An Odor of Decay

An Odor of Decay

This is the final post in a three-part series on the mortal human body in two classic works of literature: Homer’s Iliad and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Though the topic may seem morbid, it grants an opportunity to reflect on God’s continued care for “this earthly tent” even after death, and to reclaim The Great Books as conduits for Christian formation.

Now… allow me to share something I don’t like about the handling of this subject in the Iliad, and how Dostoyevsky helps.

An Odor of Decay

One of the more brilliant and poignant moves by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov involves what happens to the body of the saintly Elder Zosima.

Zosima is, in many ways, the voice of Christian love within the work. And as he nears death, many expect some great miracle to accompany his soul’s departure. Perhaps the corpse will smell of lavender and be miraculously preserved. Perhaps the heavens will portend some sign of triumph and approval. Perhaps (like Elisha) his remains will work great wonders to convert the scoffers and the skeptics.

But none of this transpires.

Dostoyevsky patterns this part of The Brothers Karamazov on the traditional Russian construction of a saint’s life (zhitie), where a holy person’s relics perform signs or withstand decomposition.

Yet shockingly, for Zosima, his corpse almost immediately emits a terrible stench of fleshly corruption: an odor of decay that sets in far faster than normal.

To quote the KJV in its description of Lazarus: “He stinketh.”

The scene was so scandalous Dostoyevsky had to beg his publisher not to censor it, and he implores his editor to leave in the more jarring Russian word for “stank.”

The expedited smell of rot causes some to declare Zosima a false teacher. And the combination of rumors and self-righteous gloating from his enemies drives the story’s hero, Alyosha Karamazov (Alexey), to question his faith, reach for a glass of vodka, and head off to visit a woman of ill repute (Grushenka) who has designs on debauching the young monk.

From Homer to Dostoyevsky

I bring up this strange happening because I find it to be a helpful counterbalance to a trend I spoke of previously (here and here) in Homer’s Iliad.

In Homer, the gods always dole out special treatment in who gets cared for both before and after death. Great warriors and the sons of deities get extra care and preservation, as when “Apollo pitied Hector, and kept his body free from taint.” Meanwhile, the rest of us rot.

When a spear is hurled at the mortal child of a god or goddess, it gets bumped off course by a nepotistic divinity. But it never clatters harmlessly to the sand. It always skewers some poor schmuck standing just behind the target.

Life still feels like that sometimes. The powerful and privileged get special treatment. And they have special resources to keep them “well preserved” despite the fact that death still comes.

But not with Zosima.

So why does Dostoyevsky tell his story this way?

Why does the saint emit an odor of decay in The Brothers Karamazov, whereas Homer keeps his main characters lemon fresh until the funeral pyre is lit?

The answer, I think, has to do with Dostoyevsky’s own wrestling match with faith and doubt in a world where God’s presence isn’t always discernible. And it hows his tenacity to cling to resurrection hope even when “the gods” don’t provide proof of their affections.

The Other Alexey

The epigraph for The Brothers Karamazov is a quote from John 12:24:

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

It is, in many ways, the key that unlocks the entire novel.

Though Dostoyevsky names his hero Alexey Fyodorovich, the ghost of another Alexey hovers over the story’s most painful questions: the author’s three-year-old son (Alexey Fyodorovich), who died just before the book was written, of the epilepsy inherited from Dostoyevsky.

In many ways, The Brothers Karamazov is a father’s raw attempt to work through crushing grief and anger while refusing to relinquish gritty Christian hope. “Unless a seed falls into the ground…,” you can almost hear him reciting as he hammers out his tale of fathers and sons, faith and doubt, death and longed-for immortality.

If the problem in Homer is that the gods intervene too much (and too capriciously), the worry in Brothers is that God might not exist at all, or that he has much to answer for in creating a world where children suffer, die, and then decay.

There is a reason why Job was Dostoyevsky’s favorite book of Scripture.

Bow and Kiss

I’ll teach through Brothers this year in a special class on Christian worldview, offered in the OKWU Honors College.

The goal is to examine some of the biggest human questions through the lens of deeply Christian work of literature—which, when read slowly and discussed deeply (without smartphones or chatbots to give our brains “the odor of decay”), has the capability of forming us more fully in Christ’s image.

So back to the question: Why does Dostoyevsky make his saintly elder stink in excess of nature?

No answer is given.

But several clues are important.

First, Zosima’s last act before dying is to bow and kiss the earth (the place where seeds must fall and decompose in order to bear fruit).

Second, upon going to the alleged prostitute (Grushenka) in his bitter grief, Alexey and the woman do nothing unseemly. Instead, her compassion over Zosima’s death and Alexey’s lack of self-righteous judgment of her past end up transforming both characters—so that neither is ever the same. (Dostoyevsky clearly wants us to notice that this spiritual “fruit” would never have sprung forth except from soil fertilized by the “miracle” of Zosima’s premature decay.)

Third, when Alexey goes next to stand vigil by the Elder’s body, the passage being read over the casket is John 2: the wedding feast at Cana. Here, wine is miraculously made by Christ from water. And what is such wine? It is the product of expedited(!) fermentation that—in John 2—causes the disciples to put their faith in the Messiah.

Thus, even decomposing matter is transformed into fertilizer for an unexpected harvest that far exceeds the single seed.

Conclusion

What I love about Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the mortal human body is his gritty ability to hold together resurrection hope with a world that still smells with the odor of decay.

