Category Archives: Culture and society

1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West

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I’m preaching a series on 1 Timothy (yesterday was 1:12-20), and it’s started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. Literally the word means “to know together with,” and it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live; it’s the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will. We might almost call it a sixth sense, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect. The problem is, it’s only valuable as far as it accurately reports reality—in this case, moral reality, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God—but that’s not how we want to use the idea of conscience; rather than recognizing it as something objective relating to real right and wrong and actual guilt, we want to take conscience as subjective, reflecting how we feel about something, whether we feel we’ve done right or not. We strive to unhook our conscience from God’s character and will, so that far from challenging our own preferred standards of right and wrong, our sense of conscience merely reflects them.

As I was thinking last week about why this is, and reflecting on Paul’s paean to the mercy of God, it hit me that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution, and we don’t even want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept his mercy, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick.

When the Bible tells us that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, and that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior, we resist. As much as we call the gospel good news, it often doesn’t come to us as good news. We don’t consider it good news that we’re sinners saved—despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it—solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners, if there’s any way we possibly can; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.

That’s one reason 1 Timothy is so important for us. Paul was far more of a winner than most of us could ever hope to be, a man who would tower over the church of our day just as much as he did in his own time, and yet he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God; for himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” He understood what folks like the Covenant Network don’t, or at least don’t seem to (any more than bad drivers in Dallas), that the good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt. Instead, it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

The coldest case of all

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I’m a fan of mystery stories, going back a very long way. I remember as a kid sitting in my grandparents’ home reading Grampa’s collection—he had an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes, scads of Agatha Christie novels, and probably everything Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout ever wrote. He also had this big blue-dust-jacketed book of true crime stories—it seems to me it might have been a Reader’s Digest book; in retrospect, I’m not sure a child as young as I was should have known who Sam Sheppard was, but at least I turned out OK. (Mostly. I think.)

Anyway, when it comes to reading mysteries, I tend to prefer the Great Detective sort of stories, authors like Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, G. K. Chesterton, and (to name someone a bit more obscure these days) Melville Davisson Post; but on TV, I enjoy the current ascendancy of police procedurals quite a bit. (Though I would say that in my book, the CSI series are really more akin to R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories than to the classic procedural.) One of my favorites—though I don’t think it’s lived up to the promise of its first season—is Cold Case, in part because the show’s premise allows them to move throughout history, and in part because of a superb cast and generally good writing.

That said, I wasn’t all that pleased with last Sunday’s episode, “The Good Death.” It was an agenda episode, pretty much intended as a commercial for euthanasia, and that posed two problems for me. First, it was pretty unsubtle about its agenda; I don’t mind if a story tries to make a point, but I dislike being bludgeoned, even if I agree with the message. Second, in this case, I don’t agree with the message, since I consider euthanasia a barbaric and anti-human practice, even if many who support it do so out of compassionate motives.

In this particular instance, I especially disliked the episode’s subtext, which is that we should allow euthanasia because hospitals just let patients suffer. As a former hospital chaplain, that blindingly white TV hospital with nary a caregiver in sight (except for the nurse who’d been arrested for euthanizing patients, and the doctor whose only function was to give the diagnosis) doesn’t look anything like any of the hospitals I know. In point of fact, the depiction was a shameful libel on our nation’s caregivers. I don’t say all hospitals are perfect, and I would imagine there are those out there that do fall down on the job, but by and large, the doctors and nurses in this country put a great deal of effort into caring for their patients—and in cases of extreme pain, that doesn’t merely include pain control, it begins with it. Clearly, the writers of this episode know little or nothing about hospice care and comfort care—either that or they suppressed what they know in order to make the case for their agenda seem stronger.

The funny thing is, though, that they actually did a pretty good job of defeating their own argument—which is perhaps evidence of the grace of God working its way through the cracks in human intentions. There was, for instance, the closing song (Paul Westerberg’s “Good Day”), which declares, “A good day is any day that you’re alive”—a remarkable affirmation of the value of life in itself to conclude an episode which tried very hard to make a very different point. More significantly, though, the entire structure of the episode undermined its argument. The case for euthanasia rests, philosophically, on the assumption that suffering is an unmitigated evil, unrelievedly bad. Given that, if you aren’t going to be able to live without significant suffering, life isn’t worth living, and you should be allowed to kill yourself—or someone should be allowed to kill you. And yet, over the course of this episode, we were shown a very different reality, as the suffering of the deceased protagonist (whose death Lily Rush and the rest were investigating) proved in fact to be powerfully redemptive. The pain and other effects of a severe brain tumor transformed one of the most selfish and unpleasant characters I’ve ever run across—well, not to put too fine a point on it, back into a human being—bringing him to the point of reconciling with several people he’d hurt, most notably his wife.

