A Little Housekeeping

Its been a long time since I've posted anything here, and I regret the lengthy delay. Life has been pretty crazy as of late, so I may not be able to post anything for a while. I graduated from college a little over a month ago, got married three weeks ago, and have been tied up with all sorts of stuff in terms of preparation for moving to Russia in August. I have also been working on studying for the GRE, so I have not had much time to post anything here. I have been thinking alot about faith and have many ideas of things that I would like to write about more extensively (like the nature of the "last days" and the apocalyptic tone of many of Jesus' words), but for the moment they will probably remain thoughts written in my journal. I have no plans to abandon this blog, but it will probably have to wait until I get settled in and have a regular internet connection in Russia. I apologize for this little hiatus, and hopefully will return soon to continue to work out my thoughts on following Christ and living in His kingdom.

-Matt

God?

One of the most puzzling statements that I run across fairly frequently is the claim that "the universe looks exactly like we would expect it to if there was no God" (or some near equivalent). This is a fascinating claim because it helps get to the heart of how people conceive of God. A whole truckload of assumptions about the nature of God and the physical world go into a claim like that, and I wonder to what extent those who would make that claim are aware of them.

Presumably what the claim means is that "the universe does not look designed" which in turn means "the universe does not appear to be crafted like a mechanism." A very mechanistic worldview is at work, assuming that any God worth his salt would design everything in creation, and that this creation should be morally and physically perfect (as determined by our perspective). The creativity and changing nature of the cosmos is something that strikes me as miraculous. While some people point to the way that genetic mutations over time create ingenious "solutions" to "problems" (its difficult to write about such things without anthropomorphizing them, so please forgive me if I fail to avoid it) and state that it shows there is no need for a designer, I am amazed that seemingly random occurrences produce such incredibly novel and sophisticated solutions. I am not claiming that what is really happening is that God is intervening in mutations all the time to influence evolutionary outcomes. Rather, I am just saying that there are regular occurrences in our universe that are quite simply astounding and almost miraculous.

Just because we can see that its "the way things work" suddenly means that there can be no room for God. I don't see why there need be any such rigid division between "natural" and "supernatural" or "regular" and "divine." Just because the universe functions in such a way that certain things happen normally does not entail that there is no God. To me, the fact that there is a universe at all is astounding (regardless of those who would like to play semantic games with words like "nothing" and use sleight of hand question begging to make claims like "nothing is inherently unstable" to explain why there exists anything at all). Because of this, the universe looks exactly like I would expect it if there was a God, particularly a God who values freedom, narrative, love, and creativity. It does not look like the universe that a mechanic God would create upon close inspection, but all that does is challenge certain conceptions about what we think God should be like.

At this point I can hear the objections of a Christopher Hitchens-type who would claim that I am just using the "infinitely elastic airbag" of faith to redefine God into something that evades what science has shown. I think there is a valid concern in this criticism, and I believe seriously that there need to be good reasons for holding to what I believe about God. I find them in the narrative of the Bible, and therefore I feel comfortable about affirming such a view of God. Its true that there are different things that one can accent and stress in the Bible that can lead to different views of God, but I also believe that no text is open to any potential meaning someone might want to apply to it and that I need to seriously ask myself if I am doing violence to the text in my interpretation. I honestly do not think that I am, and that it is a remarkable fact that the Bible has been so resilient in being able to inform the narratives of human lives throughout so many different periods of history. It is not infinitely elastic, but it is nimble enough and layered enough to reveal new treasures to different people in different places in different times.

Texts are windows, but they are also mirrors and sometimes the failure to find something in a text has as much to do with the one who is doing the looking as with the text itself. If we bring our own ideas of what a God should be and what is the only acceptable way for a God to behave we will find much that is lacking. But what is lacking is our idol, not God Himself. I realize that there is no way to completely escape from our own views and assumptions about God, but this is a challenge to myself and others to let God speak on God's terms, because when He does it is often in ways that challenge our assumptions, our theologies, and our own views of ourselves and others.

When I look at the universe I see God. Others do not. And maybe its because we're not looking for the same thing.

Just a Thought

Last weekend while taking part in a theological discussion group, someone made a very interesting point relating to the atonement that has gotten me thinking. Normally I would probably post something like this over at Logan Atone, but with Harlan taking a bit of a break from blogging for the meantime and the fact that this isn't an argument or thought out position per se, I decided to post it here.

What started out as a discussion on the issue of justification switched over to a discussion of the penal substitution view of the atonement. Anyone who has read any of my atonement related posts here or at LA knows that I do not hold to the penal substitution view, finding it deeply problematic on a number of theological levels. However, since at least the time of Anselm, penal substitution has become something of the default view, at least for Western Christianity.

The point that was made that has gotten me thinking, however, was simply if Jesus or the Gospel writers or whomever wanted to connect Jesus' death with an idea of penal substitution, then it would have made more sense to have his death coincide with the Day of Atonement. As it is, Jesus' death occurs around the time of Passover, which connects back to the Exodus, not to the Day of Atonement.

Now I realize that there are any number of reasons why this might be the case, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would be willing to put forth their own theory about about why Jesus died then (ranging from "because thats when it happened" to "in order to make a subtle polemic against divisions within the early Church" I'm sure), so as I said I am not trying to argue that this is some great or novel position. It just strikes me that the narrative of the exodus instead of the narrative of atonement would be the most prominent allusion at work at the crucifixion.

It makes me wonder how things might look if we started paying more attention to Jesus' death and resurrection as being part of a story of exodus and deliverance from slavery and bondage rather than a sort of divine legal exchange like the penal substitution view leads to. Just a thought.

Hitchens - D'Souza Debate

As I posted yesterday, last night I had the chance to see Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza debate (ostensibly) the question "Is Religion the Problem?" at the University of Notre Dame. Now that I've had a day to gather my thoughts and talk with a few friends who also attended the debate, I feel prepared to give some of thoughts on what transpired. The video is supposed to be posted on YouTube soon and also on the Notre Dame Center for the Philosophy of Religion's website, and once it is I will post a link to it for anyone who might be interested.

As a preliminary word, let me comment on the whole idea of debating these sort of topics. As many others have (rightly in my opinion) pointed out, debating has more to do with the rhetorical skills of the participants rather than the truth or strength of their arguments. I wasn't expecting to have my faith shaken to its core or substantially boosted from the exchange, and I doubt many if any in the audience experienced such a feeling in either direction. What debates are valuable for, however, is providing a starting place for further discussion on important topics. The students organizing the debate stressed this point, portraying the debate as a starting point for conversations to come. Debates don't prove the truth of atheism or theism, but they can help facilitate public discussion of important issues about God, religion, and science and help bring together people from different perspectives who share a like-minded interest in a topic. With that in mind, I'll try to summarize the main points and arguments of both participants, while tossing in a bit of my own reflection and analysis along the way.

Hitchens was the first to present his opening statement. Much of his opening statement was a call for epistemic humility. He stressed in various ways the point that in light of how little we know (and how the more we know seems to only make us aware of newer realms of which we know even less) that doubt and skepticism are the only respectable and responsible options. Religion is wrong because it claims to know the answers to our questions, but religion is simply a human-made construction that reflects humanity's primitive, primate origins, a lowly background marked by fear, tribalism, and aggression. Religion was the first faltering attempt of primitive humans to answer questions about cosmology, medicine, psychology, and the need for human solidarity. However, we have now found much better answers to these problems through science and ought to set aside the trappings of religion which so strongly testify to our primitive origins. Religion, asserted Hitchens severely warps our "moral sense of proportion" by making us think that we are somehow the center of the cosmos and the pinnacle of the world. In the light of the great age of the cosmos, to think that God revealing Himself to Middle Eastern farmers three thousand years ago is the purpose of the universe is exceedingly arrogant and presumptuous.

