Deus Decorus Est

"Thy Will Be Done"

2012-01-23T15:46:00.002-05:00

It is an interesting thing that Jesus calls us to pray: "Thy will be done" (Matthew 6.10b, KJV). It is a request, and that fact alone does not make it interesting; for requests are common enough in prayer. But it is a strange request - on the face of it, an almost nonsensical request. "Thy will be done": as though God needed our permission to do His will, as though He would not do His will if we did not beseech Him to do it! Will not Almighty God do what He wills whether or not we ask? What else could He do but that which He wills to do? Is it not inevitable that God's will be done? And, if it is, why pray for it?

Requests are common enough in prayer, because prayer is commonly thought to be nothing more than an attempt on our part to bend the will of God to our own. There is undoubtedly some truth to this understanding: "Ask, and it shall be given you," Jesus says (Matthew 7.7a, KJV). In prayer, we ask and God gives. But there is more to prayer than such requests. There is also the matter of remembering God's will.

"Thy will be done," Jesus says: not so that God's will may be bent to ours, but so that our will may be bent to God's. "Thy will be done": not because God's will is at risk of not being done, but because we are at risk of not submitting to it, at risk of resisting it and rebelling against it. "Thy will be done": not because God needs a reminder to do His will, but because we need a reminder that it is His will and not our own that is ultimately our aim. That, I believe, is why Jesus commanded us to pray that God's will be done: for our own hearts.

"Thy will be done" is a call for the believer to surrender to the will of Him Who is over us and above us, but also for us - our Lord and King, but also our Father and Shepherd. It is an exercise for the believer to lower his will and to lift his eyes to the perfect and glorious will of God. Thus, it is not superfluous or unnecessary to pray that God's will be done, though it shall be done whether we pray or not; it is vital and essential.

Father, Thy will be done.

On Christ's Divinity

2011-11-25T12:46:00.001-05:00

From G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:

"There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals, that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false. The claim to that crown, or anything like that crown, is really so rare as to be unique. Mahomet did not make it any more than Micah or Malachi. Confucius did not make it any more that Plato or Marcus Aurelius. Buddha never said he was Bramah. [...] The truth is that, in the common run of cases, it is just as we should expect it to be, in common sense and certainly in Christian philosophy.[...] Normally speaking, the greater a man is, the less likely he is to make the very greatest claim. Outside theunique case we are considering, the only kind of man who ever does make that kind of claim is a very small man; a secretive or self-centered monomaniac. Nobody can imagine Aristotle claiming to be the father of gods and men, come down from the sky; though we might imagine some insane Roman Emperor like Caligula claiming it for him, or more probably for himself. Nobody can imagine Shakespeare talking as if he were literally divine; though we might imagine some crazy American crank finding it as a cryptogram in Shakespeare's works, or preferably in his own works. It is possible to find here and there human beings who make this supremely superhuman claim. It is possible to find them in lunatic asylums; in padded cells; possibly in strait waistcoats. [...] [A delusion of divinity] can be found, not among prophets and sages and founders of religions, but only among a low set of lunatics. But this is exactly where the argument becomes intensely interesting; because the argument proves too much. For nobody supposes that Jesus of Nazareth was that sort of person. No modern critic in his five wits thinks that the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was a horrible half-witted imbecile that might be scrawling stars on the walls of a cell. No atheist or blasphemer believes that the author of the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a monster with one mad idea like a cyclops with one eye. Upon any possible historical criticism, he must be put higher in the scale of human beings than that.Yet by all analogy we have really to put him there or else in the highest place of all.[...] If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with adelusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate. Take a thing like the point of the parable of the tares and the wheat. It has the quality that unites sanity and subtlety. It has not the simplicity of a madman. It has not even the simplicity of a fanatic. It might be uttered by a philosopher a hundred years old, at the end of a century of Utopias. Nothing could be less like this quality of seeing beyond and all round obvious things, than the condition of the egomaniac with the one sensitive spot on his brain. I really do not see how these two characters could be convincingly combined, except in the astonishing way in which the creed combines them. For until we reach the full acceptance of the fact as a fact, however marvellous, all mere approximations to it are actually further and further away from it. Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is notGod, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not onlyknows, but knows that he knows."

De Futilitate

2011-11-18T10:58:00.001-05:00

From C.S. Lewis' "De Futilitate":

"There is, to be sure, one glaringly obvious ground for denying that any moral purpose at all is operative in the universe: namely, the actual course of events in all its wasteful cruelty and apparent indifference, or hostility, to life. But then, as I maintain, that is precisely the ground which we cannot use. Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot of course condemn the universe for exhibiting them. Unless we take our own standard of goodness to be valid in principle (however fallible our particular applications of it) we cannot mean anything by calling waste and cruelty evils. And unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid. In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it. The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still. I cannot and never could persuade myself that such defiance is displeasing to the supreme mind. There is something holier about the atheism of a Shelley than about the theism of a Paley. That is the lesson of the Book of Job. No explanation of the problem of unjust suffering is there given: that is not the point of the poem. The point is that the man who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticizes divine justice receives the divine approval: the orthodox, pious people who palter with that standard in the attempt to justify God are condemned. Apparently the way to advance from our imperfect apprehension of justice to the absolute justice is not to throw our imperfect apprehensions aside but boldly to go on applying them. Just as the pupil advances to more perfect arithmetic not by throwing his multiplication table away but by working it for all it is worth."

(Hat tip to VR.)

"The Supreme and Serene Blessing of a Jealous God"

2011-11-10T23:53:00.001-05:00

From Chesterton's The Everlasting Man:

"It is often said with asneer that the God of Israel was only a God of battles, 'a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts' pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend ... stretching out his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods.... It would have been easy enough for his worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe. In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. [...] If there had been, there would certainly have been another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and Carthage. [...] [T]he world's destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. [...] [T]he world would have been lost if it had been unable to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity that poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous God."

The Great Iconoclast

2011-11-09T11:44:00.000-05:00

From C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed.

Joyce, Nozick, and the Evolutionary Argument

2011-10-23T20:45:00.000-04:00

[N.B.: For whatever reason, the footnotes to this paper don't show up here.]

In §§6.0-1 of his book The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce tells a story about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs. According to Joyce, humans evolved first a disposition toward thinking of helping kin as morally required, and second a disposition toward thinking of reciprocal helping among non-kin individuals as morally required. Thus, our moral beliefs - or at least our disposition to view certain actions as morally required - are the result of natural selection.

In §6.4, Joyce argues that, if this story about our moral beliefs is true, then our moral beliefs are unjustified, because we have evolved the disposition to have such beliefs irrespective of their truth:

Suppose that the actual world contains real categorical [i.e., moral] requirements - the kind that would be necessary to render moral discourse true. In such a world humans will be disposed to make moral judgments ... for natural selection will make it so. Now imagine instead that the actual world contained no such requirements at all - nothing to make moral discourse true. In such a world humans will still be disposed to make these judgments ... just as they did in the first world, for natural selection will make it so.#

Put differently, because the disposition to have moral beliefs (i.e., make moral judgments) would be evolutionarily advantageous to us whether or not there were moral truths, we would evolve such a disposition - and, consequently, come to have moral beliefs - whether or not there were moral truths (and, a fortiori, whether or not our particular moral beliefs were true). But if we have come to have moral beliefs irrespective of the truth of those beliefs - if, as Joyce puts it, “the process that generates moral judgments exhibits an independence relation between judgment and truth” - then our moral beliefs are unjustified.# (For Joyce, a belief is justified only if it is formed by a reliable process such that one’s coming to have that belief depends in some way on the belief’s truth.)

In this essay, I will assume that Joyce’s story in §§6.0-1 is correct and focus exclusively on a criticism of Joyce’s argument in §6.4 made by Robert Nozick.# I will argue that Nozick’s criticism fails to undermine Joyce’s argument and that the argument is therefore sound if the story in §§6.0-1 is correct.

In response to the assertion that we have come to have moral beliefs irrespective of the truth of those beliefs, Nozick writes,

[E]thical behavior will serve inclusive fitness through serving or not harming others, through helping one's children and relatives, through acts that aid them in escaping predators, and so forth; that this behavior is helpful and not harmful is not unconnected to why (on most theorist's views) it is ethical. The ethical behavior will increase inclusive fitness through the very aspects that make it ethical, not as a side effect through features that only accidentally are connected with ethicality.#

According to Nozick, the aspects of our behavior which make it moral are the very same aspects which make it evolutionarily advantageous. As a result, Nozick argues that Joyce’s argument in §6.4 is unsound, because it is not the case that we have come to have moral beliefs irrespective of their truth.

Consider, after all, some non-moral property A of some behavior x.# Suppose that the following is true: Because x is A (because x has the property of A-ness), x is both morally required and evolutionarily advantageous.# If x were not A, then x would be neither morally required nor evolutionarily advantageous. But if x is not evolutionarily advantageous when it is not morally required - that is, precisely when it is not A - then it is not the case that we come to believe that x is morally required (or even come to be disposed to believe that x is morally required) irrespective of the truth of that belief. For if it were not true that x is morally required, then it also would not be true that x is evolutionarily advantageous, and thus not true that we would come to believe that x is morally required. Therefore, since it is not the case that we come to believe that x is morally required irrespective of the truth of that belief, Joyce’s argument in §6.4 is unsound.

In this reply to Joyce’s argument, Nozick takes into consideration two possible worlds: one (call it “Nozick-1”) in which x is A, morally required, and evolutionarily advantageous, and one (“Nozick-2”) in which x is not A, not morally required, and not evolutionarily advantageous. Clearly, it is not the case that we come to believe that x is morally required in both Nozick-1 and Nozick-2 (i.e., whether or not x is A), because x is not evolutionarily advantageous in Nozick-2 (because x is not A in Nozick-2). But this fact - the crux of Nozick’s reply - is irrelevant to Joyce’s argument, because Nozick-2 is physically different from the actual world,# and consequently not one of the worlds which Joyce takes into consideration in his argument in §6.4. After all, Joyce can agree with Nozick that we would not come to believe that x is morally required in Nozick-2 and still argue that we would come to believe that x is morally required in both of two possible worlds physically identical to the actual world which differ only in that certain behaviors (including x) are morally required in one and no behaviors (including x) are morally required in the other. But if we come to believe that x is morally required in both of those possible worlds, then we come to believe that x is morally required whether or not x is morally required, and Joyce’s argument in §6.4 stands.

This response to Nozick can be formulated more explicitly. If A does not necessarily make x morally required - if, in other words, it is possible that x is A and evolutionarily advantageous but not morally required - then we can speak of two worlds: one in which x is A, evolutionarily advantageous, and morally required (Nozick-1) and one in which x is A and evolutionarily advantageous but not morally required (“Joyce-3”).# It is Nozick-1 and Joyce-3, not Nozick-1 and Nozick-2, that correspond to the two possible worlds Joyce discusses in the excerpt from §6.4 quoted above: one in which the actual world (i.e., the world in which x is A and evolutionarily advantageous) is such that certain behaviors (including x) are morally required - that is, Nozick-1 - and one in which the actual world is such that no behaviors (including x) are morally required - that is, Joyce-3.# To undermine Joyce’s argument, Nozick must demonstrate that it is not the case that we come to believe that x is morally required in both Nozick-1 and Joyce-3 (i.e., whether or not x is morally required). But Nozick has not demonstrated that claim; he has demonstrated only that it is not the case that we come to believe that x is morally required in both Nozick-1 and Nozick-2. As a result, Joyce’s argument in §6.4 stands.

Importantly, this response to Nozick is successful only if A does not necessarily make x morally required. If A does necessarily make x morally required - if, in other words, it is impossible that x is A but not morally required - then Joyce-3 is not a possible world, and Joyce’s argument in §6.4 fails.# Joyce’s argument against such a claim can be sketched briefly here: Suppose that x is some sexual act and A is the property of being an episode of incest. Then, the claim in question (“E”) is “If x is an episode of incest, then, necessarily, x is morally forbidden.”# If E is true, then there is no possible world in which x is A but not morally forbidden, and the response to Nozick fails; if E is false, then the response to Nozick succeeds and Joyce’s argument in §6.4 stands.

One could defend E by contending that it is simply a brute fact, but Joyce finds such a contention ad hoc and unattractive,# as do I. Consider, in addition, the following famous occurrence of incest: Oedipus married his mother Jocasta and had sex with her without knowing that she was his mother. Is he morally responsible for these episodes of incest (assuming that they were morally forbidden) if he did not recognize them as such? If not, were his sexual acts with his mother morally forbidden even if he did not know that they were episodes of incest? It is plausible - or at least possible - that they were not morally forbidden under the circumstances. But if that claim is true, then E is false.#

Alternatively, one could attempt to establish E by employing some intermediate step: “If x is an episode of incest, then x is psychologically traumatic to someone; and if x is psychologically traumatic to someone, then, necessarily, x is morally forbidden.” But this first conditional appears to be false; as Joyce argues, “We can easily imagine circumstances in which ... incest does not lead to [psychological] trauma” (e.g., circumstances in which the parties committing incest do not realize that they are committing incest, as was the case for Oedipus and Jocasta).# Indeed, any such conditional appears to be false; counterexamples such as the Oedipus counterexample can be offered for all of them. As a result, there appears to be no reason to accept E, and consequently no reason to reject the initial response to Nozick.

Nozick’s reply to Joyce’s evolutionary argument fails once we recognize that Joyce’s argument takes Nozick-1 and Joyce-3 into consideration rather than Nozick-1 and Nozick-2. Furthermore, the claim that A necessarily makes x morally required (or forbidden) - which, if true, could salvage Nozick’s reply - is not very plausible. Thus, Joyce’s argument in §6.4 is sound if Joyce’s story in §§6.0-1 is correct.

"All That Is Here Are Humans"

2011-10-16T00:21:00.001-04:00

Wow.

What Is Romans 2.12-16 Saying?

2011-08-09T17:53:00.000-04:00

One interesting possibility.

The Slavery of Death: Part 3, The Gospel as the First Christians Understood It

2011-08-04T11:41:00.000-04:00

The gospel story as understood by the first Christians.

Can We Question God?

2011-07-14T17:21:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I saw this video from Francis Chan, which was made in response this video from Rob Bell.

One of Francis Chan's main points is that we should not submit God to our own fallible reasoning. He quotes Isaiah 55.8-9:

"'For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Neither are your ways My ways,'
Declares the Lord.
'As the Heavens are higher than the Earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.'"

But is the point of Isaiah 55 that God's ways and thoughts are inscrutable? Look at vv. 6-9:

"Seek the Lord while He may be found;
Call on Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way
And the evil man his thoughts.
Let him turn to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him,
And to our God, for He will freely pardon.
'For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Neither are your ways My ways,'
Declares the Lord.
'As the Heavens are higher than the Earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.'"

