Papal bull

We're going to be treated to saturation coverage of Catholicism for six weeks or so. There was the wall-to-wall coverage of JP2's final illness and death. This will be followed by wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral and the conclave. And that will, in turn, be followed by wall-to-wall coverage of the new pope.

This constitutes a free commercial and running advertisement for Catholicism. So I'll take this occasion to briefly explain why I, for one, am not a Catholic.

On the face of it, the comparison between Catholicism and Calvinism, or even Evangelicalism, is pretty invidious. On the one hand you have this sprawling denomination whose membership numbers some 1.1 billion, give or take. By contrast, Calvinism must look like a rather Mickey Mouse affair, consisting in tiny handfuls of believers, scattered hither and yon.

Catholicism is a many-layered thing. Is there some way of getting to the bottom of things?

Every theological tradition is a historical accident. Catholicism is no exception. But Catholicism is a frozen accident.

1. I'd suggest that the historical foundation of Catholicism is sacerdotalism.

This began innocently enough. And at least two factors contributed to that foundation.

i) It was natural for the early church to turn to the upper classes for leadership. Ambrose is a perfect example. He was a Roman aristocrat and provincial governor. This meant, among other things, that he was an educated man, and a man used to giving orders.

The RCC has an aristocratic polity because it came of age during, and was modeled upon, the Roman aristocracy. It is a sacred parallel to the Augustan age.

Roman society was hierarchical, stratified by social class--imperial, patrician, equestrian, plebian, with decurions, peregrini, free men, citizens, and slaves. The elevation of Ambrose to the episcopate was what you might call a horizontal promotion to the sacred counterpart in social rank, just as the patriciate was in charge of the old pagan priesthood. This would not be so bad were it seen for what it is--a culture-bound adaptation.

ii) Another factor in the foundation was the early church's response to heresy and schism. This took the form of a polemical shortcut. Appeal was made to an Apostolic See as the repository of apostolic doctrine.

Again, this began as a fairly innocuous appeal. At the same time, it was naive. After all, most of the NT letters are addressed to churches planted by the Apostles. And yet many their letters are occasioned by some lapse in doctrine and morals. If that could happen to an Apostolic See during the lifetime of the Apostles, it wouldn't take any time for the sub-Apostolic church to go off the rails.

In addition, this apologetic maneuver vested the true interpretation of the Scriptures in the teaching office of the true church. For this reason, Rome can never accept sola Scriptura and the right of private interpretation. To do so would be to concede to heretics and schismatics the right to appeal directly to Scripture.

There is, of course, a regressive or circular quality to the Magisterium. If the true interpretation of Scripture is only to be found in the true church, then where is the true church to be found? Presumably, the true church is true to Scripture. But if you are hereby forbidden to measure the teaching of the church against the yardstick of Scripture, then all that's happened is to resituate the question of a criterion rather than ever answering the question.

And, indeed, it didn't take very long for a rather obvious problem to emerge. For there was more than one Apostolic See. And over time, these began to diverge in doctrine and practice.

So you then have the question of which Apostolic See speaks for the Apostles. Is it Rome? Jerusalem? Antioch? Alexandria? Carthage? Constantinople? Moscow?

Indeed, you even had the question of what see has an authentic claim to apostolicity. For that, too, is a question of tradition, and competing traditions at that.

Enter the False Decretals. The claim of Roman primacy was trumped upon on the basis of what are now admitted on all hands to be forgeries.

Sacerdotalism is committed to apostolic succession. For the authentic transmission of the deposit of faith is contingent on the valid administration of holy orders.

Notice how something that was begun with the best of intentions can take on a life of its own. And there are several essential problems with apostolic succession:

i) It has no Scriptural warrant.

ii) It has no historical warrant.

Consider the Great Schism (1378-1417). Consider rigged papal elections. Remember that you only need one broken link in the chain to invalidate every succeeding link.

iii) And when fraud was insufficient to win the argument, brute force was employed. Consider the Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, Bloody Mary, &c.

The Church of Rome became so big and rich and grand because it was the church of the Roman Empire, of European royalty, of European colonialism, and of all the royal subjects, domestic and foreign, under the heel European rule and European imperialism. That too, is a historical accident, and in many respects a standing won and wrung by might rather than by right--a de facto rather than de jure status.

St. Peter's was erected on the dunghill of the indulgence racket. Imagine the different psychological effect if, instead of the marble and brocade and sheer scale of the thing, this were held in a storefront church in Chicago, with elders dressed in black-and-white business suits!

2. Having laid the foundation, the first floor is sacramentalism.

Sacramentalism builds directly on the foundation of sacerdotalism. To begin with, a priestly caste or class was also ubiquitous in the ancient world. You had it throughout the ANE (e.g., Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine). And there was a pagan precedent in Roman society at the very time the early church was formalizing its polity. Indeed, the papal title of "pontiff" is on loan from the Pontiff Maximus, who was the chief priest at Rome.

if you have a priesthood, then what does a priesthood do? Well, one thing it does is to perpetuate itself by ordaining successors. So the valid administration of the sacraments is a logical corollary of a priesthood.

In addition, it was only natural, under this arrangement, to funnel the grace of God through the sacraments--like a magic potion. Indeed, magic was another fixture of pagan priestcraft. Twas but a short step from a heathen cultus (e.g. Acts 14:13) to the sacrifice of the Mass. It is no great leap of logic to go from belief in magic spells and incantations to the belief, in Russell's words, that a man can change a piece of bread into the Body of Christ by speaking Latin to it.

What we have in Catholicism is a classic case of syncretism, whereby NT concepts and categories were assimilated to preexisting pagan concepts and categories. To some extent, this operates at a subliminal level. A convert associates the new and the unknown with the old and the well-known.

A textbook example is the "conversion" of Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24). Or just consider the seamless transition from patron gods to patron saints, as well as the continuum from Magna Mater to Mater Dei. Superstition is subconscious. When it becomes self-conscious, it ceases to be superstitious. Unfortunately, the Church of Rome has canonized superstition.

Remember that sacerdotalism was, in large part, a rearguard action in response to heresy and schism. So the priesthood functions as the quality control-mechanism to ensure the orderly and reliable dispensation of grace, just as apostolic succession functions as a chain-of-custody to ensure the orderly and reliable transmission of primitive tradition. In theory, that is.

This development is perfectly understandable. But it suffers from a couple of fundamental problems:

i) It is more pragmatic than principled--an artifact of apologetic expediency.

ii) It lacks Scriptural warrant. Indeed, it runs contrary to Scripture.

3. The second floor is penance, Purgatory, indulgences, the cult of the saints, &c.

You see, if grace is funneled through the sacraments, and yet a state of grace is not effected in every recipient, then grace alone saves no one. There must be some x-factor that makes the difference. And the x-factor is freewill.

For Catholicism, it is necessary to strike the right balance between divine grace and human merit. Synergism is taken for granted. The only quibble is over the relative order and percentage points.

When Catholicism reads the Bible, it imposes a sacramental grid on Scripture. The interpretation of Scripture must make room for this antecedent agenda, for freewill, for the merit of man.

4. The third floor of Catholicism is modernism.

The problem with a frozen historical accident is that you cannot foresee the accidental consequences of your prior dogmatic pronouncements. So you need to find some face-saving way of admitted error without appearing to admit error, without losing face.

For example, Catholicism used to stake its claim in oral tradition (at Trent and Vatican I). But, over time, this became unsustainable. It was codified at Trent, but quietly abrogated at Vatican II, to be supplanted by the development of dogma, a la Newman.

Likewise, Catholicism used to affirm the plenary inspiration of Scripture (at Trent and Vatican I), but that was also surrendered at Vatican II. Here I'd say that it bartered an original truth for a subsequent falsehood.

To take another example, the Church of Rome traditionally lays claim to be both the one true church and the universal church. Yet, as a practical matter, the world is not Roman Catholic. The original claim was easier to sustain when the Roman Church was roughly conterminous with the Roman Empire, but over time this provincial outlook became increasingly incredible, even ridiculous. The visible church cannot very well be both inclusive and exclusive in time and place.

The Roman Church barters depth for breadth, barters sanctity and apostolicity for unity and catholicity, and juggles unity with catholicity by lowering the membership bar to ground level. And if its sacraments are, indeed, a means of grace, then why is there such a disconnect between the availability of grace and the assailability of grace?

Having said in Unam Sanctam (1302) that there was no salvation outside the church, Vatican II did an audacious about-face, extending salvation to unnumbered multitudes outside the church (Nostra Aetate).

Likewise, the Pope is said to be infallible whenever he speaks ex cathedra. But this bold claim turns into a vacuous tautology. For whenever the Pope is caught in a palpable error, the original claim is salvaged by saying that he was not speaking ex cathedra. So he's infallible--except when he's fallible, and he's fallible--except when he's infallible. So the claim is made unfalsifiable by rendering it unverifiable as well.

When the Roman Church had temporal power, it used its power to wage war and persecute dissent. Now that the Roman Church is impotent, it makes a virtue of pacifism, mercy, and tolerance.

Calvinism is also a many-layered thing. Is there some way of getting to the bottom of things?

1. The foundation of Calvinism is revelation. For Christianity is a revealed religion. Only revealed truths enjoy dogmatic authority.

2. The first floor of Calvinism is sola Scriptura.

Some critics of Calvinism can't find sola Scriptura in Scripture. That's because sola Scriptura isn't "in" Scripture, as a part or subset of Scripture. Rather, sola Scriptura is the whole of Scripture.

The critic is like a man who can't find his glasses because he's wearing them. He cannot see his own glasses because he sees with them and through them. So he forgets he has them on. Sola Scriptura is correlative with the identity of the Christian faith as a revealed religion, where revelation is progressive and epochal, achieving its denouement in the Christ-Event.

3. The second floor of Calvinism is sola gratia. For a Calvinist, exegesis matters because Scripture, and Scripture alone, is the historical record of historical revelation. And the sovereignty of God is revealed in Scripture. God is sovereign in revelation (sola Scriptura) and redemption (sola gratia) alike.

4. Everything else in Calvinism--the third floor of Calvinism, is erected on this substructure (revelation) and superstructure (sola Scriptura; sola gratia). Calvinism has its own historical accidents. Some of these enjoy Scriptural warrant, and are therefore cemented into the Reformed belief-system. But others are culture-bound, and subject to revision or retirement.

It is, of course, tempting to make ourselves look good by making the other guy look bad. The Calvinist has no cause for complacency. The danger to contemporary Calvinism is the danger to ancient Judaism. Although salvation is of the Jews (Jn 4:22), many Jews were unsaved, and Israel was a poor witness to the world. Just as many Jews lived below their Jewish creed, below their blessings, while many pagans lived above their pagan creed (Rom 2)--many Calvinists live below their Calvinist creed while many Catholics live above their Catholic creed. The elect are a remnant, but to be a remnant is no assurance of election.

