Somewhere along the way, American Christianity became affected of the idea of family friendliness. Perhaps the rise of the Family Research Council in the 1980s and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio programs were influential in this regard; perhaps they were merely symptomatic. Perhaps Christians were en masse enchanted by the idea; perhaps there was a flood of people brought up in or converted under these pretenses. Either way, as far as consumer culture goes, “Christian” is now a practical synonym for “family friendly”.

But this does not necessarily follow. In fact, it makes almost no sense at all. The Bible, for example, does not at all conform to Christian standards of “family friendly”. Judges is awfully gory. Psalms is full of laments about people who don’t get what’s coming to them in life. Genesis has more than a few accounts of incest, even after Adam & Eve’s kids. A conception of Christianity molded into a family friendly model leaves the individual unprepared not only to deal with the realities of God as revealed in the scriptures, but unprepared to deal with life in general as an ambassador of Christ.

Family Friendly Culture

The ideas represented by Dr. Dobson and his organization represent an astoundingly faithless view of Christianity. Rather than being taught of bad influences, how to deal with them, and why they are bad, children are sheltered from all possible exposure these influences. This sort of attitude presents a dilemma to parents. One the one hand, kids will be kids, and the parent either does not want to or is not able to totally shelter the child. On the other hand, they don’t believe kids can handle the ideas out there. Rock music isn’t itself objectionable; it’s just the lyrics and themes. Reading is good; the kid just doesn’t need to be exposed to opposing worldviews.

And so a market niche is created to solve this problem: duplicate and sanitize. The people who fill this demand in any medium don’t need much wiggle room: the product needs to seem similar enough to mainstream fads to be cool – just with a “positive message”.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why The Passion of the Christ was so controversial in Christian circles: it shined a violent and bloody yet sadly brief spotlight on the fact that Christianity is not necessarily synonymous with family friendly.

It’s easy to see then how the Dobson mentality has stilted Christian creativity. This is why we have Christian pop and rock which most often comes off as mediocre clones of mainstream bands. This is why Christian fiction never breaks out of its niche market. This is why Christian film is seen from the outside as laughable. This is why Christian fashion (especially t-shirts) is more often than not painfully kitschy. Mainstream “family friendly” Christian culture offers nothing new, because its niche is “sanitize”, not “innovate”. The former imperative has totally superseded the latter.

Family Friendly Politics

The rise of the Christian Right as a political force can also be directly attributed to this mindset. In fact, this is more likely the direct result of the Dobson mentality and the culture the byproduct, for the Family Research Council is first and foremost a lobbying organization.

When pressed, almost anyone who advocates the Christianization of American culture (read: family friendlization) will eventually appeal to a form of the “think of the children” argument. It is the same sort of faithless idea of parenting applied to the government: if kids are screwed up more or less automatically by exposure to bad influences, why leave those decisions in the hands of the parent? Let the state prohibit gay marriage, lest the culture come to accept that lifestyle as normal and a child not know any better. Let the state regulate the sale and advertisement of alcohol and cigarettes lest a child become spoiled by the desire to indulge.

Obviously these fears are nonsensical to any Christian with a semblance of an understanding of the doctrine of election. But as this mindset prevails, Christianity becomes less about any particular doctrine than the sort of lifestyle one lives. Even as it becomes more blatantly counterproductive to the gospel, it also suppresses the ideas by which people from the inside can see that fact.

This idea of a family friendly faith has turned American Christianity into a lifestyle without religion; action without belief; and like the Pharisees, an external semblance without internal reality. Dobson-style sheltering from bad influences is both wasteful of strength, spiritually counterproductive, and empirically idiotic if the goal of parenting is to keep the child in the faith. Christianity is a doctrine: it is not a culture, as if there were one canon expression of faith. It is not a lifestyle except as far as one’s life is lived by this doctrine. Let God be again glorified in creativity and innovation, and in the faith that his sovereign grace is strong enough to shine over even the worst of influences.

This is a response to Calvinism and the Divine Decrees – Correcting a Misunderstanding over at the excellent Parchment & Pen Blog.

