Testing God

We have it on high authority that we should not tempt (aka test) God. (Matthew 4:7)

It might seem that this means that we shouldn't seek evidence for the existence of God or the claims of Christianity, but any of my long-time or even short-time readers will know that that is the last use I would make of Jesus' injunction. The Bible also tells us that God has provided much evidence. Jesus emphasized his works as evidence of his being sent from the Father.

But there is a certain model of evidence that depends upon experiment and repeatability. In fact, some people have no other model for hard evidence, so when they think of "evidence for God," they immediately look around for some kind of test they can do to find out whether God is really there. The prosperity hacks and the verses they rip out of the context of the Bible as a whole and present as "divine promises" provide plenty of fodder for this. God promises, they say, to "pour down blessings" on those who give, so therefore, if you give, God will make you rich. Then, of course, we find out that plenty of such people don't get rich, so there y'go! God failed the test, the experimentum crucis has been done and has yielded a negative result. Christianity has been falsified!

This entire model of evidence for Christianity is flat wrong. God is not a physical law nor a physical process but a personal being. He gives evidence of his existence through many avenues, the most dramatic of which are miracles. Miracles are mighty acts of power that occur at a particular time and place and are thereafter available to historical inquiry. This does not make them subjective; it doesn't mean that they can be known only "by the eyes of faith." But it does mean that they are not something you can repeat in your back yard as a test.

All of this is related to some questions that I was recently asked about a couple of posts at an atheist site. The posts urged Christians to test God by praying sincerely for good things and then seeing how the alleged "promises" in the Bible of answered prayer are falsified. I'm reluctant to link the atheist site, because quite frankly, I think it's a mistake for Christians to get involved in lengthy, public, on-line debates with Internet atheists. Sincere inquirers are one thing, but even then it is better to communicate with them privately than in the form of a kind of gladiatorial contest surrounded by an often trollish and un-serious audience. At the same time, I'm afraid that, "God didn't answer my prayer" has probably led more than one soul to damnation. (I know of one case among my own acquaintances in which I later learned that the person excused his deconversion in this way.) So it is probably worth looking at some of these questions and at the verses that prompt them. I beg the reader's indulgence for some absence of organization in what follows, as it is a somewhat edited version of what was originally a personal e-mail.

Notice how [our atheist blogger] lumps things together. He lumps the fact that Jesus did miracles or that Paul was not killed when bitten by a snake together with verses that appear to promise answers to prayer and treats all of these as though they are part of some “Christians will have success” pattern of biblical promises. But this is ridiculous. Jesus was God! The apostles were showing signs and wonders as part of kicking off Christianity. It simply isn't true that the fact that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead means that all of us are supposed to be able to raise people from the dead.

Inconsistently, he also faults Christians for taking seriously all those places where the New Testament, especially, tells us to expect earthly troubles and persecution. He argues that this makes Jesus' promise never to leave us meaningless. But why so? If Jesus' promise never to leave us is a spiritual promise of His presence through our trials, a promise of spiritual strengthening, and a promise of carrying our souls through to everlasting life, how does the existence of those earthly trials make that promise meaningless? On the contrary, the expectation of trouble and persecution is far more deeply woven into the warp and woof of Christian theology than the relatively far fewer passages that appear in isolation to promise an earthly answer to prayer. That very fact should cause us to think twice (on the principle of comparing Scripture with Scripture) about taking those passages to be promises of earthly success. But the atheist wants to have it both ways. He wants to chide Christians for taking Jesus' promise of being with them spiritually through unpleasant trials as though that makes Jesus' promise meaningless, and he wants to fault some of them (Pentecostal snake handlers and prosperity preachers) for believing that Christianity promises earthly success. It's heads he wins, tales we lose. Christians are just wrong whether they look at the whole sweep of New Testament teaching and don't expect earthly success as a promise or whether they look at isolated passages and do expect earthly success as a promise.

Here follows a short digression on the long ending of Mark, in which we find Jesus predicting that Christians (or his apostles) will be able to pick up serpents and drink deadly poison without harm: This ending is considered not to have been part of the original manuscript of Mark entirely for textual reasons. The oldest manuscripts do not have this ending, and it appears that the original ending of Mark was lost. It happens to be the case that this obviates the need to deal with the “snake handling” verse, but that is not why the ending is rejected. Certainly the gospel would end very abruptly without the long ending, but that is a reason for believing that the original ending has been lost, not for insisting that the added ending is authentic. Note that this does not in any way call into question the genuineness of post-resurrection accounts in the other four gospels, even though treating the long ending of Mark as inauthentic involves cutting out the post-resurrection account in Mark itself. Whether or not Mark is in fact the oldest gospel (patristic evidence is that some version of Matthew was the oldest), we have no reason to accept the shallow, higher-critical evolutionary view that only what is in the oldest gospel is true and that everything else evolved in a legendary fashion from there. *All* of the gospels, including very strongly the *latest* gospel, John, show clear internal signs of eyewitness testimony and also of having an important degree of independence in their accounts. Nothing heavy rides on whether we have an authentic ending to Mark including a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.

Now, back to the “promises” criticism: Any attempt to press Christians into adopting a prosperity gospel is monumentally unconvincing. One verse used for this purpose is 2 Cor. 9:6ff, in which the Apostle Paul urges the Christians to give generously to a collection he was gathering for the Christians at Jerusalem. Paul says that he who “sows generously” will also “reap generously.” These words have a strongly proverbial ring and are pretty clearly an allusion to a proverb. In fact, they sound much like Proverbs 11:24-25. Now, Proverbs are notoriously overstated, just because they are proverbs. Think of the English proverb, “What goes around comes around.” We can all think of counterexamples to this. Nobody takes it as an exceptionless truth. Nonetheless, we've seen enough examples to think it worth embodying in a proverb. A stitch in time doesn't always save nine, etc. Proverbs 11:24-25 is not giving some kind of divine promise but rather worldly wisdom. It is warning against stinginess and pointing out that sometimes being stingy causes you to end up literally poorer than you were before. (There's a whole Victorian novel in that picture right there!) Paul is citing this proverbial wisdom as part of urging the Corinthians to give, but for that very reason he should not be taken to be making a revealed promise of wealth as a result of giving. Moreover, below in the same passage, vs. 11, when Paul uses the phrase “enriched in everything...” he seems to be echoing I Corinthians 1:5 which says that the Corinthians are “enriched in everything” by God and clearly refers to spiritual gifts.

Once we clear away the fog, what we are left with is not a consistent pattern of actual divine promises of prosperity or of positive answers to prayer. What we find rather is a handful of verses that, taken in isolation, appear to be sweeping promises of answers to any prayers or at least to any serious and good prayers. There is, however, so much in Jesus' own teaching and in the apostles' teaching and practice that stands in opposition to the “promise of success” interpretation that that sweeping interpretation seems ruled out. The same Jesus who said, “Ask and ye shall receive,” “You shall do greater works than these,” and “Anything you ask, believing, you shall receive,” also said, “In this world you will have trouble,” “They will cast you out of the synagogue and kill you,” “Happy are you, when men persecute you,” and “Take up your cross and follow me.” If the “ask and receive” verses were really supposed to mean that we could ask for anything, or even anything serious and good, and receive it, then all the prophecies of persecution, all the calls to come and die with Jesus, would be meaningless. For it is in an obvious sense a serious and good thing, not a frivolous or wicked thing, to ask that God would rescue a Christian in danger of death or being persecuted for his faith or that God would heal the sick. And again, since the themes of suffering for Christ and growing through suffering are absolutely pervasive in Christianity, to the point of being of the essence of the Christian commitment, the handful of “ask and you shall receive” verses ought to be interpreted in a way that is consistent with these overwhelming and pervasive themes.

The same point applies to the book of James. It is James who says that “the prayer of faith will heal the sick,” but at the beginning of the book James says, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.” It seems clear that illness is an example of a trial that could be used by God to produce patience, which leads one to conclude that James didn't really think that all sick Christians would be healed by prayer.

Or again: The Apostle Paul did sometimes heal sick people miraculously, but in Philippians 2:27, Paul talks about the sickness of his friend and fellow-worker, Epaphroditus. He says that Epaphroditus was near to death but was healed and that God “had mercy on” Paul because of the sorrow Paul would have had if Epaphroditus had died. Paley says in the Horae Paulinae, and I agree with him, that the whole tenor of the passage implies that Epaphroditus was healed by secondary causes–that is to say, that he got better naturally. Otherwise, Paul presumably wouldn't have let him get so close to death before miraculously healing him. Apparently Paul's ability to heal by miracle was not a “sure thing,” nor does Paul say that the elders of the nearest church prayed over Epaphroditus, and, voila, he was immediately healed. His sickness was serious, it was a near thing, he almost died, but eventually got better. We can assume that Paul did pray for him, and in that sense Paul's prayers were answered, but evidently not in any dramatic or obviously miraculous fashion. Again, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he himself had some sort of physical ailment, prayed for healing, and did not receive it.

And let us not forget that Our Lord Himself, the perfect petitioner, asked in the garden that the cup might pass from Him, but then added, “Nevertheless, thy will be done,” and of course did not receive His own petition.

So Christian teaching and practice seems to indicate that we should not expect any good prayer to be answered, nor should we expect to be able to engage willy-nilly in “faith healing.” We as Christians are responsible to take all of this Scriptural data into account, not to grab a few verses, take them at their most literal, and then insist on “holding God to” those as promises.

What, then, is the meaning of the problem passages? First, let me list what I right now (of course, I might be forgetting a couple) consider to be the remaining prima facie difficult verses.

