To follow a rule - a Christian meditation

An exploration of rule-following, Genesis, the Sermon on the Mount, and forgiveness

Recently, I was asked a question by a very intelligent little boy: “how do we follow rules?” Something that apparently looks rather obvious prima facie is, actually, an incredibly difficult philosophical question to navigate. Indeed, this is a problem which haunts contemporary professional philosophy and has haunted it since a brilliant Austrian and lapsed Catholic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, laid out the problem:

"If I give someone the order, “fetch me a red flower from that meadow”, how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word? Now the answer one might suggest first is that he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his mind, and comparing it with the flowers to see which of them had the colour of the image. Now there is such a way of searching and it is not at all essential that the image we use should be a mental one ... But this is not the only way of searching and it isn’t the usual way. We go, look about us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can be of this kind, consider the order “imagine a red patch”. You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine."¹

To translate this into ordinary language, Wittgenstein is saying that we don’t see to have much of an explanation for how rule-following (or normativity) actually works - if we say that we are “comparing” ideas of the flower to the flowers we see and experience, we don’t seem to be describing how people actually follow rules; if we say that there is something normative about the sentence itself, we are saying that we learn how to follow rules simply by hearing rules, which seems unsatisfactory; if we say that there is some “prior faculty” that we have that helps us understand rules, then we have the job of explaining the root cause of a “human nature”. Interestingly, the last option was the one that Ludwig Wittgenstein took: we seem to be able to “mechanically” follow rules:

"One follows the rule mechanically. Hence one compares it with a mechanism. “Mechanical”—that means: without thinking. But entirely without thinking? Without reflecting."²

Whether this faculty is divine import, socially acquired, or simply a quirk of nature, I’m not especially interested in - although I obviously hold a bias of some sort. But I want to draw our attention to something rather embarrassing for myself - the best I could establish in that moment was “following a rule means not breaking a rule.” While this might seem like the trickery of parenthood that helps us avoid difficult questions, I couldn’t put the question out of my mind and still only came as far as this: following means not breaking. The little boy had bested me with a throwaway remark and I found myself thinking more and more on this question until it became a little clearer for me.

Adam and the first rule

Although Christianity is not exactly left wanting for rules, I won’t start with a dry and altogether unimportant exegesis of Leviticus or even recount Christ’s clarification of the Law to His disciples and contemporaries. Instead, I’ll start - as stories so often do - in the beginning: the story of Adam and Eve, the first people to ever encounter this strange social convention of “a rule” and, infamously, became the first people to also ever break the same strange social convention. Let’s revisit the text:

2 15 Then the Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and guard it. 16 He told him, “You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, 17 except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.”

…

²⁵ The man and the woman were both naked, but they were not embarrassed.

…

3 Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the Lord God had made. The snake asked the woman, “Did God really tell you not to eat fruit from any tree in the garden?” ² “We may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden,” the woman answered, ³ “except the tree in the middle of it. God told us not to eat the fruit of that tree or even touch it; if we do, we will die.” ⁴ The snake replied, “That's not
true; you will not die. ⁵ God said that because he knows that when you eat it, you will be like God and know what is good and what is bad.” ⁶ The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, and he also ate it. ⁷ As soon as they had eaten it, they were given understanding and realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves.

Here we see the first ever rule being broken. For the sake of brevity, I have missed some of Genesis 2 out, but we should be able to clearly see the first rule being given in 2:16-17: "He told him, “You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden, except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.”" Almost as quickly as it was given, it was broken in 3:6: "The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, and he also ate it."

The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder

While these passages have caused issues for feminist thinkers, I want to draw attention to the change of state between 2:25 and 3:7 - “The man and the woman were both naked, but they were not embarrassed” becomes “As soon as they had eaten it, they were given understanding and realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves.” This change is too much to ignore or pass over in indifference, so what emerges? What changes for Adam and Eve? Along with a particularly melancholic Dane³ in the mid-1800s, I believe that the answer is one of those universally human emotions emerges: anxiety. To be clear, I’m not advocating the replacement of the health care system with church dogmatics - rather, I am saying that there is a specific type of anxiety (or, a “phenomenological sense of awareness”, in philosophical terms) that is rooted deep within our humanity. The anxiety of choice.

Having understood the rule that had been given to them by God, Adam and Eve, in hearing the words of the serpent, experienced something that they had never experienced before: the anxiety of choice. “God has told us to do something - something altogether trivial and easy, if we speak quite frankly - but still first Eve and then Adam was drawn to it in 3:6: "The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise." Despite no sociality of any real kind to influence them both towards sin, without any obvious sociological pressure to turn away from God, the temptation stuck - she would eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, share it with her husband, and he would follow suit. Both of them, through their own free will, chose to eat the fruit and break the first ever rule.

