How clear and powerful? Well, take a look:
“I’m a Christian by choice…My family didn’t – frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn’t raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead – being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me. And I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God. But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace.”
No one, of course, should claim to know the President’s heart on this topic—but he is giving us some opportunities to know his mind here. Or to try to know his mind. Let’s dig in a bit.
“I’m a Christian by choice.”
Well, so is every Christian. Even if we have been incorporated into Christ by an infant baptism that we had no say in and can never undo, sooner or later every Catholic Christian has to decide to practice his faith. But maybe that’s not what he’s talking about—perhaps “choice” here is to be understood as the quintessentially postmodern American sacrament, the solemn act of individual consumer preference, sacred and inviolable, and antithetical to anything familial, traditional, ancient, or otherwise undemocratic.
I’m not one of those unthinking religious people—he’s saying—I had a completely value-free and neutral upbringing, with no narrow-minded compulsion to believe anything, and I CHOSE to become a Christian in this vacuum, just as freely as I choose what to download on iTunes.
“The precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.”
Now, the president was speaking extemporaneously, and when we are off-the-cuff, we often fall back upon stock phrases that we don’t really think about, such as “in terms of” or “with respect to”. But these phrases convolute and obscure meaning, rather than reveal it. Is he trying, albeit awkwardly, to say that “Christ’s precepts inspired me to conform my life to them”? Or that they “spoke to me about a new kind of life that I wanted to embrace and follow”?
Perhaps. He might also be saying this: I already had a kind of general humanitarian sense of the kind of life I wanted to lead, with ethics and so forth. I found that, viewed in a certain way, a few scattered ethical teachings associated with Jesus fit very well with my overall commitment to justice and whatnot. The precepts of Christ spoke to me in secular terms that I was already comfortable with, so I decided this was the religion for me. This is a plausible LITERAL reading of the meaning “spoke to me in terms of”. It may just be a natural, verbally awkward expression of discomfort as a man who has to speak in public constantly finds he is unused to speaking about his religion, or his “religious preference”. It may also be exactly what he means.
“…being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper…”
Kudos to the AP writer who nailed two plural possessives in a row here. However, there will be no Sunday School Gold Sticker for Bible Knowledge awarded for this answer, as we have Cain’s answer to God’s “So, where exactly did you say Abel was?” (Genesis 4:9) inverted, obligatorily gender-sensitized, and turned into a “precept” of Christ. This could be theology; it could also be a misquotation of scripture.
“And I think also understanding that Jesus Christ dying for my sins spoke to the humility we all have to have as human beings, that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes, and that we achieve salvation through the grace of God.”
Okay, we have a gerund here—“understanding”—and three subordinate clauses, all depending upon it: “that…dying…spoke to the humility…” (there’s that “spoke to” again), “that we’re sinful and we’re flawed and we make mistakes” (absolutely ZERO arguments here, though please note the descent from the transcendent to the trivial), and “that we achieve salvation through…grace” (no Lutheran over-emphasis upon grace ALONE here, so this is probably safely orthodox.).
But wait a minute—where’s the action here? How is this a sentence? What about this “understanding”? Did it do something? Did something happen to it? Understanding this….what? It just dangles there, without a predicate. Of course, there could be an implied predicate, for which we would have to look back to the previous sentence. What do we find there? Perhaps that it, too, “…spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.”
This could also just be the postmodern verbal habits of the television age—like TV sportscasters who say things like “Coming up, the Cardinals preparing for the big showdown on Sunday—Matt Leinert and crew setting their sights on the Steelers.” Present participles abounding; finite verbs conspicuously missing; urgent immediacy being connoted; obscuring any possibility of sequential or causal analysis. Things just kind of happening, one after another.
This has been a rough routine; let’s see if our gymnast can stick the dismount:
“But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people and do our best to help them find their own grace.”
Well, if you have Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, and Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell as your judges, you can expect high scores for this. Thomas “I’ve Rewritten the Gospels to Get Rid of All the Supernatural Stuff” Jefferson would actually be right on board with such a secularized humanitarian recasting of the virtue of charity. But “help (people) find their own grace”? This does not sound like any kind of Christian theology I am familiar with.
We Christians are commanded to share the gospel, to help our brothers and sisters to receive God’s grace through conversion, through the sacraments, and through the caritas of the Christian community. In contrast, finding your own grace, with an emphasis upon the possessives, is a familiar postmodern relativism: your grace is different from mine; maybe yours is confessing your sins to your God, or going to synagogue on the high holy days; mine is forgiving my father for abandoning me, or loving the same-sex partner(s) of my choice, or getting my massive credit card debt that I accumulated through grossly irresponsible consumption waived through a government program.
Trying to find our own grace will only amount to a fumbling around on our knees in the damp, ink-dark cellars of the human heart, looking for a wet book of matches to strike for a light.
A clear statement of faith? Or perhaps just a spiritual non-churchgoer speaking to us, as flawed as we are, in terms of some precepts of his choice of a life that perhaps we would want to lead. Or not.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m glad you wrote on this. It was indeed fascinating. Unfortunately, most journalists on the God-beat lack the basic knowledge necessary to evaluate the president’s statement with any seriousness.
Thought experiment: who came across as a more serious Christian. (a) President Obama in the statement described above, or (b) Jimmy Carter telling Playboy in a 1976 interview that he’s committed adultery in his heart many times.
“But what we can do, as flawed as we are, is still see God in other people…”
Unless they’re not born yet, apparently.
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I do not get the sense from this statement that the President has a personal and real relationship with Christ. It is a more thought out calculated reasoning if you will. “the precepts spoke to me”????? When GWB was asked who in history influenced him the most his reply was “Jesus Christ, He changed my life…” Whether you like him or not, you got the sense that Jesus was REAL for him. You almost get the opposite with Obama, that He is an “ideal”, and suits his purposes whatever those may be. I could be way off, maybe he is a closet Jesus Freakazoid.
Um…. Obama’s faith story is a little less than inspiring. And how convenient that it comes right before the election. I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince or influence, as his far-left base is repulsed by religion, and actual church-goers aren’t impressed. Weird.
Good post.
Articles like this are why God created the internet!
“Let’s see if our gymnast can stick the dismount.” Hilarious!!