Apologetics and the Biblical Christ by Avery Dulles

Apologetics and the Biblical Christ by Avery Dulles
S.J., Woodstock Papers: Occasional Essays for Theology, No. 6, Newman Press, 1971.

Apologetics is endangered when too much is ascribed to its office, it seems clear. A likely result seems to be a reaction to the hubris in which the whole endeavor is rejected altogether. A more effective and less theatric endeavor for Christ is in the path between the two. Avery Dulles, now a Cardinal in the Catholic Church, and still a frequent contributor to the first class periodical First Things (my favorite magazine) now in his 80s, wrote this helpful and astute overview of apologetics in 1971 yet I found it helpful in elucidating key aspects of modern Biblical scholarship. The clarity of definitions is helpful and the historical account of historicist apologetics and the critique of them I think would be helpful to anyone seeking a better grasp of how to think of the Bible in its relationship to modern scholarship.

I am afraid that time has passed and memory of the specifics is already receding after reading this book but I want to at least call to my rough mind some of the few praiseworthy things I have been made aware of through reading it. I appreciate Dulles concise and clear coverage of the history, nature of, dangers and virtues and viability of certain kinds of apologetics. A large point of the book is to reject historicist apologetics and point to possible paths for apologetics. Dulles defines historicist apologetics as apologetics which placed unquestioning confidence in the powers of the scientific historical method to defend the rational basis of the Christian faith. His first chapter is devoted to explaining what the apologetics of historicism has been. He notes in it that even in the Victorian era religious thinkers like Kierkegaard and Newman “protested that history, considered as a purely scientific discipline, could not impose a definite religious interpretation of the person of Jesus.” I pause for a moment on this: here the scientific methodology by being given ascendancy strips history of the certainty and militates against the discernment of metanarrative. It has a limiting, curbing nature to it.

Dulles notes two major charges which had been raised against historicist apologetics in recent times: 1) misunderstanding the limits of history and 2) misconstruing the nature of the biblical sources. On the first he writes the following: “Academic history, it is clear, cannot be the final judge in matters of religion. It does not pretend to be able to pronounce on matters of philosophical truth, aesthetic, ethical , or religious values. The object of technical history is simply the phenomenal past- past events, that is, as they appeared in their spatiotemporal relationships. The ultimate interpretation of the source and significance of such events cannot be achieved by historical research alone. Even to say that the phenomenal past can be recovered by history is to risk exaggeration.” (p. 12).

Dulles goes on to make the following interesting point: “Let us assume, however, that the historical method could establish with overwhelming verisimilitude a definite picture concerning what Jesus had said and done. Would it follow then that history could tell us whether He was really the Messiah and the Son of God? A moment’s reflection will suffice to answer in the negative. At its ideal best, scientific history, conducted according to the norms of the historical-critical school, can put us in the same situation as the original spectators. We have no reason to believe that Jesus’ contemporaries found it easy to believe. Their faith did not issue more or less automatically from what they saw and heard.” (p. 13-14).

In the second chapter of the book, Dulles addresses the topic of the Gospels and scientific history. He addresses the issue of the Synoptic Gospels and “endless list of discrepancies among [them] in reporting the same events.” Examples are the different versions of the Our Father, and the Beatitudes. Dulles writes:

“Divergences of this nature, as Fr. O’Keefe has said, ‘serve to counteract any naïve understanding of the Gospels as some sort of photographic representation of the life of Christ… The Gospels have a freedom in the order of the facts, in their presentation, in their very redaction of the words of Christ, which shows that their authors did not feel bound to the repetition of a definitive formula’ (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 21 [1959]. 173 f.). Matthew and Luke do not, to be sure, radically innovate. We never find them inventing, so to speak out of whole cloth. But these minor changes which they do introduce should makes us cautious in assuming that in any given instance we know exactly what we should have seen or heard if we had been on the spot. What is here said of the Synoptics applies a fortiori to John, whose testimony is not greatly esteemed by positivistic historians.” (p.25)

John Calvin noted the same long ago:

“We know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates, or even in detailing minutely everything that Christ said or did” (John Calvin, Commentary on the Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. William Pringle, vol. 1, Calvin’s Commentaries 16 (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 216. )

“The Gospels likewise provide “history” in the minimal sense of stories about an actual human being who lived at a particular time and place not all that far distant from the time of their authors. That they are not “accurate” in many of the ways a modern historian would try to be is not a recent discovery. Calvin took it for granted that their authors rearranged details- the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, combined sayings originally delivered at different times. His doctrine of ‘accommodation’ allowed that God speaks to human beings in ways we can understand, [Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.11.13; ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:462-63.] and that might mean expressing a spiritual truth in terms of the worldview that would make sense to a scientifically primitive people: ‘He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.’ [Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King, Calvin’s Commentaries 1 (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 79] …One reason that the Reformers and their successors recognized such freedom with detail is that they knew the Bible so much better than we do and were therefore aware of the smallest discrepancies.” – William C. Placher, The Triune God, p. 54-55. Calvin wrote: “Pious and modest readers ought to be satisfied with having a brief summary of the doctrine of Christ placed before their eyes, collected out of his many and various discourses.” (Calvin, Harmony of the Evangelists, 1: 259.

It is nice to see John Calvin and a Catholic scholar who is now a Cardinal of the Catholic Church agreeing, if unknowingly.
Dulles concludes:

“Most Biblical scholars would now hold that the tradition is faithful without being servile; it transmitted the words and deeds of Jesus with such adaptions as were required to render them intelligible and significant for a different generation living in a different environment.” (p. 26)

Dulles the technical skill and range of knowledge needed in the task of historical criticism, which includes a knowledge of archeology, philology, textual criticism, and comparative religion. He remarks that the task is not a proper field for amateurs and notes that certitude is a rare and precious jewel in it.

He ends the chapter by concluding that the quarrel over the historical value of the Gospels cannot be settled by the techniques of history itself. The conflict, as far as pure history is involved, between the believer and the unbeliever, is irreducible. To overcome the opposition, he directs us to transfer the debate to some other ground.

In the third section, entitled “The Gospels As Confessional Documents”, Dulles elaborates on what he means by moving the debate to other ground, and he asserts this is grounded in the very nature of the Gospel. The Gospels do not aim to transmit a photograph of Jesus as He might have appeared to detached observers. Rather, it is a portrait of Jesus as understood by the believing church. The portrait is an appeal to faith and adoration and an invitation to join the Church in her devout confession. There is no escaping the deadlock on the plane of academic history, Dulles argues, but by moving to the terrain of religious concern we may hope to find a solution.

“Once we have grasped the spiritual nature of their mission, we can easily see why the apostles and Evangelists write as they do. It would be utterly inappropriate for them to offer documentary poofs and hold themselves to the rules of judicial evidence. They can afford to be frankly partisan and to be careless of points of chronology, geography, and descriptive detail.” P. 36.

Dulles avers that there are however, excellent reasons for judging the evangelical portrait of Jesus as credible. First, the New Testament unquestionably reflects the way Jesus was understood by his immediate band of followers. There are many theologies in the New Testament but only one faith. Second, the New Testament faith about Jesus is proclaimed with the stoutest conviction. Third, the New Testament doctrine about Christ is utterly novel. Nothing in the Jewish tradition would have predisposed them to accept what they now proclaimed and they would have shrunk in horror from it before becoming Christians- paying divine honors to a man! One can extend this to also say that nothing in the Hellenic society around them also prepared them for this. Gresham Machen’s The Origin of Paul’s Religion goes into detail about numerous theories that were raised about how the Christian religion could have been derived from Jewish sources (other than the Old Testament) and pagan cults and shows how everyone of them was problematic and how the most likely answer was that Paul’s religion had its origin in the love of the resurrected Christ. Fourth, the apostles themselves were transformed into new men by the news they bore. Fifth, the intrinsic qualities of the Christian message is not the type easily fabricated by the ingenuity of the wise.

In the fifth section, entitled “The Resurrection: History and Confession”, Dulles seeks to demonstrate the difference between the historicist apologetic, which he debunks, and the and the confessional apologetic, which he proposes. The historicist apologetic, he writes, may be boiled down to the following syllogism: “The Gospels are reliable historical sources; moreover, they affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus; therefore, the bodily resurrection occurred.” p. 45. Dulles writes that there is much that is good in the historical critical approach that should be retained but to treat the whole problem with the presupposition that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts is to oversimplify the problem out of existence. “It is to demand concessions which no adversary, or well-informed believer, will grant.”
Sources for example on the appearances of Christ after the resurrection were considered when Dulles was writing (I don’t know the case now) by many to have been from relatively late material. ( I am uncomfortable with this point until I know the reasoning behind such positions better and am not inclined to yield benefit of the doubt on it.) The three Gospel accounts of the appearances are “widely discrepant”. Dulles goes into more detail about this and there are some difficult things to reconcile about this if one is trying for a photographic representation of events. Have you ever tried to compare the different accounts of the appearances side by side? There are difficulties and scholars have ruminated on many angles of these and he mentions some of the most prominent of these points apparently.
Also, there is a difficulty relating to literary genre. “Some of the incidents are narrated in the concise, simple style characteristic of old, traditional material. But other episodes, such as Luke’s account of the journey to Emmaus and the Johannine version of the lakeside apparition, are told with such consummate artistry as to suggest the hand of a skilled litterateur. History can perform an invaluable service for apologetics by removing many of the preposterous conjectures and constructs (Again, Machen’s book is an example of how this may be done). But history can only bring us to the point where opinion divides similar to the way men in Jesus’ day were divided about his miracles. Scientific history may allow us to deny that anyone has the right to deny the resurrection occurred based on it but those adhering to it may not necessarily affirm that anyone in the name of “pure” (scientific) history could affirm that it happened. Dulles further discusses the passages of the post resurrection appearance and how it appears a tradition in the early Church that to percieve the risen jesus required something more than the normal use of one’s eyes and ears. Think of the road to Emmaus and how the disciples did not recognize Jesus at first. Think of Mary Magdalene mistaking him for a gardener. “At the Sea of Tiberias it was reserved for the beloved disciple to perceive and to declare, “It is the Lord.” The other disciples did not apprehend Him so clearly. Otherwise it would hardly be written of them that they did not dare to ask Him: ‘Who art thou?’ (Jn 21:12).”

