Channeling the dark side

Victor Reppert said...
“It seems that the Calvinistic God comes across a little bit like a hypocritical parent, who says ‘Don't do as I do, do as I say’ and ’That's different’, two responses I think I've managed to avoid using with our kids.”

In reading Victor Reppert, you must make a forcible attempt to remind yourself that he’s supposed to be a philosopher. It’s trivially easy to come up with examples in which what is right for one person may be wrong for another.

i) It’s wrong for an alcoholic to consume booze. That doesn’t mean it’s also wrong for someone who can hold his liquor.

ii) It’s wrong for Typhoid Mary to attend a baseball game. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong for you and me attend a baseball game.

iii) It’s wrong for a two-year-old to handle a loaded pistol. That doesn’t make it wrong for a policeman or soldier to handle a loaded pistol.

“In my view moral obligation is created by the fact that God creates us with an intended purpose which is identical to our good, and is acts in a way that is consistent with the pursuit of that good for all his creatures.”

So when the rattlesnake eats the groundhog, that’s good for the groundho? When the shark eats the seal, that’s good for the seal?

Somehow I doubt the seal and the groundhog would share Reppert’s Panglossian outlook. Admittedly, they can’t be reached for comment–inside the tummy of the shark and the rattlesnake.

“On Calvinist theory there is a large gap between what makes God's character good, and what makes us good, a gap that cannot be explained in terms of a difference in God's wisdom or knowledge.”

Well, what do you expect? To take one obvious example, humans reproduce sexually. This creates a whole network of natural social obligations, between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, as well as unrelated age-mates, &c.

As such, there are both analogies and disanalogies between divine and human goodness.

“A native may believe that men in white coats bearing long needles are mean to little kids because he lacks knowledge that the men in the white coats possess, but the standard of goodness for natives and for missionary doctors is the same. Both the native and the doctor want the child to be well, and for the child not to suffer, but they have different ideas as to how to go about it.”

Note the incorrigible irony: Reppert is trying to define goodness, yet he invariably defines goodness in amoral terms. For Reppert, the difference between guilt and innocence never figures in his definition of goodness.

Of course, that’s the way I’d expect the Old Horny to define goodness. To define it amorally, so as to avoid incriminating distinctions between good and evil.

So often, Reppert seems to be channeling the dark side. Listening to Reppert is like overhearing the speech a certain archangel must have given to his comrades to make recruits for his “cause.”

“Piper seems concerned to respond to the charge that God's interest in his glory makes him selfish, since selfishness is a vice amongst humans. If I were to read on someone's tombstone ‘He pursued his own glory single-mindedly throughout his life’ I don't think I would think I was looking at the grave of someone I wish I had known. Glory hogs in basketball don't help the team win.”

i) God is the benefactor, not the beneficiary. God has nothing to gain. It’s for the good of the elect.

ii) God is the summum bonum. The infinite good from which all finite goods derive. Our human self-fulfillment relies on the various ways in which God communicates his goodness to human beings. That’s the opposite of selfishness.

Reppert is a study in spiteful, hellish ingratitude.

“It seems to me that when you say God gives commands based on his nature, it is pretty clear that we don't have obligations to reflect all aspects of God's moral nature in our own conduct. We might be rightly wrathful when someone we love is raped, but we aren't supposed to be looking for or artifically creating opportunities for us to exercise our attribute of being wrathful at evil, (maybe by creating androids who commit crimes so that we can punish them for those crimes)…”

As a general proposition, human beings constantly look for or create artificial opportunities to exercise their attributes, viz., art, literature, music, sports.

So Reppert needs to explain which it’s wrong to “artificially” manifest some attributes, but not others.

Remember, Reppert is the one who’s accentuating the commonalities between God and man.

“As if there was some aspect of us that is going to go unfulfilled if we are fortunate enough never to be in a position where that sort of wrath is called for.”

Once again, this is a spiteful caricature of the Reformed position. The question is not whether God is unfulfilled, but whether creatures are unfulfilled unless they exemplify the exemplar.

That, of course, doesn’t mean every creature is entitled to achieve self-fulfillment. If, for example, a suicide-bomber kills a pizzeria full of Jewish teenagers to get his 70 virgins in Paradise, it’s a fit punishment if, in fact, his eternal destiny deprives him of the very thing he sought through murderous means.

“So while divine commands are supposed to be based on the divine nature, the kind of people we are commanded to be fails to fully reflect the character of God, and there are actions on the part of God which are deemed right which, if parallel actions are performed by humans, they would contravene the commands of God.”

Reppert doesn’t state what he’s referring to. For example, God sometimes visits direct judgment on the wicked (e.g. raining fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah), but sometimes he delegates the judicial action to second parties (commanding the Israelites to execute the Canaanites).