Purgatory now

C. S. Lewis helped to popularize the notion of purgatory among quasi-evangelicals. That's a reason not to get your theology from Lewis.

One issue is how we define purgatory. Suppose we define purgatory as means of weaning believers from the attractions of sin. On that definition, this life is purgatory. God uses this life to wean Christians from sin. By experiencing the deleterious consequences of sin, it helps Christians to foster an aversion to sin. Sin has short-term attractions, but it causes long-term suffering. For Christians, life in a fallen world is remedial punishment. 

In the intermediate state, we''ll presumably remember the deleterious consequences of sin. However, the intermediate state won't have the temptations to sin that bombard us in this life. So purgatory, in a traditional sense, is superfluous and misplaced. 

C. S. Lewis as a Parishioner

[Ronald Head pastored the church Jack and Warnie Lewis attended.]

My parishioners knew little about them [Jack and Warnie] and had no idea who they were. They looked like countrymen, walked abound in old clothes, smoking pipes, visiting public houses, and fitted in happily with the local scene. Their conversation sparkled, and seemed to deal with any subject with equal brilliance. 

It was during the period of the 1939 War that the Professor [C. S. Lewis]–already known widely for The Screwtape Letters–became famous as a Christian apologist on account of his broadcast talks and lectures to the Forces, leading up to the publication of Mere Christianity and other works of that kind. As far as I can tell, this fact remained unknown to the great majority of the faithful at Quarry, or they entirely failed to realize that this brilliant expositor was the man sitting concealed by a pillar in the aisle. My parishioners in general, at the time, had not read either the science fiction, Out of the Silent Planet, or the children's stories. There were, of course, some, like Miss Griggs and Mrs Barnes-Griggs at Tewsfield, who had read everything; but they were quite exceptional.

C. S. Lewis–who, as I have said, became know to his intimates as Jack–usually arrived early to Church services, and would sit there quietly reading the Psalms or other parts of the Prayer Book…I've often though that Meditations on the Psalms in some respects occurred in my church…Letters to Malcolm, number 21, reports on an actual conversation on prayer with me.

In July 1963 the Professor was seriously ill indeed in the Acland Home and the Radcliffe Informatory. Father Hooper took me down to Keble to confer with Dr Farrer in these moments of crisis. It was not possible to get the Major [Warnie] back; he also was in the hospital. Happily, the Professor–after being anointed by Father Michael Watts, the Precentor of the Cathedral–recovered, and in time returned to The Kilns with a male nurse temporarily and Walter Hooper permanently added to the household. 

Lewis's heart attack, and its complications, led to his resignation from the Cambridge professorship. I then began communicating him at home on a fortnightly basis–which situation continued until his death. In the nature of the case there was a period when I had long conversations with the Professor–covering, of course, the usual field of spiritual matters…

He was a very humble man, self-effacing, never speaking of his remarkable talents, or his service to other people. One cold note his care in answering letters…Of course I remember his generosity in giving money away; not, I believe, so much to institutions, but rather to individuals he could help…scholars, clergy, all sorts of people. Ronald Head, "C. S. Lewis the Parishioner." Roger White, Judith Wolfe, & Brendan Wolfe, C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society (Oxford University Press 2015), 180-85. 

Prayer, providence, and importunity

[Peter Bide was a student of C. S. Lewis who later became an Anglican priest.] 

I had come up to Oxford in 1936, at the age of 24, to read English. After I took my degree in 1939, I kept up with Lewis during the war when I was a Royal Marine. When I came through Oxford I used to go and see him, and later on, when I was ordained, I continued the habit.

My first parish was Hangleton on the edge of Hove. As well as having this tiny medieval church in the middle of a down, with great fields around it, I had care of the local "fever hospital", as we used to call it in those days. In 1954 I think it was, we had a terrible epidemic of polio, and people were streaming into the hospital.

