Blood and soil

Keith Burgess-Jackson has an interesting taxonomy of conservativism: 

I'm not the first person to notice this, but there are different types of conservative. Ordinarily, there is no reason to distinguish them, but this year this is. Here are the types:

• Idea conservatives.
• God conservatives.
• Blood conservatives.
• Money conservatives.
• War conservatives.

Ted Cruz, George Will, and Jonah Goldberg are idea conservatives. Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson are God conservatives. Sarah Palin, Pat Buchanan, Michael Savage, Donald Trump, and I are blood conservatives. Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan are money conservatives. Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and William Kristol are war conservatives.

http://keithburgess-jackson.typepad.com/blog/2016/04/politics-part-2-10.html

Some of this is self-explanatory. Some of this is less clear.

i) "Money" conservatives would suggest people whose center of gravity is business and economics. That's what orients their conservativism. But the examples that Jackson gives to illustrate the category are confusing. I think better examples would be Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. But perhaps he has something else in mind. 

ii) More provocative is the category of "blood" conservatives. This inevitably triggers associations with the "blood and soil" ideology that informed Nazism–as well as Afrikaner apartheid. Moreover, the association isn't just incidental. White nationalists have rallied behind Trump. 

Jackson links to a clip in which Michael Savage promotes English only in gov't and business (or the workplace). He says ballots should be in English. The only reason to have multiple language ballots is to make sure illegals can vote. 

I agree with him on English-only in the public sector. However, in the private sector, it should be up to the employer. Moreover, it's obviously beneficial to have businesses that can cater to customers of varied ethnicities. Likewise, if two employees speak Spanish or Laotian or whatever, there's no reason they shouldn't be free to speak to each other in their native language at work. Indeed, that might be more efficient. For that matter, if two gov't employees happen to speak the same foreign language, there's no reason they should be prohibited from communicating with each other in that language at work. 

iii) I assume Jackson uses "blood" as a synonym for nationalism, nativism, America-firsters and the like. 

Although "blood and soil" form a combined slogan, it's a simplistic slogan. On the "soil" side, many people identify, not so much with the nation as a whole, than a particular region. Likewise, there's the distinction between town and country. Some people are urbanites by choice while others prefer a rural location or lifestyle. For instance, are Southerners Americans first and Southerners second, or Southerners first and Americans second? 

On the "blood" side, many people identify more strongly with social class rather than race or ethnicity. Likewise, in more racially homogenous nations or regions, people identify and distinguish themselves more by religion or social class. 

Are good and evil primary colors or secondary colors?

Here's a sequel to my post in Inwagen:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/evil-dreams.html

Among other things, he says:

But an omnipotent and omniscient creator could be called to moral account for creating a world in which there was even one horror. And the reason is obvious: that horror could have been "left out" of creation without the sacrifice of any great good or the permitting of some even greater horror. And leaving it out is just what a morally perfect being would do: such good things as might depend causally on the horror could–given the being's omnipotence and omniscience–be secured by (if the word is not morally offensive in this context) more "economical" means. The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2006), 96. 
A defense cannot simply take the form of a story about how God brings some great good out of the evils of the word, a good that outweighs those evils. At the very least, a defense will have to include the proposition that God was unable to bring about the greater good without allowing the evils we observer (or some other evils as bad or worse). Ibid. 68.

Inwagen uses some standard categories: greater good, greater evil, countervailing goods (i.e. goods that "outweigh" evils). He also talks about the possibility of particular evils that could have been "left out" without sacrificing any great good or permitting an even greater evil.

One problem with that analysis is his failure to define his terms. What makes something a greater good or greater evil? How is that identified? 

Does he mean it in the collective sense of what is best overall? Is it like the common good (i.e. what's good for the most people)? Is it the most goods with the fewest evils? 

This raises the question of how we count goods and evils. Are goods and evils discrete items? Can you put them in parallel columns to see that one possible world is better or worse than another? 

Seems to me that in a fallen world, good and evil bleed into each other. For instance, there are virtuous parents of vicious kids and vicious parents of virtuous kids. So how do we separate that out in order to tabulate the respective goods and evils? Do they count as two distinct events or one seamless cause-and-effect event? 

Let's take a more complex example. Suppose you have a teenager who's a good intramural athlete. When he goes to the shopping center, he always parks in front of the store, if there's an available slot, to save himself a few extra steps. That means he has no compunction about taking a disabled parking slot. He doesn't care about elderly customers with walkers or customers in wheelchairs who might actually need that slot. He's in a hurry, and he can't be bothered to walk a few extra yards from the parking lot to the store. 

He has no empathy for the disabled. Indeed, as a natural athlete, he has a certain disdain for the disabled. He's proud of his body. Proud of his athletic prowess. He doesn't relate to the disabled. He's impatient with the disabled. They get in the way. They slow him down. He may even think they'd be better off euthanized. 

Until a day when he's crossing the street. He is texting. The driver is texting. He doesn't see the approaching car. The driver doesn't see the pedestrian. 

He wakes up in a hospital with spinal chord injury. No more intramural sports. He will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. 

Of course, now he sees the world from the other side of the wheelchair. Now he resents able-bodied shoppers who take the disabled parking slot. He sees himself, when he was the same way.

His new existence is extremely frustrating. And he becomes socially isolated, because his buddies and girlfriend tune him out of their lives, now that he can't keep up with them. Having him tag along is inconvenient. They'd have to go at his pace. That's no fun. 

But there's another side to this. He becomes the caring, considerate, observant person he never used to be. He becomes a good listener. He develops an empathy he never had before, because he is forced to identify with the weak and lonely. He hates it, but it makes him a better person. 

