Rejoice! Mourn! Help!

"This side of Paradise I will have to accept that every party will be in the midst of sorrow and every funeral on a day of joy. Someday sorrow will be no more and the joy will be complete. Even so come Lord Jesus."

-John Mark Reynolds

For St. Patrick: Two Cheers for Trinity Analogies

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

My life is all about teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. And everywhere I go, the first question people ask me about the Trinity is “what’s a good analogy for the Trinity?” I usually make a sour face before I can catch myself, because in my opinion, the most important things to say about the Trinity are things like: There’s nothing like the Trinity, analogies are distracting, and it’s possible to talk about the thing itself rather than what the thing is like. But I also have to admit that within a very limited range, for very specific purposes, the occasional trinitarian analogy will shed some light and help some people.

And St. Patrick of Ireland is somebody who reminds me of this fact. So to celebrate St. Patrick’s day, here’s a drawing of a leprechaun picking a shamrock, and the text of an interview I did back in the summer of 2002 for Biola Connections magazine (their nifty online back issues feature doesn’t go as far back as Summer ’02).

Biola Connections: Summer 2002

Ask an Expert: How Can We Explain the Trinity?

Of all the Christian doctrines, the Trinity has probably caused the most confusion. The idea that one God has eternally existed in three persons has challenged Christians as far back as the second century A.D. when Irenaeus began developing analogies to explain the Trinity. To help bring understanding to this doctrine, Biola Connections interviewed Dr. Fred Sanders, an expert on the Trinity. Here’s what he said.

Q. What are common analogies people use to explain the Trinity that are misleading?

A. Almost all analogies for the Trinity end up being misleading. Usually they each have one point of helpfulness and that’s it. Legend has it that when Saint Patrick was explaining the Christian faith to the barbarians of Ireland and got to the part about the Trinity, they said, “How can that possibly be true?” And he picked up a shamrock and converted the whole nation of Ireland. So, it was good enough to get an incredible piece of evangelistic work done. But if you continue thinking about a shamrock, it gets less and less like the Trinity. It would be similar to using the analogy of a pizza that is cut into three pieces (like the three shamrock leaves). God the Father is not a third of God. Each person of the Trinity is fully God.

Another common analogy is water. It can exist in three forms: liquid, ice or steam. The major problem is you can’t have the same piece of water being liquid, solid and gaseous at the same time. But the Bible shows the three Persons of the Godhead existing simultaneously.�

Q. What is the simplest way to accurately explain the Trinity?

A. As soon as you use an analogy to explain the Trinity, you introduce complexity. It’s ironic, but the simplest way to explain the Trinity is to tell the story of Jesus Christ. Jesus is sent by the Father to earth where He is empowered by the Holy Spirit. When he ascends to the right hand of the Father, he sends the Holy Spirit to us.

A good analogy can be helpful sometimes, but can’t possibly please God when the word “Trinity” makes us think primarily about ice cubes and shamrocks rather than the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit.�

Q. What is a common misconception people have about the Trinity?

A. Probably the most common misconception is the fear that it really doesn’t make sense. That somehow we became Christians and that committed us to believe in certain things and , unfortunately, on of those things is rationally impossible.

But the Trinity is not irrational in any direct sense. I think the main intellectual problem with the Trinity is that it’s so dense. When we say “the Trinity,” we are really saying all the basic elements of the gospel at once. So it’s a very dense formula, sort of like e=mc2 is difficult to understand –not because it’s logically contradictory, but because there’s so much information packed into it.

The Trinity would be irrational if it were self-contradictory –for example, if it said that there are three person in God and yet only on person. Or if it said that God is one being and God is three beings. But for God to be one Being who is three Person in no way contradicts the laws of logic. Now, it may be beyond our understanding in some way because we don’t know of any other being like that. It’s a mystery, but a mystery is not an excuse to stop thinking. A mystery is something that is bigger than our minds can take in and invites us to a lifetime of intellectual wrestling.

Reading the Bible with the Reformers

By Timothy George
First Things

We ought to read Scripture the way Luther and Calvin did

For the reformers the Bible was a treasure trove of divine wisdom to be heard, read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested, as the Book of Common Prayer’s collect for the second Sunday in Advent puts it, to the end that “we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou has given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” In his commentary on Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,” John Calvin declared, “Whenever the Lord accosts us by His Word, He is dealing seriously with us to affect all our inner senses. There is, therefore, no part of our soul which should not be influenced.” The study of the Bible was meant to be transformative at the most basic level of the human person, leading to communion with God. The spiritual power of the Bible emerges for Christians from the fact that the “Word of God” is not just a matter of words. Jesus Christ is the substantial Word, the eternal Logos who was made flesh— verbum incarnatum—for us and for our salvation. Thus the “Word of God” involved the spoken word; the preaching of the gospel is a sacramental event, a means of grace. As Heinrich Bullinger put it boldly in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566): “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”

Whether read, preached, or heard, it was the Bible that stood at the center of the age of the Reformation, a time of transition, vitality, and change. In 1522, looking back on the recent and dramatic events of the previous years, Martin Luther saw God’s Word as the agent of change. “I opposed indulgences and all papists,” he observed, “but never by force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.”

Of course, the Word “does it all” by working through the hearts of people—and through their deeds as well. Luther had recently completed a translation of the New Testament from Greek into German. Soon William Tyndale would follow suit in English, and others in French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, even Arabic, so that the written Word of God resounded from the lecture rooms, debate halls, and pulpits of all parts of Europe, initiating a period of extraordinarily creative and influential biblical interpretation that did a great deal to shape the imagination of the West. Luther did more than drink Wittenberg beer. He and countless other Reformation leaders wrote commentaries.

We do well to return to this tradition of Reformation biblical exegesis. C. S. Lewis noted: “We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present.” For the present can become imperial, seducing us into imagining that the assumptions that reign today have always defined what it means to be reasonable, sensible, and mainstream. Against the tendency toward presentism, Lewis observed that “a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

We can suffer from a biblical presentism. It is all too common to think of biblical interpretation as answering the question “What is the Bible saying to us now?” This approach, which one finds both in liberal mainline churches and in conservative evangelical ones, owes a great deal to the liberal Protestant theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. The father of modern hermeneutics, Schleiermacher defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence and understood Scripture as a detailed expression of the faith that satisfies our need to feel a sense of absolute dependence. With this subjective account of the meaning of Scripture, Schleiermacher displaced the central teachings and dogmas of the Church, putting in its place a phenomenology of Christian self-consciousness. In view of this approach, it is not surprising that Schleiermacher’s entire treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity is contained in a thirteen-page appendix to his nearly 800-page textbook of systematic theology, On the Christian Faith. The important questions, for Schleiermacher, concerned the present influence of biblical preaching and its ability to create in modern men and women a “God-consciousness” that would induce feelings of absolute dependence.