This point makes sense to me. As it says in Proverbs, “Lean not on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight.” It is not merely a rational step to believe. The whole is enveloped. And it is not merely a self-awareness or perfection of self-discipline. It is a new birth into believing awareness of God with us. We cannot therefore isolate apprehension of the resurrection from its doctrinal aspect. Dulles quotes Fr. Levie:

“If we bracket the doctrinal aspect, if we deny to dogma and theology any right to intervene in our apologetics, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in April of the year 30 of the Christian era becomes an unintelligible fact, unthinkable to the human mind, since it would be meaningless and contrary to all ordinary likelihood. As a profane historian, I will have no choice except to reduce the documents which seem to favor it to the framework of the verisimilitude to which I am accustomed…If my reconstruction runs up against serious improbabilities, they will seem to me more tolerable than a resurrection in which I can see no meaning.”

This reminds me, oddly enough of a Rumi poem, for the parallel imagery to our Lord’s reference to being born again, though granted it is an appropriation from Rumi’s original sense:

“If anyone were to say to an embryo in the womb, “Outside is a world well-ordered,
a pleasant earth, broad and long, wherein are a thousand delights and many things to eat;
Mountains and seas and plains, fragrant orchards, gardens and sown fields,
A sky lofty and full of light, sunshine and moonbeams and innumerable stars;
its wonders are beyond description: why dost thou say, drinking blood, in this dungeon of filth and pain?’-
The embryo, being what it is, would turn away in utter disbelief; for the blind have no imagination…”

(frm. A poem called “The Unregenerate” in Selected Poems of Rumi trans. By Reynold Nicholson).

We must be born again, and being born again, we must look and see with faith, and not merely with profane science. Reason and education can not save us. Only God can.

In the final section entitled “The Divinity of Christ: History and Confession” Dulles makes similar points about investigation of the claim of Jesus’ divinity. “If it was not clear, even to Jesus’ intimates, that He was more than a national saviour, it may well be asked how a modern reader, by recapturing the words and actions of jesus in His earthly life, could find a clear presentation of His divinity. As a factual historian, I suggest, he cannot hope o rise notably above the level achieved by Jesus’ own disciples.” Dulles continues, though, by asserting that this does not mean that academic history is useless. It can indeed establish the great verisimilitude that Jesus did in numerous ways indicate that His origin was more than human. Further, the rapidity with which the early church came to believe dogmatically that He was the Lord, the Adonai of the Old Testament, can be established with a robust strength of exegesis. A fine example of the logic along this lines is the following:

In many of the regions of the empire it was quite possible to deify a private citizen. but itn at least one nation it was impossible, and that was among the Jews. They adored Yahweh, the one God, the transcendent and ineffable God, whose image they did not portray, whose name they did not pronounce, who was separated from every human creature by abyss upon abyss. To associate with yahweh any kind of man at all would have been a sacrilege and a supreme abomination. The Jews honored the emperor but they let themselves be cut to pieces rather than profess even in a whisper that the emperor was a god; and they would also have let themselves be cut to pieces if they had been obliged by to say the same thing about Moses himself. And would the first Christian whose voice we hear, a Hebrew son of the Hebrews [St. Paul], associate a man with Yahweh in the most natural manner in the world? This is a miracle I refuse to accept." -P.-L. Couchoud qtd. in Le mystere de Jesus (Paris: Rieder, 1926, p. 84), which is qtd. in Apologetics and the Biblical Christ, by Avery Dulles (now a Cardinal in the Catholic church), 1971, p. 70.

Certainly in saying that understanding and seeing Christ for who He is requires more than mere sight and that we should not lean on our own reason we need not and we should not say that reason and logic is to be thereby abandoned, abused and despised. We need men like Couchoud to manifest the logic of it. Dulles puts it succinctly:
“There can be no question of framing arguments, whether deductive or inductive, which rigorously prove the divinity of Christ. Syllogisms can have rhetorical and expository value, but they do not really capture the dynamism by which the mind arrives at the recognition of Christ’s godhead. “ p. 72.

Dulles ends in a quite Catholic way by concluding that in the end there is only one sign of credibility: “the whole Christ in His Church”.

As For Secularism

“It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europe seems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, but even any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of course those few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union--that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity--but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewal that might inspire a new zeal for having children…

A culture--a civilization--is only as great as the religious ideas that animate it; the magnitude of a people's cultural achievements is determined by the height of its spiritual aspirations. One need only turn one's gaze back to the frozen mires and fetid marshes of modern Europe, where once the greatest of human civilizations resided, to grasp how devastating and omnivorous a power metaphysical boredom is. The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, institutions, ideas, and great deeds, but boredom's disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid.” –David B. Hart, “Religion in America: Ancient and Modern,” New Criterion, March 2004, p. 6.

The fertility rate of all of the European countries is below replacement level.

“He said: We have observed that theoretical knowledge is something beautiful and valuable and that some theoretical sciences surpass others, being superior either in one or both of two things- namely, in the eminence of the subject and in the firmness of the demonstration occurring in that art…knowledge of the soul is beneficial for every science one intends to learn, and this is due to three considerations: because knowledge of the principles of every science is attained in this science; because other sciences posit as a principle that which has been explained here…and because a main part of the knowledge of a particular science can be attained only by knowing it…For a main part of the natural scientist’s study deals with animal life, knowledge of which is completed only by knowing the soul, the most noble principle of animal life.”-Averroes, Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, p. 1. Aristotle does not generally strike one as bored though whether he strikes one as boring may be a different question. Aristotle here is expressing a robust and exalted view of knowledge of the soul. In secular and materialist philosophy there simply is not a soul. The counterpart of the “death of God” is the death of the soul. Isn’t it noteworthy that the announcement of the “death of God,” received with all seriousness in the West, preceded a frenzy of man's self-destruction suggestive of a man-made Apocalypse? In Christian terms this may be understood with the help of the following: “The ‘love of God,’ as a love accepted by us, consists precisely in the fact that we for our part love him. We are so inclined to the erroneous division of this one love into two separate acts because we have forgotten to regard man in his indissoluble connection with God and have preferred instead to take as our starting point the false conception of ‘man in himself,’ man as one who has his being in himself. All this is expressed in the fore-mentioned section of the Apology [of the Augsburg Confession] which says that in his mercy God himself becomes for us a lovable object: ‘We cannot love God until we have grasped his mercy by faith. Only then does he become an object that can be loved.’ In the very fact of his being revealed to us as the loving subject, the one who does the loving, in that very fact is God the lovable object; that is, we for our part are now subjects who love. We are so in virtue of this fact. We do not have to become loving subjects, nor demonstrate that we are grateful (at any rate this command belongs to a different context): we simply are! Our love appears here as the reverse side of the love of God.” –Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations, Vol. 1, p. 66-67. [Thielicke was a German pastor who oposed Hitler when it counted the most.] There is a profound reason that in the Scriptures the analogy of marriage is repeatedly returned to for God’s relationship with Israel and for His relationship with the Church of Christ Jesus. Now I am going get a little graphic, but I think the following further illustrates something of the nature of the ideal, analogous relationship, the perfect love and oneness, that is conceived of as the only wholesome state of relationship between God and man in the Christian religion: “After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they were touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.” –Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, p. 31. The love of God and man is two-sided and seamless. The result of the death of one, or the death to one, is the death of the other. Secularism promises only further death, aimlessness and the boredom of nihilism because in it man has lost their partner for life.

The Origin of Paul's Religion by J. Gresham Machen

J. Gresham Machen was at the center of the storm of controversy about Biblical criticism and more broadly, the controversy between liberalism and orthodoxy in the first few decades of the 20th century. Years ago, I first took note of his name when reading Francis Schaeffer’s The Great Evangelical Disaster. In it Schaeffer had written:

“Then in the mid 1930s, there occurred an event which I would say marks the
turning-point of the century concerning the breakdown of our culture. By 1936
the liberals were so in control of the Northern Presbyterian Church that they
were able to defrock Dr. J. Gresham Machen. Machen… had been a brilliant
defender of Bible-believing Christianity, as can be seen for example, in his
book entitled Christianity and Liberalism published in 1924…it marked the
culmination of the drift of the Protestant churches from 1900-1936. It was this
drift which laid the basis for cultural, social, moral, legal and governmental
changes from that time to the present. Without this drift in the denominations,
I am convinced that the changes in our society over the last fifty years would
have produced very different results from what we have now. “(p. 34-35).

Not being a Presbyterian or deeply familiar with their tradition, Schaeffer’s remark, impressive for its forcefulness, has sometimes struck me as making too much of the Presbyterians and their affairs, but nevertheless, I’ve regarded it as something noteworthy and still do. Reading on the same page, I was first clued into what seems to me a compelling connection between the philosophically naturalistic Biblical criticism known as “higher criticism” and the Nazi phenomenon: “It is interesting to note that there was a span of approximately eighty years from the time when the higher critical methods originated and became widely accepted in Germany to the disintegration of German culture and the rise of totalitarianism under Hitler.” (p. 35).

