IS CHRISTIAN FAITH ETHICALLY RESTRICTIVE?
BAYSIDE COMMUNITAS: WORLDVIEW
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fb_H7jbu
4w&list=PL1FB3BC06DB3B2909&index=4&fea
ture=plpp_video
GENESIS 2:16-17
• “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You
are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
but you must not eat from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat
of it you will surely die.’”
• Why is the restriction of eating from ‘the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil’ placed on
man?
POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE:
RELIGION IS ALL ABOUT CONTROL
• Truth-claims are power plays. When you claim
to have the truth, you are trying to get power
and control over other people. (Foucault)
“THEY LIKE JESUS BUT NOT THE CHURCH”
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISURp7Ux1g
CHRISTIAN FREEDOM?
• How could something that constrains a
person’s freedom (such as a regular
commitment, obligation or law) expand his or
her freedom in other areas of life?
• What is Christian freedom? What is the
relationship between “grace” and “law” in the
Christian worldview?
WHAT IS “THE GOOD”?
• “…there now is no recognized moral knowledge upon which
projects of fostering moral development could be based.”
That is to say, no body of moral knowledge exists in our
culture. (Former President, Harvard University, Derek Bok)
• “Open-mindedness” requires us to be agnostic—we cannot
know—regarding good or bad moral behavior and/or
ethical rightness or otherwise.
• What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying
to become a good person?
POSTMODERN CULTURE: TRUTH/EPISTEMOLOGY
• In our culture, freedom is highly valued and truth-claims
are devalued.
• People who believe in absolute truth—truth that everyone
should believe in—undermine freedom.
• They tend to oppress/marginalize people who don’t believe
like they do.
• They impose their belief; they tend to harm others.
• People who claim to possess absolute truth are themselves
not free—they are attempting to obey absolute truth and
they are not free.
• Absolute truth is the enemy of freedom; it harms and
erodes freedom—everyone should be free to determine
their truth; truth must be subjective—”truth for me.”
THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC
• Who will inherit the kingdom of God?
(‘The Beatitudes’—Matt. 5:3-20)
• How do we live in the kingdom of God?
(‘The Sermon on the Mount”—Matt. 5:20 –
7:27)
THE ‘BEATITUDES’ & THE ‘SERMON ON THE MOUNT’
• Truth: All who hear and do will have life!
• Freedom: more complex than we think!
• Liberty: Jesus is our Liberator!
TRUTH: ALL WHO HEAR AND DO WILL HAVE LIFE!
• Christians believe they possess truth—
Christians believe everyone should believe in
Christ as the Savior of the world:
• “If you belong to Christ, then you are
Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the
promise”—Galatians 3:29.
• The family of God is a single family, redefined
around and by the Messiah, and this single
family was promised by God to Abraham.
TRUTH: THE BEATITUDES
• Common misinterpretation: “the poor in spirit” is a spiritual condition
that warrants entry into the kingdom of God; “the poor in spirit” has come
to refer to a praiseworthy condition.
• However, to the contrary, these are people with absolutely no spiritual
qualifications or abilities at all—they are people standing, at present,
before Jesus whom our Lord has touched and graciously changed their
lives.
• Those referred to as “poor in spirit” (or any other condition mentioned in
the Beatitudes) are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a
meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of
their ever so deplorable condition, the kingdom of God has moved
redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ” (D. Willard).
THE NATURE OF BIBLICAL TRUTH
•
The Beatitudes are not instructions to do anything; they do not indicate conditions that are
especially pleasing to God or good for human beings.
•
Rather, they are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the
present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus.
•
The notion that the Beatitudes, in particular, are instructions, promotes the legalistic notion
that we are to “build the kingdom” or “advance” or “establish” the kingdom.
•
The kingdom of God is a present reality—”the immediate presence of the Kingdom is found
in Jesus.”
•
Therefore, rather than “building” or “bringing” the kingdom of God through our works, we
are to “implement” Christ’s finished work through the Spirit’s empowerment—through the
Spirit’s power, we find spiritual riches, comfort, strength, righteousness, mercy, purity of
heart, peace, assurance. Instead of being called to be contractors, we are called to be priests
(intercessors) occupying space between those outside the covenant and the kingdom of
God.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM:
OUR CULTURE’S PERSPECTIVE
• Postmodern culture: If we must obey “the” truth, we must
give up freedom—”Truth is a thing of this world. It is
produced only by multiple forms of constraint and that
includes the regular effects of power” (Foucault).
• Truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the
truth, you are trying to get power and control over other
people.
• If you claimed “everyone should do justice to the poor,”
Nietzsche would question whether you said that because
you really love justice and the poor or because you wanted
to start a revolution that would give you control and power.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM:
THE BIBLE—THE BEATITUDES
•
Jesus confronted the Pharisees because they were using their claims to truth for
the purpose of power and control over people.
•
Whereas some truth-claims are power plays, to include the Pharisees’ claims, not
all truth-claims are power plays.
•
In the person of Jesus Christ, God reveals divine ethical action, even in the face of
human sin and injustice—the unity of truth in Christ is purchased only at the cost
of violence: Jesus’ death on the cross.
•
Contrary to the ruthless, brutal regimes of fallen men, e.g., totalitarianism (“the
values of one’s own society”) or authoritarianism (“my values, not yours”), the
Gospel reveals Christ’s atoning death for his enemies: he forgives them instead of
conquering them; he gives up power and becomes a servant—Christ’s death is
revealed in the NT as God’s counter-ideological confrontation of the world and its
bloodstained history; the totalizing violence of the majority is associated with evil
in God’s world.
