Monday, October 09, 2017
The Benefit Of Christ's Death
From a sixteenth-century book about justification, titled The Benefit Of Christ's Death:
let us run unto [Christ] with the feet of lively faith, and cast ourselves between his arms, [since] he allureth us so graciously, crying: "Come unto me, all you that labour and are heavy laden; and I will refresh you;" what comfort or what joy in this life can be comparable to this his saying there, when as a man, feeling himself oppressed with the intolerable weight of his sins, understandeth so sweet and amiable words of the Son of God, who promiseth so graciously to refresh and rid him of his great pains?...
O great unkindness! O thing abominable! that we, which profess ourselves Christians, and hear that the Son of God hath taken all our sins upon him, and washed them out with his precious blood, suffering himself to be fastened to the cross for our sakes, should nevertheless make as though we would justify ourselves, and purchase forgiveness of our sins by our own works; as who would say, that the deserts, righteousness, and bloodshed of Jesus Christ were not enough to do it, unless we came to put to our works and righteousness; which are altogether defiled and spotted with self-love, self-liking, self-profit, and a thousand other vanities, for which we have need to crave pardon at God's hand, rather than reward….
Now, if the seeking of righteousness and forgiveness of sins, by the keeping of the law which God gave upon mount Sinai, with so great glory and majesty, be the denying of Christ and of his grace [Galatians 5:4], what shall we say to those that will needs justify themselves before God by their own laws and observances? I would wish that such folks should a little compare the one with the other, and afterward give judgment themselves. God mindeth not to do that honour, not to give that glory to his own law; and yet they will have him to give it to men's laws and ordinances. But that honour is given only to his only-begotten Son, who alone, by the sacrifice of his death and passion, hath made full amends for all our sins, past, present, and to come…
let us give the whole glory of our justification unto God's mercy and to the merits of his Son; who by his own bloodshed hath set us free from the sovereignty of the law, and from the tyranny of sin and death, and hath brought us into the kingdom of God, to give us life and endless felicity….
for the love of his only begotten Son, [the Father] beholdeth [Christians] always with a gentle countenance, governing and defending them as his most dear children, and in the end giving them the heritage of the world, making them like-fashioned to the glorious image of Christ….
O happy is that man that shutteth his eyes from all other sights, and will neither hear nor see any other thing than Jesus Christ crucified; in whom are laid up and bestowed all the treasures of God's wisdom and divine knowledge! (15-16, 21-23, 26, 69, 93)
Sunday, October 08, 2017
Celestial portents
Remarking on Joshua's Long Day in his recent commentary, Kenneth Mathews says:
The traditional view is that the sun stopped (i.e., the earth's rotation ceased), thus prolonging the sunlight of the day. The overthrow of the fleeing Amorites can be thoroughly complete if they cannot escape into the night…[But] the text itself does not support this view. Depiction of the sun "over Gibeon" and the moon "over the Valley of Aijalon" shows that the time of day must have been in the morning (10:12), not at midday, as this view assumes ("middle of the sky," 10:13). Gibeon and the Valley of Aijalon are on an east-west plane, meaning that with the naked eye the sun is seen in the eastern sky and the moon in the western sky. In astronomy this relationship is called "opposition." That two celestial bodies appear in the sky at the same time indicates that the time of day is morning.The background to understanding the Joshua passage is the Assyro-Babylonian celestial omen texts…by studying the positions and movements of celestial bodies, diviners discerned messages from the gods regarding human events…For example, the celestial signs portended either good or ill for the king and the nation in battle. A propitious sign was when the first day of the full moon fell on the fourteenth of the monthly, at which time "opposition" of the moon and sun briefly occurred in the morning…On the other hand, if the opposition…appeared on another day (e.g. fifteenth day), the omen indicated disaster.Although the practice of celestial divination was widespread in the Late Bronze Age (a notable exception is Egypt), there is uncertainty about the extent to which Joshua and the Canaanites knew the technical art of celestial divination as conducted by trained scholars. Assyriologists are divided as to when and to what degree celestial omen calculation was current in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age. K. Mathews, Joshua (Baker Books 2016), 92-94.
