The harmonistic principle

The current debate over Nestorius and Nestorianism has raised the larger issue of harmonization. What are the limits and legitimacy of the harmonistic?

Textbook examples in which this question crops up are Bible “contradictions,” the Trinity, the hypostatic union, as well as the relation between determinism and responsibility. There’s more than one answer, for there are several different issues in play.

1. What is the function of a harmonization? One function is historical. In attempting a historical reconstruction, if you have more than one source of information, you are immediately confronted with the issue of how these sources correlate.

The objective is to piece together a continuous narrative of events, using multiple sources.

This may also involve the question of whether one source is more reliable than another.

2. Another function is apologetic. If your belief-system is charged with inconsistency, one way of responding is to offer a harmonization. This can take different forms:

i) There’s a difference between a factual harmonization and a philosophical harmonization. Take the relation between determinism and responsibility.

A Calvinist will harmonize the data on a factual plane by demonstrating, at an exegetical level, that Scripture subordinates human agency to divine agency. In Scripture, the divine and human factors are no coequal. Rather, human belief or unbelief is traceable to God.

In one respect, that answers the question of how they interrelate. Of which dynamic enjoys priority.

However, for many people, that simply raises another problem. Or, to put it another way, it relieves the tension at a factual level, but leaves it unresolved, or even intensified, at a philosophical level. For the theodicean problem remains.

If man’s actions are predetermined, how can he be blameworthy? And if man’s actions are predetermined, how can God be blameless?

ii) But, from the standpoint of Protestant theological method, you answer the factual question first. You don’t begin with a philosophical answer, and then work back from there to frame your theological position.

We may or may not be able to come up with a philosophical answer. But we are not duty-bound to come up with a philosophical answer. We are only duty-bound to remain faithful to divine revelation.

iii) This is not to say that a philosophical answer is necessarily unavailable. Or that a philosophical answer is divorced from revelation. That can only be ascertained on a case-by-case basis.

iv) As far as a Reformed theodicy is concerned, there is more in play than predestination alone. There is also a doctrine of divine creation, as well as providence.

Evil has a purpose. It has a place in an overarching plan.

Moreover, there are second causes as well as God’s primary causality. Secondary agents and agencies.

v) If you combine these factors with a model of compatibilism, you have a working theodicy.

Compatibilism is not, itself, a revealed truth. Rather, it’s a philosophical construct.

But revealed truths can furnish the raw materials that feed into a philosophical construct.

The makings of a Reformed theodicy are already implicit in Scripture.

3. There is also the question of what a harmonization is supposed to amount to. Must a Christian apologist offer a positive harmonization? Or a negative harmonization?

Is it incumbent on him to demonstrate that two things are compatible? Or is it only incumbent on his to demonstrate that two things are not incompatible?

Must he demonstrate the actual, or the possible?

Obviously, it’s easier to establish the weaker thesis.

4. On a related note, it’s not as if a Christian apologist must shoulder the whole burden of proof.

To the contrary—none of the textbook examples I cited in my introduction is strictly internal to Scripture. In each case, the critic who alleges a tension is making an assertion which takes certain things for granted. He is bringing unspoken assumptions and preconceptions to the textbook examples. So the onus is equally on him to identify and defend his operating assumptions.

It will not do for him to say: “That’s incoherent! Prove me wrong!”

No, he has his own burden of proof to discharge.

5. Let’s run through the list:

i) The problem of how to harmonize determinism and responsibility is only a problem because the critic has an intuitive sense of what must obtain for an agent to be responsible. The problem isn’t generated by Scripture itself.

The critic assumes that responsibility entails freedom, and a particular kind of freedom.

ii) The” problem” of the Trinity is often due to a simplistic statement of the problem, as if a Christian is claiming that the *number* three is identical to the *number* one.

But it should be needless to point out that a Trinitarian isn’t making a claim about abstract numbers, but numbered objects or numerical relations.

In addition, the” problem” of the Trinity isfrequently generated by the critic’s own way of modeling a one-over-many relation. He thinks in terms of discrete units. Or a linear continuum. Absolute identity or absolute alterity.

There are, however, other models of the one-over-many. In certain symmetries, you can have a one-to-one correspondence between A and B without collapsing A into B, or vice versa.

iii) The same reductionist thinking afflicts stock objections to the hypostatic union, as if the Christian were claiming that God *is* a man, simpliciter—or that divine attributes are interchangeable with human attributes.

But the tension is generated from the outside by a simplistic description of the hypostatic union. The hypostatic union doesn’t mean that divine attributes are intersubstitutable with human attributes, or vice versa.

iv) The identification of contradictions in Scripture is also conditioned by extraneous criteria. A critic assumes that Bible character couldn’t have two different names.

He assumes that a number couldn’t be mistranscribed. Or be symbolic. Or be a round number.

He assumes that Scripture couldn’t describe more than one calendrical system.

He assumes that a Bible writer couldn’t paraphrase a speech. Or be selective. Or arrange his material thematically.

I could give many other illustrations. The immediate point is that our “internal” contradiction is actually not an “internal” contradiction at all. Rather, the contradiction is an external relation generated by the critic’s imported assumptions.

6. On another related note, both harmonizations and allegations of disharmony are often arguments from analogy. Debates over the Trinity, hypostatic union, or relation between determinism and responsibility, make use of analogies. Both sides make use of analogies. Critic as well as Christian.

Various analogies. Hypothetical, psychological, mathematical, technological, &c.

And that’s why it’s unreasonable to insist that a Christian apologist must demonstrate that A and B are compatible. For analogies are never demonstrative.

Every argument from analogy involves an element of disanalogy. Since it is only an analogy, it doesn’t entail the thing it analogizes, for the analogue is not identical with the thing it analogizes.

And the absence of strict implication cuts both ways. If it limits the Christian, it limits the critic. Competing analogies.

The objections and analogies often go back to perennial debates over realism and nominalism, monism and dualism, infinity and finitude, time and eternity, freedom and necessity.

They also make use of modern mathematics and technology for apt illustrations.

Nothing is either proven or disproven by such methods. At most they show that a given belief is not incoherent. But the reason for affirming it to be true is independent of the analogy.