I received this email from someone I know:

Hey Aron,

It’s been quite a while. How are things going? Enjoying your time across the pond?

I’m curious about your thoughts on having close non-Christian friends. I’ve known my best friend, who is non-Christian, since college. I was the best man in his wedding. His kids call me ‘uncle’. So I clearly see nothing wrong with it. I’ve come across a number of articles, though, that argue that believers should not have unbelievers as close friends, and that the primary purpose of having a casual friendship with them should be to try and convert them. Take, for example, the following:

“We are called to evangelize the lost, not be intimate with them. There is nothing wrong with building quality friendships with unbelievers – but the primary focus of such a relationship should be to win them to Christ by sharing the Gospel with them and demonstrating God’s saving power in our own lives.” (https://www.gotquestions.org/friendships-unbelievers.html)

This seems to be a pretty consistent theme across various articles on the topic. I always like hearing your view on various things so I’m curious to hear what you think.

I replied approximately as follows:

Good to hear from you.  I consider the idea you mention to be a heresy straight from the blackest, stinkiest pit of Hell.

1.  The commandment is to “Love your neighbor as yourself”, not “Love your neighbor, but only if they are a fellow Christian.”  But love naturally leads to friendship, whenever there are shared interests and interactions making it possible.

The author of this article apparently allows for “quality” friendships, but not for “intimate” or “deep” ones—but I’m not sure this distinction makes very much logical sense.  Leaving romance aside, what could be more intimate than talking about the most important things in one’s own spiritual life?

2.  The advice to avoid becoming close doesn’t make any sense practically either.  Becoming close friends with somebody is THE most effective form of evangelism (certainly in my own experience), but only if it is done sincerely and in good faith.

You can’t know in advance when or if a friendship will lead to an opportunity to explicitly share the Gospel in a way that the other person will be receptive to.  Sometimes it takes 5 years, 10 years, even 50 years to get to that point.  So when are you supposed to show that person the door and eject them as a lost cause?

Imagine saying to a non-Christian: “I’m going to act friendly with you, but all I’m really interested in is converting you.  If you don’t show any signs of listening to my gospel shpiels within a few months or so, then I’ll put up barriers to make sure this doesn’t develop into a close friendship.  Please don’t share your deepest heart-concerns with me, unless you make it obvious that it’s a possible prelude to conversion.  And I in turn will make sure to never share my deepest struggles with you.”

What a horrible thing that would be to say out loud!  It makes me feel sick just to write it.  Wouldn’t any non-Christian quite reasonably be offended by that?  Wouldn’t it confirm all their worst suspicions about us, as judgmental sanctimonious hypocrites?  That all we care about is using them to score religious points?

But you might ask, isn’t trying to lead people to Christ and thus saving their souls the highest form of love?  Isn’t that far more important, and thus loving, than say hanging out and talking about movies or football?

Yes and no.  The REALITY of our neighbor’s soul is of course infinitely more valuable than any of their worldly interests.  That is why the person who gives up their eye, hand, or even life for salvation will find that their true self is the one that is in Jesus.

But, our own CONCEPT of what is going on in our neighbor’s soul is in many ways imaginary, and is therefore often much less real than their secular interests. That’s why we are commanded to get involved with our neighbors’ lives in concrete ways—like sharing meals with them or visiting them when they are sick.  It is the concrete person, the same one who loves BBQ and funny Youtube videos, whom Christ came to save.  The visible self of our neighbor, is usually the most real self we have access to, and therefore the self we are to love as ourselves.

Of course, the greatest saints share God’s perspective on human beings, so it’s perfectly fine to tell them to just focus on people’s souls. There is not much risk that somebody like Mother Theresa would fail to see somebody’s unique individuality because of an excessive focus on spirituality.

But you can’t believe any old blowhard neighborhood pamphleteer who claims to have a “passion for souls”, if their attitude to the neighbor’s kid prattling about Pokemon or something like that is indifference or contempt.

As C.S. Lewis’ devil Screwtape writes:

“It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual’, that is is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without any qualm.”

That’s why evangelism is fraught with temptations and perils.  To regard ourselves as better.  To be more interested in our own (perceived) altruism and righteousness than our neighbor’s actual welfare.  (Or, to take these potential pitfalls as excuses not do it at all,)  This battle is not for wusses.  If we reach out it in the face of these fears, it should normally be precisely because our friendship with the person makes us care enough about them to take a risk and share Jesus, ideally in a way that is sensitive to the person’s unique interests and needs.

