This article is brilliant in its essentiality and succinctness. In evaluating the Christian foundations of capitalism, Brad says, "The problem is that the counter-narrative is not as psychologically or morally powerful as the central narrative taught directly by Jesus and his followers." This is absolutely true. A strong morality of altruism will always beat a weak morality of self-interest.
Prof. Thompson, might you carry this topic through to the Founding and the 1800s? Where did the Founders come down on selfishness vs selflessness? How long did their view hold?
When Comte coined “altruism,” after all, he was complaining that selfishness was the dominant ideology in the West. That was in 1852.
As late as 1888, the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Oberly could write of “the exalting egotism of American civilization,” as if there was nothing controversial in the phrase.
Was American founded in a spirit of selfishness? Didn’t de Tocqueville think so in 1840?
This is a well thought out essay and I hold you in high regards as one of the greatest thinkers I’ve known. I do appreciate you and I’m grateful to be able to interact with you.
I very much agree that Christian socialism is dangerous, mainly because it’s the “almost” truth we’ve come to hate about socialism. It hijacks true Christianity and tells the lie from the snake in the garden that the solution is in our hands—all it takes is one bite.
I have to disagree with you, though, because I believe you’ve made the fatal error that socialists make, concluding that the end state of Christianity is wellness of mankind or even morality at the expense of himself—at least this is my take away from listening to it twice.
Please, correct me if I’m wrong and consider the rest of what I have to say.
The reason I say this is because socialist’s think socialism is the best means to the end, let’s say, of greed or poverty, with mutual prosperity through community. Harmony is achieved as everyone meets everyone else’s needs.
As we know this is a huge lie, mostly because humanity’s selfishness corrupts.
Capitalism is the greatest mechanism for prosperity and has produced the greater freedom, materially and psychologically. But like socialism, humanity’s selfishness corrupts it and this freedom stops at the material and psychological level.
Pharisee’s believed that the law given to man by God Himself to Moses was man’s path to harmony, peace, justice, and prosperity. But what was revealed was that in all of their righteous acts, their hypocrisy rooted in selfishness negates whatever they meant or achieve through the perfect law of God.
Morality, by mechanisms of man, appear to be the end state, whether that’s through capitalism, socialism, or the Mosaic law. But God made clear that by workings of the law, or any moral law for that matter, would no man be justified (Romans 3:20), “since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” The point of any moral law is not merely to guide men towards charitable acts, but to also make known the shortcomings of man.
Morality to the Christian is in his fruits. These are the wages of his faith as a result of a changed heart by the hands of God (Deuteronomy 30:6, Jeremiah 31:33). But his end state is his confident hope of abiding with God for eternity because of Christ. (Romans 6:20-22)
You said, “Consider the full meaning of Jesus’ moral teaching. It suggests that all men are born with an unknowable, undefinable, limitless debt to others. Conversely, it means that one’s mere existence, ie from the perspective of the needy, represents a demand or a mortgage on another man’s life.”
This isn’t the full meaning of Jesus’ teaching because His moral teaching doesn’t revolve around a debt we owe to others. It starts with the debt humanity owes to God. We do, indeed, have an unknowable (only in our inability to recount all the sins we’ve committed), but well defined and limitless debt to God measured in sin that we cannot repay.
James 2:8-10 says, “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.”
Surely capitalism and socialism are guilty of partiality, either the self-centered in capitalism or the self-centered proletariat, filled with envy.
Now if we break one part of the law and are guilty of it all, owing a debt that cannot be reimbursed, this, to me, is as nihilistic as it gets. And God says, “there’s none who does good, not even one (Psalm 14:1-3, Romans 3).” And if man’s end ends with man, then what’s even the point to being moral if in the end we all must die? Yet, the Christian’s hope is in eternity so as the Apostle Paul says, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:21)”
Now, this is the heart of the Christian. The moral fruits of an authentic Christian stem from his gift of mercy and grace given by God, Himself.
Because the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), according to God’s law, it’s our own heads that we owe to God. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2:4-5).
Jesus is righteous and our righteousness. The grace of God is that He paid the propitiatory price of sin for us, even when we were dead in our trespasses. And because He “show(ed) the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:7),” what we knew as limitless debt towards God has been paid in full through Jesus—the immeasurable payment of a limitless debt.
