Cutting Jesus down to size

Randal Rauser 

That depends. To note one example, Jesus refers to Moses (John 6). That provides prima facie evidence for the Christian to believe that Moses did in fact exist. But if there is strong evidence that Moses did not exist, the Christian could conclude based on that evidence that Moses does not exist. In that case, the Christian may come to believe that Jesus was accommodating to the errant beliefs of his audience because he was aiming to teach about his own messiahship, not a history lesson on the ANE. Or one could believe that Jesus adopted to the common knowledge of his day in accord with the kenotic emptying described in Philippians 2:6 ff. Or, one could believe that the text is a post-New Testament theological reflection on Jesus and his unique status. If the evidence for Moses were problematic, I would think the first (accommodation) explanation is the most natural one. (Cf. Jesus saying the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds.)

https://randalrauser.com/2019/03/the-problem-of-evil-and-biblical-violence-a-conversation-with-an-exvangelical/#comment-4373719730

Several issues:

i) This is a good illustration of progressive theology. Rauser has a Rauser-sized Jesus. A domesticated Jesus. Rauser has Jesus on a leash. Rauser's Jesus isn't big enough to ever pose an intellectual challenge to what Rauser is prepared to believe. Rauser's Jesus isn't any bigger than Rauser. Indeed, Rauser's Jesus is smaller than Rauser. A child of his times. Rauser's Jesus is a Jesus Rauser can manipulate and control. 

ii) Notice the false dichotomy between the historicity of Moses and the messiahship of Jesus. But in Scripture, the credentials of Jesus must be validated by the OT. Jesus is a superior counterpart to Moses. 

iii) What would count as strong evidence that Moses didn't exist?

iv) Phil 2:7 doesn't describe kenotic emptying. That's a 19C misinterpretation. Consult any good commentary. For instance, as Fee explains:

Christ did not empty himself of anything. He simply…poured himself out. This is metaphor, pure and simple. G. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians (Eerdmans 1995), 210.

What is literally meant by the metaphor is explicated in terms of incarnation, undertaking the status of a slave, and a criminal.  

v) Rauser proposes another explanation: this is a fictional speech which the narrator put in the mouth of Jesus, like a ventriloquist dummy. That makes the Johannine Jesus an imaginary character. There may be a historical Jesus who lies in the distant background, but the Johannine Jesus is a product of legendary embellishment–like King Arthur. The Johannine Jesus never existed in real life. That's the implication of Rauser's proposal. 

vi) To say the comparison with the mustard seed is divine accommodation is an absurdly inflationary characterization. Why not just say it's idiomatic, proverbial, maybe hyperbolic? 

vii) Finally, this is a good example of how termites burrow into evangelical institutions. Rauser teaches at a nominally evangelical seminary with a token statement of faith that affirms inerrancy, but he has little gimmicks to evade that, and the administration lets him get away with it. This inerrancy statement is just for show, to hoodwink gullible parents and donors. 

Likewise, he's a contributor to The Christian Post. Richard Land is the editor, but Land is asleep at the switch. There's no serious vetting process for contributors. That laxity gives progressives openings to hollow out evangelical institutions from the inside, until there's nothing left but the facade. 

Point of contrast

Here's useful principle in biblical hermeneutics, although it's not one I've run across in books on biblical hermeneutics. When assessing the semantic force of certain biblical statements, it's sometimes helpful for the reader to ask, what's the point of contrast? Certain kinds of claims (e.g. commands, prohibitions, categorical statements) stand in implicit contrast to something to the contrary. 

This is important to keep in mind when people appeal to the "plain sense" or "face value" meaning of Biblical statements. Let's take a couple of examples to illustrate the principle:

Suppose I'm driving down the street when I see a small business with a sign that says "Happy birthday Brad!"

Now, in a world will billions of people, many are named Brad. Statistically, many even have the same birthdate. Is this sign wishing happy birthday to every Brad in the world? Living, dead, and future? Is this sign wishing a happy birthday to Brads who live in another town, another state, another country? Is this sign wishing a happy birthday to imaginary Brads in fictional books, movies, and TV dramas? 