Dinesh D'Souza followed with his statement in which he stressed he would use reason alone to show the truth of religion. He stated that his approach would be that of a presuppositional argument (by which he seemed to mean an inference to the best explanation). He then proceeded to list a number of features of the world and our experience that he claimed science (particularly evolution) could not adequately account for. I should note that D'Souza does not appear to reject the theory of evolution, but instead believes that it has certain explanatory limitations. Evolution cannot account for the origin of the cell, and no good account of how the first life arose has been offered, he claimed. The depth of human evil also seems to go far beyond what evolution calls for, which merely offers "cruelty tempered by necessity" while human evil seems to often go well beyond any sense of necessity. Altruistic acts for strangers and rationality itself were also points that D'Souza claimed could not be accounted for satisfactorily from an evolutionary perspective.

I take issue with a number of Dinesh's points and his overall approach. I was a bit disappointed that he seemed to present only traditional Christian apologist fare, but much more seriously (as was also pointed out in the question and answer portion), Dinesh's argument seems to be only about the explanatory gaps of science, not the strength of theistic explanations. This is simply nothing more than the God of the gaps arguments. Dinesh seemed to admit as much himself when he claimed that if a better account could be given he would change his mind, implying that his only attachment to a belief in God is based upon naturalistic evidence. I find this a little difficult to believe to say the least. Also, Dinesh seems to ignore an important distinction within biology, namely the distinction between evolutionary biology and origins of life biology. This is not a major point, because even within the realms of origin of life biology there is no strong case for how the first life arose on earth, but to imply that evolution should be able to answer this question is misguided. Evolution only tells the story of how life on earth developed and changed over time, not how it first came to be.

In the rebuttal portion, Hitchens claimed that Dinesh's arguments were unfalsifiable and that religion provided an "infinitely elastic airbag" that could be made to assimilate any possible data point. He also claimed that even if there is no God, our moral problems would be identical. Thus, we should not presume that we can only be good with God. At several points throughout the debate, Hitchens took umbrage at the notion that he is somehow unable to behave morally simply because he doesn't believe in God, arguing that he had no need of a cosmic parent in the sky in order to behave morally and for the benefit of others.

I take issue with this last point of Hitchens'. While I do not doubt that Christopher Hitchens is able to behave morally, I disagree that the question of God has no bearing on the issue of morality. While I applaud Hitchens for desiring to do things like give blood and promote freedom and liberty around the world, what if someone else seeks fulfillment in doing things that Hitchens' would consider to be evil? There are profound disagreements in our world about what the good is and what the good society should look like, but all Hitchens' does is draw implicitly upon Western assumptions about what the good society should look like and our distate for societies that do not look that way.

Wouldn't it be better if Iran were a secular democracy and not a theocracy, asks Hitchens. But why is a secular democracy better? To certain strands of Islam, the good society is one that operates in accordance with Islamic law and seeks to behave rightly before God. A society that allows people to choose to disobey God as an act of free consequence is terrible and invites the judgment of God on such a view. All Hitchens has shown is that those of us who share a common cultural heritage and intellectual legacy prefer things to be a certain way and are suspicious and fearful of others who do not value the same things that we do. That says nothing about whether or not they are good. Hitchens' obviously has a strong sense of morality, but seems to assume that his moral principles are self-evident. This is simply cultural arrogance unless he can give an account as to how his moral views should hold any sway over someone else. The theistic explanation at least has that in its favor. This is a huge blind-spot in much of contemporary atheism and one that is quite simply mind-staggering to me. There are many different views of what the good and the moral is in our world, but Hitchens' fails to provide any clues as to how or why these different views can be adjudicated.

In D'Souza's rebuttal, he stressed that science is not only based on verification in response to Hitchens' charge of unfalsifiability. He also claimed that divine revelation has been corroborated by science, claiming that modern cosmology seems to have vindicated the ancient Hebrew view of a creation out of nothing. He also stressed that explanations function at multiple levels. Thus, a scientific explanation is only part of the story. He used the example of making a cup of tea. There is a scientific story that can be told about why a cup of tea came to be based on the boiling of water, the chemical interaction that take places when that water hits the tea leaves, etc. But just as correctly, a story can be told about why the tea came to be that simply states "Dinesh wanted to have a cup of tea." Thus, science cannot give an exhaustive explanation of things because it cannot begin to grapple with purpose and intentionality.

It needs to be pointed out that to the best of my knowledge, the ancient Hebrews did not in fact believe in creation ex nihilo, but instead believed that God had brought order to primeval chaos. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo still vastly predates big bang cosmology so the core of Dinesh's argument in this particular case is still defensible, but I believe that he has gotten his details wrong.

The question and answer session was entertaining as both participants are gifted speakers and very funny in their own unique ways. Hitchens' jokingly talking about leaving the Anglican Church was hilarious (and made me think of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death" comedy sketch). Also, this was the only point in the debate where the two interlocutors traded atrocities, something I feared the entire debate would dissolve into given the topic. Happily, the topic seemed to have been discarded with the very first opening statement in favor of broader arguments for and against belief and religion, so there was only limited exchange about whether believers or atheists have committed worse atrocities. After dealing with the question of atrocities committed in the name of secular utopianism, Hitchens' declared that the problem is the belief that humanity can be perfected by force, whether this belief be religiously or secularly motivated. This is a telling revelation in my mind considering that the topic of the debate ostensibly was "Is religion the problem?" Based on this view, it would seem that Hitchens' ought to say "no."

Hitchens' also claimed that the question of creation ex nihilo has been answered scientifically and pointed the audience to Lawrence Krauss' presentation on a universe from nothing. Having already watched Professor Krauss' presentation several months before the debate, I happen to agree with D'Souza's retort that Krauss merely uses some verbal sleight of hand to get around the question of how something can come from nothing. Krauss' answer is basically that in a quantum universe, nothing gives rise to something, which only begs the question since it naturally only leads to why we should have a quantum universe at all (incidentally, something that Krauss seems to admit in passing in his brief article "The Free Lunch that Made our Universe").

There was also a brief exchange on the nature of evolution debating Stephen Jay Gould's famous videotape analogy about evolution, with Hitchens' speaking in favor of Gould's contention that if the story of evolution were to replayed things would look completely different while D'Souza countered with Simon Conway Morris' work on evolutionary convergence to claim that things would look strinkingly similar as they do now if evolution could be played out again. Having recently read a collection of essays edited by Conway Morris, I admit that I drawn to his views on evolutionary convergence.

In the end, it made for an entertaining evening with two engaging speakers, even though I did take significant issue with points raised by each side. While both speakers were very engaging, I can't help but thinking that these debates are a bit canned. Afterall, Hitchens and D'Souza have debated each other several times before and will do so yet again later this year. There is obviously very good money to be made on the debate circuit, but the result is that the same anecdotes get retold each debate along with the same clever quips designed to get a warm reception from the audience (as anyone who has ever viewed any of the other numerous debates by either Hitchens or D'Souza available on YouTube can attest to). While there is nothing wrong with presenting the same ideas and anecdotes to different audiences, the cynic in me wonders about the sincerity behind them sometimes. If you keep debating the same guy again and again, at what point is this just a mutual agreement to make a lot of money by engaging with another entertaining person who disagrees with you? Perhaps that's a bit too cynical, but its the same way that I feel about itinerant preachers.

