Orthodox Priest: Thieves Hijacking the Language of the Christian Moral Tradition

By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse
10/4/2010
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

The Christian moral vocabulary properly belongs to Christians, and we should not cede the vocabulary to the thieves.

What happens then when people leave Christianity and want to promote ideas about morality that violate the moral tradition? They have only one option: Hijack the language. They use the terms of traditional Christianity but mean very different things by them. Words don't mean what they used to mean. Language gets inverted, turned upside down. Do this long and loud enough, and in less than a generation the new meanings take hold. When hijackers use the language of the moral tradition, they implicitly claim to stand inside that tradition. It's only a pose of course, but their pose fools many people.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is an Orthodox priest serving in Naples, Florida. He is President of the American Orthodox Institute and edits the website Orthodoxy Today.

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NAPLES, FL (Catholic Online) - In a recent Catholic Online article (Social Justice: Take Back the Term from the Thieves and Build a New Catholic Action) Deacon Keith Fournier writes about a question he was asked at a recent conference:

"(T)he host of the conference made a suggestion that we get rid of the term "Social Justice" because it is now used by 'the left". He asked for my thoughts. I strongly disagreed. I insisted that we take back the phrase from those who have stolen it, either on the "the right" or "the left". He then suggested the Church does not use the phrase "Social Justice". An attendee did a "google" search of the Vatican documents on his handheld device and reported it was used thousands of times in the magisterial teaching of the Church."

Fournier is right on two counts: The Christian moral vocabulary properly belongs to Christians, and we should not cede the vocabulary to the thieves.

The problem is not limited to the term "Social Justice" alone. Many of the familiar terms drawn from the moral tradition are used in ways that are different today than in generations past. Nothing is sacrosanct. For example, as recently as a decade ago the idea that same-sex partners who "loved" each other had a "right" to "marriage" was inconceivable. Today many people shrug it off. To many, the "redefinition" of marriage seems self-evidently true and morally proper.

But how did it get this way? Why is it that these terms, which have been part of the moral tradition for centuries, no longer mean what they used to mean? What can Christians do about it?

The answer lies in the slow drift of Western culture away from God. It used to be that when people spoke about morality, God was automatically part of the mix. When we had to decide what was wrong and what was right, we appealed to higher laws - laws that almost everyone understood came from God - in our sacred texts, teachings, and tradition. When we had to decide the proper way to treat our neighbor, we looked into what those texts, teachings, and tradition said. We don't do that anymore.

But the drift comes with a cost. "When men quit believing in God," the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "they believe in anything." No man can live without God. If he tries to live without God, then he will end up making himself a god. This is as true as the sky is blue. It will never change.

This is true because man was created to live with and in God. Man cannot live without God just as a child cannot be born without a parent. Out of all the religious texts in the world, only the Christian Scriptures defines this coherently: Man is created out of the dust of the ground (man comes from created matter), but unlike the rest of creation he also has the capacity to partake of God Himself ("And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.").

God is the proper object of the deep longing in the soul of man for communion and connection to something higher, to a wellspring that gives life. The longing is a thirst that man himself cannot slake.

When God is forgotten however, that object becomes whatever man fancies it to be. It can be something debilitating like an addiction, or grand in design and promise like a political ideology. Nevertheless, whatever a person chooses, all are substitutes impregnated with false promises and lies that can only lead ultimately to collapse.

When we look back at the last century and see the rank foolishness of belief in political ideologies like Marxism or Facism and their brutal and murderous legacies for example, we see how powerful Dostoevsky's prophesy was. When we look around today at the epidemic of teenage STDs, or the poverty of single mothers, or the unbridled greed of some on Wall Street, we see that the prophecy applies to all walks of life. Forgetting God leads to the catastrophic breakdown of both society and individual people.

When man unties his morality from God - his sense about who God created him to be starts to dim. How he understands his purpose in life, what gives life its enduring meaning, how he should treat the neighbor, how his community should organize and govern itself - all the constituents that give human life its purpose, meaning, and order get confused. That's why, for example, Marxists and Nazis believed they were serving a greater good, why pro-abortion activists think abortion is social progress, or why people believe same-sex "marriage" doesn't really differ from heterosexual monogamy.

Yet, we still live in a civilization that was nurtured and shaped by Christianity. The moral language of Western civilization is uniquely Christian, not Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, pagan, or any other religion that exists on the ...