First, to clear up what this post is not: this is not a disputation as to whether decrees can precede one another. Even lacking a temporal order, a logical order may be necessary. Patton explained it very well (and I think the debate would be in general better phrased) in terms of means and ends, rather than order of decrees. He uses the example of marriage: does one marry for the sake of love, with children as a happy consequence, or marry for the sake of an heir with love as only the necessary prerequisite? Neither is unheard of. This distinction is then extended to God’s relationship to humanity: Were humans created for the sake of salvation and reprobation, or were salvation and reprobation created for the sake of humans?

Seen thus in light of means versus ends, the debate becomes less arcane. Its irrelevance also becomes more apparent – for neither of these things are ends in themselves. God’s only final ends are his own glory, and all of creation and history are those ends playing out. It is not the case that the infralapsarian versus supralapsarian debate hinges on whether or not God is the author of sin – neither position has any bearing on God’s passivity or activeness in decreeing the fall. In neither case can the existence of evil be laundered through passivity on God’s part, free will or otherwise: the active-passive distinction is meaningless when applied to the Sovereign (a fact also relevant to the single/double-predestinarian debate).

It is the heart of Calvinism – and thus both lapsarian strands – that all of creation, including evil, exists for the magnification of the glory of God by display of his attributes. Therefore, the only divine decree which can be said to logically precede any other is the decree that the glory of God should be declared. Everything else is a means to that. Ultimately both infralapsarianism and supralapsarianism place mankind as ends in the designs of God – a place which mankind is not warranted to occupy.

The fact of our existence is proof that we serve the glory of God better than our nonexistence. This fact, the Leibniz principle, levels all further means and ends into uniform means: humanity is not for salvation and reprobation, nor are salvation and reprobation for humanity, but all are for the glory of God. Any benefit to us means we’re just tagging along for the ride.

We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called “nearness to God.” One is likeness to God. … But, secondly, there is what we may call nearness of approach. If this is what we mean, the states in which a man is “nearest” to God are those in which he is most surely and swiftly approaching his final union with God, vision of God and enjoyment of God. And as soon as we distinguish nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach, we see that they do not necessarily coincide. They may or may not.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

C.S. Lewis in the above passage from The Four Loves draws a contrast between proximity to God and likeness to God. And when we say that nearness to God is the Good for all men, it is important to keep in mind in which sense we mean that.

The way of the LORD is a stronghold to the upright, but ruin to the workers of iniquity.
Proverbs 10:29

Is the spirit of the LORD impatient? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to the one walking uprightly?
Micah 2:7

The way of the Lord is ruin to some? The words of God only do good to those walking uprightly?

The Way of the Lord in Proverbs can be understood as encompassing all of life, for the worker of iniquity is as surely on his way to the Lord in judgement as the upright (Hebrews 9:27); as can the Words of the Lord in Micah, for the prophecy (which up to that point had been of woe) spoke of events which would affect the lives of everyone. This is where the distinction between proximity and likeness to God become clear: both these verses describe a proximity to God; not a likeness. As the worker of iniquity draws proximately near to God, his woe is made manifest.

At this point it will be good to define the difference between the upright and the workers of iniquity – or more generally, between good and evil. As Augustine argued in Confessions, evil does not have a substance of its own, as if it were the substantial opposite of good. Lewis expounded on this point several millennia later in works such as The Great Divorce, arguing that evil is not the lack of good, but a malformed good – a good whose aim has been twisted from its proper ends. How many evils have been spawned in the name of love – love of self, overprotective jealousy, idolatry – just to name a few malformations of one good. Thus, the upright man is the man whose ends are oriented correctly towards God. He is the sanctified man whose selfish ends have been aligned towards God by the revelation of the supreme worth of God. The worker of iniquity, by contrast, is not any more or less human than the upright man; his ends are merely misaligned.

Yet this is not a “mere” misalignment: this is the very definition and full extent of culpable evil. Proximity to God is good in an absolute sense, in that all ends orient towards God as they approach him in proximity. Yet we know that the flesh can be incorrigibly rigid in its ends (Romans 8:7). Thus as this rigid evil approaches God, it faces a choice: bend – align yourself towards God as the supreme desire and ends of your heart – or be destroyed. Final judgement is thus the threat of utter destruction of the rigid fleshliness at the presence of God. They are cast away for their existence cannot bear the near presence of God (Matthew 7:23). Proximity to God, though good in an absolute sense, is destruction to that which is not like God in perfection.

