I believe in the living God. Now, that may not seem like a surprising statement for a bishop of the church to make – but as we approach the Lambeth conference of bishops, it may be a crucial belief to reaffirm.
The debate raging in the Anglican communion over the place of women and gays in the life and ministry of the church, and the name-calling about who does and does not accept the authority of scripture, belies a much deeper question: did God stop revealing God’s self with the closing of the canon of scripture at the end of the first century, or has God continued to be self-revelatory through history, and right into the present?
My conservative brothers and sisters seem to argue that God revealed everything to us in scripture. Ever since, it has simply been our difficult but straightforward task to conform ourselves to God’s will revealed there and to repent when we are unable or unwilling to do so.
For me, there is something static and lifeless in such a view of God. Could it be that even the Bible is too small a box in which to enclose God?
[blockquote]did God stop revealing God’s self with the closing of the canon of scripture at the end of the first century, or has God continued to be self-revelatory through history, and right into the present?[/blockquote]
Soren Kierkegaard’s little book Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle answers this question. Robinson’s language indicates that he considers himself to be an Apostle rather than a mere genius.
Now that is called thinking outside the book, er I mean box.
Part of the official teaching of the TEC is in the Prayer Book. If we bother to open it we find on pages 852-854:
[blockquote]The Holy Spirit
Q. Who is the Holy Spirit?
A. The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Trinity, God at
work in the world and in the Church even now.
Q. How is the Holy Spirit revealed in the Old Covenant?
A. The Holy Spirit is revealed in the Old Covenant as the
giver of life, the One who spoke through the prophets.
Q. How is the Holy Spirit revealed in the New Covenant?
A. The Holy Spirit is revealed as the Lord who leads us into
all truth and enables us to grow in the likeness of
Christ.
Q. How do we recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in
our lives?
A. We recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit when we
confess Jesus Christ as Lord and are brought into love
and harmony with God, with ourselves, with our
neighbors, and with all creation.
Q. How do we recognize the truths taught by the Holy
Spirit?
[b] A. We recognize truths to be taught by the Holy Spirit
when they are in accord with the Scriptures.[/b]
The Holy Scriptures
Q. What are the Holy Scriptures?
A. The Holy Scriptures, commonly called the Bible, are the
books of the Old and New Testaments; other books,
called the Apocrypha, are often included in the Bible.
Q. What is the Old Testament?
[b] A. The Old Testament consists of books written by the
people of the Old Covenant, under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit, to show God at work in nature and history.[/b]
Q. What is the New Testament?
[b]A. The New Testament consists of books written by the
people of the New Covenant, under the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit, to set forth the life and teachings of
Jesus and to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
for all people.[/b]
Q. What is the Apocrypha?
A. The Apocrypha is a collection of additional books
written by people of the Old Covenant, and used in
the Christian Church.
Q. Why do we call the Holy Scriptures the Word of God?
A. We call them the Word of God because God inspired
their human authors and because God still speaks to us
through the Bible.
Q. How do we understand the meaning of the Bible?
A. We understand the meaning of the Bible by the help of
the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church in the true
interpretation of the Scriptures.[/blockquote]
What this bishop is saying is flatly contradicted by the official teaching of TEC. Not that this is new and not that TEC will do anything about it.
William Witt [#1], care to elaborate? Some of us aren’t familiar with the Kierkegaard book you cited, and aren’t ready to invest the time needed to acquire and read it. Help us out with a quick summary of K’s relevant argument.
Those who deny even the possibility that God might be saying something new, as +VGR argues — because supposedly God said all he would ever have to say in Scripture, and supposedly what he said in Scripture is fixed and never-changing — are blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, because they’re declaring categorically that God would never tell us X. In fact that might be true, but declaring it to be so is way above our pay grade.
From another perspective, those folks ignore the fact that a loving father often gives his children different and even contradictory instructions at different stages of their maturity. When my son was 12, I said “no, you may not have a glass of wine with dinner”; now that he’s a young adult, I’m the one who offers him a glass of wine. It’s not for us to pronounce with false certainty that God would never do something similar; anyone who claims otherwise is setting himself above God.
This is one of those situations in which Paul had the right advice in 1 Thess. 5.20-21: don’t despise those who claim to be inspired by the Spirit; instead, test everything, and keep that which proves to be good.
Well, DC we already know that you reject the teachings of the Church.
I do hope that NT Wright and other UK bishops will address this heresy.
I wish that more bishops considered themselves as apostles rather than anything else; at least recognizing that they stand in the place of the Apostles. That would be better than a church led by geniuses, lawyers, politicians, and activists. And it might mean that the whole lot might be more inclined to impose discipline when there is one – such as Robinson – who thinks himself an apostle when it’s clear to almost everybody else that he’s not.
Good people of New Hamshire: PLEASE do something to rein this man in, whom you have foisted upon the Church. Aside from his other more salacious personal/character issues, you should recognize that anybody who either misunderstands or deliberately misrepresents the views of his flock and the teaching of the Church is clearly unfit to be an apostolic bishop.
#4, William Witt’s statement from Standfirm regarding PB Schori’s position on Scripture would I believe apply to Robinson’s position as well.
Dr. William Witt unpacks PB Jefferts Schori’s statement that “to assume there is only one way of reading [the Bible] is hubris”:
Despite Katherine Jeffert-Schori’s claim that it is hubris to assume that there is one way to read the Bible, in order for her own statement to be intelligible, she must assume that there is essentially one way to read her own statement. Otherwise, Schori’s statement could be interpreted to mean that not only is it hubris to assume that there is one way to read the Bible, but that it is also not hubris to assume that there is one way to read the Bible, or that it is also hubris to assume that there is less than or more than one way to read the Bible, etc. At some point the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle apply or all statements become inherently meaningless, and no communication can take place whatsoever.
Basically, the church claims: The Bible can have multiple readings because it has a superfluity of meaning, but truly contradictory readings are not allowed, and wherever such take place, the problem is this: at least one of the readings, and thus one of the readers, is mistaken.
The plain meaning of Schori’s statement (and its coherence depends on its having a plain meaning) is that she is affirming that the Bible is capable of multiple interpretations because it has no plain or clear meaning. The Scripture are not then inherently intelligible, and thus we are free to impose whatever meaning we want on them. Such a reading places the reader’s own authority over the text, and is, itself, an example of willful hubris–an unwillingness to submit oneself to the authority of anything outside one’s own wants.
The most tragic implication of Schori’s statement, however, is what it says about God. Karl Barth’s masterful rediscovery of the centrality of trinitarian theology was based on the premise that God must be in himself who he is in his revelation. We can know that God is gracious in himself because we can trust and have confidence in the Word he has given us in Jesus Christ, and the Scriptures faithfully bear witness to that revelation.
However, if the Scriptures are themselves unintelligible, and thus incapable of any sure interpretation, then, far from one interpretation being as good as another, no interpretation can provide us any sure guidance about God whatsoever–and we are left with absolute skepticism. If one reading of Scripture is as good as another, then there is no sure revelation of God, and God is not in himself who he is in his revelation. We can then have no confidence that God is gracious in himself, because we can have no confidence in the conherence or intelligiblity of the Word that the church has always claimed he has spoken.
Far from Schori’s statement being a cause for rejoicing, it represents a truly tragic reading of the gospel. Schori’s God is a God who has not spoken, and cannot speak, and we can know nothing about him/her/it. Unlike the God revealed in Jesus Christ, such a God cannot reach beyond him/itself to be gracious, but leaves us trapped in our own subjectivity, while he/she/it is trapped in unknowable silence.
Br. Michael [#5], any thoughtful person would reject teachings that have the effect of making an idol out of a collection of human writings. Those writings might have been God-inspired perhaps, but there’s no a priori reason to assume they were complete, undistorted, and still prescribed for us. Nor is there any reason to assume Scripture was more inspired than, say, Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s special- and general-relativity papers — which arguably had an additional divine credential, in that they were testable against the reality that God wrought (cf. Deut. 18.20-22).
D. C. Toedt :
Or more simply put – “He is not a Tame Lion” but He always “plays by his own rules”.
It’s amazing that the Liberal version of The Almighty, All Knowing, Infinite God is so pathetic:
So, not only is the TEC god so lame that he can’t keep one book in the entire Universe together, but then he has to rewrite it because so much of it is wrong.
Pathetic – pathetic – pathetic.
Either believe in the Omnipresence of God or don’t believe in God- a version of ‘whimpy I’m incapable of managing my publicity’ god simply isn’t even worth the time.
DC, we could dance around all day on the head of that philosophical pin. The crux of the matter is not whether God COULD or MIGHT teach us something new and contradictory – but whether he HAS in fact done so. TEC has made its case to the worldwide Church, and she has not received it.
DC, we have been around this over and over again. You simply reject the teachings of the church. You are a non-believer who for your own reasons like to call himself a Christian without believing any of it. But then again, maybe it is valuable since you and Robinson share the same beliefs.
Eclipse [#9] writes: “… not only is the TEC god so lame that he can’t keep one book in the entire Universe together, but then he has to rewrite it because so much of it is wrong.”
I wonder why some reasserters are so insistent that God’s word MUST be fixed and immutable? There’s no reason to think that God had exactly one shot to tell us everything he was ever going to have to say to us, and therefore what he did 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus was “it,” once and for all. Both time and change are universal constants in our lives — and they were created by God along with everything else. There’s every reason to think he might be cultivating our universe over time, in an ongoing process of continuing creation, to use Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner’s phrase.
12, QED.
The Mormons have their Book of Mormon – Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Also Doctrine and Covenants. Also Pearl of Great Price…and of course whatever the sitting prophet emits as truth.
We have the Book of Geneology.
Was it only last week that Bishop Robinson was saying how orthodox he was?
DC. Re: 1 Thess.–Remind me again what part of the current debaucle in the Anglican Communion has been “good”?
God didn’t have take “exactly one shot”-the Bible is not “one shot”, like the Koran, but is 66 books, written over 1,500 years, by 40 different authors-and is a perfectly cohesive, complete message for mankind. The purpose of the Jewish people, in part, according to the Apostle Paul, was the writing and preservation of the Scriptures-they have indeed written, preserved, and determined the OT canon, and wrote the NT-the Holy Spirit then guided the church, Christs body, to the discernment of which apostolic writings and gospels were truly breathed by Him. Thus, we have the Holy Scriptures in our possession.
The Bible is thus the most sacred single document which exists on the earth-period. If someone is going to attempt to change or alter it, then he/she should at least have a better reason for doing so than to justify a personal sexual craving or ecclesiastical power craving which absolutely flies in the face of everything taught in the Holy Scriptures.
“Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”.
“You have exalted Your word and Your name above all else.”
“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth.”
“Test all things; hold fast to that which is good.”
Br Michael, reexaminers do not reject all the teachings of “the church.” We see a conflict within two traditions: that of grace, and that of sexual disorder. You do not see a conflict. I think there are many ways to handle it (as James Alison, the gay catholic theologian demonstrates).
Of course, the church did once teach that the earth was the center of the universe. I do reject that. Glad they did eventually, also.
The many ways to read scripture, rules that not longer apply, etc is a ploy to move the cheese. The debate is about whether the historic creeds mean what they say and whether they are just part of the richness of our liturgy.
I admit, I’m dissatisfied with the phrase “locked up.” It’s a war phrase.
I would say that the bible isn’t the end. It is the currency. Or – it is the map of the territory. But it is not the territory itself. It is an old map, a reliable picture of the human heart. But conservatives read the map and say homosexuality is in the land of blasphemy. When we read the map, we don’t see where homosexuality lies, but suppose its in “better to marry than to burn.”
Same map. However, the territory is the lives we inhabit. They aren’t the same.
Like I said John, grace is not license nor is it affirming what people want to do. It is not love and it is not grace to tell people that they can keep on sinning so that they will feel better about it.
The simple fact is that you, DC and Robinson are teachin and preaching a different religion.
what I find so ridiculous in this type of argument that God is doing/saying a new thing is how people like Bishop Robinson, Schori and Blogger DC identify themselves as being the “enlightened” ones to whom God is now speaking. Talk about hubris! Everyone else here is missing the Spirit and as DC suggests and the others would probably agree “blaspheming the Spirit.” I guess we orthodox have not come of age or matured like they have.
And what ideal lives they present to church. Can any of them say like Paul, who proved himself an apostle, “imitate me as I imitate Christ.” Jesus even said if you don’t believe my words believe the miracles. To any who suggest a new word or teaching or “wind” of the Spirit I would say “Prove it” that your lives would bear witness to the advanced spiritual stage you are claiming. All they demonstrate is self-centeredness, sentimentalism and shallowness.
The reason so much suspicion surrounds those that would advocate “continuing revelation†(and changing revelation; and changing to conveniently match the current flavor of secular society, for that matter) is that they border on denying the divinity of Christ. That is, they would have our understanding of God’s precepts and will for our lives continue to evolve, even though the Scripture concludes with the words of and events surrounding the Incarnation of God Himself.
It might be one thing to debate the true meaning of this prophet from the 5th century B.C., or that prophet from the 3rd century B.C., versus this or that Christian thinker from 800 or 1,300 years ago. But what we have received is the revelation of God, from God, incarnate on this earth. It seems to me that those who cavalierly dismiss that Gospel may not really comprehend the gravity of what happened at that time some 2,000 years ago. They see it as a bunch of people who had some kind of heightened religious experience, just as we might if we were as deep a set of thinkers as Katharine Jefferts Schori, rather than the unfolding of the divine plan from God’s very Christ.
Gene Robinson is a good example of this, as he parrots his party’s line that sexuality isn’t important. Yet Jesus Himself said it was. If you really believe Jesus was the Son of God, how dismissive are you of His words? On the other hand, it’s easy to do if you think He was only a pretty smart guy, but maybe, in the final analysis, not as smart as you.
its very simple really:
all real Christians realise what faith is
they also realise that sadly, control in the Western Anglican Church has been hijaked
What else needs to be said?
Except that the faithful have always lived on the margins and encountered persecution. that is why I rejoice at Synod’s rejection of my convictions- its a good sign I am onto something good!
D. C. Toedt –
Yes, it makes perfect sense – An Intelligent all Knowing – Omni-Present Being knows that mankind will interpret Him on the basis of the books written about Him –
So, He makes sure all kinds of mistakes are in there and it’s all wrong.
Yep, really plausible that…
Hi Brother Michael,
You assume that being gay is something people want to do. That’s interesting. Why would people want to be something that requires constant explanation and mental torture?
What you do not seem to hear is that we differ on the list of “sins.” I use the fruits of the spirit: for us, sin is – among other things – a broken promise. In scripture the fruit of sin seems to be dissension, envy, etc. If being open about who you are leads to maturity, love, and self-control then that’s where the holy spirit lies. I just don’t know enough about how individual consensual acts can be offensive to God, and it often feels like a projection (“I find it offensive, so God must find it offensive”).
If we were to compare gluttony and sexual activity, it seems that you would say to not be a glutton, you shouldn’t eat at all. I would say – eat healthy. Some people diet like so: they stop eating for a while, and then they eat everything. When it comes to sex, it is gay men who feel bad about “sinning” who end up being the most promiscuous and least healthy. Those gay people who accept their identity are more likely to have strong relationships that exhibit the fruits of the spirit.
