you happy. All utilitarian arguments for ethics, from John Stuart Mill to Reinhold Niebuhr, are simply a development of the way that Aristotle understood virtue. He sees happiness as the standard for life because we seek happiness as an end in itself. We do things in hopes of them making us happy, but we do not seek happiness for any other purpose than simply to be happy. And so he sees happiness as the final word. “For both the common run of people and cultivated men call it happiness, and understand by ‘being happy’ the same as ‘living well’ and ‘doing well’”(Nichomachean Ethics, 1095a.15); “We always choose happiness as an end in itself and never for the sake of something else. Honor, pleasure, intelligence, and all virtue we choose partly for themselves—for we would choose each of them even if no further advantage would accrue from them—but we also choose them partly for the sake of happiness, because we assume that it is through them that we will be happy. On the other hand, no one chooses happiness for the ake of honor, pleasure, and the like, nor as a means to anything at all” (NE, 1097b.1-5).
The greatest objection to this way of thinking about standards for living life was made by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. He held that right and wrong had nothing to do with what was effective for making you happy in your immediate circumstance. For him, this was much too subjective, leading to selfish decision making that only looks out for “me and mine.” He was looking for an objective standard that applied equally to all people, regardless of circumstance, so that my “duty” would be the same as everyone else’s. Kant found this universal standard in what he called the “categorical imperative,” which means that right and wrong are determined by what you would hope and expect every person in every place to do in a given situation. “Nothing is left but the conformity of actions to universal law…That is to say, I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, §18). In light of this, Kant holds that the consequences of our obedience have nothing to do with whether or not we did the right thing. “There remains nothing over to which the maxim [rule for how to act] has to conform except the universality of a law as such; and it is this conformity alone that the that the imperative properly asserts to be necessary” (GMM, §52).
When we in the church step into this conversation, it seems clear that there are aspects of both arguments that we should affirm, but also some that we must reject. With Aristotle, we should affirm the fact happiness is a real motivation for everything we do. The promise of heaven, that “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4) tells us that the end is happiness, our eternal enjoyment of life together with God. However the rule of Christ tells us that true happiness is found only in self-sacrifice, when we renounce our rights and claims to happiness. Jesus says that “if anyone wants to be first they must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35), and that “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:35). This is a hard teaching! Jesus is telling us that we don’t find happiness in trying to establish and secure happiness, but rather that happiness is given to us as a gift when we renounce our claims to it, and quit trying to defend and protect what is ours. Yet how do we know when we give up our rights that we wont be left abandoned? We know that God will not leave us abandoned because he did not leave Jesus abandoned to the grave, but rose him up from the dead. God’s promise to us that we, too, will one day be raised with Christ is sealed the Holy Spirit. The Spirit that dwells in us is the same Spirit by which God the Father raised God the Son from the dead. Paul calls this “the down-payment of our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession” (Ephesians 1:14).
With Kant, we ought to affirm that our own private notions of effectiveness cannot be the standard for living. In contrast with the idolatrous American infatuation with success and performance, the church judges its actions only by whether or not they are faithful. But against Kant, we should deny that this is a faithfulness to universal principles that are apparent to anyone at anytime. Life “under the cross” makes absolutely no sense apart from Jesus Christ and the community that embodies him, the church. Christian life is not one that we foist on others without regard to their situation, but is rather something we invite the world to participate in. Christian life doesn’t make sense apart from Jesus—it must be lived out here, specifically where Jesus is present in his body, which is the church.
The font got smaller and smaller that further down I read. Weird.
Um, I like it. An introdcution to Christian Ethics is a tough move, especially since much of our popular thought rests on utilitarianism/pragmatism, “It works for me” sort of mentality.
I do have a couple of thoughts to shoot your way. First, “Faith seeking understanding” can be understood in different ways. One, which you rightly deem incomplete, is that faith seeks cognitive information of affirmation of the direction of one’s faith. This, it seems, limits the role of faith to the acquisition of knowledge. However, if you take the term “understanding” and look at its parts, the words tends to connote submission: Stand under something else. In this sense, all other shperes of life are called into submission under one head who is Christ. If we mean understanding like this, then I think that the hook “Faith Seeking Understanding” works very well. But, given the intellectual climate that divorces the intellect from the rest of one’s life requires this sort of qualification to make it useful.
Something that I would have liked to see (though I grant that an hour is hardly enough time) is a discussion of the direction of that life. You mentioned that it is “cross-shaped”, but what, exactly, does that mean? Further, how do we make sense of obedience in the terms that John employs in his “epistles”? If obedience is bound up in one’s love for Christ, what ought imitation to look like? I guess htat these are the questions of discipleship that are on my mind, mostly because the language of imitation often distills into a social ethic that is really “Christian” and “virtuous” but does not require love for Christ. That is troubling to me.
It’s too bad that you only had an hour. What if you could have them day and night for three years? Whoa.
Thanks for the thoughts, Patrick.
I think you’re right in observing some of the interesting etymological implications of the word “understanding.” The problem, though, is that we don’t normally use language etymologically – we just use it for what we use it for. So as necessary as we may deem obedience and discipleship for true knowledge of God, I think we just have to argue for this on its own, rather than trying to make the word itself mean that. Maybe another way to approach it is by emphasizing the idea of relational knowledge, like how I “know” you!
As for the second point, I do leave that too open-ended. It worked out well, though, because this was the place where people were especially talkative. One of the big questions that was asked was about the way we should understand boundaries when our ethic is marked by self-sacrifice. What do we do when we are dumping ourselves out for someone who doesn’t recognize or respond to it? Our initial response was that boundaries can only be established out of care for the other (like Calvin on church discipline), rather than out of self-protection.
And as for the love of Christ, I have a hard time seeing anyone really buying into a lifestyle of real Christian discipleship without their hearts having been really gripped by the gospel. It’s hard teaching, and our communication of it has to take care that it does not make it out to be a wise and obvious decision. Like I said, this lifestyle only makes sense within the context of the Gospel: it is not meaningful or productive or redemptive on its own, but only when and where the Spirit of Christ makes it meaningful and redemptive.