The
third class of the term was titled “searching for biblical ethics” and there
were a number of parts to it. The text started by making the point that there
is not one single coherent ethical framework in the Bible, but several, including: the creation myths, which explain the Judeo-Christian relationship
with God; the ten Commandments, which outline the identity of the Jewish people
and the ground rules for tribal life; the teachings of Jesus, who contrasted
the rules of worldly power with those of God’s kingdom; and those of the
apostles, who merged Jesus’s teachings with Greek philosophy to form a
Christian faith based on what in German is succinctly called das
Doppelgebot (the double commandment, does this have a name in
English?): love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and
with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
 |
| Predigerkirche, Zurich: das Doppelgebot is front and center |
Something
I found interesting was the link between the biblical creation myth, “God
created Man in his own image” and the modern Western notion of human rights:
“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In
ancient times, this wasn’t self-evident at all: in Egypt, the Pharaoh was
considered a god, at an entirely different level than other humans; in Greek
mythology, the gods mixed with and toyed with humanity in ways that were
anything but equal. And of course even the writers of the Declaration of
Independence were only talking about rich white guys. But my point is that
it’s easy for us today to think that human rights are indeed “self-evident”
when they are in fact a product of one strain of human thought that stretches
back to the creation myths of Judaism. What we in the West take to be a secular
worldview was very much nurtured by Judeo-Christian thought. Maybe that could
be a comfort to those in the church who feel threatened by secularism, and a
caution to those who feel they have evolved beyond religion: a Christian
worldview is in fact what most of us already have, whether we like it or not.
I’ve
been delaying and delaying this post because I wanted to say something about
what’s going on in the U.S. right now. Or really, what’s going on in my
Facebook feed. But everything I write either sounds wishy-washy or preachy, and
in the end, I’m in the limbo of expathood – clearly not Swiss but also not
really American. I’m just not there, I don't know what y'all are going through. But still...I guess what is comes down to is, please liberal friends: you may have lost a battle but you are winning the war, demographically and ideologically. Don't lose sight of that. In my last post
I said that my own worldview fell somewhere between “our values are changing
(for the better)” and “we live in a multi-ethical society, and we need to learn
to deal with that.” The events of the past week have made me realize that I’m
not in between at all, but firmly with that second one. Our values are changing, and will always be changing, hopefully
largely for the better. But 323 million Americans (not to mention 7.5 billion
humans on our planet) are never going to be on one side of any given question. I don't think we can hope to win everyone over - but what we can hope for is that we'll learn to do better at living with each other, at learning to love our neighbors (yes, even our white supremacist neighbors) as ourselves. I'd like to think that there are tools within the Catholic tradition that can help us do that, and that's where my own journey seems to be going at the moment. But more than that I feel very deeply that there are contributions to be made - to appropriate a much-maligned phrase from last week - on many sides. As naïve as I know that sounds. To borrow a less-maligned phrase: Don't Panic.
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