The article also says:

Another detrimental effect of closeness with unbelievers is our tendency to water down the truths of Scripture so as to not offend them. There are difficult truths in the Word of God, truths such as judgment and hell. When we minimize or ignore these doctrines or try to “soft pedal” them, in essence we are calling God a liar for the sake of those already in the grasp of Satan. This is not evangelism.

But being adaptive to a person’s needs isn’t at all the same as “soft pedalling” the gospel.  It’s applying it to an actual, God-loved life.  Argh!  I think this Got Questions author thinks that liking non-Christians actually interferes with evangelism.  What could be more wrongheaded?  It’s a bit like somebody who hears about someone injuring themselves at the gym, and thus decides that the healthiest lifestyle must therefore be to never exercise.

3. It’s worth noting that articles like the one above are in many ways based on a spirituality of fear, especially fear by authority figures that children and young adults will fall away from the faith.  A parent or teacher who feels responsible for someone else’s spiritual development is naturally tempted to be over-protective, and err on the side of caution.  But this is a trap, which prioritizes keeping people safe over obeying the will of the Father.  It blasphemously supposes that Adam is more powerful to condemn, than Christ is to save.

And it leads to the very un-Christian idea, stated quite explicitly in the first 3 sentences of the article, that spirituality is a function of our environment:

As Christians, we have to constantly face temptations and the attacks of the world around us. Everything we see, read, do, hear, put in our bodies, etc., affects us somehow. That’s why, to maintain a close relationship with God, we have to put aside our old ways of doing things—the things we watch on TV, old bad habits (excessive drinking, smoking, etc.), the activities we participate in, and the people we spend our time with.

It is not so!  “To the pure all things are pure.” (Titus 1:15),  “A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it.” (Matt 15:11).  Note how these verses DIRECTLY contradict the opening premise of the author’s argument, and how this totally unbiblical idea is snuck in before ever giving Christ a chance to speak.

(That doesn’t mean you should go out and destroy your body with drugs; or that God can’t help you overcome harmful addictions.  But the focus of the above paragraph is entirely in the wrong place.)

Then starting in the fourth sentence, it somehow gets even worse.  The article says:

People are divided into only two categories, those who belong to the world and its ruler, Satan, and those who belong to God (Acts 26:18). These two groups of people are described in terms of opposites all through the Bible; e.g., those in darkness/those in the light; those with eternal life/those with eternal death; those who have peace with God/those who are at war with Him; those who believe the truth/those who believe the lies; those on the narrow path to salvation/those on the broad road to destruction, and many more. Clearly, the message of Scripture is that believers are completely different from nonbelievers, and it is from this perspective that we must discern what kind of friendships we can really have with unbelievers.

This is true in an eschatological sense, but note how he conveniently forgets that Jesus told us it was impossible for even the angels to make this separation into two categories prior to the Final Judgement (Matthew 13:24-30).  Still less is it possible for us human beings here on Earth to make this kind of distinction, without judging people in a way that is forbidden to us.

So this application of Scripture is amateurish at best, and diabolical at worst.

I am not saying that we should not distinguish between those inside and outside of the Church.  But any distinctions we can make between believers and unbelievers in this life must be more nuanced; allowing for more uncertainty and shades of grey, and concerned more with the qualities that are actually observable.  It is reasonable to be hopeful of the salvation of the godly Christians we know whose lives clearly exhibit humility and love (even while recognizing that it isn’t our place to judge them).  On the other hand, we should be very reluctant to express a belief that even an obviously wicked person would be damned if they died in their current state.  Because this places limits on God’s mercy, and exposes us to the temptation to have contempt for that person.

(I am not saying that such a person can be saved apart from Christ, since none of us are saved apart from Christ.  But I don’t pretend to know all the means by which Christ can work.)

Note that the passage in Acts quoted is actually about the conversion of St. Paul, and doesn’t at all prove the relevant point.  Paul was commissioned to preach the gospel “so that they may turn from darkness to light”, but this did not require him to definitively know exactly which individuals he preached to were “saved” before or after his preaching.  The important thing is that Paul was working to help people be reconciled to God.

