Bonhoeffer and "authentic" humanity

Well it's about time I posted again. Sorry to anyone who has been checking this site to see any updates...

In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer spoke of a “sincerely intended love for humanity that amounts to the same thing as contempt for humanity”.[1] This particular notion is founded on evaluating human beings “according to their dormant values”,[2] aspects not visible on the surface always or even at all, but always felt to be potential somehow. The great problem of this way of thinking is that extraordinary evil can be excused on its account, as it had been of course in Bonhoeffer’s own time. “One loves”, he wrote,

a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality, and one ends up despising the real human being whom God has love and whose being God has taken on.[3]

In other words, we count the potential human and not the actual one; we may even appease what is monstrous in the actual one because we are imagining the potential one. The problem with an "ethic of authenticity" is that it invites an evaluation of some potential self and not the self as it really is. Bonhoeffer’s reply gives a reason as to why finally the ethics of authenticity is not as companionable to Christian theology as might have first appeared:

Only because God became human is it possible to know and not despise real human beings. Real human beings may live before God, and we may let these real people live beside us and before God without either despising or idolizing them…The reason for God’s love for human beings does not reside in them, but only in God. Our living as real human beings, and loving the real people next to us is, again, grounded only in God’s becoming human, in the unfathomable love of God for us human beings.[4]

[1] Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 87
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

Authenticity

The ideal of authenticity is very strong in western culture. That is to say, people feel they ought to live a life that is authentic to who they really are. They want to live according to the truth of themselves as beings. This longing is partly in response to a sense that cultural conditions - technology, urbanisation, mass immigration - have made discovery of authenticity in life much harder, because our freedom has been so restricted.

It looks pretty selfish, and it has had some nasty outworkings. If you think that the authentic me is only discoverable internally to myself, from some intuitive sense of who I am without the constraints of what others say or the influences of others, then you can see what would result. If the ideal of authenticity is coupled with self-defining freedom, then what we are left with is a mess.

Interestingly, our great heroes are the artists who create (not copy or imitate). Rock musicians, for example, need to write AND perform the songs, because we value originality as a sign of authenticity. These heroes are above the constraints of ordinary relationships and boring morality. They can do what the heck they want - they do it almost on our behalf, because the rest of us can't.

But is the ideal of authenticity itself the problem? Charles Taylor (a Canadian philosopher) thinks most definitely not. Seeking to fulfil ones sense of self is surely one of the most basic drives of any human being. However, if the MEANS to fulfil myself is cut off from factors that are external to me - friends, family, morality, even God - then authenticity lapses into incoherence as a human ideal.

But authenticity isn't necessarily defeated by this. Authenticity as an ideal to strive for at least acknowledges that we human beings at least begin as strangers to ourselves. We do not start as people at one with who we are and what we are here to do, but rather feel we need to seek it. We are 'fallen', 'in the dark'.

For me, the question is: can this discussion of authenticity as an ideal be appropriated for theological discussion of what human selves are about?

I think that we should not be surprised to discover human beings longing to discover who they really are: one of the effects of the fall has been to hide even our true selves from view, to obscure us from ourselves. What do I mean? We seem to be at odds with those things that are essential to our identity formation: God, friends, family, others, world. We also aware of our own possibilty, and our own falling short of that self we imagine ourselves to be.

That the answer to the quest for the self is not found within the self is no surprise either for a theological world-view. The self is never posited as an enclosed independent system in a world-view that begins with a creator.

But is following another, namely Jesus Christ, in tune with this ideal of self-discovery? Can we say that becoming a follower of Jesus is finding your true self?

Stanley Hauerwas

Stanley Hauerwas is a fascinating thinker who reckons that narrative and character are the keys to moral thinking in the Christian life. He writes this:

"We do not become free by conforming our actions to the categorical imperative but by being accepts as disciples and thus learning to imitate a master. Such discipleship can only appear heteronomous from the moral point of view, since the paradigm cannot be related to, or determined by, principles known prior to imitation. For the Christian, morality is not chosen and then confirmed by the example of others; instead, we learn what the moral life entails by imitating another.”

