Why I am voting for the American Solidarity Party

In the Democratic party lies one half of our bifurcated moral consciousness, a concern for the common good of all humans, but, ironically, a neglect of the sacredness of human life. The party of social justice, equality and acceptance defends the rights of the powerful against the most powerless members of our human race, and stands in fundamental disconnect from the mind of Christ, not recognizing that justice is mercy.

In the Republican party lies the other half of proper moral consciousness, a concern for social morality and a defense of life and family, but a neglect for our moral obligation to the common good of our fellow man. The party of liberty and prosperity excuses the most prosperous and powerful from their obligations to those who, by their human dignity, ought to share in the natural goods which God has given to all men; thus it stands in fundamental disconnect from the mind of Christ, not recognizing that mercy is justice.

The American Solidarity Party acknowledges within its platform and ethos a “whole-life ethic,” the responsibility to take strides as a society to care for the poor with a spirit of solidarity and common good, and also to stalwartly defend human life from conception to natural death. It reintegrates the divided moral consciousness of America into a whole. It unifies mercy and justice; and they are united in the Cross.

I am voting for the American Solidarity Party because it alone vows to protect the sanctity and dignity of human life from conception to natural death and everywhere in between, and that is the essence of Christian morality. I am not at all discouraged by the low probability of large practical effects in the near future. I am willing to be a part of the small beginnings of something I can truly believe in. Even without understanding or necessarily agreeing with every minute point of the ASP platform, I fully endorse the party as a way to express my voice in our democracy without having to compromise my fundamental moral beliefs, and I call all my Christian brothers and sisters to join me in the ASP and provide a way out of the false dilemma into which American politics have sunk.

The purpose of your vote is your vote

Many Americans believe that probabilities of success of political candidates should weigh against their moral value. They vote for a popular candidate they admit is more evil than an unpopular candidate because they are concerned about how likely it will be that the unpopular one succeeds. It’s the truism of third party critics: “Don’t waste your vote.” I am close to someone who insisted vehemently that the Virginia ballot (which had at least five candidates listed, not to mention registered write-in candidates) had “only two candidates.” He meant that only two had a competitive probability of winning, and that such a probability should limit our choice.

The problem with this is that it views the outcome of the election as the purpose of our vote. Probabilities have the outcome in view. Rather, we must view our vote as the purpose of our vote.

According to the Doctrine of Double Effect, it is not permissible to more directly cause a lesser evil in order to less directly avoid a greater evil. The reason is that the bad that I cause by my action is more causally immediate than the good, and is therefore involved by definition as a means to the other outcome which I effect less directly (when I foresee both). I therefore “do evil that good may result,” which is always wrong. Contrary to popular idiom, the ends do not justify the means! Foreseeing both good and bad effects of an action, we may only do it if the good proceeds from our action at least as immediately as the bad. In terms of voting, this means we may only vote for a candidate if the good and bad effects of our vote are equally direct.

In the case of voting for an evil candidate in order to achieve as a good outcome the avoidance of another candidate’s success, the evil effect is our vote, and the good effect is an outcome of the election. So, when we vote, do we cause the outcome of an election as directly as we cause our vote? Not at all! We do not each cause the outcome of the election. Rather, we each directly, certainly, and completely cause our vote, and all of our votes contribute to the outcome as minuscule partial causes, fragments of probability that together equal the whole. Therefore, a vote that one admits is evil but intends for the avoidance of a worse electoral outcome causes the lesser evil (itself) directly, and avoids the greater evil (the outcome) only partially and indirectly. Such a vote is never permissible according to the Doctrine of Double Effect.

Instead of using my vote as an evil means to a good end, I must vote with my vote itself as its own moral end, because it is only my vote that I fully cause. I must make it the most moral vote in and of itself. In other words, I must not compromise my moral beliefs based on the predicted outcomes of the election or the popularity of candidates; rather I must vote as I would if I alone controlled the outcome of the election. That is what is binding on me as a moral agent with a voice in my democracy.

For what does it profit a man if he gains the oval office and forfeits his soul?

Double Effect and equal causality

The Doctrine of Double Effect articulates when it is justified to perform an action that one foresees as having both good and evil effects. This doctrine was first credited to St. Thomas Aquinas, who used it to justify self-defense killing. The doctrine holds that an action that has both a good and a bad effect is justified if and only if the following four conditions are met:

The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect. (Catholic Encyclopedia, qtd. McIntyre, 2014)

The first condition rules out actions that are intrinsically evil, such as fornication, regardless of their side effects, and the second condition rules out formal cooperation in evil–if you do evil because you want to do it, then it is illicit regardless of its good side effects. That leaves us with material cooperation: doing evil that you don’t want or intend to do, per se, but feel compelled to do for some reason, such as to avoid a greater evil. This is where it gets trickier.

