-vi-
For the most part, music is an aristocracy, but there are some exceptions to the rule: Anything with a German name carries a certain prestige. This is true is many fields besides music. An American name lacks the same caché.
By the same token, chauvinism promotes certain composers out of due proportion to their intrinsic worth--merely as a matter of national pride. A mediocre composer on the international stage may enjoy a national following because he has no domestic competitors, or because the indigenous standard is so uniformly low that what’s bad is good.
Ironically, some mediocre composers make it into the standard repertory as an act of diplomatic deference--in the musical equivalent of the UN--where every native son, however ne'er-do-well, has a seat at the table.
Some mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory because their music is a war-horse or virtuoso vehicle for a diva or big-ticket pianist or violinist.
Likewise, some mediocre composers make the cut in a musical subdivision like opera. It may not be great music, but all it needs is the sponsorship of a particular constituency or special-interest group.
Similarly, mediocre composers figure in the standard repertory of a particular instrument, because the solo repertory is so limited for that particular instrument.
Finally, some mediocre music gets performed because it's oh-so avant-. No one may play it a generation from now when it takes is place beside yesterday’s newspaper, but for the time being it’s the toast of the town.
-vii-
There is a perennial battle--especially in opera--between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. The Apollonians are the voice-lovers, while the Dionysians champion the singing-actor. Dionysians attack singers golden-throated singers who are fat, can’t act, and sacrifice diction for euphony.
It’s funny to read music reviewers who solemnly inform the reader that the younger generation will no longer put up with overweight singers. Raised on TV and film, young operagoers are going to demand opera singers with a credible physique.
Of course, this rather elitist prediction makes the assumption that fat people can’t fall in love--or that fat operagoers can’t identify with fat opera singers. And year after year, voice-lovers continue to patronize the opera singers with the best set of vocal cords. What is more, this comes in a roly-poly package. There is the rare singer who is pleasing to eye and ear alike. But that’s a bonus point. As long as you’ve got the vocal equipment, you can look like you’re auditioning for the circus and still have a very lucrative career on the opera stage.
The Dionysian complaint suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium. It is the job of the composer, not the singer, to capture the mood and the meaning of the text. When setting words to music, a composer’s duty is to translate dramatic values into musical values. And, by that same token, the singer’s duty is to sing well. If the composer has done his job, then the singer will be true to the text by being true to the vocal line, respecting the dynamic markings, and so forth. The drama lies in the music and musicianship.
This is not to deny that a naturally expressive or verbally alert singer can enhance the dramatic effect. No doubt divas like Sutherland, Caballe, and Milanov are fairly faceless--like musical mannequins. To turn from one of them to a recording of Regine Crespin in her prime is like going from a disembodied voice to a woman in the flesh. And if you can get all this in one juicy package, which is very rare, then so much the better. But it is unfair to the singer and uncomprehending of the art form to constantly berate singers who do full justice to the music while always praising singers whose acting, however compelling, is in spite of and at the expense of musical values.
-viii-
Some Christians disapprove of choirs and soloists because they think it’s prideful and egotistical to stick out. The focus has shifted from God to man.
There is, of course, a grain of truth to this. Some folks are wittier and prettier. They have star-power.
This is unavoidable. It is never truer than in the pulpit. But you might as well say that a beautiful woman should go around with a sack over her head. Come to think if it, there’s a religious tradition--Islam--which says that very thing.
But in Paul’s master metaphor, the church is a body with many members. The solution is not to level everyone down to the same lowly member, but to honor every member for its distinct contribution to the whole, and to deploy each member according to its particular gift.
IV. Semiotics
Although music is an abstract artistic medium, it has a marvelous mimetic and synesthetic potential in simulating and stimulating moods, hues, and visual cues. This operates at many levels.
Rhythmic intervals reflect time while pitch intervals simulate space. Sound is folded space.
A major key naturally conveys an upbeat mood, and a minor key a downbeat mood. Notice how "upbeat" and "downbeat" are, of themselves, musical metaphors.
A rising cadence conveys as comic mood--in the classical sense of comedy--whereas a falling cadence conveys a triste or tragic mood.
The very fact that we think of music as high and low, rising and falling, represents a synesthetic carryover of a naturally visual cue. The musical analogue is a case of second-order synesthesia.
Fast music conveys agitation or exhilaration, while slow music conveys a sad or meditative mood.
The contrast between staccato and legato can have the same effect.
We lavish a variety of visual and tactile metaphors on timbre, describing a certain sound as bright and dark, warm and cold, creamy, silvery, velvety, abrasive, and so on. For some striking comparisons, cf. N. Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian aesthetic (Eerdmans, 1980), 96ff.
What accounts for this cross-categorial affinity? And why we invest certain sensory properties and spatial relations with such moral and emotional significance?
This is because the material order is a moral order. God has made the sensible world to be a simile of the spiritual world. God has encoded these associations in the human mind--associations which are triggered when the mind comes into contact with a suitable stimulus. Herein line the power of painting and poetry as well as music.
V. Genre
-i-
Is there such a thing as a sacred style of music? To some ears, certain types of sacred music sound profane. Voltaire described Haydn and Mozart church music as opera for the masses. One can only imagine what epithets he would have reserved for the sacred music of Rossini, Berlioz and Bizet.
Conversely, certain types of profane music sound sacred, viz., "Ombra mai fu," Gluck’s dance of the blessed spirits, &c.).
In terms of musical style, there is no sacred genre, per se. And to some extent, what strikes a listener as reverent or irreverent has a lot to do with the music’s cultural associations. Contemporary music has the strongest cultural associations because it is something we directly experience in conjunction with the current state of the general culture. As music drops outside the lifetime of the listener, it tends to lose whatever odious associations it may otherwise have.
One reviewer criticized a hymnal because one of the hymn tunes was taken from Brahms’ first symphony. I find this objection decidedly odd.
It is one thing to disapprove of a hymn-tune because it triggers unsuitable textual associations. There was, for example, a time when you could hear a "sacred" setting of the Drinking Song from Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia when you went to Mass.
But most orchestral (or chamber) music has no textual referent. So what if we associate a hymn-tune with a symphony? If we don’t find the symphony offensive, why do we find the hymn-tune offensive?
To me, the more important distinction is between good music and bad music. If a hymnodist can plunder the Egyptians, in Augustine’s apt phrase, so much the better.
Finally, if a singer is astute enough to associate a hymn-tune with a Brahms' symphony, he is astute enough to discount this adventitious association. Sophistication is a two-way street. It can disallow or make allowance--whichever is better.
-ii-
The distinction between old music and new music is deeply misleading. Music has a date, but music isn’t dated in the same sense that Jane Austen or Thomas Gainsborough is dated. That is because music is an abstract medium in a way that portrait painting or a novel of manners, with its concrete setting, is not. Music is a product of a particular period and place, but it is not a period piece in the same sense as many other art forms.
Its time of composition doesn’t come stamped upon it, and if you didn’t know the history of music, you couldn’t tell to what century a given piece of music belongs. To someone whose musical ideal is the George Beverly Shea repertory, an Ira Sankey hymn sounds up-to-date while a carol by John Rutter sounds old-fashioned--even though Sankey is long dead while Rutter is very much alive.
A partial exception to the law of diminishing invidious returns is opera music. If a listener is an opera buff, he is likely to recognize an opera tune, and, what is more, it will conjure up all the dramatic associations as well. This is especially the case with 19C opera, which still forms the backbone of the repertory.
-iii-
There is, however, a more intrinsic sense in which some music is more reverent than other music. And that lies in music’s mimetic capacity to simulate and evoke certain moods. Indeed, the emotional appeal of music is what makes music such an appealing art form to so many men and women.
And some moods are more appropriate to worship than others. Of course, a good worship service varies the mood. So the intuitive view of a sacred style, however, inchoate, has more than a grain of truth.
VI. Gender
-i-
Nothing is more stereotypical than opera. Sopranos and tenors play young lovers, baritones play the stalwart friend of the hero, mezzos play bad girls, while bassos and altos play mom and pop or other authority figures, whether benevolent or malevolent.
More often than not, the stereotype precipitates a comic clash between sight as sound as a chunky-built, overripe soprano plays an ingénue while a chunky-built, overripe tenor plays the fresh-faced suitor.
Is this just a convention, or does the stereotype run deeper than that? That’s is an important question because it goes, in part, to why we find beauty so elusive of definition, of why we find certain sights and sounds agreeable, and others disagreeable.
On the face of it, there’s no logical reason why opera should even exist. Why are there folks who find the vocal medium so compelling? Why can they get into heated debates over the relative merits of Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland? Why do they put up with these ridiculously overwrought plots in which everyone is dead by the last act?
No doubt there’s a heavy element of decadence in all this. But it has a basis in natural revelation and common grace.
The world is at once a natural order and a moral order. At one level, the natural order is a metaphor for the moral order. The reason we associate certain vocal ranges with certain role-relations, the reason we, or--at least, some of us--find a particular timbre pleasing, is that God has encoded natural law into certain sights and sounds. We are preprogrammed to register, at a subliminal level, a moral norm or abstract universal in a concrete particular.
Various vocal categories symbolize and simulate various social roles and relations--a masculine ideal, a feminine ideal, the friend, the lover, the father, the mother, the hero, the heroine, the priest, prophet, king, or villain.
At a literal level, the only difference between Joan Sutherland and Florence Foster Jenkins is a different set of overtones. At that level, there’s no reason why we attach so much emotional significance to one sound wave over another.
From a biological perspective, the primary purpose of the larynx in not to generate a high C, but to regulate food and oxygen intake. Nothing especially romantic about that. On the face of it, singing is a rather freakish secondary adaptation of muscle designed to do something else.
And yet, from a theological standpoint, that explanation is unduly reductionistic. For one thing, the idea of dual-use technology in the engineering of the human body is not an alien concept. An obvious example is the way in which the same organs perform sexual and excretory functions.
We know that man was graced with the gift of speech (Gen 2), so that application of the larynx is a primary, and not a secondary application.
Singing is an extension of speech, and song is a Biblical means and mandate of worship. That does not, of itself, prescribe a particular technique, but it does suggest that the capacity of the larynx to sing as well as speak is written into the original design of the organ. Among other things, the larynx is meant to be used as a musical instrument.
To approach this from another angle, the many references to the turtledove in Canticles (1:15; 2:12,14; 4:1; 5:2,12; 6:9) is such a romantic cliché that we may not give it a second thought. We associate songbirds with spring, and spring with the season of love. Nothing is more trite than calling a smitten couple a pair of lovebirds--wooing and cooing in each other’s company. Yes, that’s the stuff of love poetry the world round.
But this is more than a cliché, this is a Biblical cliché. It is important to know which cultural clichés enjoy divine warrant.
-ii-
The question of gender also raises the question of gender-specific music. For some, the sexless style of Palestrina and Tudor music, with their prepubescent boys and foppish countertenors, sheered of any orchestral accompaniment or rhythmic vitality, represents the ideal. Anything else is irreverent.
This sort of music exemplifies the popular preconception of angelic song. Indeed, the voice of a boy soprano is typically described as "angelic."
Now, I have no problem with boy choirs or girl choirs. A lot of parents also thing it’s cute when kids sing out of tune. But there’s no reason why boys and girls can’t be taught to sing properly.
There is, however, no good reason why we should be writing music for the angels. We may have an immortal, incorporeal soul, but we are also creatures of flesh-and-blood, differentiated by sex and sexual maturation.
The Bible condemns any gender-bending ethic. But pop vocalism has an insidious way of reversing the roles. Women belt out their numbers in a raw, mannish chest voice while men croon like drag queens. Gender-blending isn’t limited to pop vocalism. Countertenors are literally effeminate.
Conversely, the Italian tradition fosters a compartmentalized piety, in which we have sexless church music and oversexed opera music. Some opera buffs even find their religious inspiration on the operatic stage. Rudolf Bing attributed Renata Tebaldi’s cult-like fandome to the confluence of Marian iconography with Tebaldi’s stage persona.
We need to strike a balance. There ought to be no sacred/profane dichotomy, but rather, a style suitable to both. There is nothing wrong with a degree of muted sensuality in church--a sensuality that doesn’t flaunt itself, but is simply a God-given and God-honoring expression of our natural manhood or womanhood. We ought to foster a closer connection between Christian anthropology and Christian axiology. Men should sound like men, and women like women. It’s a judgment on the church when the opera house often does a better job of modeling manhood and womanhood than the sanctuary.
-iii-
Opera presents a corrupt version of the chivalric code. One reason for the development of opera is that it deals with subject-matter disallowed in traditional church music. Indeed, we have here something of a vicious cycle. Opera music is so profane because it is not an outgrowth of a Christian outlook on life. Opera is essentially a product of Catholic culture. And in Catholicism you have a dichotomy between the religious orders and the laity. The subject-matter of Catholic church music is the Mass and the cult of the saints.
What this leaves entirely out of view is normal family life--of men and women who come of age, fall in love, marry, and raise of family--who work inside or outside the home to support a family--as well as many other aspects of ordinary life, such as friendship, sports, war, adventure, exploration, the natural world, the life-cycle, &c.
These are things which the rank-and-file are going to think about, write about, sing about, and act on with or without religious guidance. By failing to integrate that larger slice of life into Christian music, it cannot be consecrated and sanctified to the glory of God.
One of the legacies of the Protestant Reformation was the notion that every Christian has a divine vocation, that the layman has a Christian calling to serve God.
This, however, did not work its way into Christian music because Lutheran music is cross-centered, while Reformed music is Psalm-centered. Bach set the Mass to music. He replaced the cult of the saints with the Passion of Christ. And he wrote a few secular cantatas, as well as many sacred cantatas. For his part, Handel set OT narrative to music--along with many Italian operas, as well as a few in English--while Mendelssohn set NT narrative to music.
Much of this marks an advance over the subject-matter of Catholic church music. There is an important place for this. But, for the most part, it still leaves the laity on the outside, looking in.
You can see the same divided piety at work in "gospel" music and the crossover artist. A gospel-singer who "crosses over" is stigmatized for cashing in on a lucrative market. And there is usually an element of moral and spiritual compromise at work here. In that respect, a crossover artist deserves to be ostracized.
Yet the standard fare of gospel music, which is all about getting saved and getting to heaven, but not much in-between, presents a severely truncated view of the Christian lifestyle. There’s more to the walk of faith than a conversion experience followed by a funeral.
It ought to be possible for a believer to sing about falling in love and staying in love without having to check his faith at the doorstep.
VII. Vox et verbum.
-i-
Every language or dialect has a distinctive timbre which tends, in turn, to cultivate a certain vocal placement.
Spoken French is beautiful, but sung French is very tricky, for sustaining the nasals produces a nasal twang, which is not at all bel canto--reminding one of Rudolf Bing’s quip that if the Met had a bad night, the Paris Opera had a bad century.
German is better for low voices than high voices. Among the great Wagnerians, Melchior was Danish, Nilsson Finnish, and Flagstad Norwegian. But Germany has produced some fine altos, baritones, and bassos.
Russian is also better for low voices than high voices--especially the basso, although Russian opera doesn’t make the same demands on the low range as the choral repertory. The women, by contrast, are often squally in the high range.
English depends on the dialect. The Oxbridge accent, however elegant for the spoken word, is fatal for the sung word.
However, other English accents seem to fare better: Forrester and Vickers are Canadians, Melba and Sutherland Aussies, Te Kanawa a New Zealander.
French, German, and English women normally have a fairly clear division between the head and chest registers. Is this an effect of language, or a result of their ecclesiastical choral tradition, with men and boys co-opting the soprano/alto line? It doesn’t have that effect on Italians, who share the same ecclesiastical tradition.
Speaking of boy sopranos, the sound which we’re accustomed to hearing today--involving a cool, pure, and straight-edged head-tone is not necessarily how the treble used to sound in times past. If you listen to Earnest Lough’s recordings from the 20s, he has a mixed tone with a natural vibrato. Although the timbre is unmistakably male, the production is more characteristic of grown woman. This may be because boys' voices broke at a later age back then--around the upper teens.
The Welsh language also turns out some fine singers (Burrows, Howell, Terfel, Price).
Black-Americans often have deep, resonant speaking voices, although they incline to a nasal or chesty production, with a rough transition over the break. You can hear this in Norman and Price when they sing around the break. Blacks have yet to produce a great operatic bass, although some black men clearly have the raw equipment. But their musical tradition selects for pop vocalism instead of classical vocalism.
The typical white American accent tends to be somewhat pinched and nasal. This works well enough for country-western, but not for classical vocalism. It has the same aesthetic appeal as Japanese opera--where you sing through the nose instead of the mouth.
