What We Owe to Our Creator

In Matthew chapter 22, a Pharisee, who was a lawyer, attempts to trap Jesus by asking him which is the great commandment from God. Jesus’ reply is recorded in verses 37-40.
“Jesus said unto him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Tracing out what this means, that is, how one loves God with one’s whole heart, soul, and mind, and how one loves his neighbor as himself, can take a lifetime to learn, however, we get a concise answer for following Jesus’ instruction in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. In June of 1776, the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded from the British Empire and established a new constitution for the newly independent country. The constitution has a bill of rights, and this bill is generally referred to as the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Declaration has sixteen sections. Section fifteen reads as follows: “That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” Here we have a description of the kind of people, alone, who are able to be free and self-governing. Section sixteen, the final section in the document, reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

It may not be clear from the language in these sections of the Virginia Declaration, but when the text announces that all men are entitled to the free exercise of religion, and this according to the dictates of conscience, they are nevertheless writing about the duty we owe to our Creator, and for Americans of the 18th century, our Creator is the God of the Bible. Americans at that time assumed that people were Christians, and that if someone might be a bit skeptical about Christian teaching, he didn’t make it a regular topic of conversation. Certainly, no American wanted a country populated by non-Christians whose religion would receive a standing equal to that of Christianity, for then the governments of the United States would have to be secular, that is, neutral as among religions, and secular government was understood to be a curse that ends only in tyranny and its attendant harms to the people. The danger of secular government is that it is power without restraint, since there is no God recognized as an authority to which all people, including those in government, are accountable. As children in schools we were taught that free government, self-government, must be secular otherwise government will become an oppressive “theocracy” that determines what people can think and say, and how we must behave. It seems that the record of secular government in this regard has vindicated the concerns of our forebears who did not think that excluding God from the education of the young, and from society more generally, was a requirement of religion, or “the duty which we owe to our Creator.”

The disagreement between North and South about education, for example, and how it is to be done was an important element in the sectional differences that ultimately led to the failure of the political order established in the Constitution, and finally to the secession of eleven southern states whose leaders saw in consequence of the general demise of Christianity in the North, and in New England in particular, a growing hunger for money and power, and a growing contempt for the restraints on power in the Constitution. (The concern of southerners about northern secularization is captured in 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”)

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay beginning in 1620 held to a fervent Christian faith, but they held also the conviction that the way they practiced Christianity was the only legitimate way to do it. They also had a urgent desire for money and power which, in time, secularized the North. Southerners believed, correctly, it seems, that secular governments must become tyrannical because they recognize no power above them to keep the state in check. In a book titled The Southern Tradition at Bay, Richard Weaver discusses, among other things, a book by Bernard Sage in 1881 titled Republic of Republics, in which Sage identifies the growing lust for power of an increasingly secular North as a prime cause of the war of 1861-65. As Weaver describes it:

The author found, moreover, an interesting source for the consolidationist philosophy of Story, Webster,[i] and their school. It lay, he argued, in the views of the original enemies of the Constitution, who had sought to defeat its adoption by exaggerating its prerogatives. These opponents had attempted to frighten the hesitant states by describing the contract as a kind of “American Divine Right,” an instrument “heaven-inspired, perfect, and to last forever” until they were refuted and voted down by its champions. Lincoln became the heir of their views, not knowingly, but through ignorance, and so was in a position to be misled by cunning advisors.[ii]

Weaver argues that Sage’s book, Republic of Republics, demonstrated with careful scholarship and argumentation that the invasion of the Confederate States of America by the United States in 1861 was both illegal and immoral; the invasion had nothing to do with what we may understand to be a public, political application of doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God . It was intended to crush dissent from northern demands and to consolidate power into the central government in Washington, D.C. Northern leaders were determined to break the South and with it, to destroy the form of government, a federation of sovereign states, that is established in the Constitution of the United States. By 1860, northern leaders correctly perceived that they had become numerous enough and wealthy enough that they no longer needed the Constitution and could simply take power by force. Southern leaders understood this, and by early 1861 had concluded that the union established in the Constitution had failed, and so they left it.

It is important to understand that when the states of the lower South seceded from the United States early in 1861, four southern states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, did not secede. Instead, they remained in the hope of using the secessions of the other southern states as leverage to pressure northern leaders to follow more closely the restrictions on government in the Constitution. When Lincoln ordered these states to send troops for an invasion force, they seceded, determined not to participate in such a moral and legal outrage. Perhaps Lincoln forgot that the Constitution he swore an oath to protect and defend included Article III, section 3, which defines treason as levying war against states, and Article IV, section 4, which imposes on the federal government the duty to protect each state against invasion. But the Northern states had become sufficiently powerful to rule the United States on their own, and so ignored the Constitution and launched a war of destruction upon the South. Thus after the war had concluded in favor of the North, there was no patience among northern leaders for southern arguments about the war. Weaver rightly explains this as the reason Sage’s book had little impact in the north, and in fact, Weaver described the book’s impact as “but chaff before the wind.” However, Weaver does credit Sage’s book, Republic of Republics, with convincing northern members of Congress not to seek prosecution of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee on charges of treason because it will be a trial on the right of states to secede. This is not a case anyone can prosecute successfully because the history of secession among the American states, beginning with the Declaration of Independence of 1776 when the thirteen colonies of British America seceded from the British Empire, has been one in which it had been understood by everyone that the states are free, sovereign, and independent, and therefore each has the right to leave any union it enters voluntarily.

