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Does Christianity Make You Good? · Scripture-ish

0:01
SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Ed Gallagher reading my essay, Does Christianity Make You Good?
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SPEAKER_00: In chapter seven of The Hiding Place,
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SPEAKER_00: Corrie Ten Boom described the trouble she had finding a placement for
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SPEAKER_00: a Jewish infant.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Of course,
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SPEAKER_00: this is during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands Perhaps in 1943,
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SPEAKER_00: and the Ten Boom family was involved in the underground resistance to the Nazis,
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SPEAKER_00: especially by hiding Jews.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: By the way,
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SPEAKER_00: their house in Harlem,
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SPEAKER_00: that's with two A's,
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SPEAKER_00: H-A-A-R-L-E-M, Harlem,
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SPEAKER_00: was about 15 miles or so west of Of where Anne Frank was hiding in Amsterdam,
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SPEAKER_00: though their stories do not intersect as far as I know.
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SPEAKER_00: As I was saying,
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SPEAKER_00: the Ten Boom family was hiding Jews,
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SPEAKER_00: but hiding an infant presents a special challenge because you can't tell them
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SPEAKER_00: to be quiet.
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SPEAKER_00: Corrie Ten Boom says she had a good prospect for someone who would take this infant
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SPEAKER_00: in,
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SPEAKER_00: a family friend whom she thought would be receptive to the idea of hiding this baby.
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SPEAKER_00: When this family friend,
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SPEAKER_00: this man, entered her watch shop, she went to get the baby to show to the man.
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SPEAKER_00: She describes the scene that transpired, and here I'm quoting from her book, The Hiding Place.
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SPEAKER_00: Back in the dining room I pulled back the coverlet from the baby's face.
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SPEAKER_00: There was a long silence.
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SPEAKER_00: The man bent forward,
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SPEAKER_00: his hand, in spite of himself, reaching for the tiny fist curled around the blanket.
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SPEAKER_00: For a moment I saw compassion and fear struggle in his face,
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SPEAKER_00: Then he straightened, No, definitely not.
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SPEAKER_00: We could lose our lives for that Jewish child.
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SPEAKER_00: Unseen by either of us, Father had appeared in the doorway.
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SPEAKER_00: Give the child to me, Corey, he said.
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SPEAKER_00: Father held the baby close.
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SPEAKER_00: His white beard brushed its cheek,
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SPEAKER_00: looking into the little face with eyes as blue and innocent as the baby's own.
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SPEAKER_00: At last he looked up at the man.
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SPEAKER_00: You say we could lose our lives for this child?
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SPEAKER_00: I would consider that the greatest honor that could come to my family.
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SPEAKER_00: That's the end of the quote.
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SPEAKER_00: It's an amazing scene,
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SPEAKER_00: an amazing comment from this 82-year-old man,
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SPEAKER_00: Casper Ten Boom, about whom, if you're curious, there's a Wikipedia page.
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SPEAKER_00: He cultivated a deep Christian faith as a lifelong member of
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SPEAKER_00: the Dutch Reformed Church, which was basically the State Church of Holland.
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SPEAKER_00: He lived a simple, pious life.
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SPEAKER_00: He read the Bible to his family morning and night,
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SPEAKER_00: and during the day in between,
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SPEAKER_00: he worked in the watch shop that he inherited from his father.
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SPEAKER_00: He was a man of prayer,
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SPEAKER_00: a characteristic powerfully illustrated in Chapter 5 of The Hiding Place,
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SPEAKER_00: at the time that the Nazis first attacked the Netherlands.
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SPEAKER_00: Corrie Ten Boom describes the situation,
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SPEAKER_00: quote, For five days, Holland held out against the invader.
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SPEAKER_00: We kept the shop open.
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SPEAKER_00: Not because anyone was interested in watches, but because people wanted to see Father.
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SPEAKER_00: Some wanted him to pray for husbands and sons stationed at the borders of the country.
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SPEAKER_00: Others, it seemed to me,
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SPEAKER_00: came just to see him sitting there behind his workbench as he had for 60 years now.
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SPEAKER_00: And to hear in the ticking clocks a world of order and reason.
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SPEAKER_00: They wanted to hear him pray.
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SPEAKER_00: They wanted to see him work.
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SPEAKER_00: In a world turned upside down, they wanted to witness stability, faithfulness.
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SPEAKER_00: And they found it in an old man behind the counter of a watch shop.
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SPEAKER_00: And later,
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SPEAKER_00: when the Ten Boom family,
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SPEAKER_00: along with a group of about 35 resistance leaders and workers,
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SPEAKER_00: were arrested by the Nazis, Corrie Ten Boom witnessed this scene.
