Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas

By Logan Paul Gage
Touchstone Magazine

The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design

In a little-recounted episode of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial, the plaintiffs (objecting to a four-paragraph statement read in biology class) summoned a curious expert witness: John F. Haught, former chair of Georgetown University’s theology department. Asked to identify the antecedents of intelligent design, Professor Haught pointed to Thomas Aquinas’s five arguments for the existence of God, “one of which was to argue from the design and complexity and order and pattern in the universe to the existence of an ultimate intelligent designer.”

Intelligent design (ID) was on trial because it conflicts with Darwin’s theory as taught in the classroom: Modern Darwinian evolution claims that the unguided processes of random mutation and natural selection are sufficient to explain the stunning features of living things, while intelligent design claims there is evidence that some things are better explained by an intelligent cause.

Haught slightly mischaracterized Thomas’s argument, which says nothing about complexity per se. But Thomas certainly made a design argument by appealing to features of the natural world, as do contemporary ID theorists. Despite these similarities, however, some Thomists claim that Thomism is compatible with Darwinian evolution and incompatible with intelligent design.

So which is it? Are Thomas’s writings a precursor to intelligent design, as even design-critics like Haught claim; or is Darwin compatible with and ID irreconcilable with Thomas’s philosophical and theological framework? Or is there some third possibility? These are important questions, especially for Catholics, because St. Thomas is the gold standard of Catholic thought—not infallible, but highly trustworthy.

In a typical discussion of Darwinian evolution, Christian philosophy, and intelligent design, one is likely to hear that St. Thomas had no problem with secondary causes operating in nature and that St. Augustine knew that the Bible is “not a science textbook.” Both of these assertions are true, as far as they go. But unfortunately, such platitudes only obscure deeper sources of tension between Darwinism and Thomistic thought. Here I would like to explore three intimately related sources of tension: the problem of essences, the problem of transformism, and the problem of formal causation.

The Essences of Species

First, the problem of essences. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that “evolution . . . does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.” It might appear shocking, but in this one remark the ever-perspicacious Chesterton summarized a serious conflict between classical Christian philosophy and Darwinism.

In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms.

Think about it: How is it that we are able to recognize different organisms as belonging to the same group? The Aristotelian provides a good answer: It is because species really exist—not as an abstraction in the sky, but they exist nonetheless. We recognize the squirrel’s form, which it shares with other members of its species, even though the particular matter of each squirrel differs. So each organism, each unified whole, consists of a material and immaterial part (form). (“Species” here is a more encompassing concept than in modern biological definitions. For example, wolves and domesticated dogs might share a common essence.)

One way to see this form-matter dichotomy is as Aristotle’s solution to the ancient tension between change and permanence debated so vigorously in the pre-Socratic era. Heraclitus argued that reality is change. Everything constantly changes—like fire, which never stays the same from moment to moment. Philosophers like Parmenides (and Zeno of “Zeno’s paradoxes” fame) argued exactly the opposite; there is no change. Despite appearances, reality is permanent. How else could we have knowledge? If reality constantly changes, how can we know it? What is to be known?

Aristotle solved this dilemma by postulating that while matter is constantly in flux—even now some somatic cells are leaving my body while others arrive—an organism’s form is stable. It is a fixed reality, and for this reason is a steady object of our knowledge. Organisms have an essence that can be grasped intellectually.

Denial of True Species

Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes:

I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.

Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder. This is an extreme expression of the anti-Aristotelian (and anti-Thomist) philosophy of nominalism. Nominalism (stemming from the Latin nomen, or “name”) suggests that the individual is the only reality—not the universal, form, or essence. The mind invents universals in order to group together similar objects. But the universal is not a reality in which the individual in some way participates.

But Thomas embraced form and, following Augustine, even maintained that a creature’s form reflects the second member of the Trinity. For, “as it [the creature] has a form and species, it represents the Word as the form of the thing made by art is from the conception of the craftsman.”

The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow.

What About Man?

Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals.

Classical notions of ethics were radically dependent upon this notion of a real, knowable human nature. Aristotle and others often argued for what is ethical in terms of what leads to human flourishing and fulfillment. Yet if there is no human nature, how can we know what human fulfillment looks like in general? Tim and Tom might, then, flourish under different moral codes. Lack of a human nature may leave us with “different strokes for different folks.”

