I.
INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous
Mind
Premise: we are genetically wired for morality, which is not
necessarily rational – cultural and visceral
Contains within it
judgment of others
Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-Imagined
Paul’s first church fight –
circumcision
Generally perceived as
Gentile norms – anti-Jewish.
Kahl argues that Paul
was challenging the Roman nomos
along with the Torah.
II.
WHERE
DO WE GET THE LAW?
Jonathan Haidt is an anthropologist and evolutionary
psychologist.
His project in The Righteous Mind is to show
that American and European notions of morality
may make sense philosophically
but they are out of sync with human
biology and psychology.
He isn’t just making this up.
He has done lots of psychological testing cross culturally.
In the West, we think that something is right or wrong
according to whether it hurts someone
or not.
Haidt’s testing involved whether various people would call it
wrong:
a.
to
eat the family dog that had been accidentally killed
b.
to
have sex with a dead chicken before eating it
c.
to
cut up an old American flag and use it for cleaning.
if nobody knew.
Haidt’s studies show the
following things:
1.
Having
a moral code that divides things into right & wrong
is universal. Only psychopaths and people with brain injuries
do not make moral judgments.
2.
Those
codes are almost entirely intuitive
–
based
on fleeting attractions and aversions
too quick and subtle to even be full emotions,
certainly not thoughts.
3.
Those
moral intuitions are mostly
genetically programed & culturally taught,
not rationally
figured out.
4. We judge others by our codes. That’s hardwired.
III.
WEIRD
MORALITY
We as Americans talk about morality in a distinctive way.
Our language and thought categories come from the 18th
C philosophy
of rationalists
like Immanuel Kant and 1960s psychologists
like Lawrence
Kohlberg.
We talk a lot about freedom meaning our right to do whatever
suits us as long
as it doesn’t get in the way of somebody else’s
right to do whatever
suits him or her.
We have a political philosophy based on that.
It’s by a guy from Harvard named John Rawls.
It’s called “a thin theory of the good”
because it is an
admittedly narrow and shallow vision
of
human life and destiny.
But it may provide room for each individual to create his or
her own
private religion,
ethic, aesthetic and so construct a life.
As Americans, we assume this is the rational way to organize
ourselves.
But in fact only a tiny percentage of humanity living today
thinks that.
A miniscule portion of the human race over time has thought
that.
Hence, Jonathan Haidt refers to our way of deciding right and
wrong
as WEIRD – which means it is out of step with most people
but also standing for White, Educated, Individualistic, Rich,
& Democratic (not the party but the form of government)
Haidt does not say we are wrong.
Plenty of critical theorists on the left and social
conservatives
on the right
say it’s very wrong indeed.
But Haidt just wants us to know that our moral assumptions
are not
ordained by God or fixed by natural law.
They arise out of our WEIRD set of genetically programmed
and
culturally taught matrix of attractions and aversions.
IV.
OTHER
CULTURES
Outside the WEIRD world we inhabit, people are much more
direct
about basing
morality on feelings having to do with disgust
and disrespect.
Taking off your shoes when entering a home in India for
example.
Women wearing hijabs or burkas for example.
When people living in such cultures look at Americans,
they find us
appallingly immoral.
We in turn look at many of their
practices as oppressive and unjust,
which is a fashionable way of saying they are wrong,
or in the language
of philosophy immoral.
To bring this home:
Our church just authorized some
rituals for same gender weddings.
Social conservatives are angry
because what we are doing is immoral.
They feel a genetically programmed
aversion to gay and lesbian sex.
So they are distinctly uncomfortable
with our sanctioning immorality.
But proponents of LGBTQ inclusion
protest just as angrily
because there will still be dioceses
where clergy are not authorized do
use the new rites.
There will still be parts of the
Church discriminating against LGBTQ
– and this is immoral.
So the homophobic people should be
forced to comply or leave.
The homophobic people are violating
the moral standards
of our
Kant/Kohlberg/Rawls individualistic freedom.
We have here right in our one little
denomination of the USA
two rival sets of morality, two rival moral
codes.
Now I happen to agree with the LGBTQ
inclusion code,
and I can construct rational
and even Biblical
arguments to support my
position.
But if Haidt is correct, my
arguments are actually post hoc justifications
for my gut instinct that
just happens to differ from
the gut instinct of the
social conservatives.
In a WEIRD society such as ours, we
usually resolve these differences
by going out separate
ways.
In his book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop demonstrates how Americans
are dividing up socially
and geographically into smaller and smaller
clusters of the
like-minded.
