[Bill,
January 22, 2008]
If you are the Son of God, make these stones become bread
UPDATE: As usual, C.S. Lewis has summed up in a few words what I struggled, and failed to do, in 100 times as many.
Kathy over at MCJ described Lewis' comments as follows: "We've got an inversion going on where feeding the poor is the reason for Christianity, instead of Christianity being the reason for feeding the poor."
(Note: The old post follows.)
*****
Pope Benedict 16 came out with a remarkable book, Jesus of Nazareth, and I only stopped reading it because it was so rich in thought and implication, that it was too much to process at once. Though the Pope isn't the greatest writer, he has come out with a series of pointed articles and books that have correctly diagnosed the problem with the West's "culture of death."
I can't really do his point justice, but one critical point is the first temptation of Christ. Jesus has spent 40 days in the desert, in prayer and fasting. The devil appears and says to Him, "If you are the Son of God, make these stones become bread." And Jesus responds, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of the living God."
I've always thought this was about the devil causing Jesus to doubt Himself. That is, the first line is "If you ..." Jesus knows Who He is, and doesn't need to respond to anything that follows. But there's a lot more to this passage.
The deeper lesson is about a certain attitude, specifically, that we need to feed the world before we go through the process of conversion. It's a call for Jesus to wipe away hunger and want — if you are who you say you are, then feed the world.
Christ calls us to feed the hungry, as well as clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, visit the imprisoned and sick, and bury the dead. Indeed, we are largely judged on our behaviors toward our neighbor. Good intentions don't count. But we are also called — first — to the word of the living God, the source of life.
In other words, the attitude that's tempts here is, "What's really important is that we take care of the poor. The rest is quibbling over religious concepts." Look at the Millennium Goals of the Episcopal Church and some Episcopalians' attitudes toward it. It boils down to "sin isn't important, what's really important is our acts toward social justice."
The reason it's a temptation is because it contains a half-truth and a diversion, which is one of the oldest plays in the devil's playbook.
BTW, the ole bastard gets me with this all the time. I will correctly diagnose someone else's problem (or our culture's problem) as a diversion from my own "issues" — the half-truth is I'm often (arguably) correct in pointing out the issue. The lie is that I'm using this truth to cover up something I don't want to deal with about myself.
So, yes, the Millennium Goals of the Episcopal Church are diversionary — let's talk about our virtuous efforts and laudable intentions (and they are virtuous and laudable) so we don't have to talk about the "sin" stuff we don't want to deal with.
And similarly, those who support a big welfare state while ignoring or even contributing to the cultural causes that create poverty and the need for a welfare state, are similarly falling into this temptation. (Again, this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to help others, it's a question of wrong emphasis at the expense of other things. It's sort of turning everything 90 degrees.)
And then of course, what follows is "I [Bill the conservative] don't want to deal with my own stuff, so I'm going to point out the flaws in the Episcopal Church." And then someone comes along and says, "Bill is an idiot/misguided/delusional and I'm going to point out his flaws" and miss that unconsciously they are diverted from their own stuff.
There's also the temptation of "I haven't achieved perfection yet, so I'm not going to do works." Or focusing entirely on spiritual acts of mercy at the expense of the corporal ones.
One thing I learned in my charismatic days is that the devil has three tactics to take our eyes off God and lead us to perdition: lies, deception and games. The first temptation of Christ is a deception — it folds laudable intentions back upon themselves and diverts us from real knowledge of God, at which point works can be blessed with faith. And worse, failure to see the deception leads to various psychological and spiritual games, such as the projection example above.
Why do we many of us fall for this so easily and so often? Pride, I suppose.
Lord have mercy on us all. "Can these bones live?" "Lord, thou knowest."
*****
I'm still having trouble articulating this point. The deception of the first temptation concerns not just that we get diverted from the Gospel in the search for social justice. There's a deeper level, too. It concerns magic — the idea that God should do for us what He has clearly told us to do for ourselves. We are to work out our salvation through faith and works.
So the point is not that if you're volunteering for a soup kitchen, you should stop. And the point is not that if you're praying that the poor be fed, you should stop. It's recognizing our dependence on God first and foremost, and then continuing to do so as we act out the works of mercy.
