Independence Day can take on new meaning this year. While your neighbors are declaring their independence from the British crown, why not declare your independence from tacit assumptions and unexamined presuppositions?

Between BBQ chicken and fireworks, I encourage you to watch Astra Taylor’s documentary film, Examined Life (2008), which was finally released in February 2010. She “accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.” Read the synopsis and watch the trailer below.

Contrary to the adage that familiarity breeds contempt, I found that my familiarity with Cornel West and Martha Nussbaum only increased my affection for them as philosophers and public intellectuals. Central casting missed an opportunity to feature some of my other favorite contemporary thinkers, including Camille Paglia, Michael Sandel, and Leon Kass.

The salient line in the film is spoken by the wonderfully idiosyncratic Cornel West. In one sentence he offers a crystalline vision for the tasks of philosophy:

Philosophy is a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy in the face of domination.

Cross posted at Mere Orthodoxy

Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

Edited by Francis S. Collins

HarperOne, 2010

352 pp., $19.99

What kind of flowers does Francis S. Collins—one of the world’s leading geneticists—gather? His new anthology, modestly entitled Belief, answers this bizarre question. The etymological origin of anthology means “flower-gathering,” from the Greek anthologia (anthos “a flower” + logia “collection). For seekers, believers, and skeptics, Collins has gathered flowers of prose—classic and contemporary—that quietly display the harmony between reason and faith, in contrast to what he calls “the cacophony of extreme voices dominating the microphones, bookshelves, and airways.”

Readers should not be surprised that the former director of the National Human Genome Project and the current director of the National Institutes for Health is a preeminently reasonable man, equally repulsed by “a camp for kids in the United Kingdom that aims to indoctrinate them with atheism” as he is by “a Creation Museum in Kentucky that shows humans romping with dinosaurs.” By following the argument wherever it led, Collins became a disciple of Jesus Christ at age twenty-seven, overcoming his scientific skepticism through studied reflections on the moral law and the order of nature, particularly the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and evolution.

His anthology is personal, leading the reader to the scents and sights that have captured his fancy in the botanical garden. The case for the existence of God begins with N. T. Wright, who is commonly but mistakenly regarded as the “successor” to   C. S. Lewis because HarperOne, the publisher of this anthology and Wright’s apologetic books, has touted him as such. Wright communicates cogently to the postmodern audience like Lewis did to the late modern audience, but the style and substance of their writing differs notably because of their respective vocations: the former as a New Testament scholar and the latter as a Medieval and Renaissance Literature scholar.

That quibble aside, Collins classifies the flowers according to themes: the meaning of truth, intellectual devotion to God, the problem of evil and suffering, the cry for justice, the concord between science and faith, the possibility of miracles, the experiences of longing and mysticism, love and forgiveness as pointers to God, and the irrationality of atheism.

All the “oldies but goodies” are present (Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Locke, Pascal), along with the “usual suspects” (C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton) and some relative “newbies” (Os Guinness, Madeleine L’Engle, Art Lindsley, Paul Brand, Desmond Tutu). For an American, Collins has a nose for British, ergo Anglican, voices (John Stott, Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne, Alister McGrath). In the mix, there are five Catholics (Aquinas, Chesterton, Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa, Hans Küng), two Reformed (Alvin Plantinga, Tim Keller), two Jews (Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl), one Lutheran (Dietrich Bonhoeffer), one Quaker (David Elton Trueblood), one Baptist (Martin Luther King Jr.), and one Deist (Antony Flew). In the corner of the garden are voices from the East (Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama), lest Collins be accused of a “West and the rest” ethnocentrism.

Based on his flower gathering, we can conclude that Collins has adopted the via media sensibility of the Anglican tradition: ecumenical in his outlook and eclectic in his apologetics, although he shows a preference for classical and evidential methods. If the temptation for a scientist is to live by reason alone, we can be grateful that Collins resists, nodding to the affective and imaginative dimensions of the Christian faith. This everyman anthology offers accessible selections, “self-contained and brief enough to be read in a single sitting.” For a more philosophically and theologically sophisticated anthology, see Paul Helm’s Faith and Reason (Oxford, 1999).

Thanks to HarperOne for sending a review copy.

Here’s an instructive passage from one of my favorite contemporary Christian writers.

From Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity

Christian tradition has historically articulated a threefold purpose for sex: sex is meant to be unitive, procreative, and sacramental. That means, in simpler language, that sex is meant to unite two people, it is meant to lead to children, and it is meant to recall, and even reenact, the promise that God makes to us and that we make to one another in the marriage vow––that is, we promise one another fidelity, and God’s Spirit promises a presence that will uphold us in our radical and crazy pledge of lifelong faithfulness.

Each of these ends of sex has a basis in scripture. The unitive aspect is hinted at in Genesis 2:23, when Adam says that Eve is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The procreative purpose is also spelled out in Genesis, in God’s instruction to be fruitful and multiply. Finally, the sacramental end of sex is implied in Ephesians 5:32, when Paul, having offered a set of guidelines for how husbands and wives should relate to one another, says, “This is a profound mystery––but I am talking about Christ and the church.” At first blush, it seems like something of a non sequitur. But, in fact, it tells us what marriage, and marital sex, is: a small patch of experience that gives us our best glimpse of the radical fidelity and intimacy of God and the church.

These three purposes––the unitive, procreative, sacramental, and procreative––are deeply interwoven with one another. Openness to children reshapes how we experience and understand sex; procreative possibility changes the way sex is unitive and sacramental. The unitivity of sex, for example, looks different when we remember that unitive sex might produce kids. Without the possibility of procreation, sex can quickly become part of a romantic two-ness, wherein the couple simply becomes more and more deeply interested in one another. The prospect of procreation reconfigures unity, forcing the couple out of themselves, out of a potentially suffocating and selfish oneness, and toward another––toward a stranger, a neighbor, a baby whom they might welcome into their home. When procreation is possible, unitive sex is fruitful beyond simply the couple themselves. (This procreative potential is one thing that keeps marriage from becoming, in Kierkegaard’s candid phrase, an ingrown toenail.)

So, too, the possibility of procreation affects how we understand the sacramental aspect of married love and sex, for, again, procreation redirects the lover’s attention beyond the spouse, beyond the marriage bed. This is the way sacraments are always meant to work: the Eucharist happens at the table of the body of believers, but we do not stay put at the table; we take Communion with one another so that we might be equipped to follow Christ’s injunction to go out into the world. The same is true with baptism––we are washed clean not so that we can preen over our purity and cleanliness, but so that we can go into the world with the unwashed. And sex that is open to procreation is sex that pushes us to be other-directed, that pushes us to leave the bed and journey into the household, and the wider community.

Of course, it is possible for sex without procreation to be incarnate, sacramental, and other-directed. Consider a husband who is sterile, or a wife who is past menopause––these marriages can be as open and hospitable as a marriage that produces children (although that openness and hospitality may require a different level of intention). Nonetheless, experience, nature, and scripture suggest that there is a deep connection between the work of sex and the possibility of procreation.

Technologically effective birth control has severed those connections. We can reaffirm them without necessarily landing at the Roman Catholic position––we can, for example, say that the whole of a married couple’s sex life needs to be open to procreation, but each and every sex act need not be. And we can worry about technology’s separation of sex and procreation because we see that it does violence to what sex is finally about (pp. 65-67)

Cross-posted at Mere Orthodoxy.

Because my blog post on the role of disgust in the debate on same-sex marriage has generated some controversy, I thought an excerpt from Martha Nussbaum’s book, From Disgust to Humanity, would be helpful. She challenges the conventional view that disgust is only a visceral emotion that is not affected by social learning. Pay special attention to the distinction and relation between disgust at primary objects and projective disgust.

Disgust seems like a deep-seated bodily response to certain smells, sights, and feels, which has little to do with what we learn or how we interpret the world.

In the past twenty years, however, important experimental work by psychologist Paul Rozin and his colleagues has shown conclusively that disgust has a marked cognitive element. What people find disgusting depends crucially on the idea they have of the object. Thus disgust is not simply sensory distaste. Subjects who sniff the same odor from two vials, being told that one contains feces and the other contains cheese, are usually disgusted by the first but not by the second. Nor is disgust identical with the sense of danger. People will eat formerly poisonous mushrooms if they are convinced that the poison has been removed, but they won’t swallow a cockroach even if they are sure it has been sterilized; subjects even refuse to swallow a cockroach sealed in a plastic capsule that will emerge, undigested, in the subject’s feces.

