Peter Edman
While updating things for our Online Store this morning, I had to mark a Reading as out-of-print (Amazing Grace) and was reminded of the other Readings that have sold out and that we’ve decided for various reasons not to reprint.
One of those is “You Are the Man,” the second Reading we ever did, an excerpt from sociologist Peter Berger’s book The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (Doubleday 1961) with a foreword by Os Guinness. Os wrote:
Unquestionably, our greatest challenge is not the fictions of totalitarian tyrannies or of Western consumer fantasies. It comes from the rationalizations of our own minds, the fictions of our own imaginations, and the deceptions of our own hearts. “Living in truth” is a prerequisite of personal integrity before it is one of public life. All of us who do not wish to be exposed some day should live by submitting ourselves to truth every day. The way of faith turns the way of the world upside down. Instead of concealing our worst and revealing our best, we are called to do the reverse. After all, as Jesus taught and modern psychology underscores, we are our secrets, not our PR. It is truth in the hidden life that counts. The story of David is worth pondering.
Our excerpt, apparently postscript to the book, is a meditation on the story of David and Bathsheba, and the prophet Nathan’s method to get David to recognize his own guilt. The ending deserves a wider audience. I’ve highlighted a couple phrases below, but first, another quote to whet your appetite (echoes of Postman, anybody?):
The natural inclinations of man lead him to take society for granted, to identify himself fully with the social roles assigned to him, and to develop ideologies which will organize and dispose of any doubts that might possibly arise. There is an instructive affinity between Christian faith and the analytic enterprise of the social sciences in that both serve to disturb this happy state of affairs . . . The debunking effect of social-scientific analysis is far from contradictory to this prophetic mission. Indeed, it might be called its profane auxiliary. The smashing of idols, with whatever hammers, is the underside of prophecy. (p. 204)
And now the closing of the book:
David’s sin is pitilessness. It is the sacrifice of what is dearest in another’s life for the routine needs of one’s own existence. Bathsheba’s virtue and safety are sacrificed to David’s momentary lust, just as the poor man’s lamb is sacrificed for the miserly ostentatiousness of his rich oppressor. And Uriah’s life is sacrificed for the temporary exigencies of royal prestige and raison d’état. What is life or death to one man becomes a matter of convenience or inconvenience to another. And so the life of Caryl Chessman was spared for the convenience of President Eisenhower’s trip to South America. When there was no more danger of the President being even slightly inconvenienced by Chessman’s death, the way was open for the gas chamber. With all the relativities of time and history, the way is not so long from the walls of Rabbah to those of San Quentin. And the voice of God’s judgment remains the same now as then.
The story does not end with Nathan’s condemnation of David. David acknowledges the odious identification with the rich man in Nathan’s story. David repents and he is forgiven. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once referred to David as a shadow of Christ in the Old Testament. The story of David’s sin is not only one of judgment but also one of grace. What concerns us most, however, is the relationship of both judgment and grace to the process of David’s perception of himself. The encounter with God brushes aside all the pet illusions with which men hide themselves from their own conscience. Nothing but the truth is good enough then. As men confront God’s address they also perceive themselves in a new—that is, a more truthful—way.
We would venture to argue that in this “You are the man” of our story lies the essence of Christian humanism. And this Christian humanism involves not only moral imperatives but also perception. It means to see men as men and to address them as such. It means to ground all moral imperatives in men and not in institutionalized fictions. It means to see through the deceptions of social structure, through the web of bad faith and rationalization. There is a very great liberation in acquiring such perception, though even this liberation pales compared with that which comes from God’s eternal recognition of ourselves as men created and men redeemed—as Nathan said to David, “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”
Fodder, Character and Ethics, Meaning and Calling, Tue 05 Jul 2005
[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
A Cultural Manifesto and Showcase
China, Tibet, and the Olympics
The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up by Don Eberly.
A sweeping and hopeful overview of the extraordinary new forces that are prying open closed societies and cultivating democratic norms across the globe.
Orthodoxy: Georgetown’s Father Schall reviews G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy on its 100 year anniversary. “In coming to believe in Christianity, Chesterton, as he tells us, did not read a single Christian book in the process. Rather, he read book after book of those who maintained that Christianity could not possibly be true. After he had read many of these tractates, he suddenly realized that the intellectual opponents of Christianity were constantly contradicting themselves about what they were opposing. Chesterton, the most logical of men, figured that anything so odd as to be opposed for the exact opposite reasons must either be quite strange or, in fact, rather normal and true.” A helpful introduction to a lovely book. (James V. Schall, SJ, InsideCatholic.com , 2008 05 05)
Where Were Obama’s Friends?: Friendship under fire: “As for the supersized candidates, what strikes one most about them is their ‘aloneness.’ They look so solitary. Indeed, it is possible that the old and honorable notion of ‘standing with’ a candidate like Obama simply didn’t occur to his famous supporters this week. Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation’s presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.” Makes one pause. (Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal , 2008 05 01)
There’s no way you’re going to convince me: Catholic professor Scott Carson covers the current debates on evil between N T Wright and Bart Ehrman on Beliefnet: “[H]aving had a look at this most recent exchange I have to say that it continues to astound me how simplistic and thoughtless the popular treatment of the problem has become. . . . It’s as if generations of sophisticated and complex theological and philosophical argument amount to nothing when compared to the emotional attitudes of a single individual living in a highly particularized time and place. . . . Just as atheists and agnostics are often—perhaps way too often—tempted to assume that believers only believe for emotional or psychological reasons, so too, it seems rather obvious to me, every non-believer almost certainly has emotional and psychological reasons for not believing that will trump any and every legitimate argument posed against them.” (extensive links from the article to the primary sources) (An Examined Life , 2008 04 27)
The Way We Weren’t: “The fifties really were a time when the culture broadly affirmed Christianity as a Good Thing. I was there. I saw it; I heard it. And yet some kind of demurral is strongly indicated: some sign of recognition that no human society, whatever its good intentions and methods, has lived unburdened, unencumbered by the crushing weight of human fallenness. Good as life may appear to have been in the cities and universities of France and Italy in the thirteenth century, or amid the sweaty fervor of the camp meetings in nineteenth-century America, or among the fierce faith of the emancipators, always human pride and general nuttiness were there to spoil the broth.” (William Murchison, in Touchstone , 2008 04 23)
• Not on Sale (2008 04 14)
• Seven New Deadly Sins, Suitably Updated (2008 04 10)
• The Pope Comes to America (2008 04 09)
• Both Read the Same Bible (2008 04 09)
• Muslims Outnumber World’s Catholics (2008 03 31)
