Christ's moral modernity
In my last meandering post on tradition and gay marriage (far from my best organized essay ever) I both defended and moderated my criticism of appeals to tradition. Nathanael seems more or less satisfied with it en total, (even the editing mistakes which I throw in, um, as an interpolation exercise for the reader) but in response to my claim that the Bible is “not exactly state-of-the-art ethical reasoning these days” Nathanael asks:
After I finish wincing at the very idea of Nietzsche as the pinnacle of moral philosophy, I open my eyes and notice, yes, Nietzsche is incontrovertibly an influential example of almost-modern moral reasoning, if not at all the foot I’d want to put forward.
As Nathanael points out immediately prior to the above passage, the Bible has some unsavory parts and makes some moral progress of its own from beginning to end - answering my statement that the Bible “has its wise and less-wise parts” - but he does not, nor does modern Christian theology, identify these unsavory parts as the culmination of Christian or Biblical moral reasoning. Christ’s words specifically are the archetype here. This, filtered through the most erudite and advanced exegesis offered by modern Christian theology, is Christianity’s ‘best foot,’ to which I must offer a counterpart if I am to make my claims credible.
One issue at the outset is that I view all words through the lense of assumption that the inspiration of their human authors came from non-supernatural sources. Instead of trying to tease the sublime from a few sentences based on the idea that the person speaking has an extraordinary conduit to transcendent truth, I interpret using the same principles of literary analysis I apply to everything else. In the case of Jesus Christ, this can be problematic, because his recorded statements are sparse relative to the length of the bible and a good amount of what he says holds only implicit moral reasoning. As soon as we’re attempting to deduce the reasoning, we’re thrown on our understanding of context, intended audience, the narrative traditions of the day, and so on. It leaves us lots of room for disagreement.
Theologians, of course, have already done a great deal of work on these subjects, but while I’ve read some C S Lewis and others, I can by no means lay claim to mastery of the modern understandings. I’m also not sure if these count in our comparisons, since while they take the Bible as their primary text, they by no means restrict themselves to the contents thereof to achieve their more explicit moral systems. I suppose if I wanted to escape this whole essay cheaply, I could just say that the two sources of moral reasoning (Christ’s words and modern philosophy) are incomparable. Alternately I could dismiss theology as necessarily tendentious, since it has no work to do without the divinity of its subject. Neither of these is fair, so I’ll carry on in the consciousness that I’m inevitably going to elide the separation between modern Christian thought and the original content of Christ’s words.
So, then, we come to modern philosophy, of which I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge so much as a working familiarity. I am not a ninja even of ethical philosophy, but I do have my bearings and a position. The major schools of personal ethics that still hold sway in ethical philosophy all sprang from Mill (or Bentham) and Kant, and just about every ethical philosopher tends to get classified as some form of Utilitarian good-maximizer or Kantian rule-follower*. I first encountered my favorite “third way” of ethical reasoning in Dennettm who advocates “heuristic” ethical analysis, but I doubt his idea is completely novel and I bet it gets categorized as a sort of update to Kantian ethics using some Utilitarian reasoning. Nietzsche has his influence, but as Dennett has implied in his own writings, Nietzsche’s position is too confused to engender any single coherent school.
In political philosophy the major modern voices are Rawls and Nozick, with updates from their peers. Both leave a great deal to be desired in my eyes, but they certainly crush the classic analyses of Hobbes through Marx in terms of rigor and rooting in fundamentals. Since Justice as Fairness and Anarchy, State and Utopia plenty of philosophers and others have built on - and improved - those foundations so that we now have a relatively robust set of answers that compare very favorably to those of the early and late Enlightenment scholars.
The modern understanding of Christ’s words seem to center around the ideas of love and avoidance of hypocrisy. We can derive from just those two principles many great things. If we endeavor to love consistently and thoughtfully, so that we do not reduce our love to a thin facsimile of itself, we indeed lead to many excellent insights. However, Christ offers little justification to the materialist for his directives. “Why?” we ask, and we receive back an answer that references God’s will - not a convincing tactic for those who fail to believe in God in the first place. Also, there are problems with making God’s will the source of moral value rather than a guide thereto. In any case, the promise of an afterlife or presumably positive “closeness to God” do offer efficient reasons for the described moral behavior in terms of personal benefit, but I’m not sure how to respond to such a supernatural quid pro quo. Fortunately, I don’t believe in God or an afterlife anyway, so I escape that particular quandary.
