The Foundation of Good Religion

Some preliminary thoughts in response to a thoughtful question from Nicholas Miller.

To be human is to be religious.

The earliest homo sapien sites known to science give evidence of ritual.

In the last century, the societies that tried to eradicate religion ended up creating rituals, pageantry, and even “deities” that mimicked religion. (For example, Stalin in the Soviet Union, Hitler in Nazi Germany, and Mao in China.)

Most readers of this paper will be religious. Even those who label themselves “spiritual but not religious,” generally are religious if we use the word in its broad sense. Their self-chosen label is meant as a protest against what they see as distortions and errors in dominant religious institutions and an affirmation of what they see as valuable at the heart of humanity's religious instincts.

Given the variety of religions, where do we start in figuring out what is right and best?

I begin with creation and assertions about the character of God and the character of humanity.

(Footnote 1. I do not start with the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are legislation. They are appropriately negative and specific to a particular time and place. They are founded on universal principles, but not all the details of the Ten Commandments are universal. For instance, the references to donkeys in commandments four and nine, the reference to the “land” in commandment five, and the prohibition of the making of sculptures or statues in commandment two.)

The Character of God and Humanity

The Bible begins with the dual assertions that God and humans are not identical and that God and humans are similar. God made humanity in his image.

Humans were male and female, so no single individual embodies the totality of humanity. Humanity in its fullness exists only in community. Christians understand this to point back toward God: God is not an individual, but a community with a perfectly coherent purpose. This is the heart of the Adventist doctrine of the Trinity.

Adam and Eve were to serve as lords of creation. They were sexual beings designed to create good children who would in turn create good grandchildren. They were to live in an unbroken union that sustained and completed each of them. This is the “image of God.” This was the Creation ideal.

In the Creation ideal there is no hint of a “single adult” or a childless pair. Aloneness is merely a preparation for joyous union, and childlessness is merely preliminary to fruitfulness.

God delighted in creation. He looked at what he had made and said it was very good. He created Sabbath as a sign of his pleasure.

Then Adam and Eve sinned. The world was no longer the way God intended. What does God do? God begins bending, accommodating the new realities of humanity.

Cain is the first single person—wandering alone. He is cursed for murdering his brother, but he is protected in his singleness. God put a mark on him so no one would kill him. (Note: God's response to murder is stern condemnation, but not capital punishment. Approved execution of murderers is linked in the Bible with making slaves, polygamy, prohibiting shaving and mixed fibers in clothing, and executing rebellious children.)

Then Adam has another son, Seth, and the Bible makes explicit the notion that God is like a father. The Creator was not merely an artist. The Creator is a Father. So every human action, even the most egregiously evil actions, are traceable back to God. God fathered the wrong doer, so while wrong doers are morally responsible for their actions, God also takes some measure of responsibility. This is the foundation of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. We are all in this together—and the “we” includes God. The strong and weak, the smart and the mentally disabled, the righteous and the unrighteous, the wage earner and the diaper-wearer, the divine and the human—the Bible's view of the universe puts us together. This communal view of humanity stands in radical opposition to the unrealistic individualism epitomized by Ayn Rand.

The Character of God

Influenced by Ellen White, Adventists frequently refer to the law as a transcript of God's character. This can be used in two very different ways. Do we begin our thinking about law by meditating on the character of God as revealed in Creation and Jesus? Or do we begin out thinking about law by focusing on some “model legislation” such as the Ten Commandments?

Some Adventists take the second approach. I take the first.

Taking the second approach, we insist that God the Father will eventually annihilate the vast majority of his children because they used the gift of free will to rebel against God and goodness. Taking the first approach, I argue God will eventually save the vast majority of his children because that's what good fathers do. 

80 

Taking the second approach, married theologians living in Adventist ghettoes, casually write legislation for the conduct of single people and pairs incapable of having children and homosexuals--legislation that imposes on others obligations the theologians would never consider taking on themselves. This reminds of the words of Jesus to the Pharisees in Matthew 23 about loading burdens on others. It stands in stark contrast to good fathers who always impose stricter more burdensome obligations on themselves than they do on their children.

The second approach begins its systematic approach to religion with the assumption that the Ten Commandments are the preeminent legislation. The first approach begins its explication of religion with the ideals of Creation and moves to the revelation of the character of God in Jesus. Only as a third step does it move to legislation.

You get different religions depending on how you rank the value of these different perspectives on law. (Just to be clear: I believe the church as a social organization needs legislation. I just argue that as a spiritual community, legislation must be strongly informed by the vision of God's character provided by Jesus.)

Legislation

Legislation is concerned with tolerable limits of behavior, not ideals. God's ideal for humans is that every man and every woman should be married and have children. The question to be answered by church legislation is how should we as a church accommodate those persons for whom this ideal is not possible. What do we do with people who cannot live safely with their spouse? What do we do about people who cannot marry? What about couples who cannot have children? What do we do about 80 year old widows who have fallen in love with 80 year old men--who, if they marry, will lose their pension and thus their housing? In short, how do we respond to the exceptional cases? Does bending to accommodate exceptional cases destroy the ideal? I think not.