144 Sermon Illustrations on Morality

The Intellectual event of the year was the publication of James Q. Wilson's "The Moral Sense."

It has become the conventional wisdom that there is no knowledge, only opinion, about morality, and that human beings have no nature other than their capacity to acquire culture. Wilson's warning is: We must be careful of what we think we are, lest we become that. By "scavenging" (his word) in various sciences, particularly evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology, he concludes that cultural diversity although vast, is not the whole story.

Human nature is not infinitely plastic; we cannot be socialized to accept anything. We do not recoil from Auschwitz only because our culture has so disposed us. And the fact that so much about America nowadays, from random savagery to scabrous entertainment, is shocking is evidence for, not against, the moral sense, which is what is shocked.

The development of conscience has been much studied - Jean Piaget's many hours watching Swiss children playing marbles; studies of altruism in the Holocaust; studies of twins, including those separated at infancy. The studies have produced powerful empirical evidence of a moral sense that is component of a universal human nature.

A moral sense is the most plausible explanation of much of our behavior.

Statecraft always is soulcraft, for better or worse, so the political challenge is to encourage the flourishing of a culture that nurtures rather than weakens the promptings of the moral sense.

Inside every person there is (in Konrad Lorenz's phrase) a "parliament of instincts." The moral sense, says Wilson, is among the calmer passions; it needs help against its wilder rivals. We have selfish interests, but also the capacity - and inclination - to judge disinterestedly, even of our own actions.

Wilson asks, Could mankind survive if parents had to have the skill, perseverance and good luck sufficient to teach every rule of right conduct the same way they teach multiplication tables? Right conduct is so important that the tendency to it must be rapidly acquired, which suggests that children are biologically disposed to imitate behavior and learn the underlying rules by observation.

Children are intuitive moralists, equipped by nature for making distinctions and rendering judgments. Instincts founded in nature are developed in the family, strengthened by daily habits - particularly in work-and reinforced by fears of punishment and social ostracism. We acquire virtues as we acquire crafts, by the practice of them. Above all, the family transforms a child's natural sociability into a moral sense.

Most of the things likely to produce enduring happiness - education, employment, stable families - require us to forgo immediate pleasures. What happens when that discipline fails? Look around. Crime used to respond to material circumstances, declining with economic growth. Now it responds to cultural circumstances, to the diminished legitimacy of what are derisively described as "middle class values" - thrift, industriousness, deferral of gratification.

All parents are parenting against today's culture. But for disadvantaged black parents, and particularly of unmarried mothers, the lack of support from the culture is especially damaging. This is so regardless of how many (mostly white) intellectuals blandly embrace single-parent households as "alternative family systems."

Boys are harder to socialize. In modern society, aggressiveness is no longer an adaptive trait. Civilization is partly an attempt to restrain male aggressiveness, or turn it into appropriate channels. The failure of families, and work experiences, to perform that shaping function has many consequences, including Jesse Jackson' words. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking robbery - than look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

#4114

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JUBILEE is the first clue for recovering the Sermon on the Mount for preaching, teaching, and living.

The Sermon on the Mount really does need to be recovered. It is the largest block of Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. In the first century of Christian churches, it was the most cited part of the New Testament. It was how early churches taught what it means to be a Christian. It is Jesus' teaching of the commands we are to teach and obey that Jesus refers to in the Great Commission ("Make disciples of all nations, baptize them, and teach them to obey everything I have commanded you"). The attitude people take to the Sermon on the Mount affects the attitude they take to Jesus' teachings as a whole, and to Jesus as Lord and Savior. Yet the Sermon on the Mount is distressingly absent from Christian preaching, teaching, and living. One big reason for that evasion is the hermeneutic of idealism, which interprets the Sermon on the Mount as high ideals to be reached by human moral effort, but impossible to live in the real world. Preaching or teaching it as high ideals tires people out and causes evasion. Praising Jesus for teaching impossible ideals, and then living some other ethic, makes Jesus the captive of 19th-century idealism; and it makes us unfaithful disciples.

Instead we need a hermeneutic of Hebraic context.(1) The Jubilee in the Hebrew Scriptures is key to understanding the Beatitudes -- the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount that sets the tone for the whole Sermon. If they are interpreted as high ideals, it sets that tone for the remaining teachings. But the beatitudes are based largely on Isaiah 61, which is the passage on which Jesus preached his inaugural sermon in Luke 4:16: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, liberty for the oppressed.(2) Notice how the Beatitudes echo Isaiah 61, the Jubilee passage of deliverance.

ISAIAH 61

61:1 The LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor...

61:2 to proclaim the year of the LORD'S favor ... to comfort all who

mourn,

61:1 To bind up the brokenhearted; (61:7) ... they will inherit a

double portion in their land.

61:3 They will be called oaks of righteousness.

61:11 So the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness and praise spring up

before all nations.

MATTHEW 5

5:3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of

heaven.

5:4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5:5 Blessed are the meek (or the tamed, as Clarence Jordan translated

it) for they will inherit the earth.

5:6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness...

5:10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for

theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

That's not about high ideals and impossible effort; it's good news about

God's grace-based deliverance. In Talmudic lectionaries, Isaiah 61 was

linked with the Jubilee in Leviticus 25. When Jesus said that today this

Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, "for rabbinic Judaism and thus for

the listeners of Jesus it most likely meant ... the Jubilee year, the time

when the inequities accumulated through the years are to be crossed off and

all God's people will begin again at the same point."(3)

Once we see this, we see that the Beatitudes are set in the prophetic context

of God's deliverance. They are not about hard teachings and impossible

ideals, but about God delivering us. They are about joy, happiness,

blessedness, because we are being given the opportunity to participate in

God's deliverance. They are beatitudes or blessings, not exhortations or pep

talks. Jesus is announcing the kingdom is at hand and we get to participate!

The focus is on the joy of participation in God's deliverance, on God's

grace, not our perfection.

A second clue is like the first: when Jesus teaches about the Kingdom of God,

he is teaching in line with the Hebrew Scriptures, and especially Isaiah.

(As a good Jew, Matthew was reluctant to use the holy name of God, so he

wrote Kingdom of Heaven, but like Mark and Luke, he meant Kingdom of God.)

The shape of the reign of God was not an unknown for Jesus' hearers. The

theme of the coming reign of God or Kingdom of God recurs often in Isaiah.

Besides Isaiah 61, see also Isaiah 9:6-7; 52:7; 60:1ff., etc. The

characteristics of the coming Reign of God in Isaiah are fourfold: salvation,

justice/righteousness, peace, and God's presence (often symbolized by light).

Notice how much Jesus emphasized these four themes in the beatitudes: peace

(peacemakers), justice (righteousness), salvation (mercy), and presence (the

pure in heart will see God). Jesus continues these four themes in the rest

of the Sermon on the Mount. These four characteristics of the reign of God

already began in Jesus' teachings, deeds, and community. We can begin to

experience them as mustard seeds now, in Christ; they will come in fullness

in God's future.

The third clue for recovering the Sermon on the Mount for preaching and

living is to understand the central theme of righteousness (Matthew 5:6, 10,

20; 6:1, 33). Again, we find the meaning by studying the Hebrew Scriptures.

Jesus taught not in English or Greek, but in Aramaic, citing the Scriptures

in Hebrew. The Hebrew for righteousness is TSEDAQAH, which is very often

used as synonymous with MISHPAT, justice. It means the kind of justice that

delivers from bondage and exclusion and restores community. It means

delivering, community-restoring justice. That is why Jesus speaks so often

of giving alms to the poor, giving to the one who begs, investing our money

in God's reign and righteousness rather than hoarding it. It is, again, a

Jubilee theme -- a theme of deliverance. It is not impossible ideals, but

realistic attention to the kind of justice that restores people to community.

The fourth clue is that the structure of the Sermon is not twofold

antitheses, but threefold triads. The first member of each triad is always a

traditional piety whose verb is either a subjunctive or future, like "thou

shalt not kill," or "when you pray." The second member is always a diagnosis

of a vicious cycle with a continuous action verb like "being angry with your

brother," or praying to be seen by others. The third member is where the

emphasis comes, and is in an imperative, like "go and be reconciled to your

brother," or "go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who

is in secret." The command is always a practical, doable transforming

initiative, based on grace, and is the way of deliverance from the vicious

cycle. Jesus does not teach the impossible ideal of never being angry, but

the realistic transforming initiative of going to make peace with the person

who is separated from us by anger. He does not teach the impossible ideal of

praying, giving alms, and fasting in public while thinking only of God and

not of whether other people are noticing us, but the transforming initiative

of doing these practices secretly so you can think of God singly. He does

not teach the impossible ideal of hoarding money but keeping your eye and

heart fixed on God, but the transforming initiative of investing your money

in God's reign and justice. This threefold structure, with the emphasis on

the imperative in the third member, is consistent from Matthew 5:21 through

7:11.(4)

There were fourteen such triads, just as Matthew's gospel begins with three

sets of fourteen generations from Abraham to Jesus. Matthew loved numbers

like this, and has about 75 triads in his Gospel. Once we study this pattern

of fourteen transforming initiatives carefully, we see that each is a

transforming initiative, each is grace-based, realistic, practical, doable,

and the way of deliverance from the vicious cycles that we get stuck in.'

The fifth clue is that Jesus does not teach us "do not resist evil." He

himself certainly resisted evil. He confronted evil directly. The Greek in

Matthew 5:39 is ME ANTISTENAI TO PONERO. ANTISTENAI in the rest of the New

Testament does not mean simply "resist," but "resist with vengeance and

violence."(6)

TO PONERO has the grammatical ending that means it is either dative -- "do

not resist evil" -- or instrumental -- "do not resist by evil means." The

grammatical rule is that you determine which it is by what makes sense in the

context. If it means "do not resist evil," it makes no sense in the context;

it contradicts Jesus' direct and consistent resistance of evil. But if it

means "do not resist by evil means," it is thoroughly consistent with Jesus'

actions.(7)

Clearly it should be translated "do not resist revengefully by evil means."