An apology to the world

An Apology to the World -

NEW DATE: Saturday, June 4, 2005, 9am-2pm
With all the apologies being offered to various people groups, we want to offer our own apology. The difference being, ours will not consist of an "I'm sorry." Join the Resource Center for Theological Research as we offer An Apology to the World.


Featuring:
             
      
Kerry Gilliard                            
Ozzie Osgood                            
Jeff Downs
For bio information click speakers name.

Brochure (Word doc); Press Release (Word doc).
Schedule:
Session One: An Apology - 9am
What is an apology? By first examining the word in its historical context and then its usage is specific biblical passages, Mr. Gilliard will set the agenda for what a Christian apology to the world is. It is important to know that every Christian is called to give an apology. God has given his people the privilege of "given a reason for the hope that is within." Mr. Gilliard will discuss why it is important to be well equipped in biblical theology and the importance of loving God with all of your mind. This session will end with encouragement and examples on how to offer an apology to the world.

Session Two: An Apology to our Culture - 10am
In this lecture Mr. Osgood will demonstrate the situation between Christian and non-Christian cultures is fundamentally a conflict between two entirely different worldviews and will thereby expel the myth of neutral inquiry. Osgood will then proceed to give a model for a God-centered apology to non-Christian worldviews as well as a critique of the culturally popular arguments against the existence of God. This session will conclude with practical interaction with primary source material of all levels of cultural argumentation that attacks the Christian worldview.

Lunch - 11am

Session Three: An Apology to the Cults - 12pm
In this session, Mr. Downs will contend that it is the particular (Triune) God of Christianity that is "back of everything." Without this particular God, man could not live, move, or have his being. Therefore, any other sort of god is no god at all. In our pluralistic society, there are a variety of groups offering their viewpoint on who God is. But, can their particular form of deity, whether they claim it is derived from the biblical text or not, account for our how we know what we know, what is real, and how we should live our lives? In application, Downs will examine various New Religious Movements, asking if their particular god can give an account for reality. Downs will conclude where the book of Romans begins - contending that the worship of other gods is idolatry and part of the suppression of the truth (of the God) they do know.

Question and Answer Session - 1pm
Click here to register. There will be no cost to attend and everyone is welcome, but we would like a head-count beforehand.
To be held at Calvary Orthodox Presbyterian Church
10 Spruce Street
Middletown PA 17057
http://www.calvaryopc.com
Further information e-mail jeff@rctr.org or call (717) 333-7969


A list of area resturants will be availble at the church. For a map of Middletown PA click here. Local Hotels & Motels click here for a area Bed & Breakfast click here.

The last laugh-2

-v-

Bud looked over the menu. There was only one item--ambrosia.
The waitress came to take the order.
“You look familiar,” Bud said. “Haven't I see you somewhere before?”
She blushed. “I'm Fanny Crosby. So what's your pleasure, gentlemen?”
“I think I'll try the ambrosia hors d'oeuvre, followed by the ambrosia entree, along with a side-dish of ambrosia,” Bud answered.
“How'd you like the entree prepared?” she asked.
“What are my choices?”
“Well, the chef's special is fricasseed ambrosia. But if you prefer, you can also have your ambrosia boiled, broiled, baked, barbecued, roasted, toasted, deep-fried, stir-fried, pan-fried, poached, stewed, scalloped, sautéed, or curried.”
“Do you happen to have deviled ambrosia?”
She blanched. Mike and Gabe averted their eyes and shook their dreadlocks. The whole room went dead silent except for a contagious fit of throat-clearing all around. Bud was getting warm around the ears. Bud Buster had just committed yet another breach of heavenly etiquette.
After the color returned to her cheeks, she explained to him that that sort of preparation was only available at The Demon Rum. Indeed, that's the only sort of preparation they ever did Down Under--with a heavy accent on ever, as in forever.

Bud ordered the fricasseed ambrosia.
“Good choice, old chap!” Gabe exclaimed. “Latimer does the most divine ambrosia. Best place to eat since that little bistro in Herculaneum Mike and I used to frequent went out of business back in--when was it, now?--AD 80 or so.”
“79!” Mike corrected.
“Yes, that's right!”
“Did you say 'Latimer'?” Bud asked.
“Uh-huh, the late Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worchester. “We'll go back into the kitchen and introduce you after dinner.”
“You say he's the chef?”
“On week-ends. And Huss during the week.”
“John Huss?”
“Precisely! They're the two best chefs in all of Zion.”
“How did they get the job?”
“Their personal experience with the auto-da-fe gave them on-the-job training with the culinary arts. No substitute for hands-on experience, you know!”
“And is that why Luther is the bar-tender?”
“On week-ends. Pascal during the week. That's their department. Can't beat a Frog and a Kraut when it comes to beverages! Nice thing about heaven--everyone knows his place.”

“Pascal is also the go-to guy for handicapping the Antichrist,” Gabe interjected.
“What do you mean?” Bud asked.
“Whenever a promising candidate comes along--like Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, or Kaiser Wilhelm--folks flock to Pascal to lay odds. He and Newton had a real row one time when Newton, in the 105th edition of his Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, came up with a numerological proof for Napoleon III, whereas Pascal had him at no better than 50/50. The cherubic pool went heavily for Newton's candidate, but the Seraphim, who are better connected with the Powers-That-Be, chose to stand pat.”
“So Pascal won the bet?,” Bud asked.
“Well, in the 106th edition, Newton attributed their 'apparent' difference of opinion to a simple misunderstanding--what he meant all along was the 'spirit' of the Antichrist, not the 'embodiment' of the Antichrist.”
“I read somewhere that Newton was an Arian,” Bud said, in a quizzical tone of voice.
“Repented on his deathbed,” Mike replied, with an air of finality.
“And not a moment too soon!” Gabe added, helpfully. “The Pale Rider was one house away when Izzy had a last minute change of heart.”
“And how did Milton make it in?”
“Yet another deathbed conversion. He was warned by his chaplain that unless he recanted certain theses in De Doctrina Christiana, he would be spending eternity with Mary Powell. Now that threw the fear of God into him--let me tell you!”

-vi-

“So, Bud, who do you think is the Antichrist,” Gabe asked.
“Back at Holy Smokes, all the smart money was on Hillary Rodham.”
“Doesn't the Antichrist have to be a man?” Mike interjected.
“Yeah, but Hillary's true gender was one of the hotly disputed questions.”
“I take it, though, that she wasn't your first pick?” Gabe asked.
“The type-casting just seemed too good to be true--if 'good' is the operative word. I mean, if the Antichrist came straight out of central casting, who'd he be fooling? No, it has to be someone less obvious.”
“So who do you suspect?”
“The meter maid.”
“The meter maid?”
“Yes, the meter maid.”
“Which one?”
“You mean there's more than one? Sure about that? Haven't you ever noticed that they all look alike--right down to the little red eyes?”
“Can't say I have, but whenever Mike and I are sent on a mission to terra firma, we've got diplomatic license plates, so we can park wherever we please.”
“Well, every meter maid I ever saw was a pistol-packin' momma in a pintsized three-wheeler. That's what tipped me off in the first place. There's only one meter maid in all the world. She's omniscient and omnipresent, handing out tickets if you're two minutes over the limit, or two inches over the line--and just generally making life a living hell. Now, if that's not an entry-level job for one-world government, I don't know what is!”
“I see your point! But, strictly speaking, only God is omniscient or omnipresent.”
“Okay, okay...but the meter maid's near enough to it to have a decidedly preternatural aura about her, if 'her' is the operative word.”

-vii-

“There's a question I've always wanted to ask when I got to heaven,” Bud said.
“What's that?” Gabe answered.
“How could the highest archangel become a devil?”
“The highest who?”
“Lucifer.”
“Who makes you think Lucifer was ever the highest archangel?”
“Oh, I don't know...that's what I've always heard.”
“I see that Old Horney has been padding his résumé again. But back when Mike and I knew him, he was just a royal page. Indeed, he was one of my employees in The Ministry of Telecommunications--before it became the Ministry of Misinformation, oh...some six-thousand years ago. Even back then he was a bit of a bigmouth and gossip. Should have seen it coming.”
“So what caused him to fall?”
“He got tired of being a lowly errand boy--hankered to see his name up in lights, sit in the big chair. You know the drill. Don't be fooled by all the low-falutin' titles like the 'The Prince of Darkness' and 'His Satanic Majesty.' Underneath it all he's just your average, small-time social climber and all-around flimflam man--a showman with a cardboard crown.”
“But if he wasn't the highest archangel, how come so many other angels followed him.”
“It isn't so much that they followed him as followed his example. He got them to think they were doing themselves a favor. Rebellion is infectious. All it takes is one guy to make the first move. Then the idea takes on a life of its own. Hell is chock-full of frustrated prima donnas.”
“But how could a sinless angel sin?”
“Again, all it takes is a vivid imagination. You don't have to be a sinner to contemplate good and evil. That's how you know right from wrong in the first place.”
“But wasn't it a lost cause from the get-go?”
“Yes, but that's only because you know how the story ends. God plays his hand close to his vest. Predestination would never work if he laid all his cards on the table, face up.”
“I've never been able to wrap my head around all that predestination business,” Bud said. “I mean, if it's a stacked deck, then what difference does it make what we do, or did, or didn't do?”
“That's a delicate question,” Mike replied. “Pity you never read Marcel Proust's immortal novel on the subject. A trifle long-winded, but up here we've got all the time in the world!”
“What's its called?” Gabe interposed.
”Remembrance of Things That Might Have Been.”
“I never knew Proust wrote a book by that title.”
“He didn't. That's one of the things that might have been! I said it was a pity, did I not?”
“Then how did you hear of it?”
“From a well-placed seraph, who heard it first from...oh, well--you know who!”
“Even so, they had a lot more to lose than to gain, didn't they?” Bud asked, in tones of resignation.
“Who?”
“Adam and Eve.”
“Oh, back to that. Well, sure, but that's the thing about sin. Where sinning is concerned, at least in my own extensive observation--I can't speak from personal experience, you understand--you never know what you're getting into until you get into it, at which point it's too late to get out. Besides, they thought that even a demotion would be a promotion of sorts. That's why Lucifer tempted Adam and Eve--to give him someone to lord it over.”

-viii-

“When did Lucifer have time to rebel before the fall of Adam?” Bud asked.
“Well, for all we know, it was a matter of days, weeks, months or even years before that Adam's lapse,” Mike replied.
“You mean you don't know?”
“Not from our vantage-point. According to Metatron's Sempiternal Theory of Relativity, heaven and earth occupy different time zones.”
“Metatron?”
“Yes, he won the Noel Prize for Metaphysics back in 4003 BC--your time. Very clever fellow--even for an angel.”
“What is more,” Gabe interjected, “there are two different solutions to Metatron's equations. The Thrones and Dominions, seconded by Boethius, Berkeley, Augustine, Anselm, and Edwards, are of the opinion that just as time passes faster in a dream than in the waking world, time passes faster or slower in the supernal realm than in the sublunary realm, relative to one another. Time moves very fast in heaven, but very slow in hell.