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SPEAKER_00: Quote from Chapter 9.
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SPEAKER_00: When I got back the last time, a group had gathered around Father for evening prayers.
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SPEAKER_00: Every day of my life had ended like this,
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SPEAKER_00: that deep,
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SPEAKER_00: steady voice,
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SPEAKER_00: that sure and eager confiding of us all to the care of God,
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SPEAKER_00: The Bible lay at home on its shelf, but much of it was stored in his heart.
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SPEAKER_00: His blue eyes seemed to be seeing beyond the locked and crowded room,
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SPEAKER_00: beyond Harlem, beyond Earth itself.
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SPEAKER_00: As he quoted from memory, Thou art my hiding place and my shield.
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SPEAKER_00: I hope in thy word.
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SPEAKER_00: Hold thou me up and I shall be safe.
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SPEAKER_00: That's the end of the quote.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: The topic I want to address is, Does Christianity Make People Good?
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SPEAKER_00: And Casper Ten Boom and his family,
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SPEAKER_00: especially his two spinster daughters,
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SPEAKER_00: Corey and Betsy,
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SPEAKER_00: who never left home,
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SPEAKER_00: this Ten Boom family is Exhibit A for the positive answer to the question.
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SPEAKER_00: Yes, Christianity makes people good.
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SPEAKER_00: Just look at the Ten Boom family.
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SPEAKER_00: They prayed daily.
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SPEAKER_00: They read their Bible daily.
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SPEAKER_00: They went to church.
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SPEAKER_00: They had a genuine faith that came out in their actions.
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SPEAKER_00: And when they saw people in need, it was their faith that told them they must act.
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SPEAKER_00: They believed 1 John 3, 17 and 18, where they read these words.
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SPEAKER_00: But whoso hath the world's good and seeth his brother have need
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SPEAKER_00: and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him,
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SPEAKER_00: how dwelleth the love of God in him?
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SPEAKER_00: My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth.
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SPEAKER_00: So when the Jews in the Dutch city of Harlem started wearing gold stars,
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SPEAKER_00: The Ten Boom family learned for the first time who
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SPEAKER_00: among their acquaintances were Jewish.
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SPEAKER_00: Some of these Jews were,
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SPEAKER_00: in fact,
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SPEAKER_00: Christians,
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SPEAKER_00: having been baptized years earlier,
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SPEAKER_00: followers of the one perfect Jew, as some of them said.
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SPEAKER_00: No matter.
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SPEAKER_00: In something akin to the one-drop rule,
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SPEAKER_00: the Nazis counted these Christians as Jews, and they wore the star.
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SPEAKER_00: When the Jews started to be rounded up and shipped out,
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SPEAKER_00: it quickly became obvious to the Ten Booms what they must do.
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SPEAKER_00: In 2008,
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SPEAKER_00: the Ten Boom family was named by the state of Israel as belonging to the righteous
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SPEAKER_00: among the nations for their heroism in saving Jews from extermination in
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SPEAKER_00: the Holocaust.
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SPEAKER_00: Naturally, they put themselves in danger.
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SPEAKER_00: But again,
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SPEAKER_00: they believed the words of 1 John 3.16,
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SPEAKER_00: Hereby perceive we the love of God,
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SPEAKER_00: because he laid down his life for us,
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SPEAKER_00: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
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SPEAKER_00: That man,
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SPEAKER_00: that family friend presented by Corrie Ten Boom with a Jewish infant
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SPEAKER_00: that needed shelter,
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SPEAKER_00: he correctly perceived that,
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SPEAKER_00: in his words, we could lose our lives for that Jewish child.
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SPEAKER_00: But Caspar Ten Boom correctly perceived that such an outcome would be a great honor,
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SPEAKER_00: a chance to imitate Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: Does Christianity make you good?
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SPEAKER_00: Yes.
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SPEAKER_00: Behold the love of God displayed in the Ten Boom family.
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SPEAKER_00: As the Apostle Paul tells us, the fruit of the Spirit is goodness.
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SPEAKER_00: And the divine spirit has been at work in the Ten Boom family.
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SPEAKER_00: The spirit has made good use of its tools,
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SPEAKER_00: the spiritual disciplines,
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SPEAKER_00: especially prayer and scripture and communal life,
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SPEAKER_00: frequent worship with other believers.
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SPEAKER_00: And we can see the fruit.
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SPEAKER_00: It's obvious truth.
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SPEAKER_00: You come to Christ a sinner,
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SPEAKER_00: helpless, desperate, and Christ enters your life and changes everything.
