It was remarkable, yes, nothing short of remarkable, with what frantic alacrity his thoughts could tumble, one upon another, in the little time it took for saline solution made its way from the plunger to the heart muscle. There! You could see it coming out of the syringe, like an army on the march, and commence its advance through the plastic tube in the lockstep stride of a crack unit on its daily drill. Such elegant efficiency is not without a certain austere beauty.
How did Dr. Liebestod find himself is such a position as this? It all seemed so long ago. And, indeed, it was. It began with debunking that old mythology about the imago Dei. For how very many centuries, millennia, in fact, had humanity been shackled to this primitive creed? Think, just think, I say, of how that backward belief had stalled the natural evolution of human society.
When Liebestod began his career in bioethics, it was a brave and lonely field. There were the usual run of religious fanatics who never saw an innocent life they didn’t try to save. In order to overcome this insensate hostility to progress, it was necessary to think strategically. The first step was a public campaign of judicious relabeling.
A lot of simple folks had a hang-up over words like "death" and "killing." The pairing of an adjective like "mercy" or "dignity" could soften up their resistance, but the controlling noun was still too negative. That was until Liebestod hit upon the phrase "life-reassignment therapy." Had such a positive, life-affirming ring to it, don’t you think?
Liebestod glanced over at the I.V. The solution was slinking down the tube.
Where was he? Oh, yes. Strategic thinking. The next step was to recast the issue in terms of freedom--freedom of choice, freedom of opportunity, freedom to do your own thing. "To be or not to be" and all that good stuff. In time, of course, this would mean the freedom to be done to, to be done in, but once the wedge was firmly a place, a little hammering would do the rest.
And it was a short step from the right to die to the duty to die. No one had a right to be a burden on anyone else. In order to get the law enacted, it was necessary to put in a temporary conscience clause for the overscrupulous physician, but these could be amended with a sunset proviso once the legislation was in force.
The final step was to repackage this question in terms of compassion. And you needed to illustrate this principle with a few well-chosen tearjerkers about having to put the family dog to sleep.
Once the scarecrow of religious extremism was taken down and tossed upon the dunghill of history, the way was clear.
Liebestod took another look at the I.V. The solution was now down to the bottom of the loop.
What was he thinking? Ah, yes! Emancipated man was a meat machine, and what a glorious meat machine was he! But just as there were gradations in the quality of steak meat, there were gradation in the quality of human life--as between a zygote, a newborn, and a grown-up. It all came down to simple, elementary biochemistry, you see. Mix up one batch of chemicals and you get a baby, another and you get a chicken, yet another and you get a Mozart. You mix them up for different reasons: a chicken for eating and a Mozart for hearing. Indeed, there were some cultures in which Mozart would be on the menu as well, and who were we to judge?
Oh, did I say "baby." This, of course, was not a term to be used in polite company. A cool, clinical, impersonal term like "zygote" or "fetus" was so much more serviceable. Made it sound like an old car part at the junkyard.
It is true that we have a soft-spot for the smile and the chuckle of a cute little kid. After all, he reminds us of--well--of us! When we look into his bright and trusting eyes we see ourselves staring back.
By the same token, there were children--grown children, mind you!--who retained an inordinate attachment to their elderly parents.
No doubt natural selection programmed us to feel this way--for the preservation of the species. But now that we know about evolution, we can improve on our own evolution. We can overrule our baser, familial instincts with an eye to the balance sheet. It would be irrational, quite irrational, I say, to let our primitive feelings get in the way of judicious human pruning and weeding of the ill-timed or suboptimal members of our species.
Liebestod looked over his shoulder. The solution was now crawling up the loop.
How did he get hear again? Forty-eight hours ago, Liebestod had checked into the hospital, complaining of abdominal cramps. A scan turned up stage-4 liver cancer. He was immediately transferred to the Haven of Rest ward, conveniently located adjacent to the morgue. The usual preparations were made for his "life reassignment."
One mildly irritating development was the subsequent discovery that he had been misdiagnosed. Seems that the scans had been inadvertently switched. What he really had were gallstones, not terminal cancer. They passed out of the system in due course, and he was fit to be discharged.
But once a patient was officially transferred to the Haven of Rest ward, no reprieve was possible. Originally, life-reassignment therapy required some sort of informed consent. However, experience had shown that candidates had the inconsiderate habit of changing their minds at the last minute.
Perhaps "inconsiderate" is too harsh a word. Such vacillation was only understandable. But to put their minds at ease, the onerous decision was taken out of their hands and given to the Board of Medical Ethics. After all, no one needed a consent form to shoot a horse with a broken leg. Indeed, Dr. Liebestod, until his unfortunate mishap, had been a board-member in good standing.
A bonus point of this minor readjustment is that life-reassignment therapy could now be scheduled to dovetail with limb reattachment and organ transplant surgery. If, say, an accident victim needed a new eye or ear, or hand or toe, or skin-graft, the Vivisection Team would pay a visit to the Haven of Rest ward.
At first, organ donation was voluntary, but as with life-reassignment therapy, it didn’t take long to find out that a promising organ donor was not always the best judge of the cost/benefit ratio, and could not be relied on in a crunch to act in the best interest of all parties concerned. Why, without some procedural safeguards in place, there was always the danger that a perfectly healthy organ donor might just up and check himself out of hospital, leaving an accident victim stranded on the operating table.
The equitable distribution of medical goods and services demanded the enforcement of a more predictable routine. And, after all, a life-reassignment patient could get along well enough with one eye or one foot. It’s not as if he had much more use for a full complement at this stage of the game.
On a busy day, like a holiday weekend, the Haven of Rest ward did a steady business as the Vivisection Team might even need both eyes, or a reproductive organ--to patch up the overflow of accident victims, gunshot victims, and the like.
And, after a while, it was found to be more cost-effective for area hospitals to share organ donors when high-priority items were in short supply. The burn unit of one hospital would swap organ donors with the cardiovascular unit of another--in case they needed a particular pigment or hair color.
And the procedure was reversible as well, for the best way of preserving an organ was to stow it inside a life-reassignment patient until the transplant patient was ready for surgery. Did you know that some life-reassignment patients had as many as two livers, three hearts, and four stomachs--all snuggled up inside, like a stuffed turkey?
Just as parts were replaceable, so were people. We all die sooner or later, so it’s only a matter of timing, and we can juggle the timing. As long as killing had no adverse effect on the body politic, it was the responsible thing to do.
Speaking of the time, Liebestod glanced over at the I.V. The solution was inching up his left ventricle.
It had been an uphill climb to arrive at this point--bioethics, I mean, not the saline solution. Liebestod looked back over his distinguished life with a certain contentment as he savored the magnitude of his achievement. He had beaten back the forces of superstition and ignorance--what with their blind, implacable opposition to progressive ethics and human rights. He was widely respected in his field.
Why, only next month he was slated to receive the philanthropist-of-the-year award for his humanitarian services. As luck would have it, he had been drafting his acceptance speech when the gallstones acted up. He was especially proud of the opening paragraph. How did that go again? Oh, yes, "My fellow physicians, I am honored tonight to re..."
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Friday, December 17, 2004
More on a converted atheist...
Biola > Page 1 : Biola News & Communications: "During a couple telephone discussions shortly after their last dialogue, Flew explained to Habermas that he was considering becoming a theist. While Flew did not change his position at that time, he concluded that certain philosophical and scientific considerations were causing him to do some serious rethinking. He characterized his position as that of atheism standing in tension with several huge question marks. "
This is an extensive interview between Flew and long time philosophical opponent. It's riveting.
This is an extensive interview between Flew and long time philosophical opponent. It's riveting.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
The Matrix
At one level, there’s not much to say about The Matrix. The only reason to take it seriously is that so many other folks take it seriously. Whatever you think of it as a movie, it’s a cultural phenomenon worth commenting on.
But let’s say a few things about the movie itself before commenting on its popular appeal. It plays on the perennial theme of the gap between appearance and reality. This goes back to Parmenides. For him, time and motion were illusory.
No one might have taken that seriously except for two influential disciples who did much to popularize and immortalize his counterintuitive views. One was Zeno. His celebrated paradoxes lent a loony logic to Parmenides. They were deployed to prove something "obviously" false. And yet, even to this day, some of them are very difficult to disprove.
In addition, there was Plato, the mythmaker and prose-stylist. If Zeno lent logical appeal to Parmenides, Plato lent him aesthetic appeal.
The same sceptical outlook infects Indian and Buddhist philosophy, viz., Sankara, Nagarjuna. The world is "Maya"--illusory or delusive.
You also get this with Bishop Berkeley. Locke had drawn a distinction between primary and secondary properties. Primary properties were objective while secondary properties were subjective impressions. Berkeley took this a step further. Since our only port of entry to the primary properties is via the secondary properties, why assume that there is any extramental object at all? All properties are mental ones. No one really believes this, and yet, how do you disprove it?
And even if you believe in a world "out there," you can never know to what extent your perception of the external world resembles the external world. Where do sense and sensible meet?
So when the character of Morpheus asks, "What is real? How do you define ‘real?’ If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain," this poses a genuine philosophical conundrum. And the first half of the film, which toys with this theme, definitely pricks the curiosity of the viewer.
But the answer is less interesting than the question--at least as the movie develops the answer. For the second-half is anticlimactic--a long fuse without a bang.
There are several reasons for this. One is the acting. Where Keanu Reeves is concerned, I just don't see what anyone sees in him. Maybe the girls go for him or something. But, for me, he’s just a blank space on the screen--what with that lobotomatic stare and surfer-dude delivery. This is the actor who put da "duh" into "duh." He’s a parody of a parody.
By contrast, Laurence Fishburne has real stage presence. But that only serves to expose the vacuities of the lead actor.
Neo’s love interest is played by a fetching actress. But she has no dramatic function. Her only purpose is to be pretty and kick some major butt.
Then you have the underlying premise. Computers have turned their makers into human batteries. Now, the generic idea of computers outstripping their makers and taking over the world is a stock theme in SF film and literature. And there is a horrific irony in the idea of computers turning human beings into mechanical components.
However, the idea of computers harnessing our body temperature as an energy source is simply absurd. To begin with, surely there are inanimate energy sources at their disposal--even if you take solar power out of the picture. And as far as biological sources are concerned, would it not be more efficient to harness a larger warm-blooded mammal than Homo sapiens?
There is also the question of how much energy would be expended in the care-and-feeding of the human host. And where are all these human batteries being warehoused? How are they kept warm on a sunless planet?
But even if we waive all that aside, why entertain the human host with simulated sensory input? If all you need is a warm body, a comatose state or even brain-dead host on life-support would seem to do the job just as well without recourse virtual recreation.
In addition, how does simulated sensory input connect one mind with another? How are they conscious of each other’s existence? Would that not require some mode of mental output to form a shared awareness?
It isn’t just that the human batteries are interacting with virtual characters in separate programs. Rather, they seem to share a common VR world.
And how is it that Morpheus or Trinity us able to "jack into" the Matrix without the computer monitoring this security breach?
For that matter, who was the first human being to break the spell? And having awakened from his dream-world, how did he escape his pod? How did he survive? Where did he go?
Finally, what’s the point of all that gravity-free kung fu--like Peter Pan on steroids? Why must the computer resort to a martial-arts program to polish off the hackers? Why doesn’t it just delete the neural interface without all the kickboxing antics? Who’s in control of the video game--the computer or the hacker? Cyberspace is real to a character within cyberspace, but neither the computer nor its escapees are laboring under that illusion.
The reason for this parade of illogicality is to furnish a clothes-hanger on which to drape all the fancy f/x. Of course, many SF films stumble and fall down at that common sense level--sacrificing elementary logic for razzle-dazzle. But if film is to be a serious artistic medium, and if SF is to be a serious literary genre, then shouldn’t we hold the SF film to a higher standard? If the SF genre is incapable of fabricating an internally consistent world, then why bother with the SF genre? Why not work within the fantasy genre where you are not bound by the laws of physics? Where you can make your own rules?
I admit that I only saw the first installment of the series. To judge by movie reviews, the second was worse than the first, and the third was worse than the second.
And yet the Matrix was a cult movie in more than the artistic sense of a cult following. There were fans that really came to believe in the "Matrix." And even for fans who could still distinguish between fact and fiction, the movie was taken quite seriously, generating a good deal of philosophical analysis and debate. And this despite its overdraft on the willing suspension of belief.
What accounts for this deep-seated appeal? Two related reasons, I surmise:
i) As touched upon before, The Matrix trades upon an apprehension of and appetite for the transcendent. There is, indeed, more to reality than meets the idea. By dint of natural revelation and common grace, even the unbeliever can intuit the existence of an unseen realm and intangible dimension.
ii) The Matrix pirated redemptive themes from the Christian faith. To be sure, the Wachowsky brothers borrowed a lot of ideas from a lot of folks. But many of these names and allusions were merely clever and incidental.
Yet the redemptive themes run deeper. Neo is a cyber-Messiah. And the Messianic motif is central to the story. In addition, the identity of "Zion," as antipodal to the "Matrix," plays off the Exodus and Eschaton.
This illustrates the fact that post-Christian art cannot revert to the state of pre-Christian art. It can go back on the faith, but it cannot go back of the faith.
Neo cannot be a Savior of his world, for he is a creature of the world. For all he knows, his escape from the Matrix is just another VR program. Only the designer of the Matrix would be in a position to know where illusion ends and reality begins.
Christ can be the Savior of the world, for Christ is the Maker of the world. Neo is from the world, but Christ comes into the world. He knows what the world is really like. And he is able remake a fallen world.
But let’s say a few things about the movie itself before commenting on its popular appeal. It plays on the perennial theme of the gap between appearance and reality. This goes back to Parmenides. For him, time and motion were illusory.
No one might have taken that seriously except for two influential disciples who did much to popularize and immortalize his counterintuitive views. One was Zeno. His celebrated paradoxes lent a loony logic to Parmenides. They were deployed to prove something "obviously" false. And yet, even to this day, some of them are very difficult to disprove.
In addition, there was Plato, the mythmaker and prose-stylist. If Zeno lent logical appeal to Parmenides, Plato lent him aesthetic appeal.
The same sceptical outlook infects Indian and Buddhist philosophy, viz., Sankara, Nagarjuna. The world is "Maya"--illusory or delusive.
You also get this with Bishop Berkeley. Locke had drawn a distinction between primary and secondary properties. Primary properties were objective while secondary properties were subjective impressions. Berkeley took this a step further. Since our only port of entry to the primary properties is via the secondary properties, why assume that there is any extramental object at all? All properties are mental ones. No one really believes this, and yet, how do you disprove it?
And even if you believe in a world "out there," you can never know to what extent your perception of the external world resembles the external world. Where do sense and sensible meet?
So when the character of Morpheus asks, "What is real? How do you define ‘real?’ If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain," this poses a genuine philosophical conundrum. And the first half of the film, which toys with this theme, definitely pricks the curiosity of the viewer.
But the answer is less interesting than the question--at least as the movie develops the answer. For the second-half is anticlimactic--a long fuse without a bang.
There are several reasons for this. One is the acting. Where Keanu Reeves is concerned, I just don't see what anyone sees in him. Maybe the girls go for him or something. But, for me, he’s just a blank space on the screen--what with that lobotomatic stare and surfer-dude delivery. This is the actor who put da "duh" into "duh." He’s a parody of a parody.
By contrast, Laurence Fishburne has real stage presence. But that only serves to expose the vacuities of the lead actor.
Neo’s love interest is played by a fetching actress. But she has no dramatic function. Her only purpose is to be pretty and kick some major butt.
Then you have the underlying premise. Computers have turned their makers into human batteries. Now, the generic idea of computers outstripping their makers and taking over the world is a stock theme in SF film and literature. And there is a horrific irony in the idea of computers turning human beings into mechanical components.
However, the idea of computers harnessing our body temperature as an energy source is simply absurd. To begin with, surely there are inanimate energy sources at their disposal--even if you take solar power out of the picture. And as far as biological sources are concerned, would it not be more efficient to harness a larger warm-blooded mammal than Homo sapiens?
There is also the question of how much energy would be expended in the care-and-feeding of the human host. And where are all these human batteries being warehoused? How are they kept warm on a sunless planet?
But even if we waive all that aside, why entertain the human host with simulated sensory input? If all you need is a warm body, a comatose state or even brain-dead host on life-support would seem to do the job just as well without recourse virtual recreation.
In addition, how does simulated sensory input connect one mind with another? How are they conscious of each other’s existence? Would that not require some mode of mental output to form a shared awareness?
It isn’t just that the human batteries are interacting with virtual characters in separate programs. Rather, they seem to share a common VR world.
And how is it that Morpheus or Trinity us able to "jack into" the Matrix without the computer monitoring this security breach?
For that matter, who was the first human being to break the spell? And having awakened from his dream-world, how did he escape his pod? How did he survive? Where did he go?
Finally, what’s the point of all that gravity-free kung fu--like Peter Pan on steroids? Why must the computer resort to a martial-arts program to polish off the hackers? Why doesn’t it just delete the neural interface without all the kickboxing antics? Who’s in control of the video game--the computer or the hacker? Cyberspace is real to a character within cyberspace, but neither the computer nor its escapees are laboring under that illusion.
The reason for this parade of illogicality is to furnish a clothes-hanger on which to drape all the fancy f/x. Of course, many SF films stumble and fall down at that common sense level--sacrificing elementary logic for razzle-dazzle. But if film is to be a serious artistic medium, and if SF is to be a serious literary genre, then shouldn’t we hold the SF film to a higher standard? If the SF genre is incapable of fabricating an internally consistent world, then why bother with the SF genre? Why not work within the fantasy genre where you are not bound by the laws of physics? Where you can make your own rules?
I admit that I only saw the first installment of the series. To judge by movie reviews, the second was worse than the first, and the third was worse than the second.
