Fighting for a lost cause

For some reason, there are any number of Christians who suffer from a moth-like attraction to a lost cause. You can see this in how they spend year after year butting their head against a wall as they try to save a dying church or liberal denomination or apostate parachurch organization. What should we make of this?

1. Some Christians have a sentimental attachment to the church or denomination they grew up in, or the "Christian" college they attended, or some other "Christian" institution they had a role in. This is only natural. There is a point, however, when our social allegiance comes into conflict with our theological allegiance, when it’s time to cut the apron strings. Like Abraham, God us calling us out of Ur, out of idolatry.

2. Some Christians can’t distinguish between the church as a divine institution, and a variety of denominations. Now a denomination is just a man-made convention. Its rationale is purely utilitarian. Ideally, a denomination exists to exemplify the church. But if a denomination ceases to exemplify the church, then it is time to cut our ties, to cut our losses, and join a more faithful fellowship.

3. Some Christians suppose they have a divine duty to save a dying church or apostate denomination. They confuse the salvation of souls with the salvation of an organization. An organization is just an abstraction or legal entity with official positions in a formal chain-of-command.

A Christian organization exists to save the people, the people do not exist to save the organization. Our calling is to follow Christ, not a bureaucracy--especially when the bureaucracy refuses to follow Christ.

In fact, by remaining in an apostate church, they support it. Liberals are very generous--with everyone else’s money. The collection plate is filled by the faithful, not the faithless. Conservatives subsidize liberal theology and liberal activism by remaining in a liberal church. Cut off the source of funding, and liberal agenda dies of attrition and malnutrition.

4. Some Christians don’t k now how to count. It’s all about votes. If you don’t have the numbers on your side, forget it. Sorry to sound crass, but life isn’t fair. A minority of conservative activists can’t overcome a faithless or spineless clergy in league with a faithless or spineless laity.

Jesus talks about a wise commander who sizes up his own army and the opposing army (Lk 14:31-32). To keep fighting procedural skirmishes or quoting Scripture to unbelievers is a poor stewardship of your God-given time.

5. Some Christians feel an undue responsibility for others. But I am responsible for my own actions as well as the actions of those under my authority. I am not responsible for those over whom I have no ultimate control. They are responsible for their own conduct--or misconduct, as the case may be.

There is a difference between surrendering to the enemy, on the one hand, and staging a strategic retreat, on the other. You still stand your own ground, but on a battlefield of your own choosing.

You don't win by losing. You don't win by fighting an uphill battle on enemy turf. You don't win by putting yourself at a tactical disadvantage. There is no honor in delivering yourself into enemy hands. That does nothing to advance the cause of Christ.

6. Some Christians project th eir lack of guile onto unbelievers. Because a Christian believes in fair-play, he may imagine that if he wins fair-and-square, then the unbeliever will play by the rules in turn.

7. Apropos (6), some Christians forget their theology when dealing with unbelievers. Because they are well-intentioned, they project their pure motives onto the unbeliever--as though the unbeliever must be well-meaning too. But Scripture warns us against the untrustworthy character of unbelievers--especially outright enemies of the faith.
Some believers play the chump time and time again. But being duped by enemies of the gospel is not a theological virtue.
o

Apocalypse redux

<< Just one comment on this: you say there are three basic positions on the afterlife. But what about the position that there is no afterlife? That's my position. >>

Actually, if you go back and carefully reread what I said under option #2 (no one is saved), you'll see that I expressly mention the position you take. So I think I've covered the bases.

<< In my opinion, the concept of an afterlife has two main sources - 1) an inability to accept the finality of death and 2) a carrot-and-stick way of getting people to behave in whatever way is considered desirable by a given religion -- if you do bad things, you go to hell (or are reborn in a lower caste or as a lower life form), if you do good things, you go to heaven (or are reborn into a higher caste); if you accept Jesus Christ, you go heaven, if you don't you go to hell, etc. etc. >>

This is the standard Marxist-cum-Freudian critique. By way of reply:

i) There is no doubt that the fear of death makes a doctrine of the afterlife appealing.

ii) It would be viciously circular to say that I fear death because I fear hell, and I fear hell because I fear death. So when it comes to a causal relation between a general fear of death and a specific dogma of death, wish-fulfillment won't do the job.

iii) As a practical matter, no one except the occasional cult-leader draws up a shopping list of his fears and longings, and then concocts a religious creed that offers a point-by-point answer to his shopping list.

So this is a highly artificial explanation of how folks come to faith. It's a classic outsider's description which betrays no familiarity an insider's motives. That's not surprising, coming from Freud and Marx--since they didn't associate with Christians.

iv) If wish-fulfillment were the incentive, then we would expect various religions to make the terms of admission into a glorious afterlife easy to achieve.

However, most every religion, excepting evangelicalism, makes the attainment of a glorious afterlife very arduous and uncertain. Hence, the projectival theory is a just paper theory that fails to comport with the concrete phenomenology of faith which it purports to explain.

v) There is a basic tension between your two explanations: social control would fit with your second explanation--which affirms heaven and hell alike--but runs counter to your first explanation; for if fear of death is the driving dynamic, then the leading motive would be to affirm the assurance of heaven, but disaffirm the possibility of hell.

vi) Another weakness with projectival theories is that they cut in more than one direction, for they can be deployed to explain unbelief just as easily as belief.

For example, we could conjecture that Freud didn't believe in God because Freud had a dysfunctional relationship with his own father, and transferred his hang-up to God, as the archetypal father-figure.

In fact, there's a book-length treatment of atheism from a Freudian perspective. Cf. Paul Vitz, Faith of the Fatherless.

Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he rejects Christian sexual morality, and he rejects Christian sexual morality because he wants to be sexually promiscuous.

Indeed, if you read testimonies by folks who left the church, this is one of the favorite reasons they give. E.g., E. Babinski, Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (Prometheus Book 1995).

Or one could say that someone rejects the Christian faith because he finds the idea of a divine Creator and Judge and affront to his personal autonomy. Once again, you can find this reason given in the literature of infidelity.

In sum, your alternative theory either explains too much or too little.

<< It's extremely presumptuous of religious people, whether Christians, Muslims, or Hindus, to assert there is an afterlife when that this totally unprovable. There is no evidence whatsoever of heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Just because the Bible asserts something doesn't mean the assertion is true -- the Bible was written by mortal humans, who even contradicted each other in various places. You may believe these human beings were only conveying what God told them (through what means I don't know), but there's no way you or anyone else can prove this. >>

First off the bat, I wasn't trying to make a positive case for the Christian doctrine of the afterlife. I was merely responding to the incoherent allegations and baseless assertions of Kristof.

You, by contrast, do make the effort to outline an argument for your own position. That's not surprising since you're ten times smarter than Kristof. By way of reply:

i) As to the question of evidence, there is, first of all, a preliminary question regarding the rules of evidence. What counts as evidence? Oftentimes in secular science we get a circular standard of evidence according to which the only thing that counts as evidence is evidence consistent with materialism and natural law.

There are different reasons for affirming or denying the possibility or reality of the afterlife. This depends, in part, on our point of departure. Do we reason from matter to mind or mind to matter?

The secular humanist typically operates with a presumptive materialism. But I don't regard this as philosophically warranted. We know our mind better than our body. We are in direct contact with our own minds, whereas the body and the external world lie at the end of a nerve impulse.

What is more, mind and matter, thoughts and things, seem to occupy different domains. When I think of a red colored thing, my thought is not a red colored thing.

ii) This goes to the general question of what is termed, in philosophy of mind, the irreducibility of consciousness. If materialism is true, then mind must be reducible to matter.

One of the interesting features of this debate is that a number of the philosophers who deny that mind is reducible to matter are card-carrying materialists, viz., John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn. They would like nothing better than to be able to carry out this program, but they can't.

iii) In their desperation, some secular thinkers (e.g., Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins, the Churchlands) relegate consciousness to an illusion. This radical position is dubbed eliminative materialism. It is also self-refuting, for if, true, there would be no mind to assert the proposition in the first place.

iv) Another problem with materialism is the relation between mind and math. What are numbers? Are numbers things or thoughts? If thoughts, are they merely human thoughts, or do they inhere in some timeless mind?

It is noteworthy that a number of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical logicians have subscribed to some version of Platonic dualism-cum-realism, viz., Cantor, Frege, Godel, Hardy, Penrose. And in the case of Cantor and Godel, this has a theistic aspect.

A couple of stimulating treatments of the above issues are:

John Byl, _The Divine Challenge_ (Banner of Truth 2004).

David J. Bartholomew, _Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational To be a Christian? (Oxford 1996), chapter 3.

The classic attack on dualism is:

George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas & Philonous, R. Adams, ed. (Hackett,
1988).

The classic defense of dualism is:

Hywell Lewis, The Elusive Mind (Allen & Unwin, 1969)

I myself have debated the pros and cons of physicalism in a section of my essay entitled _I'm glad you asked_.

iv) Another challenge to materialism comes from literature on the paranormal, encompassing such diverse phenomena as possession, the near-death-experience, out-of-body experience, uncanny animal abilities, ESP, &c.

Back in my 20s, I myself had a series of paranormal experiences. In subsequent research I found out that there's a name for my experience: Old-Hag Syndrome.

For some interesting literature on this complicated subject, one can consult:

D. Bartholomew, Uncertain Belief, chapter 5.

Felicitas Goodman, How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World (Indiana U Press 1988).

Gary Habermas & J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death (Crossway Book 1998)

Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments (Riverhead Books 1996). He also has a website.

It is, of course, true, that specific doctrine of the Christian afterlife derives from the Bible. I have given some of my positive personal reasons for believing in the Bible in my essay on _Why I Believe_.

I've also written some essays defending the veracity of Scripture, viz.,
_Who wrote the Bible?_
_Bible or Babel_
_Vanity of Vanities_

--as well as a section on alleged discrepancies in my aforementioned essay on _I'm glad you asked_.

