Wednesday, October 2, 2019

What Does Christian Committment Mean In Practice? - Chapter 5 - Hans Kung: Why I Am Still A Christian

I have been doing a political commentary on Hans Kung's very short book, Why I  Am Still A Christian,  a distillation from least three very large books he wrote on the topic of God, Jesus and the afterlife.  Note I said "topic" instead of using the plural because in Christianity, there is no distinction among them. 

In rereading this chapter, one of the things I kept thinking was what a non-Christian who supported egalitarian democracy, egalitarian liberalism would do if he concluded, as a number of thinkers, Jurgen Habermas, James T. Kloppenberg perhaps Eric Alterman, that 

" . . . the central virtues of liberalism descend directly from the cardinal virtues of early Christianity:  "prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice."   He adds that "the liberal virtues of tolerance, respect, generosity, and benevolence likewise extend St. Paul's admonition to the Colossians that they should practice forbearance, patience, kindness and charity."

Given that even in those societies in which such moral liberalism (in my reading NOT the 18th century libertarian liberalism)* the actual practice of those virtues was far from consistent or universal.   That force which sometimes leads to them is matched by the force of selfishness, self-interest,  hatred, violence, oppression.   It's not as if, even with the profession of a belief in Christianity, the effect comes with that profession.   The Trump "evangelicals" and "traditionalist Catholics" are all you need to look at to see that such Chritianity has nothing to very little to do with the Gospel, the Epistles, The Prophets or the Law.  

Given that, the hostility towards Christianity  you have to wonder why they are so ready to not only attack the hypocrisy of Christians who violate the teachings of Jesus, but attack the very virtues pf the teachings of Jesus that their own enjoyment of democracy and human rights may well depend on.

What is there in the teachings of Jesus that they dislike so much?  I believe Marilynne Robinson's speculation that many of the bright lights of the "enlightenment" didn't like the moral obligation to give up property for the sustenance of the poor had more than a little to do with it.  People with even modest wealth can be as jealous of it as the most miserly billionaire*.   I think in the Brit-atheist tradition that the American one is influenced by - the Russian one being the other major influence on American atheism - is pretty much a phenomenon like that.  The British aristocratic class such as took to 18th century materialism as a relief of moral obligations,  merely modified the anti-Catholic invective they took in with their pablum and extended it to all of Christianity, temporarily toning down the anti-Jewish aspects of that as fashions shifted.   Much of contemporary American atheist invective melds a number of tired and threadbare lines from Brit and mostly Middle-European sources.  

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As this chapter is about practice, and so more closely in line with my political commentary, I'll take some time with it. 

Here I can give no more than indications of the general direction we should take.  Let me say at the very beginning that it would be presumptuous in this brief reflection to suggest an approach to every important and topical problem - not least because for different people different problems are important and topical.   What I am concerned about here is fundamental Christian thinking and awareness:  a commitment to the essential Christian values.   Of course these must exert their influence on all the practical questions of the individual and society.  Being a Christian must profoundly influence a person's approach, for example, to the problems of war and peace, violence and non-violence, the struggle for power, the pressure toward more and more consumption;  it must make itself felt in education, it must show itself in service for others.  But here I shall confine myself to the general principles of Christian practice.  Of course one important point must be made.  What I indicate or hint at here is not just what is often reproachfully called "pure theory";  it is the theory behind a practice which is actually lived out day by day by an untold number of people in our churches - or perhaps one should say that an untold number of people try to live in this way, as best they can.  And because of this, I believe our churches remain fundamentally Christian, in spite of all the merely nominal Christianity there is within them.  

Those last points are worth repeating because if there is something that the past two-thousand years of Christianity proves, it is that individuals find it nearly impossible to live up to the actual moral teachings of Jesus,  Christian societies are going to be even less perfect in their adherence to them, nations - officially Christian governments and institutions are among the greatest source of the non-adherence to the words of Jesus, the teachings of Paul, of James, etc. the foremost generators of material for anti-Christian invective to work with.   

What is the point of it, then?   Well, if you apply the same standards of criticism made about Christianity to every single other human activity, endeavor, aspiration you can ask exactly the same question about those.  It is just that while that is the common level of criticism made of religion, it is just about never the standard applied to everything else.   

I will point out that the most sacrosanct entity in modern secular-atheist-scientistic culture, science, its somewhat lower god, technology, has apparently supplied the Kim regime in North Korea with a more powerful and accurate missile that it tested the other day, but no good, right-thinking person will make a moral critique of the science and technology or the mathematics or the engineering that has done that.  It won't, in no small part because the people who invented those, in their modern form, started out by exempting themselves from moral responsibility for what they created.  If they made their inventions and innovations in line with the teachings of Jesus, those with the professional competence to do it would not produce those weapons or any other.  We may all well die by the sword that such professionals make a living on.   I could make a similar point about the reemergence of one of the team of psychologist-entrepreneurs who designed the Bush II era torture regime using what is called science - for which their company was apparently paid tens of millions of dollars.  He has appeared on FOX lying on behalf of Trump's criminality.  

Part of the exemption given to science is based on the required fiction that science is not a humanly invented system of thought and practice, that is is not a result of human choices but some magical means of discerning the universe that is totally independent of human agency.  Which is, of course, totally untrue.  There is no such a thing as a humanly discernible view of the physical universe that is independent of human minds anymore than there is a discernible view of the mind of God that is not conditioned by human abilities, limits, wisdom and choices.  It was one of the conceits of early science, among Descartes, Bacon, Newton, etc. that their use of mathematics gave them such an "objective" view into the mind of God.  That is a fiction which scientists, by and large, and even more so those who replace religion with a cult of science, didn't give up even as they gave up God.  The habits it has made common are extremely dangerous in ways that religion never has been, its dangers have always been more modest.   When you mix in money and politics with scientific magnification of power, it has a potential to kill us and all of life on this planet.  Religion never has had any comparable power and has been one of the few forces pushing against that.   It's nothing Jesus would ever have OKed.  It's nothing fashion, entertainment, consumerism, political ideology is going to end, not unless it takes that saying of Jesus about dying by the sword seriously.   And I can guarantee you, nothing in secular culture is going to do it.  It would have by now if it were going to.



*  In a rational world, billionaire would be affixed with an -ism and it would be considered one of the most dangerous of mental illnesses and obsessions.  Billionaires and millionaires are behind just about ever great crime in human history, denominations and numbers altered for local circumstances.   That is so far more obviously true in history that it is remarkable that their massive criminality and irrationality has seldom, if, really, ever counted much in the invectives of those who are as prepared to believe anything said of religious figures as the ignorant, deluded yahoo I heard the other day is to believe that the Bidens were up to world-class evil in Ukraine even though he isn't a Trump fan.  All he has to do is hear that someone has said something bad about a Democrat for him to believe it.  That is not a dissimilar phenomenon from the one I just mentioned. 

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