It comes as no surprise that Dawkins’ God Delusion has been panned by Christian reviewers. What is striking is how many secular reviewers have panned him as well.
A Mission to Convert
By H. Allen Orr
As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers. What may be less obvious is that, on questions of God, Dawkins cannot abide much dissent, especially from fellow scientists (and especially from fellow evolutionary biologists). Indeed Dawkins is fond of imputing ulterior motives to those "Neville Chamberlain School" scientists not willing to go as far as he in his war on religion: he suggests that they're guilty of disingenuousness, playing politics, and lusting after the large prizes awarded by the Templeton Foundation to scientists sympathetic to religion.[2] The only motive Dawkins doesn't seem to take seriously is that some scientists genuinely disagree with him.
Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.
The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.
The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).
Instead, Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow. Dawkins's intellectual universe appears populated by the likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science popularizer,[3] both of whom he cites repeatedly. This is a different group from thinkers like William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein—both of whom lived after Darwin, both of whom struggled with the question of belief, and both of whom had more to say about religion than Adams and Sagan. Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question."[4]
The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote. Dawkins's discussion of religion's power to console, for example, is interrupted by the story of the Abbott of Ampleforth's joy at learning of a friend's impending death; speculation about why countries, such as the Netherlands, that allow euthanasia are so rare (presumably because of religious prejudice); a nurse who told Dawkins that believers fear death more than nonbelievers do; and the number of days of remission from Purgatory that Pope Pius X allowed cardinals and bishops (two hundred, and fifty, respectively). All this and more in four pages. Gone, it seems, is the Dawkins of The Selfish Gene, a writer who could lead readers through dauntingly difficult arguments and who used anecdotes to illustrate those arguments, not to substitute for them.
One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments appears judged largely by where they lead.
The most important example involves Dawkins's discussion of philosophical arguments for the existence of God as opposed to his own argument against God, which he presents as the intellectual heart of his book. Considering arguments for God, Dawkins is care-ful to recite the many standard objections to them and writes that the traditional proofs are "vacuous," "dubious," "infantile," and "perniciously misleading." But turning to his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument against God, Dawkins is suddenly uninterested in criticism and writes that his argument is "unanswerable." So why, you might wonder, is a clever philosophical argument for God subject to withering criticism while one against God gets a free pass and is deemed devastating?
The reason seems clear. The first argument leads to a conclusion Dawkins despises, while the second leads to one he loves. Dawkins, so far as I can tell, is unconcerned that the central argument of his book bears more than a passing resemblance to those clever philosophical proofs for the existence of God that he dismisses. This is unfortunate. He could have used a healthy dose of his usual skepticism when deciding how much to invest in his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument. Indeed, one needn't be a creationist to note that Dawkins's argument suffers at least two potential problems. First, as others have pointed out, if he is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging—as when Dawkins asks "who designed the designer?"— cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?
Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary, and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity." We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.
Putting aside these philosophical matters, Dawkins's key empirical claim—that religion is a pernicious force in the world—might still be right. Is it? Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of children's minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.
But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a systematic way. Tests of religion's consequences might involve a number of different comparisons: between religion's good and bad effects, or between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence— with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.
Part of Dawkins's difficulty is that his worldview is thoroughly Victorian. He is, as many have noted, a kind of latter-day T.H. Huxley. The problem is that these latter days have witnessed blood-curdling experiments in institutional atheism. Dawkins tends to wave away the resulting crimes. It is, he insists, unclear if they were actually inspired by atheism. He emphasizes, for example, that Stalin's brutality may not have been motivated by his atheism. While this is surely partly true, it's a tricky issue, especially as one would need to allow for the same kind of distinction when considering religious institutions. (Does anyone really believe that the Church's dreadful dealings with the Nazis were motivated by its theism?)
In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.
One of the most interesting questions about Dawkins's book is why it was written. Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably needed to say it at book length? The God Delusion certainly establishes that Dawkins has little new to offer. Its arguments are those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell's more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers. Dawkins is obviously entitled to his views on God, ballet, and currency markets. But I doubt he feels much need to pen books on the last two topics.
The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion.
None of Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking.
[6] Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of "memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult.... There is no distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge. Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of memes, or what they are selected for."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775
Daniel Dennett's main complaint about my review is that I held Dawkins's book to too high a standard. The God Delusion was, he says, a popular work and, as such, one can't expect it to grapple seriously with religious thought. There are two things wrong with this objection. The first is that the mere fact that a book is intended for a broad audience doesn't mean its author can ignore the best thinking on a subject. Indeed it's precisely the task of the popularizer to take this best thinking and present it in a form that can be understood by intelligent laymen. This task is certainly feasible. Ironically, the clearest evidence comes from Dawkins himself. In his popular works on evolution, and especially in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrestled with the best evolutionary thinkers —Darwin, Hamilton, and Trivers—and presented their ideas in a way that could be appreciated by a broad audience. This is what made The Selfish Gene brilliant; the absence of any analogous treatment of religion in Dawkins's new book is what makes it considerably less than brilliant.
The second thing wrong with Dennett's objection is that it's simply not true that The God Delusion was merely a popular survey and "not an attempt to contribute to ...philosophical theology." Dennett has apparently forgotten that the heart of Dawkins's book was his philosophical argument for the near impossibility of God. Dawkins presented his so-called Ultimate Boeing 747 argument in a chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," branded his argument "unanswerable," and boasted that it had stumped all theologians who had met it. I can see why Dennett would like to forget about Dawkins's attempt at philosophy—the Ultimate 747 argument was shredded by reviewers—but it's absurd to pretend now that The God Delusion had no philosophical ambitions. It also won't do to claim, as Dennett does, that Dawkins's book was concerned only with arguments "that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day." Dawkins explicitly stated that he was targeting all forms of the God Hypothesis, including deism, and insisted that all were victims of his arguments.
As for C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, I cited it to show that Lewis had already dispensed with one of Dawkins's claims. Dennett now tells us that Lewis was no recondite thinker but a fairly unsophisticated pop theologian. I agree. Indeed that was exactly my point. I called Lewis's book "the most widely read work of popular theology ever" and noted that there was no evidence that Dawkins was familiar even with such popular material, much less with serious theology.
Finally, Dennett fundamentally misunderstands my review. He seems to think that I'm disturbed by Dawkins's atheism and pointedly asks which religious thinkers I prefer instead. But as I made clear, I have no problem with where Dawkins arrived but with how he got there. It's one thing to think carefully about religion and conclude it's dubious. It's another to string together anecdotes and exercises in bad philosophy and conclude that one has resolved subtle problems. I wasn't disappointed in The God Delusion because I was shocked by Dawkins's atheism. I was disappointed because it wasn't very good.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19928
H. Allen Orr is Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. He is the author, with Jerry A. Coyne, of Speciation. (January 2007)
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Blacklisted
For rationally and calmly debating Brian Insapient via email, accepting his debate challenge he made on Nightline (only to have him backout), and answering his questions for theists, I have been blacklisted.
Atheist Richard Spenser, host of Faith and Freethought Radio, had this to report:
Like I said, the RRS is free to continue to present themselves as offering some kind of challenge to Christian theism (whatever that is), but they really should't pretend it's any where near a rational challenge.
Rational Response Squad - 0
Christian Theism - 1
Atheist Richard Spenser, host of Faith and Freethought Radio, had this to report:
"I spoke with Sapient recently and was informed that Paul [Manata] had been added to the list of people the RRS will not talk to. (And it's a short list, so congrats Paul.) I find it odd that the RRS has posted questions but then, after someone takes the time to answer them all, they add that person's name to the list of people they won't talk to. This creates the impression that they only want to talk to people who can't answer their questions."
Like I said, the RRS is free to continue to present themselves as offering some kind of challenge to Christian theism (whatever that is), but they really should't pretend it's any where near a rational challenge.
Rational Response Squad - 0
Christian Theism - 1
The Bible’s Definitions
In several different discussions lately, atheists have been demanding to know what the Bible’s definition of something is. Their demands have an extremely limited merit, but the approach being used is completely farcical. In both of the most recent examples (example one and example two (see also the follow up in the comments with “Doubting Tom” this post)), the atheist demands “chapter and verse” for the definition of a theological term.
Specifically, we have the most recent request of Tundaz (linked in example one above) stating:
The problem with this is that the Bible is not a dictionary, nor is it to be used as such. There are only very rare instances when the Bible specifically states out an explicit definition in a matter that would satisfy today’s atheists. But this is to be expected in a book that is meant to have a universal, trans-cultural appeal.
Atheists—no, let us get even more specific: Modern Westernized atheists account for one very small slice of all the cultural viewpoints that have ever existed. Were the Bible penned to address every whim of modern Westernized atheists, the Bible would have remained meaningless for thousands of years, incomprehensible to any other culture.
The modern Western philosophical method of defining terms—of explicitly stating them in the midst of a comprehensive philosophical argument—is not only historically limited to just a few hundred years, but is also not even the way that anyone speaks normatively today. There is a reason that philosophy books have a limited appeal while James Patterson and Steven King are read by millions.
The average person speaks colloquially, using words defined by their context set in the conventions of society. Language is fairly “loose” when used in this manner, but it is how every culture converses, and it is how modern Western philosophers speak when they are not writing stuffy books.
The Bible’s intention was not that it would be understood by only the selected philosophical elite, but that it would have a universal and transcendent scope. The uneducated farmer in the Nile Delta in 200 AD could understand the point of Scripture when it was read to him; he would not need a modern philosophy degree to “get it.”
So, to demand “chapter and verse” where a term is defined ignores 1) the cultural context of the term’s usage—that is, how it was used conventionally; 2) the textual context of the term’s usage—that is, how it was used in the text itself; and 3) the anachronistic aspect of inserting a philosophized back into a colloquial work.
While the first two points should be fairly self-evident, I will clarify what I mean by the third point. The term “omnipotent” is not found in Scripture. It is a term that systematic theologians came up with to describe one of the various attributes of God that can be discovered by reading the text of Scripture. As such, the “definition” of the term is the distillation of multiple points drawn from various sources, linked by a common bond. In the case of omnipotence, the common bond is the concept of the power of God. The meaning is defined not by a single verse, but by every verse that deals with God’s power.
That this can be summarized in a modern definitional form by systematic theologians does not mean that the modern definitional form is found in an explicit statement in the Bible itself; nor should it. The onus, at this point, is on the atheist to demonstrate how this is not a perfectly reasonable manner in which concepts can be conveyed to the vast majority of people throughout all history. In other words, the atheist needs to demonstrate why the Christian must be compelled to give him a definition in such a narrowly constructed manner as the atheist requests.
Specifically, we have the most recent request of Tundaz (linked in example one above) stating:
Please state the Bible's definition of 'omnipotence' for the record, noting the chapter and verse if you will.His request was echoed by Gray_Mouser too.
The problem with this is that the Bible is not a dictionary, nor is it to be used as such. There are only very rare instances when the Bible specifically states out an explicit definition in a matter that would satisfy today’s atheists. But this is to be expected in a book that is meant to have a universal, trans-cultural appeal.
Atheists—no, let us get even more specific: Modern Westernized atheists account for one very small slice of all the cultural viewpoints that have ever existed. Were the Bible penned to address every whim of modern Westernized atheists, the Bible would have remained meaningless for thousands of years, incomprehensible to any other culture.
The modern Western philosophical method of defining terms—of explicitly stating them in the midst of a comprehensive philosophical argument—is not only historically limited to just a few hundred years, but is also not even the way that anyone speaks normatively today. There is a reason that philosophy books have a limited appeal while James Patterson and Steven King are read by millions.
The average person speaks colloquially, using words defined by their context set in the conventions of society. Language is fairly “loose” when used in this manner, but it is how every culture converses, and it is how modern Western philosophers speak when they are not writing stuffy books.
The Bible’s intention was not that it would be understood by only the selected philosophical elite, but that it would have a universal and transcendent scope. The uneducated farmer in the Nile Delta in 200 AD could understand the point of Scripture when it was read to him; he would not need a modern philosophy degree to “get it.”
So, to demand “chapter and verse” where a term is defined ignores 1) the cultural context of the term’s usage—that is, how it was used conventionally; 2) the textual context of the term’s usage—that is, how it was used in the text itself; and 3) the anachronistic aspect of inserting a philosophized back into a colloquial work.
While the first two points should be fairly self-evident, I will clarify what I mean by the third point. The term “omnipotent” is not found in Scripture. It is a term that systematic theologians came up with to describe one of the various attributes of God that can be discovered by reading the text of Scripture. As such, the “definition” of the term is the distillation of multiple points drawn from various sources, linked by a common bond. In the case of omnipotence, the common bond is the concept of the power of God. The meaning is defined not by a single verse, but by every verse that deals with God’s power.
That this can be summarized in a modern definitional form by systematic theologians does not mean that the modern definitional form is found in an explicit statement in the Bible itself; nor should it. The onus, at this point, is on the atheist to demonstrate how this is not a perfectly reasonable manner in which concepts can be conveyed to the vast majority of people throughout all history. In other words, the atheist needs to demonstrate why the Christian must be compelled to give him a definition in such a narrowly constructed manner as the atheist requests.
