Here I want to offer a final reflection on grace and ethical systems. The original post that sparked the rather heated debate, here and elsewhere, was entitled “Stop Teaching the Ethics of Jesus.” One of the important, but missed, points of the title was that it didn’t say “Don’t Teach the Ethics of Jesus.” The reason for this was something I addressed in the interview with Jay Bakker. In that interview I mentioned how my position is neither one that claims ethics fails (and thus should be abolished), nor succeeds (and should be held onto). But that I am rather arguing the following,
Ethics is failure that succeeds in its very failure
Let us outline the two positions I mention above in the following way,
Ethical teachings are vital in helping individuals and communities engage in moral behaviour
Ethical teachings breed guilt, repression, and disavowed symptoms and thus should be abolished
My argument is neither of these. Rather I am saying that ethical teaching helps us to approach moral behaviour by the very act of exposing its impotence. In his book Less Than Nothing Slovoj Zizek uses a simple and useful analogy to explain this process (he offers this as part of a detailed and complex analysis of the structure). He takes the example of offending a friend with a thoughtless remark and then apologising (elsewhere he tells us that this is a true example of something that happened with Judith Butler). Once he realized that he had offended his friend he apologised for his remarks. After the apology she told him that there was no need to apologize as she understood he didn’t really mean it. The same logic can be found in lots of places, for example, when we bring a bottle of wine to a dinner only to be told that there was no need for the gift.
What we see in times like this can be broken down as such,
- Someone makes a comment that hurts a friend
- The friend shows that hurt in some way
- The person who made the comment feels bad and apologies
- The other person says, “you don’t need to apologise, I understand you didn’t mean it”
- The relationship is re-established and the first person is more considerate in what they say in future
The point here is that the apology is needed so that it can be rejected as not needed. The same is true of bringing a bottle of wine to a party. Imagine the awkwardness that would ensue if the person who was told that they shouldn’t have brought the wine said, “OK” and then went out and put it back in the car. The point is that the wine (or apology) is retained in its very redundancy.
It is this structure that we see play out in ethics. Take the example of a family in which a child hurts someone. Both the “hippie” response of accepting everything and the “conservative” response of helping the child internalize a code of conduct that ought to be followed, are problematic. Instead we can provide the following (simplified) scheme that follows my argument,
- Child hurts someone
- Help the child understand why what they did is unacceptable
- Child feels bad
- Tell child that its ok, that everyone messes up and that they are loved just the way they are
The idea is that this type of structure is one that can best transform our subjective relation to the other. In other words, if you stopped at stage one (do nothing) or two (show the inappropriate behaviour) the result is damaging. The point being, of course, that offering grace in the face of the necessity and impotence of ethical systems is the way of getting what ethical systems promise and yet cannot deliver. The critique of ethics through love is thus not a way of attempting to get away from ethical systems or what they aim at, but rather of approaching what they promise yet obscure through the creation of a subjective obstacle.
This properly Hegelian dialectic move is what, I would argue, is missed in both the “old” and “new” perspectives on Paul.
Great post- Looking forward to an expansion of that last line!
This really completed the circle for me from your first post, thanks. So much to think about.
I now have this wonderfully subversive image in my mind of Christ being offered up on the cross in a determinedly substitutionary atonement way, and God the Father waving his hands and saying ‘No, no, really, you shouldn’t have’.
(Those who think that’s blasphemous, yes, well, sorry, but…)
Very helpful follow-up to the other post – thanks, Peter! (I know, I shoudln’t have…)
Mike Truman – I don’t think it’s blasphemous at all – thanks for the willingness to say it.
But if were critiquing ethics with love, I think we’re being ambiguous about what love entails. As I said before, this is what I find so persuasive in Critchley who’s ethics consist around what he calls following Levinas a “infinite demand.” When Keirkegaard says in his “works of Love” that Christian love is not man-man [sic], between like and like, but is actually man-God-man, he is trying to account for the radical inequality or asymmetry that constitutes all of our relationships and “Conscience is the inward ear that listens for the repetition of the infinite demand.” There is an irreducible surplus in all of our interactions, and this is where ethics fails, it cannot account for this excess because it is infinite, ethics is a systematic way of computing proper action and actual ethical relation and demand far exceeds anything like that. I would argue that is Caputo’s basic point (again citing Levinas, who is, of course, “far too pious”) in “Against Ethics.”
