​In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Pope Francis made a few statements that I have seen many people describe as contrary to basic Christian doctrine. I think this is a mistake. First, let me give the quotes from the 60 Minutes translation of the interview.

At the close of the interview, Norah O'Donnell asks what gives him hope, and this is his response: "Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good."

I also note that immediately just before this in the interview, he says the following:

"The Church is like that: Everyone, everyone, everyone. "That so-and-so is a sinner…?" Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone. If the Church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone."

So however we want to interpret the quote that I placed first, it has to be taken in light of his immediately prior statement that everyone is a sinner, not just the occasional "rogues and sinners" that he refers to at the end. What might he mean, and is it truly incompatible with the historic teaching of Christianity on such doctrines as original sin and total depravity? I don't think so. And I will look to Augustine as a guide for how these not only fit together nicely but can explain what he means as an expression of historic Christian teaching.

​​What Pope Francis says in this interview is an affirmation of fundamental human goodness. Christian doctrine has always taught that. It also teaches that we are fallen. Augustine expressed this as the doctrine of original sin, which under a Protestant understanding has been expressed by total depravity.

Total depravity does not mean we are as fallen as we possibly could be. It means that every aspect of our being is fallen. Is this compatible with holding that we are fundamentally good? It sure is. Take Augustine for a good example of someone saying both things.

In Augustine's view, virtue is well-ordered love. Being perfect would mean loving everything according to how good it is. All of our desires are lined up in the right order, meaning we love what is most good the most and what is less good less.

Augustine sees evil as a privation, i.e. a falling from what is best. Everything that exists has some good to it, or it wouldn't exist. There is no negative value, then. Some things are not as good as they could be, but they all have some positive value. We thus should love everything God created as good.

But some things are less good than they should be. That's what we call evil. It's a distortion. Some things are evil because good things are missing, such as when the keyboard I am typing on right now has a missing key. It doesn't function as it ought to, because the J key is not present.

Other things are evil because they are in the wrong order, such as when you try to connect the hard drive of the computer in backwards. All the parts are there, but the disorder prevents it from working as it should. In Augustine's view, all evil is one of those two things -- something missing or something in the wrong order.

Sin is a kind of evil. Typically sin is when we love good things but in the wrong order. There is nothing wrong with seeing my well-being as good and seeking it out. But when I place my comfort, which is good, above higher moral concerns, I am disordered.

Total depravity and original sin are concepts Augustine would affirm. He would say that every aspect of my being has fallen desires. I want things that are good, but they are disordered. I place things that are not as good as God above God, which is idolatry. I place self-interest above the good of others, which can be selfish. And I might value good things but in a distorted way.

Yet Augustine would affirm that humans are all fundamentally good in the sense that our desires are all for good things. Everything we seek after can be conceived of as a longing for good, even if it's distorted. What we want is not bad in that sense, even if it's bad in another sense. We were created good, indeed in the image of God. That is what gives us a moral status not possessed by other animals. It's not because we are morally perfect that grounds universal human rights. It's because God made us to have intrinsic value. God declared us good, and we represent God to the world. That image has been distorted, but every human being is fundamentally good. Every desire we have is for something good, even if we have it in a distorted way or out of order with other desires for good things, because everything created by God is good, and having desires for good things is good.

Augustine also insisted on finding ways to talk that allow most of what we say to come out as true. He was a defender of ordinary speech. This manifested in his response to skepticism. He thought of skeptical approaches as having too high a standard for what counts as knowledge. Expecting knowledge to be 100% certainty, as the skeptics did, was misusing knowledge-language in a way at odds with how the words for knowledge are actually used by real people.

He criticized the Stoics for defining emotion in a way that is at odds with ordinary language use, taking emotions to be the bad ones and thus getting the conclusion that all emotion is bad, but they had to pretend that righteous indignation is not anger and is not an emotion to make such a claim, since they had no problem with that emotion. They simply refused to call it an emotion. And he insisted that when we call people good, we are not speaking falsely.

