Enemies for Your Sake: The Figure of the Jew in Paul and the Qur’an

[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!]

In this paper, I want to draw a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. I will begin by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explain how I came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggest how the parallels might have come about. I will then develop a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion in which I draw out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.

I.

Paul is conspicuously absent from the Qur’an. The sacred text of Islam mentions many figures from the New Testament, dwelling at great length on Jesus, Mary, Zechariah, and even mentioning that Jesus — alone among the Qur’anic prophets — had a special group of followers known as the “disciples.” All of those references, however, are solely to the Gospels, or to adjacent apocryphal literature, such as the Protoevangelium of James. Only the Gospel is mentioned alongside the Torah as an authentic earlier scripture in the Qur’an’s reckoning.

Yet even if Paul had been mentioned, the Qur’an also claims that the actual scriptural deposits held by contemporary Jews and Christians have been corrupted and that the Qur’an’s retelling of biblical stories are restoring the authentic originals. Hence there has historically been little curiosity among Islamic scholars about the Bible — why bother with the corrupt version when you have the real thing? Virtually the only extended engagement with Paul in the medieval Islamic tradition is ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s 10th-century Critique of Christian Origins, which portrays the Apostle as a scheming Jew who was instrumental in corrupting the original Gospel message. Along the way, he introduces many fanciful and sometimes offensive stories and evinces only a fragmentary knowledge of the epistles themselves.

Modern scholars of the Qur’an have largely left Paul aside as well. The motives, to the extent we can assign motives to this kind of lacuna, likely vary. On the one hand, scholars who are broadly sympathetic to Islam accept the basic traditional narrative that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad during his lifetime and assembled within the lifetime of his close companions. Most members of this group therefore usually attempt to square the circle between a secular perspective on the Prophet’s activities and the Islamic claim that he was an “unlettered prophet” — i.e., he didn’t directly study previous scriptural texts, but may have vaguely picked them up by osmosis. On the other hand, there are more hostile scholars who often advance far-fetched and, in my view, borderline conspiratorial narratives of a late origin of the Qur’an, which cuts the figure of Muhammad out of the picture. In place of any serious engagement with the Qur’an as a theological text with cohesive themes, they attempt to trace the lost Syriac text (or whatever) that lay at the basis of it.

Nevertheless, simply as a reader who is familiar with both texts, I cannot help but think there is an important connection to be made here. I first approached the Qur’an for the sake of my teaching, as my dean called upon me to fill in a gap in our course offerings after the faculty member who taught Eastern religions retired. As a scholar of Christianity, I figured that Islam would be the nearest reach. Hence I set to work reading the suras of the Qur’an in approximate chronological order — with no particular “angle” or agenda, and perhaps even a little irritated that this demand was interfering with my summer research plans.

When I got to Sura 2, The Cow (which comes early in the printed text but relatively late in the Prophet’s ministry), I was struck by the following passage: “They say, ‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say [Prophet], ‘No, [ours is] the religion of Abraham, the upright, who did not worship any god besides God’” (2:135; using Haleem translation here and throughout; all brackets represent attempted clarifications by the translator). This sounded very similar to Paul’s attempts in Galatians and Romans to get back behind the Law of Moses by connecting his preaching to the more primordial figure of Abraham. When I got to Sura 3, The Family of Imran, the parallel had become unmistakable:

People of the Book, why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? … Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright and devoted to God, never an idolater, and the people who are closest to him are those who truly follow his ways, this Prophets, and [true] believers—God is close to [true] believers. (3:65-68)

How can one not think of the passages where Paul argues for the priority of Abraham’s pure faith over against the later covenant of Moses? In Galatians, he specifies that “the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God” (Galatians 3:17), and in Romans he points out that Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness “not after, but before he was circumcized” (4:10), so that he can be the ancestor of both uncircumcised and circumcised believers.

No one who had attended Ted Jennings’ seminar on Romans could possibly miss these parallels. Nevertheless, I did not find much affirmation of my intuitions in the scholarship. In my admittedly far from exhaustive study of literature on the Qur’an, I have found almost zero mention of any relationship between the Qur’an’s deployment of the figure of Abraham and the Apostle Paul’s. The one exception is the biography of the Prophet by Juan Cole, probably known to some in the audience as an anti-Iraq War blogger. Breaking with both trends of the scholarship I mentioned above, Cole both accepts the historicity of the Prophet Muhammad as the vehicle for the revelation of the Qur’an over a relatively short period of time but nevertheless avoids the kid-gloves approach to the notion of the “unlettered prophet.” For Cole, Muhammad was a successful merchant and hence would have been multi-lingual as a matter of course. Moreover, he was a spiritual seeker long before he started receiving the Qur’anic revelations, and so he would have eagerly devoured any theological or scriptural literature he could get his hands on.

Hence Cole is able to make connections to texts from Judaism, Christianity, and various heretical or non-mainstream sects of both, as well as many other religious and intellectual movements — including the letters of Paul. Indeed, he takes the connection further. In an unpublished SBL paper he generously shared with me, Cole suggests that Pauline studies might provide a useable paradigm for Qur’anic studies, and in fact his biography of the Prophet, which aims to use the Qur’an rather than the traditional biographical narratives as the primary source, is constructed on the model of a biography of Paul drawn from the internal timeline implied by the letters rather the account in Acts.

Although he is definitely an outlier in terms of reconstructing the Prophet’s literary borrowings, even Cole stops short of making any strong claim that Muhammad sat down and read the literal texts of Paul. I don’t want to make any strong claim, either. Instead, I want to suggest that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Even if Muhammad studied the texts of Paul, that does not, in itself, “explain” why those precise rhetorical moves appeared at such crucial moments in the Qur’an. As the man says, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.” Whether they are borrowed or independently discovered, the rhetorical and theological parallels are rooted in their shared rhetorical and theological situation as messengers who have arrived “too late” and must shore up their legitimacy in the face of a pre-existing monotheistic tradition (or range of traditions).

The situation is doubtless more complicated in Muhammad’s case given that the centuries that separate him from Paul saw the rise of Christianity, in all of its bewildering and mutually antagonistic forms. In a sense, though, Paul himself is already dealing with multiple versions of Christianity as well, as shown in his “so I says to the guy”-style account of his debate with Peter in Galatians or the delicate tightrope he walks with Apollos in 1 Corinthians. For both Paul and Muhammad, one would initially assume that the debate with Christians is the more salient one—in Paul’s case because he is primarily concerned with the requirements for Gentile believers to join the Christian movement and in Muhammad’s because orthodox Trinitarianism and Christology clearly violate the Qur’anic prohibition of “associating partners with God” — yet both focus much more on the original bearers of the monotheistic revelation: the Jews.

II.

At first glance, Paul and Muhammad’s respective position with regard to the Jews could not be more different. Most notably, Paul is himself a Jew of impeccable credentials: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5-6). As the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul has the role of bringing an essentially Jewish message to the previously excluded nations.  Muhammad, for his part, claims no Jewish descent, and the Qur’an proudly declares itself an Arabic revelation for Arabs. Paul is also preaching a message that he understands to be the culmination or fulfillment of the Jewish revelation, whereas—at least until the later years of Muhammad’s career — the Qur’an presents the Prophet’s message as merely the latest in a series of such messages to individual nations.

Despite those very important differences, however, both Paul and Muhammad are clearly rankled by the failure of the Jews to accept their respective messages—albeit not to the same degree. Whereas the Prophet recognizes that the Jews have a special relationship to God and to the Scriptural heritage, making their failure to acknowledge his prophetic message a clear challenge to his prophetic legitimacy, that is not as pressing an issue as the refusal of Paul’s fellow countrymen’s to accept their own ostensible messiah. The gap begins to close as Muhammad becomes a political leader in Medina, where some Jewish groups explicitly ally with him and thus become quasi-insiders, but even then, Muhammad’s ultimate goal is to establish an ecumenical community of monotheists: “The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good—will have their rewards with their Lord. No fear for them, nor will they grieve” (2:62). (No one is quite sure who the Sabians are, but surely that only highlights the open-ended inclusiveness of the Qur’an’s vision!)

Once we take into account those key differences in their respective situation and degree of emotional investment in Jewish acceptance of their message, what’s remarkable is how similar their strategies are for negotiating their relationship with the Jewish monotheistic heritage. For the sake of imposing some order on two infamously disorganized bodies of literature, I will assess their approach to three interrelated issues in turn: the question of Jewish privilege, the place of the Jewish law, and the prospects of salvation for the Jews.

So first, Jewish privilege. As we have seen, both Paul and the Qur’an attempt to displace Jewish privilege by using Abraham to make an end-run around Moses. Both also deploy the primal scene of the Garden of Eden to emphasize the universality of their respective messages, though this move is much more prominent in Paul than in the Qur’an. This likely reflects the fact that the Prophet’s mission in the Qur’an is not initially envisioned as having the same universal scope as Christ’s. Indeed, the very fact that no prophet is fully definitive, that each is part of an open-ended series, seems to displace the privilege of previous prophets such as Moses or Jesus.

This strategy is especially evident in the earlier revelations, which intersperse the familiar biblical prophets with messengers to various ancient cities of Arabia — whose ruins would regularly be seen by traveling merchants — and radically downplay the fact that the biblical prophets are all part of the same family tree. For the Qur’an, a perennial monotheistic message has come down through many prophets at many places and times, and only very late in the Qur’anic revelation do we get any hint that Muhammad, as “seal of the prophets” (33:40), is anything other than one prophet among many.

Yet a form of particularism does return, precisely through the figure of Abraham. As we have seen, Paul turns Abraham into the father of those who believe in Christ and, in Galatians, reinterprets Christ as the singular “offspring” who will receive God’s promises to Abraham (3:16). Similarly, the Qur’an introduces a Muslim particularism into the Abraham story by stealthily replacing Isaac with Ishmael on Mount Moriah (37:99-111) and then has the father-son pair found the shrine at Mecca (2:125-129). Hence the “religion of Abraham” is both the perennial monotheism announced by all the prophets and the specific Mecca-centered rites preached by the Seal of the Prophets. In both cases, Jewish privilege is displaced and then reappropriated for the new movement.

This brings us to my second point, namely the role of the Jewish law as the most visible marker of Jewish particularism. Here the convergence between Paul and the Qur’an is most remarkable, given their very different starting points. For his part, Paul has two core concerns that bring him into collision with the Jewish law. Like all Jesus-followers, he must account for how the messiah’s shameful crucifixion and death as an outlaw fit into the economy of salvation, and in terms of his specific mission, he is deeply committed to the idea that Gentiles share in the messianic reality precisely as Gentiles—not as converts to Judaism. In Galatians, that leads him to identify the law as a curse (3:10-14) and a form of slavery (4:22-5:1) and to joke darkly that anyone who is interested in circumcision “would castrate themselves” (5:12). In the later epistle to the Romans, this view has softened: though the law is “holy and just and good” (7:12), its role is the fundamentally negative one of highlighting the omnipresence of sin. In both letters, then, Paul concludes that one is better off joining Christ outside the sphere of the law.

For the Qur’an, the conflict arises from a repeated concern that people should not simply make up prohibitions that God has not actually revealed. In the case of dietary restrictions, the Qur’an repeatedly states that God “has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked” (2:173). This raises the question of whether the Torah’s much more restrictive dietary rules represent the kind of imposture that the Qur’an decries. Though the Qur’an is generally comfortable performing a line-item veto of individual laws or plot points from biblical stories, disqualifying the majority of Jewish practice as a fraud is apparently a bridge too far. It decides that the restrictions are real, but they apply only to the Jews, as a form of punishment: “For the wrongdoings done by the Jews, we forbade them certain good things that had been permitted to them before” (4:160). The Qur’an also suggests that the Sabbath may have a similar punitive origin, claiming that “The Sabbath was made obligatory only for those who differed about it” (16:124).

