Category Archives: Ethics

The Wounds of God

Can we wrong God?

Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in his books ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs’ and ‘Justice in Love’ that we can in fact wrong and even wound God by failing to treat people justly. Wolterstorff ties these notions together by pointing out that God loves each person with love as attachment - to wrong that which you are attached to is to wrong you. To treat people unjustly is to treat unjustly that to which God is attached. Wolterstorff draws upon the thought of John Calvin to fortify his thesis – in his commentary on Genesis, Calvin argues that because of the image of God engraved on each person, ‘God deems Himself violated in their person’. Roughly, to harm a person is to harm God. ‘…no one can be injurious to his brother without wounding God Himself.’ Wolterstorff develops this though in more detail but that’s the basic idea.

This relates to the doctrine of impassibility that I’ve been thinking on lately – Wolterstorff does not hold to the doctrine. Calvin, however, makes a small but crucial point: ‘God deems Himself violated in their person.’ So in a sense, it seems that Calvin and Wolterstorff are at odds. Calvin says that God ‘deems Himself’ violated or injured, while Wolterstorff argues that:

‘On account of God’s attachment to human beings, one wrongs God by injuring a human being.’ (‘Justice in Love’, p. 154)

Wolterstorff does not make Calvin’s distinction that it is God who ‘deems Himself’ injured – at least so far as I can tell. Wolterstorff would hold that God is indeed wounded by our treating fellow humans unjustly, while Calvin holds that God ‘deems Himself’ injured. There is a substantial difference here.

Thoughts on Justice

‘It is not the abstract entity ‘justice as such’ that God loves. What God loves is the presence of justice in society. And God loves the presence of justice in society not because it makes for a society whose excellence God admires, but because God loves the members of society – loves them, too, not with love of admiration but with the love of benevolent desire. God desires that each and every human being shall flourish, that each and every shall experience what the Old Testament calls ‘shalom’. Injustice is perforce the impairment of ‘shalom’. That is why God loves justice. God desires the flourishing of each and every one of God’s creatures; justice is indispensable to that. Love and justice are not pitted against each other but intertwined.’ (Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs’, p. 82)

This is an understanding of ‘justice’ I like – one with breadth and nuance. Here, justice is not simply rendering to each his due, as it was for the great Roman legal minds. Wolterstorff defines justice as something Christians are called to actually practice – justice is something we do and are called to do.

In the book quoted above, Wolterstorff brilliantly shows how the themes of justice are central in both the Old and New Testaments – part of it can be read here, and I highly recommend it as a brilliant work of exegesis: http://tiny.cc/rsn5bw

Here’s another thought on justice from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:

‘God’s concern for justice grows out of His compassion for man. The prophets do not speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle or idea, called justice. They are intoxicated with the awareness of God’s relationship to His people and to all men.

Justice is not important for its own sake; the validity of justice and motivation for its exercise lies in the blessing it brings to man. For justice, as stated above, is not an abstraction, a value. Justice exists in relation to a person, and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt. What is the image of a person? A person is a being whose anguish may reach the heart of God. “You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you do afflict them, and they cry out to Me, I swill surely hear their cry…if he cries to Me, I will hear, for I am compassionate” (Exod. 22:22-23, 27).

When Cain murdered his brother Abel, the words denouncing his crime did not proclaim: “You have broken the law.” Instead we read: “And…the Lord said: What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground.’ (Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘The Prophets’, p. 216)

Both Heschel and Wolterstorff both ground their concepts of justice not in the abstract (even if their wording and language is fairly different – one is an analytic philosopher and another a rabbi/mystic) but in God’s love and relation to all of mankind – and both see justice as something we practice, something we do and are called to do. This is where justice-talk in Christianity needs to go – justice seen as something we are called to practice, instead of an abstract concept somewhere out there that serves political ends. Bonhoeffer’s ethical though follow similar lines, and the reason I find these thoughts so attractive is that they move past the ideas of justice and ‘the good’ as being things somewhere out there that we strive to do in every circumstance and bring them down into concrete relation living.

Grounding justice and ethics in relationship and in love provides, so far as I can see, the strongest framework for these subjects – and is the direction that Christian ethical thought needs to take if it’s going to have any relevance in the world.

Some Thoughts on Justice, Rights and Worth

‎’Only someone who is religious can speak seriously of the sacred, but such talk informs the thought of most of us whether or not we are religious, for it shapes our thoughts about the way in which human beings limit our will as does nothing else in nature. If we are not religious, we will often search for one of the inadequate expressions which are available to us to say what we hope will be a secular equivalent of it. We may say that all human beings are inestimably precious, that they are ends in themselves, that they are owed unconditional respect, that they possess inalienable rights, and, of course, that they possess inalienable dignity. In my judgement these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it. Be that as it may: each of them is problematic and contentious. Not one of them has the simple power of the religious ways of speaking.

