Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Some Christian Criticism of ID
“In The Blind Watchmaker, [Dawkins] provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth- century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins’s home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. ^This book remains the finest critique of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley’s ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way ‘proving’ the existence of God, and Dawkin’s extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins turns his attention to such other ‘arguments’ based on the philosophy of religion. I am not sure that this was entirely wise. He is clearly out of his depth, and achieve little by his brief and superficial engagement with these great perennial debates, which often simply cannot be resolved empirically. His attitude seems to be ‘here’s how a scientist would sort out this philosophical nonsense.’ [Examples follow in the book.]…
In The God Delusion Dawkins criticizes ‘the worship of the gaps.’ This is a reference to an approach to Christian apologetics that came to prominence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- the so-called God of the gaps approach. In its simplest form it asserted that there were necessarily ‘gaps’ in a naturalistic or scientific understanding of reality. At certain points, William Paley’s famous Natural Theology (1801) uses arguments along these lines. It was argued that God needs to be proposed in order to deal with these gaps in scientific understanding.
It was a foolish move and was increasingly abandoned in the twentieth century. Oxford’s firs professor of theoretical chemistry, the noted Methodist lay preacher Charles A. Coulson, damned it with the telling phrase ‘the God of the gaps.’ In its place he urged a comprehensive account of reality, which stressed the explanatory capacity of the Christian faith as a whole rather than a retreat into ever-diminishing gaps. Dawkins’s criticism of those who ‘worship the gaps,’ despite its overstatements, is clearly appropriate and valid…Unfortunately, having made such a good point, Dawkins then weakens his argument by suggesting that all religious people try to stop scientists from exploring those gaps…[Despite my desire to further quote criticism of Dawkins I will stay on topic here. It is interesting to me to note here how the 'God of the gaps' is a term coined by a Christian preacher in the porcess of criticizing a specific apologetic strategy, a preacher who was by no means alone in his rejection of this new development in modern times in some Christians' thought.]
It is hardly surprising that the ‘all too limited’ human mind should encounter severe difficulties when dealing with anything beyond the world of everyday experience. The idea of ‘mystery’ arises constantly as the human mind struggles to grasp some ideas. That’s certainly true of science; it’s also true of religion.
The real problem here, however, is the forced relocation of God by doubtless well-intentioned Christian apologists into the hidden recesses of the universe, beyond evaluation or investigation. Now that’s a real concern. For this strategy is still used by the intelligent design movement- a movement, based primarily in North America, that argues for the ‘intelligent Designer’ based on gaps in scientific explanation, such as ‘irreducible complexity’ of the world. It is not an approach which I accept, either on scientific or theological grounds. In my view, those who adopt this approach make Christianity deeply- and needlessly- vulnerable to scientific progress.
But the ‘God of the gaps’ approach is only one of many Christian approaches to the question of how the God hypothesis makes sense of things. In my view it was misguided; it was a failed apologetic strategy from an earlier period in history that has now been rendered obsolete. This point has been taken on board by Christian theologians and philosophers of religion throughout the twentieth century who have now reverted to older, more appropriate ways of dealing with this question. For instance, the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne is one of many writers to argue that the capacity of science to explain itself requires explanation- and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of a Creator God.
Swinburne argues that the intelligibility of the universe itself needs explanation. It is therefore not the gaps in our understanding of the world which point to God but rather the very comprehensibility of scientific and other forms of understanding that requires an explanation.” –Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? : Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, (2007), p. 24-25, 29-31.
“When philosophy textbooks gather under the same heading a range of texts from the Middle Ages to today, from Anselm and Aquinas through Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant to contemporary writers, as if all these folks were doing the same thing- offering ‘proofs for the existence of God’- they mislead the students who read them. In fact the medieval texts so cited were usually doing something like the opposite- giving an account of God that would render anything like a ‘proof’ altogether inappropriate. Those who seek to reduce Christian faith to the arena of rational proof- whether liberal Deists trying to eliminate Christianity’s ‘irrational’ elements or conservative advocates of ‘intelligent design’ trying to make religion fir their own version of the ‘scientific’- are not preserving traditional Christianity but engaging in a particular and characteristically modern project that has diverged from the Christian tradition. “ –William Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, (2007), p. 10.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins turns his attention to such other ‘arguments’ based on the philosophy of religion. I am not sure that this was entirely wise. He is clearly out of his depth, and achieve little by his brief and superficial engagement with these great perennial debates, which often simply cannot be resolved empirically. His attitude seems to be ‘here’s how a scientist would sort out this philosophical nonsense.’ [Examples follow in the book.]…
In The God Delusion Dawkins criticizes ‘the worship of the gaps.’ This is a reference to an approach to Christian apologetics that came to prominence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- the so-called God of the gaps approach. In its simplest form it asserted that there were necessarily ‘gaps’ in a naturalistic or scientific understanding of reality. At certain points, William Paley’s famous Natural Theology (1801) uses arguments along these lines. It was argued that God needs to be proposed in order to deal with these gaps in scientific understanding.
It was a foolish move and was increasingly abandoned in the twentieth century. Oxford’s firs professor of theoretical chemistry, the noted Methodist lay preacher Charles A. Coulson, damned it with the telling phrase ‘the God of the gaps.’ In its place he urged a comprehensive account of reality, which stressed the explanatory capacity of the Christian faith as a whole rather than a retreat into ever-diminishing gaps. Dawkins’s criticism of those who ‘worship the gaps,’ despite its overstatements, is clearly appropriate and valid…Unfortunately, having made such a good point, Dawkins then weakens his argument by suggesting that all religious people try to stop scientists from exploring those gaps…[Despite my desire to further quote criticism of Dawkins I will stay on topic here. It is interesting to me to note here how the 'God of the gaps' is a term coined by a Christian preacher in the porcess of criticizing a specific apologetic strategy, a preacher who was by no means alone in his rejection of this new development in modern times in some Christians' thought.]
It is hardly surprising that the ‘all too limited’ human mind should encounter severe difficulties when dealing with anything beyond the world of everyday experience. The idea of ‘mystery’ arises constantly as the human mind struggles to grasp some ideas. That’s certainly true of science; it’s also true of religion.
The real problem here, however, is the forced relocation of God by doubtless well-intentioned Christian apologists into the hidden recesses of the universe, beyond evaluation or investigation. Now that’s a real concern. For this strategy is still used by the intelligent design movement- a movement, based primarily in North America, that argues for the ‘intelligent Designer’ based on gaps in scientific explanation, such as ‘irreducible complexity’ of the world. It is not an approach which I accept, either on scientific or theological grounds. In my view, those who adopt this approach make Christianity deeply- and needlessly- vulnerable to scientific progress.
