Revisions

It ended Friday night. At 8:42pm, “The suspect is in custody” echoed over the airwaves, with a Boston police tweet not far behind. As quickly as they had come, the scattered gunshots, the chopping drone of the assault helicopters, the heavy boots of the SWAT teams, the hiss and crack of voices over the police scanner melted away into a raucous block party as Watertown returned to normalcy.

A couple of hours earlier, when the end’s imminence had become clear, Reverend Michael Rogers had sat down to write: “Dear Dzhokhar,” he typed. “I will pray for you. When the first pitch is thrown on Patriots day at Fenway, I will pray that somehow you will know joy…”¹ He was not alone. Minutes after the capture, the Father Manny Alvarez went to his Twitter: “A wise young lady just reminded me that as we pray for everyone in Boston, we must pray for this 19 year old too…because we’re Catholic.”² Their sentiments ricocheted across the internet as Christians tweeted, blogged, posted, and re-tweeted similar thoughts.

Not all responses were so sympathetic. Take New York State Senator Greg Ball’s tweet, for instance: “So, scum bag #2 in custody. Who wouldn’t use torture on this punk to save more lives?”³ In response to @csalafia’s call for Christians to pray,⁴ @DonivanRiddle requested that the prayers specify that the remaining Tsarnaev brother “dies slowly & in pain”.⁵ In contrast to the Christian call for forgiveness, others called for justice to be served.

Our deepest loyalties are laid bare in tragedies. For Christians, a commitment to Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies and pray for them (Matt 5:44) is one that ought to hold even when every fiber of one’s being is crying out with the pain of the Boston Marathon victims. But the flurry of Christian responses does raise a serious question: What about justice? The Facebook group “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev” has 78 members declaring to the hospitalized suspect “we always love you bro” and encouraging him to “Get well soon”.⁶ In what sense are Christians different than these supporters who want to laud the Boston Bombings as heroes of sorts?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach took the outpouring of Christian sentiment on behalf of the suspect as an opportunity to make a provocative statement:

The reason that tragedies, like the outrageous terrorist bombing in Boston this week, continue to take place is not because the world lacks love but rather because it doesn’t have enough hate. Living in a Christian world that teaches us to ‘love the sinner,’ we find excuses for evil and refuse to [dedicate] ourselves fully to its destruction.⁷

To distinguish between the sin and the sinner, in a case when the sinner does not immediately repent, is for Boteach an abomination and an evil. “For us to extend forgiveness and compassion to them [an unrepentant sinner] in the name of religion is not just insidious, it is a mockery of God who has mercy for all yet demands justice for the innocent.”⁸

Boteach’s remarks are not new. In 2003, another Rabbi penned an article questioning why Jews and Christians differed so strongly on the question of hate and forgiveness.⁹ In exploring the “Virtue of Hate”, Meir Soloveichik suggested that the Christian aversion against hating even evildoers in this life represented a devaluing of the agency of those who know perfectly well what they do but refuse to repent of it. “[W]hile no human being is denied the chance to become worthy of God’s love,” he writes, “not every human being engages in actions so as to be worthy of that love, and those unworthy of divine love do not deserve our love either.”

Jewish perspectives, however, are not the only ones at odds with the Christian ethic of justice and forgiveness.¹⁰ Over a hundred years earlier, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche railed against the ways in which the Christianized Europe had developed a moral philosophy that was able to too-sharply distinguish between an agent and his or her deed, a phenomenon and its essence, an appearance and reality.¹¹ This distinction between the unseen “cause” and the seen “effect,” for Nietzsche, represented a way for weak individuals who had not the will or courage to make something of themselves to abrogate their own responsibility and make those who were taking responsibility for their own lives – the strong – feel bad for being strong. Oddly enough, Nietzsche’s final diagnosis is echoed in Soloveichik’s musings: The problem with Christianity is that it is too otherworldly. In emphasizing universal sinfulness and the potential for universal salvation, Christians have put a deep wedge into their abilities to take seriously the injustices and agencies of others in this present reality. The crux of the issue is this: in relegating justice into an eschatological “final judgment” and focusing on God’s unconditional, self-giving agape love, Christians have given up the pursuit of justice in this present day and age.¹²