The Baptist Priesthood
Recently, I've seen a few individuals writing about my personal take on the Baptist concept of the priesthood of believers/the priesthood of the believers. In part this is due to a comment I made on Wade Burleson's blog last week. In part, it is due to a comment I made regarding confessions and confessionalism at Strange Baptist Fire and an article there. You will notice, there is not a comment section here. There's a reason for this. First, I just wanted to do it because Pike said something about comments. It's my attempt at humor in that regard. Also, apparently at least one person feels I "owe" him "several responses." Well, so he won't be disappointed, he can read my statements here and not feel that if I don't respond he has been slighted. This is a statement to answer the questions and concerns put forth by others in other venues who have asked or whom I have read and don't believe that they quite "get" my position. It is not open for disputation here, since apparently at least one individual has felt it is worth disputation elsewhere, and this view has been put forth by others and he appears to be impervious to anything other than disputation about it already with others who hold the same or a similar view. This will just give him one less person with whom to argue. Also, I just plain don't feel well right now, so I may not be back for awhile. It's less of an item for me to have to keep track.
This issue is a hot topic in SBC circles because there are those who are deriving the right of private interpretation of the Scriptures from it. When I disagree, they somehow get the impression that I am denying the historic meaning of the term or the right of private interpretation. This is muddled in several respects, so this article is my attempt to shed some light on my personal position.
First, it is no secret I do not believe the BFM is a useful confession of faith anymore. I have been quite consistent for some time now in stating that I prefer the older Baptist confessions of faith. They are written in far better fashion and don't suffer from the "39 Articles of the Christian Religion Syndrome" of the BFM. The BFM is the 4th iteration of the NHC. Most folks interpret it like it was written in 1963 or 2000, so they pour their own meaning into it. Likewise, they don't take account of the meaning of the terms in the NHC or the 1925, so the SBC at present has a confession that suffers from being read by too many people too broadly while being a broad confession. It could stand to be revised using the old High Protestant Orthodox method of employing positive and negative articles, and that's just for starters. Right now, you have folks who are reading the BFM as, for example, synergists, and others and monergists. These two positions contradict each other. The BFM cannot support both. Likewise, at present, I am in a brand new church plant, so I am outside the SBC. If SBC folks wish to dismiss what I have to say because of that, then sobeit. Nevermind, until then I was in the SBC from my conversion onwards and my family goes back in SBC life at least 3 generations. It is also likely that the Brabourne about whom John Bunyan wrote was one of my ancestors. He was a "7th Day" Baptist. I think my "Baptist credentials" are up-to-date.
Likewise, one young woman whom I respect a great deal, with respect to confessions brought up the issue of PPL (private prayer language) in the SBC, another topic of discussion. I agree, PPL is not addressed in the BFM, ergo attempts to use it to justify or contradict the doctrine fall outside the BFM, but this isn't because of a problem in the way confessions are used per se; rather the problem here lies in elevating "Baptist distinctives" – in this case cessationism – to a rationalistic principle around which the BFM is interpreted or constructed. The anti-PPL people have done just that. Likewise, it seems to me that her position – appealing to the priesthood of believers – over and against the confession is no different. All she has done is employ one "historic Baptist principle" over another allegedly "historic Baptist principle," so her own position is not functionally any different than the one she opposes. In so doing she has conflated the right of personal interpretation of Scripture in Baptist thought and Protestant theology at large with the priesthood of believers/the believer. These principles intersect but they are not the same.
I agree that Scripture trumps the BFM. I agree that confessions are not be believed simply because they are confessions. I agree they are derivative documents, and revisable. However, I also believe that the older confessions in particular are better confessions and well tried; that is why I employ them. There is a vast body of literature on the right use of them emanating from the Reformed tradition in particular; I will touch on this more later. I also affirm that it is enough to trump the BFM with the BFM by showing it does not address the issue. The issue of Scripture and the BFM arises if there is a move to revise the BFM, as it pertains to the administration of the denomination.
It is exceptionally difficult to construe this doctrine, the priesthood of the believer/believers, in an individualistic manner. One gentleman who appears to have sympathy with the moderate wing of the Convention (saying that the BFM "killed what was born @ Calvary) wanted to know when they changed this doctrine from priesthood of the believer to the priesthood of believers. As I pointed out, this "change" was the other way around. It is hard to see how the BFM 2000 "killed" this doctrine since, when you take a tour through other theological traditions in this regard as well as our own, you find views much more sympathetic to the BFM 2000's view than the one he apparently espouses. This concept is not simply a Baptist distinctive; it is a also Reformational distinctive and antedates Baptistery. It becomes a "Baptist" distinctive when wedded to an ecclesiology that includes a regenerate church membership. Baptists do not have the corner market on the priesthood of believers/the believer. Likewise, this individual wanted to know which I thought was to the best terminology. By way of reply, that depends on what is meant. Unlike some, I try to be precise in my terminology, so I don't throw theological jargon around lightly.
First, what does this term mean in Scripture? The locus classicus is, of course , but where does this text turn this into a license for the right to interpret or study Scripture and the right of individual interpretation? Peter draws on the rock – stone language of Scripture in the OT to speak of Christ building a church, a non-spatial temple that is composed of believers all of whom are priests within it. The emphasis here is not on the right of the individual to interpret Scripture, but the priestly status and function of the covenant community as a whole. Each individual is a priest, that is very true, and there is no sacerdotal class to be found in this text; no covenant Mediator of salvation beyond Christ the Great High Priest, but, again, where is the reference to private interpretation? The references here are to being a people, a nation of priests, a covenant community. Those seeking to construct this idea from this text will have to look elsewhere.
What of the language of offerings in the New Testament? Some of this language appears in Hebrews . Also, drawing on the OT images, Paul speaks of us offering our bodies as living sacrifices (chapter 12). He writes of us offering "faith." (). He speaks of our preaching, doing evangelism, the conversion of others, and this is described as an offering acceptable to God (). In church government, one can relate this concept to a check on the authority of elders. The members are free to "vote with their feet" if need be, or, if the local church has settled on a more strictly congregational polity, vote their elders out. Again, where is this idea the priesthood relates to private interpretation of Scripture? Hebrews speaks of believers as a priesthood that can enter into the holy of holies and "continually offer up sacrifices of praise to God, that is the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name" (Hebrews).
Intersecting with these images, Scripture ascribes a prophetic office to the believer and his community. It also places (eschatological) significance on the kingly office. In short, the threefold ministry of Christ as the mediator of the New Covenant is carried out by us as His representatives by the power of the Holy Spirit in an analogous fashion. We preach the Word, men are converted by the Spirit's power, applying the benefits of redemption to them. We pray for others; the Spirit intercedes for us; Christ intercedes with the Father.
One young lady has said to me:
Priesthood of the Believer does say that we have the same Holy Spirit and we do read the Bible for ourselves and interpret it as the Holy Spirit guides. There is only one true interpretation.
I agree in principle, but I must ask her to show where this is to be found in relation to this particular doctrine in Scripture. If there is "only one true interpretation" how does she know she has it? Her "Holy Spirit intuition?" I hope not. If so, that's Henry Blackaby and Experiencing God talking, not grammatical-historical exegesis and its work. That position is dangerous because it can lead to the Quaker error on the one hand and mysticism or to Barthian "Scripture is a channel of revelation" thinking on the other. The Reformed tradition, and the current position of the BFM 2000 I might add in response to an interlocutor on Wade's blog, strives to chart a middle course.
What is missing here is a theology of illumination and a theology of revelation. Neo-orthodoxy and Quakerism conflate them. Quakerism tended to elevate the Spirit at the expense of the Word. Neo-orthodoxy tended to equate the Word, the Spirit, and Christ in its theology of revelation. Keswickism, which seems to lie at the root of much of the "interpret Scripture on your own" thinking of the Henry Blackaby set, is quite like Quakerism. Functionally, there is little difference. Calvin complained about the impossibility of rational discussion with people who punctuated every other sentence with references to what the Spirit had told them.
For the record, I do not construe the doctrine of illumination as some sort of direct mind-to-mind contact between the individual and the Holy Spirit. I agree substantially with Steve Hays here who construes illumination as being very like (if not a product of) regeneration. The Spirit keeps us teachable and applies the Word of God to wash us of sin and its noetic effects. Essentially, He keeps our eyes and ears open, but He does not whisper the hermeneutical solution into our spiritual ears through some sort of inner voice or revelatory "encounter." This is not to be confused with a deistic view of interpretation, in which providence is in abeyance. Do not make that mistake either.
Illumination is the process by which God's Holy Spirit enables us to understand His word and apply it to our lives.
J.I. Packer tells us that,
"The knowledge of divine things to which Christians are called is more than a formal acquaintance with biblical words and Christian ideas. It is a realizing of the reality and relevance of those activities of the triune God to which Scripture testifies. Such awareness is natural to none, familiar with Christian ideas though they may be (like "the man without the Spirit" in who cannot receive what Christians tell him, or the blind leaders of the blind of whom Jesus speaks so caustically in , or like Paul himself before Christ met him on the Damascus road). Only the Holy Spirit, searcher of the deep things of God, can bring about this realization in our sin-darkened minds and hearts. That is why it is called "spiritual understanding" (spiritual means "Spirit-given," . Those who, along with sound verbal instruction, "have an anointing from the Holy One... know the truth".
The work of the Spirit in imparting this knowledge is called "illumination," or enlightening. It is not a giving of new revelation, but a work within us that enables us to grasp and to love the revelation that is there before us in the biblical text as heard and read, and as explained by teachers and writers. Sin in our mental and moral system clouds our minds and wills so that we miss and resist the force of Scripture. God seems to us remote to the point of unreality, and in the face of God's truth we are dull and apathetic. The Spirit, however, opens and unveils our minds and attunes our hearts so that we understand. As by inspiration he provided Scripture truth for us, so now by illumination he interprets it to us. Illumination is thus the applying of God's revealed truth to our hearts, so that we grasp as reality for ourselves what the sacred text sets forth.
Illumination, which is a lifelong ministry of the Holy Spirit to Christians, starts before conversion with a growing grasp of the truth about Jesus and a growing sense of being measured and exposed by it. Jesus said that the Spirit would "convict the world" of the sin of not believing in him, of the fact that he was in the right with God the Father (as his welcome back to heaven proved), and of the reality of judgment both here and hereafter. This threefold conviction is still God's means of making sin repulsive and Christ adorable in the eyes of persons who previously loved sin and cared nothing for the divine Savior.
The way to benefit fully from the Spirit's ministry of illumination is by serious Bible study, serious prayer, and serious response in obedience to whatever truths one has been shown already. This corresponds to Luther's dictum that three things make a theologian: oratio (prayer), meditatio (thinking in God's presence about the text), and tentatio (trial, the struggle for biblical fidelity in the face of pressure to disregard what Scripture says)."
Thus "illumination" applies to every verse in the Bible.
Again, where is the right of private interpretation to be found here? That is, at most, an inference from these texts and doctrines but what these texts have in common explicitly is not, as Timothy George states, a status of the individual, but the service of the individual within the covenant community and external to that community, as when evangelism is depicted as a sort of priestly service. Ergo, the priesthood of "the" believer is not to be divorced from the priesthood of believers. To assert an either/or distinction is a false disjunction. Likewise, to retreat to it for a license to believe whatever you want from Scripture is not the way this doctrine was meant to be construed, and such a position is simply unsupportable from the Scriptures.
This means that the right of private interpretation does not emanate from this function as such. On the contrary, in the OT, when we see this being exercised by the priestly class to draw conclusions to make judgments; it was a function of their community. The prophets themselves received a word from the Lord, but again, they understood this as part of a community of thinking within OT Yahwism as well as individuals hearing from God or an angel. It is common practice in Christian-Jewish apologetics to refer not only to Scripture but the rabbis to show where a great deal of NT Scripture's take on the OT can be found in the wider corpus of Jewish theological writing. Likewise to conflate the work of the prophets with the right of private interpretation, particularly in the New Covenant era, is to conflate revelation and illumination. Inscripturation has ceased. Individual believers today are not prophets proclaiming an inspired message or composing inspired Holy Writ straight from God. Certainly each individual can and should study Scripture for himself, but this does not mean that the right of private interpretation is an absolute right, where the community must tolerate whatever conclusion the individual has reached come what may. The community excluded the prophets, and God used this to judge the community. The community listened to the prophets too, and God used this to bless the community and relent.
Nor does it mean that "the mind of the church" should be invoked every time a believer studies Scripture as if the individual cannot or should not differ with the community or must rely on commentaries and confessions. (On the other hand, in 2000 or so years of exegesis, it is seriously doubtful anybody is going to arrive at some new groundbreaking conclusions). One is to err to defect where it's all about the individual; the other is to err to excess, where there is no variation at all or worse, where all doctrines are "fundamental" (the Lutheran error of which Turretin wrote) or even worse, dogmatic faith in every prescribed article from the ecclesiastical authority = saving faith, which is just another form of Gnosticism. One leads to anarchy and latitudinarianism; the other leads to legalism. In other words, one leads to the Book of Judges, where each did what was right in his own eyes, and the other leads to the Sanhedrin of the First Century or Rome post-Trent. Both are to be avoided.
