Running in Virtuous Circles: The Truth of the Bible

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Have you ever wondered why application forms ask you to list references? I recently filled out a reference form for a friend, and as I was saying things like “this person is reliable, trustworthy, and a good judge of character,” it occurred to me that one reason I thought he was a good judge of character is that he thought highly of me –that is, judged my character good. In fact, the reason he was advising his potential employer to call me was that he thought I was reliable and trustworthy enough to say that he was reliable and trustworthy. He had vouched for my ability to vouch for him, so I vouched for him as he had vouched for me. But what did this tell the person who was considering hiring him? The only real information being generated by the process was that my friend and I had a mutual admiration society, and considered each other trustworthy. I hope some other information or evidence is introduced into that hiring process, or else the potential employer is trapped in a vicious circle.

When Christians say that the Bible is trustworthy, skeptics are quick to point out that their arguments are circular: the Bible is true because it’s the word of God. God wouldn’t lie, and God says the Bible is true. As illustrated in this “Faith-Based Connect the Dots” cartoon by the redoubtable freethinker cartoonist Don Addis, an argument that presupposes its own conclusion is an argument that leads you round and round.

Given that the Bible is in fact the word of God, there are nevertheless right ways and wrong ways to go about claiming something like that. If you simply assert it, or assert it in a tail-chasing, self-proving way, you are giving people no reason –literally no reason, a lack of rational appeals– to entertain your claim. If you’ve ever been trapped in a conversation with a conspiracy buff, you know how this goes:

“Dude. The government is intentionally poisoning the sky with chemtrails.”
“But there is no evidence of what you are saying.”
“Exactly. The government is hiding the evidence. The lack of evidence proves that it is a government cover-up.”
“Oh look, this is my stop. Well, see you later.” (walks fifteen blocks under poisonous secret biological warfare chemtrail sky just to get away from chemtrail guy)

Circular argumentation is bad, and anybody who wants to be taken seriously ought to take the time to review the evidence for what they believe. When somebody asks why Christians believe the Bible is true, we ought to be able to point to evidence that is publicly available to any interested inquirer, evidence that doesn’t just assert authority but actually gives them something to think about. R. A. Torrey had “Ten Reasons I Believe the Bible is the Word of God” on the tip of his tongue at all times. John Calvin, though he was very clear that the most important thing is the witness of the Spirit, filled a whole chapter of his Institutes with some of the “reasons, neither few nor feeble, by which the dignity and majesty of the Scriptures may be not only proved to the pious, but also completely vindicated against the cavils of slanderers.” The Bible comes to us equipped with demonstrable antiquity, external corroboration, fulfilled prophecies, and historical effects which are adequate to commend it to any impartial investigator, and put it on a totally different level from conspiracy claims and mere assertion. Of course, to present the claims of Scripture in a credible way, you need to know the evidence. Any good apologetics organization anywhere can get you started on that task –you can even go get a degree in it.

Once you’ve added the heft of evidence to your claim, you’ve escaped the vicious circle and are ready to participate in polite human discourse. Suddenly, people can tell the difference between your claims and the claims of the guy on the corner shouting, “I am God! Hear thou my words, for they are true, for I speak them, and I am God!” When other devout people, in all sincerity, put forth their own holy books with putative revelations from God, you’ve got something to talk with them about instead of degenerating into “Is not,” “Is so,” “Is not,” “Is so,” “Is not,” “Is so.” People who make claims bring evidence; that’s just how we do things in civilized society.

But there’s another thing to watch out for as you think through what is true about the Bible. While you’re staying out of the question-begging fallacy, don’t let the charge of circularity scare you away from the legitimate circularity that is always necessarily involved in believing that the Bible is God’s word. Yes, your thoughts must travel in a biblical circle for the following two reasons.

First, “what you believe about the Bible” is your doctrine of Scripture. Just like “what you believe about Jesus” is your christology, and “what you believe about God” is your theology, and “what you believe about the church” is your ecclesiology, so “what you believe about the Bible” is your bibliology, an inelegant word for your doctrine of Scripture. Now, where do Christians derive their doctrines about anything? They derive them from Scripture. The source of all our knowledge about the things of God is the word of God. When you are framing your ideas about creation, salvation, the Holy Spirit, or anything else, we take our information and our interpretive keys from Scripture. When the time comes to frame some theological claims about Scripture itself, we behave exactly the same way we do in the other areas. We put together a biblical theology of Scripture. The only alternative is to have an un-biblical theology of Scripture, and who wants that? Insofar as the doctrine of Scripture is one of the doctrines, one among many, of a scriptural religion, it is legitimately circular to have a biblical theology of Scripture.

Second, if I may be so rude as to appeal to Aristotle, “first principles are indemonstrable.” That is, if you are going to prove anything, you have to presuppose other things that count as proof, which rely on other things that count as proof, until you get to first principles that you can’t prove because they’re first. Aristotle applied this to that self-evident fundamental building-block of all reasoning, the law of non-contradiction (X can’t be X and not-X at the same time in the same sense), and this first principle was nowhere more memorably defended than by Avicenna, who said “Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical.” Ouch! Harshly put, but point taken: there would be no talking to somebody who denies that first principle, because they would be both denying it and not denying it at the same time.

Aside from being morally outrageous and wrong, beating and burning have been conclusively proven to be ineffective in persuading people to consider the truth of your religion in a reasonable way. But the philosophical point about indemonstrable first principles also applies to the fact of divine revelation. If there is such a thing as God’s word, it would necessarily be the highest authority by a factor of infinity, and incapable of being proved by something higher or prior. What would you use to prove it? If you put “God says so” in one side of the balances, what could possibly go into the other side of the balances to exert equal weight? No arguments, no human authorities, no evidences, no historical probabilities, no analogies with other trusted things, no nothing could balance it out or weigh as much. If –and of course it’s a big if, the biggest– there’s a word of God, it’s the absolute truth with no peer or measure. The mind which received it would have to orbit that truth, necessarily moving in a circle around it. Of course it’s one thing to say how such a revelation would have to be received, and another thing altogether to say that the Bible is such a revelation. If you say the latter, you can’t just assert it and expect anybody to pay more attention to you than to the last umpteen people who asserted divine authority for their own favorite books. You have to bring some evidence, which brings us back to where we started this post. Full circle.

There is a kind of circular argument that is a logical fallacy: it presupposes the thing it is claiming to prove, and thus is simply asserting itself without real argumentative support. But don’t lapse into circlephobia: not every circle is vicious. There are good reasons for thinking in a circular fashion about the Bible. That circularity –a biblical theology of Scripture as the word of God– is legitimate, virtuous, and far from vicious.

Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality

By Anna Mathie
First Things

When I started reading The Lord of the Rings as an undergraduate, I was half-embarrassed to be doing so. I might become one of those girls who left each other messages on the dorm message board in elvish runes and stayed up late discussing the geography of Middle Earth in fake English accents. Even after I had overcome my snobbery and discovered the book’s magnificence, literary pretensions still kept me away from the appendices: detailed explanations of invented anthropology and linguistics—what could they be but the self-indulgent folly of an otherwise great writer? But when chance or boredom finally led me to leaf through them one day, I came upon what I still find the most exquisitely sorrowful moment in a book filled with exquisitely beautiful sorrow.

The wise and good Arwen, who has given up her elvish immortality to be the mortal Aragorn’s queen, is overcome at his deathbed and pleads for him to stay with her longer. He refuses, saying that it is right for him to go with good grace and before he grows feeble. Then he tells her:

I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.

Arwen replies that she has no choice:

I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.

In this new and bitter knowledge, she goes away alone after Aragorn’s death, “the light of her eyes . . . quenched . . . cold and gray as nightfall that comes without a star.” She dies alone in the dead land of Lorien, where deathless Elves once lived.

For Arwen, otherwise infinitely wiser than we, death is the one unknown, a new and unexpected discovery. Aragorn knows better; he knows, as all mortals should, that comfort is impossible and even unworthy in the face of death. Yet he still holds fast to what Arwen has only known as an abstract theological tenet: that death is truly God’s gift.

I cry whenever I reread this passage; it haunts me like no other, though it’s hard to explain why. At the heart of it is the phrase “the gift of the One to Men.” Tolkien looks unblinkingly at “the loss and the silence” of death, but remains steadfast: death is our curse, but also our blessing.

He has hidden this particular tale away in an appendix, but the same idea of mortality permeates the whole book. The plot centers on a ring that gives immortality and corrupts its bearer. Much of the book’s character interest arises from the interactions between mortal and immortal races, who both mystify and fascinate each other. The structure of the work also echoes mortality itself. I have heard friends criticize the long and leisurely denouement (over a hundred pages), but I’ve never understood such complaints. Myself, I was grateful for every page, always vividly aware that they would run out all too soon. Those closing chapters are a portrait of mortality: however happily a story ends, it must end, and that itself is our great sorrow. All that is beautiful and beloved dies. The Fellowship of the Ring accomplishes its quest, but with the end of its troubles comes the separation of its members. Gandalf and the High Elves win the war, but their own victory banishes them from Middle Earth. With them “many fair things will fade and be forgotten.” Frodo has saved the world but now longs to leave it. This has to be one of literature’s saddest happy endings. Tolkien makes us savor the bittersweet, for he knows (like Gandalf) that “not all tears are an evil.”

Clearly, mortality is at the heart of this story. The subject has become a hot topic today, with Leon Kass and other “mortalists” arguing against a research culture that sees death and aging merely as foes to be overcome. If medicine succeeds in making man immortal, or even much longer-lived, the mortalists argue, much that makes human life worthwhile will be lost. Kass has used the wisdom of such ancient authors as Homer to illustrate his vision of mortality’s benefits. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien makes a Christian case for the same claim. In Tolkien’s world, immortality and long life lead even the noblest creatures to a spiritual dead end, or to outright corruption.

The virtues of mortality are most obvious in the great paradox of the book: that the very mortal Hobbits are the only ones who can resist the Ring’s seduction and destroy it. Seemingly the most insignificant and lowliest race of all, they spend their (relatively) short lives in small pursuits. They have little use for lofty “elvish” ideas. As most characters in The Lord of the Rings remark, they are unlikely saviors of the world. In fact, their lowly mortality may be their greatest asset.

The Hobbits are firmly enfleshed. They love gardening, visiting, eating and drinking—“six meals a day (when they could get them)”—and parties and pres-ents. Also, unlike the other lands we see, the Shire is full of children, for Tolkien tells us that Hobbits have very large families, Frodo and Bilbo being “as bachelors very exceptional.” This is true of no other people in Middle Earth. The immortal Elves, of course, need few children. Arwen seems to be spoken of as one of the youngest of her people; they call her their “Evenstar.” Legolas has apparently been his father’s heir for aeons. The Dwarves, though mortal, are very long-lived, and they have children so seldom that many believe they are not born, but grow from stones. They have few women, and even fewer children, as many women choose not to marry; likewise with the men, “very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.” The Ents seem to live more or less forever, but even they are dying out. “There have been no Entings—no children, you would say, not for a terrible long count of years,” Treebeard tells the Hobbits. “The Ents gave their love to the things they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thoughts to other things.” Finally the Entwives disappeared altogether.

It is not only the older and the lesser races that have ceased to bear children. Barrenness also characterizes Gondor. Once great, the city has declined. Pippin sees there many houses that have fallen empty, so that “it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there.” Beregond the guard tells him, “There were always too few children in the city.” When Faramir, younger son of the Steward of Gondor, meets Frodo, he explains his country’s decay more fully:

Death was ever present, because the Numenoreans still, as they had in their own kingdom and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered old men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anorien had no heir.

Personal immortality, or the lure of it, seems to turn members of all these races in on themselves. The Elves dwell more in their memories than in the present; the long-lived mortal races turn to glorious deeds in an attempt at personal immortality. For the Elves and the Ents, the result is a kind of lethargy. For men it can be far more sinister: in Boromir and especially in Denethor, Tolkien shows the pride and despair that come from the pursuit of personal immortality through individual glory.

The Hobbits have no illusions that they can in any sense live forever. As a result, they concentrate on immediate and animal concerns. They pursue immortality only by a far humbler and more mortal path, the ordinary, impersonal, animal immortality of parenthood. It’s no accident that everyone who meets the Hobbits mistakes them for children at first. Even after long acquaintance, they are to Legolas “those merry young folk” and to Treebeard “the Hobbit children.” Something about the Hobbits is so lively and natural that they invariably turn the minds of others toward childhood and children.

This fertility, this willingness to pass life on to a new generation rather than grasping for “endless life unchanging,” is the Hobbits’ great strength, as it should likewise be mankind’s proper strength. It makes them at once humbler than immortals, since they place less confidence in their own individual abilities, and more hopeful, since their own individual defeats are not the end of everything. The life that lives for its offspring may never achieve perfection, but neither is it ever utterly defeated or utterly corrupted. Some hope always remains. The Elf Legolas and the Dwarf Gimli discuss this tenacity of mortals when they first see Gondor. Gimli observes in the older stonework of the city a promise unfulfilled by the newer:

“It is ever so with the things that men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas. “And that will lie in times and places unlooked for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.”

