For most of my life, I've been aware of a particular conflict (there are many, of course) between liberal and conservative Christians. I'm going to try to shed some light on this particular difference of opinion.
Which means, of course, that I'll just make people mad. But I persist.
The disagreement, I think, springs from a misunderstanding of the Golden Rule.
Liberal Christians (as I understand them) tend to think the Golden Rule says something it doesn't actually say. They think it says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—and then they will treat you the same way.”
But the text doesn't actually say that. What it says (I'm quoting the NIV here) is, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt. 7:12)
You'll note that there's nothing there about outcome. If you pay attention to Christ's teaching as a whole (all the business about taking up crosses, dying, etc.), you'll note that there is very little talk of temporal (that means “having to do with this present world”) benefits. The assumption in Christ's teaching generally is that we're supposed to do what's right, and chances are good we'll see no benefit from it at all. In fact, we're likely to be killed for it. But we'll have our reward in Heaven.
This, I think, is where liberal Christians go wrong when they try to apply the Golden Rule to civil law and international relations. Due to their essential misunderstanding of the (nonexistent) promise of good consequences, they think application of the Golden Rule is the best way to ensure peace and good order in this world. It is not.
Scripture makes it very clear that the king (civil authority) is meant to bear the sword for the protection of the populace. “For he [the authority] is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” (Romans 13:4)
In other words, the civil authority is meant to be the hero, the strong one who protects the weak. By violence, when necessary.
It's possible to attempt to carry out that hero function through rigorous application of the Golden Rule, letting bad guys off and setting them free to do further injury. The liberal Christian (misunderstanding, as I said, the Golden Rule as promising positive temporal consequences) thinks that such a policy will cause the criminals to have a change of heart and become nice. I maintain, as I said above, that the Golden Rule implies no promise of temporal results. Any civil authority that tries this experiment declaes itself willing to accept injury to, and the murder of, the people it's sworn to protect.
I can find no biblical mandate for the civil authority taking that kind of gamble with the people's lives. Grace is not the king's job. I'm not saying it's always ruled out, but it must be dispensed with great care.
There's a lot of personal satisfaction in being able to see yourself as kind and merciful. But that satisfaction is not worth getting innocent people killed. More than that, it's dereliction of duty.
Lars Walker is a fantasy author. His most recent novel is West Oversea.
Thank you for this excellent post! It isn’t a popular teaching, but once one embraces its truth, life actually becomes much easier to live because one stops expecting the unlikely.
A parallel error, which happens to be one of my pet peeves, is the assumption that beating swords into plowshares is the biblical method of ensuring peace. This despite the fact that Isaiah (and Micah) clearly state that this activity is the result of the Lord establishing his law in the land, thereby making warfare and its arts obsolete.
I had a conversation similar to this today with a former student of mine. One of my colleagues is a Calvinist and a pacifist. He connects his pacifism to his Calvinism by arguing that he would not even protect his wife and daughters from an intruder because Christ has taught us to turn the other cheek and that if bad things happen it’s because they are God’s will.
You may find C.S. Lewis’ essay, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, rewarding reading. http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html
Lewis is astute in his arguments about how cruel this so-called merciful liberal ideology is in practice. One of my favorite quotes from this essay is:
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I would go farther than saying that such pacifism is cruel. I would call it evil.
It is a breach of trust, for power has been given them to restrain evil and yet they do not. They are as guilty as a shepherd who refuses to drive away the wolves from his flock. The blood of the sheep is on his hands.
Randy Alcorn’s book, “The Grace and Truth Paradox” is a handy study on this subject. In one chapter he notes (generalizes, etc) that conservatives tend to be “truth” oriented, and liberals “grace” oriented. Unchecked, he says, the former leads to legalism, the latter to anarchy.
Alcorn reminds us that Christ is “full of grace and truth.” He doesn’t give us the option of being 50-50, but if we are to be like Him, it must be 100-100.
Perhaps that’s one humble beauty of our system of government; that together we can potentially cover all the bases.
I’m a Conservative and I disagree with the sentiment behind this line in the post
“The assumption in Christ’s teaching generally is that we’re supposed to do what’s right, and chances are good we’ll see no benefit from it at all. In fact, we’re likely to be killed for it. But we’ll have our reward in Heaven.”
I disagree because of Mark 10:29-30:
29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel 30 will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
and Ephesians 6:1-2:
1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— 3 “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”[a]
Both passages you’ll agree have a very temporal edge to their promises which should cause us to be careful to limit all our reward to the New Heavens and New Earth. God/Jesus/the Bible promises that there is some reward in this life for those who are faithful.
