Theodore Dalrymple, in my opinion one of the most interesting writers today, writes over at City Journal about two separate books written about famous English serial murderers. Though the authors were born only a decade apart, they write as if from different worlds. Dalrymple contrasts the two accounts in order to highlight how western culture has changed within living memory.
But the woman of lesser education and humbler occupation displays in her book a much higher level of intellectual sophistication and moral intelligence than her more educated junior. Where one is modest, self-effacing, and straightforward, the other is grandiose and egotistical, her capacity to see clearly clouded by a combination of self-importance and obfuscatory pseudo-intellection. I believe that this contrast results not only from individual differences between the two women but from the different cultural environments in which they grew up and subsequently wrote. A week, said Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics; and it seems that ten years is a long time in the history of a culture.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Dalrymple’s analysis of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. But I do agree with him that the concept has been entirely corrupted in modern times. I sometimes think that although western culture proudly regards itself as having cast off the shackles of Christianity, it has in fact only sunk into Christian heresy, with the labels switched to confuse the rubes. The theological act of forgiveness has been transformed into a vague principle that we are all morally obligated to forgive everything – even the most horrific crimes – because in fact they’re not crimes at all and there’s nothing to forgive. Our enemy, our tormenter, our murderer, is not a heinous malefactor but merely a fellow victim, the object of forces over which he had no control.
That’s not what Christian forgiveness means. Christianity grants to the sinner the dignity of responsibility. It has been argued that the doctrine of hell is the greatest compliment Christian theology ever paid to the human race. To say that someone is responsible, and to hold them responsible, is to attribute to them the dignity of free agency, declaring them a person capable of choice, rather than just an object subject to blind manipulation.
As in so many cases, it all comes down to what you think human beings are.
Would I be splitting hairs to suggest that Dalrymple’s assessment of cultural differences doesn’t go far enough? The basic differences lie in the foundational worldview on which the cultures are built not in the culture itself. I wonder if Partington’s confusion isn’t rooted in the basic philosophy of moral relativism. Confronting evil from a worldview that says there is no right or wrong leaves one in a quandry.
Lars, how does free agency work with predestination? Or am I misunderstanding Lutheran Christianity?
The short answer is that it’s a mystery. Most Lutherans, I believe, find a way to believe in both without figuring out how it works. Because it can’t be done.
I go back to a metaphor I’ve used before. A man asks a woman who loves him to marry him. She says yes. Is her act free or unfree? A scientist may say it’s completely determined and she has no choice. She herself would say it’s the freest act she ever performed.
I agree with Lars on Christian forgiveness, but don’t confuse Timothy Dalrymple with Theodore Dalrymple. The article in City Journal was by Theodore. Timothy is an editor at Patheos.com. He is also a fine essayist, I believe. Theodore is a physician by training and had written a number of books, including one of my favorite collections of his essays, “Life at the Bottom”.
Noted and corrected. Thank you.