Jesus commanded His followers to serve the needy, help the sick, and minister to the suffering. Where karma fails to encourage a believer to serve the community around them, Jesus succeeds.

A common feature among the Yogic religions (which include Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, among others) is the concept of karma. Karma “is the cosmic law of cause and effect that ensures that whatever a person does, good or bad, has ultimate consequences.”[1] Such consequences are distributed through the process of reincarnation “into a better status if a person has behaved well; if badly, a person can be reborn and pay for past sins by suffering.”[2] But if a person’s circumstances are the result of karma, should anyone seek to try to help their common man?
When one sees a person struggling through life or suffering from some affliction, it may be natural to feel a certain sense of compassion.[3] Yet, under a karmic worldview, one’s suffering is justice done as a result of the bad deeds of a prior life. If suffering poverty, etc, is what a person deserves, by what right would anyone else feel they should alleviate it?
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Transferring human obedience, creaturely obedience, into the life of God implies his creaturehood. That implication must be rejected. As the Bible tells us and consent of the church has confirmed, the Father and Son are distinguished by Fatherness and Sonness. Their relation is one of Fatherness and Sonness. 

In 2016 Evangelicals debated about the best way to affirm that God is one and yet Father and Son. The old answer is: the Father begets the Son eternally; the Son is eternally begotten. Beget and begotten are old words to describe how fathers generate children. A mother births them; a father begets.
In recent years, evangelicals attempted to find a new way to talk about Father and Son. They said that the Father relates to the Son because he has paternal authority; the Son relates to the Father in a mode of submission. Authority and submission distinguish Father and Son.
For the most part, people found the new approach insufficient. It implied eternal inferiority of the Son, implied two wills, and inserted the human life of Jesus where he obeyed the Father into God. It unintentionally implied a creaturely characteristic in God since Jesus’s creaturely obedience to the Father gets imported into how God is eternally!
Recently, however, a theologian reaffirmed that the Father eternally has authority over the eternally submissive Son. Interestingly, the theologian cited Augustine and Hilary of Poitiers as proponents of his position. 
Two Reasons Why Eternal Submission Does Not Work
First, Jesus submits to the Father in his role of Mediator, one who became obedient to the point of death in the form of a slave (Phil 2:7). But he was equal to the Father in the form of deity (Phil 2:6).
To transfer submission into God as the way the Father and Son differ is to transfer a creaturely characteristic into God. Because Jesus took on humanity, he obeys the Father vicariously in his role of Mediator for our sake.
Second, the church Fathers such as Augustine and Hilary made the above distinction clearly. They affirmed the obedience of the Son according to his humanity. But they did not pass through this obedience into God to explain how the Son and Father eternally related.
Just one example. Augustine in The Trinity writes: “In the form of a servant which he took he is the Father’s inferior; in the form of God in which he existed even before he took this other he is the Father’s equal.” Elsewhere, he says “the Father is greater than is the form of the servant, whereas the Son is his equal in the form of God.”[1]
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Written by James R. Wood |
Wednesday, May 1, 2024
If we assume that being winsome will win a favorable hearing, then heated opposition will tempt us to doubt Christian moral teaching. Most people are not ready to be perceived as unloving, hateful, and a menace to society. But that is what, in many circles, publicly affirming traditional moral teaching will get you.

It looked like an April’s Fools’ joke. It had to be. On April 1 a Princeton University student reported in a student newspaper that a social club recently changed its visitors’ policy as a result of a particular lunch guest. That guest was Robert George, distinguished Princeton professor, prominent conservative, close friend and traveling debate-partner of Cornel West, who is also a top-tier gentleman. His mere presence, it was claimed, “caught [members] off guard,” jeopardized the “inclusive environment” of the group, and deeply upset a constituency within the club.
We are left to read between the lines to discern what about Prof. George was so upsetting for these students. One would have to suppose it wasn’t his friendship with Prof. West or his polite demeanor. The narrator of these events suggests the reason relates to Prof. George’s criticisms of “left-wing ideological convictions.” Thus, this “inclusive” space was compelled to exclude a distinguished guest due to his conservative views.
This whole affair serves as a symbolic reminder of “negative world” realities. In contemporary North America, publicly affirming traditional Christian moral teachings that would have been mostly innocuous just 15 years ago is now likely to get you labeled as antisocial, as a threat to the general welfare. According to our post-Christian neighbors, such persons must be pushed to the periphery of polite society. Their views are deemed not only bigoted and backwards, but unsafe. You can be as respectable, kind, and winsome as Robert George, and you will still be declared off-limits.
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