Get Your Hands Dirty

Essays on Christian Social Thought (and Action)

Ballor

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume brings together a decade of reflection at the intersection of culture, economics, and theology. Addressing topics ranging from the family to work, politics, and the church, Jordan J. Ballor shows how the Christian faith calls us to get involved deeply and meaningfully in the messiness of the world. Drawing upon theologians and thinkers from across the great scope of the Christian tradition, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Abraham Kuyper, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and engaging a variety of current figures and cultural phenomena, these essays connect the timeless insights of the Christian faith to the pressing challenges of contemporary life.

1

The Human Person, Family, and Civil Society

“When a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child . . . God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling—not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.”

—Martin Luther

Running is one of the worst things ever invented. It is such a bad thing that judged on its own demerits, running must be deemed to be a powerful argument against the existence of God (after all, some philosophers claim evil things as evidence there is no God). This must be why God deigned to add grace, so that we might “run and not grow weary.”

I say this as someone who, in the words of bluesman Willie Dixon, was “built for comfort” and “not for speed.” The problem of running, at its core, is that it is hard. It tires you out. It makes your lungs ache, your body sore, and drains away at your mental resolve with every stride. I’m speaking here of running for its own sake, since running only really becomes acceptable when done for some other good purpose, like tackling a running back or making a layup on a fast break. In these cases running is a necessary evil. Some of the best sports, in fact, are those like golf that don’t require any running at all.

St. Francis of Assisi famously called his body “Brother Ass,” a balky, troublesome thing that represented a drag, shall we say, on his spiritual development, an impediment and a constant temptation to slothfulness. There’s a certain inertia that attaches to bodily life in this world, a tendency that makes us want to rest and be comfortable. Running is decidedly uncomfortable.

And it is the difficulty of running that is perhaps what makes it such a good image of the Christian life. Although there aren’t any accounts in the Bible about Jesus running, the Scriptures are replete with the imagery of running. Foremost, perhaps, might be the line from Isaiah quoted above about the blessings promised to those who look to the Lord for deliverance: “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” And then there’s the Apostle Paul, looking back on his life after the revelatory encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, concluding that he has “finished the race” (2 Tim 4:7). In both cases the trouble associated with running is foremost: the weariness, the obstacles, and in Paul’s case, especially, the extent to which, in Jesus’ words, “how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16).

In this way running really is a form, albeit a mundane one, of suffering. It represents a sign of the Christian call to sanctification, of putting to death the desires of the flesh. Many Christians pledge to abstain from something during the Lenten season as a way of living out in some tangible way the “dying to self” that is part and parcel of the Christian life. In this sense running can be a kind of ascetic practice, designed to discipline our bodies and our souls and orient the path of our life toward eternal rest in Christ.

There’s one other biblical image of running that relates closely to this idea, and it’s that of Joseph fleeing from Potiphar’s wife in Genesis: “She caught him by his cloak and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house” (Gen 39:12). The Heidelberg Catechism, a sixteenth-century, Reformed confessional standard, describes the “dying-away of the old self” as being “genuinely sorry for sin,” causing us to “more and more hate and run away” from sin.

Running is a terrible thing, unless it is sin that you are running away from. Let us run away from sin, as Joseph did, pray for the grace to persevere to the end of the race, as Paul did, and take comfort in God, who through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, “makes both us and you stand firm in Christ” (2 Cor 1:21).

The Human Person

It is typical in public discourse today to resort to claims of simple “right.” This “rights talk” has gotten so out of hand that Mary Ann Glendon, a law professor and former US ambassador, has described the resulting “impoverishment” of our public dialog. “Discourse about rights has become the principal language that we use in public settings to discuss weighty questions of right and wrong, but time and time again it proves inadequate, or leads to a standoff of one right against another,” she writes. But the difficulty is “not, however, as some contend, with the very notion of rights, or with our strong rights tradition. It is with a new version of rights discourse that has achieved dominance over the past thirty years.”1 This new version of rights talk is characterized, in part, by “hyperindividualism,” which abstracts rights as they have been traditionally conceived in the context of social realities, institutions, and responsibilities. The new rights talk is the right of autonomous “I” that cannot be gainsaid.