With that being said, I would encourage anyone with any interest in atheist-theist debates to see either of these two speakers live if the chance arises. Again, I do not think that either one made a knock-down case for their position, but they are both very good orators and these debates do help stimulate discussion. I wouldn't be writing a blog if I didn't think matters of faith were worth talking about, so anything that helps encourage dialog along those lines has its place:-)

Personality

I haven't done a very good job as of late in posting things regularly. I have a lot that I want to write about, but time seems to be short at the moment. Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the University of Notre Dame, which was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I plan to write a reflection on that soon, but I want to wait a little bit to reflect on it, so for the time being I will post some thoughts based on another recent talk I head from the person who happened to be moderating the debate, Mike Rea.

Professor Rea spoke on the topic of divine hiddeness (or divine silence to use his preferred term), and while that is not the topic that I want to discuss, he made a very interesting point that I think is significant. In questioning whether or not silence may be part of God's personality, Rea made the comment that there is an endemic tendency in the philosophy of religion to treat God as devoid of all personality and simply reduce God to a machine that rewards and punishes, maximizes good, etc. However, when we do so we treat God as if He has no personality Himself and can be easily made to reflect what we perceive to be the obvious good or benefit to us. Taking this point as a launching pad, I want to reflect a bit more on what it means to speak of God's personality.

This is deeply problematic on a theological level because for Christian theology God is supposed to be the epitome of person-hood. The trinity, three persons in one, is the ultimate reality, and this reality is personal. To treat God as if He has no personality is a tacit denial of this crucial point of Christian doctrine. Perhaps too much discussion of personality is bound to make some people uncomfortable. After all, stressing that God may in fact possess a vibrant and dynamic personality leaves wide open the possibility that God may be very eccentric or idiosyncratic. It is important to stress that these characteristics are not incompatible with being all-loving or all-good. What it does mean is that God's reasons for acting or not acting may look very different than ours.

This is perfectly compatible with the testimony found in Scripture. Besides an obvious verse like Isaiah 55:8 ("For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways"), we also find telling examples from the life of Jesus. Jesus in many ways is a paradigm of the unexpected, constantly defying the expectations of his culture, his family, and his disciples. For anyone who affirms the divinity of Jesus, this should be a powerful challenge to our own expectations of who God is and how God goes about acting.

While the context of the passage clearly indicates that they were being sarcastic, if we take seriously for the sake of argument the call of the teachers of the law to Jesus as he hung on the cross ("He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! ³²Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him." link), then it seems that Jesus passed up an opportunity to make evident who he was and gain more followers. Presumably there may have been other people there too who might have been willing to follow Jesus but were struggling with how such a person fit into their religious paradigm. Didn't Jesus care about these people? Didn't he know that if he came down from the cross others might believe? (Again, this is just for the sake of argument. I am not claiming that this is the meaning Mark is trying to convey).

To anyone honestly wrestling with who Jesus was at that moment, it would be extremely natural to think that the best thing for Jesus to do would be to come down and prove he was the Messiah, the anointed one. If he really cared about these people and he really was the Messiah, why wouldn't he do such a thing? It is easy to see why not in the light of the resurrection that followed, but for anyone on the first Good Friday such a thing could not have been anticipated. And that is just the point- God does things that we do not expect, things that violate what to us seem like self-evident truths about what a good person should do in a given situation, but in the end what God has done surpasses our imagination and is incomparably greater than what to us seemed like the obvious thing to do.

This imagination and counter-intuitiveness may very well be a part of God's personality that reflects just who God is. Will this satisfy everyone who wonders how a world filled with evil could ever be justified? Probably not, but perhaps, following Ivan Karamazov, they may walk the quadrillion miles and declare it incomparably better than could ever have been imagined when they at last come to see what God has done:-) All this is only to say that Scripture is filled with incidents of God acting in unexpected ways that at the time undoubtedly seemed to go against what seemed to be the obvious good decision to make. If we take seriously God's personality and look to the testimony provided in the Bible then we have reason to believe that what we see now may look radically different in the light of what God will yet do. This requires a step of faith, but it isn't a blind leap. We can only have confidence in God Himself and who He is, which is exactly what we should expect if He truly is personal.

Holy Week

Today is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. We remember Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, recognizing that it led to the cross. Dying for our sake that we might have forgiveness and new life, Jesus endured excruciating pain and loneliness, dying a criminal's death. This is the scandal of the cross- a challenge to our own assumptions, institutions, and values. As St. Paul wrote, "but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor. 1:23). We confess and celebrate the resurrection, but we can never afford to forget the reality and brutality of the crucifixion. In anticipation of the resurrection that we will be celebrating a week from today, I am posting a passage from the liturgy of St. Basil the Great for reflection on the significance of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Coming from the Holy Anaphora, I think this text is a powerful reminder of the power of God and the hope of resurrection:

Priest: Together with these blessed powers, loving Master we sinners also cry out and say: Truly You are holy and most holy, and there are no bounds to the majesty of Your holiness. You are holy in all Your works, for with righteousness and true judgment You have ordered all things for us. For having made man by taking dust from the earth, and having honored him with Your own image, O God, You placed him in a garden of delight, promising him eternal life and the enjoyment of everlasting blessings in the observance of Your commandments. But when he disobeyed You, the true God who had created him, and was led astray by the deception of the serpent becoming subject to death through his own transgressions, You, O God, in Your righteous judgment, expelled him from paradise into this world, returning him to the earth from which he was taken, yet providing for him the salvation of regeneration in Your Christ. For You did not forever reject Your creature whom You made, O Good One, nor did You forget the work of Your hands, but because of Your tender compassion, You visited him in various ways: You sent forth prophets; You performed mighty works by Your saints who in every generation have pleased You. You spoke to us by the mouth of Your servants the prophets, announcing to us the salvation which was to come; You gave us the law to help us; You appointed angels as guardians. And when the fullness of time had come, You spoke to us through Your Son Himself, through whom You created the ages. He, being the splendor of Your glory and the image of Your being, upholding all things by the word of His power, thought it not robbery to be equal with You, God and Father. But, being God before all ages, He appeared on earth and lived with humankind. Becoming incarnate from a holy Virgin, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, conforming to the body of our lowliness, that He might change us in the likeness of the image of His glory. For, since through man sin came into the world and through sin death, it pleased Your only begotten Son, who is in Your bosom, God and Father, born of a woman, the holy Theotokos and ever virgin Mary; born under the law, to condemn sin in His flesh, so that those who died in Adam may be brought to life in Him, Your Christ. He lived in this world, and gave us precepts of salvation. Releasing us from the delusions of idolatry, He guided us to the sure knowledge of You, the true God and Father. He acquired us for Himself, as His chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. Having cleansed us by water and sanctified us with the Holy Spirit, He gave Himself as ransom to death in which we were held captive, sold under sin. Descending into Hades through the cross, that He might fill all things with Himself, He loosed the bonds of death. He rose on the third day, having opened a path for all flesh to the resurrection from the dead, since it was not possible that the Author of life would be dominated by corruption. So He became the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, the first born of the dead, that He might be Himself the first in all things. Ascending into heaven, He sat at the right hand of Your majesty on high and He will come to render to each according to His works. As memorials of His saving passion, He has left us these gifts which we have set forth before You according to His commands. For when He was about to go forth to His voluntary, ever memorable, and life-giving death, on the night on which He was delivered up for the life of the world, He took bread in His holy and pure hands, and presenting it to You, God and Father, and offering thanks, blessing, sanctifying, and breaking it:

Priest: He gave it to His holy disciples and apostles saying: Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you and for the forgiveness of sins.

