This is an issue on which you shouldn't "settle"

Someone on Facebook linked to this article and set off a firestorm of controversy, which firestorm chiefly arose because I disagreed with the article. With one exception on the thread, the others who commented seemed to agree with the article.  I have to admit that I found that shocking. So, having already produced so many pixels on the subject, I decided to make it the subject of a public post. Note: I'll be using the initial p. on this thread for the word p--n because, since this is a public blog, I don't want the post to attract nasty spam bots or other undesirables doing google searches on that word.

The article is by Mark Regnerus, and for the record, yes, I do know who Mark Regnerus is. And yes, I am indeed sympathetic and grateful to him for the abuse he has taken from the gay mafia for a study in which he questioned the wonderfulness of homosexual parenting, which is an entirely different topic from the topic of this article of his or of my present post. So, no, I don't think that his background or any gratitude we conservatives feel toward him for what he has suffered is relevant to whether or not I should critique this article. I'd like to think that Regnerus, being an academic and presumably committed to vigorous, rigorous, non-personal debate, would agree with me that I shouldn't pull any punches because "he's one of us" or "the bad guys hate him" or anything of that kind, which is really just a reverse variant on the ad hominem fallacy--because of who this person is, you shouldn't criticize what he wrote. You will gather from that prelude that such an argument has been made to me already.

Regnerus's piece is oddly unclear. Time and again one wonders what, exactly, he is getting at, and that makes it difficult to pin down and reply to. But I begin with the disturbingly tepid language that he repeatedly uses to describe p.

Explanations provide only modest comfort to the many women, (and not a few men) who wrestle over the meaning of their spouse or beau’s pastime.

"Pastime"?

They feel hurt, if not cheated on.

No kidding. Wonder why.

Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, women have the right to be annoyed or upset by porn. It’s not a good thing. It’s spiritually draining.

As a ringing condemnation, that leaves a lot to be desired. "Women have a right to be annoyed or upset." Wow! Thanks very much for that permission to be "annoyed or upset." And it's not a good thing! Wow! Talk about an understatement. "Spiritually draining" is a little better, but still pretty weak. And if you think you hear a "but" coming up after that rather lame negative assessment, you're right, and I'll get back to the "but" in a moment. But first, some more examples of Regnerus's ways of describing p.

A crestfallen young woman discovered her boyfriend “struggled” with pornography. I’m never quite sure what “struggling” actually means, since it can be code for anything from shame at taking pleasure in women’s naked beauty all the way up to addiction to hardcore pornography. (There’s a difference.)

"Taking pleasure in women's naked beauty" is so sanitized and artsy a locution that it really gives the impression, perhaps unintentionally, that the man in question shouldn't feel shame! Such a phrase could describe an entirely platonic and appreciative viewing of a nude as painted by a great master. In fact, such a phrase could describe a heterosexual woman's entirely platonic appreciation of a great painting of another woman. The word "pleasure" is a nicely euphemistic way of referring to sexual arousal and lust, and frankly, no Christian should be describing p use of any kind with such a phrase.

There's more to say about that previous couple of sentences. Aside from the fact that the phrase "taking pleasure in women's naked beauty" sounds like it's downplaying the seriousness of the issue involved, what exactly does Regnerus mean by it, anyway? Since he obviously thinks it's not so bad, given the contrast he means to draw in the sentence, what is it? It's supposed to be something that a man could mean by "struggling with p," which makes its meaning rather mysterious. Perhaps it is a euphemism for watching sex videos but only relatively "normal" ones, instead of the ones with all the extra perversions. But that seems an uncharitable reading, given the fact that apparently we're supposed to think this first thing is waaaay on the mild end. So what could it be? Well, my best guess is that "taking pleasure in women's naked beauty" means only lusting, perhaps briefly, over still shots of women who have few or no clothes on and are posed rather provocatively. Light-weight girlie pictures. No videos or anything. No "actresses" actually having sex.

But now we have a further problem. Am I the only one to detect a hint of condescension in the parenthetical "There's a difference"? Since this is being brought up in the context of wondering what this girl's boyfriend meant when he said that he struggled with p, one has to wonder: Does Regnerus really believe that a significant proportion of men who, in this Internet age, say that they "use p," "struggle with p," or "view on-line p" mean only and solely drooling occasionally over a few soft-core, still-shot pictures of naked women? If that's what we're meant to think from this passage, does he have any statistics to back up such an anecdotally implausible insinuation about the meaning of such phrases? And if not, isn't the condescension a little misplaced, since he appears to be the one asking us to be willfully naive?

I would never dream of telling anyone—devoid as I am of information about particular situations—what they ought to do about their boyfriend’s roving eye.

Actually, the main statement of that sentence isn't true, because as we shall see the burden of Regnerus's article is to tell the church collectively what women shouldn't be doing about their boyfriends' "roving eyes."  And there's no point in telling that to the Christian community collectively if you don't actually intend it to influence real, individual people, so let's not pretend that this has nothing to do with what individuals should be doing about individual relationships. But leave that aside for the moment. Roving eye? Good grief, what a Victorian euphemism. No, a roving eye is a man's letting his gaze linger a little too long on the cleavage of an underdressed female colleague. Going to a p site and viewing p videos is not a roving eye.

Okay, I'll throw in one more:

Inside the Church, we still seem to have trouble admitting that men are attracted to naked women.

Not-so-subtle implication: If you are a Christian and think a problem with p use should be a deal-breaker in a relationship, you're a religious prude who doesn't want to admit the facts of life about male sexuality. And using p is sort of like "being attracted to naked women."

Nowhere in the article (go ahead, look for yourself) is there any genuine acknowledgement of the horrific and corrosive harm of p use--to the individual, to a marriage, and to society. Nowhere is there any further indication that Regnerus is aware either of its moral seriousness or of the harm it does to relationships by destroying healthy sexuality. Nowhere is there any acknowledgement of the extreme depth of evil of the p industry itself, with its unimaginably dark exploitation of women, in particular. This is it. These phrases are what we get in the way of an acknowledgement of what p really is.

So let's move on from form to substance. Where is Regnerus going with all of this? His thesis, insofar as one can discern what it is, is entirely in keeping with the soft-pedaled rhetoric.

But we often overlook another casualty of pornography (and the human reaction to it): relationships that fail to launch. Breaking off a relationship because of pornography use can be a rational, justifiable, and moral reaction to a problem—the predilection for peering at nudity online—but such actions contribute in ways not often noted to our broad retreat from marriage.

There's the "but" part of the paragraph I partially quoted up above. What precisely Regnerus means by a "rational, justifiable, and moral reaction to a problem" is a little unclear, seeing as he's about to suggest that one should actually do otherwise for the good of society. Is he suggesting that an individual woman should do something less rational and justifiable in her particular situation, sacrificing her life for the Greater Good? Maybe so.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that little bit between dashes in my list of downplaying phrases: Regnerus summarizes the problem of p use as "the predilection for peering at nudity on-line." Yeah, that shows a real understanding of what on-line p use is. It's "the predilection for peering at nudity on-line." That's one of the best of them all.

Moving on:

Not long before that, I sat around a campfire with a couple dozen enthusiastic young adults, listening to the women recount their list of relationship deal-breakers—porn was of course one of them—while the men sat by sheepishly.

While I’m sympathetic to their concern, I can also promise you that widespread departures—given the dour numbers on porn use—will only accelerate the flight from marriage in the Church and is likely to backfire on women (as many things tend to do in the domain of relationships) who would leave for pastures that may well not be greener.

So tell us, Professor Regnerus, why were the men sitting by sheepishly? Oh, yes, because the men are right now using p. Got it. Well, golly, what a shame. We wouldn't want to make any poor, p-using men feel sheepish, now, would we?

And why is it going to "backfire on women" if they don't pursue a relationship with a man who is presently using p? Oh, wait, maybe because then they will die spinsters, because so many men are now using p. Apparently that's what he means, but why think that isn't a price they are willing to pay? Maybe they know that already. It's not that I think girls should be enthusiastic about not getting married. I'd love to see my world filled with wonderful, romantic weddings between loving brides and grooms. And that is not sarcasm, either. I really would love it, and I think parents should raise their children to want to get married. But there are worse things than not getting married. St. Paul says so. A woman might well be, what was the phrase?, "rational, justified, and moral" for thinking that one thing worse than not being married is being married to a p addict who can't shake the habit. Or even to a man who claims not to be an addict, not exactly, but is an on-going user. Perhaps if those were her only options, then spinsterhood, while hardly a greener pasture, would at least be better than a blasted heath.

Regnerus is somewhat unclear, but not entirely unclear, as to what he is urging.

However, I have no trouble or qualms in declaring that collectively a categorical call to leave spells doom. Young adults are waiting longer and longer to marry, and fewer are doing so.

To counsel further flight is like asserting that our Christian ancestors should have headed to the hills, as wealthy Romans did, to avoid the plague. You can’t flee far enough, and the Church grew by gutting it out, staying put, and caring for the sick. On the matter of men and pornography, the data suggest you cannot flee far enough. Lots of “prudent” decisions to leave will still lead us to the same place—a widespread marriage avoidance. There’s nothing wrong with being unmarried, but we fool ourselves if we think this is the obvious solution.

I gather that by "further flight" he means what those women around the campfire were doing: Refusing to date men who are using p. That "spells doom," girls, because you don't have all that many options, so better pull up your socks and rethink your dating priorities if you don't want to be responsible for the Doom of the West.

Isn't the solution to p use in the church getting people (men and women alike) to stop using p? Wouldn't that stop the "doom" by giving the non-negotiators more potential spouses to consider? Oh, yes, I know, how terribly naive. But perhaps the women around the campfire do not consider their refusal to be a solution to the collective problem of male p use at all. Maybe that isn't the point. Perhaps they just consider it better for them as individual women with valuable individual lives not to be married than to marry a man who continues to use p. Yes, even if he admits that it is wrong and wants to stop. I cannot possibly blame them for thinking that way. In fact, I would counsel them so.

Regnerus is not-so-subtly implying that "the church" is supposed to respond to the epidemic of p use among (especially) young men by somehow inducing women to marry the men anyway. (Though he would never counsel anyone about a particular relationship!) Presumably hoping to help them stop. The most charitable interpretation is that the women aren't exactly just supposed to put up with it and learn not to mind but that they are supposed to accept and assist prospective mates with this problem so long as they acknowledge it and are trying to work on it. This interpretation is confirmed by the last paragraph of the article.

But the gritty reality remains—the Church will have to learn how to navigate this, and press forward with grace and truth. Men and women have to forge relationships—marriage—with each other recognizing human weakness and fostering each other’s sanctification. While pornography is certainly a problem, we cannot collectively bail on marriage. It’s too important to the future of the Church. Without a marrying culture in the West, chastity will falter on a scale we have not yet seen.