Matthew 21:21-22, which includes “All things, whatsoever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive.” The parallel passage in Mark (11:24) says, “believe that you receive, and you shall have them.”

John 14:12-13, which includes the promise that “he that believeth on me” will do “the works” that Jesus has done–“the works” being a phrase which refers clearly to miracles in vs. 11. In vs. 13 we have, “Whatsoever you shall ask in my name, that will I do...”

Matthew 18:19 “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”

James 5:14-15, apparently promising that “the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up...”

I think a number of options are open to us, and we shouldn't be dogmatic. C.S. Lewis discusses this in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly On Prayer, on pp. 59-61. There he conjectures that the apparent promises of receiving whatever one asks in faith may be intended to apply to people who are, or at least are at that time, in a special state such that they have special insight into what God intends to do and therefore ask for it.  In the Protestant tradition we hear stories about a man named George Mueller who ran an orphanage and may have been one of these people. (Of course, we don't hear of any cases where Mueller prayed and didn't get what he asked for, so we may have a case of cherry picking.) The stories are rather striking and always show Mueller as calmly confident in the result and then some event, natural in itself but a remarkable coincidence, which brings about the result. So perhaps Lewis's conjecture is correct, in which case most of us should just keep following the “thy will be done” model, which was good enough for Jesus Christ Himself at one point in His life.

There are other options for specific passages. For example, the James passage specifically says that the sick person should confess his sins and that, if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven. Paul in I Corinthians 11 says that many were sick and some had actually died among the Corinthians because of their disrespect for the Holy Communion. Perhaps James had in mind situations where the sickness was a punishment for sin. That shouldn't be taken to mean that all sickness is a punishment for sin; far from it. Merely that this might have been the sort of situation James was thinking of when he says that the prayer of faith would save the sick person and that the Lord would heal him.

John 14, where Jesus says that those who believe in him will do “greater” works, immediately says that this is “because I go unto my Father.” He strongly emphasizes the coming of the Holy Ghost, which he said could not happen until after the Ascension (going to his Father). He may therefore be referring both to the special gifts (such as the miraculous gift of speaking in tongues) given to the disciples as a sign and special aid from the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and also to their (in one sense) miraculous success in spreading the Gospel with the power of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 18:19, which Lewis lists in an essay in Christian Reflections as particularly problematic, comes (at least in the discourse as we have it) immediately after the promise of the power of binding and loosing committed to the disciples in vs. 18. “Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” This verse apparently alluded to a Jewish tradition that the “right” rabbinical rulings concerning the keeping of Judaic law had special status with God, so that those rulings were ratified in heaven. Here Jesus appears to be giving that sort of power as his “council of rabbis” to make rulings to his Apostles, a power that they have to exercise later, in Acts, when questions arise about whether the Gentiles have to keep the Jewish law. Verse 19 which says that “if any two” agree it will be “done for them” by the Father may be a reiteration, specifically to the Apostles, of their special authority.

You can take or leave any of these interpretations as you find them more or less plausible. The more important take-home lesson is how few of them there are and the necessity, in the light of a much larger biblical consensus suggesting the good of suffering, of not interpreting them as a blank check from God promising earthly answers to prayer for any Christians who asks with confidence and sincerity.

Let us by all means look for the truth and follow the evidence. But let us not create “crucial tests” for Christianity where they do not exist. We have to take our evidence as it comes and give it its due weight, not manufacture an artificial set of requirements that embody the form in which we would prefer to receive evidence. If one is locked into a test-tube model of evidence, even empirical evidence, one will miss much that is genuinely and objectively evidential in nature while simultaneously thinking that Christianity has somehow "failed." That such a mistake could have eternal consequences is a good reason for being careful not to fall into it.

"Deconstruct Heterosexuality"? Say what?

This extremely poor post at First Things blog ought to require no response, just because it is so very, very wrongheaded. It ought to suffice to say that the author, one Michael Hannon, suggests (I hesitate to say "argues") that we should "deconstruct heterosexuality," that is to say, that we should cease to believe that being heterosexual, which most of us would call having normal attraction to the opposite sex, is a real part of individual human identity at all, much less that it is per se healthy and normative. His suggestions are festooned about with many silly statements about the history of mankind, apparently garnered from academic "queer theory." Shouldn't that brief synopsis (if you must read it, I think you will see that it is accurate) be enough to cause at least any Christian conservative to conclude that the article is completely confused and not worth his time? You would like to think. Unfortunately, one of my at least somewhat conservative Facebook friends linked to the piece with apparent approval while another on-line conservative friend sent the link to me by e-mail with explicit approval. Talk about "deceiving even the elect"! I would have ignored it after the first, but I was rather shocked by the second incident of approval. And hey, I wrote so much to the second person in e-mail that I figured it was a good opportunity to put up my criticisms here on my somewhat neglected personal blog. With additions. Because this article is so bad, so wrongheaded, that I keep thinking of more things to say.

Now, I've not really had a lot of respect for the First Things blog qua entity for a long time. They have a huge stable of writers who say all kinds of things and are all over the map--the good, the bad, and the ugly. They've become rather enamored lately of what is known as the "new homophile" movement, which would have been enough to lose my respect all by itself. Blogger Joshua Gonnerman is an example. The idea of that movement, speaking broadly, is that homosexual identity is somehow a good thing, a kind of gift, really, bestowing special insights and stuff on those who have it, as long as you are chaste and don't lust. And that people who so identify shouldn't be asked to give up their identity or think of it as "identifying themselves with their temptations to sin." Even though the "new homophiles" are mostly (all?) Roman Catholic, they get pretty uneasy when one uses the Catholic Church's designation of "intrinsically disordered" for their desires.

In that context, one might regard this piece by Hannon as a kind of counterweight. Hannon is explicit in rejecting homosexuality as an identity, and one of his reasons is that very reason--namely, that we shouldn't identify ourselves with our inclinations to sin. Hannon is also concerned about the fact that young people agonize (as they shouldn't have to) over what their sexual identity is, whether they might "be gay." He is bothered by the fact that homosexual identity is treated as innate and immutable and that young people are now nervous about developing close friendships with members of the same sex lest this mean that they "are gay." With all of these concerns I agree, and that's probably the last good thing you'll see me say here about Hannon's piece, because that's all that is good about it.

The concerns about exposing young people to the idea that they "might be gay" and the harm that this does to them, including to their friendships, have been explored far more eloquently by Anthony Esolen, here, for instance. Esolen has also trenchantly answered the "new homophiles" here without any trendy nonsense about deconstructing anything, and certainly not deconstructing heterosexuality, of all things!

Hannon, either because his head has been addled by reading queer theory or because he wants to be even-handed, or maybe both, is not willing to stop at saying that homosexuality should not be regarded as a part of personal identity. He must go on (as the title of his post attests) to say that neither should heterosexuality. In fact, he informs us quite seriously that the concept of heterosexuality was invented in the late 1800's. In the 1860's, to be exact. As an historical thesis, this has all the virtues that "things fall up" has as a scientific thesis. (Hannon apparently got the claim from Michel Foucault, that fount of accurate, unbiased historical information and model of intellectual rigor and clarity.) Let's not quibble about words. I make no etymological claims about when the word "heterosexuality" was invented, because I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard the word before my own adulthood, which was long after the 1860's. But the concept that it is normal and healthy for men to desire women and for women to desire men, that, indeed, these normal and healthy desires are part of the very cement of all human society, and that part of being a normal man or a normal woman is having an "orientation," a telic attraction, toward the opposite sex, making that orientation part of one's normal individual identity, is as old as mankind, as old as the day when the Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him an helpmeet."

Or listen to St. Paul:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. (Romans 1:26-27)

See that part about "vile affections" and what is "against nature" as opposed to the "natural use of the woman"? That, my friends, is the "gay-straight divide" which Hannon tells us was an invention of the 1860's. The "natural use of the woman" is what a sexually healthy man desires. That which is "against nature" is what homosexuals desire. It's really very simple. And it wasn't invented in the 1860's.

St. Paul's identification of heterosexual intercourse as being natural looks like the sort of "heteronormativity" that Hannon wants us to reject. Perhaps Hannon should lecture St. Paul to the effect that such heteronormativity creates "pride" and "pathetically uncritical and unmerited self-assurance." But all such sophistical rhetoric does nothing to change the one paralyzing fact: Homosexual desires and acts are not only contrary to chastity, they are also contrary to nature. Normal heterosexual intercourse may well be (in specific instances) a sin against chastity but is not a sin against nature. No amount of talk-talk and worry about heterosexual "pride" can change the fact that there is a fundamental asymmetry between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The former is a gift, God's created engine for the perpetuation of the human race and for the generation of much love and beauty. The latter is a perverted and tragic disorder.

And what pernicious nonsense Hannon talks about pride and heterosexuality:

But heterosexuality, in its pretensions to act as the norm for assessing our sexual customs, is marked by something even worse: pride, which St. Thomas Aquinas classifies as the queen of all vices.

Please. So imagine a mother whose daughters have always, since childhood, noticed handsome and/or charming men. Imagine a father whose son has blushed over the beauty of women. Suppose that this mother and this father regard their children's inclinations as part of a beautiful, natural, God-given plan for the world. Suppose that they regard themselves as stewards whose job it is to guide these natural, powerful, God-given instincts in the right direction, their job to bestow, in fear and trembling and with God's help, wisdom and guidance upon these budding young women and young men. Is this pride? Is it pride for the children themselves to believe these things about the naturalness of their own feelings? Far from it.