People: Amen.

Priest: Likewise, He took the cup of the fruit of vine, and having mingled it, offering thanks, blessing, and sanctifying it.

Priest: He gave it to His holy disciples and apostles saying: Drink of this all of you. This is my blood of the new Covenant, shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.

People: Amen.

Priest: Do this in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this Bread and drink this Cup, you proclaim my death, and you confess my resurrection. Therefore, Master, we also, remembering His saving passion and life giving cross, His three; day burial and resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, and enthronement at Your right hand, God and Father, and His glorious and awesome second coming. (link)

I hope this week will be a time for sober and grateful reflection on the passion of Jesus that we might be all the more able to be filled with the joy of the light of resurrection.

Remember Me

Why doesn't God constantly reveal Himself to us? This thought has often crossed my mind, and I have heard it expressed many times, whether as the anxious petition of someone crying out for God's guidance and a sense of His presence, or from someone seeking to cast doubt on the existence or goodness of a God who seemingly is unable or unwilling to provide what seems like such a simple act of reassurance. Next week I have the chance to attend a lecture addressing the issue of divine hiddenness, so I won't try to unpack that subject just yet. Instead, I was struck by the role that memory plays in faith.

Following others, I think of faith as belief, trust, and commitment. Faith is not merely believing something (God is good, God exists, the capital of Montana is Helena, etc.), but being willing to personally commit oneself in some way to that belief, while trusting in it. On this view, doubt and faith are not opposites or antonyms, but can in fact coexist. In fact, I would argue that doubt is essential for faith, because there is no need for trust or commitment in matters of certainty, at least not in any sense of personal stake. It is this uncertainty or doubt that causes us to rely on the one whom we are putting our trust in. In order to trust someone through periods of doubt or uncertainty, we need to remember what they have done in the past, and this is where the importance of memory comes in.

Failures of memory and the suffering and pain it causes are littered throughout the Bible. Time and again in the Old Testament, God delivers Israel from affliction, persecution, or imminent danger, causing Israel to worship God. However, soon afterward we see time and again Israel forgetting God and turning to sinful ways. The book of Judges is essentially dedicated to this cycle of deliverance and return to sin. Why does this happen? Because Israel did not remember the things that God had done in the past. In Exodus, we see the Israelites demanding if Moses has led them out of Egypt simply to die, seemingly ignoring the miraculous events that have allowed for their departure. Their deliverance from the armies of Pharaoh does not stop them from crying out at the lack of food they encounter, and then after being given quail and manna, growing tired of these foods.

In all of these situations, the Israelites encountered difficult situations that threatened their lives and health. The dangers were real: death at the hands of an army and starvation. However, God delivered them in each instance. That does not take away the uncertainty that inevitably faced them in these situations: the mere fact that they had left Egypt did not logically entail safe journey to the promised land. There were legitimate grounds for doubt then, and their only choice was to have faith in God, putting their trust not in any certain circumstances or law-like processes, but in a person. However, their failure to trust God showed a failure to remember all that God had done. No matter how often God delivered Israel, in the face of danger time and again they still did not trust Him. If nothing else, this should give us pause that if God were to suddenly start performing miracles in greater frequency and visibility that it would inevitably lead to greater trust. If God is really interested in lives submitted to Him in relationships of trust and commitment, as I believe, then it seems like great acts may not be the way to achieve this end. It certainly wasn't in the stories recorded in the Old Testament.

In order to trust God, we must remember what He has done in the moments when He seems distant or absent. This memory allows us to trust when our circumstances and instincts tell us to abandon hope or give up. Nowhere in the Bible does it suggest that God is interested in freeing His followers from lives that involve risk, danger, difficulty, and uncertainty. Thus, even more overt acts of God are not going to remove uncertainty from our life, because there must still be room for trust. This gives new significance to Jesus' words "do this in remembrance of me." Remembering what Jesus has done is central to the mission of the church, enshrined in the Eucharist. Faith requires trust which in turn requires memory. Failures of memory lead to failures of trust. The Church isn't just the body of Christ on earth, working for His kingdom. It is also a community that exists to serve as a witness to God's acts and promises.

In moments where God seems distant, we are reminded of the many times that God's people went years and decades in seeming silence. Even Jesus himself cried out to God, asking if God had forsaken him. These memories can serve to guide and comfort, reminding us that God does not always act in ways that we expect or in the time frames that I want, but that He is good and able and will complete His plans. This is what I strive to remember and what Christians can never forget.

More Thoughts on Law and Morality

A professor of mine made an interesting comment in passing that resonated with a lot of my recent thinking on the idea of law and human fallen-ness. He remarked, "God had to write his law on tablets of stone because human hearts were too hard." I think sometimes Christians overlook the narratives in the Pentateuch leading up to the giving of the Law of Moses and assume that somehow people were "pre-moral" before this event. The book of Genesis is full of moral judgments, and as I mentioned in my last post, full of various "falls." From the fall of Adam and Eve through Cain and Abel, to the flood (and numerous other places in between and after), we see time after time human beings engaging in wicked actions, causing death and division to one another. This is a far cry from the created order that God proclaimed to be "very good," itself a moral judgment.

The laws of Moses then are not some new source of moral revelation that humanity was somehow unable to discover on its own. On the contrary, the created ordered is described in moral language and as such it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to see moral awareness as a feature of humanity. (the "knowledge of good and evil" that Adam and Eve gained from eating of the tree, as I have mentioned elsewhere, ought to be understood in the more wholistic sense of "knowing" that is frequently employed in the Old Testament, which would mean experiential knowing, in the same way that Adam "knew" Eve. What was gained was not moral knowledge of good and evil, but first hand experience of doing evil). By engaging in deliberately de-humanizing behaviors, humans have dulled their hearts to their own moral natures, and the law represents an attempt to reawaken these natures. Jesus makes this point in his teaching on divorce when he notes that the laws concerning divorce were given "because of your hardness of heart; but from the beginning it has not been this way" (Matthew 19:8).

Sometimes I hear the moral teachings of the Bible treated as if they are only meaningful if they represent original, heretofore un-thought-of moral principles. The claim seems to be that the teachings of the Bible should be things that could not be recognized independent of reading its pages. The problem with this is that it ignores the way the Bible itself presents moral judgments. Moral judgments are present in the very beginning of all things, they do no magically appear at Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments. What the law represents is a badly-needed reminder of the moral truths that humanity has time and again rejected. It represents an accommodation to the sinfulness of humanity that would seek to move them from morally destructive ways back towards God. This process is completed in Christ, who is the fulfillment of the law, but we see the beginning traces of it in the Pentateuch and its commands which seek to cultivate an attitude of intentionality towards one's behavior.

Yes, you can be "good without God" in the sense of never needing to open up the Bible to discover many moral principles, but a quick glance at the world (and at my own actions) shows that we constantly need to be reminded of things that we know. Virtue is developed through habit, and in order to develop habits we need reminders that prompt us to be intentional about whatever behavior we are trying to develop. In this sense, we need moral instruction and guidelines in order to soften our hearts so that they might once again become receptive to God. This is the purpose of the law in the Old Testament, I submit, and not an attempt to provide wholly original (or wholly perfect) moral instruction.