Whereas Homer’s vision is both formulaic and fatalistic (special people get “preserved” but none get resurrected), Dostoyevsky’s mind is open to surprises that are simultaneously more painful, mysterious, and hopeful.

“Bright sadness” is the paradoxical description that is often used.

Or to steal an oft-quoted line from the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenas, they tried to bury us, they didn’t realize we were seeds.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Battle for the dead (part 2)

Battle for the dead (part 2)

In the last post, I explored what might seem like an oddity in the greatest war story ever told: Homer’s Iliad.

In the epic, the most intense conflicts center not on killing enemies or conquering their land, but on securing corpses, for proper burial or vengeful desecration.

Why, though, should that matter still today?

Several insights follow, though I’ll leave them only partially developed, while admitting that I’m no expert in this area.

Despite occasional generalized claims that “Greek thought” cared little for the body (a shift that took place later), Homer reveals a deeply human impulse that what Paul calls “this earthly tent” (2 Cor. 5:1) is both precious and integral to personhood, both before death and after it.

It is right and good to feel this way, however painful it may be as we grieve those we have lost.

CHALLENGING A MISCONCEPTION

This is why it strikes me as obviously false when someone says something like this at a Christian funeral: “Now she is perfect and whole.”

To be sure, Christians believe that those who die in Christ are “with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Their suffering has ended. And they experience blessedness, rest, and even paradise (Luke 23:43). (It should be obvious from those claims that I do not hold to so-called soul sleep, since it doesn’t fit the experiential connotations of what Jesus calls “paradise,” when speaking to the thief upon the cross. Nor does it fit with Christ’s story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, however parabolic that is.)

To be spiritually with Christ is both beautiful and hope-giving. But it does not mean that we become perfect and whole upon death. The reason is simple: Bodies matter. To say otherwise would be to view God’s material creation as either irrelevant to human flourishing, or worse yet, a hindrance to it.

Such assumptions are often smeared as “Greek” or “pagan” errors (with some justification); yet even the Iliad challenges this point at one important level: In the Iliad, bodies matter, both before death and after it.

“WHAT WOULD JOSEPH DO?” (WWJD)

Second, the concern for corpse care after death, illuminates the bravery and importance of an oft-forgotten disciple in the Gospel narratives: Joseph of Arimathea.

We read this in Mark 15:42-46:

It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. […]

So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.

Scholars spill lots of ink debating whether (or how well) a given ancient philosopher or poet was known to biblical authors and their audiences. But one thing is clear: The Iliad was known. We have well-preserved wall paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum, dating from the first-century AD, depicting its scenes. Just like kids hang movie posters of Marvel Comic characters, we find the ancient fresco of “Achilles and Briseis” (or “Briseis taken away from Achilles”) in the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.

At the risk of pressing things too far, it might be like asking a modern American, “Have you heard of Superman?”

As another illustration, I’m currently in Vienna for a conference, where I visited the (incredible) Museum of Fine Arts. Below is a snap of an ancient Greek vessel, depicting scenes from the Iliad, including the arrival of Priam to plead for Hector’s body.

Priam pleads with Achilles for Hector’s body

Of course, there are big differences between Priam’s visit to Achilles, and that of Joseph to Pontius Pilate. Still, it seems reasonable that an early Christian—in a house church in Philippi, Rome, or Corinth—would have heard the echoes. Pilate also would have been shaped at some level by the story.

Here then is the point about the man from Arimathea: While other disciples fled on Good Friday, sinking in confusion and despair, Joseph put his reputation (and his life) on the line to go boldly before a man responsible for Christ’s death, and to plead for his friend’s body.

Because of Joseph, birds do not despoil the corpse, the sign of Jonah is preserved, the Sabbath rest is kept within the tomb, and the stage is set for Easter Sunday.

I don’t think Joseph did this because he was expecting resurrection three days later. That’s not why Priam did it either. They did it out of love and duty, even in the pit of hopelessness, which makes it even more powerful and relevant for us when all seems lost.

To await the Kingdom, for Joseph (and arguably for us), is to take up the shroud and not the sword. Because even when the kingly Son is dead—his body matters.

To cite Peter, on the Day of Pentecost:

Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
you will not let your holy one see decay.

~Acts 2:26–27 (Psalm 16:8–11, LXX)

Now… in the next part of this series, I’ll share something I don’t like about the handling of this topic in the Iliad, and how Dostoyevsky helps.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Battle for the dead (part 1)

Battle for the dead (part 1)

One of my summer reads this year was a slow journey through Homer’s Iliad—the great archetype of our war stories, action movies, and (in a way) superhero universes.

Among other insights, I was struck by how much of the fighting is focused not on killing an enemy or conquering a bit of ground, but on the furious desire to protect or desecrate a corpse.

The Iliad is, in many ways, a struggle for the dead–whether for the corpse of Sarpedon (mortal son of Zeus), Patroclus (intimate of Achilles), or Hector (favored son of Priam and champion of Troy).

“Human mortality is at the center of it all,” writes Emily Wilson. “I know no other narrative that evokes with such unflinching truthfulness the vulnerability of the human body.”

Yet unlike modern action movies, that bodily vulnerability (in the Iliad) is just getting started when one’s final breath departs through “the fence of teeth” (Book 9.529).

Shame and honor lie at the root of such concerns, as do ancient pagan assumptions about the requirement of proper funeral rites for a departed shade to enter Hades.

Unfortunately, countless other deaths occur in the attempt to secure the body of an enemy or comrade.

