Love and Justice

Friedrich Nietzsche, a well-known atheist philosopher, wrote a lot about religion in general and Christianity in particular. Some of his criticisms are well worth grappling with. One has to do with the following sentiment that some of you may be familiar with: 
            He’s so heavenly minded he’s of no earthly good
Put as a warning it goes like this:
            Do not be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good
The worry is that some Christians tend to (a) dwell upon heaven so much that they neglect all sorts of issues and needs right in front of them, or (b) see all of the problems in this life as minuscule compared to the problem of eternal life that they ignore various matters of earthly or temporal justice (e.g. poverty) and only offer the gospel. 
I think SK would think that the worry is a legitimate one, but that the solution is simply to become more heavenly minded, so to speak. Or to put it into SK-talk, to become more eternally minded. To see this, we can appeal to a biblical passage that SK repeatedly draws our attention throughout Works of Love: 
            What good is it for someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul?
Replace the phrase ‘the whole world’ with any term other than ‘God’ (or a synonym for ‘God’) and the meaning of the question has the same force:
            What good is it for someone to gain fame and lose their soul?
            What good is it for someone to gain riches and lose their soul?
            What good is it for someone to gain pleasure and lose their soul?
            What good is it for someone to gain honor and lose their soul?
            What good is it for someone to gain justice and lose their soul?
            ....
There is a lot that can be said about this passage. But, I want to highlight a few points that I think SK would be on board with. 
First, SK would say that the passage is written to the reader. To bring this home forcefully consider the following:
What good is it for someone to gain knowledge of everyone else’s status before God and lose their soul?
In other words, I must read the passage in this way: what is it for ME to gain x and lose MY soul? That should be the most fundamental way in which I read and hear and apply the passage. 
Second, I think SK would argue that the most fundamental injustice in the world is to fail to love God with one’s whole being and thereby fail to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Or to put it differently, the fundamental injustice in the world is to fail to help others love God with their whole being and thereby fail to love others as oneself. With this in mind, it is possible to promote justice in the world without promoting loving God with one’s entire being, but it is not possible to promote loving God with one’s entire being without thereby promoting justice. This is especially true for SK since he thinks that loving God with one’s entire being implies loving others as oneself. 

UPDATE: (I had meant to include the following in my initial edits and I did not for some reason.) Furthermore, SK would say, I think, along with the vast majority of the Christian tradition, that all instances of injustice between humans and humans and humans and the creaturely non-humans stems from this most fundamental injustice of failing to love God which itself results in the injustice of failing to one's neighbor as oneself. When we attempt to tackle some injustice within the world (e.g. undeserved poverty or various forms of oppression) without simultaneously seeking for our neighbors to love God we are actually treating our neighbors as less than human being made in God's image, made to love God. This just follows, I think, from SK's claims about neighborly love. We have to first, foremost, and fundamentally love our neighbors as humans made in God's image. If we do not do that, then we simply fail to love them (we instead love something else that is not really them). So, attempting to eradicate injustice without attempting to help our neighbors to love God is a failure to love our neighbors as ourselves, which is a failure to love ourselves properly, which is a failure to love God. END UPDATE
Third, there is a prominent tradition in Christianity that regards all terms that pick out an essential feature of God as actually referring to the same thing, namely God. For example, the term ‘goodness’ or ‘perfect goodness’ refers to the exact same thing as the term ‘God’ in a deep sense (‘creaturely goodness’ does not have the exact same reference as ‘God’). ‘Love’ or ‘perfect love’ refers to the exact same thing as the term ‘God’ in a deep sense. ‘Justice’ or ‘perfect justice’ refers to the exact same thing as the term ‘God’ in a deep sense, and so on. So, the above:
            What good is it for someone to gain justice and lose their soul?
Is actually ambiguous between the following two meanings:
1.    What good is it for someone to gain worldly or temporal justice and lose their soul?
AND
2.    What good is it for someone to gain perfect justice and lose their soul?
So, 1 makes sense and is worth pondering, but 2 does not make much sense at all since it is equivalent (in reference, not meaning) to:
            2*. What good is it for someone to gain God and lose their soul?
Lastly, there is some evidence that Christians (at least American one’s) are less and less likely to engage in evangelism. That is, less and less Christians seem to feel the need to tell others about the gospel. Now, I am not sure why that is. I suppose some of the reasons may be related to Nietzsche’s worry. But, I am concerned that some of the reasons are simply based on a denial of the above SKish points. 

What do you think?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Problems of the One and the Many

As I mentioned in class the other day, there are a bunch of problems that can be categorized as being related to the problem of the one and the many. The basic issue is that when oneness is prioritized, manyness gets cut out and when manyness is prioritized oneness gets cut out. Or put differently, when unity is most fundamental, diversity gets eliminated and when diversity is most fundamental, unity gets eliminated.  Let’s consider some examples:  Ethics : Making individuals more fundamental than communities results in communities being sacrificed for the sake of the individual. My interests, desires, hopes, etc take precedence over those of the community. If the individual is most fundamental, then it is permissible for the individual to prioritize her interests over those of the community. Making the community more fundamental than the individual results in individuals being sacrificed for the sake of the community. The community’s interest, desires, hopes, etc tak...
Read more

The Intellectual Arbitrariness Objection to Religious Exclusivism: version 1

Here is my presentation of the objection: The objection here claims that we have an epistemic duty to treat like cases alike: if the evidence I have for p is the same (or similar) to the evidence that you have for ~p, then we should suspend belief with respect to p and ~p. Response 1:   The evidence will, in many or most cases, not be relevantly similarly. The phenomenology (the way the evidence is experienced by the subject) will be different, and thus the internal evidence will be different. Different rankings of evidence will be likely resulting in different overall assessment of the evidence.  Reply:  But those who deny (1) and (2) may have the same phenomenology and whatnot so that there really is relevant similarity—all the way down to how the evidence feels and is assessed. Think of two different detectives with the exact same evidence, same experience on the job, same level of intelligence, etc. and yet they each arrive at a different conclusion. I...
Read more

The Intellectual Arbitrariness Objection: Version 2

Suppose you had been born in Saudi Arabia. If you had been you would have been a Muslim. Suppose you had been born in India. If you had been you would have been a Hindu. Suppose you had been born... If you had been, you would have been... Considerations like these can quite easily give rise to the thought that your current religious beliefs (e.g. that God exists, that Jesus is his son and is the savior of the world, ...) are in some sense arbitrary. You are not justified in thinking that the religious beliefs that you actually have are true and thus that every belief that is incompatible with them is false. After all, you only believe what you do because of a kind of accident of birth. This gives rise to the following principle:  If  S 's religious or philosophical beliefs are such that if  S  had been born elsewhere and elsewhen, she wouldn't have held them, then those beliefs are produced by unreliable belief-producing mechanisms and hence have no war...
Read more