Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts--a sample

Here is a recording of a talk I gave on March 29 about undesigned coincidences in the gospels and Acts.

Only connect the prose and the passion III: For Easter

I first wrote the post that I am, to some extent, recycling back in 2011. It's here. And the second post by the same name is here. And an accessible version of the music video with Vestal Goodman in that second post, which has now become unavailable from the U.S., is here.

If you had been there on that first Easter morn, you could have photographed the risen Jesus of Nazareth. He didn't live within people's hearts then. He was walking around. His resurrected feet printed the sod. If you had been with the disciples when he came to them in the upper room, you could have touched his hands and his feet; you could have seen the scar from the spear in his side. You could have handed him a piece of fish and felt his hand touch yours as he took it.

There is only one religion that connects the prose and the passion, and that is Christianity. Christianity offers mankind all the scope the imagination and the heart could desire--God become man as a baby with a virgin mother, sin taken away mysteriously by means of the God-man's shameful death, His vindication by a glorious resurrection, the possibility of new life for each of us and the remission of sin, the final promise that all shall be made new.

For this very reason, too many Christians have played into the hands of the skeptics, fearful that the prose might cancel the poetry, separating the "Christ of history" from the "Christ of faith" and assuring the faithful that they can have the latter in whom to rest their hearts and on whom to feed their imaginations even if the former is...a bit lacking.

But this is not Christianity. For Christianity affirms, "He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell, and the third day He rose again from the dead." There is no separation between the great truths of the Gospel and the prosaic truths of history, between the massive miracle of Jesus risen and the all-too-human, bureaucratic hand-washing of a harassed Roman official two thousand years ago.

Some writers are offended by the "physicality" of the resurrection accounts and attribute them to later additions. But there is nothing in the accounts themselves that suggests that. Indeed, the confidence of Peter on the day of Pentecost is best explained by precisely such physically grounded appearances as those recounted in the gospels--a resurrected Lord who eats and even cooks on a fire of coals for others to eat, who is tangible and invites his disciples to touch him and who, says the first chapter of Acts, shows himself to them repeatedly over forty days by many infallible proofs.

John 21, one of the longest accounts of Jesus' interactions with his disciples after his resurrection, throws in the irrelevant detail that the disciples caught 153 fish that morning. Attempts to give this detail heavy theological or allegorical meaning are laughable. The detail is there because that's how fishermen think. In this particular case, John was also struck by the fact that the net didn't break.

Here, in these truths, you can indeed rest, and upon them you can stake your lives, because they are not cloudy truths. Christianity has its mysticism and its mystics. Indeed, St. John may well have been one of them. Yet it is in John that we see most of all that mysticism and empirical hard-headedness are not at odds but rather go hand in hand. John who tells us, "He that feareth is not made perfect in love," which I, for one, feel is far beyond me, who tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," is the same author who tells us that there were 153 fish and that the net didn't break, that the fire on which Jesus cooked was made of coals (not wood?), and, oh, by the way, the servant whose ear Peter cut off was named Malchus. John the mystic is John the man of detail, the man with something akin to a photographic memory, the man who remembers, when Judas opened the door and went out to betray the Lord, "And it was night."

Well might he say, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us." 

It is all one to John. The Logos who was from the beginning and the man who cooked and ate the fish. In the mind of John there is no division between the prose and the passion.

So, on this basis, I invite you to rejoice and be glad, for our Lord is risen indeed!

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure

In the novel Theophilus, Michael O'Brien portrays the main character, a physician like Luke but not initially a Christian believer, as sickened by the cruelty of crucifixions. He is therefore horrified when he finds one of his servants praying with a crucifix in his hands. He cannot understand why the Christians have made a symbol of worship out of this horrible instrument of torment. O'Brien captures very well the surprising nature of the Christians' veneration of the cross. And indeed, the oddity--either for Jews or Gentiles--of the early glorification of the cross is one of many pieces of evidence that they had strong reason to believe that Jesus was not just another victim of the evil of man, that God had vindicated him.

I was struck by this conflict between the cross as symbol and as reality this evening while singing "In the Cross of Christ I Glory." The title is taken from St. Paul's avowal in Galatians, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ." The last verse goes

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure
By the cross are sanctified.
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.

