The Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant is often shared to promote a tolerant view of other cultures and religions.  You have likely heard the story about six blind men each touching a different part of an elephant.  One, touching the tusk, declares that it is a spear.  Another, touching the trunk, thinks it is a snake.  Still another, touching the leg, says it is a tree.  The blind man touching the tale calls it rope.  And so on.

The blind men, of course, represent mankind and his inability to know the truth about ultimate reality.  Limited as we are in our narrow points-of-view, we draw divergent, even contradictory conclusions about the nature of reality, but because no one can see the ‘big picture’ there is no basis to assert that one culture or religion’s view of the real is superior to another.  Therefore, various religions can hold to conflicting claims about reality and still be tolerated as ‘truth’ (true for them, but not true for me; or true for me, but not true for them).

Besides the obvious problem that someone knows that there is a real elephant (otherwise how could we tell the story!) and that those who tell the story are attempting to offer a superior account of what reality is like (and of our ability to know it), the skeptical interpretation of this parable that says none of us can know the Truth for certain so lets just all get along actually misses a deeper, more intellectually and experientially satisfying message this metaphor conveys.  Epistemology professor and author Esther Meek (whose work I draw on frequently in my theory of knowledge course) offers such an interpretation (Meek, Longing to Know):

Many people believe that the fact that people draw divergent conclusions about the real implies either that there is no objective real or that we must all privatize our claims about truth (“This is true for me, that is true for you.”), especially if we are to demonstrate tolerance of all people…The moral of the story [the elephant parable], however, is precisely the opposite of “There is no objective truth” or “Truth is what I say it is.”  The moral is that reality is so rich that we had better talk together if we are to stand a chance of figuring it out.  Plus, each of us, situated as we are at different vantage points with respect to the real, can contribute unique insights.  But we should expect that working together will give us a fuller picture.

As a follower of Jesus, I believe that religious beliefs based on the Old and New Testaments of the Bible provide the most complete and accurate view of God, the nature of man, the meaning of life, the way of redemption, how one ought to live, and so on.  Moreover, I believe that the doctrines of the historical Reformed faith represent the fullest, most consistent interpretation of the Bible.  However, I also recognize that even the best view is fraught with limitations and even distortions, and therefore I need to listen and learn from Christians from other traditions to help complete my understanding of the Bible.  More broadly, though I believe that non-Christian religions contain falsehoods that are at odds with these doctrines, I do not reject them as being entirely false or without merit.  Rather, I see Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. as having some level of insight about the Real and thus believe I should humbly listen to them, even while advocating for and justifying Christian answers to the questions all religions seek to ask.

Cultural relativism only offers us humility without hope:  humbling us that our view is no better than another, but leaving us hopeless  that we can ever actually know the Truth about the Real.  Cultural imperialism only offers us hope without humility:  hope that we can know the Truth, but puffing us up with pride that our group’s vision of the Real is complete and that we are superior to everyone else.  What we need to flourish in a pluralistic society is an understanding of Truth that gives both humility and hope.

The MLK Jr. holiday is an opportune time to reflect on a crucial question of our time:  How can a pluralistic society flourish?  By pluralistic, I mean a situation in which there is not one dominate religious system or worldview paradigm that unifies society, but a diversity not only of ethnicity, but of religious and philosophical view points.

One of the official objectives of my theory of knowledge course is to “encourage an interest in the diversity of ways of thinking and ways of living of individuals and communities, and an awareness of personal and ideological assumptions, including participants’ own.”  Recently, I asked my students to reflect on how achieving the course objectives would help them live lives of truth.  A few of them chose this one, so we had a class discussion about how to have a healthy relationship with diversity.

We identified two extremes to avoid.  One is a bigoted, close-mindedness that regards one’s sub-culture as morally supreme to all others and as having exclusive rights to the Truth.  We might call this cultural imperialism.  The other is a fickle, open-mindedness that regards all sub-cultures as equal to each other with none having more understanding of the Truth than any other, and is characterized by a discomfited hesitancy to make any kind of definitive judgments of other cultures.  We might call this cultural relativism. 