Latin and Italian are best, although the placement can be a bit too forward or bottom-heavy. Spanish singers can easily pass in the Italian repertory, although Caballe, for one, has to guard against a nasal attack.
-ii-
There are partial exceptions to the rule. Crespin sang French that was both beautiful and idiomatic, but that’s because she was Italian on her mother’s side, which had a moderating influence on the placement--with its pure, open vowels and bounded phrasing.
Frida Leider was an outstanding German soprano. As a dramatic soprano, she can to cultivate the chest register, which, in turn, filled out the head-tone. She also mastered the Italian repertory, which had a further softening effect on the Teutonic vocal production--melting the Alpine frost with a shaft of southern sunshine.
VIII. Vocal technique.
-i-
The human voice naturally divides into two registers, head and chest. This is equally true of men and women, children and adults.
In men, the chest register is dominant--in women, the head. Low female voices tend to be chestier, and high men’s voices tend to be headier.
In classical vocal technique, a man sings entirely from the chest--unless he’s a dandified countertenor, whereas a woman tries to bridge the two registers by cultivating a middle voice, which is a mixed tone. If you want to hear a seamless female voice, listen to Flagstad
Because women sing in both registers, they naturally have a longer voice (wider range) than men. A male vocalist has about two usable octaves--two-and-a-half if he’s exceptional, whereas a female vocalist has about two-and-a-half usable octaves--three if she’s exceptional.
The vocal apparatus must make certain muscular adjustments in going from low to high or vice versa. In terms of vocal technique, you can build a voice from the bottom up or the top down. To some extent this corresponds with the natural range of the voice. It is more natural for a lower, heavier voice to build from the bottom-up, and a higher, lighter voice to build from the top-down.
Each technique carries a trade-off. As Jerome Hines put it, every solution has its problems. You trade high notes for low notes, a higher center of gravity for a lower center of gravity.
Take some sopranos. Flagstad, Tebaldi, Milanov, and Ponselle represent the bottom-up approach. This makes for a fulsome low and middle range, with a columnar tone and even emission of sound. These were all dramatic sopranos, with the same basic range as mezzo-sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more chest resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this is the most beautiful type of timbre.
But there’s a price to be paid. It generally works better in slow music than fast music. And the effect is to tug the voice down, making high notes an audible effort. Also, big deep voices have a matronly, even matriarchal, tone which limits their sex appeal when they aspire to sing the virginal heroine.
By contrast, Sutherland, Caballe, and Leontyne Price represent the top-down approach. This makes for a vibrant, floating tone, with easy, ringing high notes and a round, ebullient middle range. They are basically corn-fed lyric sopranos.
Put another way, their voices have more head resonance mixed into the middle voice. To some ears, this pitches the voice at a more natural altitude, resulting in a more youthful tone and authentic soprano sound. True songbirds, they can live up there in a way a heavier voice cannot. They make their home in the branches, while their earthbound sisters live closer to the ground. A word like "warbler" comes naturally to Sutherland in a way it doesn’t to Flagstad. Flagstad is swan gliding on a pond, but La Stupenda is a nightingale in the treetops.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Music: sacred & profane-1
I. The state of the question
For about a generation or so there has been a controversy over the style of music to be used in Christian worship. This is usually cast as a choice between traditional music and contemporary music. Although that is one way of framing the debate, it is too superficial to be very discriminating.
Controversies over church music are nothing new. Augustine disapproved of women singing in church for fear it would be distracting male members of the congregation. There may be some truth to that, although it doesn’t seem to have entered his mind that men singing in church might be equally distracting to the women in attendance!
Palestrina’s all-male, a cappella music became the official touchstone of Catholic music. In England, an all-male choir means boy sopranos and countertenors, In Bavaria--boy sopranos and boy altos, in Italy--boy sopranos and castrati (well, once upon a time!)!
The Westminster Directory of Worship prescribes exclusive a cappella Psalmnody, and some Calvinists have never forgiven Watts for defiling the worship service with "uninspired" hymns.
Revivals usher in new musical styles, such as Wesley, Pantycelyn, and Sankey. The Jesus Freaks brought their steel drums, electric guitars and rock rhythms into the sanctuary, while black gospel brought dance music into choir loft--something you also find in Messianic congregations.
This illustrates a weakness with the distinction between traditional and contemporary. For some folks, "traditional" music means classical music. For others, traditional means exclusive a cappella Psalmnody. For still others, traditional means whatever music they grew up with. It’s a generational thing.
For the most part I’ve been rather dissatisfied by the piecemeal quality of the debate. For purposes of this present essay, I’ll try to broach the question in a more wide-ranging fashion.
II. Cosmology
The proverbial "music of the spheres" is not a mere figure of speech, but alludes to a full-blown musical cosmology. On the pagan side, this goes back to Pythagoras, with his ontological numerology as well as his discovery of musical ratios. Plato, in the Timaeus (35-6; 41-2; 47c-e), turned this idea into a creation-myth. The idea received a more "scientific" underpinning with Ptolemy’s work on Harmonics, as well as Nichomachus (Handbook of Harmonics [Encheiridion harmonikes]).
Greek speculation was popularized by such Roman writers as Cicero ("Somnium Scipionis," De republica 6:18), Capella, Apuleius, and Macrobius (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis).
On the Christian side, this outlook was baptized, popularized, and systematized by Augustine (De Musica), Ammonius, Boethius (De Institutione Musica; De Nuptiis Philogiae et Mercurii), and Cassiodorus (Variae; Expositio in psalterium).
This tradition feeds directly into Dante’s cosmology and numerology. It received its penultimate scientific defense and demise at the hands of Kepler, the great Lutheran astronomer and geometer (Harmonice Mundi). And this was, in turn, the subject of a major opera by Hindemith, Die Harmonie der Welt.
In some ways, contemporary string theory is a throwback to Greek musical cosmology. So the journey has come full circle.
There is even a dash of this cosmology in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang in unison, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
Given the degree of cultural diffusion in the ANE and the Levant, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Plato and Pythagoras were channeling some ideas which went back to the time and place of Scripture, but became garbled in the process of transmission and creative recension.
This was the thesis of Theophilus Galen in his Court of the Gentiles, and while the particulars of his argument appear pretty fanciful to modern eyes, yet the comparative historiography of Cyrus Gordon has done much to document the general phenomenon and direction of cultural diffusion.
III. Axiology
-i-
The OT temple service, by putting a premium on artistic excellence, was an expression of high culture rather than pop culture. Obviously, what represents high culture is culture-bound in terms of its concrete mode of expression. OT music was no doubt primitive compared to Classical music. But it aimed high.
In addition to the Temple, you had, at some point during the Intertestamental period, the rise of the synagogue--the inspiration for which John Frame traces to OT injunctions regarding the convocation of holy assembles (Exod 12:16; Lev 23; Num 28; 29). If the Temple reflects high culture, the synagogue reflects pop culture. It was akin a local parish church, whereas the Temple was akin to a Cathedral.
The function of the synagogue was to spread the message and cement the fellowship of the covenant community with weekly services at accessible locations.
My general point is that if we take OT precedent as a guide, then there is a place in the church for both high culture and pop culture, although we need to be critical consumers of each, and not rubber-stamp everything which either tradition or the general culture has to offer.
-ii-
This, in turn, raises the contentious issue a seeker-sensitive church. And, in Calvinism, that is an old debate, going back to the Great Awakening.
In my opinion, a worship service is for worshipers, for the believers, not unbelievers; for the edification of the faithful. So it would be a mistake to center the service on seekers.
Having said that, there is a larger sense in which the Christian faith is the most-seeker sensitive faith in the world. Ours is an outward-looking and forward-leaning faith.
And this is not merely for the benefit of the prospective convert. Without a transfusion of fresh blood, the church begins to suffer from hardening of the arteries. We fight more and more over less and less. The new birth is exchanged for either a birth-rite (baptism) or a birthright (covenant childhood).
Moreover, a service that is geared only to insiders may take too much for granted even where the insiders are concerned. They recite the same creeds and prayers year after year, sing the same hymns, yet if you were to quiz them on what the words mean, or how to defend them from Scripture, I daresay that the level of incomprehension and ignorance would be startling.
It is necessary for a pastor to explain what he’s saying and doing from time to time. This is a profitable exercise, not only for the outsiders, but the insiders as well.
That applies to music as well. Take a Charles Wesley hymn like "Hark! The herald angels, sing," "Come, o thou traveler unknown," or "And can it be that I should gain?" These are often deceptively simple. There is probably a lot that goes right over the head of the average singer. Well, the answer to ignorance is education. Before the congregation sings it, the pastor or music director should do a little exposition of the hymn.
In addition, a so-called seeker-sensitive church can be just as clubby as a high church. Printed music is dispensed with. Through sheer routine, members commit a handful of choruses to memory, so that a visitor is at a loss for either the words or the music.
The same thing with an anthem. There are times when it would be worthwhile for the choir director to explain to the congregation how the anthem is put together musically, what to listen for, how to listen for a recurrent theme, to notice how the composer employs various musical techniques to capture the mood and meaning of the text. Of course, you have to start with a quality piece of music. Frankly, if a piece of music isn’t worth explaining, it isn’t worth performing.
Much too much of modern worship, whether traditional or contemporary, is like fast food. We wolf it down and never give it a second thought.
Spiritual snobbery isn’t limited to high church circles. A snake-handlin’, King-James totin’ fundamentalist or "Spirit-filled" charismatic can look down his nose at the starched-collar crowd down the street.
Congregations, whether large or small, decompose into natural families. How open a given church is to a new comer has much less to do with a particular worship style than this invisible alliance of bloodlines.
The whole notion of "seeker-sensitive" is simplistic if the idea is to dumb down the worship to the lowest common denominator, for seekers vary in age, race, wealth, education, and taste. Some seekers are classical music buffs. For them, soft rock or country-western is not a drawing card.
If we really want to be seeker-sensitive, the answer would not be to impose some homogeneous, pop cultural style of worship, but have different churches which target different demographic groups. There is no one-size-fits-all style of worship.
Every year there are many Americans who spend thousands of dollars on a trip to Europe for the opportunity to see Renaissance art and Gothic architecture. One reason some Evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy is due to the aesthetic appeal of Orthodox worship. We need to guard against the temptation to indulge in patronizing stereotypes about the younger generation or shortchange one demographic niche as we reach out to another.
Truth be told, most folks don’t have any innate taste in art and music. They just like whatever they grew up with. They prize it for its social and emotional associations. It reminds them of the high school prom or a Billy Graham crusade.
Classical music is not all of a piece. Opera lovers are often a breed apart from chamber music connoisseurs. Only a classical music buff would enjoy Brahms or Debussy or the B Minor Mass, but everyone likes fast music--the zippy choruses of Handel and Vivaldi.
Spurgeon once said that the number of folks saved by fine music and stained-glass windows amounted to the tenth part of nothing. The allusion was, of course, to the Church of England--that magnificent museum-piece of dead formalism.
However, I also can’t help recalling that during the Downgrade controversy, Spurgeon was just as isolated as Bishop Ryle. When the chips were down, both men stood alone for the word of life.
I also recall that Jonathan Edwards was railroaded out of town by veterans of the Great Awakening, who had been converted under his own ministry.
On the other hand, Edwards’ Old Light opponent, Charles Chauncy went from nominal Presbyterian to damnable unitarian.
The Old Lights were half-right. The idea of every-member evangelism is a bit airy-fairy. Between work and kids, most parents don’t have much time left over. Christian nurture is the backbone of the church. Raising kids in the faith is their chief contribution to world evangelism.
Having said that, they can witness to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. And their children, if godly, can witness to their friends and neighbors as well. So it’s a concentric form of evangelism.
But the Old Lights were half-wrong as well. The reason they were so stung by the charge of an unconverted ministry preaching an unfelt Christ is that it cut too close to the bone. To oppose the work of Edwards and Whitfield, to oppose revival because it overturns the apple cart, is to miss the day of the Lord’s visitation.
There are churches which used to preach to believers in the morning and unbelievers in the evening. This is, of course, a mite formulaic. Solid, expository preaching is Gospel-preaching, too. And we can’t neatly divide the present company into believers and unbelievers.
Still, there’s a place for a straight evangelistic sermon every now and then. Never take anything for granted. And by that same token, it isn’t bad, now and again, for a pastor to act as though his whole flock were seekers.
There’s a danger, when you hear the same thing over and over again, of ceasing to feel that it applies to you. You know it all, you’ve heard it all before. The message must be for the guy beside you or behind you. So there’s a certain value in having the pastor occasionally treat believers as unbelievers, in not presuming their state of grace, in having them revisit the Exodus.
New lights are better at starting a fire, old lights at stoking a fire. But, eventually, the fire dies down, at which point it needs to be rekindled. Old lights and new lights need each other at different times. New lights are the spark, old lights the log. Without a match, there is no fire to conserve; without firewood, the fire flames out. Without the accelerant of revival and the fuel of evangelism, the old lights become firemen, trying to hose down and snuff out any ember of spiritual vitality and new life.
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Assuming, then, that there is a place, if not for bad music, but for better and best, are there any objective standards for winnowing the wheat from the chaff, or is merely a matter of personal taste? There are a number of factors which figure in an answer.
In terms of absolute music, some styles are more sophisticated than others. Now, good music can be simple--say, a Celtic folk tune--and bad music can be complex--atonalism, serialism.
But I would say that sophistication is a necessary, if insufficient, condition of great music. Not all good music is great music, but all great music is good music.
By "sophistication," I mean a certain level of craftsmanship, of technical know-how. In this respect, Bach is the gold standard.
In addition, some melodies have more developmental potential than others. They can be scaled up or scaled down.
There is also a difference between good music and beautiful music. This is especially evident in vocal music.
Take a sacred favorite like "Panis Angelicus." Most music-lovers would regard this as a beautiful piece of music. However, it’s not good music. It starts out on a promising note. Indeed, that’s what lingers in the mind--the first few bars. But it quickly falls apart.
Why is that? Because the inspiration of the song is verbal rather than musical. Franck plays off the natural lilt of the Latin text. The fine-sprung rhythm of the words nearly writes its own tune--nearly, but not quite. That’s not enough to sustain the piece. After the few bars it quickly degenerates into random repetition and filler. It lacks a core melody, so there’s nothing to develop.
Another reason that a song like "Panis Angelicus" sounds better than it really is that if you put a plush voice behind it, the sensuous appeal of the voice conceals the poverty of melodic invention.
This holds true of a lot of Italian opera. There’s a reason so much music is set to an Italian libretto--not just for Italian composers, but Germans like Mozart and Handel. The language itself is so cantabile and bel canto to begin with. Add to that a warm Mediterranean voice, as well as the lush string section, and the effect is very pleasing to the ear. Indeed, it seduces the ear and disarms the critical faculty--just like a man may fall for a bad woman if she’s good looking!
But one of the cruelest things you can do to expose bad opera music is to play a piano score. It is much harder to cheat on a keyboard. The keyboard is quite unforgiving of weak underlying material.
Bellini is a good example. A Bellini aria sounds beautiful if sung by a Sutherland or Caballe or Ponselle or Pavarotti or Milanov. If, however, you were to leave out the voice and play the whole thing on piano, the melody would seem rather trite; hardly a melody at all--more akin to Sprechstimme, like Gregorian chant. The same thing is true with Puccini. The vocal line is mostly recitative, while the aria is an extension of the recitative. Although we associate Sprechgesang with 20C German works, you can hear it in the Italians as well.
And if you play a Bellini chorus on piano, his lack of craftsmanship is even more evident, for a decent chorus demands harmony as well as melody--harmony as melody squared. Bellini’s problem is twofold--he doesn’t have enough raw material to scale up in the first place, and he lacks the technical competence to do good part-writing.
If you try this experiment with a piano scoring of Mozart or Handel, they fare much better. One reason, I expect, is that German is less singable than Latin or Italian. The placement is better for low voices than high voices. And it lacks rhythmic impetus of Italian or Latin. As a consequence, German music is more architectonic. This is true whether you’re talking about Bach or Brahms, Mendelssohn or Hindemith.
And this is, in my opinion, one reason that Germany continued to produce some first-rate music in the Romantic era whereas there is nothing of the same stature on the Italian side of the equation. There were some bad German composers as well as some great German composers, but Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini are not on the same plane as Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. Even a hit-and-miss composer like Schumann has some really fine pieces.
Now, if you go back to the Baroque era, the Italian is just as satisfying as the German Baroque. What happened?
Well, what do you think of when you think of the Italian Baroque? The first thing which comes to mind is the lush string sound. That, however, is all about timbre, not about structure.