The point does not seem to be that God's ways and thoughts are inscrutable and beyond (or above) our comprehension, but that they are superior. God's ways and thoughts are not necessarily difficult for wicked men to understand, but rather difficult to follow.

That being said, I do not disagree that God's ways and thoughts are beyond our comprehension. (Romans 11.33-36 makes that much clear.) But I wonder if there is more to the story than Francis Chan says.

At first glance, it sounds sinful, faithless, and un-Christian to submit God's actions to our judgment. However, according to Genesis 18.16ff, Abraham does exactly that. Abraham balks at God's original plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah entirely; in response, God does not correct him, but instead listens to him. Can we question God? Apparently, God's answer to Abraham was yes.

Of course, just four chapters later, Abraham submits to God's (famously inscrutable) command to sacrifice Isaac. Clearly, submission is in order at certain points, because God's will is not always easy to understand. However, God's will is not always difficult to understand, either; after all, God has revealed Himself to us through His Word.

Are all questions honest, humble, and faithful questions? Certainly not. But nor are all questions deceitful, arrogant, and faithless. Sometimes, Abraham's faith called him to submit; at other times, however, Abraham's faith called him to question (and even to challenge) God. If Abraham's obedience to God in Genesis 22 was an act of faith, then so were his questions in Genesis 18.

The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Anthropic Principle Objection

2011-05-05T15:10:00.001-04:00

Not ten years ago, physicist Paul Davies claimed, “There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned’ for life.”[1] If the universe were just slightly different in one of many respects – if, for instance, the mass of the neutron were increased by 1/700 its actual mass – then life would almost certainly not exist.[2] Consequently, that the universe is capable of supporting life has led some to believe that the universe was “fine-tuned”: specifically designed or created for the purpose of supporting life, in particular human life. According to proponents of this line of thinking, the odds that the universe just happened to be capable of supporting life – the odds that the universe would be capable of supporting life without having been fine-tuned to do so – are so minuscule that we ought to believe that the universe was fine-tuned by God, and thus that God exists. In Alvin Plantinga’s words,

It’s as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God.[3]

Following Robin Collins, we can formulate this fine-tuning argument for the existence of God more explicitly as follows:

1. The existence of apparent fine-tuning is not improbable under theism. (Premise)

2. The existence of apparent fine-tuning is very improbable under atheism. (Premise)

3. The existence of apparent fine-tuning provides strong evidence in favor of theism over atheism. (1, 2, prime principle of confirmation)[4]

(3) follows from (1), (2), and the prime principle of confirmation, which states that an observation counts as evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another if it has a higher probability under that hypothesis.[5]

Like any philosophical argument, the fine-tuning argument has its detractors. In this essay, I will consider the merits of a key objection raised by opponents of the fine-tuning argument – what Collins calls the anthropic principle objection – and argue that this objection does not mitigate against the argument.[6]

Before we address the anthropic principle objection directly, it is helpful to reflect on what exactly the fine-tuning argument is designed (as it were) to achieve. As Collins notes, the argument itself does not purport to prove theism; it only purports to provide strong evidence in favor of theism, all else being equal. Just how strong that evidence is can be determined by using Bayes’ Theorem, which allows us to calculate how the epistemic probability of a hypothesis (in this case, the theistic hypothesis) is affected by specific evidence (in this case, apparent fine-tuning). Let us, then, “plug in” the fine-tuning argument to Bayes’ Theorem.

Suppose that P(T), the prior probability of theism (i.e., the probability of theism without taking apparent fine-tuning into consideration), is 0.5. (As a result, of course, P(~T), the prior probability of atheism, is also 0.5.) Suppose further that P(F|T), the probability of apparent fine-tuning under theism (i.e., the probability that the universe is apparently fine-tuned if God exists), is 0.5, and that P(F|~T), the probability of apparent fine-tuning under atheism (i.e., the probability that the universe is apparently fine-tuned if God does not exist), is 0.1. Then, according to Bayes’ Theorem, P(T|F), the posterior probability of theism (i.e., the probability of theism after apparent fine-tuning has been taken into consideration), is [P(T) x P(F|T)]/[P(T) x P(F|T) + P(~T) x P(F|~T)] = [(0.5)(0.5)]/(0.5 x 0.5 + 0.5 x 0.1) = 0.25/0.3 ≈ 0.83, or 83%. Therefore, if our values for P(T), P(F|T), and P(F|~T) are correct, then the existence of apparent fine-tuning increases the probability of theism substantially, by approximately 33%.

This claim, in essence, is the claim of the fine-tuning argument. In Bayesian terms, the fine-tuning argument states that the values of P(F|T) and P(F|~T) are such that P(T|F) is significantly higher than P(T): If P(F|T) is much higher than P(F|~T), then P(T|F) will be markedly higher than P(T), and apparent fine-tuning will serve as strong evidence for theism.

Recasting the fine-tuning argument in these Bayesian terms is useful because it makes clear how one ought to go about responding to the fine-tuning argument: namely, by ascertaining the relative values of P(F|T) and P(F|~T). If one can demonstrate that P(F|~T) is not appreciably lower than P(F|T), then the fine-tuning argument loses its force. (Presumably, one could also respond to the argument by questioning the applicability of Bayes’ Theorem to the argument, but the use of that theorem in this case has not been a main point of contention.) In addition, the Bayesian formulation of the argument makes clear how one ought not to go about responding to the argument. In particular, any response to the fine-tuning argument that does not consider the relative values of P(F|T) and P(F|~T) misses the point.

Unfortunately, some responses to the fine-tuning argument either do not focus on these values or confuse them with other values. Most notable of these inadequate responses is the aforementioned anthropic principle objection:

According to the weak version of [the] so-called anthropic principle, if the laws of nature were not fine-tuned, we would not be here to comment on the fact. Some have argued, therefore, that the fine-tuning is not really improbable or surprising at all under atheism, but simply follows from the fact that we exist.[7]

The objection’s underlying intuition is simple: If the universe were not apparently fine-tuned, then life would not exist, and we would not be able to observe any apparent fine-tuning. But we are able to observe apparent fine-tuning; our ability to do so follows from our existence as living things. Why, then, should we be surprised at the existence of apparent fine-tuning in our universe?

This intuition can be restated in terms of the relationship between two values: P(L), the probability that life exists in the universe, and P(F), the probability that the universe is apparently fine-tuned. Roughly speaking, the intuition seems to be that P(L) = P(F). If P(L) were 0 – that is, if life did not exist in the universe – then P(F) would also be 0. (After all, if life did not exist in the universe, then we would have no evidence to support the claim that the universe was apparently fine-tuned for life!) On the other hand, if P(L) is 1 – if life does exist in the universe – then P(F) is also 1, because apparent fine-tuning is necessary for life to exist.

The problem, of course, is that neither P(L) nor P(F) factors into the Bayesian formulation of the fine-tuning argument. That P(L) and P(F) both equal 1 says nothing in and of itself about the values of P(F|T) and P(F|~T). As far as I can tell, then, those who employ the anthropic principle objection have erred simply by confusing P(F) with P(F|~T): They have attempted to refute the fine-tuning argument by demonstrating that P(F) is very high (which, though true, does nothing to undermine the argument) instead of demonstrating that P(F|~T) is very high (which would undermine the argument). The important thing to realize, though, is that P(F) is largely irrelevant to the fine-tuning argument. Even if P(F) equals 1, P(F|~T) can still be very low – and if P(F|~T) is very low (and lower than P(F|T)), then the fine-tuning argument retains its thrust.

To understand how P(F|~T) can be very low even if P(F) is 1, and to understand the confusion behind the anthropic principle objection, Collins provides a firing squad analogy.[8] Suppose that I am a prisoner scheduled to be executed by a firing squad of fifty expert marksmen; when the time comes for me to be executed, however, all fifty marksmen miss me. What should I conclude from the fact that all fifty marksmen missed me? As Collins notes, it would be extremely odd for me to say, “Of course I survived! If I hadn’t survived, I wouldn’t be alive to observe my survival!” On the contrary, I would probably react to my survival by concluding that the marksmen were (for whatever reason) trying to miss me.

Why is the latter reaction by far the more natural and reasonable reaction? We can answer that question by analyzing my thought process in terms of specific probabilities. Assume that I believed before my failed execution that there was a 10% chance that the marksmen would intentionally try miss me. If the marksmen were in fact trying to miss me, then there was a 99.9% chance that they would miss me – but if the marksmen were not trying to miss me, then there was only a 0.1% chance that they would miss me. Thus, P(I), the probability that they would intentionally try to miss me, is 0.1; P(M|I), the probability that they would miss me if they intentionally tried to miss me, is 0.999; and P(M|~I), the probability that they would miss me if they did not intentionally try to miss me, is 0.001. From these three pieces of information, we can again use Bayes’ Theorem to conclude that P(I|M), the probability that the marksmen intentionally tried to miss me in light of the fact that they did actually miss me, is [P(I) x P(M|I)]/[P(I) x P(M|I) + P(~I) x P(M|~I)], or approximately 99.1%.

Notoriously absent from these considerations is P(M), the probability that the marksmen actually missed me. Obviously, P(M) = 1: They did, in fact, miss me. Nonetheless, the fact that they missed me does not entail that they had to miss me – remember, the men in question are marksmen – nor does it entail that they were not intentionally trying to miss me. Consequently, to determine whether or not they were intentionally trying to miss me, we must consider P(I), P(M|I), and P(M|~I) – not P(M).

What is the point of this analogy? Just as P(M|~I) can be quite low even if P(M) = 1, P(F|~T) can be quite low even if P(F) = 1. Just as the fact that the marksmen missed me does not entail that they had to miss me or that they were not intentionally trying to miss me, the fact that life exists in the universe does not entail that life had to exist in the universe or that God did not fine-tune the universe. Just as P(I|M) does not at all depend on P(M), P(T|F) does not at all depend on P(F). Returning to the original objection therefore, the proponent of the fine-tuning argument can say the following:

I do not dispute the weak version of the anthropic principle: If the universe were not apparently fine-tuned, then we would not exist to discuss fine-tuning. But we should still be surprised by the fact that there is apparent fine-tuning in the universe, because we should still be surprised by the fact that we exist. Granted, we couldn’t possibly observe any possible universe in which there was no apparent fine-tuning and in which life did not exist. However, those other universes, unobservable though they would be, still could have existed – and since they all could have existed, our existence and the apparent fine-tuning of our universe are still both much more improbable under atheism than under theism.

If that thinking is correct, then the anthropic principle objection poses no threat to the fine-tuning argument.

Obviously, in spite of the shortcomings of the anthropic principle objection, other objections to the fine-tuning argument remain. Although Collins lists four kinds of fine-tuning that suggest that P(F|~T) is quite low – the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the fine-tuning of the constants of physics, the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe, and the fine-tuning of certain higher-level features of the universe – other physicists, such as Victor Stenger, have challenged the low value assigned to P(F|~T) by proponents of the fine-tuning argument.[9]^,[10] Of course, as a non-scientist, I am not well equipped to adjudicate disputes over the precise value of P(F|~T). (That being said, I do find it telling that even Stephen Hawking, a committed skeptic, agrees that “the values of [the dimensionless fundamental physical constants] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life,” implying that life would not exist in the vast majority of possible universes.)[11] Nevertheless, the anthropic principle objection itself, insofar as it fails to take P(F|~T) into direct consideration, does not mitigate against the fine-tuning argument.

[1] P. Davies, “How bio-friendly is the universe?”

[2] J. Leslie, Universes

[3] A. Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion; Naturalism ad absurdum”

[4] R. Collins, “God, Design, and Fine-Tuning.” For the sake of simplicity, Collins’ original argument has been modified slightly.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] V. Stenger, “The Anthropic Principle”

[11] S. Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Van Inwagen's "Quam Dilecta"

2011-01-29T20:30:00.000-05:00

I thought I had posted it before, but I don't think I have. It is well worth the read. I hope someday to be the sort of person who "[shines] with the same, dearly familiar, uncreated light that shines in the pages of the New Testament."

Article on Disciples Today

2011-01-04T18:22:00.000-05:00

Roger Lamb graciously asked me to write a brief article for Disciples Today. Here it is.

(I love how easy I am to spot in the second picture because of my purple hat. Go Tigers!)

Of Prayer and Pride

2010-12-15T21:46:00.001-05:00

Recently, a friend and I made a prayer pact: We decided to pray for a certain length of time each day and to hold each other accountable to the pact. I faithfully honored the pact every day - until yesterday, when I forgot to pray for the required length of time. When I first realized that I had forgotten, I became somewhat frustrated with myself. Then I began to think about why I was frustrated with myself.

The reason my friend and I had decided to make our prayer pact was obvioust enough: Having faith in the power of prayer, we wished to be consistent in daily prayer in spite of our cluttered schedules. My objective (and my friend's) was a stronger prayer life - nothing more. And yet it quickly became clear to me that I was not frustrated with myself because I had failed to meet this objective. After all, my prayer life had become more consistent as a result of my pact; my one day of "insufficient" prayer, though unfortunate, did not seriously hinder my walk with God. On the contrary, I was frustrated with myself because I had not met the terms of the pact, because I would no longer be able to tell myself that I had fulfilled the pact - because, in my quest for righteousness, I had left no room for grace.

The problem was not that I was striving to pray more consistently, or even that I had made a specific, potentially "legalistic" pact with my friend. The problem was that I cared about being righteous for the sake of thinking of myself as righteous, rather than caring about righteousness for righteousness' (or, better yet, Jesus') sake. The problem was that I was more worried about demonstrating to myself that I was a man of prayer than I was worried about actually being a man of prayer.

My mistake reminded of this quotation from J.B. Phillips' When God was Man:

"The 'good' man, the man whose god is righteousness, has as his life’s ambition the keeping of rules and commandments and the keeping of himself uncontaminated by the world. This sounds admirable; but, as the truth of Christ showed, the whole of such living, the whole drive and ambition, the whole edifice, is self-centered. That entire process of effort must be abandoned if a man is to give himself in love to God and his fellows. He must lose his life if he is ever going to find it."

For me, an admirable enough pursuit - prayer, of all things! - became a self-centered means of proving myself to myself, of earning my salvation. I had been pursuing righteousness so that I could avoid my need for grace, so that my faith could rest in my own good deeds and not in Christ's redeeming sacrifice. Of course, when I made the prayer pact, I was not consciously attempting to pray my way out of a need for grace; but that is what happened nonetheless.

The culprit, unsurprisingly, was the great sin, pride. And there is an important lesson here, I think, for all of us. In my experience, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who do not think they need forgiveness and those who do not think they can be forgiven. We can identify the former as the "self-righteous souls" - the souls out of touch with their own sins - and the latter as the "self-pitying souls" - the souls out of touch with God's amazing grace.