This is not to say that Christians cannot claim to care for justice in the here and now. Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, for instance, has made a valiant effort to articulate how true Christian love must take into concern the requirements of justice in order to truly be love.¹³ In other words, Christian love must be just; and as a philosopher, he has written against apartheid in South Africa and done much to draw attention to injustices committed against Palestinians in the West Bank to put his money where his mouth is. But when push comes to shove, one would not be amiss to suspect that Christian rhetoric of “justice” is just all show, especially when bowing their heads in prayer for the health, safety, and welfare of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In continuing to hope for his redemption even now, Christians seem to be perpetuating the very kind of disregard of consequences that, in Boteach’s view, allows too much injustice to continue without condemnation. If everyone is a sinner, and yet no one is beyond redemption, how can any Christian take anyone’s actions in this life seriously at all? Are Christians merely ignoring the horrible things that the Boston bomber has done in praying for him? Is Rabbi Boteach right to claim that “[T]o show kindness to the murderer,” as the Christians are doing, “is to violate the victim yet again”?

For Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, the difference between the Christian response calling for love and those responses calling for justice is not that the Christian gives up on justice altogether, but that she holds a “will-to-embrace” in the midst of seeking for justice.¹⁴ For Volf, the Christian’s aversion towards exclusion and hate stems from a deep appreciation of the myriad problems that hate – especially when justified – brings into our world today. As Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre discusses in his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, questions on justice are often also questions of whose justice we ought to enact.¹⁵ While many of us may rage at the seeming meaninglessness of the Boston bombings, one cannot help but suspect that somehow, there was a logic in the Tsarnaev brothers’ minds that made such an act make sense. Perhaps, like Osama bin Laden and the September 11^th attackers, they may have even seen their acts to represent a – from our perspective – twisted sort of justice.¹⁶

For Volf, the Christian response to injustice is not complicity because it strives for a higher kind of justice, a justice that hopes for a future reconciliation that must constantly be on guard against the temptation of establishing a temporary peace by the use of violence and selective exclusion. We must also be wary of any attempt at re-education that is willing to coercively remake the sinner in our own image. We are rightfully angry at the violence perpetrated by the bombers because they have truly wronged us. Christians, however, choose not to respond with calls for retribution because they are seeking to break the cycle of vengeance and violence, and thus even Dzhokhar might not be past redemption.

But the Christian abandonment of hate and violence is not simply an abandonment of justice. Rather, they are relinquishing the right to judge to the God who judges justly, who has broken the cycle of hate and violence by Himself dying on the cross. Here’s what Volf has to say about it:

Without entrusting oneself to the God who judges justly, it will hardly be possible to follow the crucified Messiah and refuse to retaliate when abused. The certainty of God’s just judgment at the end of history is the presupposition for the renunciation of violence in the middle of it. The divine system of judgment is not the flip side of the human reign of terror, but a necessary correlate of human nonviolence. Since the search for truth and the practice of justice cannot be given up, the only way in which nonviolence and forgiveness will be possible in a world of violence is through displacement or transference of violence, not through its complete relinquishment.¹⁷

The “otherworldliness” of Christianity, far from being a relinquishment of responsibility and justice as Nietzsche would suggest, is actually the necessary condition for any view that takes justice seriously while hoping to bring an end to the cycles of injustice that plagues our world. In praying for Dzhokhar, Christians are expressing the hope that the distinction between sin and sinner will be able to be made, that reconciliation will be possible when his violence is returned, not with violence in return, but with suffering love. The Christian does not ignore the deed – that would certainly be the abrogation of responsibility; rather, he or she acknowledges it and nevertheless chooses to absorb it in love.

At the center of it all stands a man from Nazareth who was “made… to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). You may complain that there is a sort of magical switcheroo going on here, that Christians are insisting on a distinction between sin and sinner that is so outrageous so as to be unbelievable. The sin of the sinner is displaced onto Jesus such that the sinner can be declared righteous instead; and instead of responding to violence with his own violence, Jesus absorbed it in an embrace that tries to overcome evil by doing good. Followers of Jesus are called to do the same.

