A Theological Examination of ChatGBT

Last updated on: March 19, 2023 at 7:17 pm By Gene Veith

Last week we tested the Artificial Intelligence-powered ChatGBT to see if it could generate a Lutheran sermon, with mostly unimpressive results. This week I wanted to drill down more to see how well it handles theology.

So here are the assignments, followed by the AI generated response. I’ll then discuss what it came up with. I invite you to join in. Also I invite you to play this game yourself, posing theological questions and tasks–these involve Lutheran theology but feel free to ask it about other traditions as well–and then report on how it did in the comments. You can access ChatGBT for free, though they’ll ask you to register, here.

Next week, I’ll ask it to generate a Cranach blog post!

Explain the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper

The Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, also known as the Sacrament of the Altar, is rooted in the belief that Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Lutherans believe that through the sacrament, Christ gives His body and blood for the forgiveness of sins and for the strengthening of the faith of believers.

According to Lutheran theology, Christ’s presence in the sacrament is not a physical presence, but a spiritual presence. Lutherans reject the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which teaches that the bread and wine are transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ.

Instead, Lutherans believe in consubstantiation, which means that the body and blood of Christ are present alongside the bread and wine, but not in a physical sense. Lutherans emphasize that the sacrament is a means of grace, by which believers receive forgiveness of sins, strengthening of faith, and spiritual nourishment.

The Lutheran Church teaches that the sacrament is to be received with faith, contrition, and a desire to receive the gifts that Christ offers through the sacrament. Lutherans also believe that the sacrament is to be celebrated regularly, as Christ commanded His disciples to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).

In summary, the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper teaches that through the sacrament, believers receive the body and blood of Christ in a spiritual sense for the forgiveness of sins and for the strengthening of faith. The sacrament is to be received with faith and is celebrated regularly as a means of grace.

Verdict: Lutherans don’t believe in “consubstantiation”! Everybody ascribes that to Lutherans, and Lutherans keep denying that they believe it, but hardly anyone listens, including the bulk of the internet as scanned by Chat GBT. See this for why Lutherans reject the term.

Chat GBT does pick up that Lutherans believe that we receive in the Sacrament Christ’s body and blood given for the forgiveness of our sins. That is, that the Sacrament is a tangible instantiation of the Gospel.

As for the statement that Lutherans believe in Christ’s “spiritual presence,” not a “physical presence,” that is misleading. It is Christ’s body, not His spirit, that He says is given with the bread. Some of the Reformed antagonists of the Lutherans in the sacramental disputes would concede a “spiritual presence,” but insist that the body of Christ is in Heaven. Lutherans do reject that the body of Christ is in any way contained in the physical bread, or is physical in the sense that we are committing cannibalism when we receive the Lord’s Supper.

There is certainly a spiritual dimension to the Sacrament–namely, the faith that it builds in the receivers–but the confessions resist the tendency to make “spiritual” something less than literal, preferring to use such words as “supernatural” and “incomprehensible” to describe how Christ’s body and blood can be present “in, with, and under” bread and wine. (See Article VII in the Formula of Concord, both the Epitome and the more expansive Solid Declaration.)

The concept Lutherans developed to talk about such things is called the “sacramental union.” ChatGBT does not even mention that. Nor does it say anything about the “communion of attributes” in Lutheran Christology (see below), which is what makes it possible that the body of the Son of God can be present in Holy Communion.

Nor is anything said about the practice of the Lord’s Supper, such as the conviction that even non-believers receive Christ’s body and blood, the horizontal dimension of what it means to share in this communion with other believers, controversies over closed communion, etc.

Explain the Lutheran Doctrine of Vocation

The Lutheran doctrine of vocation is based on the belief that God calls and equips every individual to serve Him in a specific vocation or calling. According to Lutherans, vocation is not limited to church work, but rather encompasses all aspects of life, including family, work, and society.

Lutherans believe that God has ordained various vocations for individuals, and that each vocation serves a specific purpose in God’s plan for the world. Lutherans emphasize that all vocations are equally important, and that individuals should carry out their vocations with excellence and a sense of purpose, for the glory of God.