So, where do I stand on the right of private interpretation? I certainly affirm it, but I do not affirm it because of some doctrine of inner light ala the Quakers or the Henry Blackaby school of determining God's will, or Pentecostalism, or a "Christocentric" revelational model, ala Barth and his followers. Rather, my beliefs in this matter fall under the rubric of Sola Scriptura itself, that is, the doctrine of Scripture; its authority, clarity and perspicuity, and its right use and the historic affirmations that all individual believers have not a right, but a duty, to read and understand Scripture for themselves going back well past the Reformation into the writing of John Chrysostom and Augustine and many others. I argue for it from the infallibility of Scripture itself; from the perspicuity of Scripture itself, etc.; from the example of the Bereans; from Jesus words in Matthew and elsewhere; from Paul's charge to Timothy to study himself and so forth. It, like the concept of the priesthood of believers, can also be found in the OT, where certain commands, for example in Deuteronomy, are predicated on the individual reading and interpreting Scripture for himself and with his family and as part of the wider community; and fulfilling the nation's prophetic, priestly service (or failing to do so) to the world externally and to each other internally. In other words, I argue for it, but not from the commonly used platform in Baptist circles, but from the platform of the doctrine of Scripture and its material and formal sufficiency, etc., so do not mistake my stand on the priesthood of believers/the believer with my stand on the right of private interpretation; they intersect; but they are not the same. Thus, when you find me taking a particular view on the priesthood concept it is because I differentiate between that concept and the doctrine of Scripture. The latter, not the former, is, in my view, the better platform from which to argue the right of private interpretation - and the former in particular should be caveatted to prevent abuse. It is the responsibility and right of each believer, with regard to the priesthood concept, not because he is priest in the 1 Peter sense, per se, although that is true in that the priesthood is composed of individual priests, but because s/he is a priest within a covenant community of them and that community needs them. It is a concept that intersects with the priesthood concept, but it is not synonymous with it. This is why I will state that what is "best" in terminology depends on what the individual means. Words form sentences and concepts. A man or woman's right of private interpretation is not a license. Timothy George, quoting Eastwood, a Methodist, no less, notes,
"The common error that the phrase "Priesthood of Believers" is synonymous with "private judgment" is most unfortunate and is certainly a misrepresentation . . . . Of course, the Reformers emphasized "private judgment," but it was always "informed" judgment, and it was always controlled, checked, and corroborated by the corporate testimony of the congregation. Indeed Calvin himself fully realized that uncontrolled private judgment means subjectivism, eccentricity, anarchy, and chaos."
For more on this see: http://www.founders.org/FJ03/article1_fr.html Also, see Eastwood's text.
Those who differ from the more moderate arm of the Convention tend to quote at length from statements of Baptists from the 19th century and beyond or discuss the Baptist view of the freedom of conscience and religious liberty. This obscures the exegetical construct and the dogmatic history of this doctrine. Further, one can detect a subtle shift from "religious liberty" to "priesthood of the believer" to "soul competency" such that some I have read have begun with one concept and wound up at another. This is sloppy theology. These three are intersecting, but not synonymous principles. The right of individual responsibility to stand before God soteriologically is not "the priesthood of the believer." The lack of any mediator than Christ for the believer is not "religious liberty," nor is it the right of private interpretation.
One has stated:
"Certainly, the biblical interpretations of the Manifesto writers are open to dispute. However, there is a simpler and more definitive way to examine their case. If Christians, throughout history, had accepted the congregational view, Baptists would still be Catholics. It was the individual interpretations of men, led by the Holy Spirit, which brought about most church advancements. Would these Manifesto writers say that Martin Luther had no right to come to his own conclusions and disagree with the confession of his Roman Church? Should Roger Williams not have fought his Congregationalist Church for the separation of church and state? Was William Tyndale indeed a heretic for translating the Holy Bible? If it were not for the individual interpretations of the Reformers, Protestant theology may never have developed."
This simply ignores the Reformers' sense of connectedness with the Ancient Church itself. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Tyndale, Bucer, et.al. were all trained in the Fathers. They did not simply ground their ideas in Scripture and nothing else, e.g. Solo Scriptura. Indeed, their theology proper, Christology, and pneumatology shows a very deep connectedness to the Ancient Church. Their view was that Rome, particularly her priestly hierarchy and thus her churches, had become apostate and obscured the gospel, keeping it from the people. They therefore believed they, not Rome and her councils, popes, priests, and ecclesiastical orders, were the legitimate heirs of the Ancient Church. They therefore sought to demonstrate that. Indeed, on the issues of Scripture, ecclesiology, and soteriology, they argued not only from Scripture but from the Fathers and from the Schoolmen. The difference lay in their belief that Scripture alone was infallible. These others were ancillary. This writer would do well to read the vast body of literature on post-Reformation dogmatics before making such distorted claims.
So, what about the use of confessions? Where do I stand on this? First, I differentiate between a confession for a local church and a confession for the association or the denomination. Second, I affirm that the association has the right to exclude any church or individual it wishes. The tradeoff for the right of private interpretation is the right of the majority to disagree and, yes, exclude if they so choose. Indeed, in Scripture, there are plenty of examples where we are told to mark out false teachers. The issue is "What constitutes false teaching at the local level, the associational level, etc.?" How much latitude should we exercise? Also, "no creed but the Bible" sounds cool, but what does that mean? Jehovah's Witnesses can make that same claim. Alexander Campbell made that claim in the 19th century too. My Baptist brethren would do well to remember that.
For the most part, I agree with Sam Waldron:
A confession of our loyalty to the Bible is not enough. The most radical denials of biblical truth frequently coexist with a professed regard for the authority and testimony of the Bible. When men use the very words of the Bible to promote heresy, when the Word of truth is perverted to serve error, nothing less than a confession of Faith will serve publicly to draw the lines between truth and error. …
The church is to "hold fast the form of sound words", to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once delivered to the saints", and to "stand fast with one spirit, with one soul striving for the faith of the gospel". In the fulfilment of this task, a confession is a useful tool for discriminating truth from error and for presenting in a small compass the central doctrines of the Bible in their integrity and due proportions. ..
Nevertheless, our confessions are not inherently sacrosanct or beyond revision and improvement; and, of course, church history did not stop in the seventeenth century (or any other). We are faced with errors today which those who drew up the great confessions were not faced with and which they did not explicitly address in the confessions, but it is a task to be undertaken with extreme caution. …
A confession is a useful means for the public affirmation and defence of truth…(it) serves as a public standard of fellowship and discipline…(and it) serves as a concise standard by which to evaluate ministers of the Word." R. P. Martin in Samuel E. Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, (Evangelical Press, 1989), p9-23.
I also agree with Shedd,
"Every house divided against itself cannot stand.".
WGT Shedd was right, those who differ with this principle are"latitudinarian bigots," who in reality hate precision, do not love liberty, and who desire to impose their latitudinarian bigotry on everyone. (W.G.T. Shedd, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1893). pp. 167-68.)
The Charleston Association's Discipline included references to churches falling into heresy and what to do. There are plenty of examples of Baptists using confessions at the associational level to include and exclude. "Back in the day" a lot of what passes for theology and ethics locally would have been dealt with long before the state convention level. NC would not be seeking to exclude sixteen churches at present over the homosexuality issue a century or more ago. A presbytery would have been formed from the churches and the association would have excluded the churches and/or publicly disciplined their elders through circular letters and questions answered. The association would have refused to seat the churches. The association would likely have voted with its own feet and left those churches behind if they refused to repent. This is not popular with some Baptists today. Too bad; you want the right to interpret Scripture the way you see fit, by all means you have it; but don't expect that to come without a price. Their objection to the price proves Shedd was right. It is also a price we must all pay if we wish to cooperate under the same roof. This price should drive us to work out our differences not bleat incessantly about them. It should drive us to sit down, hold a proverbial synod if we must, and work it out; if we still cannot come to a resolution, then we should part ways and be done with it - but only as a last resort.
This does not mean that a confession cannot be abused. On the contrary, I agree with the "Wade Burleson" wing of the SBC on that. This is no secret either. The issue, however, as I stated above, is not the use of the confession itself, but the elevation of concepts that are from deeper down in the confession to the level of a constructive doctrine around which all else is crafted and defended and / or the imposition of particular interpretations on the confession's text that the text's grammar and history do not support. The right use of a confession is predicated on a well thought out theology built on the right principia. Like the older confessions, when it lists a set of Scriptures, for example, it assumes that the exegesis of them is known and has been done and is available for review and that a certain amount of "preconfession" work has already been done. "Baptist principles," whether cessationism or the priesthood of the believer/believers, are not the right principia. That smacks of rationalism, and is no better than constructing a theology around libertarian freedom as the Open Theists, or predestination like hyper-Calvinists. That smacks of real philosophical rationalism at work, not run of the mill logical, systematic thinking, the sort of rationalism that is acceptable. That is by far a greater danger than the use of a confession or construing this priesthood concept in communal fashion. That is why I say opposing the BFM on PPL with "priesthood of the believer/s" just moves the question back one step and repeats the same sort of thinking process. My concern there is the way theology is constructed, not which principle/s is/are the best for a central plank or planks.
Some have stated
"What you are advocating in your definition is too close to the Roman Catholic Church and the days of the one Bible, one interpretation from the Priests and that just isn't so and never was."
By way of reply the RCC error was one of excess in making all articles a matter of saving faith on the one hand, as Turretin stated, and its blatantly defective soteriology and epistemology on the other. There never was "one interpretation" from the priests in the Middle Ages either.
Raymond E. Brown: To the best of my knowledge the Roman Catholic Church has never defined the literal sense of a single passage of the Bible. Raymond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 40.
Raymond E. Brown, S.S.: Roman Catholics who appeal explicitly to Spirit-guided church teaching are often unaware that their church has seldom if ever definitively pronounced on the literal meaning of a passage of Scripture, i.e., what the author meant when he wrote it. Most often the church has commented on the on-going meaning of Scripture by resisting the claims of those who would reject established practices or beliefs as unbiblical. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 31.
Maurice Bévenot, S.J.: But very few indeed are the Scripture texts of which the Church authorities have defined the meaning, and even there, their intervention has generally been to say what Scripture does not mean, otherwise leaving open what it does. See his chapter "Scripture and Tradition in Catholic Theology" in F.F. Bruce and E.G. Rupp, eds., Holy Book and Holy Tradition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968), p. 181.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J.: When one hears today the call for a return to a patristic interpretation of Scripture, there is often latent in it a recollection of Church documents that spoke at times of the 'unanimous consent of the Fathers' as the guide for biblical interpretation.(fn. 23) But just what this would entail is far from clear. For, as already mentioned, there were Church Fathers who did use a form of the historical-critical method, suited to their own day, and advocated a literal interpretation of Scripture, not the allegorical. But not all did so. Yet there was no uniform or monolithic patristic interpretation, either in the Greek Church of the East, Alexandrian or Antiochene, or in the Latin Church of the West. No one can ever tell us where such a "unanimous consent of the fathers" is to be found, and Pius XII finally thought it pertinent to call attention to the fact that there are but few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church, "nor are those more numerous about which the teaching of the Holy Fathers is unanimous." (fn. 24) Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Scripture, The Soul of Theology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 70.
R. C. Fuller: Again, Scripture texts are incorporated into Dogmatic decrees in proof or illustration of partiular doctrines. appears in the Bull Inffabilis Deus defining the Immaculate Conception. Infallibility however applies only to the dogma defined and not to any particular argument adduced in support of it; hence the interpretation of , though of great weight, is not infallible by reason of its inclusion in this decree (cf. Durand, art. Exégèse DTC 1838). The number of texts infallibly interpreted by the Church is small: for further examples see Mangenot-Rivière, art. cit. 2317-9. It has been estimated that the total of such texts is under twenty, though there are of course many others indirectly determined (cf. Corluy, 426; Durand art. cit. 1838). It should also be observed that an infallible interpretation of a text does not necessarily exhaust its full meaning. See Dom Bernard Orchard, M.A., ed., A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), pp. 59-60.
R. C. Fuller: The number of texts determined by the consent of the Fathers is even smaller than that of the texts determined by the decrees of the Church. Dom Bernard Orchard, M.A., ed., A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), p. 60.
Johann Adam Möhler: Except in the explanation of a very few classical passages, we know not where we shall meet with a general uniformity of Scriptural interpretation among the fathers, further than that all deduce from the sacred writings, the same doctrines of faith and morality, yet each in his own peculiar manner; so that some remain for all times distinguished models of Scriptural exposition, others rise not above mediocrity, while others again are, merely by their good intentions and love for the Saviour, entitled to veneration. Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctorinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 301-302.
Johann Adam Möhler: Catholic theologians teach with general concurrence, and quite in the spirit of the Church, that even a Scriptural proof in favour of a decree held to be infallible, is not itself infallible, but only the dogma as defined. Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctorinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997), p. 296.
Stravinskas: In the only declared exercise of papal infallibility, Pope Pius XII, after consultation with all the bishops of the Catholic Church, on November 1, 1950, proclaimed the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a doctrine of the Faith." Peter M.J. Stravinskas, Our Sunday Visitor's Catholic Encyclopedia (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1991), p. 100-101.
Stravinskas: It is also worth noting that whenever a rare, definitive interpretation is given, it is done only after consultation with the best exegetes of the day, as well as allowing for the divine guidance promised by Jesus to His Church (see ; )." Peter M. J. Stravinskas, The Catholic Church and the Bible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), pp. 15-16.
