Robin's Readings and Reflections

George Lukacs and the Reversal of Ethics

2012-01-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

In an article I wrote last year for the Chuck Colson Center, I talked about Peter Hitchens' book The Rage Against God and how Hitchens used his observations of life in the Soviet Union as a springboard for showing that ideas have consequences.

One of the most chilling parts of Hitchen's narrative is when he shows that many Soviet thinkers were prepared to reverse the moral continuum, believing that under certain circumstances evil could be transformed into good. He quotes George Lukacs, a Commissar for Culture and Education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, who said. “Communist ethics makes it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This is the greatest sacrifice the revolution asks from us. The conviction of the true Communist is that evil transforms itself into good through the dialectic of historical evolution.”

To read my article article about this, click on the following link:

Transforming Evil into Good

Miscegenation and the Book of Galatians

2012-01-22T14:07:00.000-08:00

Living in Northern Idaho, I occasionally run into people who are against 'Miscegenation' (the fancy way of talking about mixed race marriages). This view is often part of a larger race-based theology known as Kenism. In 2009 I wrote an article showing that the book of Galatians refutes such notions and actually supports the idea of mixed-race marriages. To read my article click here.

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Ron Paul on Abortion

2012-01-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

Let all power on earth be limited

2012-01-20T05:06:00.000-08:00

Since I have written before about the tendency for government to act as mother, assuming control over every aspect of our life, the words of the American Puritan, John Cotton, resonated with me when I read them today:

Let all the world learn to give mortall men no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will....It is necessary...that all power that is on earth be limited, church-power or other....It is counted a matter of danger to the state to limit prerogatives, but it is a further danger not to have them limited. They will be like a Tempest if they be not limited. A Prince himselfe can not tell where he will confine himself, nor can the people tell....It is therefore fit for every man to be studious of the bounds which the Lord hath set; and for the People, in whom fundamentally all power lyes, to give as much power as God in his word gives to men.

Health Freedom Articles

2012-01-18T14:22:00.000-08:00

I have always been interested in issues relating to health, but recently I have taken an interest in the politics of health freedom.

In my article Totalitarianism in Nationalized Health and 'The well worn path from socialized health to totalitarianism', I used my experiences in Britain as a springboard for exploring how nationalized healthcare changes how citizens relate to each other, as the entire populace begins to have economic incentives for policing each other's diets and health.

This type of Nanny State mentality is already well under way in America, as evidenced from the material in an interview I conducted with Ryan Close titled 'Freedom of Health: Does Uncle Sam Own Your Body?'

Building on this, my article Totalitarian Creep looked at some of the specific ways our freedom is being threatened by Obamacare.

I am also fascinated by the historical dimensions to the question of the relationship between the state and our health, and I have explored some of these in my article An Historical Perspective to the Health Care Debate.

My interest in health extends beyond the political and historical aspects, as I have also tried to debunk some of the myths about health food and about raw milk.

Finally, I have also given considerably attention to the theological dimensions of health, particularly when it comes to the Bible's teaching about healthy eating. I have explored these aspects in the following articles:

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Normalizing Sex

2012-01-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

In the latest edition of Salvo Magazine (which you can subscribe to by clicking here), I pointed out that one of the subversive features of the over-sexualized environment our children are growing up in is that they are becoming desensitized. In a society where sex is used to sell everything from shoes to vegetables, the danger is that children become so used to it that they cease to consider things to be sexual which clearly are.

This struck me when the BBC did a documentary on the sexualization of children and Sophie Raworth visited 13-year old Chloe. Dressed skimpily and imitating the erotic dancers she had seen on television, Chloe’s dream is to go all over world as a dancer. Raworth asked Chloe if she was trying to be sexual. Chloe confessed that there was nothing sexual in her mind when she was dancing. Moreover, she said, as long as she kept her clothes on, there was nothing inappropriate about her moves.

Certainly the self-evaluation of a 13-year old girl should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Yet as I point out in my Salvo article 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains', I think there is an important lesson to be learned from the fact that Chloe failed to acknowledge the obvious eroticism of her behaviour. As our children are bombarded with more and more sexual stimuli, one effect is that they cease to even see certain things as sexual, with the consequence that important barriers are lowered.

Chloe found this out in a rather disturbing way when she was eleven. A stranger who had seen some of the dance moves Chloe posted online contacted her to tell her how sexy she was. Chloe panicked and immediately removed all the videos.

Yet the question remains: how have young people like Chloe managed to convince themselves that all but the most explicit displays (in Chloe’s case, taking off her clothes) are non-sexual and benign? And do the products and media that girls like her are able to so easily access have anything to do with this?

The answer to this question may lay in the thought of one of the early pioneers of the sex education movement. In his book The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) described the means for achieving a society that would not put any obstacles in the path of sexual gratification. I have discussed Reich in my Salvo article, in which I point out that

For all his moral anarchism, Reich was perceptive. He realized that in order to achieve the type of sexual utopia he desired, he must first move society away from the shyness and embarrassment surrounding sex. In particular, he argued, people must lose their reluctance to expose erotically important parts of their bodies. Reich attempted to facilitate this by having psychotherapy sessions in which he would require his clients to remove all their clothes.

Reich would be pleased if he could see a European summer today, which is more in keeping with his ideal than what we find in brothels. In a brothel, women have overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to advertise sex; on a sunny beach, scores of women can be seen who have overcome this natural shyness with no thought of sex at all. Indeed, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge the erotic implications of minimalistic attire, we are fast approaching Reich’s goal of a society in which shyness has been overcome and sex is flattened of its inherent potency. “Profane” best describes Reich’s ideal and its realization in the contemporary situation, given that the term originally meant “to treat as common.”

The current debate about the sexualization of children needs to be charted within this same rubric. Certainly when low-cut blouses are marketed for 13-year olds, when music videos for children are saturated with sexual imagery and when sex is constantly used to sell products to young teens, the result is going to be that many girls will become hyper-sexualized. However, such saturation can equally have a desensitizing effect since it unconsciously orients youth to treat their sexuality as something trivial, benign and commonplace. Either way, it primes girls for perverts like Reich: the former because hyper-sexualized girls will want to have sex; the latter because girls are less likely to guard and protect that which they have been oriented to treat as being merely common.

To read more about this, subscribe to Salvo magazine and turn to my article, 'Sex & the Kiddies.'

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More than the sum of the parts

2012-01-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

In my article 'Tears in Things' I point out that throughout history, art has had a powerful pull on human emotion. Art can reduce seasoned warriors like Aeneas and Odysseus to tears, but it can also lift us to heights of joy and happiness. Certain types of art can even blur the distinction between joy and sadness, evoking a type of bittersweet longing that is hard to put into words.

There is a certain paradox here. How can something purely physical, like the drawings on a wall or the sound-waves produced by a musical instrument or the human voice, have such a profound effect on the non-physical world of our psyche and emotions? Though we may not be able to answer this question with metaphysical precision, it is clear that when human creativity brings inanimate matter together in a certain way, the resulting configuration is often more than merely the sum of the parts.

Christian theology is full of similar examples. When Christ meets us in the blessed Eucharist, something is happening that goes beyond the mere physicality of the properties being presented to us. Though different Christian traditions have debated what actually happens when God’s people gather to receive the sacrament of communion, most would agree that in this event God somehow meets with man.

When I receive and partake of the sacraments in faith, there is more going on than merely one person eating bread and wine, just as there was more to the mural in Carthage than mere paint.

In the world God created, things have significance.

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Why America's Foreign Policy isn't Making America Safer

2012-01-10T20:50:00.000-08:00

Last year I wrote an article for the Spokane Libertarian Examiner in which I discussed the unprecedented build-up of America's military that was occuring under the Obama administration.

One of the things I pointed out in the article was that America's foreign commitments are not making America safer.

When American Presidents first began pursuing interventionist foreign policies at the close of the 19th century, it was ostensibly to make America a safer place. The idea was a simple one: America will be safer if it is bigger and tougher. This was the idea that led America into the Spanish–American War and other wars of territorial expansion. At around the time of Woodrow Wilson (right), a new justification for international war began to emerge. No longer was the goal merely to make America a safer place: the goal was now to make the world a safer place.

The result of this paradigm shift is that neither the world or America are actually safer. If anything, the opposite is the case: America’s military internationalism has been putting the American people at a greater risk than ever.

Consider that America’s expensive militaristic policies (financed almost entirely by debt) are threatening to destroy the very economic integrity of the nation – an integrity necessary for America’s safety in the most general sense. More directly, however, America’s interventionist politics have created unprecedented levels of what the CIA calls blowback. Blowback is the violent, unintended consequences for military action directed against the civil population of the aggressor government. The bombings of 9/11 were a classic case of blowback, since they came as a reaction to the long-time presence of the American military in the Middle East. As Philip Giraldi, former counterterrorism expert with the CIA put it,

I think anybody who knows anything about what’s been going on for the last 10 years would realize that cause and effect are operating here – that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that ‘we’re over there.’

Giraldi’s conclusion was confirmed by University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, who collected a database of 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. He found that the religious beliefs of suicide terrorists were less of a motivation for the attacks than has commonly been suspected. The primary motivation is a desire “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.” Commenting on this in his book The Revolution, Ron Paul pointed out that

Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, tw o-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the United States had troops stationed. While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed. Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the U.S. , France and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon, there were no more attacks. ...the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim terri tories, the greater the chance of more 9/11-type attacks on the United States.

This does not, of course, mean that terrorists are justified in their attacks, but it should serve to caution those Americans who assume that an aggressive foreign policy is needed to make the United States or the world a safer place. As an American, I do not sleep easier at night because I know Obama has positioned active missiles next to the border of Russia, provoking our former enemy into an arms race. Nor I do not consider myself particularly safer because America is engaged in dozens of undeclared wars in Africa. Neither will I sleep better knowing that America is involved in a proxy arms race (via Taiwan) with China. And I am certainly not safer as a result of the United States’ military being stretched almost to breaking point with bases in 150 different countries across five continents. If anything, such policies are making America and the world less safe. Only time will tell how true this is.

To read more about this topic, read my articles Obama at War and Foreign Policy.

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Free Speech and Islam

2012-01-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

In an article I published today with the Chuck Colson Center, I suggest that one of the key differences between the classical liberalism of the 19th century vs. the progressive liberalism of today is in the area of free speech and intellectual freedom.

Classical liberalism, for all its limitations, was at least committed to defending individual freedom against the encroachments of state power. That is, after all, why it was called liberalism, which comes from the word liberty. However, as I explained in my articles “Thought Control” and “Is that Liberalism?”, a key aspect of today’s liberalism (what is sometimes called “progressivism”) is the expansion of the State at the expense of personal freedom.

This was also the theme of Jonah Goldberg’s eye-opening book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Goldberg shows that contemporary liberals often have no qualms when it comes to limiting the free exchange of ideas – something that would have been anathema to earlier liberals like John Locke, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith.

I was reminded of Goldberg’s book last month when the Obama administration joined forces with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to support a UN resolution that, critics fear, may result in criminalizing the criticism of Islam.

Keep reading...

Reframing the Sexualization Debate

2012-01-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

The center for Normalizing Any & All Sexual Preferences doesn't actually exist, at least not yet. At Salvo Magazine we invented the CNASP because it comes very close to the truth about how our society tends to approach sexuality. 'If it happens, it's natural. If it's natural, it's OK."

That is the topic of my article for the latest edition of Salvo Magazine, I pointed out that the debate over the sexualization of children (which was particularly strong in Britain last year) has centred primarily on quantitative questions. Are our young people being exposed to too much sex? Does this exposure happen at too young of an age?

Now certainly questions like these are important, especially when we ask who profits from the sexualisation of a 13 or 14 year-olds. I think few would doubt that the beneficiaries include the growing network of pedophiles in Britain.

What I find interesting, however, is that by framing the debate solely in terms of the above questions, the discussion has excluded crucial qualitative distinctions we need to be making.

Don't get me wrong. Certainly we should be concerned if media and marketing are influencing the next generation to think about sex when they ought to be thinking about dolls and trains. However, shouldn’t we be even more concerned if the marketing, media and the entertainment industries are subtlety influencing children to think about sex in the wrong type of way? We need to be asking not just whether children are being sexualized too early, but how they are being sexualized.

The stimuli children are bombarded with are, in fact, orienting them towards an illusory understanding of their sexuality. Embedded in the products now available to children, especially childrens’ TV and music videos, is a subtle false narrative about what it means to be a man or a woman.

The narrative I have in mind is one in which sex is disengaged from the secure relationship of marriage. It is a narrative which evacuates from sex any emotional, let alone ethical, underpinning, thus reducing it to something purely animalistic. It is a narrative which tends to associate the good life with what is fashionable, cool and up to date. In short, it is a narrative which says, 'If it happens, it's natural. If it's natural, it's OK."

To keep reading my thoughts on this subject, subscribe to Salvo magazine today and receive issue 19. Look for my article "Sex & the Kiddies The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains!"

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Charles Hodge: Presbyterian Gnostic?

2012-01-06T08:39:00.000-08:00

Charles Hodge was the living embodiment of the cerebral Presbyterianism who easily absorbed the rationalism of the reformers yet considered their high sacramentalism to be an anomaly; who eagerly embraced the Puritan hostility to form without the benefit of their spiritual dynamism; who embraced the Westminster Assembly’s doctrine of infant baptism but had lost their ecclesiological theology in the shuffle; who absorbed Jonathan Edwards discomfort with the material world without the advantage of Edwards’ poetic outlook; who rejected the popular revivalism of his day while importing the same individualism into his systematics. Above all, Charles Hodge was a man whose life was dedicated to the proposition that all would be right if only theology were done like a science - or better yet, like Euclidian geometry.

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The Reformed Imagination

2012-01-04T14:26:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading William Dyrness's excellent book Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards. Dyrness, himself a reformed scholar, discusses many of the reasons why his tradition has found it difficult to articulate a theology of imagination. On page 304 he observes that "A second tendency in the developing Reformed imagination has been the encouragement to look within oneself to discover and reflect on the presence of God. Since the external forms of piety were forbidden, believers, raised on the catechism and exposed to the weekly preaching of Scripture, inevitably turned inward to shape their images of God. It is one of the ironies that we have traced, that in rejecting the visual mediation of spiritual power prominent in the Middle Ages - in turning away from the great imaginative works of earlier artists - the Protestants were forced to develop their own 'imaginations' as the template within which the new spiritual world was to be constructed and perceived."

For more on this topic, read my article, 'A Critical Absence of the Divine: How a ‘Zero-Sum’ Theology Destroys Sacred Space.'

Feast of the Holy Innocents

2011-12-28T07:03:00.000-08:00

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a day that Christians have historically set aside for remembering the baby boys of Bethlehem that Herod cruelly slaughtered (Matthew 2:16-18).

Also called Childermas, the Feast was instituted between 400 and 500 AD by the Latin-speaking church and intentionally placed within the octave of Christmas to emphasize that the Holy Innocents – considered by many to be the church’s first martyrs - gave their life for the newborn Saviour.

But the Feast is also a time when the church annually reaffirms her commitment to the sanctity of life. As George Grant observed last year,

It has long been the focus of the Christian Church’s commitment to protect and preserve the sanctity of human life--thus serving as a prophetic warning against the practicioners of abandonment and infanticide in the age of Antiquity, oblacy and pessiary in the Medieval epoch, and abortion and euthanasia in these Modern times. Generally set aside as a day of prayer, it culminates with a declaration of the covenant community’s unflinching commitment to the innocents who are unable to protect themselves.

As Dr. Grant’s words suggest, today is a time for us to mourn, not only over the Bethlehem martyrs, but over the tens of thousands of innocent victims who have been slain on the altar of the abortion industry.

Further Reading

The Magi, the Massacre and Herod the Horrible

My Columns at the Chuck Colson Center

A Strange Alliance

2011-12-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu,
head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation

In my print and online publications I have sometimes had occasion to comment on the strange alliance between fundamentalist Islam and Western left-wing politics. (For example, see here.) This strange alliance has been particularly strong in 21st century Europe.

On the surface, left-wing politics and fundamentalist Islam share nothing in common. Well, almost nothing. They do share in common a hatred of traditional Christianity. Peter Hitchens put his finger on the psychology of the Left’s alliance with Islam in his book The Rage Against God, when he noted that,

“The Left’s hostility to Christianity is actually specific, because Christianity is the religion of their own homes and homeland, the form in which they have encountered – and generally disliked and resented – the power of God in their own lives. Islam, for most of their time on Earth, has been an exotic and distant creed, never taught to them as a living faith, and never likely to be their own, or to require their obedience. Therefore they can sympathise with it because it is the enemy of their Christian monoculture and as an anti-colonial and therefore ‘progressive’ force. Some Marxists formed alliances with British Muslims despite their highly conservative attitudes towards women and homosexuals. Others prefer to live in a state of unresolved doublethink.”

I said earlier that hatred of traditional Christianity is the only thing that Islam and the political Left share in common. However, there is one more thing. Both are incredibly intolerant of dissent, as seen by the recent coalition of the OIC with the Obama administration to push through a UN resolution that many fear will criminalize criticism of religion.

That fundamentalist Islam is virulently opposed to free speech is common knowledge. However, myself and others have argued that a dogmatic intolerance of opposing viewpoints is actually one of the hallmarks of progressive liberal politics, as the following resources make clear:

The Retreat of Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate
Tolerance in France
Liberal Fascism
Sophistry in America
The New Thought Police
Is that Liberalism?
Thought Police
'The Degeneration of Liberalism' (in 'Christianity and Society, Volume XVII No 2 Winter 2007')
Britain’s Emerging Homo-fascism
Thought Control

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Christmas and Church: Do They Go Together?

2011-12-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

This year Christmas Day happens to fall on a Sunday. That means that many American Protestants will do something they are not used to doing: they will attend church on Christmas Day.

Do Church and Christmas Day go Together?

When my wife and I first moved to America from England, we found it odd that almost all Protestant churches were shut for Christmas Day, though many Protestant liturgical churches will have Christmas Eve services.

In England, church attendance on Christmas morning is as much a part of the celebrations as stockings, mince pies and carols. In fact, many English men and women who hardly ever set foot inside a church will attend their local Anglican church on Christmas morning. Indeed, walking to the village church on Christmas morning, accompanied by the festive music of the church’s bells, is such an integral part of an English Christmas that when we moved to America my wife and I found it difficult to imagine a Christmas without it.

In America, the tradition of going to church on Christmas morning has been preserved mainly among Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, with the exception of a handful of liturgical churches. The reformed Presbyterian church that my family attends reintroduced the practice a few years ago.

Keep reading...

Go Tell it on the Mountain!

2011-12-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

Celebrating Advent in the Spirit of Saint Boniface

2011-12-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

Ye clouds and darkness, hosts of night
That breed confusion and affright,
Begone! o’erhead the dawn shines clear,
The light breaks in and Christ is here.

Earth’s gloom flees broken and dispersed,
By the sun’s piercing shafts coerced:
The daystar’s eyes rain influence bright
And colours glimmer back to sight.

So shall our guilty midnight fade,
The sin-stained heart’s gross dusky shade:
So shall the King’s All-radiant Face
Sudden unveil our deep disgrace.

No longer then may we disguise
Our dark intents from those clear eyes:
Yea, at the dayspring’s advent blest
Our inmost thoughts will stand confest.

So opens the ‘Morning Hymn’ of the 4th century Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (To read the rest of the poem, click here.)

