Talk at Jewish Synagogue

Thank you to all for your warm welcome this evening. I am grateful that for the first time in my five years as a Catholic priest to have an opportunity like this, to speak at a Jewish worship service. I am indebted to Steve Chernoff, your president and Cantor Silbersher, your spiritual leader, to have this chance to speak about the divine moral law as revealed by the Ten Commandments given to Moses by the Lord on Mt. Sinai. Of course, I am a bit nervous that I might say the wrong kinds of things while I am here, but I begin presuming upon your charity in being interested in what a young priest has to say. I am quite excited by everything I stand to learn personally through this religious encounter this evening.


In preparing for this visit some months ago, my short conversations with your president and spiritual leader concluded with our agreement that I would not touch on the topic of Jewish-Catholic relations. In such a topic, there would undoubtedly be much to celebrate within the dialogue taking place between our two religions, but as we all know, there would be plenty to lament as well. There unfortunately seem to be almost as many setbacks as there are progresses, although I hope you share my view that overall, the dialogue can still move forward. I am looking forward to following Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming visit to the Holy Land in early May of this year. In choosing the topic of the Ten Commandments instead, we have decided to discuss a moral worldview that both our religions have in common. Just as importantly, it is a moral worldview that is under constant attack today. The topic of the Ten Commandments thus represents an area where the unity we share as children of Abraham is as important as ever if religion is to remain relevant today.


Rather than taking the Ten Commandments one commandment at a time, and then exposing the evil that each commandment helps us to avoid, I would like to address an attack on the relevancy of the Ten Commandments in general. This attack is articulated well enough by the popular atheist Sam Harris in his recent book Letter to a Christian Nation.

The Ten Commandments are also worthy of some reflection in this
context, as most Americans seem to think them both morally and legally
indispensable. . . While the U.S. Constitution does not contain a single mention
of God, and was widely decried at the time of its composition as an irreligious
document, many Christians believe that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Strangely, the Ten Commandments are often cited as
incontestable proof of this fact. . . . The first four of these injunctions have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. As stated, they forbid the practice of any non-Judeo-Christian faith. Commandments 5 through 9 do address morality, though it is questionable how many human beings ever honored their parents or abstained from committing murder, adultery, theft or perjury because of them. Admonishments of this kind are found in virtually every culture throughout recorded history. There is nothing especially compelling about their presentation in the Bible. It is a scientific fact that moral emotions - like a sense of fair play or an abhorence of cruelty - precede any exposure to scripture. . . . It seems rather unlikely, therefore, that the average American will receive necessary moral instruction by seeing these precepts chiseled in marble whenever he enters a courthouse. . . . If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. (pp. 19ff)

Well, I have probably overquoted Mr. Harris and left myself with too much work to do to refute all of what he means in this paragraph, but let me begin by summarizing his argument as simply saying that the Ten Commandments are completely unnecessary and that their promotion results in net harm to society. They are unnecessary because they are unoriginal, and ultimately harmful because they are tied to irrational faith in God who supposedly revealed His divine law through such underwhelming principles. The argument is that since these principles are already written within human nature, why would you attribute morality to the revelation of God?

Thankfully, the viewpoint right in front of us agrees first of all that the moral content found within the Ten Commandments is true. There are often times that people of reason and of faith have to battle with moral relativism, which says there is no objective or transcendent good but only the subjective good chosen by individuals. Moral relativists believe that the Ten Commandments might be true for you but need not be true for me. Mr. Harris is not a moral relativist. He thinks there can be an objective and universal standard of morality. Although he does not provide a systematic system for defining what is universally good, he thinks a simple formula like the promotion of happiness over suffering by always choosing love over hate (pp.24) would be a great improvement over the Ten Commandments, tainted as they are by irrational faith in miraculous burning bushes and locust plagues.

Mr. Harris depicts people of faith, you and me, as people who are irrationally ready to throw away any universal moral principles in favor of a few particular moral principles divinely revealed. Of course, there is no one in this room tonight who is ready to say that the universal moral principle of doing good and avoiding evil, the universal basis of morality, should be thrown away forever because God Himself chiseled a particular moral law in stone that we are not to covet our neighbor's wife. In Mr. Harris's mind, the two are in opposition. Yet obviously they are not. Not coveting your neighbor's wife is a way to do good and avoid evil, straightforwardly. Simply because we believe God chiseled this commandment in stone does not make the commandment itself any less reasonable. Faith because it goes beyond reason does not obliterate human reason. Just because someone believes in a divinely revealed law does not mean he has given up hope of recognizing universal moral principles with his mind. Mr. Harris sets up an either/or scenario that does not make sense to us who live the Judeo-Christian moral worldview. We adhere to a morality that is both accessible to human reason and divinely revealed by God. It makes sense for us, if not to Mr. Harris, that God who called His creation good, including human nature which is made in his image and likeness, would reveal divine laws that seem quite reasonable to that good and intelligent human nature. If God were to reveal laws that did not correspond to human reason, of course Mr. Harris would reject those as well. Yet precisely because the Ten Commandments reveal a morality that corresponds directly to our rational nature, Mr. Harris is not impressed and is impressed instead by his estimation that He could have thought of such laws himself.

