How the Internet fights Providence

Having grown up without the Internet, I am often fascinated, not to mention dismayed, by the ways in which the Internet has changed the very concept of friendship. In this post, years ago, I discussed the way in which the "talkie" nature of the Internet makes friendship difficult. (See also here and here.) It used to be that friendship was based on more than just talking and indeed, often was based on not talking--on restraint, on leaving disagreements unmentioned, on focusing on what people had in common. In the blogosphere, we don't get together to bowl, sing, play softball, build something, eat, or run a small, local organization. We aren't doing most of the things that communities and incarnate friendships used to be based on.

Did I really want to know, in the old days, everything that my friends thought about every intellectual, political, and moral issue under the sun? Maybe when I was about twenty years old I thought I did, but deep in my heart I valued some ideological privacy and restraint on both sides. In the blogosphere, we have nothing to do but talk about what we think about everything, and what friendship can withstand that? Sometimes the blogosphere is like something out of Sartre--being stuck in an elevator with people talking forever. Of course you end up, often as not, very nearly hating each other!

But there is more: In the pre-Internet days, there was a largely unspoken notion that God "brings people into your life" and that you had some kind of duty to people just in virtue of having fallen into contact with each other. I don't know how secular people thought of this. Maybe they just let the word "community" cover it. But the idea was there for religious and non-religious alike. The fact that you just happened to work with somebody, just happened to be in the same church or neighborhood, conferred a duty to get along with each other. That, at a minimum. And over time, to develop a kind of affection of familiarity and maybe even a close friendship. One's "own folk" were to some degree chosen by chance. Even going to college had this same quality. Whom will I get as a roommate? Who will be in choir or band with me? By such chance events, or such acts of Providence (however you look at it), many of the decisions of a lifetime were made--one's spouse, sometimes one's lifelong friends, were all selected to some degree by the accidents of propinquity. And one did not lightly throw that out the window. Jones, my neighbor, might be an annoying old buffer, but after all he is part of my community, and I'm supposed to try to get along with him.

So there was a kind of loyalty that was owed to people whom one did not, or did not entirely, choose to associate with in the first instance.

The Internet makes it, I say, flatly impossible to keep on adhering to that same notion of automatic loyalty owed to those one happens to fall in with by chance. A major reason for this impossibility is that, if one includes electronic accidents of association, there are just too darned many people who fall into this category. Obviously one can't feel loyalty and a duty of friendship to every fellow commentator who hangs out at the same blog or Facebook page, including the trolls one wishes would disappear! But it's true even of the people one develops somewhat more of a friendship with on the Internet. There are now too many of them, and the friendships thus formed have too narrow and discarnate a basis (see above) for one to maintain the same sense of a duty to keep the friendship going permanently (if at all possible) or for one to allow oneself to feel the same anguish when something goes awry that one would have felt in the old days about the loss of an in-person friendship.

Worse, fallings-out on the Internet have a way of being far more nuclear than any in-person fight over the same issues would usually be. One is far more likely to find people berating each other repeatedly for alleged dishonesty, misrepresentation, disingenuousness, and so forth, in an Internet war than one would in an in-person disagreement. (And that's at the best. That's when the people involved are sufficiently decent not to descend to threats or obscenities.)

If there is an incarnate basis for the friendship, one has both more resources for working things out and avoiding conflict and also more reason to do so. If Jones has a "thing" about tariffs, he and I don't talk about tariffs once we realize that we don't agree. And if Jones and I are on the same neighborhood watch committee, I can't just drop him and walk away, nor can he just drop me and walk away. We'll be seeing each other for years willy-nilly (if we're mature people and don't drop the neighborhood watch over a political disagreement), so we both have a motive for finding a modus vivendi.

In contrast, it's relatively cheap and easy to drop an Internet friendship without a backward look when something goes badly wrong, and one is often well-advised to do so. One has one's family and other duties in life; one can't go around agonizing over every highly unpleasant falling-out on Facebook or in a blog thread.  It feels wrong to take that attitude, but it is often not only right but necessary. Let it go. Don't go back and read what so-and-so said as the last word. Don't send that e-mail. Don't worry about it. Move on. It's a freeing feeling to do that, like getting over an addiction. But those of us who have any gift for friendship also feel, to some extent, guilty about the sense of freedom itself. One finds oneself asking, "Since when am I the kind of person who wakes up in the morning and breathes a sigh of relief that I don't have to worry about 'dealing' with someone anymore, when I previously thought of that person as a friend? Do I not have a duty to be more bothered about this, to try to find a way of fixing it?" Yet on the contrary, one may well have the very opposite duty.

The Internet gives us the interpersonal equivalent of battle fatigue. Just as a doctor must get used to the sight of blood and a soldier in a war zone must get used to the experience of death, just as they must harden themselves to some degree in order to remain sane and carry on, the Internet user must to some degree harden himself to the blow-ups, harsh words, and losses of e-friendship that will inevitably occur. More inevitably, more harshly, more frequently, and often more irrevocably than used to be the case, pre-Internet.

This is a loss. There is no getting around it. It's a blow to our humanity. One can no longer invest each and every human interaction with the significance one previously could. The hardening of the human emotions, inuring oneself to things that are objectively sad, is always a loss, even when necessary.

So it comes to this: I am forced to admit that technology changes us in ways that its inventors could never have foreseen, in ways that no one planned. There was no conspiracy when e-mail was invented, then listserves, then blogs, then Facebook, to make people talk too much, to make them give in to their tempers too frequently, both to create and to destroy larger numbers of friendships, faster, than could have been dreamed of in the years before instant global communication. But that's where we are. It has happened. It's all very well, and in one sense true, to say, "Communication technology is a tool. It's only as good or as bad as the people using it." But in another sense that saying is a bit shallow. For different technologies, sometimes by pure accident, tap into different aspects of human nature--good and bad. The Internet has made us more cranky but perhaps also more generous. Facebook certainly makes me aware of more people's prayer requests. And fund-raising for those in need has never been easier. It's all a big mixed bag.

But one quiet loss that I would mourn, so that the loss will not occur unnoticed and unrecorded, is the loss of the stubborn friendship--the friendship that is the result of Providence and is kept in obedience to Providence, the friendship that tries many ways to maintain itself, the friendship of restraint and loyalty. I will not say that such a friendship can be maintained only in person, by the affection generated and exchanged via voice, facial expressions, handshakes, warmth, shared activities. But I would come close to saying that.

So we try to walk the fine line between being hypersensitive and emotional and being cold and cynical. We pray for wisdom. And we try to cultivate those few friendships with those we have never met, on, perhaps, the old "pen pal" model, that will last a good, long time, that will be broken up by death just temporarily, to be reinstated in and for eternity.

Seeing the forest

In the on-going thread on the reliability of the gospels, I wrote something about New Testament studies that I think should be highlighted elsewhere. (To be honest, I've written a lot of such things in that thread, but this is the one I'm grabbing right now to put into an independent post.)

I think a big part of the problem is that New Testament studies as it is often taught has a classic problem of being unable to see the forest for the trees. It focuses on supposed "Difficulties." Two problems with this are a) that the supposed difficulties are often exaggerated or even, properly speaking, not difficulties at all, and b) that they are not set in the context of the many confirmations of the gospels (and Acts, even more so), even on matters of detail.

The student thus comes away with the notion that Difficulties, which is to say "problems that call into question the ordinary-sense reliability of the gospels" are the rule rather than the exception, that they are typical and that confirmations are atypical. The student/scholar thus comes to have the uneasy feeling that he must redefine reliability, come up with some fancy literary theory, or "do" something else, in order to "deal with" these supposed many, many difficulties, because the difficulties allegedly make it just impossible for a Real Scholar to take the gospels to be reliable in an unhyphenated, un-asterisked sense.

I think this is a distortion.

In contrast, I want to recommend the attitude shown in a particular case by the late Colin Hemer concerning Luke, the author of both Luke and Acts. Hemer is discussing a crux in Acts concerning the allusion to Theudas by Gamaliel. He says something to the effect that, even if we cannot with confidence identify what "Theudas" Gamaliel is talking about, given all the other reason we have to trust the author of Acts as a careful historian, we should not be hasty to attribute an error to him at this point just because we don't know who this Theudas was. (I'm paraphrasing, of course.)