The mindset of cultural imperialism is what MLK battled against courageously in the civil rights movement.  The ground he stood on in this battle, intellectually and morally, was not the relativist view that because Truth does not exist, or is not knowable, we just need to tolerate every other view as different but equal from our own.  Rather, he protested on the basis universal moral law by which one can judge other cultures as just or unjust, including the oppressive white American culture he was seeking to reform.  In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King defends the practice of nonviolent civil disobedience to promote political and social change.  Central to his defense is his distinction between just and unjust laws:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.

Note his deep conviction that real moral law exists and is knowable.  All cultures stand under this moral law.  The racist beliefs and discriminatory laws of white American culture were not just different from his own, but were really unjust and thus ought to change.  The problem with cultural relativism is that it inhibits us from making confident moral judgments which are necessary to sustain an orderly, just and prosperous society.  This problem is illustrated dramatically by Chuck Colson in a recent story about an ethics lesson taught by a high school philosophy teacher, Dr. Stephen Anderson, in Canada:

To jump start the discussion and to “form a baseline from which they could begin to ask questions about the legitimacy of moral judgments of all kinds,” Anderson shared with them a gruesome photo of Bibi Aisha, a teenage wife of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. When Bibi tried to get away from her abusive husband, her family caught her, cut off her nose and ears, and left her to die in the mountains. Only Bibi didn’t die. Somehow she crawled to her grandfather’s house, and was saved in an American hospital.

Writing in Education Journal magazine, Anderson relates how he was sure that his students, “seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, [they] would have a clear ethical reaction,” one [from which] they could talk about “more difficult cases.”

But their response shocked Anderson. He “expected strong aversion [to it],…but that’s not what [he] got. Instead, they became confused…afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize,” as he said, “any situation originating in a different culture. They said, ‘Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.’”

Anderson calls their confusion and refusal to judge such child mutilation a moment of startling clarity, and indeed it is. He wonders if it stems not from too little education, but from too much multiculturalism and so-called “values education,” which is really just an excuse for moral relativism.

Anderson writes, “While we may hope some [students] are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is ‘never judge, never criticize, never take a position.’” Anderson wonders whether in our current educational system, we’re not producing ethical paralytics?

The solution to bigoted, oppressive cultural imperialism is not cultural relativism, for such a system is not only self-contradictory (for judging those who judge) but cannot produce people with the kind of moral backbone, like MLK, necessary to confront injustice in the world and make the sacrifices necessary to create a more just society.  A better solution lies in a transformed view of truth and knowledge that both recognizes the existence of the real and the need for multiple cultures to work together in order to fully understand the real.  I will lay out such a view in my next post.

The doctrine of the incarnation – the miraculous event of the divine Son of God becoming a man which Christmas commemorates – has profound consequences on how we view the world, on our attitudes, and on how we live when embraced and believed as Truth.  In my second post on the purpose of Christmas, I reflected on two of these consequences:  how Christmas makes us deeply mystical and happily material.  This last post examines the last two effects Pastor Keller applies from the 1 John 1 passage:  Christmas also makes us “fiercely relational” and “free to be emotional.”

Fiercely Relational  - “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us” (1 John 1:3)

The mystical intimate relationship we can experience with the Living God because of the incarnation also extends outward toward other people.  The incarnation not only makes us more desirous of intimate relationships, but actually makes us more adept at cultivating them.  For the most part we are divided from each other by differences.  Even within a single country or ethnic group, people are shaped by different family cultures with their own traditions, norms, and values.  Our default mode relationally is to expect people to enter into our world to become like us in order to have ‘fellowship’ (or to just seek out friendships with people who are just like us).

Keller explains that belief in the incarnation should push us out courageously and lovingly into the world of another, enabling us to become weak by humbling ourselves to learn the language, ways, and values of another person.  This applies to friendships and to marriages.  To be successful relationally, we have to learn how to (and be willing to) get into another person’s world.  The incarnation models for us such humble initiative and commitment.

It is widely understood, I think, that one of the main reasons people tend to be most unhappy during the holidays is that Christmas time exacerbates their sense of loneliness, and alienation.  Perhaps it exposes what people long for but is sorely missing in their lives:  meaningful friendships and family relationships.  Even with a preponderance of holiday parties and related social events, many feel a deep relational void.  People are happiest when they share their enjoyment of life with others (“man was not made to be alone”).    After all, how many people do you know would rather watch a comedy by themselves?  Our enjoyment in things tend to multiply when others enjoy them with us.

