For some reason, Shamgar referred me to this article, as if it was devastating to my position:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
Since he brought up the subject, here’s the material I found most worthwhile in the article he directed me to read:
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How sad. You have the audacity to designate the brave men and women of our armed service -- who perform their duty by water-boarding men of admittedly unspeakable evil -- to be morally comparable to their enemies. You arguments are demagogic and specious.
1. "Torture does not work." You are correct, unless of course it is applied in a tactically sound manner. In the stereotyped scenario, which admittedly has been employed by the truly sadistic, a torturer begins by developing a list of crimes to which he hopes the torturee will confess. Then torture is applied and -- lo and behold -- a confession is extracted. IF our nation was so foolish as to use this technique, I would agree that torture doesn't work. But they do not. Instead, they start with a portfolio of intelligence they believe to be true with a high degree of certainty. Then they slowly apply more and more powerful psychological and physical techniques until they believe that the subjects will has collapsed. But they do not accept just any interesting tidbit -- they first ensure that the subject's will has collapsed and that they are not being sabotaged by asking questions to which they already have an answer. In so doing, they ensure that they are not being fed the answer the subject "knows" they want to hear (For a real-istic example, "Was there a chemical weapons unit being trained in the second safe-house you slept at in Karachi?" A subject who has not been trained yet that false positive answers yield further punishment may decide to answer incorrectly. But this will worsen his treatment. He will learn quickly, I assure you).
2. Our enemies will torture our soldiers. They do and will continue to. This is truly a rhetorical trick -- you, I and the other readers all know our most evil enemies will subject our men and women to unspeakable, undeserved pain and humiliation as they see fit. Our more civilized enemies might not, just as we wouldn't decide to torture our more civilized prisoners (the highest officials in our government -- last I checked, it was the President himself -- must sign off on each and every increase in severity in interrogation techniques for each and every prisoner on a case by case basis. So these would not be employed in -- say -- a hypothetical war against the civilized soldiers of the African Union).
3. The heart of the argument is an argument of moral equivalence. Our enemies torture and that is evil, so if we torture, we are evil. But they same can be said of killing (ie, murder), capturing (ie, stealing) enemy supplies, etc. This is why it is better to use the Orwellian-feeling phrase of "enhanced interrogation". "Killing" is morally neutral. As is "capturing". But that "torture" historically has no such analogue is an outcome of squeamishness, moral cowardice or faulty logic, not wise ethical philosophy. Throwing an innocent man in jail is evil, whereas throwing a criminal in jail is just; similarly, torture birthed of sadism or employed upon a likely innocent victim is evil, while it employing it on an admitted mass murderer to prevent further mass murder is just. You are trying to decree a purely amoral act as immoral while stripping it of its entire ethical context. This is at the least irresponsible and wrongheaded, or worse -- in accusing honorable men of profound evil -- morally negligent. You sir and your ilk are enabling the criminals of al Qaeda to employ the argument of moral justice -- bin Laden's favorite when addressing the West (see, eg, http://dissimulationexposed.blogspot.com/2007/10/dissimulation-on-display.html ).
4. You equivocate on the word "torture". By comparing our brave men and women to the denizens of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Pol Pot, you invoke images of pure hell and sadism. But when our troops are found guilty of that breed of sadism, they are roundly punished. This renders hollow the claims of our enemies that "We closed Saddams torture chambers to open our own". What audacious bile! And yet, you mention Abu Gharaib, when its very infamy proves the falsity of your accusations. No sir, America has not given up its heart and soul -- for we punish those whom our enemies promote!
5. Just for the record: al Qaeda manuals teach their readers to dream up the most unspeakable tortures and humiliations whenever possible. Also, several very popular "torture tell all" documentaries, treatments, articles and appearances have later proven (almost certainly) false.
In conclusion, your piece is interesting, but at worst vile and at best terribly misguided. I am almost entirely certain that in your case it is the latter. Sadly, that is not the case when our most dangerous enemies employ almost the exact same arguments.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 29, 2007 3:43 AM
When it comes to extrating information from military combatants, are harsh methods acceptable? Oh, yeah. They are not only acceptable, they are NECESSARY.
Sometimes I think that the critics of military interrogation tactics have been subconsciously influenced by the police dramas on TV. After all, Starsky and Hutch could draw out a confession just by playing "Good Cop, Bad Cop". And today on Law & Order Criminal Intent and CSI Miami, all it takes to make a suspect crack and tell all is to get in their face while tilting your neck.
Cara Segwick on The Closer really applies the pressure, though. She bats her eyes and uses a southern accent to get her confessions (no head tilt needed).
TV's portrayal of successful interrogative methods has come a ways since the days when Perry Mason was always able to get the guilty party to leap to his/her feet in a courtroom and proclaim their guilt. There's a general public awareness now that harsher methods are required, but everyone realizes that Liberals have hamstrung our police interrogators.
Before we legislate exactly "who and how" can be effectively interrogated by our military and homeland security personnel, we should stop and think. Don't just react instinctively.
Obviously, we are going to need to find the middle ground in all of this. The best answer to the crises we face isn't going to always be in the extremes as it was when we were forced into firebombing and nuking Japanese cities in WWII.
I agree with everything we did in WWII. Extreme warfare requires extreme responses.
Not to sound Lincolnesque here, but we are now engaged in a great war that will test not only our resolve, but also our treasure and most importantly, the principles we are fighting to defend.
The question seems to be, "How low will we go?"
Posted by AZgirl | October 29, 2007 5:12 PM
It is also interesting to note that some of those (here and elsewhere) who oppose the use of this category of force in defense of our nation would also not criminally punish men who justly decide to act in this way. But that gives lie to the argument from morality. Either it is an evil act that must always be punished, or there are grounds when it is morally justified.
To be clear: I am advocating that an actor is justified in using the minimum force possible, against a guilty party, sufficient to meet the goal of preventing unjustified violence against the undeserving. It is indeed up to the conscience and reason of the actor or party involved to determine just how much force is required and under which circumstances. To prevent accidents, I am comfortable with every manner of safeguard provided it doesn't sufficiently diminish the ability to prevent further harm to the innocents in question.
In any case, I am arguing less about what a particular law should or should not state, and more about whether one should so eagerly condemn those who make the decision to engage in this practice without regard to the entire moral context.
One need not imagine a ticking nuclear bomb, by the way. One only need imagine that they are a father who has captured a man who belongs to a pedophilia ring that managed to kidnap his 2 year old daughter. In other words, the life of the innocent need not be in direct or immediate danger, nor must there be a high number of innocents in danger. A single innocent babe in danger of being subjected to such inhuman cruelty deserves to be protected by any means necessary, provided one is certain they have collared a member of the ring. I would never ever be able to forgive myself for allowing my daughter to be degraded in that way, but believe I would sleep well and without guilty conscious should I subject such a man to the minimum force possible yet still sufficient to rescue her.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 29, 2007 7:08 PM
I could be persuaded that a particular government should not be trusted with the power to torture, or even that legally defining "acceptable torture" is difficult to the point of inaction.
But that matter is wholly separate from the matter of whether it is logically possible to torture someone morally.
Do you agree in principle that such a thing is possible?
ReflectionEphemeral,
It is impossible to make a valid general moral argument against an action per se by appealing to a slippery slope. You may be able to make an argument against a specific use case or the granting of powers to perform the action, but you certainly cannot argue against an entire class of action in that manner. I am sure you are quite capable of imaging several of the limitless such arguments one could make against granting war powers to a government.
I did purposely use the word violence in my "to be clear" section. Now, we could argue over what constitutes violence, or we can skip that boring conversation and you could just agree that you instinctively and rationally understand the difference between lesser and greater crimes, and that dissimilar force can be justified to prevent or punish them. After all, following your logic, "Why don't we shoot ever criminal immediately to prevent further crimes? How can you judge when it is fair to or not? If you are willing to use force to prevent crime, how do you decide how much?" And so on and so on...
The slippery slope is truly a slimy thing and can almost without fail be turned on its conjuror (unless they are relativsts in which case discussion is futile).
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 29, 2007 10:04 PM
Judging by many of the comments on this post, I would not want to take my chances on jury nullification to save those who think it is wrong to use coercive interrogation. Some would have the President weigh a choice between impeachment and mass slaughter of non combatants so they can feel morally superior.
Posted by Prairiepundit | October 30, 2007 12:14 PM
Anyone who thinks I am making an argument that amounts in totality to "the ends justify the means" probably hasn't read what I've written.
But to be clear "the ends" are nearly always taken into consideration in ethical decision making. For instance, is it moral to invade another country? That question cannot be answered -- the problem is that invading another country is an amoral act. One must know the moral context ("the ends", motivation, etc) before one can determine if a particular act of invasion is a moral act.
zvelf,
The premise is neither unstated nor faulty. In fact, that is almost (the grounded version of) my entire argument: There is a fact of the matter as to whether al qaeda is evil -- drumroll -- they are! So while we may be justified in killing an al qaeda operative, they are not justified in killing an American soldier. Killing, stealing, kidnapping, inflicting pain upon others -- these must be amoral acts at the core if you are to support war. The surrounding ethical context must be known to determine if the particular act in question is to be held in contempt.
But it really doesn't matter if the US is right and al qaeda is wrong for my abstract argument to be valid. Instead, there must be at least one logically possible case in which torture is justified. If such a case exists, then it becomes a matter of degree, motivation, intent, etc.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 30, 2007 1:17 PM
Having been to SERE School, I abhor the idea of torture and believe that the US should be the “good guys” BEYOND debate. However, I certainly acknowledge that the subject of whether water boarding should be considered torture is, in fact, debatable. (Everything unpleasant can’t possibly be considered torture.) I happen to believe that it should not be considered torture, in and of itself.
Even still, I happen to be against the official use of water boarding by the US government against its enemies. That being said, I still support its use (and all current training techniques we employ) on our own people. Therefore, I don’t believe that water boarding should be considered the travesty some of you think it is.
1. Are some of you people making a deliberate attempt to not understand Nuzzolillo’s argument, or is his argument actually escaping you?
Is killing another human amoral? Are there ever justified circumstances (beyond self defense) for killing another human? Is it ok to empower our government officials to make this decision?
If you find it unacceptable for a police officer to kill another human in an attempt to save others (which, by the way, is NOT unrealistic), then I think you get a free pass from Nuzzolillo. He will not debate you any further. In fact, he will commend you on your lack of hypocrisy.
If, however, you find it justifiable to kill another human in certain situations, then you must acknowledge the argument Nuzzolillo is making. The human that gets killed by a police officer might be innocent. The human that gets killed by the police officer MIGHT believe that the police officer is the bad guy. Do you still think it’s possible to justify the police officer’s actions? Do you think the police officer should be forced to hope for a pardon, prosecutorial discretion, or a sympathetic jury? Or do you agree that it’s ok for an agent of the government (the police officer in this case) to be entrusted with the discretion to kill another human being (via an affirmative defense which is written into the law)?
If your answer to my last question is “no” then you need to widen your criticism to include most states’ penal codes.
Let’s not stop at killing. Do you believe that it’s justified to confine some humans to prison? If so, then why? What gives the government the moral authority to confine? The human might be innocent. The human might believe that the jailors are the bad guys. Have you simply been CONDITIONED to believe that confinement is justifiable by governments?
2. Why do some of you assume that SERE School type water boarding is conducted in a more controlled environment than water boarding during an actual interrogation? If training and actual water boarding were equally controlled and equal in duration would you be ok with it?
3. For others, what data exists to indicate that water boarding doesn’t render reliable (or actionable) intelligence? Or are you relying on anecdotal comments from certain individuals with previous intelligence experience? If so, what makes you think they are more “right” than the intelligence experts which are recommending the technique in certain circumstances?
3. One poster mentioned a Japanese prisoner that responded to the “soft treatment.” Great. What makes you think that the same technique isn’t tried first on terrorism detainees? It’s certainly possible that the US has enjoyed volumes of intelligence using soft techniques. From what I understand, interrogations by national intelligence professionals are a very sophisticated process – probably more sophisticated than you think. I’m sure methods have been developed (maybe even tested) to increase the reliability of the information generated. The one poster’s comments about false positives is certainly germane. This being said, would you be ok with techniques such as water boarding if it was only attempted AFTER a soft treatment has been deemed ineffective and if it was only accompanied by techniques to increase reliability? Ask yourself if you would still object to water boarding even if all intelligence professionals agreed that it was effective. If you would still object, then I recommend you discontinue to use the ineffective argument as a shortcut.
Posted by corkie30 | October 30, 2007 6:48 PM
I’d just like to add that if you do believe that it’s ok for government agents (e.g. local, state, and federal officers, etc.) to kill other humans in certain circumstance, and you believe that it’s ok for government agents (e.g. judges and wardens) to confine other humans in certain circumstances, then you must admit that you believe it’s ok to subject other humans to death or duress in certain circumstances.
Posted by corkie30 | October 30, 2007 7:08 PM
While the articles of the Nuremburg tribunal are certainly of historical and/or legal interest, it escapes me how they could change whether an act can morally justified (and to think otherwise would be to accept actual moral relativism; eg, that the law of a land can render an otherwise moral act immoral).
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 30, 2007 7:35 PM
And for those of you having a hard time understanding what I mean by objective morality, consider the follow:
Paul shot a gun and the bullet hit and killed Angelina. Angelina was not a threat to Paul. Is Paul an evil murderer?
That question is -- I hope! -- impossible to answer. For 1) Paul could have been shooting at a man who was raping his wife at knife point, and accidentally hit Angelina as she passed his window. Or, 2) Paul could have shot Angelina because she was tied up to his bed and it got him off sexually.
Now, (1) killing a person accidentally while defending your wife is not evil and does not render you a murderer. But (2) killing someone for the sole purpose of sexual excitement is always evil.
So you see, there is an objective moral conclusion to be drawn, but it is 100% dependent on the context surrounding the action.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 30, 2007 7:55 PM
For those of among the readership who might take something away from what I have written, take only this: before you condemn the men and women in the difficult position of deciding when or when not to escalate force; before you decide once and for all that some category of action is always immoral and off limits; before you tie the hands of the government that is ostensibly here to protect us, be sure you have given this subject grave and careful thought, for it is of the utmost importance.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 31, 2007 2:42 AM
I think you’re asking the right question. A line needs to be drawn.
Personally, I believe that water boarding should be considered out of bounds. However, I respect that others may believe that water boarding is acceptable (even if only marginally).
It seems that you believe that water boarding should be restricted and should be considered torture. What else do you consider torture? Is it torture to tell someone that if they don’t cooperate that they will spend the rest of their life in prison? Is it torture to keep someone awake for 16 hours straight? 18 hours straight? 20 hours straight? Is it torture to use an open hand slap?
I assume that you do approve of some level of interrogation. If so, then please provide me with one example of an interrogation technique which you could approve. Ideally, I’d like to have an example of something which you believe to be acceptable, yet borderline.
It’s interesting that you believe that, “moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and using GABAergic drugs” SHOULD be used in interrogations.
I’m not sure how I feel about exposing someone to constant white noise, etc. I suppose that some would include these methods in the torture category
*BTW, I hope everyone would admit that there’s a difference between attempting to get a confession and attempting to generate useful intelligence.
Posted by corkie30 | October 31, 2007 1:32 PM
I am not suggesting that circumstances could ever turn an evil act into a good one. Instead I am suggesting that many (most?) violent actions are amoral per se, and the surrounding context must be known to determine if they are immoral or moral. See my example regarding Paul and Angelina above*. Is it such a leap to presume that the same logic that applies to murder/killing, stealing/capturing, kidnapping/imprisonment, etc can apply to torture/enhanced interrogation? Maybe, but I cannot see why.
. http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/index.php#comment-763http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/index.php#comment-763
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Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | October 31, 2007 1:48 PM
You obviously understand Jared Nuzzolillo’s argument. Therefore, my comment was not directed at you. Overall, I agree with your other comments. However;
1. As I stated in #1, you obviously understand why the killing argument was presented. You wrote,
“I personally believe that no one should intentionally kill another person outside of self-defense (wars can be considered self-defense).”
I assume that I could rephrase this and state that you believe it is ok for an agent of government to be entrusted to intentionally kill another person or wage war in certain circumstances.
2. You stated, in response to my question regarding whether you believed water boarding would be ok if it was equally controlled and equal in duration to the water boarding used to train Americans,
“No, I would not be okay with it as this is a theoretical that would prove impossible to realize in actual practice.”
Wouldn’t that be like saying that we should NOT allow the military to drop bombs because any constraints on the use of the bombs would be theoretical and would prove impossible to realize in actual practice.
The military and agencies of the government conduct training and operations which are highly regulated and carefully controlled every day. Believe me when I say that the government is really, really good with bureaucracy. I don’t think it’s unrealistic at all to think that restrictions on water boarding would be strictly followed.
Otherwise, why should we bother having these conversations? If the military and government agencies are disregarding guidelines, then it doesn’t matter what the guidelines state anyway.
If I misunderstood your point, then I apologize.
Posted by corkie30 | October 31, 2007 2:02 PM
Would Sen. McCain have betrayed his country more if the interrogators had been inquisitive, analytical, patient, professional, amiable and compassionate? Would he then have taken that early release he was offered? As he has already said he broke under torture and revealed information that he should not have, it seems that he is trying to have this argument both ways. Torture does not work, except when it does.
Posted by Dbltap | November 1, 2007 8:14 PM
I am arguing that the use of ever-escalating levels of force can be justified if and only if one has been rationally convinced that their opponent is evil and that he is extremely likely to be withholding information that could be used to protect innocents.
This is why one could arguably be justified in torturing, say, KSM, but not in torturing, say, a Pashtun who has never left his valley and knows only that someone has come to attack him in his home. That Pashtun is not necessarily evil, and accordingly must be treated with all of the courtesies afforded to a traditional prisoner of war.
This criterion is also what rules out al Qaeda's capture and justified torture of one of our soldiers. They must have a high degree of certainty that our soldier's intent in fighting them is evil before they could contemplate escalating force. Then they'd need to be able to justify that the reason that they seek to torture him is just -- ie, that their goal in torturing him is noble. And al Qaeda would never be able to justify that they are noble given their goals and methods (including attacking and torturing those that are not evil!).
I should also say that taking the minimum action needed to defend oneself, when it is not reasonably clear whether an attacker is acting morally, could be justified. But once the threat has been removed, one could not justify further escalation of force without possessing a high degree of certainty that the attacker had evil intentions and that the attacker is withholding information that could be used in the defense of oneself or others.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | November 2, 2007 12:15 A
American prisoners in the present conflicts will be treated just as badly pre,post or present water boarding. To say other wise ignores the facts on the ground.
To say that American Jurisprudence will collapse because KSM got a boo boo or some other dirtball got an attitude adjustment from the Egyptians is just plain silly. Go to your local VFW or RSL and buy a shot and a beer for some of the greatest generation and then sit back and listen to the loving and patient way they treated captured Germans and Japanese. We survived WWII, the Civil War and other challenges this too will pass.
Torture is an ugly business, a bit of both parties souls are taken, much like killing. However there are times when we as a society or a tribe must say that the rules are now a bit different or we will no longer have any rules at all.
Posted by Dbltap | November 2, 2007 12:47 AM
My claim (with regards to objective/relative morality) is that there is a universal, timeless and firm fact of the matter as to whether any particular act is moral or not. But that fact can only be discerned by taking into consideration the motivation behind the act; that, generally speaking, a description of an act that omits the mental state of the actor is not sufficient to determine whether an act is justified morally.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this position, is that it is very similar to what most people believe in practice. People like to say that lying is wrong, but when they learn that the liar was lying to save his family from a murderer, they decide that his lying was morally justified. People are quick to say that killing is wrong, but almost without fail make exceptions for accidental killing or self-defense. The common man will decry stealing, but hails as hero the courageous soldier who captures a supply depot. And so and so on. The common arch here is that one cannot accurately discern the moral status of an act without knowing the intent of the actor.
This does not, as far as I can tell, imply that there is not a fact of the matter as to whether any specific act is evil or good; instead, it suggests that that fact is in large part determined by intent (but I would stress that proper moral action requires not just 'good intention' but also: the responsibility to be prudent in moral judgments, especially those bearing on the application of force; the necessity that one be entirely willing to accept what reason and conscience dictate; etc...).