Interestingly, the self-righteous soul and the self-pitying soul are not that different, for self-righteousness and self-pity are both manifestations of pride. It is pride that reassures us that we have no need of grace, that our sins are minor or justifiable, that we are actually quite good people (and certainly better than him or her); and when we do (inevitably) stumble and fall, when the truth of our sinfulness becomes inescapable, when we can no longer pretend that we have it all together, it is pride that tells us that it is too late, that nothing can be done, that we are eternally stained and unforgivable.

Notice how these two superficially different attitudes are both fundamentally egocentric in nature. The self-righteous soul cares not at all (or very little) that his good deeds please God or benefit his fellow men; he cares only that his reputation with others - and with himself - be preserved. The guilty soul cares not at all (or very little) that his sins have injured God; he cares only that he can no longer think of himself as good, that he has toppled himself from his own imaginary pedestal. The self-centeredness evident in both cases is the hallmark and calling card of pride.

Pride convinces the self-righteous soul that grace is beneath him and the self-pitying soul that grace is above him. Both are wretched lies, but they are not lies that are easy to spot; the devil is too cunning for that. No, these lies can only be discovered if we are on the lookout for them - rather like the moonwalking bear.

If we are willing to catch our pride in the act, we will, of course, succeed. ("Seek, and ye shall find" goes for sin, too.) After all, pride is plenty common, and it can be found virtually anywhere - as I recently learned, even in prayer. Unfortunately, the first step with pride, as with alcoholism, is admitting we have a problem - and this we are not always willing to do. If we are courageous enough, however, to resist our pride - to pray for humility, to seek advice and correction, to submit to others, to confess our sins, to search out our hearts, and to cast off our façades - then the Scriptures are clear: "Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up" (James 4.10).

Francis Chan: Are Your Beliefs Biblical?

2010-12-15T11:50:00.000-05:00

I was pleasantly surprised by this video from Francis Chan, a leading Evangelical church leader and author of the book Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God:

Of course, even if we in the Restoration Movement got baptism right, we've got a long way to go...

(Hat tip to WCW.)

Fumerton and Skepticism

2010-11-20T18:29:00.000-05:00

From Richard Fumerton's Metaepistemology and Skepticism:

"This reminds us, of course, of Quine's injunction to naturalize epistemology. Quine suggested that we give ourselves full access to the deliverances of science when it comes to understanding how we have knowledge of the world around us. Contemporary externalists have simply given us more detailed metaepistemological views which allow us to rationalize following the injunction to naturalize epistemology. If the mere reliability of a process, for example, is sufficient to give us justified belief, then if that process is reliable we can use it to get justified belief wherever and whenever we like.

All of this will, of course, drive the skeptic crazy. You cannot use perception to justify the reliability of perception! You cannot use memory to justify the reliability of memory! You cannot use induction to justify the reliability of induction! Such attempts to respond to the skeptic's concerns involve blatant, indeed pathetic, circularity. Frankly, this does seem right to me and I hope it seems right to you, but if it does, then I suggest that you have a powerful reason to conclude that externalism is false. I suggest that, ironically, the very ease with which externalists can deal with the skeptical challenge at the next level betrays the ultimate implausibility of externalism as an attempt to explicate concepts that are of philosophical interest. If a philosopher starts wondering about the reliability of astrological inference, the philosopher will not allow the astrologer to read in the stars the reliability of astrology. Even if astrological inferences happen to be reliable, the astrologer is missing the point of a philosophical inquiry into the justifiability of astrological inference if the inquiry is answered using the techniques of astrology. The problem is perhaps most acute if one thinks about first-person philosophical reflection about justification. If I really am interested in knowing whether astrological inference is legitimate, if I have the kind of philosophical curiosity that leads me to raise this question in the first place, I will not for a moment suppose that further use of astrology might help me find the answer to my question. Similarly, if as a philosopher I start wondering whether perceptual beliefs are accurate reflections of the way the world really is, I would not dream of using perception to resolve my doubt. Even if there is some sense in which the reliable process of perception might yield justified beliefs about the reliability of perception, the use of perception could never satisfy a philosophical curiosity about the legitimacy of perceptual beliefs. When the philosopher wants an answer to the question of whether memory gives us justified beliefs about the past, that answer cannot possibly be provided by memory."

(Hat tip to Agent Intellect.)

Lewis on Fern-seed and Elephants

2010-10-19T18:25:00.000-04:00

An excellent address given by C.S. Lewis originally entitled "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," nicely summarized here.

Communion: October 17, 2010

2010-10-17T15:55:00.002-04:00

"Hi, everyone. My name is Joseph Porter, and I am a junior at Harvard College. I would like to share some thoughts about the cross.

There is one thing that most people think about when they think about the cross: forgiveness. And forgiveness is a beautiful thing. Jesus has washed our sins away, our consciences have been cleared, we've been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb! Forgiveness is awesome. But it's just the beginning.

Turn with me to 1 Peter 2.24.

'He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.'

'He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.' There's the forgiveness. Jesus nailed our sins to the cross. And that's great, but it's not the end of the story. That's not all Jesus did. The forgiveness comes with a purpose: Jesus nailed our sins to the cross so that we could 'die to sins and live for righteousness.'

Think about that. Jesus didn't just die so that we could be forgiven; Jesus died so that we could be transformed. Jesus didn't just die for our sins; Jesus died to destroy our sins. Jesus didn't just die to set us free from Hell; he died to set us free from sin and temptation and anything that entangles or separates us from God. Jesus was crucified so that our sins could be crucified - so that our lives could be changed forever.

You know, the world does not think that our lives can change. The world says that we are the way we are and that's the end of the story. 'He was born that way.' 'That’s just how she was raised.' 'He’s a sex addict, he'll never be pure.' 'She'll always be short-tempered.' 'You can't teach an old dog new tricks.' 'He'll never change.'

And maybe that's what you think about yourself. Maybe you think that you'll never overcome that one sin. Maybe you think that it will enslave you for the rest of your life. Maybe you think that you can't do it, that you're not good enough to be a Christian, but God says, 'No! It doesn't have to be that way! You can do it! You can change! You know why? Because I have crucified your sin!'

Guys, God has crucified our sin. Colossians 2.11 says, 'In [Jesus] you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ.' Jesus cut off our sinful natures! Romans 6.18 says, 'You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.' That's not a typo. We have been set free from sin!

Do we live as though we have been set free from sin? Do we allow God to work in our hearts so that we can 'die to sin and live for righteousness'? Or do we listen to the world's lies and think we can't change? Do we treat our sin as something that happens to us inevitably? Or do we see it for what it is - something that we can overcome?

It's true that we'll never be sinless or temptation-less. Being a disciple of Christ is not easy. But guys, the sky is the limit. Jesus is the limit of how righteous we can be. We are free to serve God in every way, because Jesus has set us free from sin.

The cross sends the most powerful message of forgiveness and love that I can imagine. But that's not the only message the cross sends. The cross also reminds us that God doesn't just sit back and hope that we repent. God sends his son to the cross and says, 'Do you see My Son up there? That is what I'm going to do to your sin. I am going to crucify your sin.'

Guys, Jesus has paved the way of righteousness for us. All we have to do is to follow in his steps. As we take the bread and the wine today, let us remember Jesus' sacrifice and give thanks that we have died to sin so that we can live for righteousness."

The Sinner's Prayer: A Brief History of a Novel Practice

2010-10-12T13:25:00.000-04:00

A great introductory article by Steve Staten to the Sinner's Prayer.

Paul's Conversion

2010-09-20T21:17:00.003-04:00

A light from Heaven blinds Saul (Acts 9.3, 22.6, 26.13).
Saul falls to the ground and a voice says to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (9.4, 22.7, 26.14)
Saul asks, "Who are you, Lord?" (9.5a, 22.8a, 26.15a).
Jesus identifies himself (9.5b, 22.8b, 26.15b).
Paul asks, "What shall I do, Lord?" (22.10a)
Jesus says, "Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me" (26.15b-18).
At this point, Paul has faith in Jesus. He has confessed Jesus as his Lord (22.10a) and Jesus has appointed him as his servant (26.15b-18). However, Paul has not yet received the gift of the Holy Spirit and thus has not been saved (Romans 8.9b).
Paul's companions lead him to Damascus (Acts 9.8b, 22.11a).
Paul waits for three days without eating or drinking (9.9).
Jesus sends Ananias to Paul (9.10-16, 22.12).
Ananias tells Paul that he has been sent so that Paul may receive the Holy Spirit (9.17b).
Paul regains his sight (9.18a, 22.13).
Ananias tells Paul to "be baptized and wash [his] sins away" (22.16b).
Paul is baptized (9.18b)

Paul is saved not when he comes to faith in Christ, but three days later, when he is baptized and receives the Spirit.

Russell on Loving One's Neighbor

2010-08-14T15:43:00.000-04:00

Christ said, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself', and when asked 'Who is thy neighbour?' went on to the parable of the Good Samaritan. If you wish to understand this parable as it was understood by his hearers, you should substitute 'Germans and Japanese' for Samaritan. I fear my modern day Christians would resent such a substitution, because it would compel them to realize how far they have departed from the teachings of the founder of their religion."

Tolstoy on the Rich and Powerful

2010-08-14T15:31:00.002-04:00

From Tolstoy's "What Is Art?":

"No longer able to believe in the Church religion, whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life's meaning in personal enjoyment. And then among the upper classes what is called the 'Renaissance of science and art' took place, which was really not only a denial of every religion, but also an assertion that religion was unnecessary."

Attitudes and Points

2010-08-09T23:15:00.001-04:00

Bad attitude + good point < good attitude + bad point.It is better to have a good attitude than a good point. If I have a good attitude, I'll figure out the good points eventually. If I have a bad attitude, I'm in trouble.

Lewis on First Things

2010-08-03T14:32:00.002-04:00

From God in the Dock:

"The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping.

The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication.

It is a glorious thing to feel for a moment or two that the whole meaning of the universe is summed up in one woman - glorious so long as other duties and pleasures keep tearing you away from her. But clear the decks and so arrange your life (it is sometimes feasible) that you will have nothing to do but contemplate her, and what happens?

Of course this law has been discovered before, but it will stand re-discovery. It may be stated as follows: every preference of a small good to a great, or partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice is made."

2 Corinthians 8 and Giving

2010-07-07T14:01:00.002-04:00

I read 2 Corinthians 8 today in my quiet time and was taken aback by how much we can learn from it about giving! My impression was that the Bible did not say very much specifically about financial giving; I do not think that impression took the wealth of information in 2 Corinthians 8 (pardon the pun) into account. I recommend reading it yourself, but here are some of the things that I noticed:

Paul describes the generosity of the Macedonian churches as a grace given to them by God (v. 1).
"[I]n a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints" (vv. 2-4). Wow!
We should "excel" in our giving (v. 7).
Our giving reflects the sincerity of our love (v. 8).
The goal is equality (vv. 13-15). That is certainly worth some thought.

The Unacknowledged Success of Neoliberalism

2010-07-05T15:57:00.001-04:00

What I read, what I write, and what I think has become less political in the past years, for a few reasons: the chances that I can meaningfully influence politics are slim to none; expressing opinions on political issues can foment unnecessary division within Christian circles; politics and the economy are frickin' complicated, and I do not have the time or desire to become an expert in either; and, finally, talking about politics (and especially arguing about politics) is unhealthy for me.

That being said, I really liked this column by Scott Sumner. What I liked about it the most was that it distinguished between two different topics that often seem to be conflated in our thinking: government control of the economy and transfer of wealth. (That's probably an oversimplification on my part, but it's better than nothing! I've never even taken an economics class.)

To me, the evidence is quite clear that government control of the economy - price controls, tariffs, direct government ownership of different companies, &c. - is generally bad. Free markets are better.

However, I think the evidence about transfer of wealth - taxes, social services, &c. - is more mixed. Sumner notes how the Nordic countries have done quite well for themselves even with high tax rates (to the chagrin of many right-wingers here in the States); there's also the moral question (which can't be answered solely by economists) of whether it is worth sacrificing some efficiency for some equality. (Again, this is all muddled simplifying on my part!)

I think this distinction is absent in most American discourse on politics, and I think that is unfortunate. Conservatives think that the Nordic countries are all left-wing, when in fact some of them do quite well on scales of economic freedom (see the article for details). Liberals, meanwhile, probably resist a lot of pro-market reforms because they think "pro-market" means "anti-poor people"; again, the Nordic countries show that this thinking is incorrect.

Anyway, good article, and what Sumner says is of much more value than what I say.

The Log and the Speck

2010-07-02T12:59:00.000-04:00

The simple message of Jesus' famous speck-in-the-eye analogy in Matthew 7.3-5 is that hypocrisy is bad. And that is a worthwhile message, as far as it goes.

But I think the analogy runs deeper than that. Notice what Jesus says in v. 5: "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye." What Jesus is saying is not "Focus on your own log; the speck is none of your business." Rather, he says that you cannot see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye until you have first dealt with your own log. Intuitively, hypocrites do not judge themselves as they should. Jesus' point, though, is that hypocrites cannot judge others as they should as a result of their hypocrisy.

I am sure this is not an original observation, but I had not really thought about it before.

It Shall Not Be Forgiven

2010-06-09T19:14:00.000-04:00

Very interesting.

Fish Tank Post: Balance

2010-06-05T09:42:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

The Hound of Heaven

2010-06-04T17:39:00.001-04:00

The Hound of Heaven

Francis Thompson

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat - and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet -
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.'

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside).
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of His approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to Dawn: Be sudden-to Eve: Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover-
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:-
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat-
'Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.'

I sought no more that after which I strayed
In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
'Come then, ye other children, Nature's-share
With me' (said I) 'your delicate fellowship;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring.'
So it was done:
I in their delicate fellowship was one-
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;
All that's born or dies
Rose and drooped with; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine;
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the days dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
For ah! we know not what each other says,
These things and I; in sound I speak-
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o' her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noisèd Feet
A voice comes yet more fleet-
'Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me!'
Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years-
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must-
Designer infinite!-
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
'And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said),
'And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited-
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'

Acts 8 and Sola Fide

2010-06-03T11:04:00.000-04:00

Unlike the majority of Evangelical Christians today, I do not believe that salvation is through faith alone. On the contrary, I believe that salvation - the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit - is usually received at baptism. For my purposes here, it does not matter why I believe there are exceptions to the baptismal rule, or what those exceptions might be. What matters is that my position allows for exceptions.

Importantly, my Evangelical friend does not have the luxury of allowing for exceptions to the sola fide rule - for if exceptions exist, then salvation is not actually through faith alone, but also (at least sometimes) through something else.