How do we count that? In one sense, it's better to be able-bodied than disabled. His physical disability is a natural evil. Yet it becomes the source of moral good. A soul-making virtue. A fallen world is a blended world of good and evil. A world in which the boundaries of good and evil are blurry. 

You can arrange possible worlds along a spectrum of good and evil. You can distinguish possible worlds at the extremes of good and evil, where a greater good or greater evil occupy the farther ends of the spectrum. But closer to the middle, it's harder to say what's better or worse overall, because the goods and evils bleed into one another in ways that aren't easily separable. There are centers of good and centers of evil, but the circumference is blended. Primary colors of good and evil inside secondary colors where good and evil mix. 

Language Speculation

This post requires a small bit of backstory. Over the weekend, I was engaged in a fun e-mail exchange with several co-bloggers covering a couple of different topics. One of the guys in the conversation was Patrick Chan. There was a bit of discussion about how languages seem to easier for kids to pick up. Then Patrick (who has given permission for me to quote him) gave this anecdote:

[O]nce on a trip back to Italy as an adult I could somehow speak Italian again, which was weird, as I got into an impromptu debate over religion in Italian, and my French-Italian godmother (who was in the same room and listening in just a few feet away) was flabbergasted that we had been going back and forth in Italian and exclaimed as much near the end of the debate. But I don't remember Italian anymore.

This sparked a thought in my own memory of a conversation that members of my own family had had with another family that was friends of ours. This would have been in the 90s or possibly early 2000s (but I think closer to mid-90s).

In any case, the family we were talking to was a husband and wife missionary team named Gene and Pat. Gene relayed the story to us of a time when they were in Ecuador. He told us of how at one point he was with his team and they were stopped somewhere in Ecuador when a native Indian came out of the jungle. This Indian came up to the group and asked in Spanish for directions to a nearby town. Gene replied and gave him the directions and the Indian went on his way.

When Gene looked back at his team, they were looking at him in astonishment. “When did you learn to speak that dialect?” they asked. Gene said, “What do you mean? We were just speaking Spanish.” The team members shook their head and said, “No, he spoke to you in his native tongue and you responded with that same language.”

Now here’s the thing. Gene had never been taught whatever language the Indian had used. It is possible he heard some of it being used by other natives in the area, but he had no conscious knowledge of the language. And not only that, but he believed he was speaking Spanish anyway. Had there not been witnesses to this event who informed him that he had been speaking the native tongue, he would have had no idea that he had done so.

This brings to mind a couple of points. First of all, people who have read me for a while will already know that I have a fondness for Rupert Sheldrake’s view of morphic resonance. This could very well be more anecdotal evidence for that. In short, if there is a morphic field for languages then the fact that Gene was in an area where the dialect was spoken could be evidence for that. In short, when the Indian asked for directions, Gene’s brain could have recognized that it was an unfamiliar pattern to him (i.e., not the English Gene was used to) and thereby made him think he was speaking in Spanish, since he was learning that language, all while using the morphic field for the native Indian language instead. Of course, there’s a lot of “could have”s and “might be”s in that, so it hardly constitutes any proof.

But it leads me to my second point. I do not believe that language can be bootstrapped from the ground up. That is, to me, it does not seem to follow that simple animal grunting or other vocalizations can eventually morph into what we actually have as language. In fact, that seems counter to the way most of our languages have come about. For instance, Spanish, Italian, French, and all other “Romance Languages” all derived from Latin; they did not come about from the ground up as independent languages. More specifically, all the Indo-European languages are theorized to originate from the same Proto-Indo-European language. (Indo-European languages include Albanian, Armenian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek (Hellenic), Iranian, Italic (Romance languages), and Slavic languages.) The Proto-Indo-European language is believed to be a single language as recently as 3500 BC. This language was theorized based on similarities discovered between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Likewise, Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Tigrinya all seem to have come about from a precursor language. In fact, all the Afroasiatic languages (primarily Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semetic) are classed as part of the same language family, and they all are believed to be originated from Proto-Afoasiatic, which was believed to be a single language around 8,000 BC.

The point is that for the vast majority of languages—at least in Europe and the Middle East—evidence indicates not that groups of various individuals had developed their own local languages and then merged together to form their different national languages, but rather that all the people spoke a proto-language that has morphed into the various languages that exist throughout Europe and the Middle East today. We can even see this happening with various English dialects, as differences between British English, American English, Australian English, and Canadian English start becoming more pronounced over time.

Even more important than word use is grammatical structure. For example, Latin has a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) structure, whereas English has a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order. To give an example of what I mean, let’s render the following (using English words) in SVO and SOV order: “Roger” is the subject; “hit” the verb; and “the ball” is the object.

SVO: Roger hit the ball.
SOV: Roger the ball hit.


So this makes it seem that language is not bootstrapped. The precursor language had to be there from the beginning, otherwise you would see radically different languages without the common ancestral language. After all, one tribe of people pointing at a particular animal may decide to call it “dog”, but the next tribe over might decide to call it “perro”, and furthermore the first tribe might decide on SVO while the second uses SOV. There’s absolutely no reason to expect that from such a random conglomeration you’d end up with anything like language families.

Now all of the above is fairly standard information, although not everyone will agree with my conclusions on it. But now I want to jump straight into the deep pool of speculation. So get your scuba gear ready.

