Letter #126: Is This the Real World?

Or a Christian Fantasy?

Spenoza,

I met Nino too. I was the one who had to break it to him that everyone secretly thought his wife-beater t-shirts made him look sleazy, but they didn’t want to offend him because his sriracha chicken pizza was a masterpiece.

Come to think of it, that may have been a different Nino. Never mind.

As for your Nino — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — his sriracha chicken was only so-so, but he really did have a good point when he said, “I don’t think Jesus wants the poor to be helped as much as he wants you to be the one that helps them.” That doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t care about the poor, of course. It means Jesus had no illusions about what charity can and can’t do. When Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you,” he was echoing Deuteronomy 15, where Moses tells the Israelites, “There will always be poor people in the land,” but if you “give generously” to them, “the Lord will bless you.”

In other words, charity is a practice that helps create, in the giver, the sort of soul that God will bless. Gratitude is the practice that shapes the soul of the receiver. Welfare programs eliminate both charity and gratitude, and I will leave it to others to reckon the effects of that on our souls.

But neither charity nor gratitude nor welfare will “leave the world better than we found it,” because the world — meaning the moral state of society — doesn’t actually get any better, not really, not taken in general over time. Technology improves the quality of human lives, but the quality of human hearts tends to remain pretty much what it is. We live in the sort of world where the best of men will be crucified, mostly because the best of men will make the rest of men look bad, and expose their fine projects and high-sounding philosophies as so much moral sawdust.

That, in fact, is the very story of the gospel: the best of men crucified. And if we don’t understand that, we don’t understand what a pretty word like love will actually look like in the real world.

But our faith is not in the world where the best man is crucified. It’s in the resurrection of the crucified best man. And our only evidence that the resurrection is real is the text of the Bible. That is why I wrote this month’s essay: because it matters so much that we read the Bible as if it were a witness to reality written by real people writing and acting in the ways real people write and act.

Which brings me back to my point about the trans-human time we are entering. What we are discussing — as Christians, what we are always discussing — is not how to save mankind from the machines, but how to save the only thing we can save, namely our individual souls.

Love, Dad