Thinking about Death

This week I read Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein's short and mostly humorous book Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between. Catchart and Klein have written other books in a similar vein, using jokes and philosophy to explore various topics. I was interested since death is one of those things that my mind seems to wander towards (perhaps to an abnormal degree). On on the one hand, it seems preposterous that I could continue to exist after death, while on the other hand, the idea that my consciousness could cease permanently seems almost absurd as well. I'm obviously not the only one who has wondered at the looming figure of death and what does or does not lie beyond it.

Cathcart and Klein make frequent reference throughout the book to Ernest Becker's influential book The Denial of Death. I have not had the opportunity to read Becker's book, so I anything I say is based off of reading a bit of secondary literature on it and from the summaries provided by Cathcart and Klein. Becker's thesis seems to be that fear of death is the most fundamental drive of human beings, and that as a result civilization itself is driven by the need to create structures that defy death. Catchart and Klein speak of "immortality systems" like groups and religions that are created to provide a means of escape from the looming spectre of death.

This is a provocative thesis, and Becker's book has been widely read since its publication in 1974. However, it makes me think some of the same thoughts that happen when I encounter the belief that the origins of religion can be rooted in wish fulfillment. Simply put, if religion is about creating an immortality system, then historically they seem not to have done such a great job. Ancient Greek and Hebrews both seemed to see the afterlife as Hades/Sheol, a place not of punishment or reward, but simply the place where souls went after death. It generally appears to be somewhat gloomy and not a terribly inviting place. If religion serves to provide an immortality system, it seems that many have gotten away with not offering their adherents much. This isn't even touching upon Eastern religions where "immortality," if we can even call it that, looks very strange indeed to Western eyes.

Plus, it seems that belief in immortality is not dependent on a belief in God. It seems, to use the Greeks again as an example, that they simply believed in an afterlife in which the things of this world (people, things, and yes the gods) continued to exist. The gods were part of this world and of the next. The gods did not secure the existence of the afterlife. Perhaps Becker was moving the right direction towards recognizing that a belief in immortality seems to be almost foundational for humans. I just don't think religions secured belief in immortality. Simply put, we don't seem to "need" immortality systems and religions to arrive at a belief in the afterlife.

Western civilization has produced many images of the afterlife through the works of Milton and Dante and a host of lesser known figures who have created deeply-ingrained images of heaven and hell that are easily called to mind. While these images have a basis in passages of the Bible, as Catchart and Klein show with tongue-in-cheek humor, they represent an enormous amount of exaggeration and extrapolation. This just shows that the New Testament really doesn't provide all that much detail about what the life to come will be like. If it's all about immortality, then why didn't Jesus focus more on it? Jesus speaks about a future resurrection as if its a foregone conclusion, not a new revelation and not something that seems to need additional fleshing out.

In light of Jesus' resurrection, Christianity has recognized the centrality of resurrection as the culmination of history and the sign of new creation and a reordering of the universe. When I die I'll do so in the hope of this resurrection that raised Our Lord from the dead as the first fruits of things to come, as Paul wrote. Until then, we live in a world where death is central and unavoidable, yet the inclination to believe that it is not the end remains difficult to shake. My specific hope for the future lies in Jesus Christ, but I think my belief in a continuation of life after death has a deeper history that may be a glimpse of God's presence in creation.

The Fall of Humanity

After reading Doug Chaplin's excellent blog post (No Adam, No Fall? Wrestling with Sin and Science) reflecting on the idea of the fall of man earlier today, I find myself reflecting more and more on the idea of the fall and sin. Chaplin has jogged my thinking, making me realize just how prevalent the notion of falleness is throughout the Old Testament, and questioning the "privileged" position we give to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the creation narrative. Chaplin makes a number of great points about what the fall might mean in light of our modern biological understandings about human origins, but I won't focus on them here.

I think Chaplin makes an excellent point when he postulates that Paul's use of Adam as a prototype of human sinfulness is done out of a need to find a suitable counterpoint to the saving work of Jesus. This is an important point to keep in mind in general when we think of the apostolic use of the Old Testament in the writings of the New Testament. As has been pointed out by many, the writers of the New Testament were not using the Old Testament to mine for details of Jesus' life (contra those who would want to claim that the events in the life of Jesus recorded in the Gospels were made up by writers mining the Old Testament for messianic passages), but instead were reading the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus Christ. Peter Enns in particular stresses this point in his book Incarnation and Inspiration.

The centrality of Jesus can never be overlooked when we look at the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament (and, I would add, should never be overlooked in general). Those who were radically transformed by their encounter with Jesus and His followers read the Hebrew scriptures through the lens of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, looking for ways in which they could find parallels to it. I think we too often read the flow thought in the wrong direction, assuming that a belief in Adam as the source of sin necessitated a belief in Christ covering over this sin, but it seems that it is actually the reverse. It is Christ's covering of our sin that motivated Paul and others to find an appropriate parallel in the scriptures of Israel that could help encapsulate this important revelation. In doing so, he was looking for resources from within the Jewish tradition that could help frame the salvific work of Jesus.

The story in Genesis is clearly a story of man's fallenness, but to move beyond this and claim that it is THE FALL of mankind overlooks why Paul was using Adam in his discussion of Christ's salvation and the repeated theme of fallenness that runs throughout the Old Testament. Gary A. Anderson sheds important insights into viewing the concept of fallenness in the Old Testament. In his article "Biblical Origins and the Problem of the Fall," Anderson notes that the creation of the tabernacle strongly parallels the creation account of Genesis, and suggests that we see the creation of the tabernacle, and Yahweh's coming to dwell with the people of Israel, as the climax of the creation story. Israel's subsequent disobedience of God results in their punishment and exile from a land of paradise, a striking parallel with the story of Adam and Eve.

As Anderson notes, throughout the Old Testament we find God placing before Israel the promise of life and fulfillment if they only follow His commands, only to have the Israelites disobey almost immediately. Because of this

Indeed, "immediacy" may be the best way to define "original sin" in its Old Testament context. As soon as Israel receives the benefaction of her election, she offers not praise and gratitude but rebellion. This pattern defines not only the narrative of Israel's election but also other founding moments in the Hebrew Scriptures.(26)

As such, the story of Adam and Eve can be read as the story of Israel's later history in a microcosm:

Indeed it is difficult not to see the influence of a theology very similar to that of Deuteronomy; in that book God sets life and death before the Israelites and says the choice is theirs. Obey my Torah and you shall have life in the land, disobey it and you shall die in exile. Eden is Torah in miniature. (28)

In light of this, perhaps we should see the fall as not one single event that forever sets the course for humanity and covers all future generations, but as a series of events in which humans have again and again turned away from God's promises of life and blessing to embrace things that only lead to sorrow, pain, and death. This is the story that is recorded time and again in the Old Testament, of which the story of Adam and Eve is but one incident. And just as St. Paul did, we can look to Jesus Christ as the source of freedom and new beginning from a cycle of disobedience and the sorrow that inevitably results from this.