No, it's only wishing a happy birthday to a customer. Even if your name is Brad, and you see the sign as you're driving down the street, it's not about you unless you're the customer in question. That's just a coincidence.

There's a difference between what "Brad" means and what "Brad" refers to. In addition, it depends on the intention of the person who arranged the letters to spell out that message. Who did they have in mind?

To take another example, suppose there's a backpack in a gym or locker room with Brad's name on the label. The backpack contains a laptop, smartphone, and wallet. Admittedly, it would be imprudent to leave that unattended. 

Is it okay for anyone named Brad who happens to go into the gym or locker room to take the pack back? After all, it has their name on it!

Although it's their name, and the name designates the owner of the backpack (and its contents), the name isn't meant to distinguish one Brad from another Brad, but to distinguish a particular Brad from folks who aren't Brad. It doesn't point to just any Brad. If someone who's not the intended Brad swipes the backpack, and the intended Brad catches them, there's going to be blood on the floor.  

Biblical warfare

https://randalrauser.com/2019/03/the-problem-of-evil-and-biblical-violence-a-conversation-with-an-exvangelical/

Fraternite 

It should be fairly obvious that God commanding genocide is only a problem if our master values and identity are those of modern Western liberalism. For example, nobody (and especially not the authors) really had a problem with these texts for several thousand years. For a fairly clear example of this, remember that the Crusaders recited the mantra "Christus Dominus est" when they were running Muslims through with their swords in the Holy Land.

At least as far as I am concerned, the first challenge for modern Christians is to recognize just how completely shaped we are by modern Western liberalism and secondly to then summon up the fortitude to identify and label those (typically invisible) cultural assumptions for what they are.

Daniel Wilcox 

What? Heck, I was a fundamentalist kid of 11 when I started encountering these horrific texts.:-( My dad was the minister of our small village church.

It doesn't take liberalism for a kid to know that slaughtering children is evil, and that God would NEVER command such horrific actions.

Fraternite 

Aside from maybe David and Goliath, these gory war texts in the late Hexatuch and Judges are exactly what my 3 year old and 6 year old boys seem to be inexorably attracted to. They also like the carnage in Revelation, for what it's worth -- and trust me, this is not where I am steering them. And even in David and Goliath, their favourite part is where David cuts off Goliath's head. They play act it all the time and insist on parading around the house with the invisible head. It's quite fascinating.

I have a hard time believing that you only ran across these things at 11 if you grew up fundamentalist, honestly.

Is freewill theism a pipeline for apostasy?

Here's what I mean: lots of churchgoers are indoctrinated in a theology of God's "unconditional love". By theologians and apologists. In sermons and praise songs. A lopsided emphasis on God's "unconditional love". That's treated as God's central, overriding attribute, eclipsing all other attributes. And that's often set in explicit contrast to Calvinism. 

I imagine, for many churchgoers, who never read the Bible cover to cover, that when they actually read about Noah's flood, God firebombing Sodom and Gomorrah, the holy war commands and narratives, capital crimes, God sending plagues, and hellfire passages in the NT, it generates cognitive dissonance. Having been conditioned by a one-sided theology of God's "unconditional love", they shake their heads in disbelief and ask how a "loving" God can say and do the things Scripture attributes to him. 

If they were exposed to a more muscular, dare I say masculine theology, if their theological diet was balanced by God's justice and holiness as well as his love and mercy, reading these passages wouldn't create the same cognitive dissonance. To what extent is freewill theism making churchgoers apostates waiting to happen? Even passages condemning homosexuality are hard to square with God's "unconditional love". Such passages seem to be so judgmental and exclusionary. 

Two types of apostates

There are roughly two kinds of people who lose their faith over the problem of evil. On the one hand are apostates for whom this is an intellectual problem. That may include "offensive" passages or "offensive" doctrines in Scripture, as well as the usual assortment of natural and moral evils in the world around us. 