Aurelius’ poem captures the spirit of the season we are now celebrating, the season of Advent. The hymn reminds us that in the early church the season of Advent was a time when Christians anticipated Christ’s second coming. It was a time when they expectantly waited for Him to come and judge the earth, scattering the darkness with His light.

The theme of light conquering darkness was the message that Boniface took to the ancient Germans in the 8th century.

Keep reading...

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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History of 'O come, O come, Emmanuel'

2011-12-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

"O come, O come, Emmanuel," is one of the oldest Christian hymns that we possess. The words are based on the ancient Latin text "Veni, veni, Emmanuel" while the musical setting derives from an antiphon stretching back at least to the time of the 12th century. There is some evidence that the original antiphon, from which our metrical version of the song derives, may itself have evolved out of earlier Hebrew temple liturgy, which could push the origins of the work back to the very time of our Blessed Lord. The significance of this is almost staggering as we realize that Jesus Himself may well have sung this very piece, or an earlier version of it.

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Scripture Readings for the last week of Advent

2011-12-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

At the Chuck Colson Center I have published special scripture readings, together with reflection questions, for each of the days this week, the last week of Advent. To get the scriptures and questions, click on the following link:

Waiting With Burning Oil

North Korea update

2011-12-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

I have posted an article on the Christian Voice website today giving an update on North Korea following the death of the monster Kim Jong Il. The situation in North Korea has been much on my heart over the last few years, because of researching the situation for both Christian Voice and Open Doors ministries. To read my article, click on the link below:

Kim Jong Il’s Death Highlights Concerns for Christians

Advent Articles

2011-12-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

The Lord has recently given me the opportunity to publish some articles on the meaning of Advent and the importance of the church year. Click on the following links to read these articles:

'Cheer Our Spirits by Thine Advent'

Sacred Times and Seasons (part 1)

Sacred Times and Seasons (part 2)

Waiting With Burning Oil

Celebrating Advent in the Spirit of Saint Boniface

From Eucharist to Pulpit

2011-12-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles in Paris France

The blood (and bones) of the martyrs is the seed of the church

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” So wrote the church father Tertullian at the close of the 2nd century, even as Christians were perishing under the reign of emperor Septimius Severus.

Throughout church history, Tertullian’s words have been a constant reminder that God works in unexpected ways, using the Persecution of His church to strengthen and expand her.

More recently it has been impressed upon me that while it is true that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, this is also true of their bones.

At least, that is what a friend of mine recently suggested after returning from a European tour in which he and his family visited numerous ancient churches. He noted that many of the churches his family saw were built directly on top of the graves of martyrs and saints, often with the altars (or, as a Protestant like myself would say, the communion tables) situated strategically right over the bones of these holy men and women of the faith.

My friend had been particularly moved when he and his family visited St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Here one is able to look through a steel grate behind the altar down three floors to the very tomb of St. Peter. He also told me about his moving experience in the Roman Catholic church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles in Paris France, where the bones of St. Helena (Constantine’s mother) are situated in a small prayer chapel directly beneath the altar.

These churches reflect an ancient tradition. Ever since the time when Christians met in the catacombs, the liturgy of the Eucharist was celebrated, quite literally, on the tombs of the martyrs. When the early Christians were able to start building churches, they carried on this tradition, building their altars directly over the tombs of the martyrs and saints who had gone before. This was to proclaim physically what we know to be true spiritually, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

But it also proclaimed that the blessed Eucharist is the heart of the Christian life, and thus the worthy location for those whose bones we wished to honor. The idea that our burial rites acknowledge a certain location or activity as being central to life is presupposed in secular burial rituals. It is typical that people ask to be buried under, or to have their ashes scattered over, those places they identify as being central to their life. By burying saints under the Eucharist table, the early Christians were acknowledging that the Eucharist is the central activity in the life of the church.

It is interesting that in many Eastern Orthodox churches this practice still continues, with relics of saints and martyrs embedded within their altars of their churches.

The Pulpit as Center

After returning from Europe with the tombs of so many holy martyrs fresh in his mind, my friend was listening to a program about George Whitefield (whose biography I have written up here.) He was struck by the fact that Whitefield asked to be buried under the pulpit of Old South Presbyterian Church, in Newburyport, Massachusetts. As we talked about this, we were struck by the fact that Whitefield’s request seems to represent an important paradigm shift that occurred throughout the 18th century as the ‘center’ of Christian worship (or at least Protestant worship) was migrating from the Eucharist to the Pulpit.

During the time of Whitefield, and actually stretching earlier into the era of the Puritans, Protestant worship was coming to be increasingly more about preaching and doctrines, with the celebration of the Eucharist increasingly occupying a secondary role. A whole constellation of practices and assumptions were beginning to bud which saw human identity as primarily cognitive. According to this narrative, what we think is the defining feature of who we are. This new paradigm is one which James K. A. Smith diagnosed in his 2009 book Desiring the Kingdom. Referring to the rationalist modalities that began to grip the Protestant imagination in the post-Enlightenment world of the 18th century, Smith suggested that

“this rationalist picture was absorbed particularly by Protestant Christianity (whether liberal or conservative), which tends to operate with an overly cognitivist picture of the human person and thus tends to foster an overly intellectualist account of what it means to be or become a Christian. . . . It is just this adoption of a rationalist, cognitivist anthropology that accounts for the shape of so much Protestant worship as a heady affair fixated on messages. ... The result is a talking-head version of Christianity that is fixated on doctrines and ideas.”

Of course, doctrines and ideas have always played an important part of Christian worship. What changed in the centuries following the reformation was more a question of what is the center of worship? If our implicit operating assumption is that we are primarily defined by what we think, then we will view church as first and foremost a vehicle for preaching the Word, for giving doctrinal instruction and for equipping the saints for another week of thinking correct thoughts. This is in contrast to a more sacramental and liturgical view of worship (and indeed, of life) which recognizes that love for Christ must be cultivated not primary through hearing correct doctrine, important as that is, but through the embodied practices of communal ritual, through material practices that educate our desires and, in so doing, shape our identity in ways that are often pre-cognitive.

Reformed Theology and the Primacy of the Cognitive

What James K.A. Smith has described as a cognitivist anthropology found particular vibrancy in the reformed tradition in general and Puritanism in particular, which tended to give attention to God’s utter transcendence in a way that mitigated against those tangible gestures of piety embedded in materiality. This de-materialization involved investing the sacred with what Mellor and Shilling have described as “a linguistic and textual character” resulting in “the ‘discursive symbolisation’ of religion.” In their book Re-forming the Body Mellor and Shilling suggest that within the reformed communities, the prioritization of “the cognitive commitment of individuals…rendered profane those embodied social bonds the Catholic Church had sacralised”, resulting in “an altogether more abstract” conception of religion.

This heightened premium on states of cognition dovetailed with the rise of new ecclesial communities throughout Europe that were held together, not primarily through ritual eating (administered through the Eucharist table) but through cognitive assent to doctrinal formulations (administered through the pulpit). In Re-forming the Body, Mellor and Shilling describe this paradigm shift:

“Centred upon an essentially individual and cognitive engagement with a radically transcendent God, Protestantism made the sacred sublime insofar as it could only be apprehended indirectly, through the Word of God, and not directly through the fleshly body…. Protestantism abstracted religion from much of people’s everyday lived experiences by dislocating faith and the sacred from ritual forms encountered through the sensuous body, and turning them into cognitive ideals.”

This emphasis on the cognitive over the physical that came to characterize reformed theology would be marked by the tendency for the cerebral to swallow up the sacramental, for the invisible to absorb the incarnational. Sermons became the de facto “ordinary means of salvation,” with longer and more didactic preaching needed to convince the Puritans that their faith was really genuine. As Diarmaid MacCulloch pointed out in The Reformation when discussing the Puritans:

Observations of the way in which the Prayer Book was used had increasingly disenchanted Puritans with liturgical approaches to God. They became convinced that preaching was the only way in which Christians should in normal circumstances receive God’s truth: Calvin said similar things, but had never been so categorical in asserting that a sermon was ‘the ordinary means of salvation’. Now they felt it a matter of scandal that there were not enough sermons in England – a major proof of the Church’s corruption.

The Puritans were tracking with the template set by Calvin in Geneva, where many of the English Puritans had fled there during the reign of Mary Tudor. In his book Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, William Dyrness explains what a Sunday in Geneva looked like:

“Sunday services in Geneva were to begin with sermons ‘at break of day’ at St. Peter’s (Calvin’s parish church) and St. Gervais, then again at the usual hour at all three churches. At noon the catechism was to be taught to children at all three churches. At three o’clock there would be a third sermon at St. Peter’s and St. Gervais. Additionally at St. Peter’s, services were to be held three times a week, on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. For these services ministers were appointed – this schedule needed, at the beginning, five ministers and give coadjutor ministers.”

In one sense, this heightened valuation of preaching was indicative of the reformed tradition’s greatest strength. Reformed theology has always emphasized the importance of the intellectual dimensions of our faith, offering a robust theology that takes seriously Christ’s mandate to love God with all our minds (Mt. 22:37). However, whenever a good thing is emphasized, there is the risk that it will be elevated to the exclusion of other equally important dimensions. In his book The Communion of Saints: radical puritan and separatist ecclesiology, 1570-1625, Brachlow suggests that this overweighting of the cognitive or scholastic dimensions of the faith occurred when Beza mediated Calvinism to the larger Protestant world, leading to “a serious though subtle transformation under the impact of the rationalizing process of protestant scholasticism.” One of the corollaries to this rationalizing process was a devaluation of the Eucharist within the Protestant traditions touched by Calvin’s canopy

Devaluing the Eucharist

In his book Against the Protestant Gnostics, Philip Lee suggested that at the time of the Reformation certain trends were put in place that eventually resulted in this dialectical balance between matter and spirit being lost. In particular, he suggests, the role of the Eucharist began to be subservient to the preaching of the Word within the theology of the magisterial reformers. That this was true in the case of Ulrich Zwingli (1484 –1531) has been well established. However, Philip Lee also finds Calvin occasionally colluding with the Zwinglian spiritualization of the Supper as well as the Gnostic devaluing of the material realm. The Eucharist, as important as it was within Calvin’s system, remained God’s concession to our materiality. As Calvin himself would write, “since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to flesh, and, do not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings.” Calvin thus made himself vulnerable for later generations to suggest that, as Lee put it, he “left the Eucharist dangling, an inadequately attached appendage to his system.” Lee continues, pointing out that

It is easy to see how Calvin’s suspicion of knowing God through material things would influence his sacramental theology. Although he makes every attempt to keep Word and Sacrament together, to handle them in a parallel way, there is never the slightest doubt in his mind as to which is preeminent. If necessary, the Gospel could stand by itself and indeed would do so were it for our human weakness, which makes us dependent on these more primitive means of grace….

A similar point was made by William Dyrness , again in his Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, when he observed that, “The objects of the sacraments have no intrinsic importance, either aesthetically or theologically - these aspects have been stripped away. Rather the performance of the preached word enacted in the sacraments becomes a unique mediation of grace, and it is the theological center of Calvin's cultural-aesthetic identity.”

It was not only in the theology of the Eucharist that we find this dephysicalizing impulse. The Swiss reformer had no hesitation invoking the distinctly Platonic idea of the body being a prison, thus making the integration of spirit and matter deeply problematic. In his Institutes, Calvin wrote, “And when Christ commended his spirit to the Father and Stephen his to Christ they meant only that when the soul is freed from the prison house of the body, God is its perpetual guardian.” In the same section Calvin writes, “It is of course true that while men are tied to earth more than they should be they grow dull…” Elsewhere Calvin made a particular point of pointing out that “it is not necessary that Christ or for that matter his word be received through the organs of the body”, thus giving a degree of credence to those scholars who have identified a Platonic drift to Calvin’s approach to the material world.

One of the areas where this Platonism played out was the approach that Calvin and his followers took towards the church building. For Calvin, who did not recognize physical spaces as being sacred apart from the use, there was no point in a lay person coming into a church to pray during the week since the action he is performing can be conducted just as efficiently anywhere. Calvin thus urged that places of worship be locked during the week, only to be opened during times of public worship. He wrote, “If anyone be found making any particular devotion inside or nearby, he is to be admonished…”

Though correlation does not imply causation, there may be some credence to William Dyrness’ suggestion that the disembodied approach to matter which became a feature of Cartesian dualism should be understood as an outgrowth of Europe’s Calvinist heritage. In his 2011 publication Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life, Dyrness compares the way Calvin “wanted to…empty the worship space, so that it could be filled with God’s word” with the way Descartes attempted to empty his mind of all material encumbrances. Dyrness continues, noting that

“If any external mediation is unnecessary [within Calvin’s theology] and the Spirit only works within, there is a threat to traditional understandings for what the church had known as sacraments (or sacramentals). To put it another way, the sacraments now can only picture this inward work. Although in his understanding of signs Calvin sought to counter the minimalism of Zwingly, in the end nothing external can be essential to this process. We are not encouraged, as with Bonaventure, to move from mediation on the beauty of creation to the reflection of that beauty within and above us. (Incidentally, as near as I can tell, it was around this time that people began to close their eyes during corporate prayer to better focus their minds.) As a result, though Calvin probably did not intend this, over time it became the case that people, especially in the Pietist stream of this tradition, had no way of finding any substantial theological meaning in any external object or act. There was no longer anything for their eyes or their feelings to hold and indwell.

“Descartes was key here. I believe that one can argue that he was working in the shadow of this Calvinist heritage when he said in 1642, ‘I am certain that I cannot have any knowledge of what is outside of me, except by what is in me.’ The view that we should have more confidence in what is in our minds than what is before our eyes led to what Charles Taylor calls a ‘mediational epistemology’ (the notion that knowledge is mediated through ideas in our minds), and to the split between public and private religion, seen perhaps in its earliest form in Descartes. This distrust of the unity of sense and spiritual knowledge was surely one of the conditions, if not the cause, of his splitting inner and outer knowledge. Such a view tends to privilege the ear over the eye, and, as a result, language over other symbolic forms.”

In reviving the descendants of the Puritans in the American colonies, Whitefield was able to draw on this shared narrative in which the Eucharist had become merely an adjunct to the preaching of the Word. Whitefield’s request to be buried under the pulpit and not the Eucharist table is symbolic of the important paradigm shift that had occurred. The Church for 1,500 years had built countless Altars, where the sacred offering of the body and blood of Christ was consecrated, over the graves and tombs of Martyrs and Saints. But now, by the mid 18th century a profound shift was taking place in the Protestant West. Where the offering of the Eucharist had previously been the center of Christian Worship, preaching and teaching had now become the primary focus, with Eucharistic celebration being merely an adjunct to that.

From Whitefield to the Present

Since the age of the revivals, much of the hyper cognitivism would migrate from the intellectual to the subjective. While contemporary evangelical culture (especially within the self-consciously non-traditional evangelical churches) has been shorn of the intellectual integrity that was integral to the scholasticism of the reformers, they have retained the basic rationalistic impulse. This is best seen in the salvific role that knowledge is thought to play within different sub-traditions of the American evangelical community. In some groups, this is felt in the assumption that in order to be saved by the gospel one must first understand the gospel. There is also the tendency, especially in churches that are self-consciously ‘reformed’, to make doctrinal exactitude on certain key doctrines a necessary condition for salvation. Perhaps the most common manifestation of this, which I have dealt with here, is when the ability to articulate justification in broadly sola fide categories is elevated to being a necessary condition to salvation. In other groups, one finds this rationalism at work in the Wesleyian assumption that one cannot be saved if one does not possess personal assurance of salvation, thus rendering deeply problematic the salvation of children or mentally handicapped individuals.

Towards a Recovery of Sacred Space

The ancient churches that my friend visited in Europe suggest to us that perhaps the reformation through the baby out with the bathwater. When Protestants can once again see the Eucharist table as the center of Christian worship, we will be on the road to recovering a true sense of the physical as sacred.

That reformed Protestantism is uneasy with the notion of sacred space was impressed upon me earlier in the year when I read Terry Johnson’s Reformed Worship. Johnson writes with approval of when the Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah dedicated a new church building in 1891 and deliberately refrained from calling it a ‘sanctuary.’ Instead they called it a ‘church building’ or ‘church house.’ Johnson comments, “God’s presence is in heaven. There are no holy buildings, holy places, or holy things through which God’s blessing is uniquely mediated….”

Although Johnson’s bold statements might be challenged by numerous examples of holy objects in both the Old and New Testaments, one can at least be sympathetic with his concerns. After all, this type of spiritual reductionism is often motivated by a sense of wanting to affirm all the world as being uniquely holy. Certainly this was the case with the reformers, who attempted to reintroduce the sacred into everyday life. Objecting to the bracketing of the sacred to circumscribed spheres of vocations and activities, both Lutheran and reformed traditions affirmed the glory of the mundane and the splendor of the ordinary. This led to a new sense of worldly affirmation that reached its height in the Puritan movement. However, it is easy to miss the fact that such affirmation was possible, in part, because they lived in a world that already had a clear concept of sacred space. But this concept was, to a large extent, parasitic on the paradigms they were rejecting. The institution of the holy church, the food of the sacred Eucharist, the time of concentrated days and the spaces hallowed by acts of worship, all enabled the concept of the sacred to have coherence within the social imaginary of the reformers and their immediate descendants. After all, one could extend the sacred to every day of the calendar because the population already possessed a tacit understanding of what it meant for a day to be sacred, an understanding that was, if you will, ‘carried’ in the Christian holidays that the reformed tradition rejected. Or again, one could extend the notion of sacred space throughout all of God’s creation because there was already an understanding embedded deeply within the affective unconscious of what it meant for a space to be holy, an understanding that derived from certain physical spaces (churches and sites of pilgrimages, for example) that for centuries had been set apart and hallowed for special purposes. All of the world could approximate a cathedral because cathedrals existed and carried accessible connotations within the social imaginary. One could extend the idea of priesthood to every believer and grant to the laity the honor previously reserved for clergy because the social unconscious still remembered what it was like to have priests and the honor that the office invoked. Paradoxically, therefore, the plausibility structures necessary for the reformers to extend the sacred into all of life by the reformers included a whole constellation of structures and practices that they also rejected. The extension of the sacred was, to a large degree, dependent on the distinction between the sacred and the profane, since such a distinction allowed the former to have a network of implicit meanings and associations within the social imaginary of a whole society. But this very distinction would ultimately be undermined by the conflation of the two. Though done ostensibly with the aim of expanding the sacred, it had the effect of evacuating the world of any specific ‘carriers’ of sacredness, paving the way for the emergence of secular objects, like the flag or the original Declaration of Independence, to be treated as sacred in a way that many Protestants would never dream of doing to an icon or a saint’s relics.

As the concept of sacredness was stripped from all material reference points, the pulpit would come to be occupy the evacuated center, not because the material pulpit was seen to be sacred, but because it represented the invisible doctrines mediated to Christians by the sermon. It is significant that reformed theology has made much of the fact that such preaching reaches us invisibly through the mind independent of bodily organs. Calvin himself would note that

“In the preaching of the word, the external minister holds forth the vocal word and it is received by the ears. The internal minister, the Holy Spirit, truly communicates the thing proclaimed through the word that is Christ to the souls of all who will, so that it is not necessary that Christ or for that matter his word be received through the organs of the body, but the Holy Spirit effects this union by his secret virtue, by creating faith in us by which he makes us living members of Christ.”

