Identifying as human has deadly implications

The incarnation and an execution impacts humanity.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Head and shoulders image of a man with closed eyes, on his forehead is an ashen cross.

Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Christmas makes no sense without Easter.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the Creator himself entered his creation to live among us. This is what Christians call the Incarnation. But why? What was the point of this identification with humanity? You might have expected these sorts of answers: he came to found the Christian religion, to teach us how to live and to gather a community of followers. These are true enough but look inside any church building or read any part of the New Testament, and you’ll find that another thing is the focus, something that makes Jesus different to any other founder of a religion. He came to die.

Jesus’ death is the climax of all four gospel stories. It is evident that the point of the narrative is there. The rest of the Bible’s New Testament spends more time describing the machinations that led to Jesus’ death than outlining what he taught. Does that mean it doesn’t matter what Jesus taught? Of course not: Jesus’ teachings matter tremendously to Christians. But his death matters still more.

No doubt you knew that. The first thing anyone learns about Christianity is its symbol, the cross on which Jesus was executed. One of the cruellest forms of capital punishment that has ever been legal, those executed on the cross were called ‘crucified’ – a word which still has its shuddering power even today. Crucifixion was a death reserved for the lowest of the low: common thieves, runaway slaves, rebels, and lawbreakers. Yet this particular death was the ultimate goal of Jesus’ life.

Why? What’s it all about? For Christians, Jesus’ crucifixion strikes at the very root of all that is wrong with the world. To understand it, first we have to understand what Christians believe about that.

If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out.

Everyone agrees the world in its current state is, to put it mildly, less than ideal. Most put it down to a lack of education, or to the stubborn foolishness of a few isolated individuals.

If you believe that people behave badly because they are ill-informed, then you might think the solution is to teach people what is right. You will put great faith in education: give people the information they need and they will change their ways.

Alternatively, if you believe ‘other’ people are the problem, you can focus your attention on opposing them, imprisoning them, or stripping them of power somehow. But Christians believe that the root of the problem is far deeper, such that these efforts only scratch the surface and will never be effective in the long run.

Christians believe that the whole of humanity has been damaged, cut off from its relationship to what matters by a primordial catastrophe that we call ‘the Fall’. Human beings are not simply ignorant, and the problem does not lie in lack of information, or education. The problem lies in our will, the part of us that chooses what is wrong even when we know full-well that it is wrong. And the problem is not just some people ‘over there’, conveniently set apart from me. Every single human being has been impacted. Including you. And me. Every one of us is part of the problem, which is why no one of us, however smart or well-informed we are, can be the solution. If you fall into a pit you can’t climb out of, then lack of information is not your problem. Nor does it matter how many other people are in the pit with you: nobody down there can pull you or themselves out. You need someone outside the pit who can reach down and grab hold of you.

That is why Christianity is more than a moral programme for self-improvement, or a set of spiritual practices comparable to those of other religions. According to Christians, the human race does not need another set of rules about how to live, or a formula to cultivate mindfulness and inner peace. We need a saviour: someone who does not share our fallen condition, but who can reach down and lift us to safety.

How far down did Jesus have to go? All the way to the bottom, which means death. Even the worst kind of death.

How did Jesus’ death save us? Christians have various theories about that. You may have heard the most common which uses law court imagery: we were guilty and sentenced capital punishment, but Jesus was punished instead so we don’t have to. Some people love this theory and live by it; others find it morally problematic and offensive. But the point is not the theory: the point is the reality to which it points. One way or another, by dying Jesus reconnected us to God and restored the broken relationship.

But it’s stranger still than that, because Jesus’ death is not the end. It was only the preliminary to something far more wonderful and transformative, a sign of a promise beyond our wildest hopes. By dying, Jesus defeated death itself and came back to life. If Christmas makes no sense without the cross, then the cross makes no sense without the resurrection. But more on that in my next article.

Article

Creed

Ethics

4 July 2024

5 min read

Whistleblowing: what if your CEO is a Caesar?

What are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

On a conference stage, a seated speaker leans back and opines

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons .

If you discovered that the company you worked for was doing work that posed an existential risk to humanity, would you consider yourself entitled – or perhaps morally obliged – to blow the whistle?