While all of this might seem like it is dreadfully off topic, it is crucial to understanding my argument that the act of torture per se is amoral (provided one does not define "torture" in a manner similar to "sadistically inflicting great pain upon another").
As always, best wishes.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | November 2, 2007 12:48 AM
And just to head off the claim that the essential commonality among my examples is instead that the actors are engaged in battle, consider instead for a moment the hypothetical example of a man who fires a gun at a target while at the gun range. Just as he fires, a child steps out in front of the gun, is struck by the bullet and dies. Is the shooter guilty of an evil act? Of course not, and it is only knowledge of his intent (shooting a target at a gun range) that leads to understanding the moral status of his act. This scenario doesn't need to be likely for it to support my claim; instead, it need only be logically possible that the scenario could occur.
Posted by Jared Nuzzolillo | November 2, 2007 1:04 AM
Quick quiz: when was the last war in which Americans were treated per the Geneva Convention.
The answer? HALF of World War TWO.
The USA's treatment of enemy prisoners has not affected enemy treatment of Americans one jot, and it is hard to imagine that Mr. Nance, as a claimed expert in this field, is not aware of these facts. Yet he chooses to make an emotional argument that, if one accepts him as an expert, can only be called a deliberate lie since one finds it very difficult to ascribe to ignorance.
That's a problem with the article, which becomes a serious problem because it calls Mr. Nance's entire credibility into question. If he'll... I'll be kind... If he'll tell me something blatantly untrue on this subject, I must conclude either that his expertise may not be up to the level he presents it as, or that he is willing to lie to me about other things as well. Neither is reassuring.
Nuzzolillo advances what is, I think, a sensible and civil counter-argument and set of questions. If we are prepared to grant to a government certain levels of coercion to protect the innocent, why not others?
In answer, I respond by recommending Hayek's "Road to Serfdom," especially the parts that talk about the kind of people one must then recruit for certain jobs, and the effect this has when played out over institutional time.
I guess I fall into the category of people who will grant the argument that torture may be effective, and see circumstances under which one might legitimately consider the question of authorizing it... but have a level of concern about it over the long term, because the effects of authorizing it are different than the effects of authorizing guns and/or incarceration.
I'm also honest enough to realize that this will have consequences - one of which is that the response to a doctrine of total warfare (terrorism) is more likely to be one of total warfare, as the technology curve continues to fall. If that means we end up firebombing enemy cities, I'm Ok with that, because we can do that and not affect the powers considered proper for a government. Or the people we become. We've proven that to my satisfaction.
I don't kind myself that I can have my cake and eat it too on this one. I hope Mr. Nance doesn't, either._---
AX - you realize that your language mirrors quite closely the sort of language used by real torturers in civil wars and totalitarian governments, which begins by dehumanizing their fellow citizens. I mean, you get that, right?
Being a brownshirt wannabe who belongs to the leftist movement, Democratic Party, Republican Party, or what have you... still makes you a brownshirt at the end of the day.
Think about it.
Posted by Joe Katzman | November 6, 2007 2:47 AM
just listened to the RadioTimes interview with Mr. Nance. I just have one simple question. Forgive me if this has already been addressed._Mr. Nance, have you ever considered how you would respond if members of your own family were kidnapped and held by terrorists? If the only way to obtain their location was by water boarding, what would you do? Would the discomfort and duress of your detainees supercede the lives of your own family members in that case?
Posted by Mr. Evans | November 6, 2007 11:37 AM
And to all of the posters who are so concerned about the welfare and discomfort of detainees, I have another question. These very same men come from the ranks of those who would slash your throat and then rape your children while you lie on the floor bleeding to death. Forgive the graphic description, but I think we tend to forget who we are dealing with here.
The goal of these people is to destroy us and our way of life, by ANY means neccessary. Go to http://thereligionofpeace.com/ and you'll see exactly what I mean. Yes, we have our reputation to consider, as well as our moral integrity, but let's bring this down to more personal terms. If a murderer attacks your family with a machete, do you quibble with yourself about what would be the better method of defense? Do you worry what the neighbors might think if you should cause harm to come to the murderer, or do you put all that aside and do whatever must be done to protect your family? Or would you rather feel satisfied with your moral superiority as you step aside and allow your family to be hacked to pieces?
I realize that I may be over-simplifying, but I do so for the sake of framing the debate in more personal terms that we may all be able to relate to.
Posted by Mr. Evans | November 6, 2007 12:01 PM
Finally, also from a practical point of view, I would ask that people examine the case of Ahmed Ressam, the captured millenium bombing plotter:
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2005/08/terrorizing-judges.html
A sample:
"Ahmed Ressam became a terrorist turncoat.
On May 10, 2001, FBI Agent Fred Humphries questioned Ressam, the first of dozens of interviews. The information was invaluable — and terrifying. He explained how he was recruited in Montreal and funneled into the bin Laden camps. He talked in detail about training with Taliban-supplied weapons. He informed on Abu Zubaydah, Abu Doha and other top al-Qaida operatives. He provided the names of jihad fighters he had met in the camps. He revealed that he had contemplated blowing up an FBI office and the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C....
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Ressam's solitude has been broken by a stream of visitors, often FBI agents such as Fred Humphries, but also investigators from Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
With federal public defender Jo Ann Oliver at his side, he is told names and shown photographs of suspected terrorists and asked if he knows them.
On several occasions, Ressam has been flown to New York City for similar questioning. There, he is held in a detention center just blocks from Ground Zero.
Ressam did not recognize any of the 19 suicide hijackers from Sept. 11. But he was able to identify student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui of Minneapolis, now in U.S. custody, as a trainee from Osama bin Laden's Khalden camp.
Ressam informed on Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian who was the brains and money behind Ressam's Los Angeles airport plot. He identified Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran the Khalden camp, and Abu Sulieman, who taught bomb-making at the Darunta camp.
Most importantly, Ressam named the previously little-known Abu Zubaydah as a top aide to bin Laden. That helped smash the notion that Zubaydah, also now in U.S. custody, was little more than a travel agent for terrorist wannabes making their way to the al-Qaida camps.
Ressam is expected to testify at the trials of these and other suspected terrorists.
So it is that Ahmed Ressam — the boy who loved to fish in the Mediterranean, the teenager who loved to dance at discothèques, the young man who tried and failed to get into college, who connected with fanatical Muslims in Montreal, who learned to kill in bin Laden's camps, who plotted to massacre American citizens — has become one of the U.S. government's most valuable weapons in the war against terror...
Ressam's information was given to anti-terrorism field agents around the world _ in one case, helping to prevent the mishandling and potential detonation of the shoe bomb that Richard Reid attempted to blow up aboard an American Airlines flight in 2001"
Posted by Maimonedes | November 6, 2007 1:03 PM
Point "A" about 'the right thing to do' is irrelevant to the article's claims I am discussing. Nance made a specific argument re: enemy treatment of Americans that bears on his credibility. That is the question I am dealing with.
"Our complaints had some credibility with the world because we tried to treat our prisoners properly. If our public policy had been "we torture when we feel like it" there would have been no credibility."
As illustrated by the lack of credibility that al-Qaeda's treatment of prisoners earned them, because they torture when they feel like it, which is why issues of claimed torture generated no pressure on their behalf when they complained.... oh, wait.
Interestingly, one can point to other instances of prisoner treatment improving toward the end of a war. Read McNab's "Bravo Two Zero" for another, and note that Vietnam was fought in a Cold War world where the only significant foreign influences on Vietnam were Soviet and Chinese. Both of whom are known to care so very much about (a) the ethics of torture; and (b) American complaints.
I'm afraid your contention has no credibility, either. If you had reordered your response so that "A" was 'B', you would have sounded much less tendentious - since the point about doing the right thing would look less like a blatant diversion from a factual discussion, and more like a fall back that remains true even if Mr. Nance has in fact injured his own credibility.
Prisoner treatment tends to improve toward the end of a war (resources permitting) because it bears directly on one's ability to end hostilities, and helps ensure that the war does not start again immediately afterward. There are many examples of this phenomenon. I presume Mr. Nance is familiar with them since he was devising key training courses on the subject, and such awareness would be part of basic professionalism since it's an important 'edge' for US troops to spot.
Note that death cults may be exempt from this rule, however, vid. Japanese plans to kill all Allied prisoners if Japan was invaded.
Posted by Joe Katzman | November 6, 2007 1:05 PM
But what do we do when we encounter an enemy that clearly does not value human life, and that continues to attempt to inflict death and suffering on a massive scale. How do you deal humanely with men who will intentionally target schools and hospitals, and who operate under the assumption that their enemies do not deserve to live simply by virtue of the fact that we do not believe as they believe? How do you deal in good faith with an enemy who refuses to even acknowledge your own humanity? How do you reason with men who allow twelve-year-old boys to decapitate a human being and broadcast it on the web? Yes, you can attempt to engage them on an intellectual level, but you'd better have a back-up plan in case the olive branch gets slapped out of your hand.
Also, for all of the concern and anxiety about the comfort and welfare of these men, I rarely ever hear an acknowledgment that they are indeed evil, savage human beings who commit the worst kinds of attrocities. Should we waterboard them for that reason alone? Of course not. But we are fighting against men who use brutal tactics. We cannot simply assume that being nice to them and asking for their assistance will persuade them to offer up vital information. If you bring a knife to a gunfight, it's pretty clear who the winner will be. Again, I ask you to go to http://thereligionofpeace.com/
It is very easy for us all to sit back and armchair quarterback, from either side, while we remain safe in our homes. How many of us will ever have to make a true life or death decision in our lives? Those of you who, with such moral certitude, state that the American government is unnecessarily "torturing" people, you are the very same people who accuse our government of not connecting the dots before 9/11, and not doing more to prevent it. And what if they had connected the dots? What if they had someone in custody who had information about the wheres, whens, and hows of the event. Would you then have approved of waterboarding to prevent what happened on September 11, 2001? I'm not even talking about some horrific torture method, such as some of you have detailed. I'm talking about waterboarding!
Posted by Mr. Evans | November 6, 2007 5:18 PM
CWO, I'm glad to hear that you don't have to worry about being harmed by such men way up in the Great White North. Fortunately, you will never have to face having your ideals truly put to the test in that way. Unfortunately, there are those in other parts of the world for whom such atrocities are very real. Go to http://thereligionofpeace.com, and you'll see what I mean. There is nothing "straw" about the men that carry out those acts.
My point is, it is good to have ideals, and to stick to them. Unfortunately, you have to at least be willing to meet aggression with some kind of physical force, or you're going to get your bell rung. Also, while it is good to be liked, it is sometimess more beneficial to be respected. When you are dealing with hostile enemies, "respect" is simply another term for "fear." I wish like hell that we could sit down with the leaders of Al Qaeda or Hamas and have a real working dialogue with them. In a perfect world, we would be able to. But these groups have made it clear, in no uncertain terms that they want only our death! If YOU think you can go over there and have a nice chat with them, then be my guest.
Posted by Mr. Evans | November 6, 2007 9:34 PM
But sir, since you have indeed seen active duty, and, I assume, have taken part in the killing of other human beings, why the strong stand against a procedure that does not kill? Don't get me wrong, I understand that killing is an inevitable, albeit regrettable outcome of warfare. I also assume that you understood when you enlisted that you would be required to possibly kill those who were deemed to be hostile enemies by our military. Do you still believe in the objectives of our armed services as it applies to the issue of killing, or have you disavowed any beliefs in such military objectives? I'm not trying to get cute, I really am curious. Why is killing ok, but not waterboarding? I fully understand that witnessing death and destruction would make one second guess an institution whose primary objective is the facilitation of those very things. But why now the concern for the welfare of enemy combatants, especailly when you know, better than most of us posting, what they are capable of? This is not the same kind of enemy that we have faced in previous wars. They do not follow the Geneva Convention. They have no compunctions whatsoever about killing innocent women and children. Many in this debate are making it sound like we're picking up random farmers and tailors and just dunking them in water tanks for kicks. If THAT was the case, then I'd be right there with you in complete and total opposition.
As a final note, I must disagree with the posters that state that this is a black-and-white issue. I'm afraid that this has become all about semantics. Yes, torture is wrong, but interrogation is necessary. From where we sit, it may seem black-and-white. However, the closer you get to the center of the storm, the more gray things become.
Posted by Mr. Evans | November 7, 2007 11:50 AM
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Powder puff warfare
One of my ulterior motives for posting on this subject is a disturbing trend I see in some fringes of the religious right. At one level, I don’t care what liberals think. Since I’m not a liberal, I don’t have a vested interest in the fortunes of liberal ideology. Mind you, I care what happens when liberals come into positions of power.
By contrast, I do take a personal interest in the religious right since I myself belong to that end of the ideological and theological spectrum. That’s my own backyard, or even my own frontyard.
There’s a contagious outbreak of tinfoil punditry and Bush Derangement Syndrome that’s infecting certain conservative circles. Some right-wingers are using arguments interchangeable with George Soros, Ramsey Clark, Noam Chomsky, Rosie O’Donnell, and Gore Vidal.
I don’t think it’s funny when this sort of paranoid, self-loathing anti-Americanism begins to infiltrate and take over certain sectors of the religions right—turning them into pod people. It’s poisoning the minds of the younger generation. And it needs to be challenged.
I’m also taking aim at the notion that it’s okay for professing Christians to slander our men in uniform—many of whom are, themselves, professing Christians—by tarring them with indiscriminate charges of rape, murder, &c.
In a moment I’m going to respond to something Shamgar said, but this pathology extends higher up the food chain as well. To take one example, last time I looked at Mike Butler’s blog, I seem to recall him saying that 9/11 was an inside job—along with Pearl Harbor. This is a guy who used to be Greg Bahnsen’s right-hand man.
Before I delve into the details, I want to put one issue front and center, because this is the issue which the opponents of counterterrorism constantly dodge.
A terrorist doesn’t have a right to withhold information from us. To the contrary, he has a moral obligation to divulge whatever he knows about his comrades, cell groups, future plots, and so on.
That being the case, we have a right to find out what he knows. Yet he’s not going to volunteer that information. So what’s the next step?
As Bill Vallicella puts it:
“My case was one in which you have a known terrorist in custody; he is guilty of past terrorist acts; he is known to have the inside dope re: a plot that will take out the whole of Manhattan. Now do you allow a million innocents to perish in gruesome deaths because of the precious dignity of this fellow that you dare not violate? Or is this a case where you simply must look to the consequences in order to determine the rightness/wrongness of the act?”
At this point, the opponents of counterterrorism offer us a recipe for moral paralysis.
SHAMGAR SAID:
“Steve, I really don't know why I bother to continue to try.”
It’s not as if you’re doing me a personal favor.
“You are quite clearly not interested in having any sort of rational discourse on such issues.”
This is what Shamgar said in his previous reply:
“Wow, that's great reasoning. I didn't realize we could so easily justify our actions in any case. Lets keep going. The enemy beheads our contractors and soldiers on video tape and broadcasts it on the news. I guess that makes it ok for us too. They murdered civilians, I guess that makes it ok for us too. If they were to land troops here and rape our women and children that would make it ok for us to do too.”
That’s his idea of “rational discourse.”
“My point in terms of torturing her was not about certainty - it was about the same thing the rest of my post was about. Drawing lines. I asked you a very simple question. Given that your position as stated provides for a wide range of things that at least some of us would find to be clearly wrong, where is your line where you can no longer justify your actions in this manner? Further, I want to know where it is. I ask because I don't believe you have one and that's part of your problem.”
Several issues:
i) Like all the opponents of counterterrorism, Shamgar wants to frame the issue in terms of “torture.” He then demands that I tell him where I’d drawn the line.
But, of course, he’s rigged the debate. Since I reject his framework, I’m under no obligation to draw lines within a framework I reject.
ii) Moreover, this goes to the issue of borderline cases in ethics. That's an ethical challenge we’re confronted with on a regular basis.
However, it would be quite unethical to say you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong unless you can resolve every conceivable borderline case in ethical valuation or ethical decision-making.
Consider speed limits and stoplights. Is it a good idea to have speed limits? Presumably we don’t want drivers hurtling through a residential area at 100 mph.
But how fast is too fast? Exactly—and I do mean “exactly”—where do you draw the line? 25 mph? 30 mph? 23.7 mph?
Are we going to say that unless you can tell me precisely how fast is too fast, there’s no moral justification in having a speed limit in a residential area?
Same thing with stoplights. Is it a good idea to have stoplights? Presumably we don’t want every car crossing a busy intersection at the very same time.
But exactly how long should the stoplight be? 20 seconds? 30 seconds? 22.003 seconds?
Nothing could be more morally irresponsible than to say that unless you can draw bright lines in every conceivable case, you should do nothing at all.
iii) However, I’m all for drawing lines. I draw the line with softheaded opponents like Shamgar who confuse emoting with moral deliberation.
iv) Finally, let’s draw some distinctions. Historically, there have been a variety of reasons for the imposition of physical or psychological duress:
a) Interrogation
b) Punishment
c) Deterrence
d) Sadism
Only (a) is relevant to counterterrorism, and (a) can be further subdivided:
a-i) Obtaining information
a-ii) Obtaining a confession
Only (a-i) is relevant to counterterrorism.
Keep these distinctions in mind as we proceed.
“First you denied there was any real torture.”
When and where have I ever denied that? This is such a vague allegation that there’s nothing to respond to. There’s been no demonstrable shift in my position.
I haven’t bothered to investigate every allegation of torture. That isn’t my job.
“I denied this was my definition of torture and tried to get you to operate under the functional definition of real torture which you flatly refused to do - preferring to dismiss me as a bleeding-heart liberal.”
Actually, I have defined torture in the past, but I refuse to let you dictate the terms of the debate. Just because you want to cast the issue in those terms doesn’t mean that I have to go along with you.
“Then, real torture became the issue. Cigarette burns, electric shock, and waterboarding. You grabbed on waterboarding and made it out to be not such a big deal, despite all evidence to the contrary.”
I made it out “not to be such a big deal” for the reasons I cited. I cited reasons that opponents of waterboarding gave. And I subjected those reasons to a bit of elementary scrutiny.
Here’s another example. In the 11/10/07 issue of World Magazine, these are the objections to waterboarding:
“The scars of torture are in the mind…It’s the destruction of the human spirit that makes torture so pernicious…waterboarding is especially traumatic…[it has] detrimental effects to the human psyche…[including] lifelong anguish” (25).
So, if we were to capture bin Laden, we shouldn’t waterboard him to find out what he knows about various operatives and associates and sleeper cells and future plots because that would be too “traumatic.” It would have a “detrimental effect” on bin Laden’s “psyche.” It would be “dispiriting.” It would inflict “lifelong anguish.”
“Now you have come up with this philosophical argument to justify our behavior based on the behavior of our enemies.”
This is a mendacious and malicious oversimplification of what I actually wrote. But let’s take one of his scurrilous examples:
“The enemy beheads our contractors and soldiers on video tape and broadcasts it on the news. I guess that makes it ok for us too.”
I oppose beheading a jihadist informant. For one thing, it isn’t very practical. Decapitated informants aren’t especially informative. So I don’t think that beheading an informant is a terribly effective way of extracting information from him.
“Do you know that for sure? Can we be certain w/out torturing her to make sure she won't give up some information?”
Counterintelligence has never been predicated on being “sure.” One simply makes reasonable judgment call. If it’s a choice between interrogating bin Laden or Fanny Crosby, which one do you choose? Is it really that difficult? Do we need to draw some abstract line in the sand to make that determination?
“I would obviously disagree as to the characterization of "useful". The problem with this sort of logic is the same one as the logic you used before. It quickly turns into a license to do anything.”
This is a classic slippery slope argument. One problem with a slippery slope argument is that it’s possible to slide down more than one slope. If, like Shamgar, you try to turn counterterrorism into a game of powder puff football, the end-result is not to restrain evil or humanize the conflict.
