I’m not Christian now, but I used to be. I parted ways with Christianity because I came to identify as more of an Empiricist—believing that knowledge should come from experiment and observation, not writings in old sacred texts.
But some of the writing in those old sacred texts is actually really good.
The King James Bible contains roughly 770,000 words, including a lot of different books written by different people at different times saying different things. However, the writings in the Bible are not equally important, and there is broad agreement (at least among mainline Protestants) about which parts are the most important:
The New Testament outranks the Old Testament. The Gospels outrank the rest of the New Testament (hence the phrase “Gospel Truth”). The words of Jesus outrank other material in the Gospels. The Sermon on the Mount outranks the other words of Jesus. The Beatitudes are the most important part of the Sermon on the Mount. If someone comes at you with a quote from St Paul, and you counter with a quote from the Beatitudes, then you win.
The Beatitudes are Jesus’s own nine bullet summary of the Christian concept of morality.
Each of the beatitudes consists of a “blessed are the” part, followed by a “for theirs is” part. In my mind the “blessed are” parts are the meat. I’m going to go through them one by one, giving my interpretation[1] of what each of them means:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: Do not place value in materialism and status symbols. When Pope Francis toured the US in a little Fiat 500, or chose not to live in a palace, he was demonstrating what it means to be “poor in spirit”.
Blessed are those who mourn: We should value the things that have passed. The people who have died, the ideas people had, the things people built, the great things that have become broken.
Blessed are the meek: Be humble. Realize that often you are wrong and sometimes the actions that you believe will make the world better will actually make it worse.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness: Do your part to make the world better. Don’t be content to just float along, looking after yourself.
Blessed are the merciful: Resist the temptation to excessively punish others when you are strong, since this leads to cycles of violence. In game theory parlance, practice tit for two tats.
Blessed are the pure in heart: Practice inner integrity. Don’t do things that conflict with your own moral principles.
Blessed are the peacemakers: Where possible, act to make peace with your enemies, not to dominate them.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness: It won’t always be the good guys who are in charge, or the correct moral principles that are being enforced. Moral progress relies on having people who are willing to peacefully show their opposition to injustice, and allow themselves to be punished for doing so. This is Martin Luther King, and also the Crucifixion.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me: You should not live in fear of those who try to “cancel” you for your beliefs. A tiny minority can oppress a large population if nobody is willing to be insulted by them.
If this sounds a lot like a summary of liberal pluralism, then that’s not a coincidence. Key figures in liberal thought, such as John Locke, drew strongly from the moral principles in the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are particularly significant when you compare them to the “flaunt your status, be certain in your beliefs, crush your enemies, bow to the powerful, win by any means necessary” morality that has been the “default ideology” for most of human history, and that still exerts a strong gravitational pull.
The Beatitudes are of course not unique in expressing these sentiments. There are writings in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Taoism that say similar things. Indeed I suspect that most reasonably successful societies have had some variant of these ideas, because a society has to resist the pull of “the default ideology” to avoid tearing itself apart.
There are good reasons why Western society has been moving away from Christianity, and Christianity in practice has often done a poor job of following the principles laid down in the Beatitudes. But you don’t have to be Christian to revere the Beatitudes. We need them now as much as ever.
- ^
The interpretation I give is pretty mainstream, but by no means the only interpretation. In particular, some people have more spiritual interpretation that are less applicable to non-believers.
The Halo Effect (pun not intended) is very strong here.
I seldom see people who say thibnngs like this also say that the writing in the Koran is actually really good, for some reason. And not because there’s some difference in how good the writing in the Koran and in the Bible is.
It seems one is missing: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”.
And it is worth noting that there are, of course, many previous expositions on the Beatitudes, which, along with the expected focus on eternal rewards as outranking earthly ones, often provide additional insights, like how the “pure in heart” merit to “see God” because “purity” here means something like “singular focus”, which has analogical application to being single-mindedly devoted to a cause, etc.
As you say (and I alluded to as a footnote) there are a lot of interpretations of what the beatitudes mean.
My personal feeling is that those who emphasize the “spiritual” interpretations are often doing it as a dodge, to avoid the challenge of having to follow the non-spiritual interpretations.
That said, I make no claim that my interpretations are what most Christians believe. They are definitely what some Christians believe, and they are the interpretation of the Beatitudes that I find personally valuable today, as a non-Christian.
That feels a bit contrived. Do you really suggest that the most natural reading of something like “poor in spirit” is… non-spiritual? Turning away from materialism may sure derive from that, but to claim that it was the main focus seems quite a stretch.
Urgh. So you are right. Not sure how I missed that one. Probably because I counted to eight and the last one isn’t always included in the list. I’ll do a revision.
Now fixed—missing beatitude added. That was awkward.
This seems like a really stupid moral to adopt. The guys in charge are bad, and if you can get away with defying them without being punished, the moral teachings of anyone suggesting you ought not to do so – because their rule is instituted by God, Redde Caesari …, or whatever – are suspect at best.
Personally, I find the story of Jesus most useful as a cautionary tale: he famously gets tortured to death by the government.