Patrick Madrid on : . . . the dogma being defined here is Peter's primacy and authority over the Church — not a formal exegesis of . The passages from and are given as reasons for defining the doctrine, but they are not themselves the subject of the definition. As anyone familiar with the dogma of papal infallibility knows, the reasons given in a dogmatic definition are not themselves considered infallible; only the result of the deliberations is protected from error. It's always possible that while the doctrine defined is indeed infallible, some of the proofs adduced for it end up being incorrect. Patrick Madrid, Pope Fiction (San Diego: Basilica Press, 1999), p. 254.
Karl Von Hase: If the Catholic Church really believed in her infallibility, and did not prefer to hide the Divine pound in the earth, she would long ago have set forth a clear and well-defined list of all her teaching concerning the faith, instead of which we are now obliged to search for this, especially in its finer relations, from sources which in other respects are not irreproachable. On so many points are Catholic schools at variance with one another, and in rejoinder to every Protestant attack the appropriate subterfuge is of course that the Catholic teaching has been misunderstood or misrepresented.
It is only seldom that tradition, summoned to the support of newly arisen dogmas, corresponds to any extent with the rule upon which Vincentius laid stress, that it should have been believed everywhere, always, and by all. Karl Von Hase, Handbook to the Controversy with Rome, trans. A. W. Streane (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1909), Vol. 1, pp. 128-129.
My view of confessions is exactly that of the elders at Bethlehem Baptist Church on the local level. It is also largely the view of Turretin and Witsius and the High Orthodox Reformed on the associational/denominational level. It is by far the traditional Protestant view. If this smacks of Romanism, then the view being offered by this person smacks of Quakerism, but I don't believe that for a moment. This person needs some historical perspective before leveling such hyperbolic judgments. I agree with Andrew Fuller,
"If a religious community agrees to specify some leading principles which they consider as derived from the Word of God, and judge the belief of them to be necessary in order to any person's becoming or continuing a member with them, it does not follow that those principles should be equally understood, or that all their brethren must have the same degree of knowledge, nor yet that they should understand and believe nothing else. The powers and capacities of different persons are various; one may comprehend more of the same truth than another, and have his views more enlarged by an exceedingly great variety of kindred ideas; and yet the substance of their belief may still be the same. The object of articles [of faith] is to keep at a distance, not those who are weak in the faith, but such as are its avowed enemies." Andrew Fuller, Works 5:222.
My church uses the First London Confession. It requires ascription to particular articles for the members. I, and the elders, agree that every member need not be held to the level of accountability for every doctrine in the confession as the deacons or elders, ergo certain ones are essential; others are not. Essentially, I agree with the way the PCA uses the WCF and Bethlehem Church uses its confession. For example, you don't have to be a Calvinist to join the PCA. Some of their churches even accept credo-baptists. However, if you wish to be an elder, teacher, or deacon, you are held to a higher standard. You may differ with the confession with the approval of the presbytery. Bethlehem Baptist follows a similar pattern. I affirm the right of each local church to set its own parameters in that regard.
What is my position on fundamental articles? That's a very good question. My position is largely that of Turretin and Witsius. I would point readers to Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics Volume 1, the concluding chapter, by Richard Muller for more on that.
Contradictory appeals to omnipotence
It’s rather amusing to see unbelievers level mutually exclusive objections to the Christian faith. I’ve commented on this once before, but to take a different example:
On the one hand, when unbelievers are mounting the argument from evil or the argument from divine hiddenness, they appeal to divine omnipotence. Surely God would make a better world. He could improve the world by intervening more often. By suspending or bypassing the laws of nature. He could make his existence more evident tot all by arranging the stars to spell out Jn 3:16. Things like that.
Not only could he do so, but if he really existed, this is what he would and should be doing. God is unbelievable because an omnipotent God should be far more generous with his signs and wonders.
On the other hand, when unbelievers are attacking YEC or the Resurrection or dominical exorcisms or Biblical miracles generally, they reverse course by appealing to the uniformity of nature and the laws of nature.
Such events are unbelievable because they’re too supernatural. They invoke too many miracles, thereby violating the laws of nature and disrupting the uniformity of nature. We must always presume methodological naturalism.
Apparently, militant unbelievers need to hold a private retreat in order to decide among themselves why they don’t believe in Christianity. Is it because the Christian worldview is too ordinary or too extraordinary? Too miraculous or too providential?
After they report back to us on which objection they’ve finally agreed to use, we’ll be happy to respond in kind.
On the one hand, when unbelievers are mounting the argument from evil or the argument from divine hiddenness, they appeal to divine omnipotence. Surely God would make a better world. He could improve the world by intervening more often. By suspending or bypassing the laws of nature. He could make his existence more evident tot all by arranging the stars to spell out Jn 3:16. Things like that.
Not only could he do so, but if he really existed, this is what he would and should be doing. God is unbelievable because an omnipotent God should be far more generous with his signs and wonders.
On the other hand, when unbelievers are attacking YEC or the Resurrection or dominical exorcisms or Biblical miracles generally, they reverse course by appealing to the uniformity of nature and the laws of nature.
Such events are unbelievable because they’re too supernatural. They invoke too many miracles, thereby violating the laws of nature and disrupting the uniformity of nature. We must always presume methodological naturalism.
Apparently, militant unbelievers need to hold a private retreat in order to decide among themselves why they don’t believe in Christianity. Is it because the Christian worldview is too ordinary or too extraordinary? Too miraculous or too providential?
After they report back to us on which objection they’ve finally agreed to use, we’ll be happy to respond in kind.
The Practical Papacy
A recent article in the Times of London, regarding the possibility of a reunion between some Anglicans and the Roman Catholic Church, reads:
"Anglicans rejected the Bishop of Rome as universal primate in the 16th century. Today, however, some Anglicans are beginning to see the potential value of a ministry of universal primacy, which would be exercised by the Bishop of Rome, as a sign and focus of unity within a reunited Church."
Obviously, the reasoning of these Anglicans leaves a lot to be desired. But which is worse? The fact that these Anglicans are following that sort of logic? Or the fact that even some of the most conservative defenders of Roman Catholicism are so desperate as to use the same sort of reasoning as their primary defense of the doctrine of the papacy? We hear less and less about a historical case for the papacy from passages like Matthew 16 and the church fathers and more and more about a philosophical case in which an appeal is made to the practical benefits of having a papacy.
These Anglicans are leaving one sinking ship to join another. One of the ships is bigger and is sinking more slowly.
"Anglicans rejected the Bishop of Rome as universal primate in the 16th century. Today, however, some Anglicans are beginning to see the potential value of a ministry of universal primacy, which would be exercised by the Bishop of Rome, as a sign and focus of unity within a reunited Church."
Obviously, the reasoning of these Anglicans leaves a lot to be desired. But which is worse? The fact that these Anglicans are following that sort of logic? Or the fact that even some of the most conservative defenders of Roman Catholicism are so desperate as to use the same sort of reasoning as their primary defense of the doctrine of the papacy? We hear less and less about a historical case for the papacy from passages like Matthew 16 and the church fathers and more and more about a philosophical case in which an appeal is made to the practical benefits of having a papacy.
These Anglicans are leaving one sinking ship to join another. One of the ships is bigger and is sinking more slowly.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Saturday, February 17, 2007
An Introduction
People who read the comments on the various posts here will probably already know this, but since certain people are enaged in a crusade against comments I thought it would be helpful to give a brief introduction to who I am here.
My name is Peter Pike. I am now a T-Blogger.
You probably know me better as CalvinDude. While some have thought there might be a kind of conspiracy as to why I post as CalvinDude instead of my given name, the reality is that I don't mind if people know my real name. In fact, it's always been on my website. CalvinDude was simply my chat-handle, and since most people who I originally spoke with on-line knew my chat handle, it made for an easy website name.
In any case, since everyone else who posts here uses their actual name, I shall do so too for consistency. (Hey, some of the atheists may be glad they finally got rid of "CalvinDude"!) :-)
Now, what about me? I am simply an almost 29-year-old man who lives in Colorado. I'm currently taking a few classes, but I never really stop learning. Even when I'm not in an official class, I read just about anything I can get my hands on. My interests are wide, ranging from theology and philosophy to number theory and quantum mechanics. My main passion is writing, both fictional works as well as works designed to communicate what I believe.
I work for a Christian non-profit organization, but I neither speak officially for them nor should anyone take my views as representative of their views.
I am a Presbyterian (PCA) and hold to the Westminster Standards. Soteriologically, I am a Calvinist. Eschatologically, I am a partial-preterist. Most already know that I am a Presuppositionalist in my apologetics, but I do not deny the usefulness of other approaches to shore-up the faith of believers (as well as to put a stone in the shoe of unbelievers). I am covenantal, not dispensational.
I look forward to contributing more to Triablogue, and thank Steve for inviting me aboard :-)
My name is Peter Pike. I am now a T-Blogger.
You probably know me better as CalvinDude. While some have thought there might be a kind of conspiracy as to why I post as CalvinDude instead of my given name, the reality is that I don't mind if people know my real name. In fact, it's always been on my website. CalvinDude was simply my chat-handle, and since most people who I originally spoke with on-line knew my chat handle, it made for an easy website name.
In any case, since everyone else who posts here uses their actual name, I shall do so too for consistency. (Hey, some of the atheists may be glad they finally got rid of "CalvinDude"!) :-)
Now, what about me? I am simply an almost 29-year-old man who lives in Colorado. I'm currently taking a few classes, but I never really stop learning. Even when I'm not in an official class, I read just about anything I can get my hands on. My interests are wide, ranging from theology and philosophy to number theory and quantum mechanics. My main passion is writing, both fictional works as well as works designed to communicate what I believe.
I work for a Christian non-profit organization, but I neither speak officially for them nor should anyone take my views as representative of their views.
I am a Presbyterian (PCA) and hold to the Westminster Standards. Soteriologically, I am a Calvinist. Eschatologically, I am a partial-preterist. Most already know that I am a Presuppositionalist in my apologetics, but I do not deny the usefulness of other approaches to shore-up the faith of believers (as well as to put a stone in the shoe of unbelievers). I am covenantal, not dispensational.
I look forward to contributing more to Triablogue, and thank Steve for inviting me aboard :-)
New Testament Authorship
In addition to what Steve has mentioned in his recent posts on 2 Peter and Jude, I wrote an article last year that discusses some general reasons to be skeptical of modern skeptical theories about New Testament authorship.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Who wrote 2 Peter?
I already written some things about the authorship of 2 Peter, so I’m not going to repeat all that here. Instead, I wish to reinforce a few of the points I’ve already made.
The primary objection to Petrine authorship has always been stylistic. Either considered on its own, or in relation to 1 Peter, it’s unlikely that the Apostle Peter could have written 2 Peter—or so goes the argument.
But there are at least a couple of basic problems with this line of objection:
1.Nigel Turner, who’s a leading authority on NT Greek, has documented a certain amount of “Jewish Greek,” in 2 Peter, consisting in Hebraisms and Septuagintalisms. Cf. N. Turner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek (T&T Clark 1980), 4:142-43. This would be quite consistent with Petrine authorship. It would be far less consistent for a 2C native Greek writer.
2.Ellis has also identified what he takes to be the extensive use of preexisting source material in 2 Peter:
“Cited traditions, interspersed with applicative commentary, form the substance of 2 Pet 1:20-3:13. They can often be identified by formulas used elsewhere to introduce quoted material,” E. E. Ellis, The Making of the New Testament Documents (Brill 2002), 120.
“The citations in 2 Peter noted above constitute c. 366 words out of a total of c. 1103=33% of the letter. They are part of two extensive commentaries, 2 Pet 1:20-2:22 and 2 Pet 3:3-13. If the two commentaries, i.e. midrashim are preformed pieces en bloc that the author has (reworked and) incorporated, as seems to be the case in Jude, the preformed material then constitutes c. 606 words or c. 55% of 2 Peter,” ibid. 122. (Cf. 132-33.)
If his analysis is essentially correct, then it makes it very difficult to isolate a Petrine style, for the style of the letter would largely derive from the secondary source rather than the primary source, i.e. the source material which Peter redacted for his own use.
It would also undercut the comparison with 1 Peter, for Ellis applies the same analysis to 1 Peter: “preformed traditions in 1 Peter constitute at least c. 652 out of a total of c. 1669 words, that is, 39% of the letter,” 138.
Needlessly to say, the traditional doctrine of inspiration has never precluded the use of preexisting material (e.g. the Chronicler).
The primary objection to Petrine authorship has always been stylistic. Either considered on its own, or in relation to 1 Peter, it’s unlikely that the Apostle Peter could have written 2 Peter—or so goes the argument.
But there are at least a couple of basic problems with this line of objection:
1.Nigel Turner, who’s a leading authority on NT Greek, has documented a certain amount of “Jewish Greek,” in 2 Peter, consisting in Hebraisms and Septuagintalisms. Cf. N. Turner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek (T&T Clark 1980), 4:142-43. This would be quite consistent with Petrine authorship. It would be far less consistent for a 2C native Greek writer.