Of course, those entering the Church and being baptized should be told that they are renouncing the work of Satan and being reconciled to Christ, because (normatively speaking) that’s what ought to be happening.  But this does not exclude hypocrites being falsely numbered as Christians; nor does it exclude the possibility of salvation for certain individuals known to God, who are not visible members of the Church, but are still in some kind of relation to Christ, which is not seen from the outside, and may even come as a surprise to that very person.

4. Finally, it’s not the example Jesus gave us.  He was willing to make friends with sinners at parties, including types of companionship that were sufficiently intimate that they caused the Pharisees to question Jesus’ own morals!

On this topic, the article you link to also abuses the Book of Proverbs:

The book of Proverbs has a few wise verses on believers befriending non-believers: “The righteous should choose his friends carefully, for the way of the wicked leads them astray” (Proverbs 12:26). We should stay away from foolish people (Proverbs 13:20, 14:7), from people who lose their temper easily (Proverbs 22:24), and from the rebellious (Proverbs 24:21). All these things represent those who have not been saved.

Uh, no.  These proverbs aren’t at all about avoiding “non-believers” or the “unsaved”.  First of all, that’s ahistorical.  “Saved/unsaved” simply wasn’t a theological category in Judaism, back when Solomon wrote Proverbs.  (For example, it wasn’t until later that the concept of a final judgement and afterlife was explicitly taught by prophets.)

(There is an distinction made in the Old Testament between Israelites and foreigners.  Such passages are a bit more relevant theologically to the relationship between Christians and to those outside the Christian Church.  However, this is not the same distinction as saved/unsaved—since there’s nothing in the Old Testament suggesting that all Gentiles were obliged to convert to Judaism, nor that everyone outside of the nation of Israel was automatically condemned by God.  Anyway, the Book of Proverbs does not take much notice this distinction since it is more about categorizing wise behavior in the abstract.  Indeed the word “Israel” is never used in the entire book, after the first verse!)

Secondly, as I’ve said, the unsaved are undetectable.  We simply can’t tell whether people are unsaved by external examination, that’s for God to judge.

Finally, this reading defies the literal meaning of the text.  For example, Proverbs 22:24 merely says:

Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person,
do not associate with one easily angered,

which includes many believers I regret to say!  (Conversely, there are many placid nonbelievers which are not described by this verse.)  This verse says zero, zip, nothing, about whether or not the easily angered person is “unsaved”, either now or at the Final Judgement.

The reason is given in verse 25:

or you may learn their ways
and get yourself ensnared.

In other words, the goal is to avoid getting your own life caught up in grievance mongering.  There’s no magic that prevents this from happening when the angry person is a fellow believer.  (And you certainly don’t need to judge the other person’s state of salvation to figure out whether they are causing you to get angry more often.)

And like many other proverbs, this is not even a commandment, just practical advice that may or may not be applicable to your particular situation.

Yes, it may sometimes happen that the wisest course of action is to cut off a friendship.  If your association with a specific person is dragging you down morally, without you doing them any good in return, then of course you should re-evaluate that relationship, whether or not the other person is a Christian.  (Assuming the relationship is of a purely voluntary nature, rather than e.g. a close family member, or someone you have a duty to care for.)  But this should not be done priggishly.  In such sad situations the need for separation usually arises from our own moral shortcomings; if we were more like Jesus we would be able to interact with arbitrarily bad sinners without being corrupted by them.

I do agree with the article that Christians should not marry or romantically date non-Christians.  (Although like St. Paul, I would make an exception for pre-existing relationships, since Christ came to heal, not to destroy.)  That is a different situation entirely; since marriage is a vowed, permanent one-flesh union, and there it is essential for the spouses to have union in their fundamental goals, if at all feasible.

The same would hold for any other vow of inescapable fealty to a non-Christian person or institution.  But there are not many such vows available in the modern era, besides marriage!  The medieval world was chalk full of orders of knights, monastic vows etc. while for secular moderns, marriage is pretty much the only vow-based relationship which remains.

Regarding your best friend: (1) are you helping him to become a better person than he would otherwise be?  (2) And is he helping you to become a better person than you would otherwise be?  And (3) does he know that you are a Christian, and that your faith is important to you?  If the answer to all three of these questions is yes, then you have no grounds for concern.

But, you might consider being more intentional about looking for openings to have spiritual conversations with him (unless you are already doing so), when and if the situation arises.  It doesn’t need to be stereotyped or overbearing, just leaving a door open in case something develops.  The details depend a lot on the personality of your friend.  Some people live for a theological cage match, while with others you have to tread softly or you’ll spook them.  You’re the one who knows him, not me.  So you have to trust your own instincts, and the leading of the Spirit.