The Lutheran doctrine of vocation teaches that every individual’s primary vocation is to love and serve their neighbor. This involves carrying out one’s duties and responsibilities in a way that benefits others and promotes the common good.

Lutherans also believe that vocation is a means through which God works in the world, and that individuals are called to use their talents and abilities to serve others and bring about God’s kingdom on earth. Lutherans emphasize that vocation is not just a job or a career, but a calling from God to serve Him and others in a particular way.

In summary, the Lutheran doctrine of vocation teaches that God calls and equips every individual to serve Him in a specific vocation or calling. Vocation encompasses all aspects of life, and individuals are called to carry out their duties and responsibilities in a way that benefits others and promotes the common good. Vocation is a means through which God works in the world, and individuals are called to use their talents and abilities to serve others and bring about God’s kingdom on earth.

Verdict: OK, this is much better. It includes the points that vocation is not just a matter of a “job,” but that we have multiple vocations in the church, the family, work, and society. These allude to Luther’s doctrine of the “estates,” though ChatGPT does not mention it explicitly.

This account also includes what many treatments of the subject omit, that the purpose of vocation is to love and serve our neighbors.

Also it picks up the point, neglected in many discussions, that God works through the vocation of human beings.

“Bring about God’s Kingdom on earth”? Well, no. “The kingdom of God certainly comes by itself,” says the Catechism.

Still, pretty good effort. I think ChatGPT, as it scoured the internet searching for information, was using some of the stuff I have posted on line.

Explain Lutheran Christology

Lutheran Christology refers to the Lutheran understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Lutherans affirm the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which teaches that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, Lutherans place a particular emphasis on the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Lutherans believe that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, fully God and fully human. They affirm that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, and that He lived a sinless life on earth.

Lutherans emphasize the centrality of the cross in Christ’s work of salvation. They believe that through His death and resurrection, Jesus atoned for the sins of the world and reconciled humanity to God. Lutherans teach that salvation is a gift of God’s grace, received through faith in Jesus Christ.

Lutherans also emphasize the importance of Christ’s presence in the life of the believer. They believe that through faith, the Holy Spirit enables the believer to participate in Christ’s life and work, and that Christ is present in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

In Lutheran Christology, the focus is on Christ’s work of salvation and His ongoing presence in the life of the believer. Lutherans affirm that salvation is a gift of God’s grace, received through faith in Jesus Christ. They believe that Christ is present in the sacraments and that through faith, the believer is united with Christ in His life and work.

Verdict: This is true as far as it goes, but it is mostly just generic Christology common to all Christians. Lutherans have some distinctives that ChatGBT completely ignores, such as our understanding of the two natures of Christ and the communication of attributes. (See this.)

This treatment does pick up that Lutherans believe that Jesus atoned for the sins of the world, as opposed to the Calvinist notion that He atoned only for the sins of the elect. Also that Christ is present in the sacraments (which is possible because of the communication of the attributes) and that the believer is united with Christ.

Still, ChatGBT doesn’t give an adequate answer.

OK, now you play around with it. I made this a weekend post because ChatGBT can absorb lots of your time, so beware! But it’s kind of fun just the same.

I think we can safely conclude that ChatGBT as the embodiment of the Artificial Intelligence of the internet is no theologian. And is not a Lutheran.

Illustration: “Artificial Intelligence” by mohamed mahmoud hassan via PublicDomainPictures.net, CC0, Public Domain

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How Non-Christian Religions Are Dealing with Secularism

Last updated on: March 11, 2023 at 3:07 pm By Gene Veith

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Christianity isn’t the only religion facing problems from today’s secularist mindset. So are Hinduism and Buddhism. But they are different problems.

Secularist scholars themselves tend to think in Christian terms. They assume that all religions are alike, but they aren’t. They measure rates of worship attendance, finding that fewer and fewer people go to church. Well, Hinduism and Buddhism don’t really have anything like corporate worship as Christians do. They have temples where individuals and priests can meditate and perform rituals for their deities, but attendance is not obligatory and there is no group gathering.

Western social scientists measure the percentage of people who believe in God. Well, Eastern religions don’t have the same conception of a transcendent God as Christians (and Jews and Muslims) do. Hinduism believes in lots of gods tied to natural forces and to specific sacred tangible images. Of course they believe in their gods. They can see them!