Mention the reliability of Luke to nine seminary-educated people out of ten, even conservatives, and like clockwork you'll immediately hear, with great solemnity, about the difficulty placing the census in Luke 2 in relation to secular history and the difficulty placing Paul's journeys, recounted in Galatians, with confidence into the events in the book of Acts!

One gets the distinct impression that such students and scholars have been led to believe that the prima facie case is that Luke is an unreliable author. But this is astonishingly incorrect. On the contrary, there are so many places where we can minutely connect the epistles with Acts and confirm Luke's connection to secular history in detail, that it is the "difficulties" that are the outliers. So strongly is this the case that, as with the case of Theudas discussed by Hemer, the difficulty in being sure exactly how the census in Luke 2 fits into secular history is a place where we are fully justified in concluding that, while it is possible that Luke made a rare error (especially rare for him), one historical explanation or another, consistent with what Luke says, is very likely correct even if we don't know which one.

Look, ma, no literary theory required.

So many words

In the wake of the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia, the Internet guarantees that there are many words. That is what the Internet provides--words. There are the evil words of those who hated him, spewing across the Twitter feed. There are the tributes with quotations of his own words, one of which I hope we will write soon at What's Wrong With the World. There are the free-standing quotations on Facebook, reminding us just how eloquent, profound, and pithy he was, how much he could say in how short a space. And then there are the debates about how to appoint his successor.

Since the great man's own vocation was one of words, it is fitting that he should be memorialized by bringing what he said and wrote to our minds. Since he loved the Constitution, it is fitting that those who also love it should discuss its implications (one way and another) for appointing his successor in an election year, or waiting until a new President is inaugurated.

At the same time, there is something within me, remembering the days and the years before the Internet, that rebels just a little at so many words. Sometimes it seems as though, in the avalanche of words in which we now live, we cannot concentrate on just one word--one quotation, one thing that epitomized the man, one speaking action, one human word eternally stamped upon the face of reality.

I am ambivalent about the tendency to make every important event about oneself. Where were you when the Challenger shuttle went down? Do you remember the moment you learned about 9/11? Did you ever get to meet ______? Such ways of framing events personalize the great happenings of this world, show children that history lives, and demonstrate the connections among men. At the same time, there is a whiff of narcissism about them, about reducing everything to me, me, me. So I hesitate to mention that I did, one time, have the great privilege of shaking Justice Scalia's hand. It was only a moment at a Federalist Society dinner at which he was speaking--a high point of my earthly pilgrimage. There was no long conversation. Indeed, I myself mostly stammered, having hoped for such a meeting for over a decade and, when it came to it, finding no words to say. I bring it up here only because it allows me to focus on just a few words. I remember that someone mentioned Justice Rehnquist, who was then ill. In the most natural way possible, with complete sincerity, Antonin Scalia said something like, "Pray for him. He needs it." He focused on those of us gathered round, yet he deftly and deprecatingly deflected our praise directed toward himself. He did not ask if we were Christians and would pray. He assumed it. His thought was for his sick colleague.

The greatness of Antonin Scalia lay in the fact that he was an aristocrat who lived to defend democracy. He did so because he believed that was right. That was his vocation. Thrust by the perversions of the Supreme Court and of the role of the federal government into the unwanted role of unelected oligarch in the United States, Scalia bore his burden of power with good humor, Christian humility, a touch of wryness, and unswerving integrity.

The truth of who Antonin Scalia was came out even in that moment greeting fans at a Federalist Society dinner. It came out, too, in this unbearably touching incident recounted by the libertarian pundit Jeffrey Tucker, at the time a silent, unsuspected eyewitness.

So if you admired Justice Scalia and are mourning his passing, do not feel that you have to read all of the words. Not just now, anyway. You may, instead, pick one word and focus on that, and let your meditation on it draw your mind to the God whom he served unto the end, Lord alike of the living and of the dead.

We shall not see his like again

How sleep the Brave

HOW sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.
...
There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there! ********************************** Antonin Scalia, rest in peace See also here.

Discussion continues concerning gospel harmonization and fictionalization

My blogging time has been dominated lately by discussions generated from my post here on Mike Licona's approach to gospel difficulties. The blog thread discussion there continues and contains a huge amount of relevant material, especially in my exchanges with commentator Christopher McCartney. I strongly encourage readers interested in the subject to read those exchanges.

Meanwhile, at Triablogue, I have had interesting exchanges on the same subject in this thread and this thread.

Whatever else may come of the controversy, one good thing has been that Steve Hays has drawn my attention to (without necessarily endorsing) this article by John Warwick Montgomery. It looks like it is from 1999. I had not read it before. Montgomery, though writing in terms of inerrancy which I would not necessarily adopt, makes excellent points against the neo-inerrantists of that time. Apparently the stylish thing then in attempting to integrate redaction criticism with conservative biblical scholarship was this: Take some theological truth. Say that a later redactor added it to Jesus' words and that Jesus didn't really utter it. (For example, the Trinitarian formula in the Great Commission.) Then say that this is a version of inerrancy because the Holy Spirit guided the redactor only to attribute truths rather than falsehoods to Jesus! The small fact that the claim that Jesus said these words would be a falsehood in the biblical account seems to have been of no account to these theorists.

Montgomery is nearly tearing his hair out in the article (in a scholarly sense of "tearing his hair out") trying to deal with the illogic and poor reasoning of those making these claims, and reading him was like a breath of fresh air to me just now. It rocks. Go read it.

New Post at W4 on Licona and gospel discrepancies

I have a long post just up at What's Wrong With the World on Mike Licona's approach in his forthcoming book to Gospel discrepancies. (I'm agin' it.) I was able to use a long lecture of his that lays out the approach, so I have plenty of material even though the book is not out yet. Comments can be left here or at W4.

Interview on Songtime

Host Adam Miller interviewed me on Songtime, a northeastern radio broadcast, last week on the "same God" debate. He had read my article on the Gospel Coalition web site on the subject.

The interview took about twenty-five minutes, and portions of it are found from about minute three of the broadcast here and again beginning at about minute sixteen. At the end of the second segment the host says that the interview in its entirety is on the web site, but I confess I haven't yet figured out how to find the recording of the entire interview. I think the segments included in the broadcast turned out well.

I've redirected comments here from W4, due chiefly to the brief discussion of dual covenant theology and whether the Jews worship the same God. This is because of some of the problems we have been having lately with anti-semitic commenters both here and at W4. Comments at Extra Thoughts are pretty strictly moderated.

Blog housekeeping

I'm sorry to have to announce that, for the time being, I have changed the settings for commenting here at Extra Thoughts to "registered users." This allows those with a Google account or any of several other types of accounts (Blogger, Yahoo, WordPress, and others, see list here) to comment, but it does not permit comments from those who are entirely anonymous or who do not sign in in some way.

I notice that some who commented on my "You Can Trust God" post below did not sign in with any ID, because that was not required at that time. Be assured that this change in comment policy has nothing to do with any of you and that I appreciated my interactions with all of you who commented there. I hope that all of you are able to keep on commenting here at Extra Thoughts with Google or some other type of account.

This change might or might not be permanent, but unfortunately there has been a recent uptick in particularly vile anonymous comment attempts to this blog, and I would prefer to allow Blogger to block them from the outset rather than deleting them individually at the moderation stage.

Thanks for your understanding!

You can trust God, but men are fallible

Having been raised as a conservative Baptist, I'm surprised that I only just last week ran across the following saying:

If we can't trust God about Genesis 1, how can we trust him about John 3:16?

A moment's googling shows that this question (or some version of it) is used by Answers in Genesis, the young-earth creationist organization, and specifically by Ken Ham of that organization. The concept was not new to me, but that wording was something I hadn't heard before.

