About Those New, Western Values—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

 

I continue to be very pessimistic about the public square, expecting an increasing opposition to and persecution of Christians throughout the world.  This is based on reading stories daily about how Christians are opposed, sued, discriminated against, deplatformed, and ridiculed.  This does not mean for me a disengagement with the world but a recalculation of what that engagement involves.  The prophets found themselves in the important role in ancient Israel of telling the governmental and social powers of their day that they did not know God.  As the West today becomes increasingly anti-Christian, not simply post-Christian, in its values and practices, and as it redefines virtues in anti-Christian ways, the Church’s engagement with the public square ought to be less and less a matter of finding common cause with others in the pursuit of justice but needs rather to be a matter of showing the world that it is not the Kingdom of God.  An anti-Christian vision of the world defines social justice in a way that is opposed to divine justice.

One significant way to describe the moral changes in public discourse about justice is in terms of social values.  Not that long ago, Western values were defined in terms of human rights, based on the notion that all humans were equal.  Freedom and equality became the primary values for the West.  The American version of this argument involved a Deist understanding: the Creator made humans from the same cloth, so to speak, and He endowed them with inalienable rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence.  The French had their secular understanding of this, but it, too, highlighted similar values: equality, liberty, and fraternity.  Over the history of secular Western modernity hung the vestige of a Judeo-Christian worldview involving freedom and equality for all because there is one God, Creator of all.  With this loosely Christian version of justice, Christians could usually agree—it was their ethic, after all, that stood at the root of Deist and secularist versions of the public square’s ethic.  Thus, Christians could frequently engage the public square in common cause with non-Christians.  Or they could, at least, dialogue and argue with them.

In the 21st century, however, these values have been shuffled to the storage closet and three new values have been erected in the public square: diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Not a few in the West have been duped by the reshuffling of values, thinking that there is continuity between what was and what is now proclaimed as truths self-evident.  The three new values are all predicated on the essential differences of humanity, not their essential sameness.  Instead of universal commonality or unity we now have diversity.  Instead of equality we now have equity.  Instead of God’s work of inclusion, His mission—Christians would say His offer of salvation through Jesus’ sacrificial death for the sins of the world—we have strictly human efforts at inclusion, particularly of things God calls sin.  The shift in values in the public square has left many Christians speechless.  Thinking that diversity, equity, and inclusion sound like worthy values, ones Christians might affirm, they have been confused at the resultant changes in Western society.

I recall one well-meaning Christian jumping on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon only a short while ago, thinking that this racist organization was all about racial justice.  I know a seminary administration and board that has made diversity its mantra, even down to replacing white male authors on its syllabi for anything else—as though truth wears the faces of the authors writing about it and academic excellence is found in readers’ responses rather than critical arguments.  I know of ministers who crafted confused sermons about diversity, equity, or inclusion, not realizing that they were shifting the congregation’s eyes from the cross to street activism, from the Church’s mission to the public square’s version of justice.  The confusion comes because activist efforts in the face of perceived or actual injustices are easily endorsed without realizing that they are defined and pursued in entirely non-Christian ways.  Justice in the Kingdom of God is not a mere quantitative improvement of justice in the public square; it is a qualitatively different understanding of justice.

Some ‘evangelical’ seminaries have contributed to the confusion.  Even before the value shift to diversity instead of the universal Gospel, some mission departments changed their names to ‘intercultural studies.’  This involved reconceiving the method and purpose of mission studies.  Instead of being about understanding the Gospel, the focus was now on understanding the audiences.  Instead of missions understood through Biblical and theological interpretation, it was now a project of the social sciences—anthropology, culture, and sociology.  Instead of involving evangelism to the lost, it was now about dialogue and understanding.  Instead of understanding the Gospel as all about the world streaming to the cross to make their garments white in the blood of the Lamb, the public square’s value of diversity ruled the agenda.  In an Evangelical seminary, beyond the mission department changes, this might not be so blatantly presented as the study of other religions.  It might also be presented as a communal journey toward social diversity.  The result is to focus on ourselves, not the cross of Jesus Christ.  The achievement of diversity is never clearly defined, since an ultimate definition would have to recognize that each person is unique.  Instead, some vague notion of diversity of groups is in view, and this inevitably means a valuing of some groups over others.  Has the faculty reached its goal of diversification when it has hired a black, Hispanic, or Asian professor, or does that black professor have to be Afro-American and not Nigerian?  Is a Nigerian enough diversity, or does the seminary also need a Kenyan?  What about a Polynesian?  Would a Chinese from Singapore be as acceptable as one from the Philippines?  And so the game of diversification is played.  It is played by forgetting the Church, theology, and ministerial calling and focusing on incidental distinctions and accidential characteristics as though they are critical, permanent, and essential.  Instead of focusing, as we have heard so often, on the content of a person’s character, we are told to focus on the colour of his or her skin.  We are told to focus not on releasing people to the ministry to which God has called them but on racial, gender, and cultural identities.  The concern for adherence to the truth is sidelined in the pursuit of some menagerie of multicultural community.  We are considered stronger with our differences, and woe be it that someone changes culturally and no longer provides that difference he or she initially contributed.  The Gospel is seated in the shadows so that the spotlight might fall on the dappled differences we represent from our diverse groups. To be sure, diversity in Christian community will occur as we focus on the worldwide mission of the Church and affirm the gifts God has given each of us irrespective of our marginal identities.  This is, however, a result of one faith, one Gospel, one Lord, one Spirit, and One God and Father of all.  Results are different from purposes.  When we make our own diversity the purpose, we shift everything to being about us.  When diversity is pursued as the goal, community replaces ecclesiology, diversity replaces mission, and human differences replace our one Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

The public square has also replaced equality with equity.  Equality emphasizes opportunity, equity emphasizes outcomes.  A notion of essential ‘equalness’ is replaced by a notion that social justice is required to created ‘equalness.’  Scripture advocates concern for more than equal opportunity.  God’s view of justice in Scripture recognizes human depravity and a world groaning under sin and its results such that more than opportunity is called for to achieve justice.  Thus, the public square’s ‘equity’ has caught the eye of many Christians, and they have tried to catch up to the higher view of justice as equity in the public square than what they have found in their Christian circles.  Yet the public square’s version of equity is not the Scripture’s version of equity.  Scripture encourages social efforts in particular directions to help groups like the widows, orphans, and aliens so that they might have equal opportunity, not so that everyone in society might have equal outcomes.  Grain is to be left on the edges of the field for those without fields of their own, not collected and handed out to everyone equally.  Needs are to be met, not property redistributed.  The former version of justice gives the help needed so that people can achieve their goals through hard work; the latter version of justice puts the government in control of production and distribution of goods.  Equity in this sense at best penalizes those who work hard and at worst removes the very possibility of private property, hard work, and self-achievement.  Instead of helping the needy, it makes the needy the preferential social group.  Perhaps worst of all, it puts the determination of social justice into the hands of a political elite, a vanguard of the people, whose judgements are seldom just.

Finally, the public square has replaced God’s missional vision with its version of inclusion.  This is a theological versus secular distinction at its root.  God’s mission in the world is soteriological and ecclesial.  The human predicament is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  God’s solution is the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.  All are in need of salvation, and only God can provide that salvation.  People can do nothing to save themselves.  All that they can do is accept or reject the salvation that God has provided.  Salvation is by grace through faith—God’s gracious gift in Christ’s sacrificial death. Our response of faith is believing that Christ has died for us and receiving that gift of salvation.  The public square’s value of inclusion rejects all this.  It rejects that humans are in need of God or of God’s salvation.  If there is ‘sin’, it is not sin against God’s just decrees but society’s own determinations of injustice.  Thus, ‘inclusion’ is humanistically and not theologically defined, and those awkwardly trying to merge this public version of inclusion with Christianity regularly find themselves opposed to the teaching of Scripture, particularly around sexual ethics.  These progressive Christians call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5.20), for their notion of inclusion involves tolerance and welcoming of people without the need for repentance of sin and obedience to God.  They not only tolerate evil but call unjust those who affirm what Scripture says is sinful.  ‘Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them’ (Romans 3.32).  It is enough for them to be inclusive, and, like the Corinthian church of old, they congratulate themselves for their toleration of things that even pagan society finds excessive (cf. 1 Corinthians 5.1).  Indeed, society is not to be called pagan, and the Church is urged instead to be as inclusive as society is towards sin.  This version of inclusiveness runs right through the Christian counselling world and the degrees seminaries offer in therapeutic counselling, for, in order to hold onto their cherished licenses in the public square, these Christian counsellors are required not to identify anything as sinful and not to call for repentance, conversion, and transformation in their practices.