There is also a large literature on the veracity of Scripture. Representative titles include:

_Allis, O. The Old Testament (P&R, 1972).
_Archer, G. (Moody 1994). A Survey of Old Testament Introduction.
_____, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan 1982).
_Barnett, P. Is the New Testament Reliable? (IVP 1986).
_Blomberg, C. The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel (IVP 2001)
_____, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (IVP 1987)
_Comfort, P. (ed.). The Origin of the Bible (Tyndale 1992).
_Currid, J. Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament (Baker, 2001).
_Frame, J. "God and Biblical Language: Transcendence and Immanence," in J. Montgomery, ed., God's Inerrant Word (Bethany Fellowship, 1974), 159-177.
_____, "Scripture Speaks For Itself," ibid., 178-200.
_Guthrie, D. Introduction to the New Testament (IVP 1990).
_Harris, R. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scriptures (A Press, 1995).
_Helm,P. The Divine Revelation (Crossway Books 1982).
_Hemer, C. The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (Eisenbrauns 1990).
_Hengel, M. The Four Gospels & the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (SCM 2000).
_Kim. S. The Origin of Paul's Gospel (Coronet 1984).
_Kitchen, K. On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003).
_Lightfoot, J. Biblical Essays (Baker, 1979).
_Linnemann, E. Historical Criticism of the Bible (Baker 1990).
_Mauck, J. Paul on Trial (Nelson 2001)
_Metzger, B. The Text of the New Testament (Oxford 1992).
_Neuer/Yarbrough, Adolf Schlatter (Baker 1995).
_Porter, S. The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research (Sheffield 2000)
_Robinson, J. Redating the New Testament (SCM, 1976).
_Stonehouse, N. Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Baker, 1979)
_Tov, E. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Fortress 1992)
_Wegner, P. The Journey from Texts to Translations (Baker 2001)
_Wenham, J. Christ & the Bible (IVP 1973)
_Winter, B. (ed.). The Book of Acts in its First Century Setting (Eerdmans/Paternoster
1993-96)
_Yamauchi, E. Africa & the Bible (Baker 2000)
_____, Persia & the Bible (Baker 1990)
_Young, E. Thy Word is Truth (Eerdmans, 1981)
_Zahn, T. Introduction to the New Testament (Kregel 1953).

This is in addition to all of the conservative commentaries on various books of the Bible.

A subset of this general subject would be literature on the quest for the historical Christ. Representative titles include:

_Barnett, P. Jesus and the Logic of History (Eerdmans 1997)
_____, Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity (IVP 1999).
_Blomberg, C. Jesus and the Gospels (Broadman 1997)
_Bock, D. Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Thomas Nelson, 2004)
_____, Jesus According to Scripture (Baker 2002)
_____, Studying the Historical Jesus (Baker, 2002)
_Bruce, F. Jesus & Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans 1974).
_Davis, S. Risen Indeed (Eerdmans, 1993).
_Evans, C. Jesus & His Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1995)
_Guthrie, D. A Shorter Life of Christ (Academie Books 1970)
_Harrison, E. A Short Life of Christ (Eerdmans, 1968)
_Johnson, L. The Real Jesus : The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth
(Harper SanFrancisco1997).
_Ladd, G. I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans 1975)
_Longenecker, R. Life in the Face of Death (Eerdmans, 1998)
_Moore, P. (ed.), Can A Bishop Be Wrong? The Scholars Challenge John Shelby Spong
(Moorehouse, 1998).
_Schlatter, A. The History of the Christ (Baker, 1997).
_Stein, R. Jesus the Messiah (IVP 1996)
_Stonehouse, N. The Witness of the Synoptic Gospels to Christ (Baker 1979)
_Strimple, R. The Modern Search for the Real Jesus (P&R 1995)
_Twelftree, G. Jesus the Exorcist (Hendrickson, 1993).
_____, Jesus the Miracle Worker (IVP, 1999).
_Warfield, B. "The Historical Christ," Christology & Criticism, Works, vol. 3.
_Wenham, D. Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Eerdmans 1995)
_Wilkins/Moreland (eds.). Jesus Under Fire (Zondervan 1995).
_Witherington, B. The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (IVP 1997)
_Wright, N. The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP 1999)
_____, The Contemporary Quest for Jesus (Augsburg/Fortress 2002)
_____, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress 2003). Definitive.
_____, Who Was Jesus? (Eerdmans 1993)

All-in-all, I'd say that the evidentiary ball is definitely in the unbeliever's court.

Steve

War crimes?

It's always with a certain sense of frustration that I follow the news. For over a week now, the news media has been chewing over the footage of the Marine shooting a
gunman. The primary purpose of this coverage is to discredit the war effort. Now, whether or not you support the war, this is a canard. For if the war were wrong,
it would still be wrong even if the Marine did the right thing; and if the war were right, it would still be right even if the Marine did the wrong thing.The critics
have also raised two generic objections to the actions of the Marine. I say 'generic,' because these are objections they've been raising to the war in general from the
get-go: (i) it sends the wrong message to the Muslim world, inflaming Arab opinion: (ii) it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.To the first objection I'd say a
couple of things:a) You notice that whenever the Muslims do it to us, we're told that this has nothing to do Islam; Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.But
whenever we do it to a Muslim, we told that this will inflame the Muslim world, which assumes that it has everything to do with Islam.b) The message which the
Marine's action sends to me is that if you pick a fight with a Marine, you'll end up on the losing end of a rifle butt. And to my Neanderthal mind, that's a very
excellent message to be sending to the Muslim world.As to the second charge, notice how the debate has been framed: whether what the Marine did was right or
wrong depends on whether his action is defensible consistent with the terms of the Geneva Conventions.No one is questioning the Geneva Conventions. Rather,
they are questioning his action in relation to that unquestioned standard of reference.Well, I, for one, am going to question the Conventions. Suppose, for the sake
of argument, that the Marine did violate the Conventions. I don't care. The Conventions are not a moral absolute.As so often happens, you have something that
was put into effect for a reason. But once it's put into effect, folks are apt to forget what the reason was, and absolutize the policy. It takes on a life of its own--a
free-floating autonomy.In traditional warfare, there were two ways of dealing with POWs: enslave them or execute them.Both methods were harsh, but there was a
reason for the harsh policy. If you repatriated POWs, they would live to fight you another day. But that all changed, on paper, at least, with the Geneva
Conventions--which stipulated that POWs were entitled to certain rights.Yet it is important to remember the reasoning which lay behind the Conventions. The
reasoning was not that we should be nice to POWs for the sake of being nice; rather, the reasoning was that we'll be nice to our POWs so that you'll be nice to
your POWs.The reasoning was that if, in a given war, both sides take POWs, then it is in the self-interest of both sides that their imprisoned soldiers not be
mistreated.That's the logic. Notice that the logic is bilateral, not unilateral. This is not a moral imperative, but a pragmatic arrangement.It also comes at a cost. The
side which honors the Conventions is assuming an additional risk. It should be much safer for our soldiers to take no prisoners rather than to gingerly pick their
way through the fallen. Now, what kind of enemy are we facing in Iraq? We are facing an enemy that does not abide by the Geneva Conventions. Yet the
Conventions were predicated on the principle of reciprocity. Both sides assume a risk to yield a benefit.But given that the enemy doesn't play by the rules, there's
no earthly reason why our soldiers should be giving the wounded the benefit of the doubt.I'm not saying that we should kill indiscriminately. We should only kill
in self-defense and in the furtherance of a strategic objective.But the enemies we're up against live to kill. Whenever they take one of our soldiers captive, they kill
him--kill him as brutally as their diabolical minds can devise.So there's no good reason why we should sacrifice the safety of our soldiers or our tactical advantage
with an enemy like
this.

At the risk of repeating myself, the underlying rationale for the Conventions is pragmatic, not principled--utilitarian, not absolute.

The reasoning is that when we capture your combatants, we'll be nicer to them so that you'll return the favor when you capture our combatants.

This is not a question of intrinsic values or lowering ourselves to the level of the enemy. Rather, this is a case of contract law. Both sides assume a mutual obligation in the interests of a mutual benefit. If one party reneges on the contract, then that voids the contract.

This is an end-means arrangement, contingent on both parties to the contract upholding their end of the bargain. In case of nonperformance, the deal is off.

A cease-fire is a good comparison. If one side resumes hostilities, no reasonable man would say that other side is still bound to abide by the terms of the cease-fire, for the terms were mutual and the rationale was reciprocal. The salient point is the point for which the rules were framed in the first place.

This doesn't mean that our side is free to do whatever it pleases. For teleological reasoning conditions other aspects of just warfare. You try not to inflict more harm that is necessary to achieve the strategic objective. Wanton brutality and random carnage are without warrant because they are, among other things, gratuitous.

There are certain minimal standards of humane conduct, regardless of what the enemy does. To that extent we must sometimes surrender a tactical advantage.

*****************

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ollienorth/on20041119.shtml

Apocalypse Now

Once more, Nicholas Kristof sallies forth on his pogo-stick in another death-defying jousting match with the evangelical world. The latest excursion is his article on "Apocalypse (Almost) Now." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/opinion/24kristof.html?ex=1102319420&ei=1&en=33da1dada4db6045

I must begin by saluting Mr. Kristof's indomitable courage. He never balks at a chance to make a public fool of himself. But after drawing the short straw so many times, you'd think he might become a tad suspicious of the odds. Is there somebody who pushes him on stage? "Atta boy, Nicky! Go get 'em!" Why, he is the very model of a modern Major-General!

It takes a long time to fish out all the red herrings from his customary drag-net. Basically, the piece seems to be a hoary old exercise in innuendo and guilt-by-association. Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are hypocrites. Their eschatological timetable has often been of the mark. Ergo: there is no hell.

It should be needless to say that the conclusion doesn't strictly follow from the premise. But, evidently, Kristof’s intellectual pretensions do not commit him to the laws of logic.

He appears to level a twofold charge of hypocrisy against the authors. First, he insinuates that their portfolio is inconsistent with their belief in the imminent return of Christ. This may be a legitimate charge.

He also insinuates that their lavish income is a mark of worldliness, contrary to the otherworldly ethic of Scripture. This, too, may be a valid accusation.

Incidentally, for him to suggest, even tongue-in-cheek, that alms-giving would increase their chances of getting into heaven, betrays an utter and lamentable ignorance of fundamentalism. In fundamentalism, as in evangelicalism generally, salvation is a result of divine charity rather than human charity.

But neither allegation, whether considered in separation or taken together, has the slightest bearing on whether hell is real or not.

Incidentally, why do liberals like Kristof get so indignant about hypocrisy? Do they believe in moral absolutes?

Finally, he seems to suggest that the poor track-record of premillennial date-setting falsifies belief in the Day of Judgment. But to make that stick he would need to do a lot more than cite the sorry record of Hal Lindsey, Seventh-Day Adventism and the like.

The Bible itself discourages date-setting (Mt 24:35; Acts 1:7). Hence, the failure of those who ignore Biblical admonitions to the contrary is a confirmation rather than disconfirmation of Scripture.

I would hasten to add that the authors' pretrib version of the end-times has only been around since the Victorian era. It hardly represents the consensus of the historic Christian church. Indeed, Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye scarcely represent the best that Dispensationalism has to offer.

By contrast, the doctrine of hell does represent the consensus of the historical Christian church--at least in the Western Hemisphere.

But Kristof has several more misguided arrows in his quiver. There is, for instance, this odd exchange,

"Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series,
have both emailed me (after I wrote about the ‘Left
Behind’ series in July) to protest that their books do not
'celebrate' the slaughter of non-Christians but simply
present the painful reality of Scripture.