With that in mind, consider Acts 8.14-17, a passage that has often been cited against theologies of baptism such as mine. Acts 8 does indeed present a problem for me, because it indicates that baptism was insufficient for the reception of the Holy Spirit on at least one occasion.

In light of this scripture, I have a few options. I could perhaps say something about how the practice of laying on hands died out with the apostles. I could argue that this instance is merely an unexplained exception to the rule. I could even concede that I was wrong about baptism and begin laying on hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What options, however, does the Evangelical have? His theology has no room for exceptions. It would be untenable to argue that the Samaritans came to faith in between baptism and the laying on of hands. He could (maybe) argue that forgiveness of sins is through faith alone, but that the Holy Spirit comes afterward - but even this lesser concession would constitute a radical shift from the understanding of baptism (or the laying on of hands) as an "outward sign of an inward grace."

This much, at least, seems undeniable to me: Regardless of how we handle Acts 8.14-17 (and I by no means have a "set" understanding of the passage), we cannot avoid the simple fact that practices such as baptism and the laying on of hands were not instituted as mere symbols closely associated with the act of conversion, but spiritually efficacious practices in and of themselves. Here, we see that the gift of the Holy Spirit came distinctly after the Samaritans' initial profession of faith and baptism - not through faith alone.

The Evangelical has often argued that the New Testament's description of baptism as being "for the forgiveness of sins" (Acts 2.38) is a result of baptism's temporal proximity to the act of coming to faith. But such an argument cannot, as far as I can tell, make sense of Acts 8.14-17.

Fish Tank Post: The Myth of Half-Christianity

2010-06-02T00:14:00.000-04:00

Here it is. (A bit rushed on my part, but oh well.)

The Didache

2010-05-25T10:20:00.003-04:00

Richard Beck's post about the Διδαχή (Didache), or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, got me re-interested in that early Christian text, and so I read Tony Jones' translation (linked to in Dr. Beck's post) in about twenty minutes. I thought I'd jot down a few quick thoughts on different verses that struck me:

2.5-6: I've always wondered about how absolutely we should apply commands like "Give to every one who asks you." For example, should I give money to a homeless person if I know that person will use the money to buy cigarettes or liquor? The saying in v. 6 - "Let your alms sweat in your hands until you know to whom to give them" - suggests that it is wise to use discretion with our almsgiving. This discretion should not lessen our generosity, but it should focus it.
2.2: Notice the prohibition of abortion.
2.7: "Hate no one; correct some, pray for others, and some you should love more than your own life."
3.3: Filthy talking is put on the same level as lust.
4.2: Daily fellowship! Apparently, they needed it, too.
4.6: Hmm...
4.8: This comes close to saying that Christians shouldn't have private property (echoing Acts 2). We could probably do a lot better in sharing what we have; after all, if we will share everything in Heaven (as the author argues), why not share everything on Earth?
4.9: Spare the rod and spoil the child!
4.10-11: It seems that the early Christians had servants - or slaves, for the Greek word (δοῦλος) translated "servants" here and "slaves" in Ephesians 6 (among others) is the same. This is something worth keeping in mind (not to condone modern institutionalized slavery).
4.14: Confess before you pray!
6.2: "For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able, then at least do what you can." Perhaps a reference to martyrdom?
6.3: It seems that the author(s) weren't aware of 1 Corinthians 8. This is interesting for determining how authoritative we should consider early Christian texts to be (in this case, this particular text seems to go against Paul's writings) and for understanding how doctrinally and theologically united the early Christians were.
7.4: Already, the Christians seem to be moving away from the immediate baptisms of Acts. I am not sure if this is a good thing; after all, we take our time as well!
8.2-3: We probably do not focus enough on the Lord's Prayer.
9.4: This is a side of Communion that we almost certainly neglect: the communal aspect. For the author(s) here, the Eucharist (i.e., Communion) symbolizes the Church's desire for unity. (And, of course, the Eucharist was originally part of a meal - a social event.)
9.5: Baptism marked the entry of Christians into the Church - not faith. Notice that candidates for baptism (i.e., catechumens) - people who were presumably believers - were not yet considered full members of the Church.
10.6: I love this.
11.1: Teachers have a distinct role in the Church.
11.3ff: "Apostles" and "prophets" seem to be used relatively interchangeably. Also, the different tests for evaluating the legitimacy of prophets are interesting.
11.7: Probably a reference to the unforgivable sin (cf. Matthew 12.31-32, Mark 3.29-30). Not sure what to make of that.
12.1: Discretion!
12.4: "[A] Christian should not live idle in your midst."
13.1-3: Yeah, full-time ministry! (Seriously, though, that's what it sounds like.) Notice that teachers are entitled to support just as much as prophets.
14.1: cf. 4.14.
14.2: This is something Jesus commands as well - and yet I have never (to my knowledge) seen it practiced today. Maybe we should have a time for reconciliation and confession before every Communion.
15.1: Bishops (what we would call "elders") and deacons (literally "servants") are appointed by their churches - not by some higher central authority. And they "render to [us] the service of prophets and teachers."
16: A lot of interesting things here about the last days, imminent eschatology, and all that jazz.
16.2: cf. 4.2. We come together "seeking the things that are good for [our] souls."
16.4: Anti-Christ?

Overall, I find this glimpse into the practices of the first-century Christians quite illuminating. Nonetheless, I cannot help but agree with most of the early Christians that the Didache is non-canonical; it just doesn't have the right feeling about it. But it is very instructive, and worth the twenty minutes.

The Great Divorce

2010-05-22T12:41:00.002-04:00

The Great Divorce is an awesome book. You should read it.

Rather than writing a long blog post about it that wouldn't do it justice, I thought I'd just go through some of my favorite excerpts. Don't let these fool you into not reading it! What matters aren't the quotations as much as the characters.

Exchange between a sinner in Hell and a murderer in Heaven who (of course) repented:

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
"No. Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself."

Later on:

"But I got to have my rights same as you, see?"
"Oh no. It's not so bad as that. I haven't got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You'll get something far better."

Once we understand grace, we will stop insisting on our rights.

"I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity."
"Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for asking and nothing can be bought."

After the sinner describes himself as a "decent man":

"You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did."

The repentant murderer confesses some sin:

"Murdering old Jack wasn't the worst thing I did. That was the work of a moment and I was half mad when I did it. But I murdered you in my heart, deliberately, for years."

"You mind your own business, young man.... Because I'm not taking any impudence from you about my private affairs."
"There are no private affairs."

And then the ultimate expression of pride:

"I'd rather be damned than go along with you."

Next is a discussion with a liberal theologian which you'll just have to read in its entirety.

One Ghost (people in Hell are Ghosts) says, "If they wanted to rescue us they could do it." But all that must happen for us to be rescued - and the only thing that can rescue us - is our willingness to be rescued: our willingness to repent.

Another great exchange:

"I wish I'd never been born. What are we born for?"
"For infinite happiness. You can step out into it at any moment...."

On shame:

"Don't you remember on earth - there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it - if you will drink the cup to the bottom - you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds."

This latest Ghost is unwilling to repent:

"You've no right to ask me to do a thing like that. [...] And now - please, please go away!"
"Friend. Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?"

A bunch of pearls of wisdom from Lewis' spiritual mentor (and guide through the afterlife) George MacDonald:

"[Y]e cannot in your present state understand eternity.... But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective."

"They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. [...] The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven."

An interesting take on Heaven and Hell:

Hell is a state of mind.... And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains."

Some metaphysics:

"Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both."

Why do people go to Hell?

"The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy - that is, to reality."

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened."

"The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing."

"[A] damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. [...] First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see."

How sinful pleasures lead us astray:

"[T]he time comes on when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust and would not have it taken from him. [...] He'd like well to be able to scratch: but even when he can scratch no more he'd rather itch than not."

On bad emphases:

"There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occuped in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ."

On conversion:

"Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already."

"It's only the little germ of a desire for God that we need to start the process."

"[T]he whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake."

"Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death."

On the danger of art:

"Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him."

One Ghost is offered to drink from a special fountain:

"When you have drunk of it, you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."

A Fountain of Humility! Would I drink of it?

On loving God first (a lot to think about here):

"Human beings can't make on another really happy for long. [...] You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God."

On fulfillment in Heaven:

"Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed."

On feelings:

"[N]o natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and themselves into false gods."

Repentance is freeing:

"That's what we all find when we reach this country. We've all been wrong! That's the great joke. There's no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living."

On Heaven:

"Don't you know that you can't hurt anyone in this country?"

"Here is all joy. Everything bids you stay."

"Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light."

"If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me."

"The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy. [...] He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire."

"[A]ll loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all."

As sinners, we misunderstand love:

"When your own heart's been broken it will be time for you to think of talking. But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried. [...] There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him."

"[W]hat we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. [...] We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly."

It is amazing how we have confusing love with this craving.

False religion is dangerous and deceptive:

"The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion."

On pity:

"Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity."

"Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves."

"[True pity] leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. [...] Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice...."

And finally, on Freedom:

"That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens."

Fish Tank Post: Magic

2010-05-21T10:50:00.004-04:00

Here it is.

Is David Too Vindictive?

2010-05-19T10:58:00.000-04:00

To me, at least, that can often appear to be the case. Consider, for example, Psalm 35.8-9:

"Let destruction take them by surprise!
Let the net they hid catch them!
Let them fall into destruction!
Then I will rejoice in the Lord
And be happy because of his deliverance."

On the face of it, David seems to be rejoicing in the destruction of his enemies. And, of course, there are countless passages in the Psalms similar to this one.

Notice, however, what David writes a few verses later (vv. 13-15):

"When they were sick, I wore sackcloth,
And refrained from eating food.
(If I am lying, may my prayers go unanswered!)
I mourned for them as I would for a friend or my brother.
I bowed down in sorrow as if I were mourning for my mother.
But when I stumbled, they rejoiced and gathered together;
They gathered together to ambush me.
They tore at me without stopping to rest."

David - long before Jesus exhorted anyone to love his enemies - prayed and fasted for his enemies as though they were his friends. That strikes me as remarkable - and it should give us all pause when we think about David and Old Testament morality in general.

The Importance of Insight

2010-05-18T19:00:00.001-04:00

A miraculous story is not terribly difficult to fabricate. I imagine that considerations like that explain the ease with which many people reject the historicity of the Resurrection and other supernatural claims made in the Bible.

To a point, I am sympathetic to such skepticism; the Bible itself warns against false prophets and instructs us to test the spirits (1 John 4.1). But I ultimately find myself less than compelled by such worries, because other features of the Gospels do not strike me as the sort could be easily fabricated.

One such feature is the remarkable moral insight of the Gospels and New Testament writings. It does not take a genius to devise the Golden Rule - or even a particularly good man. But what the Apostle Paul says about (for example) godly sorrow and worldly sorrow - how contrition, in and of itself, is meaningless and even dangerous - is something that I have found to be remarkably true in my own life, and also something that I never would have understood on my own. What the Bible has to say about pride has struck at the central problem of the human condition unlike anything else I have ever known. And such wisdom, I think, is not the mark of "cleverly devised myths" (2 Peter 1.16), but of the Truth.

Fish Tank Post: The Myth of Individual Christianity

2010-05-07T12:32:00.000-04:00

Here it is.

My Translation of Romans 11

2010-04-27T23:01:00.005-04:00

[UPDATE: I hope to amend and improve this translation as time goes by. The original is preserved in my archives.]

For my final project in my Greek class, I had to translate Romans 11. Here is the final result:

I ask, then: Has God driven His people away? Absolutely not! For I myself am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. God has not driven His people away, whom He foreknew.

Or do you not know what the Scripture says about Elijah? As he appealed to God against Israel, 'Lord, they have killed Your prophets, destroyed Your altars, and I alone have been left behind – and they seek my life as well!' But what is God's response to him? "I have left behind to Myself seven thousand men, whose knees have not bowed to Baal."

In this way, then, there has come to be at this very time a remnant according to the choice of grace: and if by means of grace, then no longer from works, or else grace would no longer be grace.

What then? That which Israel sought, it did not obtain, but the chosen did. The rest were hardened, just as it is written, 'God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that cannot see, and ears that cannot hear, up until this very day.' And David says, 'Let their table be a snare and a trap and a stumbling block and a retribution to them; let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see, and let the south wind bend them forever.'

I ask, then: Did they stumble in order that they might fall? Absolutely not! But what is a lapse to them is salvation to the Gentiles, in order to provoke jealousy in Israel. And if their lapse is riches to the world and their loss riches to the Gentiles, how much greater will their fullness be!

Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch, then, as I myself am an apostle to the Gentiles, I extol my ministry, if I may in that manner provoke some of my kin to jealousy and save some of them. For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what is their acceptance if not life from the dead?

If the firstfruits of the dough are holy, so also is the entire batch; if the root is holy, so also are the branches. If some of the branches were cut off, you of the wild olive tree who were grafted into them and became partners of the nourishing roots of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. But if you boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you.

You will say, then: 'The branches were cut off in order that I could be grafted in.' Very well! They were cut off because of their faithlessness, but you have stood because of your faith. Do not, however, think yourselves exalted, but be afraid – for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will He spare you.

Behold, then, the kindness and strictness of God: strictness to the fallen, but God's kindness to you, if you remain in kindness. Otherwise you too will fall. And even they, if they do not remain in faithlessness, will be grafted in – for God is able to graft them in again. For if you were cut off from olive tree that is wild by nature and grafted into the cultivated olive tree contrary to nature, how much more will these natural branches be grafted into their own tree!

For I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you will not be wise in your own eyes: A hardening in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. And so all Israel will be saved, just as it is written: 'Out of Zion will come a deliverer; he will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this will be My covenant with them, when I take away their sins.'

According to the gospel, they are enemies for your sake; according to the choice, however, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers, for God's gifts and call are irrevocable. For just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy due to their disobedience, so too they now have disobeyed in order that by the mercy given to you they too may now receive mercy. For God shut up all men in disobedience so that he might have mercy on them all.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments and inscrutable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become His counselor? Or who has given to Him first, and been repaid by Him? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things; to Him be glory into the ages! Amen."

Communion: April 25, 2010

2010-04-26T00:27:00.001-04:00

"Hi. My name is Joseph Porter, and I am a sophomore here at Harvard. This is the time in our service when we celebrate what is called Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist. It is our time to remember Jesus Christ.

Oftentimes, we can think that the purpose of Communion is primarily to remember the cross – and indeed, Christianity is empty without the cross. But I do not believe that Jesus instituted Communion only so that we would remember the cross, because I do not think that the cross can be truly understood in isolation.

Christianity, as I said, is empty without the cross – but the cross is empty without the Resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15.14, Paul writes, '[I]f Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.' And again, in v. 17: 'If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.' Paul’s point is striking: If Jesus has not been raised from the dead - even if he died on the cross – our faith is in vain. If Jesus has not been raised from the dead – even if he died on the cross – we have no hope of a new life, of citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven. Salvation is found not in the God who died, but in the God who died and rose again.