Blessings,
Aron

I had the following question from a reader [edited to make the person less identifiable, and posted with permission]:

I’ve been following your blog for a few months now, and I’ve found your posts thoughtful and gracious. Thanks for the time you put into it.

I wanted to take a minute and ask you for a line or two of your advice. I was a teacher myself for many years and realize how precious free time can be, so however brief of a response you can afford is appreciated.

Several years ago I made the transition from a more explicit ministry role to a role in the technology/media industry. I had been teaching computing for some time, was starting a family, and the financial penny eventually dropped. So I took a conversion course and made the change. My current job I view primarily as a way of supporting my role in theological education and as a part-time pastor.

The trouble is, along with the secular workplace come certain ethical grays that I hadn’t been accustomed to dealing with. Seeing as you work in a secular university, I wondered if you had any thoughts on this.

For example, the net ethical consequences of the technology I work on is still TBD.  […]  More immediately, our company provides access to an array of films, some of which are of some value, others of which are in direct opposition to the Christian values I espouse and preach.

I do have a degree of influence in the company, and have been able to steer the direction in certain positive ways during my time there. But the fact remains that impacting the nature of the entertainment industry, or influencing the ultimate societal impact of certain technologies is beyond the scope of my influence. So I will inevitably find myself earning a paycheck resulting from the promotion of certain materials that have to do with darkness rather than light.

Do I leave and protect my conscience, or remain and seek to be a light, however dimmed by the surroundings?

Peace,
______

[I wrote back something like the following:]

Peace of Christ to you as well.

It’s good that you’re carefully thinking through the moral consequences of your job.  I’m not going to pretend that there are always easy answers to these questions.  But maybe I can say a few things that will encourage you in your present circumstances.

1.  Jesus said we were to be “in the world, but not of the world”.  It’s sounds to me like you’re wrestling here more with the “in” part than the “of” part.

Obviously, Christians should not directly endorse or commit acts which they think are sinful.  But when it comes to more indirect forms of enablement, I think that the Spirit of God actually leads different people to adopt different strategies, depending on the individual person.  Some Christians are called to serve God within explicitly Christian sub-communities with a relatively high degree of autonomy from secular culture, while others are called to immerse themselves within a secular culture and be salt and light there.

This isn’t moral relativism.  The reason different Christians are called to different positions in society, is that it’s a question of different talents and tactics; not a question of who you stand for, which always stays the same.  (There are a variety of gifts, but just one Spirit.)

2.  And sometimes, God moves people from one of these lifestyles to the other one; in other words he can call you to take different strategies at different times in your life.  St. Paul the Apostle was no stranger to this feeling of disorientation.  As he described his experience in 1 Cor 9:

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.  To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.  To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.  To the weak I became weak, to win the weak.  I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.

There may be some shock of transition, in that if you started off with the “Christian sub-culture” approach, you might feel like you are compromising yourself by being involved with people or things that seem unclean to you.  (Like Peter’s reaction to the sheet from heaven.)  And perhaps several of these things really are unclean, and you can’t endorse them in your mind; but sometimes it’s hard to separate yourself (in an external sense) from those things, without also rejecting the people involved.  That’s why it’s a judgement call.

The important thing is that you remain faithful to him in whatever situation he’s called you to.  If you have heart-righteousness, you can’t be compromised by any amount of indecency around you.  This is what St. Paul the apostle called having a “strong” faith in Romans 14-15.

No seriously, you can’t be compromised by it if your heart is right.  Not if you have the kind of “innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents” character that Jesus is calling you to have.  And if you don’t have that character yet, ask him for it.  He might allow you to make some mistakes along the way that are part of the learning process, but he will be faithful to you in whatever situation he’s placed you into, if you place your trust in him.

3.  When I was about 6 years old, I was attending a Baptist school in Los Angeles, and I recall that they had a kids concert where my older sister helped to perform the following “Input / Output” song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whKay8FCU0I

It’s cute and catchy, but I think it fundamentally contradicts Jesus teaching in Matthew 15:10-20.  Jesus says that it isn’t the inputs into our life that cause us to sin, but rather the outputs (which come from our heart).  Human beings are not robots, who are mechanically controlled by our programming and data.  Attempts by Christian parents and leaders to create a “safe” environment that prevents children from ever being exposed to evil, can ironically be motivated by an almost Marxist view, where the spirit of a person is controlled by their material circumstances.  So they think that, in order to change people, you have to control them externally, rather than inspiring them from within.