Similarly, Jonathan Edwards shared the Calvinist antipathy to physically engaged worship. While he allowed that the physical body could be involved in the worship of God, since “there is an indissoluble, unavoidable association, in the minds of the most rational and spiritual, between things spiritual and things bodily”,

Edwards argued that the more mature we become, the less involved our physical body must be in worshiping God:

“I acknowledge, that the more rational a person, the less doth his disposition of mind depend on anything in his body; and that if he practises gestures of body in worship, where there is no necessary and unavoidable association, it tends to make him, or to keep him less rational and spiritual.” …Wherefore the weak and beggarly elements are rejected, and the childish bodily ceremonies cashiered, as being fit only for children, and unworthy of those who are come to riper years; and the worship that is now required of [us] is only that which is manly, rational and spiritual.”

The logic of believing that “it is not necessary that Christ…be received through the organs of the body” (Calvin) or that “the more rational a person, the less doth his disposition of mind depend on anything in his body” (Edwards) could only be realized in a sacramentalism that either downplayed the centrality of the Eucharist or else reinterpreted it in purely cognitive terms, or both.

It is precisely this shift from the bodily to the cognitive that, I suggest, helps us to understand why Whitefield asked that his relics be placed under the pulpit of Old South Presbyterian Church, instead of underneath the Eucharist table.

Further Reading

Sacred Times and Seasons (Part 1)

Sacred Times and Seasons (Part 2)

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

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Rethinking Unquenchable Fire (complete series)

2011-12-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

Over the last few days I have been doing a series of blog posts on the topic of Unquenchable Fire. Following are links to all the posts in this series followed by a summary of my basic argument.

Unquenchable Fire (Part 1)

Background to Isaiah (Unquenchable Fire, part 2)

Gehenna in Isaiah 66 (Unquenchable Fire, part 3)

Unto Us a Son is Born! (Unquenchable Fire, part 4)

Jesus’ Use of Isaiah 66 (Unquenchable Fire, Part 5)

Summary of Argument

Jesus’ words in Mark 9:42-50 form another favourite proof text for those who support the doctrine of endless torment. Yet as with the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, the context is often neglected.

The recurring motif in this passage about the worm and the fire is drawn directly from Isaiah 66:24, the final verse in the book of Isaiah. By repeatedly citing this motif, Jesus is invoking for His hearers the whole Isaianic narrative and bracketing his words within the context of the story Isaiah was telling. That story, of course, was the narrative that Israel’s God would renew the earth through the work of his Servant. It was a narrative that would have been common knowledge to Jews of the Second Temple period and by invoking it, Jesus is implicitly saying that he is the Servant who is restoring the earth; He is the Servant who is bringing all flesh to worship Him. Isaiah‘s story, the story of the New Exodus, is unfolding right before them and in front of the disciples’ very eyes.

Yet He is not merely bracketing His ministry within the context of the Isaianic narrative; He is also characteristically investing it with a new twist. The subtext of Jesus’ use of Isaiah 66 is that the Jews who believed they had Abraham as their father, will find themselves cast into Gehenna (the rubbish dump outside Jerusalem where non-covenant members were traditionally dumped as an alternative to ceremonial burial), if they continue to reject Jesus. By telling the people to cut off their offending hand, foot or eye, Jesus is essentially saying: abandon everything that is standing in the way of embracing My agenda of New Creation, or you will find yourself outside the covenant. It is the same message that we find in many of Jesus’s parables: the insiders will become the outsiders, and the outsiders will become the insiders.

Now, we know that there were many things standing in the way of the Jews accepting Jesus work, not least their own ideas of how the kingdom would unfold, including but not limited to their nationalistic aspirations. Those nationalistic aspirations would eventually bring about the destruction of Jerusalem and the literal death of the generation that refused to heed Jesus‘s warnings. In AD 70 the unbelieving Jews did parish in exactly the way Jesus described in Mark 9. Rotting and smoking corpses became a literal reality. This is one of the reasons we need not invoke the idea of eternal hellfire to explain Mark 9. It points to a judgment within the space-time continuum – not hellfire but Roman-fire, not the cosmic rubbish dump but Jerusalem’s rubbish dump. It is the same reality towards which the Olivet discourse points (see Mark Hornes The Victory According to Mark for the reasons why everything about the Mount Olivet prophecy indicates a local fulfilment).

(Understanding this helps us to avoid the contradictions which follow from belief in literal hell fire. For example, how can the descriptions of hell be literal when such descriptions include both fire and darkness? Fire, by definition, cannot be dark or it isn’t fire.)

Mark 9 stands as a solemn warning throughout the ages that destruction comes upon those who reject Jesus. Whether that destruction includes endless hellfire is a question that must be settled from an appeal to other passages, not Mark 9. Nevertheless, Mark 9 remains one of the most cited proof texts of endless torment.

Jesus’ Use of Isaiah 66 (Unquenchable Fire, Part 5)

2011-12-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Many little details in Isaiah 66 resonate so clearly with the ministry of Christ and the apostles.

66:21 continues the theme of the Gentiles coming in. “Who are the people meant by ‘and some of them also I take?’” asks Claus Westermann in his commentary. “Taking the words by themselves, there seems to be no way of getting around interpreting them in the sense of ‘not only from the Israelites, but from the Gentiles as well’.” (Westermann’s commentary Isaiah 40-66 A Commentary, p. 423). This, of course, immediately brings to mind the missionary activities of the apostles. Verse 19 even mentions missionary work – the sending out of individuals to distant peoples to proclaim God’s glory. Interestingly, the apostles self-consciously invoke the “all nations and tongues” of Isaiah 66 to show that God is doing this work now in and through His servant Jesus.

The mountain of God and the valley of perdition in Isaiah 66 thus become symbolic for two types of realities on the earth All flesh coming to worship God (Isaiah 66: 23) suggests that Isaiah is no longer thinking specifically about the mountain in Jerusalem on which the temple was built, but a figurative world mountain, symbolic of the entire earth

But the return of YHWH to his people also included the sombre element that God would judge His own people.

Those who claimed to represent the true worship of God but who had become unfaithful would receive the brunt of God’s judgment. The book of Malachi is taken up with this theme, as is Zechariah 11 and the first half of Isaiah 65. God would indeed vindicate His people, but this vindication would involve a separation between the true Israel and those who claimed to represent a tradition that they had in fact abandoned.

Throughout the gospel, Jesus’ takes up this theme of judgment. The kingdom parables tell the story of Israel’s God returning to them yet radically redefining the covenant around Himself and His ministry. The parable of the vinedressers (Mt. 21:33-44), the wedding feast (22:1-14) the foolish virgins (25:1-13) and the talents (25:14-30) all invoke this idea of a king returning in judgment. Clearly, the returning king is Jesus, who comes as yhwh’s representative to vindicate His people and to judge His enemies.

It is this theme of judgement that animates the section of Mark 9 where Jesus invokes the unquenchable fire of Isaiah. Yet He does this in a way that would have been deeply subversive to His hearers. He has redrawn the covenant around Himself and then pronounces the type of judgment on those who reject Him which the Jews were expecting to be applied against the Gentiles. Those who thought they were in will find themselves excluded (and there are many parables which point to the same reality).

This is characteristic of Jesus’ method of invoking a familiar narrative but investing it with a new twist. Throughout the gospel we find Jesus, on the one hand, confirming the people’s expectations, but we also find Him going about things in a radically unexpected way. For example, earlier in Mark 9 (9:31-32) Jesus had predicted His death and the disciples were afraid to ask him about it.

Jesus’ use of Isaiah 66 is one more example of this and would have been equally troubling to his audience. On the one hand, the words in Mark 9:42-48 invoke Isaiah’s whole narrative that would have been common knowledge among Jews of the Second Temple period. It is Jesus’ way of saying that he is the Servant who restores the earth. He is the Servant who is bringing all flesh to worship Him. Isaiah’s story, the story of the New Exodus, is unfolding right then and there in front of the disciple’s eyes. Yet He is not merely bracketing His ministry within the context of the Isaianic narrative that we have already explored at some length; He is also characteristically investing it with a new twist.

The subtext of Jesus’ use of Isaiah 66 is that the Jews who believed they had Abraham as their father, will find themselves cast into Gehenna if they continue to reject Jesus. By telling the people to cut off their offending hand, foot or eye, Jesus is essentially saying: “abandon everything that is standing in the way of embracing My agenda of New Creation.”

We know that there were many things standing in the way of the Jews’ accepting Jesus work, not least their own ideas of how the kingdom would unfold, including but not limited to their nationalistic aspirations. Those nationalistic aspirations would eventually bring about the destruction of Jerusalem and the literal death of the generation that refused to heed Jesus’s warnings. In AD 70 the unbelieving Jews did parish in exactly the way Isaiah and Jesus describe. Rotting and smoking corpses became a literal reality.

This is one of the reasons we need not invoke the idea of eternal hellfire to explain Mark 9. It points to a judgment within the space-time continuum – not hellfire but Roman-fire. It is the same reality towards which the Olivet discourse points (see Mark Hornes’ The Victory According to Mark for the reasons why “Everything about the Mount Olivet prophecy indicates a local fulfillment”.

Further Reading

Hell, Universalism and Some Remaining Questions

Rethinking Unquenchable Fire (complete series)

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

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Unto Us a Son is Born! (Unquenchable Fire, part 4)

2011-12-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

Over the last week we have been exploring the themes of the book of Isaiah in our ongoing series on unquenchable fire. Today I would like to explore how all the themes we have been exploring come to play in and through Christ’s messianic work. In Jesus the entire narrative Isaiah is telling reaches its eschatological climax. And that, my friends, is what Christmas is all about.

Jesus is the Servant who brings God’s people back from exile and vindicates YHWH’s name by making a spectacle of the dark powers. Jesus is the one who holds out the promise of comfort to Jerusalem. Jesus is the Servant who brings His people back from exile and vindicate them (65:18-19; 66:5-13). Jesus is the one who begins to extend the worship of the Lord to the Gentiles and to spread God’s images throughout the whole earth. In short, it is through Christ that the entire story of Israel reaches its fulfillment and dramatic climax.

In the second chapter of Luke’s gospel we read the account of angels announcing Jesus’ birth to shepherds. In Luke 2:14 the angels sing “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.” The phrase, as it occurs in the second chapter of Luke’s gospel, follows directly after the angelic announcement of the “good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” (Lk. 2:10) It is hard to imagine a more direct reference to the Isaianic narrative. To a first-century Jew, phrases such as these would have bound together the whole network of associations and expectations related to the return from exile, the establishment of God’s physical kingdom over the face of the earth, the renewal of the covenant, the vindication of God’s people, and so on. Above all, however, the words invoke the Isaianic narrative.

We have already seen how Isaiah 40:9-11 and 52:7 announce a royal herald bringing glad tidings that Israel’s God has come to restore His people, to renew and reign in the earth and to bring to fruition the eschatological climax towards which Israel’s history has been striving. When the angel’s in Luke’s narrative invoke the ‘glad tidings’ to describe Jesus’ ministry, they implicitly invoke this whole story-line. It is no wonder that the shepherds got so excited. When the angels announced ‘peace on earth, good will to men’, this was a reference to the peace the Messiah brings when all the earth is submitted to His sovereign rule of justice (Isa. 9: 2-7, 11:1-5, 42:3-4; Zech. 9:9-10; Mic. 4:2-3). The great Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:6-7 pointed to this same reality:

For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called “Wonderful, Counsellor,
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
To order it and establish it with judgment and justice
From that time forward, even forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

As this and so many of the other Messianic prophecies made clear, the purpose of the Messiah coming would be to bring God’s kingdom to the earth, which meant justice and peace for everyone. Seen within the context of God’s covenant with Abraham, this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, however, we’ve had it drummed into our heads to think of Jesus’ work as ‘spiritual’ in the sense that it belongs to a separate sphere to the material world. We’ve been taught to think that Jesus’ mission was merely to save our souls so that we can be taken away from this earth rather than to heal this earth.

As we read the gospels through the lens of Isaiah, however, we find that it’s all about new creation breaking into the space/time universe. It’s not about God gathering as many people as possible to take to heaven so that the earth can just be abandoned or destroyed; it’s about a renewed Israel being rescued from exile. It’s about the earth being put to right.

During Jesus’ day the people still thought of themselves as being in a state of spiritual exile. Although the southern tribes had returned from the geographical exile during the period of Ezra and Nehemiah, and even rebuilt the temple, the great covenantal promises of Deuteronomy 30 and Daniel 9 were still unfulfilled. The people had returned to the land but God had not returned to His people. God’s presence had not returned to the temple in the way described in Ezekiel 40-48 and the Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine had a daily reminder that they had yet to be vindicated from their enemies.

This is why, according to many Jewish theorists of the time, the real return from exile was still future. The real return from exile would be when Daniel’s Son of Man came and assumed dominion of the kingdom, when God returned to His people to bless and vindicate them and judge His enemies. This was, of course, was what Messiah was expected to bring about.

The theme of yhwh returning to bless His people and judge His enemies goes back to the great covenantal blessings of Deuteronomy 30. There the Lord promised that yhwh’s return to His people would be marked by an end of captivity, blessing in the land God has given them and judgment on his enemies and theirs. After the people of Judah were exiled to Babylon in BC 586, Daniel took up this same theme, showing that there would be a return from exile when God vindicated His people (Daniel 9). This too would be marked by the Lord coming back to His people: specifically the “the Son of Man coming” (Dan. 7:13) to assume dominion of His kingdom and to make a judgment in favour of the saints of the Most High.

Jesus draws on all these themes in a way that would have resonated deeply with a 1st century Jewish audience. Yet he also invests many of these ideas with unexpected meaning. One of the ways he does this is through the gradualism of his ministry. Though the idea of gradualism is firmly rooted in Isaiah, who had prophesied about the Messiah’s government increasing (thus implying process), Jews in the Second Temple period were expecting what my pastor calls “a silver-bullet solution.”

In the fourth chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus went to His own region of Nazareth where, in the synagogue, he read the traditional reading from Isaiah 61.

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To preach good tidings to the poor;
He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
And the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD; (Isa. 61:1-2)

At this point in the reading Jesus closed the book and sat down (Luke 4:20). This must have seemed very strange to Jesus’ listeners, for traditionally the reading would have continued. But Jesus stopped in the middle of the sentence. No wonder we are told that “the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him” (Luke 4:20). Then Jesus utters the following words: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (4:21).

If we review the things mentioned in this passage – the passage Jesus claims is now fulfilled - we will see that Jesus fulfils all of them. The Spirit of God was upon Him (Luke 3:22); He has been anointed to preach the good news to the poor (Mat. 4:23); He has a ministry of healing the brokenhearted (Mat. 4:23); He liberates those who are captive (Eph. 4:8); He opens the prison to those who are bound and He proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord. All these things can be said to be fulfilled, or at least partially fulfilled, in Jesus’ healing ministry. Jesus’ miracles are the signs of the kingdom. (In fact, in the original Greek of John’s gospel, Jesus’ miracles are always referred to as ‘signs.’)

What Jesus does not do are the things spoken of in the rest of this Isaiah passage which normally would have been read. The passage goes on to mention “the day of vengeance of our God”, various symbols which seem to indicate an end of suffering for God’s people, the restoration of desolate places, the elevation of God’s people [now those who are in Christ] above the Gentiles [read: uneblievers], and the fulfilment of the promise for God’s people to inherit the land. Jesus does not say of these things that they have been fulfilled in the people’s hearing.

So we see that Jesus fulfilled some of the criteria for the Messiah but not all the criteria. The most important aspects are left undone. Even those things which Jesus does fulfil are fulfilled only in part in a very localized region and not throughout the whole earth. So the question is, has Jesus really brought in the Messianic era or not? If not, how can Jesus legitimately be considered to be the Messiah?

Jesus’ answer to such questions seems to be this. “The Kingdom of God is indeed something that is yet to come (future). But you now see the firstfruits of that kingdom. I have fulfilled enough of the promises now for you to believe that I will fulfill the rest later.” This explains why Jesus and the Apostles sometimes speak of the kingdom of God as if it is yet to come while elsewhere they speak of the kingdom as if it has already arrived. It has already arrived in the sense that it has been inaugurated and the firstfruits of it have been given to mankind. That is why Jesus could say to the people, “surely the kingdom of God has come upon you [present]” (Mat. 12:28) and yet pray, “Your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven [future]” (Mat. 6:10). The Apostle Paul could both refer to the future appearing of the kingdom (2 Tim. 4:1) as well as say that the Lord has “conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love [present]…” (Col. 1:13).

So there is an already and a not yet. And again, this is what we should expect given the way Isaiah prophesied about the Servant. Isaiah 42:4 spoke of the God’s Servant not growing discouraged till he had established justice the earth and the coastlands wait for His law. The wonderful Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:7 speaks of the Messiah’s government, not as something that arrives fully formed, but as something which increases. Paul echoes this gradualism when he told the Christians in Corinth that Jesus must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet (1 Cor. 15:25).

This gradualism may help to explain the strange juxtaposition we found at the end of Isaiah 66 between the new heavens and the new earth side by side with the sufferings of Gehenna (which itself closely parallels Zechariah 14:16-19 where worldwide revival is juxtaposed with harsh judgment.)

Since I have already argued that both realities describe events within the space-time continuum, this may seem to be a contradiction. The answer lies, I believe, in the gradualism of Christ’s ministry. There is an overlap time when the Messianic age is being inaugurated. This overlap time occurs between the inauguration (Jesus’ first coming) and the consummation (Jesus’ second coming). It is a period that involves judgment, since judgment is one of the means by which the redemption of the nations percolates to an ever wider radius. (This is what I concluding when studying Christ’s parable of the Sheep and the Goats)

Further Reading

Rethinking Unquenchable Fire (complete series)

Hell, Universalism and Some Remaining Questions

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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Gehenna in Isaiah 66 (Unquenchable Fire, part 3)

2011-12-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

When the final verse of Isaiah speaks of God’s enemies suffering a worm which does not die and a fire that is not quenched, this should not be taken as an isolated proof text establishing an endless hell, but should be read in the context of Isaiah’s entire narrative. That is why I spent time in the preceding posts establishing that narrative. Isaiah 65 and 66 are permeated with the rich panoply of theological themes we have already explored, in particularly

YHWH rules in the heavens above the gods of the other nations (66:1).
Through His servant, YHWH will one day bring His people back from exile and vindicate them (65:18-19; 66:5-13).
The theme of comfort is picked up again in 66:12-13– a theme which Isaiah always invests with eschatological significance. God’s people are being comforted because Israel’s exile is over and the Lord is extending peace to her.
When this happens, the worship of God will abound throughout the entire earth (65:17-25), including the Gentiles (66:12 & 19-21).
In order for this to be achieved, YHWH must first defeat His enemies and judge the idols (66:3-6; 66:14-18). Those who purify themselves falsely by means of pagan rites (66:17, echoing 65:3) is contrasted with the purifying judgment that God brings.
YHWH will defeat His enemies. He does this by converting some (66:19-21) and bringing death to others (66:24).

The unquenchable fire of Isaiah 66:24 is an instance of the last point, and it is specifically connected with the establishment of the new heavens and the new earth.