Another thing we think of are those grand and glorious crescendi. If, however, you compare Vivaldi with Bach or Handel, he composes is shorter units. And this, again, goes back to the fact that he doesn’t have as much structural depth as his German contemporaries. He has tremendous energy, but he cannot build or sustain a climax to the same degree. The melodies are shorter, and the movements briefer.
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Yet another criterion is the relation between music and nature. Too much modern music is nine parts theory to one part music. Yet just as the function of formal logic is not to take the place of informal logic, but to systematize informal reasoning so that we can test the validity of an inference and fill in the missing steps--the traditional function of music theory was not to displace spontaneous invention, but to systematize inspiration so that a composer could elaborate a tune in a wide variety of ways.
There is, in the arts, a creative tension between form and freedom. Unfettered freedom poses a mental block, because it presents the creative artist with too many choices. He has nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, no goal. But excessive formality, or an arbitrary form, presents the creative artist with too few choices to channel his imagination.
In the popular imagination, dissonance is the one thing most associated with modern music. The absence of melody, the absence of euphony.
The culprit in this is, of course, the atonal school--a la Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. It’s not so much that atonal composers aim for dissonance. Rather, this is the consequence of what they avoid--classical scales and harmonic sonorities. The effect, however, is a solid wall of cacophony--albeit a highly methodical rather than random cacophony, generated by a dodecaphonic algorithm.
Connoisseurs listen to atonalism or serialism as a kind of civil duty. Like imbibing medicine, the sour taste and acrid aftertaste makes the duty all the more virtuous.
Since, however, I don’t subscribe to supererogatory merit, whether in theology or musicology, I don’t see why I should submit to this penance!
A great composer doesn’t generally set out to compose great music. He writes whatever he likes. He writes to express, rather than impress. He may be inspired by a melody or libretto. He may be solving a musical problem he poses for himself. If the result is great music, that is not because the composer was self-consciously writing a great piece of music, but because he was a great composer.
But a lot of modern music takes itself far too seriously. It is weighed down by its lead-footed self-importance. The aim is impress rather than express.
In this it differs, and differs deliberately, from the great religious music of the past. What we are witnessing is the contraction and collapse of the semiotic dimension--the musical analogue of abstraction in the fine arts and deconstruction in literature--where there is nothing outside the text. This steady progression, or should I say, regression, is accessory to secularism.
Christian composers took God seriously. He was the object of art. Even what God was not the textual referent, as in the case of chamber music, Protestant theology regarded the lay lifestyle as a sacred calling no less than the clerical vocation. All was done to the greater glory of God. Music was important as a consecrated offering "to" God, as much as it was "about" God.
But in the transition to mundanity, there was a shift from God to the world, as exemplified in opera music, which is androcentric, and then in landscape music like Debussy’s La Mer or Ibéria--which alluded to the subanimate order. Notice that the more secular the art, the more impersonal it becomes. Like a suicide-cult, humanism promises ambrosia, but dispenses arsenic. This was a concern of Husserl's in The Crisis of European Sciences.
Finally, you get atonalism and serialism--where technique becomes an end it itself, rather than a means to an end: syntax without semantics, like a formal system. This is a self-referential game in which God, man, and the world are banished. Music loses its allusive, allegorical power. Music is now at war with its own medium, as music theory comes to impose its iron will on acoustics rather than exploiting the science of sound. Destruction ex nihilo takes the place of creation ex nihilo.
Serialism represents a limiting-case of atonalism. Atonalism eschewed the consonant intervals, but was more conventional with respect to other attributes of music, viz., rhythm, timbre, meter, duration, dynamics. Serialism attempted to round out the atonal revolution.
But when everything is a free variable, absent harmony, melody or periodicity, the result is chaotic. In an effort to supply a principle of stability, serial music is algorithmic and automatic. The ironic effect, however, is that serial music might as well be white noise. It never sounds more disorderly than when the outcome is rigidly ordered: nihilism by numbers. To the ear, even a trained ear, the formulaic flux of Pierre Boulez sounds about as random as the accidental "music" of John Cage.
This is the music of apostate man, at war with God and the world. To be a religious rebel, to be in rebellion against your Maker, is to be in rebellion against his handiwork. If you take God to be your enemy, then this hostility will bleed into the creaturely realm, for it bears the divine imprint.
Literature and the fine arts have charted the same downward curve. Of course, any technique can still be pressed into service if a composer wants to set words to music. But the center of gravity lies elsewhere.
There is a certain parallel here between Berg or Boulez and James Joyce: a great deal of surface complexity at the expense of linear form. And the effect is to alienate the artist from the audience. If you make art too much of a chore, most folks, even art, music, and book-lovers will simply not bother with it. Joyce forgot the first rule of story-telling: to tell a good story. Berg forgot the first rule of music, to compose a tune you can whistle.
When art ceases to please, and begins to bark orders at us, it loses our allegiance. We are not indentured servants to the high altar of art. Therein lies the secret of Verdi and Rossini: in the shower stall, every man can sing like Robert Merrill or Luciano Pavarotti!
Yet common grace will frequently conserve a subliminal reverence for natural revelation. Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition, Deniélou’s Sémantique Musicale, Salzer’s Structural Hearing and Tonal Coherence, as well as Ansermet’s Les Fondements de la Musique all represent earnest efforts at adapting music theory to the natural order rather than adapting the natural order to music theory.
My purpose is not to offer a blanket endorsement of any particular approach, but to commend the general approach. It is of passing interest that Hindemith, though German, was an enemy of atonalism while Boulez, while French, was an apprentice of atonalism.
In my opinion, the purpose of dissonance is rhythmic and dramatic. We associate rhythm with the beat, but rhythm in this narrow sense is tactile rather than auditory. Deaf men and women can dance because they can feel the beat.
But dissonance, when it inheres is a consonant/dissonant pattern of tension-and-release, is the musical analogue of rhythm. It is a purely auditory, and in that respect, a purely musical phenomenon.
It is also the musical equivalent of conflict/resolution in drama. Thus, the judicious use of dissonance subserves dramatic and musical values alike by simulating rhythmic propulsion and emotional compulsion.
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And this is, in turn, bound up with the narrative character of classical music--of music with a dramatic arc, of music which tells a story, with or without words.
Poulenc was once asked why he had never composed any oratorios. He answer was that Roman Catholics set prayer to music, whereas Evangelicals set drama to music.
This is insightful in part because it may to explain the convergent development of vocal music and absolute music, as well as the divergent development of Catholic and Evangelical music.
To compose what is essentially incidental music for a few liturgical set-pieces does not demand the same syntactical resources as setting historical drama to music. And a musical syntax engineered to cope with dramatic demands of an oratorio or Passion can then be transferred and further elaborated in relation to absolute music. This may be one reason why the musical texture of Catholic composers is thinner than that of their Protestant counterparts.
In setting prayer to music, you want to conjure up a meditative mood--with subtle inflections in tone and timbre. The composer’s focus is on centering one’s thought--even stilling one’s thought. I’m speaking, now, of prayer in the Catholic contemplative tradition. The Protestant theology of prayer is quite different.
But historical drama demands a more dynamic style and chiaroscuro technique to capture the mood-swings and propel the action. Composing on a large scale calls for a wide tonal variety to alleviate tedium, as well as enough architectonic hardware to keep the thing in once piece.
For about a generation or so there has been a controversy over the style of music to be used in Christian worship. This is usually cast as a choice between traditional music and contemporary music. Although that is one way of framing the debate, it is too superficial to be very discriminating.
Controversies over church music are nothing new. Augustine disapproved of women singing in church for fear it would be distracting male members of the congregation. There may be some truth to that, although it doesn’t seem to have entered his mind that men singing in church might be equally distracting to the women in attendance!
Palestrina’s all-male, a cappella music became the official touchstone of Catholic music. In England, an all-male choir means boy sopranos and countertenors, In Bavaria--boy sopranos and boy altos, in Italy--boy sopranos and castrati (well, once upon a time!)!
The Westminster Directory of Worship prescribes exclusive a cappella Psalmnody, and some Calvinists have never forgiven Watts for defiling the worship service with "uninspired" hymns.
Revivals usher in new musical styles, such as Wesley, Pantycelyn, and Sankey. The Jesus Freaks brought their steel drums, electric guitars and rock rhythms into the sanctuary, while black gospel brought dance music into choir loft--something you also find in Messianic congregations.
This illustrates a weakness with the distinction between traditional and contemporary. For some folks, "traditional" music means classical music. For others, traditional means exclusive a cappella Psalmnody. For still others, traditional means whatever music they grew up with. It’s a generational thing.
For the most part I’ve been rather dissatisfied by the piecemeal quality of the debate. For purposes of this present essay, I’ll try to broach the question in a more wide-ranging fashion.
II. Cosmology
The proverbial "music of the spheres" is not a mere figure of speech, but alludes to a full-blown musical cosmology. On the pagan side, this goes back to Pythagoras, with his ontological numerology as well as his discovery of musical ratios. Plato, in the Timaeus (35-6; 41-2; 47c-e), turned this idea into a creation-myth. The idea received a more "scientific" underpinning with Ptolemy’s work on Harmonics, as well as Nichomachus (Handbook of Harmonics [Encheiridion harmonikes]).
Greek speculation was popularized by such Roman writers as Cicero ("Somnium Scipionis," De republica 6:18), Capella, Apuleius, and Macrobius (Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis).
On the Christian side, this outlook was baptized, popularized, and systematized by Augustine (De Musica), Ammonius, Boethius (De Institutione Musica; De Nuptiis Philogiae et Mercurii), and Cassiodorus (Variae; Expositio in psalterium).
This tradition feeds directly into Dante’s cosmology and numerology. It received its penultimate scientific defense and demise at the hands of Kepler, the great Lutheran astronomer and geometer (Harmonice Mundi). And this was, in turn, the subject of a major opera by Hindemith, Die Harmonie der Welt.
In some ways, contemporary string theory is a throwback to Greek musical cosmology. So the journey has come full circle.
There is even a dash of this cosmology in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang in unison, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
Given the degree of cultural diffusion in the ANE and the Levant, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Plato and Pythagoras were channeling some ideas which went back to the time and place of Scripture, but became garbled in the process of transmission and creative recension.
This was the thesis of Theophilus Galen in his Court of the Gentiles, and while the particulars of his argument appear pretty fanciful to modern eyes, yet the comparative historiography of Cyrus Gordon has done much to document the general phenomenon and direction of cultural diffusion.
III. Axiology
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The OT temple service, by putting a premium on artistic excellence, was an expression of high culture rather than pop culture. Obviously, what represents high culture is culture-bound in terms of its concrete mode of expression. OT music was no doubt primitive compared to Classical music. But it aimed high.
In addition to the Temple, you had, at some point during the Intertestamental period, the rise of the synagogue--the inspiration for which John Frame traces to OT injunctions regarding the convocation of holy assembles (Exod 12:16; Lev 23; Num 28; 29). If the Temple reflects high culture, the synagogue reflects pop culture. It was akin a local parish church, whereas the Temple was akin to a Cathedral.
The function of the synagogue was to spread the message and cement the fellowship of the covenant community with weekly services at accessible locations.
My general point is that if we take OT precedent as a guide, then there is a place in the church for both high culture and pop culture, although we need to be critical consumers of each, and not rubber-stamp everything which either tradition or the general culture has to offer.
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This, in turn, raises the contentious issue a seeker-sensitive church. And, in Calvinism, that is an old debate, going back to the Great Awakening.
In my opinion, a worship service is for worshipers, for the believers, not unbelievers; for the edification of the faithful. So it would be a mistake to center the service on seekers.
Having said that, there is a larger sense in which the Christian faith is the most-seeker sensitive faith in the world. Ours is an outward-looking and forward-leaning faith.
And this is not merely for the benefit of the prospective convert. Without a transfusion of fresh blood, the church begins to suffer from hardening of the arteries. We fight more and more over less and less. The new birth is exchanged for either a birth-rite (baptism) or a birthright (covenant childhood).
Moreover, a service that is geared only to insiders may take too much for granted even where the insiders are concerned. They recite the same creeds and prayers year after year, sing the same hymns, yet if you were to quiz them on what the words mean, or how to defend them from Scripture, I daresay that the level of incomprehension and ignorance would be startling.
It is necessary for a pastor to explain what he’s saying and doing from time to time. This is a profitable exercise, not only for the outsiders, but the insiders as well.
That applies to music as well. Take a Charles Wesley hymn like "Hark! The herald angels, sing," "Come, o thou traveler unknown," or "And can it be that I should gain?" These are often deceptively simple. There is probably a lot that goes right over the head of the average singer. Well, the answer to ignorance is education. Before the congregation sings it, the pastor or music director should do a little exposition of the hymn.
In addition, a so-called seeker-sensitive church can be just as clubby as a high church. Printed music is dispensed with. Through sheer routine, members commit a handful of choruses to memory, so that a visitor is at a loss for either the words or the music.
The same thing with an anthem. There are times when it would be worthwhile for the choir director to explain to the congregation how the anthem is put together musically, what to listen for, how to listen for a recurrent theme, to notice how the composer employs various musical techniques to capture the mood and meaning of the text. Of course, you have to start with a quality piece of music. Frankly, if a piece of music isn’t worth explaining, it isn’t worth performing.
Much too much of modern worship, whether traditional or contemporary, is like fast food. We wolf it down and never give it a second thought.
Spiritual snobbery isn’t limited to high church circles. A snake-handlin’, King-James totin’ fundamentalist or "Spirit-filled" charismatic can look down his nose at the starched-collar crowd down the street.
Congregations, whether large or small, decompose into natural families. How open a given church is to a new comer has much less to do with a particular worship style than this invisible alliance of bloodlines.
The whole notion of "seeker-sensitive" is simplistic if the idea is to dumb down the worship to the lowest common denominator, for seekers vary in age, race, wealth, education, and taste. Some seekers are classical music buffs. For them, soft rock or country-western is not a drawing card.
If we really want to be seeker-sensitive, the answer would not be to impose some homogeneous, pop cultural style of worship, but have different churches which target different demographic groups. There is no one-size-fits-all style of worship.
Every year there are many Americans who spend thousands of dollars on a trip to Europe for the opportunity to see Renaissance art and Gothic architecture. One reason some Evangelicals convert to Orthodoxy is due to the aesthetic appeal of Orthodox worship. We need to guard against the temptation to indulge in patronizing stereotypes about the younger generation or shortchange one demographic niche as we reach out to another.
Truth be told, most folks don’t have any innate taste in art and music. They just like whatever they grew up with. They prize it for its social and emotional associations. It reminds them of the high school prom or a Billy Graham crusade.
Classical music is not all of a piece. Opera lovers are often a breed apart from chamber music connoisseurs. Only a classical music buff would enjoy Brahms or Debussy or the B Minor Mass, but everyone likes fast music--the zippy choruses of Handel and Vivaldi.
Spurgeon once said that the number of folks saved by fine music and stained-glass windows amounted to the tenth part of nothing. The allusion was, of course, to the Church of England--that magnificent museum-piece of dead formalism.
However, I also can’t help recalling that during the Downgrade controversy, Spurgeon was just as isolated as Bishop Ryle. When the chips were down, both men stood alone for the word of life.
I also recall that Jonathan Edwards was railroaded out of town by veterans of the Great Awakening, who had been converted under his own ministry.
On the other hand, Edwards’ Old Light opponent, Charles Chauncy went from nominal Presbyterian to damnable unitarian.
The Old Lights were half-right. The idea of every-member evangelism is a bit airy-fairy. Between work and kids, most parents don’t have much time left over. Christian nurture is the backbone of the church. Raising kids in the faith is their chief contribution to world evangelism.
Having said that, they can witness to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. And their children, if godly, can witness to their friends and neighbors as well. So it’s a concentric form of evangelism.
But the Old Lights were half-wrong as well. The reason they were so stung by the charge of an unconverted ministry preaching an unfelt Christ is that it cut too close to the bone. To oppose the work of Edwards and Whitfield, to oppose revival because it overturns the apple cart, is to miss the day of the Lord’s visitation.
There are churches which used to preach to believers in the morning and unbelievers in the evening. This is, of course, a mite formulaic. Solid, expository preaching is Gospel-preaching, too. And we can’t neatly divide the present company into believers and unbelievers.
Still, there’s a place for a straight evangelistic sermon every now and then. Never take anything for granted. And by that same token, it isn’t bad, now and again, for a pastor to act as though his whole flock were seekers.
There’s a danger, when you hear the same thing over and over again, of ceasing to feel that it applies to you. You know it all, you’ve heard it all before. The message must be for the guy beside you or behind you. So there’s a certain value in having the pastor occasionally treat believers as unbelievers, in not presuming their state of grace, in having them revisit the Exodus.