Where does that power come from. Not, I am quite sure, from esoteric theological or philosophical elaborations of what it means for something to be sacred. It derives from the unashamedly anthropomorphic character of the claim that we are sacred because God loves us, his children. (Raimon Gaita, ‘Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice,’ p. 23-24, quoted in ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs’, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, p.324-325)

Gaita is not himself a theist – but this is an interesting observation. I do think that Christian theism can offer the most solid account of rights/justice/ethics, and that while there are secular accounts, most of them seem to fail at providing a solid grounding.

The above has the feeling of someone who has taken seriously the thought of people like Nietzsche and has the consistency to see the consequences of such thinking. Religious thought, and in particular Christian thought, seems to offer the strongest and most powerful account of human worth, rights and justice.

Loving Like Jesus

‎’Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.’
-Rich Mullins

Ethical Judgement and Rights

What gives someone the right to make an ethical judgement? An ethical judgment is how one determines which action to take in any scenario, and on that definition is linked with the action itself. Broadly, ethical judgement can be defined so as to include the decision process as well as the action itself.

It seems to me that this question is somewhat wrongly framed, however – ethical judgments are not something that I have a right to in the same way that I have rights to other goods in my life. In a strict sense then, I don’t have a ‘right’ to make ethical judgement in that ethical judgments are a good to which I have a right. But let us examine some arguments in favor of ethical rights.

One could argue that I have a moral right to make ethical judgement - that an ethical judgement is something I ought to do – but it seems to me that just because I ought  to make an ethical judgement does not give me the right to make such judgements. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t intervene – only that, strictly speaking, I would not have a right to – I would have an obligation to.

One could argue that I have a legal right to make an ethical judgement – and this seems to me to be a position more solid. If I see someone being mistreated in an illegal way, than I have a legal right to to make an ethical judgement. However, this is a bestowed right – suppose there are laws in other countries different from my own or no laws at all – if this were the case then I would not have such rights to make an ethical judgement, or at least have more limited rights. The bestowing of the rights to ethical judgement by various legal codes seems to be somewhat arbitrary – and as such is not concrete enough to ground a theory of the rights to ethical judgement.

It would seem then that the two strongest contentions of the rights to ethical judgements, the moral and the legal, do not provide sufficent justification for the idea of ethical judgement being a right. Ethical judgments, then, do not seem to be something to which I have a right to make, for two reasons: (a) ethical judgments are not a good to which I have a right, in the same way I have a right to be treated well, and (b) the moral and legal arguments for ethical rights do not seem to provide sufficient justification for such a position. On these two accounts, it appears that ethical judgements are not something I have a right to make.

However, all we have done so far is examine the negative side of the question of ethical rights. The issue it seems to me is that the above arguments are too abstract to provide any concrete ethics – ethical judgments are not things that take place in the abstract but in the concrete, in human existence. Let us then re-frame the question in a non-abstract way that can be directly applied to human existence.

My assertion, then, is that ethical judgement is not something to which I have a right  but something that I have a freedom for, and only insofar as I stand in relation to another person – ethical judgments are something I only have freedom for in relation to another person, because it is only in relation to another person that I have freedom.

‘No man is free “as such,” that is, in a vacuum, in the way that he may be musical, intelligent or blind as such. Freedom is not a quality of man, nor is it an ability, a capacity, a kind of being that somehow flares up in him. Anyone investigating man to discover freedom finds nothing of it. Why? Because freedom is not a quality which can be revealed–it is not a possession, a presence, an object, nor is it a form of existence–but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means “being free for the other,” because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.’( Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Creation and Fall / Temptation: Two Biblical Studies,’ p. 39-40)

Bonhoeffers ethical thought is grounded in the concrete reality of human existence and relationships as opposed to the abstract of what I ought to do or what I have a right  to do. For Bonhoeffer, ethics are meant to be real concrete and not abstract, because real human existence demands concrete ethics.

Existence, Reality, Love, Christ and God

We have seen in previous posts how Dietrich Bonhoeffer connects being human to being in Christ – that in being in Christ, one truly is human.