One of the latest examples of this is the purported “right to die,” or the exercise of a personal decision to end one’s life free of legal barriers or any other impediments. This “right to die” movement gained prominence with the Terri Schiavo case and the release of the Academy Award-winning movie Million Dollar Baby in 2004. In the context of court cases involving the perceived right to suicide or euthanasia, public opinion has displayed a growing affinity for certain aspects of Libertarian political thought, which generally espouses a radical personal autonomy. The National Platform of the Libertarian Party adopted at the May 2004 Convention in Atlanta speaks of “the right to commit suicide” as an application of “the ultimate right of an individual to his or her own life.”2

What’s most disturbing for the cause of Christ, though, is the increasingly broad acceptance of these kinds of views within Christian circles. Dr. Robert Baird, professor of philosophy and ethics at Baylor University, argued in a lecture for the right for persons to choose physician-assisted suicide. “Do not we as moral agents have the right to paint the final stroke, or write the last sentence?” he wondered.3 Lest one thinks this is merely the opinion of some ivory-tower academic, the Baylor student newspaper followed up Baird’s speech with an editorial in favor of the right to die, calling it a “fundamental freedom.”4 And a 2003 Pew Forum survey found that 38 percent of evangelical Protestants favored a move to “give terminally ill patients the means to end their lives,” with much greater support among other religious groups (58 percent of Roman Catholics surveyed answered favorably to this question).5

Both scholars and laypersons need to realize that the advocacy for a “right to die” represents a significant challenge, diametrically opposed to a biblically Christian view of the human person—both in life and death. A brief theological primer on these issues seems warranted. This idea of the absolute right over one’s life is incompatible with a biblical worldview. The Heidelberg Catechism, a historic document of confessional Reformed Christianity, asks and answers such a question in its most famous section, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death? That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ . . . .”

So Christians, at least, do not own themselves in any absolute sense. When writing about sexual immorality, Paul asks, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Cor 6:19–20). This biblical concept of our bodies belonging to Christ means that the Christian’s attitude toward his or her life and body is radically different than a Libertarian view. The human body, as an integral part of the whole person, is a possession or property, but in a limited rather than an absolute sense.

An idea of property rights in this limited sense implies that we are stewards of our possessions and that we are answerable to God for how we use these gifts. This is what is portrayed the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30) and the contention that God “will give to each person according to what he has done” (Rom 2:6). The very fact that Paul talks about judgment of both Christians and non-Christians implies that non-believers too are accountable to God for their stewardship. While Christians are specially linked to Christ as his Body, all of creation (including unbelievers) ultimately belongs to God and is accountable to him.

Paul writes elsewhere in the book of Romans that “none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom 14:7–8). Whatever rights we may purport to have about choosing the time and manner of our death with dignity, they pale in comparison to the responsibilities and duties we have to God and our neighbors.

The intimate link between the two great love commandments—to love God and our neighbor—means that in living “to the Lord,” we also live to, for, and with others. The social nature of the human person means that a view of absolute individual freedom, such that gives rise to the “the ultimate right of an individual to his or her own life,” is simply inadequate. It cannot account for the legitimate social and moral claims put upon us by our friends, family, and neighbors, or for the duties put upon us by God.

In one of the more remarkable moments in recent pop culture, the character Jack Shephard on the TV show Lost gives a speech to a group of survivors of a plane crash who find themselves alone on a seemingly deserted island. “Every man for himself is not gonna work,” says Jack. “It’s time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we’re gonna survive here. No

w I found water . . . fresh water up in the valley. I’ll take a group in at first light. If you don’t wanna come, then find another way to contribute! Last week most of us were strangers. But we’re all here now, and God knows how long we’re gonna be here. But if we can’t, live together . . . we’re gonna die alone.”6 No man is an island even when they are on an island.

In The Walking Dead, a show that follows a group of survivors as they attempt to navigate the world after the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, there’s a dynamic that illustrates deeply how the death of someone impoverishes us all. The group needs everyone’s gifts to survive. When members of the group give up hope, or are otherwise lost, it makes everyone that much more vulnerable.

If we are not “to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13), then we are not to approach death in conformity to the wisdom of the world. Surely it was such worldly wisdom spoken to Job, afflicted “with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head,” when his wife said, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:7,9). Job, of course, had many more reasons than simply his bodily suffering to give up hope and die; he had lost his entire family and all of his worldly possessions. Instead, Job displayed a spiritual wisdom that contradicts the hopelessness of the world: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”

Whether we are blessed, following our struggles and suffering, in this life (as Job was) or the n...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Human Person, Family, and Civil Society
• Chapter 2: Work, Culture, and Economics
• Chapter 3: Church Authority, Moral Formation, and Public Witness
• Chapter 4: Faithful Presence, Power, and Politics
• Epilogue: The Dirtiest Job
• Selected Bibliography