And I began thinking of Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil (though I couldn't then remember his name) who has been captured by ISIS in Yemen. The nuns of his order fear that he will be or has been crucified by ISIS today, Good Friday. Others have argued that the fear is unfounded, but in any event, Fr. Tom is certainly in danger if not already dead, and ISIS has been known to crucify people.

How, I wondered, could I glorify the cross as a symbol of my salvation while Christians are literally being killed on crosses by the most evil of men who glory in torturing and mocking Christians by this means of death? When the notion of crucifixion ceases to be a notion and becomes all too real, it becomes difficult to sing about how "peace is there that knows no measure."

Yet the Apostle Paul was not a comfortable, 21st-century, American Christian. He lived in a time when men were crucified. He personally knew Peter who, according to tradition, was later crucified upside down. Paul escaped a similar fate only because he was a Roman citizen. And it is the Apostle Paul who first teaches us in Scripture to glory in the cross. "For I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."

Somehow it was possible for those early Christians to hold the cross in their minds as both a symbol and a reality and to embrace that reality because, as Paul quotes a "faithful saying," "If we die with him, we shall also live with him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." "Buried with him by baptism into the likeness of his death, raised in his likeness to walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection."

And so, they were willing to die, like Christians facing the evil of ISIS. Like Fr. Tom. It wasn't that they did not know, that they did not understand. It was, and is, that they understand better. They go past the easy thoughts of the cross, mind half-wandering, heart unmoved by what has become old hat. But so, too, they go beyond the sheer, stark, horror, a horror to darken the mind, of the thing itself. For on the other side of the horror that Our Lord suffered, and that all Christians are called in some measure to suffer with him, and that some suffer literally, there is a deeper meaning yet again, which is neither easy symbol nor mind-paralyzing evil and torture. And that meaning is the reversal of evil, accomplished by that death. If it had not been accomplished by that crucifixion, then every crucifixion would be nothing more than, at most, a tale of gross evil nobly born by an innocent victim. And at worst we should suspect that perhaps even nobility itself had no meaning at all.

But now, we see through a glass darkly that death need not be just death, that crucifixion, yes, even real crucifixion, need not be just crucifixion, because Jesus died and, by death, defeated death, and lives again.

An invitation to peace

Through the invaluable Screwtape, telling his nephew demon how to tempt, we get the following words of wisdom from C.S. Lewis:

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy's will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him--the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say "Thy will be done," and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier, and is usually helped by this direct action. The Screwtape Letters, p. 29

Every person who is naturally a worrier, as I am, needs to read this passage so often as nearly to have it memorized. The only part with which I might quibble is the assumption that the worrying human will always work out a set of future fears about which he can reassure himself that they can't all happen to him. Those of us who are really good at anxiety are also good at developing a list of highly varied things to fear in the future, all of which actually can happen to us.

Aside from that, however, Screwtape is completely right. (Very insightful, those demons have to be sometimes.)

When I was younger, I used to hear a lot of talk in the churches about "surrendering to God's will." That's good, and I don't want to tear it down. Anti-piety is much more corrosive than slightly over-enthusiastic piety. But unfortunately, some of us devout young ones got the idea that surrendering to the will of God meant something like this: Think of something that you really, really don't want to happen to you, or think of something's not happening to you, that you really, really don't want not to happen to you. For example, imagine that it's God's will that you never get married. (I don't know if the young men worried about this. But we girls did.) Or imagine having to give up some activity you really enjoy. Or having to move to some unpleasant location, or just having to move somewhere you don't want to move to. Or getting a terrible disease. Then ask yourself, "Would I be willing to accept that, if it were God's will?" If you feel hesitant about your spiritual ability to submit to this fate, especially if you feel inclined to grumble or chafe at the prospect, then you have failed the test of submissiveness to God's will, and you should start wondering if whatever-it-is has become an idol to you. In fact, you should maybe start wrestling in prayer over this hypothetical loss until you have reached the proper mindset of acceptance and submission.