But the ‘God of the gaps’ approach is only one of many Christian approaches to the question of how the God hypothesis makes sense of things. In my view it was misguided; it was a failed apologetic strategy from an earlier period in history that has now been rendered obsolete. This point has been taken on board by Christian theologians and philosophers of religion throughout the twentieth century who have now reverted to older, more appropriate ways of dealing with this question. For instance, the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne is one of many writers to argue that the capacity of science to explain itself requires explanation- and that the most economical and reliable account of this explanatory capacity lies in the notion of a Creator God.
Swinburne argues that the intelligibility of the universe itself needs explanation. It is therefore not the gaps in our understanding of the world which point to God but rather the very comprehensibility of scientific and other forms of understanding that requires an explanation.” –Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? : Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, (2007), p. 24-25, 29-31.
“When philosophy textbooks gather under the same heading a range of texts from the Middle Ages to today, from Anselm and Aquinas through Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant to contemporary writers, as if all these folks were doing the same thing- offering ‘proofs for the existence of God’- they mislead the students who read them. In fact the medieval texts so cited were usually doing something like the opposite- giving an account of God that would render anything like a ‘proof’ altogether inappropriate. Those who seek to reduce Christian faith to the arena of rational proof- whether liberal Deists trying to eliminate Christianity’s ‘irrational’ elements or conservative advocates of ‘intelligent design’ trying to make religion fir their own version of the ‘scientific’- are not preserving traditional Christianity but engaging in a particular and characteristically modern project that has diverged from the Christian tradition. “ –William Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology, (2007), p. 10.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
God's Story: As For The Story the Tyrants Try to Write
“Throughout the centuries, the blood of the righteous has been spilled on the earth: the blood of Abel and the blood of countless innocents who died during the violent times before the flood; the blood of nameless infants of Israel slaughtered by Pharoah and the blood of the innocents shed during the reign of Manasseh; the blood of the prophets sent to Ahab and Jezebel and the blood of the infants surrounding Bethlehem slaughtered by Herod; the blood of Stephen and James and Peter and Paul; the blood of Thecla and Polycarp and Lawrence and Ignatius and Agnes and Hippolytus. They have been crucified, skinned, torn in pieces, and fed to lions.
From all appearances these martyrs are forgotten forever. There are no warcrimes tribunals; there are few monuments, few memorials, few memories. Hundreds and thousands remain forgotten, nameless, faceless. By one estimate, seventy million martyrs have been killed in the history of the church, as many as forty-five in the past century. They have been killed in Russia and in Nazi Germany, in Turkey and in Algeria, in Nigeria and Sudan and Pakistan…Who even knows? Their blood is soaked into the ground and is silent forever.
That is what Ahab and Jezebel think, and that is what all the cruel powers who prey on the innocent have always thought- and hoped. As [Rene] Girard argues in book after book, all religions and cultures outside of Christianity are premised on this perverse hope, that blood is only blood, the hope that innocent blood can be silenced. When imitative desires fracture a society into war of all against all, harmony is restored by uniting all energies and hostilities against a scapegoat. The scapegoat does not cause the descent into social anarchy, but suffers as if she or he had and restores the social order…In all these systems, the gods underwrite the powers, the scapegoating majority, instead of defending the scapegoat. Girard argues that the Bible is unique in proclaiming the innocence of scapegoats and in revealing a God who hears the cry of innocent blood.
The innocent scapegoat is not some peripheral issue in Scripture but its central message: the gospel is the story of a man whose enemies conspire against him, a man falsely accused of blasphemy, a man taken outside the city to endure an unjust execution (Heb. 13:10-13). Naboth’s body [See 1 Kings 21 for the story of how Ahab and Jezebel murdered Naboth in order to take possession of his vineyard] like the flesh of a purification offering, is taken outside the camp to be destroyed (Lev. 4:11-12, 20-21), foreshadowing the greater purification offered by Jesus. In one sense the blood spilled from the cross speaks a word of mercy for the world, a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Yet the Lord remains an avenger of blood, even after the cross (Rev. 17-19), and the blood of martyrs cries out for vengeance against the persecutors of Christ, his bride, his gospel. That cry will be heard; that blood will be avenged.” –Peter Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, Brazos Theological Commentary, (2006), p. 156-57.
“Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea and said: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again… “ The following verses describe how the music and the commerce and the social events will be silenced forever. The reason: “By your magic spell all the nations were led astray. In her was found the blood of the prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth” (Revelation 18:21, 23-24).
The movie Cry Freedom (with Denzel Washington) recounts the story of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid leader in South Africa who was savagely tortured and murdered by the South African police for his outspokenness. I know little about Biko beyond this movie. I do not even know if he was a Christian, a “saint”, let alone a prophet-saint. But he was murdered for standing up for justice and God hears the cry of innocent blood. He is in solidarity with the poor, whether they call on Jesus name or not. The judgment of Babylon referred to in the passage quoted from Revelation is not merely for the blood of Christian martyrs.
From all appearances these martyrs are forgotten forever. There are no warcrimes tribunals; there are few monuments, few memorials, few memories. Hundreds and thousands remain forgotten, nameless, faceless. By one estimate, seventy million martyrs have been killed in the history of the church, as many as forty-five in the past century. They have been killed in Russia and in Nazi Germany, in Turkey and in Algeria, in Nigeria and Sudan and Pakistan…Who even knows? Their blood is soaked into the ground and is silent forever.
That is what Ahab and Jezebel think, and that is what all the cruel powers who prey on the innocent have always thought- and hoped. As [Rene] Girard argues in book after book, all religions and cultures outside of Christianity are premised on this perverse hope, that blood is only blood, the hope that innocent blood can be silenced. When imitative desires fracture a society into war of all against all, harmony is restored by uniting all energies and hostilities against a scapegoat. The scapegoat does not cause the descent into social anarchy, but suffers as if she or he had and restores the social order…In all these systems, the gods underwrite the powers, the scapegoating majority, instead of defending the scapegoat. Girard argues that the Bible is unique in proclaiming the innocence of scapegoats and in revealing a God who hears the cry of innocent blood.
