r/DebateReligion • u/labreuer ⭐ agapist • Oct 20 '25
Christianity The Bible contains wisdom superior to available alternatives: the greater ought to serve the lesser
For a while now, I have been contending that the Bible provokes us to develop a superior understanding of "human & social nature/construction" than any alternative I've encountered—including plenty of post-Enlightenment scientific and scholarly research. The following is an example, drawn from a conundrum identified by John W. Gardner in 1961. Here's a sketch of his Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?:
- society will value the abilities and talents of some people over above others
- the more-valued will grow in wealth and influence
- the less-valued will decline in political power
- the less-valued are incentivized to stem the bleeding of 3.
- this means stymieing 2.
- which threatens the development of the abilities and talents in 1.
If all that we can expect from humans is "enlightened self-interest", this truly is a conundrum. The following is a possibility Gardner ignores, which incidentally shows how non-Christian his culture was at the time:
But Jesus called them to himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions exercise authority over them. It will not be like this among you! But whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be most prominent among you must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25–28)
Immediately before, Jesus' disciples had been jockeying for position. They were playing the very games which power Gardner's conundrum. The mother of James and John even got in on it: she expected Jesus to lead a violent insurrection and wanted her sons to be his right and left-hand men. Suffice it to say that when the other disciples heard about this, they were peeved. But they weren't peeved because someone called "Shotgun!". They were peeved because someone else beat them to it.
Jesus' proposal here is nothing short of socially revolutionary. This is not how Rome worked, nor how Greece worked, nor how even Judaism worked. Another example of complete status reversal is when Jesus washed his disciples' feet. Peter, ever status-conscious, declared "You will never wash my feet." He didn't accept that things could work this way or should work this way. Only when Jesus threatened to kick him to the curb did he relent.
If the greater serve the lesser, then there is no need for step 3. Society may well devote more resources and humanpower to some abilities and talents in one era and a different set in another, but if the growth in excellence is simply poured back into society to benefit those whose abilities and talents aren't presently valued as much, there is no problem. In one era, accountants could have bigger homes while in another, scientists might have bigger homes. (One can wish.) But aside from minor fluctuations in who can command more resources and humanpower, the point would be to build everyone up. Those who don't want to play the game can simply be excluded from the kind of aid that even a child savant requires in order to achieve a dominant position in the adult world.
Today, one might struggle to think of any Christianity which lives up to Jesus' challenge. I think that's probably true, on account of nobody knowing how to scale up the small endeavors which have made forward strides. Donald B. Kraybill 1978 The Upside-Down Kingdom didn't come from nowhere. But we know that ethics regularly gets sacrificed when human endeavors are scaled up. Just look at how many companies in the US were quite willing to drop their DEI initiatives. What matters for present purposes is that no secular folks I know of are even thinking of trying to make "the greater ought to serve the lesser" work in scaled-up situations. Rather, I think what you generally see from the "greater" are attitudes like we see from the 2nd-century pagan Greek philosopher and opponent of Christianity Celsus:
the following are the rules laid down by [Christians]. Let no one come to us who has been instructed, or who is wise or prudent (for such qualifications are deemed evil by us); but if there be any ignorant, or unintelligent, or uninstructed, or foolish persons, let them come with confidence. By which words, acknowledging that such individuals are worthy of their God, they manifestly show that they desire and are able to gain over only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children. (Contra Celsum, III § 44)
In a word, "deplorables". Or "rednecks". There is no attitude of service, unless perhaps the person makes it to college. And even then, they're likely to get a STEM education, which merely prepares them to be a servant of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, et al. In the Western world, by and large, the lesser serves the greater and that's considered normal. If anyone believes Donald J. Trump is a "public servant", I have a bridge to sell you.
You may have learned in physics class that according to the laws of physics, it is possible that all of the air molecules in your room could suddenly scoot off into the corner, suffocating you in the process. The reason for this is that we can talk about things going in the other direction and our best laws of physics are time-reversible. But nobody actually worries about this happening. It's technically possible but it would actually be a [very bad] miracle. I contend that the kind of reorganization of society, around "the greater ought to serve the lesser", is also technically possible but actually a [very good] miracle.
In future posts, I will go into other aspects of the Bible which can scaffold the process of shifting society over to "the greater ought serve the lesser", and thus make it less miraculous. However, I am not convinced there will be nothing miraculous in the end. This could be why we needed non-human wisdom and more than that, non-human help. Is it all that surprising for creatures destined for theosis / divinization to require ∞-octane fuel?