On this issue, he insisted that the perfect life is not possible in this life, but it still makes sense to speak of some lives as better than others. So we can call someone's life a good life and, speaking relative to other lives, be speaking truly, even though the truly blessed life is only possible in the afterlife, Similarly, he is very clear that there's nothing wrong with saying that someone is good, in a way that is totally compatible with the doctrine of original sin or what later came to be called total depravity. We can say that Mother Theresa is good, relative to Adolf Hitler. Some people are morally better than others. And we can say that one person is better than they were several years ago. Our desires can become more in line with what they ought to be. We can make such comparative judgments, and they are relative to each other, not to the absolute standard. So we can call someone a good person and not be saying something false, even if the person is not good in an absolute sense.

What Augustine would insist on is recognizing that we are fundamentally good but distorted from the goodness that would be ideally present in humanity's original state. Total depravity is traditionally presented as being fallen in every aspect of our being but not as being fallen to the greatest degree. Every aspect of our being, in Augustine's view, is below where it ought to be. We don't want what is most good as much as we should. We want other things that are less good more than the things that are most good. But that is compatible with recognizing that the things we want are good and with seeing our hearts as mostly directed toward good things.

The pope said that most humans are fundamentally good. In what sense? He says we mostly want good things. Our heart desires good. That's pretty much all he actually said. But isn't that precisely what Augustine says? And Augustine was a firm believer in original sin and what later came to be called total depravity. So I don't see anything here that necessarily is at odds with historic Christian doctrine on this issue. Is it possible that he could have been clearer, perhaps by saying right before this that everyone is a sinner? Sure, and he actually did do that, but the clips posted on social media are conveniently cutting that out in order to make this look worse than it actually is. But that is what the Bible calls false witness. I will have no part of that.

The first time I studied Leviticus carefully (about 13-14 years ago), one of the things that stood out to me was the fact that ritual uncleanness transfers very easily, but cleanness does not. If someone is unclean for whatever reason, touching someone or something clean renders the clean person or thing unclean. It doesn't go the other way. Going from unclean to clean requires certain ritual ceremonies, and it often takes time, sometimes even a week or more. Going from clean to unclean simply requires exposure.

That's one of the reasons that it's particularly impressive that in the gospels Jesus touches people who have skin diseases or unhealthy menstrual conditions when he heals them, since those conditions were ritually unclean under the Torah ritual system. And it's clear that this wasn't out of some notion that the Torah ritual system was an ancient superstition that should be discarded. He insists in his teaching about Torah that it is the word of God and will be eternally true. But he also insists that it is eternally true not because it perpetually applies but because he fulfills it himself.

So what's going on when he heals people whose conditions would normally require a week or more of cleansing ceremonies? Sometimes he does tell them to go to the priests in the temple and do the ceremonies the Torah prescribes. Other passages don't mention him saying that. But certainly what's odd about it is that he touches them himself, when there are plenty of cases where he heals people without touching them. Are we to assume that he takes on the uncleanness himself voluntarily and then has to go through the rituals to be cleansed himself? The first would be a nice symbol of how he elsewhere describes what he would do at the cross, but I don't think that's the right way to think about these cases, because he's even telling them in some cases that he has simply made them clean (e.g. Matthew 8:3, although there he does say to make the sacrifices with the priest, but he says it's to be done for proof, not for actually making the guy clean).

I've long thought of this as just an exception. Normally cleanness doesn't spread to the unclean, but these passages are presenting Jesus as demonstrating something about himself as different. He can make unclean clean instantly, and that shows that he's superior to the Torah ritual system, which only looked forward to him.

But that turns out to be wrong, on closer inspection. For one thing, it can't be mere superiority. The Bible is clear across the entire canon that God can't entangle himself with sin or sinful beings, and that's why sacrifices are needed to begin with to deal with that sin. Isaiah 59:2 describes sin as separation from God. Jesus couldn't, merely by being God, do something that the scriptures clearly present God as not being able to do without sacrifice. So it has to be tied to sacrifices in some way, and it would be nice if we could find something explicit in the ritual ceremonies that looks more like what Jesus was doing in these passages.
​
It turns out that these cases in the gospels are not unprecedented. There is at least one mention in Leviticus of a case where holiness spreads to something common (although it isn't described as cleanness spreading to something unclean). That's in the description of the sin offering in Leviticus 6:27, where anyone who touches the flesh of the animal offered as a sin offering is made holy. I know of no other place where something is made holy merely by touching something in the entire Hebrew Bible, although maybe there are others that I just never connected with this issue.
What's going on in the gospel passages, then, given that there is a precedent for holiness spreading from a sin offering to something else? Perhaps the implication is that Jesus could reverse the normal flow of the symbolic status of ritual uncleanness to the clean because, as a future sin offering, he is in fact able to touch something and make it holy, whereas being divine without being the sin offering wouldn't do that. That seems to make these things fit together a lot better than the way I had been thinking about it.