If it is the case that languages cannot be bootstrapped then the initial humans must have had the same language, and even more specifically that that language was given by God Himself as part of the creation of man. This fits with what we know from Genesis. We also know from Genesis that at one point, man sought to build a tower so they could reach the heavens, and at that point God confused their languages and spread them over the Earth. Now what happened in that process?

It helps for us to examine what the function of language is. Language is designed to communicate information from one person to another. It does this by mapping sounds (and in written language, symbols which are typically mapped to sounds) to concepts. These mappings are agreed to by the various people speaking that language. Thus, when one person refers to a “dog” another person has to have in mind the same idea of what a “dog” is.

So language is the vehicle by which concepts are transmitted. If I write about a “dog” then I have a concept of “dog” in my mind and I want that concept to get to your mind. Since we agree that “dog” refers to the same object, then when I use the label “dog” to define the concept, you unpack that label and receive the concept.

So what happens when we disagree on the labels? At that point, the concepts cannot get through. So if I use the label “dog” with someone who does not understand English, they will never get the same concept—even if they know what the concept is.

Of course, that alludes to the second way in which language might fail. It could be that you’ve never seen a dog. At that point, my use of the label “dog” does not convey information to you, even if you understand every other word I’m using.

This brings up an interesting comparison in my mind. Who among us is the most likely to have no experience with the concepts language refers to? Infants and young children. It’s almost too obvious to mention, but a newborn has never seen a dog. It takes time for them to acclimate to the objects around them.

Now who have studies consistently shown have the best aptitude at picking up languages? Those very same infants and young children. So there is a correlation (not necessarily causation, of course!) between those who have the least amount of experience with the objects language references and the ease at picking up multiple languages.

All of this brings me to my speculation. What if the human brain’s default mode is actually to understand all languages? What if the reason we do not understand all languages has nothing to do with learning or knowledge, but rather it has to do with the fact that God put some kind of inhibitor in our minds at the Tower of Babel, rendering our minds incapable of grasping foreign languages with ease once we had a single objective component to it?

That is, I speculate that part of the curse at Babel was that God altered our minds so that as soon as we had one linguistic concept in mind (e.g., we give the label “dog” to a specific animal) then our mind locks out alternative labels, and only with great difficulty can we learn these alternate labels.

But even that doesn’t fully describe the phenomenon. When you boil it down, there ought to be no reason that it would be more difficult to add the label “perro” to your list of labels referring to a specific animal just because you already called it “dog”. Especially when you realize that we already have tons of synonyms for “dogs” in our language already: mutt, mongrel, pooch, flea bag, hound. We can add these synonyms with ease, and yet have difficulty adding in “perro” because it’s Spanish.

Why? It makes no sense. Unless something’s going on behind the scenes to restrict our understanding of foreign languages.

Which leads me back, in a roundabout way, to the story I told about Gene at the very beginning of this post. Could it be that we already know every language that’s out there—whether because we’d have access to its morphic field or just because it’s inbuilt in humans to know concepts regardless of labels—but God has put a limiter on our minds because of the evil we would commit if we were able to share ideas freely? Could the reason Gene was able to speak in a foreign tongue without even knowing it be because, for just that moment, God lifted the restriction on his mind so that the Indian would be able to make it to the village he was looking for?

Again, it is speculation. I make no dogmatic (pun definitely intended) claim regarding dog synonyms and translations. But it’s fun to speculate sometimes.

Wild-eyed doctrines

I'm going to use two statements by Fred Butler as a launchpad to discuss several related issues:

I think the difference would be that dispensationalism alone doesn’t lead people to wild-eyed doctrines. 

But, the defining, unifying factor is that both groups are continuationists. Meaning, they both adhere to the same view regarding the actions of the Holy Spirit in this day and age. 

https://hipandthigh.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/continuationism-is-not-a-non-essential/

i) It's arguable that dispensationalism leads to date setting. Dispensationalism believes there are signs of the endgames. It believes that developments in the Mideast will be central to the fulfillment of endtime prophecies. That leads dispensationalists to correlate modern events in the Mideast with Bible prophecies about the Second Coming. And that, in turn, leads to failed, "It's the end of the world!" predictions. 

Now, I don't think that's a reason to discount dispensationalism. But that's endemic to dispensationalism. 

ii) Take another example: Catholics say sola Scriptura is a "blueprint for anarchy". When Catholics looks a Protestantism, they see what cessationists see when they look at the charismatic movement. It as much or more a question of what you're looking for as what you're looking at. 

iii) Fred does, however, draw a valid distinction. But if anything, his distinction needs to be even more discriminating. 

In the nature of the case, there are errors and abuses distinctive to continuationism. By definition, cessationism won't be prey to the same errors and abuses. 

There is, however, a difference between what is distinctive to a position and what is essential to a position. For instance, there are forms of sexual misconduct distinctive to heterosexuality, viz. heterosexual fornication, adultery, rape, and incest. However, no orthodox Christian would contend that that's essential to heterosexuality. 

Or to take a comparison that's closer to the issue at hand, there are errors and abuses distinctive to messianism. A messianic religion opens the door to messianic pretenders. A religion that denies messianism avoids that particular error or abuse. But, of course, Christianity is unavoidably messianic. The attendant errors and abuses go with the terrain. 

Likewise, there are errors and abuses distinctive to a religions founded on prophecy and miracles. That opens the door to charlatans. A religion that denies prophecy and miracles avoids that particular error or abuse. But, again, Christianity is unavoidably committed to prophecy and miracles. The attendant errors and abuses go with the terrain. 

iv) Both cessationists and continuationists must distinguish between true and false prophets, true and false miracles or miracle-workers. That's hardly a challenge unique to continuationism.

