If campaigns were a measure of a candidate’s economic policy, there would be no questions about Mike Huckabee’s fiscal conservatism.  He has gotten more mileage for every dollar he’s spent than any of the other top Republican candidates.   Roger Simon at Politico did the math:

Mitt Romney has spent $53.6 million this primary season and has 36.2 percent of the vote in Iowa, according to the poll. Which means Romney has spent $1.48 million for every percentage point of support.

Rudy Giuliani has spent $30.6 million and has 13.1 percent of the vote. Which means he has spent $2.34 million for every percentage point of support.

Mike Huckabee has spent $1.7 million and has 12.8 percent of the vote. Which means he has spent $133,000 for every percentage point of support.

So who is the biggest fiscal conservative?

By my calculations, if Huckabee had Romney’s money, Huckabee would have 40.3 percent of the vote in Iowa and would be in first place.

The fact that Romney has spent $53.6 million on his campaign and hasn’t managed to decisively pull away from the field in Iowa (where he has spent a good chunk of that money, per his strategy) is instructive as to his limitations.

But it’s also instructive of Huckabee’s potential–with almost no money, he has managed not only to hang around, but to make a dent in the campaign.  That’s fiscal conservatism at work.

(Also, see Joe’s destruction of the Club for Growth report on Huckabee.   And this write-up in the Des Moines Register is a huge boon to Huck’s campaign.)

James Poulos nails the attitude of my generation:

In a nutshell, significant numbers of young people, mainly in Los Angeles and New York, have come up in a popular culture that refines the art of self-referentiality to a razor’s edge. The leisure these people have on their hands results from a post-industrial work schedule and a post-modern disinterest in and freedom from politics. Part of virtuoso self-referentiality is an emphasis on the malleability and the performance of sexual identity. A habit of mass therapy has developed where everyone is each other’s — and their own — therapist; publicizing intimacy and sharing what used to always be private is the rule.

Is there any wonder why smart young people tend to become cynical?  They can’t escape artificiality, even when it claims to be “authentic” (this is the lurking problem behind my qualms with Rudy Giuliani).

***Every now and then, I like to procure dissenting opinions to items I have written from people whom I know have thought a lot about certain issues. I recently wrote a brief reply to the question of whether Christians should feminine inclusive pronouns, concluding that they should not. This is Cate MacDonald’s (biography below) response to that post.***

When Matt asked me to respond to his post on the feminine inclusive pronoun, I became worried that I wouldn’t have enough of an objection to the arguments he was making. I do, after all, embrace what I believe to be a biblical theology of gender that very much includes the importance of man (the male) as the representative head and leader of humanity. I believe that the order of creation and the incarnation of Christ are not accidents of Divine will or mere necessities of culture, but meaningful forms of communication about who we are as human beings and what it means to be male and female. That being said, I still wind up on a somewhat different side of this debate than Matt.

When used in academic and nonfiction publications, feminine inclusive pronouns are an acknowledgment of women in the public sphere. Where once there was a single gender in the working world (at least as the vast majority), now we have almost equal interaction. Inclusive pronouns are simply more accurate when writing about sets of people. They are also more easily understood. If one was to refer to “man” the way Shakespeare or Milton were free to, it could be easily mistaken in the modern climate to be referring to males. As the word evolves to become more specific to gender it is less likely to be understood as a universal reference and loses some of its meaning. To continue to use it would be similar to insisting on using the word “ass” when referring to a donkey; the intended meaning is not the first thing that comes to the audiences’ mind and it may end up being mildly offensive.

Much of what I just wrote could be easily dismissed if you believe that there are important moral issues at stake. Matt’s main objection, after all, was one of principal and a desire to reflect proper theology, not concern with the most pragmatic use of language. That’s why I think it is important in this issue, like all others, that we reflect carefully on where we draw our figurative line in the sand.

We should attempt to never become reactionary or unsoundly extreme when defending what we believe. It is easy when trying to protect biblical patriarchy (for lack of a better term) to observe the cultural distaste for it and respond with renewed and expanded vigor against American feminism and what can be viewed as postmodern language usage (Ah, postmodernism and feminism, can any other two things get us so riled up?). This would be a mistake. Making a small change like using “she” or “they” when possible is a culturally relevant and sensitive way to increase our communication with the secular world (and this is of no small significance). To include women in referencing humankind doesn’t—on its own—contradict even a traditional view of the created difference between man and woman, and it keeps us from dying in a battle of limited importance when we are waging a great and significant cultural war.

Cate MacDonald is a graduate of Biola University where she majored in English literature. She is now studying Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, and is particularly interested in the development of one’s life and soul in the context of their gender. She blogs at MissCate.com.

George F. Will says “no.”

