How does our mortality impinge upon our morality? A brief Ash Wednesday reflection, and some announcements of upcoming speaking where I’d love to see you if you’re in the neighborhood.
The Final Enemy Does Win One Battle
When I used to teach New Testament survey, one of the most challenging portions of Scripture to teach was Romans, not because there wasn’t enough there to fill a semester, but because the structure of Romans upends any possibility that we can win.
This is, I think, the major mistake of more progressive Christian ethics: the notion that moral questions are a matter of managing our way out of the mores subtle dynamics which constantly create new iterations of old problems.
This is not to say that there aren’t structural considerations to many moral problems: as Michael Emerson and Christian Smith pointed out some time ago, evangelical responses to racism as a “matter of the heart” is not wrong, but only half right. To neglect the questions of how societies permit, forbid, and organize is to miss a major component of how many moral problems have gained traction across history.
This being said, the notion that the moral life can be a matter of social policy runs into a buzzsaw in Romans, in which Paul describes the pervasiveness of death not just as a condition of the human creature, but as a pervasive condition hanging over our lives:
(5:13-14) Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
If the pervasive connection between the condition of sin and the presence of death isn’t enough for you:
(7:11-13) For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
Surprise! Death also piggybacks on the moral life as well. No place to hide, much less in the pursuit of the moral good.
In multiple places in Romans, death looms not only over our existential decisions, but coinheres in how we morally reason. Paul Tillich, in his The Courage to Be, describes fate as the “mini death” which puts a question to the very act of living, and while he’s wrong about a great number of things,1 he’s not wrong about this: the moral life is not something immune from death’s shadow, but can be that which death mobilizes: we use the moral life as a way to try to evade death, not realizing that we are playing further into Death’s designs.
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