To the contrary, when CIA agents and field commanders are subjected to the Pollyannaish scruples of perennial bed-wetters like Shamgar, their natural reaction, if they were to take it seriously, is to conclude that since it’s impossible to get the job done under all these restrictions, the only alternative is to chuck moral misgivings and do whatever it takes to beat the enemy.
“Even if we just keep it to a discussion of the killing of innocents - once you state that it is ok, and justified it becomes exactly that and there ceases to be any real effort made to avoid it and the situation escalates. This is exactly the problem with allowing things like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be justified. Perhaps they were necessary, perhaps they saved millions - but they should still be held up as a horrible evil. When you hold up the killing of ‘innocents’ in war-time as wrong, then you force people prosecuting the war to evaluate options in that light and look for ways around it. If there is truly no other way, and they proceed anyway, the repercussions will likely take that into account - but the action itself must continue to be held as evil. If it is instead then spoken of as good, it only encourages others to perpetrate the same - and greater - acts of evil and with far less justification.”
Notice the utter moral confusion in Shamgar’s analysis. It’s wrong, yet it’s necessary. But if it’s truly wrong, then, by definition, there can be no moral justification for it. Folks like Shamgar are very emotional and reactionary and moralistic, but they haven’t begun to think through a morally consistent position.
“In War, sometimes people who shouldn't are going to die. That is a harsh reality. That doesn't mean it should become acceptable to us. Second, he seems to predicate the whole argument on it being a just war in the first place, something that does not apply to our current involvement in Iraq.”
Actually, there’s no reason that we should be bound by just-war theory. Aquinas and Suarez aren’t Holy Writ.
And, frankly, theologians don’t have the right to simply dictate the moral parameters of war. What does the average theologian know about military strategy and tactics? Or counterintelligence? What does he know about the real-life circumstances and contingencies that soldiers have to confront on the battlefield?
This is not to say that theologians should have no input on the issue. But this ought to be a collaborative effort. Theologians need to consult soldiers, CIA agents, and the like to even begin to come up with a well-informed evaluation of what should constitute the rules of war, counterterrorism, &c.
“Third, I'll note we are the aggressor in Iraq. We have been bombing them for nearly a decade. But, of course, the kind of logic we use to justify our own actions never gets to be used by the enemy. It's only right when we do it.”
Who’s the “we.” The bombing involved the enforcement of UN sanctions, not US sanctions.
Finally, Shamgar referred me to an article:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
I’ll quote the relevant portions and offer my assessment:
“In fact, waterboarding is just the type of torture then Lt. Commander John McCain had to endure at the hands of the North Vietnamese.”
This objection disregards the distinction I drew regarding different reasons for the imposition of physical or psychological distress. These are not morally insignificant distinctions.
“These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo.”
Keep in mind that this objection isn’t limited to the Iraq war. Anyway, this is the version of events you get from knee-jerk opponents of the war effort in general. I’d simply note that these allegations were formally investigated. The Schlesinger Report presents a very different picture:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30013-2004Aug24.html
And here’s what a professional interrogator had to say:
http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/1119720579.shtml
“The Washington Post reported in 2006 that it was mainly America’s enemies that used it as a principal interrogation method. After World War 2, Japanese waterboard team members were tried for war crimes. In Vietnam, service members were placed under investigation when a photo of a field-expedient waterboarding became publicly known.”
Once again, this disregards the purpose of waterboarding, which varies. One might as well say that we should ban firearms because criminals use guns to commit crime—therefore, no law-abiding citizens has the right to own a gun to protect himself or defend his family.
“Torture in captivity simulation training reveals there are ways an enemy can inflict punishment which will render the subject wholly helpless and which will generally overcome his willpower. The torturer will trigger within the subject a survival instinct, in this case the ability to breathe, which makes the victim instantly pliable and ready to comply. It is purely and simply a tool by which to deprive a human being of his ability to resist through physical humiliation.”
Of course, this keeps using the prejudicial word “torture.” But if we had bin Laden in custody, I hope that our interrogators would be able to break his will and overcome his resistance.
“The very concept of an American Torturer is an anathema to our values.”
i) This begs the question of whether pressuring information out of a terrorist is anathema to our values. Why should that be the case?
ii) And it uses the prejudicial word “torture” to skew the answer.
“I concur strongly with the opinions of professional interrogators like Colonel Stewart Herrington, and victims of torture like Senator John McCain. If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable and compassionate.”
i) If kinder and gentler methods work, fine. However, I don’t assume that if we gave bin Laden enough candy bars and access to the Playboy channel, he would automatically sell out the cause and turn state’s evidence against his cohorts.
ii) Incidentally, McCain’s judgment is clouded by his personal experience.
“Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but "not all of it reliable." Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.”
I already addressed this simplistic objection in answer to Julie.
“According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.”
Aside from the fact that this disregards elementary distinctions, it’s willfully naïve since the bad guys never did abide by the Geneva conventions.
“A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?”
Once more, there’s no attempt to draw elementary moral distinctions.
“What next if the waterboarding on a critical the captive doesn’t work and you have a timetable to stop the “ticking bomb” scenario? Electric shock to the genitals? Taking a pregnant woman and electrocuting the fetus inside her? Executing a captive’s children in front of him? Dropping live people from an airplane over the ocean? It has all been done by governments seeking information. All claimed the same need to stop the ticking bomb. It is not a far leap from torture to murder, especially if the subject is defiant. Are we willing to trade our nation’s soul for tactical intelligence?”
A morally blind and intellectually obtuse, all-or-nothing argument.
“Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it.”
Our enemies already do far worse than that, and for no good reason. Look at what happens when one of our soldiers is captured in Iraq?
“To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of by Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.”
This is scurrilous slander that discredits itself by its own shameless hyperbole.
“I have stated publicly and repeatedly that I would personally cut Bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic MRE spoon if we per chance meet on the battlefield. Yet, once captive I believe that the better angels of our nature and our nation’s core values would eventually convince any terrorist that they indeed have erred in their murderous ways.”
Yes, if we play him some records of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” any hardened jihadist will become a flag-waving patriot.
“Once convicted in a fair, public tribunal, they would have the rest of their lives, however short the law makes it, to come to terms with their God and their acts.”
This misses the point. We aren’t trying to extract a confession out of them and convict them of a crime. Rather, we’re trying to obtain actionable intel to prevent another terrorist attack.
“This is not enough for our President. He apparently secretly ordered the core American values of fairness and justice to be thrown away in the name of security from terrorists.”
If it’s a secret, how come you’re in on the secret?
“Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured.”
That’s a good reason for keeping the detainees detained, is it not?
By contrast, I do take a personal interest in the religious right since I myself belong to that end of the ideological and theological spectrum. That’s my own backyard, or even my own frontyard.
There’s a contagious outbreak of tinfoil punditry and Bush Derangement Syndrome that’s infecting certain conservative circles. Some right-wingers are using arguments interchangeable with George Soros, Ramsey Clark, Noam Chomsky, Rosie O’Donnell, and Gore Vidal.
I don’t think it’s funny when this sort of paranoid, self-loathing anti-Americanism begins to infiltrate and take over certain sectors of the religions right—turning them into pod people. It’s poisoning the minds of the younger generation. And it needs to be challenged.
I’m also taking aim at the notion that it’s okay for professing Christians to slander our men in uniform—many of whom are, themselves, professing Christians—by tarring them with indiscriminate charges of rape, murder, &c.
In a moment I’m going to respond to something Shamgar said, but this pathology extends higher up the food chain as well. To take one example, last time I looked at Mike Butler’s blog, I seem to recall him saying that 9/11 was an inside job—along with Pearl Harbor. This is a guy who used to be Greg Bahnsen’s right-hand man.
Before I delve into the details, I want to put one issue front and center, because this is the issue which the opponents of counterterrorism constantly dodge.
A terrorist doesn’t have a right to withhold information from us. To the contrary, he has a moral obligation to divulge whatever he knows about his comrades, cell groups, future plots, and so on.
That being the case, we have a right to find out what he knows. Yet he’s not going to volunteer that information. So what’s the next step?
As Bill Vallicella puts it:
“My case was one in which you have a known terrorist in custody; he is guilty of past terrorist acts; he is known to have the inside dope re: a plot that will take out the whole of Manhattan. Now do you allow a million innocents to perish in gruesome deaths because of the precious dignity of this fellow that you dare not violate? Or is this a case where you simply must look to the consequences in order to determine the rightness/wrongness of the act?”
At this point, the opponents of counterterrorism offer us a recipe for moral paralysis.
SHAMGAR SAID:
“Steve, I really don't know why I bother to continue to try.”
It’s not as if you’re doing me a personal favor.
“You are quite clearly not interested in having any sort of rational discourse on such issues.”
This is what Shamgar said in his previous reply:
“Wow, that's great reasoning. I didn't realize we could so easily justify our actions in any case. Lets keep going. The enemy beheads our contractors and soldiers on video tape and broadcasts it on the news. I guess that makes it ok for us too. They murdered civilians, I guess that makes it ok for us too. If they were to land troops here and rape our women and children that would make it ok for us to do too.”
That’s his idea of “rational discourse.”
“My point in terms of torturing her was not about certainty - it was about the same thing the rest of my post was about. Drawing lines. I asked you a very simple question. Given that your position as stated provides for a wide range of things that at least some of us would find to be clearly wrong, where is your line where you can no longer justify your actions in this manner? Further, I want to know where it is. I ask because I don't believe you have one and that's part of your problem.”
Several issues:
i) Like all the opponents of counterterrorism, Shamgar wants to frame the issue in terms of “torture.” He then demands that I tell him where I’d drawn the line.
But, of course, he’s rigged the debate. Since I reject his framework, I’m under no obligation to draw lines within a framework I reject.
ii) Moreover, this goes to the issue of borderline cases in ethics. That's an ethical challenge we’re confronted with on a regular basis.
However, it would be quite unethical to say you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong unless you can resolve every conceivable borderline case in ethical valuation or ethical decision-making.
Consider speed limits and stoplights. Is it a good idea to have speed limits? Presumably we don’t want drivers hurtling through a residential area at 100 mph.
But how fast is too fast? Exactly—and I do mean “exactly”—where do you draw the line? 25 mph? 30 mph? 23.7 mph?
Are we going to say that unless you can tell me precisely how fast is too fast, there’s no moral justification in having a speed limit in a residential area?
Same thing with stoplights. Is it a good idea to have stoplights? Presumably we don’t want every car crossing a busy intersection at the very same time.
But exactly how long should the stoplight be? 20 seconds? 30 seconds? 22.003 seconds?
Nothing could be more morally irresponsible than to say that unless you can draw bright lines in every conceivable case, you should do nothing at all.
iii) However, I’m all for drawing lines. I draw the line with softheaded opponents like Shamgar who confuse emoting with moral deliberation.
iv) Finally, let’s draw some distinctions. Historically, there have been a variety of reasons for the imposition of physical or psychological duress:
a) Interrogation
b) Punishment
c) Deterrence
d) Sadism
Only (a) is relevant to counterterrorism, and (a) can be further subdivided:
a-i) Obtaining information
a-ii) Obtaining a confession
Only (a-i) is relevant to counterterrorism.
Keep these distinctions in mind as we proceed.
“First you denied there was any real torture.”
When and where have I ever denied that? This is such a vague allegation that there’s nothing to respond to. There’s been no demonstrable shift in my position.
I haven’t bothered to investigate every allegation of torture. That isn’t my job.
“I denied this was my definition of torture and tried to get you to operate under the functional definition of real torture which you flatly refused to do - preferring to dismiss me as a bleeding-heart liberal.”
Actually, I have defined torture in the past, but I refuse to let you dictate the terms of the debate. Just because you want to cast the issue in those terms doesn’t mean that I have to go along with you.
“Then, real torture became the issue. Cigarette burns, electric shock, and waterboarding. You grabbed on waterboarding and made it out to be not such a big deal, despite all evidence to the contrary.”
I made it out “not to be such a big deal” for the reasons I cited. I cited reasons that opponents of waterboarding gave. And I subjected those reasons to a bit of elementary scrutiny.
Here’s another example. In the 11/10/07 issue of World Magazine, these are the objections to waterboarding:
“The scars of torture are in the mind…It’s the destruction of the human spirit that makes torture so pernicious…waterboarding is especially traumatic…[it has] detrimental effects to the human psyche…[including] lifelong anguish” (25).
So, if we were to capture bin Laden, we shouldn’t waterboard him to find out what he knows about various operatives and associates and sleeper cells and future plots because that would be too “traumatic.” It would have a “detrimental effect” on bin Laden’s “psyche.” It would be “dispiriting.” It would inflict “lifelong anguish.”
“Now you have come up with this philosophical argument to justify our behavior based on the behavior of our enemies.”
This is a mendacious and malicious oversimplification of what I actually wrote. But let’s take one of his scurrilous examples:
“The enemy beheads our contractors and soldiers on video tape and broadcasts it on the news. I guess that makes it ok for us too.”
I oppose beheading a jihadist informant. For one thing, it isn’t very practical. Decapitated informants aren’t especially informative. So I don’t think that beheading an informant is a terribly effective way of extracting information from him.
“Do you know that for sure? Can we be certain w/out torturing her to make sure she won't give up some information?”
Counterintelligence has never been predicated on being “sure.” One simply makes reasonable judgment call. If it’s a choice between interrogating bin Laden or Fanny Crosby, which one do you choose? Is it really that difficult? Do we need to draw some abstract line in the sand to make that determination?
“I would obviously disagree as to the characterization of "useful". The problem with this sort of logic is the same one as the logic you used before. It quickly turns into a license to do anything.”
This is a classic slippery slope argument. One problem with a slippery slope argument is that it’s possible to slide down more than one slope. If, like Shamgar, you try to turn counterterrorism into a game of powder puff football, the end-result is not to restrain evil or humanize the conflict.
To the contrary, when CIA agents and field commanders are subjected to the Pollyannaish scruples of perennial bed-wetters like Shamgar, their natural reaction, if they were to take it seriously, is to conclude that since it’s impossible to get the job done under all these restrictions, the only alternative is to chuck moral misgivings and do whatever it takes to beat the enemy.
“Even if we just keep it to a discussion of the killing of innocents - once you state that it is ok, and justified it becomes exactly that and there ceases to be any real effort made to avoid it and the situation escalates. This is exactly the problem with allowing things like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be justified. Perhaps they were necessary, perhaps they saved millions - but they should still be held up as a horrible evil. When you hold up the killing of ‘innocents’ in war-time as wrong, then you force people prosecuting the war to evaluate options in that light and look for ways around it. If there is truly no other way, and they proceed anyway, the repercussions will likely take that into account - but the action itself must continue to be held as evil. If it is instead then spoken of as good, it only encourages others to perpetrate the same - and greater - acts of evil and with far less justification.”
Notice the utter moral confusion in Shamgar’s analysis. It’s wrong, yet it’s necessary. But if it’s truly wrong, then, by definition, there can be no moral justification for it. Folks like Shamgar are very emotional and reactionary and moralistic, but they haven’t begun to think through a morally consistent position.
“In War, sometimes people who shouldn't are going to die. That is a harsh reality. That doesn't mean it should become acceptable to us. Second, he seems to predicate the whole argument on it being a just war in the first place, something that does not apply to our current involvement in Iraq.”
Actually, there’s no reason that we should be bound by just-war theory. Aquinas and Suarez aren’t Holy Writ.
And, frankly, theologians don’t have the right to simply dictate the moral parameters of war. What does the average theologian know about military strategy and tactics? Or counterintelligence? What does he know about the real-life circumstances and contingencies that soldiers have to confront on the battlefield?
This is not to say that theologians should have no input on the issue. But this ought to be a collaborative effort. Theologians need to consult soldiers, CIA agents, and the like to even begin to come up with a well-informed evaluation of what should constitute the rules of war, counterterrorism, &c.
“Third, I'll note we are the aggressor in Iraq. We have been bombing them for nearly a decade. But, of course, the kind of logic we use to justify our own actions never gets to be used by the enemy. It's only right when we do it.”
Who’s the “we.” The bombing involved the enforcement of UN sanctions, not US sanctions.
Finally, Shamgar referred me to an article:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/10/waterboarding-is-torture-perio/
I’ll quote the relevant portions and offer my assessment:
“In fact, waterboarding is just the type of torture then Lt. Commander John McCain had to endure at the hands of the North Vietnamese.”
This objection disregards the distinction I drew regarding different reasons for the imposition of physical or psychological distress. These are not morally insignificant distinctions.
“These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo.”
Keep in mind that this objection isn’t limited to the Iraq war. Anyway, this is the version of events you get from knee-jerk opponents of the war effort in general. I’d simply note that these allegations were formally investigated. The Schlesinger Report presents a very different picture:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30013-2004Aug24.html
And here’s what a professional interrogator had to say:
http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/1119720579.shtml
“The Washington Post reported in 2006 that it was mainly America’s enemies that used it as a principal interrogation method. After World War 2, Japanese waterboard team members were tried for war crimes. In Vietnam, service members were placed under investigation when a photo of a field-expedient waterboarding became publicly known.”
Once again, this disregards the purpose of waterboarding, which varies. One might as well say that we should ban firearms because criminals use guns to commit crime—therefore, no law-abiding citizens has the right to own a gun to protect himself or defend his family.
“Torture in captivity simulation training reveals there are ways an enemy can inflict punishment which will render the subject wholly helpless and which will generally overcome his willpower. The torturer will trigger within the subject a survival instinct, in this case the ability to breathe, which makes the victim instantly pliable and ready to comply. It is purely and simply a tool by which to deprive a human being of his ability to resist through physical humiliation.”
Of course, this keeps using the prejudicial word “torture.” But if we had bin Laden in custody, I hope that our interrogators would be able to break his will and overcome his resistance.
“The very concept of an American Torturer is an anathema to our values.”
i) This begs the question of whether pressuring information out of a terrorist is anathema to our values. Why should that be the case?
ii) And it uses the prejudicial word “torture” to skew the answer.
“I concur strongly with the opinions of professional interrogators like Colonel Stewart Herrington, and victims of torture like Senator John McCain. If you want consistent, accurate and reliable intelligence, be inquisitive, analytical, patient but most of all professional, amiable and compassionate.”
i) If kinder and gentler methods work, fine. However, I don’t assume that if we gave bin Laden enough candy bars and access to the Playboy channel, he would automatically sell out the cause and turn state’s evidence against his cohorts.
ii) Incidentally, McCain’s judgment is clouded by his personal experience.
“Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but "not all of it reliable." Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.”
I already addressed this simplistic objection in answer to Julie.
“According to the President, this is not a torture, so future torturers in other countries now have an American legal basis to perform the acts. Every hostile intelligence agency and terrorist in the world will consider it a viable tool, which can be used with impunity. It has been turned into perfectly acceptable behavior for information finding.”
Aside from the fact that this disregards elementary distinctions, it’s willfully naïve since the bad guys never did abide by the Geneva conventions.
“A torture victim can be made to say anything by an evil nation that does not abide by humanity, morality, treaties or rule of law. Today we are on the verge of becoming that nation. Is it possible that September 11 hurt us so much that we have decided to gladly adopt the tools of KGB, the Khmer Rouge, the Nazi Gestapo, the North Vietnamese, the North Koreans and the Burmese Junta?”
Once more, there’s no attempt to draw elementary moral distinctions.
“What next if the waterboarding on a critical the captive doesn’t work and you have a timetable to stop the “ticking bomb” scenario? Electric shock to the genitals? Taking a pregnant woman and electrocuting the fetus inside her? Executing a captive’s children in front of him? Dropping live people from an airplane over the ocean? It has all been done by governments seeking information. All claimed the same need to stop the ticking bomb. It is not a far leap from torture to murder, especially if the subject is defiant. Are we willing to trade our nation’s soul for tactical intelligence?”
A morally blind and intellectually obtuse, all-or-nothing argument.
“Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it.”
Our enemies already do far worse than that, and for no good reason. Look at what happens when one of our soldiers is captured in Iraq?
“To defeat Bin Laden many in this administration have openly embraced the methods of by Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Galtieri and Saddam Hussein.”
This is scurrilous slander that discredits itself by its own shameless hyperbole.