Many, perhaps most, Americans, foggy about the workings of their government, think that overturning Roe would make abortion, one of the nation’s most common surgical procedures, illegal everywhere. All it actually would do is restore abortion as a practice subject to state regulation. But because Californians are content with current abortion law, their legislature probably would adopt it in state law.

Joseph Knippenberg counters:

Stated another way, the debate about abortion isn’t simply a political or legal or constitutional debate. It’s a moral debate. For abortion proponents, giving up the status quo for “moral federalism” is a step in the wrong direction, a step toward a new moral constellation. Moral federalism is an end-state only if it’s legitimate to have essentially any preference regarding abortion. Since that’s in effect what we have now–i.e., what the law “teaches” now–if moral federalism is something different it’s different because its merely a political accommodation with “sin,” that is, a step on the road to further delegitimization of abortion. A good thing, I think, but not one that folks to my left will acquiesce in.

Indeed.  Will’s claim that a candidate’s position on pro-life issues shouldn’t matter in the election demonstrates a naivety about the pro-life agenda, which in its best manifestations is seeking Wilberforce-type tactics to end-run abortion laws.  A president not committed to pro-life issues may not be as invested, say, in easing the tax burden on single mother as a president who has moved that position to the center of their governing framework.

In other words, policies on abortion matter in presidential candidates, as the commitments a candidate holds there will (if he is to be consistent at all!) inform and expose his commitments elsewhere.

4 things we have to explain:

1. The diversity of tastes and preferences in beauty. For example, modern vs. classical painting, ballet vs. modern dance, avant garde french drama vs. 50’s musical films, etc.

2. The universality of tastes and preferences in beauty. For example, Beethoven’s symphonies (especially the 5th and the 9th), U2, Bach, Palestrina.

3. The existence of “experts.” For example, production designers who get paid more or less to build sets for films, artists who get paid more or less to make paintings for corporate buildings, architects who get paid more or less to create schools, skyscrapers, neighborhoods cities.

4. The powerful effect of certain objects. For example, sunsets motivate hundreds of thousands of poems, moonsets motivate almost none; women of a certain shape, size, color, tone, personality, and poise are the source and cause of a dozen thousand films being made, women certain shapes, sizes, colors, tones, personalities, and poise never motivate the creation of a film. Pictures of flowers adorn the walls of millions of North American suburban homes, dead rats adorn almost none.

In summary, there are four phenomena that need accounting.
1. The diversity of taste in beauties.
2. The uniformity of taste in beauty.
3. The existence of “experts” in beauty.
4. The powerful effect of certain beauties.

If beauty is real and knowable, this accounts for 2., 3., and 4. We have to explain 1.

If beauty is not real and subjective, this accounts for 1. We have to explain 2., 3., 4.,

The Red Sox have won the World Series.

That’s not the real story, though.  The real story is that I was 4-7 in my playoff predictions this year (I actually got caught up in politics and missed making a prediction for the World Series, for which I am taking a loss).

That’s a 400% improvement over last year. If I dare say myself, that’s an impressive figure.
But it’s also unsustainable growth, so make sure you keep expectations low next year.  Until then, congrats BoSox and their all-too-irritating fans.

As Mike Huckabee has started gaining traction, the hit pieces have come so hard and fast that I haven’t been able to respond to all of them. One of the common threads, however, has been critiquing his alleged devotion to “big government” and raising taxes.

Mike Toomey, the president of Club for Growth, penned a particularly damaging piece on Huckabee’s economic policies. At least at first glance. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the argument hinges on whether Huckabee actually is as Toomey describes him: a proponent of “big-government liberalism.”

During Huckabee’s tenure as governor, the average Arkansan’s tax burden increased 47 percent, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. A dyed-in-blue tax hiker, Huckabee supported raising sales taxes, gas taxes, grocery taxes, even nursing home bed taxes. He virulently opposed a congressional moratorium on taxing Internet access, and sat on the sidelines while his Democratic legislature pushed the largest tax hike in Arkansas history into law. What’s more, on his watch, and frequently at his behest, state spending increased by 50 percent, more than double the rate of inflation, and the number of state government workers rose by 20 percent. Yes, as a presidential candidate, Huckabee has signed on as a supporter of the Fair Tax and pledged against raising taxes, but when a candidate’s long and clear record flies in the face of his election-year symbolism, you can chalk it up to politics every time.

Toomey apparently doesn’t read his own organization’s report cards, which is far less cut and dry than Toomey’s rhetoric indicates.

Governor Huckabee’s record on pro-growth, free-market policies is a mixed bag, with pro-growth positions on trade and tort reform, mixed positions on school choice, political speech, and entitlement reform, and profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.

