| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
"He did not demand that people live in a way that required some special motivation that went against their deepest desires."
"Jesus was far from being an idealist if by this we mean one who sets up ideals unrelated to the facts and who recommends that we be guided by them rather than by the realities of our lives. ... He urged people to live in terms of reality. His morality differed from normal human practice because his view of reality differed from our normal view of the world."
"He did not set up a new end to be sought, or a new impulse toward and already familiar end. Instead, Jesus offered a new understanding of the world that allowed us to live rationally in the world as it is, by living the way he portrayed it."
The above is a passage from Philosophy of Religion by religious philosopher John Hick. According to this, Jesus taught that the world is under God's grace and that all people are loved by God, so he preached not to worry about tomorrow and to forgive others seventy times seven.
Jesus' ethics are something that can be properly called "beneficism", which reverses the actions and the results of eudemonism. It is not that you should do something if you want to obtain happiness, but that you should do something because you are already in grace.
However, this ethics requires faith. For those in difficult situations, seeing this world as one in which God's grace is poured out would be difficult to accept unless it was based on faith. This is therefore a difficult ethics that cannot be achieved without trust in Jesus' words.
However, I was drawn to the fact that Jesus did not demand that people live in a way that went against their deepest desires. Especially the "their deepest desires" part. To uphold ideals and duties may not be a "deepest desire".
A young man in the church once told me that "other people have more urgent appeals", and they may have been asking Jesus for such a basic request. Jesus accepts this request as natural. No one wants to suffer illness, loneliness, or poverty. Jesus is the one who answers these desperate requests.
― If that's the case, I have no intention of denying that I am a person who also seeks that. If Jesus said, "You ask this," I would agree. I also have unspoken wishes. What I felt when I read the story of the "Samaritan woman" in the Gospel of John might have been like this.
But then I thought again, that such teachings are found everywhere in Japan, a country with many religions, and that in the end, they are nothing more than teachings for benefit that lead to selfishness.
As in the Book of Job, if the man had not been favored by God for a long time and his morality had not been particularly elevated, he would have abandoned his useless faith. When Job was exhausted by God's trials, his wife told him, "Curse God and die." This bad wife's faith is that. Kantian ethics, I thought, is an ethics that fights against these secular beliefs that are believed solely for the sake of happiness.