I’m interested in the point for several reasons:

  1. N. T. Wright points out that Homer functioned somewhat like the “Old Testament” for ancient pagan audiences, in a way roughly analogous to how the Hebrew Scriptures remained foundational for Christians.
  2. I agree with C. S. Lewis about the value of old books to reveal our modern blind spots, not because they are infallible, but because they do not share our unexamined assumptions.
  3. I’m convinced many well-meaning Christians lack a proper view of the body both before and after death. Thus, reflecting on this subject in the Iliad (alongside Scripture) might actually make us more faithful Christians.

In Homer’s story, the struggle for the dead happens in at least three ways: (i.) corpse care, (ii.) desecration, (iii.) divine intervention to stave off decay.

CORPSE CARE

The importance of proper corpse care is demonstrated by Achilles, as he sets out to wash and rub with olive oil the body of his dear friend Patroclus, and to fill his wounds with ointment (18.438).

Though Achilles feels compelled to avenge his comrade, he cannot bear the thought of what may happen to the body in his absence:

I am still most terribly afraid for brave Patroclus

Whose body has been hacked with so much bronze.
Flies may get in his wounds and worms may grow there,
Dishonoring his corpse. His life is gone,
And now his flesh may rot (19.30-36).

The mirror of this heartrending concern is found in Priam, who ultimately sneaks behind Greek lines to plead with Achilles for the body of his beloved son, Hector.

In that meeting, “They both remembered those whom they had lost.” And “Curled in a ball beside Achilles’ feet, Priam sobbed desperately,” in a fatherly move that finally breaks the callous wrath of his adversary (24.631–35).

DESECRATION

The desire to care for the bodies of friends and family is matched by an unholy drive to desecrate the corpses of one’s enemies.

Achilles exceeds all others in this impiety, for which the deathless gods are furious with him (24.146), since he does not stop at merely killing foes or stripping their armor, but commits abominations on their corpses.

In the final battle between Achilles and Hector, the matter of who will win is never in doubt. The only question, even for Hector, is what Achilles will do to his corpse.

Despite pleas from his dying adversary, Achilles proclaims:

If only I had will and heart to do it
I would carve up your flesh and eat it raw […]

No one can save your body from the dogs,
not even if they bring me as a ransom
ten times or twenty times the usual rate (22.465-70).

True to his word, Achilles then commits “shameful atrocities on noble Hector,” piercing the tendons behind both his feet (#foreshadowing) and dragging him behind his chariot. Upon finishing his circuits ‘round the body of Patroclus, Achilles leaves Hector’s corpse face down in the dirt—unburied, unreturned, and yet (incredibly…) undecayed.

This brings us to the last point.

MIRACULOUS INTERVENTION

It would not be Homer if the gods did not intervene.

In each case (Sarpedon, Patroclus, Hector), divinities step in not to save or resurrect the warriors, but to preserve their corpses:

even now in death, Apollo pitied
Hector, and kept his body free from taint
He wrapped a golden cape, an aegis, round him,
To ensure the dragging never scratched his skin (24.24-27).

Though Hector’s body has been abused and left unburied for twelve days, still “dewy-fresh he lies”; and his many wounds “are quite closed up” (24.520).

Despite violent death outside the city gates, Apollo will not allow his holy one to see decay.

A father intervenes, a trip is made to the one responsible for his death, and a brave plea is made for the body.

Now what does that sound like?

In the next post I’ll unpack why this still matters.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

You can’t think your way out

You can’t think your way out

All summer, I’ve been chipping away at my next book, which is a practical exploration of a single pregnant verse of Scripture: Micah 6:8.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

After mulling various possible projects, I landed on this one, in part, because it seems like the one that can best serve both spiritual seekers and the church in our current cultural moment.

I’m now drafting the last full chapter, which is on humility.

Or rather, that’s what I thought it would be on.

It still is, but it strikes me as important that the lone action verb at the end of Micah 6:8 is not “Humble thyself” or “Be humble”—but rather: “walk.”

“Walk humbly with your God.”

The Hebrew word is halak, which has a long history in the Scriptures.

God’s Law is described as halakha: “the way of walking.”

The imagery goes back to Genesis. We read there that Enoch walked with God (Genesis 5:24). Noah walked with God (Genesis 6:9). And even earlier, the LORD’s first mention after Adam and Eve eat the fruit is of God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8)—searching for his walking partners.

WALKING > THINKING

The call to “walk” is helpful to me personally because I have a tendency to get stuck in my own head. Analyzing. Ruminating. Evaluating. Replaying. Comparing. Worrying. Constructing the perfect response to the imagined slight that happened yesterday.

And while thinking is fine and good (says the college professor), it is precisely this “stuck-ness” in our own heads that is the deadly enemy of both humility and joy.

In fact, I’ve come to question the common assumption that we should speak of humility merely in opposition to the sin of pride. Yes, pride is real and deadly, but in my experience I see problem more like this:

Thus, the beauty of the call to “walk”—and walk humbly.

A wise colleague suggested to me that the use of “humbly” in the verse connects not just to our need to “walk” (in general, or alone), but to walking “with” a certain kind of Partner. That is: it takes humility to walk with a greater Other, to let him set the pace, neither running ahead (in pride) nor ghosting him to hide behind fig leaves (in shame and self-loathing).

While restless, self-conscious comparison is a loop that takes place in our heads, walking is a slow, embodied practice. One foot, then the other.