As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre showed in After Virtue, the way out of this modern dilemma is to recognize that if something’s nature includes purposes or proper functions, then “ought” follows from “is.” For if man is a certain sort of being, if he has a certain formal nature, then there are facts about how man ought to behave. There are objective criteria by which we can judge a human being good or bad. This kind of telos-infused nature cannot be sustained by Darwinism, however, for Darwinism denies that organisms have formal natures or are purposefully made.

But, the Darwinian will say, “We believe in function, too!” True, the Darwinian knows of function—that ears hear, for example. But to say in the Darwinian sense that the function of ears is to hear, notes philosopher Lydia McGrew, is only to say that the information encoding ears was passed to progeny because ears happened to hear—and that hearing, presumably, gave these organisms some survival advantage. If, in 10,000 years, humans walk on their hands because this somehow aids survival, the Darwinian cannot claim that hands are meant for walking, only that hands in fact do walk at this time. That is, the Darwinian cannot support the notion of proper function.

Implications for Bioethics

This is not a mere abstract point. This dilemma is playing itself out in contemporary debates in bioethics. With whom are bioethicists like Leon Kass (neo-Aristotelian and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics) sparring today if not with thoroughgoing Darwinians like Princeton’s Peter Singer, who denies that humans, qua humans, have intrinsic dignity? Singer even calls those who prefer humans to other animals “speciesist,” which in his warped vocabulary is akin to racism.

What justifies the excessive expense and effort required to keep a baby with Down syndrome alive? For the traditionalist, it is the baby’s membership in the human species. This gives the baby intrinsic value. For the utilitarian like Singer, such expense is not justified; one would do better to contribute to the World Wildlife Fund, for species’ differences are not essential but accidental. As Singer notes,

All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. . . . He showed in the 19th century that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe.

If one must choose between saving an intelligent, fully developed pig or a Down syndrome baby, Singer thinks we should opt for the pig. Perhaps this is why natural law theorist J. Budziszewski writes, “If any contemporary scientific movement holds promise for the furtherance of the natural law tradition, it is not the stale dogma of natural selection, but frank recognition of natural design.”

No Essential Differences?

The second conflict is very similar to the first. The Thomist, as we have seen, is committed to the reality of universals, for universals are the objects of higher knowledge. But it is not only the existence of species that Darwinism destroys; it is also their stability.

Darwinian theory posits that all living things are related through one or very few ancestors via solely material processes. This is known as “Universal Common Ancestry.” But if living things have unchangeable essences, how can these living things change (or “transform”) into other living things through mere material causes?

Mark Ryland, a Thomist who is not an ID proponent, put it this way to a gathering of the American Maritain Association in 2006:

For those defending at least some aspects of the classical idea of essences, the problem can be stated as follows: how can one kind of living substance with its own unique essence change into another kind? And beyond the how, why would this happen in the natural world? What intrinsic end or ends would it serve?

For Darwin, there was no problem to solve, for there are no essential differences between living things. We see this assumption at work in every new primatological study finding that apes have an inner mental life, use sign language, or form hierarchical social structures “just like we do!” The Thomist should see this as hyperbolic, for his starting point is our everyday experience of the world. And as David Berlinski sardonically observes, the first and most obvious fact about apes is that they are “behind the bars of their cages and we are not.” Put plainly, “beyond what we have in common with the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting, the differences are profound.”

Stable Realities

We should not be too flippant about this, however. No doubt, apes’ capacities are more similar to ours than are, say, alpacas’. But sometimes these similarities serve to hide real transitional difficulties. British literary critic A. N. Wilson gives a fine example from his atheist days:

A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved,” like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena—of which love and music are the two strongest—which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.

For the Darwinian, complex biological realities exist for the sake of their smaller units of composition. Richard Dawkins has gone so far as to suggest that we are the pawns of our selfish genes. In this view, biological reality is a continuum, and the smallest units of composition run the show. Species’ differences are mere accidents of environment and mutation.

But for Thomas, “the elements are for the sake of the compounds, the compounds for the sake of living things.” That is, reality is decidedly discontinuous, hierarchical, and top-down. The entire point of essences is that they are stable realities; they cannot change and thus can provide real knowledge. The differences between species (intelligible essences) are differences of kind. Thus, those defending the tradition of natural philosophy found in Aristotle and St. Thomas simply cannot accept transformism—at least not without introducing teleological conceptions that transform Darwinian theory itself.