For both the radical messianist and the Seal of the Prophets, then, the Jewish law is reversed from a blessing to a curse, or at least from a privilege to a burden. This obviously complicates my third point of comparison, the ultimate fate of the Jewish people, which is also the place where their strategy most differs. The key passage here in Paul is the labyrinthine Romans 9-11. On the one hand, Paul is unequivocal that “gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Jesus is and always remains the Jewish messiah, and his death and resurrection make possible the unexpected extension to all nations of God’s promises to the Jewish people. Even the fact that they have rejected the messiah and become “enemies for your sake” (11:28) only highlights the Jews’ special role in the economy of salvation—they had to step aside temporarily in order to make room for Gentiles to come in. Yet Jewish particularism is only redeemed through accepting Christian particularism, as their jealousy at seeing the Gentiles enjoy the benefit of God’s promises will lead them to relent and accept that Jesus is the messiah (11:11). Only in that sense can Paul say, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

By contrast, in the Qur’an, the standards for the salvation of a Jewish person are the same as for anyone else: believe in God and the last day, pray, and live a righteous life. The prophetic message provides no information about what happens if they don’t fulfill their special dietary obligations, though it does include an enigmatic story in which God tests the Jews’ faithfulness by sending them a fish that surfaced only on the Sabbath (7:163-167). They give into temptation, leading God to declare that “until the Day of Resurrection, He would send people against them to inflict terrible suffering on them” (7:167) — a dire punishment, to be sure, but one that only applies to the life of this world. One assumes, as with every commandment in the Qur’an, that the faithful Jew’s duty is to do their best to obey their extra commandments and not be too hard on themselves if some necessity or misunderstanding prevents them. The displacement of Jewish privilege thus leads to a situation where they have no particular advantage or disadvantage in salvation. Indeed, the Qur’an, in a distant echo of Paul’s rude comment from Galatians, can sometimes taunt Jews who believe that their special relationship to God means they are automatically saved that they should therefore wish for death (62:6).

Nevertheless, this live-and-let-live attitude does not exclude a bitter enmity, at least for a certain subset of Jews. The direct cause here is the fact that some Jewish groups explicitly submitted to Muhammad’s leadership through the so-called “Constitution of Medina,” then failed to fulfill their obligations. As Juan Cole is at pains to clarify, many verses that seem to vent fury at the Jews as a whole should instead be interpreted as applying only to specific groups who behave in the specific ways described. That contextualization is helpful, yet it does not dispel my impression that the Qur’an’s attitude toward the Jews is on something of a hair trigger—their presumed favor and cooperation is especially coveted, making their opposition all the more galling. The fact that Christians, who on the face of it violate the Qur’an’s radical monotheism, do not face the same love-hate dynamic only heightens this suspicion. That may simply be a result of a lower or less unified Christian population in the Hijaz — or it may reflect a sense that Christians, as another post-Jewish monotheistic movement, are more natural allies.

III.

Overall, then, both the Apostle Paul and the Prophet Muhammad arrive at very similar strategies for negotiating their relationship with the original bearers of the monotheistic message. Both tend to displace Jewish particularism and replace it with their new movement’s own particularism. Both reinterpret the Jewish law as a burden or punishment rather than a sign of God’s blessing. Thankfully, these negative moves do not lead either to exclude the Jews from salvation, but both nonetheless insist that any redemption they experience will conform to the standards of their new revelation—which was of course the true meaning of the old revelation all along. The specific theological paths they take to get there differ based on their respective historical contexts and emotional investment in the Jewish community, but the fact that such different starting points can lead to such similar results is, at the very least, unexpected—especially for two texts that the medieval and modern scholarly traditions have taken to be completely unrelated.

My contention is that this convergence ultimately stems from the very nature of historical, revealed monotheism. Here I am drawing on the work of Jan Assmann. In The Price of Monotheism, Assmann argues that revealed monotheistic traditions represent “secondary” religions. Whereas the “primary” traditions, retrospectively called polytheism, have an open-ended and inclusive quality — new gods can always be added to the pantheon, and the gods of other groups can be “translated” into their local equivalents—the secondary religions style themselves as the correction of the errors of paganism and have a built-in intolerance. This intolerance extends not only to the unwashed masses outside the monotheistic circle, but to the backsliders and compromisers within it, who fall short of the monotheistic demand encapsulated in a scriptural deposit. Living traditions will inevitably lapse into such “betrayals,” and they will just as inevitably be met with Reformation-like demands to “return” to the pure religion represented in scripture.

All of this seems to me to be basically right, and classroom use has showed me that students find Assmann’s concepts helpful for negotiating the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Where Assmann seems to me to stumble is in his account of the relationships among the existing monotheistic traditions, which for him grows out of the tensions between universalism and particularism in the monotheistic idea. On the one hand, monotheism has universal implications—the God it reveals is the God of everyone. On the other hand, monotheism insists on particularity—the God is reveals is a particular named God who has participated in specific historical events, and all other gods are false and/or demonic. Judaism manages this tension in a straightforward way:

In Judaism, the universalism inherent to monotheism is deferred until a messianic end-time; in the world as we know it, the Jews are the guardians of a truth that concerns everyone, but that has been entrusted to them for the time being as to a kind of spiritual avant-garde. For Christians, of course, this end-time dawned some two thousand years ago, putting an end to the need for such distinctions. That is why Christian theology has blinded itself to the need for such distinctions. (17)

He then adds, almost as an afterthought, that Islam suffers from a similar blindness, which is why both traditions have at times embraced an intolerance and violence that seems to contradict their universal message.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to provide much explanation for why so much of that intolerance and violence has been directed at a group that both traditions agree to be fellow worshippers of the one true God: namely, the Jews. Here the problem doesn’t seem to me that Christianity and Islam can’t admit that their universal message is rooted in particularism. It’s that they can’t admit that their new revelation is new. This is not merely bad faith or willful blindness, but a structural necessity of participating in the revealed monotheistic tradition. The one true God is not a vague philosophical principle of unity or a trans-historical ideal that may be reflected in many different ways — he is a particular, named deity who has reportedly done particular things at particular times and places. The claim to follow this God therefore requires maintaining some form of continuity with the existing deposit of revelation, even as the felt demand for a new approach demands some critical distance.

The ideal outcome from the perspective of a budding new prophet would of course be that the Jews accept the new “purified” version of monotheism en masse. Every new monotheistic movement seems to include a moment of delusional optimism that this will occur — even Martin Luther expected that Jews would rush to embrace the “real” Christianity that had been obscured for so many centuries. This blessed outcome somehow never occurs, leading to the kinds of mental gymnastics I have documented above.

The necessarily polemical nature of revealed monotheism is therefore directed precisely at the original bearers of the monotheistic demand. Their very faithfulness to the divine command is recast as a form of stubbornness or arrogance. Their entire history — here drawing on authentic threads in the Hebrew Bible — is interpreted as one of rebellion and disbelief. In the Qur’an, which proclaims to the Jews that God has “blessed you and favored you over other people” (2:47), the chosen nation is reduced to a perpetual object lesson for the believers. Even worse, the Christian tradition of typological exegesis that finds its beginning in the Pauline epistles reads the entire history of Israel as a series of unwitting anticipatory pantomimes of the life of Christ.

The Jews are wrong, yet necessary, indeed necessarily wrong. They become, in Paul’s words, “enemies for your sake,” constitutive enemies at the foundation of a new tradition that can structurally never understand itself to be new. And so the new revelation’s declaration that the Jews’ special favor with God, represented by the divine law that structures their lives and sets them apart from all nations, is actually a burden and a curse becomes a grim self-fulfilling prophecy. For the crime of bringing revealed monotheism into the world and sustaining its demand against all odds, the Jews are condemned to perpetual suspicion, exclusion, and persecution—precisely by their fellow monotheists. The dynamic may be more virulent (as in Christianity) or less (as in Islam), but it is nonetheless real and destructive.

I began this paper by considering the understandable reasons that scholars have ignored the possible connection between Paul and the Qur’an, and I will end by asking why Assmann might downplay the toxic theological dynamic that my comparison has highlighed. The answer, it seems to me, is that he is attempting to extract some redemptive core to the monotheistic revolution, which will allow him to declare it, despite everything, a progressive step toward the inclusive secular world order he is clearly hoping for. That core, he claims, is the universal demand for justice, which could form the basis of a universal law, though never a universal religion. Yet the dynamics I trace in this paper call the justice of God deeply into question, as an entire nation’s history is reduced to an object lesson or a ladder to truth that can be safely kicked away. It is no mistake that Romans 9-11, where Paul grapples with the salvation of the Jews, is also Christian theology’s locus classicus for the doctrine of predestination, which seems to reduce God to an arbitrary monster. The hope for a universal justice is surely a valid one, but to get there, we need to break more definitively with the habits of thought that the secondary monotheisms have bequeathed to us.

Fidelity to God: Our Highest Good

Editor’s Note: This essay is the first in a three part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

One of the most important sentences in the entire Western canon comes from Augustine. It is a statement written in the indicative voice that many are doubtless familiar with, given its ubiquity. From The Confessions, Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Though this sentence is an indicative statement of truth, it also assumes an imperative: we are meant to be in communion with God. For homo religiosus, knowing God is to be human at its fullest. We are to commune with God not because we seek our own supremacy, but because communing with God is what brings peaceful rectitude to the soul. Knowing God quenches our deepest desires to know the glorious and be known by the glorious.

The First Pillar

In the planning and execution for Fidelity Month, it became clear that dedication to God needed to be the first pillar of fidelity. This first pillar reminds us of an architectonic truth: whatever the goods of family, community, and nation represent, their intelligibility must be ordered and understood by what created them and, in turn, best illuminates them: God. The “ordo amoris,” or “order of loves” spoken of in the Christian tradition, insists on the inherent goods of family, community, and nation as ends to be pursued for their own sake. The love they are given, however, is proportionate to the love they are owed. But we owe God our highest affections because it is He who has made us. As we come to know God and conform ourselves to His divine plan, fullness of being comes into view. Scripture deems the knowledge of God as a resplendent good that colors every other experience of our humanity. As Psalm 36:9 states, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” Communion with God is what lights our path (Psalm 119:105). If we shall not walk in darkness, we must turn ourselves to the light (Isaiah 9:2; John 8:12).

Never more than now is the time ripe to rededicate ourselves to God. It’s what our culture needs most. With religion on the decline, it should come as no surprise that mental health appears more statistically volatile than ever before. Excise or trivialize the most important foundation of a person’s existence—their relationship to God—and it is to be expected that humanity’s sense of balance and purpose would be torn asunder.

Furthermore, in an age of cascading “identities” on endless offer, knowledge of God bequeaths a right and definitive knowledge of the self. Christian theology has a rich tradition of delineating the relationship between epistemology and anthropology, insisting on their essential unity. The two subjects ask: how do we know who we are? Theologians believe that philosophy on its own cannot adequately answer this question. In John Calvin’s Institutes, his famous opening lines sought to demarcate how knowledge of God spills over into an accurate knowledge of the self. For Calvin, they are inextricably bound in a helix-like structure. As Calvin says:

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while they are joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being shares in God’s own being. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.

Here Calvin restates that architectonic truth: God is the font of all meaningful knowledge. Apart from him, we fumble around in the darkness. We cannot explain the obligations that beset us without God as the source of those obligations. As Vladimir Solovyov once remarked, “Men descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.” This is the dilemma of modern man, who craftily detects “facts” but cannot muster objective “values” without reference to the infinite.

Liberty under Law

As Psalm 100:3 declares, “Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” This indicative is followed by an imperative: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!” The imperative is followed by an enveloping promise: “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). As we know God as our Creator and praise Him, we exult in His promised love and goodness to us.

Economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell has explained two rival accounts of understanding reality and the cosmos: A “constrained” versus an “unconstrained” vision of the universe. For Sowell, the ways in which individuals can understand their place in the cosmos are a binary between accepting the givenness of an ineluctable moral order—one bounded by truth, order, and obligation—and endless plasticity, wandering, and subjectivity. Man, wont as he is to choose the path of least resistance, is prone to think that living according to passion, desire, and appetite are the summum bonum of existence. In a biblical cosmology, recognizable desires that are present—among them desires for friendship, knowledge, beauty, sexual intimacy, and one’s patrimony—are subsumed within a broader horizon of intelligibility, one of constraint and rightly ordered fulfillment. In the Christian account of the human person, there is only “liberty under law” not “liberty above law.” The Psalmist captures such sentiment in Psalm 119:45: “And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.” Here, the Psalmist affixes flourishing to a sense of limitation and obligation, grounded ultimately in friendship with God.