There is a lot of audio (and some video) material on Revelation online from Don Carson. I'm listing these in as close to chronological order as I can.

CICCU talk (Cambridge University organization for Christian students):
Apocalypse Now (Nov 9, 1986)

1994 Carey Conference, Wales (The Doctrine of Last Things) [all talks found at this link]

Rev 4 Vision of a Transcendent God (August 28, 1994)
Rev 5 Vision of a Redeeming God (August 29, 1994)
Rev 12 Rage, Rage Against the Church (August 30, 1994) [this link is to a Gospel Coalition listing that I think is the same talk)
Rev 13 Anti-Christ and the False Prophet (August 31, 1994)
Rev 21-22 Triumph of the Lamb (September 1, 1994)

The audio for Don Carson's entire seminary class on Revelation is online at The Gospel Coalition website. These are numbered out of order. The numbering was wrong before The Gospel Coalition got hold of the files, but they made it worse by listing the last six under numbers that aren't the same as the numbers the files themselves have (and they still weren't the right numbers). I spent some time a while back listening to the beginnings and ends of each file to see the proper order, and I'm reproducing my conclusions here. Because the lectures are already numbered (in some cases inconsistently), and because there happen to be 26 audio files, I will use letters to indicate the correct order to avoid confusion. (My first attempt to put these in the proper order got completely messed up because I used numbers.) This class was probably in 1995, given that he says The Gagging of God was coming out the next summer.

A. 1:1-3 (#1)
B. 1:4-15 (#2)
C. 1:16-2:7 (#3)
D. 2:8-11 (#4)
E. 2:12-28 (#5)
F. ch.3 (#6) starts with slides on cities, ends chs.2-3
G. ch.4pt1 (#9) right before #7 -- talking about elders at end
H. ch.4pt2 (#7) talking about elders at beginning
I. ch.5 (#8)
J. 6:1-6 or so (#10) new class, quiz then begins at 6:1
K. 6:6-ch.7 (#13) right after #10
L. 7:4ff. (#12)
M. 8:1ff (#14) new class starts, hands back quiz, begins ch.8 after 5 min intro
N. 10:1ff. (#11) interlude before 7th trumpet
O. 11.1ff. (#15)
P. ch.12 (#16) fills in 11:4 stuff he missed; eventually gets to ch.12
Q. 13:1-17 (#17) starts new class on 13-14,parts of 17
R. 13:17-into ch.14 (#18) class ends but didn't finish ch.14
S. ch.14 (#19) new class:rest of ch.14 some. ch.20 then ch.17, ends with children saved
T. ch.17 (#20) starts with Jews saved, continues children saved, ch.18 by end
U. ch.19 pt1(#21) new class,systematic issues,ch.19 ends with amill problem #1
V. ch.19 pt2 (#24) begins 2nd problem with amill, ends on imminent return [TGC lists as 24. Filename says 25.]
W. 19pt3 (#22) begins postmill prob: imminent Christ's return, end 19.8; class over [TGC lists as 22. Filename says 23.]
X. 20.1-6 (#25) last class, begins with ch.20 [TGC lists as 25. Filename says 26.]
Y. 20.7-21.8 (#26) starts 20.7, ends around 21.8 [TGC lists as 26. Filename says 22.]
Z. 21.9-22.21 (#23) begins 21.9 ends by reading to end of book [TGC lists as 23. Filename says 24.]