Imagine that we were beset with a dirt-eating activist contingent in our society who tried to make out that eating dirt is normal. Would it be anything other than nonsense on stilts to chide those who say, "The desire to eat food is normal. The desire to eat dirt is deviant and disordered" for fostering pride by such declarations of obvious truth?

Now, someone might say, Hannon wants us to emphasize married sexuality rather than heterosexuality as the norm. What could be the problem with that? Since it is set expressly in opposition to the normalizing of heterosexual desire, lots and lots. First of all, if we ditch the very concept of heterosexuality as a natural, telic orientation in anyone who isn't married, how is anybody ever going to get married? Call me over-literalistic if you will, but it's important to remember as one reads heady talk like Hannon's about "deconstructing heterosexuality" and about how "heterosexuality blinds us to sin" that if unmarried people didn't have heterosexual desires they would never become married people! If churches and other organizations didn't regard heterosexuality as normal and natural, they would have no reason to provide, for example, opportunities for young people to get to know each other and hopefully meet mates and get married.

Girls need to be given a picture of themselves as girls and boys as boys during their whole lives, from long before they are actually married, and part of that picture is the understanding and expectation that, in due time, they will be attracted to members of the opposite sex and that this is perfectly natural. Nor is this sort of gradual heterosexual self-awareness appropriate solely in relation to the one and only one person they will actually marry. It need not be a case of lust for young women to notice men, including men they know they are never going to marry, and to recognize that they find those men attractive or unattractive, to evaluate and even analyze those instinctive attractions, to decide, for example, when they are wise or unwise. And the same mutatis mutandis for young men. To hold, as Hannon urges us to hold, that attraction to the opposite sex should not be considered an important part of one's normal and innate identity any more than same-sex attraction is is a psychologically dangerous thesis. Adopting it would be utterly disastrous for parenthood. For this reason alone it is to be hoped that Christian parents completely reject Hannon's misguided advice if they should happen to read it. The solution to the tragedy of children who agonize over their sexual identity is not the deconstruction of heterosexuality but rather a "heteronormativity" so absolute as to be beyond doubt or question, a "heteronormativity" that gives children a secure background against which to set themselves and in which to grow up.

Here is another point: In general the relations of the sexes are part of what makes the world beautiful and interesting. When a gentleman holds a door for a lady or even compliments her respectfully on her appearance or when a lady dresses nicely because there will be gentlemen present at some meeting, this is all entirely good and appropriate as far as it goes. The parties need not be married to one another at all. Certainly such recognition of the presence of members of the opposite sex and appreciation of them, even of their physical attractiveness, can descend into crudity and lust, but it need not do so. None of us should want to live in an androgynous world. Nor should we be reacting to our own pornified world by trying to turn all male-female interactions into androgynous interactions unless they are between people actually married to one another. So, no: Gender identity and even sexual identity cannot and should not be confined solely to "married identity," and heterosexual identity in these areas is normal whereas homosexual identity is not. That is one of the places where the "new homophiles" err. They want to create some space, for homosexuals, for a category such as I have just described for innocent heterosexual appreciation. There is no such space, however, precisely because homosexuality is intrinsically disordered.

A central fallacy of Hannon's post consists in the strenuous attempt to treat homosexual inclinations and heterosexual inclinations as on a par. In this Hannon actually agrees with the "new homophiles." They, like him, want to treat homosexual desires in a similar way (as much as possible) to the way one treats heterosexual desires. Their solution is to treat homosexual desires as, somehow, a positive thing, a gift, and part of one's identity. That puts them to some degree (except that they must not be acted upon) on a par with heterosexual desires. Hannon, too, wants to treat the two even-handedly, yet his solution is to say that neither is a normal part of identity and that any identification of oneself in connection with one's sexuality merely blinds one to sin. What neither group is willing to do is to recognize the absolutely fundamental asymmetry between heterosexual and homosexual desires. The reason that the former are a normal part of identity is because they are really part of nature, really part of God's design for the world. Masculinity and feminity are important aspects of reality, and our recognition and celebration of them is an important part of being human. The reason that homosexual desires are an unhealthy source of identity is because they are disordered. Identifying oneself as intrinsically "a homosexual" really is identifying oneself with one's inclinations to sin. This is not so for being heterosexual.

It may be replied to all of this that I am just out of touch with the world of 2014 and don't understand the extreme perversions of "heterosexuality" that many people are being exposed to and developing a horrible taste for--e.g., via pornography. This ain't the 1950's, so maybe we shouldn't celebrate heterosexual desire. No, dear reader, I assure you. Though I do indeed try to follow the injunction of Philippians 4:8 to think on whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report, I am indeed aware that people can be inclined to genuine perversions which happen to be carried out with members of the opposite sex. Even without going into any lurid detail, one can see this merely by considering that a pedophile man may desire little girls.

What, then? Is the solution to this to reject or deny the beauty of natural attraction between the sexes and of the natural recognition of the attractiveness of the opposite sex? God forbid. If anything, we need more and more attempts to resurrect that old world and that old vision. Hence, my deliberately dated references above to relations between ladies and gentlemen in public situations.

Moreover, to go back to Hannon's post, how does the existence of sexual perversions involving males with females support Hannon's thesis that heterosexuality should be "deconstructed" and that its "deconstruction" is an "opportunity" for Christians? In short, it doesn't support it one smidgen. Since God did indeed make men and women and did indeed intend them for one another, since normal heterosexual desires are indeed natural, Hannon's denial of "heteronormativity" is just flat wrong. No amount of twisting or perversion of the sexual instinct on the part of (some of) those who are not homosexuals can possibly change the fact that he is wrong. It simply does not follow from the fact that there are unhealthy urges and acts involving members of the opposite sex that there are no healthy urges and acts. Indeed, the only healthy human sexual urges and acts are between two people who are members of opposite sexes. If Hannon thinks it is "prideful" to point that out and to recognize it in society, then he just has a war on with reality.

I would go so far as to say that for Christians, who have both general and special revelation at their disposal, to join in "deconstructing heterosexuality" as Hannon suggests is so badly confused and so wildly irresponsible as to be actually sinful. Such a "deconstruction" can only do harm, not good. Let us join in promoting "heteronormativity" in every venue where we can, and most of all in our homes.

"I need it" doesn't mean "is a basic human need"

Time for an economics post, as some slight attempted atonement for my neglect of my personal blog. (I have to some degree kept up posting during the same period at What's Wrong With the World, so be sure to check in there from time to time.)

Oh, digression before I even get started: If you love J.R.R. Tolkien and/or are skeptical of movie versions of great works of literature, or if you are interested in how to make a work of fantasy utterly stupid, do not miss John C. Wright's takedown of the most recent Peter Jackson hobbit movie. I had no intention of seeing the movie anyway, but reading Wright's review is worthwhile even if you never see the movie. In fact, it'll probably prevent you from ever wanting to, and reading it will be a better use of your time than going to the movie. Sometimes I have to admit that Wright is a little too wordy, but this time it was fine, just fine. He could go on at length with no complaint from me, because he was just so darned funny. Though "lol" has become an overused Internet pseudo-word, in this case I really did laugh out loud, repeatedly. Warning: Pictures of mostly unclad girl warriors included in the post. They are part of Wright's satiric comment on the movie's gratuitous inclusion of an inauthentic, not-in-the-book warrior elf chick. Not that John C. Wright needs much excuse, mind you, to include pictures of scantily clad girl warriors. He does it in other posts sometimes apparently just for its own sake. Anyway, tolle lege, and enjoy.

Now, moving on to my own post...

It makes sense to me to say that, if some society or country frequently faces famines in which large numbers of its citizens starve to death, there is probably something wrong with that country's economy. It doesn't absolutely have to be something morally wrong. It could be some vast failure of prudence caused by stupidity. It could be a well-intentioned ideology that actually creates shortages. We all know people whose economic sense appears to be nil but who aren't actually bad. Some country might be run by such people. On the other hand, there might be moral wrong behind the problem--graft, corruption, theft, anarchy. In general, if a country has the rule of law and a sensible economic system, especially in the 21st century, most people will be able to have the bare necessities of life in that country, either by means of working, by means of being supported by relatives, or by means of accepting charity or government aid.

But we must distinguish those extremely vague and harmless comments from the proposition that, if I need x, even if I genuinely do need x in order to survive, x should be fairly readily affordable for me. It depends entirely on what x is. If I have a rare disorder that means that I will die if I don't have weekly blood transfusions, then maybe my society isn't rich enough that I can get that without extraordinary economic help. Suppose that I need some expensive medication in order to survive. It doesn't follow from the fact that I need it that, if that medication is expensive and I may not be able to afford it, "something is wrong." I don't have a cause of grievance against society for not meeting my "basic needs" or making sure that I have what I "need to live" if there are difficulties with obtaining that medication. Someone in such a situation may have to accept charity. He may turn to government assistance. He may have to work at a job that he very much dislikes or take on extra hours.

All of this is just a concrete instance of the old TANSTAAFL--there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. But it's perhaps easy, especially for young people who don't seem to have been taught TANSTAAFL, to equate "Joe needs this" with "Joe is entitled to this" or "something must be terribly wrong if Joe might not be able to get this." In our highly technological and immensely rich Western society, we often expect a great deal of our healthcare system. Got psychological problems? There's an OCD medicine for that, and oh, by the way, insurance will pay for your therapist. Got digestive problems? "Somebody" should provide Prilosec or Nexium. At risk for blood clot? Your insurance will pay for Coumadin. And so on and so forth. Sometimes, as in the case of heart ailments or stroke risk, these really are life-saving medications. But nobody is entitled to the medicines just because they are life-saving. The fact that they are live-saving really has very little to do with the question of how much they "should" cost. Indeed, it is highly dubious that we have any good grip on the meaning of the question, "How much should this heart medication cost?" Does it even have a meaning? Is the meaning moral or economic? If economic, what reason do we have to believe that the current cost is skewed or distorted from some norm?

