The way that CS Lewis puts this is essentially that if the reward becomes the motive, you're not going to get it:

> We are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives.

If the alternative is eternal torture in hell I'm not sure that holds.

This is more a disagreement about fact than it is a threat.

"Take care of your body or else it will grow weak and sick" has a directive and a warning of consequences---is it a threat?

Your example isn't a threat because there is no external/conscious actor who is going to cause your body to grow weak and sick if you don't take care of it; it will just happen as a consequence of normal biological processes.

There need not be a consequence of failing to follow the Christian Bible; God/Satan have decided that there will be consequences, and Satan will be the one torturing you if you don't do what God says. That's definitely a threat. In these stories, God and Satan are conscious, sentient beings with free will. They can choose to reward or punish you based on whatever criteria they've decided.

Your questioning here rhymes with what drove me from the church:

If God is good, why do bad things happen?

I never got an answer that resonated with me. Wound up not pursuing theology.

This is what has always baffled me.

‘I don’t understand something therefore there is no God’ is one of the most common trains of thought that lead to atheism.

Especially and most commonly ‘How could a loving God allow x.’

There isn’t an easy answer to this stuff and I wouldn’t expect there to be. The notion that the universe is easily comprehensible is a framework of thinking that only gets there by discarding everything NOT easily comprehensible and calling the remainder ‘real.’

When people ask why a loving god would allow bad things to happen I want to reply ‘how would you do it better? Design a universe that has meaningful goodness without suffering and evil. Explain how it would work …’

I view this as the root hypocrisy in the Bible, not as Yet Another Question. Assume I’ve thought and read about this.

> Design a universe that has meaningful goodness without suffering

Without meaning offense, “you try it” is one of the weaker defenses of religion I’ve heard…

I don’t view religion as needing defending.

I view it as a wonderful resource that people deny themselves through overweighting their own cleverness.

That you favor religion as a resource means your walk is orthogonal to any issues of faith I have. My call to serve as a pastor was hard to justify when I saw suffering. The utility of my faith just isn't a part of the calculus.

It’s hard for me to understand your POV. I empathize, but I can’t grok it.

What you call hypocrisy I call a mystery or an enigma or something that it might takes decades of work to understand.

How can you be called by something that doesn’t exist? Or you are saying it does exist but isn’t good. Or the practice isn’t good.

I just don’t understand why lacking a good explanation for the existence of suffering that you, personally, can wrap your mind around would be such a deal breaker.

I’m sure it makes sense to you. I just don’t think that way, at least not anymore.

Everything in the Bible, including what Christians are supposed to be like, should be viewed through the lens of Jesus on the cross. The idea is that you are supposed to imitate Christ in your life for salvation which is reaching Heaven i.e glorifying God, the Father forever via achieving the Beatific vision.

So the "reward" in this case is you becoming one with Christ and thus closer to God. It's not a "currency" to be accumulated to attain Heaven. This is why you can't "fake" your way through it by for example donating money to the poor or the Church and thinking that will impress God.

I think what Christians say before receiving the Eucharist at Mass really summarizes this nicely: "Lord I am not worthy to receive you".

Is that last part really a Christian (in a wide sense) thing or just a Catholic thing? I definitely hear it at Catholic Mass but I have not experienced it at most protestant Eucharist ceremonies.

There may be some overlap in some denominations I'm not aware of, but as far as the Eucharist is concerned, it's largely only a Catholic thing. In Catholicism, the first Eucharist has a particular significance as Christ/the Spirit dwelling within you. In Protestantism, it's only an ordinance, so is only a representation/ritual/tradition. There is often a component of confessing sins privately before partaking though, but the "Lord's Supper" (as it's called by most protestant denominations) is not a means of grace or sacrament in most protestant denominations. By "means of grace", I mean that taking the Lord's Supper does not lead to salvation or impart God's grace or anything else. It's purely symbolic in probably 95% of Protestantism. In the other 5% of orthodox Protestantism, it's not just symbolic, but is not a means of salvation/grace. In Catholicism (to my understanding of not being Catholic but studying it in a protestant seminary), it is considered a means of grace and imparts some form or measure of grace for salvation.

In all of Christianity though, there is an understanding that our sin is a failure to live up to God's holiness and standards, and that in Protestantism one of the pillars (5 solas) is that it is only through his grace, mercy, and love for us that Jesus came to die, and that our salvation is due to his grace alone and not something individually inherent in ourselves that makes us worthy.

I'm hedging all of that with the fact that there's a lot of religions/denominations/cults that call themselves "Christian", and many believe very different things.

Great summary! It's not actually talked about much, and not even well understood by many Protestants themselves, but it actually is a sacrament in most major Protestant traditions I'm familiar with (Reformed[1], Lutheran[2], Anglican, Methodist[4]). Zwingli was the only major reformer I know of to take purely memorialist stance, while Luther, Calvin, and Wesley all professed some degree of presence (spritual presence or real presence) in the eucharist.

Some non-reformed baptists and non-denominationals are memorialist, but historically most protestant churches do consider it a sacrament.

[1] https://www.blueletterbible.org/study/ccc/westminster/of_the... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist_in_Lutheranism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_eucharistic_theology [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_theology#Methodist...