How does this translate to the Christian in his moral character?
In God’s gift of grace towards us, we are called to show this same grace towards others because grace supersedes charitable works, bypassing the material and psychological boundaries to include the spiritual.
If to live is Christ, and Christ is love, then we are to live, loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves in the same way that God showed us grace. This fulfills the law, except we aren’t saved from our sins by acts of the law, but by faith in Jesus, the Son of God, who never sinned.
To answer your conclusion questions, first, Christ’s moral teachings are only true in part, according to you, because of the direction of debt you started out on and by a misunderstanding or ignorance of grace, to no fault of your own. I’m not sure if you’ve ever received the gospel before, but I hope what I write resonates well with you and you take it seriously, according to God’s will.
Second, Christianity doesn’t lead to nihilism, nor does it lead to socialism.
Pertaining to nihilism, selflessness does not mean hopelessness. The question for you is, is hope selfish? To the Christian with a changed heart, hope is assured to us who believe through faith because of Jesus’ propitiation (Hebrews 11:1). It’s not selfish because salvation doesn’t rely on us. Nothing we could do would earn it, so it is a gracious gift from God through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Pertaining to socialism, we’ve already covered how no man-made law of morality can ever be truly moral because “none is righteous, not even one.” The fact that there are similarities doesn’t make them the same. It’s the difference of Mug Root beer and Barq’s. Clearly, Mug is the superior, perfect in every way, while Barq’s is a root beer, but has its limitations on perfection.
All jokes aside, I hope that the point is made that man’s end is with man if his hope is in man, no matter how moral he is. But man’s end is with God if his hope is in God and God’s love will guide him to be moral in any situation he is in—capitalistic or socialistic, free or slave, prosperity or persecution.
Your essay has a lot of ground to cover but I did enjoy it and I appreciate your time. Thank you.
If there’s anything else I need to address or if I misrepresented anything, please feel free to let me know. I’m just a “no body” who would like to share God’s good news of hope to anyone who’ll read and believe.
Impressive piece. Born a Catholic, I was unenthusiastic from the start, sensing even as a child something unappealing and weirdly morbid about it. Indeed, in the struggle between the Classical and Christian worlds, I silently rooted for the pagans.
A dualistic analysis. Selfishness requires altruism at least with respect to certain bundles of sticks, just as principals(capitalists) require agents(labor) and for much the same reason. Supply+demand.
But let's take the garden of Eden. In the Christian version of the story, you are right that the selfishness of Eve is the original sin, but the main character is God and a personal God with a hybrid virtue between selfishness and altruism, it could be called Grace, but I prefer to think of it as an illustration of the Aristotlelian virtue of Liberality. So God conveys to Adam and Eve in fee simple absolute subject to complete defeasance on a condition (not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil). God's selfishness and thus his identity as a personal God rests in this monopoly or reservation. The original sin might be selfishness, but its effect is also a conversion of God's liberality into altruism. The virtue of selfishness is important to God.
God then has to sacrifice his son, and only allows direct access to God from those who don't pose a risk to his selfishness/liberality. Jesus and selflessness thus act as gatekeepers preventing greedy souls who can't be grateful with liberality.
So Christianity may in fact be one hell of a job interview. Of course selflessness isn't as important as love or even gratitude.
So from the perspective of God, the fall was liberality into altruism. And perhaps the complete end of a God beyond laws of physics. It is hard to gage the vulnerability of God or how exposed he might have left himself with that tree.
Platonically that the selfishness of God would manifest itself primarily as Liberality tracks with the notion that an all powerful God is for the most part without needs desires or lack.
Since God was cut off from the world by selfishness and is limited in his liberality, he primarily calls on his followers to exhibit this virtue on his behalf, perhaps his only need an ability to manifest love on a plane of existence he is shorn from.
We have the same options that Adam and Eve had. We can choose to think we know it all and disobey God, or we can acknowledge that we don’t know it all and obey Him by turning from ourselves toward Him who made us.