New lights are better at starting a fire, old lights at stoking a fire. But, eventually, the fire dies down, at which point it needs to be rekindled. Old lights and new lights need each other at different times. New lights are the spark, old lights the log. Without a match, there is no fire to conserve; without firewood, the fire flames out. Without the accelerant of revival and the fuel of evangelism, the old lights become firemen, trying to hose down and snuff out any ember of spiritual vitality and new life.
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Assuming, then, that there is a place, if not for bad music, but for better and best, are there any objective standards for winnowing the wheat from the chaff, or is merely a matter of personal taste? There are a number of factors which figure in an answer.
In terms of absolute music, some styles are more sophisticated than others. Now, good music can be simple--say, a Celtic folk tune--and bad music can be complex--atonalism, serialism.
But I would say that sophistication is a necessary, if insufficient, condition of great music. Not all good music is great music, but all great music is good music.
By "sophistication," I mean a certain level of craftsmanship, of technical know-how. In this respect, Bach is the gold standard.
In addition, some melodies have more developmental potential than others. They can be scaled up or scaled down.
There is also a difference between good music and beautiful music. This is especially evident in vocal music.
Take a sacred favorite like "Panis Angelicus." Most music-lovers would regard this as a beautiful piece of music. However, it’s not good music. It starts out on a promising note. Indeed, that’s what lingers in the mind--the first few bars. But it quickly falls apart.
Why is that? Because the inspiration of the song is verbal rather than musical. Franck plays off the natural lilt of the Latin text. The fine-sprung rhythm of the words nearly writes its own tune--nearly, but not quite. That’s not enough to sustain the piece. After the few bars it quickly degenerates into random repetition and filler. It lacks a core melody, so there’s nothing to develop.
Another reason that a song like "Panis Angelicus" sounds better than it really is that if you put a plush voice behind it, the sensuous appeal of the voice conceals the poverty of melodic invention.
This holds true of a lot of Italian opera. There’s a reason so much music is set to an Italian libretto--not just for Italian composers, but Germans like Mozart and Handel. The language itself is so cantabile and bel canto to begin with. Add to that a warm Mediterranean voice, as well as the lush string section, and the effect is very pleasing to the ear. Indeed, it seduces the ear and disarms the critical faculty--just like a man may fall for a bad woman if she’s good looking!
But one of the cruelest things you can do to expose bad opera music is to play a piano score. It is much harder to cheat on a keyboard. The keyboard is quite unforgiving of weak underlying material.
Bellini is a good example. A Bellini aria sounds beautiful if sung by a Sutherland or Caballe or Ponselle or Pavarotti or Milanov. If, however, you were to leave out the voice and play the whole thing on piano, the melody would seem rather trite; hardly a melody at all--more akin to Sprechstimme, like Gregorian chant. The same thing is true with Puccini. The vocal line is mostly recitative, while the aria is an extension of the recitative. Although we associate Sprechgesang with 20C German works, you can hear it in the Italians as well.
And if you play a Bellini chorus on piano, his lack of craftsmanship is even more evident, for a decent chorus demands harmony as well as melody--harmony as melody squared. Bellini’s problem is twofold--he doesn’t have enough raw material to scale up in the first place, and he lacks the technical competence to do good part-writing.
If you try this experiment with a piano scoring of Mozart or Handel, they fare much better. One reason, I expect, is that German is less singable than Latin or Italian. The placement is better for low voices than high voices. And it lacks rhythmic impetus of Italian or Latin. As a consequence, German music is more architectonic. This is true whether you’re talking about Bach or Brahms, Mendelssohn or Hindemith.
And this is, in my opinion, one reason that Germany continued to produce some first-rate music in the Romantic era whereas there is nothing of the same stature on the Italian side of the equation. There were some bad German composers as well as some great German composers, but Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini are not on the same plane as Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. Even a hit-and-miss composer like Schumann has some really fine pieces.
Now, if you go back to the Baroque era, the Italian is just as satisfying as the German Baroque. What happened?
Well, what do you think of when you think of the Italian Baroque? The first thing which comes to mind is the lush string sound. That, however, is all about timbre, not about structure.
Another thing we think of are those grand and glorious crescendi. If, however, you compare Vivaldi with Bach or Handel, he composes is shorter units. And this, again, goes back to the fact that he doesn’t have as much structural depth as his German contemporaries. He has tremendous energy, but he cannot build or sustain a climax to the same degree. The melodies are shorter, and the movements briefer.
-iv-
Yet another criterion is the relation between music and nature. Too much modern music is nine parts theory to one part music. Yet just as the function of formal logic is not to take the place of informal logic, but to systematize informal reasoning so that we can test the validity of an inference and fill in the missing steps--the traditional function of music theory was not to displace spontaneous invention, but to systematize inspiration so that a composer could elaborate a tune in a wide variety of ways.
There is, in the arts, a creative tension between form and freedom. Unfettered freedom poses a mental block, because it presents the creative artist with too many choices. He has nowhere to begin, nowhere to go, no goal. But excessive formality, or an arbitrary form, presents the creative artist with too few choices to channel his imagination.
In the popular imagination, dissonance is the one thing most associated with modern music. The absence of melody, the absence of euphony.
The culprit in this is, of course, the atonal school--a la Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. It’s not so much that atonal composers aim for dissonance. Rather, this is the consequence of what they avoid--classical scales and harmonic sonorities. The effect, however, is a solid wall of cacophony--albeit a highly methodical rather than random cacophony, generated by a dodecaphonic algorithm.
Connoisseurs listen to atonalism or serialism as a kind of civil duty. Like imbibing medicine, the sour taste and acrid aftertaste makes the duty all the more virtuous.
Since, however, I don’t subscribe to supererogatory merit, whether in theology or musicology, I don’t see why I should submit to this penance!
A great composer doesn’t generally set out to compose great music. He writes whatever he likes. He writes to express, rather than impress. He may be inspired by a melody or libretto. He may be solving a musical problem he poses for himself. If the result is great music, that is not because the composer was self-consciously writing a great piece of music, but because he was a great composer.
But a lot of modern music takes itself far too seriously. It is weighed down by its lead-footed self-importance. The aim is impress rather than express.
In this it differs, and differs deliberately, from the great religious music of the past. What we are witnessing is the contraction and collapse of the semiotic dimension--the musical analogue of abstraction in the fine arts and deconstruction in literature--where there is nothing outside the text. This steady progression, or should I say, regression, is accessory to secularism.
Christian composers took God seriously. He was the object of art. Even what God was not the textual referent, as in the case of chamber music, Protestant theology regarded the lay lifestyle as a sacred calling no less than the clerical vocation. All was done to the greater glory of God. Music was important as a consecrated offering "to" God, as much as it was "about" God.
But in the transition to mundanity, there was a shift from God to the world, as exemplified in opera music, which is androcentric, and then in landscape music like Debussy’s La Mer or Ibéria--which alluded to the subanimate order. Notice that the more secular the art, the more impersonal it becomes. Like a suicide-cult, humanism promises ambrosia, but dispenses arsenic. This was a concern of Husserl's in The Crisis of European Sciences.
Finally, you get atonalism and serialism--where technique becomes an end it itself, rather than a means to an end: syntax without semantics, like a formal system. This is a self-referential game in which God, man, and the world are banished. Music loses its allusive, allegorical power. Music is now at war with its own medium, as music theory comes to impose its iron will on acoustics rather than exploiting the science of sound. Destruction ex nihilo takes the place of creation ex nihilo.
Serialism represents a limiting-case of atonalism. Atonalism eschewed the consonant intervals, but was more conventional with respect to other attributes of music, viz., rhythm, timbre, meter, duration, dynamics. Serialism attempted to round out the atonal revolution.
But when everything is a free variable, absent harmony, melody or periodicity, the result is chaotic. In an effort to supply a principle of stability, serial music is algorithmic and automatic. The ironic effect, however, is that serial music might as well be white noise. It never sounds more disorderly than when the outcome is rigidly ordered: nihilism by numbers. To the ear, even a trained ear, the formulaic flux of Pierre Boulez sounds about as random as the accidental "music" of John Cage.
This is the music of apostate man, at war with God and the world. To be a religious rebel, to be in rebellion against your Maker, is to be in rebellion against his handiwork. If you take God to be your enemy, then this hostility will bleed into the creaturely realm, for it bears the divine imprint.
Literature and the fine arts have charted the same downward curve. Of course, any technique can still be pressed into service if a composer wants to set words to music. But the center of gravity lies elsewhere.
There is a certain parallel here between Berg or Boulez and James Joyce: a great deal of surface complexity at the expense of linear form. And the effect is to alienate the artist from the audience. If you make art too much of a chore, most folks, even art, music, and book-lovers will simply not bother with it. Joyce forgot the first rule of story-telling: to tell a good story. Berg forgot the first rule of music, to compose a tune you can whistle.
When art ceases to please, and begins to bark orders at us, it loses our allegiance. We are not indentured servants to the high altar of art. Therein lies the secret of Verdi and Rossini: in the shower stall, every man can sing like Robert Merrill or Luciano Pavarotti!
Yet common grace will frequently conserve a subliminal reverence for natural revelation. Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition, Deniélou’s Sémantique Musicale, Salzer’s Structural Hearing and Tonal Coherence, as well as Ansermet’s Les Fondements de la Musique all represent earnest efforts at adapting music theory to the natural order rather than adapting the natural order to music theory.
My purpose is not to offer a blanket endorsement of any particular approach, but to commend the general approach. It is of passing interest that Hindemith, though German, was an enemy of atonalism while Boulez, while French, was an apprentice of atonalism.
In my opinion, the purpose of dissonance is rhythmic and dramatic. We associate rhythm with the beat, but rhythm in this narrow sense is tactile rather than auditory. Deaf men and women can dance because they can feel the beat.
But dissonance, when it inheres is a consonant/dissonant pattern of tension-and-release, is the musical analogue of rhythm. It is a purely auditory, and in that respect, a purely musical phenomenon.
It is also the musical equivalent of conflict/resolution in drama. Thus, the judicious use of dissonance subserves dramatic and musical values alike by simulating rhythmic propulsion and emotional compulsion.
-v-
And this is, in turn, bound up with the narrative character of classical music--of music with a dramatic arc, of music which tells a story, with or without words.
Poulenc was once asked why he had never composed any oratorios. He answer was that Roman Catholics set prayer to music, whereas Evangelicals set drama to music.
This is insightful in part because it may to explain the convergent development of vocal music and absolute music, as well as the divergent development of Catholic and Evangelical music.
To compose what is essentially incidental music for a few liturgical set-pieces does not demand the same syntactical resources as setting historical drama to music. And a musical syntax engineered to cope with dramatic demands of an oratorio or Passion can then be transferred and further elaborated in relation to absolute music. This may be one reason why the musical texture of Catholic composers is thinner than that of their Protestant counterparts.
In setting prayer to music, you want to conjure up a meditative mood--with subtle inflections in tone and timbre. The composer’s focus is on centering one’s thought--even stilling one’s thought. I’m speaking, now, of prayer in the Catholic contemplative tradition. The Protestant theology of prayer is quite different.
But historical drama demands a more dynamic style and chiaroscuro technique to capture the mood-swings and propel the action. Composing on a large scale calls for a wide tonal variety to alleviate tedium, as well as enough architectonic hardware to keep the thing in once piece.
Monday, January 17, 2005
The thick rotundity of the earth
Is a flat earth an article of faith among Bible-believing Christians? Every now and then a liberal or outright unbeliever will accuse the Christian of inconsistency for failing to credit the biblical witness to a flat earth. This accusation is made, not because the accuser believes in a flat earth, much less because he believes in the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Quite the contrary, he brings this up to embarrass the Christian and put pressure on his faith. A unbeliever will bring this up to show that faith in Scripture is absurd, while a liberal will bring it up as a wedge issue to show that we ought to hang loose about the inspiration and authority of Scripture and demythologize it at will, subordinating Scripture to prevailing philosophy of the day.
Both the liberal and the unbeliever will use this as a double-daring dilemma. They will seize on some "outlandish" claim of Scripture and parade it under the nose of the Christian. If a Christian dares to call their bluff, this will prove that he's beyond the reach of rational discourse. If a Christian declines to call their bluff, this will prove that he really doesn't believe the Bible either. What are we to make of this?
1. As a matter of fact, a Christian is honor-bound to affirm whatever the Bible affirms, and to deny whatever the Bible denies. This follows from its identity as the word of God, the word of the omniscient and almighty Maker of the world.
That doesn't mean that a Christian is expected to swallow a whole lot of nonsense. For the God of the Bible is a rational God--is, indeed--the exemplar of reason. However, this is not a standard or selection-criterion that we impose on Scripture, choosing what we're prepared to believe. Rather, this is a presupposition of our faith in Scripture. Whatever God says, even if it should, in some cases, go against the available evidence, is still to be believed.
2. This debate usually operates on the assumption that primitive people believed in a flat earth. This, however, seems to be a bit of academic propaganda to promote modernity over against Christian tradition. A good corrective to this is supplied by J. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger Paperback 1997).
Another informative treatment is supplied by C. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Adventures Unlimited Press 1996). On the basis of comparative ancient cartography, Hapgood illustrates a knowledge of spherical trigonometry dating back thousands of years.
In addition, Hugh Moran & David Kelley, in their monograph on The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs (Daily Press 1969), have documented the phenomenon of ancient transoceanic navigation.
There is, then, no prima facie presumption that Bible writers believed in a flat earth. And, indeed, if Noah built an ark to cope with the demands of a global flood, then this technology would pass on to his descendants--and thereby kick-start circumnavigation.
The ancients, who were far more attuned to nature than most moderns, were hardly unobservant. It would be a simple thing to analogize from the shape of the sun and moon to the shape of the earth.
Likewise, one of the early proofs for the sphericity of the earth was the phenomenon of departing ships disappearing below the horizon, or approaching ships reappearing above the horizon. The Greeks inferred the sphericity of the earth from this observation.
Now thousands of the ancients had had occasion to observe this common phenomenon, and it's reasonable to assume that the more intelligent among them drew the same inference, even if we have no records to that effect. We have no records for most things that were ever thought, said, and done--yet we don't depend on a record to know that certain things had to be to get from where they were to where we are today.
So when we approach the Bible we need to clear our minds of modern-day prejudice.
3. The Bible generally depicts earthly events at the eye-level perspective of an earthbound observer, since it was revealed for the benefit of earthlings rather than Martians!
And that relative reference-frame is accurate as far as it goes. After all, most modern astronomy is ground-based astronomy.
Beyond that, it's not so much that Scripture depicts the earth as flat, but rather as cubical. That is to say, the OT sometimes represents the world as a house built by God. This isn't an accommodation to obsolete science or mythology. Rather, it's a theological model. It portrays the Lord as the architect of the world. The world is a "house" (Job 38:4-6) with "windows" (Gen. 7:11; 8:2; 2 Kings 7:2, 19; Is. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) and "doors" (1 Kings 9:35; 2 Chron. 6:26; 7:13; Ps. 78:23; Rev. 4:1; 11:6; 19:11) and "stairs" (Gen 28:12; Amos 9:6). This is picture-language--but with a purpose.
In addition to the "housing" metaphor there is the figuration of the cosmic "tent." This sets up an intentional parallel involving the tabernacle as a microcosm of the cosmos. For a full vetting of these connections, cf. G. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission (IVP 2004); D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (HarperCollins 1988), 78-99.
4. Intellectual snobbery has a pecking order. The Darwinist looks down upon the creationist, the creationist looks down upon the geocentrist, the geocentrist looks down upon the flat-earther.
A lot of this has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with saving or losing face. To some extent, every culture is a shame culture. Most of us could not prove the thousandth part of what we believe on any given subject.
I happen to believe that the earth is spherical. But suppose, for the sake of argument, I wanted to play the role of agent provocateur? How would you me wrong? The obvious arguments won't go very far, because it doesn't take much ingenuity to come up with symmetrical counterarguments.
Yes, the earth appears to be spherical from certain vantagepoints (outer space, ships at sea), but maybe that's an optical illusion due to the curvature of light.
Or maybe the external world is really a VR program run by aliens. We are to aliens what lab rats are to us. How would you disprove that hypothesis? Indeed, such a theory would cut the knot on those intractable Zenonian paradoxes of locomotion, would it not?
Suppose that some really bright guy like, say, the late Richard Feynman, decided to play devil's advocate with his class and make a case for a flat earth? In fact, this would be a useful exercise. Don't you suppose that Feynman could argument circles around his students?