We associate only with those who
look like us, think like us, feel like us,
talk like us, and eat
the same stuff we do.
In Bowling Alone, sociologist
Robert Putnam says we no longer
join voluntary associations – not the
Rotary, not the NAACP,
not even bowling leagues.
People leave churches to be spiritual but not religious
because what we really deify is individual
choice.
There are several bad consequences of this polarization.
One is that it makes it impossible to govern such a nation.
But on the personal level it makes our hearts tighter,
our minds narrower, and our lives
smaller.
University of Chicago philosopher
moral Nussbaum has written
many important books
–but none more important than
The New Religious Intolerance.
She discusses the human capacity for
“participatory imagination,”
the ability to see
things through another person’s eyes,
to walk in their shoes,
to empathize our way into feeling
what they feel.
Nussbaum argues that this is a fundamental
part of being human.
When people are dramatically lacking
in that capacity,
we diagnose it as a
pathology.
But Nussbaum says that as we divide
up into opposing religious camps
-- and secularism is
just one of the camps --
-- arguably
the most narrow minded judgmental camp of all --
as we divide up into
these camps we lose our capacity
for
participatory imagination.
Without that capacity, we cannot
have authentic relationship.
V.
FORESKINS
AND TABLE FELLOWSHIP
The Christians in the new church in Southern Turkey had a
problem.
They were a mix of ethnic Jews and Celts.
Both groups had historically been rabble-rousers defying
Rome.
But the Celts had posed an actual threat to the Empire.
Both groups had been effectively subjugated in Paul’s day.
The argument arose between two moralities
– Jewish and Roman.
This may not seem like a
big issue to us.
But it was the
equivalent of homosexuality for them.
The issue was
circumcision of the men.
Jews felt aversion for the
uncircumcised.
Part of their purity was not just
being circumcised
but keeping their
distance from men who were not.
I confess this to my shame because
in the morality of today,
this is racist and
disgusting.
But when I was a child I was raised
not to drink from the same fountain
or eat at the same table
as a Black person.
And that instilled in me an actual
sense of physical aversion.
I got over it. But that’s how I was
raised and that’s what I felt.
How I got
over it will be the point of all this.
We’ll get to
that.
That’s how it was for the ethnically
Jewish Christians.
They lived by the Torah. That was
their law.
The problem was that Christians ate
together.
Our central ritual is eating and
drinking together.
The Eucharist was originally part of
a real meal.
But Jewish Christians were very
uncomfortable.
So some of the Celtic Christians
were considering
adopting the Torah.
The option seemed to be separating
into two churches.
Paul went ballistic.
The Epistle to the Galatians is his passionate plea for a 3rd
option.
VI. WHAT IS “THE LAW?”
Since Martin Luther we have read Galatians
as a repudiation
of Judaism in favor of a Gentile Roman
brand of
Christianity.
Luther was harshly anti-Semitic.
He held the Torah in contempt and replaced it with a religion
of believing the
right doctrines.
Progressive Christians today might say that Christianity
repudiates the
oppressive purity regulation religion
of social
conservativism in favor of our WEIRD morality
-- different issues but the same
process.
But in Galatians
Re-Imagined, Brigette Kahl says that Paul’s Christianity
Is far more
radical, more liberating, more inclusive,
and more beautiful
than Luther imagined.
She says Roman law had embraced the Torah
and the whole
network of law was used to keep
the subjugated
people in line – Celt and Jew alike.
When Paul wrote about the nomos
(in Greek) he was
challenging both
the Torah and the Roman law.
So what do we mean by “the law?”
It is the set of rules by which I know that I am justified
and the people who
don’t do what I do, feel what I feel,
think what I
think, eat what I eat, have sex the way I have sex,
and vote the way I vote are wrong,
condemned, deficient.
We have our conservative codes of law and our liberal codes
of law.
Recently on The View,
Kelly Osborne tried to say something
in defense of immigrants but she said
it in a way
that violated liberal norms of discourse and there was hell
to pay.
I am not saying she was right. I am just saying liberals have
their rules.
She broke one and was condemned even when she was trying
to take the
liberal side.
It is a given that we have moral codes.
It is inevitable that we will have different moral codes from
each other.
Paul’s issue is: can we still eat at the same table?
He says we not only can, but as Christians, we must.
How is that possible?
We can do it in the spiritual state that for Paul is
the very heart and soul of
Christianity.
VI.
LIFE
“IN CHRIST”
In 1931, Albert Schweitzer dramatically changed
the way we read Paul.
