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The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion

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The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1-23-2013 The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion Howard Lesnick University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, and the Religion Law Commons Repository Citation Lesnick, Howard, "The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion" (2013). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 339. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/339 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE REALITY OF MORAL IMPERATIVES IN LIBERAL RELIGION HOWARD LESNICK Fordham Professor of Law University of Pennsylvania Abstract This paper uses a classic one-liner attributed to Dostoyoevski’s Ivan Karamozov, "Without God everything is permitted," to explore some differences between what I term traditional and liberal religion. The expansive connotations and implications of Ivan’s words are grounded in the historic association of wrongfulness and punishment, and in a reaction against the late modern challenge to the inexorability of that association, whether in liberal religion or in secular moral thought. The paper argues that, with its full import understood, Ivan’s claim begs critical questions of the meaning and source of compulsion and choice, and of knowledge and belief regarding the specific content of religiously grounded moral norms. Liberal religion views knowledge of the "Will of God" in ways that pervasively tend to emphasize the place of human discernment of that Will, finding clarity in ambiguity and complexity, in a focus on process as well as outcome, in an openness to questioning as well as honoring tradition, and in a willingness to go beyond the propositional aspects of a text in seeking its "meaning." In all these ways, it may seem to dilute, even to dissolve, the imperative quality of moral norms. One’s attraction to or wariness of a liberal approach is to a significant extent grounded in non-theological preferences, and reflexive condemnation of liberal religion because of these differences fails to engage with the question whether they are better calculated to serve the task of achieving moral knowledge. While it would therefore aid the process of coming to grips with that question for traditional religion to resist the tendency to dismissal, caricature and polarization, adherents to liberal religion need to take on a greater responsibility for articulating their own theological position more fully. I undertake briefly to take my own advice. _________________________ THE REALITY OF MORAL IMPERATIVES IN LIBERAL RELIGION HOWARD LESNICK* God has made man with the instinctive love of justice in him, which gradually gets developed in the world.... I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Theodore Parker (1853)1 A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her ... hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. [G]radually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be felt, [giving rise to the claim] that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus man created God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be. Bertrand Russell (1903)2 “Ah! Thou hast ceased to call upon God, Wherefore repentest thou of calling upon Him?” “The answer ‘Here am I’ came not.” “Did I not engage thee to call upon me? That calling ‘Allah’ of thine was my ‘Here am I.’ And that pain and longing of thine my messenger.” Rumi (13th Century)3 *Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania. 1II The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed, Francis Power Cobbe 48 (1879). Parker was a Unitarian Minister and leading abolitionist in pre-Civil War Massachusetts. 2“A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. Russell was a preeminent mathematician and philosopher in 20th Century England, and a peace activist during the Cold War. 3The Spiritual Couplets of Mawlana Jalalu-‘D-Din Muhammad Rumi, Book III, Story I (2008). Rumi was a Persian poet, mystic, and Islamic jurist. I. INTRODUCTION II. “PERMITTED” (AND NOT), IN A WORLD OF CHOICE III. INHERENTLY MUNDANE WITNESSES TO TRANSCENDENT TRUTH IV. NON-THEOLOGICAL SOURCES OF DIVERGENT THEOLOGIES V. CONCLUSION VI. ADDENDUM I. INTRODUCTION “Without God, everything is permitted.” This classic one-liner, a judgment famously attributed (in the novel) to Dostoevski’s Ivan Karamazov,4 is readily endorsed by many people, in his day and ours. Many more lines are needed, however, to spell out the layers of meaning embedded in what I will call “Ivan’s claim.” Rather than move directly to analysis and critique, I will indulge a lawyer’s habit and begin with two highly specific stories, which I believe will illuminate our understanding of the scope and bases of the claim and the questions raised by it. The first is well-known in the American legal world, for it ended in a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.5 In 1963 Daniel Seeger, a recent college graduate, was convicted of unlawfully refusing to submit to induction into the Armed Forces. The federal statute recognizing conscientious objection to participation in war required that it arise from the objector’s “belief in relation to a Supreme Being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation, but does not include essentially political, sociological or philosophical views or a purely personal moral code.“6 In applying for exemption, Seeger asserted: “The existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, and the essence of His nature cannot be determined. I prefer to admit this, ... and leave the question open rather than answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” He went on to say, however, that “skepticism or disbelief in the existence of God ... does not necessarily mean lack of faith in anything whatsoever.” Professing 4Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov 817 (Amber R. MacAndrews, trans. 1984) (attribution by Smerdyakov to Ivan in conversation with him). 5U.S. v. Seeger. 380 U.S. 163 (1965). The facts of the case are taken from the opinion of the Court of Appeals, 326 F.2d 846 (2d Cir. 1964). 6As quoted by the Court of Appeals. The words are the statutory definition of “religious training and belief,” which is the requisite source of a qualifying conscientious objection. 2 “respect for belief in and devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes, and a religious faith in a purely ethical creed,” he maintained, “I cannot participate in actions which betray the cause of freedom and humanity.” The Court of Appeals, noting that Seeger’s sincerity was unquestioned, found him eligible for exemption, specifically rejecting the conclusiveness of the source of the constraint on his action: [T]oday, a pervading commitment to a moral ideal is for many the equivalent of what was historically considered the response to divine commands. [T]he stern and moral voice of conscience occupies that hallowed place in the hearts and minds of men which was traditionally reserved for the commandments of God. Agreeing, the Supreme Court described the critical question in these words: “Does the claimed belief occupy the same place in the life of the objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption?” Both courts thus viewed the critical question as the authentic existence of a state of mind in which a certain action is not “permitted,” with or without God as its source. The second story is not at all well-known, although there was a moment during the Second World War when its protagonist rose above anonymity. Martin Niemoller was a German Lutheran Pastor, imprisoned by the Third Reich for anti-Nazi activities. In 1961, now a Bishop, he spoke on the University of Pennsylvania campus, and I went to pay my respects as much as to hear him. It was a time of high “Cold War” consciousness, and the organization sponsoring Niemoller’s appearance billed his topic as “Theism Versus Atheism in the Conflict of Nations.” Waving a hand toward the blackboard notice of his talk, he said that to him the salient question was not, were you a theist or an atheist, but “were you a Christian”? Obviously, he then had to say what made one a Christian. His response: “A Christian is a person who accepts Jesus as teacher and brother.” He had been a submarine commander in the German Navy during the First World War, and he spoke of how he had subsequently become a pacifist: I would watch through the periscope for the enemy vessel, and when the crosshairs were amidships of it, I would say, “fire.” The sailor standing by would press a button, and I would
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