2.Ellis has also identified what he takes to be the extensive use of preexisting source material in 2 Peter:
“Cited traditions, interspersed with applicative commentary, form the substance of 2 Pet 1:20-3:13. They can often be identified by formulas used elsewhere to introduce quoted material,” E. E. Ellis, The Making of the New Testament Documents (Brill 2002), 120.
“The citations in 2 Peter noted above constitute c. 366 words out of a total of c. 1103=33% of the letter. They are part of two extensive commentaries, 2 Pet 1:20-2:22 and 2 Pet 3:3-13. If the two commentaries, i.e. midrashim are preformed pieces en bloc that the author has (reworked and) incorporated, as seems to be the case in Jude, the preformed material then constitutes c. 606 words or c. 55% of 2 Peter,” ibid. 122. (Cf. 132-33.)
If his analysis is essentially correct, then it makes it very difficult to isolate a Petrine style, for the style of the letter would largely derive from the secondary source rather than the primary source, i.e. the source material which Peter redacted for his own use.
It would also undercut the comparison with 1 Peter, for Ellis applies the same analysis to 1 Peter: “preformed traditions in 1 Peter constitute at least c. 652 out of a total of c. 1669 words, that is, 39% of the letter,” 138.
Needlessly to say, the traditional doctrine of inspiration has never precluded the use of preexisting material (e.g. the Chronicler).
Hey Jude!
I. Introduction
Last week I got into a conversation with a Christian friend over the status of the apocryphal citations in Jude.
(Just to forestall any confusion, we’re discussing the canonical book of Jude, and not the ballad by Paul McCartney, which raises a rather different set of higher critical questions.)
My friend had consulted several commentaries, but didn’t come away with any entirely satisfactory answers.
So let’s see if we can’t to a better job on this question. The answer depends on how we nail down a number of key identifications.
II. The Evidence
1.Who was Jude?
We don’t have a lot of direct information about Jude.
i) According to the letter itself, he was the brother of James.
This probably refers to James of Jerusalem. And that, in turn, would make Jude a sibling (half-brother) of Jesus.
For arguments in favor of this identification, see: (Bauckham 1983; Bauckham 1990); (Carson/Moo 2005); (Davids 2006); (Guthrie 1990); (Schreiner 2003).
ii) From the author’s familiarity with the OT, Palestinian pseudepigrapha, and pesher exegesis, it is only natural to identify him as a Palestinian Jew, which would be consistent with, and corroborate, (i).
For supporting arguments, see: (Bauckham 1990); (Ellis 1993:221-26).
iii) Jude was probably one of the missionaries alluded to in 1 Cor 9:5. See: (Bauckham 1990).
2.Who was James?
While we lack much direct information about Jude, there are a number of scriptural and extrascriptural sources of information about James. This makes it possible to draw some likely extrapolations from what we know about James to what we can analogize about Jude.
As it bears on the topic of this particular post, the most salient considerations are:
i) James was a very traditional, Palestinian Jew. A pious law-keeper who resided in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. Neither a reactionary nor a revolutionary.
For supporting arguments, see: (Moo 2000); (Shanks/Witherington 2003).
ii) After the dispersion of the Apostles, he assumes leadership of the Jerusalem Church.
For more information, see: (Bauckham 1995).
iii) James was the elder brother. In a culture in which primogeniture was a mark of social status, this would mean that he outranked his younger brother.
3.Who were the readers?
From Jude’s appeal to the OT, Palestinian pseudepigrapha, and use of pesher exegesis, it stands to reason that his audience shared his cultural outlook.
Either they were Palestinian Jews, or Jews who, if living abroad, identified with Palestinian Judaism.
4.Who were the false teachers?
i) The only thing we can say for sure is that the false teachers were antinomians. Some scholars have taken this to rule out their Jewish identity. But that’s premature.
ii) To begin with, they may have been radical Paulinists See: (Bauckham 1990:168)
Indeed, there are modern-day theologians who read Paul the same heretical way, viz. Zane Hodges, Charles Ryrie, Robert Lightner, R. T. Kendall,
iii) If the false teachers weren’t Jewish, it’s unclear why Jude’s very Jewish audience would give them a hearing.
5.Who were the Essenes?
i) As Beckwith explains, “Both parties [Sadducees and Pharisees] had accepted the Maccabaean high-priesthood, which began when Jonathan Maccabaeus became high priest in 152 BC, but it appears from the Qumran evidence that the Essenes had from the beginning rejected it and started setting up their separate communities under their own priesthood; and before the destruction of the Temple the Essenes had been excommunicated from Temple worship (Josephus, Antiquities, 18:1:5, or 18:19). The separate existence that they led probably explains why they never actually figure in the New Testament” (Beckwith 1996:170).
ii) Beckwith has also argued that the Essenes did not canonize their own sectarian literature. See: (Beckwith 1986:364).
6.Which pseudepigrapha?
This is a bit complicated:
i) The church fathers attributed Jude 9 to The Ascension of Moses. But Bauckham has argued that Jude is alluding to a different work, The Testament of Moses. However, Charlesworth, for one, demurs.
Due to various recensions, and the incomplete state of our extant sources, it’s difficult to be precise.
Beckwith says, “The Assumption of Moses seems, at least in its present form, to be another, though earlier, apocalypse like 2 Esdras, reflecting a mixture of Essene and Pharisaic ideas. Its rejection of the sacrifices offered in the Second Temple (Ass. Mos. 4.7.; 5:1-4; cp. 1 Enoch 89:67,73) is Essene, but its computation of time is Pharisaic” (Beckwith 1986:38-39).
DeSilva says that “after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, E. -M. Laperrousaz has reopened the argument for an Essene provenance for Testament of Moses…We can say for certain that it arises from sectarian circles (the model of Taxo; the rejection of the institution of the Second Temple, at least under its current administration,” (de Silva 2000:1195a).
ii) By contrast, there is common agreement on the attribution of Jude 14-15 to 1 Enoch 1:9. And what was the provenance of 1 Enoch? Beckwith has argued at length that the Enochian literature is Essenic. See: (Beckwith 1981; Beckwith 1996); Cf. (Collins 2000:315a)
III. Evaluation
So where does this leave us with respect to Jude’s use of the Pseudepigrapha?
1.Given that James was, by all accounts, a conventionally and devoutly observant Jew who frequented the Temple, and given the further fact that the Essene literature was sectarian literature, written by a schismatic Jewish party that disowned the religious establishment and was, in turn, disowned by the religious establishment, this creates a very strong presumption against the suggestion that James would regard the Essene literature as either canonical or even inspired (i.e. prophetic).
2.Not only would that conflict with his religious principles, but it would also be at odds with his evangelistic policy. To side with a breakaway sect of Judaism would be very offensive to mainline Jews, and from everything we know about James, he was quite sensitive to the dangers of giving unnecessary offense to the Jewish community at large. So, both on principled and pragmatic grounds, there’s a strong presumption against the idea that James would treat Essene literature as either canonical or inspired.
3. Likewise, it would be very odd of James or Jude to treat Essene literature as canonical if Essenes didn’t even treat their own literature as canonical.
4.What about Jude?
i) He shared the same religious culture. He was subordinate to his older brother. And he collaborated with his older brother.
So, once again, we must presume that he shared his brother’s outlook and practice.
ii) Indeed, there is more than just a strong presumption to that effect. For Jude is the very one who explicitly identifies himself to his readers by reference to his brother James. So he is reinforcing that connection.
5.At the same time, both brothers would be very adept at audience adaptation. Jerusalem was a crossroads of international Jewry. A microcosm of the Jewish macrocosm.
Luke underscores that point in his account of Pentecost (Acts 2). Jewish pilgrims from the far-flung Diaspora.
6.In addition, Jude was probably an itinerate missionary who not only ministered to Jewish pilgrims from the Diaspora, but carried the gospel to the Diaspora.
7.As such, Jude would encounter Jews from a wide variety of Jewish traditions. Cross-culture evangelism would include the various schools and sects of Judaism.
8.Jude seems to cite the Intertestamental literature as authoritative. From this, many scholars conclude that he himself regarded this literature as authoritative.
But that’s a fallacious inference. For he may be mounting an ad hominem appeal, and the ad hominem argument is, almost by definition, an argument from authority.
You appeal to what your audience or your opponent honors as authoritative.
The NT is full of ad hominem arguments.
9.It’s possible that Jude is citing this literature because the false teachers had connections with Essenism. So he’s quoting their own in-house literature against them.
Or it’s possible that Jude is citing this literature because his readers had connections with Essenism, and would therefore find his appeal persuasive on their own grounds.
10.When a Christian apologist critiques Mormonism or Roman Catholicism, he will appeal to Mormon or Roman Catholic literature. And he will cite their literature as authoritative *for them*, given their religious background and social attachments.
We would expect Jude to do no less. And that interpretation gives us the best fit with the overall evidence.
References
Bauckham, R. “James and the Jerusalem Church,” R. Bauckham, ed. The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting (Eerdmans 1995), 415-80.
_____. Jude, 2 Peter (Word 1983).
_____. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus (T&T Clark 1990).
Beckwith, R. Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian (Brill 1996).
_____. “The Earliest Enoch Literature and its Calendar,” Revue de Qumran 10/39 (1981), 388-98.
_____. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (Eerdmans 1986).
Bruce, F. Men and Movements in the Primitive Church (Paternoster 1979).
Carson, D. & D. Moo. An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan 2005).
Charles, J. Literary Strategy in the Epistle of Jude (Scranton Press 1993).
Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament (Cambridge 1987).
Collins, J. “Enoch, Books of,” C. Evans, & S. Porter, eds. Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP 2000), 313-18.
Davids, P. The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (Eerdmans 2006).
DeSilva, D. “Testament of Moses,” C. Evans, S. Porter, eds. Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP 2000), 1192-99.
Ellis, Prophecy & Hermeneutics in Early Christianity (Baker 1993).
Guthrie, D. New Testament Introduction (IVP 1990).
Moo, D. The Letter of James (Eerdmans 2000).
Schreiner, T. 1,2 Peter, Jude (Broadman 2003).
Shanks, J. & B. Witherington. The Brother of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco 2003).
Last week I got into a conversation with a Christian friend over the status of the apocryphal citations in Jude.
(Just to forestall any confusion, we’re discussing the canonical book of Jude, and not the ballad by Paul McCartney, which raises a rather different set of higher critical questions.)
My friend had consulted several commentaries, but didn’t come away with any entirely satisfactory answers.
So let’s see if we can’t to a better job on this question. The answer depends on how we nail down a number of key identifications.
II. The Evidence
1.Who was Jude?
We don’t have a lot of direct information about Jude.
i) According to the letter itself, he was the brother of James.
This probably refers to James of Jerusalem. And that, in turn, would make Jude a sibling (half-brother) of Jesus.
For arguments in favor of this identification, see: (Bauckham 1983; Bauckham 1990); (Carson/Moo 2005); (Davids 2006); (Guthrie 1990); (Schreiner 2003).
ii) From the author’s familiarity with the OT, Palestinian pseudepigrapha, and pesher exegesis, it is only natural to identify him as a Palestinian Jew, which would be consistent with, and corroborate, (i).
For supporting arguments, see: (Bauckham 1990); (Ellis 1993:221-26).
iii) Jude was probably one of the missionaries alluded to in 1 Cor 9:5. See: (Bauckham 1990).
2.Who was James?
While we lack much direct information about Jude, there are a number of scriptural and extrascriptural sources of information about James. This makes it possible to draw some likely extrapolations from what we know about James to what we can analogize about Jude.
As it bears on the topic of this particular post, the most salient considerations are:
i) James was a very traditional, Palestinian Jew. A pious law-keeper who resided in Jerusalem and frequented the Temple. Neither a reactionary nor a revolutionary.
For supporting arguments, see: (Moo 2000); (Shanks/Witherington 2003).
ii) After the dispersion of the Apostles, he assumes leadership of the Jerusalem Church.
For more information, see: (Bauckham 1995).
iii) James was the elder brother. In a culture in which primogeniture was a mark of social status, this would mean that he outranked his younger brother.
3.Who were the readers?
From Jude’s appeal to the OT, Palestinian pseudepigrapha, and use of pesher exegesis, it stands to reason that his audience shared his cultural outlook.
Either they were Palestinian Jews, or Jews who, if living abroad, identified with Palestinian Judaism.
4.Who were the false teachers?
i) The only thing we can say for sure is that the false teachers were antinomians. Some scholars have taken this to rule out their Jewish identity. But that’s premature.
ii) To begin with, they may have been radical Paulinists See: (Bauckham 1990:168)
Indeed, there are modern-day theologians who read Paul the same heretical way, viz. Zane Hodges, Charles Ryrie, Robert Lightner, R. T. Kendall,
iii) If the false teachers weren’t Jewish, it’s unclear why Jude’s very Jewish audience would give them a hearing.
5.Who were the Essenes?
i) As Beckwith explains, “Both parties [Sadducees and Pharisees] had accepted the Maccabaean high-priesthood, which began when Jonathan Maccabaeus became high priest in 152 BC, but it appears from the Qumran evidence that the Essenes had from the beginning rejected it and started setting up their separate communities under their own priesthood; and before the destruction of the Temple the Essenes had been excommunicated from Temple worship (Josephus, Antiquities, 18:1:5, or 18:19). The separate existence that they led probably explains why they never actually figure in the New Testament” (Beckwith 1996:170).
ii) Beckwith has also argued that the Essenes did not canonize their own sectarian literature. See: (Beckwith 1986:364).
