Where can we find the official Bible of the Eastern Orthodox church?
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The fact that there are variations of the translations of the Bible indicates most clearly the need for a common edition of the Greek New Testament on which other translations will depend.
The text of the Patriarchate was prepared by a commission in 1904, which also has approximately 2,000 variations compared to the Common Edition, Textus Receptus, prepared much earlier. Despite these efforts there is still no one common edition of the New Testament Greek accepted by all. It must be recognized, though, that the edition issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople depended mainly upon the passages and verses designated by the Church to be read during the celebrations on Sundays and feast days, For this reason these passages were kept intact with fewer changes. It is evident that greater efforts involving all the Christian churches must be made to arrive at one common edition in the original language recognized by all Christians.
The Eastern Orthodox Church officially uses the Septuagint-Old Testament Greek which was translated from the original Hebrew language into Greek in the third century B.C.
http://www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article7068.asp
THE SEPTUAGINT, derived from the Latin word for "seventy," can be a confusing term, since it ideally refers to the third-century BCE translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt. There is a complicated story, however, behind the translation and the various stages, amplifications, and modifications to the collection we now call the Septuagint.
In the third century, the great Christian scholar, Origen (184/85–254/55), keenly interested in the textual differences between the Hebrew and the Greek, set out to arrange the Church's Old Testament in six columns: (1) the Hebrew, (2) a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, (3) Aquila's translation, (4) Symmachus's translation, (5) the Septuagint (LXX), and (6) Theodotion. The volumes were compiled in Caesarea, probably between 230 and 240 CE, a project funded by Origen's patron. The resultant work, the Hexapla, was massive, and has for the most part perished, probably due to cost and labor of transcribing all 3600 folios for posterity. Origen was a very careful scholar, but he did not observe modern editorial conventions. He composed his version of the LXX from several different manuscripts and preferred readings that brought the text into conformity with the Hebrew. Thus, this fifth LXX column, while establishing the first "standardized text" of the Christian Church, created problems for modern scholars who would seek to recover a pre-Christian version of the LXX.
Further rescensions of the Greek text in the fourth century are attested. Hesychius (fl. 3/4th c.) is said to have created a rescension for the Church in Egypt; Lucian (d. 312 CE), in Antioch. Some scholars posit other rescensions from this period. Thus, we find some Greek Church Fathers quoting the same Old Testament texts, but in very different forms. There is no indication, however, that this troubled to Church leadership. The insistence on letter-for-letter, word-for-word accuracy in the Scriptures was a feature that was not to emerge in Christian thought for many centuries, and then in imitation of Jewish and Islamic models. As far as most early Christians were concerned, any Greek version of the Old Testament read in the Church merited the term Septuagint.
Wherever Christianity spread, translations of the Hebrew Scriptures were made based on the LXX. Thus, it became the basis for translations made into Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Old Latin, Coptic, Georgian, and Old Church Slavonic. (It was not the basis either for the Syriac version [known as the Peshitta], which is a pre-Christian translation based directly upon the Hebrew, or for St. Jerome's Latin translation, which is also based on the Hebrew.)
Modern scholars, sifting through this very interesting and eventful history, have attempted to create editions of the Septuagint that reflect as early a text as possible. Rahlfs's edition of the LXX (1935) is semi-critical, utilizing what he believed to be the chief manuscripts. Brooke, McLean, and Thackeray's partial edition (1906–40) sought a more critical approach. The Göttingen edition of the LXX (1931–), now mostly complete, is the most critical edition of the LXX, taking into account over 120 manuscripts, many languages, and a multitude of patristic quotations. Modern Biblical scholars have accepted the Göttingen as the standard working edition, although the ease and accessibility of Rahlfs's edition has made it popular less exacting work and study. It is important to bear in mind that all these editions are eclectic, and reasonable attempts to reconstruct the earliest version of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Thus, the term Septuagint could refer to any one or more of the states of the Greek translation throughout history. It is important to understand specifically what is meant in any given discussion of the LXX. A strict, purist use of Septuagint would allow the term to be used only of the earliest, (probably) unrecoverable translation of the Pentateuch made by the Jewish scholars around 282 BCE (some refer to this as the "Old Greek," but with some confusion, since the assignment of this term forces Septuagint to be applied to texts with no direct connection to the legend of the seventy-two).
http://www.kalvesmaki.com/LXX/
The LXX is in some sense the "official" Orthodox Old Testament, but from the time of Origen's Hexapla until recently there seems to have been little effort to actually publish a standardized version. Ancient manuscripts and fragments differ so much from each other and from the readings in the Church's lectionary that this is something of a problem. The first "official" (hierarchically approved) printed editions, which appeared in Russia and later in Greece in the XIX Century, were essentially reprints of Western scholarly texts based on the Codex Alexandrinus and other ancient manuscripts rather than on the liturgical practice of the Church. Even now, it is not clear to us that there is a universally accepted Orthodox version based on liturgical usage.
http://www.voskrese.info/spl/Xlxx.html
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Radical Skeptic
This post will consist of two parts in one post. The first part is directed toward T-Stone. The second part is for everyone else :-)
Part I
In comments on this post, I pointed out the irony that Touchstone would defend Cameron’s subjective testimony during his & Comfort’s “debate” (which isn’t really the correct word for what happened) with Brian Sapient and Kelli Whatshername (you know, from the Green Day song). The irony of T-Stone’s comment is due to the fact that T-Stone never misses a chance to bash the Triabloguers who, rather than presenting subjectivist “testimony,” actually produce arguments.
T-Stone took umbrage with my classification of his position. He said:
The problem is that T-Stone hypocritically applies a radical skepticism to anything I say in an attempt to turn everything into a subjective argument when he does not use the same radical skepticism against his own views. There is a reason for this. He isn’t a radical skeptic (no one is, for we all must actually live in this world).
When it comes to T-Stone, I could argue “2 + 2 = 4 in a Base-10 system is objectively true” and T-Stone would counter: "Have you considered quantum mechanics possibly making 2 + 2 both equal to and NOT equal to 4 at the same time and in the same relationship? No? Then you're being subjective while pretending to be objective!"
T-Stone's refuge is to hold onto pure skepticism as his weapon against the T-Bloggers. But his skepticism comes at a price. If T-Stone is to remain faithful to his skeptical position, he can never assert any positive claim. This includes his claim that I am being subjective instead of objective, as well as his claim that skepticism is a valid approach.
Perhaps the best argument is a demonstration. So, T-Stone can have it back now. He begins by saying: “The problem is that you offer arguments that are supremely subjective, yet suppose they are objective.” T-Stone: is this an objective statement? That is, can you objectively demonstrate that my arguments are “supremely subjective”? Can you even define “subjective” and “objective” (without doing another of your “trivial Google searches” that you are so fond of)? And if you do define those words, how do you know that you defined them correctly? Isn’t your use of the words themselves subjective rather than objective?
T-Stone continues: “Nothing wrong with subjective arguments, or objective arguments.” Really? Is THIS an objective statement, or a subjective statement? How do you know it is true that there is nothing wrong with either type of argument?
T-Stone charges: “But it's a problem when you try to claim the mantle of objectivity for your subjective assertions.” But A) how is it objectively a problem for me to lie (if, indeed, that is what I have done) and B) how do you KNOW that i) it actually is a problem for me too and ii) that I did violate this principal? What is your objective proof that I am engaged in such bad behavior here? Show me your objectivity, T-Stone.
You challenge me to show my arguments (as if I hadn’t already done this hundreds of times). I’m challenging you to back up your statements.
And since this began as a discussion in interpretation in the first place, I want you to objectively prove to me right now that you have objectively understood my statements (whether you agree or disagree with them). Keep in mind that no matter what you say, I’m going to respond with, “But how do you know this is true?” just as you do.
Dealing with the radical skeptic is oh-so-fun, isn’t it T-Stone? But if it’s good enough for you to behave this way, it’s good enough for me to respond in kind. When you’ve had enough of this nonsense, we can move on.
Part II
While my above challenge to T-Stone is a serious challenge (that is, T-Stone has to do it if he’s going to keep any sense of self-respect), it may also actually appear to some as a valid method of attacking someone’s point of view. It appears valid because A) the method employed is only asking questions and B) there is a level of “uncertainty” associated with knowledge. But in reality, the radical skeptic approach is self-contradictory and, as such, it is impossible for it to actually be true.
It is rather simple to demonstrate this if we take the radical skeptic view toward radical skepticism in the first place. “Is radical skepticism objective? How can we know? Have we understood radical skepticism correctly in order to know whether we’re using it right in the first place?”
The bottom line is, if radical skepticism is true we cannot know that it is true. If we know that radical skepticism is true, then we know that radical skepticism must be false for radical skepticism cannot know anything. This is the self-contradictory nature of radical skepticism. As such, even before we look at the questions in any attack against our position, we know that at the basic level skepticism can no longer be viable.
But there is another level where the radical skeptic approach becomes self-contradictory, and that is during its application. When we get into language (which is where this subject with T-Stone originated), this means that the radical skeptic who assumes that there can be no objective transfer of meaning in a text must, in the midst of attacking that text, make an objective statement about the very text he is criticizing. To illustrate this, consider the following:
I write out a concept C. Our radical skeptic reads concept C and applies his radical skepticism to it. His radical skepticism says, “I cannot know for certain anything about C.” But in order to make this claim, he must have universal knowledge of C! If he does not know the totality of C, he cannot say, “I cannot know anything about C” for there could remain a part of C that he is able to know, if he surveyed it. Thus, in order for the skeptic to say that he cannot know anything about a concept, he must first assert that he knows all there is to know about the concept!
In reality, the skeptic, in an attempt to remain consistent, can only say: “I cannot know that I cannot know anything about concept C.” But this, in turn, is yet another concept! This concept (“I cannot know that I cannot know anything about concept C”) we will call concept C'. C' falls to the same problem. The skeptic cannot say, “I cannot know C'” without knowing C' universally. This leads to C'': “I cannot know that I cannot know C'.” Ad infinitum.
Maintaining a radical skepticism is, therefore, inherently irrational. Skepticism must end somewhere. And in language this is ultimately demonstrated in the fact that the radical skeptics will write, talk, gesture, or use all other types of language in order to convey the meaning that you cannot know any meaning they are attempting to convey. This hypocrisy undoes their arguments, for it is obvious that if they convince someone to their position they have conveyed the meaning they wished to convey using the very means they say cannot do this.
As such, it cannot be “skepticism all the way down.” There must be some point where we have unquestionable positions, for to question them would be to commit ourselves to infinite regress.
T-Stone said he wanted examples of my arguments that were objective so he could see how much subjectivism was in them. Perhaps he can start with this one…
Part I
In comments on this post, I pointed out the irony that Touchstone would defend Cameron’s subjective testimony during his & Comfort’s “debate” (which isn’t really the correct word for what happened) with Brian Sapient and Kelli Whatshername (you know, from the Green Day song). The irony of T-Stone’s comment is due to the fact that T-Stone never misses a chance to bash the Triabloguers who, rather than presenting subjectivist “testimony,” actually produce arguments.
T-Stone took umbrage with my classification of his position. He said:
Peter,
The problem is that you offer arguments that are supremely subjective, yet suppose they are objective. Nothing wrong with subjective arguments, or objective arguments. But it's a problem when you try to claim the mantle of objectivity for your subjective assertions. A "truth in advertising" problem.
-Touchstone
(If you disagree, let's have a look at your "objective arguments", shall we and we'll see just how much subjective you tuck away in there...)
The problem is that T-Stone hypocritically applies a radical skepticism to anything I say in an attempt to turn everything into a subjective argument when he does not use the same radical skepticism against his own views. There is a reason for this. He isn’t a radical skeptic (no one is, for we all must actually live in this world).
When it comes to T-Stone, I could argue “2 + 2 = 4 in a Base-10 system is objectively true” and T-Stone would counter: "Have you considered quantum mechanics possibly making 2 + 2 both equal to and NOT equal to 4 at the same time and in the same relationship? No? Then you're being subjective while pretending to be objective!"
T-Stone's refuge is to hold onto pure skepticism as his weapon against the T-Bloggers. But his skepticism comes at a price. If T-Stone is to remain faithful to his skeptical position, he can never assert any positive claim. This includes his claim that I am being subjective instead of objective, as well as his claim that skepticism is a valid approach.
Perhaps the best argument is a demonstration. So, T-Stone can have it back now. He begins by saying: “The problem is that you offer arguments that are supremely subjective, yet suppose they are objective.” T-Stone: is this an objective statement? That is, can you objectively demonstrate that my arguments are “supremely subjective”? Can you even define “subjective” and “objective” (without doing another of your “trivial Google searches” that you are so fond of)? And if you do define those words, how do you know that you defined them correctly? Isn’t your use of the words themselves subjective rather than objective?
T-Stone continues: “Nothing wrong with subjective arguments, or objective arguments.” Really? Is THIS an objective statement, or a subjective statement? How do you know it is true that there is nothing wrong with either type of argument?
T-Stone charges: “But it's a problem when you try to claim the mantle of objectivity for your subjective assertions.” But A) how is it objectively a problem for me to lie (if, indeed, that is what I have done) and B) how do you KNOW that i) it actually is a problem for me too and ii) that I did violate this principal? What is your objective proof that I am engaged in such bad behavior here? Show me your objectivity, T-Stone.
You challenge me to show my arguments (as if I hadn’t already done this hundreds of times). I’m challenging you to back up your statements.
And since this began as a discussion in interpretation in the first place, I want you to objectively prove to me right now that you have objectively understood my statements (whether you agree or disagree with them). Keep in mind that no matter what you say, I’m going to respond with, “But how do you know this is true?” just as you do.
Dealing with the radical skeptic is oh-so-fun, isn’t it T-Stone? But if it’s good enough for you to behave this way, it’s good enough for me to respond in kind. When you’ve had enough of this nonsense, we can move on.
Part II
While my above challenge to T-Stone is a serious challenge (that is, T-Stone has to do it if he’s going to keep any sense of self-respect), it may also actually appear to some as a valid method of attacking someone’s point of view. It appears valid because A) the method employed is only asking questions and B) there is a level of “uncertainty” associated with knowledge. But in reality, the radical skeptic approach is self-contradictory and, as such, it is impossible for it to actually be true.
It is rather simple to demonstrate this if we take the radical skeptic view toward radical skepticism in the first place. “Is radical skepticism objective? How can we know? Have we understood radical skepticism correctly in order to know whether we’re using it right in the first place?”
The bottom line is, if radical skepticism is true we cannot know that it is true. If we know that radical skepticism is true, then we know that radical skepticism must be false for radical skepticism cannot know anything. This is the self-contradictory nature of radical skepticism. As such, even before we look at the questions in any attack against our position, we know that at the basic level skepticism can no longer be viable.
But there is another level where the radical skeptic approach becomes self-contradictory, and that is during its application. When we get into language (which is where this subject with T-Stone originated), this means that the radical skeptic who assumes that there can be no objective transfer of meaning in a text must, in the midst of attacking that text, make an objective statement about the very text he is criticizing. To illustrate this, consider the following:
I write out a concept C. Our radical skeptic reads concept C and applies his radical skepticism to it. His radical skepticism says, “I cannot know for certain anything about C.” But in order to make this claim, he must have universal knowledge of C! If he does not know the totality of C, he cannot say, “I cannot know anything about C” for there could remain a part of C that he is able to know, if he surveyed it. Thus, in order for the skeptic to say that he cannot know anything about a concept, he must first assert that he knows all there is to know about the concept!
In reality, the skeptic, in an attempt to remain consistent, can only say: “I cannot know that I cannot know anything about concept C.” But this, in turn, is yet another concept! This concept (“I cannot know that I cannot know anything about concept C”) we will call concept C'. C' falls to the same problem. The skeptic cannot say, “I cannot know C'” without knowing C' universally. This leads to C'': “I cannot know that I cannot know C'.” Ad infinitum.
Maintaining a radical skepticism is, therefore, inherently irrational. Skepticism must end somewhere. And in language this is ultimately demonstrated in the fact that the radical skeptics will write, talk, gesture, or use all other types of language in order to convey the meaning that you cannot know any meaning they are attempting to convey. This hypocrisy undoes their arguments, for it is obvious that if they convince someone to their position they have conveyed the meaning they wished to convey using the very means they say cannot do this.
As such, it cannot be “skepticism all the way down.” There must be some point where we have unquestionable positions, for to question them would be to commit ourselves to infinite regress.
T-Stone said he wanted examples of my arguments that were objective so he could see how much subjectivism was in them. Perhaps he can start with this one…
Hitchens' flat world
Hitchens' flat world
Father Raymond J. De Souza
National Post
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Hitchens' approach is to romp through history, using his cutting literary style to spoof and mock all the absurdities he finds in the world of religion. If Hitchens met a local vicar with bad breath, religion is to blame for halitosis. It's a fun game, but not really an argument.