Here and throughout the book, seed is Tolkien’s symbol for the hope peculiar to mortals. Gandalf tells Denethor that he too is a steward, charged with preserving all good things. He will not have failed completely, he says, “if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.” Gondor’s emblem, a white tree, withered centuries ago. Even after Sauron’s defeat, Aragorn is anxious for his realm until he can find a seedling to replant in the Citadel. For as he tells Gandalf, however long his life, he is still mortal. Gandalf’s answer tells Aragorn to seek hope in mortality: “Turn your face from the green world, and look where all seems barren and cold.” Aragorn finds the seedling—growing alone on a stony, snowy slope—that signifies the continuance of his reign through his heirs. He seeks life in a place of death, as he did before in the Paths of the Dead, as Arwen did when she chose mortal life with him, as the Hobbits did when they undertook the hopeless quest, and as Gandalf did when he died, though immortal.

The hope of life that mortality offers is far from certain. Legolas and Gimli’s conversation continues with Gimli wondering if men’s deeds will “yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens.” “To that the Elves know not the answer,” replies Legolas.

We do not know the answer either. Tolkien is not cheerily trying to pretend that our condition is ideal, or that mortality guarantees us any kind of virtue. But unlike the earthly immortality he has envisioned for us, our mortality offers another and higher hope beyond this world, however uncertain it may seem. This hope is the comfort Aragorn offers Arwen in his last words: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold, we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell.”

cTen Reasons Why I Believe the Bible is the Word of God

By R. A. Torrey

I was brought up to believe that the Bible was the Word of God. In early life I accepted it as such upon the authority of my parents, and never gave the question any serious thought. But later in life my faith in the Bible was utterly shattered through the influence of the writings of a very celebrated, scholarly and brilliant sceptic. I found myself face to face with the question, Why do you believe the Bible is the Word of God?

I had no satisfactory answer. I determined to go to the bottom of this question. If satisfactory proof could not be found that the Bible was God's Word I would give the whole thing up, cost what it might. If satisfactory proof could be found that the Bible was God's Word I would take my stand upon it, cost what it might. I doubtless had many friends who could have answered the question satisfactorily, but I was unwilling to confide to them the struggle that was going on in my own heart; so I sought help from God and from books, and after much painful study and thought came out of the darkness of scepticism into the broad daylight of faith and certainty that the Bible from beginning to end is God's Word. The following pages are largely the outcome of that experience of conflict and final victory. I will give Ten Reasons why I believe the Bible is the Word of God.

FIRST, on the ground of the testimony of Jesus Christ.
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SECOND, on the ground of its fulfilled prophecies.
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THIRD, on the ground of the unity of the book.
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FOURTH, on the ground of the immeasurable superiority of the teachings of the Bible to those of any other and all other books.
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FIFTH, on the ground of the history of the book, its victory over attack.
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SIXTH, on the ground of the character of those who accept and of those who reject the book.
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SEVENTH, on the ground of the influence of the book.
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EIGHTH, on the ground of the inexhaustible depth of the book.
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NINTH, on the ground of the fact that as we grow in knowledge and holiness we grow toward the Bible.
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TENTH, on the ground of the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit.
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Trapped In Camelot

By Edward B. Driscoll Jr.
TCS Daily

[T]he November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As James Piereson recently told me, "If Kennedy had been killed by a right winger with the same evidence that condemned Oswald, there never would have been any talk about conspiracies. It would have fit neatly into the moral framework of 1950s and '60s-style liberalism. And the liberals would have been off and running with it, and no one would have talked about conspiracies."

That's the subject of Piereson's new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, in which he argues both that Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War, and that the repression of his killer's ideology caused tremendous psychological damage to the collective health of the nation.

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Piereson believes that it was a combination of the news of the days leading up to Kennedy's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy's desire to have her husband be a Lincolnesque martyr to civil rights, and a fear of upsetting the Soviet Union and Cuba that caused the background of Oswald to be suppressed.

But the actual causes of liberal disorientation regarding Kennedy's death and the motives of his killer predate his assassination by several years. It was during the 1950s and early '60s that that liberal elites declared America's nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon "a vast literature that developed in the '50s and early '60s about the threat from the far right," Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell's The Radical Right.

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"So when the news spreads that Kennedy has been killed, the immediate response is that it must be a right winger who's done it," Piereson notes. And while the Birch-era right definitely had severe issues, JFK's assassin on November 22, 1963 had, of course, a polar opposite ideology. "When the word is now spread that Oswald has been captured, and that he has a communist past, and they start running film of him demonstrating for Castro in the previous summer, there is a tremendous disorientation at this."

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The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level. This was in stark contrast to the narrative that framed the death of Abraham Lincoln a century prior. "When Booth shot Lincoln, everybody knew that Booth was a southern partisan, and they could easily understand why he wanted to kill Lincoln," Piereson says. "Northerners blamed the south for this, and you assimilate it into the moral framework of the Civil War."

In contrast, "Liberals had great difficulty assimilating this idea that a communist would kill Kennedy. It made sense to them that an anti-civil rights person might do it, or an anti-communist might do it, but not a communist."

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"However, that is not how the Kennedy assassination was interpreted," Piereson says, with enormous understatement. Instead, a sense of collective guilt is imposed on the nation through its liberal elites and media. "And this is really the first time that you get on the liberal-left this idea that America is guilty. But this however now becomes a metaphor for the left for everything that happens moving on in the 1960s."

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"In 1963, you have a fairly conservative country, culturally," Piereson notes. "You have a communist assassinate the president, a popular president. In 1968, the country has kind of gone off the rails, especially liberal-left culture as you find in the universities, and places like that. The students are taking drugs, and they're demonstrating, and they're rioting against the war in Vietnam.

"Their hero is Castro, and people like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung," Pierson says, noting the surfeit of Castro and Ché-style army fatigues being worn on campuses. "So how do you get, really, from this place in 1963, where Kennedy is shot by a communist, to '68 where communists like Castro are heroes to the left?"

Piereson believes this could have only happened due to the cultural disorientation caused by the airbrushing of Kennedy's assassination and the attempt to "view it as a civil rights event, instead of a Cold War event."

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The psychological discord in the wake of JFK's assassination also destroyed the line that had previously separated New Deal-style liberals with the more extreme hard left. "The anti-Americanism and the conspiracy theorizing and the rough political language characterized by the left now enters into liberalism," Piereson says. "These movements now meld from the sixties on. Now, it wasn't just the Kennedy assassination; obviously, the war in Vietnam was a factor, too. But the Kennedy assassination's in there-a significant event which breaks down the wall between the far left and the liberals. And this is one of the things that now leads, as I say, to the collapse of liberalism, to the kind of thing that we have now."