As such, it moves the focus out of our heads, where, in the famous line from David Foster Wallace,

“Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”

This reminds me of a story.

“WE’LL THINK OUR WAY OUT”

When I was new to ministry, and serving as an intern at a local church, I was blessed to attend a teaching conference at a massive megachurch in the Chicago area.

For a kid from rural Kansas, I had seen nothing like it. The sanctuary could have housed a minor league hockey club, the music was pitch-perfect (U2-inspired, obviously); and while every speaker could have hosted a TED Talk followed by a comedy special, my favorite preacher brought a live goat on stage to illustrate a point about the high priesthood of Jesus.

To be honest, I loved the conference. And I still believe God uses different types of churches to reach different types of people. Looking back, however, it isn’t hard to see the interplay of hubris, inferiority, and comparison that thrives in such settings—not just in the organizers, but in attendees like me.

One line stuck with me so much that I remember it verbatim.

In a breakout session, one of the church’s executive pastors explained one of their internal mottos: “We will think our way out of any problem.” It was meant as a calming encouragement in the face of future challenges. As in: Yes, we will invariably encounter setbacks and surprises, but if we think clearly, creatively, and objectively, we can always engineer a way out. I remember scribbling down the quote within my conference notebook.

Alas, I no longer agree.

Years later, when this same megachurch imploded in scandal and the inevitable coverup, it became clear just how wrong the maxim was. Some the most destructive fallout—overlooking impropriety, silencing victims, subbing NDAs for repentance—came from leaders trying desperately to “think their way out” of sin rather than coming clean, holding accountable, and taking the next difficult but faithful step.

The logic of PR firm won out over the ethos of the Kingdom. Gnosis (“knowledge”) over halakha. Cunning over wisdom.

Here then is the way I see it now: You can think your way into sin, but you can’t think your way out of it.

As the saying from AA goes, “Remember, your best thinking landed you here.”

Israel doesn’t think her way out of slavery. Lazarus doesn’t think his way from the tomb. And Paul most certainly doesn’t think his way out of persecuting Christians and into apostleship. In all cases, God intervened; then his people had the choice of whether they’d start walking or stay put.

None of that diminishes the importance of clear, well-ordered, rigorous thought, which can be the midwife and the handmaid to obedience.

But it does mean this: You can reason well or poorly, but neither is sufficient for the “good” that God requires: To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Are all sins equal before God? (part 2)

Are all sins equal before God? (part 2)

In the last post, I examined what I take to be a common false assumption in some Christian circles: namely, that all sins are equal in the sight of God.

While acknowledging the gravity and pervasiveness of sin, my reasons for rejecting the myth were fourfold:

  1. Scripture never says it.
  2. Scripture teaches the opposite.
  3. Common sense and church tradition corroborate the Bible.
  4. There’s a hidden danger in the myth, especially for victims.

Since the prior post focused on points 1 and 2, this one will move (eventually) to points 3 and 4.

But before that, let me aim for a bit more charity in understanding why the false assumption might arise.

TOWARD CHARITY

First, I suspect some folks gravitate to the myth partly because they have a rightful aversion to the religious impulse to create a “ranked” list of sins that (conveniently) focus on the faults of others while ignoring our own. That worry is understandable. Jesus takes aim at this hypocrisy in his parable about the Pharisee who is confident in his own righteousness while loudly condemning the sins of others, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).

Thankfully, to accept the biblical position that some sins are more serious in God’s sight than others (see part 1), need not lead to this self-righteous posture—in part, because (if anything) it is the sin of callous and exploitative self-righteousness that falls most under Christ’s condemnation. Nor should it lead to the fearful false assumption that God can’t forgive me because I have committed a particularly heinous or unpardonable sin. Though that’s a topic for another post, the worry of blaspheming of the Holy Spirit likely has more to do with a human unwillingness to repent rather than a divine unwillingness to save and forgive. As Charles Wesley put it, “His blood can make the foulest clean,” and “His blood availed for me.”

Second, I suspect another reason for the “all sins are equal” assumption involves passages like James 2 (mentioned last time), or Galatians 3:10, which claim the following:

“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” ~James 2:10-11

“For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.'”
~Galatians 3:10 (citing Deuteronomy 27:26)

(As a side note: I love how these texts counteract the false assumption [set forth by Luther] that James and Paul stand in blatant contradiction with one another, especially in James 2 and Galatians. While that’s a conversation for another day, here we see two deeply Jewish Christ-followers making quite similar points with respect to Torah.)

But does that mean all sins are equal in severity before God?

No. Neither passage says that.

Rather, both teach that breaking any of God’s laws makes one a lawbreaker, which makes one liable to judgment. Hence, we cannot be saved by works of Law (Paul), nor should we fail to love our impoverished neighbors while showing favoritism to the rich and powerful (James). Both points are important. But both fit in the “all sin is sin,” “all sin is serious,” and “all sin is liable to judgment” bucket, not the “all sins are equal” one.

By analogy, if I boast in my perfect driving record because I have not been involved in a vehicular homicide; yet I conveniently forget that I have a DUI and thirteen speeding tickets, three truths follow: (1) My boasting is hypocritical, (2) I am a lawbreaker, and (3) I am liable to judgment. But these facts do not imply that the tickets, the DUI, and the vehicular homicide are equal in severity. All break the law. All are serious. And all make one liable to judgement apart from grace or mercy. But not all are equal before a judge who is just.