Truth in Literature

How can there be truth in something that strictly speaking is not so? This question is a crucial one when it comes to whether or not we can speak of a fictional/mythic/symbolic/poetic work as being "true." If the Genesis creation stories are not literal scientific and historical fact, then in what sense can we find truth in them? The key to understanding this, I believe, lies in recognizing different understandings of truth and not falling victim to a pernicious reductionism that seeks to formulate all things as scientific statements of facts and affairs.

Jean Jacques Lecercle makes an important point in his 2007 article "How to Articulate Genuine Experience In, Of, and Through Language":

A literary utterance or discourse cannot have the same relation to truth, in the simple opposition of the true and the false, as a scientific statement has (if only because it introduces a third term in the opposition: fiction). And here the philosopher of language, having read Wittgenstein, will remember that different language-games need different concepts of truth (judicial truth, being what the trial produces at its outcome, is not exactly the same as scientific truth, obtained through the protocols of experimentation and the determinative judgements deriving from the laws of nature). And the philosopher of language will remember that ‘truth’ is a concept which, in the philosophical tradition, is associated with at least three different paradigms, the poetic and ontological paradigm of aletheia, famously revived by Heidegger (1971), the judicial paradigm of verum, and the rational and scientific paradigm of truth as adaequatio. So there is scope for a specifically aesthetic paradigm of truth to apply. (264)

Lecercle argues that the kind of knowledge that literature captures and expresses is knowledge of experience, something that propositional knowledge cannot capture (this could probably be phrased in Polanyian terms as "personal knowledge"). This is an interesting point because it shows that there are forms of truth that escape articulation in a strict scientific sense. Literary works capture moral truths, truths about human nature and above all the human experience. To borrow another example from Lecercle's article, a poem describing the trenches World War I can capture the authentic experience of such a situation. Statements of fact could never do such a thing.

We should avoid the mistake of making all things collapse into a naive scientific realism, especially taking into account the fact that we are fundamentally limited by the language that we use. And language itself is fundamentally metaphorical; it is not simply one to one representations of objects in the world (Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances is a useful illustration of this). We speak in metaphors, not in representations. Nietzsche was another who realized this, and he strove to make his readers cognizant of the way language itself smuggles in metaphysics:

Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Fortunately, it is too late to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief. Logic, too rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). (From Human, All to Human in The Nietzsche Reader, eds. Pearson and Large, 164)

This should give us some pause about the weight and force we try to give to any of our conclusions, not simply ones about God and faith. (One might respond that since we are so limited we must withhold all judgments about God since it is clearly beyond our capacity. And I agree to a certain extent with this view, which is why the idea of revelation is essential to faith. Simply put, I cannot derive all of the features of my faith from my own rational reflection. However, if there is a God who exists as a person then this is exactly the way things must be since in person to person interactions and communications, we must rely upon the other person to reveal or withhold things - communication cannot be compelled.)

If nothing else, we should be mindful of the different senses of truth and should avoid making a category mistake by dismissing something as untrue simply because it is of a different kind than something else. This doesn't make literary truth any less "real" than scientific truth: the authenticity of the aesthetic experience captured can correspond to the actual feelings of humans even if the tools used to craft it were metaphors, simile, hyperbole, parallelism, and repetition instead of experimentation and observation. Thus, I don't need to read the book of Genesis as a scientific treatise in order to find truth in it. I can find truth in its description of human nature and experience and of our relation to God. There is truth to be found and had in literature, and it need not entail an impoverished reductive view of the world.

Hell

Over at Logan Atone, there is a recent post on passages from the Bible dealing with the reality of hell and its nature. I am posting this here and as a comment over there because hell is a topic that I have planned on addressing for a while.

When we look at passages in the Bible dealing with hell, we need to be careful because so much of our mental imagery of hell owes more to popular culture and Dante than to anything found in the Bible. We need to be careful not to take these passages out of context and meaning (something that Christians have probably been more guilty of than any other).

The Old Testament word that sometimes get rendered "hell" is "Sheol" which is sometimes rendered "Hades" which is simply the place of the dead. The Old Testament is largely silent on what this is like and often implies that is the destination of everyone, good or wicked.

The New Testament word rendered hell is "gehenna" and this refers to an actual physical location: the valley of Hinnom. To take the entry from Funk and Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia:

"GEHENNA (Gr. Geenna; Heb. Ge Hinnom), Valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where Solomon, king of Israel, built “an high place,” or place of worship, for the gods Chemosh and Moloch, according to 1 Kings 11:7. Because some of the Israelites are supposed to have sacrificed their children to Moloch there (see 2 Kings 23:10), the valley came to be regarded as a place of abomination. In a later period it was made a refuse dump, and perpetual fires were maintained there to prevent pestilence. Thus, in the New Testament, Gehenna became synonymous with hell."

Also, a similar summary can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Gehenna which also contains a helpful list of the occurrences of this word in the New Testament (12 times total, and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels).

N.T. Wright has some interesting thoughts in his recent book Surprised by Hope on Gehenna/hell that bear quoting at length:

The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not as a general rule, telling that them unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one. As with God's kingdom, so with its opposite: it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else. His message to his contemporaries was stark and (as we would say today) political. Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy, and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries . . . It is there only by extension, and with difficulty that we can extrapolate from the many gospel sayings that articulate this urgent, immediate warning to a deeper question of a warning about what may happen after death. The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife. They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as "Abraham's bosom," not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within the present life. This is not to say that Jesus would have dissented from their implied picture of postmortem realities. It is, rather, to point out that to take the scene of Abraham, the Rich Man, and Lazarus literally is about as sensible as trying to find out the name of the Prodigal Son. (176-177).

As Wright alludes to, it is interesting to note that most of Jesus' sayings involving Gehenna are when he is talking with his disciples. If hell was such a pressing matter, then one would think Jesus might have included it more often in his more public teachings. The centrality of the kingdom of God to Jesus' mission and message should never be forgotten when we consider the words of Jesus.

This does not mean that there is no judgment or consequences for those who choose to live in wickedness through their dehumanizing behavior. I think there is much to C.S. Lewis' famous observation that if the doors of hell are locked, it is from the inside. However, we need to realize how little focus on hell (or heaven for that matter) Jesus provides in his teachings, and the danger of trying to read too much of anything into the passages. The word "hell" is full of all sorts of connotations and implications, and it takes some work to try to peel these accretions away and go back once more to the world of Sheol and Gehenna.

The Lost History of Christianity

I finished reading Philip Jenkins' excellent recent book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Gold Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died last week, and was very favorably impressed by it. Jenkins, who teaches at Penn State and has written other works on the subject on religious history and global Christianity, presents a facet of Christian history that too often gets overlooked by a view of Christianity that sees it primarily as an European/North American/Western religion long since divorced from its Semitic roots.

These roots remained strong for far longer than the story of the Western Church would lead one to believe, and Jenkins shows how the history of Eastern Christianity (such as the Coptic Church, Nestorians, or Jacobites) provides a balance to many assumptions about the nature of Christian history. The growth of the Church to the East, its flourishing, its existence well past the emergence of Islam all paint a different view of Christianity, which is often assumed to be a majority faith closely allied with governments based on the course it took in the West. Jenkins' work shows that the course of Western Christianity is only one possible route, and indeed, is only one way in which it developed historically. He provides a balanced analysis of religious persecution, noting the extensive periods of peaceful toleration and coexistence under Islamic rule while also noting that periods of intense persecution and violence that did take place as well.