The innocent scapegoat is not some peripheral issue in Scripture but its central message: the gospel is the story of a man whose enemies conspire against him, a man falsely accused of blasphemy, a man taken outside the city to endure an unjust execution (Heb. 13:10-13). Naboth’s body [See 1 Kings 21 for the story of how Ahab and Jezebel murdered Naboth in order to take possession of his vineyard] like the flesh of a purification offering, is taken outside the camp to be destroyed (Lev. 4:11-12, 20-21), foreshadowing the greater purification offered by Jesus. In one sense the blood spilled from the cross speaks a word of mercy for the world, a better word than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Yet the Lord remains an avenger of blood, even after the cross (Rev. 17-19), and the blood of martyrs cries out for vengeance against the persecutors of Christ, his bride, his gospel. That cry will be heard; that blood will be avenged.” –Peter Leithart, 1 & 2 Kings, Brazos Theological Commentary, (2006), p. 156-57.
“Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a large millstone and threw it into the sea and said: “With such violence the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again… “ The following verses describe how the music and the commerce and the social events will be silenced forever. The reason: “By your magic spell all the nations were led astray. In her was found the blood of the prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth” (Revelation 18:21, 23-24).
The movie Cry Freedom (with Denzel Washington) recounts the story of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid leader in South Africa who was savagely tortured and murdered by the South African police for his outspokenness. I know little about Biko beyond this movie. I do not even know if he was a Christian, a “saint”, let alone a prophet-saint. But he was murdered for standing up for justice and God hears the cry of innocent blood. He is in solidarity with the poor, whether they call on Jesus name or not. The judgment of Babylon referred to in the passage quoted from Revelation is not merely for the blood of Christian martyrs.
Stephen Biko
(See: http://www.sshep.com/stephen_biko.htm).
Though Biko’s murder gathered media attention and helped to break the back of apartheid, many died unjustly and only a few knew, and official slanders and absurdities became their capstones. In Russia, many who profited during Soviet communism from the slander and torture and murder of the innocent still enjoy the loot of their corruption and the country suffers for not having had a public reckoning, which makes the demoralization more intense. Many believe in the existence of wickedness but as for goodess... But there is a new and living way and a vantage point has been opened to us: The wicked may prosper for a season, but let us sing with Rich Mullins, “Jesus, write me into your story!” We are a people who believe in the resurrection and a people who believe the story is ultimately one of justice for the innocent, The grave does not end the story. The case is not like Epicurus thought- that we should not sin, unless we can get away with it. The blood is remembered and there is a reckoning. Tyrants, big and small, observe the wind over the naturalistically silent graves of their victims and dream and hope and therapeutically remind themselves that after we die there is only annihilation. Though Lady Macbeth may wring her hands sleepwalking, with the apparition of the blood of her victims on them, when she wakes it is to a mundane, sealed existence safe from seeming unreality of guilt's claims on her. "Guilt" is only the threat of being caught in this lifetime. But God hears the blood, even if it is only Him alone who knows, and this ultimately will determine the end of the story.
Friday, January 11, 2008
"One who has been instructed by the pagan examples"
The following section comes from a short work by the early church father, Basil the Great, addressed to young Christian men on the study of the classics of Greek Literature, , "Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature". Although there are things in the work as a whole which one clearly need not agree with, much of what Basil writes is quite helpul and valuable food for thought, it seems to me, and illuminative of the consonance and continuity with Christian teaching through the centuries. I found little that I disagreed with in the following section (though I suspect Alexander's scorn of the women was for purely noble reasons) in which he discusses specific instances of ways in which Christians can benefit from heathen literature:
"VII. After this wise, then, are we to receive those words from the pagan authors which contain suggestions of the virtues. But since also the renowned deeds of the men of old either are preserved for us by tradition, or are cherished in the pages of poet or historian, we must not fail to profit by them. A fellow of the street rabble once kept taunting Pericles, but he, meanwhile, gave no heed; and they held out all day, the fellow deluging him with reproaches, but he, for his part, not caring. Then when it was evening and dusk, and the fellow still clung to him, Pericles escorted him with a light, in order that he might not fail in the 110 practice of philosophy.27 Again, a man in a passion threatened and vowed death to Euclid of Megara,28 but he in turn vowed that the man should surely be appeased, and cease from his hostility to him. How invaluable it is to have such examples in mind when a man is seized with anger! On the other hand, one must altogether ignore the tragedy which says in so many words : 'Anger arms the hand against the enemy;' 29 for it is much better not to give way to anger at all. But if such restraint is not easy, we shall at least curb our anger by reflection, so as not to give it too much rein. But let us bring our discussion back again to the examples of noble deeds. A certain man once kept striking Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, in the face, yet he did not resent it, but allowed full play to the ruffian's anger, so that his face was swollen and bruised from the blows. Then when he stopped striking him, Socrates did nothing more than write on his forehead, as an artisan on a statue, who did it, and thus took out his revenge. Since these examples almost coincide with our teachings, I hold that such men are worthy of emulation. For this conduct of Socrates is akin to the precept that to him who smites you upon the one cheek, you shall turn the other also 30 — thus much may you be avenged; the conduct of Pericles and of Euclid also conforms to the precept: 'Submit to those who persecute you, and endure their wrath with meekness;' 31 and to the other: 'Pray for your enemies and curse them not.' 32 One who has been instructed in the pagan examples will no longer hold the Christian precepts impracticable. But I will not overlook the conduct of Alexander, who, on taking captive the daughters of Darius, who were reputed to be of surpassing beauty, would not even look at them, for he deemed it unworthy of one who was a conqueror of men 111 to be a slave to women.33 This is of a piece with the statement that he who looks upon a woman to lust after her, even though he does not commit the act of adultery, is not free from its guilt, since he has entertained impure thoughts.34 It is hard to believe that the action of Cleinias,35 one of the disciples of Pythagoras, was in accidental conformity to our teachings, and not designed imitation of them. What, then, was this act of his? By taking an oath he could have avoided a fine of three talents, yet rather than do so he paid the fine, though he could have sworn truthfully. I am inclined to think that he had heard of the precept which forbids us to swear.36" http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/basil_litterature01.htm