For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did, sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin: He condemned sin in the flesh.
Romans 8:3

He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
Philippians 1:6

These verses, however, speak of likeness to God. Though we are of ourselves incorrigibly rigid, and though the law was powerless to overcome that rigidity, sanctification by the work of the Holy Spirit has been given to overcome just this problem. Rather than face obliteration at the day of judgement because our ends cannot orient themselves towards the Good, sanctification is the progressive reorientation of one’s desires and values to align with the Good.

In this way, our perfection by the work of the Holy Spirit, though not completed until the day of Christ Jesus, allows us to approach God in proximity because we have approached Jesus Christ in likeness. It makes us good by making our identity malleable, and so saves us from destruction when all things are made good. Thus though we are never fit to behold the glory of God firsthand in this life (even Moses could not behold God’s face without the threat of destruction; Exodus 33:20), sanctification is the down payment which assures us the ability to be joined to God in nearness – to our good, and not to our destruction (Jude 24). Election is the assurance that the final and absolute good coincides with our personal good, the gracious gift of God in overcoming our own rigidity for His own glory.

Two and a half years ago, Saving The Church Part II set off a systematic decoupling of faith and politics. This is my attempt at reintegration.

A lawyer asked Him [Jesus] a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:35-40

Jesus here makes a distinction in the things we are commanded to do. The entire law and prophets are summed up in two commandments – not one.

The distinction here is between morality and justice: Morality is rightness before God; justice is rightness before other men. To a certain degree they are not separate: justice is attendant to morality. Loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind entails that we will love our neighbors as ourselves. Yet justice can exist on its own: Romans 2:14-15, when it says the work of the law is written on the hearts of the gentiles, is referring to justice – not to morality. It refers to their treatment of fellow men, not to their position before God – for the implication is that the gentiles do not know God.

Justice is further separated from morality in that it has implications beyond the individual and spiritual level. Whereas morality throughout the Bible is always treated as an individual problem, every time as far as I’m aware that God has threatened physical judgement on a nation, it has been because of injustice. In Amos, where God pronounces judgement on Israel plus seven other nations separately, each condemnation involves societal injustice or war cruelty. Moral condemnation certainly comes along with it, but it appears in each case that injustice was the thing which brought the physical condemnation.

Contrast this to moral condemnation, which often has little to no effect in this world. David often cries out in the Psalms asking why his enemies prosper. Job was morally righteous and yet suffered greatly. The condemnation and reward for morality comes after death (Hebrews 9:27): indeed, morality must be completely agnostic to its material circumstance.

Justice however, unlike morality, has direct physical consequences in the here and now, as well as collective implications for societies. Indeed, though it is at all times inappropriate to codify morality into law, there is a call for Christians to bring justice to our legal systems.

But “Love your neighbor as yourself” is still an individual command. What then can we say about just societal laws? Firstly, there must be equality before the law: all laws must apply equally to all people. Hayek laid it out well in The Constitution of Liberty: laws must be general principles for all – never allowing the rules to be different for one than for another. These would be the “evil statutes” upon the enacters of which will come woe, as per Isaiah 10:1. The prophets very often condemn Israel for turning away the poor at the gate. The gate is where disputes were settled – a court of sorts, where the judges would arbitrate. These judges were condemned for refusing to provide legal protection to the poor (Amos 5:12): essentially, the law only afforded protection to the rich.

So now that we have established the necessary relationship between just law and the individual, what sorts of particular laws are just? Jeremiah expresses a curse on those who use others’ labor without paying them their wage (22:13). This would suggest an injunction against slavery. Indeed, “You shall not steal” suggests that property rights are the very first prerequisite for a just society. Proverbs is full of condemnation for “unbalanced scales” by which men would defraud others in deals (11:1, 20:23) – “The Lord hates” them, and furthermore any society which does not afford property rights or fraud protection to the poor (or anyone, for that matter) is odious in the sight of the Lord.