To understand the third and fourth conditions, the distinction must be made between the degree of causality which a person has on the good and evil effects (third condition) and the magnitude of the good and evil effects themselves (fourth condition). While the fourth condition holds that the good and bad effects must be measured against each other, and the good effects themselves (or the evils avoided) must outweigh the bad, the third condition constrains this proportional consideration by stipulating that the degree of causality must also be weighed. The evil effect cannot be a means to the good effect; in other words, they must be caused by your action with equal directness. This rules out immediate (direct) material cooperation, such as assisting in an abortion operation by providing nursing care before or after the operation, but leaves remote (mediate) material cooperation as permissible under certain conditions. Since immediate/direct material cooperation and mediate/remote material cooperation are relative terms, this principle means we must take into account the relative directness with which we will cause the good and bad effect, and never act in such a way as to more directly cause the bad than we cause the good, that is, to use the bad as a means to the good.

The principle of equal causality, though few can articulate it, can be widely felt in people’s natural moral conscience. I offer the example of two ethical thought experiments that are often contrasted with each other.

In the basic version of the “Trolley Dilemma”, there is a runaway train barreling down a track toward five people who are lying helpless in its path. You are standing at a lever that can divert the train onto a second track to miss those people. However, on the second track there is one person lying similarly helplessly. Your hand is on the lever, and you must decide whether to pull the lever and permit the death of the one man, or do nothing and permit the death of the five. What would you do? Why?

Contrast this with a situation in which you are a doctor with four sick patients and one healthy patient, and you know that, unless those four patients receive organ transplants within the next hour, their death is immanent; furthermore, you know that the healthy patient, who is sleeping under anesthesia, has all the organs they need. You must decide whether to harvest his organs, killing him, in order to save them. What would you do then? Why?

The difference that most people can sense is a difference in the relative directness with which one achieves the good and bad effects. In the Trolley Dilemma, the directness of both effects is pretty much equal. In the doctor scenario, one effect is clearly more direct; in other words, it is involved as a means to the other effect. Such reflections confirm to us that it is not justifiable to make a choice based on the foreseen outcomes without consideration for the degree of causality or agency one has in the evil.

A consequentialist or utilitarian ethic is focused on the foreseen results as the ultimate basis of determining the morality of an action and believes that the end justifies the means. It does not limit this consideration of outcomes by one’s agency in the act. An honest utilitarian would say that the doctor should kill the healthy man to save the sick men, if he was sure that the others would die.

This kind of thinking is prevalent in our society today but is contrary to Christian ethical norms. Pope John Paul II rejected consequentialism and its cousin proportionalism in 1993. Even non-Catholic Christians should realize that a Christian view of man regards his foreknowledge as imperfect and recognizes that ignoring ourselves as subjects of our moral actions is to pretend to have God’s omniscience and his responsibility to direct all eventualities. The humble heart that acknowledges God’s sovereignty in all things remembers that there is a line he must not cross even when he foresees evil, because he trusts in God’s providence. Therefore, he acts according to the Natural and Divine law within his sphere of control, and trusts the Lawgiver to do the same within his own sphere, that is, the whole world.

While the Christian is prudent and shrewd in his dealings, nevertheless he looks to God and never “does evil that good may result.” The Doctrine of Double Effect, including its third condition, is not simply an obscure formulation or an optional stance, but an articulation of the moral law that binds the conscience of the Christian in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s restoration of his mind and reason.

“I despise Birth-Control”: G.K. Chesterton on babies and distributism

As he has done time and again since I recently started reading him in earnest, Chesterton comes in and says with a machete what I had been trying to think with a butter-knife for some time.

The following is from The Well and the Shallows and was copied from Ignatius Insight.

____________________________

I hope it is not a secret arrogance to say that I do not think I am exceptionally arrogant; or if I were, my religion would prevent me from being proud of my pride. Nevertheless, for those of such a philosophy, there is a very terrible temptation to intellectual pride, in the welter of wordy and worthless philosophies that surround us today. Yet there are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.

I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control. It cannot for instance, determine sex, or even make any selection in the style of the pseudo-science of Eugenics. Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth. But these people know perfectly well as I do that the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine. They dare not call it by its name, because its name is very bad advertising. Therefore they use a conventional and unmeaning word, which may make the quack medicine sound more innocuous.

Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all the difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born; and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.

But there is a third reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be “free” to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word “free.” By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Killing the Canaanites: Part 4

Did God really tell the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites?

From Part 3, we know that God uses people to accomplish his purposes, and that even if his purposes included killing other humans, his human instruments would be justified in doing so – and even bound to do so. But countless people over the centuries have claimed to have received revelation from God to kill people, and committed atrocities as a result. The Crusades and the Inquisition come to mind, not to mention many smaller lashings-out from people bearing the name of YHWH. Were the Israelites deluded just like them? Was their leader Moses, who told them to do these severe deeds?

Let’s also assume for our argument that the Bible reflects the true revelation of God. If you don’t agree, check out this article, which evolved as a bubble off of the current article. Now, from scripture, did the Israelites have reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses when Moses told them to kill the Canaanites? Quite a lot of reason, in fact. The whole period was loaded to the brim with miracles!