And yet the Matrix was a cult movie in more than the artistic sense of a cult following. There were fans that really came to believe in the "Matrix." And even for fans who could still distinguish between fact and fiction, the movie was taken quite seriously, generating a good deal of philosophical analysis and debate. And this despite its overdraft on the willing suspension of belief.
What accounts for this deep-seated appeal? Two related reasons, I surmise:
i) As touched upon before, The Matrix trades upon an apprehension of and appetite for the transcendent. There is, indeed, more to reality than meets the idea. By dint of natural revelation and common grace, even the unbeliever can intuit the existence of an unseen realm and intangible dimension.
ii) The Matrix pirated redemptive themes from the Christian faith. To be sure, the Wachowsky brothers borrowed a lot of ideas from a lot of folks. But many of these names and allusions were merely clever and incidental.
Yet the redemptive themes run deeper. Neo is a cyber-Messiah. And the Messianic motif is central to the story. In addition, the identity of "Zion," as antipodal to the "Matrix," plays off the Exodus and Eschaton.
This illustrates the fact that post-Christian art cannot revert to the state of pre-Christian art. It can go back on the faith, but it cannot go back of the faith.
Neo cannot be a Savior of his world, for he is a creature of the world. For all he knows, his escape from the Matrix is just another VR program. Only the designer of the Matrix would be in a position to know where illusion ends and reality begins.
Christ can be the Savior of the world, for Christ is the Maker of the world. Neo is from the world, but Christ comes into the world. He knows what the world is really like. And he is able remake a fallen world.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
The first noel-2
" Traditionalists promote theories meshing Matthew's and Luke's versions. Says Paul L. Maier, a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University: 'Radical New Testament critics say it's a hopeless jumble. I myself do not think it's impossible to harmonize them.'"
So why doesn't van Biema proceed to tell the reader how Maier proposes to harmonize the two accounts? Didn't he ask him? If not, why not? If so, why didn't he include the explanation?
"Luke's description of an empire-wide census at the time of Jesus' birth, with Palestine's part conducted by the Syrian governor Quirinius, seems inaccurate. There is no other record of a census in Palestine at the time, and Quirinius was not yet governor. But he did administer an infamous census on Augustus' behalf some 12 years later, in AD 6."
i) This is an argument from silence.
ii) It presumes a standard of comparison. Why assume that Luke is less accurate than Tacitus or Josephus? Why is Luke erroneous, but Josephus is inerrant?
Isn't Luke a 1C witness to 1C history? Why is he deemed to be less reliable than Tacitus or Josephus--especially when he is closer in time to the events than either of them? Luke wrote in the early to mid-60s, Josephus in the mid-to-late 70s (The Jewish War) and early to mid-90s (Antiquities of the Jews), while the Annals of Tacitus date to the 2C.
iii) It is beyond the scope of my review to delve into the census of Quirinius. The reader should consult the relevant entries in the standard reference works (The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 4:12-13; The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3:1308-11; The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, 5:5-6) as well as excursus 2 of Bock's commentary on Luke, 1:903-09; Arndt's explanation in Bible Difficulties & Seeming Contradictions (Concordia 1987), 68-71; Cranfield's discussion in "Some Reflections on the Virgin Birth," On Romans (T&T Clarke 1998), 157-58, Barnett's discussion in Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity (IVP 1999), 97-99, chapter 11 of E. Martin's The Star that Astonished the World (ASK 1996), and B. Witherington's article on the "Birth of Jesus," in the Dictionary of Jesus & Yhe Gospels, J. Green et al. eds. (IVP 1992), 60-74.
To illustrate, let's summarize Martin's discussion. In a nutshell, his argument is as follows: based on interlocking sources of info from Josephus, Tertullian, Justin, Orosius, Moses of Khorene, and the Paphlagonian inscription, Martin argues that the census was not for purposes of taxation, but for the citizens for the Roman Empire to take a loyalty oath to Augustus as the Pater Patriae.
He also argues that, according to Josephus, there was a chronological gap between the governorship of Saturnius and the governorship of Varus. He then argues that Quirinius was the acting governor to fill this gap.
The gap took place during the summer break of 2 BC. He argues that the reason for the gap is that August was when Augustus celebrated his Silver Jubilee as well as the 750th anniversary of Roman, such that all the bigwigs would want to be in town at that time for the celebration.
"The blank space that Brown reported in the 1st century astronomical accounts where there should have been notice of Jesus' star has not prevented thousands of enthusiasts from attempting to locate it retroactively."
"Blank space?" "Enthusiasts"? Within the last few years, two professional astronomers independently published two book-length investigations of the Matthean account, both put out by academic publishing houses: Mark Kidger, The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer's View (Princeton U 1999); Michael Molnar, The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi (Rutgers U 1999).
Once again, it wouldn't hurt van Biema to acquaint himself with the relevant literature before he advertises his ignorance to the world.
" In keeping with his view of Joseph and Mary as year-round residents, Matthew has the Magi visit a "house." Luke introduces the manger as part of his view of them as involuntary short-timers."
Van Biema reminds me of a conductor's quip about the great Heldentenor: "at least you knew where you stood with Melchior because he always made the same mistakes." Once Van Biema gets a bad idea fixed in his brain, he just keeps harping on it.
" How do the experts interpret these lines? As you might guess, they wonder where Luke got them. The first angel's language, some note, was less biblical than ... imperial. Brown called it 'a christology phrased in a language that echoes Roman imperial propaganda.'"
i) Maybe. But all the key terms ("sign") and titles (soter, christos, kyrios) have their antecedents in LXX usage, and the heavenly host is another OT motif. Van Biema should take a look at Fitzmyer's commentary (AB 28) on Luke, 1:409-12.
ii) In addition, the imperial cult antedated Luke on any dating scheme you please, whether early or late.
Moving on from Van Biema's hit-piece to Meacham's hatchet job, the subtitle is, itself, highly prejudicial: "how the gospels mix faith and history."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek
But why oppose faith and history in this invidious fashion? Doesn't Meacham have faith in what he's writing? Doesn't he want the reader to believe in the factual accuracy of his article? Isn't he writing to persuade as well as inform?
" The clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing out in theaters and bookstores."
Another false antithesis. Why posit a clash between what is literal and what is historical? Should the reader apply this disjunction to Meacham's own article?
" This is why modern, grounded, discerning people do make leaps of faith, accepting that, as the Gospel of John put it, 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.'"
Why equate Christian faith with a "leap" of faith? Why can't Christian faith be a reasonable faith?
" If we dissect the stories with care, we can see that the Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology."
Why should we "dissect" the Gospels? They were not put together to be taken apart. It isn't possible, at this distance, to reconstruct the editorial process.
Does Meacham's many-layered analysis represent the original viewpoint of the Evangelist, or an artificial grid imposed on the text by Meacham and his fellow sceptics?
"The first followers, we should always remember, believed that the Risen Lord was going to return and usher in a new apocalyptic age at any moment."
Did they? I've dealt with this bogus claim in my essay on hyperpreterism.
" As the years rolled by and the world endured, however, the Apostles and the first generations of church fathers realized they were not witnesses about to be swept up into heaven but earthly stewards of a message that had to be written down, explained and defended."
How does Meacham happen to know this? How do you document the existence of oral tradition? If it's oral, it doesn't leave a paper trail, right?
Meacham is regurgitating the old evolutionary theory of the Bible--an oral stage followed by a literary stage. Doesn't Luke indicate that there were many literary digests of the life of Christ at the time he put pen to paper (Lk 1:1)? Only Mark's effort has survived, but his was not the only one or even the first in line.
Doesn't this make sense? You use the spoken word when dealing with people face-to-face, and the written word when dealing with people at a distance. That is why the Apostles were avid letter-writers.
" To make their case in this congested theological universe, the Gospel writers collected traditions in circulation and told Jesus' story."
Isn't this an overstatement? It may apply to Luke. But does it apply to John?
"John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, the author of a monumental series, 'A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,' points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke of his birth."
And there is no convincing evidence that Jesus himself never spoke of his birth. An argument from silence is a doubled-edged sword.
"Neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source."
Once again, how is Meier or Meacham in a position to know that? Mary and Matthew both belonged to the church of Jerusalem (Acts 1:13-14). And Luke certainly had occasion of visit the church of Jerusalem, with or without Paul.
"In 1965, the Second Vatican Council held that while the Scriptures are ultimately "true," they are not necessarily to be taken as accurate in the sense we might take an Associated Press wire report about what happened at a school-board meeting as accurate. The council focused on the importance of paying attention to "literary forms" in Scripture. The Gospels are such a "literary form," and the accounts of Jesus in the canon are not history or biography in the way we use the terms. Classical biography, however, was a different genre. Writers like Plutarch invented details or embellished traditions when they were reconstructing the lives of the famous, and the Christmas saga features miraculous births, supernatural signs and harbingers of ultimate greatness similar to those found in pagan works. If we examine the Nativity narratives as classical biography, then the evangelists' means and mission—to convey theological truths about salvation, not to record just-the-facts history—become much clearer."
i) This is yet another fact-free assertion. To begin with, the Gospel-writers already had a preexisting tradition of historiography at their disposal--it's called the OT.
ii) In addition, Meacham is simply ignorant of the major literature on Greco-Roman historiography as well as the historicity of the Gospels and Acts.
He should read Keener's commentaries on Matthew and John, France on Mark, Bock on Luke, Witherington on Acts. He should read France on Matthew: Evangelist & Teacher. He should read Blomberg's commentaries on Matthew and John, as well as his book on Jesus and the Gospels--not to mention his book on The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. He should read Hemer on The Book of Acts In the Setting of Hellenistic History. He should read The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting, Winter & Clarke, eds. He should read Stonehouse on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels, as well as Barnett on Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity. That's just for starters.
As to comparative mythology, I've already made mention of Machen and Metzger. We could throw in Everett Ferguson on the Backgrounds of Early Christianity for good measure.
" The earliest and sparest Gospel, Mark's (circa AD 60), begins at Jesus' baptism by John as an adult, skipping the Nativity altogether. The latest and most philosophical, John's (circa 90), links Jesus with God at the very birth of the universe."
Where is the supporting evidence for this dating-scheme? I myself would date Mark to the 40s or 50s, and John to the 60s--after the demise of Peter.
" So we are left with Matthew and Luke, Gospels composed between AD 60 and 90."
Between 60 and 90? That's quite a spread! If he dates their composition to after the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70), then this comes into conflict with his thesis about the imminent return of Christ. Matthew and Luke could not very well believe that Jesus would return with the sack of Jerusalem if they were writing after the sack of Jerusalem. So something has to give. Which is it?
" By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish writer had before."
"The device?" In what sense is the virgin birth a device? I've heard of a birth-control device, but not a virgin-birth device!
" If the virginal conception were a historical fact, however, it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament."
i) Why is it odd? It occurs where we would expect it to occur--in the gospels, which are a biographical genre. There is no expectation that it would crop up in a non-biographical genre.
ii) What would occasion its introduction in the ministry of Christ?
iii) Actually, Cranfield, for one, finds further allusions to the Virgin Birth in Mk 6:3, Jn 1:13; 6:41f.; 8:41; Rom 1:3; Gal 4:4, & Phil 2:7. Ibid. 153-54. And, of course, there's Isa 7:14 hovering in the wings.
" It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny."
Her incomprehension would be the same apart from the particulars of the Virgin Birth.
" If Jesus had been conceived by a human father before Joseph and Mary had begun their lives together as husband and wife (either by Joseph himself, a soldier or someone else), then the Holy Ghost would have provided a convenient cover story for the early church."
i) "A cover story"? But just a few paragraphs before, Meacham told his readers that "The last thing the Christians wanted was to appear to be yet another mythological cult, worshiping some kind of demi-god; their deep Jewish faith in the commandment to have 'no other gods before me' foreclosed that possibility. 'Incredible tales' were for the idolatrous." Does Meacham listen to his own words?
ii) And a few more paragraphs before that, Meacham told his readers that " Miraculous conceptions have deep roots in Jewish tradition: the aged Sarah bearing Isaac, the barren wife of Manoah bearing Samson, the barren Hannah bearing Samuel (and, according to Luke, Mary's kinswoman Elizabeth, both aged and barren, bearing John the Baptist just before Mary conceived Jesus)."
All true. But if preternatural pregnancies enjoy such precedent in OT history, how is the Virgin Birth a convenient cover story?
" Matthew makes an even more explicit connection with the Jewish past, stating outright that Jesus is answering ancient expectations. Citing Isaiah 7:14—'Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us'—the evangelist writes: 'Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet.' A problem with this elegant passage from Isaiah is that it may have long been mistranslated and misinterpreted."
It should be needless to say that the exegesis of Isa 7:14 is well-trodden ground. For a defense of the traditional interpretation, the reader should consult: M. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus (Baker 2003), 3:17-32; 199-210; J. Motyer, "Content and context in the interpretation of Isaiah 7:14," TynB 21 (1970); E. Young, Studies in Isaiah (Eerdmans 1954).
"What is clearer is that the visit of the Magi came to be seen as a fulfillment of Psalm 72…There is no historical evidence of such a visit, but the symbolic significance is obvious."
"History records no such Herodian slaughter…"
i) Of course, ancient historians only write about the rich and famous. By that standard, there's no historical evidence that more than a few hundred people ever existed in the ancient world. There is no historical evidence of trees in the state of Georgia in 1066. There is no historical evidence that fish were swimming in the Columbia River in 1492. In fact, there is no historical evidence that the Columbia River even existed in 1492. At least, I know of no period historian who has recorded the presence of trees and rivers and fish at this place and time. Is it therefore reasonable to conclude that although Alexander the Great was a real person, since historians wrote about him, that Alexander never had a great-grandfather, if no historian wrote about his great-grandpa? Is it reasonable to conclude that there were no trees in Georgia or fish in the Columbia River absent a written record to that effect?
There are no written records for most of the things that ever were or ever occurred in the past. Is it reasonable to conclude from this that most of the time, nothing at all took place? That the timeline consists of long stretches of nothingness punctuated a little blips of being?
ii) Notice the perversely tendentious character of Meacham's denial. If Cicero or Tacitus or Josephus say that something happened, then we have a historical record of the event; but of Matthew or Luke or John say that something happened, then there's absolutely no evidence that it ever happened!
The chief value of corroboration is not to confirm every detail, which is unrealistic to expect, but to attest the trustworthy character of the reporter. If what he says holds up on the points at which it can be tested, then that carries a presumption of fidelity on the points at which it cannot be tested.
And a disagreement between two sources is not, of itself, prejudicial to one source over against another.
" There is, of course, no way to know whether Luke's story of the heavenly host announcing Jesus' arrival to the shepherds really happened; one has to believe in angels, and explain away the fact that the Gospels fail to note any ensuing communal or individual recollection of this spectacular birth, one witnessed by the rustics (in Luke) and the Magi (in Matthew), in the years of Jesus' public life."
i) Of course, should you operate under Meacham's rules of evidence, then if the Gospels did record an ensuing recollection of this event, that would be further evidence that it never occurred!
ii) To say that there's no way of knowing assumes that you can only know something directly. But if you know someone who knows it, if you know that your source of knowledge is reliable, then you know whatever it tells you to be true.
"In the gnostic 'Gospel of Philip,' Pagels points out, the Gospel author reinterprets Jesus' birth, suggesting that while Jesus was born biologically to Mary and Joseph, he was reborn spiritually as the son of God…Such a view prompted a fierce counterattack from Irenaeus, a late-second-century church father who believed that Jesus was utterly unique—that he had been born in a unique way and had been raised from the dead in a unique way."
i) The Coptic Gospel of Philip dates to the 4-5C. I'd like to see the steps by which Elaine Pagels is able to trace this back to the time of Irenaeus or before.
ii) How is it that liberals make so much of the very brief interval between the life of Christ and the canonical Gospels, but so very little of the far wider interval between the life of Christ and the Gnostic gospels?
When all is aid and done, the question is not how an inspired book which was written 2000 years ago could confront a modern reader with a few obscurities; no, the real question is how an uninspired book which was written 2000 years to could confront a modern reader with so few obscurities. It is the low view of Scripture, and not the high view of Scripture, which cries out for a special explanation. It takes less faith to be a believer than an unbeliever.
So why doesn't van Biema proceed to tell the reader how Maier proposes to harmonize the two accounts? Didn't he ask him? If not, why not? If so, why didn't he include the explanation?
"Luke's description of an empire-wide census at the time of Jesus' birth, with Palestine's part conducted by the Syrian governor Quirinius, seems inaccurate. There is no other record of a census in Palestine at the time, and Quirinius was not yet governor. But he did administer an infamous census on Augustus' behalf some 12 years later, in AD 6."
i) This is an argument from silence.
ii) It presumes a standard of comparison. Why assume that Luke is less accurate than Tacitus or Josephus? Why is Luke erroneous, but Josephus is inerrant?
Isn't Luke a 1C witness to 1C history? Why is he deemed to be less reliable than Tacitus or Josephus--especially when he is closer in time to the events than either of them? Luke wrote in the early to mid-60s, Josephus in the mid-to-late 70s (The Jewish War) and early to mid-90s (Antiquities of the Jews), while the Annals of Tacitus date to the 2C.
iii) It is beyond the scope of my review to delve into the census of Quirinius. The reader should consult the relevant entries in the standard reference works (The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 4:12-13; The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3:1308-11; The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, 5:5-6) as well as excursus 2 of Bock's commentary on Luke, 1:903-09; Arndt's explanation in Bible Difficulties & Seeming Contradictions (Concordia 1987), 68-71; Cranfield's discussion in "Some Reflections on the Virgin Birth," On Romans (T&T Clarke 1998), 157-58, Barnett's discussion in Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity (IVP 1999), 97-99, chapter 11 of E. Martin's The Star that Astonished the World (ASK 1996), and B. Witherington's article on the "Birth of Jesus," in the Dictionary of Jesus & Yhe Gospels, J. Green et al. eds. (IVP 1992), 60-74.