But let us say for instance that we’re actually only talking about actual (practical) moral directives rather than their justification. We should also throw out Christ’s directives concerning God if we expect to discuss answers relevant to the many people whose metaphysical positions lack a deity. Christ has a good amount of personal instruction to give, though he has little to offer on political ethics except to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s. One might regard this as a major weakness since the real-world state very much needs ethical direction to guide lawmaking and enforcement, but it’s also been mentioned that if we were all angels government wouldn’t be necessary. Ditto if the world was going to end pretty soon, as Christ seemed to be saying in Mark 13:30-33 (as well as in other places). Since it didn’t work out that way, I don’t know if that amounts to poor moral advice or not.
Anyway, Christ’s morality is pretty sparse by word count, which reminds me of how Bentham’s rhymes and formulations attempt to package a complex moral system into a small set of adages that evoke rather than describe moral solutions. Both, I think, are open to similar pedagogical criticisms, though in Bentham’s case there exists the rest of his writing in which he attempts to flesh out a comprehensive moral structure to back up the simplifications. Unfortunately for Bentham, his attempts are pretty inadequate; Mill well-earned his standing in the Utilitarian tradition with his more robust reworking thereof. Am I comparing Christ to Bentham now? Not exactly - no one now has seen what comprehensive system of argument lurked behind his words, so we must either bracket that consideration or try to read between lines. Since bracketing the logical substance of Christ’s moral thought makes attempts to compare Christ’s morality with modern morality, I suppose we must choose the latter.
Since to do this convincingly would require much closer and more comprehensive reading of the Bible than I have ever brought myself to perform, I’ll have to give my impressions with the caveat that I don’t regard them as particularly reliable. When I said in my previous essay that there are more and less wise portions of the Bible, I was thinking of the (somewhat Hellenist) New Testament as broadly wiser and the (somewhat tribalist) Old Testament as broadly less wise, not intending to take a strong stance on Christ specifically. Since we’re already on the same page about moral progress in the Bible, this is quasi-tangential to my thesis at the time.
Christ seems to stick to the idea that obedience is a cardinal virtue and that authority justifies his command to love. Also, the form of ‘love’ he recommends seems a little different that what I would hope. I think of Matt 21:18-21 when Christ withers a fig tree because it didn’t have fruit when he wanted something to eat. Now, this is by no means a human and I don’t think of trees as having moral rights, but in conjunction with Christ bearing a sword, and his episodes with cursing villages that were insufficiently impressed with his miracles, I get this idea that his love is a bit erratic. Perhaps it has to do with so much of his love being pointed toward deity or something, but I find it a little less person-positive than I would hope. He sometimes seems to support the idea of all people having the same value and sometimes he seems to be less willing to take his message to gentiles. I have heard a lot of apologetics regarding Jesus’ seemingly less-than-perfectly-loving actions, but stripped of the theology which I find empty and unpersuasive, they fail to convince me that his actions are anything like a guade to perfect living.
Now, some Christian theologians drop a lot of the details and synopsize Christ’s innovation as the elevation of love over mechanistic, heartless law. Some of the more liberal brand even manage to do this without distorting the definition of the word “love” into something I don’t want in the process. The problem I find with this is that all of these theologians are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. Humanist currents within the Catholic Church sparked that to some extent in conjunction with contact with the much more learned Muslim lands. To a large extent this marked a turning away from the focus on heavenly concerns that, to me, is very much a divergence from Christ’s own apprehension of priorities. A search for God, infinitude and Truth ensued that was perhaps inspired by Christ’s message of love but seems to have traveled very far beyond it, eventually forming naturalistic science, secular ethics, and so on. It just doesn’t seem that even the best modern Christian moralists find Christ’s teaching sufficient - he’s perhaps a muse or stands in for an idealization of human potential.
Meanwhile, modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means, but they certainly do offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving. My personal favorite philosopher, Daniel Dennett, is not a straight ahead ethical philosopher, but I think his ideas about incremental improvements in moral heuristics, which takes realistic account of limited information and ability to calculate (predict), offers a way of reifying our substantial progress without requiring any particular theory be the final answer.
Ultimately, there may be no fair way to compare the parsimoniously preserved words of an ancient prophet to a modern thinker who can not only draw on that prophet’s words (and other forerunners) but write quite a few more of her own to craft a truly deep moral position. Nonetheless, I think it’s also difficult to describe Christ’s words as constituting especially advanced morality.
* Of course utilitarianism is a sort of expansion on consequentialism and within utilitarianism there’s a bunch of finer gradations, such as Moore’s ideal utilitarianism and Hare’s preference utilitarianism. I simplify egregiously.