It’s a fear-based system (what will happen to the kids if they hear about this idea?) rather than a faith-based system.

4.  In the Old Covenant, when a ceremonially unclean object touched a clean thing, the clean thing became unclean (Haggai 2:10-14).  But in the New Covenant, there is something so perfectly clean, that when it touches an unclean thing, it is the unclean thing that becomes clean, without contaminating the clean thing (Matthew 8:1-4)!  In other words, in the Old Testament, uncleanness was contagious, but in the New Testament, cleanness is contagious, because Jesus has the power to make people clean.  And he lives inside of each Christian.  If you love as he loved, then you will be like that too.

That’s why Jesus uses yeast (a reproducing organism) as a metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels.  (Even though in the Old Testament Passover ritual, yeast had previously been used as a metaphor for sin, again because of its contagiousness.)

The reason uncleanness was contagious in the Old Covenant was that there hadn’t yet come into the world a powerful enough love and light and disinfectant to fully cleanse our sin.  So God gave Israel some quarantine rules, as a temporary measure, until Christ entered the world to save it.  But after Christ came, these quarantine rules were no longer so necessary.

That’s why Jesus went to dinner parties with prostitutes and tax collectors.  You can be pretty sure that some stuff happened at those parties that you and I would not approve of.  But the Son of Man went to them anyways, to seek and save that which was lost.

Like I said, some people are called to live in Christian sub-cultures, and I’m not in any way trying to minimize or disrespect that choice, since it works well for many people.  But sometimes people conceive of such subcultures wrongly, as a place where we can go to avoid temptations.  But that’s just not possible in this life!  A Christian sub-culture just exposes you to a different set of possible temptations.  (Such as the temptation to slap the word “Christian” on schools or music, and assume they’ve just been redeemed, even though nothing in people’s hearts is any different than what happens outside in the “world”.)

Don’t get me wrong, an unclean thing can still infect you today, if you turn from Christ and your heart lusts after it.  Christians must keep themselves pure from worldly desires (James 4:4, Rev 18:4).  Yet Jesus taught his apostles that the dividing line of purity has to be in the heart, not in walls of separation from other people.  As the famous quotation from St. Solzhenitsyn goes:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

If you work in a secular environment, there may be tendencies for it to look a little bit like Romans chapter 1.  But if you work in a churchy environment, there will be temptations for you to become like Romans chapter 2; and these temptations can sometimes be very subtle, difficult to avoid, and encouraged by the community.  Neither way looks very much like Romans chapter 8, which is where we ought to be living.  If so, we can triumphantly say:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor [secular culture nor religious culture], shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

5. Your metaphor of “light dimmed by the surroundings” is not really sound.  Darkness is just the absence of light, and hence it has no inherent power of its own to overcome light (John 1:5).

This is certainly true for literal light.  Darkness is not a substance.  There is no such thing as a “dark flashlight” which can emit darkness the way a normal flashlight produces light.  Only if the light is concealed or blocked by an opaque object (so that the light doesn’t reach whatever spot you are looking at) can there be darkness somewhere.  And even when the light is blocked by a solid object, it still shines on whatever object is blocking it, and illuminates it.

The light of God is truth.  Do you believe that truth is more powerful than lies?  Do you really believe it?

6.  Reread the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares in Matt 13:24-30.

Part of the point of this story is that no person is smart enough to separate the wheat from the tares; at least, not right now at this stage in history.  (The separation is coming, but this has to wait for the final judgment, when both plants have reached their full maturity.)

You might think you know which movies are “wheat” and which ones are “tares”, but art is a funny thing because it can speak to people’s hearts in ways that aren’t entirely predictable.  It is good that there exist stories of every possible sort, since they enlarge the range of our thinking about the world.

Most of the divines of St. William Shakespeare’s day thought it was a sin to attend theatrical performances, because of their ribaldry and because it distracted people from more noble endeavors, but today he is considered “high culture”.  Can you imagine where the English language would be, without Hamlet and his other plays?  We can all express our thoughts more vividly, because he existed.