“Cosmic Anchoring”

Now, more than ever, we must assert that infidelity to God is what plagues Western man and that what stands as his greatest need is fidelity and right relationship to Him. Without that sure foundation provided by a divine guarantor, the value, responsibilities, and duties that attend to individuals are mere contrivances; they need to be secured to a divine ontology not subject to the vicissitudes of human passions. In other words, Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Vàclav Havel longed for but could not find—a “Cosmic Anchoring,” a foundation that orders existence, something that political orders hostile to God cannot supply on their own. Christian anthropology, and its emphasis on the human person bearing God’s image, forever changed the equation for the significance of the individual—the human became definitively suffused with moral meaning. With Christianity, as historian Larry Siedentop writes, “Individual agency acquires roots in divine agency.”

We must know God to know our relationship to our family, to our community, and our nation. Nothing made, including the virtues of political community, can be fully understood apart from their ultimate foundation in God. Individuals need God. So do the nations. Democratic virtues that we take for granted as necessary to the American project—among them respect for human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law—all find their origins in Christianity. Outside of Christianity, each concept exists as a vapor hanging in thin air.

So, as we begin this inaugural Fidelity Month, we recommit and rededicate ourselves to God. You were made to know God. He is your ultimate happiness. Knowing God is not a rejection of creaturely good. It is vantage point that allows us to enjoy creaturely good as intended “from the beginning” (Matt. 19:4–6). We are made for an eternal joy that no temporal good, despite what good they do indeed provide, can fully satisfy. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.”

What does rededicating ourselves to God mean practically? At the risk of oversimplifying matters, we need not make the practical more complex than it needs to be. Perhaps there is a gnawing sense of emptiness that besets you. Maybe you have tried living according to instinct and appetite; maybe that has resulted in what Scripture refers to as “chasing the wind” and “vanity.” As Augustine says above, the sense of emptiness and lack of direction that plagues every human heart is how the law written on the heart tells us to return to God. Empty bottles, one-night stands, and hollowed-out pill containers cannot elide the reality of the conscience, however hard you may try. Come to God. For the non-Christian, “fidelity to God” may mean coming to know Him for the first time. If that is you, there are churches in your community that will be there to share with you the good news of God’s love for you in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For practicing Christians, fidelity to God may mean recommitting ourselves to the practices that habituate us into deeper relationship. Even when we do not feel like it, we must read our Bibles and pray as a ritual reminder that the first thing about each of us is our ultimate end, not our temporal end. Contemplating God’s works in His Word is good for you. We must go to church, catechize ourselves and our families, and love each other.

As a Christian, I believe the fullest and final revelation of God comes in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I am always grateful for Christ, but the more I grow in understanding human nature—in all its resplendent wonders and spectacular failures—I grow in gratitude for Christ and how He is sufficient in ten thousand ways. The sufficiency of Christ is all the sweeter and more essential to the soul, for He alone is our highest good (Mark 10:18).

The Bible and Book of Mormon Challenged Under Utah Book Ban Law

Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.

Is the American Founding Christian, Secular—Or Something Else?

The question of the relationship between the American Founding’s ideals and the Christian faith is as old as the Mayflower Compact. The line between secular and religious has never been plainly visible in American history. The famous “wall of separation” has never really amounted to more than a picket fence. It is not surprising, then, that declining confidence in American institutions and declining conviction in American ideals has occurred in parallel with declining religiosity in the United States. Any attempt to reverse the former must contend with the ongoing impact of the latter. What, though, is the nature of the relationship between the secular and the religious in American political thought and history?

Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer’s The Classical and Christian Origins of American is an elegantly written, tightly argued, and profoundly thoughtful contribution to the recurring debate over this question. Cooper and Dyer’s deep immersion in the historical and ongoing conversation about the role of religion in American political life, and their contributions to this conversation, will provide a touchstone for scholars and commentators for years to come.

Cooper and Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without, in this reviewer’s opinion, successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again across the book’s pages like a well-greased elephant. This middle option may be described as follows: the American experiment is a novus ordo seclorum that has coexisted with and drawn support from the classical–Christian order that preceded it.

Natural Law

Despite ultimately missing the bullseye on the question whether the Founding is ultimately a Christian or secular project, the book makes noteworthy contributions on the relationship between natural law theory and American political thought. The first of these occurs in the introductory chapter’s treatment of the question “What is Natural Law?” In addition to providing one of the most succinct and accessible descriptions of natural law available in recent literature, in this section the authors very helpfully highlight natural law’s relevance to American constitutionalism, in contrast with “Hobbist” absolutism. Cooper and Dyer define the natural law as “the moral law for human beings known to reason through rationally apprehended goods, rationally discerned moral obligations, and the freedom of the will to choose to obey or disobey this law.” By tethering moral obligation to reason rather than force, the natural law requires political constitutionalism rather than absolutism—“reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” to quote the first Federalist essay.

The authors’ discussion of the pamphlet debates in the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence is also excellent. They successfully establish the importance of natural theology to the colonists’ arguments throughout this time. They also show how natural theology informed other important lines of argumentation (such as debates about the British imperial constitution). Of particular note in this context is the illuminating discussion of James Otis, who, along with another James (Wilson), provides a central case for the authors’ overall account. Cooper and Dyer expound insightfully on Otis’s belief in the existence of a “supreme ruler of the universe” who governs all of nature—inanimate as well as human—through necessary laws. Just as rocks fall to the ground, so human beings are naturally drawn to moral goods and bound by moral obligations. This framework is, the authors show, essential to appreciating Otis’s arguments about the British imperial constitution and the rights of the colonists.

The book’s treatment of sovereignty and constitutional theory is another signal contribution to scholarship. Cooper and Dyer persuasively establish the direct relevance of natural law theory to the concept of popular sovereignty, connecting popular sovereignty to American constitutionalism in clear and compelling terms. Drawing primarily on James Wilson and James Madison, they explain how popular sovereignty relies on individual sovereignty, and how individual sovereignty in turn was conceived by these leading theorists of the founding in the context of both natural law and natural rights.

When it comes to constitutional authority and interpretation, the authors successfully illustrate how their natural law-based account speaks to current debates about the American Constitution. This occurs through a nuanced discussion of the “voluntaristic originalism” espoused in various ways by constitutional scholars such as Bruce Ackerman, Keith Whittington, and Randy Barnett. While agreeing with these scholars on the importance of popular sovereignty in establishing constitutional legitimacy, Cooper and Dyer argue persuasively that “the people’s constitution-making power [was] an exercise of reason rather than will.”

Secondary, Dispensable Causes?

It is in the context of this discussion of sovereignty that the aforementioned greased elephant enters the room most forcefully. Orestes Brownson, as Cooper and Dyer explain, elaborated on the theological doctrine of “secondary causation.” This is the idea that God creates certain things (“substantial existences”) that then act as causes for other things. Human beings are good examples of secondary causes, because they act through reason and free will to accomplish their own purposes. Human beings’ role as secondary causes is, as the authors note, closely connected with Aquinas’s definition of natural law as “a form of participation in the eternal law.”

Cooper and Dyer emphasize the fact that human beings’ causality is secondary, subject to and ordered teleologically toward the prime cause (God). The magnitude of God’s primary causality and the primacy of His purposes end up eclipsing the significance of secondary causality in the remainder of this and related discussions throughout the book. The ontological dependence of secondary causes appears to translate into their ultimate dispensability or irrelevance because, after all, the buck ultimately stops with God.

The authors wrestle frequently with the idea that the natural law is supposed to be accessible to unaided reason, and the attendant idea that reason is supposed to be able to gain knowledge and guide action apart from revelation. What, then, is the relationship between reason and faith, or between natural law and eternal or divine law? If you have the latter, do you really need the former? If the latter really exist, do the former have independent existence at all? Does the possession of faith eliminate the need for reason, and does the recognition of the eternal or divine laws obviate the need for the natural law? Is reason really just faith’s substitute for the nonbeliever, and natural law really just divine law’s substitute for the non-Christian?

These and related questions hover over many of the book’s discussions, and the authors’ persistent hesitation to address them leads to the “missing middle” problem that plagues the book’s overarching account. Whenever a non-theological concept comes into contact with a theological one, its significance effectively vanishes. Secondary causes collapse into the Primary Cause, natural theology becomes a branch of revealed theology, political ideology becomes religion, the state bows to the church, and the natural law is baptized Christian.

Ownership and Imago Dei

This phenomenon is especially evident at a few key moments in the book. The first is the book’s recurring references to the imago Dei doctrine in the Book of Genesis. The authors see a connection between this principle of revealed theology and the secular idea of human dignity. Cooper and Dyer consider this connection in discussing Locke’s theory of property, and particularly Locke’s disagreement with the idea that children are owned by their parents. They dismiss the Lockean argument that “there is something intrinsic to persons barring them from being owned by their makers” because “[t]o be an imago Dei does not per se shield one from being owned, because by that very fact one is owned by God.”

This is not quite true, though. It is not by virtue of being made in a certain way—as an imago Dei—that human beings are owned by God; it is by virtue of being made by God simply. Squirrels are similarly owned by God because they are made by God, but they are not made in God’s image and likeness. Moreover, being made in God’s image and likeness might shield one from being owned by another creature without shielding them from being owned by God. It is possible, as Cooper and Dyer note in citing one of my articles, to be simultaneously owned by God and to own oneself in a way that excludes ownership by other human beings.

This difficulty reemerges at the end of the book, when Cooper and Dyer state that “[t]he Declaration and other founding era sources clearly rooted the value and dignity of persons in a transcendent Creator, who was the source of value in the world, and apart from whom that world did not have value. Human dignity was and is, at bottom, a theological concept.” This passage perfectly illustrates the missing middle problem of the book’s account. Of course it is true that without the Creator the world wouldn’t have value; but this is because the world wouldn’t exist at all. Does the fact that squirrels wouldn’t have bushy tails without the Creator mean that the bushiness of squirrels’ tails is a theological concept?

The question here is similar to the question that separates the voluntarists and the rationalists, and that Cooper and Dyer consider at length: is creation good because God created it, or did God create this way because it was good to do so? Is there some secondary goodness in creation that is related to but not identical with the primary goodness of God? In the case of human dignity we seem to have a clue in the biblical account of creation in the imago Dei. Every being other than God is created, but only human beings are created in God’s image and likeness. The simple fact of creation does not bestow any special dignity on human beings that is not shared by all other creatures. It is the unique fact of creation in God’s image and likeness that roots the concept of human dignity in the Bible. But what does it mean to be created in God’s image and likeness? The Bible does not say. Human dignity is thus a theological concept in one way—because the meaning of creation in the imago Dei presumes some knowledge of God—but it is a philosophical concept in another way, because the question of what God’s image in humanity is is nowhere revealed directly by God.

A Missed Middle

A recognition of the missing middle would also have allowed Cooper and Dyer to more successfully account for some key elements of the American political tradition that are either excluded, downplayed, or otherwise mishandled in the book. One of these is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which is alternately dismissed as “an outlier” despite its incredible popularity and influence, and then rescued as being centrally concerned with biblical interpretation. Another is Abraham Lincoln’s civil religion, which is affirmed to be “in essential continuity with the classical Christian natural-law philosophy” without substantial argumentation, despite the fact that Lincoln would probably be even more difficult to bring into the Christian natural law fold than Jefferson was (and he has an entire chapter dedicated to him).

Lastly, there is the book’s concluding statement that “sectarian confessional states . . . are, in our view, in principle within the ambit of prudence as a constitutional arrangement.” Although the authors do, to be fair, describe and qualify this approval in such a way as to distinguish it substantially from the position of church–state integralists, this statement sits very uneasily with key strains of the American political tradition. One need look no farther than James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Liberty, or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (not to mention the First Amendment itself) to appreciate the fact that Cooper and Dyer steer wide of the course set by American Founding thought on this question. The reason for this is the same as in the case of accounting for people like Paine and Lincoln or explaining the concept of human dignity: because the purposes of the secular state are ultimately ordered to those of the church, the intrinsic meaning and value of the former become subsumable into the meaning and value of the latter.