By and large, the modern Protestant tradition has appealed to historical-critical exegesis as a source for objective biblical teaching that can work against the presentism implicit in Schleiermacher’s approach. Unfortunately, for all the important intellectual contributions they have made, historical-critical methods of interpretation were developed as part of a distinctively modern project. The goal, which has been often and vigorously stated since its inception in the late-eighteenth century, was to release the Bible from the shackles placed on it by the intervening two millennia of biblical interpretation. For example, in his famous 1885 Bampton Lectures, Frederic W. Farrar described the long history of Christian interpretation of the Bible as something to be overcome: “How often has the Bible thus been wronged! It has been imprisoned in the cells of alien dogma; it has been bound hand and foot in the grave clothes of human tradition; it has been entombed as a sepulcher by systems of theology, and the stone of human power has been rolled up to close its door.” It was the aim of Farrar and his colleagues to liberate the Bible from its churchly bondage.

They largely succeeded, but the effect has not been to reorient the churches around a revitalized biblical center. The historical-critical approach breaks the Bible down into discrete units to be further dissected in terms of competing hypotheses about authorship, literary form, original context, source of origin, and so forth. This makes for good academic debate, but without a narrative or doctrinal unity the Bible cannot compete with the imperial present. As a result, the history of the Church’s interpretation of the Bible has been swept away, but little has taken its place. As the historical scholars write their monographs, we’re left enclosed within our presentism, reading the Bible only from the perspective of own age and not with the Christian ages.

An imperialism of the present also thrives within a populist evangelicalism shaped by the likes of the celebrated evangelist Billy Sunday, who once boasted, “I don’t know any more about theology than a jackrabbit does about ping pong, but I’m on the way to glory.” A higher level of discourse is carried on in the Evangelical Theological Society, but even this august group of scholars only recently has amended its annually subscribed statement of faith to include, in addition to the affirmation of biblical inerrancy, a required belief in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. If, in Paul Tillich’s terms, Protestant principle has swallowed up Catholic substance in much of contemporary evangelicalism, this is because evangelicals have paid too little attention to the sum total of the Christian heritage handed down from previous ages.

This inattention sadly includes neglect of the history of biblical interpretation, the practice of reading Scripture in the company of the whole people of God. It is ironic that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, much misunderstood, has led to the neglect among Protestants of older biblical commentaries, even those of the reformers themselves. J. N. Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren, tried to eliminate all vestiges of the Catholic tradition, including ministerial orders and the use of biblical commentaries, which he considered unhelpful intermediaries between the Scriptures and the individual soul. Although often thought of as an archconservative, his approach actually ministered to the triumph of the imperial present. F. F. Bruce, the great evangelical New Testament scholar, recalled what a wag once said about Darby: “He only wanted men ‘to submit their understanding to God,’ that is, to the Bible, that is, to his interpretation!”

Times are changing. Within the past generation the dominance of the historical-critical paradigm has been challenged from two different yet converging sources. On the one hand, there is a growing appreciation for the history of exegesis and the theological interpretation of the Bible understood as the book of the Church. On the other hand, postmodern interpretations of the human self, language, and textuality, while often couched in nonreligious terms, call into question many assumptions of critical exegesis and suggest sympathy with the themes and sensibilities of the premodern Christian tradition. Together these developments have created a new openness for a fresh engagement with the exegetical writings of the church fathers, Scholastics, and reformers.

In 1980, David C. Steinmetz published in Theology Today an essay with an edgy title, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.” He tackled what C. S. Lewis once called the “chronological snobbery” of scholarly methods that dismiss Reformation-era studies of the Bible, along with the interpretive tradition that preceded them, as antiquated, regressive, and all but useless. For an example of this approach, Steinmetz quotes Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, who in 1859 insisted: “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author.” Jowett’s desire to sweep away all of Christian history, though dressed in high-Anglican garb, sounds strikingly similar to Alexander Campbell’s advice to his disciples. The Restorationist leader encouraged his followers to “open the New Testament as if mortal man had never seen it before.”

Returning to Augustine and the early Church, Steinmetz shows how the famous theory of the fourfold sense of Scripture, an approach widely used in the Middle Ages, was a way of taking seriously the words and sayings of Scripture, including implicit meanings that extend beyond the original intentions of the human authors. According to Steinmetz, this kind of exegesis did not mean the abandonment of the literal sense of the text. Indeed, beginning with Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra in the Middle Ages and continuing into the Reformation the literal sense became more prominent, even if more complex, as it absorbed more and more of the content of the spiritual meanings. The Bible opened up a field of possible meanings that allowed for considerable exegetical creativity but that also imposed limits on the interpreter.

Steinmetz’s insights into the integrity and fruitfulness of precritical exegesis have been developed further in recent years. One of the best recent introductions to the theological interpretation of Scripture, J. Todd Billings’ The Word of God for the People of God, affirms the value of premodern biblical exegesis, defending it against popular objections. Billings emphasizes the churchly context of reading Scripture—the Bible is the Church’s book and is meant to be a means of grace, an instrument of communion with God—and he points out that Christian interpreters throughout the centuries have been churchly readers. One finds a similar sympathy for precritical exegesis in a recently published volume of essays on sixteenth-century exegesis and interpretation: Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, edited by Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson.

Amid all the enthusiasm for sources of biblical wisdom from the early Church, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation era, it must be admitted that the knowledge base for the study of the Bible is quantitatively much greater today. For example, the field of archaeology (and such related disciplines as epigraphy, numismatics, and comparative philology) was just emerging in the age of the Renaissance. Textual criticism of the Bible was also in its infant stages. No one had heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta Stone. The study of New Testament Greek remained uninformed by the discovery of additional manuscripts and Hellenistic papyri. It would be foolish to neglect these and many other advances that have been made in the study of the Bible over the past two centuries, and no responsible practitioner of theological exegesis advocates anything like that.

The appeal to the “superiority” of premodern biblical exegesis is best understood as a protest against the reductionism inherent in the long-standing monopoly of the historical-critical method, not as a rejection of rigorous historical study of the Bible. Surely this protest is fitting. In order to benefit from great voices of the Christian tradition, we need to recover the full tradition of Christian interpretation of the Bible. This tradition, which was reaffirmed and reinforced by the reformers, is characterized by five principles that should guide our reading and understanding of Scripture. They are principles that often stand in contrast to the assumptions underpinning modern critical approaches.

The Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God. Recent debates about biblical inspiration and inerrancy have obscured for some what has been the received wisdom for all orthodox Christians: Holy Scripture is a divinely bestowed, Spirit-generated gift of the triune God and should thus be received with gratitude, humility, and a sense of reverence. Christians do not worship the Bible but the God they do worship—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has revealed himself and his plans for them and for the world through the words and message of the Bible. As the great Methodist leader John Wesley put it: “The Scriptures, therefore, of the Old and New Testament are a most solid and precious system of divine truth. Every part is worthy of God and altogether are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess. It is the fountain of heavenly wisdom, which they who are able to taste, prefer to all writings of men, however wise or learned or holy.” Thus the Bible cannot be read just “like any other book” (Jowett’s phrase). Its contents must be received in faith, the kind of faith that is formed by love and leads to holiness.