Western secularist scholars assess the prevalence of religious belief. Doctrines are foundational for Christians. But not so much for the average Hindu or Buddhist. Yes, Hinduism and Buddhism have extensive intellectual and theological traditions and hold to specific teachings, such as reincarnation and the illusory nature of the world. But ordinary adherents leave the details to their priests, monks, and holy men. What they focus on is meditation and venerating their sacred images at home.

But secularization and, specifically, technology are posing challenges of their own, but these are not the same technological challenges we have been discussing this week that apply to Christianity.

Anthropologist Holly Walters has written an article for The Conversation entitled Robots are performing Hindu rituals – some devotees fear they’ll replace worshippers. Hindus already believe in what she calls “divine object persons.” That is to say, idols.

For us Christians, an “idol” means a false god. But Hindus themselves refer to the images of their multiple deities as “idols.” They aren’t the actual gods, they say, but are manifestations of the gods, worthy of not just veneration but service. Observant Hindus wash their idols, bring them food, and perform rituals to the idol to placate the god and to receive favors.

These rituals, as I understand them, are thought to work ex opere operato; that is, by the work performed, apart from any faith on the part of the person who performs them. So some Hindus, using modern technology, have automated some of these rituals. Some even employ robots to perform them. Walters writes,

In 2017, a technology firm in India introduced a robotic arm to perform “aarti,” a ritual in which a devotee offers an oil lamp to the deity to symbolize the removal of darkness. This particular robot was unveiled at the Ganpati festival, a yearly gathering of millions of people in which an icon of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is taken out in a procession and immersed in the Mula-Mutha river in Pune in central India.

Ever since, that robotic aarti arm has inspired several prototypes, a few of which continue to regularly perform the ritual across India today, along with a variety of other religious robots throughout East Asia and South Asia. Robotic rituals even now include an animatronic temple elephant in Kerala on India’s southern coast.

This has created controversy, but of a different kind. Our discussion of ChatGPT sermons this week hinged on their being inferior to sermons given by actual human pastors. This is not only because machine-generated sermons are not as substantive as those given by an actual pastor, but more deeply, because God has chosen to bestow his gifts to human beings by means of other human beings working through their office and callings. This is the doctrine of vocation.

But Hindus worry that the robots in all of their artificial intelligence and the efficience of automation will perform the rituals more perfectly than human beings can. Walters, who has studied the phenomenon, cites “the uneasiness Hindus and Buddhists express about ritual-performing automatons replacing people and whether those automatons actually might make better devotees.”

Some devotees believe the more perfect performance of the rituals through automation will herald a bright future. “In other cases,” she writes, “there are concerns that the proliferation of robots might lead to greater numbers of people leaving religious practice as temples begin to rely more on automation than on practitioners to care for their deities.” This already seems to be happening.

The innovation of animatronic idols–images programmed to move and speak–is also concerning to traditionalists, who “question the concurrent use of robotic deities to embody and personify the divine, since these icons are programmed by people and therefore reflect the religious views of their engineers.”

Some of the articles Walters links to refer to these same issues as they also affect Buddhism, whose popular expression also employs idols and rituals, some of which have been automated. But Buddhists are also frustrated because the secularists are trying to co-opt the religion as “neuroscience.”

Curtis White has written an article for Religion Dispatches entitled Don’t Worry, Be Happy: How Amazon, Google & Neuroscience Threaten American Buddhism.

Contemporary American Buddhism has a problem, although, thankfully, unlike Christianity it has little to do with the politics of the nation state. Buddhism’s problem is with our state-within-the-state, corporate capitalism—especially high-tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. The situation is basically this: Buddhism has been removed from its traditional ethical and spiritual context, grounded in the hard sciences, mainly neuroscience, and then made useful to a predatory techno-capitalist economy.

Like something out of the Book of Revelation, Buddhism looks ever more like a three-headed beast: corporate profit-seeking, secular resentment, and science delusion, an American version of what the Buddha called the Three Poisons—greed, anger, and delusion.