This last question actually does have an answer: Insurance and other third-party payments (e.g., Medicare) have a strong tendency to drive up costs and drive down competition. For decades our healthcare system has been moving to more and more third-party payers, and Obamacare is making matters even worse. Fee-for-service tends in general to keep costs down. (Ask yourself sometime why body work on your car is so expensive in contrast to mechanical work. I submit that part of the reason is that a lot of bodywork is paid for by auto insurance after accidents and that this has warped the market.) So we can guess that many medications would be cheaper if they had from the outset been paid for by people themselves (that means you and me, dear reader) out of their own pockets and if competition had been allowed to drive the price down.

But there are several problems with deriving from those facts any strong conclusions such as, "My Nexium ought to be less expensive. Someone is doing something wrong, or my society is badly messed up, if it's more expensive than I think it should be." First of all, there's the small matter of patenting. One of the few actually constitutional things our federal government does is to issue patents, a function given to it by the founding Fathers. If the first company that put in gazillions of dollars in research and development is going to recoup that huge investment, it needs to be able to have exclusive rights at least for a time to its intellectual property. After that time the generics come in like the Light Brigade, and prices generally come down. During the time that the initial company has exclusive distribution rights, there won't be any competition for the sale of that product, and the cost will be high so that the company can recoup its R & D costs. In other words, it has to be made worth the company's while to develop the medicine or the medicine just won't exist in the first place. People who look only to production costs when they make airy statements about how much medicine "should" cost neglect the research end. They neglect also the fact that the pharmaceutical companies may be helping to pay for their development of some other medication (which will save somebody else's life) by what they charge for your medication. Nor is there anything wrong with that.

Second, if we really did go to more of a fee-for-service model, there would be an extremely tough market correction, and it would take some time. Medical costs would not drop like a stone overnight, and in the meanwhile a lot more people, faced with paying out of pocket, would face a lot of difficult decisions and would have to forego a lot of things that they think they need. Many hospitals might just go out of business. Once the economy has become addicted to bad economic practices, the withdrawal can be unimaginably painful.

Third, to the extent that R & D and production costs have been covered by an inflationary economy and by third-party payments, some medications might simply go off the market altogether. It would be foolhardy to say that one knows that one's own medicine would continue to exist and would just fall to a more affordable price if "all were as it should be." The fact is that you simply don't know if the pharmaceutical company would continue to consider it worth its while to make the medicine, or what the natural, uninflated price would be if it did.

So even though we do have reason to believe that medical costs are artificially inflated, it doesn't follow that we know what the landscape would look like if those artificial price supports were removed. We should be especially cautious when it comes to predictions about specific products.

Notice in any event that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the fact that some people need x medicine to survive. "Affordable" cost simply doesn't track necessity, especially not when the urgent demand comes from a relatively small percentage of the population. Everybody needs food to survive, so there's a booming and competitive market for food. A lot fewer people need Lovenox.

My more economically savvy readers may think that all of this is so obvious as not to need to be said, but listen around next time you hear some far less savvy young people talk about what people "should have" and what people "need" and what things "should cost." You might get a surprise. Nobody has, apparently, ever explained to these people that neither money nor pharmaceuticals nor fully-trained doctors grow on trees. It's just an astonishing thing, but the fairies don't distribute goods and services.

Be sure you discuss these things with your kids explicitly. Children are compassionate, and their compassionate natures can easily be manipulated by those who will tell them that things "should be different" without any clear idea of what that means. Moreover, children tend to be somewhat self-centered (so do human beings in general), and when a compassionate person is himself in need, if he has had no good economic training, he might well be tempted to say, "It shouldn't be so hard to get this. This is what I need. It shouldn't be so expensive. The whole world ought to be different!" Sound childish? Well, yes, I'm afraid it does sound childish, but then, economic liberalism is childish and all too easy to fall into.

Teach 'em TANSTAAFL young, and then teach them, in true bourgeois fashion, to apply it to themselves: "No, honey, we can't afford that." Even if they really do need something, it doesn't follow that it will be magically and painlessly provided, with no struggle, discomfort, or embarrassment to themselves. Indeed, it may not be provided at all. Sometimes, life's just tragic like that, and all men are mortal.

A conservative view of the world is a view that recognizes limitation. This applies, alas, even to some things that some people need.

A Ken Medema sampler

Over the years here at Extra Thoughts I have repeatedly mentioned blind pianist and singer Ken Medema. He was big in the Midwest in the 1970's. Ken has a talent for piano improvisation and for livening up or rewriting hymns. For a long time you couldn't find his older stuff anywhere on-line, and as I look over old posts that mention him, that complaint comes up frequently. That has gradually ceased to be the case on the music playing site Grooveshark, and I'd like to share several of his numbers here.

First, "Someday," which is the hymn "Saved By Grace." I wrote about its words here. The original author of the lyrics, Fanny Crosby, was also blind. Ken gives it a new tune.



Here's a fun jazzy number called "Sonshiny Day" that should pick you up if you happen to be feeling blue during this long, dark winter.



This next one turns up on Christian radio at Christmas time for some reason. I think it must be because of the line about the newborn baby. I would say the newborn baby is the narrator's own baby.



"Lead the Way" is, in my opinion, a particularly beautiful song in a 70's ballad style. Christian contemporary music has only gone downhill since this counted as "contemporary."



"Fork in the Road" shows Ken's grittier style as well as his ability to tell a story in song. It's about Judas and always makes me tremble a bit for my soul.



"Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying" gives us Medema with what sounds like a black back-up choir. Soulful.



Here is a more recent example of Ken with a "choir" backup, which actually sounds like a live audience. His energy has apparently not been sapped with age. Sure it's repetitious, but I love it when he yells, "Play the music." I know it's comparing small things with great, but the African drum rhythms make me think of something on Paul Simon's Graceland. Here is Medema's version of "Amen."



I'll finish up this sampler by returning to something more mellow from Medema in the 70's. "Jesus, Lover of My Soul."



Ken Medema is an original. There will not be anyone else quite like him in Christian popular music. I'd like to see this older music shared more widely.

Some music from the Martins

I was cooking again today (yes, you are starting to notice a pattern in these posts) and listening to a Gaither hymns CD (yep, that's another pattern). This one included the Martins singing "He Leadeth Me." They have the most amazing a capella sound.



I've seen them sing the Doxology in person at a Christmas concert a few years ago. It brought the house down. Here is that number:



And this is a great, fun song for Epiphany, which happens to be the season we are in. (Sorry that there's an ad at the beginning, but it's a good, high-quality video.)



I don't know why I don't own an entire CD and/or DVD of the Martins. I should rectify that.

"In the Garden"

Today while cooking I was listening to a hymns CD by the Booth Brothers, one of my favorite Gospel music groups. Unfortunately not nearly enough of their music is available on-line. So I can't link the version of Michael Booth singing "In the Garden." I harmonized with him while cooking. It sounded pretty, at least to me. (But I have to share a link, because it's the Booth Brothers, so here is Michael singing "Look for Me at Jesus' Feet," which is really wonderful.)

Anyway, I was thinking about "In the Garden," because it gets a certain amount of hatin' from the hymn purists. Here's how the position roughly goes: Hymns are fine provided you go way, way back. Like, to Bach. Or maybe to Wesley. But all that 19th century stuff, like Fanny Crosby and such, is more or less sentimental schlock unfit for manly singing. In such statements, inevitably "In the Garden" comes in for a whack.

Or there's an attempted tu quoque if a traditional hymn lover like yours truly makes some mention of the "Jesus is my boyfriend" tendency in all too many contemporary worship songs. "Oh, yeah! Well, what about 'In the Garden'? Huh?"

So here are the words to "In the Garden."

1.

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

(Refrain)
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

2.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

Refrain

3.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.

Refrain


Now, as sentimental lyrics go, those beat many a Jesus is my boyfriend song hollow and then some. It's not the greatest poetry in the world, but it's perfectly respectable poetry. (How many people in 2014 even know that "discloses" can be used that way?) Moreover, the meaning is not actually romantic at all. The allusion is clearly to the book of Genesis where it is said that God walked with Adam in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. (Though here it is the early morning rather than the evening.) The impression is of a deep and close friendship but not a romantic relationship. The third verse deepens the meaning by bringing back in the voice of the world outside the garden with its worries and woes. The speaker comes to the garden to spend time with the Lord in order to be strengthened to go out and endure what must be endured. Jesus' voice, heard clearly in the quiet of the garden, will continue to sound through the voice of woe outside.

As I read the lyrics, too, I think of how many great saints of God have arisen early in the morning to pray and read the Bible. I love my own sleep, making sloth one of my besetting vices. I tried getting up early to pray for a brief time in my ardent youth but wouldn't even think of such a thing now in middle age, unless truly convinced that the eternal fate of my soul depended on it. Now I try to pray when more awake, later in the day. But many do not have that luxury.