The Bible is rightly read in light of the rule of faith. There is a pattern of Christian truth found in the Bible. It has been recognized by the Church since the days of the apostles and designated as the regula fidei, the rule of faith. This rule is what Wesley refers to when he observes that the Scriptures make up a “precious system of divine truth.” This rule or “system” is the apostolic summary of the Bible’s own storyline: how the God of Israel created all that is, the drama of His redemptive mission in the life, death, and resurrection (and coming again) of Jesus Christ, and the account of His sending the Spirit to gather unto himself a people called by His name. Its earliest forms are found already in the hymns and creeds of the New Testament and in the first baptismal confession of faith, “Jesus is Lord!” As the early Church confronted new threats from within and from without, the rule of faith found fuller expression in what we now call the Apostles’ Creed and in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381. The reformers of the sixteenth century were guided by this rule of faith in their interpretations of the Bible. They thought of their catechisms, commentaries, and longer theological works (such as Melanchthon’s Common Places and Calvin’s Institutes) as but summaries of the basic Christian message found in the Bible and expressed in the rule of faith.

Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires a trinitarian hermeneutics. The rule of faith demands that Scripture be read as a coherent dramatic narrative, the unity of which depends on its principal actor: the God who has forever known himself and who, in the history of redemption, has revealed himself to us, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Athanasius and the other fathers who struggled against the Arians for the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity were embroiled in serious exegetical arguments. How could the Old Testament affirmation, “God is one,” be reconciled with the New Testament confession, “Jesus is Lord”? What was the relationship of the eternal and unchanging God to the Logos who became flesh, Jesus Christ? Among many other things, the struggle for the doctrine of the Trinity was a debate over the meaning of the Bible.

At the time of the Reformation, the doctrine of the Trinity once again emerged as a major point of dispute, especially between the mainline reformers and certain evangelical rationalists among the radicals. The doctrine of the Trinity could not be surrendered because it had to do with the nature and character of the God whom Christians worship. This God, the triune God of holiness and love, was not a generic deity who could be appeased by human striving but rather the God of the Bible who had made himself known by grace alone through the sending of His Son, Jesus Christ, “for us and for our salvation.” To enter into the mind of Scripture with a trinitarian hermeneutic is to come to know this God and not another. As Todd Billings puts it, “The Bible is the instrument of the triune God to shape believers into the image of Christ, in word and deed, by the power of the Spirit, transforming a sinful and alienated people into children of a loving Father.”

The Bible is front and center in the worship of the Church. The reformers of the sixteenth century inherited a Christian tradition in which the Bible had been at the heart of the Church’s liturgy and life. For centuries manuscripts of the Bible had been painstakingly copied by Benedictine monks whose motto was ora et labora, pray and work. The monk’s engagement with Scripture did not end when the day’s work of copying was done in the scriptorium. He continued to pray, sing, and recite the Scriptures in the daily liturgy of the hours. This did not mean that the Bible was never read by an individual apart from corporate worship—think of Augustine and his encounter with Romans 13:11–14 in the garden in Milan. Yet Augustine had been prepared for that encounter with Paul’s text by first hearing the Bible prayed and proclaimed by Bishop Ambrose in regular services of worship in the cathedral.

In the sixteenth century, translations of the Bible were accompanied by the translations of the liturgy. Luther’s German Mass and Order of Service was published in 1526; Calvin’s Form of Prayers came out in 1542. As part of their protest against clerical domination of the Church, the reformers aimed at full participation in worship. Their reintroduction of the vernacular was jarring to some since it required that divine worship be offered to Almighty God in the language used by businessmen in the marketplace and by husbands and wives in the privacy of their bedchambers. The intent of the reformers was not so much to secularize worship as to sanctify common life. For them, the Bible was not merely an object for academic scrutiny in the study or the library; it was meant to be enacted as the people of God gathered for prayer and praise and proclamation.

The study of the Bible is a means of grace. The post-Enlightenment split between the study of the Bible as an academic discipline and the reading of the Bible as spiritual nurture was as foreign to the reformers as it was to theologians and Christian scholars in prior centuries. They all repudiated the idea that the Bible could be studied and understood with dispassionate objectivity, as a cold artifact from antiquity. The Cambridge scholar Thomas Bilney discovered the meaning of salvation while reading Erasmus’ new Latin translation of 1 Timothy 1:15: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” He did not remember the moment as one of scholarly insight; instead, he reported that “immediately I felt a marvelous comfort and quietness insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.”

The reformers practiced what Matthew Levering has called “participatory biblical exegesis” in which the intimate “vertical” presence of the Trinity’s creative and redemptive action suffuses the “linear” or “horizontal” succession of moments. According to Levering, “To enter into the realities taught in the biblical text requires not only linear-historical tools (archeology, philology, and so forth), but also, and indeed primarily, participatory tools—doctrines and practices—by which the exegete enters fully into the biblical world.” Bilney’s experience led to his becoming an evangelist and eventually one of the first martyrs of the English Reformation.

A return to Reformation exegesis has become increasingly appealing in large part because the mentality that animated the great figures of modern historical criticism no longer holds sway. The Enlightenment project, with its dogmatic rationalism and its scientistic epistemology, can be roughly dated from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001. Its after-effects still linger, but it has been eroded from within by postmodernism. The postmodern moment privileges the visual, the ephemeral, the pleasurable, the immediate, the evanescent, the disconnected. Metanarratives with absolute or universal implications have been replaced by local stories, and principles by preferences.

Postmodern hermeneutics, left to itself, devolves into relativism, fragmentation, and subjective perspectivism, a trajectory that challenges the historic Christian understanding of language as a reliable medium of truth. Yet postmodernism unmasks the pretentions of an exaggerated individualism and the overweening confidence in reason that has shaped the historical-critical method of studying the Bible. It has also emphasized the relational character of knowledge and the role of the community (for Christians, the Church) in interpretation, as well as the situatedness (language, gender, culture, and historical particularity) of every interpreter. A reader cannot presume to possess authoritative and fail-safe methods to deliver impersonal truths. In this sense, postmodernism calls for us to recognize our limitations, our finitude.

As it turns out, many of the habits of reading suggested by postmodernism are already deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, not least in the hermeneutical legacy of the Protestant Reformation. In a bold and important study, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, Jens Zimmermann has argued that the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment was anticipated by major themes in the biblical and theological work of the reformers. Three themes stand out.

The first concerns the interrelated and existentially involving reality of truth. The famous opening lines of Calvin’s Institutes declares that “nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” These two kinds of knowledge are simultaneous and correlative. It is not as though one could gain a thorough knowledge of the self by earning a Ph.D., say, in psychology, and then transfer to a divinity school to pursue the knowledge of God. No, at every step of the way, and in every area of life, we are confronted by a seeming contradiction: genuine knowledge of ourselves drives us to look at God, and at the same time any real grasp of ourselves presupposes that we have already contemplated Him.

In this respect Calvin anticipates later postmodern theorists. As a pre-Cartesian thinker he did not presume that the act of knowledge involves a singular thinking subject that surveys an external world of extended stuff. Calvin knew that the human mind, left to itself, would become a “factory of idols” producing self-made gods of darkness and delusion, which is why a true interpretation of the Bible required the inward witness of the Holy Spirit. There is no independent epistemological platform on which we may stand and objectively survey our theological options. In every act of understanding, as in every moment of life, we all have “business with God” ( negotium cum Deo). As Zimmermann notes, for Calvin, “the whole purpose of reading Scripture is the restoration of our humanity to the fullness of the image of God in us as individuals and in society as a whole.” To know is to participate.