Moses performed the 10 signs – the 10 plagues on the Egyptians – which made even hard-hearted Pharaoh acknowledge that God’s power was behind him
God appeared to Israel as a mysterious of cloud by day and fire by night
Israel had just experienced the Parting of the Red Sea (!)
Moses received the law on top of a smoking mountain atop which thunder and lighting crashed, and his face was glowing when he came down
God provided manna and quail for them to eat in the desert
God made water come out of a rock when Moses struck it (at Meribah)
Israel defeated the attacking Amalekites whenever Moses was raising his arm, but lost whenever he dropped his arm
God sent a plague among the Israelites after they made the golden calf
Israel would have remembered the promise to their father Abraham that they would return to Canaan (Genesis 15).

Etcetera etcetera. The whole exodus and redemption of the Israelite nation, and the formation of God’s covenant with them, had been filled with incredible miracles and signs. So Israel had every reason to believe that God was really speaking to them through Moses – not that Moses or any human contrivance was responsible for the command to kill the Canaanites. Therefore, if we have accepted the Biblical narrative as part of our faith in God, it follows that God really was responsible for the command to the Israelites, and that many miracles and signs affirmed this to the Israelites themselves. They and we both have reason to believe that they heard the divine voice giving them the solemn command to invade and “devote to destruction.”

Killing the Canaanites: Part 3

Can God use people to kill other people?

Say (from Part 2) that God is just in killing the Canaanites. But what about the Israelites themselves? Was it wrong for THEM to kill the Canaanites? Isn’t murder wrong, period? Shouldn’t God have used some non-human means to wipe out the Canaanites, like a plague, and then had His people enter the promised land peaceably?

God Used Israel
First of all, it is immediately and abundantly clear that, throughout history, God uses people to accomplish his divine purposes. For example, all of the prophets, the Levitical priesthood (who were the ministers through which God interacted with man in the OT) and the New Priesthood of the Church (Christ’s Body and manifestation, through which he continually interacts with the world). Israel was nationally part of this, as part of God’s promise in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. So, it is clear from the Biblical narrative that God was using Israel in a special way to accomplish his purposes.

It’s Possible for Killing to be Just
There’s no real conflict with “God can use people to accomplish his purpose”…unless his purpose is killing others. Is it wrong for people to kill other people? Ethics provides a decisively indecisive answer. Although some in the Categorical or Deontological ethical camps would haggle with wording, the vast majority of people consent that, in some of the most extreme circumstances, administering death to a fellow human is the best possible course of action. For example, if a policeman happened upon Sandy Hook Elementary in the middle of the Newton, CT massacre, he would have been justified in stopping the massacre by shooting the gunman. The same would be true of the slaughter that happened in 2006 on the very campus where I sit writing this (Virginia Tech). Isn’t killing out of self defense sometimes acceptable (for example, resistance against a military invasion)?Furthermore, when we think of certain extremely corrupt parties, killing seems more justified: Consider the “Lord’s Resistance Army” that has forcibly conscripted children for several decades. If you were in a village when that army was raiding, abducting, killing and raping, would just men not be rightly inspired to fight back? The point is, killing is wrong for certain reasons, not absolutely or inherently. What are those reasons?

What Makes Killing Wrong?
This is the most fascinating part of this argument to me. What, fundamentally, makes the taking of human life right or wrong? Human life is valuable and protected under morality because it is a God-given right. From Genesis we see that we were made in God’s image, and that brings with it a sacredness. From the covenant with Noah we see a reinforcement of this:

Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man. (Gen. 9:6)

When David killed Uriah and took his wife Bathsheba, he uttered this:

Against you, you only, I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight… (Psalm 51:4)

How can killing a man be a sin against God, not against that man? Well, as we established in Part 2, man has no right over his own life. But God does. Human life is sacred because it is given by (and patterned after the image of) YHWH, the God of Life. Therefore, killing is wrong because it usurps God’s authority to give and take the breath of life. The Noah verse explains why it is justifiable to kill the VT or Newton gunmen, etc. God has decreed that he has appointed the right to take a man’s life to his neighbor, should that man himself take innocent life. So in those cases, God’s right has been delegated, not usurped.

Presumption vs. Obedience
But what about a different circumstance: What if God tells man to take a life of a non-murderer? In that case, the One who has the right to take the life is still consenting to the act. In fact, he is initiating the act by direct command, instead of perennial decree, which makes it even more binding. One may object, “But a man hasn’t got the right to take another man’s life! You just said it was God’s right, not man’s.” Maybe, but it is not presumptuous to obey a command to do something that one has no authority to do on his own. If Bobby is playing videos games, and Johnny comes in and unplugs the game console, he acts presumptuously, because the video games are the property of their dad, and their dad has by default given both boys the right to play the game. Therefore Johnny violates the right that his dad has given to Bobby. However, if their dad told Johnny to unplug it for some reason (say an electrical emergency) and Johnny unplugs the console, he acts lawfully. Furthermore, he does not even have to fully understand the reasons that their dad had. His moral responsibility is to obey.

Therefore, the Bible clearly claims that God was using the Israelites to accomplish his purposes. It is not unequivocally wrong to kill: it is wrong to kill whenever you rob the right to give and take life from God. Thus, if God sanctions it, the normal moral rule doesn’t apply. This removes another chunk of ground from the objections to the killing of the Canaanites. In Part 4, we’ll look at the question of whether the Israelites really did receive a command to annihilate from God (or, in particular, whether they had sufficient reasons to believe that they had received such a command).