This really should be the essence of gift giving too.  We enjoy the enjoyment others experience when receiving our gifts.  And a ‘fiercely relational’ gift giver is not going to think “What would I want this person to get me?”  but “if I were this person, what would I want me to get for him?”  Be incarnational in your gift giving!

Free to be Emotional – “We write this to make our joy complete.” (1 John 1:4)

Keller notes that this statement assumes that the author already has joy, but by sharing the good news of the fellowship with God that is made possible by the reality of the incarnation and experiencing the fellowship with others that the incarnation forms, his joy will be made full.  That he already has joy demonstrates that his joy does not depend on what they do or how they respond to this message.  Most of us need the world to go right to experience joy:  our happiness depends on people doing what we expect and not disappointing us.  But Christmas gives us, what Keller calls, a “subterranean joy” – like an underground river that is always flowing – that doesn’t depend on what other do.

Yet this is not a disinterested joy that is indifferent to the well-being of others.  Rather the well-being of others enlarges the joy, which provides an incentive for taking risks in relationships, entangling ourselves in the lives of other people to whom we’ve tied our hearts, even when it is costly.

At times in the past, critical of the way our culture celebrates Christmas, I have become a bit of a Grinch-like Christmas curmudgeon.  My disdain for materialism needs to be coupled with a greater joy in “fellowship with the Father and the Son” and in fellowship with others over the gift and promise of Christmas, supplemented by a healthy enjoyment of material gifts.

I hope that the incarnation of the Son of God in the man Jesus Christ takes on a renewed and deeper meaning for you this Christmas.  As we give and receive “Merry Christmas” greetings, may the truth of the Christmas story penetrate our lives to make us more deeply mystical, happily material, fiercely relational, and free to be emotional.

Experiencing deeply the true meaning of Christmas depends on one accepting the events of the Christmas story, chiefly the astounding incarnation of Deity in the baby Jesus, as literal historical truth.  The writers of the Gospels claim no less and the Bible’s message of salvation by sheer grace alone completely depends on the incarnation of God in Jesus actually happening.  With this foundation, Pastor Keller applies the doctrine of the incarnation in four different ways that Christmas should change us.  This post reflects on the first two qualities:  ‘deeply mystical’ and ‘happily material’

Deeply Mystical – “And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:3)

If ultimately reality, God, actually took on human form and lived a complete human life from cradle to grave, what we can know about God and how we relate to Him fundamentally changes:  we have in Christmas the basis for a personal relationship with God.  The word ‘fellowship’ in this Scriptural text denotes an intimate, loving friendship.  It is analogous to knowing a historical person through a book that is based on personal, autobiographical accounts.  Keller asks us to consider the difference between a historian writing a biography based on secondary sources and on five letters the person wrote to his wife versus a historian writing a biography based on what he believes are authentic autobiographical records, like memoirs.   Which one is going to give us a more personal and specific understanding?

If Jesus is God incarnate, we have in the Gospel accounts, and by extension the rest of Scripture, an autobiographical narrative of God.  Incarnation invites us to look at what God has done to open Himself to you to get you to know Him personally and to draw near.  It shows that He purposes to be more than a concept to us, but as close as a friend, even a lover.

Before our children we born, my wife and I made the unusual (and unpopular) decision not to celebrate Christmas in our home with Santa Claus as a real figure.  Our children know about Santa Claus – we read them and let them watch Santa stories – but have never believed he is a real person who delivers gifts to them on Christmas.   Some would (and have!) accuse us of robbing our children of the wonder and awe of Christmas by dispelling them of the mystery of Santa Claus, but we argue that our approach to celebrating Christmas actually increases their experience of wonder and awe by making them more mystical.

The difference is that we teach them that the mystery of Christmas is based on reality, not a myth.  To help them experience real mystery rather than fabricated mythology, we help them worship ‘the Father and the Son’ all month by singing Christmas hymns and carols, reading a splendid Advent book that apportions the whole Christmas narrative into 25 different sections, exposing them to sermons at church on ancient prophesies in the Old Testament fulfilled through Christmas, and even memorizing and reciting Mary’s Magnificat.  The aim of these activities is more than just preventing them from being swept away by commericialism, but is to help them cultivate an intimate personal relationship God that makes them deeply mystical for their entire lives, not just until they grow up and learn Santa Claus isn’t real.  What happens to the mystery then?  Christmas should flood our hearts will real, life-transforming, enduring mystery in the form of fellowship with our eternal Creator.