There came an afternoon when the Bishop of Lewes came to baptize my latest child,and after the baptism I came out of my tiny church and somebody said, "Do you know that the Gallagher's boy is seriously ill"? Now the Gallaghers were Roman Catholic Irish who had just come to live in my parish. I said, "No I didn't know that he was ill, but I'll go and see him as soon as I've got rid of the Bishop.

I went down to the Gallagher's, and it was clear from the beginning that something very serious was going on because there they all were, with Mrs Gallagher at the center, handkerchief in her hands, and all the local Irish community around her in a tiny room. I said to her, "What's the matter, Mrs Gallagher?" and she said, "Michael's up in the hospital and they say he's doing to die." "Well," I said, to her, "there's one thing I can say about that; the doctors haven't got the gift of life and death. Only God has the gift of life and death, and what you've got to do is to relax your fear and your distress insofar as you can, and rest on the mercy of God. Meanwhile I'll go and see him."

I got on my scooter and I went up the half-made road to the hospital. And as I went, it was as if a little green man was sitting on the handles, babbling away in my ear: "What the hell do you think you're going to do? Have you got your bones with you? Why don't you take those out and thrown them round? You're going to see this boy? What can you do about it?"

Well, I didn't turn around and go back; I don't know why, but I didn't. I got to the hospital and put on my gown and my mask and went into the room where the boy was. It was absolutely clear that something very serious was happening to this child, because the sister was sitting in the room with him, an unusual thing for a sister to do. There was nobody else there, but she was sitting there with him, and I went up to the bedside and there he lay. His face was the color which I had come to associate with death, a sort of leaden, blue-y white. His eyes were wide open and turned up so only the whites were visible. He was flailing the pillow with his hands. If there was ever a child dying, it was this boy; and at the same time, as I saw this, I had this sort of feeling that this was a crux. Something about my whole vocation hung on it.

I didn't touch the boy. I went down on my knees beside him and I said some simple, naive, corny prayer like, "Lord, look at this Thy child, if it be Thy gracious will, let him recover in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen." Then I got up and  I turned to the sister and said, "Well, now I hope he'll be all right". And she looked at me as if I was mad not unnaturally, not unnaturally: I thought I was mad myself And I went back and I got ready for that evening.

This was Lent, and I was giving a whole series of Lenten evening lectures on the nature of faith, such as most of you have suffered under at some stage or another. The preceding week, I had been discussing the healing of Jairus's daughter, which makes a very good story for discussing the nature of faith and what is involved in faith. And I said to this group, "I'm sure that since last week, in your prayers and thoughts, you have been concerning yourself with the nature of faith. Now here is Michael Gallagher. I you will set everything that you have learnt in this church, all the many blessings that have come to you through sacrament and worship, and put Michael's welfare at the heart of this, then he will get better." I heard myself say this, and of course it was a terrible thing to say. I was putting all these people's faith at risk, and equally well I'd drawn a blank check on the Holy Spirit, which is not in my judgment a very good thing to do. But I went on with what I had to say to them that particular evening, and when I got onto my scooter again, I went straight up to the hospital.

When I got into the ward, the night sitter was on duty. I can remember her face very well. I said to her, "How is he?" and she said, "I don't know why, but he's getting better." Two days later, the chief physician at the Children's Hospital in Brighton rang up the "fever hospital" and asked what the result of the autopsy was, and was told he was sitting up in bed having his breakfast.

Now, I found this theologically extremely puzzling. I had visited all sorts of other patients in this hospital: I'd prayed for them, I'd laid hands on some of them, and they'd died. Why was Michael (who incidentally turned out to a right tearaway) selected from all this? It really worried me. It may not worry you, but it worried me like nothing else, and the next time I went up to see Jack Lewis, I discussed it with him. So we went over the top of Shotover, as we nearly always did, and I told him how I found this incomprehensible.

I don't think he'd got any special answers to this–I don't remember what he said about it, to tell you the truth. But this is the basis on which he sent me later on. When Joy was diagnosed as having a sarcoma, he wrote to me and said would I be kind enough to come up and lay hands on her. Well, how could I say "no"? He was a friend of mine and this was a terrible situation, and of course I had to say "yes". So I went.