The scriptures say in Isaiah 29:16,
“You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay,
that the thing made should say of its maker,
‘He did not make me’;
or the thing formed say of him who formed it,
“He has no understanding”?
And hasn’t this always been the case? To think that knowledge is the fruit of man when knowledge is from God.
This is the repetitive story of all of the Bible from its beginning to its end, except at the end of the Bible in the book of Revelation, we see the results of the obedience or the disobedience.
There is no measure of goodness to outweigh the amount of sin because all it takes is one sin, i.e. one bite out of the wrong fruit, to take you away from abiding with the creator of all things.
I think you’re all stand-up people, but what my opinion is doesn’t have any weight to what God thinks about both your sins and my sins. We’re all guilty, but because of God, we have a mercy and grace that man cannot give, regardless of if it’s capitalistic, communistic, altruistic, egotistic, or ascetic.
God judges impartially and God give grace impartially.
This is a misunderstanding of the faith, with all respect.
God isn’t selfish. He is sovereign and self sufficient. It’s hard to compare finite man with infinite God in every way. What, actually, was the condition God set before Adam and Eve? It was obedience. Grace, as we know it to be, an undeserving gift, came in all stages of the garden and every age until now, from the creation of all things to the breath God gave man. And even in the midst of disobedience, God’s grace came in the form of a promise, that through their seed would come a Savior. And by faith, from that point on, man has been saved from eternal death.
It’s not simply that God had to sacrifice His Son. It’s that man could never right himself, even in acts by, or the presence of, a righteous, God-given, holy law. Romans 8:3 says, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”
And Christianity isn’t an interview. There’s no works or morality you could ever do to right yourself in the eyes of God. This is the reason God did it as propitiation—in our place because of love.
Love is the greatest gift one could give back to God and to his fellow man.
John 15:13 “(Jesus said) Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends”
And,
1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”
So laying down one’s life for someone else is essentially dying to yourself in order to raise someone else up, the essence of biblical edification. And this is not because we have to, but it is our desire because of grace.
This is Christianity and unfortunately, many people have a misunderstanding of what the faith is because they see the Catholic Church and all their works as the pinnacle or they see modern evangelicalism in all its enormous flaws, and both create the worst misconception of the reality of faith in Christ.
Well, now you’ve done it, Brad. Here I am tinkering with your conflation of “selfishness” and “self-interest” and you throw this brick in the outhouse. I’ll have to get back to you.
This is a very powerful essay, especially the concluding challenge to Christian apologists. In addition to those challenges that Christianity must confront, as Dr. Bradley underlines, one should add that the doctrines discussed, if taken seriously, will lead to (have already led to) a repudiation or undercutting of the idea of all individual rights, and, consequently, of limited government. Moreover, the doctrine(s) are radical – the quotations make it clear that the antipathy to selfishness leaves no sphere which remains private, personal and individual that may be retained by the person – and that is the basis of the totalitarian impulse: everything you possess, including your person, your mind, your values, must be surrendered to society.
I think you are mistaken right at the start about the primary driver of the Christian moral universe. Not unselfishness. Love. You shall love the LORD your God..." "You shall love your neighbor..." Does this make a difference? Absolutely it does.
"If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues,
nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the
great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A
negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than
philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the
suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without
them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important
point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots
to say about self- denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to
deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and
nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an
appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our
own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that
this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian
faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering
nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds
our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling
about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an
ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot
imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily
Prof: Years ago i read the "Imitation of Christ" by Thomas`a Kempis. I was dejected - no human can possibly imitate Christ i thought. But i have come to the accept the idea that maybe that is the point - you touch on this in your essay. if it were easy to imitate Christ, humans - being what we are - might likely sin even more, i.e., 'resting on one's laurels.' But by constantly being challenged, humans may be more likely to keep striving and although usually failing in our attempts at imitation - we won't give up the struggle.
No familiarity with OT. Land ownership under covenant is far different than land ownership in social contract theory. Property is not a right but a gift to be stewarded under the covenant suzerain.
This article is brilliant in its essentiality and succinctness. In evaluating the Christian foundations of capitalism, Brad says, "The problem is that the counter-narrative is not as psychologically or morally powerful as the central narrative taught directly by Jesus and his followers." This is absolutely true. A strong morality of altruism will always beat a weak morality of self-interest.