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1 - 10 of 16 Comments

Jack Gordon
2 years ago
Mr. Krio: I can provide the relevant data, but this is a web site and we are writing mere commentary on articles published here. Since I don't wish to bore readers with a long dissertation they can find elsewhere, I suggest they (and you, of course) visit http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/, the website of Emmanuel Saez, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. There you will find the charts and data proving that under neo-conservatism the US has seen a huge increase in the gap between the immensely wealthy and the average citizen. (Not surprisingly, I haven't seen you post demands for similar backing for many of the totally outrageous assertions of your reactionary cohort, those like Vance who states above, "BUT there are too many Liberals in the ranks of the Bishops and clergy and they will not comply because they were accomplices in the Liberal Establishment hijacking Christian Moral Language." That is the kind of nonsense that regularly shows up here and, as I said, Mr. Krio, I can't remember your calling anyone on it.)
George Krio
2 years ago
Jack Gordon, for all your talk about data, all you provide is assertions. Your point here is not to make an argument, but to scream out "Unfair! Unfair!" like so many Progressive statists where moral posturing substitutes for an argument.

You assertion needs a lot more examination and critical thinking that you display here.
Jack Gordon
2 years ago
Amen, Rob.
Rob
2 years ago
I don't mind folks becoming rich due to their hard work, innovation etc. But what I do have a problem with is our government enacting laws (lack of regulations & tax policy) that only serves to make it easier for them to enrich themselves meanwhile the average working man receives no such assistance. I don't favor socialism or anything of the sort, but I'm not sure stacking the deck for the ultra rich is a good thing either. When folks like Warren Buffet are saying that it's time for the ultra rich to pay more tax, I believe him. It's an acknowledgement that maybe there will be a few less zeros because of the tax, but when you are dealing with the number of zeros these guys are dealing with, losing one isn't going to disrupt your empire.
Jack Gordon
2 years ago
Eric: Check the stats and you will discover that the data presented is correct. Economists have little use for personal anecdotes because they don't really tell us much beyond their small story. Global statistics, on the other hand, are an indication of what is really going on, not what some pundit or pol wants us to believe is going on. All data shows us that the disparity between the very richest Americans and the poor or even average income earner has widened appreciably since the time of Reagan; with Bush, the figures have grown absolutely embarrassing. What is curious is that there are still workers like you willing to defend this stick up. I notice, on the other hand, that many leftists who once defended so-called free trade have wised up and are now attacking that particular plan to further enrich the already filthy rich.
Pete Brady
2 years ago
While we're at it let's take back the "rainbow."
Rob
2 years ago
The best way we are going to take the words back is to live the words. But I have felt over the years that too much of our Catholic energy is being spent trying to influence politicians instead of converting souls. I do realize that our Chruch teaches that we are to participate in politics, but I have begun to feel like most Catholics are expecting the government to take care of all the ills of the world. it's as if we expect our governement to be an extension of the church.

Instead of focusing on what our government is doing or not doing, we should be focused on what people in our parishes are doing. We have no credibility on any of these issues anymore because the statistics for divorce, abortion, rampant materialism etc do not differ much from the churched to the unchurched. Too many Christians are living in the world no different from their non-Christian brothers, the only difference is the non-Christian catches the full game on Sunday and the faux Christian takes an hour out of their week to go to mass. Doesn't have a clue what is going on there, but there is no real difference in how each lives.

I wish my Church would take all the money it's spending on who knows what and begin to really instruct the faithful. Stop worrying about politics and teach us the faith. Trust that the faithful when properly instructed will change this country. Focus on creating vibrant parish communities with strong Catholics who live their faith. If you do that, all this other nonsense will take care of itself. Not having done that, well we all see the results.
azul
2 years ago
Jack Gordon, you are absolutely correct. Since the 80's and our folksy, grandfatherly President, Americans are being told that tax breaks for the rich, for corporations are good because the rich create jobs. That hasn't happened.We have story after story of the corporations cutting jobs and getting huge profits. The rich get richer and the poor are getting poorer. Our middle class is disappearing and we are allowing this to happen. The unfortunate part is that so many are drinking the koolaide, and believe what the right is pushing. When we have a strong middle class, we have stronger families, families who can welcome babies into this world. Growing up the Democrats and the Catholic Church practiced social justice. It's not the left trying to redefine the term, it's the right and unfortunately too many in the Catholic Church.
R. Ariel Vázquez
2 years ago
Thanks for this article, it is appropriate for a discussion in a Bible study group that I am conducting in my home church about "The Voice of God" (Psalm 29), obviously, if you guys don't mind. . .
John
2 years ago
Jack and Ed,

Maybe your little interaction should open your eyes to the fact that we shouldn't identify as right or left, that we should live our lives as Catholic, which is neither right or left. Instead of automatically jumping to the defence of your respective parties open your eyes and see what the people are saying about them and realize that they may have a point. As catholics there is no party or side that is perfectly right for us. The republican party has a slight edge because they are supposed to be Pro-life, and there is nothing on this world more important than life, however, we have to be careful about assuming republicans are pro-life because some are not.

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