Disgust, Rozin finds, concerns the borders of the body. Its central idea is that of contamination: the disgusted person feels defiled by the object, thinking that it has somehow entered the self. Further experiments show that behind this idea of personal contamination lies the idea that “you are what you eat”: if you take in something base or vile, you become like that yourself.

So what are people unwilling to be or become? The so-called primary objects of disgust are reminders of human animality and mortality: feces, other bodily fluids, corpses, and animals or insects who have related properties (slimy, smelly, oozy) . . . .

When people experience disgust, then, they are expressing an aversion to prominent aspects of what every human being is. They feel contaminated by what reminds them of these aspects, which people often prefer to conceal. Such aversions almost certainly have an evolutionary basis, but they still have to be confirmed by learning: children do not exhibit disgust until the ages of two or three years old, during the time of toilet training. This means that society has room to interpret and shape the emotion, directing it to some objects rather than others, as happens with anger and compassion.

In virtually all societies, disgust is standardly felt toward a group of primary objects: feces, blood, semen, urine, nasal discharges, menstrual discharges, corpses, decaying meat, and animal/insects that are oozy, slimy, or smelly . . . Disgust at primary objects is usually a useful heuristic, steering us away from the dangerous when there is no time for detailed inquiry.

Disgust is then extended from object to object in ways that could hardly bear rational scrutiny. This sort of extended disgust is what I call projective disgust . . . .

Projective disgust is shaped by social norms, as societies teach their members to identify alleged contaminants in their midst. All societies, it appears, identify as least some humans as disgusting. Very likely this is a stratagem adopted to cordon off the dominant group more securely from its own feared animality: if those quasi humans stand between me and the world of disgusting animality, then I am that much further from being mortal/decaying/smelly/oozy myself. Projective disgust rarely has any reliable connection with genuine danger. It feeds on fantasy, and engineers subordination. Although it does serve a deep-seated human need – the need to represent oneself as pure and others as dirty – this is a need whose relation to social fairness looks (and is) highly questionable.

Projective disgust (involving projection of disgust properties onto a group or individual) takes many forms, but it always involves linking the allegedly disgusting group or person somehow with the primary objects of disgust. Sometimes this is done by stressing the close practical connection of the group with the primary objects: untouchables in the Indian caste system were those who cleaned latrines and disposed of corpses; women seem to many men to be particularly closely linked with blood and other bodily fluids through their receptive sexuality, their role in birth, and menstruation, a common source of norms of “untouchability.”

Often, however, the extension works in more fantasy-laden ways, by imputing to people or groups properties similar to those that are found disgusting in the primary objects: bad smell, ooziness, rottenness, germiness, decay. Typically, these projections have no basis in reality. Jews are not really slimy, or similar to maggots, although German anti-Semities, and Hitler himself, said that they were. African-Americans do not smell worse than other human beings, although racists said that they did. And often, when there is an element of what I’ve called practical connection, projection imputes dirtiness or contamination where where is no reason to do so. . . Notice, then, that projective disgust involves a double fantasy: a fantasy of the dirtiness of the other and a fantasy of one’s own purity. Both sides of the projection involve false belief, and both conduce to a politics of hierarchy.

Societies have many ways of stigmatizing vulnerable minorities. Disgust is not the only mechanism of stigmatization. It is, however, a powerful and central one, and when it is removed (when, for example, aversion to physical contact with a racial minority is no longer present), other modes of hierarchy tend to depart along with it.

It is not surprising that sexuality is an area of life in which disgust often plays a role. Sex involves the exchange of bodily fluids, and it marks us as bodily beings rather than angelic transcendent beings. So sex is a site of anxiety for anyone who is ambivalent about having an animal and mortal nature, and that includes many if not most people. Primary-object disgust therefore plays a significant role in sexual relations, as the bodily substances people encounter in sex (semen, sweat, feces, menstrual blood) are very often found disgusting and seen as contaminants. Therefore, it is not surprising that projective disgust also plays a prominent role in the sexual domain. In almost all societies, people identify a group of sexual actors as disgusting or pathological, contrasting them with “normal” or “pure” sexual actors (prominently including the people themselves and their own group). This stigmatization takes many different forms. Misogyny is an aspect of it in most cultures, as males distance themselves from the discomfort they feel by associating bodily fluids with the woman who receives them, and not, at the same time, with their own bodies . . . .