Zimmermann develops the second theme—the role of humility as a way to conviction rather than skepticism—with the observation that the young Heidegger was drawn to the young Luther’s strong critique of Aristotelian scholasticism. In his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, Luther argued that the message of the Cross destroyed, dismantled, and reduced to nothing all abstract, speculative, and objectified knowledge of God. Heidegger thought that later Reformation traditions had failed to build on Luther’s radical insight, and he saw himself as “a kind of philosophical Luther of Western metaphysics.” Heidegger proposed a “deconstruction” of Aristotle as well as of the subsequent foundationalist construals of Descartes and Hegel on which so much modernist thinking was based. Thus, according to Zimmermann, the postmodernist critique of autonomous reason, including the notion of deconstruction itself, was foreshadowed in an important strand of early Reformation theology, one that puts an emphasis on epistemic humility as a corrective to the temptation to idolatry. Yet, unlike so much of postmodern thought, which counsels a skeptical despair of ever knowing metaphysical truths, the Reformation theology of the Cross prepares the heart to receive the gift of faith. God’s revelation in Christ delivers the human mind from its idol-making patterns of false objectivity and metaphysical presumption.

Finally, the third theme: a critique of individualism. Jacques Maritain’s famous book Three Reformers presents the story of Luther as the “advent of the self.” Luther was the supreme individualist, Maritain claimed, a rebellious monk pulling down the pillars of Mother Church by placing his own subjectivist interpretation of the Bible above that of 1500 years of ecclesial tradition. In this view, Luther and the reformers who followed him were early advocates of what Wilhelm Dilthey called “the autocracy of the believing person.”

Although this interpretation of the Reformation has long been popular, it is actually a projection of modern themes onto the Christian past. Luther’s approach was not carried out in lonely isolation from the Church. On the contrary, he undertook all his intellectual work within the Body of Christ extended throughout time as well as space. All the reformers read, translated, and interpreted the Bible as part of a centuries-old conversation between the holy page of God’s Word and the company of God’s people. While in many cases they broke with the received interpretations of the fathers and the Scholastics who came before them, theirs was nonetheless a churchly hermeneutics. What R. R. Reno has written of theological exegesis in general applies directly to the reformers: “To be a Christian is to believe that the truth found in the Bible is the very same truth we enter into by way of baptism, the same truth we confess in our creeds, the same truth we receive in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.” Our knowledge of God’s truth is not just participatory and based on a receptive epistemic humility, it is also corporate.

By emphasizing the correlative and communitarian character of knowledge, and by following a Cross-centered hermeneutic, the reformers of the sixteenth century anticipated major themes of postmodern theories of interpretation. Yet, at the same time, Reformation exegesis resisted the disintegrating impulse of deconstruction. Reformers read Scripture as a coherent story, a non-totalizing but still all-encompassing metanarrative in the light of which everything else has to be understood. In the words of Richard Bauckham, the biblical story is about nothing less than the whole of reality, and thus it cannot be “reduced to an unpretentious local language game in the pluralism of postmodernity.” Here the reformers were one with the great sweep of Christian interpreters through the ages, affirming of God that, as Francis Schaeffer put it, “He is there and He is not silent.”

The French word réssourcement is often associated with the renewal of theology within the Roman Catholic Church that led up to the reforms of Vatican Council II. This movement involved a fresh engagement with the biblical and patristic sources of the Christian tradition. It’s a return to the riches of our sacred history that should be familiar to the Christian historian, for it recalls a major watchword of the Renaissance and Reformation: recursus ad fontes,“Back to the sources.”

When it comes to biblical interpretation, we seem indeed to be in a season of réssourcement. Several new commentary series and specialized studies devoted to the history of biblical interpretation have recently appeared. The well-received Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, overseen by Thomas Oden, has made the exegesis of the church fathers available to a wide audience. Robert Louis Wilken is the general editor of another important multivolume series, The Church’s Bible, which provides extensive selections from ancient biblical commentaries. Early Christian thinkers knew, writes Wilken, “something that has largely been forgotten by biblical scholars, and their commentaries are an untapped resource for understanding the Bible as a book about Christ.” Another commentary series, the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, for which R. R. Reno serves as general editor, recognizes the important task of “reading alongside” the church fathers, Scholastics, reformers, and other theologians of ages past. Still another series guided by the conviction that a return to the sources will revitalize our current understanding of Scripture is Reformation Texts with Translation (1350–1650), for whom the general editor is Kenneth Hagen.

I myself am proud to serve as general editor for a new commentary series animated by the same spirit of réssourcement, the Reformation Commentary on Scripture (RCS), published by InterVarsity Press. The volumes will cover the entire Bible, gathering passages of commentary from the writings of sixteenth-century preachers, scholars, and reformers. I hope that our renewed engagement with the riches of Reformation exegesis will inspire us to enter more fully into the spirit and practice of that extraordinarily rich and influential epoch of biblical knowledge and piety. May we make the interpretive virtues of the reformers—virtues shared by the great Christian exegetes down the ages—our own.

Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and a member of the editorial and advisory council of First Things. This article is adapted from his book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.

On Lent, Romance, and Moderation

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It might be Lent. It might be my continued struggles with gluttony. It might be the number of friends and former students struggling with alcoholism. Whatever the cause moderation has been much on my mind.

Prudence used to be a popular name. Other virtues, hope and charity, still retain their cachet, but being “prudent” hasn’t been popular since the first President Bush was a young man fighting World War II.

Even youth groups I visit advertise that they are “radical” for Jesus. This is a bad idea, because immoderate religion has caused at least as many problems in the world as immoderate secularism. Christianity is not revolutionary, because virtue can only come to fallen men gradually if it is to come at all.

A revolution in the name of virtue is like killing a man in order to save him. Ask the Iranians.

Christian religious immoderation can lead those of us in ministry to ignore our family duties to “love God.” We forget that we cannot love God we have not seen, if we fail to love the brother we have seen.

Moderation says: “I will have enough, but no more.” Moderation demands of the cosmos only “daily bread” and does not think every day is a feast day. Moderation says to Eros, “Don’t ruin future loving by demanding more today than you should.”

An economy based on consuming will never say: “be prudent.” It will demand the latest Apple product and spend millions mocking the saver. Advertisement is so ubiquitous that we freely wear it on our clothing as a mark of status.

Love is the greatest power in the Cosmos, but Love requires Moderation in order to last. The lover wants total passion, but Love wants the beloved to flourish and to love forever. Moderation aids Love in making this possible by her virtuous advice.

The recent Jane Eyre movie reminded me of the role of Moderation in romance. As a younger man, my natural passion wanted a Grand Romance and led me to a God-defying totality of love that was pagan and not Christian. Moderation told me to seek intimacy and to let love grow slowly and appropriately.

The lesser Eros of my sinful nature demanded an absolute commitment to some beloved, either a god, a cause, or a woman. Love wanted cosmic romance and that meant being less romantic today so that love could last forever.