“For as the new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before Me,” says the LORD, “so shall your descendants and your name remain. And it shall come to pass that from one New Moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, all flesh shall come to worship before Me,” says the LORD. And they shall go forth and look upon the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. They shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” (Isaiah 66:24)

Significantly, the valley of Hinnom (latter called Gehenna) where this occurs was associated with idol worship for much of Judah’s history. It was here that the people of God passed their children through the fire to Molech. It later became a garbage dump where the corpses of dead animals or those who were denied a ceremonial burial, were discarded. Maggots infested the rubbish, which was continually smoking. This is not a cosmological projection but a literal description of a specific place in the space-time universe. As worshipers bring their gifts to Zion they pass by the city dump, where the enemies of YHWH have been unceremoniously dumped as a testimony to YHWH’s vindication that would have resonated deeply with Ancient Near Easterners. To quote again from Daniel Block, “The image is also that of a pile of corpses, victims in battle, ignominiously dumped in a heap and torched.” Arthur Pink gets it right in describing the history of this valley:

First, "Gehenna" is the Grecianized form of the Hebrew for "valley of Hinnom," which was a deep gorge on the east of Jerusalem. This valley of Hinnom was first used in connection with idolatrous rites (2 Chronicles 28:3). Later it became a burial ground (Jeremiah 7:31), or more probably a crematorium. Still later it became the place where the garbage of Jerusalem was thrown and burned (Josephus). Its fires were kept constantly alight so as to consume the filth and rubbish deposited therein.

Isaiah 66:24 thus speaks entirely of the type of judgment that the Servant brings to the earth in the process of redeeming it, the culmination of a process that has already been described in detail in such passages as chapter 34 and 42:13. I italicized the words ‘to the earth’ since many people have stripped this passage from its temporal-historic context to be made into a free-standing threat of eternal hellfire. Here I must depart company with our blessed brother John Calvin, who believed that the plain meaning of Isaiah 66:24 was “that the wicked shall have a bad conscience as an executioner, to torment them without end, and that torments awaits them greater than all other torments; and finally, that they shall tremble and be agitated in a dreadful and shocking manner, as if a worm were gnawing the heart of a man, or a fire were consuming it, and yet thus consume, he did not die” (Calvin’s Commentary on the Book of Isaiah)

But whatever the postmortem fate of the wicked may be (and that question is far from being the slam dunk issue that so many conservative Bible scholars have assumed it to be), Isaiah 66:24 has nothing to do with it. The problem is that Christians often take a certain idea of hell derived from popular religious culture (and, as we shall see, from a misunderstanding of Christ’s words when he quotes Isaiah 66:24) and then import that idea back into this verse. But remember what we have already seen: the work of God’s Servant is that of bringing restoration, healing and judgment to this space-time universe. This fulfills the promise made to Abraham that all the earth would be blessed through his descendants. It is highly anachronistic to assume that an Ancient Near Eastern audience would have interpreted these words in any other sense than about what happens in the here and now. After all, we have already seen that the narrative Isaiah is drawing on is one in which the God of Israel rules in the heavens above the gods of the other nations and then proves His supremacy through restoring His people, judging unrighteousness and making His worship abound from sea to sea. Only a feat of hermeneutical gymnastics can turn these themes into a charter for what happens in heaven and hell.

This is a point that even conservative Bible scholars have been obliged to point out in a book defending the doctrine of eternal punishment. In Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment, Daniel I. Block, professor of Old Testament at Wheaton, has noted in his discussion of Isaiah 66:24 that

“the sight that greets the worshipers coming out of Jerusalem is not a netherworldly scene. On the contrary, the image is realistic and earthly.” Daniel I. Block, “The Old Testament on Hell” in Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment, edited by Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Grand Rapids, MI; Zondervan), p. 60.

The point is worth making since years of subtle Gnosticism have oriented Christians to put a spiritualized gloss over the Old Testament’s prophetic literature – a gloss which leads many commentators to assume that all the judgment passages find fulfillment in an eternal hell while all the restoration passages find fulfillment in heaven. Then when we come to the New Testament it is assumed that the resurrection of believers must be an approximation for the immortality of the soul. But Isaiah’s proclamations of judgment do not function as some hidden code to be deciphered by later generations who had a concept of postmortem torment; rather, they should be read through the lens of their Ancient Near Eastern backdrop and taken to be a description (whether literal or figurative) for what happens in this world that God has made and is redeeming.

This puts me at odds with some of the interpretations offered by my universalist friends and relations who take Isaiah’s promises of earthly restoration and apply them to the postmortem salvation of the wicked. I have a number of universalist books and tracts in my office which offer a narrative that runs something like this: Isaiah speaks of everyone coming to be redeemed after the fires of judgment have done their work; because “everyone” includes those who are presently wicked, it must therefore follow that the wicked (those who die and go to hell) are one day redeemed. Ergo, hell must be a temporary place of purifying suffering.” Again the problem with such a reading is that it becomes plausible only if we first disengage the text from its immediate context, as well as the largely narrative-structures of Biblical theology. One of these narrative structures, as I pointed out in my open letter to a Christian universalist, is that God entrusted Israel with a special vocation in order that through them the means for reconciling all the nations would come. Whenever scripture describes this process of reconciliation it is a process that occurs here on the earth. But moreover, it is a process that has to occur on the earth by the very nature of the case.
This last point may require some further elucidation.

God Images and His Plan for the Earth

Consider, ever since the Garden of Eden, God’s plan has been to fill the world with the worship of Him. This was implicit in the very first commands that God gave Adam and Eve. In the Garden, God gave His images the obligation to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) and “fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). God’s plan for the world was to fill it with His images. Now images and worship are closely linked. The original Hebrew says that mankind was made ‘into’ God’s image. In other words, men and women are not made in the image of God; they actually are the image of God. In the ancient world, people would have understood the importance of this better than we do because of the role images played in the surrounding culture. The Ancient Near Eastern god-kings set up images of themselves all over their territory, as a way of establishing their dominion and fostering the worship of themselves and the god that they represented. The king’s dominion was established by the numerical and geographical extent of his images, and it was in that region– the region marked by his images – that he was worshiped. Similarly, the way God establishes His dominion is through the expansion and dominion of His images: mankind. In commanding His images to populate the earth and take dominion as His representatives, God is acting like a king who is concerned with the increase of his kingdom (the region where he is worshiped). Thus, another way of saying that God’s plan for the world is to fill it with His images, is to say that God’s plan for the world is to establish a kingdom, a kingdom marked out by His images.

With that in mind, look again at the commands God gives to mankind:

“Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). This command establishes that God’s images are supposed to expand numerically.
“Fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). This command establishes that God’s images are supposed to expand geographically.
“Subdue [the earth]; have dominion” (Gen. 1:28). This command, known as the dominion mandate, shows that God has delegated some of His authority to man, giving us the job of taming and ruling over the earth as well as naming and defining it. The earth is full of raw materials that have to be developed by man.
“Tend and guard it” (Gen. 2:15) This command, often referred to as ‘the cultural mandate’, establishes our responsibility both to develop and to guard the earth’s resources.

These purposes are clearly rooted in what happens in the earth, not in heaven. When Moses wrote or compiled the Genesis narrative, it would have resonated deeply with an Ancient Near Eastern audience since God is showing the type of concern for His glory that was a typical feature of Ancient Near Eastern kings and the gods they represented. We should avoid the type of spiritualized interpretations offered by universalists which strip these realities from their earthly, historic-temporal setting and bracket them within the context of a postmortem restoration of disembodied souls.

A key narrative of Biblical theology is the question of how the purposes of Genesis (the multiplication and dominion of God’s images) can be fulfilled now that the image of God has become defaced through sin. God’s defaced images take dominion, but they take dominion through sin in a way that dishonors YHWH rather than bringing Him glory. Isaiah helps to answer this question. We have seen that Isaiah shows that the earth will be reconciled to God, and fully populated with those who glorify YHWH, and that this will be achieved through the figure of the Servant and the judgment He brings. It is a finite judgment leading to a very specific end within the space-time continuum. In keeping with the preoccupations of the Israelites in Isaiah’s day, it is a description of what happens in the here and now.

A corollary of this is that when we read the Old Testament and come across the concept of “salvation”, we mustn’t assume that salvation meant the same thing that it has come to mean within Christian theology. As I pointed out in my letter to a universalist, quite a lot of the time Old Testament authors use the word “salvation” they have in mind the rescuing of corporate Israel rather than something that happens to us when we die. Quite often in the Psalms “salvation” just means personal deliverance from one’s enemies. To quote again from Block:

“Modern readers often wish that Old Testament prophets and authors had been more forthright and explicit in their comments concerning the afterlife in general, and the netherworld in particular. The fact remains that biblical writers and ancient Israelite characters tended to be preoccupied with the here and now. Their goal was to enjoy a long full life, secure in the knowledge of God’s presence and rich in the blessings that attend a life of covenant faithfulness. Furthermore, eternal life was often viewed in terms of living on in one’s children. Accordingly, a man “with a full quiver” (Ps. 127:3-5) was considered most blessed; a person who was childless was deemed under the curse.” Daniel I. Block ‘The Old Testament on Hell’ in Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment)

New Creation

Most critical scholars believe that verse 24 is a later addition. But even if this is true, it is in keeping with the themes of the book, as Brevard S. Childs has shown in his commentary. He argues that it is entirely appropriate for the final antithesis of the righteous and the wicked to be maintained into the eschaton. In his commentary on Isaiah, Child rightly recognizes that one finds in 66:18-23 a succinct summary of eschatological themes that occur throughout the entire book of Isaiah, themes which are not inconsistent with the antithesis in 24. Actually what one finds in this passage,” Childs notes,

“is a succinct summary of eschatological themes that occur throughout the entire book of Isaiah. The gathering of all the nations from the ends of the world, the seeing of God’s glory (41:5), the survivors sent to the nations as a witness, the return of the diaspora to God’s holy mountain, and the choosing of foreigners for priests of Yahweh (56:6ff.), are all themes that appear in differing forms. What is new in the passage is the joining of them together in one concluding oracle. The radical formulation of 65:17-18 is repeated, but now in such a way as to provide an interpretation of the earlier promises as a part of the one eschatological goal: the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. This purpose does not emerge as a cosmological projection, but as the context for God’s descendants, his own people, whose name will remain forever and whose life consists in the eternal worship of God from new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath.”

There are two final and related points worth making with regard to this New Creation. The first is that New Creation comes in gradations and the second is that New Creation co-exists with old creation. Child rightly points out on page 546 of his book on Isaiah that the sense of gradualism is essential to make sense of Isaiah and the way the description of the new age is set over against the continuing opposition to the old. But how do these realities play out in practice? This question is one which is before us as throughout the entire prophetic corpus. Throughout the eschatological writings of the prophets we find the overlapping interplay between new creation, on the one hand, and judgment of the old creation, on the other. This interplay is often interpreted as describing geographically or dimensionally distinct realms, such as heaven and hell. But we have already seen that such a reading can only be maintained by completely dispensing with authorial intent: the prophets, at least, believed they were writing about what happens on the earth.

We get a sense of how this gradualism plays out by seeing how Jesus fulfills these realities. By exploring Christ’s fulfillment of these themes, the stage will finally be set for understanding Mark 9. But that will be the subject of the next post in this series.

Further Reading

Hell, Universalism and Some Remaining Questions

Complete Unquenchable Fire Series

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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Background to Isaiah (Unquenchable Fire, part 2)

2011-12-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

Isaiah 66:24, along with the two verses that proceed it, are the summation of the entire book of Isaiah. Isaiah was writing to the nation of Judah from about 740 to 687 BC. This was during the period when the waning Assyrian empire was trying to reassert her power in the Ancient Near East. Isaiah prophesied that the king of Assyria would invade the land of Judah as judgment against her sins (Isaiah 7:17; 8:7-8) and he also prophesied that the Northern Kingdom of Israel (sometimes also called Samaria after its capital) would experience God’s righteous judgment for her sins (Isaiah 9:8-21).

These prophecies against Israel were fulfilled very dramatically when the brutal Assyrian leader, Shalmaneser, put Samaria under siege (2 Kings 17:1-5). His successor (and probable usurper), Sargon II, proceeded to take the Northern ten tribes of Israel into captivity in B.C. 722 (2 Kings 17:6-41). The Assyrians then made their way to the Southern kingdom of Judah and laid waste the entire land except for the city of Jerusalem, which remained under King Hezekiah’s control (2 Chronicles 32; Isaiah 36-37). Only the city of Jerusalem was delivered.

Hardly do we finish reading Isaiah’s account of Jerusalem’s deliverance (chapters 36-37), then Isaiah gives us an ominous foretaste of Judah’s downfall at the hand of another empire: the Babylonians. Chapter 39 recounts how King Hezekiah was visited by the Babylonian envoys and foolishly showed them all of his treasure. When Isaiah learned from Hezekiah what had happened, he said:

“Hear the word of the LORD of hosts: ‘Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house, and what your fathers have accumulated until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the LORD.” (39:5-6)

This judgment that the Lord prophesied was not simply a punishment on Hezekiah for his foolish diplomacy. Rather, it is the expected response to Judah’s sin. The Lord had promised to bring siege and exile on His people if they were disobedient (Deuteronomy 28). The first half of Isaiah builds the case against Judah by showing just how disobedient she has become (see Isaiah 1 and 3 as just two examples). In short, Judah can expect to experience from Babylon what Israel had already experienced from Assyria: siege, genocide, destruction and exile.

And that is exactly what happened. The Assyrians were defeated when the Chaldean king Nabopolassar (c.658 - 605 BC) joined forces with the Medes, a tribe from the Persian hills, to wage an attack on their stronghold of Nineveh in 612 BC. King Nabopolassar established a new Babylonian monarchy while his son, King Nebuchadnezzar, finally defeated the Assyrians and established Babylon as his capital. Though Nebuchadnezzar’s empire was not as large as the Assyrian empire had been, he accomplished what the Assyrians could not: he captured the Southern kingdom of Judah (including Jerusalem) in BC 586, carrying the Jews into captivity and destroying Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 36:15-21).

Return from Exile

When Isaiah foretold this impending calamity against Judah, his message of doom was also tinged with comfort. Throughout all of Isaiah’s prophecies the theme of judgment is interspersed with the theme of redemption and return from exile. After reading the account of Hezekiah and the Babylonian envoys in Isaiah 39, and God’s subsequent pronouncement of judgment upon Judah, we are immediately given a promise of comfort and restoration (though it has been a matter of debate whether Isaiah 40 to 66 was written by the same author). Isaiah 40:1-2 speaks of the time when Jerusalem (shorthand for the nation of Judah, just as Samaria is often shorthand for the nation of Israel) will be comforted, having received double from the Lord’s hand for all her sins. Moreover, verses 3-4 speak of God’s presence returning to His people (an important Biblical motif, signifying the return of God’s favor).

As the second half of Isaiah builds, we find that the return of God’s presence to His people becomes focused in the person of God’s servant. Sometimes the servant is clearly the person of Cyrus (Isaiah 45), who was God’s instrument for overthrowing Babylon (an event described in Daniel 5 and predicted in Isaiah 13). However, as we work our way through the various servant songs of Isaiah it becomes clear that Cyrus is a type of a greater Servant, even as Israel’s return from physical exile under Cyrus functions is a metaphor of the entire earth’s release from spiritual exile. This greater Servant is one in whom God delights, who will have God’s Spirit poured out on him (11:1-5; 42:1), who will defeat the idols of the world (44:6-20), who will enable the Abrahamic promises to be fulfilled that God’s people might become a light to all nations (42:6), who will release His people from their continuing state of spiritual exile (42:7; 44:24-28), and who will achieve this deliverance by suffering substitutionally for Israel’s sins (53).

Again, the physical deliverance from exile instituted by Cyrus (Isaiah 45) functions as a metaphor for the greater New Exodus brought by God’s Servant – an Exodus from spiritual exile that will bring YHWH’s people, and through them the entire world, out of spiritual bondage. This international perspective surfaces in chapters 49, 56, 60 & 61, where Gentiles and foreigners come into covenant with Israel’s God. But just as the exile and restoration of Israel functions as a metaphor for the exile and restoration of all humanity, so it also functions as a metaphor for the renewing of the natural world (Isaiah 65:17-25).

Such renewal is often described using the language of “the new heavens and the new earth.” Texts such as Isaiah 40:9-11 and 52:7 speak about a royal herald announcing the glad tidings that Israel’s God has come to restore His people, to renew and reign on the earth. This renewal is also described in terms of God defeating the idols of the nations through judgment. For example, chapter 11 had spoken of the Rod from the stem of Jesse bringing His people back from exile (11:11-16), restoring the natural world (6-8) and extending the knowledge of the Lord to all the Gentiles throughout the whole earth (11:9-10), yet the same passage also makes clear that the Servant’s means for accomplishing these ends is that He must first strike the earth with the rod of His mouth and slay the wicked with the breath of His lips (11:4). This is an important theme that recurs again and again throughout the Isaianic narrative: when YHWH’s Servant begins restoring Israel (and by extension the whole earth), He will do this by judging the idols and prevailing over the gods of the other nations. Similarly, in Isaiah 41:21-29 God had issued a challenge against all idols, and his answer is that His servant will reveal His glory by prevailing against His enemies and extending His worship throughout the whole earth (42:8-13).

YHWY’s Vindication and the Ancient Near Eastern Religious Context

All of this makes complete sense within Isaiah’s Ancient Near Eastern context. Ancient Near Eastern culture was one in which each nation had its own special god. The Babylonians had Marduk, the Cannanites had Baal, and so on. Artifacts and documents from the time indicate that each nation considered that its god was enthroned in a heavenly palace above the lesser gods (the gods of the other nations) and symbolically enthroned in an earthly palace or temple. The temple was the place where heaven and earth joined and where the god of your nation, which you considered to be the supreme god, was symbolically enthroned.

Now as a consequence of each nation believing that their god was supreme above the gods of the other nations, they also believed that their nation would one day become supreme over the other nations. The two ideas were connected. If your god was really the highest deity, there was only one way for him to demonstrate that supremacy, and that was through the god causing your kingdom to be victorious in battle and eventually to conquer the world. The god of your nation was the one who ruled in the heavenly realm and he would demonstrate his superiority by triumphing over the gods of the other nations and ruling the earth through his favored nation.

So what would happen if your kingdom was being defeated in war? You could conclude that your god is weak and that perhaps he is not as supreme as you believed. This is the backdrop to Sennacherib’s boast against the Lord in chapter 36:18-20. The gods of the other nations have been powerless to protect their people from the might of Assyria. That is one of the reasons why subjugated peoples (including, unfortunately, God’s own people during times of trial) had no problem switching to the religion of those who had conquered them. Had not their own god proved powerless? However, another option for those who were being defeated in war was that perhaps your god was angry. He might still be the supreme god but is letting this trouble befall you in order to teach you a lesson – perhaps that you needed to offer more sacrifices or build more images of him. Or your nation’s god might be showing patience, being in no rush to vindicate himself, but willing to bide his time at it. Whatever the reason might be, everyone in the Ancient Near East was agreed about the fact that when your god did decide to act decisively to vindicate himself, there was only one way to do it: he would make his people rule over the nations of the earth even as he ruled over the gods of the other nations in heaven.