Thumbing through the book again now, his rhetoric seems more rigid and simplistic than I recalled, yet Schaeffer still, it seems to me, is worth regarding and evaluating firsthand, and his analysis seems to me to have hit on the vital in this point. The German poet Heinrich Heine, a Jewish convert to Christianity, perceiving the trajectories of the naturalist philosophies which would come to characterize and guide “higher criticism” (and which Schaeffer was looking back on), predicted the Nazi holocaust a hundred years in advance in a prescience I still find stunning whenever I return to it (which is often) in the final pages of his book Religion and Philosophy in Germany which was published in 1832:

"Christianity-and that is its greatest merit- has somehow mitigated that brutal
German love of war, but could not destroy it. Should the subduing talisman, the
cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane
Beserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more
burst into flame... The old stone gods will then rise from the ruins and rub the
dust of a thousand years from their eyes and Thor will leap to life with his
giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals... Do not smile at my advice- the
advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians and Fichteans and
philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same
revolution in the realm of the visible that has taken place in the spiritual...
Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, German thunder... comes
rolling somewhat slowly, but... its crash... will be unlike anything before in
the history of the world. At the uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead,
and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away... a play
will be played in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an
innocent idyll ." (For more on this quote and on Heine go to http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/quo-heine.html ).

J. Gresham Machen lived at a time when the triumphalism of naturalism was at its peak (before it was meeked by blood) and he dwelt more or less in its storm center, especially as far as the US participation in the theological and philosophical arguments of the day was concerned. The trajectories of the mainline churches today were pivotally affected by the events in which he was a key player. It is also note worthy, it seems to me, that he was defrocked at the same time as the rise to ascendancy of the Third Reich in Germany.

Machen did his undergraduate studies at John Hopkins U. in 1898, majoring in classics, and then went to Princeton U. for an M.A., and then went to Germany where he studied directly under many of the liberal professors whose arguments he would address in The Origin of Paul’s Religion. “Machen considered himself and consciously chose the title of Calvinist, an adherent of the Reformed faith, in the tradition flowing from the Word of God through Paul, Augustine, Calvin, and in America in the noteworthy and great tradition represented by Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and the other representatives of the "Princeton School," rather than a fundamentalist (a term that he said that he never called himself). The later title was often put on him by others.(6) More precisely yet, Machen considered himself in the tradition of the Westminster Confession, of "Old Princeton," and "Old School Presbyterianism." Machen considered himself a fundamentalist only in the sense that if one meant by that, one who is opposed to modernism.” -http://www.apologeticsinfo.org/papers/machen.html

Much of postmodernist thought is also opposed to modernism and its certainties. Machen did scholarly battle with many of the false certainties in the naturalistic higher criticism of many of the liberal Bible scholars of that day, on their own turf, drawing on his vast knowledge of the ancient world to answer their arguments. “In a well-known 1922 sermon, Harry Emerson Fosdick threw down the gauntlet to fundamentalism when he demanded whether ‘anybody has the right to deny the Christian name to those who differ with him.’ In words that could have been lifted from the editorial page of today’s New York Times, Fosdick lamented that ‘the fundamentalists are giving us one of the worst exhibitions of bitter intolerance that the churches of this country have ever seen.’ John Gresham Machen responded a year later with the great popular defense of conservative theology Christianity and Liberalism, warning that ‘the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology’… In his 1923 response to modernism, John Gresham Machen wrote that “vastly more important than all questions with regard to methods of preaching is the root question as to what it is that shall be preached.” Machen understood that theology matters a great deal to the preservation of historic Christian orthodoxy. The modernist-fundamentalist controversies in which Fosdick and Machen were central characters are long over, but the same battle between two Christianities—a historic faith grounded in a supernatural biblical record and two thousand years of church tradition, and a modern Christianity redefined by the assumptions of Enlightenment anti-supernaturalism—rages on.” ” – Dean C. Curry, First Things, October 2007, “Evangelical Amnesia”.

“…with his involvement in the debate about the Philadelphia Plan of 1920,
the publication of The Origins of Paul's Religion in 1921, and of Christianity
and Liberalism in 1923, Machen went from a relatively unknown professor of New
Testament to one of the central figures and spokespersons in the
modernist-fundamentalist controversy, and at that not just within the
Presbyterian Church U.S.A., and of Princeton Seminary, but in Christendom. On
May 21, 1922 at the First Presbyterian Church, New York City, Harry Emerson
Fosdick, a Baptist, who had been invited to be the associate minister of the
church, preached a sermon entitled, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"(11) The
sermon contrasted among other issues the conservative and liberal views (which
Fosdick subsequently admitted he held) of the virgin birth, the inspiration of
Scripture, and the atonement, and pleaded for tolerance of both views within the
church.(12) Through a series of events, the sermon whose title had been changed
to "The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith," was reprinted and sent around
the country.” -http://www.apologeticsinfo.org/papers/machen.html

In my volume American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr., one of the classic sermons is J.G. Machen’s “History and Faith” and the other is Harry Emerson Fosdick’s “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” They are worth comparing side by side and are relevant to the modern divides. Both make noteworthy points. A very noteworthy observer came to the US at the time and made pertinent remarks:

“Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary as a postgraduate fellow, having
completed two doctoral programs at the University of Berlin. At this time he was
‘making up his mind’ about faith and practice. He was a careful observer of all
of his experiences outside of Germany. The American experience was enriching,
but, in many ways, it was also disappointing. Bonhoeffer was turned off by the
message of celebrated American preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick at the
Riverside Church, and by what he described as ‘Protestantism without the
Reformation.’ Preachers did not do justice to biblical interpretation of
theological creeds, as he viewed their message. They were mainly interested in
social issues. This lack was reinforced by the absence of serious theological
reflection. He observed that ‘only in the Negro churches did he find that they
spoke and heard in a Christian way of sin and grace and love toward God and the
final hope.”

–J. Deotis Roberts, Bonhoeffer & King: Speaking Truth to Power, p. 45.

I find Machen’s writings generally persuasive, sometimes even with a prophetic force. So when I emphasize the following distinction, I do not wish to imply much direct criticism of him, but more of what has generally come to be known as “fundamentalism”. Bonhoeffer’s criticism of Harry Emerson Fosdick could seem to imply that he was on the side of Machen in opposition to liberalism but Bonhoeffer expressed no awareness of Machen that I know of but only of the vitality of the faith in the Negro churches. Nevertheless, I think they had a lot in common in their stances. The following however is a description of a broad trend into which may be accurate in describing the broad trend into which the “fundamentalists” seem to fall. Pay attention to what Placher says about the Westminster Confession of Faith. I’ll come back to that:

“In sum, premodern thinkers like Anselm and Aquinas, and the mystical tradition
before the early modern age, were not trying to prove God’s existence, define
God’s essence, or describe their own experiences of God. They were trying,
instead, to show that such enterprises are impossible and that God lies beyond
all our proofs and definitions and imaginations. But the world changed, and
after the Reformation, in a divided Christian world, each party wanted to be
able to argue for its own correctness, which meant drawing matters of faith into
a realm where decisive argument was supposedly possible. Protestant orthodoxy,
for example, took the doctrine of Scripture- in the hands of Luther and Calvin a
way of challenging tradition- and turned it into a theory of propositional
authority. The Westminster Confession of 1647, which unlike previous Protestant
statements of faith began with the authority of Scripture rather than with God,
provides one mark of the change. Catholics countered with new definitions of the
authority of the church.” –William C. Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in
Postliberal Theology, (2007), p. 20.

After Fosdick’s sermon had been reprinted and widely distributed the modernist-fundamentalist controversy rose to a new pitch culminating in a famous General Assembly of 1923 in which the Assembly was asked to affirm “‘Five Declarations’ or the five necessary or essential doctrines: the infallibility of the Bible; the virgin birth of Jesus; his substitutionary atonement on the cross; his bodily resurrection; and Christ's mighty miracles, as essential doctrines of Scripture; and to reaffirm its adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith.” This Assembly was split something similar to our nation in the last election with a vote of 439 to 359 on a pivotal issue. In response this action of the 1923 General Assembly “a committee of 150 Presbyterian ministers, headquartered in Auburn, New York, issued a document.(16) This document became known as the “‘Auburn Affirmation.’ It had two major contentions: (1) that the General Assembly had no constitutional right to elevate the five doctrines as special tests for ordination to the ministry, unless the constitution was changed by a vote of the presbyteries”; and (2) that the five doctrines are non-essential to the system of doctrine taught in Scripture and that they are only theories of about what the Bible actually teaches.(17) It was signed by over twelve hundred Presbyterian ministers in the spring of 1924.” The idea that Christianity can remain uncompromised fatally with the exclusion of the doctrine of Christ’s bodily resurrection is anathema. Central issues were at stake and Machen was rising to the issue, a bold and capable man. But there still might be noticed from afar, outside the heat of that battle (though similar battles certainly still rage), possible weaknesses in assumptions of the brave.

As regards Placher’s observation, this seems to be a crucial issue now in hindsight, something that to some extent defined the “fundamentalists”, and a weakness. Machen was all about the Westminster Confession of Faith. Yet Placher observes that the Westminster Confession marks a turning point from emphasis on the authority of God to the authority of Scripture, and is a trend of combat which effectively was reducing God in some ways to proofs and Scripture. Machen would be one of if not the central figure in the breaking off from Princeton to form Wesminster Seminary. Yet hear what Machen says about the Bible:

“The Bible, then, is right at the central point; it is right in its account of
Jesus; it has validated its principal claim. Here, however, a curious phenomenon
comes into view. Some men are strangely ungrateful. Now that we have Jesus, they
say, we can be indifferent to the Bible. We have the present Christ; we care
nothing about the dead documents of the past. You have Christ? But how, pray,
did you get Him? There is but one answer; you got Him through the Bible. Without
the Bible you would never have known so much as whether there be any Christ. Yet
now that you have Christ you give the Bible up; you are ready to abandon it to
its enemies; you are not interested in the findings of criticism. Apparently,
then, you have used the Bible as a ladder to scale the dizzy height of Christian
experience, but now that you are safe on top you kick the ladder down. Very
natural! But what of the poor souls who are still battling with the flood
beneath? They need the ladder too. But the figure is misleading. The Bible is
not a ladder; it is a foundation. It is buttressed, indeed, by experience; if
you have the present Christ, then you know that the Bible account is true. But
if the Bible were false, your faith would go. You cannot, therefore, be
indifferent to Bible criticism. Let us not deceive ourselves. The Bible is at
the foundation of the Church. Undermine that foundation, and the Church will
fall. It will fall, and great will be the fall of it.”(http://homepage.mac.com/shanerosenthal/reformationink/jgmhistfaith.htm )

