In his opening address to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), Jordan Peterson argued that the Christian foundation for civilization is this:
“Reciprocal, voluntary self-sacrifice.”
Peterson illustrated with the form of sacrifice we all learn first:
When a child learns to make a friend, he learns necessarily, the principle of sacrificial reciprocity.
“I have a turn, then you have a turn. I have a turn, then you have a turn.”
The sacrifice there is that it’s not always my turn.
And that sacrificial reciprocity is the…foundational principle of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society…are predicated.
Reciprocal self-sacrifice is fundamental to political society. The kind of sacrifice Peterson praises requires us to transcend hedonism and self-absorption.
[Last week, I reacted to Peterson’s ARC address in this post.]
Societies that cannot establish reciprocity and the ability to sacrifice one for another, and one’s present for one’s future, remain mired in hedonism. Collectively, they remain in barbarism.
To achieve civilization, humans must rise to the level of reciprocal self-sacrifice:
The principle of voluntary upward self sacrifice [is] the foundation of the community, as the foundation of abundance itself, as the precondition for the trust and reciprocity that enables us to compete and to cooperate so that we can produce societies that are endlessly productive.
Now many criticize Peterson for instrumentalizing religion, either for psychology or politics. (Last week, subscriber Paul P. sent me this Catholic example.)
This criticism misses the mark, though not because Peterson’s focus transcends psychology or politics, but because Peterson is right about psychology and politics.
But there is one place where Peterson errs.
At least in this speech, he interprets the fundamental principle of Christianity as reciprocal self-sacrifice. Reciprocal sacrifice, like that of the child above, exhibits natural justice, the kind of mutuality and “giving to each his due” on which political society is indeed founded.
Yet, following the great opponents of civilizational Christianity, Tolstoy and Kierkegaard, Paul Kingsnorth has argued that the Christian ethic is not the kind of mutual back-scratching that founds a civilization and leads to GDP growth. It is a kind of self-sacrifice that incurs loss and is folly from a worldly or civilizational perspective.
And in this, Kingsnorth et al. have more than a grain of exegetical truth:
If you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. (Luke 6:33-35)
We could update it: “If you sacrifice five minutes with your toy in order to gain five other minutes with your toy, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.”
In other words, the ethic of reciprocal sacrifice, i.e., natural justice, is not the distinctively Christian ethic. It is the natural law. And even sinners, Gentiles, and non-Christians often abide by it.
What then is the distinctively Christian ethic? And how does it relate to reciprocal sacrifice and the natural law?
The New Commandment
Christ frequently affirms that what he is teaching does not abolish but fulfills the old law and the creation order:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. — Matthew 5:17
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” — Matthew 19:4-6
He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. — Matthew 19:8
Jesus reaffirmed the moral law, of the Old Testament and of nature.
However, at a crucial juncture, Christ told his disciples that he was giving them a new commandment. If he is to be believed, this commandment was not in the Law and the Prophets. It was not man’s duty by nature. And it is not something that even sinners do.
What is it? “That you love one another:” (John 13:34b).
[Brakes screeching]
Hold on, Jesus.
That’s not a new commandment.
It’s in Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
You, Jesus, said that it was the second greatest commandment and, together with “Love the Lord your God,” it summed up the Law and Prophets (Matt 22:36-40).
You can’t actually mean that that commandment is new.
That is a very natural reaction. But there are two problems with it.
* In the next verse, Jesus says that, “By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
But wouldn’t it just make you a good Old Testament Hebrew if you loved your neighbor as yourself? It wouldn’t mark you out as a disciple of Christ.
Exactly, so Jesus must be talking about something more.
And,
* You cut me off when I was quoting the first verse: “That you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34b-c).
“Just as I have loved you.” But wait, Jesus says these words as he’s about to go to the cross to offer his life for the sins of the world.
And Jesus’ sacrifice is radically new in human history.
Jesus’ death was the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. It was not an act of reciprocal self-sacrifice. It was not mutual.