Since when is that a good thing to counsel? Is that how you would counsel a beloved daughter who has saved herself for marriage? To forge a marriage with a man who is presently using p, hoping to "foster his sanctification"?

Let's be blunt: Nobody (I hope) would say this if the issue instead were beating women. Suppose that a man slaps his girlfriend only occasionally. He engages, in a manner of speaking, only in soft-core girl-beating. And suppose that somehow this had become endemic in American society so that even many Christian men were doing it. Suppose, even, that we had to tell our daughters, helping them to be realistic, that they might not get married at all if they made it a non-negotiable that they would not date a man who slapped them around in the course of the dating relationship. Should we then write articles urging the church not to "run away" from prospective wife-beaters, meaning by that that women should "navigate this" and "forge marriages" with such men so that there aren't too few marriages taking place?

What is astonishing about all of this is that there is a much more obvious and straightfoward approach: Tell the p users, just as you would tell women-beaters, to stop it. Stop it first! Then, when you've gotten rid of this terrible habit, which nobody should be negotiating with you about, seek someone with whom to forge a relationship and a marriage. Sure, there may well still be baggage, as there is for anyone with sin in their past (past sexual relationships, for one thing). And the baggage may, sad to say, scotch the relationship in itself. Such is the nature of sin that it leaves earthly consequences. But it should be a sine qua non, a bare minimum, that a person seeking to date and marry does not presently have a serious, on-going, destructive problem, especially not a problem that strikes at the very heart of the prospective couple's sexual relationship.

There is an interesting dilemma here for the downplayers who want to urge women to "foster the sanctification" of men presently practicing p use. On the one hand, they want to stress that there is a big range of what can be meant by "p use." (One sees this in the sentence analyzed above from Regnerus's article.) This means that they are sort of implying (without quite saying so) that they aren't really urging women to date and marry men who are really addicted, who have that bad of a problem. On the other hand, there is their odd reticence to address the problem via the Bob Newhart method. STOP IT!

Why? Why be reticent about telling the Christian men to stop first, before seeking mates, if you're only asking the women to date those who don't have such a bad problem?

See, here's the thing: Either the people you want them to date are at least somewhat addicted or they aren't. Suppose that they aren't. Then, apparently they don't think stopping is that important, or else they would stop. So then we have a very straightforward theological and moral problem, and this should be a non-negotiable. Nobody should be even considering marrying somebody who just doesn't want to stop using p, who doesn't think stopping is important. Suppose, on the other hand, that they can't stop so easily. Then they are addicted. Then all of the words Regnerus is saying about not "running for the hills" are in the service of suggesting that Christians should be considering marrying mates who are p addicts, at least to some extent, which is manifestly unreasonable. (Lest anyone wonder, yes, I would apply exactly the same recommendations and say exactly the same things if the p user were a woman.)

So which is it? I think this dilemma is unanswerable. Either they're addicts or they're not, and either way, no Christian should be dating them, much less marrying them, until they STOP IT.

Then, too, there is the element of deception. What about all those sheepish men sitting around the campfire? If they were p users, and they knew how the women felt about it, should they have been dating the women? There is an element of moral and emotional blackmail involved in deliberately leading someone to fall in love with you and only then revealing a dark, on-going behavior problem that you know will cause them great anguish, revealing it only after they feel at least somewhat committed to continuing the relationship and are loathe to hurt both of you by breaking it off. That sort of emotional blackmail is not right. That's why you should STOP IT first, and truly get past it, and be sure that you can love a normal woman and make a real, loving, physically consummated marriage, before seeking someone to fall in love with you. (Compare: If a woman already knows that she hates the very idea of sex and is going to be frigid and make her husband's life miserable in the bedroom, should she be dating? I say, absolutely not. And that isn't even a sin. Some people just shouldn't get married, cruel though that fact may be.)

Moral equivalence is going to be the bane of this debate. It's the whole pobody's nerfect thing. Nobody's perfect, we're all imperfect beings, we all have "human weakness," we all need to "foster each other's sanctification." Etc., etc. But moral equivalence is wrong. Wrong in the sense of wrong-headed, misleading, false, and inaccurate. It's especially wrong when it is applied to practical matters. Whether or not one maintains at some heady, theological level that all sins equally condemn us before God, it is dead obvious that all sins are not equal in their real-world consequences, and especially not in their real-world consequences for that most delicate of human relationships--marriage. Gluttony is not the same thing as a critical spirit is not the same thing as recklessness is not the same thing as violence is not the same thing as homosexuality is not the same thing as p use, and on and on and on. Each sin is different, and some are vastly more worthy, if "worthy" is the right word, to be regarded as deal-breakers in a prospective mate.

So, I disagree with Regnerus. Run for the hills, ladies. And gentlemen, for that matter. I'd give the same advice to a young man whose girlfriend has a present p problem. If the prospective spouse really gets over it later, perhaps the relationship can be resumed. But until then, a deal-breaker it is and should be.

And what can the church do? The church can help people to stop. (There are such things as church-sponsored anti-addiction programs. And for those who aren't actually addicts, clear counseling and catechesis should be more than sufficient.) Moreover, the church can teach that marriage is not therapy. Chastity should be a way of life, in or out of marriage. Nobody has a right to marriage. In particular, nobody has a right to marriage as therapy. Young people seeking marriage should not be continuing in destructive behaviors while waiting for a prospective spouse to come along and act as a savior girlfriend or savior boyfriend. The church, of all institutions, should not be encouraging them to do so. Rather than addressing solemn admonitions to the church to (somehow) encourage Christians to undertake marriage with people who have a p problem, let's strategize about dealing with the underlying p problem directly.

Whatever else we do, let's not settle, either individually or corporately.

Sons of Thunder--new post at What's Wrong With the World

If you are interested in my work on apologetics and the historical reliability of the gospels, you will want to read, and hopefully comment on, my latest post at What's Wrong With the World on unexplained allusions.

For All Saints and All Souls: Speak of me always to Maleldil

At the very end of Perelandra, when Ransom is about to return to earth and is saying goodbye to Tor and Tinidril, Tor and Tinidril ask Ransom to pray for them and promise prayers for him: "Farewell till we three pass out of the dimensions of time. Speak of us always to Maleldil, as we speak always of you. The splendour, the love, and the strength be upon you."

They make no specific request. They simply say that they will speak of each other to God. (Maleldil is, in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, the space-dwellers' name for God the Son.)

Compare that notion of prayer with this, from Letters to Malcolm:

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him? (Letters to Malcolm, p. 106)

Lewis goes on to state the argument against prayers for the dead that the dead are no longer on the road, no longer developing, that "progress and difficulty" are no longer possible for them, and that therefore there is nothing for which to pray for them. In response, he openly states that he believes in Purgatory, and he gives his own theory of what Purgatory is.

But I am interested still more in the paragraph I have just quoted. A couple of years ago when a person I had known only on-line died, I found that what Lewis says there is true. On the day after he had died I was praying, and it was virtually impossible not to speak to God of him and to ask...something. It was psychologically incredibly difficult to feel that there was literally no point in talking to God about him, and with fellow human beings, talking to God about someone invariably means some sort of petitionary prayer. I have had the same experience recently with a loved one who died.

How can one go from praying earnestly for those one loves to having nothing to say to God about them? It is true that, if one doesn't simply believe in Purgatory, as Lewis did, one isn't quite sure what to say to God about them. One is especially unsure what to request. A fragment from the Book of Common Prayer seems suitable and such as even a die-hard Protestant might not mind: "And we also bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching Thee that they may continually grow in Thy love and service." That'll work. "Continually grow in Thy love and service." This corresponds to a conjecture that Lewis makes on the way to his comments about Purgatory to the effect that even in heaven there might be a "perpetual increase in beatitude" gained by a process with its own "ardours and exertions."

I think, too, that it is possible to pray for someone without knowing precisely what to ask, leaving that in God's hands. It is in the realm of petitionary prayer for human beings that I feel most of all the truth of Romans 8:26-27: "For we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." How often, when praying for the living, must we leave in God's hands what we should pray, realizing that what we would request spontaneously might not be best? Or, if a friend is no longer present, as in the case of someone who has moved to another state, we might literally not know their present needs, but we ask that God would do all for their good. Can this be extended to the dead? I believe that it can. As Lewis says, only the most compelling theological case that the dead have nothing whatsoever to gain or to do in the afterlife would convince me that it is pointless, at best, to pray for them. In that case, I suppose that the most one could do would be to bless the name of the Lord for them--i.e., to thank the Lord for them. But do we, even we Protestants, have such a compelling case that the blessed dead have nothing left to gain? I think that we do not. It is not necessary absolutely to believe that the dead still have growth before them to pray for them. It is necessary only to think that it might be so in order to pray that God would do all for them that can be done, that God would draw them ever-nearer to Himself, would give them in a continual outpouring of Himself that unimaginable (to us) increase of beatitude, knowledge, and understanding that is now proper to their state.

Notice, too, that a doctrine that Scripture contains all that we need for salvation (some version of sola scriptura) is consistent with such a practice. For it is not necessary to our or to their salvation that we should pray for them in this way. Nor is it necessary to our or to their salvation that we should refrain from praying for them in this way. We already know that Scripture leaves much of our curiosity unsatisfied concerning the afterlife for those who are saved. We are told that we will be with Christ, that this is far better. We are told that we will "know even as we are known." But the sum total is much less than we should like to know, which is, surely, exactly as God intended it.

Now I will push the argument in the other direction, which is yet more delicate.

But first, a pause for Protestantism: I am of the opinion that it is at least somewhat theologically problematic for us to ask the saints to pray for us, and especially for our particular needs and requests. I hope that is not offensive to my Catholic friends, but it seems to me that, to assume that the dead can hear our intercessions, that they know our present state on earth, and that they are speaking of it to God is to attribute to the dead something uncomfortably close to omniscience and to give to them something uncomfortably close to prayer. I will not say that prayers to the saints are definitely and intrinsically idolatrous, but I will say that I think they raise the danger of idolatry, for to treat the dead in this way is to treat them "too much" as we treat God--as an invisible Personage, far greater than ourselves, who can help us in our need, to whom we fly for refuge, who is always present to us, who knows our needs and what is best for us, and to whom we should cry out.

I also disagree with the idea, which I have often seen expressed by Catholics, that certain dead saints have special influence with God the Father or with Jesus Christ ("Doesn't it make sense to ask a man's mother to intercede with him for you?"), so that by going to them we are making our prayers more efficacious than they otherwise would be. This conveys a notion that seems to me theologically false and even unsavory--namely, a notion of needing to be "in with the in crowd" theologically rather than being loved fully by Our Lord oneself and being able and encouraged to approach Him directly with one's petitions. I note, too, that this notion of special "influence at court" is at odds with the other claim one sometimes sees--namely, that asking for the prayers of the saints is entirely unobjectionable because it is just like asking one's friends on earth to pray for one. But in fact, we don't believe that our ordinary friends on earth have this exalted "influence at court" in the heavenly realm, such as we are encouraged to think of the dead saints, especially certain ones like Mary, as having! So the two defenses of prayers to the saints are in conflict.