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Which may be the most curious element of Kennedy's death: Oswald may have been the ultimate "liberal in a hurry," as communists were often called during the Cold War. But Kennedy's death and the left's reaction to it caused many sixties and seventies liberal ideas to become seemingly frozen in amber. Which is the final remarkable paradox for a group that likes to call itself "progressive" these days. (more)

Married With Children: Could anything be crazier?

by Kate Bluett
Salvo Magazine

The New York Times reported on October 15, 2006, that married couples—“with and without children”—now make up a minority of American households. Don’t worry, the Times hurried to assure its readers, marriage isn’t dead: “The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry.” Be that as it may, the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University finds that the likelihood of an American marrying has been declining for decades, and the average age at first marriage has risen since 1960 from 23 to 27 for men and from 20 to 26 for women.
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The Times sums up the decline in marriages by stating, “Marriage has been facing more competition.” This competition for the title of “Most American Households” comes primarily from cohabitation. In other words, couples are moving in together instead of marrying, or cohabiting first and then marrying. Why has shacking up become such a popular option while marriage has declined in popularity? There are many answers, but some of the most common are: solidarity with homosexual couples who cannot marry, the fact that working women need no longer rely on marriage for economic security, and the idea that cohabitation before marriage is a good preventative of divorce.

Today’s young adults grew up watching divorces, and according to the recent book Midlife Crisis at 30 by Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin, “even those with married parents were left with an uneasy anxiety, the feeling that things that were supposed to be permanent just might change.” Young women are therefore delaying marriage until after they’ve established themselves personally and professionally as a sort of “Divorce Insurance Policy”; should they be left to support themselves and their children alone, they’ll be able to. And as a supplemental policy, more and more couples are choosing cohabitation as a form of trial marriage, an extra guarantee against the possibility of divorce.

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Alas for young love. Conventional wisdom in this case is wrong. Couples that cohabit before marriage are more likely to divorce afterwards. Cohabiting couples also have higher rates of child abuse and domestic violence. And more and more children—40 percent now—will spend some part of their lives in a cohabiting household. That means these children will experience the same difficulties as the children of divorce; they will enter adulthood in the same quandary as their parents did, searching for permanent relationships and having no idea how to find and maintain them. Perhaps they’ll believe, as some of their parents do, that marriage happens magically, and that there are no rules about it anymore because none are needed. They’ll search for their soul mates, but many of them will find their ex-spouses.

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It takes, among other things, the conviction that divorce is not an option (see “Catholic Girl” above). I know myself well enough to know how much I like the easy way out. Only with the mental certainty that my marriage is forever am I able to put forth the effort—and it’s a big one—to make my marriage happy. Part of that effort was watching happy couples during my engagement. These couples talked to each other, never went to bed angry, and never gave each other the silent treatment. They studied compromise the way they’d once studied long division. And none of them had assumed that marriage would be easy; thus, none of them ever decided that difficulties in marriage automatically mean divorce is in the cards. I entered my marriage with no illusions that my fiancé was my soul mate, or that he and I would be able to read each other’s hearts and minds in silence. Rather, I walked up the aisle ready to work and ready to talk.

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We’ve all heard the news that Americans are having fewer and fewer children than ever, and that they are reproducing below the replacement rate. What may be less well known is the fact that this decline represents a decades-long trend, and that as Americans have had fewer and fewer children over the years, those children have seen less and less of child-rearing as adults. American family life is losing its “child-centeredness.” And the adult children of the fertility decline are not just having fewer children; they are in many cases not having children at all. According to the National Marriage Project, “the percentage of households with children has declined from half of all households in 1960 to less than one-third today—the lowest percentage in the nation’s history.”

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If you measure sanity by the size of your checking account, parenthood is madness. If you seek sanity in self-sufficiency, marriage is crazy. If, on the other hand, you want a sane culture—one that can not only perpetuate itself and pass on its values but also work to establish justice and care for the least powerful of its members—then the divorce culture and childfree-by-choice demographics must be dismissed as the products of a diseased mind. Because culturally speaking, sanity is the ability to love others; only compassion can drive the search for justice and the effort of social perpetuation. And my generation’s minds have been warped by the mad scientists of divorce and consumerism.

Our families were destroyed by divorce, but families are the schools where children first learn to love. You might say school ended before we took our finals. So now many of us are rejecting that school altogether. And where we are starting families, we are more and more often starting them out of wedlock, meaning that our children will have the same difficulties learning about love, self-sacrifice, and delayed gratification that we did. So the problems of my generation will be worse in the next. The world will be even more disjointed, populated by people who live more and more in their own customized bubbles, by people who no longer seek the lost permanence of community and instead buy relationships for which they know the expiration dates. Those in my generation don’t have babies; they have appliances and iPods. And in another twenty years, those iPods will probably need therapy.

There are two options: Either we stop having children altogether, so as not to inflict the madness of broken families on them, or we start having children and making a concerted effort to learn how to make love permanent. Our choices are love or isolation. I know which I’m choosing: All questions of sanity aside, my husband and I are trying to conceive. Starting a family won’t be easy, and it’s true that we may not get much sympathy from our peers. But maybe they can get some help from us. Just maybe, while my husband and I are trying to perpetuate his dimples and my eyes, we can also work to turn the tide away from selfishness and fear in the next generation. Yes, I know it sounds like a crazy plan, but sanity is often mistaken for psychosis in a world gone stark-raving mad. (more)

Focus on the Public Purpose of Marriage: Protecting Children

By Colleen Carroll Campbell
Ethics and Public Policy Center

Battles over same-sex marriage typically turn on arguments about gay rights, judicial activism and views on homosexuality. Absent are answers to a more fundamental question: What is the public purpose of marriage?
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Blankenhorn worries that this child-welfare ideal is endangered by a view increasingly prevalent among Americans: that marriage is merely another lifestyle choice, the public recognition of a private relationship with no intrinsic connection to parenthood.

That view is a historical anomaly. For thousands of years, marriage has existed in nearly every society for the purpose of ensuring that a child is raised by his mother and father. Far from simply blessing a private relationship between consenting adults, marriage has aimed to promote stable sexual unions between men and women whose public commitment creates a suitable context for childrearing.

In recent decades, factors ranging from increasing acceptance of sex outside marriage and wider use of contraception to the institution of no-fault divorce laws gradually have changed our view of marriage as a permanent, public bond linked to parenthood. A Pew survey released this week confirmed this trend, finding that most Americans now consider adult happiness, not child rearing, as the primary purpose of marriage, and most do not consider children very important to a successful marriage.