Yet Machen goes on and conflates the Bible with Christ! : “The Bible is despised—to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Greeks foolishness—but the Bible is right.” Why this move? A shrewd combat technique? I am treading dangerous ground because I believe I am toying with criticism of a godly man who rose to the challenge more straight then many around him, and truly contending for the faith. But there is a scent of danger in the way in which he elevates the Bible as well as a swell of courage. The Bible is shamed in the liberals hands and its uniqueness is forsaken but this does not mean that the fundamentalists had it all right. In case I appear to claim that I have sounded these events or can navigate them in any great depth or detail, I want to state here that I do not know them well or thoroughly. It is still to me like a faint din that has been brought nearer by some recent reading. My purpose in the above is to situate my summary of Machen’s book The Origin of Paul’s Religion in the historical controversy in which it was born. I now intend to cover only some main points that have most struck me in reading the book, the main things I have learned from it, and the questions the book and the reading around it have brought more into relief for me. Machen raises all sorts of questions. He is at the center of divisions and many have accused him of being a divisive character. This is the tenor of Fosdick’s general argument in his famous sermon noted above. So one question that is brought forward for me is how to distinguish the nature of diviseness as a work of the flesh versus divisiveness (See Galatians 6:20-21) as the work of Christ (“I came to bring not peace but a sword.”)

Another question that comes to the fore is the general one of how best to understand the nature of the arguments at these times. Were J. G. Machen and B.B. Warfield reactionary and narrow-minded in the face of the modern advances? There are severe problems in taking a naïvely liberal, one-sided view of these events. They are certainly caricatured in the modern memory, what little there remains of it, and the word fundamentalist is a pejorative now. But when one takes a closer look at the writings of these men, I for one find they were not simple-minded ideologues. Their argumentation was informed by the heights of scholarship of their day and many of their arguments still hold. Machen argued against the naturalist interpretations and constructs in a vigorous way, citing fully the strengths of a position, laying it out with clarity, giving each what seems their due acknowledgments, before answering them, sometimes with quite a bite. Many of the liberal scholars he argued against he had sat under personally. He was not speaking condemnation from a remote cave, blind to the progress of modernity. He was, however, rejecting modernity, before the postmodernists. Likewise the liberal positions of the day were not the paragons of sobriety and sturdy mindedness that they are now often assumed to be.

Take for instance the Scopes trial held at that time and generally regarded as a triumph over fundamentalist narrow-mindedness. Few seem aware that the “science” that was being argued for at that time was evolutionary theory wed with, one with, of a piece with eugenics, Darwinian race theory, Nietzschean nihilism and Social Darwinism. I recommend everyone read the Wikipedia entry on A Civic Biology, the text book that Scopes was brought to trial for teaching from. Here are some excerpts: “The Races of Man. -- At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America. .. Eugenics. -- When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics. ... Parasitism and its Cost to Society. -- Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.” It may not fit with the ‘stories we tell ourselves” but the “fundamentalists” like William Jennings Bryan were fighting eugenics and race theory when they were fighting the teaching of evolution in the schools because that is what evolution meant at that time. Much of what liberalism of that day stood for has been backed off from by all today. Much of what was believed to be scientific (and therefore most true) is now called scientism. Machen was facing what he saw as a mortal threat to sound doctrine. Fosdick and others were ready to sacrifice doctrine for the sake of unity in other matters. Fosdick, for instance, rejected belief in the virgin birth in accommodating the false absolutes of the liberalism of that day.

Here is a sample of the kind of aggressive stance Machen takes toward liberalism:

“The particularism of the Old Testament might have been overcome by practical
considerations, especially by the consideration that since as a matter of fact
the Gentiles would never accept circumcision and submit to the Law the only way
to carry on the broader work was quietly to keep the more burdensome
requirements of the Law in abeyance. This method would have been the method of
‘liberalism’. And it would have been utterly futile. It would have meant an
irreparable injury to the religious conscience; it would have sacrificed the
good conscience of the missionary and the authoritativeness of his proclamation.
Liberalism would never have conquered the world. Fortunately liberalism was not
the method of Paul. Paul was not a practical Christian who regarded life as
superior to doctrine, and practice as superior to principle. On the contrary, he
overcame the principle of Jewish particularism in the only way in which it could
be overcome; he overcame principle by principle. It was not Paul the practical
missionary, but Paul the theologian, who was the real apostle of the Gentiles.
In his theology he avoided certain errors that lay near at hand. He avoided the
error of Marcion, who in the middle of the second century combated Jewish
particularism by representing the whole of the Old Testament economy as evil and
as the work of being hostile to the good God. That error would have deprived the
Church of the prestige which it derived from the possession of an ancient and
authoritative Book; as a merely new religion Christianity never could have
appealed to the Gentile world. Paul avoided also the error of the so-called
“Epistle of Barnabas,” which, while it accepted the Old Testament, rejected the
entire Jewish interpretation of it; the Old Testament Law, according to the
Epistle of Barnabas, was never intended to require literal sacrifices and
circumcision in the way in which it was interpreted by the Jews. That error,
also, would have been disastrous; it would have introduced such boundless
absurdity into the Christian use of the Scriptures that all truth and soberness
would have fled.” –The Origin of Paul’s Religion, p. 17-18.

One thing I noted in Machen’s writings is the appearance of rudiments of the “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” argument that is commonly attributed to C.S. Lewis. It appears both in the sermon and in The Origin of Paul’s Religion. For example here is part of the argument at least in “History and Faith”:

“It is really impossible, but suppose it has been done. You have reconstructed
the historical Jesus—a teacher of righteousness, an inspired prophet, a pure
worshipper of God. You clothe Him with all the art of modern research; you throw
upon Him the warm, deceptive, calcium-light of modern sentimentality. But all to
no purpose! The liberal Jesus remains an impossible figure of the stage. There
is a contradiction at the very centre of His being. That contradiction arises
from His Messianic consciousness. This simple prophet of yours, this humble
child of God, thought that He was a heavenly being who was to come on the clouds
of heaven and be the instrument in judging the earth. There is a tremendous
contradiction here. A few extremists rid themselves easily of the difficulty;
they simply deny that Jesus ever thought He was the Messiah. An heroic measure,
which is generally rejected! The Messianic consciousness is rooted far too deep
in the sources ever to be removed by a critical process. That Jesus thought He
was the Messiah is nearly as certain as that He lived at all. There is a
tremendous problem there. It would be no problem if Jesus were an ordinary
fanatic or unbalanced visionary; He might then have deceived Himself as well as
others. But as a matter of fact He was no ordinary fanatic, no megalomaniac. On
the contrary, His calmness and unselfishness and strength have produced an
indelible impression. It was such an one who thought that He was the Son of Man
to come on the clouds of heaven. A contradiction! Do not think I am
exaggerating. The difficulty is felt by all. After all has been done, after the
miraculous has caretully been eliminated, there is still, as a recent liberal
writer has said, something puzzling, something almost uncanny, about Jesus.2 He
refuses to be forced into the mold of a harmless teacher. A few men draw the
logical conclusion. Jesus, they say, was insane. That is consistent. But it is
absurd.”

There may be an overconfidence and leaning upon proofs too much but there is something healthy as well, something strong in the reasoning dispatch of men like Machen. He reminds me in some ways of C.S. Lewis. They were men of their times but we have much we can learn from them. My ambivalence in criticizing Machen is in part because I don’t want to contribute to an already misleading critical caricature. I also am afraid that I have focused in some ways on peripherals and have given little discussion of the content of the main book in question. The argumentation is dense and is navigating some of the most prestigious scholarship of the day. Much of the arguments Machen makes still hold today and variations of them can be seen in the apologetic of N.T. Wright today, for example.

Machen certainly does not think we should avoid biblical criticism of liberal scholars. He himself was fully engaged with them and fully believed the essentially orthodox gospel of Christianity was the superior understanding available through scholarship, and not in spite of all the ideas observations and theories of predominantly naturalist modernist Bible scholarship. In summing up in the final pages of his book, Machen concludes on the question of the origin of Paul’s religion that it was the love of Christ:

“If Jesus was not the divine Redeemer that Paul says He was, how did the Pauline
religion of redemption arise? Three great hypotheses have been examined and have
been found wanting. Paulinism, it has been shown, was not based upon the Jesus
of modern naturalism; if Jesus was only what He is represented by modern
naturalistic historians as being, then what was distinctive about Paul was not
derived from Jesus. The establishment of that fact has been a notable
achievement of Wrede and Bousset. But if what is essential in Paulinism was not
derived from Jesus, whence was it derived? It was not derived, as Wrede
believed, from the pre-Christian apocalyptic notions of the Messiah; for the
apocalyptic Messiah was not an object of worship; and not a living person to be
loved. It was not derived from pagan religion, in accordance with the brilliant
hypothesis of Bousset; for pagan influence is excluded from the self-testimony
of Paul, and the pagan parallels utterly break down. But even if the parallels
were ten times closer than they are, the heart of the problem would not have
been touched. The heart of the problem is found in the Pauline relation to
Christ. That relation cannot be described by mere enumeration of details; it
cannot be reduced to lower terms; it is an absolutely simple and indivisible
thing. The relation of Paul to Christ is a relation of love; and love exists
only between persons. It is not a group of ideas that is to be explained, if
Paulinism is to be accounted for, but the love of Paul for his Saviour. And that
love is rooted, not in what Christ has said, but in what Christ had done. He
‘loved me and gave himself for me.’ There lies the basis of the religion of
Paul; there lies the basis of all of Christianity. That basis is confirmed by
the account of Jesus which is given in the Gospels, and given, indeed, in all
the sources. It is opposed by modern reconstructions. And those reconstruction
are all breaking down.”