When I got there, up to the quarry where he lived, Jack said, "Peter, what I'm going to ask you isn't fair. Do you think you could marry us? I've asked the Bishop. I've asked all my friends at the faculty here, and none of them will." He said, "It doesn't seem to me to be fair. They won't marry us because Joy was divorced, but the man she married in the first place was a divorced man, so in the eyes of the church, surely there isn't any marriage anyway. What are they making all this fuss about?" 

Well, I must admit that I had always thought that the Church of England's attitude to marriage was untenable…And so I married them in the hospital, with Warnie and the ward sister as witnesses. I laid hands on Joy, and she lived for another three years.

I don't understand this, I never have done; but that is the story, and what you see in Shadowlands had little or nothing to do with it. It made me very cross that there have been about six different treatments of this episode in the course of the last ten years and nobody has every come and asked me what happened. It strikes me as absolutely extraordinary. A. N. Wilson went all the way to America to talk to somebody who had spoken to me: an expensive journey, when he could have walked down the road and found me himself. It's a very odd thing, but now you know what the truth is. My own wife died of cancer about a year before Joy Lewis, and I wrote him and told him about it, of course, and he said "There's nothing I can say Peter." Peter Bide, "Marrying C. S. Lewis." Roger White, Judith Wolfe, & Brendan Wolfe, C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society (Oxford University Press 2015), 187-90.

What's the Gospel?

1. This question lies at the heart of Christian theology, yet the question is deceptively simple. One challenge is that we're using to resorting to theological shorthand. The NT uses key words borrowed from the OT. And those words derive their summary connotations from entire paradigmatic narratives. They then get translated into Latin words, that are retranslated into  English synonyms. We use traditional categories like "sin", "atonement", "redemption", "grace", "justification", "salvation", "the cross". But what does that mean?

There are two opposite ways they can lose meaning. One is through unfamiliarity. Someone who's biblically illiterate. Someone who's not a from a Christian culture.

Conversely, through overfamiliarity. It can be like dead metaphors, where people forget (or never knew) what the metaphor originally represented. What's the source of the metaphor? Even Christians can forget what these words stand for. 

2. Left to their own devices, humans are evil. Evil is hatred of good and the source of good. Evil is ingratitude.

Evil has two sides: 

i) To be blameworthy. Having blameworthy beliefs and attitudes. Committing blameworthy actions.

ii) To suffer from malice and ill-will. Alienation from the source of good. An inclination to destroy anyone who gets in your way. 

Humans are born into this condition. They don't become evil, although they can become more evil. 

We can see this in our own culture, as it becomes increasingly secularized or post-Christian. Abortion, antinatalism, and euthanasia. Intolerance for babies, the elderly, and the developmentally disabled. The impulse to destroy babies, the elderly, and the developmentally disabled through abortion or euthanasia. Murderous ill-will. We can see this in people who hate God's design for human nature. Hate to be a normal man or woman. 

Our society is increasingly Nietzschean. Not coincidentally, Nietzsche was an apostate.

2. It's possible to wrong someone without harming someone. Take the Biblical prohibition not to trip the blind or curse the deaf (Lev 19:14). The motivation to trip the blind isn't necessarily to injure them, but to humiliate them, and take advantage of their disability. That's even clearer in the case of cursing the deaf. They can't hear you. 

The point behind the biblical prohibition is that we have a duty to protect the vulnerable. It's especially vicious to play on their handicap. 

Another example might be a celebrity memoir where the star defames a dead or senile parent. The star lies about their parents by claiming, falsely, that their parents were abusive. 

Technically, that doesn't harm the parent. They don't lose their livelihood. They don't suffer a physical injury. But it's a mark of contemptuous ingratitude toward those we owe the most. 

3. A paradox of evil is that, by dint of evil action or evil character, the wrongdoer is morally disqualified from climbing out of the hole he dug for himself. He desperately needs to be forgiven and repaired. 