The man truly in love will give up today’s feast for tomorrow. It will acknowledge Lent in order to gain Easter. The slow moderate intimacy of marriage is smaller at first, but grows weighty indeed after twenty-five years of shared pain and pleasure.

The man who drinks too much will soon not be able to drink again. The glutton, as I know too well, eventually derives more pain than pleasure from his feasting. Immoderate love soon makes toxic the very object of desire for the lover.

Moderation is no pinched prude, but a fecund Mother who loves feasting so much she councils this fast. She adores Beauty to the extent that she will urge me to turn my head from Beauty I cannot yet appropriately experience. Moderation turns a Lenten Spring into bountiful summer.

Doing Away with Hell? Part Two

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

The doctrine of hell has recently come under vicious attack, both from secularists and even from some evangelicals. In many ways, the assault has been a covert one. Like a slowly encroaching tide, a whole complex of interrelated cultural, theological, and philosophical changes have conspired to undermine the traditional understanding of hell. Yesterday, we considered the first and perhaps most important of those changes — a radically altered view of God. But other issues have played a part, as well.

A second issue that has contributed to the modern denial of hell is a changed view of justice. Retributive justice has been the hallmark of human law since premodern times. This concept assumes that punishment is a natural and necessary component of justice. Nevertheless, retributive justice has been under assault for many years in western cultures, and this has led to modifications in the doctrine of hell.

The utilitarian philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham argued that retribution is an unacceptable form of justice. Rejecting clear and absolute moral norms, they argued that justice demands restoration rather than retribution. Criminals were no longer seen as evil and deserving of punishment but were seen as persons in need of correction. The goal — for all but the most egregious sinners — was restoration and rehabilitation. The shift from the prison to the penitentiary was supposed to be a shift from a place of punishment to a place of penance, but apparently no one told the prisoners.

C. S. Lewis rejected this idea as an assault upon the very concept of justice. “We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.”

Penal reforms followed, public executions ceased, and the public accepted the changes in the name of humanitarianism. Dutch criminologist Pieter Spierenburg pointed to “increasing inter-human identification” as the undercurrent of this shift. Individuals began to sympathize with the criminal, often thinking of themselves in the criminal’s place. The impact of this shift in the culture is apparent in a letter from one nineteenth century Anglican to another:

“The disbelief in the existence of retributive justice . . . is now so widely spread through nearly all classes of people, especially in regard to social and political questions . . . [that it] causes even men, whose theology teaches them to look upon God as a vindictive, lawless autocrat, to stigmatize as cruel and heathenish the belief that criminal law is bound to contemplate in punishment other ends beside the improvement of the offender himself and the deterring of others.”

The utilitarian concept of justice and deterrence has also given way to justice by popular opinion and cultural custom. The U.S. Constitution disallows “cruel and unusual punishment,” and the courts have offered evolving and conflicting rulings on what kind of punishment is thus excluded. At various times, the death penalty has been constitutionally permitted and forbidden, and in one recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, the justice writing the majority opinion actually cited data from opinion polls.

The transformations of legal practice and culture have redefined justice for many modern persons. Retribution is out, and rehabilitation is put in its place. Some theologians have simply incorporated this new theory of justice into their doctrines of hell. For the Roman Catholics, the doctrine of purgatory functions as the penitentiary. For some evangelicals, a period of time in hell — but not an eternity in hell — is the remedy.

Some theologians have questioned the moral integrity of eternal punishment by arguing that an infinite punishment is an unjust penalty for finite sins. Or, to put the argument in a slightly different form, eternal torment is no fitting punishment for temporal sins. The traditional doctrine of hell argues that an infinite penalty is just punishment for sin against the infinite holiness of God. This explains why all sinners are equally deserving of hell, but for salvation through faith in Christ.

A third shift in the larger culture concerns the advent of the psychological worldview. Human behavior has been redefined by the impact of humanistic psychologies that deny or reduce personal responsibility for wrongdoing. Various theories place the blame on external influences, biological factors, behavioral determinism, genetic predispositions, and the influence of the subconscious — and these variant theories barely scratch the surface.

The autonomous self becomes the great personal project for individuals, and their various crimes and misdemeanors are excused as growth experiences or ‘personal issues.’ Shame and guilt are banned from public discussion and dismissed as repressive. In such a culture, the finality of God’s sentencing of impenitent sinners to hell is just unthinkable.

A fourth shift concerns the concept of salvation. The vast majority of men and women throughout the centuries of western civilization have awakened in the morning and gone to sleep at night with the fear of hell never far from consciousness — until now. Sin has been redefined as a lack of self-esteem rather than as an insult to the glory of God. Salvation has been reconceived as liberation from oppression, internal or external. The gospel becomes a means of release from bondage to bad habits rather than rescue from a sentence of eternity in hell.

The theodicy issue arises immediately when evangelicals limit salvation to those who come to conscious faith in Christ during their earthly lives and define salvation as anything akin to justification by faith. To the modern mind, this seems absolutely unfair and scandalously discriminatory. Some evangelicals have thus modified the doctrine of salvation accordingly. This means that hell is either evacuated or minimized. Or, as one Catholic wit quipped, hell has been air-conditioned.

These shifts in the culture are but part of the picture. The most basic cause of controversy over the doctrine of hell is the challenge of theodicy. The traditional doctrine is just too out of step with the contemporary mind — too harsh and eternally fixed. In virtually every aspect, the modern mind is offended by the biblical concept of hell preserved in the traditional doctrine. For some who call themselves evangelicals, this is simply too much to bear.

We should note that compromise on the doctrine of hell is not limited to those who reject the traditional formulation. The reality is that few references to hell are likely to be heard even in conservative churches that would never deny the doctrine. Once again, the cultural environment is a major influence.

In his study of “seeker sensitive” churches, researcher Kimon Howland Sargeant notes that “today’s cultural pluralism fosters an under-emphasis on the ‘hard sell’ of Hell while contributing to an overemphasis on the ’soft sell’ of personal satisfaction through Jesus Christ.” The problem is thus more complex and pervasive than the theological rejection of hell–it also includes the avoidance of the issue in the face of cultural pressure.

The revision or rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell comes at a great cost. The entire system of theology is modified by effect, even if some revisionists refuse to take their revisions to their logical conclusions. Essentially, our very concepts of God and the gospel are at stake. What could be more important?

The temptation to revise the doctrine of hell — to remove the sting and scandal of everlasting conscious punishment — is understandable. But it is also a major test of evangelical conviction. This is no theological trifle. As one observer has asked, “Could it be that the only result of attempts, however well-meaning, to air-condition Hell, is to ensure that more and more people wind up there?”

Hell demands our attention in the present, confronting evangelicals with a critical test of theological and biblical integrity. Hell may be denied, but it will not disappear.

Augustine’s Worst Sin

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Augustine sets out, in Confessions, to confess his sins to God comprehensively. He analyzes his life story minutely, and when he brings it all the way up to date, he makes the great leap into the present tense and confesses all that is within him. “May I know you, who know me,” he says to God, and then he ponders not just the events stored in his memory, but his memory itself: his entire mental presence, with all its details and depths, all its self-awareness and all its self-deceptions. He brings the whole mess into God’s presence and confesses.