What he empahises is that Christian moral teaching is not something "out there", abstracted from the people who live such teaching out in their daily lives.

He thinks too, that Protestant doctrines of justification haven't helped us to live out our discipleship in the world actually:

“The Protestant condemnation of moral theology did not help, as Protestants did little more than assert that good works “flow” from faith. Concern for moral development from the Protestant perspective was thus seen as a form of works righteousness”.

The result he says is that Protestant morality has just been an adaptation of local moral values and ends up being just "decency".

I think he has a point: when i hear people explain what it is to be Christian in practice sometimes it just sounds like they are just talking about middle-class moral decency and not the kind of costly discipleship that Jesus seems to advocating.

He also says:

“What is crucial is not that Christians know the truth, but that they be the truth”.

Which brings me to a further issue: what is the role of suffering for the Christian? Can middle-class white educated Christians (like me) with every privilege going really speak of themselves as taking up their crosses and following Jesus in any convincing way?

An introductory paragraph

“Yes: we are all individuals.” (The Life of Brian)

Imitation of others is not merely a matter of choosing some deeds over others but is basic to the formation of the self. Though the idea that our identities are a composite of those we know is not one that contemporary culture enjoys, it is really not a matter of choosing whether we will imitate someone, but who it is we will imitate. Sociologist George Herbert Mead wrote “the individual develops a self by first becoming an object to himself and he does this by adopting the ‘attitudes’ of the individual members of the group to which he belongs”.The moral self is constructed from the impress of other selves: usually consisting of a conglomeration of parental and societal influences. In the contemporary world of course celebrity and fame have assumed an exalted position in imitation: the exalted figures are, ironically, paradigms of individual freedom and hedonistic excess.

"Jesus the exemplar": what could that mean?

[This may be long and rambling but I would appreciate your comments: one of my supervisors has asked me to "open myself to the kiss of imagination"(!) and write something "wild" in order to hone in on my thesis topic.]

Well, then, what role has/does/should Jesus of Nazareth in moral theology?

"Jesus plays a normative role in Christians’ moral reflection."

"Jesus lived a particular life that has universal meaning; the analogical imagination recognizes how to be faithful to Jesus in ever new situations."
William C. Spohn Jesus and Ethics p.2; p. 186


It is scarcely disputable that Jesus plays “a normative role” in the moral reflection of Christians.
What is in dispute is what that normativity consists of. I like Sphon's observation, that Jesus lived a particular human life - located in space and time quite precisely, and not repeatable, unique in many ways, but that it has a "universal meaning". Jesus' human particularity must be upheld: he is not the instance of a type, or the first of many Christs. You cannot paint an African Christ, or a female Christ, or a Western, blond Christ (more to the point) without doing real violence to true meaning of Christ. He was "like us in every way", but precisely in being himself: he couldn't have been just any of us for exactly that reason.

This means that Jesus' life is made available to us as a pattern of life but only in a way that is conditioned by this particularity and uniqueness. However, I would want to strength the "analogical imagination" idea and say that Jesus is still present, but in a way universally present. He has overcome that particularity by being pneumatologically present in the members of the body and by incorporating them into himself, so that they are at home with him, his brothers and sisters under the Fatherhood of the Father.

Karl Rahner writes:
The imitation of Christ does not consist in the observance of certain moral maxims which may be perfectly exemplified in Jesus, but which have an intrinsic value in themselves independently of him…[but] in a true entering into his life and in him entering into the inner life of the God that has been given to us.

The great Roman Catholic theologian gets it right here: following in the way of Jesus Christ is not a matter of pursuing the values that Jesus represented or embodied, though it is often presented as such. Discipleship of Christ is not merely a matter of resembling him in actions but of "participation" in his life: living with him. "Entering into his life", as Rahner puts it.