‘We can't read it some other way just because it sounds
exclusivistic and not currently politically correct,’ Mr.
Jenkins said in an email. ‘That's our crucible, an
offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and
tolerance.’

Silly me. I'd forgotten the passage in the Bible about how
Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to
Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren't
born-again Christians."

What makes this odd is the insinuation that the authors are damning folks whom Jesus would never think to damn. How is this illustrative of Kristof’s own position? Bertrand Russell, for one, had no difficulty quoting Christ on the subject of hell. In this regard, Lord Russell reads the Bible the same way as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

Would Kristof subject Bertrand Russell to the same scorn and ridicule? Of course, Russell didn’t believe the Bible, but neither does Kristof.

What is even odder is that in the very next paragraph, Kristof says the following:

"I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They
base their conclusions on John 3.)"

Okay, the reference to Jn 3 is an allusion to the new birth as a prerequisite for salvation. And this comes direct from the lips of Christ. If Kristof knows that much, then why does he pretend that the position of the authors runs counter to Christ?

Once again, Kristof illustrates his intellectual superiority by a display of intellectual confusion. Then he’s baffled by why Christians don’t find his position the paragon of reason.

Kristof, presuming to speak for the reader, says that "If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hate-mongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard."

We would? Speak for yourself, Mr. Kristof. There are many things amiss in this statement. Let’s look at a few.

i) I wouldn’t make any such demand on the Muslim world for the obvious reason that such a demand would be ineffectual. But, of course, liberals like Kristof are devoted to empty gestures--nonbinding UN resolutions and toothless treaties, so I realize that my distinction would elude him.

ii) Mr. Kristof tries to force a practical parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series, but other issues aside, the difference could hardly be plainer: it is Islam, and not Christianity, which is the hotbed of global terrorism.

iii) And there’s simple reason for this: the final judgment is an act of God, not an act of man. There is nothing in the doctrine of damnation which incites the Christian world to wage war on unbelievers. The final judgment is all about divine vengeance.

iv) Instead of attacking what Muslims believe, I would ask them why they believe it. That’s the real issue--not the symptom of belief, but the source of belief.

Kristof tries to draw another parallel between the Jihadi and the Left Behind series:

"But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word."

Yes, there are some formal parallels between Islam and Christianity. And that is owing to the fact that Islam is a Judeo-Christian heresy. The Koran is based on Muhammad’s garbled, hearsay knowledge of Judaism and Christianity.

But to imply that this elevates it to a level of moral equivalence or epistemic parity is like placing a third-rate forgery is on the same plane as the masterpiece it plagiarizes.

So what is the point of Kristof’s hit-piece? Hard to say, but in sorting out all the non-sequiturs, the following statement seems to cut to the heart of the matter, at least as he sees it:

"Now, I've often written that blue staters should be less
snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that
this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the
good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief
efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as
bigotry. A dialogue about faith must move past taboos and
discuss differences bluntly. That's what blue staters and
red staters need to do about religion and the "Left Behind"
books."

He begins by paying a part of the Christian community a throwaway compliment. He thinks that by patting us on the head for our social work, we should be so grateful that this gives him the right to accuse us of bigotry.

Nice try, Nick, but tossing a few doggy biscuits our way won’t make us wag our tail when we see you coming down the street in your Animal Control truck.

But what about those juicy adjectives like "bigotry" and "hate-mongering?" As with so many other left-wing pundits, Mr. Kristof labors under the lazy illusion that adjectives can do the work of arguments. He supposes that by shouting a few smear words into his megaphone, we’ll take fright and then take flight. But this is just a lot of rhetorical bluff and bluster, unredeemed by any supporting arguments.

And what, exactly, is the basis for the defamatory language? Presumably this all goes back to the venerable doctrine of hell. But how is belief in hell hate-mongering or bigotry? He doesn’t say.

One can hardly call it reason, for he doesn’t give a reason. But does he feel that hell is too horrible to be true? Yet horrible things happen everyday. Kristof appears to cling to the childish belief that whatever he likes is what the world is like.

There are only three basic positions on the afterlife: (i) everyone is saved; (ii) no one is saved; (iii) some are saved and others are damned.

i) Many men find (i) the most appealing position. Like Kristof, they like to nominate their favorite humanitarians to bolster the claim.

But there is a downside to this charming picture. If everyone is saved, then the misanthrope is saved alongside the philanthropist. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, and other such splendid specimens of humanity live happily ever after with all their unnumbered victims. And I daresay that for many of the victims, that would take the sheen off the prospect of universalism.

Of course, the Christian doctrine of the afterlife doesn’t divide neatly into heavenbound victims and hellbound victimizers. But when Kristof strives to foist so much odium on the Christian doctrine, is his alternative any less odious?

Another tension in universalism is that it amounts to a very exclusive inclusivism inasmuch as it must claim more for many secular and religious traditions than they are prepared to claim for themselves. Universalism can only be universally true if every opposing position is universally erroneous. So its apparent modesty and magnanimity are a false modesty and mock magnanimity.

ii) Speaking of which--secularism is generally committed to (ii). Man is just a meat machine. Consciousness cannot survive brain-death. This delightful position includes secular Jews. Likewise, the classic Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana asserts the extinction of personal consciousness. Softheaded Unitarians affirm (i), while hardheaded Unitarians affirm (ii).

Since an unbeliever denies the very existence of heaven, why is he so offended when Christian theology denies his admission into heaven? Seems like a mutually agreeable arrangement to me!

In the words of Bertrand Russell, this is the eschatology of secular humanism:

"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction...that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...

United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom...The life of man is a long march through the night...One-by-one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death."

That's the faux-Miltonian version. In the colloquial version, "First you die, then you rot!"

Russell tries to perk this up a bit by some sanctimonious palaver about "the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes," but such pale allusions to the Christian hope--to the seed of the martyrs and the communion of the saints--merely serves to magnify hollow sound of his infinitely bleak and pitiless creed.

Would Kristof call Russell hate-monger and a bigot for damning everyone to a common oblivion?

By process of elimination, this leaves some version of (iii). Damnation is predicated on the principle of retributive justice--taking sinners as its object. Given the extent of injustice in life here-below, does Kristof deem it morally preferable that the scales of justice never be righted in the life to come?

It should be unnecessary to point out that a number of supporting arguments have been deployed in support of the Christian doctrine. As usual, Kristof displays his intellectual superiority by ducking every one of the supporting arguments. Stupid is as stupid does.

As to Catholicism, much could be said, but let us never forget those dire Tridentine anathemas.

Whatever position Kristof himself stakes out will be intolerant and exclusive of the other two alternatives. So that must make Kristof a hate-monger and a bigot as well. And I guess that makes us a big tent party after all. Join the club, Nick!

A time to hate

Dear Mr. Jacoby,

Thanks for your recent article.


A number of distinctions need to be made.

1. Different Christian traditions have different views of the Old Testament. In general, those in the Lutheran, Baptist, Anabaptist, and fundamentalist tradition see more discontinuity between Old Testament ethics and New Testament ethics than those in the Reformed (=Calvinist) tradition. A Calvinist like myself sees the moral law of God as the same, whether under the Mosaic Covenant or the New Covenant. This view is fairly common among conservative Presbyterians.

2. I would add that some Christian traditions change over time. Roman Catholicism, for most of its history, has been very exclusive and militant. But in the 20C it became quite inclusive and pacifistic. There's a world of difference between John-Paul II and Julius II or Innocent XIII.

3. The scope of God's love also differs with different traditions. Most Christian traditions believe that God loves everyone--equally and without exception.

However, the Augustinian tradition, which is taken up in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition, sees the love of God as intensive rather than extensive. Just as the Jews were a chosen people as over against the multitude of the heathen in Old Testament times, God does not show his favor to everyone alike. Rather, the love of God is like marital love--exclusive and intensive rather than inclusive and extensive. The difference is between a love which is broad, but shallow, and a love which is narrow, but deep.

4. By the same token, a Calvinist would say that God loves a sinner, not because the sinner is lovable or at all deserving of love. To the contrary, God loves a sinner out of his sheer mercy and grace.

5. At the same time, there is also a doctrine of divine judgment in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. There is such a thing as damnation and hell. This is true of almost every Christian tradition, although some have liberalized.

6. God's attitude towards the sinner is, of course, germane to our attitude towards the sinner. There is a sort of folkloric version of Christian ethics that is popular in many churches. It is based on a very lopsided and hermeneutically naïve reading of the Gospels. It contains a grain of truth, but a half-truth.

7. One element is the fallacy of unconditional forgiveness. Many Christians believe it to be their Christian duty to forgive everyone, period.

One thing they forget is that the Gospels were written to the church, to the Christian community, just as the Mosaic Law was addressed, in the first place, to the covenant community.

This doesn't mean that there's one standard for insiders, and a totally different standard for outsiders. But what makes a faith-community a community is a certain level of mutuality and reciprocity. One cannot transfer this without qualification to those who are not signatories to a common ethic.

Even in the church, forgiveness is contingent on repentance: "if your brother sins, reprove him, and if he repents, forgive him" (Luke 17:3). Notice that there are three conditions in view: (i) the offender is a "brother," a fellow Christian; (ii) the offender is penitent and contrite, and (iii) the offended party is forgiving the offender for a wrong done by the offender to the offended party. In other words, I can forgive Jim for what Jim did to me (personally), but I can't forgive Jim for what Jim did to John.

Many Christians are very confused about forgiveness because they don't study the details for themselves, but simply recite a popularized, sloganized sound-bite.

8. Regarding the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), several things need to be said:

i) This is not dealing with genocide or crimes of violence. Rather, it is dealing with personal affronts and civil infractions.

ii) There is a radical element to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead of simply reacting in kind, we should restrain our punitive impulses and be merciful, acting in the best interests of the offender. We should return good for evil, rather than evil for evil. We do not become the thing we hate. We do not model our code of conduct on the enemy.

One presupposition of Christian ethics is that a Christian has a limited stake in this world. Another presupposition is that we are all sinners, and those of us who have been redeemed should try, where possible, to redirect other sinners in the way of righteousness, blessing them as the Lord has blessed us--showing mercy because the Lord has shown us mercy.

iii) However, the Bible is not all about doing mercy; the Bible is also about doing justly. We can't be equally loving to everyone. We can't be merciful to the merciless without being merciless to their victims. There are certain moral and practical priorities.

Steve Hays

P.S. I hope you don't receive any hate-mail for your article on hatred! :-)
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Why do the heathen rage?

Why do the heathen rage?