One certainly cannot judge the spiritual value of a work by applying superficial “content filters” (e.g. if the movie depicts adultery or swearing or smoking or gang warfare or alternative sexualities, then it is bad; if it avoids all this stuff and also has an uplifting overall message, then it is good).

There are some deeply spiritual and moral works of literature which portray people committing crimes or serious sins, but they are still wholesome precisely because they shine a light on how this actually affects real people.  As a result of seeing these consequences more clearly, people can be inspired to turn away from destructive actions before they ruin their lives.  Indeed, in some ways it’s especially important to have stories portraying sinful deeds, since that’s the only possible way for us to learn about sin, without having to actually commit it.

Then there are films and novels that are deeply anti-Christian in their outlook (I’m not talking about straight up XXX pornography here, but rather works which have some artistic merits, but also glorify ungodly values).   Even so, that doesn’t automatically imply that it is only bad for the world that they exist.  It could well be that some of these stories help the discerning to see something new about the world, and some might even be the instrument of somebody’s conversion to Christ!  After all, I don’t think any work can have much artistic value if it doesn’t resonate with some important truth about the world (even if that truth might be mixed with lies, in a way that is a trap for the unwary).  And to the extent a work of fiction resonates with any truth, it reveals something about God who is the Truth—even if the person who wrote it is an atheist and never intended for that to happen.

Conversely, a studio which makes a film that is “clean” and “Christian” might still be creating a work with very little artistic value.  Because artistic value is closely connected to truth, this implies that it is (to some degree) telling lies about what humans are like, and what real virtue and vice look like.  Such fiction specializes in equipping people to see the world in an immature and unrealistic manner.  There’s a whole Christian film industry which specializes in this type of glop.  (Of course there are also some great Christian films like Chariots of Fire.)

So maybe some of the works which seem to us like “wheat” are actually “tares”, or vice versa!  It’s not really our place to judge.  (Of course it is fine to judge for yourself what seems spiritually/artistically good, for purposes of deciding what you will watch, or make, or recommend to your friends!  What I mean by “not judging” is more that if somebody else makes something on your platform, and then somebody else enjoys it, you aren’t necessarily in a good position to know whether it will have been good or bad for them, in the long run.)

7.  Suppose now that you are a creator of technology.  You can foresee that this technology will be used to produce both good things and bad things.  Some will use it to become more virtuous, while others will use it to sin.  What should you do?

It seems to me you have a pretty obvious role-model here.  I’m talking about God himself.  He created a world, and he could have turned on content filters that made it so bad things weren’t possible.  But in his wisdom, he didn’t do that.  Instead he put all sorts of things in the world that humans can use both for good purposes and for bad purposes, and he gives us the freedom and space to pick what we will do with them.  Most of the time, he lets people make their own mistakes and learn from them, so we can learn the consequences for ourselves.  Of course, he’s provided us with lots of direction and guidance in the Bible, and yet he doesn’t even force people to believe he exists, if they don’t want to do that!  Yet even so he still provides the same sunshine and rain for the wicked, just as much as to the righteous (Matt 5:45).

As my Dad said in an interview once about the philosophy that motivated him to make the Perl programming language:

The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (“There’s more than one way to do it.”) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn’t come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.

8.  New technology often has unforeseen consequences, and can drive social change.  But once again the character of the heart matters more than the nature of the particular medium.

Historically you can find alarmists whenever any new communications media appears (e.g. people freaked out about the printing press, and about radio, and about TV, and about the internet, and about smart phones).  And there have always been people who consumed each of these products in an unhealthy and addicted manner, or were led astray by lies.  But when the dust settles, we’ve usually found that the essentials of human life are still the same under new technological conditions.

Even in the days of Twitter, print books still exist, and a lot of people still read them.  Or if, someday in the future, Virtual Reality reaches the mass market, it will just be one more thing in the media ecosystem.  People will still meet in person and talk to each other (once the pandemic ends, anyway!)

9.  Before Jesus preached the gospel, he made furniture.  A skilled craftsman has to judge whether they are making good, solid, reliable work.  Whether it is useful to others.  Some people might have used his furniture in morally questionable ways, but a craftsman can’t prevent that.  He can only make the best product he can, and leave the rest to the customer.

So if you think whatever you make personally is good in and of itself, and that it will be mostly used in good ways, then I think your job is morally justifiable.  Even if some folks take advantage of the opportunity to sin.  If, however, you think that the evil predominates (e.g. if you were making your money as a loan-shark exploiting poor people) then you’d need to find another line of work.

