I had an interesting conversation in the baby room at church recently. To be honest, any sort of conversation with little kids around is challenging...Both parents spend most of their time redirecting and parenting their small children through a maze of things that they can play with or injure themselves with, depending on the context. I didn't know the other Dad in the room, and we chatted for a bit. At one point, one child did something selfish, and I made a comment about how children are inherently selfish, and it isn't something that we have to teach them. His response surprised me. He defended a sort of morally neutral viewpoint that the reason a child is selfish isn't because they are naturally that way; it is a learned behavior. It is because they hear "no" from us when they grab at our mobile phone (or in our case, the dog's water dish, to which Maya makes a bee-line ever chance she gets). When they hear "no", they learn our own selfishness.
To be honest, I was pretty fascinated by this line of thinking. I find this here every once in a while. I try to make comments that lift up the hood on my worldview every now and again. I understand that my worldview is fundamentally different than many of the people I encounter here in Austria, but it is often something that lies under the surface. Aspects of worldview are things that aren't normally addressed. They are hidden around every corner, but don't always come all the way up to the surface. It is important to be able to talk about and dialogue about worldview perspectives. I don't think we think enough or discuss enough these sorts of fundamental questions.
The weakness in his view is two-fold. First of all, I have less and less moral agency in my own life if I am purely a product of my environment and learned behavior. I can say, "its not my fault, I was raised like this", but our parents and their parents can make the same argument. I can give up responsibility for my own choices. It also doesn't explain the foundation of this all. If it just runs up the generations, where is the genesis for it all? It all remains subjective and disconnected from a reality outside of the material world.
The second weakness is it feels awfully hopeless. If this spiral is bread into us and permeates society, what hope do I have to break out? Do you really trust yourself to have the shear force of will to pull yourself out of this? Maybe others are able to bear that, but it feels too heavy for me.
The world is fundamentally broken, there is something wrong, and we can feel it. If we are honest with ourselves, the sickness is not just outside ourselves in society or just in other people, it is in our own hearts, as well. It is in my heart. I think this is the first step to understanding our need for the gospel. We need to understand that all that darkness is in our own hearts, too.
But that is not the end of the story. It is into our darkness that Jesus arrives and gives us the chance to change; he makes us new. It isn't my white-knuckled fingers on the steering wheel that change the direction of my life. It is his transformation and his power.
The weakness in his view is two-fold. First of all, I have less and less moral agency in my own life if I am purely a product of my environment and learned behavior. I can say, "its not my fault, I was raised like this", but our parents and their parents can make the same argument. I can give up responsibility for my own choices. It also doesn't explain the foundation of this all. If it just runs up the generations, where is the genesis for it all? It all remains subjective and disconnected from a reality outside of the material world.
The second weakness is it feels awfully hopeless. If this spiral is bread into us and permeates society, what hope do I have to break out? Do you really trust yourself to have the shear force of will to pull yourself out of this? Maybe others are able to bear that, but it feels too heavy for me.
The world is fundamentally broken, there is something wrong, and we can feel it. If we are honest with ourselves, the sickness is not just outside ourselves in society or just in other people, it is in our own hearts, as well. It is in my heart. I think this is the first step to understanding our need for the gospel. We need to understand that all that darkness is in our own hearts, too.
But that is not the end of the story. It is into our darkness that Jesus arrives and gives us the chance to change; he makes us new. It isn't my white-knuckled fingers on the steering wheel that change the direction of my life. It is his transformation and his power.