The above sketch of Ancient Near Eastern assumptions is true on a purely historical level, yet it also has profound spiritual truths embedded in it. The Bible teaches that YHWH is enthroned in the heavens high over the gods of the other nations (Exod. 15:11; Ps. 82:1, 86:8, 89:6, 95:3, 96:4, 97:9, 135:5). Further, it teaches that YHWH’s heavenly supremacy will one day be established by His people ruling the earth (Daniel 7:27). This is the backdrop to the work of the Servant in Isaiah. The second half of Isaiah specifically connects YHWH’s defeat of the false gods/idols with his vindication and the establishment of His rule throughout the whole world. Isaiah 60:5-10 speak of the wealth of the Gentiles pouring into Zion and foreigners turning to the God of Israel. Moreover, when Isaiah 65:25 invokes Edenic conditions, this is a significant signpost to the fact that God’s people will be ruling over the earth even as Adam and Eve ruled in the garden. While such rulership could involve God’s people ascending to positions of authority over the rest of an unwilling mankind, passages such as Zechariah 9:23 and Micah 4:2 make it more likely that it involves the complete proliferation of true worship throughout the earth. But either way, the God of Israel will vindicate His name by defeating the gods of the other nations (which is to say, the idols) and establishing his rule (which is to say, peace and justice) throughout the world.

Now read Isaiah 42:8-13 in light of this Ancient Near Eastern backdrop:

I am the LORD, that is My name; and My glory I will not give to another, nor My praise to carved images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them. Sing to the LORD a new song, and His praise from the ends of the earth, you who go down to the sea, and all that is in it, you coastlands and you inhabitants of them! Let the wilderness and its cities lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar inhabits. Let the inhabitants of Sela sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory to the Lord, and declare His praise in the coastlands. The LORD shall go forth like a mighty man; He shall stir up His zeal like a man of war. He shall cry out, yes, shout aloud; He shall prevail against His enemies. (42:8-13).

The Ancient Near Eastern formula couldn’t be clearer: God will establish His supremacy over the gods of the other nations by establishing His rule on the earth. In order to do this He will have to first defeat His enemies and destroy the carved images (as if in silent answer to Rabshakeh’s question of 36:18-20).

Isaiah sometimes describes this defeat in terms of God’s enemies being converted and at other times in terms of God’s enemies being killed off. No doubt the itinerary for getting there involves some of each. Yet the end result is an eschatological vision of an earth entirely devoted to the worship of YHWH, a vision that Isaiah describes by using the language of the new heavens and the new earth. The Servant Song of Isaiah 42 explicitly connects the Servant’s judgment upon the idols with His establishment of a new order: “I am YHWH, that is my name; and My glory I will not give to another, nor my praise to carved images. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.” (42:8-9).

This sets the backdrop for the New Heavens and the New Earth which we read about in Isaiah 65. References to the New Heavens and the New Earth is another way of talking about the return from spiritual exile that the Servant brings. Brevard S. Childs explains this most helpfully in his commentary on Isaiah.

“The description that follows v. 17 [in chapter 65] and provides the context by which the understand the new heavens and earth is portrayed always in relation to God’s faithful people, who experience the entry of God’s rule within transformed Jerusalem. The imagery of joy and absence of weeping is set in contrast to the sorrow through which the community of faith has come. The planting of vineyards and the enjoying of its fruits is simply the converse of Israel’s experience of exploration and conquest. Verse 23 summarizes this eschatological hope: ‘They shall be the offspring blessed by Yahweh.’ The link with the promise to the suffering servant is fully evident: ‘[H]e will see offspring…From the agony of his soul he will see’ (53:10-11). The promise in chapter 65 is not an apocalyptic flight into an imaginative world of fantasy, but the fulfillment of God’s will taking shape through the entire book of Isaiah. Verse 24 once again repeats the theme of chapter 65 of God’s utter accessibility in his calling and answering those who seek his presence.” Isaiah, Brevard S. Childs (Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), p. 538.

Restoration Through Judgment

Isaiah unfolds to a climax like concentric circles. At the beginning the destruction of Babylon and other specific nations has become judgment of the entire earth, just as the return from exile becomes restoration of all humanity.

This state of affairs doesn’t arrive all at once. We have already seen that in order for God’s Servant to bring about the New Exodus for His people, and through them for the entire earth, the idols have to first be dealt with. Just as Isaiah connects God’s judgment against His people with His redemption of them, so God’s judgment against all the idols and wickedness among the nations is connected with His redemption of the nations. For example, Isaiah pronouncements against the people of Egypt (19:1-17) and Assyria (10:5-19) end in God promising to redeem Egypt and Assyria (19:18-25):

In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will serve with the Assyrians. In that day Israel will be one of three with Egypt and Assyria – a blessing in the midst of the land whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, ‘Blessed is Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel My inheritance.” (19:23-25)

Given the relation between judgment and restoration, it is not surprising that in passages such as Isaiah 11:4, 41:21-29 and elsewhere, the ministry of the Servant is connected specifically with judgment. YHWH will vindicate His name and prove that He is supreme by judging the idols, defeating His enemies, slaying the wicked, establishing the government of His Servant and restoring the earth. These great promises culminate in the final Servant song in chapter 61, as the Servant speaks to describe the type of culture that he will create.

Further Reading

Complete Unquenchable Fire Series

Hell, Universalism and Some Remaining Questions

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

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Unquenchable Fire (Part 1)

2011-12-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

Earlier in the year I used my morning devotions to do a Bible study on unquenchable fire – a phrase which appears in Mark 9 and Isaiah 66 and which is often taken to be a reference to the everlasting fire of hell.

But first, some personal background.

The question of hellfire is important to me, given that I spent most of my life as a universalist, defending the view that hell is a temporary purifying process that people can escape from once they have repented. So strongly did I advocate the position that every person would one day be saved that I even had a public debate with Douglas Wilson on the matter. Wilson defended the traditional view and I defended the view that hell has an exit. (Since changing my position I took the debate offline.)

I abandoned universalism around 6 years ago. Though I believe I had good reasons for rejecting universalism (reasons I have explained here), it was not easy for three reasons. The first reason is that it would be wonderful, not to mention comforting, to know that all the wicked will eventually repent, turn to Christ and be saved. I still hope that this is true, even though I no longer think the Bible supports that position. But another reason it was hard to give up universalism is because universalism solved the problem of endless evil, which is the Gordion knot for all theodocies constructed within the eternal punishment paradigm (though the doctrine of annihilation or conditional immortality may also go towards solving that problem). The third reason it was hard to give up universalism is because the universalist theology runs deep in my family – both my parents and my wife’s parents have written books on the subject. In fact, the was one of the reasons that Esther and I met in the first place.

Rejecting universalism has not meant that I have embraced the doctrine of eternal hellfire either. I am keen to explore whether the Bible does in fact teach eternal punishment. Towards that end, every once in a while I use my personal devotions to study one of the hellfire passages. Given the demands of family life and work, however, I have only had a chance to explore two passages so far - Matthew 25:31-46 and Mark 9:42-50. I posted my Bible study of Matthew 25:31-46 (the sheep and the goats) back in 2009 and over the next few weeks I will be posting my Bible study of Mark 9:42-50 in stages.

On the outset it should be noted that Mark 9:42-50 is a favorite proof text for those who support the doctrine of endless torment. For example, when discussing the “future, final, retributive punishment of the wicked”, Bob Gonzales, Dean Reformed Baptist Seminary, cited Mark 9:44, 46, 48 as one of the passages supporting his statement that the Bible “clearly portrays the duration of this punishment as endless…”

Larry D. Pettegrew, in his article ‘A Kinder, Gentler Theology of Hell?’ (The Master's Seminary Journal 9/2 (Fall 1998), pp. 203-217) references Mark 9:43–48 as among “the many Scriptures that teach the eternal punishment of the wicked in hell.”

Similarly, James E. Rosscup, Professor of Bible Exposition at Masters Seminary, cites Mark 9:44 to show that “as the fire is never put out, the suffering which it is causing never ceases.” (James E. Rosscup, ‘Paul’s Concept of Eternal Punishment,’ TMSJ 9/2, Fall 1998, p. 169-189)

In his article, ‘The Eternal Punishment of the Lost’, Lehman Strauss cites Mark 9:44 as one of the proof texts establishing that “the fire of Hell is as literal as the place itself”, and by “hell” he means “a literal Hell of fire” that “the resurrected physical bodies of the unbelievers of every age… will go into…”

Alec Motyer argued that Christ’s words in Mark. 9:43-48 indicate “a final change of place and state with continuity of person” and he connects it to the lake of fire in Rev.20:15. (Isaiah, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, Inter-Varsity Press, 1999).

Alan Bernstein says that Mark 9:43-48, “appears to be the earliest New Testament reference to an eternal hell.” (The Formation of Hell, Alan Bernstein (UCL Press), p. 229

John Piper writes: “How did Jesus expect his audience to think and feel about the way he spoke of hell?... He spoke of…“unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43)…to portray hell as an eternal, conscious experience…”

In his book The Worm that Dyeth Not, the 17th century writer, William Strong, Worms commented on Mark 9:48 by saying that if worms “should breed in a man, and feed upon him whilst he were alive, it would be much more terrible; as it was a torment invented by a Tyrant to keep a man in a Coffin, and feed him, till by his own filth he breed worms, and these worms devoured his flesh, and he dyed from them…but what will it be for a worm to be gnawing upon the soul for ever?”

I think the above interpretations are missing something. I will be arguing that regardless of whatever we may believe concerning the final fate of the wicked, Mark 9 has nothing to do with it. If everlasting punishment is true, defenders of the doctrine will have to look elsewhere.

But first, let’s see exactly what the Mark 9:42-50 actually says:

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea. 43 If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— 44 where

      ‘ Their worm does not die
       And the fire is not quenched.’
45 And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— 46 where

      ‘ Their worm does not die
      And the fire is not quenched.’

47 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire— 48 where

      ‘ Their worm does not die
       And the fire is not quenched.’
49 “For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt loses its flavor, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.” (Mark 9:42-50)

The recurring motif in this passage about the worm and the fire is drawn directly from Isaiah 66:24, the final verse in the book of Isaiah. By repeatedly citing it, Jesus is invoking for His hearers the Isaianic narrative and bracketing his words within the context of that story. If we approach Mark 9:42-50 as one more isolated proof text establishing the post-mortem torment of the wicked, without attending to this Isaianic background, we will completely miss the import of Christ’s words. It is crucial, therefore, to first unpack what Isaiah 66:24 is all about. But that will be the subject of my next post.

Further Reading

Rethinking Unquenchable Fire (complete series)

Hell, Universalism and Some Remaining Questions

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

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Sam Harris on Evolutionary Ethics

2011-12-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

“It is easy to see why the study of the evolutionary origins of ‘morality’ might lead to the conclusion that morality has nothing at all to do with Truth. If morality is simply an adaptive means of organizing human social behaviour and mitigating conflict, there would be no reason to think that our current sense of right and wrong would reflect any deeper understanding about the nature of reality. Hence, a narrow focus explaining why people think and behave as they do can lead a person to find the idea of ‘moral truth’ literally unintelligible.”

Further Reading

Review of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

Sam Harris on Moral Relativism

2011-12-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

I am currently reading Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Harris is an atheist possessed of what seems to be unlimited faith in science. But while the book has much that is objectionable from a Christian perspective, it is also filled with gems of sense floating around like bits of confetti without any foundation. Listen to what he says about relativism:

"While few philosophers have ever answered to the name of 'moral relativist,' it is by no means uncommon to find local eruptions of this view whenever scientists and other academics encounter moral diversity. Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul.... Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework - but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to tolerance is not put forward a simple one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is. The contradiction here is unsurprising. Given how deeply disposed we are to make universal moral claims, I think one can reasonable doubt whether any consistent moral relativist has ever existed."

Further Reading

Robin Phillips' Review of The Moral Landscape

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Kind of a Calvinist

2011-12-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago when I told a local brother that I attended a reformed church, he asked if I was a Calvinist myself. Perhaps there are others who would like to know: is Robin Phillips also among the Calvinists?

The short answer is kind of.

The reformed tradition has many strengths, ranging everywhere from its emphasis on the importance of loving God with all our minds, to a robust appreciation for God's sovereignty, to an understanding of the totality of Christ's Lordship. Moreover, it avoids the errors inherent in competing traditions like Roman Catholicism, modern evangelicalism, Lutheranism, and the list could go on. And I have written a positive review of R.C. Sproul's Chosen by God. So why the "kind of"?

The reason for the qualification is because the reformed tradition, even at its best, does seem to be characterized by a subtle Gnosticism, specifically in its approach to the material world and to instrumental means. This reached fruition in the Puritan movement though the Gnostic tincture is by no means limited to the Puritan strain. I have talked about this in more detail in my post 'Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?' (recently updated to take into account recent reading).

(I also have questions about the Calvinist approach to grace, which seems to be tinged with a zero-sum mentality. But that is a subject of another article.)

Anyway, check out my updated post 'Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?

Special Sale of Boreham Books

2011-12-08T11:35:00.000-08:00

"Love achieves its creativity by being perceptive" wrote Oliver O'Donovan in his book Resurrection and Christian Order.

I like that quote, because it encapsulates the reality that for the great artists of the Western tradition, creativity was a form of love. This is the point that Josef Pieper made so eloquently in his tender book Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.

Great sculptors like Michelangelo could look at a slab of unworked marble and ‘see’ the finished product that they would then take months to lovingly bring to reality. Similarly, Bach could be given a series of five or six notes and instantly realize in his mind the potential those notes had for an entire invention. (In the case of the Goldberg Variations, Bach was able to take a simple musical statement that by itself might seem unimportant and, under the loving care of his creativity, to worked it into some of the finest music that has ever existed.) This is similar to the way that we are the workmanship of our Heavenly Father, whom He is steadily bringing to completion (Ephesians 2:10). The Lord sees us not as we are, but as the people He is making us into and the people He will have brought to perfection when we are finally glorified.

If this is true of the way artists perceive raw materials and how God perceives us, it can also be true for how you and I perceive the world. We can train ourselves to observe the glory and beauty inherent in the world we inhabit.

Children do this naturally, since they have an inborn sense of wonder and enchantment. Part of what it means to grow in maturity, however, is to recover this sense: to learn to once again experience a child-like delight in the things we have become accustomed to taking for granted, to perceive the world around us in fresh and exciting ways. As I have observed elsewhere, we can begin to feel about the moon like a young child feels about a silver dollar in his pocket; we can begin to perceive events that would otherwise be merely routine (like the sun rising in the East) as being part of the delightful dance that we have been privileged to get a sneak peek at.

Like lovers who find creative ways to explore each other, and through such perception realize the potential of love’s creativity, we can begin to find creative and fresh ways to perceive our world. As a lover unveiling the apparel of his beloved to explore what is normally hidden from view, by approaching the world in love we learn to remove the veil of cynicism, boredom and ungratefulness that normally conceals the wonder and enchantment that was there all along.

This is an important perspective since we live in a world that has become increasingly disenchanted and stripped of this sense of wonder. As I explained in my earlier post, ‘A Festival not a Machine,’ the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries implicated a view of the universe that was increasingly mechanistic in its orientation. Similarly, the Protestant reformation (for all its indisputable benefits) mitigated against a sense of wonder and enchantment by disputing the notion of sacred space (a topic that William Dyrness has recently written about and which I hope to publish on in the near future).

Precisely because of this, I was excited when my good friend Michael Dalton introduced me to the writings of F.W. Boreham. Rather like George MacDonald (see my article 'Clothing Truth with Beauty'), Boreham is able to help us find beauty in unexpected places, to perceive splendour in the ordinary, to be filled with wonder over those little things that most of us overlook. Boreham is able to help us to behold the grandeur – even enchantment - in what would otherwise seem everyday and commonplace.

I am currently reading Boreham’s book A Packet of Surprises, and am continually delighted at his ability to perceive the world through the eye of love’s creativity. He is able to take something that most of us might find prosaic and commonplace - whether the alphabet, a painting, or an apparently trivial conversation - and transform it into an occasion of glory. I plan to start reading the book to my children at the meal tables because his warm and fresh perspective is one I want them to imbibe.

The reason I am posting about Boreham today is because I learned earlier this week that John Broadbank Publishers, who have brought many of Boreham’s titles back into print, are now doing a special offer of his works on a pay-what-you-can-afford basis. The books make great Christmas presents and I would encourage all my readers to check it out. The John Broadbanks Publishing news blog also contains numerous articles about, and selections from, the writings of Boreham. Don't delay to check it out.

Pictures from Summer/Autumn 2011

2011-12-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

Since this is both my personal and professional blog, it's time to once again upload some pictures and videos for the grandparents and relatives to see/watch.

Matthew, Timothy and Susanna

Robin and Esther

Susanna

Susanna with Dad

Susanna with her Mother

Timothy Phillips

Susanna's Birthday Party

Hike in the Idaho mountains

Susanna finds a snail

Robin and Esther

Here's a video of Matthew and me playing 'Go Tell it On the Mountain' - our own arrangement specially for the grandparents who will be watching this.

This was our second duet that we have arranged. Our first one was, 'Go Down Moses', and can be watched by clicking here.

To see more pictures of the Phillips Family, click here.

The Queen's Power

2011-12-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

How much power does Her Majesty the Queen (long may she live!) actually possess, people sometimes ask me. Is her position purely ceremonial now? Well, no. Her Majesty the Queen is actually the most powerful person in Britain. Those who would wish for the UK to abolish the monarchy on the grounds that the position is now purely ceremonial would do well to consider the following facts (particularly the last two sentences), taken from FAQ of The Heraldica website:

Her Majesty is the Head of State of the United Kingdom and is Head of the Commonwealth. She is Sovereign of the British Orders of Knighthood, Sovereign Head of the Order of St. John, Lord High Admiral, and, in theory, is all-powerful, the source of justice and the fountain of honour. However, her power is limited by the (unwritten) Constitution. The Queen's real power lies in her being able to deny absolute power to anyone else. For example, it is in her power to dismiss the prime minister and dissolve Parliament.

The Powerful Tongue

2011-12-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

St. Faustina

St. Faustina (1905 – 1938) once remarked as follows about the tongue:

“The tongue is a small member, but it does big things. A religious who does not keep silence will never attain holiness; that is, she will never become a saint. Let her not delude herself - unless it is the Spirit of God who is speaking through her, for then she must not keep silent. But, in order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence in one's soul and to keep silence; not a gloomy silence but an interior silence; that is to say, recollection in God.”

Many Christians think that the ethics of speech involves simply not sinning with one’s tongue. But St. Faustina, following the book of James, suggest that silence – or at least being slow to speak - should be the Christian’s default mode.

Keep reading...

Blessings You Can Chew

2011-12-03T10:15:00.000-08:00

In Angels in the Architecture, Douglas Jones has an excellent chapter titled “Worshiping with Body.” In this chapter Jones notes the prominent role occupied by feasting in the Biblical narrative.

Jones draws our attention to some of the many places in Scripture where fine food is talked about as being a blessing. For example, when Isaiah is prophesying about the time when God will bring salvation the ends of the earth, he speaks of “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” (Is. 25:6)

God gives His people blessings they can chew, and part of our ability to receive these blessings depends on our food preferences growing in maturity. It is on this point (food maturity) that Jones believes Americans are sadly lacking, and he points to the examples of the French and Italians to shame us.

It is difficult for modern Americans to get their heads around the fact that food is an area where maturity is even possible in any objective sense. Given our Gnostic assumptions, we tend to think the Lord is only interested in attitude issues, and that the actual stuff of our diet is a thing indifferent to Him. We easily understand that the Lord is concerned in how we eat (i.e., we must be grateful, we mustn’t grumble, etc.) but we instinctively feel He couldn’t possibly care about what we eat. However, if God promises to bless His people, not just with any food, but with good quality ‘rich’ food, then the quality of food cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to God.

Keep reading...