Killing the Canaanites: Part 2

Was God wrong to want the death of the Canaanites?

This post examines the first of the four conditions under which we could judge the killing of the Canaanites to be wrong. The thesis is this: God desired the death of the Canaanites, and he did so justly. First of all, the doctrine of Total Depravity says that all mankind is polluted by sin, and “the wages of sin is death”. Death entered the human race through Adam, and we are subject to it now, as part of the natural order.

Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

Therefore, no one has a right not to die. This applies even to children.

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
And in sin my mother conceived me. (Psalm 51:5)

This is not the same as saying that all children go to hell. Only that all children are subject to death. As Copan reminds us:

If any infants or children were killed, they would have entered the presence of God. Though deprived of earthly life, those young ones wouldn’t have been deprived of the greatest good–enjoying everlasting friendship with God. (p. 189)

Besides, let’s not forget that it is God who may require our lives of us whenever he wants – he decided to give us life, and he decides when it’s over. I have never understood the indignant attitude that some people feel when God takes a life early. He gives you life, and then suddenly it becomes your possession, and he is obligated to let you retire, or see your grandchildren, or some other rule that you impose upon him? Homicide, abortion and euthanasia are wrong because in them, man is usurping God’s right to end life. But when God exercises this right, he is not wrong.

It is also important to understand that Canaanite culture was perverse. In Genesis, when God was making covenant with Abraham, he he predicted that although Abraham himself would not take ownership of the land, his descendants would 400 years later, when “the sin of the Amorites is complete.” God was patient for 4 centuries with the Canaanites. Finally, when he sends Israel back to take possession of it, he says:

It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 9:5-6)

Various passages in the Bible describe the kind of immorality practiced in Canaan, and the Law warns against it. The Canaanites openly affirmed child sacrifice, both heterosexual and homosexual adultery in temples and on high places, and bestiality. What’s more, as Capan points out, these things were part of Canaanite worship and theology: their gods practiced these things. Like gods, like worshippers. For example, when the fertility god Baal had sex with his consort Anath, patroness of both sex and war, his semen is the rain that brings fertility to the land. By the way, Anath is described as joyfully wading in blood and decorating herself with disembodied human heads and hands. Wow.

Lastly, sin exists in cultures, not just in individuals. Evil practices have a way of polluting a culture from the roots up. Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, had thousands of citizens, but their sin was so great that there were not even 10 righteous men in those cities. That’s pervasive pollution of hearts! God often judges and saves people as family units (Abraham and his family…Achan and his family…Cornelius and his family…). Western culture is not very aware of the social bleed-over of righteousness because we are very individualistic, but God reveals himself in the Ten Commandments as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,” (Exodus 20:4). So, in the Canaanite question, it is quite in keeping with truth for God to judge the societal sins of the Canaanites not just their individual sins. I’m sure that each will be judged individually on Judgement Day.

Therefore, the Almighty and Righteous Judge of the earth was not only lawful, but utterly good and just, in killing the Canaanites. Why did he choose to wipe them out, and yet deal with other pagan nations differently? Is that favoritism? Unfortunately, such questions exceed the question of morality, or the realm of human knowledge in general. The Parable of the Workers reminds us that we cannot act like children and make comparisons with God. “Well, HE got TWO pieces of cake!” doesn’t work. As the landowner says,

Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

We all deserve death. The question is not why some receive death, but why we still have life. So yes, if God’s secret intentions for the redemption of the world involved the death of the Canaanites, he is just to bring it about.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! (Romans 11)

Killing the Canaanites: Part 1

In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to possess the fertile crescent and wipe out its inhabitants. This has been called “genocide” and smells rancid to the modern conscience. It is a bit of an embarrassment in a society that champions tolerance, peace, and religious coexistence. Prominent atheists call the God of the Old Testament ruthless, and point to the invasion of the Promised Land as nothing but barbarism: “indiscriminate massacre and ethnic cleansing”. The war passages are not the favorites of most Christians either. How many Bible study application questions have you heard like, “What does the total annihilation of the Canaanites mean for your relationship with your neighbors?” Many Christian traditions object to war outright (like my wife’s family’s denomination, the Brethren in Christ). What then do we do with a God who orders the mass destruction of an entire ethnic group? What do we do with verses like this?:

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (Deuteronomy 20:16-17)

We believe in an unchanging, loving God. He is Love, so much that he incarnated himself in Immanuel to offer the free gift of salvation to all peoples. So what do we make of the killing of the Canaanites? Some considerations, leaning very heavily on (and inspired by) Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster?, might help to justify the destruction of the Canaanites.

Semitic Exaggeration Rhetoric: How Brutal Was the Invasion?

Some cultural and linguistic evidence shows that the invasions of Canaan were probably not as brutal as we think at first glance. The account of the conquest of Canaan is filled with the language of “total destruction”, for example, from Joshua 10:

So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills and the mountain slopes, together with all their kings. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all [haram] who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.