But this means the offended party must act on behalf of the offending party. The offended party must absorb the punishment by taking the place of the offending party. Salvation by divine Incarnation, vicarious atonement, and sanctification. 

To have faith in Jesus is to acknowledge that only God can save you by acting on your behalf and in your place. 

4. What does it mean to be forgiven? Isaiah uses the anthropomorphic metaphor of forgetfulness (Isa 43:25). It's as if the offended party forgot that you wronged them. Yet you remember, and that's a cause for humility and gratitude.

5. Suppose one student hates another student. Maybe he hates the other student because the other student is a rival. He plants evidence in the rival student's locker to get him expelled. Maybe drugs or explosives. Yet he forgot to wipe his fingerprints. Or maybe there's a hidden security camera that recorded him planting the evidence. Or maybe he phoned in a bomb threat, in the name of the rival student–only the phone call is traceable to the malicious student rather than his target. Now the scheme backfires. 

Suppose, though, the rival student is in a position to destroy the evidence which incriminates the perp. He did something for the wrongdoer that the wrongdoer couldn't do for himself, even though he was the intended victim of the wrongdoer. That ought to make the malicious student thankful. Indeed, it ought to turn an enemy into a friend. That's like vicarious atonement. 

6. Consider someone who's clinically insane. He requires psychotropic drugs to restore his sanity, but his condition renders him incompetent to consent to treatment. He doesn't think he's crazy. He thinks everyone else is crazy! He requires an intervention. Help from the outside. Initially, he can't even cooperate with the psychiatrist who medicates him. That's like monergistic regeneration. 

"Transgender men" in the military

From a former Marine. This is germane, not only to the coed military in general, but to the notion of "transgender men" (i.e. biological women who "self-identify" as men) in the military:

https://veritasdomain.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/when-gi-jane-has-her-monthly-pain/

Transgender squeegee punks

A stock objections to banning the transgendered from the military is that we ought to be grateful for their service to our country. I disagree. 

To begin with, the very fact that transgender members of the military are even using that appeal tells me their motivation for joining wasn't to defend our country, but to use their "service" as leverage to advance their social agenda. I refuse to reward their cynical moral extortion.  

I don't owe transgender soldiers any more gratitude than I owe squeegee bandits. Don't do something I didn't ask you to do, want you to do, or approve of, then pretend you were doing it for me. Don't attempt to put me in your debt against my will. Your emotional coercion is illegitimate. 

Did prayer save England?

Although there's room here for wishful thinking and self-deception, it's a striking window into what British Christians were thinking and praying on the eve of what appeared to be the unstoppable German advance. We know how the story ended–they didn't. The dramatic irony is intense, because they don't know the outcome. For them there's the agonizing suspense:

http://www.inspirationalchristians.org/rees-howells-intercessor/chapter-34-intercession-for-dunkirk/

I wouldn't put so much emphasis on one man. Many British Christians were in prayer.

Delta force, can I help ya?

This is germane to "transgender men" (i.e. biological women pretending to be men) in the military:

http://rockingwithhawking.blogspot.com/2017/07/delta-delta-delta-force-can-i-help-ya.html

Eye of Sauron

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/343785-newly-declassified-memos-detail-extent-of-improper-obama-era-nsa

Lower fitness standards for women

Keep this in mind in reference to "transgender men" (i.e. biological women pretending to be men) in combat roles:

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/off-duty/military-fitness/2017/05/21/new-concerns-that-lower-fitness-standards-fuel-disrespect-for-women/

Disabled vet on transgender troop ban

https://thefederalist.com/2017/07/26/disabled-combat-veteran-speaks-out-on-trumps-transgender-military-ban/

Does skeptical theism entail moral skepticism?

I will comment on this essay:

Maitzen, S. (2013) The Moral Skepticism Objection to Skeptical Theism, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK.,ch30.