Thus, engagement with the public square is not a matter of joining arm in arm with the social justice warriors of diversity, equity, and inclusion in some sort of mindless blurring of the distinction between Church and society.  The Church’s first role in society is to lift high the cross of Christ for all to see.  Wherever the centrality of Christ diminishes in our pursuit of justice, we are making compromises with the world.  These are subtle, duping many a Christian, church, seminary, Christian organization, and denomination.  Kingdom justice is not diversity but unity in Christ, not equity as elitist control of production and distribution but as care for the needy, and not inclusion without repentance for sin and baptism into Christ.  Only in showing the world that it is not the Church will the Church be the light that shows the world the way to God.  And only then may it find the righteousness of God.

The Seven Churches of Asia Respond to John's Apocalyptic Letter

 

Setting of the Letter: Upon receiving St. John’s apocalyptic missive to the seven churches of Asia in the mid-90s AD, those churches decided to formulate a collective response.  Delegates, two from each church, were sent to Ephesus to discuss the letter and compose a reply to John, their beloved elder imprisoned by the Roman authorities on the Isle of Patmos.  The council listened to testimonies from Nicolaitans, who gave tearful descriptions of their exclusion from certain Christian communities.  Activists were brought in to explain their involvement in social justice.  While disagreeing among themselves, they nevertheless were able to formulate a rejection of John’s theology.

[This is a fictional and satirical letter, of course, intended to highlight current differences among those in the Christian tradition—whether actually Christians or not—on the issue of Church and State, culture, and society relations.  Certain groups in John’s day, claiming to represent Christianity, held views diametrically opposed to Christian doctrine and ethics.  Also, today, certain groups continue to oppose Christian doctrine and ethics even though a book like John’s Apocalypse was accepted into the Christian canon.  Such groups would rather leave John in exile on the little island of Patmos than associate with him, let alone emend their ways.]

Dear John,

Thank you for your very interesting and creative letters to each of us and the apocalyptic visions that followed.  We very much enjoyed your engagement with earlier texts in Scripture and use of the apocalyptic genre to make your point—theological discourse is often too dry.  That being said, we have some concerns with the overall view that you have taken about our engagement with the state, culture, and society as Christians and as churches.  We have disagreement among ourselves about those concerns, and so we are writing openly about our differences.  Yet we are in agreement that a more reasonable and kinder approach to the state, culture, and society should characterise Christianity.

First, we should state what we did understand your position to be in your letter.  You do give some room for different responses, depending on what really is the state’s or culture's challenges to us at any one point in history.  We think that this is advisable as well, since the church may be permitted or even favoured at one point in history and disfavoured or even persecuted at another.  Your overall view, however, is decidedly negative.  You see the general trend in history to be towards an apocalyptic, tyrannical persecution of the church that only an intervention by God can withstand.  We could decipher your symbolism to see that you apply this to the current Roman government and to Roman economic practices.

Part of our group found this concerning, not necessarily because they disagree with you but because they do not want the church to become political.  They see a separation between the spiritual and the political in distinct terms.  Sermons from the pulpit should not endorse or oppose certain government persons or policies, they say.  Their reasons are that this will also divide the church into political camps, it will make government funding for church projects in education or charity work difficult or impossible, and it will even lead to further persecution.  They also believe that the church should pray for the government and support it as a God-given authority.  This is their understanding of ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’  In a word, there is no place for politics in the Church.

Another group in our meeting took a very different position.  They were quite in agreement with you that we as Christians need to respond to the government’s policies and actions.  They do not, however, think that the best approach is to write a ‘Christian’ view on some matter so much as a human rights view of social justice.  We do not, they say, need to divide Christians and others over issues of social justice.  In fact, some said, they thought that the Church has some catching up to do on matters of social justice in society.  Mentioning Jesus in such an exclusive and exalted way, as you do throughout your letter, shuts out so many good and honest citizens who have high ethical standards.  We need a united front, and Christian exclusivity is a problem.  Could we not rather, they suggested, speak of ‘human rights,’ such as equality, life, freedom, and so forth?  This universalism could even include the atheists, such as the Epicureans, as well as other religions.  They would not want to formulate Christian identity around dogma but rather see Christianity as one way among others to speak of a universal ‘spiritual experience’ of the divine and as one voice among many that supports universal human rights.

There was a smaller group in our meeting, although the most vocal.  It presented a third position.  While agreeing with the last mentioned group in their opposition to uniquely Christian views, they rejected the universal approach to rights.  They rather wanted to identify justice with respect to the issues facing particular groups of people.  In this way, they almost agreed with the first group noted in this letter, given its desire to formulate a uniquely Christian rather than universal view.  However, they quickly took the same approach to every group that falls out of favour with the current Roman government or any authority.  For example, they did not want to include the barbarian because of some universal justice concept but simply because the barbarian is entitled to his or her own version of justice.  They have their truth and justice whether or not it agrees with the Roman view—or the Christian view.  This group found your railings against ‘Jezebel’ and the so-called ‘Nicolaitans,’ with their open views on sexual ethics, to be offensive.  They also found your comment about a ‘synagogue of Satan’ and your hyper-negative view of culture to be bigoted and insensitive.  Identifying the Roman emperor with the Antichrist was surely extreme, offensive, and needlessly provocative.  This progressive group wants to move ahead in relations with culture and with the state by charting a moral path of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Like the previous view, it calls for understanding Christian identity not in terms of religious beliefs but in terms of moral action understood as social justice.

While we might go on at a greater length about our meeting, we think that this brief overview of our three different positions might be enough to convey to you that we reject your letter to us, whatever our reasons.  After these discussions, we took a vote on whether or not to petition the government for your release from exile on Patmos.  The majority vote was not to do so.  Should you be released, we believe that your views would be detrimental for the churches themselves and for their relationship to their municipalities, and probably for the church everywhere in relation to the Roman government. 

We have, furthermore, resolved the following:

There is to be no more prophesy (and especially no more apocalypticism) in the church;

Theology and ethics will not be based on the interpretation of Scripture, which is too ‘Christian’ and also divisive as we have discovered we have different interpretations;

Theology and ethics will be based on a common understanding of social justice with others in society—they are not to be stated as uniquely Christian;

Consequently, we will, like the Stoics, simply speak of ‘God’ (and by this they really mean ‘Reason’) and not explain what we mean by this, and we will no longer identify God with Jesus as that is so specific a definition that it will completely divide Christians from others in society;

Social justice will be understood as ‘affirming’ the views and practices of others, without judgements on their views and practices.  We will celebrate the diversity among us, including the sexual practices of the Nicolaitans, rather than push for some sort of unity, and we will make tolerance and inclusivity the gold standard for our communities, including eating meat sacrificed to idols as we participate with all faiths in religious devotion;

As evangelism is too confrontational a practice, calling for people to believe exclusively in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross for all our sins and so be saved.  We prefer inclusivity, and so we will henceforth cease from all proselytism;

There will be no preaching in churches that touches on exclusive beliefs of Christians or anything political;

However, the churches are encouraged to back social causes that others in society also back.  Christians are encouraged not to do so as Christians so much as citizens concerned about social justice.  Activism is encouraged, but only activism supported by all oppressed groups.

We expect that, in taking these approaches, we will be able to avoid being singled out as ‘Christians’ and therefore not be persecuted.  While our decisions leave you in exile, know that we remember you fondly.  Your devotion is admirable, even if your views are outdated and unacceptable.

Sincerely,

The Churches of Western Asia (AD 96)

Wanted: Good Friends and a Worthy Enemy for a Faltering Evangelicalism

 

The 1^st/2^nd c. AD philosopher, Plutarch, wrote several essays on friendship and then one essay entitled How to Profit by One’s Enemies.  The writings balance one another in that they worked towards the common goal of exploring how relationships might make one better—or worse.  Therein lies a relevant lesson for Evangelicals in the 21^st century.  What it needs, if it is still possible to rescue it, is good friends and a worthy enemy.  'Evangelical' means different things in different parts of the world, so the point made here applies primarily to the North American context.

