Posted by Parker English
on 7/4/2009, 10:11 pm, in reply to "Re: Scandals"
70.181.59.171
You’re right to emphasize that standard doctrine distinguishes a Christian’s having a right to judge the social acceptability of someone else’s behavior from their not having a right to judge someone else’s salvation. But I’ve been hoping that Carter’s comment about condemnation and pride meant more than this.
Part of what’s more for me is something with which you might agree, that we should be leery of punishing someone else’s social behavior. This is a standard lesson drawn from the admonition against casting a first stone, typically interpreted as a warning against hypocrisy.
But I hope Carter meant even more than this. After all, he denies that he philanders in the flesh even while talking about those who do. So, he wouldn’t himself be hypocritical in condemning such people on social grounds. Yet Carter forbears doing it even on those grounds.
Perhaps this means only that Carter condemns the sin without condemning the sinner, but would nonetheless recommend the sinner cease the sin. More likely, he means more. On the one hand, he associates condemnation-avoidance with avoiding pride in one’s relative goodness. On the other hand, he does this while warning against treating any type of understanding as so absolutely true that further truth-searching is unnecessary.
Many Americans have recently increased respect for the latter point. The reason is their recognizing Bush led us to the second war in Iraq largely on the basis of a poorly examined understanding of wmd’s and al Qaeda-links, itself based on data from sources officially identified as unreliable. What I hope Carter’s comment meant is that we should try to inoculate ourselves against such mistakes by avoiding pride in our relative goodness, our city-on-the-hill self-image.
This includes the way we understand social institutions such as marriage as well as the way we understand international relations. Consider, for example, a view of marriage as a contract of convenience to be terminated if that convenience evaporates, the view of England’s Henry VIII. My hope is that Carter was inviting us to avoid condemning someone like Henry even if he acted on his lust for Anne before his marriage to Catherine was annulled. The reason is my understanding that such an approach enhances compassion, and that society benefits at least when this is combined with reasonable support for social responsibilities.
Granted, that understanding is defeasible. Within it, however, Carter’s comment was not gratuitous. Rather, it was a risky invitation by example to individual self-examination, something recommended on a national scale by many of our allies who think us arrogant.
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