Despite Hitchens entertaining style, his book quickly becomes tedious. If you are the sort of person who thinks it very clever to respond to, say, an argument defending the role of religious believers in a pluralistic society by shouting, "What about the Crusades?", you will be nodding along with Hitchens in emphatic agreement. If you find such ad historiam arguments tedious, you will be simply nodding off.
Page after page, Hitchens piles one outrage upon another. So convinced is he of the rightness of his conclusion -- "religion poisons everything" -- that he does not blanch from the most breathtaking rearrangements of the facts and terms of debate. With an apparently straight face he excuses the evils of secular regimes, by blaming the Catholic Church for Nazism and classifying North Korea's communist regime as a religious cult.
What then does Hitchens propose as the antidote to the poison of religion? He opts for scientific materialism, the banality of which he tries to hide behind such -- dare we say it? -- "pious" invocations about the sense of wonder induced by photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope. It's like saying that the ultimate questions of life and death that religion grapples with can be set aside by watching the sunset.
Hitchens inhabits a flat world, devoid of the spirit even broadly understood, and thinks that he can see farther, not realizing that he has razed all the interesting features of the landscape. It is a literally parenthetical comment that exposes the barrenness of Hitchens worldview: "Charles Darwin was born in 1809, on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, and there is no doubt as to which of them has proved to be the greater 'emancipator.'"
Only in world stripped of all that is distinctively human would Darwin's theories about the evolution of finch beaks provide greater emancipation for the human spirit than Lincoln's sublime words about human dignity, sacrifice and the better angels of our nature. On balance, Lincoln on our destiny is a better bet for a humane world than Darwin on our origins.
"Religion has run out of justifications," Hitchens concludes. "Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important." Hitchens is not unlike the zealots he assails, which explains how an obviously intelligent man could write something so embarrassingly stupid.
Here are some unimportant questions for which a microscope is rather unhelpful in answering: Why are we here? Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the purpose of human existence? Hitchens is so fascinated with what he can see in the skies or in the laboratory that he is blind to the world in which men actually live. Perhaps he thinks that without religion there would be more peace, wisdom and beauty in a world dominated by politics, science, entertainment and industry. There is no evidence for that claim whatsoever, and good reason to believe that such a flat world would be more brutal to live in.
God has no place in the world Hitchens wants, but nobody else has ever lived there either.
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=bffaef89-eefb-44fe-aa39-cdfdd7b11cd5
Father Raymond J. De Souza
National Post
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Hitchens' approach is to romp through history, using his cutting literary style to spoof and mock all the absurdities he finds in the world of religion. If Hitchens met a local vicar with bad breath, religion is to blame for halitosis. It's a fun game, but not really an argument.
Despite Hitchens entertaining style, his book quickly becomes tedious. If you are the sort of person who thinks it very clever to respond to, say, an argument defending the role of religious believers in a pluralistic society by shouting, "What about the Crusades?", you will be nodding along with Hitchens in emphatic agreement. If you find such ad historiam arguments tedious, you will be simply nodding off.
Page after page, Hitchens piles one outrage upon another. So convinced is he of the rightness of his conclusion -- "religion poisons everything" -- that he does not blanch from the most breathtaking rearrangements of the facts and terms of debate. With an apparently straight face he excuses the evils of secular regimes, by blaming the Catholic Church for Nazism and classifying North Korea's communist regime as a religious cult.
What then does Hitchens propose as the antidote to the poison of religion? He opts for scientific materialism, the banality of which he tries to hide behind such -- dare we say it? -- "pious" invocations about the sense of wonder induced by photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope. It's like saying that the ultimate questions of life and death that religion grapples with can be set aside by watching the sunset.
Hitchens inhabits a flat world, devoid of the spirit even broadly understood, and thinks that he can see farther, not realizing that he has razed all the interesting features of the landscape. It is a literally parenthetical comment that exposes the barrenness of Hitchens worldview: "Charles Darwin was born in 1809, on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, and there is no doubt as to which of them has proved to be the greater 'emancipator.'"
Only in world stripped of all that is distinctively human would Darwin's theories about the evolution of finch beaks provide greater emancipation for the human spirit than Lincoln's sublime words about human dignity, sacrifice and the better angels of our nature. On balance, Lincoln on our destiny is a better bet for a humane world than Darwin on our origins.
"Religion has run out of justifications," Hitchens concludes. "Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important." Hitchens is not unlike the zealots he assails, which explains how an obviously intelligent man could write something so embarrassingly stupid.
Here are some unimportant questions for which a microscope is rather unhelpful in answering: Why are we here? Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the purpose of human existence? Hitchens is so fascinated with what he can see in the skies or in the laboratory that he is blind to the world in which men actually live. Perhaps he thinks that without religion there would be more peace, wisdom and beauty in a world dominated by politics, science, entertainment and industry. There is no evidence for that claim whatsoever, and good reason to believe that such a flat world would be more brutal to live in.
God has no place in the world Hitchens wants, but nobody else has ever lived there either.
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=bffaef89-eefb-44fe-aa39-cdfdd7b11cd5
Kallistos Ware Contradicts Orthodox
In another thread, I gave some further examples of Eastern Orthodox disagreement about the Old Testament canon. Orthodox has responded by ignoring much of what I cited, distorting other portions, and making a series of unsupported assertions. Contrary to what he argued earlier, he's now claiming that all Eastern Orthodox agree with a canon advocated by a seventeenth century synod. In the thread linked above, Orthodox writes:
"There is no chance that the Orthodox church would ever remove from its canon the books that all the Church have agreed on as canonical. Those are the books which can be found listed by the Synod of Jerusalem"
And:
"I'm not 'appealing' to the synod, I'm just pointing out the list of books from the synod because Jason continues to claim I havn't given him a list of books that all Orthodoxy accept. This is a convenient place to find a list."
And:
"The purpose of a synod is to state the faith in a clear fashion. It is binding to the extent that the Church accepts it. Much of the synod was accepted by the whole church, and to that extent it is binding."
Notice that Orthodox claims that all Eastern Orthodox agree with the canon in question. He was asked for documentation, and here's what he told us:
"If you want to know the Tradition, join the Church. We do not claim the Tradition is always written down."
In that thread, I explained why such a response is unreasonable. But what I want to address here is Orthodox's claim that all Eastern Orthodox accept the canon in question.
Notice, first of all, that the previous thread I've linked to already cites multiple sources, including Eastern Orthodox sources, denying what Orthodox is affirming. But since Orthodox keeps ignoring or distorting the books I cite, let's try an online source, a source Orthodox himself has cited before. The Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware wrote:
"The Hebrew version of the Old Testament contains thirty-nine books. The Septuagint contains in addition ten further books, not present in the Hebrew, which are known in the Orthodox Church as the ‘Deutero-Canonical Books’ (3 Esdras; Tobit; Judith; 1, 2, and 3 Maccabees; Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus; Baruch; Letter of Jeremias. In the west these books are often called the ‘Apocrypha’). These were declared by the Councils of Jassy (1642) and Jerusalem (1672) to be ‘genuine parts of Scripture;’ most Orthodox scholars at the present day, however, following the opinion of Athanasius and Jerome, consider that the Deutero-Canonical Books, although part of the Bible, stand on a lower footing than the rest of the Old Testament."
Notice that Ware contrasts the canon of the synod Orthodox is appealing to with the position of "most Orthodox scholars". Ware goes on to mention Athanasius and Jerome. Those men didn't just argue that books like 3 Maccabees are scripture, but less significant than other books of scripture. Rather, they denied that those books are scripture as that term is commonly defined. Orthodox has repeatedly argued against the position of Jerome, so he can't now claim that Jerome agreed with him, if he's to be consistent.
Note, also, that Ware refers to what most Eastern Orthodox scholars believe. If most believe one thing, while a minority believe something else, then it would be incorrect to claim that all agree on the issue.
But why be concerned with Ware's opinion when we can go to a higher authority, like Orthodox? Here's what Orthodox wrote in a thread last month:
"The Churches will stick to their respective canons until such time as the Holy Spirit leads it to make adjustments. Just like in the early church. The important thing is to be in the actual Church that the apostles founded, believing the apostolic teachings. That there are discrepencies in the canon is of no more concern to us than it was for the first four hundred years of Christendom."
Contrast that assessment with Orthodox's recent claims about how all Orthodox agree about the canon of the synod of Jerusalem. It doesn't seem that he was as concerned to put forward an image of Eastern Orthodox unity on this issue a month ago as he is today.
Though Orthodox can't defend everything he's argued on this subject, he might try to defend some of it by arguing that he didn't cite the synod of Jerusalem as representative of everybody's full canon. Rather, he cited it as representative of books that all Eastern Orthodox accept, even if some Eastern Orthodox add one or more books to that canon. But such an argument would still be contradicted by the sources I've cited (The Blackwell Dictionary Of Eastern Christianity, Kallistos Ware, etc.). And if Orthodox was citing the synod of Jerusalem in such a manner, then he wasn't sufficiently addressing the issues he was being asked about. I asked him for a listing of his canon and to tell us where Eastern Orthodoxy infallibly gave him that canon. I also explained that since he considers Protestant disagreements about what is and isn't scripture unacceptable, then he should conclude the same about Eastern Orthodox disagreements about what is and isn't scripture and what is and isn't Tradition. To respond by citing a canon that some Eastern Orthodox consider incomplete would fail to overcome my objections to Orthodox's position. All Eastern Orthodox agree about the canonicity of the Pentateuch, but it wouldn't make sense to cite such agreement in response to what I was arguing. If agreement over part of the canon is accompanied by disagreement over another part, then there is no elimination of canonical disagreements by means of a full canon defined infallibly by the church.
"There is no chance that the Orthodox church would ever remove from its canon the books that all the Church have agreed on as canonical. Those are the books which can be found listed by the Synod of Jerusalem"
And:
"I'm not 'appealing' to the synod, I'm just pointing out the list of books from the synod because Jason continues to claim I havn't given him a list of books that all Orthodoxy accept. This is a convenient place to find a list."
And:
"The purpose of a synod is to state the faith in a clear fashion. It is binding to the extent that the Church accepts it. Much of the synod was accepted by the whole church, and to that extent it is binding."
Notice that Orthodox claims that all Eastern Orthodox agree with the canon in question. He was asked for documentation, and here's what he told us:
"If you want to know the Tradition, join the Church. We do not claim the Tradition is always written down."
In that thread, I explained why such a response is unreasonable. But what I want to address here is Orthodox's claim that all Eastern Orthodox accept the canon in question.
Notice, first of all, that the previous thread I've linked to already cites multiple sources, including Eastern Orthodox sources, denying what Orthodox is affirming. But since Orthodox keeps ignoring or distorting the books I cite, let's try an online source, a source Orthodox himself has cited before. The Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware wrote:
"The Hebrew version of the Old Testament contains thirty-nine books. The Septuagint contains in addition ten further books, not present in the Hebrew, which are known in the Orthodox Church as the ‘Deutero-Canonical Books’ (3 Esdras; Tobit; Judith; 1, 2, and 3 Maccabees; Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus; Baruch; Letter of Jeremias. In the west these books are often called the ‘Apocrypha’). These were declared by the Councils of Jassy (1642) and Jerusalem (1672) to be ‘genuine parts of Scripture;’ most Orthodox scholars at the present day, however, following the opinion of Athanasius and Jerome, consider that the Deutero-Canonical Books, although part of the Bible, stand on a lower footing than the rest of the Old Testament."
Notice that Ware contrasts the canon of the synod Orthodox is appealing to with the position of "most Orthodox scholars". Ware goes on to mention Athanasius and Jerome. Those men didn't just argue that books like 3 Maccabees are scripture, but less significant than other books of scripture. Rather, they denied that those books are scripture as that term is commonly defined. Orthodox has repeatedly argued against the position of Jerome, so he can't now claim that Jerome agreed with him, if he's to be consistent.
Note, also, that Ware refers to what most Eastern Orthodox scholars believe. If most believe one thing, while a minority believe something else, then it would be incorrect to claim that all agree on the issue.
But why be concerned with Ware's opinion when we can go to a higher authority, like Orthodox? Here's what Orthodox wrote in a thread last month:
"The Churches will stick to their respective canons until such time as the Holy Spirit leads it to make adjustments. Just like in the early church. The important thing is to be in the actual Church that the apostles founded, believing the apostolic teachings. That there are discrepencies in the canon is of no more concern to us than it was for the first four hundred years of Christendom."
Contrast that assessment with Orthodox's recent claims about how all Orthodox agree about the canon of the synod of Jerusalem. It doesn't seem that he was as concerned to put forward an image of Eastern Orthodox unity on this issue a month ago as he is today.
Though Orthodox can't defend everything he's argued on this subject, he might try to defend some of it by arguing that he didn't cite the synod of Jerusalem as representative of everybody's full canon. Rather, he cited it as representative of books that all Eastern Orthodox accept, even if some Eastern Orthodox add one or more books to that canon. But such an argument would still be contradicted by the sources I've cited (The Blackwell Dictionary Of Eastern Christianity, Kallistos Ware, etc.). And if Orthodox was citing the synod of Jerusalem in such a manner, then he wasn't sufficiently addressing the issues he was being asked about. I asked him for a listing of his canon and to tell us where Eastern Orthodoxy infallibly gave him that canon. I also explained that since he considers Protestant disagreements about what is and isn't scripture unacceptable, then he should conclude the same about Eastern Orthodox disagreements about what is and isn't scripture and what is and isn't Tradition. To respond by citing a canon that some Eastern Orthodox consider incomplete would fail to overcome my objections to Orthodox's position. All Eastern Orthodox agree about the canonicity of the Pentateuch, but it wouldn't make sense to cite such agreement in response to what I was arguing. If agreement over part of the canon is accompanied by disagreement over another part, then there is no elimination of canonical disagreements by means of a full canon defined infallibly by the church.
Orthodox Must Be Losing The Debate
In previous discussions, Orthodox has claimed that when people like Steve Hays criticize his character or behavior, it means that he (Orthodox) must be winning the debate. We don't accept that reasoning, but let's apply Orthodox's own standards to one of his latest posts. In a recent reply to Gene Bridges, Orthodox writes:
"Are you deaf?"
And:
"Jason asked for a list. I could have cut and paste the list here, but I didn't want to fill up the blog just because Jason is too lazy to look it up himself."
And:
"You've got a severe comprehension problem as you cannot distinguish between the present and past tenses."
And:
"Go back to junior high school English."
Judging by his own standards, Orthodox must be losing the debate.
"Are you deaf?"
And:
"Jason asked for a list. I could have cut and paste the list here, but I didn't want to fill up the blog just because Jason is too lazy to look it up himself."
And:
"You've got a severe comprehension problem as you cannot distinguish between the present and past tenses."
And:
"Go back to junior high school English."
Judging by his own standards, Orthodox must be losing the debate.
Sola Touchstonia
First off, I note that Touchstone responded to my last comment, but didn't bother to respond to Peter's (see here; BTW, these responses are worth reading, too). I surmise the reason is because Peter's response, as usual, has entirely overwhelmed Touchstone!
Now, if only I could present the truth as clearly and as intelligently as Peter does, maybe I could frighten Touchstone away, too. But since I lack Peter's incisive intellect, I'll just have to hobble along and do what I can.
Touchstone said:
But, stepping away from the Bible for a second, how do you interpret any piece of writing? How do you go about this sort of thing? I suppose there are several possible points of departure. For example, you could start by looking at the genre of a work. A poem is to be understood differently than a novel which in turn is to be understood differently than a work of history. The Bible itself has 66 books which contains genres as diverse as poetry, proverbs, historical narrative, etc. Not to mention subgenres within those genres.
Also, you could keep in mind that the goal of interpretation is to understand a particular book as the original author intended it to be understood by the original target audience.
You could use what you know of the historical background and the cultural milieu of the book in question to aid you in understanding it.
You could google "Grammatico-Historical method" and read up on it.
You could take a look at something like D.A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies.
And you could use your reason and logic. Or, wait a sec, I totally forgot: you've abandoned using reason and logic in your capitulation to post-modernism. My bad!
Anyway, the broader point I'm trying to make is that the Bible dictates how we interpret it; we do not dictate the way we interpret the Bible. (I realize this is overly simplistic, but I am talking to a simpleton, after all, and making do as best I can.)
But I thought Touchstone was a Protestant?
Ah, yes he is! As he says here:
Hey, but don't think I'm somehow knocking him. I mean, judging by Touchstone's own standard (there is no other!), at least sola Touchstonia has the merit of being more post-modern (it's all about Touchstone) than Touchstone's previous position, that is, when he was espousing sola ecclesia:
Now, if only I could present the truth as clearly and as intelligently as Peter does, maybe I could frighten Touchstone away, too. But since I lack Peter's incisive intellect, I'll just have to hobble along and do what I can.
Touchstone said:
How does one decide what is "rightly exegeted" and what is not, Patric, so that we may understand what is "orthodox" in your view. Without a way to determine who has "rightly exegeted" and who has not, your definition is useless.Well, Touchston, er, I mean, Touchstone, as we have pointed out to you time and time again, the Bible is the inspired Word of God. That's the starting point for Christians -- among whom, I might remind you, you profess to belong.