Augustine discerns that the root of his sin is concupiscence, or disordered desire. And that disorder, whatever objects it may fasten on proximately, is ultimately a perverted desire to imitate God unlawfully: to be high and lifted up and almighty and in control in a way utterly inappropriate to a creature. So Augustine points to lust and pride as the ultimate forms of sin.

But in the autobiographical details he offers, he names his worst particular sins as sexual lust and worldly ambition. His desires for sex and for reputation are so deeply ingrained into his personality that he can only pry them apart with supernatural help. His conversion is a kind of ripping apart, and he feels his habit of lust being torn away from him. When he leaves it behind, he gets a new girlfriend, Lady Continence, and stays with her for life. He bids secular ambitions farewell, and commits himself to the church.

But Augustine’s worst sin may be one that he is not fully aware of. He gives us enough autobiographical detail that we can make our own judgment. As Augustine makes his journey out of darkness into light, he steps over somebody who is in his way. His concubine, the mother of his son Adeodatus, is not a proper wife for him when he is a rising academic star, and she is still not a proper wife for him when he is a convert to Christianity. Somewhere in the interim, Augustine’s mother Monica arranges for him to make a connection with a more suitable woman. Augustine ends up marrying nobody at all, instead committing his life to the church more directly in a semi-monastic mode.

But whatever became of that concubine? He sends her away, and we never learn her name. Surely it isn’t just our twenty-first century’s pervasive feminist sensibilities that allow us to see how bad his treatment of her is. Augustine treated this human being as a sexual object (“my sin, a woman”), as a career obstacle, as an encumbrance. He had to get past her to get on with his life, and he did.

It’s possible that the historical Augustine in fact treated her better than the character in the Confessions is able to show us. Perhaps he withheld her name from posterity for her own good; perhaps he provided for her in various ways; perhaps he was deeply aware of the interpersonal and relational transgression that he was involved in, but only wrote about the sexual element of the relationship because of the theme of his book.

But as it stands, the Confessions presents a terrible irony that may underline its basic message in spite of itself. Augustine’s worst sin might be one that he himself remained unaware of, one that his saintly mother aided and abetted him in carrying out, and one that remained imperfectly confessed because imperfectly understood.

If so, this is not garden-variety hypocrisy. It’s completely accounted for in Augustine’s own admission that he does not know how deep his sinfulness runs. God is not waiting for a perfect confession before he forgives Augustine, and Augustine knows it. He brings everything he is, known and unknown, into the presence of God. “May I know you, who know me.”

Finding a Wife for Cain

By Dr. Hugh Ross

The question concerning possible candidates for marriage to Cain comes near the top of the list of most frequently ask questions at our outreach events. It stems from the apparent problem of the first couple's having only three sons; Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain, the firstborn, after murdering Abel was banished to a land towards the east called Nod. If we are all descended from Adam and Eve, where could Cain have found a wife?

The problem is actually more serious yet. According to Genesis 4, Cain not only found a wife, but by the time of the birth of his son Enoch, he found enough people to help him build and populate a city. Furthermore, Adam and Eve did not give birth to Seth until after Cain murdered Abel and was banished to Nod.

Resolving the Population Problem

The first step in the solution of this problem is to recognize that Adam and Eve had many more children than Cain, Abel, and Seth. Genesis 5:4 says that "after Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years," and that "he had other sons and daughters." In fact, the genealogy of Genesis 5 records that every descendant of Adam down to Lamech had "other sons and daughters." These other sons and daughters were born to men even older than 187 years. Considering the long life spans recorded in Genesis 5 (which I take seriously based on evidences described in The Genesis Question, pp. 117-122) and assuming that couples remained reproductive for about half their lifetime, the possibility existed for a veritable population explosion. In fact, the world's population could have approached a few billion by the time of Adam's death at the age of 930 (see table).

Expected Population Growth in Adam's Lifetime

According to Genesis 5, life spans from Adam to Noah averaged 912 years. Each of the patriarchs mentioned had "other sons and daughters" in addition to the sons recorded by name. The table calculations are based on:

life span = 900 years, first child comes at age 50, child bearing years =500, and one child every 5 years during child bearing years.

year	reproducing couples	children born	total population
0	1	0	2
50	1	0	2
100	1	10	12
150	6	30	42
200	21	100	142
250	71	352	494
300	247	1210	1704
350	852	4180	5884
400	2942	14,450	20,334
450	10,167	49,892	70,226
500	35,113	172,358	242,584
550	121,292	595,378	837,962
600	418,980	2,056,530	2,894,492
650	1,447,245	7,103,862	9,998,364
700	4,999,176	24,538,536	34,536,930
750	17,268,444	84,762,338	119,299,368
800	59,649,613	292,790,780	412,090,500
850	206,045,003	1,011,374,120	1,423,465,830
900	711,732,063	3,493,544,650	4,917,014,660

According to the simple mathematics, if Cain waited to marry until he was about 200 years old, he probably had several women to choose from, providing some migrated eastward to Nod with other family members. If he waited another 200 years to build a city, he could have had at least a few thousand people to help him, again assuming some migration occurred. It is not entirely impossible that Cain had sisters from whom to take a wife even before his banishment and the birth of Seth. The text does not tell us.

Archeological evidence indicates that population growth did not take off explosively in the pre-Flood era. What happened? My view is that the sin of Cain eventually grew out of control. Murder may well have become the number one cause of death. This scenario would explain the very strong language God used with Noah in Genesis 9:6, commanding Noah's descendants to exercise whatever means necessary up to the death penalty to restrain the sin of murder.

The latter part of the fourth chapter of Genesis suggests, however, that the sin of murder took several generations to reach catastrophic proportions. Thus, the numbers suggested above for Cain's marriage candidates and fellow citizens are not likely to have been significantly affected.

Resolving the "Incest" Problem

Given that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, either Cain or one of his brothers must have married a sister. This would seem to violate the commands recorded in the book of Leviticus forbidding marriage between brothers and sisters. The Levitical laws, however, must be considered in their proper historical context.

Though the book of Genesis condemns sexual relations between children and their parents, it nowhere prohibits a man from marrying his sister or niece. Abraham, for example, married his half-sister without compunction. Not until the time of Moses were laws established forbidding a man from marrying a sister or niece. The timing of this command makes perfect sense biologically, for genetic defects as a result of intra-family marriage would not begin to crop up until after the first few dozen generations.

The Mystery of Cain's Mark

Genesis 4 tells us that God found it necessary to put a mark on Cain as a warning to other humans not to take vengeance upon him. The necessity of this mark indicates that the population of the human race had reached (or would reach) such a level that mistaking Cain for someone else would be a problem.

The text says nothing about what kind of mark Cain received or about its being passed on to his progeny. I see no basis for believing that any one of the races of man carries the mark of Cain.