What Does God Do?

Finally, before moving to consider intelligent design, there is the problem of formal causation. It is here that we find St. Thomas’s unique contribution, illuminating the insights of Aristotle with the light of Christian knowledge.

St. Thomas argued against the Islamic scholars of his day who held that God is the direct cause of everything in nature, a view known as occasionalism. Put negatively, occasionalism denies that creatures exercise their own causal powers. It is God who always acts as the only cause; creatures only appear to cause effects. “On the contrary,” as Thomas is fond of saying, God created creatures with real natures that have real powers. Thus, ants act in an ant-like fashion. Ants themselves cause effects.

God is, of course, also a true cause of ant behavior: He created ants, he sustains ants in being, and he concurs (co-operates) with every ant action. According to Notre Dame philosopher Alfred Freddoso, this last aspect was extremely important to medieval Aristotelians: “It cannot be emphasized enough that the position being rejected here (viz., that God’s action in the world is exhausted by creation and conservation) is regarded as too weak by almost all medieval Aristotelians. . . .” These medieval thinkers would be scandalized by the claims of modern Christian thinkers who exclude God from nature except as the First Cause and as having a merely bureaucratic role as sustainer of the universe.

So Thomas believed in true secondary causes. In a certain sense, it is true that God causes everything. But in the act of creation, God also delegates to creatures the power to act as true causes of their creaturely behavior, according to their natures. Because Aristotle is so well known for recognizing teleology intrinsic to living things, and because Thomas is so well known for this view of secondary causation, some Thomists think that their tradition can wholeheartedly embrace Darwinian evolution. After all, Darwin just claimed that nature is due to secondary causes, right? Nature just “does its own thing.” It is this drastic over-simplification that lies at the heart of the casual acceptance of Darwinism among some classically thinking people today. We must dig deeper.

Exemplar Causes

Recall that for Thomas, creatures are a combination of form and matter. The question that must be answered, then, in any version of Thomistic evolution, is where form comes from. Darwin, denying Aristotelian essentialism, saw organisms’ traits as accidental properties of living things that change with the winds of time. Not so St. Thomas.

In his recent book Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes, Catholic University philosophy professor Gregory T. Doolan gives the most extensive treatment to date of Thomas’s notion of “exemplar causation,” an integral part of Thomas’s metaphysics.

What is an exemplar cause? It is a type of formal cause—a sort of blueprint, the idea according to which something is organized. For Thomas, these ideas exist separately from the things they cause. For instance, if a boy is going to build a soapbox derby car, the idea in his mind is separate from the form of the car; yet the car’s form expresses the idea, or exemplar cause, in the boy’s mind. Exemplar causes actually do something. They are “practical ideas,” writes Doolan.

For Thomas—and here is the important point—a creature’s form comes from a similar form in the divine intellect. In other words, the cause of each species’ form is extrinsic. In fact, writes Thomas, “God is the first exemplar cause of all things.” Creatures do possess the causal powers proper to the nature God has granted them, but creatures most certainly do not possess the power to create the form of their or any other species.

For instance, frog parents have the proper ability to generate tadpoles. They are able to bring out the natural form that is present in the potentiality of matter. However, the frog parents cannot create the form “frog.” After all, Thomas reasons, if frog parents could create the form “frog” they would be the creators of their own form, and this is clearly a contradiction. Natural things can generate forms of the same species, but they cannot create the form of a species in general.

Thus, natural agency is not eliminated, yet God is still actively involved in nature. Specific forms originate and reside in his mind, though God allows creatures the dignity of acting in this creative drama. Still, Thomas is careful to note that while secondary causes are real, “God . . . can cause an effect to result in anything whatsoever independently of middle causes.”

By now it should be clear how different Thomas’s philosophy of nature is from Darwinism. Rather than form being a merely apparent reality that can be molded into any other form, for Thomas form originates in God’s mind. He directly creates it. It is a forethought, not an afterthought. Species, then, come to be because of his will and power (either successively or all at once). They are neither the product of a trial-and-error process of natural selection nor the mere intrinsic unfolding of secondary causes. Secondary causes have their place, but they are inherently impotent to create novel form.

Let’s face it: Thomas Aquinas was not an evolutionist, let alone a Darwinist, in any sense.