Having now (sad to say) probably thoroughly succeeded in offending my Catholic readers, I shall proceed, like a good via media Anglican, to try to offend my Protestant readers. All that I have just said notwithstanding, love between ourselves and others does not, cannot, cease simply because death intervenes. If someone loves you on earth, does he cease to love you because he dies and goes to heaven? God forbid. It seems rather that his capacity for love for other human beings should increase with his increased knowledge of Christ and union with Christ in heaven.

If, then, we find ourselves unable to stop praying for the dead simply because they are dead, since we still love them, might it not similarly be the case that the dead, at least those who have known and loved us on earth, find it impossible to stop praying for us? Just as we must speak to God of them, does it not seem plausible that they speak to God of us?

What remains is the question of what they know of us. Perhaps, as our knowledge of their state is blocked by the chasm of death, and we can pray for them only in the general terms suggested above, their knowledge of our situation is similarly blocked or greatly limited. They are finite beings, as we are, and we have no reason to believe that God has ordained that they shall have supernatural knowledge of all that is going on here on earth. As I already stated, to attribute that degree of knowledge to them seems to come uncomfortably close to making them demigods. Yet the blessed dead have no problem concerning us such as we have when praying for them--the problem of wondering whether there are difficulties still to face! They know quite well that we who are still in this vale of tears have many difficulties still to face, much sin in our nature, much needed growth, many dangers, toils, and snares ahead. On the other hand, it does not seem that the blessed dead should be able to experience worry or anxiety, which (one must admit) lies behind much of our own petitionary prayer.

So what would their prayers be like? Well, that is probably beyond our present ability to imagine. But, conjecturing, I envisage something like an outpouring of the entire self to God for the good of the other. We get a tiny glimpse of this in our own best prayers, perhaps for our children or for others whom, just occasionally, we begin to love with selflessness. And if such an outpouring is effective as prayer when uttered here on earth, why would it not have effect when uttered by one in heaven?

In other words, perhaps the dead really do pray for us effectually, and perhaps we really can pray for them effectually, even though we are absent from each other.

Imagine that someone whom you love has gone far away. He is still very much alive, and you know (in some way) that all is well with him, but you know very little else. He, in turn, knows that all may or may not be well with you, but he knows very little else of you. There is no Internet, no telephone, no physical mail. You are, in the ways of this world, separated from each other. Yet you both have the same Lord whom you love and to whom you pray. You have not ceased in love for one another. In those loves--for Our Lord and for each other--you are united despite the miles and limitations that come between you.

Might it not be, in some measure, like this with us Christians on earth and in heaven?

This is all conjecture, but it is conjecture befitting the season. If it is conjecture too timid for Catholic doctrine and too bold for Protestant doctrine, so be it.

I will only say this to those whom I love and who love me: Whether here on earth or absent from the body, speak of me always to Maleldil, as I will speak always of you.

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confess,
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest,
Alleluia! Alleluia!

O blest communion, fellowship divine,
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

Related post here.

Safe in God's hands

The world is a discouraging place. Herewith, for encouragement, a quotation from Lizette Woodworth Reese:

Oh, unforgotten things,
Gone out of all the springs;
The quest, the dream, the creed!
Gone out of all the lands,
And yet safe in God's hands;--
For shall the dull herbs live again,
And not the sons of men?

From "Herbs" by Lizette Woodworth Reese.

This one, also:

      Wild Geese

THE sun blown out;

The dusk about:

Fence, roof, tree — here or there,

Wedged fast in the drab air;

A pool vacant with sky,

That stares up like an eye.

Nothing can happen. All is done —

The quest to fare,

The race to run —

The house sodden with years,

And bare

Even of tears.

A cry!

From out the hostelries of sky,

And down the gray wind blown;

Rude, innocent, alone.

Now, in the west, long sere,

An orange thread, the length of spear;

It glows;

It grows;

The flagons of the air

Drip color everywhere:

The village — fence, roof, tree —

From the lapsed dusk pulls free,

And shows

A rich, still, unforgotten place;

Each window square,

Yellow for yellow renders back;

The pool puts off its foolish face;

The wagon track

Crooks past lank garden-plot,

To Rome, to Camelot.

A cry!

See also here. 

Baylor prof. goes all gee-I-don't-know on assisted suicide

The meltdown of Christian stances in the moral fields is happening with head-spinning speed. This post is from a professor at Baylor University. God have mercy. Looks like we need to include assisted suicide in our statements and our witch hunts. (See previous entry.) Gotta love the reference to "enlightened Christians" who think suicide isn't sinful unless done for "purely selfish reasons." Condescend much, Prof. Olson?

Good witch hunts

I've been thinking lately about witch hunts at Christian colleges. I've had contact with several very conservative colleges in my time, and I know well how difficult it can be for faculty not to have tenure and to face the possibility of being fired over small deviations from school doctrine on unimportant points. It does not foster a good academic environment for people to have to worry that they will lose their jobs if they have the "wrong" views on the order of events in eschatology, for example. And the more or less "fire at will" atmosphere on some Christian college campuses can just as easily be used to penalize conservatives who want to uphold the school's traditional identity as to penalize liberals who want to tear it down.

But when I read a post like this I have to think that at some point there has been a failure of leadership. The whole point of not granting tenure in Christian colleges, or of making that tenure conditional on continuing to uphold the mission and doctrinal positions of the school, was supposed to be to avoid precisely this sort of attack from within. Given the bio of Stephen Dilley (the author of the above-linked post), it appears that he is talking about Whitworth College, about which I know little to nothing. I do know that there are many other colleges who still have a chance to get it right. Cedarville seems to have been doing some house cleaning lately. Oddly, and receiving most attention in the news, this seems to have taken the form of ruling that women cannot teach theology classes with male students in them. I am anti-feminist but am not sure that biblical teaching on that subject mandates that particular reform at an institution of higher learning. However, my hope is that this is just a signal of deeper and more important reforms at Cedarville--specifically, routing out some more-than-nascent "emergent" and postmodern views which I happen to know were getting far too popular among some faculty in the past. There is some reason to believe that this is so given the proposal that one-man-one-woman marriage be added to the statement of faith. Indeed, that should have been done some time ago, but by all means, it should be added ASAP, and any faculty member who refuses to sign on that ground should be outta here.

Long ago, I used to think that a minimalist statement of faith at a Christian school was the way to go. This was an understandable reaction to some over-detailed requirements. The older I get, the more I realize that statements of faith are very much like creeds in Christian history. Why does the Nicene Creed go on and on about the Son's "being of one substance with the Father"? Of course, it is because that creed grew out of the response to the Arian heresy. In the same way, as the Enemy attacks in subsequent ages, it is understandable that the creedal affirmations required at Christian institutions will evolve so as to block the intrusion of new heresies and serious moral false teachings into the institution. The result will, no doubt, be statements that would appear odd in other ages. Others might wonder why statements on marriage suddenly crop up, or statements about God's omniscience (in response, say, to open theism), or statements about the existence of Adam, and so forth. So it will happen, inevitably, that a statement of faith will be to some degree a "monster," in the technical sense of having what appear to be disparate parts put together in an ad hoc manner.

What I am realizing is that this isn't entirely a bad thing. Nor do my own disagreements with the particulars of some school's statement of faith mean that the ideal is to have a "mere Christian" school whose only statement of faith is, say, the minimalism of the Apostles' Creed. (I hate to point this out, but it would be possible to be a non-Trinitarian and affirm the words of the Apostles' Creed.)

The funny thing is that even if I wrote a "monster" statement of faith of my own for faculty at my own imaginary and hypothetical Christian college, it would probably be fairly "mere Christian" in some respects. It might very well not contain inerrancy! It would contain nothing about eschatology except a minimal statement that we look for the return of Jesus Christ, who will come to judge the quick and the dead. It would be by intention broad enough to include both those who affirm only believers' baptism and those who advocate infant baptism. It would be intended to allow both conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants to teach or be administrators. On the other hand, it would be strongly enough worded on Trinitarian theology and the nature of God to make it clear that Mormons would not be regarded as Christians and could not teach at the school and that modalists would be o-u-t, and it would very likely exclude those who refused to affirm the existence of an historical Adam. I'm undecided on whether to exclude open theists. I would like to include something that would exclude doctrinaire, bullying, anti-ID theistic evolutionists and prevent them from taking over the biology department but haven't yet figured out how to word that. The moral section would be fairly extensive, given our present world's Corinthian debauchery and the appalling extent to which approval of this debauchery is entering the Christian world through specious and sophistical arguments. I would support any administrator who was an absolute hawk on these moral issues and promptly fired any faculty member who showed himself to be undermining the mission of the institution on those points.

My point in listing those suggestions is not so much to defend every single one of them as to suggest a trajectory of simultaneous minimalism in some areas and maximalism in others. It seems to me that Christian institutions need to get their priorities straight. I read some years ago about a well-known Christian college that was hiring a high-level administrator whose background was in the Assemblies of God. By my recollection (I haven't time to try to find the exact words) he had also made some disturbingly wishy-washy statements about abortion. I then read about an on-campus interview process (or perhaps this occurred immediately after he was hired) in which he had an open Q & A with students. Even though both his Assemblies of God background and his abortion remarks had previously been published, the students appeared to be questioning him far more about whether he believed in eternal security of salvation than about his down-playing the evil of abortion. In fact, if I recall correctly, I didn't see a single reference in the questions to what he had said about abortion. This was misguided. Was the same set of priorities represented among those who hired him? If so, that was misguided. Eternal security is a far more open question, biblically and in terms of Christian ethics, than the grave evil of abortion.

I suppose it is not surprising that I should have become more authoritarian as I have gotten older, and I'm keenly aware that authority can be abused. But where authority exists, as it certainly does exist in the private "little kingdoms" of small Christian colleges, it should be used aright. Having and keeping faculty who are teaching what Dilley calls "evangelical self-loathing" is a recipe for disaster. If nothing else, it means accepting parents' hard-earned money and/or students' back-breaking debt under false pretenses.