One of the most important achievements of the book is that it keeps questions and debates like these alive for scholars and citizens in the United States today. As the rise of the “religious nones” continues, and as American ideals continue to be mocked by some as the baseless imaginings of hypocrites, the time is ripe for reopening the question of the relationship between American Christianity and American politics. Cooper and Dyer have given us an excellent place to start.

A Small NY University Fired Employees For Using Their Pronouns in Emails

After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.

Ep. 317: Character Philosophies in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” (Part One)

Following up on our live episode, we further ponder the 1869 novel, revisiting the "problem of evil" arguments and how the various brothers cope with an imperfect world.

Plus, we relate Dostoevsky's views of freedom and ethics to those of other existentialists.

Every Day I Worry My Kids Will Be Killed at School

How does a parent answer a child’s questions about school shootings? For instance: Why does this keep happening? Will it happen to me? If it does, will I be OK? Writer Meg Conley, a mother of three, describes the agony of not having all the answers:

After the second shooting at East High School, we started talking about homeschooling. It’s not the first time we’ve had the conversation. But my kids love lunchtime, talking in the halls, learning new things from new teachers, school plays and after-school clubs. Being separated from those things during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic affected them in ways I still find frightening to contemplate. Forming community with people who are not part of their household is a vital part of their lives. There are just some things that can’t be replicated in the home.

One night in New York City, I sat in between my two oldest daughters as they watched their first Broadway play, Funny Girl. The play opened with Fanny Brice, played by Julie Benko, sitting in front of a mirror, looking at herself before she says, “Hello, gorgeous.” When she said those words, most of the audience knew what was coming, so they cheered. But my girls didn’t, so they politely clapped. I watched them watch the play, with wide eyes. By the end of the show, they loved Brice. They loved Benko. When she started to sing the reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” the girls understood what had been and what was coming. They cheered with everyone else. They became part of the community in that room.

We were wandering through the Met museum when my daughter got a text from another friend. It was just a link to a news story. Her middle school principal had gone to the media. There is a child at her school that was recently charged with attempted first-degree murder and illegal discharge of a firearm. That child doesn’t need incarceration; the child needs help. But teachers are not trained to give that help. The district rejected the school’s request that the student be moved to online schooling. Instead, the child goes to school every day and receives a daily pat down from untrained school staff before going to class. This student is on the same safety plan as the student who shot two deans before spring break. My daughter showed me the text and asked again, “What are we going to do?”

My two oldest girls went to see a preview of the new musical New York, New York with their dad that night. I stayed behind with their youngest sister. She’s too young for Broadway, but nearly old enough to be killed at school.

Hamline University’s President Announces Retirement After Prophet Muhammad Controversy

Dr. Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, lost the confidence of the university’s full-time faculty members.

Grace and the Parthenon Marbles

Most consider museums places to spend a quiet, untroubled afternoon, not hotbeds of international controversy. But especially when it comes to ancient art, there is intense disagreement between the nations from which the art originated and the museums across the world that house such antiquities. “The world is divided on this question,” explained James Cuno in his 2008 book Who Owns Antiquity?, with “museums, private collectors and art dealers” on one side, and “archaeologists, academics, and source nation cultural ministers” on the other.” Museums generally feel that preservation and wide access to cultural heritage justify the retention of most objects. Countries of origin view these antiquities as their rightful patrimony and vehemently fight for their return home.

Among these disputes, which I like to call the “Art Wars,” one has been particularly interminable, and especially heated of late: the controversy over the British Museum’s so-called Elgin Marbles. These remarkable sculptures from the Parthenon and other Acropolis structures date from the fifth century BC and exemplify the zenith of classical art and thought. Whether they were stolen (as some insist) or rescued (as others do), the marbles arrived in London at the start of the nineteenth century due to the intervention of the British diplomat Lord Elgin (1766–1841). The Greek state asked the British to return the marbles in the 1980s, and the controversy has simmered since then. Initially, the British complained that the Greeks did not have a suitable facility to hold the marbles, and so the Greeks built one. In recent negotiations, the British have considered return of the Parthenon Marbles on a long-term loan agreement. Rumors swirl, private meetings are convened, and the public debate carries on.

What is missing from the Parthenon Marbles debate and other skirmishes in the Art Wars is an understanding of how grace might play a role in settling these disputes. Such an absence is not surprising, for presumably “neutral” museums—founded in the Enlightenment in the wake of the European wars of religion—were designed in part to avoid any theological appeals. But grace might help anyway. If the British government were to freely give the marbles back to Greece, it would not only illustrate recent claims for the sound moral character of the British; it would also set a good precedent for similar debates taking place among other museums and nations.

Finders Keepers

In The Telegraph, Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar recently made an eloquent case for the British Museum to keep the Parthenon Marbles. Biggar’s account is notable not only because the author is an accomplished scholar, but because he is also a theologian and Anglican priest. Biggar might therefore be expected to bring in some robust theological vocabulary to the debate about the Parthenon Marbles, but (at least in the Telegraph article I am responding to here) he does not. Instead he disputes what he considers a poorly researched book that accuses the British of “cultural despoliations and war crimes.” Biggar’s case for retention of the marbles amounts, it seems to me, to finders keepers:

The case for retention is this. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries. In 1687, under siege by the Venetians, a gunpowder store in the Parthenon exploded, destroying part of the building. The Ottoman authorities cared so little that the antiquarian debris was still littering the ground more than a century later when Elgin’s agents arrived on the scene. What’s more, the latter found Ottoman soldiers damaging the remaining sculptures as they prised out the lead from the clamps holding the marble blocks together, in order to make bullets. Elgin had secured from the highest official in Constantinople authorisation to take away “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures”.

Now aware of the vulnerability of the sculptures, he persuaded the city governor, in the presence of an official from the sultan’s court, that this open-ended permission extended to those, too. The work of removing the Marbles then proceeded in full public view over two-and-a-half years from 1801. The last shipment to London left nine years later. Had the authorities objected, they could easily have stopped it. But they didn’t.

Because of this, Biggar feels that the British Museum should keep the Parthenon Marbles. After all, it is only thanks to Lord Elgin that they even survived.

Barclay’s Gift

So far in the debates about the Parthenon Marbles, no one to my knowledge has brought up the idea of a gift—yet this very concept could provide the path for settling the dispute. A gift transcends guilt, shame, or restitution. A gift rules out the language of “demand,” for no genuine gift can be demanded. As theologian John Barclay lays out in his magnificent 2017 tome Paul and the Gift, ancient Greece—which carved the Parthenon Marbles—did not have a very rich understanding of the gift. “[T]o give to the stingy,” so thought the ancient Athenians, to give “to those who cannot or will not give back, would be as useless as ‘sowing seeds in the sea.’”

The Christian understanding of grace amplified the notion of the gift in ways that were hitherto only dimly imaginable. At least six such ways, in fact. Barclay spells out the Apostle Paul’s notion of grace, describing its “six perfections.” These include (1) superabundance, that is, an extravagance of scale; (2) singularity, that is, the giver gives not due to a recipient’s merit but from the giver’s own goodness alone; (3) priority, meaning the gift chronologically precedes any initiative of the recipient; (4) incongruity, which is to say, “without regard to the worth of the recipient”; then comes (5) efficacy, that is, grace achieves its aim of imparting benefit to the recipient; and finally, (6) non-circularity, that is, grace escapes any quid pro quo arrangement.

What is lacking in Biggar’s informative account, which appeals at points to Christian principles, is just this kind of grace. The British Museum did indeed rescue and preserve the so-called Elgin Marbles. They could come to the conclusion that their reward for doing so was keeping them for over two centuries, but that now it’s time to simply give them back as a gift.

Biggar’s case for keeping the marbles at the British Museum stems from a desire to defend the British Empire’s actions against detractors who have unfairly condemned it. But this concern does not preclude the British Museum’s returning the marbles to the place where they came from on the basis of grace. In fact, to do so would illustrate the good that Biggar claims the British Empire frequently exemplified. Such magnanimity would beautifully correspond to Barclay’s first two perfections of grace, (1) superabundance and (2) singularity. If they act quickly, that is, before any Greek legal claims are successfully filed, the British might even fulfill Barclay’s category of the chronological (3) priority of the giver.

Unworthy Recipient?

Biggar seems to suggest that Greeks are less than worthy, not having a legitimate ethnic or ideological connection to the creators of the sculptures. “The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning,” he claims. “They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks.” The marbles cannot therefore represent the “essence of Greekness.” Fair enough. A more worthy Greek recipient would not accuse the British of brazen theft; nor would a worthy Greek recipient angrily demand the marbles’ repatriation while opportunistically deploying political theatrics at press conferences in Athens to win elections. (The Greeks have done both these things.)

But again, in Barclay’s economy of grace, marked by (4) incongruity, the fact that such worthiness is not evident just does not matter. In fact, a lack of such an attitude only strengthens the case for returning the Parthenon Marbles on the basis of their being an unmerited gift.

The penultimate perfection of grace according to Barclay is (5) efficacy, imparting benefit to the recipient, and this would be a clear result of the marbles’ return. London is a well-trafficked city to be sure, but Athens is also a major world destination. The Acropolis Museum is already beautifully staged to meet the same eye-level display that the marbles currently enjoy in London. Biggar suggests that Athens should use video technology to replicate the marbles (something the Acropolis Museum already does). But why couldn’t London take up Biggar’s idea and use video technology to replicate the marbles upon their return to Greece?

Finally, Barclay’s last perfection of grace is (6) non-circularity. What would the British Museum get for returning the marbles? It does not matter. Perhaps nothing. Pagan notions of the gift, famously illustrated by the three circulating charites, expect recompense. But in the Christian economy as elucidated by St. Paul, one does not give to get something in back. Even so, the wonder of grace is that the benefits accrue anyway. While it might be considered disappointing to have future British sons and daughters settle for the copies that Athens must settle for today, perhaps it would not be so disappointing after all. Future British children might even look to the skyline of London, with St. Paul’s Cathedral gracefully crowning her varied crenelations, and conclude—thanks to the preservation and return of the Parthenon Marbles—that their country chose to live by the principles the original St. Paul espoused.

It might here be objected that to expect God-like grace from a mere institution is unrealistic, even presumptuous. Rest assured, despite its holding of precious biblical artifacts, I am well aware that the British Museum is not divine. But while Paul’s notion of grace is first a record of God’s activity, it also invites human emulation, even for those beyond the church. Demanding as grace may be when applied to the antiquities controversy, we need not wonder about the alternative. What Cuno called the “bouillabaisse of good intentions and [unenforceable] bureaucratic ambitions” will boil well into the future. Absurdly enough, one of its creations is actually called the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation. With due respect to no doubt meticulous annals of the ICPRCPCORCIA since its inception in 1978, nothing cuts through red tape like grace.

In sum, Biggar correctly dismantles shallow arguments for the return of the marbles that are premised on guilt; but he fails to imagine a magnanimity that would return these sculptures to their original home premised on grace. Grace is a gesture that the pagan culture that created the Parthenon Marbles was unable to imagine—and unfortunately, the culture of modern museums frequently seems unable to imagine grace as well.

Maybe this is why it is the church, not the museum, that seems more capable of noncompulsory charity. Late last year, Pope Francis, choosing against a loan, simply gave back the pieces of the Parthenon in the Vatican collection to the Orthodox Archbishop of Greece (who will return them to the Acropolis Museum). Perhaps the Pope had been reading St. Paul.

Image credit: Archibald Archer, the Parthenon Marbles in a temporary Elgin Room at the British Museum, 1819. Public Domain.

Do Goods Have an Inherently Just Price?

Today’s essay is the second of four in a series by James E. Hartley on what literature can teach us about economics. You can read the first here.