Some see this severance of the link between love, marriage and the baby carriage as social progress. Yet Blankenhorn sees a downside: rising rates of divorce, unmarried cohabitation and births to unwed mothers that have resulted in more children growing up without a married mother and father.
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This radical change would affect all Americans by further eroding our fragile marriage culture. As Blankenhorn and other scholars have noted, international surveys show that people in countries where gay marriage and civil unions are accepted widely tend to be less positive about marriage, more accepting of divorce and less inclined to believe that people who want children should marry.

Marriage survives in a culture as long as a critical mass of the population views it as the socially acceptable context for childbearing and childrearing. When popular support for marriage drops too low and public policy denies the unique value of marriage between a man and a woman as a guarantor of social stability, fewer men and women marry. More children are deprived of the presence of their mothers and fathers. And marriage no longer serves its civic purpose, which always has been more about defending child welfare than validating adult desires. (more)

No, I'm Not Offended

By Albert Mohler
www.albertmohler.com

Aren't you offended? That is the question many Evangelicals are being asked in the wake of a recent document released by the Vatican. The document declares that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church -- or, in words the Vatican would prefer to use, the only institutional form in which the Church of Christ subsists.

No, I am not offended. In the first place, I am not offended because this is not an issue in which emotion should play a key role. This is a theological question, and our response should be theological, not emotional. Secondly, I am not offended because I am not surprised. No one familiar with the statements of the Roman Catholic Magisterium should be surprised by this development. This is not news in any genuine sense. It is news only in the current context of Vatican statements and ecumenical relations. Thirdly, I am not offended because this new document actually brings attention to the crucial issues of ecclesiology, and thus it presents us with an opportunity.

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The document claims a unique legitimacy for the Roman Catholic Church as the church established by Christ. The document stakes this identity on a claim to apostolic succession, centered in the papacy itself. As the document states, "This Church, constituted and organised in this world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him."

Lest anyone miss the point, the document then goes on to acknowledge that the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy also stake a claim to apostolic succession, and thus they are referred to as "Churches" by the Vatican. As for the churches born in whatever form out of the Reformation -- they are not true churches at all, only "ecclesial communities."

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According to Catholic doctrine, these Communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called "Churches" in the proper sense.

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Evangelicals should appreciate the candor reflected in this document. There is no effort here to confuse the issues. To the contrary, the document is an obvious attempt to set the record straight. The Roman Catholic Church does not deny that Christ is working redemptively through Protestant and evangelical churches, but it does deny that these churches which deny the authority of the papacy are true churches in the most important sense. The true church, in other words, is that church identified through the recognition of the papacy. Those churches that deny or fail to recognize the papacy are "ecclesial Communities," not churches "in the proper sense."

I appreciate the document's clarity on this issue. It all comes down to this -- the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to the primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Pope as the universal monarch of the church is the defining issue. Roman Catholics and Evangelicals should together recognize the importance of that claim. We should together realize and admit that this is an issue worthy of division. The Roman Catholic Church is willing to go so far as to assert that any church that denies the papacy is no true church. Evangelicals should be equally candid in asserting that any church defined by the claims of the papacy is no true church. This is not a theological game for children, it is the honest recognition of the importance of the question.

The Reformers and their heirs put their lives on the line in order to stake this claim. In this era of confusion and theological laxity we often forget that this was one of the defining issues of the Reformation itself. Both the Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church staked their claim to be the true church -- and both revealed their most essential convictions in making their argument. As Martin Luther and John Calvin both made clear, the first mark of the true Church is the ministry of the Word -- the preaching of the Gospel. The Reformers indicted the Roman Catholic Church for failing to exhibit this mark, and thus failing to be a true Church. The Catholic church returned the favor, defining the church in terms of the papacy and magisterial authority. Those claims have not changed.

I also appreciate the spiritual concern reflected in this document. The artificial and deadly dangerous game of ecumenical confusion has obscured issues of grave concern for our souls. I truly believe that Pope Benedict and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are concerned for our evangelical souls and our evangelical congregations. Pope Benedict is not playing a game. He is not asserting a claim to primacy on the playground. He, along with the Magisterium of his church, believes that Protestant churches are gravely defective and that our souls are in danger. His sacramental theology plays a large role in this concern, for he believes and teaches that a church without submission to the papacy has no guaranteed efficacy for its sacraments. (This point, by the way, explains why the Protestant churches that claim a sacramental theology are more concerned about this Vatican statement -- it denies the basic validity of their sacraments.) (more)

The Problem of Equality

By
By Samuel Gregg, D.Phil.
Acton Commentary

While usually regarded as the intellectual founder of modern conservatism, the economic thought of Edmund Burke closely parallels the views of his contemporary Adam Smith, commonly viewed as a father of classical liberalism. Though Burke was firmly of the view that “charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians,” he was equally vehement that government intervention in the market place amounts to defying “the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God … ”

That certain forms of inequality exist in commercial society is a given. Though it is indisputable that the standard of living for everyone, including the poorest, continues to rise in commercial society, some people will always possess more wealth than others. Gaps in wealth between different income segments of the population often increase in commercial society, even though very few people become poorer.

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In the view of the great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, the intensity of these discussions in commercial society is heightened by democracy’s emergence. The equalizing tendencies of democracy were not something that Tocqueville regarded with unequivocal appreciation, especially in terms of its impact upon liberty:

“Democratic peoples always like equality, but there are times when their passion for it turns to delirium. . . . It is no use pointing out that freedom is slipping from their grasp while they look the other way; they are blind, or rather they can see but one thing to covet in the whole world.”

Though Tocqueville held that democracy’s emergence was underpinned by the effects of the Judeo-Christian belief in the equality of all people in God’s sight, he perceived a type of communal angst in democratic majorities that drove them to attempt to equalize all things, even if this meant behaving despotically.

None of this is to intimate that the concept of equality has no place in commercial society. Not only are various forms of equality—such as the equality in dignity (understood as the equal and inherent worth of each human being)—compatible with commercial society, but some of commercial society’s foundations depend on particular understandings of equality for their rational consistency.