On these points, both common sense and church tradition concur with Scripture.

COMMON SENSE AND CHURCH TRADITION

It’s important to note that the false assumption we’ve been addressing is primarily a “pop-Christian saying,” not an official doctrinal position across most faith traditions.

As proof, it is rejected outright by Catholics, Calvinists, and Wesleyans alike.

Catholicism:

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1992

CCC 1854: Sins are rightly evaluated according to their gravity. The distinction between mortal and venial sin, already evident in Scripture, became part of the tradition of the Church. It is corroborated by human experience.

CCC 1855: Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law… Venial sin allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it.

CCC 1856: Mortal sin, by attacking the vital principle within us—that is, charity—necessitates a new initiative of God’s mercy and a conversion of heart which is normally accomplished within the setting of the sacrament of reconciliation.

The Reformed/Presbyterian Tradition:

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648)
The Westminster Larger Catechism clearly teaches that some sins are more grievous than others:

Q. 150. Are all transgressions of the law of God equally heinous in themselves, and in the sight of God?

A. All transgressions of the law of God are not equally heinous; but some sins in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are more heinous in the sight of God than others (Jn 19:11; Ezk 8:6, 13, 15; 1 Jn 5:16; Ps 78:17, 32, 56).

Wesley:

For his own part, when John Wesley revised the Westminster Standards, he left the above Q/A unchanged to demonstrate his agreement.

Yet his position (as revealed by other statements on the topic) relied not only on Scripture or tradition, but also upon what he calls “reason” (or just plain common sense).

In other words, a God who weighs all sins as equally heinous would be manifestly unjust. He would stand in blatant contradiction to the LORD revealed within the Law of Israel (a problem that I never broached within the prior post, but which points in the same direction).

In sum, these examples (Catholic, Reformed, and Wesleyan) reveal that the assumption about all sins being equal in severity is just that: a “pop assumption,” and not a view that enjoys broad support across the centuries.

Now for a more practical concern.

ABUSE AND ANTINOMIANISM

One last reason to reject the myth has to do with the way it has been weaponized to do great harm, especially to victims of abuse.

You’d have to live under rock to miss that scandals, exploitation, and their coverup have plagued American evangelicalism in recent years.

To choose one example, just down the road from me in rural Oklahoma, the pastor of a Texas megachurch (one of the largest in the country) was just indicted on five counts of lewd or indecent acts to a child for offenses that took place decades earlier. To make matters worse, we now know numerous Christian leaders (in his own church and in others) knew of these heinous acts. Not only did they fail to report them, but they also continued to protect and elevate the pastor in his own church and in other churches all around the country.

Of course, it would be wrong to blame such acts of cowardice and injustice on a misguided assumption about all sins being equal. (I have no idea if that line was used in this particular case.)

Still, we need not look far to see how that saying has been used to silence victims, sweep abuse under rug, and move quickly to “restore” offenders to places of leadership without justice or accountability.

After all, if all sins are equal in God’s eyes, who are we to disagree?

More commonly, however, the myth leads to a form of antinomianism. Here, the logic runs as follows: “I’m going to sin no matter what, and all sins are equal, [insert whatever destructive tendency I’d like to excuse].”

In a weird way, the fact that the misguided view is not enshrined in Christian doctrine or affirmed in most church traditions may actually add to its power.

It’s a “pop-assumption,” which makes it more prevalent at a popular level.

CONCLUSION

Thankfully, the confluence of Scripture, tradition, and common sense give ample grounds to retire this false assumption.

In the end: God is just. Sin is serious. All are sinners. But not all sins are equal in their heinousness or consequences.

That said, it feels wrong to end there. Better to close with Charles Wesley on the good news of a grace that extends to any sin you have committed, regardless of its nature.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
he sets the prisoner free;
his blood can make the foulest clean;
his blood availed for me.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Are all sins equal before God? (part 1)

Are all sins equal before God? (part 1)

About once a year in my theology or Bible classes, a student will say something like the following: “But as we know, all sins are equal in God’s sight.”

In response, I’ll often ask: “How do we know that? Can you think of any passages that support the claim?” In what follows, we usually discover that the phrase “As we know” is substituting for any solid evidence from Scripture or tradition.

This realization need not be belittling. In fact, the chance to rethink our unexamined assumptions can be one of the great joys of learning, even for professors.

The Bible never states that all sins are equal in God’s sight. Several passages teach the opposite. And in the end, both common sense and church tradition corroborate the biblical witness. More importantly, the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can avoid a subsequent move that sometimes does great harm, especially to victims of abuse.

Grace is real. God is just. Sin is serious. All are sinners. But none of those facts leads to anything like the equalizing of, say, child abuse and coveting thy neighbor’s goat.

Theologian Beth Felker Jones has written well on this subject over at her Substack (here), where she traces the unfortunate myth to a Protestant desire to avoid certain medieval Catholic assumptions about mortal and venial sins, penance, and a web of other questions. It’s a great post, though I can’t seem to review it now behind the Substack paywall.

My focus is slightly different.

I’d like to work quickly through the points I laid out above to show why it’s time to retire this evangelical cliché:

  1. Scripture never says it.
  2. Scripture frequently teaches the opposite.
  3. Common sense and church tradition corroborate the Bible.
  4. There’s a hidden danger in the myth, especially for victims of abuse.

To keep things short, this post deals only with points 1 and 2.

JESUS CONTRA EVANGELICALS

In the interest of being fair, I’ve tried to wrack my brain for any passages that might challenge what I’ve said above. But upon inspection, none pass muster.