There is no doubt that the body of the gay man has been a central locus of disgust-anxiety – above all, for other men. Female homosexuals may be objects of fear, or moral indignation, or generalized anxiety; but they have less often been objects of disgust. Similarly, heterosexual females may have felt negative emotions toward the male homosexual – fear, moral indignation, anxiety – but again, they have more rarely felt emotions of disgust . . .

What inspires disgust is typically the male thought of the male homosexual, imagined as anally penetrable. The idea of semen and feces mixing together inside the body of a male is one of the most disgusting ideas imaginable – to males, for whom the idea of nonpenetrability is a sacred boundary against stickiness, ooze, and death. (The idea of contamination-by-penetration is probably one central idea, but the more general idea is that of the male body as defiled by the contamination of bodily fluids: and proximity to a contaminated body is itself contaminating.) The presence of a homosexual male in the neighborhood inspires the thought that one might lose one’s own clean safeness, one might become the receptacle for those animal products. Thus disgust is ultimately disgust at one’s own imagined penetrability and ooziness, and this is why the male homosexual is both regarded with disgust and viewed with fear as a predator who might make everyone else disgusting. The very look of such a male is itself contaminating – as we see in the extraordinary debates about showers in the military. The gaze of a homosexual male is seen as contaminating because it says, “You can be penetrated.” And this means that you can be made of feces and semen and blood, not clean plastic flesh. Thus it is not surprising that (to males) the thought of homosexual sex is even more disgusting than the thought of reproductive sex, despite the strong connection of the latter with mortality and the cycle of the generations. For in heterosexual sex the male imagines that not he but a lesser being (the woman, seen as animal) receives the pollution of bodily fluids; in imagining homosexual sex he is forced to imagine that he himself might be so polluted. This inspires a stronger need for boundary drawing . . . .

I contend that projective disgust plays no proper role in arguing for legal regulation, because of the emotion’s normative irrationality and its connection to stigma and hierarchy.

We cannot conclude that a policy is wrong simply because it is backed by a rhetoric of disgust: for there may be other better reasons in its favor. Disgust, however, often prevents us from looking for those good reasons, creating the misleading impression that the policy has already been well defended. Turning to it to legitimize policies that can be defended in other ways is therefore dangerous, because this encourages us to stop short in our search for rationally defensible categories. And the emotion itself encourages us to accept hierarchies and boundaries that are not defensible within a political tradition based on equal respect.

Even those who believe that disgust still provides a sufficient reason for rendering certain practices illegal, however, should agree with a weaker thesis: namely, that disgust provides no good reason for limiting liberties or compromising equalities that are constitutionally protected (pp. 13-21).

I thought Evangel readers would appreciate knowing about my Christianity Today interview with James Davison Hunter, Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford, 2010), which promises to be the most important book written on Christian cultural engagement in the last 50 years.

Faithful Presence | Christianity Today (May 2010)

Be sure to read the online critiques by Charles Colson and Andy Crouch and the response by Hunter.

More Than Faithful Presence | Charles Colson

Hunter and I Agree on Culture Making (He Just Doesn’t Seem To Know It) | Andy Crouch

Faithful Presence Is Not Quietism | James Davison Hunter

Two other resources are worth considering:

Ken Myers interview with James Davison Hunter | Mars Hill Audio (Volume 101)

“How Not to Change the World“ | Andy Crouch | Books & Culture (May/June 2010)

I’ve begun reading Terry Eagleton’s new book, On Evil (Yale University Press, 2010). Eagleton is Professor of English Literature at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Theory at Lancaster University, and Professor of English Literature at Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

I’ll try to offer chapter by chapter exposition. Please don’t expect evaluation because it’s my firm conviction that exposition must always come before evaluation. Comments will offer an opportunity to evaluate. Here’s my exposition of the introductory chapter where the main argument is constructed.

INTRODUCTION

The book opens with a crime that happened 15 years ago when “two ten-year old boys tortured and killed a toddler in the north of England. There was an outcry of public horror, though why the public found this particular murder especially shocking is not entirely clear. Children, after all, are only semi-socialized creatures who can be expected to behave pretty savagely from time to time” (p. 1).