Like you say, the “hippy” response of unconditional acceptance fails, I see it as representing the liberal attitude that Zizek rightly detests of “tolerance,” where we accept everything while obsessively not allowing the other to disrupt our space, while the conservative response is the typical attepmt to repress or do violence to the other via a kind of assimilation or homogenization. I think that your and Zizek’s answer to this dilemma is is in a way the liberal “hippy” response with a supplement of “love,” which we’re not really sure of a definition for. I would argue with Caputo and Critchley, and by extension Levinas and Derrida, that love must always take the form of something uncontainably and unquantifiably infinite. Thus, love or the ethics of Jesus/love are not meant to generate guilt, but responsibility.
So then, the ethics of Jesus are mistaken as moral commands, but are really more like rules of thumb. Critchley says “The point is that we are doubly bound: both to follow the thumb-line of divine commandment and to accept responsibility not to follow it.” Why might we have to not follow it? For the same reason Levinas was not a pacifist. The command, for instance, is “You must not kill,” but given the undecideability or incalculability of life itself, we may end up in a position of forced violence or necessary violence that we are nonetheless responsible for (because we are acting out of love). When Jesus gives the sermon on the Mount, an infinite demand is being issued, not something that can simply be followed (which you point out sometimes generates guilt). What it does, and is supposed to do, is put us call in a “position of ethical overload,” and ethics (according to Crtichley by whom I am persuaded) is “all about overload… What such a demand does is expose our imperfection and failure.” “The imperfect is our paradise.” (zizek refuses this label of imperfection) And now, finally, we may be at the same conclusion. We have communities that accept brokenness that is realized in the shadow of an infinite demand, but we do not feel guilty (‘God’ didnt intend the commands that way) but we do feel responsible, even in our brokenness, and it is this responsibility that is the binding agent of the community. Feeling good and accepting one another is too abstract. Responsibility, I argue, is necessary. Sorry for the longwinded response, I see it as a meditation on your final stage of “-Tell child that its ok, that everyone messes up and that they are loved just the way they are.” It’s ok because of love which is constituted by a taking total responsibility for that child. Which is, of course, a check that one writes and cannot be cashed. No one can take full responsibility. No one can give themselves completely. But that brings us nicely to Lacan talking about love as the giving of something “you don’t possesses in the first place.”
This would be getting off topic, so I responded with a (too-short) critique of Critchley on my blog here: http://stephenkeating.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/faith-of-the-faithless/
Great comment! I like the phrase “ethical overload.” I think the ethical sections of the sermon on the mount are meant exactly to do this, because at the beginning Jesus proclaimed blessing on different groups of the unsuccessful. Blessing, whatever it is exactly, is a GIFT, undeserved and quite apart from ethical merit. Then, he says, you don’t like this undeserved gift of blessing? Let’s talk about what it takes to merit it. Secret attitudes and desires must be right; you must be perfect as my Father is perfect.
I am a database programmer and administrator. If I have a table where each record is a different shirt, I can query the database for shirts which are red AND cotton AND have buttons AND have collars. Each condition narrows the resulting found set to fewer and fewer records. On the other hand, I can query for shirts which are red OR cotton OR have buttons OR have collars. Each parameter expands the resulting found set.
The beatitudes offer blessing based on an OR style algorithm. If you are poor in spirit OR hungry for (thus lacking) righteousness, OR persecuted, OR a peacemaker (meaning you live in strife), you are blessed. It is a gift. Blessing is offered for any of them.
The ethical teachings are the opposite: they are an AND algorithm. You have to avoid adultery AND anger AND lying AND do it all from the bottom of your heart, AND it must be completely perfect or you will not land in the found set of the righteous. It is complete overload, and it makes you go back and reconsider if you would rather approach life under the rubric of blessing via gift or the rubric of blessing via ethical merit.
