Catacomb Resident Blog

Misreading Scripture: Vice and Virtue 02

01 April 2024

We inject a lot of western definitions of vice into the Bible. Do you know any verses condemning procrastination or plagiarism? We like to imagine that self-sufficiency is a virtue in there, too, but none of them are. Our educational standard of "do your own work" and not copying is something you'll rarely use in real life, especially outside of the West. You cannot supplement the biblical virtues and vices with western ones. The authors explain a few examples.

Self-sufficiency verges on the sin of not trusting God (James 4:15), and conflicts with Paul's admonition that we carry each other's burdens. Fighting for freedom? That's actually a vice in the Bible. Jesus was quite clear on this, as were the Apostles in their writings. Instead, America is infamous for taking everyone else's freedom by enforcing our habits and economic exploitation on the rest of the world. That doesn't sound like Romans 12:18 to me.

We disparage followers and promote leadership. Indeed, the military assumes everyone must become a leader and it shows in how "leaders" are simply managers who perform terribly in combat, but got promoted because they played the system. (I've seen that personally.) Well, submission to earthly authority is a Christian value.

R/OB take on tolerance, but I think they get it wrong. Tolerance is a great propaganda value in America, but it's tolerance for the wrong things altogether. Meanwhile, westerners really do not understand the moral standards that produces prophetic warnings about tolerating sin. It's not an either/or issue on tolerance, but a question of what you should tolerate, as should be obvious by now. Westerners don't understand how boundaries work.

Meanwhile, western minds also tend to ignore virtues that the Bible promotes. We get a lot of emphasis on thrift, saving your excess, paying your own way, etc. In the Bible, that's called "materialism" and is awfully close to greed. Remember the parable Jesus told about the Rich Fool (Luke 12)? Here's the problem: It's not wrong to have wealth. It's wrong to have no plan for investing that wealth into the lives of those for whom God makes you accountable. I'll grant that random Americans are not on the same par as random Jews were to other Jews. This is not a covenant nation; we have no obligation for the welfare of random Americans. But we should have a plan to help our fellow covenant believers with one kind of thing we can provide, and random other folks with other kinds of assistance just as a testimony.

Boomers in particular are greedy, hoarding everything away from their own descendants. If nothing else, good morals means that we will have given away almost everything of value to somebody before we die so that the bottomless tax system doesn't confiscate it through courts when we die. The sin of the Rich Fool was not sharing with anybody. The idea is to save up for the purpose of sharing, not hogging it all.

In the Parable of Talents, nobody condemned the investors who used their talents to increase wealth, but the guy who buried it in fear of losing it was all wrong. Wealth is to be used to bless others. This subject is too big to leave at the summary offered by the authors in this book. But I'll leave you with this: What would you say of the ambition to give away a million dollars' worth of stuff before you die?

  1. Consider the virtues that get you into a good school or get you hired for good jobs. Compare that list with Colossians 3.
  2. What impression would strangers have if they could read transcripts of your "sermons" (lectures, rants, complaints, etc.)? What would it say about you?
  3. A church in the US might teach money management as a survival skill, while another in Haiti would teach ESL. Do you understand the difference between social and cultural values versus outright biblical ones?
  4. What vices do you identify when you read Proverbs 6:16-19 or Psalm 101?

Comments

Jay DiNitto

"We disparage followers and promote leadership. Indeed, the military assumes everyone must become a leader."

Leadership is one of the "paths" of the myth of the western hero. Typically, if a hero performs well morally, they "move up" the ladder in authority, even if it's unoffically... heros staying put in the hierarchy, or even moving down, aren't seen as a victory. Once in a while you'll get a story that bucks the trend, but not often.


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