White inveighs against all of the secularized talk about “mindfulness” and “meditation,” especially their monetization in the apps, programs, and workshops that make up the “happiness industry.”

And how the Science Buddha has grown, thanks in large part to the support of Google’s Search Inside Yourself Institute; neuroscience’s discovery of what the psychologist Rick Hanson calls “neurodharma”; and the multitude of businesses who’ve adopted Amazon’s WorkingWell strategy to use yoga, meditation, and mindfulness to enhance the corporate brand and improve productivity.

This, he says, is a violation of Buddhism, which teaches that “the cause of suffering is delusion”:

It’s deluded to think that we’re better off without the experience of the transcendental, whether it’s offered to us through religion, the natural world, or the arts. It’s deluded to think that science can show us the neuro pathways that will take us to happiness’s door. It’s deluded to think that mindfulness is about workplace stress reduction, especially when it was the workplace that caused the stress in the first place.

What we’re left with isn’t the Buddha but a Buddha “simulacrum,” in Jean Baudrillard’s term; a thing without an origin. Buddhism becomes just another aspect of “workforce preparation” puzzled together by neuroscientists. Eventually, we forget that it ever even had its own meaning.

Photo: “Hindu High Priest (Iyer) conducting puja at the Nataraja shrine” by Denish C. via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0,

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Good Secularism vs. Bad Secularism

Last updated on: March 11, 2023 at 4:36 pm By Gene Veith

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One kind of secularism takes no position on religion to make a place for religious pluralism and thus for religious liberty. The other kind of secularism tries to stamp out religion altogether.

So observes Jordan Ballor in Christian Pluralism as a Way of Loving. This is a review in Religion & Liberty of Michael Bird’s book Religious Freedom in a Secular Age: A Christian Case for Liberty, Equality, and Secular Government.

Ballor writes,

There are better and worse forms of secularism, or better yet true and false versions. Bird favors what might be called classic or even Christian secularism. This is a kind of secularism arising out of firm and even traditional convictions about the human person—inspired if not informed by Christian anthropology. This variety of secularism is conducive to pluralism and civil peace. Thus, Bird contends, “secularism establishes appropriate spaces for religion to be pursued and performed,” even as it “establishes spaces that are deliberately desacralized to make them common to all, irrespective of someone’s faith or lack of faith.”

This kind of “benign” secularism “is not against religion, but about common spaces that are neutral, nonsectarian, and free of religious affiliation.” We might be reminded here of Michael Novak’s metaphor of the empty shrine, which he used 40 years ago to describe “a genuinely pluralistic society” in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. “Its emptiness. . . represents the transcendence which is approached by free consciences from a virtually infinite number of directions.”

To extend Novak’s metaphor, what Bird describes as “militant secularism” is not an “empty shrine.” It is, rather, a society with no shrine at all, because anything evocative of transcendence is opposed and overthrown with totalitarian force. “Secularism as manifested in the separation of church and state is good for a tolerant, pluralistic, and democratic state,” writes Bird. But “militant models of secularism require a state to intervene in people’s religion precisely to keep it a private matter and publicly invisible.”

This presents the point of view of the state. But from the point of view of the Christian, the good kind of secularism is also valuable, though it perhaps requires the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms to fully appreciate this. That the state has no religious identity prevents us from turning it into an idol.

On that basis, some Christians repudiate the state and the secular culture, attempting to live for the church alone. But the Two Kingdoms rejects this kind of dualism.

Though the state and the secular realm do not claim a religion, the Christian can still value them because God governs and is at work in them too, though in a hidden way. And the mundane activities of making a living, raising a family, and exercising one’s citizenship are the arenas of vocation, in which God works through human beings–whether they are aware of it or not–to bestow His gifts and to care for His creation.

Illustration: “Freedom of Worship” by Norman Rockwell – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16925975

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ChatGP Tries to Preach Lutheran Sermons

Last updated on: March 15, 2023 at 3:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday I posted about ChatGPT, the super-sophisticated artificial intelligence-driven chatbot that Henry Kissinger thinks “will redefine human knowledge, accelerate changes in the fabric of our reality, and reorganize politics and society.”

