In a recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast, writer and philosopher Paul Kingsnorth described the challenge and the excitement of living in a time when there is “more pressure on the simple reality of actually being human than there’s ever been before.”
To preserve humanity, Kingsnorth argued, we need a clear sense of where to place limits on technologies like artificial intelligence and how we allow them to shape society. Otherwise, we may find that in running after the innovative and expansive capacities technology brings, we lose parts of our very humanity in the exchange. His warning is merited: people have already used AI to generate simulations of loved ones or political figures who have passed on, working through personal problems as one might in therapy, and even interacting with chatbots that simulate talking with Jesus.
There may be good uses of AI, but there are certainly very bad ones. Deciding which is which requires anchors in truth, goodness, and beauty. As with AI, current and planned developments in reproductive technology make the need for clear boundaries and limits pressing. As more methods become available for addressing and controlling fertility, we need guidance for determining which are licit and which are not.
The greatest commandments are positive: love God and love your neighbor. As Whittaker Chambers pointed out, a witness is primarily for, not against, something. But eight of the Ten Commandments God gave at Sinai are prohibitions—even the fourth command to honor the Sabbath comes with a built-in command to rest from work. These prohibitions are warnings against paths that lead to death, personally and communally. Maintaining our witness for the true, good, and beautiful, our witness for Christ, requires a clear sense of boundaries and limits. The first step toward pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty is often to recognize the reality of “intrinsic evil” and haul our anchors against it.
Drawing Lines
Many faithful men, women, and communities who found anchors and sails in truth, beauty, and goodness did so by drawing clear lines and establishing clear limits. The Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and Anglican Bishop George Bell, virtually alone among elites in England, objected to bombings targeting German and Japanese civilians in World War II on the grounds of just war principles. Peter Hitchens said of Bell:
George Bell was for many a pattern of courage when he spoke out, almost alone, against what is now increasingly recognized as having been the mistaken deliberate bombing of German civilians during the 1939–45 war. He knew it would damage him to say this, yet he still said it, which is what his Lord and Master would have wished, even though it was very much not what Winston Churchill would have wished.
The people of the town Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in southern France, rooted in the teachings of the Bible and a Huguenot-Protestant tradition of peaceful resistance to persecution, stood against the Vichy government’s directives to deliver up Jews; instead, they provided safe passage to thousands of the Jews. The great pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood against the Nazification of the German church, calling to exclude churches who abetted it. In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI stood against pressure to change Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality. He wrote,
Unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed.
The path to life is narrow. Following it means turning from the many paths that lead to death.
Finding Anchors
In Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover seeks (but is unable to find) a purely humanistic basis for resistance to the temptation toward unrestrained violence that beset many men and women amid the upheavals of the twentieth century. Rather, he mentions Anscombe and Bell as the primary examples in England who held resolutely to the Christian just war tradition. Martin Warner traced Bell’s ability to connect his unpopular stand to his lively sense of membership in the body of Christ: “Bell spoke in the [House of] Lords as a bishop who embodied the Christian ideal that rises above national interests because it is grounded in the sacramental reality of baptism into Jesus Christ, and draws its life from him.”
Likewise, German historian Hans Rothfels argues in German Opposition to Hitler that only deep spiritual sources—namely, belief in God and adherence to Christianity—suffice to lead men who resist the Nazi regime to the point of death. Helmuth James von Moltke, who described Christianity as a “sheet-anchor in chaos” in a letter to his wife before his execution, changed his view during the war: he believed that general morality could empower men to resist the regime, but he came to believe that faith was essential. The Nazis executed him on January 23, 1945. In his account of the life of another, lesser-known martyr to the Nazis, Franz Jägerstätter, George Zahn describes Jägerstätter’s reliance on “weapons of the spirit” that God has provided: prayer and the sacraments. Bonhoeffer, too, counseled Christian confirmands to “dive into Scripture and into prayer” and to “learn to fight with the weapon of the word of God wherever it is needed.”
Faithful Witness Today
More recently, law professor and former university president Christiaan Alting von Geusau led a Christian university through Covid in a dignified and faithful manner, avoiding unnecessary closures and attending to the personal, social, and spiritual wellbeing of students, faculty, and staff. Alting von Gesau’s ability to act as a faithful witness stems from his clear and deep sense of the Christian calling: “We must be ready to give our all—including our lives—in order to be faithful to our vocation, especially our calling to spread the gospel to all corners of the earth.” He expresses a clear and deep sense of the formation we must undergo to be faithful to that call:
As disciples, we must dedicate our life to the pursuit of truth. But we can only do so if our hearts and minds have been so formed that we are able to stand upright in a world that is utterly confused, a world that has become enslaved to its passions, to the trends of the day, and to the violence which ensues when faith is detached from reason, and reason is detached from faith.
As the Chinese government pursues renewed persecution and crackdowns on non-sanctioned churches in China, we might look to Wang Yi, the founder of what is now called Early Rain Covenant Church, and his explanation for his “faithful disobedience” in refusing to register with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement during the last major crackdown in 2018:
The mission of the church is only to be the church and not to become a part of any secular institution. From a negative perspective, the church must separate itself from the world and keep itself from being institutionalized by the world. From a positive perspective, all acts of the church are attempts to prove to the world the real existence of another world. The Bible teaches us that, in all matters relating to the gospel and human conscience, we must obey God and not men. For this reason, spiritual disobedience and bodily suffering are both ways we testify to another eternal world and to another glorious King.
Like Bonhoeffer and Bell, and like the leaders and villagers in Le Chambon, Yi’s clear teaching about the nature of the church, the reality of the gospel, and the importance of fidelity to the Bible gives him and many hundreds of Chinese Christians the wherewithal to draw clear lines and resist unjust demands at great risk to self and family, in witness to the Lordship of Christ.
Conclusion
For those of us in the West, more than persecution, the current danger to our witness is the infiltration in our churches and homes of practices and habits that threaten to unmoor us from the anchors of faith, family, friendship, and an abiding trust in Christ. There is a temptation to focus on keeping up with the technological and social changes around us. To be sure, we need sails to point us true as the winds beset us. But the anchors that keep us from washing away willy-nilly with the currents are paramount.
Our current dangers may differ from the Christians who lived during World War II or who today face persecution from the likes of the Chinese Communist Party, but we can hold fast to the same anchors, wield the same weapons of the Spirit, and trust we will find the same sails to guide us through our own storms.
Ben Peterson is an assistant professor in the Department of Government and Criminal Justice at Abilene Christian University.