Jenkins' also discusses why faiths die in various regions, and what lessons this reality might hold for the faithful in those regions and followers of the faith observing it from afar. The idea that Christianity could be driven out of areas of the world that it had inhabited and flourished in for centuries is something that is deeply unsettling for believers, and The Lost History of Christianity forced me to grapple with this uncomfortable truth. However, this book also has much that is hopeful for a Christian, showing that Christianity can be practiced anywhere in the world without forcing Western culture as a part of it. Indeed, the ways in which the Eastern churches presented Christianity in ways that connected and fit with the cultures it encountered is an important lesson for 21st century Christianity, which once again is making major inroads in places like China and is growing at a torrid place in many parts of Africa. The re-Christianization of these lands that once before had important Christian centers is a reminder that the end of Christianity in a place is not the final word on the matter, as history has shown time and again.

Indeed, an understanding of this is key to beginning to grapple with the fact that Christianity died out (actually was killed, as Jenkins' shows. It was violence and persecution that brought an end to these churches). If we as Christians seriously believe that God's sense of time is different than hours and that there is any truth to be found in the simile "with the Lord a thousand years is as a day" then we must recognize that in view of God's time what we may see as a irreversible setback may be nothing more than a small shift. This doesn't mean that this is the end of all grappling with why Christianity may die or be killed in certain areas, and I think we should take seriously the need to develop what Jenkins' calls a "theology of extinction."

The history of Christianity in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is a huge part of Christian history that gets overlooked and is a powerful antidote to a Eurocentric view of Christianity that leads to all sort of assumptions about Christianity that are often more to do with Western culture than anything inherent to Christianity. To give just one example, Jenkins' points out how knowledge of the history of the Church in the East can offer a valuable contribution to debates in Biblical studies:

The Syriac Bible was a conservative text, to a degree that demands our attention. In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the Emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity iwth the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians or Jacobites were under an coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho'dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins (87-88).

This is just one way in which knowledge of the broader history of Christianity has important ramifications for how we understand the faith today, and I appreciative of people like Jenkins' interested in telling this story in a way that is both academically rigorous and popularly accessible, sharing with a wider readership what has been circulating in scholarly circles for a long time. I am grateful for the way this book has helped me to appreciate the fuller history of the church and is continuing to make me grapple with why the faith has spread and contracted in different ways and different places throughout history.

A New Project for Me

My dialog with Harlan Quinn through QuIRP and the Logan Cres blog has turned into a new blog. It is a collaboration between us on the logical structure of the atonement. This will serve as an educational resource for things related to the atonement. It is not intended to be a debate blog, but comments and thoughts are strongly encouraged. We are interested in seeing some stimulating dialogue on the atonement! I am happy to be able to participate in this kind of dialog between a Christian and an atheist.

I have already posted two fairly substantial posts related to the issues of sin and law. You can view them here:

Sin and Community

Jesus and the Law

I don't want to post redundant content here and there, but these posts contain some thoughts that I think are important to the atonement and to gaining a better understanding of the Bible and Christianity in general, so I wanted to make links to them available here. A permanent link to Logan Atone is now available on the side, so feel free to check it out and see what is going on over there.

Isaiah 45:7

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, I have seen references to Isaiah 45:7 popping up frequently. The passage reads (in the NIV):

I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things. link

The reason this passage has garnered recent attention, obviously is the fact that it seems to claim that God creates disasters (the NASB translates it as "calamity.") This has only fueled debate over things like Pat Robertson's comments on the cause of the earthquake. While there are plenty of Christian apologetic sites that will point out that the Hebrew word translated disaster here refers to natural disasters and not moral evil, this does not make the passage any less troubling.

I don't think that every difficult passage in the Bible can be harmonized or given an explanation that is satisfying to 21st century ethics, however I don't think it is never legitimate to try to explain a passage that may seem to be troubling. In the case of this passage, however, there is perhaps a greater need to offer comment on it because it seems to refer to more than God simply punishing people for evil (which would just lead to debates over whether or not God's punishments are just or not), but for God being the source of all natural disasters.

In doing some reflecting and research on the passage, I came across an interesting article by Michael Deroche from a 1992 issue of Vetus Testamentum entitled "Isaiah XLV 7 and the Creation of Chaos?" In the article, Deroche in passing makes an interesting analysis that provides a compelling way of understanding this passage. This is all the more interesting because Deroche is not seeking to grapple with the ethical implications of the passage or seeking to explain it away, but is instead weighing in on a debate about the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Hebrew creation account.

In looking at the verse, Deroche comments:

The four elements that Yahweh claims to create are not listed in a random fashion. They appear in two groups of two, each group containing a pair of terms normally thought of as opposites. This form of expression is called a merism, a figure in which two opposite terms are used together to refer to a totality

This idea of opposites used to express a totality is elaborated upon later in the article:

I would argue that Isa. xlv 7 reflects the same notion that the created world is comprised of sets of binary opposites. In this case, the two pairs reflect the two dimensions of human existence: light and darkness reflect the physical world, while well-being and evil stand for the ethical world. Of course, since light and darkness can be metaphors for good and evil, the distinction is by no means absolute, and reflects the Hebrew notion that the physical and ethical realms are intertwined. The last stich of the verse summarizes in a more succinct manner the point of the first two: Yahweh is the creator of everything!

What this merism expresses is God's supremacy over the physical and ethical realms of the universe, which is a pretty uncontroversial claim for a Christian. If we view this as a literary technique that uses binary opposites to express a totality, what we have isn't an affirmation of God's role in sending disasters upon people, but in affirming God's role as Lord of all of creation.

This sort of affirmation would stop short of attributing divine agency to everything that takes place in the universe, but instead only asserts that God is the creator of a universe in which such things take place. This obviously can raise the question of why God would create a universe in such disasters are able to take place at all, which is a legitimate question. But this is not the same thing as ascribing responsibility to God for disasters (anyone with children will recognize that you can create something that can do things that you are not morally responsible for). This little bit of exegesis doesn't provide an answer to the problem of evil, but it does provide a plausible interpretation of the verse that avoids the conclusion that God is the author of all natural disasters. Whether such a claim can be made from the Bible is up for debate, but I don't think Isaiah 45:7 will be able to establish this on its own.

Whose Interpretation?

I may be a little late to weigh in on the recent controversy surrounding Richard Dawkin's recent article on Pat Robertson's controversial remarks about the earthquake in Haiti, but I felt I needed to say something about an issue that is deeply connected with it. Many Christians were quick to criticize Robertson for implying that the earthquake was a sort of divine punishment, but Dawkins insists that Robertson is the real Christian here for affirming a belief in a God who seeks to send disaster and punishment on those who disobey Him, which is the God that the Bible reveals. Dawkins' view has been affirmed by other atheists (over at Debunking Christianity there has been some recent bickering about it), who argue that Christians may very well want to disagree with Robertson, but in doing so they are being unfaithful to the tradition that they claim to represent.

The issue that I find troubling here is the presumption of people like Dawkins to tell Christians how they should interpret the Bible and Christian tradition. This is by no means the first time that people have argued that the Christian Church has misunderstood the Bible, going back to the earliest decades and centuries after the death and resurrection of Christ. As Craig Allert notes in A High View of Scripture? the early Church fathers argued against heresies that sought to appropriate scripture, by claiming that the Bible is the Church's book and it is the Church's privilege and responsibility to interpret it. While I don't think this means that only Christians are allowed to weigh in on issues of Biblical interpretation, I think that this is a very important point. Those outside the Church may have their opinions about the Bible ought to be interpreted, but they should not presume to claim the authority to tell the faith community who possesses these scriptures that they have the proper interpretation and that other Christians have it all wrong.