On the ‘friendship’ side of the equation, one of the developments over the past fifty years has been the breakup of friendships between Evangelicals.  The ‘instruments of unity’ have either disappeared or become too weak.  It is difficult to find unity around a central figure—an evangelist like Billy Graham, a pastor like John Stott, or a scholar like Howard Marshall.  A few prominent names might come to mind, but they represent large, independent churches or agencies without an ecclesial affiliation.  It is also difficult to have larger scale cooperation the more the Evangelical churches choose independence from denominations.  And it is difficult for once multidenominational, Evangelical seminaries to play any role in unity in light of this disarray.  The result is, to a large extent, that 'Evangelical' denominations turn inward for their own relationships, and independent churches have little engagement with other churches.  A missionary, for example, might find funding from a collection of local churches, but the supporting churches have no connectivity with each other in a definable mission of the Church.  The independent church movement has, moreover, disconnected these churches from an historical understanding of the Church—‘friendships’ with the past are broken.

On the ‘enemies’ side, Plutarch’s point is that enemies can make us better people.  When someone identifies errors in an enemy, e.g., one might practice some self-awareness as well.  His point is rather like Jesus’ warning not to point out the speck in someone else’s eye when one has a log in one's own eye (Matthew 7.4), but he offers a lengthy essay on the profit one might gain from one’s enemies.  The fact is, Evangelicalism has lost a good enemy.  It did rather well when the mainline denominations thrived but needed a reforming, revivalist movement like Evangelicalism to keep them orthodox or pull them back to orthodoxy.  The threat to orthodoxy was liberalism, which opposed the belief that the Bible is God’s Word and treated it as just any other book, opposed the belief in miracles and endorsed ‘science’ in interpretation of Scripture and theology, questioned orthodox dogma, and replaced the details of doctrine with the most general affirmations (Christianity as simply the belief in God the Father, the brotherhood of mankind, and the infinite worth of the human soul, ala Adolph von Harnack).  The mainline denominations’ denial of orthodoxy over the past sixty years, their progressive decline in numbers, and Evangelicals withdrawal from them eventually meant that the ‘liberal’ enemy of Evangelicalism was no longer a worthy opponent.  (In a Plutarchian manner, ask Evangelicals in the Church of England if their opponents in the denomination in any way help to improve them.)  Evangelicals had developed particular tools to fight liberalism, but these are not quite the tools needed to fight the battle in a postmodern, post-Christian era.

Postmodernity’s challenge is not a challenge about what is true; it is a challenge of truth itself.  For them, truth is constructed and functional, not objective and authoritative ('my truth' is not necessarily 'your truth').  It is not so interested in debating theological doctrine as simply dismissing the importance of doctrine.  Instead, it makes ‘social justice’ and activism the major concerns, and in doing so Evangelicals have become confused.  Progressive Evangelicals (ones guided more by culture than Scripture--not really Evangelicals) have aligned themselves with this agenda.  Of course they are for social justice and believe in activism--who wouldn't be?  Evangelicals have always been activist in social justice, such as the Abolition movement of the 19th century or the Pro-Life movement of the 20th century.  

The problem, of course, is that ‘social justice’ means nothing until it is defined.  If it is not defined by Scripture and the Church's long history, it will be defined by the contemporary culture--and it has been. Progressives have allowed themselves to be moved from their concern for Scripture as the authority in Christian faith and practice by chasing after partnerships with those pursuing activist agendas in the public sphere.  They have also moved to a spirituality that is not centred on Christ and His forgiving and transforming grace.  They have become weak in their concern for evangelism, wanting to be more agreeable and inclusive than appear to be confrontational and exclusive.  And the details of social justice have turned out to be a radical change from what Christians have valued.  Evangelicals could fight the enemy of liberalism, an error in solid form.  But they are, of course, embarrassed to be defined as persons opposed to ‘social justice,' which is no justice at all in its particulars for the unborn, for children, for marriage, for family, for law and order, for equality, etc.  A ghostlike enemy cloaked in some undefined 'social justice' does not help to define Evangelicals, and they are even painted as unethical or needing to catch up to the alleged higher ethic that the culture offers.

Without good friendships and without a good enemy, Evangelicalism has been faltering.  It may not be possible to save it as a movement, although what it was historically is still something that can be promoted.  What it was, as historian David Bebbington famously determined, was a movement committed to the authority of Scripture, with Christ at the centre, the need for conversion and salvation in the cross of Christ, and an activism of believers engaging the world through the deep streams of  Christian faith and practice.  Let's hope that, even as Evangelicalism has been knocked on its heels through the loss of good friendships and the lack of a good enemy (!), it will nonetheless survive as a movement in this new era of postmodernity.  Those values identified by Bebbington are worth continuing, along with a clearer understanding of the Church's role (we need a better ecclesiology) in all of this.

A Brief Comparison of Plutarch and Paul on Opposition to Homosexuality

After two thousand years of a clear understanding that Romans 1.26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6.9 understand homosexuality to be sinful, some revisionist interpreters in the late 20th century began to venture alternative—albeit contradictory—readings of Biblical texts in a vain attempt to dismiss Scripture’s testimony declaring homosexuality to be a sin.  Some revisionist interpretations have even been proposed by Biblical and Classics scholars, who should know better but who, for one reason or another (sometimes even intentionally), have misled their readers.[1]

Some of the revisionist readings, however, can be dismissed by considering just a few passages in Plutarch (1st/2nd c. AD).  This is helpful, since laity can become confused amidst all the primary texts from antiquity that might be considered.  The following, brief study examines some of the conceptual and linguistic parallels between Paul and Plutarch in just a few passages.  Plutarch undermines a number of the fanciful, revisionist readings of the two texts in Paul. (There is, of course, no textual relation between these two authors.)

In Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, two characters argue over whether homosexual or heterosexual love is better.  (Some other dialogues covered the same subject.)[2]  Homosexual love is discussed with respect to pedophilia, but the age of participants in same-sex love is not at all the issue.  Pederasty is handled as same-sex relationships.  The real issue being argued at this point in the argument is the distinction between friendship and erotic love as expressed in homosexual and heterosexual relations.  In the dialogue, Protogenes argues against mere sexual pleasure by arguing for homosexual friendship.  He rejects lust:

… mere pleasure is base and unworthy of a free man. For this reason also it is not gentlemanly or urbane to make love to slave boys: such a love is mere copulation, like the love of women (Plutarch, Dialogue on Love 751b).[3]

Protogenes is not arguing against sexual intercourse and is actually arguing for homosexuality. He argues that homosexual love of boys (not the use of slave boys) is preferable when it is voluntary as it is first friendship.  He does not believe that friendship is possible between men and women as the basis of the relationship is sexual pleasure first and last:

 genuine Love has no connexion whatsoever with the women’s quarters. I deny that it is love that you have felt for women and girls—any more than flies feel love for milk (Plutarch, Dialogue on Love 750c).

Daphnaeus, on the other hand, argues that heterosexual love is natural love, being what nature intends for the production of children and continuation of the human race.  (This is Paul’s position.)  To counter Protogenes, he says that friendship can develop even if sex is the initial attraction between men and women.  Of particular interest is a passage that allows comparison with Paul's language:

But I count this as a great argument in favour of [men’s love of] women: if [for argument’s sake][4] union contrary to nature [παρὰ φύσιν] with males does not destroy or curtail a lover’s tenderness, it stands to reason that the love between men and women, being normal and natural [τῇ φύσει], will be conducive to friendship developing in due course from favour [‘favour’ means freely giving sex]…. But to consort with males (whether without consent, in which case it involves violence and brigandage; or if with consent, there is still weakness [softness, μαλακίᾳ] and effeminacy [θηλύτητι] on the part of those who, contrary to nature [παρὰ φύσιν], allow themselves in Plato’s words’ to be covered and mounted like cattle’)—this is a completely ill-favoured favour, indecent, an unlovely affront to Aphroditê (Plutarch, Dialogue on Love 751c-e).

