The Making and Keeping of Commitments • Introduction
Dr. Lewis Smedes
By Dr. Lewis B. Smedes
The 1986 Stob Lectures
© 1986 The Henry Stob Endowment
Introduction

Robert Bellah’s much talked-about book, Habits of the Heart, has the subtitle Individualism and Commitment in American Life, and it gives strong evidence for a hunch most of us have had anyway, that individualism is winning out over commitment to other people in the struggle for the American soul. Bellah’s thesis is that our individualistic ethos has given birth to what he calls a therapeutic culture whose unwritten creed is every individual’s right to psychic well-being. People of the therapeutic culture relate to each other on the premise that every human association is one means for the individual to gain a bit more of the personal fulfillment that he or she has a right to have. In the individualist’s life, a human relationship itself has no moral claims on the individuals who are in it; nobody has a duty to stick with a relationship he or she is stuck with if sticking does not pay off in private satisfaction.

In the Christian moral tradition, we generally assume that the Creator has lovingly intended us to make commitments to other people and to keep the commitments we make. We enter some human relationships with a commitment to stay with them, and, afterward, we have a moral obligation to keep the commitment even though keeping it does not pay off well in individual satisfaction. We are not meant to keep our bags packed, ready to take off and leave the other person to pick up the pieces whenever the grass looks greener down the street.

But this is a very general observation. Real life, in the anguish and sin of concrete situations, does not always present us with two clear options: keep one’s commitments at all costs or selfishly follow one’s desires. Nor does life present us with two wholly different sorts of persons: the free-wheeling uncommitted individual on one hand and the uncompromising keepers of commitments on the other.

What we have are many different sorts of human relationships, each of which needs its own sort of commitment. And what we have are people who are more or less committed and more or less given to staking their claims to personal fulfillment.

So I come to these lectures impressed with two things. The first is that commitment-making and commitment-keeping are important moral qualities, and that human communities suffer where commitments are not kept. The second is that commitment-making and commitment-keeping are very large and fuzzy moral ideals that bear some examination.

Both of these impressions persuaded me that it might be helpful to devote the Stob Lectures this year to the subject of commitment-making and commitment-keeping.

Before we get started, I want to say a quick word about the sort of commitment I will be discussing. I will be talking about a person’s freely willing to keep a commitment to another person or to other people.

There are two parts to what I just said.

First, we will be talking about a freely willed determination to stick with someone whom we promised to stick with, a daily renewable commitment. We are not talking about crossing a point of no return after which we cannot go back.

Having just signed a purchase agreement for a new car and driven it home, I may be attacked by a severe case of buyer’s remorse; I would turn the car back in, but I cannot, for the signing of the agreement commits me: I have no choice. I may be a pilot taking a 747 into the air; my engines are throttled, my wheels are off the ground, I am three hundred feet in the air, and I can no longer decide not to be airborne: I am committed, I have no choice. This is not the sort of being committed that I will be talking about. I will be talking about commitments that I can keep if I will to keep them, and I can stop keeping whenever I will to stop.

Secondly, I will be talking about personal commitment to other persons. I will not be talking about commitment to causes or careers, and not about commitment to ideas or to truth, but only about commitments to persons in human relationships.

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The Stob Lectures are sponsored annually by Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary in honor of Dr. Henry J. Stob. Their subject matter is normally restricted to the fields of ethics, apologetics, and philosophical theology. The Stob Lectures are funded by the Henry J. Stob Endowment.

Dr. Smedes gave the inaugural Stob Lectures in 1987. His lectures were included in an omnibus volume of the first 10 Stob Lectures entitled Seeking Understanding (Eerdmans, 2001). Copies of Seeking Understanding and other Stob Lectures are available from Calvin College.