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SPEAKER_00: The evidence is overwhelming.
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SPEAKER_00: Christianity makes you good.
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SPEAKER_00: If only it were so easy.
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SPEAKER_00: The man called into the Tin Boom Dining Room,
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SPEAKER_00: the family friend who ultimately refused to help a Jewish infant because of
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SPEAKER_00: the real danger the child presented,
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SPEAKER_00: that man was a Christian pastor who worked for a congregation in
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SPEAKER_00: a small town outside of Harlem.
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SPEAKER_00: It was a Christian pastor.
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SPEAKER_00: Who refused to help that Jewish infant.
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SPEAKER_00: This Christian pastor surely,
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SPEAKER_00: like the Ten Boom family, read the Bible regularly and prayed daily.
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SPEAKER_00: And he certainly attended church services frequently.
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SPEAKER_00: And when called upon to put his Christian ideas into action, he declined.
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SPEAKER_00: He was fearful that helping others would put himself in danger.
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SPEAKER_00: He had read and probably preached the verse that says perfect love casts out fear.
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SPEAKER_00: And when the moment of decision came, he chose fear over love.
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SPEAKER_00: He was willing to offer God only that which cost him nothing.
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SPEAKER_00: Does Christianity make you good?
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SPEAKER_00: No, not always.
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SPEAKER_00: But let me say this about that Christian pastor.
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SPEAKER_00: It was a struggle for him.
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SPEAKER_00: He gave in to fear, but at least he wanted to help, however weakly.
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SPEAKER_00: It's not like he said that the infant deserved whatever it got.
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SPEAKER_00: It's not like he reported the infant to the Nazis.
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SPEAKER_00: He clearly wanted to help the child and the Ten Boom family.
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SPEAKER_00: He was not sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
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SPEAKER_00: That is something.
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SPEAKER_00: In the face of evil,
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SPEAKER_00: Christians might not stand for goodness in the way you would like,
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SPEAKER_00: but at least they don't root for the evil of Christianity might not make you good,
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SPEAKER_00: but at least it doesn't make you evil.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, Christians aren't Nazis.
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SPEAKER_00: Are they?
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SPEAKER_00: Okay, some Christians are Nazis.
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SPEAKER_00: I use the present tense advisedly.
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SPEAKER_00: I am reminded of another situation when,
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SPEAKER_00: in hindsight, the cause of justice, goodness, seems so obvious.
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SPEAKER_00: But Christians had a hard time navigating the ethical terrain.
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SPEAKER_00: Robert Louis Dabney is perhaps most remembered for writing a biography
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SPEAKER_00: of Stonewall Jackson,
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SPEAKER_00: but he himself was a Presbyterian theologian and chaplain in the Confederate Army.
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SPEAKER_00: Like many Southern Christians, he was pro-slavery.
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SPEAKER_00: His biographer quotes a letter that Dabney sent to his brother,
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SPEAKER_00: dated January 15, 1851,
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SPEAKER_00: part of which I will quote because I appreciate the clarity with
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SPEAKER_00: which this theologian expresses his ideas.
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SPEAKER_00: Here's the letter, 1851.
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SPEAKER_00: If we want to effect,
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SPEAKER_00: Dabney tells his brother,
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SPEAKER_00: the general current of national opinion
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SPEAKER_00: on this subject is slaveholding intrinsically immoral or unjust,
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SPEAKER_00: We must go before the nation with the Bible as the text,
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SPEAKER_00: and thus saith the Lord as the answer.
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SPEAKER_00: This policy is the wiser because we know that on the Bible argument,
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SPEAKER_00: the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies.
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SPEAKER_00: The Bible being bound to stand on our side,
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SPEAKER_00: they will have to come out and array themselves against the Bible.
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SPEAKER_00: Here is our policy, then,
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SPEAKER_00: to push the Bible argument continually,
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SPEAKER_00: to drive abolitionism to the wall,
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SPEAKER_00: to compel it to assume an anti-Christian position.
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SPEAKER_00: By so doing, we compel the whole Christianity of the North to array itself on our side.
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SPEAKER_00: This would be an immense political advantage."
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SPEAKER_00: Wow.
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SPEAKER_00: This theologian cannot imagine a scenario in which the Bible could be used to oppose slavery.
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SPEAKER_00: No beating about the bush here.
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SPEAKER_00: He actually says in the letter that if we get into an ethical argument,
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SPEAKER_00: we might lose unless the argument turns on religion.
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SPEAKER_00: Then we'll win.
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SPEAKER_00: Christianity is obviously pro-slavery.