“I have stated publicly and repeatedly that I would personally cut Bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic MRE spoon if we per chance meet on the battlefield. Yet, once captive I believe that the better angels of our nature and our nation’s core values would eventually convince any terrorist that they indeed have erred in their murderous ways.”
Yes, if we play him some records of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” any hardened jihadist will become a flag-waving patriot.
“Once convicted in a fair, public tribunal, they would have the rest of their lives, however short the law makes it, to come to terms with their God and their acts.”
This misses the point. We aren’t trying to extract a confession out of them and convict them of a crime. Rather, we’re trying to obtain actionable intel to prevent another terrorist attack.
“This is not enough for our President. He apparently secretly ordered the core American values of fairness and justice to be thrown away in the name of security from terrorists.”
If it’s a secret, how come you’re in on the secret?
“Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured.”
That’s a good reason for keeping the detainees detained, is it not?
The Future of Justification
Piper's The Future of Justification is available at WTS Books for 33% off ($11.99).
The Flew caper
Is Flew being manipulated by Christians in the interests of spreading their message about the gospel? Is that possible? Would they do this?
Posted by John W. Loftus
at 11/06/2007
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/11/ny-times-writer-questions-former.html
Yes, I think that Loftus and other sceptics of the "official" story are clearly on to something. Like 9/11, this was obviously an inside job.
Roy Varghese and Gary Habermas probably had Flew involuntarily committed to a nursing home. They threatened to take away his bedpan unless he signed an X on the book contract.
And I suspect that Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is an unindicted coconspirator in this nefarious scheme as well.
Mind you, that's just one ominous possibility. It may really be more like that movie with Kathy Bates and James Caan—only in this case, Flew is the hapless hostage. Varghese and Habermas kidnapped the old geezer, cut the phone lines, and smack his kneecaps with a sledgehammer when he tries to escape.
Posted by John W. Loftus
at 11/06/2007
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/11/ny-times-writer-questions-former.html
Yes, I think that Loftus and other sceptics of the "official" story are clearly on to something. Like 9/11, this was obviously an inside job.
Roy Varghese and Gary Habermas probably had Flew involuntarily committed to a nursing home. They threatened to take away his bedpan unless he signed an X on the book contract.
And I suspect that Karl Rove or Dick Cheney is an unindicted coconspirator in this nefarious scheme as well.
Mind you, that's just one ominous possibility. It may really be more like that movie with Kathy Bates and James Caan—only in this case, Flew is the hapless hostage. Varghese and Habermas kidnapped the old geezer, cut the phone lines, and smack his kneecaps with a sledgehammer when he tries to escape.
Raymond Brown's Assessment Of The Infancy Narratives (Part 2)
As I mentioned in an earlier post, although Raymond Brown often came down on the liberal side of the spectrum in his analysis of the infancy narratives, he sometimes reached more conservative conclusions. His agreements with conservative scholarship seem to be discussed much less often than his arguments that are more consistent with the prevailing liberalism of our day. Below are some examples of his more conservative conclusions.
"Recent major works by M.D. Johnson (Purpose) and R.R. Wilson ('Genealogy') show that renewed investigation into OT genealogies have implications for the birth records of Jesus as well. Perhaps the most important single factor is the recognition that genealogies serve different purposes and that an individual can be accorded two or more different genealogies according to the purpose for which they were drawn up. Only rather rarely and to a limited depth do ancient Semitic genealogies afford us a list of strictly biological ancestry - a factor that does not necessarily make them inaccurate since the intention of those who preserved them was not strictly biological. Too often the genealogies of Jesus have been read with the same expectations with which one reads the list of grandparents and great-grandparents constituting the frontispiece of the family Bible....One can never disprove such hypotheses [harmonizing the genealogies in Matthew and Luke]; but there is absolutely nothing in the Gospel text to justify them. And what is gained if such diverse genealogies are reconciled when the other parts of the two infancy narratives are apparently quite irreconcilable?...Mussies ('Parallels') fills in a lacuna in Wettstein by offering classical parallels to almost every aspect of the Matthean genealogy (placing, omission of some names, counting the generations). Indeed, on pp. 43-44 he points out that famous figures like King Agamemnon and King Theseus could be attributed different ancestors by different authors, even as happened with Jesus." (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], pp. 64-65, 588-590)
"If the marital situation between Joseph and Mary [portrayed in Matthew's gospel] were not a fact and could have been created according to the dictates of Christian imagination, it is difficult to see why a situation less open to scandal was not contrived. For instance, instead of picturing Mary as already pregnant, the narrator could have imagined her as betrothed to Joseph but without child. Then he could have had the angel of the Lord appear and begin his message with 'Joseph, son of David, hasten to take Mary your wife into your home.' Everything else in 1:20-25 could follow, and there would be no hint of scandal....Matthew's world view and that of his opponents is not one in which deities have sexual relations with men or women and beget children. He is in confrontation with Pharisees and in his account of the ministry he is most careful not to give them anything they can use against Jesus (e.g., his omitting the spittle miracle narrated in Mark 8:22-26). If the situation described in Matthew is not a factual one but is the product of Christian romantic imagination, one must deem it a great religious blunder; for it gave rise to the charge of illegitimacy against Jesus that was the mainstay of anti-Christian polemic for many centuries." (pp. 142-143 and n. 28 on p. 143)
"One may hypothesize that independently Matthew and Luke hit upon the pattern of an annunciation, the idea of a virginal conception, etc.; but it is more plausible that these are earlier ideas that each has taken over and developed in his own way. I find totally implausible that they would independently chance upon the same peculiar marital situation as a setting for the annunciation." (n. 41 on p. 247)
"One has to account for the accurate knowledge shown in [Luke] 1:8-10 about priestly terms of service, the incense offering, and the cult. Even the detail that Zechariah did not live in Jerusalem (1:23), but in the hill country of Judea, betrays a knowledge of the priesthood in the first century...with remarkable accuracy" (pp. 266, 270)
"It is always risky methodologically to assume that a writer does not see the contradictions in his own narrative." (p. 307)
"Luke's description of the structure and ideals of the Jerusalem community comes remarkably close to what we know of Qumran structure and ideals, and so Luke was describing a way of life that was entirely plausible in early first-century Judaism." (n. 46 on p. 354)
"It is probably true that many Jews of Jesus' time expected the Messiah to be born at Bethlehem, but we must be aware that our chief evidence for this is Christian, not Jewish....Without reference to Micah 5:1, Bethlehem appears as the birthplace of the Messiah in passages like TalJer Berakoth 5a, and Midrash Rabbah 51 on Lam 1:16. As for Micah 5:1 (RSV 5:2), L. Ginzberg, Legends, V, 130, traces the messianic interpretation of the passage back to relatively old rabbinic traditions....I mentioned in the previous Appendix (footnote 6) the expectation of a hidden Messiah who would appear suddenly, without people knowing where he came from. (This expectation is described in John 7:27, in contrast to 7:42 which involves the expectation of the Messiah's birth at Bethlehem.) If Jesus had not been born at Bethlehem, why could Christians not have been content to present him as the hidden Messiah, who made his appearance at the Jordan to be baptized?" (p. 513, n. 2 on p. 513, p. 514)
"Even if Luke had little historical information about how the census of Quirinius had been conducted, he lived in the Roman Empire and may have undergone census enrollment himself. It is dangerous to assume that he described a process of registration that would have been patently opposed to everything that he and his readers knew." (p. 549)
"Leaving aside formal biographies, one can make a better case that even Jews would have known (sometimes derisively) popular stories about the gods, but would they have wanted to imitate them in describing the Son of the Lord God of Israel? Most lines in the infancy narratives have patent OT parallels; it is very difficult to show that the evangelists drew upon the proposed and far more distant Greco-Roman parallels. The two evangelists could have written their infancy narratives without ever having heard or read biographies and tales composed by pagan writers; the orientation of the Gospel narratives could have come from Hebrew or LXX forms of the biblical stories of the Patriarchs, Moses, and David (enlarged by subsequent oral lore), plus some Jesus tradition and theological reflection....[quoting another source] 'None of the proposed parallels [to the virginal conception], either pagan or Jewish, seemingly accounts for the story we find in the NT.'" (pp. 579-580, 707)
"Two mutually hostile traditions about Jesus' birth, Christian and Jewish, came to agree on that point [that Joseph wasn't Jesus' biological father]. The Christian claim that Joseph was not the father (Matt, Luke) can scarcely have arisen by reaction to Jewish calumny - that would have been answered by saying Joseph was the father - so that, unless one wants to say that Jewish polemic about Jesus' illegitimacy was based entirely on misunderstanding, it helps to show that Christians were claiming an unusual conception." (n. 318 on p. 703)
"On 528-31 above I argued that although the limited NT evidence is not conclusively probative, to posit historical fact as an explanation of Matt's and Luke's agreement on the v.c. [virginal conception] is more conformable to the evidence than to posit fictional creation." (p. 705)
"Recent major works by M.D. Johnson (Purpose) and R.R. Wilson ('Genealogy') show that renewed investigation into OT genealogies have implications for the birth records of Jesus as well. Perhaps the most important single factor is the recognition that genealogies serve different purposes and that an individual can be accorded two or more different genealogies according to the purpose for which they were drawn up. Only rather rarely and to a limited depth do ancient Semitic genealogies afford us a list of strictly biological ancestry - a factor that does not necessarily make them inaccurate since the intention of those who preserved them was not strictly biological. Too often the genealogies of Jesus have been read with the same expectations with which one reads the list of grandparents and great-grandparents constituting the frontispiece of the family Bible....One can never disprove such hypotheses [harmonizing the genealogies in Matthew and Luke]; but there is absolutely nothing in the Gospel text to justify them. And what is gained if such diverse genealogies are reconciled when the other parts of the two infancy narratives are apparently quite irreconcilable?...Mussies ('Parallels') fills in a lacuna in Wettstein by offering classical parallels to almost every aspect of the Matthean genealogy (placing, omission of some names, counting the generations). Indeed, on pp. 43-44 he points out that famous figures like King Agamemnon and King Theseus could be attributed different ancestors by different authors, even as happened with Jesus." (The Birth Of The Messiah [New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999], pp. 64-65, 588-590)
"If the marital situation between Joseph and Mary [portrayed in Matthew's gospel] were not a fact and could have been created according to the dictates of Christian imagination, it is difficult to see why a situation less open to scandal was not contrived. For instance, instead of picturing Mary as already pregnant, the narrator could have imagined her as betrothed to Joseph but without child. Then he could have had the angel of the Lord appear and begin his message with 'Joseph, son of David, hasten to take Mary your wife into your home.' Everything else in 1:20-25 could follow, and there would be no hint of scandal....Matthew's world view and that of his opponents is not one in which deities have sexual relations with men or women and beget children. He is in confrontation with Pharisees and in his account of the ministry he is most careful not to give them anything they can use against Jesus (e.g., his omitting the spittle miracle narrated in Mark 8:22-26). If the situation described in Matthew is not a factual one but is the product of Christian romantic imagination, one must deem it a great religious blunder; for it gave rise to the charge of illegitimacy against Jesus that was the mainstay of anti-Christian polemic for many centuries." (pp. 142-143 and n. 28 on p. 143)
"One may hypothesize that independently Matthew and Luke hit upon the pattern of an annunciation, the idea of a virginal conception, etc.; but it is more plausible that these are earlier ideas that each has taken over and developed in his own way. I find totally implausible that they would independently chance upon the same peculiar marital situation as a setting for the annunciation." (n. 41 on p. 247)
"One has to account for the accurate knowledge shown in [Luke] 1:8-10 about priestly terms of service, the incense offering, and the cult. Even the detail that Zechariah did not live in Jerusalem (1:23), but in the hill country of Judea, betrays a knowledge of the priesthood in the first century...with remarkable accuracy" (pp. 266, 270)
"It is always risky methodologically to assume that a writer does not see the contradictions in his own narrative." (p. 307)
"Luke's description of the structure and ideals of the Jerusalem community comes remarkably close to what we know of Qumran structure and ideals, and so Luke was describing a way of life that was entirely plausible in early first-century Judaism." (n. 46 on p. 354)
"It is probably true that many Jews of Jesus' time expected the Messiah to be born at Bethlehem, but we must be aware that our chief evidence for this is Christian, not Jewish....Without reference to Micah 5:1, Bethlehem appears as the birthplace of the Messiah in passages like TalJer Berakoth 5a, and Midrash Rabbah 51 on Lam 1:16. As for Micah 5:1 (RSV 5:2), L. Ginzberg, Legends, V, 130, traces the messianic interpretation of the passage back to relatively old rabbinic traditions....I mentioned in the previous Appendix (footnote 6) the expectation of a hidden Messiah who would appear suddenly, without people knowing where he came from. (This expectation is described in John 7:27, in contrast to 7:42 which involves the expectation of the Messiah's birth at Bethlehem.) If Jesus had not been born at Bethlehem, why could Christians not have been content to present him as the hidden Messiah, who made his appearance at the Jordan to be baptized?" (p. 513, n. 2 on p. 513, p. 514)
"Even if Luke had little historical information about how the census of Quirinius had been conducted, he lived in the Roman Empire and may have undergone census enrollment himself. It is dangerous to assume that he described a process of registration that would have been patently opposed to everything that he and his readers knew." (p. 549)
"Leaving aside formal biographies, one can make a better case that even Jews would have known (sometimes derisively) popular stories about the gods, but would they have wanted to imitate them in describing the Son of the Lord God of Israel? Most lines in the infancy narratives have patent OT parallels; it is very difficult to show that the evangelists drew upon the proposed and far more distant Greco-Roman parallels. The two evangelists could have written their infancy narratives without ever having heard or read biographies and tales composed by pagan writers; the orientation of the Gospel narratives could have come from Hebrew or LXX forms of the biblical stories of the Patriarchs, Moses, and David (enlarged by subsequent oral lore), plus some Jesus tradition and theological reflection....[quoting another source] 'None of the proposed parallels [to the virginal conception], either pagan or Jewish, seemingly accounts for the story we find in the NT.'" (pp. 579-580, 707)
"Two mutually hostile traditions about Jesus' birth, Christian and Jewish, came to agree on that point [that Joseph wasn't Jesus' biological father]. The Christian claim that Joseph was not the father (Matt, Luke) can scarcely have arisen by reaction to Jewish calumny - that would have been answered by saying Joseph was the father - so that, unless one wants to say that Jewish polemic about Jesus' illegitimacy was based entirely on misunderstanding, it helps to show that Christians were claiming an unusual conception." (n. 318 on p. 703)
"On 528-31 above I argued that although the limited NT evidence is not conclusively probative, to posit historical fact as an explanation of Matt's and Luke's agreement on the v.c. [virginal conception] is more conformable to the evidence than to posit fictional creation." (p. 705)
Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?
From Steve:
Vallicella has a sceptical streak that I don't share, but that caveat aside, he does a good job of analyzing and annihilating a stock argument for atheism (or agnosticism).
Vallicella has a sceptical streak that I don't share, but that caveat aside, he does a good job of analyzing and annihilating a stock argument for atheism (or agnosticism).
War and the Killing of Innocents
From Steve:
I don't agree with Vallicella's view of church/state relations, but that caveat aside, he has some useful points to make about the ethics of warfare.
I don't agree with Vallicella's view of church/state relations, but that caveat aside, he has some useful points to make about the ethics of warfare.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
"Feel the Love"
(Posted on behalf of Steve Hays.)
Here's David Brooks' mock presidential debate between the Democrat contenders.
Here's David Brooks' mock presidential debate between the Democrat contenders.
Death isn't good for us
A very old Jewish man called his wife to bed. "I am going to die. Please call a priest -- I wish to convert to Catholicism." His wife responded with shock and disbelief, reminding her husband that they had been devout Jews all their lives. "I know, dear," he said, "but isn't it better that one of them should die than one of us?" --Anonymous.
Raymond Brown's Assessment Of The Infancy Narratives (Part 1)
One of the most influential scholarly works on the infancy narratives in modern times is Raymond Brown's The Birth Of The Messiah (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999). It was originally published in 1977, and an expanded edition was released in 1993. Brown, who died in 1998, was somewhat liberal, but he wasn't an anti-supernaturalist, and he agreed with conservatives on some significant issues. His work on the infancy narratives is several hundred pages long, more than 700 in the 1993 edition, and it covers many of the relevant issues in a lot of depth. The book is highly useful even for those with a more conservative perspective, but it has a leftward leaning overall.
Critics of traditional Christianity often cite it. Some of you may remember that Newsweek's Jon Meacham based much of his largely negative 2004 article about the infancy narratives on Brown's book. Last Christmas season, John Loftus of Debunking Christianity wrote an article in which he repeated many of Brown's arguments.
I've already discussed some of the problems with Brown's work in this field (here, for example). Many other criticisms could be added.
As modern Biblical scholars often do, Brown underestimates the significance of external evidence. His dismissals of traditional Christian beliefs about the infancy narratives, such as Matthean authorship of the first gospel, are often shallow. He even suggests that the author of the first gospel may have been so ignorant of Jesus' background as to not know whether the "brothers" of Jesus were biological siblings (p. 132). That's a remarkable claim in light of factors such as the earliness of the first gospel and the prominence of Jesus' brothers in early church leadership. He makes many similar claims that assume an unlikely degree of apathy, forgetfulness, and other faults on the part of the early Christians and non-Christian sources.
Brown often neglects patristic evidence relevant to the issues he's considering, although there are many references to the significance of the patristic sources in his 1993 material (pp. 589, 616, 619, 634, 637, 704, 708). He seems to have increasingly accepted the significance of the patristic evidence with the passing of time. My impression is that he assigns more weight to it in his 1993 material than in the 1977 material, and he often does so when responding to critics who are to his left. Much of what he says about the patristic data in his comments in 1993 could be applied to his own conclusions elsewhere. For example:
"Feuillet cannot dismiss so easily as he does the fact that it took close to 1,500 years for an interpreter to have recognized specifically that Luke intended the suggested parentage....First, it is very weak exegetically to contend that an author expressed his central concern so incompetently that his contemporary audience would miss it. That should be resorted to only as a last possibility, for often it serves as a ploy for imposing on a text what it does not say. Second, since the mid-2nd century most readers of the Gospels have had Matt's infancy account, and it has not cast the light on Luke that Schaberg assumes." (pp. 589, 637)
I would recommend that people compare Brown's comments like those above to his assessment of the authorship of the gospels on p. 27 or the genre of the infancy narratives on pp. 199, 562, and 608, for example. Brown is correct in citing patristic evidence against some of his opponents, but that evidence is often highly problematic for his own theories. He cites an article by B. Buby in support of the notion that "in the broad range of patristic interpretations there are views quite harmonious with modern critical positions on the infancy narratives" (p. 634). He says (p. 634) that Buby's article "compares ideas in patristic nativity sermons" to ideas in his (Brown's) book. I haven't read Buby's article, but it's titled "Research on the Biblical Approach and the Method of Exegesis Appearing in the Greek Homiletic Texts of the Late Fourth and Early Fifth Centuries, Emphasizing the Incarnation Especially the Nativity and Mary's Place within It". Apparently, then, the article is about patristic sources from the late fourth and early fifth centuries. That's relatively late. And I'm wary of Brown's characterization of the article as showing patristic "ideas" that are "quite harmonious" with ones like his. I haven't read Buby's article, but I've read thousands of pages of patristic material. None of the earliest fathers saw the infancy narratives in a manner comparable to Brown's liberalism, and the portions of the later fathers I've read are similarly conservative. They may have agreed with Brown in not placing much emphasis on the historicity of some portions of the infancy narratives or in seeing some Old Testament echoes in the infancy accounts, for example, but they could do so without agreeing with Brown's view of the origins and historicity of the narratives.
In addition to underestimating the patristic evidence, Brown often underestimates the early response to the infancy narratives by non-Christian sources. If the narratives were as unhistorical as Brown and other modern scholars claim, then the early enemies of Christianity would have been in a position to know it, often to easily know it. Yet, the evidence we have suggests that the early enemies of Christianity either didn't significantly argue against or corroborated much of what modern critics dispute. Brown will sometimes acknowledge the significance of this fact (for example, n. 318 on p. 703), but not as often as he should. His discussions of subjects such as Jesus' birthplace and the census of Luke 2 neglect some significant evidence from non-Christian sources. When discussing whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, for example, Brown acknowledges that it would be significant if Origen was correct about non-Christian corroboration of Jesus' birth in that city (p. 514), but he fails to go on to discuss whether it's likely that Origen was correct, and he doesn't even mention some other evidence of non-Christian corroboration elsewhere in Origen and in other sources.