Furthermore, it is decisively confirmed by Paul when he reports Jesus'

teaching in Romans 12:19-21 exactly as we have seen: "Do not take revenge....

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." How much reading

of Jesus as teaching impossible ideals could have been avoided if Matthew

5:39 had not been translated in this impossible way!

As Romans 12 reports it, Jesus is not teaching the impossible ideal of not

resisting evil, but the practical initiatives of transforming your enemy into

a friend by feeding your enemy if she is hungry and giving her something to

drink if she is thirsty. In Matthew 5:38ff., the initiatives that Jesus

teaches are to turn the left cheek, go the second mile, give your shirt, and

give to the one who begs. None of these is a doormat strategy, as they are

usually taken in our culture. To understand them, we need to see that in

Jesus' Jewish culture they each mean not simply to do what the other demands,

but to seize the initiative, stand up for your dignity, and ask for justice

and reconciliation, as Martin Luther King did. I do not have the space to

explain the meaning in context further here, and have to refer to my book or

Walter Wink's book in the footnotes. There you can see a more extensive

explanation of this and the other clues that I am presenting in a very small

space here.

The sixth clue is to see that Matthew 5:48 doesn't mean "be perfect" in the

sense of morally ideal, but "be merciful," as Luke 6:36 says. "Nowhere in

the Old Testament or in the Dead Sea Scrolls is God called" perfect; you

can't measure God by ideals of moral perfection. Rather it means "be all-

inclusive" as God is all-inclusive in giving sun and rain to the just and

unjust alike.(8)

That is a more accurate translation for three reasons: unlike "be perfect" in

the sense of morally ideal; it makes sense in Aramaic and Hebrew; it makes

sense in the context of Matt. 5:45; and it agrees with Luke 6:36.

The seventh clue to recovering the Sermon on the Mount is to pray and

practice: Pray, puffing our trust not in what Jesus' compatriots called the

"dogs" and "pigs" (the powers and authorities of the status quo), but in God.

God knows our needs even before we ask, and unlike the Roman authorities

knows how to give good gifts far more than we do (Matt. 5:44; 6:5-15; 7:6-

11). So pray, relying on God's grace. And practice Jesus' words (Matt.

7:16, 22, 24). If we don't start practicing what Jesus commands, then we

will surely rationalize self-defensively by teaching that the Sermon on the

Mount is high ideals that we cannot live. We will praise Jesus as idealistic

without listening to his way of discipleship, and we will follow some other

way.

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End Notes:

1. See Pinchas Lapide, "The Sermon on the Mount: Utopia or Program for

Action?" (Orbis, 1986).

2. Robert Guelich, "The Matthean Beatitudes: Entrance Requirements or

Eschatological Blessings?" Journal of Biblical Literature 95 (1976),

415-34; Guelich, "The Sermon on the Mount" (Dallas: Word, 1982) 62ff.

3. John H. Yoder, "Politics of Jesus," 2nd edition (Eerdmans, 1994) pp. 29-

30.

4. The one exception is the teaching on divorce in Matt. 4:31-32, where the

transforming initiative is missing. But Paul reports the initiative

that Jesus taught in I Cor. 7:11 -- "be reconciled."

5. I develop this insight and its implications for recovering the Sermon on

the Mount for realistic living more fully in "Just Peacemaking:

Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace" (Westminster/John Knox

Press, 1992), and the forthcoming "Christian Ethics as Following Jesus"

with David Gushee (InterVarsity Press).

6. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Augsburg Fortress Press, 1992), chapter

9.

7. Clarence Jordan, "The Substance of Faith and other Cotton Patch Sermons"

(Association Press, 1972), 69.

8. W. D. Davies and Dale Allison, "A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on

The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (T&T Clark, 1988), Vol. 1, 561-563.

Glen Harold Stassen is the Lewis Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of "Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture and Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace."

#4426

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"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is out of harmony with the moral law."

It was with these very words, in his memorable Letter from the Birmingham Jail, that Martin Luther King, Jr., threw down the gauntlet in his great Civil Rights crusade. King refused to obey what he regarded as an immoral law that did not square with the law of God.

All across America today, millions of people are celebrating the birthday of this courageous man, and deservedly so. He was a fearless battler for truth, and all of us are in his debt because he remedied past wrongs and brought millions of Americans into the full riches of citizenship.

In schools and on courthouse steps, people will be quoting his "I Have a Dream" speech today. It is an elegant and powerful classic. But I would suggest that one of Dr. King's greatest accomplishments, one which will be little mentioned today because it has suddenly become "politically incorrect," is his advocacy of the true moral foundations of law.

King defended the transcendent source of the Law's authority. In doing so he took a conservative Christian view of law. In fact, he was perhaps the most eloquent advocate of this viewpoint in his time, as, interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas may be today.

Writing from a jail cell, King declared that the code of justice is not man's law: It is God's law. Imagine a politician making such a comment today? We all remember the controversy that erupted weeks ago when George W. Bush made reference to his Christian faith in a televised national debate.

But the figure we celebrate today is a man who built his whole case on the argument, set forth by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that "An unjust law is no law at all." To be just, King argued, our laws must always reflect God's Law.

This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters have suggested, simply what courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?

Ever since Dr. King's day, the United States Supreme Court has been moving us step-by-step away from the positions of this great Civil Rights leader. To continue in this direction, as I have written, can only lead to disastrous consequences -- indeed, the loss of self-governing democracy.

So I would challenge each of us today to use this occasion to reflect not just on his great crusade for Civil Rights but also on his wisdom in bringing Law back to its moral foundations.

Many think of King as some kind of liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dr. King was a great conservative who stood on the shoulders of Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, striving without apology to restore our heritage of justice.

This is a story I tell in my book, How Now Shall We Live?: a great moment in history when a courageous man applied the law of God to the unjust laws of our time, and made a difference. And that is the lesson we should teach our kids on this holiday. It is not just another day off from school or a day to go to the mall.

Read through King's letter with you kids: It's the most important civics lesson they'll ever get.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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A former Archbishop of Canterbury has labeled Princess Diana a “false goddess” with “loose sexual morals,” The Sunday Times newspaper said. Lord Coggan, who was the head of the Anglican church from 1974 to 1980, said the nationwide grieving and admiration for Diana, who died nearly a year ago, had turned Britain into a godless nation.

“Along came this false goddess and filled the gap for a time,” said Coggan. “The British people identified with someone who had pretty loose morals and certainly loose sexual morals.” The newspaper did not say where Coggan was speaking. His words echoed those of Sunday school teachers who sparked a row last week after they told children the Princess of Wales went to hell because of the immoral and unchristian lifestyle she led. Angry parents withdrew their children from the Sunday school and several church leaders leaped to Diana's defense.

It was a matter of apparent coincidence that I ran across two items that just may be related. The only obvious thing they have in common is that they scan the 20-year period from 1973 to 1993. But I suspect there is something more significant.

The first was a statistical overview of American prisons during the period. In 1973 there were 210,000 people in prisons across the United States; the incarceration rate was 98 per 100,000 of our citizens, well behind the infamously high rates of imprisonment in the Soviet Union and South Africa. At year's end last year, 856,000 Americans were in prison, with another 425,000 in our jails; the total incarceration rate was thus 512 per 100,000.

The United States of America now leads the world in the percentage of its citizens behind bars. Are we safer with these people off the streets? Hardly. Violent crime has increased over 75 percent from 1973 to the present.

The second was a 1973 article from Newsweek. A syndicated columnist lamented what he called "The End of Outrage." His thesis was that events in the '60s moved us away from moral outrage over obvious evil to ethical insensitivity. "Nothing is forbidden. We cannot be shocked in the United States anymore," he wrote. "We are so cool and so hard and so hip any more, we are so wisely cynical to every one of life's darkest possibilities, that there has grown a large dead spot inside us all. Somewhere along the [way] ... our last remaining bits of innocence got stomped to death."

The writer cited the then-current movie, "Deep Throat" and the then-recent network broadcasts of such events as "Alice Cooper's sex-and-violence show" and Chuck Berry singing "I Want to Play with My Ding-a-Ling." He dared raise the possibility that things such as these might have a negative impact on young people.

Wonder what he might think about today's crop of movies, rapper Ice-T's song that glorifies killing police, Madonna's "Girlie Show" tour, a culture where the dialogues of Beavis and Butt-Head are more studied than the dialogues of Plato, and where ABC treats the nation to Stephen Bochco's indulgent exercise with R-rated language, nudity and sex on NYPD Blue's opening episode?

A shock-proof culture has been created in America. Nothing is wrong or immoral. Nothing can be forbidden. No lines can be drawn. So nothing is sacred, and no one is safe!

If we ever realize what is being done to truth, values, and decency in our world, perhaps we will move beyond current "political correctness" to champion a restoration of civility. If something doesn't happen soon, what will our situation be 20 years from now? -- Rubel Shelly; Nashville, TN

Bertrand Russell's critique of Christianity has been one of this century's most conspicuous. It carried credibility because Russell was generally acknowledged to be a genius of the first rank, and because he attacked with such an intriguing mixture of passion and wit. Now that we have an excellent account of the first half of his life by Ray Monk (whose previous book was a widely acclaimed biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein), I want to raise what has always seemed to me an interesting question: Why did Bertrand Russell hate Christianity so much?

I will be speculating on the basis of Monk's account about the psychological causes of Russell's antipathy. This is risky for a mere philosopher, and I do not claim any psychological expertise. Monk doesn't either. But Russell is so articulate about his own mental states that a substantial account can be constructed without trying to go beyond what he says himself. A trained psychologist will undoubtedly see more, and see more clearly; but there is more than enough material in Russell's own words to license a layman's interest.