The report even points out that the condemnation of his positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation isn’t wholesale. Rather, Huckabee’s early days were spent doing what fiscal conservatives love: cutting taxes.

While Toomey’s own organization recognizes the nuances of Huckabee’s fiscal record, such subtleties seem lost on Toomey himself. In fact, Toomey never bothers to mention exactly why Huckabee raised taxes in Arkansas. Having been ordered by the state Supreme Court to increase education spending, and finding himself in a situation with no money for prisons or Medicaid, Huckabee opted to raise taxes rather than decrease these services, letting the sales tax increase pass into law without signing it because it did not include enough reform in the education system to constitute a good use of dollars.

As a fiscal conservative, the dilemma is understandable to me. The lag time between cutting taxes and seeing and increase in government revenue shouldn’t prompt fiscal conservatives to stop providing crucial services, like adequately sized and staffed prisons. At least not until adequate long-term solutions can be hammered out in the fires of democracy.
Huckabee wasn’t alone in his dilemma. In 2002 and 2003, a slew of fiscally conservative Republican governors grudgingly raised taxes to pay for their budget shortfalls (see here as well) which had been exacerbated by rising Medicaid expenses. Huckabee’s own Arkansas had 25% of its population on Medicaid.

Can one be a small-government fiscal conservative and still raise taxes? I think so, especially if one governs with an eye to long-term gains. Huckabee seems to approach economics with a pragmatic “take what you can get, give when the bleeding is too much” mentality that those who suffer from tax-cut myopia will hardly understand, but the rest of the world (like myself) will appreciate.

***Note: I am precising Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics this week here at Mere-O. I hope you will work through the challenging and provocative theological ethic that O’Donovan articulates.***

Chapter Twelve: The End of the Moral Life

Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. While the gifts of prophesy, tongues, and or knowledge are intelligible on their own, faith, hope and love depend upon the return of Jesus Christ at the end of time. If the Son of Man were not to return, faith and hope would describe a pointless expectancy.

Yet it is faith and hope that love is grouped with, not with the more immediately intelligible “spiritual gifts.” As O’Donovan writes, “If we have understood why love, the form of the moral life, is grouped…with faith and hope…, then we have grasped how morality is related to salvation, how it is that Christian ethics is evangelical…The true moral life of the Christian community is its love, and its love is unintelligible except as a participation in the life of the one who reveals himself to us as Love, except, that is, as the entry of mankind and of the restored creation upon its supernatural end.”

In other words, properly considered, love puts us “under the shadow of the last things.” We cannot understand love if we do not understand its eschatological dimensions. Hence, the goal of this chapter is to highlight the eschatological aspect of love and the moral life.

Yet, O’Donovan points out, faith and hope qualify life in different ways. His route into the eschatological nature of the moral life is through these respective qualifications.

We begin with “what it means for love to be hopeful.” O’Donovan contends that we must consider love’s reward, answering both those who object that there is a higher good (the reward) that is added on to the love that we experience, and with those who object that the higher reward could be a motive for action.

When the first objection, that there is no higher good than the love which we currently have, is framed badly, it results in pantheism. This is the danger of speaking of the “participation in the divine life”—it suggests that “divinity were no more than a transferable quality of existence to which mankind too can aspire.” However, when pantheism is avoided, the objection contains a clear warning: what good could be higher than the love of God (Augustine’s “he himself is the reward!”)?

With the warning noted, however, it is still permissible and necessary to distinguish between love now and love hereafter. “The articulation of love into labour and reward in Jesus’ teaching corresponds to the apostolic teaching that we must die with Christ so that at the last we may rise with him.” What’s more, we must speak in this way because “the present hiddenness of God’s new creation demands its fulfillment in public manifestation.”

But what of the second objection? What of the temptation to introduce self-interest into ethical deliberation, which “compromises the true loss-of-self-in-other which is the true essence of love?” As the objection goes, “In desiring, the subject loves himself.”

While love must not degenerate into self-love, the loving of an object as ‘good’ suggests that it is a good also for me, “by virtue of the fact that I am a part of the world in which and for which it exists as a good.” But I do not have to be anxious about the fact that it is a good for me if I properly understand “the objectivity of my good, given to me in the order of the universe as a reality which I can only acknowledge and welcome.” At the heart of the anxiety is the “voluntarist presupposition that my good is something which I create or evoke for myself.”

God Himself, then, is the reward for us—but we need not worry about our own interest because of the object of our love. In giving Himself to us as the object of our love, God has “given us also the love with which it is appropriate to love him.”

What, though, of faith? How does it qualify the love that we have for Jesus?

For one, it qualifies love in a different way than hope. In hope, we move from the ambiguity and imperfections of the present toward the eventual completion of the future. In faith, we move from the final judgment “with its affirmation of man’s created life and love” back to the present, where we “claim and enjoy that affirmation.”