That's a very intriguing interpretation. Mathews is not the first scholar to propose it.
i) In its favor, it explains the significance of the implied celestial opposition. That's something a modern reader is apt to miss, which an ancient reader might pick up on. Although that identification depends on knowing the local geography.
ii) However, I have reservations about that interpretation as stated. One difficulty, which commentators remark on, is whether the same sign would be viewed as a propitious omen for the Israelites but an unpropitious omen for the Canaanites. Perhaps, though, the idea is that this is polemical theology, which exploits the superstition of the pagan army–a view not shared by Joshua.
iii) There's nothing extraordinary about that phenomenon. Doesn't opposition of sun and moon occur twice a month (once after dawn and once before dusk)? So how would that be an unparalleled day (v14)?
iv) Likewise, the shifting position between sun and moon is periodic and predictable. Since the Canaanite army could presumably anticipate that phenomenon, why would they even engage the Israelite army if they regarded that, ahead of time, as a portent of disaster?
v) Perhaps, though, what they saw was surprising and shocking. Maybe God produced an optical illusion, like a sundog, which defied their expectations. The perceived celestial opposition was not supposed to happen on that calendar day. And that happened in answer to prayer by the enemy. Their God caused it. If so, one can see how that would have a demoralizing effect on the Canaanite troops, leaving them in disarray. It would be like the "counterclockwise" effect of Ahab's sundial. They weren't just arrayed agains the Israelite army, but against the God of the Israelite army, who displays his terrifying power, in contrast to the impotent gods of Canaan. And that's in addition to the targeted hailstorm (v11). A God who can manipulated the forces of nature to shield his people and rout their adversaries.
Saturday, October 07, 2017
Genealogical Adam and Eve
I don't subscribe to theistic evolution. That said, this is a striking critique of Dennis Venema:
http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/06/a-genealogical-adam-and-eve-in-evolution/
http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/06/a-genealogical-adam-and-eve-in-evolution/
Déjà vécu
-i-
When Jayden awoke, he found himself in a hospital room. He didn't remember how he got there. He wasn't in pain. Wasn't injured. Had no surgical incisions. The hospital was eerily quiet. He walked down the hallway, but the hospital was deserted. He went outside, but the streets were deserted. He didn't remember what happened after that.
-ii-
Jayden found himself hiking with his son Xavier. He didn't remember what happened before then. They were climbing a hill. When they reached the summit, there was a was a mountain range in the distance. They started down the hill, towards a stream. He didn't remember what happened after that.
-iii-
Jayden found himself on the football field of his old high school. He was coaching a player named Xavier. It was a crisp autumn day, with colorful trees surrounding the field, as well as leaves littering the track. He didn't recall what happened after that.
-iv-
Jayden found himself in a barbershop. He didn't recall how he got there. Ava, a middle-aged beautician, was cutting his hair. He felt like he'd known her for a long time.
-v-
Jayden found himself at a Thanksgiving meal at his mother's home. His mother Ava was busy in the kitchen, while he was talking to his brother Jordan in the front yard, facing the river. The sun was low on the horizon. He didn't remember driving there.
-vi-
Jayden was driving on the expressway. He didn't recall where the trip began. The expressway was lined with familiar motels and exits he'd seen so many times before along that stretch of highway. He felt that he was heading home, although, as he thought about it, he didn't recollect where home was. He was driving back by force of habit–like he'd done this many times before. In the passenger seat was his wife Debbie.
-vii-
Jayden woke up in the bedroom of his college dorm. His roommate, Jordan, was seated upright in bed, typing on his laptop. Jordan was his best friend from high school. Jayden was pondering what to do next, but he didn't remember what happened after that.
-viii-
Jayden found himself sitting in a pizzeria, talking to a pretty waitress named Debbie. He sensed having had this conversation before. He had a foreboding that this would slip away as abruptly as it began.
-ix-
Jayden found himself sitting in an empty church. One of those churches that's open during weekdays so that people can visit the sanctuary to pray and mediate. He was flipping through the hymnal.
Jayden couldn't shake the feeling of déjà vécu, like he was trapped inside a recurring dream, or circuit of dreams. Only he never really woke up. Every time, he woke up in the dream rather than waking up from the dream. A merry-go-round of dreams, where he kept reliving the same episodes, in no particular order. He could remember just enough to recall having done it all before, but he couldn't remember when it began–or if it began. He kept meeting the same people–or were they the same people? They had the same names. Same faces. Like a parallel universe.
What was real? What was happening to him? Was he losing his mind? Or tripping out on LSD? Perhaps he suffered traumatic brain trauma from an accident. This was his delirium, as he frantically struggled to become fully lucid. Like a diver swimming towards the sunlight, but every time he's just about to surface, he sinks back.
It had been going on for much too long to be a dream. He remembered it happening over and over again. Or did he? Maybe his memories were part of the hallucination–if that's what it was. The fact that he kept encountering the same people suggested that he knew them in the real world–whatever that was. He felt like an amnesiac groping to piece his life together, hoping to tap into some association that would suddenly bring it all back. Maybe in the real world, his body was sedated, with simulated imagery feeding into his mind through a neurointerface.
