Its Worth if for a Single Soul

That’s what our choir director said before each performance of the youth choir annual tour. Any effort to save a single soul was justified.  After all we were talking about Jesus who died in the cross for me!

Very motivating but a moronic moral calculation. To save one soul we spent enough money to save 100 people from starving to death? To save one soul we put thousands of hours that could have cared for a child with severe disabilities, or worked the suicide hotline? Because you see what the evangelical discourse forgot is that in our actual behavior we cannot distinguish the human soul from the embodied human life.

A single soul has infinite worth to God, but only God has the capacity to pay an infinite price, and that has already been done. Every human effort on behalf of the gospel is a series of compromises forced by our limited human ability to know ourselves and God’s will. Compromises imposed by the reality that we aren’t dealing with human souls, we’re dealing with human lives. Still, American Christians, full of zeal of God’s Reign, have trouble seeing just how limited our human ability to realize it really is. 

The abortion debate is an example. Abortion, like war and imprisonment, is a bad thing for human lives. It just isn’t the worst thing. In a world in which we are forced to weigh the life of one person, or even a whole society, against that of another person lives must sometimes be lost, not least innocent lives. Our world is one of greater goods and lesser evils, never just good and evil. 

Except perhaps that evil is nowhere more present than in the forging of absolute values into unbending laws.The assumption that infinite worth can be inscribed on human decisions, especially the imperfect and often corrupt decisions of the state, leads inevitably to tyranny.

This is why freedom, personal and corporate, is almost always the greater good - and even then not an absolute good. Even freedom must be constrained for societies to thrive and individuals to mature. Finite beings must inevitably place limits on themselves as individuals and one another socially if they are to survive. The question again is where and how we are constrained, and again the closest thing to absolute evil is that which constrains freedom of choice absolutely. 

It would be nice for Christians if we could entrust our freedom to the Body of Christ, the Church. Surely there we would find the freedom in Christ that makes us truly free. But this is not the case. The Church, if notable through the ages for its charity, is equally notably for its bouts of tyranny. It is no more trustworthy a guardian of human lives than the state, because like the state it is made up of fallible humans with limited vision and conflicting interests. We Christians are saints only in theory or in some metaphysical sense. In day to day living we’re potential tyrants constrained by whatever discipline we’ve adapted for ourselves or is imposed by society. 

Ideologues will assert that in the long run the Market and its particular servants in business can be trusted to insure the correct balance of finitude, good, and freedom. But that is equally nonsensical, both historically and theoretically. The market at its best simply insures the smoothest possible movement of wealth from one person or group to another. It cares not at all whether or how wealth accumulates in a few hands, or how it is used so long as it keeps changing hands. The “free market” isn’t merely a maker of tyrants and oligarchs, it is tyrant itself, constraining all other human freedoms to give itself free reign for the exchange of wealth. 

For the Christian this leaves a host of almost impossibly difficult and absolutely necessary choices. If we are to be politically engaged we will have to judge on a cause by cause and candidate by candidate basis what and who maximizes the worth of the most humans while constraining human freedom the least. 

So no, it may not be worth it to save a single soul in so far as that soul is one with a human life. It may not be worth it to save a million unborn children. It may not be worth it to give freedom to the prisoner, or end the war immediately. 

The painful recognition in difficult choices by free people that human lives have measurable worth is the greatest affirmation of the creatureliness granted us by God, and is finally the truest tribute to the infinite value of the human soul.