They robotically repeat all the tropes about God and evil. They stop thinking after they lose faith in God. They show no awareness for the evil of atheism. They reprobate the perceived implications of Christian theism but never think far enough to seriously consider the implications of naturalism (e.g. moral, existential, and epistemic nihilism). They remain cocooned in the residual idealism of their former faith. Their apostasy is an intellectual affectation. I have no sympathy for apostates like that.

On the other hand are apostates for whom this is an existential problem. It's not about ideas. Rather, they've been crushed by life. Or they've seen a loved one crushed by life. They don't become crusaders for atheism. They don't turn this into their new cause in life. Rather, they withdraw in quiet resignation and despair, defeated by life. They haven't simply given up on faith, but given up on life. Too beaten down to care about anything anymore. They dare not hope for something better. They don't get the attention that ostentatious apostates do because they don't seek attention. They'd rather disappear. Be forgotten.  

I have more respect and sympathy for them. Not intellectual sympathy, but compassion and empathy. Although their position is tragically mistaken, it's not for show. I suspect apostates like that are easier to reach and reclaim. 

Real spiritual presence

Lydia McGrew

Full disclosure: I'm a believer in a spiritual Real Presence, not in transubstantiation.

Apparently we have to be able to believe in some sort of special divine presence in particular physical locations in Old Testament passages. For example, the Holy of Holies.There was "something about it" so that only the High Priest could enter. The Ark of the Covenant. If the wrong person handled it, he would die. The Shekinah. So such statements as, "God is especially present in this box [the ark]" cannot literally be meaningless, or these OT passages wouldn't make any sense.

In those passages it may be that we can't go any farther in defining it than something like this: God had so ordained that he would specially interact with human beings in various ways (good and bad) in relation to that physical object or location. 

That's not really apophatic, but it is something of a surd. That's just how it is. You do this, you die. You do this, the walls fall down. You do this, you've offered a sacrifice of atonement for the people for another year. Why? Because God has set it up that there's something special--some special manifestation of his power or grace--in relation to this physical thing. And that can be referred to as "presence" despite the fact that God is omnipresent.

I think that that could be applied to the spiritual Real Presence in the Sacrament as well. In any event, the OT examples are a "proof of concept" that we can't rule it as per se meaningless to say that some object or location on earth "has" the "presence" of God in a way that other places or objects don't.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/03/apophatic-sacramentalism.html?showComment=1552002724694#c4288716035029626027

i) Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox affirm that the consecrated communion elements are the True Body and Blood of Christ (whatever that means). At the other end of the spectrum is the Zwinglian position. Then you have Christians who try to stake out a mediating position: spiritual presence. This provokes the scorn of Catholics, Lutherans et al. 

ii) One issue is exegetical. If you don't think the stock prooftexts for the real presence (e.g. Jn 6) in fact refer to the eucharist, then there's no pressure to explain in what respect Jesus is presence in the eucharist.

iii) Another issue is metaphysical. In classical theism, God is separate from time and space. On that view, God can't physically or literally occupy time and space. That's a question of philosophical theology rather than exegetical theology, although some biblical passages may point to classical theism in that regard.

iv) I expect that in the background of Lydia's discussion is 1 Cor 11:30: 

That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.

That's analogous to the effect of profaning the ark of the covenant. In the Mosaic covenant, there's a concept of sacred space and cultic holiness. Does that mean God is present in holy objects associated with the tabernacle? Another example is the tree of life and tree of knowledge.

Rather than presence, I'd say these are examples in which God assigns a beneficial or harmful effect to the use or misuse of certain physical objects. That's not inherent in the nature of the object. They're not poisonous or radioactive. The object doesn't cause that reaction. Rather, God institutes an extrinsic correlation.

v) However, we might explore different models of presence. Consider the notion of indirect presence. Take a love letter. The lover can't be with the beloved, so he writes her a letter. The letter is a stand-in for the lover. It says on paper what he'd say in person if he was there.

Photographs of loved ones are another example of indirect presence. Sometimes these are photos of the living, but sometime these are photos of the dearly departed. 

In the modern era, phones are another example of indirect presence. Likewise, it's now possible to see the person you are talking to. 

