No images? Click here A Personal Note:Hello fellow wayfarers, Well, I am kind of overwhelmed (in a good way) by your response to last week’s launch of this new project. Please forward it along to any of your friends who might be interested in the stuff we converse about here, and encourage them to subscribe. Coronavirus and Lesser of Two Evils Thinking With a world riven by a deadly pandemic, some questions must be asked. When deciding who should get a scarce ventilator, for instance, should doctors decide on the basis of quality of life? Should that mean rationing of these treatments away from the elderly or the disabled and toward healthy, younger people who can live “better quality” lives? A Pew Research study this week demonstrated that Americans are divided by religion on that question, with more secular people more open to rationing based on age or range of ability. “These findings are consistent with research showing that people who are not religious tend to prefer utilitarian solutions in a variety of moral dilemmas,” the report asserted. “This may in part be due to a lack of shared, formalized moral rules among the nonreligious, who are more likely to rely on personal philosophy and ethical principles when resolving moral quandaries. Religious believers, on the other hand, often rely on deeply ingrained moral rules, and on guidance from religious leaders and texts. Religious people also may respond negatively to the idea of doctors ‘playing God’ by choosing which patients should receive potentially life-saving treatments.” How I wish that were true. While I am glad to see that more religious people are still skeptical of the “quality of life” arguments so common at the moment, I hardly think that we are standing, firmly, on a transcendent ethic. One can hear at almost every level of church life, the acceptance of actions in which the means can justify the end. How many times in doing counseling with people do I hear, “What choice did I have? At least what I ended up doing wasn’t as bad as what I could have done.” That sort of reasoning may make some sort of carnal sense, but it is not a Christian ethic. The Bible commands, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21), and demolishes the idea that we should do anything evil “in order that good may come” (Rom. 3:8). And the Bible tells us that when we are tempted by evil, we will never be in the place where our only option is to choose something wrong (1 Cor. 10:13). In truth, we can always talk ourselves into anything on the basis of some good that will result. That’s not the way of the cross. When it comes to medical treatment, many agonizing decisions will have to be made. But they should be made on the basis of whether a medical treatment can help or hurt a person, not on the basis of a social Darwinian notion that the lives of the weak or the aged or the disabled or the unborn are not worth the lives of others. Are We Living in a Stephen King Novel? Last week, Terri Gross interviewed horror/suspense novelist Stephen King on her NPR “Fresh Air” program and asked, since he has written about viruses and pandemics in books such as The Stand, whether we are all kind of living now in a dystopian Stephen King novel. The whole interview was fascinating, but I was drawn, especially, to King’s comments on religion and the Bible. King, who grew up in the Methodist Church, says he’s no longer a churchgoer but still believes in God, and is drawn to the beauty of the Bible, especially the “liquid and rhythmic” language of the King James Version. As a child, he said, “The story that fired my imagination the most was the story of Job.” King said he found Job interesting because while Job experiences all sorts of horrors, much of the reasons behind it all happen “off-stage” from where he can see, in a conversation between God and Satan. That’s what set up, he said, the question that has fascinated him all his life: “Is there such a thing as outside evil? Are there demons, devils, ghosts, possessions, horrible things that come to us from the outside or is it all built into our DNA?” He contrasted what he sees as outside evil in Job with what he sees as inside evil in the tree of knowledge of good and evil or the golden calf story of Exodus and said, “The Bible tries to have it both ways.” Well, I would argue that the Bible tries to have it both ways because, well, it is both ways. That’s why the Christian tradition, reflecting on the Bible, speaks of the world, the flesh, and the devil. I would argue it’s both ways even in the accounts King mentions. In the Genesis story, there’s the human desire for the fruit (which is an internal pull) but there’s also the external reality of a tempting reptile. In Job, there’s the outside antagonist of Satan in the heavenly court, and there is the wrongheaded counsel of Job’s friends, and Job himself has to be silenced by God for his arrogance. Evil is outside of us, and evil is inside of us. That’s why we need the blood of Christ that can silence our accuser of his charges against us by nailing those charges to the cross (Col. 2:14) and can cleanse us of our sin (1 Jn. 1:9). The world needs to be reconciled. The flesh needs to be crucified. The devil needs to be dethroned. All of it is the problem—and grace is the solution to it all. In the end, King said, however bad the current world situation is, we are not, actually, living in one of his horror novels. He writes fiction, he said, because plotted fiction is orderly and presents a rational universe. “I’m not sure we live in a rational universe,” he said. He’s partly right. The Bible says that a universe groaning under a curse doesn’t seem to make any sense to us (Heb. 2:8). It’s only when we look to Christ, crucified and returning, that we can see the Word that holds everything together (Col. 1:17). That Word is the plotline. And that Word is not an abstract concept, but is personal—a Word that entered our horror story, with us, a Word that can bleed (Jn. 1:1-18). Adopted for (Real) Life In my book Adopted for Life, I wrote about how Maria and I first met the two little one year-old boys, Maxim and Sergei, in an orphanage in Russia. I told how they became our sons, and how and why we named them Benjamin and Timothy. I wrote about how, on the day we came to get them, to take them home from the orphanage, they were too young to really know what was going on, how they were crying and reaching backward to the orphanage. That experience prompted me to re-examine all sorts of things I had missed in the Bible’s revelation of our adoption as children, into the family of God. I, just like my now-sons, am often accustomed to life as an orphan, reaching back to my cosmic orphanage, kicking against the One who is bringing me home, just because it seems familiar and “normal.” That’s why, in explaining the reality of our adoption in Christ, Paul writes, “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but you have receives the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry ‘Abba, Father!”” (Rom. 8:15). And it’s why he exhorted the Galatian Christians to see their belonging in Christ, and not to retreat back into slavery (Gal. 4:8-9). I’m thinking a lot about that because today is the last day of high school for Ben and Timothy. I am grieving that, because of this pandemic, they won’t have what almost all of us have had—a high school graduation. But, even more than that, I find myself wondering how eighteen years flew by so quickly, and how those two little babies are now the two men towering in height over me. I’m thinking about all the life that is yet to come for them—all the joys and agonies and graces of adulthood. I’m spending a lot of time looking at pictures of those two little boys, remembering those first words, those first steps, those days riding around the carport on tricycles. Now, I’m the one reaching backward, and maybe even crying. Quote of the Moment: “Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.” --Walker Percy Currently Reading Evan Thompson, Why I Am Not a Buddhist Thomas Howard, Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal Scott Cairns, Anaphora: New Poems (Paraclete Press) J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring (my annual slow re-read) Currently Listening Jason Gray, “Everything Sad Is Coming Untrue” J Lind, “Letter to the Editor” Hank Williams, “Lovesick Blues” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” Simon and Garfunkel, “The Boxer” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Serenade No. 13 in G Major” Buddy Greene, “There Is Power in the Blood” Turnpike Troubadours, “The Housefire” If there’s something you would like for us to converse about here on the “Moore to the Point” newsletter or if you’d just like to say hello, please reply to this email. Onward, Russell Moore |