The comparison between a few passages in Plutarch and Paul of ideas and language can be more clearly seen in a table:

Plutarch	Paul
Homosexual sex is ‘ill-favoured’ and ‘indecent’ [ἀσχήμων] and an affront to Aphrodite, the goddess of love	Homosexual sex is ‘shameless’ [ἀσχημοσύνην] (Romans 1.27)
Heterosexual love is normal and ‘natural’ [τῇ φύσει].  Homosexual sex is ‘contrary to nature’ [παρὰ φύσιν].	Lesbians exchange ‘natural use’ [of sexual organs; φυσικὴν χρῆσιν] for what is ‘against nature’ [τὴν παρὰ φύσιν] (1.26).  Homosexual male acts involve men forsaking the ‘natural use’ [τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν] of women (1.27)
Daphnaeus sidelines the argument that homosexuality might destroy or curtail a lover’s tenderness.  However, whether rape or consensual, homosexual sex involves softness [μαλακίᾳ] and effeminacy.[5]  'If you wish to distress the man who hates you, do not revile him as lewd [κίναιδον][6], effeminate [soft, μαλακὸν], licentious, vulgar, or illiberal, but be a man yourself, show self-control, be truthful, and treat with kindness and justice those who have to deal with you' (Plutarch, How to Profit by One's Enemies 4).[7]   Note that the word ‘soft’ [μαλακὸν] appears between two other sexual terms and should be understood here to refer to homosexuality, as it often does.[8]  It is here differentiated from the word for the active male giving sex in a homosexual relationship (κίναιδον).	Homosexuals receive ‘in themselves the due penalty for their error’ (1.27) Homosexuals are ‘soft men’ [μαλακοὶ] (1 Cor. 6.9)

Conclusions: Over against recent revisionist suggestions to read Romans 1.26-27 differently, Paul is speaking about homosexuality and saying that it is a sin.  He does not mention pederasty because he is not talking about it.  Even when Plutarch has his characters focus on pederasty in the passage cited, the discussion is really about homosexuality, not adult males having sex with boys.  The problem that Daphnaeus and Paul have with homosexuality is not that it is not mutual love of adults but that it is unnatural love.  Unnatural love is not, as some revisionist have ventured, acting against your own inclinations (such as a heterosexual male having sex with another male) but same-sex love.  Daphnaeus says it is against the goddess, Aphrodite; Paul says it is against God the creator.  Nor is the issue having same-sex with slaves—Daphnaeus ignores the point of Protogenes about sex with slave boys because the issue is homosexual versus heterosexual sex.  Both Plutarch and Paul note the diminishment of character among homosexuals--Paul with a vague reference ('in themselves the due penalty'), Plutarch (really Daphnaeus) more explicitly identifies the loss as softness and effeminacy.

The closeness of argument between Daphnaeus and Paul extends to the Greek terminology used: indecent/shameful,’ ‘against nature,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘soft’ (bringing in 1 Corinthians 6.9 to the discussion of Romans 1.26-27).  Moreover, ‘soft’ takes the argument beyond a discussion of the act to a discussion of orientation or disposition, which both Daphnaeus and Paul argue, against a number of ancient and modern writers, is not natural.

So much has been written on homosexuality in recent decades that distorts the issues and attempts to dart down some shadowy cul-de-sac of interpretation to undermine the unchanging witness of both Scripture and the Church over centuries.  One of the problems with these recent challenges is that they have thrown up alternative theses that confuse their readers and go nowhere under scrutiny, but they have done so without proper attention to the relevant primary texts.  Under closer examination of primary sources, such as Plutarch, the revisionist readings are easily dispelled.  This brief essay considers a few texts from a near contemporary of Paul's, a popular and prolific, pagan author, Plutarch.  Paul, of course, is not dependent on non-Jewish contexts for his theology, but he easily uses language from his Graeco-Roman context to express himself to an audience that is also familiar with it.  These passages from Plutarch demonstrate this.

---

[1] S. Donald Fortson and Rollin G. Grams, Unchanging Witness: The Consistent Christian Teaching on Homosexuality in Scripture and Tradition (Nashville: B&H Press, 2016).

[2] Cf. Xenophon, Symposium (4^th c. BC) and Lucian, Amores (4^th c. AD).

[3] Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. IX, trans. Edwin Minar, Jr., F. H. Sandrach, and W. C. Helmbold (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928).

[4] This is the meaning of the first class conditional in Greek.

[5] For example, Plutarch offers a few characteristics when he discusses false accusations of homosexuality: ‘an unwarranted suspicion of unmanliness was aroused against Lacydes, king of the Argives, by a certain arrangement of his hair and a mincing gait, and Pompey suffered in the same way on account of his habit of scratching his head with one finger [a signal for homosexuals], although he was very far removed from effeminacy and licentiousness’ (Plutarch, How to profit by one's enemies 6).  Homosexuality is one example of softness in men.  People who are soft are incapable of self-control, too weak to withstand desires.  Plutarch says, ‘But for a man who is sick it is intolerable, nay, an aggravation of the sickness, to be told, “See what comes of your intemperance [ἀκρασίας], your soft living [μαλακίας], your gluttony and wenching” (How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend 28).  Similarly, they like soft living, which is characteristic of women, who are soft.  Thus, homosexual men are soft men in the senses that they (1) in to vice; (2) play the part of soft women; and (3) like the soft life.

[6] That is, the active partner in a male, same-sex relationship, over against the pathic.

[7] Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. II, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928).

[8] Cf. the extensive discussion in chapter 15 of Fortson and Grams, Unchanging Witness.

The Church and Friendship

 At times, Greek and Roman philosophers turned to the subject of friendship as a moral category.  Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch gave considerable thought to the nature of true friendship and to the relationship between it and the virtues.  In this brief reflection, I would like to point out a few points made by the 1st/2nd century philosopher and writer, Plutarch, in his essay, ‘On Abundance of Friends.’ Some of his comments offer a way to compare and contrast his statements with our understanding of the church.

The question to consider is, 'How does thinking about the church as a place for forming and practicing friendship expand our understanding of the church?'  Plutarch's comments will challenge a shallow view of 'friendship,' such as we have with Facebook 'friends.'  The Covid pandemic has shut down fellowshipping together, challenging our understanding of the church as primarily a worship service with programmes and some light fellowship around these.  Plutarch's comments also address this problem.  Yet Paul's understanding of the church calls for even a higher bar of relationships than Plutarch's concern for more depth to friendship.  Paul uses the language of intimate friendship for the church, but he also uses the language of family.  Especially, however, Paul's understanding of church relationships and community are always and essentially in Christ.  These initial comments should orient the reader to the following engagement with Plutarch.

Not Many Friends

Plutarch's main point is that true friendship precludes having many friends.  He says,

But among many other things what stands chiefly in the way of getting a friend is the desire for many friends…’ (II).[1] 

As he concludes his essay, Plutarch restates his point:

… the soul suitable for many friendships must be impressionable, and versatile, and pliant, and changeable. But friendship requires a steady constant and unchangeable character, a person that is uniform in his intimacy. And so a constant friend is a thing rare and hard to find (IX).

Rather, he avers, friendship comes in pairs.  That is, one hears of celebrated friendships between two people, not a group.

Choosing Your Friends Carefully

A corollary of this point is that one should not fall into friendship but choose friends carefully.  Plutarch says,

We ought not, therefore, lightly to welcome or strike up an intimate friendship with any chance comers, or love those who attach themselves to us, but attach ourselves to those who are worthy of our friendship (IV).

The argument does make good sense and is the sort of advice to offer young people.  One might also apply this to the broken friendship in the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, and Plutarch does discuss the painful ending of a friendship too quickly formed.  Yet the story of Judas among Jesus’ intimate disciples might also alert us to the problem in Plutarch’s advice.  The formation of friendships involves vulnerability and, as a matter of fact, disappointment and pain.  This vulnerability points to one aspect of ecclesiology: the church functions as a cauldron in which intimidate friendships might be formed among people who fellowship, worship, and work together.  This more ‘process’ notion of friendship must be willing to accept that there will be failed friendships, even betrayals. 

Three Components of Friendship

Just what goes into the cauldron for the formation of friendship?  From the following two overlapping quotations, Plutarch identifies three components of friendship:

What then is the purchase-money of friendship? Benevolence and complaisance conjoined with virtue, and yet nature has nothing more rare than these (II).

And since true friendship has three main requirements, virtue, as a thing good; and familiarity, as a thing pleasant; and use, as a thing serviceable; for we ought to choose a friend with judgement, and rejoice in his company, and make use of him in need… (III).

We might restate the point.  Friendship has to do with the formation and support in one another of common virtues, with the bond of fellowship, and with mutual care and concern.  This point from Plutarch is also applicable to considerations about the church.  Some, for example, wish to focus on the Christian community as a friendship bond among diverse persons.  This is certainly a key characteristic of the church in the New Testament, as Paul points out in Galatians 3.28; 1 Corinthians 12.13; and Colossians 3.11.  This is, however, not a celebration of diversity but a celebration of unity despite diversity.  The emphasis is on the unity, and that unity is found in Christ.  Thus, the New Testament does not celebrate diversity in community but unity in Christ.

With Plutarch, Paul would agree on the importance of friends having common virtues.  This applies to the friendships formed in the church.  There is no room for friendship understood as something separable from common virtues—no ‘walking together’ of people who disagree over matters of virtue.  This is a regular point in Paul’s writings, and the Corinthian correspondence stands as an example of the importance of having clear lines such that believers are not ‘unequally yoked with unbelievers’ (2 Corinthians 6.14) and do not tolerate egregious sin as a mark of love and grace but rather expel the immoral person (1 Corinthians 5).