God isn't going to wipe away the poor. Man, dependent on God and responding to the Gospel, is charged with helping the poor. That doesn't mean a big secularist welfare state. That doesn't mean that the state isn't called to help the poor. Only that it's not enough, and it will never be enough. The welfare state is (often) a Christian virtue unhinged from the Gospel and then wedded to a statist philosophy. And that's falling into the first temptation.
Which is why many conservatives say that the United States' Constitution cannot live up to its ideals without being populated by Christians and Jews. Anyone else will inevitably lapse into some form of idolatry — and lose the freedom promised by the Constitution.
My two cents.
Kathy over at MCJ described Lewis' comments as follows: "We've got an inversion going on where feeding the poor is the reason for Christianity, instead of Christianity being the reason for feeding the poor."
(Note: The old post follows.)
*****
Pope Benedict 16 came out with a remarkable book, Jesus of Nazareth, and I only stopped reading it because it was so rich in thought and implication, that it was too much to process at once. Though the Pope isn't the greatest writer, he has come out with a series of pointed articles and books that have correctly diagnosed the problem with the West's "culture of death."
I can't really do his point justice, but one critical point is the first temptation of Christ. Jesus has spent 40 days in the desert, in prayer and fasting. The devil appears and says to Him, "If you are the Son of God, make these stones become bread." And Jesus responds, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of the living God."
I've always thought this was about the devil causing Jesus to doubt Himself. That is, the first line is "If you ..." Jesus knows Who He is, and doesn't need to respond to anything that follows. But there's a lot more to this passage.
The deeper lesson is about a certain attitude, specifically, that we need to feed the world before we go through the process of conversion. It's a call for Jesus to wipe away hunger and want — if you are who you say you are, then feed the world.
Christ calls us to feed the hungry, as well as clothe the naked, comfort the afflicted, visit the imprisoned and sick, and bury the dead. Indeed, we are largely judged on our behaviors toward our neighbor. Good intentions don't count. But we are also called — first — to the word of the living God, the source of life.
In other words, the attitude that's tempts here is, "What's really important is that we take care of the poor. The rest is quibbling over religious concepts." Look at the Millennium Goals of the Episcopal Church and some Episcopalians' attitudes toward it. It boils down to "sin isn't important, what's really important is our acts toward social justice."
The reason it's a temptation is because it contains a half-truth and a diversion, which is one of the oldest plays in the devil's playbook.
BTW, the ole bastard gets me with this all the time. I will correctly diagnose someone else's problem (or our culture's problem) as a diversion from my own "issues" — the half-truth is I'm often (arguably) correct in pointing out the issue. The lie is that I'm using this truth to cover up something I don't want to deal with about myself.
So, yes, the Millennium Goals of the Episcopal Church are diversionary — let's talk about our virtuous efforts and laudable intentions (and they are virtuous and laudable) so we don't have to talk about the "sin" stuff we don't want to deal with.
And similarly, those who support a big welfare state while ignoring or even contributing to the cultural causes that create poverty and the need for a welfare state, are similarly falling into this temptation. (Again, this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to help others, it's a question of wrong emphasis at the expense of other things. It's sort of turning everything 90 degrees.)
And then of course, what follows is "I [Bill the conservative] don't want to deal with my own stuff, so I'm going to point out the flaws in the Episcopal Church." And then someone comes along and says, "Bill is an idiot/misguided/delusional and I'm going to point out his flaws" and miss that unconsciously they are diverted from their own stuff.
There's also the temptation of "I haven't achieved perfection yet, so I'm not going to do works." Or focusing entirely on spiritual acts of mercy at the expense of the corporal ones.
One thing I learned in my charismatic days is that the devil has three tactics to take our eyes off God and lead us to perdition: lies, deception and games. The first temptation of Christ is a deception — it folds laudable intentions back upon themselves and diverts us from real knowledge of God, at which point works can be blessed with faith. And worse, failure to see the deception leads to various psychological and spiritual games, such as the projection example above.
Why do we many of us fall for this so easily and so often? Pride, I suppose.