"VII. After this wise, then, are we to receive those words from the pagan authors which contain suggestions of the virtues. But since also the renowned deeds of the men of old either are preserved for us by tradition, or are cherished in the pages of poet or historian, we must not fail to profit by them. A fellow of the street rabble once kept taunting Pericles, but he, meanwhile, gave no heed; and they held out all day, the fellow deluging him with reproaches, but he, for his part, not caring. Then when it was evening and dusk, and the fellow still clung to him, Pericles escorted him with a light, in order that he might not fail in the 110 practice of philosophy.27 Again, a man in a passion threatened and vowed death to Euclid of Megara,28 but he in turn vowed that the man should surely be appeased, and cease from his hostility to him. How invaluable it is to have such examples in mind when a man is seized with anger! On the other hand, one must altogether ignore the tragedy which says in so many words : 'Anger arms the hand against the enemy;' 29 for it is much better not to give way to anger at all. But if such restraint is not easy, we shall at least curb our anger by reflection, so as not to give it too much rein. But let us bring our discussion back again to the examples of noble deeds. A certain man once kept striking Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, in the face, yet he did not resent it, but allowed full play to the ruffian's anger, so that his face was swollen and bruised from the blows. Then when he stopped striking him, Socrates did nothing more than write on his forehead, as an artisan on a statue, who did it, and thus took out his revenge. Since these examples almost coincide with our teachings, I hold that such men are worthy of emulation. For this conduct of Socrates is akin to the precept that to him who smites you upon the one cheek, you shall turn the other also 30 — thus much may you be avenged; the conduct of Pericles and of Euclid also conforms to the precept: 'Submit to those who persecute you, and endure their wrath with meekness;' 31 and to the other: 'Pray for your enemies and curse them not.' 32 One who has been instructed in the pagan examples will no longer hold the Christian precepts impracticable. But I will not overlook the conduct of Alexander, who, on taking captive the daughters of Darius, who were reputed to be of surpassing beauty, would not even look at them, for he deemed it unworthy of one who was a conqueror of men 111 to be a slave to women.33 This is of a piece with the statement that he who looks upon a woman to lust after her, even though he does not commit the act of adultery, is not free from its guilt, since he has entertained impure thoughts.34 It is hard to believe that the action of Cleinias,35 one of the disciples of Pythagoras, was in accidental conformity to our teachings, and not designed imitation of them. What, then, was this act of his? By taking an oath he could have avoided a fine of three talents, yet rather than do so he paid the fine, though he could have sworn truthfully. I am inclined to think that he had heard of the precept which forbids us to swear.36" http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/basil_litterature01.htm
Plato on Articulation of One's Beliefs
“ATHENIAN: So it looks as if have to compel the guardians of our divine foundations to get an exact idea of the common element in all four virtues- that factor which, though single, is to be found in courage, restraint, justice and wisdom, and this in our view deserves the general title ‘virtue.’ This element, my friends, if only we have the will, is what we must now cling to like leeches, and we must not relax our grip until we can explain adequately the essence of what we have to contemplate… ATHENIAN: Well, then, do we have the same line about goodness and beauty? Should the guardians know no more than that these terms are a plurality, or should they understand the senses in which they are unities? CLEINIAS: It looks as if they are more or less obliged to comprehend that too- how they are unities. ATHENIAN: But what if they understood the point, but couldn’t find the words to demonstrate it? CLEINIAS: How absurd! That’s the condition of a slave. ATHENIAN: Well, then, isn’t our doctrine going to be the same about all serious questions? If our guardians are going to be genuine guardians of the laws they must have genuine knowledge of their real nature; they must be articulate enough to explain the real difference between good actions and bad, and capable of sticking to the distinction in practice. CLEINIAS: Naturally. ATHENIAN: And surely one of the finest fields of knowledge is theology, on which we’ve already lavished a great deal of attention. It’s supremely important to appreciate- so far as it’s given to man to know these things- the existence of the gods and the obvious extent of their power. The man in the street may be forgiven if he simply follows the letter of the law, but if any intended guardian fails to work hard to master every theological proof there is, we must certainly not grant him the same indulgence; in other words, we must never choose as a Guardian of the Laws anyone who is not preternaturally gifted or has not worked hard at theology, or allow him to be awarded distinctions for virtue.” –Plato, The Laws, Trans. By Trevor J. Saunders, Penguin Books, 1970, (Reprinted 1975), pgs. 525-526.
[Plato here is articulating a principle about articulation which I have heard before from C.S. Lewis and which I think is generally true: If one cannot articulate an understanding then chances are they do not fully understand the subject matter, so we should aim in our educational endeavors to be able to articulate as well as to understand. There are some things which cannot be spoken- the ineffable- which nevertheless can be articulately evoked at times. Nevertheless, many subject matters can be. I find for instance in talking with Alex and Megan and many others of you that I am confronted with a challenge to articulate my understanding on a subject, and it does not always come easily, and the temptation sometimes is to slough off the effort. I think there are many instances where I have said something in response to a question which was in effect a settling for a more or less insufficient articulation of a buried understanding or view point of mine. But when I have made a ‘straight up’ and proper reply, with some pepper, it is valuable, either for having given form to and having conveyed my understanding, or having given a full articulation of my viewpoint which then exposed it to criticism and so possible correction, whereas if I had not fully expressed my understanding or viewpoint, it have remained insulated from either benefitting others or my being benefitted by its correction. Often when I seek to express some understanding or insight the endeavor allows me to self-correct the otherwise dormant mistaken thinking.
Thinking of and putting into practice ways by which we can together challenge each other to articulate fully our understandings and develop our views, especially on what we think are the most important things, and to cultivate among us articulateness and receptiveness and understanding, is surely a fruitful goal.
Plato’s Gaurdians are the rulers of his imagined colony and they are to understand above all others the whys of the Laws of the colony as well as what the Laws are. They must be able to articulate for instance to a lawbreaker the virtues of the Laws and why they are good to embrace and why it is bad to not follow them. Similarly, elders and leaders in a church should be able to articulate the reasons why they believe, and there should be a general culture in the church in which this articulation is grown and fostered.]
[Plato here is articulating a principle about articulation which I have heard before from C.S. Lewis and which I think is generally true: If one cannot articulate an understanding then chances are they do not fully understand the subject matter, so we should aim in our educational endeavors to be able to articulate as well as to understand. There are some things which cannot be spoken- the ineffable- which nevertheless can be articulately evoked at times. Nevertheless, many subject matters can be. I find for instance in talking with Alex and Megan and many others of you that I am confronted with a challenge to articulate my understanding on a subject, and it does not always come easily, and the temptation sometimes is to slough off the effort. I think there are many instances where I have said something in response to a question which was in effect a settling for a more or less insufficient articulation of a buried understanding or view point of mine. But when I have made a ‘straight up’ and proper reply, with some pepper, it is valuable, either for having given form to and having conveyed my understanding, or having given a full articulation of my viewpoint which then exposed it to criticism and so possible correction, whereas if I had not fully expressed my understanding or viewpoint, it have remained insulated from either benefitting others or my being benefitted by its correction. Often when I seek to express some understanding or insight the endeavor allows me to self-correct the otherwise dormant mistaken thinking.