Now comes deceit betwixt merchant and merchant. And thou shalt understand that merchandise is in many sorts; that one is bodily, and that other is ghostly; that one is honest and lawful, and that other is dishonest and unlawful. Of that bodily merchandise that is lawful and honest is this: that, whereas God has ordained that a reign or a country is sufficient to himself, then is it honest and lawful that of the abundance of this country, men help another country that is more needy. And therefore there must be merchants to bring from that one country to that other their merchandises. That other merchandise, that men exercise with fraud and treachery and deceit, with lies and false oaths, is cursed and damnable.

—Chaucer, “The Parson’s Tale”

Last week, we looked at the current discussion of the nature of wealth by exploring the very old idea that wealth is not distributed properly. As we saw, that idea was as common in ancient Athens as it is today. We also saw that to a significant degree, the proper distribution of wealth hinges on the question whether high levels of wealth are acquired in an appropriate manner or not.

Everyone knows that some fortunes are made by illicit means, and few (if any) defend thieves. But, is wealth acquisition by people engaged in perfectly legal business ever immoral? For example, if the price of oil rises because of a disruption to the supply chain or production, there are loud cries of price gouging. The accusation of price gouging hinges on the idea that there is an inherently “just price” that the seller is departing from. Price gouging is thought to be immoral because buyers are being charged far more than the appropriate price. One implication of this view is that making a profit (especially a large one) is wrong because it probably means that the seller is charging far more than the good’s “just price.”

This idea that selling goods for more than the just price is immoral is ancient, and it was expounded by a variety Christian thinkers beginning with the Church fathers and culminating in Aquinas. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales illustrates this view, giving examples of how greed and desire for profit are morally blameworthy. As we will see, the “just price” framework doesn’t map neatly onto economies, but its legacy lingers on anachronistically in today’s economic debates.

The Just Price

When Chaucer describes the pilgrims in the “General Prologue,” he labels them by their job titles rather than their names. Chaucer’s age was a time of great change in the economic life of Europe. Earlier generations primarily comprised rural, agricultural workers. In those days, life was inextricably tied to the land. One worked outside, and a person’s willingness to work hard was an essential part of his or her moral character. Chaucer portrays this earlier age through his ploughman, a common rural laborer, who is a model of hard work and impeccable Christian virtue.

Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognized the ploughman as a relic of a bygone era. By Chaucer’s time, economic life was becoming increasingly dominated by the towns. Craftsmen had begun to eclipse ploughmen as the paradigmatic profession. As craftsmen grew in importance, they organized themselves into guilds, associations that regulated both the method of production and the products sold. To work in a medieval town meant to join a guild whose power over what you could do was great. Specialization was the rule, and jobs were rigidly defined. Chaucer includes a quintet of guildsmen among his pilgrims, whose characters are clearly antithetical to the ploughman’s. Rather than quietly committing to work hard, the guildsmen are obsessed with status. These guildsmen are also obviously all prosperous. Interestingly, for all their moral shortcomings, there is no hint that their professions rely on scams or cheating. Chaucer does seem to condemn the guildsmen’s desire for gain and their avarice. But their occupations themselves are seemingly innocuous.

In this historical era, then, economic life is rigidly divided into specific professions. Hovering on the fringes of this economy, though, was a profession that was inherently morally suspect: the merchant. Merchants were people who would buy goods from one person with the intention of selling them to another. By buying an item for a lower price and selling it for a higher price, the merchant could make some profit.

As everyone at the time knew, any individual who buys a good to resell it for a profit was worthy of great condemnation. For example, the sixth-century Roman statesman Cassiodorus declared that merchants were an abomination. Similarly, in remarks falsely attributed to St. John Chrysostom explaining why Christ cast people from the temple in Matthew 21, we read: “He that buys a thing in order that he may sell it, entire and unchanged at a profit, is the trader who is cast out of God’s temple.”

Condemnations like those in the preceding paragraph strike the modern ear as rather odd. After all, reselling products is exactly what retail stores do all the time. To understand why the activities of the merchant are inherently problematic, we need to look back at medieval economic theory, beginning with the idea of the just price. All goods have an inherent price; the price of the good is, in essence, a property of the good, much like the color and shape are properties of the good.

Because each item has a just price, it is inherently unjust to sell an item for more than its true value. As Aquinas explains, “Therefore if either the price exceed the quantity of the thing’s worth, or, conversely, the thing exceed the price, there is no longer the equality of justice: and consequently, to sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful.” It is thus not only unjust for a seller to demand more than the just price for a product, it is immoral for someone to pay less than the just price for a product. To demand more or pay less than the just price is a form of theft.

Merchants have long been considered dishonorable because their practice tended toward injustice of this sort. Plato notes, “all that relates to retail trade and merchandize, and keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things.” Similarly, Aristotle would ban any merchants from the state, since “such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.” The early Church Fathers completely agreed: Ambrose, Tertullian, Leo the Great, and others roundly condemned the activities of merchants because their activities inherently tended toward cheating, lying, and enhancing greed.

By the time we get to the thirteenth century, the idea of the just price was well established. Aquinas follows Augustine in finding some exceptions to the blanket prohibition on selling a product for more than the price for which it was acquired. But any merchant whose motive is solely to enrich himself by his trading activity is acting in a thoroughly immoral and completely indefensible manner; this latter sort of trading is “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.”

When we first meet the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales, we know immediately from the description of him into which category he falls.

A merchant was there, on a high-saddled horse:
He’d a forked beard, a many-coloured dress,
And on his head a Flanders beaver hat,
Boots with expensive clasps, and buckled neatly.
He gave out his opinions pompously,
Kept talking of the profits that he’d made,
How, at all costs, the sea should be policed
From Middleburg in Holland to Harwich.
At money-changing he was an expert;
He dealt in French gold florins on the quiet.
This worthy citizen could use his head:
No one could tell whether he was in debt,
So impressive and dignified his bearing
As he went about his loans and bargaining.
He was a really estimable man,
But the fact is I never learnt his name.

(This and following: David Wright translation)

A contemporary of Chaucer would immediately recognize that the Merchant is a villainous fellow. The forked beard makes us think of the forked tongue of a serpent, much like that in the Garden of Eden, which was “more crafty than any other best of the field” (Genesis 3:1, ESV) and inherently deceitful. His dress indicates great wealth, he talks of nothing but his profits, and his financial dealings are sometimes illicit. This particular merchant is thus constructed in a way to alert the reader that he does not meet any of Aquinas’s exemptions to the prohibition on trading; the Merchant is clearly profiting far beyond necessity, using the profits to buy luxurious goods for himself, and obviously trading with the sole intention of making such profits. Indeed, the Narrator concludes by noting with an air of sarcasm that while the Merchant was obviously an esteemed figure, the Narrator never even learned his name; never once on the pilgrimage does the Narrator stoop to a conversation with this despicable fellow. The Merchant is clearly the outcast.

The Merchant’s tale adds an element of comedy to the situation. The Merchant begins his tale by relating his marital problems; stating that he finds it too depressing to talk about his own life, he launches into a story of another’s problems in marriage (though it’s obvious this “other” person’s marital problems are actually the Merchant’s own).

The “Merchant’s Tale” is a story of “fraud and treachery and deceit, with lies and false oaths” to which the protagonist, January, is subjected by his wife May and her lover Damian. January is literally blind for much of the story, and his wife takes advantage of him. As the pilgrims’ host notes in the epilogue to the tale.

‘Now God have mercy on us!’ cried our host,
May the Lord keep me from a wife like that!
Just look what stratagems and subtleties
There are in women! Busier than bees
To diddle us poor fellows. On my oath,
They never miss a chance to twist the truth
That’s clear enough from this good merchant’s tale.’

This is not merely an accurate summary of the “Merchant’s Tale.” If you switch “a wife” and “women” to “merchants” in that passage, you would have a very good summary of the complaints about merchants’ activities in the fourteenth century. The “Merchant’s Tale” is thus an elaborate joke on the Merchant himself. The reader, knowing that merchants are full of deceit and will never pass up the opportunity to cheat another, are regaled with a tale told by the Merchant himself in which the Merchant is subjected to the very fraud he habitually practices on others.

Chaucer’s equating of the activity of merchants with adultery and infidelity is not unique to “The Merchant’s Tale.” It runs throughout The Canterbury Tales. If objects do indeed have a just price, then as the Roman Catholic Church once decreed, it is impossible for a merchant to attain salvation without first abandoning such an abhorrent occupation.

The Legacy of the Just Price

As economies developed, the idea that a commodity has an inherently just price faded away. It is, for example, difficult to determine a just price for a good with a very complicated production process. We now think of the value of a thing as being a price on which a buyer and seller agree. But, the legacy of this idea of a just price lingers in the popular imagination. It is an odd lingering notion, however. If asked, few people would be able to explain when a price is just. Yet, when the price is high, they do not hesitate to call it “unfair price gouging.”

But what about when the price is unusually low? Is it immoral to buy a good for a really low price? If there is a just price for a good, then charging more or paying less than that price is equally immoral. This lingering notion of a just price has an odd modern feature. When a seller profits from a high price, it is wrong, but when I profit by buying something at a low price, it is simply shrewd dealing?

Chaucer’s comparisons of the activities of merchants to adultery is a useful way of separating merchant activity itself from immoral activity. It is not the sexual act itself that makes adultery wrong, but rather the context of sex that can make it wrong (i.e., sex with someone other than one’s spouse). Similarly, the act of buying low and selling high is not inherently immoral, but cheating and deception are still quite wrong.

Are the wealthy in modern society as inherently morally suspect as the Merchant in Chaucer? Clearly not. Nonetheless, even though Chaucer is still instructive in many ways, insofar as the complaints about wealth are a vestige of the old complaints about merchants engaged in buying low and selling high, they are relying on an economic paradigm that is just no longer here.

Obviously, our discomfort with exorbitant profiteering has little to do with people who get wealthy by running retail sales outlets. Maybe there is some other source of wealth that undergirds the suspicions about the morality of wealth. We will discuss that in a future essay.

On Abolishing the Death Penalty: A Response to Daryl Charles

 . . . [Divine] Mercy is found even in the damnation of the condemned, for, while not completely loosening the punishment, It nonetheless lessens it short of what is entirely deserved. (Summa Theologiae Ia.21.4 ad 1).

I would like to address J. Daryl Charles’s argument published here at Public Discourse yesterday that the death penalty is a mandatory punishment for premeditated murder, necessary to achieve justice, and necessary to respect the image of God in the offender by holding him responsible for his acts. I cannot address everything that Charles argues in his essay. I will do only three things. First, I will argue that Charles has not and cannot successfully press the case that the use of the death penalty is mandatory in the exercise of punitive justice. Second, I will argue that it should be abolished in the United States, against the background of Thomas Aquinas’s argument (that Charles himself cites) that taking a criminal’s life is lawful in order to protect the common good. Third, I will conclude by reflecting on the implications of the image of God within us for justice and mercy.

The Early Church and Capital Punishment

On the first point, consider only the early Church figures that Charles cites. By and large, they do indeed recognize the legitimate authority of a political community to take the life of an offender. However, they also recognize something that Charles does not: it is within the state’s authority to refrain from this punishment and to instead extend mercy. (In this section, I summarize, paraphrase, and later quote the excellent article by Phillip M. Thompson, “Augustine and the Death Penalty,” in Augustinian Studies, January 2009, pp. 188–203.)

For example, Lactantius in one work forbids anyone in authority charged with the administration of justice from charging anyone for a capital crime, but in another acknowledges the state’s authority to put someone to death. Tertullian recognizes the authority of the state to impose death, and yet forbids any Christian from doing so. So also, the Christian author Athenagoras, whom Charles does not cite, forbids Christians from participating in it. This is not yet a point about mercy. However, it suggests a certain abhorrence on the part of the early Church for the death penalty as inconsistent with the life of a Christian. The secular or pagan state may be permitted to impose death as a punishment, but the authors suggest Christians ought to play no part in exercising that power.