A "Last Days" Warning

In many places Scripture speaks of horrible wickedness again overtaking humanity in the "last days." One indicator that these last days may be approaching is the fact that for the first time since the Flood, murder has become the prime cause of death for the human race. In case you wonder about my statistic, it includes the murder of living humans before their birth. According to the widely published data on abortion, one individual in three experiences death by murder in the United States, exceeding the toll taken by both heart disease and cancer. The figures for the rest of the world's nations are typically worse. In the case of Eastern Europe, Russia, and the People's Republic of China, the figures are much worse.

Amazingly, God holds back His judgment upon such rampant evil and widespread lack of repentance, even among believers. He patiently waits for those who will yet throw themselves upon His mercy and receive His grace. May we who are His show the way until He comes.

Keep doctors practicing medicine

By John Mark Reynolds
The Washington Post - On Faith

The U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, along with a variety of health care services for women. The Virginia General Assembly last week approved legislation that requires abortion clinics to be regulated as hospitals, and providers say the stricter regulations will force many of them out of business. Both measures were pushed by anti-abortion activists. Should personal and religious views be allowed to prevent women from having access to a legal medical procedure?

Of late Americans have witnessed the sad and ugly sight of a group imposing a narrow and extreme ideology on the nation. This minority refuses to recognize professional limits and are attempting to corrupt medicine.

How?

They confuse doctors with ethicists or lawmakers and expect our poor medical professionals to be judges of right and wrong and decide what should or should not be legal. Already overworked, these extremists demand doctors do what doctors are not trained to do.

Medical decisions should be left to a doctor and patient. Ethical decisions cannot always be and political decisions should never be. Doctors are credentialed by other doctors, but we elect our legislators.

Doctors are free to suggest the best medical care and patients are free to choose or reject it. The American ideal is for "we the people" to be given the most liberty possible. The American, and Christian, society respects an individual's power to choose. The right to choose and have power over one's own body is a great good, but it is not the only good.

Medical care and the choices involved cannot be isolated from the rest of human life. Some medical procedures come with a social or ethical cost. What would it profit a man to save his body at the cost of his soul?

Put simply: medical decisions sometimes involve ethical decisions.

Ethical decisions cannot be left to amateur ethicists, such as most medical doctors. That doctors wish to do a thing, can do a thing, and even want to do a thing, does not mean they should do it. What any man should do is not "just medicine." American history shows that medicine can easily be corrupted by bad men to pursue wicked ends.

Sterilizing certain Americans involuntarily in the twentieth century may have been a legal medical procedure that was justified by some scientists, but it was still wicked. The problem wasn't with the medicine, but with the ethics.

Medical doctors can only tell us what can be done, but they are as fallible as the rest of us in knowing what should be done.

Americans also know that not everything that is bad should be illegal. The dominant Christian ethical tradition taught us to balance liberty and law. Tolerating too much wickedness will bring societal collapse, but too many laws will choke out liberty and lead to tyranny.

Who will decide these questions?

The Founders of the American Republic decided that "we the People" through our elected representatives would decide what things are legal, though we don't decide "right and wrong." Every human being was given the right to life, liberty, and human happiness by their Creator. The laws of Nature and of Nature's God are not subject to Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court may have declared the fugitive slave laws legal and constitutional, but the perfume of legality did not cover the stench of moral rot.

Abortion, like race based slavery, is a very bad thing. God and most Americans know it is wrong, though the Supreme Court made it legal. Pretending that legal restrictions on abortion merely interfere with "medicine" is intellectually shallow. Pro-lifers are not restricting medicine, but what they believe to be unethical uses of medicine.

Some describe this as "personal" or "religious" concerns being used to restrict liberties, but all laws in the history of the Republic have been passed based on the "personal" or "religious" concerns of the voters or their representatives. Saying a thing is "personal" or "religious" is not the same as saying "irrational," though extremists in the secular community would have us believe it.

Individuals make decisions based on their best reason and experience. One set of facts to be considered are religious facts. If God's will can be known, humans ought to take it into account. Each personal decision becomes part of the will of the nation and it is this will that should become law. If the laws are good, a society will generally prosper.

In a republic, our elected officials, politicians, ultimately will reflect that the general will. Politicians may not decide "right and wrong," but they do regulate liberty with necessary laws. Mainstream Americans on the right and left know that some regulations are necessary to prevent abuses from powerful interests. The development and use of medical drugs and procedures are regulated in the public interest.

Advocates for legal abortion have carved out exceptions to sane regulations which have led to horrific abortion mills. Advocates of legal abortion cannot coherently argue that abortion is merely medical and then exempt abortion clinics the same regulations applied to other medical procedures.

Most American doctors don't want to practice abortion. They vote with their practices. Most Americans don't want to see an abortion clinic come to their neighborhood or have their children grow up to be abortionists. Overwhelmingly we know what we think about abortion ethically.

Most Americans are coming to the conclusion that our grandparents were right: abortion should not be legal in most cases. The 30-year experiment with legal abortion has failed. Through their elected representatives the American people soon will regulate and limit legal abortion, because we wish it. Courts can block the people's will for a time, but they cannot do so for long. This is particularly true when the Court is siding against Nature, Nature's God, and the will of the American people.

The Court and the laws made an immoral decision with Roe versus Wade, but now are making an anti-republican one by refusing to listen to the electorate. Americans believe medicine must be decided by doctors, but laws must reflect the judgments of "we the people." May the Republic be freed from the tyranny of an extremist minority using legal fiat to impose legal, unregulated abortion on the rest of the nation based merely on their personal, religious, or secular views.

Condemned to Joy

By Pascal Bruckner
City Journal

The Western cult of happiness is a mirthless enterprise.

On August 21, 1670, Jacques Bossuet, the bishop of Meaux and official preacher to the court of Louis XIV, pronounced the eulogy for Princess Henrietta of England before the Prince of Condé. The Duchess of Orléans had died at 26 after drinking a glass of chicory that may have been poisoned. At the threshold of death, the young woman had called on priests rather than doctors, embraced the crucifix, asked for the holy sacraments, and cried out to God. The wonder of death, Bossuet exclaimed, citing Saint Anthony, was that “for the Christian, it does not put an end to life but rather to the sins and perils to which life is exposed. God abbreviates our temptations along with our days; he thus sets a limit to occasions that might cost us true, eternal life; for this world is nothing but our common exile.” The good death was a door opened on eternity, a passage to that “true, eternal life.” In this life, by contrast, agony was expected.

Is it possible to imagine an attitude toward happiness and living further from our own?

Notwithstanding the Jacobin leader Saint-Just’s famous remark, happiness was never “a new idea in Europe.” In fact, it was the oldest of ideas, defended by the ancients and pondered by the great philosophical schools. But Christianity, which inherited the notion from Greek and Latin writers, changed it with a view to transcendence: man’s concern here below must be not joy but salvation. Christ alone redeems us from original sin and puts us on the path to divine truth. All earthly pleasures, according to the Christian authors, are but phantoms from the point of view of celestial beatitude. To wish for earthly happiness would be a sin against the Spirit; the passing pleasures of mortals are nothing compared with the hell that awaits sinners who pant after them.