The resurrection is a key here because an exemplar can be dead, a mere memory we invoke. But Christ - according to the fundamental Christian testimony - is not dead: he is risen. The resurrection explodes the regular use of Christ as a pattern, because in seeing him resurrected by his Father in the Spirit we know that we can never without external aid follow him in this. We could conceivably even suffer a more a tragic death than Christ's, on behalf of others even: but the resurrection is his and his only to share with us by faith.

Interestingly, the New Testament has a role for a mediated pattern of the way of Christ, in that the apostles and saints were to be afterChrists - I think this Stanley Hauerwas' term.

Bernd Wannenwetsch on sex and the Trinity

Bernd Wannenwetsch replies to an advocate of Christian homosexual marriage, raising some interesting issues for applying the Trinity to our social relationships:

"This necessary move to the doctrine of creation within the doctrine of the Trinity makes a crucial difference to Rogers’ (pro-homosexual marriage) argument, which brings the Trinity into immediate relation with marriage. The Trinity may be the “paradigm or perfect case of otherness as an exchange of gift and gratitude”, as Rogers says. But it cannot as such render the proper model for sexual unions exactly because the Trinity is not a bodily union…

Now it is easy to see why this non-bodily “perfection” of communion may provide a model perfectly suited for Rogers’ claim, which feeds on the marginalization of the meaning of bodily differences. But invoking the Trinity to suggest a “richer” and theologically fuller account of marriage should not make us overlook the bare fact that nowhere in the Scriptures are human sexual unions intended to mirror the Trinity (or at least the union of the Father and Son). Rather, they are specifically assigned to mirror the union of Christ and the church which is a “material”, sensual, in fact a bodily relationship.

That these bodily differences characterize our creaturely existence, means that we should mirror God’s will for human beings to the extent that it can be known from (the witness of) God’s deeds in creation, salvation and perfection. Therefore, when Rogers claims “marriage can represent the Trinity in space and time” he claims at the same time too much and too little. Seeking the sort of perfect community in mirroring God’s Trinitarian life seems to be, at best, a triumphalist anticipation of the eschaton, and, at worst, a denial of our creaturely finitude. "

anyone?

use of Greco-Roman background

How ought knowledge of the historical and cultural context be applied to Paul’s thought, especially as exemplified in 1 Corinthians? Since H.-D. Betz's 1979 commentary on Galatians, Paul’s epistles have been read in the light of the alleged influence of the various streams of First Century Greco-Roman culture. The tendency is to read for (and emphasize) similarity with the background and not to notice difference. It is frequently assumed that Paul is a creature of his times, incapable of challenging the mores and fashions of his day; or, perhaps, of producing from a synthesis of various strands of thought something novel. So it is suggested that Paul uses conventional Greco-Roman rhetoric (so Betz); or apes Platonic thinking about hierarchies (so Castelli); or imports a particular local ideology of the body (so Martin). While in general, the investigation of the conditions for the production of any text is to be applauded, this strategy risks becoming blind to the originality of Paul and the uniqueness of his message; and of a perhaps arbitrary selectivity over which elements of Greco-Roman culture are to be applied in each case.

So, the question is: (humanly speaking) is Paul a genius who come up with something new, or merely a product of his times? To what degree ought we to see his thought as ground-breaking?

Dining with Terrorists anyone?

My review of "Dining with Terrorists" is online here:


http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/culture/reading/dining_with_terrorists/


Love to hear your thoughts. I wrote it along time before the recent spate of "terrorist" attacks...

Imitation as an ethic for today? Some po-mo babble

The value of imitation as an ethic has its detractors. Is the imitation of an example a feasible approach to ethical thinking today? Gender theorist Judith Butler, in an essay entitled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, argues in the context of sexual – and particularly homosexual – self-identification that the rhetoric of imitation is dependent on an ordering of the inferior and derivative copy to the superior and authentic original:

[R]econsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here “imitation” carries the meaning of “derivative” or “secondary”, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing.

For Butler, however, imitation is dubious because the so-called imitated is dependent on the imitator for its status as the original:

Logically, this notion of an “origin” is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively conform the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives…the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.