To lay my cards on the table, I'm pretty sure the earth and the cosmos are very old. I would call myself an old-earth progressive creationist--a category not very well-known in YEC camps, where everyone who is not young-earth is generally thought of as an evolutionist. Actually, as readers of this blog know, I'm an outspoken advocate of intelligent design theory, and I'm also quite willing to come out and say (more so than some authors in the ID camp) that I think this evidence supports repeated intelligent interventions in the making of various species and animals, not merely in the origin of life or some other major transition. I don't have enough expertise to state precisely how often God probably created new species, but I'd be willing to lay bets that mammals didn't evolve by purely natural processes from reptiles, for example. I'm also an extremely strong supporter of the historical Adam, though I think he lived a lot longer ago than 6,000 years. (And no, I don't know exactly how long ago. And that's actually okay.) By "the historical Adam" I mean a real man, the one and only male progenitor of the human race, from whom, with Eve his wife, all of us are biologically descended, without interbreeding with non-human animals. I think that God made him by miraculous means and that there was strong physical as well as spiritual and mental discontinuity with all animal species. I've argued for the theological and even ethical importance of this view, here. I've also strongly opposed the recent work of John H. Walton in proposing a radically different view which he calls "an historical Adam" but which is not "the historical Adam" in the strong sense I have just defined. See my posts contra Walton  here, here, here, and here. And I've argued that the scientific claims that it is impossible for one couple to be the progenitors of the whole human race are shaky, here. So I don't at all shrink from the creationist label, and I'll admit to being more than a little impatient with John H. Walton, and even more so with Peter Enns, whom I find annoying.

All of that, I admit, may not be enough to establish my creationist "creds" with a real hard-liner on the age of the earth, but I'd like to think it would be a start.

With all that out of the way, let me go back to the saying at the beginning of this post and say this: It's wrong.

Why is it wrong? After all, on its face it almost sounds like a tautology. Either we do or don't worship a deity who is, by his very nature, not a deceiver. If we do, then we can trust him about everything, right? Including various parts of the Bible. And if we worship a being who might deceive us, then how can we trust him about anything?

But the saying is still wrong. It's wrong, to begin with, because it confuses God with man. What Ham is doing there is identifying his interpretation of Genesis 1 with "God's word" and insisting that, if Ken Ham is not infallible in his interpretation of Genesis 1, then God is a liar.

Mind you, I can well imagine that Ken Ham and I would have a lot more in common than I would have with his critics. To me, the comments by the Gungors (some musicians), to whom Ham is responding in that particular blog post, sound over-wrought and snobbish. They give the distinct impression that anyone who isn't an evolutionist is a contemptible knuckle-dragger. I have no patience with that kind of thing.

But the fact remains that it is a perilous and a misguided matter to identify your interpretation of one passage of Scripture with what God says, with no questions or differences of opinion allowed. All the more so when the question at issue is one where scientific evidence also comes into play. We absolutely must be willing to admit to our young people that there is such a thing as biblical interpretation, that controversy about biblical interpretation isn't per se a bad thing, that human interpretations are fallible, and that our interpretation of Genesis 1 is not equivalent to "God's word." Yes, that means admitting that you could be wrong about it. I think you should be willing to tell kids that this is what you think, but that you could be wrong. You can even be a young-earth creationist and tell them that.

This issue of varying interpretation comes up in many places in Scripture. You aren't turning into a Christianity-denying liberal if you think the story of the rich man and Lazarus was a parable that Jesus was telling and that Jesus wasn't actually affirming that it happened. Jesus often told parables. This looks like one of them. Another example: It is a completely viable possibility that the flames of hell in various biblical passages are a metaphor for the horror of eternal separation from God rather than describing a physical state of the damned. There can be legitimate difference of opinion on that point among those who take the Bible very seriously indeed as God's Word.

There are also textual areas where we as Christians need to be able to keep our heads and handle some uncertainty. It is not an abandonment of the Bible to recognize that the long ending of Mark may not have been there in the original text that Mark wrote; in fact, there is solid textual reason to doubt that it was. There is even reason to believe that the original ending of the Gospel of Mark may have been lost. That's okay.

Our faith shouldn't be shaken by such points. There is room for both human error and difference of opinion among solid Christians on all of these matters and more. These issues should not be presented to congregations or to young people as "trusting God's Word" vs. "not trusting God's Word."

There are more problems with the statement about Genesis 1 and John 3:16: It strongly implies that there are no levels of importance amongst doctrinal statements. It gives the impression that either all the views that Ken Ham (or your particular church) holds about God and theology are right or they are all wrong, dubious, or up for grabs. It certainly implies that a young-earth position is right up there in importance with, say, the doctrine that Jesus died for our sins, taught in John 3:16.

That's not true. Nowhere in the Bible does anyone say to anyone else, "Believe that the earth is 4,000 years old [or whatever it would have been at the time], and thou shalt be saved." But people are told to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. When the Apostle Paul gives a creed in I Corinthians 15, he doesn't include anything about the age of the earth, but he does talk a lot about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Jesus is asked what the most important commandments are, he lists loving the Lord God with all your heart and soul.

I don't want to be misunderstood. This isn't meant to encourage a facile argument of the sort one hears from social liberals nowadays, "Jesus never condemned homosexuality, so why are you Christians getting so het up about it?" Jesus explicitly taught that God made male and female and created marriage between them. The Apostle Paul again and again condemns homosexual practice. And then there is the natural law, which is another topic altogether.

My point is that biblical authorities do have priorities, and there is not the slightest indication whatsoever that the age of the earth is one of the high priorities. The existence of Adam, I'll grant, is given prominence in several important Biblical teachings, such as Paul's teaching about the origin of sin and death. But not the age of the earth, nor the creation within six twenty-four hour days.

Some doctrines are more important than others. You can still be a Christian and even get some things wrong. Most of us probably do have some things wrong, though we should do our conscientious best to interpret Scripture accurately.

Another, related problem with the statement is this: It teaches that all literal biblical interpretations stand or fall together. It strongly implies that, if the most natural, literal, on-the-face-of-it interpretation of Genesis 1 is called into question, it becomes impossible to know what any other part of the Bible means. But that's not true. I might be wrong about whether the days in Genesis 1 are ages or 24-hour days, but I can say with much greater confidence that the Gospels are asserting that Jesus really lived, really walked on this earth, really said various things, really died on the cross, and really rose again. The genre of the gospels is different. The sources of information are different. The nature of the claims is more tied into known history. (He was crucified under Pontius  Pilate, etc.) We should not think or teach that a wide-ranging skepticism about all Biblical meaning is the only alternative to a 24-hour-day interpretation of Genesis 1. That's incorrect.

And finally, perhaps my most controversial claim: That slogan communicates to young people that, if they are not young-earth creationists, they might as well be atheists, because they have "stopped trusting God." It teaches an inflexible theology that presents apostasy as the stark alternative to an acceptance of precisely this interpretation of this passage.

As I've indicated above, I think it's deeply and importantly misguided to believe that Adam was just the head of a clan of hominids and that man came into existence by natural, evolutionary processes from non-human animals. I think it creates all kinds of problems for one's theology of the fall and sin and for one's view of the image of God. I've put lots of energy into arguing against it. But if someone comes to hold that seriously mistaken view about Adam, he can still be going to heaven. Would I argue with a daughter of mine who was influenced by people who teach that? Sure, of course I would. I'm an argumentative person anyway, and I think this is important. Would I be concerned about possible other sociological "domino effects," causing someone to fall into theological and/or moral liberalism? Yes, I would. If you run with a certain crowd that sneers at special creation, you may pick up other things from them. But despite all of that, I would rather that someone I love were wrong about Adam and still believed that Jesus Christ is God the Son who came to this earth to die for our sins and to rise for our justification than that he decided he might as well go whole hog and become an agnostic or an atheist because of an all-or-nothing theological system! All the more so should we take such an attitude concerning the age of the earth all by itself.

Some years ago I knew of a man who lost his faith in Christ. His Christian parents were deeply distressed, of course. They were strong young-earth creationists and said that their son (then in his twenties) had begun sneering about "not believing all of that" and then had made it clear that he didn't believe Christianity at all, that he no longer regarded himself as a Christian. They were asked this question: Would you rather that your son believed in an old earth and were still a Christian, still a follower of Jesus Christ, still believed in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and in Jesus' death and resurrection for sin? They said yes, of course! But by then it was too late. Their son never gave anyone a chance to present that alternative to him, to show him the direct, powerful evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the other truths of Christianity, quite independent of one's views on the interpretation of Genesis 1. He was an adult by then, and a highly intelligent adult. He was responsible, because he could have figured out for himself that it didn't all have to stand or fall together. He could have asked more questions, sought for more light, looked into the evidences of Christianity. He chose to apostasize instead. I would not for the world heap blame upon the heads of his heart-broken parents.