***************************************
Thanks for the article:
I take more interest in the first part as it relates to the Bible. A few comments:
1. The census under Quirinius is an old chestnut. The fact that liberals keep coming back to the same flea-bitten handful of stock objections is, to me, an evidence of how very weak their case is. In any event, I've already addressed this objection in my review of the Time & Newsweek articles.
2. In the same connection, I read people who say that Matthew and Luke disagree, but they never show me how Matthew and Luke disagree. From what I can tell, Matthew and Luke agree on many things, and disagree on nothing.
3. O'Connor is, indeed, a distinguished scholar. There are distinguished scholars who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, as well as distinguished scholars who deny it. So scholarly distinction does not, of itself, broker the issue.
4. The RCC has done a 180 on this issue. Traditional Catholicism affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. It formally committed itself to that proposition at Trent and Vatican I. And it suppressed the modernist movement in the 19C. That, however, drove the modernist movement underground. The RCC began to soften its position under Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943).
And Vatican II quietly revised and restricted inerrancy to the parts of Scripture which deal directly with the knowledge of salvation. This happened after a vigorous floor debate at St. Peter's, where the sessions took place.
<< One product of such intellectual contortions is "creation science" and
an insistence on the literal truth of the proposition that God took
seven days to create the world, with the evidence from fossils as a
kind of decorative, but confusing, extra. Even wackier, from the
secular viewpoint, is America's "biblical astronomy" movement which
insists, under the guidance of a Dutch-born astrophysicist, Gerardus
Bouw, that the sun goes round the Earth. >>
This jumbles together a whole lot of things.
1. Before the Economist makes fun of creation science, it should make some effort to read and respond to the argumentation. I happen to know or know of a number of folks in this field. One studied at Caltech. Another studied at MIT (got his doctorate there). Another has a doctorate in astronomy. Yet another has a doctorate from Harvard in paleontology, where the late Stephen J. Gould was his thesis advisor.
2. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world was made in seven days. Would a prefabricated world look any different from a world billions of years old? How would you detect the difference? What evidence would count against it?
The Economist doesn't consider the implications of creation ex nihilo. I, for one, fail to see how the proposition is easily falsified, if at all.
3. As a rule, the creationist community attributes the fossil record, not to creation, but the flood.
4. As to geocentrism, I don't see that this is even a question of science proper. According to modern astronomy, both the sun and its satellites are in a state of mutual motion, so there is no fixed frame of reference.
In addition, it has always seemed to me that the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would make it easier to defend geocentrism, if one wanted to. In fact, I recently ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D. Lynden-Bell et al., "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
5. Speaking for myself, I don't take sides on some of these scientific disputations because I'm an antirealist in my philosophy of science. The fundamental problem is how the mind perceives the material world. Perception involves a process of information transfer from the sensible, via sensation, to the mind. But in order for information from the outside to reach our consciousness, it must encoded and reencoded in the form of electromagnetic and electrochemical information. Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox.
But, in that event, our mental representation of the external world is not a miniature photograph of the world, but a cryptogram. And the ciphertext need bear no resemblance to the plaintext. So I'm quite sceptical of all our scientific constructs--whether in creation science or conventional science.
***************************
<< Wouldn't parts of this analysis presuppose scientific realism? After all,
you refer to electromagnetic and electrochemical information, and their
encoding processes. But if antirealism were true, we wouldn't even know this much. >>
That's why I weaseled in the further disclaimer to the effect that "Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox."
So even the scientific analysis of our sensory processing is at yet another remove from reality. This how the percipient perceives the perceptual process, using sensory enhancements supplied by science. So this is a scientific description of the process, but it doesn't get behind the process. Indeed, the sensory enhancements add yet another layer to the process.
And this poses a dilemma for scientific realism. If it's true, it's false.
That was always a profound point of tension in Quine's philosophy. He treated science as the measure of all things, and yet he also said "science itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to irritations of our surfaces," and his final book carried the sceptical title _From Stimulus to Science_. How do you justify such a vast extrapolation from such a tiny database?
<< Is there a way to draw the line here? >>
Yes! Divine revelation. Propositions are abstract, including propositions about the external world. And God's knowledge of the world is not filtered through the veil of perception.
As view sensory input as analogous to radio carrier waves on which you can piggyback a message.
But were it not for revelation, I do think we'd be in the same epistemic boat as Berkeley's oyster.
I'd add, though, that unlike Quine, I don't believe that sense knowledge is the only knowledge there is.
In addition, the cryptological interpretation isn't limited to a scientific analysis of perception. For it not only works at a sensory input level, but a sensory output level.
In order for me to type this email, I must encode my thoughts in some material medium. Yet there is no correspondence between the nature of thought and the verbal tokens which serve as a code language for my mental expressions. So the outgoing direction of the mind/body interface will afford an analogue to the incoming direction of the mind/body interface.
Likewise, it doesn't follow that a scientific analysis is totally useless on my view. Rather, the scientific evidence would need to be rephrased or paraphrased in cryptological terms. For example, you could still mount teleological arguments based on irreducible or specific complexity, but they would apply at the level of the ciphertext rather than the plaintext.
There would be some loss of concrete information, but isometries between the abstract structure would remain. And propositional information would be unaffected.
Indeed, a cryptological analysis would add another lay of complexity to account for the correlation between the ciphertext and the plaintext. You'd have a cryptological version of a teleological argument, with God as the cosmic cryptographer.
Or you could still use dating techniques, not to establish an absolute date, but a relative date between analogous cryptograms.
Both the liberal and the unbeliever will use this as a double-daring dilemma. They will seize on some "outlandish" claim of Scripture and parade it under the nose of the Christian. If a Christian dares to call their bluff, this will prove that he's beyond the reach of rational discourse. If a Christian declines to call their bluff, this will prove that he really doesn't believe the Bible either. What are we to make of this?
1. As a matter of fact, a Christian is honor-bound to affirm whatever the Bible affirms, and to deny whatever the Bible denies. This follows from its identity as the word of God, the word of the omniscient and almighty Maker of the world.
That doesn't mean that a Christian is expected to swallow a whole lot of nonsense. For the God of the Bible is a rational God--is, indeed--the exemplar of reason. However, this is not a standard or selection-criterion that we impose on Scripture, choosing what we're prepared to believe. Rather, this is a presupposition of our faith in Scripture. Whatever God says, even if it should, in some cases, go against the available evidence, is still to be believed.
2. This debate usually operates on the assumption that primitive people believed in a flat earth. This, however, seems to be a bit of academic propaganda to promote modernity over against Christian tradition. A good corrective to this is supplied by J. Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger Paperback 1997).
Another informative treatment is supplied by C. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Adventures Unlimited Press 1996). On the basis of comparative ancient cartography, Hapgood illustrates a knowledge of spherical trigonometry dating back thousands of years.
In addition, Hugh Moran & David Kelley, in their monograph on The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs (Daily Press 1969), have documented the phenomenon of ancient transoceanic navigation.
There is, then, no prima facie presumption that Bible writers believed in a flat earth. And, indeed, if Noah built an ark to cope with the demands of a global flood, then this technology would pass on to his descendants--and thereby kick-start circumnavigation.
The ancients, who were far more attuned to nature than most moderns, were hardly unobservant. It would be a simple thing to analogize from the shape of the sun and moon to the shape of the earth.
Likewise, one of the early proofs for the sphericity of the earth was the phenomenon of departing ships disappearing below the horizon, or approaching ships reappearing above the horizon. The Greeks inferred the sphericity of the earth from this observation.
Now thousands of the ancients had had occasion to observe this common phenomenon, and it's reasonable to assume that the more intelligent among them drew the same inference, even if we have no records to that effect. We have no records for most things that were ever thought, said, and done--yet we don't depend on a record to know that certain things had to be to get from where they were to where we are today.
So when we approach the Bible we need to clear our minds of modern-day prejudice.
3. The Bible generally depicts earthly events at the eye-level perspective of an earthbound observer, since it was revealed for the benefit of earthlings rather than Martians!
And that relative reference-frame is accurate as far as it goes. After all, most modern astronomy is ground-based astronomy.
Beyond that, it's not so much that Scripture depicts the earth as flat, but rather as cubical. That is to say, the OT sometimes represents the world as a house built by God. This isn't an accommodation to obsolete science or mythology. Rather, it's a theological model. It portrays the Lord as the architect of the world. The world is a "house" (Job 38:4-6) with "windows" (Gen. 7:11; 8:2; 2 Kings 7:2, 19; Is. 24:18; Mal. 3:10) and "doors" (1 Kings 9:35; 2 Chron. 6:26; 7:13; Ps. 78:23; Rev. 4:1; 11:6; 19:11) and "stairs" (Gen 28:12; Amos 9:6). This is picture-language--but with a purpose.
In addition to the "housing" metaphor there is the figuration of the cosmic "tent." This sets up an intentional parallel involving the tabernacle as a microcosm of the cosmos. For a full vetting of these connections, cf. G. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission (IVP 2004); D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (HarperCollins 1988), 78-99.
4. Intellectual snobbery has a pecking order. The Darwinist looks down upon the creationist, the creationist looks down upon the geocentrist, the geocentrist looks down upon the flat-earther.
A lot of this has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with saving or losing face. To some extent, every culture is a shame culture. Most of us could not prove the thousandth part of what we believe on any given subject.
I happen to believe that the earth is spherical. But suppose, for the sake of argument, I wanted to play the role of agent provocateur? How would you me wrong? The obvious arguments won't go very far, because it doesn't take much ingenuity to come up with symmetrical counterarguments.
Yes, the earth appears to be spherical from certain vantagepoints (outer space, ships at sea), but maybe that's an optical illusion due to the curvature of light.
Or maybe the external world is really a VR program run by aliens. We are to aliens what lab rats are to us. How would you disprove that hypothesis? Indeed, such a theory would cut the knot on those intractable Zenonian paradoxes of locomotion, would it not?
Suppose that some really bright guy like, say, the late Richard Feynman, decided to play devil's advocate with his class and make a case for a flat earth? In fact, this would be a useful exercise. Don't you suppose that Feynman could argument circles around his students?
***************************************
Thanks for the article:
I take more interest in the first part as it relates to the Bible. A few comments:
1. The census under Quirinius is an old chestnut. The fact that liberals keep coming back to the same flea-bitten handful of stock objections is, to me, an evidence of how very weak their case is. In any event, I've already addressed this objection in my review of the Time & Newsweek articles.
2. In the same connection, I read people who say that Matthew and Luke disagree, but they never show me how Matthew and Luke disagree. From what I can tell, Matthew and Luke agree on many things, and disagree on nothing.
3. O'Connor is, indeed, a distinguished scholar. There are distinguished scholars who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, as well as distinguished scholars who deny it. So scholarly distinction does not, of itself, broker the issue.
4. The RCC has done a 180 on this issue. Traditional Catholicism affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. It formally committed itself to that proposition at Trent and Vatican I. And it suppressed the modernist movement in the 19C. That, however, drove the modernist movement underground. The RCC began to soften its position under Pius XII, in his encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943).
And Vatican II quietly revised and restricted inerrancy to the parts of Scripture which deal directly with the knowledge of salvation. This happened after a vigorous floor debate at St. Peter's, where the sessions took place.
<< One product of such intellectual contortions is "creation science" and
an insistence on the literal truth of the proposition that God took
seven days to create the world, with the evidence from fossils as a
kind of decorative, but confusing, extra. Even wackier, from the
secular viewpoint, is America's "biblical astronomy" movement which
insists, under the guidance of a Dutch-born astrophysicist, Gerardus
Bouw, that the sun goes round the Earth. >>
This jumbles together a whole lot of things.
1. Before the Economist makes fun of creation science, it should make some effort to read and respond to the argumentation. I happen to know or know of a number of folks in this field. One studied at Caltech. Another studied at MIT (got his doctorate there). Another has a doctorate in astronomy. Yet another has a doctorate from Harvard in paleontology, where the late Stephen J. Gould was his thesis advisor.
2. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the world was made in seven days. Would a prefabricated world look any different from a world billions of years old? How would you detect the difference? What evidence would count against it?
The Economist doesn't consider the implications of creation ex nihilo. I, for one, fail to see how the proposition is easily falsified, if at all.
3. As a rule, the creationist community attributes the fossil record, not to creation, but the flood.
4. As to geocentrism, I don't see that this is even a question of science proper. According to modern astronomy, both the sun and its satellites are in a state of mutual motion, so there is no fixed frame of reference.
In addition, it has always seemed to me that the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would make it easier to defend geocentrism, if one wanted to. In fact, I recently ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D. Lynden-Bell et al., "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
5. Speaking for myself, I don't take sides on some of these scientific disputations because I'm an antirealist in my philosophy of science. The fundamental problem is how the mind perceives the material world. Perception involves a process of information transfer from the sensible, via sensation, to the mind. But in order for information from the outside to reach our consciousness, it must encoded and reencoded in the form of electromagnetic and electrochemical information. Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox.
But, in that event, our mental representation of the external world is not a miniature photograph of the world, but a cryptogram. And the ciphertext need bear no resemblance to the plaintext. So I'm quite sceptical of all our scientific constructs--whether in creation science or conventional science.
***************************
<< Wouldn't parts of this analysis presuppose scientific realism? After all,
you refer to electromagnetic and electrochemical information, and their
encoding processes. But if antirealism were true, we wouldn't even know this much. >>
That's why I weaseled in the further disclaimer to the effect that "Even this analysis is deceptively objective, for it is also the deliverance, not of the raw input, but the output as it permutates through our sensory blackbox."
So even the scientific analysis of our sensory processing is at yet another remove from reality. This how the percipient perceives the perceptual process, using sensory enhancements supplied by science. So this is a scientific description of the process, but it doesn't get behind the process. Indeed, the sensory enhancements add yet another layer to the process.
And this poses a dilemma for scientific realism. If it's true, it's false.
That was always a profound point of tension in Quine's philosophy. He treated science as the measure of all things, and yet he also said "science itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to irritations of our surfaces," and his final book carried the sceptical title _From Stimulus to Science_. How do you justify such a vast extrapolation from such a tiny database?
<< Is there a way to draw the line here? >>
Yes! Divine revelation. Propositions are abstract, including propositions about the external world. And God's knowledge of the world is not filtered through the veil of perception.
As view sensory input as analogous to radio carrier waves on which you can piggyback a message.
But were it not for revelation, I do think we'd be in the same epistemic boat as Berkeley's oyster.
I'd add, though, that unlike Quine, I don't believe that sense knowledge is the only knowledge there is.
In addition, the cryptological interpretation isn't limited to a scientific analysis of perception. For it not only works at a sensory input level, but a sensory output level.
In order for me to type this email, I must encode my thoughts in some material medium. Yet there is no correspondence between the nature of thought and the verbal tokens which serve as a code language for my mental expressions. So the outgoing direction of the mind/body interface will afford an analogue to the incoming direction of the mind/body interface.
Likewise, it doesn't follow that a scientific analysis is totally useless on my view. Rather, the scientific evidence would need to be rephrased or paraphrased in cryptological terms. For example, you could still mount teleological arguments based on irreducible or specific complexity, but they would apply at the level of the ciphertext rather than the plaintext.
There would be some loss of concrete information, but isometries between the abstract structure would remain. And propositional information would be unaffected.
Indeed, a cryptological analysis would add another lay of complexity to account for the correlation between the ciphertext and the plaintext. You'd have a cryptological version of a teleological argument, with God as the cosmic cryptographer.
Or you could still use dating techniques, not to establish an absolute date, but a relative date between analogous cryptograms.
Friday, December 31, 2004
All's well that ends well-2
The universalist is in a bind. Unlike the conditionalist, the universalist must affirm that the hell-bound will live forever, but disaffirm that they will live forever in hell. He needs the eternality, but not the fixity, of the afterlife, to make room for postmortem conversion. There are, however, no passages of Scripture, whether individually or in combination, that drive a wedge between fixity and perpetuity, or teach, or even permit, a postmortem reversal of fortunes.
Sensing, I guess, the inadequacy of his exegesis, Bonda takes another bite at Mt 25:46 later on: "Now his blood will be given as a ransom for many (Mt 20:28). His blood will be poured out for many (26:28). Twice we read ‘for many.’ who are these ‘many’? They are the many who have entered the wide gate and walk the easy road that leads to destruction (Mt 7:13; cf. Mt 22:14). These are the same people of whom he just said that they will end in ‘eternal punishment’" (218).