But this leaves the rather stark question: did God, against the rather certain conviction of James the Apostle (James 1:13), tempt Adam and Eve by allowing them to be exposed to the serpent? Could Adam, as if the man par excellence, stand before God and say “God has tempted me” without being dragged away by his own evil desire and giving birth to sin? (James 1:14)? To even contradict myself, are we saying that Adam and Eve did not understood the rule that had been given to them? A certain Danish theologian writing under the pseudonym of Vigilius Haufniensis (or, “the Defender of Copenhagen”)⁴ seemed to stray out onto the 70,000 fathoms of the deep⁵ in order to ask the heretical question: how could God have done this to us?

Breaking rules that we don’t understand

While it seems hardly appropriate to put God on trial, investigating this problem is key for understanding exactly what happens when a) Adam and Eve chosen to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and b) understanding how the anxiety of choice interacts with the concepts of rule-following and rule-breaking.

Starting from our position “to follow a rule is to not break a rule”, we find that we don’t gain a satisfactory answer as to how anyone ever learns to follow rules at all - telling the child not to put their hand on a hot stove, not to kick a wall out of frustration, not to speak to others rudely⁶; these all seem like strange demands and surely must be completely alien to the child who has no idea what a rule is. Does the child have the capacity to understand what they “ought” to do (or, inversely, what they “ought not” do) when they have never internalized the idea of what “not breaking a rule” means, let alone “following a rule”. Let’s turn back to Adam and Eve in order to illustrate the process.

The Anxiety of Sin

Look at the change between Genesis 3:6 and 3:7 - after eating the fruit, the pair turn away from God in shame. “To follow a rule is to not break a rule”, but to understand a rule requires the opportunity to break a rule. Here, we find open declaration of free will - there are choices we make and we feel the impact of those decisions in our lives. Obviously following rules is necessary for the basic functioning of any and all human society, so this seems to lead us to an important point of understanding: only by learning to break a rule do we understand how to follow a rule and only by not breaking a rule do we know how to follow rules. In this sense, the task for Adam, Eve, and everyone thereafter is to discover how to follow rules - something which requires first for us to recognize that we are breaking rules.

As Haufniensis notes, this is what we might call a “qualitative shift” as opposed to a “quantitative shift”⁷ - we’re not interested in finding how we acquire more knowledge (anyone who has spent any amount of time with small children sees how obvious it is that anyone can learn something new without a particularly complicated explanation), but rather how new knowledge changes the way we view the world at a fundamental level. Think back to the moment you gave your life to Christ - how do we move from the state of “understanding what Christianity is” to “commitment to Christ’s message”? I’m afraid I’m going to use a cliched and much abused phrase here - there is a “leap of faith” which tears us from what we were and creates us anew. But neither Kierkegaard nor Wittgenstein (nor the likes of Christ, Paul, Luther, nor Wesley) would be contend with the rather lazy use of this phrase which I may have accidentally led you towards here with my use of the cliché. Instead, I want us to focus on the “leap” within the context of making choices.

Much like Adam and Eve, something changes us when we accept that we have duties, attempt to follow rules, or - in those inspiring words of Wesley himself - when the moment comes that 'a Christian is a man that is "anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power."'⁸ Indeed, the washing by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5), whether at the baptism font or in the righteous fire that the apostles felt on Pentecost (Acts 2:2-4), is the most obvious “sign of a Christian” that even the faithless can recognize. But remember the point of our investigation: how do we follow a rule? It seems that our ability to follow rules depends on our ability to recognize the rules that we break and a turn towards forgiveness in the wake of the rule-breaking. Adam did not learn to follow a rule simply by breaking it, but in the upbuilding that followed: God showed him the consequences of the rule he had broken. The apostles did not understand the task that they had been “sent out” to carry out: God showed them the rule they were asked to follow in the Holy Spirit.

For those of us who have not been set on fire by the Holy Spirit, a turn towards something a bit more concrete might help at this stage. Therefore, we turn to a collection of rules which are not apparently rules on first inspection.

Beatitudes qua teachers

Although it might be expected for me to now turn to a more formal, codified system of law, I’m going to take a “leap” to a section of Christ’s teachings that aren’t obviously rules - the Beatitudes. And while the Beatitudes aren’t rules per se, they do call us to understand rules: by expressing what faith looks like, we can infer what faith is.

He said:

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

(Matthew 5:1-12)

As with so many well-trodden paths, sometimes it can be difficult to recognize the ground for what it actually is. But who are these people that Christ says are blessed - not shall gain blessing, but are blessed already! The “poor in spirit”, the “mourners”, the “meek”, those that “hunger and thirst for righteousness”, the “merciful”, the “pure of heart”, the “peacemaker”; who are these people?