Butler seeks thereby to subvert the entire logic of imitation by undoing the precedence of the original. She cites in particular Jacques Derrida’s riff on Mallarme’s “Mimique”, his “The Double Session”. Derrida’s strategy is to show that an imitator, such as a mime artist, does not in fact imitate some prior thing, but instead actually constitutes the spectre of the original in and through the mime:

[H]e represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh...

Further, the structure of imitation, for Derrida, is radically compromised because the imitation can only exist insofar as it is not a perfect imitation. If imitation succeeds too well, then it dissolves itself:

For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its non-essence…A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation…Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless it is in some way at fault or, rather, in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad.

Imitation undoes itself. Derrida is mainly concerned with mimhsij in the aesthetic sphere, as in Plato and Aristotle; Butler, by casting human identity as performative, appropriates Derrida’s deconstruction of mimetic ideas for what is essentially an ethical discussion.

Juengel

Eberhard Juengel:

"The truly human person is the person who is definitively recognized by God, and in that way one who cannot be discredited by anything or anyone, not even by him- or herself; a person who is, however, liberated by just this irrevocable recognition for ever more human activity...The most human kind of conduct is probably still that which is truly natural or self-evident, or which at least ought to be self-evident, however inconspicuous it may be."

He is inspired in this by Martin Luther, who saw the truly human person as the righteous person - in our case therefore the justified person.

Thoughts anyone?

Imitating Christ

Interesting stuff by Hans Conzelmann in his 1 Corinthians commentary (p.179-80):

"His (Paul's) exemplariness consists in the fact that - in himself, objectively, on the basis of his calling - he is nothing. In all the passages on the imitatio Pauli the paradox of this exemplariness appears... The imitation of Christ takes its bearings not on the person of the historical Jesus, not on his way of life, but - in the sense of Philippians 2:6ff - on his saving work."

Paul never knew the earthly Jesus, as far as we know: at least, not as a disciple. While he quotes teachings of the Lord not found in the Gospels, what drives his sense of his own calling and his instructions to his followers is rooted in Paul's gospel - the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah. His "principal norm" is the gospel itself, and for Paul this means that the self-sacrifice and suffering of the cross and the exaltation (by the Spirit) of the resurrection. It also means the binding of the Corinthians into a new set of relationships, with God and with each other.

So: the imitation of Christ in 1 Corinthians takes place in not only in echo of his sacrificial and suffering work on the cross but also proleptically, in advance of his return, in terms of his resurrected, "second Adam" identity.

In 1 Corinthians both flanges of the gospel are prominent in response to "ethical" or sociological issues. Their imitation of Paul and Jesus takes place in the context of their new identity as Jesus body/the temple of the Holy Spirit...

Oh, and it involves their bodies...

The question of the day is:

What does Paul mean when he invites the Corinthians to imitate Christ in 1 Corinthians (4:16-17 and 11:1)?

What specifically is he enjoing the Corinthians to do or be in this imitation?

Some (Michaelis) have said that "imitation" here actually means "obey" not "mimic". "The call for an imitatio Christi finds no support in the statements of Paul".

However, I think you can make a good case here that Paul actually points to Christ's example of suffering self-sacrifice, of laying down of rights. That is what is going on in 1 Cor 8-11:1, where Paul is urging the Corinthians NOT to insist on their rights but to conisder the rights of others a priority. This theme is what you see in Phil 2 and Eph 5: an imitation especially rooted in the incarnation and cross...

This discussion is relevant because it bears on the shape of the fulfilled or truly human life modelled for us by Christ... so what is it particularly about that life that we ought to resemble?

Well I hope the formatting is more readable!

Pannenberg goes on to argue that in each of these we need to inquire as to the relationship of the conceptions of man’s essence to the historical figure of Jesus himself. So, for example, Paul’s use of the Adam typology in 1 Cor 15 and Romans 5. What happened to Jesus - the resurrection - happened with the horizon of universal human hope found in apocalyptic literature (though P says "the experience of Jesus as risen occurred within the horizon of universal human hope", carefully hedging his historical bets). In Paul there was a shift of course: he took the pattern of true humanity found originally in the distant past and threw it into the eschatological future, picking up what had already been hinted at in Daniel 7 and so on. Jesus is the “last Adam” – in other words, the “last-first”… a future-type, not a prototype...

