Healthy attitudes for young men

A fundamentalist radio station I listen to has been featuring readings lately from Elisabeth Elliot's Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot.

This biography of Elliot includes generous excerpts from his journals. I was much struck when I heard it by this entry, from November 23, 1951.

Just read again the story of Abraham. Convenient food just now--with this pressing sense of need, the want of warmth and woman, tenderness, relief, and children. The God who 'prepared laughter' for Sarah in her old age, whose promises made Abraham himself fall to the ground and laugh because they seemed so goodly and impossible--fitting thoughts for my present attitude because I feel now as though it may mean five years of single life, these next five resilient years, years when I will most want her, most need her, and best be able to satisfy her. Then, maybe after I'm thirty, getting paunchy, wrinkling and balding even--then the marriage bed! Mother said the other day 'Who wants to wait until they're thirty to start raising a family?' Certainly not I. All I knew to say was, 'You raise a family when God wants you to.' And I believe. I feel sure that God is doing the best for us, and that in the face of what seems most unlikely. Perhaps I'm wrong in thinking I have years to wait--but a man can't feel the 'lustihood of his young powers' swell and surge inside him and not be affected by restraining them. It may be that He hasn't planned to make us wait years, but it certainly looks like it from here. Of course I hope I'm wrong. But if I'm not, then El Shaddai, the God who saw and heard Hagar, considered Sarai's laugh, and disregarded Abraham's 100th year--this God is the One I believe to be guiding and governing me in these affairs. And in this, in prospect, I with Abraham can laugh. (pp. 211-212)

At this time in his life Jim Elliot, twenty-four years old, thought that God wanted him to be a single missionary for a substantial time. I don't know how he picked the five-year period. It doesn't appear to have been a matter of finances. Perhaps he just thought that God wanted him to do work entirely alone for about five years in order to get the work well-started among the Indians in Ecuador to whom he felt called.

As it happened, the wait was almost exactly two years. After much indecision, Jim finally concluded that it was God's will for him to marry Elisabeth somewhat sooner, and they were married on his twenty-sixth birthday, October 8, 1953.

There is something both touching and refreshing about this passage from Elliot's journal. It is a little amusing that he thinks of his future, over-thirty self as paunchy, wrinkled, and possibly unable to satisfy his wife sexually. It shows such a charmingly youthful attitude toward the ancient early thirties.

But that youthfulness is bound up with a robust and healthy attitude toward sex and life in general. Young men nowadays would do well to read this passage and emulate Elliot's thinking. Here are several things I notice:

--Elliot doesn't think that a desire for sex is an ignoble motive for wanting to get married. He is no prude. He doesn't act as though he has to desire marriage entirely for reasons independent of the sexual ones. He understands his desires to be natural in a young man and realizes that marriage is their telos.

--Elliot takes for granted that his own sexual satisfaction is to be found only in marriage. The fact that he desires marriage for sexual reasons emphatically does not mean that he is thinking of Elisabeth in a cold-blooded or instrumental way. His romantic feelings are naturally and inextricably bound up with his erotic feelings. There is no question of his not being able to "get" sex otherwise and being forced to wait for marriage, as if sex were a product and the woman the mere provider of the product. The whole cynical idea that women have to withhold sex from men in order to make the men marry them is foreign to young Elliot's way of thinking. It is not that he is reluctantly holding himself to a traditional moral standard. Rather, the fact that he wants sex means that he wants the marriage bed. Nor does he think it quaint to speak or think that way. He wants sex precisely in the context of tenderness, warmth, commitment, and a family. He doesn't think for a moment that he would be satisfied with promiscuity, a prostitute, pornography, or anything else. In fact, he clearly knows, if only tacitly, that he wouldn't.

--Jim Elliot wants children. The idea that seems to have taken hold in some circles now that only women want children is foreign to Jim Elliot. He, personally, wants children, wants a family. He takes it to be natural and inevitable that a man wants children. He doesn't just want Elisabeth to have a chance to have children. He yearns for them himself.

--Elliot understands that a man needs to think about biological clocks. Now, he may be a little confused here by his funny notion of himself over thirty as sexually comparable to Abraham at one hundred. But beyond that, I suspect that he realizes that the woman he has chosen will not be as fertile herself in five years and therefore that his own desire for children means that he needs to think about getting married sooner.

Some further thoughts:

The Book of Common Prayer says, of marriage,

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body. 

Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.

It may be that lots of conversations are taking place where I do not hear them and that in these conversations young men are telling their older, male advisers (fathers, pastors, Christian mentors) that they would like to get married while young because they don't think they have the gift of continency and realize that God has ordained marriage as the proper channel for what Elliot calls the "lustihood of his young powers."  As a woman, I certainly wouldn't be the proper recipient of such confidences. But I have a feeling, which I would be glad to be proven wrong about, that such conversations aren't taking place nearly as often as they should be and that our society, including Christian society, has been o'ertaken by a peculiar reticence. It is as though we've all been seized with excessive delicacy or prudishness about even mentioning sexual desire as a motive for marriage.

Marriage is assumed to be undertaken later and later, and I don't hear of very many people asking young men, even reasonably attractive young men who don't believe in sex outside of marriage, "Er, don't you have a reason (hint, hint) why you would like to get married sooner rather than later?" This (and the desire for children) is a reason not to set out to be in college and graduate school throughout one's twenties or even longer. See related post here.

It is strange and to my mind ominous that, in our increasingly p*rnogr*phic and sexualized society, Christians, who reject the norms of that society, continue to accept late (even very late) marriage as reasonable. Since our young people are probably not being swept up in a wave of vocations to permanent celibacy, we should encourage them to be marriage-minded. For that matter, promiscuity and p*rn use are horrendously destructive for anyone. Non-Christians, too, used to understand that and need to understand that. So there is a reason to encourage healthy, early marriages throughout society as a whole.

Lest there be any question, I am not assuming that only men have sexual desires! I am, however, assuming a traditional perspective according to which the initiative should lie with the man to ask the lady on dates, pursue her, and eventually ask her to marry him. It's interesting to note that even in our feminist-influenced society a lot of girls would prefer not to be the one to ask the man out, much less to propose to him.

But all of this somber talk does not mean that romance is to be separated from marriage. Far from it. What we need to recapture is not the cold-bloodedness of an ancient Chinese marriage broker but rather something like Elliot's freshness and ardor. Yes, it is natural for young people to want sex. Yes, marriage should be encouraged for that reason. Therefore, romance and falling in love should be encouraged for the very same reason. No one, including men, should seek sex in an impersonal fashion, not even in seeking marriage. This shouldn't need to be said, but it does. Nor is cynicism the answer. We do a grave disservice to our young people if we encourage them to be cynical about the opposite sex. Wise and prudent, yes, and aware of the sad dangers of this world, but not cynical and hardened.

As regards children, I find it disturbing to run into the idea that women want children but men don't. Normal men should, like Jim Elliot, desire children. Young men, if you think that you don't want children, or if you just never think about the matter at all, stop and think about it. There is nothing unmanly about wanting a family. Not just a girlfriend, not just a wife, not just a sex partner, but a family, including children with the woman you love. If you already have a girlfriend, then you should think about her in connection with a family and children. Which is yet another reason actually to marry her, of course, or to break off the relationship if you cannot picture yourself marrying her.

Relatedly, if a man does want children, and if he doesn't want to marry a woman much younger than he is, then he shouldn't be deliberately (or unthinkingly) putting off marriage until late. I'm not actually opposed to a gap in ages in marriage. In fact, I think our current society needs to lighten up on that. There's nothing intrinsically creepy or exploitative about a marriage between a man of thirty-five and a woman of twenty-five. Many such marriages through the ages have been joyful, God-honoring, and fruitful. But there will be some challenges unique to such a marriage, and as it happens many people don't want that kind of a gap in ages. On the assumption that for the most part people will marry those of approximately the same age, then men, her (your prospective or hypothetical wife's) biological clock is your biological clock, and there is another reason to be marriage-minded sooner rather than later.

I suggest that men who advise young men (especially Christians) consider using this journal entry as a conversation-starter in a male-only Bible study or other serious discussion.

P.S. I anticipate an objection to the fact that I am not giving more advice to young women in this post. The main reason for that is that my thoughts were sparked by Jim Elliot's journal entry and by the extreme healthiness of his attitudes as the attitudes of a man. Also, I have recently run into an extremely cynical article (that I'm trying to resist writing about) that endorsed all the wrong attitudes for men, exactly the opposite of Elliot's; hence, this is on my mind. Naturally I am not proposing that a man should marry a woman selected at random, a shallow woman, a promiscuous woman, or a bad woman. I acknowledge that a good woman can be hard to find just as a good man can be hard to find.  I also happen to know plenty of good women, good men, and happy marriages.

The king's heart

The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will. Proverbs 21:1

Some years ago I read an interview with Justice Anthony Kennedy. Or perhaps it was commentary on an interview with Anthony Kennedy. I remember that Kennedy said in the interview something to the effect that the Supreme Court says that this or that is what the Constitution means...but one can't really be sure. He seemed a bit wry about it all. The commentator mused, drily, "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

That stuck with me as an apt comment. Here was Kennedy, with his utterly chaotic, one might say nonexistent, jurisprudential theory, more or less admitting that he has all this power and doesn't know what the heck he's doing. The commentator's point was that a Supreme Court justice isn't supposed to be a king and that Kennedy was actually seeking sympathy for the weight of a responsibility he shouldn't have at all--the responsibility of making law by his own will and whim. Kennedy makes these needless complications for himself because he has no coherent notion of what it means to interpret an existing document in an historically responsible manner. Or, perhaps more bluntly, he doesn't care about that boring stuff. He cares about vaguer things like looking independent, but at the same time progressive, striking a pose, moving with the times, but not too fast...