There is also something distasteful about an opponent mucking around in the history of somebody's personal life after his death. Should philosophers expect to have their views evaluated in the light of how they lived their lives? This is controversial. Kierkegaard, for example, condemned any attempt to separate the two, especially where the question is a philosopher's relation to God. Ethical and religious knowledge, he said, "has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower." In Russell's case there is an additional reason for overcoming the distaste. He seems to have relished inspection. He expected others to find his life fascinating and was not at all constrained by the usual sense of shame.

Monk's account is, as far as I can tell, factually accurate, and it has the great merit of being written by a philosopher. As Russell says when talking about the biographers of Socrates, he would himself rather have his biography written by an enemy who is a philosopher than by a friend who is not. It is possible to quibble with some of Monk's treatments of surrounding philosophers such as Bradley and McTaggart. Also troubling from the standpoint of objectivity is Monk's clear lack of sympathy for the piety of Russell's grandmother, who had charge of his upbringing after his parents' deaths. Monk quotes Russell's brother Frank at length to show the awfulness of the atmosphere at their grandmother's house. But the two brothers had very different relations with their grandmother, and Bertrand's feelings were always, I think, more ambivalent. By and large, however, the biography is convincing as a philosophical account as well as a personal history.

It is also well written and is, in fact, a page-turner. Monk does not spare us the gory details of Russell's betrayals and lies, his murderous rages and his devastating coldness, his arrogance and his self-pity. And yet, despite all of this, Monk clearly admires his subject and expresses both his admiration and his dislike with a dry and detached wit, which reminds one of Russell himself. Thus Monk records Russell's reaction to D. H. Lawrence's visit to Cambridge, "[He was] disgusted with Camb., but not with me." Monk adds, "[This] seemed to be just what Russell would expect from someone blessed with an infallible perceptiveness."

What keeps the reader fascinated is the unfolding of this double truth; that one of the century's brightest, most influential thinkers seems to have been at the same time capable of appalling cruelty and moral blindness.

One of Monk's major themes is that Russell was throughout his life terrified of the possibility that he might be, or might be going, mad. The cover picture of the book is a reworking of a drawing by Augustus John, which the book also contains. It is interesting to compare the cover with the drawing, because John's portrait of an eccentric has been turned into the portrait of a madman. There was indeed madness in the family, or at least so Russell was himself convinced. His grandmother used this argument in seeking to dissuade him from marrying Alys Pearsall Smith (the daughter of Hanna Whitall Smith, who wrote The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life). She found evidence of inherited instability in Alys's family as well and said it would be wrong for two people with such heredity to have children. When Russell decided to marry Alys anyway, he promised his grandmother that there would be no sleeping together. "Now that I know she is going to die soon," he wrote to Alys in justification, "I mind less giving her hopes not likely to be fulfilled."

Russell's sense of the hereditary danger was confirmed by his own experience. An informal account of what we would now call a psychopathic personality is the disorder of someone who is amoral, who harbors great rage that he usually hides, who considers almost all others inferior, and who is a pathological liar. Monk gives us evidence of all of these traits in these first 49 years of Russell's life. I am not trying to say here that Russell was a psychopath, but that he had evidence in his own life to make it reasonable for him to fear that he was predisposed to some such disorder.

There is first Russell's extraordinary lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others, except on rare and exalted occasions. Beatrice Webb, after a visit, put it this way, "[Russell] looks at the world from a pinnacle of detachment. What he lacks is sympathy and tolerance for other people's emotions." One of the most chilling examples of this trait is the story of Russell's relationship with Helen Dudley, whom he met in America and persuaded to come to England to live with him. When she arrived, he discovered he was no longer in love with her and got rid of her, as a result of which she suffered a complete and permanent mental breakdown. In his Autobiography, Russell puts it this way: "I had relations with her from time to time ... and I broke her heart."

It is not just what Russell did that is chilling, but the fact that he talks about this and other such episodes as though they had happened to somebody else. It is as though, in Kierkegaard's terms, he was merely the lookout on the mast, and not the captain of his own ship; indeed, his life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Kierkegaard's aesthete in Either/Or. It is Kierkegaard's point that the aesthete has not managed the transition into the ethical life. In this, as in so much else, Russell knew himself. He was aware of his unusual capacity for "cold-blooded immorality."

Beatrice Webb continued, "He is a good hater." Russell's desire to kill people was sometimes quite literal. Indeed, this was one of his fears about his heredity, because of the fate of his Uncle Willy, who had lost his memory and ended up in a workhouse infirmary. As in Plato's example in the Republic, the police gave Uncle Willy back a knife he owned and with it he went on a murderous rampage. When institutionalized, he continued to be prone to apparently random attacks of rage and violence. Russell had moods in which he hated the whole human race. But he also had to fight against the desire to kill quite specific people, such as his friend Fitzgerald: "On one occasion, in an access of fury, I got my hands on his throat and started to strangle him. I intended to kill him, but when he began to grow livid, I relented. I do not think he knew that I intended murder."

Russell's sense of superiority and therefore isolation is what gives Monk his subtitle, "The Spirit of Solitude." "When I am talking to an ordinary person," Russell says, "I feel I am talking baby language, and it makes me lonely." In prison because of his antiwar activities, he reports that "Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner. One is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one's own state-room." Even when the announcement came that the war was over, Russell found that "the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet." The biography is one long story of Russell's attempts to break out of his sense of isolation, even from his family and friends. He never succeeds, except for brief and ecstatic moments.

One of the causes is that his friends always end up ceasing to trust him because he cannot resist constantly lying to them. He seems to have been a pathological liar. This started very early, with his grandmother. He maintained the outward show of piety, while departing further and further from the Christian faith. It became, however, a recognizable pattern in all his relationships, even those he cared most about. "You simply don't speak the truth," said D. H. Lawrence to him. "You simply are not sincere." Russell himself describes the crucial row with Wittgenstein this way: "Then he said he never knew whether I was speaking the truth or being polite, so I got vexed and refused to say another word."

Finally, there are some troubling suggestions that Russell increasingly got into the habit of lying to himself. One of the almost disarming features of Russell's character is that he was clearly aware of this tendency (as he was of all the others I have mentioned).

As one might expect, both the deception and the self-deception are painfully clear in Russell's descriptions of his endlessly complicated love affairs, but self-deception is also present in his philosophical work. There was in this an intellectual dishonesty that "spread like poison" and caused him to think (as he did repeatedly) of suicide. Thus he went on lecturing and writing as though he could ignore what (in some sense) he knew, that Wittgenstein's work in the Tractatus destroyed the connection Russell was trying to make between logic and psychology. From early on he was aware of his tendency to self-deception and therefore also aware of the danger of losing touch with his "inmost self," because the "crust" he was building up around it had become so thick.

I want to make three suggestions about why Russell hated Christianity so much. Suppose we grant, first, that Russell was afraid that he might be, or might be going, mad. How did he respond to this fear? With two incompatible strategies, both present in Kierkegaard's description of the aesthete.

The first was, in Russell's own words, to "retreat to the surface." This is a metaphor that relies on a strong dichotomy between reason and emotion. Russell means that he wanted to leave all of the murky passions down below and come up for air to the clear light of the sun. This is a strategy that he implemented by "intellect tempered by flippancy." I want to suggest as a hypothesis that he thought of rejecting God and rejecting his sense of his own sin as parts of this necessary retreat to the surface.

This strategy seems to alternate, however, with another one, which is to find a healthy outlet for his impulses in his sexual relations. Thus he comments about Dostoevsky's murderous protagonist in Crime and Punishment that "where the impulse is not trivial, it produces pronounced mania ... unless some strong and healthy passion is found to replace the one resisted." He also, I think, hated Christianity because it stood against the "healthy" expression of his desires, and thus required a dangerous repression. The Christian God is the enemy, whichever of the two strategies is adopted. God is either hounding him in his internal life or trying to block him by "senseless prohibitions" from the only kind of external release that would do any good.

Second, there is strong evidence earlier in Russell's life of his making a dichotomy between reason and passion, and his locating the appeal of Christianity with the latter. There is an initial premise here about what reason requires, which (given the dichotomy) ensures that Christianity will be classed with passion. For Christianity to be credible, Russell thinks, it has to be proved. He sounds very like W. K. Clifford, whose book influenced him deeply just at the point he was rejecting Christianity as an adolescent. He reflects Clifford not only in his views but in the "robustious pathos" (as William James puts it) with which Clifford expressed them.

Clifford's principle was that Christian belief, just like any belief, needs evidence; and in the case of Christianity there was just not enough evidence for a responsible thinker to accept it. Russell imagines saying to God when he arrives at the pearly gates, "Not enough evidence." As an adolescent, he vowed to accept "only scientific arguments" for belief in God and "to reject all sentiment." But if belief in the Christian God is what some philosophers now call "properly basic," it is a mistake to think that it has to be proved at all.

This review is not the place to pursue that argument. The point here is that once Russell had convinced himself that the evidence was deficient, and that all the standard arguments for the existence of God failed, he was then free to conclude that it is only emotion that holds Christians in thrall. "I do not think," he says in Why I Am Not a Christian, "that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds."

Third, there were gods still in principle available for his intellect, namely, the god of the Platonists or, alternatively, the god of Spinoza. But because of the empiricist turn of his thought, Russell gradually ceased to believe in these gods as well. There was, first, what he calls "a retreat from Pythagoras." This was painful for Russell because he could not bear to think of rationality in other than transcendent terms, as an access to a kind of being beyond the realm of nature. But he came to think that this kind of Platonism could not be justified. And in his Autobiography he records how he lost belief even in the somewhat abstract god that Spinoza allowed himself. "I have loved a ghost," he says, "and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral."