Happily Material – “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” (1 John 1:1)

Claims to have sensed the eternal and transcended would have been astounding to Greeks and Romans in the first century who, under the worldview shaping influence of Platonic philosophy, believed matter was bad. Even today the concept of the incarnation is incoherent to traditional religions which say that salvation is escaping out of this world.  Christmas, rather,  teaches that salvation is the kingdom of God coming into this world, to renew and rehabilitate it.  After all, the Bible does not promise some Paradise removed from this world, but promises a new heaven and a new earth.  Thus, the doctrine of the incarnation shows the importance of matter.

One of the main reasons people are unhappy during Christmas time is a dysfunctional relationship with the material world.  I vividly remember one Christmas during my college years when my then 4 year old niece after receiving more gifts than she could possibly enjoy and appreciate broke down crying when she realized that all her gifts were opened and there were no more left for her.  Surrounded by all these wonderful new toys, she could not enjoy them but just bawled because she was focused on what was missing rather than what she had.  I had just started thinking critically about the problem with materialism in Christmas and this scene epitomized for me the problem with setting our heart’s affections of material possessions to find happiness.

But as we are so prone to do when we make critical judgments about anything, I reacted by going to the opposite extreme of shunning gift giving, neither wanting to give nor receive anything for Christmas, viewing the material, like the Greeks, as bad.  I felt guilty getting gifts and buying them for others.  Frankly, I am still recovering from this attitude and seeking a proper balance.  On one hand, Christmas teaches me not to exalt material possessions as the source of ultimate happiness, but to find joy in fellowship with God by grace.  But on the other hand, Christmas teaches me the value of the material world and how I can enjoy material things when put in their proper place.  As the Apostle Paul teaches, ““¹²All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12).

Last Christmas I heard a sermon titled simply “The Purpose of Christmas” given by NYC Pastor Timothy Keller.  For those searching for a more meaningful holiday experience and celebration of Christmas, I highly recommend this sermon.  Over the next week, I will post a series of reflections on this theme based on the Keller sermon.  At a minimum this will help me enjoy a deeper Christmas experience; I hope it helps others do the same.

The text for this sermon, from the first epistle of John, is not likely one that you have heard preached on during Christmas before^:

¹ That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. ² The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. ³ We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. ⁴ We write this to make our joy complete.

After expounding on the essential nature of doctrine (that everyone has a faith – or doctrinal – commitment), for to even criticize one for being dogmatic about their beliefs about God and try to persuade other people is to oneself attempt to persuade another to believe one’s own dogmatic position, he then argues for the importance of the Christmas story being an actual historical event. The Apostle John makes a historical, eye-witness claim in this passage:  we have heard, we have seen, we have touched the Word of life.  He is claiming that these are not legends, not feel-good spiritual parables, not myths they made up.  To argue that these things never actually happened, but that these are just wonderful parables that teach us moral truth is an absurd position.  Either these are historical accounts or they are lies because they undeniably claim to be historical.  If they are lies, they are not only nonsense, but they are dangerous nonsense that ought to be opposed. There is no logical middle position, for what they claim is so extraordinary and so history and life transforming, that if it is not actually true it should be rejected.

What is claimed to have happened on Christmas is that the ‘Word of life’ became ‘flesh.’  The Word of life is referring to eternal, divine, ultimate reality.  The miracle and the mystery of Christmas is that in the birth of Christ, the ideal actually became material, the timeless became temporal, the spiritual corporeal, the infinite finite.

This doctrine of the incarnation distinguishes Christianity fundamentally from other religions.  In Eastern religions, like Hinduism, which are pantheistic (God is in everything) such acts of incarnation are normal.  In Hindu mythology, for example, divinity often manifests itself in physical form.  On the other hand in other theistic religions like Judaism and Islam, God is so transcendent that incarnation is impossible, even offensive:  the divine would never condescend to take on flesh.  In contrast to these religions, Christianity teaches that incarnation is possible, but in contrast to Eastern religions Christianity teaches that incarnation is not normal: the act of God becoming man in the conception and birth of Jesus is so utterly unique and extraordinary that it required the sundering of the universe to happen and changed history irrevocably.