Thinking of and putting into practice ways by which we can together challenge each other to articulate fully our understandings and develop our views, especially on what we think are the most important things, and to cultivate among us articulateness and receptiveness and understanding, is surely a fruitful goal.
Plato’s Gaurdians are the rulers of his imagined colony and they are to understand above all others the whys of the Laws of the colony as well as what the Laws are. They must be able to articulate for instance to a lawbreaker the virtues of the Laws and why they are good to embrace and why it is bad to not follow them. Similarly, elders and leaders in a church should be able to articulate the reasons why they believe, and there should be a general culture in the church in which this articulation is grown and fostered.]
Monday, January 07, 2008
The Demographic Descent of Russia
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19951/pub_detail.asp
“…The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful and by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering this demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. Unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor its voting public have begun to face up to this enormous challenge…
…For example, in Italy--the prime example in many current discussions of a possible depopulation of Europe--there are today about 103 deaths for every one hundred live births. Russia, by contrast, reports more than 170 deaths for every one hundred births….
…Russia's current depopulation bears all the trappings of a "demographic shock," reflecting abrupt and violent changes in the nation's vital rates in the immediate wake of a momentous, system-shattering, historic event. This shock is probably not just a temporary disturbance: there are good reasons to believe that Russia's population trends define a new norm for that country….
…First: Russia's poor and declining overall health patterns extend into the realm of reproductive health, meaning that involuntary infertility is a more significant problem for Russia than for Western countries, and possibly a worsening one. According to some recent reports, 13 percent of Russia's married couples of childbearing age are infertile--nearly twice the figure for the United States in 1995. Other Russian sources point to an even greater prevalence of infertility today. Russian womanhood has been scarred by the country's extraordinary popular reliance upon abortion as a primary means of contraception--with the abortions in question conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. As one expert (Murray Feshbach) has noted, "approximately 10 to 20 percent of [Russian] women become infertile after abortions, according to numerous reports." Add to this the explosive spread of potentially curable sexually transmitted infections. According to official figures, the incidence of syphilis in 2001 was one hundred times higher in Russia than in Germany. Second: Russian patterns of family formation have been evolving markedly over the past generation-and not in a direction conducive to larger families. Simply put, young Russians are now much less likely to marry--and ever more likely to divorce if they do. In 2001 Russia recorded three divorces for every four new marriages. Third, and perhaps most important: With the end of the Soviet system, Russia has in some real sense commenced a rejoining with the rest of Europe--and in present-day Europe, Russian fertility rates are by no means aberrant. While Russia's levels tilt toward the lower end of the European spectrum, they are actually higher than for some other post-Communist areas whose "transitions" to democracy and market order look rather more complete (Slovenia, 1.21; Czech Republic, 1.14)--and are comparable to the current levels in a number of the established market democracies of the European Union (Austria, 1.31; Greece, 1.29; Spain, 1.26; Italy, 1.24). Viewed over a longer horizon, Russia's postwar fertility levels and trends look altogether "European." But Russia's death rates do not look European at all. Over the four decades between 1961-1962 and 2002, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, though just slightly. Desperately poor health conditions are distributed with a wretched evenness across the land….
…As for mortality attributed to injury--murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning, and other violent causes--age-adjusted levels for men and women alike more than doubled between 1965 and 2001. Among contemporary societies at peace, Russia's level of violent deaths places the country practically in a category of its own. For men under sixty-five, the death rate from injury and poisoning is more than four times that of Finland, the nation with the worst rate in the European Union…
…As for the effect of population decline on daily life and affairs of state: in the decades immediately ahead, Russia seems likely to contend with a sharp falloff in its youth population. Between 1975 and 2000, the number of young men ages fifteen to twenty-four ranged between ten million and thirteen million. By 2025, on current UN projections, the total will be barely six million. Apart from the obvious military implications of this decline, there would be economic and social reverberations. With fewer young people rising to replace the older retirees graduating from the Russian workforce, the question of improving (or perhaps maintaining) the average level of skills and qualifications in the economically active population would become that much more pressing. And since younger people the world over tend to be disposed toward and associated with certain kinds of discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking, a pronounced choking off of younger blood could have real consequences for Russia's social capabilities and economic responsiveness…”
“…The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful and by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering this demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. Unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor its voting public have begun to face up to this enormous challenge…
…For example, in Italy--the prime example in many current discussions of a possible depopulation of Europe--there are today about 103 deaths for every one hundred live births. Russia, by contrast, reports more than 170 deaths for every one hundred births….
…Russia's current depopulation bears all the trappings of a "demographic shock," reflecting abrupt and violent changes in the nation's vital rates in the immediate wake of a momentous, system-shattering, historic event. This shock is probably not just a temporary disturbance: there are good reasons to believe that Russia's population trends define a new norm for that country….
…First: Russia's poor and declining overall health patterns extend into the realm of reproductive health, meaning that involuntary infertility is a more significant problem for Russia than for Western countries, and possibly a worsening one. According to some recent reports, 13 percent of Russia's married couples of childbearing age are infertile--nearly twice the figure for the United States in 1995. Other Russian sources point to an even greater prevalence of infertility today. Russian womanhood has been scarred by the country's extraordinary popular reliance upon abortion as a primary means of contraception--with the abortions in question conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. As one expert (Murray Feshbach) has noted, "approximately 10 to 20 percent of [Russian] women become infertile after abortions, according to numerous reports." Add to this the explosive spread of potentially curable sexually transmitted infections. According to official figures, the incidence of syphilis in 2001 was one hundred times higher in Russia than in Germany. Second: Russian patterns of family formation have been evolving markedly over the past generation-and not in a direction conducive to larger families. Simply put, young Russians are now much less likely to marry--and ever more likely to divorce if they do. In 2001 Russia recorded three divorces for every four new marriages. Third, and perhaps most important: With the end of the Soviet system, Russia has in some real sense commenced a rejoining with the rest of Europe--and in present-day Europe, Russian fertility rates are by no means aberrant. While Russia's levels tilt toward the lower end of the European spectrum, they are actually higher than for some other post-Communist areas whose "transitions" to democracy and market order look rather more complete (Slovenia, 1.21; Czech Republic, 1.14)--and are comparable to the current levels in a number of the established market democracies of the European Union (Austria, 1.31; Greece, 1.29; Spain, 1.26; Italy, 1.24). Viewed over a longer horizon, Russia's postwar fertility levels and trends look altogether "European." But Russia's death rates do not look European at all. Over the four decades between 1961-1962 and 2002, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, though just slightly. Desperately poor health conditions are distributed with a wretched evenness across the land….
