One of the great scandals of Christianity is the radical challenge it poses to conventional morality. In the tradition of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re in his book “The Kingdom” emphasizes the punishing sacrifice of self that Jesus\u2019 teaching enjoins. Classical and Jewish thinking had promoted the Golden Rule \u2014 Hillel said it was the essence of the Torah \u2014 but had never said, \u201cLove your enemies.\u201d And not only love your enemies but also Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. This overriding command cannot be a worldly imperative; it is impossible. It is the shocking inversion of health that Nietzsche railed against, and perhaps the \u201chatred of humanity\u201d with which, Tacitus says, Christian were charged. Everything natural and human is turned upside down. With only slight exaggeration, Carr\u00e8re summarizes this outrageous benevolence:
\n Love your enemies, take joy in being unhappy, prefer being small to being big, poor to rich, sick to healthy. And whereas the Torah posits the elementary, evident, and verifiable truth that it\u2019s not good for men to be alone, Jesus said: Don\u2019t desire women, don\u2019t take a wife, if you have one, keep her so as not to harm her, but it would be better if you didn\u2019t have one.[ * ] Don\u2019t have children either. Let them come to you, take inspiration from their innocence, but don\u2019t have any. Love children in general, not in particular, not like men have loved their children since time began: more than those of others, because they\u2019re their own. And even \u2014 no, above all \u2014 don\u2019t love yourselves. It is human to want one\u2019s own good: don\u2019t.
\nYou can feel both the attraction and the recoil in Carr\u00e8re\u2019s stridency. He fears what he deeply admires; he is repelled by an ideal he cannot quite dislodge.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
* Holwick: This attitude is more reflective of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7:29-40 than anything Jesus says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the great scandals of Christianity is the radical challenge it poses to conventional morality. In the tradition of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, French intellectual Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re in his book “The Kingdom” emphasizes the punishing sacrifice of self that Jesus\u2019 teaching enjoins. Classical and Jewish thinking had promoted the Golden Rule \u2014 Hillel said it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[994,995,993,992,900],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}