IS CHRISTIAN FAITH ETHICALLY RESTRICTIVE?

BAYSIDE COMMUNITAS: WORLDVIEW

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fb_H7jbu4w&list=PL1FB3BC06DB3B2909&index=4&feature=plpp_video

GENESIS 2:16-17

• “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’”

• Why is the restriction of eating from ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ placed on man?

POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVE: RELIGION IS ALL ABOUT CONTROL

• Truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people. (Foucault)

“THEY LIKE JESUS BUT NOT THE CHURCH”

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ISURp7Ux1g

CHRISTIAN FREEDOM?

• How could something that constrains a person’s freedom (such as a regular commitment, obligation or law) expand his or her freedom in other areas of life?

• What is Christian freedom? What is the relationship between “grace” and “law” in the Christian worldview?

WHAT IS “THE GOOD”?

• “…there now is no recognized moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based.” That is to say, no body of moral knowledge exists in our culture. (Former President, Harvard University, Derek Bok)

• “Open-mindedness” requires us to be agnostic—we cannot know—regarding good or bad moral behavior and/or ethical rightness or otherwise.

• What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?

POSTMODERN CULTURE: TRUTH/EPISTEMOLOGY

• In our culture, freedom is highly valued and truth-claims are devalued.

• People who believe in absolute truth—truth that everyone should believe in—undermine freedom.

• They tend to oppress/marginalize people who don’t believe like they do.

• They impose their belief; they tend to harm others.• People who claim to possess absolute truth are themselves

not free—they are attempting to obey absolute truth and they are not free.

• Absolute truth is the enemy of freedom; it harms and erodes freedom—everyone should be free to determine their truth; truth must be subjective—”truth for me.”

THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC

• Who will inherit the kingdom of God? (‘The Beatitudes’—Matt. 5:3-20)

• How do we live in the kingdom of God? (‘The Sermon on the Mount”—Matt. 5:20 –

7:27)

THE ‘BEATITUDES’ & THE ‘SERMON ON THE MOUNT’

• Truth: All who hear and do will have life!

• Freedom: more complex than we think!

• Liberty: Jesus is our Liberator!

TRUTH: ALL WHO HEAR AND DO WILL HAVE LIFE!

• Christians believe they possess truth—Christians believe everyone should believe in Christ as the Savior of the world:

• “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise”—Galatians 3:29.

• The family of God is a single family, redefined around and by the Messiah, and this single family was promised by God to Abraham.

TRUTH: THE BEATITUDES• Common misinterpretation: “the poor in spirit” is a spiritual condition that

warrants entry into the kingdom of God; “the poor in spirit” has come to refer to a praiseworthy condition.

• However, to the contrary, these are people with absolutely no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all—they are people standing, at present, before Jesus whom our Lord has touched and graciously changed their lives.

• Those referred to as “poor in spirit” (or any other condition mentioned in the Beatitudes) are called “blessed” by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the kingdom of God has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ” (D. Willard).

THE NATURE OF BIBLICAL TRUTH• The Beatitudes are not instructions to do anything; they do not indicate conditions that are

especially pleasing to God or good for human beings.

• Rather, they are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus.

• The notion that the Beatitudes, in particular, are instructions, promotes the legalistic notion that we are to “build the kingdom” or “advance” or “establish” the kingdom.

• The kingdom of God is a present reality—”the immediate presence of the Kingdom is found in Jesus.”

• Therefore, rather than “building” or “bringing” the kingdom of God through our works, we are to “implement” Christ’s finished work through the Spirit’s empowerment—through the Spirit’s power, we find spiritual riches, comfort, strength, righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, peace, assurance. Instead of being called to be contractors, we are called to be priests (intercessors) occupying space between those outside the covenant and the kingdom of God.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM: OUR CULTURE’S PERSPECTIVE

• Postmodern culture: If we must obey “the” truth, we must give up freedom—”Truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by multiple forms of constraint and that includes the regular effects of power” (Foucault).

• Truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people.

• If you claimed “everyone should do justice to the poor,” Nietzsche would question whether you said that because you really love justice and the poor or because you wanted to start a revolution that would give you control and power.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND FREEDOM: THE BIBLE—THE BEATITUDES

• Jesus confronted the Pharisees because they were using their claims to truth for the purpose of power and control over people.

• Whereas some truth-claims are power plays, to include the Pharisees’ claims, not all truth-claims are power plays.

• In the person of Jesus Christ, God reveals divine ethical action, even in the face of human sin and injustice—the unity of truth in Christ is purchased only at the cost of violence: Jesus’ death on the cross.

• Contrary to the ruthless, brutal regimes of fallen men, e.g., totalitarianism (“the values of one’s own society”) or authoritarianism (“my values, not yours”), the Gospel reveals Christ’s atoning death for his enemies: he forgives them instead of conquering them; he gives up power and becomes a servant—Christ’s death is revealed in the NT as God’s counter-ideological confrontation of the world and its bloodstained history; the totalizing violence of the majority is associated with evil in God’s world.