TRUTH-CLAIMS: CONCLUSIONS
• To say no one can make truth-claims is a truth-claim itself (selfdefeating argument)—if you say all truth-claims are power plays,
then so is your statement (if you say, like Freud, that all truth-claims
about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal
with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement).
• Truth-claims are unavoidable.
• Truth-claims do not necessarily lead to oppression rather it’s what is
in the truth-claim that is important—does the truth-claim lead to
the majority’s control or to personal freedom, especially for the
most vulnerable, i.e., those “outside” (e.g., Jesus’ audience while
delivering The Beatitudes).
THE BEATITUDES: POSTSCRIPT
• It is true that truth-claims can be used to destroy
freedom, but there is no freedom without truth: “If you
hold my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you
will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
• Only the truth will set you free; freedom comes from
submission to the truth not fleeing from it: ‘For I tell
you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of
the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will
certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ –Mt. 5:20.
Freedom: More Complex Than We Think!
• Six antitheses: You can’t live anyway you
want—Matthew 5:20 – 44.
• Modern/Postmodern protest: “I thought
freedom was an absence of restrictions; an
absence of all constraints, all boundaries.”
[Re: John Lennon’s Imagine]
HOW DO WE LIVE IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD?
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT: MATTHEW 5:20-7:27
• “… the truth will set you free” but freedom is
not the absence of restrictions on anything I
do.
• But restriction and discipline does not
produce freedom.
• Freedom is not the absence of restrictions or
the presence of restrictions.
WHAT THEN IS FREEDOM?
• Freedom is finding the right combination of “the absence of
restrictions” and the “presence of restrictions” in the
context of liberating love.
• This love does not consist of acts and projects but is a
pervasive condition of vision, joy, and love in which we
habitually reside—it is a love of the same quality as God’s
love (Matt. 5:45-48).
• For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a
mutual loss of independence, it can’t be just one way.
• Love is the most liberating freedom-loss in all of life—you
must sacrifice independence for greater intimacy.
• To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must
forsake your personal autonomy.
C.S. LEWIS
• “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and
possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it
intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an
animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little
luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the
casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe,
dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be
broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable,
irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the
risk of tragedy, is damnation.”
• Freedoms of love are only possible if you surrender all kinds
of freedoms.
LIBERTY: JESUS IS OUR LIBERATOR!
• Matthew 5:29-30—This message (Matthew 5:3 –
7:27) is one unified whole intended to teach us
that true rightness is a matter of one’s heart;
such actions (cf. 5:29-30) would therefore make
no difference.
• “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth
came through Jesus the Anointed” (John 1:17)—
His teachings illustrate how those alive in the
kingdom can live in God’s presence, through the
days and hours of their ordinary existence.
MATTHEW 5:20
• “The law” Jesus’ hearers had in mind and rubbed up against every day was
not the law of God. It was a contemporary version of religious
respectability, very harsh and oppressive in application, that Jesus referred
to as “the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.”
• But the presence of the kingdom of God brings us all that is right for
human life—in Matthew 5:20-48, we discover exactly what fulfillment of
the law would look like in daily life.
• There is a sequence of contrasts between the older teaching about what a
good person would do—e.g., not murder—and Jesus’ portrait of the
kingdom heart in 5:20-48.
• 5:20-48 moves from the deepest recesses of human evil, burning anger
and obsessive desire, to the pinnacle of human fulfillment in agape or
divine love. Jesus undermines the entire edifice of human corruption by
eliminating its foundations in the human heart.
OBEDIENCE = LIBERTY!
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The only proper response to this word which
Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”
• Almost 1/6 of the entire Discourse (15 of 92 verses) is devoted to
emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says.
• Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the
reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it.
• How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of
the church as it enters the 21st century (Dallas Willard).
• And, liberty (freedom) is discovering what you were made for and
obediently responding to God’s call on your life.
ABSOLUTE TRUTH
• Obedience to abstract absolute truth is dehumanizing; but
obedience to Jesus—he who is personal absolute truth—is
liberating.
• Tim Keller: “At first sight… a relationship with God seems inherently
dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be “one way,” God’s way. God, the
divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God—there is no way that
God could adjust to and serve me. While this may be true in other forms
of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most
radical way, God has adjusted to us—in his incarnation and atonement. In
Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and
death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition—as sinners—and died
in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in
Christ, ‘I will adjust to you… I’ll serve you though it means a sacrifice for
me.’ If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and
others. St. Paul writes, “the love of Christ constrains us” (2 Cor. 5:14).
DIVINE CONSPIRACY
• “When Jesus hung on the cross and prayed, ‘Father,
forgive them because they do not understand what
they are doing,’ that was not hard for him. What would
have been hard for him would have been to curse his
enemies and spew forth vileness and evil upon
everyone, God and the world, as those crucified with
him did, at least for a while. He calls us to him to
impart himself to us. He does not call us to do what he
did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then
the doing what he did and said becomes the natural
expression of who we are in him”—Dallas Willard.
HITCHENS & CRAIG: EXISTENCE AND MEANING
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9NlRKJBK
t4&feature=related
CHRISTIAN FREEDOM?
• How could something that constrains a
person’s freedom (such as a regular
commitment, obligation or law) expand his or
her freedom in other areas of life?
• What is Christian freedom? What is the
relationship between “grace” and “law” in the
Christian worldview?