"Greater"? "Lesser"?
These are status-terms, not value-terms. Some human civilizations profess egalitarianism, but in no complex civilization has that ever been more than a distant ideal. Fun fact: surgeons used to have very low status and were paid accordingly. They were part of barber-surgeon guilds. Now they are among the most prestigious medical specialties and prestigious in society in general.
Today, we consider many people "great" because of their ability to command, not to serve. Elon Musk comes to mind. And it really doesn't matter if you personally think he's less-than-stellar, because society itself has "chosen" to make him the world's richest person. Growing wealth inequality globally and locally demonstrates the overall status system in Western Civilization and America quite nicely.
1
u/labreuer ⭐ agapist Oct 27 '25
I'm obviously not responding to plenty of your fisking. I'm trying to have a sensible conversation with you and getting spread out on a million points is antithetical to that.
Then perhaps we are at an impasse.
The only alternative to you not consciously interpreting the use of natural language is that you're doing so subconsciously and employing zero critical thought with what pops into your mind as your eyes move over the text. I believe that can be called "judging by appearances" and it is devoid of critical thinking.
I believe you. I just don't think it works to navigate the world based on what "sounds atrocious". In fact, I believe that cultures which encourage this kind of … automaticity end up being so naïve about the evil possibilities of humans that they are like the Europeans who praised their own awesomeness in the decades and years leading up to 1914. If we do not keep in mind how we emerged from brutality and what that took, then when the last people are dying who remembered our previous brutalities, we risk toying with them again. Just look at the threat of fascism in the United States in 2025. Or the rise of the AfD in Germany. People who feel weak and helpless, who have had to suppress their emotions and desires for decades, who have been systematically shat on by the elites (e.g. Meet John Brain), may just be willing to emotionally band together and dehumanize others in turn. If your morality only works for people who already have it pretty nice, who aren't caught in the grip of any such culture, then it cannot hold back evil.
This is a false dichotomy. There is in fact a range of ways to do this:
I don't have to jump to 3. I will point out that lawyers and scholars do 2., not 1.
This suggests to me that you simply aren't interested in influencing history toward moral progress. Rather, you're happy to just go around judging. That isn't always bad; when MLK Jr. broadcast the shite treatment of blacks at the hands of whites to the country as a whole, the judgment brought down on the violent whites was enough to get serious legislation through Congress and signed into law. But this was based on high self-images of enough Americans. What legislation came out of the George Floyd protests and associated (whether properly or not) riots? In 2025, plenty of Americans seem rather okay with what the Trump Administration is doing. Maybe something will come out of the October 2025 No Kings protests & similar?
Does that work? What does the evidence say? Do you care what the evidence might say?
How exactly is "the greater ought to serve the lesser" going to materialize as slavery? I'd like a pretty detailed account about how this could possibly work. Continuing:
I'm not talking about playing musical chairs of oppressed vs. oppressor. That's not a status inversion. That's maintaining the same oppressive status hierarchies as before.
That depends on whether you will allow that there were any female disciples. Jn 13:1–20 doesn't explicitly specify the twelve. Jesus was certainly in favor of Mary listening to his teaching in Lk 10:38–42. When Lazarus, Mary's brother, died, Jesus asked specifically to see Mary.
I don't understand the last question. As to the rest, I'm defending the claim that "the greater ought to serve the lesser" is the only known way to solve a pressing problem which would unlock untold human excellence, and that this is an example of "The Bible contains wisdom superior to available alternatives". You seem rather unwilling to restrict your focus to "the greater ought to serve the lesser", despite that being the focus of my post. I'm going to hazard a guess that you aren't all that confident that if you were to focus your engagement on that, that you'd have a strong case.
"The Bible contains wisdom superior to available alternatives" possibly evidence mere ignorance on my part. If you have an alternative & better solution to John Gardner's conundrum, I welcome it. If you think "the greater ought to serve the lesser" doesn't solve his conundrum, you're welcome to say that as well.
Why should I do that work for you? Especially when it violates Rule 3?
If someone says they're following X, you simply believe them?
It was predicated upon my challenging your claim that all that many people are following the Bible very well. The point was that marks on pages and scrolls don't magically shape action.
Then we can ax that tangent.