In fact, moments later, Jesus predicted that Peter would not lay his life down for him but deny him three times (John 13:38).
Jesus sacrificed himself for us without expecting anything in return.
And in his new commandment, he asks us to do the same for one another.
The Natural Law and the New Commandment
Now Jordan Peterson might be correct that reciprocal sacrifice is the foundation of civilization. Civilization requires individuals to make sacrifices for each other and for the community as a whole. It rewards these sacrifices with mutual benefit, safety, and prosperity.
But what if Paul Kingsnorth et al. are also correct that Christ’s new commandment demands something at odds with political and economic prudence?
In fact, it appears that they are.
Political peace, for instance, is built on mutually assured destruction.
But Christ says, “Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt 5:39).
The modern economy is built on lending at interest, based on expectation of repayment.
But Christ says, “Lend to them without expecting to get anything back” (Luke 6:35).
Natural justice is built on short-term sacrifice for mutual benefit, doing good to those who do good to us.
But Jesus says, “if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. … But love your enemies, do good to them” (Luke 6:33, 35).
Peterson correctly identifies the ethic that gives a foundation to civilization.
But Kingsnorth correctly identifies that the kind of sacrifice Christ commands contradicts that ethic.
If this is so, then there is an irreconcilable tension between civilization and Christianity.
Tension or Extension?
But the objection to this conclusion comes from Christ’s own lips:
I did not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to fulfill them. (Matt 5:17)
The new thing Christ brings, both in his atonement and his example and ethic, does not contradict or abolish the law. (Think both Old Testament law and natural law.)
In theological shorthand:
Grace does not abolish nature, but restores and perfects it.
The new commandment doesn’t subtract from the old commandments, Jesus says. The new commandment fulfills and adds to the old:
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20).
Christ’s new commandment is not in tension with the old; it is an extension beyond the old.
Jesus Christ asks of us even more than Jordan Peterson does.
Three Ways Christ Asks More, But No Less
You can see the new commandment extend beyond the natural law in various dimensions of Christ’s teaching.
i. Marriage and Celibacy
Christ reaffirmed the creation ordinance of marriage, calling the Pharisees back to the first and second chapters of Genesis (Matt 19:1-9).
But he also opened up the possibility of celibacy as an honorable path for the Christian, one that will be greatly rewarded (Matt 19:10-12).
Christ’s reaffirmation of marriage indicates that Aaron Renn is correct to caution the urban church against overplaying the goodness of singleness and underplaying that of marriage and family.
But Christ’s extension of blessing to “eunuchs” indicates that Grant Hartley and other members of Side B, and Sam Allberry are also correct to argue that the church has idolized marriage and family, neglecting the good of celibacy.
(King Laugh and I explored the controversial idea of marriage idolatry with David Frank and TJ Espinoza in this podcast episode.)
We must obey God’s natural law with regard to marriage and sexuality, but we can and must also transcend it.
ii. Christian Economics
On economics, Christian defenders of free market conservatism are right to defend the moral legitimacy of mutual exchange in a market economy. At the same time, critics of economic libertarianism are correct to highlight market failures and inequality of bargaining power in labor markets. So far, natural justice.
But purveyors of redemptive entrepreneurship are also correct to argue that Christian entrepreneurship can and should go beyond fair, mutual exchange. As managing partner at Praxis Sajan George argues, while ethical entrepreneurship argues for “I win, you win,” redemptive entrepreneurship holds to the principle of “I lose, you win.”
Rather than being contrary to good business, to practice “self-disadvantaging meaningful sacrifices” requires good business abilities to carry out (Tanner Gesek’s words). One unskilled in business might choose, out of Christian piety, to incur a loss; but, this could simply end his business and ability to exercise generosity and self-sacrifice.
Kingsnorth recounts this reply and responds to it:
After all, as one critic pointed out, if we don’t create wealth, how are we going to distribute it to the poor?