Scripturally, it is the concept of “righteousness” that “binds ethics and eschatology together.” It is righteousness, according to Paul, that we “wait in hope for.” As O’Donovan writes, “To conceive God’s final judgment of grace upon man’s life as the hope of righteousness is to insist that any rightness which may belong to human act or character derives from this final judgment.” The final affirmation, the “Yes” of God, determines both the “possibility and the conditions of human morality.”

This doctrine of divine justification, however, errs when it speaks “in general terms of a dependence of human achievement upon divine favour.” Such a position locates the justification in a believer’s experience of conversion, or in his subsequent works, rather than in this final judgment, thus replacing God’s final judgment “with a judgment based on the strange warmings of their hearts and the success of their most passionate and sustained endeavours.”

To avoid this error, however, we must look to where God has revealed this final judgment: “to Jesus and to the justification of mankind which God has effected by raising him from the dead.” Only here does talk about the “final judgment” have any meaningful content, and only in Christ does the doctrine of justification have grounding.

Faith, then, returns from the Divine “Yes” in the future to our own life in the present. Our pasts may fall under the “No” of those who reject God, but “in so far as we, the agents, stand under the ‘Yes’ which God has spoken to Christ, then our pasts, too, are brought within the favourable meaning which that ‘Yes’ confers upon our lives as a whole.

When we think about the lives of the wicked and the righteous, their “settled dispositions,” their virtues and vices, their objective historical records, we can still make assessments. But in terms of the final assessment, their histories are secondary. “The turn that each has taken, to or away from the law of God, has marked his life and imposed a shape upon it which is decisive for the whole…the end of a career settles the value of the whole.”

This is the moment of recognition of the thief on the cross, in which “he encountered a decisive reality which must shape his life one way or the other whenever he met it.” Any settled dispositions of character are secondary to this “formative moment, the meeting with the divine presence in Jesus which stamps the life with the mark of love.”

But this moment is “elusive of observation.” It may not “declare itself in immediately observable ways.” Hence, the admonition to “Judge not, lest you be judged.” According to O’Donovan, the words are not intended to promote moral indifferentism, to affirm a tolerance that stems from “not taking moral questions seriously, from regarding the difference between right and wrong skeptically because of the ambiguities with which human behaviour confronts us.” Their common usage for self-justification is far afield of the intended meaning.

Rather, “There is another tolerance, quite different in spirit from this, which comes from taking moral questions so seriously that we recognize the point at which they exceed our competence to resolve them.” We cannot pronounce a verdict on “a human being’s life in its totality.” In other words, all judgments are provisional in nature—we cannot pronounce final verdicts on those around us.

This tentativeness is applicable also to our own lives. While we have better knowledge of our own souls, it too is limited and sinful. Hence, any “certainty” we have in our own salvation must be grounded not on our experiences but on “faith in the objective word of God.” In introspection, we confess our own ambiguity and then turn away from the appearances of our soul to the reality of the Word of God. Conversion, in this sense, happens many times.

But we are also given a sign of this hidden transformation—baptism. Though “distinct from the reality to which it points…only the sign itself, because it is given by Christ, can give a public assurance that God’s redemptive grace is active in the world and that this person too will encounter it, so entitling us to read the indications in the candidate’s subjective and active life hopefully, as evidence of the Spirit’s activity.”

This is not to deny, points out O’Donovan, that “criminality is no different from honest citizenship or asceticism from self-indulgence.” Rather, there is a final question that must be asked of all the “varied constellations and patterns” that human lives may form: “what do they constitute for eternity?” The answer is not immanent to the created order, but comes outside of it, “from its supernatural end.”

Within the light of this question, the complex and diverse issues of morality “are reduced to a stark and awesome simplicity.” It is a choice between sin and virtue, for or against God’s new creation, the broad versus the narrow way. “Such absolute oppositions cannot be avoided in Christian thought, for without it morality loses its eschatological relation to the new creation and becomes no more than a reflection of the ambiguities and complications of the world.”

It is, of course, not only Christian moral thought that reduces the world to this simplicity. Rather, the “announcement of God’s final judgment simply told mankind what it knew implicitly: that beneath the ambiguity of concrete decisions, beneath every hesitation between alternative goods in alternative courses of action, there lay a simple and final choice between good and evil, a choice on which the fate of the soul depended.”

But when the eschatological mooring for ethics is lost, that simplicity is immanentized. Legalism attempts to clear away the ambiguities, “so that the moral agent, provided that he will take expert advice, need not be troubled by the tasks of discernment but has only to take the simple decision of will seriously.” What this means is that in every decision, the soul hangs in the balance. The decision has been reduced to his will, but rather than decreasing the anxiety, it increases it. This is the “inevitable result when man attributes to his own decisions the capacity to invoke the apocalypse of final judgment which properly belongs to God’s decision.”