What in moral philosophy over the past 2000 years has surpassed the words of Jesus Christ? Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell both see post-Enlightenment moral philosophy as finding its logical culmination in Nietzsche, whose mercilessly "heroic" doctrines underlay Nazism. I know some people look for moral systems in Rawls, Kant, Nozick, or even Marx, but does anyone really have the bravado nowadays to see these as "state-of-the-art," and Christianity as somehow passe?
After I finish wincing at the very idea of Nietzsche as the pinnacle of moral philosophy, I open my eyes and notice, yes, Nietzsche is incontrovertibly an influential example of almost-modern moral reasoning, if not at all the foot I’d want to put forward.
As Nathanael points out immediately prior to the above passage, the Bible has some unsavory parts and makes some moral progress of its own from beginning to end - answering my statement that the Bible “has its wise and less-wise parts” - but he does not, nor does modern Christian theology, identify these unsavory parts as the culmination of Christian or Biblical moral reasoning. Christ’s words specifically are the archetype here. This, filtered through the most erudite and advanced exegesis offered by modern Christian theology, is Christianity’s ‘best foot,’ to which I must offer a counterpart if I am to make my claims credible.
One issue at the outset is that I view all words through the lense of assumption that the inspiration of their human authors came from non-supernatural sources. Instead of trying to tease the sublime from a few sentences based on the idea that the person speaking has an extraordinary conduit to transcendent truth, I interpret using the same principles of literary analysis I apply to everything else. In the case of Jesus Christ, this can be problematic, because his recorded statements are sparse relative to the length of the bible and a good amount of what he says holds only implicit moral reasoning. As soon as we’re attempting to deduce the reasoning, we’re thrown on our understanding of context, intended audience, the narrative traditions of the day, and so on. It leaves us lots of room for disagreement.
Theologians, of course, have already done a great deal of work on these subjects, but while I’ve read some C S Lewis and others, I can by no means lay claim to mastery of the modern understandings. I’m also not sure if these count in our comparisons, since while they take the Bible as their primary text, they by no means restrict themselves to the contents thereof to achieve their more explicit moral systems. I suppose if I wanted to escape this whole essay cheaply, I could just say that the two sources of moral reasoning (Christ’s words and modern philosophy) are incomparable. Alternately I could dismiss theology as necessarily tendentious, since it has no work to do without the divinity of its subject. Neither of these is fair, so I’ll carry on in the consciousness that I’m inevitably going to elide the separation between modern Christian thought and the original content of Christ’s words.
So, then, we come to modern philosophy, of which I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge so much as a working familiarity. I am not a ninja even of ethical philosophy, but I do have my bearings and a position. The major schools of personal ethics that still hold sway in ethical philosophy all sprang from Mill (or Bentham) and Kant, and just about every ethical philosopher tends to get classified as some form of Utilitarian good-maximizer or Kantian rule-follower*. I first encountered my favorite “third way” of ethical reasoning in Dennettm who advocates “heuristic” ethical analysis, but I doubt his idea is completely novel and I bet it gets categorized as a sort of update to Kantian ethics using some Utilitarian reasoning. Nietzsche has his influence, but as Dennett has implied in his own writings, Nietzsche’s position is too confused to engender any single coherent school.
In political philosophy the major modern voices are Rawls and Nozick, with updates from their peers. Both leave a great deal to be desired in my eyes, but they certainly crush the classic analyses of Hobbes through Marx in terms of rigor and rooting in fundamentals. Since Justice as Fairness and Anarchy, State and Utopia plenty of philosophers and others have built on - and improved - those foundations so that we now have a relatively robust set of answers that compare very favorably to those of the early and late Enlightenment scholars.
The modern understanding of Christ’s words seem to center around the ideas of love and avoidance of hypocrisy. We can derive from just those two principles many great things. If we endeavor to love consistently and thoughtfully, so that we do not reduce our love to a thin facsimile of itself, we indeed lead to many excellent insights. However, Christ offers little justification to the materialist for his directives. “Why?” we ask, and we receive back an answer that references God’s will - not a convincing tactic for those who fail to believe in God in the first place. Also, there are problems with making God’s will the source of moral value rather than a guide thereto. In any case, the promise of an afterlife or presumably positive “closeness to God” do offer efficient reasons for the described moral behavior in terms of personal benefit, but I’m not sure how to respond to such a supernatural quid pro quo. Fortunately, I don’t believe in God or an afterlife anyway, so I escape that particular quandary.