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The kind of equality genuinely conducive to a prosperous and humane society is thus not the same “equality” touted by those wishing to capitalize on Burke’s “popular prejudices” for political gain. Equality before the law reflects commercial society’s animus against arbitrary use of state power and the legal privileging of particular groups. Only when equality is rightly understood will we be able to build and sustain societies that are both prosperous and freedom loving. (more)

The Cause and Cure of Poverty

By John H. Armstrong
Advancing The Christian Tradition in the 3rd Millennium (ACT 3)

Many Christians, who think about these kinds of questions, will argue that poverty can not be solved in a free-market context. They believe the problem is economic since capitalism is fundamentally rooted in greed. The idea here is quite simple. The rich have all the wealth, they are the ones who create the products, make the money and drive the markets. The poor suffer all the more when this happens. Because capitalism has this perceived inherent flaw it will always, or at least ultimately, foster huge inequities in income and create greater poverty. These inequities will actually increase grinding poverty for millions of people, making things even worse for more poor people as the wealthy class grows. Since the percentage of monetary growth in the present economy shows the rich are getting richer and the poor and middleclass are gaining ground by a much smaller percentage this seems to favor these kinds of arguments against capitalism. (I will not get into this issue in this article, but there are different answers to this question that are both appropriate and sound.)
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Gilder’s basic argument is simple really—capitalism is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian moral code. (This is not to defend all that Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, wrote since Smith made mistakes as any theorist will.) Gilder’s argument is true precisely because capitalism is not rooted in greed at all, as is falsely argued by numerous Christian activists today. Gilder argued, and I believe quite convincingly, that capitalism, when it is rightly understood, is rooted in altruism. And it is fundamentally based upon creativity, the creativity of both service and wealth. And Gilder believes that wealth is good, something many pious Christians have a hard time appreciating. Like almost everything else in life the question is not about the good of something that is materially based. The question is: "How will the rich use their wealth?" This is what will determine whether or not it will do harm or good in the end. This means that the real answer to poverty, and the various mutations of socialism, is not greedy, self-centered capitalism, but rather a creative virtue-based entrepreneurial capitalism that serves others and builds robust economies at the same time. Gilder believes that capitalism has an inherent orientation toward others. This is why it is wrong to treat capitalism as a purely competitive system since its success in the marketplace will create opportunities for more success spread even more widely. This success is a good thing. A true entrepreneur will want the poor to succeed precisely because these people will buy his goods and services and by this means all people will be better off in the process. Simply put, capitalism creates new wealth, it doesn’t simply capture it or steal it from others.

Think about the much-maligned Wal-Mart chain. Politicians, and the various critics of modern forms of American capitalism, routinely attack Wal-Mart even though their overall record as a company is generally one of helping create jobs, of providing goods at cheaper prices and of stimulating creative economic changes. Yes, mom and pop stores do suffer when Wal-Mart moves to town. But that is the nature of the system. Mom and pop will have to adjust. The spirit of freedom allows them to do exactly that if they become creative enough to work better within the free-market system. They can "blame" capitalism as a bad system or they can become entrepreneurs, take a few personal risks, and potentially turn the situation in their own favor in due time. (Yes, they can also fail, thus I believe there ought to be safety nets to help them where it is appropriate. These safety nets are best created in local settings, not by national governments.) The alternatives to this process are much worse when you seriously begin to entertain them. We need laws to protect people from scams and business corruption for sure. But we do not need laws to keep Wal-Mart out of town. This is why Mayor Daley recently fought his own city council over the issue of taxing such businesses heavily in Chicago. Daley knows that stopping big businesses like Wal-Mart will actually harm the economy of Chicago in the big picture and thus he rightly vetoed the city council’s foolish "big box" ordinance.

Socialism always destroys personal freedoms by trying to plan for other lives through a central government system that watches out for you. (This is why President Reagan once quipped that the worst words you could ever hear were these: "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you!") Capitalism allows you to plan for yourself. It allows for creativity and enterprise. Furthermore, it encourages people to provide for others in order to express their creativity through goods and services. Greed is, in reality, inimical to capitalism. Greed drives the welfare state more than it does capitalism since greedy people want unearned rewards to be given to them by a benevolent government that levels the playing field. Such a system directly causes people to petition governments to solve their personal problems. and the bigger the government’s role becomes the worse the nightmare.

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But many will say, "I know greedy capitalists." Or, some will ask: "What about the famous Robber Barons?" Gilder argued very powerfully that greedy capitalism is a system bent on self-destruction. Capitalism, he argued, will best succeed best where faith, family and freedom thrive. Where they shrivel, capitalism will be threatened.

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Many young Christians are being sold a bill of goods about the evils of capitalism by evangelical writers such as Ron Sider, Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis. The intentions of these men are generally good. They desire equality, which is good. They also hate injustice and racism. This is also very good. But the equality of means and income is not the basis of real freedom. Even lifting everyone out of poverty is not possible since poverty is rooted in much more than access to more money.

As I looked at the Acton Institute banner, while Gilder was speaking, I realized again what is wrong with the Ron Sider, Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis agenda for social and economic change. Good intentions do not result good ends without sound economics. These well intentioned Christian men are not good economists, thus they embrace one of the biggest economic myths of all—the myth that there is only so much wealth to go around. This is, in reality, a materialist Darwinian social theory. But these men have influenced numerous young Christians with their myth of a "zero-sum" economy. This is a myth that says that while some people get rich others will necessarily become poor. Gilder smashed this idea to a million pieces with his compelling presentation of a sound economic theory. (more)

How to Look at Art

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

The first three tips help you see the things about the painting that are, paradoxically, too obvious for you to notice. To bring these things to your attention, you need to temporarily turn off some of your mind’s habitual tendency to recognize and label what it sees. You didn’t notice it happening, but by the time you’re standing there thinking about an image, your unconscious mind had already run the image through all sorts of perceptual grids and decided to help you ignore a great deal of the information. Your first three steps, therefore, are backward steps, giving your eyes a chance to reclaim some of that information from your necessary habits of rapidly simplifying all visual experience. So do this:

1. Squint at it. Narrow your eyes enough to blur the image. You need to eliminate the details of the image and try to see nothing but the main colors and forms that are there. If you’re near-sighted, take off your glasses and enjoy the big blurry blob of visual goo in front of you. No matter how detailed or nuanced or textured the image is, the biggest structural design elements are all there to be seen at the macro level. After you’ve seen the total shape without the sharp details, alternate focusing and un-focusing your eyes and notice which elements pop back into your field of attention.

2. Flip it over. A preliminary word: DO NOT LITERALLY FLIP A PAINTING OVER. But turn your head as far sideways as you can. What you want to do here is scramble the information so that it stops making normal sense to you, and begins to make sense as simply abstract shapes. What you couldn’t stop seeing as a boat turns out to be an oblong white shape with a lot of blue in it, against a background which used to just be “the ocean” but now is obviously a blob of paint shaped like a catcher’s glove. Turning a picture upside down shakes all the representational reason out of it and leaves behind nothing but the shapes, lines, and colors that are the real containers of the visual meaning.

