The Betrayal of Charity: The Sins that Sabotage Divine Love

3--Sloth and the Joy of the Resurrection

41 CHAPTER 3 Sloth and the Joy of the Resurrection Rebecca DeYoung identifies biblical examples of the vice of sloth “in the Israelites’ resistance to embracing their new home in the promised land, and in Lot’s wife turning back to the familiarity of Sodom while angels attempted to rescue her.”1 In both cases, she connects sloth with a failure to trust in God’s redemption. This chapter extends DeYoung’s insight by connecting sloth with agnosticism about the resurrection of the dead. I argue that without faith in resurrection, we cannot sustain the joy that flows from charity, but instead fall into the sin of sloth regarding what God is doing for us.2 It would seem, however, that loving God for his own sake requires that our joy in God be unrelated to whether God has conquered death for us. Immanuel Kant describes the nature of “pure morality” by telling a story whose moral, he thinks, will be evident to a child.3 The story is about an effort to corrupt an honest man into doing something wrong. First the honest man is offered enticing rewards; then he is threatened with dire punishments, and even his family implores him to yield. Despite his agony, he persists steadfastly in the path of honesty. Kant imagines that “my young listener will be raised step by step from mere approval to admiration, 42 — The Betrayal of Charity from that to amazement, and finally to the greatest veneration and a lively wish that he himself could be such a man.”4 In this costly action, Kant suggests, the boy will be able to identify pure morality, lacking any tinge of incentive or self-interest. Kant adds that the immortality of the soul is a postulate of practical reason, a postulate without which we would despair.5 But Ludwig Feuerbach deconstructs this practical postulate as simply another instance of the human pursuit of self-interest. As Feuerbach depicts the believer’s worldview: “God is the certainty of my future felicity. The interest I have in knowing that God is, is one with the interest I have in knowing that I am, that I am immortal. God is my hidden, my assured existence.”6 Accepting Kant’s critique of self-interest, Timothy Jackson argues that charity requires agnosticism about resurrection and life after death. In what follows, I consider Jackson’s argument in light of Aquinas’ theology of joy, the interior effect of charity that is opposed by sloth. Aquinas’ presentation of joy and sloth helps to reveal the intrinsic relation of charity to faith that God will resurrect us from the dead. Without faith in the resurrection, we almost inevitably sin against charity by falling into sloth. The vice of sloth requires the strong spiritual medicine brought by Jesus Christ. Timothy Jackson on Charity and Eternal Life Charity Is Its Own Reward In two recent books, Love Disconsoled and The Priority of Love,Timothy Jackson suggests that Christian charity should be dissociated from faith in life after death. His aim is to show that the reason we practice self-giving love is not because we hope for an eternal reward; rather, self-giving love is simply worth practicing for its own sake. In Love Disconsoled, Jackson notes Boethius’ view that if humans do not live forever, we cannot hope to experience real happiness. For Boethius, the happiness we experience in this short life is too fleeting to merit the name “happiness.” In response, Jackson insists that even without “certainty about one’s endless longevity,” we can still live a life of grateful charity.7 God does not owe us eternal life, Sloth and the Joy of the Resurrection — 43 since our life is his gift. In gratitude for this gift we owe God (and our neighbor in God) self-giving love or charity. As Jackson observes, Feuerbach’s early work Thoughts on Death and Immortality suggests that the desire for immortality, as found in Christian faith, is self-centered and prevents Christians from freely surrendering themselves to the whole. Feuerbach considers death to be the physical analogue of the spiritual self-giving that is love. Against this view, Jackson warns against the danger of valorizing death. Charity should not be equated, as in Feuerbach, with “the absorption of the personal into something infinite, universal, and impersonal.”8 In other words, even if self-giving love makes life meaningful in the...