To illustrate, let's summarize Martin's discussion. In a nutshell, his argument is as follows: based on interlocking sources of info from Josephus, Tertullian, Justin, Orosius, Moses of Khorene, and the Paphlagonian inscription, Martin argues that the census was not for purposes of taxation, but for the citizens for the Roman Empire to take a loyalty oath to Augustus as the Pater Patriae.
He also argues that, according to Josephus, there was a chronological gap between the governorship of Saturnius and the governorship of Varus. He then argues that Quirinius was the acting governor to fill this gap.
The gap took place during the summer break of 2 BC. He argues that the reason for the gap is that August was when Augustus celebrated his Silver Jubilee as well as the 750th anniversary of Roman, such that all the bigwigs would want to be in town at that time for the celebration.
"The blank space that Brown reported in the 1st century astronomical accounts where there should have been notice of Jesus' star has not prevented thousands of enthusiasts from attempting to locate it retroactively."
"Blank space?" "Enthusiasts"? Within the last few years, two professional astronomers independently published two book-length investigations of the Matthean account, both put out by academic publishing houses: Mark Kidger, The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer's View (Princeton U 1999); Michael Molnar, The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi (Rutgers U 1999).
Once again, it wouldn't hurt van Biema to acquaint himself with the relevant literature before he advertises his ignorance to the world.
" In keeping with his view of Joseph and Mary as year-round residents, Matthew has the Magi visit a "house." Luke introduces the manger as part of his view of them as involuntary short-timers."
Van Biema reminds me of a conductor's quip about the great Heldentenor: "at least you knew where you stood with Melchior because he always made the same mistakes." Once Van Biema gets a bad idea fixed in his brain, he just keeps harping on it.
" How do the experts interpret these lines? As you might guess, they wonder where Luke got them. The first angel's language, some note, was less biblical than ... imperial. Brown called it 'a christology phrased in a language that echoes Roman imperial propaganda.'"
i) Maybe. But all the key terms ("sign") and titles (soter, christos, kyrios) have their antecedents in LXX usage, and the heavenly host is another OT motif. Van Biema should take a look at Fitzmyer's commentary (AB 28) on Luke, 1:409-12.
ii) In addition, the imperial cult antedated Luke on any dating scheme you please, whether early or late.
Moving on from Van Biema's hit-piece to Meacham's hatchet job, the subtitle is, itself, highly prejudicial: "how the gospels mix faith and history."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6653824/site/newsweek
But why oppose faith and history in this invidious fashion? Doesn't Meacham have faith in what he's writing? Doesn't he want the reader to believe in the factual accuracy of his article? Isn't he writing to persuade as well as inform?
" The clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing out in theaters and bookstores."
Another false antithesis. Why posit a clash between what is literal and what is historical? Should the reader apply this disjunction to Meacham's own article?
" This is why modern, grounded, discerning people do make leaps of faith, accepting that, as the Gospel of John put it, 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.'"
Why equate Christian faith with a "leap" of faith? Why can't Christian faith be a reasonable faith?
" If we dissect the stories with care, we can see that the Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology."
Why should we "dissect" the Gospels? They were not put together to be taken apart. It isn't possible, at this distance, to reconstruct the editorial process.
Does Meacham's many-layered analysis represent the original viewpoint of the Evangelist, or an artificial grid imposed on the text by Meacham and his fellow sceptics?
"The first followers, we should always remember, believed that the Risen Lord was going to return and usher in a new apocalyptic age at any moment."
Did they? I've dealt with this bogus claim in my essay on hyperpreterism.
" As the years rolled by and the world endured, however, the Apostles and the first generations of church fathers realized they were not witnesses about to be swept up into heaven but earthly stewards of a message that had to be written down, explained and defended."
How does Meacham happen to know this? How do you document the existence of oral tradition? If it's oral, it doesn't leave a paper trail, right?
Meacham is regurgitating the old evolutionary theory of the Bible--an oral stage followed by a literary stage. Doesn't Luke indicate that there were many literary digests of the life of Christ at the time he put pen to paper (Lk 1:1)? Only Mark's effort has survived, but his was not the only one or even the first in line.
Doesn't this make sense? You use the spoken word when dealing with people face-to-face, and the written word when dealing with people at a distance. That is why the Apostles were avid letter-writers.
" To make their case in this congested theological universe, the Gospel writers collected traditions in circulation and told Jesus' story."
Isn't this an overstatement? It may apply to Luke. But does it apply to John?
"John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, the author of a monumental series, 'A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,' points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke of his birth."
And there is no convincing evidence that Jesus himself never spoke of his birth. An argument from silence is a doubled-edged sword.
"Neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source."
Once again, how is Meier or Meacham in a position to know that? Mary and Matthew both belonged to the church of Jerusalem (Acts 1:13-14). And Luke certainly had occasion of visit the church of Jerusalem, with or without Paul.
"In 1965, the Second Vatican Council held that while the Scriptures are ultimately "true," they are not necessarily to be taken as accurate in the sense we might take an Associated Press wire report about what happened at a school-board meeting as accurate. The council focused on the importance of paying attention to "literary forms" in Scripture. The Gospels are such a "literary form," and the accounts of Jesus in the canon are not history or biography in the way we use the terms. Classical biography, however, was a different genre. Writers like Plutarch invented details or embellished traditions when they were reconstructing the lives of the famous, and the Christmas saga features miraculous births, supernatural signs and harbingers of ultimate greatness similar to those found in pagan works. If we examine the Nativity narratives as classical biography, then the evangelists' means and mission—to convey theological truths about salvation, not to record just-the-facts history—become much clearer."
i) This is yet another fact-free assertion. To begin with, the Gospel-writers already had a preexisting tradition of historiography at their disposal--it's called the OT.
ii) In addition, Meacham is simply ignorant of the major literature on Greco-Roman historiography as well as the historicity of the Gospels and Acts.
He should read Keener's commentaries on Matthew and John, France on Mark, Bock on Luke, Witherington on Acts. He should read France on Matthew: Evangelist & Teacher. He should read Blomberg's commentaries on Matthew and John, as well as his book on Jesus and the Gospels--not to mention his book on The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. He should read Hemer on The Book of Acts In the Setting of Hellenistic History. He should read The Book of Acts in Its Ancient Literary Setting, Winter & Clarke, eds. He should read Stonehouse on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels, as well as Barnett on Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity. That's just for starters.
As to comparative mythology, I've already made mention of Machen and Metzger. We could throw in Everett Ferguson on the Backgrounds of Early Christianity for good measure.
" The earliest and sparest Gospel, Mark's (circa AD 60), begins at Jesus' baptism by John as an adult, skipping the Nativity altogether. The latest and most philosophical, John's (circa 90), links Jesus with God at the very birth of the universe."
Where is the supporting evidence for this dating-scheme? I myself would date Mark to the 40s or 50s, and John to the 60s--after the demise of Peter.
" So we are left with Matthew and Luke, Gospels composed between AD 60 and 90."
Between 60 and 90? That's quite a spread! If he dates their composition to after the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70), then this comes into conflict with his thesis about the imminent return of Christ. Matthew and Luke could not very well believe that Jesus would return with the sack of Jerusalem if they were writing after the sack of Jerusalem. So something has to give. Which is it?
" By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish writer had before."
"The device?" In what sense is the virgin birth a device? I've heard of a birth-control device, but not a virgin-birth device!
" If the virginal conception were a historical fact, however, it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament."
i) Why is it odd? It occurs where we would expect it to occur--in the gospels, which are a biographical genre. There is no expectation that it would crop up in a non-biographical genre.
ii) What would occasion its introduction in the ministry of Christ?
iii) Actually, Cranfield, for one, finds further allusions to the Virgin Birth in Mk 6:3, Jn 1:13; 6:41f.; 8:41; Rom 1:3; Gal 4:4, & Phil 2:7. Ibid. 153-54. And, of course, there's Isa 7:14 hovering in the wings.
" It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny."
Her incomprehension would be the same apart from the particulars of the Virgin Birth.
" If Jesus had been conceived by a human father before Joseph and Mary had begun their lives together as husband and wife (either by Joseph himself, a soldier or someone else), then the Holy Ghost would have provided a convenient cover story for the early church."
i) "A cover story"? But just a few paragraphs before, Meacham told his readers that "The last thing the Christians wanted was to appear to be yet another mythological cult, worshiping some kind of demi-god; their deep Jewish faith in the commandment to have 'no other gods before me' foreclosed that possibility. 'Incredible tales' were for the idolatrous." Does Meacham listen to his own words?
ii) And a few more paragraphs before that, Meacham told his readers that " Miraculous conceptions have deep roots in Jewish tradition: the aged Sarah bearing Isaac, the barren wife of Manoah bearing Samson, the barren Hannah bearing Samuel (and, according to Luke, Mary's kinswoman Elizabeth, both aged and barren, bearing John the Baptist just before Mary conceived Jesus)."
All true. But if preternatural pregnancies enjoy such precedent in OT history, how is the Virgin Birth a convenient cover story?
" Matthew makes an even more explicit connection with the Jewish past, stating outright that Jesus is answering ancient expectations. Citing Isaiah 7:14—'Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us'—the evangelist writes: 'Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet.' A problem with this elegant passage from Isaiah is that it may have long been mistranslated and misinterpreted."
It should be needless to say that the exegesis of Isa 7:14 is well-trodden ground. For a defense of the traditional interpretation, the reader should consult: M. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus (Baker 2003), 3:17-32; 199-210; J. Motyer, "Content and context in the interpretation of Isaiah 7:14," TynB 21 (1970); E. Young, Studies in Isaiah (Eerdmans 1954).
"What is clearer is that the visit of the Magi came to be seen as a fulfillment of Psalm 72…There is no historical evidence of such a visit, but the symbolic significance is obvious."
"History records no such Herodian slaughter…"
i) Of course, ancient historians only write about the rich and famous. By that standard, there's no historical evidence that more than a few hundred people ever existed in the ancient world. There is no historical evidence of trees in the state of Georgia in 1066. There is no historical evidence that fish were swimming in the Columbia River in 1492. In fact, there is no historical evidence that the Columbia River even existed in 1492. At least, I know of no period historian who has recorded the presence of trees and rivers and fish at this place and time. Is it therefore reasonable to conclude that although Alexander the Great was a real person, since historians wrote about him, that Alexander never had a great-grandfather, if no historian wrote about his great-grandpa? Is it reasonable to conclude that there were no trees in Georgia or fish in the Columbia River absent a written record to that effect?
There are no written records for most of the things that ever were or ever occurred in the past. Is it reasonable to conclude from this that most of the time, nothing at all took place? That the timeline consists of long stretches of nothingness punctuated a little blips of being?
ii) Notice the perversely tendentious character of Meacham's denial. If Cicero or Tacitus or Josephus say that something happened, then we have a historical record of the event; but of Matthew or Luke or John say that something happened, then there's absolutely no evidence that it ever happened!
The chief value of corroboration is not to confirm every detail, which is unrealistic to expect, but to attest the trustworthy character of the reporter. If what he says holds up on the points at which it can be tested, then that carries a presumption of fidelity on the points at which it cannot be tested.
And a disagreement between two sources is not, of itself, prejudicial to one source over against another.
" There is, of course, no way to know whether Luke's story of the heavenly host announcing Jesus' arrival to the shepherds really happened; one has to believe in angels, and explain away the fact that the Gospels fail to note any ensuing communal or individual recollection of this spectacular birth, one witnessed by the rustics (in Luke) and the Magi (in Matthew), in the years of Jesus' public life."
i) Of course, should you operate under Meacham's rules of evidence, then if the Gospels did record an ensuing recollection of this event, that would be further evidence that it never occurred!
ii) To say that there's no way of knowing assumes that you can only know something directly. But if you know someone who knows it, if you know that your source of knowledge is reliable, then you know whatever it tells you to be true.
"In the gnostic 'Gospel of Philip,' Pagels points out, the Gospel author reinterprets Jesus' birth, suggesting that while Jesus was born biologically to Mary and Joseph, he was reborn spiritually as the son of God…Such a view prompted a fierce counterattack from Irenaeus, a late-second-century church father who believed that Jesus was utterly unique—that he had been born in a unique way and had been raised from the dead in a unique way."
i) The Coptic Gospel of Philip dates to the 4-5C. I'd like to see the steps by which Elaine Pagels is able to trace this back to the time of Irenaeus or before.
ii) How is it that liberals make so much of the very brief interval between the life of Christ and the canonical Gospels, but so very little of the far wider interval between the life of Christ and the Gnostic gospels?
When all is aid and done, the question is not how an inspired book which was written 2000 years ago could confront a modern reader with a few obscurities; no, the real question is how an uninspired book which was written 2000 years to could confront a modern reader with so few obscurities. It is the low view of Scripture, and not the high view of Scripture, which cries out for a special explanation. It takes less faith to be a believer than an unbeliever.
The first noel-1
Both Newsweek and Time Magazine have come out with articles about the birth of Christ. Ordinarily, the only time I bother to read either magazine is when I'm waiting to see the doctor, and flip through whatever magazines happen to be lying around.
But given the intrinsic importance of the issue, I've decided to make an exception to my rule--although the quality, or lack thereof, of the two articles, offers no incentive for me to revise my usual policy.
Before we dig into each article individually, a number of preliminary points need to be made:
1. If you want to have an honest debate over the birth of Christ, the fair and balanced way of doing it would be to invite a liberal and a conservative NT scholar to debate the issue. Side A would give an opening statement. Side B would comment on the opening statement. Side A would reply to his comment. Then Side B would give an opening statement. Side A would comment on the opening statement. Side B would reply to his comment. Then Side A would give a closing statement, followed by a closing statement from side B. You might wrap up the debate with a round table discussion in which a moderator was to ask an equal number of liberal and conservative panelists to comment on the debate. That would be an honest debate.
By contrast, Meacham and van Biema control the flow of information. They only tell you what they think is important. They quote little snippets from so-and-so, or summarize the views of anonymous scholars. But this is not how either a liberal or a conservative scholar would marshal his arguments if he had a free hand in writing his own article on the subject.
We are not getting any representative idea of how a conservative scholar would make his case. In particular, we are not getting the supporting arguments. The journalist functions as a filter to screen out whatever he doesn't want the reader to hear--whatever doesn't comport his journalistic agenda.
2. Both articles try to cast doubt on the Gospel accounts by the mere fact that they differ in their treatment of the subject. But if this is reason to infer, in the words of Meacham, that neither account "is fully fanciful nor fully factual," then, by parity of reasoning, we are justified in saying that neither the Newsweek nor the Time Magazine article is fully factual since each of them differs in its treatment of the subject. One could easily perform a comparative study of the two articles, parallel to the so-called Synoptic problem, and try to derive the same sceptical conclusions.
3. Both Meacham and Van Biema pose a pseudo-problem, which then they propose to solve. They make heavy weather over the fact that the setting of nativity stories alternates between Bethlehem and Nazareth. But how is that a problem?
At this point we need to draw a few elementary distinctions. To say that I don't know how to relate two events can either mean that (i) the events present an actual or apparent contradiction, or else (ii) there is not contradiction in view, but I simply lack enough incidental detail to put them in order or explain what motivated the action.
Now, what do Matthew and Luke say about the setting of the nativity accounts? Matthew says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Mt 2:1). After he was born, one or two years later (2:7,16), the Magi paid him a visit. At that time, the Holy Family were living in a house of some sort. After the Magi came and went, the Holy Family fled to Egypt (2:14). After their Egyptian sojourn, they moved to Nazareth (2:23).
Luke indicates that Mary and Joseph were living in Nazareth before Jesus was born (Lk 2:4). While she was pregnant, they made a trip to Bethlehem, where she gave birth (2:4-6). His birth was witnessed by shepherds and angels (2:8-20). Afterwards they made a trip to Jerusalem (2:22ff.). And after that they returned to Nazareth (2:39).
Now, none of this presents the reader with either an actual or apparent contradiction. Remember what a historical discrepancy would amount to: a solid object cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
Where does one Evangelist either say or imply that the Holy Family was residing in one place and time when another Evangelist says or implies that the Holy Family was living elsewhere at exactly the same time? Am I missing something?
Luke says that Joseph and Mary were living in Nazareth before Jesus was born. Matthew doesn't say where they were living before Jesus was born. Luke states that Jesus was born in a stable, after which the Holy Family made a trip to Jerusalem for the circumcision of Jesus and purification of Mary--while Matthew states that, at a later date, the Holy Family was living in a house. Both Matthew and Luke say that the Holy Family eventually settled in Nazareth.
There is plenty of time between the first noel and the first epiphany (1-2 years, Mt 2:7,16) to fit in a trip to Jerusalem. Of course, any reconstruction is someone speculative, but to impute a contradiction to the two accounts also entails a conjectural reconstruction of how the elements could or could not be harmonized.
4. Both Meacham and van Biema lean on the argument from silence. Their assumption and insinuation is that if everything happened the way Matthew and Luke tell us, we should expect corroborative evidence for the various steps of the story.
But such an argument from silence ignores two obvious problems:
i) It assumes that period historians would take an interest in, and have knowledge on, the circumstances surrounding the birth of a working-class Jewish boy in Palestine.
ii) It overlooks the fragmentary state of the record. As a leading scholar puts it,
"How very little we really know about Syria in the 1C BC and the 1C AD, above all about the religious atmosphere prevailing there in that period, or about Judaea under the Roman prefects between AD 6 and AD 41 (which is even closer to the heart of the NT scholar)!" M. Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (Fortress 1980), 3-4.