This is especially true in this day and age when it comes to having faculty who are teaching that moral perversion is right. As I noted here, this has apparently happened at Gordon College. Quite frankly, I am not terribly sympathetic to talk about the lawsuits that a Christian college would or might face if it fired a "gay" professor who was opposing the mission of the school by advocating the legitimacy of homosexual acts. For decades Christian colleges have been leaning on religious exemptions to non-discrimination laws to allow them to enforce minor points of doctrine. If they cannot now use such exemptions, or at least attempt to do so, to fire members of "sexual minorities" who are teaching gross sexual perversion (or anyone who is so teaching under their auspices), then the sooner they cease to put themselves forward as Christian schools, the better! Indeed, the sooner they cease to exist, the better, since their raison d'etre will be gone. What? If open advocacy by faculty of the morality of homosexual practice is not a reductio, what is? Would an administrator refuse, out of fear of lawsuit, to fire a faculty member at a Christian school who was openly advocating orgies in the chapel? I suppose the time might come when that person's "orientation" would also gain the sympathy of the intelligentsia and the courts, but that certainly would not mean that he should be kept on staff, paid by the dollars of pious parents under the impression that they are sending their students to receive a grounding in the Christian worldview! Better for the school to close its doors altogether. The same applies to anyone who is teaching the licitness of homosexual sodomy. An administrator who lacks the stomach for that legal and spiritual fight betrays, at least to my mind, a failure to understand the serious moral evil involved.

I'm sorry for those who have been harmed by misguided witch hunts. But I'm even more sorry for students who will someday go to hell because of a failure of proper vigilance against seriously false teaching. May God give grace and wisdom to Christian leaders to know the difference between one and the other.

Cross-posted

The surprise of beauty

Her beauty, with her face a little flushed and her hair ruffled, took him freshly by surprise. This shock of surprise was in all real beauty, he thought. If one was not surprised it was only a counterfeit.

Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch, p. 310.

The painting below, by artist Timothy Jones, hangs on my wall. It was finished by commission this summer.

It has been on the wall now for almost exactly a month. As the days move into the full glory of a Michigan autumn with much sunshine, welcome in the house to take off the chill, the glowing picture of oranges and strawberries seems somehow to grow more important.

No doubt it is partly the fact that I'm still not used to having it there at all, but many is the time in the last two weeks that I have looked up in the midst of thinking of something else entirely--often something boring or vexing--and have been caught by it, like the Dean in Goudge's book, taken freshly by surprise.

If you have lived any length of time in this world you know what it is like first to be a child, to take in beauty with your full attention and without self-consciousness, then to lose that ability to be captivated, then to regain it, but only in fits and starts. We are creatures, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "distracted by distraction from distraction." It is a great grace to have one's whole attention captured by something lovely and to sense its quiddity, its "whatness." It seems to me that this is where Jones's genius lies as a painter--in drawing attention to the "whatness" of good things. See Oak Leaf 1, for example, or Oranges and Raspberries, Psalm 104, and others. These pictures can give the viewer, for a moment, the opportunity to forget the self, simply to see what is there, and to feel in some way, difficult to explain, that that moment of seeing is all that matters. Jones's use of light accentuates the significant object; the light "tells" the viewer that he is right to see this thing as important, for the light rests upon it. It is only sunlight, natural light. But can sunlight ever be "mere" or "only"? The light shines in darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

If we are lucky, we have these moments of clear vision sometimes in relation to nature--a shaft of sunlight cast across a church nave, blue tree shadows on the snow on a winter's evening, a translucent leaf green against a blue sky. It doesn't happen nearly often enough. One cannot command such seeings, nor sustain them by one's own power. They come when they will, the wind that bloweth where it listeth.

Nor can the visual artist capture vision in the sense of "canning" it and making it available at will. What the work of art provides is an opportunity.

My thanks to Timothy Jones for his work on the painting I own and on all the others out there. May there be many more of his works in this dark world in the years to come.

(See here for a Christendom Review feature on Jones in 2008.)

"O Christ Our Hope"

It's been a looong time since I did a hymn post. Yesterday I learned of a new hymn. It's "O Christ Our Hope, Our Heart's Desire." The words evidently come from as long ago as the seventh or eighth century in their Latin version and were translated by John Chandler, an Anglican priest, in the 1830's. Here are the words:

O Christ, our hope, our heart’s desire,
Redemption’s only spring!
Creator of the world art Thou,
Its Savior and its King.

How vast the mercy and the love
Which laid our sins on Thee,
And led Thee to a cruel death,
To set Thy people free.

But now the bands of death are burst,
The ransom has been paid,
And Thou art on Thy Father’s throne,
In glorious robes arrayed.

O may Thy mighty love prevail
Our sinful souls to spare;
O may we come before Thy throne,
And find acceptance there!

O Christ, be Thou our lasting joy,
Our ever great reward!
Our only glory may be it be
To glory in the Lord. 

All praise to Thee, ascended Lord;
All glory ever be
To Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Through all eternity.

I'm not sure what tune Chandler would have recommended that it be sung to, but it is now sometimes sung to a modified version of Handel's "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth," which I think is an ingenious idea. I can't find a performance of that tune, but click on the MIDI file for "Bradford" here and see the print version here. Of the tunes I have seen associated with it, this is my favorite.

I'm quite surprised that this didn't make it into the Anglican 1940 Hymnal, but I hope that church music leaders will consider introducing it, as it is worthy to be sung congregationally. The Handel tune may be a bit difficult for congregations because of the jump on "O Christ," but not significantly more difficult than many other tunes that congregations are able to sing, and if anyone has heard Handel's Messiah, the tune will already be somewhat familiar.

Paley's Horae Paulinae on Aquila and Priscilla

The world needs more Horae Paulinae. What's that, you may ask? I'm glad you asked. The Horae Paulinae is a work by the great William Paley, better known for his version of the design argument. In the Horae, Paley goes systematically through the Pauline epistles and makes meticulous arguments showing their connections to one another and to the book of Acts. Paley shows again and again (and again and again) that these incidental and casual connections provide evidence both for the authenticity of the epistles and for the reliability of Acts and the origin of Acts as written by a companion of Paul. Eventually the evidence simply towers like a mountain. These are the marks of truth. These events really happened, these epistles were really written by the person to whom they are attributed, and the book of Acts really was written by someone intimately connected with the life of Paul. The entire set of books is part of the web of reality, involving real persons, places, events, and controversies of the time.

Paley's genius in the Horae lies in his ability to draw out what he calls undesigned coincidences. These are places where texts come together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but where no attention is drawn in the text to the connection. One account or epistle casually mentions a place name, a person, or an event. Another mentions some other incidental fact, person, or event. And from these emerges an hypothesis that involves the truthfulness of both texts (or even of more than two), but in such a way that it is overwhelmingly unlikely that either was copied from or based on the other. Rather, the coincidence emerges from the fact that both are referring in different ways to some factual state of affairs. (Sometimes undesigned coincidences can also occur within a particular book.) Tim has written about undesigned coincidences in a series of posts, and I have written about them here.

In this post I am going to type out a long passage from Paley with very little commentary of my own interspersed throughout. Bear with me. After the passage I will explain the argument, which, despite one slight overstatement of the case at one point, is truly brilliant. When you realize that there are many, many more such arguments that can be made concerning the epistles and Acts, you begin to realize the strength of the case for the authenticity and historicity of these documents.

Now what this quotation leads us to observe is, the danger of scattering names and circumstances in writings like the present, how implicated they often are with dates and places, and that nothing but truth can preserve consistency. (Emphasis added.)

The point that Paley is making is extremely important. If you go scattering people's names around in a forgery or a lie, you easily involve yourself in contradictions with other known facts. If, for example, you are trying to convince someone that you were at church one Sunday when you were not, and if you make up a conversation that you had with Joe at church, it may turn out that Joe was not at church that day at all, and someone may thus catch you in the lie. This is a simplified example. The problem can get a lot more complex than that as more specifics are involved. Paley continues:

Had the notes of time in the Epistle to the Romans fixed the writing of it to any date prior to St. Paul's first residence at Corinth, the salutation of Aquila and Priscilla would have contradicted the history, because it would have been prior to his acquaintance with these persons. If the notes of time had fixed it to any period during that residence at Corinth, during his journey to Jerusalem, when he first returned out of Greece, during his stay at Antioch, whither he went down from Jerusalem, or during his second progress through the Lesser Asia, upon which he proceeded from Antioch, an equal contradiction would have been incurred; because from Acts xviii.2-18, 19-26, it appears that during all this time Aquila and Priscilla were either along with St. Paul, or were abiding at Ephesus. Lastly, had the notes of time in this Epistle, which we have seen to be perfectly incidental, compared with the notes of time in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which are equally incidental, fixed this Epistle to be either cotemporary with that, or prior to it, a similar contradiction would have ensued; because, first, when the Epistle to the Corinthians was written, Aquila and Priscilla were along with St. Paul, as they joined in the salutation of that church, 1 Cor. xvi.19; and because, secondly, the history does not allow us to suppose, that between the time of their becoming acquainted with St. Paul, and the time of St. Paul's writing to the Corinthians, Aquila and Priscilla could have gone to Rome, so as to have been saluted in an Epistle to that city, and then come back to St. Paul at Ephesus, so as to be joined with him in saluting the church of Corinth. As it is, all things are consistent. The Epistle to the Romans is posterior even to the Second Epistle to the Corinthians; because it speaks of a contribution in Achaia being completed, which the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, chap. viii, is only soliciting. It is sufficiently, therefore, posterior to the First Epistle to the Corinthians, to allow time in the interval for Aquila and Priscilla's return from Ephesus to Rome.

Okay, so what's Paley talking about? He is starting with the place in Romans where Paul says,

Greet Priscilla and Aquila my helpers in Christ Jesus: Who have for my life laid down their own necks: unto whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Likewise greet the church that is in their house. (Romans 16:3ff)

So, if we are to take Romans to be a genuine Pauline epistle, then whenever he wrote it, he believed Priscilla and Aquila to be in Rome and to have a church meeting in their house. Now, as briefly as possible, here's where it gets fun: Independent arguments give us reason to take I Corinthians to have been written from Ephesus right about in the space indicated by Acts 19:21-22, where it says that Paul sent Timothy and Erastus into Macedonia but remained in Asia "for a season." But I Corinthians 16:19 says,

Aquila and Priscilla salute you much in the Lord, with the church that is in their house.

Therefore, I Corinthians shows Aquila and Priscilla to be with Paul at that time and sending greetings to the church in Corinth. Got that?

In Acts, Priscilla and Aquila first meet Paul at the beginning of Chapter 18, when he comes to Corinth. They work with him in Corinth for a time while he founds a church there, then they travel with him continuously until they all wind up in Ephesus. P & A then stay in Ephesus for a while (Acts 18:21-26) during which Paul goes and has some other travels, returning eventually to Ephesus (Acts 19:1).

So, for consistency's sake, the other indications as to the dating of Romans should place that epistle after a time when Priscilla and Aquila knew Paul but at some time when they could have been in Rome rather than traveling around with Paul or living in Ephesus. But it also has to be possible for them to be in Ephesus (not Rome) at the right time for Paul to send their greetings to the church at Corinth when he wrote I Corinthians. Got it?