On the face of it, the attitude of the unbeliever is quite irrational. If a Martian were eavesdropping on the conflict between believer and unbeliever, he'd assume that the unbeliever's creed must have something indispensable and irreplaceable to offer the unbeliever, something denied him by the believer's creed. He'd assume that the unbeliever's creed was a wonderfully life-affirming creed, whereas the Gospel must be a nihilistic creed. Otherwise, why would the unbeliever be so devoted to his creed and so opposed to the believer's?

And yet the truth is just the opposite. For the unbeliever, man is just a meat machine. He has no immortal soul. His very consciousness is a clever illusion. Morality is just a dirty trick played upon us by natural selection. Life has no ultimate purpose. When we die, all our loves and longings die with us. The benevolent philanthropist and the genocidal tyrant share a common oblivion.

Why would an unbeliever live and die for such a self-destructive creed? And why is he so fanatically opposed to the Gospel? The Gospel is like a match in the darkness, lighting our way out of the cave and illumining our footsteps lest we fall down a bottomless pit. Why is the unbeliever so hell-bent on extinguishing the flickering match-light? Why this passionate communion with death?

Warfield offers a striking psychological profile of the unbeliever:

"The sinner instinctively and by his very nature, as he cannot help believing in God, in the intellectual sense, so cannot possibly exercise faith in God in the fiducial sense. On the contrary, faith in this sense has been transformed into its opposite--faith has passed into unfaith, trust to distrust," Selected Shorter Writings 2:116.

For the unregenerate and the reprobate, God is an object of fear, for God is the sinner's judge. And like a suicide-bomber, the graceless sinner is prepared to blow up the courtroom in order to kill the judge, even if it means killing himself in the process. The more brilliant the unbeliever, the more elaborate the perfect crime--the cosmic murder-suicide.

The Christian apologist has written book after book defending the faith, while the unbeliever has written book after book attacking the faith. And when words fail, the unbeliever has resorted to more forcible means of suppression.

But in his unwitting way, the unbelieving is a living apologetic for the very faith he denies with every gasping breath. Unbelief is an enigma to itself. Unbelief can make no sense of an unbeliever. Only belief can make sense of an unbeliever. The unbeliever would rather die in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole, than eat the bread of life come down from heaven. This is the squint-eyed attitude, not of mere unbelief, but of sheer disbelief--of an impenitent rebel without a cause.

Three views of eastern orthodoxy-3

"Most Protestant Evangelicals with their generally dualistic--if not epistemologically Nestorian--methodology inherited from the Scholastic heritage, which starts not with a person but with a written text, the Bible, telling us about the person of Jesus Christ...," (60).

"The differences are reminiscent of the contests between ‘personal’ (Christ himself) and propositional (Scripture) forms of revelation within the evangelical community in its reaction to Karl Barth. It would be an overstatement to label Orthodox theology as ‘Barthian,’ but the similarities are clearly there...The problem itself derives from making a disjunction between personal and propositional revelation, which itself is but a further instance of the false dichotomy set up by the Protestant Scholastics and others between Scripture and tradition, a dichotomy that implies an adversarial relationship between the two...God’s primary revelation of himself being personal through Jesus Christ...yet which is also propositional through the written Word which tells us about the personal Word," 61.

By way of reply:

i) One wonders if Barthian influence is what accounts for the resistance of Nassif and other Orthodox contemporaries to directly equating Scripture with divine revelation. Do they believe, a la Barth, that Scripture becomes, at best, a secondary witness to revelation?

ii) The reason that evangelical conservatives rejected the Barthian reconstruction of Scripture is owing to the fact that it ran counter to the self-witness of Scripture, period.

iii) One also wonders if Nassif and others find affinities between Barthian universalism and Orthodox universalism.

iv) Nassif fails to draw an elementary distinction between ontological priority and epistemic priority. Christ is prior in the order of being, but not of knowing.

v) This confusion causes Nassif in turn to misalign personal and propositional revelation. The person is ontologically prior to the proposition; but, for most of us--excepting the Apostles--our only access to the personal revelation of Christ is via the propositional revelation of Christ.

vi) Even this oversimplifies the relation. For the spoken word is another port of entry in getting to know the person. Even for the Apostles, their personal knowledge of Christ came largely through the teaching ministry of Christ.

vii) We need to guard against exaggerating the analogies and disanalogies between the personal Word and the written word. The "logos" is an economic title for Christ--one of many titles. It is a figurative title. It has its primary antecedents in the OT word of the Lord, which had written as well as spoken modes of transmission.

viii) The whole Scholastic etiology is based on a single article by Thomas Torrance, a Barthian, and hotly contested by the likes of Roger Nicole, Paul Helm, John Woodbridge, and Richard Muller. Muller, for one, is the world authority on Reformed Scholasticism. Nassif would be well advised to steer clear of issues far outside his area of expertise unless he’s going to bone up on the standard literature, which is not in evidence.

"In the area of biblical exegesis, Orthodoxy consistently manifests and tolerates a hermeneutical pluralism that generally falls within the third and fourth-century Alexandrian school or allegorical exegesis or the Antiochene school of literal exegesis," 61.

By way of reply:

i) For the umpteenth time, Nassif advertises the Orthodox incapacity for self-criticism. The central question is not, "What do the Orthodox believe?" but "Whether the Orthodox are right?"

ii) Is it coherent to affirm both literal and allegorical exegesis? Does this have any basis in the self-understanding of Scripture?

iii) Couldn’t allegorical exegesis be used with equal ease to prooftext heresy?

Quoting from a couple of Orthodox sources, Nassif cites the following:

"They [the Scriptures] are at once divinely inspired and humanly expressed. They bear authoritative witness to God’s revelation of himself...as such, they express the Word of God in human language," 62.

"Inspiration is the operation of the Holy Spirit in the authors of the holy scripture so that they may bear witness to the revelation (Jn 5:39) without erring about God and God’s ways and means for the salvation of humankind. Expressions and concepts of biblical authors about God are inspired because they are unerring guides to communion with God...Authentic interpreters of the holy scripture are persons who have had the same experience of revelation and inspiration within the body of Christ as the biblical writers had. Therefore, it is necessary for authentic understanding that anybody who reads or hears the Bible be inspired by the Holy Spirit," 64.

Then, adding his own commentary, Nassif says that "in Orthodoxy one can be an inerrantist, as were some of the Fathers," 65.

By way of reply:

i) What we have here is a classic restatement of limited inerrancy or partial inspiration.

ii) In addition, we have a doctrine of continuing revelation, which amounts to an open canon.

iii) One can be an Orthodox churchman is good standing without adhering to the plenary inspiration of Scripture.

There’s a lot that one could say about all this, but I’ll confine myself to a few remarks:

i) We might dub this the "fits-and-starts" school of inspiration. According to Orthodox pneumatology, the Holy Spirit would evidently run out of steam if he tried to inspire the entire Bible. So inspiration must be strictly rationed.

The first job of an Orthodox commentator is to go through the Bible with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other. He highlights every sentence that tells us how to get to heaven, but draws a line through every sentence that doesn’t.

At this point, my only question is, Why even pretend to uphold the inspiration Scripture? Why go through this charade of affirming the first sentence, disaffirming the second sentence, affirming the second clause of the first sentence while denying the first clause of the second sentence, and so on?

This makes a mockery of inspiration, the purpose of which is to confer certainty on the message.

ii) Some one-time evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy under the misimpression that the Orthodox Church is the last bastion of conservative values. Take a long hard look at what Nassif has just said. What we have here is just another one of the infinite permutations of liberal theology.

iii) Nassif never bothers to ask himself if his doctrine of Scripture is Scriptural. Does this comport with the self-witness of Scripture? A good place to find an answer to would be the classic essays of Benjamin Warfield on the subject.

iv) Likewise, where does the Bible ever make an inspired audience a condition of understanding? Indeed, if everyone were inspired, then no one would need to listen to the Apostles and prophets, for they could hear God directly.

v) Imagine how easy it would be for a heretic to claim inspiration on Nassif’s open-ended view?

vi) Nassif denies a dichotomy between Scripture and tradition, but affirms a dichotomy between one part of Scripture and other part, between witness and revelation, between the Word of God and human language.

vii) Yes, divine revelation is expressed in human language. But what is the source of human language? God, as Adam’s Creator, is the source of human language (Gen 2). And linguistic diversity falls under the sovereign providence of God as well (Gen 11).

viii) Ordinary language is perfectly adequate to describe historical events--as well as the divine intent driving historical events.

ix) Appeal to the ineffable is a double-edge sword. For there are things which the liberal theologian and the Orthodox theologian wish to affirm as much as the evangelical theologian. But they cannot invoke ineffability against evangelical theology without dismounting their own hobbyhorse in the process.

"Chronologically [speaking], tradition is anterior to Scripture because it transmitted the gospel within the liturgical community of the church...the church later decided which texts constituted the canon of Scripture by ‘recognizing’ their apostolic origins, content, and usage within the worshipping community...the church was inseparably united with its sacred texts as the mediating authority," 66-67.

"Whether they are aware of it or not, when evangelicals give assent to the canonical texts, they are simultaneously validating the church’s tradition as an authoritative norm of canonicity, just as it has actually functioned within the life of the Orthodox church itself...the irony of this disdain is that evangelicals rely on the church’s authoritative charismatic judgment on the colossal issue of canonicity but not on its consensual agreement on fundamental matters of historic interpretation, such as the sacramental meaning of baptism and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist," 67.

By way of reply:

i) This is a classic, High-Church objection to the Protestant faith. But one problem with such an objection is that it classic to more than one High-Church tradition. Both an Orthodox apologist and a Catholic polemicist deploy this argument.

But if two opposing communions can use the same generic argument, then how is that an argument for one or another communion in particular?

ii) Why do high churchman constantly leave the OT canon out of account when they talk about the priority of oral tradition or the priority of the NT church? The prooftexting for the apostolic kerygma came from the OT.

It is also striking that when God constituted the nation of Israel, he did so by means of a written constitution (the Mosaic Covenant), just as, when he constituted the NT church, he did so by means of a written constitution (the NT).

iii) It wasn’t the church which wrote the NT, but chosen individuals over and above the church. The transmission of the message is no more charismatic than the scribal activity of the Jews who copied the OT text.

iv) When Nassif talks about an "authoritative charismatic judgment," he is imputing his own criterion to the evangelical, then accusing the him of inconsistency for failing to carry that criterion over to hermeneutics.

But this is an instance of mirror-reading. To the extent that the evangelical appeals to external attestation, this does not commit him to the idea of an "authoritative norm" or "charismatic judgment." He is simply treating the early church fathers as a historical witness to the origin of the canonical books. But an appeal to historical testimony in no sense assumes or necessitates an authoritative norm or charismatic judgment. Why does Nassif apply a totally different standard to canonicity than he ever would to archeology or historiography?