Three Misperceptions & Four Causes

Given the active role of God in nature in Thomas’s system, one might think today’s Thomists would encourage the pursuit of signs of intelligent design in nature. Yet in recent years, some Thomists have shied away from ID. They do so not only because of lax scrutiny of the tensions just discussed but also because of three major misperceptions of intelligent design: first, that ID is “mechanistic”; second, that ID is a “God of the Gaps” theory; and third, that ID is inherently “interventionist.” While many Thomists harbor doubts about the more extravagant claims of Darwinian science, taken together these three factors make it almost impossible for some Thomists to embrace intelligent design. That is as unnecessary as it is unfortunate.

One of the defining hallmarks of modern Thomism is its strong rejection of early modern philosophy as seen in René Descartes and Francis Bacon. In general, modernists reduce Aristotle’s four causes down to only two causes and, as a result, reduce all knowledge to empirical knowledge. Both moves strike directly at Thomistic philosophy, so it is no surprise that they have aroused Thomists’ ire.

“Causes” in Aristotle’s sense explain why something is the way it is, and as Thomas explains, “there are four kinds of cause, namely, the material, efficient, formal and final.” Aristotle and Thomas would explain a marble statue by reference to its material cause (the marble), its efficient cause (the sculptor), its formal cause (the shape of the statue), and its final cause (the purpose of honoring Athena). A modernist, in contrast, sees only material man and marble at work. Ultimately, all is explained by atoms in motion—not by immaterial ideas, forms, or purposes. Thus for the modernist, knowledge is necessarily and exclusively knowledge of the empirical.

Some Thomists insist that ID is methodologically flawed because, they claim, ID, like modernism, rejects formal and final causation. This is incorrect. Far from rejecting final causation, ID theorists see ID as finding empirical evidence of purpose or teleology, for they see some features of nature as inexplicable apart from intelligent activity such as foresight and planning.

By reintroducing intelligent causes as a legitimate scientific pursuit, and by rejecting the Darwinian notion that material and efficient causes suffice to explain nature, ID theorists may well open the door for renewed attention to formal causes. Thomists should welcome ID as a partner.

Agency, Not Mechanism

Still, some Thomists insist that ID inherently views nature mechanistically. Those who say this consistently have in mind Michael Behe’s argument for the “irreducible complexity” of what are referred to in the scientific literature as “molecular machines.” They seem to forget that Thomas repeatedly used analogies between living objects and man-made artifacts. So they should hardly be offended that Behe would compare some aspects of microbiological structures to machines.

Besides, ID arguments propose the very opposite of mechanism—agency. Consider Stephen Meyer’s argument concerning the informational content of DNA. In Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that blind material causes are insufficient to produce the immaterial information content of DNA. An immaterial mind, Meyer claims, is a better explanation than any mindless, material cause.

Some Thomist critics go one step further and claim that ID concedes a modernist, Enlightenment view of science. Perhaps this is because ID proponents insist that ID arguments fall within the domain of natural science. But this criticism has things precisely backward: ID theorists challenge the Enlightenment notion that only matter matters, that science cannot take immaterial concepts like mental causation seriously. ID challenges this directly, noting that while materialist science may have seemed plausible in the age of steam, it is hardly plausible in today’s world of the information super-highway—run on the power of the invisible and the immaterial. According to ID theorists, accounting for nature in all its richness requires that we appeal not just to material but to personal causes as well.

Moreover, the claim that design is empirically detectable concedes nothing to the modernist idea that reason is limited to the empirical realm. Nor does anything in ID imply that only science can provide real knowledge. One can argue for empirical evidence of design and also defend, say, knowledge of divine revelation, moral knowledge, knowledge of abstract essences, and knowledge derived from philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

Not a “Gaps” Argument

The second confusion regards the claim that intelligent design is a “God of the Gaps” argument. As Thomist Edward Feser writes, “Aquinas does not argue in this lame ‘God of the gaps’ manner. . . . Paley did, and ‘Intelligent Design’ theorists influenced by him do as well.” Expressed more formally, a “gaps” argument is known as an argument from ignorance. These arguments base claims upon what one does not know rather than upon what one does know. Critics misconstrue contemporary ID arguments (and perhaps Paley’s as well) as, “I do not know how this feature of the natural world arose via material causes; therefore, God did it!”