6.Which pseudepigrapha?
This is a bit complicated:
i) The church fathers attributed Jude 9 to The Ascension of Moses. But Bauckham has argued that Jude is alluding to a different work, The Testament of Moses. However, Charlesworth, for one, demurs.
Due to various recensions, and the incomplete state of our extant sources, it’s difficult to be precise.
Beckwith says, “The Assumption of Moses seems, at least in its present form, to be another, though earlier, apocalypse like 2 Esdras, reflecting a mixture of Essene and Pharisaic ideas. Its rejection of the sacrifices offered in the Second Temple (Ass. Mos. 4.7.; 5:1-4; cp. 1 Enoch 89:67,73) is Essene, but its computation of time is Pharisaic” (Beckwith 1986:38-39).
DeSilva says that “after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, E. -M. Laperrousaz has reopened the argument for an Essene provenance for Testament of Moses…We can say for certain that it arises from sectarian circles (the model of Taxo; the rejection of the institution of the Second Temple, at least under its current administration,” (de Silva 2000:1195a).
ii) By contrast, there is common agreement on the attribution of Jude 14-15 to 1 Enoch 1:9. And what was the provenance of 1 Enoch? Beckwith has argued at length that the Enochian literature is Essenic. See: (Beckwith 1981; Beckwith 1996); Cf. (Collins 2000:315a)
III. Evaluation
So where does this leave us with respect to Jude’s use of the Pseudepigrapha?
1.Given that James was, by all accounts, a conventionally and devoutly observant Jew who frequented the Temple, and given the further fact that the Essene literature was sectarian literature, written by a schismatic Jewish party that disowned the religious establishment and was, in turn, disowned by the religious establishment, this creates a very strong presumption against the suggestion that James would regard the Essene literature as either canonical or even inspired (i.e. prophetic).
2.Not only would that conflict with his religious principles, but it would also be at odds with his evangelistic policy. To side with a breakaway sect of Judaism would be very offensive to mainline Jews, and from everything we know about James, he was quite sensitive to the dangers of giving unnecessary offense to the Jewish community at large. So, both on principled and pragmatic grounds, there’s a strong presumption against the idea that James would treat Essene literature as either canonical or inspired.
3. Likewise, it would be very odd of James or Jude to treat Essene literature as canonical if Essenes didn’t even treat their own literature as canonical.
4.What about Jude?
i) He shared the same religious culture. He was subordinate to his older brother. And he collaborated with his older brother.
So, once again, we must presume that he shared his brother’s outlook and practice.
ii) Indeed, there is more than just a strong presumption to that effect. For Jude is the very one who explicitly identifies himself to his readers by reference to his brother James. So he is reinforcing that connection.
5.At the same time, both brothers would be very adept at audience adaptation. Jerusalem was a crossroads of international Jewry. A microcosm of the Jewish macrocosm.
Luke underscores that point in his account of Pentecost (Acts 2). Jewish pilgrims from the far-flung Diaspora.
6.In addition, Jude was probably an itinerate missionary who not only ministered to Jewish pilgrims from the Diaspora, but carried the gospel to the Diaspora.
7.As such, Jude would encounter Jews from a wide variety of Jewish traditions. Cross-culture evangelism would include the various schools and sects of Judaism.
8.Jude seems to cite the Intertestamental literature as authoritative. From this, many scholars conclude that he himself regarded this literature as authoritative.
But that’s a fallacious inference. For he may be mounting an ad hominem appeal, and the ad hominem argument is, almost by definition, an argument from authority.
You appeal to what your audience or your opponent honors as authoritative.
The NT is full of ad hominem arguments.
9.It’s possible that Jude is citing this literature because the false teachers had connections with Essenism. So he’s quoting their own in-house literature against them.
Or it’s possible that Jude is citing this literature because his readers had connections with Essenism, and would therefore find his appeal persuasive on their own grounds.
10.When a Christian apologist critiques Mormonism or Roman Catholicism, he will appeal to Mormon or Roman Catholic literature. And he will cite their literature as authoritative *for them*, given their religious background and social attachments.
We would expect Jude to do no less. And that interpretation gives us the best fit with the overall evidence.
References
Bauckham, R. “James and the Jerusalem Church,” R. Bauckham, ed. The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian Setting (Eerdmans 1995), 415-80.
_____. Jude, 2 Peter (Word 1983).
_____. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus (T&T Clark 1990).
Beckwith, R. Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian (Brill 1996).
_____. “The Earliest Enoch Literature and its Calendar,” Revue de Qumran 10/39 (1981), 388-98.
_____. The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (Eerdmans 1986).
Bruce, F. Men and Movements in the Primitive Church (Paternoster 1979).
Carson, D. & D. Moo. An Introduction to the New Testament (Zondervan 2005).
Charles, J. Literary Strategy in the Epistle of Jude (Scranton Press 1993).
Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament (Cambridge 1987).
Collins, J. “Enoch, Books of,” C. Evans, & S. Porter, eds. Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP 2000), 313-18.
Davids, P. The Letters of 2 Peter and Jude (Eerdmans 2006).
DeSilva, D. “Testament of Moses,” C. Evans, S. Porter, eds. Dictionary of New Testament Background (IVP 2000), 1192-99.
Ellis, Prophecy & Hermeneutics in Early Christianity (Baker 1993).
Guthrie, D. New Testament Introduction (IVP 1990).
Moo, D. The Letter of James (Eerdmans 2000).
Schreiner, T. 1,2 Peter, Jude (Broadman 2003).
Shanks, J. & B. Witherington. The Brother of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco 2003).
Ken Connolly's Work
I recently came across a web site that features the work of Ken Connolly. He was (he died in 2005) a teacher and author who produced some videos that I highly recommend. He did a series on the history of the Bible from Mount Sinai to Plymouth Rock, titled "The Indestructible Book", and he did some good biographies of George Muller and Charles Spurgeon. The web site also has the audio of some lectures he gave on various topics. I haven't listened to them, but I have watched some of his videos, and I recommend them to anybody who's interested in material in that format for use in Sunday school classes or for some other purpose.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Bruce Metzger's Death
Justin Taylor has linked to a couple of articles on Bruce Metzger that I'd recommend reading, one by John Piper and another by Ben Witherington. Contrast the little attention Metzger's death is receiving with the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death.
Though I disagreed with Metzger on some issues, and I'm generally more conservative than he was, he was a scholar of the highest rank, and he accomplished a lot. I don't have any stories of personal contact with him, as John Piper and Ben Witherington do, but one of my most positive memories of him is his participation in Lee Strobel's highly influential The Case For Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998). Metzger had to have known that Strobel is an Evangelical, and he had to have known that the book was being written for evangelistic purposes. He not only agreed to be interviewed, but also went out of his way to emphasize his confidence in the historical credibility of Christianity.
His death probably won't receive much attention from the mainstream media, but he lived a highly significant life by any reasonable standard. I'm grateful for that life.
Though I disagreed with Metzger on some issues, and I'm generally more conservative than he was, he was a scholar of the highest rank, and he accomplished a lot. I don't have any stories of personal contact with him, as John Piper and Ben Witherington do, but one of my most positive memories of him is his participation in Lee Strobel's highly influential The Case For Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998). Metzger had to have known that Strobel is an Evangelical, and he had to have known that the book was being written for evangelistic purposes. He not only agreed to be interviewed, but also went out of his way to emphasize his confidence in the historical credibility of Christianity.
His death probably won't receive much attention from the mainstream media, but he lived a highly significant life by any reasonable standard. I'm grateful for that life.
Happy V-Day
Since everyone and their mother is posting today, I thought I'd join the crowd. So this is just to say to all the singles out there, Happy Singles' Awareness Day! :-)
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
McRyanMac Movie Reviews
One of the few privileges that I retain as one of those who helped Steve begin to blog (who then quickly left me in the dust) is the ability to post on Triablogue.
Steve recently reminded me to post my movie reviews here since he noticed that recently I've continued my reviews. I seem to have more time to blog lately and coincidentally to watch movies.
As an overview I give you a link to my rating system which, thanks to the new Blogger, has a handy list at the bottom of some or perhaps all of my blog reviews: McRyanMac Movie Rating System
Who knows when I'll post more. I almost saw A Good Year on the plane today. But then they kicked us off the plane. Doh.
Steve recently reminded me to post my movie reviews here since he noticed that recently I've continued my reviews. I seem to have more time to blog lately and coincidentally to watch movies.
As an overview I give you a link to my rating system which, thanks to the new Blogger, has a handy list at the bottom of some or perhaps all of my blog reviews: McRyanMac Movie Rating System
Who knows when I'll post more. I almost saw A Good Year on the plane today. But then they kicked us off the plane. Doh.
Evil 101
JOHN W. LOFTUS SAID:
“Steve, the problem of evil is stated by me in these words: If God is perfectly good, all knowing, and all powerful, then the issue of why there is so much suffering in the world requires an explanation. The reason is that a perfectly good God would be opposed to it, an all-powerful God would be capable of eliminating it, and an all-knowing God would know what to do about it. So, the extent of intense suffering in the world means for the theist that: either God is not powerful enough to eliminate it, or God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is just not smart enough to know what to do about it. The stubborn fact of evil in the world means that something is wrong with God’s ability, or his goodness, or his knowledge. Again, the explanation needed if from within what you believe. In fact, even if there were no atheists around to argue for it, you would still have to deal with it.”
Yes, John, we know the drill.
Problems:
1.The *amount* of evil (extent, intensity) is not the issue.
The argument from evil, if is to have any traction at all, is a *qualitative* argument, not a *quantitative* argument.
Not, how *much* evil, but evil of a particular *kind*: namely, *gratuitous* evil.
You need to establish the existence of *gratuitous* evil. I’ve pointed this out to you umpteen times.
2.So, we would need to begin by reformulating argument. The correct formulation would be:
“A benevolent God would be opposed to gratuitous evil.”
I agree.
3.So Loftus needs to establish the existence of *gratuitous* evil. How does he propose to do that?
He claims to be mounting an internal argument. But I have yet to see him even begin to mount an internal argument for the existence of *gratuitous* evil.
What examples of evil in the world would count as *gratuitous* evil *according to Christian theology*? That’s the question?
That’s the question, John.
As I’ve said before, there’s more to an internal critique than Christian *theism*. You need to bring the whole of Christian *theology* to bear.
Not just three divine attributes plus a generic dose of brand-X evil.
4.When Loftus talks about “so much suffering in the world,” or “the extent of intense suffering in the world,” or “the stubborn fact of evil,” he clearly has a number of unspoken examples in mind of what *he* considers to be evil.
Three more problems:
i) Not everything he thinks is evil, a Christian thinks is evil; and not everything a Christian thinks is evil, he thinks is evil.
ii) Indeed, he doesn’t think anything is intrinsically evil.
iii) While I might agree with him that *some*, but not all, of his stock examples count as genuine evils, I would not agree with him that they count as gratuitous evils. He has given me no reason to think that consistent with my theology.
“Steve, the problem of evil is stated by me in these words: If God is perfectly good, all knowing, and all powerful, then the issue of why there is so much suffering in the world requires an explanation. The reason is that a perfectly good God would be opposed to it, an all-powerful God would be capable of eliminating it, and an all-knowing God would know what to do about it. So, the extent of intense suffering in the world means for the theist that: either God is not powerful enough to eliminate it, or God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is just not smart enough to know what to do about it. The stubborn fact of evil in the world means that something is wrong with God’s ability, or his goodness, or his knowledge. Again, the explanation needed if from within what you believe. In fact, even if there were no atheists around to argue for it, you would still have to deal with it.”
Yes, John, we know the drill.
Problems:
1.The *amount* of evil (extent, intensity) is not the issue.
The argument from evil, if is to have any traction at all, is a *qualitative* argument, not a *quantitative* argument.
Not, how *much* evil, but evil of a particular *kind*: namely, *gratuitous* evil.
You need to establish the existence of *gratuitous* evil. I’ve pointed this out to you umpteen times.
2.So, we would need to begin by reformulating argument. The correct formulation would be:
“A benevolent God would be opposed to gratuitous evil.”
I agree.
3.So Loftus needs to establish the existence of *gratuitous* evil. How does he propose to do that?
He claims to be mounting an internal argument. But I have yet to see him even begin to mount an internal argument for the existence of *gratuitous* evil.
What examples of evil in the world would count as *gratuitous* evil *according to Christian theology*? That’s the question?
That’s the question, John.
As I’ve said before, there’s more to an internal critique than Christian *theism*. You need to bring the whole of Christian *theology* to bear.
Not just three divine attributes plus a generic dose of brand-X evil.
4.When Loftus talks about “so much suffering in the world,” or “the extent of intense suffering in the world,” or “the stubborn fact of evil,” he clearly has a number of unspoken examples in mind of what *he* considers to be evil.
Three more problems:
i) Not everything he thinks is evil, a Christian thinks is evil; and not everything a Christian thinks is evil, he thinks is evil.
ii) Indeed, he doesn’t think anything is intrinsically evil.
iii) While I might agree with him that *some*, but not all, of his stock examples count as genuine evils, I would not agree with him that they count as gratuitous evils. He has given me no reason to think that consistent with my theology.