We may have different understandings of “self control.” Surely, if you see homosexuality as an addiction rather than as an identity, then we just see it differently. Surely, if it is an addiction than laying off the sauce is a good idea.
So I’m a bit exhausted at the idea of saying we’re preaching a “different” religion. I am still a Christian. And – in spite of our differences, I affirm that you are also one. Perhaps, in an act of charity, you might remember that I am one also.
God is the same yesterday, today and forever. The continuing protestations/rationalizations among Robinson, Schori, D.C., Msgr. Wilkins et al just exhibits a profound lack in the virtues of humility and fear of the Lord.
Either we believe God says what he means and means what he says (sorry for the Seussism) or we don’t. I prefer to follow the path of Newman and (very soon) Burnham.
The idea about scripture being changeable is answered in John 19:30.
John Wilkins #26, obviously it is something people want to do. You could spend all day reading Episcopalian websites full of outraged comments from people that don’t want the church telling them not to do what they want. Gene Robinson was married, with kids, and had vowed commitment, just what you claim to extol, to another person, yet he threw it all in the trash because he wanted to do something different.
Let us all gives thanks to God for Gene, and his endless self-focussed idiocy/blasphemy posing as theology. It helps bring marvelous clarity to deliberations within the Communion as to what the problem is and how grave.
John, you seem to want to make sin more acceptable to God. If we are talking about fornication you seem to be arguing that if you can’t stop that behavior then God is pleased if you practice safe sex. I suggest that the correct way of repentance would be to stop the fornication completely. It is not for us to say whether fornication is a sin or not, because God has already done that.
I would also add that if there is such a thing as sexual orientation (for which there is no proof sust assertion) then your first sentance is wrong. If there is such a thing as orientation then you would want a homosexual relationship and would see it as good. On the other hand if there is “constant explanation and mental torture?” then might that be because it is a disordered condition?
I would not consider “a loving committed” homosexual relationship as a fruit of the spirit. It may ease the human consequenses of sin, but the offense to God remains.
Br. Michael [#21] writes: “The simple fact is that you [“John Wilkins”], DC and Robinson are teachin and preaching a different religion.”
I can’t speak for “John” or for +VGR, but I would certainly agree that what I argue for is indeed a different religion, in important respects, than that espoused by most reasserters.
But we all, reasserters and reappraisers alike, share at least a professed commitment to the Summary of the Law. For me, that’s all that’s necessary for someone to be my co-religionist.
I feel compelled to contribute to this thread, but I scarcely know where to begin… and consequently I’m afraid I may not be able to add to any understanding. From D. C. Toedt:
[blockquote]I wonder why some reasserters are so insistent that God’s word MUST be fixed and immutable?[/blockquote]
In the end, to me this is the acid test. Recall, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand: And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” If Jesus cast out devils by the power of the devil, then the kingdom of Satan is divided against itself and must fall.
So, the Bible is God’s Word, and now He’s doing something which is different from what his own Word says. Then, is not the Kingdom of God divided against itself, in this post-modern age? So, will the Kingdom of God fall? God forbid. (“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”)
I imagine this argument would be refuted with something like, “No, the Kingdom of God is not divided against itself. God is not paralyzed by or confined to the small size of our understanding of him. Therefore, He can change. As such, there’s nothing wrong with God’s Word being mutable. This is not inconsistent.” A stronger theologian than I should better answer this point, but I’d just say: God is timeless — being outside of time since he created time — and therefore does not change over the time which passing we perceive. Therefore, his mind cannot “change.” “But thou art the same; and thy years shall have no end.”
As for Robinson, his arguments seem much harder to destroy. I always feel it’s a bit like nailing jello to a wall; it always squirms out of any analysis based on rigorous logic. Once an argument disproves an assertion, it seems it’s *always* possible for another to craft a reply which isn’t covered by the assumptions on which your original argument was based (and surely every logical argument is based on certain assumptions) (argumentation by obfuscation?).
From the Robinson interview:
[blockquote]For me, there is something static and lifeless in such a view of God. Could it be that even the Bible is too small a box in which to enclose God?[/blockquote]
[blockquote]This God is alive and well and active in the church – not locked up in scripture 2,000 years ago, having said everything that needed to be said, but rather still interacting with us, calling us to love one another as he loves us.[/blockquote]
I believe Robinson and others have said previously that the church fathers were misinterpreting (or differently-interpreting) the Bible. Isn’t this correct? In this interview, Robinson is clearly saying that God is doing something new that is not contained within the small box of the Bible. They may have said this previously as well. They may perhaps say both of these assertions can be simultaneously true; I don’t know if they do.
I know the first assertion has been addressed often before. In addressing the second assertion, I believe the whole argument comes down to whether this “new thing” is or is not contained within the Bible. I believe it clearly is covered there. And I believe it’s rather hard to refute that it is. I leave scriptural proof of this as an exercise to the reader (sorry ;^).
From the Robinson interview:
[blockquote]No one of us alone can be trusted to such a process because, left to our own devices, we recast God’s will in our own image. But in the community of the church, together we are able to discern God’s will for us – and sometimes that may mean reinterpreting and even changing old understandings of things thought settled long ago.[/blockquote]
This seems quite problematic to me. “No one of us alone….” However, it seems to me that the present leaders of TEC are claiming an exclusive right to the truth contained in the Bible and which they say is continually revealed by God, that is, exclusive of the confessions of the conservatives. They clearly assert that they know and follow the truth, and that those who disagree with them are wrong. Indeed, I believe they have not sought “discern”ment “together” “in the community of the church” in any way.
For me, the kicker is the quote, “left to our own devices, we recast God’s will in our own image.” From the outset, I’ve perceived that this is exactly what the leaders of the “new thing” movement are doing. They’re imposing their own desires over and above the Word of God. N’est ce pas?
It might be best to defer the the Apostle John as to what the definition of sin is. In his first epistle, he teaches: “Everyone who sins is breaking God’s law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God.”
Now the moral law of God is eternally in force; it is not erased by “the gospel of grace”; as Paul taught, “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?”
So the gospel of grace does not give the Christian licence to pick, choose, or measure what sin is-or is not. The principle that blood atonement is necessary for the remission of sins is not erased in the New Covenant; rather, the means by which this is achieved has been superseded by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ & the shedding of His blood; there is no further shedding of blood needed as under the Levitical priesthood, but the need for such sacrifice remained at the heart of Gods eternal law.
And so it is with the rest of the moral law of , as has been amply attested to by the apostles.
The Mosaic law tells us: “You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, but shall not incur sin because of him.
You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD.”
Needless to say, these precepts are repeated time and again by the Apostles [Col. 3:12-13, 1 Peter 3:8-9, etc.].
So when prohibitions against certain behaviors are uniformly enforced throughout the whole of scripture, it is an indication that Gods eternal moral law regarding such matters remains constant. In the case of homosexuality, the prohibitions against it which are found in the law are also reiterated in the new covenant; they are clear & unequivocal.
D.C.’s god seems to be committed to the philosophy, “If at first you get it wrong, try, try, again.”
I’m just curious as to why the Holy Spirit was absent from 2000 years of church tradition, absent from Rome, from Orthodoxy, from the historic Protestant Reformation, absent from Lambeth 98 when all the bishops of the Anglican Communion had gathered, absent from Windsor, absent from Kigali, absent from Dar Es Salaam, absent from hundreds of bishops gathered at Gafcon, but decided to settle infallibly on the tiny American Episcopal diocese of Maine, and the General Convention of a church with less than 700,000 ASA.
And how would we know? As I said, these people think they are apostles.
Leander Harding summarized the theology well in a blog post he wrote a few years ago on [url=http://www.leanderharding.com/blog/2005/01/19/homosexuality-and-the-american-religion/]”Homosexuality and the American Religion.”[/url]
William Witt [#35] writes: D.C.’s god seems to be committed to the philosophy, “If at first you get it wrong, try, try, again.â€
My teen-aged daughter loves to bake. If you (Wm. Witt) were to walk into our kitchen while she still had her cake batter in the mixing bowl, I hope you wouldn’t say she had “gotten it wrong” because she had not made a cake.
The evidence strongly suggests that God may well be “baking” the universe in somewhat the same way. For whatever reasons, instead of creating a finished “cake” in an instant — that is, a complete, perfectly-operating universe — the Chef appears to be orchestrating processes that so far have produced stars, planets, and every form of living creature. (It also appears that we humans are helpers in this effort, being most effective at the same when we follow the Summary of the Law.) We have no idea what the final “cake” will look like, but if past trends are any guide, it should be unimaginably wonderful.
If we frame the story in this way, it makes perfect sense that the Chef might have different instructions for us now than he did 2,000 years earlier in our development. (I assume purely for the sake of argument that the scriptural laws were in fact divine instructions.) Continuing the analogy, if I wanted to eat my daughter’s cake when it consisted of raw batter, she likely would tell me NOT to do so (cake batter contains raw eggs, which could have salmonella bacteria). After the cake was baked, she would have no problem with my digging in. For all we know, it MIGHT be the same with human sexuality. “By their fruits you will know them”; when the human race gets some experience with committed same-sex relationships, we’ll have a better idea whether we’re talking about batter or cake.
——————-
Wm. Witt writes: “I’m just curious as to why the Holy Spirit was absent from 2000 years of church tradition ….”
There’s that all-or-nothing thinking again, the seeming inability to see any colors except black or white. I’m increasingly convinced it’s a learning disability.
——————
Wm. Witt writes: “… decided to settle infallibly on the tiny American Episcopal diocese of Maine, and the General Convention of a church with less than 700,000 ASA. “
Who said anything about GC or TEC being infallible? You’re setting up a straw man (and possibly falling victim to all-or-nothing thinking again). We’re muddling along as best we can.
“We’re muddling along as best we can.”
As is DC’s god apparently. And not too well at that.
#36–“We’re muddling along as best we can.”
I don’t think any reasserter would take issue with your statement. That’s why we reassert. God has given us the way to freedom, we don’t have to muddle along.
OK, let’s agree then to leave interpretation of the Bible out of it. Any student of patristics 101 would instantly recognise the views of this man as valentianism, a combination of (1) we like the Bible because it accidently states some things we believe anyway, (2) our beliefs come from cultural convictions/philosophies we hold dear; Jesus happens to have confirmed these. Moreover, when one digs a bit deeper, one also finds the kind of logic we see in the TEC briefing paper, viz., the apostles disagreed with each other; we disagree; disagreement is good, though this comes from a different kind of patristic challange; and deeper digging shows that Paul had special revelations not recorded in the Bible, but Peter was too Jewish, etc, a view of disagreement agreeable to F Chr Bauer and a hegelian idea of the way truth emerges. Of course, NT scholars like Trobisch and Childs take the oppositie view of the matter, namely, that the canon of the NT sees final deeper continuity, with Peter commending Paul in his letters and Paul assuring the super apostles the Jerusalem church is first to receive their monetary gifts. Of course God is bigger than the Bible, and the only way to know that is to defer to the priviledged account of the Bible’s view of the matter. VGR believes God is bigger than the Bible because he cannot really square his views with what the Bible says, and no amount of fussing around can change that. That is exactly the difference between liberalism and a standard apophatic account of God’s hidden but revealed character. It is sad to listen to such jejeune accounts of serious matters, but VGR and others are on stage and people are listening and they are producing lots of valentianian gems. But then, I would also bet that the PB and many of our present Bishops have never bothered to study closely the church fathers. They are probably just as out of it as the Bible. God is bigger than them.
#26: You are right about “eat healthy,” wrong about what Br. Michael has said. I too favor the Eat Healthy position, but we note that homosexual practices are not included in this rubric, for they are patently unhealthy and abnormal in the extreme. Look at it this way: Since the numbers show that AIDS is growing among young homosexuals and that homosexuals are still the majority of the AIDS patients in the US, is this the result of eating healthy?
As to sin, the Bible is clear. Will you tell me it is not, re:homosexual practices? Or, will you tell me that it is simply wrong in its position? Or will you tell me that this position is outdated, in which case, I would like some evidence that is position on homosexuality (and marriage too, for that matter) have been superseded by some new and finer replaccement for this grave personal evil?
I gather that you are a homosexual and we may therefore understand why you would wish to rewrite wcripture, but I would think that you would need some far more compelling reason than those that the homophiles have advanced over the last few years, for they are insubstantial. LM
#33 has complained that nailing vgr’s arguments down is like nailing jello to the wall. We may see why in #36, whose entry is in fact nothing more than an extended speculation resting on no evidence whatsoever.
This is not a shred of reason to suppose that God is baking a cake, so to speak. However, #36 does what vgr does – and this answers #33: He takes an idle speculation and by the end of the paragraph, draws a set of concrete conclusions from it. #36 has gone from an idle speculation to the assertion of a hypothesis, which, like Renaissance putti, has no visible means of support.
The liberal establishment has made a mockery of language at every level until clarity of expression and care in exegesis has been suborned beyond restoration. We have a long history of being careless with language, so the liberal establishment’s semantic silly putty is not surprising. Its just that this abuse has grown so radical and so extensive that, like, Dude, one cannot know, you know, where we’re at which is so yesterday, but no probs is what I say, like whatever, you know? I mean the dynamic is multicultural; the platform is electronic, and perception is the new reality.
As the culture has grown more adolescent, so has our language,
so widespread and so universal that the broad culture cannot recognize the puerile. Indeed, I should say, correctly, that it celebrates it. Or perhaps indabas it, do you suppose? Larry
#25. In Maine? In MAINE??????????????????????? Begging you parding, NOT in Maine. Please. We’re rural and prone to blackflies and the murdering of helpless lobsters, soaking their poor flesh in melted butter and downing it with Smethwicks, but we always try to kill ticks when we find them. Humph. Larry
And this is the bottom line in DC’s (36) and probably the PB’s and VGR’s thinking of the orthodox mindset: “I’m increasingly convinced it’s a learning disability.” (#36 entry above)
Well I happen to know for sure that pride is a sin. And I think if you got to know William Witt you would quickly become disabused of any notion that he has a learning disability. I think you have illustrated that the God that you believe in is half-baked while the God we believe in is Sovereign and holy and is an “all or nothing” God in the end.
Your right there with Dr. Freud DC. We believers are all under a delusion…the delusion that the Lord of Lord’s resides in us.
The phrase that the Bible is too small a box for God also caught my eye, and I also thought what an earlier writer said, that this remark was incommensurate with his earlier assertion that he was exceedingly conservative. How can he pay so little attention to simple logic and consistency. I have talked – too much I daresay – about the language of affect, but this remark of VGR’s reminded me that I had overlooked an important element, that declaring the Holy Ghost as the author of one’s positions is, in reality, a declaration of infallibility, for no one can prove that the Holy Ghost is NOT the author, and therefore the conjecture stands with the assumption that there is a Holy Ghost and its does act. If one believes that the Holy Ghost is the source, then whatever one says in this matter must carry the divine imprimatur, even if what you say is inconsistent. And we have all noted this, that vgr and Schori et al all act as if they CANNOT be wrong. Naive we say or purblind or what not, but they position remains unassailable.
Because of this, they need a language that will express the infallibility that is an inward condition, not a dogma. How can they say, “It is not possible for us to be wrong”? But they have been saying it, and we haven’t understood their condition as the Elect – an old notion that has finally come to be true again. So we have watched the creation of a language that will speak, not what they think and not what they feel (in the usual sense of the word) but what will reflect their inward condition of being the Chosen, infallible. This must be a strange language for it needs no cognitive elements: hence the language of affect, a mirror behind the light inside themselves, a device to throw this light outwardly. Their language is solely intended to illuminate. To be one of the Elect IS their affect; they need only show it.