That is precisely what Screwtape is talking about. It is not actual submission to the will of God. It's psychological gymnastics. It's a kind of emotional self-test, and there's no reason to think that it is reliable, either. For one thing, you don't know what spiritual resources will be given to you if that feared outcome really presents itself to you. Nor can you predict those resources from your own present feelings, including your present feeling of your own submissiveness to God. There is a reason why Jesus said "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and that applies to things you think you need to submit to in prospect.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not advocating sitting around in an attitude of defiance toward God. "God, I'm just serving you notice that if you let me fail that class, or lose my job, or if I ever come down with a terrible, painful disease, or if you don't bring me a good husband within a reasonable time frame, then it's sayonara. I'm outta here. My submission to you and faithfulness to you is only on the condition that you not let any of these things I'm worried about happen to me. I'm getting geared up to fight this out with you, Lord." Of course not. But the person trying to submit to a host of hypotheticals is, in practice if not in intent, trying to call up such internal defiant feelings by imagining an event that hasn't happened and that may not happen, and then chiding himself for the fact that he now feels somewhat angry at God because of the hypothetical prospect he has deliberately, mentally entertained! This is folly. It's a waste of emotional strength.

It is also an attempt to gain spiritual strength in the wrong way. As Lewis/Screwtape says, there isn't really a reason to think that God will grant you today the strength to "face" a prospect that you don't really need to face, a prospect that is merely possible. Instead, if for some reason you are filled with fear about some particular future possibility, then pray about that. Pray to be delivered from that present feeling of fear or, if the fear is the will of God for you to bear as your present cross, to be given the grace to bear it well and not to be a burden to others. Then, after thus praying, resolutely attempt, with God's help, to turn your mind to something else about which you can actually do something positive.

Digression: The chronic worrier always thinks that maybe he actually can do something about the future thing feared by worrying about it now. The Internet encourages this. Maybe I can look up something that I can "bear in mind" if such-and-such ever happens. Maybe I can think of an idea that I can do now that will fend off such-and-such. And so forth. This is also a snare, by and large.

Maybe nobody nowadays goes around trying to "submit to God's will" in the way described above anymore. Nobody else, that is. But I still occasionally do it, and I need to learn not to. At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, I will say that the chronic worrier needs to learn that it's okay to be happy right now. But I can do better than a motivational poster, simply by quoting more from Uncle Screwtape, who lets us into the aims of hell. "The Enemy," of course, as Screwtape uses the term, is God:

[The Enemy's] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hagridden by the Future--haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth--ready to break the Enemy's commands in the Present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other...We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present. pp. 69-70

What Lewis seems chiefly to have in mind in this passage is a kind of utopianism rather than a tendency to fear for one's personal future happiness or for the personal happiness of those one loves. Nonetheless, the comments apply to the latter as well as the former. I note, too, that the technology we now live with has made it much harder to "wash one's mind of the whole thing" and to "commit the issue to heaven," much less to regard such "washing of one's mind" as returning to the reactions that are demanded of us at the moment. In a time of 24-hour Internet, we are likely to feel that at all waking moments of the day we are required to be beating our brains or harrowing our own emotions with whatever debates, stories, or concerns come across the screen. Lewis's whole picture of a division of life into different compartments and of taking one's mind off of one thing and putting it onto another is one we would do well to ponder and perhaps to try to recreate.

Beyond that, the point for the worrier is that the Devil wants a man to be hag-ridden by the future, and all the better (from the devil's perspective) if he is a Christian. If what the devil wants is that we should never be kind or happy now, then perhaps one of our first items of business should be to try to be both kind and happy (and honest) now, let the future bring what it will.

The idea of a duty to try to be happy is rather shocking in a way. Certainly it isn't, especially not to the worrier, an invitation to hedonism. Rather, it is an invitation to peace. I suggest that those of us tempted too much to "take thought for the morrow" accept that invitation wholeheartedly.

A civics lesson

I've been getting a civics lesson lately in what is meant by a "brokered convention." I've done some googling, and asked a poli sci expert, and you can check out what I say for yourself and correct me if I'm wrong. With that caveat, here's what I believe I've learned.