Like so many other modern Biblical scholars, Brown largely argues from highly speculative theories about internal evidence. He often recognizes the speculative nature of his arguments and acknowledges that he doesn't have much reason to be confident about his conclusions. He'll suggest that one part of the infancy narratives may have been derived to a significant extent from one portion of the Old Testament, then he'll appeal to a different portion of the Old Testament to explain another part of the infancy accounts. He'll parallel the patriarch Joseph from the book of Genesis with Jesus' father Joseph (pp. 111-112), then he'll acknowledge that the patriarch could be paralleled with Jesus in another context (n. 32 on p. 112). The prophet Samuel will be compared to John the Baptist, then will be compared to Jesus (pp. 450-451). Brown has to appeal to a wide range of Old Testament sources in his attempt to explain much of the infancy narratives as something other than an effort to convey history. See, for example, the large number of Old Testament figures and events cited on pp. 268-271. On p. 193, we're told about a wide range of possible sources for the material in Matthew 2, including "the combined story of Joseph in Egypt and Moses...the stories of the birth of Abraham, the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, and the struggle between Laban and Jacob...the most likely background is offered by the episode centered on Balaam in Num 22-24...The Matthean Herod resembles both the Pharaoh and Balak." After citing such a diverse array of possibilities, Brown assures us that he's omitted any mention of other parallels that are "too tenuous" (n. 40 on p. 193). I prefer his advice elsewhere that "one should be cautious in drawing an identification from such echoes of an OT scene." (p. 344) He argues against the Old Testament parallels drawn by other scholars on the basis that those parallels are inconsistent in some of their details (for example, n. 15 on p. 482 and p. 490), yet many of Brown's proposed parallels are inconsistent.
There have been some relevant changes in Biblical scholarship since Brown wrote his book, especially since the original 1977 edition. Brown's dismissals of eyewitness testimony, for example (p. 27, etc.), are far outweighed by the contrary arguments cited by Richard Bauckham and other scholars. As Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd document in their recent book The Jesus Legend (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007), the early Christians probably had more written sources to draw from than critics often assume, and oral tradition would have been more reliable than critics often suggest in an oral culture like ancient Israel. Much of what scholars like Bauckham, Eddy, and Boyd have documented was unknown or widely neglected when Brown published his book. As we'll see in the coming days, however, much of what these scholars have documented is found in some sort of seed form in Brown's work, even if he doesn't apply the principles consistently.
Over the next couple of days, I want to quote some examples of Brown's more conservative conclusions about the infancy narratives. We seem to hear much more about his more liberal conclusions, but he also agreed with conservative scholarship on some points.
Critics of traditional Christianity often cite it. Some of you may remember that Newsweek's Jon Meacham based much of his largely negative 2004 article about the infancy narratives on Brown's book. Last Christmas season, John Loftus of Debunking Christianity wrote an article in which he repeated many of Brown's arguments.
I've already discussed some of the problems with Brown's work in this field (here, for example). Many other criticisms could be added.
As modern Biblical scholars often do, Brown underestimates the significance of external evidence. His dismissals of traditional Christian beliefs about the infancy narratives, such as Matthean authorship of the first gospel, are often shallow. He even suggests that the author of the first gospel may have been so ignorant of Jesus' background as to not know whether the "brothers" of Jesus were biological siblings (p. 132). That's a remarkable claim in light of factors such as the earliness of the first gospel and the prominence of Jesus' brothers in early church leadership. He makes many similar claims that assume an unlikely degree of apathy, forgetfulness, and other faults on the part of the early Christians and non-Christian sources.
Brown often neglects patristic evidence relevant to the issues he's considering, although there are many references to the significance of the patristic sources in his 1993 material (pp. 589, 616, 619, 634, 637, 704, 708). He seems to have increasingly accepted the significance of the patristic evidence with the passing of time. My impression is that he assigns more weight to it in his 1993 material than in the 1977 material, and he often does so when responding to critics who are to his left. Much of what he says about the patristic data in his comments in 1993 could be applied to his own conclusions elsewhere. For example:
"Feuillet cannot dismiss so easily as he does the fact that it took close to 1,500 years for an interpreter to have recognized specifically that Luke intended the suggested parentage....First, it is very weak exegetically to contend that an author expressed his central concern so incompetently that his contemporary audience would miss it. That should be resorted to only as a last possibility, for often it serves as a ploy for imposing on a text what it does not say. Second, since the mid-2nd century most readers of the Gospels have had Matt's infancy account, and it has not cast the light on Luke that Schaberg assumes." (pp. 589, 637)
I would recommend that people compare Brown's comments like those above to his assessment of the authorship of the gospels on p. 27 or the genre of the infancy narratives on pp. 199, 562, and 608, for example. Brown is correct in citing patristic evidence against some of his opponents, but that evidence is often highly problematic for his own theories. He cites an article by B. Buby in support of the notion that "in the broad range of patristic interpretations there are views quite harmonious with modern critical positions on the infancy narratives" (p. 634). He says (p. 634) that Buby's article "compares ideas in patristic nativity sermons" to ideas in his (Brown's) book. I haven't read Buby's article, but it's titled "Research on the Biblical Approach and the Method of Exegesis Appearing in the Greek Homiletic Texts of the Late Fourth and Early Fifth Centuries, Emphasizing the Incarnation Especially the Nativity and Mary's Place within It". Apparently, then, the article is about patristic sources from the late fourth and early fifth centuries. That's relatively late. And I'm wary of Brown's characterization of the article as showing patristic "ideas" that are "quite harmonious" with ones like his. I haven't read Buby's article, but I've read thousands of pages of patristic material. None of the earliest fathers saw the infancy narratives in a manner comparable to Brown's liberalism, and the portions of the later fathers I've read are similarly conservative. They may have agreed with Brown in not placing much emphasis on the historicity of some portions of the infancy narratives or in seeing some Old Testament echoes in the infancy accounts, for example, but they could do so without agreeing with Brown's view of the origins and historicity of the narratives.
In addition to underestimating the patristic evidence, Brown often underestimates the early response to the infancy narratives by non-Christian sources. If the narratives were as unhistorical as Brown and other modern scholars claim, then the early enemies of Christianity would have been in a position to know it, often to easily know it. Yet, the evidence we have suggests that the early enemies of Christianity either didn't significantly argue against or corroborated much of what modern critics dispute. Brown will sometimes acknowledge the significance of this fact (for example, n. 318 on p. 703), but not as often as he should. His discussions of subjects such as Jesus' birthplace and the census of Luke 2 neglect some significant evidence from non-Christian sources. When discussing whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, for example, Brown acknowledges that it would be significant if Origen was correct about non-Christian corroboration of Jesus' birth in that city (p. 514), but he fails to go on to discuss whether it's likely that Origen was correct, and he doesn't even mention some other evidence of non-Christian corroboration elsewhere in Origen and in other sources.
Like so many other modern Biblical scholars, Brown largely argues from highly speculative theories about internal evidence. He often recognizes the speculative nature of his arguments and acknowledges that he doesn't have much reason to be confident about his conclusions. He'll suggest that one part of the infancy narratives may have been derived to a significant extent from one portion of the Old Testament, then he'll appeal to a different portion of the Old Testament to explain another part of the infancy accounts. He'll parallel the patriarch Joseph from the book of Genesis with Jesus' father Joseph (pp. 111-112), then he'll acknowledge that the patriarch could be paralleled with Jesus in another context (n. 32 on p. 112). The prophet Samuel will be compared to John the Baptist, then will be compared to Jesus (pp. 450-451). Brown has to appeal to a wide range of Old Testament sources in his attempt to explain much of the infancy narratives as something other than an effort to convey history. See, for example, the large number of Old Testament figures and events cited on pp. 268-271. On p. 193, we're told about a wide range of possible sources for the material in Matthew 2, including "the combined story of Joseph in Egypt and Moses...the stories of the birth of Abraham, the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, and the struggle between Laban and Jacob...the most likely background is offered by the episode centered on Balaam in Num 22-24...The Matthean Herod resembles both the Pharaoh and Balak." After citing such a diverse array of possibilities, Brown assures us that he's omitted any mention of other parallels that are "too tenuous" (n. 40 on p. 193). I prefer his advice elsewhere that "one should be cautious in drawing an identification from such echoes of an OT scene." (p. 344) He argues against the Old Testament parallels drawn by other scholars on the basis that those parallels are inconsistent in some of their details (for example, n. 15 on p. 482 and p. 490), yet many of Brown's proposed parallels are inconsistent.
There have been some relevant changes in Biblical scholarship since Brown wrote his book, especially since the original 1977 edition. Brown's dismissals of eyewitness testimony, for example (p. 27, etc.), are far outweighed by the contrary arguments cited by Richard Bauckham and other scholars. As Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd document in their recent book The Jesus Legend (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007), the early Christians probably had more written sources to draw from than critics often assume, and oral tradition would have been more reliable than critics often suggest in an oral culture like ancient Israel. Much of what scholars like Bauckham, Eddy, and Boyd have documented was unknown or widely neglected when Brown published his book. As we'll see in the coming days, however, much of what these scholars have documented is found in some sort of seed form in Brown's work, even if he doesn't apply the principles consistently.
Over the next couple of days, I want to quote some examples of Brown's more conservative conclusions about the infancy narratives. We seem to hear much more about his more liberal conclusions, but he also agreed with conservative scholarship on some points.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Resources For The Upcoming Christmas Season
The historicity of the infancy narratives will be widely discussed in the coming weeks. I want to recommend some resources.
Many of the relevant issues were discussed here during the last Christmas season. See the archives from last November and December.
Not much has changed since last year. Bruce Waltke has published a commentary on Micah that gives the best treatment of the Bethlehem prophecy that I've seen (the prophecy, not its fulfillment). R.T. France's 2007 commentary on the gospel of Matthew is good, but the best resource on Matthew's infancy material is still Craig Keener's commentary on that gospel (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999). The best resource on Luke is Darrell Bock's commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994). Raymond Brown's The Birth Of The Messiah (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999), though wrong on many points, covers the issues in a lot of depth and remains one of the best resources available. (I'll have more to say about Brown's work in the coming days.) A good concise treatment is Ben Witherington's article in the Dictionary Of Jesus And The Gospels, Joel B. Green, et al., ed. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 60-74.
There's a lot of relevant, and often underestimated, material in the church fathers. I discussed some of it in my posts last year. I'll mention a few representative examples here:
Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 77-79
Justin Martyr, First Apology, 34
Julius Africanus, Eusebius' Church History, 1:7
Origen, Against Celsus, 1:51
Origen, Against Celsus, 1:58-61
Notice, in these passages, that both the early Christians and their enemies interpreted the infancy narratives in a highly historical manner. Notice, also, that these early Christian sources viewed the material in Matthew and Luke as harmonious, and that there was concern for and citation of extra-Biblical corroboration. Note what sources are cited (relatives of Jesus, for example), and note what the early opponents of Christianity did and didn't argue and on what grounds.
Many of the relevant issues were discussed here during the last Christmas season. See the archives from last November and December.
Not much has changed since last year. Bruce Waltke has published a commentary on Micah that gives the best treatment of the Bethlehem prophecy that I've seen (the prophecy, not its fulfillment). R.T. France's 2007 commentary on the gospel of Matthew is good, but the best resource on Matthew's infancy material is still Craig Keener's commentary on that gospel (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1999). The best resource on Luke is Darrell Bock's commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994). Raymond Brown's The Birth Of The Messiah (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1999), though wrong on many points, covers the issues in a lot of depth and remains one of the best resources available. (I'll have more to say about Brown's work in the coming days.) A good concise treatment is Ben Witherington's article in the Dictionary Of Jesus And The Gospels, Joel B. Green, et al., ed. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 60-74.
There's a lot of relevant, and often underestimated, material in the church fathers. I discussed some of it in my posts last year. I'll mention a few representative examples here:
Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 77-79
Justin Martyr, First Apology, 34
Julius Africanus, Eusebius' Church History, 1:7
Origen, Against Celsus, 1:51
Origen, Against Celsus, 1:58-61
Notice, in these passages, that both the early Christians and their enemies interpreted the infancy narratives in a highly historical manner. Notice, also, that these early Christian sources viewed the material in Matthew and Luke as harmonious, and that there was concern for and citation of extra-Biblical corroboration. Note what sources are cited (relatives of Jesus, for example), and note what the early opponents of Christianity did and didn't argue and on what grounds.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Because I said so
In response to a statement about arguments from authority and how Aquinas employed them I replied....
************
Douglas Walton, in Informal Logic: A Handobook for Critical Thinking, discusses the argumentum ad verecundiam and concludes that it is not always fallacious or weak (p. 179 - 197). Its merit should be judged from within the "context of dialogue" and can be seen as a valuable way to put the burden back on to your opponent. Walton is recognized as one of the most respected authorities, a breaker of new ground (he even argues that not all circular argumentation is fallacious!) in informal logic. Walton's work should be concluted before one goes throwing around this fallacy in a haphazard way. The argumentum ad verecundiam was so dubbed by John Locke and means "the argument from modesty." But even Locke did not claim all such appeals to be fallacious (see Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 159-160).
I answer that the argument is fallacious when you try to silence the opposition. In the context of dialogue - especially a persuasion dialogue, there are rules of procedure expected of both sides. If you are in a dialogue, and try to silence the other dialoguer, then you show you are not in a dialogue. It shows that you're not trying to come to an understanding, or even persuade your disputer. A dialogue is not a monologue; to state the obvious. Hence, in the context of a dialogue, when authority is appealed to to shut down your opponent, that is an instance of the fallacious use of the argument because once the dialogue is begun, both parties are expected to finish it.
But obviously such appeals are not always fallacious. It would seem foolhardy and irrational to tell your doctor that you refuse to heed his advice because to do so would engage in taking his conclusions on his authority. Or, when we investigate something we cannot very well investigate everything required, hence we will appeal to some authority. If our cognitive authority is regarded as a means of supplementing experimental investigation, when such investigation is impractical, it may not be wrong to appeal to said authority.
Also, in court cases juries are expected to listen to authorities. They have no time to investigate what was said. Are all such court proceedings shams? Travesties of justice based on fallacious decisions handed down by jurors?
No doubt the above can be question. The opposing side in a court case will no doubt invoke his own authority.
The question that concerns us is are arguments from authority weak arguments, or fallacies? The answer we have sought to prove is no, not always. We must look at the context of dialogue and ask critical questions about how the appeal was invoked. In some cases we may say that the appeal validly threw the burden of proof back on to the other party(ies). If every single Greek scholar in the world translated some word in a certain way, and someone, especially one unfamiliar with the Greek language - or only partly so - dissented, I think our mere appeal to authority (given that we don't understand Greek too) would be appropriate here and would force our interlocutor to have the burden of proof. Our appeal, though, obviously doesn't *necessitate* his being wrong about the translation. it just throws the burden on him.
I see no objections, but in case they say, "but such an appeal does not necessitate that you are correct," I agree. But I never intended to convey that it did. That would try to squeeze too much juice out of the authoritative fruit. But certainly even our objector does not dilly dally after the doctor has prescribed some course of action. To do so would be foolish. Surely our objector would not hang every jury he was a part of because he didn't have the time, means, or education to personally investigate the issues discussed by the authority.
So, we shouldn’t go too far on either end of the spectrum. We should try to find some mean. I submit that Aquinas, being the good Aristotelian that he was, would appreciate the nod towards moderation, towards means. Excess in either direction is potentially foolhardy.
************
Douglas Walton, in Informal Logic: A Handobook for Critical Thinking, discusses the argumentum ad verecundiam and concludes that it is not always fallacious or weak (p. 179 - 197). Its merit should be judged from within the "context of dialogue" and can be seen as a valuable way to put the burden back on to your opponent. Walton is recognized as one of the most respected authorities, a breaker of new ground (he even argues that not all circular argumentation is fallacious!) in informal logic. Walton's work should be concluted before one goes throwing around this fallacy in a haphazard way. The argumentum ad verecundiam was so dubbed by John Locke and means "the argument from modesty." But even Locke did not claim all such appeals to be fallacious (see Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 159-160).
I answer that the argument is fallacious when you try to silence the opposition. In the context of dialogue - especially a persuasion dialogue, there are rules of procedure expected of both sides. If you are in a dialogue, and try to silence the other dialoguer, then you show you are not in a dialogue. It shows that you're not trying to come to an understanding, or even persuade your disputer. A dialogue is not a monologue; to state the obvious. Hence, in the context of a dialogue, when authority is appealed to to shut down your opponent, that is an instance of the fallacious use of the argument because once the dialogue is begun, both parties are expected to finish it.
But obviously such appeals are not always fallacious. It would seem foolhardy and irrational to tell your doctor that you refuse to heed his advice because to do so would engage in taking his conclusions on his authority. Or, when we investigate something we cannot very well investigate everything required, hence we will appeal to some authority. If our cognitive authority is regarded as a means of supplementing experimental investigation, when such investigation is impractical, it may not be wrong to appeal to said authority.
Also, in court cases juries are expected to listen to authorities. They have no time to investigate what was said. Are all such court proceedings shams? Travesties of justice based on fallacious decisions handed down by jurors?
No doubt the above can be question. The opposing side in a court case will no doubt invoke his own authority.
The question that concerns us is are arguments from authority weak arguments, or fallacies? The answer we have sought to prove is no, not always. We must look at the context of dialogue and ask critical questions about how the appeal was invoked. In some cases we may say that the appeal validly threw the burden of proof back on to the other party(ies). If every single Greek scholar in the world translated some word in a certain way, and someone, especially one unfamiliar with the Greek language - or only partly so - dissented, I think our mere appeal to authority (given that we don't understand Greek too) would be appropriate here and would force our interlocutor to have the burden of proof. Our appeal, though, obviously doesn't *necessitate* his being wrong about the translation. it just throws the burden on him.
I see no objections, but in case they say, "but such an appeal does not necessitate that you are correct," I agree. But I never intended to convey that it did. That would try to squeeze too much juice out of the authoritative fruit. But certainly even our objector does not dilly dally after the doctor has prescribed some course of action. To do so would be foolish. Surely our objector would not hang every jury he was a part of because he didn't have the time, means, or education to personally investigate the issues discussed by the authority.
So, we shouldn’t go too far on either end of the spectrum. We should try to find some mean. I submit that Aquinas, being the good Aristotelian that he was, would appreciate the nod towards moderation, towards means. Excess in either direction is potentially foolhardy.
Keep your hands off my body!
SHELLY SAID:
“you boys should just shut your yappers. if a woman wants your opinion on what to do with her body, she'll beat it out of you.”
Of course, this is boilerplate feminism, but let’s subject it to a dash of rational scrutiny.
The article that Peter referred to was not about a generic “woman,” but about a mother. A pregnant woman is a mother. Indeed, in this case, the mother was also someone’s wife.
Now, she apparently conceived the child the old-fashioned way, and last time I checked on the logistics of this procedure, it would actually involve a male body intersecting with a female body. So the rhetoric of female autonomy doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we’re talking about a married woman who is having conjugal relations with a man.
In this respect, lesbians are a bit more consistent. They realize that you can’t mouth slogans about female autonomy if you make your life with a man. To be married to, or even live with a man, implies a relationship of emotional codependency.
Mind you, lesbians are only a bit more consistent, since all they’re doing is to suppress their natural (sexual and maternal) instincts to make a political statement. From far being emancipated, they negate their feminine self-fulfillment.
In addition, to be a mother (and a pregnant woman is mother) is already to be in a relationship with another—your baby. By definition, motherhood is a social role. So it’s the opposite of autonomy.
“you boys should just shut your yappers. if a woman wants your opinion on what to do with her body, she'll beat it out of you.”
Of course, this is boilerplate feminism, but let’s subject it to a dash of rational scrutiny.