This means that they cannot compromise, they cannot vacillate, they cannot deviate. This matches our observations exactly. For all their warm and fuzzy newspeak, these are fanatics properly so-called. Odd. We are seeing the resurrection of Ann Hathaway and the Familists.
Sorry to go on so long. Maybe this has all been obvious to y ou. But it has not been to me, and these observations show me what I did not know before, namely, that they cannot be dealt with because they are not in communication with us, can not be indeed.
Larry
Larry… you assume I have a fish to fry in this. Actually, I don’t. However, as someone who comes to a non-religious background, if I had thought that the church’s primary doctrine was that homosexuality was a disorder, or that the bible’s God was primarily concerned with genitals, I would not have become a Christian. For me, it was the power of Jesus Christ – the resurrected one who brought peace to the apostles – that remains primary in my life. I find inerrancy to be problematic.
I admit, the anti-gay position is generally rife with misunderstanding of who gay people are and their spiritual lives. When a couple gets blessed its never two anonymous people: its people called to love each other, who make each other into better Christians. I think Paul is pragmatic with this when he says it is better to marry than to burn. I seem to hear the assumption that it is impossible to be a gay Christian.
I also assume – which might not be correct – that our world is very different than the ancient Greek or Hebrew or Roman world. I imagine that they would have found our world, with its cars, computers, and airplanes to be very different. They did not believe in the big bang or evolution. And yes, I think we do know more than people did in the ancient world. The ancient world was brutal and ignorant. But Jesus offered some thing very different.
For that reason I’m skeptical about our claims to find a convenient ethic from scripture. We have to do hard work ourselves in community, as Christians. The good news is that as faithful Christians, if we love one another, we can do it.
Seitz mentions the ancient church fathers. In the end, aren’t we the readers and critics? As reformed Christians it is our duty to be both charitable and critical toward the past. But it is bias to assume that the past is intrinsically better than how people think now. Useful, perhaps, but not necessary. Not sure why I would trust many of the church fathers on their view of property, for example.
However, I do get tired of making the bible into a “box.” How is this: for some people the bible is the gold standard: everything must refer to it. For reappraisers, the bible is paper currency. Still useful; creates lots of abundance for more people; but its use is based on mutual trust, not on attachment the the material thing.
CraigStephans [#43], conjecturing that reality falls into either an A category or a B category is fine. Only a fool, however, insists that reality MUST conform to these categories. Engineers, military officers, doctors, and litigators, among others, learn this fairly early in their careers. Those who don’t can cause serious problems for themselves and others — including, in the first three cases, getting themselves (and others) killed.
The postings of William Witt, Larry Morse, and others here indicate that they haven’t yet fully grasped the folly of INSISTING on this type of artificial A-or-B, black-or-white, all-or-nothing categorization.
Reality is what God made it, not what you claim it has to be.
Larry Morse [#41] writes: “This is not a shred of reason to suppose that God is baking a cake, so to speak.”
Larry, it’s indisputable that the universe has not been static, but has been evolving hurly-burly for at least the past 13.7 billion years. If you need a quick high-level survey with links to further reading, see a posting I did a couple of years ago: Creation: A Titanic Set of Processes That Continues Today.
But, #45, what you say about the ancient world being brutal is both true and untrue, and there is nothing so misleading as a shiny half-truth. When you ancestors and mine were fresh out of caves, the Chinese were casting bronzes of still unsurpassed beauty. and the Egyptians were fashioning an elaborate social and semantic world. When my ancestors were running around Britain st ark naked and covered with blue woad, Aristotle and Plato were fashioning a conceptual world so complex it still invigorates and compels all we think.
Was their world brutal? Sure. Was it MORE brutal than our present world? The world of the hydrogen bomb, which we are still well in, has no equivalent in the ancient world. China of 500 BC did not hesitate to kill thousands. We have upped that record. China under Mao probably killed more Chinese than Germany under Hitler. And it it was less than 400 years ago the Indians were scalping my distant relatives. I submit therefore that it is not whether brutality was present or not in past and present. Who can doubt its presence? Our world haas gained only in this, that we have mitigated the effects of disease and made physical comfort more widespread. That’s all. Which is more brutal, to live in a world without modern dentistry or to live in a world of constant anxiety, of obsessive speed, of mind-killing anomie, of lives driven to match the speed of computers? Do we know more? Well, we have more information, but if you examine the humanities you will see that China undere the Tang and England under Elizabeth was far richer and in every way to be preferred.
But scripture steps outside all of this. Its truth is of a radically different order. It sees man sub species aeternitatis, and this can never be outdated. This is not to demand that scripture be read with a blind literalness, but it does demand that its insights do indeed form a gold standard. You don’t believe it? Heigh-ho. LM
Larry Morse [#48], would you be willing to permanently trade places with a random person living in the ancient world?
I thought not.
(This is a thought experiment proposed by Gregg Easterbrook in his book The Progress Paradox.)
46. D. C. Toedt wrote:
[blockquote] CraigStephans [#43], conjecturing that reality falls into either an A category or a B category is fine. Only a fool, however, insists that reality MUST conform to these categories.[/blockquote]
You had better be consistent with this line of thinking:
So, when the Monopoly card says “Do not pass Go, Do not collect 200 dollars” please argue with the rest of the players that you are not required to use such black/white thinking – that there are many ways to play the game and none is better than another. Then snatch all their pieces and money and declare yourself king. I’m sure it will go over well.
When going 100 miles an hour down the highway, please remember to [b] tell the patrol officer that his insistence that there is a ‘speed limit’ of 75 is black/white thinking – that there are many ways to go down the highway and none is better than another… That he is learning disabled to think otherwise.[/b] Sure that will go well as well.
Please remember when your child comes home at 3 am and you expect him/her to tell you the truth about where they have been – that you should NOT expect such black/white learning disabled type of thinking from yourself – or him/her. She should be able to tell you any story and all of them should be fine. Expecting that there is A TRUTH to where she has been is limited and farcical.
If you do not do these things, DC – then your are not abiding by your own rules, hence, are the one with illogical and ill-thought-out ideas.
My old ethics professor would tell you that you need to redo your assignment.
That’s an extremely weak argument, Eclipse [#50]. Black and white thinking is entirely appropriate for enforcing existing rules, especially when the rules have been agreed to, or at least acquiesced in, as an appropriate balance of public safety and individual freedom. (Speaking of speed limits, have you seen the suggestion by Sen. John Warner to reduce the speed limit back to 55mph?). This is especially true when the rules being enforced arise out of a mental model of the universe that is coherent with the available empirical evidence.
The Current Disputes about homosexuality are another matter entirely. At bottom, the reasserter position rests on their belief that God’s will about sexual relationships has been authoritatively and finally revealed to us and will never change. Their only support for this position is, we and our spiritual forefathers said so, and it would be absurd to believe the contrary, therefore it MUST be that way. When reasserters insist on using this as a rationale for regulating others’ lives, it’s hard to see any principled difference between them and the Taliban.
So there’s no mistake, let me anticipate and deal with another attack. Independent of religious considerations, the societal regulation of some sexual relationships has benefits that are generally agreed to outweigh the interference with individual liberty. For example, incest is demonstrably harmful to family units and especially to children; polygamy can result in unwanted young men being set adrift in the surrounding society.
But there’s also an increasing general agreement that the balance between social utility and individual liberty is very different in the case of other sexual relationships between consenting adults. If reasserters want to justify regulating such relationships, they’re going to have to do better than just proclaiming the fantasy that “God said it, and his will never changes, therefore it MUST be this way.”
The question raised by VGR’s sermon is whether the following Christian understanding is in error: that the biblical canon is uniquely inspired and that God’s public revelation (not private revelation and not all Divine activity and not the ability of human beings to achieve increasingly accurate understandings of some parts of the created order) ended with the apostolic era.
For almost all Christians in all ages this understanding is definitional. It is part of what characterizes Christian belief. Has anything been said by D.C. or anyone on this thread that calls into question that understanding at a level any deeper than “in my mind, I don’t think God would be like that”? (D.C. might need to add the further qualification “assuming purely for the sake of argument God exists.”) I think not.
Mike, that is what is at issue and that is also the “Official” position of TEC as reflected in the BCP. VGR+ says no and DC says no. And a no position immediatley moves us out of Christianity and into something else. In a way the argument above is amusing. It’s like watching a combined game of baseball and football. There just is no commonality in the arguments.
Mike Watson [#52], many Christians, including this one, are not persuaded by the propositions about the biblical canon and God’s public revelation that you describe as “definitional.”
As to, in my mind, I don’t think God would be like that: In a free society, when people claim that a proposition X is true, and ask others to govern their lives accordingly, it’s up to them to justify their claim. Those skeptical of the claim are not required to justify their unbelief. Were it otherwise, the definition of acceptable belief would be reduced to the wishes of the strongest. This is definitional, IMO.
#49. You are DEAD wrong. I would indeed. Well, but where. (1)New England in the late 17th, the late 18th, early 19th century. (2) England in the 3rd, 15th, 18th centuries, (3)China during the early Han, the early Tang, (4) Athens in the 4thC bc, (5) Rome under Augustus, this names just a few. You think I would be unwilling to give up TV, Bluetooth, ipods, in short, the comfy easy life of constant entertainment and steady painless gratification – ah, the American Dream. But my take is different: When was life more richly meaningful, regardless of a toothache or typhus? I choose then.
[i] Slightly edited by elf. [/i]
Then let us add, BC that the available empirical evidence tells us that evolution has no use for homosexuality for obvious reasons. Evolution speaks of fertility and reproduction if the species is to survive. Homosexuality speaks of sterility, the sure death of the species. Evolutions allows all sorts of abnormalities; homosexuality is simply one of them. But they are not intended to survive. So we may say that evolution is simple black and white: One reproduces and adapts or one perishes. This is all life sub species aeternitatis, God’s view of the world. All in this universe obeys God’s Law; there is no chaos; there are no exceptions. This is black and white at its most distinct and final. LM
D. C. Toedt:
[blockquote]That’s an extremely weak argument, Eclipse [#50]. Black and white thinking is entirely appropriate for enforcing existing rules, especially when the rules have been agreed to, or at least acquiesced in, as an appropriate balance of public safety and individual freedom.[/blockquote]
Why does this so strongly remind me of the speech by Uncle Andrew in the [b]Magician’s Nephew[/b]? Please don’t add “Ours is a high and lonely destiny…”
No, the reality is DC that there are ‘rights/wrongs’ in the Universe and your hoping otherwise does not make it so. Reality is that you live by and with them all the time… and to not perceive that ‘stop’ meaning stop means you are learning disabled.
That is the point.
Re:
The Current Disputes about homosexuality are another matter entirely. At bottom, the reasserter position rests on their belief that God’s will about sexual relationships has been authoritatively and finally revealed to us and will never change. [b]Their only support for this position is, we and our spiritual forefathers said so, and it would be absurd to believe the contrary, therefore it MUST be that way.[/b] When reasserters insist on using this as a rationale for regulating others’ lives, it’s hard to see any principled difference between them and the Taliban. <- that comment isn't even worth addressing. Are you trying to misconstrue this on purpose? I have to believe that because after wandering around on Titus 1:9 you have to know that the reason the orthodox have issues stating sin is not sin is precisely because of the Scriptures stance' - not church fathers or anything else. You have to know that - so why are you implying otherwise? Interesting that you are trying to avoid it. We have (gasp) people all over our church struggling with sin - anger, bitterness, covetness, gluttony - and yes, homosexuality. We all attend church together and love one another. What sets us apart from the non-orthodox is that we realize God asks us to be perfect as He is perfect - "Shall we sin that Grace abound? God Forbid" "We have DIED to sin to LIVE for Christ" That is the difference - we know that our job is to get better and not continue in sin.
But realize where DC is coming from. He simply does not believe in almost any of the fundamentals of the faith that make up orthodox Christianity.
Jesus in not divine, their is no original sin, there is no need for salvation, Jesus in only a wise Jewish sage who got himself curcified, buried and stayed dead and buried. The scriptures are not inspired but are purely human constructs and have no more value than say Tacitus or Homer. To the extent you argue creedal Christianity with DC you are talking past each other because there is no common ground.
Larry Morse [#55], if you think life would be “more richly meaningful” living in squalor, struggling to put food on your family’s table, suffering horrendous infant mortality and childbed death, with little prospect of a significantly-better life for your children — remember, you’ve agreed to trade places permanently with a random person in the ancient world, not with Socrates or King Aethelred — then you have a very different take on the meaningfulness of life than most people I know.
——————
Larry Morse [#56] writes: “the available empirical evidence tells us that evolution has no use for homosexuality for obvious reasons. … Homosexuality speaks of sterility, the sure death of the species. Evolutions allows all sorts of abnormalities; homosexuality is simply one of them. But they are not intended to survive. So we may say that evolution is simple black and white: One reproduces and adapts or one perishes. ”
Um, not quite. Harmful genetic traits can and do survive if they hitchhike with some other genetic advantage. A well-known example is the genetic trait for sickle-cell anemia, which (when present as a single recessive) provides some protection against malaria.
Given that homosexuality hasn’t died out, there would seem to be some as-yet-undiscovered evolutionary advantage that is at least tangentially related to homosexuality. Researchers in Italy have proposed a hypothesis about what that advantage might be. In a nutshell, “a gene can be reproductively harmful to one sex as long as it’s helpful to the other. The gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men’s mothers, sisters, and aunts.”
Eclipse [#57] writes, apropos of my comment about the ipse dixit beliefs of our spiritual forefathers: “the reason the orthodox have issues stating sin is not sin is precisely because of the Scriptures stance – not church fathers or anything else.”
“Spiritual forefathers” encompasses the various human authors of what we now call Scripture, not just the church fathers. I don’t know of any Christian who believes the biblical writings were dictated verbatim by God.
That’s like saying the crime against Sodom an Gomorrah that got them reduced to rubble was inhospitality. Laughable.
D.C. (re #54): That the understanding about the biblical canon and public revelation is definitional was an empirical assertion about the belief of most Christians. It was already evident you don’t accept it.
I was not telling you how to govern your life or asking you to justify unbelief. I was observing that your assertions involving baking cakes, black and white thinking, cosmology, societal regulation, social utility and individual liberty don’t contain any well-formed argument calling into question the Christian understanding about the biblical canon and revelation.
Mike Watson [#62] writes: “I was observing that your assertions … don’t contain any well-formed argument calling into question the Christian understanding about the biblical canon and revelation.”
It’s not unreasonable to ask for my own reasoning, Mike [ELVES: I think this is legitimate “topic drift”]. I’ve written extensively on this subject at my own blog; see, for example, Serious Inconsistencies in the New Testament Writings: Six Reasons for Skepticism About the Traditionalist Account. It links to other essays such as The Apostles’ Teaching Didn’t Seem to Include a Divine Jesus as well as Is Jesus Coming Again? The Predictors’ Track Record Doesn’t Inspire Confidence. If you go there, then while you’re at it, you might look at the right sidebar and scroll down to the category “Some inconvenient difficulties with traditionalist Christianity.” It contains links to other essays that I think you might find of interest.
