A Holy Conjunction and the Call to Live with Tensions

Today I am remembering my mentor, Elton Trueblood, and how he emphasized the holy conjunction "AND." "I will pray in the Spirit AND with my mind." "Love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, AND mind." After the resurrection, the disciples remembered the Scriptures AND the words Jesus had spoken to them.

Jesus is fully divine AND fully human.

Elton talked about the clear head AND the warm heart. He said the Christian life is a life of devotion AND a life of service.

The Gospel is both forgiveness for our sins AND a call to social justice.

One of the times this holy conjunction comes into play is when we think about how the Scriptures point us toward the kingdom of God in the eschaton and yet we live in that kingdom now. Already...AND not yet.

And I lament that American Christianity has seemed to lose sight of this holy conjunction and how the Gospel calls us to live exactly with such tensions.

I can think of several examples. I have a fellow ethicist, also Catholic, who told me one time, prior to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, that if a hypothetical young girl was raped and impregnated by a family member, she would incarcerate the girl until she had the baby to make sure she gave birth.

I am not making this one up! This lady is a Ph.D. medical ethicist in Texas. I put this hypothetical question to her, and then last year the exact scenario happened in the state of Indiana, where I live. The only difference was the young girl was 10 instead of 14. She came to Indiana to have an abortion because she could not get one in Ohio. Conservatives in both states expressed their outrage and wanted the doctor jailed. Some politician in Ohio said she was not even raped and then the guy who did it was convicted of this rape!

Living with tensions is not easy. But I believe it is important. I believe in both personal responsibility and social responsibility. I have tried to practice both, in both my professional and personal lives. It is not easy at all. But it is necessary because life is full of contingency, relativity, and nuance.

I am not an ethical relativist. I do believe in absolutes, but I do not think it is healthy to see everything as absolute. It is also not healthy to see everything as relative. I do not believe it is ever morally right to take a human life. I also think anyone who tells you they know when life begins is overestimating their own knowledge. I explained why here.

People face terrible complexities, contingencies and uncertainties. So grace is vital, and locking up a young pregnant lady for being pregnant against her will, forcing her to give birth against her will, is like raping her a second time. It is reprehensible to me that a professional ethicist would even think about that.

I have told this story a few times. But in the past few days I have thought about it in terms of the idea of "the holy conjunction." In light of that I want to make a proposal.

I think it is possible to be pro-life AND pro-choice. I think it is not one bit incoherent to find abortion to be hideous and awful, AND still believe it should be legal, and that no one but the woman should make the decision about when a pregnancy should be terminated. It seems to me to be decidedly anti-life to take her agency away from her, even if we oppose abortion, precisely because we do not know when life begins, and we do not know how the pregnancy is or will be affecting her physically or emotionally.

I believe it is possible to believe in free enterprise AND believe in limits on how much wealth and income one can have. I think it is possible to believe in personal responsibility AND believe there is a basic minimum income level below which we will let no one fall. I believe it is possible to believe there are people who should not have guns AND believe there are guns no private citizen should have.

I believe it is possible to believe in freedom of conscience AND believe their are times when someone's individual convictions are outweighed by the common good.

We do not have to sacrifice our convictions on either side of the AND, as long as we approach one another with grace. I think my own Catholic faith does this well sometimes and fails at other times. Canon law can turn Catholics into Pharisees.

But as I said, this is not easy. Living out the holy conjunction AND is fraught with difficulties. It reminds me of what GK Chesterton said about Christianity itself. He said, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried!"

We are called to live in this tension but so often we resist it.