christianity, heroism, ethics

The highest priority in Christian ethics is to be a hero, to do something extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult. This begins with the altar call, which is a conversion from cowardice to heroism, weakness to strength.

The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.

Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!

Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.

The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?

Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.

God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.

In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.

Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.