But let's get this issue clearer--in our own minds, in our churches, and in our families. If you, dear parents, think that Ken Ham is right about the saying at the top of this post, and all that it implies, I most earnestly urge you, in Christ, to reconsider.

New post on Muslims, Christians, and the same God question

The Gospel Coalition has kindly asked me to write on this subject, and the post is now up, here.

One of the commentators opined that the "Clark Kent/Superman" argument is not intended by those who put it forward as a positive argument that Muslims and Christians do worship the same God but only as an answer, which he considers a good one, to the argument that Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God because of the major differences in doctrine and concept of God between the two religions. I wanted to highlight my response to that, here, and then (if this is brought up again), I can always link to it again if this question comes up again. To his claim that he isn't hearing people using this as a positive argument, I reply,

Well, then you haven't "heard" the same things I have "heard." It is definitely being used as a positive argument in various spontaneous debates all over the place (e.g., on Facebook), and it is being written up in ways that strongly sound that way even when someone might try to claim "deniability" that that was the intent. See, for example, this article by Beckwith, where the Clark Kent/Superman analogy is *quite reasonably* interpreted as a positive argument, though he may say that it was not his intention.
http://www.thecatholicthing.or...

Moreover, you are simply wrong to say that this would be a good response to arguments about divine properties and differences of concept. The arguments about the divine properties, especially essential properties, create a strong prima facie case that the two deities are not the same. The Clark Kent/Superman analogy does _nothing_ to answer this prima facie case. It merely points to a possibility. Who cares about bare possibilities? How do bare possibilities refute the perfectly legitimate prima facie case from major differences of concept?

Notice that this would be the case with even the scenario with Clark Kent himself. If someone proposes to Lois Lane (without positive argument) that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, it's completely reasonable and relevant for her to reply that Clark Kent is dweebie, shy, wears glasses, and shows no signs of super-powers. That's a case that has to be answered if someone wants her to _believe_ that they are the same being. It is _no_ answer to that case to say, "Hey, it's possible that Superman is Clark Kent's secret, superhero alter ego." That is not a "good refutation" of Lois Lane's argument. After all, there's a reason why Superman's identity with Clark Kent _is_ generally thought of as a secret that most people don't know--Superman goes to some trouble to keep the identity quiet and to make them appear different.

Just how much of a difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism?

We are often told, sometimes with exasperation, by the critics of Israel that there is a big, big difference between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic. Without delivering an entire dissertation on the subject, I'll just say that the more virulent, committed, and tunnel-visioned your anti-Israel perspective, the less plausible the claim.

But some cases don't even require us to develop such general principles, as they wear the equivalence between the two perspectives right on their faces. Viz., here:

A Michigan woman posted a video on YouTube supporting Palestinian stabbing attacks against Jews and blasted Muslims who try to argue that stabbing is “haram,” or forbidden, under Islamic law.

The Middle East Media Research Institute translated the Arabic-language video posted on YouTube last week by Lina Allan, who MEMRI described as “a Palestinian-Jordanian activist who lives in Michigan.”
[snip]
Allan disparaged Muslims who claim Islam does not allow stabbing attacks, accusing them of trying to be “muftis” and telling them to “go back to watching Turkish soap operas.”
Throughout the video, titled, “Is Stabbing Jews Haram [Forbidden]?” she notably used only the word “Jews” to describe the target of stabbing attacks, not “Israelis.”
[snip]
“Nobody can feel the suffering of the Palestinian people but the Palestinians living in Palestine,” Allan said. “I wish that you would stop interfering. Spare us your views, and go back to watching Turkish soap operas. It would be better if you didn’t talk about something you don’t understand.”

“I, Lina Allan, do not support the Palestinian government or any party. I support the Palestinian people, and I support any decision made by the Palestinian people, in order to regain its rights and its land,” she said.

As she delivered her statement, hanging behind her on the walls were photos of ancient Petra in Jordan and a sign that read, “Calm and Proud to Be an Arab.”

Israel has faced a wave of nearly daily stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks since September, that has been widely encouraged in songs and videos on Palestinian social media. The latest attack was a shooting in Hebron on Sunday.

Well, yes, Miss Allan, that's very clear. Thank you for being so forthright.

When we're talking about going around stabbing people, of course (and car-ramming, etc.), the distinction becomes more or less moot. If I supported stabbing random Swedes, would that be better than my supporting stabbing random Scandinavians?

Behold the face of God: Christmas and the scandal of particularity

In a debate with John Lennox several years ago, in which Lennox emphasizes the historical evidence for Christianity, Richard Dawkins scornfully gives us a textbook example of what Christian theologians call the scandal of particularity.

Dawkins is offended by the localism of Christianity and by the way that the evidences of Christianity tie in with its localism.

From the transcript of closing remarks, written out here: (I have silently altered some punctuation and capitalization.)

John Lennox:

I would remind you that the world Richard Dawkins wishes to bring us to is no paradise except for the few. It denies the existence of good and evil. It even denies justice. But ladies and gentlemen, our hearts cry out for justice. And centuries ago, the apostle Paul spoke to the philosophers of Athens and pointed out that there would be a day on which God would judge the world by the man that he had appointed, Jesus Christ, and that he’d given assurance to all people by raising him from the dead. And the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a miracle, something supernatural, for me constitutes the central evidence upon which I base my faith, not only that atheism is a delusion, but that justice is real and our sense of morality does not mock us.

Richard Dawkins:

Yes, well that concluding bit rather gives the game away, doesn’t it? All that stuff about science and physics, and the complications of physics and things, what it really comes down to is the resurrection of Jesus. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the sophisticated scientist which we hear part of the time from John Lennox – and it’s impressive and we are interested in the argument about multiverses and things, and then having produced some sort of a case for a deistic god perhaps, some god that the great physicist who adjusted the laws and constants of the universe – that’s all very grand and wonderful, and then suddenly we come down to the resurrection of Jesus. It’s so petty, it’s so trivial, it’s so local, it’s so earth-bound, it’s so unworthy of the universe.

Watch Dawkins saying this on Youtube here. You can hear the scorn in his voice.

If anything "gives the game away," it is Dawkins's derisive and purely subjective rejection of anything other than (in his words) a "deistic god perhaps."

There is no argument there. It just offends Dawkins's taste that God should reveal himself through a miracle, at a particular place and time, within a particular cultural context, to a particular people. To Dawkins, such divine condescension, in order to reveal particular doctrines and to save mankind, is "unworthy of the universe." (Whatever, precisely, it means for something to be unworthy of the universe.)

Thanks be to God, the true God, we do not worship Dawkins's Universe. We worship the personal God, the God who said, "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and out of Egypt have I called my son." We worship a God who has always had a chosen people and who has deigned to speak to man at sundry times and in diverse manners, and in these last days has spoken unto us through His Son.

His Son, whom he sent down from heaven, and who was made man for us and for our salvation.

For man could not have been saved in any other way. The deistic god about whom Dawkins will grudgingly hear tell is not a God who saves. He is a god who won't interfere once things are set going. He is a god who lets man go his own way.

But we are sinners, and we need a Savior. And so the true God did not abhor the womb of a virgin. Notice that whoever wrote the Te Deum already understood the Richard Dawkinses of the world very well, hundreds of years ago. Those of us who take our Christianity for granted at times might wonder, "Why even bring that up? Why would Jesus abhor the womb of the virgin?"

Because it was "so unworthy of the universe." Because it was so petty, so local, so earth-bound. That the Eternal Son, the one who made all things, who, yes, set the constants of the universe, the Great Physicist, the Eternal God who is above and beyond all things, should come down from heaven and be Incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary, and be made man.