Well, we Americans thought that, by setting up a constitutional republic of checks and balances with strictly limited powers we were done with kings. That was the plan, anyway. Wise old Benjamin Franklin said it best: "A republic, if you can keep it."

We couldn't.

So now we have kings again. Or perhaps more precisely, a small oligarchy of nine men and women with the untoward power to make laws for the entire country at, in effect, their own pleasure. All they need is the pretext of a case before them to begin telling us all about the mystery of life and all the rights of man and what groupings and rules are rational and irrational, what laws we must have and must not have. A few of them actually voluntarily submit themselves, or attempt to submit themselves, to a coherent body of law lying outside themselves and their own will and desire. These are called, perversely, "conservatives," as though theirs, the only non-partisan position, were narrowly partisan. They are not acting as kings, but that is because they choose not to do so.

In reflecting on this recently I was struck by one small silver lining in the dark, dark cloud of judicial usurpation and tyranny in America: We Christians can once more claim Proverbs 21:1, quoted above. Indeed, we are forced to do so. No longer can we say, "That doesn't apply to us. We don't have kings in our country. We are ruled by a government of laws, not of men." Believe me, in the U.S.A. in 2015 we are ruled by men, in a strict and uncomfortably literal sense of the phrase. Not only Supreme Court justices but also IRS agents, regulatory inspectors, rogue prosecutors (as in Wisconsin), lawless policemen, bullying TSA agents, family law judges, and more.

So as we live our daily lives (turn in your taxes, pray for your loved ones when they travel by airplane, be nice to the policeman who stops you and gives you a ticket...) and as we await the SCOTUS decision on marriage, we are forced to remember that there is One in whose hand is the heart of the king. Even, perhaps especially, the wicked king, the unjust judge. We don't know if God will make the king do what is right and just. Often God doesn't. But our times are in his hand, and so we learn a new humility. We learn that government can do grave harm whatever form it originally started out with, and that all of us mere individuals have great need of the One who is no respecter of persons. Let us pray that he will turn the hard heart of the king as the rivers of water, and heal our land.

A new undesigned coincidence discovered

This is hot off the presses, folks, just discovered late last night. I found it while reading Paley's Horae Paulinae and comparing some biblical passages, but it is not contained in the Horae Paulinae, possibly because Paley did not have available to him the NASB or any other translation based upon the older text families as opposed to the textus receptus.

Here's the context: In II Corinthians 11:8-9, Paul says,

I robbed other churches by accepting support from them in order to serve you. And when I was with you and was in need, I did not burden anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my need. So I refrained and will refrain from burdening you in any way.

For this side of the UC, it doesn't matter what translation you use. That is the ESV translation of II Cor. 11:8-9.

In this passage Paul is discussing his own first interaction with the Corinthians, which is apparently recounted in Acts 18 where Paul comes to Corinth and founds the church there. Paul, in II Cor., is defending all of his proceedings with the Corinthians and, in these verses, defending himself against any idea that he tried to milk them for money. He says that, when he was in Corinth, his financial needs were supplied from other churches, by implication churches in Macedonia, rather than by the Corinthians themselves.

Now see Acts 18:3-5, first in the KJV:

And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them [Aquila and Priscilla], and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. And he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks. And when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul was pressed in the spirit, and testified to the Jews that Jesus was Christ.

Now in the NASB:

[A]nd because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and they were working, for by trade they were tent-makers. And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks. But when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul began devoting himself completely to the word, solemnly testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ. (emphasis added)

Other modern translations of the crucial vs. 5 are similar to the NASB. For example, the NIV has:

When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.

The ESV is clearly based on the same text family but does not emphasize as much of a contrast between vss. 3-4 and vs. 5:

When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

The textual difference between the textus receptus and the oldest texts lies in the question of what Paul was wholly occupied with or "pressed" by--was it the word or the spirit?

Whether one accepts the textual reading "word" or "spirit," I would argue that vs. 5 does present a contrast with vss. 3-4. As the pulpit commentary says,

As an English phrase, this ["was constrained by the word"] is almost destitute of meaning. If the R.T. [textus receptus] is right [in saying that he was constrained in the spirit], and it has very strong manuscript authority, the words συνείχετο τῷ λόγῳ mean that he was seized, taken possession of, and as it were bound by the necessity of preaching the Word, constrained as it were to preach more earnestly than ever.

The pulpit commentary continues:

In St. Luke συνέχεσθαι is a medical term: in Luke 4:28, R.T., "Holden with a great fever;"Luke 8:37, "Holden with a great fear;" Acts 28:8, "Sick of fever and dysentery;" and so frequently in medical writers ('Medical Language of St. Luke,' Hobart). But it is worth considering whether συνείχετο [the word for "pressed" or "constrained"] is not in the middle voice, with the sense belonging to συνεχής, i.e. "continuous," "unbroken," and so that the phrase means that, after the arrival of Silas and Timothy, St. Paul gave himself up to continuous preaching.

This is obviously how several modern translations have taken it, in conjunction with the word "word" rather than "spirit"--that after Silas and Timothy's arrival, Paul gave himself over to preaching more continuously than he had before. The verb translated in the NASB "began devoting himself completely" appears to be in a voice that means  that one began and continued the action. (See the pulpit commentary above.)

Either way, the idea is that something changed when Timothy and Silas arrived from Macedonia. Why would this be? Would it simply be a psychological matter of Paul's being inspired by their arrival to work harder? Yet we know that Paul always worked hard at preaching. The word "tireless" scarcely does him justice!

If we look at vss. 3-4, we find a pattern of work: Paul was working at his tent-making, presumably during the working week, and going into the synagogue and preaching on the Sabbath, when of course his tent-making work would have been forbidden by the Law of Moses. Verse 5, then, can plausibly be read as standing in contrast to this pattern. When Timothy and Silas arrived from Macedonia, Paul devoted his time more fully than before to preaching the word.

If we connect this with the coming of messengers from Macedonia to Corinth mentioned in II Corinthians 11, the inference springs to mind that Timothy and Silas are those referred to in II Corinthians 11 and that they brought money from a church or churches in Macedonia. This freed Paul from the need to work at tent-making. Hence, it was when they arrived that Paul began to devote himself entirely to preaching the word (or, if you take the textus receptus reading, became more constrained in spirit to preach). Yet Acts says nothing about their bringing money. (It is an interesting and curious fact that Acts more than once omits references to contributions or monetary transactions when these appear, from the epistles, to have been going on at the time.)

This is exactly the sort of minute but casual and subtle congruence between the epistles and Acts that Paley teases out and celebrates in the Horae Paulinae. In this case, Paley does note (p. 116) that the coming of Timothy and Silas to Corinth in Acts 18 appears to be the arrival referred to in II Corinthians 11. But he does not note the change in Paul's behavior at the time of their coming. Plausibly he does not note this because he was working with the KJV and therefore had only the odd phrase "he was pressed in the spirit" rather than the clearer "he began devoting himself completely to the word."

I have not seen this undesigned coincidence noted anywhere else, so it appears that modern textual scholarship and translations have brought to light a previously unknown undesigned coincidence between a Pauline epistle and the book of Acts. Note that this confirms that the author of Acts had intimate knowledge of the movements of Paul at this time in his ministry, even as his ministry emphasis changed from one week to the next.

A few more details:

Paley conjectures elsewhere (pp. 271-274), based on I Thessalonians 3:1-7 and Acts 17:15-16, that Timothy came to Paul in Corinth from Thessalonica at this time. Paley's idea is that Paul had (though this is not mentioned in Acts explicitly) actually seen Timothy in Athens and had, per I Thessalonians 3, sent him back to Thessalonica to strengthen the new Christians there, whom Paul had been forced to leave hastily when a riot arose in Thessalonica (Acts 17:5-10). (It must have been hard being Timothy, Titus, or any of Paul's other co-workers. The epistles show ample evidence that he would summon them and then send them out again, sometimes over the very route they had just traveled and hither and yon, to check up on the churches' spiritual well-being. Compare Acts 17:15, where Paul is sent hastily to Athens from Berea to get away from a possible riot in Berea. He leaves word for Timothy and Silas to follow him ASAP. Yet it appears that when they met him in Greece they were almost immediately sent back to Thessalonica, which is near Berea in Macedonia, because Paul had meanwhile become worried about the Thessalonians!)

Philippians 4:15-16 states that after Paul left Macedonia, at least at first, only the Philippians sent him any financial assistance. Timothy and Silas were therefore in all probability bringing money from the Philippians, though they had not most recently been visiting Philippi but rather (probably) Thessalonica. Paul also says in Philippians 4:16 that the Philippians actually sent money to him more than once in Thessalonica. It is therefore quite possible that Timothy picked up a contribution that had been sent to Thessalonica for Paul and brought it down to him in Corinth. Another possibility is that Paul is saying in Philippians only that at first ("in the beginning of the gospel") only the Philippians sent him money after he left Macedonia (e.g., perhaps some came to him when he was in Athens). By the time he was in Corinth the Thessalonians and/or the Bereans might have decided to send him a contribution of their own, which could have come to Corinth with Timothy and Silas.