But Copan points out the problem: later in Joshua and Judges, the very same people that were totally destroyed appear again! The Jebusites appear again (Judges 1:21), and the Anakim appear again in the hill country (to be driven out by Caleb) even though “there were no Anakim left in the land…they were utterly destroyed in the hill country” (Joshua 11:21-22). In Judges 1-2, God says that he will “stop driving out” the people before Israel because of their sin: so the destruction was a gradual process of smothering the Canaanite culture and religion, not a once-and-done massacre. How? The “total destruction” language isn’t literal. Rather, it is using exaggeration as a rhetorical style. It was common ancient Near Eastern culture to exaggerate conquests using obliteration language, similar to how one boy today would say to another, “Dude, you totally destroyed him.” For example, Copan says:

Egypt’s Tuthmosis III (later fifteenth century) boasted that ‘the numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour, annihilated totally, like those now not existent.’ In fact, Mitanni’s forces lived on to fight in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. (p. 172)

This kind of hyperbole can also be found in the records of the Hittite Mursilli II, the Egyptians Rameses II and Merneptah, the Moabite Mesha, and the Assyrian Sennacherib.

The fact that haram might not necessarily mean killing everyone is evident in Deuteronomy 7. In verse 2, God tells them to utterly destroy (haram) the seven Canaanite nations, but then, as Copan points out, he tells them not to intermarry with them. How can you intermarry with dead people? The whole context of Chapter 7 shows that God is primarily creating a ban on Canaanite thinking and culture – they are to be shunned and debased as unclean. The focus is on destroying their religion: verse 5 continues with, “Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.” Copan cites scholars that haram is thus focusing on obliterating political/military strongholds, desecrating religious symbols (high places, temples, etc.), and “driving out” or dispossessing the people of the land. In other words, the focus of the ban was on wiping out the corrupted Canaanite identity and culture, and above all their idolatry, not so much on taking the lives of the Canaanites themselves.

A last note is that the Old Testament commonly refers to “driving out” and “dispossessing” the Canaanites, as opposed to killing them. Presumably this meant that all those who would flee were allowed to. Only those who resisted and fought would be killed.

If Some Women and Children Did Die

Despite this significant down-tone of the brutality of the occupation of Canaan, suppose we still have to admit that some women and children were killed. The text isn’t clear, so we should be ready to deal with a worse-case scenario. For example, Deuteronomy 20 commands the “destruction of everything that breathes” among the Caananites in contrast (“however,” v. 16) to nations outside the promised land, from which the Israelites could keep the women, children and livestock as plunder (v. 14). So, presumably, Canaanite women and children couldn’t be kept as plunder. What then was their fate? More subjectively, scriptures such as Joshua 1 seem to express God’s displeasure when devotion to destruction (harem) is not complete, and we see that when the Israelite Achan is cut off from Israel and stoned after he took objects under the ban during the battle of Jericho, his wives and children are stoned with him (Joshua 7:24-25). The point is that God’s command was intended to be very severe and that noncombatants and families weren’t necessarily exempt from punishment in the ancient Semitic conscience. So we are still faced with the possibility that God commanded, and the Israelites executed, the death penalty for both combatants and noncombatants in those Canaanite lands. Is this the Bible committing moral suicide? Not so fast: let’s think it through. The Israelites would have committed a moral atrocity by killing the Canaanites if and only if any of the following scenarios were true:

(1) It was wrong for God to desire the death of the Canaanites. That is, the Canaanite women, children, etc. were innocent and not worthy of death.

(2) Human hands were not a legitimate means for God to accomplish the death of the Canaanites. That is, although Providence might have desired their death, it is always wrong for men to kill other men, so it is impossible for them to be the agents of God’s judgement (at least when it comes to the death penalty).

(3) Even though it would have been possible for God to have ordered Israel to execute his justice, Israel did not receive the command. Perhaps the God who ordered the death of the Canaanites was only an invention of religious leaders to accomplish their political conquest – not the True God.

(4) Even if Israel had indeed received a divine command, they were motivated not by this command, but by selfish motives for invading Canaan (greed for the land, xenophobic hatred, etc.), and thus did the right thing for the wrong reason. Similarly God acted with unloving, wantonly wrathful motives, not demonstrating love for the Canaanites.

I think that all four of these conditions are false, and therefore, by indirect reasoning, the Israelites did NOT commit a moral atrocity. If none of the above conditions is true, then God rightly desired the death of the Canaanites and lawfully delegated the task to Israel, who, accordingly, received a true revelation from God and acted in faith and holy fear. There is nothing ignoble anywhere in the equation. My next four blog posts will aim at these four points, and will, I hope, show us how we can gladly accept God’s war on the Canaanites as a triumph of his justice, love, and strength, not as something to be ashamed about.

Child sacrifice? Justifying the binding of Isaac

In Genesis 22, God told Abraham to go to Mount Moriah and sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham obeyed until he was about to plunge the knife, when God intervened. That story seems like a real moral problem for Christians. Wasn’t it cruel and immoral of God to tell Abraham to kill is own son, especially considering this is the God who decries murder (10 Commandments) and the child sacrifices of the Canaanites? Paul Copan makes a good argument against such accusations in his book Is God a Moral Monster?. Here is my take on this challenging issue, based on selected ideas he presented.