1995 EMW Aberystwyth Conference:

Rev 12:1-13:1 (August 8, 1995)
Rev 13:1-10 (August 9, 1995)
Rev 13:11-18 (August 10, 1995)
Rev 14 (August 11, 1995)

Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS) 2004 Missions Conference: Missions as the Triumph of the Lamb
[note: this is the same set as the ones labeled June 26, 2005 at The Gospel Coalition site, but RTS clearly labels it 2004]

Rev 4
Rev 5
Rev 21:1-8
Rev 21:9-22:6
Rev 12
Rev 13
Rev 14

June 1, 2004 (Summer at the Castle in Northern Ireland):

Rev 4
Rev 5
Rev 12
Rev 13, pt 1
Rev 13, pt 2
Rev 14
Rev 21:1-22:6
Q&A
ch.6 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)
ch.12 Rage, Rage Against the Church unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)
21:1-22:6 Even So, Come, Lord Jesus! unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)


Rev 12 The Strange Triumph of a Slaughtered Lamb (Dec 6, 2008 at Mars Hill Church in Seattle) video and audio

Rev 14:6-20 The God Who is Very Angry (Feb 28, 2009 according to TGC: part of The God Who is There series)
Rev 21:1-22:5 The God Who Triumphs (Feb 28, 2009 according to TGC: part of The God Who is There series)

Rev 21:1-22:5 The Unqualified Joy of the God-Centered New Heaven and New Earth (July 24, 2009)

Rev 21:1-22:5 What is the Gospel and How Does It Work, Part 3 (Gospel Coalition Regional Conference Los Angeles, Nov 6, 2010)

Rev 21-22 (unsure extent but probably through 22:5) Home at Last (Gospel Coalition National Women's Conference, Orlando, FL June 22, 2012)

John Stott died yesterday at age 90, after only four years of retirement. One of the most well-loved among influential evangelicals, Stott rarely drew much criticism from fellow evangelicals, even among those who considered his few controversial positions to be wrongheaded. Stott was the rare pastor-scholar. As a single, celibate minister, he had the time to devote a day each week, a week each month, and a month each year to engaging in scholarly study outside his normal preaching preparation. His popular-level expositional commentaries on books of scripture are among the best in that genre, and his commentary on John's epistles was perhaps the most useful commentary for the actual teaching of scripture for something like two decades after it was published. His popular-level presentations of what the gospel is all about have been among the most influential works in teaching those in a largely biblically-illiterate generation what the basics of Christianity really are. People in the media who are outsiders to evangelicalism tend to see leaders of political movements like the Christian Coalition as the influential leaders of evangelicalism, but nothing could be further from the truth. People like John Stott, John Piper, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, Chuck Swindoll, and Rick Warren have far more influence among evangelicals as preachers, spiritual leaders than anyone seeking a purely or largely political agenda.

I can think of three areas of controversy that have led Stott to be criticized by fellow evangelicals. One is his annihilationism. He never denied the reality of hell, but he conceived of hell as the complete annihilation of the person. They simply no longer exist. It's one thing for theological liberals like Clark Pinnock to hold such a view, but Stott was the rare conservative annihilationist. The second is his moderating position on women's preaching. Complementarians typically hold that a congregation's elders should be men, and the primary teaching of scripture should be restricted to men. Stott agreed, except that he had women as elders, and they preached, provided that there was not a majority of women on the elder team, and as long as the person occupying the role of overseeing the elders was a man. More conservative complementarians thought he went too far, and egalitarians didn't think he went far enough. The third is his remaining in the Church of England when numerous Anglicans evangelicals have left over various issues in that denomination that conservatives have disagreed with. He sought to resist change from the conservative direction while remaining an Anglican, and he sided firmly with evangelicals against fundamentalism in not endorsing separatism over such issues.