A Google search on the term “child torture” retrieves the following case among others: in 2010, four-year-old Dominick Calhoun of Argentine Township, Michigan, died after days of being beaten and burned by his mother’s boyfriend. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and this is the worst case of child abuse I’ve ever seen,” said the local police chief; “in all respects, he was tortured.” Dominick’s grandmother reported that “burns covered his body” and that his brain was “bashed out of his skull.” A neighbor told police he heard Dominick screaming, over and over again, “Mommy, make him stop.” Dominick’s crime? Wetting his pants.1

Where was God while this was going on? Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect God stand by and let someone torture Dominick to death? Atheists of course reply, “Nowhere: there is no God in the first place.”

Transgender troop ban

https://www.axios.com/pence-bannon-pushed-for-transgender-troop-ban-2465917198.html

"Kristin" Beck

A retired Navy SEAL Team 6 hero who is transgender had a message for President Donald Trump after he announced the US military would bar transgender people from serving.

"Let's meet face to face and you tell me I'm not worthy," Kristin Beck, a 20-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, told Business Insider on Wednesday. "Transgender doesn't matter. Do your service."

Beck is not just your average service member. Born Christopher Beck, she served for 20 years in the Navy with SEAL Teams 1, 5, and, eventually, the elite 6. She deployed 13 times over two decades, including stints in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She received the Bronze Star award for valor and the Purple Heart for wounds suffered in combat.

http://www.businessinsider.com/kristin-beck-trump-transgender-ban-2017-7

i) To begin with, a "transgender woman" is a biological male. But the logic of trangenderism is that "transgender men" (i.e. biological females) should be able to serve in elite forces. However, the fact that a "transgender woman" (i.e.. biological male) can be an effective Navy SEAL hardly means a "transgender man" can pull it off. Men and women have dramatically different physical and psychological aptitudes. For instance:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423888/women-in-combat-marine-corps-study

ii) In addition, I assume Beck wasn't on hormone therapy during his time as a Navy SEAL. But if, to be a "transgender woman," he must undergo hormone therapy, that will impair his speed, strength, and stamina. He'll no longer perform at peak ability, compared to his normal, untransitioned self. 

By the same token, would Beck have been a successful Navy SEAL if his parents put him on puberty blockers during adolescence? 

Same problem with the Bruce Jenner comparison. Think "Caitlyn" could still win the decathlon if he underwent hormone therapy? Not to mention hormone blockers as an adolescent boy. 

"Being transgender doesn't affect anyone else"

Tell that to the biological girls and women who are now getting creamed in competitive sports by "transgender females". 

Charlie Gard and the Experts

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/opinion/sunday/charlie-gard-and-the-experts.html

Moses was humble

Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth (Num 12:3, NIV).

That's a prooftext for critics who deny the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Surely it's oxymoronic for a humble man to brag about his humility! 

1. To begin with, to be "humble" is ambiguous. That can denote two different things:

i) A humble attitude

ii) A humble condition

The first definition refers to a psychological state whereas the second definition refers to an objective state. For instance, we sometimes talk about people who rose from humble origins. That doesn't ascribe humility to them in the sense of a modest, self-effacing attitude. Rather, that makes a statement about their background. Their lowly circumstances. 

In the traditional Book of Common prayer, supplicants frequently refer to themselves as "humble servants". That's not, in the first instance, a claim about their state of mind. Rather, that's an acknowledgement of their dependent, subordinate status in relation to God. 

So the word has different connotations

2. More to the point is the implied contrast:

i) The immediate context is the difference between Moses and his siblings (Num 1:1-2). Unlike Miriam and Aaron, Moses is not ambitious. Not power-hungry. Doesn't seek prestige. 

ii) Lying in the background is the history of Moses as a reluctant prophet (Exod 4). Moses makes every excuse he can think of to evade the leadership position that God has thrust him into. So Num 12:3 is just a way of saying Moses lacks ambition, in contrast to his self-seeking brother and sister. He never wanted the job. He's the leader in spite of his decided preference to take a backseat. 

"More humble than anyone else on the face of the earth" is simply hyperbole. 

Is every promise fulfilled in Christ?

http://www.alankurschner.com/2017/07/26/is-every-promised-fulfilled-in-christ-a-reply-to-thomas-schreiners-supersessionist-covenant-theology/

Must purported revelation pass a moral test?