Plutarch’s point about friends having mutual care and concern for one another is also a feature of Paul’s letters.  First, there is a common labor that builds bonds of friendship: Paul begins the letter of Philippians by noting the church’s partnership in the Gospel—their labor towards the same evangelistic ends (1.5).  Second, this leads to mutual care and concern between Paul and the Philippian believers.  They are partakers with Paul in grace, in his imprisonment, in his defense and confirmation of the Gospel, and this has the effect of binding them together more firmly in the mutual affection of Christ Jesus (1.7-8).  This mutual care and concern is very practical.  Paul sends Timothy back to the church when he cannot visit.  Timothy is ‘genuinely concerned for your welfare’ (2.20).  The church has sent along Epaphroditus to be with Paul and minister to his needs and do the work of Christ (2.25, 30).  Such reflections on Paul’s letters could be greatly expanded.  The point is that, as with Plutarch, friendship requires agreement about virtues, intimate fellowship, and a relationship of mutual care and concern.  In the church, people fall out over disagreements about Christian virtue, their bond of fellowship can fail, and they may settle for common worship and not be more deeply formed in friendship by mutual care and concern.  What Paul would insist in this is that friendship in the church, koinonia, must be fellowship in Christ.  Common virtues, the nature of fellowship, and the activity and care of the church’s members are defined by Christ, our relationship with Christ and who He is.

Conclusion

In comparing Plutarch's philosophical reflection on friendship to what Paul says about intimate relationships in the church, we see how important it was for Paul to move to a theology of friendship.  That is, relationships were understood and practiced as 'in Christ' relationships.  This overlaps at points with Plutarch's emphases about friendship--even in ways that challenge our practices in the church--but Plutarch's views ultimately fall short of what Paul expected from believers.  While reminding us in an age of Facebook and Covid of the importance of true friendship, Plutarch's thoughts need to be expanded by asking at every point, 'And what does it mean to understand this aspect of friendship as in Christ?'  In a cultural context that celebrates diversity as a virtue, we need to respond that the Christian virtue is unity in Christ, not our differences in some sort of community of toleration and inclusion.  Diversity, toleration, and inclusion are not absolute virtues but are always to be understood as values that need to be considered in Christ.  Plutarch helps us to think more deeply about the church as a cauldron for the formation of intimate friendship, but Paul helps us to gain an ecclesiology that understands Christian fellowship as in Christ friendship and family.  Therein lies a worthy challenge for our practice of church.

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[1] Plutarch, Plutarch’s Morals, Vol. 1, trans. Simon Ford (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1878).

Free Speech, Religious Freedom, the University, and Distress

During the summer of 2021, the Wilberforce Academy held its annual meeting at Worcester College, Oxford.  On the agenda was discussion of abortion and homosexuality from an orthodox, Christian understanding.  Subsequently, the Provost of the college, David Isaac, apologised to students from the college (on summer break) for allowing the college’s facilities to be used to host the event—and this despite his previous record of defending free speech at institutes of higher learning.[1]  An excellent response to this decision has been published as an open letter from the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Toby Young.[2]  What Provost Isaac appears rather clearly to have done is set his college on a path to fall afoul of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill aimed at those opposed to freedom of speech by de-platforming speakers, cancelling classes, and so forth at British universities in order to advance their own viewpoints and not allow others to present their views.

The European discussion of free speech has lagged far behind the United States of America, which secured such freedom in its First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This incident highlights the problems facing cultures as they move decidedly away from their Christian heritage towards something else as yet undefined.  This involves deconstruction and cancelation while yet still uncomfortable with opposing freedom.  Yet freedom is clearly a roadblock in Late Postmodern tribalism.  As but another example of how this is developing in England, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales has ruled against a Christian foster child agency for upholding its Christian value that children should be given a home in families of a father and mother—not in homes with some new definition of ‘marriage’.[3]  England still has an official religion—the Church of England—and yet it is in the United States that religious freedom is not so easily dismissed because of the First Amendment.  The Amendment prohibits laws that impede the free exercise of religion, which is precisely what the Court of Appeal is doing by forbidding the foster child agency to operate according to its Christian convictions.  Of course, America’s Title IX is the route being used to undermine the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion.  Moreover, the US Supreme Court infamously redefined the legal definition of ‘marriage’ (Obergefell vs. Hodges in 2015)—a subjective outrage against millennia of civilizations.  Both the UK and the USA are on trajectories to overthrow Christian values of the past and establish new laws and practices for a post-Christian culture, but paths to these unfortunate ends are slightly different.

European protection of speech has tended to start not from a view on freedom but from a concern about ‘hate speech.’  This is why the UK’s Higher Education Bill is so important, introducing freedom as the operating value.  Otherwise, one ends up with a prohibition of free speech on the flimsy grounds that allowing others to use college facilities for a conference has caused students ‘significant distress’ by the Wilberforce Academy’s defense of long-held beliefs in ‘Christian’ England that have come to be derided only within the last generation.

Some reflection on how changing values are expressing themselves in the changing culture might be helpful.  In the post-Enlightenment period of Modernity, which I would consider to be an approximately 200-year period ending around 1980, freedom was upheld as a cardinal virtue.  It was enshrined in the American and French Revolutions of the late 1700s, attended with another cardinal virtue of equality.  These virtues were sustained by convictions in Modernity that were based in creation (America) or nature (France)—universal, objective truths.  Truths guaranteed certain ‘rights’ that were not attached to one or another group but that were for all human beings.  A Judeo-Christian understanding of creation, that all humans are created in the image of God, or a scientific interpretation that required a view of objective truth (the laws of the universe) could come together to guarantee such rights.  The redesigned chapel of Worcester College in the mid-19^th century contains both images of faith (e.g., Christ’s death on a cross to save us from our sins) and creation or nature (animal carvings, e.g., on pews)—attesting to belief in objective truth in both faith and science. Though a Deist and apparently not a Christian, Thomas Jefferson still thought in universal terms and believed in human rights because of them, as his wording in the Declaration of Independence demonstrates: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’  Even as many Modernists turned away from Christianity, they continued to uphold a concept of rights based on universal truths—so much so that the United Nations Charter in 1948 is wholly dependent on the Modernist concept of ‘rights,’ being titled, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’

Postmodernity, with roots back to Jean-Jacque Rousseau and developed by others like Friedrich Nietzsche under different names (‘Romanticism,’ ‘Existentialism’), found its day in the sunlight of Western culture sometime around 1980.  It became a defined movement earlier in some fields of study, such as architecture.  It seems to have gained particular force in the university in the 1970s as historical and scientific studies gave way to literary interpretations.  Under the reign of the literature department in the university, meaning was severed from the author and his or her intention, and the pursuit of truth was replaced with interpretation.  Readers were encouraged to introduce their own interpretations into discussions around texts, not to declare one reading as the right reading.  New virtues derived from new values were moved into the list of cardinal virtues alongside freedom and equality: diversity, tolerance, and inclusion.  These new virtues created a tension with the older notion of the purpose of a university to discover universal truth through the various disciplines.  Literary studies insisted, on the contrary, on the truism (!) that there was no truth, only interpretations, and virtues like diversity, tolerance, and inclusion encouraged novel interpretations for novelty's sake.  The perspective of Modernity that there was ‘truth’ was considered negatively as a totalising, monocultural metanarrative.  Alongside the interest in novelty was a concern to deconstruct hegemonic authorities and established views of the past.  Freedom, still a cardinal virtue, was redefined by its new fellows.  It had to shift from being a virtue within a divinely created or natural world of objective truth to a virtue within a personally created or subjective world.  Politicians trained in this period of Early Postmodernity will speak of ‘his’ or ‘her’ truth—there is, in this world of subjectivity, no such thing as ‘truth.’  Freedom became the right to live according to one’s own, subjectively created reality.  In Early Postmodernity, freedom of speech could still be valued, albeit now as a defense of the value of subjectivity and related virtues like diversity.