"Supernatural"
What generally falls under the “horror” genre in film and TV breaks down into roughly three, sometimes overlapping subgenres:
1.Phobic
Phobic dramas are designed to evoke fear in the audience by primarily psychological devices rather than blood and gore.
A classic exponent is Hitchcock (e.g. Psycho; The Birds). A more recent exponent is Shyamalan (e.g. The Sixth Sense).
This type of “horror” show isn’t essentially different from a ride on a rollercoaster.
Paradoxically, a lot of people like to be scared out of their wits as long as it’s safe.
2.Sadistic
Sadistic dramas, generally known as “slasher films,” attempt, to some extent to evoke fear in the audience through simulated violence.
But there’s a further difference. In phobic dramas, the audience is meant to identify with the victim.
In sadistic dramas, by contrast, the audience is meant to identify with the avenger, tormenter, or serial killer. Sadistic dramas are voyeuristic in an especially evil way. For it’s a legal way to be a vicarious, serial killer. Jonathan Moorhead recently did a post on the subject.
Due to the increasing decadence of society as well as computer graphics, it’s possible to simulate mutilation with extreme realism.
3.Occultic
Finally, occultic dramas generally deal with diabolical creatures, although this can be counterbalanced by saints, angels, and other suchlike.
For some reason, vampires and Antichrist figures are a staple of occultic dramas.
Classic examples include Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.
The occultic subgenre intersects with the Christian worldview. Mind you, occultic dramas are rarely distinguished by their orthodoxy, and some of the occult critters like vampires and werewolves have no immediate analogue in Christian theology.
But at a more general level, this genre is parasitic on Christian supernaturalism and demonology. That distinguishes it from other genres, such as sci-fi or the Western.
“Supernatural,” the TV series which debuted last year on the now-defunct WB, and was picked up by the CW for the second season, is a current vehicle of the occultic category.
It’s about two twenty-something brothers who are demon-slayers by vocation or avocation.
From what I’ve seen of it, a lot of the episodes belong the freak-of-the-week variety. It recycles storylines which have been used and reused since Night Gallery, Dark Shadows, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Yes, I know—I’m showing my age, aren’t I?
The treatment is often rather campy. I’ve tuned out of several episodes after the first five or ten minutes.
More interesting than the show itself is what it tells you about the pop culture. Would the show secularize or rationalize the occultic dimension in order to downplay the Christian roots of this genre?
Classically, the part played by the Winchester brothers would be performed by a priest or exorcist.
Not surprisingly, the show generally takes the tradition out of the church. However, a couple of episodes have in some measure restored the ecclesiastical setting.
In “Faith,” Dean, who suffers from terminal heart disease, is taken by his brother Sam to see a a faith healer.
In this series, Dean is an unbeliever, while Sam is more of a seeker or generic believer—though not a Christian.
How will this episode depict the faith healer? As a rule, television depicts the faith-healer as a charlatan.
Yet in this episode, there’s a twist. The faith-healer is sincere, and, in a sense, he is able to cure the people who come to him.
But unbeknownst to him, he has been empowered by black magic, for his wife has, in effect, made a pact with the devil.
This episode also presents a very sympathetic character (Layla) with terminal brain cancer. And, at the end of the show, Dean is inching towards the light of faith. Here’s one snatch of dialogue:
Dean: It must be rough, to believe in something so much and have it disappoint you like that.
Layla: You wanna hear something weird? I'm okay, really. I guess if you're going to have faith you can't just have it when the miracles happen, you have to have it when they don't.
Dean: So what now?
Layla: God works in mysterious ways. Goodbye Dean.
Dean: Hey, um, you know, I'm not much of the praying type. But I'm gonna pray for you.
Layla: Well, there's a miracle right there.
The treatment of religious themes falls short of Christianity, but it also rises above what we’ve come to expect of standard TV fare.
Then, in the second season, we have what is, in some respects, a sequel: “Houses of the Holy.”
This episode does center on the church. And the primary guest character is a priest (Fr. Reynolds), who is portrayed a strong, principled man of faith
Dean has since reverted to his secular default setting.
The story is about what seems to be an avenging angel. Dean doesn’t believe in angels, and this is why:
Dean: I'll tell you who else had faith like that. Mom. She used to tell me when she tucked me in that angels were watching over us. In fact, that was the last thing she ever said to me.
Sam: You never told me that.
Dean: What's to tell? She was wrong. There was nothing protecting her.
That’s rather perceptive, isn’t it? Dean is an unbeliever, because he’s a disillusioned believer. His atheism is emotional rather than intellectual. His false expectations were dashed, leaving him embittered and hardened.
There is also an exchange between Dean and his brother:
Dean: What's next, you're going to start praying everyday?
Sam: I do pray.
Dean: What?
Sam: I do pray everyday, I have for a while.
Once again, this is unusual for standard TV fare—especially a show that targets the same demographic niche as sci-fi. Indeed, some viewers resent the religiosity of these episodes.
There’s also a point in the dramatic arc where the brothers trade place. Sam is looking for a sign. He thinks he found it in what looked to be an angelic apparition. But it turns out that appearances were deceiving. This leaves him in a state of despair. He was grasping at straws, and the straw he was clinging to snapped.
By contrast, Dean receives a sign, although he wasn’t seeking a sign—indeed, even though he is spiritually evasive and obdurate.
In the end, Sam questions his faith while Dean questions his doubt.
1.Phobic
Phobic dramas are designed to evoke fear in the audience by primarily psychological devices rather than blood and gore.
A classic exponent is Hitchcock (e.g. Psycho; The Birds). A more recent exponent is Shyamalan (e.g. The Sixth Sense).
This type of “horror” show isn’t essentially different from a ride on a rollercoaster.
Paradoxically, a lot of people like to be scared out of their wits as long as it’s safe.
2.Sadistic
Sadistic dramas, generally known as “slasher films,” attempt, to some extent to evoke fear in the audience through simulated violence.
But there’s a further difference. In phobic dramas, the audience is meant to identify with the victim.
In sadistic dramas, by contrast, the audience is meant to identify with the avenger, tormenter, or serial killer. Sadistic dramas are voyeuristic in an especially evil way. For it’s a legal way to be a vicarious, serial killer. Jonathan Moorhead recently did a post on the subject.
Due to the increasing decadence of society as well as computer graphics, it’s possible to simulate mutilation with extreme realism.
3.Occultic
Finally, occultic dramas generally deal with diabolical creatures, although this can be counterbalanced by saints, angels, and other suchlike.
For some reason, vampires and Antichrist figures are a staple of occultic dramas.
Classic examples include Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.
The occultic subgenre intersects with the Christian worldview. Mind you, occultic dramas are rarely distinguished by their orthodoxy, and some of the occult critters like vampires and werewolves have no immediate analogue in Christian theology.
But at a more general level, this genre is parasitic on Christian supernaturalism and demonology. That distinguishes it from other genres, such as sci-fi or the Western.
“Supernatural,” the TV series which debuted last year on the now-defunct WB, and was picked up by the CW for the second season, is a current vehicle of the occultic category.
It’s about two twenty-something brothers who are demon-slayers by vocation or avocation.
From what I’ve seen of it, a lot of the episodes belong the freak-of-the-week variety. It recycles storylines which have been used and reused since Night Gallery, Dark Shadows, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Yes, I know—I’m showing my age, aren’t I?
The treatment is often rather campy. I’ve tuned out of several episodes after the first five or ten minutes.
More interesting than the show itself is what it tells you about the pop culture. Would the show secularize or rationalize the occultic dimension in order to downplay the Christian roots of this genre?
Classically, the part played by the Winchester brothers would be performed by a priest or exorcist.
Not surprisingly, the show generally takes the tradition out of the church. However, a couple of episodes have in some measure restored the ecclesiastical setting.
In “Faith,” Dean, who suffers from terminal heart disease, is taken by his brother Sam to see a a faith healer.
In this series, Dean is an unbeliever, while Sam is more of a seeker or generic believer—though not a Christian.
How will this episode depict the faith healer? As a rule, television depicts the faith-healer as a charlatan.
Yet in this episode, there’s a twist. The faith-healer is sincere, and, in a sense, he is able to cure the people who come to him.
But unbeknownst to him, he has been empowered by black magic, for his wife has, in effect, made a pact with the devil.
This episode also presents a very sympathetic character (Layla) with terminal brain cancer. And, at the end of the show, Dean is inching towards the light of faith. Here’s one snatch of dialogue:
Dean: It must be rough, to believe in something so much and have it disappoint you like that.
Layla: You wanna hear something weird? I'm okay, really. I guess if you're going to have faith you can't just have it when the miracles happen, you have to have it when they don't.
Dean: So what now?
Layla: God works in mysterious ways. Goodbye Dean.
Dean: Hey, um, you know, I'm not much of the praying type. But I'm gonna pray for you.
Layla: Well, there's a miracle right there.
The treatment of religious themes falls short of Christianity, but it also rises above what we’ve come to expect of standard TV fare.
Then, in the second season, we have what is, in some respects, a sequel: “Houses of the Holy.”
This episode does center on the church. And the primary guest character is a priest (Fr. Reynolds), who is portrayed a strong, principled man of faith
Dean has since reverted to his secular default setting.
The story is about what seems to be an avenging angel. Dean doesn’t believe in angels, and this is why:
Dean: I'll tell you who else had faith like that. Mom. She used to tell me when she tucked me in that angels were watching over us. In fact, that was the last thing she ever said to me.
Sam: You never told me that.
Dean: What's to tell? She was wrong. There was nothing protecting her.
That’s rather perceptive, isn’t it? Dean is an unbeliever, because he’s a disillusioned believer. His atheism is emotional rather than intellectual. His false expectations were dashed, leaving him embittered and hardened.
There is also an exchange between Dean and his brother:
Dean: What's next, you're going to start praying everyday?
Sam: I do pray.
Dean: What?
Sam: I do pray everyday, I have for a while.
Once again, this is unusual for standard TV fare—especially a show that targets the same demographic niche as sci-fi. Indeed, some viewers resent the religiosity of these episodes.
There’s also a point in the dramatic arc where the brothers trade place. Sam is looking for a sign. He thinks he found it in what looked to be an angelic apparition. But it turns out that appearances were deceiving. This leaves him in a state of despair. He was grasping at straws, and the straw he was clinging to snapped.
By contrast, Dean receives a sign, although he wasn’t seeking a sign—indeed, even though he is spiritually evasive and obdurate.
In the end, Sam questions his faith while Dean questions his doubt.
In the Big Chair
The argument from evil assumes a divine vantage point. “If I were God, what would I do differently?”
However, this is a deceptively simple, equivocal, and contradictory question.
After all, I can only attempt to answer this question by taking myself as the point of reference. My values. My needs. My duties. My desires.
So what does the question really amount to?
If we unpack it, the question may take this form: “If I were omnipotent, what would I do differently?”
In this version of the question, everything about me remains the same except that I have godlike power.
Of course, this is every boy’s superman fantasy.
Put another way, “If I had a genie in a bottle, what would I ask for?”
Naturally I can think of all sorts of things I might like to have. Maybe my own private island in the Caribbean.
Maybe a wife who looks like Greta Garbo, sings like Joan Sutherland, writes like Christina Rossetti, has a mind like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, &c.
Needless to say, God hasn’t given me any of these things. So God doesn’t necessarily want the same things for me that I might want for myself if I were in a position to wave a magic wand.
Does this mean I’m a religious hypocrite because I might arrange things a little differently if I could do whatever God can do?
But notice that, in this hypothetical, that I’m hardly anything like God. I’m simply a man with one divine attribute.
Suppose we add the attribute of omniscience. Not only am I omnipotent, I am now omniscient as well.
But an omniscient being would not do everything that a merely omnipotent being would do. An omniscient being would know the long-range consequences of every option.
It’s like those time-travel scenarios in which a scientist goes back into the past, makes one apparently discrete improvement, and wipes out the future.
Suppose we add other attributes like wisdom and justice?
The problem with this cumulative procedure is that I lose my personal point of reference. I no longer know what I would do, because the less human I am, and the more godlike I am, I cease to be me. I don’t know what it would be like to be someone else—especially someone with a very different set of attributes. I only know what it’s like to be me, and, by analogy, others of a kind. My fellow human beings.
The question seems to be intelligible when you change one attribute, but leave everything else intact. Yet I can’t relate to my godlike alter-ego. I can’t identify with what such a being would do if I were him, for I no longer know what it would mean for *me* to be *like* him. I wouldn’t be me anymore. My godlike alter-ego would be unrecognizable. Personal alterity instead of personal identity. Not enough continuity to even extrapolate from what I am to what I would be.
So the question is contradictory. It assumes in the premise what it denies in the conclusion. It trades on a radical equivocation of terms by appealing to my humanity while, at the very same time, swapping out my humanity for divinity. It asks me to assume a divine perspective while appealing to my human perspective.
My deified self wouldn’t want a South Sea island, or the wife of my dreams, or anything else uniquely human or male or mammalian or creaturely. There rapidly comes a point beyond which we cannot make any projections from our own experience to an utterly alien experience.
You might as well ask, what would I do if I were a kumquat? How would I feel if I were a starfish?
