Why I am a Christian

Since I started this blog I've been intending to write a series on philosophy and Christianity. Indeed, one of the reasons I started the blog is because of two reactions I often get to my career path from people I meet in church settings. One is the question: do my studies challenge my faith? The other is the sentiment that study of philosophy is valuable primarily for the defense of the faith. I will address each of these questions in subsequent blogs. I have decided that it makes most sense, however, to begin this series by explaining why I am a Christian, and what that means.

So here it is, as succinctly as I can manage:
Christianity means following Jesus Christ, and this means accepting who he is, what he has done, and what he commands us to do. These things are to be found in the Bible, which is summarized in a variety of creeds and confessions. No one is born a follower of Christ or made one by the actions of others. We must become followers by coming to know him. It takes a sovereign act of God to make one a follower, but God acts through our own reason and experience. I became a Christian when I concluded that Jesus had risen from the dead, experienced his forgiving love, and surrendered my life to him. Every other belief and practice stems from how these things confirm the authority of the Bible.

And now to explicate a little:
The three words I italicize indicate that being a Christian requires a rational conclusion, an experience, and a permanently expressed decision. These may not occur at the same time, and I suppose but won’t insist that they usually will occur in the order I have listed them. What I do insist on, because I find Jesus to insist upon it, is that one is not a Christian without all three. Reason, experience and desire (yes, we decide based on our desire) come together for the disciple of Christ. In the gospels we find Jesus challenging people in regard to each (e.g. Mt 16:15, Lk 7:47, Jn 1:38).

Sometimes people claim to be Christians without having all of these, or having none at all. I would find this very strange, except that I was once in that category. We naturally base our identities on belonging to a group or engaging in a certain activity, and some churches reinforce this kind of identification by granting membership and participation in sacraments and leadership without appropriate standards of belief and desire. (Experience cannot be judged directly, but desire is adequate evidence of it. Certain things just are not desired without a first taste.) Needless to say, I think these churches to varying degrees obscure the call to follow Christ.

In more theological terms, I am describing faith and repentance. However, I have described these in terms of reason, experience and desire/decision to try to make them more clear. There are ways of taking “faith” and “repentance” that I, and Scripture, do not at all intend (along the lines of blind submission to an authority figure).

What we must conclude by reason is basically the historical facts about and identity of Jesus. He is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and the Creator God taken on human flesh, who died to atone for sin and rose bodily from the dead to defeat death. Some people might call this fundamentalism and claim a more enlightened Christianity, but the Bible is very clear that Christianity stands or falls with the bodily resurrection of Christ.

What we must experience is the forgiving love of God in Christ. This is not necessarily a moment of ecstasy; though it can include that, it can be described in terms of self-knowledge as well. We must come to see ourselves as sinners against God, unworthy of his favor, and then as recipients of his forgiveness. This forgiveness is not a mere ignoring of sin or acceptance of the sinner, rather it is accomplished by the self-sacrifice of Christ. In Christ’s death we see both how bad our sin really is, and how deep God’s love for us really is.

What we must desire, and decide to pursue, is obedience, or submission, to Christ. Our culture does not like these words, but those who are firmly convinced that Jesus is God and that he defeated death, and who have experienced God’s love, will trust that God’s commands are intended for our good and are reliable. Of course, God does not give step-by-step instructions for our actions. What he gives is the Bible and his sovereign direction of all events (also known as providence). He wants us to grow by learning to apply Biblical examples and standards to our own circumstances.

Why the Bible, and why do I say that the foregoing beliefs, experience and desire confirm the authority of the Bible? Very simply, the Bible is the only authentic record of Jesus. It provides the historical facts and is itself part of the evidence that confirms those facts. In my own experience, after concluding the resurrection to be true, I began to take the claims of the Bible more seriously, and eventually God ‘opened my eyes’ to see the narrative of forgiving love, which led in turn to my desire to obey Christ. And full-circle, the Bible is where we find what Jesus said and did. But even if we were just to start with the gospel records of Jesus, we find that Jesus confirms the Old Testament and anticipates the writings of the Apostles that form the New Testament. So the whole Bible informs us about what it means to follow Christ. What about subsequent writings? The New Testament indicates a unique, foundational authority was given to the designated Apostles, those who physically saw the resurrected Jesus. It also makes reference to the importance of public preaching, which explains why we have church sermons. These and various writings are helpful to the extent that they illuminate and apply the sacred text.

What does all of this have to do with philosophy? Clearly there are claims about truth and the nature of human life and the universe involved in Christianity. I’ll be getting at those things in subsequent blogs. But please comment if anything in this one is not clear!

(I am well aware, by the way, that many of the statements I have made here are controversial for various people. They are my reasoned conclusions and I’d be happy to discuss my reasoning in more depth. Of course, I think what I have concluded is objectively true.)

Money's Two Faces (an epilogue to the philosophy of money)

In my two previous posts on the philosophy of money, I mentioned at several points that money has dual consequences. I do not wish to rehearse all of these here. I would like to put forward two quotes, from different sections of Simmel's book, which set the dual character of money into sharp relief. I have no definite conclusion to draw or point to make from these two quotes, but I would suggest that they are worth thinking about, especially in regard to one's own attitude toward money. Please share your comments!