At this point I am reminded of a scene I saw almost three years ago. My mother had passed away, and when I went to the funeral (in a different city) I stayed overnight for several days with my mother's pastor and wife. I did not sleep well with all that was on my mind, so I was up unwontedly early, sending a flurry of practical e-mails back home to my family. One morning I arose while it was still dark around 6 a.m., an hour at which I would usually be fast asleep. I saw the pastor's wife sitting quietly by a lamp with her Bible in her lap. She was a wonderful hostess and one of the sweetest, busiest, and hardest-working ladies it's been my privilege to know. (Just after her devotions, still very early, she put on her coat and went over to clean the church nursery in preparation for the next day's services.) But that time belonged to the Lord. She sat there quite still and read and prayed. I have not the slightest doubt that she was hearing His voice and gathering spiritual strength for the day ahead.

Even if we do not come to the garden literally while the dew is still on the roses, let's be sure that, at some time, we do come.

The Strange Attraction of Political Alienation: "Silent Running"

Back when I was "out there" in the office working world, twenty-some years ago, "Silent Running" by Mike and the Mechanics was playing on the radio all the time. I felt then that being forced to listen to the radio constantly while trying to concentrate on office work was a version of water torture, and I tuned out the repetitious songs as much as possible. I'm pretty certain I'd feel the same way now. So this one got a bad rap. I've become more open-minded since then. Not being forced to listen to a song over and over again helps one to be more objective about it. (But certain Billy Joel songs, like "Honesty," are eternally ruined for me.)

So when I heard "Silent Running" in the store a couple of weeks ago, I got curious: What in the world is that song about, anyway? Now we have the Interwebs (unavailable twenty-some years ago), so I was able to find out.

According to La Wik, the songwriter said that the lyric:

is about a guy who's traveled light-years away, out in space somewhere, and he's ahead in time. Therefore he knows what's going to happen to his wife and kids back home, on Earth. And he's trying to get the message to them to say what's going to happen, the kind of anarchy, the breakdown of society, to tell them to be prepared.

In 2013, the lyric has something eerily evocative about it:

Take the children and yourself
And hide out in the cellar
By now the fighting will be close at hand
Don't believe the church and state
And everything they tell you
Believe in me, I'm with the high command

Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?
Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?

There's a gun and ammunition
Just inside the doorway
Use it only in emergency
Better you should pray to God
The Father and the Spirit
Will guide you and protect from up here.

Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?
Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?

Swear allegiance to the flag
Whatever flag they offer
Never hint at what you really feel
Teach the children quietly
For some day sons and daughters
Will rise up and fight while we stood still.

I have little doubt that Mike Rutherford conceived these lyrics in terms of the Evil Republicans (or, in England, the Evil Thatcherians). There is a hint in the "swear allegiance to the flag" line. I realize I'm jumping to conclusions here--assuming that Mike Rutherford was not a Tory. But I think that's a safe guess. It was, after all, 1985, when all the artists were a-twitter (before Twitter) about the Power of the Right. Nonetheless, there's something refreshing about the gun and ammunition. It is interesting to see that the rebel spirit in 1985 did not always take the form of hating guns.  It's difficult to imagine any lefty in 2013 counseling the use of a gun even in an emergency, such as when one's home is attacked by an anarchic mob.

But what is particularly striking is how swiftly the passage of time has made these lyrics applicable on the other side of the political spectrum. Who is it now who is being asked to "swear allegiance to the flag, whatever flag they offer"? Who, now, is having to teach the children in secret? The phrase "political correctness" is really much too tame to describe the ideological totalitarianism and the lockdown on the free exchange of thought that has taken over our Western world, whether the topic be the morality of perverted sexual acts, the blatantly racial aspect of increasing thuggish violence, or, for that matter, gun ownership. Is it not now the Right that is said to be encouraging "vigilantism" by suggesting that people be prepared to defend themselves and their property, as the police in various parts of the West become ineffective at keeping the peace?

These words resonate with a home schooling right-winger in 2013. Now we find ways to keep our countenance in public, and we teach our children to do the same. Now we adults find ways to avoid saying the wrong thing, to avoid losing a job or even getting a visit from the authorities. Now we teach the children politically disallowed truths. We teach them, if not precisely in whispers, at least not very loudly.

This lyric is first and foremost about political alienation. To be sure, it's also about anarchy. In fact, one might have thought a priori that there is a tension: The lyric portrays at one and the same time a totalitarian and controlling State that makes everyone swear allegiance to the flag and, simultaneously, an impotent State that cannot prevent anarchic violence. Ah, but real-world history cannot be done a priori, can it? For anarcho-tyranny is a reality. We in the West now know better than we could have known in 1985 that it is entirely possible to have a government that makes itself impotent to carry out its real functions of keeping streets and homes safe and punishing evildoers but at the same time creates endless fear and harassment for peaceful people who simply want to go about their legitimate business. And naturally, that causes those peaceable people eventually to conclude that their government does not, to put it mildly, represent their best interests.

It goes without saying that political alienation is a dangerous and troublesome thing. But it is worth saying that, for an individual and especially for a Christian, reveling in political alienation is also a dangerous and troublesome thing. Dangerous to the soul if nothing else. I do not wish to be unclear: We need to have a clear-eyed view of the present situation and the future prospects for freedom in our country (or, for my readers abroad, countries). Being a bunch of Christian Pollyannas will only trigger blunders which could cost us dear.

At the same time, however, we need to be aware of the dangers of treachery. I do not use that word lightly. When, inspired by a series of quotations on Bill Luse's blog, I read Witness for the first time all the way through, I was much struck by the way in which treachery comes upon a man unawares. Each of us is preoccupied with his own affairs, and the more thoughtful of us are preoccupied with our own ideas and theories. When the suggestion comes that, because of those theories, a man should do something genuinely treacherous to his own country, the suggestion always comes in plausible guise--at least, a guise that is plausible to that man at that time. No one says to himself, "I am about to be a traitor, but treachery is a good thing." Rather, a man says to himself, "This country is no longer my country, so I am not being a traitor," or "By doing this I am fighting for the true essence of what my country ought to be," or "I am moving forward with the right current of history," or some other excuse.

Of course, most of us ordinary folk are in no position to commit any treachery anyway. At the most we are tempted to commit the tiniest and most trivial of infractions--running a red light or something of that kind. Nonetheless, he who is faithful in the least is faithful also in great matters, and he that is a scofflaw in the least is more likely to be treacherous in the great matters. It is a matter of daily, cultivated attitude, and it is especially an issue for those on the non-mainstream right.

I therefore say: Yes, let us be clear-eyed. Let us acknowledge that we are strangers in a strange land and are, in a real sense, much beset by an increasingly hostile government at various levels. Let us not duck the fact that government officials are not our friends. But at the same time, let us not cultivate in ourselves or in others a spirit in which we are, in essence, waiting only for the right trigger to go from being dissidents and critics to being seditious.

The strange attraction of political alienation is real and therefore calls us to walk a crucial, and all-too-fine, line. It is a line that we cannot afford to ignore, in either direction.

Lazy Sunday--John C. Wright has a Christmas story

I'm being a bit lazy this Sunday. Put it down to the large blizzard cum sub-zero temperatures we are having here. Not that that weather is actually demanding any serious action on my part, beyond sliding my car gracefully into something on the road the other day and bending my left front wheel, that is. (It'll be going into the shop tomorrow, if the mechanic isn't snowed in at his home.) Or some extra snow brushing for the purposes of store runs. Or carrying all the groceries into the house from the snowy driveway. Exhausting stuff like that. Esteemed Husband is the one doing the snow-blower and shovel shtick.

My children and I start home schooling again tomorrow after our two-week Christmas break. I'm pretty well prepared. I have just ordered live paramecia and amoebas from this science supply company, with a special live stain which is supposed to make them easier to see and slowing drops which are supposed to keep the paramecia from running away. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, I offer you a link to a Christmas story that made me cry. Mind you (backhanded compliment alert), I'm not entirely sure why it made me cry. It is a John C. Wright fantasia. Digression: John C. Wright either never sleeps or types faster than any man on the planet. I don't know how he writes things that long. End digression. Imagine a Roman Catholic mash-up of A Christmas Carol, a sci-fi short story, complete with changing the past (if I'm understanding the ending correctly), visions of the end of the world, complete with a monster that eats continents, the Book of Job, and St. Nicholas doing theodicy and performing miracles. Oh, and did I mention a little girl going to heaven and getting to hold Baby Jesus? I didn't? It's in there, too. But it kept my attention, peering short-sightedly at the screen (I hate reading fiction on the computer), and it made me cry. So if you think you will enjoy such a story, give it a whirl.

Blessed Epiphany!

"Grace Has a Face"

This is a very good, relatively new Christmas song by the southern gospel trio Greater Vision:



I especially like the lyrics of the chorus:

Hope has hands.
Freedom has feet.
Truth will stand.
The Word will speak.
The Holy and lowly will finally embrace,
For Love has a heartbeat, and Grace has a face.

It takes a special kind of philosophy of religion geekery to take an interest in this dispute between Ed Feser and Dale Tuggy about Perfect Being theology and its relationship both to logic and to Scripture. I confess that I take some interest in it, enough to have read all of Ed's most recent (as usual, lucid, well-written, carefully argued, and altogether classy) post on the subject, but not enough to keep up with it from day to day and week to week. I do think it relevant, as Ed has pointed out, that Tuggy is not a Trinitarian. That's got to be a count at some level against Tuggy's rather robust dismissal of classical theism.