In the closing words above and elsewhere Machen gives a fine sense of the nature of the faith, and intuitively rejects the historicist project that was a pitfall especially then. Line up the facts in verisimilitude and you may still not see it. Faith comes by hearing but we must grasp the whole, the essential, the simple love of Christ. He also emphasizes that what Paul grasped about Christ was not from what he said but from what he did. A good way to end a defense of doctrine. For a fascinating window into the current state of affairs in the PCUSA, I recommend going to the following link and selecting number 10 to listen to the fascinating the interview with Parker Williams. According to his perspective the PCUSA refused to censure in the highest PC court the statement, "What is the big deal about Jesus?" Williams is an intriguing figure:
http://www.stannespublichouse.com/newdraught/

And it might finally be worth noting one of of the main observations of Bonhoeffer in regard to the churches in the US (as summed up by Roberts): "there is no arrogance in claiming to be the true church of Jesus Christ. The church is a church for sinners and not only for the righteous." p. 45.

The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz

The Day the Leader Was Killed by Naguib Mahfouz
(translated by Malak Mashem), (orig. pub. in 1985).

This is a slender novel by Mahfouz, only 103 pages. Mahfouz is one of the greatest writers of the Middle East in modern times. He was recognized for his accomplishment with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Almost anyone in the Middle East you talk to knows of him. He died only this year, in his nineties. It was primarily through him that the novel as a form of writing was introduced into the Middle East. And O, how richly! The warmth and humane eye of his novels ponders the streets of Cairo, Egypt, the lives and loves and struggles and sorrows of humanity in the alleys and streets and behind the closed doors. The universal commonality of people is clearly brought to the fore in his deft works.

I don’t care to make this a lengthy and needless praise. My purpose here is to hopefully bring to mind some of the noble and lovely, etc. things for at the least my fuller contemplation. The story is exquisitely told. It is about the love of a working age couple under the stresses of poverty and political unrest in Egypt. Each chapter alternates between three characters, Elwan and Randa and Elwan’s grandfather, Mutashimi Zayed. The grandfather in the story is a pious Sufi Muslim that has had a wild past. The kind of sweetness and stress on universal love in Sufi Islam comparative to the more austere and stern and miltant strains seems to be reflected in Mahfouz’s books in general, but that is just a guess.

This book is a fine piece of art. It takes a writer like Mahfouz to be able to find the exact sentences with which to somehow evoke depth of emotion in his characters and the corresponding resonance in his readers in so few words. It takes a truly praiseworthy elegance of mind to trace the inner thoughts and lives of these three characters in a way that really captures depth and dimension, passion and sweetness, anger and despair, not just in them but also in the peripheral characters through their eyes.

There is something about Mahfouz’s writings that is like a kind of sunlit illumination. I don’t mean this sentimentally. First there is his broad eye which is reminiscent of Tolstoy for how much he takes in and the deft verisimilitude with which he paints a picture of the lives in his story. And there is the soulful focus on people. People are central to his writings. By the sunlit I mean this kind of attention to each person, even to the villains, that somehow is soft like the light of sunset. There is a kind of benevolence and knowing in his novels. He sees a great deal and does not hesitate to portray the dark motives and the evil behaviors but he treats all with a dignity so that there is a kind of perspective that is not inimical to the command to love ones enemies.

This book was also for me a chance to reflect on the exterior pressures such as finances and family on love. The portrayal of poverty and the sense of its oppressiveness and strain was also made more palpable. Elwan was not able to make enough money to pay for a flat and so he had to postpone marrying Randa until her parents began to intervene and her lecherous and ambitious boss sought to make the most of the opportunity and to enlist her in his project like a useful item rather than an end in herself. The dignity and the pride and humbleness in the midst of the stresses of poverty is portrayed in a moving way in the lives of these characters, each with their perspectives and cares and perceptions and emotions. The grandfather’s love for his grandson as he is nearing the end of his life with the distance of age is also movingly depicted.

Reading a book on the Triune God and going in increasingly rarified air, it was a true respite to turn to this novel on a sleepless night.

Such a novel I think depicts simply and elegantly and truthfully something that is often denied now, put out of mind as strange and foreign, or even militantly and openly attacked, the perception that men and women have natures, that love can grow up naturally and more or less purely between them, and that these routes can be abandoned by warping ways that effect our character, such as ambition, which stifles and paves over the possibility of true love in a man or woman’s breast, by solidified ways of thinking and basing their life which negate the other, the Thou, preventing the fullness of the I and Thou relationship. It is in this sense a good and gentle reminder of the natural and a beacon to seek it.

One of the sins condemned in Romans 1 is the lack of natural affection (such as a mother who abandons her baby). C.S. Lewis discusses this concept as it was conveyed in an archaic meaning of the word kinde in a poem by George Herbert: “In Herbert’s ‘I the unkinde, ungratefull’ (from Love) the modern meaning would be disastrous; the idea of general beneficence fromman to God borders on the absurd. Herbert is classing himself with ‘unkind mothers’ and ‘unnatural children’ as one who, with gross insensibility, makes no response to the arch-natural appeal of the tenderest and closest personal relation that can be imagined; one who is loved in vain.” –C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words, p. 32-33.

This is what I think of when I think of the effects of idolatry, on me and on others. The plastering over of natural affections, the replacement of them with void and drugs and distractions, with buzz and squirminess and shallow vapidity in the presence of the profound and lovely and whole. In every country it seems there are always those growing up who view their country with a canny eye, who love the people and life they know enough to caressingly portray truth about it, granted with the imperfection and limitation of man. But they are always signs, it seems, to point us all, any who will heed, to truths which are plain to all except when pushed out by idolatry.

The Richness of Unanswerable Questions

"6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world...
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that is exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni [under the category of eternity] is to view it as a whole- a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole- it is this that is mystical." -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , 149

"To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." -Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, 74e, entry for 8.7.16.

[Interjection: Here W. is reminding me of the Sabbath and of the knowledge we come to in conversion. By knowledge here is referenced, I think, what W. also says in these words: "Feeling the world as a limited whole- it is this that is mystical". I like Philip Rieff's term "the feeling intellect." The menuha, the positive rest of the Sabbath, is properly a resting embrace of this wholeness, of this larger meaning, of the eternity that God has placed in our hearts. Perhaps some may feel threatened by my linking knowledge to conversion, that is, special knowledge that sets the believer apart from others, in a more enviable position, having something the princely, self controlled Buddhist may not, while one is poor and of no account and still swayed by addictions, perhaps. Some Jesus freak loser. But there are, however you cut it, differences in the "wholes" acknowledged, either by secularity or Buddhists, to use these examples, with Christianity. For example, in secularity, the facts of the world are the end of the matter, but: "To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." Buddhists deny that we have a self. They point to discontinuities and suggest from this that we are not we.... Christ, on the otherhand, says, only if you lose yourself will you find yourself. The Buddhists are also, apparently (from my limited knowledge) keen to avoid self-absorption and self-centeredness. They acknowledge the problem that Jesus is addressing. They just seem to disallow the solution that Jesus Christ's words speak about. So their wholeness is not the wholeness of the self surrendered to Christ. It is a different wholeness. But then one must admit that this is doubtless a highly surface level reading. Still, don't fear the synthesis. Its how you live! ]

Famous final words of Wittgenstein's Tractatus : "7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

"My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits on the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing , I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it." -Wittgenstein in a letter to the editor Ludwig von Ficker.

"Positivism holds- and this is its essence- that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about." -Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (1987 trans.), p. 97.

"Life seriously led poses questions whose answers lie beyond language's reach, questions that can be answered only in the living. But Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard and Levinas, realized how impoverished life would be absent such questions ." -William Placher, The Triune God: An Essay In Postliberal Theology , 2007, p. 36-37. [All quotes were also taken from the cullings presented in Placher's book).

There Is A God by Antony Flew

Antony Flew’s There Is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, 2007, Harper Collins.

http://www.amazon.com/There-God-Notorious-Atheist-Changed/dp/0061335290/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195530032&sr=8-1

I found this book exceedingly interesting and absorbing though requiring careful attention to the elegant simplicity of the arguments in which few if any words were wasted.

Antony Flew was one of the most influential atheists of this century, helping to set the agenda for world atheism for a half century. His “Theology and Falsification”, a paper first presented at a 1950 meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis, became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century.

Roy Varghese writes in the introduction, “It is not too much to say that within the last hundred years no mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and influential exposition of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew’s fifty years of anti-theological writings.” In comparison, Bertrand Russell only produced a few polemical pamphlets on his skeptical views and his disdain for organized religion. There were other atheists in later years, but none of them have changed the agenda in the way that Flew did.

Part of the learning I have derived from this book was of the first hand historical accounts. Antony Flew first really began his path of atheistic argumentation in the debate forum of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C.S. Lewis. He gives an account of one famous night when the atheist Elisabeth Anscombe debated Lewis and routed him, causing the revision of a chapter in his book Miracles. He tells of the Lewis’s surprise and describes his memory afterward of seeing the lone figure of Lewis retreating to hurriedly walking to his study in the distance and Anscombe and her friends directly ahead of Flew laughing and in high spirits. Lewis has been accused at times of chauvinism. Women I respect have detected it in his writings. It occurs to me that sometimes God humbles through objects of our scorn and in this case it may have been an atheist woman. Certainly for anyone who has read much of Lewis, though, especially for instance his reflections upon the death of his wife in A Grief Observed, the tenderness and humility and devotion he shows there seem to indicate that if he was chauvinist he progressed in his beliefs to greater wisdom, or at least showed at times an uncommon feeling connection to the opposite sex.

