Andrew Murray’s Birthday

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Andrew Murray, Reformed pastor who worked chiefly in South Africa, was born on May 9, 1828 and died at a ripe old age in 1917. He wrote scores of books, most of them having 31 chapters and intended to be read a chapter at a time for one month. They are devotional books, and if the term “devotional book” makes you think of light-weight, empty-headed heart-warming comments, you should try out Andrew Murray. His work is powerful, rich in ideas, and mentally stimulating.

It’s hard for me to imagine anybody not respecting Andrew Murray, and even harder to imagine me respecting anybody who didn’t respect Andrew Murray. But recently I ran across some criticisms of Murray’s work, written at the time of their publication, by a theologian who I respect a great deal: B. B. Warfield. It might be perverse to post this on Andrew Murray’s birthday, when everybody ought to be encouraged to read this great spiritual writer, but Warfield vs. Murray is just too interesting to keep to myself.

This is Warfield’s review of one of my favorite Andrew Murray books, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer and in the church (London: James Nisbet, 1888). The review was published in The Presbyterian Review Vol. 10 No. 38 (1889) Page 334-5.

The author treats this greatest of all Christian subjects with adequate reverence and tender devoutness, but scarcely with sufficient judiciousness.

The mystical spirit has been always of the greatest value to the Church, and sometimes the sole preservative of true Christianity in a materialistic or legalistic age. But no tendency requires a stricter watchfulness to preserve it from extravagance. Mr. Murray’s mystical tendency shows itself especially in laying too great stress on the duty of being conscious of the Spirit’s working within us, and in an odd insistence on the duty of exercising “faith in the indwelling Spirit” as the source of life –as if the Scriptures proclaimed the necessity of any other faith than that in Christ. Here he introduces an undesirable dualism into the Christian life, finding two moments of development in it corresponding to the two objects of this twofold exercise of faith.

He rightly modifies Mr. Boys’ statement as to the nature of prayer for the Spirit, and modifies it in the right direction; but it is a great pity that he adopts the confusion of the charismatic and gracious work of the Spirit upon which Mr. Mahan bases his separation of regeneration and sanctification. We must not separate these two works of the Spirit: it is no more true that whom God foreknew, them also he predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son, and whom he predestinated, them also he called, and whom he called, them also he justified, than it is that whom he justified, them also he glorified, which surely includes more than external acceptance into the heavenly glory. The essence of this passage is to teach that God selects his children, chooses the goal to which he shall bring them, and brings them safely to that goal; and it justifies us in saying that without exception “whom he regenerates, them also he sanctifies.” The separation of these two begets the very evil which Mr. Murray deprecates, of failure to live up to our privileges.

Enthusiastic minds like Mr. Murray’s need to exercise special care in adopting forms of statement from other writers. We meet every now and then in the book with a phrase or a doctrine the implications of which have scarcely been thought through by him. For example, the crude trichotomistic anthropology of p. 34 is an excrescence on his thinking, and is adopted only to be laid aside. On p. 54 he speaks for a moment like a fully developed Schleiermacherite. And every now and then we strike against a sentence delivered as if it contained the very kernel of the Gospel, which quite puzzles us. For example, what idea of ‘holiness’ underlies the assertion that ‘It is as the Indwelling One that God is Holy,’ offered in defence of the statement that the Spirit is ‘the Holy Spirit’ only as sent forth by the incarnate Christ? And what shall we do with the statement made in the same connection, ‘It is not the Spirit of God as such, but the Spirit of Jesus that could be sent to dwell in us,’ in the face of the biblical usus loquendi? The book is marred everywhere by such straining after novel and striking forms of statement, a vice, we may add, very common with books of this class.

The Audacity of the State

By Douglas Farrow
Touchstone Magazine

It’s Bent on Bringing Down the House on the Family & the Church

Jeremiah Wright’s 1990 sermon, “The Audacity to Hope,” which lent Barack Obama the title of his electioneering book, has the story of Hannah as its text, and a painting by G. F. Watts

as its foil. Whether the lecture at which Wright first heard of the painting, or his own subsequent reading, included a consultation of G. K. Chesterton’s 1904 treatment of Watts, I can’t say. But Chesterton writes of Watts as follows:

Those who know the man himself, the quaint and courtly old man who is still living down at Limnerlease, know that if he has one trait more arresting than another, it is his almost absurd humility. He even disparages his own talent that he may insist rather upon his aims. His speech and gesture are simple, his manner polite to the point of being deprecating, his soul to all appearances of almost confounding clarity and innocence. But although these appearances accurately represent the truth about him, though he is in reality modest and even fantastically modest, there is another element in him, an element which was in almost all the great men of his time, and it is something which many in these days would call a kind of splendid and inspired impudence. It is that wonderful if simple power of preaching, of claiming to be heard, of believing in an internal message and destiny: it is the audacious faculty of mounting a pulpit. [ G. F. Watts, 1904]

The Reverend Wright and President Obama certainly have the courage to mount a pulpit and preach. They, too, show a certain “inspired impudence,” albeit not of a Victorian variety. Obama’s rhetoric in particular strikes me as lacking any underlying modesty or humility. But then our present political condition is one of immodesty, not least where the state is in view, which is why I have somewhat impudently turned the title of Obama’s book back upon itself.

The Savior State

When I speak of the audacity of the state, the kind of state I have in mind is what we may call the savior state. The main characteristic of the savior state is that it presents itself as the people’s guardian, as the guarantor of the citizen’s well-being. The savior state is the paternal state, which not only sees to the security of its territory and the enforcement of its laws but also promises to feed, clothe, house, educate, monitor, medicate, and in general to care for its people. Some prefer to call it the nanny state, but that label fails to reckon with its inherently religious character. The savior state does have a religious character, precisely in its paternalism, and may even be comfortable with religious rhetoric.

We are familiar with such rhetoric from ancient times. Was Caesar not soter? Did his coinage not mark him out as divi filius and pontifex maximus? “This, this is he,” says Anchises in Virgil’s Aeneid, the one you’ve been waiting for—“the man you have heard promised to you so often, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will once again establish the Golden Age in Latium, in the region once ruled by Saturn.”

We are familiar with it from modern times too. The savior state is the kind of state that Hobbes envisioned, or that Louis Du Moulin had in mind when he said that “the Commonwealth is a visible church.” It is the kind of state that emerges when it is assumed, as Herbert Thorndike pointed out in objection to both “Hobbism and Independency,” that “a man may be heir to Christ’s kingdom and endowed with Christ’s Spirit without being, or before he be, a member of God’s church.” It is the kind of state that Obama had in mind when, during the presidential campaign, he invited a Christian audience in South Carolina to see him as “an instrument of God” and to help him “create a Kingdom right here on Earth.” Presumably it is the kind of state Dorothy Cotton had in mind when she penned her new gospel ditty:

Tell me, tell me, why was Obama born?
Tell me, tell me, why was Obama born?
Somebody had to inspire our youth
Somebody had to hear every voice
Somebody had to tell the truth
That’s why Obama was born, my lordy,
That’s why Obama was born.

A single verse—there are five others—suffices, I think, to make the point.

Eschatological Reserve

It is customary these days to associate the religiously audacious state with theocratic Islamic countries such as Iran, or with Christendom, and to see them as belonging to a “medieval” mindset. The savior state should not be associated with Christendom, however, but with the demise of Christendom. It is a great achievement of the Enlightenment to have taken credit for the doctrine of the separation of church and state, when in fact it effectively abolished that doctrine.

Separation of church and state was predicated on the eschatological reserve on which Christianity insisted, a reserve that required a doctrine of “the Two” and refused to combine the kingly with the priestly in a single office or person. To combine these offices (with their respective “swords”) belonged to Christ alone, and any other claimant to both was ipso facto a kind of Antichrist.

This same eschatological reserve, while supporting all manner of advances in civilizing social and political life, repudiated all utopianism, whether progressive or regressive. It sought no return to a Golden Age, nor did it trumpet “Change you can believe in.” It knew of two loves and two cities made by those loves, and it sought only peace as far as possible between them and within them.

The disruption of that peace in the so-called Wars of Religion was what inspired a revolution under the banner of political liberalism, but the Wars of Religion were not merely Wars of Religion, and political liberalism has morphed into a comprehensive liberalism that is itself religious in character. Comprehensive liberalism will not hear of Christian eschatology as a matter of public and political relevance. Indeed, it has as one of its fundamental premises that Western society has done away with Christian theology (I do not say, all theology) as a matter of public and political relevance. And so it has. But that has opened the field to would-be saviors and utopians of every stripe. It has made possible the return of the savior state—the audacious state that aims at building a kingdom of God right here on earth.

Re-Sacralized State

We can hardly be surprised at this. The Erastianism which (to speak anachronistically) had long been trying to get the upper hand in Christendom, managed to do so in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation, though it was in England that it first succeeded. The year 1534 brought the Act of Succession, and a mandatory oath of allegiance that included assent to everything declared by parliament about marriage in general and about Henry’s in particular. Later that year, the Act of Supremacy also established the king’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction, making no mention of the proviso formerly attached to it by the bishops: “as far as the law of Christ allows.”

Christendom, of course, had already seen many princes who were determined to make the church do their bidding. But Henry, by writing his supremacy into the laws of the realm, inaugurated a new era. In that era, the ongoing process of subordinating religion to the demands of the state would outrun the monarchy as such, and the Church of England too. Not merely some, but all of the church’s authority over things public would gradually be expropriated, binding even the conscience—as the Act of Succession already did—to the authority of the state.

Today we live in a society that shrinks in horror from the very idea of established religion, something the American Constitution in any case forbids. Yet we live, even if we live in America, in states increasingly ready to withdraw conscience clauses not only from public servants but also from doctors and druggists and so forth, requiring them to violate the teachings of their religion and the dictates of their consciences in order to demonstrate their allegiance to the state.

In Britain, and increasingly in North America, even churches and charitable organizations are not exempted from laws that demand conformity to state-endorsed ideologies loaded with religious implications. Penalties for violation include heavy fines or even imprisonment. Thus have we come round to accepting Erastus’s invitation to the state to punish the sins of Christians, supplanting the church’s sacramental discipline. We have come round, that is, to the de-sacralization of the church and the re-sacralization of the state, which is once again taking a tyrannical turn.

A Modern-Day Samson

Tyranny can nowhere succeed without pulling down the two most prominent pillars of political freedom, the pillars that have always provided for a roof or shield over the individual and his conscience. One pillar is the natural family unit; the other is the religious community. Of course, these pillars are not everywhere equally strong or upright. They may themselves be transformed into instruments of tyranny by this or that form of idolatry. But they are pillars for the simple reason that they do not concede to the audacious and immodest state the total authority it craves.

The natural family unit confronts the state as an entity that claims rights not granted by the state but brought to it—rights the lawful state is obliged to recognize and respect. The religious community likewise claims rights and liberties that derive from a source other than the state, a source that transcends and relativizes the state.

These two pillars are beginning to crack, however, in the grip of a modern-day Samson. I mean precisely that muscular but (if he only knew it!) blind and captive creature called “the individual.” Not the individual of whom Kierkegaard spoke when he asserted, in view of the peculiar dignity bestowed on human beings by the incarnation of God, that “one is worth more than a thousand.” But rather the individual fancied by the likes of Bentham, whose dignity consists merely in the freedom to pursue his own interests in his own way, whose interests must therefore be balanced against those of his neighbor under the formula, “Each to count for one and no more than one.”

Even this individual comes to the state with rights of his own, rights that do not derive from the state; but the state is always the arbiter of his rights. Moreover, this individual is not natural (as the “state of nature” philosophers claim) but unnatural, just because he is naked and alone, brought into the world by no one, lacking kin or allegiance, unclothed by tradition—or at all events resentful of it. With such an individual the state that has tyrannical aspirations can happily do business, for he is the individual who has been taught to see himself as chained between the two great pillars of family and church, constrained and belittled by their conventions; who in his shame and fury is willing to call, not on God, but on the power of the state as if on God, to bring them down to the dust.

More than one modern philosopher has dallied with this Samson, betraying him into the hands of the state. John Stuart Mill comes to mind as one of the most successful. Mill’s seductive side is his libertarian individualism. The sting is in the statism that ultimately overpowers it.

Liberty Prior to Truth

It is not as though no one has noticed the contradiction. William Gairdner, for one, makes much of it in The Trouble with Democracy. He observes how the first three chapters of On Liberty lay the foundations of libertarianism, the cornerstone of which is the thesis that “mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” That thesis has as its corollary the so-called harm principle, which Mill puts as follows: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

To read these first three chapters is to be led out of the cave of civil coercion and social intolerance into the broad places of spontaneous experiments in individual freedom. “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” “No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free,” says Mill, “whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified.”

Gairdner has put his finger on the most seductive element in these chapters of On Liberty, which are pitched at just about the right level, intellectually and rhetorically, for crusading law clerks and higher-court justices. It lies in the notion that “liberty is prior to truth,” and indeed truth’s “efficient and final cause.” Gairdner is exactly right to put it this way. The power of On Liberty to overturn social and moral and religious conventions arises from Mill’s exciting and flattering suggestion that freedom will lead you into the truth. That iconoclastic gospel from the Romantic period still competes very successfully, tractable as it is to post-modern cynicism, with the older idol-smashing gospel of Jesus, that “the truth will set you free.”

Mill’s gospel takes no account of the creator/creature distinction, or of the fallenness of man. It takes no account of a freedom higher than freedom of choice, and gives no thought to how the truth of our own good will be recognized, or how that good will prove commensurate with the good of others. It is incurably romantic and naively optimistic. Most significantly, it fails to reckon with the fact that, in the absence of an overarching common good, based on a prior truth to which both the individual and the state are subject, the state must become the arbiter of all the competing goods of “free” individuals. It is not the individual who triumphs, then, in the appeal to a freedom that is prior to truth, but the state.

The Harm Principle

Behind Mill stands Rousseau, of course, whose rather more obvious statism Mill hoped to avoid. The basic premise of On Liberty is drawn from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that “liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not injure another.” And that dictum is in turn drawn from Rousseau, who got it from the Marquis d’Argenson, to whom we actually owe the harm principle: “In the Republic each man is perfectly free in all things that do no harm to others.” Rousseau’s intention in popularizing it was to downplay the obligations imposed by civil society, which he regarded as a corrupting more than a civilizing influence, especially in the form of family and church.

One’s primary obligations would hereafter be understood as obligations chiefly to oneself, on the one hand, and to the state on the other. That is what the harm principle is really all about—the elimination of the oppressive middle term between the individual and the state. This begs the question, however, as to what does or does not harm another, and who will decide that. Both Mill and Rousseau have ideas about that, and one gets glimpses of Mill’s ideas in the final chapters of On Liberty. Only glimpses, mind you, because Mill’s ideas aren’t really very libertarian after all.

Linda Raeder has also noted the contradiction in Mill, and her take on it is more cynical. In John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity she develops Joseph Hamburger’s argument that Mill’s purpose in On Liberty was to implement the first stage of his Comtean agenda; that is, to assist in the people’s liberation from Christian religion and morals via individualist ideals, with a view to their eventual re-indoctrination in the atheistic Religion of Humanity, the religion of duty to the greater good of man. In other words, first you must make of the Christian an individual; then you must free him from his “miserable individuality” (Mill’s expression in Utilitarianism) into the new community that is the society whose ideal object is not God but itself.

Here again, Mill reminds one of Rousseau. They have in common an idea of obligation to the res publica, religiously conceived, that is a deliberate alternative to the idea of obligation to God and to the neighbor. Like Gairdner, Raeder points to the influence of Mill’s wife, the Romantic poet Harriet Taylor, on the first three chapters of On Liberty. But liberty was really for great souls like Harriet, not for the masses. The masses must “be indoctrinated from infancy in the values and ethics created by the best and wisest specimens of humanity.” They must be domesticated, in other words, by the savior state.

State Control of Education

However one reads Mill, it is safe to say that the further we have pressed his libertarian principles, the deeper we have submerged ourselves in the statist element of his thought and compromised our freedom. The sphere of education, and the related sphere of family law, have become particularly important battlegrounds.

For Mill, as for Bentham and others of their persuasion, the lack of a properly domesticated society is due (as Jacob Talmon puts it in The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy) “not to man but to the failure of governments to form man with the help of education and proper laws.” Working on the premise that “in an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the increase which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest,” Mill invites us to imagine a situation in which

this feeling of unity [would] be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion, directed, as it once was, in the case of religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and by the practice of it.

Today that isn’t at all difficult to imagine.

Take Quebec, for example, where public education in North America was begun back in the 1660s by the diligent labors of the Vicar Apostolic, François de Laval, and a small band of hard-working colonists. The remarkable system they built has been almost completely colonized by the state, which has now instituted a mandatory curriculum in religion and ethics designed to instill just such a feeling in every young citizen (even those in private or religious schools, though that been challenged in the courts).

More proximate than Mill, in the inspiration of the program, is a 1996 report by the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, titled Learning: The Treasure Within, which has globalized Mill’s basic idea. “We must be guided,” says Jacques Delors in that report, “by the Utopian aim of steering the world toward greater mutual understanding, a greater sense of responsibility and greater solidarity, through acceptance of our spiritual and cultural differences.”

One should not be deceived by the reference to acceptance of differences. What this actually means in practice is increased state intervention in areas constitutionally reserved for civil society, so as to suppress or neutralize the visions children inherit from their familial and religious communities, in favor of the vision of “the best and wisest specimens of humanity” that such commissions can muster.

State Control of Children

The ascendancy of the state over civil society, which it ought rather to serve, is virtually guaranteed where the state exercises full control over education—particularly if the goal of education, as one professor boldly asserted in a recent McGill forum, is to release children from the control of their parents. In America, one notes, there have long been advocates of the still more radical idea that children should be regarded as the state’s property, to be educated on a compulsory basis according to state needs and requirements. That is a thesis likely to be advanced with renewed urgency as the implications of our declining birthrate begin to be grasped.

Nor is it altogether lacking support from the law. In 1840 Justice Paige of Connecticut opined in Mercein v. People that “the moment a child is born it owes allegiance to the government of the country of its birth, and is entitled to the protection of the government.” He further explained that “with the coming of civil society the father’s sovereign power passed to the chief or government of the nation.” While the state, for its own convenience, passes part of this power back to the parents, it maintains sovereignty over the question of what is in the best interests of the child. The Colorado Supreme Court partly endorsed that view in a 1910 child custody case:

Though nature gives to parents the right to the custody of their own children, and such right is scarcely less sacred than the right to life and liberty, and is manifested in all animal life, yet among mankind the necessity for government has forced the recognition of the rule that the perpetuity of the state is the first consideration, and parental authority itself is subordinate to this supreme power.

The pattern we have already observed is very much in evidence here. Radical critics such as John Taylor Gatto are not mistaken in pointing out the use of (basically Christian) doctrines of individual destiny, and of subjective rights, to separate children from their natural communities and attach them to artifacts of the state. In Canada we have performed costly exercises of public penance over such strategies in connection with the native residential schools, yet we are now doing something very similar with everyone but natives. The ever more vigorous expansion of public welfare programs, which we have witnessed on both sides of the border, works on exactly the same principle, of course: Citizens are separated from both their natural family units and their religious communities by a cultivated reliance on the state.

What is more, the normalization of divorce—one of the most significant features of our contraceptive culture—has ever more deeply insinuated the state into the child-rearing process and so into the sphere of the family. The “great and pernicious error” against which Pope Leo XIII warned in Rerum Novarum has thus gradually become the norm; namely, “that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household.”

Naked Before the State

To make matters very much worse, the parens patriae power has recently received an enormous boost from another feature of the contraceptive society: same-sex “marriage.” Though most people have not yet realized it, the advent of same-sex marriage has transformed marriage from a pre-political institution conferring “divine and human rights,” as the Roman jurist Modestinus put it, into a mere legal construct at the gift and disposal of the state. The legal terrain has thus changed dramatically, along with the cultural—something I have tried to show in a little book called Nation of Bastards. The family is ceasing to be what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights confesses it to be, viz., “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

Replaced by a kaleidoscope of transient sexual and psychological configurations, which serve chiefly to make children of adults and adults of children, the declining family is ceding enormous tracts of social and legal territory to the state. At law, parent-child relationships are losing their a priori status and privilege. Crafty fools ask foolish fools, “What harm does same-sex marriage do to your marriage, or to your family?” The truthful answer is: Same-sex marriage makes us all chattels of the state, because the state, in presuming to define the substance rather than the accidents of marriage, has made marriage itself a state artifact.

Those who have trouble connecting the dots here—which lamentably includes many defenders of the traditional institution—should take time to consider the fact that the new “inclusive” definition, in striking procreation from the purview of marriage, has left both parents and children without a lawful institution that respects and guarantees their natural rights to each other.

Opening up marriage in principle to non-generative unions really means closing it in principle to the inter-generational interests on which it has always been based. From now on, the handling of those interests will be entirely dependent, legally speaking, upon the good graces of the state. Every citizen will stand naked before the state, unclothed by his most fundamental community, unbuffered by any mediating institution with its own inherent rights. Nor should it be overlooked that, what the state has the power to define, it has the power to define again and again, and even to dispense with.

Admittedly, even the state has not yet fully connected the dots, but that is happening with remarkable rapidity, as concurrent moves in education demonstrate. States and international agencies are increasingly prone to argue that children have the right to a state-directed education and that this right must be protected by the state against the interference of parents. The logic is not difficult to follow: If marriage is procreative, it is also educative; but if it is not procreative, it is not educative either—educative rights and responsibilities are up for grabs, and it is the state that will do the grabbing. The pillar that is the family appears to have cracked nearly through.

Samson’s Revenge, or the Ichabod Effect

In a 2008 speech at the Catholic University of America, James Cardinal Stafford—who apparently does not see in Obama the humility that Chesterton saw in Watts—deployed his meditations on St. John’s Apocalypse “to strengthen the Catholic faithful . . . against the ever increasing pretensions of the state [to make] itself absolute.” Cyril of Jerusalem would have thought him wise: “If thou hast a child according to the flesh,” said Cyril, “admonish him now; if thou has begotten one through catechizing, put him also on his guard, lest he receive the false one as the true. For ‘the mystery of iniquity doth already work.’”

Had I space, I would now try to show you the way in which that mystery has also been at work in religion, producing cracks in the other pillar that holds up the roof which shields the individual from the state. That will have to await another opportunity, however, except insofar as I can hint at it by adverting again in conclusion to the story of Hannah.

I trust you know the story. Hannah meets Eli, who, sitting by the temple gate, mistakes her fervent prayer for drunkenness and rebukes her for being a base woman, only to discover that she is quite sober after all, and that she has been praying out of “great anxiety and vexation.” He blesses her. When Samuel is born as the answer to her prayers, Hannah delivers Samuel into Eli’s care in fulfillment of her vow to God.

That must have been a rather frightening prospect, given what everybody knew about the goings-on at the temple in those days. Eli’s sons, whom the text describes as “worthless men [who] had no regard for the Lord,” were the ones who had taken charge of it, and Eli apparently hadn’t the backbone necessary to bring them into line. (“They would not listen to the voice of their father,” we are told, “for it was the will of the Lord to slay them.”)

But Samuel is not corrupted by the sons of Eli, a fate from which God preserves him. Instead, he is given the unhappy burden of disclosing to Eli that his family line is about to be brought to a bitter end. That is just what happens during the rout of Israel by the Philistines. Blind old Eli, learning that both his sons and the ark of God have fallen to the Philistines, falls backwards from his seat at the gate, breaks his neck, and dies. His daughter-in-law, Phineas’s wife—who dies in childbirth on the same day—names her son Ichabod, “the Glory is not,” for the Glory, she says, “has departed from Israel.”

The Reverend Wright didn’t mention any of that in his sermon. I thought I would mention it, however, for the audacity of the savior state is rather like the audacity of Hophni and Phineas, who apparently believed that the house of God, and the people of God, were there merely for plunder. The savior state has its own aims and motivations, of course, motivations that may seem (despite the ever more frequent corruption scandals) much nobler than those of Eli’s sons. But the process is much the same, and the final outcome will also be the same, if its advance is not checked. That the state must collapse, when the pillars of family and church are gone, is the secret that the state itself does not know. This secret I call Samson’s revenge, but we may also call it the Ichabod effect.

The Hopeful Christian

Christianity is not about revenge, however, and it is certainly not about despair. It is, as Jeremiah Wright said, about hope (the title of Watt’s painting). Christians deny that the state is savior because they believe that God is savior. Their hope is not, like Mill’s, in the state; nor, like libertarians’, in themselves. Their hope, like Hannah’s, is in God.

So how shall they express their hope in God? What shall they do in the face of the audacious state, which threatens to bring them and their society to ruin?

Since I live in Québec, I will begin with Québec, where there is something Eli-like about many of our older clergy, and something Phineas and Hophni-like about certain of our civil servants, who follow a line of priests that defected from the Catholic Church during the Quiet Revolution. Which is to say, the former often content themselves with a rueful, defeated glance at the latter, while the latter proceed pretty much as if they had assumed the place of the former.

The hopeful Christian—hope being something quite different from mere optimism—will not be taken in by any of this. The Ministry of Education, though it issues documents these days that read like upside-down versions of Gravissimum educationis, is not the new regime in the house of the Lord. Moreover, Christians have undertaken no vow to deliver their children over to it, to be shaped by the state for its own ends. Rather, they have taken vows to God to see that their children are raised according to the faith. They must therefore demand of the state respect for their right to have their children eat from their own educational table. And they must be willing, like Bishop Laval and his “handful of colonists and scanty resources,” to invest what resources they have in providing such a table.

Something similar, I suspect, can be said in the land of Obama and Wright, though its history and habits are different. To be sure, there is a much stronger tradition there of resistance to the overweening state, but the forces of the state are also far greater. In America, Christians will require the courage of Dorothy Cotton’s hero, Martin Luther King, Jr., if they are to repair the pillars of freedom that have sustained such damage, and to roll back the impressive gains that have lately been made by the savior state. In America, too, the churches will need to renew their pedagogical mission and to fight for freedom of education. The natural family will need somehow to reclaim, if it can, the rights it is losing.

And in both countries, men and women will need to rediscover Hannah’s hunger for progeny, for the contraceptive mentality and the practice of abortion contribute very directly to the Ichabod effect.

Inspired Impudence

The hopeful Christian will not give up on any of this. But there is something else to be said. The cracks that have appeared in the pillar that is the family appeared first in the pillar that is religion. For, in Christianity, religion is still more fundamental than the family, as Jesus made clear. “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” The Christian religion is decidedly not an individualistic religion, however. Rather, it is an ecclesial religion that sacramentally embraces and transcends the family. That, alas, was obscured by the sectarianism into which it degenerated in the wake of the Protestant Reformation—the very same sectarianism that revived the beast that is the audacious state.

The hopeful Christian, then, if his hope is not misplaced, will eschew both individualism and sectarianism, seeking the union and communion of the Church. Like Hannah, who gave up her only son to serve the people of God in the temple of God, he will seek always the good of the Church, the precariousness of the times notwithstanding. If he acts with “inspired impudence,” it will be an inspired impudence that begins in prayer at the temple gate. That is where Hannah began, and it is where we, too, should begin. And if we, who are sober, are thought drunk and disorderly by the state and our fellow-citizens, or even by some of our priests, so be it.

Douglas Farrow is Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. This article is based on a lecture Dr. Farrow gave at the Stead Centre for Ethics and Values in Evanston, Illinois, in March 2009.

Happy 300th birthday, David Hume!

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

David Hume (May 7, 1711 – August 25, 1776) was born this day, three hundred years ago, and died just a month and a half after the founding of the United States of America. He is known as being the third in the series of British philosophers in the school of Empiricism, as opposed to the Continental philosophers in the school of Rationalism.

The Rationalists were Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Pascal, and they basically argued that man has inherent within himself the light of reason which can make sense of the universe. Their starting-point is logic, their reasoning is deductive, and they believed that all internally naturally possess such epistemological potential.

In contrast, the Empiricists (John Locke was English; George Berkeley was Irish; and David Hume was Scottish) believed that man was born as a tabula rasa, devoid of internal knowledge, and all truth is derived from externals such as sensory perception and experience.

Among the Empiricists, Locke (1632-1704) was a devout Christian and Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglican bishop. However, Hume is known for being a staunch atheist. How did he veer so far from his Empiricist predecessors?

David Hume was best known for being a skeptic. He took Locke’s representative theory of knowledge to the furthest possible conclusion. Locke said that the mind does not really have any direct knowledge of the outside world, because the outside world is always filtered through the senses to arrive at the mind. The mind then takes that data and interprets it. But if we cannot know anything except that which we derive from external sense perception, then Hume reasoned: maybe we cannot even trust that. Perhaps we cannot prove anything at all, not even our own existence!

Hume was especially famous for his denial of causation. He could not prove that any two objects or actions can actually have a connection between them outside of coincidental correlation. For example, if you put your hand in a fire and are burned, he would argue that you cannot definitely say that that fire necessarily burned you, or that every fire in the world would burn you.

This led him to his path of atheism. In his denial of causation, he ultimately denied a first cause, or Prime Mover, i.e. God. He especially did not think that one could put moral attributes on this first cause, or that miracles could ever occur. Ironically, his objection to miracles lay in the fact that they defy laws of nature, which is odd coming from a man who doubts any reality which comes to us through sensory data! Contrast this to Locke who argued that miracles provide evidence for faith. Hume took the inverse argument: miracles are so nonsensical that only people who had faith can believe in them!

Though much of what Hume taught can be debunked, especially considering how logically inconsistent he was, he is mainly credited with being the founder of modern skepticism which roots his significance in history and as someone worth studying, even if we disagree with him.

Atheism’s Gift

By Christopher Killheffer
Touchstone Magazine

On the Good Questions That Dispel False Beliefs

In discussing the nourishing character of Scripture, C. S. Lewis noted the importance of confronting the Bible in all its moods and voices, even “something in itself so anti-religious as the nihilism of Ecclesiastes.” It’s a striking idea, that Scripture should speak in the tones of the anti-religious, and perhaps it’s an even more striking idea to suggest that exposing ourselves to those caustic tones could somehow be beneficial to us. What good could a blast of anti-religious nihilism do for a Christian life?

It’s a question well worth asking in our own day, when anti-religious forces, especially the proponents of atheism, are both on the rise and growing more confident in their challenge. Richard Dawkins’s much-discussed The God Delusion is only the most successful of many recent books by the so-called New Atheists, a school whose newness is found mostly in the assertiveness and even aggressiveness of its tone.

An Ad Campaign

While these authors are at times shrill and belittling, other atheists and atheist groups have pursued gentler, more appealing ways to promote their message. Groups in Europe and North America have developed clever, attractive ads that are displayed on billboards and city buses, usually during the Christmas season. One of last year’s ads, sponsored by the American Humanist Association, showed smiling atheists in Santa hats, with the text: “No God? No problem. Be good for goodness’ sake.”

These ads avoid the deliberate offensiveness that mars much of New Atheism—compare their tone to that of Christopher Hitchens, whose most recent book is titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. And yet this more amiable campaign has met with outrage from many Christians. A dean at Liberty University complained that the ads were the work of “the ultimate Grinch.” Bishops in Spain called them “an attack on all religions.” Some groups have led efforts to pressure advertising companies to pull the ads. When an ad campaign in the UK came to a close, the director of Christian Voice cheered that “the forces of darkness are in retreat.” Apparently, the ads have even inspired violent reactions: Some billboard companies reported receiving threats, and ads in some places have been repeatedly vandalized.

Emphatic denunciations, demands that disagreement be silenced, the identification of opponents with evil powers: Such a posture of besieged defensiveness has characterized the Christian response not just to this particular campaign, but often in the overall dialogue with a culture that does not understand or accept our beliefs.

The Ichthys Battle

Perhaps the most emblematic example of the over-heavy counterpunch is to be found in the silent battle that has been taking place on the backs of cars in recent years. The ichthys symbol, with the name of Jesus inscribed inside the silhouette of a fish, has been displayed by Christians for many years—a graceful, non-aggressive expression of faith. Atheists responded with a witty modification that illustrates their view: an ichthys that has grown tiny legs, with Darwin’s name replacing that of Jesus.

The response of many Christians has been to chuckle with appreciation and go on displaying the original Jesus ichthys. But others have brought out a new version: a large Jesus fish, with mouth wide open, gobbling up a smaller Darwin ichthys. That image sadly captures what we’re losing in these counterpunches; in this exchange we, not our opponents, have replaced a graceful and confident image of Christ with one that is a caricature of intolerance and aggression, unable to respond to a clever barb with anything but a club.

That kind of response does no good for the cause of spreading the gospel, signifying as it does a religion that has little confidence in its own truth. But aside from what we’re losing in the public debate, we are also missing an opportunity to grow in our own faith, and perhaps even to have our faith purified. If we listen to atheist messages with curiosity rather than defensiveness, we will find that many of them are not simply poking us in the eye; their content is often interesting and may possibly even be useful in helping us better understand what we do and do not believe.

Listening to the Challenger

An example of how listening to atheism can benefit us may be seen in Pope Benedict XVI’s recent book Jesus of Nazareth. The book is a meditation on the early life of Jesus, often movingly expressed, but by far the most powerful and striking points come when Benedict brings into discussion the views of those who do not see Jesus as the Christ, or even as a good man at all. Throughout the text, Benedict carries on an extended, respectful dialogue with Rabbi Jacob Neusner, and then, as he turns to the Beatitudes, goes so far as to invoke the angry attack of Nietzsche.

Benedict does not simply state where he thinks Nietzsche is wrong; he gives the philosopher room to speak his own mind, even quoting him, so that in the middle of this meditation on Christ we find the words: “What can be the greatest sin on earth so far? Surely the words of the man who said, ‘Woe to those who laugh now.’” Benedict not only quotes this cry of protest, he affirms the importance of its challenge, sincerely asking Nietzsche’s question in his own words: “Is the direction our Lord shows us in the Beatitudes and in the corresponding warnings actually the right one? Is it really such a bad thing to be rich, to eat one’s fill, to laugh, to be praised?”

The pope allows this challenge to be heard and seriously considered because it helps us see more clearly what the Beatitudes really are. We have all heard countless times from the pulpit that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus “turns the values of the world upside-down.” But how easily those words glide over us, leaving no impression at all. Nietzsche’s protest, containing the palpable anger of the natural man, allows us to feel the impact of that inversion of values that Christ preaches; it forces us to consider, perhaps for the first time, what those explosive sayings of Jesus actually mean and whether we have any intention of following them.

What would happen if we were to follow Benedict’s example by bringing a spirit of openness and curiosity to our own dialogue with the anti-religious? Consider the ad on the bus, with its text, “No God? No problem. Be good for goodness’ sake.” That final phrase is a beautifully succinct statement of one of atheism’s more compelling objections. What good is virtue, they are asking, if it is done for the reward of heaven? Isn’t there something more noble and real about goodness that is not done “for credit”? Isn’t goodness actually robbed of its essential character when it is really only a mask for self-interest?

These are very good questions, and ones we perhaps don’t often ask ourselves. They may not occur to us, but they certainly occur to atheists, who tend to see our religion as resembling the childish philosophy embodied in the holiday song the ad is quoting: “You better watch out, you better not cry . . . Santa Claus is coming to town.” Christianity itself does not see God as a Kris Kringle coming round to give out candy for good behavior and coal for bad, but has that idea crept into our own belief? What do we actually mean by “heaven”? A reward for goodness, or the enjoyment of goodness for its own sake?

A Sharpening Tool

These are questions that may be discomfiting if taken seriously; we’ve certainly all known Christians who seem to make an idol of “salvation,” as if it is something separate from goodness and God, but it’s easy to miss how much this view clouds our own belief. The gift of atheism among us is that it can, if we take its challenge seriously, help clear away those clouds, leaving us a faith that is purified of naïve and alien ideas.

Lewis, considering the problem of salvation-idolatry, pierces the fog with his characteristic precision: “God cannot give us happiness apart from Himself; there is no such thing.” It’s no accident that such clarity is found in a man like Lewis, who took full advantage of the atheism that surrounded him, who indeed welcomed the openness of its challenge as a means to sharpen his own thought and faith.

Ecclesia Americana

By Ken Myers
Touchstone Magazine

Last week, while driving on an Interstate in the Southeast, I spotted a billboard that announced: “A church for people who don’t like church.” This description prompted me to imagine exactly what it was that the target market for this invitation might find objectionable about “church” as conventionally experienced.

It is unlikely that the congregation in question was ditching all references to God or to spiritual renewal (although who God is and what constitutes spiritual renewal might well be reconfigured in this setting). And while there are “churches” that eschew making any significant moral demands on their constituents, I don’t know that this was in the minds of the billboard’s presenters. However, since the leaders of this religious enterprise seem so eager not to offend potential clients, I also doubt that vigorous and sustained exhortation will be on the agenda come Sunday.

Driving further down the road, I wondered whether the NFL could dream up some sort of football for people who don’t like football. Might marketers at NASCAR re-tool stock-car racing for people who don’t like stock-car racing? Could the imagineers at Disney build a theme park for people who don’t like theme parks? In such scenarios (and countless others), what would need to be eliminated in order to attract the disaffected? And would the event still retain its identity when stripped of allegedly accidental characteristics?

History of the “Unchurch”

I’m guessing that what people typically dislike about “church” (not, interestingly, “the Church”) includes ritual, tradition, reverent silence, hierarchy, mystery, and doctrinal orthodoxy rooted in historic and learned debates. These are the things that Americans have typically and dramatically disliked about “church” for a long time.

The history of that dislike explains a great deal about American religion and American culture more generally. That history had its defining moment in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a heady season of revolutionary enthusiasm for “liberty,” understood in terms of the absolute competence of individuals and of the shucking off of old forms of authority.

To my knowledge, there is no better account of that history than Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity. One cannot hope to make sense of the various twists and shifts and emergings of contemporary American religion without examining the way the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian visions of human flourishing stamped American Christianity with an individualistic character that fundamentally reshaped the American Church and its message. Hatch brilliantly traces the personalities and movements that advanced the notion that—in the words of one popular preacher of the time—“religion is a matter between God and individuals.” No creeds. No ecumenical councils. No authoritative community. No educated clergy. The unchurch: church for people who don’t like church.

A Passion for Equality

In the first several decades of the young republic’s life, many religious Americans came to believe that “the Spirit of ’76” was Pentecost 2.0, an event propelling the Church into a new level of spiritual power. Hatch uncovers how the radical egalitarianism of the late eighteenth century—a “passion for equality” stemming from a novel confidence in individual reason and common sense that had been advanced by the pioneers of the Enlightenment—came to reshape religious institutions and redefine the typical understanding of religious experience. As Hatch explains,

the Revolution dramatically expanded the circle of people who considered themselves capable of thinking for themselves about issues of freedom, equality, sovereignty, and representation. Respect for authority, tradition, station, and education eroded. Ordinary people moved toward these new horizons aided by a powerful new vocabulary, a rhetoric of liberty that would not have occurred to them were it not for the Revolution.

This vocabulary was applied without dilution to the life of God’s people. As a result, “The correct solution to any important problem, political, legal, or religious, would have to appear to be the people’s choice.”

Hatch describes how “the people” dismissed the alleged lessons of history and tradition and “refused to defer to learned theologians and traditional orthodoxies.” They followed Kant’s path to Enlightenment by insisting on judging for themselves “rather than depending upon the mediations of an educated elite.” Egalitarianism was allied with strong anti-intellectual biases.

Cultural Captivity

One of the subplots in Hatch’s story is how the untethering of the Church’s life from a tradition of thoughtful reflection produced “a society in which grasping entrepreneurs could erect new forms of tyranny in religious, political, and economic institutions.” The rejection of existing forms of authority did not magically transform the world into a place with no authorities; the repudiation of the Church’s tradition simply meant embracing a less venerable legacy of more recently developed (and more dubious) ways of thinking, often with disastrous results. “Attempting to erase the difference between leaders and followers,” Hatch concludes, “Americans opened the door to religious demagogues.”

The Democratization of American Christianity is a cautionary tale about how the Church surrenders its vocation when it allies itself with dubious cultural trends. Since we are going through another season of enthusiasm about the power of populism—much of it inflected with anti-intellectual confidence—it is a particularly good time for Christians to reflect on the cultural captivity experienced in the life of the Church when her members embrace these most American of sentiments.

Irrigating Deserts

By Ken Myers
Touchstone Magazine

Many years ago, I had a conversation with philosopher and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender about the work of C. S. Lewis. As we were discussing why Lewis was such a compelling apologist, Gil said, “I think he’s not so much trying to argue anybody into thinking something as he is simply trying to understand what it would mean to believe something, through the enormous gifts he has for illustration and metaphor and story.”

Lewis’s imaginative skills were thus focused less on the mere credibility or plausibility of belief (which are the concerns of most apologists) and more on the ramifications of belief: If the gospel is true, here is how the world will look. Even “belief” had a more comprehensive scope in his thinking than most apologists recognize. The gospel wasn’t just a message about getting saved; it was a message of salvation in the context of a bigger story about the meaning of everything. It presupposed a cosmology and a rich anthropology. As in the Creed, Lewis’s defense of the faith began with a tacit but rich affirmation of the Maker of heaven and earth, who made all things in a particular way, the shape of which his creatures would do well to honor.

As a great lover of stories, Lewis knew that Christianity had a big story to tell. He also was acutely aware that there were fatally misleading ways of telling the story about the world and all that is in it. The Screwtape Letters is such a powerful work because Lewis described so well how all of life looks from the viewpoint of a devilish tempter. In his fiction, many of his villains are comprehensively wrong, not just mistaken on this or that point of doctrine. The way they look at the whole of life is out of whack. In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs observes that Lewis had a shrewd eye for “what Marxists call ‘ideology,’ that is, the system of beliefs that are so taken for granted in a given culture that hardly anyone even notices that they are beliefs.”

Fatal Indoctrination

In all of his writings, Lewis always presented Christianity as something that was true, and as something that should be embraced precisely because it was true ( not because it was felt to be a ticket to happiness or safety). The Christian account of God and Creation and Man and Sin was the Way Things Really Are. So, as Jacobs observes, Lewis was profoundly troubled by the fact that “after being indoctrinated into a systematic disregard of truth and falsehood, people can find themselves unable to recognize the difference even when it is put before them plainly.”

Such fatal indoctrination comes through many cultural conduits, and Lewis damns them all at one time or another in his books: journalism, political rhetoric, advertising, bad literature. But he seems to regard the false indoctrination practiced by educators as the most insidious and pervasive. It was, Lewis makes clear, the shape of his education that made Mark Studdock (in That Hideous Strength) such a man of straw and so vulnerable to being corrupted.

Given Lewis’s concern about the disordering effect of misguided schooling, it is not at all surprising to read the somber epigraph to the first chapter of The Abolition of Man, a book whose subtitle identifies it as Reflections on Education. Lewis begins his scathing critique of a common mentality of modern educators by citing two lines from a fifteenth-century carol, “Unto Us a Boy Is Born,” that suggest a Herodian quality in the teachers in question: “So he sent the word to slay/ and slew the little childer.” The pedagogical practices under scrutiny amount to a slaughter of the innocents.

A Dehumanizing Lie

The Abolition of Man is a powerful tract defending the assumption that value judgments (in ethics, aesthetics, and everyday life) are tied to objective reality. The book does not prove the reality of what Lewis calls “the Tao” (and what others, as he points out, have called “Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes”). Rather than offer proof for the Tao (which Lewis says would be impossible, since there would be nothing higher to appeal to in making such a proof), Lewis teases out what the world would look like (and what Man becomes) if the subjectivists are right. If all value judgments are expressions of mere feeling and preference, then human beings are merely trousered apes.

Because feelings are so highly valued in modern culture, some Christians assume that the response is to train reason so as to resist the blandishments of emotion. Lewis strongly disagrees. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”

Education rightly ordered must properly train the sentiments, sensibilities, and affections of students. After all, “approvals and disapprovals are . . . responses to an objective order,” and thus we should seek to align our emotions with the Way Things Really Are. A person so trained will understand that the chief end of a truly human life is to conform the soul to reality, not (as the modern mind assumes) to attempt to remake reality to fit our desires.

Subjectivism is one of the deep, dehumanizing lies of modern culture. It devalues emotion as well as reason, truth as well as tradition. Subjectivist assumptions prevent many unbelievers from becoming believers, and they deter many believers from living fully as believers. I think every Christian teacher, pastor, and parent should wrestle with The Abolition of Man and ask how teaching and the shape of everyday life should be altered if Lewis’s prophetic warnings are true.

Arousing Ourselves to Death

By Russell D. Moore
Touchstone Magazine

Porn Is Ravaging Our Churches

The couple will typically tell me first about how stressful their lives are. Maybe he’s lost his job. Perhaps she’s working two. Maybe their children are rowdy or the house is chaotic. But usually, if we talk long enough about their fracturing marriage, there is a sense that something else is afoot. The couple will tell me about how their sex life is near extinction. The man, she’ll tell me, is an emotional wraith, dead to intimacy with his wife. The woman will be frustrated, with what seems to him to be a wild mixture of rage and humiliation. They just don’t know what’s wrong, but they know a Christian marriage isn’t supposed to feel like this.

It’s at this point that I interrupt the discussion, look at the man, and ask, “So how long has the porn been going on?” The couple will look at each other, and then look at me, with a kind of fearful incredulity that communicates the question, “How do you know?” For a few minutes, they seek to reorient themselves to this exposure, wondering, I suppose, if I’m an Old Testament prophet or a New Age psychic. But I’m not either. One doesn’t have to be to sense the spirit of this age. In our time, pornography is the destroying angel of (especially male) Eros, and it’s time the Church faced the horror of this truth.

A Perversion of the Good

In one sense, the issue of pornography is not new at all. Human lust for covenant-breaking sexuality is rooted, Jesus tells us, not in anything external to us but in our fallen passions (Matt. 5:27–28). Every generation of Christians has faced the pornography question, whether with Dionysian pagan art, or with Jazz Age fan-dancers, or with airbrushed centerfolds.

But the situation is unique now. Pornography is not now simply available. With the advent of Internet technology, with its near universal reach and its promise of secrecy, pornography has been weaponized. In some sectors, especially of our young male populations, it is nearly universal. This universality is not, contrary to the propaganda of the pornographers themselves, a sign of its innocence but of its power.

Like all sin, pornography is by definition a perversion of the good, in this case of the mystery of the male and female together in a one-flesh union. The urge toward this is strong indeed, precisely because our Creator, in manifold wisdom, decided that human creatures would not subdivide like amoeba, but that the male would need the female, and the female the male, for the race to survive.

Beyond that is an even greater mystery still. The Apostle Paul tells us that human sexuality is not arbitrary, nor is it merely natural. It is, he reveals, itself an icon of God’s ultimate purpose in the gospel. The one-flesh union is a sign of the union between Christ and his Church (Eph. 5:22–33). If human sexuality is patterned after the very Alpha and Omega of the cosmos, no wonder it is so difficult to restrain. No wonder it seems so wild.

An Ecclesial Issue

Pornography, by its very nature, leads to insatiability. One picture, stored in the memory, will never be enough to continue arousing a man. God, after all, designed the man and the woman to be satisfied not with a single sex act but with an ongoing appetite for each other, for the unitive and procreative union of flesh to flesh and soul to soul. One seeking the mystery outside of this covenantal union will never find what he is looking for. He will never find an image naked enough to satisfy him.

Yes, pornography is an issue of public morality. We have spoken to this repeatedly. A culture that doesn’t safeguard the dignity of human sexuality is a culture on its way to nihilism. Yes, pornography is an issue of social justice. After all, pornography, at least as we know it today, is rarely about mere “images.” Behind those images stand real persons, created in the image of God, who through some sad journey to a far country of despair have tumbled down to this. We agree with those—often even secular feminists with whom we disagree on much—who say that a pornographic culture hurts women and children through the objectification of women, the trafficking of children, and the commodification of sex.

But before pornography is a legal or cultural or moral issue, it is an ecclesial one. Judgment must, as Scripture tells us, begin with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). The man who is sitting upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs their children to soccer practice might well be a religionless, secular culture warrior. But he is just as likely to be one of our church members, maybe even one who reads Touchstone magazine.

To begin to address this crisis, we call on the church of Jesus Christ to take seriously what is at stake here. Pornography is about more than biological impulses or cultural nihilism; it is about worship. The Christian Church, in all places and in all times and in all communions, has taught that we are not alone in the universe. One aspect of “mere Christianity” is that there are unseen spiritual beings afoot in the cosmos who seek to do us harm.

These powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that a disruption of the marital sexual bond defaces the embodied icon of Christ and his Church (Eph. 5:32). They know that pornography, in the life of a follower of Jesus Christ, joins Christ, spiritually, to an electronic prostitute or, more likely, to a vast digital harem of electronic prostitutes (1 Cor. 6:16). And these accusing powers know that those who unrepentantly practice these things “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

Sham Repentance

This means that our churches cannot simply rely on accountability groups and blocking software to combat this scourge. We must see this as darkly spiritual and, first and foremost, reclaim a Christian vision of human sexuality. Internet pornography, after all, is downstream from a view of human sexuality that is self-focused and fruitless. In an era when sex is merely about achieving orgasm by any means necessary, we must reiterate what the Christian Church has always taught: sex is about the covenant union of one man with one woman, a union that is intended to bring about flourishing, love, happiness, and, yes, sensual pleasure.

But it is also intended to bring about new life. An incarnational picture of sexuality, rooted in the mystery of the gospel, is the furthest thing possible from the utilitarian ugliness of pornography. Our first step must be to show why pornography leaves a person, and a culture, so numb and empty. Human sexuality is, as our colleague Robert George put it, more than “body parts rubbing against one another.”

Moreover, we must call for repentance in our own churches, and this will be more difficult than it sounds. Pornography brings with it a kind of sham repentance. Immediately after an “episode” with pornography is “over,” the participant usually, especially at first, feels a kind of revulsion and self-loathing. An adulterer or a fornicator of the more traditional kind can at least rationalize that he is “in love.” Most people, though, don’t write poetry or romantic songs about this isolated, masturbatory compulsion. Even the pagans who find pornography pleasant and necessary seem to recognize that it is kind of pitiful.

Typically, for those who identify as Christians, a pornographic episode is followed by a resolve “never to do it again.” Often these (again, typically) men promise to seek out some sort of accountability and leave it behind. But often this resolve is less about a convicted conscience than about a sated appetite. Even Esau, belly full of red stew, wept for his lost birthright, but “found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears” (Heb. 12:17).

Without genuine repentance, the cycle of temptation will grind on. The powers of this age will collaborate with the biological impulses to make it seem irresistible again. The pseudo-repentance will only keep the sin in hiding. This is devil work, and is among those things our Lord Jesus came to destroy (1 John 3:8).

Genuine Repentance

Our churches must show what genuine repentance looks like. This does not mean setting up legalistic rules and regulations against the use of technology itself. This, the Apostle Paul tells us, is “of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col. 2:23). It does mean, however, that every point of temptation comes with a corresponding means of escape (1 Cor. 10:13). For some especially vulnerable members of our churches, this will mean giving up the use of home computers or of Internet technology altogether.

Such a suggestion seems absurd to many, as though we were suggesting that some Christians might do well to stop eating or sleeping. But human beings have lived thousands of years without computers and without the Internet. Is our Lord Jesus right when he says it is better to cut off one’s hand or gouge out one’s eye rather than be condemned by our sin? (Matt. 5:29). How much less is it, then, to ask that one cut through a cable?

We must also empower women in our congregations to grapple as Christians with husbands enslaved to pornography. We believe, and have taught emphatically, that wives should submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:23). But, in Scripture and in Christian teaching, all submission (except to the Lord directly) has limits. The husband’s body, the Bible says, belongs to his wife (1 Cor. 7:4). She need not subject herself to being the physical outlet for her husband’s pornographically supplied fantasies. If both are members of a Christian church, and if he will not repent, we counsel the wife to follow our Lord’s steps (laid out in Matt. 18:15–20) to call a brother to repentance, up to and including church action.

The Gospel Answer

Finally, and most importantly, we call on the church to counteract pornography with what the demonic powers fear most: the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus, after all, walked with us, before us, into the testing of the appetites. His enemy and ours offered him a solitary masturbatory meal, to be wolfed down in the desert. Jesus turned back Satan’s offer, not because he did not hunger, but because he wanted a marriage supper, joined with his Church “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).

The powers want any child of Adam, especially a brother or sister of the Lord Jesus, to cringe in hiding from accusation. Through the confession of sin, though, any conscience, including one darkened by pornography, can be cleansed. By the blood of Christ, received in repentance and faith, no satanic indictment can stand, not even one that comes with an archived Internet history.