That it is an alien logic should not be a surprise, for it is the logic of a world wholly different from our own, a world in which deception and injustice no longer exists and love reigns supreme. In our troubled times, when full forgiveness must remain contingent upon repentance, the “will-to-embrace” must nevertheless be there, the willingness to hope against hope that such reconciliation is possible and refuse to write off anyone as a lost cause. As the Rev. Rogers wrote, “Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you next year when the first shot is fired in the annual reenactment of the battle of Lexington in Concord, that you will come to know that PEACE and LOVE are the only ways in which the world will ever be changed.”

So we pray.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-mr-michael-rogers-sj/dear-dzhokhar-i-cant-hate-you_b_3128805.html [↩]
https://twitter.com/FrManny/status/325412378202234881 [↩]
https://twitter.com/ball4ny/status/325411515333230592 [↩]
“If you call yourself Christian, tonight a 19yo Chechen needs your prayers. #JesusSaidSo” https://twitter.com/csalafia/status/325438617155665920 [↩]
https://twitter.com/DonivanRiddle/status/325545781241196545 [↩]
https://www.facebook.com/groups/192551754225560/ [↩]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuley-boteach/and-hate-the-sinner-too_b_3129324.html [↩]
Ibid. [↩]
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/05/the-virtue-of-hate-26 [↩]
Indeed, not all Jews would agree with Boteach and Soloveichik’s interpretation of Judaism, nor Christians on the relationship between justice and forgiveness, for that matter. See, for instance, some of the articles penned in response to Soloveichik’s article: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/jews-and-christians-hate-and-forgiveness-27. See also Claudia Ricci’s reflections on Cain and Abel for a different Jewish take on the Boston Bombings. One might say, however, that her article is just the first half of a Christian sermon which would appropriately end with a quotation from Hebrews 12: “You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (vv. 23–24). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/claudia-ricci/cain-and-abel-and-the-bos_b_3127638.html. [↩]
“For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such sub-stratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.” Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), Essay 1, Section 13. [↩]
Nietzsche, of course, would doubt whether “justice” is the right virtue to be seeking. For him, even “Christian justice” would just be one kind of justice that just so happens to be in vogue at this point in history; alternate value systems and ways of dealing with those with whom one disapproves have existed and may exist once more. As for a Christian view that declares love to have eclipsed justice, see, for instance, Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, in which God’s agape love in Jesus is contrasted with the “calculating” concerns of justice. [↩]
See Nicholas, Wolterstorff’s Justice in Love (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s, 2011). [↩]
See Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). [↩]
See MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988). [↩]
If you have not read Osama bin Laden’s 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” you might want to consider reading it. Whereas Americans may have seen the ⁹⁄₁₁ attacks to constitute a senseless, unprovoked assault on American lives, bin Laden saw it as a justified retaliation against the many ways that the Americans were violently occupying Muslim territories in the Middle East. In other words, bin Laden thought himself to be on the side of justice; for him, Americans were the original terrorists. See, for instance, a copy of the text here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/july-dec96/fatwa_1996.html. See also, a second 1998 declaration expressing similar sentiments: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/jan-june98/fatwa_1998.html [↩]
Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 302. [↩]

The Problem of Sin

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Christians have long been committed to the theological claim that all humans are corrupted by sin. For evangelicals, this is often interpreted in terms of individual moral failing. In other words, to say that humans are sinful is to say that humans have failed to live up to an absolute standard of morality that God has set (i.e. the Ten Commandments). The brokenness of the world we live in is seen to be the unfortunate consequence of such a failure. Under this understanding of the nature of sin, Jesus is important because he lived the morally flawless life that each of us should have lived, yet paid the penalty for sinning as if he had failed. In dying on the cross and enduring the wrath of God, Jesus effectively takes each individual’s punishment upon himself, inaugurating the ultimate exchange in which one’s failure to attain proper moral living can be overlooked if one is willing to accept Jesus’ sacrifice on one’s behalf and believe in him. The guilt of the believer is imputed to Jesus (who atones for it on the cross), and the innocence of Christ is counted as the believer’s own.

