An answer to an excellent question

In response to my last, The Commenter Presently Known As Arnie asks the very excellent question:

"Since your original question was about the morality of torture, how can you justify not using the Bible? Or are you saying that morality comes from somewhere else?"

That question is so good it deserves not to be buried in a comments section. Let me try, no doubt inadequately, to answer it. It deserves a whole series of essays but I simply don't have time to do it justice. So I hereby proceed to do it an injustice:

Arnie,

I'm not exactly not using the Bible; my whole point of departure is after all Romans 13:4. But it's quite true that I'm arguing that the Bible doesn't address the particular political question of the use of torture as an interrogation technique of last resort against mass-destruction-wielding terrorists. I've laid out in some detail precisely why I don't think any passages of Scripture address the question with enough specificity to let us say, "Thus saith the Lord." Yet you still don't feel that your question has been answered; and I think that's because your question is a deep and general one, rather than a question about this specific issue. I think you want to know how I approach Scripture in general, not how I think Scripture relates to this particular issue. So I'll do my best to explain it.

Basically, morality comes from the nature of God as expressed in this particular creation. Our knowledge of what is moral comes from two sources: special revelation (Scripture and, in some schools of thought, the Church), and natural law. Special revelation is much more reliable, but doesn't cover everything that we want to know. Natural law covers the entire field of human decision-making, but is notoriously unreliable.

The obvious approach, then, is to use revelation as much as you responsibly can. Unfortunately revelation is not unmediated; nobody really trusts sola Scriptura. This is because...

Okay, look, I'm a dad, and I think there's a good chance you're a parent, too. I think most parents would recognize the following experience: you try to explain something to your kid about how you expect him to behave in a certain situation. Then three months later he does something that you really didn't want him to do -- but when you start to talk to him about it, he says, "But you said such-and-such!" And in frustration you hear yourself saying, "But that's not what I meant!" In other words, "Yes, but when I said that I wasn't talking about this situation; you're misapplying my advice."

Now if you look at how you deal with your kids you will see that sometimes you don't get mad at them for misunderstanding you, because it was an understandable mistake. On the other hand, sometimes you get royally angry because you know that they knew exactly what you meant and they're just making excuses. In that case, you would say, "You know perfectly well that's not what I meant! And now you're grounded."

But sometimes they were honestly confused, and yet you get annoyed with them all the same. That's because their confusion comes from their having been too lazy to bother to ask themselves what you meant. In that case, when they say, "But I thought you meant..." you are likely to say something like, "Then you weren't listening very carefully." Which means they're still in trouble.

My point is that we expect our children to respond to what we meant, not to what they wish we meant or to what they can (like little Supreme Court Justice wannabes) pretend we meant. And even though we recognize that honest misunderstandings happen, we still consider that our children have a duty to put some effort into thinking about what it is we really meant and how we want them to act in different situations -- even when they're in a situation for which we haven't given them specific instructions. Furthermore, we don't expect them to run around telling everybody in the neighborhood, "My daddy says..." when what they're saying is not at all what we meant; if they're going to go around telling people, "My daddy says..." then there's a much higher standard of caution and diligence that we require of them, to make sure they aren't giving their own opinion disguised as ours.

Now the situation we are in when we come to Scripture, is that we have a record of things that God has said to our older brothers and sisters, when they were faced with various situations that were more or less similar to situations in which we find ourselves -- in some situations more, and in some situations less. And from what God has said to them, we have to deduce (barring direct instruction from the Big Guy himself) what God wants us to do now. In some cases, it's easy: if your neighbor's wife is gorgeous, and you sneak over while he's gone and knock her up, and then you arrange to have him killed so that you can marry her, well, God doesn't like that. In other cases it's not so easy.

To return to my analogy: let's say that I have two sons; that when the older was first a teenager we were living in some fiercly traditional Muslim country; that before the younger hit puberty we moved back to the States; and that for the past five years I have been in a coma. When we were in Islamostan my older son wanted to date, but I told him he was not allowed to, and that I was not at any time to see him so much as holding hands with a girl. Now my younger son wants to start dating, and the question they are asking themselves is: would Dad approve?