Case in point: What about Jesus, when he links inner attitudes (of, say, lust or hatred) to outward actions (like adultery or murder)?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28).

From this passage, we learn that outward acts flow forth from internal ruminations. Both lust and adultery are serious and sinful. And indeed, one springs from the other like a plant from a seed, or a birth from conception (see also James 1:14-15).

Hence, we should care not just about our external actions, but about the inner habits of the heart that birth them. (In fact, this isn’t new: the Ten Commandments warn not only against theft but coveting—which arguably is what leads to theft, adultery, and sometimes murder.) What Jesus says is crucially important. But he never says, “All sins are equal.”

Elsewhere, he teaches quite the opposite.

In the texts below, Jesus links the seriousness of certain sins (and the level of their accompanying consequences) to the amount of knowledge or opportunity possessed by those who reject the way of truth and obedience.

  1. Matthew 10:15: When sending disciples to preach and minister to some of their own people, who know God’s word and yet rebel against it, he proclaims that “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (Matthew 10:15).
  2. Matthew 11:22: He then says something similar when decrying the lack of repentance in the Jewish towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida, where many miracles were performed: “But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.”
  3. Luke 12:47-48: More starkly, Christ tells a parable about some unwatchful servants whose punishments are proportionate to the knowledge they had of their master’s will. Their unwatchfulness is the same, but their culpability and consequences differ:

“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

  1. John 19:11: Finally, when standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus again demonstrates that while the Roman Governor is guilty of rejecting truth and (indeed) murdering an innocent man, he does so with more ignorance and less premeditation than do others. That’s no plea for Pontius Pilate, but it does mean, “the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

In short, Jesus is clear that while repentance is required from everyone, not all sins are equal in culpability or accompanying consequences.

What’s shocking, then, is not that Jesus sees some offenses as more egregious in God’s sight than others (that’s just common sense if God is just), but that he focuses on the sins of callous self-righteousness coming from religious insiders (scribes and Pharisees), who while having ample exposure to the word of God, still reject their Messiah and his way of peace and justice, even while they exploit the vulnerable.

Thus, prostitutes and tax-collectors flock to him, and theologians plot his murder.

Once again, Christ calls all to repentance, which is the only right response to any sin. But his talk of “millstones” is reserved for those who prey upon the “little ones” (Luke 17:2). And his most famous fire and brimstone parable is about a rich man who ignores a beggar underneath his table (Luke 16:19–31).

This makes me wonder: Is the evangelical myth about all sins being equal less about Protestant vs. medieval Catholic minutiae, and more about Christ’s way of weighing our offenses?

BEYOND JESUS

The same goes for the rest of the New Testament.

Paul is perhaps clearest of all that all people (except Jesus) are sinners (Romans 3:23), and that sin’s wages are ultimately death (Romans 6:23).

James likewise argues that to break one part of the law makes one a lawbreaker. Hence, there is no place for boasting in anything apart from Christ, in whom “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:10,13).

But as Miroslav Volf points out:

From “All are sinners” it does not follow that “All sins are equal.” [. . .] The aggressors’ destruction of a village and the refugees’ looting of a truck and thereby hurting their fellow refugees are equally sin, but they are not equal sins; the rapist’s violation and the woman’s hatred are equally sin, but they are manifestly not equal sins.

The world of equal sins is a world designed by the perpetrators.

~Exclusion and Embrace, p.82

In this last line, we begin to see the hinge-point between the biblical truth and why it matters in our daily lives.

More on that next time.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

The right kind of secrets

The right kind of secrets

There’s a scene near the end of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in which Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) finally locates the long-lost James Francis Ryan (played by a young Matt Damon). Damon’s character is in shock, after learning that his three brothers have been killed in action.

After years apart, he struggles to visualize their faces. So Hanks’ character suggests a trick he uses to recall his old life before the war:

Well, when I think of home, I… I think of something specific. I think of my, my hammock in the backyard or my wife pruning the rosebushes in a pair of my old work gloves.

Ryan tries it, and a risqué story follows about the brothers before they left for war. When the men stop laughing, he asks Captain Miller, “Tell me about your wife and those rose bushes.”

“No. No,” Hanks’ character replies, “that one I save just for me.”

THE SECRET PLACE OF THUNDER

I thought about that scene as I read John Starke’s book, The Secret Place of Thunder: Trading our Need to Be Noticed for a Hidden Life with Christ.

Starke’s claim is that we have entered an age of “performative individualism.” In this context, every moment of our lives—traumatic events, acts of service, sitting down to read a book—is curated for the gaze of others, usually online. (And as I type that, “curated” feels like one of the sadder words in our cultural lexicon.)

The vehicle is social media, but the driver is an age-old longing to be noticed, affirmed, and validated. Cue Ron Burgundy: “Hey everyone! Come see how good I look!”

“We have internalized the idea,” writes Starke, “that the markers of ‘being okay,’ of having an admirable life and enviable success, are primarily visible.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Ironically,

A deep loneliness comes for those who live off a curated image. … We can have many followers but few friends, lots of comments but no communion.

YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARD

Into the performative rat race, Jesus offers a word of warning: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). To do so is to have received your reward. God is interested in virtues done in secret—not because the homeless get less if I vlog my service at the local soup kitchen (though they might, if I’m preoccupied with my smartphone), but because I do.