Robin Phillips Speaking at ASCH Conference

2011-12-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

The Winter Meeting of the The American Society of Church History looks like it's going to be an extremely enriching time and not only because I will be one of the speakers. A draft of the meeting and the scheduled speakers can be downloaded here. My talk deals with 19th century American secularism and how it arose partly as a byproduct of the dualisms of the Second Great Awakening. To book a reservation at the conference, click here.

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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The Industrial Revolution: good or bad?

2011-11-30T20:20:00.000-08:00

(See the update at the end of this post for my latest views on this question)

From the invention of the clock in the Middle Ages to the rise of the internet in the 20th century, human beings have had a remarkable knack for coming to resemble the tools they employ. Technologies which offer to give man greater mastery over nature often end up exerting mastery over man.

The inventions that spawned the industrial revolution were no exception to this pattern. Following the perfection of the stream engine in the 1770’s, industries in England and Scotland began to thrive. Work which previously required skilled laborers was taken over by machines. While these machines needed human operators, they required a certain type of human being, one that resembled the machines themselves: mindless, repetitious, and uncreative. If those who sought industrial jobs in the late 18th and early 19th century did not possess these characteristics, it was certain that after a lifetime in the factory they would. The unsafe conditions, smothering uniformity and mind-numbing repetitions tended to suck the humanity out of the men, women and children who worked the machines.

The amount of people caught up in this change was astronomical. At the beginning of the 19th century, approximately 85% of those who lived in Britain worked on farms. At the end of century, 62% of Britain’s population was city-dwellers, and most of these were industrial workers cramped in the main metropolitan centers, working long-hours in what Blake called the “dark Satanic mills.”

The thousands of peasants who left their farms in the countryside for the promise of a better life in the cities, were not merely changing how or where they worked – they would inadvertently be subjecting themselves and their children to changes in how they thought, how they perceived the world, and how they and their children related to one another. Just as the invention of the clock had caused man to perceive the flow of time separate from the flow of events, so life in the factory oriented men and women to see their lives not only separate from nature but separate from any transcendent purpose. In a world where everything hinged on efficiency, value and meaning shifted from the transcendent to the functional.

So this raises a question. Was the Industrial Revolution good or bad? The Romantic movement in the mid 19th century reacted against the dehumanizing impact of industrialization and urged a return to a more primitive and nature lifestyle. Is this a biblical alternative? What would Jesus have said about the industrial revolution? Visit my Facebook page for a discussion of this question.

Update

Since writing the above post, I have come to understand that the Industrial Revolution was DEFINITELY BAD (thanks Brad Bleschner and Brad Littlejohn). Here's why.

The thousands of peasants who left their farms in the countryside did not do so because of the promise of a better life in the cities. Most of the peasants were actually forced out of their farms. The thousands of peasants who left their farms in the countryside for the cities thus had little choice. Forced privatization left entire populations of peasants exiled from common lands that had sustained them for centuries. A series of Inclosure Acts meant that even entire villages sometimes had to be deserted, prompting Oliver Goldsmith to write his moving poem The Deserted Village in 1770.

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Fate of American Republic is Sealed

2011-11-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

Descartes, Calvin, and Closing Eyes During Prayer

2011-11-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

“If any external mediation is unnecessary [within Calvin’s theology] and the Spirit only works within, there is a threat to traditional understandings for what the church had known as sacraments (or sacramentals). To put it another way, the sacraments now can only picture this inward work. Although in his understanding of signs Calvin sought to counter the minimalism of Zwingly, in the end nothing external can be essential to this process. We are not encouraged, as with Bonaventure, to move from mediation on the beauty of creation to the reflection of that beauty within and above us. (Incidentally, as near as I can tell, it was around this time that people began to close their eyes during corporate prayer to better focus their minds.) As a result, though Calvin probably did not intend this, over time it became the case that people, especially in the Pietist stream of this tradition, had no way of finding any substantial theological meaning in any external object or act. There was no longer anything for their eyes or their feelings to hold and indwell.

"Descartes was key here. I believe that one can argue that he was working in the shadow of this Calvinist heritage when he said in 1642, ‘I am certain that I cannot have any knowledge of what is outside of me, except by what is in me.’ The view that we should have more confidence in what is in our minds than what is before our eyes led to what Charles Taylor calls a ‘mediational epistemology’ (the notion that knowledge is mediated through ideas in our minds), and to the split between public and private religion, seen perhaps in its earliest form in Descartes. This distrust of the unity of sense and spiritual knowledge was surely one of the conditions, if not the cause, of his splitting inner and outer knowledge. Such a view tends to privilege the ear over the eye, and, as a result, language over other symbolic forms.” William A. Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life, pp. 195–196.

Edmund Burke's Response to the French Revolution

2011-11-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Edmund Burke

France’s old regime, which was overthrown at the time of the French revolution, had been hated by the English. Not only had monarchical France been rivals with Britain in the scramble for colonial domination, but they had helped the rebellious Americas to gain independence. Thus, it was not without some sympathy that Britain watched as their old nemesis was overthrown.

Naturally, British sympathy was quickly extinguished once the reign of terror began. However, in the critical time between the advent of the French revolution and the outbreak of the terror, many of England’s leading intellectuals believed the French were emancipating themselves. Pitt and Fox even went so far as to praise the revolution in Parliament. Still others held up the revolutionary National Assembly as a model that England would do well to copy.

So great was public sympathy among the English that many historians believe that England came perilously close to entering a similar debacle. It was during this decisive period, with England teetering in the balance, that Edmund Burke stood up to offer his penetrating refutation of the revolutionary mentality and to warn Britain not to follow France down the slippery slope of destructive folly.

Burke’s critique of the French revolution occupied the form of an extended letter to the young man Charles DePont, who had written to Burke asking for his opinion on the revolution. Thus it was that the Reflections on the Revolution in France came to be. It first appeared in print on 1 November, 1790 and sold twelve thousand copies in the first month alone. In less than a year there were eleven editions. By 1796, over thirty thousand copies had been sold, making it one of the most influential political books ever written.

To read more about Edmund Burke and his amazing book Reflections on the Revolution in France, click on the following link:

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Advice on Marital Love from Richard Baxter

2011-11-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

In my Ancient Path column at the Charles Colson Center, I have written out a week's Bible study for married couples centered around the teaching of the Puritan pastor Richard Baxter. His advice on maintaining conjugal love is so Biblical, wise and practical that I would encourage all married couples to read his words and to work through the accompanying scripture readings. To do that, click on the following link:

'Maintaining Conjugal Love'

Luther, Calvin and Music

2011-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

When I was researching about J.S. Bach for my book, I came across authors who mentioned that Bach's music could only flourish in the Lutheran states and not those dominated by Calvinism. I was curious why that was, so I started reading a bit about Luther and Calvin's different views of art and creativity. This has helped me to have a better appreciation for the Lutheran musical tradition, as well as an appreciation for the progress that the Calvinist tradition has made since then (I attend a Calvinist church that has pretty good music, at least compared to other churches, though we're a long way from producing another J.S. Bach).

Luther's views on music are well documented, so this post will mainly look at Calvin's thinking, though I will refer to Luther to emphasize the contrasts.

Luther’s own crisis of faith had led to an experience of divine favor that would propel him to always emphasize the immediacy of God’s supernatural grace. For Luther, God’s presence could be mediated in physical objects used in worship no less than the natural world ("God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees, and flowers, and clouds, and stars.") This, together with Luther's natural interest in music (see his letter about music here) would assure that art would always retain a special place in mediating to man something of God’s beauty, majesty and awe (this, of course, reached fruition in J.S. Bach).

By contrast, the dispassionate and logical Calvin tended to emphasize God’s absolute transcendence, majesty and otherness, resulting in modes of worship that eschewed Lutheran physicality, avoided creativity wherever possible and remained closely tethered to those things which could be formulated in didactic and cognitive terms. As Evelyn Underhill has noted in Worship,

In the type of worship which [Calvin] established, we seem to see the result of a great religious experience - the impact of the Divine Transcendence on the awe-struck soul - and the effort towards a response which is conditioned by a deep sense of creaturely limitation, but deficient in homely and child-like dispositions; and, with intrepid French logic, refuses the use of creaturely aids. Calvin desired, as so many great religious souls have done, a completely spiritual cultus; ascending towards a completely spiritual Reality, and rejecting all the humble ritual methods and all the sensible signs by which men are led to express their adoration of the Unseen. God, who 'hath no image', was the ultimate fact. Therefore a pitiless lucidity of mind, which ignored the mysterious relation between poetry and reality, and the need of stepping-stones from the successive to the Eternal, insisted that all which is less than God must be abjured when man turns to adoration. Unlike Luther, Calvin was really hostile to the mediaeval embodiments of worship. He regarded them with abhorrence, and went to all lengths in the fury of his denunciation. Without Luther's first-hand knowledge of Catholic devotion, and interpreting Catholic theology in terms of the crude popular religion of the time, he even felt able to say that in the Roman Mass "all that a criminal godlessness could devise is done". Hence he cast away without discrimination the whole of the traditional apparatus of Catholicism; its episcopal order, its liturgy, symbols, cultus. No organ or choir was permitted in his churches: no colour, no ornament but a table of the Ten Commandments on the wall. No ceremonial acts or gestures were permitted. No hymns were sung but those derived from a Biblical source. The bleak stripped interior of the real Calvinist church is itself sacramental: a witness to the inadequacy of the human over against the Divine.

The nascent hostility to physicality in worship led Calvin to include the use of musical instruments in worship as among the shadows that were dispelled “when the clear light of the gospel has dissipated.” He Calvin writes,

“With respect to the tabret, harp, and psaltery, we have formerly observed, and will find it necessary afterwards to repeat the same remark, that the Levites, under the law, were justified in making use of instrumental music in the worship of God; it having been his will to train his people, while they were yet tender and like children, by such rudiments until the coming of Christ. But now, when the clear light of the gospel has dissipated the shadows of the law and taught us that God is to be served in a simpler form, it would be to act a foolish and mistaken part to imitate that which the prophet enjoined only upon those of his own time …We are to remember that the worship of God was never understood to consist in such outward services, which were only necessary to help forward a people as yet weak and rude in knowledge in the spiritual worship of God. A difference is to be observed in this respect between his people under the Old and under the New Testament; for now that Christ has appeared, and the church has reached full age, it were only to bury the light of the gospel should we introduce the shadows of a departed dispensation.”

The “shadows of a departed dispensation” seems to have included not only musical instruments but all hymns other than Psalms. As John Barber noted in his article 'Luther and Calvin on Music and Worship':

“Luther wanted the hymns of the Church to reflect as closely as possible the exact words of scripture. Calvin went a step further. He felt that the singing of the express words of only the psalms, though he did permit the singing of other select scripture texts, ensured that Divine revelation was being put to music. The only notable musical contribution of the early Calvinist churches was therefore the Psalters, metrical translations of the Book of Psalms." Barber, 'Luther and Calvin on Music and Worship.'

Richard Arnold noted similarly in The English Hymn: "Calvin’s enthusiasm for singing was subject to a crucial qualification: he restricted what was to be sung exclusively to the Psalms – these were, he writes in 1543, the songs provided by God and dictated by His Holy Spirit, and it would be presumptuous and sacrilegious for humankind to sing any words or arrangements of his of her own devising.”

The idea seems to have been that for worship to be "spiritual" it had to be "simple" in the sense of being disencumbered with the trappings of materiality (including musical instruments). For example, in his book Reformed Worship, Terry Johnson wrote “the worship of Reformed Protestantism is simple. We merely read, preach, pray, sing and see the Word of God… True faith comes through the word (Rom. 10:17). True worship then must be primarily (though not absolutely) non-material, non-sensual, and non-symbolic.” The attempt to achieve non-material worship has greatly crippled Calvinist artistic endeavors. Calvin did allow for musical instruments and art in contexts other than worship, writing

"And yet I am not gripped by the superstition of thinking absolutely no images permissible. But because sculpture and painting are gifts of God, I seek a pure and legitimate use of each, lest those things, which the Lord has conferred upon us for his glory and our good be not only polluted by perverse misuse but also turned to our destruction."

Even though Calvin allowed for musical instruments and art and contexts other than worship, the problem that arose was comparable to that which Tom Howard described in Evangelical is Not Enough. "If by its practice [our religion] implies that colors and symbols and gestures and ceremonies and smells [and, I would add, musical instruments] are inappropriate for the house of the Lord and must be kept outside, for ‘secular’ and domestic celebrations like birthdays, parades, weddings, and Christmas banquets, then it has driven a wedge between his deepest human yearnings and the God who made them."

Cultural Victories Won by the Left

2011-11-20T21:10:00.000-08:00

Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s:

"The visible impact of feminism."
"The effects of affirmative action."
"The emergence of gay rights politics, and … the attention paid to it in the media."
"The acceptance of cultural pluralism."
"The transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media."
"The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere — classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on."
"The virtual abolition of capital punishment."
"The legalization of abortion."
"The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns."

Commenting on this, Walzer said that these victories were imposed upon our society by "liberal elites," rather than "by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party." He noted that these changes "reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers — not the population at large,"

Hmmm.

My Christian Voice articles

2011-11-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

Readers of my blog would do well to visit some of the recent articles I have written for the Christian Voice website. Christian Voice is a lobby group in the UK that continually reports on current events from a Biblical perspective. Although I have been employed by them for a number of years, this summer I began to work for them in a new capacity, part of which has involved regularly supplying their website with new content. Some of my recent articles include:

Review of Stacy McDonald's Raising Maidens of Virtue

2011-11-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

Stacy McDonald recently asked me to review her latest book, a new edition of Raising Maidens of Virtue, which I have done so at my Alfred the Great Society website. To read my review, click on the following link:

Review of Raising Maidens of Virtue

Review of The Shallows for 'Fermentations'

2011-11-16T12:25:00.000-08:00

'Fermentations: Ruminations on Theological and Bacterial Cultures' Volume 2, Number 2 is now hot off the press.

This issue features a review I wrote of Nicholas Carr's fascinating book The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains. To subscribe to this magazine and read a copy of my review, click here.

My Columns at the Chuck Colson Center

2011-11-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

If you are concerned to think Christianly and to apply the categories of the Biblical worldview to every area of life, then you may want to keep abreast of my regular columns at the Chuck Colson Center. Following are some of the articles that have been appearing in my columns:

Changepoint Column

Worldview Column

Ancient Paths Column

Perspectives Column

Salvo's Winter 2011 Issue is Nearly Out

2011-11-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

What a better time to subscribe to Salvo Magazine than now as the Winter 2011 issue is getting ready to go to press. Those who enjoy reading this blog should particularly enjoy this cheeky magazine since it features regular articles by me in it. This upcoming issue has an article of mine on how the advertising and entertainment industries are rewiring our children's brains, leading to unhealthy sexualisation. To take out a subscription to Salvo click here.

God's Kingdom is for the earth

2011-11-10T20:50:00.000-08:00

In Graeme Goldsworthy's According to Plan he most helpfully points out that

it should be absolutely obvious that the Old Testament references to the kingdom being on earth and populated by people cannot be spiritualized away. Once we accept that Jesus rose bodily, even though his resurrection body was not exactly as it had been before, the physical component of the Kingdom is clear. Those texts which support the ideas of souls going to heaven (for example, 2 Cor. 5:1-10) see it as a purely temporary situation. Peter's description of the new heaven (sky above) and new earth is drawn directly from Isaiah 65:17 (2 Pet. 3:13), which in turn is based on Genesis 1:1. So also, the marvelous description of the kingdom in Revelation 21 and 22 is based on a number of Old Testament passages. But there is no suggestion that is mere symbolism which must be interpreted in a spiritualized way.

For John, the consummation is the open fulfillment of the Old Testament hope. There is a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven (Rev 21:1-2). Some may think of the heavenly Jerusalem as a place in the heavens. But John describes it as from heaven and coming down onto the new earth. That which the tabernacle and temple pointed to, the dwelling of God with his people, becomes a reality (Rev. 21:3). The regeneration is now complete (Rev. 21:5), and thus there is no longer any need for 'government outposts and agencies', such as the temple which is the symbol of God's presence, for he is present and is also the source of all light (Rev. 21:22-23). The old images of Eden are there joined with those of the holy city and throne (Rev. 22:1-2, cf. Ezk. 47:1-12).

All sorts of questions no doubt spring to mind about what the new earth will be like. Most of them will have to remain unanswered in this life since scripture provides little information. One thing is for sure: the biblical view of the total regeneration of all things really beats the pagan view of an eternity spent as disembodied souls with only the odd cloud or two for support!"

Fall of the Berlin Wall

2011-11-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Twenty-two years ago on this day, 9 November, I remember watching the evening news with my parents as the Berlin wall come tumbling down. Though I was only a child, the event had a marked effect on me.

You see, three years earlier, when I had been eleven, my family had traveled to West Germany. One afternoon my dad drove us to see the wall separating West and East Germany. I still remember how ominous the electric fence looked which divided the free world from the “evil empire.”

As we emerged from the car, we were met by a chill, drizzling rain. On the other side of the fence a lone guard stared gloomily at us. The rest of my family had their picture taken about thirty feet from the fence, but I was too afraid to venture near. A few minutes later I plucked up the courage and asked my dad to photograph me next to the terrible barrier, or as close to it as I dared approach.

That was three years before that evening in 1989 when I sat with my brothers and parents to watch the wall being torn down. Communism had collapsed and Eastern Europe was finally free.

A year after these momentous changes, we went back to Germany. This time there was no fence preventing us driving into the Eastern section. We traveled to Berlin where the remnants of the wall still zigzagged through the city like a serpent. In some areas there were portions of the wall still intact. Here and there I saw people dismantling the remains of this hated emblem of totalitarianism.

There was something strangely moving in seeing the broken concrete all over the ground and thinking, “So this is all that is left of a regime that tried to turn the state into God.” I stooped down and collected some big chunks of the rubble, determined one day to show them to my own children.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 reminds us that God judges regimes that try to usurp His place as redeemer. Make no mistake, for that is exactly what the communist parties of Eastern Europe did. In preaching that government was the solution to all of society’s ills, in teaching that public policy can bring civic regeneration and utopia, the communist parties of Eastern Europe presented a parody of the true gospel and a false narrative of redemption. The fall of the Berlin wall twenty-two years ago reminds us that government cannot be God, and all attempts to deify the state are doomed to end in abject failure. The fall of the Berlin wall revealed the utter futility of what David Galland recently called the “unblinking faith in an all-caring, omnipotent ‘Godvernment’.”

While the communism of the Eastern block may have failed, idolatrous attempts to deify the state continue.

Keep reading...

Ideas have Consequences: wisdom from Peter Hitchens

2011-11-07T09:39:00.000-08:00

I first met Peter Hitchens in 2008 when I bumped into him by accident in a coffee shop in Moscow, Idaho. After I got over my surprise at seeing this award-winning British journalist in a provincial village in the Idaho panhandle, we began to talk. It turned out that this former Marxist turned conservative journalist wanted get a grass-roots perspective of the political tensions at the time, and he had chosen this small town as his observation point. Although I was scheduled to return home later that afternoon, Mr. Hitchens persuaded me to stay until the evening so I could hear a talk he was giving at New St. Andrew’s College.

I was glad I decided to stay for the talk. Hitchens spoke about the upcoming election, but I was particularly interested to hear his perspective on the “culture wars” in America and England. Being a former socialist and the brother of bestselling atheist author Christopher Hitchens, Peter was able to give a unique glimpse into the strategies and goals of those who are working to undermine the Christian heritage of the West. He explained how ideas have consequences, urging that the rejection of God cannot help but bring a legacy of cultural desolation in its wake.