As Christians, it can be easy for us to focus only on the cross or only on the Resurrection, forgetting that each depends upon and completes the other. When we focus only on the cross, we can make Christianity a guilt trip. 'Look at your sin! Look at what you did to him! Look at what he had to do for you!' We can forget that the true climax of Jesus’ time on Earth was not his death, but his victory over death and over the grave.

On the other hand, when we focus only on the Resurrection, we can lose sight of the fact that God’s grace is not cheap – that we were bought at a price (1 Corinthians 7.23). We can think, 'God loves us, regardless of who we are!' That is true, but we were called to take up our own crosses and to follow Jesus, to be united with him in death so that we could be united with him in a new life. Salvation required sacrifice on Jesus’ part, and it requires sacrifice on our part as well – sacrifice of time, money, ambition, and sin. Simply put: Just as the cross is meaningless without the Resurrection, the Resurrection is impossible without the cross. To focus on one and not the other is to distort the gospel. We desperately need both.

We are about to partake of the bread and fruit of the vine in remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ. The fruit of the vine represents Jesus’ blood shed on the cross – but it also represents the blood that flowed through his veins when he rose from the dead on the third day. The bread represents Jesus’ body hanging on the tree – but it also represents his resurrected body, which ensures that we too can be resurrected.

This is the beauty of Jesus Christ, the beauty I have found nowhere else. It is the beauty of strength in weakness, of life in death, of victory in defeat – of Resurrection in the cross. 'The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed' (Isaiah 53.5b).

As 1 Corinthians 11.26 tells us, whenever we eat the bread and the drink the cup, we proclaim Jesus’ death until he comes. It is not without reason that we take time every Sunday to meditate upon the cross. But the cross is a triumphant cross only because it anticipates the Resurrection. And so I ask you: As you eat the bread and drink the cup, remember Jesus in his entirety. Remember the life he led, the life he gave up, and the life he regained. Do this in remembrance of him."

Fish Tank Post: Infant Baptism and Covenant

2010-04-23T15:30:00.000-04:00

Here it is.

Believe It or Not

2010-04-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

My favorite parts:

"The most venerable metaphysical claims about God ... start ... from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself."

"It is not logically requisite for anyone, on observing that contingent reality must depend on absolute reality, to say then what the absolute depends on...."

"Above all, Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. [...] He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us."

(Hat tip to RGD.)

Ichthus Article: Façades

2010-04-19T15:44:00.000-04:00

Here it is.

What Is Original Sin?

2010-04-19T11:34:00.000-04:00

Given my recent post on the matter, I've been thinking a lot about original sin and talking about it with different people. I've been a bit a frustrated by the vagueness of the doctrine. One friend told me that he never thought original sin implied (for example) the guiltiness of infants, but that it had something to do with the sinful nature or fallenness of mankind. I've heard different people suggest similar understandings of original sin.

Call such an understanding a "weak" view of original sin. A couple thoughts about the weak view:

1. No one I know of claims that Jesus was born with the stain of original sin. (I may not think that Mary was immaculately conceived, but I certainly think that Jesus was!) But Jesus was tempted, so he must have had a sinful nature in some sense...right? (Remember that what the NIV translates "sinful nature" literally means "flesh" - and Jesus clearly had flesh.) So it seems that, under the weak view of original sin, Jesus was born with the stain of original sin. But that is problematic.

2. Does anyone really dispute that we are born predisposed to sin or with sinful natures? And, if not, is the difference between proponents of a weak view of original sin and opponents of original sin just a semantic one?

Fish Tank Post: Infant Baptism and Original Sin

2010-04-16T12:13:00.000-04:00

Here it is.

A Resurrection That Matters

2010-04-04T18:30:00.000-04:00

Reply to Evan Fales: On the Empty Tomb of Jesus

2010-04-04T18:10:00.002-04:00

Fish Tank Post: The Man on the Cross

2010-04-02T11:40:00.003-04:00

Here it is.

Evil as Privation?

2010-03-30T00:54:00.000-04:00

There is a long tradition in Christian thought of describing evil as nothing more than a privation of good.

The thought that always comes to mind: What about pain? Pain is not a lack of a good experience, but a (sometimes quite powerful) experience all its own. There is a difference between experiencing a lack of pleasure and experiencing pain. But pain, ceteris paribus, is evil.

Two Sides of the Coin

2010-03-04T18:37:00.001-05:00

I have noticed what I believe is a sort of confusion in Christian theology, especially on the popular level. It is not (I think) a particularly troublesome confusion - most of the time - but it is worth mentioning nonetheless.

Consider the two following claims: "We are saved by faith alone" and "We are saved by grace alone." Without delving into the precise meaning of the five solas, I can say at least this: It does not make obvious sense that we can be saved both by faith alone and by grace alone. It seems, rather, that we are saved by both, and that neither is alone; the one is accompanied by the other.

In making this observation, I have not uncovered any glaring inconsistency in classical Protestant theology; I have only demonstrated a need for clarification. Here, I would like to propose a rough draft of a clarification, using the analogy of a coin.

Salvation, like a coin, has two sides. It is a gift (or set of gifts) we receive both through God's efforts to impart it to us - through His grace and Jesus' sacrifice on the cross - and through our efforts to receive it - through our faith or baptism, or perhaps (controversially) through our works. My preliminary suggestion is to call the former the means of salvation and the latter the conditions of salvation. Faith, then, would be a condition of salvation - "[W]ithout faith it is impossible to please [God]" (Hebrews 11.6) - while grace would be a means of salvation. Christians often discuss the question "What saves us?" Such discussions should, in my mind, be divided into discussions of what God has done to bring salvation and what we must do to accept it.

Perhaps this distinction is simplistic at best - perhaps the line between conditions and means is not so clear-cut. Perhaps it is biased toward certain perspectives on salvation. I do not know. I find this distinction helpful because it emphasizes and brings to light the covenantal nature of salvation; salvation has two sides because it is a covenant which must be (like any covenant) both offered and accepted.

It could also illuminate certain theological debates. For example, I think that saying we are not saved by works is saying (primarily) that our works cannot and can never be a means of our salvation; in other words, we cannot earn our salvation. However, the question of whether or not works can be a condition of our salvation - whether "faith without works" can be enough - is, in my opinion, a thornier one.

Fish Tank Post: Resurrection

2010-02-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

Here it is.

Fish Tank Post: Where Were We in Haiti?

2010-01-30T21:03:00.000-05:00

Here it is.

James on Skepticism

2010-01-21T23:09:00.000-05:00

From William James' The Will to Believe:
"We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error. [...] To preach skepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us that yielding to our fear of error is wiser and better than yielding to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law."
"To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn, — so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be."
(Hat tip to JAM.)

Searle on the Overriding Question

2010-01-18T22:15:00.000-05:00

From Searle's Freedom & Neurobiology:

"There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy. [...] How do we fit in? [...] How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles?

For the scientific naturalist, the answer is, 'Not very well.'"

(Hat tip to CoW.)

The Sorrow of God

2010-01-14T22:32:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of BW3, a beautiful and simple Cockney poem called The Sorrow of God: A Sermon in a Billet. My favorite parts:

But what if 'E came to the earth to show,
By the paths o' pain that 'E trod,
The blistering flame of eternal shame
That burns in the heart o' God?

For the voice of the Lord, as I 'ears it now,
Is the voice of my pals what bled,
And the call of my country's God to me
Is the call of my country's dead.

Chesterton on the Way Things Are

2010-01-11T11:29:00.000-05:00

Gotta love it.

Fish Tank Post: Atheistic Moral Realism?

2010-01-07T17:29:00.002-05:00

Here it is.

Chesterton on Christmas

2009-12-25T22:44:00.005-05:00

And another one, from Chesterton's excellent The Everlasting Man:

"No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventourously to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity."

(Hat tip to CDK.)

Lewis on Demons

2009-12-25T20:20:00.004-05:00

From the Postscript of The Screwtape Letters:

"A belief in angels, whether good or evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature. Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all....

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish and consolatory angels of nineteenth-century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a tea-table paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying 'Fear not.' The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say 'There, there.'

The literary symbols are more dangerous because they are not so easily recognised as symbolical. Those of Dante are the best. Before his angels we sink in awe. His devils, as Ruskin rightly remarked, in their rage, spite and obscenity, are far more like what the reality must be than anything in Milton. Milton’s devils, by their grandeur and high poetry, have done great harm, and his angels owe too much to Homer and Raphael. But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of hell. The humorous, civilized, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

A little man may sometimes avoid some single error made by a great one, and I was determined that my own symbolism should at least not err in Goethe’s way. For humour involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. Whatever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must not attribute this. Satan, said Chesterton, fell through force of gravity. We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives in the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age.

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin'. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

(Hat tip to this blog.)

Fish Tank Post: What Is the True Meaning of Christmas?

2009-12-25T10:45:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas!

Fish Tank Post: Thoughts on Omnipotence

2009-12-18T09:49:00.002-05:00

Here it is. Interested in what people have to say.

Λόγος Christology in John, Justin, and Origen

2009-12-17T22:09:00.008-05:00

...and yet another. (I took it out of formatting because it was being weird.)

Λόγος Christology in John, Justin, and Origen

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[1] So famously begins John’s Gospel, in which Jesus is identified as the λόγος (“Word”) incarnate, “who became flesh and dwelt among us.”[2] In the first eighteen verses of the Gospel alone,[3] we learn (among other things) that Jesus has existed from the beginning; indeed, “[a]ll things were made through him.”[4]

With these simple words, John outlined a Christological doctrine that would reverberate through subsequent Christian thought. The idea of Jesus as λόγος was hugely influential in later Christian theology:

The Prologue was so shocking, so divergent from what had gone before, so different from what the rest of the New Testament was saying about Jesus and the Word that it had an immense affect [sic] on what followed, whether that affect [sic] meant convergence with or divergence from Johannine teaching.[5]

Virtually everywhere else in the New Testament (including the Johannine corpus), the λόγος is simply the message or teaching of Christ, not Christ himself; John’s introductory proclamation to the contrary, then, is a powerful attestation to Jesus’ divinity which functions as a “signpost pointing to the incarnation and to Jesus” until Jesus himself enters the narrative.[6] (Importantly, John is not concerned with prolonged metaphysical discussions of the nature of the λόγος, as later Christians would be; John’s use of the λόγος lexeme is not primarily philosophical, but literary – “a clever ruse to grab the reader’s attention.”[7])

Of course, none of this theological reflection exists in a vacuum; long before the time of John or Jesus (in the flesh, at least), Judaism had evolved understandings of “subordinate agencies and powers” – such as God’s Spirit, Word, Wisdom, and Law – which served as intermediaries between God in Heaven (Who, it was thought, could not simply abandon His throne to address human affairs) and man on Earth.[8] (Most famously, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria – considered a forerunner of Christian thought – developed a Platonic theology of Judaism in which the λόγος was variously described as the only-begotten Son of God, man of God, and image of God.[9]) Thus, John, in equating Jesus with the λόγος, draws upon earlier Jewish concepts of divine revelation that are seen both in the ubiquitous Old Testament formula “the Word of the Lord” (suggestive of God’s power) and in the Jewish perception of Wisdom as the Word of God.[10]

As the faith spread beyond Jewish Palestine to the entire Roman Empire, this nascent Johannine Christology (along with the rest of Christian theology) was subsequently Hellenized by later Christians, who increasingly drew on Greek philosophical sources for their conceptualization of the λόγος.[11] (Greek philosophers had used “λόγος” as a technical term since the time of Heraclitus.[12]) Platonists had deemed the “transcendence of God [to be] such that it became more and more difficult to suppose that He exercised any action whatsoever upon the Cosmos.”[13] In contrast, Stoicism had thought of God as being in direct contact with the material world, operating through a divine λόγος that manifested itself in various forms (and was thus more often referred to in the plural as λόγοι – more specifically, λόγοι σπερματικοί[14]).[15] An “elegant blend” emerged as Platonists borrowed the Stoics’ λόγος to serve as an intermediary (or, in practice, as whatever they needed) between their transcendent God and His creation.[16] (One crucial consequence of this appropriation was that the λόγος was always “subordinate, in the second rank” – and indeed, for the first few centuries of Christian history, the Son was thought to be secondary to the Father.[17]) This syncretistic (and multifaceted) doctrine of the λόγος acted as the backdrop for ensuing Christian theologies, even when those theologies strayed significantly from the original meaning of the λόγος (a common occurrence; as de Faye observes, “[The] Logos, adopted by the early Christians, is not exactly the Logos of the philosophers”[18]).

One early example of a Christian thinker influenced by such Hellenistic thought was Justin Martyr (who, ironically, was unfamiliar with the Gospel of John),[19] a pagan philosopher who converted to Christianity in A.D. 132 and became the foremost Christian apologist of his time.[20] For Justin, Jesus is the incarnation of a “rational power [proceeding] from [God], who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos.”[21] Christ can bear all these names because he was begotten by the Father in the same way in which we beget words; such begetting does not diminish the Father any more than the act of speech diminishes us.[22] (In this sense, Jesus is both λόγος as spoken word and λόγος as rational principle; as Stead puts it, “The Logos is pictured in two-fold form, as the Father’s immanent Reason and as his outgoing, active and creative Word.”)[23],[24]

Why did Justin posit such a transitional divine entity? What metaphysical purpose does the λόγος serve? According to Minns and Parvis,

Justin believed that the very possibility of divine revelation required the existence of such a distinct, subordinated, or second-order divinity, for the possibility of God directly and immediately communicating himself to anyone else was ruled out by God’s own transcendence. […] This idea that God deals with the created order by means of a ‘second God’ had contemporary parallels in Jewish exegesis and in Greek philosophy.[25]
(Is Justin’s Christology implicitly ditheistic? It is difficult to say; Justin does, after all, go as far as calling Jesus “another God and Lord.”[26] In fairness to Justin, his λόγος is conceived more as a power than as a persona – following Tertullian – or as an ὑπόστασις – following Origen. Nevertheless, though his Christ is still “subject to the Maker of all things … [announcing] to men whatsoever the Maker of all things … wishes to announce to them,” the problem certainly remains.[27])

It was through the λόγος, then, that the world was created; it was through the λόγος that God spoke by His prophets; and it was through the λόγος σπερματικός (“spermatic word”) – the seed of the λόγος, reason, implanted in all people – that mankind could partially perceive the Truth.[28],[29] (Justin appropriates the concept of a “spermatic” λόγος from Philo and Stoic philosophy. [30]) This seed had afforded the Greek philosophers of antiquity (to whom Justin is heavily indebted) an imperfect view of God; it was only afterwards, however, through Jesus – “in whom the Logos dwells fully” – that a full understanding of God became possible.[31]

Evidently, Justin’s λόγος Christology was deeply rooted in the unfolding revelation of God to man – in Old Testament theophanies, in the Old Testament itself, and ultimately (and most fully) in Jesus himself. Yet, in using a lexeme married to a rich tradition in classical Greek philosophy (as well as in the pagan philosophy of his own time), Justin also clearly sought to establish a common ground with his opponents.[32] In fact, Justin goes so far as to call certain pre-Christian philosophers who have followed the (thitherto un-incarnate) λόγος “Christians”:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word [λόγος] of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably [μετὰ λόγου] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them.[33]

Thus, the λόγος operates not only as a mediator between God and man but also as a mediator between Justin and his interlocutors.

