The Letter Kills
“The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” Reinhold Niebuhr
Niebuhr meant one needs no faith to accept the doctrine, because it is demonstrated to us empirically every day. Rousseau was wrong about a great many things and perhaps on this point most of all. He asserted that humans are born naturally good and are corrupted by society. It is a wonder that anyone ever took this claim seriously. Everyone who has ever been around toddlers knows no one needs to teach them to be selfish. “Mine” may be the most natural word of all. Perhaps Rousseau was never actually around a toddler since he abandoned all five of his children at an orphanage (which makes his highly influential works on parenting advice one of history’s most stunning examples of sheer hypocrisy).
Sin abounds and efforts to control it through written codes are doomed to at best partial success if not outright failure. I was thinking about this the other day when I saw a man park his motorcycle in a handicapped spot. Curious, I looked and sure enough he had a handicapped sticker on his plate. I thought to myself that someone who can manhandle an 850-pound Harley Electra Glide probably doesn’t need to park 20 feet closer to the door. But under the DMV rules he qualified for the sticker for whatever reason. He was complying with the letter of the law while obviously defying its spirit.
Consider the income tax. It is really a fairly simple concept. “Add up you income and send a percentage of it to the government.” But the income tax code and its accompanying regulations devote literally millions of words to trying to close all of the loopholes that countless legions of lawyers and accountants have opened in that simple concept. I could multiply examples but you get the point. There is not enough ink in the world to cover all of the infinite ways people get around rules.
Is there a solution? Yes. The Sermon on the Mount. Jesus knew that the problem with formulaic compliance with rules is not that the rules are bad but that the spirit of the rules is easily subverted. This is the point of his series of “you’ve heard it said, but I say” examples in which he called out the religious establishment of the day for just this. Jesus’ solution was to trash the entire system of rules the religious authorities had erected and put in its place one overarching rule that cannot be evaded: Love God and your neighbor. “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40.
The law of love is perfect because it subsumes all other laws and allows for exceptions in appropriate circumstances. If our concern is always focused on the good of the other, we automatically comply with God’s moral commands. The letter of the law is never sufficient because the letter does not change hearts hardened by original sin. But love breaks our hearts of stone and gives us a heart of flesh and frees us to follow the Spirit.
“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” 2 Corinthians 3:6. “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Romans 7:6.
People never wonder how the modern world appeared.
They live in a fishbowl just assuming what they see is natural and always existed. But it didn’t always exist and started in one small place.
So what did cause the modern world? It obviously didn’t always exist as I said and didn’t slowly progress because it happened in one place by happenstance and relatively quickly by world history standards. And we can point to where and when if we are honest about it. It didn’t appear with wealth or else the Spanish or Portuguese would be the mot likely origin. But they were obviously not.
Christianity was a necessary but not a sufficient cause. This article very rightfully points to a necessary ingredient of a love of neighbor as part of a flourishing society. One that progresses continually. But 1500 years after Christianity began, the modern world had not began. So it wasn’t sufficient.
The missing ingredient was individual freedom at the lowest levels. When freedom expanded in 16th and 17th century England due to religious wars between Protestants, accommodations began to be made at the lowest levels. This led within a couple of generations to the average persons being allowed to keep the rewards of their innovations. This led to wealth accumulation but what tempered the abuse of these freedoms was Christian morality. Obviously not completely but it was part of the culture when individual freedom arrived.
This has nothing to do with Protestantism but with the fact that there were competing versions of it. Today we are seeing both Christianity and individual freedom disappearing.
Will we see our modern utopia also disappear? If the two things that made it happen also disappear how can the modern world survive? I do not mean the technology will disappear but that this technology will be used to support a completely different world.