At the end of all time, the book of life will be opened. There is a simple question that we all must face: is our name written there? O’Donovan concludes the chapter and the book:

“The final judgment of God is, on the one hand, a judgment rendered on human deeds; on the other, it is a creative new word rendered from a source that is independent of human deeds. These two aspects of divine judgment are complementary. Human deeds become what they are not in themselves, the story of God’s gracious purposes, when their books are interpreted out of that ‘other book’. The works that men have done become the basis of God’s favourable or unfavourable judgment when they are read in the light of God’s work of sovereign grace. The ultimate and simple decision is not found in the books of human deeds, but in the book of life, where it is a question of Yes or No: either a name is there, or it is not. But the book of life does not supplant the book of men’s deeds; rather, those books, when read in light of that book, take on the character of a correspondingly simple and final decision, a Yes or No to God’s grace. However much our moral decisions strive for clarity, they are never unambiguous or translucent, even to ourselves. But—and is this not the gospel at the heart of evangelical ethics?—it is given to them by God’s grace in Christ to add up to a final and unambiguous Yes, a work of love which will abide for eternity.”

Other posts in the series:

Series Intro
The Created Order
Eschatology and History
Knowledge in Christ
Freedom and Reality
Authority
The Authority of Christ
The Freedom of the Church and the Believer
The Moral Field
The Double Aspect of the Moral Life

***Note: I am precising Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics this week here at Mere-O. I hope you will work through the challenging and provocative theological ethic that O’Donovan articulates.***

Chapter 11: The Double Aspect of the Moral Life

As O’Donovan has asserted, it is love that is the unifying principle to the moral life. But Jesus’ command as Matthew records it is a twofold command: you shall love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Since Augustine first moved this command to the center of Christian ethical reflection, there has been an underlying anxiety: does the nature of the twofold command imply that there is some potential conflict between our loves for God and man?

This recurrent anxiety, however, is grounded in a covert Manicheism—the notion that there are two First Principles at work in the world. But this is not to dismiss the problems associated with characterizing the relationship between the “two loves.” After all, it is a single demand made by God, and as such the demand is unified. It is a demand that we love reality, but that reality is itself differentiated due to the fact of creation. Reality is itself twofold: “The secondary object [creation] is given by, and depends upon, the primary object. Just as God, in a certain sense, continues to be the sole reality, even though he has created a new reality apart from himself, so love for God continues to be, in exactly the same sense, the sole thing that is demanded of us…”

But how do the two loves, which are really unified, relate?

As O’Donovan writes, “In the first place, we are to love the neighbour because the neighbour is ordered to the love of God.”

In other words, self and neighbour are ontological equals—neither is an “end or an origin to the other.” But such a fact can only be acknowledged when both self and neighbour are understood in their teleological relationships to a common end—namely, God. The recognition of the common kind—man—implies a teleological ordering; “real kinds are defined in terms of real ends.” O’Donovan is here building on his first chapter.

While the fact of man’s teleological ordering to God has sometimes been ignored, loving our neighbour depends upon seeing him for who he is–“he, like ourselves, is a being whose end is in God.” It is impossible to love him without recognizing this fact.

On the other hand, while our love for our neighbour has its end in the love of God, it is truly a love for that which is not-God, “and therefore it is quite different from the love of God.”

The creation of the world involved not only the creation of a single soul apart from God, but of many souls. The plurality of the world is not a state of fallenness—the neo-Platonic quest to be alone before God is not Christian, “in that it refuses the communitarian character of redemption.” The Church has always had room for solitude as a private practice—it has even had individuals who devoted their entire lives to it. But in doing so, they were resolutely communal in that they devoted themselves to the task of intercessory prayer.

The fact that we have a love for that which is not-God entails that there are two distinct spheres of love. On the one hand, there must be “prayer and praise directed to God.” On the other, there must be “fellowship with the neighbour and service of his welfare which is not directed to God.” How are these two spheres of action one love?