Augustine, however, is particularly important when it comes to mercy. He recognizes the authority of the state to impose death as a penalty, particularly to protect the common good from a threat to its safety. And he does not forbid Christians from participating in it, as others had. But he also pleads for mercy on the part of governing authority. In one case pleading for mercy he writes, “[W]e do not in any way approve the faults which we wish to see corrected, nor do we wish wrong-doing to go unpunished because we take pleasure in it. … [However,] it is easy and simple to hate evil men because they are evil, but uncommon and dutiful to love them because they are men.” Even if one does not agree with Augustine that one should love the offender because he is a man, as it seems Christ commanded us to do, Augustine gives evidence in the Christian community of the recognition that not only justice is the task of the state, but also that mercy is within the authority of the state, as much within its authority as is the authority to execute the offender.

However, the importance of mercy amid justice is no sectarian Christian virtue. The responsibility of governing authority to show mercy is a fact recognized by Seneca, no Christian, in his letter to Nero, De Clementia, where he argues that mercy in a ruler is essential to governing. As a stoic, however, his argument for mercy is significantly different from Augustine’s, focusing not on loving the offender as a fellow human being, but on the need to rein in both leaders’ and society’s passions of cruelty and savagery, passions that often accompany the just desire to punish. He goes on to argue that the power of the emperor to extend mercy is even greater and more manifest than is his power to condemn, “for anyone can take a life, but few can give it.” That power in a ruler is in fact godlike, according to Seneca. Aquinas agrees when he writes that among all of God’s attributes, it is in mercy that God’s omnipotence is most clearly shown. (“Unde et misereri ponitur proprium Deo, et in hoc maxime dicitur eius omnipotentia manifestari” ST IIaIIae 30.4.)

Just as one would be hard pressed to find a culture with a governing authority, biblical or otherwise, that had not at some point asserted and exercised the right to put capital offenders to death for heinous crimes, one would be equally hard pressed to find one that did not claim the authority to exercise mercy and punish short of death. Good government in the administration of criminal punishment will establish a range of possible punishments for a crime, acknowledging the need for both mercy and equity in judging which punishment is best in the circumstances. Again, this is a point recognized by the pagan Seneca, who argued that mercy does not come after the judgment of just punishment, to limit justice as it were, but enters into the determination of what justice is in a particular case.

Aquinas on Capital Punishment

Aquinas argues that this governing authority to establish the character of punishment and its application to cases is rooted in the natural law. But in the end, positive human law determines the actual force and scope of punishment. Any such “determination” of the actual punishment appropriate for a crime has only the force of human law, not the force of the natural law itself (ST IaIIae 95.2). We decide how crimes will be punished as a matter of human positive law, not by deriving them from natural law. This determination is part of our dignity as images of God: we participate in divine providence by being provident over ourselves. We use our reason both to recognize the natural law within us and to establish human law over diverse political communities and common goods (ST IaIIae 91).

In addition, like Seneca before him, Aquinas recognizes that it is also the task of judicial authority to exercise equity (epikeia) when determining punishment under human law. The judicial authority does this by taking into account circumstances not anticipated by the legislature when it crafted the law. In other words, judicial authority sets aside “the letter of the law,” lest one sin against the common good by application of the “letter of the law” (ST IIaIIae 120.1).

If we acknowledge Aquinas as an authority on these matters, as Charles seems to do in citing him, these points make it clear that it is well within the governing authority of a community to refrain from the use of the death penalty to punish crime. Political leaders can even refrain from legislating that capital punishment will be among the range of punishment for serious crimes, including premeditated murder. This decision ultimately requires reflection about how to preserve and promote the common good of a particular community in a particular place and time.

A Case for Abolition

Now I would like to argue that the death penalty should be abolished, at least in the United States and many other nations as well. Of course, Aquinas’s argument about the lawfulness of a community’s taking the life of an offender is often cited by proponents of the death penalty in the way Charles cites it—as if permissibility requires the exercise of the death penalty in certain cases, that is, makes it “mandatory.” However, Aquinas’s argument is merely that it is lawful to take the life of an offender to protect the common good from threat. He does not come anywhere close to arguing that it is required or mandatory for certain crimes.

It is very important to notice about Aquinas’s argument that it is not based on principles of restitution, that is, not based on the need to redress the harm done to the one who has been wronged. Nothing can be done to redress the wrong done to the one who has been killed. Nothing can undo that, no recompense given, no restitution made. This is a point that Charles himself recognizes in the case of murder. In addition, though it might sound harsh, it is not the task of governing authority to criminally punish offenders in order to assuage the anguish of the family and friends of the murdered. Those left behind or affected by a murder may derive a certain amount of psychological catharsis in seeing the responsible parties punished, but it is probably not lasting. What’s more, in terms of restitution, nothing can undo what they have lost. That is in part the horror of the crimes done—that nothing can be done to restore to the one abused or to family and friends what has been taken from them. At best, punishment can be merely symbolic with respect to restitution in these cases.

Criminal law punishes not on behalf of the individuals who have been harmed by a crime, but on behalf of society’s common good, which has been harmed by a crime. It punishes to restore the order and peace of society that has been disturbed by the crime, and to further protect it from threat. But even here in the case of capital crimes, society cannot have restored to it what the crime has taken; society cannot have restored to it the human being killed. No punishment will return the order of tranquility and innocence lost to a society by the abuse of children, or to women and men by various forms of violence. However, a certain amount of peace and tranquility can be restored in protecting society from further threat of such things.

Close attention to Aquinas’s argument suggests that a malefactor loses, in a way proportionate to the gravity of the crime, the protections afforded by society to the innocent and thus becomes subject to the punishment of the law. This is its retributive aspect, that formally the gravity of the punishment is directed to the will of the offender in a way proportionate to the gravity of the crime willed by the offender. But, as we’ve seen above, the idea of “proportion” here is not a conclusion drawn from the natural law, but a “determination” of human law in light of the common good that punishment serves to protect. The offender becomes subject to the loss of property or the loss of freedom of movement, for example. Also, in some cases he becomes subject to the loss of life.

What Aquinas does not argue, however, is that having become subject to punishment, even possibly the loss of life, a criminal’s loss of life is required or mandatory. It is not the so-called lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life—that allows for the lawfulness of killing another human being. The lawfulness of ending an offender’s life is based on the need to protect society from the threat by the one who has lost the protection of society. So, one cannot claim that according to Aquinas the killing of a human being is lawful in order to pursue retribution or restitution for the wrong done. It is lawful to protect from harm, which is forward-looking, not backward-looking.

Thus, Aquinas’s argument is not that killing an offender is always lawful, much less that it is mandatory. It is lawful upon a condition, namely, that it is necessary to protect the common good from a threat. Absent that condition, Aquinas does not argue or even suggest that killing a malefactor, including one who has committed murder, is lawful. Indeed, in his discussion of clementia as mercy extended to those who are subject to punishment (ST IIaIIae 157.3 ad 1), he suggests that the desire to harm through punishment should be avoided and mitigated, even when someone deserves punishment. He also says that it is better when the one doing the punishing decides the wrongdoer has had enough, rather than pursue the full extent of punishment possible.

One can ask under what conditions governing powers should exercise mercy. The exercise of mercy ought also to take into account the common good. Aquinas’s argument that it is lawful to take the life of a malefactor to protect society from threat also suggests that mercy is legitimately exercised when no threat to the common good is posed by the offender. This would be the case when, for example, the offender can be rendered harmless to the common good by means other than killing. This point concerning the death penalty is made explicitly by Pope St. John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

In the thirteenth century when Aquinas made his argument, it might not have been possible in general to render a murderous malefactor harmless short of killing him. However, it is now possible in the United States and many other modern nations to protect the common good from the threat of those who have committed murder and other heinous crimes. That being the case, we have no reason to think that it is lawful for those nations to kill human beings who in other times and places might pose a threat to the common good. Given the imperative to act with mercy as much as with justice, the death penalty ought thus to be abolished in the United States and other such countries.

Mercy and Justice

To conclude, Charles makes much of the idea that the image of God in human beings is not taken seriously if we do not hold offenders responsible for their crimes, particularly those who have killed with premeditation. I agree with that proposition. What Charles and other defenders of the death penalty do not take seriously enough is the thought that being made to the image and likeness of God is not a static fact of human nature, but a responsibility. Nothing can erase from the nature of a human being the image created within him or her by God, no sin or crime however heinous. We acknowledge that fact when we hold our fellow human beings and ourselves responsible for our actions. However, being made to the image of God is a vocation, that is, a call to being godlike in all that we do. So, those of us who seek justice in the punishment of others must ask ourselves what our godlike responsibility is in the circumstances in which we live.

God is not simply a God of justice, but also a God of mercy. Mercy and justice are not set against one another. As Aquinas argues, they are manifest in every act of God’s (ST Ia 21.4). Even so, divine justice is founded upon divine mercy. Even the pagan Seneca recognized that mercy is as godlike as justice. In addition, mercy is not a poor second cousin to justice. Again, Aquinas argues that among human virtues, mercy is the greatest of all virtues, greater even than justice (ST IIaIIae 30.4). Mercy does not come in after justice to limit it. Mercy informs justice. Indeed, if we take Aquinas seriously, justice strives after mercy as its goal. “It is clear that mercy does not take away justice, but is in a certain way, the plenitude of it” (Ia 21.3 ad 2). Justice must always then be informed by mercy. After all, with the responsibility to live up to the image of God within us, it is worth pondering the fact that not even the damned in Hell are punished by God as much as justice alone might allow that they deserve. How much more, then, should punishment be loosened for those among us who have not yet been damned?

Capital Crimes and Capital Punishment

Today’s essay by Daryl Charles makes the case for capital punishment for those guilty of premeditated murder. Tomorrow’s essay will be a reply by John O’Callaghan, who argues for the abolition of the death penalty.

Our culture is morally confused about many things. Conservative Christians tend to focus on concerns about hot button issues like abortion, sexuality, relativism, and education. But one phenomenon that is overlooked but no less urgent is murder. A mere listing of mass killings occurring in the United States in recent years boggles the mind. The year 2022 alone, by all counts, surely must be record-setting. As I write (early October of 2022), one reads that a fifteen-year-old in Raleigh, North Carolina goes on a shooting spree, killing five (including his brother and an off-duty police officer) as he walks through a neighborhood; that five people have been shot in a northern South Carolina home; that in Bristol, Connecticut, two police officers are fatally shot and a third wounded in responding to a domestic violence call (which is said to have been a ploy to lure the officers); and that a thirty-two-year-old is charged with two counts of murder and six of attempted murder following a stabbing melee on the Las Vegas Strip. In the same week we read that four bodies have been found in the Oklahoma River. And this just in: a Florida jury recommends a life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty for the man who murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

These randomly selected tragedies, of course, only identify the tip of the iceberg. Most of our cities are currently reeling from the sheer frequency of killings that have descended on our streets, our neighborhoods, our families, and even our schools. In the four months of June, July, August, and September of 2022, there were respectively 73, 100, 71, and 70 mass shootings, with the total numbers of injured or dead being 297, 439, 262, and 272 respectively. Tucked away in these numbers are the horrendous tragedies and suffering that have visited communities such as Orlando, Uvalde, and Buffalo.  According to the Marshall Project, more mass shootings (i.e., of four or more victims) have occurred in the last five years than in any other half decade since 1966.

The barbarism behind increasing murder rates suggests that debates over capital punishment should intensify. But this has not been the case. In fact, what is striking is the relative absence of discussion and debate of the death penalty. On the rare occasions when the death penalty is discussed today, it is almost always viewed unfavorably. The abolitionist argument takes any number of forms: the mental health of the murderer; the possibility of prematurely ending a criminal’s rehabilitation; debates over deterrence; the misconstruction of retribution as revenge (i.e., retributivism); fallibility of the criminal justice system; and modern notions of “civility.” Religiously motivated abolitionists sometimes point to the annulment of the Mosaic code, assumed ethical discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments; and Christ’s teaching on forgiveness.

We have grown intolerant of meting out punishment that is perceived as “cruel” or “barbaric.” Strangely, however, our abhorrence of penal “barbarity” is displayed against the backdrop of increasingly barbaric criminal acts themselves. Indeed, until very recently, capital punishment was almost universally affirmed biblically, morally, and legally.