It's interesting what NPR chooses to focus on in their headlines. I can't find anything on their site about him, but I heard them announce his death least night, and they repeated it this morning. Their emphasis was on his unusual combination of views (to their mind). They said that, despite his conservative views on homosexuality and abortion, he drew criticism from other evangelicals for pursuing social justice issues. Really? I can't think of any evangelical who might have criticized Stott on such concerns. That has played no role in the controversies over his life and ministry. His positions on social justice are recognized by most evangelicals as being perfectly biblical. There might be disagreements among evangelicals about the best methods of pursuing social justice, but evangelicals typically recognize the concern and would laud his efforts to pursue such goals. I realize that the NPR news staff have probably never met an evangelical and don't quite grasp what drives evangelicalism in any way, but it seems they've invented a controversy out of thin air to serve a political narrative about evangelicals when there are actual controversies they could have mentioned. Wikipedia captures at least two of them very well, and I couldn't imagine why they couldn't just use its presentation of the issues to guide their presentation of it if they can't figure out how to understand those issues coherently themselves.

Update 8:12am: There's a great writeup by Tim Stafford that not only gives a much fuller picture of Stott's life and influence but gets the social justice issue right. Also, Justin Taylor quotes Stott's conclusion of his last book (which he wrote two years ago, still by pen and paper):

"As I lay down my pen for the last time (literally, since I confess I am not computerized) at the age of eighty-eight, I venture to send this valedictory message to my readers. I am grateful for your encouragement, for many of you have written to me. Looking ahead, none of us of course knows what the future of printing and publishing may be. But I myself am confident that the future of books is assured and that, though they will be complemented, they will never be altogether replaced. For there is something unique about books. Our favorite books become very precious to us and we even develop with them an almost living and affectionate relationship. Is it an altogether fanciful fact that we handle, stroke and even smell them as tokens of our esteem and affection? I am not referring only to an author's feeling for what he has written, but to all readers and their library. I have made it a rule not to quote from any book unless I have first handled it. So let me urge you to keep reading, and encourage your relatives and friends to do the same. For this is a much neglected means of grace. . . . Once again, farewell!"

I'm not about to revert to writing books with pen and paper, but I have to agree about electronic books. It's nice to have ready access to stuff online, and I've benefited from not having to go to the library to find journal articles or to look briefly at online portions of books, but I can't read anything of any decent length online. It was torture going through my dissertation on the computer to edit it as a result of my desire not to print it out to save several hundred pages of paper. Thirty-page articles are hard enough for me to read through on PDF. There's something about holding it in your hands, being able to carry it around without having to lug around some proprietary electronic device whose manufacturer can revoke your ability to read it at any time, and being able to mark it up however you like, never mind being able to put it on a shelf near other works of a similar kind in an organized way (not that I've been able to do that part for years for anything but my commentaries).

In the KJV and some translations that it's influenced, Genesis 2:18 describes Eve as "a help meet for" Adam. Somehow this has come into English as a noun "helpmeet", which (judging by how it was used in circles I grew up in) seems to mean "helpmate" or something like that. Since I hardly ever use the KJV, I don't look at this expression all that much, and it never occurred to me until recently that this understanding of "help meet" completely misunderstands the language of the KJV, which actually translated the Hebrew very well into the languge of the day but completely misleads the reader of today, as is so often the case with archaic translations.
What the KJV says is "I will make her a help meet for him." In archaic English, "meet" in such a context means "fitting" or "suitable". She is a helper who is meet for him. She is fitting for him, well-suited to him. That's exactly what the Hebrew says. To garble this as a noun "helpmeet" completely obscures the point (not to mention sounds meaningless to most speakers of English who weren't raised on the KJV).

There’s a fascinating element in the discussion of the Sabbath year in Deuteronomy 15. The general law requires releasing people from their debts every seven years. That means if you lend to someone a few months before the release of debts, and the person is too poor to pay it back in time, you have to release them of the debt. You might expect this to give rise to unprecedented amounts of stinginess in the time before the year of debt-release. The law anticipates this, though, and it commands Israel not to use such fears as excuses not to give. It’s sin to refuse to give in such a situation, and they were commanded to give and not grudgingly. It says God will reward those who get stiffed in such a situation.

In the debate between complementarianism and egalitarianism about gender distinctions in marriage, egalitarians often say that calling on a woman to submit to her husband is unfair when the man isn’t called on to do the same. This does ignore that the same Ephesians 5 that tells women to submit to their husbands commands husbands to love their wives as self-sacrificially as the love that brought Christ to die for the church, which I think should count as at least as significant a level of sacrifice as what the wife is asked to do. But one thing complementarians often say strikes me as missing the point. They say that in any ideal marriage this shouldn’t be an issue. If the husband is loving his wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, then it won’t be difficult at all for the wife to submit to the husband.