I'm going to comment on this essay:

Morriston, W. (2013) The Problem of Apparently Morally Abhorrent Divine Commands, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK.,ch10

Morriston is an atheist.

If God is morally perfect, there must be many things that could not be commanded by him, and it might seem to be quite easy to name some of them. William Lane Craig, for example, says that it is absolutely impossible for God to command rape (Craig et al. 2009, 172) or to command us to eat our children (Craig and Antony 2008). David Baggett and Jerry Walls say that it would be impossible for God to command us to “rape and pillage hapless peasants in a rural village of Africa” (Baggett and Walls 2011, 134).1

“Absolutely impossible” may somewhat overstate the case. Circumstances matter, and an imaginative philosopher might perhaps conjure up a world in which God is morally justified in commanding someone to do these things. But even if such a world were genuinely possible, it would bear little resemblance to the actual world. As things actually are, commands like these do not pass moral muster and cannot reasonably be attributed to God. As Robert Adams rightly says, “purported messages from God” must be tested for “coherence with ethical judgments formed in the best ways available to us” (Adams 1999, 284). If someone were to cite a “message from God” as justification for rape or pillage or eating children, we would rightly conclude that he was a charlatan or a madman.

Should this moral test be applied even to biblical reports of divine commands?2 This is a serious issue, because the biblical record contains a number of divine commands that are – on the face of it – every bit as morally objectionable as those mentioned in the first paragraph. Among the most worrisome passages are those in which God is represented as mandating the extermination of a large number of people.

Adams (1999, 284) quotes with approval the words of Immanuel Kant: “Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God – of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down from (visible) heaven.’” On the other hand, Adams also says this: “The command addressed to Abraham in Genesis 22 should not be rejected simply because it challenges prevailing values. . . . Religion would be not only safer than it is, but also less interesting and less rich as a resource for moral and spiritual growth, if it did not hold the potentiality for profound challenges to current moral opinion” (Adams 1999, 285). Despite this qualification, one is left with the strong impression that Adams does not believe that God has ever commanded anyone to sacrifice a human life.

These biblical justifications raise new and troubling questions. Are the reasons stated in the terror texts worthy of a perfectly good and loving God? Would commanding the Israelites to kill large numbers of people be a morally acceptable way to prevent them from adopting “abhorrent” religious practices? Would it be morally acceptable to punish the Amalekites of Samuel’s day for what a previous generation of Amalekites had done to a previous generation of Israelites?

At the very least, those who deny that there are serious moral errors in the Bible must show that it is not unreasonable to believe that the biblical rationale for each problematic command is consistent with God’s perfect goodness. In making this demand, we are not asking anyone to read the mind of God. But we are asking that everyone read what the terror texts say about God’s actions and about the intentions behind them, and consider whether it is plausible to suppose that they accurately represent the actions and intentions of a God who is perfectly loving and just.

Imagine a pastor who is concerned about a local atheist organization that has lured some young people away from his church. He prays for divine guidance, and comes to believe that God wants his church to be the instrument of divine justice. Fresh from this “discovery,” he tells his congregants that God has a special mission for them: they are to stop this spiritual infection in its tracks by killing those atheists. Many church members are skeptical, but the Pastor reassures them by pointing out that “our life comes as a temporary gift from God,” that God has a right “to take it back when he chooses,” and that God also a right to commission someone else “take it back for him.”

Such a high degree of skepticism about what God might command is surely excessive. The immoral content of the pastor’s “revelation” is a perfectly good reason to reject it. This reason is, of course, defeasible, but in the absence of overriding evidence confirming the veridicality of the pastor’s “message from God,” we should regard it as a matter for the police.21

I suggest that we should approach the terror texts in the Bible in somewhat the same way. By our best lights, they are morally subpar, and this gives us a strong prima facie reason for believing that they do not accurately depict the commands of a good and loving God. This reason is defeasible, but unless overriding reasons for accepting the terror texts can be produced, they should be rejected.