It should go without saying that a man can be a competent historical witness without being an especially competent exegete. The son of Albert Einstein may be highly qualified to write a biography about his father, and utterly unqualified to write an exposition of general and special relativity. Evangelicals don’t treat canonics and hermeneutics the same way for the simple reason that they’re not relevantly the same.

v) Perhaps Nassif would say that nothing short of an authoritative church will yield an authoritative canon. However, the Calvinist regards the historical process as under the sovereign providence of God. I also deny that the case for the canon is limited to external attestation.

vi) Did the church decide at a later date which books constituted the canon? This represents a very canned view of the process--one which is endlessly regurgitated by writer after writer. But it’s not as though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, James and Jude, Peter and Paul, or the author of Hebrews simply stuffed a scroll into a bottle and cast it upon the waves to go wherever the currents happened to take it.

To say so betrays very little historical imagination, as well as specific data to the contrary. Luke, for one, tells us that he had a specific audience for his gospel (Lk 1:1-4). John says the same thing (Jn 20:31). Same thing with the Book of Acts.

And you have only to read the beginning and ending of a NT letter to see that it had a specific recipient. Indeed, that’s in the nature of a letter. A letter is sent to someone. The NT church was a small, tight-knit association in which everyone knew everyone else. It operated very much like an extended family, and--in no small measure--really was an extended family.

There was a preexisting constituency for the NT. All of the NT writings are either by first or second generation Christians. Many of the NT writers are affiliated with the mother church in Jerusalem, either as members or via members.

The NT authors share a number of documented contacts and go-betweens. Mark is an associate of both Peter and Paul (Acts 13:5; Col 4:10; 2 Tim 4:11; Phlm 24; 1 Pet 5:13). Timothy is an associate of both Paul and the author of Hebrews (Acts 16-20; 1 Cor 4:17; 16:10; 2 Cor 1:19; Col 1:1; Phil 1:1; 1 Thes 1:1; 3:2,6; 2 Thes 1:1; 1-2 Tim; Heb 13:23). Luke is an acquaintance and/or associate of Paul, Mark, Mnason, Philip, and James (Acts 21:8,16,18; Col 4:10,14; 2 Tim 4:11). Barnabas is an associate of both Paul and the Jerusalemite apostles (Acts 4:36; 9:27; 11-15; 1 Cor 9:6; Gal 2:1,9, 13; Col 4:10). Silas/Silvanus is an associate of both Peter and Paul (Acts 15-18; 2 Cor 1:19; 1 Thes 1:1; 2 Thes 1:1; 1 Pet 5:12). And for every documented associate who is mentioned in passing, you can sure bet there are many more whom the author had no occasion to mention.

vii) Nassif is setting up a very wooden two-stage process between the phase of composition and the phase of canonization. But the process was much more organic than that. It has more to do with diffusion in time and place from a local church to the church-at-large. Geography and chronology distinguish one phase from another.

viii) Even when it comes to the church at large, it is not as though the church sat down with a random pile of books, and sorted them out book-by-book. For the books of the NT fall into several natural groupings, based on various levels of literary dependence. For example, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptic. 2 Peter and Jude are synoptic.

In addition, there would also be preexisting blocks of material based on common authorship: This would include the Lucan corpus (Luke-Acts), the Pauline corpus (Romans—Philemon), the Petrine corpus (1-2 Peter), and the Johannine corpus (John; 1-3 John; Revelation).

So the NT canon consists of several literary units and cross-references to form a larger, interlocking corpus.

"In this liturgical setting the evangelical theology of the Orthodox Church is very vividly confessed...the necessity of personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is made absolutely clear through the direct questions that are powerfully addressed to the candidate no less than three times by the priest, along with the candidate’s public declaration of Jesus as his/her personal King and God and a solemn confession of the Nicene faith," 70.

By way of reply:

i) Given that, to my knowledge, infant baptism is the rule in the Orthodox Church, I can only marvel at how precocious are the offspring of Orthodox parents. Whether or not this is a recommendation for Orthodox theology, it is certainly a recommendation for enrolling your young children in an Orthodox daycare in case some of this precociousness were to rub off.

ii) As Nassif has to admit on the next page, the necessity of personal faith is not, in fact, expressed by the baptismal candidate, but by the child’s parents or godparents.

Now, whatever you may make of paedobaptism, per se, if personal faith is a necessity, then that condition cannot be exercised on behalf of the candidate, and in his place, by a sponsor, for whatever the merits of a sponsor, proxy faith is the antonym of personal faith.

On either count, the theology of the Orthodox church is sub-evangelical: either the exercise of personal faith is not necessary after all--or else it is necessary, but that condition is not satisfied by the terms of the baptismal ceremony.

Again, I’m not commenting on whether infant baptism is a good or bad thing, or whether evangelical theology is a good or bad thing. I am simply pointing out that Nassif has, himself, stated the condition which must be met, only to fail in its fulfillment.

This is reinforced by yet another condition of his:

"Baptism does not and indeed cannot ‘depend’ for its reality (e.g., for truly being our death, our resurrection with Christ) on personal faith. this is not because of any deficiencies or imitations of that personal faith, but only because baptism depends--totally and exclusively on Christ’s faith," 72.

By way of reply:

i) If the reality of baptism "depends totally and exclusively on Christ’s faith," then personal faith cannot even be a necessary condition, for the faith of Christ, which is a proxy faith, is a sufficient condition.

ii) Where does Scripture ever say that the faith of Christ is a necessary, much less a sufficient, condition for the reality of baptism?

Once again, Orthodox theology seems to think that truth is a matter of sheer stipulation: if we say it’s so, then it must be so! If we say the moon is made of green cheese, then the moon is made of green cheese!

"The Orthodox understanding of freewill rejects the need for a special act of God’s prevenient grace, which includes the freedom of choice given to humans in creation and remaining within them in a dysfunctional condition even after the fall. Our basic orientation, or compass, toward God and the freedom to choose him remains intact, yet we fail to see that compass clearly or to exercise that freedom to believe and obey properly, because our will is now wayward and because sin has dramatically blurred our ability to see God and know ourselves.

For the Greek church fathers, sin was understood not primarily as a deliberate act of willful disobedience (which it is) as much as the inability to see and know God and ourselves clearly," 74.

By way of reply:

i) One more time: where is the supporting argument? The Orthodox theologian has it pretty easy. He never has to prove a thing. He has only to quote a church father or two. How do I know that such-and-such is thus-and-so? Because tradition says so. How do I know that what tradition says is thus-and-so? Don’t ask!

ii) Now, the imago Dei is a Scriptural category. Since, therefore, he is appealing to a Scriptural category to begin with, you just might suppose that it would be important to actually exegete his version of freewill from the imago motif in Scripture. And to do so by responsible methods.

But, no. Like an astronaut, he floats about in an evidentiary vacuum, unencumbered by any burden of proof. In this weightless environment, he has no onus to discharge. Like God’s verbal fiat, he can speak reality into existence.

iii) Note, the question here is not whether freewill in general or some particular version thereof is true, possibly true, or false. The question is not abstract, but concrete. How do we convert this hypothetical to an object of knowledge?

Assume, for the sake of argument, that it is the case. How does Nassif or anyone else happen to know it to be so? How is the reader in a position to judge the claim?

iv) On the face of it, though, his claim is incoherent. If an ability to clearly discern the will of God is a precondition for choosing to obey his will, then an inability to discern his will renders it impossible to do his will. And in that event we would need a special act of prevenient grace to choose between good and evil.

Why is it that Nassif cannot connect his own dots? Presumably because he is reciting rather than reasoning. He is faithfully reproducing his tradition instead of asking whether his tradition makes any sense on its own or is faithful to the Scriptures.

There is nothing wrong with commitment to a theological tradition. But there is something very wrong with blind commitment--with a commitment which is not answerable to the word of God.

I could comment on some additional things, but why bother? At one level, it’s entertaining to poke fun at this, but there’s a deadly serious side to it. On my deathbed, as I look over my life and the lives of those I’ve taught, and as I stare into eternity, should it not be a matter of no little concern whether I founded my faith on solid ground rather than quick-sand? Rommen, Nassif, and Berzonsky are too wrapped up in the part they’re playing to step outside their role and see how much they’ve taken for granted.

The Orthodox do not have a monopoly on groupthink. One can find this in the Reformed community as well. But because the Reformed tradition is also a polemical tradition, used to debating its claims with the Romanist, the Remonstrant, the Lutheran, the Socinian, and a host of others, it has a capacity for criticism and self-criticism alike--whereas the Orthodox, who boast of never having had a Reformation, are so used to seeing the world through their Orthodox window that they cannot see either the window or the world apart from the window. This renders them unteachable.

Three views of eastern orthodoxy-2

"Protestants themselves are selective with regard to the contents of the Bible, which Martin Luther demonstrated by rejecting, as a ‘book of straw,’ the epistle of James...This selectivity proves that the Bible is neither self-sufficient nor self-evident...," 175.

By way of reply:

i) Yes, both sides are selective. So how does that observation weigh in favor of Berzonsky’s side? What are Berzonsky’s own selection-criteria? Why does he privilege some traditions, but not others?

ii) I have argued elsewhere that a case for the canon can be made based on the internal evidence of cross-attestation.

iii) Whether or not the Bible is self-sufficient is an ambiguous question. The Calvinist, for one, combines a high doctrine of Scripture with a high doctrine of providence--a doctrine which is, itself, Scriptural.

Is the church self-sufficient? Does the church exist in an air-lock? By what standard does Berzonsky deem his church to be the true church?

No criterion is self-adhesive. Someone must apply a general norm to a specific case. The human element cannot be eliminated.

It is, however, Orthodox theology that looses a randomizing element of radical uncertainty into the application by its commitment to libertarian freewill.

Something can be self-evident or inevident in different ways. For example, Reformed theology has never said that content of Scripture is self-evident to the reprobate or unregenerate.

Again, the divine authority of Scripture can be self-evident even if everything said in Scripture is not self-evident. Likewise, some Scriptural teachings may be more evident than others.

The larger point is that Scripture serves the purpose which God has assigned to it. It is as clear as God intended it to be, at any particular time and place, to any particular person. To impose some uniform condition of clarity or sufficiency is an artificial exercise. It is equally sufficient for mine needs and yours, but my needs are not the same as yours, so that what is sufficient for me may not be sufficient for you. When God uses his word to harden and darken some hearers, that acquits the purpose of Scripture no less than when God uses his word to illumine and liberate other listeners.

"The Bible is, in Orthodox terms, an image, or icon, of truth, but is not truth itself in the same way Christ is truth. To say it is so is to limit Christ to the Bible and deprive the church of his continuing presence in history. To set the Bible as an abstract criterion of truth is to harness the freedom of the church to utilize its wisdom garnered from centuries of witnessing the gospel through countless thousands of Christians," 175.