Thank you, Jim, for your very kind words.
Prof. Thompson, might you carry this topic through to the Founding and the 1800s? Where did the Founders come down on selfishness vs selflessness? How long did their view hold?
When Comte coined “altruism,” after all, he was complaining that selfishness was the dominant ideology in the West. That was in 1852.
As late as 1888, the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Oberly could write of “the exalting egotism of American civilization,” as if there was nothing controversial in the phrase.
Was American founded in a spirit of selfishness? Didn’t de Tocqueville think so in 1840?
Dear Professor McCaskey: Yes, I will be running this up through the founding and beyond!
This is a well thought out essay and I hold you in high regards as one of the greatest thinkers I’ve known. I do appreciate you and I’m grateful to be able to interact with you.
I very much agree that Christian socialism is dangerous, mainly because it’s the “almost” truth we’ve come to hate about socialism. It hijacks true Christianity and tells the lie from the snake in the garden that the solution is in our hands—all it takes is one bite.
I have to disagree with you, though, because I believe you’ve made the fatal error that socialists make, concluding that the end state of Christianity is wellness of mankind or even morality at the expense of himself—at least this is my take away from listening to it twice.
Please, correct me if I’m wrong and consider the rest of what I have to say.
The reason I say this is because socialist’s think socialism is the best means to the end, let’s say, of greed or poverty, with mutual prosperity through community. Harmony is achieved as everyone meets everyone else’s needs.
As we know this is a huge lie, mostly because humanity’s selfishness corrupts.
Capitalism is the greatest mechanism for prosperity and has produced the greater freedom, materially and psychologically. But like socialism, humanity’s selfishness corrupts it and this freedom stops at the material and psychological level.
Pharisee’s believed that the law given to man by God Himself to Moses was man’s path to harmony, peace, justice, and prosperity. But what was revealed was that in all of their righteous acts, their hypocrisy rooted in selfishness negates whatever they meant or achieve through the perfect law of God.
Morality, by mechanisms of man, appear to be the end state, whether that’s through capitalism, socialism, or the Mosaic law. But God made clear that by workings of the law, or any moral law for that matter, would no man be justified (Romans 3:20), “since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” The point of any moral law is not merely to guide men towards charitable acts, but to also make known the shortcomings of man.
Morality to the Christian is in his fruits. These are the wages of his faith as a result of a changed heart by the hands of God (Deuteronomy 30:6, Jeremiah 31:33). But his end state is his confident hope of abiding with God for eternity because of Christ. (Romans 6:20-22)
You said, “Consider the full meaning of Jesus’ moral teaching. It suggests that all men are born with an unknowable, undefinable, limitless debt to others. Conversely, it means that one’s mere existence, ie from the perspective of the needy, represents a demand or a mortgage on another man’s life.”
This isn’t the full meaning of Jesus’ teaching because His moral teaching doesn’t revolve around a debt we owe to others. It starts with the debt humanity owes to God. We do, indeed, have an unknowable (only in our inability to recount all the sins we’ve committed), but well defined and limitless debt to God measured in sin that we cannot repay.
James 2:8-10 says, “If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.”
Surely capitalism and socialism are guilty of partiality, either the self-centered in capitalism or the self-centered proletariat, filled with envy.
Now if we break one part of the law and are guilty of it all, owing a debt that cannot be reimbursed, this, to me, is as nihilistic as it gets. And God says, “there’s none who does good, not even one (Psalm 14:1-3, Romans 3).” And if man’s end ends with man, then what’s even the point to being moral if in the end we all must die? Yet, the Christian’s hope is in eternity so as the Apostle Paul says, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain. (Philippians 1:21)”
Now, this is the heart of the Christian. The moral fruits of an authentic Christian stem from his gift of mercy and grace given by God, Himself.
Because the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), according to God’s law, it’s our own heads that we owe to God. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved (Ephesians 2:4-5).
Jesus is righteous and our righteousness. The grace of God is that He paid the propitiatory price of sin for us, even when we were dead in our trespasses. And because He “show(ed) the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:7),” what we knew as limitless debt towards God has been paid in full through Jesus—the immeasurable payment of a limitless debt.