Justin’s λόγος Christology constitutes an unmistakable progression from that found in the Gospel of John. Justin unequivocally follows John in identifying Jesus as the λόγος, but then proceeds (as it were) to flesh out this identification; the λόγος becomes connected to classical philosophy, God’s rationality and revelation, and the faculty by which mankind discerns truth.

Origen’s λόγος Christology (aptly named, for “[t]he doctrine of the Logos … constitutes the very essence of [Origen’s] Christology”[34]) is not wholly dissimilar from Justin’s. Just as Justin sought to defend Christianity against its detractors by means of a λόγος Christology, “the whole of [the] Christology of Origen is nothing else than a learned justification of the Christian belief of his time.”[35] Finally, for both Origen and Justin, “God the Father delegates to his Logos tasks which it would be inappropriate for him to perform in his own Person. […] The Logos might therefore be described as the permanent agent of God’s self-limitation and condescension.”[36]

Yet Origen is innovative in speaking of the λόγος as a distinct ὑπόστασις (“hypostasis”),[37] and he is also the first to develop a concept of eternal generation.[38] Arguing that it would be absurd to suppose that there could have been a time at which God existed but His Wisdom (i.e., Christ) did not, Origen concludes that “we must believe that Wisdom was generated before any beginning that can be either comprehended or expressed.”[39] (This vital distinction, Trigg notes, “provided the theoretical foundation of Nicene orthodoxy. It allows the Father to be the cause of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s procession, but in such a way that, in distinction from all other created beings, they share in the Father’s eternal and incorporeal existence.”[40] Arius, in contrast, believed that “the Son came into being in time and out of non-existence.”[41])

Furthermore, Origen integrates into his sophisticated theology the belief that Christ has a divine and a human nature:

The divine nature, God’s Logos, fully shares … in the Father’s eternity and incorporeality. … [T]he Logos also shares our full human nature. […] This union is so intimate that Scripture habitually applies the properties of either nature to the other, so that the man Jesus Christ is called the Son of God and the Son of God is said to have died.[42]

This full human nature includes not only a human body, but also a human soul (which, according to Origen, the divine λόγος assumes before assuming the body itself);[43] in Origen’s words, “[T]his altogether surpasses human admiration … how that mighty power of divine majesty, that very Word [λόγος] of the Father … can be believed to have existed within the limits of that man who appeared in Judea.”[44]

At this point, it may be the case that Origen diverges slightly from John and Justin Martyr. Origen does not believe, as John and Justin did, that the λόγος became Jesus; instead, Origen believes that the λόγος “cohabits with Jesus and remains himself. So independent is he [the λόγος] that … it is permissible for him to leave the man he has chosen, to absent himself, to return and again take up his associate.”[45] In his own words,

[I]f in that man [Jesus] as He appeared among men there was something divine, namely the only-begotten Son of God, the first-born of all creation … of this Being and His nature we must judge and reason in a way quite different from that in which we judge of the man who was seen in Jesus Christ.[46]

Origen does, of course, affirm that Jesus and the λόγος are “one personality.”[47]

Nothing in Origen or Justin, fortunately, indicates any radical departure from the λόγος of John’s Gospel. The same dominant themes of incarnation, creation, rationality, revelation, and subordination to the Father reappear in all three Christologies (though some of these themes are inevitably only implicit in John, given the brevity with which he discusses the λόγος). Differences exist, obviously, mainly indicative of general trends in the evolution of a Christianity that was increasingly Hellenized and systematized; the λόγος of Light and Life in John gave way to the rational power of Justin and finally to the ὑπόστασις of Origen. Ultimately, however, the best summation of the λόγος doctrine remains the opening words of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.[48]

[1] John i. 1. (Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references come from the English Standard Version.)

[2] John i. 14.

[3] The only other potential New Testament reference to Jesus as the λόγος occurs in Revelation xix. 13. Peter M. Phillips, The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 88.

[4] John i. 2-3.

[5] Phillips, 90.

[6] Ibid., 140.

[7] Ibid., 140-141.

[8] Christopher Stead. Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148-149.

[9] “logos.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[10] “Philo Judaeus.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[11] “logos.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[12] John Mark Reynolds. When Athens Met Jerusalem (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 39.

[13] Eugène de Faye, Origen and His Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 100.

[14] Stead, 47.

[15] De Faye, 100.

[16] Ibid., 101.

[17] Ibid., 102.

[18] Ibid., 103.

[19] Helmut Köster, “Rome and Religious Sectarianism in the Second Century (From the Death of Paul to Irenaeus).” Andover Hall 102, Cambridge, MA. 24 Sept. 2009. Lecture.

[20] “Saint Justin Martyr.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[21] Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphoni, LXI.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 61.

[24] Stead, 156.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Justin Martyr, Dialogus cum Tryphoni, LVI.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Helmut Köster, “Christianity and Philosophy.” Andover Hall 102, Cambridge, MA. 8 Oct. 2009. Lecture.

[29] It should be noted that Minns and Parvis argue that Justin – unlike Philo before him and the majority of Christians after him – does not “explicitly assign a mediatorial role to the Logos in the creation of the world. […] His remarkable coyness about ascribing a directly mediatorial role to the Logos or Son in the work of creation, especially when set beside the fact that it is from God as creator that Justin habitually distinguishes the Logos or Son, suggests that he was chary of the idea – perhaps suspecting that it would provide comfort for Gnostic heretics who sought to disparage creation and to deny that it was the work of God.” Minns and Parvis, 62-65.

[30] Minns and Parvis, 65.

[31] Helmut Köster, “Christianity and Philosophy.”

[32] Minns and Parvis, 65.

[33] Justin Martyr, Prima Apologia, XLVI.

[34] De Faye, 99.

[35] Ibid., 113.

[36] Stead, 156.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Joseph W. Trigg, Origen (London: Routledge, 1998), 24.

[39] Origen, De principiis, I.II.2.

[40] Trigg, 24.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Ibid., 25.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Origen, De principiis, II.VI.2.

[45] De Faye, 105.

[46] Origen, Contra Celsum, VII.XVI.

[47] De Faye, 105-106.

[48] John i. 1-5.

Trinity and Controversy in the Third and Fourth Century

2009-12-17T22:04:00.004-05:00

Another (slightly rushed and unformatted) paper related to the purpose of the blog...

Trinity and Controversy in the Third and Fourth Centuries

Today, of course, the doctrine of the Trinity is relatively uncontroversial among most Christians (with some notable exceptions).[1] For the first few centuries of Christianity’s history, however, the true nature of the Triune God was hotly contested; in fact, “[i]t was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons.”[2] Though Trinitarian formulæ did exist in the New Testament,[3] their exact theological and metaphysical implications were left unexplored. This lack of fixity in apostolic doctrine concerning the Trinity – “the Church entered [the Trinitarian] dispute possessing no established doctrinal consensus concerning the understanding of God as Triad”[4] – provided the impetus for subsequent controversy: “The occurrence of a major debate in the Church concerning an understanding of God as Trinity was inevitable. The issue was too central and basic and too open to conflicting and contradictory positions to be avoided.”[5] Put simply, the need to reconcile the putative divinity of Christ and of the Spirit with the clear Old Testament proclamation of the one God (seen especially in the Shema) was pressing.[6]

What, specifically, was at stake? The broad question involved the entire Trinitarian conception of the Godhead; however, discussion about the exact role and status of the Holy Spirit often appeared peripheral in comparison to the analogous disputations over the Son.[7] Indeed, Novatian, in his third-century treatise De trinitate,[8] summarized the contemporary disagreement in the following manner: “Some heretics have thought [Jesus] to be God the Father, others that he was only God without the flesh.”[9] The former heresy was modalism (also known, in its various forms, as Monarchianism and Sabellianism, or Patripassianism[10]), the latter subordinationism, which developed into Arianism.[11] Both began with the principle of monotheism and concluded either (in the case of modalism) that there was only one person in God or (in the case of subordinationism) that Christ was necessarily inferior to the Father.[12]

The central idea of Sabellian modalism is this:

[A]n only God, Father and Legislator in the Old Testament … became flesh and Son in the New and sanctified the Church as Holy Spirit after Pentecost. […] God was one originally and eternally but … became trinity in time: Father at creation, Son at the time of the Incarnation and Sanctifier at the time of Pentecost. Thus the Three Persons were conceived as modes or functions of one really single Person, just as the same human person could be successively priest, doctor, and magistrate.[13]

For Sabellius and other modalists, the Trinitarianism of what would become Nicene Orthodoxy was, in fact, implicitly tritheistic.[14]

The obvious alternative, which denied the equality of the Son with the Father, was subordinationism. Importantly, subordinationism, though essentially anathematized in the Council of Nicæa,[15] was not terribly dissimilar to earlier theological beliefs that were (in their time) thoroughly orthodox; in fact, Lonergan implies that the ante-Nicene Fathers were, in certain respects, subordinationists.[16] (He cautions, however, against an anachronistic evaluation of “the doctrine of the ante-Nicene authors according to the criteria of a later theology.”[17] We should understand the alleged subordinationism of the ante-Nicene Fathers not as heresy, but simply as an indication that they “were not well up in the theology of a later age.”[18]) Nonetheless, more explicit strands of subordinationism were always rejected as heterodox.

One such strand was adoptionism, according to which “Jesus was a mere man, in whom God dwelt in a special way.”[19] “The son of Mary … was not the Son of God by nature but only by adoption.”[20] Some, such as Cerinthus, extended this notion and argued that Jesus, “superior to other men only in prudence, justice, and wisdom,” was conceived naturally by Mary and Joseph; God sent His Spirit (called Christ) upon Jesus during his ministry, but the Spirit abandoned Jesus before his death.[21]

Others – the Docetists – suggested instead that “Jesus of Nazareth was not really a human being at all. Jesus only seemed to be human; in reality, he was divine. His humanity was a phantasm, an illusion.”[22] Such ideas could be traced backward at least to the time during which the three Johannine epistles were written.[23] Docetism never emerged as an organized movement within non-Gnostic Christianity but enjoyed popularity among Gnostics such as Valentinus and Basilides.[24]

The most important branch of subordinationism, of course, was due to Arius, a presbyter in the church of Alexandria who publicly criticized the doctrine of the co-eternality of the Son and Father maintained by Alexander, his bishop.[25],[26] Arius’ objection to Alexander was simple: Scripture clearly taught that Christ was begotten,[27] yet Alexander contended that he was eternal. For Arius, such a conjunction was impossible: “[Christ] was either unbegotten and eternal, as the Father was, or he was begotten and had therefore come to be.”[28] Arius opted for the latter option:

God was not always a Father, but [that] there was a time when God was not a Father. The Word of God [Jesus] was not always, but originated from things that were not … wherefore there was a time when He was not; for the Son is a creature and a work. Neither is He like in essence [κατ' 'ουσίαν] Neither is He like in essence to the Father … but He is one of the things made and created, and is called the Word and Wisdom by an abuse of terms, since He Himself originated by the proper Word of God, and by the Wisdom that is in God.[29]

Though Jesus was a “very perfect creature … he did not really know the incomprehensible Father, for the finite cannot know the infinite.”[30] The line between God and creation was absolute; rather than reconcile the immutable, transcendent God with the mutable, earthly Christ, Arius chose instead a dissociation of the former from the latter.[31],[32]

Arius’ criticisms of Alexander eventually led to his excommunication in 318 by the Synod of Alexandria; nevertheless, “he continued to spread his own doctrine, and even managed to find favour with other bishops.”[33] Marsh writes,

Arius … did not accept his degradation easily. He already had … considerable support … in Alexandria, but he now sought support also from farther afield and in more powerful quarters. He pleaded his cause to bishops in the Greek East outside of Egypt…. Arius could not but have been gratified by the support he received, especially from the two Eusebiuses [of Nicomedia and of Cæsarea]. Any hope Alexander had of confining the dispute within his own jurisdiction … had now vanished. He too was now obliged to circulate his Episcopal colleagues in the East in order to discredit Arius and vindicate his own position. But the affair had now effectively passed outside his control and had become a public controversy involving and dividing the whole Church of the East.[34]

The repercussions of this parochial squabble were thus far-reaching.

In response, the Emperor Constantine convened a church-wide council to come to a resolution.[35] In Luibhéid’s words, “The bishops who assembled in 325 at the Council of Nicaea dealt with several matters, but the main reason for their gathering lay in [the controversy between Arius and Alexander] which had broken out in Alexandria.”[36] The significance of this first ecumenical council is unmistakable. Such an opportunity to formulate a single, universal proclamation of faith – to address the emerging theological fissures before they ruptured completely – was unprecedented.

The Council, of course, rejected the Arian tenets of the Son’s creaturehood, non-eternality, and mutability.[37] But its enterprise was not entirely negative; in what would become a pivotal moment in the Church’s history, the Council affirmed the ὁμοούσια (consubstantiality) of the Son and the Father, “[proclaiming] inseparably the dogma of the perfect divine unity and of the divinity of the Word, equal to the Father.”[38] Such terminology was not without its drawbacks – it ran the risk of a modalist interpretation – nor was it, strictly speaking, biblical.[39] Nonetheless, it determined the course of all further theologizing concerning the Trinity.