Christian History and Capital Punishment

Even though abolitionist arguments have been dominant in recent decades, it is worth recalling that for most of history, a variety of civilizations have used the death penalty and grounded it in serious moral reflection. Capital punishment was practiced in the earliest recorded history. Its prescription appears in the mid-eighteenth-century-BC Code of Hammurabi, in sixteenth-century-BC Assyrian codes, in fifteenth-century-BC Hittite codes, in the thirteenth-century Mosaic Code, as well as in ancient Greek and Roman law.

Among the church fathers, one finds varying perspectives on the death penalty, although there is a general recognition of the state’s responsibility to implement capital justice. Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (late third century) affirmed that in the case of murder divine law consistently required a life for a life. Both Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and Theodosius II (mid-fifth century) acknowledged the state’s role in mediating capital sanctions. In addition, various councils from the seventh century (the Eleventh Council of Toledo) to the thirteenth (the Fourth Lateran Council) followed the lead of Leo the Great (fifth century) in forbidding clerics from engagement in matters of capital justice, even as they understood the state’s legitimate role in facilitating such matters.

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas insisted that the community had both the right and the duty to “cut away” an individual in order “to safeguard the common good.” The common good, he reasoned, is “better than the good of the individual,” notably because “certain pestilent fellows” who serve as “a hindrance to the common good, that is, to the concord of human society.” Such persons, he concluded, therefore “are to be withdrawn by death from the society of men.”

Late medieval and Reformation-era theologians also affirmed the state’s duty before God to impose capital sanctions upon murderers. Even the so-called “left wing” of the Protestant reform movement—from which much modern religious opposition to capital punishment is thought to derive—recognized the death penalty. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, an exemplary document adopted by the Swiss Brethren (the progenitors of earliest Anabaptism), reads: “The sword is an ordinance of God. … Princes and Rulers are ordained for the punishment of evildoers and putting them to death.” This Anabaptist declaration concurs with the 1580 Lutheran Formula of Concord, which prescribes for “wild and intractable men” a commensurate “external punishment.” In summary, the patristic, medieval, and late medieval periods generally mirror the church’s tacit acknowledgment of capital punishment in cases of murder.

There has been much debate about the place of capital punishment in Catholic social thought, but the pre-2018 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church articulates the most sound position on the topic:

Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. (no. 2266, emphasis added)

The Church’s teaching on the death penalty historically finds expression in Thomas Aquinas’s question “Is it legitimate to kill sinners?” (S.T. II-II, Q. 64.2). His response is predicated on “the common good,” with an analogy. If the well-being of the whole physical body requires the amputation of a limb, the treatment is to be commended. “Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good, for a little leaven sours the whole lump.” What is forbidden, Aquinas argues later, is to take the life of an innocent person (Q. 64.6).

Theological Arguments

It is no surprise that for most of Christian history, the death penalty was widely embraced. To understand the theological basis for capital punishment, we must first look to the nature of law. Fundamental to the biblical story is the depiction of the Creator as Lawgiver. Law, as the reader of the biblical narrative discovers, is of no human origin, nor does it issue out of pragmatic or popular consent. Its authority issues not out of cultural or intellectual enlightenment but from the universal created order. Whether individual cultures and regimes recognize this reality is, of course, another matter. Yet the effects of moral law are as the law of gravity: its disregard always and everywhere results in the rotting of social culture.

In a remarkable—though little remembered—series of homilies in 1976 (eventually published under the title Sign of Contradiction), Karol Wojtyła, at the time Archbishop of Cracow, delivered a sustained reflection on the question of man’s purification from sin in the present life. Guilt incurred by sin, he observed, constitutes a debt in the present order that must be paid. Punitive dealings, thus, provide necessary atonement and restore the balance of justice and moral order that has been disturbed. In theological terms, they prepare the human being for a destiny in eternity.

In Sign of Contradiction, we find the necessary response to religious abolitionists who ground their bias against capital punishment in a particular (mis)reading of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and a purported “forgiveness” ethic. Pitting a misinterpreted Jesus against Paul, they ignore ethical continuity in the broader sweep of biblical revelation and prefer, based on the flaws of human government, to dismiss its divinely instituted commission to punish evil and reward good.

This defect in religious thinking—“the cross is not a sword”—demonstrates conspicuous disregard for what is recorded in the text of Genesis 9, where God makes his covenant with Noah after the flood, the implications of which are stated in universal terms. It is precisely because the human being is fashioned in the image of God that one who purposely sheds the blood of another must die. Genesis 9:5–6 is to be understood foremost as an institution that protects life, in accordance with the Decalogue’s pronouncement “Thou shalt not murder.” The rationale for this morale imperative is none other than the safeguarding of human life. Retribution discourages invasions on the sanctity of the human creature. (Here let us pause for a moment: any society that advances an “inversion ethic” of killing human beings in utero while refusing to take the life of a convicted murderer should strike us as barbaric.) The Genesis narrative suggests that premeditated murder is an assault on human life and is comparable, as it were, to an assault on the very being of God. The fact that justice demands punishment befitting the crime—i.e., just retribution—reveals the essential difference in character between revenge and retribution.

Having been created in the imago Dei, human life is a sacred trust. The implication is clear: murder—i.e., the deliberate extermination of a life by another human being—is tantamount to killing God in effigy. Moreover, as confirmed in Mosaic legislation, premeditated murder is the one crime for which there exists no restitution. As C. S. Lewis noted in his wonderfully prescient essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” to be punished however severely because we in fact deserve it is to be treated as a human being created in the very image of God.

Justice, Charity, and Restitution

When a murder occurs in our community, we are obliged, regardless of our comfort level, to clear our throat as it were and make a public, communal declaration. The deliberate extermination of another human being is an absolute evil and therefore absolutely intolerable. Period. This was the argument advanced by David Gelernter in a 1998 Commentary essay. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale who was letter-bombed in June of 1993, almost lost his life. The essence of Gelernter’s argument was that we execute murderers in order to make a communal statement: deliberate murder embodies evil so terrible that it defiles the community, and as a result the community needs catharsis that occurs through criminal justice properly construed. Gelernter correctly noted that in the face of murder, contemporary society, however, is more prone to shrug it off than to exact just retribution and affirm binding moral standards.

Justice has classically been defined as rendering to each person what is due. Desert, then, is foundational to ethics; it is a part of the human moral intuition. Parents know this, children know it, and indeed people from Kansas to Canada to Kenya to Kazakhstan know it as well. Retributive justice, then, is a social good, for it corrects social imbalances and perversions. Herein we find the wedding of justice and charity. When through social attitudes and the rule of law we affirm retributive justice, we are addressing several levels of “imbalance” and disturbance: we are attentive to (1) the victimized party who has been wronged, (2) society at large, which has been offended and is watching, and (3) future offenders who might be tempted to do evil. This trifold application of justice, as Augustine and Aquinas understood it, was in fact an application of charity. And as an extreme example, both saw going to war as an act that can express the wedding of charity and justice properly construed: it is charitable to prevent the criminal (whether domestically or in war) from doing evil, and it is charitable toward society, which needs protecting.

Punishment for a crime and restitution for the victim are interrelated concepts. In the case of premeditated murder, compensation is not available. Hence, as much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment being meted out by civil authorities, at least in a relatively free society, is not some “higher” ethic as some might contend; nor is it “Christian” by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei.

Civilized societies do not tolerate the murder of innocent human beings; uncivilized regimes do.

Who decided Jesus needed a brand makeover? "Jesus gets us" and evangelical hypocrisy

Augustine Isn’t the Political Pessimist You Think He Is

In the past twenty years, the rhetoric of hope in American politics has fallen out of favor. The first decade of this century featured John Edwards’s convention speech declaring that “hope is on the way” and Barack Obama’s “hope and change” campaign. Many expected that we were helping the arc of history bend a little faster towards justice.

But in retrospect, it seems like hope never arrived. Instead we got American carnage, Democracy dying in darkness, and critical theories about structural racism. We have a rhetoric of gloom if not despair. We went from the optimism of The West Wing shaping our political imaginary to the cynicism of House of Cards. With this prevailing mood, Michael Lamb’s A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought is an important intervention not only in Augustine studies, but also in our politics of stagnation and hopelessness. I will address the former first and then consider how it might offer hope and guidance for us in the realm of political life.

Augustine the Pessimist?

Lamb lays out the standard interpretation of Augustine: he is an otherworldly pessimist. Nothing in this life gets better, and nothing in this life is worth loving. Our hope is in the next life; this life is only good for getting us there. For Lamb, this is how Augustinian realists interpret the great saint’s thought. The earthly city is thoroughly wicked, and we better get used to facing that. Whereas the realists have no hope for virtuous political life, the Augustinian communitarians think that virtuous political life can take place within the pilgrim city, which is the Church. Only the Church is capable of midwifing political improvements, according to the communitarians, so it’s best to join these pilgrim communities heading for the exits. Meanwhile, most liberal theorists think Augustine offers nothing constructive for our political life. For the liberals, we can have a sunnier political life if we stop treating politics like a doomed endeavor as Augustine does.

These different interpretations of Augustine often depend on highly selective readings of his work. But a growing number of Augustine scholars (such as Lamb, but also Eric Gregory, Veronica Ogle, Joshua Nunziato, and Robert Dodaro) are questioning this selectivity. The selective readings offer a false vision of both Augustine and the relationship between the pilgrim and earthly cities. Looking beyond some of the standard texts of the Augustinian corpus, Lamb turns our attention to sermons, letters, and catechetical pieces to flesh out an Augustine beyond the doom and gloom.

Lamb points to an Augustine who is hopeful. This Augustinian hope is connected to love. For Lamb, Augustine develops an order of loves in which our love of God does not negate love of other people and other things, but rather conditions and shapes these loves. Likewise, hoping in God for our entrance into the heavenly city does not mean we cannot hope in God for our earthly city. With both hope and love, we need to get things in the right order so we can act rightly. The Augustinian vision that Lamb presents means that when we love or hope for something else more, we do not cease loving or hoping for the lesser thing; rather, by loving and hoping in God first, we are able to situate our hopes and loves the right way.

Hopeful Rhetoric

Along these lines, Lamb brilliantly shows how Augustine uses rhetoric to move his listeners toward the right order of hope so that they can act rightly in the world. Augustine’s commitment to rhetoric—to finding the available means of persuasion and applying them—only makes sense because he thinks that persuasion can bring about change. Augustine’s attempts at persuasion indicate his hopefulness: you can’t write and speak as much as Augustine did without hoping for at least marginal improvement.

Lamb ably directs his readers to see Augustinian rhetoric as a form of spiritual exercise meant to develop the listener’s ability to hope in the right way, for the right things, and in the right God. Hoping rightly, we can work in and for the pilgrim city and for earthly cities. Augustine’s descriptions of life’s evils and turmoil should awaken us to life’s uncertainties, our lack of self-sufficiency, and our need for mercy. But for Lamb, these descriptions can’t be separated from Augustine’s depictions of the beauty of this life, which are meant to remind us that goodness and peace are deeper and more real than evil and strife. Both Augustine’s dark and bright renderings of this world guide us to hope in the good that we only partially perceive and can only partially attain. We can partially attain, and so should work to attain, the good of this life.

Emphasizing Augustine’s rhetoric allows Lamb to show the Augustinian navigation between presumption (which expects too much from or for ourselves) and despair (which expects nothing from or for ourselves). For Augustine, hope is the middle way between these errors in part because it is less self-referential than either. We do not get much certainty in this life (contra both the presumptuous and the despairing). But we can hope that the good we partially perceive can be partially realized here and now, and it will be fully known in the next life. Our deepest hope lies in God, but our lesser hopes can also be in ourselves and in others. Just as we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, so too we hope in our neighbor as we hope in ourselves. For Lamb, in hoping in God, we can have the moderate and reasonable hope in others that does not make them idols. When we make idols out of politicians or political causes, they will inevitably fail us. But when our hope in them in mediated by a greater hope in God, we can do the work our communities need from us.