It was also at the Oxford Socratic Club that Flew made his first and only presentation, reading the paper “Theology and Falsification”, which would become the over the years the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century and a regular staple for philosophy courses. Of the Oxford Socratic club, Flew notes: “This Socratic principle [“follow the argument wherever it leads.”] also formed the inspiration of the Socratic Club, a group that was really at the center of what intellectual life there was in wartime Oxford. The Socratic Club was a lively forum for debates between atheists and Christians, and I was a regular participant at its meetings. Its redoubtable president from 1942 to 1954 was the famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis. The club convened every Monday evening during term time in the underground Junior Common Room of St. Hilda’s College. In his preface to the first issue of the Socratic Digest, Lewis cited Socrates’ exhortation to ‘follow the argument wherever it leads.’ He noted that this ‘arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christianity and unbeliever was a novelty.’” (p. 22-23).

Obviously my attention is being caught especially by Lewis, a truly “beautiful mind”, in Flew’s accounts. However, there is something noteworthy about Flew from the beginning here that sets him apart from the “New Atheists”. Flews’ first work, while challenging theism is also considered by him to have been a driving of the nail into the coffin of logical positivism which as a cultural phenomenon and a philosophical tactic had had the effect of silencing conversation and toleration between the theists and atheists. Flew participated in and truly appreciated the open exchange of views and the dialogue between atheists like him and men like Lewis, who altered their views when confronted with logic regardless of who it came from. Part of what this book brings out in clarity and historical perspective is how intellectual communities are often guided by tactics and temporal vogues of approaches that frame their thinking and debates. Understanding this brings out in relief how the tactics being adopted by the New Atheists as a whole are similar to the Logical Positivists in not allowing for discussion or debate.

Flew defended the legitimacy of discussing theological claims against the logical positivist tactic and challenged philosophers of religion to elucidate their assertions. Oddly enough, his principled atheist argumentation facilitated the rebirth of rational theism in analytic philosophy. Before him the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, popularized by A.J. Ayer in the English speaking world by his 1936 work, Language, Truth and Logic, held that only statements which could be verified through sense experience or which were true simply by the nature of their form and the meaning of the words used. At the heart was the claim called the “verification principle” that the meaning of a proposition lies in its verification. Flew considered his argument in “Theology and Falsification” a final nail in the coffin against this position. “Instead of the arrogant announcement,” he wrote, “that everything which any believer might choose to say be ruled out of consideration a priori as allegedly constituting a violation of the supposedly sacrosanct verification principle- here curiously maintained as a secular revelation- I preferred to offer a more restrained challenge. Let the believers speak for themselves, individually and severally.” Ayer himself agreed on the death of logical positivism and stated that he no longer thought much of Language, Truth and Logic was true, but that it had a cathartic effect at the time.

“In ‘Theology and Falsification’, God and Philosophy, and The Presumption of Atheism….he laid out a road map for subsequent philosophy of religion. In ‘Theology of Falsification” he raised the question of how religious statements can make meaningful claims (his much-quoted expression ‘death by a thousand qualifications’ captures this point memorably); in God and Philosophy he argued that no discussion on God’s existence can begin until the coherence of the concept of an omnipresent, omniscient spirit had been established; in the Presumption of Atheism he contended that the burden of proof rests with theism and that atheism should be the default position. Along the way, of course, he of course analyzed the traditional arguments for God’s existence. But it was his reinvention of the frameworks that changed the whole nature of the discussion.”


Flew in his introduction responded to the spurious claims by Dawkins and others hand waving a man of his accomplishment off by reference to his age at a distance, without listening to the man, no doubt. He responds to this and Roy Varghese responds too, much more blisteringly. Flew’s response is with the quiet lucid reasoning that characterizes the book as a whole. The wise, the few, will note that popular opponents, such as Richard Dawkins, of positions like Flew’s are indicating by their silencing tactics their willingness to be intolerant but not their capacity to answer the superior arguments that men like Flew quietly, elegantly, serenely give. Flew writes: “It has been said that fear concentrates the mind powerfully, and these critics had concluded that expectations of an impending entrance into the afterlife had triggered a deathbed conversion. Clearly these people were familiar with neither my writings on the nonexistence of the afterlife nor with my current views on the topic. For over fifty years I have not simply denied the existence of God, but also the existence of an afterlife. My Gifford Lectures published as The Logic of Mortality represent the culmination of this process of thought. This is one area in which I have not changed my mind. Absent special revelation, a possibility that is well represented in this book by N.T. Wright’s contribution, I do not think of myself “surviving” death. For the record, then, I want to lay to rest all those rumors that have me placing Pascalian bets.” After reading the book the vacuity of the dismissive remarks is amply apparent. There is no reason to belabor this point but I would like to remark that the vast majority including Dawkins are unable to write such a well reasoned book as the one Flew has provided.

I am not going to try to reconstruct the arguments of the book in detail. It recounts key issues and how positions he held and argued forcefully were met and answered in ways he had not at first seen. The story is one of an incremental change, a progress in philosophy, in following the argument where it led. Four key chapters address the following questions (chapter headings):

Who wrote the laws of nature?
Did the universe know we were coming?
Did something come from nothing?

In reading this book one of the things that were brought home to me was the work of philosopher and how beyond reading books there is the reading of arguments, exactly the thing Socrates was so keen on. The work of following an argument requires great labor at times and may lead to embarrassing overturning of ones hard fought positions. It is easier to cast aspersions and revel in prankish tongues, ‘innovative’ for their intolerance, but weak on reason. But there is a reward in love of the truth.

Flew is a quiet sign to searchers that beyond the silencing tactics of the “new atheists” and others voices in an increasingly intolerant secularism, there is the argument and the questions, and if one is brave enough in their soul to heed these instead of the cosmic diversions, a lucid and narrow way beckons.

Another thing that occurs to me is the nature of atheism in general. It becomes more vividly apparent that not all views are equal. Flew directly contrasts with much of what atheism stands for, which is often an evasion and silencing of deeper questions. Materialism after all from ancient times has had the notion that the cosmos always was and is and will be and that therefore we need not ask why is there anything and not nothing. Many atheists express their distaste for ultimate questions, their boredom, their repugnance, their pride in innocence from contemplation, their erstwhile avoidance of philosophy. Schopenhauer’s quip remains true: “…materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” I do not mean to say by this that there are not honest and truth loving atheists that are sincerely seeking the truth. I know at least one. But as for the repudiation of ultimate questions, that is more blameworthy than anti-science, which is quite blameworthy. It is avoidance of, well, one’s reason. There is always something lesser to lose yourself in, you cowards!

Especially interesting in the context of the present debates is Flew’s history with Richard Dawkins, most recently the author of The God Delusion, and his pointed criticism of some of Dawkins arguments. I see about recounting some of these in more detail, especially if there is expressed interest. One point is perhaps in a sense more minor but not too flattering of Dawkins. He points out that Dawkins is aware of and cites Max Jammer’s book Einstein and Religion, (Jammer was one of Einstein’s friends) but uses it very selectively in order to uphold the view Flew previously held that Einstein was an atheist. Dawkins tries to explain away Einstein's statements about God as metaphorical references to nature. Roy Varghese writes, "But this bit of Einsteinian exegesis is patently dishonest. Dawkins references only quotes that show Einstein's distaste for organized and revelational religion. He deliberately leaves out Einstein's belief in a 'superior mind' and a 'superior reasoning power' at work in the laws of nature, but also Einstein's specific denial that he is a pantheist or an atheist." Einstein even in one place cited by Jammer expresses anger at the attempts of atheists to misuse his statements to this end. Jammer also dispels notions that Einstein believed in Spinoza’s God, relating Einstein’s relation to Spinoza, which was not a deep conceptual one.

This book is worth getting a copy of even for the preface and first appendix alone by Roy Varghese in which he sets out an astute and withering critique of the New Atheists. Similarly, the final appendix by N.T. Wright stands on in its own right, where he sets out a powerful argument for belief in the resurrection of Christ, the most powerful that Flew says he has ever encountered.

Below touches on Varghese’s critiques:


Roy Varghese notes that oddly the recent books by the new atheists read like fundamentalist sermons with hell-fire and brimstone and asks how the new atheists fit into the philosophical discussion on God of the last several decades. He answers that they don’t, that basically they are a reversion to the refuted logical positivism of another age.

First, he says, they refuse to address the central grounds for positing a divine reality. “Dennett spends seven pages on the arguments for God’s existence. Harris none… Dawkins talks of the origins of consciousness as ‘one-off’ events triggered by an initial stroke of luck.’ Wolpert writes: ‘I have purposely [!] avoided any discussion of consciousness, which remains mostly poorly understood.’ About the origin of consciousness, Dennett, a die-hard physicalist, once wrote, ‘and then a miracle happens.’

Dawkins talks of the origins of consciousness as ‘one-off’ events triggered by an initial stroke of luck.” Besides the rationality implicit in all our experience of the natural world, Varghese identifies autonomous agency, consciousness, conceptual thought and the self as unaccounted for by all of the new atheists. He develops his point about each of these in Appendix A of the book.

Secondly, the new atheists show no awareness of the raise and fall of arguments of logical positivism.

Third, they seem entirely unaware of the massive work in analytic philosophy of religion or of the sophisticated arguments within philosophical theism.

Varghese then notes in contrast to Dawkins how often Russell was known to change his mind and also the case of J.N. Findlay who argued that God's existence can be disproved but then reversed himself and argued for the existence of God in a series of subsequent books.

"Dawkins 'old-age' argument (if it can be called that) is a strange variation of the ad hominem fallacy that has no place in civilized discourse. True thinkers evaluate arguments and weigh evidence without regard to the proponent's race, sex, or age." p. xvii

““It would be fair to say that the ‘new atheism’ is nothing less than a regression to the logical positivist philosophy that was renounced by even the most ardent proponents. In fact, the ‘new atheists,’ it might be said, do not even rise to logical positivism. The positivists were never so naïve as to suggest that God could be a scientific hypothesis- they declared the concept of God to be meaningless precisely because it was not a scientific hypothesis. Dawkins, on the other hand, holds that ‘the presence or absence of creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.’ This is the kind of comment of which we say it is not even wrong!” -Roy Varghese p. xviii.

Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings

Summary of Josef Pieper’s Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Ralph McInerry once said of the Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper that he “speaks out of the abundance of his heart and mind where knowledge has become wisdom.” I think that captures what I wanted to express about Pieper’s writing but couldn’t find the words for. Pieper is one of those writers whose work is full of choice phrases culled reflectively from the classical texts of philosophy with a practical and applicational soundness generally. He is an excellent communicator of the ideas of philosophy similar to C.S. Lewis. Only the Lover Sings is the second volume I have read by him. (The first was In Defense of Philosophy: The Power of the Mind for Good and Evil, Consists in Argumentation). He is most well-known for his book is Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which Br. Dunstan has recommended to me.

Only the Lover Sings is a short, 76 page collection of essays on art and contemplation, originally published in German in 1988. The first essay entitled “Work, Spare Time and Leisure” in which Pieper discusses the ancient conception of leisure held by those such as Aristotle, which is a substantially different concept than one might think of when hearing the term today. Pieper argues that avoiding idolization of labor today cannot be achieved except by an objection based on some ultimate truth about human nature (which is therefore to be taken as of lasting relevance, he assumes). He notes how there are still vague notions about the seventh day of the week being special and about holidays and quitting time (in Germany), but that we are ignorant of how the accumulated wisdom of our Western cultural and existential tradition “as expressed, say, by Plato, and Aristotle, or the great teachers of Christianity” viewed leisure.

“The most important element in this teaching declares: the ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in the contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.” P. 22. He asks the question what constitutes here and now an activity that is meaningful in itself, in contrast to an activity that is meaningful for what it produces, and he answers that it is whenever in contemplation we touch, however remotely, the core of all things. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, “The touch of truth is the touch of life.”

He says that in feast days (he glancingly mentions the Sabbath, focused more on the Greek heritage rather than the Jewish) man has traditionally expressed his being in harmony and awareness of being surrounded by such fundamental realities, in nonordinary ways.

He says, indeed, that wherever there is lacking the attitude of heart and mind recognizing and seeking to live in harmony with this fundamental truth of human nature (“even if beheld through a veil of tears”), all endeavors to organize relaxation techniques turn hectic and, indeed, become an “outright desperate, form of work”.

Pieper has in mind some of the Communist materialists’ notions of work and of the human. Although Communism has receded, materialism has not, and the erosion of the spiritual conceptions of man and work and rest still remains. Piepr mentions five-year plans which were apparently rigid impersonal plans by which the Communist countries attempted to idealistically pursue science in a scientific way. Michael Polanyi also mentions these plans in The Tacit Dimension and in Science, Faith and Society. Polanyi was a ground-breaking chemist who turned to philosophy in the later part of his life in order to defend science as he understood it against the materialist conceptions of science exemplified by the Communists at the time, of which the Five-Year plans were an example. Pieper and he seem to share the same impulse here. They are defending a view of man against a rival, materialist anthropology. This battle still rages in a different form today.

What Pieper is arguing is that we must acknowledge that man is created with a telos, with a purpose and a design which he does not operate well without conforming to, and that leisure that allows for contemplative wholeness is part of that design. However, acknowledgment of a telos is something disputed by the broader public. In some ways it seems that acknowledgment of a telos is systematically excluded by a secular milieu. I believe it was in Roe vs. Wade that there was a famous mystical paragraph asserting a kind of right of people to forge for themselves their own good and evil. Maybe I am parodying that a little. But the idea was certainly the rejection of a telos, of responsibility, of a right and a wrong to one’s actions. (This reminds me of the book of Amos where justice is disgraced in the courts. I hope Blackwater does not in the end end up being another such a disgrace in American courts! Let justice roll down like a river and don’t let legal loopholes prevent it!)

The great Medievalist scholar Etienne Gilson wrote a book entitled From Aristotle to Darwin and Back which by many accounts I have been coming across is an excellent treatment of telos and the view of human nature. Darwinism tends to convert human nature into a liquid thing, to create static for notions of telos. (Unfortunately the book is out of print and the only copy on Amazon sells for $300! Publishers of the world, what is wrong with you?)

The question Pieper raises is significant and touches on the question of Sabbath observance and similar wistful hopes of Christians today. Does such a high view of leisure, one which sees it as essential to fulfilling the existential purpose of man, have a basis only in a belief in there being a telos of man? Well, if I put it that way… But I mean to say, is there no securable place in our hearts for rest and contemplation which ascend to the highest of human experience without such a recognition of our nature? This may be a tricky question. How much did Pieper for instance consider the Buddhist positions which hold that there is no self. Without a self, what telos can there be? One can say that without regarding leisure of this contemplative kind as to be aimed for there can be no pursuit of it, and without a cogent reason for its pursuit the pursuit will deteriorate in half-heartedness or be a desperate asceticism for asceticism’s sake. But how is one to counter Darwin? How is one to extract telos from a supposed sea of chance and natural selection? It seems Pieper’s point is that there will be no leisure and no Sabbath without this understanding of human nature, or telos. The Jews rested on the seventh day because that is when God rested and they are created in God’s image. I think that is at least a theologically sound way of putting. Pagans had cultic feast days in which they recognized something more than is sold in the secularist bill of goods perhaps.

In the second essay, “Learning How To See Again”, Pieper asks the excellent question “How can we be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer of mass-produced goods and a subservient follower beholden to every slogan the managers may proclaim? The question really is: How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality? He suggests that more and more we tend to see with less detailed grasp, to hear with less detail (in contrast for example to the Indians) and to remember with less capacity (he didn’t mention that but I was thinking of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death which cogently points out the loss of memory skills with the advent of writing).

He says that fasting and abstention from the “noise” is a valuable first step but hardly sufficient. “A better and more immediately effective remedy is this: to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.

Nobody has to observe and study the visible mystery of the human face more than the one who sets out to sculpt in a tangible medium. And this holds true not only for the manually formed medium.”

I think his recommendation is excellent and true. There is a sense too in which familiarizing with works of art can also train the eye and awaken to reality. I think Emerson was not all wrong when he said works of art depicting people train the eye to look at actual people. A while ago I took a day off and spent half of it at the National Museum of Art, and it was for me very revivifying. The stimulation from contemplating the works of art I saw there noticeably to me opened my eye to the perception of the world around me after I had left. An afterglow lingered with me for a day or two. There was a kind of generative stimulation that suggested I do the same. (Note to myself an interesting parallel that occurs between the notion of generativity from the male side in The Skies of Babylon and from the feminine side in Elaine Scary’s On Beauty). If this could be incorporated in my life into a better rhythm of work and rest much could be accomplished! But on the other hand, let this not be strumming on David’s harp and improvisation of musical instruments while the poor are crushed (see Amos 6:5), aristocratic complacency at the expense of others.

The third essay, entitled “Thoughts About Music”, argues that music by its nature is very close to the fundamentals of human existence. He asks “What indeed do we perceive when we listen to music?” He quotes Schopenhauer in answering this question: Music “does not speak of things but tells of weal and woe”.

“To repeat: thus has the nature of music variously been understood in the Western philosophical tradition- as nonverbal articulation of weal and woe; as wordless expression of man's intrinsic dynamism of self-realization, a process understood as man's journey toward ethical personhood, as the manifestation of man's will in all aspects, as love. This, for instance, is the meaning of Plato's statement that 'music imitates the impulses of the soul', or as Aristotle puts it: music is similar to ethics and related to it. The same tradition continues in remarks by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when they say that music 'invariably is the expression of an immediacy as no interfering medium is involved'; or (Schopenhauer) that of all the arts it is music that represents the will itself; or (Nietzsche in his interpretation of Wagner) that music lets us hear 'nature transformed into love'.””

Pieper argues that since music is an expression of individual’s inner dynamic, and that, as the process of ethical growth is one faced with innumerable dangers and interferences, “a thousand different expressions of pretense error, and confusion can also appear. "

“Thus the musical articulation may include a shallow contentment with the facile availability of the cheapest 'goods', the rejection of any ordered structure, the despairing denial that man's existential becoming has a goal at all or that such a goal could be reached. There can also be, as in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, the music of nihilism, which lives on parody and comes about through the 'devil's help and hellish fire under the cauldron'.”

Pieper obviously accepts Plato’s and others of the Western traditions’ view that music can be a force for good or evil and that it is not wise to merely regard it as an indifferent matter. This is an open question for me. We are told to think about whatever is lovely, etc. but some argue that beauty is a purely subjective, an personal matter. Here is an expression of a counter view to Pieper’s which suggests the indifference of musical medium:

"The apostolic tradition is a tradition of words, not music. It’s the words that are important and not their method of delivery. In the few times where singing is specifically mentioned in the New Testament, I think it’s reasonable to think that if the music were important, some sort of musical instruction would have been preserved in the texts. This is particularly important when we consider the Greek “Doctrine of Ethos,” which held that certain musical devices influenced character. In regards to that widespread belief, if it had carried any weight in the circles in which the New Testament documents were formed it would be reasonable to see it reflected in those documents (“and when they had sung a hymn in the Dorian mode, they went out to the Mount of Olives” or something like that). There isn’t even a hint of that kind of notion in the New Testament. There isn’t even a hint because music, the business of high and low notes, half steps and whole steps (and how big the half steps are, because the size changes), loud and soft,—is a mater of adiaphora, or indifference. That doesn’t mean that music is unimportant, it just means that it’s not particularly privileged and the specifics of what is or isn’t appropriate decided on an ad hoc basis." from Michael Litton, http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=858

If it is true that music is indifferent, then an arbitrary standard may simply cause divisions. But then one might ask whether knowledge of the beautiful and that which heeds the depths in musical composition versus that which is on a more incognizant level is really a baseless distinction. Perhaps there is difference and it rides on the nature of reality. But it doesn’t seem like something to fight about, but something to heed.

