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Christian Nationalism
Within my own circles this is rather a hot topic, but I've yet to see it discussed in this forum. Christian evangelicalism has had its own version of the culture war; to whit, how involved and in what manner should Christians (both individually and the Church) be engaged in society and politics. There are factions of "Big Eva" who seem to be moving more Left (see the recent "He gets us" commercial in the Super Bowl). There are those who think that the "third-way"ism of Tim Keller (taking a high road that transcends politics and culture war) is still relevant in these days (from my perspective, with echos of Martin Niemoller). And there are those who are actively seeking a more aggressive and explicitly Christian approach to governance and policy. For those interested, a useful taxonomy provided by the Gospel Coalition describes to a reasonable first approximation the different approaches that Christians have to our current moment.
I have had my own journey in the direction of Christian Nationalism (though I wouldn't...yet...apply that label to myself). While in college I was a pro-life Ron Paul libertarian, over the years I've become less individualistic as I've grown in my faith. I used to think of religion as a private exercise. I know recognize the centrality of community. I even have begun to entertain the idea that there may be salvific consequences for those who are under the authority of a Christian leader. If the unbelieving spouse can be sanctified by his or her believing counterpart, and an entire house can be baptized when the head of the house believes, could there not be salvation extended to a nation whose head of state is an orthodox Christian and whose government practices the precepts of the Word? (If you are interested in more of my ramblings on this topic, https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/what-is-christianitys-role-in-culture and https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/on-theocracy-and-redemption)
Christianity in America has enjoyed centuries of being a dominant culture. Many Christians, having grown up in a culture that was at least outwardly compatible with Christianity, have slipped into casual acceptance of cultural norms. They are in the world, and of the world. In many cases self-proclaimed Christians are functionally agnostic, with no significant lifestyle differences from Atheists. Do we really believe Christ is Lord or do we not? Do we not believe in divine judgement and divine mercy? Is Church a weekly therapeutic exercise or is it a place where we meet the transcendent and drink of the body and the blood? Christian Nationalism, at its core, recognizes the reality and consequence of a world in which Christ is Lord. There is no "third way", there is only God's way. (For a somewhat related essay on the reality of God, see https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/christianity-and-culture-continued).
There is a common assumption among Christians that all sin is equally damning. Man can never follow the Law, and Jesus even makes it clear that the Law didn't go far enough (the Law allows divorce, and does not explicitly proscribe lust). At the individual level, this assumption is correct. Outside the atonement found in Jesus, we all stand condemned. Yet at the societal level, there are varying levels of alignment with God's will. Every single person in Nazi Germany was a sinner. Every single person in 1941 USA was a sinner. Yet it would be an unusual Christian who would argue that 1941 USA was not more aligned with God's will than Nazi Germany. Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned. Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay. Christian Nationalism, perhaps alone among contemporary strands of Christian thought, fully acknowledges these implications.
This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.
(I leave aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism and non-DCT metaethics as interesting but very widely condemned by Christians.)
If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.
I think that this is the better option for what you want to say. Even if all sins are equally sinful, you can still coherently argue that different societies have different propensities to sin vs. redemption. A hardline Christian DCT fan can still reason in a consequentialist way about maximising the probability of redemption and minimising the probability of sins.
Every sin, no matter how "small", condemns us. However, at a societal level there is a clear distinction between a population that occasionally looks on someone with lust, and a population that murders and rapes babies.
Yes, I noted that a Christian can say that there are differences. It's just debatable whether Christianity gives one a basis to say that there is a difference of moral superiority, rather than e.g. a difference of predisposition towards sinful behaviour; of course, that's not an insignificant difference from a Christian perspective!
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I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.
Sure he didn't provide a comprehensive list but he did on many occasions outright define a hierarchy of sins.
Matt. 22:36-40:
Matt. 23:23
I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.
What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.
On Matthew 22, the key term here is magos (μεγας) which is used in the New Testament to mean largest or highest in rank, just as "greatest" is ambiguous in English. One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank. If humans truly had complete faith and love for God, then they would neither commit adultery in their hearts, nor murder.
Note I'm not saying that this is common sense, but just a natural implication of an unranked DCT.
Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.
All of these are quite clear examples of more disobedience.
You conveniently ignore the second part of that, which is loving thy neighbor. I agree that all sins violate the first commandment, but not all sins violate the second, so why, according to Divine Command Theory, is it explicitly placed above all other commandments?
You should at least address both of my examples before accusing me of not providing enough. Jesus explicitly says that judgment, mercy, and faith are "weightier" than small tithes; a strong implication that obeying such commandments is straightforwardly more important.
There is plenty of direct evidence contradicting your interpretation of Divine Command Theory and very little actually supporting it. I can't think of a single passage anywhere in the Bible which comes close to saying "all instances of sin are equal" whereas I came up with two off the top of my head which contradict that. The closest I can think of is James 2:10:
This might sound bad for my position, but read the very next verse:
and I think it becomes clear that he's more referring to whether someone has transgressed the law or not. In this sense, yes, one sin does make you a sinner, but it doesn't mean that that sin is exactly perfectly equal to any other sin.
I'm interested in why you think DCT holds any weight at all. What evidence is there for it?
But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity. So while there is more disobedience, it doesn't seem to make a moral difference: someone who commits one sin is treated by God exactly the same as if they've committed them all.
If all other sins (breaking of God's commands) are implicit in the first commandment, then it isn't.
That's one possible interpretation of the text. However, the text itself is not a contradiction, since it's not clear that Jesus is saying that these are more morally important, as opposed to e.g. important for spiritual development (the context is condemning the religious practices of scribes and Pharisees.
Biblically? One advantage is that it (allegedly) explains why a benevolent Father would punish his children in a lake of fire for the slightest infraction of his will, excepting grace. More generally, it neatly answers the Problem of Evil which otherwise perplexes the Bible (Job in particular; the Jews' efforts to explain their suffering in spite of being God's people; Jesus's partial revelation to humanity) as there is no separate standard of morality by which God can be judged. On a DCT view, God being anything other than perfectly good is a category mistake. This is not so much grasping one of the Euthyphro Dilemma's horns as try to ride it off into the sunset.
Maybe "traditional christianity" is doing some work here that I'm unaware of, but I'm going to assume that the text of the bible is still in play.
The bible does absolutely give us at least two classes of sin, with different punishments. For most sinners, once they have committed a sin, they are given a chance to repent and be forgiven. But for those that blaspheme against the holy spirit, this option is cut off (Matthew 12:31). It would seem to be a reasonable interpretation of the words of Christ here that at least 1 sin is viewed more harshly by the divine.
Those are different conditions of forgiveness/non-forgiveness (given grace) not different punishments.
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Well I'm not a believer in "traditional" Christianity i.e. medieval Christianity. That said I don't think this is an accurate framing. It's not that all sins are equal, it's that without grace, one sin of any magnitude is sufficient to send you to hell. This doesn't imply that all sins are exactly the same in magnitude.
Well why was it named as the second commandment then, the one which in addition to the first supports the rest of the law and prophets? Clearly it has some sort of exalted position over the other commandments. There's no way Jesus was just referring to chronological order when he called it the second commandment.
I was more looking for verses that say this directly, the way I've been finding verses which directly contradict this. There are many explanations for theodicy, and this one seems to have a lot of contradictory evidence.
Many Christians do believe that God can say what's good and what's bad, but I'd argue that most of this is a practical belief rather than a theoretical one. It's not that God is defining good and bad, it's that he's right about what good and bad are, and if you disagree with him you'll always be wrong. However to describe it as I have--God as a perfect, omnipotent being, but not one who actually invented the concept of morality--is to "limit" God and so was seen as increasingly unpopular and heretical by the medieval Church.
So I won't argue that DCT isn't popular but I don't think the Bible supports it at all.
It's not the only explanation, but if God doesn't treat them as morally different, it indicates that they are morally equal. If there was a moral distinction, wouldn't that (a) be made clear in the Bible and (b) factor into punishments?
Some sort, maybe, but it doesn't follow that this distinction is a moral one. For example, it could be more important as a test of faith than some other commandments, which is not the same as being more morally significant.