By way of reply:

i) To say that the Bible is an icon of truth is to suggest that the Bible is neither true nor false, but is only symbolic of something else which is true. This seems to deny the identity of Scripture as propositional revelation. However, the propositional character of the Bible is conspicuous and pervasive. So either Scriptural propositions are true or false. To compare it to an icon is disanalogous, for an icon is a nonverbal mode of communication.

ii) To accuse the Protestant position of limiting Christ to the Bible is, even if true, a description, not a disproof. What if God has indeed chosen to delimit his disclosures to certain authorized and identifiable channels of revelation?

iii) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that it is a bad thing for God to restrict his revealed will to the Bible, why is it not equally bad for God to restrict his revealed will to the Orthodox Church? Why can’t Evangelical churches share in his wisdom and presence?

iv) When we read the NT, we don’t find Christ and the Apostles appealing to the Sanhedrin. Rather, we find them appealing to the OT. But by Orthodox logic, they ought to refer all exegetical questions to the Sanhedrin as the official spokesmen of the Jewish church.

"To proclaim the Bible to be self-sufficient is to open it to subjective, arbitrary interpretation," 176.

By way of reply:

i) To proclaim the Bible to be insufficient is to open it to the subjective, arbitrary interpretations of the church fathers.

ii) To proclaim the Bible to be self-sufficient is to open it to public, verifiable methods of exegesis.

"The church has an oral tradition before the gospels were written," 176.

i) So what? You may say that oral tradition antedates the Gospels. Then again, you may say that the OT antedates the NT church.

ii) We don’t know for a fact that orality preceded literality. Jews were not illiterate. Greco-Roman civilization was not preliterate. The spoken word was one method of communication, but so was the written word. As we know from the NT letters, a formal written gospel was not the only literary means of communication. There is also the epistolary genre.

"All the senses share in the earnest of the heavenly banquet feast breaking into a moment of time: the aroma of incense, the icons of grace-filled saints, the sounds of chanted psalms and hymns...," 177.

By way of reply:

i) The debate between Evangelical and Orthodox is not primarily a debate over the style of worship. Even within the Reformed tradition, there is diversity on this issue. The Westminster Directory of Worship represents one point of view, but the Dutch Reformed were patrons of Christian art, while the Reformed Anglican tradition is quite open to a wide variety of artistic media in worship.

ii) The issue turns on the relation between a specific form of art as an illustration of a specific point of dogma. For example, sacred images are one thing, but when an icon is elevated to a sacramental status as a means of grace, or when the fine arts are deployed to facilitate the veneration of the saints, then that is quite another thing.

"To properly understand the Orthodox approach to the Fathers, one must first of all understand the mystical characteristic of Orthodoxy theology and the tradition of the apophatic approach to understanding--if ‘understanding’ is indeed the proper word--of what the hidden God in Trinity reveals to us...This makes the requirement for gaining of true knowledge (gnosis) the abandoning of all hope of the conventional subject-object approach to discovery," 178.

By way of reply:

i) This claim entails yet another denial of propositional revelation.

ii) The position is self-refuting. Berzonsky’s essay consists in a string of theological assertions. But if Berzonsky cannot say what God is, if he is unable to distinguish between the object of knowledge (God) and the subject of knowledge (the Christian), then what he says bears no relation to the truth. He cannot affirm anything to be true. What he says is neither true nor false, for it has no referential force. All his positive claims carry this nugatory disclaimer.

iii) If God is not an object of knowledge, then God is not an object of worship. If God is opaque to human reason, then there is no distinction between truth and false worship.

"The doctrine of the kenotic Son of God (Phil 2:6-11) offers insight into the greatness of God’s love," 180.

Does Berzonsky subscribe to the Kenotic heresy? He would do well to read the standard commentaries (Bockmuehl, Fee, O’Brien, Silva).

"What followed? Descent into Hades...," 180.

Did our Lord descend into Hades? That is what the creed may say, but is the creed correct? For my money, Grudem has much the better of that argument.

Elements of Berzonsky’s position can also be gleaned from his reply to other essays:

"Evangelical Christians must take into account the period following the era of the apostles, as well as the work of the Holy Spirit in every generation, reexamining what may be a presupposition too easily held, namely, that the Holy Spirit went to sleep and awoke in the 16C with the Reformers," 268.

By way of reply:

i) Orthodox Christians must take into account the period following the Renaissance, as well as the work of the Holy Spirit in every generation, reexamining what may be a presupposition too easily held, namely, that the Holy Spirit went to sleep after the death of John of Damascus or Gregory Palamas, and never woke up.

ii) Berzonsky goes on to quote Florovsy about an ecumenism of time as well as space, but he himself seems to believe that the working of the Holy Spirit is coincident with the geography of the Eastern Orthodox communion.

"The call at the midpoint of the sacred service to imitate the cherubim...and lay aside all earthly cares is impossible for one who is held in bondage to his reason and immersed in negative thoughts of criticism and judgment. Christianity, like Judaism, is a religion of revelation. It is God who acts, and he does so despite the limits of the human being’s ability to comprehend what he is doing for the life of the world...We all worship a God Unknown. Serious theologians understand that speaking of God is better done apophatically, that is, by telling what God is not rather than by trying to describe who he is...We come to know the Unknowable One not by thinking or by understanding but by progressive unions," 225.

By way of reply:

i) Of course, an Evangelical could say that it is Berzonsky who is enslaved to reason, and at several levels of bondage:

a) Tradition is human tradition. It codifies the reason of the church fathers.

b) Berzonsky has swallowed Neoplatonic epistemology hook, line, and sinker.

c) For Berzonsky, divine revelation is a revelation of nothing. Revelation is a revelation from God, but not a revelation of God. We know as little about God after revelation as before.

ii) It is clear that Berzonsky has no use for the Bible, because the knowledge of God is not obtainable by propositional revelation, but by mystical experience.

iii) Berzonsky fails to draw an elementary distinction between what reason can know apart from revelation, and what reason can know in light of revelation. To say that God is unknowable apart from revelation--even if we were to credit such an extreme thesis, which denies any natural knowledge of God--does not imply that God’s sovereign self-disclosure is unknowable as well.

"The heresy of Anabaptism begins with rejecting all traditional authority...When, therefore, the anathemas are read on Orthodoxy Sunday...is it any wonder that the Reformationists are included along with Arius and others?...It is imperative to continue telling the truth (Eph 4:15), 226.

By way of reply:

i) Needless to say, Evangelicalism is not conterminous with radical Anabaptism.

ii) But there is a far deeper flaw in Berzonsky’s indictment: how can a commitment to apophatic theology sustain a distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, truth and error? If God is unknowable--except in some noncognitive encounter--if the truth cannot be captured in propositional form, then in assenting to the creed, we affirm absolutely nothing. And if there is nothing we can affirm, then we cannot deny its contrary or contradictory. There is nothing to be believed or disbelieved. Berzonsky worships at the feet of the Great Sphinx.

The longest and strongest essay in support of Orthodoxy is by Nassif. This may be, in part, because he is the most ecumenical of the three, and has therefore made the most effort to get inside the opposing position.

He says that the classic evangelical view of the atonement has its roots in Anselm. This may true, although it is important that we not equate the two. Anselm marked a turning point in dogmatic reflections on the atonement, but the Protestant Reformers at most took Anselm as a cue to go even further back in time to St. Paul. If, for example, you consult the index of the Institutes (in the classic edition by McNeill & Battles), there are all of two footnotes on Anselm, neither of which referring to Cur Deus Homo, whereas the entries under Augustine go on for pages and pages. So this is a question of exegetical rather than historical theology.

"The Orthodox view baptism as both a justifying event and the beginning of theosis. As long as justification is proclaimed in terms of the ‘union with Christ’ model for imputed righteousness from Christ’s divinized humanity, without the basic assumption of an Augustinian anthropology of inherited guilt, it comports well with today’s emphasis on...sanctification...Unfortunately, Orthodox theologians...have at times viewed justification in an exclusively forensic sense and wrongly rejected it chiefly on that basis.

Justification cannot be interpreted in any sense apart from the incarnation, from which it derives its benefits. Justification derives its forensic sense of imputed righteousness from the hypostatic union," 39.

By way of reply:

i) This assumes, without benefit of argument, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. That is something the Orthodox have in common with Lutherans and Anglo-Catholics, but not with other Evangelicals in the main--who have argued to the contrary.

ii) Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, by what internal logic does regeneration entail justification? Where’s the supporting argument to fill the gap?

iii) To make baptism the justifying event, especially in conjunction with infant baptism, which is the norm in Orthodox circles, is hardly harmonious with justification by faith.

iv) Baptismal regeneration is traditionally associated with infused merit rather than imputed merit.

v) Although the incarnation is a necessary precondition of imputation, the grounds of our justification are directly indexed to the cross, and not the incarnation.

Indeed, it is unclear from Nassif’s incarnational soteriology that the cross figures at all in our justification. Rather, the moral transfer seems to be an automatic consequence of the hypostatic union. We are righteous because of what Christ is, rather than what he does.

Christ is righteous apart from the cross, and if we are righteous by virtue of our union with Christ via the deification of humanity, then the cross is rendered superfluous. And by the very same token, faith is rendered superfluous.

vi) You can’t have imputed righteousness without inherited guilt. Vicarious atonement assumes federal headship with respect to Adam and Christ alike.

vii) Likewise, guilt and righteousness are correlative. The merit of Christ answers to the demerit of the sinner.

viii) Both Reformed and Lutheran theology insist that justification is exclusively forensic. And they have made an exegetical case for that very position.

Nassif refers to the "new quest for Luther’s theology," but these are liberal Lutherans, suffering from an identity crisis and searching for foster parents to have mercy on their orphaned status and adopt them.

ix) This assumes, without benefit of argument, that Augustinian anthropology is false. It also disregards the case to the contrary.

x) This assumes, without benefit of argument, that theosis is true.

Although Nassif is a more conscientious writer than either Rommen or Berzonsky, he seems to illustrate a common pattern in Orthodoxy reasoning: they appear to be oblivious to the sheer number of individual claims into which their position factors out, not to mention the evidentiary gap between so many claims outpacing so few supporting arguments. Is there something about Orthodox theology itself that breeds this persistent lack of mental discipline?

Nassif invokes the Nicene Creed to explain the Trinitarian structure of salvation in Orthodox soteriology. However, the Nicene Creed doesn’t give us a Trinitarian soteriology. It describes the role of the Father in relation to creation rather than redemption, and in relation to the person of Christ rather than the work of Christ. It describes the part played by the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of Scripture, as well as the vague phrase about his role as the giver of life--which could allude to natural life instead of spiritual life.

By contrast, Calvinism does have a Trinitarian soteriology: those chosen by the Father are redeemed by the Son and renewed by the Spirit. Again, the redeemed are adopted and justified by the Father on account of Christ’s redemptive work, and are kept to the day of their death by the Holy Spirit.