The Covenant Context

The command to sacrifice Isaac was given in the context of God’s covenant promise to Abraham that he would multiply him and give him many descendants through Sarah’s son. Isaac was the child of the promise (not Ismael). His living was the only hope of this promise being fulfilled.

The Conditions of Wrongness

Our judgment of the moral “wrongness” is based on a certain set of assumptions about the world. The reason that theft is wrong is because it robs someone of their right to their property. The reason that murder is wrong is because it (permanently) robs this person of their right to life.

However, what if the rules of reality were suspended? Imagine a world where stealing $100 from a man’s wallet in the subway caused $200 to appear in his wallet several minutes later. Would theft then be wrong? I think the temporary harm to the victim would be permissible in light of the immense benefit they would receive. (“Thanks for stealing from me, sir!”) Next, imagine a world where killing someone over the age of 18 caused them to be immediately resurrected the next morning with a completely restored body—and the power of flight! Would murder then be wrong? I think the overnight harm would be permissible in light of the immense benefit the next morning.

Abraham’s Faith that God’s Covenant Suspended Nature’s Laws of Life and Death

If Abraham believed that God’s promises were true, he must believe that God would give life to his son, either by providing a way out before he killed his son (which was how it turned out) or after he killed his son, by resurrecting him. Thus, if Abraham was going to obey, he had to believe that either God was going to keep his promise even by resurrecting Isaac, or God was not going to keep his promise, and was being fickle and masochistic.

If Abraham believed that God would keep his promise, then he was operating in a world where the normal moral parameters were suspended by the explicit intervention of God. Nature says, “You kill someone, they stay dead.” And it’s wrong to deprive them of the right to life. But if Abraham believed that God would make Isaac a prosperous nation, and by implication, preserve his life, then murdering him was not to deprive him of that right, at least not permanently. Killing without the context Abraham had is wrong. Killing is by default wrong. But if you believe that God must be going to miraculously reverse the death, and if you trust that He knows what he’s doing, then God’s special command plus his covenant promise equal a situation which trumps and suspends the natural moral circumstances which define the wrongness of killing. The covenant context makes this an issue of trusting the triumph of God’s promise even over the death of the beloved son. It’s not an issue of appeasing some sort of divine blood-lust through child sacrifice. The situation is fundamentally different from the Canaanite practices, which did not promise the resurrection of the children.

The Greatest Test of Faith

God’s command to sacrifice Isaac was the ultimate faith test. “I will give you your life’s one great hope—a son in your old age. I will give you the greatest of gifts—a legacy and innumerable children. Then I will see whether you believe I am Lord of death and life, or whether you will disobey me to protect the gift I have given you.”

Abraham passed the test and proved his faith. The same faith in God’s power to raise from the dead is at the core of our belief in Christ’s victory over death. (It’s no coincidence that the mountain where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac was possibly also the mountain where the Temple of Solomon was built.) Abraham became the father of the three greatest religions in the world because his faith was so great that he believed God would fulfill his promises even through death –that even when God told him to do something seemingly cruel and contradictory, he expressed ultimate trust in God’s goodness and his faithfulness to keep his promises. The sacrifice of Isaac is not a point to eschew or be shy about—it is a triumph of faith and a precursor to Christ, a moment of great glory in the redemptive history of the Bible.

Bigger questions

A Response to Lauren and Nate on Abortion and Gay Marriage

I spent the last weekend wrestling with some very good comments I received by Lauren, Nate and others from my Open Letter to Christians Concerning the Presidential Election. I am grateful to them for the thoughtful responses that made me really think twice about things. I offer the following response in hopes that it will be as helpful/challenging/insightful as their thoughts were to me. If you prefer, here is a PDF form of the article:

On Abortion

My friend Lauren says, “Economic stability, especially for the lower and middle class, is what’s going to reduce abortions.” She says that fewer abortions happen by “reducing unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies are reduced by providing women and girls with educational [sex ed] and economic opportunities.” This is true, but I think it is a red herring, not the real issue.

I totally agree that sex ed can help reduce unwanted pregnancies. No cultural event short of the Second Coming will totally halt illicit sex, so I am in favor of teaching safe sex to the young and undereducated. That is, providing that real alternatives to sexually active lifestyles are presented, and the dangers of sexual activity are discussed. (I don’t think that sexual activity should be merely assumed, but presented as a choice.) Yet, however well sex ed may be taught, some unwanted pregnancies will persist. The question is, what to do with these?

As for economic stability, yes, poor socioeconomic conditions increase the rate of unwanted pregnancies. However, I think it impossible to argue that people who are economically stable and well educated will not have any unwanted pregnancies, and therefore will not want to get abortions. Rich people sometimes want to get abortions too. What do we do with these cases?

So we agree that it is good to work to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies. But the real sticky question is, what do you do with those pregnancies that are still unwanted?

Before answering this, let me take down a pair of straw men. Lauren defended that pro-choice people don’t “support abortion”—they think there should be less abortions. I never meant to communicate otherwise. I don’t think that pro-choice people are happy when babies die—they simply see the woman’s choice as more important. And on the other hand, some people assume that pro-life people don’t care about the women who get abortions. I confess that I, for one, usually don’t show enough gentleness toward the difficult, sometimes harrowing personal situations surrounding abortion decisions. I admit that I need to do more to help them and show that I care. However, the pro-life position does care about the women; it’s just that they see the baby’s life as more important.