So, as I said I would, I signed up for ChatGPT, which you can do here, and put it through its paces. I read about a rabbi who gave a sermon generated by the technology and then learned of other clergy who are doing it. I told the friendly machine to “Write a Lutheran Sermon for Next Sunday.”

Unlike the rabbi, I made the assignment deliberately vague, wanting to see what the wisdom of the internet would come up with. With the caution that ChatGPT is not called and ordained, so is not authorized to preach, and that we Missouri Synod Lutherans are not in pulpit or altar fellowship with the internet, so that none of you pastors should actually use this, here is the sermon:

Grace and peace to you all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today, I would like to talk about the importance of faith in our lives as Christians. Faith is at the core of our beliefs as Lutherans, and it is through faith that we are saved by God’s grace.

Faith is not simply an intellectual acceptance of certain beliefs. Rather, it is a trust and reliance on God and His promises. It is a deep-seated conviction that God is who He says He is, and that He will do what He has promised to do. Faith allows us to see beyond the limitations of our own understanding and to trust in God’s wisdom and goodness.

In today’s Gospel reading, we hear the story of the healing of the blind man. The man had faith that Jesus could heal him, and Jesus honored that faith by restoring his sight. But the Pharisees, who lacked faith, refused to believe that Jesus could perform such a miracle. They were blinded by their own skepticism and self-righteousness, and they missed the opportunity to witness the power of God’s love.

We too can be like the Pharisees, allowing our doubts and fears to blind us to the truth of God’s love and grace. But if we put our faith in God, we will be able to see beyond our own limitations and experience the fullness of God’s love and grace in our lives.

So, let us embrace the gift of faith that God has given us, and let us trust in His promises with all our hearts. Let us be like the blind man, who trusted in Jesus and received the gift of sight. And let us be a witness to others of the power of God’s love and grace that is available to all who put their faith in Him.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I wanted to see if the chatbot would recognize the church year and the lectionary. I did this exercise last Friday, so “next Sunday” would be the Third Sunday of Lent. None of the lectionary readings–neither the One Year version, or the Three Year, Series A, B, or C–involve the healing of the blind man, nor is there any mention of Lent.

The chatbot knows that Lutherans put a lot of emphasis on faith, so here it is. There is no “law and gospel” and no reference to the sacraments. Nor is there any mention of the Cross; that is to say, what we must put our faith in, namely, the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is so generic. Since ChatGBT draws on the whole internet, there are probably more liberal Lutheran sermons posted online than confessional ones.

So I tried again with a more pointed request: “Write a Law and Gospel sermon for a Missouri Synod congregation for next Sunday.” Here is the result:

Grace and peace to you all in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Today, I want to talk about the importance of understanding the distinction between Law and Gospel. In the Bible, the Law refers to God’s commands and expectations for our behavior, while the Gospel refers to the good news of God’s grace and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

As Christians, we often hear about the importance of following God’s commands and living a holy life. And while it is certainly important to strive for righteousness and obedience, we must also remember that we are all sinners and fall short of God’s standards. That is where the Gospel comes in – it reminds us that salvation is not something we can earn or achieve through our own efforts, but rather a free gift of God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son. The younger son had squandered his inheritance and lived a life of sin, but when he returned to his father, the father welcomed him back with open arms and threw a great feast to celebrate his return. This story is a powerful reminder of God’s grace and mercy, even for the most undeserving sinners.

But we must also remember that the Law has a role to play in our lives. It shows us our sinfulness and our need for a Savior. Without the Law, we would not understand the depth of our sin and the greatness of God’s mercy. The Law serves as a mirror, reflecting back to us our own brokenness and need for redemption.

So let us remember the distinction between Law and Gospel. Let us strive to live obedient lives, following God’s commands to the best of our ability. But let us also remember that our salvation is not based on our own merit, but on God’s grace alone. Let us never forget the amazing gift of salvation that God has given us through faith in Jesus Christ.

