Reverence, fundamentalism, and modern evangelicalism

Recently I heard on the radio that an adult coloring Bible has been published by Zondervan.

The Babylon Bee has been satirizing the proliferation of "Bibles" for a while (e.g., here, here, and here), but really, satire almost seems to be dead on this subject.

In real life there is the so-called Brick Bible, which is a Bible story book (why does a Bible story book have to be called a Bible, since they aren't the same thing?) done in the style of Lego pictures. They even crucify a Lego Jesus on a Lego cross.

And then there's this one: NIV Wild About Horses Bible. It intersperses photos of horses, inscribed with "short inspirational thoughts and scripture verses on themes of love, peace, friendship, beauty, strength and faith [that] accompany the photos," amongst the pages of Holy Writ.

I was posting about the coloring Bible on Facebook and encountered the argument that "as long as it gets more people to read the Bible, what's the problem?" Well, I beg to question whether, in fact, a coloring book combined with the text of the Bible is actually going to get more people to read the Bible.

In thinking about all the problems with treating the text of the Bible (or even dumbed-down Bible stories labeled as "a Bible") as an opportunity for marketers to make lots of money by selling people irreverent, self-expressionistic kitsch, I got to thinking about this whole notion of reverence.

At first I was tempted to think that the "what does it matter" evangelical tin ear to all matters of tackiness and reverence is a result of an absence of sacramentalism. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that isn't quite right, sociologically.

The old fundamentalists would have had conniptions over a coloring Bible. They carried their Bibles, the actual physical books, with reverence. They even questioned whether you should place your Bible on the floor. And don't get me started imagining what they would have probably said about a fake Lego "Bible" in which Lego Jesus gets crucified on a Lego cross.

Yet they weren't, at least officially, sacramentalists. They may have treated the physical bodies of their Bibles in a quasi-sacramental way, but the only theory involved in general was the theory of being reverent and respectful toward sacred matters, including the Word of God. This meant that there were proprieties that needed to be followed. The Veggie Tales makers showed some of this idea of propriety when they refused to do New Testament stories in which Jesus appeared as a vegetable (!).

Part of the problem with a "coloring Bible," which is in turn a lot less bad than a Lego Bible, is the idea that the things of the Lord exist principally for our benefit. A Bible that you color in encourages the idea that the Bible exists for your entertainment and enjoyment rather than your existing for God's glory. Another obvious problem is history. The Bible is a large, messy, often unpleasant set of books in a variety of historical settings. It's not there to be pretty or soothing.

It would be one thing to have a coloring book, a thin, cheap, paperback thing that made no claim to be a Bible, that had some passages from the Psalms with pictures of flowers to color. Even that would be somewhat kitschy. We pick out the parts that we like, combine them with pretty pictures, and give them to you to soothe your mind and meditate on. But it is much worse to print an entire Bible this way. At least a coloring book using Bible passages is openly, frankly, using biblical passages for some other purpose. The purchaser of a mere coloring book is under no illusion that he's getting the whole Scripture. An entire Bible, printed, is supposed to have an existence in itself, aside from any particular use to which we might want to put it. In this way the whole Bible, or even a printed New Testament, testifies to the fact that man is not the measure of all things. This is an uncompromisingly real set of historical books that exists apart from ourselves and that we cannot make in our own image. We may turn to particular passages in our time of need. That isn't wrong. But if we really want to know the Scriptures, we must be prepared to be judged by the Scriptures. A coloring Bible communicates something quite different.

The old fundamentalists understood that sort of thing instinctively. But perhaps instinct is not enough in the fight against cultural slide. As the culture has coarsened and become aesthetically tone-deaf, as reverence has waned in general, virtually all of the churches that were once quiet, even somewhat bare, testaments to quiet, pious, Protestant prayer have succumbed to the culture of kitsch. Rightly desiring to bring souls to Christ, they have hired more and more number-focused pastors who subscribe to the "what does it matter, so long as..." school of thought. We wouldn't want our churches to be boring, bare, and frumpy, would we? And we wouldn't want to be legalistic and judgemental, would we? And mere aesthetics are just subjective, aren't they?

God doesn't think so. God ordered that even the tabernacle was to be made beautiful. The God who struck a man dead for touching the Ark of the Covenant hardly seems like a God who doesn't care about ceremony. It was our Lord Jesus himself who drove the money-changers from the Temple for showing disrespect for the physical House of God and using it only as a means of profit. Can irreverence send souls to hell? I venture to fear that it can.

Irreverence where there should be reverence takes us away from the awe and majesty of the great God who, miracle of miracles, loves us, and from the glorious, painful seriousness of the Christian faith, rooted in uncompromising historical fact, recorded and revealed in ancient and somewhat alien books. I suggest that we try to teach Christians to confront and meditate on all of that rather than softening and obscuring it with coloring Bible Christianity.

In closing, I leave you with a few words from the inimitable Alistair Begg, on the related subject of worship and feelings:

This is the true face of the alt-right

I enjoy having full comments moderation turned on here at Extra Thoughts. It allows me to filter the nastiness I get in response to posts like this one. I've also decided to start posting more, and shorter, posts here, more like Facebook updates.

I just learned of this bit of despicable trash today. As one Facebook wag put it, I wonder how it reads in the original German.

This is the face of the alt-right. If you are a conservative with any conscience left, have nothing to do with it, period. And, yeah, I really couldn't care less how upset you are with the betrayals of establishment Republicans. You must be really messed up if you think for a moment that "being frustrated with the betrayal of conservatism by establishment Republicans" can somehow be expressed by joining an utterly destructive movement that stands for none of what conservatives have stood for, run by foul-mouthed little boys pretending to be he-men, who think that they can carry out big Accomplishments for The Right Side by being, and encouraging, bullying jerks on Twitter and by attacking Ted Cruz, one of the most intelligent, principled, hard-working conservatives to come along in a long time. So don't be fooled like that.

Oh, and while we're at it, you know that word that starts with a c and ends with "servative" that I keep telling people at What's Wrong With the World is despicable and won't be tolerated? If you think it is a mere synonym for the older English word "cuckold," use Google and get a little more information, huh? Because it isn't just a synonym for that word. And it should have clued you off in the first place that it's a little bizarre and twisted to criticize someone for spinelessness or lack of principle or whatever you thought you meant by the word (the alt-right, of course, means "any conservative we hate") by referring to him merely as a man whose wife has been unfaithful, since that doesn't in itself necessarily mean anything bad about the character of the man.

Yes, I'm being blunt, here. So maybe I will merely a) preach to the choir and b) tick off the alt-righters and their fellow travelers.

But if you are a fellow traveler who can still be reached, read the above-linked article, back off from the alt-right sites you read, and ask yourself, "What am I becoming by making excuses for these people? And what of any enduring value am I gaining by associating with them?"

It's never too late to reject evil. It's never too late to turn back.

A profound comment

This post isn't going to rise to my usual level of deep commentary. But I can't resist.

I have just one deep comment on the last few days for all the Trumpers who ranted (and ranted and ranted) in combox after combox about how we have to vote for Trump because immigration is The One, The Only, The Most Important Issue Ever in the Entire History of the USA:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, SUCKERS!

"And Now the Wants Are Told"

Here is a good hymn text sorely in need of a new tune.

And now the wants are told, that brought
thy children to thy knee;
here lingering still, we ask for nought,
but simply worship thee.

The hope of heaven's eternal days
absorbs not all the heart
that gives thee glory, love, and praise,
for being what thou art.

For thou art God, the One, the Same,
o'er all things high and bright;
and round us, when we speak thy name,
there spreads a heaven of light.

O wondrous peace, in thought to dwell
on excellence divine;
to know that nought in man can tell
how fair thy beauties shine!

O thou, above all blessing blest,
o'er thanks exalted far,
thy very greatness is a rest
to weaklings as we are;

for when we feel the praise of thee
a task beyond our powers,
we say, "A perfect God is he,
and he is fully ours."

Original author William Bright, 1865. Published in 1895 under the authority of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

This seems meant for a meditation at the end of a church service or prayer service. It draws the mind from our earthly needs to God's eternal glory.

My only quibble is that "heaven's eternal days" include the beatific vision and hence will involve the perfection of the worship that the song is all about. But that really is a quibble. It is a long tradition to contrast any desire for the concrete things we might hope for in heaven with pure worship.  "Look for Me At Jesus' Feet" and "I Want to See Jesus" are examples in Southern gospel music.

The poem captures well the mind's repose in the greatness of God. We don't have to do something about it. We can appreciate it and rest our minds on the contemplation of it. "Thy very greatness is a rest to weaklings as we are."

The tune to which it is set in the 1940 hymnal is "Stracathro," found here. It is less than exciting as a tune, in my opinion. Ideally we would find a tune that would have more intrinsic interest while being singable and fitting with the words. It could be introduced to modern churches as a worship song.

But wait! There's more! Refuting a claim of discrepancy in the gospels

My apologies to my readers for being away from this blog for so long. Here's a meaty apologetics/New Testament post to make up for the hiatus.

A friend asked me the other day to repeat my opinion, which he'd heard me give at one time, about an alleged discrepancy between Mark's and Luke's location of the feeding of the five thousand.