But, stepping away from the Bible for a second, how do you interpret any piece of writing? How do you go about this sort of thing? I suppose there are several possible points of departure. For example, you could start by looking at the genre of a work. A poem is to be understood differently than a novel which in turn is to be understood differently than a work of history. The Bible itself has 66 books which contains genres as diverse as poetry, proverbs, historical narrative, etc. Not to mention subgenres within those genres.
Also, you could keep in mind that the goal of interpretation is to understand a particular book as the original author intended it to be understood by the original target audience.
You could use what you know of the historical background and the cultural milieu of the book in question to aid you in understanding it.
You could google "Grammatico-Historical method" and read up on it.
You could take a look at something like D.A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies.
And you could use your reason and logic. Or, wait a sec, I totally forgot: you've abandoned using reason and logic in your capitulation to post-modernism. My bad!
Anyway, the broader point I'm trying to make is that the Bible dictates how we interpret it; we do not dictate the way we interpret the Bible. (I realize this is overly simplistic, but I am talking to a simpleton, after all, and making do as best I can.)
If you can't brook that, it's no problem for me. You are your own pope, and you define your own orthodoxy -- you are a canon unto yourself.Hm, I wonder where I've heard this before? Oh, that's right: from Roman Catholic critics of the Protestant position on sola scriptura.
But I thought Touchstone was a Protestant?
Ah, yes he is! As he says here:
And just so we're clear, I'm not a Catholic, or an Eastern Orthodox. I'm a Protestant, which makes me a pope unto myself just like you. I am the top-most earthly authority on what the Bible says to me. I can delegate whatever interepretational responsibilites to whatever theologians, denominations or snake oil salesman apologists I'd like, but it's still delegation. I begin with the authority, and ultimately retain it; if I don't think denomination XYZ is "rightly exegeting", I look elsewhere for "right exegesis", asserting myself as the final earthly authority on what Scripture says.So if Touchstone is his own pope, and if what the Bible teaches is adjudicated at the court of Touchstone, then ultimately Touchstone sits in judgment over Scripture itself. Welcome to sola Touchstonia! All hail Pope Touchstone! He is Touchstone, and on this rock, Christ will build his church! Touchstone finally lives up to his name.
Hey, but don't think I'm somehow knocking him. I mean, judging by Touchstone's own standard (there is no other!), at least sola Touchstonia has the merit of being more post-modern (it's all about Touchstone) than Touchstone's previous position, that is, when he was espousing sola ecclesia:
It [doctrine] isn't orthodox because of it's [sic] age or historical status, but, as I've [Touchstone] said several times now, because it represents the formal consensus of the catholic episcopate.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
A Friendly Critique of the Cameron and Comfort vs. Rational Responders Debate Part I
INTRODUCTION
Both pop-evangelical culture and the skeptical internet community are discussing the recent debate held between participants Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron versus “Kelly” and “Brian Sapient” of the Rational Response Squad. As of today (5-12-07), no comments have been offered regarding the debate from the ministry of Comfort and Cameron, but the Rational Responders have proclaimed that they believe themselves have been victorious over Christian Theism. We will get to the issue of their supposed “victory” in light of Comfort and Cameron’s performance later in this series, but it is more imperative that we first begin by turning our attention to something that Cameron and Comfort said before the debate,
"Perhaps you think that anyone who says he can prove the existence of God is a dreamer . . . we can prove that God exists, scientifically, absolutely, without mentioning faith or even the Bible,” said Comfort and Cameron. “Do you find that hard to believe? Then watch the debate.”
I already commented on this statement two weeks before the debate occurred and so what is said here will be somewhat re-worked material with the necessary post-debate commentary and observations. It is important at the outset of this critique to provide a disclaimer stating that I have no personal angst against Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, and The Way of the Master ministries. Instead, I and others in our church body have benefited from their respective ministries in the past and truly appreciate their efforts at building the
I. Examining a Proposed and Flawed Apologetic Methodology
Problem # 1: We do not prove the existence of the God of Christianity by first giving up Christianity.
Again, let me review what Comfort and Cameron have said,
"Perhaps you think that anyone who says he can prove the existence of God is a dreamer . . . we can prove that God exists, scientifically, absolutely, without mentioning faith or even the Bible,” said Comfort and Cameron . . . .” [1] [Bolded emphasis mine]
For Comfort and Cameron to declare that they intended to employ this type of apologetic method is irreverent, dishonoring to Christ and is downright sinful. Greg Bahnsen rightly said,
“Neutrality in scholarship, apologetics, or schooling is both impossible and immoral. No man can serve two masters, and thus one must choose to ground his intellectual efforts in Christ or in his own autonomous reason; there is no middle ground between these two authorities. Neutrality would erase the distinctiveness of the Christian position and muffle the antithesis between godly and ungodly thinking. A Christian who strives to be neutral not only denies the Lordship of Christ in knowledge and loses his solid ground in reasoning, he also unwittingly endorses assumptions which are hostile to his faith.”[2]
- As mentioned with Dr. Bahnsen’s comment above, the apologetic methodology Comfort and Cameron employed is sinful because (1) it assumes that unbelievers have the ability to correctly examine, interpret, and come to the proper conclusions about hard evidence apart from special revelation, thus giving heed to their sinful autonomy versus calling them to repentance for it. (2) They verbally announced that they would defend the existence of “God” without any mention of “faith or even the Bible”,[3] and as a result, one of the traditional arguments that they sought to use (i.e., the teleological argument per the “Portrait assumes a painter” argument by Comfort) actually backfired on them somewhat as seen in Sapient’s rebuttal period. The classical arguments for the existence of God, in their traditional form, do not defend the existence of the Christian God but only an extremely nebulous concept of a “god” that could just as well be Zoroaster, Zeus, Allah, or one of the infinite numbers of supposed gods presupposed by the theosis doctrine of Mormonism. Worse yet, this “god” wouldn’t have to necessarily be theistic, especially since Comfort and Cameron would not have been able to make any reference to their “faith”, had they adhered to their original debate challenge. Such a god(s) could merely be super-intelligent extraterrestrials that created advanced life and seeded the planet earth in the distant past. As a result, had they adhered to a purely evidential-scientific apologetic approach in this debate (which they did not) they would have willingly avoided (per their own words) doing the very thing that they as Christians are commanded to do, namely, to “earnestly contend for the faith (versus giving it up) once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3), and “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”. However, as Cornelius Van Til has noted, the defense of the Christian worldview must necessarily have as its foundation the self-attesting Christ of Scripture. There is simply no other way of appropriately and biblically providing a rationale for the hope that abides in you (Col. 2:3; 1 Peter 3:15).
There was much ado in this debate about appealing to general revelation to prove the existence of God, (i.e., where there is a painting there must be a painter), but such a generic and non-specific approach fails both biblically and philosophically.
- Biblically: General revelation (as per Romans 1) does not prove the existence of some nebulous concept of a god, but proves that the ton theon (“the God” cf. Rom. 1:21 in Greek) of Scripture exists and that the unbeliever already intuitively knows that He exists and thus needs no “proving” as it were:
Romans 1:19-21 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened..
Paul says that the creation reveals God’s existence, eternal power, and divine nature, and wrath against suppressors of said truth (Romans 1:18-20). His primary point in Romans 1 is not that unbelievers are ignorant of God’s existence and simply need to be educated via the traditional proofs and historical evidences, but that unbelievers do already in fact know about God and will intuitively recognize His creative power in nature. However, as God-haters, they will sinfully suppress the truth and knowledge that they already have about Him and as a result, they will be judged for it, regardless of their lack of special revelation. Of course, general revelation does not show man the way of salvation, the Trinitarian nature of God, and other necessary doctrinal truths, but it does show the Christian that every unbeliever has enough knowledge to damn him, but not always enough to save him, hence the need for missionaries (Rom. 10:14-17).
And so, Paul’s commentary in Romans 1:18-22 shows that all unbelievers know intuitively that God exists and that this knowledge is sufficient in and of itself to condemn them to hell. The knowledge that they possess intuitively consists in His wondrous power in creation and their moral responsibility to Him (Rom. 1:19-21). The strange theories that they concoct about the origin of the universe and man serves as further corroborating evidence that they are truth suppressors hell-bent on escaping their own moral culpability (Rom. 1:22-23). Comfort and Cameron already know this and have spoken and written about it. However, for them to proposition for a debate by giving the atheist the very thing that the word of God denies him (namely, autonomous neutrality) is to deny what Paul clearly teaches about unbelievers as outlined in Romans chapter 1.
In part II, I will provide some helpful, constructive criticism regarding the debate proper, so that we can learn how not to do apologetics.
Arkeology 101
Aside from the creation account, the flood account is the event in Scripture most often targeted for scientific objections. Normally, this all-out assault isn’t limited to the flood account, but is bound up with a more general offensive directed at flood geology. What are we to make of this?
1.Local or global?
For some reason, critics direct most of their fire at the specter of a global flood. Why is that?
i) Some or many come out of a fundamentalist background. So this is their point of reference.
ii) To their own way of thinking, a global flood presents an easier target.
iii) Perhaps they also feel that young-earth creationism represents a more potent social force or political threat than old-earth creationism or theistic evolution—although, with the rise of the ID movement—any level of religiosity is coming under attack.
2. Flood or flood geology?
For some reason, those who criticize the flood account generally bundle their attack on the flood with a larger attack on flood geology. Why is that?
i) They think it’s easier to attack the flood by linking it to flood geology.
ii) Since they regard both the flood and flood geology as equally erroneous, they don’t bother to distinguish their objections.
But (1)-(2) need to be challenged.
i) As a matter of intellectual honesty, if you claim to be disproving the Bible, or some portion thereof, then the onus is on you come up with your own interpretation of Scripture. What is the best interpretation of the Biblical account?
You cannot merely depend on the interpretation offered by the opposing side, for their position is only as good as their interpretation. Even if you succeeded in disproving their position, that would not, of itself, disprove the Bible. In order to show that the Bible is incorrect, you would first need to show that their interpretation is correct, and then show that the Bible, correctly interpreted (by them), is incorrect.
ii) Likewise, disproving flood geology is not the same thing as disproving the flood. Flood geology is an exegetical and scientific construct. It intersects with Scripture, but it’s not restricted to the witness of Scripture. Hence, even if you succeeded in disproving flood geology (and there’s more than one version), that would not, of itself, disprove the Bible. To pull that off, you would have to show that you are disproving those elements of flood geology which are grounded in the correct interpretation of Scripture. Critics of the flood take far too many shortcuts.
3.Bronze Age literature.
People who disbelieve the flood tell us that this account is bound to be unscientific because it’s reported in bronze-age literature. It was written by authors or redactors who didn’t know any better.
And yet, when they mount an attack on the flood account, or flood geology, they typically construe the exegetical data in a highly anachronistic fashion. What are the standard arguments for the global interpretation? There are two basic lines of evidence:
i) The flood account employs universal quantifiers (“every,” “all”) with certain nouns.
a) At this point, the unconscious instinct of a contemporary reader is to transfer these expressions to his modern image of the world. But there’s nothing literal about that interpretation. For the reader isn’t really taking these expressions at face-value. Rather, he takes the quantifiers literally, yet when he transfers them to his own mental picture of the world, what he ends up with is not a literal interpretation of the text, but a hybrid, acontextual interpretation in which his own picture of the world supplies the object. He’s kept the quantifiers intact, but swapped in a different referent.
If, however, you’re going to take a bronze age approach, then you need to ask yourself what the narrative landmarks would conjure up to the original audience. What was their internal map? How big did they think the world was?
Indeed, we have some examples of ANE cartography, such as the Mappa Mundi and the Sargon Geography. Cf. W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Geography (Eisenbrauns 1998).
Once you make allowance for the perspectival difference between them and us, then the descriptions could be global from the viewpoint of the original audience, but local from the viewpoint of the modern audience.
b) And this would have other consequences, regarding the number and variety of animals represented on the ark, since they would sample the implied geography of the implied reader, and not the space age generation.
Remember, the unbeliever keeps telling us that Genesis is bronze-age literature. And that, in turn, commits him to ANE cartography, not satellite cartography.
If this is indeed taken to reflect the narrative viewpoint of the flood account, then that alone, at one stroke, undercuts almost all of the stock objections to the feasibility of the account. How did the animals migrate from all over the world? How did they disperse? How were they adapted to the diet and climate aboard the ark? How did they all fit into the ark? How could they be loaded in time? How did eight passengers care for so many animals? How did they multiply and diversify so soon after the flood? What did they eat after the flood? How did marine and freshwater species survive the mixing of seawater and freshwater? How did plants survive? Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? How does a global flood account for various geological phenomena around the world?
I’m not claiming that flood geology can’t answer these questions. I’m only addressing the unbeliever on his own grounds. He is trying to saddle the flood account with a string of complications that do not, in fact, derive from his own view of Genesis. To the contrary, he is holding Genesis to an anachronistic outlook which he has superimposed on the text, despite his stated view that this is bronze-age literature.
And even from a believer’s standpoint, the text would be heard by bronze-age ears.
c) I’d add that while the flood account employs universal expressions, it obviously doesn’t intend these expressions to be taken without any limitation whatsoever, for the same account specifically exempts the occupants on the ark. So these expressions were never meant to be all-encompassing. Their force is explicitly moderated by paradigmatic exception of the ark itself.
d) Unbelievers also think that Scripture uses hyperbolic language from time to time. So when do they take the language literally here, but hyperbolic elsewhere?
ii) Another argument involves an inference from the size of the ark, as well as the depth and duration of the flood. Unlike (i), this isn’t a narrative assertion regarding the extent of the flood, be it local or global, but a possible implication. Yet there are some problems with this inference, especially from an unbeliever’s vantage-point.
a) For some thing, the unbeliever also thinks that Scripture assumes a flat-earth perspective. Indeed, the unbeliever will castigate the flood geologist for abandoning his literalism at this juncture.
I’ve discussed what is wrong with this interpretation on more than one occasion, so I won’t repeat myself here, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that the flood account is written from a flat-earth perspective. If so, then how high could the floodwaters rise or remain? Even if the world is flat, it’s not a fish tank. There are no walls to hold the water in. To the contrary, if the earth were flat, the overflowing water would run off the edge of the earth. It is therefore quite inconsistent, on the one hand, to attribute a flat earth perspective to the narrative, and then, on the other hand, to go on and on about the absurdities involved with floodwaters overtopping Mt. Everest.
b) I’d add that whether or not the duration of the flood is consistent with a local or global flood depends, in part, on what flood mechanism we postulate. The Bible gives two sources: one from the top down, and the other from the bottom up. Rainwater is one source, but the other has reference to some vaguely stated geological phenomenon (“the fountains of the deep”).
Because this reference is so unspecific, and even poetic, it leaves the flood geologist with a pretty free hand regarding what flood mechanism he should postulate.
Depending on what model you use, it would be possible to have a local flood of indefinite duration by simply damming the water supply. Mountains and hills function as natural dikes.
c) As to the ark, it’s true that Noah’s ark, or at least an ark of that size, is unnecessary in case of global flooding. But that’s a rather superficial objection. After all, a global flood is equally unnecessary. God could kill just as many men and animals without resorting to a worldwide deluge. And he could spare a remnant without resorting to an ark.
Many things in Scripture are strictly unnecessary. The kosher laws go well beyond what is necessary. But many things in Scripture have a symbolic value. Why did God bring the flood rather than some other medium of judgment? Because that medium signified a reversal of the creative process: a reversion to the formless void.
The triple-decker design is emblematic of the cosmic temple. So the design is both functional and figural. There is also septunarian numerology in play (e.g. seven days, seven animals).
iii) A local flood would also explain why the ark landed in the Ararat range (Gen 8:4). In a worldwide flood, the ark could have landed in any mountain range around the world. So why did it come down in upper Mesopotamia?
The contextual reason is that that garden of Eden was located somewhere in Mesopotamia (Gen 2:10-14). And the human race was still confined to this general region when the flood struck. So that is where the ark was launched. And that was the vicinity of the flooded region.
1.Local or global?
For some reason, critics direct most of their fire at the specter of a global flood. Why is that?
i) Some or many come out of a fundamentalist background. So this is their point of reference.
ii) To their own way of thinking, a global flood presents an easier target.
iii) Perhaps they also feel that young-earth creationism represents a more potent social force or political threat than old-earth creationism or theistic evolution—although, with the rise of the ID movement—any level of religiosity is coming under attack.
2. Flood or flood geology?
For some reason, those who criticize the flood account generally bundle their attack on the flood with a larger attack on flood geology. Why is that?
i) They think it’s easier to attack the flood by linking it to flood geology.
ii) Since they regard both the flood and flood geology as equally erroneous, they don’t bother to distinguish their objections.
But (1)-(2) need to be challenged.
i) As a matter of intellectual honesty, if you claim to be disproving the Bible, or some portion thereof, then the onus is on you come up with your own interpretation of Scripture. What is the best interpretation of the Biblical account?