3. Find the negative space. “The term negative space …refers to the opposite of solid objects. It describes the spaces left open around the objects and the empty hollows within them.” (Rudolf Arnheim, To the Rescue of Art, p. 92). This stuff is the other half of visual reality, the stuff between all the other stuff, the rest of the jigsaw puzzle. Learning how to see it will open your eyes to the visual structure of the whole composition. Remember that when an artist paints an object against a background, they have to paint the background as well. That background is really a big slab of negative space, a blob of paint with a specific shape. You could cut it out and have a background with a person-shaped hole in it (Do not actually cut out the figure; remember the guards again and the future generations who want to see this painting). Don’t panic if you can’t see negative space yet; it’s a skill worth acquiring, but it takes practice.

The next three tips move from recapturing easily ignored information to analyzing what you’re seeing.

4. Define the moment. Why does this image capture precisely the moment it does? If it were a photo, could it have been taken one second earlier? Ten seconds? Is there a decisive instant in time which the image captures? What is that instant?

5. Re-Construct it. Mentally dis-assemble the art object you’re looking at and ask yourself how it was put together in the first place (Do not actually take apart a painting in a museum). The more you know about the artistic medium used, the better you can do this. But even if you have no experience with oil painting or marble carving, you can learn a lot about an art work by studying it for signs of the craftsmanship that went into it. For all the cerebral and spiritual and illusionistic elements of the visual arts, there is a very important physical side to it as well, and when you can see how the marks were made (varied, layered, mixed, etc.) you can see the piece of art as the product of a performance that once occurred.

6. Let the artist guide your eyes. You may notice that parts of the painting are hard to focus on, while other parts keep drawing your eyes in with a kind of visual magnetism. The artist has worked hard to draw your attention where he wants it, and to keep your attention from being able to linger in other places. Some sections seem brightly lit and sharply focused, while others are dark, hazy, and blurred. You may find your eyes making a circular swooping motion, or sliding off the left side of the image and having to jump back in to the middle. All of that is by design, and as you warm up to a piece, you should entrust your eyes to the visual and compositional forces which the artist has marshalled for that reason. The better the artist is, the more you can trust him to do the right thing with your eyes. Leonardo DaVinci may encourage you to let your attention roam around an evenly-lit space, but Rembrandt owns your eyeballs and puts them exactly where he wants them. You know when art teachers draw circles and lines all over a painting to show the basic compositional forces at work? This is the kind of stuff they’re trying to show (Do not actually draw lines on a painting).

These first six steps are the most important for increasing your odds of pure visual experience. But after these six steps, it is fine to move on to the next two, which re-engage your understanding at the level of representation, narration, and interpretation. Notice that the next two steps encourage you to label things, identify them, describe them, and analyze them in light of other knowledge you have. These are great things to do, but frankly they’re the two things you were most likely to do anyway. They’ll mean a lot more after the first six.

7. Say what you see. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in some art, and when you’re confronted by a complex visual field, it’s helpful to start sorting it out and labelling the parts you recognize. Often you will hear yourself describing it and recognize that you understand more than you thought you did. The very act of labelling something can take you to the next level of appreciating it. A related tip is to act out the thing you are seeing. Put your body in the position of the body you see painted; usually you will discover that the pose is considerably more exaggerated than it seemed when you were just a spectator. Also, you will provide amusement for your fellow museum goers.

8. Use background knowledge. If you know something about the artist in question or the image you’re looking at, go ahead and bring that information to bear on it. It’s fine to say, “Michelangelo was a Platonist” as you study his work, and see if you can find connections between what you’re seeing in front of you and what you already knew. But notice that you have to keep this “what you already knew” in check long enough to have a real, new, purely visual experience of the art object. There is a great danger that we will bring our preconcieved ideas to a painting and ruin our chance to learn anything new by applying background knowledge too early and too thoroughly. Just because Van Gogh had a hard life doesn’t mean you can find a note of sadness in every picture he made. Sometimes he paints sheer joy, and you have to see that with your own eyes before you start squaring it with the other things you know about him.

I could add after this list a ninth step: Read the label on the wall. I know that you’re usually going to do that first of all, and that’s okay. But if you really want to do things the right way, follow the basic flow of analysis I’ve presented here, and you’ll proceed from fundamental visual encounter all the way up through the kind of analytic understanding the label wants to hand over to you at first encounter. (more)

Who Persecutes Religion the Most?

By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPage

The greatest persecutors of religion are Islamist and communist regimes, according to a just released report from the Hudson Institute's Center on Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. Regimes that respect religious freedom also have more civil liberties, more prosperity, better health for their people, and less militarized societies.
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All of the most religiously free countries are democracies, almost all of them culturally Christian in background. The non Christian exceptions are Shintoist Japan, Buddhist Thailand and Mongolia, Jewish Israel, and Islamic Mali and Senegal.

The most religiously repressive include communist regimes such as Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Islamist regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and former Soviet republic such as Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the later two of which are predominantly Islamic.

Hungary, Ireland, Estonia and the United States are ranked as the most religiously free.
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A majority of the world's most religiously repressive regimes have majority Muslim populations, including 12 of the 20 religiously "unfree" nations, according to the Hudson report. The problems are not just with the obvious theocracies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Democracies in predominantly Muslim Indonesia and Bangladesh were ranked only partly religiously free. They suffer not so much from government persecution but from private Islamist influence and social mores that are hostile to religious minorities and religious tolerance. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories are also religiously unfree, thanks primarily to non-government violence aimed at religious groups.

Religiously free countries are more amenable to civil liberties over all, according to the Hudson report. Some democratic regimes have poor records on religious freedom, but just about all the religiously free nations have good civil liberties rankings. Although still religiously free, almost all Western European regimes have better civil liberties rankings than religious freedom rankings. That region's growing secularization and discomfort with religion may account for the disparity.

Maybe more provocatively, the Hudson report asserts that freedom of religion facilitates greater economic liberty and prosperity. A section written by Brian Grimm of the Pew Forum provides data indicating that nations with greater protections of religious expression are likelier to protect property rights and have stronger economic growth. Regimes that are prone to regulate religion are also more prone to manipulate and restrict the economy. Nations that persecute religion also have fewer physicians, higher infant mortality, and more underweight children. Regimes that restrict religion likewise tend to be more militarized and devote larger chunks of their economy to armaments.
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Malloch also pointed to evidence that belief in an afterlife and divine judgment can contribute to economic growth. And religion can foster traits conducive to economic productivity such as "thrift, a work ethic, honesty, and openness to strangers," along with a tolerance for delayed gratification. "Religious freedom creates the conditions for people (if they wish, and many do not) to make their own choices in relation to their ultimate concerns," Malloch wrote. "This freedom highlights personal decisions and increases the stress on individual responsibility for religious commitments, thus increasing the degree to which individuals personally choose, shape, and own their core ideas, concepts, worldviews, habits, virtues, social engagements, and behaviors."