One hint that something is amiss here comes from considering the flip-side, which would be: If the wife submits to the husband, then it won’t be difficult to love her as Christ loved the church. Really? I suspect it would still be immensely difficult for a sinful husband or wife to follow these commands even with a sinless spouse.

But I think the main reason I don’t like that complementarian response is that you shouldn’t have to go to the ideal situation to see that these commands are all right. If complementarianism is correct, then wives should submit to their husbands even if their husbands are complete jerks, and husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church even if their wives are as unlovely as someone’s inner self could be.

Indeed, I would say this is so even with an egalitarian interpretation of this passage. This is simply Christian teaching. Philippians 2 makes this utterly clear. Christ’s model of giving himself for us is just plain the model for Christians and how we should treat others, regardless of how those others treat us. And this is simply continuous with the Hebrew scriptures, including the Mosaic law, since the very same principle underlies the command in Deuteronomy 15 that lenders should give to the poor even when there’s little chance of getting the money back before the debt-release year (and many other places in the Torah, Proverbs, prophets, etc. along these lines).

So, while I don’t think the complementarian reply above is correct (i.e. saying that in an ideal situation it isn’t all that bad to follow complementarianism), at the same time I think objections to complementarianism that involve any claim that it asks too much are, at the very least, contrary to the very spirit of Christ and his call on the church. There are those who will resist such an ethic. They will say that Nietzsche was right in his diagnosis of Christianity as a slave-morality. I’m willing to grant that to a point, as long as they recognize that they resist Christianity in doing so. What I will have little patience for is those who think they can maintain a Christian ethic while thinking any unfairness here is immoral.

It reminds me of a discussion I overheard between two atheist philosophers, both of whom had some Christian influence when they were younger. One was giving a certain argument against a certain conception of hell, saying that it would be unfair, and the other said that it won’t make much sense to use an argument that assumes God is fair against the followers of Jesus, since Jesus described God in terms of an employer giving the same amount of pay to the laborers who only worked an hour as he gave to those who had been working all day. These were day-laborers who subsist on a day’s wage to live for the day. The Torah even requires people to pay day-laborers every day for that very reason. Jesus says God is like the farmer who pays the day-laborers a full day’s wage even if they don’t earn it. There’s nothing fair about that arrangement, and yet Jesus says it represents what God’s character is like. It’s not remotely fair to ask Israelites to give to their poor fellow Israelites who will almost certainly end up with no debt due to the closeness of the year of debt-release. But it’s very clear that biblical morality requires doing exactly that sort of thing and much more.

[cross-posted at First Things]

Here are some of the things I really hate in a worship song.

1. Too simplistic, banal, lacking in depth, shallow, doctrineless: Consider that one that just talks about unity among brothers that only mentions God in passing at the very end.

2. It's so repetitive. I mean, come on, how many times can you repeat "His steadfast love endures forever" before you start thinking the song is going to go on forever? Examples: here and here

3. For some songs, the focus is too much on instruments, and the sheer volume leads to its seeming more like a performance than worship and prevents quiet contemplation.

4. There might be too much emphasis on too intimate a relationship with God, using first-person singular pronouns like "me" and "I" or second-person pronouns like "you" instead of words like "we" and "God". This fosters a spirit of individualism, and it generates an atmosphere of religious euphoria rather than actual worship of God. Worship should be about God, not about us. Or what about the ones that use physical language to describe God and our relationship with him? Can you really stomach the idea of tasting God?

5. Some songs have way too many words for anyone to learn.

6. It patterns its worship on experiences that not everyone in the congregation will be able to identify with. If you're not in the frame of mind or don't have the emotional state in question (e.g. a desperate longing for God. Then what are you doing lying and singing it? Worship leaders who encourage that sort of thing are making their congregations sing falsehoods.

7. Then there's that song with the line asking God not to take the Holy Spirit away, as if God would ever do that to a genuine believer.

