Steven Nemes weighs in on Matt. 5:38-42 in his Substack entry, When should Christians not resist an evildoer?
He makes some of the same points I have made over the years, most recently, here at Substack: Morality Private and Public.
Commenter Ben wrote:
Neighbors are familiar, local. This is in direct contrast to the sort of pablum about being a "citizen of the world" and preferring the plight of the universal faceless stranger over what you owe to your own countrymen . . .
That's right. I'll add that while we are enjoined to love our neighbors, we are also commanded to love our enemies (MT 5:44 and Luke 6:27). Are these enemies familiar and local too and not, say, Iranian Islamists? Do the verses mentioned rule out hating foreigners who pose an existential threat to us? Or do they permit it?
Carl Schmitt has something to say on the question in The Concept of the Political (expanded ed., tr. G. Schwab, U. of Chicago Press, 2007, 28-29):
The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship. The enemy is hostis, not inimicus in the broader sense; polemios, not ecthros. As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” agapate tous ecthrous, and not diligite hostes vestros.
No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.
What is Schmitt telling us? The criterion of the political sphere is the Freund-Feind, friend-enemy distinction. (26) But who is the enemy? The main point made above, as I understand it, is that the political enemy is a public enemy who may or may not be in addition a private adversary whom one hates. Suppose you are I are Trump supporters who hate each other. That would be a case of political friendship but personal enmity. Or it may be that you and I are on the same side politically and love each other. That would be a case of both political and personal friendship. (I assume that love includes friendship but not conversely.) A third possibility is realized in many marriages: the partners love each other on the personal plane but are on opposite sides of a political divide. (James Carville and Mary Matalin?)
Now consider Luke 6:27: "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you (KJV)." Who are the enemies referred to in this verse? Not political/public enemies, but private enemies, according to Schmitt. The verse therefore allows the hating, and presumably also the killing, of foreign and domestic enemies who pose an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is one not merely to our biological life, but to our way of life.
Is that right?
Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36.
What does 'this world' refer to? In the "Our Father" we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely spiritual realm, and that therefore 'this world' at John 18:36 refers to this age of the earthly realm and not to the earthly realm as such.
Yes or no?
The traditional doctrine of hell appears to be a consequence of two assumptions, the first of which is arguably unbiblical.
Geddes MacGregor: ". . . the doctrine of hell, with its attendant horrors, is intended as the logical development of the notion that, since man is intrinsically immortal, and some men turn out badly, they cannot enjoy the presence of God." (Reincarnation in Christianity, Quest Books, 1978, 121)
1) We are naturally, and intrinsically, immortal.
2) Some of us, by our evil behavior, have freely and forever excluded ourselves from the divine presence.
MacGregor: "Having permanently deprived themselves of the capacity to enjoy that presence [the presence of God] , they must forever endure the sense of its loss, the poena damni, as the medieval theologians called it." (Ibid.)
Therefore
3) There must be some state or condition, some 'place,' for these immortal souls, and that 'place' is hell. They will remain there either for all eternity or else everlastingly.
According to MacGregor, premise (1) is false because it has no foundation in biblical teaching. (Ibid.) St. Paul, says MacGregor, subscribes to conditional immortality. This is "immortality that is dependent on one's being 'raised up' to victory over death through the resurrection of Christ." (op. cit., 119) It follows that the medieval doctrine of hell is un-Christian.
The choice we face is not between heaven and hell but between heaven and utter extinction which, for MacGregor, is worse than everlasting torment.
Two issues: Would extinction of the person be worse than everlasting torment? That is not my sense of things. I would prefer extinction, for Epicurean reasons. The other issue is whether the Pauline texts and the rest of the Bible support conditional immortality. I have no fixed opinion on that question.
I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):
Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.
Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.
To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.
I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:
Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this.
I shall now dispute it.
We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce. The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen. It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce. (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)
The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce? I answer in the negative.
Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal." The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman. The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*
And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.
Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman. It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.
Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose) is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all. (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)
Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease — no chance of that! — or b) that procreation ought to cease. For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation. It is only for those we are specially called to it.
Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.
Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it. This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity. But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.
_________________________
*Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience. As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions. Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!
ADDENDUM (3/4/19)
Karl White responds:
To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.
Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." – C.S. LewisIt is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" – if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.
. . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought – in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy – many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.
I came across your article from five years ago, and I'd like to respond to Karl White (with the hope of my response being added in just beneath Karl's comments). I'd like to offer a plausible way of thinking why St. Paul should not be interpreted as an antinatalist, even in a weaker sense. For this response, I would explain Paul's words taking into account the historical context.