Advocates of Early Postmodernity abound but are, however, out of date, since the culture has moved on to Late Postmodernity, as Worcester College demonstrates.  One hears the same person articulating rhetoric from Early Postmodernity but advocating Late Postmodernity.  The shift from the dominance of the literature department to the dominance of the social sciences has come quickly, with too few understanding the significance of this.  Truth is now said to be neither factual nor subjective (and this objectively stated) but is defined functionally according to some other values in Late Postmodernity.  This is Critical Theory in a nutshell.  Politics, economics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology (the social sciences) are studies about how things work, but they evaluate how things work based on values derived not from efficiency but from some view of ‘the good.’  Late Postmodernity is characterised by tribalism—hence the shift to the ‘social’ sciences over against individualism that was based on universalism during Modernity and diversity in Postmodernity.  On this view, freedom is actually problematic, and it would be fair to say that Late Postmodernity has removed freedom from the list of cardinal virtues for Western society.  It has become, at best, a respected, great grandfather now in his dotage, consigned to a corner chair out the way of his active progeny.  Late Postmodernists also dislike tolerance as a virtue, unless it is reserved for a circle around their own views alone.  Someone else’s ‘free speech’ must not be tolerated if it undermines ‘the good.’  In Late Postmodernity, ‘the good’ can only be defined by what the dominant tribe declares it to be.  There are no rational arguments, only emotional inclinations.

So, then, the Provost of Worcester College finds himself in the awkward position of an Alice in Wonderland.  A group, the Wilberforce Academy, shows up for a conference that upholds the Christian tradition that the college’s forebears would equally have defended and that, even in the long centuries of Modernity, would have been upheld.  Founded originally as Gloucester College in 1283 by 13 Benedictine monks, its heritage was certainly for centuries favourable towards Christian faith and ethics.  It is met, however, by young minds still in their formative stages but already formed by Early Postmodern academics only lately come into the sunlight in academic circles.  These views elevated diversity and tolerance to cardinal virtue status but introduced deconstructivism as a means by which to introduce and champion new views over old views.  Yet the students are Late Postmoderns, lacking an interest in diversity and tolerance, extending the deconstruction programme of Early Postmodernity with their tribal, cancel culture activism.  Freedom is, on this scheme, offered only to entitled groups and is not tendered to others.  As such, it is not only demoted to a lesser virtue but is redefined.  In its place is a psychological value, negatively defined—‘not causing distress’—which rejects freedom, diversity, and tolerance in order to establish a tribal society based on subjectively chosen, emotive values.

The Church of England, moreover, has ridden the culture’s wave right to shore.  It offers no critique of Late Postmodernity for it has lost its own moorings in the historic faith.  It is, as Ezra Pound might have put it, an ‘old bitch gone in the teeth.’  The Church of Wales has wholly embraced this climate change, leaving Evangelicals stranded on a sandbank amidst the tidal surge, too late in responding to the weather warnings.  Islam will prove eventually to be the great challenge to the West’s Late Postmodernity as it emerges with an entirely different understanding of ‘truth,’ ‘freedom,’ and other virtues and values.  Let in the front door as an intersectional saint by Late Postmoderns, it will eventually reveal its contrary values in Europe to those who still do not understand.  It shares with Late Postmodernity a commitment to intolerance of anything that causes distress, but defines what causes distress and for whom totally differently.  And it shares with it an intolerance of freedom, valuing above all submission. This leaves us all intrigued to see if the UK government will be able to enforce its defense of free speech in the current and emerging context. Already there are indications that the Higher Education Bill will be undermined through a variety of practices in universities, such as processes for recruitment and grant applications.[4] 

In this post-Christian, Late Postmodern world, about all that Christians can do is point out the glaring inconsistencies to tribal warlords who monitor success by how much self-concocted, psychological distress the tribe is under at any one time.  Fear of inconsistency is hardly a cure for persons seeking a psychiatrist’s couch under great distress.  And, if the current crop of Worcester College students passing through its halls in a brief three years find the Wilberforce Academy’s Christian views distressing, they must surely find their own age-old prayer tradition before meals a matter of great distress too.  The prayer begins with, ‘We unhappy and unworthy men’—distress appears to be a feature of the college’s men and women.  It further appeals to God to feed them above all with ‘the true bread of heaven, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord.’  This affirmation of God, commitment to Christ’s Lordship, and desire for God’s Word that is prayed at the college but is also the bedrock of the Wilberforce Academy’s values stands squarely opposed to Late Postmodernity and must cause the already distressed students a tidal wave of more distress.  Yet their new Provost’s response so far is to drown out the freedom of speech that centuries of Worcester College students enjoyed. In tribal Postmodernity, only certain people’s distress counts.

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[1] See the story: https://www.christiantoday.com/article/oxford.college.apologises.for.hosting.christian.concern.training.event/137437.htm (accessed 29 September, 2021).

[2] See online: https://freespeechunion.org/letter-to-provost-of-worcester-college-about-his-recent-apology-for-hosting-christian-event/ (accessed 29 September, 2021).

[3] See online: https://www.christianpost.com/news/uk-court-rules-evangelical-foster-agency-cant-refuse-gay-couples.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook (accessed 29 September, 2021).

[4] See Chris Newton, ‘The Government’s Free Speech Bill won’t fix universities if viewpoint diversity isn’t addressed too,’ Conservative Home [Sept. 21, 2021]; online at: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2021/09/chris-newton-the-governments-free-speech-bill-wont-fix-universities-if-viewpoint-diversity-isnt-addressed-too.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Wednesday%2022nd%20September%202021&utm_content=Wednesday%2022nd%20September%202021+CID_c1dd7b553916af4c24259e6f1d63fd55&utm_source=Daily%20Email&utm_term=The%20Governments%20Free%20Speech%20Bill%20wont%20fix%20universities%20if%20viewpoint%20diversity%20isnt%20addressed%20too (accessed 22 September, 2021).

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’[1]

MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and teleological ('What goals govern our actions?') ethics as examples.  But surely an ethic of doing should be based on a moral vision of the sort of character we wish to uphold or become.

In his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, MacIntyre suggested that ethics of various sorts can be understood as three types of inquiry: encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition.  None of these terms are in general use, and so some further explanation is required.  By 'encyclopaedia', MacIntyre means primarily ethics since the Enlightenment as we find it in those authors who believe that clarity in moral quests might come through scientific application of principles and criteria.  By 'genealogy' he means the criticism of all such constructions--a deconstruction of all systems, which might take place through an inquiry into the 'genealogy' of such constructions.  This anti-foundationalism for ethics functions as a gadfly for any positive attempts to establish a morality.  By 'tradition' MacIntyre means ethics pursued upon the presuppositions of a given tradition, not universally applicable but nevertheless foundational inasmuch as tradition offers a foundation for a people committed to it.

Encyclopaedia

MacIntyre’s prime example for the encyclopaedic version of moral enquiry is the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Thomas Spencer Baynes, the editor of the Ninth Edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1873), described the scientific method of encyclopaedic version of inquiry as follows: ‘The available facts of human history, collected over the widest areas, are carefully coordinated and grouped together, in the hope of ultimately evolving the laws of progress, moral and material, which underlie them, and which will help to connect and interpret the whole movement of the race’ (Vol. 1, p. vii).[2]

MacInyre further describes this encyclopaedic method of inquiry when he distinguishes between the culture of 19^th century Great Britain (representing the assumptions of the encyclopaedic method) and today:

(1) ‘They assumed the assent of all educated persons to a single substantive conception of rationality; we inhabit a culture a central feature of which is the presence of, and to some degree a debate between, conflicting, alternative conceptions of rationality’;

(2) ‘They understood the outcome of allegiance to the standards and methods of such a rationality to be the elaboration of a comprehensive, rationally incontestable scientific understanding of the whole, in which the architectonic of the sciences matched that of the cosmos.  We are confronted with the multiplicity of types of enquiry and of interpretative claims on their behalf, so that the very concept of an ordered whole, of a cosmos, has been put radically in question’;

(3) ‘And finally they saw their whole mode of life, including their conceptions of rationality and of science, as part of a history of inevitable progress, judged by a standard of progress which had itself emerged from that history.’[3]

Rene Descartes’ method of beginning with doubt and admitting back to belief whatever could be proved beyond doubt—the Cartesian Method—also functions as a fine example of this Enlightenment version of moral inquiry.  The Cartesian Method not only emphasises the role of reason; it also understands reason as capable of initiating inquiry from no perspective, only from first principles (‘I think, therefore I am’).[4]

Immanuel Kant argued that, although the Empiricist David Hume is correct in saying that empirical data cannot lead us to a priori truths, there is indeed a priori truth.  Just as Copernicus produced a revolution in astronomy by overturning the assumption that the sun revolved around the earth, so too in epistemology one must see that it is not data gained from the senses which are imposed upon our minds to produce understanding but the mind imposing its categories upon what is observed that produces understanding.  The mind is no clean slate written upon by sensory data.  Rather, it imposes reason upon what we see and experience; we order the world around us through fundamental forms and categories of thought itself.  Kant believed he could identify these categories: all minds work with two forms of perception (space and time) and twelve categories of understanding (e.g., cause and effect).  These together form a grid through which all sensory data pass.