The NT certainly picks up traditional (not necessarily OT) anthropologically related themes/titles and relates them to Jesus – especially the idea of the image of God. P. thinks also the Johannine logos idea is true here, though what OT provenance this has he doesn’t mention.

WP positively evaluates Luther’s “Jesus as prototype of justifying faith” model, by claiming that it best reflects the reality of Jesus “perceived behind the Synoptic tradition.” That word "behind" is revealing...

Intriguingly he also points out: “Our understanding of man today is deeply stamped by the centuries-long influence of Biblical thought, and especially of the figure and message of Jesus…the correspondence of anthropology and Christology has been operative in the whole history of ideas in Europe since the rise of Christendom” p.203

This would be an interesting thesis to develop: that is can the correspondence of anthropology and Christology be demonstrated from an analysis of secular anthropologies? Where would one go to find out? The classical humanist tradition? The Enlightenment? What would be the most interesting period to isolate, or who would be the most interesting figure to study in this regard?

How is Jesus exemplary human?

Just to follow on from Byron's mention of Karl Rahner in an earlier discussion, an interesting quote from him:
Rahner: “Christology is the beginning and the end of anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical realization, namely Christology, is in all eternity theology”. Schriften zur Theologie (1960), Vol IV, p.151

Wolfhart Pannenberg (in Jesus- God and Man) lists these ways in which Jesus’ humanity has been held to be of exemplary significance for humanity in general:
a. the incarnation of the Logos consummates the nature of man as living being having the Logos. Only through the incarnation of the Logos does the true man come into existence. (Irenaeus, Athanasius)
b. Jesus is the man who brings the universal striving towards an imitation of God – ethical perfection – to its goal. Ethical perfection, in other words. (Paul of Samosata and the Antiochenes)
c. Jesus fulfills the duty of obedience incumbent on all human beings and the duty of satisfaction through his death. (Anselm and the medieval church)
d. Jesus is the prototype of God’s dealings with humanity and thus of justification by faith. On the cross he upholds the right of God who judges and yet remains righteous before God. (early Luther)
e. Jesus realizes true humanity in that in him the consciousness of god that establishes the unity of human existence is dominant. (Schleiermacher)
f. Jesus is the prototypal man who as the one completely obedient to God was completely dedicated to his fellow man. (Barth)
g. As the Son, Jesus is in a prototypal way what all people ought to be: the reality of sonship that it intended for all in trusting obedience to the Father and in free responsibility for the inheritance of the creation entrusted to him. (Gogarten)
h. Jesus is eminently the believer who exposes himself directly to God’s future. Jesus is the essence of faith and faith is the essence of what he did. (Ebeling)
i. Jesus is the highest perfection of the human: he is the fulfillment of that unlimited openness which is constitutive for being human and whose truth is openness for God. (Welte, Rahner)

An intriguing list, with several of the items overlapping somewhat...
Pannenberg asks: in all these “is the change of Christological conceptions perhaps explained as a change in the image of man?” Haven’t the universal ideal images of man hidden the uniqueness of Christ? At
MJ says: yes, isn’t the trouble here that we begin with some idea of what human aspiration and destiny and meaning is and then determine how Jesus fulfils that? Is this valid? Does the Bible do this? Shouldn’t we rather decide what Jesus is and so see what humanity ought to be from there?