The other theory, favored by the Principalities and Powers, as well as Newton, Aquinas, Scotus, Philoponus, and Bradwardine, is that that the supernal realm is a separate domain, parallel to the sublunary realm. Each sphere has its own absolute timeframe, along with its very own point of origin.”

“Isn't there some way of proving one or the other?”
“No, because you can't tell, when you're within the sublunary timeline, if that's isocronic with the supernal timeline, or vice versa. You can only be in one time at a time, as it were. I should add that Kierkegaard and Tertullian dismiss the whole question as absurd, while Pascal remains undecided.”
“But surely the good Lord knows the answer.”
“Naturally, but he keeps his own counsel.”

-ix-

“I had another queston for you,” Bud asked.
“What about?” Mike answered.
“The Lake of Fire.”
“What about the Lake of Fire.”
“Well, I believe it, of course, 'cause it's in the Good Book and all, but...”
“But what?”
“But it does seem a wee bit excessive. I mean, is it really strictly necessary to cast the damned into a lake of lava or vat of acid or whatever it's filled with.”
“It's filled with water--that's what it's filled with.”
“Water?”
“Yes, water.”
“Plain old water?”
“No, not exactly.”
“What kind of water, then? Mineral water? Distilled water? Artesian spring water? Clorinated water?”
“Holy water. We have it blessed by Aaron.”
“So what makes it the Lake of Fire?”
“A simple chemical reaction--like putting a Tums tablet in a glass of water.”
“I don't get it.”
“When pure evil comes in contact with utter goodness, you get a this colorful chemical reaction. But all the fizzle and sizzle is supplied by the evildoer, not by the water itself. The water is perfectly swimable and drinkable if you happen to be a saint or an angel. Ingersoll used to get all lathered up about this--still does, more so than ever!--but you might as well curse a bottle of Perrier.”

-x-

“So, Gabriel, what's your day job?” Bud asked.
“Gabe's an Attaché to the Ministry of Misinformation,” Mike interjected. “So am I.”
“Ministry of Misinformation?”
“That's right. Our mission is to delude the lost and ensnare the wise in their own craftiness.”
“Doesn't that sound a tad underhanded to you,” Bud asked, a little bit shocked--not to say, scandalized.
“Underhanded?” Mike replied, in questioning tone of voice, as the Tetramorph gazed at all three pair of his hands.
“That's a rather jaundiced way of looking at the matter,” Gabe interjected. “Think of it as a practical joke.”
“A joke?”
“Yes, a cosmic joke. God's a great practical joker, you know.”
“He is?”
“Indeed, is it not written that he who sits in heaven shall laugh them to score and hold them in derision?”
“I guess I never took it all that literally.”
“I'm surprised. You were a Southern Baptist, weren't you?
“Yes, I was. Still am, I guess.”
“It's just the difference between worldly wisdom and otherworldly wisdom. To the philosopher of this age, wisdom from above is just so much folly and Tomfoolery. But remember that the court jester is the smartest, sharpest character in the play--the only one who's in on the joke.”
“But it still strikes me as a tad unscrupulous.”
“How so? Just because some people can't take a joke? You'll always have folks who don't know satire when they see it. When Dean Swift came out with his Modest Proposal, why, some folks took it to be a new dainty for the five-star palette! Is God to blame because too many men have no sense of humor?
“Just who is God spoofing, anyway?” Bud asked. “What do you guys do?”
“Well, there was the time when Mike and I painted navels on Adam and Eve. Then were was the whole peppered moth business.”
“What business is that?”
“We spray-painted some white moths a darker shade. You wouldn't believe how many men were taken in by that prank! Scientists are such a straight-laced lot!” Gabe said, convulsed with laughter.
“Painfully earnest!” Mike interjected. “There was also the occasion when Gabe and I were up all night gluing the wings onto Archaeopteryx.”
At this point, Mike was shaking so hard that the vibrations were making him levitate involuntarily.
“Not to mention Pitdown man,” Gabe blurted out, in-between spasms of laughter.
“You were even behind the Pitdown hoax?” Bud asked, astonished.
“Who else? I also get a big kick out of conjuring up quantum quandaries by changing myself into quarks and tachyons, playing dead, being in two places at once, and all that fun stuff. Poor old Einstein never figured it out!”
“Gabe is such tease!”
“Sleight-of-hand is child's play when you've got six hands to work with!” Gabe exclaimed, modestly.
“What about fossil water on Mars?”
“We didn't have enough lead-time on that one, which is why we kept zapping the unmanned probes. But in the end we were able to fake it with an out-take from an old Star Trek episode--you know, what with the styrofoam rocks and day-glo color scheme. Looks kind of cheesy up close, but the resolution is too poor to detect at a distance.”
“Sometimes though, the joke is on us,” Mike admitted. “I mean, when Crick came up with his Panspermia hypothesis--now that takes a real leap of the imagination!”
“Wish we'd thought of it first!”
“No, that would be way too far-fetched for any self-respecting creationist. To be really gullible, you just can't compete with the pros,” Mike said--feathers flying every which way in gales of hilarity.
“Next week we'll need to tweak the red-shift once again,” Gabe said.
“Why?”
“Every time they send a new telescope into orbit, we have to push the stage-lights back a bit further to maintain the illusion. It takes constant monitoring and incessant tinkering to keep up appearances.”
“Stage-lights?” Bud asked, in a questioning tone of voice.
“What you vulgar earthlings call the 'stars,'” Gabe explained.
“Who runs the Ministry, anyway?”
“It's chaired on a rotating basis. Last year, Bishop Wilberforce; this year, William Jennings Bryan; next year, Philip Henry Gosse--with G. K. Chesterton as the Director-at-large.”
At that moment the appetizers arrived. After Gabe said grace, they dug into the first course with relish--while the Bebop Band played a Thelonius Monk arrangement of “Too Close To Heaven.”

The last laugh-1

-i-


It was a Saturday night in downtown Zion, and The Olympian Speakeasy was filling up fast. Indeed, Mike and Gabe were waiting in line for a table. The late Pastor Bud Buster was with them. In Zion, everybody was the late someone or another--'cepting for the angels, naturally.

Pastor Bud was a new arrival, assigned to Mike for orientation week. He was still pretty green--green as a chameleon on Astroturf, quite unacculturated to the otherworldly street smarts of urban life in the Holy City.

“Isn't there a free table over there?” Bud asked.
“That's set aside for the Angelic Doctor,” Mike answered. “He's got a lifetime reservation, and in Zion, a lifetime reservation is going the distance.”
“The Angelic who?”
“The Angelic Doctor?” Mike answered.
“They didn't teach us about no Angelic Doctor at Holy Smokes Bible College,” Bud explained. “Just Bible and rodeo. Still, whoever he is, it seems a mite unsportsmanlike that he's got a lifetime reservation.”
“Well, he wrote a whole Quodlibet on the finer points of terpsichorean angelology--which got him in good with the upper management,” Gabe interjected.
“You mean...like...how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Bud asked.
“Exactly!”
“Seems like kind of a useless question to me,” Bud said.
Gabe glared at him while Mike had to suppress a frown. Bud reddened, realizing that he had committed a celestial faux-pas.
“Let me assure you,” said Mike, in tones of archangelic solemnity, “that up here it's a question of utmost metaphysical import!”
“Anyway, it's not like he has the whole table to himself,” said Gabe, recovering his self-composure. “He usually eats with St. Anselm. Why, only last Saturday they got into a rather intense discussion over Al's modal version of the ontological argument. Even St. Augustine got drawn into the conversation. Tom thought they were ganging up on him, at which point he abruptly reverted, in mid-sentence, from Latin to his native Neopolitan. Unable to win the debate, this at least precluded him from losing it.”
“So what's the answer?” Bud asked.
“The answer to what?” Mike replied.
“How many angels can...”
“Oh, that again. I'm not sure what to say,” Mike replied, slightly flustered. “I mean, that's an extremely personal question--one we don't ordinarily discuss in mixed company. What do you think, Gabe? Is this suitable material for an outworlder to hear?”
“If he doesn't hear it from us, he'll hear it from the wrong sort--in snickering, gold-plated back-alleys. Besides, we're all grown-ups here, and he's almost one of us by now,” Gabe whispered, under his breath.
“I suppose so,” said Mike, with a sigh. “Very well then,” he continued, in a low tone of voice, after looking around the room. “If you really must know, it all depends. In flamenco, it comes to 133 1/3 angels to the 50th power; in square dancing--220 1/4 to the 100th power, and in break dancing--545 1/2 to the 150th power. And that's not counting ballet, tap-dancing, the waltz, the foxtrot, or the Chattanooga Choo-choo.”
“How can you have a fraction of an angel?” Bud asked.
“Just as you've got the four-color problem, we've got the tetramorphic close-packing problem. There's an intimate branch of hyperdimensional geometry on all possible positions, wingtip to wingtip, of illocal angelology, but I fear it would be a bit over your head. Why, even poor old Newton went back to counting on his fingers--dubbed it 'digital fluxions,' he did.”
“I'll take your word for it,” Bud replied.