The article that Peter referred to was not about a generic “woman,” but about a mother. A pregnant woman is a mother. Indeed, in this case, the mother was also someone’s wife.
Now, she apparently conceived the child the old-fashioned way, and last time I checked on the logistics of this procedure, it would actually involve a male body intersecting with a female body. So the rhetoric of female autonomy doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we’re talking about a married woman who is having conjugal relations with a man.
In this respect, lesbians are a bit more consistent. They realize that you can’t mouth slogans about female autonomy if you make your life with a man. To be married to, or even live with a man, implies a relationship of emotional codependency.
Mind you, lesbians are only a bit more consistent, since all they’re doing is to suppress their natural (sexual and maternal) instincts to make a political statement. From far being emancipated, they negate their feminine self-fulfillment.
In addition, to be a mother (and a pregnant woman is mother) is already to be in a relationship with another—your baby. By definition, motherhood is a social role. So it’s the opposite of autonomy.
Shim, the pro-choice advocate
===============
shelly said:
you boys should just shut your yappers. if a woman wants your opinion on what to do with her body, she'll beat it out of you.
'nuff said.
11/04/2007 5:19 AM
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/11/words-have-meaning.html#comments
===============
Ah yes, the enlightened, rational, scientific mind of the pro-choice advocate.
Since the "unborn child"/extra body part she is referring to was male, and since "it" is part of her body, and since it has a penis, then she has a penis. Pro-choice rhetoric implies that some of our wives have penises. I am she-male, hear me roar.
Also, since the "unborn child"/extra body part has its own distinct set of 46 chromosomes, then "Shelly" has a total of 92 chromosomes! Normal humans are only supposed to have 46. Pro-choice rhetoric turns pregnant women into freaks.
People who have an improper amount of chromosomes have been called retarded. Perhaps this explains the level of argumentation the pro-choice side employs.
shelly said:
you boys should just shut your yappers. if a woman wants your opinion on what to do with her body, she'll beat it out of you.
'nuff said.
11/04/2007 5:19 AM
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/11/words-have-meaning.html#comments
===============
Ah yes, the enlightened, rational, scientific mind of the pro-choice advocate.
Since the "unborn child"/extra body part she is referring to was male, and since "it" is part of her body, and since it has a penis, then she has a penis. Pro-choice rhetoric implies that some of our wives have penises. I am she-male, hear me roar.
Also, since the "unborn child"/extra body part has its own distinct set of 46 chromosomes, then "Shelly" has a total of 92 chromosomes! Normal humans are only supposed to have 46. Pro-choice rhetoric turns pregnant women into freaks.
People who have an improper amount of chromosomes have been called retarded. Perhaps this explains the level of argumentation the pro-choice side employs.
Instead of me
A short answer in response to a question about the justice of the cross....
**********
Justice is getting what you deserve. Getting your 'just deserts.'
Getting off "Scot free" (as you say) when you don't deserve Scott-freedness is not 'justice,' it's mercy.
So, were we treated justly? No. And, thank God.
Justice administers deserved punishment. The deserved punishment for sin is death.
Was this not administered?
It was, at Calvary. Christ became the sinner. He stood in our place, as if it were you and me up there.
So, there was no total disregard of a punishment for sin.
What's the problem?
It seems to be that Jesus took the penalty for our sin. He stood in for us. Took our place. He himself didn't deserve the penalty, we did.
What's wrong with that?
1) The idea of substitution was not foreign to the Ancient Near East mindset. We may have a problem, but it wasn't always this way. The Greek Pharmakos, comes to mind. (I just cite this to show that the idea of an "innocent" substitute for the people wasn't obviously wrong to the mind of man.)
2) It is 'illegal.' Perhaps within our legal code it is, but not in God's. Legality is determined from within a legal code. God's legal code allows for the idea of substitution, if done legally (according to his stipulations). Take Amsterdam's drug culture. Since it is legal there to ingest heroin, we wouldn't call what they're doing illegal, per se. It may be immoral, but we wouldn't call it illegal. So, since sin is a crime (it's more sophisticated than that, but crime sufficies for our purposes) in God's legal jurisdiction, against his law code, then the substitution was what took place within that law code, and hence was not 'illegal.' (The essence of this point I took from Glen Miller.)
3) It is 'immoral.' How so? Obviously to call something X immoral, one needs a framework of morality which allows one to call X immoral.
3.1) Take Utilitarianism, for instance. Seems like greater happiness resulted. Some Utilitarians even allow that it would be acceptable to rape a child if that's what a terrorist requested to avoid him detonating a nuclear bomb in the middle of Time Square.
3.2) Take Ethical Egoism, for instance. Surely if Christ chose to do this, and it was in his best interest, then it was not immoral. (Now, I think Egoism has serious problems, but all I need to do is present the *possibility* of the atonement being motivated out of self-interest, and the Egoist must accept the argument. In fact, Egoists have a knack for revision. They could easily make the atonement motivated by self-interest. And, if Ethical Egoism is motivated by Psychological Egoism - which many Egoists claim it is - then it is a *fact* that Jesus sacrificed himself out of self-interest.)
3.3) What about ethical anti-realistism, for instance. Obviously they can't complain about the immorality of the atonement, because nothing is really immoral. I bring these three up just to show that the person making the claim that it is immoral needs to offer a theory where that claim is intelligible. We've seen that on three non-Christian views, substitutionary atonement wouldn't be immoral.
3.4) Take a fourth view - Christian morality. On this view it is hardly immoral since God chose to do it and he cannot chose to do an immoral act.
4) It's not fair. That's right, it's not; for us. If we were treated fairly, we'd be in trouble. What's the problem, then? Usually we call foul when two supposed equals are matched up. If one has an advantage, then it's not fair. But if someone volunteers to do something that isn't what he deserves, we don't call that unfair. It might be unfair if a poor kid gets drafted to go to war when a rich kid should have gone in his place. But, if that poor kid *volunteers* to go in the place of the rich kid, we wouldn't call that unfair.
So, what is the problem? We've already noted that though we were not treated justly, Christ was in our place. We then asked what the problem with this view was. We can see that though we may have intuitions to the contrary, when we try to spell out what the problem is, we have problems specifying exactly what's supposed to be wrong here.
**********
Justice is getting what you deserve. Getting your 'just deserts.'
Getting off "Scot free" (as you say) when you don't deserve Scott-freedness is not 'justice,' it's mercy.
So, were we treated justly? No. And, thank God.
Justice administers deserved punishment. The deserved punishment for sin is death.
Was this not administered?
It was, at Calvary. Christ became the sinner. He stood in our place, as if it were you and me up there.
So, there was no total disregard of a punishment for sin.
What's the problem?
It seems to be that Jesus took the penalty for our sin. He stood in for us. Took our place. He himself didn't deserve the penalty, we did.
What's wrong with that?
1) The idea of substitution was not foreign to the Ancient Near East mindset. We may have a problem, but it wasn't always this way. The Greek Pharmakos, comes to mind. (I just cite this to show that the idea of an "innocent" substitute for the people wasn't obviously wrong to the mind of man.)
2) It is 'illegal.' Perhaps within our legal code it is, but not in God's. Legality is determined from within a legal code. God's legal code allows for the idea of substitution, if done legally (according to his stipulations). Take Amsterdam's drug culture. Since it is legal there to ingest heroin, we wouldn't call what they're doing illegal, per se. It may be immoral, but we wouldn't call it illegal. So, since sin is a crime (it's more sophisticated than that, but crime sufficies for our purposes) in God's legal jurisdiction, against his law code, then the substitution was what took place within that law code, and hence was not 'illegal.' (The essence of this point I took from Glen Miller.)
3) It is 'immoral.' How so? Obviously to call something X immoral, one needs a framework of morality which allows one to call X immoral.
3.1) Take Utilitarianism, for instance. Seems like greater happiness resulted. Some Utilitarians even allow that it would be acceptable to rape a child if that's what a terrorist requested to avoid him detonating a nuclear bomb in the middle of Time Square.
3.2) Take Ethical Egoism, for instance. Surely if Christ chose to do this, and it was in his best interest, then it was not immoral. (Now, I think Egoism has serious problems, but all I need to do is present the *possibility* of the atonement being motivated out of self-interest, and the Egoist must accept the argument. In fact, Egoists have a knack for revision. They could easily make the atonement motivated by self-interest. And, if Ethical Egoism is motivated by Psychological Egoism - which many Egoists claim it is - then it is a *fact* that Jesus sacrificed himself out of self-interest.)
3.3) What about ethical anti-realistism, for instance. Obviously they can't complain about the immorality of the atonement, because nothing is really immoral. I bring these three up just to show that the person making the claim that it is immoral needs to offer a theory where that claim is intelligible. We've seen that on three non-Christian views, substitutionary atonement wouldn't be immoral.
3.4) Take a fourth view - Christian morality. On this view it is hardly immoral since God chose to do it and he cannot chose to do an immoral act.
4) It's not fair. That's right, it's not; for us. If we were treated fairly, we'd be in trouble. What's the problem, then? Usually we call foul when two supposed equals are matched up. If one has an advantage, then it's not fair. But if someone volunteers to do something that isn't what he deserves, we don't call that unfair. It might be unfair if a poor kid gets drafted to go to war when a rich kid should have gone in his place. But, if that poor kid *volunteers* to go in the place of the rich kid, we wouldn't call that unfair.
So, what is the problem? We've already noted that though we were not treated justly, Christ was in our place. We then asked what the problem with this view was. We can see that though we may have intuitions to the contrary, when we try to spell out what the problem is, we have problems specifying exactly what's supposed to be wrong here.
Roman foot-in-mouth disease
Recently, a sinful saint and saintly sinner asked me to comment on some of Scott Carson’s posts on Scripture. Carson (not to be confused with D. A. Carson) is a Catholic epologist.
I’ve gleaned some quotes from his blog:
http://examinelife.blogspot.com/
These strike me as his major arguments against the Protestant rule of faith. If I overlooked an important argument, you’re welcome to draw that to my attention.
“There are some who claim that the canonical texts are the only ‘inspired’ texts, and we accept them not because they are the product of a particular community but because they are inspired. But of course the texts themselves do not make any claims to being inspired that cannot be found in the Gnostic texts as well, so to believe the one claim of inspiration rather than the other is rationally unwarranted without the added witness of a particular community that one endorses as having the special charism of handing on the orthodox faith to future generations.”
i) Why assume that the criterion consists of a revelatory claim to inspiration along with a charismatic community to spiritually discern the validity of the claim? As far as Gnostic apocrypha are concerned, one doesn’t need a “special charism” to give them the boot. If they claim to be written by contemporaries of the events they relay, even though they are demonstrably written long after the death of the (pseudonymous) author, then their anachronistic character is sufficient to brand them as pious frauds or forgeries.
ii) Why couldn’t the evangelical “community” lay claim to a “special charism?”
iii) In Catholicism, is it the “community” or the Magisterium that makes this determination?
“What is the nature of that witness, exactly? After all, the Gnostic communities had preaches and teachers, and they were attempting to hand on a version of the faith as well. Is it, as our author would have us believe, nothing more than a matter of individual judgment, made separately and uniquely each and every generation, to decide which set of texts to accept, which teachings to adopt, which beliefs to hold de fide? Am I to believe that our author has himself examined each and every one of the surviving Gnostic texts, and has decided literally on his own authority, and for no other reason, that it is the canonical texts of the New Testament that are authoritative? If so, how on earth did he come to know that?”
The Protestant rule of faith (sola Scriptura) does not preclude the use of expert testimony or secondary sources.
“Frankly, I'm not at all sure that he has in fact conducted such an investigation, but even if he has I see no compelling reason for him to choose orthodoxy rather than heresy on the basis of these texts alone.”
I agree. Orthodoxy doesn’t have to be the criterion. Anachronism can be a criterion. Was it written by the putative author? Does he claim to be contemporary of the people and events he is writing about?
“Some folks may say things like ‘Oh, the canonical texts present a much more plausible picture of Jesus than the Gnostic texts,’ but that really is a desperate little argument, grasping at the frailest of straws. There's nothing in the canonical gospels that is intrinsically more plausible than anything in the Gospel of Thomas, for example. People accept the canonical texts, whether they like to admit it or not, for no other reason than that these are the texts that the Church has preserved for us. In short, the texts are accepted on the basis of the Church's authority to determine the content of our faith.”
Did “the Church” preserve these texts? Did the Vatican sometime in the 2C set up a scriptorium to preserve and reproduce the canonical texts? Is that a primitive office of the Curia?
“In fact, plenty of Popes have taught things that were not authentic Magisterial teachings, and nobody ever had any duty to submit themselves to such teachings. When a Pope teaches heresy, he ceases to be Pope, and there is certainly no virtue involved in submitting oneself to the teachings of a heretic who is not the Pope but who claims to be.”
Well, that’s very interesting. Suppose a heretical Pope issues a heretical encyclical in which he claims to be speaking ex cathedra? Is it up to the laity to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy? And if the laity has that level of spiritual discernment, who needs the Magisterium?
“An interesting facet of this form of infallibility is rather easier to see if one imagines the situation of the neophyte in the second and third quarters of the first century, before any of the New Testament texts had been committed to writing.”
The third quarter of the 1C would take us to AD 75 (as the terminus ad quem). Not one NT text had been committed to writing by AD 75?
Does he have the slightest idea what he’s talking about? Even Catholic NT scholars like Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, Murphy-O'Connor, and Luke Timothy Johnson wouldn’t date the totality of the NT that late.
“During the period immediately following the death of Our Lord there was a variety of groups claiming to be followers of the Christ, but they certainly did not all agree on the nature of what it meant to be such a follower. Some versions of the story were decidedly heretical.”
What is his evidence that “immediately” after the death of Christ, there were a variety of heretical groups presenting heretical biographies of Christ?
“These versions came later to be committed to writing as well as the more familiar (to us) orthodox texts, but for the neophyte of the years A.D. 33-80 there were no Gospel accounts other than those that were preached orally in the local house-churches in which the Christians met.”
This assumes that all four canonical Gospels were all written after AD 80. Where’s the argument?
“The neophyte had to trust that the word he was hearing was authentic and authoritative. The only way to have such trust was to accept, by virtue of divine grace, the truth of what was preached. Certainly the Holy Spirit would not provide divine grace to believe a false account: it is an article of our faith that orthodoxy became what it is by virtue of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit himself.”
How does that follow? We have cult members in our own day and age. There’s no guarantee that a neophyte will not be exposed to a false gospel, and believe whatever he is told. Indeed, there were certainly adherents of heretical sects from the 2C onward, and even prior to the 2C.
From a Reformed standpoint, the only guarantee is that God will bring his elect to a saving knowledge of the truth. But reprobates may well be dupes for every wind of doctrine.
“The consensus refers to that which unites Christians, namely, their belief in what is true and that they are inspired to believe by the Holy Spirit.”
And why can’t a Protestant lay claim to the same charismatic validation for himself or his own faith-community?
“It is sometimes said, mostly by Protestants but sometimes by Catholics and Anglicans, that there exists such a thing as ‘the plain meaning of Scripture’ (PMS) and this thing ought to serve as the normative criterion for the acceptance or rejection of any proposed assertion about Christianity in particular but sometimes of any assertion at all.’
Who says that, exactly? There are some popular, old-time dispensationalists like John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, Charles Lee Feinberg, and Paul Lee Tan who talk that way. But I don’t think the current generation at, say, Dallas Theological Seminary is that naïve.
Certainly older Reformed writers like Oswald Allis didn’t take that position. Modern Protestant hermeneuticists like Thiselton, Poythress, Ricoeur, and Vanhoozer don’t take that position. Modern Reformed exegetes like Beale, Longman, McComiskey, Poythress, Ridderbos, O. P. Robertson, D. A. Carson, and Waltke (to name a few) don’t take that position—not to mention other Protestant commentators.
You can find anyone to say anything, but since Carson is attacking the Protestant rule of faith, it is irresponsible to ignore the leading scholars in the field.
“First of all it must be admitted by all sides that, whatever else one must mean by the expression ‘the plain meaning of scripture’, it means, first and foremost, a certain kind of interpretation of scripture.”
i) Of course, this is predicated on the false premise of Scripture’s “plain meaning.” Carson has cited no major Protestant exegete or hermeneuticist who takes that position.
ii) Meaning and interpretation are hardly synonymous. Meaning is the object and objective of interpretation. But they are not interchangeable—otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish between the true meaning and a misinterpretation.
“The first factor that must be taken into consideration is the origin of the Scriptures themselves, and this factor has two aspects. On the one hand, there is the question of the individual texts themselves and their historical origins. By’"individual texts’ what I mean is, for example, the text of the Gospel of Matthew, or the text of St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. This aspect can be further divided into two distinct problems: the text of these works as we have them today and the text of these works as they may have existed in the first century. There is not only no reason to suppose that these two things are the same in any particular instance, there is actually every reason to suppose that they are, in fact, quite different.”
There are two basic issues here:
i) Does any particular MS differ from the Urtext? Probably. Of course, even then, it doesn’t follow that the divergence is significant. Most scribal errors are trivial.
ii) Does a critical edition of the NT differ from the Urtext? To a lesser extent than any particular MS since the point of textual criticism is to reconstruct the Urtext.
“The second factor that must be taken into consideration is the nature of the community that received these texts and made use of them for determining the content of the faith. This community is itself a historical phenomenon and it is vitally important to assess whether this community suddenly ceased to exist in the 16th, or indeed, any other, century. There are two essential elements to this factor that must be taken into consideration: its communal nature and its accepted standards of discourse, including its use of literary genres such as myth, history, biography, and epistolography. Let us call this second factor the ‘cultural context’.”
I happen to agree with Carson on this point. Unfortunately for him, it torpedoes his own position. He likes to use communal language, but, for him, the relevant “community” boils down to the Magisterium. Yet the Roman Catholic Magisterium is completely different from the target community for the books of the Bible.
“The final factor I will call the ‘semantic context’. By this what I have in mind is the simple fact that meaning and reference are culturally bound concepts, and the plain fact of the matter is that, as similar as we may be in some ways to the peoples of 2000 years ago, we are mostly very different. Cultures, like every other biological category, evolve over time, and when the timespan is great enough cultures may evolve in such a way as to become incommensurate with what they once were. Although I do not think that the Christian community as such has evolved to that degree in 2000 years, nevertheless our capacity to understand the earliest Christian community is a function of our capacity to cognitively grasp the overall cultural milieu of 2000 years ago, and our capacity to do that is severely limited by the vast distance of time and space that separates the contemporary Western intellectual scene from the intellectual scene of the first century in the Mediterranean basin.”
i) This is an argument for the grammatico-historical method.
ii) I wouldn’t say that our capacity to grasp the cultural milieu is “severely” limited by time and space. There’s such a thing as cultural universals. One can also have a general knowledge of the period.
iii) Assuming, however, that the situation is that dire, historical distance also limits our cognitive grasp of the church fathers and church councils. So Carson’s scepticism will boomerang on his own alternative.
iv) Notice the implicitly Marcionite slant of his statement. For him, the Bible is the NT.
“I will begin by saying a few things about the historical context that affect the viability of PMS. It is a historical fact that the earliest New Testament document is St Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, which has been dated by most scholars to the year 50 or 51, though some scholars argue for a date as much as a decade earlier.”
Yet he just told us that no NT text was written before the fourth quarter of the 1C. But his date for 1 Thessalonians would take us to the borderline between the second and third quarter of the 1C. Carson is so addlebrained.
“If we accept a date of around AD 27-30 for the death of Our Lord and the beginning of the Apostolic Age, there is a gap of at least 10 and as many as 20 years before any document was even available to be counted as ‘Scripture’. During this period, the ‘Scriptures’ as such for the new Christian community would have consisted solely of the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the various holy books circulating at that time among the various Jewish communities in and around Palestine and as far south and west as Alexandria (where the translation was made). It is important to note, as well, that the Septuagint contains more books than what we now think of as the Hebrew Scriptures: not all of the books contained the Septuagint had Hebrew originals, but they were all used in one way or another by one or another local Jewish community.”
i) This is a methodological error. He is inferring the state of an allegedly 1C Alexandrian/LXX canon from MSS of the LXX that date far into the Christian era.
ii) He’s also assuming, for some odd reason, that the only OT which the 1C had at its disposal was the LXX. But while that might be the case for Gentile Christians and Hellenistic Messianic Jews, it’s hardly applicable to Palestinian Messianic Jews. The 1C church was ethnically and linguistically diverse.
iii) The fact that NT writers prove the gospel from the OT already evinces their Scriptural orientation. And they appeal to Scripture even when they are addressing a Gentile audience.