The bishops assembled at Nicæa subscribed to the proposed Creed with near unanimity. (Several bishops – among them Eusebius of Cæsarea, the famed church historian – chose not to endorse it out of concern over the exact meaning of ὁμοούσια.[40] Furthermore, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicæa, both of whom had signed the Creed, soon thereafter “let it be known that they were now dissatisfied with the conciliar document.”[41]) The controversy, however, was far from over. Arius had been exiled by imperial decree following the Council, but Constantine subsequently decided to accept Arius’ return to the Empire.[42] It was this decision of Constantine’s that effectively “brought into existence two opposed parties and initiated the real controversy” in the East.[43]

Athanasius, an Alexandrian deacon and vigorous opponent of Arianism who had succeeded Alexander as Bishop of Alexandria in 328, was commanded to receive Arius back as a priest in the Alexandrian church; his subsequent refusal led to banishment for him and for other prominent anti-Arians.[44] The tide had turned. Arianism was far from dead; in fact, the controversy would persist for another sixty years (long after Arius’ death) until the Council of Constantinople in 381.[45]

How did Arianism persist for so long? Any sufficient answer must address the political dimensions of the controversy. As de Margerie argues,

The gravity of the Arian crisis, in the course of which, some thirty years after Nicaea, about half of the bishops abandoned the orthodox doctrine, becomes more comprehensible when we perceive that the divine unicity … appeared to offer a better justification for the existence of the monarchical Roman Empire. The eternal monarchy of God was the supreme exemplar of the Empire, a projection of the eternal in time. Such a mentality … inclined [the official theologians of the Empire toward the side of Arianism.[46]

Regardless of the truth of this (somewhat Freudian) claim, the political divisions which followed Constantine’s death in 337 must have exacerbated the theological divisions in the Church.[47] The emperor’s three sons (Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius) all adopted competing Trinitarian views; afterward, the co-emperors and brothers Valens and Valentinian would also espouse conflicting stances (Valens, in fact, went as far as to persecute non-Arian Christians in the eastern empire).[48] Only after Valens’ death in 378 did the Emperor Theodosius I succeed in establishing Nicene Christianity in the East as Damasus had already done in the West.[49] (The entire sequence of events, of course, was much more complicated. At one point, four distinct theological positions – the Nicene, Arian, pro-Arian Conservative, and anti-Arian conservative – coexisted in the East.[50])

The Trinitarian controversy, then, was an iconic moment in Christian history. It was during this time that orthodox conceptualization of the Trinity was solidified, and ecclesiastical precedents for settling doctrinal disputes among the different bishops and churches were set; however, it was also the time during which the heavy hand of the Roman State began to meddle in internal Christian affairs. The events of the fourth century involving Arius and Nicæa would thus set the stage for the next thousand years of Western history.

[1] Examples include Christian Unitarians and Oneness Pentecostals.

[2] “Trinity.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[3] cf. Matthew xxviii. 19, 2 Corinthians xiii. 14.

[4] Thomas Marsh, The Triune God (Blackrock: The Columbia Press, 1994), 97. Adds Luibhéid: “What has to be remembered here is that at the start of the Arian controversy the establishment of a consensus on such great problems as the nature of the Trinity … was still in the future.” Colm Luibhéid, The Council of Nicaea (Galway: Galway University Press, 1982), 3.

[5] Ibid., 95.

[6] “Trinity.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[7] Marsh, 96.

[8] “Novatian.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[9] Novatian, De trinitate, XXIII.

[10] Bernard Lonergan, C.C., S.J., The Way to Nicea (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 36.

[11] Bertrand de Margerie, S.J., The Christian Trinity in History (Still River: St. Bede’s Publications, 1982), 72. It should be noted that different scholars use these labels in inconsistent ways.

[12] De Margerie, 73.

[13] Ibid.

[14] For example, Hippolytus quotes the modalist Callistus as saying the following: “I will not profess belief in two Gods, Father and Son, but in one. For the Father, who subsisted in the Son Himself, after He had taken unto Himself our flesh, raised it to the nature of Deity, by bringing it unto union with Himself, and made it one; so that Father and Son must be styled one God, and that this Person being one, cannot be two.” Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Hæresium, IX.VII.

[15] Maurice Wiles, “Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy.” Michael R. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams, Arianism After Arius (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 32.

[16] Lonergan, 41.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Lonergan, 36.

[20] “Adoptionism.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[21] De Margerie, 87. While adoptionism per se may not explicitly contradict the New Testament, a denial of the virgin birth clearly goes against the Gospel narratives.

[22] Alister McGrath, Heresy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 111.

[23] Ibid., 111. cf. 1 John iv. 1-3: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.” (Unless otherwise noted, all scriptural references come from the English Standard Version.)

[24] Ibid., 113-116.

[25] Luibhéid, 25.

[26] Such criticism, Luibhéid observes, should be understood in its historical context rather than in the context of “a later age when the major doctrinal issues had long been settled and bishops … had come to be regarded as the custodians of a received and unalterable tradition.” In this light, Arius’ actions do not seem quite as mutinous. Luibhéid, 3.

[27] On this point, Arius was in agreement with his opponents; the Nicene Creed itself states that Jesus is “begotten of the Father.”

[28] Luibhéid, 25.

[29] Athanasius, de Arii depositione, II.

[30] De Margerie, 88.

[31] McGrath, 144.

[32] Recent scholarship has proposed a slightly different interpretation of Arius’ theology, beginning not with a particular view of God’s transcendence but with “a particular view of redemption and the Redeemer-figure which this view entails. Arius saw redemption, according to this view, in moral terms, as a breaking out of the cycle of moral weakness and evil which envelops the human scene to union with God. […] The Redeemer was the one who achieved this union with God…. […] But since the Redeemer achieved this union with God, he could not have been one with God from the very beginning or in his essential being.” Marsh, 103.

[33] Lonergan, 69.

[34] Marsh, 99.

[35] “Council of Nicaea.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

[36] Luibhéid, 1.

[37] De Margerie, 91.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., 90-91.

[40] Lonergan, 73. Theodoret preserves a letter from Eusebius to Paulinus in which Eusebius writes, “[W]e affirm that the unbegotten is one and one also that which exists in truth by Him, yet was not made out of His substance, and does not at all participate in the nature or substance of the unbegotten, entirely distinct in nature and in power, and made after perfect likeness both of character and power to the maker. We believe that the mode of His beginning not only cannot be expressed by words but even in thought, and is incomprehensible not only to man, but also to all beings superior to man.” Theodoret, Historia ecclesiastica, I.V.

[41] Luibhéid, 126.

[42] Marsh, 101.

[43] Ibid., 101-102. Of the party opposed to the Nicene Creed, not all were necessarily Arians: “This latter body was … a heterogeneous group which included strict Arians, pro-Arians like Eusebius of Nicomedia and a large middle group which … were very uncomfortable with the statement of Nicaea.”

[44] Ibid., 102.

[45] Ibid., 117-118.

[46] De Margerie, 89.

[47] Marsh, 111.

[48] Ibid., 116.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., 113.

Lonergan on Gnosticism

2009-12-17T10:27:00.002-05:00

From The Way to Nicea, by Father Bernard Lonergan, C.C., S.J.:

"From the time of Harnack it has frequently been said that the Gnostics were the first Christian theologians, since it was they who first used the psychological analogy, and the notions of consubstantiality and of procession. What is one to make of such an assertion? In the first place, we must note that there is a great difference between the dramatico-practical pattern of experience, common to all men, and the intellectual, or theoretic, or scientific pattern of experience.... Further, the drive towards theory has first to develop and become manifest, before one can learn how to guide and control it by logic, by scientific method, and so on. So the cult of numbers preceded the science of mathematics, astrology preceded astronomy, alchemy preceded chemistry, legend preceded history and theogony precede theology. Viewed from this point of view, what happened when heretics borrowed some elements of the Christian faith should cause no great surprise, but one does not have to call the resulting speculation Christian theology."

It's an interesting thought; I'm not sure, however, how far it can be taken.

A Technical Note

2009-12-13T21:21:00.001-05:00

I've started posting to the blog from a different profile that looks exactly like the old profile. There shouldn't be any real difference, however.

Communion: December 13, 2009

2009-12-13T15:54:00.004-05:00

It was my honor today to provide the Communion message at church. Per the request of a friend, here is the written-down version of what I said:

"Hi. My name is Joseph Porter, and I am a sophomore at Harvard College. I’d like to share briefly about some of what the cross means to me.

How many of you guys are stressed out about finals right now? I know I am; I have three in the next week. It’s tough, isn’t it? When I’m studying for a final and I’m lonely and it’s three in the morning, it’s hard to feel like God loves me. I’m literally too tired to feel loved by God.

Of course, finals aren’t the only thing that can make it hard for us to feel loved by God. There are times when we can be too hurt to feel loved by God, too depressed to feel loved by God, too outraged to feel loved by God. There are times when we can want nothing more than to cry, to forget, to escape, to scream, Why? Why did my girlfriend break up with me? Why did I lose my job? Why did my husband die in Iraq? Why does my kid have cancer?

I think about some of the things I have seen happen to people around me. I remember when I was seven years old and I found out that I was leaving the United States and all of my friends and everything I knew for a different country. I remember crying and asking my mom if I could hang out with my best friend one last time. I remember crying when I visited an orphanage for children with cerebral palsy. Their bodies were stunted and they were crying for their mothers, and I just couldn’t bear it. Why? Why should I trust You, God? How can this suffering all be worth it?

God could have just given us a point-by-point answer to these questions. He could have simply said, 'Trust me, it’s for the best. My ways are higher than your ways; it’ll all work out.' But He did something much, much better instead: He gave us His Son.

Why should we trust God that it will all be worth it? My answer is the cross. The cross, to me, says this: 'I love you, and I know that you are suffering. So am I. I know that you are wounded. So am I. I know that you are broken-hearted. So am I. How do you know that I love you? This is how you know: Jesus Christ laid down his life for you.'

What’s crazy isn't that an all-powerful God would let mankind suffer. What’s crazy is that an all-powerful God would let Himself suffer. That is why the cross is the ultimate proof of God’s love; as John 3:16 famously says, 'For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.'

As many of you know, Jon and Rachel were engaged yesterday, and Jay and Alex were engaged just a couple weeks ago. Because of all the recent engagements, I’ve been thinking about what it means for the Church to be the Bride of Christ.

Let’s fast forward to Jay and Alex’ wedding. (I’m going to pick on Jay since he’s my cousin.) It’s a beautiful day outside, Jay’s in a nice tux; Alex is wearing a beautiful white dress. Alex walks up to the altar and Jay begins his vow: 'I, James, take you, Alexandra, to be my lawfully wedded wife: to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, but not for worse; for richer, but not for poorer; not in sickness, only in health.' That’d be a pretty pathetic vow. (Hopefully Jay realizes this.)

We all know that that’s not how marriage works. The beauty in a marriage vow doesn’t come from the commitment to someone for better; the beauty comes from the commitment to someone for worse, for poorer, in sickness. The beauty comes from the commitment of the lover to suffer for the beloved. And Jesus is the most reckless lover in history. Romeo doesn't have anything on Jesus. Because Jesus committed to his Bride when doing so meant dying on a cross for his Bride.

There will be times when life will seem hopeless and unfair, when the pain will feel unbearable, when we may want to hate God or to plead with Him: 'My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?' When those times come, remember that Jesus was there, too. Jesus felt the same way. And he endured all that pain and all that God-forsakenness simply because he loved us.

On August 23, 2006, I was baptized into Christ in Davie, Florida. I became Christ’s bride, and this was the vow made to me:

'Your present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in you. I am for you; who can be against you? Who shall separate you from my love? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things you are more than a conqueror. For neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from my love.'

As we prepare for Communion, let us remember that vow and that love."

Fish Tank Post: How to Read the Bible

2009-12-11T09:53:00.001-05:00

Here it is.

Fish Tank Post: Beyond the Sunday School God

2009-12-04T10:54:00.003-05:00

Here it is.

Just a few of my thoughts on the "tone" of modern Christianity. They are, for now, incomplete thoughts.

Ichthus Article: Must Christians be Pacifists?

2009-11-27T12:18:00.002-05:00

Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. I'm still very open to more discussion on the issue.

The Last Day

2009-11-22T14:42:00.003-05:00

From this collection of poems:

The Last Day

Kevin Hart

When the last day comes
A ploughman in Europe will look over his shoulder
And see the hard furrows of earth
Finally behind him, he will watch his shadow
Run back into his spine.

It will be morning
For the first time, and the long night
Will be seen for what it is,
A black flag trembling in the sunlight.
On the last day

Our stories will be rewritten
Each from the end,
And each will hear the fields and rivers clap
And under the trees

Old bones
Will cover themselves with flesh;
Spears, bullets, will pluck themselves
From wounds already healed,
Women will clasp their sons as men

And men will look
Into their palms and find them empty;
There will be time
For us to say the right things at last,
To look into our enemy’s face

And see ourselves,
Forgiven now, before the books flower in flames,
The mirrors return our faces,
And everything is stripped from us,
Even our names.

(Hat tip to RB.)

Fish Tank Post: By Any Other Name?

2009-11-20T11:07:00.001-05:00

Here it is.

To Create an Enemy

2009-11-14T00:09:00.003-05:00

To Create an Enemy

Sam Keen

To create an enemy
Start with an empty canvas.
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.
Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.
Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.
Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.
Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.
Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils,
demons, minions of evil.
When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

(Hat tip to RB.)

Fish Tank Post: The Criterion of Modernity

2009-11-06T15:45:00.002-05:00

Here it is.

Pruss, Rasmussen, and the Kalām Cosmological Argument

2009-11-05T16:33:00.002-05:00

In my opinion, Pruss' thoughts and Rasmussen's shore up many concerns about the Kalām cosmological argument.

Chesterton on Humility

2009-11-03T23:11:00.002-05:00

From Orthodoxy:

"It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything - even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance."

(Hat tip to NN.)

Lewis on Morality

2009-10-29T15:49:00.004-04:00

"The very activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth, variously impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others. Not to practice them is to abandon our humanity. To practice them spontaneously and delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of duty, the whole specifically moral realm.

It exists to be transcended. Here is the paradox of Christianity. As practical imperatives for here and now, the two great commandments have to be translated 'Behave as if you loved God and man.' For no man can love because he is told to. Yet obedience on this practical level is not really obedience at all. And if a man really loved God and man, once again this would hardly be obedience; for if he did, he would be unable to help it. Thus the command really says to us, 'Ye must be born again.' Till then, we have duty, morality, the Law. A schoolmaster, as St. Paul says, is to bring us to Christ. We must expect no more of it than of a schoolmaster; we must allow it no less."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

MacDonald on Prayer

2009-10-29T15:21:00.002-04:00

From George MacDonald's "The Word of Jesus on Prayer":

"We know that the wind blows; why should we not know that God answers prayer?

I reply, What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand? What if there would be no good in that? There is some testimony on record, and perhaps there might be much were it not that, having to do with things so immediately personal, and generally so delicate, answers to prayer would naturally not often be talked about; but no testimony concerning the thing can well be conclusive; for, like a reported miracle, there is always some way to daff it; and besides, the conviction to be got that way is of little value: it avails nothing to know the thing by the best of evidence... 'But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?'

I answer, What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at home; but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer... So begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God's end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that: to bring His child to His knee, God withholds that man may ask."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

Sicut Cervus

2009-10-28T21:51:00.004-04:00

Palestrina's Sicut cervus, as (spontaneously) performed by the Harvard Glee Club in Limerick, Ireland:

Harvard Glee Club - Sicut Cervus from Umang S on Vimeo.