Just here Paley does overstate his case somewhat. He says that it wouldn't have been possible for them to have been in Rome after meeting Paul but prior to the writing of I Corinthians and then to have come back to Ephesus in time. This isn't strictly correct. Acts 19:1-10 records that Paul stayed in Ephesus for a period of over two years on that visit. This was after he knew Aquila and Priscilla, but they are not mentioned during the entirety of chapter nineteen. So in principle it would have been possible for them to have taken a journey to Rome, for Paul to have surmised that they were there and to have sent greetings to them in a letter to Rome, and for them to have returned to Ephesus in time to join in his greeting to the Corinthians, probably written about the time of the events recorded in Acts 19:22. However, as Ockham might have said, journeys to and from Ephesus should not be multiplied without necessity. It is simpler to assume that Aquila and Priscilla stayed with Paul during all or nearly all of his time in Ephesus until the writing of I Corinthians and that they went to Rome subsequently. (By the way, Acts 18:2 says that they were originally from Rome and were forced to leave when the Emperor Claudius ordered all of the Jews out, so it was natural for them to return to Rome when that was possible.)

It gets even more delicate to fit the epistles together with each other and with Acts when we add the further information that Romans appears (on independent grounds I'm not detailing here) to have been written not from Ephesus but from Corinth and also that Paul told the Romans (Romans 15:25ff) that he was just about to go to Jerusalem with a contribution from the churches of Macedonia and Greece for the Christians in Jerusalem. That contribution is mentioned in both I and II Corinthians (I Cor. 16:1ff, II Cor. 8:1-9:7) as being collected at the time that those epistles are written, so this definitely places the time of Romans much too late for the former idea to work. That is, the epistle to the Romans couldn't have been written from Ephesus during some unmentioned journey taken by Aquila and Priscilla back to Rome and then back again to Ephesus during the long period in Acts nineteen when Paul was working in Ephesus.

The question then arises as to whether there was time for Priscilla and Aquila to have gone back to Rome and started a church back up in their house after the writing of I Corinthians (at which time, remember, they were in Ephesus with Paul and sent their greetings to the church at Corinth). And as it turns out, there is. Not a huge amount of extra time, but enough. Here's how it goes: Aquila and Priscilla meet Paul at the beginning of Acts eighteen when they all happen to be in Corinth. At that time Paul founds the church in Corinth. They then travel about with him for a time. He leaves them eventually in Ephesus while he goes and travels on further missionary work.  He returns to Ephesus while they are (we surmise) still there. He has a ministry in Ephesus for more than two years. Eventually, shortly after Passover but before Pentecost (argument omitted here for reasons of space), he sends Timothy and Erastus into Macedonia and, just after that, writes I Corinthians. Because Aquila and Priscilla know the church at Corinth, they join in the greeting of that letter. Paul then stays in Ephesus for a while longer, probably less than two months. (Argument omitted.) There is a riot in Ephesus forcing him to leave (Acts 19:23-20:1). Either shortly before that riot or when Paul is leaving after the riot, Aquila and Priscilla also decide to leave and to return to their home in Rome. This makes sense, as the city of Ephesus would have been rather "hot" for them as well, since they were Paul's fellow-workers. Paul may have sent them away even earlier, realizing the growing danger even before the riot breaks out. In fact, we find in Acts 19:21 that Paul sketched out a future itinerary that involved eventually going to Rome himself, so it fits quite well that he would have suggested to Aquila and Priscilla that they return there and set up their base of operations there once again. Whether before or after the riot in Ephesus, they leave by ship for Rome. (Conjecture.) Paul then makes the overland (or mostly overland) journey to Macedonia and "goes over all the parts of Macedonia," which could easily have taken several months (Acts 20:1-2). Paul states in 2 Cor. 2:12-13 that he went to Troas and then on from there to Macedonia. Troas is north of Ephesus on the route one would take if one were going mostly by land from Ephesus into Macedonia. From Macedonia Paul goes south into Greece and (Acts 20:3) stays there for three months.

Since Paul knew that Aquila and Priscilla were planning to go straight back to Rome and begin to have a church in their house, he did not need to receive definite word that this had happened. However, in the seven to ten month total period I am envisaging between Paul's writing I Corinthians and writing Romans, it is possible that he actually received a letter or message back from Aquila and Priscilla at Rome indicating that they had arrived safely and had begun their ministry. Such a letter could have been sent to one of the churches in Macedonia or to the church at Corinth, to which Paul was eventually planning to go to gather up the collection for Jerusalem. In any event, Paul writes to the church at Rome from Corinth shortly before he plans to leave with the collection for Jerusalem (Romans 15:25). He sends greetings to Aquila and Priscilla in that letter (Romans 16:3). The reference to their having risked their necks could easily refer to the danger they were all in together not long before in Ephesus, which would have been fresh in his mind.

Phew!

It is all quite consistent. In fact, it all fits together quite beautifully. But as Paley notes, how easily could it have been inconsistent. The introduction of the reference to the collection in Romans is a potential landmine. Anyone forging a letter to the Romans (for example) and referring to the collection to give his forgery verisimilitude could, if he were not very careful, easily have placed that letter at a time--e.g., at the same time as I Corinthians--when the salutation to Aquila and Priscilla would have been wrong, as they would still have been with Paul or, at most, might have just then left Ephesus.

Or look at it from the other side: This perfect jigsaw provides confirmation for Acts. If Acts were not written by someone with excellent knowledge of the associates and movements of Paul, how would he know when and where Paul met Aquila and Priscilla, their connection with the church at Corinth, and their presence with Paul at the time that he was writing a letter to Corinth? The fact that Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians is not even mentioned in Acts, but the events recounted in Acts permit Aquila and Priscilla to be with Paul at the time that, we believe on other grounds, the letter of I Corinthians was written. How likely would it be that someone using unreliable hearsay or allowing a heavy dose of legendary accretion into his narrative would write a book like Acts in which Aquila and Priscilla are able to be just where they need to be at just the right times to fit in with the salutations in letters to both the Romans and the Corinthians? If, on the other hand, Acts were written by exactly the sort of person it has always been taken to be written by and purports to be written by--a close friend and associate of Paul, such as Luke, and also one who was meticulous about the material he included--then it is entirely explicable that the incidental references in Acts to persons and places should fit with separate allusions in the epistles.

Another argument, which I am not laying out here in detail, can be made from the entire matter of the collection. Briefly, the collection is scarcely mentioned in Acts, only alluded to briefly in Paul's defense before Felix (Acts 24:17). Yet there can be no doubt, based upon all the evidence, that the visit to Jerusalem during which Paul was attacked by the Jews in the Temple (Acts 21) and subsequently taken into Roman custody was the journey to Jerusalem that he speaks of in Romans as imminent. On that trip to Jerusalem he brought a collection (alluded to in several epistles) for the Jerusalem Christians. He had gathered this money from the churches in Macedonia and Greece. That Acts dovetails so beautifully with the epistles in all the details concerning this journey--including the list of the countries Paul had been passing through just before going to Jerusalem--while scarcely mentioning the collection itself is strong evidence that Acts was written by a source very close to Paul and knowledgeable about his movements. The author of Acts simply recounts what happened as truthfully as possible, and truth preserves the consistency between the Acts narrative and the epistles.

The relevance of all of this to the central truths of Christianity is indirect but important. One possible "out" for the skeptic concerning Jesus' resurrection is to say that the disciples themselves never actually said that Jesus came and talked to them after his resurrection in the detailed scenes we find in the Gospels. The idea is that these scenes were some sort of legendary accretion that "grew up" later on and that perhaps, at most, the disciples had some sort of vague experience or hallucination that could be better explained as a result of grief or religious enthusiasm. The specifics of the gospel accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances are, if insisted upon, an embarrassment for the skeptics. If they are taken to be what the disciples actually claimed, one has to hypothesize either implausible and detailed lying on the part of the apostles, for which motive is severely lacking, or extreme, polymodal, repeated, and lengthy hallucinations that coincidentally involve multiple people at once. This is why it is a good deal more convenient to dismiss them as something other than what the disciples actually claimed.

Athwart the road to that comfortable skeptical view lies the book of Acts and hence, by extension, the book of Luke, which was manifestly written by the same author. Both of these books contain specific scenes in which Jesus appears to people and talks with them, sometimes in groups, after his resurrection. The book of Acts contains a detailed account of Jesus' Ascension, and it also states that Jesus showed himself to the disciples over forty days after his resurrection by "many infallible proofs." Furthermore, Acts contains repeated accounts of sermons and statements by Peter (and John) that they were personal witnesses of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and Acts indicates quite clearly that they and the other apostles were willing to die for this affirmation. The meaning of their having seen Jesus cannot possibly be taken to be something vague, given the context, which is absolutely explicit that Jesus was walking about physically and tangibly, talking with the disciples.

If Acts and Luke were really written by a close companion of Paul who took great care over what he reported, then we can at a minimum take it, from a purely historical perspective, that Acts and Luke reliably convey what the disciples were claiming at the time of the first founding of the church.  Luke, the companion of Paul, would have had opportunity to meet the apostles and to talk both to them and to others who had heard them. He probably would have had the opportunity to meet Mary, the mother of Jesus, as well; in fact the first chapters of the gospel of Luke, concerning Jesus' conception and birth, bear a strong stamp of being translated from an original in Hebrew which (though this is conjectural) may have been written down by Jesus' own family and given to Luke. All of this, in turn, brings us back to the difficulties that skeptics should have explaining the disciples' detailed testimony and the disciples' willingness to die for it. Hence, anything that supports the reliability of Acts bears upon the truth of the resurrection.

There is a free electronic copy of Paley's Horae Paulinae available on-line here. (In fact, there are several different editions available on-line. This is a particularly good one; the notes by Howson, the editor, are excellent.) Paley is quite reader-friendly, I find. His language, though formal by 21st century standards, flows beautifully.

Take up and read.

Thai commercials--What's up with that?

So as not to waste the research I just engaged in to find all of these Thai commercials, I'm going to put them in a post.

There is this one about getting your nose out of your electronic devices. It's a commercial put out by DTAC, the largest mobile phone company in Thailand. (No, the irony is not lost on me, but it's still an extremely well-done spot with a good message.)

This one, with the message "Giving is the best communication," appears to be from a different mobile phone company. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) It squeezes an entire heart-warming story into three minutes.

This beautiful ad, from a lingerie company, of all things, manages to fit in not only a great story but also a surprise ending, though it takes seven minutes.

And I'm actually going to embed the one I just saw today, for a life insurance company:



It looks like the (presumably) Buddhist Thais understand something that a few Western Christians don't get about keeping your promises to your disabled spouse.

I've known some people who have spent quite a bit of time as missionaries to Thailand, and from everything they have said I have concluded that Thai culture is not in general heartwarming. Child prostitution (to mention just one thing) is so huge and so blatant in the big cities in Thailand that some Western countries have passed laws penalizing men who travel abroad (with Thailand as one destination) to engage in pedophilia. My missionary friends have repeatedly referred to the country, which they love, as "dark." They say this while acknowledging the darkness in America.

So what gives with the sentimental but also profound Thai commercials? These are commercials, too, that you have to pay attention to. They're brief but they aren't soundbites. In the story ones, the story unfolds gradually, and you're supposed to be following it, not just spacing out between football plays. They have visual subtlety, which is part of their charm. The messages are important, not merely gratifying. In fact, they could be seen as convicting to some segments of their audience. The one that shows all the people disappearing because of an over-focus on electronic devices is a tacit criticism of a large swathe of the population. The lingerie commercial criticizes a false notion of female beauty. And as for the Alzheimer's one--what can I say? Nor are they all from a single company, so the appeal of this type of commercial must be fairly widespread.

I really have no brilliant conclusion to draw here except to note the phenomenon. Whatever effect these commercials have in Thailand, we in the West would do well to learn from them.

Blown about by every wind

[H]e that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. (James 1:6)

Those few of you lucky enough not to have gotten sucked into the Facebook Borg may not know about the Ice Bucket Challenge, in which one is "called out" by friends.  One is then expected (unless one wisely just blows it off) to drop everything and either donate $100 to research on Lou Gehrig's Disease within the next 24 hours or, within those same 24 hours, to make and post a video of oneself getting doused with ice water. Some people do both.

It's a clever gimmick and I gather has garnered a lot of money for research on this particular disease. It has also sparked a lot of interesting talk about the ethics of embryonic stem cell research, since the major organization to benefit from the viral gimmick (the ALS Foundation) has apparently engaged in ESCR in the past and is still using at least one cell line created thereby. So some people have hustled around and found ethical alternative organizations which also do research on this particular disease.

Which is okay as far as it goes but to all of which I want to say:

Stop. Just stop and think a minute. What are you doing? Why are you suddenly getting all interested in just this disease at just this moment? Presumably it's for the entirely arbitrary reason that it's what everybody else is doing at this moment and that someone tagged you in his video and "challenged" you to join in. It's a gigantic fad, a chain letter with a charity tie-in. Are we all so immature that we run our lives this way? Do we all interrupt whatever else we are doing and jump and run to do something, as long as we can find an ethical way to do it, because it's In just now? Have we all turned back into junior highers? Are we incapable of recognizing the unproductive yen to join in with the cool kids and not to look bad just because it happens to be connected to a benevolent cause?

I am not saying that it is morally wrong to donate to research on this disease.  I certainly applaud people's desire to take the trouble to make sure that their money goes to ethical research. But I am speaking out against a spastic culture, a social media culture, that lives by the Facebook challenge, that leaps about jerkily from one thing to another, driven and dragged by pings and tags. National Breast Cancer Awareness Day, National Black History month, National Dog Day, the Ice Bucket Challenge, the disease of the week, the cause of the moment. It should not need saying but apparently does need saying:

An irresistible urge to follow every ephemeral fad is not the mark of a life well-lived.

This also applies when the ephemeral fad happens to be benevolent in intent.

Get a life and live that life. Donate to charitable causes in a calm hour, with a cool head, because those causes are genuinely important to you, and incorporate that giving into your normal life. Don't do it randomly and arbitrarily because someone called you out in a video. Spend your time doing things that you already knew were important. Craft your life. Make your life. Live your life prayerfully and intentionally. Don't let fads make your life for you. If someone sends you the Ice Bucket Challenge and you aren't too busy to drop everything and make a video of yourself getting doused with ice water, you probably aren't busy enough doing more important things. Either that, or you have Internet-induced ADHD. Maybe both.

I'm sorry that this sounds so harsh, but it concerns me that media is making us into people who don't know how to do even good things unless someone tells us what to do, people who don't seem to have our lives in our hands, who don't know who we are. Move forward with your own life, fill it with good things, with well-chosen and well-considered activities.

C.S. Lewis once said (I paraphrase) that he did not feel obligated to read a book simply because the author happened to be alive at the same time that he was alive. The principle is more timely than ever in 2014. If you blog, you don't have to be writing about a topic just because it's what everybody else is writing about this week. You don't have to read a book just because everyone is talking about it and you don't want to be left out. And, yes, that has a ministry hook, too: "I have to read this extremely popular book or watch the latest movie hit so that I can minister to people who have read it or watched it." It ain't necessarily so. And if you give, you don't have to give to the cause that went viral on Facebook this week.

Be, even a little, self-consciously behind the times, because being always in touch with the times probably means that you have been wasting your time just keeping up.

No magic bullet--Copan's insufficient answer to the slaughter of the Canaanites

Let me say up front that there is not going to be a happy ending to this blog post. I am not going to disagree with someone else's argument merely as a prelude to displaying a solution of my own. I have no solution to the slaughter of the Canaanites. It's that simple. I don't know. As far as I can tell, the text of Old Testament Scripture indicates that God ordered the Israelites to kill children down to and including infants, and this is a problem. (Women as well, but at least one can conjecture that maybe all of the people from the age of reason on up had committed crimes worthy of death. Not the babies, though.) Prima facie, this is in direct conflict with the commandment to do no murder. Any attempt to answer the problem by saying that original sin means that no one is really innocent proves far too much, for it removes the rationale for regarding the killing of infants generally as murder.

There is no particular textual reason to take the problem passages to have been added later. It helps a little bit if one is not a strict inerrantist. But even then, what one is left with, at most, is something like, "Maybe God didn't really order that, but my only reason for thinking that is that, as far as I can tell, it is completely incompatible with divine goodness. I'll hope to have this clarified when I get to heaven." One piece of good news, as far as it goes, is that there is nothing about the slaughter of the Canaanite children that is theologically necessary to the truth of Christianity. Unlike, say, the historical existence of Adam, the killing of Canaanite children is not woven into the warp and woof of Christian theology, doctrine, or ethics. Very much to the contrary.

Lest anyone try to combine this problem with God's destroying Sodom and Gomorrah or with the tenth plague, I want to block that at the outset. God is the author of life and death. God gives life and can always licitly take life. God can take a child to Himself and into life everlasting. God knows exactly what is best for every human being and can bring that about by taking a human being's life. The category of murder applies only to the action of finite creatures. Murder is wrong, even in cases such as euthanasia, precisely because it involves playing God, taking on the power of life and death. But it would be downright silly to call God's taking a suffering patient to heaven "euthanasia." The problem is that this answer cannot be applied to the slaughter of the Canaanites, because God is not just striking the Canaanites dead. The Israelites themselves are being ordered to put them to the sword--to hack infants and children to death. To my mind, the difference should be obvious, but I might as well state it up front so that things are made neither easier nor harder than they should be. On the one hand, Christians shouldn't make their job easier by reasoning that, since God's killing people directly seems obviously not to be a problem, this isn't either. On the other hand, skeptics shouldn't be able to overwhelm the Christian with a much larger list of allegedly problem texts in which God kills people or bamboozle Christians into treating God Himself as just a Big Man In the Sky who cannot morally take life, even by His own hand, without due process.

With all of that made clear, onward to the main subject of this post.

Paul Copan's approach to the issue of the slaughters, as represented in Is God a Moral Monster, is quite popular right now. The impression that I think many people are getting is that Copan has come up with a way to use specialized linguistic and/or archeological knowledge to make the problem simply vanish away by showing that the Bible doesn't really say that God ordered the killing of children. Such a magic bullet would of course come as a great relief to Christians, who are constantly getting hit with the "What about the Canaanites?" question. But for that very reason, I think that Copan's proposed solution requires careful examination to discover if it can really deliver such a marvelous outcome, or indeed if Copan himself even claims that it does. (As we shall see below, he actually doesn't claim that his approach takes care of all the problem passages.)

To begin with, in discussing this question, it's important to bear in mind just how bad the most problematic passages are. In my evaluation of Copan's answer, I will be coming back to the details of the worst passages, so let's get them before our minds before we try to discuss whether Copan has made the problems disappear. To my mind, the three absolutely worst passages are Deuteronomy 20:10-18, Numbers 31:12-18, and I Samuel 15:1-3. Slightly less bad, because descriptive (but it fits perfectly with the prescriptive passages) is Joshua 6:21. Compare also Deut. 2:34 and 3:6.

Deuteronomy 20. The passage is rather long, so I won't quote every word. This passage is directly ascribed to God, through Moses. It is part of the second giving of the Law to the Israelites. First, it tells what they are to do with cities that "are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations" (vs. 15). There, they are to leave alive the non-combatants and cattle:

[W]hen the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies. (vss. 13-14)

This policy is explicitly contrasted with their treatment of the cities in the promised land itself:

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, and Canaanites,...as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods. (vss. 16-18)

The passage could not be clearer. In geographical regions farther from the Promised Land, noncombatants and cattle (both of which are indisputably spoken of as real, not as metaphorical) may be saved and taken as spoil. In the land itself, they are to be destroyed lest contact with the people of the land lead the Israelites astray religiously. The contrast is what makes the passage so impossible to get around. The Bible is here portraying God, through Moses, as expressly envisaging the existence of women and children in the cities, expressly telling them to spare their lives (as spoil) in one geographical location, and expressly ordering that the cities within the entire Promised Land, including whole people groups, be treated differently--namely, by killing every living thing. And that difference explicitly concerns the women, little ones, and cattle, which were singled out to be spared in the farther-away cities.

The next passage that gets my nomination for "extremely bad" is in Numbers 31.

And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle...And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest,...And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord...and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. (Num. 31:-18)

Here Moses, purporting to speak for the Lord (and there is no reason in the text to think that he is not speaking for the Lord) expressly orders the killing of real infant boys, not to mention all non-virgin women.

We also find express descriptive statements by Moses in Deuteronomy as well as in the book of Joshua that the children of Israel did kill "the women, and the little ones..." (Deut. 2:34), "men, women, and children" (Deut. 3:6), "man and woman, young and old" (Joshua 6:21). An interesting note here, relevant to the "idiom" or "hyperbole" suggestion I will discuss below, is that in the next verses of the early Deuteronomy passages Moses says that they took the cattle as spoil, whereas in Joshua 6 it states that they also killed "ox, sheep, and ass with the edge of the sword." This shows that the animals in these passages are literal; sometimes they are taken as spoil and sometimes killed. (Which fits with the prescription put in the mouth of God in Deuteronomy 20.) This is evidence against taking the women and children to be merely metaphoric or hyperbolic.

An odd point to note in passing is that, in discussing Copan's and Hess's approach (which he does not find convincing in the end), William Lane Craig makes the extremely surprising statement that "It is, in fact, a striking feature of these narratives that there is no record whatsoever that women or children were actually killed by anyone." Since Craig does not specify any narrow set of passages, he appears to be speaking generally of the narratives of the conquest of the Promised Land. There are actually several places where there is definitely a record that women and/or children were killed. It is difficult to understand how Craig could make such a statement.

In a later period of Israel's history we find the third impossible-to-ignore prescriptive passage. In I Samuel 15:2-3, the prophet Samuel, apparently speaking for the Lord, tells King Saul,

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel...Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Again, the cattle are undeniably real, as is the order to slay them all, for Saul is punished by God for taking some of the cattle back as spoil rather than killing them (I Samuel 15:19-23). God takes away the kingdom from Saul because of this disobedience. And, of course, the words "infant and suckling" are prima facie explicit.

Copan suggests, in the face of these texts, that virtually all of the references to killing children can be explained away as using "stereotypical" or "hyperbolic" expressions that merely refer to "everyone" who happens to be in a particular city or fort, not necessarily real women or children. He also suggests that the places where the Israelites are said to have wiped everyone out were actually military forts and that no non-combatants were actually killed. He further points out that populations of the Canaanites and others were still around after the supposed destruction, so therefore the Israelites did not literally kill everyone; hence, the references to total destruction must be hyperbolic. He manages to suggest that, because of this absence or failure of literal genocide, we should not take literally some passages that imply that the Israelites killed Canaanite infants and children by the command of God.

Copan does not even attempt to explain away Numbers 31 as hyperbole or metaphor. It is simply too explicit a command to kill children. I want to emphasize this, because anyone who thinks that Copan has taken care of everything by way of specialized knowledge should know that even he does not claim that he has done so. In fact, Copan goes so far as to justify Moses' order to kill the Midianite infant boys in Numbers 31 on the grounds that they would have formed a future army against Israel.

As with Israel’s lifelong enemies, the Amalekites (cf. Deut. 25:17–19), the Midianites also posed a serious threat to Israel. Whereas Amalek endangered Israel’s very existence, Midian profoundly threatened Israel’s spiritual and moral integrity as the people of God. With the help of the devious pagan prophet Balaam, the Midianites devised a plan to lead Israel into pagan worship. This involved ritual sex, feasting before their Baal, and bowing and sacrificing to him (Num. 25:1–2; 31:16). When he couldn’t bring a curse down on Israel (Num. 22–24), he sought another way.

This is why Moses gives the command, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (Num. 31:17–18 NIV). This command must be understood in the context of Numbers 25. At Peor, the Midianite women deliberately seduced the Israelite men into orgiastic adultery as well as Baal worship.

The death sentence for all males is unusual. However, males were the potential enemy army to rise up against Israel.

What Copan does not seem to realize is that the indisputable reality of the women and children in this passage calls deeply into question the entire idea that the Israelites were attacking only forts and encountering only combatants as they moved forward. To be sure, this encounter with the Midianites occurred before they actually entered the Promised Land (since Moses himself did not enter the Promised Land), but the entire picture hangs together extremely well--a picture of conquest that includes real women and children and conquerors who believe themselves entirely justified in killing non-combatants and, indeed, required to do so by religious command.

Where does Copan get the claim that the death sentence for all the infant males in Numbers 31 is unusual? We have seen several passages that appear to indicate that all children, male and female, were targeted at various points in the conquest of the land. Perhaps Copan means that this passage is "unusual" in being so utterly specific and explicit and in dealing so clearly with real, undeniable infants that he cannot explain it away as hyperbole. Or perhaps he means (comfortless thought) that it is unusual in targeting male infants, specifically. Either way, he is apparently quite ready to justify the killing of infant boys as a matter of military expediency when he cannot get around it some other way. This shows, if nothing else does, that Christians have a difficulty here for which no simple remedy exists, not even a scholarly remedy.

Bearing in mind, then, Copan's capitulation to the unavoidable interpretation in Numbers 31, here are some typical passages from Copan regarding other texts:

When reading the text of 1 Samuel 15:3, we are led to believe that Israel targeted and obliterated Amalekite noncombatants. However, Old Testament scholar Richard Hess argues that we do not actually have indications that this was so — whether toward the Amalekites or the Canaanites. Deuteronomy 2:34 states that “we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women and children of every city. We left no survivor” (NASB). Again, in the next chapter, we read that Israel “utterly destroyed … the men, women and children of every city” (3:6, NASB).

The sweeping words like “all,” “young and old,” and “man and woman,” however, are stock expressions for totality — even if women and children were not present. The expression “men and women” or similar phrases appear to be stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, “without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders."

[snip]

This stereotypical ancient Near East language of “all” people describes attacks on what turn out to be military forts or garrisons containing combatants — not a general population that includes women and children. We have no archaeological evidence of civilian populations at Jericho or Ai (6:21; 8:25).8 The word “city [‘ir]” during this time in Canaan was where the (military) king, the army, and the priesthood resided. So for Joshua, mentioning “women” and “young and old” turns out to be stock ancient Near East language that he could have used even if “women” and “young and old” were not living there. The language of “all” (“men and women”) at Jericho and Ai is a “stereotypical expression for the destruction of all human life in the fort, presumably composed entirely of combatants.”9 The text does not require that “women” and “young and old” must have been in these cities — and this same situation could apply to Saul’s battling against the Amalekites.

[snip]

Remember Moses’ sweeping commands to “consume” and “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, not to “leave alive anything that breathes”? Joshua’s comprehensive language echoes that of Moses. Scripture clearly indicates that Joshua fulfilled Moses’ charge to him. So if Joshua did just as Moses commanded, and if Joshua’s described destruction was really massive hyperbole common in ancient Near East warfare language and familiar to Moses,then clearly Moses himself did not intend a literal, comprehensive Canaanite destruction.

[snip]

Any conquest of Canaan was far less widespread and harsh than many people assume. Consider Joshua 10:40: “Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded” (NASB). At first glance, it appears that Joshua captured all the land, defeated all the kings, and destroyed all the Canaanites (cf. 10:40–42; 11:16–20). Total obliteration? Not quite. Joshua used typical ancient Near East rhetorical language that exaggerates what actually took place.

Joshua was not trying to deceive people; the ancient audience would have readily understood what was going on. In fact, if we read the text closely, we see this is exactly right. Joshua later refers to nations that “remain among you,” and he warns Israel not to mention, swear by, serve, or bow down to their gods (Joshua 23:7,12,13; cp. 15:63; 16:10; 17:13; Judges 2:10–13).

[snip]

We read in Joshua (and Judges) that, despite the “obliteration” language, there were plenty of Canaanite inhabitants who Israel did not “drive out”; rather, they lived in the areas where Israel had settled.

Most of Copan's arguments here are heavily dependent upon Old Testament scholar Richard Hess. It is therefore necessary, in order to evaluate Copan's arguments, to evaluate both Copan's representation of Hess and Hess's own arguments. Before I turn to that analysis, let me dispose of the argument that runs, approximately, "There were still lots of Canaanites around after this, so the references to killing everybody, including noncombatants, are hyperbolic and needn't concern us."

The problem with the slaughter of the Canaanites is not chiefly a problem of body count. In other words, this is not about the quantity of Canaanites killed but about the quality of Canaanites killed. If 100% of all Canaanite soldiers were killed in obedience to God but not a single infant, young child, or woman was killed in obedience to a real command from God, and if we could know that, we would have no problem. For that matter, we'd have far less of a problem if only adults were killed in obedience to God, or at least only those of an age to be morally responsible, including (non-pregnant) women, for then all the historical information we can gather about the depravity of Canaanite culture would become directly relevant. But the hyperbole response by itself, bolstered by later Biblical reference to the continued presence of Canaanite populations, simply tells us nothing at all about whether God really ordered the Israelites to target children and/or women. It is not as though the later Canaanite populations were composed of adults who had been carefully taken up and raised by the Israelites as babies and who later turned against them! The idea that this language is hyperbolic and that total destruction didn't really occur applies, as far as it goes, equally to combatants and non-combatants, to adults and children, and to men and women. It is orthogonal to the really important concerns about these passages. Even if the statement that everyone was destroyed is hyperbole in the sense that a substantial number of inhabitants of unspecified ages and genders survived (perhaps by running away or being driven out of the land), there are nonetheless passages that appear to indicate that God commanded that women and children, inter alia, be killed. There are also passages that seem to indicate that the Israelites took that command in that way and attempted to carry it out. The "hyperbole" response, based on later Canaanite presence, is a simple evasion of this point.

Now, to turn to Hess: First of all, a problem arises in that, with a combination of summaries and footnotes, Copan implies that Hess makes and defends stronger statements than Hess actually defends. For example, Copan says that the cities the Israelites destroyed (such as Jericho) "turn out to be" military forts or garrisons. Here is Hess's argument. The reader can see for himself that, on the contrary, Hess's argument is for conclusions such as "could have been," "may have been," and the like. Hess merely shows that Jericho, for example, could have been a military fort. (Nor is his argument for that conclusion very strong, but I will resist the temptation to a digression.) Similarly with the word 'ir. Hess does not argue that the word did mean a military garrison rather than a city with civilian inhabitants, but merely that a military garrison is one of its possible meanings. So with the "military king" Copan refers to. Hess spends pages arguing merely that a military commander is one possible meaning of the word used for the king of Jericho. But the more ordinary meanings of "city" and "king" are also possible! So the statement that it "turns out" that Israel is said to have utterly destroyed only military forts is far too strong even as a representation of what Hess is arguing.

In essence, what Hess is doing throughout is arguing that, if you are determined to conclude that the Israelites didn't kill any civilians by the command of God in Jericho and Ai, you aren't pressed to that conclusion by the text. Even on that point, Hess's argument is weak to the point of being bizarre. At one point he argues from silence that, since no non-combatants other than Rahab and her family are named as living in the city of Jericho, they may have been the only ones! (pp. 38-39) Faced with the uncomfortable fact that Rahab and her family are, after all, there in the story, Hess turns to the ad hoc hypothesis that they are the exception that proves the rule: "Rahab, as an innkeeper, may have been an exceptional non-combatant who, with her family, lived in what was otherwise a militarized camp." (p. 39)

Then we come to the statement in Joshua 6:21 that they destroyed "man and woman, young and old," which seems on the face of it to refute, by express statement, Hess's entire thesis that Jericho may have been a military fort at which no civilians were killed. Hess's treatment of this bit of the text is worth taking time over, because Copan gets such a wholesale return of conjecture out of Hess's argument. From what Hess does on this point, Copan concludes that time after time in the Old Testament (except for Numbers 31), when it says that the Israelites killed men, women, and children, believing themselves to be fulfilling God's command, or when the text says that God actually commanded this, such language is Ancient Near Eastern literary convention that could easily refer to killing only male warriors. Copan even goes so far as to apply this type of literary dismissal to the destruction of the Amalekites in I Samuel 15 where "infants and sucklings" are listed by Samuel.

Prima facie, this is implausible, and there is surely a pretty stiff burden of proof for anyone who wants to argue this. Moreover, as I shall point out later, even if there were evidence that such an expression was sometimes used when there were no women or children present, it would scarcely follow that this is how the phrase is being used in the relevant Biblical passages. In fact, there is clear evidence to the contrary regarding those particular passages.

In fact, though, Hess gives the reader almost nothing in the way of an argument that a statement that women and children were killed was ever used when no women and children were killed. Here is what Hess says, in full (pp. 38-39):

There is...an important verse, 6:21, that states:

     They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword            every living thing in it–men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep      and donkeys.

This text appears to include women, children, and the aged in this mass destruction. However, is this really the case? The actual expression is translated "men and women," literally, "from man (and) unto woman." The phrase occurs elsewhere seven times, referring to the inhabitants of Ai (Josh 8:25), Amalek (I Sam 15:3, here without the waw), Nob (I Sam 22:19), Jerusalem during David's time (2 Sam 6:19 = I Chr 16:3), Jerusalem during Ezra's time (Neh 8:2), and Israel (2 Chr 15:13). In 2 Sam 6:19 (= I Chr 16:3) it describes the joyful occasion of David's entrance into Jerusalem with the ark of the covenant and his distributing food to all the onlookers. Except for Saul's extermination of the inhabitants of Nob in I Sam 22:19, where children are specifically mentioned (unlike the texts about Jericho, Ai, and elsewhere), all other appearances of the phrase precede or follow the Hebrew kol "all, everyone." Thus, the phrase appears to be stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders. It is synonymous with "all, everyone."

It would be easy to get lost in the welter of details and Hebrew words here, but this is actually an extremely poor argument, particularly for the use Copan wishes to make of it. It is important to note that, when Hess refers to "the phrase," he is not talking about the entire phrase "men and women, young and old" but only about the portion "men and women." The majority of his examples do not include any reference to age and thus aren't even directly relevant to the entire phrase he wants to explain away in Joshua. On the other hand, Hess errs when he says that only in the case of Saul's destruction of Nob are children expressly mentioned (as if to imply that there are no other places where sweeping phrases about killing children create a problem to address), since the very text he is discussing mentions "young and old" and since children are expressly named in I Samuel 15, where it appears that God is commanding their destruction.

Importantly, this argument does not contain a single case where the phrase "men and women" is used and where we have independent evidence that women were not present! Not one. For example, in I Samuel 6:19 it says that David distributed food to everyone, both men and women. Do we have any reason to believe that David did not distribute food to women on that occasion? No reason whatsoever. Nor does Hess give a single instance where "children" or "young" are mentioned and where we have independent evidence that children were not present. Let that sink in for a moment. This is supposed to be a biggie--a scholarly argument from ancient textual literary convention that a sweeping expression like, "Kill all men, women, and children" or "we killed all men and women, young and old, infants and sucklings" could be used merely to mean something like, "Fight hard" or "We really wiped out that army." And Hess does not give a single example of a case where such a phrase is being used in that way! Not one.

How, then, does Hess get to the "thus" in his conclusion? What, exactly, does his argument even amount to? The entire force of his case as given here apparently rests on what one might call the sing-song nature of binary pairs such as "men and women" and "old and young," together with the fact that the phrase "men and women" is usually combined with some Hebrew expression like "all" or "everyone." Hess is probably thinking of (though he does not mention) the fact that Hebrew, like English, does have idioms that are merely emphatic ways of saying "all" or "everything." For example, I am told that the Hebrew translated as "neither good nor evil" is an idiom for "nothing." A near English equivalent to what Hess wants us to envisage would be the phrase "everything from A to Z," where "from A to Z" is merely a way of emphasizing "everything." From these slight indications Hess concludes that all of this sounds conventional, sounds like it is just an idiomatic way of saying "everyone," and from that derives the quite strong conclusion that the reader wouldn't have been disposed to think anything whatsoever about the ages or genders of the people present from a phrase like "men and women, old and young."

So Hess's argument for the "possible literary convention" conclusion regarding such phrases is exceedingly weak. But more can be said: Suppose that Hess had provided some examples where some Ancient Near Eastern text says that all men, women, and children were killed and where there is independent evidence that only men were present. It would have to be fairly strong evidence, not just something vague like, "Well, it looks like this was a military fort, so maybe there were no women or children there." But just suppose. While that would be somewhat interesting as showing that such an expression could be used in that way, how much would that help with the problem passages?

Not much. The problem passages are just too clear. Even aside from Numbers 31 (where Copan himself gives up and callously suggests that killing baby boys is okay because they are a future army), Deuteronomy 20 gives us, as already pointed out, an express contrast between cities where real women, children, and cattle are expected to be present and can be taken as spoil and cities where they are not to be taken as spoil but where, instead, everything is to be killed. This passage cannot be fit into the "idiomatic expression" concept at all. Where women, little ones, and cattle are listed, they are separated out rather than being part of some sweeping reference to "all" or "everything." And where "everything that breathes" is ordered for destruction in the cities of the Promised Land itself, the only possible thing it can refer to, by way of contrast, is those very women, little ones, and cattle who are, in those cities, not potential spoil or prisoners but must be killed instead. What could such a contrast even mean if killing everything that breathes is merely a reference to fighting really hard or killing a lot of soldiers? That the Israelites are to fight less strongly against the armies farther away from the Promised Land than in the Promised Land? That they are to destroy only some of the male combatants far away but all of them within the land? Any attempt to make such conjectures constitutes a reductio of the application of the "ancient near eastern literary convention" idea to Deuteronomy 20.

Moreover, in Deuteronomy 20 the prescription is for an entire geographical area and for entire people groups. God does not tell the Israelites in Deuteronomy 20 merely to go to such-and-such a named city (which might be a fort, for all we know) and kill everything that breathes in that location. That would be simple enough to dismiss, because who knows whether any non-combatants were breathing in that particular location? But the command isn't like that at all. Whatever one may say about Jericho, surely in the entirety of the land of Canaan there were some women and children! Surely among all the Hittites, Amorites, and Canaanites some non-combatants were to be found. And what about that rationale--that they should not teach the Israelites to do according to their abominations? Is the idea that the soldiers, if left alive, would be teaching the Israelites false religion? No, that seems to be an allusion to the women and to intermarriage with the civilian population.

Similarly with the Amalekites in I Samuel 15. Saul is not sent against some named and possibly entirely military location. He is sent to wipe out a group qua group. It seems reasonable to think that that is why infants, sucklings, women, and cattle are named--to emphasize the destruction of all that pertains to the tribe. One can even go farther: Suppose that Hess had succeeded (as he certainly has not) in arguing that such pairs as "man and woman, infant and suckling," etc., were the literary equivalent of the English "from A to Z." If one said, "Go and kill everyone in that tribe, from A to Z," that would be an extremely bloodthirsty order on its face. To say that these are emphatic ways of saying "everyone" gets one in trouble all on its own when "everyone" refers to an entire tribal group!

And, as I have already pointed out, the animals in these passages are shown to be entirely literal, even when they are listed in pairs ("ox and sheep, camel and ass") and even when they are part of a larger list of types of entities. The literary form does not, it turns out, mean that the animals are merely hypothetical bookends in an idiomatic expression that "would not have predisposed the reader to assume" that there were any real animals present! If the cattle and their destruction are real, why are the women and children not real?

The entire "literary convention" idea simply falls to pieces when one makes the attempt to apply it to the details of the worst of the problem passages.

So after looking into Copan's argument, we are left with the unfortunate conclusion that he has not made the problem go away after all. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to draw this conclusion. In fact, I have hesitated for some time to say anything about the matter, because I have no desire to weaken anyone's Christianity nor to dismiss publicly an argument that I do not understand. But when the scholarly argument simply will not give what many hope for from it, and when this can be discovered fairly directly by a careful investigation of the relevant texts, it is quite certain that some atheist will do that investigation and will be ready to mop the floor with a Christian apologist (or a Christian student) who tries to use Copan's argument as a magic bullet. After gradually realizing the influence that this attempted response is coming to have, I decided that I needed to write something public on the topic. It is tempting, if one does not have the relevant problem texts clearly before one's mind, to think that perhaps there is some esoteric information out there that fixes everything. I am sorry to have to say it, but that does not at all appear to be the case.

Finally, let me emphasize an important point where I agree with Paul Copan. He says,

Despite our remaining questions, we need to look at God’s clear revelation in Jesus Christ — especially His incarnation and atoning death. A concerned, relational God — who made himself known to ancient Israel — showed up on the scene in flesh and blood. He entered into first-century life in Palestine, stooping to share our lot to enduring life’s temptations, injustices, sufferings, cruelties, and humiliations. However we view the Canaanite question, God’s heart is concerned with redemption. Christ’s dying naked on a barbaric cross reveals how very low God is willing to go for our salvation. As Michael Card sang about those who scorned and spurned God’s salvation in Jesus of Nazareth:

They mocked His true calling
And laughed at His fate,
So glad to see the Gentle One
Consumed by their hate—
Unaware of the wind and the darkening sky,
So blind to the fact that it was God limping by.

Since God was willing to go through all of this for our salvation, the Christian can reply to the critic, “While I cannot tidily solve the problem of the Canaanites, I can trust a God who has proven His willingness to go to such excruciating lengths — and depths — to offer rebellious humans reconciliation and friendship.”

However we interpret and respond to some of the baffling questions raised by the Old Testament, we should not stop with the Old Testament if we want a clearer revelation of the heart and character of God. In fact, the New Testament clearly reveals a God who redeems His enemies through Christ’s substitutionary, self-sacrificial, shame-bearing act of love (Romans 5:10). Though a Canaanite-punishing God strikes us as incompatible with graciousness and compassion, God is also light (1 John 1:5) — a God who is both good and severe (Romans 11:22). Yet this righteous God loves His enemies, not simply His friends (Matthew 5:43–48). Indeed, He allows himself to be crucified by His enemies in hopes of redeeming them: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34, NASB).

Philosophers of science are well aware that a theory does not need to have answers to all anomalies in order to be well-supported and rationally accepted. We have ample, to my mind overwhelming, evidence, quite independent of our response to the question of the Canaanite slaughters, that God exists, that He is loving and all-good, that His goal is to redeem mankind, and that Jesus is God the Son who reveals the loving Father to us. That means that we can handle points where we do not know the answer while still retaining a robust confidence in the truth of Christianity. It is a brittle and irrational approach that says, "You must have an answer to everything or else your faith is vain and not founded on fact." Being an evidentialist, as I am, does not at all mean having to have all answers to all questions. On the contrary, it means viewing the totality of the evidence one has and trying, to the best of one's ability, to come to an intelligent and judicious conclusion. I believe that any fair-minded inquirer who investigates the evidence for Christianity will come to believe it to be true. This means believing that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the one true God and is a necessarily good and perfect God, worthy of all worship.

Someday, in heaven, I hope to know the answer to these problem passages. If I don't, it will be because I don't need to know. Meanwhile, we endure as seeing Him who is invisible, knowing that He loves us better than we can properly love ourselves and knowing, too, that He loves every Canaanite child far better than we, with our questioning minds on the child's behalf, could have loved him.