Moral legislators will try to confuse the issue by conflating justice with morality. They will use William Wilberforce, the man who by faith was able to abolish slavery in England, to justify their support for a constitutional amendment ban on gay marriage – as if all faith-motivated government activism were the same. What is the difference between William Wilberforce and Jerry Falwell? William Wilberforce campaigned for justice in England’s laws – for the equal treatment of Africans – which was the proper domain of justice. These moralizers, on the other hand, far overstep the internal and individual domain of morality. Indeed by doing so they deny the very existence of morality, for in advocating moral laws they assume that people will be morally better off acting under threat as if they were moral – as if the external behavior were all that mattered. It is an undeniable fact that legal pressure cannot change the heart of a man. Morality is not justice.

In addition, welfarists will try to confuse the issue by conflating the existence of the poor with the treatment of the poor. Nowhere in the Bible is the existence of the poor used as an indictment of society – Jesus even says “the poor you will always have with you” (Matthew 26:11) – it is always their treatment. That is not to say we should not care about the poor as such: there is tremendous Biblical impetus for charity. Yet charity is a moral question, not a question of justice. “Trampling on the poor” (Amos 5:11) cannot be made into any sort of Marxist indictment of Capitalism, as if being poor necessitates having been trampled upon: it refers specifically to unequal legal treatment of the poor (Amos 5:12).

As a moral question, care of the poor falls under the same individual domain as the issues of the moralizers. Welfare is indeed unjust, for it throws out equality under the law in favor of some groups over others. By collectivizing charity by taxation and redistribution, through welfare, healthcare, and whatever else – these welfarists commit exactly the same error as the moralists: overstepping the bounds of morality, thus effectively denying its import as if the external were all that mattered. Individuals may indeed be morally indicted for failing to give charitably, but it is a pernicious and unjust society that removes from the individual the responsibility of charity to make it the role of “society” or the government.

The Benefits of Justice: An Argument from History
Many times we as good modernists tend to think of ourselves as living in a different sort of world than that described in the Bible. Since the coming of Christ, it seems God has been silent, letting history take its course. This is completely different from Amos’ vision. He spends nearly half of his book detailing specific condemnations on the various nations surrounding Israel. This was so that, when the calamity did come, no one could say that it was chance – that it was simply the course of history irrespective of God’s design. This seems harshly disconnected from our own day, where it seems that history has simply been running its course for 2000 years.

One might start to wonder at the difference between the two eras, listening to the moralizers. Sodom and Gomorra were destroyed for their condoning of homosexuality they say, yet no brimstone falls on Massachusetts. This idea has even extended into our lexicon in the word “sodomy” – meaning in English anal sex, usually homosexual.

With the realization that immorality only condemns the individual, and that it is societies which are condemned by injustice, the need for this distinction between eras suddenly disappears. What touched off the rapid acceleration of scientific progress and material prosperity in the past few hundred years? The Industrial Revolution. And what sparked the Industrial Revolution? The advent of Enlightenment thought. What Enlightenment thought – specifically representative government plus Capitalism, in this case – brought, with the writings of such luminaries as Adam Smith and John Locke, was the social institutionalization of justice.

The history of the world prior to the enlightenment with regard to justice has been very spotty. If justice ever appeared at any point, it was relatively short-lived. Ironically it took a secular revolution in thought to bring about the Biblical social vision that had been actively inhibited by the Catholic Church. Essentially, people realized that institutions matter – that you can do better than hoping to live under a good ruler and praying they don’t die or turn bad.

This insight is also found in the Bible. When Israel asked for a king, the Lord told Samuel to tell the people that a monarch would lead directly to bad societal consequences: he tells them monarchy is not an institution conducive to justice. It’s not impossible to achieve justice, temporarily – Solomon ruled justly as a monarch and led Israel to great prosperity – but death and replacement always decrease the likelihood of continued justice. Even now, the most impoverished countries are the ones without institutions guaranteeing justice and property rights to the poor (cf. David Guest’s The Shackled Continent, Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital) – welfare programs and foreign aid have so far been everywhere completely ineffective at relieving poverty without institutional reform.

It has been the advent of limited government, realized through the progress of Capitalism, that has directly led to our modern prosperity. Is this simply the course of history? If one takes a sovereign view of God’s work in history, as Amos (and all the prophets, for that matter) requires us to do, this is no coincidence. Capitalism and representative government are the institutionalizations of Biblical justice: moral freedom, and legal protection for all regardless of position. It takes the idea of justice and removes its administration from the hands of any particular person, so that its permanence is not jeopardized by the death or removal of a leader. It is no coincidence that these have been attendant to our modern prosperity.