In that respect, there are degrees of indirect presence. To hear someone's voice has greater immediacy than reading their words. To see them talking to you via a computer screen has greater immediacy that merely hearing their voice.

vi) To take a different example, suppose a woman is a gardner. Everyday she puts fresh cut flowers on the dining room table. Suppose, at bedtime, her husband moves the flowers to her nightstand. Suppose her husband dies. Everyday she continues her routine of putting fresh cut flowers on the dining room table. 

Suppose, when she returns from errands, she doesn't see the flowers on the dining room table. When she goes into the bedroom she finds them on her nightstand. Suppose that happens every so often.

She's sure no one broke into the house while she was out. Moreover, the position of the flowers has coded significance. Something only the widow and her late husband were in a position to appreciate.

So she concludes that while she was out of the house, her husband's ghost moved the flowers, as a symbolic way of indicating his continued existence and enduring love for his wife. Changing the location of the flowers, in a way his wife would remember and cherish, is a mode of indirect presence. An oblique way to make contact. She never sees an apparition of her husband, but a token of his presence. 

vii) A related example is an unmistakable answer to prayer. It's not like a theophany or Christophany. But events arrange themselves in such an unlikely yet discriminating and auspicious way as to point beyond the observable events to the hidden hand of providence. 

vii) Another category is psychological presence. Take a premonitory dream in which a mother dreams that her grown son, who's far from home, is in grave danger. She wakes up and prays for him. The next day he phones her and tells her about he narrowly eluded death the day before. 

Seeking the 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination

At last count, I think, there are 15 or 16 Democrats running for the presidential nomination for the 2020 election (or maybe as many as 40, according to the article I cite). And it’s only March.

Contrast this with the last election cycle, 2016, when Donald Trump, one of the early players, threw his hat into the ring in a June 16, 2015 speech.

None of this matters right now, and everyone is jockeying for position. As a service to Triablogue readers, I’ve prepared the following overview, which will be helpful from our perspective in understanding who’s riding what horse(s).

I’m starting with this Yahoo News story, which gives the following names (ordered in Yahoo’s opinion from most likely to least likely to win the nomination.

Interestingly, this is in the Entertainment section of their news site:

How Many Genders Are There? (Or, Where is the Logical End of Postmodern Thought and What Do We Do About It?)

This Dude – and so far as I can tell, This Dude is neither the anonymous “CalvinDude” nor the writer of the “Epistle of Dude” – has mined the social media platform Tumblr for an answer to the question, “How Many Genders Are There In 2019?”.

The short answer is 112. Unless you are a regular old male or female, neither of which is listed. In that case, adding those in, there are 114.

But wait, there’s more!

Archer City

In this post I'll briefly revisit an issue I've discussed before, using a different illustration this time around. I'm going to deploy an a fortiori argument (from the lesser to the greater). Unbelievers contend that the Gospels aren't reliable history. Suppose, for argument's sake, that we classify the Gospels as fiction. However, that doesn't say a whole lot because fiction ranges along a continuum. For instance, some fiction writers mine their childhood for plots, setting, and characters. Although technically these belong to the genre of fiction rather than autobiography, they are often very close to life. Historical fiction that's one step removed from autobiography. 

Take Larry McMurtry, who wrote a trilogy situated in his hometown of Archer City, Texas. These memorialize his boyhood in a postwar oil town in North Texas. A small town where everyone knows everyone else. Everyone knows who is sleeping with whom. Who has a drinking problem. Who has a gambling problem. 

Suppose, after reading the trilogy, you step into the time machine and go back to Archer City, circa 1950. There's a lot you'd recognize. The diner, pool hall, movie theater. And you'd meet the people on whom his characters were based. It would have a very familiar feel to it. Even though the novels are technically fictional, the realty frequently surfaces. Even if you couldn't tell exactly which boy in Archer inspired Sonny or Duane, there'd be boys like Sonny and Duane in Archer City. Not to mention McMurtry himself. In fact, by observing who teenage McMurtry hung out with, you could match up the characters with their real life counterparts. 