He looked again at the hymnal in his hands. He knew this scene would vanish. He'd been there before. He'd been there again, sitting in the same spot, holding the hymnal open to the same page.
He hadn't been very pious when all this began, assuming it had a beginning. Maybe it was like a Möbius strip, forever circling back on itself, without a starting-point or destination. But in his maddening ordeal, the only thing that kept him centered was the dawning realization that even if nothing else was real, God had to be real. If it was a recurring dream, that existed in God's reality. If it was an acid trip, that existed in God's reality. If it was a parallel universe, that existed in God's reality. If it was a computer simulation, that existed in God's reality.
Only God could penetrate his experience. God was the only thing outside his experience that was able to reach into his experience. So God was the only realty he could reach from inside the illusion. And only God could connect him to his loved ones, whom he kept meeting and losing, meeting had losing.
Friday, October 06, 2017
Thursday, October 05, 2017
Dealing with grief
During those times in a Christian's life when he's passing through a desert, times of grief, frustration, the dry seasons of faith, theological propositions, while indispensable, only take us so far. They feel flat. External. At times like this I think Christians benefit from listening to music. To favorite hymns and carols. Depends on your taste in music. Christian song can water a parched soul in a way that theological propositions cannot. We need both. The Bible says a lot about sacred song. There's a reason for that.
Timothy McGrew on Plutarch
Michael Licona has been making a big deal about the value of Plutarch in Gospel studies. I asked Jonathan McLatchie to ask Timothy McGrew (on Grill a Christian) if he thought Plutarch is a good literary model or frame of reference for understanding the narrative techniques of the Gospel writers. Dr. McGrew answers that question between 23-28 min. mark of this video:
Dr. McGrew's answers throughout the video are valuable. The other contributors also make useful points.
Machine Gun Preacher
1. The actions of this Marine are receiving widespread praise:
On Facebook, a Christian wondered if we could analogize from his actions to a prolifer "stealing" the car of an abortionist to prevent him from getting to work, or would that violate the Biblical prohibition against theft? That's a very interesting question with many moral complexities. The question could spin off in many directions. I've discussed variations on that question on multiple occasions, so I will try to avoid getting too bogged in response to this question.
2. I'll begin with some general preliminary observations: some biblical commands and prohibitions represent intrinsically right or wrong actions. Inherently obligatory or prohibitory.
But other biblical commands and prohibitions represent prima facie duties. These are not an end in themselves, but means to an end. Instrumental rather than intrinsic goods. In case of conflict between higher and lower obligations, the higher obligation temporarily supersedes the lower obligation. A classic example is the Sabbath controversies in the Gospels.
3. Apropos (2), there's a pro tanto or prima facie obligation to obey the law (e.g. Rom 13). But under special circumstances, that can be overridden (e.g. Acts 5:29). The most general exception is when the state forbids you to do right or commands you to do wrong.
4. Apropos (2-3), we must often balance social obligations. In general, social obligations are concentric. We have greater obligations to relatives or fellow believers than we have to neighbors or strangers.
5. Apropos (4), some Christians have prior obligations. Take a Christian husband and father. He's not at liberty to take the same risks as a Christian bachelor.
Likewise, if a Christian bachelor is an only child, he may need to avoid taking certain risks in case his parents will need him to care for them in their dotage. If, on the other hand, he has several siblings, then he can assume a greater risk.
6. Apropos (4), Christians don't have a duty to, say, buy a ticket to some third world hellhole, purchase a machine gun when when they arrive, and become self-appointed avengers. This is ultimately God's world. In his providence, God has often put us in situations where we can't rectify evil. In many cases, we must commit miscarriages of justice to eschatological judgment to right the scales. God is the ultimate avenger. There's only so much we can and should do on our own, in this life.
7. That said, vigilantism is not inherently wrong. If civil authorities are hopelessly corrupt, vigilantism may be necessary to some degree, but that's in dire circumstances. Depends on the availability of legal remedies.
A modern example is Christians who illegally sheltered Jews from Nazis. A secular example is the French and Italian Resistance. And although I disagree with this example, consider sanctuary cities, championed by the liberal establishment (as well as the church of Rome).
8. A vigilante action might save a few innocent lives, but it won't change the policy. So there's a cost/benefit analysis. What can we do to do the most good?