You cannot merely depend on the interpretation offered by the opposing side, for their position is only as good as their interpretation. Even if you succeeded in disproving their position, that would not, of itself, disprove the Bible. In order to show that the Bible is incorrect, you would first need to show that their interpretation is correct, and then show that the Bible, correctly interpreted (by them), is incorrect.
ii) Likewise, disproving flood geology is not the same thing as disproving the flood. Flood geology is an exegetical and scientific construct. It intersects with Scripture, but it’s not restricted to the witness of Scripture. Hence, even if you succeeded in disproving flood geology (and there’s more than one version), that would not, of itself, disprove the Bible. To pull that off, you would have to show that you are disproving those elements of flood geology which are grounded in the correct interpretation of Scripture. Critics of the flood take far too many shortcuts.
3.Bronze Age literature.
People who disbelieve the flood tell us that this account is bound to be unscientific because it’s reported in bronze-age literature. It was written by authors or redactors who didn’t know any better.
And yet, when they mount an attack on the flood account, or flood geology, they typically construe the exegetical data in a highly anachronistic fashion. What are the standard arguments for the global interpretation? There are two basic lines of evidence:
i) The flood account employs universal quantifiers (“every,” “all”) with certain nouns.
a) At this point, the unconscious instinct of a contemporary reader is to transfer these expressions to his modern image of the world. But there’s nothing literal about that interpretation. For the reader isn’t really taking these expressions at face-value. Rather, he takes the quantifiers literally, yet when he transfers them to his own mental picture of the world, what he ends up with is not a literal interpretation of the text, but a hybrid, acontextual interpretation in which his own picture of the world supplies the object. He’s kept the quantifiers intact, but swapped in a different referent.
If, however, you’re going to take a bronze age approach, then you need to ask yourself what the narrative landmarks would conjure up to the original audience. What was their internal map? How big did they think the world was?
Indeed, we have some examples of ANE cartography, such as the Mappa Mundi and the Sargon Geography. Cf. W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Geography (Eisenbrauns 1998).
Once you make allowance for the perspectival difference between them and us, then the descriptions could be global from the viewpoint of the original audience, but local from the viewpoint of the modern audience.
b) And this would have other consequences, regarding the number and variety of animals represented on the ark, since they would sample the implied geography of the implied reader, and not the space age generation.
Remember, the unbeliever keeps telling us that Genesis is bronze-age literature. And that, in turn, commits him to ANE cartography, not satellite cartography.
If this is indeed taken to reflect the narrative viewpoint of the flood account, then that alone, at one stroke, undercuts almost all of the stock objections to the feasibility of the account. How did the animals migrate from all over the world? How did they disperse? How were they adapted to the diet and climate aboard the ark? How did they all fit into the ark? How could they be loaded in time? How did eight passengers care for so many animals? How did they multiply and diversify so soon after the flood? What did they eat after the flood? How did marine and freshwater species survive the mixing of seawater and freshwater? How did plants survive? Where did all the water come from? Where did it go? How does a global flood account for various geological phenomena around the world?
I’m not claiming that flood geology can’t answer these questions. I’m only addressing the unbeliever on his own grounds. He is trying to saddle the flood account with a string of complications that do not, in fact, derive from his own view of Genesis. To the contrary, he is holding Genesis to an anachronistic outlook which he has superimposed on the text, despite his stated view that this is bronze-age literature.
And even from a believer’s standpoint, the text would be heard by bronze-age ears.
c) I’d add that while the flood account employs universal expressions, it obviously doesn’t intend these expressions to be taken without any limitation whatsoever, for the same account specifically exempts the occupants on the ark. So these expressions were never meant to be all-encompassing. Their force is explicitly moderated by paradigmatic exception of the ark itself.
d) Unbelievers also think that Scripture uses hyperbolic language from time to time. So when do they take the language literally here, but hyperbolic elsewhere?
ii) Another argument involves an inference from the size of the ark, as well as the depth and duration of the flood. Unlike (i), this isn’t a narrative assertion regarding the extent of the flood, be it local or global, but a possible implication. Yet there are some problems with this inference, especially from an unbeliever’s vantage-point.
a) For some thing, the unbeliever also thinks that Scripture assumes a flat-earth perspective. Indeed, the unbeliever will castigate the flood geologist for abandoning his literalism at this juncture.
I’ve discussed what is wrong with this interpretation on more than one occasion, so I won’t repeat myself here, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that the flood account is written from a flat-earth perspective. If so, then how high could the floodwaters rise or remain? Even if the world is flat, it’s not a fish tank. There are no walls to hold the water in. To the contrary, if the earth were flat, the overflowing water would run off the edge of the earth. It is therefore quite inconsistent, on the one hand, to attribute a flat earth perspective to the narrative, and then, on the other hand, to go on and on about the absurdities involved with floodwaters overtopping Mt. Everest.
b) I’d add that whether or not the duration of the flood is consistent with a local or global flood depends, in part, on what flood mechanism we postulate. The Bible gives two sources: one from the top down, and the other from the bottom up. Rainwater is one source, but the other has reference to some vaguely stated geological phenomenon (“the fountains of the deep”).
Because this reference is so unspecific, and even poetic, it leaves the flood geologist with a pretty free hand regarding what flood mechanism he should postulate.
Depending on what model you use, it would be possible to have a local flood of indefinite duration by simply damming the water supply. Mountains and hills function as natural dikes.
c) As to the ark, it’s true that Noah’s ark, or at least an ark of that size, is unnecessary in case of global flooding. But that’s a rather superficial objection. After all, a global flood is equally unnecessary. God could kill just as many men and animals without resorting to a worldwide deluge. And he could spare a remnant without resorting to an ark.
Many things in Scripture are strictly unnecessary. The kosher laws go well beyond what is necessary. But many things in Scripture have a symbolic value. Why did God bring the flood rather than some other medium of judgment? Because that medium signified a reversal of the creative process: a reversion to the formless void.
The triple-decker design is emblematic of the cosmic temple. So the design is both functional and figural. There is also septunarian numerology in play (e.g. seven days, seven animals).
iii) A local flood would also explain why the ark landed in the Ararat range (Gen 8:4). In a worldwide flood, the ark could have landed in any mountain range around the world. So why did it come down in upper Mesopotamia?
The contextual reason is that that garden of Eden was located somewhere in Mesopotamia (Gen 2:10-14). And the human race was still confined to this general region when the flood struck. So that is where the ark was launched. And that was the vicinity of the flooded region.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
A few questions for Touchstone
The following quotations from Touchstone have been culled from a recent post. I follow-up with questions.
Touchstone, addressing an anonymous commenter, said:
Now, just a few direct questions for Touchstone please:
1. Touchstone said:
2. Touchstone said:
b. If a truth does not become orthodox teaching until it is affirmed by an episcopate, then Touchstone is suggesting that the episcopate is the final arbiter of orthodoxy. My question is, which episcopate(s)? And why not others?
3. Touchstone said:
b. In Touchstone's view, is what the Council of Trent decided for Christendom orthodox? Why or why not?
Touchstone, addressing an anonymous commenter, said:
and please note that I am answering your questions directly, off topic or no -- keep this in mind when you look at how T-Bloggers generally (don't) respond.Yes, let's please keep this mind.
Now, just a few direct questions for Touchstone please:
1. Touchstone said:
Don't know much about Gene, but you Patrick entertain a good number of God-dishonoring ideas and doctrines.Would Touchstone care to cite which specific God-dishonoring doctrines he has in mind?
2. Touchstone said:
No. The Trinity has always been a Truth, even before the world was created, but it was not orthodox teaching until it was affirmed by the episcopate.a. Let's take an example. Would Touchstone propose that the deity of Christ is "not orthodox," say c. 5 AD, prior to any credal or confessional affirmation of his deity by an episcopate?
b. If a truth does not become orthodox teaching until it is affirmed by an episcopate, then Touchstone is suggesting that the episcopate is the final arbiter of orthodoxy. My question is, which episcopate(s)? And why not others?
3. Touchstone said:
It [doctrine] isn't orthodox because of it's age or historical status, but, as I've said several times now, because it represents the formal consensus of the catholic episcopate.a. What happens when various church councils let alone churches themselves (as Peter points out in the post) disagree on a particular doctrine? Which council would Touchstone say is the "orthodox" one? Based on what?
b. In Touchstone's view, is what the Council of Trent decided for Christendom orthodox? Why or why not?
Eastern Orthodox Acceptance Of The Hebrew Canon
We've repeatedly asked Orthodox to list his Old Testament canon for us and to tell us where Eastern Orthodoxy specifically gave him that canon infallibly. He's refused to do either. (See here, for example.) We've seen one of the reasons why he's refused to do so. Different sources over the centuries have accepted different Apocryphal books, and Eastern Orthodox disagree among themselves concerning which ones to include. Also worth noting is that some Eastern Orthodox support the Hebrew canon, a canon that Orthodox has criticized and (ineffectively) argued against at length:
"The controversy between Rome and the Reformers did not long escape the notice of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but the Orthodox were slow in taking sides. They knew both the broad and the narrow canon of the Fathers, and were concerned that the books of the broad canon, which they used in their liturgy, should continue to be esteemed. On the other hand, the belief that only the books of the Hebrew Bible are actually inspired has gradually gained ground among the Orthodox, at the expense of the Roman view, and it now looks as if a decision to this effect could be taken in the forseeable future by a pan-Orthodox synod....A draft statement which makes a firm distinction between the canonical books (those of the Hebrew Bible) and the books that are read (the Apocrypha) was prepared for the coming Great Council of the Orthodox Church, and though this topic has now been deferred until some future occasion, a similar statement has been agreed in the promising negotiations between the Orthodox and the Old Catholics. The first of these two statements is published in Towards the Great Council (London, SPCK, 1972), p. 3f., and the second in Episkepsis, no. 131 (23 September 1975), p. 10f. The Orthodox list of the books that are read, by comparison with the Apocrypha of the English Bible, adds 3 Maccabees, but finds no place for 2 Esdras (4 Ezra) or the prayer of Manasses. The 4 Maccabees of the LXX is not included either." (Roger Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon Of The New Testament Church [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986], p. 2, n. 9 on p. 14)
"in 1642 and 1672 respectively Orthodox synods at Jassy (Iasi) and Jerusalem confirmed as 'genuine parts of scripture' the contents of the 'Septuagintal plus' (the canonicity of which had been taken for granted), specifically: 1 Esdras (= Vulgate 3 Esdras), Tobit, Judith, 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ben Sira (Ecclesiastiscus), Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. The Septuagint remains the 'authorized version' of the Old Testament in Greek Orthodoxy, its deviations from the traditional Hebrew text being ascribed to divine inspiration. Most Orthodox scholars today, however, follow Athanasius and others in placing the books of the 'Septuagintal plus' on a lower level of authority than the 'proto-canonical' writings....an ecumenical milestone was reached in 1973 with the appearance of the Common Bible, an edition of the RSV with the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books printed between the Testaments in a form which received the blessing not only of Catholic and Protestant church leaders but also of the Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, the leader of the Greek Orthodox community in Britain....The commendation of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop is the more telling because the OT part of the work is not based on the Septuagint, which is the authoritative text for the Orthodox Church" (F.F. Bruce, The Canon Of Scripture [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1988], pp. 82, 113, n. 31 on p. 113)
For more on such issues from Eastern Orthodox sources, see Steve Hays' discussion here. One of the sources Steve cites, The Blackwell Dictionary Of Eastern Christianity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), Ken Parry, et al., ed., comments that "Protestant ideas infiltrated Russian theology in the eighteenth century, whence they spread to parts of the Greek-speaking churches." (p. 83)
"The controversy between Rome and the Reformers did not long escape the notice of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but the Orthodox were slow in taking sides. They knew both the broad and the narrow canon of the Fathers, and were concerned that the books of the broad canon, which they used in their liturgy, should continue to be esteemed. On the other hand, the belief that only the books of the Hebrew Bible are actually inspired has gradually gained ground among the Orthodox, at the expense of the Roman view, and it now looks as if a decision to this effect could be taken in the forseeable future by a pan-Orthodox synod....A draft statement which makes a firm distinction between the canonical books (those of the Hebrew Bible) and the books that are read (the Apocrypha) was prepared for the coming Great Council of the Orthodox Church, and though this topic has now been deferred until some future occasion, a similar statement has been agreed in the promising negotiations between the Orthodox and the Old Catholics. The first of these two statements is published in Towards the Great Council (London, SPCK, 1972), p. 3f., and the second in Episkepsis, no. 131 (23 September 1975), p. 10f. The Orthodox list of the books that are read, by comparison with the Apocrypha of the English Bible, adds 3 Maccabees, but finds no place for 2 Esdras (4 Ezra) or the prayer of Manasses. The 4 Maccabees of the LXX is not included either." (Roger Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon Of The New Testament Church [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986], p. 2, n. 9 on p. 14)
"in 1642 and 1672 respectively Orthodox synods at Jassy (Iasi) and Jerusalem confirmed as 'genuine parts of scripture' the contents of the 'Septuagintal plus' (the canonicity of which had been taken for granted), specifically: 1 Esdras (= Vulgate 3 Esdras), Tobit, Judith, 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ben Sira (Ecclesiastiscus), Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. The Septuagint remains the 'authorized version' of the Old Testament in Greek Orthodoxy, its deviations from the traditional Hebrew text being ascribed to divine inspiration. Most Orthodox scholars today, however, follow Athanasius and others in placing the books of the 'Septuagintal plus' on a lower level of authority than the 'proto-canonical' writings....an ecumenical milestone was reached in 1973 with the appearance of the Common Bible, an edition of the RSV with the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books printed between the Testaments in a form which received the blessing not only of Catholic and Protestant church leaders but also of the Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, the leader of the Greek Orthodox community in Britain....The commendation of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop is the more telling because the OT part of the work is not based on the Septuagint, which is the authoritative text for the Orthodox Church" (F.F. Bruce, The Canon Of Scripture [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1988], pp. 82, 113, n. 31 on p. 113)
For more on such issues from Eastern Orthodox sources, see Steve Hays' discussion here. One of the sources Steve cites, The Blackwell Dictionary Of Eastern Christianity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004), Ken Parry, et al., ed., comments that "Protestant ideas infiltrated Russian theology in the eighteenth century, whence they spread to parts of the Greek-speaking churches." (p. 83)
Friday, May 11, 2007
Did The Apostles Require That All Churches Have A Monarchical Episcopate?
There's widespread agreement among modern scholars that not every early Christian church had a monarchical episcopate. But Orthodox, characteristic of what he often does, has taken contradictory positions on the issue. He writes:
"And even if it [the monarchical episcopate] wasn't the earliest practice, that wouldn't refute my actual proposition, which is that it was an apostolic command that the church should have a monarchial episcopate at a later date....Firstly I didn't claim they [the apostles] did it [commanded the monarchical episcopate] later, I said that had they done it later you are not off the hook. Why might they have done it later? Because the age of the monarchial rule by the apostles was ending....There is no solid evidence for anything other than the monarchial episcopate....I'm saying nobody knows exactly how it played out, but the church witnesses that the monarchial episcopate is an apostolic teaching. Exactly what when and how that came to be is something we may not know, but that it so is what we do know....Obviously, because it [the monarchical episcopate] is the Apostolic Tradition and it is a command. It was always done this way. James in Acts is the single leader of the Jerusalem church." (sources here and here)
As those who have read much of Orthodox's material should know, he's a poor communicator, he often contradicts himself, and he frequently makes assertions without any supporting argumentation. But part of what he's saying in the comments above seems to be that the monarchical episcopate is required in all post-apostolic churches and was the form of government that existed during the time of the apostles. Orthodox argues that the apostles could have commanded that every church have a monarchical episcopate after their (the apostles') death, even if the monarchical episcopate hadn't existed everywhere during apostolic times, but he seems to think that such a scenario isn't the most likely one.
In the first thread quoted above, Orthodox also makes the following claims about Jerome:
"Jerome doesn't 'attest' to anything other than a monarchial episcopate. He gives an opinion it wasn't always so, but he gives no reason to believe he has any inside knowledge that we don't have....I've seen no evidence cited against the monarchial episcopate apart from a theory Jerome had."
So, he acknowledges that Jerome referred to something other than the monarchical episcopate existing early on, but he dismisses that view as "a theory Jerome had" without "any inside knowledge that we don't have". Yet, in the second thread cited above, Orthodox contradicts himself:
"All Jerome comments on is the naming. It doesn't help you at all."
First Orthodox claims that Jerome did acknowledge an early form of church government other than the monarchical episcopate. Then he claims that Jerome didn't do so, but instead only comments on the terminology of "presbyter" and "bishop" ("the naming").
Why would Orthodox want to change his argument? Because, as I pointed out to him, he's argued that Jerome was Eastern Orthodox and that the ancient church accepted the monarchical episcopate as something required of every church. If Jerome refers to early churches as not having a monarchical episcopate, as Orthodox originally acknowledged he does, then that raises doubts about Orthodox's claim that the ancient church always required the monarchical episcopate as something commanded by the apostles.
