This paper was a Sunday School lesson that I taught many years ago. 

Preamble

As you may know, I tend to be rather serious, a rather dry old stick, so I was searching for some way to lighten things up a little, and I ran across an interesting note on tithing. It was an announcement in a church newsletter that read:

The Associate Minister unveiled the church’s new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: “I Upped My Pledge – Up Yours.” 

That didn’t seem very appropriate as a preamble to this morning’s lesson, so I went searching for another opening and ran across this, which is actually a bit more relevant (and that relevance will eventually become apparent): 

In the hospital the relatives gathered in the waiting room, where their family member lay gravely ill. Finally, the doctor came in looking tired and somber. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” he said as he surveyed the worried family. “The only hope for your loved one at this time is a brain transplant. It’s an experimental procedure, very risky but it is the only hope. Insurance will cover the surgery, but you will have to pay for the brain yourselves. The family members sat silent as they absorbed the news. 

After a great length of time, someone asked, “Well, how much does a brain cost?” The doctor quickly responded, “$5000 for a male brain and $200 for a female brain.” The moment turned awkward. Men in the room tried not to smile, avoiding eye contact with the women, but some actually smirked. Finally, a man, unable to control his curiosity, blurted out the question everyone wanted to ask, “Why is the male brain so much more expensive?” The doctor smiled at the childish innocence and explained to the group, “It’s just standard pricing procedure. We have to mark down the price of the female brains because they’ve been used.”

Part A

It is my personal belief that everyone always does what he or she believes to be the right thing to do. This morning, I would like to share with you what has led me to that conclusion, beginning with some research conducted by the well-known Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget (1896-1980).

Piaget is best known for his studies of children, and his view of how children’s minds work has been enormously influential, particularly in educational theory. In his study of children, he observed that their thinking develops through a series of stages, that they exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of thinking in each of these developmental stages, and that no matter how bright children may be, they are not capable of understanding things beyond their cognitive developmental level. In addition, he observed that thinking does not develop entirely smoothly; transitions between developmental stages tend to be rapid and radical, and the bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining that new understanding. Piaget saw these transitions as taking place at about 18-24 months, 7 years, and 11 or 12 years, resulting in four stages in the development of thinking. 

The first of these stages, from birth to about 1 to 2 years was known as the Sensorimotor stage. At this stage of their development, children are beginning to experience the world through movement and their senses. They are extremely egocentric in that, in terms of their thinking, they are not yet able to perceive the world from any viewpoint other than their own. 

Then comes what is called the Preoperational stage, from about ages 2 to 7 years, a time in which egocentrism begins to weaken. At this stage of their development, children have not yet acquired the ability to think logically, and they tend to indulge in a lot of magical thinking. 

Next comes what is called the Concrete Operational stage: from about ages 7 to 12. Although they are beginning to think logically, abstraction is still more-or-less beyond them. So, while they can now think logically, it is only with assistance. 

Finally comes the Formal Operational stage, from about age 12 onwards. During this stage, children develop the capacity for abstract reasoning and are finally fully capable of thinking logically. 

Piaget next turned his attention to the study of moral reasoning. In 1932, he published a book entitled The Moral Judgment of the Child, in which he proposed several ideas which, at the time, seemed rather radical: 

(1) that growth needs to progress through these developmental stages in the order given, since the acquisition of each stage depends on mastery of the preceding stages, 

(2) that “the child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary” (Gallagher, 1978, p. 26), mainly through interaction with his or her peers,

(3) that the development of moral reasoning, like reasoning in general, proceeds on a stage-by-stage basis,

(4) that children cannot reason morally beyond the level at which they can reason in general. That is, judgements about right and wrong –judgements concerning what ought to be done, and why – are limited by cognitive development in general, and

(5) that morality is not so much a function of what one does but of the reasoning that underlies the choice. That is, the morality of any behaviour is not determined by what the child does but by why it does what it does, by the reasoning behind the behaviour.