Russell still felt, throughout the period covered by Monk, an acute sense of the absence of God and a longing for his presence. "The longing for religion is at times almost unbearably strong," he writes to Lady Ottoline Morrell. It may be that he tended toward religiosity in his writing to her just because he perceived she liked it. But the sentiment can be found repeated in several contexts. This sense of loss is what makes me think his early response to his grandmother's piety is more complex than Monk allows. Every now and again, this longing for God breaks through, sometimes as a sense of the gap between what God wants him to be and what he is, and sometimes as a sense of the possibility that he might become better.

An example of the first kind of experience is the intense prayer for forgiveness he records in his diary as an undergraduate, after he has supposedly lost his faith, "O God forgive me; I have sinned grievously." Later, the sense of sin keeps recurring, as a kind of self-hatred. "The disgust of human life that I have been feeling lately is generally a sign of unrecognized sin." An example of the second kind of experience is what he calls his "conversion." It came after reading Gilbert Murray's translation of the Hippolytus, when Russell was with Evelyn Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead's wife) during one of her bouts of pain. In his Autobiography he writes,

Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the

following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can

penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that

religious teachers have preached.... For a time, a sort of mystic

illumination possessed me. Having for years cared only for exactness and

analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty.

On another occasion Russell found himself on his knees in a church in Verona, praying for strength to subdue his instincts. He does not associate either experience explicitly with God, but what strikes this reader is the echoes of Russell's grandmother's piety, which was also a religion of love, duty, and suffering.

A Christian can see these experiences as God trying to break through, as the untiring chase by the hound of heaven. But Russell himself could not interpret them that way, or at least he could not do so for long. My hypothesis about why he could not do so is the one I gave earlier. The experience of God's presence and his own failure was just too painful for him, and the pain was too close to his fear of madness.

One response was the retreat to the surface and to disengagement. But like Kierkegaard's aesthete he was, paradoxically, aware of himself. He was aware that he was not only losing a substantial God but also himself turning into a ghost. Another response was to re-engage in his sexual liaisons, which in turn generated a vicious cycle of self-disgust.

It may be that this hypothesis is hopelessly amateur. But we need some explanation for Russell's hatred of Christianity. It is not merely that he thinks Christianity mistaken; he writes about it with a passion that springs from some deep personal source. This leads him to some surprising errors of judgment and overstatement, such as his claim that Christianity has been the enemy of modern science from its beginning, or his claim that religious persecution starts and ends with Judaism and Christianity.

But I am not going to try to treat these claims further here. I am looking forward to Monk's second volume, which will cover the period from 1921 to Russell's death in 1970. It will be interesting to see how the hypothesis fares about his life as the progress of a Kierkegaardian aesthete toward the various forms of despair and its denial. Will we, for example, find Russell increasingly seeking distraction in various public contexts from his internal and private failures, and increasingly distanced from any core philosophical commitments of his own? In the first volume we have, in any case, a fascinating study of Russell's rejection of God, fascinating because he and his biographer have given us such an acute and unvarnished description of this extraordinary life's trajectory.

________________________________________________________

Book reviewed --

Bertrand Russell:

The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921

By Ray Monk

Free Press

695 pp.; $35

________________________________________________________

John Hare is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and author most recently of The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford University Press).

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 26

7B3lm7B326b7430

*

THREEFOLD DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN

-------------------------------

In the New Testament completely adequate teaching is provided as to the principles of conduct the Christian will follow if he truly presents his body “a living sacrifice” (Rom 12:1) and walks “in the Spirit” (Eph 5:9). In Titus 2:11-14 is to be found a convenient outline around which to group these principles. First in this passage it is majestically stated that God’s grace brings us salvation. But His grace then teaches us to live soberly, righteously and godly. These are three important lines of responsibility: the believer is to live soberly with regard to himself (Rom 12:3); righteously with regard to his fellow men; and godly with regard to the Lord. The same truth can be more or less expressed in a somewhat different way: We should seek to live in accordance with the precepts of grace because (1) this will please God (Heb 13:16) and will demonstrate our love for Christ (John 14:15); (2) it will help others (Matt 5:16; Titus 3:8,14); (3) it will bring true joy and blessing to our own hearts (John 15:10-11).

The following compilation, though not exhaustive, contains some of the most important of these precepts.

DUTIES TOWARD GOD

-----------------

I. Positive

1. Trust Him. (Mark 11:22; John 14:1, ASV; Heb 11:6)

2. Love Him and seek to know Him better. (1 John 5:2; Phil 3:10, 15;

Jam 4:8)

3. Be thankful to Him; worship and praise Him. (John 4:23; Col 3:15;

Heb 13:15.)

4. Serve Him. (Rom 12:6-8, 11; 1 Cor 15:58)

5. Pray to Him. (Luke 18:1; Rom 12:12; Eph 6:18; Phil 4:6; Col 4:2; 1

Tim 2:2)

6. Live in accordance with His will. (Rom 12:1; Heb 13:21; Jam 4:7)

7. Walk in the Spirit. (Gal 5:16, 25; Eph 5:18)

8. Hold fast to sound doctrine and contend for the faith. (2 Tim 1:13;

Heb 13:9; Jude 3)

9. Witness for Christ. (John 15:27; Acts 1:8; 1 Pet 3:15)

10. Do everything as unto Him. (1 Cor 10:31; Eph 6:7-8; Col 3:17,23-24)

11. Be diligent in devotion and study of His Word. (John 5:39; Col 3:16;

2 Tim 2:15; Jam 4:8; 1 Pet 2:2)

II. Negative

1. Do not have idols. (1 Cor 10:7, 14; Eph 5:3; Phil 3:19; Col 3:5;

1 Tim 6:17; Heb 13:15; 1 John 5:21)

2. Do not receive false teachers. (2 John 10)

3. Do not mock or speak against God. (Gal 6:7; Col 3:8)

DUTIES TOWARD OTHER HUMAN BEINGS

--------------------------------

I. Positive

1. Love all, especially our brethren. (John 15:17; Rom 12:10;

1 Cor 16:14; 1 Pet 1:22; 1 John 3:23; 4:7)

2. Be sympathetic and compassionate. (Eph 4:32; Phil 2:4; Col 3:12)

3. Forgive and forbear. (Rom 12:19; Eph 4:32; Col 3:13)

4. Deal honestly and fairly. (Rom 12:17b; 13:7; 13:13; 1 Thess 4:12;

Jam 2:1)

5. Do good to all and help all. (Rom 12:13; Gal 6:2, 10;

1 Thess 5:15; Titus 3:1; Heb 13:16; Jam 4:17; 3 John 11)

6. Tell the truth. (Eph 4:25)

7. Be courteous and live peaceably with all. (Rom 12:18;

1 Pet 2:17; 3:8)

8. Treat others as we would like for them to treat us. (Luke 6:31;

Rom 12:17a)

9. Provide a good example for others. (1 Cor 8:9, 13; Phil 2:15)

10. Urge brethren to good works and seek to restore backsliders.

(Gal 6:1; Heb 10:24)

II. Negative

1. Do not lie or bear false witness. (Eph 4:25; Col 3:9; Titus 2:3)

2. Do not steal. (Eph 4:28; 1 Pet 4:15)

3. Do not murder. (1 Pet 4:15)

4. Do not commit adultery or fornication. (1 Cor 6:18;

1 Thess 4:13)

5. Do not judge others or speak evil of them. (Rom 14:13; Titus 3:2;

Jam 4:11; cf. John 7:24)

6. Do not be unequally yoked with an unbeliever. (2 Cor 6:14)

7. Do not have fellowship with professing Christians who live in

scandalous sin. (1 Cor 5:11; 2 Thess 3:14)

8. Do not go to law with other believers. (1 Cor 6:lff)

9. Do not glory in men. (1 Cor 3:21)

10. Avoid troublemakers and useless disputes. (Rom 16:17; 2 Tim 2:23;

Titus 3:12)

11. Do not have unpaid debts. (Rom 13:8)

DUTIES TOWARD SELF

------------------

I. Positive

1. Be holy. (1 Pet 1:15; 2:11; 2 Pet 3:1)

2. Cleave to the good and do good to all. (Rom 12:9; 1 Thess 5:15)

3. Study the Word of God and meditate on sacred things.

(1 Thess 4:11; 2 Tim 2:15)

4. Grow spiritually. (2 Pet 3:18)

5. Think on good things. (Phil 4:8)

6. Think soberly of yourself. (Rom 12:3)

7. Be ambitious in the right way. (1 Cor 12:31; 14:1; 2 Cor 5:4)

8. Be content with what God gives you. (Heb 13:5)

9. Rejoice in the Lord. (Rom 12:12; Phil 3:1; 4:4; 1 Thess 5:16)

10. Live in the light of the judgment seat of Christ. (1 Cor 9:24)

11. Judge yourself and confess sins to God. (1 Cor 11:31; 2 Cor 13:5;

1 John 1:9)

12. Conserve time for good purposes. (Eph 5:11; Col 4:5)

13. Cultivate your mind. (1 Pet 1:13)

14. Do useful work. (Eph 4:28; 2 Thess 3:12)

15. Keep your body clean and in good health. (1 Cor 6:15; 6:19,20;

10:31; Rom 12:1)

II. Negative

1. Abhor evil. (Rom 12:9; 1 Thess 5:22)

2. Avoid pride. (Rom 12:3; Jam 4:10; 1 Pet 5:6)

3. Do not conform to or love the world. (Rom 12:2; 1 John 2:15)

4. Do not fellowship with evil. (Eph 5:11)

5. Do not sin through anger. (Eph 4:26)

6. Do not worry. (Phil 4:6; 1 Pet 5:7; 1 John 14:1,27)

7. Do not be lazy. (Rom 12:1)

8. Do not use filthy speech. (Eph 4:29; 5:4)

9. Do not become drunk. (Eph 5:18)

10. Do not complain. (1 Cor 10:10; Phil 2:14)

GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF CONDUCT UNDER GRACE

-----------------------------------------

The above list certainly shows that there are many specific commands

given to the Christian in the New Testament with regard to his conduct.