In any event, the inference is quite strong that Timothy and Silas brought Paul money in Corinth from some church or churches in Macedonia and that this is why he devoted his time more fully to preaching after they arrived.

The discovery of a new undesigned coincidence, especially one so much in the spirit of the great Paley himself, is always exciting.

An undesigned coincidence involving John 6

Those who read my apologetics work know my fondness for the so-old-it's-new argument from undesigned coincidences. I'm feeling too lazy right now to scare up the links to all the posts that I and Esteemed Husband have written on this subject, so I'll have to leave it to readers to Google them or use the "evidentialism" and "apologetics" tags here and at W4 to find mine. Some of my older ones have links to a series of six posts that Tim did on undesigned coincidences (in Acts). I have more written work in the pipeline on this argument--one scholarly article using probability theory and possibly a layman-level book manuscript.

As I have been filling out further a chart originally begun by my husband Tim on undesigned coincidences in the gospels, thinking about what to include in a longer manuscript, I have hesitated to include in such a book-length treatment the UC I plan to discuss in this post. The reason for my hesitation is that this particular UC involves us immediately in some intra-Christian disagreement about interpretation.

I was always taught as a Baptist (both in church and at Bible college) that Jesus' discourse on "eating his flesh" and "drinking his blood" in John 6 had nothing whatsoever to do with Communion. It was just an elaborate metaphor for believing in him with saving faith, and nothing more, period.

In part, my change from memorialist to sacramentalist on the significance of Holy Communion was occasioned by the realization that this insistence is simply interpretively insupportable. To argue that Jesus meant nothing about the Last Supper and hence Communion by the discourse in John 6 is to assert that his use of the same terminology in both places is pure coincidence. But from the sheer perspective of human communication, this must be false. There is no way in the world that Jesus just happened to speak of eating his flesh and drinking his blood in both places, but that in one place it referred purely to believing on him, without even mysteriously foreshadowing his later establishment of the rite of Communion, while in the other place it referred to taking Communion as (on the memorialist view) a purely symbolic act showing one's remembrance of his death.

It seems beyond doubt that the disciples, who must have thought the John 6 discourse very odd (some previous followers forsook Jesus altogether over it), would have remembered his words when he later spoke almost exactly the same words at the Last Supper. In the former case he stresses the importance of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. In the latter case he actually hands them bread and wine and tells them to go ahead and eat and drink, because this is his body and blood. It is extremely likely that the disciples at the Last Supper would have thought something like, "Aha, this must be telling us more about that weird stuff he was saying a couple of years ago about eating his flesh and drinking his blood." Even without any worked-out sacramental theology, they would of course have associated the two sayings of Jesus and would have taken them to be about the same thing.

Moreover, we know that Jesus often did say things that his disciples only understood later. For example, his reference to Jonah in the belly of the whale was a prophecy of his resurrection. His reference to raising up the temple after three days was likewise a reference to the resurrection. His teaching about the Comforter was probably confusing to them, though not unclear in itself, prior to the day of Pentecost.

It would be possible for a memorialist to acknowledge that the disciples would have back-solved the John 6 discourse as an allusion to Communion while retaining his memorialism. Presumably such a memorialist would say that, yes, it was about the Lord's Supper, but it was simply about the particular memorial act of obedience in the Lord's Supper.

I do not think that is satisfactory as an interpretation of John 6 either, because of the peculiar urgency and explicitness of Jesus in his discussion. Jesus insists that you have no life in you if you don't do this act, whatever it is, of eating his flesh. But memorialists don't believe anything like that about the urgency and theological importance and efficacy of taking Communion, even though of course they can be very respectful and solemn about it. (Some memorialists are even more respectful of Communion than some in allegedly sacramental denominations, but I'll say no more about that right now.)

But regardless of whether I consider that a satisfactory interpretation of John 6, it is at least not crazily, wildly implausible, as is the insistence that John 6 isn't about Communion at all at all no no no.

This leads me to the slightly wan hope that I could give this undesigned coincidence to any audience, whether memorialist or sacramentalist, and have it seen as valuable rather than as divisive. But probably not.

So I'll just give it in this post, because I think it has merit. And it is just this: It's a remarkable fact that the Gospel of John does not record the institution of the Lord's Supper. It's amazing how many years I was a Christian without realizing this. John, of all authors! John the theological, John the observant, John who tells us so much else about the night in which Jesus was betrayed, does not record the institution of the Lord's Supper. Instead, John gives a vivid account of Jesus' act of washing his disciples' feet, which is found nowhere in the synoptic gospels. On the other side, the synoptic gospels all contain an account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, including Jesus' words "this is my body" and "this is my blood" and his injunction to the disciples to eat and drink thereof, but they do not contain any parallel of the passage in John 6 in which Jesus says that you have no life in you unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood (vs. 53).

If John had made up the discourse in John 6, it seems undeniable that he did so as a deliberate parallel to the institution of the Lord's Supper found in the synoptics. But in that case, why did he not include the fulfillment of Christ's words? One would, in fact, almost expect him to include not only the Last Supper but some sort of allusion back to what Jesus had said earlier, tying the two passages together. But John's selection interests are different, he is not writing a piece of literary fiction but a piece of memoir-like history, and he includes the discourse but not the Institution. This is to my mind a strong indication that the discourse really occurred and that John included it because he knew that it really occurred. The discourse and the Last Supper fit together as question and answer. Why did Jesus say these strange things in John 6? Because, as was his wont, he was both stretching his audience with somewhat mysterious utterances, demanding that his followers trust him that all would be made clearer in time, and foretelling his institution of the Lord's Supper and teaching its importance in the life of the Church and the individual believer. The discourse itself answers a different kind of question: Would Jesus do something so cryptic as institute the Lord's Supper in the words he used without giving the disciples any more teaching on the matter? Of course, John himself emphasizes that Jesus did and said many things that are not recorded, many more than could be recorded, and it is entirely possible that Jesus taught the disciples more, perhaps during the forty days after his resurrection, about how they were to practice the Lord's Supper and baptism after his ascension. I consider that entirely plausible. But if we actually have teaching from Jesus about the Lord's Supper in John 6, that passage itself partly fills the apparent gap left by the brevity of his remarks on Maundy Thursday.

So the synoptic accounts of the Last Supper and the discourse in John 6 fit together in the classic way that we find in many undesigned coincidences--missing pieces supplied by each passage to fill out the whole picture, questions raised by one passage and answered in the other.

This is, like it or not, evidence of the veracity of the gospel accounts. While one will have to decide on a case-by-case basis when to include it or leave it out in any given presentation, it deserves to be examined and known, despite its apparently anti-ecumenical implications.

The annotated Rawlinson

Years ago I published this short post on "evidential ammunition" for Christian apologetics. In the course of it I had a long quotation from 19th century historian George Rawlinson, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records: Stated Anew (1860), pp. 185-88.

I have noticed recently that I threw in some ellipses in the Rawlinson quotation at some points where I wish I hadn't. So here is the same passage from Rawlinson with the elided portions included. I will follow up on this with an annotated version thereof:

The political condition of Palestine at the time to which the New Testament narrative properly belongs, was one curiously complicated and anomalous; it underwent frequent changes, but retained through all of them certain peculiarities, which made the position of the country unique among the dependencies of Rome. Not having been conquered in the ordinary way, but having passed under the Roman dominion with the consent and by the assistance of a large party among the inhabitants, it was allowed to maintain for a while a species of semi-independence, not unlike that of various native states in India which are really British dependencies. A mixture, and to some extent an alternation, of Roman with native power resulted from this arrangement, and a consequent complication in the political status, which must have made it very difficult to be thoroughly understood by any one who was not a native and a contemporary. The chief representative of the Roman power in the East—the President of Syria, the local governor, whether a Herod or a Roman Procurator, and the High Priest, had each and all certain rights and a certain authority in the country. A double system of taxation, a double administration of justice, and even in some degree a double military command, were the natural consequence; while Jewish and Roman customs, Jewish and Roman words, were simultaneously in use, and a condition of things existed full of harsh contrasts, strange mixtures, and abrupt transitions. Within the space of fifty years Palestine was a single united kingdom under a native ruler, a set of principalities under native ethnarchs and tetrarchs, a country in part containing such principalities, in part reduced to the condition of a Roman province, a kingdom reunited once more under a native sovereign, and a country reduced wholly under Rome and governed by procurators dependent on the president of Syria, but still subject in certain respects to the Jewish monarch of a neighboring territory. These facts we know from Josephus and other writers, who, though less accurate, on the whole confirm his statements; they render the civil history of Judaea during the period one very difficult to master and remember; the frequent changes, supervening upon the original complication, are a fertile source of confusion, and seem to have bewildered even the sagacious and painstaking Tacitus. The New Testament narrative, however, falls into no error in treating of the period; it marks, incidentally and without effort or pretension, the various changes in the civil government—the sole kingdom of Herod the Great,—the partition of his dominions among his sons,—the reduction of Judaea to the condition of a Roman province, while Galilee, Ituraea, and Trachonitis continued under native princes,—the restoration of the old kingdom of Palestine in the person of Agrippa the First, and the final reduction of the whole under Roman rule, and reestablishment of Procurators as the civil heads, while a species of ecclesiastical superintendence was exercised by Agrippa the Second. Again, the New Testament narrative exhibits in the most remarkable way the mixture in the government—the occasional power of the president of Syria, as shown in Cyrenius’s “taxing”; the ordinary division of authority between the High Priest and the Procurator; the existence of two separate taxation—the civil and the ecclesiastical, the “census” and the “didrachm;” of two tribunals, two modes of capital punishment, two military forces, two methods of marking time; at every turn it shows, even in such little measures as verbal expressions, the coexistence of Jewish with Roman ideas and practices in the country—a coexistence which (it must be remembered) came to an end within forty years of our Lord’s crucifixion.