Before I go on to address the evidence relevant to Jerome, I should note that Jerome isn't the only patristic source who acknowledged that presbyter and bishop were originally the same office. Roger Beckwith comments:
"Other fourth-century writers, besides Jerome, who continue to recognise that bishop and presbyter were originally one, include Ambrosiaster, Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia." (Elders In Every City [Waynesboro, Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2003], n. 13 on p. 24)
Let's first look at Jerome's Letter 146. In that letter, which addresses matters of church government and whether presbyters and bishops were originally the same, he writes:
"Do you ask for proof of what I say?" (Letter 146:1)
As the Eastern Orthodox patristic scholar John McGuckin notes (see here), Jerome was arguing for something that had been largely neglected in his day. He wasn't just addressing a matter of terminology that would have been relatively uncontroversial. That's why he thinks his audience might be so skeptical of what he's saying.
Jerome goes on to comment:
"When subsequently one presbyter was chosen to preside over the rest, this was done to remedy schism and to prevent each individual from rending the church of Christ by drawing it to himself." (Letter 146:1)
Jerome tells us that what Orthodox has argued for was a "subsequent" development. And Jerome uses that reference to "subsequent" just after discussing the last apostle to die, John. He's referring to a change in church government that at least generally occurred after apostolic times.
Below are two other passages from Jerome that David King brought to my attention a number of years ago. I'm posting them as I received them from him:
"A presbyter, therefore, is the same as a bishop, and before dissensions were introduced into religion by the instigation of the devil, and it was said among the peoples, ‘I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, and I of Cephas,’ Churches were governed by a common council of presbyters; afterwards, when everyone thought that those whom he had baptised were his own, and not Christ’s, it was decreed in the whole world that one chosen out of the presbyters should be placed over the rest, and to whom all care of the Church should belong, that the seeds of schisms might be plucked up. Whosoever thinks that there is no proof from Scripture, but that this is my opinion, that a presbyter and bishop are the same, and that one is a title of age, the other of office, let him read the words of the apostle to the Philippians, saying, ‘Paul and Timotheus, servants of Christ to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi with the bishops and deacons.’" (Commentariorum In Epistolam Ad Titum, PL 26:562-563)
And:
"Therefore, as we have shown, among the ancients presbyters were the same as bishops; but by degrees, that the plants of dissension might be rooted up, all responsibility was transferred to one person. Therefore, as the presbyters know that it is by the custom of the Church that they are to be subject to him who is placed over them so let the bishops know that they are above presbyters rather by custom than by Divine appointment, and ought to rule the Church in common, following the example of Moses, who, when he alone had power to preside over the people Israel, chose seventy, with the assistance of whom he might judge the people. We see therefore what kind of presbyter or bishop should be ordained." (Commentariorum In Epistolam Ad Titum, PL 26:563)
Notice that Jerome tells us that the monarchical episcopate was a later development from "custom" and not a "Divine appointment". Notice, also, that above I've cited the Eastern Orthodox patristic scholar John McGuckin referring to the monarchical episcopate as a gradual development. If Eastern Orthodoxy has always recognized the monarchical episcopate as a requirement for every church by commandment of the apostles, then why would ancient sources like Jerome and modern Eastern Orthodox scholars, like John McGuckin, be unaware of that fact and even deny it?
"And even if it [the monarchical episcopate] wasn't the earliest practice, that wouldn't refute my actual proposition, which is that it was an apostolic command that the church should have a monarchial episcopate at a later date....Firstly I didn't claim they [the apostles] did it [commanded the monarchical episcopate] later, I said that had they done it later you are not off the hook. Why might they have done it later? Because the age of the monarchial rule by the apostles was ending....There is no solid evidence for anything other than the monarchial episcopate....I'm saying nobody knows exactly how it played out, but the church witnesses that the monarchial episcopate is an apostolic teaching. Exactly what when and how that came to be is something we may not know, but that it so is what we do know....Obviously, because it [the monarchical episcopate] is the Apostolic Tradition and it is a command. It was always done this way. James in Acts is the single leader of the Jerusalem church." (sources here and here)
As those who have read much of Orthodox's material should know, he's a poor communicator, he often contradicts himself, and he frequently makes assertions without any supporting argumentation. But part of what he's saying in the comments above seems to be that the monarchical episcopate is required in all post-apostolic churches and was the form of government that existed during the time of the apostles. Orthodox argues that the apostles could have commanded that every church have a monarchical episcopate after their (the apostles') death, even if the monarchical episcopate hadn't existed everywhere during apostolic times, but he seems to think that such a scenario isn't the most likely one.
In the first thread quoted above, Orthodox also makes the following claims about Jerome:
"Jerome doesn't 'attest' to anything other than a monarchial episcopate. He gives an opinion it wasn't always so, but he gives no reason to believe he has any inside knowledge that we don't have....I've seen no evidence cited against the monarchial episcopate apart from a theory Jerome had."
So, he acknowledges that Jerome referred to something other than the monarchical episcopate existing early on, but he dismisses that view as "a theory Jerome had" without "any inside knowledge that we don't have". Yet, in the second thread cited above, Orthodox contradicts himself:
"All Jerome comments on is the naming. It doesn't help you at all."
First Orthodox claims that Jerome did acknowledge an early form of church government other than the monarchical episcopate. Then he claims that Jerome didn't do so, but instead only comments on the terminology of "presbyter" and "bishop" ("the naming").
Why would Orthodox want to change his argument? Because, as I pointed out to him, he's argued that Jerome was Eastern Orthodox and that the ancient church accepted the monarchical episcopate as something required of every church. If Jerome refers to early churches as not having a monarchical episcopate, as Orthodox originally acknowledged he does, then that raises doubts about Orthodox's claim that the ancient church always required the monarchical episcopate as something commanded by the apostles.
Before I go on to address the evidence relevant to Jerome, I should note that Jerome isn't the only patristic source who acknowledged that presbyter and bishop were originally the same office. Roger Beckwith comments:
"Other fourth-century writers, besides Jerome, who continue to recognise that bishop and presbyter were originally one, include Ambrosiaster, Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia." (Elders In Every City [Waynesboro, Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2003], n. 13 on p. 24)
Let's first look at Jerome's Letter 146. In that letter, which addresses matters of church government and whether presbyters and bishops were originally the same, he writes:
"Do you ask for proof of what I say?" (Letter 146:1)
As the Eastern Orthodox patristic scholar John McGuckin notes (see here), Jerome was arguing for something that had been largely neglected in his day. He wasn't just addressing a matter of terminology that would have been relatively uncontroversial. That's why he thinks his audience might be so skeptical of what he's saying.
Jerome goes on to comment:
"When subsequently one presbyter was chosen to preside over the rest, this was done to remedy schism and to prevent each individual from rending the church of Christ by drawing it to himself." (Letter 146:1)
Jerome tells us that what Orthodox has argued for was a "subsequent" development. And Jerome uses that reference to "subsequent" just after discussing the last apostle to die, John. He's referring to a change in church government that at least generally occurred after apostolic times.
Below are two other passages from Jerome that David King brought to my attention a number of years ago. I'm posting them as I received them from him:
"A presbyter, therefore, is the same as a bishop, and before dissensions were introduced into religion by the instigation of the devil, and it was said among the peoples, ‘I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, and I of Cephas,’ Churches were governed by a common council of presbyters; afterwards, when everyone thought that those whom he had baptised were his own, and not Christ’s, it was decreed in the whole world that one chosen out of the presbyters should be placed over the rest, and to whom all care of the Church should belong, that the seeds of schisms might be plucked up. Whosoever thinks that there is no proof from Scripture, but that this is my opinion, that a presbyter and bishop are the same, and that one is a title of age, the other of office, let him read the words of the apostle to the Philippians, saying, ‘Paul and Timotheus, servants of Christ to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi with the bishops and deacons.’" (Commentariorum In Epistolam Ad Titum, PL 26:562-563)
And:
"Therefore, as we have shown, among the ancients presbyters were the same as bishops; but by degrees, that the plants of dissension might be rooted up, all responsibility was transferred to one person. Therefore, as the presbyters know that it is by the custom of the Church that they are to be subject to him who is placed over them so let the bishops know that they are above presbyters rather by custom than by Divine appointment, and ought to rule the Church in common, following the example of Moses, who, when he alone had power to preside over the people Israel, chose seventy, with the assistance of whom he might judge the people. We see therefore what kind of presbyter or bishop should be ordained." (Commentariorum In Epistolam Ad Titum, PL 26:563)
Notice that Jerome tells us that the monarchical episcopate was a later development from "custom" and not a "Divine appointment". Notice, also, that above I've cited the Eastern Orthodox patristic scholar John McGuckin referring to the monarchical episcopate as a gradual development. If Eastern Orthodoxy has always recognized the monarchical episcopate as a requirement for every church by commandment of the apostles, then why would ancient sources like Jerome and modern Eastern Orthodox scholars, like John McGuckin, be unaware of that fact and even deny it?
Babel, Babble, & Babinski
***QUOTE***
I also noted while dipping into your Eastertide book that you had read John Walton's NIV APPLICATION COMMENTARY on GENESIS. So have I. Did you note what he said about the way the ancient Hebrews views the shape of the cosmos according to Genesis chapter 1 and other verses? For instance, that the birds don't fly "in" the firmament" but upon its face. I recall Walton admitting that the writer(s) of Genesis most probably viewed/assumed the earth was flat.
***END-QUOTE***
Actually, he seems to take two different positions on that subject. On the one hand, he regards the description as an accommodation to ANE cosmic geography. On the other hand, he also regards the description as involving architectural metaphors that foreshadow the tabernacle.
It doesn’t appear to me that he’s expressed himself in a way that’s entirely coherent. However, one could harmonize the two interpretations without too much difficulty.
Moses used architectural metaphors to foreshadow the tabernacle. That would also fit with the literary unity and intertextuality of the Pentateuch. And in using architectural metaphors, ANE architecture supplied the point of reference.
On that view, the element of literary dependence is not on ANE cosmic geography, but ANE architecture.
At the same time, Walton also agrees with Seely. I do not. Poythress has a brief, but trenchant critique of Seely. Cf. Redeeming Science, 96n8.
“He also admits that "Satan" does not appear in Genesis chapter 2 at all, but instead a ‘wise serpent,’ understood to be an actual serpent. Walton also wrote a bit in that commentary about the relative lack of appearances of ‘Satan’ and ‘demons’ throughout the O.T., i.e., compared with the N.T.”
There’s nothing liberal about progressive revelation. Gen 1-3 lay down markers that are developed in later parts of the Pentateuch, including later parts of Genesis. You’re not going to a get a full-blown diabology in Gen 3. As regards the identity of the Serpent, there are several considerations:
i) What the text says.
ii) Intertextual links.
iii) The cultural preunderstanding.
Speaking for myself, I view in Serpent as an angelophany. There are many angelophanies in the Pentateuch. This would be a diabolical angelophany, in contrast to the theophanic angelophany in 2:7 and 3:3ff., or the cherubic angelophany in 3:24.
In translating Hebrew into English, we seek an English synonym whose semantic range intersects with the Hebrew noun. But while they intersect, they do not coincide, and the English word has different connotations than the Hebrew word.
As Hamilton points out in his commentary, the Hebrew word may well be a pun, to trigger associations with divinatory imprecations, viz. casting spells and hexes. This would, in turn, dovetail with ANE ophiolatry and ophiomancy. A good example is Pharaoh’s uraeus. The audience for Genesis is the same audience for Exodus. There are also parallels with the Balaam cycle.
Likewise, “we may see the snake as the embodiment of the commonest Egyptian word for ‘statement’, written as a serpent, a word that appears in Egyptian magical texts as a synonym for ‘spell’.”
http://www.jtsa.edu/research/pubs/janes/pdf/24_noegel.pdf
So it’s a mistake for a modern reader to assume that the Serpent in Gen 3 must be a “snake” in the English sense of the word. We need to hear the text the way in which the original audience would hear the text.
***QUOTE***
Do you believe that the Noah's ark story is historically true? Have you read Moore's online piece, "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark" that cites the works of a host of creationist Christian ark believers and simply asks rather obvious and logical questions? Woodmorappe attempted to "answer" Moore's question-packed little booklet, then Glenn Morton stepped in and easily batted down Woodmorappe's ad hoc "answers," with a host of additional questions that such "ad hoc" explanations raised. It's all on the web, just google their names and "Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark."
I've also compared the relative arrangement of fossils in the geological record with attempts by "Flood geologist" to explain such relative arrangements, and found their explanations wanting. Woodmorappe, ICR, and Answers in Genesis have all backed down over the years from their original assertions that "out of place" strata, and "out of place fossils," and "out of place artifacts" had been found and proven to exist. They backed down from the Paluxy "man prints," from Baugh's "hammer in stone," and even from "The Lewis Mountain" formation, which ICR's Ph.D. paleontologist, Kurt Wise and it's Ph.D. geologist, Steve Austin, agree is a genuine overthrust and the largest overthrust in the world. So the geological record is not all mixed up. As for Woodmorappe, last I read he's been arguing in typical ad hoc fashion that no "out of place" fossils or human artifacts are likely to ever be found, because (here's the ad hoc part), when the Bible speaks about the earth being full of sin and violence in the days of Noah it only referred to a relatively small portion of the earth, that only 30 or 40 thousand human beings were alive at that time, and they lived in only one small portion of the earth, and God took special care to bury their homes and artifacts and bones where no one will ever find them. Hence, there's no need for "Flood geologists" like Woodmorappe to even have to continue digging and looking for out of place fossils.
But the huge fact that young-earth "Flood geologists" ignore is the relative arrangement of strata around the world and the relative arrangement of the fossils of each representative geological period in those strata, right down to the relative arrangements of microfossils of single-celled organisms, and small minor bones of organisms, all sorted in ways no single "world wide Flood" of mere water could ever sort so finely and in such an "evolutionary-like" order without a host of countless additional miracles.
***END-QUOTE***
You have a habit of wanting me to comment on what other people have said. I’m more concerned with exegeting Scripture than exegeting Steve Austin.
To some extent, the modern-day, YEC reading of Genesis is constrained by the YEC reading of prophecy. Its premillennial literalism establishes the hermeneutical paradigm.
And apostates like you and Moore and Morton typically operate with the very same hermeneutic since you usually come out of the very same religious milieu. You haven’t changed the way you read the Bible. You continue to read it the way Tim LaHaye reads it. You’re Tweedledee to Austin’s Tweedledum. The only difference is that you no longer believe what you read.
At the same time, I don’t have to agree with Wise on all his theories or interpretations to find him useful. And Wise at his worst is better than Dawkins at his best. Dawkins’ just-so stories are ad hoc from start to finish.
That, however, is not the same thing as the grammatico-historical method, which is my own point of reference. I ask myself, “how would the original audience hear the text?” Sometimes the answer is literal, other times figurative.
The original audience wouldn’t register the geographical landmarks in the flood account the same way a modern audience is wont. We have a different sense of scale. The danger is to superimpose our modern mental picture of the globe back onto the ancient text, and then burden the text with a lot of logistical difficulties that are not, in fact, generated by the text itself, but by our own anachronisms.
But I assume the original audience would hear the text in light of ANE cartography, not satellite cartography. It is wrong to literally map our own atlas back onto Gen 7.
BTW, this doesn’t mean the narrator was committed to ANE cartography. He isn’t that specific. The imagery is quite generic. The question is how the original audience would visualize the account. These are the sorts of preliminary questions that a contemporary reader needs to ask himself before we ever get around to the scientific questions. Not, what does it mean to us? But, what did it mean to them?
And I’ve addressed “scientific” objections to the account on several other occasions, so I won’t repeat myself here.
As to the fossil record, what we’re generally getting, as Henry Gee has documented at length, is not a continuous sequence frozen in rock, but discontinuous data-points which are rearranged into a continuous sequence by a value-laden reconstruction of the record that is enormously underdetermined by the actual state of the evidence. A thousand theoretical interpolations to every isolated bone fragment.
Of course, Gee isn’t trying to undermine evolution. Rather, like so many others, he’s trying to retrofit the theory. But to clear the ground for cladistics, he must slash and burn phenetics, and it’s quite a spectacle to see how little is left over after his scorched earth policy. So now we have another outbreak of the Darwin Wars.
I also noted while dipping into your Eastertide book that you had read John Walton's NIV APPLICATION COMMENTARY on GENESIS. So have I. Did you note what he said about the way the ancient Hebrews views the shape of the cosmos according to Genesis chapter 1 and other verses? For instance, that the birds don't fly "in" the firmament" but upon its face. I recall Walton admitting that the writer(s) of Genesis most probably viewed/assumed the earth was flat.
***END-QUOTE***
Actually, he seems to take two different positions on that subject. On the one hand, he regards the description as an accommodation to ANE cosmic geography. On the other hand, he also regards the description as involving architectural metaphors that foreshadow the tabernacle.
It doesn’t appear to me that he’s expressed himself in a way that’s entirely coherent. However, one could harmonize the two interpretations without too much difficulty.