By way of reply:
i) This interpretation is nonsensical on its own grounds. In Mt 7:13-14 & Mt 22:14, the "many" are relative to "the few." But in universalism, such a contrast is meaningless. In universalism, the choice is not between the comparative contrast of the many over as against the few (a la Calvinism), but between the superlative contrast of the salvation of all (inclusivism) as over against the salvation of some (exclusivism).
ii) It clearly does violence to Mt 7:13-14 to turn two divergent roads into one convergent road.
iii) The "many" is Mt 20:20 & 26:28 is not an antonym for the few or a synonym for all. Rather, it is a literary allusion to Isa 53:11-12. In this chapter, "many" and "all" are interchangeable designations for the covenant community. The Messiah lays down his life for his people.
Bonda goes on to claim that "eternal punishment does not forever continue, since that punishment itself, is not his goal. When God’s purpose has been achieved, there is no need for further punishment--for sin no longer exists!" (219).
By way of reply: notice how this turns the word of God on its head. In Bonda’s interpretive alchemy, "eternal" punishment is temporary. "Unquenchable" fire is quenched. The "undying" worm dies of hunger. Bonda systematically converts Biblical affirmations into Biblical negations, and Biblical negations into Biblical affirmations. This is exactly how the Devil would rewrite Scripture.
Continuing,
"Let us review: The word ‘eternal’ has played a major role in the doctrine of eternal punishment. But what Scripture tells us about God’s purpose with this punishment remained a secondary concern. We have seen that this divine purpose must be our first interest in any Biblical discourse about the eternity of the punishment. Never is there any other purpose than that the unbeliever return to obedience to God. Nowhere in Scripture do we find a statement that tells us that God wants those who are punished to suffer without end--that is not the purpose for which God created humans! If we keep this singular purpose of God in focus, we understand that eternal punishment is punishment that has as its only purpose an obedience return to the God of love...When Jesus refers to this punishment as eternal, he simply underlines...the eternal seriousness--of God in pursuing his one and only purpose" (219).
By way of reply:
i) In what sense did the divine purpose remain a secondary consideration in formulating the traditional doctrine? Is the administration of justice not a purposeful activity?
ii) Even if it were a secondary concern, is there something wrong with deriving a doctrine from passages of Scripture which directly and primarily address the subject-matter of the doctrine in question?
iii) This is an ironic complaint to lodge against Calvinism, for no theological tradition shows the same respect for God’s inviolable purpose.
iv) Bonda is using this appeal as an inner canon and winnowing fan to demote and deny the witness of Scripture whenever it comes into conflict with "his" primary concern.
v) Nowhere in Scripture? Isa 66:24? Dan 12:2? Mt 25:41? Mt 25:46? Mk 9:48? 2 Thes 1:9? Jude 7? Jude 9? Rev 14:11? Rev 20:10?
vi) Isn’t it simplistic to insist that God can have only one purpose for what he does? Why can’t the revelation of his justice be one such purpose? Why can’t the revelation of his mercy be another such purpose?
v) It is difficult to divorce the temporal end of God’s creatures from the teleological end of his creatures. Their final destination in time answers to his final design outside of time. And their eternal destiny marks the climactic realization of any ends-means relation.
vi) To equate the threat of eternal punishment with eternal seriousness in God’s pursuit of every lost sinner is a form of words which bears no resemblance to the wording, import, or intent of our Lord’s usage. This is a wholly artificial gloss that fails to connect at any point with what our Lord ever said or ever meant.
In fairness, though, Bonda defends this reinterpretation by recourse to prophetic usage. By way of reply:
i) Once again, Bonda is confounding historical judgements with eschatological judgments. We need to distinguish preexilic prophecies that have reference to the Exile and Restoration from postexilic prophecies which have reference to the eschaton.
ii) We also need to distinguish oracles that pronounce a common judgment on the nation of Israel from those that pronounce judgment on one party, but deliverance upon another (Isa 26:14,19; 66:24; Dan 12:2)..
iii) On a related, we further need to distinguish judgment on the nation of Israel from the impending or eventual redemption of the remnant (Isa 1:9; 4:3; 6:11-13; 10:22; 45:20) .
iii) On another related note, also need to distinguish between the end of the old covenant and the inauguration of the new (Jer 31:31-40).
iv) Bonda pedals in half-truths. The logic of Isaiah is thus: just as there is but one Maker of men, there is but one Judge and Redeemer of men. Whoever would be saved can only be saved by the one true God.
v) Bonda is very selective in his citations. In Isaiah you can see inclusivity and exclusivity side-by-side. In Isa 45:22-23 you have a universal form of address, but this is immediately followed, in vv24-25, by a dichotomy between the enemies of God, who shall suffer shame (24), and the people of God, who shall be justified (25). Likewise, in Isaiah 66:23, you have a general expression, immediately followed by a dire pronouncement upon the damned (24).
It isn’t hard to relate the two: if there is only one true God, then there is only one true knowledge of God. The God of the Jews is the God of mankind. The saving knowledge of God disclosed to Israel must be revealed in due time to the Gentiles. But just as salvation did not extend to every single Jew, neither does it extend to every single Gentile.
v) Bonda divorces 45:23 from the taunt-song in 46:1-2. But it’s all of a piece. The ancient world was not a democracy. You bowed the knee before your lord and swore fealty to him because he was your lord. What you thought of him was quite beside the point. He was your sovereign, and you were his subject. Even the high "gods" of Babylon must bow before the Lord’s emissary (Cyrus). The kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia were absolute monarchies. This is where we get the phrase "oriental despotism." And the God of Israel is the king of kings.
Bonda rushes by Dan 12:2 in a couple of sentences:
"The text does not deal with a judgment over all the dead...our interest here is limited to the term ‘eternal’" eternal life and eternal shame and contempt. Jeremiah mentioned redemption following eternal shame, but Daniel does not" (216).
By way of reply:
i) The comparison with Jeremiah disregards the fourfold distinction I drew above, viz., mass/remnant; old/new covenant; pre/post-Exilic perspective; common judgment/divergent destiny.
ii) Dan 12 is part of a larger oracle targeting the end-time (11:35,40).
iii) For the rest, one can hardly improve on Joyce Baldwin at this juncture:
"Hebrew rabbim, ‘many,’ tends to mean ‘all,’ as in Deut 7:1; Isa 22, where ‘all nations’ becomes ‘many peoples’ in the parallel v3; and in Isa 52:14-15; 53:11-12, where this key-word occurs no less than five times, with an inclusive significance. As Jeremias points out, the Hebrew word kol, ‘all,’ means either ‘totality’ or ‘sum’; there is no word for ‘all’ as a plural. For this rabbim comes to mean ‘the great multitude,’ ‘all’; cf. ‘Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth...’ (NIV). The emphasis is not upon many as opposed to all, but rather to the numbers involved.
In the light of this usage our author can be seen to be thinking of a general resurrection prior to judgment. Jesus almost certainly had this verse in mind in Mt 25:46 & Jn 5:28-29," J. Baldwin, Daniel (IVP 1978), 204.
Moving from the prophets to Paul, he cites Rom 14:10-11 & Phil 2:10-11. Yet is hard to see how the passage in Romans is a prooftext for universalism. To begin with, it is on the theme of judgment. In addition, it takes the Christian as the object of divine judgment. But if even the believer must stand before the tribunal of God, what hope is there for the unbeliever?
Although the judicial role is unstated in Phil 2:10-11, that is implicit from the parallel passage in Rom 14:10-11. The person and work of Christ in Phil 2:6-9 have qualified him to be the judge of all the world. I’ve already discussed the Isaian background of both passages. This is what is meant by the Lordship of Christ.
We have gone from the age of absolute monarchy, to constitutional monarchy, to titular monarchy, to popular sovereignty. We have forgotten what it means to "reign." But the dominion of Christ is the antitype of the oriental despotism. Either submit willingly or be forcibly subjugated.
You can see this theme in the Messianic Psalms (2:9; 110:1-2), which is, in turn, picked up in the NT (1 Cor 15:24-28; Rev 12:5; 19:15). Indeed, the Apocalypse is a NT version of OT holy war. Christ is a warrior-God and conquering king (Rev 19). Hell is a permanent POW camp. His enemies are vanquished and taken captive. The camp has an entrance, but no exit.
In the section on Revelation, Bonda says the following:
"All nations will come and will worship God (15:4)...In other words, the ‘forever and ever’ of 14:11 was not the final word! Just as the prophecy about Edom in Isaiah 34:10--from which this imagery of the eternally ascending smoke is borrowed--was not the final word. Isaiah’s prophecy and this vision are both related to the destruction of Sodom (Gen 19:24,28). We saw that God’s judgment over this city did not imply the end of his compassion for it" (230).
By way of reply:
i) He maunders the meaning of Rev 15:4. As Beale remarks, "’All the nations’ is a figure of speech (metonymy) by which the whole world is substituted for a part of it in order to emphasize that many will worship, which is in line with 5:9; 7:9ff.; and 14:3. The whole for the part is clearly the meaning where pas (‘all’) occurs with ethnos (‘nation’) elsewhere (5:9; 7:9; 13:7; 14:8; 18:3,23)," G. Beale, The Book of Revelation (Eerdmans/Paternoster 1999), 797-98. Cf. Bauckham, Climax of Prophecy (1993), 238-337 (esp. 312-13.
ii) I’ve already dealt with the judgment upon Sodom.
iii) The last word on the fate of Edom is Mal 1:1-4, which is decidedly less than sanguine!
iv) The fate of the damned (14:10-11) presents an antithetical parallel to the rest of the saints (14:13). The saints are forever at rest while damned are never at rest.
v) The fate of the damned (14:10-11) presents an antithetical parallel to the adoration of the angels (4:8). As long as the angels shall praise God, the damned shall suffer.
vi) The same time-maker ("forever and ever") is applied to the very life of God (4:9-10; 10:6; 15:7). As long as God shall live, the damned shall suffer.
vii) The fate of the devil and his minions (20:10) presents an antithetical parallel to the reign of the saints (22:5). As long as the saints shall reign, the damned shall suffer.
For better or worse, the state of all parties is fixed for all time. The timeline is isochronic for God and Christ, saints and angels, devils and idolaters. And once the die is cast, there is no reversal of fortunes.
Bonda then says that those outside the New Jerusalem (22:11) are invited to come inside (22:17). But this commits a level-confusion. The invitation is directed, not to the narrative characters, but to the reader, the audience, the congregation (of the seven churches of Asia Minor) to whom the prophecy is addressed.
"God has created man with the intention that all should love one another, as he loves them. This love allows of no exception: One is even to love one’s enemies, since God loves them all (Mt 5:44-45)...In God’s law the single command of love, given to all human beings, we find the answer to the doctrine of eternal punishment. This law makes it crystal clear that we are dealing with a doctrine that clashes with God’s commandment" 102.
By way of reply:
i) Mt 5:44-45 doesn’t say that God loves everyone. Rather, the point of Mt 5:44-45, like the parable of the wheat and the tares (note the same agricultural setting), is that God dispenses common grace to all as a way of dispensing special grace to the elect. Because the elect and the reprobate inhabit in the same world, living under same roof (as it were), sun and rain cannot discriminate. All must prosper to some degree for any to prosper at all.
ii) It is illicit to invoke Mt 5:44-45 in order to negate everything else the Bible might have to say on the subject.
iii) This is not the only command that God has given to man. He also commanded the Israelites to execute the Canaanites.
iii) Mt 5:44-45 does not address the destiny of man, but rather, the Christian code of conduct for the duration of the church age.
iv) A divine command is not equally binding on God and man. God is the judge. He bears a different relation to man than man to his fellow man.
v) Bonda has a very flat-footed concept of love. There are different degrees and species of love. Conjugal love is not the same thing as neighborly love. Love can be exclusive as well as inclusive, intensive as well as extensive.
"What has this doctrine of Israel’s rejection brought about? The great catastrophe of our century tells us: The murder of almost six million Jews from 1940-45 in post-Christian Europe would not have been possible without the preparatory work of this ecclesiastical tradition.
The genocide was not committed by Christians, but by pagans who had rejected faith in Jesus. However, this would not have happened in Europe if through the centuries the church had been taught to see Israel as the apple of God’s eye," 132.
By way of reply:
i) This is a form of emotional extortion: either interpret Romans my way or else you’ve got the blood of six million Jews on your hands! That brand of blackmail is irrelevant to the meaning of Romans, and given that the Book of Romans was penned by a devout Jew, no authentic interpretation could possibly be anti-Semitic, so we should follow the text wherever it takes us, without fear of consequences, without dragging in extraneous anxieties or imposing extraneous filters on the material.
ii) It would take a lot of documentation to substantiate Bonda’s charge--none of which is forthcoming. What is the relation between church and synagogue in Reformed, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Orthodox theology? Is it all the same? Is it all anti-Semitic?
iii) Even if the church had been more philosemitic, how would that have restrained the Nazis?
iv) What about the effect of German Bible criticism, with its evolutionary view of religion, which necessitated a low view of the OT and OT piety?
v) In what sense is the Reformed tradition anti-Semitic? Wasn’t Holland a haven for the Jews? Weren’t the Jews well-treated by the Puritans? Doesn’t Reformed theology stress the continuity of the covenants? Doesn’t Reformed theology speak of OT saints as well as an OT church?
Supercessionism isn’t a racist doctrine. It doesn’t mean that Gentiles replace Jews. It doesn’t even mean that the church takes the place of Israel. There’s a very real sense in which Reformed theology regards an OT saint as a Christian. To be a Messianic Jew is to be a Christian, whether Abraham, Asaph, Moses, or David; Isaiah, Daniel or Zechariah; Peter, James, or John; Paul or Matthew, Simeon or Anna, Mary or Elizabeth, Zecharias or John the Baptist.
vi) What about Jews who are not Messianic Jews? you ask. What about gentiles who are not Christian gentiles? I ask. It's all the same.
vi) I get a little tired of all the complaints about the gentile complexion of the church. No doubt the church would be better off if it were more Jewish. But let us remember that the church is mostly gentile because most Jews chose to opt out. And let us not write off two thousand years of church history as very large and very long mistake. To do so dishonors the plan and providence of God.
In dealing with the imagery of damnation, a couple of cautionary notes are in order.
i) There is not a great deal in Scripture on the eternality of hell. And yet the eternal duration of hell is far better attested than, say, the Virgin Birth. There are many "evangelicals" who affirm the Virgin Birth, but disaffirm the eternality of hell. For example, John Wenham, in his autobiography, uses this statistical approach to minimize the Biblical witness to everlasting punishment. Yet he would never employ that same methodology to minimize the testimony of Scripture to the Virgin Birth--even though that is built on a much thinner database than hell.
ii) It is important not to over-analyze the imagery. Scripture doesn’t speak with technical precision. The imagery is intended to convey a general impression. The attempt to break down the general impression into atomistic word-studies and isolated images does violence to the authorial intent. The general impression which popular as well as scholarly imagination has always taken away from these passages is one of unending misery.
These passages were never meant to be subjected to minute analysis. They don’t demand much in the way of interpretation. To overinterpret is to misinterpret. The broad brush, and not the fine brush-stroke, is what counts. This is not the time and place for finesse, nuance, or sophistication. Blunt, brutal, graphic and primitive picture-language was used to drive home a dire and unmistakable admonition. And it succeeded, for century upon century.
Those who construe the passages otherwise always do so, not because the imagery is suggestive of another interpretation, but because the conditionalist and the universalist find the idea of eternal punishment intolerable. What they give us is not the exegesis of the text, but a hermeneutic of emotion.
Bonda tries to find univeralism in Paul. One obvious objection to this construction is that faith is, in Paul, a prerequisite for salvation. Bonda attempts to get around this by positing postmortem conversion on the basis of Rom 4:17; 5:15; 14:9! That is certainly a novel interpretation of the verses in question. If nothing else, we must give Bonda some credit for ingenuity!
But the point of these passages is that God will save those who die in faith, such as Abraham--the paradigm of sole fide. Everyone dies, including the faithful. What happens to us when we die? If death is a penal sanction for sin, then salvation must apply to the living and the dead, but not all the living and not all the dead. The God who saved the OT saints shall save the NT saints. To die in the Lord is to live in the Lord.
Bonda denies original sin. Instead, he reverts to the old Pelagian position. He blames original sin on Augustine’s use of the Vulgate rendering of Rom 5:12. By way of reply:
i) It is unclear to me why Bonda rejects Federalism in favor of individualism. If, after all, you were going to concoct a doctrine of universal salvation, the some form of corporate solidarity would afford a more promising mechanism than radical individualism.
ii) It is a fact that Augustine relied on the Vulgate rather than, say, the Old Latin version or Ambrosiaster? For that matter, Augustine was conversant with the Greek text of Rom 5. (See the commentaries by Cranfield and Fitzmyer).
iii) It is inexcusably ignorant for a Dutch-Reformed pastor to allege that the Reformed doctrine of original sin derives from the Vulgate. Even if Bonda has left his hereditary tradition far behind, he should at least know what he has left behind.
iv) His interpretation of Rom 5:12 disregards the five-fold emphasis, in Rom 5, on the one sin of the one man (Adam) as the basis of common condemnation. (See Murray’s commentary).