Amazing. Nothing in the above discussion changes my mind that the reference I made to Soren Kierkegaard’s distinction in #1 was correct. 63 comments later, D.C.’s and John Wilken’s argument is basically that there are no apostles, only geniuses. Or, perhaps, the gnostic disciples of Schleiermacher are the true apostles, and the first century eyewitnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were not even geniuses–although they did the best they could. At the time. Which was a long time ago. And they didn’t have penicillin. But we do.
D.C.,
Perhaps the biggest problem with your position is that your god is a bumbler. Even the gnostics realized that a demiurge was not worthy of worship.
I know. That’s black and white thinking. As if the law of non-contradiction had anything to do with the nature of reality.
Wm Witt [#65] writes: “Perhaps the biggest problem with your position is that your god is a bumbler.”
Only if being a non-bumbler requires achieving what we deem the correct result at a time that we think such a result is called for. But that would put us in a position of judging God according to our human standards. It’d be roughly analogous to my telling Wolfgang Puck that he was doing it all wrong.
If God is anything like the orthodox say, then he gets to do creation the way he wants. It appears that he has been doing it for billions of years via natural processes (for support of this claim, see the links I posted yesterday). I don’t feel qualified to judge God a bumbler for taking this approach; Instead I watch in awe and try to help as best I can — which, strangely, we seem to do best when we try to follow the Summary of the Law.
I’m talking about a particular set of ethics here, Professor Witt. My view is that the reasserting view of homosexuality is based on bad science; reasserters put it in the set as described in #57 – envy, gluttony and… homosexuality. I just don’t think the argument that it is of the same set makes much empirical sense unless you say that scriptural categories are automatically better than modern ones. They may or may not be. I just think we are the ones who have to take a look. I still haven’t seen how envy and homosexuality are the same.
However, I do think that there is a deeper issue that you allude to when speaking of Schleiermacher. I guess I’m one of his “disciples.” But I’m confused by what you mean by genius or apostle. I do admit, I don’t have a problem with a religion of muddling – or bumbling. Seems thats why there is room for Grace. I leave perfectionism for other religions – and gnostics.
Witt’s comment about the demiurge, however, does reveal the complicated nature of our contemporary divisions. I’ve always been skeptical that we could make much theology from scripture.
As far as the genetic roots of homosexuality, [url=http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002282]here[/url] is an interesting study. Seems that gay men share the same “androphilic” gene as fecund women. I doubt one could derive any sort of ethic from this, either for or against.
D.C.,
The question is not about how long it takes for God to create the world. He takes as long as it takes. Thomas Aquinas argued that although Scripture indicated that the world was created at a certain moment in time, God could have created an eternal world–one that always existed–if he willed.
You seem to be arguing that God creates the world by trial and error, that God is as dependent on the world as the world is on him, that God (like your teenage chef) learns from his errors, that divine revelation is equivalent to divine cookery (I can’t use the word “creation” to describe such a process), that God is “doing the best he can,” but, after all, we can’t expect too much, that God seems incapable of revealing definitely at one moment in time what his intentions are, or else that God changes his mind–he can morally approve or disapprove of something at one time only to reveal the contrary at a different time–or that the biblical writers just got it wrong, and God has just now gotten around to set the record straight, bypassing the Scriptures and the entire Christian tradition only for the Holy Spirit to settle down in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.
Whatever else such a conception of god is, it is not remotely Christian. It might be gnostic except that, as I mentioned, the gnostics would reject such a god as an inferior demiurge, hardly one worth worshiping. It reminds me of some of the less believable Star Trek scripts or the emergent evolution “god” of 2001 A Space Odyssey. You, of course, are welcome to such a deity (with a very small “d”) so transparently created as an imago hominis. I would prefer Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover or Plotinus’s One to such a godling. Fortunately, those are not my options. I’ll take the infinite transcendent Triune God of biblical revelation, who creates ex nihilo, who acts and speaks consistently, and who does not need to change his mind, thank you very much.
John Wilkins,
Leander Harding’s area of interest is in human development. He has had a challenge on his blog for years for someone to bring forth the definitive study that shows that homosexuality is genetically determined. There has been no response because no such study exists. There may well be genetic corollaries to same-sex attraction or same-sex activity, as there seems to be genetic corollaries between left-handedness and mathematical ability or between tallness and basketball playing.
To say that you’re skeptical about making much theology from Scripture is simply to abandon the entire Christian tradition.
But, again, neither your nor D.C., are actually making a case. You simply continue to illustrate the main point–that it has been abandoned.
Wm. Witt [#68] writes: ‘You seem to be arguing that God creates the world by trial and error … that God (like your teenage chef) learns from his errors … that God is “doing the best he can,†but, after all, we can’t expect too much ….‘
Wm Witt, it appears to me that you’re reading a lot of things into my comments that just aren’t there. Nowhere have I argued that God proceeds by trial and error, or even that anything he does is a error (although I certainly wouldn’t rule it out; the OT suggests God is entirely capable of error). When my “teenage chef” — my daughter — makes a batch of cake batter before making the frosting, it’s not an error, it’s an intermediate step. I argue only that the cosmological evidence is coherent with the notion that God is proceeding in very roughly the same way.
—————-
You write that I argue “… that God seems incapable of revealing definitely at one moment in time what his intentions are ….”
I’d be grateful if you’d quote the specific language where you read this. You seem to be presuming that the Creator would in fact wish to reveal “definitely” his intentions to us. This strikes me as the sort of high anthropology that Paul Zahl used to criticize.
—————-
You write that I argue “… or else that God changes his mind–he can morally approve or disapprove of something at one time only to reveal the contrary at a different time ….”
That’s not quite what I argue (although I am entirely receptive to it). I argue more that it’s entirely possible for God’s plan to involve wanting us to do, or avoid, different things at different stages of our existence as a species.
To return to my analogy of yesterday: Years ago, I refused my son a glass of wine at dinner. Nowadays I offer him a glass when he’s home. That’s not “changing my mind,” it’s following my plan, which has always had different desires for my son’s behavior at different times of his life. There’s a big difference.
—————–
You write that I argue “… God has just now gotten around to set the record straight, bypassing the Scriptures and the entire Christian tradition only for the Holy Spirit to settle down in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.”
Again, no; you’re putting up a straw man in the hope of belittling the arguments I offer.
John Wilkins wrote:
[blockquote]I’ve always been skeptical that we could make much theology from scripture.[/blockquote]
And herein lie the roots of this problem, and the argument raging over it (unless I somehow stupidly misunderstand what the above statement really means). Astounding. Simply astounding.
Now all meaningful discussion is concluded. Congratulations, we’ve just created a new corollary to Godwin’s law. To quote Homer J.: “Forget it, Marge, it’s Chinatown!”
No #59, I did not agree to shange places with a random person. That’s your reading. Rather In intended to translate myself into a past world to take the skills I have, sharpen them, and make them work. So in 1670, I shall be a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person who is ready to make a place for myself in Boston, say, or Salem or Portsmouth. I can become a ship builder, for example, or a potter, or a trapper among the Amerinds. Will I struggle to put food on the t able, die young, watch my children die etc stc? Probably. On the other hand, I will live in a world where craftsmen are necessary, where men and women work hard, side by side, where life cuts deep and runs close and where one’s identity is validated at every turn. This is a world in which religion in integral to society, and for all its internecine conflicts, men depend on each other. The sea runs rich with cod and haddock for t hose who dare to handline for them, lobsters wash ashore in the storm until they are a pain to eat, and forty inch pine await the axe and t he team. If I have a wife, we will pull in the yoke together, and the sea of faith is loud on the shore. Cotton Mather was tough man to take, as was Sewell, but they knew how to make a decision, how to act without fear, how to be just; and we may put this in contrast to the ABC and Schori. To live, is to live intensely, to be wide awake as Thoreau said. In short, practically any day is a good day to die.
. As Aristotle said, courage is the father of all the virtues, and in this world, courage is the minimum wage for survival. In contrast to the present, in which money is the parent of all the virtues because there is nothing that cannot be bought and homosexuality and all the other bizarretes are admired and imitated. Who is wide awake now, truly awake? Those babbling on cell phones, pecking away at keyboards, emailing people who can’t even use their real names?
What do you prefer, to die living, or to rot away little by little as Alzheimers takes your identity away?
I understand about the sickle cell gene. It does survive, but the disease it causes is a perfect sign that evolution does not favor its presence. Those with it are meant to die so that it cannot be passed on. Nothing you have said alters evolution’s iron standards.
Let me put it another way: evolution and genetics favor the norm. That is PRECISELY why they are normative the norm. Homosexuality is an extreme abnormality, and the extremes are discards (inso far as they are defects). – or are meant to be if we do not interfere and keep them alive. God’s Law and evolution are never at odds because the Law is the same, as far as we know, across the face of the universe. LM
60. D. C. Toedt –
[blockquote] “Spiritual forefathers†encompasses the various human authors of what we now call Scripture, not just the church fathers. I don’t know of any Christian who believes the biblical writings were dictated verbatim by God. [/blockquote]
Yes, I see – The Almighty Bumbling God [i](who has some visual resemblance of Homer Simpson) [/i]couldn’t figure out how to tell the people he stumbled on creating – by chance – and about 1,000,000,000,000 random mutated permutations – couldn’t figure out in his tiny little brain how to tell anyone how to write anything.
Under this terrific theological ideology, I can see why you can’t believe God could do anything – much less write out a book accurately.
I agree and defer to Dr. Witt – that is NOT the Christian God… no wonder you are having problems understanding anything relative to the Christian Faith with such a flawed set of beliefs.
If you want to understand the concept of the Christian God – I suggest Job for starters – and then John.
If you want an understanding of how to live your Christian Faith – Romans is the book for you.
Then, if you demonstrate a working knowledge of the concepts and perceptions that lie within those books – then I can have a decent conversation with you.
Until then, I don’t know what you think you are worshiping but it is NOT Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
Eclipse [#73], your and Wm. Witt’s chant that “my god” is a bumbler is willfully erroneous. If you guys are trying to call me names, why don’t you do it directly; I promise I won’t respond in kind.
To use Paul Zahl’s terminology again, the anthropology of some of the reasserter comments here is as high as anything I’ve ever seen. God’s speech to Job out of the whirlwind would not be out of place here.
Speaking of Job, and of Romans, please don’t mistake my non-orthodox view as bespeaking a lack of familiarity with those books. I’d be happy to discuss the concepts and perceptions of either one with you at any time.
Finally, you’re right, I do NOT worship Father/Son/Holy Spirit. I seem to be in good company: by all the evidence, neither did Jesus or the apostles.
[blockquote]To use Paul Zahl’s terminology again, the anthropology of some of the reasserter comments here is as high as anything I’ve ever seen.[/blockquote]
D.C.,
The distinction between an apostle and a genius has nothing to do with either a high or a low anthropology. Apostles are not smarter than the average bear nor more virtuous than the average slob. Apostles are neither intellectual, spiritual, nor moral geniuses. The highest anthropology in the world would not enable one to be an apostle. The lowest anthropology in the world would not prevent it. The chief of the apostles denied Christ three times. The apostle to the Gentiles was a persecutor who said he was the “chief of sinners.”
Dear me, I have found a toad in the font. Why would it go there where there is nothing for it to eat? Surely it found nothing attractive in holy water, although I suppose it cannot tell this from the pond. I have put it in the garden where there are many good bugs and where it will be very useful. I like toads well enough, but there is a place for them. But now I must scrub out the font and replace the water. Lucky it didn’t get in the wine! Larry
Oh elves, scrub the former entry. I don’t know what got into me.
Guilty as sin in Maine
An apostle is a witness to the resurrected Christ. But then DC you deny that that ever happened.
But DC, Jesus said He was equal to the Father. And that got Him crucified. Do you deny that? Daniel 7.
[b]D. C. Toedt : [/b]
[b]Re: The God Who Doesn’t Do Anything [i](with apologies to VeggieTales) [/i]-[/b]
You have described a ‘deity’ unable to figure out how to write a book accurately, unable to create anything without thousands of mistakes and random mutations, one who can’t tell people what is correct for two thousand years, and has a great deal to learn from the beings it has created.
I don’t know how stating that such a god seems, oh, a little obtuse and powerless, is calling you personally anything in particular.
Afterall, it is this ‘divine being’ that is having some serious issues, it seems, managing the Universe, not yourself.
However, I must admit a certain inability to see relationship to it and the Triune, All Powerful, All Knowing, Omnipresent God of Christianity.
Yes, God WAS in the wind and thunder and the still small voice – he also was the God who said, “Look Job, I like run everything on the planet and know everything – who are you to question me?” This is not the voice of a God who can’t figure things out and can’t even get a book right.
That is the point.
As for Who Christ Worshiped – of course He worshiped the Triune God – part of which was Himself. I do not believe you ignorant of basic Christian belief so do not go down the primrose path of “Is there a Trinity” – it’s not a good use of time.
I think, dead honest, if we did what Jesus did – which is use the Word of God as it was written (which He did on several occasions failing to tell anyone how flawed it was) IF we remembered His Words “If you love me, You will keep my commandments” – then we’d be a great deal better off.
Either believe God’s Word or dispense with it – but do not minimize God with statements that He hasn’t a clue what He’s doing and needs to take a ‘managing decent writers’ course.
I have teased you DC – but it is not with malicious intent. I want you to comprehend that in the cold light of reality – in the stark logic of the case – that if you look at this ‘deity’ you have described above objectively he’s not much of one at all.
That is something I think worth pondering.
Oh great – sorry for the Ultra Bold – 🙁
Note to self – always preview always preview…
William, I’m not the only person who’s ever been skeptical about designing too much theology from scripture. John Collins, Leo Perdue and Bert Harrill are just a few biblical scholars who would agree with me, although perhaps I’m being a bit glib. I would also note that – although I respect Harding greatly and think he has done a good job of parsing through the literature, you clearly didn’t read the abstract I linked to, which is fairly recent. I would have agreed with you even a month ago that the genetic basis for homosexuality is thin.
The argument is best set forth by James Alison. The basic idea is that there are two traditions in conflict: that of grace and that belief that makes homosexuality a disorder. I notice that nobody has denied that homosexuality is not like envy or gluttony.
I’m not sure if the apostle genius categories are that relevant here. Personally, apostles make mistakes, as you seem to note, and so will we. Why is that an issue? We are all pilgrims. We know better about science – of which I think homosexuality is an issue – we know that the earth was made billions of years ago; it doesn’t make us geniuses. But I seem to take it that you don’t see the connection between science and homosexuality.
Hm – eclipse gives the same argument that Dawkins does for God’s non-existence. I think one of the easiest objections to this view is that he still implicitly models God’s work kind of like an omnipotent, omniscient, human being, who thinks a lot like us. It’s an easy God to reject, but one at the heart of Calvinist thought, alas.
Eclipse [#78], unless I’m missing something, you have to be reading my comments with the following premise in mind: If God DID not create the universe without “mistakes” (or at least to us they look like mistakes), it follows that he was INCAPABLE of doing so. The logical extension of that premise is that whatever God is CAPABLE of doing, he WILL do, as if he had no choice in the matter. That’s a pretty low theology, if you ask me.
I don’t think we can rule out that what we think of as mistakes, God might see as intermediate steps in his creation cuisine, along the lines of breaking eggs to bake a cake.
