{"id":37002,"date":"2024-04-02T14:20:36","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T21:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=37002"},"modified":"2024-03-22T14:30:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T21:30:01","slug":"morality-dignity-and-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/morality-dignity-and-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Morality, Dignity, and Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent review in the New Yorker on Marilynn Robinson\u2019s recent book Reading Genesis[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, James Wood held back few punches.[2]<\/a> Though a respecter of Robinson as a writer, Wood holds her religion in contempt. Wood entertains his readers with plentiful depictions of the Christian (particularly Calvinist) tradition that, though occasionally fair and meriting robust dialogue, are predictable and unimaginative strawman rhetoric. Wood attests \u201cFar from obviously being good, the God of the Hebrew Bible come up short, morally.\u201d He continues a few paragraphs later, \u201cif the Bible is properly thought of as a human text, then all of its moral discussion is human, and one can quite easily ground oneself in a morality that is both perfectly Biblical and perfectly God-less-since God, in the Bible at least, is a literary creation.\u201d [3]<\/a><\/p>\n

This argument begs the question of the location of morality\u2019s inception. According to Wood, it comes not from God, but from human writings. Morality is a human invention. But then this leaves the question \u201cWhere did humans come up with morality?\u201d unanswered. I personally do not believe that apart from God us humans are that clever. Apart from God, morality comes down to a social Darwinian \u201cSurvival of the fittest tribe over the other.\u201d And yet, in Western culture, there is a bent toward a morality that seeks the care of the most vulnerable. Ironically, the moral basis from which Wood judges the God of the Hebrew Bible would not be possible without the intellectual tradition of the Hebrew people. Historian Thomas Cahill wrote about the influence of the Jewish tradition in Western culture and the overall progress of human history in his book The Gift of the Jews.[4]<\/a> Cahill contends in this brilliant work \u201cMost of our best words, in fact\u2014new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice are the gifts of the Jews.\u201d[5]<\/a> Cahill later writes, \u201cAll who share this outrageous dream of universal brotherhood, peace, and justice, who dream the dreams and see the visions of the great prophets, must bring themselves to contemplate the possibility that without God there is no justice.\u201d[6]<\/a> The basis of morality to which Wood holds God is, in itself, a Judeo-Christian concept.<\/p>\n

As Cahill revealed the entangled web of Jewish influence in our modern world, so Tom Holland continues the thread with Christianity. In a time when Western culture in general, with Christianity in particular, has long since fallen out of favor with the cultural left, Holland ambitiously attempts, and masterfully executes, a seeming impossibility: tracing through two thousand years the influence of Christianity on Western culture. He convincingly argues that it is the very air we breathe.<\/p>\n

Even in Europe \u2014 a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States \u2014 the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Throughout his over 500-page excursion through Western history, Holland highlights the theme of innate dignity every individual possesses, merely based on the fact that one is made in the imago dei, and how it shapes our morality today. One example is the abolition of slavery via the unassuming Quaker Benjamin Lay.[8]<\/a> Lay and his wife, Sarah, compelled by their faith and a catalytic moment seeing a physically abused African slave, committed their lives to abolishing slavery. In the words of Holland, \u201cBenjamin Lay had succeeded, by the time of his death in 1759, in making the community in which he had lived just that little bit more like him\u2014 in making it just that little bit more progressive.\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

Progress, innate dignity, and morality. The intellectual foundation of these ideas was laid by the Jewish tradition. The Christian tradition took these concepts, reoriented around the truly righteous and faithful Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, and changed the world. The effects, and societal benefits of the change are taken for granted by us all \u2013 including Mr. Wood.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis<\/em> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> James Wood, \u201cWhen Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, March 4, 2024, https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2024\/03\/11\/reading-genesis-marilynne-robinson-book-review.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels<\/em> (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 241.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Ibid., 252.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World<\/em>, First US edition (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 533.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Ibid., 379-386.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Ibid., 386.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent review in the New Yorker on Marilynn Robinson\u2019s recent book Reading Genesis[1], James Wood held back few punches.[2] Though a respecter of Robinson as a writer, Wood holds her religion in contempt. Wood entertains his readers with plentiful depictions of the Christian (particularly Calvinist) tradition that, though occasionally fair and meriting robust […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2347,2627],"class_list":["post-37002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp01","tag-holland","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37007,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37002\/revisions\/37007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}