So the right course of action in those pregnancies that are unwanted depends on which is more valuable: the woman’s choice or the life of the baby? This question in turn depends on whether it is really a baby, a person—or simply a fetus, a nonperson. The issue of abortion thus depends on how we define personhood, which follows from the worldview that we are looking through.

From a humanist or materialist worldview, a human being becomes a person when it reaches some point of self-awareness or sentience, or when it is able to feel a certain amount of pain, or by some other subjective standard determined by a judge or by popular vote. So no one can say exactly when a fetus becomes a person. The definition is wishy-washy. (I once had a friend who thought that infanticide was permissible until around age two.) A “possible-person” or a “pre-person” has less rights than a full person, so, under a materialist view, the adult mother’s right to choose naturally trumps the rights of the “baby” prior to a certain point. A materialist has to support the right of the woman to choose.

From a Christian worldview, a human being is a person from the moment of conception. In fact, it is really a person before conception (but I suppose it would be difficult to kill someone prior to their conception). Consider the following scriptures.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

For you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:13-19)

God gives identity to human beings even before they come into physical existence, and it is he who forms them in the womb. If we believe this, then the thing we abort is a person whom God has ordained and known and named and begun himself to shape. Thus human life takes on sacredness. That child is God’s as much as it is the woman’s. It is more than a person; it is a son or daughter of God. Therefore, it seems to me, the Bible allows no other position than that fetuses in the womb are persons, and are thus entitled to the right of life. If the unborn are entitled to the right of life, yet unable to defend their lives themselves, then it is the responsibility of our government to make laws protecting that right.

Lauren says that Roe v. Wade did not increase the number of abortions—it just gave safer options to women who would have gone to drastic measures anyway. She mentions some uncited research. I’m curious about the degree of conclusiveness that this research can reach as to whether legalizing abortion did not in any way increase the number of abortions. As she says, abortions were not documented before, so how can we know for sure? Someone close to me has had two abortions. She told me recently, “I probably wouldn’t have had those abortions if they were illegal. I was scared, but I don’t think I would have gone looking for ways to do it. You don’t think through things like that when you’re pregnant, you’re just scared.” I’ll admit that, possibly, a very significant number of people found ways to have abortions when they were illegal, but I question whether legality doesn’t have a significant curbing effect for many women. And if that curbing effect is all the law can produce, it is nonetheless worth making the law.

Ultimately, I think the solution to abortion is both to reduce unwanted pregnancies, and also to advocate for the lives of the most defenseless children in our society. This is about helping mothers and saving their babies. It’s an issue of social justice as important as any—they are “invisible children” too.

On Gay Marriage

The other hot topic about which I received excellent replies is the legalization of homosexual marriage. Lauren makes the point that opposing gay marriage communicates hatred to gays. Both Lauren and Nate argue that, as far as the government is concerned, marriage is merely a social contract, and the law should be blind to any moral or religious dimensions of marriage. I will respond to these two points below.

1. Opposing gay marriage communicates hatred

Lauren says that vocalizing a political stance in opposition to gay marriage makes the gay community feel like Christians hate them. Saying that gay marriage is wrong “alienates people when I’m supposed to love them….It automatically throws up barriers to loving and serving a community that is in desperate need of love and truth.”

First, I want to admit that I’m not very good at loving the gay community. Neither are most evangelicals (n.b. I apply the label to myself with certain reservations). I want to change that. Making some of my first gay friends at GMU during the last two years has been very enlightening. I totally agree that Christians need to stop sending the vibe that homosexuals are heinous, beyond-redemption perverts who are single-handedly responsible for the moral demise of our country. We need to develop bridges of communication and friendship. Jesus hung out with the tax collectors.

But if gays are indeed a community “in desperate need of love and truth,” as Lauren says, then loving them while tip-toeing around the truth they desperately need is no love at all. The gospel first empathizes and identifies with your brokenness until you can admit “I have a problem.” Then it says, “Jesus is the answer to your problem.” This is the gospel for every one of us guys who has had a problem with porn, and every couple who is living together, so a gay couple is not exempt. When Jesus hung out with tax collectors, he explained it by saying, “It is not the healthy who need a physician, but a sick.” I feel that the homosexual political agenda (maybe not all gays themselves) is asking me to agree that “nothing is wrong.” Well, nothing is more wrong with you than with me, but that is still a lot of wrong. If I hold the Christian worldview, it is the most hateful thing I can do to smile and nod when gays say that they’re “born this way and they don’t need to change.” It is the most loving thing I can do to embody the tension between truth and love that exists in the gospel. Living this tension will probably make enemies with many conservatives, and it won’t be enough for gays who want exoneration from any moral standard other than “being true to their hearts.” But I feel like that is the line God has called his people to walk in our culture today.