I realize this raises the issue of the fact that many different Christians have varying views of how to read the Bible and often take issue with the way that other Christians read it. This is true and important, but I do not think decisive over the issue of who can presume to tell another how to interpret a sacred text. I believe there is an important distinction that needs to be made between in-house debates and those with "outsiders." Debates within Christianity are carried out within a larger shared context of faith and belief that makes it distinct from other debates. In the same way, it would be inappropriate for a young earth creationist to tell evolutionary biologists which view of evolution is the proper understanding of it (no doubt with the aim of showing that this view is untenable or unethical). If someone rejects evolution then they probably should not presume to tell those who accept it how best to interpret it. That matter of interpretation is best left in the hands of those in the community that affirm it, which in this example is obviously the community of other evolutionary biologists. They may disagree with one another over how evolution ought to be interpreted, but surely someone who rejects evolution altogether has little standing in such a debate.

This is not a problem unique to only Christian-atheist debates. I have read Christian apologists seeking to convert Muslims who argue that if Muslims take the Koran seriously they must believe such and such (inevitably unsavory) belief. The problem I have with this is that we as Christians have no right to tell Muslims how they must or should interpret their own holy writings. We may disagree with these writings and may not accept them as authentic or complete revelation, but that does not mean that we get to tell them how to interpret them. That privilege lies with the community that affirms it. Obviously a Christian who becomes a scholar of Middle Eastern religion would have a bit more authority to speak to such matters, but she still has no right to tell that faith community that they are wrong in their interpretation of their own work.

I am not trying to say that only Christians can weigh in on Biblical debates and interpretation. There are many competent and excellent scholars in the field who are not Christians who have important perspectives to offer on the Bible, but even they do not really have any say in telling Christians now that they are "wrong" in how they read the Bible now. Clearly many Christians reject Robertson's (and Dawkins') interpretation of parts of the Bible, and do so for reasons that are just as much rooted in the history and tradition of Christianity and the words of the Bible, and it is wrong to say that we are misunderstanding our own tradition when we do so.

More Thoughts on Morality

Awhile ago, I wrote something on how an argument from morality doesn't give a Christian, or anyone else, a free pass to say that moral principles are ontologically grounded. I want to expand on some of the thoughts I have on the issue of morality, because I think Christianity has an important role to play in it, even if it is a little bit different than what is often put forth by other Christians.

In reflecting on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, I began to think about the moral impact that Christianity has left in its wake. In this work, Nietzshe provides a searing indictment of Christian morality as "slave morality" that sought to enshrine its own powerlessness and impotence through a redefinition of "good" and "bad" to make signs of powerlessness moral goods (like "humility," "forgiveness," "submission,", turning the other cheek, etc.). He criticizes those who seek to locate the source of these values as being simply evolutionarily advantageous, arguing that this view is merely seeking a justification for holding to principles of Christian morality that are now untenable in the wake of the death of God. What struck me during this particular reflection on the Genealogy was the way that Nietzsche asserts that Christianity has pulled off a moral coup, redefining moral concepts along new lines and replacing an older model.

The reason I find this to be so interesting is that so often it is assumed that moral principles that have been enshrined in Western Europe/Anglophone world are somehow moral universals for all humans, when in fact they reflect a particular cultural moral legacy, a cultural moral legacy that has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. Even if these values are no longer necessarily seen as originating in Christianity, it does not change the way in which the Christian Church has dramatically shaped the moral world of the West. To paraphrase Lesslie Newbigin, you cannot live with the Christian God for a thousand years and then simply cut ties. The influence still remains.

This is not to say that terrible things have never been done under the banner of Christianity, or that no other religion has expounded powerful moral principles. This does not "prove" that Christian moral principles are derived from divine authority or that no one other than Christians has any access to these kind of moral thoughts. I'm not making any such claim. What I am saying is that it is interesting how many moral principles that we treat as "obvious" are not at all obvious in the light of history or in the light of the experiences of the vast majority of people throughout the world. To say that moral principles are good because they reflect a basically human feature that makes us beings who want to show compassion and who empathize with the sufferings of others is a nice sentiment (and one that I encountered in one particular book on atheism) , but it does not sit well at all with most of human experience.

While the moral teachings of Christianity have not been employed perfectly and many who claim the name of Jesus still do terrible things in his name (something that I attribute to what Paul Hiebert calls "Christo-paganism"), it is interesting to see how moral principles that are derived in many ways from the Western worlds encounter with the God of Christianity are assumed to be universal and derivable from nature or sociology or history, when it is not at all clear and it appears that very different views of morality are possible and still exist. We're still living in the wake of the moral redefinition that Nietzsche saw, and it raises many interesting things to reflect upon about the nature of morality if we reject the source, not in the sense of not being able to have moral principles at all, but in the intellectual consistency of holding on to moral principles based on a belief that is rejected. Just a little food for thought. We'll see what I think in another couple of months:-)

Suffering

In the wake of the terrible devastation that hit Haiti last week, my thoughts have been drawn increasingly to thinking about suffering. It is difficult to comprehend that while I live in such relative wealth and luxury, hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the world (and certainly the poorest period in the Americas) suffer a terrible blow when their lives are already extremely difficult. I wrestled with these thoughts even more since in the past week I have received several unanticipated and extremely generous gifts. Here I am, already with so many things and blessings receiving even more when people who have nothing to begin with experience utter devastation. It tears my heart in two. On the one hand, I want to praise God for the things that have taken place in my life, while on the other hand I question God and ask why such a thing would happen.

This is a difficult question and one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. While I don’t think the logical problem of evil is a problem for God, the emotional and intuitive problem is deeply troubling. It is obviously possible that God has a reason unknown to us for allowing such things to happen, but in the wake of the suffering that comes from evil such a thought seems hollow and mercilessly ad hoc. It is interesting to me that throughout the Bible, there never is an answer given as to the purpose or why of suffering.

Just looking at the life of Jesus is almost shocking in regard to suffering. We have a man who for probably 30 years lived an invisible life in Nazareth. For 30 years people died, endured sickness and oppression, experienced injustice, and the Son of God remained silent. This isn’t even God in heaven appearing silent, this is God incarnate dwelling as an unknown among us for three decades before beginning his ministry and began healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising the dead. If Jesus really can do such things, why didn’t he do them sooner? Even when he did perform these miracles, Jesus acknowledged that there were others who were sick and did not receive healing. This seems shocking and immoral. If this is the great physician and he is aware of the need, then why doesn’t he go and meet it?

Instead of bringing an end to suffering, Jesus’ response is much different. He enters into it. He suffers alongside. He experiences injustice, scorn, pain, abandonment, and ultimately an excruciating death. God’s response to suffering is not to end it but to humbly dwell in it along with us. The response is not to end pain, but to experience it. It is a response of empathy and humility and gives us a different picture of God than what we are used to. Instead, we are confronted with a God who suffers. As seems to be the case so often throughout scripture, our propositional and existential questioning is met only with the person of God. This is so strange and frankly often seems deeply unsatisfying. Still, I must admit I do find comfort in a God who suffers and understands suffering. Perhaps evil may be a metaphysically irreducible feature of existence; I don’t know, and God seems silent on this question. It’s something that I grapple with and find on the one hand incredibly frustrating and on the other incredibly beautiful.