At the same time, I have something of a tendency in Tuggy's direction (though needless to say, not in the direction of his loosy-goosey approach to the Trinity), as evidenced by the mere fact that I can't get into the debate over Perfect Being theology all that deeply. If I agreed entirely with Ed, I would doubtless think the debate a good deal more crucial than I can find it in my heart to think it. Moreover, a long time ago Ed and I had a collegial but intense and long debate over the design argument in which Ed vigorously rejected the types of arguments made by intelligent design writers in science as, allegedly, incompatible with Perfect Being theology. And if that's really the case, then I'm inclined to say, "The heck with Perfect Being theology, because the evidence is what it is, and it says what it says." The more stratospheric flights of Perfect Being theology leave me gasping for air, and when I'm quite sure that I won't know what I'm talking about if I take a definite position, I'm just not going to take a definite position.

Okay, that all sounds like a rather strange paragraph either to follow or to precede a discussion of a Christmas song. Here's the connection: One point Tuggy brings up that Ed doesn't have time to address (Ed's post being quite long, careful, and detailed enough as a response to Tuggy already) is that, whatever we say about God aside from the Incarnation, Jesus was an individual man with a real human nature. Hence Jesus was undeniably a specific self among other selves, which is exactly what Perfect Being theology says God cannot be.

I knew already that Perfect Being theology has to make a big bracket anyway for the Incarnation, because Jesus underwent change (growing, for example, from a child to a man, weeping and then ceasing to weep, and so forth), whereas the changelessness of God, who has "no potentialities to actualize," is a linchpin of Perfect Being theology. So a lot of this is going to have to be "apart from the Incarnation" no matter what. That actually makes sense to me and doesn't seem to me to vitiate Perfect Being theology in itself. After all, even a non-philosopher should say, "God does not have literal hands, aside from the Incarnation." So it needn't be too much of a problem to say the same about God's having literal emotions or undergoing literal change, and I suppose there is some perfectly precise locution the theologian can use for a similar point concerning God's "not being a self among other selves"...aside from the Incarnation.

Hence the connection with the song: Even if one is committed to Perfect Being theology, the Incarnation forces one to admit that all those abstract and perfect Divine attributes which go beyond personhood--Truth itself, Being itself, Intelligence itself, Holiness itself--came down to us and became one particular person, one baby, one child, one man, with a particular face. Somehow, if God really is all those superpersonal and abstract things, this must be possible, for it is the core of our Christian faith that God became a man. Love has a heartbeat, and Grace has a face.

On this, it seems, the classical theist and the less philosophical or at least less classical theist must agree, if they are both Christians. God became man, and in becoming man, did not cease to be God. God, who sustains all the universe by the word of His power, did not take a break from sustaining the universe, a time-out while he went down for a little thirty-three-year episode of being a man. No, the Eternal Son could not cease to be the Eternal Son. (There's something for the one who wants to scoff at Perfect Being theology to ponder.) On the other hand, the Eternal Son, by whom and from whom and for whom are all things, really became a person with a particular personality, a Jewish baby in a manger, a child playing with other children, a boy talking with the rabbis in the Temple, a man weeping over Jerusalem, a man dying on a cross. This is a great mystery, one of the central mysteries of our revealed religion.

Someday, when we are in heaven, we will not only kneel and adore but perhaps also talk together: "Of course. It must have been this way. I understand it all so much better now." Not that our minds, being finite, will ever be able to understand it all. But since we are assured that then we shall know even as also we are known (I Corinthians 13), there is some hope of those conversations. In those heavenly philosophy get-togethers, I trust that Ed and I, and hopefully Dale Tuggy, too (if he gets his heretical views on the Trinity knocked out of him in some purgatorial fashion here on earth or beyond), can raise a glass of some heavenly wine and together love, with our minds, the God who is Perfect and who also, for us men and for our salvation, became a man.

Light and Darkness

It is quite likely that this will simply be my Christmas post. Apologies to the liturgically strict, since it is going up on the 22nd.

But I wish to tie it to a wonderful Advent hymn. I cannot seem to find a performance of this hymn anywhere on Youtube. I would post it if I could. It's very beautiful. The lovely, minor-key tune is Bangor, but as far as I can tell, hymns using it do not appear in any evangelical hymnals. The other text that I know of is for Passion Week and is "Alone Thou Goest Forth to Die." Try to find the tune somewhere. If nothing else, there's a simple midi here which gives you some idea.

The Advent words, which I already discussed here, are these:

O very God of very God,
and very Light of Light,
whose feet this earth's dark valley trod
that so it might be bright:

Our hopes are weak, our fears are strong,
thick darkness blinds our eyes;
cold is the night; thy people long
that thou, their Sun, wouldst rise.

And even now, though dull and gray,
the east is brightening fast,
and kindling to the perfect day
that never shall be past.

O guide us till our path is done,
and we have reached the shore
where thou, our everlasting Sun,
art shining evermore!

We wait in faith, and turn our face
to where the daylight springs,
till thou shalt come our gloom to chase,
with healing in thy wings.

As I noted in the older post, the association of Jesus' actual birth date with the darkest, coldest time of the year is probably ahistorical and is hence an addition of tradition. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Tradition is important, and this is one of the most powerful. I often think of that line from "Lo, How A Rose"--"She bore to men a Savior when half-spent was the night." It has so much richness to it. The literal middle of the night, the dark and wintry night of the year, and the deep darkness of human evil. The translation, too, adds something. The German simply means something like, "Halfway through the night," but the translation "half-spent" conveys not only the darkness but the exhaustion of human sin and history.

Which brings us to something that was not invented by man: The association of the Incarnation with light. That has been given to us both by Our Lord on earth and by the Holy Ghost in the inspired prologue to the Gospel of John. Just before healing the man born blind (John 9), Jesus says, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

John, echoing his Master's words, tells us again and again that Jesus is light:

"In him was life, and the life was the light of man, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."

"[John the Baptist] was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light, that lighteth every man that cometh into the world...."

And in John's first epistle, he says, "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

[Digression on just one of many reasons why I hate postmodernism: When I was in graduate school in English, I once received a high-falutin' lecture from a fellow student, who happened to be white, on how insensitive it had been for me to use the word "black" when describing evil in a class presentation on the problem of evil. We were studying 18th century literature, and I had made a presentation on Pope's Essay on Man. I used a tapestry metaphor, saying that dark colors may be used by the weaver as part of the beauty of the pattern. I pointed out how painful it is, nonetheless, to be the one actually suffering. I expressed this by saying, "But you probably wouldn't want to be the black," using hand motions indicating that I meant black thread. That was what was allegedly so offensive. She was, naturally, unmoved by my pointing out to her that darkness has long been a metaphor for pain, suffering, and evil. That came as no surprise to me by that time. It was always part of the raison d'etre of postmodernism in the humanities to tear down those stark dichotomies which are the very food of a sane man's mind. Good/Evil, light/dark, male/female, parent/child, Creator/creature, beauty/ugliness, truth/falsehood. Any powerful and true description of reality, especially any that has its roots in the very vitals of the human psyche, that speaks with rhetorical power to the way things are, must be torn up and destroyed. Postmodernism is evil because postmodernism lies and tells us that there is no evil. Postmodernism is dark because it tells us that darkness and light do not exist. Postmodernism is a lie because it teaches man not to believe in lies. God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. Make sure your children know that, and know that there is light and darkness, and how to tell the difference, so that they can love the light and flee the darkness. End of digression.]

Those of us living in the north have a tangible symbol of the darkness of this world. But no matter what region you live in, if you are a Christian and have your eyes open, you can see spiritual darkness all around. If you live in Syria or other places where Christians are under physical persecution, you know it in one way. If you live in the West, you know it in a different way. We are surrounded by darkness. But we must not be disheartened by it. Jesus also told us that we are the light of the world (Matt. 5:14). John points out that he that commits evil hates the light, because by it his deeds are reproved. (John 3) So we must expect disapproval and even hatred and real persecution from the world and should not marvel at it (I John 3:13). But that's not the end of the story.

Our Lord came to this earth to bring light. No matter how long it is, no matter how many thousands of years pass, He will come again, bringing the final light of judgement. And in the end, those who are His own will be with Him in that Land where there is no night, where Christ Himself is the light.

We wait in faith and turn our face to where the daylight springs, till thou shalt come our gloom to chase, with healing in thy wings.

Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus.

A Merry Christmas to readers of Extra Thoughts.

Forgiveness is not excuse-making

I've been pondering lately on something that C.S. Lewis says in one of his essays on forgiveness. He has several. I'm not sure which one this is. It may just be called "On Forgiveness."

Anyway, he makes the point that forgiveness starts after we have made all possible excuses for the other person, found all possible extenuations. Strictly logically speaking, if some act of another really did simply arise out of a misunderstanding or really was not a fault, then the person doesn't need forgiveness. Thus, to the extent that we "explain away" things that annoy us from our friends (or our enemies), we aren't forgiving them but rather excusing them. Now, justice and truth demand that we should try to discern events accurately, so if we are truly finding extenuations that exist objectively (as opposed to manufacturing them because we are motivated to do so), then that is merely a matter of being fair.

Mentally, when one is angry, it feels as though the psychological movement to find explanations and extenuations for the other person's actions is the beginning of forgiveness. It may be a psychological preparation for it, but in fact it isn't forgiveness. Forgiveness is needed for an actual fault, for actual wrong-doing. So it's when you say to yourself, "Yes, but even so, my friend was still wrong" that forgiveness actually gets started. It's that "still wrong" part that you have to forgive him for.