…As for mortality attributed to injury--murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning, and other violent causes--age-adjusted levels for men and women alike more than doubled between 1965 and 2001. Among contemporary societies at peace, Russia's level of violent deaths places the country practically in a category of its own. For men under sixty-five, the death rate from injury and poisoning is more than four times that of Finland, the nation with the worst rate in the European Union…
…As for the effect of population decline on daily life and affairs of state: in the decades immediately ahead, Russia seems likely to contend with a sharp falloff in its youth population. Between 1975 and 2000, the number of young men ages fifteen to twenty-four ranged between ten million and thirteen million. By 2025, on current UN projections, the total will be barely six million. Apart from the obvious military implications of this decline, there would be economic and social reverberations. With fewer young people rising to replace the older retirees graduating from the Russian workforce, the question of improving (or perhaps maintaining) the average level of skills and qualifications in the economically active population would become that much more pressing. And since younger people the world over tend to be disposed toward and associated with certain kinds of discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking, a pronounced choking off of younger blood could have real consequences for Russia's social capabilities and economic responsiveness…”
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Feeling Burdened by Others Expectations of You?
Donkey: "Idiots!"
This reminds me of a story from the life of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. When he was a slave of a bodygaurd of Nero, one day his master was torturing him by twisting his leg. He calmly and characteristically told the man, "Master, if you twist my leg further it will break." The man continued twisting and his leg broke. Epictetus responded, "I told you it would break."
The Demographic Descent of Europe: What Does It Mean?
“Above all, and most urgently of all, why is Europe committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself in what British historian Niall Ferguson calls the greatest ‘sustained reduction in European population since the black Death of the 14th century’?
- Why do eighteen European countries report ‘negative natural increase’ (i.e., more deaths than births)?
- Why does no western European country have a replacement-level birthrate? (The replacement level, according to demographers, is 2.1 children per woman; as of 2004, Germany’s birthrate was 1.3; Italy’s 1.2, Spain’s 1.1, and France’s 1.7; the higher French rate is due to Muslim immigration).
[Footnote: "As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has noted, the difference between a replacement-level birthrate and a birthrate of 1.5 or 1.4, other things being equal, is the difference between a stable population over time and a population that decreases by one-third as each generation passes."] - Why is Germany likely to lose the equivalent of the former East Germany in the first half of the 21st century?
- Why will Spain’s population decline from 40 million to 31.3 million by the middle of the century?
- Why will 42 percent of Italians be over sixty by 2050- at which point, on present trends, almost 60 percent of the Italian people will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, or uncles?
- Why will Europe’s retired population increase by 55 percent in the next twenty-five years, while its working population will shrink by 8 percent- and, to repeat, why can’t Europeans, either politicians or the public, draw the obvious conclusions from these figures about the impending bankruptcy of their social welfare, health care, and pension systems? Why, to cite Niall Ferguson again, is Europe’s ‘fundamental problem… senescence’?
- What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?
- Why do many Europeans deny that these demographics- which are without parallel in human history, absent wars, plagues, or natural catastrophes- are the defining reality of their twenty-first century?
These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily by reference only to Europe’s distinct experience of the twentieth century and what Europe learned from it. Nor can they be answered by appeals to European shame. A deeper question has to be raised: Why did Europe have the twentieth century that it did? Why did a century that began with confident predictions about a maturing humanity reaching new heights of civilizational accomplishment produce in Europe, within four decades, two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War threatening global catastrophe, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag? What happened? Why?”
-George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral, (2005), p. 21-23.
Weigel goes on in this slender and fascinating volume to gather and assess anaylses of the contemporary European scene in the context of its historical trajectories.
Marriage Conceptions Leading to Divorce, and Same Sex Unions' Use of These Conceptions
Here is some interesting commentary. There is widespread distaste for and rejection of the views of marriage that have resulted in rampant divorce. Many of those who have grown up as the children in these families do not accept the view of the family as expendable if the romance dies between the parents. Yet same-sex unions are being based on this idea of marriage, posing a further exascerbation of this misery.
"... David Blankenhorn writes in his recent book The Future of Marriage against the idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults. Marriage, Blankenhorn persuasively contends, is and always has been a social institution with the primary public purpose of ensuring that children will have an emotional, moral, and legal relationship to the parents who are responsible for their existence. Blankenhorn quotes approvingly the counsel of the German theologian-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote to a young couple getting married that it is not only their love that will sustain their marriage but also their marriage that will sustain their love. Blankenhorn argues in a very civil manner free of polemics that the idea of same-sex marriage is a further and potentially fatal deinstitutionalizing of marriage….
As Blankenhorn argues in The Future of Marriage, the crucial factor is not the number who deviate from the norm, although that is not unimportant, but the effectiveness with which the norm is defended. The idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults has no doubt gained ground in recent decades. More important than its impact on agitation for same-sex marriage is the impact of that idea on the prevalence of divorce. Many millions of children have been subjected to the wrenching experience of the divorce of their parents, and studies suggest that young people today have little patience with the notion that the family is expendable if the adults responsible for holding the family together do not find their relationship emotionally satisfying. That is a hard-earned wisdom born of much sorrow, but it is wisdom, and it enhances the persuasiveness of David Blankenhorn’s argument in The Future of Marriage….There is nothing speculative about the millions of children of divorce who have a deep personal interest in not further destabilizing what is meant by marriage and family. "
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=943
"... David Blankenhorn writes in his recent book The Future of Marriage against the idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults. Marriage, Blankenhorn persuasively contends, is and always has been a social institution with the primary public purpose of ensuring that children will have an emotional, moral, and legal relationship to the parents who are responsible for their existence. Blankenhorn quotes approvingly the counsel of the German theologian-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote to a young couple getting married that it is not only their love that will sustain their marriage but also their marriage that will sustain their love. Blankenhorn argues in a very civil manner free of polemics that the idea of same-sex marriage is a further and potentially fatal deinstitutionalizing of marriage….
