The Table Video

C. Stephen Evans (Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University) discusses accountability, responsibility, and human behavior as it relates to spiritual formation.

Transcript:

Steve: Hi, thanks for checking out this video, This is Dr. C. Stephan Evans from Biola University, and he’s gonna be discussing accountability. This is from the Center for Christian Thought’s “The Table Conference,” where our topic was “Mind Your Heart,” exploring the intersection of psychology and spirituality.

Stephen: Well, it’s a great honor for me to be invited to be a part of this conference, although I must say, that’s a hard act to follow. [chuckles] But I believe very strongly in the mission of the Center for Christian Thought here, and I love the fact that they not only see themselves as Christian scholars rooted in the church, but also see it as important to reach out and minister and serve the church. I believe very strongly in that.

I wanna talk about accountability tonight. There should be a handout, I hope you all have it. It’s mostly just quotations; there’s a brief summary of the talk at the top. There’s a lot of talk about accountability in our culture. Politicians talk about making school teachers and principles accountable. Journalists talk about holding politicians accountable for their actions, or inaction in the case of Congress. Insurance companies insist on evidence-based outcomes as a basis for compensating physicians, so as to hold healthcare providers accountable. Accrediting agencies ask colleges and universities for quantifiable outcomes as a way of making higher educational institutions accountable.

Trial lawyers on television ads promise riches to people who want to hold big corporations and insurance companies accountable by suing them and getting rich. People expect the criminal justice system to hold lawbreakers accountable for their actions. One can easily see, from this quick sampling, that the concept of accountability is a mixed bag. It’s linked to both noble goals, but also base human motives. Psychologists, of course, have also studied the notion of accountability, and they’ve shown what a powerful influence on human behavior accountability can be. In experiments, for example, people who believe that they are being observed typically behave quite differently than people who do not believe they are being observed. They are much more likely to be extra careful and diligent, for example, in a task.

And if a speaker knows the views of the audience, luckily, I don’t really know what your views are… If the speaker knows the views of an audience, that speaker is much more likely to tailor what he or she says to please the audience. Now, this is hardly surprising. We humans are social beings, and accountability is fundamentally a social notion. What does it mean to be accountable? Clearly, the root of the notion lies in the idea that someone who is accountable must be able to give an account of their actions to someone, though the someone can differ radically. So I may be accountable to teachers, to law enforcement personnel, to my boss, other authority figures, friends, family, or just public opinion in general. Most people also think that we humans are morally accountable. What does that mean?

Well, I think it means even if we fool the people around us, in some sense, when we violate moral standards, we see ourselves as accountable. Although accountability is a fundamental part of human life, it’s also something we often don’t like very much. We dislike having to make end-of-the-year reports for our employers. We hate filling out tax returns, in which we have to account for our income. Many students dread getting report cards. John 3:19 tells us that we humans, quote, “Love darkness rather than light, “because our deeds are evil.” We love darkness because we think the dark will cover our deeds and give us anonymity.

Of course, this craving for darkness is, Christianly understood, ultimately futile. It’s true we may escape being accountable to other humans. The teacher may never be aware that I cheated, the IRS may never discover the income I conveniently forgot to report, but not so for God. The psalmist tells us, “Even the darkness “will not be dark to you, for darkness is as light to you.”

1 John tells us that in God there is no darkness at all, and thus there is no escape from accountability to our Maker. We should not underestimate the extent to which the desire to escape accountability actually, I think, motivates religious unbelief. For example, the famous atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said this: “If there were a god, there would be no way “for me to escape God’s gaze.” Sartre found this to be intolerable, terrifying, in fact.

The only way he could escape this terror was by convincing himself that God did not exist. Perhaps Sartre’s case is extreme, but something like his fear of God’s gaze, I think, is common, even among believers. I sometimes ask my students, how do they picture God, or image God? I think the most disturbing answer I ever received, was a student who said, “My God is writing all the time.” What a terrible image of God, a cosmic Santa Claus, always busy with his naughty and nice list, keeping a record of all of our wrongs, nothing escaping his gaze.

It’s commonly claimed, of course, since Freud, that religious belief is motivated by wish fulfillment, and this may be true, in some cases. But it’s equally true that unbelief can be motivated by wish fulfillment, or, perhaps more precisely, by fear avoidance. I have a friend who says he was raised by two alcoholic parents who, if you asked them, “Do you believe in God,” their answer was, “We’re afraid there might really be a god.” I suppose this aversion to accountability even infects the Christian community.

Perhaps, as a reaction to disturbing images of God we have, we prefer to focus solely on God’s love, and avoid speaking of God’s wrath. We like to picture Jesus as our friend, and he is indeed the Friend of Sinners. But he’s also the King of Kings, the one to whom all power and authority is given. He’s not a flattering bosom buddy, whose chief function is to make us feel good about ourselves. Perhaps it is our dislike of being held accountable that explains why we hear so few sermons these days about hell, or even about the miseries of sin.