10.  If I had interpreted 2 Cor 6:14 with excessive rigor, I could never have become a physicist working in my area of interest (my PhD advisor isn’t a Christian, and virtually all of the top universities are secular in practice, if not always in theory).  But the rest of St. Paul’s writings make it abundantly clear that he never meant that we shouldn’t interact with non-Christians socially or in the marketplace.

I don’t think working in a secular workplace contradicts this passage, as long as you keep open the option to leave, in the event that you would otherwise be forced to cross a line which violates your own conscience.

I think it is of enormous importance that this line of conscience exists (that it is clear in your own mind, and that your coworkers know there are some things you would never do).  But it is actually not very important for all Christians to draw this line in exactly the same place as each other.  And it’s also not wrong to think strategically—in light of your specific circumstances and culture—when you decide exactly where this boundary should be, based on the truths that you think are the most important to witness to.

Refusing to do specific things for specific moral reasons, seems like a far more compelling testimony to outsiders, then simply refusing to associate with them from the outset would be.  Even non-believers often respect and admire people with a strong internal moral compass, as long as they don’t come across as judgemental.

(Of course if God makes it clear to you that he’s drawing a line you for you in some particular place, then obviously follow the Spirit’s prompting, however difficult it may be.  But in such cases there’s no need for my advice.)

I can’t make this judgement call for you.  But I don’t think the situation you’ve outlined for me is necessarily an ungodly compromise.  Maybe it’s exactly where God wants you to be, and you just need to approach the situation with faith, rather than doubting.

Blessings,
Aron

Most of us have experienced the Pandemic as constraining our freedom in one way or another.  More personally, I have recently experienced a pervasive dust allergy (which I have had since New Years of 2019), and the failure to buy a certain house, as a constraint on my freedom.

I.

In an economic model of rationality, constraints are always bad or neutral when imposed on a perfectly rational agent, but can never be embraced as a good thing.  Let’s try to make this more mathematically precise.  Suppose that you have some set of choices:

{A, B, C, D…}

which are ranked in order of your preference:

A > B > C > D…

Now suppose that we impose a constraint on your choices.  Is this good or bad for you?

Well, it all depends on whether it eliminates your best option.  If we eliminate choice C, you can still pick your best choice A.  Hence, the constraint is neutral—you get to do what you wanted either way.

On the other hand, if option A is eliminated, then you are forced to pick your second best choice B, and if both A and B are eliminated, you are forced to pick C.  In this case, the constraint is bad—you get something you don’t like as much as your first choice!

In this model of rationality, eliminating a choice never improves your best option.  So constraints can only be bad.  (For you, that is.  You might like there to be constraints on other people to prevent them from hurting you in specific ways.)

If your best option was C, for example, then you wouldn’t have wanted to pick A or B anyway?  In this case, your choice shouldn’t depend on whether A or B were options.

On the other hand, if for eample A was your best choice, then you will be forced to pick your second best option.  (And if that second best option was B, then you will be forced to pick the 3rd best option.)

In no circumstances can such a perfectly rational agent experience a constraint on their choices as a good thing.  Giving them more choices can only be a good thing, since either taking one of the extra options is better (in which case they will take it), or it isn’t (in which case they won’t).

With me so far?

II.

All of that is a prelude to saying this: in real life human beings are very far from being such “perfectly rational” agents.  This means that the model is inapplicable.  For us, constraints are so often a good thing.

In reality, there are lots of `hard choices’ where we would never consider that choice (or even think of it as being on our menu of options) if we weren’t driven to do so based on constraints (because the easier option, or the one we would immediately prefer, was taken off the table).

Yet, these are often the choices that tend to develop our character the most.  By this I mean that these choices give us the ability to appreciate new kinds of rewarding expereiences, to develop skills which give us more freedom and power, to empathize with a broader range of people, and to have a better grasp on invisible realities.

A lot of the humility that comes from getting older is realizing the ways in which constraints have helped to turn you into the person that God wants you to be.  So this can open your eyes to maybe believe that the constraints you are currently chafing under are the same sort of thing.  As the New Testament says:

Have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son?  It says,

“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
because the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father?  If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.  Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it.  How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live!  They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness.  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.  “Make level paths for your feet”, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.  (Hebrews 12)

One form that divine discipline takes, is our experience of the constraints inherent to earthy life, which so often forces us to take paths other than the ones we want to take.  Yet, when we take those paths, we often find things along them which we would never have noticed if we had gone the direction we wanted to originally.