Ethics, however, is different from the scientific world.  It does not deal with the world of phenomena or things but with the world of noumena or thoughts.  The latter can be known to exist but only by thought, and so ethics is not something to be grounded on observation.  One would not, for instance, ground ethics in an observation about what the greatest good would be for a certain action (utilitarian ethics).  Yet Kant found the same rationality at work in both the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.  Ethics begins with a certain sense of right and wrong and can be further analysed according to a principle, the ‘categorical imperative’: what is right to do must be universally right to do.  If it is wrong for me to lie in this situation, then it must be so in all situations for everyone.  If a person should be treated as an end and not as a means to an end, then this must always be the case.

In the nineteenth century, we find an ongoing belief in the encyclopaedic approach.  G. W. F. Hegel followed Kant’s proposal of an objective rationality which we all share by speaking of a cosmic rationalism: ‘What is real is reasonable and what is reasonable real.’[5] One way in which Hegel saw this cosmic reason operating was in his view of history: every event had its logical place in a grand, linear progression towards a certain end.  This grand design, as Johann Fichte had previously argued, often worked through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Nineteenth century views of society and history followed this idea that history was progressing positively according to some rationality.  Hegel argued that history could be divided into three main phases: the Asiatic, with its absolute monarchy, the Graeco-Roman, with its individual freedom, and the Germanic-European, which fused the earlier two in a political theory of freedom within a strong state.  Similar analyses of history were offered by Auguste Compte and Karl Marx.  Comte saw history in terms of a dialectic of modes of thought: the theological (itself developing from fetishism to polytheism to monotheism), the metaphysical, and the ‘positive’ or scientific.  Marx saw history as a technological-economic dialectic progressing from primitive communism to ancient slave society to feudalism to capitalism to communism.  For Hegel, Compte and Marx, underlying the often surprising events in history, is a logic which fits the pieces together in some grand scheme.

Another major ethical perspective in the 19^th century was utilitarianism, a form of consequentialist ethic which argued that the outcomes of various action could be calculated and weighed according to a principle of their utility, such as seeking to do the greatest good to the greatest number of people (so John Stuart Mill).  While utilitarianism, as a consequentialist ethic, seems to be directly opposed to an ethic holding to absolute rights and wrongs, it in fact assumes a prior commitment to some definable and incontestable good.  Thus, Mill's utilitarianism and Kant's deontological ethic are both examples of an encyclopaedic method of moral enquiry.

Enlightenment ethics entailed the pursuit of right principles which could be applied rightly and reasonably, once the situation was fully understood.  Hence ethics begins with an accumulation of data so that the situation might be rightly assessed; it then proceeds to the application of the right principles to determine the right course of action.  Whether following the epistemological arguments of Descartes or Kant, or the ethics of Kant and Mill, an 'encyclopaedist' method is in view, an approach seeking to construct something upon certainties which cannot be doubted and which are logically or scientifically verifiable apart from any perspective.

Genealogy

The key spokesperson for the antithesis to the encyclopaedic approach came towards the end of the 19^th century in the person of Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis…,’ averred Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht, 560).  In this he agrees with Kant.  But Nietzsche lacked Kant’s belief in the rationality of mind, whether for science or religion.  He preferred S`ren Kierkegaard’s (b. 1813) rejection of the Enlightenment belief in objective reason: the individual chooses his or her own moral precepts.  Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Genesis 22, Abraham’s binding and near sacrifice of his son Isaac, explains this rejection of objective reason.  One can see in Abraham’s obedience to God, in his being willing to sacrifice his son when told to do so, that moral choice is not a matter of rational argument but of choice prior to logic.  The result of this sort of speculation is an increase of the role of the will over against rational argument.

Nietzsche, however, not only rejected objective moral precepts guiding choices but also followed Arthur Schopenhauer in supposing that life is irrationality.  He spoke of a cosmic Will (rather than Reason) which was in fact one’s predetermined character and basic human motives.  Schopenhauer argued that these basic human motives are self-interest, malice, and compassion, but Nietzsche excluded compassion and spoke of a single motive which might include self-interest and malice: the will to power.  A rational argument, averred Nietzsche, amounts to nothing more than the dressing up of one’s will to power in rational garb:

Truth is ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and poetically, intensified, ornamented and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical.  Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency’ (U(e)ber Wahrheit und Lu(e)ge im Aussermoralischen Sinn I).[6]

The term ‘Genealogy’ applied to this line of thought derives from Nietzsche’s own use of the term in Der Genealogie der Moral. In this work Nietzsche sets himself the task of exhibiting ‘the historical genesis of the psychological deformation involved in the morality of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy and theology which sustained it….’[7]  This study of origins uncovers the will to power behind the pretence of a will to truth as well as the substitution of the aristocratic nobility of ancient heroes with a priestly set of values concerned with purity and impurity but which really had to do with malice and hate.[8]  Here we have not only an opposition to the place of reason in philosophy and ethics but also a hermeneutic of suspicion arising from a fundamental belief in the exercise of will.

In literary theory, the term ‘deconstructionism’ is used.  For me, it is more descriptive than ‘genealogy’ in that it expresses both the study of the ‘construction’ of different systems and then pokes around here and there to find weak spots in such constructions in order to bring them toppling down.  Whatever term we use, we are speaking about a paradigm with does not believe that any construction of reality holds.  The reason for this is best expressed by existentialists as due to the fact, so it is maintained, that existence precedes essence rather than the other way around.  If so, whatever existence is asserted remains arbitrary and indefensible, even if we still do act  somewhat parasitically with appeals to this or that logical construction.  But all activity, no matter the construction we offer to explain our acts, is only a matter of exerting our will to power.[9]

Genealogy replaces the encyclopaedic belief in an overarching, rational interpretation of the world with the irrational will to power and a hermeneutic of suspicion; it replaces the study of being (ontology) with the study of metaphor; it replaces the method and object of study as science with the study of self; it replaces the belief in a single perspective with a multiplicity of perspectives; it replaces a notion of the objectivity of truth with that of ‘truth-from-a-point-of-view’; it replaces the expectation that the audience will agree with the learned lecturer with the expectation that the audience will reject a speaker's logic; it replaces the postulating of a theory with deconstructing and abandoning theories; it replaces the encyclopaedist’s concepts of duty, obligation, the right, and what is good with their ‘pre-Enlightenment predecessors’.[10]

There is a natural progression from the encyclopaedic to the genealogical approach: (1) the proliferation of knowledge in the encyclopaedic method can result in (2) a specialisation within fields, (3) a demise of linkages with other, even related, fields, (4) a fragmentation of unifying theories (of history, society, beliefs, etc.); (5) a de facto challenge to attempts to do so in previous decades; (6) an increasing gulf between the average person and the expert in a field, the former unable to pursue the latter’s thought and the latter disinterested in the exertion necessary to enlighten the former.  The result is that one could take an agnostic stance still sympathetic to the encyclopaedic method of inquiry by deciding that we will henceforth be less assertive about how to put it all together until we gain more knowledge.  Or the result could lead to a shift toward the genealogical method, in which one disallows the possibility of putting it all together and opposes the programme outright as an attempt by seeming experts to control everyone else.  Knowledge is no longer the subject of inquiry; the will to power is.  Already in 1975, Roland Stromberg saw this progression in the West:

The Western intellectual tradition is doubtless the most complex ever known.  It is now an old rouJ of civilization, which has experienced everything and seen through all myths.  It now finds it difficult to believe in anything; it tries, but it is too self-conscious, it knows that its faith will be a myth.  But the specialist has taken over at the expense of a general culture, and amid a wealth of specialized techniques for unearthing scientific, factual knowledge, modern man has the greatest difficulties finding values.[11]

The advance in electronic technology is not only an achievement for science.  It is an achievement for the individual. While the knowledge necessary to achieve this technology could produce an argument for the notion of progress through knowledge, the use of this technology by individuals represents an achievement for the genealogical interpretation of life.  Now the individual is empowered to gain access to knowledge and put it together apart from how others, particularly those who have controlled the access to and interpretation of knowledge in the past, put it together with peer review.