Nevertheless life under grace is not defined down to the very last detail

as was life under law. Instead grand principles are provided whereby we

may test all things if occasion should ever arise where we were in doubt

as to what we should do. For such principles the following verses should

be carefully studied:

Romans 6:4; 2 Corinthians 6:17; Ephesians 4:1; 5:1,8,15;

Colossians 1:10; 4:5; 1 Thessalonians 2:12; 4:1; 1 John 2:6.

*

Nobody who watched the film ALIEN will ever forget the scene that takes place when the astronauts are having dinner: A lizard-like creature comes bursting through a crewman's torso and scurries away. Talk about heartburn!

It's one of the scariest films ever made. But the story behind the horror genre is even scarier.

In his newly re-issued book HORROR: A BIOGRAPHY, professor E. Michael Jones advances a fascinating thesis. Horror fiction, he argues, grew out of the sexual decadence of the Enlightenment.

Few people embraced the sexual decadence more eagerly than the English poet Percy Shelley. Shelley's first wife killed herself after he abandoned her to live with Mary Godwin. Shelley then victimized his new wife, Mary, even encouraging her to sleep with his friends.

As tragedy followed tragedy, a remorseful Mary became disillusioned with radical ideals. But she could not relieve her conscience, Jones writes, because she didn't understand repentance. "Literary catharsis seemed the only way" to purge her soul.

So Mary began writing FRANKENSTEIN. According to Jones, Mary's experience explains the genesis of horror films. We recognize, as she did, that the moral order is true, but if we suppress that, it comes back in our imagination as an avenging monster.

This was evident in the story of FRANKENSTEIN. Dr. Frankenstein wants to play God, to create life on his own terms -- just as Percy Shelley had created an Enlightenment sexual ethic. But instead of designing a superb new species, Frankenstein gives life to a murderous monster.

The avenging monster from the id, as Jones calls it, took new form during the second phase of the Enlightenment -- a time when syphilis had contaminated European blood. Tragically, adulterous husbands often infected their innocent wives. DRACULA -- a novel about a vampire who infects the blood of innocent girls -- symbolizes this deadly plague. DRACULA's author, Bram Stoker, had syphilis himself.

As with FRANKENSTEIN, the true story of horror in the author's life -- that is, sexuality divorced from the moral law -- "is repressed and replaced by a monster who points to the [truth]."

A century later, another vengeful monster emerged in the wake of the modern sexual revolution: that is, the creature in the 1979 film ALIEN. The man chosen to create the monster, H. R. Giger, claims he never procured an abortion for his mistress. And yet, Jones notes, "his art is full of images of abortion and dead babies." In any event, Jones writes, Giger's thwarting of child-bearing, through either contraception or abortion, "is so morally significant that it embeds itself onto his consciousness."

And Giger's conscience sought relief by creating a fetus-monster for ALIEN. At the film's end, a female astronaut kills the monster in a manner that strikingly resembles a suction abortion.

The warning of these films is that "sex disconnected from the moral order is horrifying," Jones writes.

This Halloween, when your kids want to rent a horror film, don't let them. Instead, sit down with them -- and with the neighbor's kids, as well -- and explain where horror films really come from and why they are perverse. It's a great way to expose the cultural lies that are at the root of our society's celebration of horror.

FURTHER READING & INFORMATION

E. Michael Jones, HORROR: A BIOGRAPHY (Spence, 2002). http://www.theimarketplace.com/Spence/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewitem&invid=485 This was published in hardcover under the title MONSTERS FROM THE ID.

E. Michael Jones was recently interviewed on the MARS HILL AUDIO JOURNAL. http://www.marshillaudio.org/resources/segment_detail.asp?ID=453053934&TABLE=segments

Robert K. Johnston, REEL SPIRITUALITY: THEOLOGY AND FILM IN DIALOGUE (Baker Book House, 2000).

Father Augustine Thompson, "Surprise: Halloween's Not a Pagan Festival After All," Beliefnet.com. http://www.beliefnet.com/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/47/story_4771_1.html&boardID=27513

Read Mercer Schuchardt, "The Exorcist -- Pure Evil?", BREAKPOINT ONLINE, 2000. http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/OnlineFeatures/The+ExorcistPure+Evil.htm

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5580]

The celebrated historian Barbara Tuchman called our times, "The Age of Disruption, a period when we've lost belief in certain kinds of moral understanding of good and bad."

A reporter for "The Indianapolis Star" once asked the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner what she thought was most needed in the next century.

"Probably personal responsibility," she replied, explaining that this means "taking responsibility for your behavior and your expenditures and your actions, and not forever supposing that society must forgive you because it's not your fault."

Cited in The Best of BITS & PIECES

There is a need for each of us to develop what I like to call "moral imagination." By this, I mean the ability fully to think through the implications of our actions, particularly as to how they will affect others. Over the past century, society has made extraordinary technological advances because of the active imaginations of our scientists and researchers, but we have been slower to advance morally because of a general unwillingness to practice imagination in the moral sphere. So let me start now by offering an example of the harm that can ensue when we refuse to exercise moral imagination.

[Consider] the late Lee Atwater, the brilliant but highly aggressive campaign manager who directed George Bush's successful 1988 presidential bid. In 1980 Atwater was managing a congressional election campaign in South Carolina, during which his campaign released information that the Democratic candidate in the race, Tom Turnispeed, had years earlier suffered an episode of depression for which he had received electric shock treatment.

Turnispeed was mortified and outraged. None of us appreciates having his or her medical history made public, and particularly not our psychiatric history. He responded with an anguished attack on his opponent's campaign ethics. When Atwater was asked to respond to Turnispeed's attack, he answered that he had no intention of responding to charges made by a person "hooked up to a jumper cable."

What a grotesque violation of privacy and what a shameful humiliation of another! Atwater's cruel words put into the voters' heads a vicious, graphic image that potentially poisoned not only their perceptions of Turnispeed, but also of everyone else who had undergone electric shock therapy.

This story, however, has a postscript. Ten years later Atwater was in a hospital bed dying of an inoperable brain tumor. In the last weeks of his life, while he was lying in a room connected to all sorts of uncomfortable and invasive machines, he wrote a letter to Turnispeed begging his forgiveness. I am convinced this was no phony deathbed repentance. Finding himself in this horrible circumstance, Atwater finally realized the enormous cruelty he had committed and fully regretted it.

Had Atwater had the moral imagination to realize in 1980 what he realized in 1990, he never would have released information about Turnispeed's treatment or mocked his experience. Indeed, moral imagination involves "repenting" of evil acts before we commit them, by wielding our imagination in such a manner that we act rightly towards others even when we don't have the experience or knowledge to be fully empathetic.

*

Though the chorus of voices decrying belief in God has been humming in the ideological background for centuries, it seems to have reached a crescendo with the emergence of a movement that has been dubbed the new atheism. The trademark of this new brand of atheism is its vitriolic attack on religion. To its advocates, religious beliefs are not only false; they are also dangerous and must be expunged from all corners of society. The pundits of the new atheism are not content to nail discussion theses on the door of religion; they are also busy delivering eviction notices to the allegedly atavistic elements of an otherwise seamlessly progressive atheistic evolution of Homo Sapiens.

Given the rhetoric, one might be forgiven for thinking that some new discoveries have rendered belief in God untenable. Curiously, this drama is unfolding in the same era in which perhaps the world’s leading defender of atheism, Antony Flew, has declared that recent scientific discoveries point to the fact that this world cannot be understood apart from the work of God as its Creator. This is no small matter, for Flew has been preaching atheism for as long as Billy Graham has been preaching the Gospel. Unlike Flew and others, the new atheists seem to forget that the success of their mission hinges solely on the strength and veracity of the reasons they give for repudiating religion. Venom and ridicule may carry the day in an age of sensationalistic sound bites, but false beliefs will eventually bounce off the hard, cold, unyielding wall of reality.

A good example of a claim against religion that does not sit well with the facts of reality is issued in the form of a challenge to the believer to “name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.”(1) We are expected to agree that no such action or statement exists, and then conclude that morality does not depend on God. The problem is that the conclusion does not follow from the premise. The fact that a non-believer can utter moral statements and even act morally does not logically lead to the conclusion that morality does not depend on God, much less that God does not exist. This challenge misunderstands the believer’s position on the relationship between morality and God.

The believer’s claim is that the world owes its existence to a moral God. All human beings are moral agents created in God’s image and are expected to recognize right from wrong because they all reflect God’s moral character. The fact that human beings are the kinds of creatures that can recognize the moral imperatives that are part of the very fabric of the universe argues strongly against naturalism. Unlike the laws of nature, which even inanimate objects obey, moral imperatives appeal to our will and invite us to make real decisions on real moral issues. The only other parallel experience we have of dos and don’ts comes from minds. Thus when the atheist rejects God while insisting on the validity of morality, he is merely rejecting the cause while clinging to the effect.

Without God, morality is reduced to whatever mode of behavior human beings agree on. There is no action that is objectively right or wrong. Rape, hate, murder and other such acts are only wrong because they have been deemed to be so in the course of human evolution. Had human evolution taken a different course, these acts might well have been the valued elements of our moral code. Even Nazi morality would be right had the Nazis succeeded in their quest for world dominance. Unless the world contains behavioral guidelines that transcend human decisions, there is no reason why anyone should object to such conclusions.

Though some religious people do not live up to the moral principles they prescribe, it is not true that genuine religious devotion makes no difference to one’s moral commitments. It is missionaries, and not atheists, who regularly give up their own comforts and accept unbelievable amounts of pain and suffering to better the lives of societal outcasts, not just through preaching but also through education, technology, and humanitarian relief. Our failure to live up to what we know to be right provides empirical evidence for the need for God’s intervention in our lives.

