“Osservate il Sabato”, ecco un comandamento essenziale!
Che me ne faccio della tavola su cui è inciso il “non uccidere”: lo sapevo già! E con me lo sapevano tutti. Ma la “rivelazione” divina diventa imprescindibile quando si tratta di capire che è nostro dovere “osservare il Sabato”.
Per il cattolico l’ “eccellenza” è un dovere, ma perseguirla presenta almeno due inconvenienti: 1) è faticoso: provatevi voi; 2) è oscura: chiari sono solo i doveri minimi.
Perché Dio c’ impone obblighi che difficilmente avremmo adempiuto spontaneamente? Due ragioni svettano sulle altre:
1. per creare nella società un costume che faciliti il coordinamento dei comportamenti umani: se le incertezze ambientali diminuiscono tutti possono perseguire meglio i rispettivi obiettivi indipendentemente da quali essi siano. Lo dicono i teologi, e la scienza sociale più avanzata gentilmente conferma (vedi F.A. von Hayek).
2. per rendere “importanti” certe azioni al fine di favorire la felicità umana: l’ uomo è felice quando si realizza nel compimento di opere “importanti”. Lo dicono i teologi, e la psicologia evolutiva gentilmente conferma (vedi Jonathan Haidt).
Mi soffermo ancora un attimo sul punto due con un esempio: noi sappiamo che per aiutare il prossimo le forme di volontariato sono irrazionali; meglio sarebbe che il benefattore si impegni in cio’ che sa fare per poi devolvere il ricavato a “professionisti dell’ aiuto”. Eppure i “volontari” animati dalle migliori intenzioni pullulano, e non sono certo stupidi. Perché? Bè, adesso lo sappiamo: perché oltre a voler aiutare il prossimo intendono aumentare il loro benessere interiore “realizzandosi” partecipando in prima persona a una missione “importante”.
Altro esempio:
…the prohibition of divorce is obviously a considerable burden on those whose marriages seem to have broken down. Why should God make divorce difficult or impossible —say, for a wife to divorce a cruel (though not unfaithful) husband? These instructions have never been seen as forbidding a temporary separation in such circumstances, but why should not the wife marry again? An apparent breakdown of marriage may be repairable. But that is much more likely to happen if the spouses regard themselves as bound by their original commitment never to give up attempting to overcome difficulties in the marriage. And even if all the attempts of some couples to make their marriages work fail, the persistence of these couples in this task will encourage other couples to try harder to make their marriages work; and these other couples may succeed in this task. And further, if separated spouses do not remarry, that will bring home to others considering marriage the seriousness of the marriage commitment and deter them from entering into marriage too lightly…
Per connettere la morale con la felicità dell’ uomo si rende necessaria una rivelazione. Nel Credo si menzionano i profeti, Gesù e la Chiesa. Evidentemente occorre una rivelazione sempre aggiornata che muti al mutare del contesto.
L’ “usura” è stata proibita per più di 1300 anni, ma oggi?:
Jews of Old Testament times and the Christian Church for its first 1,300 years taught (as Islam still teaches) that usury, that is, lending money to someone on condition of receiving it back with interest, is wrong. But the societies to which that teaching was addressed were ones in which it was mainly the rich who lent money to the poor at a high rate of interest; when someone could not feed their family, they borrowed money from a rich man. God has very good reason to tell people of such societies not to receive interest on money: it would be very cruel for the rich individuals to demand interest from the poor. Yet in our modern commercial society it is often people of modest income who lend money to financial institutions which earn a lot of money for their shareholders, some of whom are very rich, by the use to which they put the borrowed money.
Ancient societies did not have financial institutions of the modern kind. It is not a necessary truth of morality that people have an obligation not to receive interest on money which they lend to financial institutions, and God surely has no reason for imposing such an obligation; although surely he still has very good reason to forbid lending to poor people at high rates of interest.
Sarei curioso di ascoltare una storiella del genere,,, che ne so… per il celibato dei sacerdoti, diciamo.
Cambiano i contesti e cambiano anche linguaggi ed esigenze, abbiamo bisogno di una rivelazione continua, di un’ incarnazione continua: abbiamo bisogno di una Chiesa.
To be easily comprehensible in some society, it is often best if teaching is expressed within the presuppositions of that society. For example, if a society thinks that the world consists of two parts, the Earth and the Dome of the Sky which covers it, then it will understand the doctrine of creation most easily if you tell it that God made the Earth and its Dome. But of course we believe that the world consists not of the Earth and its Dome, but of stars and planets. And maybe it consists also of a lot of other things about which we do not know. So why not convey the doctrine of creation by saying ‘God created everything’? But even that is not quite correct. He did not create himself. And does ‘everything’ include numbers and the truths of arithmetic? Surely 2 + 2 = 4, whether or not there is a God.
It must be possible to teach the essence of the doctrine of creation to relatively simple people without having to solve all these philosophical questions in the process. But that means teaching it in a way that takes for granted the presuppositions of the society about what exists, apart from God, and saying that that (for example) the Earth and its Dome is what God created.
Even if teaching in one culture is not expressed in terms of false presuppositions, it may be expressed in ways that do not provide answers to questions which worry a different culture which has different concepts and lives in
different circumstances; and so teaching may need to be re-expressed for a different culture in a different way.