Evil actions are commonly viewed as “unintelligible,” “without rhyme or reason,” and “without a cause.” Why? It is “a preemptive strike against those who might appeal to social conditions in seeking to understand why they did what they did. And such understanding can always bring forgiveness in its wake” (p. 2)

Eagleton observes “there is a kind of tautology or circular argument implicit” in this view: “people do evil things because they are evil.” “We have thrown out a determinism of environment only to replace it with one of character. It is now your character, not your social conditions, which drives you to unspeakable deeds. And though it is easy enough to imagine an environment being changed – slums demolished, youth clubs set up, crack dealers driven out – it is harder to imagine such a total transformation when it comes to the question of human character. How could I be totally transformed and still be me? Yet if I happen to be evil, only such a deep-seated change will do” (p. 4).

Both views – determinism of environment (held by liberal structuralists) and determinism of character (held by conservative behaviorists) – exonerate the actor from doing the action. If social conditions are solely responsible for the evil action, you are innocent. If “bad blood or malevolent genes” are solely responsible for the evil action, you are innocent. And herein lies the irony: the condition which damns you succeeds only in redeeming you. “If terrorists really are mad, then they are ignorant of what they are doing and therefore morally innocent.” If men and women are “helpless victims of demonic powers,” should they to be pitied or condemned? (pp. 5-6).

A third response to evil – beyond social conditions and character – is to claim that the actor is evil because of his own free will, similar to Shakespeare’s Richard III (“I am determined to prove a villain”), Milton’s Satan (“Evil, be thou my good!”) or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Goetz in the play Lucifer and the Lord (“I do Evil for Evil’s sake”). This response often lapses into a determinism of character: “You might always claim that people like these, who consciously opt for evil, must already be evil to do so.”

Against all these responses, Eagleton argues that evil actions are rationally explicable because “reason and freedom are bound closely together.” Lest we fear that explaining evil is excusing evil, he writes: “To explain why I spend my weekends cheerfully boiling badgers alive is not necessarily to condone what I do. Not many people imagine that historians seek to explain the rise of Hitler in order to make him look more alluring.” In short, “explanations may sharpen moral judgments as well as soften them” (emphasis mine) (pp. 7-8).

Too often, our responses to evil are simplistic: “evil human actions are explicable, in which case they cannot be evil; or they are evil, in which case there is nothing more to be said about them” (p. 8). Neither viewpoint, Eagleton argues, is true.

There is no absolute distinction between being influenced and being free. A good many of the influences we undergo have to be interpreted in order to affect our behavior; and interpretation is a creative affair. It is not so much the past that shapes us as the past as we (consciously or unconsciously) interpret it. And we can always come to decipher it differently. Besides, someone free of social influences would be just as much a nonperson as a zombie. In fact, he or she would not really be a human being at all. We can act as free agents only because we are shaped by a world in which this concept has meaning, and which allows up to act upon it. None of our distinctly human behavior is free in the sense of being absolved from social determinants, which includes such distinctively human behaviors as poking people’s eyes out. We would not be able to torture and massacre without having picked up a great many social skills. Even when we are alone, it is not in the sense in which a coal scuttle or the Golden Gate Bridge is alone. It is only because we are social animals, able through language to share our inner life with others, that we can speak of such things as autonomy and self-responsibility in the first place. They are not terms that apply to earwigs. To be responsible is not to be bereft of social influences, but to relate to such influences in a particular way. It is to be more than just a puppet of them. “Monster” in some ancient thought meant, among other things, a creature that was wholly independent of others (pp. 11-12).

Summary:

Four responses to evil:

1. Determinism of environment: social conditions are solely responsible for evil actions (usually held by liberal structuralists).
2. Determinism of character: human behavior is solely responsible for evil actions (usually held by conservative behaviorists).
3. Free will: evil actions are chosen by the individual (lapses into determinism of character).
4. Interplay of environment and character: evil actions are the result of social conditions and human behavior (Eagleton’s position).

Major implications of fourth response to evil:

• Evil is performed by a social actor – not an autonomous actor. “Pure autonomy is a dream of evil” (p. 12).
• Evil affects the private realm and public realm.
• Evil has ethical and political consequences.

Key questions:

• Is evil intelligible?
• Is evil caused?
• Is “evil” a conversation-stopper?
• Is evil ordinary or extraordinary?
• What is the relationship between evil and sin?
• Is evil natural or supernatural in origin?

There has been much talk on Evangel lately about social justice. Here is an upcoming book from Moody Publishers that sounds promising.