Two inadequate proposals have been put forward:

1. “Put God first, others next and yourself last.” This fails for two reasons. One, it depends upon arbitrating between God and man the way we arbitrate between the claims upon us made by other humans. While there is some truth to this, this conception also makes God’s claim one among many, while in reality, God’s claim “embraces the whole of our duty.” God may sometimes place our neighbour as most important, and sometimes even demand that we place our own interests at the forefront of the list. Two, this conception “obscures the fact that the neighbour’s good can be realized only when God is the object of his love.” By understanding the relationship between God and man as one of competing claims, this conception mischaracterizes the nature of love, which sometimes is compelled to decide against a neighbour in a conflict of interest.
2. “Means to an end.” In this relationship, we love the neighbour “for God’s sake.” This idea was put forth by the early Augustine (who later, O’Donovan contends, rejected it) and famously repudiated by Kant. O’Donovan contends, however, that even if we disagree with Kant’s critique, there is still good reason to reject the position. “Means” and “ends” belong, as categories, to practical deliberation. That is, they belong to the “’deliberative’ rather than ‘natural order.’” But there is no need to impose ‘order’ on our love of our neighbour from the outside like this. Rather, “The neighbour’s being imposes the order upon love…We are to love him as a creature destined for his Creator’s fellowship, because that is what his nature demands of us.”

This last sentence highlights the third way of characterizing the relationship, which is more successful. It is “the free conformity of our agency to the order of things which is given in reality.” (The sentence perfectly encapsulates O’Donovan’s first and second sections of the book, wherein he articulated the order of reality and our free response to that reality). We love God as God, humans as humans. Titania’s love for Bottom is a perversion because it is a love without truth—he, though a monster, appeared to her as a beauty.

Hence, the twofold love that we are commanded to have “is not a matter of one love canceling the other out, nor of one being subjected to the other in a project of the loving subject; but it derives from the ordered and intelligible relations of its two objects, and presupposes that love is interpenetrated and shaped by the order of reality disclosed to the understanding.”

But what are the contents of that reality which we must love? The commandment draws our attention to only two aspects: God and neighbour. But “what kind of precedence do the two commands of love for God and neighbour have over other rules of moral obligation” anyway?

If we take a narrow view of our obligation (as Kant does), then we will see only ourselves and our neighbours as having status as “absolute reality.” On the other hand, for Augustine, if we get God and neighbour “right,” then all other loves will fall into place. The priority of the love-commands is not that of an inclusive generality, but rather a pedagogical priority which “arises from the ascetic measures necessary to correct man’s biased starting point.”

O’Donovan, it seems, doesn’t want to decide between these two answers, though it seems he leans toward Augustine. Rather, he writes, “We can do no more than hint at how these alternative answers unfold into sharply contrasting patterns of moral thought.” Regardless, if the two commands are the most “general statements of moral obligation,” then we are compelled to ask, “And who is my neighbour?” This, however, is a question the parable of the Good Samaritan does not answer. Rather, Jesus’ parable “defeats the presuppositions of the question as well as the supposed answer” by addressing applying the concept of neighbour to the agent, rather than the object of the act. What the parable highlights is the “contingency of the circumstances which can place us in an unlooked-for neighbourly relation with others.”

In other words, while some modern ethicists have argued that Jesus taught an “undifferentiated love to all,” such a conception misses the point of the parable, which “counters the limiting structures of racial and communal proximities precisely by challenging them with a proximity of a different sort, the contingent nearness which we constantly find ourselves thrown into with all sorts of people.”

O’Donovan argues that the pedagogical priority of the two commandments becomes clearer when they are brought together under the command that we should love Jesus. In Jesus, we not only love God, but we love Him as a neighbour, as one who has come near to us. O’Donovan elegantly concludes:

Love of Christ has priority over all other obligation because it is the love of Jesus as the Christ, the acceptance of him as the one whom the Father has sent. From it there follows that we are given to love the whole reality in due order: God, the neighbour, self and the world. And from it there follows obedience to the authoritative teaching and life which interpret what is given to us in reality; ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’. It is a love which springs from faith, and which therefore loves the universal in the particular, finding in Jesus the head in whom every neighbour is summoned to appear before God and in whom the non-human creation awaits its redemption. This brings us back to where we began, to the divine act by which God has designated Jesus as the Christ and has vindicated creation in him, his resurrection from the dead. In this act all Christian love, from the universal to the familiar, finds its spring.

Other posts in the series:

Series Intro
The Created Order
Eschatology and History
Knowledge in Christ
Freedom and Reality
Authority
The Authority of Christ
The Freedom of the Church and the Believer
The Moral Field
The Moral Subject

While digging through archives of Huckabee’s tenure in Arkansas, I found this little tidbit from a Washington Times article dated December 10th, 2001:

The Republican governor, who appears to be a shoo-in for a second term next year, has set up the “Tax Me More Fund” to give voters who think they are not taxed enough the chance to send more money to the state.

Too much fun, indeed. It’s brilliant satire, and so effective at curbing tax raises that other Republicans used it around the country. As Huckabee says in the article:

“What it does is expose the hypocrisy of the liberals because they want to raise taxes as long as someone else has to pay for them. Our state law does not prohibit someone from paying more. So if they believe it would make them feel better to contribute more, then I want them to write as generous a check as they can to make themselves feel good,” Mr. Huckabee said.