Enhypostasis/Anhypostasis

Classical Christology has described the relationship of the two natures of Christ by using the rather arcane-sounding terms anhypostasis and enhypostasis. What does this mean? Well, firstly, the human nature of Jesus has no hypostasis, or “person”, of its own, but subsists only as the human nature of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. His human nature is anhypostatic in that it has no personhood, or independent reality of its own (the word ‘subsists’ is used rather than ‘exists’ to indicate this dependence): rather it is hypostatized in union with, in (so, enhypostasis), the person of the Logos. This is how Chalcedon is explained: we have in Jesus one person in two natures. The subject of this human nature is divine.
Now, all of this seems impossibly abstract. Also, how can it be possible to have a true human nature that is not personal, or whose person is not human? Is the human nature of Jesus then merely an outer shell, or a disguise perhaps? These are good questions to which I do not have an immediate answer. But in fact something rather important is being said here: that Jesus is not a man who merely fulfilled the potential of human beings better than others have done; he is real man only as the Son of God (so Ivor Davidson). Barth says: “God and Man are so related in Jesus Christ that He exists in Man so far and only so far as He exists as God, i.e., in the mode of existence of the eternal Word of God.” (CD I.2.163) In other words, Jesus’ humanity is the humanity of God.
Why does this matter? I want to inquire as to how Jesus’ humanity relates to, and so identifies or prescribes, the humanity of the rest of us. This description of J’s human nature may actually compromise this as a possibility, because it sounds like his humanity is only the generalized humanity of the human species and not that of an individual: in which case is it real humanity? Real humanity is only ever instanced as individual. In addition, it sounds like this formulation makes J’s human flesh only a passive recipient or instrument of divine power. Perhaps we need to think of it the other way round… Any suggestions?

The Bible and Theology...

In one of the discussions Craig S asked about a comment I made about the reluctance to use the Bible in modern academic theology.

I guess I mean that in general in the academic practice of theology the Biblical scholars have tried to do their work with as little reference to systematic theology as possible AND vice versa. IN short, it's a turf war. The NT and OT guys and girls say to the theologians "you can't do that - that's our job" when the theologians start to do some exegesis of the text! Even quite conservative Biblical scholars seem reluctant to allow a place for a theological use of the Bible.

From the other side, the Bible is just not regularly seen as the authoritative source of the knowledge of God by academic theologians: partly I think because they fear that their use of their Bible is trespassing on another's field of expertise, as I said...Theology is held to more akin to philosophy and distant from the historical nitty-gritty of Biblical studies. And perhaps this is reflected in the differance between continental, rationalist thinkers and Anglo-Saxon empirical scholars. (It's a bit like Sydney and Melbourne...cultural differences do shape us more than we think!)

Writers like Francis Watson (NT scholar) and John Webster in Aberdeen as well as NT Wright and OO'D have reacted strongly to this in the contemporary British scene. They think this seperation of the departments of theological knowledge is disastrous. I agree! But of course, this begs the question of how the Bible ought to be related to theology...
What do people reckon?

A sermon preached in Moore College Chapel, Tues 6th Sept 2005

Judge not
Do not Judge, that you may not be judged!