Humanitarian Jesus
Social Justice and the Cross

by Ryan Dobson

A resurgence of the Social Gospel is energizing many evangelicals, but what does the Bible say about the role of humanitarian works in the Christian life? As new covenant believers, Christians are called to a specific central task: to be ministers of God’s message of salvation for sinners. At the same time, the New Testament justifies nearly every concern of the revitalized Social Gospel. Care for the poor and needy, reconciliation of social and racial divisions, and nurture for the sick and abused — all can be biblical and Christ-honoring activities.

Ryan Dobson and Christian Buckley have a message for believers on either side of the battle lines hardening around today’s Social Gospel. To those on the Religious Left, they say: “Don’t forget that Jesus Christ died to save sinners, not to bring about political change.” To those on the Religious Right, they say: “Don’t forget that Jesus spent much of his time helping the sick, the poor, and the needy.” A corrective and a call to action all in one, Humanitarian Jesus shows that evangelism and good works coexist harmoniously when social investment is subservient to and supportive of the church’s primary mission of worship, evangelism, and discipleship. In accessible and non-academic style, Dobson and Buckley outline the biblical case for humanitarian concern. They also engage the topic through interviews with leading Christian thinkers, activists, and humanitarian workers — including James Dobson, Rick Warren, Franklin Graham, Gary Haugen, Ron Sider, Tony Campolo, and many more – seeking to define a broadly biblical approach to good works that all Christians can join hands around.

Download an excerpt.

In comment #23 of his blog post, “On the Bible and Civil Government,” John Mark Reynolds says:

I have never been sure what the phrase “social justice” means.

I am for justice.

Like him, I am also for justice. I suspect that Professor Reynolds and other conservative Christians are reluctant to use the expression “social justice” because it has been co-opted by progressive Christians (think Jim Wallis), academic elites (think Martha Nussbaum, author of Sex and Social Justice), and radical activists (think William Ayers, who edited a book called Handbook of Social Justice in Education). I sympathize with this reluctance, but we should not be afraid to reclaim “social justice” as a biblical principle and theme.

For a definition, go no further than my selected reading of scripture for today:

‘Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen’ (Deut. 27:19).

Cross-reference:

[God] executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing (Deut. 10:18).

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world (James 1:27).

Recently radio and television host Glenn Beck instructed Christians to abandon their churches if they hear the code word of “social justice.” I, for one, expect to hear this biblical principle and theme sounded out in Christian colleges and churches, as Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says in his clear-sighted commentary, “Glenn Beck, Social Justice, and the Limits of Public Discourse“:

To assert that a call for social justice is reason for faithful Christians to flee their churches is nonsense, given the Bible’s overwhelming affirmation that justice is one of God’s own foremost concerns.

What we should oppose, as Mohler says, is the political captivity of the Gospel from the Christian Right or the Christian Left, although “social justice” tends to be the province of the Christian Left:

The last century has seen many churches and denominations embrace the social gospel in some form, trading the Gospel of Christ for a liberal vision of social change, revolution, economic liberation, and, yes, social justice. Liberal Protestantism has largely embraced this agenda as its central message.

The urgency for any faithful Christian is this — flee any church that for any reason or in any form has abandoned the Gospel of Christ for any other gospel.

I share Mohler’s well-articulated concern:

As I read the statements of Glenn Beck, it seems that his primary concern is political. Speaking to a national audience, he warned of “code words” that betray a leftist political agenda of big government, liberal social action, economic redistribution, and the confiscation of wealth. In that context, his loyal audience almost surely understood his point.

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ – the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church’s main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ’s command and the example of the apostles.There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

Faithful Christians can debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets. Bringing all these things into submission to Christ is no easy task, and the Gospel must not be tied to any political system, regime, or platform. Justice is our concern because it is God’s concern, but it is no easy task to know how best to seek justice in this fallen world.

And that brings us to the fact that the Bible is absolutely clear that injustice will not exist forever. There is a perfect social order coming, but it is not of this world. The coming of the Kingdom of Christ in its fullness spells the end of injustice and every cause and consequence of human sin. We have much work to do in this world, but true justice will be achieved only by the consummation of God’s purposes and the perfection of God’s own judgment.

Until then, the church must preach the Gospel, and Christians must live out its implications. We must resist and reject every false gospel and tell sinners of salvation in Christ. And, knowing that God’s judgment is coming, we must strive to be on the right side of justice.

