I’ve claimed that we can see the world, at least after Jesus Christ’s ascension to His Father, as being the story of the growth and development of the Body of Christ, including the evolution and development of the organs of that Body. We can read the main purposes of God as Creator out of this story, not just purposes regarding the physical stuff around us but even our moral obligations to each other.
To realize God’s purposes for us, we need to more strongly intend membership in the Body of Christ, that is, we need to move toward that membership making God’s purposes our own as best we can. This sort of a Christian viewpoint complicates, even fundamentally changes, a Christian’s movement toward salvation. The Body of Christ is the communal us in full union with Jesus Christ. That Body is alive in this mortal realm, developing and growing, sinning as well as working for the good.
We need to act as morally courageous individuals, but we Christians, Jews as well, are communal beings as well as individuals. We Christians travel together in the Body of Christ. Since we can’t be sure who is truly in that Body, not even our own selves, then we must treat all human beings as being members or at least as being potential recruits before their mortal lives are ended. This doesn’t mean we need to be squishy toward others, forgiving when we have no right to forgive. It doesn’t mean we should give up our right to legitimate defense of ourselves or others under our care, though there are some other and more plausible arguments for a radically non-resistant attitude in Christians.
Let me try to deal with a specific moral question: What responsibilities do we have toward those who can’t care for themselves? Do we have any responsibilities toward those who seem to be missing some of the attributes of human nature, not being able to socialize or perhaps being stuck in a coma with few signs of brain activity because of an accident or because they were born missing some major brain regions? Can we serve God by fighting against the mechanisms of evolution as God ordained them to be in this sometime nasty world? Do we want those with low IQs or the impulsive tendencies of criminals to leave behind children and grandchildren? If such human creatures survive to a long life in this world, can they enjoy their years in the way of a true human being? Should we be extending charity to those who have problems and may well produce children with similar problems?
I discussed the relationship between progressives and eugenics programs which sterilize those declared “defective” in Progressives as Typical Modern Thinkers but I didn’t try to address the issue of natural selection. Are we fighting God’s story when we keep alive those who clearly wouldn’t be able to survive on their own in, say, a radically individualistic civilization? Not that I think such a civilization could ever form.
There are various lines of analysis which can lead to possibly consistent answers to this sort of questions. Some of those answers draw a line in the sand—on this side, human, but not human on the other side. Some of those answers, Christian or Jewish, find it difficult to exclude any creature which might be human. In fact, there is a rule at least as ancient as the first generation of Christians: we should treat any creature which might be human as if it were fully human. Even if the creature is missing much of a human brain and is incapable of even moving toward food, we should care for him and treat him with the respect we wish for our own intact selves.
I’m raising this somewhat complex question, which I’ve asked in slightly different forms before, only to say we should contemplate possible answers but realize there is no way to provide an answer which all men will accept. This is the story God chose to tell: that of the Son of God emptying Himself of His divinity to live as a creature, to enjoy life, to suffer, to die in a humiliating and painful way, and to raised from the grave as a perfect union of God and man that He might ascend to the world of the resurrected to one day be reunited in the Body of Christ with all of those He chooses to be His friends and companions, part of His own Body, for time without end. Suffering is part of that story. Some can’t accept that an all-good Creator would create realms of being in which suffering plays a major and necessary role. Some have defective but seeming rational reasons and some have merely allowed their feelings to be deformed by a squeamishness masquerading as compassion. Most of these dissenters against the Christian position about the goodness of this world of both pleasure and suffering have good motives, however defective their reasoning or their feeling. We need to respect these Christians of wavering faith as well as the many non-Christians. We need to evangelize them properly and we need to start by realizing that we modern Christians as a community have no good story in which the sufferings of Jesus Christ, the sufferings of a child with inoperable brain cancer, biological evolution, and Christian beliefs come together as other than a pagan tragedy. We have mostly ungrounded assertions, largely drawn from past centuries when they might have been grounded in premodern understandings of this world and what might lie beyond it.
We are saved as members of that Body and not as individuals. We can understand a little better what that Body is by learning from the works of evolutionary biologists studying the social natures of living creatures, especially human beings: see The Body of Christ: A Christian Sociobiology for a very preliminary effort to adopt sociobiological concepts into Christian thought. After all, the Body of Christ first forms as a community in this mortal realm, a community of mortal men not yet fully in union with Jesus Christ.
Communities are real and have been made real by the processes described by evolutionary biologists doing sociobiological analyses. Communities are real and aren’t just ways of speaking about gatherings of individuals, as I argued recently in the essay, Are Communities a Form of Created Being?, where I wrote:
We modern believers in a radical and incoherent individualism deny too easily our raw perceptions of communal entities. We ignore the underlying being which can’t be explained to any significant extent by assembling our understanding of the constituent members and other parts. This is strange on the part of sacramental Christians; after all, some of the special bonds coming down to unite man and woman as a married couple, individuals as a Church, and mortal men as sharers of God’s life are brought about by those acts we call Sacraments. The more general, less special bonds are still knowable as the glue of a sacramental world.