Here's how that concern about a discrepancy arises. Luke 9:10-12 says that the feeding of the five thousand took place near the town of Bethsaida. (It didn't take place in Bethsaida, because it was a deserted place, as verse 12 says. Some text families explicitly say in verse 10 that they went to a deserted area associated with the town of Bethsaida.)  Here's a map of the region around the Sea of Galilee in the time of Christ. As you can see, Bethsaida is roughly on the northeast of the Sea of Galilee. (Yes, I'm aware that there is an archeological controversy about precisely which tell represents the location of Biblical Bethsaida. No, that doesn't affect the present discussion, because the archeological candidates are all pretty darned close together, and none of them is on the west side of the Sea of Galilee.)

Mark 6:45 says that after the feeding of the five thousand Jesus told his disciples to get into a boat and go ahead of him to the other side "to Bethsaida" (as it is usually translated).

From Mark 6:45 taken in isolation, one would naturally conclude that the feeding of the five thousand took place on, in some sense, the opposite side of the Sea of Galilee from Bethsaida--hence, on the west or northwest side. After all, Jesus is telling them to go away from the location of the feeding to the other side, and the narrator is calling this direction away from the feeding "to Bethsaida." Right?

It is from this phrase "to Bethsaida," using the Greek preposition "pros," that the entire idea of a discrepancy between Mark and Luke arises.

So as not to keep the reader in suspense, I will now float two relatively simple possible harmonizations concerning the phrase "pros Bethsaidan." First possibility: "Pros" should be translated here as "over against" rather than "to." This is a possible translation of the preposition. In this case, the narrator in Mark is saying that they were going to the other side which was "over against" (i.e. opposite) Bethsaida--exactly consonant with Luke's statement about the location of the feeding near Bethsaida. Second possibility: "Pros" should be translated with a more common meaning of "toward," but the feeding took place in a deserted area somewhat to the east of Bethsaida itself, so that they would pass Bethsaida as they crossed back over to the other side, going west. Hence, they might have been sent back to the other side (that is, to the region of Capernaum) and in the process traveled "toward Bethsaida."

But wait, there's more!

Much more. The reader, especially a reader impatient with harmonization in the gospels, might well sigh and say that one would consider those readings of "pros Bethsaidan" only if one were committed a priori to inerrancy, or only if one were deeply uncomfortable with contradictions in the gospels, or something to that effect. Why not just say that either Mark or Luke made a mistake?

At this point I want to emphasize the importance of considering the positive case for the reliability of the gospels and placing alleged contradictions against that backdrop. Too much focus on alleged contradictions and on possible resolutions, or even on despair of resolutions, can create a major "can't see the forest for the trees" problem. As it turns out, the location of the feeding of the five thousand, so far from being an embarrassment to the advocate of the reliability of the gospels, is a point that confirms the reliability of the gospels.

There are two undesigned coincidences related to the location of the feeding that confirm Luke's statement that it occurred near Bethsaida. I'll give them briefly, because I have more to say beyond this, but briefly, here they are:

Both Matthew (11:20ff) and Luke (10:13ff) record Jesus, in a completely different passage, calling down woe upon Bethsaida, saying that its inhabitants ignored "mighty works" done there and did not repent. But none of the gospels records anything else, other than the feeding of the five thousand, that could plausibly be regarded as a "mighty work" that the inhabitants of Bethsaida should have known about. Interestingly, the gospels record not only the feeding of the five thousand on that day but also healings among the crowd (see Luke 9:11). Hence, the feeding of the five thousand and the healings connected with it explain the "woes" against Bethsaida. (I note in passing that it is implausible that Luke engineered this deliberately within his own gospel, for the "woe" passage also mentions mighty works done in Chorazin, but Luke records no mighty work done in Chorazin at all.)

The other undesigned coincidence connected with the location of the feeding is the "Why ask Philip?" coincidence that some of my readers may have heard in talks given by my husband or others who present the argument from undesigned coincidences. John 6:5 states that Jesus asked Philip, specifically, where they can buy bread for the crowd. John never says that the feeding took place near Bethsaida. That statement is found only in Luke. But John does say elsewhere (1:44, 12:21) that Philip was from Bethsaida. This rather neatly explains Jesus' question specifically to Philip as to where bread could be purchased for the crowd.

So Luke's location of the feeding near Bethsaida, rather than on the other side of the Sea of Galilee away from Bethsaida, is independently confirmed, as well as the other details connected with those undesigned coincidences (Jesus' calling down woe on Bethsaida, Philip's home town, the fact that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread), and the location of the feeding thus supports the reliability of the gospels rather than undermining it.

But wait, there's more!

John's gospel also supports the conclusion that the location of the feeding was somewhere on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. John 6:16-17 says that, after the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples got into a boat and "started across the sea to Capernaum." The word translated "to" there is "eis" which can be translated in a variety of ways, including "toward." Capernaum is on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee, so if they were going from east to west, away from the vicinity of Bethsaida on the northeast, they would indeed be going toward Capernaum.

But wait, there's more!

The very idea that Mark places the feeding of the five thousand in a different location from Luke is, as I mentioned above, based solely on the phrase "pros Bethsaidan," used for the direction the disciples were sent by boat after the feeding. If one gets a larger picture within Mark, one actually finds evidence that fits with the placement of the feeding on the northeast side of the Sea of Galilee rather than on the northwest side. This evidence confirms Luke's location of the feeding and would create a problem within Mark itself if we insisted on interpreting "pros Bethsaidan" to mean that the feeding took place on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee. Hence it is misguided to say that Mark places the feeding in a location different from Luke's.

The first bit of evidence to this effect, not very strong in itself but suggestive, arises in another undesigned coincidence. Mark 6:31 says that Jesus and his disciples were bothered by crowds "coming and going" prior to the feeding of the five thousand and that Jesus suggested that they go away somewhere. The phrase "coming and going" suggests that these were not merely crowds following Jesus, specifically, but that there was some kind of bustle where they were. This fits with the statement in John 6:4 that the Feast of Passover was near at hand, especially if Jesus and the disciples were in or near Capernaum, a major hub. If they left Capernaum in a boat and went away, then they might well have gone along the top of the Sea of Galilee and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Bethsaida, just as Luke says.

But wait, there's more! (I've saved the best for last.)

Mark itself tells us where the disciples ended up when they landed on the other side--that is, the "other side" from where the feeding of the five thousand took place, the "other side" to which Jesus sent them after the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:45), the "other side" about which there was supposedly a discrepancy between Mark and Luke.

When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore. (Mark 6:53)

So when they had crossed over to the other side, they landed at Gennesaret. Look at the map. Where is Gennesaret? (And by the way, the location of Gennesaret is independently known. It doesn't depend on some specific interpretation of this passage.) It's on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee! It's also within a stone's throw of Capernaum. In other words, it's not on the same side as Bethsaida. It's approximately where we would expect the disciples to end up if they went away in the boat from the vicinity of Bethsaida, where Luke says the feeding took place, going (in general terms) toward Capernaum, as John says, across the top of the Sea of Galilee, and landed on the other side--going from the northeast to the northwest shore.

If we were to interpret "pros Bethsaidan" in Mark 6:45 to mean that the feeding took place on the same side of the Sea of Galilee as Capernaum and Genessaret and that they crossed over afterwards in a boat to Bethsaida, we would have an apparent conflict within Mark with verse 6:53, which says that when they crossed over they landed at Gennesaret.

So Mark doesn't "place" the feeding of the five thousand on the west side of the Sea of Galilee after all.

This means that we have reason within Mark itself for reading "pros Bethsaidan" in one of the ways suggested above. This does not solely arise from a desire to harmonize Mark and Luke or Mark and John. Independent evidence from multiple gospels, including Mark, consistently points to approximately the same location for the feeding of the five thousand, with the single phrase "pros Bethsaidan" in Mark being the only outlier. Hence, it is entirely rational to translate or interpret that one phrase in a way that is consistent with multiple, independent lines of other evidence. By doing so, we get a unified picture that makes sense of all of the evidence.

So far from being strained, this procedure is a careful, tough-minded way of making use of evidence and seeing if there is a reasonable picture that can explain all of it. This doesn't always work. Sometimes there may be an intransigent bit of evidence that just doesn't fit in with the rest, and there's nothing wrong with admitting as much when it happens.

But it's unfortunate that sometimes we get a picture of apparent biblical discrepancies that leaves out some evidence and hence that gives a skewed view. Even relatively conservative interpreters may sometimes feel mired in a slough of despond, slogging through discrepancies and trying to pull themselves out. Or, to change the metaphor, may feel bothered to death by claimed discrepancies like an attacking cloud of midges. It could be tempting to think that one is breaking free of that feeling by not attempting harmonization at all, by coming to disdain it. But that is not a correct evidential approach, even when we simply think of the gospels as historical documents. It is entirely common for different witness testimonies to have apparent discrepancies. Sometimes these are real, but surprisingly often they are merely apparent, and the real picture of what occurred fits both accounts when more is known.