Now, here is an annotated version of Rawlinson's allusions to the deft and accurate movement of the New Testament narrative. (Hat tip to Esteemed Husband for much of the leg-work on the annotations. The annotation on two methods of marking time was taken from Jerome Dean Davis, Handbook of Christian Evidences.)

[T]he sole kingdom of Herod the Great [Matthew 2:1 – "Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king,"],—the partition of his dominions among his sons [Matthew 2:22 – "But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod,…he turned aside into the parts of Galilee," Galilee being ruled by Herod Antipas, not by Archelaus], -- the reduction of Judaea to the condition of a Roman province, while Galilee, Ituraea, and Trachonitis continued under native princes [Luke 3:1 – "Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, …"],—the restoration of the old kingdom of Palestine in the person of Agrippa the First [Acts 12:1 – "About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church"], and the final reduction of the whole under Roman rule, and reestablishment of Procurators as the civil heads [Acts 23:24 (Antonius Felix); Acts 24:27 (Porcius Festus)], while a species of ecclesiastical superintendence was exercised by Agrippa the Second [Acts 25:13ff (Agrippa the Second invited by Porcius Festus to listen to Paul, apparently as a mere courtesy)]. Again, the New Testament narrative exhibits in the most remarkable way the mixture in the government—the occasional power of the president of Syria, as shown in Cyrenius’s “taxing” [Luke 2:1-2]; the ordinary division of authority between the High Priest and the Procurator [Luke 3:2 -- "in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiphas....", John 18:31 "Pilate therefore said to them, 'Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law.' The Jews said to him, 'We are not permitted to put anyone to death.'"]; the existence of two separate taxation—the civil [Matt. 22:17--"Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar?"] and the ecclesiastical , the “census” and the “didrachm;” [Matthew 17:24--"Does not your teacher pay the two-drachma tax?"] of two tribunals [John 18-19], two modes of capital punishment [stoning, e.g., Acts 7 vs. crucifixion, as in the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves], two military forces [Acts 4:1 the temple guard, in contrast to the Roman forces, mentioned in multiple places in the NT], two methods of marking time [Luke 3:1-2 "...in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar...in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas..."];

When we speak of historical confirmations of the accuracy of the gospels and Acts, this is the type of thing we have in mind. These incidental confirmations, as Tim points out in this lecture, are even stronger (not to mention more numerous) than direct allusions to major events in the New Testament by non-Christian authors. It is in these incidental confirmations that we see that the gospels and Acts were written by people of the time who were familiar with these facts as part of their lives. (Remember, no Google!) As Rawlinson points out, this complex sociopolitical dance between the Jews and Rome was wiped out by the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Remember this next time someone asks you why we should think that the gospels are historically reliable.

On petitionary prayer

We had some friends over the other evening, and the issue of petitionary prayer came up. Here was one set of questions on the table (in my paraphrase): As Christians we don't believe that Christianity is falsified if you pray for something, even something "reasonable" that seems like it would advance the kingdom of God and that is not selfish, and you don't get it. But in that case, we don't really expect to receive our petitions. So why bother to engage in petitionary prayer? What's the point? Moreover, if you are praying for spiritual strength (e.g., to resist some temptation), and you know that you will have to put in the effort yourself to resist the temptation anyway, why bother praying about it? Why not just do your best to resist the temptation?

Now, it would be simple enough to answer these questions by saying that God tells us to pray for our needs, including our spiritual needs. So do it because it's commanded, end of discussion. Scripture is unequivocal in telling us to engage in petitionary prayer: "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God." (Phil. 4:6) "Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;" (Eph. 6:18) "Give us this day our daily bread...and deliver us from evil." (The Lord's Prayer) "You have not because you ask not..." (James 4:2) "If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God" (James 1:5). "Pray for us...I beseech you to do this, that I may be restored to you the sooner." (Hebrews 13:19) "Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation" (Matt. 26:41)

I think, though, that these and other verses give us more information than just a bare commandment. The most important part of this information, mysterious as it must seem, is that in some way we cannot fully understand God has elected to use our prayers as part of the causal chain for bringing about his will in our lives and in the world.

That seems incredibly inefficient. Why should I have to pray for my daily bread? God knows what I need. He could just send it! God knew the good that Paul could do if released from prison. (Assuming that Paul was the author, or one of the authors, of Hebrews.) If it was God's will to release him from prison, why did people need to pray for it? Why should God accomplish his will in any way whatsoever by means of our prayers?

But that question could be asked of anything. God could have spelled out his message by special revelation to each individual on earth, but it pleases him (at least most of the time) by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. (I Cor. 1:21; cf Romans 10:14ff) God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and could provide all the cups of water necessary for every thirsty person, yet instead he promises a blessing to those who give a cup of water in his name. (Mark 9:41)

In other words, one thing that Scripture teaches again and again and again is that God likes to do things "inefficiently." God chooses, of his own free creativity, to make us mysteriously a part of the vast web of causal processes in this world by which to bring about his purposes. And sometimes we can mess up and not do our part. So with prayer. It is just as true of prayer as it is of telling others about Christ, speaking up instead of being silent, or doing your daily work: God has a job for you to do, and if you don't do it, the ball might get dropped. Something might not happen that would otherwise have happened. Oh, to be sure, as with all our sins both of commission and of omission, God can nonetheless bring good out of evil. He is never taken by surprise. But the point is that praying is a form of working for God's kingdom. It is part of what we can and should be doing. It is causal. We don't have to understand precisely how this is so to know that it is so and that this is why God tells us to pray.

Notice that this is true even of praying for our own needs. It is true of praying for a job, for example. Presumably if one is looking for a job one is working to that end. If you believe that God is glorified by your applying for jobs, that it is a worthwhile endeavor (a reasonable enough proposition!), then you can see that God is also glorified by your praying both for a job and for wisdom in the entire process of application and decision-making.

With that point made about the real causal role of prayer, I know that there is no danger that what follows will be interpreted as saying, "The only point of prayer is that it changes you." That isn't the only point of prayer. But it is one point of prayer, including petitionary prayer. There is no spiritual exercise that is the equivalent of prayer. Nothing else can be substituted for it. An important aspect of that spiritual exercise is genuinely, sincerely asking for something from God, thinking of God as a great King who loves you, who can grant your request, and asking for it with no irony or reservation, while at the same time submitting yourself to his will if he should choose not to grant it. That is hard. It is one of the hardest things for us Christians to do. (We have Jesus' own example of it in the Garden.) In doing this we speak to the Father as to a Person. (If that offends the classical theists in my audience, so be it.) We understand that prayer is not just a rote exercise to go through. It is not just a series of motions. It is a real transaction in a real world that we cannot see. We are speaking to Someone and asking Him for something. But at the same time, we are not treating the concrete thing we request as a right. We are not saying, "I deserve this." We are submitting to Him completely, realizing that we may not get what we ask, or at least not in any visible or sensible form.

I suggest that if one tries this for a few months, repeatedly, it will make a difference to one's spiritual character.

What this also means is that petitionary prayer shouldn't be separated off into a little box from adoration, thanksgiving, and confession of sins. That's presumably part of why the Apostle Paul uses the expression "prayer and supplication with thanksgiving." Psychologically, this makes sense. If you are asking for something from God in a concentrated and sincere way, recognizing that you are speaking to a real Personal Being, but at the same time recognizing how far above you God is, then petition will be constantly passing in and out of adoration and thanksgiving. As for confession, that will be there as well, because it will be extremely difficult to come to God in that humbleness and openness of mind without recognizing that one has things one must confess.

Note, too, that confessing sins is not an option. Christians are required to do it, to be repeatedly confessing, repenting, and seeking forgiveness, to be getting their hearts right with God. So we must pray for that reason if no other, and in the process of confessing sins, asking forgiveness, and thanking and praising God, it would be quite artificial to exclude more ordinary petitionary requests.

All of this may sound rather too obvious, or thin, or preachy. But it's what I've got to offer on this urgent, practical issue.

Prayer for the Christian is like water--an absolute need. In fact, it is so whether you feel that way or not. If you make a habit of prayer, setting aside time for it and doing it with all your might, opening your heart to God, I predict that you will come to feel it to be a need as well as knowing it to be. That can only be a good thing.

The Generation Gap

We were driving home from church today and passed a greenhouse with a Christian Easter message on its board: "Because He lives, I can face tomorrow." I drew the family's attention to it. Youngest Daughter exclaimed solemnly, "Wow, that's really good, that he's being so bold."

I was struck.

I cannot imagine making a similar remark to my own Christian family in childhood. I'm not saying we never heard anything about Christians being mocked for their faith in America--usually in public schools, which I did not attend. But the idea that a businessman would have been "bold" in the 1970's to put up a quotation from a Christian Easter song would never have crossed our minds. In those days businessmen still occasionally pretended Christianity to make themselves look good!