“Music and Silence” is a short contemplation of the middle place music occupies between noise and absolute silence. The two antipodes both destroy the any possibility of mutual understanding but

The final essay, “Three Talks in a Sculptor’s Studio” is reflection on memory in relation to the muses. This follows the other essays in perceiving the realist foundation of art. Memory of the actual the window on the foundations of existence. Contrast this with the point made in a Far Eastern proverb, “Those who only look at themselves do ever radiate nothing.” There is included a reflection also on a piece of art on t the conversation of those crucified beside Christ Jesus and a poem. An association is made between the arts and times of festivity, between dark times and heaven. Lastly there is the point made that art should neither be merely depiction of the real, like a photograph, nor ‘absolute’ art which is indifferent to the forms of the world.

The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel

Summary of The Sabbath by Abraham Heschel

Abraham Heschel is one of the most respected Jewish scholars of the 20th century and of an orthodox view friendly to Christian belief. He was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement and wrote a seminal study called The Prophets and a number of works of reflective and broad scholarship. (I will append a summary of Heschel’s life by Richard John Neuhaus at the end).

In this slender and reknowned volume, Heschel sets forth an explanation of the Sabbath tradition among the Jews. In my faulty way I would like to recall here to mind some of the things that I have learned, the questions that it raised and the contingent reflections I have had in relation to it, in hopes of fulfilling the injunction in Philippians 4 prescribing the contemplation of the lovely and true, etc.

One thing that stands out is the cogency of Heschel’s explanation of the Sabbath as a spiritual fitting rhythm of life. He speaks of the rest, the menuha, of the Sabbath not in the negative sense of merely ceasing labor.

“Menuha which we usually render with ‘rest’ means here much more than withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil and strain or activity of any kind. Menuha is not a negative concept but something real and intrinsically positive.” p.. 22-23

Like Aristotle and other ancient Greeks’ conception of leisure, the conception of the Sabbath rest is positive in nature, and is viewed as the purpose and culmination of labor. Work in the mundane realities is to culminate in rest and contemplation from which we may cease from the hustle and bustle and attend in quietness and rest to the Lord. As it is says in Isaiah, “In quietness and rest is your strength…” "Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without the spirit the source of depravity." (p. 18. of The Sabbath.)

It seems to me that perhaps a great enduring strength in the religious culture of the Jewish people lies centrally in the keeping of the Sabbath. In so doing, they fulfill that of which the verse I quoted above speaks. I counterpoise this in my mind with the ambition to control and conquer space in Descartes’ schematic. This brings me to a major point of the book. Heschel finds a distinction between the Jewish religion and other religions in that in others’ religions, grand temples and cathedrals are built as sacred space, but that in the Jewish religion a cathedral in time is built to God, the cathedral of the Sabbath. He notes the distinction between this and for instance Spinoza’s propensity for supposing the geometrico sufficient for explanation of all, an extension of Descartes, and in some sense the paradigm of the modern, and especially of science.

“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments”, Heschel writes. This reminds me of the experiences related of Jacob in the Bible. There is one in particular, perhaps a more obscure one, but one which struck me by its nature as conveying indeed a real historical experience, a sacred moment, which moved Jacob to purify his household. Judaism, and Christianity after it, are distinct in being irreducibly historical in their accounts which are punctuated by pivotal sacred moments, and which also imply sacred moments in the life of every believer. If these sacred moments in the Bible are mythologized in their entirety, as for instance, it seems to me, the philosopher Eric Voegelin does, then they are completely devalued. They are no longer the Faith.

Part of the cogency of Sabbath-keeping seems to me to lie in the nature of the self and our relation to God. We live a fractured and distracted existence. The fractured paintings of Picasso for instance seem to capture some of the fractured-ness of self in the modern world. Resting and ceasing allows us to remember what it is all for, to renew our bearing and orientation to the ultimate and in so doing helps to fulfill the ultimate of our being or existence. The shalom, the peaceful fullness of living, is attained only in this beholding relationship. But it is not all about self and certainly not about “self-help”. I think of the over-extendedness of Descartes who made the leap to supposing mathematics valid for all realms of human inquiry, and the motivated definition of the self that is inherited markedly from him which leaves no place of honor and recognition to the infinite and the to the I and Thou. Contrast this with the Sabbath which recognizes a limitedness to man, but not merely a limitedness but a purpose and a directedness of man’s aspirations, which establishes an end to man’s grasping control and allows for a beholding and a composition of the self to the whole.

This reminds me of Martin Buber in that the Sabbath is such that it is to help us to rise beyond the I-and-It to the wholeness of our being in the I and Thou. When this is learnt through living wisely, then even in the “chrysalis state of the It,” the I and Thou is still intact. In the same way the Sabbath principle of orientating toward the eternity in our hearts, when kept wisely, becomes something that persists through the days of labor.

It seems to me too that the Sabbath is very much related to the Jewish tradition of universality in the doctrine of the Imago Dei which became in modern times the basis of human rights thought. The humaneness seems to me related to the anthropology/ view of the self and of relation to God and man manifested in the practice. Through the quietness and rest and contemplation, the human soul is equipped to help others, the helpless, the homeless, the outcast and the needy. There needs to be sought and grown a wholeness out of which kindness and ministry is deepened.

An image that I found particularly poignant was in a rabbinic tale that Heschel related and drew morales from. Honestly, the tale was largely outlandish and comic-bookish to my ears, but at the end there was the beautiful story of an old man who ran by holding bundles of myrtles to honor the Sabbath. Myrtles are fragrant flowers that are ubiquitous in the traditional Jewish wedding ceremonies. The old man running at twilight to welcome the Sabbath represented Israel. The Sabbath is seen as a bride based on the injunction in the Old Testament to keep the Sabbath, which uses a word which has the association of a wedding in it:

“When the people of Israel stood before the mountain of Sinai, the Lord said to them: ‘Remember that I said to the Sabbath: The Community of Israel is your mate.’ Hence: “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it” Exodus 20:8) The Hebrew word le-kadesh, to sanctify, means in the language of the Talmud, to consecrate a woman, to betroth. Thus the meaning of the word on Sinai was to impress upon Israel the fact that their destiny is to be the groom of the sacred day, the commandment to espouse the seventh day.” P. 51-52.

The image strikes me as beautiful and conveys the positive nature of the Sabbath in the Jewish thought and imagination. Traditionally averse to personification, in this case they personify the Sabbath as a bride. Heschel elaborates on this wonderfully.

In closing, although I still have questions about the relation of Christianity to the Sabbath and the keeping of special days, I am convinced of the cogency of the principle (and of the value of exploring the relation further), so that it is incumbent upon me to give careful thought about how I might order my life in such a way that conforms to this knowledge wholly, and that I might encourage the community of Christ to do likewise, not legalistically but in order to live.




Richard John Neuhaus on Heschel:

Abraham Joshua Heschel
I first met Abraham Joshua Heschel in 1965, when he was fifty-eight and I a kid of twenty-nine. The occasion had to do with defending protestors against the Vietnam war, which led to the formation of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV). We hit it off in a big way, and ours became an intense intellectual and spiritual friendship until his death in December 1972. We both loved to argue, and mainly we argued about the connections and conflicts between the Jewish and Christian ways of being children of Abraham. I thought he was too enamored of what I viewed as an excessively easy pluralism. He thought I was too insistent in my Christian particularism. For hours beyond number we went back and forth, often in his book-crammed office high in the tower of Jewish Theological Seminary, he smoking his cannon-sized cigars and I puffing on my pipe until the air was so thick we had to open the window even in the dead of winter. (He quit the cigars after a minor heart attack a few years before he died.) Of course I learned much more than he did from these exchanges. Heschel was a very learned man, and a great soul.
His books are still in print (e.g., The Earth is the Lord’s, The Sabbath, Man is Not Alone, God in Search of Man) and I warmly recommend them. Since his death twenty-six years ago, something of a Heschel cult has sprung up. In fact, it had already sprung during his lifetime. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, the first volume of the biography by Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner appeared, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness (Yale University Press). It has been admirably and admiringly reviewed by Rabbi David Novak, one of Heschel’s star students, in these pages (October 1998). It is also reviewed in Commentary by Jon Levenson of Harvard, a frequent contributor to this journal, under the title "The Contradictions of A. J. Heschel." While Levenson, too, admires Heschel, he has some big problems.
Heschel came from a dynasty of hasidic rabbis in Poland, took his doctorate at the University of Berlin, succeeded Martin Buber as head of the Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, and, after escaping Nazism to America, became the most read and most influential Jewish theologian of his time. He was a devoutly observant Jew who believed there are many ways to the truth. Kaplan and Dresner say it is a wonder that he was able to "reconcile" the different worlds of which he was part. Levenson is not sure that he did. "The question of the authority of halakhah, traditional rabbinic law in all its specificity, is the most obvious point of division between the traditionalist world of Heschel’s origins and Jewish secular modernity. But it is, or should be, a no less troubling point of division between the world he grew up in, and whose basic religious dictates he continued to follow, and the world of religious but non-Orthodox Judaism in which he spent his entire professional life both in Germany and later in the United States." Levenson’s conclusion is that "it was not out of the reconciliation but out of the collision of the several worlds in which he traveled that his most profound reflections on Jewish theology and spirituality were born."
It is for others to figure out the "contradictions" in Heschel’s way of being Jewish. I am interested here in another question about Heschel’s thought that Levenson raises, a question that was at the heart of our friendly but intense disagreement. He notes that at the University of Berlin Heschel immersed himself in the emerging fields of aesthetics, phenomenology, and psychology (a combination in which another Polish thinker of the time was also deeply immersed-Karol Wojtyla, later to be Pope John Paul II). From this he developed his crucial understanding that God is always the Subject and man the object of divine action; the initiative is always with God. In Heschel’s case this was combined with the dominant liberal Protestantism of Berlin that pitted the prophetic against the priestly, and the authentically spiritual against the religiously institutionalized. As Levenson observes, this "very dubious dichotomy . . . was a staple of Protestant biblical studies and was, moreover, often linked to anti-Jewish (and anti-Catholic) polemics."