I’ve about run out of things to say on this subject. It’s been an enjoyable intellectual sparring match; thanks.
(I tried posting this before from Firefox 3.0, but the browser seems to have eaten it. I’m re-doing it from IE7. It’s been 4 days since I rebooted; maybe that has something to do with it.)
[blockquote]The argument is best set forth by James Alison. The basic idea is that there are two traditions in conflict: that of grace and that belief that makes homosexuality a disorder. I notice that nobody has denied that homosexuality is not like envy or gluttony. [/blockquote]
What little I have read by James Alison on this issue I find extremely disappointing. He repeats the same tired old arguments from Boswell, Countryman et al that have long been refuted. Anyone who thinks that there is some kind of conflict between a theology of grace and a theology of disorder has not read Augustine (the Western theologian of grace) very carefully. If no one has denied that homosexuality is like envy or gluttony, there is a reason.
I would actually suggest that Augustine is quite helpful here on the whole “scientific” issue. Augustine’s position is that all actions are driven by desires, and specifically the desire to be happy. We cannot choose what we do not first love. So Augustine would have no problem with talking about same-sex orientation. There could be no same-sex activity without a prior same-sex desire.
But the existence of an attraction or a desire says nothing about whether acting on that desire will bring genuine happiness, and is thus morally permissible. A key theme in Augustinian moral theology is about sorting out proper from improper desires. Not all desires that claim to bring happiness will do so. Indeed, the nature of sin is privation of good–the pursuit of a desire for a wrong reason or apart from a proper end or out of proportion to the true good. Sinful desires are desires for things that promise happiness but lie. They bring misery and damnation rather than happiness and union with God.
That individuals have same-sex attractions, and that these attractions may have some biological component to them says nothing about whether or not such desires are proper and should be acted on or rather whether they are disordered and their fulfillment would be vicious rather than virtuous. Whether a certain sexual desire should be acted on has to do with the teleology of sexuality. What is its purpose? What was God’s intention in creating humanity male and female?
And, of course, the apostolic categories are helpful. If apostles “make mistakes” about such issues where Scripture speaks consistently from Genesis to Revelation, then they are hardly apostles. They would then have no Word from God, but be speaking merely from their own cultural presuppositions. To even suggest such a thing is to reduce apostles to the level of geniuses–and not too clever ones at that.
Wm. Witt [#80] writes: “Whether a certain sexual desire should be acted on has to do with the teleology of sexuality. What is its purpose? What was God’s intention in creating humanity male and female? “
The truth is, we have only a rough, idea of God’s intention — or intentions, plural — in creating humanity male and female.
We can infer some pragmatic possibilities for those intentions from what we observe in humanity (cf. Romans 1.20). But to presume that we know God’s mind on this subject well enough to categorically command gays and lesbians to live in celibacy — that’s awesomely presumptuous. It takes a pretty high anthropology to accept, merely because over the centuries some have imagined that God spoke definitively for all time, that we’re all supposed to order our lives accordingly.
It’s not permissible to say, forget whether it’s true that God spoke definitively; if you want to call yourself a Christian, that’s what you must accept. As David Pailin is quoted by John Polkinghorne as saying, to ignore the question of truth in our beliefs is to worship human wishes instead of Ultimate Reality.
It might be different if there were compelling evidence to support the notion that God has spoken definitively. But there’s not. Such factual evidence as there is, doesn’t rise even to the level of substantial evidence, the kind that would justify a reasonable person’s reaching a conclusion. (See the links I posted here yesterday for a more detailed argument on this point.)
[blockquote] The truth is, we have only a rough, idea of God’s intention — or intentions, plural — in creating humanity male and female.[/blockquote]
Indeed, which is why revelation is so important.
D.C., you seem incapable of understanding the difference between natural and revealed theology, or, as I said earlier, the difference between an apostle and a genius. Your entire argument for the last 80-some posts is that geniuses can’t tell us all that much about God’s intentions. Precisely. No disagreement.
Wm Witt [#83] writes: “… you seem incapable of understanding the difference between natural and revealed theology …”
Permit me a slight edit so that I can agree with you: What I don’t understand is why orthodox Christians think their revealed theology is reliable, while that of Muslims or Mormons or Branch Davidians is not. The usual response is that the reliability of Christian revealed theology is supposedly established by certain historical events. But the historical evidence supporting the orthodox version of those events has grave reliability problems, which I’ve addressed extensively in various postings on my own blog, some of which are linked above.
Those problems are so serious, in my judgment — and yes, ultimately it’s a matter for private judgment by each person, at least if one is going to obey the First Commandment — that in my view, no reasonable person who faced the facts about them would be comfortable reciting those parts of the Nicene Creed that come after the words “of all that is, seen and unseen.” I’m not, and I don’t. I strive to follow Jesus not because he was supposedly raised from the dead — about which I’m agnostic in the strong sense: I don’t think we can ever know, at least not in this life — nor because he was supposedly God Incarnate — of which I’m utterly unpersuaded; if you read Acts, it’s clear his apostles didn’t even regard him as God — but because he was a heroic prophet eminently worthy of emulation.
D.C., why would you want to follow a dead guy? That just doesn’t make sense (but it does explain your inability to understand why those of us who know the living Christ place so much importance in the authority of Scripture).
I really hope you come to know the Guy I know some day. It has made all the difference in the world for me and I am confident it can make all the difference in the world for you. (And please do NOT read smug arrogance or condescension into this comment. Nothing could be further from the truth.)
[blockquote]What I don’t understand is why orthodox Christians think their revealed theology is reliable, while that of Muslims or Mormons or Branch Davidians is not.[/blockquote]
D.C.,
It’s not news that you don’t believe the gospel is true. Have you forgotten what this thread is about? May I remind you of Bishop Robinson’s own words?
[blockquote] did God stop revealing God’s self with the closing of the canon of scripture at the end of the first century, or has God continued to be self-revelatory through history, and right into the present[/blockquote]
Obviously a god who has never revealed himself at all does not stop revealing himself. It is frustrating to attempt to have a logical discussion with someone who repeatedly rejects the very premises of the discussion, and then thinks there is still something to talk about.
I’m happy for you that you are fascinated with Jesus’ summary of the law–assuming (based on your own quaintly Cartesian methodology of doubt) that he ever said those words. We would not have the documents that contain those words if their authors had not been absolutely convinced that the one who spoke them was the Son of the God who had raised from the dead. The words themselves make no sense outside the context of covenental monotheism. The God whom Jesus tells us to love is the God who rescued Israel from slavery, whose coming Kingdom Jesus proclaims, and whom Jesus claims as his Father. The resurrection of Jesus is the presupposition that permeates the entire New Testament, and the God whom Jesus commands us to love is the God whom every NT document tells us raised Jesus from the dead. The neighbor whom Jesus tells us to love is the neighbor for whom Jesus believed his death would provide a “random for many.” Reject the resurrection, the Deity of Christ, and the atonment, and you have rejected the only context in which the NT documents make any sense at all. Accepting anything else in the NT as authoritative after rejecting that is simply arbitrary, and absolutely incoherent–sort of like buying a new car because you like the leather finish on the steering wheel, abandoning the car while keeping the steering wheel, and then continuing to insist that you’re driving a new car because you’re running down the street with a steering wheel in your hands.
I would add that I reject the Muslims, the Mormons, and the Branch Davidians for the exact same reason I reject Robinson’s claim to be the recipient of a new revelation. The content of Christian faith is not a secret. It is a public matter, available in the documents of the New Testament for almost 2,000 years, and summarized in the Creeds. The Muslims, the Mormons, the Branch Davidians, and Bishop Robinson all claim to be recipients of new revelations. In each case, they claim that the entire Christian tradition has completely misunderstood the message of the gospel, and they alone have suddenly become privy to the new true hitherto secret meaning. In each case, the new secret meaning is directly contrary to the easily accessible old public meaning which anyone can read for themselves. And, of course, none of these new secret meanings are ever in agreement with one another. The only thing they have in common is that they are unhappy with some aspect or other of the old easily accessible public plain text meaning of the Scriptures that has been the common faith of the Church for almost two millennia.
Kevin Maney+ [#85], many thanks for the good wishes.
——————–
Wm. Witt [#86] writes: “It’s not news that you don’t believe the gospel is true. “
Objection, non-responsive to my implicit question that you quoted just before that comment.
You seem to assume it to be axiomatic, not requiring discussion, that we should accept the “revealed theology” of the New Testament, while disregarding that of, say, the Qur’an and the Book of Mormon. Sorry, I can’t go along with that assumption.
—————
Wm. Witt writes: “Obviously a god who has never revealed himself at all does not stop revealing himself. “
I feel like Ronald Reagan in his famous debate with Jimmy Carter: em>There you go again. Just because I don’t think God has revealed himself in the way that the orthodox claim, doesn’t meant I think God has never revealed himself at all (cf. Rom. 1.20).
William, I’m even more frustrated than you are. Every time I make an assertion that drills down into your premises, you fabricate a straw-man argument and (mis)attribute it to me, then offer what I’m sure you imagine to be a devastating rejoinder. It’s almost as if you were a politician on camera, “responding” to every question with a facile sound bite. It’s small wonder so many intelligent young people — not all, but a large number — drift away from orthodoxy: it’s because they can’t get a straight answer to their questions.
(When I taught high-school Sunday school, at the beginning of each year I would pass out index cards and ask the students to write down, anonymously, what questions and other topics they’d like to discuss. Invariably, THE most frequently-asked question was, in some form, how do we really know there’s a God. This suggests that they had found previous answers to the question to be unsatisfying.)
Wm. Witt [#87], you still haven’t answered a foundational question: What exactly privileges orthodox Christian revelation over any other? The passage of time isn’t enough, nor is the fact that most Christians have accepted the orthodox claim of privilege: early Christians also believed the earth was flat and that diseases were caused by demons; and if we’re talking a numbers game, Christians have always been outnumbered by adherents of other religions.
I think it comes down to one thing; the resurrection of Christ.
The Christian faith hinges on that one point. The empty tomb and subsequent appearances by the risen Christ to the disciples is what turned their lives from dejected, cowering and hopeless to an army determined evangelists that no threat could silence. And this was the key componant of the apostles first messages-the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The apostle Paul would later write that the Christians faith hinged on the resurrection, more so than on any other point. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, spells this out in no uncertain terms.
This is why the Spongite version of the resurrection is fatally flawed; there is no such thing as a Christianity without the literal, bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead.
[blockquote] What exactly privileges orthodox Christian revelation over any other?[/blockquote]
D.C.,
I’ve been quite clear about what privileges orthodox Christian revelation over any other, or, rather I should say Christian revelation, as anything else is Christian only in name. Read the final paragraph of my #86 above. The Christian claim has to do with certain specifiable historical claims: 1) covenantal monotheism, i.e., that God actually spoke to Moses, delivered Israel from Egypt, and made a covenant with Israel at Sinai; 2) That Jesus of Nazareth claimed that this God who had delivered Israel from slavery was his Father, that the future Kingdom of this God was being anticipated in his preaching and his miracles, that this God was in a unique sense his Father, that his death was not an accident but that he knowingly went to the cross understanding his death to be a “ransom” for sin, and that he predicted that his Father would vindicate his mission after his death; 3) that God did indeed vindicate Jesus’ mission by bodily raising Jesus from the dead, confirming Jesus’ identity as his Son, after which Jesus appeared in bodily form to his disciples, whom he then sent out as authorized witnesses. They were not geniuses, but apostles.
This is what Christianity is about. Anything less than this is not Christianity. If these events happened, then Christianity is true. If they didn’t, then Christianity is false, and Christians are simply deluded. If there was no Moses, if Jesus never lived, or if he never claimed that God was his Father, or if his death was a tragic mistake, or if his bones are rotting in a grave somewhere in Palestine, then Christianity is a fraud, plain and simple.
[blockquote]Just because I don’t think God has revealed himself in the way that the orthodox claim, doesn’t meant I think God has never revealed himself at all (cf. Rom. 1.20).[/blockquote]
This is a fallacy of equivocation. If you do not believe that the three historical events I mentioned above occurred, then you do not believe “that the gospel is true,” and you do not believe in revelation in the biblical sense. That you refer to Rom 1.20 affirms nothing more than that you acknowledge some kind of natural theology, that you’re again confusing the roles of apostles and geniuses. Paul’s entire argument in this passage is that such knowledge of geniuses is inadequate for salvation because human beings “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” It is in this very passage that Paul brings up the very issue about which Gene Robinson is so excited as an example of “exchanging the truth of God for a lie.”
To appeal to Rom. 1.20 as an example of your belief in “revelation,” while rejecting the heart of Paul’s message in Romans that “at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (5:6), that “God raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, was was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (4: 24-25), and “who was declared to be the Son of God in power . . . by his resurrection from the dead” (1:4) is either deliberate disingenuousness or sheer incoherence. Rather than straining at a gnat to swallow a camel, it is to throw out the camel while searching relentlessly for the gnat.
You’re welcome, D.C. (88). Glad you took my comment in the spirit in which it was offered.
I would still like to hear your answer to my question, however: Why would you want to follow a dead guy?
Kevin Maney+ [#98], that’s a fair question. I try to “follow Jesus” for two main reasons:
1) I’m persuaded that the Summary of the Law, which Jesus emphasized, touches on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe, at the heart of the processes by which the creation continues. Specifically, we seem to do our best in life — both individually and as a species, both in passing on our genes to future generations and in serving as created co-creators: (a) when we put God first — more concretely, when we face the facts of the reality that he wrought, and when we rejoice in, or at least acknowledge, the goodness of that reality — and (b) when we seek the best for others as for ourselves.
2) Jesus was faithful, even unto death, to what he believed to be his duty; for whatever reason(s) — growing up in the military, my own military service, whatever — that kind of loyalty is a huge pushbutton for me.
These are the two main reasons why in an earlier posting I called Jesus a heroic prophet, someone eminently worthy of admiration and emulation. Off the top of my head, I can think of several other qualities about him to admire and emulate:
3)Â Jesus was personally kind; I’m going to assume readers can “take judicial notice” of this without my having to cite chapter and verse.
4) He was willing to admit that he didn’t know everything, viz., the day or the hour when the Son of Man would come in the clouds with great power and glory [Mk 13.31-32].
5) He was willing to listen to, and even be persuaded by, other points of view, viz., that of the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was cured even though she was not an Israelite [Mk 7.24-30].
6)Â He was willing to “tell it like it is,” another matter for judicial notice.
7)Â He was personally courageous, being willing to physically confront the moneychangers in the temple, and seemingly not being rattled by the crowds that wanted to kill him.
On reflection, it probably would be fair to characterize what I do as seeking, not to follow Jesus as Jesus, but to conduct my life in accordance with the principles and values that he emphasized and exemplified. Phrasing it another way, I put Jesus in roughly the same hero category as the late Dr. Michael DeBakey, except that Jesus’ impact has been several orders of magnitude greater than that of Dr. DeBakey (and, at least so far, none of Dr. DeBakey’s later followers have taken it upon themselves to persecute and even kill those who disagreed with them). Granted, arguably this view of Jesus is scarcely any different than wanting to “be like Mike” [Michael Jordan]. But I don’t see a major problem with that.