As Blankenhorn argues in The Future of Marriage, the crucial factor is not the number who deviate from the norm, although that is not unimportant, but the effectiveness with which the norm is defended. The idea that marriage is a private relationship based on an emotional commitment between two adults has no doubt gained ground in recent decades. More important than its impact on agitation for same-sex marriage is the impact of that idea on the prevalence of divorce. Many millions of children have been subjected to the wrenching experience of the divorce of their parents, and studies suggest that young people today have little patience with the notion that the family is expendable if the adults responsible for holding the family together do not find their relationship emotionally satisfying. That is a hard-earned wisdom born of much sorrow, but it is wisdom, and it enhances the persuasiveness of David Blankenhorn’s argument in The Future of Marriage….There is nothing speculative about the millions of children of divorce who have a deep personal interest in not further destabilizing what is meant by marriage and family. "
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=943
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Civilization cannot survive the repetition of these crimes.
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
–Justice Robert H. Jackson in the Nuremburg Trials of the Nazi doctors, qtd. in the documentary In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine.
–Justice Robert H. Jackson in the Nuremburg Trials of the Nazi doctors, qtd. in the documentary In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine.
Your Grandmother Extremely Lively, You A Paralytic
"A 6000-year-old Egyptian tomb bears this inscription: 'We live in a decadent age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They inhabit taverns and have no self-control.'"
-Robert J. Morgan in Then Sings My Soul, p. 151.
Sound familiar? The cliche "Somethings never change" comes to mind, but it seems to me the more nuanced understanding brings to mind that civilizations and societies go through different stages and phases. The Egyptian may be quite right in his observation.
This brings to mind the following:
"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.
-G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying.
"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom the spreading laurel tree."
-W.B. Yeats, "A Prayer For My Daughter"
(Quotes taken from Robert Kimball's splendid essay, "The Fortunes of Permanence", available on the web.)
William Wilberforce in a pivotal night of prayer, wrote that Almighty God had laid on his heart the goals of abolishing the slave trade and of reforming English manners, and he then devoted the next fifty some years of his life to these ends, effectively. Manners in the sense of civility and humane and humble deference are essential for civil discourse and fruitful dialogue. The "New Atheists" of late have been distinguishing themselves by their willingness to forgo the "ceremonies" of civil dialogue, Sam Hall, for instance, suggesting that people should be killed for holding certain beliefs. This is the kind of thing Yeats decried when he wrote "The center can not hold. Things fall apart..." The theme of humaneness and honoring of parents and faithfulness to friends was huge for Confucius and other wisemen like Plato who, whatever their faults, both helped to establish civilizations which had admirable and noble aspects to them as well as the blameworthy. Tongues of disorder in ascendance and pervasive shock trooper mentalities don't bode well for a particular society or civilization.
-Robert J. Morgan in Then Sings My Soul, p. 151.
Sound familiar? The cliche "Somethings never change" comes to mind, but it seems to me the more nuanced understanding brings to mind that civilizations and societies go through different stages and phases. The Egyptian may be quite right in his observation.
This brings to mind the following:
"Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.
-G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying.
"How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom the spreading laurel tree."
-W.B. Yeats, "A Prayer For My Daughter"
(Quotes taken from Robert Kimball's splendid essay, "The Fortunes of Permanence", available on the web.)
William Wilberforce in a pivotal night of prayer, wrote that Almighty God had laid on his heart the goals of abolishing the slave trade and of reforming English manners, and he then devoted the next fifty some years of his life to these ends, effectively. Manners in the sense of civility and humane and humble deference are essential for civil discourse and fruitful dialogue. The "New Atheists" of late have been distinguishing themselves by their willingness to forgo the "ceremonies" of civil dialogue, Sam Hall, for instance, suggesting that people should be killed for holding certain beliefs. This is the kind of thing Yeats decried when he wrote "The center can not hold. Things fall apart..." The theme of humaneness and honoring of parents and faithfulness to friends was huge for Confucius and other wisemen like Plato who, whatever their faults, both helped to establish civilizations which had admirable and noble aspects to them as well as the blameworthy. Tongues of disorder in ascendance and pervasive shock trooper mentalities don't bode well for a particular society or civilization.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Biotechnology Raises Unavoidable Theological Questions
“When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies, they reach first for the language of autonomy, fairness, and individual rights. But this part of our moral vocabulary does not equip us to address the hardest questions posed by cloning, designer children, and genetic engineering. That is why the genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo. To grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world- questions about the moral status of nature, and about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make them unavoidable…It is commonly said that enhancement, cloning and genetic engineering pose a threat to human dignity. This is true enough. But the challenge is to say how these practices diminish our humanity. What aspects of human freedom or human flourishing do they threaten?” –Michael Sandel, The Case Against Perfection, p. 9, 24.
"Christ-killer"
The documentary The Cross and the Star ascribes to the Gospel of John and Matthew in particular anti-semitic texts, but on what basis? In these texts the death of the earthly Christ is said to have occurred by the hands of the Jews. But there is something odd in charging these texts with anti-semitism. We know in hindsight how they have sometimes been used against the Jews in a long history of anti-semitism in which Jews were called “Christ-killers” and charged with deicide. But the charge of these texts with anti-semitism, while coming from an understandable emotionalism in response to the horror of the Shoah, hardly seems to make sense. The historical statement that the Jews crucified Jesus under Pontius Pilate is a mere historical assertion that is unexceptional in itself. It has taken on extra-historical connotations for many who hear it today, but these are the issue and not the simple historical content of the Gospel. Changing history because of the symbolical misuse of it is hardly the solution. Rather, any tendency to ascribe to the historical account undue meaning should be addressed from within the church by a countering theological correction. As for Jews today and those who surreptitiously support the Jews but attack religious particularity, their skepticism is understandable until clear teaching is presented that maintains the historical account of the Gospels intact but clearly counters any tendency to make the Jews the pariah. The Christian Scriptures in fact ascribe to the Jews a continuing privileged and beloved place in God’s design. They are identified as loved by God “on account of the patriarchs”. The eleventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans could not be more explicit in the acceptance of the Jews, the rebuke of the Gentiles who mistreat them, and the assertion that the Jews have an ongoing place in God’s plan. The solution of those who are supposedly the friend of the Jews of saying that any claim to particularity and superior truth in either the Christian, or by un-extrapolated implication the Jewish religion, as was advanced axiomatically in the abovementioned documentary, is the root of the problem is in fact to attack the tenants of both religions. The Jews await a Messiah and the Christians say that Christ is the Messiah. These are irreducible doctrinal differences but they should not equate to rejection and ascription of immorality by either side.