I'm not going to say that Youngest Daughter's ideas about the Christian's need for boldness in 2015 have been formed entirely independently. Without giving her the lurid details, I have definitely conveyed the fact that Christian businessmen are sometimes targets of those who hate our faith and who attempt to "get them in trouble."

It's true, isn't it? The culture has changed, and boldness is needed. Our community is probably one of the better ones, but it is still entirely possible that someone would target a business in our area for "discrimination" against certain "identities." In fact, shortly after our region passed a "gender identity" ordinance, the story came back of a Christian girl working at a local clothing store who had to deal with two cross-dressing men, one of whom demanded to try on clothes in the women's dressing room and then flabbergasted the young lady by asking, "How do I look?" after putting on a skirt. I would like to think that she put on her driest face and tone and said, "I don't think it's your color," but I'm sure she didn't have that much savoir faire.

So we can't say, "It would never happen here." A greenhouse, unlike a florist, does not celebrate events, so that helps, but any business that employs people can be the target of an employment discrimination "sting" by the shrieking harpies of tolerance.

There is a generation gap. The temptation is great to keep a low profile, and when it comes to young people with a place to find still in the world, maybe that's good advice. But I'm glad that Youngest Daughter's first thought was to admire the greenhouse owner who is displaying the words to "Because He Lives."

The new generation needs people to admire, and a bold Christian greenhouse owner is a good one to start with.

The short-sighted use of copyright power

I recently learned that Bill Luse at Apologia has been asked to take down his excerpts from Whittaker Chambers Witness. Chambers's grandson owns the copyright and has gone to a relatively low-traffic blog asking that excerpts cum appreciative commentary be disappeared from the Internet. Legally he probably has the power to do this, though, given that there was commentary, the excerpting posts might fall under fair use, depending on the percentage of the work they amounted to. However, the blogger has agreed, rightly, to the demand of the copyright holder.

Speaking for myself, I am more than a tad annoyed at the short-sightedness of Chambers's grandson in making this demand. I was motivated to go back and read Witness all the way through by reading those excerpts. It was a book that I had long intended to read but had never gotten around to, and I might have never gotten around to it were it not for the excerpts on Apologia. Since then I have passed on my love of the book to others.

I am not making an anarchic argument for the abolition of intellectual property rights, but I am going to say that holders of intellectual property should ask themselves: Do they want the property they hold to be entombed, or do they want it to be read? It is blinkered thinking to run all over the Internet trying to suppress excerpts of a book to which you hold the copyright. Even from a crassly material point of view (and I doubt that this is what motivates the grandson, though in honesty I don't know what motivates him), reading such excerpts is likely to make people go out and buy the book! I happened to own a copy already, but not everybody does. From a more important point of view, if what is in the book is important, you should want people to be interested in it and to read it. A respectful appreciation accompanied by even fairly extended excerpts isn't taking bread out of anybody's mouth, but it may put ideas into their minds.

I think Whittaker Chambers himself would be more interested in getting his words out to more people than in taking them down. He was, after all, a witness.

He Is Risen!

It is Easter Sunday. Our world is growing ever worse. In the Middle East, the most merciless of enemies kills our fellow Christians in unspeakable ways. Here in the United States, our merciless political enemies are driving Christians out of business in an anti-Christian pogrom unimaginable even twenty years ago. (I almost wrote "a legal pogrom" or "a non-violent pogrom," but the recent death threats that have closed a pizzeria whose owner gave the politically incorrect answer to an inquisitorial reporter make even those phrases inaccurate.)

Meanwhile, three hundred Republican pundits have joined to send an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to lie again about the Constitution and to spread this sort of slavery and oppression of conscience, and the approval of perversion, all across the country. Traitors and Judases, every one of them.

In case readers have wondered why I have not said more about these events, it is quite frankly because I do not know what to say. I am appalled and stunned by the speed with which evil is taking over our land and the world.

But is it not in this context that Easter needs to come? As a blogger, I have nothing to offer you today. Nothing but Eeyorish predictions about all the badness in the world. Nothing but head-shaking.

It is Jesus Christ who has everything to offer. It is true that what he offers us, in the first instance, is the opportunity to die for him. May we recognize the moment for sacrifice when it comes and not be like Peter who denied. But he also offers us eternal life. He says, "I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

This world will come to an end. What will matter for each of us as it does is how we, as Christians, lived, and how we, as Christians, died. Of course we should continue fighting the culture wars. But we should remember at all times that our help is in the name of the Lord who has made heaven and earth and that it is he who gives the victory. We don't know what is going to happen. Good. That's probably just about where God wants us to be. Then we will acknowledge our utter dependence on him. Then we will acknowledge that he is the Lord of history and the Lord of the future, as much when we are losing the war as when we are winning, as much when we cannot predict tomorrow as when we can. And as much when we have a clever spin to put on today's bad news as when we bloggers on the right side, we mini-pundits, do not know what to say.

The resurrection says that God has the last word. So be of good cheer!

He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

What was writing like in the 1st century

I have recently been reading two books, both of which I highly recommend. The two are Colin Hemer's The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, about which I hope to have more to say later. This post is about just one bit in John Wenham's Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem.

Says Wenham (pp. 204-205),

How are we to suppose that Mark went to work? It is anachronistic to think of him working like a modern author with well-referenced sources, convenient writing materials and plenty of space. A quotation from A. Dain, the eminent French authority on manuscripts, will illustrate the point:

With very rare exceptions, one always sees the copyist in a quite characteristic attitude: he does not execute his copy on a desk or reading-stand--nor a fortiori on a table--but he writes on his knees, usually but not always, with a board serving as a writing-surface for him...It is astonishing that the professional copyists should not have used a table for their work. The truth is that Antiquity did not know what we call a writing-table. The table virtually serves only for eating, and it is always very low. It is only in the second part of the Middle Ages that one finds representations showing copyists writing on a desk, or even on a table...There is then a classical copyist position...[my omission from Dain here]. The person is seated, his left leg bent; his right leg is vertical and his knee supports the little writing board on which [he] writes. With the right hand he traces the parchment marks, while with the left he holds the sheet of parchment.

Think about what Wenham is quoting Dain as saying here: They didn't write on tables! They didn't write on desks! They wrote in this incredibly uncomfortable position sitting on the ground with a little lap-board on their knees, holding the parchment with one hand and writing with the other. Could any writing position be less useful for purposes of complex editing and redacting of a literary source? Wenham continues (pp. 205-206):

This is borne out by B. M. Metzger's subsequent study 'When did Scribes Begin to Use Writing Desks?' in which he shows that desks, tables and stands are traceable only to the ninth century. He adds useful information about note-taking:

...when a scribe was making relatively brief notes on a wax tablet or on a sheet of papyrus or parchment, he would usually stand and write while holding the material in his left hand. When a scribe had a more extensive task, such as the copying of a rather lengthy manuscript, he would sit, occasionally on the ground but more often on a stool or bench, supporting the scroll or codex on his knees (123).

He discounts the idea that the 'table' in the scriptorium at Qumran, which was solid and only seventeen and a half inches high, could have served as a writing-desk (136). Nothing could give a more vivid idea of the awkwardness of redactional work than a study of Plates III-XIX in Metzger's book, which shows how cramped scribes were even when they began to have desks to work at. In the first century tables and chairs such as we know them did not exist. Diners reclined, propped up on an elbow, at the low tables. To consult more than one scroll an author would presumably have had to spread them out on such a table or on the floor and either crawl around on hands and knees or else repeatedly crouch down and stand up again, looking at first one and then another. He could either make notes or commit what he read to memory before writing the matter up on a sheet of papyrus or vellum, or, possibly, sitting down and transferring it direct to his new scroll. Finding the place, unless he was prepared seriously to deface his scrolls, would be difficult. Handling a reed pen dipped in ink (or moistened to get ink from a dry ink-cake) to write on a surface made of strips of papyrus pith was a skilled operation--which Paul seems usually to have left to an amanuensis. In a community where most had small, dark, crowded homes, finding a room suitable for the task, and reasonably free from distractions, would not be easy.

In ideal conditions, it was not particularly difficult for a trained scribe simply to copy a scroll, though (as Dain points out) it required great concentration. Copying with some adaptation was also common in the ancient world, but it was the work of highly educated scholars. For one who was not a professional to take a lengthy manuscript with no chapter, verse or even word divisions and select, rearrange and revise it was a formidable task. It is highly unlikely that one gospel was produced as the result of an author working directly on the scroll of another; even less that he worked on two or three at once.

No tables or chairs! This information about the physical conditions of writing in the ancient world has enormous importance for any redactional theory of the origins of any ancient book, including the gospels. Indeed, these difficulties make it an interesting question as to how we come to have even the verbal similarities that do exist among the synoptic gospels. Knowledge of these difficulties in copying, much less in using multiple sources at once, should rule out altogether hypotheses according to which any of the synoptic authors were literally editing and grafting together earlier sources in anything like a complex literary manner.

Wenham gives his own ideas of how an author like Luke might have worked: Making an outline based on Mark, doing the actual writing partly from memory based on his previous reading of Mark and Matthew, fitting in as he writes additional information he had available (such as the annunciation and birth narratives), and then reading back through either Matthew or Mark (or both, but not both at once) and his own draft and making some changes to his draft in the light of this re-reading. This is conjectural and would have been cumbersome enough, in all truth, but it at least avoids the more absurd picture of Luke (or anyone else) crawling around on a large area of floor covered with un-indexed scrolls in an attempt to do a true copying-with-detailed-redaction.