In Paul's times, Christians were already dealing with a lot. Life for early Christians wasn’t easy, and a lot of it had to do with tension with both the Jewish leaders and the Roman authorities.For one thing, the early Christians, faced a lot of heat from Jewish leaders who saw the new movement as a threat to their traditions. Paul himself got chased out of several cities—places like Antioch and Thessalonica—just because of his preaching (Acts 13:50, Acts 14:5-6, Acts 17:5). Christians were getting kicked out of synagogues, and sometimes they were beaten or even stoned by angry mobs. It wasn’t a good time to be a Christian believer, especially when you were trying to keep your faith while also facing public ridicule or violence.On top of that, there was growing suspicion from Roman authorities. Their refusal to participate in Roman religious practices—like worshipping the emperor—made them look like troublemakers. Later on, Tacitus (a Roman historian) would talk about how Christians were hated by the wider public, calling them “haters of humanity,” mostly because they refused to take part in traditional Roman rituals.The early church also had to deal with some tough circumstances like famines. For instance, during Emperor Claudius’s reign in the 40s AD, there was a serious famine that hit places like Judea (Acts 11:28). Christians, many of whom were poor to begin with, felt the effects of that hardship pretty hard.This historical view is also supported by a few later verses. (1 Corinthians 7:26) starts with "Because of the present crisis…". (1 Corinthians 15:30-32) says "And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord." So it seems that in later verses Paul seems to confirm that they are indeed living through dangerous times.So, with all these pressures—religious opposition, economic hardship, and natural disasters—it makes sense why Paul might suggest that it could be a good idea to avoid the extra complications of marriage and family. It had little to do with philosophical musings and a lot to do with material conditions at the time.
Philoponus writes,
Is there anywhere in the NT where they argue for an afterlife, or is it an assumption shared by all the authors of the NT? Passages?
Before I answer this question, there are a couple of logically prior questions of considerable interest. First, is there any argumentation at all in the NT? Second, does Jesus argue for anything, or does he just make gratuitous (unsupported) assertions? (If he was, and eternally is, God, that would be his prerogative, right?) The answer to both questions is in the affirmative, as you can see from the following quotation from Dallas Willard's essay, Jesus as Logician:
(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.
Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.
Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God–which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.
(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)
Luke 20: 27-40 shows three things: there is argumentation in the NT; there is argumentation by Jesus in the NT; and to Phil's query, there is argument about the afterlife in the NT, in the form of argument against and for the resurrection of the dead.
It is now my turn to ask questions inasmuch as I am no scholar of the NT, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.
Q1: Did the Sadducees, in rejecting the resurrection of the body, equate that rejection with the rejection of personal immortality tout court? My guess is yes.
Q2. Did any of the rabbis hold to a personal immortality along Platonic lines? My guess is no.
Nescio ergo blogo.
Finally, was it true that Jesus was a logician? Well he certainly was a not a theorist of logic along the lines of Aristotle or Frege. Nor is Dallas Willard claiming that he was. But Willard succeeds in showing that Jesus did argue and make typical logical moves. The difference is that between logica docens and logica utens if I understand that distinction. It is the difference between logical theory and logical practice.
I first discovered Dallas Willard (1935-2013) as an undergraduate fascinated with Edmund Husserl and his quest to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft. Willard was a Husserl man, and a good one. Only much later did I discover that this USC professor was a Christian apologist. May he rest in peace.
Here is my tribute to him.
Substack latest.
Is the Pauline passage an example of Jamesian over-belief?
I have a Twitter/X account, but I don't post there often. Today I took a peek and found this:
https://x.com/DaleTuggy/status/1786943516922306708. The following is from Tuggy:
An interesting passage from Origen's commentary on John. Some readers still make the same mistake!
"Those, however, who are confused on the subject of the Father and the Son bring together the statement, "God . . . raised up Christ' [1 Cor 15:14]. . . and words like these which show him who raises to be different from him who has been raised, and the statement [in Jn 2:19], "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." They think that these statements prove that the Son does not differ from the Father in number, but that both being one, not only in essence, but also in substance, they are said to be Father and Son in relation to certain differing aspects, not in relation to their reality.
Comment: Yup, some still look at that text from John and conclude that Jesus and God are one and the same ("same in number"). Back to Origen,
For this reason, we must first quote to them the texts capable of establishing definitely that the Son is other than the Father, and we must say that it is necessary that a son be the son of a father and that a father be the father of a son. After this we must say to them that it is not strange for him, who admits that he can do nothing except what he sees the Father doing, and who says that whatever the Father does, the Son likewise also does, to have raised the dead, (which was the body), since the Father, who we must say emphatically has raised the Christ from the dead, grants this to him."
Comment: I think if you're a dualist you could accept this solution. If you're not, I think you can simply understand Christ to mean that after God would bring him back to life, he'd get up!
The book has been recently translated.
Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."
Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it. But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing.
To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely. Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid, and the same goes for many Europeans to the east of France.
On Romans 1: 18-20.
Substack latest.
. . . I will say a prayer for you.
You don't even need the 'closet' referred to at Matt 6:6:
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)
Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum in abscondito: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi. (Biblia Vulgata)
Related words: closet, claustra, enclosure, claustrophobia, exclaustration.
Material bread or spiritual bread?
Substack latest.
This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind." While I do not deny that doubt can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.
Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.
The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':
5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:
But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they speak of could not be reduced to the world of black holes and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.
To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it. They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.
Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term. The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of humanity. That's my first point.
Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self. He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind. He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.
And of course the religious train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.
Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will. Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.
Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.
Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion. Surely this is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so. (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)
Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable. Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology but also in scriptural exegesis.
Philosophy and religion are opposed and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.
"And Jesus wept." (John 11, 35)
Here, by Tim Hsiao. (HT: Elliot Ruffin Crozat)
This essay offers a comprehensive defense of the position that Luke 22:36 endorses the carrying of weapons for personal self-defense. I address in detail every objection to this view that I have been able to find.