Fish Tank Post: Secular Reductionism

2009-10-26T08:55:00.001-04:00

Here it is.

Fish Tank Post: "The Red Sweater"

2009-10-23T13:01:00.001-04:00

Here it is.

Aristides on the Early Christians

2009-10-21T22:25:00.003-04:00

From The Apology of Aristides, written in the early second century:

"Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If a man has something, he gives freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger, Christians take him home and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God. [...] And if they hear that one of them is in jail, or persecuted for professing the name of their redeemer, they all give him what he needs - if it is possible, they bail him out.

If one of them is poor and there isn't enough food to go around, they fast several days to give him the food he needs... This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

Tertullian Is Ballin'

2009-10-21T12:58:00.003-04:00

From his Apologeticus:

"As to the Emperor and the charge of high treason against us, Caesar's safety lies not in hands soldered on. We invoke the true God for the Emperor. Even if he persecute us, we are bidden pray for them that persecute us, as you can read in our books which are not hidden, which you often get hold of. We pray for him because the Empire stands between us and the end of the world. We count the Caesars to be God's vice-regents and swear by their safety (not by their genius, as required). As for loyalty, Caesar really is more ours than yours; for it was our God who set him up. It is for his own good, that we refuse to call the Emperor God; Father of his Country is a better title. No Christian has ever made a plot against a Caesar; the famous conspirators and assassins were heathen, one and all. Piety, religion, faith are our best offering of loyalty."

(Hat tip to CQOTD.)

Fish Tank Post: Unity and Doctrine

2009-10-18T19:15:00.001-04:00

Here it is.

Pinnock and Universal Salvation

2009-10-11T20:08:00.005-04:00

Clark H. Pinnock seems to think universal salvation would be unloving:

"Most Christians would agree with C. S. Lewis when he says [of the doctrine of the Final Judgment], 'There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power.' But we cannot do so, for two reasons: first, because it enjoys the full support of Christ's own teaching, and second, because it makes a good deal of sense. If the gospel is extended to us for our acceptance, it must be possible also to reject and refuse it. The alternative would be for God to compel an affirmative response.

It would be nice to be able to say that all will be saved, but the question arises, Does everyone want to be saved? What would love for God be like if it were coerced? There is a hell because God respects our freedom and takes our decisions seriously, more seriously, perhaps, than we would sometimes wish. God wants to see hell completely empty; but if it is not, He cannot be blamed. The door is locked only on the inside. It is not Christians but the unrepentant who 'want' it [to be locked]."

The implication is that God simply cannot simultaneously take everyone's decisions seriously and save everyone.

Regardless of whether or not the doctrine of universal salvation is correct, I don't think this argument works. The reason is that Pinnock is arguing with a very simplistic kind of universal salvation that most Christian Universalists wouldn't accept, a kind that can be roughly summarized by the following:

Judgment Day comes. All people proceed immediately to Heaven, regardless of what they have done.

But of course, that is not the only possible means of formulating universal salvation. Here's a version of Christian Universalism that passes Pinnock's "coercion test":

At Judgment Day, some people proceed immediately to Heaven; the rest proceed to Hell. However, people in Hell are given the opportunity to repent, be baptized, and cross the chasm into Heaven.

Under this story, everyone would eventually be saved without being coerced by God, because everyone would eventually choose Heaven over Hell given the prospect of eternity in the latter.

The scriptural, theological, and doctrinal merits of these two iterations of Christian Universalism can, of course, be debated. But I don't think I can agree with Pinnock that Universalism necessitates some sort of coercion on God's part.

Fish Tank Post: Divine Epistemology

2009-10-09T14:13:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

Some Other Varieties of Religious Experience

2009-10-04T16:29:00.002-04:00

At the recommendation of a friend, I've been (slowly) reading through Gaudium et Spes, a Catholic constitution that resulted from Vatican II. I thought this one particular discussion of atheism was interesting:

"The word atheism is applied to phenomena which are quite distinct from one another. For while God is expressly denied by some, others believe that man can assert absolutely nothing about Him. Still others use such a method to scrutinize the question of God as to make it seem devoid of meaning. Many, unduly transgressing the limits of the positive sciences, contend that everything can be explained by this kind of scientific reasoning alone, or by contrast, they altogether disallow that there is any absolute truth. Some laud man so extravagantly that their faith in God lapses into a kind of anemia, though they seem more inclined to affirm man than to deny God. Again some form for themselves such a fallacious idea of God that when they repudiate this figment they are by no means rejecting the God of the Gospel. Some never get to the point of raising questions about God, since they seem to experience no religious stirrings nor do they see why they should trouble themselves about religion. Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world, or from the absolute character with which certain human values are unduly invested, and which thereby already accords them the stature of God. Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God not for any essential reason but because it is so heavily engrossed in earthly affairs."

Some different "varieties" of "atheism" are mentioned: "garden-variety" atheism, logical positivism, relativism, &c. More importantly, however, several different emotional and spiritual factors that contribute to unbelief are enumerated: pride, apathy, materialism (i.e., consumerism), the idolatry of human values, and - most interesting - "violent protest against the evil in the world."

Of course, one could make similar lists, mutatis mutandis, about theism. But it's interesting to think of unbelief as a similarly multifaceted set of phenomena.

Fish Tank Post: What Is Science?

2009-10-02T11:44:00.003-04:00

Here it is.

Chesterton on Wealth

2009-09-26T22:07:00.003-04:00

From Orthodoxy:

"Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was in not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous of all is the commodious environment. I know that most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest - if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this - that rich men are not likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags."

(Hat tip to JCP.)

Fish Tank Post: People, Ideas, and Motives

2009-09-25T11:10:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

Fish Tank Post: Perfection

2009-09-18T15:49:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

Cyprian on Joy

2009-09-17T19:56:00.004-04:00

From a letter Saint Cyprian wrote:

"This seems a cheerful world, Donatus, when I view it from this fair garden, under the shadow of these vines. But if I climbed some great mountain and looked out over the wide lands, you know very well what I would see - brigands on the high roads, pirates on the seas; in the amphitheaters men murdered to please applauding crowds; under all roofs misery and selfishness. It is really a bad world, Donatus, an incredibly bad world. Yet in the midst of it I have found a quiet and holy people. They have discovered a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasures of this sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They have overcome the world. These people, Donatus, are the Christians - and I am one of them."

(Hat tip to CQOTD. Incidentally, several of the quotations I've posted here before have come from them, and I don't think I've ever remembered to tip my hat to them before! Apologies.)

Barth on Baptism

2009-09-14T15:20:00.005-04:00

From Karl Barth's "Die christliche Lehre nach dem Heidelberger Katechismus":

"The real reason for the persistent adherence to infant baptism is quite simply the fact that without it the church would suddenly be in a remarkably embarrassing position. Every individual would then have to decide whether he wanted to be a Christian. But how many Christians would there be in that case? The whole concept of a national church (or national religion) would be shaken. That must not happen; and so one proposes argument upon argument for infant baptism and yet cannot speak convincingly because fundamentally he has a bad conscience. The introduction of adult baptism in itself would of course not reform the church which needs reforming. The adherence to infant baptism is only one - a very important one - of many symptoms that the church is not alive and bold, that it is afraid to walk on the water like Peter to meet the Lord, that it therefore does not seek a sure foundation but only deceptive props."

(Hat tip to Halden.)

Fish Tank Post: In Osama's Shoes

2009-09-11T14:51:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

Fish Tank Post: The Bible and the Word of God

2009-09-04T15:00:00.002-04:00

Here it is.

God Loves Wrestling

2009-08-28T00:18:00.000-04:00

From a post at Stuff Christians Like:

I once wrote about something that my counselor said when I told him I felt like I was wrestling with God on some issues. He said, 'God loves that.' This is not the answer I was expecting. I thought he would say, 'You need to trust the Lord more.' Or 'You need to let go and let God.' But he didn't say that. Instead he remarked, 'Jon, do you know what is true about wrestling? Have you ever stopped to think about the nature of wrestling? God loves to wrestle with us, because you can't wrestle with someone who is far away. They have to be close to you. It's a very intimate, personal activity.' And I think he was right. I think that God wants me close. I think He wants me near to His side, close enough to feel His breath and know His strength. And when I approach to wrestle over an issue with Him, like Jacob wrestling, I don't think He is angry. I think He is happy, because I am close. Sure, I want to surrender and trust without question, but I no longer see wrestling as instant failure."

Health Care Reform Alternatives

2009-08-25T01:45:00.004-04:00

This article gives a wonderful summary of the many problems with our health care industry and why Obama's proposal won't really help fix it (though the author isn't entirely opposed to the current bill in Congress). I'm not sure how well his HSA plan proposed on the final page will work, but it sounds a whole lot smarter than the system adjustments currently proposed. It's good to see an article written by a Democrat who doesn't deny established economic principles.

Hat tip to Dr. Mankiw for posting it.

Micah 6:6-8

2009-08-25T00:39:00.001-04:00

"With what shall I come before the LORD
And bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
With calves a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
With ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God."

Churches of Christ and Baptism: An Historical and Theological Overview

2009-08-22T10:49:00.004-04:00

A good summary of Restoration Movement thought about baptism, relevant to my most recent post. A couple notes:

1. The current ICOC view is not what Dr. Foster describes it to be.

2. The son of the Jimmy Allen mentioned in the article (who is also named Jimmy Allen) spoke at Harvard about baptism just a few months ago!

(Hat tip to Douglas Jacoby. Also, thanks to LT for the correction about which Jimmy Allen was mentioned in the article.)

Some Thoughts on the "Cognizance" Issue

2009-08-21T14:45:00.011-04:00

(N.B.: A good portion of my argument depends on what Peter's hearers knew. I am certainly no expert on that subject, and would appreciate any corrections or further information about them. Furthermore, these thoughts are only preliminary.)

[UPDATE: In one of his podcasts, Douglas Jacoby states that most of the people whom Peter addressed on Pentecost had probably been aware of Jesus' ministry for a few years. In a way, I think this undermines my argument. However, certainly not all the people in the crowd - including those who were baptized - were familiar with the gospel beforehand.]

Recently, I've been thinking about the "cognizance" issue, the issue of whether one's understanding of the spiritual import of baptism affects the validity of one's baptism. The most germane question for those of us within the conservative wing of the Restoration Movement is this:

Do we have to understand that baptism is for the forgiveness of sins in order for our baptisms to be "valid"?

For conservatives within the Restoration Movement, this question is hugely important. Very few Christians today subscribe to the Restoration Movement view of baptism (i.e., immersion of adults for the forgiveness of sins and gift of the Holy Spirit); however, many Evangelicals, "born-again" Christians, and other Protestants (not to mention converts to Catholicism) are baptized as adults. This means that our position on the cognizance issue immediately affects what we believe about the salvation of many of our friends and people such as C.S. Lewis and Peter van Inwagen. If our answer to the question above is Yes, then C.S. Lewis et al. are not saved; if our answer is No, then they are. (Some people I know do not answer the question Yes or No, instead arguing that we cannot say with certainty. While this is true in theory, some tentative answer must be given in practice.)

I have not finalized my thoughts on this matter, but I thought it would be worthwhile to share a few thoughts on the implications of Acts 2 for the cognizance issue.

More conservative Church of Christers will argue that a proper understanding of baptism is necessary because Peter's hearers in Acts presumably understood that baptism was "for the forgiveness of sins" (cf. Acts 2:38). The argument, then, is that baptisms are only valid for those whose "cognizance" of baptism is at least comparable to that of the Christian converts in Acts 2.

Because the argument centers around the understanding of Peter's hearers in Acts 2, it would be useful to reflect on what exactly their states of mind were prior to their baptisms.

Peter's Acts 2 sermon was given during the Pentecost. Jews from all over the Roman world had traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Festival of Weeks.

These Jewish pilgrims were "amazed and perplexed" (v. 12) because the Christians were speaking in their native languages (vv. 7-11). On top of all this, the Christians had tongues of fire resting above their heads (v. 3). In other words, this was no ordinary day.

Jesus was well-known in Jerusalem and the surrounding regions, but most of those present for Peter's sermon - travelers from various distant lands - had probably never heard of him. They were religious Jews - familiar with the Tanakh (the Old Testament), not necessarily with Jesus' ministry. This means that what they knew about Christianity and baptism was, for the most part, limited to Peter's sermon (vv. 14-36). It is true that Peter's comment in v. 22 ("as you yourselves know") implies some prior awareness of Jesus' miracles; that notwithstanding, I find it difficult to believe that their insight into Jesus' life was anything more than cursory.

From Peter's sermon, they learned that Jesus had performed miracles (v. 22), had been raised from the dead (v. 24), had been exalted to the right hand of God (v. 33), and was Lord and Christ (v. 36).

That is pretty much it.

As far as I can tell, they did not know that Jesus had died for their sins (barring some extremely quick inference from Isaiah 53) or that God was Triune. They probably did not understand the entirety of Jesus' divinity. In all likelihood, some of them knew nothing about Communion, Christian morality, or the relationship of the New Covenant to the Old. For that matter, their understanding of baptism was incomplete or undeveloped at best; they did not know, for example, that baptism was a means of participating in Christ's death, burial, and resurrection (cf. Romans 6). Even if many of them were more informed than I suppose (which is certainly within the realm of possibility), it is clear that no emphasis was placed on their comprehension of Christian doctrine.

In short, any cognizance they may have had of any issue was rudimentary and disorganized - so much so that their exact understanding of the significance of baptism seems completely irrelevant.

Am I to believe that the very same men who may not have known that Jesus died for their sins were saved because they understood that baptism was for the forgiveness of sins? Is incomplete knowledge of baptism necessary for salvation if knowledge about Jesus' death on the cross is not?

Perhaps - but, at the moment, I find it extremely unlikely. And if our answer to the question posed at the beginning of this post is "No, such understanding is not necessary," then we should probably reconsider how we approach evangelism, re-baptism, and almost all of our interactions with the broader Christian community. Acts 2 never says that the Pentecost converts knew exactly what they needed to know to be saved; for all we know, they knew more than what was necessary.

But these are just my initial thoughts.

Pelagius on Will

2009-08-16T14:54:00.007-04:00

From Pelagius's Defense Of The Freedom Of The Will, as quoted by Augustine:

"The man who hastens to the Lord, and desires to be directed by Him, that is, who makes his own will depend upon God's, who moreover cleaves so closely to the Lord as to become (as the apostle says) 'one spirit' with Him, does all this by nothing else than by his freedom of will."

"That we are able to do good is of God, but that we actually do it is of ourselves."

It seems to me that Pelagius has a valid interpretation. If we are not responsible for our own good behavior, it seems unjust for God to reward us for it. Heretics can still be right some of the time...