The following poem by John Donne captures for me a theological point that seems crucial to real Christianity. Although immediately offensive and anti-Semitic, according to the definition of anti-Semitism taught in the documentary, it seems to me that a thoughtful reading discovers in it a counter to anti-Seimitism that doesn’t resort to emotionalism and historicism to deal with a terrible problem:
Holy Sonnet XI
Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,
Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me,
For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he
Who could do no iniquity hath died:
But by my death can not be satisfied
My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety:
They killed once an inglorious man, but I
Crucify him daily, being now glorified.
Oh let me, then, his strange love still admire:
Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment.
And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire
But to supplant, and with gainful intent:
God clothed himself in vile man's flesh, that so
He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
Anyone who does not believe that Christ was crucified because of their own sins, and not because of the Jews, is not a Christian in any believing sense. Donne repeats the historical assertion of the Gospels that the documentary brands as anti-Semitic, but he is saying that for the Jews it was a mere mundane killing of an inglorious man. For those who believe, there is a greater guilt, a greater sin, repeated daily. To call Jews Christ-killers is in Christian teaching to malign the significance of Christ’s teaching for one’s own life. It is a mock piety, a show that always reveals to the discerning unbelief, lack of humility, and distortion of the Gospels and the New Testament teachings. It is in fact a killing of Christ to call Jews “Christ-killers” because the term is clearly appropriating the historical event and ascribing to it a narrowness of symbology that is anathema to the gospel of salvation. Anyone who says to his brother "Christ-killer" is in danger of the fires of hell.
The following poem by John Donne captures for me a theological point that seems crucial to real Christianity. Although immediately offensive and anti-Semitic, according to the definition of anti-Semitism taught in the documentary, it seems to me that a thoughtful reading discovers in it a counter to anti-Seimitism that doesn’t resort to emotionalism and historicism to deal with a terrible problem:
Holy Sonnet XI
Spit in my face you Jews, and pierce my side,
Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me,
For I have sinned, and sinned, and only he
Who could do no iniquity hath died:
But by my death can not be satisfied
My sins, which pass the Jews' impiety:
They killed once an inglorious man, but I
Crucify him daily, being now glorified.
Oh let me, then, his strange love still admire:
Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment.
And Jacob came clothed in vile harsh attire
But to supplant, and with gainful intent:
God clothed himself in vile man's flesh, that so
He might be weak enough to suffer woe.
Anyone who does not believe that Christ was crucified because of their own sins, and not because of the Jews, is not a Christian in any believing sense. Donne repeats the historical assertion of the Gospels that the documentary brands as anti-Semitic, but he is saying that for the Jews it was a mere mundane killing of an inglorious man. For those who believe, there is a greater guilt, a greater sin, repeated daily. To call Jews Christ-killers is in Christian teaching to malign the significance of Christ’s teaching for one’s own life. It is a mock piety, a show that always reveals to the discerning unbelief, lack of humility, and distortion of the Gospels and the New Testament teachings. It is in fact a killing of Christ to call Jews “Christ-killers” because the term is clearly appropriating the historical event and ascribing to it a narrowness of symbology that is anathema to the gospel of salvation. Anyone who says to his brother "Christ-killer" is in danger of the fires of hell.
The Armenian Genocide
A very valuable documentary about the Armenian Genocide:
http://www.amazon.com/Armenian-Genocide-Critically-Acclaimed-Documentary/dp/B000FIFHZ0/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1199209859&sr=8-1
An issue that Turkey to the present day is cavilling about and stonewalling.
The coiner of the term "genocide" had in mind the Turkish genocide of Armenians as well as the Holocaust. "Hitler sardonically asked, 'Who remembered the Armenians?'" (Qtd. in the documentary "The Cross and The Star")
When people say that life was good under the dhimmis comparative to life under Christian dominion, stop and consider this: The extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians as a desperate expression of the Muslim Ottoman dimishment of power.
http://www.amazon.com/Armenian-Genocide-Critically-Acclaimed-Documentary/dp/B000FIFHZ0/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1199209859&sr=8-1
An issue that Turkey to the present day is cavilling about and stonewalling.
The coiner of the term "genocide" had in mind the Turkish genocide of Armenians as well as the Holocaust. "Hitler sardonically asked, 'Who remembered the Armenians?'" (Qtd. in the documentary "The Cross and The Star")
When people say that life was good under the dhimmis comparative to life under Christian dominion, stop and consider this: The extermination of a million and a half Armenian Christians as a desperate expression of the Muslim Ottoman dimishment of power.
They wanted knowledge and beauty now
"The horrifying slaughter of September 11 tempts us to draw a line around that day and treat it and its immediate consequences as an exceptional case. There is a deep sense, however, in which the terrorist attacks underscore not the fragility of normality but the normality of fragility. This is a point that C. S. Lewis made with great eloquence in a sermon he preached at Oxford in 1939. “I think it important,” he said,
to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is
not panache: it is our nature."-qtd. by Roger Kimball in an excellent New Criterion article on culture with much in relation to Christianity:
http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/20/summer02/fortunesofpermanence.htm
Plato wrote in the wake of the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. He founded his school during a lifetime full of turmoil, and yet the school would last a thousand years before it shut its door, and his writings would continue to challenge and train to the present day.
to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is
not panache: it is our nature."-qtd. by Roger Kimball in an excellent New Criterion article on culture with much in relation to Christianity:
http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/20/summer02/fortunesofpermanence.htm
Plato wrote in the wake of the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. He founded his school during a lifetime full of turmoil, and yet the school would last a thousand years before it shut its door, and his writings would continue to challenge and train to the present day.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
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”.
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”.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
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:
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:
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”.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
“Then in the mid 1930s, there occurred an event which I would say marks theNot 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).
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).
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 brutalJ. 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.
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 ).
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”.
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:
“…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
“Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary as a postgraduate fellow, having–J. Deotis Roberts, Bonhoeffer & King: Speaking Truth to Power, p. 45.
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.”
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 practicalOne 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”:
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.
“It is really impossible, but suppose it has been done. You have reconstructedThere 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.
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.”
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 PaulineIn 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:
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.”
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.
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