Yet this, too, is simply a misunderstanding. ID is not an argument for God’s existence. Rather, it is an inference to an intelligent cause. Some people think ID theorists are being coy, but they just want to avoid overstating their argument. Thomas drew the same distinction in Summa Contra Gentiles:

For seeing that natural things run their course according to a fixed order, and since there cannot be order without a cause of order, men, for the most part, perceive that there is one who orders the things that we see. But who or of what kind this cause of order may be, or whether there be but one, cannot be gathered from this general consideration.

So there’s certainly nothing anti-Thomistic in distinguishing between a generic argument for design and an argument for God’s existence—even if the former might provide evidence for the latter.

Effects That Come from Minds

Furthermore, ID—whether true or false—is not an argument from ignorance. ID proponents argue from the known features of natural objects, the known causal capacities of minds in our everyday experience, and the known limits of certain material causes. In fact, this is the same method that makes Thomism so appealing. Experience teaches us that some effects in our everyday observation of the cause-and-effect structure of the world always come from minds. Material causes simply do not suffice to explain some things.

If, for instance, I come home and find that the magnetic letters on the refrigerator say “I love daddy,” I know that a mind rather than material causes alone (e.g., strong winds blowing through the kitchen window) produced the message. I already have numerous experiences with written language; I know the limits of material causes in this arena. ID merely formalizes this common experience with analytic rigor.

Take Stephen Meyer’s argument mentioned previously. Meyer argues that DNA, which contains the same semantic quality as human language, also comes from a mind. He surveys today’s most prominent materialistic theories for the origin of DNA’s specified complexity and concludes that they lack the causal resources to explain this salient property of DNA. But intelligent agency does not. Thus, judged by standard modes of reasoning in the historical sciences, intelligent agency is a better explanation.

The form of Meyer’s argument is precisely the same as Darwin’s. (Darwin learned it from Sir Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology.) The method involves looking to presently operating causes to explain past events in natural history. DNA is often called a “code,” and if Meyer is correct, the metaphor runs deeper than materialist philosophy ever dreamt.

Let the Evidence Decide

Finally, as we have already seen, in arguing against the occasionalists St. Thomas affirmed that God has given nature causal capacities of its own. They are bounded, of course, by certain actions of which only God is capable, but nature has its role nonetheless. And this fact has led some Thomists to an aesthetic preference for scientific theories that do not involve God’s “interference” in nature. They are wary of ID’s seeming “interventionism.”

Whereas materialists must be non-interventionists, theists have more explanatory resources at their disposal. Thus, it seems that the evidence should decide the matter for theists. Perhaps it is logically possible that God limited himself to secondary causes in natural history, but we cannot deduce that beforehand. If the fossil record remains discontinuous despite the occasional media hype over a new “missing link,” and if field studies of natural selection continue to show that natural selection merely keeps populations healthy, then so be it. Maybe God acted as a primary cause at different periods in life’s history.

Christians already believe this. They recite it every time they say the creed. As Avery Cardinal Dulles—an advocate for teleological evolution—wrote:

Christian Darwinists run the risk of conceding too much to their atheistic colleagues. They may be over-inclined to grant that the whole process of emergence takes place without the involvement of any higher agency. Theologians must ask whether it is acceptable to banish God from his creation in this fashion. . . . [God] raised Jesus from the dead. If God is so active in the supernatural order, producing effects that are publicly observable, it is difficult to rule out on principle all interventions in the process of evolution. Why should God be capable of creating the world from nothing but incapable of acting within the world he has made?

No Commitment Necessary

For Christians, this is surely a needed warning against swallowing popular prejudices. But even so, is the ID proponent necessarily committed to God’s repeated intervention in the natural world? Absolutely not. Postulating intelligent agency as a necessary causal ingredient for certain features of nature does not commit one to exactly when or how those features arrived on the scene. Recall the letters on my refrigerator: I cannot be certain who put them there, or how, or when, but I surely know that the arrangement was intelligently designed.

Catholic biochemist and ID proponent Michael Behe, for one, thinks it unlikely that God intervened directly in the development of the biological realm. Rather, he speculates that God may have front-loaded the information and laws necessary for humanity’s development into the beginning of the universe. Behe thinks that

the assumption that design unavoidably requires “interference” rests mostly on a lack of imagination. There’s no reason that the extended fine-tuning view . . . necessarily requires active meddling with nature. . . . One simply has to envision that the agent who caused the universe was able to specify from the start not only laws, but much more.