Sheesh. Give me Tolstoy any day of the week. — Paul Kingsnorth, “The Vagabond King”
While easy to dismiss as a kind of capitalist cope, the principle is inescapable.
Even the smallholder or the urban homesteader must make a living in order to live the simple and generous life.
iii. Immigration
The apparent tension between the natural law and the new commandment has broken out into the political domain in debates over immigration.
Christian and non-Christian advocates of, in the US, not enforcing immigration laws and, in European nations, restricting Muslim immigration appeal to compassion and self-sacrificial love as reasons to be more liberal on immigration. Christians appeal to Old Testament provisions for the stranger and the foreigner and to Christ’s teaching.
Meanwhile, some Christian advocates of immigration enforcement and restriction have appealed to the natural law, to natural limits, and to the ordo amoris as reasons to maintain the integrity of national community prior to aid to non-citizens. Brad Littlejohn’s “Theology of Immigration” (First Things) is a great example of this. Vice President J. D. Vance’s famous remarks are another.
There doesn’t have to be tension here. I have been reflecting recently that I grew up with a vision of faith that was very focused on helping the poor, the minority, and the immigrant.
But I never once thought or heard another Christian even suggest that this had implications for national immigration policy until I was in a graduate degree.
Why? Because the biblical and the Christian call is to love “the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you” (Lev. 19:34). It is not to allow anyone who desires to enter the borders of your polity to do so.
A state may have many reasons to allow and even encourage immigration. The Christian openness to love of others beyond the circle of one’s natural attachments will undoubtedly have some implications for Christian thinking about immigration policy.
(And the economic libertarians have, I think, even superior arguments against right-wing restrictionism.)
But what levels of immigration should be permitted and how strictly laws should be enforced are questions of political prudence, not Christian principle.
In this case too, the new commandment does not subtract from the old commandments and from the natural law; it adds to them. In addition to living in accord with natural justice, exercising reciprocal sacrifice, we must exercise self-sacrificial love.
But even as Christ asks more, he asks no less than Peterson and the natural law:
“These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt 23:23).
Sacrifice and the Social Good
At present, then, Jordan Peterson is flattening a significant dichotomy within biblical teaching:
The principle of self-sacrifice, embodied in Christ’s passion, is not that of reciprocal sacrifice, on which civilization is indeed founded. It is something more.
But true self-disadvantaging sacrifice does not contradict reciprocal sacrifice, but extends beyond it.
What is more, a venerable, if recent tradition argues that even the truly Christian principle of sacrifice without expecting a return contributes to political well-being.
Hannah Arendt argued that the principle of Christian forgiveness is necessary to put an end to adjudication of past misdeeds. Conditions of natural justice require forgiveness that is indeed willing to leave some wrongs unrecompensed.
René Girard argued that social peace requires the sacrificial scapegoat. Cycles of retributive justice and tribal warfare can come to an end only through sacrifice.
And I would argue that natural justice and finite human flourishing are increased by the costly good works Christians and others perform that will never be repaid in this life. In fact, the willingness to do good for the community that will not be repaid is at the heart of the role people like Socrates and Peterson play.
Peterson’s rise to prominence was precipitated by a willingness to suffer harm for the good of the community. His courage was rewarded with fame but also punished with criticism, slander, cancellation, and eventually, nearly-fatal health complications.
Peterson’s sacrifice, I would argue, was never reciprocal. While he may have been rewarded, including financially, nothing can recompense the loss of scholarly and clinical reputation, the physical suffering, and the withering criticism to which he has been subjected.
In his own person, Peterson displays a kind of sacrifice that goes beyond the reciprocal.
And that kind of sacrifice, “the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate,” is required to restore a broken and faltering civilization.
Christ himself indicated that self-disadvantaging sacrifice would not be temporally useless:
Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10:29-30)
This is Christian civilization: “Houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions.”
And it is a prelude to the city, the civitas, even the “civilization of God” to come.
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