Contrary to popular impressions fostered by vague headlines, vague articles, and vague talk, a contested or brokered convention (say, the Republican convention in July) is not a convention in which "the establishment" simply picks a political candidate out of nowhere, whom no one wants, and by fiat makes him the party nominee.

All the talk about "stealing" the convention or "taking" the nomination from a candidate who has a bare plurality (but doesn't meet pre-existing party rules for number of delegates for the nomination) is sheer rhetoric, and misleading, and I will no longer be a party (pun intended) to it.

In the end, the delegates choose the nominee. It's like voting for the pope. If no one has the required number of delegate votes on the first ballot, where they are all bound to vote for the candidate they came there to represent, they are freed from their original pledge, and the delegates vote over and over again until someone gets the requisite number of delegate votes. So the nomination is still made by the delegates. Any wheeling and dealing, any "brokering," any influence, must ultimately cash out in terms of delegate votes on some subsequent ballot. The delegates must be persuaded.

Now, certainly, illegitimate things could be done there. People could be outright bribed with $10k apiece. People could be outright threatened with physical harm. There is plenty of room for corruption as there is, unfortunately, in any political process, including votes of Congress.

But the process is not intrinsically wrong, corrupt, or even "undemocratic," anymore than are votes in Congress. People have this weird idea that democracy isn't democracy unless representatives are automata. In this case, the delegates should be thought of as representatives. They get sent to the convention in the first place according to all the Byzantine rules by which the popular primary (and caucus) votes select them. Once there, they vote. First according to their pledge, and, if that doesn't garner any one candidate the required total on the first ballot, according to however they are persuaded to vote. This isn't intrinsically bad any more than any representative democratic process is bad.

I am sorry to see that even some sensible people (including my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, himself) are getting into this talk about "stealing" the nomination and the "illegitimacy" of a brokered convention. At this point, if D.T. cannot get enough delegate votes ahead of the convention, then guess what? The real "fix" would be just saying, "Ha, we didn't mean it. We'll give you the nomination even though you never won enough delegate votes." That would be illegitimate. He, just like anyone else, has to win enough delegate votes on some ballot or other. And if he can't win it on the first ballot, then he has to try to win it on subsequent ballots. Requiring that is just fair play. Indeed if anyone is likely to cheat at that point and use outright illegitimate tactics, perhaps threatening delegates with personal harm if they don't support him on subsequent votes, I fear that it is D.T.--the very man whose followers are most likely to yell about "letting the will of the people be heard" and "not stealing the nomination."

Cruz himself should hope to be the unity candidate in case of a contested convention (that's certainly what I hope), and unfortunately he's leaving himself only the tiniest inch of wiggle room, if that, in the above linked interview to do that without being accused of hypocrisy.

I think we conservatives, of all people, ought to be here to educate ourselves and others about how these processes actually work, not just to repeat talking points and empty rhetoric. I offer this post as a small step in that direction.

Ben Shapiro on nationalism and the nasty right, with a few tweaks

Ben Shapiro has been excellent in his criticisms of a certain dreadful political candidate, D.T., whose last name rhymes with "Dump." Here he skewers his lack of character and his lies. And here and here he calls him out for deliberately appealing to the nasty right.

I would like to talk about this article, with which I have many agreements, and to see if I can "tweak" Shapiro's views, particularly on the issue of nationalism. The result, I would say, will be very similar to what Shapiro says, but a little bit different.

To begin with, Shapiro is importantly right (and I'll probably say this more than once in this post) that conservatives need to recognize and reject the despicable, self-styled "right," whether it goes under the name of the alt-right, the racialist right, or any other title. These groups have been growing on the Internet and the Dump candidacy has brought them out of the woodwork. We should, quite simply, have no truck with them whatsoever and condemn them repeatedly. Why? Well, certainly not to ingratiate ourselves with the left, which will never work anyway. No, for the sake of our own clarity of mind and that of any with whom we have influence.