9. Few Christians are professional ethicists. God doesn't expect garden-variety Christians to have a sophisticated rationale for their actions. For that matter, even Christian ethicists disagree with each other on some issues. Even Christian ethicists are stumped by some ethical dilemmas.
So there are cases where, even if an action is objectively wrong (from God's viewpoint), godly intentions can attenuate or exculpate what would otherwise be blameworthy. We must often make snap decisions. We must often make morally important decisions based on inadequate information. We lack divine wisdom.
In that respect, I think it's possible to do good even when you're not doing right. It's possible for conscientious Christians to make innocent mistakes. There's a margin for error.
10. Machine Gun Preacher presents an extreme case. Christian reviewers were conflicted:
I haven't seen the movie, but to judge by reviews, I'd be rooting for the protagonist. I sympathize with his actions. What he did was admirable. But I don't think that makes it obligatory–or even permissible–although there were powerful mitigating factors.
11. Moses was a vigilante (Exod 2:11-15). Most commentators classify his action as murder. But I don't see it that way. I don't assume he intended to kill the assailant. That wasn't his aim. And it was commendable that he intervened to spare the victim from further harm.
If, however, you interpose in a situation like that, you must be prepared to use lethal force, for even though the motivation is to protect a second party from harm, once you insert yourself into that situation, it instantly becomes a matter of self-defense. You've drawn the assailant's fire from the original target to you. Depending on the tenacity of the assailant, that may be a battle to the death. That's why many people don't get involved. They know the risk. You must take the potential for lethal force into consideration, for once you intervene, you're committed to do pretty much whatever it takes. If you're not prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect the victim or protect yourself, once you insert yourself into that situation, then it would be foolhardy to intervene. At that point it's too late to back out.
Admittedly, this example is descriptive rather than prescriptive. So it doesn't prove that vigilantism is ever warranted. But in the larger context of the Mosaic law, where there's an obligation to protect the defenseless (e.g. orphans, widows), I think the reader is meant to view the action of Moses as brave, honorable and even exemplary.
12. Although the Marine may technically be guilty of theft, it isn't theft in the usual sense. He didn't intend to keep the car or use it for recreation (joyriding). He intended to return the car. To be more accurate, he commandeered the car in an emergency situation.
13. I doubt biblical prohibitions against theft are absolute. Many biblical commands and prohibitions have an implied context. They were not designed to be universally applicable to every conceivable situation. Rather, they apply to typical situations. And when we apply them today, we should apply them to comparable situations. That's a class apart from the subset of biblical commands or prohibitions that represent moral absolutes.
14. However, the issue doesn't turn on that particular example. Suppose we vary the example. Would it be permissible for a prolifer to deflate the tires of the abortionist? I doubt there's anything inherently wrong with that. But, of course, that's not a long-term solution. That's not something he can get away with on a regular basis. After the first two or three times, the abortionists will be on the alert. The prolifer will be arrested. And business as usual will resume.
I don't know the legalities. If this is a misdemeanor offense, and you had a series of prolifers doing it, that would be more disruptive. Still, it's a piecemeal approach.
15. Take a more creative example. Suppose a prolife hacktivist infiltrates the computer system of abortion clinic to shut it down. Suppose he can cover his tracks so that his repeated actions are indetectable. Technically, that's cyberterrorism, but depending on your viewpoint, that's more analogous to actions of the French and Italian Resistance. From what I've read, they used to sabotage power lines and railway tracks. Most of us wouldn't classify them as terrorists. For that matter, liberals don't object to hacktivism in principle.
Do I think it would be morally licit for a prolifer to do that? I think that might be justifiable. Direct, nonviolent action.
16. Suppose, though, I don't think that's justifiable. Suppose the hacktivist is my roommate, and I discover what he's up to. Do I have a duty to notify the police? No. Our abortion laws are a miscarriage of justice. I have no obligation to facilitate that injustice by collaborating with the authorities. Moreover, my roommate is doing good even if he's not doing right. So I wouldn't report him to the authorities. And if I happened to know the authorities were on to him, I might warn him.