This fascinating information should be much more widely known. Wenham quotes the dry comment of F.G. Downing, "[T]he long debate on the sources of the Synoptic Gospels seems to have been conducted without paying much or any attention to this issue of whether any indications of 'sensible' compositional procedures in the first century C.E. are available." (Wenham, p. 206)

Debunking the claim of "development" in the crucifixion narratives

I have recently been discussing with a friend the hypothesis, put forward by some skeptics of Christianity, that the gospels show evidence of legendary accretion in the form of the development of Jesus as a character in the crucifixion narratives. The general idea is supposed to be that we can see that Jesus changes from one crucifixion story to another in ways that are best explained by the hypothesis that the gospel writers were massaging or manipulating the portrayal of Jesus, putting words into his mouth, and so forth, rather than simply attempting to record historical events that lay within their knowledge or within the knowledge of their immediate sources. In particular, the claim is that the initial crucifixion stories in the earlier gospels Matthew and Mark portray a despairing Jesus and a prima facie meaningless crucifixion and that Jesus grows "nobler," more controlled, more martyr-like or even godlike, and the crucifixion more meaningful as the "line of development" proceeds through the gospels. This, in turn, is supposed to cast doubt on the idea that the gospels are simply memoirs of Jesus from people in the know. Rather, we are supposed to see them as having, at least to some degree, the characteristics of fictional portrayals which are therefore less than reliable concerning the actual details of what Jesus did and said.

In particular, the data used for this developmental hypothesis concerning the crucifixion narratives are

a) That Jesus says only, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" from the cross in Matthew and Mark.

b) That in Luke Jesus says, "Into thy hands I commend my spirit" when he dies, that he offers the thief on the cross a place in Paradise, and that he asks his father to forgive those who are crucifying him.

c) That Luke does not contain, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Although the following was not presented to me as a datum when I was informed of the details of this hypothesis, I can continue spinning this alleged pattern myself (momentarily, before debunking it) by pointing out

d) That Jesus commits his mother to the care of John in the gospel of John, which may be regarded as a noble, controlled, and meaningful act.

Dear reader, let me make some suggestions. When anybody claims that Jesus "develops" in the gospels, do the following: First, get a handle on what sort of trajectory of development is being claimed. Then, sit down, pick up your Bible, open it up, and read swathes of relevant text to see whether they in fact display such a pattern. Do not allow cherry-picked, even uber-cherry-picked data points to be treated as evidential in themselves. After all, your Bible is sitting right there, is it not? And there is likely to be more evidence in the Bible one way or another concerning this alleged pattern, is there not? And the facts thus far mentioned, even if correct as far as they go, are a pretty meager basis on which to build such an hypothesis, are they not?

Let me also suggest that you bear in mind all the other data we have that argue that the gospels were not massaged, fictional accounts but rather are memoirs coming from truthful eyewitnesses--data such as undesigned coincidences among the gospels (including in Jesus' trial before Pilate), unexplained allusions, pointless but truth-like details, the clearly unretouched and strongly Jewish account of Jesus' conception and birth in Luke, etc. With all this in mind, a couple of points like a-d above should be treated with grave skepticism when it is claimed that they establish a pattern of development. But in any event, the matter is quite easy to test. Which I did.  I widened my focus to the passion narratives conceived slightly more broadly than the words on the cross alone. There are probably even more points than what I am going to give, but here are the ones I found even just in a brief re-reading:

1) In all of the synoptic gospels, including Mark, Jesus says to the Sanhedrin, when asked if he is the Christ, the Son of God, "Ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power." In fact, the wording in Mark (which skeptics themselves generally take to be the earliest gospel) is one of the strongest: "I am, and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Note that Jesus says this despite the fact that he has predicted his crucifixion (Mark 8:31). Therefore, not only does Mark not portray Jesus as surprised by his death or as seeing his death as a terrible and meaningless tragedy; Mark portrays Jesus as defying the Jewish leaders on the very eve of his death and predicting his own ultimate vindication and power!

2) These statements to the Sanhedrin are not found in John, the latest gospel! So in this area, there is exactly the opposite of any "development" of Jesus into a stronger, more godlike, or more in-charge person in the passion narratives.

3) All the synoptics record a) the darkness from the 6th to the 9th hour at Jesus' crucifixion, b) the rending of the veil of the temple, and c) the statement (attributed in Mark to the centurion), "Surely this was the Son of God." This is far from portraying the crucifixion as meaningless. These indications in the synoptics strongly imply a deep theological meaning in Jesus' death. The rending of the veil in the temple implies that his death had some sort of heavy theological effect concerning the Old Covenant. We can be sure that if these events occurred in John, they would be used to argue for "development" of Jesus, of Christology, and of the gospel writers' view of the meaning of the crucifixion. Yet they are in the earliest gospels, and...

4) John, the latest gospel, does not record the darkness, the rending of the veil, or the statement, "Surely this was the Son of God."

5) Of all the gospels, only Matthew states that the dead came forth after Jesus' crucifixion. Regardless of whether one thinks that this really happened or not, the point is that it is a counterexample to an alleged pattern of gradual development of significance from the earlier to the later gospels. Even Luke does not include this claim, and John certainly doesn't, though both are later than Matthew, but Matthew includes it along with the rending of the veil of the temple. Again, we can be sure that if Matthew were independently known to be the latest gospel, this would be used as evidence of the alleged pattern of development.

6) Of all of the gospels, only John, the latest, records the most human admission of physical pain and weakness in the words from the cross: "I thirst."

7) The three "noble" words from which, apparently, the skeptics are attempting to build their developmental thesis are, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," "This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise," and "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." But in fact, these are recorded only in Luke and not in John! John has the more ambiguous, "It is finished" just before Jesus breathes his last. In John, Jesus is not shown asking his Father to forgive those who crucify him and is not shown offering a place in paradise to the thief on the cross. So what is the developmental thesis? That Jesus got "nobler" abruptly in Luke's portrayal, for some unknown reason, and then less "noble" and more pathetic and human in John's later portrayal?

All of this is in addition to,

8) The words, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" should by no means be taken to be simply an expression of despair on Jesus' part. While they may express deep suffering on his part, they are a direct allusion to Psalm 22, which contains rather amazingly coincidental phrases seeming to foretell crucifixion and which ends with the vindication of the speaker by God. While the precise reasons for which Jesus cried out this phrase from the cross are not revealed directly in Scripture, taking it to be merely a portrayal of a man in despair is an extremely shallow, uninformed, and tendentious interpretation.

I would emphasize 1-7 even more right here, however, because they do not even require a knowledge of the Psalms. Of course, anyone investigating the claims of Christianity should know that about Psalm 22, but even more than that, anyone investigating the claims of Christianity should have a sufficient modicum of skepticism about the skeptics to take up and read and see the other points, which completely destroy the idea of a linear progression from sad, despairing, human Jesus dying a meaningless death to controlled, godlike figure. It's just a completely bogus claim. There is no such progression. In Luke we have three sayings not contained in John or any of the other gospels. In John we have three sayings from the cross not contained in any of the other gospels, in the synoptics we have some things not in John, and there just is no pattern of development. At all. What we have instead is exactly what we would expect to see if the various gospels had, at least to some extent, independent access to the events in question from witnesses who noticed different things, remembered different things, and recorded different things. That hodge-podge of detail is exactly what we get with human testimony to real events. 

In fact, an interesting conjecture (though only a conjecture) arises from John 19:35, where Jesus commits his mother to the beloved disciple. If that disciple was indeed the author of the gospel, it may be that John does not record the words given by Luke because he left the cross immediately and took Mary away from the grisly scene to his own home, returning thereafter alone and witnessing Jesus' last moments. It is, again, only a conjecture, and I do not wish to place too much weight on it, but it is certainly one kind of thing that happens and causes witness testimony to vary.

Skeptics, and unfortunately some Christians, are easily captivated by a kind of phony evolutionary hypothesis about the gospels. I call it the "eohippus model." Mark is the shortest, so it is like the little eohippus horse ancestor, and all the other gospels evolved by chance processes of accretion (not anything like truthful alternative witnesses!) from a Markan original.

All the evidence of the actual contents of the gospels tells against this, and there is nothing in the sheer shortness of Mark to support this hypothesis.

I submit that we need to get over, well over, and forever over, the entire picture of the gospel writers as "making Jesus say" things he never said, portraying different "Jesuses" in a literary fashion, and "developing" Jesus for their own agendas. That is not the way the evidence points. It is a mere construct of airy and unsubstantiated literary critical approaches. If anyone tells you that Jesus "develops" in the gospels, let your antennae twitch good and hard. Then, if you are interested, go and see for yourself that it isn't so.

I will not let thee go except thou bless me

Dorothy Sayers has her character Lord Peter Wimsey say that the personality of Jacob irritates him. I have been recently re-reading Genesis and am tempted to agree with Lord Peter. The personality of Jacob is both very distinctive and highly irritating.

