Author: Andrew Sullivan

Amidst a culture that “leads us to spend our lives frantically propping up our image or reputation, trying to have it all, do it all, and do it all well, often at a cost to ourselves and those we love,” Tullian Tchividjian reminds us that the message of Jesus had little to do with “performance” – despite what you’ll hear in most churches:

In recent years, a handful of popular books have been published urging a more robust and radical expression of the Christian faith. I heartily amen the desire to take one’s faith seriously and demonstrate before the watching world a willingness to be more than just Sunday churchgoers. The unintended consequence of this push, however, is that we can give people the impression that Christianity is first and foremost about the sacrifices we make rather than the sacrifice Jesus made for us – our performance rather than his performance for us. The hub of Christianity is not “do something for Jesus.” The hub of Christianity is “Jesus has done everything for you.” And my fear is that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard our “do more, try harder” sermons and pleas for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of the Christian faith is the work that we do instead of the work God has done for us in the person of Jesus.

Furthermore, too many churches perpetuate the impression that Christianity is primarily concerned with morality. As my colleague David Zahl has written, “Christianity is not about good people getting better. It is about real people coping with their failure to be good.” The heart of the Christian faith is Good News not good behavior. When Sunday mornings become one more venue for performance evaluation, can you blame a person for wanting to stay at home?

Berfois recently republished G.K. Chesterton’s pitch-perfect rumination, “On Lying in Bed.” An excerpt:

Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get used to getting up at five o’clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.

Anthony Grafton praises David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism, an intellectual history of Western anti-Semitism. On the image of Jews espoused by the early Church fathers:

Again and again, Christian thinkers denounced their critics and enemies as “Jews”—that is, Christians who read too literally, or with no inspiration. And almost every one of them was denounced in his turn for the same crime of Jewish deviationism. In this world, in which imaginary Jews haunted real cities and their imaginary crimes became the object of real sermons, [St.] Jerome could find it reasonable to insist, almost in the same breath, that the Christian scholar must master Hebrew in order to understand the first half of his own sacred scripture and that Jewish liturgy and practice had lost their entire positive value with the coming of Christ, so that his own duty, as the pupil of a Hebrew teacher, was to hate the entire Hebrew race. …

The Fathers had far less to do with actual Jews than Paul or the evangelists—which is why Nirenberg’s enterprise really takes wing when he reaches them. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the Jews whom Jerome fiercely hated and Augustine drily pitied were largely abstract figures of thought rather than individuals of flesh and blood. Yet they were central to the two men’s visions of the past and the future—and their errors provided vital weapons with which Jerome could fight those who denied his readings of the Bible, and Augustine the Manicheans who did the same to his. Fictional Jews, as vivid as they were imaginary, began to fill the virtual world that the writers conjured into being. 

(Image: anti-Semitic caricature shortly after the big bang at the stock exchange in Vienna, 1873, via Wikimedia Commons)

That’s what Richard Beck argues in a theologically-inflected rumination on how blogging feeds the competitive, narcissistic tendencies he finds at the heart of original sin:

One of the things I’ve learned from writers like James Alison, a theologian deeply informed by Rene Girard, is how rivalry is intimately associated with our self-concept. Specifically, most of us create, build up and maintain our self-esteem through rivalry with others. Our sense of self-worth is created and supported by some contrast and opposition to others. I am a self in that I am over and against others. Better. Smarter. More righteous. More successful. More authentic. More humane. Less hoodwinked. More tolerant. More insightful. More kind. More something.

In short, selfhood is inherently rivalrous. Rivalry creates the self. Rivalry is the fuel of self-esteem and self-worth.

… From sunrise to sunset every thought I have about myself is implicated in acts of comparison, judgement, and evaluation of others, allowing me to create a sense of self and then fill that self with feelings of significance and worthiness.

Things like blogging, given its nature, can bring these rivalrous feelings to the surface making them more transparent (if you are self-reflective). But it’s just a symptom of a deeper sickness, that the self in inherently rivalrous and that self-esteem is a feeling of significance achieved over against others.

Casey N. Cep ponders religion’s complex role in the documentary:

“The debate is always framed in such stark, absolute terms, but when you hear from these women and what their lives are like, it’s harder to apply blanket, abstract rules,” [filmmaker Lana] Wilson said. The same is true for the four physicians, who themselves articulate doubts and uncertainties over the procedures they perform. When Dr. Sella reflects on her work, she confesses, “The reason that I’ve struggled is I think of them as babies. I don’t think of it as a fetus.” Later, Dr. Robinson decides to deny an abortion to a woman who is thirty-five weeks pregnant because she lacks a compelling reason, and then disagrees with her staff by approving an abortion for a Catholic teen-ager who considers herself pro-life.

That teen-ager is one of many patients who prays and worries over her relationship with God. Listening to her testimony, I thought back to my second year of seminary, when I lived down the street from a Planned Parenthood health center. Some mornings, on my way to lectures on the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, I would stop to talk with the protestors who occupied the street corner. I remembered some of those conversations while watching “After Tiller.” When I asked Shane and Wilson why they did not interview those opposed to late-term abortions, they pointed to the presence of those views in the film. “Many of the patients, usually the ones struggling most with the decision, are wrestling with their religion,” Shane said. “Some of the patients are even anti-abortion,” Wilson explained. “These women struggle with these issues more than anyone.”

Check out the Dish’s “Ask Anything” series with the After Tiller filmmakers here.