Religiously free societies encourage private initiative and entrepreneurship, Malloch described. Corporate activity depends upon trust and reliable contracts, which are often best sustained by religious belief. The state by itself cannot generate the moral capital to fuel economic risk taking and reliable economic relationships. "When religious freedom is restricted, then civil society is also stifled, and countries are deprived of its creative energies," Malloch concluded. (more)

Interpreting Texts on Interpretation

By Greg Peters
Scriptorium Daily

Does God withhold truth from believers? Now, I am not talking about the areas of physics, science, medicine, etc. Rather, my question is spiritual in nature: are there things about God and his creation that I cannot know while living on earth? Well, many Christians have already formed a response and, I am guessing, many answers go something like this: “Of course, there are things about God that I do not know, like the Trinity or how Jesus Christ was both God and man.” I would agree. We cannot fully know about the nature and persons of God while earthbound. Now, let me ask another question: are there passages of Scripture that we are unable to understand because we are bound by these bodies of flesh? This is a different sort of question because we are not talking about the essence of God but rather the very word of God and the word of God, the Bible, is what God has provided for us to know Him and to make Him known. This question is really a question about the nature of God’s word and our own intellectual abilities: can we always understand the Bible?
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I believe that the answer lies partly, at least, in 2 Peter 1:19-21 and 1 Corinthians 13:9-12. In his second epistle Peter writes, “So we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts. But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” The primary thing to notice about these verses is that the prophetic scriptures did not come into being through the prophet’s “own interpretation.” But what exactly does Peter mean by this expression? He appears to be saying that no prophecy is a matter of one’s own interpretation. Therefore, by implication, the Church (i.e., the community of all the faithful) must interpret prophecy (“no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will”), the interpretation must be that intended by the Holy Spirit (“moved by the Holy Spirit”) and the individual’s interpretation is not to be done in “private” but according to the analogy of faith (“… from God”). The sense of the verse is that no prophecy of Scripture is to be interpreted by any individual in an arbitrary way. This fits the problem of the false teachers’ distorting Paul’s writings and the other scriptures mentioned at 3:16, and the next verse clarifies that the prophecy originated with the Holy Spirit.

Thus, according to 2 Peter 1:19-21, the steps to interpreting Scripture are:
1. Interpretation is done in the community of the church (v. 20). This does not mean that only a preacher or teacher can properly interpret the scriptures, but that someone who is outside of the church cannot and will not be able to discern God’s truth. It also means that everyone’s understanding of the scriptures must be scrutinized by the Church, the body of Christ, before it is determined to be a proper understanding.

2. The interpretation must be that intended by the Holy Spirit (v. 21b). This means that ultimately scriptural interpretation is under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit. It is through him that one comes to a proper meaning of the scriptures. Now, the Holy Spirit works through other believers to help discern what is the correct understanding of a passage. So a preacher or a teacher who is unwilling to subject himself to the scrutiny of his fellow-believers regarding his interpretation has, in my opinion, an understanding of a text that is likely unique and, quite possibly, incorrect.

3. An individual’s interpretation is not to be done in “private” but according to the analogy of faith (v. 21a). The “analogy of faith” is a term that refers to the larger teaching of the scriptures. In other words, one’s interpretation of a text cannot contradict what is taught elsewhere in the scriptures. For example, it is clear that adultery is forbidden by the scriptures. So anyone who interprets the scriptures and says, “God says we are to love everyone, therefore I should love an adulterer and accept his behavior,” is going against the analogy of faith.

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In 1 Corinthians 13:9-12 the apostle Paul writes, “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” The immediate context of these verses concerns the spiritual gifts of prophecy and tongues. However, without getting bogged down in this debate I think that these verses are teaching us something very important about our ability to understand things, the scriptures included. When talking about tongues and prophecy, the apostle Paul is talking about knowledge. Thus, verses 9-12 are Paul’s summary statement regarding knowledge, particularly earthly knowledge. Biblical commentator Harold Mare summarizes the passage this way: “Paul’s illustration of a child’s thoughts and speech, real but inadequately conceived and expressed in comparison with those of a mature person (v. 11) aptly conveys the difference between the Christian’s present understanding and expression of spiritual things and the perfect understanding and expression he will have in heaven (v. 12). The metaphor is that of the imperfect reflection seen in one of the polished metal mirrors of the ancient world in contrast with seeing the Lord face to face. Paul’s thoughts in 12b may be expanded as follows: Now through the Word of God, I know in part; then, in the presence of the Lord I will know fully, to the full extent that a redeemed finite human being can know and in a way similar in kind to the way the Lord in his infinite wisdom fully and infinitely knows me.”

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Further, we see from 1 Corinthians 14:30-31 that prophecy “involved a revelation, a special deep teaching, which, however, was distinct from the kind of revelation that Scripture is.” Thus, when Paul says, “we prophesy in part” he is saying that we have a limited understanding of the deep teachings of God’s Word. If we have a limited understanding of the scriptures, then we must concede that there are times when are wrong and do not understand the Bible. (more)

Self-Cultured Men Lose the War and Their Souls

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Sadly, times have changed enough that almost all of us have been expelled from that particular garden. We will have to make do with superficial knowledge of much more of the world. We must be patriots without being parochial, because for most of us parochialism is too big for our virtue. Parochialism demands a big heart to keep from becoming overly expansive about the glories one will find in one’s own garden. And yet on the narrower and less dangerous road of patriotism checked by internationalism there is certain charm.
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Sadly, it is not missionary kids who mostly lurk the halls of the United Nations. It is not Adam Johnson running the European Union or most of our multinational corporations (yet!). There is a second kind of international man . . . one who loves mankind so much in general that he hates every national expression of humanity mankind has produced.

This international sort has more in common with other internationals than he does with his own country of birth.

He lauds multiculturalism, but he knows no culture well enough to love it. He borrows and choices (mostly the food) from scores of different cultures. He is not multicultural, but self-cultural. He eats no national cuisine; he cries at no anthem, his mother tongue is some Esperanto-pop jargon that he has picked up from ABC-BBC-CNN. The crisis of this week was getting the i-phone and not global terrorism. He has no history, no roots, no lord, and no liberty from the tyrannical demands of self.

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Self-cultural man does not create culture, understand any culture, just loots the “best” of each culture to satisfy his desires. The patriot, the nationalist, acts internationally to protect his nation. The self-cultural man acts to protect those like self, the other self-cultural men.

Real nationalists created the international community to protect the nation states from excesses of patriotism. Internationalism blocked patriotism from becoming jingoism. The real work was done by the nationalist, but international affairs were a necessary medicine to keep the system of nations functioning. (more)

Related article: The ACLU: Enemy of America and Christianity by Rabbi Aryeh Spero (Human Events).