However, this is a deceptively simple, equivocal, and contradictory question.
After all, I can only attempt to answer this question by taking myself as the point of reference. My values. My needs. My duties. My desires.
So what does the question really amount to?
If we unpack it, the question may take this form: “If I were omnipotent, what would I do differently?”
In this version of the question, everything about me remains the same except that I have godlike power.
Of course, this is every boy’s superman fantasy.
Put another way, “If I had a genie in a bottle, what would I ask for?”
Naturally I can think of all sorts of things I might like to have. Maybe my own private island in the Caribbean.
Maybe a wife who looks like Greta Garbo, sings like Joan Sutherland, writes like Christina Rossetti, has a mind like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, &c.
Needless to say, God hasn’t given me any of these things. So God doesn’t necessarily want the same things for me that I might want for myself if I were in a position to wave a magic wand.
Does this mean I’m a religious hypocrite because I might arrange things a little differently if I could do whatever God can do?
But notice that, in this hypothetical, that I’m hardly anything like God. I’m simply a man with one divine attribute.
Suppose we add the attribute of omniscience. Not only am I omnipotent, I am now omniscient as well.
But an omniscient being would not do everything that a merely omnipotent being would do. An omniscient being would know the long-range consequences of every option.
It’s like those time-travel scenarios in which a scientist goes back into the past, makes one apparently discrete improvement, and wipes out the future.
Suppose we add other attributes like wisdom and justice?
The problem with this cumulative procedure is that I lose my personal point of reference. I no longer know what I would do, because the less human I am, and the more godlike I am, I cease to be me. I don’t know what it would be like to be someone else—especially someone with a very different set of attributes. I only know what it’s like to be me, and, by analogy, others of a kind. My fellow human beings.
The question seems to be intelligible when you change one attribute, but leave everything else intact. Yet I can’t relate to my godlike alter-ego. I can’t identify with what such a being would do if I were him, for I no longer know what it would mean for *me* to be *like* him. I wouldn’t be me anymore. My godlike alter-ego would be unrecognizable. Personal alterity instead of personal identity. Not enough continuity to even extrapolate from what I am to what I would be.
So the question is contradictory. It assumes in the premise what it denies in the conclusion. It trades on a radical equivocation of terms by appealing to my humanity while, at the very same time, swapping out my humanity for divinity. It asks me to assume a divine perspective while appealing to my human perspective.
My deified self wouldn’t want a South Sea island, or the wife of my dreams, or anything else uniquely human or male or mammalian or creaturely. There rapidly comes a point beyond which we cannot make any projections from our own experience to an utterly alien experience.
You might as well ask, what would I do if I were a kumquat? How would I feel if I were a starfish?
The Lion, the Witch, and the iMonk
Michael Spencer has replied to something I wrote about him, which was, in turn, written in support of something over at Fide-0.
Here is the gist of his reply:
“Let me suggest to a number of bloggers that according to this article, Lewis was a ‘boilerplate liberal’ no different from ‘Fosdick,’ and logically, turning his back on Christianity.”
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/cs-lewis-and-inerrancy
What Spencer has done here is to play a game of chicken. Like teenage drag racers, who will blink first? Who will swerve before hitting the oncoming car or slam on the brakes before careening over the cliff?
The way he’s set up his reply, this is an argument from analogy, based on a bluff:
“I dare you—I double-dare—you to call me a liberal, cuz if you call me a liberal, then you gotta call C. S. Lewis a liberal to!”
To begin with, this is an intellectually pitiful reply. A comparison between his position and Lewis’s, even if the parallel holds, does absolutely nothing to validate his own position.
And why does he think I would hesitate to criticize Lewis’s theory of inspiration? Indeed, I’ve done so in the past.
Apparently, he’s attempting to create a pragmatic dilemma. Lewis has a big following. If I force people to choose between my view and Lewis’s, then I will lose the popularity contest.
So, if I back down, he wins, and if I press the comparison, he also wins—wins by hiding behind the skirts of C. S. Lewis.
You could hardly come up with a better example of Spencer’s poor-little-me-centered theology. And it also illustrates his frivolity.
Instead of showing that the charge originally leveled by the Fide-0 boys is false, he turns this into a popularity contest and a game of chicken.
Instead of asking which theory of inspiration corresponds with reality, he indulges in sophomoric sophistries.
Spencer is way more concerned about his self-image, and public image, and massaging his wounded ego and hurt feelings and personal insecurities.
All of us have our share of fears and weaknesses, but not all of us erect kneeing-rails around the altar of our fears and weaknesses. Spencer is creating a customized religion—designed to insulate himself from outrageous slings and arrows to his persecution-complex. He’s beginning to erect a whole edifice around the Religion of Spencerism—to pad and pamper his felt needs and hurts. The time is past due for a grown man to grow up.
If this were a private affair, it would be no one’s business but his own immediate social circle. But when he goes public to justify himself, and to justify himself by assuming the role of a false teacher, then this needs to be publicly reproved.
In addition, Spencer as a rather revealing way of misquoting and misrepresenting his opponents. He attributes to me the claim that he is a boilerplate liberal, no different from Fosdick, that he has logically turned his back on Christianity, and that, by parity of argument, I should say the same thing about C. S. Lewis.
This is what I actually said:
“Jason reproduced part of an essay by Spencer to document his charge that Spencer has a liberal view of Scripture… The essay articulates boilerplate liberalism. It could have been penned by Fosdick.”
“If we can take him at his word, then it’s clear from what he wrote that Spencer has turned a corner on what he believes about Scripture (unless this is what he always believed, but kept mum about it in the past). He has given a series of reasons for his belief. There is no way for him to back down without retracting his arguments. On the face of it, he's crossed a line of no return.”
So, just to set the record straight, I made no sweeping claims about Spencer’s theology in general. Rather, my remarks were specifically targeting his view of Scripture, as articulated in his own essay on the subject.
Whether Spencer is liberal or conservative in other respects is not question on which I expressed myself. I have opinion one way or the other.
That said, if you have a liberal view of Scripture, then, at best, this makes you’re a theological moderate. And I’d say the same thing about Lewis.
Some professing believers have a way of compartmentalizing their faith, being more conservative on some doctrines, and more liberal in others.
In many respects, Lewis held traditionally orthodox positions, and his view of Scripture is well to the right of Bultmann—not that that’s hardly a very exalted standard of comparison.
But even though this is not what I originally said, yet, since Spencer chooses to frame the issue in these terms, it’s quite true that if you deny the inerrancy of Scripture, then, *logically* speaking, you’ve committed apostasy.
Now, there’s a difference between psychology and logicality. A mediating position represents an intellectually unstable compromise.
Yet some moderates, perhaps many, do not pursue their liberal views of Scripture to their logical conclusion. Often, though, their students or disciples do take their mentor’s position to its logical conclusion. So they are setting others up for the fall.
Continuing:
“Lewis’s statements may frustrate Christians who hold that Scripture is inerrant.”
Since Lewis is not my rule of faith, it doesn’t frustrate me. He did some things very well—mainly the fictional stuff. And his apologetic work was important at the time, although it’s be overtaken by more sophisticated treatments.
But he is not and was not a sound theological guide. For that you need to look elsewhere.
“One wishes that Lewis had taken more time to examine other apologetic responses to his objections against inerrancy, but the message of his writings remains clear. Lewis did not believe in an inerrant Bible, though he did believe that Scripture was in some sense inspired.”
Except that this is one of the areas in which the self-serving parallel between Lewis and Spencer breaks down. For there were mitigating circumstances in the case of Lewis. His culture dealt him a weak hand. His church was the church of Lux Mundi, Bishop Colenso, Pusey, and Fredrick Farrar. And we know from the Downgrade controversy that the dissenting tradition didn’t offer much of a counterballast.
Lewis was a layman, fighting on his own. Lewis improved on his circumstances. He parlayed a pair of deuces into, if not a royal flush, then at least a full house.
By contrast, Spencer has parlayed a royal flush into three of a kind on a way to deuces. Like a dissolute son of the peerage, he squanders his evangelical patrimony on the apologetics of self-pity.
Here is the gist of his reply:
“Let me suggest to a number of bloggers that according to this article, Lewis was a ‘boilerplate liberal’ no different from ‘Fosdick,’ and logically, turning his back on Christianity.”
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/cs-lewis-and-inerrancy
What Spencer has done here is to play a game of chicken. Like teenage drag racers, who will blink first? Who will swerve before hitting the oncoming car or slam on the brakes before careening over the cliff?
The way he’s set up his reply, this is an argument from analogy, based on a bluff:
“I dare you—I double-dare—you to call me a liberal, cuz if you call me a liberal, then you gotta call C. S. Lewis a liberal to!”
To begin with, this is an intellectually pitiful reply. A comparison between his position and Lewis’s, even if the parallel holds, does absolutely nothing to validate his own position.
And why does he think I would hesitate to criticize Lewis’s theory of inspiration? Indeed, I’ve done so in the past.
Apparently, he’s attempting to create a pragmatic dilemma. Lewis has a big following. If I force people to choose between my view and Lewis’s, then I will lose the popularity contest.
So, if I back down, he wins, and if I press the comparison, he also wins—wins by hiding behind the skirts of C. S. Lewis.
You could hardly come up with a better example of Spencer’s poor-little-me-centered theology. And it also illustrates his frivolity.
Instead of showing that the charge originally leveled by the Fide-0 boys is false, he turns this into a popularity contest and a game of chicken.
Instead of asking which theory of inspiration corresponds with reality, he indulges in sophomoric sophistries.
Spencer is way more concerned about his self-image, and public image, and massaging his wounded ego and hurt feelings and personal insecurities.
All of us have our share of fears and weaknesses, but not all of us erect kneeing-rails around the altar of our fears and weaknesses. Spencer is creating a customized religion—designed to insulate himself from outrageous slings and arrows to his persecution-complex. He’s beginning to erect a whole edifice around the Religion of Spencerism—to pad and pamper his felt needs and hurts. The time is past due for a grown man to grow up.
If this were a private affair, it would be no one’s business but his own immediate social circle. But when he goes public to justify himself, and to justify himself by assuming the role of a false teacher, then this needs to be publicly reproved.
In addition, Spencer as a rather revealing way of misquoting and misrepresenting his opponents. He attributes to me the claim that he is a boilerplate liberal, no different from Fosdick, that he has logically turned his back on Christianity, and that, by parity of argument, I should say the same thing about C. S. Lewis.
This is what I actually said:
“Jason reproduced part of an essay by Spencer to document his charge that Spencer has a liberal view of Scripture… The essay articulates boilerplate liberalism. It could have been penned by Fosdick.”
“If we can take him at his word, then it’s clear from what he wrote that Spencer has turned a corner on what he believes about Scripture (unless this is what he always believed, but kept mum about it in the past). He has given a series of reasons for his belief. There is no way for him to back down without retracting his arguments. On the face of it, he's crossed a line of no return.”
So, just to set the record straight, I made no sweeping claims about Spencer’s theology in general. Rather, my remarks were specifically targeting his view of Scripture, as articulated in his own essay on the subject.
Whether Spencer is liberal or conservative in other respects is not question on which I expressed myself. I have opinion one way or the other.
That said, if you have a liberal view of Scripture, then, at best, this makes you’re a theological moderate. And I’d say the same thing about Lewis.
Some professing believers have a way of compartmentalizing their faith, being more conservative on some doctrines, and more liberal in others.
In many respects, Lewis held traditionally orthodox positions, and his view of Scripture is well to the right of Bultmann—not that that’s hardly a very exalted standard of comparison.
But even though this is not what I originally said, yet, since Spencer chooses to frame the issue in these terms, it’s quite true that if you deny the inerrancy of Scripture, then, *logically* speaking, you’ve committed apostasy.
Now, there’s a difference between psychology and logicality. A mediating position represents an intellectually unstable compromise.
Yet some moderates, perhaps many, do not pursue their liberal views of Scripture to their logical conclusion. Often, though, their students or disciples do take their mentor’s position to its logical conclusion. So they are setting others up for the fall.
Continuing:
“Lewis’s statements may frustrate Christians who hold that Scripture is inerrant.”
Since Lewis is not my rule of faith, it doesn’t frustrate me. He did some things very well—mainly the fictional stuff. And his apologetic work was important at the time, although it’s be overtaken by more sophisticated treatments.
But he is not and was not a sound theological guide. For that you need to look elsewhere.
“One wishes that Lewis had taken more time to examine other apologetic responses to his objections against inerrancy, but the message of his writings remains clear. Lewis did not believe in an inerrant Bible, though he did believe that Scripture was in some sense inspired.”
Except that this is one of the areas in which the self-serving parallel between Lewis and Spencer breaks down. For there were mitigating circumstances in the case of Lewis. His culture dealt him a weak hand. His church was the church of Lux Mundi, Bishop Colenso, Pusey, and Fredrick Farrar. And we know from the Downgrade controversy that the dissenting tradition didn’t offer much of a counterballast.
Lewis was a layman, fighting on his own. Lewis improved on his circumstances. He parlayed a pair of deuces into, if not a royal flush, then at least a full house.
By contrast, Spencer has parlayed a royal flush into three of a kind on a way to deuces. Like a dissolute son of the peerage, he squanders his evangelical patrimony on the apologetics of self-pity.
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