The Anglican divine John James Blunt, who wrote an excellent work on undesigned coincidences in Scripture, argues persuasively that the vividness and consistency of Jacob's personality is evidence for the veracity of the sections of Genesis that tell his story. I think Blunt is right. Jacob is always the same--calculating, tricky, greedy, nervous to the point of cowardice, a master of self-pitying drama, pessimistic. In Laban he meets his match--a trickster and dodger after his own pattern. But after putting up with it for fourteen years, Jacob takes the opportunity to make a gigantic, Middle Eastern family scene about it.

When Jacob returns from Laban to Canaan and sends messages to Esau, whom he tricked out of his birthright, Esau decides to give little brother a good scaring. One can just see Esau chuckling into his beard when he sends the message, "Tell your master that his brother Esau is coming with four hundred men." As it turns out, Esau never meant Jacob any harm, but he knew quite well that Jacob would not have changed in twenty years and that the message would send him into a veritable frenzy of worry and fret.

So Jacob sends elaborate gifts ahead to Esau and, finally, sends everyone else on ahead, including his wives and children. But when he stays behind alone, he encounters Someone a good deal more formidable than Esau.

And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh. (Genesis 32:22-31)

I submit that this is a truly great passage of Western literature. Try reading it aloud sometime. We move almost seamlessly from the all-too-real cowardly Jacob, staying behind the women and children, to a vision scene fraught with a depth of meaning impossible to pin down.

What does it all mean? Why does the angel (or God in a theophany) call Jacob a prince with God? Jacob, of all people! Merely because he is persistent in a wrestling match?

One can just imagine what a film version of this scene would be like--the mysterious man who shows up, barely visible in the night, and falls into a wrestling position, the match, the dramatic dialogue. The attempt to "pin" each other, not only in wrestling but in the telling of names, as though knowing your adversary's name gives you power. But it is God who obtains Jacob's name, and gives him a new one.

And then the last verse: "And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted on his thigh." The sun rises on a Jacob permanently changed by something that could not have been only a vision, for it left behind an undeniable physical mark.

Yet in the text, Jacob is not changed in personality. He continues to be just as cautious, just as pessimistic, just as full of worry. He doesn't act any more like a prince with God after he receives the name Israel than before that all-night wrestling match.

What does it all mean?

To which I answer: I don't know. I think it happened, mind you. At the risk of trivializing its depth, I will say that one obvious application is that we ourselves are, or can be, God's instruments, even God's crucial instruments in sacred history, despite our absurdities.

If such a scene could come to Jacob, and such a name, then any of us may hope to see the face of God, and live.

So, what's Eve Tushnet been up to lately?

In this post at What's Wrong With the World, I criticized the ideas of the group some have called the New Homophiles. I dubbed them CHIs--Christian Homosexual Identifiers.

One of the most prominent of the CHIs is Eve Tushnet. In her explicit statements, Tushnet affirms that homosexual acts are morally wrong. She is therefore said to affirm the Roman Catholic Church's position on sexuality. However, she insists that homosexual "eros" ("eros" is the term she uses) is not wrong and that it can be channeled to good ends.

Recently, Tushnet has, to my mind, made it clear that, if she regards homosexual acts as wrong at all (as she claims), she doesn't regard them as all that wrong. Here are the two new items that have come to light:

First, Tushnet has unequivocally stated that she would attend a lesbian "wedding" in order to celebrate the positive aspects of the relationship. Here is the quote:

This decision about attendance is easier for me, because I believe God calls some people to devoted, sacrificial love of another person of the same sex. Let me be clear: I don’t think that that love should be expressed sexually. But some people who marry a same-sex partner are doing so out of a call to love, even though they misinterpret the nature of that love. We should support as much as we can. When a woman forgives offenses and humbly apologizes for her own wrongdoing, cares for children, listens, comforts, and learns to put others’ needs above her own preferences, those are acts of love—which do not become worthless or loveless when they take place within a lesbian relationship.

This is an absurd argument. Why should we "support as much as we can" the celebration of the sexual aspect of their relationship? And why should we tell ourselves lies that a wedding isn't, inter alia, a celebration of a sexual relationship? Answer to both: We shouldn't.

If you've ever attended a wedding in your life, you know quite well that the sexual nature of the relationship is made clear, even though this needn't be and often isn't done in crude ways. The glasses are clinked at the reception so that the couple will kiss. The couple kisses at the altar. There is not the slightest doubt that the people are there to celebrate this couple qua sexual-romantic pair. Is Eve Tushnet going to clap at the reception when the lesbians kiss? Because after all, I'm sure they're doing lots of selfless things, and those don't become worthless, blah, blah.

No one who thinks that homosexual sexual intercourse is all that wrong is going to make this kind of lame excuse for attending a homosexual "wedding" and celebrating lesbianism's alleged "positive aspects."

But it gets worse. If you have the stomach for it, watch this video. (It's about fourteen minutes long.) The video is openly celebrating homosexual sex from beginning to end. One of the men interviewed states in so many words that it is "inherently discriminatory" for the church to call upon homosexuals to be celibate. It also endorses homosexual "marriage" and transgender transitions. It is completely heretical. It makes not the slightest pretense to be anything but a celebration of homosexual sex.

Eve Tushnet is featured in the video. She sits about smiling with other participants. She makes various comments about what it feels like to be a lesbian in the Catholic Church. And she even informs us that she was very pleased to learn that the Bible uses "same-sex love" along with heterosexual love as "models and mirrors of God and the human soul" (minute 3:34).

That is a disgustingly false statement. At no point, anywhere, in the Bible is homoerotic emotion (even aside from actions) used as a metaphor for the love of God and the soul. Men are, of course, called upon to love God, and God is portrayed as masculine. But there is no place whatsoever where "same-sex love" is used as a "model and mirror of God and the human soul." That is some sort of Queer Theory perversion of Scripture and deserves to be anathematized. I don't, frankly, even want to know what passages Tushnet thinks she is talking about.

It is quite impossible that Tushnet does not know what this video is about and what it is promoting. On her blog she promoted the video herself just four days ago. The only thing she distances herself from is the title--"Owning our Faith." I don't even know why. She says, "I did not name this." But she in no way indicates any distance between herself and the pro-sex content of the video or the blatantly, openly pro-sex agenda of the group who has made it. She just makes a joke about how she needs a haircut. Ha ha.

It would be impossible for anyone who takes with any real degree of intellectual seriousness the immorality of homosexual acts to lend the slightest appearance of approval to this video. The video is utterly rebellious against traditional moral teaching on homosexual acts.

I therefore conclude that, her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Eve Tushnet does not take with any real degree of intellectual seriousness the immorality of homosexual acts.

At this point, anyone who wants to point to Eve Tushnet as an example of homosexual orthodoxy within the Roman Catholic Church needs to do some serious reevaluation.

Ravenswood Baptist Christian School

On the off chance that anyone reads this blog who is not also my Facebook friend and has not already seen my plug there, I want to take this week to do a little fund-raising. (Very unusual activity for me.)

Ravenswood Baptist Christian School, the educational arm of Ravenswood Baptist Church, was my high school. I went there at the age of 13 1/2 as a grumpy, funny-looking, social outcast. My parents had decided to transfer me to Ravenswood from the Christian school where I had gone for K-8, hoping that a change to a different atmosphere would give me a chance to start over and make friends. I was not only a nerd, I was also sarcastic, unkind, and argumentative. Peers and teachers alike were justifiably annoyed by me, and most other teenagers just couldn't be bothered.

The thing about Ravenswood, though, was that it excelled at dealing with misfits. It was, and I believe still is, the Island of Misfit Toys School. We had plenty of odd birds of all sorts. I was by no means the only one. (Details suppressed to protect the innocent.) The teachers were firm but kind. They referred to all of the students as "Mr." and "Miss." Strangely enough, the students picked up somehow from the teachers the message that bullying was not acceptable. "Anti-bullying programs" were completely unnecessary. The love of Christ was manifested in the love for the students.

It was at Ravenswood that I started on the road to becoming a person whom anyone would want to be friends with, to be close to, to work or to live with. I had been simultaneously spoiled at home and rejected at school before going there; my friends and teachers at Ravenswood began to correct both of those imbalances. There I made dear friends in my own generation whom I've been privileged to reconnect with now that the Internet makes that possible. Until I went off to college three years later, Ravenwood Baptist Church also became my church.

I have been back to Chicago and visited Ravenswood several times in the last few years in connection with deaths in my family. No church could have been kinder or more supportive at those times.

Now the school is struggling financially. My understanding is that they fell behind in the slump that began in '08, as did most everyone. They have yet to catch up with the financial losses of those years. Ravenswood is an inner-city school, and its families are by no means well off. Sometimes even now parents are unable to pay tuition.

Here is a GoFundMe page for Ravenswood Baptist Christian School. If you're looking for somewhere to make a donation, consider donating there. Or you can send a check directly to the school's address at 4437 N. Seeley, Chicago , IL 60625.

For the truth be not dismayed

Last evening was a hymn sing at our home. One of the children chose the hymn "The Banner of the Cross," which I don't believe we've sung very often. Here are the words to the first two verses and the chorus:

1. There’s a royal banner given for display
To the soldiers of the King;
As an ensign fair we lift it up today,
While as ransomed ones we sing.

Refrain

Marching on, marching on,
For Christ count everything but loss!
And to crown Him king, we’ll toil and sing,
’Neath the banner of the cross!

2. Though the foe may rage and gather as the flood,
Let the standard be displayed;
And beneath its folds, as soldiers of the Lord,
For the truth be not dismayed!