Those who insist that objective morality makes no difference to human autonomy still expect morality to guide the behavior of others. That our society is saturated with transcendent moral sentiments accounts for the popularity of some television programs that arrest our attention night after night. Perhaps ninety percent of the shows they contain depend exclusively on our ability to apply objective moral standards to the actions of the characters. Should the Judeo-Christian moral bank close its doors to our cultural psyche, the bankruptcy of human-centered morality would eventually send our spiritual tentacles scouring for an alternative transcendent anchor. Thus were the new atheists to succeed in their quest, the result would not be the elimination of religion but the entrenchment of a different religion. As Ravi Zacharias has warned, eventually, the real choice for the West will not be between Christianity and atheism but between Christianity and some other religion. Beware of ethical naturalists bearing moral gifts.

________

1. Christopher Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” The Washington Times (Saturday, July 14, 2007).

________

Copyright © 2008 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

*

[Original illustration at this number was moved to HolwickID #210]

Quote From A Journalist

A journalist student recently asked veteran Washington journalist Jack Anderson, what ideas he had about how to turn the moral fabric of our society around. His response was: "Our political leaders pay little notice to letters to their office. But what they do notice is the polls. If you want to improve the moral fabric of our leadership, we must be moral ourselves." He then added: "If to seek a rule to be moral, take this pledge: 'If it isn't right, I won't do it; if it isn't true, I won't say it; if it isn't mine, I won't take it.' "

--The Chapman Challenger, Ripley, MS

In 1981 Daniel Yankelovitch published a book entitled “New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down.” He argues on the basis of extensive interviews and nationwide polls that massive shifts have occurred in our culture and that the widespread search for personal self-fulfillment has created a new set of rules that govern the way we think and feel as Americans.

He says, “In their extreme form the new rules simply turn the old ones on their head, and in place of the old self-denial ethic we find people who refuse to deny anything to themselves -- not out of bottomless appetite, but on the strange moral principle that 'I have a duty to myself.'“ (p. xviii).

He tells of a young woman in her mid-thirties who complained to her psychotherapist that she was becoming nervous and fretful because life had grown so hectic -- too many big weekends, too many discos, too many late hours, too much talk, too much wine, too much pot, too much lovemaking. “Why don't you stop?” asked the therapist mildly. The patient stared blankly for a moment, and then her face lit up, dazzled by an illumination: “You mean I really don't have to do what I want to?” she burst out in amazement.

The trademark of the new self-fulfillment seekers is that “they operate on the premise that emotional cravings are sacred objects and that it is a crime against nature to harbor an unfulfilled emotional need” (p. 59). “Ours is the first era when tens of millions of people offer as moral justification for their acts the idea that an inner and presumably more 'real' self does not fit well with their assigned social role.”

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5232]

"Moral atmosphere is the ultimate regulator of conduct. If

something can be said, if it can be shown, if it is obviously

permitted by society, then that society begins to think it is doable."

Zig Ziglar

The story has often been

told of a man who wanted to steal some potatoes from his neighbor's field. He put his little son on a fence to watch. "Is

anyone coming from the north?" he asked. "No," replied his son. "From the

south?" "No." "From the east?" "No." "From the west?" "No, Daddy." "Then I can

go ahead and take the potatoes," said the man. "But there is one

direction we forgot to look," said the boy. "Which direction is that?" asked his

father. "Up," answered the boy.

A major television network recently aired a documentary featuring the music of bands formed behind the bars of maximum-security prisons. The producers actually went inside the prisons to film the videos that featured the inmates.

Now this is hard to take in on many different levels. But one thing is more obvious: It is absolutely clear that the great modern crime is to prevent people from doing whatever it is they want to do. One reviewer mentioned the rights of the inmates to get their music heard. Another cited the rights of viewers to know what goes on inside those walls.

But now listen to a comment made by the producer after the filming: “The first thing that surprised me,” he said, “was the air... Floating in the air, palpable and just out of reach was the unmistakable stench of evil.” [1] What he did not specify was whether that stench of evil came from the inmates, the music, or the producers.

When morality is carelessly sacrificed on the altars of art and information, mention of evil seems strangely out of place. Ironically, before terrorism became a household word, mention of evil on national programming would have seemed out of place, too. As a country, we have grown far more comfortable using the word evil, and with due reason. And recognition of evil is good, in that it leads to a knowledge of the Good, for how could we recognize evil if good did not exist? This is why Lewis called evil a parasite: Evil cannot exist without good.

But there is a danger in labeling evil without understanding our need for the Ultimate Good. When God is taken out of the picture, evil is misunderstood. Apart from God, evil becomes reasonable. You see, Lewis also reasoned that wickedness is the pursuit of some good in a wrong way. You can be good simply for the sake of goodness. But you would not do something wrong simply because it is wrong, but because it was in some way satisfying or useful. The lesson in this must be clear: Apart from God, we readily forget that this same evil, prevalent in the hearts of prison inmates, is present in the hearts of all.

I am reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's ripe warning: “The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.” [2]

God has done what we cannot do. Jesus Christ is the only man ever to live a perfect life. As a stream becomes stagnant when it is cut off from the spring, good things, like morality, apart from the Source of Goodness become something less. He is our righteousness. In Him alone can we overcome.

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1. VH1 News, Oct. 23, 2003.

2. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Volume II. Human Destiny (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1964), pp. 43.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5388]

In a schoolboy experiment, some young lads put a frog in a

container of water and began to heat the water very slowly. The water

finally reached the boiling point and yet the frog never even

attempted to jump out. Why? Because the changes in the environment

were so slight and slow to occur that the frog didn't notice them

until it was too late.

As Christians, we can end up like the frog. There are changes in

our moral environment that we don't even notice have occured. We can

be dying without even noticing it!

Christina Hoff Sommers, who teaches ethics at Clark University, tells a wonderful story — one that exposes the bankruptcy of modern ethics. After Sommers had written an article arguing that a just society begins with individual virtue, one of her colleagues berated her for holding to “an antiquated, Victorian, view of ethics.” Modern ethics, her colleague informed her, is social justice. It is concerned not with personal morality but with causes, such as saving Brazilian rain forests and preventing Third World exploitation by multinational corporations. Three months later the same colleague came back sheepishly to Sommers and said: “I have just had a shocking experience in my ethics class. Half of my students cheated on a take-home exam. And this is an ethics course!” The woman confessed she needed to reread Sommers’s article about private virtue.

When people see how flawed the modern view of ethics is, it opens a grand opportunity for a Christian apologetic. Our modern dilemma in ethics began with the French Enlightenment. Like Sommers’s colleague, the Enlightenment thinkers believed that Christians were wrong about individual sin, that people were good, corrupted only by social structures. So reforming social structures would produce a perfect society.

For 200 years ethicists have tried to create ethical systems without God. The result has been the dismantling of any objective standard of right and wrong, leaving the individual to act according to his or her own “personal preference.”

But what happens when someone’s “personal preference” happens to be cheating on an exam? Or stealing? Or — for example — collaborating with murderous Nazis? That is exactly what happened in the very homeland of the Enlightenment. During wartime France the Vichy government rounded up Jews and handed them over to the Nazis. Seventy-five thousand French Jews perished in the death camps. French President Jacques Chirac recently acknowledged that shameful chapter of his country’s history. “France,” he said, “the homeland of the Enlightenment, and of the rights of man . . . committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed over those who were under its protection to their executioners.”

How did the Enlightenment notion of the “rights of man” break down in wartime France? Well, ethical precepts in themselves have no moral force unless individuals view themselves as responsible to a Supreme Being. The French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre understood very well that ethics had no meaning once God was removed from the equation. “It doesn’t matter how you act,” Sartre said, “as long as you ‘authenticate yourself’ by an act of the will.”

Thus, to borrow a trenchant Francis Schaeffer illustration, you can decide to help an old lady across the street — or to push her into the path of an oncoming car. For Sartre, because there is no God, it doesn’t matter what one chooses to do. So the next time someone argues that ethics has nothing to do with obedience to God, show him exactly where that logic leads. And remind him that it is precisely because God exists that there is ultimately no getting away with cheating — or, for that matter, murder.

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Copyright (c) 1995 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Psychologist Stanley Milgram, in his book OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY, describes a mock experiment he conducted at Yale University in the 1960s. It is a revealing illustration of natural man’s inability to safeguard individual rights.

A group of volunteer subjects participated in a study to “test the effects of punishment on learning.” They stood in front of an imposing device labeled a “shock generator.” Another man — called the “student” — was strapped into what looked like an electric chair.

The volunteers were told to read a list of questions to the student and to administer an increasing level of electric shock for each wrong answer. What they DIDN’T know was that the “shock generator” was a dummy, and the hapless “student” was an actor hired to give a convincing performance of a man being electrocuted by degrees.

As to be expected, the actor proved to be a most unpromising student and was subjected to — what the volunteers thought were — increasing levels of electric shock. What Professor Milgram found so extraordinary was how easily the volunteers set aside whatever moral qualms they might have had. One after the other, they pressed the shock buttons despite the desperate pleadings and feigned screams of the actor in the phony electric chair.

Professor Milgram’s obedient tormentors were not hardened criminal types. When interviewed, they stated their opposition — in principle — to hurting innocent people. Yet what they abhorred in PRINCIPLE they did in PRACTICE. Why? Because an authority figure in a lab coat assured them THEY HAD NO CHOICE.

What the Milgram experiments show is that — without allegiance to a higher law — decent people can be goaded into assaulting innocent strangers. In so doing they disregard a fundamental moral obligation.

The Heidelberg Catechism teaches that the commandment “You shall not kill” includes the God-given obligation to protect our neighbors “from harm as much as we can.” But when the Christian foundation for society is lost, freedom collapses. We will torture our neighbors.

The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, in his novel entitled THE POSSESSED, clearly saw the implications of attempting to build a society without God. In the book, Shigalov the revolutionary laments the failure of his utopian ideals: “I started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and I have arrived at unrestricted despotism.” Without God, it is inevitable — as our society may soon discover.