-ii-

“I trust you had a pleasant flight,” Mike asked, as they waited in the lounge.
“I knew a priest back on earth who assured me that I'd have a layover in Purgatory. I didn't believe him, of course, but I was still gratified to be booked on a nonstop flight to heaven,” Bud said.
Mike was winking at Gabe, while Gabe nodded in return.
“There is no Purgatory, is there?” Bud asked.
“It's a matter of definition,” Mike replied.
“What do you mean?” Bud asked.
“So many folks put so much faith in Purgatory that we decided to meet them half way. After all, if they can invent a Purgatory, so can we,” Mike replied.
“We aim to please!” Gabe interjected.
“I don't follow you.”
“We positioned Purgatory on the upper story of Dis, as the grand entrance to hell,” Gabe explained.
“There's always a hot market for prime real estate Down Under,” Mike interposed.
“New arrivals are mightily impressed at first. You should have been there to see Mussolini's face when the truth began to dawn on him,” Gabe continued.
“How so?”
“Well, long before his adoring public turned him into a Christmas tree ornament, Il Duce had this nifty little arrangement with a charming old Premonstratensian abbey just outside of Trieste. In exchange for a weekly wad of lira, delivered in thick, discreet manila envelops, the monks would celebrate a Requiem Mass in his honor once a day and twice on Sundays.”
“Why?”
“Why? To replenish his pension plan in the Treasury of Merit--like making regular deposits to a Swiss Bank account, you know.”
“Consider it a nest-egg for the Netherworld,” Mike added, helpfully.
“But doesn't that border on entrapment?” Bud asked, anxiously.
“Oh dear, you do have such a literal way of looking at things!” Gabe exclaimed, with a sigh. “Think of it as a sit-com--where the bad guy gets his comeuppance.”
“I guess so,” said Bud, in a doubtful tone of voice. “So what tipped him off?”
“He began to complain about the room service. And when he got no satisfaction, he took the elevator down to the first floor.”
“I don't understand,” Bud said.
“Hell is built like an upside down skyscraper,” Gabe explained. “You might call it a groundscraper, in the subterranean sense of the word. So the upper story is really the lower story, and vice versa--depending on how you look at it. Gives a whole new meaning to that sinking feeling.”
“And the elevators only go down, never up,” Mike interjected. “So once he got down to the first floor, he became cognizant of his truly abysmal situation.”
“How in hell can hell have a first floor?” Bud asked. “I thought it was a bottomless pit?”
“That's what makes it one of the Seven Wonders of the Underworld, designed by the old architectural firm of Hilbert, Cantor & Associates.”
“The original blueprint was deposited in the Empyrean Archive of Public Works, if you'd like to look it over sometime,” Gabe added. “A very ingenious feat of engineering.”
“What are the other Six Wonders?”
“That's above your security clearance!”

-iii-

After they were seated, Pastor Bud looked around a bit apprehensively. The sports bar was fitted with HD Plasma TV screens and Dolby surround sound so that every diner could enjoy the great and glorious spectacle of the scarlet whore a.k.a. the painted Jezebel a.k.a. the amber-scented Delilah weep and gnash her teeth in the Lake of Fire.

In the background, the Bebop Band was playing a riff on “When the Saints Go Marching In,” with Vivaldi on bass, Palestrina on drums, Mendelssohn taking the alto sax, and Bach at the jazz organ console. Handel would be by later that evening with his clarinet after he finished rehearsing the Junior Cherub Choir for Sunday morning services.

At one table, Milton and Dante were collaborating on a new poem, having discovered, upon their arrival, that both were way off on the architecture of heaven. It took them several centuries to hammer out a verse scheme agreeable to both, as terza rima was unsuitable to Elizabethan English, and blank verse to Medieval Italian. Finally, they settled upon Esperanto, for Milton was more at ease with Romance usage than Dante with Anglo-Saxon--although they gave serious consideration, for a time, to rewriting the Inferno in German since everything already sounds like a curse-word in German.

Then there was the Catholic question. For patriotic reasons, Dante was a Romanist, while Milton was an ardent foe of popery. With a word of advice from St. Peter, they agreed to confine all Augustan allusions to the state of the Avignon papacy, upon which they each could vent with equal spleen.

At another table, Jon and Sarah Edwards were having a romantic meal out on the town. Although it was hard to make out by candlelight, the Rev. Edwards seemed to be illustrating a point by dangling a spider over the flame.

At yet another table, Chuck Spurgeon and Sam Rutherford were debating church polity. Rutherford said the twenty-four elders in heaven proved the divino jure origin of Presbyterial governance, but Spurgeon countered by saying it wasn't for naught that John was denominated a Baptist.

“Is that who I think it is?” Bud asked, pointing to a table in the far corner of the room.
“Calvin and the Wesley boys, you mean?” Mike answered.
“I thought they didn't' get along.”
“That was before,” Gabe explained. “Heaven is a best seminary.”
“But it still took upwards of a century for Calvin to get John straightened out on the finer points of predestination,” Mike interjected.
“Thankfully, we've got time to spare up here,” Gabe added. “You should hear some of his brother's brand-new hymns on the horrible decree. Very edifying!”

“And what about that rather dispirited man over there?”
“Who? Oh, you mean Bishop Berkeley. Just as there are degrees of pain in hell, there are degrees of happiness in heaven,” Mike explained.
“But why isn't he as overjoyed as all the rest?”
“At first, he was bowled by the place. It was the very vindication of esse is percipi.
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, I see they didn't teach you that at Holy Smokes Bible College either. Very well then. Berkeley was of the opinion that things are really thoughts. And he tried to convince everyone that, deep down, this is what the common man believes as well. For his high-minded efforts, he was treated as a laughing-stock and butt of endless abuse. When, however, he finally made it to heaven, where everything is oh-so ethereal, his was, indeed, the common sense philosophy.”
“So why does he not appear to be more upbeat.”
“Well, there's nothing very revolutionary about telling everyone what they already believe. When he endeavored to explain his philosophy up here, it was like trying to prove that water is wet and grass is green. Everyone nodded with polite approval and went on about their business. It was rather like the reception accorded to Alister Crowley in hell.”
“How so?”
“Back on earth, to be a devil-worshipper with a worshipful throng was naughty fun; but when he actually got to hell, it was something of an anticlimax. Down Under, a Satanist is a dime a dozen, and he was pretty low on the pecking-order of infernal infamy. And over time, of which there's no shortage, above or below, he began to find the company distinctly disagreeable. Why, Down Under, they've got time to burn--literally!”

“And who's that?” Bud asked.
“Who do you mean?” Mike replied.
“The dude over there in the tiara.”
“Oh, that's Pius IX.”
“Why's he playing a game of Solitaire?”
”When he first got here he used to play a friendly hand of stud poker with Pascal, St. Theresa, and Bernard of Clairvaux.”
“I guess I understand about Pascal, since he could play the odds. But what about the other two?” Bud interrupted.
“Theresa and Bernard both bring a certain mystic intuition to the game.”
“I see. So what went wrong?”
“Whenever Pius was dealt a weak hand, he had a sneaky habit of switching to his infallible setting. At first they chalked it up to beginner's luck, but after the winning streak continued unabated for the next twenty years or so, they started to suspect that he had an ex cathedra card up his sleeve--which was tantamount to cheating, as far as they were concerned.”
“You mean the Pope really is infallible?”
“Not as a rule, but this is heaven, after all, so we humored him.”
“Service is our middle name!” Gabe interjected.
“Did he ever fess up?”
“Whenever they confronted him, he'd simply grin with that wry, Mona Lisa smile of his. So now he plays Solitaire.”
“Sounds highly questionable to me,” Bud said.
“Pius insisted that his conduct throughout the whole affair conformed to the highest canons of casuistry--which provoked a rather strenuous exchange with Pascal over the respective merits, or lack thereof, of probabilism, equiprobabilism, and probabiliorism.”

-iv-

“You seem to be a tad uneasy,” Gabe said.
“It's just not what I was expecting,” Bud said.
“What's not to expect?” Gabe asked.
“Well, the bottle and the altar-call don't mix where I come from.”
“I thought you were a Southern Baptist?”
“What of it?”
“Doesn't that make you a whisky Calvinist?”
Bud was speechless.
“Heaven takes a bit of getting used to,” Gabe continued. “Why, you should have seen the expression on Fra Angelico's face when we picked him at the airport back in 1455. It was obvious that he'd never seen a real angel before!”
“And then there was the first time that Raphael got to meet the Blessed Virgin,” Mike interjected. “I guess he was expecting a face like Dolores Del Rio, not Golda Meir!”
“Still, I wasn't prepared for a celestial establishment serving intoxicants,” Bud said.
“Intoxicants? Let me assure you that every elixir served on these premises is non-alcoholic!” Mike remonstrated.
At this, Bud let out an audible sign of relief and his facial muscles went flaccid.
“And unlike that other place, The Olympian is a strictly non-smoking establishment,” he added.
“What other place?” Bud asked.
“Why, The Demon Rum saloon--Down Under,” Gabe answered, lowering his gaze. “If you want to get your mitts on a real Bloody Mary, ya gotta go to Bloody Mary. She's the barmaid.”
“How do you know that?” Bud asked.
“Gabe's a part-time building inspector,” Mike explained.
“It takes a certain amount of regular maintenance to keep a firetrap up to code,” Gabe interjected. “The Demon Rum has been fined on numerous occasions for code violations--wrapping bare wires with rubber tape, stuffing insulation in the walls, stocking extinguishers and other contraband retardants smuggled in from off-world suppliers--in exchange for a few magic spells to hex old enemies and charm new hearts.”
“But if they get caught and punished every time, why do they keep on doing it?” Bud asked.
“Because they're incorrigible, that's why,” Gabe answered.
“Hellions do the damnedest things,” Mike interjected. “You might say it goes with the territory. And it's not as though they've got a lot to lose at this stage of the game!”
“Where in hell is The Demon Rum anyway?” Bud asked.
“In the third circle, on the corner of Broadway and Easy St., right behind the Blockbuster, and down a block from the old law firm of Lupine, Rapine, & Abaddon,” Gabe answered.
“What's it like Down Under?” Bud asked.
“Pretty dingy,” Gabe answered. “The scenery hasn't been refurbished since Hieronymus Bosch was last brought in to perk up the decor.”
“It's soooo Fifteen Century!” Mike exclaimed. “And, needless to say, The Demon Run caters to a very different clientele than we do up here,” he said, with a pious sniff.
“Such as?” Bud asked.
“Oh, all the usual riff-raff,” Gabe answered. “Fallen angels and fallen broads; hypocrites and heretics; Simonites and sodomites; Turks, apostates, and reprobates; infidels and idolaters; lawyers, abortionists, and Antipopes; perverts and politicians; French diplomats and Belgian bureaucrats; rock stars and porn stars; Swiss bankers and eastern liberals; merit-mongers, free-willers, loose-livers, and Bible-debunkers; psychics and psychos; freethinkers and hard drinkers; Berkeley professors and tax assessors; Darwinists, feminists, environmentalists, and so on, ad nauseum. In sum, hell on earth transposed to a lower key.”
“How could a loving God permit it?” Bud exclaimed.
“Ours is not to say,” Mike replied.
“Last time I was down there,” Gabe interposed, “Leibniz was attempting to prove to Russell that hell is the best of all possible pandemonia--based on the Principle of Sufficient Unreason.
“Did Russell agree?”
“He was unpersuaded at first until Kant piped in with a supporting argument.”
“What was that?”
“The nonontological argument.”
“Which is what?”
“Well, Kant reasoned that according to the privative theory of evil, pure evil is nonbeing, such that if being is not a predicate, then--by parity of reasoning--nonbeing must be a predicate, in which case less is more, the badder the better, or something like that. I'm a little fuzzy on the details. It's been a while.”
“I guess I'm gratified to learn that The Olympian only serves nonalcoholic nectar. But shouldn't we avoid even the appearance of evil?”
“What evil? What appearance? What's more natural than for spirits to imbibe spirits?” Mike replied.
“This is heaven. Every hour is the happy hour,” Gabe interjected.