Starke notes that in this passage Jesus doesn’t warn against flaunting our wealth, our power, or our giftedness; he warns against trumpeting our virtues: praying, fasting, giving to the poor.

And in our day, the “virtues” includes a kind of performative vulnerability: “I cried for hours… and then I wrote this.” (Use code #vulnerable for 10% off.)

I’ve thought a lot about what this means for ministries and Christian non-profits that manage online spaces, especially since sometimes what seems required for “marketing” often sounds like what Jesus told us not to do. I don’t have easy answers there, but it deserves some thought.

THE RIGHT KIND OF SECRETS

In the end, let me be clear about what I’m not saying: It is obviously beautiful and good to share our lives with one another, including certain deeply personal moments. It is also wrong to label every act of online sharing as “performative.”

My point is more limited and unique to your own life and personality.

It comes down to this: We need the right kind of secrets. Not the kind that fester and metastasize because we refuse to share them with the right person in the right place: the addiction, the struggle that needs community to heal. Rather, we need the kind of secrets that retain their beauty and formative power precisely because they are known only to God, us, and perhaps those closest to us.

To share those things (whatever they are) may be to cheapen and commodify both us and them. As in the famous double slit experiment from quantum physics, the act of (constant) observation changes us, and not always for the better. In that way, the old indigenous taboo is right: the camera has the power to steal part of your soul.

I’m not sure what that looks like for you; and I don’t pretend that it looks the same for all of us.

Still, the longer I live in a performative age, the more I side with Jesus and John Miller: “No. No… That one I save just for me.”

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Are students customers?

Are students customers?

A common refrain these days in (Christian) higher ed goes like this, “We must remember, students are our customers.”

The logic runs as follows:

  1. Anyone who pays for a good or service is a customer.
  2. Students and parents often pay (a lot) for education.
  3. Viewing students as customers is not just accurate but important, since it helps colleges take things like student satisfaction, institutional accountability, and appropriate return on the investment (ROI) seriously.

To be fair, I’m sympathetic to parts of the argument. And its intention can be good.

It’s absolutely right to say that universities must continually evaluate whether they are caring for and training students well. And parents have every right to inquire as to whether the cost of a particular education is worth it. That involves not just how much money a student may earn upon graduation, but the kind of spiritual formation and integrity fostered at the school. Christian colleges that don’t get deadly serious about those points will disappear, and they deserve to.

That said, I reject the idea that students should be viewed primarily as customers.

There are good reasons to believe that points #1 and #3 are wrong, at least in certain cases.

EDUCATION AS DISCIPLESHIP

At its best, Christian education is a form of discipleship.

Jesus was a teacher. And his teaching ministry was funded, at least partly, by students. Luke’s Gospel makes special mention of some female disciples who paid to keep Christ’s teaching ministry going—Mary (called Magdalene), Joanna the wife of Chuza, Susanna, “and many others.” These women, the Gospel tells us, supported the Lord, “out of their own means” (Luke 8:1–3).

Yet if someone were to approach Jesus and refer to these female apprentices as his “customers,” I suspect he’d have harsh words for them. (He might even pull out one of his trademark Jesus-burns that he could get away with, on account of being sinless, but sounds egotistical and mean when I try it.) The reason is self-evident: to speak of Jesus’ disciples as “customers” sounds profane, and it cheapens the relationship between a rabbi and his students.

The problems persist when we turn from Jesus’s teaching ministry to ours.

I currently serve as a Teaching Pastor at a local church. Parishioners (myself included) give monetarily to keep that teaching ministry going—and a portion of that money pays my salary.

Yet that exchange of funds would never drive me to refer to my parishioners as “customers.” To do so sounds odd, it commits a category mistake, and it risks making a pastor-teacher more like false prophets from the Old Testament who espoused the formula, “The customer is always right.”

I’m well aware, of course, that there are differences between the teaching role of Jesus, that of a pastor, and that of a college professor. Yet the above examples are enough to prove that there are indeed spheres of life–one of which is Christian education–in which one invests funds in education without being viewed primarily as a customer or consumer. To the extent that we reject that precedent, Christian ed is secularized. And to the extent that is secularized, it ceases to have sufficient reason to exist.

CONCLUSION

Once again, none of this changes the need for professors and universities to step up their game. And one way to do that is to remind ourselves of the financial cost of college as we strive to go above and beyond for students. That’s right and good.

Yet if the telos of learning is more about formation than consumption, then the student-as-customer model runs contrary to a Christian view of education. It does so, in part, because it wrongly assumes that the only way to serve a person well is to view them as consumers. Yet as Neil Postman argued long ago (see here), that’s precisely the modern heresy we must overcome.

In the end, the problem is not that the student-as-customer approach goes too far in seeking to train and mentor students with excellence, but that it does not go far enough.

It cheapens the nature of the relationship, commits a category error, undermines the purpose of learning, and fails to grasp that there are spheres of life (like family, faith, and education) that must not be flattened by the all-reducing language of the market.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

While his characters were getting better (a cautionary tale)

While his characters were getting better (a cautionary tale)

A bombshell landed on the literary world last year after the death of Cormac McCarthy, the man who had been, arguably, America’s greatest living novelist.

The shock was not McCarthy’s passing (he was 89), but a Vanity Fair article by Vincenzo Barney that broke news of a nearly fifty-year relationship with a woman named Augusta Britt—the “secret muse” whose life and personality inspired many of McCarthy’s greatest characters, most of whom were male.

“I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history,” the article began.