"Of the sixteen books of Tacitus' Annals, which are fundamental to our knowledge of Roman history in the 1C AD, books 7-10 are missing. They are important for the history of the NT period as they covered the years 37-47 and also dealt with the situation in Judaea under Tiberius and Caligula," ibid. 7.
"It is a special gift of providence that the works of Josephus have survived when those of his Jewish competitor and opponent, Justus of Tiberias, have been lost. By far the greater part of our knowledge about Jewish history in the Hellenistic period from the time of the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great comes from Josephus. A whole series of names and narratives from the gospels and Acts only become really comprehensible in the light of the more detailed report by the Jewish historian," ibid. 7.
There are other, minor sources of information which Hengel goes on to mention--in relation to later phases of NT history, but what is impressive is not how little corroboration we have of NT history, but how much we enjoy despite the ravages of time.
5. Both Meacham and van Biema quote or summarize scholars when it suits their purpose, but they fail to distinguish between scholarly opinion and scholarly argument. Merely to quote some scholar's opinion is unconvincing without the supporting evidence.
Moreover, Meacham and van Biema cite a number of no-name "scholars" from third-tier institutions. The only big name that comes up on a regular basis is Raymond Brown.
Furthermore, Meacham and van Biema often content themselves with generic summaries of some school of thought. Now, I realize that reporters are addicted to anonymous sources, but is there some compelling reason why they refrain from naming a liberal or conservative scholar? Presumably, this is not the same as protecting the identity of a Mafia informant, is it?
I suspect the reason they don't name their sources is that a lot of this information is derived from third-hand, word-of-mouth reportage.
Let's move on to van Biema article: "Behind the First Noel,"
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/covers/1101041213/story.html
"How peculiar it is to find that the actual Gospel Nativities are the part of Jesus' biography about which Bible experts have the greatest sense of uncertainty—even more than the scripture about the miracles Jesus performed or his sacrificial death. Indeed, the Christmas story that Christians know by heart is actually a collection of mysteries. Where was Jesus actually born? Who showed up to celebrate his arrival? How do the details of the stories reflect the specific outreach agendas of the men who wrote them?"
What experts? Liberals? Conservatives? No conservative scholar has the greatest sense of uncertainty over the nativity accounts.
What makes an expert an expert on the nativity stories? Is Dominic Crossan an expert. A few years ago, Jacob Neusner wrote a review of a book by Crossan. He commended Crossan for his engaging prose style, but not for his command of the primary sources.
"Agendas?" What about van Biema's agenda? Assuming that the gospel-writers have an agenda, if an "outreach" agenda discredits their record, does a journalistic agenda discredit his article?
"In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues. There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story."
What is the "forensic," "physical" evidence that Augustus ever existed? Do we need a DNA sample to write history?
"Despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous ways on details of the event. In Matthew's Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph while Luke's is to Mary. Matthew's offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke's prefers shepherds and a manger. Both place the birth in Bethlehem, but they disagree totally about how it came to be there."
I've already addressed the general allegation, but to comment on a few of the particulars:
i) Since Joseph and Mary were both parties to the arrangement, is there some reason why both of them would not be let in on the secret?
ii) Van Biema is conflating two different events--Christmas and Epiphany-- separated in time and space, and then imputing a conspicuous divergence in the details. But the confusion lies with van Biema. The account of the Magi is not a nativity account. The adoration of the Magi happened at a later date. By then the Holy Family had moved out of the "manger." Van Biema's analysis is simply inept.
iii) Matthew and Luke don't disagree at all, much less "totally," on how it came to be there. Luke tells us, while Matthew is silent. That is not any kind of disagreement.
"These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcoming Feminist Companion to Mariology, are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness."
Isn't this agenda driven?
"After Mary's Annunciation, she visits Elizabeth, and the fetus in Elizabeth's belly miraculously leaps up in recognition of God's promised Messiah."
The "fetus"? Is this a Roe v. Wade rendering of Luke?
" Such filigree, scholars concur, would have been foreign to Matthew, who wrote sometime after AD 60, a decade or two before Luke."
What scholars?
Where is the supporting evidence for this dating-scheme? What about scholars like Guthrie (New Testament Introduction), Robinson (Redating the New Testament) and Bock (BCNT 3) who date the composition of Luke to before AD 70?
For that matter, what reason is there, besides the entropy of critical consensus, not to date both to the 40s? This is not a preliterate or illiterate culture. If you know how to write in the 60s or the 80s, you also know how to write in the 40s, give or take.
" Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity…"
He is? What about scholars who think he was probably a convert to Judaism (a proselyte or God-fearer) before he became a convert to Christianity? His Christian faith would be a natural extension and completion of his adopted Jewish faith.
" His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential "lives" being written about pagan leaders in the same period. In such sagas, a hero is not a hero unless his birth reflects the magnificence of his later achievements, and such super-nativities, originally attached to great figures from antiquity like Alexander the Great, were at that point bestowed upon Roman leaders within decades of their actual deaths."
i) Once again, what is the date of these other literary forms?
ii) A "tantalizing resemblance"? Does the "life" of Alexander, or some Roman emperor, involve a parallel pregnancy, virgin birth, angelic choir, and band of shepherds? Show us the details.
iii) The "hero"? Van Biema is channeling the shade of Joseph Cambell. The technique is to fabricate a "monomyth" by mushing a lot of stuff together without regard to time, place, or divergent details. Such an ahistorical construct is imposed on the data rather than derived from the data.
iv) There were angelic heralds, preternatural pregnancies, and shepherds aplenty in the OT too. No need to roam further afield.
v) J. Gresham Machen went over all this ground some 75 years ago in his classic monograph on The Virgin Birth of Christ.
" By the time Luke wrote, says John Dominic Crossan, author of The Birth of Christianity, 'Christians are competing in a bigger world now, not just a Jewish world ... And in this wider world, Alexander the Great is the model for Augustus and Augustus often becomes the model for Jesus.'"
This is an assertion masquerading as an argument. Where is the supporting evidence?
"Says John Barclay, a New Testament expert at the University of Durham, England: "Theologically, this is the one thing that people will go to the stake for. If they defend the historicity of anything in the Christmas stories, they will defend this.'"
No, that's not where the lines fall. As a rule, those who affirm the virgin birth affirm everything else while those who deny the virgin birth deny everything else.
"Raymond Brown was one who did not. Brown, author of the landmark work The Birth of the Messiah, dean of historical Jesus scholars until his death in 1998 and a Sulpician priest, observed that the idea of divine conception in the womb appeared to be part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God's Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first Gospel written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth."
i) If this is part of a theological progression, then we should expect the Fourth Gospel to be even more miracle-laden than Matthew and Luke. John would have more angels. More stars. But John doesn't have an account of the Virgin Birth.
ii) Actually, Mark has a very high Christology. Mark begins his Gospel by equating Christ with Yahweh (Mk 1:3). At that level, there is no room for theological progression.
" Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source for the Holy Spirit's direct involvement in Jesus' birth (and who else could it be?), her testimony was lost to Christians for half a century before Luke somehow picked it up."
Once again, this assumes, without benefit of argument, the late dating of Luke.
"Facts like Jesus' relatives' seeming ignorance of his messiahship in Mark and John and other clues…"
What other clues? Aside from the "Messianic Secret," Christ's half-brothers knew his Messianic claims, but acted in disbelief until Easter morn.
"Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew's Gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.)"
i) The Septuagint, which is the Greek version in question, was translated from the Hebrew by pre-Christian Jews.
ii) I would add that the exact translation of Isa 7:14 is something of a red-herring. The important point is not the precise semantic domain of the Hebrew word or its Greek rendering. The point, rather, is whether Isaiah meant to refer to a virgin, and chose the best available word (Heb.='almah) to convey his intent, and wehther the Septuagintal translators, in turn, chose the best available word (Gr.=parthenos) to intersect with the Hebrew.
As a man who makes his living with words, it would profit van Biema to master the elementary distinction between sense and reference.
" Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts."
This assumes that Matthew was responding to early accusations. Where's the evidence? "Much later sources" are hardly evidence of a pre-Matthean slander.
"Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long maintained that parts of Luke's introduction to the topic echo the beginning of an Old Testament passage on rape…"
Isn't this another agenda-driving interpretation?
" Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept."
i) Except that neither Evangelist says that Jesus was conceived by means of carnal relations between Mary and a god or demigod. Quite the contrary.
ii) This free associative method was debunked by Bruce Metzger in his essay, "Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity," in Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Leiden, 1968), 1-24.
" Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction that today's Christianity believes marked Jesus' conception."
What pagan models in particular? As usual, we are treated to an empty claim, unredeemed by any specifics.
" Those sticking with Bethlehem point out, not unreasonably, that both Matthew and Luke place Jesus' birth there. The skeptics note that they reach the town by such extravagantly different means that one has to wonder whether they weren't trying too hard to get there."
As anyone who bothers to read Matthew and Luke can see for himself, neither writer ever says how Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem. How can they present different means, much less "extravagantly" different means, of getting there when both are entirely silent on the subject? Has van Biema ever read the accounts for himself?
" By Matthew's account, Joseph and Mary are Bethlehem residents and Jesus is born at home. But his very birth necessitates their flight to Egypt (and eventually Nazareth) because Jerusalem's vicious regent, Herod, is determined to murder the Bethlehem child he has learned will one day be King of the Jews. None of that gripping story, however, can be found in Luke. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary, Nazarenes, are on a brief if inconvenient visit to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem, complying with a vast census ("All the world should be enrolled") ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Meanwhile, Mark, written closer to Jesus' actual lifetime, omits Bethlehem and refers to Nazareth as Jesus' patrida, or hometown."
i) Notice, according to van Biema's very own summary, that Matthew doesn't say how they got there. So his supporting argument falsifies rather than validates his claim.
ii) The reason Matthew includes the material about the flight into Egypt and back is to draw attention to the fulfillment of OT typology. That would be more meaningful to his Jewish readers than Luke's Gentile readers. Indeed, van Biema goes on to say that very thing.
Van Biema then says that Luke discusses the nativity in relation to the census to show that Christians were loyal Roman citizens. Perhaps. But in any case, these are not by any means mutually exclusive explanations. Matthew didn't invent Judaism. Luke didn't invent the Roman Empire. These are cofactors in a common history of the period.
This is not "extravagant." To the contrary, that is a perfectly lucid rationale.
iii) Matthew doesn't say that Joseph and Mary are year-round residents. Once again, Van Biema is conflating two separate events. When they first arrive they stay in the manger (according to Luke) as an emergency measure. Later, they secured semi-permanent lodgings (according to Matthew). Jesus is not "born at home."
iv) The whole effort to box the Holy Family into a single hometown is silly. They lived in a mobile society, just like we do.
But given the intrinsic importance of the issue, I've decided to make an exception to my rule--although the quality, or lack thereof, of the two articles, offers no incentive for me to revise my usual policy.
Before we dig into each article individually, a number of preliminary points need to be made:
1. If you want to have an honest debate over the birth of Christ, the fair and balanced way of doing it would be to invite a liberal and a conservative NT scholar to debate the issue. Side A would give an opening statement. Side B would comment on the opening statement. Side A would reply to his comment. Then Side B would give an opening statement. Side A would comment on the opening statement. Side B would reply to his comment. Then Side A would give a closing statement, followed by a closing statement from side B. You might wrap up the debate with a round table discussion in which a moderator was to ask an equal number of liberal and conservative panelists to comment on the debate. That would be an honest debate.
By contrast, Meacham and van Biema control the flow of information. They only tell you what they think is important. They quote little snippets from so-and-so, or summarize the views of anonymous scholars. But this is not how either a liberal or a conservative scholar would marshal his arguments if he had a free hand in writing his own article on the subject.
We are not getting any representative idea of how a conservative scholar would make his case. In particular, we are not getting the supporting arguments. The journalist functions as a filter to screen out whatever he doesn't want the reader to hear--whatever doesn't comport his journalistic agenda.
2. Both articles try to cast doubt on the Gospel accounts by the mere fact that they differ in their treatment of the subject. But if this is reason to infer, in the words of Meacham, that neither account "is fully fanciful nor fully factual," then, by parity of reasoning, we are justified in saying that neither the Newsweek nor the Time Magazine article is fully factual since each of them differs in its treatment of the subject. One could easily perform a comparative study of the two articles, parallel to the so-called Synoptic problem, and try to derive the same sceptical conclusions.
3. Both Meacham and Van Biema pose a pseudo-problem, which then they propose to solve. They make heavy weather over the fact that the setting of nativity stories alternates between Bethlehem and Nazareth. But how is that a problem?
At this point we need to draw a few elementary distinctions. To say that I don't know how to relate two events can either mean that (i) the events present an actual or apparent contradiction, or else (ii) there is not contradiction in view, but I simply lack enough incidental detail to put them in order or explain what motivated the action.
Now, what do Matthew and Luke say about the setting of the nativity accounts? Matthew says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (Mt 2:1). After he was born, one or two years later (2:7,16), the Magi paid him a visit. At that time, the Holy Family were living in a house of some sort. After the Magi came and went, the Holy Family fled to Egypt (2:14). After their Egyptian sojourn, they moved to Nazareth (2:23).
Luke indicates that Mary and Joseph were living in Nazareth before Jesus was born (Lk 2:4). While she was pregnant, they made a trip to Bethlehem, where she gave birth (2:4-6). His birth was witnessed by shepherds and angels (2:8-20). Afterwards they made a trip to Jerusalem (2:22ff.). And after that they returned to Nazareth (2:39).
Now, none of this presents the reader with either an actual or apparent contradiction. Remember what a historical discrepancy would amount to: a solid object cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
Where does one Evangelist either say or imply that the Holy Family was residing in one place and time when another Evangelist says or implies that the Holy Family was living elsewhere at exactly the same time? Am I missing something?
Luke says that Joseph and Mary were living in Nazareth before Jesus was born. Matthew doesn't say where they were living before Jesus was born. Luke states that Jesus was born in a stable, after which the Holy Family made a trip to Jerusalem for the circumcision of Jesus and purification of Mary--while Matthew states that, at a later date, the Holy Family was living in a house. Both Matthew and Luke say that the Holy Family eventually settled in Nazareth.
There is plenty of time between the first noel and the first epiphany (1-2 years, Mt 2:7,16) to fit in a trip to Jerusalem. Of course, any reconstruction is someone speculative, but to impute a contradiction to the two accounts also entails a conjectural reconstruction of how the elements could or could not be harmonized.
4. Both Meacham and van Biema lean on the argument from silence. Their assumption and insinuation is that if everything happened the way Matthew and Luke tell us, we should expect corroborative evidence for the various steps of the story.
But such an argument from silence ignores two obvious problems:
i) It assumes that period historians would take an interest in, and have knowledge on, the circumstances surrounding the birth of a working-class Jewish boy in Palestine.
ii) It overlooks the fragmentary state of the record. As a leading scholar puts it,
"How very little we really know about Syria in the 1C BC and the 1C AD, above all about the religious atmosphere prevailing there in that period, or about Judaea under the Roman prefects between AD 6 and AD 41 (which is even closer to the heart of the NT scholar)!" M. Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (Fortress 1980), 3-4.
"Of the sixteen books of Tacitus' Annals, which are fundamental to our knowledge of Roman history in the 1C AD, books 7-10 are missing. They are important for the history of the NT period as they covered the years 37-47 and also dealt with the situation in Judaea under Tiberius and Caligula," ibid. 7.
"It is a special gift of providence that the works of Josephus have survived when those of his Jewish competitor and opponent, Justus of Tiberias, have been lost. By far the greater part of our knowledge about Jewish history in the Hellenistic period from the time of the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great comes from Josephus. A whole series of names and narratives from the gospels and Acts only become really comprehensible in the light of the more detailed report by the Jewish historian," ibid. 7.
There are other, minor sources of information which Hengel goes on to mention--in relation to later phases of NT history, but what is impressive is not how little corroboration we have of NT history, but how much we enjoy despite the ravages of time.
5. Both Meacham and van Biema quote or summarize scholars when it suits their purpose, but they fail to distinguish between scholarly opinion and scholarly argument. Merely to quote some scholar's opinion is unconvincing without the supporting evidence.
Moreover, Meacham and van Biema cite a number of no-name "scholars" from third-tier institutions. The only big name that comes up on a regular basis is Raymond Brown.
Furthermore, Meacham and van Biema often content themselves with generic summaries of some school of thought. Now, I realize that reporters are addicted to anonymous sources, but is there some compelling reason why they refrain from naming a liberal or conservative scholar? Presumably, this is not the same as protecting the identity of a Mafia informant, is it?
I suspect the reason they don't name their sources is that a lot of this information is derived from third-hand, word-of-mouth reportage.
Let's move on to van Biema article: "Behind the First Noel,"
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/covers/1101041213/story.html
"How peculiar it is to find that the actual Gospel Nativities are the part of Jesus' biography about which Bible experts have the greatest sense of uncertainty—even more than the scripture about the miracles Jesus performed or his sacrificial death. Indeed, the Christmas story that Christians know by heart is actually a collection of mysteries. Where was Jesus actually born? Who showed up to celebrate his arrival? How do the details of the stories reflect the specific outreach agendas of the men who wrote them?"
What experts? Liberals? Conservatives? No conservative scholar has the greatest sense of uncertainty over the nativity accounts.
What makes an expert an expert on the nativity stories? Is Dominic Crossan an expert. A few years ago, Jacob Neusner wrote a review of a book by Crossan. He commended Crossan for his engaging prose style, but not for his command of the primary sources.
"Agendas?" What about van Biema's agenda? Assuming that the gospel-writers have an agenda, if an "outreach" agenda discredits their record, does a journalistic agenda discredit his article?
"In the debates over the literal truth of the Gospels, just about everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues. There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story."
What is the "forensic," "physical" evidence that Augustus ever existed? Do we need a DNA sample to write history?
