CAN WE LIVE A VIRTUOUS LIFE FOR LONG WITHOUT CHRIST?

A husband wrote to a Stoic-Advisor about his adulterous wife. This advisor supplied many important and sensitive pieces of advice, but he also added:

·       Your wife, according to your description, has been ungrateful, arrogant, and deceitful. But she has done these things because of her lack of wisdom, so she needs to be pitied and helped, not condemned.

I certainly agree that “she needs to be pitied and helped, not condemned.” I also agree that she had acted out of a “lack of wisdom.” She has caused irreparable damage to her family and four children, and the costs are likely to multiply.

However, is her betrayal just a matter of a cost/benefit analysis – how the different parties will either pay or prosper?

This is pragmatism – the overriding concern about results. Interestingly, God is also pragmatic. Consequently, He created this world in such a way that we experience the costs of sin and the benefits of living virtuously. For example, when we apologize for our sin, we experience a sense of relief.

However, this pragmatic relationship (virtue-->benefit) is only an indication of the truth and not the substance itself. It functions like a shadow alerting us to the reality that had cast the shadow.

If this is so, then costs and benefits are mere pointers to the reality of moral truths emanating from the mind and nature of God Himself who created us in His likeness in order that we would know Him. This also means that pragmatic considerations should not be independent of the God from whom they come any more than a shadow can be independent of the object (moral truths) and the Light Himself that casts it.

What is the relevance of this to moral questions like adultery? While, in the long run, the pragmatic life is both the virtuous life and the heaven-bound life. Why? If we are truly pragmatic, we will accept the Light, believe that Jesus died for our sins, and live accordingly. This life is associated with many benefits – physically, psychologically, familially, and even societally, as Jesus had taught in the Sermon on the Mount:

·       But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these [necessary] things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:33; ESV)

However, we humans are blind and short-sighted. We convince ourselves that our best interests are best served by immediate gratification, like by having a fling. In fact, the substance of human history is a grand display of the pursuit of immediate gratification and its consequences. Nor will any amount of education be able to change this as long as we are hot-wired to our emotions and desires.

Perhaps this husband will be able to convince his wife to stay put in the family for her own good. However, deeper questions and longings will remain giving rise to resentment and self-pity that she is now stuck in a less-than-exciting-and-romantic relationship. Yes, she can still dream about what it could be like with another, but this will just increase her dissatisfaction with her marriage.

Can we expect pragmatic considerations to penetrate deeply enough to turn around her dissatisfaction? Not really. Instead, she would need a frame-of-reference that transcends the immediate. She would need to believe that:

·       maintaining her marriage represented the ultimate good.

·       this good isn’t just a social convention or creation but that it represented the unchanging truth of God.

·       the real payoff would be an eternal heaven.

·       God saw and rejoiced in her obedience to Him.

·       God would work everything out and even give her a greater temporal blessing.

·       Her temporal desires and fulfillments are both illusory and temporary.

·       she is not alone in her struggles, but that God’s Spirit is intimately involved, even suffering along with her.

·       the Spirit will actually make real for her the beauty or her husband and commitment to him.

A morally relativistic and godless world is incapable of imparting to her this necessary perspective and Divine assistance.

There is a related issue – her objective culpability (OC), which the Stoic-Advisor has glossed over. Since this advisor is an atheist, he has no basis to affirm an OC. Ultimately, when someone does wrong, it is merely the result of their lack of wisdom to do otherwise. Consequently, the solution is more and better education – an education that necessarily denies OC and the justice of punishment.

This is the condition of the secular West. While I doubt my prophetic abilities, I think that such a belief will bring about the destruction of the West, something that we are beginning to see as our treasury of Christian habits of thinking is quickly being spent.