He noticed that Paul was not interested in detailed doctrines
like the Augsburg
catechism.
He was interested in something Schweitzer
called “Christ Mysticism,”
the state of being “in
Christ.”
It happens Paul said through a kind
of dying to self.
He said to the Galatians:
“I have been crucified with Christ
and yet I live –
No, not I. It is Christ who lives in me.
And the life I live in the body, I
live by faith in the Son of God
who loved me and gave himself for
me.”
To be in Christ was to have given up
self and the whole ego-project
as Buddhists call it.
Paul said that he had “died to the
law.”
He died to the code by which he
justified himself
and looked down on others.
Paul had used the law to justify
himself.
In Philippians, he lists all his
achievements under the law,
all
his impressive claims to righteousness, but then he says:
“Whatever
things were gain to me I count as garbage.
Indeed I count everything as garbage compared
to
the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”
When we are in Christ, that doesn’t
mean the moral code goes away.
We till have our genetic programming
and cultural conditioning.
But without the ego-project, we don’t
invest our value in it.
We aren’t good and praiseworthy people because of our
adherence
to our moral
code be it the Analects of Confucius
or
Rules for Radicals.
We are worth as much as
the blood of Jesus shed for us,
no more – no
less.
What happens then to the law?
The law is there but it no longer threatens us.
And it is no longer a club we can use against anyone else.
So to be in Christ, trusting in his
grace to justify us,
is to be in the same
camp with each other.
To the Galatians Paul said,
“In Christ // there is
neither Jew nor Greek,
neither slave nor free; nor
is there male and female.
For you are all one in Christ.”
When we are not ego-invested in
being right
and proving the other
person is wrong,
a whole new field of
possibility opens up --
the possibility of
participatory imagination,
seeing the world through
someone else’s eyes,
living a life larger
than our own skulls.
When we are not ego-invested in winning a fight,
it becomes possible to
form relationships,
to enjoy each other, to
delight in wonder at how different we are.
This happens when we stop pretending
to have it down pat
and admit our only hope
is the grace of God.
We may be
pristine as distilled spring water according to our law.
But how do we know we’ve got the
right law?
I guarantee
you we are all sinners and reprobates under somebody’s law.
Torah, Sharia, the Analects of Confucius,
the Resolutions of General
Convention,
are all just chapters of the one great Law,
which it is impossible
for anyone to fulfill.
But if Christ died for us, then we are all saved by one
grace.
There are so many
standards
by which we judge each other as right
or wrong,
wise or foolish, good or bad.
That’s “the law, “the
standard of judgment we use to set ourselves apart.
But Paul says in
Ephesians,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law with its commandments . . . ,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law with its commandments . . . ,
that he might create in himself one new humanity;
in place
of the two, thus making peace,
and might reconcile both groups into one body through the
cross.”
One speaks Spanish; the
other, English.
One is black descended
from slaves; the other, white,
descended
from slave owners.
One is straight; the
other, gay.
And we’ve all got a law
to make us right and the other guy wrong.
But the Bible says,
“(Jesus) has abolished the law . . .
that he might create in himself one new humanity.”
How did he do that?
It wasn’t easy. He went
to the cross for both sides
of every division we can invent.
Paul says Jesus
“create(d) in himself one new
humanity;
in place
of the two, thus making peace,
and . . .
reconcile(d) both groups into one body through the cross.”
When Jesus brought us
together in the Body of Christ,
he did not abolish our differences.
He did not make us all
alike.
He left us different –
including our different hardwired moral codes.
But he gave us something
in common that runs deeper than our differences.
He gave us grace.
He gave us the love of
God.
Now what I said about our
morality being determined
by genetic programming and cultural imprints
is not the end of the story.
If it were, we would live
our whole lives in the prison
of that programming.
There would be no room
for change or growth.
But it turns out that our
hearts are capable of change and growth,
which is what makes life interesting and worth living.
Haidt has studied how
that happens.
It isn’t through our own
reasoning in a library.
It isn’t even through
spiritual experiences in a monastery or ashram.
It isn’t through
teachings or sermons.
Back to my water fountain
aversion:
I didn’t get over that through reason.
I got over it through personal relationships with Black
people.
After experiencing those relationships, my culturally
imprinted
racism began to heal in turn into something
quite different.
Change and growth happen
though relationships
with
people who are different from us.
That’s why we need each
other.
That’s why Paul was so
concerned to keep the people who lived
according to different moral codes
still eating and drinking at the same table.