The notion that ideas have consequences is one of the themes in Peter Hitchens’ latest book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith.

Keep reading...

Richard Hooker vs. Michael Horton

2011-11-07T09:33:00.001-08:00

In his A Learned Discourse on Justification, the judicious Hooker wrote:

They be not all faithless that are either weak in assenting to the truth or stiff in maintaining things any way opposite to the truth of Christian doctrine. But as many as hold the foundation which is precious, although they hold it but weakly and as it were by a slender thread, although they frame many base and unsuitable things upon it, things that cannot abide the trial of the fire, yet shall they pass the fiery trial and be saved, who indeed have builded themselves upon the rock which is the foundation of the Church.

Hooker's words remain an important antidote to those Protestants who maintain that in order to be saved by justification by faith alone, one must believe in justification by faith alone. Such an idea is prevalent within Protestant evangelicalism. When having conversations with lay people, Christian educators and those in leadership positions in Protestant churches, I am frequently told that while individual Roman Catholics can be saved, this can only happen if they “trust in Christ alone for salvation.” When pressed to explain what it means to “trust in Christ alone for salvation,” the response I am usually given is that it means the Roman Catholic has to (more or less) believe in Sola Fide. To reject Sola Fide is to reject Christ, which is to reject any hope of salvation. This myth persists on a more scholarly level as well. For example, Michael Horton seems to have made lack of self-conscious assent to official Catholic teaching on justification a necessary condition to being a brother or sister in Christ, writing

“We affirm that individual Roman Catholics who for whatever reason do not self-consciously assent to the precise definitions of the Roman Catholic Magisterium regarding justification…but who think and speak evangelically about these things, are indeed our brothers and sisters in Christ, despite Rome’s official position.”

What's wrong with this picture? Well, return to Hooker. If Sola Fide is true, then to deny it (for example, to say that we are saved by faith in Christ plus works) is to lack perfect faith, assuming of course that Sola Fide is true. Yet can any one of us really claim to have perfect faith? Evangelicals frequently hold meetings where someone will testify that they learned to make Christ Lord of some new area of their life. Well, what does that mean other than that such a person realized by God’s grace they were trusting themselves, and not Christ, in some important area of their life? The person had imperfect faith, but that does not mean they had no faith at all. Similarly, in matters relating to salvation, even staunch five-point-its-all-by-grace Calvinists can fall into the trap of unconsciously trusting in themselves rather than Jesus. But this lack of perfect faith does not mean that the person in question cannot be saved.

Part of the problem here is that the reformed doctrine of “justification per fidem propter Christum” (justification by faith on account of Christ) has morphed into its parody “justification propter fidem per Christum,” (justification on account of faith through Christ). While the difference is subtle, the second actually leads to a denial of the historic Protestant doctrine.

Sola Fide affirms that if a person is saved, it is only because of Christ and His finished work, mediated to us through our faith, and that all other things are irrelevant. The ‘all other things’ include imperfections in and misunderstand about faith itself. The Protestant who really believes Sola Fide is thus released from having to assume that the efficacy of a person’s faith is dependent on a person having a correct theology about faith.

The same point can be made by way of analogy. A person can die of microbiological poisoning without believing in microbiology, as was the case until comparatively recently in human history. Likewise, a person can experience the results of living on a heliocentric planet without believing in Heliocentrism, as is still the case for some primitive peoples. Similarly, a person can be saved by faith alone without believing in justification by faith alone, as everyone agrees is the case with children and mentally handicapped individuals.

If we can get this simple fact straight, there are enormous implications for the ecumenical agenda. The Protestant is released from having to assume that the efficacy of a person’s faith is based on that person having to agree with his theology of justification. This releases Protestants to rejoice in the faith of those (such as Roman Catholics) who hold to a different theology of faith. It can enable there to be common ground between those who affirm Sola Fide and those who do not.

To read more about this, visit my article 'Sola Fide: The Great Ecumenical Doctrine'. In that article you may learn some surprising things about Sola Fide that you didn't know before.

The Deeper Issue Behind Facebook's Annoying Changes

2011-11-06T06:55:00.001-08:00

A couple years ago a fellow journalist suggested I join the social networking site Facebook. By using the site to post links to articles I write, she said, my writing would have greater visibility.

My friend was right. Since being on Facebook the amount of people who read my articles has doubled. Moreover, I have found it to be an invaluable tool for networking with other intellectuals, many of whom have contributed valuable insights to my own projects.

At the same time, however, Facebook is not without its drawbacks. In particular, the more I use the service, the more I have become aware of certain worldview assumptions implicit in the project.

This was impressed upon me last month when Facebook supposedly “improved” its layout. The normal news feeds are now duplicated with a “ticker” on the right hand side that offers a constantly changing stream of details about what my friends are doing in real time. For example, right now my ticker is showing me that one of my friends just finished listening to Schumann’s “Carnaval”, that another friend is telling his wife how much he loves her, and that another friend just managed to get her children to school on time.

Almost nobody is happy with the changes which allow you to “Facebook while you Facebook.” And although they keep saying it’s possible for individual users to revert back to the old style, I haven’t yet figured out how to do that.

OK, so it’s annoying, but is there anything deeper going on?

In an article I published today with the Chuck Colson Center, I argue that the answer to this question is yes. To read my observations, click on the following link:

The Worldview of Facebook

Our God Reigns

2011-10-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

"The church – being the community of those who have been reconciled to God – are given the vocation of bringing the message of reconciliation to the rest of the world, as Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:18-19 and 10:5. Like the Psalmist, we are to “say among the nations, ‘The Lord reigns’” (Ps. 96:10). Naturally, this includes all the institutions, organisations and cultures that make up those nations. We are to proclaim the salvation and kingship of Jesus over all the arts, the sciences, the economies, the music, the philosophy, the educational systems, and of course the political systems of this world. In the church, this should already be reality." From my Open Letter to a Christian Universalist. To read the entire post, click here.

Application of the Old Testament in Today's World

2011-10-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the appropriation of the Old Testament to today’s world, there is a popular antithesis between the following two positions:

P) all of the Old Testament laws still apply apart from those which have been specifically repealed, fulfilled or replaced by the New Testament

And

Q) none of the Old Testament laws still apply apart from those which have been specifically reiterated by the New Testament

This dilemma is resolvable by giving attention to

S) the hermeneutics of Ancient Near Eastern legal theory assumed by the cognitive structures of their sense construction

And

P) an imagistic approach to the sufficiency of the Torah

That S and P resolve the dilemma between P and Q should make sense after if I flesh out the content of S and P.

Explanation of S:The hermeneutics of Ancient Near Eastern legal theory assumed by the cognitive structures of their sense construction.

It is now pretty certain that the original audience of Leviticus would have understood the plentiful case laws less literally and more paradigmatically or imagistically than we tend to do. Even saying it like this doesn’t quite get it right since the difference would have been qualitative rather than quantitative. The very cognitive structures that go into reading the biblical laws would have been narrative and visual, rather than semantic and literal. What this means practically is that legal disputes among God’s people would not have been settled by seeing whether the dispute was ‘covered’ by the literal meaning of the case laws given in the Torah, but by asking whether the dispute is sufficiently similar to the image evoked by the law to justify invoking its use in order to resolve the conflict in question. If it is sufficiently similar, it applies, even when the literal meaning of the words do not. Now because “how similar” questions are evaluative, there would have been a huge discretionary element among the judges of Israel. A good judge would have required more than just knowledge of the law; rather, he needed to have a sense of spiritual wisdom that could only be gained only through a great deal of reflection on and understanding of the whole of God’s law. I am indebted to Jonathan Burnside for helping me to understand this in his article on Exodus 22. He notes that

“Modern scholarly assumptions on how to read biblical law are often based on the values of modern liberalism, particularly the ‘rule of law' (the belief that adjudication should be governed by laws and not by people). The dominant paradigm of ‘conventional meaning' today is ‘literal meaning', which is closely tied (as its name suggests) to writing. When we talk about literal meaning, we often ask what situations the words ‘cover'. However, there is another way of thinking about language and about legal rules. Instead of asking, What situations do the words of this rule cover?, we may ask, What typical image(s) do the words of this rule evoke? What situations (within known social contexts) does it make you think of? It is a picture-oriented or ‘imagistic' approach, rather than a literal one. Bernard Jackson [in Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law] persuasively argues that this latter approach is more appropriate for understanding biblical law.”

This distinction between ‘literal' and ‘imagistic' approaches is an important one in practice. Rules that are read literally cover all cases that may be included under their language. By contrast, rules that are understood as ‘pictures' apply only to the typical cases they make you think of. Take a simple example, such as the ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth' formula in Exodus 21:24–25. One of the classical arguments against this rule (posed by Plato and others) was, What happens if a one-eyed man puts out one of the eyes of a two-eyed man? This objection assumes a literal reading: namely that the rule applies whatever the circumstances of the parties. A literal application of the ‘eye for an eye' rule would mean that the offender's eye must be taken, even though this means that he will be rendered completely blind, whereas his victim was left half-sighted.

An alternative approach, preferred by Jackson, is to read Exodus 21:24–25 ‘imagistically'. The typical offender is ‘pictured' as a two-eyed man. This means that the case of the one-eyed offender is far removed from the typical case. Under this ‘picture-oriented' approach, the further the real-life case is from the ‘typical case' the less likely it is that the rule applies and the more room there is for negotiation between the parties.

The question is no longer whether the dispute is ‘covered' by the literal meaning of the words of the rule, but whether the dispute is sufficiently similar to the picture evoked by the rule to justify its use in order to resolve the problem. If it is sufficiently similar, it applies, even though it is not the literal meaning of the words. There is an example of this in the New Testament, where Paul argues that Deuteronomy 25:4 (the ban on muzzling oxen) is not solely concerned with oxen but ‘applies' to those who proclaim the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:9, 14). For some, a ‘pictureoriented' or ‘imagistic' approach to biblical law might seem rather strange. But this is what historians are always discovering about the way people other than ourselves thought. In fact, resistance to this way of reading biblical law may simply show how ingrained literal meaning has become in our culture.

Significantly, questions of relative similarity evoke intuitive judgements of justice to a greater degree than literal interpretations. ‘How similar…' questions are evaluative questions (‘how justified is it to treat these cases as similar?'). This in itself suggests a more popular form of dispute resolution than we are used to. It also means that biblical law demanded a great deal of private and creative reflection (see, for example, Deuteronomy 6:6–9). The role of the law in educating and instructing in wisdom is affirmed in the New Testament. In Galatians 3:24–25, for example, Paul compares the function of the law to that of a pedagogue who was responsible for a Greek boy's early discipline and education.”

Explanation of P: "an imagistic approach to the sufficiency of the Torah"

P is a corrolary of S. The understanding of the Torah articulated in the above explanation of P helps with the doctrine of scripture’s sufficiency. The Pharisees and contemporary orthodox Judaism have gone wrong by attempting to fill in the gaps of scripture with further positive law. However, to quote again from Burnside (this time from his article “What Shall We Do with the Sabbath-Gatherer? A Narrative Approach to a ‘Hard Case’ in Biblical Law”)

…there is considerable evidence that biblical law has no such aspirations towards completeness which in turn means that perceived ‘gaps’ are not as problematic as they are in a modern legal system. In addition, there also appears to be a difference between modern and biblical law in terms of how any ‘gaps’ that might arise are addressed. Phillips and Sakenfeld assume, without further argument, that ‘gaps’ should be ‘filled in’ by further, positivist, law. By contrast, the biblical materials point towards ‘wisdom’ as being the primary means by which ‘missing’ and ‘hard’ cases are resolved (e.g. Exod 18:19-22, 2 Sam 14:2-21; see generally Jackson, 2006, pp. 411-425).

While the Pharisees were right in believing that there is nothing on which God’s laws do not give us proper direction, they were wrong in thinking that the completeness had to be generated through the proliferation of new case laws (technically “explanations” but functionally new case law).

Where This Takes Us

When we factor in S, namely, "the hermeneutics of Ancient Near Eastern legal theory assumed by the cognitive structures of their sense construction", with P, namely "an imagistic approach to the sufficiency of the Torah" (which is itself a corollary of S), then the debate evacuates between those who say

(P) all of the Old Testament laws still apply apart from those which have been specifically repealed, fulfilled or replaced by the New Testament

and those who say

(Q) none of the Old Testament laws still apply apart from those which have been specifically reiterated by the New Testament.

This is because both P and Q involve a naïve reading of Biblical law which sees each law as applying to situations ‘covered’ by the meaning of the literal words. However, provided that one holds to the more mature approach of S and P above, the extremes of P and Q meet. They meet – and here’s the crux of my whole argument - at precisely that place which recognizes that the circumstances of life in the New Testament period is itself a coordinate that must be factored into the imagistic application of case law – a factoring which is, in principle, no different to how those laws would have been appliedwithin Old Testament times. Put another way, the “how similar?” questions assumed by Ancient Near Eastern hermeneutics, already have embedded within it the mechanism for assessing the application of those laws within New Testament society (or hypothetically within other pre-New Testament societies) without having to invoke the theological issues of continuity and discontinuity on which such questions have traditionally hinged.

Feminism and Male Domination: Two Sides of the Same Coin

2011-10-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, feminism and male domination are just two sides of the same coin.

Here's why.

Both feminism and male domination assume that there is a necessary relation between a woman's personal role and her personal worth. Both insist that personal role and personal worth must go together, so that any limitation to the former reduces or threatens the latter. The only difference is that while feminism thinks this is a bad thing, and hence attempts to increase a woman’s worth through nullifying any limitation of role, male domination thinks it is a good thing, and hence attempts to decrease a woman’s worth by maintaining her role.

Feminism thus shares the very premise upon which male domination is founded, namely, that my personal significance is measured according to my rung on the ladder, and my opportunity for personal fulfilment enlarges or contracts according to my role. Both are wrong. As Ortlund as pointed out,

“Ironically, feminism shares the very premise upon which male domination is founded, namely, that my personal significance is measured according to my rung on the ladder, and my opportunity for personal fulfilment enlarges or contracts according to my role. By this line of reasoning, the goal of life degenerates into competition for power, and no one hungers and thirsts for true fulfilment in righteousness. No wonder both male domination and feminism are tearing people apart.”

Keep reading...

Cameron and Clegg's Europe U-Turn

2011-10-25T14:04:00.000-07:00

The motion to give the people of Britain a referendum on the EU was defeated in a vote of 483 to 111 after David Cameron ordered his MPs to vote against the proposal.

In an article I wrote today for Christian Voice, I pointed out that David Cameron has continually promised to change Britain’s relationship with Europe and even gave a ‘cast iron guarantee’ that his government would support a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
After yesterday’s events, the image of Cameron as a Eurosceptic will be increasingly difficult to sustain. But it is not just David Cameron that is guilty of making a U-turn. In the run-up to the last general election the Liberal Democrats campaigned for a referendum [see photo below from their campaign flier]. However, when faced with a choice of keeping to their promise, they have capitulated to David Cameron’s europhilia.

To read more, click on the link below:

Government Squashes Referendum Hopes

UK Riots: the Totalitarian Aftermath

2011-10-25T13:41:00.000-07:00

When the London riots broke out last August, I was particularly interested. You see, three days prior to the violence I had been staying in Hackney, one of the areas of London affected by the social unrest. So severe had the violence become in that area the subway station I had been using to travel to and from graduate school had to be shut down until the police got control of the situation.

As I kept up on the news, I confess my heart sank to see the lame reaction on the part of both the police and the British government. The pinnacle of this half-hearted response was when members of the coalition government criticised the number of lengthy jail terms given by the courts to the perpetrators of burglary, disorder and theft.

But my heart sank even more when I realized that, in all likelihood, the real legacy of the August riots would be the quiet and little-noticed legislative reaction which would move Britain one step closer to being a totalitarian police state. I hoped that this wouldn’t happen, but as I observed in 2009, power-hungry governments are all too willing to use national emergencies as a cloak for introducing draconian laws. They know the public are all too willing to give up any number of freedoms if they can be persuaded that it is in the interest of public safety.

Keep reading...

The Role of Beauty in Christian Apologetics

2011-10-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

In an article I wrote for the Charles Colson Center, I pointed out that Christian apologetics must not be merely intellectual – concerned with the Big Questions of the universe and its origins. We must also engage in what a friend of mine has called “cultural apologetics”, working to transform the rhythms and practices of our culture – including the culture of our Christian communities - to reflect the beauty and desirability of Christ.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once noted, “In vain does one repeat what the heart does not find sweet.” It is not good enough simply to prove to someone that Christianity is true; if we are to have an impact for Christ we must also show that the faith is sweet. One of the ways we can do this is through cultural expressions that embody that sweetness, which show that Christianity is not only true, but lovely and desirable.

EU Referendum Vote

2011-10-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

I've just written an article for Christian Voice about an historic opportunity that the people of Britain have to hold a referendum on EU-membership. I would encourage all my British readers to check out the article and to sign the petitions given at the end of it. To do so, click on the following link:

MPs to Vote on EU Referendum

Catholicity and Ecumenism

2011-10-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I was eager to accept the position as Co-Director of the Reformed Liturgical Institute (besides being able to work closely with my friend Greg Soderberg) is because of the Institute’s emphasis on catholicity. As an evangelical who was rescued six years ago from the sectarian home-church mentality, I have found that catholicity and ecumenism are very important concepts to me. By ‘catholic’ I do not mean Roman and by ‘ecumenism’ I do not mean syncretism. Rather, both terms should be understood in the twofold sense that my friend Brad Littlejohn defined catholicity in his book The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity. Speaking of the catholicity of Nevin and Schaff, he wrote that

“first, catholicity in the sense (or similar to the sense) of ecumenism – a passionate desire that all believers may be truly one, one in spirit and one in visible union; second, catholicity in the sense of an embrace of what I am calling the ‘catholic heritage,’ that is, the sense of motherhood of the Church, the mysterious power of the sacraments and the liturgy, the divine authority of the ministry, and the rest of the spiritual worldview that characterized the first five or even the first fifteen centuries of the Church.”

In trying to identify with the first fifteen centuries of the church, this ecumenical emphasis is enthusiastic about emphasizing and celebrating areas of continuity between Protestants and Roman Catholics or between Protestants and Eastern Orthodox.

Sadly, however, I have found that not all of my reformed Protestant friends share this agenda, and one of the primary reasons for this is because of the doctrine of Sola Fide. Indeed, if there is any doctrine that divides Protestant evangelicals from their brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditions, the doctrine that we are justified by faith alone (Sola Fide) has to be it.

At least, that has been my experience. When having conversations with lay people, Christian educators and those in leadership positions in Protestant churches, I am frequently told that while individual Roman Catholics can be saved, this can only happen if they “trust in Christ alone for salvation.” When pressed to explain what it means to “trust in Christ alone for salvation,” the response I am usually given is that it means the Roman Catholic has to (more or less) believe in Sola Fide. To reject Sola Fide is to reject Christ, which is to reject any hope of salvation.

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Bank of England 'injects' £75 billion into the economy - oh joy!

2011-10-12T20:06:00.001-07:00

Echoing points made in earlier posts about hidden taxation and the G20 conference, Daniel Hannan (the "Ron Paul of Britain") has recently written an article titled 'More money printing? My masters are you mad?' exposing the foolishness behind the Bank of England's decision to inject a further £75 billion into the economy. He observes:

I can't believe I'm having to write this, but nothing new will be manufactured, invented or developed as the result of this monetary splurge, no services offered, no businesses founded. Rather, the money already in circulation – the money in your bank account, in your purse, under your mattress – will be worth less. The government, in other words, is helping itself to your savings – and, in doing so, is damaging productivity, disincentivising work and weakening the competitiveness of the British economy.