Cogent as such an articulation of the gospel message may be, however, it is not without its difficulties. Believers are often pressed, for instance, to explain how the so-called “natural evils” of the world fit into this picture. Questions are also often raised about the gruesome nature of God’s justice: why is it that there must be punishment? Why can’t God just forgive? These are questions which must be set aside for now. Instead, I want to focus on a smaller set of concerns (though no less important!) which center on the individualistic tones with which evangelicals typically discuss sin. I want to question this dominant conception by bringing up a few of the theological difficulties that such an individualistic view may run into and suggest how a more social view of the nature of sin may escape such difficulties. My ultimate concern is that the individualism with which evangelicals typically construe sin and morality has both diluted the radical implications of the gospel message and limited its persuasiveness.

The Problem of Universal Sinfulness

The first problem that our individualistic view of sin runs into is that of simple plausibility. All too often, one may run into non-Christians virtuous enough that one can’t actually pin any meaningful moral failing to their name – sure, they may have lied a few times in their lives, and perhaps they have even been angry, but it’s hard to see how they are contributing in substantial ways to the evil state of the world. Faced with this dilemma, evangelicals typically double down on their insistence that people must be absolutely morally perfect and try to make internal sins like anger seem much worse than people typically take them to be. If you’ve ever been angry, our imaginary evangelist might say, you’re guilty of murder.¹ If you’ve ever lusted after a woman who’s not your wife, you’re an adulterer!² The fact remains, however, that it’s hard to see how such actions contribute to the wars, genocides, and other atrocities of human history. In our first-world environment, most people you talk to will not have secretly committed some horrendous act of evil in their lives. Morally speaking, they’re relatively “good”. Yet the evangelical Christian must insist that they’re essentially on the same level as Hitler because of their need for salvation. This is, simply put, hard to buy.

Does a social view of sin work much better? If, for instance, sin is a communal affair in that individuals share in the responsibility for sins even if they are not the ones actually perpetrating them, their position in a sinful community means that they themselves are morally compromised. Insofar as the United States of America is involved in moral atrocities such as the torture of terrorists and the killing of civilians – or killing in general – the citizens of the United States are also culpable insofar as they are part of the communal project that is the United States of America. That this conception probably seems quite foreign to us is mostly a product of political liberalism and its emphasis on individual autonomy. The principle of collective responsibility, however, was certainly not alien to most pre-modern societies, Israel included. Consider, for instance, the Rape of Dinah in Genesis 34, where the entire town bears the punishment for the sin of one man.³

The Doctrine of Original Sin

An individualistic view of sin also runs into problems when trying to understand the doctrine of original sin. In order to assert that all have sinned, our evangelist must posit an underlying sinful nature that belongs to each and every human being which makes it inevitably the case that he or she will fail morally. This sinful nature is claimed to have originated from the original sin of Adam and Eve, whose initial transgression has a special character in that, not only was it disobedience to God’s lawful commands, but it resulted in a distortion of human nature such that it became impossible for any after them to properly follow God’s command.⁴ For the Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, any position that claims sin does not introduce this sort of fundamental change to human nature falls into the Pelagian heresy. Bavinck insists that it becomes impossible to understand how sin can be universal if men do not possess a fundamentally sinful nature.⁵ But how can one be held morally responsible if things are rigged against him from the start? It seems that we are forced to bear the responsibility for decisions we had no say in making. God’s condemnation seems rather unjust if there was absolutely nothing you could have ever done to get out of hell because he’s judging you for the consequences of what Adam did.⁶ In his zeal to stay faithful to Scripture as interpreted through the lens of a particular individualistic conception of sin, Bavinck is forced to ignore basic intuitions about the nature of moral responsibility.⁷