The rest of the sermon applies this doctrine of a historical incarnation to our own experience of Christmas.  The incarnation should affect us in at least four ways, making us “deeply mystical, happily material, fiercely relational, and free to be emotional.”  I will write two more posts on the purpose of Christmas this week each reflecting on two of these existential effects of the reality of the incarnation.  In the meantime, I highly recommend this sermon to you.  It can be purchased in mp3 format for only $2.50 at sermons.redeemer.com/store.

In my previous installments on the Penn State Scandal, I identified two of the key ethical principles at stake in the associated moral failures:  1) adults’ have an obligation to put the interests of children ahead of their own; and perhaps a more fundamental principle that 2) people in power have an obligation to humbly use that power to protect and not exploit the weak.  In this final post on the topic, I will look at a more difficult issue to conceptualize:  the danger of projecting utopian expectations on certain places or institutions and of imbuing specific individuals with imagined moral perfections.

The main text I will interact with is an article by Michael Weinreb(of GRANTLAND.com), a sports journalist who grew up in Happy Valley, PA where Penn State is located.  His classmates included both Paterno and Sandusky children (the latter’s were adopted).  Thus, he brings a deep personal perspective into the analysis.

Weinreb describes his hometown in Shangri-La terms and Paterno as its mythical king (emphasis added):

Everything in State College — even the name of our town — was one all-encompassing, synergistic monolith, and Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on….Those were great years [late 70s-early 80s], and Penn State was in its heyday and Joe Paterno was the Sportsman of the Year and State College was a community that never gave in to the ethical lapses of the ’80s and early  sounds apt enough…Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man, as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package, and now that word isn’t in our dictionaries anymore.

A degree of realism set in as children matured into adulthood, but nonetheless a deep trust in Paterno and the football program endured:

It [a powerful force] is never quite as benevolent as you imagined it to be. In order to acquire power, you have to be at least a little ruthless.All you can hope for is that those who do acquire power operate by some sort of rough ethical standard, and even if I no longer deified Paterno, I continued to believe that the monolith I’d grown up inside was essentially a force for good. They did things I found untoward, but I always presumed they did them for the right reasons.

Something deep within the human psyche wants, or perhaps even needs, to believe that such places and people exist.  Nostalgia is a similar mindset (and is even expressed by Weinreb, at least explicitly) projected on the past.   Most people have nostalgic longings for times and places in their past that they idealize compared with present realities, believing that the circumstances today would be so much better if we could somehow recapture the past. The biblical worldview accounts for such longings in the origin’s story of Paradise and the Fall of Man.  We were created in a perfect state to dwell in an ideal place, but as a result of sin we have exiled from Eden, and thus live in a state of cosmic exile, of homelessness.  This feeling of alienation is often accentuated during the holidays. As Pastor Tim Keller writes

The memory of home seems to be evoked by certain sights, sounds and even smells. But they can only arouse a desire they can’t fulfill. Many of the people in my church have shared with me how disappointing Christmas and Thanksgiving are to them. They prepare for holidays hoping that, finally, this year, the gathering of family at that important place will deliver the experience of warmth, joy, comfort, and love that they want from it. But these events almost always fail, crushed under the weight of our impossible expectations. There is a German word that gets at this concept- the word Sehnsucht. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no simple English synonym. It denotes profound homesickness or longing, but with transcendent overtones (Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith).

My purpose is not to judge feelings of nostalgia as sinful, but to expose the perils of seeking to fulfill this desire in utopian places lorded over by deified people. The reason why such horrific crimes could continue unchecked for so long in Happy Valley was that no one believed this kind of thing could happen there.  Perhaps the reason why Joe Paterno and other men in power failed to confront these crimes was that no one dare admit that such gross evil could ever be associated with such a cleanly-run football program led by a man who was revered for his moral leadership.  The natural of evil is that it loves the darkness:  it flourishes most when it is denied, suppressed, covered up.  Thus, the Apostle John writes,

⁵This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. ⁶If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. ⁷Butif we walk in the light,as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. ⁸ If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins andto cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:5-8).

Utopias say they have no sin.  Moral demagogues like Joe Paterno are believed to be above sin.  Such claims are deceptive because the deny the truth that we live in a corrupt world that mirrors the inherent corruption of human hearts.  Evil is strengthened when it is denied, but weakened when it is exposed by light.  The ‘blood of Jesus his Son’ beckons us to bring evil into the light, knowing that because of His sacrifice our sins can be forgiveness and our corrupt hearts can be transformed.  Only as we honestly admit and confront the reality of evil in the heart can evil be overcome.

