Salt

John E. Hare (YCFC Advisory Board, 1 March 2004)

John Hare, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He gave this devotional meditation to open the inaugural meeting of the Advisory Board.

Sometimes my students who are Christians and also philosophers or historians ask me, “How Christian should my academic work be?” This might seem an odd question. Is it possible to be too Christian? But this is in fact a troubling question for many academics who are also Christians. I myself did my Ph.D. at Princeton in philosophy, where no-one encouraged me to think that academic work could be integrated with Christian faith. For about seven years after that, I confined myself to technical articles and books, published by academic publishers; and though the work was acceptable, I now think of much of that time as wasted. I think I did not start to do really excellent academic work until I got tenure, and I started to feel free to think and write professionally about what I cared most about, which was my faith. One reason I wanted to come to Yale is so that I could encourage students to start doing this kind of integration sooner. I thought it might be profitable, since this is the inaugural Board meeting for a center of faith and culture, to think for a few minutes about this kind of integration in terms of the biblical image of salt. Jesus says, in Matthew 5.13, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled by men.”

We know what it means for salt or for food to be insufficiently salty. A dish without enough saltiness is bland, boring, fit to be thrown away. In the same way, Christians doing academic work or trying to evaluate the culture can let their faith lose its distinctiveness, so that they simply become absorbed into the prevailing culture and their work loses its power to add savor or to preserve. I am going to say more about that in a minute, But I want to start with a different question, one Jesus was not asking, but one that naturally comes to mind with the comparison of faith to salt. We also know what it means for a dish to have too much salt. When we speak to the culture, can we be too Christian? I think, in a sense, we can. When a dish has too much salt, all you taste is salt. Sometimes Christians try to do academic work, or to evaluate culture, too directly. I worked for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, mainly on foreign aid for the Middle East and on arms control issues. We would have people come to us and tell us, as Christians, that the Bible taught what U.S. policy should be towards Israel, and they used especially the apocalyptic portions of the Scriptures. On the other side of the political spectrum people would come to us and tell us, as Christians, that the Bible taught that nuclear weapons were a kind of sacrilege and offensive to God. The head of the committee, the congressman I was working for, Lee Hamilton, was himself a Christian of strong personal faith. But he used to get irritated with both these kinds of people. The problem was that they had not understood either what kind of book the Bible is or the complexities of the situations to which they were trying to prescribe. A certain kind of translation has to be done if the Christian gospel is to speak in the language appropriate to the situation; otherwise it sounds forced, or stilted, or quaint. This is what I mean by the analogy of a dish tasting overwhelmingly of salt.

On the other hand there is the danger of too little salt. We can conform so closely to the culture itself that all the purchase or the leverage of the gospel gets lost. This is one worry I have had about coming to Yale and joining the establishment. I have found myself tempted to modify my teaching about what is required of us by way of sacrificial living. My wife and I have been reading I Corinthians, where Paul says, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are.” We have to be sure that the voices of the foolish and the weak and the despised by the world’s standards are heard and strongly respected in what we do here. Christians can be so anxious to fit in to the prevailing systems that they empty out the gospel. I used to teach at Calvin College in Michigan, and sometimes I used to look at the racks of Christian magazines in the library, for Christian business leaders, or Christian musicians, or Christian wedding-planners, and some of it seemed merely a second-rate endorsement of prevailing norms, with a veneer of Christian language pasted over the top of it. If it really was like this, then it was not merely useless but a kind a debasement or betrayal of the gospel. I hope that whatever we do here, we can preserve the witness of the faith against the world.

But there is a second way to lose saltiness which is the opposite of too much assimilation. Christians can also make too little engagement with culture. I used to meet every week, when I was in Washington, with a group of Christian congressional staff from offices all over the Hill. We would try to talk about our work and our faith. But I noticed one group who took the view that politics is itself a domain under the power of the prince of this world, and therefore not appropriately part of Christian life. They were themselves engaged in politics, but they held their Christian lives separate from it; their Christianity was a matter of personal devotion and communal fellowship. They thought it was wrong, for example, to pray for the passage of any piece of legislation, because as legislation it was already corrupt. The politics they practiced was, so-to-speak, salt-free, except to the extent that they preserved personal honesty and integrity in their professional lives.

What would it be like for a dish to have the right amount of saltiness? I think the key is that the right amount of salt allows the other flavors of the dish to taste the way they are supposed to taste with full and distinct vividness and clarity. You do not taste salt; you taste mushroom or buckwheat or halibut. I want to end with an example of what this might be like for Christian engagement with culture. Paul Ramsey was a man I deeply admired. I knew him as a professor when I was a graduate student at Princeton. He, more than any other individual, is responsible for the rebirth of medical ethics as a sub-discipline. His book The Patient as Person has shaped the whole field. He wrote the book explicitly as a Christian, delivering the first version of it as the Lyman Beecher Lectures of 1969 here at the Divinity School, where he got his seminary and graduate education. He got the faculty to agree that the lectures would be sponsored jointly with the School of Medicine, and he got together a group of commentators consisting of physicians and medical school professors. Before this he spent a whole year on a research appointment at the medical school at Georgetown, immersing himself in the problems of informed consent, the definition of death, organ donation, the allocation of scarce medical resources, and genetic counseling. In this way he began, I quote, “to learn how teachers of medicine, researchers, and practitioners themselves understand the moral aspects of their practice.” Here he was equipping himself for what I called translation. But this did not mean dilution. When he did finally speak, it was a word of powerful critique — that the practice of medicine had in many areas failed to respect the dignity of human beings in the most vulnerable stages of their lives. So here is a model for us, an example of the power of salt. Ramsey was able to speak a faithful word that ended up challenging and transforming the culture. Perhaps our center can do the same.