In wouldn't surprise me if some locals were offended by the unflattering novels and cinematic adaptations. And that would be dramatic irony in reverse. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something a character doesn't–but in this case the locals know something the audience doesn't. The locals can see themselves mirrored in the characters. They can spot which character stands for an actual resident. 

So even though the novels are filed under "fiction", they provide a window into what it was like to live at that time and place. People, buildings, landscape. Both ethos and individuals. Representative events.  

Internal testimony of the Holy Spirit

https://www.equip.org/pmr-podcast/episode-106-internal-testimony-of-the-holy-spirit/

Mentoring young men

This illustrates the need young men have for good male mentors and role models:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXB6PJVJ-Q

The world of the soul

The relationship between body and soul is of great personal and practical importance in Christian theology. I've discussed this before, but now I'd like to approach it from a different angle. 

In part, that's related to the perennial nature/nurture debate. Humans have some hardwired psychological traits. Likewise, there are hardwired masculine and feminine traits. Finally, even as young children, individual humans have distinctive character traits. That' the nature side.

On the nurture side, social conditioning has great impact on our psychological formation. And while that's acquired, it becomes deeply engrained. Second nature. As embodied agents, our physical experience creates formative memories that we retain after we leave the body behind. 

There is, though, something about the relationship between psychology and physical experience that doesn't seem to be reducible to a physical explanation. Take the effect of a beautiful woman on a male viewer. Or consider the mood-altering power of music.

If you think about it, that's rather mysterious, because it's so indirect. It's not like drinking alcohol or popping psychedelic drugs, where you infuse your brain with foreign chemicals which alter brain chemistry. So how does merely hearing or seeing something have a similar effect? 

When a boy hits adolescence, he views women differently–especially pretty girls. Is that just due to hormones? Perhaps. When I die and leave my body behind, will images of women lose their appeal for me? 

What about music? As a young boy I enjoyed boy choirs. When I hit adolescence, I discovered a newfound appreciation for opera divas. Although androgens had a role, does this mean that when I die, I will cease to find the voice of opera divas like Caballé, Sutherland, Crespin, Milanov, Ponselle, Verrett, and Leontyne Price alluring?  Even if that has a physical point of origin, does the experience change the soul? 

But suppose this is backwards. Are hormones and brain chemistry productive or receptive? Is it like opening a window?

To take a comparison, different species have different sensory aptitudes. Some species can sense things other species can't detect. Yet their senses don't create the stimuli. 

Does the maturing brain generate these feelings? Or does it, like sensory enhancement, create new openings that enable the soul to become self-aware of mental states native to the soul, but impeded by physical barriers?

The Sovietization of the American Political-Media Establishment

A bit dated, but more germane than ever, and broadly applicable to the current behavior of the liberal establishment:

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-sovietization-of-the-american-political-media-establishment/

Why Did Obama Import a Somali Muslim Congressional District for Ilhan Omar to Represent?

https://stream.org/why-did-obama-import-a-somali-congressional-district-for-ilhan-omar-to-represent/

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Creative outline from Dan Block for preaching through the Book of Ruth.https://t.co/VLDFzedvZo pic.twitter.com/0tpH9Lgex7

— Justin Taylor (@between2worlds) March 6, 2019

Battle for the future

There's currently a debate going on inside and outside evangelicalism. One group includes SJWs like Thabiti, Kyle Howard, Anthony Bradley, and Jemar Tisby.

On the opposing side, there's a group consisting of church leaders like John MacArthur, Phil Johnson, James White, and Tom Ascol. 

Straddling these two groups are some major players in the SBC and PCA, viz. Russell Moore, Albert Mohler, Ligon Duncan, Daniel Akin, JD Greear, David Platt, Matt Chandler, Wade Burleson. Darrell Bock is another fence-straddler. 

That's complemented by some figures in TGC, viz. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/conference/mlk50/

However, that's offset by culture warriors Joe Carter as well. 

There are folks like Beth Moore who have their own coterie. And there's some overlap among the fence-straddlers. 

On the outside, there are ordinary Americans who generally support the Trump administration as a bulwark against the secular progressives.   

There are pundits at NRO. 