Reverend Kip: what do you say to the lonely brother or sister in the middle east or southeast asia who’s only reward for making these choices is prison and/or death? Mark 10:29-30 couples the reward in this age and the age to come. There is no promise that any of it will be in this age, other than the spiritual family, which you inherit whether you are aware of it or not. It may very well be that 100% of your reward (otherwise) is in the age to come. As for Ephesians 6:1-2, honoring your father and mother provides that it MAY go well with you and you MAY enjoy a long life on the earth. These are not guarantees, as plenty of children who honor their abusive parents right into the grave will bear witness on that final Day.
I’d say that temporal edge is thinner than you suggest, and I’m with Lars in believing that it ought not to be expected. Scriptural wisdom and existential evidence bear this out. We pray for the Kingdom to come on earth as it is in Heaven. We live out the full gospel and proclaim that it has come to every man, woman and child, regardless of whether we ourselves taste more than the redemption and hope of life eternal. But our most powerful witness to principalities, powers and our fellow man is to be drained of temporal hope, and yet not curse God, but praise him even more.
A point about the liberal view of the Golden Rule: Lars is right when he says that liberals expect that obedience will produce an equivalent response, but there’s more to their expectations. They also expect that it is right not only to obey it themselves with an expectation of reciprocity, but that it is right to force others to obey it out of the same expectation. That is, pacifists of my acquaintance not only want to be pacifists themselves, they expect all 300 million Americans to be pacifists right along with them, and are willing to use the power of government to enforce that pacifism. Why else support laws that keep the means of self-defense out of the hands of law-abiding people while ignoring the firearms in the hands of criminals (cf, “gun-free zones”)? Or the effort to ban this nation from the possession of nuclear weapons despite the efforts by such nations as Iran and North Korea to acquire them — as if they would give them up if we did. All such laws do is expose peaceful people to potentially lethal violence without any means of defense — and the sponsors of such things consider themselves “more moral than thou” for supporting them.
Nathan,
What I’d say to the lonely brother or sister out in the Middle East or Southeast Asia is that in the normal run of things, God brings blessing to those who are faithful and brings curse to those who are not. That in essence is what the two passages I quoted (and others e.g. Proverbs 10:6,22) states. It is also by the way what real life attests. In Kenya where I have family and where the Church is growing massively, becoming a Christian brings spiritual blessing and also some material blessing – friendship, a caring community who provide as best as they can to those in need, food, etc etc and thus I know Mark 10 to be existentially true. This is not to say that all without exception receive blessing (passages like Psalm 73 and the book of Job come to mind). Nevertheless in the normal run of things being a Christian does bring phyiscal as well as spiritual blessing.
At heart this question depends on one’s eschatology as well as whether one thinks that God rewards obedience and punishes disobedience. The issue is this, on average, over a long period of time, should we expect that living according to God’s word in His world would bring greater fruitfulness or not?
My answer given Scripture’s teaching is that yes on the whole God blesses obedience and punishes disobedience.
Blessings brother
KC+
Mr. Walker:
You might be able to make that case in the Lukan version (6:27-31), for there it is preceded (v. 27) directly by the teaching to “Love your enemies,” etc.
But the Matthean version is more homiletically more awkward. In Matt. 7:7, we have “seek and you shall find.” Vv. 9-11 uses the human analogy of earthly fathers, to say: if human fathers give good gifts, “how much more” will our heavenly father give us good gifts. So the meaning of vv. 7-11 seems to be: always keep asking for good things, since our heavenly fathers intends and wills to give us such gifts.
We then have your text, “So in everything, do….” This implies that since our heavenly father is one who always gives good gifts, therefore we must do to others, as we want them to do to us. The previous admonition to keep asking, and promise of divine answer, is the ground on we stand when we “do to others”. “Doing to others” is a form of prayer by which we seek our heavenly father to return such deeds to us, through the agency of the other.
Edits to the previous post:
Obviously, I meant “heaven father” in the second paragraphs, not “fathers.” And I only intended the second sentence of the final paragraph to be italicized.
Lars – I think there is something valuable to identify behind your articulation of the differences between how liberal and conservative Christians relate to the Golden Rule. Liberals relate to God’s law instrumentally, which is akin to the addendum you say they add to the Golden Rule: “and then they will treat you the same way”. By contrast, conservatives related to God’s Law as an absolute, which is to say that regardless of the pragmatic value, the laws of God ought to be obeyed merely because they express God’s will. In saying this, a factor to note is that he who created the cosmos is the one who established the laws by which the cosmos was made. This means that often there will be benefit when individuals and communities conform to those laws, which is to say there will be pragmatic value. This said, however, the foundation upon which liberals and conservatives relate to the law is different. Again, a conservative believes it is good to uphold God’s law even when the value of doing so is not apparent, whereas a liberal will likely feel it is okay to change the law when its social value is not apparent.