Refrain

The lyrics were written in 1884 by Daniel W. Whittle. They are timely today. When we were singing I immediately thought of Barronelle Stutzman . I also thought of her when we sang "Dare to Be a Daniel."

Why did people write those songs? They wrote them because they realized that Christians need encouragement, and the hymns were supposed to offer that encouragement, that spine stiffening.

What struck me was that in our own time it is less likely that such lyrics would be written because too many Christians are afraid of sounding too sure that we know what God wants us to do. To apply a song like "The Banner of the Cross" to a concrete situation like that of Barronelle Stutzman requires confidence that she is displaying the banner of the cross, that she is fighting the good fight, and, most controversial of all, that her opponents represent "the foe." In short, such songs come from an era when we were not worried about identifying the foe and the fight. I really don't imagine that anybody wrote to Daniel W. Whittle and told him that he was being presumptuous and "demonizing" his opponents. Yet that's exactly the sort of advice Christians give Christians now--don't think in us-them terms, don't think of those who are on the other side (of the abortion issue, of the homosexual rights issue, of any issue) as "the Other."

It is a breath of fresh air to open a hymnal and sing a song that tells us that all will be well, that heartens us, that says, "Though the foe may rage, display the standard! Wave the banner! For the truth be not dismayed! We are fighting the good fight, and the Lord is with us. Stand up for what is right."

And in the meanwhile, for Christ count everything but loss. That line is in there too. Barronelle Stutzman may lose all her worldly goods. She counts it all but loss, as the Apostle Paul wrote,

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; Philippians 3:7-10

Stutzman wrote the following to Bob Ferguson, the State Attorney General who has tried to induce her to promise "not to discriminate" in the future in return for his dropping the case in return for a small fine:

You are asking me to walk in the way of a well-known betrayer, one who sold something of infinite worth for 30 pieces of silver. That is something I will not do.

She knew when the moment came, she heard the call, she has answered the call. May God grant us grace to follow her example and not to be dismayed for the truth.

Creation doesn't have to be different

In discussing creationism, intelligent design theory, and related issues on blog threads and also in some of my scholarly reading (I think I caught a whiff of it in Paul Helm's otherwise very good book on God and time), I have come to the surprising conclusion that too many people think that anything that God does that goes by the name of "creation" has to be different from all other miracles. In particular, there seems to be a pervasive, though sometimes vague, idea that anything called "creation" is subject to some sort of special restrictions, that God always will do it in a certain way or a certain restricted set of ways. (This article, though I haven't read it all, looks like a pretty classic example of the problem.)

For example, sometimes creation is restricted to ex nihilo creation, with the implication being that God creates only ex nihilo and never uses pre-existing materials. Why? Call me naive, but I don't find anywhere in Scripture that this is asserted. To the contrary, Scripture expressly states that God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground and formed Eve from Adam's rib.

Maybe that isn't intended to be literal; maybe it is. But prima facie it would seem to argue against any hard and fast prohibition on God's making things in the physical world using pre-existing materials. Scripture, at least, is not at the slightest pains to guard against the alleged mistake of thinking that God would ever create something using pre-existing materials.

Sometimes "creation" is connected with Providence or the continual sustaining of the world plus ex nihilo creation. Nothing else. So, using this set, we can refer to God's making the cosmos out of nothing at the first moment as "creation," and we can refer to God's continual (but invisible), intimate providential connection with the world (whether we are concurrentists, occasionalists, preservationists, or what-not) as "creation."

But the one sort of thing we can't call "creation" is God's forming man out of the dust of the ground! In fact, we have to express a lot of puzzlement about what in the world Scripture could possibly mean by such expressions. Maybe they mean God's invisibly guiding evolution so it looks like man came into existence by natural processes from ape-like ancestors, and then God's silently "ensouling" a pair of ape-like ancestors. Maybe that's what the passage is referring to. But not a situation in which first there's no man there, and then suddenly a man there, sleeping on the ground. That would be so...crude. So the one thing, on this view, that we aren't supposed to think creation could ever look like is what all those Christians through all those centuries very likely thought creation looked like--creatures appearing suddenly on the earth that weren't there before, by miracle, by the word of the Lord.

The first Word is impressive, and we can write theological treatises about it. Light coming out of darkness has all sorts of symbolic meaning. Divine Providence is mysterious and theological. God's just making critters pop into existence is...something we don't want to be associated with anymore. Because reasons.

Funny. Jesus doesn't seem to have been bothered by that sort of worry. He made bread and fish pop into existence out of his hands to feed five thousand people. For real. He made wine (from pre-existing water, no less) where there was no wine before. Poof, voila! Bam! And God made manna appear all over the sands of the desert for His people, morning after morning. (But not on Saturdays.) How crude. Did God make the manna? Should we not even say that God created the manna in some important sense? Why not?

Do I know absolutely and for a fact that no species emerged on this earth by some kind of subtly God-guided semi-evolutionary process? No, I don't know that absolutely for a fact, though I have my layman's scientific doubts as to how widespread any such evolutionary origin of species was.

But there is a gigantic difference between saying that God could have brought species into existence by subtly guided processes and saying that God had to or definitely would have done so only by such subtle processes. Those pushing against Intelligent Design theory constantly conflate these two. One will get a little lecture on how theistic evolution is "compatible" with Christian doctrine, when the real question at issue is whether it is required by some theological considerations, as though all Christians should have believed in naturalistic-looking theistic evolution for almost two thousand years before Darwin was born!

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever, theologically speaking, to think that God wouldn't create creatures on this earth in a sudden way, at different times, miraculously, just like any other miracle, sometimes using some pre-existing matter, sometimes not. There is precisely zero theological restriction that militates against the "crudest" sort of creationism. God could have had this beautiful world all put together as a habitat, with fish in the sea, birds in the air, and other critters wandering about, and then a bunch of dust could have started agitating and bubbling and, when it settled, Adam could have been lying there, miraculously brought into being. And some of the very same atoms that were previously part of the dust could have been incorporated into Adam's physical body by this sudden miracle. And that might have been how God made man. Why not? Theologically speaking, no reason whatsoever. None.

Let me add that this has absolutely nothing to do with a belief in Divine timelessness. That doesn't constrain our options here. A Boethian (one who believes that God is timeless) nonetheless believes that. in terms of human history, there are miracles that happen at particular times. The parting of the Red Sea occurred long after the near-sacrifice of Isaac but long before David's reign, etc. Any view of Divine timelessness that can accommodate all the jillion miracles at different times in the Bible has no extra problem accommodating biological special creation!

The same is true of the doctrine of divine simplicity. If you believe in divine simplicity, this cannot exclude the performance of particular miracles at particular points in time, or you cannot be an orthodox Christian. But if the doctrine of divine simplicity can accommodate manna in the wilderness, water from the rock, and the burning bush (and it'd better be able to), then there is no reason in the world why it cannot accommodate God's making Adam, or hippos, or any other new species, suddenly and miraculously. It is also fairly ridiculous to refuse to call such making "creation," but if you have some sort of weird terminological scruples about calling anything "creation" after the Big Bang, then call it "making." So maybe God made hippos, Adam, and many other things subsequent to the Big Bang. If your doctrine of divine simplicity can't handle that possibility, then you have much bigger problems than intelligent design theory! Much, much bigger. In fact, you've locked yourself into a kind of deism.

I cannot help thinking that everything I have said here would have been perfectly obvious to any educated priest, orthodox clergyman, or layman in the year 1799. I think such Christians would have been completely puzzled at the suggestion that the appearance of the species had to be or had to appear non-miraculous. They would have been astonished at restrictions on divine methods of creation and by confusion over what it could or might mean for God to create man and animals.

So I submit that such confusion is self-evidently the product of a post-Darwinian sensibility. Because people think that Science has told us that all the creatures, including man, appeared to come into existence by natural processes, theology has tagged along and muddied the waters by setting "creation" aside from all the other special, powerful acts of God with which we are familiar from our Bible stories.

Now that neo-Darwinism is coming unraveled at the seams, scientifically speaking, it is sad to see Christians stranded on a theological island and unable to find their way back, finding it incredibly hard even to consider that the creation of creatures and man might just have looked like lots of other miracles look.

I submit that, ironically, we are going to close ourselves to scientific evidence if we take such a pointlessly restrictive theological approach. Christians should not be greeting evidence for God's direct working in creation in the past to bring new types of creatures into being with theological suspicion on the grounds that we wouldn't want to think of God as "a magician with a magic wand" (translation--a God who intervenes). You never know; maybe intervention is pretty much what it looked like. It's what a lot of other miracles looked like. So I suggest that we should eliminate any a priori theological dichotomy between creation and miracles more generally considered and then see, with an unbiased eye, what the evidence points to.

Update: I almost forgot to include this. V.J. Torley has an extensive take-down of Tkacz (whose article I have linked in the first paragraph of this post). If you like take-downs so extensive that there is nothing left but dust at the end (out of which God could create a man), you will love this material by Torley. I couldn't possibly have read it all, but what I have read is devastating. Here is a link to part of it. My favorite part, though, so beautiful that it almost brought tears to my eyes (yes, I have written a fan note to Torley telling him this) was this section, where Torley shows fifteen (!!) places where Tkacz contradicts St. Thomas Aquinas while claiming to speak for Aquinas.