In order to settle that question, if they are at all sensible, they will ask themselves why I laid down that rule, and how general a principle I meant it to be. And they will draw on their memories of all the other conversations we had...if, for example, I had been heard to say that the practice of dating was a clear sign of Western post-Christian decadence, that would argue strongly for the idea that I would be opposed to all dating. If I had told my older son that I didn't want him dating and had added, "I don't want you killed by some honor-obsessed older brother," that would tend to support the idea that I wasn't opposed to dating per se, but just thought it inadvisable in that particular special situation.

But if I had said at some point, "You know, when you're a teenager living in America, dating is how you get to know a girl you think you might be interested in marrying," then the older brother would definitely be way out of line if he tried to say, "We're not allowed to date because Dad told me so." That would be a clear misrepresentation of what I had meant when I told him, "You're not allowed to date," given what I had said about dating in America.

Yet even in that last case, even after we had established that the boys could date as long as they were in America, there would still be the question of what you were allowed to do on a date. And if I hadn't said what those rules were, then it wouldn't be right for one boy to say to the other, "Well, Dad says you can't do such-and-such on a date." But that wouldn't mean that they could therefore just do whatever they wanted to because, "Hey, Dad didn't say anything one way or another." They would still need to look at the general purpose I had laid out for dating (to decide whether you really wanted to marry a particular girl, in my hypothetical), and then work out for themselves what rules seemed best to honor the general principles I had taught them, while in the special situation of dating.

For example, if I had given them a general rule that sex was out until they got married, then the question of, "Can I jump her bones?" would be readily answered. But the question of, "Does holding hands count as sex?" might be a bit trickier. There would even be room for sincere disagreement between the brothers. But they would both be responsible for doing their best to do what I wanted, while still recognizing the differences between:

1. What I said clearly they could and could not do.

2. What they thought I probably meant by some of the things I didn't say as clearly as they would have liked.

3. What I didn't address, but that their own best efforts to be reasonable and to apply the principles they learned from me, led them to think I probably would say if I were to pop out of my coma long enough to answer a few pointed questions.

4. What I didn't address, and that their own best efforts, etc. led them to think I wouldn't care about one way or the other.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that sola Scriptura, if interpreted to mean "Scripture literally on its own," has never been realistic; every human being is faced with moral choices where he has to try to do the right thing even though Scripture doesn't give him explicit instructions, and in such cases he must bring to bear all the resources at his disposal -- guidance of the Holy Spirit through prayer, wise counsel from other people (which includes Church tradition), his own moral intuition, reason, empirical evidence, etc. When he does so, some of the answers will be clear and some will still be tough. In the end, you make your best and honestest effort and trust to God's grace to deal with the things you get wrong.

So, in the places where it's not easy to know what God means, we don't actually wind up trusting Scripture per se. We wind up trusting somebody's interpretation of what God meant to say -- our preacher's, or our parents', or the Pope's, or C. S. Lewis's, or our own logic, or what we think we heard God tell us in the prayer closet, or (what is probably wisest in most cases) a mix of all of that -- the voice of the Spirit, the Church, tradition, and reason. Where Scripture speaks clearly -- and it often does, even though people who don't like what the Scripture says try very hard to pervert its meaning -- then it trumps everything. Where Scripture doesn't speak clearly, you bring to bear all the resources at your disposal to help you make the decision that is most likely to be God's will for you.

If Scripture addressed the question of torture clearly and unambiguously, I would absolutely yield to Scripture. But it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then I have no business running around pretending that what are actually rules I've come up with out of my own head, are established by Divine endorsement; that is the kind of presumption for which Jesus ruthlessly condemned the Pharisees. But even in the cases where Scripture doesn't choose to answer our questions, you're not off the hook for behaving morally.

And it is for precisely that reason that I started this whole thread. The question of the limits of magisterial violence seems to me to be precisely one of those questions where (a) there's a right answer, (b) it's important to come as close to the right answer as we can, and (c) God has chosen not to give us much help in the way of the shortcut that is special revelation. And that's why, my dear Arnie, even though you're being deeply critical of my position and have been rather less than gentle in expressing your opinion of my moral character, I'm grateful for, and not in the slightest offended by, your admirably voluminous comments. On tough questions like this, there's nothing a sincere Christian needs more than a few other sincere Christians who think he's utterly in the wrong and are willing to explain in painstaking detail why it is that they think so.

Does that help?