Moses used architectural metaphors to foreshadow the tabernacle. That would also fit with the literary unity and intertextuality of the Pentateuch. And in using architectural metaphors, ANE architecture supplied the point of reference.
On that view, the element of literary dependence is not on ANE cosmic geography, but ANE architecture.
At the same time, Walton also agrees with Seely. I do not. Poythress has a brief, but trenchant critique of Seely. Cf. Redeeming Science, 96n8.
“He also admits that "Satan" does not appear in Genesis chapter 2 at all, but instead a ‘wise serpent,’ understood to be an actual serpent. Walton also wrote a bit in that commentary about the relative lack of appearances of ‘Satan’ and ‘demons’ throughout the O.T., i.e., compared with the N.T.”
There’s nothing liberal about progressive revelation. Gen 1-3 lay down markers that are developed in later parts of the Pentateuch, including later parts of Genesis. You’re not going to a get a full-blown diabology in Gen 3. As regards the identity of the Serpent, there are several considerations:
i) What the text says.
ii) Intertextual links.
iii) The cultural preunderstanding.
Speaking for myself, I view in Serpent as an angelophany. There are many angelophanies in the Pentateuch. This would be a diabolical angelophany, in contrast to the theophanic angelophany in 2:7 and 3:3ff., or the cherubic angelophany in 3:24.
In translating Hebrew into English, we seek an English synonym whose semantic range intersects with the Hebrew noun. But while they intersect, they do not coincide, and the English word has different connotations than the Hebrew word.
As Hamilton points out in his commentary, the Hebrew word may well be a pun, to trigger associations with divinatory imprecations, viz. casting spells and hexes. This would, in turn, dovetail with ANE ophiolatry and ophiomancy. A good example is Pharaoh’s uraeus. The audience for Genesis is the same audience for Exodus. There are also parallels with the Balaam cycle.
Likewise, “we may see the snake as the embodiment of the commonest Egyptian word for ‘statement’, written as a serpent, a word that appears in Egyptian magical texts as a synonym for ‘spell’.”
http://www.jtsa.edu/research/pubs/janes/pdf/24_noegel.pdf
So it’s a mistake for a modern reader to assume that the Serpent in Gen 3 must be a “snake” in the English sense of the word. We need to hear the text the way in which the original audience would hear the text.
***QUOTE***
Do you believe that the Noah's ark story is historically true? Have you read Moore's online piece, "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark" that cites the works of a host of creationist Christian ark believers and simply asks rather obvious and logical questions? Woodmorappe attempted to "answer" Moore's question-packed little booklet, then Glenn Morton stepped in and easily batted down Woodmorappe's ad hoc "answers," with a host of additional questions that such "ad hoc" explanations raised. It's all on the web, just google their names and "Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark."
I've also compared the relative arrangement of fossils in the geological record with attempts by "Flood geologist" to explain such relative arrangements, and found their explanations wanting. Woodmorappe, ICR, and Answers in Genesis have all backed down over the years from their original assertions that "out of place" strata, and "out of place fossils," and "out of place artifacts" had been found and proven to exist. They backed down from the Paluxy "man prints," from Baugh's "hammer in stone," and even from "The Lewis Mountain" formation, which ICR's Ph.D. paleontologist, Kurt Wise and it's Ph.D. geologist, Steve Austin, agree is a genuine overthrust and the largest overthrust in the world. So the geological record is not all mixed up. As for Woodmorappe, last I read he's been arguing in typical ad hoc fashion that no "out of place" fossils or human artifacts are likely to ever be found, because (here's the ad hoc part), when the Bible speaks about the earth being full of sin and violence in the days of Noah it only referred to a relatively small portion of the earth, that only 30 or 40 thousand human beings were alive at that time, and they lived in only one small portion of the earth, and God took special care to bury their homes and artifacts and bones where no one will ever find them. Hence, there's no need for "Flood geologists" like Woodmorappe to even have to continue digging and looking for out of place fossils.
But the huge fact that young-earth "Flood geologists" ignore is the relative arrangement of strata around the world and the relative arrangement of the fossils of each representative geological period in those strata, right down to the relative arrangements of microfossils of single-celled organisms, and small minor bones of organisms, all sorted in ways no single "world wide Flood" of mere water could ever sort so finely and in such an "evolutionary-like" order without a host of countless additional miracles.
***END-QUOTE***
You have a habit of wanting me to comment on what other people have said. I’m more concerned with exegeting Scripture than exegeting Steve Austin.
To some extent, the modern-day, YEC reading of Genesis is constrained by the YEC reading of prophecy. Its premillennial literalism establishes the hermeneutical paradigm.
And apostates like you and Moore and Morton typically operate with the very same hermeneutic since you usually come out of the very same religious milieu. You haven’t changed the way you read the Bible. You continue to read it the way Tim LaHaye reads it. You’re Tweedledee to Austin’s Tweedledum. The only difference is that you no longer believe what you read.
At the same time, I don’t have to agree with Wise on all his theories or interpretations to find him useful. And Wise at his worst is better than Dawkins at his best. Dawkins’ just-so stories are ad hoc from start to finish.
That, however, is not the same thing as the grammatico-historical method, which is my own point of reference. I ask myself, “how would the original audience hear the text?” Sometimes the answer is literal, other times figurative.
The original audience wouldn’t register the geographical landmarks in the flood account the same way a modern audience is wont. We have a different sense of scale. The danger is to superimpose our modern mental picture of the globe back onto the ancient text, and then burden the text with a lot of logistical difficulties that are not, in fact, generated by the text itself, but by our own anachronisms.
But I assume the original audience would hear the text in light of ANE cartography, not satellite cartography. It is wrong to literally map our own atlas back onto Gen 7.
BTW, this doesn’t mean the narrator was committed to ANE cartography. He isn’t that specific. The imagery is quite generic. The question is how the original audience would visualize the account. These are the sorts of preliminary questions that a contemporary reader needs to ask himself before we ever get around to the scientific questions. Not, what does it mean to us? But, what did it mean to them?
And I’ve addressed “scientific” objections to the account on several other occasions, so I won’t repeat myself here.
As to the fossil record, what we’re generally getting, as Henry Gee has documented at length, is not a continuous sequence frozen in rock, but discontinuous data-points which are rearranged into a continuous sequence by a value-laden reconstruction of the record that is enormously underdetermined by the actual state of the evidence. A thousand theoretical interpolations to every isolated bone fragment.
Of course, Gee isn’t trying to undermine evolution. Rather, like so many others, he’s trying to retrofit the theory. But to clear the ground for cladistics, he must slash and burn phenetics, and it’s quite a spectacle to see how little is left over after his scorched earth policy. So now we have another outbreak of the Darwin Wars.
A disingenuous orthodoxy
Originally, I intended to post the following comment in the combox of Peter's latest post. But I thought it'd derail the discussion even more than it's already been derailed. So I'm publishing it as a new post instead.
Touchstone said:
In the context of Gene's use of the words, what are "exegetical reasons" based on? Exegesis of the Bible.
And, in turn, good exegesis of the Bible is what good confessions of faith are themselves built on.
2. Now let's ask Touchstone the same question. What is Touchstone's own measure or standard for orthodoxy? Well, at this point it seems to be what he vaguely terms "catholic consensus." As Touchstone puts it, "I offered the 'catholic consensus' understanding, which, by my reading is completely uncontroversial among church historians."
a. First, what does Touchstone mean by "catholic consensus"? Is it the consensus of the entire or at least the majority of the church over a particular period of time? But, for example, as Gene has already noted, the Arians took over after Nicea. Does Touchstone consider the Arians orthodox?
b. Plus appealing to "catholic consensus" actually begs the question. Who or what determines "catholic consensus" in the first place? What is "catholic consensus" itself based on? Is it the "church historians" Touchstone writes about above? If so, which ones, and more to the point, from where do church historians derive authority to define orthodoxy?
3. Gene rightly points out: "The onus is on you [Touchstone] to show why the Ancient Creeds are the ones which are 'the' ones to hold in order for a person to make a credible profession of faith. I'm simply asking you to make good on your claim."
Indeed, that's the real issue. Earlier Touchstone mentions that he holds to the Nicene and Apostles' Creed and that these are what define him as orthodox. But why these creeds and why not others, as Gene has noted? (Let alone whether Touchstone actually does consistently hold to these creeds in his Christian profession.)
Again, and as Touchstone himself asks, what standard or measure does he use to determine what's orthodox from what's not? What is Touchstone's own basis for holding to certain creeds and confessions over others? "Catholic consensus"? Church historians? Bishops and councils? Will he join the chorus of voices which sing sola ecclesia (e.g. the RCC, the LDS)? Himself -- after all, he is a self-proclaimed touchstone? All of these? Some of these? Who/what/how much will he accommodate? Something else entirely?
(I suspect Touchstone is at least partly reluctant to answer with something along the lines of "a fair exegesis of the Scriptures" because he knows if that's the case, and if he has to exegete actual texts of Scripture to prove his point(s), he won't have as much wiggle room in his words as he might've otherwise.)
4. In any case, the more I read him, the more convinced I am that, even at best, Touchstone sadly exemplifies some of the most discouraging and in fact unorthodox aspects and trends of the Emergent Church movement rather than (what Touchstone presumably wants others to believe) its more positive ones. As Al Mohler has said, "Orthodoxy must be generous, but it cannot be so generous that it ceases to be orthodox."
Touchstone said:
But I would like to know what you use to determine what is "orthodox" and what is not.1. Since it appears Touchstone missed it, here's what Gene said in his very first paragraph: "My standards are not at all arbitrary. I have exegetical reasons for holding to a confession of faith that includes Sola Fide..."
In the context of Gene's use of the words, what are "exegetical reasons" based on? Exegesis of the Bible.
And, in turn, good exegesis of the Bible is what good confessions of faith are themselves built on.
2. Now let's ask Touchstone the same question. What is Touchstone's own measure or standard for orthodoxy? Well, at this point it seems to be what he vaguely terms "catholic consensus." As Touchstone puts it, "I offered the 'catholic consensus' understanding, which, by my reading is completely uncontroversial among church historians."
a. First, what does Touchstone mean by "catholic consensus"? Is it the consensus of the entire or at least the majority of the church over a particular period of time? But, for example, as Gene has already noted, the Arians took over after Nicea. Does Touchstone consider the Arians orthodox?
b. Plus appealing to "catholic consensus" actually begs the question. Who or what determines "catholic consensus" in the first place? What is "catholic consensus" itself based on? Is it the "church historians" Touchstone writes about above? If so, which ones, and more to the point, from where do church historians derive authority to define orthodoxy?
3. Gene rightly points out: "The onus is on you [Touchstone] to show why the Ancient Creeds are the ones which are 'the' ones to hold in order for a person to make a credible profession of faith. I'm simply asking you to make good on your claim."
Indeed, that's the real issue. Earlier Touchstone mentions that he holds to the Nicene and Apostles' Creed and that these are what define him as orthodox. But why these creeds and why not others, as Gene has noted? (Let alone whether Touchstone actually does consistently hold to these creeds in his Christian profession.)
Again, and as Touchstone himself asks, what standard or measure does he use to determine what's orthodox from what's not? What is Touchstone's own basis for holding to certain creeds and confessions over others? "Catholic consensus"? Church historians? Bishops and councils? Will he join the chorus of voices which sing sola ecclesia (e.g. the RCC, the LDS)? Himself -- after all, he is a self-proclaimed touchstone? All of these? Some of these? Who/what/how much will he accommodate? Something else entirely?
(I suspect Touchstone is at least partly reluctant to answer with something along the lines of "a fair exegesis of the Scriptures" because he knows if that's the case, and if he has to exegete actual texts of Scripture to prove his point(s), he won't have as much wiggle room in his words as he might've otherwise.)
4. In any case, the more I read him, the more convinced I am that, even at best, Touchstone sadly exemplifies some of the most discouraging and in fact unorthodox aspects and trends of the Emergent Church movement rather than (what Touchstone presumably wants others to believe) its more positive ones. As Al Mohler has said, "Orthodoxy must be generous, but it cannot be so generous that it ceases to be orthodox."
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The real me
TOUCHSTONE SAID:
“What do we get here? YEC from Steve Hays, militating against the whole of science itself.”
Sigh! T-stone is soooo naïve!
Truth is, the YEC business was part cover story, part wedge tactic.
When Paul Kurtz ushered me into his office a few years ago (I’m on the payroll, but it’s an off-the-books operation, you understand), he explained to me that I was recruited to be a secular plant. He already had Shermer to do public debates, but he needed a man on the inside.
So I’ve spent the last few years blogging on YEC, Calvinism, theonomy, &c., to build up street cred with the Blogdom of God. It was a softening up exercise so that when I began to post stuff steering the reader in the direction of strong atheism, I’d catch my constituency off guard and coax them over to the dark side unawares.
The YEC material was designed to force the issue by making middle-of-the-roadkill compromises like theistic evolution untenable, thereby paving the way for nominal believers like T-stone to emigrate to the greener pastures of moral nihilism.
Just between you and me, some of my teammates are also double agents. For example, “Paul Manata” is really Paula Zapata, Director of Womyn’s Studies at UC Berkeley, while “Patrick Chan” (not his real name) is actually Chuck Liddell’s personal trainer. Chan would be a contender in his own right if he didn’t have to spend so much of his spare time as Director of the Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften.
“What do we get here? YEC from Steve Hays, militating against the whole of science itself.”
Sigh! T-stone is soooo naïve!
Truth is, the YEC business was part cover story, part wedge tactic.
When Paul Kurtz ushered me into his office a few years ago (I’m on the payroll, but it’s an off-the-books operation, you understand), he explained to me that I was recruited to be a secular plant. He already had Shermer to do public debates, but he needed a man on the inside.
So I’ve spent the last few years blogging on YEC, Calvinism, theonomy, &c., to build up street cred with the Blogdom of God. It was a softening up exercise so that when I began to post stuff steering the reader in the direction of strong atheism, I’d catch my constituency off guard and coax them over to the dark side unawares.
The YEC material was designed to force the issue by making middle-of-the-roadkill compromises like theistic evolution untenable, thereby paving the way for nominal believers like T-stone to emigrate to the greener pastures of moral nihilism.
Just between you and me, some of my teammates are also double agents. For example, “Paul Manata” is really Paula Zapata, Director of Womyn’s Studies at UC Berkeley, while “Patrick Chan” (not his real name) is actually Chuck Liddell’s personal trainer. Chan would be a contender in his own right if he didn’t have to spend so much of his spare time as Director of the Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften.
Thoughts on Modern Evangelicalism
The recent reversion of Francis Beckwith to Roman Catholicism brings to mind some practical issues regarding theology in Evangelicalism. Since Beckwith’s Christianity Today interview was basically subjective, I’ll likewise start with some subjective points.
First, I’ve been meeting off and on with a group of friends on Sundays (I say “off and on” because due to my work schedule and the lack of free-time during the week, I’ve had to use my Sundays to catch up a bit on other things and haven’t gone for a while). This group is composed of my brother and myself on the Reformed front, an Eastern Orthodox man in training for the priesthood, several Roman Catholics (indeed, the Catholics are recruiting everyone at the moment so there are more Catholics than anyone else), and several people who are disaffected with the modern state of Evangelicalism but who would still be considered Evangelicals. The result is a semi-ecumenical forum where we abide by certain rules to keep discussions civil and we discuss various issues, especially from Church history.
Speaking broadly, then, it is not at all surprising to me that Beckwith has abandoned Evangelicalism. There is very little appeal to Evangelicalism in its modern form. Indeed, the reason the group I am in formed in the first place was because one of my friends was so frustrated with the lack of thinking that goes on in Evangelical churches these days that he knew there must be something more out there.
Thankfully, I go to a good church that teaches Biblical doctrine every Sunday. It is intellectually satisfying. But there are many churches in America that have gone to the opposite extreme: pure emotionalism, and indeed a hostile spirit toward intellectual pursuits. As such, modern Evangelicalism can largely be defined today as anti-intellectual. Instead of teaching the Bible, we teach Rick Warren books. Instead of referring to Bible passages in our sermons, we quote 24 or Lost. Instead of focusing on God, we are anthropocentric.
In many ways, the Evangelical church is simply mirroring the anti-intellectual state of our culture as a whole. Thinking—true thinking—is not an easy thing. Wrestling with ideas, trying to defend a position logically, even reading up on opposing viewpoints—all these things take mental energy and stamina. It’s easier to watch American Idol and make fun of talentless singers than it is to think about what the doctrine of Justification means. And even if we pay lip service to doctrines such as this in our church services, how many people can think of an application of this doctrine on Sunday night or Monday morning?
Obviously, Beckwith was one person who could not find an application from the modern version of Evangelicalism. In many ways, though, Beckwith’s movement was not that much different from the movement of many of the apostates over at Debunking Christianity. Both were unsatisfied with the modern Evangelical church, and each picked a substitute philosophy to answer the questions they found problematic in Evangelicalism. While the Debunkers became atheists (thus “solving” the problem by pretending it was an artificial problem in the first place), Beckwith became a Catholic (thus “solving” the problem by substituting group-thought—the papacy—for the anti-intellectualism of modern Evangelicalism).