The main difference is that cessationism considers that to be more an issue in the past–although many cessationists do make allowance for modern miracles (just not modern miracle-workers). 

Yet by accepting the Protestant canon, cessationists are required to distinguish between true and false revelatory claimants. So it's a difference of degree rather than kind between cessationists and continuationists. 

v) Apropos (iv), three groups raise the same basic issue:

Critical scholars regard the traditional canon of Scripture (whether Tridentine, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, or Protestant) as an arbitrary selection. They think the cutoff between canonical and extracanonical books is ad hoc. That's because they believe both the OT and the NT contain pseudepigrapha. By the same token, they think some OT books chronologically overlap intertestamental literature while some NT books chronologically overlap some 2C literature. So, for instance, they think it's ad hoc to canonize Daniel but exclude 1 Enoch. Either canonize both or exclude both. Likewise, they think it's ad hoc to canonize Jude. 2 Peter, John, or 1 John, but exclude the Gospel of Thomas. 

Likewise, Catholic apologists contend that Protestants can't justify the cutoff for their canon. And in similar vein, cessationists say continuationists can't justify the cutoff for their canon. 

Of course, an obvious problem with this line of argument is when competing groups raise the same basic objection, that ricochets on their own position. Cessationists are using an argument against continuationists which Catholic apologists use against cessationists. And Catholic apologists are using an argument which critical scholars use against Catholic apologists. 

Indeed, contemporary Catholic Bible scholars are critical scholars. They think Trent unwittingly canonized many books under false auspices. 

vi) To be sure, cessationists deny that the Protestant canon contains pseudepigrapha. But then, continuationists say the same thing. Both groups use the same arguments in that regard. 

vii) Cessationists make the apostles or their immediate successors the cutoff. However, St. Paul poses a dilemma for their position. He isn't connected to the historical Jesus the way the Twelve were. If God could raise up Paul, even though Paul wasn't a regular companion of Christ, and received crucial information, either by revelation or tradition, then the cessationist cutoff is makeshift. Conversely, if Paul is anomalous, then continuationists can draw the same line.  

viii) Another problem is how their objections to continuationism and the canon have a parallel respecting the OT canon. Even if cessationists say the death of the apostles or their immediate successors demarcates the NT canon, that doesn't work for the OT canon. When cessationists say continuationists have no principled cutoff for the canon, aren't cessationists in the same situation respecting the OT canon? 

By that I mean, is there an a priori objection to the production of Scripture during that 400 year interval? Sure, it's called the Interestamental period, so, by definition, that's in-between the OT and the NT. But that's a conventional designation. Is there in principle a reason to deny that God might have raised up new prophets or inspired new writings during that period? I can't think of any.

Seems to me the reason evangelicals deny it is not because that's antecedently inadmissible, but because there are no good candidates for that period. When we look at the evidence, when we look at the record, we have no reason to think God did it that way. Our conclusion is not a matter of principle, but a matter of fact. 

So even if (ex hypothesi), continuationists are unable to furnish an a priori cutoff for the canon, cessationists are in the same boat. And by the same token, there can be a posteriori arguments for the closure of the canon.

ix) Mind you, it would be extremely destabilizing if God were to raise up figure like St. Paul at this late date. So that of itself might be an priori argument–which cessationists and continuationists alike could invoke. 

The historical Enoch

Because Jude quotes from 1 Enoch (Jude 14-15), this raises the question of whether the church either made a mistake by canonizing Jude or by not canonizing 1 Enoch. I've discussed 1 Enoch in various occasions, but I'd like to make some additional points:

i) Because Jude is such a short document, there's no context to judge how he personally views 1 Enoch. To take a comparison, Christian missionaries and apologists sometimes quote from the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, &c. That's not because they believe in the Muslim or Mormon scriptures. They might use the Koran as a bridge. Or they might use the Koran or the Mormon scriptures as a wedge tactic. Using their own sacred literature against them. 

So the mere fact that Jude quotes 1 Enoch doesn't indicate endorsement. It might be a tu quoque maneuver. 

ii) There was no document called 1 Enoch in Jude's time. That's a later editorial title. Our copies of 1 Enoch overlap with whatever document Jude was quoting from, but we have no idea what the boundaries of whatever edition he was quoting were. 

iii) The historical Enoch was an antediluvian. Even assuming he was a seer, what are the odds that his oracles suddenly surfaced in the 2C BC? No one ever heard of it before. No chain of custody. 

Did Noah bring a copy onto the ark? Was it passed down in secret, like an esoteric Disciplina Arcani? Was it a lost book that some rediscovered in the 2C BC? Where was it hidden? Seems an awful lot like Joseph Smith and the golden tablets. 

How likely is it that authentic oracles of a antediluvian appeared out of thin air in the 2C BC? Is it not far more plausible than some Jews during the intertestamental period composed pious fiction which they put on the lips of this enigmatic antediluvian, rather than believing that this appeared out of the blue in the 2C BC, without a trace of their prior existence in Jewish lore? 

iv) For that matter, even if the historical Enoch was a seer, he certainly didn't speak in the late Biblical Hebrew of the Persian period. Who knows what his original language was. It might not even be cognate with Hebrew. Might be a non-Semitic language. So this would be, at best, a translation of what he originally said. 