So I believe this aversion to accountability can even affect Christian intellectuals, perhaps in unconscious ways. If you look at Christian ethics today, there is a massive swing away from talk about God’s commands, or God’s laws, and towards what has come to be known as virtue ethics.

Now virtue ethics, in itself, is highly important, and, I think, valuable. It’s a tremendous rediscovery of something that’s been deeply present in Christian thinking from the Bible onwards. So virtue ethics, in itself, is a praiseworthy emphasis on the fact that God does not care simply about what we do, but also about who we are and what we’re like. We are to be people who love justice and mercy and kindness. People who are above all, characterized by love of God and neighbor, a love acquired through trust in God, motivated by hope that we are becoming more and more like God. So there’s nothing wrong with virtue ethics, in itself, but I think there is plenty wrong with people who think that an ethic of virtue can replace or supplant an ethic of law, who think that if we focused on virtues, we will no longer have to think at all about how we ought to act or behave.

Biblically, there is no competition between God’s law and the virtues God wants to instill in us. Rather, God’s law is seen as a gracious gift, that it’s an essential tool in acquiring the virtues God wants us to have. And one of those virtues is, in fact, the virtue of faithful obedience, a virtue we might call conscientiousness. The Biblical writers did not see God’s commands as burdensome or onerous.

On the contrary, for example, Psalm 119 celebrates the joys and delights of God’s law. “I will always obey your law, forever and ever. “I will walk about in freedom, “for I have sought out your precepts. “I will speak of your statutes before kings, “and will not be put to shame, “for I delight in your commands because I love them. “I lift up my hands to your commands, which I love, “and I meditate on your decrees.”

Nor is this joyous embrace of God’s commands limited to the Old Testament. Both the gospels and the epistles are full of exhortations to keep God’s commands, whether given through the Hebrew scriptures, or through the words of Jesus himself, and his followers. Jesus’ words in 1 John 15:10 express this very powerfully. “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, “just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands, “and remain in His love.”

How can those of us who are Christians recover this sense of gratitude for God’s law? How can we learn to rejoice that we are accountable to God? We might begin by remembering that even secular thinkers realize that accountability is often a good thing, a blessing, even if it’s one we don’t welcome at the time. A child may not relish a parent who holds the child accountable, but those of us who are fortunate enough to have had loving parents, realize in hindsight what a gift it was to have a parent who cared enough about us to hold us accountable. Even secular philosophers sometimes recognize the value of accountability.

Philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who recently died, and he was an atheist, and his last book was called “Religion Without God.” Dworkin spoke of responsibility rather than accountability, but I believe he had the very same concept of mine. Dworkin insists that our task as humans is not merely to be happy or enjoy ourselves, It’s rather to, as he puts it, “live well.” What does it mean to live well? Well, living well, he says, is a matter of living up to our responsibilities. To whom are we responsible? As an atheist, Dworkin cannot say. Many of his atheist counterparts would say we’re responsible to ourselves, but Dworkin refuses this answer because it won’t work. He knows that if we were responsible to ourselves, we could release ourselves from that responsibility. But Dworkin affirms that we cannot do that.

So he concludes, “We are charged to live well “by the bare fact of our existence “as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead.” I believe Dworkin had an experiential awareness of God’s claim on his life. But his atheism blocked him from recognizing the source of his accountability. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard expresses the idea that God has a rightful claim on each of us when he affirms that, “At every person’s birth, “there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular.” Our lives are a gift, but the gift comes with a responsibility that stems from the gratitude we owe the Giver.

Our task, what we are accountable to do, is to be faithful to that divine purpose. What we humans call conscience, is simply I think, an awareness of that accountability, of that responsibility, or as Kierkegaard says, “Conscience is a relationship in which you, “as a single individual, relate yourself “to yourself, before God.” The experience of conscience, then, is itself powerful evidence that we know we are, in fact, accountable. At some level, we know this, but it’s a knowledge we have strong reasons to repress.

How can we Christians recover our sense that we live our lives at every moment before God, that God is literally present to us, and we are accountable to God? I think, to do this, we must remind ourselves of two things that we know, but that our culture pressures us to forget. The first is, we must remind ourselves what genuine freedom is like. The second thing is, we must always strive to remember what God is really like. Lemme say something briefly about each of these two things.

All of us value freedom. I think American society is positively obsessed with the idea, and all too often, we equate freedom as freedom from any constraints whatsoever. So freedom is just the power to do what I want, to choose whatever I want. My freedom is infringed when the government tells me I cannot cover my front yard with litter and junk cars that offend my neighbors. Or when the government tells my I must pay taxes, and therefore cannot spend every dime of my money exactly as I want to do.