Do-it-yourself popery

Dave Armstrong, a lay Catholic apologist, has replied, sort of, to a couple of things I posted on my blog a while back.



Last July, I had commented on a list of books in defense of Catholicism posted, as I recall, at his old Erasmus website. In his reply, he refers the reader to his annotated list at Amazon.com. That, at least, is what I remember, so that further comment would draw us into an exercise in comparative higher criticism, which goes beyond the parameters of my original commentary.

I shall, however, venture a few replies. Armstrong draws attention to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, a catechism is, by common definition, a popular manual of Christian doctrine, and not a work of apologetics, in the sense of fundamental theology. It does not, therefore, afford a counter-example to my claim.
In addition, Armstrong says the following: >>

<< [This is strange logic indeed. By this "reasoning," a Protestant could argue:
1. The Bible is the sole infallible authority in Protestantism.
2. Laymen can make a case that the Bible is what it is.
3. This presents the striking phenomenon of a non-biblical defense of a Bible-heavy institution.
4. Therefore, who needs the Bible?
How does it follow that something is not necessary simply because an entity outside of it argues that it is true and necessary? >>

Unfortunately for Armstrong, his argument from analogy breaks down at the very point where it needs to hold fast. Protestant theology affirms the right of private judgment whereas Catholic theology denies it. Hence, there is no parallel between a lay Catholic apologist and a lay Protestant apologist at the relevant point of comparison.

<< Furthermore, the very magisterium that Mr. Hays absurdly attempts to pit against Catholic laypeople, has itself made it very clear that those laypeople have a definite, important role in apologetics and catechesis and evangelism: Vatican II: Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People (Apostolicam Actuositatem). That magisterial document states:

. . . the Council earnestly exhorts the laity to take a more active part, each according to his talents and knowledge and in fidelity to the mind of the Church, in the explanation and defense of Christian principles and in the correct application of them to the problems of our times.
(ch. II, section 6)] >>

Quoting from the magisterium to prove the consistency of his practice merely begs the question.

i) Cardinal Ratzinger, for one, is quite aware of the tension: “The faith no longer seemed exempt from human decision-making but rather was now apparently determined by it. And we knew that the bishops had learned from the theologians the new things they were now proposing...how could the bishops in the exercise of their teaching office preside over theologians when they, the bishops, received their insights only from specialists and thus were dependent on the guidance of scholars?” J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius 1998), 133.

ii) The logical tension remains. An institution which denies the right of private judgment in favor of the magisterium is dependent on the private opinion of extra-magisterial consultants for dogmatic guidance.

And the same tension is evident when the magisterium delegates the explanation and defense of the faith to the laity.

By way of reply, Armstrong says that:

<< [only insofar as we are in harmony with what that magisterium teaches, as the Council explained in my citation above. And -- to be clear -- we lay apologists have no "authority" per se: we only have more or less degrees of truth in what we assert is the Church's teaching. If we defend what is actual Church teaching, then our activities are perfectly legitimate and fully Catholic, and indeed highly encouraged by the Church -- as the magisterium confirms] >>

Armstrong is now propping up one question-begging assertion with another. When the laity speaks for the magisterium, rather than vice versa, how do we know that what they say on behalf of the magisterium is, in fact, harmonious with magisterial teaching?

In reply to my statement that the real Roman Catholicism is represented by the likes of Rahner and Raymond Brown, Armstrong counters that:

<< [Raymond Brown was not even an orthodox Catholic in many beliefs. Yet Mr. Hays wants to lift him up as an example of "real Catholicism," while in effect denigrating the above monumental figures] >>

This reply is striking on several counts:

i) Among the “above monumental figures” listed by Armstrong is Socrates. So Socrates was an Orthodox Catholic, but Raymond Brown was not. I'm afraid that this leaves me a bit mystified by how Armstrong defines the outer bounds of orthodox Catholicism. Does the name of Socrates crop up in the False Decretals somewhere? I must have missed that.

ii) Ratzinger would be another one of the “monumental figures” whom I implicitly “denigrate.” This also raises mysterious questions as to how Armstrong draws the lines. In #59 of his “150 Reasons Why I am a Catholic,” Armstrong had said that “Liberal Protestantism, and evangelicalism increasingly, have accepted "higher critical" methods of biblical interpretation.“

Yet Cardinal Ratzinger, for one, has also accepted higher critical methods of biblical interpretation. Just consider the following statement: “The moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile. It was then that the account that we have just heard-based, to be sure, on very ancient traditions-assumed its present form,” J. Ratzinger, In the Beginning (Eerdmans 1995), 10-11.

Now anyone conversant with the history of higher criticism can see that this is just a variant on the old Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis. If Ratzinger had written this during the papacy of Pius IX or Leo XIII, he would have been defrocked.

iii) Back to Brown--didn't his publications receive the Nihil Obstat, Imprimi Potest, and Imprimatur before going to press? But that isn't good enough for Armstrong. You see, when push comes to shove, he doesn't put his faith in the official review process and accountability system which the magisterium has put in place to ensure that Catholic authors are orthodox. That is why Armstrong is, at bottom, a skin-deep convert. All he's done is to exchange sola Scriptura for lay Popery.

iv) Of course, if Armstrong doesn't like Raymond Brown, there are plenty of other examples to prove the same point. What about Joseph Fitzmyer, very much the higher critic, who's a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, no less. Or what about Cardinal Koenig, who persuaded the Vatican II Council to recant on the Church's traditional adherence to the plenary inspiration of Scripture? How high up the latter would Armstrong like to go?

Regarding my 3-part series on “Back to Babylon,” all Armstrong can do is to say that I make “many absurd statements,” and then quote a short passage. Unfortunately for Armstrong, adjectives (“absurd”) are a poor substitute for reasoned argument, and quoting something someone has said hardly amounts to a refutation of what he said. Had he backed up his adjectives with something resembling a counter-argument, then that would be different, but as it stands, there is no choo-choo pulling his caboose.

Finally, Armstrong rounds out with an ad hominem inquiry regarding my credentials. This is odd coming from Armstrong. What are his credentials? He is not a bishop or even a priest. He doesn't teach theology at a Catholic university.

Well, Dave, just between you and me, I'm the last surviving member of the Illuminati. Our order can trace its ordination in unbroken apostolic succession straight back to the last true Pope, Urban VI. You can find all this meticulously documented in the Ethiopic version of the False Decretals. I conceal my true identity so that hit-men from Opus Dei don't erase me from the space-time continuum. It's a lonely existence, but someone's got to do it, and I've been assured a reduced sentence of 52 years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 5 hours, 4 minutes, and 59 seconds in Purgatory for my supererogatory efforts.

How art thou fallen from heaven

Who is Isaiah talking about in chap. 14?

The Alexandrian school, with its love of allegory, identified Isa 14 with the fall of Satan ("Lucifer," Vulgate).

The Protestant Reformers rejected this identification, and they've been followed by a number of contemporary commentators. However:

i) It may well be true that the immediate historical referent is to some Mesopotamian king. Various candidates have been proposed, viz., Belshazzar, Nabondinus, Nebuchadnezzar, Sargon, Sennacherib, Tiglath-pileser.

The concrete referent depends, in part, on whether you favor the tradition or liberal late dating of the book. In addition, inspiration is not bounded by the past or present time-horizon.

We should also resist the temptation to draw too fine a distinction between king and kingdom (a whole dynasty).

ii) That, however, doesn't account for the imagery itself. There is, in comparative mythology, a revolt-in-heaven motif. This lies behind Isa 14.

One suggestion would be that Isaiah is making use of stock mythopoetic imagery, in the manner of Milton and Dante, in his taunt-song to whomever the historical referent happens to be.

iii) That, however, doesn't account for the origin of the motif. Since, in terms of genealogy, all of these cultures go back to a common point of origin (Gen 9-11), the common motif likely has its roots in a primordial tradition, of which Scripture either preserves the authentic tradition or corrects a corrupted version.

iv) The three-decker universe, with heaven as the abode of supernatural agents, terra firma as the abode of earthlings, and the netherworld as the realm of the dead seems to be a cultural universal. It's a natural figurative extension of an earthbound observer's viewpoint.

v) The analogy between stars and angels is commonplace in Scripture.

vi) Again, by logical extension, is the analogy between waning/falling stars (e.g., meteors) and fallen angels. (v)-(vi) figure in Revelation. See also Lk 10:18 (cf. Isa 14:12, LXX).

vi) Since (the planet) Venus is the brightest star in the night sky, and since it has its own periodic phases (the transit of Venus), causing it to wax and wane, it is a natural choice to illustrate a fall from heaven.

vii) In apocalyptic literature, you have a micro/macroscopic parallel between earth and heaven. For example, pagan kingdoms are treated as front-organizations for the invisible kingdom of darkness--working behind-the-scenes.

Postmortem on Holding-4

iii) The only proper way in which to exegete the concept of divine mercy and compassion in Rom 9 is not to import and intrude some free-floating, reductionistic definition supplied by anthropology or sociology, but to retrace the redemptive-historical trajectory, of which Rom 9 is the apex. Paul himself directs the reader to the relevant background material: Exod 33:11. And how does the concept function in the original? Listen to what a number of "credentialed scholars have to say:

"While mercy can be expected because of God's nature and historical actions, it can never be demanded or earned; God freely bestows it. As God said to Moses, 'I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy' (Exod 33:19)," D. Garland, ISBE 3:322-23.

"The reference here is to the Israelites, those on whom the Lord has had mercy and compassion. It is a summary of what God has done for Israel in bringing them out of Egypt, an act of pure mercy," P. Enns, Exodus (Zondervan 2000), 583.

"Yahweh follows this promise with a statement of his sovereignty. His favor and his compassion are given only on his own terms," J. Durham, Exodus (Word 1987), 452.

"Rom 9:15 quotes this verse and applies it to the sovereignty of God," W. Kaiser, The Expositor's Bible Commentary (Zondervan 1990), 483.

"Yahweh uses an idem per idem formula to express other important aspects of his nature. This formula, 'favor…favor' and 'compassion…compassion,' signifies that God is autonomous, free to bestow his grace and compassion on whomever he pleases. It underscores the doctrine of the sovereignty of God," J. Currid, A Study Commentary on Exodus (Evangelical Press 2001), 2:305.

"The name of God, which like his glory and his face are vehicles of his essential nature, is defined in terms of his compassionate acts of mercy. The circular idem per idem formula of the name--I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious--is closely akin to the name in Exod 3:14--I am who I am--and testifies by its tautology to the freedom of God in making known his self-contained being," B. Childs The Book of Exodus (Westminster Press 1974), 596.