How does this translate to the Christian in his moral character?
In God’s gift of grace towards us, we are called to show this same grace towards others because grace supersedes charitable works, bypassing the material and psychological boundaries to include the spiritual.
If to live is Christ, and Christ is love, then we are to live, loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves in the same way that God showed us grace. This fulfills the law, except we aren’t saved from our sins by acts of the law, but by faith in Jesus, the Son of God, who never sinned.
To answer your conclusion questions, first, Christ’s moral teachings are only true in part, according to you, because of the direction of debt you started out on and by a misunderstanding or ignorance of grace, to no fault of your own. I’m not sure if you’ve ever received the gospel before, but I hope what I write resonates well with you and you take it seriously, according to God’s will.
Second, Christianity doesn’t lead to nihilism, nor does it lead to socialism.
Pertaining to nihilism, selflessness does not mean hopelessness. The question for you is, is hope selfish? To the Christian with a changed heart, hope is assured to us who believe through faith because of Jesus’ propitiation (Hebrews 11:1). It’s not selfish because salvation doesn’t rely on us. Nothing we could do would earn it, so it is a gracious gift from God through faith (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Pertaining to socialism, we’ve already covered how no man-made law of morality can ever be truly moral because “none is righteous, not even one.” The fact that there are similarities doesn’t make them the same. It’s the difference of Mug Root beer and Barq’s. Clearly, Mug is the superior, perfect in every way, while Barq’s is a root beer, but has its limitations on perfection.
All jokes aside, I hope that the point is made that man’s end is with man if his hope is in man, no matter how moral he is. But man’s end is with God if his hope is in God and God’s love will guide him to be moral in any situation he is in—capitalistic or socialistic, free or slave, prosperity or persecution.
Your essay has a lot of ground to cover but I did enjoy it and I appreciate your time. Thank you.
If there’s anything else I need to address or if I misrepresented anything, please feel free to let me know. I’m just a “no body” who would like to share God’s good news of hope to anyone who’ll read and believe.
Impressive piece. Born a Catholic, I was unenthusiastic from the start, sensing even as a child something unappealing and weirdly morbid about it. Indeed, in the struggle between the Classical and Christian worlds, I silently rooted for the pagans.
A dualistic analysis. Selfishness requires altruism at least with respect to certain bundles of sticks, just as principals(capitalists) require agents(labor) and for much the same reason. Supply+demand.
But let's take the garden of Eden. In the Christian version of the story, you are right that the selfishness of Eve is the original sin, but the main character is God and a personal God with a hybrid virtue between selfishness and altruism, it could be called Grace, but I prefer to think of it as an illustration of the Aristotlelian virtue of Liberality. So God conveys to Adam and Eve in fee simple absolute subject to complete defeasance on a condition (not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil). God's selfishness and thus his identity as a personal God rests in this monopoly or reservation. The original sin might be selfishness, but its effect is also a conversion of God's liberality into altruism. The virtue of selfishness is important to God.
God then has to sacrifice his son, and only allows direct access to God from those who don't pose a risk to his selfishness/liberality. Jesus and selflessness thus act as gatekeepers preventing greedy souls who can't be grateful with liberality.
So Christianity may in fact be one hell of a job interview. Of course selflessness isn't as important as love or even gratitude.
So from the perspective of God, the fall was liberality into altruism. And perhaps the complete end of a God beyond laws of physics. It is hard to gage the vulnerability of God or how exposed he might have left himself with that tree.
Platonically that the selfishness of God would manifest itself primarily as Liberality tracks with the notion that an all powerful God is for the most part without needs desires or lack.
Since God was cut off from the world by selfishness and is limited in his liberality, he primarily calls on his followers to exhibit this virtue on his behalf, perhaps his only need an ability to manifest love on a plane of existence he is shorn from.
We have the same options that Adam and Eve had. We can choose to think we know it all and disobey God, or we can acknowledge that we don’t know it all and obey Him by turning from ourselves toward Him who made us.
The scriptures say in Isaiah 29:16,
“You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay,
that the thing made should say of its maker,
‘He did not make me’;
or the thing formed say of him who formed it,
“He has no understanding”?