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SPEAKER_00: Okay, but
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SPEAKER_00: maybe the kind of slavery that Christianity favors is,
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SPEAKER_00: you know, the good kind of slavery.
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SPEAKER_00: The nice kind,
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SPEAKER_00: where the master treats his slaves in a respectful,
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SPEAKER_00: love-your-neighbor-as-yourself kind of way.
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SPEAKER_00: The kind of slavery that's less enforced labor under threat of death and more of a partnership.
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SPEAKER_00: Or even a vacation for the slave.
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SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
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SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think that's going to work.
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SPEAKER_00: Now let me say that both my own reason and the evidence I have seen suggest
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SPEAKER_00: that different masters treated their slaves in different ways.
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SPEAKER_00: Some masters were more cruel than others.
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SPEAKER_00: For instance,
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SPEAKER_00: in his autobiography,
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SPEAKER_00: Barton Stone,
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SPEAKER_00: Tells a story about a trip he took to Savannah where he encountered a form
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SPEAKER_00: of slavery that disgusted him and led him to believe that slavery was incompatible
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SPEAKER_00: with his Christian faith.
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SPEAKER_00: Stone had seen enslaved people before.
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SPEAKER_00: He grew up around slaves.
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SPEAKER_00: But his experience in Georgia was something different from what he had previously witnessed.
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SPEAKER_00: There were different forms of slavery, even in the American South.
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SPEAKER_00: None of them, I think, compatible with the principles of Christianity.
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SPEAKER_00: I've written about this before.
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SPEAKER_00: None of them compatible with the principles of Christianity, as I understand those principles.
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SPEAKER_00: None of them coherent with the greatest commands upon which our Lord said everything.
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SPEAKER_00: The law and the prophets hinge.
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SPEAKER_00: But I acknowledge that not all slave masters were the same.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to know exactly what to trust out of our eyewitness sources,
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SPEAKER_00: because in the American South of the 18th and 19th centuries,
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SPEAKER_00: everyone had a dog in the fight.
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SPEAKER_00: There are no unbiased records.
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SPEAKER_00: Certainly Frederick Douglass was not unbiased,
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SPEAKER_00: and his experience is the experience of merely one enslaved person,
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SPEAKER_00: but we should still consider what he has to say about the effect of Christianity
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SPEAKER_00: on his own enslaver.
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SPEAKER_00: Did Christianity make the slaveholder of Frederick Douglass good?
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SPEAKER_00: Douglass gives us the answer in chapter 9 of his first autobiography,
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SPEAKER_00: which the 27-year-old Douglass published in 1845.
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SPEAKER_00: In the following excerpt,
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SPEAKER_00: Douglass looks back at a time more than a decade earlier when Douglass was
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SPEAKER_00: a young teenager.
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SPEAKER_00: Here's the quote.
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SPEAKER_00: In August 1832,
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SPEAKER_00: Douglas writes,
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SPEAKER_00: my master attended a Methodist camp meeting held in the Bayside,
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SPEAKER_00: Talbot County, and there experienced religion.
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SPEAKER_00: I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves
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SPEAKER_00: and that if he did not do this, it would at any rate make him more kind and humane.
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SPEAKER_00: I was disappointed.
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SPEAKER_00: End quote.
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SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm starting to wonder whether Caspar Ten Boom is the exception rather than the rule.
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SPEAKER_00: Maybe Christianity is not at all all that helpful to the moral improvement of people.
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SPEAKER_00: Is it more of a crapshoot?
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SPEAKER_00: And we haven't even started talking about the reasons that John and Yoko wanted
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SPEAKER_00: to imagine a world without religion,
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SPEAKER_00: which I'm sure had something to do with big things like wars, probably the Crusades.
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SPEAKER_00: And probably also smaller scale things like the religious people they'd encountered
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SPEAKER_00: who are arrogant jerks.
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SPEAKER_00: Is it their religion that made them arrogant jerks?
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SPEAKER_00: I'm getting the feeling that there is none righteous.
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SPEAKER_00: No, not one.
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SPEAKER_00: There is none that understandeth.
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SPEAKER_00: There is none that seeketh after God.
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SPEAKER_00: They are all gone out of the way.
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SPEAKER_00: They are together become unprofitable.
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SPEAKER_00: There is none that doeth good.
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SPEAKER_00: No, not one.
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SPEAKER_00: One of my heroes is Alexei Navalny.
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SPEAKER_00: For whom a report that came out this year endorsed by
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SPEAKER_00: a few European governments concluded that the cause of his death
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SPEAKER_00: a few years ago was murder, specifically poison by the Russian government.
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SPEAKER_00: I know, what a shock.
