Recently on the PBS show "Hidden Brain” they discussed recent research on moral convictions. What research shows is that psychologically these moral convictions are seen as facts, objective facts in the world, even though if the person holding them could step back they could see that they are subjective states of mind.
But the problem isn’t merely that we see moral convictions as objective facts. We associate our own moral character with upholding our moral convictions. Thus, if someone disputes our moral convictions they are equally calling into question our moral character. If they cannot be convinced to agree with us, at the very least we have a deep psychological need to remove them from our presence in order to maintain our psychic balance. Or we need to remove ourselves from their presence. Either way, the emotion associated with this need to move apart from somebody is hatred. The person who disputes our moral convictions is a person that to some degree we have a psychological need to hate.
Of course any Christian can see that the psychology of moral convictions demonstrated through scientific tests and reasoning comes into direct conflict with the command of Christ that we love one another without reserve. But to fully understand how we can learn to love and include those who do not share our moral convictions we need to talk about the Bible, and some rather unfortunate history.
Part of the long story of the Hebrew Bible, our Christian Old Testament, is a story of how the Hebrew people became more and more aware of the breadth and diversity of God’s love. By the time we reach the 8th century prophets we have learned, with Israel, that God’s love and concern for humans is truly universal. In Amos chapter 9 God reminds Israel that Divine guidance not only led Israel out of Egypt, but the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Arameans out of Kir. Whether in blessing or judgment Israel has no special place.
In the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Malachi we find the same affirmations not only that God cares for all humanity, but that all humanity in some way worships and honors God.
This idea, hinted at poetically when Psalm 87 asserts that all the peoples have their birthplace in Zion comes to its fulfillment in the universality of inclusion found in the teaching of Jesus. He not only finds faith among the nations of the earth, the universal impact of his death and resurrection breaks down the last barrier between righteous and unrighteousness. All, are saved when he is lifted up above the earth, and he draws all people to himself.
Unfortunately at a fairly early stage in its history our Christian community turned away from the trajectory that began when Abraham was called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth and the apostles were send to the ends of the earth.
By its second and third century the church, instead of focusing on the breadth of God’s love began obsessing over who was saved and why. Rightfully eschewing the divisions Paul so clearly decried the church instead focused on new divisions: between the baptized and unbaptized, between those who held orthodox beliefs and those who didn’t.
In Christ there may be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. But for the emerging Catholic Church there was certainly a difference between the saved and the damned, or the orthodox, the heretics, the apostates, and the pagans. The old categories that might have divided the nascent Christian church in the time Paul were replaced by new categories suited to an empire, a civilization. Everything was based on whether you were baptized or not, whether you held the right beliefs or not. The practice of damning the pagans and anathematizing fellow Christians became a Christian habit.
These new divisions were complimented, if we may use the word, by a hierarchical view of the created order drawn from the Genesis account of creation and neo-Platonism. Paul’s poetic vision aside, his own hierarchical understanding of the orderliness of God’s creation eventually justified the perpetuation of social hierarchies as exclusive as any in the pagan world.
Nor were these finally overcome by Enlightenment egalitarianism and universalism, which the church fought tooth and nail. Instead Enlightenment Christians like Schlieremacher would devise their own hierarchies, now all quite scientific. And in the United States emerging scientific theories of race were readily read back into biblical accounts of ethnic distinctions to justify the enslaving of Africans. The mark of Cain, the descendants of Ham, were blessed with forced conversion and then cursed with slavery.
The result of all this is that contemporary Christian church inherited a dearth of traditional resources for comprehending diversity of its world in its emerging forms. And it is thus ill-equipped to realize in its life, or the larger life of society, the inclusiveness that is the natural result of the universality of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.
Instead, and indeed despite a century of ecumenism, differences in belief quickly devolve into differences between the saved and the damned, and a diversity of cultures and customs is all too quickly mapped onto the distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous.
And this brings us directly to what I spoke about earlier in terms of moral convictions. The traditional church has imbued us with a set of moral convictions, and indeed a moral order, that only grudgingly makes way for genuine diversity and inclusion.
But we do have a resource and that resource is Jesus Christ and his teaching. It takes little effort when one reads of the conflicts between Jesus and the teachers of the law to see a new revelation that actually interrogates moral convictions. That is what Jesus does with great consistency - he questions the moral convictions by which the Jews of his day lived, and loved, or hated.
Even the disciples of Jesus are sometime aghast at his breaking of conventional moral codes, whether in conversing with the woman at the well or mixing with the unclean and uncouth.
In our time Jesus is the one who leads us into the questioning of our own moral convictions. It is precisely the old law law written on our hearts and leading us into hateful hearts that we need to question. It is that old law that must be replaced by a new law, the law of love.
Instead of letting our neighbor’s disagreement with our moral convictions lead us into just another form of ritual cleanliness and isolation, another variation on the old hatred for apparent unrighteousness, we need to see in our neighbor the probing of Jesus himself. The neighbor who will not let us rest easy in our convictions is just ike the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, the naked: an incarnation of Christ demanding that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Not merely when, but particularly because he or she is puncturing our posture of moral confidence and asking us to find ourselves not in our own righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ.
In a time of deep divisions, exclusion, and hatred the teaching of Christ provides a guide for those who have been blind guides.
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
And on these we must hang together, or we will fall apart.
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