To my mind this is all the more important for someone who has ever written anything politically incorrect on an issue such as race or immigration. I was calling for a ban on Muslim immigration years before anyone ever thought that D.T. would be a candidate for the presidency, of all things. It's an idea that deserves a much better, more careful advocate. I argued for it in a series of posts co-written with my then-co-blogger, Jeff Culbreath. Mine are here and here. I am also generally an immigration hawk. In general, I think there's just too much immigration going on from all locations and that this is causing all kinds of problems. In Europe, the mass influx of Syrian "refugees" has been an unmitigated disaster. The reports of crime, cities taken over, medical systems overloaded, unspeakably bad behavior by immigrant gangs, and the like, all utterly predictable, should make all the bleeding heart Christians who chided the so-called "xenophobes" repent in dust and ashes and apologize personally to the German women who can't walk in safety on their own streets.

So given that some of my ideas resemble some of theirs, I have all the more reason to make it excessively clear that I loathe the self-consciously racist, often anti-semitic, ideology of the following that has erupted around D.T. And I've suffered from it right here at Extra Thoughts, having to change my comment policy to block vile comments.

Interestingly, I think that Shapiro's comments could actually sustain a fairly hawkish immigration policy. For example, Shapiro seems to endorse the propositions

that Muslim refugees to the United States must be treated with more care than non-Muslim refugees thanks to the influence of radical Islam, for example, or that illegal immigration brings with it elevated levels of criminality. 

I would quibble that "radical Islam" isn't really so radical but is basically just Islam and also that legal immigration sometimes also brings with it elevated levels of criminality. But the point is that Shapiro and I could no doubt work out together a set of principles that would place a lot more limitations on immigration, including Muslim immigration, than the moderates would ever be comfortable with, and vastly more than we have right now.

Shapiro also says, "It’s one thing to object to an influx of people who disagree with basic constitutional values."

Right, well, look at the ways in which Muslim enclaves behave and their treatment of, say, Christian missionaries, and you will find out quickly that those who want to set up such enclaves disagree with basic constitutional values.

I think, too, that it would be possible to get Shapiro to recognize the importance of negative cultural values--forced marriage, female genital mutilation, child marriage, honor killings, and the like. Other cultural communities may take bribery and cheating for granted--"values" they have brought to the U.S. from their own countries.

Once we start taking such cultural values into account, there is no doubt that immigration policy would become "discriminatory" and would have "disparate impact" upon groups of various national origins. That is not racial per se--indeed, a careful immigration policy might rationally prefer an African Christian from Mombasa over a light-skinned Bosnian (think of the Tsarnaev brothers). But there is no doubt that taking cultural background into account would end up having ethnic implications in the broad sense of "ethnic."

Again, I would like to think that Shapiro's interest in the "content of our character" would lead him to recognize that possibility without flinching.

But there is one place where I think what he says does need to be tweaked.

According to Trump, we ought to operate off of the assumption that Americans deserve better lives not because they live out better principles or represent a better system, but because they’re here.

Setting aside the question of whether that candidate actually has any worked-out opinion or principle on any subject whatever, including that one, I would submit the following proposition for Shapiro's consideration:

It is legitimate for the American government and American employers to have special concern and loyalty toward American citizens over the citizens of other countries.

This seems like a very mild version of the principle. Suppose that you are an American employer and can hire an American worker who can do the job that you need done, and do it well, for a wage you can easily afford. Is it legitimate for you to have some preference, any at all, for that arrangement as opposed to hiring a non-American from abroad, bringing him here, and giving him the job? To put the matter no higher, it is a good deal more efficient for everyone involved to hire the person who is already here. It can also increase community cohesion by keeping people who already live here employed rather than leaving them to become a burden on the surrounding community. And, if your business is located in America, you have a stake in having stable, law-abiding, employed communities surrounding your businesses.

Or consider governments. It doesn't seem like a terribly radical form of nationalism to say something like this:

The government of the State of Michigan has more of a duty to consider the well-being of an unemployed former auto worker in Detroit than of a Syrian in a refugee camp in Greece.

Having a strong libertarian streak in me, I'm inclined to think that the attention of government is more often a curse than a blessing, but it is possible to think of some concrete circumstances to which this principle might apply. For example, it would seem to follow from this principle that the State of Michigan should be quicker to spend its scarce tax dollars to retrain the former auto worker than to relocate the Syrian refugee to the United States!