"The proclamation will not be just generally speaking before you but literally so; it will announce the name of the Lord [YHWH] and the significance implicit therein, to wit, the attributes to which it alludes--'and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and show compassion to whim I will show compassion'--the meaning being; but the exercise of these qualities depends entirely on My will; you may know that I am compassionate and gracious, and that I love to go beyond the strict letter of the law, but the decision to act according to these virtues is at all times in My discretion, and it is impossible for you to know when, or if, I shall act thus. If I were constantly to let the quality of mercy prevail over that of justice, and were to forgive every sinner, I should not be a righteous judge, and every man would permit himself all kinds of wickedness in the assurance that he would be forgiven. I shall be gracious and compassionate if it pleases Me, when it pleases Me, and for the reasons that please Me," U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Magnes Press 1997), 436).

The common thread here is the unfettered freedom of God. God can, of course, bind himself in covenant. But God is utterly free to choose if, or with whom, he enters into covenant relations. In Rom 9 and Exod 33:19, the compassion in view is not a "contractual obligation of ongoing reciprocity, "much less "back-pay for previously earned favor."

It has, rather, reference to God free and sovereign decision to adopt Israel in the first place, and, deeper still, to elect a remnant within the chosen people of God.

"All of this blather is just another round of verbal diarrhea, saying nothing and addressing nothing I have said. I do agree that bare meaning is not good enough"

i) Ah, yet another delightful instance of Holding's argumentum ad excrementum. When reason fails him, vulgar invective takes up the rear. I think Holding should consider seeking out the services of a Christian counselor.

ii) When Holding claims that "'Compassion' DOES 'select for' kin in the ancient world -- there is always a kinship relationship of some sort," he is guilty of implicitly saying that "compassion" selects for its own referent. And this commits the Fregean intension=extension fallacy.

" It has been over forty years now since James Barr published his seminal work on The Semantics of Biblical Language, yet Holding continues to repristinate the old word=concept fallacy.

It's too bad Hays can't explain how specifically. By the way, that's just Barr's opinion. That's an argument from authority."

i) I guess I must also explain to Holding what an ad hominem argument is. In an ad hominem argument, you stipulate to the opponent's premise or presupposition for the sake of argument.

I am not the one who said that an argument from authority is fallacious. Holding did. There is no inconsistency in my making use of an argument from authority. Indeed, I expressly argued for that in Rom 9.

Holding has since amended his position. In Holding's home-cooked logic, an argument from authority is sound if and only if the authority source is fallible. If, however, the authority source is inspired, then it is not truly authoritative, and therefore fallacious.

ii) By way of specific answer, take the following statement:
"'Consider this now as well with reference to Pilch and Malina's observation that in an ancient context, 'mercy' is better rendered as 'gratitude' or 'steadfast love' -- as in, 'the debt of interpersonal obligations for unrepayable favors received.' Mercy is not involved with feelings of compassion, as today, but the 'paying of one's debt of interpersonal obligation by forgiving a trivial debt.' To say, 'Lord, have mercy!' (Matt. 20:31) means, 'Lord, pay up your debt of interpersonal obligation to us!' Far from being a plea of the hapless, it is a request to pay back previously earned favor from our client (God) whose patron we are."

This is a textbook example of what Barr dubs illegitimate totality transfer, where a general semantic construct, abstracted from a multiplicity of individual occurrences in a variety of conceptual contexts, is read back into any given occurrence of the word.

What is far worse in this case is that the purported meaning isn't even derived from an inductive study of Biblical usage, but is, rather, a reductionistic, free-floating definition abstracted from the Greco-Roman patronage-system.

"Once again, there is no answer needed as Hays made no 'precise objection'' -- he erected a strawman ("only prism") and then cried foul when I pointed out his error and how idiotic it was, never admitting his error."

What I actually did was to pose question, followed by a statement: " Is sociorhetorical criticism the only prism through which we ought to read the Bible? He quotes sociorhetorical scholars to prove the primacy of sociorhetorical criticism. What a thoroughly vicious specimen of circular reasoning!"

Holding has yet to explain how the act of quoting sociorhetorical scholars proves the primacy or even the legitimacy of their assumptions and methods.

"So now the real question: How will Hays claim that Rom. 9:16 cannot be such an example, in a way that does not cut the rug out from under him with Jer. 7:22?"

Notice Holding's last-ditch burden of proof. It is no longer a case of having to provide positive evidence for his contention. Rather, it's up to me to show that his importation of Jer 7:22 "cannot" be such an example. However, sound exegesis is based on what is most probably, not what is barely possible.

I said: "If Holding is really that naïve, then it may go a long way in explaining why he's so star-struck by sociorhetorical criticism. All I did was make the elementary, but important observation, that sociology--inclusive of sociorhetorical criticism--is not a neutral discipline which follows the evidence wherever it leads, but rather, comes to the table with certain presuppositions regarding human nature. This carries with it the danger of skewing the evidence to support a foregone conclusion, or ignoring contrary evidence. You shoehorn the evidence to squeeze into your preconceived notions. Remember Margaret Mead?"

He said: "In other words, but much prettier ones, Hays admits that he is a perfect imitation of an atheist. To make matters worse, he commits the fallacy of guilt by assoication [sic], as though to tar Malina with Mead, without any effort to prove the errors of the former, much less than any error of the former (if any if made) is of relevance to any arguments made here. This is sheer laziness and incompetence, once again."

My point, which Holding continues to duck and dodge, is that sociology, like any "science" (if we choose to classify sociology as a true science), is theory-laden and value-laden. When it comes, therefore, to the task of evaluating the "findings" of sociology, or some subdivision thereof (e.g., sociorhetorical criticism), we need to consider the metascientific methods and assumptions of the sociologist, such as his prior commitment to psycholinguistic nominalism.

"But in fact neither view is of any impact to my case, so I skip Hays' further comments on the difference in approach."

Whether we take the essentialist view of Chomsky or the nominalist view of Holding has a crucial impact on Holding's case. For if we side with the essentialist view, then thought is prior to word, in which case it is illicit to compartmentalize an ethnic mindset.

"Hays purposely confuses the issue, which is not that an argument from authority is valid or invalid, but that it is not logical."

"Hays is once again playing semantic games. While validity and invalidity are indeed logical categories, this does not make all valid or invalid statements expressions of logical process. "The ball is red" may be arrived at by some logical process, but it cannot stand by itself and be called 'logical' or 'illogical'".

Holding is now attempting to administer triage on his hemorrhaging claim with an emergency infusion of face-saving distinctions.

"Fine. It remains that what Paul offers in Romans 9 is not a 'reason' for his assertions about election; any more than saying 'shut up' is a "reason" for 'why did you drop that plate'. It is not illogical either; it is non-logical. It puts the questioner off, and that is what Paul does in Romans (as he has a right to, since it is foolish to question God)."

It has already been pointed out to Holding that Paul does more than that. As I said before: "In addition, Paul's reply is not limited to an argument from authority. In addition to that, he also invokes a theodicean rationale for election and reprobation (9:17,22-23; 11:32)."

So Paul is, indeed, giving a reason--is, indeed, offering a supporting argument, for his assertions about election and reprobation.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Holding responds to my rejoinder with yet another potty-mouthed screed. Since, however, I'm not in the habit of hanging out at the local outhouse, I shall hereafter leave my interlocutor to his fecal fulminations.

Postmortem on Holding-3

ii) But let us play out Holding's contention to its logical conclusion. According to Feinberg, who is cited in this debate--although Feinberg never exports his interpretation of Jer 7:22 to Rom 9:16--"the idiom does not intend to deny the statement but only to set it in a secondary place," Jeremiah: A Commentary (Zondervan 1982), 75.

So assuming for the sake of argument that Feinberg's interpretation is both correct and portable, how would this cash out in application to Rom 9:16? The only effect would be to subordinate the force of the first clause to the second. It would still be true that election and reprobation (v15-16a) are not dependent on human participation. And this secondary fact would hold true due to the primary fact that election and reprobation are, instead, entirely dependent on the sheer mercy of God.

So even if we play along with Holding's misguided application, the predestinarian force of Rom 9:16 remains undiluted.

Since Holding continues to harp on Jer 7:22, as, I guess he must, having so little on which to build his case, it is worth pointing out that his interpretation of Jer 7:22 is not the only viable option or even the best available interpretation of the text. The issue raised by Jer 7:22 is how to square Jeremiah's statement with the divinely ordained sacrificial system in the Mosaic law. A couple of harmonizations are offered. One is the grammatical solution "parroted" by Holding. However, another solution draws attention to narrative sequence and relative chronology:

"In point of fact, then, God never said anything to them at the beginning--'in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt'--about offerings or sacrifices," G. Archer, Bible Difficulties (Zondervan 1982), 272.

"At the time the Sinai covenant was instituted, God required His people Israel to be obedient and to worship Him alone. Only when these prime stipulations were promulgated did God prescribe a developed sacrificial system," R. K. Harrison, Jeremiah & Lamentations (IVP 1973), 87.

"A reading of Exod 19:3-8 makes it clear that the first step in the covenant ceremony was Yahweh's demand for the unconditional acceptance of the covenant. The Decalog is spelled out in Exod 20:1-17, but at no point is the narrative concerned with cultic details. It was only after the covenant has been ratified (24:1-8) that the cultic details of the tabernacle, the priesthood, and the sacrifices were declared," J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (Eerdmans 1987), 287-88.

"Jeremiah is engaged not in a wholesale critique of the temple, but specifically of certain burnt-offerings and sacrifices that the people brought to the temple, which in turn were not a part of the specified public ritual established at Mount Sinai," P. Craigie (Nelson 1991), 124.

It is odd that Holding, who brags of having "cracked more commentaries than Hays has sat on to reach the dinner table in his lifetime," seems to wholly ignorant of this major exegetical alternative--offered by a number of "credentialed" scholars.

And if we favor that interpretation, then Holding's argument, such as it is, collapses like the proverbial house of cards.

He said: "Yet another misplaced answer. Gal. 5:19-21 refers to the 'works of the flesh' and therefore would be referring to the outworking of a decision, not the decision or thought itself which takes place in the mind. Which of these items Hays has in mind as 'mental acts' I can only guess but none are merely decisions or thoughts.

I said: "Oh, what about 'jealousy' (Gr.=zelos), for one. That's an attitude, a mental act--not the outworking thereof. It may well issue in some concrete form of expression, but that is not the essence of it. Indeed, it is just because a sinful attitude need not translate into a sinful deed that the NT warns the believer that even unconsummated attitudes can still be sinful."

He said: "A blatant dodge. Hays can now find only one item in the list that he thinks works."

Don't you just love the way Holding's mind works? He said that "none of the items" count. Well, it only takes one exception to disprove a universal negative, does it not? He issues a challenge; I rise to the challenge, he calls it a dodge. In other words, whenever you call Holding's bluff, he moves the goal post.