May we always seek to grow in our understanding of God’s Word and His plan for our lives, and may we live in the freedom and joy of His grace.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This time next Sunday’s reading is a different text not in the lectionary for the Third Sunday in Lent. ChatGBT just picked a Bible passage in both cases. I wonder what governed that. Here we have a Wikipedia-style definition of what the distinction between Law and Gospel is, but not the kind of application you get in a genuine sermon, in which the pastor would typically scare us to death by showing us how we too are prodigal and wallowing in our filth, then filling us with relief by showing how our Father extends to us His unmerited grace.

But, again, there is no Cross in this sermon. And notice how ChatGPT gets the order wrong, speaking of the Law after he speaks of the Gospel (“But let us also remember that the Law has a place in our lives”).

I don’t see any direct reference to any particular Missouri Synod distinctive. Perhaps the part about “growing in our understanding of God’s Word.” But nothing about the Word as a means of grace. And still, nothing about Baptism or the Lord’s Supper.

And it’s all pitched as a mental exercise (“the importance of understanding,” “it reminds us,” “a powerful reminder,” “so let us remember,” “let us also remember,” “let us never forget,” “may we always seek to grow in our understanding”) rather than as a personal encounter with God’s Word.

The chatbot does approximate the form of many Lutheran sermons, which it must have picked up from the untold numbers posted online: beginning with “Grace and Peace.” It ends with a Trinitarian invocation. But Missouri Synod sermons, according to the Lutheran Service Book, end with a blessing: “The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

I was also struck by the shortness of these computer-generated sermons. I purposefully did not specify what length they should be. The rabbi asked for a 1000 word sermon. These are just 322 words and 382 words, respectively. I don’t know of any sermons of any tradition that are this short.

I know the technology will get better, but I don’t think you pastors need to worry about being replaced by a machine.

Image by mikemacmarketing, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Lent as Training

Last updated on: February 22, 2023 at 1:29 pm By Gene Veith

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The disciplines of Lent are good ways to train ourselves for the difficulties ahead. And the hardest but most fruitful disciplines are not those we choose but the ones God Himself lays on us in the everyday challenges of life.

Joy Pullman at the Federalist has written a thoughtful and helpful article entitled Simple Observances For Lent, A Season That Can Help Christians Prepare For Persecution. She writes,

The wise see the gathering storms and make ready to weather them. The culture war is a spiritual war, and that means it must be fought with spiritual means: receiving Christ’s true Body and Blood, fasting, prayer, public repentance, and increased Biblical instruction. This is what Lent is all about: training for and engaging in spiritual warfare.

She discusses “‘fasts’ of not just food but also of enjoyments, not as punishment but to practice self-denial and obedience so we are better capable of denying ourselves and taking up our crosses when suffering arises in our lives, as it does to all.”

She goes on to recommend simple and not-all-that arduous observances that families can do, such as reading books of devotion or edification together and taking on projects that help other people. I like her idea of having a jar of slips of paper that her children draw from, giving tasks such as “Pray for your [father, mother, church, friends at school, family, etc.]”; “Pray for someone who annoys you,” and “Pick up five messy things in your brother’s room.”

Such small disciplines are like military training for spiritual warfare. Or like exercises in physical training, building up our weak muscles to make us more spiritually fit. But, of course, Lenten disciplines are no substitute for the Word and Sacraments, through which God builds up our faith. Rather, the Lenten disciplines should drive us to God’s Word and Sacraments, both in our private and family devotions and in worship. (I would venture to say that virtually all Lutheran churches have a midweek Lenten service.)

Indeed, it is of great value to learn how to deny oneself. We almost never have to do that, these days, though our ancestors certainly did. Being able to say “no” to our desires is a survival skill, for persecution if it comes, but certainly for the trials and tribulations that we always must endure.

In fact, as David Deavel points out in The Imaginative Conservative, those daily trials and tribulations are the disciplines that God Himself gives us. Those can be the hardest for us to bear, rather than the ones we choose for ourselves, but they are the most beneficial. In his article Aiming for the Toughest Penances in Lent, though he uses the Catholic language of “penance,” he makes some helpful points about bearing our crosses. Some excerpts:

The best kind of penances, all spiritual writers seem to agree, are the penances that are passive. They are the ones God has chosen for us.

While the term “passive” makes it sound as if we are simply sitting there, this only means that God has taken the initiative in giving us our crosses.