Nobody is so good of a person that they can say, “I don’t need to be hemmed in and constrained; my moral character will develop just as well if I develop it autonomously through my own voluntary choices of how to interact with the world, as if I am forced to respond to external circumstances I would rather avoid.”

In fact, not even Christ (who was without sin) was able to say that:

For in bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was entirely appropriate that God–for whom and through whom all things exist–should make the source of their salvation perfect [that is: complete] through sufferings.  (Heb 2:10)

III.  

Living during a pandemic is a type of disability.  That is, it makes you un-able to do things you would otherwise be able to do.  (Obviously, you will be even more disabled if you actually catch the disease.)

No Christian can accept the view, advocated by some, that disability is inherently good; simply a way of being “differently-abled” as the PC term from the 90’s had it.  If this were true, it would have been wrong for Christ to heal those who were deaf, blind, and lame.

On the other hand, no Christian can deny God’s ability to paradoxically use suffering and disability in a redemptive way.  Otherwise, it would have been wrong for Christ to say that the poor were blessed; for him to go to the Cross, and to tell us to pick up our own crosses and follow him.

Without plumbing the depths of these theological mysteries, here is a somewhat more pedestrian way of thinking about the dignity and value of disabled people (which remember, is all of us at the moment).

Humanity has a great deal of potential.  There are many, many skills that we can develop as human beings.  For example, people can learn to play an instrument, or to garden.  People can ponder the universe or socialize with others or play games.  They can retreat to the wilderness, become a hermit, and find God in the mysterious silence of creation.  Or, they can join a non-profit, advocate on behalf of the poor and needy, and find God in serving others.  They can do some of these things at some times, and other things at other times.

My tentative idea for expressing the dignity of disabled people, is to say that no matter how many of these activities are taken off the table for you, there still remains a nearly infinite number of options that are on the table, which represent ways of flourishing.  And if you actually take one of these roads, you will probably find the same sorts of happiness and opportunity for growth that you would have found on another road.

(Admittedly there some limits to how far we can understand this.  If somebody is in a permanent coma, with no higher mental functions, obviously there’s some sense in which, for that person, at that time, everything has been taken off the table, besides bare biological existence.  Christians, who believe that all humans are created in the image of God, are bound to find some dignity even in a life like this.  But this blog post isn’t really about such extreme cases.  If you are reading this blog post, then you still have your higher brain functions and that means you aren’t in a situation like that.)

True, if you used to enjoy doing something specific, which now you can’t do, you are likely to miss it.  And that might make you feel bad.  But objectively, there’s still a lot for you to do which you can still do, which you can find if you put your mind to it.

Or you could just kvetch about our current moment in history, and fail to see these opportunities.

IV.

A lot of what people are trying to do during this time, is try to figure out how to do the things they would have been doing if there had been no Pandemic.  (E.g. How can we safely open schools, or have schools move to online settings.  How can we keep the economy running?  How can we have a normal social life?)

All these are good questions to ask.  But we should also ask what options might be available (or salient) to us during this time which weren’t options before.  (For example, before the Pandemic started, I didn’t have the option to attend churches I’d belonged to in the USA, while living in the UK.  But this year, I can.)

Ask yourself in what ways things might be better for you:

♠  What useful work (possibly for pay) is available to me now, that wasn’t available before?

♠  In what ways am I now resting, where I was overtaxing myself before?

♠  Are there any new opportunities to develop friendships in a deeper way?

♠  Or, new opportunities for solitude?

♠  Or, more time to spend with immediate family members?

♠  Were my children actually being well served by their school?  Maybe they’d benefit from home schooling.  (Or from taking a break and doing something different for a while.)

♠  Is this my chance to start a new hobby?

♠  Which spiritual disciplines can I cultivate?

OK, so your life is cramped into a smaller location then it used to be…  but maybe there’s a kind of metaphorical Uncertainty Principle, which increases your possible momentum when your position is restricted.

Those who don’t cling to property, may find that they own everything.  Those who are forced to remain in one physical location, may journey farther in their prayers.  Those who are deprived of obvious political power, may learn the greater power of solidarity with others.  Those without a future on Earth, may gain eternity.