How can a social theory of sin avoid such a problem? The German Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher offers one way of addressing the issue. For Schleiermacher, it must be the case that humans were created with the potential for original sin. The sin of the first humans, as such, holds no special character apart from the fact that, as with any action, it sets a precedent which gets picked up and imitated by others. It is special only by virtue of being the first.⁸ This example is picked up by those who follow, who, though possessing the capacity for good, by nature of being inescapably a member of the sinful human community, will end up sinning. By growing up in a post-Fall human community, one is conditioned to act in sinful ways, and, insofar as one continues to voluntarily act in these sinful ways (which one cannot help but to do because of the lack of any alternative precedents), one becomes complicit in the universal sinfulness of humanity.⁹ The important thing is that one’s sin cannot be considered in isolation from the sin of the community – both across space and time. Insofar as we are human, we are implicated in the failures of humanity. As Schleiermacher writes, “It is in nature of this connexion [between all humans], in fact, that the individual is the representative of the whole race in this regard, for the sinfulness of each points to the sinfulness of all alike in space and time, and also goes to condition that totality both around him and after him.”¹⁰

The Arbitrariness of Penal Substitution

The final problem I want to consider here arises with connection to the concept of penal substitution. Under an individualistic theory of sin, it is difficult to see how justice is actually being meted out when an innocent is tortured to death on behalf of the guilty. If such a thing were to happen in today’s society – an innocent man, for instance, takes the place of a death row inmate – one would hardly say that justice was being done. Indeed, one would probably condemn the justice system that permits such a swap to take place at all, even if voluntary! It seems to be a basic principle of justice, construed on individualistic terms, that one’s punishment should match up with one’s sin.
Again, Schleiermacher can act as a representative of the social view:¹¹

“Now it would indicate not only a limited and erroneous but a dangerous point of view—even if a view deeply rooted in Judaism and Greek heathenism—were we to make a similar affirmation regarding the individual, namely, that for each the measure of his sin is the measure of the evil that befalls him. For the very conception of the community and fellowship of human life implies, as indeed follows all but self-evidently from the manner in which sin produces evil, that quite possibly only the merest fraction of the common evil may fall upon the author of much of the common depravity. …Again, as regards social evils: were these to be apportioned to each individual according to his share in the collective wrong-doing, we should often, as by some magic process, have to find justice in injustice. In point of fact, Christ warns His disciples of persecution and suffering in their work for the Kingdom of God, but not assuredly in proportion to their sin. How indeed could such a supposition be squared with the idea—an idea pervading the New Testament, and, if rightly understood, essential to Christianity—that within a common sphere of sin it is possible for one to suffer for the rest, so that the evil due to the sin of many may all converge upon one, and that penal suffering may fall pre-eminently upon one who is himself most free from the common guilt and most resolute in his battle with sin?”¹²

For Schleiermacher, the social aspect of sin means that, all too often, the consequences of sin are unevenly distributed such that the innocent suffer on behalf of the sins of the guilty. Under this conception, penal substitution is no longer so arbitrary, but a natural consequence of the way sin works in society. This makes more sense of the ofttimes noted claim that Christ bears the sins of every individual on the cross. Insofar as we are participants in the human project, it was our sin that held him there.

A shift away from individualistic conceptions of sin to more social conceptions is not without its own issues. I have barely had enough time to even articulate what a social conception of sin may be, let alone draw out its implications and address potential objections. I hope, however, that this trek will help you think more deeply about the potential repercussions of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If a social theory of sin is true, it is definitely the case that we are far more sinful than we could ever have imagined. Yet, at the same time, the radical call of Christ’s love for us comes into clearer focus. Being a Christian cannot merely be about crossing our moral p’s and q’s – indeed, the ideal of moral perfection is probably beyond our grasp this side of eternity. Instead, we are to trust in God, who justifies the ungodly and counts their faith as righteousness, and seek a morality that is not of this world and its communal projects, but of a kingdom that is already-but-not-yet. In the midst of a world where various powers rule and clash, we Christians are to testify of a different kind of community that is in the world, but not of it, with a king whose rule leaves no one behind and requires no dirty hands because he has conquered even death.