Intelligent design by natural laws and initial specifications is still intelligent design, and it may be detectable in the same way that the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics are detectable. The detectable effects of intelligent design could be the same, no matter how that design was implemented.

But Thomas himself, far from being worried about intervention, thought there was good reason to think that God purposefully “intervenes” in nature, writing that

the divine power [can] at times work apart from the order assigned by God to nature, without prejudice to His providence. In fact He does this sometimes to manifest His power. For by no other means can it better be made manifest that all nature is subject to the divine will, than by the fact that sometimes He works independently of the natural order: since this shows that the order of things proceeded from Him, not of natural necessity, but of His free will.

Thomas’s way of speaking here is more helpful than speaking of “intervention,” which is often used pejoratively. In Thomas’s view, when God acts directly in nature, he is not invading foreign territory, tampering with something he should have fixed earlier, or violating natural laws established in opposition to his will. He is acting within the world that he created and that he sustains from moment to moment. If he sometimes chooses to act independently of the natural order, to bring about results that would not have happened if nature were left to its own devices, that is his prerogative. Thus, Thomists who decry “interventionism” may not be as Thomistic as they think.

Compatible Spheres

Still, St. Thomas’s argumentation differs at times from modern design arguments. For one thing, Thomas is more concerned with ontology than biology. His chief concern is why something should exist at all, not the intricate features of particular biological organisms. For another, Thomas preferred deductive arguments. ID proponents prefer newer forms of argumentation, especially “inference to the best explanation”—the method common in the historical sciences, whereby one must not only weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a given hypothesis but also compare hypotheses with each other. In this fashion, a scientist can decide which theory currently explains the data better than all rivals and yet remain open to new data or hypotheses that might change the equation.

While they don’t provide the certainty of deductive conclusions, one advantage to these arguments is that they recognize that this finite world often requires trade-offs: One cannot sit satisfied having raised questions about an ID argument; rather, he must show that his own hypothesis is better at explaining the relevant data.

As Alexander Pruss, an analytical Thomist and former Georgetown colleague of John Haught, writes, “On the compatibility between Thomism and ID, the answer is surely positive. Thus, one might think that the irreducible complexity types of arguments provide a strong probabilistic case for design and that the existence of teleology provides a sound deductive argument for a first cause.”

Despite the different subject matter and styles of argumentation, Thomists and ID theorists have, as we have seen, much in common. The dismissal of intelligent design by some contemporary Thomists is unfortunate. For if reality is a unified whole, that is, if it stems from the divine mind, as Thomas believed, would it not be odd if good philosophy concluded that life was designed but good science concluded that it was not?

Narnia Invaded

By Steven D. Boyer
Touchstone Magazine

How the New Films Subvert Lewis’s Hierarchical World

As everyone knows, two Hollywood productions of recent years bear the titles of two of C. S. Lewis’s famous stories from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. The third installment in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is scheduled for release this December, with The Silver Chair slated for 2011.

Many Christians are very excited about these developments, believing (quite rightly) that Lewis’s stories are shot through with deeply Christian imaginative themes. What can be wrong with disseminating the stories more widely in this way? The answer is: Absolutely nothing—so long as it really is Lewis’s stories being disseminated. But there’s the rub. A thoughtful investigation suggests that the Narnia films are very far from being a faithful representation of Lewis’s own Christian vision of reality.

This is a serious charge, so let me focus it a bit more. I shall not object to the quality of the movies simply as movies, nor to the interpolation of much non-Lewis material into both movies, nor even to the appropriateness of film, in principle, as a vehicle for telling such stories. Objections might be made (and have been made) on all three points, but I shall not make them here.

Instead, I have a larger and more basic question in mind. Do these film versions “do” what Lewis’s books themselves “do”? Do those who see the films come away nourished in the same way that readers of the stories do? Do the films give us, or do they try to give us, something recognizably like Lewis’s comprehensively Christian vision of the world?

A Peculiar Love of Hierarchy

In order to address questions like these, we have to ask first what Lewis is trying to do. What is his “Christian vision of the world”? We could address this question by focusing on the Narnia tales specifically, but it ends up being more productive (and avoiding some of the twists and turns of scholarship on Narnia) to begin with a broader account of Lewis’s basic theological outlook, and so that is what we shall do.

Understanding this basic outlook does bring with it, however, one really substantial obstacle: we have to think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world, even among contemporary Christians. That element is Lewis’s peculiar fondness for hierarchy.