In the final analysis secular society cannot provide an inviolable basis for protecting individual rights. Unless man owes his allegiance to a power higher than the state, he cannot stand against moral degradation and tyranny.

People resent the fact that the so-called “New Religious Right” obeys an authority higher than the state. But this is the very thing that guards our liberties. Look at the heroes, the martyrs of Eastern Europe who brought down communism. Most of them have a “reverend” before their names.

The Declaration of Independence states that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Liberty is inalienable because it comes from God, and, make no mistake, the Christian world view is the BEST defender against tyranny. If you don’t believe it, ask Professor Milgram’s students.

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Version from February 6, 2009:

SHOCKING: CONSCIENCE AND CRUELTY

In 1961, shortly after Israel put Adolf Eichmann on trial — ”the architect of the Holocaust” — Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of psychological experiments. The goal was to “test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was “ordered to” by an authority figure.

In the experiment, the subject was told to administer an electric shock every time a participant in another room (who was called the “learner”) gave a wrong answer. While there were no real shocks, the subjects thought there were, a ruse made more believable by the sounds of screaming coming from the other room.

With each wrong answer, the subject was instructed to increase the severity of the “shock” — all the way to a potentially lethal level.

When the participants expressed concern or a desire to stop, they were told things like “please continue,” or in the most extreme cases, “you have no other choice, you must go on.”

Sixty-five percent of the subjects administered what they thought was a potentially lethal shock. Only one participant refused.

The results, understandably, shocked both scientists and the public. They implied that, given the right setting, “ordinary citizens” were capable of brutality and even murder. The difference between us and the perpetrators of the Holocaust weren’t as great as we liked to believe.

In the 45 years since the experiments, our attitudes toward authority have changed a lot. That and the lessons of history led many of us to believe that the results would be different if the experiments were performed today by more enlightened citizens.

They were wrong. When researchers at Santa Clara University performed a modified version of Milgram’s experiment — where the “shocks” were limited to the merely painful — the results were “nearly identical” to Milgram’s.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Even though the social movements of the last 30 or 40 years weakened institutions like the family, they didn’t change human nature itself. We are inclined by nature to seek out authority if for no other reason than self-preservation. So when there’s chaos, people choose order over liberty.

Another reason we shouldn’t be surprised is that what stands between us and obeying an immoral order isn’t our view of authority — it’s conscience. Not “conscience” in the sense that we do something we feel inside of us. I mean conscience in the sense of actually understanding right from wrong — an informed view of life. The word “conscience” comes from the Latin cON SCIENTIA, meaning “with knowledge.”

And that implies that you know something in the first place — that you have been taught principles you are prepared to apply when you are asked to do something immoral. Given the devaluing of human life and dignity in the American culture, we cannot assume that many people have that kind of knowledge today.

But without access to this higher law and belief in a higher authority — or highest Authority — resisting unlawful and immoral authority is almost impossible. So all that stands between a person and cruelty are vague feelings that, not surprisingly, can’t resist authority, or peer pressure for that matter.

This is why the biblical worldview and the authority of God, and understanding it in our lives, matters.

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Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Or so it is said. Reality is more ironic than fiction. Or so I say. Consider an anecdote told by Edward Skidelsky in Book Reviews:

As he was leaving his lodgings in Turin on January 3 1889, the

philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche caught sight of a cabby beating

his horse. Forgetting his former invectives against pity, he ran

across the street, and weeping, threw his arms around the

animal's neck in an act eerily reminiscent of a scene from

Dostoevsky's “Crime and Punishment.” He then lost consciousness

and had to be carried back to his room. When he awoke he was no

longer himself.

Nietzsche had gone mad. Sadly, one of the most fiery minds of

the 19th century had burned itself up.

And so Nietzsche went insane unknown and unread, but by the 1960s his influence had grown to such a degree that Time magazine devoted an issue to the fierce debates that Nietzsche's work had incited. Time even put his most famous line on the cover, “God is dead.” By this Nietzsche was not saying that an omnipotent being had once lived and now was dead. He was saying that the incredible idea of God had infused the West with life for centuries, and now the idea's vitality was all spent. The idea of God was dead.

As the herald of the death of God, Nietzsche also heralded the death of Christian morality. The only real Christian, he believed, had died on the cross, and the rest of us were just slavish imitators. So the whole lot of Christian ethics, he believed, ought to be destroyed. But as the above anecdote relates, he did not fall far from the tree. The irony is two-fold: one, his fit of pity for the horse is just the sort of moral sentiment that his philosophical writings impugned. So he went crazy violating his own principles. The second and richer irony, is the similarity between this scene and a pivotal scene in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." In it, the main character Raskolnikov, a man attempting to live by an ethic similar to Nietzsche's, protests weepingly when he sees a horse beaten.

Neither Raskolnikov in fiction, nor Nietzsche in reality, could escape the demands of morality. Goodness and evil so deeply infuse reality that even their antagonists cannot elude them.

Even if you deny the reality of goodness and evil with your philosophy, you cannot deny them with your life. You see, Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #6243]

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| My Source:

| GOSPEL GLEANER, Online Version

| \webpage{http://www.cei.net/~mabelval/gleaner.htm}

| Volume 14, #4

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| Author: John T. Polk, II

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WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THE CLINTON-LEWINSKI AFFAIR?

John T. Polk, II

“Why is such a 'big deal' made of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, since it's only about sex in the Oval Office and not over how he runs the country?”

It's a “big deal” because it marks the erosion of America's morals. Samuel Adams wrote a friend in 1775, “He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country.” (Human Events, p. 8, Vol. 54, No. 36, September 25, 1998). An adulterous affair with Donna Rice caused Gary Hart to withdraw from presidential campaigning in 1988, but by 1992, Bill Clinton falsely denied his Gennifer Flowers affair, devoted a staff member to “bimbo eruptions,” became the first U.S. president to set up a personal legal defense fund, and flaunted his disregard for truth regarding his immorality. For eight months of 1998 the U.S. Government, media, and public opinion have been sated with his Monica Lewinsky adultery, and all the school children he put on Internet can read its salacious details.

God's Law of marriage (and sex) is higher than any law or lawbreaker of any land. God made heterosexual, monogamous, lifetime marriage the only “safe sex” (Genesis 2:18-25; Matthew 19:3-9; Romans 7:1-3). Marriage is to be honored in every house—even the White House (Hebrews 13:4)! Whether adulterers are Henry Hyde, Jimmy Swaggert, Thomas Jefferson, or William Jefferson Clinton, they are never right or justified.

Clinton's contortive definition of “sex” caused comedian Jay Leno to declare he and his wife “have never had sex yet.” “Parse sex” according to Galatians 5:19-21, and outside of marriage, sex is sin whether in: a car or the “Titanic,” a dorm room or prom, the Oval Office or governor's mansion, youth or adulthood:

1. Adultery, “unlawful sexual intercourse,” including: the lust (Matthew 5:28), the act (John 8:3-4), [lit. “caught stealing sex”], and unscriptural re-marriages (Matthew 19:9; Luke 16:18).

2. Fornication, “giving one's body for the lust of another,” should be: avoided (1 Thessalonians 4:3-5), unless married (1 Corinthians 7:2), and when listed with “adultery” includes all sexual activity leading to and unspecified by the term “adultery.”

3. Uncleanness, “actions without good moral purpose.” These are done by those who: pervert sex (Romans 1:18, Romans 1:24-32), have no conscience (Ephesians 4:19), and reject God's gospel call (1 Thessalonians 4:7).

4. Lewdness, “shamelessness and unbridled lust.” William Barclay notes that Lightfoot said this sin “shocks public decency” then adds such a one “does not care what people say or think so long as he [or she-jtpII] can gratify his evil desires...[and] who is lost to shame.” (pp 60-61, New Testament Words, The Westminister Press, Philadelphia, 1964).

5. And The Like, “resembling.” This phrase picks up the crumbs that fall from the “spin-meisters” table of orgy.

Add to these #6. Touch, “long, lingering, sexual contact” is only for those married to each other (1 Corinthians 7:1-5). This encompasses terms like: foreplay, petting, necking, fondling, stroking, feeling, spooning, or whatever it may be called in current vernacular. There is no government legislation, Supreme Court, or executive officer who is above God's law or who is empowered to change it!

For seven months of 1998, Clinton lied publicly and under oath about this Lewinsky affair, and used his wife, cabinet, political party members, publicly-funded lawyers, willfully-blinded media, and mis-guided public to defend him in his lie! “A lying tongue” and “a false witness who speaks lies” are twenty-eight percent of everything “the Lord hates” (Proverbs 6:16-19). The devil is the father of lies (John 8:44), thus if policy or practice of government personnel is lying then government is of the devil! If not—why not? If Americans with no respect for God elect legislators who enact laws without respect for God, and cannot deal with a President who disrespects God's laws of marriage and truth—then America is an ungodly nation! If not—why not?

Moral authority for any government to exist is determined by God's authority. “There is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God...For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil” (Romans 13:1-3), then governments that are a terror to good and not to evil have no authority from God to exist! (Cf. 1 Peter 2:11-14). God rules over all nations (2 Chronicles 20:5-6; Psalms 22:28; Psalms 47:8; Isaiah 37:15-20; John 19:10-11; Acts 12:20-24), and this should be recognized. America was founded upon “self-evident truths” based upon the Bible. If these truths are no longer “evident” then there must be a re-emphasis on the Bible for this country to exist. The “Clinton Crisis” has revealed the national conviction, conscience, community, and convention, and it doesn't bode well. The vilest king to date, Ahab, despised God's “independent counsel” of the day, Elijah (1 Kings 16:30-33; 1 Kings 18:17-18). Saul denied his sin with lies until the truth was forced on him, then his “confession” was rejected by God (1 Samuel 15:10-16:1). Ungodly, impenitent, wicked, and proud men reject the truth (John 3:19-21).