For some reason I often find this reflection rather freeing. After all, if we were all either perfect or merely involved in misunderstandings or accidents, no forgiveness would ever be necessary. If I never did anything actually wrong, I wouldn't need to be forgiven either. All my apparent wrong-doings could be explained away. But of course, I do sometimes really need to be forgiven. And the same goes for others. So when one says, especially of a dearly loved friend, "Yes, but that was just not right!" one's mental reply to oneself should be, "Of course it wasn't. That's the part you forgive him for!" The temptation, instead, is to go on niggling away at it, trapped in a false dichotomy: Either I find an excuse for this, so it wasn't really wrong, or else I go on being angry, perhaps until and unless I get an apology acceptable to myself, an apology that propitiates my anger. Well, that's baloney. It's a false dichotomy perpetuated by the Devil, maybe even personally put into your mind by your own personal Screwtape. It is both unbiblical and untrue. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" has no room for it.

I throw this reflection out today in the hopes that it will catch someone at a moment when it can do the most good. Go ahead and forgive your friend (or your enemy) in your own heart and mind and before God, and do so precisely because you can't find any full excuse for his actions. Because you can be sure that there isn't any full excuse for your actions sometimes either, so forgive as you hope to be forgiven.

Gaudete Sunday

Today is Rejoice Sunday, in the midst of Advent. (It's rather a dark, cold, and snowy Rejoice Sunday, and Advent as a whole, where I live. One could call that "seasonal," but I just hope no family member has an accident on the roads!)

In honor thereof, I have a song that isn't really an Advent carol, because it is a Christmas carol. Christmas songs can't, technically, be Advent songs, because Advent songs have to be anticipatory. They can't include lines like "Christ is born," because in liturgically pure terms, we don't start saying that until after sundown on December 24.

Nonetheless, this is a cheerful Renaissance carol with the word "Gaudete" in it, so here goes:



Here are the words to a more "real" Gaudete hymn, based on Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish virgins. "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers."

Rejoice, rejoice, believers, and let your lights appear.
The evening is advancing, and darker night is near.
The Bridegroom is arising, and soon He will draw nigh.
Up, watch in expectation: At midnight comes the cry.

See that your lamps are burning; replenish them with oil.
Look now for your salvation, the end of sin and toil.
The watchers on the mountain proclaim the Bridegroom near.
Go meet Him as He cometh, with alleluias clear.

O wise and holy virgins, now raise your voices higher,
Until in songs of triumph ye meet the angel choir.
The marriage feast is waiting, the gates wide open stand;
Rise up, ye heirs of glory, the Bridegroom is at hand.

Our hope and expectation, O Jesus, now appear!
Arise, Thou Sun so longed for, over this benighted sphere!
With hearts and hands uplifted, we plead, O Lord, to see
The day of earth’s redemption and ever be with Thee.

I have not been able to find a good recording of the tune, Greenland, which is by Haydn.

A couple of manly songs

There are a lot of versions of "He Just Needs a Few Good Men" out there, some of them no doubt vocally smoother than this one, but I like the series of Gaither Vocal Band Reunion videos, so I'm picking this one. Larnelle Harris should probably tone it down a bit, but not toning it down is part of Larnelle's charm, so I'm inclined to be tolerant. The words are good. Just think of all the "fight" and "warfare" and "men" hymns that have been cut out of our hymnals, and you'll understand why this was written.




While we're at it, here's "Build an Ark."

Close the path to misery

The Advent hymn "Veni Emmanuel" contains the following lines:

"Make safe the way that leads on high,/ and close the path to misery."

The hymn is very familiar, and it's easy to blow right past those lines, but I was much struck by them in church yesterday. What do they mean? Admittedly, they are a bit obscure. Taken literally, they state a request that we really don't intend to make, presumably. That is to say, we presumably don't actually believe that God will or should override the free will of man so that man cannot go to hell, so that the way to misery is literally closed. That the path to misery is open to man's choice is one of the terrible mysteries of Christianity.

What I will give here, then, is more a personal application of the words than an actual guess as to what the author intended when he wrote them. There are many Christians who genuinely have good will, who want to serve God, but who are unsure what they ought to be doing at any given time. They may face difficult decisions and conflicting loyalties and priorities, not to mention conflicting advice from human counselors. One can make this request to God as a request for guidance: "Please, Lord, as I'm seeking your will, don't let me make any really fatal mistakes for myself or for others. Close the path to misery." The Psalmist says, "Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path." And elsewhere, "Teach me thy way, O Lord; I will walk in thy truth. Unite my heart to fear thy name." This is a prayer we need to be praying both practically and spiritually. Practically, for all those daily decisions and life decisions, that they would be wise. Spiritually, when we are wondering whether to be stern or soft, whether our motives are wrong, whether we are encouraging in ourselves or in others the wrong spirit or attitude. In all these things, we can cry out to God to make safe the right way and close the wrong way.

This is at least one good application that one can make of the hymn lyrics, and I present it to my readers for what value it may have for them. And a blessed Advent season to you.

Tips aren't entitlements [Updated]

This story is doing the rounds on social media. The story is allegedly about a boorish and embarrassing Christian family who gratuitously insulted a waitress for her mannish appearance (see below for more on appearance) at the outset of a meal and then refused to tip her, instead writing her a note saying that they did not approve of her (presumptively lesbian) lifestyle and that this was why they were not tipping.

I have a somewhat different perspective, so hear me out. First of all, let me say at the outset that it's entirely possible that these people really were as rude and as much of an embarrassment to Christians as they are alleged to be. Perhaps, for example, their comments to the waitress were wholly gratuitous. Perhaps their comment was quite pointless, perhaps she did very little to put her "orientation" in their faces, and perhaps she gave them excellent service. Moreover, even if their side of the story turned out to be different than hers, even if there was more excuse for their behavior than the mainstream story tells us, and even if the story isn't faked (let's not forget that there are such things as faked "hateful incidents"), what they did was still foolish, because they should have known that it would do no good and would do harm to the reputation of Christians.

So I'm not condoning what they did from either angle.

However.

Point 1: We have only her side of the story. According to her, she was a saint, and they were jerks from the get-go. Should we automatically assume that this was true? Is it possible, for example, that she made some reference to her "lifestyle" in order to test them, perhaps because she saw them look startled at her haircut, etc.? Her Facebook posts about what she wanted to do (spit in their food, for example) certainly don't show a saintly disposition, and one of her allegedly laudable supporters says (on a homosexual Facebook page) that the family and all their ilk should be wiped off the face of the earth. So...this is obviously an activist type of person with an in-your-face gay activist attitude, and I'm not entirely sure she is an unbiased reporter of what happened.

Point 2: Appearance. What the heck are those tattoos all over her hands? Are employers not permitted to take bizarre tattoos into account when hiring waitresses if they suspect the tats have something to do with being homosexual and if they are therefore afraid of getting in trouble for "discrimination"? Or are tattoos all over your hands out of bounds for employers to consider no matter who you are? The girl says, "The short hair and clothes just gave it away in her eyes." Well, it looks like "it" was in fact true, so maybe some combination of hair, clothes (What clothes? Do these waitresses not have to wear any sort of uniform? How weird were the clothes?) and the tats really did "give it away." Did it ever occur to this waitress or to anybody commenting on this that it's legitimate for customers not to want their waitresses to look bizarre and that having a deliberately bizarre appearance might be a legitimate cause for downgrading a tip, because that is rude, too? Yes, get a clue: Putting your "lifestyle" in people's faces by deliberately looking bizarre is rude. Rudeness on the part of a waitress or waiter is a legitimate reason for a customer's not tipping. But no, evidently not. Look at this preachy blog post, for example:

[The Bible] doesn’t say to leave them a note about what a miserable sinner they are; how disgusted you are by their obvious homosexuality, Goth appearance, tattoos, the enormous holes in their earlobes, or the bone in their nose;

Um, so lady, you're implying that it's perfectly okay for a waitress to have a Goth appearance or even a bone in her nose but that if I don't leave a Goth or be-boned waitress a full fifteen percent tip, I'm the baddie? I don't buy that. At all.

There used to be this sort of old-fashioned understanding that waitresses were expected both to behave and to appear pleasant. Presumably they don't want to be thought of as mere robots who bring you your food and are rated only by the speed with which they do so. Well, then, they have to be prepared to be docked if they wear unpleasant piercings or tattoos or in some other way deliberately, by their appearance, interrupt the pleasant nature of the customer's lunch. Which brings me to

Point 3: Contrary to the implication of said preachy blog post, a tip is not an entitlement. A tip has to be earned. Every single Bible verse quoted in our faces there (and aside--don't you love how progressive Christians are all against proof-texting except when they can try to shoehorn tipping flamingly lesbian waitresses into an Old Testament passage on paying your field hands or a New Testament passage on feeding and clothing our brethren in Christ?) implies that the customer at a restaurant is the direct employer of the waitress or waiter. Is this really accurate? Is the relationship "customer-waitress" really the same as the relationship "employer-employee"? If so, it's an extremely odd employer-employee relationship, especially since no wage has actually been agreed upon in advance, as it usually would be. That's why tipping is voluntary and falls on a sliding scale. Don't misunderstand me: I think one should normally tip 15 percent, and that's what I teach my kids. It should be the default setting, the prima facie case, that you'll tip at a restaurant where tips are left. (Some, like fast food restaurants, don't assign a particular waitress to your table, and tips are not the norm there.) But a default setting or a prima facie case is defeasible, and it's defeasible by a lot of different types of things. There isn't some moral rule, given by God, that if the food gets to your table in good time, if the waitress doesn't forget anything, if everything pertaining narrowly to the food and the food alone is okay, you owe the waitress a 15% tip. There are other ways in which the waitress could fail to earn that tip. By sitting down at the table, you don't tacitly agree to pay that tip. The entitlement mindset here is overwhelming, and it needs to stop. Sure, a customer could fail to leave a tip for unreasonable reasons, a customer can be a real boor, but we shouldn't start by assuming that a tip is an entitlement.