Let us repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

See Matthew 5:21–22. [↩]
See Matthew 5:27–28 [↩]
Another excellent example can be found in Joshua 7, where a single individual (Achan) sins and the entire Israelite army is punished for it. [↩]
See, for instance, Herman Bavinck’s articulation of this position in his systematic theology, Our Reasonable Faith. “For that sin, which the first man committed, was quite different in character from other sins. It is called transgression, different in kind from the sins which men committed in the time between Adam and Moses… and as such it forms the sharpest of contrasts with the absolute, death-tested obedience of Christ” (241). [↩]
See Our Reasonable Faith, 234. [↩]
One may make various appeals to individual free will in order to try to avoid the problem, but the central critique remains the same. Even if one freely chooses to sin, Bavinck’s formulation would have it that one may only freely choose between various sinful alternatives. [↩]
While he may not identify sin with moral failure, his definition of sin as “lawlessness” is similarly individualistic in character. See Our Reasonable Faith, 224. [↩]
“…then the universal sinfulness that precedes every actual sin in the offspring is to be regarded not so much as derived from the first sin of our first parents, but rather as identical with what in them likewise preceded the first sin, so that in committing their first sin they were simply the first-born of sinfulness.” Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §72.4. [↩]
“Since, then, this later sinfulness which has issued from the individual’s own action is one and the same with that which was congenital in origin, it follows that, just as the supervening sinfulness has arisen within him from voluntary acts based upon the original sinfulness, so the latter, which in fact falls more and more into the background in comparison with the former, and which always forms his starting-point, does not continue in him, and therefore would not have arisen through him, apart from his will. We are thus justified in calling it the guilt of the individual.” Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §71.1. One may object that this by no means guarantee that humans will be universally sinful – Bavinck’s accusation. A better understanding of Scheleiermacher’s characterization of the antithesis between the flesh and the spirit would dispel such an objection. Such a project, however, is beyond this scope of this article. [↩]
The sentences immediately prior: “What appears as the congenital sinfulness of one generation is conditioned by the sinfulness of the previous one, and in turns conditions that of the later; and only the whole series of forms thus assumed, as all connected with the progressive development of man, do we find the whole aspect of things denoted by the term, ‘original sin.’ Moreover, the interconnexion of places and that of times condition each other and indicate dependence on each other. And every man will readily testify that it is only in relation to the totality of things that either the idea of the sinfulness of individuals or his sense of sharing it becomes to him certain and adequate.” Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §71.2. [↩]
It would do well to note that, for Schleiermacher, the experience of evil and suffering is essentially equated with the experience of God’s judgment [↩]
Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §77.2. [↩]

Laying Down the Basics: The New City Catechism

For those who don’t pay as close attention to Tim Keller as I do, Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA) and The Gospel Coalition¹ recently unveiled a new catechism². The fact that the word “catechism” probably draws blanks in most people’s minds today reflects the concerns that led these prominent Reformed evangelicals to want to draw up a new catechism in the first place. For those who are a bit unsure about what a catechism is, it is essentially a systematic summary of Christian doctrine usually presented in a question-and-answer form that makes it easier to memorize. In the past, churches primarily used catechisms in order to instruct the young or new believers about the Christian faith. As such, one could both lay the building blocks upon which further instruction about the gospel is based and exposit the faith in a way that addresses and counters the heresies of the current day.

The New City Catechism, as the new catechism is called, is essentially a shortened adaptation of some of the traditional Reformed catechisms: Calvin’s Geneva Catechism, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the Heidelberg Catechism. Containing 52 questions and answers, it is quite short compared to the 100+ question presentations it draws from, and as can be expected from anything drawing from such precedents, there’s nothing too radically surprising about the answers given to many of the questions. (Hint: Presbyterian Covenant Theology, divine command, imputed righteousness, and the Apostle’s Creed.)