So the question for Evangelicals is a stark one. The question isn’t “Is there anything wrong with modern Evangelicalism?” The question is: “Since there is a problem with modern Evangelicalism, what is the solution?”
Hosea 4:6a says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Knowledge is vital for the Christian walk. When pastors speak to the Lowest Common Denominator in the audience, assuming that it is a pagan who has just walked in off the street, there can be no growth in the body. When a church is seeker-friendly (read: seeker-centered), those who believe and are not “seeking” will simply starve to death. Right now in Evangelicalism, there is no place for the flock to go to get fed.
The author of Hebrews chastises those who live on “milk” alone, saying: “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child” (Hebrews 5:12-13). He then implores the church to move on, saying: “Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment” (Hebrews 6:1-2).
Ironically, in the above passages, the author of Hebrews called the very reason Beckwith left Evangelicalism to return to Rome, part of the “elementary doctrine of Christ.” Yet our modern Evangelical churches do not even teach this elementary, foundational doctrine of “repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.”
This is not taught because we live in an anti-intellectual age where teaching anything is considered pointless. But Hosea made it clear that without knowledge, the people of God are destroyed. Indeed, he was even more to the point for our modern church because he continues: “[B]ecause you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.” (Hosea 4:6b). It wasn’t just that people had no knowledge, it was that they rejected knowledge, exactly as the modern Evangelical church has done today.
If the rejection of knowledge is the cause of the problem, the cure is simple: gaining that knowledge. And while groups of laymen can gather and do things to promote the knowledge of God (such as occurs on Triablogue), what we really need is for the church as a whole to move on to the solid food. While our culture may be largely anti-intellectual, people cannot live anti-intellectually for very long. It is against our natures, and we will become dissatisfied with our lack of growth. Therefore, when a layman realizes he could preach all the sermons that a pastor who supposedly went through years of seminary can do, what is left for him in that church? Where will he go to be fed?
False religions that promise knowledge are tempting for that reason. If a starving man is offered rotten meat, he will eat it. The Evangelical church should be giving people steak so that they would never feel that starved in the first place. If Evangelicalism wishes to avoid more “embarrassments” like having the president of the Evangelical Theological Society reject Evangelicalism, it needs to start feeding the sheep in every church, abandoning the “seeker-centered” approaches that only serve to inoculate members against Christianity and instead focusing on the weighty theological issues of Scripture. If, instead of mimicking the anti-intellectualism or our culture, the church shone as the beacon of reason and rationality that it was for so long, the church would actually transform the culture instead of being transformed by the culture.
Unfortunately, I do not see much hope that Evangelicalism as a whole will change. Thankfully, these things are ultimately in God’s hands instead of mine.
First, I’ve been meeting off and on with a group of friends on Sundays (I say “off and on” because due to my work schedule and the lack of free-time during the week, I’ve had to use my Sundays to catch up a bit on other things and haven’t gone for a while). This group is composed of my brother and myself on the Reformed front, an Eastern Orthodox man in training for the priesthood, several Roman Catholics (indeed, the Catholics are recruiting everyone at the moment so there are more Catholics than anyone else), and several people who are disaffected with the modern state of Evangelicalism but who would still be considered Evangelicals. The result is a semi-ecumenical forum where we abide by certain rules to keep discussions civil and we discuss various issues, especially from Church history.
Speaking broadly, then, it is not at all surprising to me that Beckwith has abandoned Evangelicalism. There is very little appeal to Evangelicalism in its modern form. Indeed, the reason the group I am in formed in the first place was because one of my friends was so frustrated with the lack of thinking that goes on in Evangelical churches these days that he knew there must be something more out there.
Thankfully, I go to a good church that teaches Biblical doctrine every Sunday. It is intellectually satisfying. But there are many churches in America that have gone to the opposite extreme: pure emotionalism, and indeed a hostile spirit toward intellectual pursuits. As such, modern Evangelicalism can largely be defined today as anti-intellectual. Instead of teaching the Bible, we teach Rick Warren books. Instead of referring to Bible passages in our sermons, we quote 24 or Lost. Instead of focusing on God, we are anthropocentric.
In many ways, the Evangelical church is simply mirroring the anti-intellectual state of our culture as a whole. Thinking—true thinking—is not an easy thing. Wrestling with ideas, trying to defend a position logically, even reading up on opposing viewpoints—all these things take mental energy and stamina. It’s easier to watch American Idol and make fun of talentless singers than it is to think about what the doctrine of Justification means. And even if we pay lip service to doctrines such as this in our church services, how many people can think of an application of this doctrine on Sunday night or Monday morning?
Obviously, Beckwith was one person who could not find an application from the modern version of Evangelicalism. In many ways, though, Beckwith’s movement was not that much different from the movement of many of the apostates over at Debunking Christianity. Both were unsatisfied with the modern Evangelical church, and each picked a substitute philosophy to answer the questions they found problematic in Evangelicalism. While the Debunkers became atheists (thus “solving” the problem by pretending it was an artificial problem in the first place), Beckwith became a Catholic (thus “solving” the problem by substituting group-thought—the papacy—for the anti-intellectualism of modern Evangelicalism).
So the question for Evangelicals is a stark one. The question isn’t “Is there anything wrong with modern Evangelicalism?” The question is: “Since there is a problem with modern Evangelicalism, what is the solution?”
Hosea 4:6a says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Knowledge is vital for the Christian walk. When pastors speak to the Lowest Common Denominator in the audience, assuming that it is a pagan who has just walked in off the street, there can be no growth in the body. When a church is seeker-friendly (read: seeker-centered), those who believe and are not “seeking” will simply starve to death. Right now in Evangelicalism, there is no place for the flock to go to get fed.
The author of Hebrews chastises those who live on “milk” alone, saying: “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child” (Hebrews 5:12-13). He then implores the church to move on, saying: “Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment” (Hebrews 6:1-2).
Ironically, in the above passages, the author of Hebrews called the very reason Beckwith left Evangelicalism to return to Rome, part of the “elementary doctrine of Christ.” Yet our modern Evangelical churches do not even teach this elementary, foundational doctrine of “repentance from dead works and of faith toward God.”
This is not taught because we live in an anti-intellectual age where teaching anything is considered pointless. But Hosea made it clear that without knowledge, the people of God are destroyed. Indeed, he was even more to the point for our modern church because he continues: “[B]ecause you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.” (Hosea 4:6b). It wasn’t just that people had no knowledge, it was that they rejected knowledge, exactly as the modern Evangelical church has done today.
If the rejection of knowledge is the cause of the problem, the cure is simple: gaining that knowledge. And while groups of laymen can gather and do things to promote the knowledge of God (such as occurs on Triablogue), what we really need is for the church as a whole to move on to the solid food. While our culture may be largely anti-intellectual, people cannot live anti-intellectually for very long. It is against our natures, and we will become dissatisfied with our lack of growth. Therefore, when a layman realizes he could preach all the sermons that a pastor who supposedly went through years of seminary can do, what is left for him in that church? Where will he go to be fed?
False religions that promise knowledge are tempting for that reason. If a starving man is offered rotten meat, he will eat it. The Evangelical church should be giving people steak so that they would never feel that starved in the first place. If Evangelicalism wishes to avoid more “embarrassments” like having the president of the Evangelical Theological Society reject Evangelicalism, it needs to start feeding the sheep in every church, abandoning the “seeker-centered” approaches that only serve to inoculate members against Christianity and instead focusing on the weighty theological issues of Scripture. If, instead of mimicking the anti-intellectualism or our culture, the church shone as the beacon of reason and rationality that it was for so long, the church would actually transform the culture instead of being transformed by the culture.
Unfortunately, I do not see much hope that Evangelicalism as a whole will change. Thankfully, these things are ultimately in God’s hands instead of mine.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Perspectives on the New Perspective
The Narrative of Scripture and Justification by Faith: A Still Fresher Reading of Paul by Mark Seifrid.
Francis Beckwith
Francis Beckwith has given an interview on his reversion to Roman Catholicism:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/mayweb-only/119-33.0.html
HT: Patrick Chan.
I’ll just comment on a few statements:
“The issue of justification was key for me. The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something. It's important to allow the grace of God to be exercised through your actions. The evangelical emphasis on the moral life forms my Catholic practice with an added incentive. That was liberating to me.”
Notice what is missing from this statement. He doesn’t say: “I went back and reexamined Paul’s teaching on justification. I came to the conclusion that Trent has the better of the exegetical argument.”
Instead, he offers a subjective, impressionist, existential argument—if you can even call it an argument.
Continuing:
“Evangelicals kid themselves when they believe that they can re-invent the wheel with every generation, that you have to produce another spate of systematic theology textbooks to teach people the stuff that has already been articulated for generations.”
Given the number of years that Beckwith has been an evangelical, a well-connected evangelical, moving in a variety of evangelical circles, does he really think evangelicals believe that they need to reinvent the wheel each generation? Is that the issue?
No, the issue is that Christianity may be 2000 years old, but it’s new to each new generation, and it’s incumbent upon each new generation to double-check “the stuff that has already been articulated for generations.”
Continuing:
“Look, you're not going to come up with the Nicene Creed by just picking up the Bible.”
Why not? How did the Nicene fathers come up with the Nicene Creed, if not by picking up the Bible?
“Does the Bible contribute to our understanding? Absolutely it does; the Nicene Creed is consistent with Scripture. But you needed a church that had a self-understanding in order to articulate that in any clear way.”
And how did the church come to its self-understanding? From Scripture, or apart from Scripture? Is the church’s self-understanding consonant with the way the Bible understands the church?
“But we have to understand that the Reformation only makes sense against the backdrop of a tradition that was already there.”
No one denies this. But let’s also remember that it’s not as if there was a monolithic, pre-Reformation tradition. There was a lot of diversity. Trent narrowed and hardened tradition in reaction to the Reformation.
“Calvin and Luther did not go back and re-write Nicea. They took it for granted.”
To my knowledge, that’s inaccurate. Calvin rejected Nicene subordinationism in favor of the autotheos of each Person.
“Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical.”
Do evangelicals reject liturgy per se as unbiblical? Or do they reject certain liturgical innovations as unbiblical? Or believe there’s a measure of freedom in our liturgical practice?
“It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles.”
Two or three obvious problems with this argument:
i) Apostolic practice is not automatically normative for the subapostolic church. For example, the apostles continued to attend the Temple services. Is that normative for Christians?
ii) Certain NT letters are already combating heresy in the NT church(es). Heresies were afoot during the apostolic era. So there’s no correlation between antiquity and orthodoxy.
iii) What about discontinuities between early church practice and the practice of the 21C Catholic church? Doesn’t the appeal to primitive tradition cut both ways? Does it undercut discontinuities between past and present?
“I think I underestimated the deep divisions that were still there, at least among lay evangelicals and Catholics more so than the academics who interact with each other more often.”
It’s true that elites tend to think alike. For example, the Episcopalian hierarchy is far more likely to agree with the secular elite on social issues than with the laity. Is that a good thing?
“Non-denominational Bible church folks are still reading stuff about Catholicism published in the 1950s.”
What is his evidence for this claim? No doubt it’s true in some cases, but does he have any statistical data to back up his sweeping generalization?
And why is it always that evangelicals don’t understand Catholics, but not vice versa? We live in the same country, you know.
“That's what led me to read the Joint Declaration on Justification.”
Were the Catholic participants official representatives of the Vatican? Do they speak for Rome? Were they papal delegates? Did the Vatican codify this Declaration?
“Then I began reading some Catholic authors who did a very nice job with explaining the Catholic views of grace and faith.”
Which Catholic authors?
“I thought to myself, ‘How come every evangelical book that I've read on Catholicism didn't get this right’?”
Which evangelical books?
“They both accept the same premise that the Enlightenment view of reason is the correct view of reason.”
This gets to be tedious. It’s the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from Bishop Wright. But we make allowance for the fact that he’s a NT scholar rather than a philosopher. Yet Beckwith is a philosopher.
So what evangelical theologians operate with an Enlightenment view of reason? Does that include pre-Enlightenment theologians like Calvin and Beza?
And what about the role of reason in Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, Arnauld, Maréchal, Maritain, Rahner, and so on?
“At some point, there has to be some connection between the church and its role and the phenomenon of Scripture. There are a lot of evangelicals who believe that and aren't Catholic. But if you accept that particularly narrow view of Sola Scriptura, then it becomes almost impossible to understand the Catholic view.”
i) Did Luther, a Catholic professor theology, not understand the Catholic view? Did Vermingli, by turns an abbot and prior, not understand the Catholic view?
ii) And assuming, for the sake of argument, that sola Scriptura precludes a proper understanding of the Catholic view, how does that validate the Catholic view?
iii) Conversely, does the Catholic view make it almost impossible to understand sola Scriptura?
"And I think it's a kind of axiomatic rationalism that doesn't really capture why people convert, and why people believe things."
Even if that were true, how does the psychology of conversion validate the process of conversion? After all, an individual can convert to anything.
"That is what you often find in real strong Calvinist views of God's moral nature, that things ought to be obeyed because God says so, not because he's good."
Can he quote any Reformed creed or major Reformed theologian who takes that position?
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/mayweb-only/119-33.0.html
HT: Patrick Chan.
I’ll just comment on a few statements:
“The issue of justification was key for me. The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something. It's important to allow the grace of God to be exercised through your actions. The evangelical emphasis on the moral life forms my Catholic practice with an added incentive. That was liberating to me.”
Notice what is missing from this statement. He doesn’t say: “I went back and reexamined Paul’s teaching on justification. I came to the conclusion that Trent has the better of the exegetical argument.”
Instead, he offers a subjective, impressionist, existential argument—if you can even call it an argument.
Continuing:
“Evangelicals kid themselves when they believe that they can re-invent the wheel with every generation, that you have to produce another spate of systematic theology textbooks to teach people the stuff that has already been articulated for generations.”
Given the number of years that Beckwith has been an evangelical, a well-connected evangelical, moving in a variety of evangelical circles, does he really think evangelicals believe that they need to reinvent the wheel each generation? Is that the issue?
No, the issue is that Christianity may be 2000 years old, but it’s new to each new generation, and it’s incumbent upon each new generation to double-check “the stuff that has already been articulated for generations.”
Continuing:
“Look, you're not going to come up with the Nicene Creed by just picking up the Bible.”
Why not? How did the Nicene fathers come up with the Nicene Creed, if not by picking up the Bible?
“Does the Bible contribute to our understanding? Absolutely it does; the Nicene Creed is consistent with Scripture. But you needed a church that had a self-understanding in order to articulate that in any clear way.”
And how did the church come to its self-understanding? From Scripture, or apart from Scripture? Is the church’s self-understanding consonant with the way the Bible understands the church?
“But we have to understand that the Reformation only makes sense against the backdrop of a tradition that was already there.”
No one denies this. But let’s also remember that it’s not as if there was a monolithic, pre-Reformation tradition. There was a lot of diversity. Trent narrowed and hardened tradition in reaction to the Reformation.
“Calvin and Luther did not go back and re-write Nicea. They took it for granted.”
To my knowledge, that’s inaccurate. Calvin rejected Nicene subordinationism in favor of the autotheos of each Person.
“Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical.”
Do evangelicals reject liturgy per se as unbiblical? Or do they reject certain liturgical innovations as unbiblical? Or believe there’s a measure of freedom in our liturgical practice?
“It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles.”
Two or three obvious problems with this argument:
i) Apostolic practice is not automatically normative for the subapostolic church. For example, the apostles continued to attend the Temple services. Is that normative for Christians?
ii) Certain NT letters are already combating heresy in the NT church(es). Heresies were afoot during the apostolic era. So there’s no correlation between antiquity and orthodoxy.
iii) What about discontinuities between early church practice and the practice of the 21C Catholic church? Doesn’t the appeal to primitive tradition cut both ways? Does it undercut discontinuities between past and present?
“I think I underestimated the deep divisions that were still there, at least among lay evangelicals and Catholics more so than the academics who interact with each other more often.”
It’s true that elites tend to think alike. For example, the Episcopalian hierarchy is far more likely to agree with the secular elite on social issues than with the laity. Is that a good thing?
“Non-denominational Bible church folks are still reading stuff about Catholicism published in the 1950s.”
What is his evidence for this claim? No doubt it’s true in some cases, but does he have any statistical data to back up his sweeping generalization?
And why is it always that evangelicals don’t understand Catholics, but not vice versa? We live in the same country, you know.
“That's what led me to read the Joint Declaration on Justification.”
Were the Catholic participants official representatives of the Vatican? Do they speak for Rome? Were they papal delegates? Did the Vatican codify this Declaration?
“Then I began reading some Catholic authors who did a very nice job with explaining the Catholic views of grace and faith.”
Which Catholic authors?
“I thought to myself, ‘How come every evangelical book that I've read on Catholicism didn't get this right’?”
Which evangelical books?
“They both accept the same premise that the Enlightenment view of reason is the correct view of reason.”