So, I have 4 sons, and I can vouch that calling their hand on their bad stuff and then saying it was nothing, they didn’t mean it, teaches them very little. They learn the exact logic of things more than you would think: they learn that if they do something wrong, it is nothing real. If you say, what you did was extremely wrong, and I’ll never say anything different about that kind of thing, but I believe you are justified by Christ’s death, and I forgive you, they learn it was wrong, and that love triumphs without brushing their lapse under the rug or minimizing its harm. In a practical sense this is to me a more powerful approach, and I’ve seen it work over and over.
I know a lot of people on here have trouble with thinking of Christ’s death as propitiatory, but it is a central tenet for me for this very reason. In this case I mean to offend. POKE!!!
clears it up well. and this works for the vast middle ground of grey area ethics – telling a lie, minor theft (in some cultures), lust (in every culture), etc.
but there will be course times when it won’t be ok, and when not everyone feels the same way and acts the same way as the offending person.
this – the seeming acceptance of all things not just the ones that are currently marginally acceptable – is something that your critics are likely to pounce on.
So, let me see if I am understanding, if you don’t mind. I am going to turn to John 8:1-11 for a bit to try to see if I am understanding what you are saying.
In this passage the religious elite, those rigid upholders of the ethical framework of the Mosaic law, drag in a woman caught in the very act of committing a capital offense: adultery. The ethical framework calls for her execution. Yet, Jesus accepts her, loves her just as she is and where she is. Strict adherence to the ethical framework in this instance does no one any good, except to satisfy the blood lust of some, maybe. Jesus accepts her, doesn’t condemn her. She is seemingly brought to an understanding that what she has been doing is not beneficial, neither to her nor her husband. He, in His love, opens the door for her freedom from her harmful, to herself, behaviour when He tells her to go and sin no more. Less of a demand to conform to the ethical standard, which failed or she wouldn’t've been there, and more of opening a space for her to be able to choose a better course in the future. An opportunity that was never allowed by the ethical framework. Also, a choice that is not available in a, “Hey, whatever you do is okay, man,” approach either.
I wish I had used that
Thanks
here, though, we don’t know what became of her really. did she still feel guilty? did she sin again? and this passage give us no idea of what jesus would have done had he caught her on his own. would jesus’ acceptance, with the absence of a threat of execution, been beneficial? isn’t jesus without the threat just “hippy”?
jesus (and his teachings) is tied in directly with the issues and conditions of the time he lived.
the device here works because the alternative is stoning to death. put in some lesser punishment, like i don’t know minor restitution to the wife (or just shaming as we have in some places today), and it no longer works as well. the harsh justice was met by jesus with the opposite.
I think this is a perfect example of what Pete is saying (as I read it). The Law (ethics) is still needed, but needed as a failure, which it was in the case of the adulterous woman. The thought to “go and sin no more” is not a push back into the Law, but rather a freedom from it in light of the grace/acceptance shown. This is the freedom from the “death drive/idol” matrix that Pete highlights… which again operates under the scope of grace, moving one away from guilty/repression. The whole framework she lived under was turned upside down, as her hope to follow is driven by this grace/acceptance.
its an example of forgiving someone in the face of an unjust law, yes. is that all there is to what peter is saying though? letting a murderer go in spite of the law is also an example. but if he goes and murders again its not a good example is it?
we aren’t told excplicitly why the woman should be put to death – we can make our own assumptions based on current thought processes, but we are not told that then, only that moses commanded it. it’s assumed that we would know at the time it was written. we don’t see what happens to the woman or even whether anything about it has been internalized by her, or whether she really did “sin no more” – this is more a demonstration for the pharises than for the guilty party.
its about who has not sinned being capable of judging her and pysically putting her to death – which would be ludicrous for any other punishment beside death. let he who has never sinned impose a fine upon her to be paid to the wife – it just doesn’t work the same way.
it only seems to be a good example because the punishment is so harsh that anything else would totally go against anything jesus was teaching at the time – which is why they brought the case to him in the first place i suppose.
and again, we have no indication here what jesus would say or do if he himself caught the woman in the act. would he just tell her its ok everyone wants to do it? jesus was pushed into this by the people who brought her to him. we don’t know what he would have done outside that scenario.
