Fish Tank Post: "The Red Sweater"

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Aristides on the Early Christians

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'

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

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Pinnock and Universal Salvation

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

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Some Other Varieties of Religious Experience

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?

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Chesterton on Wealth

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

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Fish Tank Post: Perfection

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Cyprian on Joy

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

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

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Fish Tank Post: The Bible and the Word of God

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