2. The government has no right to define marriage

The second thrust of Lauren’s argument about gay marriage is that the government should not be concerned with any sanctity of marriage. “Marriage” to the government is simply a social contract that “ensures joint property rights, right to decide medical care issues, etc.” Any so-called sanctity is only within the walls of the church. (I presume she means like how the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches “recognize” marriages.) This connects with Nate’s point that the purview of the government is to interfere with someone’s freedom only if it violates someone else’s. The U.S. is not Israel, he observes. It is not built to enforce Christian mores, but to tolerate the maximum number of mores. Lauren and Nate essentially agree that the government should be blind to all but the economic and social privileges due to any two people who are willing to enter into a contract of life cooperation.

This is the point I almost agreed with. I agreed with it for most of the weekend; I kept thinking about it while helping to paint my parents’ house. I annoyed my wife by playing devil’s advocate with both positions back and forth. Our government was built on the right of every man to the “pursuit of happiness”. What right does it have to define what may or may not make him happy? Isn’t that counter to the heart of the American experiment? As Nate implied when he referred to the “red scare,” if people want to be communists, they are allowed. Likewise, if people want to be gay, they are entitled to all the rights otherwise due to them by the government—including the privileges conveyed by marriage laws.

This reasoning, however, makes an assumption. It assumes that the authority exercised by the civil government is derived solely from the consent of the citizens, and that there is no greater authority than those citizens themselves. Is there a greater authority?

The Declaration of Independence says that authority of the government is derived from the rights that “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle” to man. It holds the 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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….” The authority that our government exercises is derived from the combination of the “consent of the governed” and the Laws of Nature. Without the laws of nature, I suppose we would have a simple majority rule—whatever the majority of people voted on at any one time, would be right. An appeal to individual rights in the Natural Law gives minorities a voice, protects the marginalized and powerless, and forms the foundation of social justice. Crucially, such the Natural Law cannot be divided from a Lawmaker, God, since no rule exists without an authority enforcing it with proper jurisdiction.

Furthermore, if the standards of the Creator were revealed to us in ways other than Natural Law, then these revelations too would hold sway, just as the Natural Law does. Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845), then Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University, captures this perfectly:

“the Law of Nature…lies at the foundation of all others laws, and constitutes the first step in the science of jurisprudence…” but, “the law of nature has a higher sanction, as it stands supported and illustrated by revelation. Christianity, while with many minds it acquires authority from its coincidences with the law of nature, as deduced from reason, has added strength and dignity to the latter by its positive declarations….Thus Christianity becomes, not merely an auxiliary, but a guide to the law of nature, establishing its conclusions, removing its doubts, and elevating its precepts. (A Discourse Pronounced Upon the Inauguration of the Author)

Therefore, if government is built on the Laws of Nature, and the Laws of Nature descend from God, the Lawmaker, and if Christianity is the revelation of God, then the principles of Christianity ought to inform and constrain the principles of civil law.

If we accept that God is the ultimate sovereign, then we must believe that governmental strata that steward his authority must be structured to acknowledge the sovereignty of God.

It just so happens that the authority to which government answers has defined marriage. God has painted a pretty clear picture in his word about homosexuality and marriage. He calls homosexuality wrong and unnatural, while urging that marriage be kept holy (1 Corinthians 6:9, Jude 1:5-6, Romans 1:24-27, Leviticus 18:22, etc.). I won’t get into this in detail because I don’t think we disagree about what the Bible says on this topic.

If homosexual marriage thus violates Divine Law, which informs the Natural Law, and if right civil statutes derive their authority by conformance to the Natural Law, then civil homosexual marriage also violates right civil statues. It is the obligation of good citizens who have a Christian worldview to vote for representatives who will create right civil statues that adhere to the Divine law.

What is ultimate, democracy or deity? We are faced in our culture with the tacit elimination of God’s authority in the public sphere. The humanist believes that people’s freedom is limited by nothing but their desires. The Christian believes that people’s freedom is limited by God’s laws. And we gladly fight to keep the knee of our country knelt before God. “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people” (Proverbs 14:34).

Bringing Change

The questions of abortion and gay marriage summon deeper questions. Who defines personhood? Who has sovereignty over man? These questions lead us down to the bedrock of worldviews. Do we believe that God exists? Do we believe all of His implications, in all the spheres of life? Are we willing to stand up for these beliefs?

I will end by discussing one of Nate’s points. He says that making laws against a certain immoral practice will not stop the practice from happening. Legislation will not bring about change. He says, “I don’t think we can charge people with being moral when they don’t understand the real reason why it’s needed. Christ produces morality and fruit, and not vice-versa.” I admit that it is the Holy Spirit who makes the ultimate change in hearts, but this is not a reason to abdicate our seat at the cultural roundtable. In fact, quite the opposite. We are Christ’s representatives. If he is to get into people’s hearts, it will be through us—through our speaking the truth in love. (And in love is crucial.) We need to be like Christ, unswerving in his condemnation of sin in the Jewish culture, yet recklessly compassionate in his dealings with the broken, sinful Jews. As I said regarding abortion, this is the tension we are called to walk as believers. We need to fearlessly advocate toward a culture that honors and obeys God, while loving and being a part of a culture that isn’t there yet. We may never see direct fruit of our efforts, but by God’s grace, they will not be in vain.