"Despite agreeing on the big ideas, Matthew and Luke diverge in conspicuous ways on details of the event. In Matthew's Nativity, the angelic Annunciation is made to Joseph while Luke's is to Mary. Matthew's offers wise men and a star and puts the baby Jesus in a house; Luke's prefers shepherds and a manger. Both place the birth in Bethlehem, but they disagree totally about how it came to be there."
I've already addressed the general allegation, but to comment on a few of the particulars:
i) Since Joseph and Mary were both parties to the arrangement, is there some reason why both of them would not be let in on the secret?
ii) Van Biema is conflating two different events--Christmas and Epiphany-- separated in time and space, and then imputing a conspicuous divergence in the details. But the confusion lies with van Biema. The account of the Magi is not a nativity account. The adoration of the Magi happened at a later date. By then the Holy Family had moved out of the "manger." Van Biema's analysis is simply inept.
iii) Matthew and Luke don't disagree at all, much less "totally," on how it came to be there. Luke tells us, while Matthew is silent. That is not any kind of disagreement.
"These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcoming Feminist Companion to Mariology, are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness."
Isn't this agenda driven?
"After Mary's Annunciation, she visits Elizabeth, and the fetus in Elizabeth's belly miraculously leaps up in recognition of God's promised Messiah."
The "fetus"? Is this a Roe v. Wade rendering of Luke?
" Such filigree, scholars concur, would have been foreign to Matthew, who wrote sometime after AD 60, a decade or two before Luke."
What scholars?
Where is the supporting evidence for this dating-scheme? What about scholars like Guthrie (New Testament Introduction), Robinson (Redating the New Testament) and Bock (BCNT 3) who date the composition of Luke to before AD 70?
For that matter, what reason is there, besides the entropy of critical consensus, not to date both to the 40s? This is not a preliterate or illiterate culture. If you know how to write in the 60s or the 80s, you also know how to write in the 40s, give or take.
" Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity…"
He is? What about scholars who think he was probably a convert to Judaism (a proselyte or God-fearer) before he became a convert to Christianity? His Christian faith would be a natural extension and completion of his adopted Jewish faith.
" His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential "lives" being written about pagan leaders in the same period. In such sagas, a hero is not a hero unless his birth reflects the magnificence of his later achievements, and such super-nativities, originally attached to great figures from antiquity like Alexander the Great, were at that point bestowed upon Roman leaders within decades of their actual deaths."
i) Once again, what is the date of these other literary forms?
ii) A "tantalizing resemblance"? Does the "life" of Alexander, or some Roman emperor, involve a parallel pregnancy, virgin birth, angelic choir, and band of shepherds? Show us the details.
iii) The "hero"? Van Biema is channeling the shade of Joseph Cambell. The technique is to fabricate a "monomyth" by mushing a lot of stuff together without regard to time, place, or divergent details. Such an ahistorical construct is imposed on the data rather than derived from the data.
iv) There were angelic heralds, preternatural pregnancies, and shepherds aplenty in the OT too. No need to roam further afield.
v) J. Gresham Machen went over all this ground some 75 years ago in his classic monograph on The Virgin Birth of Christ.
" By the time Luke wrote, says John Dominic Crossan, author of The Birth of Christianity, 'Christians are competing in a bigger world now, not just a Jewish world ... And in this wider world, Alexander the Great is the model for Augustus and Augustus often becomes the model for Jesus.'"
This is an assertion masquerading as an argument. Where is the supporting evidence?
"Says John Barclay, a New Testament expert at the University of Durham, England: "Theologically, this is the one thing that people will go to the stake for. If they defend the historicity of anything in the Christmas stories, they will defend this.'"
No, that's not where the lines fall. As a rule, those who affirm the virgin birth affirm everything else while those who deny the virgin birth deny everything else.
"Raymond Brown was one who did not. Brown, author of the landmark work The Birth of the Messiah, dean of historical Jesus scholars until his death in 1998 and a Sulpician priest, observed that the idea of divine conception in the womb appeared to be part of a theological progression. The very first Christians thought that Jesus had become God's Son at his Resurrection; Mark, the first Gospel written, seemed to locate the moment at his baptism in the Jordan; and it is only by the time that Matthew and Luke were writing that believers had dated his Sonship to before his birth."
i) If this is part of a theological progression, then we should expect the Fourth Gospel to be even more miracle-laden than Matthew and Luke. John would have more angels. More stars. But John doesn't have an account of the Virgin Birth.
ii) Actually, Mark has a very high Christology. Mark begins his Gospel by equating Christ with Yahweh (Mk 1:3). At that level, there is no room for theological progression.
" Thus, if Mary was the eyewitness source for the Holy Spirit's direct involvement in Jesus' birth (and who else could it be?), her testimony was lost to Christians for half a century before Luke somehow picked it up."
Once again, this assumes, without benefit of argument, the late dating of Luke.
"Facts like Jesus' relatives' seeming ignorance of his messiahship in Mark and John and other clues…"
What other clues? Aside from the "Messianic Secret," Christ's half-brothers knew his Messianic claims, but acted in disbelief until Easter morn.
"Fellow Jews early on challenged Matthew's Gospel assertion that it fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Isaiah that the Messiah would be born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.)"
i) The Septuagint, which is the Greek version in question, was translated from the Hebrew by pre-Christian Jews.
ii) I would add that the exact translation of Isa 7:14 is something of a red-herring. The important point is not the precise semantic domain of the Hebrew word or its Greek rendering. The point, rather, is whether Isaiah meant to refer to a virgin, and chose the best available word (Heb.='almah) to convey his intent, and wehther the Septuagintal translators, in turn, chose the best available word (Gr.=parthenos) to intersect with the Hebrew.
As a man who makes his living with words, it would profit van Biema to master the elementary distinction between sense and reference.
" Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts."
This assumes that Matthew was responding to early accusations. Where's the evidence? "Much later sources" are hardly evidence of a pre-Matthean slander.
"Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long maintained that parts of Luke's introduction to the topic echo the beginning of an Old Testament passage on rape…"
Isn't this another agenda-driving interpretation?
" Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept."
i) Except that neither Evangelist says that Jesus was conceived by means of carnal relations between Mary and a god or demigod. Quite the contrary.
ii) This free associative method was debunked by Bruce Metzger in his essay, "Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity," in Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian (Leiden, 1968), 1-24.
" Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction that today's Christianity believes marked Jesus' conception."
What pagan models in particular? As usual, we are treated to an empty claim, unredeemed by any specifics.
" Those sticking with Bethlehem point out, not unreasonably, that both Matthew and Luke place Jesus' birth there. The skeptics note that they reach the town by such extravagantly different means that one has to wonder whether they weren't trying too hard to get there."
As anyone who bothers to read Matthew and Luke can see for himself, neither writer ever says how Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem. How can they present different means, much less "extravagantly" different means, of getting there when both are entirely silent on the subject? Has van Biema ever read the accounts for himself?
" By Matthew's account, Joseph and Mary are Bethlehem residents and Jesus is born at home. But his very birth necessitates their flight to Egypt (and eventually Nazareth) because Jerusalem's vicious regent, Herod, is determined to murder the Bethlehem child he has learned will one day be King of the Jews. None of that gripping story, however, can be found in Luke. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary, Nazarenes, are on a brief if inconvenient visit to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem, complying with a vast census ("All the world should be enrolled") ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Meanwhile, Mark, written closer to Jesus' actual lifetime, omits Bethlehem and refers to Nazareth as Jesus' patrida, or hometown."
i) Notice, according to van Biema's very own summary, that Matthew doesn't say how they got there. So his supporting argument falsifies rather than validates his claim.
ii) The reason Matthew includes the material about the flight into Egypt and back is to draw attention to the fulfillment of OT typology. That would be more meaningful to his Jewish readers than Luke's Gentile readers. Indeed, van Biema goes on to say that very thing.
Van Biema then says that Luke discusses the nativity in relation to the census to show that Christians were loyal Roman citizens. Perhaps. But in any case, these are not by any means mutually exclusive explanations. Matthew didn't invent Judaism. Luke didn't invent the Roman Empire. These are cofactors in a common history of the period.
This is not "extravagant." To the contrary, that is a perfectly lucid rationale.
iii) Matthew doesn't say that Joseph and Mary are year-round residents. Once again, Van Biema is conflating two separate events. When they first arrive they stay in the manger (according to Luke) as an emergency measure. Later, they secured semi-permanent lodgings (according to Matthew). Jesus is not "born at home."
iv) The whole effort to box the Holy Family into a single hometown is silly. They lived in a mobile society, just like we do.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Fighting for a lost cause
For some reason, there are any number of Christians who suffer from a moth-like attraction to a lost cause. You can see this in how they spend year after year butting their head against a wall as they try to save a dying church or liberal denomination or apostate parachurch organization. What should we make of this?
1. Some Christians have a sentimental attachment to the church or denomination they grew up in, or the "Christian" college they attended, or some other "Christian" institution they had a role in. This is only natural. There is a point, however, when our social allegiance comes into conflict with our theological allegiance, when it’s time to cut the apron strings. Like Abraham, God us calling us out of Ur, out of idolatry.
2. Some Christians can’t distinguish between the church as a divine institution, and a variety of denominations. Now a denomination is just a man-made convention. Its rationale is purely utilitarian. Ideally, a denomination exists to exemplify the church. But if a denomination ceases to exemplify the church, then it is time to cut our ties, to cut our losses, and join a more faithful fellowship.
3. Some Christians suppose they have a divine duty to save a dying church or apostate denomination. They confuse the salvation of souls with the salvation of an organization. An organization is just an abstraction or legal entity with official positions in a formal chain-of-command.
A Christian organization exists to save the people, the people do not exist to save the organization. Our calling is to follow Christ, not a bureaucracy--especially when the bureaucracy refuses to follow Christ.
In fact, by remaining in an apostate church, they support it. Liberals are very generous--with everyone else’s money. The collection plate is filled by the faithful, not the faithless. Conservatives subsidize liberal theology and liberal activism by remaining in a liberal church. Cut off the source of funding, and liberal agenda dies of attrition and malnutrition.
4. Some Christians don’t k now how to count. It’s all about votes. If you don’t have the numbers on your side, forget it. Sorry to sound crass, but life isn’t fair. A minority of conservative activists can’t overcome a faithless or spineless clergy in league with a faithless or spineless laity.
Jesus talks about a wise commander who sizes up his own army and the opposing army (Lk 14:31-32). To keep fighting procedural skirmishes or quoting Scripture to unbelievers is a poor stewardship of your God-given time.
5. Some Christians feel an undue responsibility for others. But I am responsible for my own actions as well as the actions of those under my authority. I am not responsible for those over whom I have no ultimate control. They are responsible for their own conduct--or misconduct, as the case may be.
There is a difference between surrendering to the enemy, on the one hand, and staging a strategic retreat, on the other. You still stand your own ground, but on a battlefield of your own choosing.
You don't win by losing. You don't win by fighting an uphill battle on enemy turf. You don't win by putting yourself at a tactical disadvantage. There is no honor in delivering yourself into enemy hands. That does nothing to advance the cause of Christ.
6. Some Christians project th eir lack of guile onto unbelievers. Because a Christian believes in fair-play, he may imagine that if he wins fair-and-square, then the unbeliever will play by the rules in turn.
7. Apropos (6), some Christians forget their theology when dealing with unbelievers. Because they are well-intentioned, they project their pure motives onto the unbeliever--as though the unbeliever must be well-meaning too. But Scripture warns us against the untrustworthy character of unbelievers--especially outright enemies of the faith.
Some believers play the chump time and time again. But being duped by enemies of the gospel is not a theological virtue.
o
1. Some Christians have a sentimental attachment to the church or denomination they grew up in, or the "Christian" college they attended, or some other "Christian" institution they had a role in. This is only natural. There is a point, however, when our social allegiance comes into conflict with our theological allegiance, when it’s time to cut the apron strings. Like Abraham, God us calling us out of Ur, out of idolatry.
2. Some Christians can’t distinguish between the church as a divine institution, and a variety of denominations. Now a denomination is just a man-made convention. Its rationale is purely utilitarian. Ideally, a denomination exists to exemplify the church. But if a denomination ceases to exemplify the church, then it is time to cut our ties, to cut our losses, and join a more faithful fellowship.
3. Some Christians suppose they have a divine duty to save a dying church or apostate denomination. They confuse the salvation of souls with the salvation of an organization. An organization is just an abstraction or legal entity with official positions in a formal chain-of-command.
A Christian organization exists to save the people, the people do not exist to save the organization. Our calling is to follow Christ, not a bureaucracy--especially when the bureaucracy refuses to follow Christ.
In fact, by remaining in an apostate church, they support it. Liberals are very generous--with everyone else’s money. The collection plate is filled by the faithful, not the faithless. Conservatives subsidize liberal theology and liberal activism by remaining in a liberal church. Cut off the source of funding, and liberal agenda dies of attrition and malnutrition.
4. Some Christians don’t k now how to count. It’s all about votes. If you don’t have the numbers on your side, forget it. Sorry to sound crass, but life isn’t fair. A minority of conservative activists can’t overcome a faithless or spineless clergy in league with a faithless or spineless laity.
Jesus talks about a wise commander who sizes up his own army and the opposing army (Lk 14:31-32). To keep fighting procedural skirmishes or quoting Scripture to unbelievers is a poor stewardship of your God-given time.
5. Some Christians feel an undue responsibility for others. But I am responsible for my own actions as well as the actions of those under my authority. I am not responsible for those over whom I have no ultimate control. They are responsible for their own conduct--or misconduct, as the case may be.
There is a difference between surrendering to the enemy, on the one hand, and staging a strategic retreat, on the other. You still stand your own ground, but on a battlefield of your own choosing.
You don't win by losing. You don't win by fighting an uphill battle on enemy turf. You don't win by putting yourself at a tactical disadvantage. There is no honor in delivering yourself into enemy hands. That does nothing to advance the cause of Christ.
6. Some Christians project th eir lack of guile onto unbelievers. Because a Christian believes in fair-play, he may imagine that if he wins fair-and-square, then the unbeliever will play by the rules in turn.
7. Apropos (6), some Christians forget their theology when dealing with unbelievers. Because they are well-intentioned, they project their pure motives onto the unbeliever--as though the unbeliever must be well-meaning too. But Scripture warns us against the untrustworthy character of unbelievers--especially outright enemies of the faith.
Some believers play the chump time and time again. But being duped by enemies of the gospel is not a theological virtue.
o
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Apocalypse redux
<< Just one comment on this: you say there are three basic positions on the afterlife. But what about the position that there is no afterlife? That's my position. >>
Actually, if you go back and carefully reread what I said under option #2 (no one is saved), you'll see that I expressly mention the position you take. So I think I've covered the bases.
<< In my opinion, the concept of an afterlife has two main sources - 1) an inability to accept the finality of death and 2) a carrot-and-stick way of getting people to behave in whatever way is considered desirable by a given religion -- if you do bad things, you go to hell (or are reborn in a lower caste or as a lower life form), if you do good things, you go to heaven (or are reborn into a higher caste); if you accept Jesus Christ, you go heaven, if you don't you go to hell, etc. etc. >>
This is the standard Marxist-cum-Freudian critique. By way of reply:
i) There is no doubt that the fear of death makes a doctrine of the afterlife appealing.
ii) It would be viciously circular to say that I fear death because I fear hell, and I fear hell because I fear death. So when it comes to a causal relation between a general fear of death and a specific dogma of death, wish-fulfillment won't do the job.
iii) As a practical matter, no one except the occasional cult-leader draws up a shopping list of his fears and longings, and then concocts a religious creed that offers a point-by-point answer to his shopping list.
So this is a highly artificial explanation of how folks come to faith. It's a classic outsider's description which betrays no familiarity an insider's motives. That's not surprising, coming from Freud and Marx--since they didn't associate with Christians.
iv) If wish-fulfillment were the incentive, then we would expect various religions to make the terms of admission into a glorious afterlife easy to achieve.
However, most every religion, excepting evangelicalism, makes the attainment of a glorious afterlife very arduous and uncertain. Hence, the projectival theory is a just paper theory that fails to comport with the concrete phenomenology of faith which it purports to explain.
v) There is a basic tension between your two explanations: social control would fit with your second explanation--which affirms heaven and hell alike--but runs counter to your first explanation; for if fear of death is the driving dynamic, then the leading motive would be to affirm the assurance of heaven, but disaffirm the possibility of hell.
vi) Another weakness with projectival theories is that they cut in more than one direction, for they can be deployed to explain unbelief just as easily as belief.
For example, we could conjecture that Freud didn't believe in God because Freud had a dysfunctional relationship with his own father, and transferred his hang-up to God, as the archetypal father-figure.
In fact, there's a book-length treatment of atheism from a Freudian perspective. Cf. Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless.
Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he rejects Christian sexual morality, and he rejects Christian sexual morality because he wants to be sexually promiscuous.
Indeed, if you read testimonies by folks who left the church, this is one of the favorite reasons they give. E.g., E. Babinski, Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (Prometheus Book 1995).
Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he finds the idea of a divine Creator and Judge and affront to his personal autonomy. Once again, you can find this reason given in the literature of infidelity.
In sum, your alternative theory either explains too much or too little.
<< It's extremely presumptuous of religious people, whether Christians, Muslims, or Hindus, to assert there is an afterlife when that this totally unprovable. There is no evidence whatsoever of heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Just because the Bible asserts something doesn't mean the assertion is true -- the Bible was written by mortal humans, who even contradicted each other in various places. You may believe these human beings were only conveying what God told them (through what means I don't know), but there's no way you or anyone else can prove this. >>
First off the bat, I wasn't trying to make a positive case for the Christian doctrine of the afterlife. I was merely responding to the incoherent allegations and baseless assertions of Kristof.