Here we have what is at once a clear division and coordination of labor in the economy of salvation. This is something you get in Calvinism, and Calvinism alone.

Commenting on the seminal slogan by Athanasius, "God became man so that man might become divine," Nassif goes on to claim that this tradition goes all the way back to,

"the NT documents themselves that contain Pauline teachings on adoption, sonship, and the indwelling Spirit (Rom 8; Gal 4); and John’s promise of the gift of divine glory (Jn 17:5,22-24). It assumes that the starting point of the fallen human predicament is death from sin, not guilt, and so life through Christ is the only appropriate redemption (Rom 5:21-21)," 45.

By way of reply:

Once again, you can only wonder what the Orthodox see when they read the Bible. Because they deny sola Scriptura, they have no incentive to do painstaking exegesis.

How could anyone read Romans or Galatians and decouple sin from guilt? To be a sinner is to be guilty of sin. And the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). It was the sin of Adam that sentenced the human race to death (Rom 5; 1 Cor 15). Sin and guilt are inseparable, and the root-cause of death is sin. In Paul, adoption and sonship are forensic categories, not ontological categories.

"On that basis [the incarnation], Christ’s self-offering in death was a sacrifice in which he acted to pay the debts ‘on behalf of all’ (hyper panton) and ‘in the place of all’ (anti panton)--an apparently clear reference to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement," 46.

By way of reply:

i) Penal substitution presupposes a guilty party or parties: the guilt of Adam imputed to his posterity; the guilt of Adam imputed to Christ. By refusing to cast redemption within the forensic framework of guilt and acquittal, Nassif is rejecting a presupposition of penal substitution.

ii) If Christ died to pay the debt of all, on behalf of all, and in lieu of all, then why are all men not saved? If some of the redeemed are damned, for what are they damned if they are accounted innocent by virtue of universal penal substitution?

"The sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist are ways in which the incarnate Christ communicates his divine life to believers in the church...One of Cyril’s favorite Biblical texts...came from [Jn 6:53,55]," 49.

By way of reply:

This appeal takes for granted the sacramental reading of Jn 6. Where is the supporting argument? As usual, Nassif is assuming what he needs to prove. Is there any other way in which the Orthodox reason?

I realize that each contributor may not have space enough to defend all his contentions, but when we find a systematic omission of evidence, when every step of the argument is suspended in thin-air, then the conclusion will carry no conviction for the outsider, and, frankly, you wonder what reason the insider has for believing it.

Even if space constraints prevent the contributor from bolstering his case, he could at least refer the reader to polemical literature where supporting arguments are to be found. Absent even that, one begins to suspect that there are no supporting arguments--that the tradition is self-reinforcing.

"It is difficult to avoid observing a major theological inconsistency in evangelicals who give verbal allegiance to historic Christianity as represented by Cyril and the Chalcedonian Definition, while at the same denying the equally strong witness of the church’s eucharistic doctrine of the real presence of Christ maintained by those same church fathers as a corollary to orthodoxy Christology and soteriology," 51-50.

By way of reply:

i) I think the explanation ought to be pretty transparent: Evangelicals believe that Orthodox Christology is more firmly founded in Scripture than Orthodox sacramentology.

ii) As a matter of fact, Calvin and Calvinists such as Benjamin Warfield, Paul Helm, and John Frame are critical of Nicene Orthodoxy when it comes to the subordination of the Son.

"The christological maximalism of the Orthodox Church in its Trinitarian framework takes the implications of the incarnation light-years beyond the christological minimalism of the evangelical movement," 54.

By way of reply:

i) There’s a tension between christomonism and a Trinitarian framework. To the extent that our soteriology is Trinitarian, it cannot also be so lopsidedly Christocentric.

ii) Nassif is assuming that the Incarnation ought to supply the focal-point and reference-point for soteriology. That, however, is not maximal, but minimal inasmuch as this selective reductionism collapses salvation into one particular event in the life of Christ. How is it maximal to orient the atonement around the Incarnation, but minimal to orient the atonement around the cross?

iii) What is more, the Bible itself is cross-centered when it comes to the atonement. The Incarnation is a prerequisite of redemption, but the Incarnation is not, of itself, a redemptive event. No only is Pauline theology cross-centered, but so is Johannine theology. All four Gospels essentially consist in a biographical prologue leading up to the Passion, followed by an Easter epilogue.

"In what became known as the famous ‘essence/energies’ distinction in the Trinity, Palamas clarified the difference between God’s unknowable essence and his knowable energies...It was Palamas’ defense of the knowability of God through participation in the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and the monastic practice of hesychasm (stillness), with its psychosomatic methods of prayer (not to be confused with yoga), that gave to Orthodoxy its personalist emphasis on Christian spirituality," 57.

By way of reply:

Once more, the reader strains in vain to see any trace-evidence of a supporting argument. Why should we dichotomize the divine nature into a knowable energy and an unknowable essence? Why should we believe that God is made known by means of sacramental participation and psychosomatic prayer?

What’s the difference, if any, between Orthodox theological method and creative writing? We might as well get our theology from Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles.

Reading Orthodox theology is like going to the movies. It may be fun to watch, but at the end of the movie you must to go back out into the real world.

Three views of eastern orthodoxy-1

The Evangelical assessment of Eastern Orthodox theology is underdeveloped. That is only natural, for Evangelicalism has framed its position in relation to the conflict with Rome, in relation to varieties of Protestant faith, and in relation to religious and secular humanism in the West.

Three Views of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism, J. Stamoolis, ed. (Zondervan 2004), is therefore a useful exercise in interfaith dialogue. The chief value of the book, for me, is in the case made for Orthodox theology by Nassif, Berzonsky, and Rommen. In this review I will therefore concentrate my comments on their essays. I will not comment on the evangelical contributors because I can speak for myself with regard to that position.

Rommen and Berzonsky are the two hard-liners. Their essays are the least irenic and ecumenical in tone and substance. They therefore present the contrast between Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism in its starkest terms. Let us commence with Rommen:

"From an Orthodox perspective, biblical texts must be interpreted with the help of historical-grammatical exegesis and the rules of hermeneutics within the context of the church, i.e., in light of what has been passed down from generation to generation from the apostles. The basic assumption here is that not everything our Lord and the apostles did and said is contained in the written canon," 237.

By way of reply:

i) But how does one verify that assumption? In the nature of the case, oral tradition is resistant to verification. For it requires a written record to document the existence of oral tradition in the first place.

ii) What exactly is the process of transmission? Is this open to public inspection? One constantly runs across the claim, but I’ve never seen any evidence of how we have a continuous transmission of oral tradition from century to century. Is this learned word-of-mouth in some secret induction ceremony or hazing ritual--a la the FreeMasons? Is there some apostolic shibboleth or blood-pact or secret handshake which identifies those in the know?

iii) How distant in time and place can tradition be to be a historical witness? If Symeon the New Theologian (11C) or Gregory Palamas (14C) are considered to be authentic trustees of apostolic tradition, why not Huss or Luther or Wycliffe?

iv) In the absence of any positive evidence of apostolicity, why should we assume that a church father knows more about certain parts of the Bible than a modern-day Egyptologist or Assyriologist? Is Gregory Palamas an authority on the Bronze Age or the Iron Age?

"One of the difficult things about the discussion at hand is that we are dealing with two very distinct mind-sets, two cultures and conceptual frameworks...(1) the East tends to be more interested in relationships, whereas the West concentrates on propositions; (2) the East emphasizes the person; the West focuses on the nature...." 239.

By way of reply:

i) Can we really generalize about national character when different ethnicities and nationalities are in view, viz. Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Slaves, Persians, Rumanians, &c.?

ii) The fountainhead of Eastern Orthodox theology is Greek Orthodox theology. Is the Greek mind really such a stranger to abstract analysis, viz., Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Euclid, Archimedes, Philoponus?

If anything, we could turn this around and say that Roman character was more sociological in orientation, viz. patriotism, filial duty.

"Thus, it might be said that the evangelical doctrine is a subset of Orthodox soteriology," 244.

Is it? We shall see.

"What is this God-intended goal of humanity? Scripture teaches that God created man in his own image and in his own likeness (Gen 1:26-27). In Orthodox theology the terms ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ are considered to be distinct, and this distinction provides an important element in the context in which soteriology is developed.

Image is a static term and ‘signifies a realized state, which in the present context constitutes the starting point for the attainment of the likeness.’ Likeness, though, is a dynamic term that points to a potential [for deification]...’Likeness to God, while it constitutes the goal of human existence, is not imposed on man, but is left ox his own freewill,’" 245-46.

By way of reply:

i) Rommen appeals to the creation account, but it should go without saying that there is nothing in either the original account or later canonical reflections on the imago Dei motif to draw a conceptual distinction between the two terms, to further invest "image" with a static import and "likeness" with a dynamic, teleological import, or to further introduce the concepts of freewill and deification.

At this point the church father is simply making up his own theology on the fly, fabricating whatever distinctions he needs out of thin air, to serve his immediate purposes. That's no different from the theological method of the cult leader, be it Basilides, Boehme, Blatsky, Mani, Paracelsus, Swedenborg, or Joseph Smith--to name a few.

ii) Even if we deny the principle of sola Scriptura, yet when explicit appeal is made to Scripture to ground a given dogma, then such an appeal must be exegetically sustainable.

"Rather than seeing the sacrifice [of Christ] as an attempt to assuage the offended honor of God or to silence his anger, the sacrifice is aimed at the root problem, which is the corruption of man’s very nature and the inevitable result--death. Using the curse of death itself to defeat that which held humanity in its grip, Christ atones for our sins--but not by providing a payment of human debt owed to God but by assuming the consequence of our sin, namely, death itself," 247.

By way of reply:

i) On p244, Rommen told the reader that the evangelical doctrine of salvation is a subset of Orthodox soteriology. But it ought to be obvious from what he says here, on 247, that what we in fact have is a completely different conceptual scheme. Why does Rommen say one thing on p244 only to contradict himself three pages later?

ii) What Rommen offers the reader is a description of the Orthodox model rather than a defense of the Orthodox model. But this leaves dangling in mid-air the entire question of why we should affirm his model over against the Evangelical model. How is this any way to treat rival truth-claims?

iii) Rommen makes not the slightest effort to engage any of the standard exegetical literature for the evangelical position as offered by the likes of Leon Morris, John Murray, Roger Nicole, Thomas Schreiner, and Anthony Hoekema--to name a few. This utter neglect of the opposing literature betrays a want of moral earnestness and intellectual seriousness on his part.