DSM-5

http://rockingwithhawking.blogspot.com/2016/04/dsm-5.html

The best of all worlds

http://www.reformation21.org/featured/the-best-of-all-worlds.php

The Hinduism of Christianity

In reality, Catholicism includes those with disparate authority and opinions about almost everything under the sun. There are liberal bishops and conservative bishops. The pope sometimes differs with his own Curia. American Catholic voters are regularly viewed by experts as a crucial swing group in every national election, too diffuse to truly categorize. In fact, some scholars of religion refer to Catholicism as the Hinduism of Christianity, because it is infused with so many different schools of prayer, ritual and perspective, much like the native and diverse religions of India now referred to under the single rubric of Hinduism. Feuerherd, Peter. Holyland USA: A Catholic Ride Through America’s Evangelical Landscape. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing, 2006), 72.

Waffle irons

Some young Calvinists become very enamored with Thomism. What makes Thomism so appealing? 

1. One motivation is the appeal of social media. A virtual community in which you can achieve social status by making comments that mark your territory. How to be an intellectual showoff on social media. 

2. On a different front, Thomism is so appealing to some because it's so encyclopedic. It has ready-made answers on a whole raft of issues from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics. Calvinism hasn't developed anything equivalent. 

Thomism has these nifty categories, slots that you can put things into, and out pops the answer, viz. form/matter, essence/existence, substance/accident, efficient/formal/material, final causes. 

Like a waffle-iron. Pour in the batter, and out come waffles. The waffle-iron determines what shape the batter will take. 

Of course, that's only a virtue if reality is waffle-shaped.  

3. Aquinas was a great philosophical theologian, a great systematic theologian, as well as an influential ethicist, political theorist, &c. So there's some justification for their interest. That said, the interest in Aquinas often becomes myopic. And there are problems with that. For instance:

i) Philosophy and philosophical theology didn't end with Aquinas, so there's no good reason why he should be the default paradigm. This leads to the neglect of later philosophers and philosophical theologians outside the Thomistic tradition. Especially for Protestants, there should be no presumption that Thomistic ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology are the best framework. For instance, philosophy often uses models and analogies drawn from logic, math, and science. Advances in logic, math, and science can lead to advances in philosophical analysis. In that respect, Thomism has antiquated conceptual resources.

Of course, Thomism has been updated, but like retrofitting an old car, there comes a point when you should stop tweaking carburetor technology and come up with something from scratch. 

ii) Left to his own devices, Aquinas is a very clear thinker. However, he's a loyal churchman first and last. His duty is to defend Medieval Catholic dogma.

That means he's stuck defending things that are hard to defend. He must come up with ingenious defenses of received dogma. That results in lack of clarity. He's unclear, in part, because he's drawing ad hoc distinctions to defend whatever happens to be dogma. He's not the dealer. He plays the hand he was dealt. 

iii) Another problem concerns time management: life is short, books are expensive, there's only 24 hours in a day. Time invested in Thomism is time taken away from other studies. That doesn't mean the philosophically inclined should ignore Thomism, but by the same token, there are other things they shouldn't ignore. It becomes a question of priorities. 

For instance, someone recently asked about some good works on Christology, besides Aquinas and Garrigou-Lagrange. Recommendations included The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford, 2002), by Richard Cross; The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study of Christology (CUA, 2015) by Thomas Joseph White; Trinity in Aquinas (Sapientia, 2003) & The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 2007), by Gilles Emery.

Now, there's an important place for philosophical Christology. But that's not the proper starting point. What we know about Jesus is based on historic revelation. The proper starting point is exegetical theology, not philosophical theology or historical theology. Put another way, philosophical theology should take its point of departure from exegetical theology. In the case of Christology, NT Christology is the foundation. 

If you're going to read high-level works on Christology, begin with exegetical monographs by scholars like Richard Bauckham, Gordon Fee, Simon Gathercole, Larry Hurtado, and Sigurd Grindheim. That supplies the raw material for philosophical analysis and modeling. 

Philosophical Christology that's not firmly grounded in NT Christology is just an exercise in the history of ideas, toying with ideas, how some ideas relate to other ideas. None of this has any basis in the reality of who Jesus actually is. It becomes intellectual idolatry: worshiping our own minds. 

4. It makes sense for a pious Catholic to begin with church dogma. He thinks Mother Church has the correct interpretation of the NT vis-a-vis the person and work of Christ. So that's his starting point. And that's logical, given the faulty premise.

But that's not a premise for Protestants. Unless we begin with revealed truths about Jesus, what we believe is just playacting. 

For instance, if you begin with Aquinas, you must cash out the two natures in terms of Thomistic anthropology (e.g. hylomorphism) and Thomistic theology (e.g. divine simplicity, actus purus, Latin Trinitarianism). You're replacing NT Christology with a simulacrum. 

Ironically, some young Calvinists are more Catholic than Catholicism. There are Catholic philosophers like Nicholas Rescher, Bas van Fraassen, Michael Dummett, and Dagfinn Føllesdal who don't share their infatuation with Thomism. Not to mention entire religious orders (Jesuit, Franciscan) which are at odds with Thomism.

Cardinal Newman took a very different approach to religious epistemology than Aquinas. Likewise, Benedict XVI is, to my knowledge, much more in tune with his favorite church fathers than he is to Aquinas. For that matter, how central was Aquinas to the philosophy/theology of John-Paul II? Wasn't Urs von Balthasar his favorite theologian?

By the same token you have Catholic philosophers like Alexander Pruss who are quite eclectic. He defends the Leibnizian cosmological argument, and has no problem combining Aristotelian and Leibnizian insights on possible worlds. 