Lord have mercy on us all. "Can these bones live?" "Lord, thou knowest."
*****
I'm still having trouble articulating this point. The deception of the first temptation concerns not just that we get diverted from the Gospel in the search for social justice. There's a deeper level, too. It concerns magic — the idea that God should do for us what He has clearly told us to do for ourselves. We are to work out our salvation through faith and works.
So the point is not that if you're volunteering for a soup kitchen, you should stop. And the point is not that if you're praying that the poor be fed, you should stop. It's recognizing our dependence on God first and foremost, and then continuing to do so as we act out the works of mercy.
God isn't going to wipe away the poor. Man, dependent on God and responding to the Gospel, is charged with helping the poor. That doesn't mean a big secularist welfare state. That doesn't mean that the state isn't called to help the poor. Only that it's not enough, and it will never be enough. The welfare state is (often) a Christian virtue unhinged from the Gospel and then wedded to a statist philosophy. And that's falling into the first temptation.
Which is why many conservatives say that the United States' Constitution cannot live up to its ideals without being populated by Christians and Jews. Anyone else will inevitably lapse into some form of idolatry — and lose the freedom promised by the Constitution.
My two cents.
btw, bending the bright nerdy girl over the sofa? Dude, you rock!
I believe that Bill's point is not that a non-{Christian|Jew} can't live up to the ideals of the constitution, it's that they have no good reason to (I'm speaking loosely, of course).
Christians especially have a good reason to respect government without ever trusting it. Secularists have a hard time philosophically supporting something in between anarchy and fascism, though of course for pragmatic reasons most of them do in practice. But it's dangerous when a person can't justify their actions; habit does tend to eventually fall away, even if it sometimes requires generations to do it.
Chris does a good job of explaining my point better than I did.
Of course, secularists and nonbelievers can be rational and live up to the ideals of the Constitution. But without an idea of grounding Natural Rights in something else, they are easy prey for philosophical nominalism, and their children and grandchildren can fall prey to a new form of paganism.
That is, we all currently believe that justice is NOT the advantage of the stronger. Socrates, in Gorgias, had to resort to the idea of Divine Judgment to explain why not, though.
Still, I don't want to make this point too hard. There's a lot of subtly and nuance missing, and there's always the chance I don't know what the heck I'm talking about :)
I think you may have to clarify exactly what you mean by paganism, as any pagans I've ever run across were certianly not nominalists.
Justifying in the sense of saying "I believe X" is not the same thing as being able to say (to one's children, for example), "I believe in X because of Y, which you grant".
To take a simple example, plenty of secularists believe in the idea in the constitution (well, declaration of independence) that "all men are created equal". But they could never justify this belief, because on secular grounds it's absolutely ludicrous. And no one really believes; people can be declared mentally incompetent and prevent from voting. Everyone acknowledges that the severely mentally retarded are not equal — in any meaningful sense other than perhaps who they'd save on a sinking ship — to engineers and physics professors.
The statement that all men are created equal is really a theological statement that God loves all men equally; it's a rejection of the caste system to which aristocracy is always tempted.
There are secularists who will come up with the lame defense that we should treat all people as equals because there's no fool-proof method of determining who the really superior people are. (Such an argument never in practice stands up long against the urgencies of excluding the wrong people.)
And the same is true of other things. Most secularists couldn't come up with a rational defense of why murder is wrong. They believe it, of course, but they can't justify it from any principles that they hold to be self-evident. So the hardly-surprising result is that this belief erodes at the margins — euthanasia and abortion.
Most secularists can't really defend the idea of freedom from universally recognized first principles, and we live in an amazingly regulated time. We're still quite free by historical standards (or even most standards), but history isn't on our side for it remaining thus. And you can see the erosion in areas like speech codes — especially in countries which aren't the United States.
It must be noted that it took the Roman Empire a few hundred years to collapse once it entered its decline. Degeneration is a slow process. (The flip side of that coin is that it's always easy to claim degeneration where it doesn't really exist, of course. It's a tricky subject. Also, people pointing out degeneration sometimes helps to cure it, just as a fear of infection might lead a person to take vitamins which help them to never get sick.)