You, by contrast, do make the effort to outline an argument for your own position. That's not surprising since you're ten times smarter than Kristof. By way of reply:
i) As to the question of evidence, there is, first of all, a preliminary question regarding the rules of evidence. What counts as evidence? Oftentimes in secular science we get a circular standard of evidence according to which the only thing that counts as evidence is evidence consistent with materialism and natural law.
There are different reasons for affirming or denying the possibility or reality of the afterlife. This depends, in part, on our point of departure. Do we reason from matter to mind or mind to matter?
The secular humanist typically operates with a presumptive materialism. But I don't regard this as philosophically warranted. We know our mind better than our body. We are in direct contact with our own minds, whereas the body and the external world lie at the end of a nerve impulse.
What is more, mind and matter, thoughts and things, seem to occupy different domains. When I think of a red colored thing, my thought is not a red colored thing.
ii) This goes to the general question of what is termed, in philosophy of mind, the irreducibility of consciousness. If materialism is true, then mind must be reducible to matter.
One of the interesting features of this debate is that a number of the philosophers who deny that mind is reducible to matter are card-carrying materialists, viz., John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn. They would like nothing better than to be able to carry out this program, but they can't.
iii) In their desperation, some secular thinkers (e.g., Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins, the Churchlands) relegate consciousness to an illusion. This radical position is dubbed eliminative materialism. It is also self-refuting, for if, true, there would be no mind to assert the proposition in the first place.
iv) Another problem with materialism is the relation between mind and math. What are numbers? Are numbers things or thoughts? If thoughts, are they merely human thoughts, or do they inhere in some timeless mind?
It is noteworthy that a number of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical logicians have subscribed to some version of Platonic dualism-cum-realism, viz., Cantor, Frege, Godel, Hardy, Penrose. And in the case of Cantor and Godel, this has a theistic aspect.
A couple of stimulating treatments of the above issues are:
John Byl, _The Divine Challenge_ (Banner of Truth 2004).
David J. Bartholomew, _Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational To be a Christian? (Oxford 1996), chapter 3.
The classic attack on dualism is:
George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas & Philonous, R. Adams, ed. (Hackett,
1988).
The classic defense of dualism is:
Hywell Lewis, The Elusive Mind (Allen & Unwin, 1969)
I myself have debated the pros and cons of physicalism in a section of my essay entitled _I'm glad you asked_.
iv) Another challenge to materialism comes from literature on the paranormal, encompassing such diverse phenomena as possession, the near-death-experience, out-of-body experience, uncanny animal abilities, ESP, &c.
Back in my 20s, I myself had a series of paranormal experiences. In subsequent research I found out that there's a name for my experience: Old-Hag Syndrome.
For some interesting literature on this complicated subject, one can consult:
D. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief, chapter 5.
Felicitas Goodman, How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Indiana U Press 1988).
Gary Habermas & J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death (Crossway Book 1998)
Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments (Riverhead Books 1996). He also has a website.
It is, of course, true, that specific doctrine of the Christian afterlife derives from the Bible. I have given some of my positive personal reasons for believing in the Bible in my essay on _Why I Believe_.
I've also written some essays defending the veracity of Scripture, viz.,
_Who wrote the Bible?_
_Bible or Babel_
_Vanity of Vanities_
--as well as a section on alleged discrepancies in my aforementioned essay on _I'm glad you asked_.
There is also a large literature on the veracity of Scripture. Representative titles include:
_Allis, O. The Old Testament (P&R, 1972).
_Archer, G. (Moody 1994). A Survey of Old Testament Introduction.
_____, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan 1982).
_Barnett, P. Is the New Testament Reliable? (IVP 1986).
_Blomberg, C. The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel (IVP 2001)
_____, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (IVP 1987)
_Comfort, P. (ed.). The Origin of the Bible (Tyndale 1992).
_Currid, J. Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament (Baker, 2001).
_Frame, J. "God and Biblical Language: Transcendence and Immanence," in J. Montgomery, ed., God's Inerrant Word (Bethany Fellowship, 1974), 159-177.
_____, "Scripture Speaks For Itself," ibid., 178-200.
_Guthrie, D. Introduction to the New Testament (IVP 1990).
_Harris, R. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scriptures (A Press, 1995).
_Helm,P. The Divine Revelation (Crossway Books 1982).
_Hemer, C. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (Eisenbrauns 1990).
_Hengel, M. The Four Gospels & the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (SCM 2000).
_Kim. S. The Origin of Paul's Gospel (Coronet 1984).
_Kitchen, K. On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003).
_Lightfoot, J. Biblical Essays (Baker, 1979).
_Linnemann, E. Historical Criticism of the Bible (Baker 1990).
_Mauck, J. Paul on Trial (Nelson 2001)
_Metzger, B. The Text of the New Testament (Oxford 1992).
_Neuer/Yarbrough, Adolf Schlatter (Baker 1995).
_Porter, S. The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research (Sheffield 2000)
_Robinson, J. Redating the New Testament (SCM, 1976).
_Stonehouse, N. Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Baker, 1979)
_Tov, E. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Fortress 1992)
_Wegner, P. The Journey from Texts to Translations (Baker 2001)
_Wenham, J. Christ & the Bible (IVP 1973)
_Winter, B. (ed.). The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting (Eerdmans/Paternoster
1993-96)
_Yamauchi, E. Africa & the Bible (Baker 2000)
_____, Persia & the Bible (Baker 1990)
_Young, E. Thy Word is Truth (Eerdmans, 1981)
_Zahn, T. Introduction to the New Testament (Kregel 1953).
This is in addition to all of the conservative commentaries on various books of the Bible.
A subset of this general subject would be literature on the quest for the historical Christ. Representative titles include:
_Barnett, P. Jesus and the Logic of History (Eerdmans 1997)
_____, Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity (IVP 1999).
_Blomberg, C. Jesus and the Gospels (Broadman 1997)
_Bock, D. Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Thomas Nelson, 2004)
_____, Jesus According to Scripture (Baker 2002)
_____, Studying the Historical Jesus (Baker, 2002)
_Bruce, F. Jesus & Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans 1974).
_Davis, S. Risen Indeed (Eerdmans, 1993).
_Evans, C. Jesus & His Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1995)
_Guthrie, D. A Shorter Life of Christ (Academie Books 1970)
_Harrison, E. A Short Life of Christ (Eerdmans, 1968)
_Johnson, L. The Real Jesus : The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth
(Harper SanFrancisco1997).
_Ladd, G. I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans 1975)
_Longenecker, R. Life in the Face of Death (Eerdmans, 1998)
_Moore, P. (ed.), Can A Bishop Be Wrong? The Scholars Challenge John Shelby Spong
(Moorehouse, 1998).
_Schlatter, A. The History of the Christ (Baker, 1997).
_Stein, R. Jesus the Messiah (IVP 1996)
_Stonehouse, N. The Witness of the Synoptic Gospels to Christ (Baker 1979)
_Strimple, R. The Modern Search for the Real Jesus (P&R 1995)
_Twelftree, G. Jesus the Exorcist (Hendrickson, 1993).
_____, Jesus the Miracle Worker (IVP, 1999).
_Warfield, B. "The Historical Christ," Christology & Criticism, Works, vol. 3.
_Wenham, D. Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Eerdmans 1995)
_Wilkins/Moreland (eds.). Jesus Under Fire (Zondervan 1995).
_Witherington, B. The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (IVP 1997)
_Wright, N. The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP 1999)
_____, The Contemporary Quest for Jesus (Augsburg/Fortress 2002)
_____, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress 2003). Definitive.
_____, Who Was Jesus? (Eerdmans 1993)
All-in-all, I'd say that the evidentiary ball is definitely in the unbeliever's court.
Steve
Actually, if you go back and carefully reread what I said under option #2 (no one is saved), you'll see that I expressly mention the position you take. So I think I've covered the bases.
<< In my opinion, the concept of an afterlife has two main sources - 1) an inability to accept the finality of death and 2) a carrot-and-stick way of getting people to behave in whatever way is considered desirable by a given religion -- if you do bad things, you go to hell (or are reborn in a lower caste or as a lower life form), if you do good things, you go to heaven (or are reborn into a higher caste); if you accept Jesus Christ, you go heaven, if you don't you go to hell, etc. etc. >>
This is the standard Marxist-cum-Freudian critique. By way of reply:
i) There is no doubt that the fear of death makes a doctrine of the afterlife appealing.
ii) It would be viciously circular to say that I fear death because I fear hell, and I fear hell because I fear death. So when it comes to a causal relation between a general fear of death and a specific dogma of death, wish-fulfillment won't do the job.
iii) As a practical matter, no one except the occasional cult-leader draws up a shopping list of his fears and longings, and then concocts a religious creed that offers a point-by-point answer to his shopping list.
So this is a highly artificial explanation of how folks come to faith. It's a classic outsider's description which betrays no familiarity an insider's motives. That's not surprising, coming from Freud and Marx--since they didn't associate with Christians.
iv) If wish-fulfillment were the incentive, then we would expect various religions to make the terms of admission into a glorious afterlife easy to achieve.
However, most every religion, excepting evangelicalism, makes the attainment of a glorious afterlife very arduous and uncertain. Hence, the projectival theory is a just paper theory that fails to comport with the concrete phenomenology of faith which it purports to explain.
v) There is a basic tension between your two explanations: social control would fit with your second explanation--which affirms heaven and hell alike--but runs counter to your first explanation; for if fear of death is the driving dynamic, then the leading motive would be to affirm the assurance of heaven, but disaffirm the possibility of hell.
vi) Another weakness with projectival theories is that they cut in more than one direction, for they can be deployed to explain unbelief just as easily as belief.
For example, we could conjecture that Freud didn't believe in God because Freud had a dysfunctional relationship with his own father, and transferred his hang-up to God, as the archetypal father-figure.
In fact, there's a book-length treatment of atheism from a Freudian perspective. Cf. Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless.
Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he rejects Christian sexual morality, and he rejects Christian sexual morality because he wants to be sexually promiscuous.
Indeed, if you read testimonies by folks who left the church, this is one of the favorite reasons they give. E.g., E. Babinski, Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (Prometheus Book 1995).
Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he finds the idea of a divine Creator and Judge and affront to his personal autonomy. Once again, you can find this reason given in the literature of infidelity.
In sum, your alternative theory either explains too much or too little.
<< It's extremely presumptuous of religious people, whether Christians, Muslims, or Hindus, to assert there is an afterlife when that this totally unprovable. There is no evidence whatsoever of heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Just because the Bible asserts something doesn't mean the assertion is true -- the Bible was written by mortal humans, who even contradicted each other in various places. You may believe these human beings were only conveying what God told them (through what means I don't know), but there's no way you or anyone else can prove this. >>
First off the bat, I wasn't trying to make a positive case for the Christian doctrine of the afterlife. I was merely responding to the incoherent allegations and baseless assertions of Kristof.
You, by contrast, do make the effort to outline an argument for your own position. That's not surprising since you're ten times smarter than Kristof. By way of reply:
i) As to the question of evidence, there is, first of all, a preliminary question regarding the rules of evidence. What counts as evidence? Oftentimes in secular science we get a circular standard of evidence according to which the only thing that counts as evidence is evidence consistent with materialism and natural law.
There are different reasons for affirming or denying the possibility or reality of the afterlife. This depends, in part, on our point of departure. Do we reason from matter to mind or mind to matter?
The secular humanist typically operates with a presumptive materialism. But I don't regard this as philosophically warranted. We know our mind better than our body. We are in direct contact with our own minds, whereas the body and the external world lie at the end of a nerve impulse.
What is more, mind and matter, thoughts and things, seem to occupy different domains. When I think of a red colored thing, my thought is not a red colored thing.
ii) This goes to the general question of what is termed, in philosophy of mind, the irreducibility of consciousness. If materialism is true, then mind must be reducible to matter.
One of the interesting features of this debate is that a number of the philosophers who deny that mind is reducible to matter are card-carrying materialists, viz., John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn. They would like nothing better than to be able to carry out this program, but they can't.
iii) In their desperation, some secular thinkers (e.g., Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins, the Churchlands) relegate consciousness to an illusion. This radical position is dubbed eliminative materialism. It is also self-refuting, for if, true, there would be no mind to assert the proposition in the first place.
iv) Another problem with materialism is the relation between mind and math. What are numbers? Are numbers things or thoughts? If thoughts, are they merely human thoughts, or do they inhere in some timeless mind?
It is noteworthy that a number of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical logicians have subscribed to some version of Platonic dualism-cum-realism, viz., Cantor, Frege, Godel, Hardy, Penrose. And in the case of Cantor and Godel, this has a theistic aspect.
A couple of stimulating treatments of the above issues are:
John Byl, _The Divine Challenge_ (Banner of Truth 2004).
David J. Bartholomew, _Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational To be a Christian? (Oxford 1996), chapter 3.
The classic attack on dualism is:
George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas & Philonous, R. Adams, ed. (Hackett,
1988).
The classic defense of dualism is:
Hywell Lewis, The Elusive Mind (Allen & Unwin, 1969)
I myself have debated the pros and cons of physicalism in a section of my essay entitled _I'm glad you asked_.
iv) Another challenge to materialism comes from literature on the paranormal, encompassing such diverse phenomena as possession, the near-death-experience, out-of-body experience, uncanny animal abilities, ESP, &c.
Back in my 20s, I myself had a series of paranormal experiences. In subsequent research I found out that there's a name for my experience: Old-Hag Syndrome.
For some interesting literature on this complicated subject, one can consult:
D. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief, chapter 5.
Felicitas Goodman, How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Indiana U Press 1988).
Gary Habermas & J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death (Crossway Book 1998)
Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments (Riverhead Books 1996). He also has a website.
It is, of course, true, that specific doctrine of the Christian afterlife derives from the Bible. I have given some of my positive personal reasons for believing in the Bible in my essay on _Why I Believe_.
I've also written some essays defending the veracity of Scripture, viz.,
_Who wrote the Bible?_
_Bible or Babel_
_Vanity of Vanities_
--as well as a section on alleged discrepancies in my aforementioned essay on _I'm glad you asked_.
There is also a large literature on the veracity of Scripture. Representative titles include:
_Allis, O. The Old Testament (P&R, 1972).
_Archer, G. (Moody 1994). A Survey of Old Testament Introduction.
_____, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan 1982).
_Barnett, P. Is the New Testament Reliable? (IVP 1986).
_Blomberg, C. The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel (IVP 2001)
_____, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (IVP 1987)
_Comfort, P. (ed.). The Origin of the Bible (Tyndale 1992).
_Currid, J. Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament (Baker, 2001).
_Frame, J. "God and Biblical Language: Transcendence and Immanence," in J. Montgomery, ed., God's Inerrant Word (Bethany Fellowship, 1974), 159-177.
_____, "Scripture Speaks For Itself," ibid., 178-200.
_Guthrie, D. Introduction to the New Testament (IVP 1990).
_Harris, R. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scriptures (A Press, 1995).
_Helm,P. The Divine Revelation (Crossway Books 1982).
_Hemer, C. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (Eisenbrauns 1990).
_Hengel, M. The Four Gospels & the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (SCM 2000).
_Kim. S. The Origin of Paul's Gospel (Coronet 1984).
_Kitchen, K. On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003).
_Lightfoot, J. Biblical Essays (Baker, 1979).
_Linnemann, E. Historical Criticism of the Bible (Baker 1990).
_Mauck, J. Paul on Trial (Nelson 2001)
_Metzger, B. The Text of the New Testament (Oxford 1992).
_Neuer/Yarbrough, Adolf Schlatter (Baker 1995).
_Porter, S. The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research (Sheffield 2000)
_Robinson, J. Redating the New Testament (SCM, 1976).
_Stonehouse, N. Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Baker, 1979)
_Tov, E. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Fortress 1992)
_Wegner, P. The Journey from Texts to Translations (Baker 2001)
_Wenham, J. Christ & the Bible (IVP 1973)
_Winter, B. (ed.). The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting (Eerdmans/Paternoster
1993-96)
_Yamauchi, E. Africa & the Bible (Baker 2000)
_____, Persia & the Bible (Baker 1990)
_Young, E. Thy Word is Truth (Eerdmans, 1981)
_Zahn, T. Introduction to the New Testament (Kregel 1953).
This is in addition to all of the conservative commentaries on various books of the Bible.
A subset of this general subject would be literature on the quest for the historical Christ. Representative titles include:
_Barnett, P. Jesus and the Logic of History (Eerdmans 1997)
_____, Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity (IVP 1999).
_Blomberg, C. Jesus and the Gospels (Broadman 1997)
_Bock, D. Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Thomas Nelson, 2004)
_____, Jesus According to Scripture (Baker 2002)
_____, Studying the Historical Jesus (Baker, 2002)
_Bruce, F. Jesus & Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans 1974).
_Davis, S. Risen Indeed (Eerdmans, 1993).
_Evans, C. Jesus & His Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1995)
_Guthrie, D. A Shorter Life of Christ (Academie Books 1970)
_Harrison, E. A Short Life of Christ (Eerdmans, 1968)
_Johnson, L. The Real Jesus : The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth
(Harper SanFrancisco1997).
_Ladd, G. I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans 1975)
_Longenecker, R. Life in the Face of Death (Eerdmans, 1998)
_Moore, P. (ed.), Can A Bishop Be Wrong? The Scholars Challenge John Shelby Spong
(Moorehouse, 1998).
_Schlatter, A. The History of the Christ (Baker, 1997).
_Stein, R. Jesus the Messiah (IVP 1996)
_Stonehouse, N. The Witness of the Synoptic Gospels to Christ (Baker 1979)
_Strimple, R. The Modern Search for the Real Jesus (P&R 1995)
_Twelftree, G. Jesus the Exorcist (Hendrickson, 1993).