But let us say for instance that we’re actually only talking about actual (practical) moral directives rather than their justification. We should also throw out Christ’s directives concerning God if we expect to discuss answers relevant to the many people whose metaphysical positions lack a deity. Christ has a good amount of personal instruction to give, though he has little to offer on political ethics except to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s. One might regard this as a major weakness since the real-world state very much needs ethical direction to guide lawmaking and enforcement, but it’s also been mentioned that if we were all angels government wouldn’t be necessary. Ditto if the world was going to end pretty soon, as Christ seemed to be saying in Mark 13:30-33 (as well as in other places). Since it didn’t work out that way, I don’t know if that amounts to poor moral advice or not.
Anyway, Christ’s morality is pretty sparse by word count, which reminds me of how Bentham’s rhymes and formulations attempt to package a complex moral system into a small set of adages that evoke rather than describe moral solutions. Both, I think, are open to similar pedagogical criticisms, though in Bentham’s case there exists the rest of his writing in which he attempts to flesh out a comprehensive moral structure to back up the simplifications. Unfortunately for Bentham, his attempts are pretty inadequate; Mill well-earned his standing in the Utilitarian tradition with his more robust reworking thereof. Am I comparing Christ to Bentham now? Not exactly - no one now has seen what comprehensive system of argument lurked behind his words, so we must either bracket that consideration or try to read between lines. Since bracketing the logical substance of Christ’s moral thought makes attempts to compare Christ’s morality with modern morality, I suppose we must choose the latter.
Since to do this convincingly would require much closer and more comprehensive reading of the Bible than I have ever brought myself to perform, I’ll have to give my impressions with the caveat that I don’t regard them as particularly reliable. When I said in my previous essay that there are more and less wise portions of the Bible, I was thinking of the (somewhat Hellenist) New Testament as broadly wiser and the (somewhat tribalist) Old Testament as broadly less wise, not intending to take a strong stance on Christ specifically. Since we’re already on the same page about moral progress in the Bible, this is quasi-tangential to my thesis at the time.
Christ seems to stick to the idea that obedience is a cardinal virtue and that authority justifies his command to love. Also, the form of ‘love’ he recommends seems a little different that what I would hope. I think of Matt 21:18-21 when Christ withers a fig tree because it didn’t have fruit when he wanted something to eat. Now, this is by no means a human and I don’t think of trees as having moral rights, but in conjunction with Christ bearing a sword, and his episodes with cursing villages that were insufficiently impressed with his miracles, I get this idea that his love is a bit erratic. Perhaps it has to do with so much of his love being pointed toward deity or something, but I find it a little less person-positive than I would hope. He sometimes seems to support the idea of all people having the same value and sometimes he seems to be less willing to take his message to gentiles. I have heard a lot of apologetics regarding Jesus’ seemingly less-than-perfectly-loving actions, but stripped of the theology which I find empty and unpersuasive, they fail to convince me that his actions are anything like a guade to perfect living.
Now, some Christian theologians drop a lot of the details and synopsize Christ’s innovation as the elevation of love over mechanistic, heartless law. Some of the more liberal brand even manage to do this without distorting the definition of the word “love” into something I don’t want in the process. The problem I find with this is that all of these theologians are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. Humanist currents within the Catholic Church sparked that to some extent in conjunction with contact with the much more learned Muslim lands. To a large extent this marked a turning away from the focus on heavenly concerns that, to me, is very much a divergence from Christ’s own apprehension of priorities. A search for God, infinitude and Truth ensued that was perhaps inspired by Christ’s message of love but seems to have traveled very far beyond it, eventually forming naturalistic science, secular ethics, and so on. It just doesn’t seem that even the best modern Christian moralists find Christ’s teaching sufficient - he’s perhaps a muse or stands in for an idealization of human potential.
Meanwhile, modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means, but they certainly do offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving. My personal favorite philosopher, Daniel Dennett, is not a straight ahead ethical philosopher, but I think his ideas about incremental improvements in moral heuristics, which takes realistic account of limited information and ability to calculate (predict), offers a way of reifying our substantial progress without requiring any particular theory be the final answer.
Ultimately, there may be no fair way to compare the parsimoniously preserved words of an ancient prophet to a modern thinker who can not only draw on that prophet’s words (and other forerunners) but write quite a few more of her own to craft a truly deep moral position. Nonetheless, I think it’s also difficult to describe Christ’s words as constituting especially advanced morality.
* Of course utilitarianism is a sort of expansion on consequentialism and within utilitarianism there’s a bunch of finer gradations, such as Moore’s ideal utilitarianism and Hare’s preference utilitarianism. I simplify egregiously.
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