However, I worry that Lamb is too quick to steer us away from the otherworldly. The focus and direction of this life is the heavenly city. The only real commonwealth in this world is the pilgrim city. Lamb is right that wayfarers can and should care for the way. Hikers en route to the summit should improve the trail for themselves and others, clear and clean the campsites on the way, and help those they meet. They do so, never forgetting the summit they aim for. Likewise, Lamb shows that Augustinians should work for earthly peace and worldly justice. And yet, he occasionally downplays the otherworldly as our proper home when he is trying to restore Augustine’s this-worldly concerns. Along these lines, his critique of Augustinian communitarians for excessive preoccupation with the church as an alternative community seems to forget just how much time Augustine spent on ecclesial matters. Yes, he intervened in political life, but most of his time was spent on building up the pilgrim city. Augustinian communitarians might reject the political too much, but Augustine certainly prioritized the ecclesial more that Lamb indicates.

Nevertheless, Lamb’s work provides an important intervention in political thought today. He helps us navigate between the extremes of presumption and despair. Lamb’s depiction of Augustine’s political agency is important because it illustrates what hope in action looks like: in his political endeavors, Augustine was not presumptuous and did not aim for a total transformation of this life—but neither did he despair of making life better. Lamb discusses Augustine’s political efforts, which generally took the form of intervening with political leaders on behalf of the poor and imprisoned or admonishing his congregation to a more equitable distribution of goods. Augustine counseled one political leader not to abandon political life for the monastery. He presided over a bishop’s court tasked with doling out justice in a world of rampant corruption and strife. Lamb corrects the supposedly apolitical and otherworldly view of Augustine, showing that he was actively engaged in the political sphere to make this life a little better. The supposed pessimist hoped enough in this life to improve it, especially for the sake of the smallest and most forgotten among us.

A Hope That Works

This is why Lamb’s book is well suited for our times. The soaring rhetoric of political hope offered by Obama, Edwards, and Jed Bartlet leads to disappointment. Promising too much, presumption inevitably ends in despair. Despair, in turn, leads to a cynicism that leads to endless political posturing with little actual political action. Politics in this earthly city is rarely transformative, but it can be reformative. We can and should make life more just, equitable, and loving. We can “improve public life in ways that were meaningful for many who were vulnerable to its worst effects,” as Lamb puts it. We can, in this life of weal and woe, make things a little less hard, a little more merciful, a little more peaceful as Augustine did.

In this, Augustine—and Lamb’s thoughtful scholarship on him—provide us with a model for hope in our times and guidance for how to live that hope. This will include the hard work of political engagement to make our republic a safer place for the weak and neglected. It entails compromise between people who hold different first principles in order to lessen social and political evils. Lamb suggests that living an earthly politics of hope includes “working on behalf of the poor, advocating for societies’ most vulnerable, preserving the rule of law, diagnosing the lust of domination, talking with neighbors, building coalitions with local leaders, and participating in activities that unite citizens around common hopes.” Sometimes this will mean voting, more often it will mean joining the group that helps clean up the local park or helping at your parish’s food drive.

We work because we hope: the more reasons to hope, the  more reasons to work. Lamb gives us reasons to work by showing how Augustine hopes. Presumption and despair do not make the world a better place. They just leave us with TV shows and empty convention speeches.

A hope that works, that is aware of hardship but still sees this life’s goodness in the light of the God who is the Good, can make life a little better for the denizens of our various earthly cities. That hope might just be the leaven for healing and point to goods higher than any this world can offer.

Lester Newman Is Stepping Down as President of Jarvis Christian University in June

Lester C. Newman, president of Jarvis Christian University in Hawkins, Texas, recently announced that he intends to retire in June. His retirement comes after 47 years in higher education and 11 years at Jarvis Christian.

“There comes a time when a leader knows it is time to step aside,” Dr. Newman said in an address to the university community in the campus chapel. “Jarvis needs a new perspective, new energy, and a new leader. I called this meeting today because I wanted my students, faculty, and staff to hear it from me first.”

During his tenure, Dr. Newman has improved the educational institution’s financial position, increased enrollments, and restored athletic programs. He expanded educational degree programs to include mass communication, cybersecurity, and healthcare management and opened a satellite teaching location in Dallas. He presided over the transition from a college to a university with the addition of two new master’s degrees in business and criminal justice.

Before becoming the twelfth president of what was then Jarvis Christian College in 2012, Dr. Newman was executive assistant to the president and director of administrative management programs at Wiley College, a historically Black college, in Marshall, Texas.

Dr. Newman is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Atlanta University.

Counterrevolutions Are Much More Successful at Toppling Unarmed Revolutions. Here’s Why.

Guest post by Killian Clarke

Counterrevolutions have historically received much less attention than revolutions, but the last decade has shown that counterrevolutions remain a powerful—and insidious—force in the world.

In 2013, Egypt’s revolutionary experiment was cut short by a popular counterrevolutionary coup, which elevated General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to the presidency. In neighboring Sudan, a democratic revolution that had swept aside incumbent autocrat Omar al-Bashir in 2019 was similarly rolled back by a military counterrevolution in October 2021. Only three months later, soldiers in Burkina Faso ousted the civilian president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who had been elected following the 2014 Burkinabè uprising.

These counterrevolutions all have something in common: they all occurred in the aftermath of unarmed revolutions, in which masses of ordinary citizens used largely nonviolent tactics like protests, marches, and strikes to force a dictator from power. These similarities, it turns out, are telling.

In a recent article, I show that counterrevolutionary restorations—the return of the old regime following a successful revolution—are much more likely following unarmed revolutions than those involving armed guerilla war. Indeed, the vast majority of successful counterrevolutions in the 20^th and 21^st centuries have occurred following democratic uprisings like Egypt’s, Sudan’s, and Burkina Faso’s.

Why are these unarmed revolutions so vulnerable? After all, violent armed revolutions are usually deeply threatening to old regime interests, giving counterrevolutionaries plenty of motivation to try to claw back power. There are at least two possible explanations.

The first is that, even though counterrevolutionaries may be desperate to return, violent revolutions usually destroy their capacity to do so. They grind down their armies through prolonged guerilla war, whereas unarmed revolutions leave these armies largely unscathed. In the three cases above, there was minimal security reform following the ousting of the incumbent, forcing civilian revolutionaries to rule in the shadow of a powerful old regime military establishment.

A second explanation focuses on the coercive resources available to revolutionaries. During revolutions waged through insurgency or guerilla war, challengers build up powerful revolutionary armies, like Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army in Cuba or Mao’s Red Army in China. When these revolutionaries seize power, their armies serve as strong bulwarks against counterrevolutionary attacks. The Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba is a good example: even though that campaign had the backing of the CIA, it quickly ran aground in the face of Castro’s well-fortified revolutionary defenses. In contrast, unarmed revolutionaries rarely build up these types of coercive organizations, leaving them with little means to fend off counterrevolutions.

After looking at the data, I found that the second explanation has more weight than the first one. I break counterrevolution down into two parts— whether a counterrevolution is launched, and then whether it succeeds—and find that armed revolutions significantly lower the likelihood of counterrevolutionary success, but not counterrevolutionary challenges. In other words, reactionaries are just as likely to attempt a restoration following both armed and unarmed revolutions. But they are far less likely to succeed against the armed revolutions, whose loyal cadres can be reliably called up to defend the revolution’s gains.

Unarmed revolutions are increasing around the world, especially in regions like Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, violent revolutions are declining in frequency, particularly those involving long, grueling campaigns that seek transformational impacts on state and society, what some call social revolutions. In one sense, these should be welcome trends, since unarmed revolutions result in far less destruction and have a record of producing more liberal orders. But given their susceptibility to reversal, should we be concerned that we are actually at the threshold of a new era of counterrevolution?

There are certainly reasons for worry. Counterrevolutions are rare events (by my count, there have only been about 25 since 1900), and the fact that there have been so many in recent years does not augur well. Counterrevolutionaries’ prospects have also been bolstered by changes in the international system, with rising powers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates acting as enthusiastic champions of counterrevolution, particularly against democratic revolutions in their near-abroads. Today’s unarmed revolutions, already facing uphill battles in establishing their rule, with fractious coalitions and a lack of coercive resources, must now also contend with counterrevolutionary forces drawing support from a muscular set of foreign allies.

But though they may struggle to consolidate their gains, unarmed revolutions have a record of establishing more open and democratic regimes than armed ones do. Violent revolutions too often simply replace one form of tyranny with another. The question, then, is how to bolster these fledgling revolutionary democracies and help them to fend off the shadowy forces of counterrevolution.

International support can be crucial. Strong backing from the international community can deter counterrevolutionaries and help new regimes fend off threats. Ultimately, though, much comes down to the actions of revolutionaries themselves—and whether they can keep their coalitions rallied behind the revolutionary cause. Where they can, they are typically able to defeat even powerful counterrevolutions, by relying on the very same tactics of people power and mass protest that brought them success during the revolution itself.

Killian Clarke is an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

possibility

Over at Plough, the tag is: Another life is possible. This ought to be a mantra for most of us. We can live in defiance of the mandates of technocracy and metaphysical capitalism; we can’t make those demonic Powers go away, and we probably can’t live uninfluenced by them — but we can reduce their power over our lives, one small step at a time. Independence is not gained in an instant, but I think there’s a growing body of people who want it. 

There’s a funny passage in James Pogue’s recent report on right-wingers relocating to the West: 

Resistance to “globalism” is a new organizing force of right-wing politics. “These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.” It could have been Alex Jones talking. 

Well, maybe. But it certainly could’ve been Bernie Sanders talking. And isn’t that noteworthy? 

It would be nice if people found it so. Recently Michelle Goldberg wrote about recent studies showing the damage that social media platforms are doing to the mental health of young people — but as soon as some politicians on the right called attention to those studies, reactive nitwits on the left, of which there are many, fled to alternative explanations. Because Josh Hawley can’t be allowed to make a valid point about anything, now can he? Goldberg: 

The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well. I’m not sure if banning social media for young people is the right way to start fixing the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids. But we’re not going to find any fix at all if we simply start with our political priors and work backward.

If people — people on social media all the freaking time, naturally — could manage to take a few minutes’ break from their Pavlovian virtual cages, they might discover the possibility of consensus — consensus on the vital necessity to restrain the predatory megacorporations that are destroying our society, and, if their recent adventures in chatbots are any indication, are very much looking for new worlds to ruin. 

Any day I can take a step back from my political priors, take a step back from absorption in Technopoly, take a step back from the commodification of myself, is a good day. That some of us find that extremely difficult is perhaps a good Lenten meditation. 

Eduardo Galeano:

In the morning, one of the prisoners who hadn’t yet lost track of the calendar recalled, “Today is Easter Sunday.”

Here’s a beautiful meditation by Eleanor Parker on the Cross and the medieval poem “The Dream of the Rood.” I recently read Parker’s book Winters in the World, which is a delight and a treasure-house. 

The Economist:

Wilmore, Kentucky, is the kind of quaint town (population 6,027) you might drive through and forget. Perhaps if you stop at the intersection of Main Street and Lexington Avenue you may notice a white Presbyterian chapel and a redbrick Baptist church on opposite corners — reminders of a bygone era when America was staunchly Christian. 

Maybe someone should tell The Economist that those churches are not museums devoted to “a bygone era” — people today actually attend them. 

If you’re going to read only one piece about the Asbury revival, make it this one by Ruth Graham. (I won’t let the fact that Ruth was once my student prevent me from saying that she’s the best religion reporter in this country, and it’s not close.)

I don’t have anything further to say about this event, though. Whether this is a genuine fruit-bearing revival is something that can’t be discerned now, and perhaps won’t ever be discernible. As George Eliot teaches us in the famous concluding words of Middlemarch, we don’t really understand the causes of the changes in our lives: sometimes the most important influences, and the most important people, work in ways too subtle for us to perceive. Maybe — and please, Lord, let it be so — this will be a great revival with lasting effects; but we’re unlikely to know what those effects are or how they have shaped people’s hearts. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.