Though the foregoing may seem a bit of a ramble from the question of what we owe to our Creator, it should actually serve to sharpen the question because when we understand what we owe to our Creator, we face also the question of how to perform our duty to God as a social and political order. In the sectional differences that developed between North and South we find, I believe, an illustration of the stakes at issue when a people forget what we owe to our Creator. Northerners, I contend, abandoned the law of God for worldly advantage and fell under the domination of what St. Augustine described in City of God as the lust to dominate others. People of the South clung too long to the injustice of slavery, but in part because they didn’t know how to solve the problem in a way that didn’t corrupt their culture by exposure to nearly four million freedmen who lacked the competence to participate in self-government. Nevertheless, they did cling to what Richard Weaver has described as the “older religiousness of the South” which is expressed well in the Virginia Declaration of Rights as “the duty we owe to our Creator,” and this religiousness, I believe, kept southerners wedded to the federation of states in the Constitution because this form of government was largely a product of that older religiousness which the North rejected.

The instruction we have in the Bible is perfectly crafted for human growth. To the question, what do we owe to our Creator? we have the answer given in Micah 6:8. “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” There are three elements in this passage, two of which have to do with one’s relations with other human beings, and the third governs our relationship with God. We are to “walk humbly” with our Creator. Yet, in order to do this, we need God’s help. One reads Jesus saying the following in John chapter 14: “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it sees him not, neither knows him: but you know him; for he dwells in you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.” There are passages throughout the Bible that make it clear that in order to “walk with God,” we must keep his commandments, but in order to do that, we need God’s help.

This makes perfectly good sense when we realize that God is Being Himself, and since God is Being, God is life. Because God is life, the life within us comes from Him, and we are made, unlike other animals, in the image and likeness of God. So for us, the law of God is the law within us according to which we are made, and so to follow the law of God is to follow the law of our nature, in which peace and happiness are to be found. But we are flawed creatures most of whom are over-attached to our embodied selves and to the pleasures and pains that attend our embodiment. This attachment hides from us the spiritual aspect of ourselves which is fundamentally who we are, and in the state of ignorance of our true created nature, it is impossible fully to obey the commandments of God. This is why we need God’s help in order to walk humbly with God.

 In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas discussed God as the Being whose essence is his existence and so God cannot not exist. This is what is meant by saying that God is Being Himself. We know that some kind of reality has always existed because if ever there was nothing, there would be nothing now. The reason for this is that if there was nothing, there would be no cause to effect the change from nothing to something because a cause is a thing, and thus if there was a cause, there would not be nothing. Since nothing other than God is the cause of itself, it follows that God is the reality that has always existed, and the cause of all other things. When we recognize that everything that exists has a cause, it should be clear right away that no cause can convey to its effect a property it does not have. If you want to light a fire, you must have a source of ignition that is hot enough to ignite the fuel. No other sort of cause could complete the job. It follows, therefore, that no combination of non-living factors can conspire to generate life. Thus it must be that the cause of life is itself alive, and is in fact our living Creator, and so we can know that the supposedly authoritative sciences that tell us that life occurred spontaneously are woefully mistaken. Our Creator has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ, the first-born of all creation, and he himself has told us that if we seek to follow the law of our creation, he will petition the Father to give to us the Spirit of Truth who will lead us into all truth, and will assist us in walking humbly with God.

How do we behave justly? Many thinkers have taken up the question of justice and some have overly complexified it, while others have insightfully uncovered the practical elements of it like distributive justice and retributive justice, but the basis of justice, of the virtue by which one does justly, is, as Thomas Aquinas described it, the firm and perpetual will to give to each person what is due to him. This, of course, includes the obvious sorts of things like keeping one’s hands off of other people and their property without permission, keeping promises, telling the truth, and being courteous to others. We can be a light in a dark society, but we have also inherent within the concept of justice guidance on how to order a society that does justly to all members by maintaining conditions in which each person may flourish as a human being (note the sharp contrast here with a society that holds money and power as its primary goods).