“The earliest surviving Gospel account is that of St Mark, which most scholars date to between 60 and 75, with a majority favoring the period between 68-73.”
Once again, this dating scheme contradicts is previous dating scheme:
“…the second and third quarters of the first century, before any of the New Testament texts had been committed to writing.”
“These versions came later to be committed to writing as well as the more familiar (to us) orthodox texts, but for the neophyte of the years A.D. 33-80 there were no Gospel accounts other than those that were preached orally in the local house-churches in which the Christians met.”
So he’s dating Mark to the third quarter of the 1C, whereas he previous told us that nothing was committed to writing until the fourth quarter of the 1C, sometime after AD 80. Carson is so addlebrained.
“Hence there was no written Gospel for a minimum of 30 years after the death of Our Lord and thus no Scriptural account of his life and teachings.”
A minimum of 30 years, on his dating scheme for the death of Christ (AD 27-30) would bring us up to AD 57-60 for the first written Gospel. So where did he come up with the post-80 figure? Carson is so addlebrained.
“It is possible, of course, that the Gospel of Mark is based upon some other, now lost, written account, but there is no empirical evidence to support such a claim.”
Actually, Maurice Casey has argued that there is empirical evidence to support such a claim.
“There is some textual evidence that Mark, Matthew, and Luke relied on some common sources, but there is no way of telling whether those common sources were written texts or oral traditions.”
The argument for reliance on a written exemplar is based on the degree of verbal correspondence as Matthew and Luke reproduce big chunks of Mark—with minor variations.
“There is, then, a rather difficult problem to be overcome by anyone who wants to claim that the only source of authoritative teaching within the Christian community is the "plain meaning of Scripture", since there were no distinctively Christian scriptures for the duration of the first Christian generation.”
This, of course, is the point he’s been building up to all along, although he arrived at this point by very maladroit means. His grand trump card against sola Scriptura was that sola Scriptura is inapplicable to 1C Christians. Of course, that’s a straw man argument:
i) Far from being incompatible with sola Scriptura, the Protestant rule of faith presupposes the difference between the epistemic situation of a Christian or Jew living in the time of public revelation, and a Christian living after the cessation of public revelation.
ii) Sola scriptura does not mean that Scripture must be our only source of religious knowledge, but rather, that Scripture is “the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” (WCF 1.10).
“Quite the contrary, what distinctively Christian Scriptures we do possess owe their very existence to the oral traditions of that first generation that were committed to writing only as the Apostolic Age drew to a close and the growing Christian community began to realize that the message would have to be handed on to future generations, given that the Lord was not returning during their lifetime in the way that many of them had originally believed he would.”
That’s a stock, form-critical argument. But even if 1C Christians in general were dependent on oral tradition for their knowledge of the gospel, it hardly follows that the NT writers were also dependent on oral tradition for their knowledge of the gospel. That requires a separate argument.
“In the end, it was the Christian community itself, operating independently of the writings themselves, that decided which writings were, and which were not, authoritative. The Canon evolved not only very slowly, but it evolved in different ways in different regions. As Bruce Metzger has shown in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origins, Development, and Significance (Oxford: 1987), the Canon evolved independently in the East and in the West, and there was not always full agreement on which writings were to be regarded as authoritative.”
i) If an evolutionary canon is a problem for Protestants (and I’m not conceding the premise), then an evolutionary Magisterium is a problem for Catholics. The Catholic Magisterium has evolved far more slowly than the NT canon. Indeed, the Catholic Magisterium is still in process of development.
ii) Carson exaggerates how long it took. The Gospels and Pauline epistles enjoyed early and widespread recognition.
iii) David Trobisch has argued on text-critical grounds for a mid-2C NT canon.
iv) Carson also commits the elementary blunder of confounding a historical process of recognition with the way in which various NT documents are inherently interrelated. For example, suppose the three installments of Dante’s trilogy were issued consecutively and circulated separately before they were reissued in a collected edition. But it’s obvious that the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso go together, even if it took a lot longer for them to be bound together.
“Works that appeared to conflict with the Christian community's sense of the Gospel message, works such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter, were rejected, in spite of the fact that they did not contain any outright contradictions of anything contained in what we now think of as the Canonical Gospels (beyond the sorts of minor contradictions that the Canonical Gospels show among themselves).”
Once again, he’s talking about evident forgeries. These were written long after the demise of Peter or Thomas.
“In light of this historical context, then, it is implausible to suggest that the ‘Scriptures’, as such, constituted anything like an authoritative source of doctrine for the first generation of Christians, or to suggest that as the Canon was forming there would have been an intuitively obvious reading of the authoritative texts that would have been obvious to any reasonable person.”
This disregards the role of the OT in the apostolic kerygma.
“Indeed, heresy was as common then as it is now, if not more so, in spite of the fact that the Christian community was much smaller then than it is now.”
And that nicely undercuts the Catholic appeal to the antiquity of tradition as a mark of apostolicity.
“At this point the importance of the cultural context should be coming into higher relief. The earliest Christian community made decisions about the content of the Christian faith not by means of appealing to specific texts, but by gathering together as a community to determine the consensus fidelium. Indeed, the very texts that we now look to for authoritative teaching teach us this very fact, as we see the Apostles gathering together in Jerusalem to determine what is to be done about certain beliefs and practices that impact the growing Christian community.”
i) The speakers in Acts 15 are Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James. All four were in a historical position to know about the gospel apart from specific texts. That is hardly analogous to the epistemic situation of a Christian living centuries after the fact.
ii) Even so, what cinched the argument at the Council of Jerusalem was an appeal to a specific text of Scripture (Amos 9:11-12; cf. Acts 15: 15-17. So Acts 15 actually undercuts Carson’s contention.
“As that community evolved over time, it grew distant from its Jewish origins. We see this, too, in the way that the earliest Christian community interpreted the Scriptural texts that it did have, the Septuagint. On their reading, the book of the Prophet Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, a term that is arguably ambiguous in both Hebrew and Greek but that was taken to mean not merely a ‘young girl’ (the meaning of the Greek term used in the Septuagint translation) but a ‘virgin’ in the sense of a young girl who had never had sexual relations with a man.”
i) “Virgin” is one of the meanings assigned to parthenos in A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, 2:359.
And as Celas Spicq, a Catholic scholar, explains:
“The LXX uses parthenos (Hebrew betulah) for an adolescent girl who has not been engaged (Exod 22:15-16), ‘who has not belonged to a man’ (Lev 21:3), sometimes emphasizing youthfulness, sometimes physiological virginity: ‘young virgins who had not had relations with a male’ (Judg 21:12). This point is as novel as it is constant (‘Here is my daughter, who is a virgin’)…she is a virgin, since she is not married and everyone thinks she is one. This is what confirms the meaning of partheneia (Hebrew betulim): physical integrity, the distinctive index of virginity,” Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, 3:47.
Since the LXX was a Jewish translation, this reflects a Jewish understanding of the Isaiah oracle. It is not an ex post factor Christian understanding.
iii) Matthew was also a Jew.
iv) The virginal interpretation is reinforced by the category of a divine sign in Isaiah usage—indicating some sort of portent or prodigy, of which a natural conception would scarcely suffice.
v) Carson also fails to distinguish between sense and reference. The verse can refer to a virgin, even if the Hebrew word itself had a somewhat wider semantic range. And if Isaiah wanted to denote an individual who was a virgin, he chose the Hebrew word whose semantic range most closely approximates virginity—especially in that cultural context, where virginity was the default assumption for Jewish girls.
“As the young community began to experience persecution at the hands of the Jews, they continued to sing the Psalms at their gatherings, but the words took on new meaning for them, as the enemies being referred to were no longer Babylonians or Philistines, but the Jews, or just sin in general. These sorts of cases are particularly troublesome for the defender of PMS, since the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ in these cases is really quite different from what the earliest Christian community imputed to the texts.”
No, this just means that they rightly view their own situation as analogous.
“This is an important feature of language, and it illustrates that in actual human languages terms must be capable of reference if they are to have any meaning, and reference is also public. It connects our terms and concepts to ontological correlates out there in the world, and makes it possible for one person to communicate to another about objective reality. The defender of PMS does not deny this, indeed, he actively relies on it, since he is assuming that the meaning of Scripture, if it is read in a simple and straightforward way, will refer in a perfectly simple and straightforward way that any man can discern for himself.”
Whether or not this is what the hypothetical defender of PMS believes, no sophisticated Protestant exegete operates with such a naïve outlook.
Moreover, the Westminster Confession has a far more nuanced statement of Scriptural perspicuity:
“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (1.7).
Carson is a theological arsonist. He keeps burning straw men. At the very least, someone needs to impose a burn ban.
“And yet, the very person who endorses this PMS view, denies to the language of Scripture the very element of linguistic usage that underpins his view: i.e., the prerogative of the linguistic community to correct the individual. According to the defender of PMS, there is not only no need to be ‘corrected’ by the community, since every man can ‘correct’ himself, there is some sense in which to be "corrected" by the community is to abandon one's right and duty to determine the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ for himself. There is, in short, a very serious contradiction in conception at work here. Without a community to determine what any meaning is, let alone a ‘plain’ meaning, there can be no such thing as meaning at all. Hence, the defender of PMS puts himself in the awkward position of saying that the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ can be determined by every individual for himself, in spite of the fact that all meanings are determined by the community that uses tha language. In the case of the Christian community, it is difficult to see how that community is not a diachronic institution that has existed for nearly 2000 years now and, hence, to determine the meaning of any utterance made within that community, including within that community's writings, one must consult the linguistic practices and rules of that entire community, that is, of the Tradition.”
i) Carson is indulging a bait-and-switch tactic; indeed, more than one. He talks about the “entire community”, as if he were a populist, but for him, this boils down to the Magisterium, which is a tiny subset of the Christian community.
ii) The linguistic community to whom the Bible was written, and within which (linguistic practice) it was written, was not in any sense the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s a completely anachronistic identification of the target community.
iii) Protestants don’t deny the value of an interpretive community. But there’s a transparency to Protestant theology. A theologian or commentator must walk the layman through the process by which he arrived at his conclusion. And his conclusion is only as good as his supporting argument.
In Catholicism, by contrast, it’s an argument from authority. You must believe in the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary because the Pope says so. And this has nothing to do with linguistic practice, per se.
“It is tempting to say that the text means what the author of the text intended it to mean, but such a temptation, like the temptation to pick at a scab, ought to be resisted if one wants to avoid further trouble. Granted, the author meant something by his text, but it is unclear why, in this context, we should care very greatly what he meant. What matters far more is why the Church thought that the text ought to be read by other Christians. It is possible that the author of the Gospel of Thomas intended his text to be orthodox, and to be so-regarded by orthodox Christians. But whether he intended that or not, what matters is that the Church thinks that the text fails to be orthodox, and does not recommend it as Christian reading. So the Church's reasons for accepting a text into the Canon of Scriptures are essentially more normative in settling the meaning and significance of a text than either mere surface grammar or authorial intent.”
Carson is now confusing meaning with truth. The fact that a text means whatever the author intended it to mean does not imply that what it means is true.
“There is no empirical evidence to support the view that there is any distinction of this kind. Certainly the Scriptures themselves do not bear it out, since they nowhere refer to the Church as being one kind of ontological structure when producing texts, another when reading them, or one kind of ontological structure while the Apostles live, another after they have died.”
This assumes that the Church “produces” the Bible.
“Instead, we read everywhere that there is One Holy, Catholic, and Apostlic Church, and what matters is that the Church is Apostolic, not that it is composed of Apostles. AC, in producing the Scriptures, is an ontological structure that has certain properties, including the property of being inspired by the Holy Spirit to produce the Scriptures. That property has never disappeared; what has happened is that the Church, by virtue of her power to make such decisions, declared the Canon to be closed and herself to be the reader (that is, the authoritative one) of that Canon.”
This is not an argument for the Catholic position. Rather, it takes the Catholic position for granted. So it begs the question.
“(It is worth adding here, merely as an aside, that the view that the Scriptures can be assumed to accurately reflect anything like the autograph view of AC is hopelessly naive in the first place, since the text of the New Testament is a notorious mess. Not only do we have no reason to believe that we are genuinely reading the authorial intent of the original writers, we do not even have any reason to believe that we are reading the same texts, since there are thousands of manuscripts exhibiting untold numbers of textual variants, all of which have to be adjudicated to produce the text that we read as a Church or as an individual. It is the Church, by and large, that makes such adjudication possible.)”
i) Notice that he doesn’t cite any textual critics to substantiate his indiscriminate scepticism. I’d add that one also needs to produce critical editions of the church fathers.
ii) Does the Catholic church adjudicate textual variants? Does the Curia include an office of textual criticism?
“Since the Scriptures themselves do not warrant the distinction, any empirical evidence for it will have to come from outside of the Scriptures. In this context it pays to remember what I have already pointed out, that the Canon was formed only very slowly over several generations, and even the individual works contained in what we now accept as the Canon were written over a period that extends from roughly 50 to roughly 110, and it is arguably the case that none of the Apostles still lived in the year 110.”
i) He doesn’t bother to explain how he comes up with this liberal dating scheme, and it’s hardly a cogent objection to the Protestant position since conservative Evangelical scholars would reject his liberal dating scheme.
ii) At the same time, if every apostle died before AD 110, then that automatically disqualifies the NT apocrypha. So he’s just given us a chronological criterion for rejecting the NT apocrypha. And that criterion would be just as valid on a more conservative dating scheme.
“Add to this the fact that the authors of the Scriptural texts were themselves mistaken about the meaning of what they were writing (they clearly thought that Jesus would return for a second time in bodily form during their lifetime, and they said as much in their Holy Writ).”
It is suicidal for a Catholic apologist to attack the infallibility of Scripture. For it’s incredible to affirm that Popes and councils can be infallible if you deny that Bible writers can be infallible.
“Another way to put this point would be to note that infallibility is not inspiration, that is, it is not, in fact, the voice of God speaking in the Pope's heart. It is, rather, a providential aid that the Pope enjoys by divine grace. Hence it is the Pope himself, and not God, who is the author of the teachings that are made by virtue of the charism of infallibility.”
So an uninspired Pope can be infallible, but an inspired Bible writer cannot be infallible? Once again, it’s quite ad hoc to suppose that Biblical documents are errant while magisterial documents are inerrant.
One can logically affirm the inerrancy of Scripture without affirming the inerrancy of the (extraordinary) Magisterium, but why would anyone affirm the reverse?
I’ve gleaned some quotes from his blog:
http://examinelife.blogspot.com/
These strike me as his major arguments against the Protestant rule of faith. If I overlooked an important argument, you’re welcome to draw that to my attention.
“There are some who claim that the canonical texts are the only ‘inspired’ texts, and we accept them not because they are the product of a particular community but because they are inspired. But of course the texts themselves do not make any claims to being inspired that cannot be found in the Gnostic texts as well, so to believe the one claim of inspiration rather than the other is rationally unwarranted without the added witness of a particular community that one endorses as having the special charism of handing on the orthodox faith to future generations.”
i) Why assume that the criterion consists of a revelatory claim to inspiration along with a charismatic community to spiritually discern the validity of the claim? As far as Gnostic apocrypha are concerned, one doesn’t need a “special charism” to give them the boot. If they claim to be written by contemporaries of the events they relay, even though they are demonstrably written long after the death of the (pseudonymous) author, then their anachronistic character is sufficient to brand them as pious frauds or forgeries.
ii) Why couldn’t the evangelical “community” lay claim to a “special charism?”
iii) In Catholicism, is it the “community” or the Magisterium that makes this determination?
“What is the nature of that witness, exactly? After all, the Gnostic communities had preaches and teachers, and they were attempting to hand on a version of the faith as well. Is it, as our author would have us believe, nothing more than a matter of individual judgment, made separately and uniquely each and every generation, to decide which set of texts to accept, which teachings to adopt, which beliefs to hold de fide? Am I to believe that our author has himself examined each and every one of the surviving Gnostic texts, and has decided literally on his own authority, and for no other reason, that it is the canonical texts of the New Testament that are authoritative? If so, how on earth did he come to know that?”
The Protestant rule of faith (sola Scriptura) does not preclude the use of expert testimony or secondary sources.
“Frankly, I'm not at all sure that he has in fact conducted such an investigation, but even if he has I see no compelling reason for him to choose orthodoxy rather than heresy on the basis of these texts alone.”
I agree. Orthodoxy doesn’t have to be the criterion. Anachronism can be a criterion. Was it written by the putative author? Does he claim to be contemporary of the people and events he is writing about?
“Some folks may say things like ‘Oh, the canonical texts present a much more plausible picture of Jesus than the Gnostic texts,’ but that really is a desperate little argument, grasping at the frailest of straws. There's nothing in the canonical gospels that is intrinsically more plausible than anything in the Gospel of Thomas, for example. People accept the canonical texts, whether they like to admit it or not, for no other reason than that these are the texts that the Church has preserved for us. In short, the texts are accepted on the basis of the Church's authority to determine the content of our faith.”
Did “the Church” preserve these texts? Did the Vatican sometime in the 2C set up a scriptorium to preserve and reproduce the canonical texts? Is that a primitive office of the Curia?
“In fact, plenty of Popes have taught things that were not authentic Magisterial teachings, and nobody ever had any duty to submit themselves to such teachings. When a Pope teaches heresy, he ceases to be Pope, and there is certainly no virtue involved in submitting oneself to the teachings of a heretic who is not the Pope but who claims to be.”
Well, that’s very interesting. Suppose a heretical Pope issues a heretical encyclical in which he claims to be speaking ex cathedra? Is it up to the laity to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy? And if the laity has that level of spiritual discernment, who needs the Magisterium?
“An interesting facet of this form of infallibility is rather easier to see if one imagines the situation of the neophyte in the second and third quarters of the first century, before any of the New Testament texts had been committed to writing.”
The third quarter of the 1C would take us to AD 75 (as the terminus ad quem). Not one NT text had been committed to writing by AD 75?
Does he have the slightest idea what he’s talking about? Even Catholic NT scholars like Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, Murphy-O'Connor, and Luke Timothy Johnson wouldn’t date the totality of the NT that late.
“During the period immediately following the death of Our Lord there was a variety of groups claiming to be followers of the Christ, but they certainly did not all agree on the nature of what it meant to be such a follower. Some versions of the story were decidedly heretical.”
What is his evidence that “immediately” after the death of Christ, there were a variety of heretical groups presenting heretical biographies of Christ?
“These versions came later to be committed to writing as well as the more familiar (to us) orthodox texts, but for the neophyte of the years A.D. 33-80 there were no Gospel accounts other than those that were preached orally in the local house-churches in which the Christians met.”
This assumes that all four canonical Gospels were all written after AD 80. Where’s the argument?
“The neophyte had to trust that the word he was hearing was authentic and authoritative. The only way to have such trust was to accept, by virtue of divine grace, the truth of what was preached. Certainly the Holy Spirit would not provide divine grace to believe a false account: it is an article of our faith that orthodoxy became what it is by virtue of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit himself.”
How does that follow? We have cult members in our own day and age. There’s no guarantee that a neophyte will not be exposed to a false gospel, and believe whatever he is told. Indeed, there were certainly adherents of heretical sects from the 2C onward, and even prior to the 2C.
From a Reformed standpoint, the only guarantee is that God will bring his elect to a saving knowledge of the truth. But reprobates may well be dupes for every wind of doctrine.
“The consensus refers to that which unites Christians, namely, their belief in what is true and that they are inspired to believe by the Holy Spirit.”
And why can’t a Protestant lay claim to the same charismatic validation for himself or his own faith-community?