Mr. Harris puts his faith not in God, but in science. This is peculiar because in other areas of his book, he mocks those who believe the world was created by an intelligence because there are so many unintelligent things about the way the world works. So on the one hand, he ridicules the intelligibility of the world, but as we said earlier, when it comes to determining universal moral principles, he believes that science will be able to discover the truth about how man should live. Admittedly, Mr. Harris is a much more intelligent and eloquent man than I am, but I have a hard time seeing how he escapes this contradiction. If the world is universally intelligible, then the world is evidence of universal intelligence. If it is not universally intelligible, then there is no need for Mr. Harris to put faith in science to figure out a universal objective morality greater than what was revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

Before I go too much farther afield, I had better start steering this horse into the barn. To those who would find the Ten Commandments unoriginal and tainted with irrational faith, I would say that the reasonability that God wrote into the first commandment in particular is what makes the Ten Commandments indispensable for any meaningful reflection on human morality. It is the unique patrimony of Israel, of course, within the course of world history and among world religions, to be the first to receive the revelation of the one true God, besides whom there are no other gods. The first commandment against polytheism and idolatry moves religion definitively toward rationality and away from superstition. But most people miss this. Perhaps it would be better to say to detractors that the first commandments really says this: 'If you have to throw away your reason to believe in me, then don't believe in me.' It is because the God of Israel is uniquely accessible to and consonant with human reason that He can and should command Himself to be recognized the one true God for all of humanity, besides whom there are no other gods.

The Ten Commandments are indispensable, and eternally valuable, not so much because they are true according to the universal moral principle of doing good and avoiding evil, but because they are accompanied by a proposal of faith that builds upon human reason. Precisely because the faith of Israel in the one true God has nothing to hide from human reason which seeks truth, the faith of Israel deserves a place at the table of moral deliberation that cannot be taken from it. The fact that the Ten Commandments were chiseled by God Himself, accompanied by great signs, does not show that the Ten Commandments are the complete exposition of divine laws not available to human reason, but shows that faith in God, the enduring source of goodness, should be present to aid and to correct human reason when it fails to behold the good. The more fundamental Christians who Mr. Harris explicitly critiques in his book find human reason extremely vulnerable to error and thus in constant need of correction by divine revelation. Such folks are usually more dramatic in their promotion of the Ten Commandments outside our courthouses, or for the right for prayer in schools. Yet the display of Ten Commandments need not mean any assault on human reason whatsoever, for the reasons we just discussed. Just because the Ten Commandments were not included in the U.S. Constitution does not mean that our founders did not provide any space for religion and faith to play a role in the promotion of the common good. In fact, our Constitution guarantees through the freedom of religion the opportunity for faith to do just that.

The Ten Commandments remain today, as ever, a particularly bright light within the moral tradition, for they mark a point of convergence between reason and faith. The fact that these commandments were received by divine revelation is of course special reason for us to celebrate, for they point us not only toward a natural happiness to be found here on earth, but also toward a supernatural happiness that corresponds to the spiritual nature and religious sense of a human person, a supernatural destiny that matches a human's person infinite desire to forever know and to encounter the good. Precisely because divine revelation is unnecessary, it corresponds to God's superabundant love in both first creating us and then subsequently choosing us for an enduring relationship with Him. Atheists like to talk about how religion is unnecessary, but they are less eloquent, at least in my opinion, in showing why the world is necessary. The ordinary reason for the world existing, at least for people of faith, is not that it just necessarily is, but that is exists because of a decision of love that was completely gratuitious. Admitting that the world need not exist disposes us toward seeking what is necessary, even if it takes the gift of faith to show us what is necessary and eternal.

The Ten Commandments show that living the moral life not only ensures a chance to pursue temporary happiness in a natural way, they show also that living a moral life enables one to enter into an enduring friendship with God. The Ten Commandments of course point out whether we are doing good and avoiding evil, but even more importantly, they point out the conditions within which a friendship with the one true God can grow. It is within this friendship with God that people of faith seek a morality that goes beyond rationality, a morality that Mr. Harris expects religion to produce but accuses it of not producing. It is a friendship with God, a living conversation and exchange of love with the One who first loved us, that alone can produce the super-rational morality that Mr. Harris expects. In this friendship, God Himself can write not merely on stone tablets, but as the prophet Ezekiel tell us, God Himself wants to write His law on our hearts. This morality written on the human heart by God Himself completes the morality set in motion by the Ten Commandments, and perfects it. The Ten Commandments divinely revealed show us when this precious relationship with with the one true God who is love is in danger of being severed. The Ten Commandments show that when the univeral moral law is violated, what is most at risk is the loss of faith in the one true God who can purify and more deeply reveal man's vocation to love and be loved than science and mere reasonability ever can. Thank you.