And hasn’t this always been the case? To think that knowledge is the fruit of man when knowledge is from God.
This is the repetitive story of all of the Bible from its beginning to its end, except at the end of the Bible in the book of Revelation, we see the results of the obedience or the disobedience.
There is no measure of goodness to outweigh the amount of sin because all it takes is one sin, i.e. one bite out of the wrong fruit, to take you away from abiding with the creator of all things.
I think you’re all stand-up people, but what my opinion is doesn’t have any weight to what God thinks about both your sins and my sins. We’re all guilty, but because of God, we have a mercy and grace that man cannot give, regardless of if it’s capitalistic, communistic, altruistic, egotistic, or ascetic.
God judges impartially and God give grace impartially.
This is a misunderstanding of the faith, with all respect.
God isn’t selfish. He is sovereign and self sufficient. It’s hard to compare finite man with infinite God in every way. What, actually, was the condition God set before Adam and Eve? It was obedience. Grace, as we know it to be, an undeserving gift, came in all stages of the garden and every age until now, from the creation of all things to the breath God gave man. And even in the midst of disobedience, God’s grace came in the form of a promise, that through their seed would come a Savior. And by faith, from that point on, man has been saved from eternal death.
It’s not simply that God had to sacrifice His Son. It’s that man could never right himself, even in acts by, or the presence of, a righteous, God-given, holy law. Romans 8:3 says, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”
And Christianity isn’t an interview. There’s no works or morality you could ever do to right yourself in the eyes of God. This is the reason God did it as propitiation—in our place because of love.
Love is the greatest gift one could give back to God and to his fellow man.
John 15:13 “(Jesus said) Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends”
And,
1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”
So laying down one’s life for someone else is essentially dying to yourself in order to raise someone else up, the essence of biblical edification. And this is not because we have to, but it is our desire because of grace.
This is Christianity and unfortunately, many people have a misunderstanding of what the faith is because they see the Catholic Church and all their works as the pinnacle or they see modern evangelicalism in all its enormous flaws, and both create the worst misconception of the reality of faith in Christ.
Well, now you’ve done it, Brad. Here I am tinkering with your conflation of “selfishness” and “self-interest” and you throw this brick in the outhouse. I’ll have to get back to you.
This is a very powerful essay, especially the concluding challenge to Christian apologists. In addition to those challenges that Christianity must confront, as Dr. Bradley underlines, one should add that the doctrines discussed, if taken seriously, will lead to (have already led to) a repudiation or undercutting of the idea of all individual rights, and, consequently, of limited government. Moreover, the doctrine(s) are radical – the quotations make it clear that the antipathy to selfishness leaves no sphere which remains private, personal and individual that may be retained by the person – and that is the basis of the totalitarian impulse: everything you possess, including your person, your mind, your values, must be surrendered to society.
Fantastic article!!
I think you are mistaken right at the start about the primary driver of the Christian moral universe. Not unselfishness. Love. You shall love the LORD your God..." "You shall love your neighbor..." Does this make a difference? Absolutely it does.
"If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues,
nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the
great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A
negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than
philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the
suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without
them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important
point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots
to say about self- denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to
deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and
nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an
appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our
own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that
this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian
faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering
nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds
our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling
about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an
ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot
imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily
pleased."
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 1943.
https://faithandlaw.org/wp-content/craft/docs/The-Weight-of-Glory.pdf
Prof: Years ago i read the "Imitation of Christ" by Thomas`a Kempis. I was dejected - no human can possibly imitate Christ i thought. But i have come to the accept the idea that maybe that is the point - you touch on this in your essay. if it were easy to imitate Christ, humans - being what we are - might likely sin even more, i.e., 'resting on one's laurels.' But by constantly being challenged, humans may be more likely to keep striving and although usually failing in our attempts at imitation - we won't give up the struggle.
You obviously have not familiarized yourself with Ayn Rand.
No familiarity with OT. Land ownership under covenant is far different than land ownership in social contract theory. Property is not a right but a gift to be stewarded under the covenant suzerain.
Looking forward to this, thanks.