It’s not too much to say, looking at this episode, that the cancer was the best thing that ever happened to this guy. His suffering was redemptive; his life was better for the pain he had endured; and yet, from the perspective of the episode, better to kill him (at his request, it must be noted) than to let him suffer any longer. Never mind that had he lived, he might have fully reconciled with his son, thereby allowing the son to heal much sooner from the damage his father had done him through their lives; never mind any of that. Pain hurts, hurting is bad, anything is justified to end it. Except that in that case, wouldn’t it have been better if he’d never gotten sick?

What a week; what a world

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This has been a week about violence and death. I believe it was D. L. Moody who declared that the world has never seen what God can do with one man wholly devoted to him; on Monday, we saw something rather more familiar–what the devil can do with one man who has given himself over to evil. Among the victims lie at least one hero, Dr. Liviu Lebrescu, and a good many people who were determined to do their part to make the world a better place. Most, I’m sure, imagined they had plenty of time to do so; and now, by the evil will of one cowardly human being, they have no more time. I appreciate those who have had something worthwhile to say about this; I particularly appreciate Blest with sons‘ call to us to appreciate the sheepdogs among us; for my part, all I’ve been able to do is say the Kyrie, over and over. Lord, have mercy upon us . . .

But he does. For all our evil, for all we do to mar the good he gives us, he shows us mercy, over and over; as broken and rebellious as we are, he loves us anyway. As obscene a thing as the VT massacre was–somehow worse, at least to me, for coming so close after Easter–yet death does not have the last word. God blesses us despite ourselves, and sometimes even despite our wishes.

In light of that, though I’m not drawing any parallels here, it seemed symbolic to me that two days later, the Supreme Court handed down a decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the federal Partial Birth Abortion Act. It was a much more limited decision than many (especially on the left) would have you believe–as Hadley Arkes expected, it upheld the law only against a facial challenge, with no repudiation of Roe v. Wade, leaving the door wide open for further challenges to the law as it’s actually applied–but as limited as it is, it is still a significant moment. As Joseph Bottum points out, this appears to mean that abortion law no longer enjoys special, protected status–the door is open to treat abortion legislation in the same way as legislation in other areas. Ultimately, we cannot know whether this step will lead to another step in the same direction or will prove but a momentary turn–barring another change in the Court’s membership, it will depend on Anthony Kennedy, who defies certain prediction–but as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus says, there is at least some reason for hope.

And if that comes through, if abortion on demand is no longer the law of the land by judicial fiat, then perhaps we can begin to build some sort of constructive consensus, along the lines Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg suggested a few years ago; even then, it would be a long way to legal recognition of the human rights of the unborn, but perhaps at least we can arrive at a general understanding that abortion is not a good choice, that there ought to be and are better choices, and that we all together need to do everything we can to make them available to and viable for women in need.

In a mirror, darkly

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Since I don’t get HBO, I haven’t seen Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Friends of God, though I’d be interested to watch it; at this point, though, I don’t know much more than what I read in Michael Linton’s post on the First Things blog, On the Square. Linton’s post, though, is plenty and enough to spark reflection—mostly grieved reflection, unfortunately. I’m in no position to pass judgment on Pelosi’s work one way or the other, but it seems that those of us who call ourselves evangelicals (and really, any serious Christian) ought to take a long, hard look at what she shows us of ourselves. The parking-lot scene Linton cites, in which Pelosi is talking with Ted Haggard and two of his church members about their sex lives, looks particularly painful, and not just because of the subsequent revelations of Haggard’s gay infidelity. As Linton puts it,

The possibility that it might be deeply indecent for a Christian minister ever to ask a man to reveal the most intimate nature of his relationship with his wife in front of anyone else—let alone in front of a camera—is apparently not within his ken. And the idea that these men should protect their wives’ privacy and refuse to answer isn’t in their ken either. They boast about their . . . well, you fill in the blank (we’ve all been in locker rooms). It feels so great. It’s all for the Lord. High fives, everybody.

Yeah. For all the fuss many evangelicals make about our country’s moral decline, we too often accept the same assumptions and impulses that have driven that decline; as someone put it, instead of being in the world but not of it, too often we manage instead to be of the world but not in it, creating our own little subculture with “Christianized” versions of everything the world has—including, all too often, its misdirected desires. As such, there’s all too much truth to Linton’s charge that

We, “us,” the Evangelicals with the capital E, have become thoughtless, sensualistic braggarts. . . . What doctrinal rigor we might have had has been progressively smothered by sensuality draped with arrogant irresponsibility. We don’t think; we feel. If it feels right, it’s the Lord’s working, and if it’s the Lord’s working, we can be proud of it.

I don’t want to beat up on evangelicals; I am one, and I make no bones about it. But we have enmeshed ourselves far too deeply in the culture and system of this world, this present age, and we have come to think far too highly of ourselves. To quote Linton again,

We’ve forgotten the Scriptures and allowed ignorance to characterize our preaching, and delirium our worship. In our confidence in God’s grace, we have become presumptuous in our salvation. And we’ve too often confused salvation in heaven with right voting on earth. We need to change. We need to repent.