There is a lot in here that I think you broadly assume of the text (and Jesus) that I would not. Here’s where I would disagree with you the most however… you seem to need “results” for the grace given. In other words, the view of grace you have appears very conditional, ie. I’ll extend grace to you AS LONG AS you change/stick to the moral code! To me, this is not grace at all but a manipulation of the ethical system. This is not acceptance, this is a “religious grace”. I don’t think anyone is saying there aren’t natural consequences for some acts committed by people that entail punishment… this is a conversation about a place of radical acceptance that has the POTENTIAL to move a person in the ways ethical frameworks can’t (and maybe aren’t intended to). To me, this is a hope-filled alternative to a church framework that I believe spews out the word grace and yet causes a great deal of harm in people’s lives through it lacking presence. I understand if all of this is not that for you.
Okay, if you don’t care for the present example how about we consider one that seems to meet the criteria you set forth. The narrative of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, John 4:4-42. Here we have Jesus meeting up with a woman who has had five husbands and is currently cohabitating with a man that is not her husband. True the Levitical penalty for this living arrangement is not death, however we get the sense that she has faced ostracism and social exclusion for whatever she has done. They are alone Jesus and this woman. Besides letting her know that He knows her and who she is and has been, what she has done, there are no words of condemnation. He accepts her just as she is and does not ask her to conform to the moral code. Never does he tell her that she must move out of her current living arrangement. I do think, and this is my personal opinion, in telling her about her life He led her to realizing she needed a change. What we do know from the text is that some change did occur. Jesus, in opening the space that was not there within the ethical framework, allowed for the change to occur. She was stuck, unfulfilled until her encounter with Christ, who did not enforce the moral code, but simply loved her.
Peter, I like your last paragraph where you hint at the subjectivity of ethics. I feel like this could play much more deeply into the discussion though. We could easily substitute the ethics of Jesus for the ethics of the Nazis, and everything in your post could remain the same.
I think that your child example makes a false assumption: that it will not simply repeat the whole process. At what point does the child move from teaching to practice? It could end – “and the child does it again.” I am confused now because I feel as though you said ethics are bad, but also ethics are good…but only because they are bad. It seems that you are playing two dissonant tones in the same chord, in which they cannot coexist harmoniously. It is analogous to a Pharisaical approach that follows the law, knowing it doesn’t work, but not wanting the responsibility of love and so re-framing the law as being subjectively good despite itself. It is like saying: “Ethics are (subjectively) good, but we know they don’t work, so they are bad. But at least we don’t have the responsibility to love within them, so perhaps they are good.” (As Bo talks about above). Ethics become a refreshing distraction from the responsibility to love.
My point is, I don’t think ethics lead to love…ever. But I also do not think that love leads to what ethics promise, as you suggest. Ethics are the distraction that prevents love, even though they suggest to aim in the same direction. Love leads to love! Why would we want love to lead back to a broken system; ethics? We must change the system by ignoring it. I am of the thinking that formally teaching ethics or even love is entirely the wrong approach. Love cannot be taught intellectually, it is all about act and experience. In this case, mimicry of the way Jesus acted; more: the way he lived love.
Thanks for the clarification. I find this much more palatable than your original post… although I still see some gaps. I look forward to seeing how the conversation continues to unfold.
Pete, I think you can make a deeper point here about ethics if you draw out the connection between morality and agency a bit more. That is, the point about how grace helps us to overcome the weakness of will generated by the extreme demands of morality and to move into a freer, a more real, and a more loving existence. I wonder if you’re familiar with the work of an Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart – I think you both share some important insights concerning how theology shapes moral psychology and vice versa. Here’s a sample quote from his book, The Providence of God, that I think you’ll appreciate:
“A God whose predestining and reprobative determinations are both utterly pure of prevision and irresistible, who creates a world that bears no more proper relation to his nature than any among an infinite number of other possible worlds, who requires a justice of his creatures that he himself does not exhibit, who condemns whom he chooses to condemn, and who is himself an efficient cause of the sinful actions he punishes, is a God whose will is sheer power, not love, and certainly not governed by reason. This is the God of early modernity in his full majesty: the God who either determines or is determined, and who therefore must absolutely determine all things—a pure abyss of sovereignty justifying itself through its own exercise. He may be a God of eternal law, but behind his legislations lies a more original lawlessness. He is, in every way, the God of nihilism.