“I have a pocketful of pre-addressed envelopes for them to mail in their checks. If someone in the legislature comes up to me and talks about a tax increase, I pull out an envelope and say mail it in. They just shake their head,” he said.

Perhaps the most bitter irony of the article comes at the end:

Mr.Huckabee’s political success with his tax fund has not gone unnoticed among campaign strategists elsewhere, some of whom think it could be used in other gubernatorial campaigns.

“I think he has come up with a kind of clever ploy that has the liberals sputtering,” said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, which supports candidates who favor tax cuts.

“There is going to be increasing muttering about raising taxes in next year’s campaigns, and this type of approach by Huckabee might be a good way to stop the liberals in their tracks,” Mr. Moore said

Clearly, one story doesn’t make a campaign, and there were times when he raised taxes in his tenure. But Huckabee can clearly be at home with fiscal conservatives, and worked actively for their side at points during his tenure.

[Note: This post is co-authored with Joe Carter and Justin Taylor, both of whom put their copies up last night.]

When it comes to politics, we three are pragmatic idealists. We are dedicated to the pursuit of noble principles and goals while never forgetting that politics is the “art of the possible.” Because we are idealists we are choosing to endorse a candidate who most aligns with our principles and values and is most worthy of our sacred trust. Because we are pragmatists we are choosing to endorse the one candidate who we believe is most capable of defeating Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Because we are pragmatic idealists we are endorsing Gov. Mike Huckabee.

For several months we have admired the scrappy campaign of Gov. Huckabee but believed it would be a wasted effort to support him with our time, energy, and finances. We bought into the notion that he could never get the GOP nomination since conservative voters would not support him. And the reason we were told conservative voters would never support him is because he could not get the nomination. To paraphrase a quote by John Piper, “It’s like the army being defeated because there aren’t enough troops, and the troops won’t sign up because the army’s being defeated.”

We can no longer sit idly by and allow the campaign of a worthy candidate and an honorable man to flounder for lack of support.

Only after prayerfully considering the issues, the candidates, and the electoral calculus have we decided to settle on this joint endorsement. We hope that you will join us in careful deliberation of Gov. Huckabee’s candidacy and that you will join us in pledging to cast a sacred vote for the office of President of the United States. Our army may go down in defeat, but it won’t be because we refused to enlist in this worthy cause.

• Matthew Anderson (Mere Orthodoxy)
• Joe Carter (Evangelical Outpost)
• Justin Taylor (Between Two Worlds)

Addendum: We hope to persuade other conservatives that Gov. Huckabee is capable of not only appealing to the three legs of the conservative coalition—social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and defense conservatives—but to a broader confederation of Republicans and independents. The following is our reasons and rationale: (more…)

***Note: I am precising Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics this week here at Mere-O. I hope you will work through the challenging and provocative theological ethic that O’Donovan articulates.***

Chapter 10: The Moral Subject

While an understanding of the moral field is essential for having a thoroughly theological ethics, it is not sufficient. After all, the individual is the subject of his actions. It is the individual who is “the consummate moral reality which his acts declare.”

But the one cannot replace the other. Agent-oriented ethics complements, not substitutes for, act-oriented ethics. Their relation is exceptionally difficult, but any satisfactory account will have to make to stipulations: “(a) the subject’s character must not be reduced to a function of his acts; (b) the subject’s acts must be allowed to disclose his character, which will make itself known only through them.”

In other words, our acts do not define our character, and yet we shall be known by our fruits. As O’Donovan puts it, “Character is hidden from public view, while acts are open to it; but the shrewd observer will be able to read the character from the tell-tale act. For acts cannot be made entirely plausible on their own, without a character to support them.”

With respect to the first stipulation, O’Donovan points out that modern ethics—extending, in fact, back to Aquinas!—is substantially “act-ethics.” Any dispositions of character are simply reduced to the repetitiveness of that person’s actions. So, for instance, we say that if “John is talkative,” we point to a series of acts where John behaved talkatively. While this is a plausible approach to take, O’Donovan contends that it “distorts certain elements of the moral reality it pretends to interpret.” There are, it seems, certain dispositions of character that are not easily reduced into acts, such as “maturity,” “even-temperedness,” or “lack of initiative.”

On the other hand, O’Donovan points to the second stipulation: the “epistemological priority of act over character.” The heart is “hidden, from man’s eyes until deeds and words declare it.” While knowing a person’s character may be helpful in understanding their action in light of their whole narrative, it is only helpful retrospectively. That is, it contributes to “evaluative moral thought only because that kind of moral reflection supposes a closed narrative of actions from which the character has already emerged clearly into view, so that each element in the narrative can be interpreted in light of the whole.” In moral deliberation, however, the end of the story is still open—our character is not yet fixed, and hence should not play a role in our deliberations.