This raises a number of issues:

i) Morriston's position is paradoxical. On the one hand, Christians have reason to believe that humans sometimes have reliable moral intuitions, although our moral intuitions are fallible. On the other hand, a consistent atheist ought to be, at minimum, a moral skeptic. According to naturalism, our moral opinions are hardwired and/or socially conditioned. But there's no presumption that socially conditioned mores are objectively right or wrong. If, moreover, our moral instincts were programmed into us by a mindless, amoral natural process, then there's no reason to think they correspond to objective moral norms. Indeed, it's hard to fathom how there can even be objective moral norms, given those background conditions. 

So even if there could be a moral criterion for assessing particular religious claimants or competing religious claimants, that could never rule out religion in general, for moral realism is parasitic on theism. 

ii) Since, moreover, it's demonstrable that our moral sensibilities are often arbitrary, given the fact that different cultures frequently have different social mores, it follows, even from a Christian standpoint, that we need to make allowance for the very live possibility that what we take to be moral intuitions or moral certainties simply echo our social conditioning, and if we were raised at a different time or place, our moral sensibilities might be very different. 

Although Christians shouldn't be wholesale moral skeptics, unlike atheists, a degree of skepticism regarding our prereflective moral sensibilities is warranted and even necessary. Our moral sensibilities need revelatory correction or confirmation.   

iii) It's possible to confirm or disconfirm a religious claimant on grounds other than morality. Having confirmed a religious claimant on grounds other than morality, you can use that as a benchmark or moral criterion to evaluate another religious claimant. But for reasons I've given, I seriously doubt you can do that from scratch. I doubt you can jump straight into a moral test. I think we lack independent access to consistently reliable moral intuitions. What we're pleased to call moral intuition is very hit-n-miss.   

Indeed, critics who object to OT ethics ironically illustrate that very point. OT writers don't share their outlook. OT writers don't think the allegedly "abhorrent" commands are derogatory to God's goodness. So what's the standard of comparison to referee competing moral opinions?

iv) Abraham's situation is different from a messenger. God spoke directly to Abraham. That's disanalogous to a "purported message" from God, which obliges second parties who were not the immediate recipients of the purported message. It's one thing for me to obey a divine command if I hear it direct from God–quite another to obey a reported divine command. 

v) In the case of Pentateuchal injunctions, although the divine commands were mediated through a messenger, the Israelites had overwhelming miraculous evidence that God spoke to and through Moses. 

Dunkirk: “English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.”

http://www.dennyburk.com/dunkirk-english-fathers-sailing-to-rescue-englands-exhausted-bleeding-sons/#more-34333

Calvinism is the worst theodicy–except for all the others

Churchill's quip reminds me of Calvinism and its critics. Here's a fascinating extension of Peter van Inwagen's theodicy:

God has a criterion for salvation. And he has a policy of enforcing it that goes as follows: If a creature meets the criterion for salvation, then admit him to Heaven. Otherwise he will end up in Hell. In creating a chancy world with free creatures and orderly laws of nature, God risked creating people that would not meet that criterion. For all we know, that is his plan and this is the world he created. And for all we know, just as it is not determinate that there is a minimum number of horrors required to realize the divine plan, it is not determinate that there is a minimum cutoff for satisfying the criterion of salvation. For any person in the indeterminate range that God saves, he may just as well have saved a slightly worse person who is also in that range. But this is no moral flaw of God’s, because – given that the criterion of salvation is indeterminate – it is not possible to always satisfy the proportional justice principle. In practical sorites situations, moral agents must arbitrarily discriminate between points in the series. For all we know, God faces a practical sorites in his plan of salvation. So, for all we know, premise (6) of Sider’s argument is false. p408.

Sullivan, M. (2013) Peter Van Inwagen's Defense, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (eds J. P. McBrayer and D. Howard-Snyder), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Oxford, UK,ch27

How's that supposed to be an improvement over what freewill theists find objectionable in Calvinism? Basically, salvation and damnation are the result of getting lucky or unlucky.