This gets to be tedious. It’s the sort of thing we’re used to hearing from Bishop Wright. But we make allowance for the fact that he’s a NT scholar rather than a philosopher. Yet Beckwith is a philosopher.
So what evangelical theologians operate with an Enlightenment view of reason? Does that include pre-Enlightenment theologians like Calvin and Beza?
And what about the role of reason in Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, Arnauld, Maréchal, Maritain, Rahner, and so on?
“At some point, there has to be some connection between the church and its role and the phenomenon of Scripture. There are a lot of evangelicals who believe that and aren't Catholic. But if you accept that particularly narrow view of Sola Scriptura, then it becomes almost impossible to understand the Catholic view.”
i) Did Luther, a Catholic professor theology, not understand the Catholic view? Did Vermingli, by turns an abbot and prior, not understand the Catholic view?
ii) And assuming, for the sake of argument, that sola Scriptura precludes a proper understanding of the Catholic view, how does that validate the Catholic view?
iii) Conversely, does the Catholic view make it almost impossible to understand sola Scriptura?
"And I think it's a kind of axiomatic rationalism that doesn't really capture why people convert, and why people believe things."
Even if that were true, how does the psychology of conversion validate the process of conversion? After all, an individual can convert to anything.
"That is what you often find in real strong Calvinist views of God's moral nature, that things ought to be obeyed because God says so, not because he's good."
Can he quote any Reformed creed or major Reformed theologian who takes that position?
Evolutionary mirror-reading
(Posted on behalf of Steve Hays)
Below are some excerpts from Henry Gee’s book on cladistics. My transcription preserves the original emphases.
Many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from the fossil record, are, however, baseless. The reason for this lies with the fact of the scale of geological time that scientists are dealing with, which is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils of creatures we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure. Any story we tell against the compass of geological time that links these fossils in sequences of cause and effect—or ancestry and descent—is, therefore, only ours to make. We invent these stories, after the fact, to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices.1
Fossils are never found with labels or certificates of authenticity. You can never know that the fossil bone you might dig up in Africa belonged to your direct ancestor, or anyone else’s. The attribution of ancestry does not come from the fossil; it can only come from us. Fossils are mute: their silence gives us unlimited licence to tell their stories for them, which usually takes the form of chains of ancestry and descent…Such tales are sustained more in our minds than in reality and are informed and conditioned by our own prejudices, which will tell us not what really happened, but what we think ought to have happened. If there are “missing links,” they exist only in our imaginations.2
Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong…If we can never know for certain that any fossil we unearth is our direct ancestor, it is similarly invalid to pluck a string of fossils from Deep Time, arrange these fossils in chronological order, and assert that this arrangement represents a sequence of evolutionary ancestry and descent. As Stephen Jay Gould has demonstrated, such misleading tales are part of popular iconography: everyone has seen pictures in which a sequence of fossil hominids—members of the human family of species—are arranged in an orderly procession from primitive forms up to modern Man.3
To complicate matters further, such sequences are justified after the fact by tales of inevitable, progressive improvement. For example, the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological achievements such a fire, the manufacture of tools, and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. They can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific. They rely for their currency not on scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of the presentation.4
Whether you believe the conventional wisdom that our own species Homo sapiens descended in seamless continuity from the preexisting species Homo erectus depends not on the evidence (because the fossil evidence is moot) but on the deferment of your lack of knowledge to the authority of the presenter or whether the presentation of the evidence resonates with your prejudices.5
The story of human interaction with fossils represents an example of how experience and belief have a powerful effect on interpretation and demonstrates why scientific truths can only be temporary. Today, we see fossils as the remains of creatures that once lived. However, this nature is not inherent in the fossils. It is our immersion in a century and half of Darwinian thought, not the fossils themselves, that gives us the capacity to see fossils as kin to things that were once as alive as you or I.6
The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.7
The conventional portrait of human evolution—and, indeed, of the history of life—tends to be one of lines of ancestors and descendants. We concentrate on the events leading to modern humanity, ignoring or playing down the evolution of other animals: we prune away all branches in the tree of life except the one leading to ourselves. The result, inevitably, is a tale of progressive improvement, culminating in modern humanity. From our privileged vantage point in the present day, we look back at human ancestry and pick out the features in fossil hominids that we see in our selves—a big brain, an upright stance, the use of tools, and so on. Naturally, we arrange fossil hominids in a series according to their resemblance to the human state.8
The conventional, linear view easily becomes a story in which the features of humanity are acquired in a sequence that can be discerned retrospectively—first an upright stance, then a bigger brain, then the invention of toolmaking, and so on, with ourselves as the inevitable consequence.9
New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries “missing links,” as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to according with human prejudices. In reality…each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.10
Just because the unicorn looks something like a bull or a horse to us, this does not imply that a unicorn is a missing link between these two animals. Horses and bulls are contingent; they just happened to offer themselves as models because they are familiar and available. Perhaps in another part of the world, a unicorn would be seen as a mixture of a camel and a kudu, but a unicorn would not be a missing link between those animals either.11
This task had very little to do with what the fishes were like as living animals. All I had were fragments that I could link to larger and more certainly known fragments that were sufficiently informative to have a name. I might as well have been doing the same thing with stamps, or cigarette cards. The relationships that these fishes had with living animals is so distant that any attempt to clothe them in flesh, to make them swim, requires a leap of faith.12
However, this leap must in some degree be fuelled by comparison with the animals that live around us today. If this were not possible, we would not be able to make any sense of fossils at all. When we look at pteraspids now, we interpret them in terms of lampreys: that is how they “make sense” to us. But the model of a pteraspid in terms of a lamprey is as provisional as that which once linked pteraspids with squid.13
The quest to interpret fossils in terms of modern models rests on the assumption that all life on Earth has a common ancestry, because we can interpret past life only in terms of other living organisms. If this were not possible, we would not recognize the fossils of animals as animals at all. We’d just see them as rocks.14
Crucially, you should have a clear idea about the position of the organism in nature before speculating about the function of its various parts. Let me explain. Let’s say that you have discovered that unicorns use their horns to kill dragons. Using this information, you could spin a tale about the importance of the horn in unicorn evolution: unicorns evolved in dragon country, where possession of horns was an asset. Unicorns without horns would all be charred to ashes by the fire-breathing dragons. Only those unicorns with horns survived to perpetuate the species.15
This story sounds plausible, but like the story about the evolution of tetrapod limbs, it cannot be tested. What is more, if you use your prior (and untestable) assumption that the unicorn evolved its horn to kill dragons as a guide to the unicorn’s relationships, you cannot then use this information in any subsequent test of the function of the unicorn’s horn. Why? Because you have already assumed that you know the horn’s function, even before you run the test. You have loaded the dice to tell you what you want.16
Misinterpretations about “adaptive purpose” ignore the fact that natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose. It is not a winnowing force with an independent existence that can b e personified, like Death, with his black cowl and scythe.17
Artificial selection is an imperfect metaphor for natural selection because breeders quite obviously do have intelligible reasons for why they select some traits and not others. Unlike natural selection, breeders have memories, plans, and purposes. They select for the same traits, generation after generation, to produce a discernible trend. Natural selection could hardly be more different18
To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a linage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.19
Ornithologists, who study modern birds, regard Archaeopteryx as an ancestor and an icon. Given that they have already judged where Archaeopteryx fits into the history of life, they look at the fossil and see exactly what they expect to find—birdlike features…Archaeopteryx has feathers, so it is a bird by definition. Its archaisms are only to be expected, given the fossil’s great antiquity when compared with other bird fossils. Because they study modern birds, ornithologists will, naturally, tend to see bird evolution in terms of perceived adaptations to birds’ current, airborne niche.20
Palaeontologists, in contrast, come to Archaeopteryx with a different search image…To palaeontologists, Archaeopteryx looks very similar to members of a group of dinosaurs called theropods….In this light, palaeontologists tends to see the feathers of Archaeopteryx as intriguing decorations for the body of a theropod dinosaur, not as central, key features essential for explaining the course of evolution in birds.21
The finds are 4.4 million years old and come from a place called Aramis. “This is the earliest-known hominid,” says White, proudly, but with a touch of self-deprecating humour that demonstrates a sensitivity to the inevitably piecemeal nature of human fossil remains, in which all the evidence for the hominid lineage between about 10 and 5 million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.22
There is therefore nothing special, advanced, or progressive about bipedality—only the fact that it is we who are bipedal, and it is we who are writing the book, makes it so.23
To complicate matters, brain volume can vary enormously among individuals in a species, with no discernible connection to intelligence.24
1 In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (Cornell 2001), 1-2.
2 Ibid. 2.
3 Ibid. 4-5.
4 Ibid. 5.
5 Ibid. 8.
6 Ibid. 9.
7 Ibid. 23.
8 Ibid. 32.
9 Ibid. 32.
10 Ibid. 32.
11 Ibid. 54.
12 Ibid. 61.
13 Ibid. 61.
14 Ibid. 82.
15 Ibid. 87-88.
16 Ibid. 88.
17 Ibid. 96.
18 Ibid. 96-97.
19 Ibid. 117-18.
20 Ibid. 180.
21 Ibid. 180-81.
22 Ibid. 201-02.
23 Ibid. 214.
24 Ibid. 214.
Below are some excerpts from Henry Gee’s book on cladistics. My transcription preserves the original emphases.
Many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from the fossil record, are, however, baseless. The reason for this lies with the fact of the scale of geological time that scientists are dealing with, which is so vast that it defies narrative. Fossils, such as the fossils of creatures we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure. Any story we tell against the compass of geological time that links these fossils in sequences of cause and effect—or ancestry and descent—is, therefore, only ours to make. We invent these stories, after the fact, to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices.1
Fossils are never found with labels or certificates of authenticity. You can never know that the fossil bone you might dig up in Africa belonged to your direct ancestor, or anyone else’s. The attribution of ancestry does not come from the fossil; it can only come from us. Fossils are mute: their silence gives us unlimited licence to tell their stories for them, which usually takes the form of chains of ancestry and descent…Such tales are sustained more in our minds than in reality and are informed and conditioned by our own prejudices, which will tell us not what really happened, but what we think ought to have happened. If there are “missing links,” they exist only in our imaginations.2
Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong…If we can never know for certain that any fossil we unearth is our direct ancestor, it is similarly invalid to pluck a string of fossils from Deep Time, arrange these fossils in chronological order, and assert that this arrangement represents a sequence of evolutionary ancestry and descent. As Stephen Jay Gould has demonstrated, such misleading tales are part of popular iconography: everyone has seen pictures in which a sequence of fossil hominids—members of the human family of species—are arranged in an orderly procession from primitive forms up to modern Man.3
To complicate matters further, such sequences are justified after the fact by tales of inevitable, progressive improvement. For example, the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological achievements such a fire, the manufacture of tools, and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. They can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific. They rely for their currency not on scientific test, but on assertion and the authority of the presentation.4
Whether you believe the conventional wisdom that our own species Homo sapiens descended in seamless continuity from the preexisting species Homo erectus depends not on the evidence (because the fossil evidence is moot) but on the deferment of your lack of knowledge to the authority of the presenter or whether the presentation of the evidence resonates with your prejudices.5
The story of human interaction with fossils represents an example of how experience and belief have a powerful effect on interpretation and demonstrates why scientific truths can only be temporary. Today, we see fossils as the remains of creatures that once lived. However, this nature is not inherent in the fossils. It is our immersion in a century and half of Darwinian thought, not the fossils themselves, that gives us the capacity to see fossils as kin to things that were once as alive as you or I.6
The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.7
The conventional portrait of human evolution—and, indeed, of the history of life—tends to be one of lines of ancestors and descendants. We concentrate on the events leading to modern humanity, ignoring or playing down the evolution of other animals: we prune away all branches in the tree of life except the one leading to ourselves. The result, inevitably, is a tale of progressive improvement, culminating in modern humanity. From our privileged vantage point in the present day, we look back at human ancestry and pick out the features in fossil hominids that we see in our selves—a big brain, an upright stance, the use of tools, and so on. Naturally, we arrange fossil hominids in a series according to their resemblance to the human state.8
The conventional, linear view easily becomes a story in which the features of humanity are acquired in a sequence that can be discerned retrospectively—first an upright stance, then a bigger brain, then the invention of toolmaking, and so on, with ourselves as the inevitable consequence.9
New fossil discoveries are fitted into this preexisting story. We call these new discoveries “missing links,” as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to according with human prejudices. In reality…each fossil represents an isolated point, with no knowable connection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.10
Just because the unicorn looks something like a bull or a horse to us, this does not imply that a unicorn is a missing link between these two animals. Horses and bulls are contingent; they just happened to offer themselves as models because they are familiar and available. Perhaps in another part of the world, a unicorn would be seen as a mixture of a camel and a kudu, but a unicorn would not be a missing link between those animals either.11
This task had very little to do with what the fishes were like as living animals. All I had were fragments that I could link to larger and more certainly known fragments that were sufficiently informative to have a name. I might as well have been doing the same thing with stamps, or cigarette cards. The relationships that these fishes had with living animals is so distant that any attempt to clothe them in flesh, to make them swim, requires a leap of faith.12
However, this leap must in some degree be fuelled by comparison with the animals that live around us today. If this were not possible, we would not be able to make any sense of fossils at all. When we look at pteraspids now, we interpret them in terms of lampreys: that is how they “make sense” to us. But the model of a pteraspid in terms of a lamprey is as provisional as that which once linked pteraspids with squid.13
The quest to interpret fossils in terms of modern models rests on the assumption that all life on Earth has a common ancestry, because we can interpret past life only in terms of other living organisms. If this were not possible, we would not recognize the fossils of animals as animals at all. We’d just see them as rocks.14
Crucially, you should have a clear idea about the position of the organism in nature before speculating about the function of its various parts. Let me explain. Let’s say that you have discovered that unicorns use their horns to kill dragons. Using this information, you could spin a tale about the importance of the horn in unicorn evolution: unicorns evolved in dragon country, where possession of horns was an asset. Unicorns without horns would all be charred to ashes by the fire-breathing dragons. Only those unicorns with horns survived to perpetuate the species.15
This story sounds plausible, but like the story about the evolution of tetrapod limbs, it cannot be tested. What is more, if you use your prior (and untestable) assumption that the unicorn evolved its horn to kill dragons as a guide to the unicorn’s relationships, you cannot then use this information in any subsequent test of the function of the unicorn’s horn. Why? Because you have already assumed that you know the horn’s function, even before you run the test. You have loaded the dice to tell you what you want.16
Misinterpretations about “adaptive purpose” ignore the fact that natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose. It is not a winnowing force with an independent existence that can b e personified, like Death, with his black cowl and scythe.17
Artificial selection is an imperfect metaphor for natural selection because breeders quite obviously do have intelligible reasons for why they select some traits and not others. Unlike natural selection, breeders have memories, plans, and purposes. They select for the same traits, generation after generation, to produce a discernible trend. Natural selection could hardly be more different18
To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a linage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.19
Ornithologists, who study modern birds, regard Archaeopteryx as an ancestor and an icon. Given that they have already judged where Archaeopteryx fits into the history of life, they look at the fossil and see exactly what they expect to find—birdlike features…Archaeopteryx has feathers, so it is a bird by definition. Its archaisms are only to be expected, given the fossil’s great antiquity when compared with other bird fossils. Because they study modern birds, ornithologists will, naturally, tend to see bird evolution in terms of perceived adaptations to birds’ current, airborne niche.20
Palaeontologists, in contrast, come to Archaeopteryx with a different search image…To palaeontologists, Archaeopteryx looks very similar to members of a group of dinosaurs called theropods….In this light, palaeontologists tends to see the feathers of Archaeopteryx as intriguing decorations for the body of a theropod dinosaur, not as central, key features essential for explaining the course of evolution in birds.21
The finds are 4.4 million years old and come from a place called Aramis. “This is the earliest-known hominid,” says White, proudly, but with a touch of self-deprecating humour that demonstrates a sensitivity to the inevitably piecemeal nature of human fossil remains, in which all the evidence for the hominid lineage between about 10 and 5 million years ago—several thousand generations of living creatures—can be fitted into a small box.22
There is therefore nothing special, advanced, or progressive about bipedality—only the fact that it is we who are bipedal, and it is we who are writing the book, makes it so.23
To complicate matters, brain volume can vary enormously among individuals in a species, with no discernible connection to intelligence.24
1 In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (Cornell 2001), 1-2.
2 Ibid. 2.
3 Ibid. 4-5.
4 Ibid. 5.
5 Ibid. 8.
6 Ibid. 9.
7 Ibid. 23.
8 Ibid. 32.
9 Ibid. 32.
10 Ibid. 32.
11 Ibid. 54.
12 Ibid. 61.
13 Ibid. 61.
14 Ibid. 82.
15 Ibid. 87-88.
16 Ibid. 88.
17 Ibid. 96.
18 Ibid. 96-97.
19 Ibid. 117-18.
20 Ibid. 180.
21 Ibid. 180-81.
22 Ibid. 201-02.
23 Ibid. 214.
24 Ibid. 214.
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