Building on Piaget’s work, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychology professor at Yale University and later at Harvard, postulated a series of six stages in the development of moral reasoning, grouped into three moral levels, as follows: 

Level 1: Pre-Moral Level 

Stage 1: Punishment and obedience

 (Action is motivated by fear of punishment)

Stage 2: Naive instrumental hedonism

 (Action is motivated by hoped-for reward: the morality of the marketplace)

Level 2: Conventional Morality 

Stage 3: Good-Boy/Good-Girl morality

 (Action is motivated by desire for approval, avoidance of disapproval)

Stage 4: Law and Order morality

 (Action is motivated by loyalty to authority, anticipation of honour/dishonour)

Level 3: Principled Morality 

Stage 5: Morality of contract and democratically accepted law

 (Action is motivated by concern for community acceptance; values are relative)

Stage 6: Morality of individual moral principles

 (Action is motivated by personal integrity, self-respect, universal values)

Part B 

Adam was walking around the Garden of Eden feeling very lonely, so God asked Adam, “What is wrong with you?” Adam said he didn’t have anyone to talk to. God said he was going to give him a companion and it would be called a woman. 

He said this person will cook for you and wash your clothes; she will always agree with every decision you make. She will bear your children and never ask you to get up in the middle of the night to take care of them. She will not nag you and will always be the first to admit she was wrong when you’ve had a disagreement. She will never have a headache and will freely give you love and compassion whenever needed. 

Adam asked, “What would a woman like this cost me?” God said an “arm and a leg.” Adam said, “What can I get for a just a rib?” and the rest is history. 

Part of that history concerns how a little glitch in research methodology has turned out to be most useful for our understanding of moral judgement. It so happens that all of the moral development research of both Piaget and Kohlberg reported above was carried out with males; and when Kohlberg’s scale is applied to females, they seem, on the average, not to progress much beyond Level 3 on Kohlberg’s six level scale of moral development. 

All of which prompted a Harvard professor by the name of Carol Gilligan to attempt to tease out the meaning of such apparently stunted moral development on the part of women; and Gilligan’s subsequent research showed that there is indeed a fundamental difference in the way in which boys and girls, men and women, approach the problem of attempting to resolve life’s inevitable moral dilemmas. According to Gilligan, however, the fact that women score lower on Kohlberg’s scale of moral development reflects not a lower level of moral development (per se) but, rather, a greater awareness of and emphasis on the inter-relatedness of all people. 

What appears to be happening is that this difference between men and women stems from the different developmental paths followed by males and females: In order to be male, the young boy must separate from his mother in a way that the young girl does not. Thus, males develop within the context of separateness (from their mothers), while females develop within the context of continuing attachment. As a result, males, on average, appear to be operating out of a “developing-understanding-of-justice-among-separate-entities” model of moral reasoning; whereas females, on average, appear to be operating out of a world-view characterized by “caring for and about those to whom one is inseparably related” – and in this case, “inseparably related” is used in the same sense as the neighbourliness illustrated by the story of the Good Samaritan, or in our terms, the intended inclusiveness of our Christian community. 

In effect, when knowledge about human development is based only on the study of males, the contribution that could be made by the study of female development is lost; and in the process, our understanding of both morality and religion comes to be dominated by justice-oriented, eye-for-an-eye, “logical” conceptual schemes; and what we might think of as the more “human” side of humanity tends to be devalued and ignored. 

The practical value of this particular difference between men and women is that the inclusion of women’s voices and values in human affairs, including in the priesthood – the oriental idea of the inseparability of yin and yang – adds a new empathic emphasis to decision-making that is not present in the values that Kohlberg wrote about. The distinction is not dissimilar to the one drawn by Jesus in his continual attacks on the righteousness of the Pharisees, who tended to observe the letter of the law, but often at the expense of its spirit. This is not to disparage the Mosaic Law – those who obey the Law have their reward – but just to point out that strict adherence to the Mosaic Law isn’t a particularly Christian way to salvation.  

Ray Broadfoot, for example, said it well when he drafted a short list of Christian fundamentals in a series of articles that he wrote for the Saints Herald some forty or so years ago,  

“God is love. 

He wants all men to be free.

He provides an example, Christ.

His Spirit works with all men.”

— to which he added, “We must be prepared to give spiritually directed aid to people who: 

* believe in God but not churches

* believe in some directive force in the universe

* believe that God’s spirit works with all men

* agree that all men should live to their highest capabilities

* do not see any sense or purpose in life

* do not know our God but worship their own gods.”