Bill Clinton rejects “separation of church and state,” for he “preached” his politics in the pulpit of the New Psalmist Baptist Church, Baltimore, Maryland on November 1, 1998. It is time for pulpits of the land to put the fear of God back on Capitol Hill, ring out the Bible truth on sin, salvation, and every word God has spoken, and return to righteous ways! Read these verses (Jeremiah 5:12-13; Jeremiah 6:19; Acts 10:34-35) and maybe you, too, will see the “big deal.”

—125 The Trace, Dover, TN 37058

You've seen the stories: They're nothing short of horrifying. An 18-year-old girl at her high school prom delivers her baby in a bathroom stall, then leaves the dead child in a trash can and returns to dancing. We shudder at the breathtaking callousness and disregard for human life; yet for some scientists, such behavior is only natural.

They believe that humans are robots, programmed by our genes, to dump newborns into garbage cans if our gene-controlled brains determine that such cold- hearted actions are in our Darwinian best interest.

Well, in his new book, "THE WEDGE OF TRUTH: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism," author Phillip Johnson challenges the naturalistic view of human nature. Our true nature, he says, which finds such acts morally wrong, is profoundly different.

Johnson starts with this provocative question: Why exactly is it wrong to kill babies? In the case of the 18-year-old who abandoned her newborn in a bathroom, the MIT evolutionary psychologist and science popularizer Steven Pinker wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES that the young woman was acting on a "genetic imperative." That means, basically, that impersonal forces of natural selection had molded her behavior, through her genes, to jettison any drag on her future "reproductive success."

Pinker wrote, "If a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising," a mother may cut her "losses, and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on."

Yet this explanation, even if true (and there are many reasons to doubt it) simply doesn't answer Johnson's first question. Pinker's answer doesn't explain why we find the actions of the 18-year-old mother morally reprehensible. If there really is no difference between human beings and other animals, then we would no more condemn the young woman's abandoning her newborn than we would condemn her for clipping her fingernails or plucking her eyebrows.

But that isn't the case. We do condemn such behavior. The tragic young woman in question was convicted of homicide and sent to prison. Why? Because human beings recognize the reality of a moral realm which is not derived from nature. As Phillip Johnson argues, evolutionary psychologists like Pinker can explain that moral realm only by suspending their naturalistic rule of reasoning.

Pinker himself admits that infanticide is wrong, yet he is more or less helpless to explain WHY he thinks it's wrong. Instead, he flatly proclaims. "Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning."

But not so fast, objects Johnson. If we genuinely know that some actions, such as infanticide, are wrong, then that knowledge must have an ultimate source or cause. Our moral knowledge, therefore, must in some sense be "immaterial" or "supernatural," stemming from an ultimate source other than nature.

For Johnson, as for the great ethical philosophers throughout the centuries, that ultimate source is God. In THE WEDGE OF TRUTH, Johnson the feisty law professor makes a compelling case that our moral nature is not Darwinian but theistic. And it's a case that you and I can and must make to our neighbors.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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What motivates people when they makes choices? Developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan believes the majority of our daily decisions are issued in the service of gaining or maintaining a feeling of virtue. In this Kagan is refuting the "Pleasure Principle," the idea that when a person consciously selects one act over another, he does so to attain a conscious feeling of pleasure. Those who adhere to this concept believe that sensory pleasure is the basis of all morality, that is, a child experiences a reduction in fear and thus an increasing sensory pleasure when he conforms to adult demands. Over time, obeying family and community standards becomes a habit, a moral.

Darwin believed that CONSCIENCE or ETHICS in humans was a product of the social behavior of animals. But WHICH ethics of humans? Kagan writes:

"Anyone with a modest knowledge of animal behavior and only minimal inferential skill can find examples of animal behavior to support almost any ethical message desired. Those who wish to sanctify the institution of marriage can point to the pair bonding of gibbons; those who think infidelity is more natural can point to chimpanzees. If you believe that people are naturally sociable, point to baboons; if you think they are solitary, point to orangutans. If you believe sex should replace fighting, point to rhesus monkeys; if you prefer the father to be the primary caretaker, point to titi monkeys. If you believe that surrogate care is closer to nature, point to lionesses. If you are certain that men should dominate harems of beautiful women, point to elephant seals; if you believe women should be in positions of dominance, point to elephants. Nature has enough diversity to fit almost any ethical taste."

Kagan says that it is an error to assume that any human ethic is a clear product of some particular class of animal behavior.

Viktor Frankl saw more of the world and knew more about the heart of man than most of us could bear. As a young man he was imprisoned in various Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Although he survived three terrible years of confinement, his father, mother, brother, and wife did not. He emerged from the experience broken and angry, and anxious to see a better world.

You can imagine his excitement upon arriving in America. As the ship bringing him here sailed past the Statue of Liberty, he was thrilled beyond words to be in a country so committed to freedom.

But after traveling across America, Frankl decided that America needed another statue. He suggested that we place this statue on the opposite coast in the San Francisco Bay, and that we name it the "Statue of Responsibility." These were wise words from a man who had learned the hard way that liberty without responsibility is dangerous.

Frankl understood that the only way we can guarantee the preservation of our freedom is to use it responsibly. The rights we enjoy today depend upon our remembering and fulfilling our duties as citizens.

That's why President John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." In our experiment in ordered liberty, citizens are given a great deal of freedom. But our system presupposes that people will do what is right and just -- that we will do our civic duty.

It works the same way with the parents of teenagers. You want your teen to flourish when she experiences the freedom of college. So, every day you grant your child a little more liberty, hoping she'll use it wisely. If you push back her curfew by an hour, and she uses that hour judiciously and comes home on time, then she preserves her freedom. But abuses of the curfew result in more restrictive rules and less freedom.

Compare this to the American right of free speech. Every citizen has the freedom to speak his mind, so long as his speech doesn't jeopardize the wellbeing of other citizens. But if someone yells "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, his right to free speech is curtailed. In the case of liberty, it's not just a case of "use it or lose it," it's a case of "use it responsibly or lose it."

When we can't control ourselves, the government steps in and imposes control, and that's a much less desirable consequence.

This tension between liberty and order is especially noticeable in today's cyberspace. There's a lot of freedom on the Internet -- practically anyone with a computer and a modem can start a website, and that website can discuss and display almost anything. That's all fine until people abuse it.

Those who can't control themselves -- pornographers, predators, and the like -- force government to step in and limit everyone's liberty in cyberspace. And this is a lesson that applies across the board. Your youngsters need to understand that responsibility is an essential prerequisite to freedom.

A "Statue of Responsibility" may not be as appealing as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. But as Viktor Frankl recognized, we won't enjoy what the Statue of Liberty stands for unless we act responsibly.

For further reading:

Adams, John. Letter to the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798. In The Works of John Adams Vol. 9, edited by Charles F. Adams. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

What would it take to prevent another Enron?

Experts in business ethics gathered at Rice University last week to work on an answer. Rice professor Duane Windsor suggested that what's needed is "more fear of a loss of reputation."

Well, the schools will be asking these questions for years: How could the auditors be so negligent? What new regulations are needed? What would be the effect of an environment of fear?

But in my view, the most crucial question is one secular observers and business school seminars may be unwilling to ask: Has value-free post-modernity -- the fruit of modern secularism -- undermined the moral foundation essential for democratic capitalism?

As theologian Michael Novak argues, western liberal democracy is like a three-legged stool. One leg, political freedom; the second, economic freedom; the third, moral responsibility. Weaken any leg -- the stool topples.

Enron's collapse exposes a decayed third leg -- moral responsibility.

Now mind you, Enron's leaders were the best and the brightest, pillars of the community. Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, boasted he hired only graduates of the top business schools.

What Enron's collapse exposes is the glaring failure of these business schools. Ethics, you see, historically rests on absolute truth, which our top schools have systematically assaulted for four decades. And business school graduates leave the schools, as I discovered when I lectured at Harvard Business School ten years ago, without a clue about ethics.

But the Enron debacle does offer a good chance for Christians to contend for the Biblical worldview in the economic marketplace. The Scriptures endorse concepts like private property, contract rights, and the discharge of debts -- all essential to free markets. The Bible also demands justice, warning of God's judgment against oppressors who withhold wages or take advantage of the needy.

The Scriptural system, in short, balances the acquisition of wealth with a demand for both justice and compassion. It requires people to subordinate self-interest to moral demands.

Through the centuries, Christians have fought to bring these moral demands to bear in the marketplace. For example, in nineteenth century England following rapid industrialization, conditions in the coal mines and factories were deplorable. Children as young as seven were forced to work twelve hours a day.

The great Christian statesman, Lord Shaftesbury, who famously argued, "What is morally wrong cannot be politically right," led a crusade against these conditions. He exposed what poet William Blake called "the dark Satanic mills." Hammonds, the economic historian, would later write, "[Shaftesbury] did more than any other single man in English history to check the raw power of the new industrial system."

The lesson of history, which our neighbors need to understand, is that capitalism is healthy only when subject to moral restraints derived ultimately from religious truth.

It is these moral restraints that have been dangerously loosened, as Enron reveals. The resulting chaos can only lead to bureaucratic regulations and the loss of freedom -- unless, that is, we rebuild the third leg of Michael Novak's stool.

This will require an heroic effort -- but it's one Christians are uniquely equipped to undertake.

For further reading:

Kristen Hays, "Watkins says warning too late, virtually ignored," Associated Press, 1 April 2002.

Os Guiness, STEERING THROUGH CHAOS: VICE AND VIRTUE IN AN AGE OF MORAL CONFUSION (Navpress, 2000).

Michael Novak, THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, rev. (Madison Books, 2000).

Michael Novak, ON TWO WINGS: HUMBLE FAITH AND COMMON SENSE AT THE AMERICAN FOUNDING (Encounter Books, 2002).

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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