TRUTH-CLAIMS: CONCLUSIONS• To say no one can make truth-claims is a truth-claim itself (self-

defeating argument)—if you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement (if you say, like Freud, that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement).

• Truth-claims are unavoidable.

• Truth-claims do not necessarily lead to oppression rather it’s what is in the truth-claim that is important—does the truth-claim lead to the majority’s control or to personal freedom, especially for the most vulnerable, i.e., those “outside” (e.g., Jesus’ audience while delivering The Beatitudes).

THE BEATITUDES: POSTSCRIPT

• It is true that truth-claims can be used to destroy freedom, but there is no freedom without truth: “If you hold my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

• Only the truth will set you free; freedom comes from submission to the truth not fleeing from it: ‘For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven’ –Mt. 5:20.

Freedom: More Complex Than We Think!

• Six antitheses: You can’t live anyway you want—Matthew 5:20 – 44.

• Modern/Postmodern protest: “I thought freedom was an absence of restrictions; an absence of all constraints, all boundaries.”

[Re: John Lennon’s Imagine]

HOW DO WE LIVE IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD?THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT: MATTHEW 5:20-7:27

• “… the truth will set you free” but freedom is not the absence of restrictions on anything I do.

• But restriction and discipline does not produce freedom.

• Freedom is not the absence of restrictions or the presence of restrictions.

WHAT THEN IS FREEDOM?• Freedom is finding the right combination of “the absence of

restrictions” and the “presence of restrictions” in the context of liberating love.

• This love does not consist of acts and projects but is a pervasive condition of vision, joy, and love in which we habitually reside—it is a love of the same quality as God’s love (Matt. 5:45-48).

• For a love relationship to be healthy there must be a mutual loss of independence, it can’t be just one way.

• Love is the most liberating freedom-loss in all of life—you must sacrifice independence for greater intimacy.

• To experience the joy and freedom of love, you must forsake your personal autonomy.

C.S. LEWIS• “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and

possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

• Freedoms of love are only possible if you surrender all kinds of freedoms.

LIBERTY: JESUS IS OUR LIBERATOR!

• Matthew 5:29-30—This message (Matthew 5:3 – 7:27) is one unified whole intended to teach us that true rightness is a matter of one’s heart; such actions (cf. 5:29-30) would therefore make no difference.

• “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus the Anointed” (John 1:17)—His teachings illustrate how those alive in the kingdom can live in God’s presence, through the days and hours of their ordinary existence.

MATTHEW 5:20• “The law” Jesus’ hearers had in mind and rubbed up against every day

was not the law of God. It was a contemporary version of religious respectability, very harsh and oppressive in application, that Jesus referred to as “the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.”

• But the presence of the kingdom of God brings us all that is right for human life—in Matthew 5:20-48, we discover exactly what fulfillment of the law would look like in daily life.

• There is a sequence of contrasts between the older teaching about what a good person would do—e.g., not murder—and Jesus’ portrait of the kingdom heart in 5:20-48.

• 5:20-48 moves from the deepest recesses of human evil, burning anger and obsessive desire, to the pinnacle of human fulfillment in agape or divine love. Jesus undermines the entire edifice of human corruption by eliminating its foundations in the human heart.

OBEDIENCE = LIBERTY!• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The only proper response to this word which

Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it.”

• Almost 1/6 of the entire Discourse (15 of 92 verses) is devoted to emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says.

• Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it.

• How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the 21st century (Dallas Willard).

• And, liberty (freedom) is discovering what you were made for and obediently responding to God’s call on your life.

ABSOLUTE TRUTH• Obedience to abstract absolute truth is dehumanizing; but

obedience to Jesus—he who is personal absolute truth—is liberating.

• Tim Keller: “At first sight… a relationship with God seems inherently dehumanizing. Surely it will have to be “one way,” God’s way. God, the divine being, has all the power. I must adjust to God—there is no way that God could adjust to and serve me. While this may be true in other forms of religion and belief in God, it is not true in Christianity. In the most radical way, God has adjusted to us—in his incarnation and atonement. In Jesus Christ he became a limited human being, vulnerable to suffering and death. On the cross, he submitted to our condition—as sinners—and died in our place to forgive us. In the most profound way, God has said to us, in Christ, ‘I will adjust to you… I’ll serve you though it means a sacrifice for me.’ If he has done this for us, we can and should say the same to God and others. St. Paul writes, “the love of Christ constrains us” (2 Cor. 5:14).

DIVINE CONSPIRACY

• “When Jesus hung on the cross and prayed, ‘Father, forgive them because they do not understand what they are doing,’ that was not hard for him. What would have been hard for him would have been to curse his enemies and spew forth vileness and evil upon everyone, God and the world, as those crucified with him did, at least for a while. He calls us to him to impart himself to us. He does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him”—Dallas Willard.

HITCHENS & CRAIG: EXISTENCE AND MEANING

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9NlRKJBKt4&feature=related

CHRISTIAN FREEDOM?

• How could something that constrains a person’s freedom (such as a regular commitment, obligation or law) expand his or her freedom in other areas of life?

• What is Christian freedom? What is the relationship between “grace” and “law” in the Christian worldview?