Sermon on the Mount, Carl H. Bloch

Let’s remember the purpose of this discourse: “how do we follow rules?” And while we do that, let’s remember my partially unhelpful response: to follow a rule is to not break a rule. But, in Matthew 5:1-12, there are no obvious rules to follow. Nothing obviously jumps out at us for us to do - unless we are not amongst those people. Am I “poor in spirit”? Am I “meek”? Am I a “mourner”? Do I “hunger and thirst for righteousness”, “mercy”, “purity of heart”, and to become a “peacemaker”? The rule, while still not apparent, emerges on the horizon of thought - the purpose is indicative edification, not further imperative law-giving⁹. To translate that into plainer English: Christ knows that we have heard the Law (especially considering his clarification occurs in Matthew 4:12-25), but now He is taking aim at the listener: everything you just heard, yes, you, everything you just heard - have you fulfilled it yet? By speaking past us, Christ calls us to draw ourselves into the conversation. The Law is nothing without law-followers, but how do they become law-followers without recognizing that they are law-breakers? By presenting the Beatitudes to us, to you, we all see the call to action.

Because no one is identified as the “poor in spirit”, the “meek”, the “mourner”, those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness”, “purity of heart”, and the “peacemaker”, we are not presented with an essence - a thing we are born as or destined to become. We are presented with a call to exist - a choice, an exercise of free will. Remember back to Genesis 2:17: “You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.” As Luther so masterfully showed all those centuries ago, the death of Adam was not a physical death, an external death of the body. Instead, it was the death of the soul - each one of us comes into this world spiritually dead, ready to turn towards sin. Each one of us needs a moment of awakening, resurrection - a moment when sin-consciousness is understood, internalized. This explains why we might find the Beatitudes so easy to overlook: when we first encounter them, it is entirely possible that we are “spiritually dead” and fail to recognize the Spirit talking to you. This is the opportunity for growth, for the eventual acceptance of the rules that Christ wills for us to follow. We always already want to break the rules of the Gospel, such is the temptation of the world - but for those “not of the world” (John 17:16), there is an opportunity for escape, for freedom here: the Spirit can act in us and make us alive in order to make the choice which resists the temptation of spiritually dead.

So, following a rule requires us to both break a rule and then endeavor not to break a rule. For the spiritually dead, the rules outlined in the Gospel may seem unattractive, if not outright offensive, yet with the Spirit even the lowliest can do the impossible and break out from the path that seems to be determined before us¹⁰. In the strangest way possible, following a rule, through a sheer act of will and commitment not to break the rule, is the only way to truly achieve freedom.¹¹

The necessity of sin in becoming a Christian

Really, there is a dual problem here:

i) Considering Christ to be the same as humanity, and

ii) Considering Adam and Eve to be different to humanity.

Let’s deal with these separately:

Imitating the Inimitable

Firstly, Christ was, is, and will forever be infinitely qualitatively different from us. So, asking us to not only recognize the rules that He gave but also follow them seems to be a necessarily impossible act: no one is perfect, no one is even good but God (Mark 10:18) - how on earth can we expect to follow the rules when we aren’t even good?

Hopefully, learning to view the Beatitudes in the second-person, i.e., as addressed to you, has already opened up an entirely new way of understanding the impossibility of these rules. Instead of the despair of knowing that we cannot possibly do what God has asked us to do, we have a prototype to follow: Christ. Although the call to discipleship is often considered something almost superhuman that the greats among us tend to - with inevitable reference to the likes of Wesley, Bonhoeffer, Stein, etc. - and something altogether unnecessary for the majority of the church. But this strikes me as an awkward admission; not a compromise, but an imposition placed on God by Christians. If anyone is familiar with either Bonhoeffer or Kierkegaard, hopefully you will now see the meaning they ascribed to “Christendom”, altogether more a term of contempt than anything else.

The imitatio, the following of Christ, can’t just be a mental or rhetorical act - very few trees are known by their fruits¹² thanks to their skills of intellect or wit, so why do we suppose that we are excused from this? Primarily, we return to our main question: “what does it mean to follow a rule?” The rather intimidating yet authoritative call to “take up your cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24) is exactly the kind of rule that we meet in our indecision, where we are “ground to a halt” in the moment, like a divine brake is grinding up against the wheels of our life. In truth, our “not-knowing” of what it means to become a disciple of Christ (when we eventually realize that Christ is speaking to the singular you and not necessarily his contemporaries in ancient Palestine) is precisely the case that the intelligent young boy caught me out with in three ways:

1. It is not entirely clear what “taking up the cross” entails, especially in an age where crucifixion is at an all time low,

2. It is not entirely clear what “taking up the cross” doesn’t entail, especially without contemporary references to hold ourselves against, and

3. It is not entirely clear what “taking up the cross” is intended towards, i.e., how one lives a life bearing the taken-up cross.