Weinreb closes his essay solemnly:  “We’ve come to terms with the corruptibility of the human soul in State College, and we’ve swept away the naïve notion that this place where we lived so quietly was different from the rest of America.”  In recognizing this terrible reality, let up hope the Penn State community has taken the first step toward dealing with the problem of evil in its midst.

In my previous post, I explored how the ethical principle that adults ought to put the interests of children before their own, and ought not to sacrifice the well-being of children to their own ambitions was not only violated by the responsible parties in the Penn State scandal, but is commonly violated throughout our society, especially in problems related to debt and marriage.  Among the chief interests adult may be tempted to pursue at the expense of children is power, or more specifically the preservation of power.  Sports journalist Howard Bryan (espn.com) diagnoses the Penn State scandal as being fundamentally a problem of power:

Schultz, Curley, Spanier and Paterno [all major figures in the Penn State hierarchy] are unwilling to admit being blinded by the power of Penn State football. That power prevented other, less powerful people from coming forward. Their first, fatal reaction was the impulse to protect the program, keep it from embarrassment, to protect personal relationships and now what’s left of the precious, sacred institution.

Sandusky’s alleged paedo-sex crimes, or more accurately the public revelation of such crimes, were a threat to the power interests of the said leadership, whose power was derived from the popularity and economic vitality of the Penn State football program, a program that enjoyed not only a reputation of winning, but of winning in a morally upright fashion.  For public knowledge of such actions by a major figure in the program (Sanduskly was the defense coordinator for nearly 30 years, including on Penn State’s two national championship teams) would shame the program,  threaten revenue streams (not likely from ticket sales or TV contract, but more likely from alumni donations), and perhaps result in firings.  Ironically, this is what happened anyways, and if the problems with Sandusky, which were known by the leadership for at least a decade, were dealt with immediately the damage would have been far smaller than it is today.

Bryan insightfully looks beyond Penn State football to uncover the same root cause in other child sex scandals:  the Catholic church, the Church of Latter-Day Saints (I had not heard of this scandal), and Boston Red Sox coach Dan Fitzpatrick.  He even broadens the scope of his critique to include public scandal not involving sex, such as the cover up of police misconduct in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by the New Orleans police department. The common moral theme in all of these instances is that “each institution committed the fatal mistake of believing that power was not a privilege to be handled with great care and humility but instead a license to be above trust. The powerful often have forgotten whom they are supposed to serve.”

Thus, the ethical principle concerned here is broader than the treatment of children; it concerns how those in power use their power in relation to the powerless (or those with less power).  In each of the said cases, those with power used it for self-preservation, without regard for the effects of their decisions on the powerless:  crimes against the weak were concealed in the interests of maintaining power.  The principle that people in power ought to use their power to serve the powerless rather than exploit them is central in Scripture.  This principle is seen in God’s commands to His people about how they should treat the powerless, typically represented in the categories of the poor, widow, and orphan, and more vividly and powerfully in the way Jesus, the Son of God, used his power.

Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, is replete with such commands.  Consider just a sample from the book of Jeremiah:

This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place (Jer. 22:3)

Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labor. He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace with spacious upper rooms.’ So he makes large windows in it, panels it with cedar and decorates it in red. Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your father have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?’ declares the LORD. But your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion (Jer. 22:13-17)

I included the second passage to show that these are more than just rules to follow for giving to the poor; rather, God equates knowing Him with defending the cause of the weak.  Concern for the weak and commitment to their well-being characterizes the heart of God.  Thus, we see these qualities in the Son of God, Jesus, who reveals perfectly the character of God in a perfect human being who is at the same time both fully God and fully man. These qualities are not merely displayed in Jesus’ teaching on how we should treat the poor or in his example of acting compassionately toward the sick, lame, and downtrodden (these things by themselves would make him indistinguishable from other religious and moral leaders throughout the ages), but shine more supremely in his redemptive mission to overcome evil and death and accomplish salvation for all nations.  In this achievement of this mission, we see true, utter humility in his use of power (Philippians 2:3-11):

³Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. ⁵ Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. ⁸And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Years ago I heard a pastor explain the phrase ‘a thing to be grasped’ as having leverage over others but not using that leverage to one owns advantage.  Jesus’ ‘equality with God’ means that as a man he possessed supreme power.  Perhaps his greatest struggle was to resist the temptation to use this power to exalt Himself by establishing a kingdom on earth and becoming a political ruler (Satan tempted him in this manner in the wilderness and even his followers held the expectation that He would overthrow the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel to greatness).  Yet he never caved into this temptation, but rather defeated evil by an act of ultimate humility:  death on the cross.  He defeated evil not by grasping after power, but by conceding power.  Through this humility, though, he has been exalted above all names and is promised global acknowledgment of his greatness for eternity.

Bryan concludes his analysis cynically: “This is what power has become. More accurately, it is what power has always been, in existence to protect itself.”  While he correctly describes the inclination of the human heart to use power for self-preservation, he ignores that reality that the supreme power of the universe, concentrated in the life of a single man, has not been used for self-protection, but for the defeat of evil and the salvation of humanity through a self-sacrificial act of humility.  May those who trust in Him exercise power in the same spirit of humility!

Let’s critically examine the basic ethical principle that adults ought to put the interests of children ahead of their own and use their power as adults to serve the well-being of children.  I believe most people regardless of religious commitment or political persuasion would assent to this principle and regard it as ethically sound.  While we revile those who exploit children sexually, and those who enable these offenders, our social conscience is not as troubled by more common instances of transgressing this principle.  I will explore two of these.

1. Financial mismanagement

The national debt is staggering ($15 trillion and growing).  Each citizen’s share is over $48,000.  And this is just the debt of the U.S. government.   The average U.S. household credit card debt is nearly $16,000* (www.creditcard.com). With an average household size of about 2.6, the debt of a typical household just as a share of the federal debt and national credit card debt is approximately $140,800.  Do the adults who have incurred this debt have the intentions, or even the means to repay it?  I don’t believe so.  Our collective debt will be passed on to our children and grandchildren.  Our luxurious, self-indulgent, self-gratifying lifestyles are funded by debt that our children and their children will have to pay for.  We enjoy lives of pleasure, comfort, and ease at their expense.

2.  Marriage

The purpose of marriage is being redefined in our culture from an institution that exists to secure the well-being of children and to raise the next generation to adulthood into to one that exists primarily for the happiness and pleasure of adults.  The high divorce rate in the U.S. is well documented (recent downward trends are result of an increase of cohabitation among young adults).  Though there are justifiable reasons for getting a divorce (the infidelity of one’s spouse, for instance), most divorces are a result of couples “falling out of love” as conflicts mount and they grow tired of each other.  Divorce is almost never in the interest of the children, but is harmful to the children, both in the short and the long-term.  Rather than make the difficult choice of staying together and persevering through relational difficulties, adults often choose what they believe will make them happier (since that’s the point of being married in the first place) regardless of the consequences on the children. The mentality is that my happiness matters more than my children’s well-being.  Sound familiar.

A sure sign of a civilization’s moral decay is when adults make decisions to increase the quality of their lives that result in the diminishing of the quality of their children’s lives.  In ancient times, literal child sacrifice to idols was practiced in many cultures (the Aztecs, Incas, and Canaanite cultures to name a few).  That this practice was common among near-Eastern peoples is evidenced in the biblical commands forbidding the practice among the Israelites:

¹The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ²“Say to the people of Israel,Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. ³I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuaryunclean andto profane my holy name. ⁴And if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do notput him to death, ⁵then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.

Molech was an ancient god worshiped throughout North Africa and the Middle East for whom propitiatory child sacrifice was practiced.  The nation of Israel was to be morally and religiously distinct by not sacrificing their children to the gods.  Throughout Israel’s history the most wicked among its kings violated these injunctions and sacrificed their children to the idols of other nations.  For instance, King Ahaz:

²Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. And he did not do what was right in the eyes of the LORD his God, as his father David had done, ³but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel.He even burned his son as an offering, according to the despicable practices of the nations whom the LORD drove out before the people of Israel.

The practice of child sacrifice to idols was a sign that the nation had descended to the depths of moral depravity.  We might not accept the willful murder of children in religious rituals, but as a society are we sacrificing the economic, spiritual, and emotional well-being of our children to the idols of pleasure, comfort, and money?