When it comes to employment policy, all of this gets very murky. What if the American would-be employee is entitlement-minded and demanding while the would-be (but legal) foreign employee is well-mannered and willing to take a lower (but still legal) wage? All else is rarely equal, and I am not advocating the mindless idea that any employer who prefers to hire a hard-working, mannerly Mexican over a mouthy, difficult American citizen is automatically a greedy, exploitative capitalist. I also tend to think (which makes the Buchananites foam at the mouth) that American unions are to blame for a lot of American unemployment and that carrots are better than sticks at bringing jobs back to America. What if government rewarded employers for certifiably employing American workers rather than punishing (with tariffs, etc.,) those who flee over-regulation for off-shore manufacturing? What about bringing American jobs back by weakening the power of unions and the NRLB?

So I'm by no means a rah-rah America Firster. But at the same time, I'm concerned that one could extrapolate Shapiro's remarks to the conclusion that it is inherently wrong for American government to give any special consideration to American citizens' problems or for American employers to give any preference whatsoever to American workers "just because they are here." This seems extreme and incorrect. Not to mention impractical. In the very nature of the case, American government exists for the purpose of governing Americans and worrying about American problems, not for the purpose of making more and more people into Americans by way of immigration. And some degree of preference for American workers by American employers seems to be a laudable form of loyalty to one's own community, not a blameworthy xenophobia. Again, if one brings in large numbers of foreign workers and leaves unemployed the workers that live right around one's own factory, who would otherwise be suitable for employment there, isn't this a recipe for civil unrest and dependency within the community?

It's worth noting that both the nasty right and the racially hypersensitive left often confuse any sort of "just because they are here" nationalism (if "nationalism" is the word) with racism. The former embrace it and the latter deplore it, but both are wrong. Black, low-skilled American workers have been disproportionately harmed by high levels of Mexican immigration, both legal and illegal. The almost intractable problems of the black community are, for good or ill, our American problems in a way that the problems of Syrians fleeing from ISIS or Mexicans wanting a better life are not. The hypothetical unemployed auto worker in the example above about the government of Michigan could easily be much darker-skinned than the immigrant in the same hypothetical example. In an already multiracial society like America's, the idea of loyalty to Americans qua Americans is hardly inherently racial.

It would be fun to have the opportunity to talk with Ben Shapiro about these proposed tweaks. He seems like a reasonable guy. I think we could have a profitable conversation. Though honestly, if I had the great privilege to meet Ben Shapiro, there are probably a lot of other things I'd rather talk about instead, like the various ways in which America is going to hell, the transgender agenda, and my great admiration for his courage in confronting all of this.

Meanwhile, the imperative remains in place to reject completely what the "alt-right" stands for, the darkness that was already in existence but that has been brought to national attention by the D.T. candidacy. I will not say that we on the right need to "own" the nasties who identify as "right." We don't own them. Many of us didn't even know they existed until five minutes ago! But I do say that now that we know they do exist, we must take them into account. We can't go back to saying, "Nobody thinks that. Nobody is saying that," as perhaps we would have ten years ago. Or saying, "Only the loony fringe, whom nobody listens to, is actually racist." The loony fringe is growing all the time, and too many people are listening. No longer can we leave the loony fringe out of our own calculations or accuse the left of manufacturing them as a bogeyman when, in fact, the left is pointing to a phenomenon that is sadly all too real. And if we do say something (as I myself sometimes do) that happens to agree with some of the ideas that the loony fringe also promotes (e.g., that Muslim immigration is a bad idea or that there are serious cultural pathologies in the black community), we must be especially careful to stiff-arm them as fellow travelers.

Some fellow travelers I'm happy to do without.

How the Internet fights Providence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing the forest

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

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

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

I think this is a distortion.

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

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

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

Look, ma, no literary theory required.

So many words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall not see his like again

How sleep the Brave

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

Discussion continues concerning gospel harmonization and fictionalization

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

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

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

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

New Post at W4 on Licona and gospel discrepancies

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

Interview on Songtime

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

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

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

Blog housekeeping

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

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

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

Thanks for your understanding!

You can trust God, but men are fallible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Lennox:

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

Richard Dawkins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Way of the Wandering Star at W4

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

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

A merry, holy, and blessed Christmas to all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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