‘Human beings are called to share the suffering of God in a godless world. Therefore we must really live in the godless world; and may not make the attempt to somehow conceal, to transfigure its godlessness religiously; we mus live in a “worldly” fashion, which means we are liberated from false religious attachments and inhibitions. ‘Being a Christian does not mean being religious in a certain way, or, on the basis of some methodology, to make something out of ourselves (a sinner, a penitent, a saint); rather, it means to be a human being. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world. This is the reversal: not to think first of our own needs, questions, sins, and anxieties, but to let ourselves be pulled into the way of Jesus, into the messianic event that is now fulfilled (Isa. 53:4-5).’
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Karl Barth makes a similar point in his magnum opus ‘Church Dogmatics’:

‎’The Christian life begins with love. It also ends with love, so far as it has an end as human life in time. There is nothing that we can or must be as a Christian, or to become a Christian, prior to love. Even faith does not anticipate love. As we come to faith we begin to love. If we did not begin to love, we would not have come to faith. Faith is faith in Jesus Christ. If we believe, the fact that we do so means that every ground which is not that of our being in love to God in Christ is cut away from under us: we cannot exist without seeking God. If this were not the case, we should have failed to come to faith. And the fact that it is so is a confirmation that our faith is not an illusion, but that we ourselves as men truly believe.

But there is nothing beyond love. There is no higher or better being or doing in which we can leave it behind us. As Christians, we are continually asked about love, and in all that we can ever do or not do, it is the decisive question. Love is the essence of Christian living. It is also the ‘conditio sine qua non,’ in ever conceivable connexion. Wherever the Christian life in commission or omission is good before God, the good thing about it is love. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, pp. 371-372.)

Barth here is referring to Christians – but I will be using this in conjunction with Bonhoeffers thought in just a moment (see 1B below).

Theologian and philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in his monumental book ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs,’ that the worth of human beings and natural rights is grounded in love – affectionate love from God.

‘…I conclude that if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, that love bestows worth on that human being; other creatures, if they knew about that love, would be envious. And I conclude that if God loves, in the mode of attachment, each and every human being equally and permanently, then natural human rights inhere in the worth bestowed upon human beings by that love.’ (Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs,’ pp. 360)

So here we have:

1A. Existence grounded in reality. (Bonhoeffer)

1B. Reality grounded in Christ. (Bonhoeffer)

1C.Existence grounded in seeking God. (Barth) Even though Barth here is intending this to refer to the Church, I am taking it one step farther and applying it to human existence on a universal level.

2. Worth of existence and natural rights grounded in the love of God. (Wolterstorff) This has more to do with ethical thought than ontological existence. See 2B below.

3. My assertion, then, is this: that apart from participating in reality and seeking God, there is no human existence. People exist, but not in their truly human form.

2B. While those not participating in reality/seeking God are not truly living in a human sense, they do in fact have worth bestowed upon them by God by His love for them as well as natural rights.

 

Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Responsible Action and Reality

Dietrich Bonhoeffer grounds his ethics in the participation of reality – one must participate in reality in order to do any kind of responsible action or make any kind of ethical or moral judgement. He grounds reality in Christ (see http://theologiansinc.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/reflections-on-christology/ for an overview of Bonhoeffers grounding of reality in Christ), and thereby ground participating in reality in participating in Christ, and therefore grounds any kind of responsible/ethical/moral (hereafter referred to as ‘responsible action) in Christ. The interesting thought here is this: does this mean that atheists are, with regard to responsible action, helpless?

Bonhoeffer never answers this question (if he even thought of or had it brought to his attention) – so this leaves some room for speculation. I would say that for Bonhoeffer, atheists and the like would indeed be unable to truly participate in reality – which isn’t to say that they can’t in some measure be responsible – obviously non-believers can do responsible actions, but they would be of no real value, it seems, since they would not be participating in reality. So they would be capable of some measure of responsible action – no one including Bonhoeffer would deny that non-believers can be and are good upstanding citizens. But it seems that ultimately on Bonhoeffer’s view, they really wouldn’t be doing much at all.

Kierkegaard Study

Questions for pondering on ‘Fear and Trembling’:

Are ethics universal?

Is the story of Abraham and Isaac a suspension of the universal?

Is God’s command to Abraham ethical?

If it’s not ethical, could God have still issued the command? (Kant)

Was the command a test of faith? If so, why?

Would Abraham have been right to disobey/refuse?

Two Reading Projects

I am currently undertaking two reading projects:

1. A study of ethics, rights and moral philosophy. My 3 main books on the subject are ‘Ethics,’ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Justice: Rights and Wrongs,’ by Nicholas Wolterstorff, and ‘The Abolition of Man,’ by C.S. Lewis.  Supplemental books will include ‘Philosophy: A Beginners Guide,’ by Teichman and Evans, ‘The Republic,’ by Plato, ‘Nichomachean Ethics,’ by Aristotle,’ and any others I can think of or have recommended.

2. A read-thru and discussion of ‘Fear and Trembling,’ by Soren Kierkegaard. This is my first systematic study of Kierkegaard.

I’ll attempt to post updates, thoughts, critiques, etc of both studies. Any insights, arguments, anything of that sort on either project are more than welcome, as always.