We are doing what God wants most when we submit to the difficult realities in our lives that range from being tired, sick, or sleepless to uncomfortable, bored, or depressed.

What is called for with all of them is not a mere stoicism involving a stiff upper lip or clenched teeth but to see them, while not denying their difficulty, as opportunities to praise the Lord in the midst of the dark, to serve him, and to participate in the work that Christ himself did in his earthly ministry.

The rule is that the best penances to be taken on are those which contradict our own wills—and thus remind us that what we want is not nearly as important as what God wants.

We ought to aim at the toughest penances, I believe. But we ought to remember two things. God has put the best ones right in front of our noses—if only we’ll accept the grace to see them and thank God in the midst of them.

I needed to hear that! This is in accord with Luther’s Theology of the Cross. And with this text, which is perfect for Lent (my bolds): “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

The “daily” makes me think that Jesus is referring not just to the big crosses that we might have to bear, such as persecution and major tragedies, but the day-to-day problems and occasions for self-denial, such as we encounter routinely in all of our vocations.

Photo via pxfuel, royalty-free images

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Pregnancy as Slavery

Last updated on: February 20, 2023 at 11:45 am By Gene Veith

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Is an unwanted pregnancy an example of “involuntary servitude,” so that the anti-slavery amendments in the Constitution give a constitutional right to abortion? That’s the new legal argument being put forward by pro-abortion activists, equating pregnancy with slavery.

Read the story from Politico:

In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped short of definitively ruling out other aspects of the Constitution that might apply. . . .

Kollar-Kotelly noted that there is some legal scholarship suggesting that the 13th Amendment — which was ratified at the end of the Civil War and sought to ban slavery and “involuntary servitude” — provides just such a right. She is asking the parties in the criminal case, which involves charges of blocking access to abortion clinics, to present arguments by mid-March.

Here is the 13th Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

This is the amendment that abolished slavery. Any “originalist” intepretation of the Constitution would point out that the authors of the amendment and those who ratified it were not, in fact, thinking of abortion. But post-modern theories of interpretation, of course, have no such limitations.

Nathanael Blake thoroughly refutes this novel reading of the 13th Amendment in his Federalist article No, Being A Mother To Your Unborn Baby Is Not The Same As Slavery,

No one at the time the 13th Amendment was written and ratified thought it included unwanted pregnancy as a form of involuntary servitude. And they were right. It is madness to regard a developing human in the womb as an intrusive stranger with no claim upon a woman. It is crazy to believe that the ordinary, natural processes of human reproduction are the moral and legal equivalent of slavery. . . .

The burdens and dangers of pregnancy are nothing like slavery because they are totally different things. The attempt to equate the two is revealing, however, insofar as it presumes a philosophy where we exist as disconnected, atomized individuals, with no moral claims upon each other except for what we have consented to. This takes liberal political theory to an absurd extreme, suppressing the reality that we are interdependent beings. . . .

Recognizing this truth about ourselves points us toward the moral truth that the dependence of others confers moral obligations upon us, obligations that are strengthened by the proximity of need and the exclusivity of our ability to meet it. Contrary to the claims of abortion advocates, the mother must provide for the child in her womb precisely because only she, and no one else, can do so.

If the Constitution forbids “involuntary servitude,” we would have to forbid schools. Teachers make their students do school work. Without paying them! Students typically don’t want to do that work. So that’s involuntary servitude. That’s slavery!

The same would apply to children and spouses who don’t want to do their household chores. And to the workplace where employees sometimes have to do things they don’t want to do. The government forces us to do things we did not formally consent to, including imposing taxes, thus appropriating our labor.

The concept of “servitude” has to do with “service,” which ties in to the doctrine of vocation, in which we are called in all of relationships, work, and stations in life to love and serve our neighbors. Luther discusses bearing the cross in vocation, drawing on the words of Jesus: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Thus, vocation often involves self-denial. That is, service that we might not want to perform of ourselves, but we perform it anyway out of love for our neighbor.

Parenting–from conception, through “labor,” through all of the stages of childhood and into adulthood–is all about this self-denying love and service to the neighbor of this vocation, namely, the child.

Illustration by Mohamed Hassan form PxHere

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