This is of course not to say that this prosperity is in any way related to salvation: this is not a gospel of prosperity. Justice on its own is completely ineffective to save from sin – and moral (godly) behavior in many cases may mean the renouncement of personal prosperity, whether through persecution or giving. The material benefits of justice are only given to entire societies, not to individuals who act justly – whereas the salvific benefits of morality are entirely individual. But just as salvation is the proper consummation of morality on the individual level, that is the valuation of God as the highest good, prosperity is the proper consummation of justice on the societal level. It makes sense that prosperity would accompany justice plus freedom: if the human mind and the axioms of human action were designed by God, then it is not a leap to say that the spontaneous order of the market would arise and generate prosperity under the social order ordained by the Creator.

Let us first define ‘nature’ as our active axiom – that is, the ultimate good towards which we strive in acting. There are then two types of nature:

-Absolute Referent: The unconditional striving towards the good of something external.
-Relative Referent: The striving towards the good of the self.

The relative referent is the defining feature of humanity: there is no action conceivable that is not done to further one’s expectation of personal good, whatever that might be. We therefore generally call the relative referent Human Nature. There is no political leader which can make an appeal to an absolute referent of a collective good without appealing to the relative referent in some way or another – whether out of a sense of duty, for safety and solidarity, or an appeal to mean materialism. There is no charity which can convince people of the absolute importance of the external worth of their cause: they must always either make their audience morally uncomfortable enough to act to alleviate their consciences, or convince them that their cause will have some sort of personal effect on them, tangibly or not.

We know, however, that the absolute good – that is, God – is an absolute referent. Yet natural man has only the relative referent. God Himself is the absolute good, so his own nature is unified: his relative and absolute referents are the same. We as humans do not have that same luxury: our relative referent is to ourselves, and that is as immutable a part of being human as being good is immutable to the nature of God.

How then may we be saved? Man, when he is endowed with the Holy Spirit, suddenly acquires a new nature – a new referent, an absolute one. Yet this nature is still alien to him – he does not cease to be human upon this endowment. This absolute referent is powerless except so far as it can appeal to what makes him human – that is, his relative referent.

This appeal by the new nature to our old nature is what we commonly think of as the battle between the flesh and the spirit, as described in Romans 8. Yet this passage does not describe a battle between the two as if the outcome would be uncertain: the relative referent, the human nature, always wins. People will always strive for their own good, for this is what it is to be human. The purpose of the absolute referent is not to vanquish the relative referent: the spirit does not abolish the flesh; it sanctifies it. The relative referent is unwavering in its ends – the good of the self. But it is not unwavering in its definitions. The new nature convinces the old nature that God really is the highest good of the self.

Human nature is limited by its knowledge and belief, and chooses its means accordingly. If one believes that raw physical hedonism is the highest good of the self, then one will pursue a lifestyle according to that belief. If a charismatic leader convinces a population that their highest good is in service of their country, then they will fall in line accordingly. The purpose of the Holy Spirit, which is itself the new referent, is to perfect our belief according to reality – to show us that our highest good really is in God. When we sin it is not because our human nature triumphed over our spiritual nature; it is because our human nature failed to be convinced by the Holy Spirit, and simply acted accordingly.

In this sense, every believer has both a divine and a human nature – an absolute and a relative referent. The power of the absolute referent is contingent upon the knowledge believed by the human nature. It is in this same sense that we can say Jesus Christ had a fully human and a fully divine nature: he was fully human and therefore strived towards his own good. Yet his human nature was fully convinced of the surpassing worth of God – and so there was no conflict. Even the crucifixion was done “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2): there was a perfect alignment of his own perceived good and the glory of God. This is likewise the final goal of the sanctification of every believer. We will never become fully convinced of the worth of God here on earth: the joy of Heaven is not that our human nature is vanquished, it is that it is redeemed and perfected. We achieve our own highest good by striving for the glory of the highest good. It is the mercy of God to allow for this alignment of these two referents: we are not saved by becoming less human, but in the perfection of our humanity.