Borrowing yet another page from Pelagius, Bonda says, "it is utterly impossible that God reveals his will to human beings, and simultaneously wills that they should not reach the point of doing God’s will. Yet, this is what tradition tells us. It suggests that he would reveal his will to people who were destined not to comply with it" (101).
By way of reply:
i) Needless to say, the Calvinist has heard all this before. It is not in ignorance of this objection that Reformed tradition can exist. The objection has been addressed on numberless occasions.
ii) In Reformed theology, revelation is the rule of faith. The God who reveals his preceptive will is the same God who reveals his decretive will.
iii) Whatever the common sense appeal of this objection, it has no force in theology, for we can only know the will of God insofar as God has made his will known to us.
iv) The objection equivocates over the identity of God’s "will." Bonda is really talking about God’s "law." No doubt God wills his law, as well as the revelation of his law. But that does not, of itself, tells us what purpose is served by the law of God. The law may be instrumental to an ulterior purpose, as a means to a higher end, rather than an end in itself. The revelation of the law brings with it the revelation of sin. The law can serve to harden as well as soften. The law teaches us right from wrong, but by that same token, you can choose to do wrong, to go out of your way to make the wrong turn and go down the wrong road or the wrong lane, just to be spiteful and rebellious. This contentious and contrarian spirit is on display throughout the pages of Scripture.
v) The law is a moral guide, but more than a moral guide. It is also a tool used by God to exhibit the depravity of sin and the gratuity of grace.
Bonda rejects the Reformed reading of Rom 5 on the grounds that, in this event, "it is not true that Christ, through his obedience, more than compensates for the havoc wreaked by the first human’s disobedience" (105). By way of reply:
i) This objection is not distinctive to Reformed theology, but would, if valid, apply with equal force to any soteric system which falls short of universalism.
ii) The problem with Bonda’s truncated allusion to Rom 5:20 is that it omits the introductory reference to the law. The sin in view is not sinful mankind in general, but lawlessness, where the "law" is the Law of Moses. In other words, Paul has in mind the national apostasy of Israel. And yet, not only was there a gracious remnant, but Israel was host to the Savior of the nations as well.
Bonda rejects the idea of a "hidden election" on the grounds that "If that were true, no one in Israel would be able to depend on God, and the question would always be: ‘Am I like Esau?" (146). By way of reply:
i) It is illogical to reject something just because you don’t like the consequences. Many things are true regardless of the consequences.
ii) The short answer is that our warrant for the assurance of salvation should not exceed the warrant of Scripture. If certain Scripturally stipulated contingencies are met (e.g. repentance & faith), then we are entitled to the assurance of salvation. But if such conditions are flouted, then we are not entitled to the same assurance.
iii) Election is hidden in eternity, but revealed in time, in the mirror of faith.
iv) Given the eye-popping maledictions of Deut 32, as well as the dire forewarnings and forebodings of the preexilic prophets, the average Israelite had good reason to examine himself and not take his blessings for granted!
Bonda appeals to Isa 19:21-22 to prove that the hardening of Pharaoh is temporary. But this prophecy is about the future, not the past. It has nothing to do with the Pharaoh of the oppression. He had been dead for 600 years when Isaiah spoke, and its fulfillment awaited the Christian era--awaited the living, not the dead.
Bonda says that "if God destines most people to eternal perdition, it would have been better if he had not created the world at all" (151). By way of reply:
i) Better for whom? Better for the damned? Yes! Better for the redeemed? No!
ii) Within the Reformed tradition, there is no received view on the relative number of the elect and reprobate. Actually, the question of how many are saved or damned has less immediate relation to predestination than it does to the condition of faith. Is faith in Christ is a prerequisite of salvation? To do away with hell, Bonda must not only do away with reprobation, but do away with faith in Christ. Of course, he has his pet theory of postmortem conversion, but I’ve already dealt with that.
Regarding Rom 9:23ff., Bonda says:
"To whom does he want to reveal this [the riches of his glory]? To the objects of his mercy? He would not need these objects of wrath for that purpose...No...he wants to show these objects of his wrath something of his mercy for the disobedient, for the heathen [Rom 9:25-26]. Once they were "objects of wrath"--"children of wrath," as we read in Eph 2:3...He wants to do the same for those who are now the objects of his wrath" (151). By way of reply:
i) In this very passage, Paul expressly affirms what Bonda denies: the vessels of mercy are the object of his glorious riches (v23).
ii) The vessels of wrath are instrumental to this aim, for mercy and justice are correlative. To withhold mercy and exact justice is illustrative of the wholly gratuitous character of grace.
iii) The way that Bonda draws the contrast, Jews are to objects of wrath (albeit temporarily) as Gentiles are to objects of mercy. But that is not how Paul draws the contrast. For Paul says that God is calling a people to himself from Jews and Gentiles alike (v24). So we have a part/whole relation here. It is not Jews as over against Gentiles, but some Jews and some Gentiles as over against other Jews and other Gentiles.
iv) Eph 2:3 alludes to original sin, whereas Rom 9:20ff. is spinning off the OT motif of the potter and the clay (Isa 29;16; 45-9-11; Jer 18:1-6). They are not interchangeable ideas.
Bonda quotes Ridderbos as denying that Rom 9 teaches the reprobation of Pharaoh or Esau. By way of reply:
i) Citing scholarly opinion is no substitute for argument. Perhaps Ridderbos has a supporting argument for his conclusion, but, if so, Bonda doesn’t quote it. So all the reader is left with is a baseless assertion.
ii) The predestinarian force of Rom 9 has received a detailed defense by the likes of Murray, Piper, and Schreiner.
iii) Even if what Ridderbos says is true, it is irrelevant. The case for reprobation and/or damnation does not depend on Scripture naming every reprobate or hellion. All that is needed to draw a conclusion in any specific case is a general statement concerning the preconditions of salvation (e.g., grace, faith, regeneration), in conjunction with enough information about an individual to draw a reasonable inference regarding his compliance, or not, with the requisite conditions. To be saved, one must be a believer. The burden of proof is on the believer. What is needed is not positive evidence that the individual is damned, but positive evidence that he was in a position and disposition to meet the preconditions of salvation.
iv) Again, even if what Ridderbos says is true, it misses the point. It is sufficient for Paul’s argument that an Esau, Ishmael or Pharaoh should typify the state of the reprobate, whether or not they themselves were reprobate.
Bonda glosses Rom 9:20 as follows:
"The point here is not that God has the absolute sovereignty to do as he pleases with his creatures and that he tolerates no protest. It is rather: Who are you, a mere human being, that you should tell God what he ought to do...to make all people, the living and the dead, want to come and be saved" (155). By way of reply:
i) The question at issue is not how God deals with his creatures, but how he deals with sinners.
ii) Bonda’s interpretation assumes that Paul’s was teaching universalism, and his sparring partner took offense at that. But what evidence is there that this is how Paul’s words were generally understood? After all, Bonda believes that the church as a whole is guilty of misinterpreting Paul. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is so, then why presume that Paul’s opponent thought otherwise?
iii) And if, moreover, Paul did not teach universal salvation, then Paul would be correcting his theological opponent.
Bonda asks, "Where does Scripture speak about…[a] God who punishes people, and continues to punish people who have repented and have ceased to sin?" (228). By way of reply:
i) This is a stawman argument. There are no penitents in hell.
ii) As a matter of fact, there are Scriptures in which men repent of their sins, yet still suffer the consequences (e.g., 2 Sam 12:7-12; 2 Kgs 23:26-27; Heb 12:16).
In my opinion, Bonda is no more successful in making a case for universalism than Adams or Talbott. And it isn't for want of scholarly sophistication. But they are handicapped by the falsity of their position. Ability, however great, cannot overcome the disability of a crippling error.
Sensing, I guess, the inadequacy of his exegesis, Bonda takes another bite at Mt 25:46 later on: "Now his blood will be given as a ransom for many (Mt 20:28). His blood will be poured out for many (26:28). Twice we read ‘for many.’ who are these ‘many’? They are the many who have entered the wide gate and walk the easy road that leads to destruction (Mt 7:13; cf. Mt 22:14). These are the same people of whom he just said that they will end in ‘eternal punishment’" (218).
By way of reply:
i) This interpretation is nonsensical on its own grounds. In Mt 7:13-14 & Mt 22:14, the "many" are relative to "the few." But in universalism, such a contrast is meaningless. In universalism, the choice is not between the comparative contrast of the many over as against the few (a la Calvinism), but between the superlative contrast of the salvation of all (inclusivism) as over against the salvation of some (exclusivism).
ii) It clearly does violence to Mt 7:13-14 to turn two divergent roads into one convergent road.
iii) The "many" is Mt 20:20 & 26:28 is not an antonym for the few or a synonym for all. Rather, it is a literary allusion to Isa 53:11-12. In this chapter, "many" and "all" are interchangeable designations for the covenant community. The Messiah lays down his life for his people.
Bonda goes on to claim that "eternal punishment does not forever continue, since that punishment itself, is not his goal. When God’s purpose has been achieved, there is no need for further punishment--for sin no longer exists!" (219).
By way of reply: notice how this turns the word of God on its head. In Bonda’s interpretive alchemy, "eternal" punishment is temporary. "Unquenchable" fire is quenched. The "undying" worm dies of hunger. Bonda systematically converts Biblical affirmations into Biblical negations, and Biblical negations into Biblical affirmations. This is exactly how the Devil would rewrite Scripture.
Continuing,
"Let us review: The word ‘eternal’ has played a major role in the doctrine of eternal punishment. But what Scripture tells us about God’s purpose with this punishment remained a secondary concern. We have seen that this divine purpose must be our first interest in any Biblical discourse about the eternity of the punishment. Never is there any other purpose than that the unbeliever return to obedience to God. Nowhere in Scripture do we find a statement that tells us that God wants those who are punished to suffer without end--that is not the purpose for which God created humans! If we keep this singular purpose of God in focus, we understand that eternal punishment is punishment that has as its only purpose an obedience return to the God of love...When Jesus refers to this punishment as eternal, he simply underlines...the eternal seriousness--of God in pursuing his one and only purpose" (219).
By way of reply:
i) In what sense did the divine purpose remain a secondary consideration in formulating the traditional doctrine? Is the administration of justice not a purposeful activity?
ii) Even if it were a secondary concern, is there something wrong with deriving a doctrine from passages of Scripture which directly and primarily address the subject-matter of the doctrine in question?
iii) This is an ironic complaint to lodge against Calvinism, for no theological tradition shows the same respect for God’s inviolable purpose.
iv) Bonda is using this appeal as an inner canon and winnowing fan to demote and deny the witness of Scripture whenever it comes into conflict with "his" primary concern.
v) Nowhere in Scripture? Isa 66:24? Dan 12:2? Mt 25:41? Mt 25:46? Mk 9:48? 2 Thes 1:9? Jude 7? Jude 9? Rev 14:11? Rev 20:10?
vi) Isn’t it simplistic to insist that God can have only one purpose for what he does? Why can’t the revelation of his justice be one such purpose? Why can’t the revelation of his mercy be another such purpose?
v) It is difficult to divorce the temporal end of God’s creatures from the teleological end of his creatures. Their final destination in time answers to his final design outside of time. And their eternal destiny marks the climactic realization of any ends-means relation.
vi) To equate the threat of eternal punishment with eternal seriousness in God’s pursuit of every lost sinner is a form of words which bears no resemblance to the wording, import, or intent of our Lord’s usage. This is a wholly artificial gloss that fails to connect at any point with what our Lord ever said or ever meant.
In fairness, though, Bonda defends this reinterpretation by recourse to prophetic usage. By way of reply:
i) Once again, Bonda is confounding historical judgements with eschatological judgments. We need to distinguish preexilic prophecies that have reference to the Exile and Restoration from postexilic prophecies which have reference to the eschaton.
ii) We also need to distinguish oracles that pronounce a common judgment on the nation of Israel from those that pronounce judgment on one party, but deliverance upon another (Isa 26:14,19; 66:24; Dan 12:2)..
iii) On a related, we further need to distinguish judgment on the nation of Israel from the impending or eventual redemption of the remnant (Isa 1:9; 4:3; 6:11-13; 10:22; 45:20) .
iii) On another related note, also need to distinguish between the end of the old covenant and the inauguration of the new (Jer 31:31-40).
iv) Bonda pedals in half-truths. The logic of Isaiah is thus: just as there is but one Maker of men, there is but one Judge and Redeemer of men. Whoever would be saved can only be saved by the one true God.
v) Bonda is very selective in his citations. In Isaiah you can see inclusivity and exclusivity side-by-side. In Isa 45:22-23 you have a universal form of address, but this is immediately followed, in vv24-25, by a dichotomy between the enemies of God, who shall suffer shame (24), and the people of God, who shall be justified (25). Likewise, in Isaiah 66:23, you have a general expression, immediately followed by a dire pronouncement upon the damned (24).
It isn’t hard to relate the two: if there is only one true God, then there is only one true knowledge of God. The God of the Jews is the God of mankind. The saving knowledge of God disclosed to Israel must be revealed in due time to the Gentiles. But just as salvation did not extend to every single Jew, neither does it extend to every single Gentile.
v) Bonda divorces 45:23 from the taunt-song in 46:1-2. But it’s all of a piece. The ancient world was not a democracy. You bowed the knee before your lord and swore fealty to him because he was your lord. What you thought of him was quite beside the point. He was your sovereign, and you were his subject. Even the high "gods" of Babylon must bow before the Lord’s emissary (Cyrus). The kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia were absolute monarchies. This is where we get the phrase "oriental despotism." And the God of Israel is the king of kings.
Bonda rushes by Dan 12:2 in a couple of sentences:
"The text does not deal with a judgment over all the dead...our interest here is limited to the term ‘eternal’" eternal life and eternal shame and contempt. Jeremiah mentioned redemption following eternal shame, but Daniel does not" (216).
By way of reply:
i) The comparison with Jeremiah disregards the fourfold distinction I drew above, viz., mass/remnant; old/new covenant; pre/post-Exilic perspective; common judgment/divergent destiny.
ii) Dan 12 is part of a larger oracle targeting the end-time (11:35,40).
iii) For the rest, one can hardly improve on Joyce Baldwin at this juncture:
"Hebrew rabbim, ‘many,’ tends to mean ‘all,’ as in Deut 7:1; Isa 22, where ‘all nations’ becomes ‘many peoples’ in the parallel v3; and in Isa 52:14-15; 53:11-12, where this key-word occurs no less than five times, with an inclusive significance. As Jeremias points out, the Hebrew word kol, ‘all,’ means either ‘totality’ or ‘sum’; there is no word for ‘all’ as a plural. For this rabbim comes to mean ‘the great multitude,’ ‘all’; cf. ‘Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth...’ (NIV). The emphasis is not upon many as opposed to all, but rather to the numbers involved.
In the light of this usage our author can be seen to be thinking of a general resurrection prior to judgment. Jesus almost certainly had this verse in mind in Mt 25:46 & Jn 5:28-29," J. Baldwin, Daniel (IVP 1978), 204.
Moving from the prophets to Paul, he cites Rom 14:10-11 & Phil 2:10-11. Yet is hard to see how the passage in Romans is a prooftext for universalism. To begin with, it is on the theme of judgment. In addition, it takes the Christian as the object of divine judgment. But if even the believer must stand before the tribunal of God, what hope is there for the unbeliever?
Although the judicial role is unstated in Phil 2:10-11, that is implicit from the parallel passage in Rom 14:10-11. The person and work of Christ in Phil 2:6-9 have qualified him to be the judge of all the world. I’ve already discussed the Isaian background of both passages. This is what is meant by the Lordship of Christ.
We have gone from the age of absolute monarchy, to constitutional monarchy, to titular monarchy, to popular sovereignty. We have forgotten what it means to "reign." But the dominion of Christ is the antitype of the oriental despotism. Either submit willingly or be forcibly subjugated.
You can see this theme in the Messianic Psalms (2:9; 110:1-2), which is, in turn, picked up in the NT (1 Cor 15:24-28; Rev 12:5; 19:15). Indeed, the Apocalypse is a NT version of OT holy war. Christ is a warrior-God and conquering king (Rev 19). Hell is a permanent POW camp. His enemies are vanquished and taken captive. The camp has an entrance, but no exit.