William Witt (# 91) writes:
[blockquote]
This is what Christianity is about. Anything less than this is not Christianity. If these events happened, then Christianity is true. If they didn’t, then Christianity is false, and Christians are simply deluded. If there was no Moses, if Jesus never lived, or if he never claimed that God was his Father, or if his death was a tragic mistake, or if his bones are rotting in a grave somewhere in Palestine, then Christianity is a fraud, plain and simple.
[/blockquote]
I don’t mean to take up D.C.’s case nor what Bp. Robinson said, but rather I want to question the idea that the “validity” of Christianity is tied to the correctness of our understanding of history, and the implication that one who is skeptical about a series of historical statements is not a Christian.
I’m not talking about your particular three statements but the method.
Neither our baptismal liturgy nor our Catechism use historical language this way.
Do you find our Catechism to be an inadequate indoctrination for new members?
If my faith depends on a correct understanding of history or on my subscription to a series of propositional declarations, then it would always be hypothetically possible that, for whatever reason, my ideas would undergo revision, and I would be lost. Does God want my relationship with Him to be that fragile? I hope not.
[i]Lex orandi, lex credendi[/i] is our way.
[blockquote]If my faith depends on a correct understanding of history or on my subscription to a series of propositional declarations, then it would always be hypothetically possible that, for whatever reason, my ideas would undergo revision, and I would be lost.[/blockquote]
stabill,
Unlike Buddhism, say, Christianity is a historical religion. The Christian story is about the God who has acted and spoken in certain concrete historical events. There is a relation between these events and a Christian ontology. As Karl Barth argued, the key to Trinitarian theology is that God is in himself who he has revealed himself to be in the history of revelation.
The creeds do not use the exact language I used, but they do acknowledge the same historical events and ontological realities to which I referred–God’s covenant with Israel (“He has spoken through the prophets”), Jesus’ life, atoning death and resurrection, his identity as the Son of God, etc. How sophisticated a particular individual’s understanding of these realities is will vary, but I do not see any tension between what I affirmed and the content of the creeds.
I wasn’t speculating about the relation between the content of a person’s beliefs and their eventual salvation. I’m quite content to leave that in the hands of God. I was using the word “Christian” in a purely descriptive sense. A “Christian” is someone who affirms the content of Christian faith and engages in Christian practices. Just as a Jew would be someone who affirmed the Shema, believed that Moses was God’s prophet, was circumcised (if male), and kept kosher. Or a Buddhist is someone who believes in reincarnation, the four noble truths, the eight-fold path, and who strives for Enlightenment so as to attain Nirvana.
Someone who does not affirm essential Christian beliefs and practices is not a Christian, just as someone who does not believe in reincarnation, and who practices hedonism would not be a Buddhist. In the particular sense in which I was using the term, there are numerous Episcopal bishops who are not Christians, including, I am convinced, TEC’s Presiding Bishop. D.C., by his own admission above, is not a Christian in any historic sense–he puts Jesus in he category of “hero.” What the eternal destiny of D.C. or the “good Buddhist” might be is not my business to speculate about.
William Witt (# 95),
[blockquote]
Unlike Buddhism, say, Christianity is a historical religion. The Christian story is about the God who has acted and spoken in certain concrete historical events. There is a relation between these events and a Christian ontology. As Karl Barth argued, the key to Trinitarian theology is that God is in himself who he has revealed himself to be in the history of revelation.
[/blockquote]
Yes.
My point was about your use of language.
My reaction was triggered by your suggestion that the “validity” of Christianity is tied to the correctness of our understanding of certain historical statements that you had formulated in the language of rational discourse.
Because human minds and human language are limited in grasping God’s truth, we usually formulate our understanding in language that is both mystical and poetic rather than in the language of rational discourse.
John 1:1-14 is both profoundly historical and profoundly mystical.
It is not cast in the language of rational discourse. One would be hard pressed to explain it under hostile cross-examination in a courtroom.
Regarding Trinitarian theology, see Archbishop Rowan Williams’ explanation of 15 July, a letter to the Islamic community, [i]A Common Word for the Common Good[/i].
[blockquote]My reaction was triggered by your suggestion that the “validity†of Christianity is tied to the correctness of our understanding of certain historical statements that you had formulated in the language of rational discourse.[blockquote]
No. You’re mixing epistemology and ontology. My point is that the validity of Christianity is tied to certain historical events actually having happened, not to a particular individual’s understanding of those events. However, theology is fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. If Christian faith is inherently intelligible–and we believe in a God who speaks (“The Word became flesh”), then it is capable of being communicated in an intelligible manner.
[blockquote]John 1:1-14 is both profoundly historical and profoundly mystical.
It is not cast in the language of rational discourse. One would be hard pressed to explain it under hostile cross-examination in a courtroom.[/blockquote]
John 1:14 is not cast in the language of rational discourse, but it can (and ought to be) capable of being communicated in such–the language of the Council of Chalcedon, for example.
Thank you, D.C. (93), for taking the time to respond to my question. Sorry for the delayed response; yesterday was just nuts. 🙂
As I read your response, I could not help but feel sadness and compassion for you because by your own admission, albeit tangentially, you admit to going at life all by yourself. You apparently do not know or have a relationship with the Living Christ who came to me four years ago, showed me his pierced wrists, took away the crushing guilt of my past sins, and allowed me a glimpse of the peace that passes all understanding. As things turned out, he also used me to get my dad ready for his death a week later and for that I am grateful. Granted this is not a usual experience for most, but it was real and Jesus’ presence in my life continues to be real. Quite simply I could not live without him being present in my daily life.
One of the reasons I need to be part of the Christ’s one holy, catholic, and apostolic church is because I have a trusted guide by which to assess my own experiences, experiences like the one I described above. Are they consistent with the collective experience of faithful souls within the church over time and across culture? Are my beliefs consistent with the consensus (not to be confused with unanimity) that exists in the Church? I need this because I am broken, fallible, and finite, and prone to getting it wrong; my own past experience and my study of history provides me ample evidence of this truth. And so, D.C., I need the Church and its historical teaching/doctrine to help me keep on track so that when I interact with Jesus, I can do so with some modicum of confidence that I am interacting with the same Guy hundreds of millions of others are interacting with and not interacting with some pathological defect in me or with a vivid imagination, etc.
I could go on, but my point is that my prayer for you is that you come to know this living Christ who loves you and wants you to have a relationship with him, now and forever.
Again, please do not interpret my words above as being condescending or smugly self-righteous. I write them because I hope fervently that you too will come to learn what it means to attach yourself to the Author and Source of all life. As I said before, it has made all the difference in the world for me and I know it can for you too. Blessings.
William Witt,
You write at #97:
[blockquote]
No. You’re mixing epistemology and ontology.
[/blockquote]
I hope not.
[blockquote]
My point is that the validity of Christianity is tied to certain historical events actually having happened, not to a particular individual’s understanding of those events.
[/blockquote]
When I said “our understanding”, I meant the understanding of the Church rather than the understanding of any particular individual.
I do agree that Christianity is tied to history.
Perhaps where we differ is that I think it inessential (and perhaps slightly idolatrous) to insist on the details as you did at item 91 — for example in suggesting that if God did not actually speak to Moses as a literal historical fact then Christianity is nonsense. I agree that the New Covenant flows from the Old to which it is inextricably tied. Though I would not claim that God has “spoken” to me in the sense that our tradition tells us God spoke to Moses, I feel God’s presence in many ways, and I don’t see such historical details as necessary for validating the Christian faith.
[blockquote]
However, theology is fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. If Christian faith is inherently intelligible–and we believe in a God who speaks (“The Word became flesh”), then it is capable of being communicated in an intelligible manner.
[/blockquote]
John 1:1-14 is an example of intelligible communication. As we agree, it is not cast in the language of rational discourse. The problem with trying to reformulate it that way is that what it tells us is both beyond our experience (apart from the appearance of Jesus in history) and beyond the limits of full human comprehension.
It is a persistent theme in the New Testament that human ability to comprehend God is severely limited. For example, the ‘eye of a needle’ dictum in the three synoptic gospels is not telling us that a rich man is ultimately lost so much as it is telling us that we don’t understand.
So what really set me on this was your use of “validity” at # 91.
In a way it goes to D.C. Toedt’s question (which I won’t answer directly), slightly re-stated:
[blockquote]
What exactly privileges Christian revelation over any other?
[/blockquote]
I understand the Christian community primarily as a community of faith rather than as a religion.
Yes, we have the Creeds and we have a doctrinal tradition, but we are primarily about relationship: for each of us our relationship with God and our relationship with our neighbors — and absolutely everyone is our neighbor.
What does the Summary of the Law say? What do we ask when we pray the Lord’s Prayer? And what is going on when we gather at the
Lord’s Table?
There it is.
This is what critics like Sam Harris miss.
[blockquote] Perhaps where we differ is that I think it inessential (and perhaps slightly idolatrous) to insist on the details as you did at item 91—for example in suggesting that if God did not actually speak to Moses as a literal historical fact then Christianity is nonsense. I agree that the New Covenant flows from the Old to which it is inextricably tied. Though I would not claim that God has “spoken†to me in the sense that our tradition tells us God spoke to Moses, I feel God’s presence in many ways, and I don’t see such historical details as necessary for validating the Christian faith.[/blockquote]
stabill,
Thank you for your clarification. I now see your point, and I emphatically disagree. The Christian faith is not a “feeling” of God’s presence. It is a covenantal monotheism. As such, it is inextricably tied to history. If God did not actually speak to Moses as a literal historical fact then Christianity is not nonsense. It is just false.
The Bible is primarily a narrative text, and the God of the Bible is identified by a specific concrete historical narrative. If God did not speak to Moses, then there was no covenant, and covenantal monotheism is erroneous.
That does not mean that we are stuck with atheism. As I said above, I would be more impressed with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover or Plotinus’s One than with D.C.’s emergent evolutionist panentheism. But Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is not the Christian God.
The language of John 1:14 is indeed beyond human comprehension, but it is also literally true and can literally be communicated. Thus the language of the Nicene Creed or the Chalcedonian definition, which is either true (if the Word truly became flesh, and is indeed truly God) or false (if Jesus of Nazareth was not truly God, or is only a human being in whom the divine is specially present, or if he–as DC claims–gives us only the summary of the law).
It is a false dichotomy to claim that Christianity is a “community of faith” rather than a religion. The community (koinonia) that Christianity is, is the community that shares in the internal and eternal koinonia of the Triune God precisely because the God who is the Father of Jesus Christ has acted in history through the incarnation, life, death and bodily resurrection of his Son. If that did not happen–if the tomb was not empty, if Jesus did not literally appear in such a manner that he was seen with physical eyes and touched with physical hands, and spoke to ears that literally heard–then Christianity is a fraud, and there is no Christian community, although there may be a community of people who mistakenly call themselves Christians.
So, again, to address D.C.’s question: What priviliges Christian revelation over any other? The God of Christianity is the God and Father of Jesus Christ who raised him from the dead. If that did not happen, then Christian revelation is not only not privileged, but is rather a fraudulent deception.
Wm. Witt [#100] writes: “The language of John 1:14 is indeed beyond human comprehension, but it is also literally true ….”
If the language of John 1.14 is beyond human comprehension, then a fortiori it’s beyond human capacity to assess its truth or falsity.
————-
Wm. Witt also writes: “if the tomb was not empty, if Jesus did not literally appear in such a manner that he was seen with physical eyes and touched with physical hands, and spoke to ears that literally heard–then Christianity is a fraud ….”
WW, you’re the one guilty (yet again) of false-dichotomy thinking. You also seem to be intellectually paralyzed by a fear that the church, by which you evidently set so much store, might not have measured up to some imagined standard of perfection in its early days:
* On the specific question of what happened after the crucifixion, you seem incapable of acknowledging that “we simply don’t know” or “we don’t have sufficient evidence upon which to base a conclusion” are often legitimate answers — and sometimes the only legitimate answers — to a question.
* But suppose we didn’t have to respond “don’t know / insufficient evidence.” Suppose newly-discovered evidence allowed us to conclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, (A) that Jesus’ tomb was empty because, after the Sabbath, the influential Joseph of Arimathea moved the body to a permanent resting place and kept that fact to himself, never telling Jesus’ hoi polloi entourage; (B) a few of the entourage honestly believed they had seen their dead loved one alive, as the grief-stricken are sometimes wont to do; and (C) in the ensuing years and decades, the tales of the empty tomb and of Jesus’ “apparitions” took on a life of their own —in the process being distorted to an unknown extent, as fallible memory and oral transmission are most assuredly wont to do.
Mistake? Almost certainly. But fraud? Extremely unlikely; as has been pointed out innumerable times, people might go to their deaths for beliefs about which they harbor doubts, but seldom will they die for beliefs they know to be out-and-out lies.
* But suppose the church had indeed arisen from fraud: Suppose hypothetically that, for reasons known only to themselves, a handful of Jesus’ followers flat-out lied to the other disciples, and then later to their broader audiences, about having supposedly seen the risen Lord. I don’t believe this is what happened, but if it had, would that mean we should throw out everything Jesus said, everything he stood for, merely because of the later failings of his all-too-human followers? No, of course not.
So, William Witt, please seriously consider that your neat division of the possibilities into either A, Fraud, or B, Absolute Truth, with nothing in between, might not be the only explanation for the extant data ….
[blockquote]If the language of John 1.14 is beyond human comprehension, then a fortiori it’s beyond human capacity to assess its truth or falsity[/blockquote]
Not at all. Much metaphysics is beyond human comprehension, e.g., existence and time. We know that they are, but we cannot comprehend what they are. Any statement about God is going to be beyond human comprehension insofar as it has to do with existence (itself comprehensible), but also God’s existence, which is infinite (so doubly incomprehensible), and necessary (triply incomprehensible), and entirely spiritual (non-physical), while the human mind is finite (not infinite) and oriented toward created (contingent not necessary) physical (not spiritual) realities. Obviously, we do not know what it feels like to be God. A fortiori, we do not know what it feels like to be fully God and fully human. If the incarnation is a fact, we obviously cannot comprehend it.
But that we cannot comprehend it does not mean that we cannot apprehend its reality, and that we cannot assess whether it is true or false. (Although it might be a bit of a task, I would recommend some study of Aquinas on analogous predication to get some kind of handle on how theological language functions.) If in fact, God raised Jesus from the dead, then we have adequate reason to believe that the statement is true. We can imagine models or metaphors that might cast light on it, but we literally cannot comprehend it.
[blockquote]Suppose hypothetically that, for reasons known only to themselves, a handful of Jesus’ followers flat-out lied to the other disciples, and then later to their broader audiences, about having supposedly seen the risen Lord. I don’t believe this is what happened, but if it had, would that mean we should throw out everything Jesus said, everything he stood for, merely because of the later failings of his all-too-human followers? No, of course not.[/blockquote]
Of course, if Christianity is based on a fraud, we would still have grounds for admiring much of what Jesus said. As we would have reason to admire much of what the Buddha said, or much of what Socrates said. However, if Guatama was wrong about reincarnation, Nirvana, and Enlightenment, then Buddhism is patently a false religion, even if its founder said some profound things. If Plato was wrong about exemplarism and participation, then Platonism is a faulty philosophy, regardless of how many wise things Socrates may have said.
The Christian gospels are narratives. That is their literary structure. At the heart of those narratives is the story that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. Moreover, these narratives are not “likely stories,” but are claimed to be historical events. That is what the stories are about. Inability to recognize this seems to indicate an inability to understand the genres of texts.