But I’ve already given an answer to these concerns: Christ. The story of Christ’s life and the subsequent struggle for faith illustrated in the four gospels and the letters that make up the New Testament are sufficient to answer this question: “taking up the cross” requires that we become contemporaries of Christ. Instead of thinking “what does God do for me?”, we should think “how do I get back to God’s presence?” - to imagine that we are standing before Christ as He delivers His speech to the 5,000, as He is spat on in the street, as He weeps in the garden, as He hangs on the cross.

Although I can’t tell you the precise contents of the rule, I can point you towards the source of the rule - Christ Himself.

The Adamic condition

There is a certain trend in some theologies - lay or otherwise - to view Adam as distinct from humanity, dooming us to a certain fate (as if we were Ancient Greek pagans), or betraying humanity through his impertinence. Although we might excuse our “impulsive reaction” that might be to blame Adam and Eve for their inability to simply follow rules, this isn’t satisfactory for a clergy that reflects - especially after we have already understood that following a rule simply means not breaking a rule and understanding a rule implies breaking a rule and, subsequently, realizing what we have done. For the sake of brevity, I will simply refer to the pair through Adam from hereon

Knowing that Adam did not understand what “a rule” was, we are presented with a choice: either there was a purpose for this lesson in rule-following or God is liable for sin in the world. Without leaning too heavily into dogmatics, hopefully we understand why the second option is undesirable. So, let’s investigate why this story of primordial rule-breaking is so important for us today. It seems to be a paradox; but one that we can “get to the other side of”. As Haufniensis identifies and Wittgenstein was quick to appropriate, following a rule seems to be reduced to “not breaking a rule”. But what does this mean? That we are forced to reconcile with the unknown before us, unaware of how we ought to react to challenges as they appear? A myopic “coolness” in the face of the unknowable reality?

In a sense, yes: we are certainly doomed to the disconcerting “fate” of an unknowable future. If this should be a surprising realization for some people, I’m afraid we’ve not been paying close enough attention to either the human condition or the gospel - unknowableness, individual finitude, is a fact. Why should we expect to be able to identify the infinite task of meeting God’s infinite will? Especially when…

To be a Christian means to believe in a special providence, not in the abstract but in the concrete. Only he who has this faith in concreto is individuality, every other is reduced to being like a copy of the species, he has neither courage nor humility, he is neither tormented enough nor helped enough to be an individuality.¹³

We find ourselves in an upside-down position. Only in the “leap” towards God, understanding in concreto what precisely it mean to be a Christian and also prepared to, indeed, act as a Christian, do we understand what it means to follow a rule: in understanding the Word, we choose not to break a rule. And that’s all it is.

That’s all it is. To follow a rule means that we are aware of what we are doing in the moment, aware that there are rules to follow and that they have real implications in our lives. The command, the “call” from the divine, weighs on us in this moment, in the moment. We are Adam in the garden, we are Jonah fleeing for his life, we are beside Christ in the garden - there are rules to follow; to follow the rule is to find hardship. To find hardship is to find the road and to find the road is to follow a rule.

That’s what I will tell that clever little boy: sometimes, you will find that doing the right thing necessarily entails finding hardship. The offensive advice from Copenhagen, Denmark 1847¹⁴ and Göttingen, Germany 1922¹⁵ rings true today: to know how to follow a rule is to simply not break a rule; and to not break a rule means to place faith in God, in Christ, that we will find what we need on the other side. This offensive advice strikes us in the very core of our humanity: our rationality, our reason. How can I trust that these words, received second-, third-, fourth-hand are actually true? The offensive words ring through us - but “blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me”¹⁶.

To follow a rule is to find the footsteps in the sand¹⁷ where the rule-giver once walked. And when we find this shallow imprint, so implausibly shallow yet so unmistakably His, then we will know what it means to follow a rule.

Amen.

1. The Blue Books, p. 3, L. Wittgenstein

2. Ibid., VII-60, p. 422

3. Søren Kierkegaard, especially in his works The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death

4. The Concept of Anxiety, S. Kierkegaard V. Haufniensis

5. Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard

6. Can you tell that I am a parent of young children?

7.

8. "Sermon 3: Wake, Thou That Sleepest", from John Wesley's Fourty-Four Sermons, p. 18, J. Wesley

9. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, p. 47, S. Hauerwas and W. H. Willimon

10. "Sermon 6: The Righteousness of Faith", from John Wesley's Fourty-Four Sermons, p. 36, J. Wesley

11. Although explored at length in the various works of any even more various collection of theologians and philosophers, we could draw upon Either/Or, vol. II, S. Kierkegaard and "Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy", P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd for the sake of brevity

12. Matthew 7:16

13. JP XI A259, The Last Years: Journals 1853-55 by Søren Kierkegaard, p. 305, tr. R. G. Smith

14. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard

15. The Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed. K Barth

16. Matthew 11:6

17. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 392 V. Eller