Voluntarism, after all, began as a doctrine regarding God, and only gradually (if inevitably) migrated to the human subject. The God of absolute will who was born in the Middle Ages had by the late sixteenth century so successfully usurped the place of the true God that few theologians could recognize him for the imposter he was. And the piety he inspired was, in some measure, a kind of blasphemous piety: a servile and fatalistic adoration of boundless power masquerading as a love of righteousness. More importantly, this theology—through the miraculous technology of the printing press—entered into common Christian consciousness as the theology of previous ages never could, and in so doing provided western humanity at once both with a new model of freedom and with a God whom it would be necessary, in the fullness of time, to kill. It was from this God that we first learned to think of freedom as a perfect spontaneity of the will, and from him we learned the irreducible prerogatives that accrue to all sovereign power, whether that of the absolute monarch, or that of the nation state, or that of the individual. But, if this is indeed what freedom is, and God’s is the supreme instance of such freedom, then he is not—as he was in ages past—the transcendent good who sets the created will free to realize its nature in its ultimate end, but is merely the one intolerable rival to every other freedom, who therefore invites creatures to rebel against him and to attempt to steal fire from heaven. If this is God, then Feurbach and Nietzsche were both perfectly correct to see his exaltation as an impoverishment and abasement of the human at the hands of a celestial despot. For such freedom—such pure arbitrium—must always enter into a contest of wills; it could never exist within a peaceful order of analogical participation, in which one freedom could draw its being from a higher freedom. Freedom of this sort is one and indivisible, and has no source but itself.
More importantly, perhaps, so terrible was the burden that this cruel predestining God laid upon the conscience of believers that it could not be borne indefinitely. It was this God who, having first deprived us of any true knowledge of the transcendent good, died for modern culture, and left us to believe that the true God had perished. The explicit nihilism of late modernity is not even really a rejection of the modern God; it is merely the inevitable result of his presence in history, and of the implicit nihilism of the theology that invented him. Indeed, worship of this god is the first and most inexcusable nihilism, for it can have no real motives other than craven obsequiousness or sadistic delight. Modern atheism is merely the consummation of the forgetfulness of the transcendent God that this theology made perfect. Moreover, it may be that, in an age in which the only choice available to human thought was between faith in the modern God of pure sovereignty and simple unbelief, the latter was the holier—indeed, the more Christian—path. For, at some level, faith in the God of absolute will always required a certain extirpation of conscience from the soul, or at least its pacification; and so perhaps it is better that the natural longing of each soul for God—even if only in the reduced form of moral alarm, or an inchoate impulse towards natural goodness, or of a longing for a dues ignotus—refuse to make obeisance before this idol. Perhaps it was the last living trace of Christian conscience in western man that moved him—like the Christian “atheists” of the first few centuries of the church—to reject any God but a God of infinite love.”
This is basically Romans 5, right? Verses 13 and 20-21 in particular. It is only by having the law that we know how much we fall short of God’s standards, and how much we therefore need His grace?
Would love to hear an elaboration of the last sentence!
Pete, I’m on board with what you are saying but have a question: Would you extend this to unethical collective behavior by institutions, or does it just apply to individuals? What you propose seems more problematic to me when it comes to institutional “sin” — take for example the way the Catholic church has handled child abuse. Perhaps the model breaks down or isn’t applicable in that situation, because institutional conduct is a different animal? If not, how would it work?
The Facebook share icon is useful (not for me because yur poists already show up in my Facebook timeline) but it would be nice if you could insert a twitter share icon that would allow readers to tweet your posts.
I think the words, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…that saved a wretch like me…” never made more sense to me…I am speechless.
For so long we have misunderstood what Jesus meant by calling us to a higher standard than the law. Maybe, just maybe, some of us are starting to get it.
Peter – Richard Rohr wrote something in Sojourner (Oct. 2004) that seems similar to what you have written in this series of posts:
“The letter to the Ephesians (5:13) intuits what later psychology would merely unpackage: Anything exposed to the light will itself become light, the author says. That is rather amazing considering that most of us today think in very dualistic terms about good and evil. Here Ephesians says that “dark” things, like fear and shame, can actually be used for our own good and transformation, if we just hold them up to the light. They themselves can become a form of light!