8. Then there's that song that basically says nothing except expressing negative emotions.

At this point I'm so outraged that people would pass this sort of thing off as worship that I'm almost inclined to give in to the people who think we shouldn't sing anything but the psalms. Oh, wait...

A lot of people think it's irrational to vote if your vote isn't going to have an effect on the outcome. I live in an extremely blue district of a slightly red county in a very blue state. In local and statewide elections, my vote has so little an effect that it's not worth voting if the only point of voting is for my one vote to have an effect on the outcome. New York is overwhelmingly going to continue to support Senators Schumer and Clinton, and they tend to vote Democratic in governor elections except when there's a very moderate Republican like George Pataki on the ballot. County-wide races are closer, and so is the U.S. House district, which was almost a toss-up in 2006. Things were even more one-sided when I lived in Rhode Island.

But it simply isn't true that voting is only worth doing if you're going to be the deciding vote. There are other reasons people give for voting, some better than others. One that often occurs to me when it seems hopeless for my candidate is that if everyone voting for the other side thought it wasn't worth voting because the outcome is assured then my candidate might have a chance. Other reasons include that it helps you psychologically to feel like you're contributing and that it's simply your obligation to do what you can to influence things for the better even if what you can isn't by itself going to make the difference in who wins the election.

Any of those responses would be sufficient by itself, except perhaps the psychological benefit one (at least if that involves self-deception, and if it doesn't then it's not a distinct reason but depends on one of the others). I think there's an even better reason to vote, and I think it might actually be what motivates me most, but I hadn't actually thought about it in these terms until today. It takes a page from Calvinist responses to the objection that if the future is already determined then there's no point in praying.

Calvinists come in several varieties, but the most common sort of Calvinist (which isn't the same as being the most noticed kind on the internet) is compatibilist about human freedom and divine predetermination. If God has a plan that includes everything I'm going to do, everything every other person is going to do, and an outcome for every prayer I ever pray, then is it worth praying? My prayer isn't going to change anything, after all. Of course, my prayer would also be in this plan, and if I didn't pray then a different outcome may well have been in the works. Compatibilists about divine predetermination and human action are going to insist that God works through our choices and doesn't just force things outside our control. Our prayers are part of how God's plan works itself out as history unfolds.

One thing Calvinists sometimes say is that praying is not so much for the outcome but for us. God wants us to pray because of what God will do in us because we pray. I don't want to deny that, but it's certainly not the emphasis in scripture on reasons to pray. The emphasis seems to be on two things. One is that prayer does affect things. It doesn't change them, because the future can't be changed anymore than the past or present can. If the future is a certain way then it can't be changed. Even open theists don't think the future can be changed. Why should someone who thinks there's a definite future think it can be changed? But for the reasons in the previous paragraph, the future can be influenced. It can be caused by things in the present, and I can be part of that process of bringing it about. A compatibilist should have no trouble saying that sort of thing.

But there's another reason in scripture for why we should pray, even though God has worked out the end from the beginning, and this one (unlike the previous one) does have some relevance for voting. God wants us to communicate our dependence on him and to express our desires to him. He wants us to see him as the Father who cares for us and meets our needs and our wishes, provided that our wishes are righteous and as long as there isn't some other reason beyond our ken for why God wouldn't grant a particular wish (as there may well be). As Jesus points out, what father when presented with a request from a child for bread or fish will give a snake? God wants to bestow good things on his children and delights when we come to him with requests, for the same reasons a giving parent delights in such things. Given that, it's a privilege to call him Father, which is why it's a big deal that Jesus starts out the Lord's prayer with "our Father". Those who don't avail themselves of that title in addressing him are missing out on something great. Those who don't address him at all are missing out on even more.

The same dynamic plays out in a smaller way with voting. I'm privilege to live in a country that seeks my opinion on who should occupy certain offices. Even if my vote doesn't have an effect in putting someone in office, it's a privilege to be able to contribute my thoughts in the process of the communal decision that an election involves. I don't believe voting is a moral right. But I think I'd be wasting an opportunity to express my opinion if I didn't vote, and wasting a privilege is at least unfortunate (and I would even argue that it's immoral). This seems to me to be a much better reason to vote than any of the more common ones that I hear, even if most of them are good enough reasons.