This issue provoked a recent open letter from current and former employees at AI companies including Sam Altman’s OpenAI, asserting that the laws protecting whistleblowers are inadequate because they typically focus on illegal activity – and the AI companies concerned are doing nothing which is (yet) illegal. It called for companies to take a number of steps (including not entering into or enforcing agreements prohibiting the raising of risk-related concerns).

Some might say that if an employee takes the company’s money, that money should buy loyal silence, and that if the public interest demands a different approach, the remedy is the extension to risk-related concerns of existing whistleblower legislation. But unless and until that legislation is extended, should we applaud conscience-driven breaches of contract?

What about breaches of the criminal law for morally justifiable reasons – for instance to draw attention to the risks that the protestors say are associated with climate change?

The reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Christian debate about these issues has traditionally turned on two Bible texts. Paul, in writing to those in a Roman church, declares: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed….the authority… is the agent of God.’ And Jesus, in Matthew's gospel, advises us to ‘render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.’

Who are the ‘authorities’ spoken of by Paul? Who is the modern Caesar spoken of by Jesus? Presumably in each case – in a parliamentary democracy – it is the combined legislature and executive of the day. Perhaps, these days, we should translate ‘Caesar’ as ‘the social contract’. But does this mean that (if we take these injunctions seriously) we should regard ourselves as bound not to commit criminal offences (which are offences against the state), but should feel no corresponding inhibition about breaching private law obligations, such as those owed under contracts of employment? My instinct is to say that this is indeed what it means, but that is not self-evident. After all, much employment law is statutory – an emanation of Parliament, and the reality of modern corporate governance means that the CEO may be more practically Caesarean than a country’s government.

Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy.

Should Christians, though, feel constrained by these scriptural passages? Both Paul and Jesus seemed to think that there was little point in establishing lasting social, legal or governmental structures because the end times were just around the corner. Jesus thought that some of his audience would still be alive when the Son of Man returned to complete the messianic project without any help from any secular governor. Paul’s belief that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand was behind his advice that the unmarried (unless they really couldn’t stay celibate) should remain unmarried and get on with the urgent business of preparing for the imminent in-rush of the true Kingdom. Both Jesus and Paul were dramatically wrong about the chronology. Why, then, should we take seriously advice about the regulation of society that was based on their mistake? Should Paul’s advice to those Romans be read as pragmatism – intended by him to convince rulers that Christians wouldn’t make trouble, and that therefore the Christians should be left alone? He may have thought that a shabby compromise with secular powers didn’t matter much because it wouldn’t last long.

Even if these texts are in some meaningful sense authoritative, what do they mean for modern life? As ever, the devil (and potentially the angel) is in the detail, and Paul and Jesus left the church to work out the relevant details. There is no consensus. Rendering the right thing to Caesar in a theocracy such as Byzantium might mean something very different in a modern tyranny or a democracy. Only in a few situations is the correct answer obvious: no one would doubt that those martyred for refusing to worship the Caesar of the day had made the (or at least a) right choice. But as soon as we move away from such cases the waters get muddy. Would Paul have denounced Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the plot to kill Hitler? If so, would he have been right? It cannot be seriously argued that it is illegitimate to protest against the policies of the day, any more than it could be suggested that Paul requires us to cast our vote in favour of the currently ruling party.

What, then, are the boundaries of legitimate protest?

Suppose that AI really does pose a threat to the whole of humanity. Does ‘rendering to God’ not then demand, in a private law context, that the whistle be blown, even if it involves a breach of a contractual obligation? It seems at least arguable.

Is a breach of the criminal law – for instance in the case of climate change protestors – different? It may well be.

In England the law has evolved a nuanced approach to ethically motivated criminality. That approach was recently displayed in the sentencing of five Extinction Rebellion activists for criminal damage to the premises of a bank. The judge accepted that each defendant believed that the bank was culpably involved in funding fossil fuel extraction projects, and that such projects endangered the planet. He noted that Lord Hoffman had said: ‘People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history [for instance the suffragettes]. It is the mark of a civilized community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind. But there are conventions which are generally accepted by the law-breakers on one side and the law-enforcers on the other. The protestors behave with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law.’ In return, he went on, the state behaves with restraint, and the judiciary imposes sentences which take the conscientious motives into account.

This approach, said the sentencing judge, amounts to a ‘social compact between the courts and protestors.’

Perhaps, in the realm of the criminal law, that sort of social compact encodes the relevant moral and theological principles as well as anything can.