“It is sometimes said, mostly by Protestants but sometimes by Catholics and Anglicans, that there exists such a thing as ‘the plain meaning of Scripture’ (PMS) and this thing ought to serve as the normative criterion for the acceptance or rejection of any proposed assertion about Christianity in particular but sometimes of any assertion at all.’
Who says that, exactly? There are some popular, old-time dispensationalists like John Walvoord, Charles Ryrie, Charles Lee Feinberg, and Paul Lee Tan who talk that way. But I don’t think the current generation at, say, Dallas Theological Seminary is that naïve.
Certainly older Reformed writers like Oswald Allis didn’t take that position. Modern Protestant hermeneuticists like Thiselton, Poythress, Ricoeur, and Vanhoozer don’t take that position. Modern Reformed exegetes like Beale, Longman, McComiskey, Poythress, Ridderbos, O. P. Robertson, D. A. Carson, and Waltke (to name a few) don’t take that position—not to mention other Protestant commentators.
You can find anyone to say anything, but since Carson is attacking the Protestant rule of faith, it is irresponsible to ignore the leading scholars in the field.
“First of all it must be admitted by all sides that, whatever else one must mean by the expression ‘the plain meaning of scripture’, it means, first and foremost, a certain kind of interpretation of scripture.”
i) Of course, this is predicated on the false premise of Scripture’s “plain meaning.” Carson has cited no major Protestant exegete or hermeneuticist who takes that position.
ii) Meaning and interpretation are hardly synonymous. Meaning is the object and objective of interpretation. But they are not interchangeable—otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish between the true meaning and a misinterpretation.
“The first factor that must be taken into consideration is the origin of the Scriptures themselves, and this factor has two aspects. On the one hand, there is the question of the individual texts themselves and their historical origins. By’"individual texts’ what I mean is, for example, the text of the Gospel of Matthew, or the text of St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians. This aspect can be further divided into two distinct problems: the text of these works as we have them today and the text of these works as they may have existed in the first century. There is not only no reason to suppose that these two things are the same in any particular instance, there is actually every reason to suppose that they are, in fact, quite different.”
There are two basic issues here:
i) Does any particular MS differ from the Urtext? Probably. Of course, even then, it doesn’t follow that the divergence is significant. Most scribal errors are trivial.
ii) Does a critical edition of the NT differ from the Urtext? To a lesser extent than any particular MS since the point of textual criticism is to reconstruct the Urtext.
“The second factor that must be taken into consideration is the nature of the community that received these texts and made use of them for determining the content of the faith. This community is itself a historical phenomenon and it is vitally important to assess whether this community suddenly ceased to exist in the 16th, or indeed, any other, century. There are two essential elements to this factor that must be taken into consideration: its communal nature and its accepted standards of discourse, including its use of literary genres such as myth, history, biography, and epistolography. Let us call this second factor the ‘cultural context’.”
I happen to agree with Carson on this point. Unfortunately for him, it torpedoes his own position. He likes to use communal language, but, for him, the relevant “community” boils down to the Magisterium. Yet the Roman Catholic Magisterium is completely different from the target community for the books of the Bible.
“The final factor I will call the ‘semantic context’. By this what I have in mind is the simple fact that meaning and reference are culturally bound concepts, and the plain fact of the matter is that, as similar as we may be in some ways to the peoples of 2000 years ago, we are mostly very different. Cultures, like every other biological category, evolve over time, and when the timespan is great enough cultures may evolve in such a way as to become incommensurate with what they once were. Although I do not think that the Christian community as such has evolved to that degree in 2000 years, nevertheless our capacity to understand the earliest Christian community is a function of our capacity to cognitively grasp the overall cultural milieu of 2000 years ago, and our capacity to do that is severely limited by the vast distance of time and space that separates the contemporary Western intellectual scene from the intellectual scene of the first century in the Mediterranean basin.”
i) This is an argument for the grammatico-historical method.
ii) I wouldn’t say that our capacity to grasp the cultural milieu is “severely” limited by time and space. There’s such a thing as cultural universals. One can also have a general knowledge of the period.
iii) Assuming, however, that the situation is that dire, historical distance also limits our cognitive grasp of the church fathers and church councils. So Carson’s scepticism will boomerang on his own alternative.
iv) Notice the implicitly Marcionite slant of his statement. For him, the Bible is the NT.
“I will begin by saying a few things about the historical context that affect the viability of PMS. It is a historical fact that the earliest New Testament document is St Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, which has been dated by most scholars to the year 50 or 51, though some scholars argue for a date as much as a decade earlier.”
Yet he just told us that no NT text was written before the fourth quarter of the 1C. But his date for 1 Thessalonians would take us to the borderline between the second and third quarter of the 1C. Carson is so addlebrained.
“If we accept a date of around AD 27-30 for the death of Our Lord and the beginning of the Apostolic Age, there is a gap of at least 10 and as many as 20 years before any document was even available to be counted as ‘Scripture’. During this period, the ‘Scriptures’ as such for the new Christian community would have consisted solely of the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the various holy books circulating at that time among the various Jewish communities in and around Palestine and as far south and west as Alexandria (where the translation was made). It is important to note, as well, that the Septuagint contains more books than what we now think of as the Hebrew Scriptures: not all of the books contained the Septuagint had Hebrew originals, but they were all used in one way or another by one or another local Jewish community.”
i) This is a methodological error. He is inferring the state of an allegedly 1C Alexandrian/LXX canon from MSS of the LXX that date far into the Christian era.
ii) He’s also assuming, for some odd reason, that the only OT which the 1C had at its disposal was the LXX. But while that might be the case for Gentile Christians and Hellenistic Messianic Jews, it’s hardly applicable to Palestinian Messianic Jews. The 1C church was ethnically and linguistically diverse.
iii) The fact that NT writers prove the gospel from the OT already evinces their Scriptural orientation. And they appeal to Scripture even when they are addressing a Gentile audience.
“The earliest surviving Gospel account is that of St Mark, which most scholars date to between 60 and 75, with a majority favoring the period between 68-73.”
Once again, this dating scheme contradicts is previous dating scheme:
“…the second and third quarters of the first century, before any of the New Testament texts had been committed to writing.”
“These versions came later to be committed to writing as well as the more familiar (to us) orthodox texts, but for the neophyte of the years A.D. 33-80 there were no Gospel accounts other than those that were preached orally in the local house-churches in which the Christians met.”
So he’s dating Mark to the third quarter of the 1C, whereas he previous told us that nothing was committed to writing until the fourth quarter of the 1C, sometime after AD 80. Carson is so addlebrained.
“Hence there was no written Gospel for a minimum of 30 years after the death of Our Lord and thus no Scriptural account of his life and teachings.”
A minimum of 30 years, on his dating scheme for the death of Christ (AD 27-30) would bring us up to AD 57-60 for the first written Gospel. So where did he come up with the post-80 figure? Carson is so addlebrained.
“It is possible, of course, that the Gospel of Mark is based upon some other, now lost, written account, but there is no empirical evidence to support such a claim.”
Actually, Maurice Casey has argued that there is empirical evidence to support such a claim.
“There is some textual evidence that Mark, Matthew, and Luke relied on some common sources, but there is no way of telling whether those common sources were written texts or oral traditions.”
The argument for reliance on a written exemplar is based on the degree of verbal correspondence as Matthew and Luke reproduce big chunks of Mark—with minor variations.
“There is, then, a rather difficult problem to be overcome by anyone who wants to claim that the only source of authoritative teaching within the Christian community is the "plain meaning of Scripture", since there were no distinctively Christian scriptures for the duration of the first Christian generation.”
This, of course, is the point he’s been building up to all along, although he arrived at this point by very maladroit means. His grand trump card against sola Scriptura was that sola Scriptura is inapplicable to 1C Christians. Of course, that’s a straw man argument:
i) Far from being incompatible with sola Scriptura, the Protestant rule of faith presupposes the difference between the epistemic situation of a Christian or Jew living in the time of public revelation, and a Christian living after the cessation of public revelation.
ii) Sola scriptura does not mean that Scripture must be our only source of religious knowledge, but rather, that Scripture is “the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined” (WCF 1.10).
“Quite the contrary, what distinctively Christian Scriptures we do possess owe their very existence to the oral traditions of that first generation that were committed to writing only as the Apostolic Age drew to a close and the growing Christian community began to realize that the message would have to be handed on to future generations, given that the Lord was not returning during their lifetime in the way that many of them had originally believed he would.”
That’s a stock, form-critical argument. But even if 1C Christians in general were dependent on oral tradition for their knowledge of the gospel, it hardly follows that the NT writers were also dependent on oral tradition for their knowledge of the gospel. That requires a separate argument.
“In the end, it was the Christian community itself, operating independently of the writings themselves, that decided which writings were, and which were not, authoritative. The Canon evolved not only very slowly, but it evolved in different ways in different regions. As Bruce Metzger has shown in his book The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origins, Development, and Significance (Oxford: 1987), the Canon evolved independently in the East and in the West, and there was not always full agreement on which writings were to be regarded as authoritative.”
i) If an evolutionary canon is a problem for Protestants (and I’m not conceding the premise), then an evolutionary Magisterium is a problem for Catholics. The Catholic Magisterium has evolved far more slowly than the NT canon. Indeed, the Catholic Magisterium is still in process of development.
ii) Carson exaggerates how long it took. The Gospels and Pauline epistles enjoyed early and widespread recognition.
iii) David Trobisch has argued on text-critical grounds for a mid-2C NT canon.
iv) Carson also commits the elementary blunder of confounding a historical process of recognition with the way in which various NT documents are inherently interrelated. For example, suppose the three installments of Dante’s trilogy were issued consecutively and circulated separately before they were reissued in a collected edition. But it’s obvious that the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso go together, even if it took a lot longer for them to be bound together.
“Works that appeared to conflict with the Christian community's sense of the Gospel message, works such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter, were rejected, in spite of the fact that they did not contain any outright contradictions of anything contained in what we now think of as the Canonical Gospels (beyond the sorts of minor contradictions that the Canonical Gospels show among themselves).”
Once again, he’s talking about evident forgeries. These were written long after the demise of Peter or Thomas.
“In light of this historical context, then, it is implausible to suggest that the ‘Scriptures’, as such, constituted anything like an authoritative source of doctrine for the first generation of Christians, or to suggest that as the Canon was forming there would have been an intuitively obvious reading of the authoritative texts that would have been obvious to any reasonable person.”
This disregards the role of the OT in the apostolic kerygma.
“Indeed, heresy was as common then as it is now, if not more so, in spite of the fact that the Christian community was much smaller then than it is now.”
And that nicely undercuts the Catholic appeal to the antiquity of tradition as a mark of apostolicity.
“At this point the importance of the cultural context should be coming into higher relief. The earliest Christian community made decisions about the content of the Christian faith not by means of appealing to specific texts, but by gathering together as a community to determine the consensus fidelium. Indeed, the very texts that we now look to for authoritative teaching teach us this very fact, as we see the Apostles gathering together in Jerusalem to determine what is to be done about certain beliefs and practices that impact the growing Christian community.”
i) The speakers in Acts 15 are Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James. All four were in a historical position to know about the gospel apart from specific texts. That is hardly analogous to the epistemic situation of a Christian living centuries after the fact.
ii) Even so, what cinched the argument at the Council of Jerusalem was an appeal to a specific text of Scripture (Amos 9:11-12; cf. Acts 15: 15-17. So Acts 15 actually undercuts Carson’s contention.
“As that community evolved over time, it grew distant from its Jewish origins. We see this, too, in the way that the earliest Christian community interpreted the Scriptural texts that it did have, the Septuagint. On their reading, the book of the Prophet Isaiah foretold that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, a term that is arguably ambiguous in both Hebrew and Greek but that was taken to mean not merely a ‘young girl’ (the meaning of the Greek term used in the Septuagint translation) but a ‘virgin’ in the sense of a young girl who had never had sexual relations with a man.”
i) “Virgin” is one of the meanings assigned to parthenos in A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, 2:359.
And as Celas Spicq, a Catholic scholar, explains:
“The LXX uses parthenos (Hebrew betulah) for an adolescent girl who has not been engaged (Exod 22:15-16), ‘who has not belonged to a man’ (Lev 21:3), sometimes emphasizing youthfulness, sometimes physiological virginity: ‘young virgins who had not had relations with a male’ (Judg 21:12). This point is as novel as it is constant (‘Here is my daughter, who is a virgin’)…she is a virgin, since she is not married and everyone thinks she is one. This is what confirms the meaning of partheneia (Hebrew betulim): physical integrity, the distinctive index of virginity,” Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, 3:47.
Since the LXX was a Jewish translation, this reflects a Jewish understanding of the Isaiah oracle. It is not an ex post factor Christian understanding.
iii) Matthew was also a Jew.
iv) The virginal interpretation is reinforced by the category of a divine sign in Isaiah usage—indicating some sort of portent or prodigy, of which a natural conception would scarcely suffice.
v) Carson also fails to distinguish between sense and reference. The verse can refer to a virgin, even if the Hebrew word itself had a somewhat wider semantic range. And if Isaiah wanted to denote an individual who was a virgin, he chose the Hebrew word whose semantic range most closely approximates virginity—especially in that cultural context, where virginity was the default assumption for Jewish girls.
“As the young community began to experience persecution at the hands of the Jews, they continued to sing the Psalms at their gatherings, but the words took on new meaning for them, as the enemies being referred to were no longer Babylonians or Philistines, but the Jews, or just sin in general. These sorts of cases are particularly troublesome for the defender of PMS, since the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ in these cases is really quite different from what the earliest Christian community imputed to the texts.”
No, this just means that they rightly view their own situation as analogous.
“This is an important feature of language, and it illustrates that in actual human languages terms must be capable of reference if they are to have any meaning, and reference is also public. It connects our terms and concepts to ontological correlates out there in the world, and makes it possible for one person to communicate to another about objective reality. The defender of PMS does not deny this, indeed, he actively relies on it, since he is assuming that the meaning of Scripture, if it is read in a simple and straightforward way, will refer in a perfectly simple and straightforward way that any man can discern for himself.”
Whether or not this is what the hypothetical defender of PMS believes, no sophisticated Protestant exegete operates with such a naïve outlook.
Moreover, the Westminster Confession has a far more nuanced statement of Scriptural perspicuity:
“All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (1.7).
Carson is a theological arsonist. He keeps burning straw men. At the very least, someone needs to impose a burn ban.
“And yet, the very person who endorses this PMS view, denies to the language of Scripture the very element of linguistic usage that underpins his view: i.e., the prerogative of the linguistic community to correct the individual. According to the defender of PMS, there is not only no need to be ‘corrected’ by the community, since every man can ‘correct’ himself, there is some sense in which to be "corrected" by the community is to abandon one's right and duty to determine the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ for himself. There is, in short, a very serious contradiction in conception at work here. Without a community to determine what any meaning is, let alone a ‘plain’ meaning, there can be no such thing as meaning at all. Hence, the defender of PMS puts himself in the awkward position of saying that the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’ can be determined by every individual for himself, in spite of the fact that all meanings are determined by the community that uses tha language. In the case of the Christian community, it is difficult to see how that community is not a diachronic institution that has existed for nearly 2000 years now and, hence, to determine the meaning of any utterance made within that community, including within that community's writings, one must consult the linguistic practices and rules of that entire community, that is, of the Tradition.”
i) Carson is indulging a bait-and-switch tactic; indeed, more than one. He talks about the “entire community”, as if he were a populist, but for him, this boils down to the Magisterium, which is a tiny subset of the Christian community.
ii) The linguistic community to whom the Bible was written, and within which (linguistic practice) it was written, was not in any sense the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s a completely anachronistic identification of the target community.
iii) Protestants don’t deny the value of an interpretive community. But there’s a transparency to Protestant theology. A theologian or commentator must walk the layman through the process by which he arrived at his conclusion. And his conclusion is only as good as his supporting argument.
In Catholicism, by contrast, it’s an argument from authority. You must believe in the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption of Mary because the Pope says so. And this has nothing to do with linguistic practice, per se.
“It is tempting to say that the text means what the author of the text intended it to mean, but such a temptation, like the temptation to pick at a scab, ought to be resisted if one wants to avoid further trouble. Granted, the author meant something by his text, but it is unclear why, in this context, we should care very greatly what he meant. What matters far more is why the Church thought that the text ought to be read by other Christians. It is possible that the author of the Gospel of Thomas intended his text to be orthodox, and to be so-regarded by orthodox Christians. But whether he intended that or not, what matters is that the Church thinks that the text fails to be orthodox, and does not recommend it as Christian reading. So the Church's reasons for accepting a text into the Canon of Scriptures are essentially more normative in settling the meaning and significance of a text than either mere surface grammar or authorial intent.”
Carson is now confusing meaning with truth. The fact that a text means whatever the author intended it to mean does not imply that what it means is true.
“There is no empirical evidence to support the view that there is any distinction of this kind. Certainly the Scriptures themselves do not bear it out, since they nowhere refer to the Church as being one kind of ontological structure when producing texts, another when reading them, or one kind of ontological structure while the Apostles live, another after they have died.”
This assumes that the Church “produces” the Bible.
“Instead, we read everywhere that there is One Holy, Catholic, and Apostlic Church, and what matters is that the Church is Apostolic, not that it is composed of Apostles. AC, in producing the Scriptures, is an ontological structure that has certain properties, including the property of being inspired by the Holy Spirit to produce the Scriptures. That property has never disappeared; what has happened is that the Church, by virtue of her power to make such decisions, declared the Canon to be closed and herself to be the reader (that is, the authoritative one) of that Canon.”
This is not an argument for the Catholic position. Rather, it takes the Catholic position for granted. So it begs the question.
“(It is worth adding here, merely as an aside, that the view that the Scriptures can be assumed to accurately reflect anything like the autograph view of AC is hopelessly naive in the first place, since the text of the New Testament is a notorious mess. Not only do we have no reason to believe that we are genuinely reading the authorial intent of the original writers, we do not even have any reason to believe that we are reading the same texts, since there are thousands of manuscripts exhibiting untold numbers of textual variants, all of which have to be adjudicated to produce the text that we read as a Church or as an individual. It is the Church, by and large, that makes such adjudication possible.)”
i) Notice that he doesn’t cite any textual critics to substantiate his indiscriminate scepticism. I’d add that one also needs to produce critical editions of the church fathers.
ii) Does the Catholic church adjudicate textual variants? Does the Curia include an office of textual criticism?
“Since the Scriptures themselves do not warrant the distinction, any empirical evidence for it will have to come from outside of the Scriptures. In this context it pays to remember what I have already pointed out, that the Canon was formed only very slowly over several generations, and even the individual works contained in what we now accept as the Canon were written over a period that extends from roughly 50 to roughly 110, and it is arguably the case that none of the Apostles still lived in the year 110.”
i) He doesn’t bother to explain how he comes up with this liberal dating scheme, and it’s hardly a cogent objection to the Protestant position since conservative Evangelical scholars would reject his liberal dating scheme.
ii) At the same time, if every apostle died before AD 110, then that automatically disqualifies the NT apocrypha. So he’s just given us a chronological criterion for rejecting the NT apocrypha. And that criterion would be just as valid on a more conservative dating scheme.
“Add to this the fact that the authors of the Scriptural texts were themselves mistaken about the meaning of what they were writing (they clearly thought that Jesus would return for a second time in bodily form during their lifetime, and they said as much in their Holy Writ).”
It is suicidal for a Catholic apologist to attack the infallibility of Scripture. For it’s incredible to affirm that Popes and councils can be infallible if you deny that Bible writers can be infallible.
“Another way to put this point would be to note that infallibility is not inspiration, that is, it is not, in fact, the voice of God speaking in the Pope's heart. It is, rather, a providential aid that the Pope enjoys by divine grace. Hence it is the Pope himself, and not God, who is the author of the teachings that are made by virtue of the charism of infallibility.”
So an uninspired Pope can be infallible, but an inspired Bible writer cannot be infallible? Once again, it’s quite ad hoc to suppose that Biblical documents are errant while magisterial documents are inerrant.
One can logically affirm the inerrancy of Scripture without affirming the inerrancy of the (extraordinary) Magisterium, but why would anyone affirm the reverse?
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