In the section on Revelation, Bonda says the following:
"All nations will come and will worship God (15:4)...In other words, the ‘forever and ever’ of 14:11 was not the final word! Just as the prophecy about Edom in Isaiah 34:10--from which this imagery of the eternally ascending smoke is borrowed--was not the final word. Isaiah’s prophecy and this vision are both related to the destruction of Sodom (Gen 19:24,28). We saw that God’s judgment over this city did not imply the end of his compassion for it" (230).
By way of reply:
i) He maunders the meaning of Rev 15:4. As Beale remarks, "’All the nations’ is a figure of speech (metonymy) by which the whole world is substituted for a part of it in order to emphasize that many will worship, which is in line with 5:9; 7:9ff.; and 14:3. The whole for the part is clearly the meaning where pas (‘all’) occurs with ethnos (‘nation’) elsewhere (5:9; 7:9; 13:7; 14:8; 18:3,23)," G. Beale, The Book of Revelation (Eerdmans/Paternoster 1999), 797-98. Cf. Bauckham, Climax of Prophecy (1993), 238-337 (esp. 312-13.
ii) I’ve already dealt with the judgment upon Sodom.
iii) The last word on the fate of Edom is Mal 1:1-4, which is decidedly less than sanguine!
iv) The fate of the damned (14:10-11) presents an antithetical parallel to the rest of the saints (14:13). The saints are forever at rest while damned are never at rest.
v) The fate of the damned (14:10-11) presents an antithetical parallel to the adoration of the angels (4:8). As long as the angels shall praise God, the damned shall suffer.
vi) The same time-maker ("forever and ever") is applied to the very life of God (4:9-10; 10:6; 15:7). As long as God shall live, the damned shall suffer.
vii) The fate of the devil and his minions (20:10) presents an antithetical parallel to the reign of the saints (22:5). As long as the saints shall reign, the damned shall suffer.
For better or worse, the state of all parties is fixed for all time. The timeline is isochronic for God and Christ, saints and angels, devils and idolaters. And once the die is cast, there is no reversal of fortunes.
Bonda then says that those outside the New Jerusalem (22:11) are invited to come inside (22:17). But this commits a level-confusion. The invitation is directed, not to the narrative characters, but to the reader, the audience, the congregation (of the seven churches of Asia Minor) to whom the prophecy is addressed.
"God has created man with the intention that all should love one another, as he loves them. This love allows of no exception: One is even to love one’s enemies, since God loves them all (Mt 5:44-45)...In God’s law the single command of love, given to all human beings, we find the answer to the doctrine of eternal punishment. This law makes it crystal clear that we are dealing with a doctrine that clashes with God’s commandment" 102.
By way of reply:
i) Mt 5:44-45 doesn’t say that God loves everyone. Rather, the point of Mt 5:44-45, like the parable of the wheat and the tares (note the same agricultural setting), is that God dispenses common grace to all as a way of dispensing special grace to the elect. Because the elect and the reprobate inhabit in the same world, living under same roof (as it were), sun and rain cannot discriminate. All must prosper to some degree for any to prosper at all.
ii) It is illicit to invoke Mt 5:44-45 in order to negate everything else the Bible might have to say on the subject.
iii) This is not the only command that God has given to man. He also commanded the Israelites to execute the Canaanites.
iii) Mt 5:44-45 does not address the destiny of man, but rather, the Christian code of conduct for the duration of the church age.
iv) A divine command is not equally binding on God and man. God is the judge. He bears a different relation to man than man to his fellow man.
v) Bonda has a very flat-footed concept of love. There are different degrees and species of love. Conjugal love is not the same thing as neighborly love. Love can be exclusive as well as inclusive, intensive as well as extensive.
"What has this doctrine of Israel’s rejection brought about? The great catastrophe of our century tells us: The murder of almost six million Jews from 1940-45 in post-Christian Europe would not have been possible without the preparatory work of this ecclesiastical tradition.
The genocide was not committed by Christians, but by pagans who had rejected faith in Jesus. However, this would not have happened in Europe if through the centuries the church had been taught to see Israel as the apple of God’s eye," 132.
By way of reply:
i) This is a form of emotional extortion: either interpret Romans my way or else you’ve got the blood of six million Jews on your hands! That brand of blackmail is irrelevant to the meaning of Romans, and given that the Book of Romans was penned by a devout Jew, no authentic interpretation could possibly be anti-Semitic, so we should follow the text wherever it takes us, without fear of consequences, without dragging in extraneous anxieties or imposing extraneous filters on the material.
ii) It would take a lot of documentation to substantiate Bonda’s charge--none of which is forthcoming. What is the relation between church and synagogue in Reformed, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Orthodox theology? Is it all the same? Is it all anti-Semitic?
iii) Even if the church had been more philosemitic, how would that have restrained the Nazis?
iv) What about the effect of German Bible criticism, with its evolutionary view of religion, which necessitated a low view of the OT and OT piety?
v) In what sense is the Reformed tradition anti-Semitic? Wasn’t Holland a haven for the Jews? Weren’t the Jews well-treated by the Puritans? Doesn’t Reformed theology stress the continuity of the covenants? Doesn’t Reformed theology speak of OT saints as well as an OT church?
Supercessionism isn’t a racist doctrine. It doesn’t mean that Gentiles replace Jews. It doesn’t even mean that the church takes the place of Israel. There’s a very real sense in which Reformed theology regards an OT saint as a Christian. To be a Messianic Jew is to be a Christian, whether Abraham, Asaph, Moses, or David; Isaiah, Daniel or Zechariah; Peter, James, or John; Paul or Matthew, Simeon or Anna, Mary or Elizabeth, Zecharias or John the Baptist.
vi) What about Jews who are not Messianic Jews? you ask. What about gentiles who are not Christian gentiles? I ask. It's all the same.
vi) I get a little tired of all the complaints about the gentile complexion of the church. No doubt the church would be better off if it were more Jewish. But let us remember that the church is mostly gentile because most Jews chose to opt out. And let us not write off two thousand years of church history as very large and very long mistake. To do so dishonors the plan and providence of God.
In dealing with the imagery of damnation, a couple of cautionary notes are in order.
i) There is not a great deal in Scripture on the eternality of hell. And yet the eternal duration of hell is far better attested than, say, the Virgin Birth. There are many "evangelicals" who affirm the Virgin Birth, but disaffirm the eternality of hell. For example, John Wenham, in his autobiography, uses this statistical approach to minimize the Biblical witness to everlasting punishment. Yet he would never employ that same methodology to minimize the testimony of Scripture to the Virgin Birth--even though that is built on a much thinner database than hell.
ii) It is important not to over-analyze the imagery. Scripture doesn’t speak with technical precision. The imagery is intended to convey a general impression. The attempt to break down the general impression into atomistic word-studies and isolated images does violence to the authorial intent. The general impression which popular as well as scholarly imagination has always taken away from these passages is one of unending misery.
These passages were never meant to be subjected to minute analysis. They don’t demand much in the way of interpretation. To overinterpret is to misinterpret. The broad brush, and not the fine brush-stroke, is what counts. This is not the time and place for finesse, nuance, or sophistication. Blunt, brutal, graphic and primitive picture-language was used to drive home a dire and unmistakable admonition. And it succeeded, for century upon century.
Those who construe the passages otherwise always do so, not because the imagery is suggestive of another interpretation, but because the conditionalist and the universalist find the idea of eternal punishment intolerable. What they give us is not the exegesis of the text, but a hermeneutic of emotion.
Bonda tries to find univeralism in Paul. One obvious objection to this construction is that faith is, in Paul, a prerequisite for salvation. Bonda attempts to get around this by positing postmortem conversion on the basis of Rom 4:17; 5:15; 14:9! That is certainly a novel interpretation of the verses in question. If nothing else, we must give Bonda some credit for ingenuity!
But the point of these passages is that God will save those who die in faith, such as Abraham--the paradigm of sole fide. Everyone dies, including the faithful. What happens to us when we die? If death is a penal sanction for sin, then salvation must apply to the living and the dead, but not all the living and not all the dead. The God who saved the OT saints shall save the NT saints. To die in the Lord is to live in the Lord.
Bonda denies original sin. Instead, he reverts to the old Pelagian position. He blames original sin on Augustine’s use of the Vulgate rendering of Rom 5:12. By way of reply:
i) It is unclear to me why Bonda rejects Federalism in favor of individualism. If, after all, you were going to concoct a doctrine of universal salvation, the some form of corporate solidarity would afford a more promising mechanism than radical individualism.
ii) It is a fact that Augustine relied on the Vulgate rather than, say, the Old Latin version or Ambrosiaster? For that matter, Augustine was conversant with the Greek text of Rom 5. (See the commentaries by Cranfield and Fitzmyer).
iii) It is inexcusably ignorant for a Dutch-Reformed pastor to allege that the Reformed doctrine of original sin derives from the Vulgate. Even if Bonda has left his hereditary tradition far behind, he should at least know what he has left behind.
iv) His interpretation of Rom 5:12 disregards the five-fold emphasis, in Rom 5, on the one sin of the one man (Adam) as the basis of common condemnation. (See Murray’s commentary).
Borrowing yet another page from Pelagius, Bonda says, "it is utterly impossible that God reveals his will to human beings, and simultaneously wills that they should not reach the point of doing God’s will. Yet, this is what tradition tells us. It suggests that he would reveal his will to people who were destined not to comply with it" (101).
By way of reply:
i) Needless to say, the Calvinist has heard all this before. It is not in ignorance of this objection that Reformed tradition can exist. The objection has been addressed on numberless occasions.
ii) In Reformed theology, revelation is the rule of faith. The God who reveals his preceptive will is the same God who reveals his decretive will.
iii) Whatever the common sense appeal of this objection, it has no force in theology, for we can only know the will of God insofar as God has made his will known to us.
iv) The objection equivocates over the identity of God’s "will." Bonda is really talking about God’s "law." No doubt God wills his law, as well as the revelation of his law. But that does not, of itself, tells us what purpose is served by the law of God. The law may be instrumental to an ulterior purpose, as a means to a higher end, rather than an end in itself. The revelation of the law brings with it the revelation of sin. The law can serve to harden as well as soften. The law teaches us right from wrong, but by that same token, you can choose to do wrong, to go out of your way to make the wrong turn and go down the wrong road or the wrong lane, just to be spiteful and rebellious. This contentious and contrarian spirit is on display throughout the pages of Scripture.
v) The law is a moral guide, but more than a moral guide. It is also a tool used by God to exhibit the depravity of sin and the gratuity of grace.
Bonda rejects the Reformed reading of Rom 5 on the grounds that, in this event, "it is not true that Christ, through his obedience, more than compensates for the havoc wreaked by the first human’s disobedience" (105). By way of reply:
i) This objection is not distinctive to Reformed theology, but would, if valid, apply with equal force to any soteric system which falls short of universalism.
ii) The problem with Bonda’s truncated allusion to Rom 5:20 is that it omits the introductory reference to the law. The sin in view is not sinful mankind in general, but lawlessness, where the "law" is the Law of Moses. In other words, Paul has in mind the national apostasy of Israel. And yet, not only was there a gracious remnant, but Israel was host to the Savior of the nations as well.
Bonda rejects the idea of a "hidden election" on the grounds that "If that were true, no one in Israel would be able to depend on God, and the question would always be: ‘Am I like Esau?" (146). By way of reply:
i) It is illogical to reject something just because you don’t like the consequences. Many things are true regardless of the consequences.
ii) The short answer is that our warrant for the assurance of salvation should not exceed the warrant of Scripture. If certain Scripturally stipulated contingencies are met (e.g. repentance & faith), then we are entitled to the assurance of salvation. But if such conditions are flouted, then we are not entitled to the same assurance.
iii) Election is hidden in eternity, but revealed in time, in the mirror of faith.
iv) Given the eye-popping maledictions of Deut 32, as well as the dire forewarnings and forebodings of the preexilic prophets, the average Israelite had good reason to examine himself and not take his blessings for granted!
Bonda appeals to Isa 19:21-22 to prove that the hardening of Pharaoh is temporary. But this prophecy is about the future, not the past. It has nothing to do with the Pharaoh of the oppression. He had been dead for 600 years when Isaiah spoke, and its fulfillment awaited the Christian era--awaited the living, not the dead.
Bonda says that "if God destines most people to eternal perdition, it would have been better if he had not created the world at all" (151). By way of reply:
i) Better for whom? Better for the damned? Yes! Better for the redeemed? No!
ii) Within the Reformed tradition, there is no received view on the relative number of the elect and reprobate. Actually, the question of how many are saved or damned has less immediate relation to predestination than it does to the condition of faith. Is faith in Christ is a prerequisite of salvation? To do away with hell, Bonda must not only do away with reprobation, but do away with faith in Christ. Of course, he has his pet theory of postmortem conversion, but I’ve already dealt with that.
Regarding Rom 9:23ff., Bonda says:
"To whom does he want to reveal this [the riches of his glory]? To the objects of his mercy? He would not need these objects of wrath for that purpose...No...he wants to show these objects of his wrath something of his mercy for the disobedient, for the heathen [Rom 9:25-26]. Once they were "objects of wrath"--"children of wrath," as we read in Eph 2:3...He wants to do the same for those who are now the objects of his wrath" (151). By way of reply:
i) In this very passage, Paul expressly affirms what Bonda denies: the vessels of mercy are the object of his glorious riches (v23).
ii) The vessels of wrath are instrumental to this aim, for mercy and justice are correlative. To withhold mercy and exact justice is illustrative of the wholly gratuitous character of grace.
iii) The way that Bonda draws the contrast, Jews are to objects of wrath (albeit temporarily) as Gentiles are to objects of mercy. But that is not how Paul draws the contrast. For Paul says that God is calling a people to himself from Jews and Gentiles alike (v24). So we have a part/whole relation here. It is not Jews as over against Gentiles, but some Jews and some Gentiles as over against other Jews and other Gentiles.
iv) Eph 2:3 alludes to original sin, whereas Rom 9:20ff. is spinning off the OT motif of the potter and the clay (Isa 29;16; 45-9-11; Jer 18:1-6). They are not interchangeable ideas.
Bonda quotes Ridderbos as denying that Rom 9 teaches the reprobation of Pharaoh or Esau. By way of reply:
i) Citing scholarly opinion is no substitute for argument. Perhaps Ridderbos has a supporting argument for his conclusion, but, if so, Bonda doesn’t quote it. So all the reader is left with is a baseless assertion.
ii) The predestinarian force of Rom 9 has received a detailed defense by the likes of Murray, Piper, and Schreiner.
iii) Even if what Ridderbos says is true, it is irrelevant. The case for reprobation and/or damnation does not depend on Scripture naming every reprobate or hellion. All that is needed to draw a conclusion in any specific case is a general statement concerning the preconditions of salvation (e.g., grace, faith, regeneration), in conjunction with enough information about an individual to draw a reasonable inference regarding his compliance, or not, with the requisite conditions. To be saved, one must be a believer. The burden of proof is on the believer. What is needed is not positive evidence that the individual is damned, but positive evidence that he was in a position and disposition to meet the preconditions of salvation.
iv) Again, even if what Ridderbos says is true, it misses the point. It is sufficient for Paul’s argument that an Esau, Ishmael or Pharaoh should typify the state of the reprobate, whether or not they themselves were reprobate.
Bonda glosses Rom 9:20 as follows:
"The point here is not that God has the absolute sovereignty to do as he pleases with his creatures and that he tolerates no protest. It is rather: Who are you, a mere human being, that you should tell God what he ought to do...to make all people, the living and the dead, want to come and be saved" (155). By way of reply:
i) The question at issue is not how God deals with his creatures, but how he deals with sinners.
ii) Bonda’s interpretation assumes that Paul’s was teaching universalism, and his sparring partner took offense at that. But what evidence is there that this is how Paul’s words were generally understood? After all, Bonda believes that the church as a whole is guilty of misinterpreting Paul. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is so, then why presume that Paul’s opponent thought otherwise?
iii) And if, moreover, Paul did not teach universal salvation, then Paul would be correcting his theological opponent.
Bonda asks, "Where does Scripture speak about…[a] God who punishes people, and continues to punish people who have repented and have ceased to sin?" (228). By way of reply:
i) This is a stawman argument. There are no penitents in hell.
ii) As a matter of fact, there are Scriptures in which men repent of their sins, yet still suffer the consequences (e.g., 2 Sam 12:7-12; 2 Kgs 23:26-27; Heb 12:16).
In my opinion, Bonda is no more successful in making a case for universalism than Adams or Talbott. And it isn't for want of scholarly sophistication. But they are handicapped by the falsity of their position. Ability, however great, cannot overcome the disability of a crippling error.
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