The principle is a simple one: when the government or its bankers inject more money into the economy, this decreases the value of everyone's savings. To read more how this work, click on some of the above links or read Mr. Hannan's other post, 'Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.'

Obama's Budget Cuts - Reality Check

2011-10-11T08:13:00.001-07:00

Problems with Jay Adams and Nouthetic Counseling

2011-10-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

This evening I’ve been preparing for tomorrow’s psychology class, and because the textbook assigned readings from Jay Adams, it seems a good time to explain to my readers some of the liabilities of Nouthetic counseling and Adams’ non-integrationist approach. Writing this post will hopefully help to refresh me in preparation for tomorrow’s class.

The Story of Secular Psychology

I begin by summarizing a common narrative about psychology that is prevalent among many evangelicals. It goes something like this:

Modern academic psychology’s perspective on the nature of right and wrong is best described as ‘moral relativism.’

Because of a belief in relativism, together with a belief in the innate goodness of man, modern academic psychology does not hold people responsible for their behavior.

Often this evasion of responsibility arises out of psychologists teaching people to think of themselves as victims. As Jay Adams put it, “Psychologists teach people to build a lifestyle around the abuse: ‘I am an abused person.’ Not ‘I’m a farmer, a mother, a child,’ or anything else. I’m an ‘abused person.’ A whole present lifestyle is built around the past.”

Although Christians psychologists have attempted to mix Christianity with psychology, the task is about as fruitless as trying to combine the Bible with evolution. As John MacArthur has pointed out, "Psychology is no more a science than the atheistic evolutionary theory upon which it is based. Like theistic evolution, "Christian psychology" is an attempt to harmonize two inherently contradictory systems of thought. Modern psychology and the Bible cannot be blended without serious compromise to or utter abandonment of the principle of Scripture's sufficiency."

By contrast, once we recognize that scripture is sufficient for all our needs, we do not require the insights of secular psychology. As Martin and Deidre Bobgan put it in their book The End of Christian Psychology, “Most Christians agree that the Bible is the basis for living the Christian life, but very few seem to believe that the Bible is sufficient to deal with all problems of living, which include those nonorganically caused categories of behavior that now carry psychiatric and psychological diagnostic labels....We maintain that God and His Word provide a completely sufficient foundation for living the Christian life, which would include mental-emotional-behavioral health. We further maintain that the Bible contains the healing balm for all nonorganically based problems of living that might be labeled as mental-emotional-behavioral disorders.”

Massive Caricature

Is anything wrong with this picture? Yes. To start with, it is a massive caricature of secular psychology. Consider what this story says about the role of relativism for example. If we take secular psychology at its worst, the problem is more often not a lack of standards of right and wrong (relativism) but the existence of false standards. A psychotherapist will normally always have goals for his patient, goals which at least tacitly acknowledge a framework of right and wrong. But often that framework is based on false standards of right and wrong like, ‘What gives self-fulfillment = good’, etc. More often it will be based on legitimate but incomplete standards of human flourishing. Actual relativism is rare among psychologists for the same reason that aesthetic relativism is almost non-existent among art critics: no one wants to think themselves out of a job. Some framework of right and wrong is about as necessary to professional counseling as the experimental method is to science.

It is also a caricature of modern psychology to imply that they do not encourage people to take responsibility for their problems. This caricature often arises out of the idea that to diagnose problems as being symptoms of childhood trauma or victimization is to remove responsibility from the agent. However, these two things need not be mutually exclusive. In my experience undergoing sessions of psychotherapy in England, talking with others who have undergone psychotherapy, reading bestselling pop psychologists like Scot Peck and Norman Doidge, I have never come across someone urging a patient to identify as a victim in order to stay there and never move on, nor someone encouraging the agent to abrogate responsibility. Now I’m sure there are psychologists out there who fit the caricature, but my point is simply that it is dangerous to generalize because it throws an entire discipline into question. In everything I have come across, if a psychologist diagnoses someone as having been abused, most often they will not be encouraging them to “build a lifestyle of abuse” around it but to identify the challenges they must work to overcome by taking responsibility of their choices and emotional life. Scot Peck and Norman Doidge have some great case studies about that, as does Marie T. Hoffman in her book Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative. While there are no doubt some psychologists who encourage people not to take responsibility, it is problematic to imply that the entire discipline of modern academic psychology is tinged with this brush.

The caricatures of modern psychology and psycho-analysis have meant that Christians like Jay Adams can claim the high moral ground in not availing themselves of the wealth of material available to Christian counselors from these secular disciplines. Instead of plundering the Egyptians in the way that creationists have done when re-appropriating the latest discoveries of science to fit within the creationist narrative, the Nouthetic approach champions a non-integrationist approach to secular psychology. It does so from a platform which misunderstands the nature of common grace and exercises faulty hermeneutical modalities.

Nouthetic Counseling and the Problem of Biblicism

In his article ‘Why shouldn't Christians use the methods of men like Freud, Rogers, and others?’ Jay Adams argues erroneously that the Methods of unbelievers cannot be separated from the worldview of unbelievers. He goes on to point out that “There are many who will say that their counselling is Christian and biblical, but the test comes in evaluating what they actually do when counseling. The issue is whether or not they incorporate other beliefs and practices or not. Nouthetic Counseling is based entirely upon Scripture.”

As this last sentence suggests, Adams approach is characterized by a highly Biblicist modality. Christians are called to be Biblical, but they are not called to be Biblicist. This is because being a Biblicist is unbiblical. But what do I mean by these terms? To put it simply, Biblicism is an approach to scripture which emphasizes the Bible’s complete clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning and, above all, emphasizes the direct applicability of the Bible to every department of human life.

Jay Adams

The key here is the word ‘direct.’ Ranald Macaulay once explained Biblical authority like this. He was speaking in a cathedral which didn’t have any electric lights but was lit up by shafts of light coming through the windows. The shafts of light came down in spotlights, directly lighting up certain areas but indirectly lighting up the entire building. He then said that Biblical authority to that. I think that's a good analogy. The Bible does not address every area of life, just as the shafts of light did not spotlight every inch of the inside of the cathedral. In order to do that the Bible would have to be not only true, but exhaustive. Instead the Bible spotlights certain areas and through them the light of God’s truth difuses to every other area of life. While there is no department of life that the Bible does not address indirectly, in only addresses some areas directly. To be a Biblical thinker means that in every area of life, one will seek to see how the Bible applies either directly or indirectly.

The Biblicist, on the other hand, acts as if every department of life is lit up directly by scripture. This is the approach taken by Jay Adams, whose Biblicism entails him to argue that the Bible is a textbook on counseling, a view he defends here. Jay Adams has made clear in a number of places that although modern psychology can lend insights to our understanding of human behavior, in principle all such insights can be inferred directly from scripture. For Adams the Bible is sufficient in the sense that it directly addresses all human problems. Consequently, the Bible could be treated as a textbook for counseling. As he writes here, speaking of the Christian counselor:

"He does not confront him with his own ideas or the ideas of others. He limits his counsel strictly to that which may be found in the Bible, believing that "All Scripture is breathed out by God and useful for teaching, for conviction, for correction and for disciplined training in righteousness in order to fit and fully equip the man from God for every good task." (2 Timothy 3:16,17) The nouthetic counselor believes that all that is needed to help another person love God and his neighbor as he should, as the verse above indicates, may be found in the Bible.”

No Biblicist is ever entirely consistent since it is impossible to use technology and live in the world without implicitly endorsing disciplines or fields of study not directly addressed in scripture. But the Biblicist tries his hardest to infer everything directly from scripture. Jay Adams did this through frequent word studies and exegesis that theologically conservative Bible scholars often found highly questionable.

Stan Jones and Richard Butman pointed out the problem with this in their book Modern Psychotherapies and in Psychology and the Christian Faith: An Introductory Reader: “While the Bible provides us with life’s most important and ultimate answers as well as the starting points for knowledge of the human condition, it is not an all-sufficient guide for the discipline of counseling. The Bible is inspired and precious, but it is also a revelation of limited scope, the main concern of which is religious in its presentation of God’s redemptive plan for people and the great doctrines of the faith.”

Make no mistake – in giving us insight into religious categories and God’s redemptive purposes, scripture sheds light indirectly on all areas of life. However, since this light is indirect, Christians must work responsibly with other subordinate authorities such as science and empirical observation, using these tools within the Biblical framework. For example, Christians should not be afraid to use with discernment the insights of a man like Freud, since his observations about the human unconscious (much of which is now being verified through advances in neuoroscience) may help to shed light on areas that the Bible only indirectly touches upon. Since the Bible teaches the existence of an objective world, observation about how the world works, including the human brain, can be seen as a further application of the dominion mandate.

The key question is this: has the Bible really given us all we need to construct a system of counseling, or has it given us the framework in which we can use subordinant sources of knowledge (i.e., science and eimpirical observation) to construct a system within the overall umbrella of the Biblical worldview? The same question could, of course, be asked of other disciplines. When we construct automobiles or study the composition of soil, we are working indirectly under the Biblical paradigm, since these are expressions of the dominion mandate. But the Bible doesn’t contain any verses that will tell me how to fix my Dodge. I have to use the subordinate authority (endorsed by scripture) of empirical observation for that.

In order for Adam’s Biblicism to work, we would have to grant that the Bible is not only true, but exhaustive. For Adams the Bible didn’t simply give us a grid by which we can sift the questions of life, but was a counseling cookbook. This led him to de-emphasize the legitimate role that science can play in helping us to understand and even to treat human problems. He wanted to circumscribe psychologists to the domain of science and medicine treating only physical problems while pastors would treat the behavior issues. He once said, “I deplore psychology’s venture into the realms of value, behavior and attitudinal change because it is an intrusion upon the work of the minister…” It is hard to see how these statements do reality to the doctrine of God's common grace.

While psychologists could profitably study things like the behavioral effects of sleep loss, Adams suggested, they needed to get out of the business of trying to change people. As he wrote incompetent to Counsel, “Psychologists may make many helpful studies of man (e.g., on the effects of sleep loss). But psychologists – with neither warrant nor standard from God by which to do so – should get out of the business of trying to change persons.”

Powlison described Adam's commitments like this:

“Jay Adams sought to fence psychology in to only one social role: a descriptive science studying human functioning. He similarly sought to fence psychiatry into a strictly medical role, as doctors to the ailments of the body. Neither profession had title to the functional troubles of the soul, which belonged to the pastor by divine right. Adam’s normative sociology – couched in terms of literal, God-ordained, ‘backyard’ turf – neatly reallocated professional responsibilities in a way that many conservative pastors found appealing.”...

Adams misused the Bible in three ways [according to his evangelical critics]: [1] He treated it as a comprehensive counseling textbook, when the Bible itself never claimed to be such; [2] he thus denied that the secular psychologies might contribute to counseling wisdom by God’s common grace; [3] he misused the Bible, by treating it as a collection of proof texts and quoting selectively. His wrong view of the Bible’s purposes led him to invalidate other sources of God’s truth and to use the Bible improperly."

…Adams had overstated the scope of the Bible’s authoritative guidance by portraying and using it as a ‘textbook’ for counseling. Such an approach was ‘erroneous…narrow and indefensible’ in one of the milder coments; according to the more biting criticisms, Adams had turned the Bible into a ‘celestial problem-solving manual,’ and ‘[It] reminds me that when people used [the Bible] as a textbook of geography, they concluded that the world was flat.’

Behaviorist Anthropology

The reductionist epistemology of Biblicism led Jay Adams to a reductionist anthropology. This can best be appreciated by looking closer to his counseling approach. In his article ‘What is Nouthetic Counseling?’ Jay Adams wrote

“From Biblical times onward, God's people have counseled nouthetically. The word, used in the New Testament primarily by the apostle Paul, is translated ‘admonish, correct or instruct.’… The three ideas found in the word nouthesia are confrontation, concern, and change. To put it simply, nouthetic counseling consists of lovingly confronting people out of deep concern in order to help them make those changes that God requires.”

Nouthetic Counseling thus reduced everything to issues of behavior that can be confronted nouthetically. As Adams put it here, “when they raise questions about life, pain, meaning, and purpose and the like, though they may not realize it, they are talking about problems with God. Every complaint—and men are full of them—in the final analysis is against God.” All human problems are thus reduced to moral confrontation. Adams even formalized this confrontation. In The Christian Counselor’s Manual he gave a table of Counselor Responses to contradict Counselee’s Remarks. If the counselee said, “I can’t” then the Counselor was urged to respond, “Do you mean can’t or won’t?” If the counselee says “Everything [one] is against me” the counselor is instructed to respond, “No, you are wrong. If you are a Christian the Bible says the opposite: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’” And so forth.

The nuts-and-bolts approach, with its promise of quick results through moral confrontation, has been appealing to busy pastors. Since counselling is really nothing other than private preaching under Adams' paradigm, pastors found they could pick up on it relatively easy without training in psychotherapy. However, many of Adams critics have felt that this approach leads to a reductionistic anthropology which falsely assumes that all human problems can be reduced to issues of behavior and moral sin. Dr. Tim Rice described this view in Homeschool Psych: Preparing Christian Homeschool Students for Psych 101 when he wrote, “A Christian worldview emphasizes sin as the primary (if not exclusive) cause of mental and emotional pain; modern psychology attributes it to anything but sin.” The question, of course, is what we mean by sin. If we mean sin in the general sense of the fall, then it is true that a Christian is committed to saying that all problems came about because of the fall. But if we mean moral sin committed by specific agents, then it is problematic to suggest that all problems arise from this. Rice references an article by Dr. Thomas Szasz that questions whether mental illness even exists (“My aim in this essay is to raise the question ‘Is there such a thing as mental illness?’ and to argue that there is not.... mental illnesses do not exist”.)

The Nouthetic model thus fails to understand people as God actually created them because it fails to attend to the whole of their life experience. It circumscribes the behavioral to being the most important. Moreover, the Nouthetic tends to reduce all human nerousis to either organic dysfunction or sin. Emotional, social or psychological problems that do not fall into one of those two categories didn’t seem to exist for within Adams’ schema. Not surprisingly, therefore, sociocultural and interpersonal trauma received scant treatment in Adams’ voluminous writings. By reducing all human problems to issues that can be addressed with either medication or direct moral confrontation, the Nouthetic model ended up excluding vast swabs of the human person from the picture.

“Nouthetic counseling in its fullest sense,” Adams once wrote, “then, is simply an application of the means of sanctification.” Seeing everything in terms of behavior and sanctification led Adams to minimize the sense in which meeting one’s psychological and social needs can also play an important role in a counselor’s goals.

One can be sympathetic of this approach because it aims to forestall what Adams called ‘blameshifting’ and the victim mentality. However, the liability is that it gives insufficient attention to the important contexts and causes of sin and that it leads to a highly pragmatic and behaviorist approach to the human person. In his PhD thesis The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context, David Powlison wrote that

Adams’ counseling was oriented towards producing specific action, toward building new skills and habits in his counselees. His counseling was a training program in problem-solving, a ‘how-to’ course in godly living. He exhorted his readers, ‘Problems must be viewed as projects, not topics.’ … He believed that motivated counselees could change relatively rapidly but not instantly. He thought most discrete problems could be significantly remedied in six to twelve weeks if both counselor and counselees stayed on task….Adams’ piety and pastoral counsel were alike rational, pragmatic, disciplined, and hard-working.

Adams push for instant results, his rapid but superficial methodology meant that more complicated cases could fall through the gaps. In an article that Richard Winter wrote titled, ‘Jay Adams – is he really biblical enough?’ Winter said “I would imagine that those who find it difficult to change rapidly do not stay with Jay Adams in counseling and are seen by him, not as failures in his theory or method, but rather as people who are in deep rebellion or sin. It goes without saying that this may be damaging to such individuals.”

Another liability of Adams reductionist/behaviorist anthropology is that he taught and counseled with the understanding that behavior determines feelings, not the other way round. However, we would do well to question whether this approach, which some critics have legitimately termed a ‘pervasive externalism’, can work as an all-purpose explanation encompassing all the complexities of human experience. John Carter put it like this: “Nouthetic counselors…leave out the ‘insides’ of the behaving person… the most glaring weakness of nouthetic counseling theory is that…no theory of motivation or fundamental dynamic tendency of the person is articulated.’

The emphasis on moral confrontation within the Nouthetic paradigm is not wrong. However, I would suggest that often this has to come at the end of a long process in which the counselor gains the trust of the patient. It can be a slow process of showing respect to the person being helped, a listening ear and developing an environment that feels safe. This cannot be achieved if the person being counseled must endure repeated confrontation from the very beginning. (I speak from my own experience helping people and also talking to others who have undergone therapy.) This is especially true if the person has been the victim of sexual abuse in which the role of self-awareness can be a crucial pre-condition to behavioral change. Victims of sex abuse often hide from themselves as a way of coping with the pain, and thus can have major deficits in self-awareness. I have known people who were victims of unimaginable trauma who had to undergo psychotherapy for years before they got to the point of being able to directly address their problems. Sometimes people enter therapy with problems they think are the real issue, only to discover other issues deeper down that take time and patience to address. All of this takes time, a trusting environment, and a counselor who is willing to avail himself of the enormous resources available within the adademic discipline of psychotherapy. If one falsely believes that everything one needs for this is directly addressed in the Bible, then it is a disaster waiting to happen.

Richard Hooker vs. Michael Horton

2011-10-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

In his A Learned Discourse on Justification, the judicious Hooker wrote:

They be not all faithless that are either weak in assenting to the truth or stiff in maintaining things any way opposite to the truth of Christian doctrine. But as many as hold the foundation which is precious, although they hold it but weakly and as it were by a slender thread, although they frame many base and unsuitable things upon it, things that cannot abide the trial of the fire, yet shall they pass the fiery trial and be saved, who indeed have builded themselves upon the rock which is the foundation of the Church.

“We affirm that individual Roman Catholics who for whatever reason do not self-consciously assent to the precise definitions of the Roman Catholic Magisterium regarding justification…but who think and speak evangelically about these things, are indeed our brothers and sisters in Christ, despite Rome’s official position.”

To read more about this, visit my article 'Sola Fide: The Great Ecumenical Doctrine'. In that article you may learn some surprising things about Sola Fide that you didn't know before.

Daniel Hannan on Euro-Debt Crisis

2011-10-06T10:52:00.001-07:00

New Position and Controversial Paper

2011-10-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

I am honored to assume the position of co-director for the Reformed Liturgical Institute and I look forward to working with the exceptional team of intellectuals affiliated with the Institute, especially Director Gregory Soderberg.

For those who are unfamiliar with the work of RLI, we aim to promote worship which is biblical, God-Centered, historically informed, and which strives for serious and vigorous participation from the people of God. Some of the ways we seek to do this is through

Strengthening local churches and help churchmen to mature in their understanding of Reformed liturgical principles.
Making reformed liturgical resources available online.
Encouraging the use of the Christian Year or church calendar as an aspect of the dominion of Christ over time.
Promoting and hosting conferences related to worship

To launch my time as co-director, I have written a controversial paper for the Institute on the ecumenical implications of Sola Fide. No doubt the paper will generate much controversy and debate in the days to come, so keep checking the Institute and this blog for updates. To read my paper, click here.