Point 4: The owner of the restaurant, eager to prove his progressive creds, is threatening not to let that family eat at the restaurant again. Really? That's interesting, is it not? Let's put this starkly: A lesbian couple could almost certainly waltz into that restaurant with their arms around each other and sit smooching from time to time at the table, and we can be good and certain that the restaurant owner would get the pants sued off him if he asked them to stop or even more shockingly told them they couldn't come there anymore. But a (putatively) Christian family that allegedly behaves rudely by leaving a snippy note instead of a tip can be told they aren't welcome? Well, presumably "non-tippers" are not a specially protected class under either New Jersey or federal law, so probably so, but to my mind there's something very strange about this set of priorities. What if they had tipped her but had also left a Bible tract explaining, in loving terms, the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle and offering contact information for groups that can help her leave that lifestyle? Would the restaurant manager then be threatening not to let them eat there anymore? To do so would skate pretty close to religious discrimination, which actually is allegedly illegal in public accommodations like restaurants. But I wonder if the restaurant manager would see the difference between that situation and the one that allegedly happened.

Let's not fool ourselves: Christians who hold traditional moral views are the last group that can be "discriminated" against. The same people who would usually imply that by golly a restaurant has a duty to serve anybody who walks through the door evidently think it's high and noble for this family to be blocked. Don't get me wrong: I'd just as soon go back to a world in which restaurants could refuse to serve anyone they wanted to refuse to serve. But that includes present liberal mascot groups as well, and you can be sure the liberals wouldn't like that compromise, either. No, they like things right where they are: Be open about your non-PC beliefs, get slammed. Put your sexual perversions in everybody's face, get fawned over.

So, while I think what the customers did was foolish at best and unnecessarily rude at worst, I'm rather inclined to say, "Cry me a river" for the mannish waitress who is arousing so much outrage and sympathy. I imagine by this time, assuming her story to be true, she has more than made up the lost tip in lavish outpourings from others. I'm pretty sure she hasn't learned anything from the experience, which is yet another reason why the customers shouldn't have done it.

But Christians, don't just jump on this self-hate bandwagon. It's not worth it, and it's a little more complicated than you might at first think.

Update: Aaaaaaand it looks like this was another hoax. Really glad I at least put that in the original post as a possibility and pointed out that we have only her side of the story! The inductive case that these things are hoaxes more often than not is adding up, so caveat lector next time you see a story of this kind. Please remember this before writing a "This is why they hate us" blog post or status update.

Also, Christians: If somebody guesses you are a Christian at a restaurant, they may fake a hate incident against you. Might be a wise idea always to tip via credit card from now on so as to be able to refute such lies. That was what this family appears to have done.

Far from the kingdom

Here is a self-styled honest atheist telling us how he would react if, after death, he turned out to be wrong and actually met the Christian God.



Several points strike me about this. First of all, it is very noticeable that nowhere does he refer to repenting of his sins if he were to turn out to be wrong. Does he believe that he has no sins? It almost sounds like that. His sneering references to the conversion of rapists, etc., and his statement that God would "know why he thinks he's led a good life" do seem to indicate that. Aside from any questions of the epistemology of religious belief, this is not the attitude of an ethically mature person. The only duty he seems interested in is one which he is very proud of having fulfilled--namely, the duty not to believe without sufficient evidence. He even goes so far as to say that he believes that God, if he exists, would be proud of him! Who says that? Even a Christian who believes his sins are covered by the blood of Jesus doesn't imagine standing up to God and telling God that God should be proud of him! Yet this young man has had every opportunity to know, given the research he claims to have done, that if God exists then we are all sinners before Him, we all have things that we need to repent of, and we will all be awed and struck to our knees by His holiness if and when we see Him face to face. Even by the natural light this young man should have some things that he is ashamed of or regrets having done, yet he is completely unfazed by the thought of God's existence in relation to his own wrong-doing. On the contrary, he has a positively pharisaical attitude towards "really bad" people who have "accepted Jesus as their personal Savior before they died." This reminds me of the Pharisee in Jesus' parable: "I thank thee that I am not as this Publican." Jesus said that those who are healthy don't need a physician. If an atheist can contemplate even the existence of God without thinking that then he would need a physician...that's a bad sign.

Second, though he says that he is taking seriously what it would mean for God to exist and for him to be wrong, he isn't taking seriously the character of the Christian God as he must know it to be postulated by Christianity. If God really does exist, God is worthy of worship, is one before whom we should bow, is all-good, and so forth. He says he's envisaging the possibility that the Christian God exists and that he is wrong, but as the end of the video makes clear, he's really holding out instead the possibility that "the Christian God" is merely vain in wanting to be worshiped, is petty, is unjust, and hence is someone he would have no duty to bow before and someone he would not want to spend eternity with. Yet given the amount of research he says he's done, he has every reason to know that in the very nature of the case the Christian God is One by whom and for whom we were made, is Goodness itself, is the true end of all men. If the Christian God exists, then worshiping Him is our true end, and attributing mere vanity to Him is an absurdity.

If he were taking this point seriously, he would take seriously the imagined conversion of those hypothetical rapists. He has had opportunity to know that anyone who truly believes and accepts Jesus has repented of his sins, that something profound has happened when these previously evil men "accepted Jesus as their personal Savior," that their doing so wasn't some trivial sop to God's vanity, yet he sneers at their conversion and sets up, to knock down, a petty and vain God.

Third, by this attitude towards God-if-God-exists, he is gearing himself up to tell God, "Non serviam," which is precisely the attitude of hell. At the outset of the video he says something good. He says that if he turns out to be wrong, he'll want to know where he went wrong in his reasoning. Great! But as he continues it sounds very much like he's absolutely sure that God would simply be dumbfounded by this request and wouldn't be able to tell him anywhere that he went wrong in his reasoning! Given that God does exist, it's entirely plausible, especially for someone who has has access to as many resources and has looked into this matter as much as this fellow says he has, that he has indeed gone wrong somewhere, that his motives hasn't been as pure as he advertises them to be or that he hasn't tried hard enough to get answers to his doubts and questions or that he has not properly prepared himself by following the light that he does have. So why not anticipate that God will show you that if God turns out to exist?

It would be quite different to say that if God exists, he will at that point be glad to fall on his knees and worship God, even if he doesn't understand everything, that he will humbly accept God's correction. But there is no trace of that attitude. Yet he says that his motives are pure and that he wants God to exist. Really? Then why would such a meeting at death not be a cause for humble joy?

Instead, by the end, he's envisaging not wanting to spend eternity with God, because a God who isn't proud of him and doesn't vindicate him would be a God who makes him sick.

There may indeed be tough questions about how God deals with those who genuinely have not had the opportunity to know about Jesus Christ--those who have been isolated from all Christians or even those with mental disabilities. But my own opinion is that people like the young man in the video are not the ones who create some kind of "problem of hiddenness" for Christians. They, rather, are the ones to whom God is likely to say those terrifying words: "Thy will be done."

Not far from the Kingdom?

This inspiring story tells of a secular Jew in Boston, Lee Eiseman, who has been babying along an historic organ in a Catholic church for several decades. Finally it looks like the parish is going to scrape together the money to give the organ the full restoration it has badly needed all along. The organ wouldn't still be working today if it weren't for Eiseman, who has kept it going all this time with the proverbial chewing gum and string. Even on the evening of the concert announcing the beginning of the restoration project (for which some of the money still needs to be raised), Eiseman was up inside it with a miner's lamp on his head, fixing a sticky key.

I was especially struck by the briefly told story of how Eiseman came to be committed to this particular organ. At the time that he moved to Boston in the 1970's, he happened to be acquainted with a great organ builder and restorer, Charles B. Fisk. Fisk specially asked Eiseman to look after the organ at St. Mary's Church.

“Look after it and keep it alive, because it’s very important,” Fisk asked after Eiseman moved into the neighborhood, just a few blocks from the church.

So Eiseman agreed, and he kept his word, as a volunteer, even though it's doubtless turned out to cost him a lot more time and trouble than he ever imagined.

If one believes in the things that are valuable in themselves, how can one not be moved by that? "Look after it and keep it alive, because it's very important." I believe that. Eiseman obviously believes it too, as did Fisk, from whom he received his commission.

The news story says that Eiseman likens his surprising success in keeping the organ alive to the story of Hanukkah, in which God miraculously keeps the Menorah burning through eight days on an amount of oil that should have been far too little.

But there's an odd thing: Eiseman is a secular Jew, so presumably he doesn't really believe the Hanukkah story. Ah, well, perhaps it's just a sort of literary allusion.

Last evening I had a spirited and enjoyable discussion with a bunch of friends about the fate of virtuous non-Christians. What provision does God make for them? What does it mean to say that a person knows about Christianity and rejects it? How much does he have to know for his disbelief to count as rejection? What sort of grace can people receive who act on the light they presently possess even though they do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior? It was all conducted with that combination of humor and earnestness that make for the best of discussions of important things. I'm sure much heresy was uttered all around, including by me, and many conjectures were put forward.

I do not believe that Lee Eiseman is somehow a Christian without knowing it. But I will say this: The fact that he sees the value of that organ and has committed himself so faithfully to taking care of it must be, to him, a means of the grace God gives to all men who know and love the good, the true, and the beautiful. By means of his faithful service and his love of what is worthwhile, Eiseman may, we can hope and pray, be preparing the soil of his own heart to receive the Word of God. If that were the case, it would be no small matter.