In the present case, any casting of the issue as, "There seem to be a lot of discrepancies surrounding the geography of the feeding of the five thousand" or "Mark appears to place the feeding of the five thousand in a different location from Luke" is, frankly, incorrect. Hence it contributes unnecessarily to that feeling of being mired in or pestered by nuisance discrepancies. But in fact, there aren't a lot of apparent discrepancies surrounding the geography of the feeding of the five thousand. There is a unified picture of it as occurring on the northeast of the Sea of Galilee with one outlying phrase in one gospel. Mark and Luke do not appear to place the event in two different locations. Nor do Mark and John. Rather, Mark itself has a geographical indicator that places the feeding on the east side (namely, that afterwards they went over to the other side and landed at Genessaret) and another geographical indicator (the outlying phrase "pros Bethsaidan") that could be interpreted to place it on the west side. So Mark's own gospel contains evidence that is consonant with the united evidence of Luke, John, and with undesigned coincidences between and among them (one involving Matthew as well), placing the feeding on the northeast side.

It is a little ironic that I am saying all of this, since I am open in principle to saying that there may in fact be places where a gospel author got some minor detail wrong. I even have candidates for such places in my own mind. In no way does my livelihood depend upon signing a statement subscribing to inerrancy. But I also think that the gospels are very, very reliable, that real witness testimony turns out to be reconcilable often when at first it appears to be irreconcilable, and that harmonization should be given a good shot before one concludes that there is an actual error. That, I believe, is not piety but merely responsible scholarship. The exciting thing is how often, when one gets a bigger picture, one finds oneself freed from that heavy sense of "so many problems," because one sees alleged discrepancies against a wider background of evidence for reliability. Sometimes, as in the present case, that wider background even helps to explain some particular alleged discrepancy. This is, to my mind, a much healthier approach than either a) becoming highly cavalier about saying that some gospel author was wrong or confused, b) becoming highly negative about harmonization, and/or c) turning to highly dubious claims of "literary device" according to which gospel authors deliberately changed details for the sake of some literary or theological effect.

None of that does justice to the real-life texture of the texts as historical memoirs.

Seriously? A vote has no expressive content?

As the bullying gears up all over the country to whip people in line to vote for D.T., I am struck yet again by something that strikes me every four years: There are people out there who will (metaphorically speaking) look you in the eye and tell you that a vote is a purely pragmatic move and has zero semantic content.

I find it difficult to believe that, but I'm forced to believe it every four years, because I'm confronted by such people. Surely it should be obvious by the sheer meaning of the phrase "to vote for _____ for ____" that doing so is, at least among other things, a semantic act that carries the meaning, "I desire so-and-so to have the position of _____" and "So-and-so is at least minimally qualified for the position of ______." It needn't mean that you can't think of anybody better for that position. It needn't mean that you agree with so-and-so on everything. It needn't mean that he's perfect. But it should not even require discussion to say that at a minimum your vote says that you want him to have that position and that you think he's minimally qualified for it.

People apparently want to deny this self-evident truth because they want to justify voting for someone that they realize they couldn't justify voting for if they admitted it. They want to be able to say that some candidate really is completely dreadful and awful but that we should vote for him anyway for some consequential reason. Now, I'm not saying that consequences have no place in voting. They could lead you, for example, to vote for a candidate whom you weren't exactly thrilled with because you believed that he would do more good than harm in the position. But at the end of the day, if you literally think that someone would be a disgrace to that political office, that he is unqualified for it, and that he is a wicked person, you shouldn't vote for him for that position.

When we pretend (and it really is a pretense) that a vote has no semantic content whatsoever, that it is simply playing a move in a consequential game, we harden our hearts to endorse evil people. We do it by lying to ourselves that a vote is in no sense, however minimal, an endorsement.

Quite frankly, I believe that people psych themselves into this because they work themselves up to believe that the United States Presidency is so important that you are morally obligated always to vote for one of the two "viable" candidates for the office. Hence they are faced with what feels like a moral dilemma: They feel that they're morally obligated to vote for A or B, yet they know that both A and B are unqualified for the job and are wicked. So they convince themselves that there must be a "lesser evil" between A and B (why think that?) that we can tell which is the lesser evil (why think that?) and that one is obligated to vote for that lesser evil as a sheer game-theoretic move without semantic content. In this way they resolve that feeling of a moral dilemma.

But conscience will have her revenge. This is why so often those who do this are so angry, bitter, and bullying toward anyone who doesn't do as they do. J. Budziszewski wrote about this in The Revenge of Conscience. When you do something that you feel morally uncomfortable about, you end up trying to get other people to join you in doing it so you will feel less uncomfortable about it. You get defensive and angry. The conscience doesn't just lie down like a lamb when you suppress it. It rouses up and becomes a kind of raging false conscience, driving you to drive others into a frenzy of support for what you have done. We see this in women who have had abortions and who then write bragging pieces about them or who join pro-abortion organizations to make abortion more widely available. And we see it here. The proposition that a vote has literally zero semantic content endorsing the candidate is so manifestly false that it is a constant irritant to the person who has relied on it as a premise to get himself out of what felt like a moral dilemma. For many, this results in striking out at others who have come to a different decision and who aren't doing what he is doing.

I submit that this is a reductio of the proposition that you are always morally obligated to vote for one of the two viable candidates for the Presidency. Or always obligated to vote at all, if it comes to that. Since there is, obviously, at least minimal semantic content to a vote, a situation could arise in which you would be doing wrong to express that content concerning any candidate, and then you shouldn't vote. It's really just that simple. Don't turn your mind into a pretzel forcing yourself to think otherwise.

The Reticence of the Evangelists at W4

I have a new post up at What's Wrong With the World on an argument for the veracity of the gospels from the reticence of the evangelists. Feel free to comment in either place.

One more bit of incoherence in the "trans" agenda

The claims by "trans" activists are so blatantly postmodern, so riddled with incoherence, that most of the time I don't bother even to try to point out the incoherences. There was a good article in, I believe, National Review that did so a couple of months ago, but unfortunately I didn't save the link. If one of my readers happens to find it, let me know. I think it may have been by Maggie Gallagher.

Here's one bit of the incoherence that came up in a thread at W4 where a commentator was asking about the best arguments (??) of the trans activists. Short version: There aren't any. Anyway, this commentator suggested that, while it seems far-fetched to say that gender identity can be constructed based solely on a person's subjective feelings, maybe it isn't so far-fetched to say that someone "is" a particular "gender" based on "social role," which might differ from biology. At least, so I understood him to suggest as one of the "best" representations of the trans position.

But as I point out in the comment here, that does not make any sense, because society never spontaneously assigns a person a "social role" that is utterly in conflict with his unambiguous biological sex. Setting aside extremely rare cases of true biological disorders in which a mistake is made at birth because the child biologically (externally) appears to be the opposite biological sex from his genetic sex, no one just "gets" a "social role" of being a man when he is biologically a woman. No biological woman just "gets" a "social role" of being a man. It doesn't happen. Something has to kick off the process in society. The person has to complain of "gender dysphoria," and get "treatment" that includes making other people use new pronouns, or parents or psychologists have to get signals that they take to mean that, in the mysterious trans meaning, the person "really is" the opposite gender from his biological sex, and then that small coterie of people starts trying to impose this new understanding on everybody else. But they aren't society. Prior to being told that Bobby is now a girl, society was just going on its merry way treating Bobby as a boy. Bobby doesn't have a "social role" of being a girl until society is forced to start calling him "she" under threat of punishment and so forth or until society is fooled by extreme (and immoral) medical procedures and drugs foisted upon Bobby so that society (or those members of it who didn't know Bobby before) falsely believe that Bobby (who now goes by "Sarah") is biologically female. If Bobby/Sarah succeeds in passing himself off as a woman, at that point "society" may assign him a female role, but that's only because of a successful deception concerning biology, not because he originally "was" a woman in the sense of having "woman" as a societal role. He didn't. That's why he had to "transition."

So there is no hope for the trans agenda in logic from a mantra like, "Gender identity is socially constructed," because that provides no rationale for society's giving a person a social role that he didn't originally have in the first place and because society, left to itself, will spontaneously assign a biologically unambiguous person a social role (whatever it may be in that society) that agrees with his biology to begin with. One could just as well tell the trans activist who mouths this "argument," "Fine, then, I guess Bobby isn't really a girl, because look at all the people who have been calling him 'he' all this time. He has the socially constructed role of a boy, so that means he's a boy. Case closed."

The trans activist has to insist upon a process of redefining a person as "really" being something other than what he biologically is without the support, initially, of either biology or social role.

None of this, of course, will stop activists (and their dupes) from talking sagely as if a phrase like, "Gender identity is socially constructed" supports their agenda. But logically, it doesn't.

Tony, my blog colleague at W4, comments here pointing some of this out as well.

Evangelism, individualism, conversion, and cradle Christianity

Over at W4 I reported on the insane, repressive new laws just passed against "missionary activity" in Russia. Here's another article on them. I'm appalled but not surprised at the number of people who defend such laws.

This arises in part because some (most?) of the "paleoconservative" persuasion are in general Russophiles and are under some strange delusion that Russia represents "conservatism" in a recognizable sense. One thing that feeds this delusion is the fact that Russian law does not celebrate sodomy as does American law (driven by lawless American Supreme Court decisions), yet another counterexample to the dubious maxim, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The paleos prefer to keep the maxim and bite the bullet on the counterevidence. Their syllogism is "What Russian law does is conservative. Russian law represses missionary activity from non-Orthodox people. Therefore, repressing missionary activity from non-Orthodox people is conservative." The first premise, of course, is the bad apple.