_____, Jesus the Miracle Worker (IVP, 1999).
_Warfield, B. "The Historical Christ," Christology & Criticism, Works, vol. 3.
_Wenham, D. Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Eerdmans 1995)
_Wilkins/Moreland (eds.). Jesus Under Fire (Zondervan 1995).
_Witherington, B. The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (IVP 1997)
_Wright, N. The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP 1999)
_____, The Contemporary Quest for Jesus (Augsburg/Fortress 2002)
_____, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress 2003). Definitive.
_____, Who Was Jesus? (Eerdmans 1993)
All-in-all, I'd say that the evidentiary ball is definitely in the unbeliever's court.
Steve
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
War crimes?
It's always with a certain sense of frustration that I follow the news. For over a week now, the news media has been chewing over the footage of the Marine shooting a
gunman. The primary purpose of this coverage is to discredit the war effort. Now, whether or not you support the war, this is a canard. For if the war were wrong,
it would still be wrong even if the Marine did the right thing; and if the war were right, it would still be right even if the Marine did the wrong thing.The critics
have also raised two generic objections to the actions of the Marine. I say 'generic,' because these are objections they've been raising to the war in general from the
get-go: (i) it sends the wrong message to the Muslim world, inflaming Arab opinion: (ii) it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.To the first objection I'd say a
couple of things:a) You notice that whenever the Muslims do it to us, we're told that this has nothing to do Islam; Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.But
whenever we do it to a Muslim, we told that this will inflame the Muslim world, which assumes that it has everything to do with Islam.b) The message which the
Marine's action sends to me is that if you pick a fight with a Marine, you'll end up on the losing end of a rifle butt. And to my Neanderthal mind, that's a very
excellent message to be sending to the Muslim world.As to the second charge, notice how the debate has been framed: whether what the Marine did was right or
wrong depends on whether his action is defensible consistent with the terms of the Geneva Conventions.No one is questioning the Geneva Conventions. Rather,
they are questioning his action in relation to that unquestioned standard of reference.Well, I, for one, am going to question the Conventions. Suppose, for the sake
of argument, that the Marine did violate the Conventions. I don't care. The Conventions are not a moral absolute.As so often happens, you have something that
was put into effect for a reason. But once it's put into effect, folks are apt to forget what the reason was, and absolutize the policy. It takes on a life of its own--a
free-floating autonomy.In traditional warfare, there were two ways of dealing with POWs: enslave them or execute them.Both methods were harsh, but there was a
reason for the harsh policy. If you repatriated POWs, they would live to fight you another day. But that all changed, on paper, at least, with the Geneva
Conventions--which stipulated that POWs were entitled to certain rights.Yet it is important to remember the reasoning which lay behind the Conventions. The
reasoning was not that we should be nice to POWs for the sake of being nice; rather, the reasoning was that we'll be nice to our POWs so that you'll be nice to
your POWs.The reasoning was that if, in a given war, both sides take POWs, then it is in the self-interest of both sides that their imprisoned soldiers not be
mistreated.That's the logic. Notice that the logic is bilateral, not unilateral. This is not a moral imperative, but a pragmatic arrangement.It also comes at a cost. The
side which honors the Conventions is assuming an additional risk. It should be much safer for our soldiers to take no prisoners rather than to gingerly pick their
way through the fallen. Now, what kind of enemy are we facing in Iraq? We are facing an enemy that does not abide by the Geneva Conventions. Yet the
Conventions were predicated on the principle of reciprocity. Both sides assume a risk to yield a benefit.But given that the enemy doesn't play by the rules, there's
no earthly reason why our soldiers should be giving the wounded the benefit of the doubt.I'm not saying that we should kill indiscriminately. We should only kill
in self-defense and in the furtherance of a strategic objective.But the enemies we're up against live to kill. Whenever they take one of our soldiers captive, they kill
him--kill him as brutally as their diabolical minds can devise.So there's no good reason why we should sacrifice the safety of our soldiers or our tactical advantage
with an enemy like
this.
At the risk of repeating myself, the underlying rationale for the Conventions is pragmatic, not principled--utilitarian, not absolute.
The reasoning is that when we capture your combatants, we'll be nicer to them so that you'll return the favor when you capture our combatants.
This is not a question of intrinsic values or lowering ourselves to the level of the enemy. Rather, this is a case of contract law. Both sides assume a mutual obligation in the interests of a mutual benefit. If one party reneges on the contract, then that voids the contract.
This is an end-means arrangement, contingent on both parties to the contract upholding their end of the bargain. In case of nonperformance, the deal is off.
A cease-fire is a good comparison. If one side resumes hostilities, no reasonable man would say that other side is still bound to abide by the terms of the cease-fire, for the terms were mutual and the rationale was reciprocal. The salient point is the point for which the rules were framed in the first place.
This doesn't mean that our side is free to do whatever it pleases. For teleological reasoning conditions other aspects of just warfare. You try not to inflict more harm that is necessary to achieve the strategic objective. Wanton brutality and random carnage are without warrant because they are, among other things, gratuitous.
There are certain minimal standards of humane conduct, regardless of what the enemy does. To that extent we must sometimes surrender a tactical advantage.
*****************
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ollienorth/on20041119.shtml
Apocalypse Now
Once more, Nicholas Kristof sallies forth on his pogo-stick in another death-defying jousting match with the evangelical world. The latest excursion is his article on "Apocalypse (Almost) Now." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/opinion/24kristof.html?ex=1102319420&ei=1&en=33da1dada4db6045
I must begin by saluting Mr. Kristof's indomitable courage. He never balks at a chance to make a public fool of himself. But after drawing the short straw so many times, you'd think he might become a tad suspicious of the odds. Is there somebody who pushes him on stage? "Atta boy, Nicky! Go get 'em!" Why, he is the very model of a modern Major-General!
It takes a long time to fish out all the red herrings from his customary drag-net. Basically, the piece seems to be a hoary old exercise in innuendo and guilt-by-association. Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are hypocrites. Their eschatological timetable has often been of the mark. Ergo: there is no hell.
It should be needless to say that the conclusion doesn't strictly follow from the premise. But, evidently, Kristof’s intellectual pretensions do not commit him to the laws of logic.
He appears to level a twofold charge of hypocrisy against the authors. First, he insinuates that their portfolio is inconsistent with their belief in the imminent return of Christ. This may be a legitimate charge.
He also insinuates that their lavish income is a mark of worldliness, contrary to the otherworldly ethic of Scripture. This, too, may be a valid accusation.
Incidentally, for him to suggest, even tongue-in-cheek, that alms-giving would increase their chances of getting into heaven, betrays an utter and lamentable ignorance of fundamentalism. In fundamentalism, as in evangelicalism generally, salvation is a result of divine charity rather than human charity.
But neither allegation, whether considered in separation or taken together, has the slightest bearing on whether hell is real or not.
Incidentally, why do liberals like Kristof get so indignant about hypocrisy? Do they believe in moral absolutes?
Finally, he seems to suggest that the poor track-record of premillennial date-setting falsifies belief in the Day of Judgment. But to make that stick he would need to do a lot more than cite the sorry record of Hal Lindsey, Seventh-Day Adventism and the like.
The Bible itself discourages date-setting (Mt 24:35; Acts 1:7). Hence, the failure of those who ignore Biblical admonitions to the contrary is a confirmation rather than disconfirmation of Scripture.
I would hasten to add that the authors' pretrib version of the end-times has only been around since the Victorian era. It hardly represents the consensus of the historic Christian church. Indeed, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye scarcely represent the best that Dispensationalism has to offer.
By contrast, the doctrine of hell does represent the consensus of the historical Christian church--at least in the Western Hemisphere.
But Kristof has several more misguided arrows in his quiver. There is, for instance, this odd exchange,
"Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series,
have both emailed me (after I wrote about the ‘Left
Behind’ series in July) to protest that their books do not
'celebrate' the slaughter of non-Christians but simply
present the painful reality of Scripture.
‘We can't read it some other way just because it sounds
exclusivistic and not currently politically correct,’ Mr.
Jenkins said in an email. ‘That's our crucible, an
offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and
tolerance.’
Silly me. I'd forgotten the passage in the Bible about how
Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to
Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren't
born-again Christians."
What makes this odd is the insinuation that the authors are damning folks whom Jesus would never think to damn. How is this illustrative of Kristof’s own position? Bertrand Russell, for one, had no difficulty quoting Christ on the subject of hell. In this regard, Lord Russell reads the Bible the same way as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Would Kristof subject Bertrand Russell to the same scorn and ridicule? Of course, Russell didn’t believe the Bible, but neither does Kristof.
What is even odder is that in the very next paragraph, Kristof says the following:
"I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They
base their conclusions on John 3.)"
Okay, the reference to Jn 3 is an allusion to the new birth as a prerequisite for salvation. And this comes direct from the lips of Christ. If Kristof knows that much, then why does he pretend that the position of the authors runs counter to Christ?
Once again, Kristof illustrates his intellectual superiority by a display of intellectual confusion. Then he’s baffled by why Christians don’t find his position the paragon of reason.
Kristof, presuming to speak for the reader, says that "If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hate-mongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard."
We would? Speak for yourself, Mr. Kristof. There are many things amiss in this statement. Let’s look at a few.
i) I wouldn’t make any such demand on the Muslim world for the obvious reason that such a demand would be ineffectual. But, of course, liberals like Kristof are devoted to empty gestures--nonbinding UN resolutions and toothless treaties, so I realize that my distinction would elude him.
ii) Mr. Kristof tries to force a practical parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series, but other issues aside, the difference could hardly be plainer: it is Islam, and not Christianity, which is the hotbed of global terrorism.
iii) And there’s simple reason for this: the final judgment is an act of God, not an act of man. There is nothing in the doctrine of damnation which incites the Christian world to wage war on unbelievers. The final judgment is all about divine vengeance.
iv) Instead of attacking what Muslims believe, I would ask them why they believe it. That’s the real issue--not the symptom of belief, but the source of belief.
Kristof tries to draw another parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series:
"But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word."
Yes, there are some formal parallels between Islam and Christianity. And that is owing to the fact that Islam is a Judeo-Christian heresy. The Koran is based on Muhammad’s garbled, hearsay knowledge of Judaism and Christianity.
But to imply that this elevates it to a level of moral equivalence or epistemic parity is like placing a third-rate forgery is on the same plane as the masterpiece it plagiarizes.
So what is the point of Kristof’s hit-piece? Hard to say, but in sorting out all the non-sequiturs, the following statement seems to cut to the heart of the matter, at least as he sees it:
"Now, I've often written that blue staters should be less
snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that
this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the
good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief
efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as
bigotry. A dialogue about faith must move past taboos and
discuss differences bluntly. That's what blue staters and
red staters need to do about religion and the "Left Behind"
books."
He begins by paying a part of the Christian community a throwaway compliment. He thinks that by patting us on the head for our social work, we should be so grateful that this gives him the right to accuse us of bigotry.
Nice try, Nick, but tossing a few doggy biscuits our way won’t make us wag our tail when we see you coming down the street in your Animal Control truck.
But what about those juicy adjectives like "bigotry" and "hate-mongering?" As with so many other left-wing pundits, Mr. Kristof labors under the lazy illusion that adjectives can do the work of arguments. He supposes that by shouting a few smear words into his megaphone, we’ll take fright and then take flight. But this is just a lot of rhetorical bluff and bluster, unredeemed by any supporting arguments.
And what, exactly, is the basis for the defamatory language? Presumably this all goes back to the venerable doctrine of hell. But how is belief in hell hate-mongering or bigotry? He doesn’t say.
One can hardly call it reason, for he doesn’t give a reason. But does he feel that hell is too horrible to be true? Yet horrible things happen everyday. Kristof appears to cling to the childish belief that whatever he likes is what the world is like.
There are only three basic positions on the afterlife: (i) everyone is saved; (ii) no one is saved; (iii) some are saved and others are damned.
i) Many men find (i) the most appealing position. Like Kristof, they like to nominate their favorite humanitarians to bolster the claim.
But there is a downside to this charming picture. If everyone is saved, then the misanthrope is saved alongside the philanthropist. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, and other such splendid specimens of humanity live happily ever after with all their unnumbered victims. And I daresay that for many of the victims, that would take the sheen off the prospect of universalism.
Of course, the Christian doctrine of the afterlife doesn’t divide neatly into heavenbound victims and hellbound victimizers. But when Kristof strives to foist so much odium on the Christian doctrine, is his alternative any less odious?
Another tension in universalism is that it amounts to a very exclusive inclusivism inasmuch as it must claim more for many secular and religious traditions than they are prepared to claim for themselves. Universalism can only be universally true if every opposing position is universally erroneous. So its apparent modesty and magnanimity are a false modesty and mock magnanimity.
ii) Speaking of which--secularism is generally committed to (ii). Man is just a meat machine. Consciousness cannot survive brain-death. This delightful position includes secular Jews. Likewise, the classic Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana asserts the extinction of personal consciousness. Softheaded Unitarians affirm (i), while hardheaded Unitarians affirm (ii).
Since an unbeliever denies the very existence of heaven, why is he so offended when Christian theology denies his admission into heaven? Seems like a mutually agreeable arrangement to me!
In the words of Bertrand Russell, this is the eschatology of secular humanism:
"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction...that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...
United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom...The life of man is a long march through the night...One-by-one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death."
That's the faux-Miltonian version. In the colloquial version, "First you die, then you rot!"
Russell tries to perk this up a bit by some sanctimonious palaver about "the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes," but such pale allusions to the Christian hope--to the seed of the martyrs and the communion of the saints--merely serves to magnify hollow sound of his infinitely bleak and pitiless creed.
Would Kristof call Russell hate-monger and a bigot for damning everyone to a common oblivion?
By process of elimination, this leaves some version of (iii). Damnation is predicated on the principle of retributive justice--taking sinners as its object. Given the extent of injustice in life here-below, does Kristof deem it morally preferable that the scales of justice never be righted in the life to come?
It should be unnecessary to point out that a number of supporting arguments have been deployed in support of the Christian doctrine. As usual, Kristof displays his intellectual superiority by ducking every one of the supporting arguments. Stupid is as stupid does.
As to Catholicism, much could be said, but let us never forget those dire Tridentine anathemas.
Whatever position Kristof himself stakes out will be intolerant and exclusive of the other two alternatives. So that must make Kristof a hate-monger and a bigot as well. And I guess that makes us a big tent party after all. Join the club, Nick!
I must begin by saluting Mr. Kristof's indomitable courage. He never balks at a chance to make a public fool of himself. But after drawing the short straw so many times, you'd think he might become a tad suspicious of the odds. Is there somebody who pushes him on stage? "Atta boy, Nicky! Go get 'em!" Why, he is the very model of a modern Major-General!
It takes a long time to fish out all the red herrings from his customary drag-net. Basically, the piece seems to be a hoary old exercise in innuendo and guilt-by-association. Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are hypocrites. Their eschatological timetable has often been of the mark. Ergo: there is no hell.
It should be needless to say that the conclusion doesn't strictly follow from the premise. But, evidently, Kristof’s intellectual pretensions do not commit him to the laws of logic.
He appears to level a twofold charge of hypocrisy against the authors. First, he insinuates that their portfolio is inconsistent with their belief in the imminent return of Christ. This may be a legitimate charge.
He also insinuates that their lavish income is a mark of worldliness, contrary to the otherworldly ethic of Scripture. This, too, may be a valid accusation.
Incidentally, for him to suggest, even tongue-in-cheek, that alms-giving would increase their chances of getting into heaven, betrays an utter and lamentable ignorance of fundamentalism. In fundamentalism, as in evangelicalism generally, salvation is a result of divine charity rather than human charity.
But neither allegation, whether considered in separation or taken together, has the slightest bearing on whether hell is real or not.
Incidentally, why do liberals like Kristof get so indignant about hypocrisy? Do they believe in moral absolutes?
Finally, he seems to suggest that the poor track-record of premillennial date-setting falsifies belief in the Day of Judgment. But to make that stick he would need to do a lot more than cite the sorry record of Hal Lindsey, Seventh-Day Adventism and the like.
The Bible itself discourages date-setting (Mt 24:35; Acts 1:7). Hence, the failure of those who ignore Biblical admonitions to the contrary is a confirmation rather than disconfirmation of Scripture.
I would hasten to add that the authors' pretrib version of the end-times has only been around since the Victorian era. It hardly represents the consensus of the historic Christian church. Indeed, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye scarcely represent the best that Dispensationalism has to offer.
By contrast, the doctrine of hell does represent the consensus of the historical Christian church--at least in the Western Hemisphere.
But Kristof has several more misguided arrows in his quiver. There is, for instance, this odd exchange,
"Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series,
have both emailed me (after I wrote about the ‘Left
Behind’ series in July) to protest that their books do not
'celebrate' the slaughter of non-Christians but simply
present the painful reality of Scripture.
‘We can't read it some other way just because it sounds
exclusivistic and not currently politically correct,’ Mr.
Jenkins said in an email. ‘That's our crucible, an
offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and
tolerance.’
Silly me. I'd forgotten the passage in the Bible about how
Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to
Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren't
born-again Christians."
What makes this odd is the insinuation that the authors are damning folks whom Jesus would never think to damn. How is this illustrative of Kristof’s own position? Bertrand Russell, for one, had no difficulty quoting Christ on the subject of hell. In this regard, Lord Russell reads the Bible the same way as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
Would Kristof subject Bertrand Russell to the same scorn and ridicule? Of course, Russell didn’t believe the Bible, but neither does Kristof.
What is even odder is that in the very next paragraph, Kristof says the following:
"I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They
base their conclusions on John 3.)"
Okay, the reference to Jn 3 is an allusion to the new birth as a prerequisite for salvation. And this comes direct from the lips of Christ. If Kristof knows that much, then why does he pretend that the position of the authors runs counter to Christ?