This rigorous conception gave way over the centuries to a more accommodating view of life. The eighteenth century saw the rise of new techniques that improved agricultural production; it also saw new medicines—in particular, alkaloids and salicylic acid, an ancestor of aspirin whose curative and analgesic properties worked wonders. Suddenly, this world was no longer condemned to be a vale of tears; man now had the power to reduce hunger, ameliorate illness, and better master his future. People stopped listening to those who justified suffering as the will of God. If I could relieve pain simply by ingesting some substance, there was no need to have recourse to prayer to feel better.

The new conception of happiness was captured in a phrase of Voltaire’s in 1736: “Earthly paradise is here where I am.” Voltaire was, of course, pursued by the Church and the monarchy; he was threatened with death, and his writings were burned. But his proposition deserves attention. If paradise is here where I am, then happiness is here and now, not yesterday, in an age for which I might be nostalgic, and even less in some hypothetical future. In this upheaval of temporal perspectives, poverty and distress lose all legitimacy, and the whole work of enlightened nations becomes eliminating them through education and reason, and eventually science and industry. Human misfortune would be rendered an archaic residue.

After the American and French Revolutions (the first of which inscribed the pursuit of happiness in its founding document), the right to a decent life and the privileged status of pleasure became the order of the day for progressive movements across Europe. It is true that in the early twentieth century, the Bolsheviks curiously rehabilitated the Christian ideal of sacrifice by exhorting the proletariat to fight and work until the great coming of the Revolution; ironically, asceticism returned within a doctrine that denounced religion as the opiate of the masses and that relentlessly persecuted priests, pastors, and believers wherever it took power. But overall, throughout the twentieth century, hedonism’s claims grew ever stronger under the influence of Freudianism, feminism, and the avant-garde in art and politics.

In the 1960s, two major shifts transformed the right to happiness into the duty of happiness. The first was a shift in the nature of capitalism, which had long revolved around production and the deferral of gratification, but now focused on making us all good consumers. Working no longer sufficed; buying was also necessary for the industrial machine to run at full capacity. To make this shift possible, an ingenious invention had appeared not long before, first in America in the 1930s and then in Europe in the 1950s: credit. In an earlier time, anyone who wanted to buy a car, some furniture, or a house followed a rule that now seems almost unknown: he waited, setting aside his nickels and dimes. But credit changed everything; frustration became intolerable and satisfaction normal; to do without seemed absurd. We would live well in the present and pay back later. Today, we’re all aware of the excesses that resulted from this system, since the financial meltdown in the United States was the direct consequence of too many people living on credit, to the point of borrowing hundreds of times the real value of their possessions.

The second shift was the rise of individualism. Since nothing opposed our fulfillment any longer—neither church nor party nor social class—we became solely responsible for what happened to us. It proved an awesome burden: if I don’t feel happy, I can blame no one but myself. So it was no surprise that a vast number of fulfillment industries arose, ranging from cosmetic surgery to diet pills to innumerable styles of therapy, all promising reconciliation with ourselves and full realization of our potential. “Become your own best friend, learn self-esteem, think positive, dare to live in harmony,” we were told by so many self-help books, though their very number suggested that these were not such easy tasks. The idea of fulfillment, though the successor to a more demanding ethic, became a demand itself. The dominant order no longer condemns us to privation; it offers us paths to self-realization with a kind of maternal solicitude.

This generosity is by no means a liberation in every respect. In fact, a kind of charitable coercion engenders the malaise from which it then strives to deliver us. The statistics that it publicizes and the models that it holds up produce a new race of guilty parties, no longer sybarites or libertines but killjoys. Sadness is the disease of a society of obligatory well-being that penalizes those who do not attain it. Happiness is no longer a matter of chance or a heavenly gift, an amazing grace that blesses our monotonous days. We now owe it to ourselves to be happy, and we are expected to display our happiness far and wide.

Thus happiness becomes not only the biggest industry of the age but also a new moral order. We now find ourselves guilty of not being well, a failing for which we must answer to everyone and to our own consciences. Consider the poll, conducted by a French newspaper, in which 90 percent of people questioned reported being happy. Who would dare admit that he is sometimes miserable and expose himself to social opprobrium? This is the strange contradiction of the happiness doctrine when it becomes militant and takes on the power of ancient taboos—though in the opposite direction. To enjoy was once forbidden; from now on, it’s obligatory. Whatever method is chosen, whether psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, we find the same assumption everywhere: beatitude is within your grasp, and you have only to take advantage of “positive conditioning” (in the Dalai Lama’s words) in order to attain it. We have come to believe that the will can readily establish its power over mental states, regulate moods, and make contentment the fruit of a personal decision.

This belief in our ability to will ourselves happy also lies behind the contemporary obsession with health. What is health, correctly understood, but a kind of permission we receive to live in peace with our bodies and to let ourselves be carefree? These days, though, we are required to resist our mortality as far as possible. The domain of therapy tends to annex everything that once belonged to the art of living well. Food, for example, is divided not into good and bad but into healthy and unhealthy. The appropriate prevails over the tasty, the carefully measured over the irregular. The dinner table becomes a kind of pharmacy counter where fat and calories are weighed, where one conscientiously chews foods that are hardly more than medications. Wine must be drunk not for its taste, under this regimen, but to strengthen the arteries; whole-grain bread must be eaten to aid digestion; garlic must be bitten off raw for various health reasons.

Duration—holding on as long as possible—becomes an authoritative value, even if it must be achieved at the cost of terrible restrictions, depriving oneself of some of the best the world has to offer. From this point of view, the hunting down of smokers, now expelled from almost all public places, looks something like a collective exorcism, as if a whole society wished to absolve itself of having once found pleasure in cigarettes. In France, photos of Jean-Paul Sartre and the young Jacques Chirac holding cigarettes have been retouched to eliminate the offending objects—just as the Soviet empire used to do with banished leaders.

Yet by trying to remove every anomaly, every failing, we end up denying what is in fact the main benefit of health: indifference to oneself, what a great surgeon once called “the silence of the organs.” Everyone must today be saved from something—from hypertension, from imperfect digestion, from a tendency to gain weight. One is never thin enough, fit enough, strong enough. Health has its martyrs, its pioneers, its heroes and saints. Sickness and health become harder to distinguish, to the point that we risk creating a society of hypochondriacs.

Now that it has become the horizon of our democracies, a matter of ceaseless work and effort, happiness is surrounded by anxiety. We feel compelled to be saved constantly from what we are, poisoning our own existence with all kinds of impossible commandments. Our hedonism is not wholesome but haunted by failure. However well behaved we are, our bodies continue to betray us. Age leaves its mark, illness finds us one way or another, and pleasures have their way with us, following a rhythm that has nothing to do with our vigilance or our resolution.

What is needed is a renewed humility. We are not the masters of the sources of happiness; they ever elude the appointments we make with them, springing up when we least expect them and fleeing when we would hold them close. The excessive ambition to expunge all that is weak or broken in body or mind, to control moods and states of soul, sadness, chagrin, moments of emptiness—all this runs up against our finitude, against the inertia of the human species, which we cannot manipulate like some raw material. We have the power to avoid or to heal certain evils, yes, but we cannot order happiness as if it were a meal in a restaurant.

The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel.