His Passion, Our Choices

By Patrick Henry Reardon
Touchstone Magazine

Matthew’s Trial of Jesus Is About More than Jesus

Although any day is a good occasion to read the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s Passion, it is hardly surprising that the ancient lectionaries of the Christian Church especially prescribe the solemn, public reading of these texts each spring—March or April—during Holy Week. An early witness to this prescription was Egeria, a nun from Gaul, who penned a priceless account of her travels in the Holy Land during the late fourth century, probably between 381 and 384.

Because she was fortunate to be present among the Christians in Jerusalem during Lent, Holy Week, and the Paschal season, Egeria’s account includes descriptions of the customs and rituals associated with the liturgical observance of those solemn seasons, including the public reading of the Passion narratives on Good Friday. This passage is worth quoting at length:

The entire time from the sixth to the ninth hour is occupied by public readings. They all concern the things that Jesus suffered; first they have the psalms on this theme, then the Apostolic Epistles and Acts which deal with it, and finally the passages from the Gospels. In this way they read the prophecies about what the Lord was to suffer, and then the Gospels about what he did suffer. Thus do they continue the readings and hymns from the sixth to the ninth hour, showing to all the people by the witness of the Gospels and the writings of the Apostles that the Lord actually suffered everything the prophets had foretold. They teach the people, then, for these three hours, that nothing which took place had not been foretold, and all that was foretold was completely fulfilled. Dispersed among these readings are prayers, all fitting to the day. It is impressive to see the way all the people are moved by these readings, and how they mourn. You could hardly believe how every single one of them weeps during those three hours, old and young together, because of the way the Lord suffered for us. ( The Travels of Egeria)

Jesus on Trial

Integral to the Gospel stories of the Passion are their records of the Lord’s two trials: the “Jewish” trial before the Sanhedrin and the “Roman” trial before Pontius Pilate. Jesus’ appearance before Pilate was ultimately included in the creedal narrative of the Church, including the Nicene Creed. This development apparently began early. If we bear in mind that a primitive word used for the baptismal creed was homologia (cf. 2 Cor. 9:13; Heb. 3:1; 4:14; 10:23), we perhaps detect in 1 Timothy 6:12–13 a first step toward the insertion of Jesus’ trial before Pilate into the Church’s confessional recitation:

Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, to which you were also called and have confessed [ homologesas] the good confession [ homologian] in the presence of many witnesses [ martyron]. I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed [ martyresantos] the good confession [ homologian] before Pontius Pilate. . . .

Although each of the four Gospels includes both of Jesus’ trials, the accounts differ quite a bit in the details. Sometimes these variations indicate source material peculiar to an individual Evangelist. For instance, it seems likely that Luke’s story of Jesus’ appearance before Herod (Luke 23:6–12) comes from his personal familiarity with Joanna, the wife of Chuza, who served in Herod’s court (8:3). In addition, only Luke includes the detail of the Lord’s turning to look at Peter after the third denial (22:61).

Likewise, only John tells of an interrogation of Jesus before Annas (18:12–13, 24), and only he seems familiar with the details of a conversation between Jesus and Pilate (John 18:34–37; 19:8–11). Again, Matthew alone appears to know that Pilate’s wife became interested in Jesus’ trial (27:19).

Sometimes, however, the differences between the four accounts of Jesus’ trials are better explained as particular features of the individual narrative preferences of the four authors. For instance, John provides not a single detail of Jesus’ interrogation by Caiaphas but says that Jesus was taken directly to Pontius Pilate in the morning (19:28). Thus, John records two distinct interrogations of Jesus by the Jewish leaders, the second ending in the morning.

Luke simplifies the narrative by saying the arrested Jesus was taken directly to the high priest’s presence (22:54). Although he tells us nothing about an interrogation until the morning (22:66), the details of that inquiry (22:67–71) closely resemble the interrogation before the Sanhedrin that Mark and Matthew portray as taking place during the night.

Another instance of a particular narrative preference is John’s arrangement of Peter’s three denials of Jesus. Each of these denials appears in all four Gospels, but only John separates them within the full narrative (John 18:15–27).

Mark is alone among the Evangelists in adding the detail that the rooster crowed twice (14:30,68,72). In fact, the first and second cockcrows refer to two different times during the night, the latter one coming at the break of dawn. Mark thus indicates the fairly lengthy time over which Peter’s three denials took place, the last one happening toward the morning. This prolonged lapse of time heightens our sense of Peter’s treachery.

In short, the differences between the four accounts of the trials of Jesus should be attributed to one or both of two causes: different sources available to the four Evangelists, and the narrative preference of each of them.

The Two Trials in Matthew

The present reflections are a study of the trial narratives in Matthew, with a view to elucidating certain theological and moral concerns I believe to be particular to this author. Matthew is the only Evangelist to insert, within both the trials, a story relative to one of the original Twelve—a story about Simon Peter in the trial before the Sanhedrin, and an account of Judas Iscariot in the trial before Pilate. Thus, Matthew’s structure of the two trials may be outlined in this way:

A. The trial by the Sanhedrin

1. Jesus’ appearance before the Sanhedrin (26:57–68)
2. The story of Peter (26:69–75)
3. The Sanhedrin’s plot to kill Jesus (27:1)

B. The trial by Pilate

1. Jesus appears before Pilate (27:2)
2. The story of Judas (27:3–10)
3. Pilate’s decision to kill Jesus (27:11–26)

Matthew’s double construction accomplishes two things: First, it varies the narrative by alternating stages: the story begins with Jesus, goes to Peter, comes back to Jesus, goes to Judas, and finally returns to Jesus once again.

This disposition to move quickly from scene to scene is very characteristic of Matthew’s style, as though to indicate that various activities are happening at once or nearly so. Thus, Matthew shifts from Jesus’ final prophecy of the Passion (26:1–2) to the Sanhedrin’s plot against his life (26:3–5), and then to the home of Simon in Bethany (26:6–13). From there, he follows Judas to the Sanhedrin again (26:14–16), and then returns to Jesus in Bethany (26:17). All these things take place on the same day (Spy Wednesday).

On the next day (Maundy Thursday), Matthew follows the two disciples to Jerusalem, where they make arrangements for the Seder (26:19); Jesus arrives in the next verse. Once in Jerusalem, Jesus moves from the room of the Seder to the Mount of Olives (26:30) and Gethsemane (26:36). After Jesus is arrested and taken to the house of Caiaphas (26:57), Matthew moves us to the courtyard of that residence to get Peter situated (26:58). He then goes back inside for Jesus’ trial (26:59). When this is over, he leaves Jesus inside and goes to talk about Peter’s denials in the courtyard (26:69). He returns briefly to the house of Caiaphas to gather all the characters of the drama and move them to the judgment seat of Pilate (27:1–2).

Once Matthew gets this scene established, he breaks off in order to tell of the final hours of the life of Judas (27:3–10). He then comes back to record the trial of Jesus before Pilate, but there is yet another interruption in order to introduce Pilate’s wife (27:19). Only then does he return to Jesus’ trial.

Consequently, Matthew’s Passion narrative is a weave of various scenes and several activities, involving various people, all of which happen at different places. Of the four New Testament stories of the Passion, Matthew’s is the most complicated.

Second, in joining a specific disciple to each of Jesus’ interrogations—before the Sanhedrin and before Pilate—Matthew demonstrates a concern about discipleship within the Passion narrative. For this Evangelist, the drama of the Cross is not isolated from the trial and trauma of the soul. That is to say, what transpires in the salvation wrought by God in his Son finds a resonating correspondence in the human struggle of failure and repentance—treachery and despair—in the souls of Peter and Judas. The ironic tragedy of the Cross resounds in the inner battle of the heart.

Thus, Matthew’s narrative construction encourages the reader to contrast Peter and Judas as two types of response to sin and redemption. In fact, Christians over the centuries have followed Matthew’s encouragement in this respect, as hundreds of extant sermons demonstrate.

The Jewish Trial: Peter

In his account of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, Matthew follows rather closely the Markan sequence by inserting Peter’s denials between the nocturnal interrogation of Jesus and the Sanhedrin’s determination, on the following morning, to seek his death. By this juxtaposition, in which both Jesus and Peter are subjected to questioning, the author invites us to compare the two cases: Jesus and Peter are both on trial, as it were, and we cannot help but contrast them.

One observes, for instance, that in both cases there are testimonies given under oath: “I put you under oath [ exsorkizo] by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God!” (26:63). And, “Then he began to curse and swear [omnuein] , “I do not know the Man!” (26:74). In each of these “trials,” moreover, perjured testimony is given, first by suborned witnesses and then by Peter (26:59–60, 70, 72, 74).

Peter, sitting in the courtyard outside the high priest’s residence, is approached by a servant maid, who believes she recognizes him as a companion of Jesus (26:69). He stands accused of only one thing—being “with” ( meta) Jesus, a charge that Matthew is at pains to sustain by his constant references to Peter’s being with Jesus all through this chapter (26:20,29,36,40,51). Apparently surrounded by a crowd, Peter denies the allegation in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody (26:70). Matthew adds this detail to Mark’s version of the story (14:68), thus heightening the sense of Peter’s perfidy and fear.

Peter moves to the gateway (Matt. 26:71), perhaps to escape from the light of the fire that John mentions. This time, another of the high priest’s maidservants announces to everyone—and not just to Peter—that he was “with” ( meta) Jesus. Whereas in the first case the maid spoke of “Jesus of Galilee,” in the present she speaks of “Jesus of Nazareth.” The point of these references will become clear in the third denial, prompted by the remark about Peter’s Galilean accent (26:73). The more Peter protests his unfamiliarity with Jesus, the more occasions he provides for the bystanders to detect the regional inflections in his speech.

Thus, Peter is driven to greater desperation and begins completely to lose control. The evidence of this breakdown is found in his recourse to an oath in the second denial (26:72) and to cursing and swearing in the third (26:74). The reader recalls Matthew’s earlier inclusion of a dominical injunction against swearing (5:33–37; cf. 23:16–22).

After the third denial, Peter goes “outside” (26:72). One gains the impression that Peter is moving away, endeavoring to escape a growing crisis and the total unraveling of his moral character.

Immediately ( evthys—26:74) after the third denial, the rooster crows, prompting Peter to remember what Jesus predicted (26:75). He remembers, leaves the place, and breaks into tears, now aware that he has added his own failure to the tragedy of the night. What Peter had boldly considered unthinkable (26:35) has now become a reality: He has publicly repudiated Jesus. The crowing of the rooster occasions the final test of Peter’s character, and his tears represent the very dissolution of his soul. Peter’s heart lies broken and crushed beneath the weight of his guilt. The man he thought he was is now proven to be nothing more than a phantom.

Matthew, however, like each of the other Evangelists, describes Peter’s repentance as immediate. No more than a few seconds separate his downfall from his rising up, and this prompt conversion is likewise incorporated into the narrative of the Passion. Just as failure is possible to any Christian, so the door to repentance is closed to no one. Peter’s tear-filled repentance is integral to the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. It is as though his repentance is the first fruit to grow on the tree of the Cross.

The Roman Trial: Judas

One is struck—perhaps even surprised—by Matthew’s insertion of the suicide of Judas within his account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. As soon as the author puts Jesus in Pilate’s presence (27:2), he leaves the scene in order to describe what Judas did.

There is ample reason to believe that Matthew is not guided here by a strict chronological sequence. We observe, for instance, that Matthew pictures the chief priests as talking with Judas in the temple at the very time they are talking with Pilate at the pretorium (27:2–3). We also recall that Luke does not narrate the death of Judas until somewhat later (Acts 1:18–20).

It is rather easy to demonstrate, in fact, that both writers tell the story of Judas’s death at a place appropriate to the theological points they want to make. Here, we consider only the case of Matthew, where the suicide of Judas fits into his larger account of Jesus’ trials.

A first concern of Matthew is to contrast the death of the innocent Jesus with that of the guilty Judas.

Second, this arrangement also permits Matthew to compare Judas and Pilate. Each man recognizes the innocence of Jesus (27:4,18,23–24), but both men refuse the path of responsibility and repentance (27:5,24). Each of them assumes an unwarranted authority over a human life, and in each the reader recognizes the profile of a coward.

Third, there is a contrast between Judas and Peter. Although Judas feels remorse at his treachery (metameletheis), Matthew avoids the vocabulary of repentance (metanoia, for instance) in his description of Judas. Indeed, this story, which follows almost immediately on the repentance of Peter (26:75), invites a contrast between these two disciples with respect to their sins: repentance in the one case, despair in the other.

“I have sinned,” says Judas— hemarton—but he quickly finds he cannot undo the sin. In fact, his efforts are mocked by men hardened in sin, who feel no remorse. The chief priests, playing Mephisto to Judas’s Faust, have purchased a soul at market price and are quite content with the deal.

A fourth concern of Matthew here is to compare Pilate with the officials of the Sanhedrin. Judas, in pronouncing Jesus “innocent” (athõos—27:4), prepares for the self-assessment of Pilate, who somehow recognizes that he, too, is on trial: “I am innocent athõos] of the blood of this person” (27:24). Likewise, when Pilate goes on to tell the Jews, “You see to it” (hymeis opsesthe), he simply pluralizes what the chief priests told Judas: “You see to it” (sy opsei).

Judas finds himself in the state described by St. Paul, who writes of the Law’s inability to justify the sinner. Judas has fallen under “the curse of the Law” (Gal. 3:13). Specifically, the conscience of Judas is faced with the divine judgment, “Cursed is he who takes a bribe to slay a soul of innocent blood” (my literal translation of the LXX of Deuteronomy 27:25). Deuteronomy’s expression, “soul of innocent blood”— pyschen haimatos athõou—is obviously the reference Matthew has in mind when Judas says he sinned in his betrayal of “innocent blood”— haima athõon (27:4). Judas, then is the man cursed by the Law, and whom the Law can in no wise justify (cf. 26:24).

The suicide of Judas finds its Old Testament prefiguration in that of Ahitophel (2 Sam. 17:23), and similar circumstances attend both cases. Judas betrays the true king; indeed, Jesus’ kingship is the burden of Pilate’s question that immediately follows the death of Judas (Matt. 27:11). With respect to Ahitophel, we recall that he, too, betrayed the true king, David, in order to side with Absalom, the usurper. Both betrayers come to the identical fate of suicide by hanging.

The contrast between Peter and Judas is, finally, a matter of choice between repentance and despair. Even within the limits of his many manifest faults—recorded in all four Gospels (as well as the Letter to the Galatians)—we recognize in Peter a fundamentally repentant heart. When he does succumb to temptation, his repentance is immediate. Judas, in contrast, when he realizes the great gravity of his offense, immediately strives in vain to make things right by his own efforts. Failing this, he falls into despair. In Matthew’s view, the mercy of God and the powerlessness of man in his sins is the difference between Peter and Judas.

Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Christ in the Psalms, Christ in His Saints, and The Trial of Job (all from Conciliar Press). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Creating Equal

By Louis Markos
Touchstone Magazine

On the Inegalitarian Leadership of Jesus.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the United States’ Declaration of Independence boldly asserts, “that all men are created equal.” This noble sentiment declares unapologetically that all human beings—no matter their age or sex, culture or religion, race or ethnicity, social class or educational achievement—possess intrinsic dignity and worth. Unfortunately, over the last century, America—and even more Western Europe—has increasingly shifted its focus from political liberty to social engineering, from equal protection before the law to sameness mandated by law, from equality to egalitarianism. The focus today is not on equal creation but on creating equality.

This almost obsessive urge to create equality has spread even to the Church herself. The last several decades in America have witnessed many Christians’ slow surrender to egalitarian values and the projection of those values back onto Jesus, the Bible, and church doctrine and discipline.

To be sure, certain facets of the church have at times adopted a partly egalitarian vision. The early Church described in Acts 2:42–47 engaged in a voluntary sharing of goods and properties. Catholic monastic orders, past and present, have lived communally, their members taking vows of poverty. In the centuries since the Reformation, Protestant sects from the Anabaptists to the Amish have, in keeping with the priesthood of all believers (see 1 Pet. 2:4–5), broken down much of the hierarchical structure between clergy and laity.

Still, even the most radical of Protestant sects or the most severe of monastic orders retain high respect for the authority of the Bible and for the moral wisdom of spiritual leaders (abbot, elder, pastor). In the egalitarianism of today, however, the Bible is treated as a malleable text and church doctrines and disciplines subject to constant revision.

Thus, if the phrasing of the Bible stands in the way of an egalitarian view of the sexes, you simply change the phrasing of the Bible—along with hymns, creeds, and prayer books—to fit your gender-neutral vision of church, marriage, and society. Likewise, if you decide that original sin or substitutionary atonement or eternal damnation might “damage” the self-esteem of the more sensitive in the congregation, you simply find new ways to “understand” these cornerstones of biblical doctrine. Or, to come to the defining egalitarian issue of our day: If you think no distinctions should be made between heterosexual and homosexual “lifestyles,” then you simply jettison the Church’s (and humanity’s!) age-old understanding of marriage and human sexuality so as to embrace same-sex “marriage.”

The Heresy of Inclusivism

Note that Christians who insist on the sanction and blessing of same-sex “marriage” are not saying: “Well, society’s changing, and if the Church doesn’t keep up with the change, she will be looked upon as old-fashioned and irrelevant to the concerns of today.” No, they are saying something far more radical and troubling: “ Because we are Christians, we should be in the forefront of those who are currently fighting for gay ‘marriage.’”

How could those who call themselves Christians take such a position? The answer is that many have accepted what I must call, without apology, the heresy of inclusivism. Though rarely stated so baldly, this heresy posits that at the core of Jesus’ life and teachings is a simple, non-negotiable message of absolute love, tolerance, and inclusivism that should determine every aspect of the faith. Any belief or practice that jeopardizes this message is to be rejected, even if it is stated clearly in the Bible, accepted by the historic Church, and believed by nearly all Christians since the founding of the faith. Any statements or doctrines that portray Jesus as exclusivist or intolerant, even if spoken by Jesus himself, must either be rejected or reinterpreted to fit in with his “true” message of inclusivism and tolerance.

Love is to be “expanded”—that is, reduced—to a nonjudgmental attitude that desires only that people find and experience happiness in their own way. But what of that bold, Christ-like love that will do what it must to rescue a friend from a self-destructive lifestyle, that would rather see a family member suffer pain than live in bondage to sin? Well, if by self-destructive lifestyle and sin you mean that he does not recycle his garbage or support affirmative action or that he votes Republican, I guess it would be okay to set him straight in a loving way. But if you mean that a Christian might be impelled by love to disagree with the lifestyle “preferences” of a brother in Christ and help guide him back to the road of biblical morality, then you simply don’t understand Jesus’ message.

Egalitarian or Not?

Well, then, let us boldly ask the question: Was Jesus an egalitarian or not? To the Christian advocate of same-sex “marriage,” the answer is as obvious as the incident that proves it. Didn’t Jesus, just before celebrating the Last Supper, wash his disciples’ feet? And wasn’t foot-washing a task performed by household slaves? Surely in humbling himself like this, Jesus was clearly demonstrating to posterity that the distinctions between teacher and student, master and servant, leader and follower were no longer valid. Surely this was his way of leveling the old hierarchies and ushering in the egalitarian Age of Aquarius.

It was not.

Right before giving the account of the foot-washing, John says the following: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist” (John 13:3–4). Notice that Jesus performs the humble act of washing his disciples’ feet from a position of strength and authority. He does not do it because he suddenly realizes that he is the same as everyone else and has no right to claim special authority, but because he knows fully and uniquely who he is.

But the real key to the meaning of the passage comes afterward, when Jesus returns to his seat and explains carefully to his disciples the meaning of the action he has just performed:

“Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” (vv. 12–17)

Had Jesus wanted to announce the tearing down of all distinctions and ranks, this would have been the ideal time to do it. Instead, he pointedly reiterates that servants are not greater than their masters and messengers are not greater than those who sent them. Indeed, he informs the disciples in no uncertain terms that they are absolutely correct to refer to him as Teacher and Lord. He even, two chapters later, exhorts his disciples to remember that “no servant is greater than his master” (15:20).

Jesus’ deliberate retention of social relationships that embody an inequality of power and status is not confined to John’s Gospel; it is also given voice in the synoptic Gospels: “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master” (Matt. 10:24); “A student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40).

A New Type of Leadership

What is Jesus “doing” if he is not abolishing all hierarchy and ushering in a new egalitarian order? He is instituting a new type of leadership, one that loves and serves those over whom it has power and authority. Luke records a saying of Jesus that, like the foot-washing episode in John, balances an endorsement of distinctions with a call to servant leadership:

Jesus said to [his disciples], “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:25–27)

Again, the servant is not greater than his master, yet the true Christian master will manifest his authority through service. Once we accept this, we can see how Jesus’ “intolerant” condemnation of sin and his “tolerant” love for the sinner go hand-in-hand. Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus forgive sins; we never see him condone or endorse the sinful choices and lifestyle that placed the sinner in need of forgiveness. His word to the sinful woman caught in adultery is not “Continue as you are,” but “Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). The very fact that he forgives her sin is a clear indication that he considers her actions to be sinful.

Christ offers salvation freely to all who repent and follow him, yet he does not cease condemning the Pharisees for their hypocrisy and hardness of heart (Matt. 23). When asked if only a few people are going to be saved, he answers: “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to” (Luke 13:24).

The Divine Perspective

No figure in the Bible speaks more about hell and punishment than the meek and loving Jesus; his very presence in a town tends to polarize people. Images of sifting, judging, and separating abound in his parables; indeed, though we are taught in Sunday school that he spoke in parables so that everyone could understand him, Jesus himself says that he spoke in parables so that “those on the outside” would not understand (Mark 4:10–12). “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth,” he proclaims. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

All this is not to say that Jesus is “unfair” or that he is a harsh taskmaster who is unaware that we all struggle under different weights and have different gifts and resources. In the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30), he tells of three servants who are entrusted with five talents, two talents, and one talent respectively. The third, lazy servant buries his talent in the ground and receives both “exclusivist” scorn and “intolerant” condemnation from his master.

But what of the first two? According to the parable, the first makes five more talents, while the second makes only two. We might therefore expect the first servant to be praised more highly than the second. But this, unexpectedly, does not occur. Instead, the master bestows upon both servants the exact same blessing: “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.”

God is just and merciful. He judges us not by what we begin with, but by what we do with what we have been given. He pays us the compliment of treating us as unique individuals, and does not seek to press us all into the same mold.

In a magisterial passage from Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the divine perspective of God:

The deity does not regard the human race collectively. He surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed; and He discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them.

God is not like those modern humanitarians who love humanity but care little for human beings. To God, each of us has not only a “corporate” value as a member of the human race but also an individual value that distinguishes us from every other human being who has ever lived or will live on this earth. Neither on earth nor in heaven does God desire to collapse that distinctiveness.

For he who created us knows that we are not all equal!

Louis Markos (www.Loumarkos.com) is Professor of English at Houston Baptist University; he is the author, most recently, of From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP) and Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age (Sapientia). He lives with his wife and two children in Houston, where they attend a Southern Baptist Church.

Wasted by Watching

By J. Daryl Charles
Touchstone Magazine

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

It is twenty-four years ago that the late Neil Postman published what was arguably his most significant piece of cultural criticism. Therein Postman argued that television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Thus, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that entertainment on the television screen has becomes the metaphor of all discourse; it is that, off the screen, the same metaphor prevails. Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; rather, they exchange images.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was intended simultaneously to be “an inquiry into the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century”—the decline of “the age of exposition” and the ascendancy of the age of television—and a lamentation. The changeover lamented by Postman has “dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse.” As a result, the substance of American cultural life—from politics to education to business to religion—“must be changed and re-cast in terms that are most suitable to television.”

A Discerning Social Critic

Despite knee-jerk reactions from Hollywood and New York City at the time, Postman cannot be thought (then or now) a mere cultural handwringer by any stretch of the imagination. This becomes clear to anyone who has read his other works—particularly The Disappearance of Childhood, The End of Education, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Conscientious Objections and Technopology. Rather, Postman’s work has shown him to be a social critic of the first order and a supremely discerning observer of cultural trends.

Indeed, Postman’s cultural analysis, even when more than two decades removed, finds confirmation and parallels in more recent social critiques that deserve to be taken seriously. One thinks, for example, of Francis Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption, James Davison Hunter’s The Death of Character, and Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture.

Berman, a cultural historian, offers a secularized—though far more readable—version of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Both writers are united in the conviction that ours is a society of moral cave dwellers. By both accounts, we have undergone a catastrophic shift in understanding that has warped our ability to do moral reasoning at all, plunging us into a new “dark age” of sorts. Berman’s call for a “new monastic option” to preserve what is enduring in the midst of this period of cultural decline is primarily literary in character. In this way he stands in broad agreement with Postman: A major factor in this cultural collapse is the replacement of reading and communication with entertainment.

Prophetic Sources

In his opening chapter, titled “The Medium as the Metaphor,” Postman acknowledges his debt to two principal sources. Marshall McLuhan was an unknown English teacher when Postman met him in the 1950s. “I believed then, as I believe now,” Postman writes, “that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools of communication.”

Postman’s “media as epistemology” argument is owing to yet another source of inspiration—a source that in standard reviews of his work receives short shrift or goes entirely unnoticed.

[M]y interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. . . . I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. . . . The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. (emphasis added)

TV as Anti-Communication

While part of Postman’s book chronicles a rather condensed yet fascinating and informed history of public discourse, Postman focuses with laser-like precision, abetted by an acerbic wit, on the implications of the shift from exposition to entertainment in American culture. The reader comes away, twenty-some years later, stunned by the author’s prescient insight. These are not the rantings of a cultural Luddite who is hell-bent on decrying the broadcast media or preventing progress. Given the explosion of the Internet, the information glut of the last two decades, and the trivialization by the electronic media of murder, mayhem, and geopolitics in general, Postman appears more prophetic today than when he wrote the book.

By way of example, consider for a moment the “Now this . . .” approach to news broadcasting. Postman believed that as unnerving as the words “Uh oh” are—whether uttered by an airplane pilot, a surgeon, or a security guard—the two words “Now this” are even more ominous. Why? Because, as Postman reminds us, they are not spoken with a measure of puzzlement or regret, but rather almost with a kind of idiot’s delight. But they are scary as well because of what they signify. To wit: there is no murder so brutal, no natural disaster so devastating,

no political blunder so costly that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster in the interest of a commercial.

Should this approach to what is newsworthy not disturb us? Viewers are permitted neither the luxury nor the necessity of entering into any thoughtful reflection on what might possibly be significant to their lives—and the lives of others. And while television technically did not initiate the shift from word to image (as telegraphy and photography are thought by Postman to have done), television has nurtured it to a place of perverse maturity. Because the medium of television subsists in images and not words, news is not merely fragmented; it is without context, without consequence, and therefore, without value.

Television as epistemology, moreover, becomes in Postman’s view “anti-communication,” since as a form of discourse it both abandons and militates against logic, reason, reflection, and sequential thinking. The philosophical term for this is nihilism, while in psychiatric terms we call this schizophrenia. Even the relatively esteemed Robert MacNeil, of The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, has stated the crass reality of television discourse—off camera, of course: Television news aims

not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. You are required . . . to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time . . . [C]omplexity must be avoided . . . nuances are dispensable . . . [and] qualifications impede the simple message . . . [whereby] visual stimulation is a substitute for thought. . . .

Remember: this is Robert MacNeil talking, not Jerry Springer.

More Huxley than Orwell

Amusing Ourselves to Death begins and ends with a Huxleyian warning, which forms a rhetorically effective inclusio in the book. Twenty-four years ago, Postman was writing in the aftermath of the year for which George Orwell’s dystopia was named. Postman was part of a chorus of literary enthusiasts who were critiquing Orwell’s cautionary tale. The year arrived but the dire prophecy did not. Postman’s critique, however, was different from most. He believed that not Orwell but Aldous Huxley had it right:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Indeed Postman seems to have a point. For, as Postman interprets the two dystopians, Orwell feared “those who would ban books,” while Huxley feared that eventually “there would be no reason to ban a book, since "there would be no one who wanted to read one." Orwell feared “those who would deprive us of information”; Huxley, by contrast, feared that truth would be “drowned in a sea of irrelevance,” a consequence of our own “passivity and egoism.”

In the end, as seen through Postman, Orwell feared that we would become a “captive” culture, whereas Huxley feared that we would become a “trivial” culture, failing to take seriously “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Accordingly, Orwell’s concern ultimately was that what we hate [italicize "hate"] will ruin; Huxley, by contrast, believed that what we love [italicize "love"] will ruin us.

Fulfilled Prophecy

It is uncontroversial today to assert that television truly has become the medium and the metaphor of American culture. Our society’s adjustment and acquiescence to television as epistemology is now virtually complete, so that Survivor, Fear Factor, and American Idol—and the endless facsimiles of the sub-genre they have spawned—constitute reality for many of us.

Only heaven—and Hollywood—knows what the next step is in the social construction of reality for most Americans. Reality and show business, alas, are by all accounts indistinguishable. Huxley’s prophecy, and that of Postman, have come to pass.

Nowhere Man

By Anthony Esolen
Touchstone Magazine

Without Remembrance There Is No Eternal Life

Behold,” says the Psalmist, “I searched for the place of the wicked man, and it was no more.”

The ancient Hebrews, it is commonly said, believed that the dead would go down to a shadowy place called Sheol, a realm of next-to-nothingness. “Can dust praise you?” cries David, pleading that God should vindicate him before he dies, as it would be to no avail afterwards. Even so, death was not the most dreadful fate they could conceive.

“Man dies, and his place knows him no more.” It is the second clause that expresses the greater dread, of a death beyond death. It is the terrible prospect of a total and unalterable severance—expressed as a loss of place. How should it be, if one were wiped clean from the memory of earth and heaven and all that dwell therein? How should it be, not to cease to live, but to have one’s few days of life delivered over—in their essence—to nothingness?

Alien to All

That is a foreshadowing of the doctrine of hell. It is also, I think, what modern man has accepted, somewhat uncomfortably, as his lot in life. He fears death, true enough, and seems ready to squeeze out a few final years by cannibalizing his offspring, farming human beings for spare parts to gerry-rig the rickety machine he has resigned himself to being. Yet he cannot understand, or will not confront, the Psalmist’s dread. That is because he already has no place: His u-topia, his no-place, is the price of his autonomy. He has made it the cornerstone of his ways and days. Search for modern man, and you may find him, for a while—anywhere, nowhere in particular.

I don’t simply mean that modern man moves about a lot. He does that; he conveys his body from place to place, or from subdivision to subdivision, whose streets are like little commercials, naming no revered man or celebrated victory, but “Julie” and “Dana,” or the trees that had to be cut down to build the thing. Such no-places resist roots, and that suits him fine. He draws enjoyment from his travels, as he’s a butterfly of a tourist, but he would scoff at the suggestion that he should belong to and love a certain place in return for the nourishment it has provided him. What nourishment? From earliest youth his strongest place-memories are of styrofoam: nowadays the garish colors of the daycare, the speckled tiles of a drop ceiling, the smell of cleaning fluid on linoleum, the ketchup oozing through the pores of one more hamburger bun among billions and billions.

He “chooses” here or there according to his autonomous taste, and that reduces his place already to insignificance. The philosopher Philippe Beneton puts it well: We are all different, says modern man, and the differences make no difference. I may choose to live in the Loire valley, because my caprice inclines me to rolling countryside and quaint little empty churches. Tomorrow I may choose the Arizona desert. It makes no difference. Any land is mine, because I am equally alien to all. I am the inverse of the old French peasant, whose boots might never have pressed the soil twenty miles beyond his farm and village, but who knew his home, as his home knew him.

Knowing One’s Time & Place

And who is the braver traveler? As a man’s commitment to love this woman, to cleave unto her alone until death shall part them, is not the end of love’s journey but its most adventurous onset, so it may be that a man’s commitment to one place—and by “place” I mean more than locale, as I will explain—fits him best to embark upon the pilgrimage. Even when he travels abroad, modern man is a commuter. The termini of his life are not birth and death, but this anywhere and that anywhere.

Compare him with the peasant who did not go abroad because he could not go abroad. When that farmer heard his church toll the noonday prayer, it might once in a while recall to his mind the hora mortis that awaits everyone. It might remind him that he really is going somewhere. If he is a good Christian man, he prepares his rucksack and chooses his walking stick well. Even when he sits still, perhaps especially when he sits still, eating his bulky fare at table with his wife and children, such a man is a viator. He knows his place, and is on his way.

He knows his time, too. The merciful exigencies of his life make it hard for him to forget it. When he turns his mattock in the loam, he may consider that his father and grandfather turned it there before him, as his son and his grandson would in the years to come. His life grips its roots down into the soil of time. Perhaps he might die of an early heart attack, or of a blister on his foot that does not heal. He sees fewer years and more hardship; still, his time stretches long before and long after his allotted days of sunlight. He almost cannot choose but dwell, living and working under the canopy of his fathers. Possibly they are in his sight each day, buried on the high hill overlooking the spire. He expects to lie there too, gathered to his fathers, exactly as if he were no ordinary farmer but a king of Judah.

I am not arguing for agrarianism; I might have used for an example a plumber in Paris instead. The point is that “place,” in the Psalmist’s sense, embraced time also, and a way of life, the treasured memory of one’s forebears, and the hopes for one’s children. It is incomprehensible without culture: the loving cultivation of one’s heritage, springing from a people’s deepest beliefs about what this place is, why we are here, and where we are going: “I will go in unto the altar of God, to God, who gives joy to my youth.”

For the Christian, the earthly place derives its authority and meaning from the place to which he is traveling, a city that will make Paris look like a bundle of sticks in the wind. But modern man has no heritage. He has forgotten his fathers, and expects to be forgotten in turn. He is like the rich man of the psalms, who amasses wealth as a stay against the hour and the destination that come to all, but “he shall carry none of it away.” Modern man must lengthen out his days, because they are all he has.

Memorial Day

Am I too hard upon my man of nowhere? I don’t think so; I’ve seen the change occur within my own lifetime.

When I was a boy, we celebrated a feast called Memorial Day. It’s hard to describe, because the holy-day was, on paper, a secular feast, but it was our shared sense of the sacred that made the public celebration conceivable to begin with.

Just after dawn the men of the American Legion, followed by a brass band from the local high school, marched through our neighborhood. My cousins and I, having waited for this morning all week, praying that it wouldn’t rain, would bolt down a breakfast and run after them, climbing up to the Protestant cemetery. From that height, you could see half of the valley into which my town was tucked, with mountains of coal residue, heaped up from a hundred years of mining, towering over the river.

A well-done headstone has something disconcertingly eloquent about it. So it was in that cemetery. Some leaned at rakish angles, riding the natural buckling of the land. A stolid obelisk of the Propst family looked with satisfaction upon lesser men beneath. Some of the oldest white slabs were porous at the skin, covered with splotches of golden lichen. You could hardly make out a date, just a few curled numerals near “geboren” and “gestorben,” words that neither I nor my cousins understood, but that we guessed were full of meaning.

We knew we weren’t supposed to walk over the graves, but it was hard not to, so we did it, gingerly. Whole families lay beneath the mounding grass, under hemlock and pine. History lay there, too. Here was a Mrs. Yuengst who had four children, one of whom died when he was a baby. Here was a star that read “Grand Army of the Republic.” Next to that star, another grave and a small American flag, in honor of a youth who died in 1917, twenty years before his father.

The men commemorating the dead on that morning understood what they were about. The band would be still; a few drum rolls, then silence. Finally one man stepped forth, big chest, big belly. A barked command, the clock-clock of rifles loading. Aim, fire. Clock-clock, fire. Clock-clock, fire. Then a lone bugle playing Taps, that solemn call to rest.

I hardly knew what I was looking at, but my cousins and I stood transfixed, every year. We said nothing. I can recall it still: the light wind, the warble of robins, the gunsmoke drifting away, the booming persistent in the ear, and the men turning about in formation, in honor of sons who served their nation and died, who served us long before we were conceived. To stand and watch and hear was not simply to remember the dead, but to acknowledge their claims upon us, to carry them with us. It was to dwell in that place and time, fostered by the eternal.

The day didn’t end there. We hopped the fire trucks. We joined up with entourages of old ladies and boy scouts and gray-haired men in uniform and cheerleaders. We heard Mass at the Catholic cemetery on the opposing mountain. We converged upon the American Legion for doughnuts and orange juice.

It’s gone. My town has had no such parade in at least twenty years. Being a semi-modern man myself, I’ve moved far away. Where I live now, there’s a paltry something-or-other that blocks up Main Street on the long weekend that has usurped the holiday’s name. It doesn’t visit the cemeteries; it just peters out after a few blocks. No Taps, no service. The rags of an old form, without the substance; no felt reality of death and eternity, and therefore nothing vital. It is our Oblivion Day parade, no commemoration of the dead, but a specter of the living.

Machines of Oblivion

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” asks the troubadour Villon, who loved this passing world all the more for his knowing that it was passing to somewhere. As for us, we no longer care about the snows of yesteryear. A snowflake falls upon a blade of grass, then vanishes in the sun, and who remembers? So has our own past evaporated, and we have fanned a breeze to speed the process.

In America, history is taught as if it were but a sorry tale of wickedness and bumbling. Children were once brought up on the heroic stories of John Paul Jones and Commodore Perry. In the Carolinas they knew the Swamp Fox; in Pennsylvania they knew Mad Anthony Wayne. Towns and counties were named after them. Not one student in twenty would now recognize those names. “Depart from me,” says the ungrateful nation. “I never knew you.”

We have cut ourselves off from the past, in large part to free ourselves of the deep bonds between secular life and faith. All we have done is to free ourselves of meaning, putting our hearts to slow death before we die. We remember maybe a verse of one or two national hymns. Historic sites are for tourists; Emerson writes in Old English; “Puritan” is a byword for “bigot.”

School, once devoted to the hallowing of hard-won learning and past accomplishments, is now an efficient machine of oblivion. Its wheels wear away every groove of memory still surviving—of coherent family life, of games passed down from child to child for centuries, without the deadening organization of adults, of summers free, of life apart from grades and scholarships and degrees and careers and diapered retirement and the unremembered grave. Universal schooling is our universal solvent.

The new freedom from the past, a freedom that makes us small, imprisoning us in ourselves and our fads, can be seen even in cemeteries. “All floral displays must be removable,” the signs read, because if you plant something that lives, it is presumed that you will not tend it. Then the caretakers, or rather the men hired by the landscaping outfit, will take too long trimming around it, and that would cost money. In the really New and Improved grounds for putting away, the landscaper mows over the memorials with his riding machine, and not gingerly either. For the sake of that machine, nothing but flat stones are allowed. Other New and Improved grounds allow the loved ones to choose pink hearts for headstones, engraved golf clubs, motorcars, whatever. Everyone is different, and the differences make no difference. Long or short menu, it is all the same at McGraveyard.

No wonder many people reject even the pretense of memory. They order their ashes to be whisked out of the community entirely, strewn over the vast nowhere of a hillside, or the sea, or stashed on someone’s mantelpiece, awaiting final and inglorious disposal. They are emptied, but not like Christ. And their place knows them no more.

Keeping Our Lamps Trimmed

Let the Christian resist. Let him honor the dead, and find wellsprings of life in that honor. Let him be a pilgrim, and know the virtue of stability. Let him not run from distraction to distraction, in a deadening attempt to forget death. Let him know his place, and in knowing it, go forth, even unto the last communion rail he will approach on earth, the moment of his death.

In the days of Bishop Ambrose, only the Christians could ensure that the poor were fed and that Roman justice was served, once the pagans had lost heart and had shrugged away what it meant to be Roman. Long after the paterfamilias had ceased to play a part in the civic life of the empire, the Christian remembered—and the abbots, fathers who followed the rule of Benedict, would lead their small platoons of monks to preserve for a better age not only the Christian Scriptures and their commentaries but even what was noblest in the pagan learning and customs.

Is our challenge any the less? For man’s temporal and eternal good, we must keep alive the very idea of a culture—to remember what it means to remember. Jesus himself lights the way, breaking bread at the Last Supper and commanding us to do the same, in remembrance of him. Whatever our doctrines about the Eucharist, we Christians must all break that immemorial bread and see in it the bread of life. Our treasuring of the Lord’s words and deeds, his miracles, his commandments, his consolations, his passion and death on the Cross, his glorious resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his promise to return as our judge, does not bury us in a dead past but plants us in the truth that brings life to all time, past and present and to come.

Think of those holy women who went to Jesus’ tomb with great earthenware vessels of aloes that stooped their shoulders. Why did they go? They didn’t yet understand what Jesus meant when he said he would rise again. But he could not be, for them, simply a body, a broken vessel. They kept their lamps trimmed, and on that Easter morning they learned that the burial shroud had become a wedding garment. Had they not remembered the dead, they would not have been the first to testify to the living.

Did the women recall then a final plea for memory, on Calvary? The Jewish leaders, cutting their cloth to fit the Roman wear, still remembered that their fathers threw Jeremiah down a cistern and murdered Zechariah in the Temple. They remembered that David had been a mere lad, Moses a stutterer, Abraham childless and old. But they forgot what these things meant. They forgot the suffering servant, the stone which the builders rejected.

Remembering & Providence

To give them their due, they at least intended to honor their dead, and in this they were superior to us. But they, like us, were men of the passing day. They bought and sold, married and gave in marriage, while the clouds of doom were gathering. So they stood there in their ignorance, mocking.

Suddenly, one of the thieves crucified at Jesus’ side—called Dismas by tradition, though his true name is written in the Book of Life—was pierced with remorse. Mindful of his sinful life, this errant man, now at last fixed in one small spot of earth, turned to Jesus, saying, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Good words for the Christian to ponder at the hour of his dying, which is also this hour, here, as we sojourn to eternity. Then the Lord of time, whose remembering and providence and act are one, will surely reply, “This day you shall be with me in Paradise.”

He goes before us, to prepare a place.

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of The Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has also translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's The Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Divine Legalities

By Michael P. Orsi
Touchstone Magazine

The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea
by Rémi Brague
University of Chicago Press, 2007
(269 pages, $28.00, paperback)

Rémi Brague is a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne and the University of Munich. In this book, he examines the 3,000-year history of law as an expression of the divine will. Because religion has reemerged as a powerful political force, both nationally and internationally, Brague’s analysis of the notion of the divine law is an invaluable resource for understanding the underlying dynamic that motivates human beings. Brague especially focuses on law as it pertains to the “People of the Book” (Jews, Christians, and Muslims).

Sources of Law

Brague’s basic insight is that law is an expression of how a society exercises power over itself. There are, he says, two fundamentally different sources, the natural law of Greek philosophy and the revealed law of Israel given by Yahweh. Brague sees Christianity and Islam as two offshoots of the Athens-Jerusalem axis. Nevertheless, he says, they understand the source of law and its application in radically different ways.

Brague says that “Greek law is divine because it expresses the profound structures of a permanent natural order; Jewish law is divine because it emanates from a god who is master of history. In both cases, it is external to the human and transcends the quotidian [that which is characteristic of ordinary life].” Brague traces the development of these philosophical concepts in the writings of the major commentators of each school of thought.

For the Greeks, although the laws were not of heavenly origin, they were seen as emanating from what is inherent in reality, and so had to be cognizant of (and commensurate with) the divinely ordained natural order. For Jews and Muslims, divine law had explicit and exclusivist political and historical dimensions.

Jewish understanding of law was limited, as something set down for the children of Israel alone. It embraced a messianic hope, not an earthly kingdom. On the other hand, Islam envisioned a transnational earthly community where law demanded submission to Allah based on divine command. The implication of both these models is more than obvious in the contemporary geopolitics of the Middle East, particularly in light of fundamentalist Islam’s effort to bring the world’s peoples to submission via the aegis of a worldwide theocratic state.

The understanding of law in Christian tradition points in a third direction, one that shows particular contrast with Islam. For Christians, law is not something “other.” Instead, it is God’s light within the heart of the believer. Muslims understand law as the will of Allah revealed directly to Mohammad in the Koran, essentially a force imposed from the outside.

Practical Implications

Brague emphasizes the different practical effects on society of these two approaches. “Christianity conquered the state through civil society,” he writes, “Islam to the contrary conquered civil society through the state.” This bespeaks a fundamentally different anthropology, touching on personal human conduct, political structures, and attitudes toward human rights. For example, concepts such as religious freedom, equality of the sexes, and the inherent dignity of the human person have little standing in

Islamic society.

Brague offers a fascinating overview of how each scriptural source—the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran—interprets divine law. Also valuable is his survey of the work of scholars who have tried to discern the practical implications of each faith’s understanding of where and how law originates.

A key insight is the importance of Greek philosophical thought—especially that of Plato and Aristotle—which Brague sees as having provided a cross-pollination of ideas between scholars in the three major religions who imagined this world vis-à-vis their sacred texts. For example, the Muslims preferred Plato, and saw Mohammed as the philosopher king in the ideal city. On the other hand, religious thinkers in the Christian West preferred Aristotle, who saw human reason as the intermediary between God and man. They understood “nature” as indicative of the divine order, believing that human reason is capable of discerning the fundamental principles for human living.

(This “natural law” understanding is the hoped-for common ground that Pope Benedict XVI sees as the basis for a peaceful co-existence between Islam and the West. Unfortunately, Brague’s analysis doesn’t offer much optimism for the fulfillment of the Holy Father’s vision, since the Koran offers a profoundly different understanding of God and how human morality is ascertained.)

Brague provides an invaluable discussion of the religious law systems of the three faiths, making an important distinction between the Talmud and Sharia, on the one hand, and Catholic Canon Law, on the other. He notes that while the Talmud and Sharia provide exegesis of their respective (Jewish and Muslim) sacred texts, Canon Law is an autonomous discipline, standing apart from the Bible, though indirectly informed by it.

Indeed, Canon Law is procedural. Its primary emphasis is on providing individual believers (and the Church herself) with principles for addressing moral questions and making moral decisions—with comparatively little stipulated about religious requirements that must be fulfilled. Canon Law, Brague says “does not claim to embrace all of human behavior; it leaves aside the entire domain of morality,” which in the end, is the province of the properly formed conscience.

De-Naturalized Law

Brague is excellent in discussing the destruction of the idea of divine law in the modern world. He traces the development of philosophical relativism (which has led to legal positivism, the idea that law should reflect current social conditions, rather than any timeless, transcending principles) from its roots in the Enlightenment, to its pervasive application throughout post-modern Western society. He observes that “the birth of wholly human law was at first a consequence of the modification of the notion of the law of nature” (as if the law of nature were only a metaphor designed to help human beings achieve whatever transitory goals they might be pursuing at the moment). “As the law is not presently seen as natural,” he writes, “even the human comes to be conceived as not natural.”

He asserts that this de-naturalization of law lends itself to the contemporary ideology of the “rights of man,” noting wisely that this “avoids evoking to what source ‘man’ owes the humanity that renders him capable of having rights.” Law thus becomes not an expression of divine truth, but simply a balancing of pragmatic interests.

Brague lays this development largely at the feet of Protestantism. For the Jews, he writes, “law could only be deployed in the private domain . . . its political dimension is reserved for the time of the Messiah.” Islam, on the other hand, “insists on the impossibility of separating the political and the religious.” But Protestant Christianity’s “separating the entire genus of the practical from the divine made it possible for three species of that genus—the ethical, the economic and the political—to declare their independence.”

The book concludes with Brague’s positive appreciation of the basic Catholic principles of law expressed in the works of the late Pope John Paul II. He approves the pope’s insight that if law is to be humane, it must be rooted in a “transcendent source of meaning,” which united to human reason, can provide a moral culture.

Clearly, Brague’s observations will not convince relativists, legal positivists, or, for that matter, radical Islamists. They do, however, provide at least an understanding of (to use the modern colloquialism) “where people are coming from.” And that may, perhaps, act as a foundation for dialogue.

Michael P. Orsi is a Catholic priest and a Research Fellow in Law and Religion at Ave Maria School of Law.

God & Robbers

By Patrick Henry Reardon
Touchstone Magazine

On Human & Divine Property Rights.

The principle of the ownership of property is complex.

First, as Christians we should insist that it is rooted in the biblical concepts of the person and the family. According to Christian teaching about the nature of human beings, they have a strict metaphysical right to the things that they work for or have inherited from their parents. Property has a metaphysical root; it is an extension of personality and a proper expression of family.

God-Given Right

Ownership of property is not a concession of the government. Indeed, governments exist for the purpose of protecting the metaphysical, God-given rights of the citizens, and one of those rights is the right to the ownership of property. It is not the business of government to take away the rightful property of its citizens.

Taxation, for the purpose of maintaining the services of government—including the care of the poor—is not a violation of this principle. We render to Caesar what is his; however, we do so precisely because Caesar is our servant, not a thief.

Consequently, robbery by the government—for the purpose of redistribution of wealth, for example—is just another form of theft. It is the playground bully stealing the lunch money of those who are smaller than he is and have no ability to stand up to him.

The Lord does not like bullies. God looks on such theft the way he looks on all robbery: He does not like it, and he has very harsh things to say about it. If one is in doubt on this point, let him go back and re-read the sermon of Samuel just before the election of Saul (1 Sam. 8) or the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21).

A Prior Claim

This is not the whole story about ownership, however. The right of families to the ownership of their property is likewise subject to a prior claim—the claim of God, the Creator of all things. The very fact of death at the end of a human life testifies to God’s prior claims over all his Creation.

Human ownership of property always has the sense of stewardship, which means that we human beings are really taking care of God’s Creation. It is everywhere the teaching of Holy Scripture that the world and everything in it belongs to God, not to men. An impulse of human nature prompts men to regard their possessions as belonging to themselves. Left to its own lights, this is exactly what philosophy will declare.

Man, however, does not live by philosophy alone. Theology will insist that we also render to God what is his. According to Holy Scripture, men do not have absolute ownership of their possessions; they hold all such things in stewardship from God. The Lord planted Adam and Eve in the garden and commanded them to take care of it. He did not, in any absolute sense, give it to them. This is the proper theological principle on which Christian ecology is based.

Everything that God made belongs to him. The earth and the elements are not given to men to exploit and abuse. Human beings are strictly answerable to God for how they treat his Creation. This is a long recognized truth of Christian theology: The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

Grateful Stewardship

This is why the Bible enjoins tithing on all God’s servants. We have a mandate to give back to God the first 10 percent of everything that comes to us—all the fruit of our labor and investments—as a sign that all of it belongs to God. The tithing of our income, a fundamental principle of biblical economics, expresses our practical recognition that we hold everything as stewards.

Even so, we serve a God who gives us everything and graciously blesses us to keep 90 percent of what comes to us. Therefore, our tithe is an act of thanksgiving as well as stewardship.

Indeed, the constant expression of thanksgiving and joy are the surest marks of good stewardship.

Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of Christ in the Psalms, Christ in His Saints, and The Trial of Job (all from Conciliar Press). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Without Borders, Ltd.

By Mark T. Mitchell
Touchstone Magazine

On Bailout Schemes & the Loss of Limits.

A question: What do these two books have in common? A Garfield the Cat book and My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands. Or these two: A book on Mother Teresa’s spirituality and Holy S**T: The World’s Weirdest Comics, featuring, on the cover, “Tales from the Leather Nun,” complete with a bare-breasted woman. Answer: these books are paired alongside each other at my local Borders.

Presumably, the Garfield book was intended to attract the kids, whose parents, perhaps, could then browse through the confessions of a randy woman while they waited on their tots. I’m less sure about the intention behind the second pair. Part of me hopes that these incongruities are the work of an employee who is silently, but symbolically, rebelling against perceived social norms. Unfortunately, in all likelihood, no such person is at work, and these juxtapositions are the result of completely random acts of carelessness.

I find this second possibility to be far more disturbing.

Our Cultural Astigmatism

If the book arrangements were intentional, that would indicate a sense, or at least an awareness, of propriety and a desire to offend. Rebellion requires a set of norms that are pushed against. Or, to put the matter in religious terms, heresy requires orthodoxy. And if there is an orthodoxy, there is hope, for that means there is a stable set of beliefs and commitments by which a community lives, and against which some rebel. An orthodoxy can change, but even in the change, there is continuity, and that continuity provides structure, stability, and a communal sense of propriety.

On the other hand, if, as I suspect, those books were placed together on the displays at random and for no particular reason, we have good reason for concern. In such a case, the sense of propriety (against which one might rebel) has been replaced by apathy—or perhaps not apathy so much as a lost ability to make distinctions. When we lose the ability to distinguish between the silly and the serious, between the public and the private, between the sacred and the profane, we have lost the ability to live as civilized human beings.

These book displays at Borders can, I think, stand as a symbol of our cultural astigmatism. And as odd as it may seem, I think we can learn something about our current economic troubles from them, for, at root, our problems are not economic at all. Rather, they are complex issues tied invariably to a culture that does not recognize the impropriety of placing a book on Mother Teresa’s spirituality beside one depicting the bare breasts of a cartoon vixen.

Such a world is one in which limits have collapsed. In our headlong rush to embrace the fruits of our individual freedom, we have forgotten that freedom without propriety leads to irreverence, irresponsibility, and, ultimately, disintegration. The economic turmoil our leaders are laboring so mightily to stave off is the product, not of anonymous market forces, but of our failure to respect limits.

A sense of propriety provides limits for both individual and corporate action. Limits create stability; they give form and meaning to society, as a skeleton gives form to the body. When a broad consensus on what constitutes propriety is lost, the sense of limits collapses. Form is reduced merely to a massive lump where distinctions are lost: where sacredness means nothing and therefore nothing is profane; where all things are made public and privacy loses its meaning; where the silly and the serious mingle and no one knows whether to laugh or to mourn.

The Harder but Better Way

We have been told that we can be rescued from our financial woes by a massive infusion of money. We have been told that all means must be employed to protect our way of life. But why are we not being asked to take a hard look at our way of life? Perhaps it is precisely this way of life that has brought us to such dire straits.

When Americans fail to see the impropriety of running up record levels of consumer debt, we should not be shocked that our public officials do not hesitate to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to shore up our way of life, even at the expense of our children and grandchildren. Surely we have lost a sense of propriety when we are willing to secure our comfort at the expense of future generations.

The solution to our troubled times is not, primarily, a government-sponsored bailout or stimulus package. That is the easy way that asks nothing of us save the tacit permission to write more checks against the wealth of future generations. The real solution is a restoration of a sense of limits—of responsibility born of propriety.

If we choose this harder but better way, our grandchildren will thank us for it. If we don’t, they will, as they should, rue our lack of restraint as they chafe under the burden of our irresponsibility.

Mark T. Mitchell teaches political theory at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He is the co-founder of Front Porch Republic.