Tradition

MacIntyre finds two features in common between the encyclopaedist’s and the genealogist’s approaches.  (1) Both form a unified view of the history of philosophy, whether of the progress of reason or of how reason disguises everything.  (2) Both separate reason from ‘the particular bonds of any particular moral and religious community’.[12]  In place of these two approaches, MacIntyre proposes a third version for moral inquiry: tradition. He defines ‘tradition’ as a ‘historically extended, socially embodied argument,’[13] or ‘an argument extended over time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict’—that inside and that outside the tradition.[14]  Over against the modernist understanding of reason of thinking without and against perspectives so that it can be universal and impersonal, MacIntyre avers that

…reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested,… [and] membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.[15]

The history of this approach to moral inquiry stretches from Socrates to Thomas Aquinas.  I will enumerate some of MacIntyre's points which define this approach based on several chapters in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

(1) First, philosophical enquiry was perceived as requiring a prior commitment to a certain perspective.  This was phrased in terms of making oneself an apprentice to a craft (techne), and so philosophy involved the practice (ergon) of a craft to achieve what is good—the good for me at my stage of learning as opposed to what is good without qualification, and the good for this craft as opposed to what appears good.[16]  Furthermore, one entering a craft becomes part of the history of that craft.  In saying so, MacIntyre argues that one within a tradition is part of its dynamic flow.  Indeed, successful inquiry itself can only be written retrospectively and is therefore open to review at a later date.[17]  Encyclopaedists, by contrast, believe in a neutral history: the past is waiting to be discovered independent of characteristics from some particular point of view.[18]  Tradition, however, recognises that history is always written from a point of view.

(2) Tradition has a narrative view of history.  MacIntyre speaks of a narrative structure to different theories of history, entailing different views on how actions and transactions of actual social life are embodied.  The encyclopaedist believes that the narrative structure involves the progression of reason.  This denigrates the past and appeals to timeless principles separate from the traditions which shaped them.  Tradition is to be sifted by our standards, and there is no need for a prior commitment to religious belief or tradition to understand these principles.  Genealogy, on the other hand, seeks to disclose what the encyclopaedic narrative has concealed by undermining that narrative and offering its own version of history.  Tradition seeks to learn from the past by identifying and moving toward a telos more adequately through identifying the questions which the tradition of inquiry poses, such as the following: What is the telos of human beings?  What is right action towards the telos?  What are the virtues which issue in right action?  What are the laws which order human relationships so that we may possess these virtues?[19]  Tradition also recognises the political (i.e., roles and social life) dimensions to tradition.

MacIntyre says that

‘modern moral philosophy has in general been blind to the complementary character of narrative and theory both in moral enquiry and in the moral life itself.  In moral enquiry we are always concerned with the question: what type of enacted narrative would be the embodiment, in the actions and transactions of actual social life, of this particular theory?…the encyclopaedic, the genealogical, and the Thomistic tradition-constituted standpoints confront one another not only as rival moral theories but also as projects for constructing rival forms of moral narrative.’[20]

Lucian, the second century satirist, saw this clearly: in depicting the various views of current philosophies as slaves to be sold in the market, he required each to describe the type of life (enacted narrative) which accompanies his understanding of the world (Philosophies for Sale).

(3) Tradition locates authority in (a) a given community (e.g., Thomistic scholarship), (b) in authoritative texts (e.g., Scripture), and (c) in a tradition of interpretation of these texts by the community through history.[21]  The encyclopaedist’s version of moral inquiry entails a separation of the individual, reasoning subject from authority, while the genealogist’s version resists all authority.  Tradition, on the other hand, requires thinking in community—apprenticing and practising one’s craft in the guild.  Tradition also appreciates the temporal reference of reasoning: the encyclopaedist seeks timeless, universal and objective truths, whereas tradition understands truth with respect to its history so far:

To share in the rationality of a craft requires sharing in the contingencies of its history, understanding its story as one’s own, and finding a place for oneself as a character in the enacted dramatic narrative which is that story so far.’[22]

Thus, one must become committed to a certain community with its unique tradition rather than work by means of reasoning from first principles, and one will find that the subject for investigation is not simply our tradition but ourselves.

In making this case for the nature of tradition as a means of enquiry, MacIntyre examines the Augustinian tradition through to Thomas Aquinas’ combination of this tradition with the Aristotelian tradition.  Some further points helping to describe Tradition emerge from this survey.

(4) Tradition appreciates the roles of the reader and teachers in interpretation.  Interpretation of these texts requires ‘a prerational reordering of the self …before the reader can have an adequate standard by which to judge what is a good reason and what is not’.[23]  This argument stems from Augustine’s understanding of the will as perverted, over against Aristotle’s trust that the mind will seek out the good and, having discovered it, do it.  But for Augustine, a transformation of the reader needs to take place in order to read with understanding.

If the reader needs a prerational reordering of the self in order to read rightly, what one needs is a trusted teacher to guide one during initial readings.  Humility, then, is a required virtue of the reader of texts and of education.  Contrast a Nietzschean opposition to such humility before tradition: what Nietzsche called for was a ‘nobility of instinct’.

(5) Tradition has a different understanding of reasoning.  It uses dialectic, arguing  towards 1^st principles.  Reasoning is ‘on the way’, it is exploratory, representing the state of the craft at this time in its history.  Encyclopaedia, on the contrary, argues from 1^st principles and concerns itself with methods and principles.  These methods and principles are thought to be without influence from the interpreter's perspective, and the means of communication in education is therefore the lecture, a rather straight-forward presentation of facts which the student must learn.  Questions and answers in such lectures are for clarification, not for probing the argument through dialectic inquiry.  MacIntyre writes that now the genealogist view of the lecture often holds: it is seen as only an episode in a narrative of conflicts.  But tradition sees the lecturer and his or her audience as interpreters of texts to be dialectically explored because both agree on an authority beyond themselves—the Divinely revealed, authoritative Scriptures.[24]

If reasoning is 'on the way', then tradition is incorrectly understood when it is thought to be an encrustation of the past.  MacIntyre insists that tradition is dynamic: it develops as any 'craft' facing its own questions arising out of its past history.

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[1] Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame, 1990),

[2] As quoted by MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 19.  MacIntyre also gives the purpose behind the Gifford Lectures as an example of the encyclopaedic method.

[3] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 23f.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, ch. 3 (‘Too Many Thomisms?’). MacIntyre argues that the encyclopaedic method begins prior to Descartes: post-Aquinas systematising of Aquinas’ philosophy represents the beginning of the move away from tradition toward an encyclopaedic approach.

[5] Cf. Roland N. Stromberg, European Intellectual History Since 1789, 2^nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 78.

[6] As quoted by Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 35.

[7] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 39.

[8] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 39f.  Cf. the role of malice in Schopenhauer’s description of human motives.

[9] MacIntyre primarily discusses Michel Foucault as the heir to Nietzsche, although in Biblical hermeneutics we usually turn to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  MacIntyre notes that Nietzsche has an early predecessor in Meister Eckhart of the Univ. of Paris in the 14^th century.  Yet, if we wish to reach back into history for beginnings, the  alternative between encyclopaedia and genealogy is one form of the philosophical alternative expressed at the beginning of (written) Western thought: can one step into the same river twice?  If we see the river as static (being--so Heraclitus) or dynamic (becoming--so Parmenides), we answer the question differently.  But Nietzsche's argument poses the true alternative to an encyclopaedic method of moral inquiry.

[10] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 42.

[11] Roland Stromberg, European Intellectual History Since 1789, p. 306.

[12] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 58f.

[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2^nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 222.

[14] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice?  Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 12.

[15] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 59f.

[16] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 61f.

[17] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 150.

[18] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 152.

[19] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 80.

[20] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 80.

[21] In medieval religious education, tradition developed as questiones related to the text.  These questions were first written in the margins of the Biblical text and, over time, were expanded into accompanying texts.  Questions arising from commentary on the text pertained to the three or four senses a text of Scripture was thought to have: the plain historical, the moral or tropological, the allegorical or mystical, and (sometimes added) the anagogical or spiritually educative sense (MacIntyre, p. 85).  Abbot Hugh of St. Victor (1125-1141) developed this Medieval approach to the text by emphasising the importance of the plain historical text and unifying the senses through encouraging a curriculum covering all three: the plain historical meaning calls for exegesis based on a knowledge of history and geography, the moral sense calls for a study of moral theology, the allegorical calls for a study of theological doctrine, and the tropological calls for a study of what work we have to do in the natural world and an understanding of the natural world so that we can do our work in the world well.

[22] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 65.

[23] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 82.

[24] MacIntyre notes that medieval theology also made use of distinctions (distinctiones) in types of sense, a method which made radical intellectual dissent possible, as in the case of Abelard.  This point overlaps with the history of Roman Catholic tradition after Abelard in Aquinas’ combining two distinct traditions in his Summa Theologica.