"We experience in the nature of money itself something of the essence of prostitution. The indifference as to its use, the lack of attachment to any individual because it is unrelated to any of them, the objectivity inherent in money as a mere means which excludes any emotional relationship--all this produces an ominous analogy between money and prostitution. Of all human relationships, prostitution is perhaps the most striking instance of mutual degradation to a mere means, and this may be the strongest and most fundamental factor that places prostitution in such a close historical relationship to the money economy, the economy of 'means' in the strictest sense." (377)

"It is the essence of economic transactions that one person gives up what another person desires, provided this other person acts in the same manner. The moral rule that one should do unto others as one would have done unto oneself finds the clearest example of its formal realization in the economy." (468)

The Philosophy of Money part 2

After several weeks I am finally ready to post my summary of the second half of Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money. In the first half Simmel examines what makes the economy a unique mode of human activity, with money as its basic expression. Money embodies value and becomes a tool whose power grows with the expansion of economic exchange. In the second half of the book Simmel explores the effects of money on life, particularly in regard to individual freedom, personal value, and our modern style of living.

Money tends to increase individual freedom with regard to personal relationships and with regard to objects. In personal relationships, we pay bills, taxes and fines, and even make gifts, with specific amounts of money. This allows us to meet our obligations to others while deciding for ourselves how we shall spend our time and what kind of work we shall do. We would be much less free if, as in earlier times, we were obliged to give so much wheat, or so many years of military service, or even our whole laboring life (as in slavery) to others. The freedom to pay in money has two consequences, which may be considered good or bad depending on one's point of view, but which cannot be separated. On the one hand, money payment establishes a degree of equality in relationships. On the other hand, money payment makes relationships less personal. Just as money itself becomes less substantial and more purely functional over time (as we saw in part 1, chapter 2), so our relationships with the many people we depend on in the modern world--cashiers, plumbers, landlords--become more purely functional. We are happy to have anyone, even a computer, fulfill the cashier function for us, and we hardly notice the person's name. This means, however, that anyone can use that cashier, regardless of class, race, etc. These twin effects cannot be fully separated.

With regard to objects, money increases our individual freedom by making us independent of particular objects. This means that we can exchange anything for money and money for anything. Simmel writes, "Just as all roads lead to Rome--Rome being conceived as lying beyond every local interest and as standing in the background of every individual action--so all economic roads lead to money. Just as Irenaeus called Rome the compendium of the world, Spinoza called money the omnium rerum compendium [compendium of all things]." (307) Again there is a further consequence: our personalities are less dependent on our possessions. Artisans and farmers tend to be shaped by the material they work with, whereas the salesman is not shaped by the product he sells, nor the business manager by the process of production. Money thus creates another paradox, for while money brings all objects closer to us by making them more accessible, it also increases our distance from them, by making our personalities more independent. Psychologically, this can produce the most profound sense of freedom and power, or the darkest sense of alienation. Socially, it has produced such things as professionalization (through which non-economic criteria are used to evaluated a field of work); individualism; and associations for planned purposes, such as corporations, clubs, and charitable organizations.

The chapter on personal value deals with phenomena such as blood money, slavery, fines, religious atonement, payment as form of penance, dowries, marriage by purchase, marriage for money, and bribes. In these matters, cultures tend to develop first in the direction of measuring the worth of persons by money, and then away from this equivalence, toward seeing personal worth as absolute and priceless. These movements result from two contrasting movements that both stem from the development of society. (Simmel also observes that Christianity and the Bible have played a significant role in cultural recognition of the absolute worth of persons.) On the one hand, people become more differentiated as social roles and work become more refined and specialized. On the other hand, money becomes less differentiated in its uses as it becomes more important in a society. Equating personal value with an amount of money makes sense only within cultures where money is used to a limited extent and where people are not very different from their peers, at least economically.

Simmel concludes his book by examining how the money economy influences how we live. Although he wrote 100 years ago, his observations are just as accurate today. First of all, the money economy elevates the importance of intellect, especially calculating thought, over emotion. Through money we quantify values and calculate our decisions. This aspect of money leads on the one hand to equality, because quantifying value makes it equally measurable and valid for all people, but on the other hand it leads to inequality, because the possessor of money can do almost anything with it. The money economy also contributes to such features of modern life as material or technological progress at the expense of social and spiritual refinement; division of labor; distance in genuine relationships and proximity in external relationships (e.g. living 1500 miles from family while not knowing my neighbors, or making a local phone call to order Chinese food); the domination of life by technology and the urgent at the expense of the important; general restlessness; interruption and leveling of the natural rhythms of life in favor of increasing regularity and symmetry; the tension between classical liberalism and socialism; an increase in the pace of life; and greater mobility of property and people. These effects stem from features of money already indicated, including its universal validity, its relative insubstantiality, its nature as a tool, and its dual character as both a measure of value and an object of value.

One final word. Throughout the book, Simmel mostly refrains from making moral judgments. He shows that many of the effects I have tried to summarize can either be seen in a good light or in a bad light, or that they are balanced by contrasting effects. His philosophy of money does not conclude that money is good or bad. Rather, it helps us to understand money and its relationship to a wide range of social and psychological phenomena. We should at least learn that whether these are good or bad can be complex question, and that our judgment should be prepared to accept its implications.