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SPEAKER_00: I read Navalny's memoir recently.
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SPEAKER_00: It makes clear that Navalny enjoyed a warm Christian faith,
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SPEAKER_00: Navalny's memoir does,
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SPEAKER_00: and he did consider his Christian faith coherent with his own persistent opposition
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SPEAKER_00: to the evils of Vladimir Putin's government.
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SPEAKER_00: But I'm not sure Navalny should count as evidence
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SPEAKER_00: that Christianity makes someone good because Navalny was raised an atheist.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, the godless communists and all that.
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SPEAKER_00: And he came to Christianity after his career in activism had begun.
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SPEAKER_00: It wasn't Christianity that made him good.
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SPEAKER_00: Was it atheism?
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SPEAKER_00: Finally, last example.
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SPEAKER_00: I think of Malcolm X.
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SPEAKER_00: He was raised as a Christian,
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SPEAKER_00: and during the first half of his life he was, I think it is fair to say, a scumbag.
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SPEAKER_00: He went to prison,
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SPEAKER_00: where scumbags sometimes find themselves,
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SPEAKER_00: and in prison he converted to an unusual form of Islam, the Nation of Islam.
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SPEAKER_00: Did the Nation of Islam make Malcolm X good?
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SPEAKER_00: That's a difficult question.
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SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you think of Malcolm X's politics or his brand
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SPEAKER_00: of civil rights activism, if that's what you call it.
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SPEAKER_00: But I will say this,
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SPEAKER_00: among the most prominent civil rights leaders in the 1960s,
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SPEAKER_00: Malcolm X would be my nomination for the most pious,
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SPEAKER_00: the most dedicated to personal holiness
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SPEAKER_00: Does Christianity make you good?
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SPEAKER_00: I hope I have illustrated that the question entails complexities.
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SPEAKER_00: And we haven't even explored what the term good means and who gets to decide.
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SPEAKER_00: That question is certainly worth exploring as Socrates does in Plato's Republic
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SPEAKER_00: and Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.
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SPEAKER_00: But assuming for the moment that we are in a position to judge the good,
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SPEAKER_00: that our own moral formation has enlightened us on this score so that we know
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SPEAKER_00: the good when we see it,
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SPEAKER_00: I think we've seen here that you can be good and not be a Christian,
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SPEAKER_00: perhaps an atheist,
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SPEAKER_00: perhaps a Muslim,
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SPEAKER_00: and you can be good while being a Christian,
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SPEAKER_00: and you can be a Christian while And a pretty terrible person.
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SPEAKER_00: But there is more to say.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm grateful that Frederick Douglass had more to say on Christianity than simply
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SPEAKER_00: that it made his master worse.
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SPEAKER_00: And we'll want to pay close attention to his comments.
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SPEAKER_00: And we should consider again that Christian pastor who refused to take in
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SPEAKER_00: the Jewish infant when approached by Corrie Ten Boom.
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SPEAKER_00: But let me remind you of two points before closing the current episode.
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SPEAKER_00: There is a Christian doctrine of sanctification,
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SPEAKER_00: which entails that you should grow in your likeness to Christ.
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SPEAKER_00: The entire point of Christianity is for us to be conformed to Christ,
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SPEAKER_00: to become increasingly Christ-like.
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SPEAKER_00: If you want a proof text, see Romans 8 verse 29 or Galatians 4 verse 19.
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SPEAKER_00: But really the entire Bible is on this theme.
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SPEAKER_00: Again, let me just say the phrase fruit of the spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: We are grateful for examples like Casper Ten Boom, who shows us that such growth is possible.
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SPEAKER_00: Second, the Bible talks about the possibility that we might quench the spirit.
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SPEAKER_00: That's 1 Thessalonians 5.19.
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SPEAKER_00: It seems obvious to me that Frederick Douglass' enslaver had done this exact thing.
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SPEAKER_00: And others whom I've mentioned here,
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SPEAKER_00: we will want to talk about ways of allowing the Spirit to do its work.
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SPEAKER_00: Becoming a Christian does not mean that you're a good person or even
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SPEAKER_00: that you're becoming a good person.
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SPEAKER_00: It does mean that over the course of years,
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SPEAKER_00: you ought to To become a better person than you have been,
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SPEAKER_00: but it very well might not have this desired effect.
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SPEAKER_00: As the martyr Stephen reminds us,
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SPEAKER_00: there are many religious people who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart
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SPEAKER_00: and ears and who make it a habit to resist the Holy Spirit This is
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SPEAKER_00: the fate we would like to avoid, this hostility toward God.
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SPEAKER_00: We'll consider this point next time.