But, yes. If God did not raise Jesus from the dead, and his bones (if anything is still left of them), are rotting somewhere in Palestine, we could still find some admirable things to say about Jesus of Nazareth. Rather too bad he was mistaken about his whole mission, and the God he believed in really did abandon him on the cross, but you can’t have everything after all.
William Witt (#100),
First, a bit of repair. You write:
[blockquote]
The Christian faith is not a “feeling†of God’s presence.
[/blockquote]
I did not say that. Please re-read.
What is the provenance of the term “covenantal monotheism”? (It does not Google very well for me.) Are there covenantal monotheisms other than Christianity and Judaism?
And you said:
[blockquote]
The language of John 1:14 is indeed beyond human comprehension …
[/blockquote]
What I said was that it is beyond [i]full[/i] human comprehension and not subject to formulation in the language of rational discourse. (The Nicene Creed is formulated in language closer to the language of rational discourse. But for example, do we really mean to suggest that God has a right hand and a left hand? Oh? The right hand of the Father is a place of honor? Hmm… Is [i]honor[/i] a concept in the Kingdom of Heaven?)
I pretty much agree with what D.C Toedt said at #101.
You say
[blockquote]
The God of Christianity is the God and Father of Jesus Christ who raised him from the dead.
[/blockquote]
This is certainly a statement that I embrace and upon which I would hasten to elaborate. But I do want to point out that in this statement the word [i]raised[/i] has a meaning that is beyond human experience.
Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical entited [i]Fides et Ratio[/i] (Faith and Reason) which among other things brought the Roman Church for the first time beyond its miserable historical mistake in dealing with Galileo. It holds that there cannot be contradictions between what is held true in the Church and what is found to be true in science. (Of course, Hooker’s understanding of reason in relation to Scripture had pretty much taken care of this for mainstream Anglicanism three centuries earlier.)
My problem with your long list of litmus test propositions is that it builds a house of cards that is possibly susceptible to hypothetical collapse as knowledge advances.
William,
Although I am a reexaminer, I don’t have much problem with believing the history. Not only that, I will assent to church teaching on the person of Jesus Christ. In fact, I even think you are right about the narrative of the church being crucial for identifying oneself as Christian.
I do admit deep disappointment that you’ve merely made a casual reading of James Alison. I suggest going a bit deeper. I think that you might want to read the most credible view on gay inclusion in the church. Now – Alison does not consider himself a liberal: he considers himself orthodox. One of his arguments is that it is a very modernist reading of scripture – and not a Catholic one – that sees homosexuality in a single light.
As far as apostles and geniuses, I think I see your point. But I have a different understanding about how people actually believe. It is not the idea [as a genius] that made the apostles witness credible, but their experience and authority. I desire not their “genius” but their experience of the living God. God is absolute: he can give one person words for their experience, and a different person another. And I suspect that when gay people read scripture, they experience the living God, but hear differently than you do.
And yet, they see themselves in the same narrative that you see yourself in.
Also – William, putting Alison in the same camp as Countryman and Boswell is intellectually sloppy. I cannot recall a single essay where Alison refers to them. Ratzinger? Thomas? Girard? Schwager? Kerr? Those are Alison’s sources.
Professor – if you want to argue against reappraisers, get to know their best argument. I admit, I’m a little disappointed. I’m no professor, and I don’t have a Ph.D, but I would have thought you might check out Alison and recognize a more complicated view. In fact, I wish more gay people in the church would read Alison. Perhaps they would relax a bit themselves and be less resentful of the church.
[blockquote]What is the provenance of the term “covenantal monotheism� (It does not Google very well for me.) Are there covenantal monotheisms other than Christianity and Judaism?[/blockquote]
Covenental monotheism is a term used by N.T. Wright in his book The New Testament and the People of God to distinguish between the god of Scripture and other gods. He intentionally uses lower case to make clear that this is a matter of identity. Christians do not believe in a generic “monotheism,” but in the specific god whose identity is established by a concrete history with Israel–in contrast to other gods, e.g., Zeus, who were available at the time. The Christian claim is that the god who made a covenant with Israel and raised Jesus from the dead is indeed the only God. No, there are no other religions besides Judaism and Christianity that are covenantal monotheisms (unless one includes Islam, but that might be a stretch).
[blockquote] What I said was that it is beyond full human comprehension and not subject to formulation in the language of rational discourse. (The Nicene Creed is formulated in language closer to the language of rational discourse. But for example, do we really mean to suggest that God has a right hand and a left hand? Oh? The right hand of the Father is a place of honor? Hmm… Is honor a concept in the Kingdom of Heaven?)[/blockquote]
I’m not really sure what to make of this paragraph. As does Scripture (and all human discourse, including theological discourse), the Nicene Creed includes some language that is literal, and some language that is metaphorical. Metaphorical language has as its primary referent, physical realities. It is virtually necessary when speaking of spiritual realities, since we have no direct contact with the non-physical. The Nicene Creed does indeed contain such language as “He came down from heaven,” “God’s right hand,” All of the bishops gathered at Nicea would have recognized this language as non-literal. Heaven is not a place “up in the sky.” God has no hands. But the metaphorical language does have a literal referent. Without a literal referent, metaphorical language would not communicate at all. If I compare Fred’s courage to that of a lion, people will know what I mean. If I compare Fred’s courage to the color blue, people would just be baffled. Edwyn Bevan’s book Symbolism and Belief has a wonderful chapter on the significance of the symbol “Height,” contrasting religions of transcendence (Judaism and Christianiy) with religions of “immanence.”
The creed also includes literal language, specifically the language of homoousios, “one substance.” This language is indeed incomprehensible. It is nonetheless literally true, and the language of rational discourse. I would refer you to Bernard Lonergan’s The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, one of the best short discussions of the development of the kind of technical critical realism of the language of the Christological controversies, and how such language differs from the metaphorical common sense realism of the “right hand of God.” Of course, Aquinas’s discussion of the difference between metaphorical and analogical language about God is also helpful.
[blockquote]It holds that there cannot be contradictions between what is held true in the Church and what is found to be true in science. (Of course, Hooker’s understanding of reason in relation to Scripture had pretty much taken care of this for mainstream Anglicanism three centuries earlier.)[/blockquote]
Indeed. But Scripture is not a science text book, and should not be construed as trying to anticipate modern astronomy, physics, or evolutionary theory. But Scripture does indeed say things that have clear implications for science, and the Christian critical realism that developed out of the Christological controversies seems itself to have been a necessary historical prerequisite to the development of Science (just as the Trinitarian controversies were a necessary historical prerequisite to the modern understanding of persons). I refer you to the work of T.F. Torrance, Stanley Jaki, and Alister McGrath’s latest “Scientific Theology” project.
But just as Scripture led to modern scientific methodology, so Scripture led to modern historiography and philosophy of history insofar as the biblical understanding of history as linear and teleological (in contrast to the cyclical views of time in Platonism or Stoicism or Hinduism) arose out of covenantal monotheism. Karl Lowith’s The Meaning of History is helpful here. Such a notion of history is indeed tied to the notion that God has revealed himself in certain concrete historical events. A historical revelation is indeed “possibly susceptible to hypothetical collapse as knowledge advances.” Antony Flew’s famous [url=http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/flew_falsification.html]”Parable of the Invisible Gardener”[/url] addresses the question of beliefs that are not in any way falisfiable, and concludes that an “invisible gardener” does not in any way differ from an “imaginary gardener” or “no gardener at all.” The Christian God is not an “invisible gardener.” Insofar as God has revealed himself in history, the Christian claim is indeed falsifiable, at least in principle. Bluntly, if someone could produce the bones of Jesus, Christianity would be discredited. I suspect that one of the motivations of liberal Protestantism to hold loosely to the historical and metaphysical dimensions of Christian faith is precisely this fear of possible falsification. Such a fear arguably points to a certain lack of intellectual confidence.
[blockquote] I do admit deep disappointment that you’ve merely made a casual reading of James Alison.[/blockquote]
John Wilkins, we have had this discussion many times before. There has for the last twenty years been a consensus among biblical scholars about what Scripture actually teaches about same-sex activity. The kinds of readings offered by people like Allison are simply not credible. That there has been no rush of scholars to embrace Allison’s reading speaks volumes in itself.
Contrast, for example, the controversy over the “New Perspective” on Paul that has been led by scholars like Ed Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright. There are many who are not happy with the “New Perspective,” and it has been challenged. I am not yet committed one way or the other. Nonetheless, Sanders et al have been able to make their case by careful exegesis that needs to be taken seriously.
There has been no comparable reappraisal of what the Scriptures say about same-sex activity. Revisionist readings continue to appear from time to time. (The original was James Boswell. Besides Allison, I would include Eugene Rogers.) The new readings inevitably contradict one another. They inevitably lead nowhere. Unlike the new perspective on Paul, there is no credible new alternative consensus. And there is still the magisterial work of Robert Gagnon, which has yet to be addressed seriously, let alone refuted by those who advocate the “”new thing.”
Few are probably still reading this thread, and I need to spend my time on other things. I note that after over 100 posts, no one has yet addressed the cruciality of Kierkegaard’s distinction between an apostle and a genius. Rather, the responses continue to blur the distinction that Kierkegaard regards as essential. The book is not expensive. I suggest reading it.
Actually, I would read Kierkegaard’s essay.
However, I think you might be confusing James Alison with another James Alison.
I don’t think you have read anything by James Alison I’m writing about – given that your comment seems to be “it’s probably nothing new. And nobody else is reading it anyway.” You also put a James Alison in the category of biblical scholar: He’s a theologian first, but grew up as an evangelical, so his knowledge of scripture is thorough. If you would have even read a little bit by him, you would have found that he doesn’t fit the categories you insist upon. I can’t make you read him, but I’m disappointed that you won’t even try to understand the most recent reappraising position. He doesn’t say that “homosexual actgs” are or aren’t sinful. He does talk about original sin, and what a Catholic Reading of Scripture looks like.
llet me tell you that lots of liberals don’t like him because he doesn’t use the word “justice.” He challenges gay people as well in their relationship to church. How would you know that?
I do think that conservatives are actually frightened of James Alison. He’s not anti-Catholic church, has none of the resentment or anger that lots of gay people have toward the Catholic Church.
Alsion’s fundamental theology can be addressed as follows: “we have only one way into an understanding of what sin, including original sin, might be, and that is starting from the resurrection…. The forgiveness of sins, which became part of both the preaching and the power that flowed from the resurrection and is its central meaning, is what enables us to approach the question of sin.”
And introduction:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s1222837.htm
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng32.html
James alison talks about Paul as an “apostle” here
http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng26.html
but please don’t put him in the category of Boswell or Countryman.
P.S., John Wilkins:
You summarize Alison’s argument as follows:
[blockquote]We see a conflict within two traditions: that of grace, and that of sexual disorder. You do not see a conflict. I think there are many ways to handle it (as James Alison, the gay catholic theologian demonstrates).[/blockquote]
This is precisely what I mean when I say that Alison is in the same camp as Countryman. Countryman’s and Marcus Borg’s entire methodology depends on claiming an imaginary conflict in Scripture between a “purity ethic” and a “love ethic.” Such an imagined conflict has been decisively refuted in Marcus Bockmuehl’s “‘Keeping It Holy’: Old Testament Commandment and New Testament Faith,” in I Am The Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments, ed. Braaten and Seitz. Alison’s methodological conflict is logically identical to Countryman’s.
Such an imaginary conflict points to a real acknowledgment among exegetes that they have lost the argument. Scripture really does condemn same-sex activity. So a shift has been made to distinguish between those parts of Scripture that confirm our values and beliefs, and those that challenge them. If a conflict can be imagined, then one can appeal to one part of Scripture over against another, and then claim (falsely) that one still upholds biblical authority.
Such a hermeneutic turns Scripture into a rubber nose. We do not place ourselves under its authority, but dictate the terms under which we choose to submit. Theologically, this approach violates the principle of canonicity–that the Scripture is a unified whole that speaks with one essential voice. In arts. 7 & 20, the 39 Articles rightly forbid any interpretation of Scripture that would set one part against another.
Alison may well appeal to Rahner and Girard. Neither are biblical exegetes, but are rather a systematician and something like a sociologist. (One of the sad things about Rahner’s heritage is the way that a theological who thought himself to be defending the tradition has been hijacked by those who subvert it.) There is nothing new whatsoever in Alison’s exegesis. He suggests in [url=http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng15.html] his discussion of Romans 1[/url] that Paul is referring to temple prostitution. This argument has long been refuted. Paul’s argument in Rom. 1 rather echoes both Gen. 1 & 2 as well as the order of the Ten Commandments. Paul is not condemning same-sex activity because it is associated with temple prostitution. He is condemning it because it violates the created order of Gen. 1 & 2.
Alison does make an insightful exegetical point when he notes that Rom. 1 & 2 must be read together, that the structure of Paul’s argument is to show that all stand guilty of violating the divine law–not just those who do the kinds of things described in Rom. 1. But this is a standard exegetical point. That Alison makes so much of it suggests that his audience knows little about Paul’s letter to the Romans. Certainly anyone who was familiar with Luther or Calvin would yawn at such a revelation.
But then Alison undermines his argument by trivializing the kind of activity referred to in verse 1 by comparing it to extreme sports like rock climbing or hang-gliding. The activities that Paul describes in Rom. 1 are not “extreme sports.” They are activities like murder, coveteousness, disobedience to parents. And Paul includes sexual sins like same-sex activity, as well as “fornication” in this list.
Alison argues that Paul is suggesting that we should not judge these activities anymore than we judge someone who engages in hang-gliding. But this is entirely to misread Paul’s argument. Paul’s argument is not that the kinds of activities engaged in by Gentiles are unusual, and therefore should not be judged or condemned, but that they are outrageously immoral, and are rightly recognized and condemned as such. The catch, however, is that insofar as Paul’s readers (who rightly agree with this condemnation) engage in immoral practices themselves, they stand self-condemned, and are equally guilty under God’s judgment. Paul then moves from this mutual condemnation–everyone is guilty–to the heart of his message: God has born our judgment in Christ.
Paul never concludes from the universal prevalence of divine sin and judgment that the church should relax its views on sinful behavior, nor that it should not exercise church discipline or judgment on those Christians who continue in sin. He repudiates such an understanding vehemently in Rom. 6: 1 ff. In the case of the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is painfully clear about how he believes the church should deal with such behavior. He says that he has already “pronounced judgment.”
There simply is no inconsistency between a theology of judgment and a theology of grace in Paul. The latter presumes the former. Alison is simply wrong when he says that “Romans 1 has quite simply nothing at all to do with what we call homosexuality.” In making such a statement he is being theologically irresponsible. The consensus of biblical scholarship for the last twenty years contradicts him.
[blockquote]I don’t think you have read anything by James Alison I’m writing about [/blockquote]
I know well who James Alison is. I own his book on The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes.
William Witt (#106),
We don’t have exactly the same understanding of what is meant by “the language of rational discourse” — my meaning for it is stricter than yours. (Oh well.)
You say:
[blockquote]
The Christian claim is that the god who made a covenant with Israel and raised Jesus from the dead is indeed the only God.
[/blockquote]
Why not first say, following Tillich, that God is the ground of all being and then formulate the Christian claim?