Thanks for correcting me, I was completely off on that! I realized after your post that I was thinking of transubstantiation instead of sacrament/ordinance. I'm Baptist and both in the 1689 confession [1] and the baptist faith and message 2000 [2] it's considered an ordinance, so most southern baptist churches to my knowledge consider it an ordinance, even those that are reformed-leaning. There are also other non-mainline denominations, probably mostly non-reformed, where it's usually an ordinance, such as Pentecostalism.

My confusion was that I was equating transubstantiation with it being a sacrament...so to my knowledge only Anglicans have preserved full transubstantiation (with others having some mixture of Christ being present)

[1] https://www.arbca.com/1689-chapter30 [2] https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/#vii

I think it's safe to say that in almost all protestant denominations, the Eucharist is not a means of salvation though. I would hope that all would say salvation is through grace alone through faith alone. Let me know if you disagree though, I'd be curious of exceptions.

No worries, it was something I actually had to research recently myself after seeing the results of a poll of users' beliefs on /r/reformed where people were asked about their own beliefs on eucharistic presence. I was raised methodist and attend a reformed (presby) church now, so I appreciate your perspective as as a Baptist as well! I don't exactly know the difference between an ordinance and sacrament (and the WCF seems to refer to it as both), so I'll check out those links for sure.

Definitely agree that most every Protestant church would agree that it's not a means of salvation, but I do think most would call it a means of grace though.

I've never been to a protestant church where the message was that we were "worthy" of the cross. Everything has always been predicated on grace which is necessarily unmerited.

Yeah don't get me wrong I'm not suggesting that any somewhat mainstream protestant church emphasizes that its followers are worthy. I'm just wondering about literally that line being said before they eat the bread and drink the wine.

The theology of the eucharist/communion is definitely different in protestant churches.

I've never been to a protestant church where they believe you receive a sort of saving grace from consuming the host - though there is agreement it is pleasing to God to do it.

In the Catholic church they definitely believe you receive some sort of grace. What "kind" of grace is something I still haven't wrapped my head around.

As someone who was a practicing catholic for over half my life, its still not exactly clear.

In terms of the specific wording, most anglophone churches that use a historic liturgy have some form of this prayer (it comes from Matthew's gospel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_of_Humble_Access

I remember wondering, when I first heard about altruism, whether I was actually an altruist. If I feel good when I do something good for someone, am I not just an egoist who's wired differently? True altruism would be going against what feels good, because I know it to be right.

Even then it's not true altruism because you're doing it because you know it to be right and you (selfishly?) want to be the kind of person who does the right thing.

I don't think it's possible for apes who evolved and outcompeted other apes in the endeavor to become the dominant species on a planet to be truly altruistic. At least not without a lot more cultural, social, and possibly biological evolution, if ever.

Doesn't matter though. What difference does it make how "true" one's altruism is?

I think this is a classic philosophical problem. Unless you are a philosopher, though, I don't think it really matters all that much. The bottom line is that you are making a sacrifice for someone else, and that you aren't involving other people in it.

Doing good for others should feel good! And if that internal reaction helps us want to continue doing good for others, then that's also a good thing.

I think also we should be less concerned about labeling ourselves this way. I would not try to make "altruist" a part of my identity (or "egoist", for that matter). You are just someone who does good things for others, and -- incidentally -- that makes you feel good. That should be enough.

I think you are an altruist if you feel good for sacrificing to helping others. That good feeling will motivate you to sacrifice to help others and sacrificing to help others is what an altruist is.

"do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing"

Weird metaphor, right? We're probably missing context for that one. My theory is that it boils down to "don't nickel and dime or be overly concerned with recording the amount of your charitable giving"

The reason I think that, is because in ancient Roman times they had a way of counting on your fingers where you could count up to 100 on your left hand alone (then you could use your right hand after that for even larger values). [1]. So if the context is "small values" and charitable giving, it makes more sense to me at least.

[1] https://tookmund.com/2020/05/roman-finger-counting

The context is the next sentence.

"do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret."

It's just hyperbolic/poetic language. It's not possible to do something in such a way that your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing, because they are both connected centrally (and they can't know anything to begin with).

"Be so secretive that your resting hand doesn't know what your charitable hand is doing."

That is very interesting!

I think the point is that if you focus too much on the reward, you lose focus on helping the person. It's not that it's bad to (want to) be rewarded for good deeds, it's bad when you end up making things worse because of it.

By some views every action you take is motivated by some psychological reward, and if you follow that through you end up with a view that there's no good/bad/emotion/etc and everything is purely mechanical.

It's more subtle than that. Because God's reward isn't really in the same conceptual category as material reward or approval of your peers.

But it means you’re doing it because you think you’ll get something out of it.

It's more mind bending than that. The reward is synonymous with the fact that it is good. These are definitionally equivalent within this framework.

It doesn't map one-to-one to the way we typically conceptualize rewards or self interest or altruism.

Perhaps it only means, seek reward from heaven, not from people. Perhaps because the former would lead you into correct behavior while the latter will lead you inevitably astray.

Not clear the passage is about selfishness per-se at all.

And since presumably reward from heaven is the ultimate in delayed gratification.