We cannot not judge.
Judging is a human necessity; and when we’re told we must not judge we risk losing something irreplaceable. You cannot have justice without judgment; we must not imagine that by, refraining from acts of judgment, justice will be delivered and good order upheld. That simply is not possible.
And to have judgment, you must have a judge, or judges: judgment, which is necessary for justice, depends on the activity of judging: naming things as they truly are, discriminating between right and wrong, rewarding, and punishing. There needs to be a business of judging done by people who judge – whether it be officials appointed to the task of administering the court system or the primary teacher awarding grades to her students.
And yet, right now, where we live, judging smells very badly.To judge is understood in the vernacular as to condemn: and as such, it is the activity of bigots and hypocrites. It carries the flavor of a generation now thankfully sitting out their days in nursing homes with blankets over the knees. It is the opposite of “open-mindedness”, that great contemporary absolute. “A mind is like a parachute”, as the bumper-sticker says: “it works better when it’s open”.
People fail to distinguish between judgment and prejudice, in other words. Judging – as it is currently misunderstood - puts the judge in a position of superiority and places the judged under them; and feeds all our worst fears of power and abuse. Judging applies the private preferences and choices of one individual to another, and so threatens to compromise the individual’s sacred right to judge for him- or herself.
And perhaps worst of all: judging breeds hypocrisy, the great sin of politicians and churchmen alike. Isn’t the person who readily judges, we suspect, ignoring or, more than likely, covering for some deficiency in their own character?
The Jerry Springer Show is a fine example of this bizarre desire to show reserve in judgment at all times. He parades before his audience the most ugly and contorted freaks he can find and has them unravel their twisted lives toe-to-toe with each on stage. And then he delivers a little homily at the end, having remained impassive throughout; and his little homilies say nothing other than “emotions do run high when love is concerned, don’t they?” He would never say “infidelity is wrong and these people are messing up their lives and the lives of those around them”: it wouldn’t cross his mind to be so, well, judgmental.
We might expect more help from Jesus. But he says: “do not judge, so that you will not be judged”. No teaching of Jesus has been more often turned on his disciples by those outside the church. This verse has been graffitied on Moore College’s walls. People who were not Christian feel that here they have a good case against those that are in accusing them of not following the teachings of their Lord; for Christians have been very good at judging. By asserting that there are objective, even God-given, moral standards of human behaviour Christians are implying that those who do not share those standards are to be judged. Instead, in this teaching, direct from the Sermon on the Mount, we have a Jesus who appears tolerant and accepting. We judge: he says do not judge.
But what is Jesus actually saying? Is he really warning against any human decision that might privilege one way of looking at the world over another, or one way of behaving over another? Is he really advocating indiscriminate acceptance?
Certainly, the people of Israel had been given authority to judge civil disputes and an office of judge to enact judgment (Lev 19:15; Deut 17). And it was lack of judging that was held against Israel in the prophets – Jeremiah 5 provides one example of many. It was neglect of the function of justice in their community that was so culpable: the distorting of justice lead to the distorting of the community of God’s people – the neglect of orphans and widows for example.
And Paul adds his voice to the call for God’s people to judge, and judge soundly. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, he says that Christians ought to judge one another as those who will one day judge the world. Sound judgment is needed to maintain the purity of the people of God, lest they be corrupted by the appalling behaviour of the man who was living with his father’s wife - on whom Paul himself pronounces judgment.
But Jesus says, do not judge. Can he really mean this? I am well aware of the tendency of Christian interpreters to take shortcuts with Jesus’ radical teaching in the Sermon on the Mount – like the preacher I once heard who said “this is the standard we can’t keep; just as well justification by faith comes in and makes up the difference”; or the school of commentary which seems to be designed to show how Jesus is not saying really what he is saying actually. It will not do to let us off the hook so easily.
But we ought to remember what target Jesus has in his sights here. He takes aim at the kind of stony-hearted legalism that admits of no give or take, the judging that is self-righteously punitive and applies standards to others that are different to the standards applied to the self. This is the kind of judging that results in the bizarrely comical picture of the person with the log in his eye pointing out the speck in the eye of his neighbour. It is judging in its condemnatory aspect that it is on view here: the kind of judging that writes the other person off on the slightest pretext without subjecting itself to the same scrutiny. It is the attitude of the Pharisee who sees the wretched Tax Collector at the temple and says “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Funnily enough, despite all the fear of judging in our culture, we actually delight in this sort of judging. On Saturday I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is a remarkable movie of a terrific book. Enjoyable as the story was, it was an old-fashioned morality tale, where we are free to enjoy the horrible fates meted out to horrible kids such as Augustus Gloop, the great big greedy nincompoop, who was sucked up into a pipe while drinking from a river of chocolate – as well he might be. It makes us feel so good to know there is someone morally inferior to us because they are fat. The pleasure of the story is the self-righteous pleasure of siding with the innocent Charlie in condemning all those awful children who get their just deserts.