What really interests me, however, is not so much the content of the catechism – although it was quite interesting to see the bottom line of the faith as conservative Reformed evangelicals see it – as the very fact that it exists. As we live in an increasingly post-Christian culture, it becomes more and more important that Christians understand the basic things they supposedly believe. This is significant both for long-time Christians and for new Christians alike. The flight from doctrine that seems all too prevalent nowadays – especially among younger evangelicals – often means that even those who are born and raised in a church lack understanding of what the historic faith has defended. The rise of the non-denominational mega-church and the category of “spiritual, but not religious” reflect a frustration with doctrinal disputes that means doctrinal knowledge is at an all-time low among Christian youth. While youth will often be able to talk about sin, judgment, and grace, one will be hard-pressed to find those able to give more systematic presentations of the Christian faith drawing together core doctrines beyond that of justification.

Catechisms have also always been as much about boundary-drawing as about religious education, and I sense that the New City Catechism is no different. I can’t help but wonder if other Protestant Christians will make similar moves and try to come up with their own attempts at self-definition in response. I’m not anticipating too much from mainline churches, but perhaps there will be a few other evangelical churches that follow Redeemer’s example. That said, I highly recommend that everyone take a couple of minutes to look through the questions and answers presented, even if you find yourself disagreeing with a few of the points. You can take a look at http://www.newcitycatechism.com.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/ [↩]
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/10/15/introducing-new-city-catechism [↩]

Revisiting the Problem of Evil

I think we’ve all heard the statement of the problem before. The claim in its canonical form goes something like this: There is a logical contradiction between the three statements that (1) God is omnibenevolent, (2) God is omniscient, and (3) evil exists in the world.¹ Christian philosophers and writers like Alvin Plantinga and C. S. Lewis have articulated defenses which posit that the existence of free will allows for the logical coherence of theistic belief in the face of the existence of things which we would consider evil.² The success of such arguments have often led to a restatement of the problem from that of logical impossibility – the three statements cannot logically coexist – to that of evidential improbability – namely, that the existence of evil provides reasonable grounds from which to reject the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God.

The classic statement of the problem can be found in J. L. Mackie’s 1955 paper “Evil and Omnipotence”. [↩]
See, for example, Plantinga’s article “Free Will Defense” or Lewis’ The Problem of Pain. [↩]

Christianity and Occupy Wall Street (Part 3)

This is the third post in a three-post series on Christianity and Occupy Wall Street. In the first post, the author introduced and attempted to frame the movement. In the second, he begins his critique by appealing to Christian notions of justice as shalom and the radical effects of the Fall. Here, he concludes his critique by warning about the dangers of idealism and cynicism when it comes to political action and calls Christians to reflect upon their potential role in the ongoing debate.

Culture Making: Beyond Idealism and Cynicism

The Biblical account of human behavior, upon which Augustine bases his thought, can escape both the illusions of a too consistent idealism and the cynicism of a too consistent realism because it recognizes that the corruption of human freedom may make a behavior pattern universal without making it normative.¹

Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Augustine and Christian Realism” in Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life, edited by Larry Rasmussen (San Francisco: Harper & Row, ), . [↩]

Christianity and Occupy Wall Street (Part 2)

This is the second post in a three-post series on Christianity and Occupy Wall Street. In the former post, the author introduced and attempted to frame the movement. Here, he begins his critique by appealing to Christian notions of justice as shalom and the radical effects of the Fall. In the next post, he concludes his critique and calls Christians to reflect upon their potential role in the ongoing debate.
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Christianity and Occupy Wall Street

This is the first in a series of posts on Christianity and Occupy Wall Street. Here, the author introduces the topic and attempts to characterize Occupy Wall Street. Later posts focus on presenting the author’s criticism and advice for the movement, focusing on the example of Occupy Princeton. These can be read here and here. Credit for featured image on home page goes to _PaulS_.

Seek justice,
Correct oppression;
Bring justice to the fatherless,
Plead the widow’s cause. (Isaiah 1:17 ESV)

Origins: An Introduction to the Issues

This post is part of a Revisions roundtable on Origins. For more information about Revisions roundtables and other articles in the same series, go here.

How do you understand Biblical accounts of creation, especially Genesis 1–3, in light of current trends and hypotheses of contemporary science and modern Biblical scholarship? more…

A Double Standard

Issue

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:22–28).