Communities are for real, not just at the level of civilizations or of that ultimate community, a supernatural civilization of sorts: the Body of Christ. Marriages are real and not just contractual relationships; extended families are for real; towns and churches and synagogues and ethnic clubs and associations of scientists or lawyers are communities of real being and not just gatherings of individuals. We become members of communities, not just for defense against real or imaginary enemies, not just to sell pickup trucks and hamburgers to each other, not even just to form communities of worship. We become members of communities to become part of each other by becoming each the entire community in the small, so that the community can become each of us in the large. As God is three Persons in one God, we will ultimately be many human persons in one Body of Christ, billions of human beings in one perfect Man, made perfect because Jesus Christ is one of us.
Except for Jesus Christ, we men are all incomplete and defective. Not a one of us can claim to be more than a tiny and badly defective part of that complete and perfect man, but God will make up the shortfall for each and every man or woman or child He chooses to bring into the Body of Christ. We become complete and perfect by drawing upon each other in forming the one man, most of all by drawing upon our Lord Jesus Christ. Even Jesus Christ has chosen to be incomplete in a strong sense. He chose to become fully a member of a race of social mammals and will ever love those who are His own. He needs us, in a different way than we need Him, and He chose to need us. But He needs us to complete His Body in the world of the resurrection.
We are infinitely more defective than the Son of God, infinitely less complete than is that divine Person. In context, a young boy with a severe form of Muscular Dystrophy that prevents normal paths of human development isn’t so bad compared to the greatest of men. I don’t know that little boy will be taken up to Heaven but I don’t have a good reason to believe he won’t. He is one of God’s creatures, a member of a race of creatures adopted by God, and we should treat him as such. A human community extrapolated to some state of perfection and completeness looks an awful lot like a gathering of Christ-like men and women, perhaps sheltering some who could never attain a mature state of humanity. It takes only a morally well-ordered Christian imagination to go from apes only a little reluctant to kill other members of their own species to that Christ-like man. After all, part of that imaginative journey lies in the past and is being actively studied by a variety of evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, narrative historians working with the scant evidence before the invention of writing, and others. We have those parts of the story to add to the Bible and more modern history.
Christians need to understand this mortal realm with all its pain and suffering. We need also to understand the strangeness of strong social bonds and moral behaviors developing in this world red of tooth and claw. Strange or not, it has happened and it’s a more complete theory of biological evolution, a theory we can only see vaguely for now, which ties Christian moral and social thought firmly to God’s Creation so long as we honestly deal with the fact that the man who is descended from ape-like creatures is the same man who is said to be the image of God.
After all, grace can be seen, in part, as the energy driving God’s story toward the fullness of the Body of Christ. Christian thinkers need to reshape their minds to God’s thoughts, their hearts to God’s feelings, their hands to God’s ways of doing things. Then, evolutionary biology and Christian theology aren’t in irreconcilable conflict; rather are they two different views of God’s acts as Creator.
I have come by an indirect path to one of the most important principles of Christian thought:
Grace doesn’t destroy or replace nature. Grace perfects and completes nature.
This is, or should be, the goal of the Christian intellect, the capitalized and communal mind of Christians: to explain all that God has created in terms of what God has created, terms in principle accessible to the human mind which can shape itself to the manifested thoughts of God. We explain Creation, the thoughts God chose to manifest, in terms we learn by studying Creation in light of our small stock of revelations.
The perverse problem created by human thinkers, Christian and non-Christian, is that of explaining what we can explore and analyze and know in terms of supposedly more certain truths, maybe even absolutely certain truths. If we recognize abstract realms as also being part of the Creation God has given to man, then we start exploring reality as reality and understanding reality becomes simply the problem of reshaping our minds to the reality which is, after all, the manifestation of certain thoughts of God.
As Christians understand this story, God wishes us to form communities on the way to the formation of the Body of Christ. Those who are “defective” by the standards of progressivists or others are to be brought into our communities and cared for if at all possible.
Yet, we should be aware that the laws of genetics and the processes of evolution aren’t to be denied in this mortal realm and we Christians need more than others to study such fields as sociobiology, at a professional level, that we might arrive at better, more technical, more exact understandings of what is really happening as the human race continues to evolve along with other species and within the context of the changing ecological environments and rapidly changing human communities.
Coming to an understanding of our moral duties as children of God doesn’t automatically tell us how to live our individual and communal lives. We do need to understand Creation, in its own terms, terms we can study as physicists and historians and novelists and theologians and carpenters and nurses.