The Mobile Phone has become the instrument of judgment as we given the chance by reality TV to judge the moral behaviour of contestants and have them ritually humiliated and removed from our screens. The crowing of the media vultures over the carcass of politician John Brogden was another example. Who among us is not guilty of making a tasteless remark? Clearly the Telegraph would have sold a lot of papers if they had followed through on the story by publishing yet more rumours after his resignation; clearly readers take great pleasure in the moral collapse of a person. Brogden’s suicide attempt brought an end to that caper. But the disturbing reality is that the media’s actions were a reflection of the readiness to judge without mercy that lurks within the soul of this community. We love to judge; but we are without a public mercy.
And yet the eschatological consequence of this type of judging is perfectly clear: do not judge, so that you may not be judged. Your condemnation of others is ultimately the reason for your own condemnation. It is this sort of judging that brings down the judgment of God, for it usurps the judgment that belongs to God. As Jesus goes on:
For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The promise of the measure is that, by judging, you are building your own gallows. There is an ultimate judgment and this is performed by the ultimate judge. And if you think to treat others severely and without remorse, then so shall it be for you too. If you are unable to forgive another, then don’t think that forgiveness will be accorded to you. If you are unable to exercise grace in your judging, then don’t imagine that grace will be shown you. It’s the lesson of the ungrateful servant of Matthew 18 who is forgiven a small fortune, yet presses the debt of one who owes him a tiny amount.
The other side of the coin is given to us in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” A sign of receiving the gospel is the preparedness not to judge, but to forgive. Of course, forgiveness involves a kind of judging itself; it discriminates between right and wrong and good and evil. As ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes: “ ‘Judge not’ is…not an injunction to spineless acceptance but a caution against peremptory legalisms that leave no space for acts of compassion and witness.” Jesus’ command transcends the false dichotomy that our culture has of judging and tolerance, and exposes its hypocrisy.
Which is the point: judging begins with God and is delegated temporarily to us. We do it imperfectly, but necessarily. All human judging takes place in anticipation of God’s final judgment and recognizes that human judges are to answer for their judging. And so Jesus’s warning is well given: before you pass judgment, hesitate. Pause and consider that you will face the divine judge who judges perfectly – the judge who has no favourites. Human judging ought to begin with a judging of the self: attending to the speck - all is it a log – in my own eye.
We cannot not judge. It is our calling as human beings to judge in the sense of “properly discriminate”. In fact, life is filled with thousands of daily discriminations. Judging preserves and builds individuals and communities. But human judgment takes place as a delegated task and recognizes its own provisional nature ahead of the final judgment.
As pastors who hold out the hope of the gospel we ought to model this judgment with mercy. There are many people in our community who would not dare darken a church building because they are divorced, or living in a de facto relationship, or homosexual, or smokers, or whatever, and they reckon they would feel judged by the people in church. Can we wield the word of God in such a way as we show that we too are subject to it and that discriminating between right and wrong does not mean condemning someone like a disused building? The messages we church people send to our community is that we are in the business, not of pursuing good, but of reveling in our condemnation of other people. What are we doing to counter this impression?
We would do well also to listen to James, who writes:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbour?
How quick we are to condemn one another. How soon we forget that ultimate judgment is not our domain. How long we hold grudges. How soon we declare, even just to ourselves, that someone is beyond the pale. I say this of course looking at you through several logs in my own eye. Jesus’ warning is for us to heed: though we cannot not judge, and must judge, we must do so as those who will be judged and whose only hope is the perfect mercy shown us by the Judge himself. How could we who have been shown grace not show that grace to others?

notes: I got some stuff from an article by Jean Bethke Elshtain. in First Things.

Ashes to ashes...

Well, we face the unhappy prospect of arriving in the UK the day after Australia loses the Ashes for the first time in 17 years... or to face the massive disappointment of the Poms if they don't win... oh well.

I am reading: NT Wright's book on Scripture. It is very good indeed: because he recognises that theology and biblical studies need to be friends. So little theology is done with any bible in view at all. That's one of the reasons I am going to work with Oliver O'Donovan, because he conspicuously DOES use the Scriptures in doing theology. I guess the trouble is, that using the bible in theology involves being a non-specialist somewhere. I'll admit it, my Hebrew ain't great... Collaboration is perhaps the answer.