Aquinas purist Ed Feser has an amusing taxonomy. Thing is, real philosophers bring some independent judgment to their assessment of Thomism. That's what makes them critical thinkers. Even when they appropriate Thomism, they sift and sort:

Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and her husband Peter Geach are sometimes considered the first “analytical Thomists,” though (like most writers to whom this label has been applied) they did not describe themselves in these terms, and as Haldane’s somewhat vague expression “mutual relationship” indicates, there does not seem to be any set of doctrines held in common by all so-called analytical Thomists. What they do have in common seems to be that they are philosophers trained in the analytic tradition who happen to be interested in Aquinas in some way; and the character of their “analytical Thomism” is determined by whether it tends to stress the “analytical” side of analytical Thomism, or the “Thomism” side, or, alternatively, attempts to emphasize both sides equally. 

We might tentatively distinguish, then, between three subcategories within the group of contemporary analytic philosophers who have been described as “analytical Thomists.” The first category comprises analytic philosophers who are interested in Aquinas and would defend some of his ideas, but who would also reject certain other key Thomistic claims (perhaps precisely because of their perceived conflict with assumptions prevalent among analytic philosophers) and thus fail to count (or even to count themselves) as “Thomists” in any strict sense. This sort of “analytical Thomism” might be said to emphasize the “analytical” element at the expense of the “Thomism.” Anthony Kenny (who rejects Aquinas’s doctrine of being) and Robert Pasnau (who rejects certain aspects of his account of human nature) would seem to exemplify this first tendency. A second category within analytical Thomism would comprise thinkers who do see themselves as Thomists in some sense, and who would argue that those aspects of Aquinas’s thought which seem to conflict with assumptions common among analytical philosophers can be interpreted or reinterpreted so that there is no conflict. This approach might be said to give both the “analytical” and the “Thomistic” elements of analytical Thomism equal emphasis, and is represented by thinkers like Geach, Brian Davies, and C. F. J. Martin (all of whom would attempt to harmonize Aquinas’s doctrine of being with Frege’s understanding of existence) and Germain Grisez and John Finnis (who would reinterpret Aquinas’s ethics so as to avoid what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”). The work of Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump also possibly falls into this second category, though since it is often interpretative and scholarly rather than programmatic, it is harder to say. 

Thomists of other schools have been very critical of both of these strains within analytical Thomism, sometimes to the extent of dismissing the very idea of analytical Thomism as being no more coherent than (in their view) “transcendental Thomism” is. But there is a third possible category of “analytical Thomists,” namely those whose training was in the analytic tradition and whose modes of argument and choice of topics reflects this background, but whose philosophical views are in substance basically just traditional Thomistic ones, without qualification or reinterpretation. Here the “Thomism” would be in the driver’s seat and the “analytical” modifier would reflect not so much the content of the views defended but rather the style in which they are defended. 

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/10/thomistic-tradition-part-ii.html

“Reformed Scotism”

John Duns Scotus

In response to my “Reformed Thomism” post, an “Unknown” commenter who identified himself as a “Reformed Scholastic” asked, “can you name one pre-20th century influential Scotistic or nominalistic Reformed theologian?” (he was of course suggesting that scads and scads of Reformed Orthodox writers (those from 1550-1750) were “Thomists”).

As a matter of fact, Muller suggests that it was Scotist influence, rather than Thomist, that shaped the “Orthodox definition of the discipline” of theology. What follows is from Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 1: Prolegomena to Theology (2nd ed., pp. 222–224). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic:

In the decade following 1590, a distinction between theologia archetypa, God’s knowledge of himself and his works, and theologia ectypa, creaturely knowledge of God and works, entered the systematic conceptuality of early Reformed orthodoxy. Althaus correctly points to Franciscus Junius’ De theologia vera (1594) as the first work to employ this distinction and to make a threefold division in the theologia ectypa: the theologia unionis, visionis, and viatorum.

The myth of the mythical Jesus

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2016/04/the-myth-of-the-mythical-jesus/

Evil dreams

Peter van Inwagen is a premier freewill theist. I'm going to quote and comment on some of his statements regarding the problem of evil. 

But an omnipotent and omniscient creator could be called to moral account for creating a world in which there was even one horror. And the reason is obvious: that horror could have been "left out" of creation without the sacrifice of any great good or the permitting of some even greater horror. And leaving it out is just what a morally perfect being would do: such good things as might depend causally on the horror could–given the being's omnipotence and omniscience–be secured by (if the word is not morally offensive in this context) more "economical" means. The Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2006), 96. 

i) One problem is the distinction between a good and a "great" good. What makes something a great good? "Great" for whom? 

For instance, suppose a couple have a child who dies of leukemia. As a result, they have another child to compensate for the loss of the child who died. Is the replacement child a great good? Well, it's great for the replacement child. It gives him an opportunity to exist–an opportunity that would not otherwise obtain apart from the tragic death of his older sibling. 

ii) When Inwagen says such good things might be secured by more economical means, that fails to distinguish between particular goods and generic goods. Even if certain kinds of goods could be secured by more economical means (which is far from evident), it doesn't follow that particular goods could be secured by more economic means. Take my example of the replacement child. If you leave out the horror of the sibling that died, you do sacrifice the replacement child. 

iii) Invoking omnipotence is not a solution, for omnipotence makes feasible the realization of alternate scenarios. But that involves sacrificing one possible outcome for another. God can do either one, but he can't instantiate both alternatives in the same timeline. 

A defense cannot simply take the form of a story about how God brings some great good out of the evils of the word, a good that outweighs those evils. At the very least, a defense will have to include the proposition that God was unable to bring about the greater good without allowing the evils we observe (or some other evils as bad or worse). Ibid. 68.

