No Moral Relativism Here
Thursday June 11, 2009
With yesterday's shooting at the Holocaust museum, I was reminded of a story told to me several years ago by a professor of when he had been a doctoral student. An eminent post-modern theologian had come to his university...
Filed Under: anti-semitism, Christians, conservatives, DC, domestic terrorism, evil, holocaust museum, individual sin, institutional sin, Jews, liberals, liberation, moral relativism, post-modernism, powers, principalities, progressive Christianity, racism, redemption, salvation, shooting, sin, transformation, von brunn, Washington
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About Progressive Revival
Diana Butler Bass and Paul Raushenbush both stand firmly within the Mainline Protestant tradition and, along with guest bloggers of all religious backgrounds are dedicated to the revival of religious progressivism and its influence in American politics.
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Diana Butler BassDiana Butler Bass is a commentator and scholar in American religion. She is the author of seven books including A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story (HarperOne, 2009).
» Posts by Diana Butler Bass
Paul RaushenbushModerator of the Progressive Revival blog and the Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University.
» Posts by Paul Raushenbush
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Wonderful reminder that the reasons are of greater scope than psychology and sociology alone can bring. Following the Columbine shootings I had a thought that a true tragedy is one in which both God and humans look bad and that the experience of evil is, by nature, something that puts us in touch with with our powerlessness to make sense of the senseless.
While psychology may help and sociology may help and theology may help, I wonder if the understanding of evil, by the nature of evil itself, will always lie just beyond the reach of our sense-making capacities.
Thank you for insight.
Thank you, and then some.
The liberal/conservative divide has crippled both groups.
Wink's material was ahead of its time ... thanks for reminding me again!
Ah! I think of the Hebrew formulation: yetzer ha-ra; yetzer ha-tov. We all have an inclination to evil and to good. The question might be, which inclination do we feed, and how do we feed it? And as I type this, I wonder if in our communities of faith we get mixed messages. Is my community of faith conscious that it has a responsibility to nurture and grow the yetzer ha-tov of our lives? Why do we get so many yetzer ha-ra messages, then? (I've got to pay more attention to my sermons!)
I'll have to see if Wink is on Kindle yet.
AS always, Diana, thank you for making me think.
Great comments...Thanks for the thoughtful post.
I don't know what to say. I have read so many stories. I didn't know which ones were real, and which ones were just stuff in the news.
What can I do besides much prayer and humility?
I think it's wrong to blame individual "sins" on "talk radio." If the bombasity on them "inclines" an unstable person to commit a senseless act - murdering someone - then I can see your point. But lumping the speakers on talk radio to instigators of violence, is going beyond the pale.
I agree with the blogger who said that liberals and conservatives BOTH have their place in a sinful society. There is good as well as bad, in either one. To say one is more moral than the other, is to give it more power than it deserves. Of course I condemn Mr. Von Brunn for his murder of an innocent man; but who's to say he wasn't committing a "hate" crime against a black man? Who KNOWS what was really in his mind when he pulled the trigger? And, who's to say there might have been further mayhem, had he not been stopped? All unanswerable questions; but grist for the mill. Excellent article...
It is unassailably wrong to burn anyone in ovens. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, or any other term that means killing people because of their race, ethnicity, or religion are always wrong.
And it seems to me that the issue here is not so much about conservatives and liberals, lone wolves or conspiracy theories, but about the way we treat the mentally ill and the way we make guns available. What is immoral is that we put people at risk this way because of our inability to come up with a way to keep guns away from disturbed individuals.
I believe that we need to start with an assumption of the Christian faith based on at least the Genesis story of Creation that says that God created the world as good in order to have relationship with it. God also gave humans the freedom to make choices in that relationship. When the choice was one of controlling life by one's own will power and of satisfying one's desires, the relationship was broken. Skipping many steps in between, this leads me to say that we make a covenant with the faithfulness to God way of live and to the self-serving destructive way of life. This is true as individuals and larger groupings. How we live out those covenant each day usually means at the end of the day we have honored by covenants. God is finally in charge of the end of the world and its goodness. Our choice seems to be how we will participate with God in the goodness during each day of our lives. The principle of morality may be of secondary importance to our loyalty to the covenant that we live with God for good or that we refuse to live with God for good. (Good being defined according to the teaching of the biblical prophets and Jesus, especially as summarized in the Sermon on the Mount.)
Thanks Dr. Bass. What would you say is the roll of "covenant" in the issue of living morally or immorally?
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