The obligation to act justly requires, importantly, the ability to take choices consistently that are sound and result in actions that are just. This quality in someone is the virtue of prudence. The history of moral philosophy has within it a long and substantial discussion of the meaning of virtue, but I find the definition given by the German philosopher Josef Pieper (d. 1997) to be at once precise and concise. In his book The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Courage, Temperance, Pieper defines a virtue as “a perfected ability.” Thus prudence would be the perfected ability consistently to take correct decisions; and justice is the perfected ability consistently to give to each person what is due to him.
One issue raised by Pieper’s understanding of a virtue is that many people, perhaps most people, who have not studied the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition of philosophy will be distracted by the use of the word “perfected” in Pieper’s definition of a virtue as a perfected ability. For Aristotle (d. 322 B.C.) and for Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274 A.D.) a person or a thing is perfect when it is complete, having within it no unactualized potential. Many people think of a perfect human being as one who is sinless, which is the condition, as we read in the first letter of John, in which one never violates the law of God. Sin, John writes, is the transgression of the law. In Matthew 5: 48, we read Jesus saying to his followers: “Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” In the Greek text of this verse, the word translated as “perfect,” be perfect, Jesus says to his followers, is “teleioi.” The root of teleioi, which is a plural noun, is telos, which is the word Aristotle used to identify the final cause of a thing. The final cause of something is its purpose, or the reason for its being. The final cause of something, its telos, is the condition in which a thing or a human being is perfect in the sense of having no unactualized potential. This is why Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, described God in part as that being in whom there is no unactualized potential, and Jesus, in the passage in Matthew we just read, identifies our Father in heaven as “teleios,” having no unactualized potential. We might think, then, that if someone reaches the place of development in which he never transgresses the law of God, then that person would faithfully adhere to the law of his nature, and would of logical necessity actualize the fullness of the potential of his human nature as given to us by God.

With this diversion into the meaning of the word “perfect” we may return to the idea of virtue as a perfected ability and to consider the social meaning of justice as the perfected ability consistently to give to each one what is due to him. Recall that we are considering what it means to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God, which is taken to be biblical advice on how to love the Lord our God with our whole hearts, souls, and minds, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  We are all in a position in which efforts to become a better human being, to do justly and to love mercy, and walk humbly with God, are undertaken within a society that is largely in rebellion against God. Jesus admonished us not to wonder why the world hates us since the world hated Him first. Still, it is natural for us to consider how we apply the command to act justly, and even we might do so as a people.
A phenomenon one often encounters when dealing with ideas is that when an idea is presented, people will quickly agree with it, and then, when examples are given, many will back away saying some version of “I didn’t mean that!” If justice is giving to each person what is due to him, then if a man does honest work for a wage, the money he worked for is due to him. It would be unjust for his employer to withhold from the worker any part of the money he earned. So we may ask, are income taxes theft? It seems clear that an income tax is taking from someone what is due to him, and is therefore unjust. Thus, if we are determined to do justly as a society, we should abolish all income and property taxation as unjust instances of theft. The standard reply to the observation that income taxes are theft is that they are not theft because we have consented to them. The problem with this assertion is that it fails to recognize that true consent, in order to be consent, may be withdrawn. If one were to inform the federal government that he has withdrawn his consent to pay income taxes and will no longer allow any of his money to go to the government, any notion he entertained of income taxes being consensual will quickly be dispelled. The example of income taxes as theft is most useful as a test case for applying justice as it is defined here because most people think the assertion that income taxes are theft is extreme, whatever that means, and maybe even a bit insurrectionist. However, if justice is to give to each one his due, which includes not taking from someone what belongs to him, then it seems obvious that income taxation is theft. If it isn’t, then we face a problem of going from definition to practice since this transition, from definition to practice, is not as easy as it might seem. Without belaboring the point, we will do well to develop the virtue of prudence which is the perfected ability consistently to take correct decisions such as how to do justly in practice.

What does it mean to love mercy? In Matthew 7: 1-2 we read Jesus saying: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete [issuing punishments and rewards], it shall be measured to you again.” It should be clear that when Jesus tells us not to judge He is not counselling an anything-goes approach to personal and public behavior, and we know this because Paul upbraids the Christians in Corinth for taking each other to court before Roman judges to settle disputes, asking them if there are no Christians among them wise enough to judge. It seems right to say that Jesus is actually counselling us about mercy. If you want to receive mercy, Jesus tells us, then be merciful toward others. And what are the limits of mercy, if any? Here I think we can properly end with a passage from the Bible we may reasonably say is among the most glorious passages in the most glorious book.
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy, does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up, does not behave unseemly, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil; rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails:… And now abides faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. I Corinthians 13

[i] The references to Story, Webster are important because they were important among the propagators of a knowingly false narrative of the political development of the United States, and one that Lincoln used to justify his invasion of the South. Joseph Story of Massachusetts was an associate justice of the Supreme Court, having been nominated by President James Madison in 1811. In 1833, Story published his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, in which the first part is devoted to a history of the United States from its initial settlement by Europeans through the founding of the colonies of British America and, finally, the United States. Story’s tale is an inversion of what actually happened to the conclusion that the United States are a single national entity with its sovereign government in Washington, D.C. According to Story, Americans had always been one people from north to south and they decided among themselves to create the several states as administrative districts of the central, national authority. Thus, Story denies the truth that the thirteen colonies of British America, when they seceded from the British Empire in 1776, became free, sovereign, and independent states which later created the United States, through the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the second article of which says: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” It is clear in this article that the states are creating a federal congress and entrusting it only with those powers “expressly delegated” in the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of Story’s lies about the founding of the United States is to create the illusion that the United States is, and always has been, one unified nation with the states as administrative districts of the central government and subject to the central government’s presumed “sovereignty.”
 
[ii] Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1968, p. 134.