Goodness is not just evil avoided, or even denied. It is much more evil transformed, as the cross itself reveals. Salvation and sin are correlatives more than opposites, and the biblical tradition does a most amazing thing by revealing this surprising and divine pattern. Paul makes it very explicit when he says that “it is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).”
I think Rohr is describing in different terms your “simplified (somewhat) scheme.” Seems similar, too, to Luther’s theology of the cross. Perhaps?
“One day husband and wife were on a driving adventure, husband decided he should always have full control of driving and direction. One day the wife about had it with the recklessness and spoke up “I think there is a better route we don’t always have to drive this way and at such high speed and tunnel vision”. They argued back and forth until the argument was nearly lost in the now growing cloud of animosity between them. It turned from advice to a jab session between them until the main goal became a need to “keep the peace” or no one was going to make it anywhere (it no longer was remembered that there was a difference in route…everything was just loud). So the husband decides that he will apologize and try to stop the emotional upheaval and riff that has grown between them and looks over at her and says “I am sorry honey, lets just try to enjoy our trip and time with each other”….instantly the tight cloud of tension starts to feel released a bit as she shares the gaze and then calmly replies “okay honey, thank you for the apology”. As they continue driving the husband keeps saying these nice things to her, she keeps thanking him….everything seems fine and he realizes that with the apology and maintaining praises to her the drive is not only more peaceful but he is still driving the same course and getting his way. As they get a few miles down the road and are enabled to settle into a sense of relaxation from the calm and she lets him state all of these nice things she then lovingly says “Honey thank you for the apology, this next turn will take us to that other route I was talking about, isn’t this great”…A heavy silence falls into the car. Husband immediately feels this sense of questions shoved into his mind “what did I apologize for, I am still right, there is no way I am turning the other way, if I don’t turn we will be fighting for eternity and this will be hell, if I turn I lose all of my pride, there is no longer anything to live for”….then thank God the rapture occurs….Husband is then taken to heaven, escapes the wife in the now aimless car….he reaches God….tells God the situation……God then says “Hey bro, even I can’t get you out of this one….you must forsake heaven and return to the car….figure it out or we will all be doomed”….Husband finds himself in the car again, it is burning hot in the air, it is intense, his mind feels warped – she is at peace and smiling – she asks how heaven was…..husband says “God and I decided that the only way out is if we can somehow delete that apology that I can’t live up to”, then wife says “Jesus Christ just turn the car!” But he would rather die right and take God with him than have a change of heart or even consider it….”
Perhaps ethics is like a cup of coffee. I invite you over for coffee, but you say, “Oh no, I don’t drink coffee.” Then I say “It’s ok, I don’t have any.” And we’re left with only the open invitation. Without the coffee we never would have gotten to the invitation, but afterwards we find that the coffee could never have succeeded in making the invitation work, except by its failure.
Interesting article and also interesting comments. Regret is a natural feeling, one who doesn’t feel sorry after he does bad things, then there must be something wrong with him.
I didn’t have time to read all the way through the above posts, which I’m sure I would have found interesting. But I would like to add the comment that the Law was given to us as a teacher, to show us what wrong is. It is a Law that we can’t, are unable to, fulfill. Jesus said He came to complete or fulfill the Law. He also said that, if we have Love, we have met all the commandments. I am coming to a new understanding myself, in that I now accept that I can’t keep the commandments as I would like, but neither can anyone else. Jesus knew that, so I am thinking that the Love He says we need is the kind that forgives—others, and ourselves. But, I thought, that would mean I don’t really have to strive for perfection. So, I questioned if Jesus could really have meant it this way. Well, if I remember the the greatest love is toward God and toward life, then that love makes me strive to perfect as much of myself as I can. In that case, I am forgivable because I am actively loving. If I should give up and stop trying, would I then not merit forgiveness? Or might I be forgiven because He loves me? Either way, Love has to be the operant force and state of consciousness. This development has caused me to revise my beliefs about/understanding of homosexuality, which seems to be exclusionary for salvation according to the Bible. Jesus said Love meets all the commandments. I don’t think I’ll solve all these questions, but rather I will solve small pieces of the puzzle piece by piece.