The short summary put it this way:

Augusta Britt would go on to become one of the most significant—and secret—inspirations in literary history, giving life to many of McCarthy’s most iconic characters across his celebrated novels and Hollywood films. For 47 years, Britt closely guarded her identity and her story. Until now.

A firestorm ensued, in part, because the relationship began when Britt was just 16 and McCarthy 42. She met him by a hotel pool, while on the run from abuse within the foster system–a Colt revolver on her hip, his book in her hand. “Are you going to shoot me, little lady?” was allegedly McCarthy’s question.

Though Britt maintains that McCarthy saved her life, reactions to the article have understandably been mixed. “Let’s be honest with ourselves,” read a headline from The Guardian, “Cormac McCarthy groomed a teenage girl.”

I read the Vanity Fair piece back when it came out, which raises the question: Why write about it now, months later?

To be honest, a particular phrase sometimes gets lodged in my mind, long after I have read a book or article, and that’s essentially what happened here.

I’ve had a long relationship with McCarthy’s novels (see here and here), and he is undoubtedly one of the great writers of his generation. You can’t read books like The Road or Blood Meridian and not be struck by the power of his prose, the Christ-haunted characters, and the desert landscapes that seem to whirl and pulse in ways unmatched by any other author.

Unfortunately, great writers are not always great people. And in some cases, the relation seems to run the other way.

Here, then, is Augusta Britt’s assessment that stuck with me about McCarthy’s later years:

But as his characters started becoming better humans, in Britt’s view, McCarthy, whom she always thought of as a great man, did not. As he dined with celebrities and reinvented himself in Santa Fe as a formidable intellectual … he turned his back on his oldest friends. “He felt he’s wasted the last years of his life,” Britt says.

I can’t say if that’s true. (After all, running off to Mexico with a underage girl seems to work against the hypothesis that McCarthy’s moral compass became skewed primarily in his later years.)

Nonetheless, the potential divergence between one’s work and life strikes me as both interesting and relevant for all of us.

Why might one’s characters be getting better, while one’s character is either stalled or getting worse?

I’ve been struggling with a term to define the tendency, beyond mere hypocrisy. In the realm of spiritual formation, we might call this compartmentalization, rationalized regression, or a sort of moral transference. Psychologically speaking, transference involves the redirection to a substitute, often a therapist, of emotions or experiences that are (or ought to be) one’s own: in this case, from one’s character, to one’s characters.

Again, I don’t know if that happened with McCarthy, but I’m quite certain it’s a temptation for us.

Consider:

“While his sermons were getting better, his inner life was getting worse.”

“While her performance evaluations were getting better, her spiritual health was growing worse.”

“While his resume was getting better, his parenting was getting worse.”

If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it’s this: substitutionary sanctification is a dead end.

To amend one of my favorite verbal amulets from L. M. Sacasas, “[moral work] cannot be outsourced”–whether to AI agents or to characters between the pages of a book.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Against Corporate Word Vomit

Against Corporate Word Vomit

“Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.”

William Zinsser penned that line in On Writing Well, but it resonates for anyone who’s had to endure a meeting or press release filled with what I affectionately call “corporate word vomit”—that is, recycled managerial euphemisms designed to mask bad news beneath a thin veneer of metaphor and sunny ambiguity.

For example: The branch isn’t closing. It’s going through a “strategic restructuring” to become more “nimble” so we can “pivot” toward “optimization” by “right-sizing” our “employee footprint” to “maximize efficiency” for the challenges and opportunities ahead. (Now box up your things.)

While I’m exaggerating, I’m convinced Christian leaders especially should reject this kind of talk as it tries to worm its way into churches, universities, and Christian non-profits. For one thing, there’s no precedent for it in the words of Christ, the prophets, or apostles. And there are many scriptural analogues to it in the language of false prophets, corrupt kings, and even Satan himself.

The trouble is not merely that such talk is inexact and weird (though it is); it’s that it verges on deception. Scripture frequently equates “smooth words” with deceit used to mislead the naïve. And for those who aren’t naïve, it can be both insulting and annoying.

Many years ago, I remember sitting through an update in which it was relayed that there would be substantial cutbacks because our numbers were “soft.” What is a soft number? I wondered. Is three more pillowy than four? Can you prick your finger on the sharp edge of a two? (Turns out, zero is softest; no edges at all.)

I was reminded of this frustration upon reading the official press release on the closing of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Deerfield campus after years of financial difficulties. TEDS has long been a flagship evangelical seminary, and I’m sad for the loss of jobs and potential impact that will happen as the school is absorbed by Canada’s Trinity Western University. Yet upon reading the official announcement, there was so much verbal camouflage and clutter that the lede wasn’t so much buried as clothed in a ghillie suit and hidden in the bushes.

The lede

If there is a lesson here, it’s that Christian leaders (whether pastors, principals, CEOs, or university presidents) must find ways to marry truth with tact, rejecting evasive or deceptive corporate-speak in favor of calm but clear assessments of the reality at hand.

That’s difficult, and I suspect I’d fail at it on numerous occasions.

Still, the goals of clarity, simplicity, and truth-telling are worth pursuing. To steal a line to Habakkuk (2:2),

“Write down the revelation
and make it plain on tablets
so that a herald may run with it.”

If that fails, imagine that upon each use of evasive managerial jargon (nimbly pivoting to right-size optimal efficiency), a kitten dies.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the home page to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. I’m grateful for you. ~JM