But there's something else going on here as well, which came out the last time such issues were discussed at W4, many years ago. Lurking in the minds of some of those from what one might call mainline denominations is, frankly, a distaste for energetic evangelistic work and conversion. In that old thread, it was openly stated that evangelism should be aimed only at "heads of households." I guess that means if you aren't a head of a household, you're outta luck.

In the strongest possible terms, let me say this: Nothing could be further from the Great Commission and the teaching and action of both our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles.

When Jesus called his disciples, he called them as individuals, not heads of households. He called James and John, the sons of Zebedee, not Zebedee. St. John, who lived to write in the late 1st century, was likely a "man" under Jewish law, but that isn't saying much. He must have been very young during Jesus' ministry and was certainly not the head of any household. Jesus' teaching is, if possible, even more emphatic and striking on such points than his action. He said that if you love your father and mother more than him you are unworthy of him. (Matthew 10:37) He taught that he came not to bring peace in families but a sword. (Matthew 10:35-36) He even used the hyperbolic language of "hating" father and mother. (Luke 14:26) He answered sharply when a man suggested coming and being his disciple only after first carrying out some burial duties toward his father. (Matthew 8:21)

However, precisely, one interprets each of these passages, they cumulatively pull strongly in the direction of individual discipleship, in the absence of familial unity and even in opposition to it. That includes individual discipleship even by those who are not patriarchal heads, as witness the repeated, explicit references by Jesus to being willing to pull away from and offend one's father and mother in order to follow him.

An example of this sort of thing in our own time would be Rifqa Bary, who became a Christian from a Muslim background at age sixteen and subsequently ran away from her parents at the age of 17 when she believed her life was in danger because of her conversion.

We have one example in the Philippian jailer where Paul apparently did evangelize the head of a household, and his entire household subsequently professed faith in Jesus. But in general, Paul just preached. So did Peter on the day of Pentecost. We have no evidence whatsoever that individuals were turned away if they weren't "heads of households." On the contrary, we have quite a few examples where women, specifically, became Christians without any mention of their husbands' conversion, and Paul even addresses specifically in the epistles the problem of believers who have unbelieving spouses. Peter makes it clear (I Peter 3:1) that this could include wives with unbelieving husbands. In that culture, individual conversion of wives against the preferences of their husbands is, again, strongly in contrast to any idea of converting people only in family groups through their heads-of-household.

Ad hoc and untenable principles such as "only evangelize heads of households" are, I will say bluntly, developed by partisans of sclerotic, mainline denominations who are afraid of or annoyed by competition from more vital, energetic groups with a strong emphasis upon individual belief and conversion. Unable to keep as much hold of their own nominal members-from-the-cradle as they would like because of poor catechesis, boredom, and population drift, they support draconian laws giving their own denominations a monopoly in particular countries. Then they support these laws by faux, anti-individualistic, anti-evangelistic principles.

Some American conservatives unfamiliar with this dynamic or psychologically uncomfortable with evangelism and witnessing (because they seem bourgeois or silly) may be tempted to go along with this for the additional reason that we are all (justifiably) freaked out by the aggressive proselytizing of the left against our children. But note: That proselytizing is most frightening in the setting of a public school where the force of truancy laws, combined with difficulties or fear of home schooling and the expense of Christian schooling, creates a captive audience. (Related, on how this works in Ontario, see here.) But the answer to state brainwashing of children isn't for the state to make it illegal for non-state actors to "direct" their messages toward minors or for the state to make this illegal except in the case of some state-favored religion. Indeed, one could argue that the problem with secularist brainwashing of children in public schools is precisely the establishment of a state "church"--namely, aggressive secular leftism. I don't want the state to outlaw Camp Quest, the secularist summer camp. I just don't send my kids there. And if some Christian parent is foolhardy enough to do so, that's on his head.

I'm all in favor of raising one's children to be Christians from the cradle. And I'm all in favor of being a protective parent, sheltering children, and even thinking very hard about what college to pay for them to go to when they are adults. But there is a great gulf fixed between a love of raising one's children in one's own worldview and a demand that the government outlaw the propagation of other worldviews, even other Christian denominations, simply as such. Some Christians demand that we buy into a kind of ecumenism that says that everybody who is a nominal member of some Christian denomination or other is going to heaven and that the only kind of evangelism that is right is one that doesn't "compete" with other Christian denominations. Well, Jesus says that there will be many who will say, "Lord, Lord" who will not enter the kingdom of heaven. That presumably includes Catholics, Orthodox, Baptist, Adventist, and all kinds of denominations. If you want to be ecumenical, try considering this possibility: Maybe some person who has been a cradle X, where X is your own denomination, has no relationship with Jesus Christ, isn't really a believer, is purely a cultural "Christian," and is going to hell. And maybe if that person is evangelized (aka "stolen") by that scruffy denomination Y that Russia wants to outlaw, he'll actually go to heaven instead. And yes, if I happen to prefer Y to X, it would be smart for me to consider that it could go the other way. But frankly, I know no Seventh-Day Adventists or Baptists who are looking to have their denomination established as a state religion and to outlaw "proselytizing" by Catholics, Orthodox, or other "stuffier" and more liturgical churches. This despite the fact that the less ecumenical among them actually do think people are likely to go to hell if they belong to those denominations! But even given that, they are willing just to witness and let the Holy Spirit do the work from there, as they see it. It's an example their more high-brow brethren would do well to follow, despite the presence of theological narrow-mindedness.

Moreover, we Christians want to start thinking very soberly about what is wrong with us when we start uttering the word "proselytizing" in tones of contempt. Or when we're standing up and cheering that the Russians are doing the same. That's a bad, bad move. Here are a couple of posts I wrote years ago about the concern that Americans are starting to demonize "proselytizing." The Great Commission is all about "proselytizing." Demonizing witnessing is the road to cutting off our own missionary efforts from soul-saving, turning them into mere humanitarian aid, at most. The Bible, and Christianity, are all about converts. They always have been. There is nothing infra dig about trying to make converts who weren't just comfortable "Christians from the cradle." Jesus told us to do it, in fact. So if you feel funny about Christian denominations that witness, maybe you should get over it and ask yourself why your denomination isn't doing more of it.

I realize that it's a problem for some conservatives, but Christianity has always been pretty individualistic. Sure, the leftists have twisted this emphasis, but they didn't invent it. No, that doesn't mean Christians should "go it alone," but a convert will become a member of the community of believers as an individual, and he may have to leave father and mother behind to do so. Moreover, those who have been Christians from their childhood actually face special dangers, of complacency, lukewarmness, and lack of zeal for spreading the gospel. It's therefore particularly ironic to see members of mainline denominations that suffer greatly from such problems trying to suppress other denominations. It's a little bit like public school lobbyists trying to outlaw home schooling. We shouldn't make a special virtue out of non-evangelism. There is no virtue in it. If the Russian Orthodox are concerned about the Baptists and Adventists (or for that matter the real heretics like Jehovah's Witnesses), I suggest they engage in vigorous debate against their tenets and present programs that will keep their own "sheep" within their fold while at the same time showing ardent concern for the individual catechesis of their own "sheep." Hey, for that matter they might try some straightforward counterevangelism directed at members of the other religious organizations. That rather than trying to use the state to enforce a monopoly. Somehow, I'm afraid that is unlikely to happen. But if you are open to reason on these things, I suggest to you that it should.

Inflammatory language, perversions, and the church

This new push to downplay pedophilia was shared with appropriate outrage on Facebook lately.

What I want to point out here is the danger that this sort of talk poses specifically to those, including Christians, who have leaned in the wrong way on the act-orientation distinction concerning homosexuality. It is entirely possible that we will be asked, to be consistent, to apply the act-orientation distinction in the same way to pedophilia, and I'm afraid that some won't know how to reply and will be sitting ducks for what is, in effect, a partial normalization and, at a minimum, a desensitization.

Many Christians have been so concerned about the charge of homophobia and so eager to show love toward homosexual individuals that they have applied the act-orientation distinction in a confused way. I'm not saying that there is no such distinction nor that it is never relevant to bring up. But I think the contexts in which it makes a big difference to our actions are fewer and narrower than some may think. If you are a pastor or priest advising someone in private on whether he's sinning, then it is relevant and appropriate to tell him that having temptations and inclinations toward homosexuality is not in and of itself a sin, as though he sins just by breathing in and out. At the same time, there is a delicate matter even there concerning fantasies, entertaining thoughts, self-identity, and so forth, so it's still not cut and dried. The homosexual, even the Christian, who goes around loudly proclaiming his problem and demanding that everybody must accept him and complaining about how he's not sufficiently accepted is, most likely, sinning in thought with some frequency. So a non-naive pastor counseling such a person shouldn't just keep telling him over and over again that his orientation isn't a sin. But, okay, the act-orientation distinction is relevant there.