BTW, I never said I could only find one item. But one good counter-example will do.

"And even it, he must admit, is followed on by concrete expression."

This is just a bald-faced lie. I said "may" well issue, not "must" issue. And I went on to note unconsummated attitudes.

"But the issue is once more than I am asking not about attitudes, but about decisions."

Notice that he's moving the goal post again. What he said was "decisions or thoughts." Now an attitude is a thought. An attitude is an intentional state, taking an object. It's an attitude about/thought of something or someone. But Holding didn't anticipate this--which is why he suddenly ditches his own choice of words and confines himself to "decisions," although that is not how he originally posed the question. Did he think no one would notice his switcheroo?

"Chances are he had no expectation of a reply from me, and now that he has one, is scrambling for some cover upon his ample posterior."

Yet another instance of Holding's anatomical fixation. When a man conjures up the mental image of another man's rear-end, you've got to wonder about his orientation. Let us hope that Mr. Holding didn't pick up any nasty habits working in prison.

"It is still not explained how this is so. Nothing of what I said makes a logical order an 'abstract object' and it really would not make an ounce of difference if it was or not. I write down a logical sequence; is it now concrete or abstract? Hays needs to stop playing semantic games to cover his inadequacies."

Whenever Holding gets caught in a trap of his own making, a favorite fallback is to complain that I'm "playing semantic games." To collapse a logical order into a causal order is more than a semantic game. To further confound a logical sequence with a verbal token only befuddles the distinction all the more. Once again, Holding has no doctrine of creation. And it won't do for him to don these airs of intellectual superiority if he's going to commit such elementary blunders.

"If God could accomplish his purpose by merely setting up the initial conditions, then that would not detract from his sovereignty. But this assumes the very answer at issue. You might as well ask if a painter can paint part of the canvass, then let the canvass fill in the gaps. A painting doesn't paint itself. Holding has no doctrine of creation. If a painter leaves the canvass half-finished, it stays half-finished."

Exactly, as in bold. Hays said it, obviously and explicitly, that it what I argued was so, there would be no detraction, and now he wants to backpedal."

Once again we have to treat Mr. Holding to a little primer in elementary logic. Any first year philosophy major can tell that my argument takes the form of a contrapositive proof, known in predicate logic as modus tollens. The abstract schema takes the form of:

If P, then Q.
Q is false.
Therefore, P is false.

Fleshing this out, the argument has two premises. The first premise takes the form of an if-then clause. The second clause, which negates the first, naturally begins with an adversative conjunction like "but"--as in, "if God could P, then Q; but Q is false; therefore P is false. Paul uses a contrapositive proof for the Resurrection in 1 Cor 15:13ff.

"Oh! So now he wants to add "deistic" to his little explanation in order to account for his huge bungle in agreeing I was correct."

At the risk of having to state the obvious and thereby insult the intelligence of the average reader, deism is implicit in Holding's idea of a painting that could paint itself once the painter gets it started and leaves the rest to a nanorobotic apprentice.

" Since Calvin knew his way around the Hebrew Bible, if he new nothing of Hebrew block logic, then that's only because there was nothing there to know.

Let the viciously circular ostrich mentality speak for itself. Will Hays insult Wilson again by saying he does not know his way around the Hebrew Bible?"

Let the viciously circular ostrich mentality speak for itself.
Will Holding insult Calvin again by saying that he does not know his way around the Hebrew Bible?

"Hays is out of touch with the conception of fictive kinship in the ancient world, upon which all covenant and patronage relationships were grounded. There is no confusion except by Hays, in his ignorance of the social world of the NT: Note that my words come from a scholarly source, with which Hays once again does not deal seriously. Compassion" DOES "select for" kin in the ancient world -- there is always a kinship relationship of some sort, whether Hays likes it or not. If he thinks not, let him provide examples to show otherwise. It ought to be worth some yuks, since being unfamiliar with ancient principles of kinship he will no doubt unwittingly pick examples that only prove my point."

i) Notice how Holding takes the Biblical category of "covenant," and stretches it out of all recognition to apply, without distinction, to social bonding throughout the ancient world. This is not inductive exegesis.

It isn't? What Hays does is create ad hoc some special "Biblical category" of covenant as though it could be divorced from the other covenants of contemporary cultures. This is the sort of thinking that refuses to see Deuteronomy as modelled on an ancient suzerainty treaty and pretends that, again, the Bible was written in an intellectual vacuum, protected from all undue influences."

i) Holding is now trading is yet another equivocation, as if analogy were the same thing as identity. To say that Deuteronomy was "modeled"--note the weasel word--on a suzerain treaty is not at all to say that a suzerain treaty is synonymous with a Biblical covenant--much less the amorphous category of "fictive kinship" or the generic concept of a "patronage" system, or the even vaguer notion of "collectivism." Notice how Holding jumbles all these things together as though they were one and the same thing.

ii) Suzerain treaties were international treaties--treaties between respective heads-of-state. But it hardly follows from that one culture-bound example that every "collective" or "fictive kinship" "always involved reciprocity of some sort" or bilateral "contractual obligations."

One of the distinguishing features setting apart the Jewish monarchy from the neighboring nations is that the Jewish king was a constitutional monarch (Deut 17:14-20), whereas the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian kings governed their own people as absolute monarchs. There was no Magna Carta under oriental despotisms.

Postmortem on Holding-2

"Next Hays will call all performed anthropological study a fruitless endeavor (as he so belches from his armchair of non-expertise)."

"Belches"? More of Holding's excretory obsession.

"Pointing to a "promise/fulfillment pattern" is not rebutting the matter stated, which is that the example of Pharaoh is one of block logic and dichotomy."

What block-logic? What dichotomy? What we have, rather, is teleological reasoning. God will harden Pharaoh's heart as a means to an end--the revelation of the true God (Exod 7:3-5). That is the form of the promise/fulfillment scheme. Even when Pharaoh is said to harden himself (8:15), this is also said to be in fulfillment of God's prophetic word (cf. 4:21; 7:3).

"'Do I need to use the latrine?' Does Hays dare engage this absurd extreme?"

I confess I hadn't gone into this discussion under the assumption that I'd have to recapitulate the fifth labor of Hercules. So I must decline Holding's kind invitation to join him in the cesspool. I haven't the nose for the job.

He said: "No more idiotic statement could be made."

I said: "What statement could I have made to justify such a sweeping condemnation? Must have been pretty outlandish, right? This is why Mr. Holding is responding to. I had said that "the Bible-believing Christian is honor-bound by the logic of Scripture."

He said: " No, Hays said far more than that, and he purpusely [sic] isolates that portion to create a red herring. His full statement was: Wilson and Holding are treating the logic of Scripture as a culture-bound casket which they are at liberty to bury in an unmarked grave. But the Bible-believing Christian is honor-bound by the logic of Scripture. Let the dishonesty speak for itself, and that Hays thereafter isolates my first sentence from the rest of the paragraph."

But Holding is just stalling for time here--hoping the clock will run out. Yes, what about his first sentence? What about Wilson? Wilson is his great authority on "block-logic." And Holding denies that "block-logic" is normative for the Christian conscience. Hence, Holding denies that the Christian is honor-bound by the logic of Scripture. Like a greedy taxi-cab driver trying to up the meter, Holding has simply taken us the long way round to arrive at the very same destination.

He said: "No one said anything about 'earning' God's covenant promises."

I said: "Really? Let's go back to back to my verbatim quote of Holding: "To say, 'Lord, have mercy!' (Matt. 20:31) means, 'Lord, pay up your debt of interpersonal obligation to us.' Far from being a plea of the hapless, it is a request to pay back previously earned favor from our client (God) whose patron we are."

There you have it. Earning God's favor and thereby casting God in the role of debtor. And this line of reasoning runs directly counter to Rom 4:1-4. If that's a representative slice of sociorhetorical criticism (Pilch & Malina), then so much the worse for sociorhetorical criticism. I choose to line up behind Paul, not against him.

He says: "There we have it, yes -- another case of dinshonestly [sic] and verbal equivocation by Hays. He has dishonestly used the words 'covenant promises' to substitute for the word I did use, 'favor' and now is trying to equate the two in a desperate attempt to justify his original falsehood."

Actually, Holding used several words. He didn't merely use the word "favor," but "earned favor"--indeed, "previously earned favor", no less: "Far from being a plea of the hapless, it [mercy] is a request to pay back previously earned favor from our client (God) whose patron we are.'

Holding went on to uses the phrases "covenant obligation" and "covenant relationship."

I then said: "Even in the former case, we did nothing to earn God's covenant promises." I used "covenant promise" as a synonym for "covenant obligation" and the like.

Holding then said: "No one said anything about 'earning' [his quotation marks] God's covenant promises."

Notice carefully just what Holding denies. He doesn't take issue with the phrase "covenant promises." Instead, he denies that such promises were "earned." He places quotation marks around the verb, for emphasis--not the noun. It's the verb, with the scare quotes, that's the object of his negation.

Now, though, he's suddenly shifting ground--rejecting as "dishonest" a synonym which he had heretofore accepted without protest. He didn't take exception to the synonym at the time. Rather, he took exception to the allegation that covenant promises were "earned."

Conversely, he also quoted, with evident approval, the phrase "earned favor." All I've done is to take my cue from his fluid usage and semantic equivocations. So much for his trumped-up charge.

But if that were not enough, Holding now follows this up with a longish gloss:

"Let it be remembered that this is not said snobbishly as though God "owes" us something naturally. By comparison God made a compact with Abraham and willingly underwent the ritual of contract (passing between the halved animals) which essentially indicated that if He broke His contract with Abraham, He would be divided in half like the animals! God in His love was willing to send His Son, and is also willing to place Himself under contractual obligation to us, to start a relationship of "ongoing reciprocity," in which "those toward whom one has such a debt are equally obliged to maintain the relationship by further favors..."

In other words, Hays purposely obscures that this "earned" is made in the context of God's own covenant promises in which God obliged Himself and thus set up the entire system of return. So now will Hays argue that God can break His promises and release Himself from His own covenant obligations? Does a covenant obligation make God a debtor? If God says, "I will do this" and God cannot lie, is there or is there not an obligation present? Rom. 4:1-4 only draws from the most critical example of this -- the covenant within which YHWH set up mutual sets of obligations for Himself and Abraham."

i) To say that I "purposely" obscure his usage once again credits me with inspired powers of foresight. In the nature of the case, I can only comment on what he said at the time, and not his retrofitted version.

ii) Yet--and here's the real kicker--Holding himself, in his retrofitted version, uses "covenant promises" and "covenant obligations" interchangeably.

At this point, Holding has his wires so thoroughly crossed that a professional electrician would be hard-pressed to sort them out.

"Hays once again plays a disgusting game of verbal equivocation. The retort was that Calvin did not find these elements to disturbing in the rabbinic writings to use them in his commentaries."