  Part C 

Which leads me to another issue: If, as suggested above, we were to supplement patriarchal morality by its feminine counterpart, it would not only require us to rethink our ideas of right and wrong; it would also require a change in our understanding of God. By admitting that the stories that we have been telling ourselves about God could, in fact, be limited by a masculine perspective, we could easily find our religion in a position very similar to that already faced by science:

(1) where ideas are recognized to be nothing more than ideas, i.e., concepts are recognized to be (no more than) constructs, 

(2) where we embrace the post-modern idea that there can be no truth independent of the person who constructed it (a very Buddhist idea, by the way),

(3) where everything that we tell ourselves needs to be treated as a hypothesis, and the telling of it a story, and

(4) where such stories are never either true or false, but only more or less useful.

Does that mean that nothing that we have been telling ourselves about God has any validity. No, of course not. In fact, the closer our understanding of reality (as reflected in the stories that we tell ourselves about how things are) approximates the real thing, the better our understanding of God will be, and the better our God-related stories will be as a guide to life.  

And personally, I believe that, when we get right down to it, the Christ story doesn’t do all that bad a job of putting us in touch with God.  

Part D 

In any event, suppose we were to go even deeper and acknowledge that our only contact with the reality of God, or of anything else for that matter, is determined by the way in which our brains structure the limited range of energy to which our sense organs are sensitive, and that the reality that we live in, on a day-to-day basis, is the reality that we construct in our own minds from the sights and sounds and tastes and smells and feelings that are formed within us from the sensory information that we receive through our various senses, plus the thought that we use to structure those sensory experiences, knowing all the while that those thoughts are structured by our upbringing, our culture, and the particular language in which they are formed. Suppose we were to acknowledge that we exist, for all time, in a subjective reality – which we can only hope approximates an objective reality out there somewhere in space-time – and that our understanding of God is limited accordingly. Or as the apostle Paul phrased it, “…we see through a glass, darkly.”

With that knowledge and admission as a foundation, humanity could begin to tear down or “deconstruct” the patriarchal logic which has supported the Christian church’s historical suppression of women and its antagonism towards peoples of other cultures, races, faiths, and so on – perhaps to the point where there can begin to be a wider ecumenism, one in which the quest for peace among people is not quite so hampered by an inherent hostility based on differences. 

When I joined this church more than seventy years ago, we were very proud of being different. I knew that this church was the right one, that all the others were wrong, and that the Catholic church, in particular, was evil. At the time, the members of those other churches knew essentially the same thing, of course, except that they knew that they were the ones who were right while we were among those other groups that were wrong. All of this was in keeping with a very fundamental law of human nature, well known in Social Psychology, which has to do with the “In Group” and the “Out Group. “Essentially, my group is right, and everyone else is wrong (or as one mother observed while watching a group of soldiers on parade, “Everyone is out of step but my Johnny.”) 

Life was relatively easy in those good old days, because we knew very little about anyone else; and it is always easy to be critical of others when you don’t know very much about them. But then the world began to shrink, and groups with whom we would have had no contact in the past began to become our neighbours in our “global village.” In the future, as we begin to learn more and more about these new neighbours of ours, it will become less and less easy to maintain holier-than-thou attitudes towards them. People will continue to be valued for their similarity to us, of course, but they will be valued for their diversity as well. And tolerance for and acceptance of all people will continue to increase, regardless of their differences from us. 

Not so long ago, when one of the leaders of the church retired, he spoke of the prejudice that he experienced within the church because of his Buddhist background and beliefs – many of you didn’t know that we had a church leader who was Buddhist as well as Christian, did you? In the future, prejudice against those who are different from ourselves is going to be more and more difficult to maintain, as we learn to value, rather than disparage, the differences that we find in these other groups to which we are inseparably related. Then, as we move towards a more inclusive view of humanity, we are all going to be neighbours, not only in our global village, but in the Good Samaritan sense of the term as well. Then, perhaps, we can get on with the task of sharing our various stories, and perhaps even listening to the theological stories told by others.