One problem with this statement is framing the justification in terms of bringing about a "greater" good, a good that "outweighs" those evils. But why is that a necessary condition? What about an alternate good? A good that would not obtain apart from attendant evil? Why is that insufficient justification? 

To recur to my previous example, suppose the replacement child doesn't "outweigh" the evil of his sibling's premature death. But why does the justification for his existence depend on that condition? 

If there were no evil, no one would appreciate–perhaps no one would even be aware of–the goodness of the things that are good. You know the idea: you never really appreciate health till you've been ill, you never really understand how great and beautiful a thing friendship is till you've known adversity and known what it is to have friends who stick by you through thick and thin–and so on. Now the obvious criticism of this defense is so immediately obvious that it tends to mask the point that led me to raise it. The immediately obvious criticism is that this defense may be capable of accounting for a certain amount of, for example, physical pain, but it certainly doesn't account for the degree and duration of the pain that many people are subject to–and it doesn't account for the fact that many of the people who experience horrible physical pain do not seem to be granted any subsequent goods to appreciate. If, for example, the final six months of the life of a man dying of cancer are one continuous chapter of excruciating pain, the "appreciation" defense (so to call it) can hardly be said to provide a plausible account of why God would allow someone's life to end this way. Ibid. 69.

i) Up to a point, that's a valid criticism. But it contains some dubious assumptions:

ii) The "appreciation" defense may fail as a stand-alone theodicy. It may, however, make a distinctive contribution to an overall theodicy. There needn't be one uniform reason for every kind of evil. 

iii) What if evil is not intended to benefit everyone who suffers evil? 

iv) Apropos (iii), the criticism is shortsighted. What if the beneficiary is not the person who suffers, but someone else? In the chain of events, someone further down the line may be the beneficiary. Changing a variable has a domino effect. Every altered variable has a different domino effect. It's not as if one variable can be changed, while leaving everything else in place. Removing the evil removes good side-effects. It changes how all the dominos fall thereafter–for good and ill alike. 

v) His example presumes that a person has to let the cancer take its course. But that's subject to debate.

An omnipotent being would certainly be able to provide the knowledge of evil that human beings in fact acquire by bitter experience of real events in some other way. An omnipotent being could, for example, so arrange matters that at a certain point in each persons's life-for a few years during his adolescence, say–that person have very vivid and absolutely convincing nightmares in which he is a prisoner in a concentration camp or dies of some horrible disease or watches his loved ones being raped and murdered by soldiers bent on ethnic cleansing…It seems clear that a world in which horrible things occurred only in nightmares would be better than a world in which the same horrible things occurred in reality… Ibid. 69.

I'm afraid that really isn't clear. 

i) There's a sense in which it would be better for your loved ones if they don't actually suffer. If these are merely dream characters.

ii) But would it be better for the dreamer if he's the one who suffers from a horrible disease? Sure, it's only a dream, it isn't real, but since the experience is phenomenologically indistinguishable from reality ("very vivid and absolutely convincing"), how is that clearly better? If it happens to you, and you can't tell the difference, how is that clearly better? Indeed, that would be a very effective form of torture. In reality, you can only die once, however horribly, but in recurring nightmare, that's indefinitely repeatable.

iii) If, conversely, we know it was just a bad dream once we awaken, then we don't take it all that seriously. It's like a video game about combat. An immersive simulation. Because no one is really harmed, it lacks moral weight. It's safe fun. 

iv) Inwagen is sketching a scenario in which horrific evil only happens–or seems to happen–in very vivid nightmares. Our waking state is Edenic. 

But wouldn't nightmares like that raise doubts about God's benevolence? If these horrors don't happen in the world I inhabit, then where do they come from? Normally, we dream about things that happen in the world we inhabit. If that's not the case, then what's the source of the nightmares? Do they happen in another world? Am I tapping into another world when I dream? Is the fact that I have these nightmares a premonition of what awaits me in the next world? Inwagen's alternative shifts the problem. 

v) It isn't clear, moreover, how he can confine moral evil to nightmares. Doesn't that say something about the imagination of the dreamer? How can his imagination be haunted by moral evil without that spilling over into his waking state? 

Repeatedly, Inwagan's analysis of the problem of evil, and his objections to proposed solutions, suffer from compartmentalization. The implications of a hypothetical scenario aren't that self-contained. 

More on miracles

http://www.craigkeener.com/miracles-lecture-at-missouri-state-university-2/

If private revelations agree with Scripture, they are needless

Some cessationists cite a statement attributed to John Owen. Commenting on Owen, Packer says:

He is quick to deploy against them the old dilemma that if their ‘private revelations’ agree with Scripture, they are needless, and if they disagree, they are false. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Crossway, 1994), 86.

That has epigrammatic clarity and concision. However, it's unclear to what extent Packer is quoting, summarizing, or paraphrasing Owen. As it stands, the statement, while pithy, punchy, and quotable, poses a simplistic and fallacious dilemma.  

I assume "agree" is synonymous with "consistent". To "agree with" is to be consistent with. Put another way, to agree with means it doesn't contradict it. If so, the statement is deceptively appealing.

It's like saying, if medical science is consistent with Scripture, then it's needless; and if it's inconsistent with Scripture, it is false. The latter clause is true, but the former is false. 

To say something "agrees" with Scripture just means that it's consistent with Scripture. But that doesn't make it redundant. Something can be consistent with Scripture, but add to our fund of knowledge–like medical science. 

To take a hypothetical case: suppose I have a premonition or dream that if I board that plane tomorrow, it will crash. I reschedule. The plane I missed explodes in midair, killing everyone on board.