O’Donovan, realizing that this is controversial, anticipates the objection from the the neo-Aristotelians, namely that we can never know the moral status of an act unless we know the agent’s intentions. In determining what he intends, an agent draws upon his history in order to inform his decisions. Thus, the neo-Aristotelians subsume character under “intention.”

O’Donovan’s response is twofold: First, a moral agent who does not approach each decision as a brand new decision not only cuts himself off from the possibility of repentance, but closes himself “against the corrective influence of this situation upon our pre-formed moral inclinations.”

Second, “Having once determined that the agent legitimately imposes his own interpretative matrix upon the situation into which he must act, it must go on to maintain the possibility of many different interpretive matrixes corresponding to many agents’ different life-intentions, all equally valid.” In other words, there is no external criterion to dictate which life-intentions a subject should choose. In other words, relativism. There is, “in principle, no rational resolution available to our deliberations: the choice between the alternatives must be nothing more than a bare choice, a raw exercise of the will.”

That is not to say that everyone’s characters are the same. Rather, the upshot of O’Donovan’s argument is that character is a category for moral evaluation¸ rather than moral deliberation. Christianity has always understood the variety of gifts and vocations, and behind that the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (one Lord, one faith, one baptism). The particularity of vocation and gift is “a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear.” As Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 13, “Love is the unitary orientation that lies behind all the uniquely varied responses to the generic variety of the created order.”

Yet one significant question still remains: what is the function of a strictly evaluative ethic of character?

For one, it places moral deliberation in its soteriological context. Ethics, in other words, is about “saving one’s soul” in addition to doing the right thing. The question of our character is a question of the eventual salvation—or damnation—of our soul: “That is why the Catholic tradition of moral theology has been right to retain it. But it does not answer [the soteriological question] sufficiently; that is why the Protestant tradition has been right to suspect its possible pretensions. We shall not learn how to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters.”

Not only that, but evaluation plays a central role in repentance. As we reflect upon our own character, “we can form judgments (partial, no doubt, but not valueless) on what kind of character our history has disclosed, and these, rather than judgments on particular acts, are what will make us feel most acutely the need for salvation.”

Thirdly, we make provisional judgments on ourselves and others. We observe others’ virtues and vices, which teaches us love. But our judgments must be provisional—“judge not”—holding both favourable and unfavourable judgments on ourselves and others tentatively in light of the unknown. As O’Donovan closes the chapter, “Thus, Solon’s warning, to call no man happy until he is dead, is less cautious than Jesus’ warning. Even of the dead we do not know what hidden work of God may yet be shown us on the last day.”

Other posts in the series:

Series Intro
The Created Order
Eschatology and History
Knowledge in Christ
Freedom and Reality
Authority
The Authority of Christ
The Freedom of the Church and the Believer
The Moral Field

If you are like most people alive today, you believe ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

This is exactly what I was taught and grew up believing — but no one ever told me that (in view of history) we are the sad minority. Most thinking people in most places at most times have believed in the three great ‘transcendentals:’ goodness, truth, and beauty. Most thinking people in most places at most times (especially in the West) have believed that beauty was one of those objective realities “out there,” that can be discovered, toyed with, hated, loved, or otherwise disregarded, but cannot be denied.

That may be the majority view, but is it true? Studying the luminous works of Jonathan Edwards with my high school students this week, I am again revisiting this most important of questions. If beauty is not real, then there are no objectively “beautiul objects” or “beautiful ideas.” Depite our sentiments, we must nobly and strictly reject all forms of fantastic nonsense in the ongoing pursuit of scientific and philosophical purity. In philosophy, we must pursue truth and not eloquence; in science and math, truth and not elegance; in theology, truth and not grace. No matter how beautiful the falsehood, it is still false.

On the other hand, if beauty is real, then it is the ground of one’s “aesthetic life,” as truth is the ground of one’s intellectual life. And the recognition of beauty would become essential (in some cases) my ability to discover the truth. For if reality is beautiful, the argument goes, then a person cannot know the truth about reality unless that person knows it as beautiful. Even more importantly, if beauty is real then according to Edwards it is also the ground in some sense of one’s morality and happiness. If reality is beautiful, then neither can a person be a good, upright, upstanding person who neglects the “sweet mutual consents” between himself and others.

Is beauty objective then? The question should be broken into two parts. The first has to do with the status of the being of beauty. What should its status be in our ontology? The second has to do with its status in our epistomology. If it is truly “out there,” then how do we get knowledge of it…? Is there a science of beauty? (more…)