Books that are worth checking out:

• Michael Sandel (editor), Justice: A Reader
• Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs
• Karen Labacqz, Six Theories of Justice: Perspectives from Philosophical and Theological Ethics
  
• Robert Solomon & Mark Murphy, What Is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings
• Christian Buckley & Ryan Dobson, Humanitarian Jesus: Social Justice and the Cross

San Lorenzo del Escorial: the palace complex of King Philip II of Spain, late sixteenth century. Architects: Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera.

Carlos Eire, author of A Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, 2009), examines how “Catholics embraced their dead even more tightly than before” in response to the Protestant Reformation. Here is a breathtaking account of morbidity from the sixteenth century:

In Spain, arguably the most influential Catholic nation on earth at the time, a prime exemplar of this renewed Tridentine piety was the king himself, Philip II, who worked very hard at reifying not only his role as a Catholic monarch but also the church’s power over the dead, and the bond between the living and the dead. For starters, King Philip built for himself and his successors a palace-monastery complex unlike any other on earth, the axis of which was the cult of the dead. Built between 1563 and 1596, at the cost of an entire year’s worth of treasure from the New World, the immense structure of San Lorenzo del Escorial was in its day the largest building in the world. Within its perimeter, Philip crammed a palace, monastery, basilica, library, and seminary, along with 8,000 relics of the saints, the world’s largest and most meticulously catalogued collection, to which were assigned tens of millions of years of indulgences. Staffed by Hieronymite monks, whose sole purpose was to pray for the king and the royal family, both living and dead, the monastery at San Lorenzo was a veritable ritual machine, where masses were offered constantly at numerous altars–except when the Hieronymite rule forced the monks to sleep–and where hundreds of monks chanted the entire psalter day after day, ceaselessly.

Not content with merely living with his monks and priests, King Philip also build his private chambers as close as possible to heaven, directly behind the main altar of the basilica, which was flanked on all sides by the 8,000 relics, and he positioned his room in such a way as to be able to see the main altar from his bed. Directly below the altar, and therefore also beneath his bed, Philip built an immense crypt for the entire Hapsburg dynasty, including his father, himself, and all his future successors to the throne. Whenever Philip stayed at the Escorial, which was as often as he possibly could, he lived and worked and slept directly over his father’s corpse and the grave he himself would soon occupy, as well as the grave of his son and of all descendants not yet born.

In his will, Philip addressed so many saintly intercessors that his list of advocates matched name for name the total list of saints invoked in every will written in Madrid. He also pulled out all the stops when it came to suffrages, consigning the Hieronymite fathers to perpetual labor and laying heavy demands on priests elsewhere. Even the Escorial was not enough. First, Philip wanted masses to be said by every single priest at the Escorial for nine days following his death. Then he asked for 30,000 masses to be said “as quickly as possible” by Franciscans throughout the realm, “with the greatest devotion.” Not content with this, Philip also requested that a High Mass be said for his soul at the main altar of the Escorial basilica every single day until Christ’s second coming, and added a special prayer for his soul to the Hieronymites’ daily canonical hours. Let us not even consider how many tens of thousands of other masses he requested for his relatives, or how he dwelt on every detail of his funeral, or how he practiced dying, or how many memorial services were held throughout the realm after his death and how many hundreds of thousands of candles were used. It might make us lose all our bearings.

Lest this hallucinatory tour of the Escorial prove unimpressive, given that extravagance befits a king, let us consider that Philip and his prayer factory-cum-city of the dead were just the tip of the iceberg. What we find when we examine the wills of his subjects are thousands upon hundreds of thousands, even millions of mirrors reflecting the same sort of obsession, only at a relatively smaller scale. Taken as a whole, the masses and prayers requested by Spaniards during the time of Philip II and his successors, Philip III and Philip IV, would dwarf the efforts at the Escorial and make them seem like a mere period at the end of one sentence in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. When the cost is finally tallied some time in the future, as I am sure it will be, chances are that the amount of money spent by the subjects of these three Philips on their souls and those of their dead could easily dwarf the amount spent by the monarchs and add up to much more than several years’ worth of treasure from the New World.

Providence, I believe, compelled the Protestant Reformers to bury this cult of the dead so that Christians could return to the land of the living.