That "private revelation" doesn't contradict anything in Scripture. But it's not superfluous or needless. 

The statement attributed to Owen makes the mistake of attempting a quick and easy refutation of a position that isn't that simple. Whatever your position on cessationism, this gambit is a nonstarter. 

No such thing as “Reformed Thomism” among the Reformed Orthodox

The concept of “Reformed Thomism” is thoroughly wrong-headed.

There’s a Facebook group (and I suppose a movement) that calls itself “Reformed Thomism”. I think that’s a wrong-headed concept through and through. “Thomism” has had a lot of different iterations, and most of the contemporary ones rely heavily on (and work to support) Roman Catholicism.

Elsewhere, I’ve cited Richard Muller regarding the phenomenon known as “Reformed Scholasticism”, something that was a mark of the “Reformed Orthodox”:

The term “scholasticism,” when applied to [the scholarly practices of the Reformed Orthodox] indicates primarily, therefore, a method and not a particular content: the method could be (and was) applied to a wide variety of theological contents and it could be (and was) applied to other academic disciplines as well. As Masson has remarked, borrowing Chenu’s definition of medieval scholasticism, this relatively uniform method of exposition, with its clear structure, its patterns of reasoning and standard practices of making distinctions, neatly dividing and subdividing topics, its brief citations of texts, its monotonous use of formulae, and its impersonality of style, serves to hide the variety of its actual contents (Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise And Development Of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 1: Prolegomena To Theology (2nd ed., pg. 34). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.).

So “Reformed Scholasticism” was a genuine phenomenon. However, taking the word “Thomism” and plugging it in where the word “Scholasticism” appears is buying into a lot of things that the Reformed Orthodox did not buy into.

Trump's politically correct position on unisex restrooms

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/trump-opposes-north-carolina-bathroom-bill.html

Bullwinkle is a dope

Once again, I'm going to explore the question of what makes a claim historically accurate. Bart Ehrman constantly impugns the historical accuracy of the Gospels, but rarely says much about what makes a claim historically reliable or accurate. 

Sometimes he says we should judge the Gospels by modern standards of historical accuracy rather than ancient standards, but that assumes, among other things, that modern standards are indeed more accurate or reliable. It's true that we can measure space and time with greater precision. Down to multiple decimal places. But unless you're an engineer, that's pedantic. 

Let's run through some examples:

#1 A newsworthy event happened on August 8, 1974. 

#2 On August 8, 1974, Nixon tenured his resignation.

#3 In a televised address, Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974. 

#4 In a televised address from the White House, Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974. 

#5 In a televised address from the Oval office, Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974. 

#6 In a televised address from the Oval office, President Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974. 

#7 In a televised address from the Oval office, President Richard Milhous Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974. 

#8 In a televised address from the Oval office, President Richard Milhous Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974, effective noon the next day. 

#9 In a televised address from the Oval office, President Richard Milhous Nixon tenured his resignation on August 8, 1974, effective noon the next day, EST. 

These successive descriptions are increasingly specific. Each is a bit more detailed than the previous description. 

In that respect, you might say #9 is more accurate than #8, #8 is more accurate than #7, and so forth. Conversely, #1 is less accurate than #2, #2 is less accurate than #3, and so forth.

However, to be less accurate is not to be inaccurate. Each description is completely accurate. 

Put another way: if a description mentions some detail, then to be accurate, the description must match the detail. However, including that detail is not a prerequisite for accuracy. Failure to mention that detail doesn't render the description inaccurate. Mere omission is not an inaccuracy. Rather, if it mentions some detail, and the description fails to match the detail, then that's an inaccuracy.

Compare three statements:

#1 Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. 

#2 Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

#3 Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Rocky Squirrel will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

Both #1 & #2 are accurate. The fact that #2 omits some details doesn't make it inaccurate. It just makes it less informative. 

#3 is inaccurate because it contains a false identification. In a sense, #3 is inaccurate because it says too much, unlike #1. Omission is not a falsehood–although it can sometimes be deceptive. 

Let's take another example: 

Rocky J. Squirrel is Bullwinkle J. Moose's best friend. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974. 

That's an accurate statement. And it contains more information than a bare statement about Nixon's resignation. But that doesn't make it more historically accurate in reference to his resignation. Rather, it combines two entirely unrelated claims. Each claim is extraneous to the other. 

The Shallowness Of The Trump Movement

Something I recently sent in an email:

It's not just Trump, but the Trump movement in general. They don't think in much depth, which includes a failure to plan ahead much. As some commentators have noted lately, Trump's supporters have shown little interest in defeating incumbents or making other changes in political contexts other than the current presidential campaign. What have Trump supporters been doing to change Congress, to change governors and state legislatures, etc.? Not much. I spent months last year trying to reason with Trump supporters in National Review's comment threads, and one of the questions I asked them was how Trump was going to work with Congress. They had no good answer, and most seemed uninterested in even addressing the subject. We can also look at this in terms of what happened before Trump entered the race. How many of Trump's supporters were calling for him to run before he got in? Only a tiny percentage of them. How many were even calling for somebody like Trump, regardless of whether they mentioned Trump by name? Few.

Here's something Ramesh Ponnuru wrote on this subject yesterday:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/434328/trumpisms-missing-middle

Seeing Christ in all of Scripture

Westminster Seminary Press is currently offering Seeing Christ in All of Scripture: Hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary (pdf) as a free download.

Bathroom battles

http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/19/federal-court-schools-may-not-provide-separate-bathrooms-based-on-biology/