I think that the Bible was created by scholars and outlaws in a largely illiterate and philosophically alien time, with no more or less divine inspiration than any of the other thousands of bewildering religious texts that have emerged from human minds, so it doesn't surprise me that this sort of issue is not made clear in the Bible, any more than it doesn't surprise me that the Bible doesn't actually give a clear answer to the Problem of Evil (for instance, the Book of Job raises more questions than answers, e.g. what is God doing chatting with Satan and playing tricks on mortals like some Olympian or Norse deity?) or to avoid about 1500 years of debate on whether the Holy Spirit processes from the Father or from the Father and the Son.
I'm not too sure about the exact history, but I do know that Augustine was a divine command theorist. I wouldn't be surprised if the question is anachronistic in the context of early Christianity, so if you asked Paul or Jesus, they'd say something that unsettled you further. Perhaps Paul would say something about miasma or the Word being the Good, while Jesus might throw you off by saying that your conceptual framing is wrong: there is intentional sin and rebellion... and unintentional sin.
That may well be true.
I don't believe that any sin will land you in hell, but again, even if one did, that doesn't mean they're punished equally, or that equal punishments are the full extent of God's treatment of them on a moral level. Many Christians believe in different levels of hell. Also, God could punish all sins equally but still consider some worse than others.
It is made clear in the Bible. I can keep finding verses, I bet there are at least a few dozen on this level, but Luke 12:47-48, Ezekiel 8:13, and John 19:11 all clearly indicate the existence of greater and lesser sins.
Proverbs 6:16-19 directly mentions a few sins which God hates more than other sins.
It certainly factors punishments too, both divine and temporal. The Law of Moses punishes different sins differently, and Jesus on many occasions implies that the punishment for some sins is worse than others.
For example Matthew 18:6 says:
Again, I'm sure I can find plenty more, but there are quite explicit verses talking about different punishments for different sins. At this point we've established:
What exactly is left in the meaning of one sin being more "morally" important than another? To me it sounds like you're relying on that word when we've already extracted all meaning from it. I'm not aware of any verse where someone explicitly says "X commandment is morally more important than Y commandment" but again all of the relevant meanings of the word moral that I can think of are covered in pretty much exactly that way.
So, based on conversation of expected evidence, the fact that the Bible is clear about the opposite, and clearly mentions multiple times the existence of greater and lesser sins, the greater punishment assigned to greater sins, and the increased importance which God puts upon those greater sins, should surprise you at least a little. Such an incoherent and illiterate book should not have been so clear about such an esoteric issue.
I can just keep finding verses that directly back me up, whereas your point is so much more indirect and relies on weird, esoteric, indirect readings of verses whose plain meaning is fairly obvious.
Augustine is a lot later than my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) believes the early Christian church fell into apostasy. At the latest it happened with the Nicene Creed which happened decades before Augustine was born.
As far as the other two, "maybe you're wrong!" is really not a strong argument or worth mentioning at all.
If your point is that DCT is wrong, and therefore early Christianity is wrong, well, I agree with you there. But to claim the Bible preaches DCT, and then fall back on "well the Bible is incoherent so it's no surprise it's not very clear about supporting DCT" after I've found multiple clear passages opposing DCT, is too far. It sounds less like you have an actual opinion regarding what the Bible teaches, and more like you've discovered an obviously-wrong interpretation of the Bible and are trying to use it to prove that the Bible is also obviously wrong.
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Matthew 12:31 even states that blasphemy against God the Father is forgiven whereas blasphemy against the Spirit is not, which is a blow to DCT because you would expect the opposite given that the Spirit proceeds from the Father according to Trinitarians. Then 12:37 specifies the two greatest commandments on which the whole of the law rests. But you can probably make DCT compatible with some kind of ranked utilitarian ethical formulation given that the underlying meaning of “feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, visiting the poor and imprisoned” is clearly signaling that we have an obligation toward another’s Ultimate Happiness, using particularly salient examples, rather than being an exhaustive list of ethical obligations. God, perhaps, commands that we see ethics as a means of promoting the greatest feasible sum happiness in a community.
Historical Christian theology has tended towards an eccentric form of virtue ethics, which doesn’t completely exclude divine command theory.
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