*Calculated by dividing the total revolving debt in the U.S. ($793.1 billion as of May 2011 data, as listed in the Federal Reserve’s July 2011 report on consumer credit) by the estimated number of households carrying credit card debt (50.2 million)

For instance, one of the issues I discussed/debated with my Theory of Knowledge classes today is the difference between our legal obligations and our moral responsibility, and whether Paterno did anything wrong even if he did not break the law. The distinction between what is moral and what is legal is critical in the analysis of what went wrong at Penn State, but it is one that I fear is becoming more confused in our country, especially among the youth.

There are so many weighty moral issues and dilemmas in this scandal that the biblical worldview sheds the brightest, purest light upon that I’ve decided to devote a series of at least three blog posts (following this one) on the scandal. Right now the topics will be:

1. How the moral principle of sacrificing our own interests for the sake of our children was not only violated here, but is being violated throughout our society.

2. How power ought to be used (to protect the weak) and how it was misused here (to exploit them).

3. The perils of utopian expectations projected onto societies (even mini-societies like a university town or a football program) and of conceiving of certain individuals as embodiments of moral perfections.

My mind is overflowing with rich, weighty idea on these topic and I’m excited about sharing them with you. I hope you’ll take the time to read and muse.

This new teaching position is the most intellectually exhausting job I’ve ever had, but also the most rewarding.  Interacting with bright kids over deep, weighty, and complex topics day in and day out expends so much of my mental energy that I’ve concluded that the only way I’ll ever write regularly on my blog this year is if I just concentrate on issues I’ve been discussing with my students.

I’m currently wrapping up a unit on Reason as a “way of knowing”  (other ways of knowing we will consider include perception, emotion, language, and even faith).  For each of way of knowing, we reflect on what we can know through this particular faculty and how it helps us make sense of the world.  Then we reflect critically on the problems with them, including their limitations and even their potential dangers/abuses.  So this week we discussed whether there were some areas of experience where reason has no real function.  Students identified such domains of experience as love, morality, and creativity as areas where reason seemed inadequate to comprehend at best.  Some debated the extent to which reason was needed in such experiences.

Eventually the problem of how we misuse reason to ‘rationalize’ immoral actions emerged.  I conveyed to my students an unforgettable lesson I had learned about this problem in a special history class I took in college on just the Holocaust.  Prior to about 1942, the Germans did not murder the Jews in concentration camps, for this concept had not yet been developed.  Their method, as they swept east through Poland and into the Soviet Union, was to line up all the Jews captured in a town or village in front of a freshly dug ditch, shoot them in the back of the head, and bury all the bodies in an instant mass grave.  It was because this method was so inefficient that they replaced it with the concentration camps.

Letters written by German soldiers to family back in Germany show the power of rationalization at work in even the most horrific human behaviors.  A common rationale was to acknowledge the severe emotional difficulties the soldiers experienced in killing innocent people but to use this reality to solicit admiration for the soldiers who were willing to set aside these emotional inhibitions and overcome these painful experiences out of a sense of duty to their country and the good of society.  This argument was even made with a sense of self-pity that they had to be the ones to perform these awful, but necessary acts.

The problem with reason as a way of knowing is that reason always has to start with something that is not based on reason:  we are always reasoning from something (i.e. premises) to something (i.e. conclusions).  So our reason is only as reliable as means for knowing truth as these starting points.  These starting points may be supplied by our unquestioned and even subliminal assumptions, prejudices, ambitions, desires, loyalties, none of which are essentially rational but are emotional, even spiritual.  These starting points will determine where reason will lead us such that even if our arguments are valid (having a correct structure) they are not necessarily true.  Yet the application of reason gives them the deceptive appearance of truth.

Whether reason leads us to the truth depends on whether we are sincerely seeking truth and whether our belief-forming processes, to borrow a concept from the preeminent American philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, are functioning correctly.  The real problem with reason then is really a problem with us.   We use reason to distort reality because sin has distorted us such that we do not seek truth but suppress it and that we form false beliefs far more readily than true ones.  Thus, the Apostle Paul describes those without the light of God’s Word as living in their “futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart” (Eph. 4:17-18).  Perhaps this is what Dostoevsky meant when he said, “If there is no God, everything is permissible.”  Everything is permissible because anything can be rationalized.