Except that that's not what Holding said. It is he who equivocates with his patch-up jobs.

"All Hays does in reply is offer misdirected and irrelevant bouts of verbal diarrhea mixed with pious outrage."

Another appeal to Holding's favorite argumentum ad excrementum.

"Well, sorry, but for Paul, Hebrew and Aramaic were the 'native' languages. Next irrelevant belch?"

i) "Belch"? Another example of Holding's unhealthy fascination with excreta.

ii) Holding is in no position to know that. Indeed, the claim is antecedently improbable. Given that Paul's hometown was a Roman city, there is no reason to assume that Paul didn't pick up Greek as a child.

"Yet part and parcel of such learning is recognizing your own biases as a social scientist. Paul, for his inspiration, was not one of these and we have no indication that he had the social scientists' knowledge and capability to think outside his own box (or that he even thought he needed to)."

Notice that this is precisely the way in which the queer lobby in liberal churches explain away Paul's opposition to sodomy.

"In other words, Hays, though too gutless to say so outright, wishes to accuse Wilson of incompetence."

Actually, this follows from Holding's criterion, not mine. If you take Holding's view of psycholinguistic conditioning, then, by his own chosen standard, no 20C Jew can be an expert on ancient Hebrew thought-patterns.

" This error is one we have seen from Farrell Till as well. Sorry, but "argument from authority" is not a fallacy if the authority really IS an authority. Fallacy occurs when authority is quoted for the sake of authority ("Albert Einstein says that basketball is stupid"); not when the expert really knows their business (it is no fallacy to quote Stephen Hawking on black holes). Let it speak for itself again that Hays imitates an atheist opponent of ours to perfection."

This is really fascinating. Remember what Holding said to Dr. White? "White's own classification of Romans 9 as 'logical' is similarly obtuse. Indeed, logicians would call what Paul does in Romans 9 a fallacious 'argument from authority'".

Okay. It's not fallacious for Holding to quote Hawking on black holes, 'cause Hawking "really is an authority" on the subject. He's an "expert who really knows his business."

But when Paul quotes from the OT, that's fallacious 'cause the OT really isn't authoritative. The inspired writer doesn't know what he's talking about. Go figure!

"So how does Hays explain the "not" in Jer. 7:22?

In i) hays claims he does not have to explain it, but out of the other side of his mouth, then does so."

For someone who claims to be a Christian apologist, Holding doesn't seem to know much about how to mount an argument. In apologetics it is commonplace to present a two-pronged strategy in which we first challenge the operating premise of the opposing side, and then, for the sake of argument, stipulate that even if his premise were true, his conclusion fails to follow. That is not talking about of both sides of the mouth. That is simply offering a multifaceted rebuttal.

" Sorry, but the "Reformed interpretation" still dies on the vine if I am right, because the negation idiom is therefore expressed as well in the "not" in the second clause. That this did not occur to Hays as once speaks volumes for the low level of his mental horsepower."

i) Except for the stubborn little fact that there is no negation in the second clause.

Postmortem on Holding-1

Holding has issued yet another whirlwind reply to my comments. It's gratifying to see that he sets a higher standard in his response time than the dreaded bloggers!

The reply is littered and larded with his trademark volley of invective--the better to plug up the all gaps where the argumentation breaks down--which is frequent. Much of Holding's reply consists of blanket, indignant denials rather than reasoned disproof of what I've said.

Indeed, his invective has become so coarse that parents may well wish to install a v-chip in the kids' computer lest their little ones stray into his website and have their imagination sullied by his foul mouth and dirty mind. I will try as best I can to retrieve what arguments I find floating in his sewer-hole.

"White now appears to be content to rest his laurels a bit and relax under the headdress of the Drama Queen while allowing his parrot Hays to handle his affairs."

I'm afraid this does me far too much credit. Remember that I had commented on Holding's TULIP series long before White ever got around to it. In order, therefore, for me to be his parrot, I'd have to be a pretty prescient parrot. But I lay claim to no such feats of precognition. So as honored as I am to have Holding attribute to me the divine gift of prophecy, modesty compels me to decline this--his most magnanimous compliment.

"Hays is no more than a tame ape with a dictionary at his disposal, able to use his vocabulary as a bludgeon to fool the ignorant into thinking he is actually saying something."

Well, this at least gives me a considerable headstart over Darwin's simian typists, who had to reconstruct the collected works of Shakespeare from scratch. Does this mean that Mr. Holding is a theistic evolutionist?

"No doubt he [Hays] had too many Chick tracts to read the day that The Only Wise God was assigned."

I read Craig's book many years before Holding belatedly heard of it--not to mention of my having read number of Craig's more academic presentations of Molinism.

"The second section is of absolutely no relevance; granting that indeed Paul had access to GR technique of rhetoric, this was also taught even in Jerusalem."

So the fact that Paul made use of philosophical reasoning in Romans is of "absolutely no relevance" to the possible role of logic in Rom 9--even though Fitzmyer specifically identifies its presence in 9:14,19-21,30 and elsewhere.

Remember that it was Holding who had patronizingly advised Dr. White to bone up on Fitzmyer--in connection with this very debate. But when someone takes him up on the offer, this is suddenly of "absolutely no relevance."

"May we remind the reader further that Hays has STILL not figured out that it was not I, but Jaltus, the TWeb seminarian, who referred to Fitzmyer."

May we remind the reader further that Holding has STILL not figured out that it was not Jaltus, the Tweb seminarian, but Holding, who referred to Fitzmyer. Remember what Holding said to Dr. White?:

"Sorry, but White clearly does not have his exegetical ducks in a row. I recommend he read Kasemann, Fitzmyer, Esler, and Witherington. That should run the gauntlet for him, and maybe throw in a healthy dose of Cranfield for the grammar."

Now, either Holding wrote this, in which case he is the one who referred to Fitzmyer, or else Holding doesn't write his own material, but employs the services of a ghostwriter. If the latter, may I humbly suggest that Holding needs to hire a better ghostwriter.

"As an aside, since Fitzmyer is a liberal, Hays by his own rules has no business citing Fitzmyer, since he is a tainted source. Let the fundy tangle himself in his own woven web."

What rules of mine? Can Holding quote me to that effect? The only time I recall using the word "liberal" was when Holding said that Dr. White should get his ducks in a row, and then indulged in a little show of name-dropping to wow the reader.

In that context, I drew attention to the theological diversity of the writers to which he referred.

Since, however, Holding brings up the issue of liberals, I do happen to think it makes no small difference whether you read John Spong or J. Gresham Machen on the Virgin Birth--to take but one example.

"But as it turns out, Childs says nothing here of an 'apologetic' and assuredly nothing of a proof for the mere existence of God, per my original point:

'The unit [41:1-7] opens with Yahweh summoning the nations to appear in court for a trial. The claims of the foreign gods will be tested according to legal rules…[21-29] The force of the argument in both parts of the trial appears to be that the claim to true divinity rests on the ability not only to control the course of future events, but also to have predicted the events before they occurred. Consequently, the ability to match the prediction with its fulfillment can then be tested rationally in the trial,' Isaiah (Westminster John Knox Press 2001), 317,321.

Since Dr. Childs is a highly 'credentialed' scholar, I trust that Holding will pay proper homage to his social betters in this matter.

I do indeed. Unfortunately for Hays, Childs only agrees with my point: There is nothing here of an argument for God's existence but of YHWH's superiority over the false gods."

i) Once again, Holding exhibits his usual deficiency in distinguishing between words and concepts. Naturally, Isaiah doesn't use the Greek derivative. The question is whether the concept is present. Apologetics is simply a rational defense of the faith. To quote Childs once more, "the force of an argument" according to which the "claim of true divinity" is subject to a "rational test," certainly qualifies as an exercise in apologetics. If that doesn't measure up to Holding's standards, this says a lot more about his standards than it does about Isaiah.

ii) In addition, there is certainly more to Isaiah's argument than Yahweh's superiority over the false gods. The whole thrust of Isaiah's argument is that the existence of the true God and nonexistence of the false gods can be put to a rational test. His existence is verified by prophecy while theirs is falsified by its absence.

It is not as if there were other gods who exist, but are merely inferior to Yahweh. Unless, that is, Holding happens to be a polytheist. At this point, I suppose that anything is possible.

I said: "Let's clarify the burden of proof here. Holding was the one who initiated an attack on Calvinism. The onus is therefore on him to acquaint himself with the supporting arguments for Calvinism in order to render an informed judgment on the system under review."

He said: " Since I did, there is no more for me to do."

It is clear from his admitted ignorance of Molinism going into the TULIP series that he did nothing of the kind.

"Hays provided not so much as one word from Warfield; he merely threw the reference at us like an elephant, as though this was some sort of data-argument."

It isn't my job to do his reading for him. Holding initiated a public attack on Calvinism. As a Christian apologist, the burden on him is to research a topic before he goes on the attack. Warfield's article runs to over 60 pages of closely reasoned argument. No, I'm not going to reduce that to a comic strip.

"Hays is incapable of supporting his point, and would be better off returning to his daily duties of sorting milk cartons at the 7-11."

This says less about me than it does about Holding's elitist attitude towards manual laborers and the working poor. He might consider brushing up on the Book of James to cure him of his sub-Christian snobbery.

"Unlike Hays, I do not live in a diaper and do not look for ways to throw the contents of it at others for cheap rhetorical points."

Welcome to Holding's argumentum ad excrementum. When he can't be logical, he can always be scatological. Perhaps, though, he'll accuse me of quoting his obscenities "out of context," or making "abusive" use of them.

I said: "Notice, also, the patent equivocation here. To say that psychology is prior to text is not to say that "block logic" is prior to the text. Holding is smuggling his conclusion into the premise."

He said: "Yet another confused and misplaced comment. Block logic is a product of Hebrew psychology; therefore it indeed must be prior to the text along with every other psychological element, and it certainly is absurd to suggest that psychology associated with the particular people emerged after the text."

All Holding does here is to clumsily repackage the original equivocation. Yes, psychology is prior to the text. But to define "Hebrew" psychology as "block-logic" is just another ham-handed effort to smuggle the conclusion back into the premise.

"Hays is once again offering excessive lines of verbal diarrhea to cover his enormous bungle in misreading my point."

Ah, Holding's argumentum ad excrementum. One is tempted to say that this is one type of argument where the genetic fallacy does not apply.

"Does he deny that there is actual dialectic in these pages of the OT? Does he deny that dialectic was a characteristic of Hegelianism? Does he then deny in turn that the OT shares this particular description with Hegelianism?"

As I originally said, I've already offered my own interpretation of the wisdom literature in my essay on "Vanity of vanities." Holding's comparison is so sloppy and anachronistic that it would die the death of a thousand qualifications.