There are Jewish culture warriors like Michael Brown, Ben Shapiro, Ben Stein, Jay Sekulow, John Feinberg, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, David Horowitz, and even Alan Dershowitz on a good day.  

There are freelance culture warriors like Robert Gagnon. 

Somewhere in the motley crew is Jordan Peterson and Steven Crowder, not to mention the old-guard (Rush Limbaugh). 

There's a Catholic contingent, viz. Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Ross Douthat on a good day. 

It even includes homosexuals like Dave Rubin and Milo Yiannopoulos.

There are public intellectuals like Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell. 

Less well-known are rising stars like Neil Shenvi, Tim Dukeman, Berny Belvedere, and Tim Hsiao.

These diverse groups form rotating coalitions. I should hasten to add that some of these I watch or read, but others I've read about. I know some of them by reputation, so I don't claim that my classifications are equally well-informed in every instance. 

The concern of many laymen is the spectacle of conservative denominations becoming infiltrated by the progressive body-snatchers. For instance, Russell Moore is an excellent candidate for a pod person. Would a genetic test turn up alien DNA? 

There are unbridgeable chasms between some of these groups. There is, however, a potential albeit partial alliance between two disparate groups. One the one hand, many blacks are deeply suspicious of the law enforcement culture. On the other hand, it's my impression that many young white guys share that suspicion. Now, there are different grounds for that suspicion. In the case of some blacks, it's based on a Black Lives Matter narrative. In the case of some whites, it's based on libertarian ideology. Both groups feel the system is against them. And this includes Tech giants a well as government.

In addition, the emerging scandal of Ivy League colleges that systematically discriminate against Asian applicants may galvanize some politically apathetic Asian-Americans or turn them against the liberal establishment. 

Is the status quo frozen in place?

Let me put this simply.

Intersectionality is utterly incompatible with a belief in the sovereign kingship of God and His divine decree.

It is God who makes men to differ, God who makes the lame and the blind and the rich and the poor.

— James White (@DrOakley1689) March 6, 2019

There are some really good arguments against intersectionality. This isn't one of them. As stated, that's classic que sera sera fatalism. Don't try to change anything because everything is foreordained. Attempting to change the status quo is spiritually mutinous. 

Yes, God makes men to differ. God determines who will be blind and lame, rich and poor. But God predestines changes to the status quo. Presently, Roe v. Wade is the status quo. That doesn't mean the prolife movement is utterly incompatible with a belief in the sovereign kingship of God and His divine decree. Predestination doesn't mean the status quo is frozen in place. God predestines change. In some cases, God predestines social reform. Calvinism isn't Hinduism, with an ironclad caste-system. 

We just do what we can, and what we can do mirrors predestination. If we succeed, that was predestined, and if we fail, that was predestined. We don't know in advance what was predestined. We just go about doing whatever we were going to do. Although predestination is prospective, we discover what was predestined in retrospect.

It's very strange to see White peddle a harmful caricature of Calvinism. Surely he knows better. He should simply critique intersectionality on the merits rather than resorting to defective theological formulations. This illustrates the danger of using Twitter to debate complex issues, which encourages intellectual shortcuts. Here's a good example of a superior lineup:

https://www.gospelsocialjustice.com/

https://www.gospelsocialjustice.com/speaker-bios

Nothing to live for

Apostates routintely glamorize atheism as liberating. That's a transparent way to rationalize apostasy.

On rare occasion, that's a half truth. Some apostates had a rotten religious background, so there's a sense in which apostasy was liberating in relation to the bad religion they put behind them. But while atheism is sometimes liberating for what it's from, it's never liberating for what it's for. 

Of course, many apostates and atheists will dismiss that assessment as Christian propaganda. Which brings me to my next point. Recently, as I was skimming Ross Douthat on Twitter, he drew my attention to an interview with Peter Bogdanovich:

https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/peter-bogdanovich-in-conversation.html

I was mildly curious because he directed The Last Picture Show–which I saw when I was about 12. That's too young to get the point of the film. I watched it again later in life. 

Now, I'm not recommending that you read the interview. Once I got into it I had to decide if I wanted to keep reading it. I had to force myself to finish it.