[blockquote]Why not first say, following Tillich, that God is the ground of all being and then formulate the Christian claim? [/blockquote]
Tillich’s ground of all being is the god of a genius. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is the God of the apostles. Tillich’s god can neither act nor speak. This god cannot forgive because this god is not a person. The God who raised Jesus from the dead not only can, but does.
The basic question here is whether we adopt the church’s historic way of pursuing theology as faith seeking understanding (fides bquaerens intellectum), or rather with Tillich we begin with our own understanding, and then omit whatever we cannot believe. Tillich’s approach is procrustean in that it forces the content of Christian faith to fit a preconceived ideological structure.
But then why start with Tillich? Why not Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover or Plotinus’s One or DC’s emerging deity? Most alternatives to Christian faith in contemporary culture are variations on what Robert Bellah identified in [url=http://www.robertbellah.com/lectures_5.htm]Habits of the Heart[/url] as “Sheilaism,” a private religion that we invent for ourselves. Why not be Sheilaists? I, at least, find Sheilaism to be depressing. It is a subjectivist worship of the self. Why bother?
Wm. Witt [#111] writes: “The God who raised Jesus from the dead not only can [act, speak, forgive], but does. ”
William, your recent comments have been helpful, in that they have nicely summarized two crucial assertions made by reasserters:
[A1] That God (for example) killed the Egyptian first-born; parted the Red Sea; etc., etc.; and, ultimately, raised Jesus from the dead; and
[A2] that (a) the evidence for A1 is supposedly so powerful, and (b) the internal- and external evidence raising doubts about A1 is supposedly so insubstantial, that (c) we are all but compelled to make two very big bets: not merely (c1) regulating our own lives as though A1 were true, but also (c2) disqualifying from fellowship those who decline to make the c1 bet.
Sub-assertion A2(c2) is where reasserters part company with many reappraisers, and for that matter with the majority of humanity throughout history.
Sub-assertions A2(a) and (b) have long puzzled me. It’s difficult for me to conceive how anyone knowledgeable about the vicissitudes of fallible memory and of oral transmission can possibly argue those assertions as vociferously as do reasserters.
William – Alison’s view point is not so much about purity (I see little of it in his book that you mention) than about atonement and sin.
I admit “placing us under authority” of scripture seems a bit self-serving to me. It sounds to me that you want me to be under your authority, and not scripture’s, for I read it differently than you do. I don’t think you understand his theory of the atonement.
I’m not sure how we would definitively say that his view has been “refuted.” Gagnon tries, but I don’t think he is successful. Scripture, for example, confirms that the sun revolves around the earth. Not sure why I should submit myself to that.
I admit, we think differently if you easily submit that homosexual partnerships are like murder.
But where Alison remains strong is how it is forgiveness where we start. Not condemnation. That is – if the resurrection has any real power in our lives now.
[blockquote]Sub-assertions A2(a) and (b) have long puzzled me. It’s difficult for me to conceive how anyone knowledgeable about the vicissitudes of fallible memory and of oral transmission can possibly argue those assertions as vociferously as do reasserters.[/blockquote]
D.C.,
We’ve had this discussion before. Look [url=http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/11295]here[/url]. I would refer you again to the helpful discussions in Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and Craig Evans Fabricating Jesus. You dismissed these texts out of hand by claiming that all such discussions were biased, and you exercise your own bias above by dismissing the gospels as “vicissitudes of fallible memory and of oral transmission.” Such skepticism is unjustified and would invalidate not only the gospels but all history.
I would say that your A2 is misstated. It is not that the evidence is so overwhelming that only one choice is possible. Critical biblical scholarship since the beginning of the twentieth century has shown however that the resurrection provides the context in which the entire NT is written. I constantly refer people to E. C. Hoskyns The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), which put back liberal NT scholarship for a generation in England. Hoskyns showed in this book that the results of historical-critical method can get us only so far in recovering the historical Jesus. Objective application of the method never gets us back to a Jesus who is not the Son of God, and who is not risen from the dead. This is the consistent presupposition behind the entire NT, and behind all of their sources (to the extent we can recover them).
I would say then that the evidence is so overwhelming that only two choices are possible. One is then forced to make a decision about the evidence. If Jesus is not the Son of God and did not rise from the dead, then the texts simply cannot be trusted because from beginning to end this is the controlling assumption under which the texts were written, and the texts are biased propaganda pieces. The other possibility is that Jesus is indeed the Son of God and did indeed rise from the dead, in which case the presuppositions that control the writings of the texts are the correct ones. But there is no neutral choice between the two positions, and historical scholarship alone cannot enable one to make the decision.
Your assumption about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony should preclude making any decision about the texts whatseover. If Jesus really were the Son of God and really did rise from the dead, and really did appear to his disciples, eyewitness testimony is so unreliable that they would be bound to get it wrong. If Jesus were not the Son of God and did not rise from the dead, eyewitness testimony is so unreliable that they would be bound to get it wrong. So regardless of what really happened, we are left with skepticism because eyewitnesses cannot be trusted.
This would certainly make things convenient, I suppose, for one who had determined ahead of time what stance he wanted to take, but it hardly strikes me as the rational objective stance that you seem to think it is. You have clearly made your own decision in evaluating the evidence. Jesus is not the Son of God, and did not rise from the dead. Yet based on your own skepticism about eyewitness testimony, there would be no way to know whether this were true or false, one way or the other.
John Wilkins,
From Robert Gagnon on Alison:
Back to you:
[blockquote]I admit, we think differently if you easily submit that homosexual partnerships are like murder.[/blockquote]
That would not be me but St. Paul, in Rom. 1. I think your comment here shows a modern bias in that modern people tend to view sin and vice as only having to do with exploitation or violence against others. Paul is linking same-sex activity (of any kind, not just exploitative relationships, male prostitution, but also partnerships) with other vices, of which sexual vices are included, not only homosexuality, but also simple fornication–a sin that most modern Western adults have committed at least once.
Different cultures at different times seem to have sensitivities to some kinds of vices, and blindness to others. Ancients and Medievals seems to be especially sensitive to such virtues as honor and courage, while despising cowardice. At the same time, they seem rather indifferent to cruelty, as evidenced by the wide use of judicial torture. Ancient pagans seemed indifferent to sexual vice (as evidenced by Paul’s discussion in Rom. 1), while Jews and Christians took it very seriously.
In the modern world, we have taken somewhat the opposite stance. We are extremely sensitive to cruelty and intolerance, while excusing and tolerating sexual vices–thus the high rates of divorce and remarriage, abortion, promiscuity, etc. Homosexuality is simply one item in this package.
[blockquote]But where Alison remains strong is how it is forgiveness where we start. Not condemnation. That is – if the resurrection has any real power in our lives now.[/blockquote]
Of course. This is why the gospel is good news. But forgiveness presumes that there is something that needs to be forgiven of. Same-sex activity is not less forgivable than other sins, but it is a sin. As, of course, are the other sins Paul mentions in both Romans 1 and Romans 2. And, of course, we are all guilty of committing some of them–which is why Paul offers the good news of God’s salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as our only solution.
Wm. Witt [#114], there you go again with the false-dichotomy thinking.
• I assert, not that the scriptural writings are per se entirely untrustworthy (as you claim), but only that they’re not sufficiently trustworthy for the specific use for which they’re being offered by reasserters. That use, of course, is to provide a justification for excluding, from full fellowship in the church, those who decline to recast their entire lives around every word of Scripture — or at least the subset of those words that “the church,” according to reasserters, holds to be binding on Christians.
• You read my assertion above as a claim that the scriptures are therefore entirely untrustworthy. Your logic simply doesn’t follow. Your own view appears to boil down to something like the opposite of my assertion: you seem to say that, because Scripture is not entirely untrustworthy, necessarily it is entirely trustworthy, even for such a grave decision as discerning who is or is not a “proper” Christian. Evidently you’re unable to recognize the possible middle ground that all but cries out from the evidence, that Scripture might be sufficiently trustworthy for some purposes, but not for others of potentially-greater consequence.
No, D.C., you are misreading me. I am not saying that you are saying that the scriptural writings are per se entirely untrustworthy. I am saying that the doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection are so pervasive and central to the message of Scripture and so color its witness that if these events did not happen, that the Scriptures themselves cannot be taken as reliable historical witnesses. There is no middle ground on this question. You may claim that you are capable of discerning those elements of Scripture that are historically reliable once you have denied the divinity of Christ and the resurrection, but your reconstruction will be entirely subjective, and no better than the hundreds of other conflicting historical reconstructions that have been offered time and time again.
You have repeatedly appealed to the misleading nature of eyewitness testimony. Is all eyewitness testimony unreliable or only eyewitness testimony to the resurrection of Jesus? If Jesus really had risen from the dead, would eyewitness testimony to his appearances be in principle untrustworthy? Is all eyewitness testimony unreliable or only eyewitness testimony that is not subject to cross examination by modern lawyers? If only the latter, then we are reduced to utter skepticism about historical events, for we are incapable of cross examining the dead.
William [#117], you write: “I am saying that the doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection are so pervasive and central to the message of Scripture and so color its witness that if these events did not happen, that the Scriptures themselves cannot be taken as reliable historical witnesses.“ [Emphasis added.]
OK, that’s your reasoning. I don’t share it — I think it’s profoundly illogical — and I would guess most reappraisers would feel the same way.
———
William writes: “If Jesus really had risen from the dead, would eyewitness testimony to his appearances be in principle untrustworthy?”
Yes, until we can positively establish that the eyewitnesses were in a position to observe, remember, and recount accurately — for example:
• that they really were present at the time, and in a position to see what they claim they saw;
• that they had their glasses on, if necessary (recall the cross-examination scene in My Cousin Vinny);
• that they actually saw what they say they saw, and didn’t merely hear about it from someone else;
• that they hadn’t been drinking or taking medications or other drugs;
• that they’re certain it was Jesus they saw, not a gardener or a fellow traveler on the road to Emmaus;
etc., etc.
This kind of “laying of foundation” is important in both scientific and courtroom work, mainly so as to rule out alternative explanations of the data (misperception, mistake, fraud, etc.) It’s especially important in this situation because, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and the essentially-universal experience of humanity is that, when people really are dead, they stay that way. If someone claims to have seen a genuinely-dead man walking around alive, then before making life-altering bets based on the claim, we would want to know a lot about the circumstances, for the reasons discussed above. That’s just good science and good law — and when it comes to ferreting out the truth of what God has wrought in the universe, this basic approach of science and law has been demonstrably more reliable, by many orders of magnitude, than any religion.
—————-
William writes: “Is all eyewitness testimony unreliable or only eyewitness testimony that is not subject to cross examination by modern lawyers? If only the latter, then we are reduced to utter skepticism about historical events, for we are incapable of cross examining the dead.”
That’s a totality-of-the-circumstances question. As a general rule, the degree of unreliability is directly correlated with how big a bet we propose to make.
• Consider one possibility: Suppose you were to tell me that Peter, Paul, and others thought they had seen Jesus, but you did not ask me to make any significant life decisions on that basis. I would be perfectly comfortable responding along the lines of, hmm, interesting, it’s probably true that Peter and Paul thought this; what a pity we’ll never really know whether they were right. Your claim would not be an extraordinary one: leaving aside all the Elvis sightings, it’s well-established that grief can cause people to “see” dead loved ones. (My mother has “seen” her dead relatives; my grandmother “saw” my dead cousin; a captured WW II pilot’s mother “saw” him flying overhead waving goodbye after he had been executed by the Japanese.)
• What you’re actually telling me, though, is that Peter, Paul, etc., really did see Jesus alive after he was stone-cold dead for 36 hours, and you tell me that this calls for every human being on the planet to radically reorient his or her life. I’m sure you would agree this is truly an extraordinary claim, and that it’s a very significant bet you’re asking people to make on it.
As I do the totality-of-the-circumstances assessment — based in large part on a good deal of professional experience dealing directly with witnesses and documents — my conclusion is that the evidence doesn’t sufficiently favor the reliability of this eyewitness testimony — not by a long shot — to support making such a significant bet on the basis of this (truly-extraordinary) claim.
I’m forced to conclude that those who do make this bet are indulging themselves in fantasies. They’re not unlike gamblers who, convincing themselves of their supposedly-superior skill, play blackjack in casinos. In each case, the practice can be harmless or even tangentially beneficial (getting out and socializing with one’s fellow players might be better than always sitting at home alone). But in each case, the practice can also do considerable damage.
D.C.,
There’s nothing new here. You’ve sung this tune many times. What I see in your constant refrain is an a priori prejudice that refuses to take the witness of the text seriously. Your insistence that you can separate out the non-miraculous parts of the text and re-construct a coherent narrative is itself a fantasy. As I said earlier, careful biblical scholarship on all sides (liberal and conservative) has recognized for a hundred years that the resurrection is the presupposition that lies behind the entire text. Take that out and the coherence of the historical narrative simply collapses. So, yes, you can reject the resurrection. What you cannot do coherently is to provide any alternative narrative that is not arbitrary projection.
William,
Thank you for pointing the essay out to me. It’s intriguing [and I’ll give Gagnon the benefit of the doubt], although I do think it misses Alison’s main point, which is that a good Catholic doesn’t need to interpret the passage like so, especially in light of Paul’s point at Romans 2:1. I wonder why Gagnon doesn’t address Alison’s theory of atonement. In other essays, Alison is aware about traditional church teaching. Alison switches the debate to one on Ecclesiology, which is the more interesting discussion.
Gagnon is a thinker that tries to find the original meaning of scripture, like a good protestant. Catholic teaching begins with someplace else. Theologically, I think Alison’s point is still pretty strong: that the forgiveness that has begun through time in the historical fact of the resurrection, moves us from secred to knowing the joy in God as persons. For gay people, it means occupying the place of shame and learning to live with that, and recognizing the cross as being where gay people have lived for most of human history.
You do raise a valid point – however – about the apostle Paul. When I read scripture, the myriad of complex emotions involved in sexuality arise – envy, rivalry, competition, etc. It’s hard for me to separate genital activity from these sorts of activities. And of course, murder often arises from such emotions. I think, contra Gagnon, that Paul would not have assumed that a mature homosexual relationship would bring fruits of the spirit. The reappraising view is that in some contexts – as in straight contexts – marriage brings fruits of the spirit. And that Paul undermines his own view – that Paul is himself culturally bound, but he gave us, as fellow apostles, the foundation of understanding that the wrath of God we fear, is really our own wrath. Gay people have every right to fear your wrath, professor Witt, and reasserters. They have no reason to fear God.
Gagnon is a good biblical scholar, but he is not a particularly good theologian. My earlier point about the rarity of doing theology and scripture together, is not because I don’t think the attempt is worthwhile, but that in the end it seems that people have to choose: I know few who do both very well (why is it, for example, that the OT God changes his mind when God doesn’t change?). Bultmann? Marxen? Ogden? In the end, there seems to be the need to enter into a language game that is hard to examine from the outside. Only with an experience of Christ, does the language game begin to make sense.
And then Schleiermacher comes back to haunt us.
William –
what’s also funny is that I actually will take the resurrection at face value. And it is precisely because of the resurrection that gay people need not fear the closet, and can occupy the place of shame, as Jesus did, knowing that it is other human beings – and not God – that is afraid of gay people.
Gawain