Best not to be born
Although atheism is ultimately self-refuting, a few hardy atheists make an effort to take their position to a logical extreme. Case in point:
The label for Benatar's position is existential nihilism. And that dovetails with Steiner's definition of absolute tragedy:
The Psychopath Inside
Most atheists are physicalists. The brain generates the mind. So morality is located in the brain. Consider this example:
James Fallon admits he has a lot in common with serial killer Ted Bundy and Columbine assassin Eric Harris. He is aggressive, lacks empathy and is a risk-taker.Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California Irvine, accidentally discovered what friends and family have suspected for years -- he has all the genetic traits and brain scan patterns of a psychopath."I don't have special emotional bonds with those who are close to me -- I treat everyone the same," he said. "I am involved in a lot of charities and good works, and my intentions are good for the world. But I don't have the sense of romance or love I am supposed to have for my wife. It's not there."For years Fallon has worked with criminologists and other legal experts to evaluate the brain for abnormalities. But while volunteering with his own family for a study of Alzheimer's disease, Fallon learned on his PET scan that he has all the features of a psychopath."The last scan in the pile was strikingly odd," he writes about the 2005 discovery. "In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath -- or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one. ... When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake. ... But there had been no mistake. The scan was mine.""Looking at my genetics, I had lethal combination, but I just had the happiest childhood growing up," he said. Fallon's mother had four miscarriages before his birth and, as a result, he said he was, "treated well because they didn't think I would be born.""There were dark periods I went through, but they didn't bring me to a psychiatrist, but they told my sisters and teachers to watch out for me," he said. "My mother instinctively knew there was a problem."
Although psychos have abnormal brains, they don't have defective brains, since–according to naturalism–there's no way the brain is supposed to be. And psychopaths can be highly functional.
On this view, morality is arbitrary. Morality is an artifact of brain structures. If you change the wiring, you change morality.
In theory, evolution might have made psychopathic brains normal rather than abnormal. The majority might have psychopathic brains. Empathetic humans would be abnormal. From a naturalistic perspective, that's all there is to morality. Rewire the brain and you get a different moral code. There's no right or wrong way the brain is supposed to be wired. That's the outcome of the blind watchmaker.
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
Mad Max
Question from a commenter on this post:
How far does this track? Crossbows to revolvers to automatic rifles to grenade launchers to nukes.Naturally, what is available to governments is not financially feasible to the average citizen. But the financial aspect aside, if citizens can afford the weaponry, is there a point where the principle breaks down in favor of minimizing casualties by crazy people?This is something I have struggled with and I am curious where you would draw the line (if at all).
1. Good question, but hard to answer in general or answer in the abstract. It depends on the specific situation and what there is to work with. There are roughly three players:
i) Gov't
ii) Private citizens
iii) Criminal class
2. How the power dynamic plays out varies in time and place. Take fictional dystopias like Mad Max, Jericho, Revolution, or The Book of Eli, where you have a breakdown in civil authority. In that situation it's every man for himself. Private citizens must use whatever is available to protect themselves.
3. Although that's fictional, it can have real-world analogues during revolution, civil war, and economic implosion.
4. Sometimes it's two against three. Gov't officials may be on the take, so that you have an informal partnership between the gov't and the criminal class. Gov't officials get a cut.
5. In some Western nations, the citizens have been disarmed, so the only foks with guns and heavy weaponry are the police/soldiers, and criminal class.
Sometimes the gov't fears the criminal class (e.g. Muslim rioters), so that you have a gentleman's agreement between civil authorities and the criminal class.
6. In our own country, police often refuse to protect property. They let rioters go on the rampage, looting stories, burning cars and buildings. In that situation, armed private citizens must protect their homes and businesses.
7. Sometimes there's collusion between gov't and the criminal class. Take the Jim Crow era, where some gov't officials were in bed with the KKK. I've read that some blacks took advantage of the ease with which guns could be procured to arm themselves. That became a deterrent.
Likewise, suppose incidents like the Warsaw uprising had been widespread and occurred sooner?
On a related note,
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Valley of Hinnom
I reader drew my attention to this post:
Several fallacies in his argument:
i) Metaphors originate in a particular concrete phenomena, but acquire an abstract, analogical significance. The significance of the metaphor is not identical to the natural or historical exemplar. It develops a significance that goes beyond the exemplar, even in contrast to the exemplar.
Take Edenic motifs or Mt. Zion. These take on symbolic connotations that are no longer conterminous with a specific address and/or the geography of that particular locale. Or, in modern usage, take metaphors like "salt mines" or "Siberian exile". These originate at a particular time or place, but they develop an emblematic significance that's independent of the historical exemplar.
ii) Although the original context has interpretive resonance, the normative context for NT occurrences is how that's used in the NT. What the metaphor means at that stage of theological elaboration.
iii) Moreover, it's not confined to the meaning of a particular word, but how that's combined with larger descriptions.
iv) Furthermore, Scripture uses a variety of metaphors to depict eschatological judgment. The concept of damnation isn't confined to the figurative range of one particular metaphor, but how that's built up on the basis of many figurative as well as literal descriptions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)