Richard Dawkins looks at that and says, "Ewww, yuck." He will not bow his stiff neck to worship a God like that, a God who would do that, a God who would come down. He cannot even do so when the whole point made by Lennox was that it is precisely such a God who gives us evidence that He exists and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Yet should not the scientific mind be interested in truth, and in evidence of the truth?

It is not only because we needed a Savior that Jesus came. It is also because we needed to know more about God. God had already revealed himself in a number of those local ways that so offend Dawkins--by choosing the Jews, by signs and wonders throughout the Old Testament. But mankind needed to know more. We needed to know that He is Triune, that He loves us as individuals, that He wants us to be united with Him forever. We needed to know that He is our Father--not just the heavenly Father of a chosen group (which God had already revealed), but of us as individuals.

And so, the Gospel of John tells us, though "No man hath seen God at any time," nonetheless "the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."

Moses could not look upon the face of God, and so God hid him in the hollow of the rock while He passed by and showed Moses His glory indirectly.

But God wanted to show us His face. And the only way to do that, to show the face of God to man, was to come down into the creation and to have a face--a real face, a literal face that could be seen and touched.

So God was born as a Jewish baby in a petty, local venue, and the face of the God who redeems was revealed to man.

Today, let us not stumble at that stumbling stone. Let us not be offended by the scandal of particularity. Let us come and adore the One in whom alone we behold the face of God.


O that birth forever blessed,
When the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bear the Savior of our race,
And the babe, the world's Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face,
Evermore and evermore.

The Way of the Wandering Star at W4

In the next day I hope to put up some Christmas thoughts of my own. After all, this evening is only the beginning of the Christmas season. But in the meanwhile, nothing I can say individually is as good as what my editor, Paul Cella, has posted at What's Wrong With the World--a Christmas sermon from 1951 by his maternal grandfather. It is based on the following couplet from G. K. Chesterton:

To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and are....

A merry, holy, and blessed Christmas to all.

A brief note on "do Muslims and Christians worship the same God"

I almost put this on my Facebook wall but decided it fits here better:

It is important to recognize the difference between the way that the "newer" religion looks at its concept of God and the way that the "older" religion looks at the "newer" religion's concept of God. Just as it is understandable that a Jew who has not converted to Christianity believes that the Christian and he do not worship the same God, and this does follow from his premises, so it is with Christianity and Islam. The Muslim, whose religion changes the concept of God in important ways from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, claims that there is an essential continuity, but the Christian, as long as he remains a Christian and not a Muslim, should reject this.

In the same way, the Christian insists that the Trinity is not a change in the concept of God and is consistent with Judaism, but unless a Jewish person converts, he believes this to be false. As soon as a modern Jew decides that the Trinity is not that big of a deal as compared to his previous concept of God, he to some extent has accepted Christian ideas. This fundamental asymmetry between the way of viewing the question from the perspective of older and newer religion must be understood and maintained.

That is why, recognizing the important innovations in Islam, we as Christians should hold that we and Muslims do not worship the same God. That Muslims say that we do is not the determining factor, because we aren't Muslims.

No theories in philosophy of language get around the need to decide how important the differences are between the Muslim and Christian concept of God. And if they are sufficiently crucial, then we should not say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

Update: Some have tried to make an analogy to cases of what is called "opacity of reference." For example, Clark Kent and Superman are the same person even though Clark Kent's co-workers don't know this. The morning star and the evening star are the same heavenly body, and this is true even if someone thinks that they are different. But this analogy, if anything, tells us that the Christian definitely should disbelieve that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, though Christians can believe that the God of Abraham is the same God that he (the Christian) worships. In the latter case, Christians believe (though modern, non-messianic Jews deny) that the same Being caused the origins of Judaism--the promises to Abraham, the Exodus, etc.--and the origins of Christianity--the resurrection of Jesus, etc. In that sense, the Christian says that the God of Abraham is the same entity as the God we worship, just as the morning star really is the evening star. But no Christian should believe that the God whom Jesus represented is the same entity who caused the origins of Islam! On the contrary, we as Christians should emphatically deny this. That point alone puts paid to any attempted analogies of the problem to that of the morning star and the evening star. It also distinguishes what the Christian claims about the relationship of Christianity to Judaism from what the Christian believes about the relationship of Christianity to Islam. The point is not that only a Trinitarian can be in some sense worshiping the true God. Abraham was not a Trinitarian but was worshiping the true God. But Abraham, we believe, really was in touch with the true God. The true God really was the source of Abraham's revelations. The true God was not the source of Mohammad's.

How Bright Appears the Morning Star

I was moved to reflect this past Sunday how incredibly fortunate I am to attend a church that uses an older hymnal. My continuing Anglican church uses the 1940 hymnal. No tuneless "praise songs," no ear-splitting performances. No modernized words. It's a gift.

Advent has some great hymns, many of which were unknown to me in my Baptist upbringing. This is one place where the Anglican tradition has hymns to teach to the Baptists, though hymn-teaching so often goes the other way.

One of my greatest favorites in this category is "How Bright Appears the Morning Star," the translation of Wie Shön Leuchtet der Morgenstern, by Philip Nicolai, but best known in its harmonization by J.S. Bach.

Here are the words:

How bright appears the Morning Star,
with mercy beaming from afar;
the host of heaven rejoices.
O Righteous Branch, O Jesse’s Rod,
thou Son of Man and Son of God!
We too will lift our voices:
Jesus, Jesus, holy, holy, yet most lowly,
draw thou near us; great Emmanuel, come and hear us.

Though circled by the hosts on high,
he deigned to cast a pitying eye
upon his helpless creature.
The whole creation’s head and Lord,
by highest seraphim adored,
assumed our very nature;
Jesus, grant us, through thy merit, to inherit
thy salvation. Hear, O hear our supplication.

Rejoice, ye heavens, thou earth, reply;
with praise, ye sinners, fill the sky
for this, his incarnation.
Incarnate God, put forth thy power;
ride on, ride on, great Conqueror,
till all know thy salvation.
Amen, amen! Alleluia, alleluia!
Praise be given, evermore by earth and heaven.

Here is my earlier post on it. I want to say again what I said there: I defy anyone to be gloomy while belting out, "Incarnate God, put forth thy power. Ride on, ride on great Conqueror, till all know thy salvation."

In the years since 2009 I still have not found a high-quality choral version of this on-line. Someone needs to get together a really good choir and put out a collection of Anglican hymns. But here is a nice organ version:

Giving content to complementarianism without giving in to the creeps [updated]

I recently learned of the existence of this video concerning complementarianism. As I said here, while it is pretty clear that Mary Kassian (the woman in red in the video) is trying to water down complementarianism, and while the very title of the post in which she embeds it ("Kissing Traditionalism Goodbye") makes it clear that she is trying to make complementarianism more like feminism, the video itself could be a lot worse. You'd have to be a pretty bitter anti-evangelical with a (probably manospherian) chip on your shoulder to classify this video with what I was discussing in the post itself--namely, a pamphlet by Focus on the Family that took a pretty morally neutral stance towards RU486 abortion.

On the other hand, I do find the video and Kassian's approach interesting and unfortunate, because I do see (e.g., reading my friends' comments on Facebook) an attempt in evangelical circles to take complementarianism regarding men and women and put it into some kind of box: We don't ordain women, and we agree that women and men ought to be different in the areas of reproduction and sexual intercourse (so we're against the homosexual agenda and the gender-bending agenda), but beyond that...meh. Who knows? This was most strikingly exemplified by a Facebook friend who acted completely clueless when I stated what seemed absolutely obvious--that if you think men and women are importantly different you should think that having women beat each other up as a spectator sport is especially disgusting and unnatural, even more so than having men beat each other up as a spectator sport. Oh, no, why should "women's mixed martial arts" be unfeminine in any way, shape, or form? To call such an approach "complementarianism" (e.g., because the person doesn't support women's ordination) is pretty absurd, in my opinion.

On the other hand, the question of giving concrete content to complementarianism in the world outside the church and the bedroom is not going to be cut and dried. It would be overly rigid to say, "Men and women are different. Therefore, their roles should be different. Therefore, the husband should not be getting up with a baby in the night and should not be changing diapers." Even John Piper's recent apparent implication that women in secular positions should never be in authority over men seemed too strong, as it would rule out a female college professor with male students in any field. On the other hand, his statement that a woman should not be a drill sergeant seems obviously correct.

The problem that I see with the video of Mary Kassian and Nancy de Vos [Correction: De Moss--see Anonymous's comment below] being interviewed on the subject of complementarianism is that they were too disinclined to give any principles with concrete implications at all. For example, here would be a few ideas that I suspect Mary Kassian, in particular, would be uncomfortable with:

--Although there are exceptions, and families should not insist on starving rather than having the mother work if this ideal cannot be maintained, as a general rule the ideal in a family is that the mother is able to be at home with her children and that the father is the breadwinner.

--Women have a special connection to children as a result of their being constructed by God to bear and nurture children.

--Women should not cancel their own femininity by entering distinctively, physically masculine fields such as the military and being cops on the beat.

--Women should be physically protected, especially when they are pregnant. Therefore, women in physically demanding areas such as sports need to rethink how this is consonant with their femininity when they get married and are or might be pregnant. In short, no pregnant racehorse jockeys.

--If a woman is in a position of authority over a man, especially a man of her own approximate age, she should recognize that this situation carries unique difficulties precisely because she is female and he is male. This does not necessarily render such situations unacceptable, but it does mean that the woman in question needs to think about how to carry out her administrative duties while retaining her femininity. In particular, she should be careful not to try to overcome any sense of insecurity in the position by being deliberately harsh and unfeminine, by using bad language, ridicule, or other "employee management tactics" that she perceives as "masculine." Needless to say, these tactics are also inappropriate for male authority figures, but there are particular temptations for women to use them, just as there are particular temptations for men to use them, and the use of them by a woman to a man creates unique tensions in the workplace.

These are the types of statements and advice that, it seems to me, we need to be willing to go out on a limb and give both to women and to men. After all, if men don't hear that there is anything particularly un-ideal about two-career families, why should they even try to shoulder the burden of supporting a family? But I didn't hear anything like this from de Vos and/or Kassian in the interview, though de Vos [DeMoss] was sounding more "traditional" than Kassian, who provocatively heads her post "Kissing Traditionalism Goodbye." In the interview, Kassian implied that ditching all differences between men and women is extreme, unbiblical, and wrong, but she was quite evidently unwilling to make any statements like those above that would imply that men and women should take on concretely different roles in society, even to some extent. Indeed, her repeated (cliched, silly) dismissive allusions to "June Cleaver" made it pretty clear that she was trying to get away from all of that.

I suspect, though they do not say so, that these complementarians may be wary of seeming to give aid and comfort to groups such as Vision Forum and ATI (Bill Gothard's group). The male heads of both of these organizations have been credibly accused of abusing their positions to obtain romantic and some degree of sexual gratification from much younger women whom they were employing. Moreover, the organizations teach an extreme form of patriarchalism, including theses such as that unmarried women should not have careers outside the home but should live with their parents indefinitely, that women should not go to college, and the like.

The fact is, unfortunately, that there are creepy hyper-patriarchalists out there in the Christian world, and it's understandable that complementarians want to distance themselves from them.

But it doesn't follow that complementarianism has virtually no concrete content, beyond an extremely generic idea that "God made male and female," opposition to the homosexual agenda, and a refusal to accept women's ordination.

One problem with such a vague complementarianism is that young people have absolutely no idea how to live out complementary male and female roles. And I really mean no idea. The very idea that the man ought to ask the woman out on a date rather than vice versa is considered positively revolutionary. And that he should offer to pay? Shocking.

Talk of how complementary male-female interaction is "like a dance" (as in the video) is nice and poetic, and I don't really mean to scorn it, but in real life terms young people don't just intuit what that means when the rubber meets the road. They are watching aggressively feminist movies all the time full of women who beat up men. How in the world are they supposed to know what that "dance" looks like? Maybe if they were lucky enough to have parents who modeled it, they will know. Otherwise, it has to be taught, and that means talking about questions like, "Should women be in the military?" "Are there special problems about women and men working together in an office environment, and how can Christians deal with them?"

It ought to be possible, and it is possible, to give sensible complementarian answers to these questions without endorsing the likes of Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips, or their extreme ideas.

I think, in fact, that when the young interviewer asked Nancy de Vos [DeMoss] and Mary Kassian, "What does that look like?" concerning complementarianism, she was thinking perhaps they would give answers like what I listed above. I don't know if she would have liked those answers, but I suspect she was trying to elicit something a little bit more definite than what they gave. I can't help thinking (based on her way of talking) that Nancy de Vos [DeMoss] thinks people already know what male-female complementarity looks like in society and that her job is just to reassure women that this doesn't mean that they are oppressed. If I'm right about that, she needs to discover that millennials often don't know. Mary Kassian, I'm guessing, wouldn't agree with most or perhaps with any of the statements I made above and really does want complementarianism to amount in practice to men and women doing nearly all the same things in society but doing them with a somewhat different oeuvre. In my opinion, that is inherently unstable. A complementarianism watered down that much, a complementarianism that is allergic to saying, "Women shouldn't be warriors. Women shouldn't be beat cops. Women shouldn't be beating each other up" eventually has so little to show in the way of real differences it is willing to state between men and women that it has little defense against full-bore egalitarianism.

If we don't want the world to divide up between the feminists and the creepy hyper-patriarchalists, we need to articulate a reasonable, but more definite, complementarianism. I consider the CBMW to be rather well-placed to do so. But in that case, I think they need someone other than Mary Kassian to do the job.

Anti-Israel Derangement Syndrome

In an earlier post I wrote, concerning Israel, "So my fundamental sense of fair play is moved to note these things and take the side that I think is most aligned with truth and accuracy."

There is something eerily fascinating about the sheer amount of irrational venom directed at the nation of Israel for even existing as a nation. Once you notice the venom, it's hard to stop noticing it. It's a bit like the virulent anti-white racism that is excused or even directly encouraged by the leftists in America and Europe. Once you notice it, you can't un-see it. And it's so manifestly unfair and weird that it's interesting, in its own bizarre way.

The most recent incident of this type concerns an Israel-hating retired Jewish academic (British), who refused to answer a child's questions about, of all things, the domestication of the horse. Nor did she merely hit the delete key on the inquiry e-mail. She wrote back a spiteful little note saying that she would answer the questions only when there is "justice for Palestinians in Palestine." Why would she do such a thing? Because she (the retired professor) is part of a Boycott Israel group and thinks refusing to answer questions about horses from an Israeli 13-year-old is a part of her boycott commitment. Really. I'm not making this up. You can't make it up. In fact, in this story Dr. Marsha Levine doubles down and defends her actions, proudly telling the UK Telegraph that she would answer similar questions from a child from another country.

Dr Levine, who completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology before taking up research posts at Columbia University and Syracuse University in New York, told The Telegraph that if a school student from a different country had got in touch with her to ask about horses, she would have responded differently.

“Kids have questions, I usually answer their questions,” she said. “But I have agreed to BDS [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel], and I do want to see justice for Palestine.

“In Israel the majority of Israelis support the policies of the government which abuses the rights of Palestinians, so the fact is I don’t want to help Israelis, and if you don't start with children where do you start?

“And she is not that young anyway, her English is pretty good. If people don’t stand up for justice, the world is going to come to an end.”

Yes, folks, you read that right. Dr. Marsha Levine is doing her small part to prevent the end of the world by refusing to answer an Israeli child about archaeology and the history of the domestic horse. Makes sense to me! What a hero!

I have never heard of such a mean, petty, spiteful, unprofessional action by an individual professor in relation to a person asking academic questions from any other country, ever. Not even South Africa in the heyday of that boycott movement. Knowing leftists, I suppose it's possible that it happened if and when some unwitting South African schoolgirl with a Dutch name wrote to a lefty professor in, say, 1990. There was no Internet then (to speak of) to shame a professor who did such a thing, so we might not have heard of it. But my guess is that politics has hardened since then and has more greatly overwhelmed such outdated notions as professionalism and courtesy. After all, if Levine wanted to pontificate against Israel, why couldn't she have done that in addition to answering questions about the domestication of the horse? My guess (though it's only a guess) is that this would have been the response of a leftist professor thirty years ago. Yes, that would be silly, pompous, and even somewhat unprofessional, injecting an unrelated political sermon into a discussion about one's academic specialty. But it would not be blatantly mean-spirited.

I note, too, the creepiness of Levine's emphasis on the age of Shachar Rabinovitch, her young correspondent: "She is not that young anyway."

Hmmm, is it just me, or is there something rather chilling about that? It is thus that people speak who are justifying much darker actions than a snarky e-mail. Let's not forget that "Palestinian" terrorists will sometimes justify killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that, given Israel's requirement of civil or military service for all young adults, there are no real Israeli civilians over a certain age. Levine is making a judgement of responsibility--what Christians sometimes call a judgement that the child has reached the "age of accountability" when she is capable of sin. The sin in question, here, is the sin of being a non-self-hating Israeli. Shachar is, apparently, considered old enough by Levine that she must either repudiate her country or be held to share in its corporate guilt. Am I saying that Levine thinks Shachar deserves to die in a terrorist attack if she doesn't share Levine's politics? Not quite. But I am saying that people exactly like Levine are often extremely quick to make excuses for "Palestinian" terror attacks, and I am also saying that Levine's haste to try to impute some kind of guilt or responsibility to Shachar, and her desire to emphasize the allegedly widespread wrong-thought among Israelis, bodes ill for her ability to condemn acts of terrorism wholeheartedly.

When people are just plain mean-spirited and vindictive toward the innocent, one starts to wonder why. When one starts to wonder why, one starts to see all kinds of facts about the poisonous nature of certain ideologies. When it comes to Israel hatred, Dr. Levine is an opportunity to gain wisdom about both the nasty fruit and the nasty root of that ideology.

Exchange on doctors killing jihadis and Himmler

Over at Triablogue I'm having an interesting back-and-forth with Steve Hays, who has proposed that it would be moral for doctors actively to kill jihadis who are injured and to harvest their organs to help their victims. He also appears to think that it would be moral for a fireman who knows that Himmler will grow up to commit genocide to refrain deliberately from rescuing Himmler from a fire as a young child in order to prevent his later evil actions.

That is the general context of the debate. It's gone through several posts. Links, starting with Steve's post to which I responded and going in order from there, are here, here, here, and here. I think that's all of them. Readers may want to follow along. That's been much of my blogging time lately.

Happy Thanksgiving

To my readers at Extra Thoughts, a happy Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving post in full is up at What's Wrong With the World. It incorporates and expands on two earlier posts originally published here.

Te Deum

We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship Thee, the Father everlasting.
To Thee all Angels cry aloud: the Heavens and all the powers therein.
To Thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of Thy Glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles praise Thee.
The godly fellowship of the Prophets praise Thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise Thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee;
The Father of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true, and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.
When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man: Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God in the glory of the Father.
We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with Thy Saints in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save Thy people: and bless Thine heritage.
Govern them and lift them up for ever.
Day by day we magnify Thee; and we worship Thy Name, ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let Thy mercy be upon us: as our trust is in Thee.
O Lord, in Thee have I trusted: let me never be confounded.

"Excuse me, I'm having trouble finding this nonsense in my Bible"

Tomorrow or late tonight I will be putting up a Thanksgiving post at What's Wrong With the World, and I will link that from here as well. But just before that, I wanted to put this amusing meme out there. I was reminded of it by this post  at Calvinistic Cartoons that mentioned women's ordination--a subject on which I share Eddie Eddings's opinion. (Disclaimer: I'm not a Calvinist even though I link Calvinistic Cartoons.)

Does dissing home schooling make you shallow?

My title is deliberately provocative, of course. It was prompted by this silly little list, "12 Signs You Were Definitely Home Schooled" (as opposed to being indefinitely home schooled?), which happened to pop up in my Facebook feed when a friend-of-a-friend shared it with a friend. (It is thus that Facebook, while killing blogging in several obvious senses, is also a friend to bloggers by giving them material.) 

The post is by Tiffanie Brunson, who is social media coordinator for the e-zine Relevant, in which her post appears. I infer that she was home schooled and is now critical of her upbringing. She also appears to think she is a humor writer, but in actuality the list just comes across as childish.

What struck me most about the list was its emphasis on ephemeral values such as being with-it and stylish. It seems that, having missed the opportunity (at the age of thirteen) to be a pathetic thirteen-year-old yearning to be "in" and look "cool" with the other kids at school, this critic of home schooling tries to live out that essential phase of life in her twenties.

Viz.

8. You Idolized Your Cool Cousins Who Went to Public School

It didn’t matter if they were Mathletes, AV club nerds or captain of the football team, if your cousins went to public school, they were the coolest. Maybe you even had cousins who got to wear one-piece swimsuits in public and listened to secular radio stations. You could have hung posters of them in your room and felt fine about it.

Tiffanie tells us at the outset that these are "12 things every home schooler experienced," though she later inconsistently (#2) says that "of course" that particular one (lots of siblings--is that a bad thing anyway?) was "not a home schooling requirement." The title, on the other hand, says that these are signs that you were definitely home schooled, which seems to imply a sufficient condition. The "every home schooler experienced" sentence seems to imply a necessary condition. Does she mean that all of these are sufficient and necessary conditions of being home schooled? The latter is certainly false, as several of them do not apply to quite a few home schoolers of my acquaintance. And of course, these are also not sufficient conditions, since it's entirely possible to have, e.g., lots of siblings without being home schooled. But never mind. One can't expect someone trying hard to be a humor writer to be logical.

As to #8, it's pretty foreign to me.

Moving on, the emphasis upon not very important things that other people get to do that "we poor home schoolers" didn't get to do gets stronger:

9. You Had No Idea What Yearbook Superlatives Were

Hardcore homeschoolers didn’t get yearbooks and didn’t have a graduating class to superlative-ize. They had to rely heavily on scrapbooking and home videos to capture sweet memories. Let’s be honest though, most of us would probably rather just forget.

I myself went to school (Christian school, but a bricks and mortar school), and I'm not entirely sure what she means by "yearbook superlatives." I edited my senior year school yearbook, which nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. (This was in the 80's, when you had to use black India ink to cover any part of the page you weren't filling with pictures if you did a collage.) So people wrote nice things or funny things in each other's yearbooks. That was cool, especially if it was a guy one had a crush on. But it wasn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

12. Your Fashion Sense Was a Bit Off

Denim frocks, scrunchies and similar things were cool when Bonnie Hunt wore them in the early ’90s, but they definitely were not cool when worn by 13-17 year-olds in 2006. And the list of things you weren't allowed to wear was likely too long to recount. A personal favorite: Graphic tees. Most homeschool moms were in agreement with the “no shirts with anything remotely questionable on it” policy. And it didn’t even have to be offensive.

Since I don't know what Tiffanie's mom considered "remotely questionable," I can't render an opinion on whether her graphic t-shirt bans were reasonable or not. But...the paragraph sounds pretty pathetic. The repeated use of the word "cool," for example. Actually, most of the home schooled teens growing up around me look quite normal, fashion-wise, though "normal" doesn't mean "immodest." So for the young ladies, especially, they and their parents have to do a certain amount of looking and perhaps spend some extra money to get around our current culture's determination that women dress like prostitutes.

Then there's this one:

10. You Never Experienced Prom

Since homeschoolers weren’t allowed to dance, proms were a definite no-go. But it wouldn’t be a weird subculture without creating a super lame alternative. Thus, you had prom-like gatherings where kids would dress up, get corralled into some sort of community or convention center and enjoy sugar-free fruit punch and salisbury steak. It was a little like going to dinner at your grandparents’ house, but with more taffeta and pocket squares and less fun.

Gosh, that's hilarious. Only it is, in fact, false. My local home school organization holds a prom, with dancing, each year, and has done so for enough years that I'm pretty sure Tiffanie's generation was included. I find it hard to imagine we are the only ones. Southwest Michigan isn't exactly the Hipness Center of the home schooling world.

But, again, I have to wonder if it really matters all that much anyway. Is prom this super-important rite of passage? Secular school proms are often...highly problematic, to put it mildly. I'm thinking here of getting drunk, sex-simulating dancing which any chaperones on hand have to be "meanies" and stop, and actual sex afterwards. Like a high school yearbook, prom is one of those things that a person's life can easily be complete without.

In fact, the "you never experienced prom" complaint, like "you didn't have a high school yearbook" strengthens the overall feeling that Tiffanie is taking trivial things and treating them as at least somewhat important--part of making sure a young person can make a successful transition into real life. But in all seriousness, how many people are helped in their future by having gone to prom, or hindered by not having had a high school yearbook? Or, setting aside career issues, is it really deeply personally enriching to have a high school yearbook? I suppose it might be in given cases. But by the same token, if it's personal enrichment we are talking about, there is no reason to think that relationships with siblings or other home schooled young people, or the activities carried out in those contexts (such as the co-op activities that Tiffanie sneers at in a different number), are not enriching.

This column, light-hearted as it is meant to sound, has a strangely culturally blinkered undercurrent: If you didn't have these specific activities, clothes, rites of passage, etc., you were deprived. And the specific ones in question just happen to be those common in secular American life. Isn't that a little narrow-minded? Yet ironically, the idea is supposed to be that it is the home schoolers who were narrow-minded if they didn't participate in all the "cool" stuff.

Every way of life has its pros and cons, and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I doubt that Tiffanie would write a similarly snarky column about South American tribesmen or Amish who don't have prom or high school yearbooks and don't dress in the latest, most popular American fashions. And she might have had some much, much worse experiences if she had not been home schooled, especially if she had been public schooled. Getting an STD at the age of 17 makes salisbury steak and taffeta look pretty good by comparison.

The idea behind her criticisms appears to be that there can be no such thing as a legitimate sub-culture that is different in part from the larger culture around. If you are part of an entirely different culture from 21st-century America, that may be okay, depending on specifics. But if you happen actually to live in 21st century America (or, presumably, Europe), and you aren't actually Amish, then you have to get "with it" or your kids will be deprived through not being cool in their teens and twenties. (Where the Mennonites fall on Tiffanie's child-depriving scale of coolness, I'm not sure.) Being in the world but not of it apparently doesn't extend to not going to a high school prom night.

At this point, as new generations grow up, there is a proliferation of "I wouldn't have done it that way" blogs and groups concerning home schooling as well as for other conservative countercultural movements. Some make good and important points. The antics of Bill Gothard of the ATI movement certainly needed to be exposed. I myself have said that the Christian "courtship" culture has come at a very bad time and that Christian parents need instead to be reclaiming a smart notion of dating, including casual dating. Even Tiffanie has one point worth considering:

Homeschoolers are awkward because they are, surprisingly, overconfident. Because most of our days are spent in our homes with our families, we just assume that whatever is OK to do at home is also OK everywhere else. Most of us learn the hard way that this is not the case.

I think she's right about that as a rough generalization, at least for some, and we home schooling parents do well to bear it in mind as a danger and try to counteract it.

But too often, the useful points get mixed up with a lot of shallow nonsense or worse.

What both parents and young people need to be thinking about is the intersection of eternal values and earthly practicalities. That is (no surprise) extremely difficult. In what ways might being un-cool become being unemployable or unmarriageable? Are those things that can be changed, or do they represent ways in which the world is demanding something wrong, and we must stick to our principles? Obviously, this will vary with specifics. At what point do decisions about just staying out of this or that cultural phenomenon (be it proms or Facebook or Twitter) stymie opportunities for friendships and future career to such an extent that our children end up helpless or problematically isolated? Have we made being countercultural an end in itself, to our harm and/or that of our children?

These are serious matters, matters with which every responsible Christian parent wrestles, whether home schooling or not. For my part, I hope and pray that my children grow up to be fully committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and also able to evaluate maturely whatever mistakes I have made. I'm afraid, though, that Tiffanie Brunson's approach does not match that mature, considered evaluation.

The apologetic value of the fall and the tension with theistic evolution of man

I have long thought that there is an argument to be made for the Judeo-Christian teaching of the fall of man quite independent of more direct arguments (such as for the resurrection of Jesus) for Christianity as a whole.

Look at what we know of human beings--man, the "glory, jest, and riddle of the world." Man is (pace those who say bonobos can talk) the only creature on earth able to use natural language, the only creature able to use abstract reasoning. Not only does man have unique abilities, man also has a unique capacity both for good and evil. Some human beings give their entire lives to altruistic endeavors, while others give their entire lives to figuring out how to torment and harm others. The former way of living one's life seems to most of us like a call to our "higher selves," while the latter seems to us twisted, not the way it ought to be, a perversion of human nature.

Where did this being come from, so different from all the other animals? And how does it come about that we have this notion of what human beings should be doing and should be like, that some people seem to fulfill (or come close to fulfilling) this ideal, while in so many ways we also fall short of this ideal?

The traditional Judeo-Christian explanation of these facts is that man was originally made in the image of God. He was specially made and is truly different from all the animals. Moreover, man was made good. Man was made with a human nature that was originally turned or oriented toward God. But there was a catastrophe at a real, historical time, and man fell, and now every human being (with perhaps only one exception--Jesus Christ--or if you are a Catholic the two exceptions of Jesus and his mother Mary) is born with a sin nature. A sin nature, at a minimum, is an innate bent or inclination to sin.

This set of historical claims does quite a good job explaining the data I brought up to begin with. Why does man seem so different from animals? On the traditional Judeo-Christian view, because he is different, and is so intrinsically, and was made so. Why does man have a yearning towards good? Because he was made originally for God and still retains the natural light and the image of God. Why does man inevitably commit evil? Because man fell and now has a sin nature. Why is there such a strong feeling that "it shouldn't be that way"? Because it was not originally meant to be that way, and because man realizes, deep down, that he was not made for evil and destruction.

It is much more difficult to explain these facts if we assume the Judeo-Christian account to be false.

To some extent, then, I think it can be justly said that the "glory, jest, and riddle" argument confirms the Judeo-Christian story of the history of mankind.

But if one accepts full-scale theistic evolution for mankind, one undermines this apologetic point. What I mean by "full-scale" theistic evolution for mankind is that one accepts that, to all appearances, mankind evolved by natural processes from non-human animals, with at least the appearance of full physical evolution. At most, the "full-scale" theistic evolutionist may allow some kind of invisible, indetectable "ensoulment" to have occurred, but for the most part the full-scale TE accepts the Darwinian's emphasis upon continuity between man and animals. I discussed some of this here.

It is highly debatable that the full-scale TE can make any forceful use of the "glory, jest, and riddle" argument I have outlined. For one thing, the whole doctrine of the fall is lessened. As I discussed here, the TE view is that there was never a time when man as a race was immortal. Physical death was a part of not only animal but (given full biological continuity) human fate from the outset. Indeed the very notion of mankind is blurred on the full-scale TE view, giving serious problems to the meaning of the imago dei itself. John H. Walton believes that mankind always killed and committed other acts which we would call "sin" now but that they were not accounted as sin prior to God's "choosing" Adam, because previous hominids were not regarded as accountable.

Insofar as such a view has a place for any sort of "fall" at all, it cannot be a sharp cataclysm followed by a radical change in human nature. It therefore becomes extremely difficult for such a view to make explanatory use of the claim that man was "originally not intended to be this way," that man was made good by God from the outset, and that the evil that man now does is a result of a severe, negative change in what mankind innately is like.

Sometimes those attracted to TE will say that they accept it (not being experts in science, etc.) for apologetic reasons, in order to avoid or remove obstacles to reaching secularists who take the full Darwinian story as gospel.

But such accommodation, ironically, cuts off the TE from using important apologetic resources. The most obvious of these are the resources provided by the empirical, scientific evidence for the intelligent design of nature, since one who is trying to accept as much Darwinian biology as possible must also accept the idea that any activity of God in the realm of biological design is indectable. My argument here is that the attempt to accept TE for apologetic reasons also cuts one off from the apologetic argument from the nature of man (both good and evil) and from the shock and wrongness of evil.

It is not in general a good idea to pursue strategy at the expense of pursuing truth. Often enough, one succeeds at neither. The "strategic" acceptance of theistic evolution is a notable case in point.