Once again, Kristof illustrates his intellectual superiority by a display of intellectual confusion. Then he’s baffled by why Christians don’t find his position the paragon of reason.
Kristof, presuming to speak for the reader, says that "If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hate-mongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard."
We would? Speak for yourself, Mr. Kristof. There are many things amiss in this statement. Let’s look at a few.
i) I wouldn’t make any such demand on the Muslim world for the obvious reason that such a demand would be ineffectual. But, of course, liberals like Kristof are devoted to empty gestures--nonbinding UN resolutions and toothless treaties, so I realize that my distinction would elude him.
ii) Mr. Kristof tries to force a practical parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series, but other issues aside, the difference could hardly be plainer: it is Islam, and not Christianity, which is the hotbed of global terrorism.
iii) And there’s simple reason for this: the final judgment is an act of God, not an act of man. There is nothing in the doctrine of damnation which incites the Christian world to wage war on unbelievers. The final judgment is all about divine vengeance.
iv) Instead of attacking what Muslims believe, I would ask them why they believe it. That’s the real issue--not the symptom of belief, but the source of belief.
Kristof tries to draw another parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series:
"But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word."
Yes, there are some formal parallels between Islam and Christianity. And that is owing to the fact that Islam is a Judeo-Christian heresy. The Koran is based on Muhammad’s garbled, hearsay knowledge of Judaism and Christianity.
But to imply that this elevates it to a level of moral equivalence or epistemic parity is like placing a third-rate forgery is on the same plane as the masterpiece it plagiarizes.
So what is the point of Kristof’s hit-piece? Hard to say, but in sorting out all the non-sequiturs, the following statement seems to cut to the heart of the matter, at least as he sees it:
"Now, I've often written that blue staters should be less
snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that
this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the
good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief
efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as
bigotry. A dialogue about faith must move past taboos and
discuss differences bluntly. That's what blue staters and
red staters need to do about religion and the "Left Behind"
books."
He begins by paying a part of the Christian community a throwaway compliment. He thinks that by patting us on the head for our social work, we should be so grateful that this gives him the right to accuse us of bigotry.
Nice try, Nick, but tossing a few doggy biscuits our way won’t make us wag our tail when we see you coming down the street in your Animal Control truck.
But what about those juicy adjectives like "bigotry" and "hate-mongering?" As with so many other left-wing pundits, Mr. Kristof labors under the lazy illusion that adjectives can do the work of arguments. He supposes that by shouting a few smear words into his megaphone, we’ll take fright and then take flight. But this is just a lot of rhetorical bluff and bluster, unredeemed by any supporting arguments.
And what, exactly, is the basis for the defamatory language? Presumably this all goes back to the venerable doctrine of hell. But how is belief in hell hate-mongering or bigotry? He doesn’t say.
One can hardly call it reason, for he doesn’t give a reason. But does he feel that hell is too horrible to be true? Yet horrible things happen everyday. Kristof appears to cling to the childish belief that whatever he likes is what the world is like.
There are only three basic positions on the afterlife: (i) everyone is saved; (ii) no one is saved; (iii) some are saved and others are damned.
i) Many men find (i) the most appealing position. Like Kristof, they like to nominate their favorite humanitarians to bolster the claim.
But there is a downside to this charming picture. If everyone is saved, then the misanthrope is saved alongside the philanthropist. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, and other such splendid specimens of humanity live happily ever after with all their unnumbered victims. And I daresay that for many of the victims, that would take the sheen off the prospect of universalism.
Of course, the Christian doctrine of the afterlife doesn’t divide neatly into heavenbound victims and hellbound victimizers. But when Kristof strives to foist so much odium on the Christian doctrine, is his alternative any less odious?
Another tension in universalism is that it amounts to a very exclusive inclusivism inasmuch as it must claim more for many secular and religious traditions than they are prepared to claim for themselves. Universalism can only be universally true if every opposing position is universally erroneous. So its apparent modesty and magnanimity are a false modesty and mock magnanimity.
ii) Speaking of which--secularism is generally committed to (ii). Man is just a meat machine. Consciousness cannot survive brain-death. This delightful position includes secular Jews. Likewise, the classic Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana asserts the extinction of personal consciousness. Softheaded Unitarians affirm (i), while hardheaded Unitarians affirm (ii).
Since an unbeliever denies the very existence of heaven, why is he so offended when Christian theology denies his admission into heaven? Seems like a mutually agreeable arrangement to me!
In the words of Bertrand Russell, this is the eschatology of secular humanism:
"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction...that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...
United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom...The life of man is a long march through the night...One-by-one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death."
That's the faux-Miltonian version. In the colloquial version, "First you die, then you rot!"
Russell tries to perk this up a bit by some sanctimonious palaver about "the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes," but such pale allusions to the Christian hope--to the seed of the martyrs and the communion of the saints--merely serves to magnify hollow sound of his infinitely bleak and pitiless creed.
Would Kristof call Russell hate-monger and a bigot for damning everyone to a common oblivion?
By process of elimination, this leaves some version of (iii). Damnation is predicated on the principle of retributive justice--taking sinners as its object. Given the extent of injustice in life here-below, does Kristof deem it morally preferable that the scales of justice never be righted in the life to come?
It should be unnecessary to point out that a number of supporting arguments have been deployed in support of the Christian doctrine. As usual, Kristof displays his intellectual superiority by ducking every one of the supporting arguments. Stupid is as stupid does.
As to Catholicism, much could be said, but let us never forget those dire Tridentine anathemas.
Whatever position Kristof himself stakes out will be intolerant and exclusive of the other two alternatives. So that must make Kristof a hate-monger and a bigot as well. And I guess that makes us a big tent party after all. Join the club, Nick!
Monday, November 22, 2004
A time to hate
Dear Mr. Jacoby,
Thanks for your recent article.
A number of distinctions need to be made.
1. Different Christian traditions have different views of the Old Testament. In general, those in the Lutheran, Baptist, Anabaptist, and fundamentalist tradition see more discontinuity between Old Testament ethics and New Testament ethics than those in the Reformed (=Calvinist) tradition. A Calvinist like myself sees the moral law of God as the same, whether under the Mosaic Covenant or the New Covenant. This view is fairly common among conservative Presbyterians.
2. I would add that some Christian traditions change over time. Roman Catholicism, for most of its history, has been very exclusive and militant. But in the 20C it became quite inclusive and pacifistic. There's a world of difference between John-Paul II and Julius II or Innocent XIII.
3. The scope of God's love also differs with different traditions. Most Christian traditions believe that God loves everyone--equally and without exception.
However, the Augustinian tradition, which is taken up in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, sees the love of God as intensive rather than extensive. Just as the Jews were a chosen people as over against the multitude of the heathen in Old Testament times, God does not show his favor to everyone alike. Rather, the love of God is like marital love--exclusive and intensive rather than inclusive and extensive. The difference is between a love which is broad, but shallow, and a love which is narrow, but deep.
4. By the same token, a Calvinist would say that God loves a sinner, not because the sinner is lovable or at all deserving of love. To the contrary, God loves a sinner out of his sheer mercy and grace.
5. At the same time, there is also a doctrine of divine judgment in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. There is such a thing as damnation and hell. This is true of almost every Christian tradition, although some have liberalized.
6. God's attitude towards the sinner is, of course, germane to our attitude towards the sinner. There is a sort of folkloric version of Christian ethics that is popular in many churches. It is based on a very lopsided and hermeneutically naïve reading of the Gospels. It contains a grain of truth, but a half-truth.
7. One element is the fallacy of unconditional forgiveness. Many Christians believe it to be their Christian duty to forgive everyone, period.
One thing they forget is that the Gospels were written to the church, to the Christian community, just as the Mosaic Law was addressed, in the first place, to the covenant community.
This doesn't mean that there's one standard for insiders, and a totally different standard for outsiders. But what makes a faith-community a community is a certain level of mutuality and reciprocity. One cannot transfer this without qualification to those who are not signatories to a common ethic.
Even in the church, forgiveness is contingent on repentance: "if your brother sins, reprove him, and if he repents, forgive him" (Luke 17:3). Notice that there are three conditions in view: (i) the offender is a "brother," a fellow Christian; (ii) the offender is penitent and contrite, and (iii) the offended party is forgiving the offender for a wrong done by the offender to the offended party. In other words, I can forgive Jim for what Jim did to me (personally), but I can't forgive Jim for what Jim did to John.
Many Christians are very confused about forgiveness because they don't study the details for themselves, but simply recite a popularized, sloganized sound-bite.
8. Regarding the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), several things need to be said:
i) This is not dealing with genocide or crimes of violence. Rather, it is dealing with personal affronts and civil infractions.
ii) There is a radical element to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of simply reacting in kind, we should restrain our punitive impulses and be merciful, acting in the best interests of the offender. We should return good for evil, rather than evil for evil. We do not become the thing we hate. We do not model our code of conduct on the enemy.
One presupposition of Christian ethics is that a Christian has a limited stake in this world. Another presupposition is that we are all sinners, and those of us who have been redeemed should try, where possible, to redirect other sinners in the way of righteousness, blessing them as the Lord has blessed us--showing mercy because the Lord has shown us mercy.
iii) However, the Bible is not all about doing mercy; the Bible is also about doing justly. We can't be equally loving to everyone. We can't be merciful to the merciless without being merciless to their victims. There are certain moral and practical priorities.
Steve Hays
P.S. I hope you don't receive any hate-mail for your article on hatred! :-)
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Thanks for your recent article.
A number of distinctions need to be made.
1. Different Christian traditions have different views of the Old Testament. In general, those in the Lutheran, Baptist, Anabaptist, and fundamentalist tradition see more discontinuity between Old Testament ethics and New Testament ethics than those in the Reformed (=Calvinist) tradition. A Calvinist like myself sees the moral law of God as the same, whether under the Mosaic Covenant or the New Covenant. This view is fairly common among conservative Presbyterians.
2. I would add that some Christian traditions change over time. Roman Catholicism, for most of its history, has been very exclusive and militant. But in the 20C it became quite inclusive and pacifistic. There's a world of difference between John-Paul II and Julius II or Innocent XIII.
3. The scope of God's love also differs with different traditions. Most Christian traditions believe that God loves everyone--equally and without exception.
However, the Augustinian tradition, which is taken up in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, sees the love of God as intensive rather than extensive. Just as the Jews were a chosen people as over against the multitude of the heathen in Old Testament times, God does not show his favor to everyone alike. Rather, the love of God is like marital love--exclusive and intensive rather than inclusive and extensive. The difference is between a love which is broad, but shallow, and a love which is narrow, but deep.
4. By the same token, a Calvinist would say that God loves a sinner, not because the sinner is lovable or at all deserving of love. To the contrary, God loves a sinner out of his sheer mercy and grace.
5. At the same time, there is also a doctrine of divine judgment in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. There is such a thing as damnation and hell. This is true of almost every Christian tradition, although some have liberalized.
6. God's attitude towards the sinner is, of course, germane to our attitude towards the sinner. There is a sort of folkloric version of Christian ethics that is popular in many churches. It is based on a very lopsided and hermeneutically naïve reading of the Gospels. It contains a grain of truth, but a half-truth.
7. One element is the fallacy of unconditional forgiveness. Many Christians believe it to be their Christian duty to forgive everyone, period.
One thing they forget is that the Gospels were written to the church, to the Christian community, just as the Mosaic Law was addressed, in the first place, to the covenant community.
This doesn't mean that there's one standard for insiders, and a totally different standard for outsiders. But what makes a faith-community a community is a certain level of mutuality and reciprocity. One cannot transfer this without qualification to those who are not signatories to a common ethic.
Even in the church, forgiveness is contingent on repentance: "if your brother sins, reprove him, and if he repents, forgive him" (Luke 17:3). Notice that there are three conditions in view: (i) the offender is a "brother," a fellow Christian; (ii) the offender is penitent and contrite, and (iii) the offended party is forgiving the offender for a wrong done by the offender to the offended party. In other words, I can forgive Jim for what Jim did to me (personally), but I can't forgive Jim for what Jim did to John.
Many Christians are very confused about forgiveness because they don't study the details for themselves, but simply recite a popularized, sloganized sound-bite.
8. Regarding the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), several things need to be said:
i) This is not dealing with genocide or crimes of violence. Rather, it is dealing with personal affronts and civil infractions.
ii) There is a radical element to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of simply reacting in kind, we should restrain our punitive impulses and be merciful, acting in the best interests of the offender. We should return good for evil, rather than evil for evil. We do not become the thing we hate. We do not model our code of conduct on the enemy.
One presupposition of Christian ethics is that a Christian has a limited stake in this world. Another presupposition is that we are all sinners, and those of us who have been redeemed should try, where possible, to redirect other sinners in the way of righteousness, blessing them as the Lord has blessed us--showing mercy because the Lord has shown us mercy.
iii) However, the Bible is not all about doing mercy; the Bible is also about doing justly. We can't be equally loving to everyone. We can't be merciful to the merciless without being merciless to their victims. There are certain moral and practical priorities.
Steve Hays
P.S. I hope you don't receive any hate-mail for your article on hatred! :-)
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Sunday, November 21, 2004
Why do the heathen rage?
Why do the heathen rage?
On the face of it, the attitude of the unbeliever is quite irrational. If a Martian were eavesdropping on the conflict between believer and unbeliever, he'd assume that the unbeliever's creed must have something indispensable and irreplaceable to offer the unbeliever, something denied him by the believer's creed. He'd assume that the unbeliever's creed was a wonderfully life-affirming creed, whereas the Gospel must be a nihilistic creed. Otherwise, why would the unbeliever be so devoted to his creed and so opposed to the believer's?
And yet the truth is just the opposite. For the unbeliever, man is just a meat machine. He has no immortal soul. His very consciousness is a clever illusion. Morality is just a dirty trick played upon us by natural selection. Life has no ultimate purpose. When we die, all our loves and longings die with us. The benevolent philanthropist and the genocidal tyrant share a common oblivion.
Why would an unbeliever live and die for such a self-destructive creed? And why is he so fanatically opposed to the Gospel? The Gospel is like a match in the darkness, lighting our way out of the cave and illumining our footsteps lest we fall down a bottomless pit. Why is the unbeliever so hell-bent on extinguishing the flickering match-light? Why this passionate communion with death?
Warfield offers a striking psychological profile of the unbeliever:
"The sinner instinctively and by his very nature, as he cannot help believing in God, in the intellectual sense, so cannot possibly exercise faith in God in the fiducial sense. On the contrary, faith in this sense has been transformed into its opposite--faith has passed into unfaith, trust to distrust," Selected Shorter Writings 2:116.
For the unregenerate and the reprobate, God is an object of fear, for God is the sinner's judge. And like a suicide-bomber, the graceless sinner is prepared to blow up the courtroom in order to kill the judge, even if it means killing himself in the process. The more brilliant the unbeliever, the more elaborate the perfect crime--the cosmic murder-suicide.
The Christian apologist has written book after book defending the faith, while the unbeliever has written book after book attacking the faith. And when words fail, the unbeliever has resorted to more forcible means of suppression.
But in his unwitting way, the unbelieving is a living apologetic for the very faith he denies with every gasping breath. Unbelief is an enigma to itself. Unbelief can make no sense of an unbeliever. Only belief can make sense of an unbeliever. The unbeliever would rather die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole, than eat the bread of life come down from heaven. This is the squint-eyed attitude, not of mere unbelief, but of sheer disbelief--of an impenitent rebel without a cause.
On the face of it, the attitude of the unbeliever is quite irrational. If a Martian were eavesdropping on the conflict between believer and unbeliever, he'd assume that the unbeliever's creed must have something indispensable and irreplaceable to offer the unbeliever, something denied him by the believer's creed. He'd assume that the unbeliever's creed was a wonderfully life-affirming creed, whereas the Gospel must be a nihilistic creed. Otherwise, why would the unbeliever be so devoted to his creed and so opposed to the believer's?
And yet the truth is just the opposite. For the unbeliever, man is just a meat machine. He has no immortal soul. His very consciousness is a clever illusion. Morality is just a dirty trick played upon us by natural selection. Life has no ultimate purpose. When we die, all our loves and longings die with us. The benevolent philanthropist and the genocidal tyrant share a common oblivion.
Why would an unbeliever live and die for such a self-destructive creed? And why is he so fanatically opposed to the Gospel? The Gospel is like a match in the darkness, lighting our way out of the cave and illumining our footsteps lest we fall down a bottomless pit. Why is the unbeliever so hell-bent on extinguishing the flickering match-light? Why this passionate communion with death?
Warfield offers a striking psychological profile of the unbeliever:
"The sinner instinctively and by his very nature, as he cannot help believing in God, in the intellectual sense, so cannot possibly exercise faith in God in the fiducial sense. On the contrary, faith in this sense has been transformed into its opposite--faith has passed into unfaith, trust to distrust," Selected Shorter Writings 2:116.
For the unregenerate and the reprobate, God is an object of fear, for God is the sinner's judge. And like a suicide-bomber, the graceless sinner is prepared to blow up the courtroom in order to kill the judge, even if it means killing himself in the process. The more brilliant the unbeliever, the more elaborate the perfect crime--the cosmic murder-suicide.
The Christian apologist has written book after book defending the faith, while the unbeliever has written book after book attacking the faith. And when words fail, the unbeliever has resorted to more forcible means of suppression.
But in his unwitting way, the unbelieving is a living apologetic for the very faith he denies with every gasping breath. Unbelief is an enigma to itself. Unbelief can make no sense of an unbeliever. Only belief can make sense of an unbeliever. The unbeliever would rather die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole, than eat the bread of life come down from heaven. This is the squint-eyed attitude, not of mere unbelief, but of sheer disbelief--of an impenitent rebel without a cause.
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