Obligations and the Christian: A Semi-Closing Argument
Summing Up the Last Several Weeks of Reflection, An Apology, and Miscellany
We near the end of this series on obligations. I offer my sincerest apologies. We go on.—The Management
An Argument for Arguments, And An Apology
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been writing about the nature of moral obligation: what it means that we are obligated morally, to whom, and why. If you’ve stuck with me for this long, it means one of four things:
You’re a paid subscriber and you’re stuck with me.
You’re genuinely interested in asking the root question of “Who is my neighbor?”, which is something like “So, what good do I have to do?”
You’ve been skipping these emails and hanging on until a different topic comes along.
You’ve been waiting for to see where it’s all been going, partly out of curiosity, but partly because these emails are more interesting to read in the grocery store line than Facebook, and arguably better for your soul than Twitter.
If you’ve been reading, a brief apology is in order: these last weeks have been fairly abstract and a bit more laborious. Though, for perhaps some good reasons. Perhaps.
In these last weeks, we’ve been turning over the nature of obligations in a fairly formal way, with far fewer current events and illustrations, with far more reference to books and arguments. And in most things, there’s a time for that. There’s a way of getting our minds clear about how certain concepts operate which require us to step back from the immediate, in that our thinking about most things moral gets clouded either by the love we attach to certain ideas or the way that certain ideas hurt those we love.
There’s no prize to be had for having pure thinking in this way, any more than there is in pure prayers, in that we are humans who think and pray: there is nowhere that we begin that except in the middle. That being said, an argument is an argument, and the arguments are only trying to be the best kind they can be.
AND YET: bloodless arguments aren’t ultimately the kind that we need all the time. It is with good reason that we can only tease out a vision of Scripture’s moral vision by way of commands fleshed out in stories, proverbs, songs, histories, and letters. And so, let this serve as my apology of sorts: thank you for tarrying with these bloodless arguments.
Now: back to flesh and bone.
But Why Obligations At All?
You can’t flip a page in Scripture without being confronted with moral obligations, large and small: Law, prophets, Gospels, epistles, all of it. There’s a certain half-right reading of Jesus’ response to the teachers of the Law which wants to slim down the manifold obligations of the Law to just two commandments: Jesus centers two things, yes, but as the lynchpins for understanding the breadth and depth of the Law. In other words, Jesus gives us a focal point for entering into a life of endless obligation which we joyfully give ourselves to.
This is the love of neighbor: an endless responsiveness to needs which we cannot predict in advance, answering a call of the LORD in which the plea of a stranger is the command of God. Obligations are important to sort out, if for no other reason, than we are bound in the world to others, before we assent to it and before we know it.
These obligations comes to us through the lens of Scripture, but not through the limits of Scripture. There is nothing in Scripture to speak to the specificity of how a mother should be hospitable to a baby who has encephaly and will die upon birth. There is nothing in Scripture to help us sort out which refugees to aid first or under what conditions asylum seekers should be granted entrance. There is no direct word to the Christian about energy policy and how to limit our consumption.
And so, obligations appear, and we have to sort them out. But there is no getting away from them: we live in a world given in grace, and in that gratuity, we hear the manifold call of God to love our neighbors, in diverse ways and under guises which must be understood carefully.
Obligations and Grace, By Way of Venezuela
If our obligations appear not as we wish, but as they are, and if the world is created not out of necessity but gratuity, then obligations are our way of participating in a world that God has graciously given.
Others are not burdens; there is no opposition between grace and law here. Anne Carpenter, in her Nothing Gained is Eternal, helps us here, describing God’s action as that which gives us agency which we then offer back to God. And to be sure, like with Abel and Cain, there are excellent and meager ways to return these gifts back. But, better or poorly, how we respond to the neighbor is, I think, part and parcel of our reasonable worship to God: to live well into the interconnected world we have been graciously given to be in.
Venezuelans have been in the news lately, as the latest iteration of refugees to come into contact with U.S. immigration policy. The legal definition of “refugees” and “asylum seekers” are strict, but do not cover the gamut of reasons for which cause people to leave. In case you’ve ever wondered why the category of “refugee” is so difficult to qualify for, let’s start with the official definition, from the 1951 UN Resolution:
Refugees are persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection.
This last bit—the “seriously disturbed public order”—is where things get murky. If your country is undergoing civil war, police brutality, political repression, or cartel violence, your chances of having your case recognized are high. But with Venezuela, the problems are primarily economic and resources, as has been the case in numerous other situations involving Latin American countries. The challenge here is that if you try to gain entry for economic reasons—which are real and viable reasons for a person to leave everything and everyone they’ve ever known— good luck and take your chances getting in line1. But if your country is undergoing real hardship, but not politically-generated violence, the refugee conventions generally don’t cover you.
So, American Christians have a fork in the road: real obligations face them, and they face them in the form of disproportionate political grace. There is no on-the-face reason for Venezuelans to suffer and Americans to prosper, nor any reason for poor Americans to suffer disproportionate loss when they come into competition with recent arrivals.2 Being obligated to multiple neighbors does not mean sacrificing neighbors, but it does mean thinking about the harms which appear, and attending to the particular faces in which they appear.
If our participation in God’s gracious world means meeting obligations well, then the ruling policy on refugees—which limits the criteria to political repression—is just wrong, and frankly, more akin to Cain’s offering than to Abel’s. This is not to say that there aren’t reasons for debating refugee policy, but discriminating against economic catastrophe because it doesn’t comport to the definition of international refugee law is a way of hiding behind law when the law was always meant to point us toward grace.
Insofar as the legal codes surrounding assylee admissions cannot account for the manifold nature of hardship and persecution, it falls to the Christian to see that their obligations are not exhausted by the law’s shortsightedness. Legal codes are not stand-ins for our relations to one another, but shorthand minimums meant (at their best) to facilitate relationships between strangers. They are a starting point, not an ending.
For the Christian, life is an endless obligation made possible by the gratuity of God. It is not that we owe God anything, but that we are meant to be living sacrifices, Paul writes, continually opting to pitch our lot with the widow crying for justice over against the sleepy judges who wish not to be bothered until the morning.
Moving On
There will always be more to say about obligations, but I feel like, for now, we’ve said enough. As I mapped out things back in August, we’ll turn in the weeks ahead to virtue. One of the nagging edges to obligations is that they always presuppose things like “toward what end?” and “what are you intending?”. Friends, these aren’t obligation questions—these are virtue questions. Obligations can tell us what we might be called to do, but virtue tells us why and how we live the moral life.
Our primary interlocutor here will be Thomas Aquinas, with reference to others along the way. I can’t promise that there won’t be some fine-grained days ahead, but in the end, our moral lives are always enfleshed, and so, there’ll be more stories, more connections to the world around us.
Because what use is a newsletter on the moral life if you can’t see it in motion?
“The line”, by the way, can often last for years, even for those with legitimate claims for entry through ordinary immigration channels. See this report on delays for worker visas, which are among some of the higher priority visas, to say nothing of the backlogs among family-reunion or lottery visas.
One of the places that folks like myself who are inclined to liberalizing immigration policies is that there *are* good reasons to say that the impact of immigration does not fall equally, and frequently falls on those who are already poorest and least educated. Borjas’ book (linked above) is a great place to begin.