It's not nearly so obviously relevant to issues of discrimination, and especially not if the person is "out." There are all sorts of issues of discretion, morale, normalization, and so forth that are created by an "out" homosexual, especially one with a chip on his shoulder, especially in a business or non-profit that aims for a high moral tone. And there are direct practical issues in a residential context, such as a college, camp, retreat, and traveling. Who even can be the appropriate roommate, with all the loss of privacy that entails, of a person with same-sex attraction disorder? So already when Christians (and, I'm sorry to say, the catechism of the Catholic Church) go on about how baaad discrimination is on the basis of sexual orientation, they are doing a disservice to clarity of thought.

But there's even more. Here are two false implications of an overuse and misguided use of the act-orientation distinction that will come back to haunt us as the push for "understanding" pedophilia starts to ramp up:

1) The false implication that all sins are equal. No, they are not. Scripture never teaches that all sins are equally bad, it teaches the contrary, and common sense teaches us that all sins are not equally destructive in a social context. Hence, the temptation to all sins is not an equal problem. The fact that a man is tempted to a sexual perversion ought to create more complexities in which jobs he can hold, how to arrange for his accommodations when he travels, and in many other areas, than the fact that a man is tempted to gluttony. That's just how it is. But saying that "the orientation isn't sinful, and we're all sinners and tempted to sin in many different ways" glosses over these practical and moral facts.

2) The false implication that disgust is an inappropriate feeling for normal people to have in response to finding out about a "mere" orientation. The idea seems to be that if the "mere" orientation isn't a sin, we shouldn't feel disgusted when we learn about it, because that is "phobic" and unloving. Baloney. Pedophilia is an obvious counterexample, and we're going to have big problems if we continue on this path that says we're not supposed to feel, act, or convey disgust about anything as long as it's "just" an orientation.

It's a tragedy that there are people who have same-sex attraction disorder and who are upset and don't want it. For that matter, it's a worse tragedy, in a different way, that there are homosexuals who are proud of their orientation and their acts. But what even those who resist and don't act are tempted toward, what they are oriented toward, is a perversion. It was a mistake for Christians to stop saying that. I think we said to ourselves, "What possible value could there be in using inflammatory language such as 'pervert'? That just looks unloving. We don't want to look like those Westboro Baptist types" (always a useful comparison for getting as much compliance and apology as possible from Christians). "It's just a pointless insult." Well, no. To say that someone is a sexual pervert by orientation, even if he does not act on it, is to retain the knowledge of the unnaturalness of what he is inclined toward. It is to remind ourselves and those to whom we speak that his temptation is not merely contrary to God's law but also contrary to nature, and that this matters. But errors #1 and #2 tell us that we aren't supposed to know this, that we are supposed to elide it. So much of our language becomes conciliatory and deliberately erases all references to disordered affections and perversion: "The LGBT community," "God loves gay people very much," and the like.

These two errors are going to turn on us when it comes to pedophilia. Because frankly, if #1 and #2 are true, then why not try to eradicate disgust from our thought and language concerning people who "merely" have a pedophile orientation? If it is a settled doctrine that all sins are equal, then "all" presumably means "all" without exception, so this one should be included. If disgust is generally a wrong feeling to have concerning any "mere" orientation, then that's it. The principle is set.

If we should try as hard as we can not to "discriminate" on the basis of a "mere" orientation, then presumably we should try as hard as we can to accommodate even an "out" pedophile in as many activities as possible, even if we have to restrict him, for safety reasons, from some activities involving children. Anything like broader avoidance on the part of, say, people with children would be cruel, right? Notice that in the interview linked above the woman "researcher" is very uncomfortable when the interviewer suggests that he should in general try to keep his children away from pedophiles. She never agrees with him on this principle. Instead she turns the question to "child pedophiles," with the obvious implication that keeping such children away from other children would be wrong, so "we" have to find some other way to deal with them. In the Salon article last year garnering sympathy for non-offending pedophiles, the author explicitly states that there are pedophiles he would "trust with" his own children, if he had any.

Moreover, if there is no shame in being "out" about one's inclinations to sexual perversions, because then one can "get help" and because then we as Christians have a chance to show our love and kindness, then why should "coming out" as a pedophile be TMI when coming out as "gay" isn't TMI? The whole idea about discretion and not telling the whole world about your sexual perversions has been abandoned wholesale in the Christian community, even among conservative Christians, with the support groups for homosexuals and the praise for coming out. How are we ever going to reclaim the notion of discretion and the condemnation of TMI, how are we ever going to affirm again that there could be something good about being "in the closet," at least as far as the general community is concerned? We've pretty much tossed those ideas out, and we'll just have to say that "it's different this time" when it comes to some new perversion for which our compassion and support are being urged. To be consistent, I think we will need to back up and say that, after all, it isn't such a great thing for homosexuals to be coming out either, that we don't all need to know about that, and that if you really recognize that what you are experiencing is a desire contrary both to the law of God and to the law of nature, you will understand (except in unusual situations) that you need to exercise discretion and discuss this only with specific people who need to know. And voluntarily exclude yourself from activities inappropriate to you given your problem. Once these principles are established again in our minds, and once we as social conservatives and Christians don't feel ashamed of ourselves for having such principles, we can think more clearly about how to apply them in various situations and to other perversions.

We will also be in a position to recognize the extremely fine line between encouraging people to be "out" about something and abandoning opposition to it. This has come up again and again and again in "support groups" for homosexuals in churches and Christian colleges. Repeatedly the deliberate eradication of shame in being out, the hugging and kissing and support, the frantic urge to assure everyone that we are not phobic, and the formation of open groups explicitly oriented (pun intended) to something so vague as the "support" of people with certain perversions, have resulted in the erosion of opposition to the acts, just as these practices have involved a deliberate erasure of disgust at the outset. After all, how bad can it really be if everybody is telling you all the time that they have this problem? How bad can it be if we are all urged not to discriminate on the basis of someone's having this problem (as long as he doesn't "act on it")? How bad can it really be if the main message we are hearing is that we as Christians need to be kinder, more accepting, less ostracizing, more supportive, and so forth?

Once we admit that it was a mistake to have "support groups" connected with Christian organizations and churches, a mistake to encourage general coming out, a mistake to abandon the "inflammatory" language of disorder and perversion, and a mistake to try so hard to be upbeat and sentimental as part of being loving, we will be able to apply those lessons learned to worse things.

Sometimes you can't go forward without going back. The church's treatment of perversion is one such area.

The dousing of the natural light

In case there are any readers who follow Extra Thoughts but not What's Wrong With the World, my relatively recent post at W4 about a lot of the bad stuff happening these days and a common thread running through it seems to have resonated with some people, so check it out.

Webinar on Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts

I will be speaking this Saturday at a free webinar on undesigned coincidences in the gospels and Acts, hosted by Online Apologetics Academy run by Jonathan McLatchie. I'm told the webinar can handle up to 100 participants at a time, plus it will be recorded for future listening. It starts at 3 p.m. eastern time on Zoom, which is very easy to use. (Speaking as a technophobe who just used it yesterday, I can say that it's easy.) Your computer will download a little software for Zoom, and you will choose a user name, and you can then enter the webinar. Here is the information with a link to Zoom. Don't be confused if you're in the U.S. by the 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. time given at the top of the entry for me. That's actually UK time!

I'll be speaking for between 40 minutes and an hour and then taking questions for an hour or two from participants.

Sentiment vs. Sainthood

The aftermath of the recent jihad murders in Orlando, like the aftermath of every other mass shooting (and for that matter every celebrity death) has been marked by a vast tide of undirected emotion and sentiment. In addition to the inevitable debates (over gun control, for example), the world of social media is awash in calls to one another to pray for Orlando and expressions of emotion over the shooting.

There are worse things than soppy sentimentalism. Cruelty and hard-heartedness, for example. But I want to be one voice stating that sentiment for the sake of sentiment has its drawbacks and that American culture is in grave danger of thinking just the opposite--namely, that sentiment for the sake of sentiment is inherently virtuous.

It's possible that part of the confusion arises from the fact that sentimentalism can be a counterfeit of saintliness. Here's what I mean: We know that Jesus took upon himself all the sins and sorrows of the world. Catholics, in particular, have a theological idea of sharing in the sufferings of Jesus. Protestants, too, often talk about bearing one another's burdens, which is fully biblical. One imagines the old monk or nun, or the prayer warrior, praying quietly and earnestly, for hours, for strangers, for the sins of the world, for evil-doers and victims, his prayers ranging over all the world, suffering with those people, offering up prayers for "all sorts and conditions of men." It is a legitimately attractive picture.

I think that people, Christians in particular, may have the false idea that, by calling upon their friends to "Pray for _____[fill in location of most recent tragedy]," and also by encouraging in themselves a lot of emotion about whatever tragedy is big in the news cycle right now, they are imitating that saint. The idea is to be selfless, to go beyond one's own concerns, to enter into the sufferings of others, yes, even others whom one doesn't know.

But in my opinion this is an illusion. Here are some thoughts on the distinction between sentimentalism and sainthood:

1) Sainthood is self-effacing. Sentimentalism is dramatic, public, and self-indulgent. The saint who prays in his cell doesn't tell the whole world that he's praying or what he's praying for. He doesn't advertise on his Facebook status that he broke down in tears while going about his daily task when the thought of _______ came to him. He doesn't pressure other people to join any prayer bandwagon. He just quietly gets on with it.

2) Sainthood is precise. Sentimentalism is vague. A saint knows exactly what he's praying for. He isn't "sending good thoughts." He doesn't send prayers (or thoughts) to a city. (Because we actually send prayers to God. Or, if you're a Catholic or high Anglican, to God via the saints. But not to places.) A saint prays for specific, holy things. Those things might include comfort or salvation for large numbers of people, even people whose names he doesn't know. But a saint's prayers cannot be captured by slogans. How many people out there saying, "Pray for Orlando" have little or no idea what, precisely, they are supposed to be asking for, and for whom? It's a catch-phrase, meant to express a feeling of solidarity.

3) Saints never willfully drum up emotion as an end in itself, in themselves or others. Sentimentalists make a habit of it.

4) Saints have their own priorities in prayer. Sentimentalists are at the beck and call of the news cycle. That's not to say a saint would never pray about something that is big in the news cycle. Maybe he would. If so, it would be as part of a disciplined prayer life with other priorities at least equal in importance. But maybe he wouldn't. Maybe instead that day he would be praying for a child dying of cancer, for Christians being tortured for their faith, for a man struggling with doubts, for children being raised in spiritual darkness, for women (or even a particular woman) being tempted to abortion, or for any of the infinite number of other matters of eternal importance.

A sentimentalist, in contrast, weeps when social media says, "Weep!" and prays when social media says, "Pray!" It's difficult to believe that, in so doing, he is obeying the Spirit of the Lord.

One might ask what harm is done by national sentimentalism. At least it draws people together. It springs from good intentions, from a natural desire to be kind and to care about others. To be sure, there are worse harms. But I think there is enough harm that it is worth speaking out about. Here are just a few of the harms:

--National sentimentalism is closely tied to virtue signaling, bandwagoning, and social bullying. I'm on a Facebook group consisting of professing Christians. One member posted to the group a day or two after the shooting complaining angrily that there had been no "statement" posted to that particular group about the shooting. Several people quickly assured him that they had expressed the proper sentiments on their personal pages. Nobody told him to go jump in the lake. Even I didn't, because I didn't need the drama in my life, and it wasn't worth my time. But the reason that kind of bullying gets off the ground is because of the sentimentalist assumption that everybody has to say somethingeverywhere. Everybody has to express a certain feeling. The whole nation is in mourning, don't you know, and we all have to make our gesture of joining in, and if you don't, you're a bad person. This is simply not a healthy state of affairs.

I want to emphasize that I think this sort of interpersonal pressure to say something is a bad thing regardless of how sympathetic the victims are. I think this about the Sandy Hook massacre, too, or the Paris massacre. I'm making no statement just here about homosexuality. What I am saying is that sentimentalism makes people ripe to be manipulated into talking in a certain way because that's what everybody else is doing, and that is bad in and of itself.

--Nationwide sentimentalism makes it difficult to be cool-headed in judging proposed policies. Note that I'm not talking, here, about which proposed policies. I mean this generalization to apply to any proposed policies. Policy should be discussed and enacted with cool heads, not in a rush of national emotion.

--Nationwide sentimentalism encourages people to force themselves to feel certain emotions. This is always bad. I cannot think of a single exception to the rule: Never try to force yourself to feel an emotion. Emotion is not inherently virtuous and should not be forced. By treating emotion as equivalent to virtue, sentimentalism tells people in the imperative mood to feel an emotion. This is not good for either the mind or the heart.

--National sentimentalism can make it harder to see the pain and suffering of those immediately around us whose sufferings aren't national news. We each only have so much time and emotional energy, and so much time spent in prayer. We need to spend it deliberately and wisely.

I won't go so far as to say, "Don't pray for Orlando!" Of course not. But if you do pray, pray for people, not for an abstract city. Pray for definite, holy things. Pray as part of a well-rounded prayer life and relationship with God. Don't gin up emotions. Don't tell everybody on Facebook about your feelings or about how intensely you are praying. Don't tell other people that they have to pray for Orlando. Maybe they have something else at least as urgent that they are called upon to pray for instead. And don't, for goodness' sake, pray just because someone says, "Pray for Orlando!"

Cross-posted

Being a blogger, being a scholar

Another jihad mass murder has happened recently, this time targeting a homosexual bar. What is one to say? It's all been said before. This is Muslim violence in the midst of blatant decadence. I'm not at all sure my further thoughts, politically incorrect though they be (in more than one direction), would be of much edifying value to anyone.

I sort of like being a pundit. Blogging gives one the opportunity for punditry without cost. One doesn't (usually) get paid, but one also doesn't have a boss to please, especially at a personal blog like this. That's all fine and dandy until and unless the desire for the status of Pundit becomes the master. Then one is at the beck and call of the news cycle. Latest atrocity demands comment.

Well, I'm actually resolving not to do that anymore. Though I might be a little more likely to do so on Facebook, where the audience is more restricted.

As it turns out, I'm a scholar with lots of other conservative opinions and an occasional yen to make pundit-like comments on news and culture. But that's pretty much it. The years when I had lengthy thoughts, thoughts that had to be expressed, on political and cultural topics seem to be tapering off. Call it fatigue, cynicism, or just laziness, the upshot is the same.

Our country certainly needs God's blessings, because we're in a bad place any way you slice it.

Straining to find a "genre"

I have raised a number of doubts about the facile use of "genre" as a response to allegations of discrepancies in the gospels. I am really almost a little shocked at the example of this represented in the long quotation below, which I read for the first time this morning. Notice that Dr. Licona expressly says that in his research he was unable to come up with any "literary conventions" from the Greco-Roman authors that would cover what he regards as problematic differences in the infancy stories about Jesus in Matthew and Luke. (I certainly do not regard these as troubling, though I think probably Luke just didn't know about the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt. Big deal.) Faced with this situation, Licona strains and reaches for "midrash" (which has now become an all-purpose word among some writers about the New Testament meaning "they made it up but I don't just want to say they made it up") to say that perhaps Luke and Matthew made stuff up about Jesus' birth. But that's okay because he has a word naming a "genre" (that is, "midrash"), so it's not a problem for reliability. Somehow. And they both affirm that Mary was a virgin, so we're not going to count that as part of the "midrash."

The trenchant discussion by N.T. Wright (no fundamentalist!) of the promiscuous invocation of midrash is relevant here. (Who Was Jesus, pp. 71ff.) "Midrash" just isn't the kind of thing that those who invoke it in this way imply. For example, says Wright,

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. (p. 73)

Wright quotes P.S. Alexander as follows:

[L]abelling a piece of Bible exegesis 'midrash' appears to set it in a definite historical and cultural context, to hint at well-known, technical parallels. But all this may be entirely bogus. (Quoted in Wright, p. 73) 

Wright also points out that midrash was a technique for commenting on ancient scripture and states that it is "fantastically unlikely" that this is what Luke and Matthew were doing in the birth narratives. (p. 73) (HT to Esteemed Husband for the information on midrash from Wright.)
Now, this midrash idea is just a conjecture Licona brings forward as possible, but he seems quite open to it and seems to think it solves some kind of problem.

I'm still in a bit of shock at how widely Licona is willing to cast his "literary devices" net while still claiming that the gospels are historically reliable. (In some sense or other.) What he writes here about the birth narratives bespeaks a positive determination to name something one calls a "genre" in order to shake off concerns about alleged discrepancies.

Here is the full quote.

Bart provides the example of the differences between the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. In my opinion, those narratives include the most difficult and profound differences in the Gospels. As my friend Jonathan Pennington writes,[5]

"Despite our conflation of all these events at the annual church Christmas pageant, these stories do not in fact overlap at all. If Jesus did not appear as the named figure in both of these accounts, one would never suspect they were stories about the same person." [LM: You can say the same thing about different facts in the life of Abraham Lincoln.]

Here I must acknowledge that I don’t know what’s going on and have no detailed explanations for these differences. [LM: The only actual difference between Luke and Matthew cited by Ehrman is the implication in Luke that they returned immediately to Nazareth after the purification of Mary. The rest of Ehrman's discussion consists of beating the dead horse of the census in Luke, which does not concern any apparent discrepancy with Matthew in any event. I don't know why Licona speaks as though there are extremely difficult, problematic discrepancies between Luke and Matthew. In fact, they simply record different details about Jesus' infancy. There is no reason to think there is something heavy "going on."] I think one can provide some plausible solutions. But I admit they are speculative. In my research pertaining to the most basic compositional devices in ancient historical/biographical literature, I did not observe any devices that readily shed light on the differences between the infancy narratives.

However — even though, as I say, I don’t know what’s going on here to cause the differences — let’s just speculate for a moment and consider the following scenario. Matthew and Luke both agree that a Jewish virgin named Mary who was engaged to a Jewish man named Joseph gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem. The early Christians all knew this much. However, little else was remembered about this event. So, Matthew and Luke added details to their account to create a more interesting narrative of Jesus’s birth, a type of midrash. I’m not saying this is what Matthew and Luke did. I don’t know what’s going on with the infancy narratives. However, if this occurred, we would have to take the matter of genre — midrash — into consideration and recognize that the historicity of the details outside of the story’s core would be questionable, while the core itself could stand. After all, with such differences between the accounts in Matthew and Luke, one could reasonably argue that the core is attested by multiple independent sources. [LM: So we refer to what Luke and Matthew both affirm as the "core," triumphantly state that this is multiply attested (!), and then attribute what we are saying they made up out of whole cloth as belonging to a "genre," to which we give a name, even though there is no evidence that they were using any well-established genre that would have these properties. This is highly unconvincing as any sort of defense of Matthew's and Luke's reliability!]

Why do bad doubts happen to good people?

I've been thinking lately about deconversion stories. If one hangs around on the Internet long enough, one certainly runs across them. A theme that sometimes crops up is that the person did not want to deconvert. Looking over the deconvert's shoulder at the flimsiness of the arguments that led him away from Christianity, one is permitted to wonder about that, but it is what a deconvert will sometimes say, and presumably he believes it when he says it: "I didn't want to deconvert. I struggled. I asked God to help me keep my faith, to speak to me, to reach out to me. God didn't help, or didn't help enough, and now here I am--I'm not a Christian anymore."

That's rather convenient, because it blames God for the deconversion. It's an insurance policy. You can see the wheels turning: "If I turn out to be wrong, and God exists after all, or Christianity is true after all, I will be able to say to God's face, in the immortal words of Bertrand Russell, 'Not enough evidence, God.'"

So you're covered. You asked God to help you not to deconvert, you tried hard not to, and after that it was up to God to come through. He had his chance.

All snark aside, I have to admit, as a person who tends to feel responsible for others who are struggling with doubts or on the cusp of deconverting, I find this sort of thing bothersome. I feel like tugging on God's sleeve to get his attention: "Uh, Lord, if you could spare a minute, there's someone over here who is doubting your existence or doubting that you sent Jesus to die for us, but it's not too late, because right now he still believes in you and loves you and is crying out to you, so, could you please do something about this? Just send him a sign or nudge him in the right direction or something. I would if I were you. Right about now would be a good time, Lord."

And sometimes, or so it seems to the person going through the crisis, God doesn't. The potential deconvert doesn't feel anything and doesn't even have any moment of great, shining, intellectual enlightenment. The things that bothered him about Christianity continue to bother him. Perhaps he finds answers that should be intellectually satisfying, but he doesn't find them emotionally satisfying, and those two things are very easy to conflate.

Why does God let this happen? It's one thing to acknowledge that God lets people who are indifferent to him go to hell, people who don't care, don't try, don't seek. But we're talking about someone who at least seems to himself to be seeking. This person is, at least to begin with, one of the good guys.

Well, I don't have all the answers. I believe that the evidence shows that God exists and is all-loving and all-just, but the precise how of the divine justice is something I don't claim to be able to follow through its infinite windings.

But I do have a thought to offer, and it is this: All of us who have been Christians for a while have major gaps in our understanding of God. That's inevitable, even for the most advanced saint, since God is beyond our comprehension. But it is especially true, I think, of two classes: First, those who have grown up Christians, and second, recent converts. For differing reasons, members of both of these groups are in danger of having a radically simplistic and insufficient view of the nature and character of God. This may take many forms. Perhaps the person thinks of God as harsh and vindictive, and it just takes a while for that to start to bother him. Or perhaps he demands that God must do things exactly as he would do them. One of the most common over-simplifications that I have run into is a misguided view of heaven. Heaven is seen as a kind of Happy Hunting Ground to which God (more or less arbitrarily) lets some people go while (more or less arbitrarily) blocking other people from going there, plopping them down in hell instead. Heaven is not intimately connected with the presence of God and with our own highest good through union with God. While they may mouth the idea that hell is separation from God, too many Christians don't really believe the corollary that heaven is union with God. Thus they will say things like, "I don't want to be in heaven with a God who would send my best friend to hell." As if they can have any good without God. As if they can casually pick and choose, shrugging off heaven and God while still holding onto truth, beauty, friendship, and human love. Or, "Why would we have a sense of perfect union with God in heaven, when we don't need it, rather than in the trials on earth, when we need it more?" Because "needing it" is entirely beside the point. Heaven is perfect union with God. You can't "be in heaven" without that perfect union with God.

Again and again, the angry things that deconverts say show just how shallow their concepts of God's character, of eternal life, and of Christianity really were and still are, because they never grew past them.

It's all very well to start out with sketchy ideas. But when you become a man, it is time to put away childish things. If you started out thinking that God owes you something, including a special revelation of himself in your time of doubt, you need to get over that. If you started out thinking that you can have any good thing without God, you need to learn what the beatific vision is.

God lets bad doubts happen to good people to give them a chance to move up, to deepen their understanding. C.S. Lewis portrays Tor and Tinidril, the characters in Perelandra who are like Adam and Eve, in much the same way. God allows a representative of Satan to come to their planet and tempt them in order for them to mature. One of the angelic characters says as much. "Today for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of [God] that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be."

In Perelandra, when the lady is being tempted, Maleldil (God) is silent. Previously she has always sensed him guiding her, but now she does not. If you know the book you may protest that God sends Ransom to (eventually) fight the un-Man after Tinidril has resisted temptation for a long time. That is true. But if I may say so, I never knew a former Christian deconvert yet who had no resources. Those resources may have been web sites, wise friends, or other people to whom he could take his questions. The resources might even have included very good answers, answers that were rejected. These "sendings," however, are rather mundane. We would prefer to have God zap people out of their doubts, not just send along some friend, perhaps some awkward or tactless friend, and then to leave the doubter to accept or reject the response given.

This all may sound rather harsh, but I think it is true nonetheless. God's intolerable love wants to make saints out of us while we would much prefer to be left alone to be happy, ordinary people. Happy, ordinary people are likely to have happy, ordinary ideas about God. Which is all very well and good for starters but isn't where God wants us to be in the long run. Any lover of detective fiction knows that the very fact that doesn't seem to fit in, the fact that gives you the most trouble, is a clue to the whole mystery. So it is in theology, and so it is inevitable that anyone given the opportunity to know God better will start to notice inconvenient facts that do not fit with his preconceived ideas.

So if you are that doubter, consider the possibility that God is deliberately not making this easy for you because there is something he wants you to understand, and you will learn it only by passing through this time without visible sign from him. Then ask what that something might be.

I would be remiss if I did not mention evidence again in closing out this post. I am not recommending fideism or even mysticism. On the contrary, I am always asking the doubter to examine the positive evidence for Christianity and take his stand on it. Indeed, one of the most curious things I find about recent deconverts is how difficult it is to get them to come back to the subject of the evidence for Christianity. A recent deconvert is like a man whose mind is always wandering from the point.

So my point is not to recommend that anyone believe against evidence or without evidence. Rather my point here is just this: If you are watching someone struggling, or you are struggling yourself, with questions and doubts about Christianity, and if you wonder why God lets this go on, take a hard look at the doubter's theological concepts (especially if the doubter is you) and ask where they need to be deepened and how such a deepening might serve to allay the doubts. If Christianity is true, then it is entirely possible that there is a step up that God wants you to take. You cannot stay comfortably where you were before. Whether or not you take that step is a matter of more than passing interest to us all.

Undesigned Coincidence in John 1

Up at W4: A post on a new undesigned coincidence in John 1.

New post on Licona, genre, reliability, and apologetics

I have a new post up at What's Wrong with the World on the theories of New Testament scholar Michael Licona. One of the things that surprised me as I went back through his older book on the resurrection was that there was so much controversy when that book came out about some things but not others. For example, though I don't claim to have read all of the back-and-forth about the book, I never saw anyone emphasize the fact that Licona states that it is unknown how much liberty the gospel authors took with the resurrection accounts and that this is part of why they are of "uncertain" historical value concerning the resurrection. Or the fact that he rates as merely "possible" the claim that the speeches in Acts represent apostolic teaching. I actually do understand why the claim that Matthew may have added the raising of the saints as a "poetical device" raised alarm bells, but that is of a piece with these other claims, which are much broader and fully bear out the concerns I have raised about the implications of these "poetical" theories for apologetics. In fact, in some ways the potential harm of the claim about Matthew was more limited, since it was said to be added "apocalyptic material," which perhaps we could recognize when we see it. But Licona admits forthrightly that, due to his ideas about the genre of the gospels, it is literally unknown how much liberty the gospel authors took with the details of their accounts! This means, just as I said before, that there are not supposed to be some sort of tip-offs or clues in the text in general when the authors are using these so-called literary devices. They might be making stuff up and changing things without leaving a trace. This is a very big deal, and I'm actually rather surprised that it wasn't noted about the book at the time, including by those who were very concerned about where Licona's approach was headed. But as I say, I wasn't reading such articles religiously, and perhaps it was noted and I just didn't hear about it.

Another matter that I consider very important to discuss is that of genre. It seems that Licona is making a big deal about the genre of the gospels as "being" that of "Greco-Roman bioi" and using this to defend his idea that the gospel authors would have thought they had freedom to invent speeches and dialogue, to make events happen when they didn't really happen, and the like. He is piggy-backing off of the fact that something of a bandwagon has gotten rolling in the last several years for saying that the gospels "are Greco-Roman bioi" and implying that every statement in scholarship to that effect supports his thesis about the gospel authors as using "literary devices." Now, this is particularly ironic, because originally it was thought that classicist Richard Burridge's work arguing that the gospels are Greco-Roman bioi actually supported the historicity of the gospels by showing that they aren't myth or some very tenuously historical, sui generis genre. This probably explains the haste with which evangelical scholars have accepted Burridge's thesis.

My response is two-fold: First, though I spend little time on this in the post, Burridge doesn't really argue convincingly in my view that the gospels are anything so specific as a Greco-Roman genre of "lives." He argues from a broad family resemblance, and the family resemblance can, I believe, be easily explained and more simply explained without invoking any specifically Greco-Roman influences on the gospels. It simply is a stronger thesis than required. But second, and perhaps more importantly (especially since as a sociological matter everybody seems to think "the scholarship is settled" on the former point), Burridge never (that I can see) supports Licona's idea that anyone who wrote "in" this genre would have automatically thought himself "licensed" to take liberties with the details of what he was writing. Rather, Burridge argues that the genre was very broad and could include books that took liberties. But that is not the same thing at all! Licona argues as though the genre wouldn't include books that took no liberties, whose authors would have been totally opposed to such liberties, and whose audiences would not have expected them. That is to turn Burridge's argument on its head: Instead of supporting the historicity of the gospels, this genre designation is then used to put a limit on the extent of their historical accuracy! That's just incorrect. It's a misuse of the scholarship surrounding genre, even if one accepts the conclusions of that scholarship.

This is extremely important, because at this point I see people starting to just follow Licona by implying that it's anachronistic to expect that the gospel authors didn't make stuff up! No, no, they will say, all the ancients thought it was fine to make these kinds of alterations. And these "are Greco-Roman bioi," so that "offered" license to do so, and you have to "take genre into account" in interpretation, etc. It needs to be said: That sort of conclusion is not supported by the claim that the gospels were "in" this genre. The genre as described could include both works that would never take liberties and those that included fictional elements. That's kinda the point of a broad and flexible genre!

There's an important confusion here, and people need to stop thinking that Licona or anybody else has supported the idea that we should just expect the so-called "literary devices" that Licona has claimed in the gospels to be there because genre. It isn't true. This is a confusion and a misuse of this whole genre concept. I challenge anybody to find in Burridge or anybody else good support for a claim such as, "Because the gospels were in the genre of Greco-Roman bioi, they would have been expected to transfer events to times when they didn't really happen, to make up speeches, or to change dialogue deliberately." And no, it doesn't count as good support for that thesis (which is simultaneously rigid and sweeping) if you believe that you've found some Greco-Roman author changing stuff. It doesn't follow that in general this was some kind of expectation or "standard" or even that these were recognized "devices." (Moreover, from what I've seen, sometimes when Licona thinks he's found Plutarch "using these devices" it could just be that Plutarch changed his mind about what happened--again, a much simpler hypothesis than the literary one.)

I also discuss the ways in which the so-called "literary devices" are over-interpretations of the passages in question--far more complex hypotheses than anything required.

So I want to stand athwart the course of evangelical history shouting, "Stop!" here, because people are just running after these ideas like they've been proven and are so wonderful because they enable us to sleep easy at night, knowing that we've been defended by "literary devices" from the Big Bad Wolf of alleged contradictions in the gospels. A) If true, these theories wouldn't be wonderful but rather fairly disastrous and B) They haven't been proved, nor even supported well.

See the post for more detail.

The one gleam of silver lining

The news last night that not only had D.T. won the Republican primary in Indiana but also that Ted Cruz had suspended his campaign came as a shock. That is to say, the latter part of that came as a shock. I can only assume that Cruz's backers told him they would no longer fund his campaign.

The whole thing is incredibly sad. This year's field of Republican primary runners, of course with the exception of the now-presumptive nominee, were so promising. There were so many for whom I could have happily voted in good conscience. Not all, but quite a few. Including, especially, Cruz the outsider who represented both the opposition to "business as usual" in the Republican party and principled, constitutional, knowledgeable conservatism. That this charlatan should have come along and poisoned and co-opted the process is sickening. That voters let him get away with it and even supported him enthusiastically is worse. That many of these voters think of themselves as conservative is the worst of all.

There is no way to make this out good. This is the death throes of the Republic, which I believed in and, in a real sense, still believe in. The destruction of a good thing is not a judgement on that good thing. Unlike some silly fools who think they are making a profound point against democracy by pointing out that democracy has been destroyed, I am (I trust) able to tell the difference between something that self-destructs because it is inherently wrong-headed and something that is destroyed by the malice and sin of man attacking it outright.

Yes, there are still good and beautiful things in the world, and we must now cling to those. But in the political world, the prospects are very bleak indeed.

There is one, and only one, gleam of silver lining in the dark, dark clouds that hover over us, and that is the NeverTrump movement itself. Matt Walsh has been a wonderfully articulate spokesman of it and remains defiant after last night, speaking for all of us. Last night on his public Facebook wall Walsh posted:

I will have more tomorrow, but let me assure you that when I said never Trump, I meant never Trump. That has not changed and never will. The disaster ahead will not be on my conscience. I wash my hands of it. I will not acquiesce to a tyrant. I do not care what letter he has beside his name. A lot of "Never Trump" people will surrender in the coming days, but I promise you I won't. I've chosen this path and I will stick to it.

Our country is headed to a dark place. Pray tonight, everyone.

Exactly. The idea that one would say "never" and then, like D.T. himself, blandly turn around and say the opposite, is deeply insulting. Never always meant never and was always set up in explicit anticipation of the possibility that he might be the Republican nominee.

Why do I call the NeverTrump movement the one gleam of a silver lining? Because for all of my adult politics-watching life two errors of thought have dominated conservative thinking: Error 1: It is an a priori truth that there is always a "lesser evil" in American politics. Error 2: It is an a priori truth that it is morally required that one vote for the lesser evil once one figures out what it is to the best of one's ability.

In the last two presidential elections I didn't vote for the candidate of either major political party. I had reasons for this. I thought that both McCain and (though to a lesser extent) Romney were too compromised on pro-life issues, and I also sensed strongly that Romney was no culture warrior and that his commitment to social conservatism was weak. I was able to articulate these reasons and discuss them, but Error 1 and Error 2 made it impossible to reason with most people. I would say again and again, "Look, maybe this candidate hasn't crossed your line, and I get that, but surely you realize that there must be a line, right? You wouldn't vote for just anybody just because he happened to have the Republican label and you think that that is always less bad than the person with the Democrat label, right?"

And again and again, they answered, in essence, "Wrong. There shouldn't be a line. There is no line. There is always a lesser evil. You always have to find out what it is and vote for that. Voting for the President of the United States for one of the candidates of the two major parties is a moral imperative."

I couldn't understand it. I would try reductios, but they were impervious. And some still are.

Well, what I'm realizing in 2016 is that people talking politics don't do very well with abstract reductios. It works better when you have an actual, blatant, moral cretin, right in front of our eyes, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for the august office of the President of the United States of America. Then, thank God, at least some good people start to realize that Error 1 and Error 2 are errors. And thus the nevertrump movement was born.

To my mind, this is an important development. I have never considered the stranglehold of the two-party system in the United States to be a politically healthy thing. We need to mix it up a little. We need more options. And conscience can help a lot in that mixing up process. But not if conscience is misdirected by Error 1 and Error 2. Those errors co-opt conscience. They draft the power of conscience into perpetuating the two-party system and the Imperative To Vote as some kind of holy relics.

Now, I have no crystal ball about what is going to happen. It's not that I expect some viable third party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. I suspect we're not that lucky, and to be frank, third parties tend to be the breeding ground of precisely the kinds of kooks and conspiracy theorists who are now enthusiastically following D.T. over the edge of the abyss.

But for decades now I have realized that the final battle in this country is going to be the guerilla warfare for individual human minds, hearts, and ultimately, souls. And in that battle, the NeverTrump movement is an extremely positive and important development. Americans, conservatives, at least some of them, have at last found the place where they will stand, where they will say, "No, never, not gonna go there.That's a bridge too far."

If you don't have a "never" place, a place to stand, a place where you draw the line and will not move, you are constantly giving away pieces of yourself, and that's a dangerous thing to do. To quote Robert Bolt's Thomas More:

And what would you do with a water spaniel that was afraid of water? You'd hang it! Well, as a spaniel is to water, so is a man to his own self. I will not give in because I oppose it--I do--not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do--I....Is there no single sinew in the midst of this that serves no appetite of Norfolk's but is just Norfolk? There is! Give that some exercise, my lord...Because as you stand, you'll go before your Maker in a very ill condition! And he'll have to conclude that somewhere back along your pedigree--a bitch got over the wall!

And now, with NeverTrump, maybe some people are discovering that they have something within themselves that is not just a voter, not just an agonized political pawn, but a man, a person, with real moral limits, and they are ready to say, "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me." Now there will be, we may hope, some who will bow neither to the image of Baal nor to the Golden Calf.

For that, we may always hope. There are always these individual victories to be won, whatever happens to the nation. For the probing and testing of God does not cease until the end of time, when history is truly ended and the books are opened.

May He find us faithful.