One is tempted to suspect that this is why he was a convert to Orthodoxy in the first place. He had lacked an elementary knowledge and grasp of his original position. But theology is not for day-trippers.

iv) Even on its own terms, his chosen framework is scarcely coherent. The orientation is lopsidedly androcentric rather than theocentric. But are death and depravity the "root-problem?" If Christ atones for our sin, then sin is the root-problem. And sin entails a relation between God and man. Death is a penal sanction for sin. This is why forensic categories such as redemption, justification, and propitiation cannot be sidelined, but must be kept front-and-center.

v) Elsewhere, Rommen writes that "the Orthodox, taking the gravity of sin seriously, regularly emphasize themes such as sacrifice, atonement, propitiation, and justification...How is it that my evangelical colleague refuses to accept my expression of commitment ox these biblical themes?" 155-56.

The answer is simple: he is confounding words with concepts. He uses all the right words, from time-to-time, but empties them of their conceptual content and then makes them synonymous with his adopted theology.

It isn’t a question of what words we use, but what our words denote. A word is just a cipher. For example, both a Catholic and a Calvinist use the word "justification" to denote a particular locus of theology, but they don’t share the same doctrine of justification. Likewise, cult-leaders pirate Christian terminology, but they use the same wording to flag a very different belief-system.

"For most of the Protestant world, salvation is the immediate change in a person’s status before the Judge of all things...Due to the extremely individualistic approach and the judicial understanding of salvation, a person is either saved or not saved. There can be no other state, no progress, no spiritual journey, and no loss of that status.

However, the New Testament clearly speaks of salvation in the past, the present, and the future tenses, indicating that it is a process that has a clear beginning and a definite goal," 248.

By way of reply:

i) Once again, this rather jumbled summary reflects an elementary ignorance of Evangelical theology in general and Reformed theology in particular. For one thing, it fails to distinguish between the static categories (e.g., redemption, justification, adoption, propitiation), and the dynamic categories (e.g., sanctification, glorification).

ii) And this, in turn, sets up a false antithesis between the static and dynamic categories. It is precisely because the static and dynamic categories are different modes of grace that the objects of grace are progressing towards a foregone conclusion. Their destiny is assured. They were redeemed and justified in order to be sanctified and glorified. Where’s the tension?

"If the church has formally declared a particular teaching to be unorthodox...any further discussion becomes useless and counterproductive...There is in these statements no room for discussion, no compatibility possible other than submission to the teaching of the church," 249.

By way of reply:

i) The problem with this move is that Rommen has done absolutely nothing to justify his rule of faith. Had he justified his rule of faith, then the rule of faith could, in turn, justify the essentials and distinctives of Orthodox theology. But his appeal to the church comes out of nowhere. Where has he laid the groundwork to establish this appeal?

ii) If this is the best he can do, then the opposing side wins by default, for Rommen has surrendered the argument to the opposing side and retreated from the field of battle.

iii) One wonders why he even bothered to contribute to the Counterpoint series if he is unwilling to make a case for his own position.

One final point from his reply to Horton:

"He [Horton] cannot see the difference between the diverse work of the Fathers and the councils, which defeated heretics and preserved the unity of the church for centuries, and the schismatic aftermath of the Reformation, which dissolved into countless theological interest groups," 156.

By way of reply:

i) It wasn’t the church fathers and church councils that preserved the unity of the church, but the Byzantine emperors who enforced the party line. This is a coercive, conformist unity, and not a conscientious, confessional unity--which is precisely why it began to unravel with the rise of nation-states and the loss of the church's temporal authority.

ii) There may be countless theological interest groups, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, the superficial diversity all boils down to how one answers four basic questions: (a) Is the Bible the only rule of faith? (b) Is there freewill? (c) How is the OT fulfilled in the NT? (d) Are the sacraments a means of grace?

iii) There were plenty of theological interest groups in the ancient church as well. It’s just that one of the theological interest groups was more successful at suppressing its rivals. That does not, of itself, make it purer or truer than the others. For example, I happen to believe that in the Donatist and Novatianist controversies, the Catholic party was not entirely in the right or the opposing party all in the wrong.

iv) The relation between his high ecclesiology and low soteriology exposes other arbitrary tensions. For Rommen, the Christian is defectible, but the Christian church is indefectible. Saving grace is amissible, but the grace of holy orders is inamissible.

Moving on to Berzonsky’s essay--in tracing the roots of Evangelicalism, he offers a historical analysis:

"Here is a religion of the Spirit setting itself in opposition to all authority. Not accidentally emerging in the era of the Age of Reason and the Age of the Enlightenment, it announces and champions the rights of the individual to know and accept what he or she believes, without help from outside," 171.

By way of reply:

i) It is anachronistic to unpack the Reformation with reference to the Enlightenment.

ii) At issue in the Reformation was not individualism as over against authority, but the locus of authority. Was authority situated in the Scriptures or in the church?

iii) Scripture is no less an external authority than the church.

"It is not a mere abstract theory, but the core of Protestantism...Grace comes from God alone, not via anything earthly or man-made. There is nothing a person can do to accomplish his salvation. Even to say that he or she cooperates with the grace that saves is to be in error. God’s power is manifested in human weakness.

To understand that relationship in this way, namely, that God is Judge and the Christian is a forgiven sinner who has done nothing to deserve the grace that saves him or her, is from the Orthodox Church’s point of view to limit both God and the human, the One as little more than Judge, the other as no more than a sinner," 171-172.

By way of reply:

i) Notice how, on the one hand, Berzonsky endorses an authoritarian view of the church while, on the other hand, his doctrine of salvation is more synergistic and humanistic. Where the church is concerned, he denies individualism; but where salvation is concerned, he affirms individualism.

ii) Also observe the implication, on his view, that fallen man is actually deserving of divine grace. So salvation is, on the Orthodox view, something of a human meritocracy.

iii) To say that on the Evangelical view, grace can never come by means of anything earthly is an overstatement. We believe that grace came in Christ, who became incarnate, lived among us, died on the cross, and rose from the dead.

"When Scripture says that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, took on human nature in the incarnation, it means that all human beings are given the possibility to receive the very uncreated energy of God by opening themselves to union with the Holy Trinity through incorporation into the God-Man, Christ. Here we find the meaning of the mysteries of baptism and Eucharist. Here we grasp the sense of Jesus’ claim: ‘I am the vine...’ (Jn 15:5-6)," 172.

By way of reply:

The problem with this paragraph is that Berzonsky presents the reader with an assertion instead of an argument. Why should we believe it? Where is the exegesis to support this stupendous claim?

Notice how many separate claims are packed into this brief paragraph:
a) when Scripture says such-and-such, it means this-and-that
b) all human beings are given something
c) this something is a possibility, not an actuality
d) they are given the possibility of receiving the uncreated energy of God
e) to realize this possibility, they must open themselves up to something
f) this something is union with another.
g) to wit: union with the Trinity
h) union is effected through incorporation with Christ
i) herein lies the meaning of baptism and communion
j) herein lies the meaning of the True Vine discourse

So Berzonsky’s sweeping assertion breaks down into at least ten distinct, connected claims. To make good on his blanket assertion, he would need to offer ten separate and interlocking supporting arguments.

What the reader gets instead are ten barefaced assertions without a single argument to back up any of his specific contentions. We don’t even get an outline of what form such an argument would take. One wonders who Berzonsky thinks he’s writing for. Is he writing to persuade the reader?

"Adam was to have united the entire world to God; now the second Christ has come to earth to complete the recapitulation. Human nature discovers itself joined to the nature, or hypostasis, of Christ. This is the specific and unique work of the God-Man," 172.

By way of reply:

i) Once again the reader is treated to an empty claim. Berzonsky is better at making a claim than making a case.

ii) Adam’s relation to humanity and Christ’s relation to humanity are clearly disanalogous. Adam’s relation is genealogical as the forefather of the entire human race, whereas Christ receives his human nature from Mary.

iii) Although Berzonsky is too indolent or arrogant to turn his assertion into an argument, it may be useful if we do it for him to assess the quality of the argument. The implicit argument seems to run something like this:

a) Every man has a human nature
b) Christ has a human nature
c) Ergo: every man is related to Christ

There’s a general sense in which this is true, but the relation is too generic, in and of itself, to support the specific work of Christ. The fact that I am related to you at a generic level doesn’t imply that what I am or what I do has any effect on what you are or your situation.

To make this argument work, what we would need is not an exemplum/exemplum relation, but an exemplar/exemplum relation, like the oak/acorn relation. If the human nature of Christ were an abstract universal in which all men and women participate, then the relation between Christ and humanity might support a transitive relation.

But the human nature of Christ is just another property-instance--a concrete particular among many. Humanly speaking, Christ was a clone of Mary, like identical male/female twins. Mary is both his mother and his sister. Such is the miracle of the Virgin Birth.

This supplies a necessary condition for a more specific relationship, but it does not supply a sufficient condition all by itself. So the implicit argument in Berzonsky’s position falters on a level-confusion.

"When the Lord appeared among his apostles in the upper room (Jn 20:22-23), he breathed on them, conferring the Holy Spirit, giving them power to bind and set free the sins of human beings. This is the gift of the Spirit to the church as the body of Christ," 173.

By way of reply:

Observe the leap of logic: from the Apostolate to the sub-Apostolic church. There is nothing in the text to justify this transference. At the very least we’d need a subsidiary argument to warrant the extension. Once again, no such reason is forthcoming. All we have are Berzonsky’s dogmatic dicta.

"The second gift of the Holy Spirit is from the Father on Pentecost (Acts 2). Here is grace poured out on persons--not any arbitrary men but on the college of apostles," 173.

By way of reply:

i) Talk about blinkered exegesis! If you turn to the account in Acts, you will see that the promise of the Spirit was by no means limited to the Apostolate (2:17-18,33,38-39). And the rest of Acts illustrates the further fulfillment of this prophecy.

ii) Berzonsky’s restriction runs counter to his doctrine of baptismal regeneration.

"Protestants hold in greatest esteem the personal quest for truth. Unfathomable to them is the need for submitting their own subjective comprehension to the objectivity of the church. To test one’s private opinion by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit at work through the body of Christ does not compute," 175.

By way of reply:

i) In what sense is the church "objective," but the Bible is not?

ii) Don’t the Orthodox merely codify one set of private opinions over against another? The private opinion of Cyril trumps the private opinion of Nestorius.

iii) For Berzonsky to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church begs the question of how we identify the true church. In which church is the Holy Spirit to be found? What are Berzonsky's criteria?

iv) Why assume that the Holy Spirit cannot be at work in Evangelical communions as well?

"The Bible requires interpretation. St. Hilary wrote, Scriptura est non in legendo, sed in intelligendo (Scripture is not in the reading but in the understanding)," 175.

By way of reply:

This statement is true, even a truism, but such a truism amounts to an empty norm. It doesn’t adjudicate between one church and another. Every side can lay claim to this truism.