When freedom is understood in this way, as freedom from constraint, freedom and accountability become a zero-sum game. Every time I’m held accountable by someone, my freedom is diminished, and my own self and happiness are constricted. The problem is, of course, not that freedom is valued, the Apostle Paul insists that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is also perfect freedom.

The problem lies in our culture’s understanding of freedom as an absolute good in itself. Freedom is, in fact, God’s gift to us, a marvelous gift. It makes it possible for us to be coworkers with God. Because we have this gift, we enjoy a dignity, an intrinsic worth that a machine could never have. But freedom is really not valuable in itself. It’s valuable because it makes possible for us to play a meaningful role in God’s great mission.

It’s a gift that’s meant to be used; it has value only when used well. When we do not use our freedom with the help of God, to make something significant of ourselves and our lives, our freedom is squandered, it’s value tragically wasted. Even from a purely psychological point of view, we can see this. No one’s life is enhanced simply by having more choices. I’m not a better person, and my life is not improved if I can choose between 30 kinds of cereal, rather than 20. What is important is not choice in itself, but meaningful choices, choices that matter. But if I see myself as completely autonomous, accountable to no one, answerable to no standards, independent of my own choices, those choices lose their value.

Meaningful choices must be choices for what is good, but if my choice is supposed to determine what is good and what is bad, nothing is truly good in itself. Kierkegaard sketches a powerful image of the person who claims to be absolutely autonomous. “This absolute ruler is a king without a country, “actually ruling over nothing, “because rebellion is legitimate at any moment.” The choices of the self are meaningful only when the self recognizes that something important is a stake when I choose, something that must transcend the self that’s doing the choosing. Meaningful choice then requires accountability.

It requires that there be good and evil that is not of my own making, and I must therefore give an account of the choices I make. Now, one could also put this point by saying that meaningful choices cannot be arbitrary. We do not become the selves we were meant to be through coin flips. But if choice is not arbitrary, it must be shaped by something, and that something is always rooted in something inside the self. What does the self love? What does the self hate?

Those who reject God are slaves. They’re slaves of the pride and the greed and the lust that shape their choices. That’s why the New Testament describes becoming a servant of Christ as liberation from bondage. The person who freely responds to God’s love in Christ is no longer a slave to his former passions. Rather, he’s allowing God to create a new heart, a new set of loves. We cannot be absolutely autonomous, but we can use the relative freedom that God has given us to commit ourselves to God, and to what is truly good for ourselves.

Really, to believe that service to Christ is freedom, I think also requires us to remember what Christ teaches us about God, and what God is like. When we have the right picture of God, we will no longer be gripped by this Sartrean fear of God’s gaze. Rather, when we picture God’s gaze, we will think of the loving gaze of the father of the prodigal son, who saw his wayward boy when that son was still a long way off, and filled with compassion for him, ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him.

We need to remind ourselves continually, that the God to whom we are accountable, the God whose gaze rests upon us, is good through and through. He loves us enough to suffer with us, and for us, and even to die for us. Now, I could imagine someone might object at this point, “Yes, God is a god of love, but isn’t he “also a god of justice? “Aren’t you forgetting about God’s judgment “contrary to what you, yourself, said earlier in the talk? “Aren’t you forgetting about hell?” Well, it’s true, we must never forget that God is a god of justice, and we certainly must not forget about God’s judgements.

However, I think we err if we think that God’s justice is somehow opposed to his love. We err if we picture God as torn between two rival emotions. No, the truth is, God is good through and through, loving to the very center of his being. There is nothing in God deeper than God’s love, and there is no principle of justice that conflicts with that love. God’s justice is not opposed to God’s love; it is actually an expression of that love. God demands that we turn away from sin, and he offers us liberation from sin precisely because he loves us. He realizes that to be trapped in sin is our greatest misery.

So even God’s judgements are motivated by his love. The writer of Revelation tells us that all whom God loves, he disciplines. God’s love does not allow us to go peacefully into misery, even if that is what we want. He continually calls us back. I believe that even hell, as Dante and C.S. Lewis both powerfully wrote, is motivated by God’s love. When someone has become the kind of creature who would find God’s presence intolerable torment, God’s love does all that it can for such a person. It separates the person from God, and God’s love.

And the Bible rightly pictures such a state as frightful, and miserable for so it is. It’s the greatest horror conceivable. But it’s the horror of people who are so steeped in evil that even God’s judgements have no power to move them toward the good and towards God. When we remember then, that true freedom is found in serving and being accountable to the one and only loving Master, we will welcome God’s gaze.

We will be thankful for God’s laws and God’s commands. We will see them as the ancient Hebrews did, as the gifts they truly are. If we understand ourselves rightly, we will even welcome God’s judgements, because they are the judgements of the one who knows us better than we know ourselves, and wants only our good.

Thanks for watching, everyone. If you wanna watch other videos from the same session, check ’em out right here. And if you really want to follow all the videos that are coming out of the Center for Christan Thought, make sure you subscribe to our channel.