We need, I would say, to remember that the true gospel is countercultural and costly; we need to set aside the idea that we can, or should, be comfortable with God. We need to go back to Isaiah 6 and remember the reaction of that great prophet when he really saw the glory and holiness of God: he cried out in terror, for he saw his sinfulness for what it really was. And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop singing “worship” songs about how wonderful we are and put the worms back in our hymnody. May God have mercy on us for our presumption.

Atheism and its discontents

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Interesting meditation over on the First Things website by one of their junior fellows, Ryan Anderson, on the question, “Are Atheists Victims of Discrimination?” He concludes that in some ways, yes, they are, but that much of it is self-inflicted (and much of the rest is in reaction to the public bloviations of folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer); and he ends with this:

Atheist discontent still bears a seed of redemption, though, as it points to the fundamental human longing for community, shared values, and shared lives. That they feel this need goes unfulfilled isn’t surprising, since it’s a large element of what religion is all about. Far from unjustly discriminating, then, believers ought to water that seed by charity and prayers so that its seedling might one day be grafted onto the one true Vine.

Amen.

Cannibalism between consenting adults

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You might not have heard this, but the lawyer for Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, is defending his client’s actions on the grounds of mutual consent–Meiwes wanted to eat somebody, Bernd Brandes wanted to be eaten, and who is the state to interfere with the actions of two consenting adults? Unfortunately, as the inimitable Theodore Dalrymple points out, he has a case. Can modern philosophy and jurisprudence really come up with any coherent reason to convict him?

Sex, please, we’re British?

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Sunday’s London Telegraph printed an eye-opening article on sex education in the US and the UK. The US has gone in the direction of abstinence education where the UK has emphasized safe sex and pregnancy prevention. The result? Teen pregnancy rates in the US are the lowest they’ve been in a decade, while the UK is “the pregnancy capital of Europe.”

Gee, maybe there’s something to be said for traditional morality after all . . .

A tree grows in Brooklyn

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Who ever came up with the term “common sense,” anyway? There are few things less common, unfortunately—especially in politics. During Advent and the Christmas season, you can really see that in the tortured compromises we come up with to let people celebrate. To me, the answer has always seemed obvious: stop trying to censor celebrations, stop trying to censor faith or keep it out of the public square, and just let everybody in. Fortunately for me, Peggy Noonan agrees with me, and she’s made a better case for it than I can.While on the subject of holidays: I ran across an interesting opinion piece from the New York Times on Kwanzaa, written by a woman named Debra J. Dickerson. The piece is titled ” A Case of the Kwanzaa Blues,” and it raises some significant concerns about the holiday, concerns I suspect most people (especially those who haven’t studied much history) haven’t considered. Whatever you might think of Ms. Dickerson’s position, I think her comments deserve careful consideration.

“There’s too much to do—I’m bored.”

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Think that sounds silly? Think again. As Charles Colson notes in one of his BreakPoint commentaries, psychiatrist and theologian Richard Winter has made a compelling case for just that thesis in his book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Here’s Colson quoting and summarizing Winter:

When stimulation comes at us from every side,’ he writes, ‘we reach a point where we cannot respond with much depth to anything. Bombarded with so much that is exciting and demands our attention, we tend to become unable to discriminate and choose from among the many options. The result is that we shut down our attention to everything.’ That is, we get bored.Over-stimulated and bored, we start looking for anything that will give our jaded spirits a lift. Winter says that boredom explains the rise in extreme sports, risk taking, and sexual addiction. ‘The enticements to more exciting things have to get louder to catch our dulled attention,’ he writes.

I think Winter is dead on, but there’s more to be said (which he might well say in his book, for all I know). Speaking theologically, the root sin here is the sin of sloth. Now, we tend to think of sloth as laziness, but there’s more to it; the ancients defined sloth as “the sin of not caring enough about anything.” C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, produced a vivid picture of a person fallen into sloth: “a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off,” because there is nothing that such a person cares about enough to pull them out of such a rut and give zest to life.Sloth, at its peak, is what we know as despair; and if Winter’s analysis is correct—and I believe it is—it’s because sloth has become a major besetting sin of people in our culture. We simply don’t care enough to do the work of engaging the world around us, but we still crave stimulation, and thus we demand stimulation without work; and thus the cycle begins. As to what has created this situation . . . well, I think Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart has done an excellent job of explaining that in his essay “Christ and Nothing.” If you’re up for some serious philosophical reflection, check it out.

“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

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Well, maybe not according to CBS execs back in 1965, when “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired; seems they thought it was way too religious—and they didn’t like the jazz, either. Apparently, even though they went ahead and ran it, they planned to bury it afterward. But then people loved it, and it won an Emmy, and so it was back the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that . . .

I can just imagine Lucy’s reaction to those network suits who tried to kill “the longest-running cartoon special known to man” 38 years ago: “You blockheads!”