Aside from the fact that it's saturated with profanity, he led such a tawdry life. And not only him, but the whole social circle he moves in. His life is a great demonstration of a life "emancipated" from any Christian direction or restraint. The same holds true for his social circle. And in that respect it punctures the mystique of a godless life. Theirs is a world in which everyone is faithless in friendship and romance. A social world of unrelieved moral ugliness. A backbiting world without fidelity or forgiveness. No one reading the interview can suppose that he had a happy, satisfying life. 

And that's why The Last Picture Show was such a great movie of its kind. Its rootless, aimless, joyless characters mirror the real world of Bogdanovich and the actors. A trail of broken lives. The Hollywood subculture.

The characters long for something better, but they have no concept of what better would be. They have no perspective beyond this world. They have no ideal of goodness. Nothing to aspire to. Just their insular secular vacuity. 

The movie is successful at that level because it's a projection of the director's worldview. Art is allegorical because art is autobiographical. The insufferable, inescapable claustrophobia of the movie allegorizes the life and soul of the director. 

That's also why, despite his great talent and promise, he made so few outstanding films. You quickly run out of good material when you have such a rancid outlook on life. Trapped in a nautilus shell. Instead of backing out into the fresh air and sunshine, they keep inching inward into an ever more constricted and stifling existence. 

That's why many Romans were attracted to Judaism and later to Christianity. Pagan morality wasn't liberating, but poisonous to the soul. 

Wise men from the East

SaelmaWhile leading a Bible study with a group of young adult Hmong Christians, active members of an LCMS congregation with a Hmong ministry, the topic of demons came up. Usually I deal with this topic and the occasional morbid interest very simply by saying: 1) Demons are real, and 2) Don't play with fire. 

To my astonishment, members of the study group began to share experiences of personal encounter with what could only be considered demonic entities. These included audible, visual, and even physical manifestations. Every single person there was well aware of such incidents with close friends or family members, and in many cases the events were witnessed by or happened to the people there present. (One of them was currently serving as a congregational elder!) This went on for some time and I kept, for the most part, a shocked silence.  

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2018/11/the-lutheran-approach-to-exorcism/#comment-4204620267

It must be very strange for non-Christians from the Third World who believe in the supernatural from personal experience to come to the West and encounter mainline denominations and progressive Christians who deny the supernatural! Likewise, it must be amusing for Third-World Christians to encounter the same disconnect!

Apophatic sacramentalism

One reason I don't believe in the real presence is because I couldn't believe it even if I wanted to. And that's because I don't know what it means. And I'm not alone in that. No one knows what it means. 

I know what a human body is. I know what a male human body is. What does it mean to say a wafer or liquid (communion wine) is a human body? 

I know what it would mean to consume human flesh. I know what cannibalism means. But proponents assure us that consuming the communion elements isn't cannibalism. 

Okay, that tells me what it's not. But that doesn't tell me what it is?

Is the body of Jesus miniaturized, so that you eat duplicate microscopic bodies of Jesus when you take communion? I have some idea of what that means. But proponents assure me that that's not what the real presence means. 

So the dogma of the real presence is a piece of apophatic theology. We're supposed to believe it, but there's no intelligible idea corresponding to the words. It's just a conceptual blank. It isn't possible to believe something if you can't form an idea of what that something is. 

Christian theology allows for mystery, but it can't be mystery through-and-through. To believe what the real presence is not doesn't tell you what it is. When you peel back the label, there's nothing underneath. At best, it's labels all the way down. Proponents use word like true body and true blood, but to avert the specter of cannibalism, they strip away what makes blood bloody or bodies bodily. You chase an ever-receding will-o'-wisp.

This has nothing to do with skepticism or lack of faith. Rather, there's nothing to believe. The claim has no positive content, once we start asking what the words stand for. To avert the specter of cannibalism, proponents must abstract away anything recognizably physical.  

That's different from, say, the Incarnation or Trinity, where we can specify the elements of the composite concept, even if the nature of the relation is mysterious. The dogma of the real presence isn't even a paradox.