The word “hierarchy” does not have very pleasant connotations in our day, so to speak of someone being “fond of hierarchy” sounds very “peculiar” indeed. It is like admitting that your great-uncle Jack, really a fine old gentleman, never got over his childhood delight in pulling the wings off flies. Of course, this odd and even repulsive idiosyncrasy might be ignored by members of the family, out of their affection for Uncle Jack.

The only problem with treating Lewis this way is that his particular oddity reappears everywhere in his work, usually quite explicitly, and it has an exceptionally strong bearing upon the way he understands orthodox Christianity. If we are going to understand Lewis’s deeply Christian vision of the world, we will need to try hard to understand how this suspicious attraction to hierarchy is a part of it.

Two Interlocked Principles

Lewis’s thinking begins with the Christian understanding of God as the Creator of the world, and of the world as God’s creation. The historic Christian doctrine of Creation requires Christians to insist on uniting two fundamental principles, and oddly enough, two principles that the contemporary outlook is often prone to separate.

First, it insists upon hierarchy. We might not use this term very often, but it is clear that any serious doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”) involves the recognition of a very real hierarchical distinction between God and world. The difference between the great Creator who gives reality and the cosmos that receives reality is absolute. The one is utterly independent, the other utterly dependent. The one is worthy of all worship; the other rightly offers this worship. There is here a hierarchy of the deepest, richest kind, for in every imaginable respect, the world is subordinate—and rightly subordinate—to the God who creates and constantly sustains her.

Yet right alongside this affirmation of hierarchy in the Christian doctrine of Creation, we find the insistence that creation is fundamentally, unambiguously good—and with a goodness that grows directly out of its unqualified dependence upon its Creator. Note the surprising interpenetration of these two principles. Creation is not good in spite of its subordination to God, in spite of the hierarchy; it is good because of its subordination, because of the hierarchy. It is good because it is created, and to be created is to be glorious precisely by virtue of reflecting or showing forth the greater, higher glory of the Creator.

Indeed, as soon as any created thing ceases to be rightly subordinate to God, that creature ceases also to be good. It becomes a competitor with God, like Molech or Baal or Satan, rather than a servant of God. This is the essence of sin in Lewis’s mind: it is a turning away from our true creaturely status. It is an attempt to replace the goodness that naturally comes from being subordinate to God the Creator with a different, independent, autonomous goodness. It is a rejection of God.

Delight in Hierarchy

So hierarchy, by its nature, is fundamentally good. And Lewis follows the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition by going further, by believing that the goodness of hierarchically ordered relationships extends all through the world that God has made. Relationships of all kinds are ordered, Lewis thinks, with an appropriate kind of giving and an appropriate kind of receiving. When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result.

Now we don’t have space here to pursue this idea very far, but the point is absolutely crucial: in Lewis’s mind, hierarchy is the source of freedom. This means that, as odd as it sounds to most of us, hierarchical order is something that we all ought not to hate or to fear, but to delight in.

To be sure, hierarchy has been abused, and Lewis is well aware that, in a fallen world, we need equality as a protection against that abuse. But it is one thing to protect ourselves from the abuse of hierarchy, and it is another to reject outright the thing that is abused—and it is this latter error that the modern world has fallen into. Finding that hierarchy has been abused, we have rejected hierarchy in principle.

But this is a dreadful mistake. It is like discovering that some of our food has been poisoned and therefore resolving never to eat again. Worse still, if Lewis is right, this rejection of hierarchy is nothing less than a rejection of a fully Christian way of seeing the world.

Countercultural Creativity

Of course, it is another question whether Lewis really is right about all of this. It seems to be a pretty important question. Unfortunately, it is also a question that most of us have very few resources to answer honestly, for the simple reason that, for most of us, “good hierarchy” is a contradiction in terms. The very word hierarchy usually has a ring of doom to it in our culture: it reeks of domination and oppression. For most of us, even to consider the possibility that something called hierarchy could be a good, edifying thing will take an intentional, countercultural act of creative imagination.

Enter The Chronicles of Narnia. At last, we are in a position to see at least part of what Lewis is up to in these delightful tales. He wants to remind us what a beautiful, elegant, adventurous, festive place the world can be, and he thinks that right order is a part of that good world. Through these stories, Lewis gives us the imaginative tools to think critically—he would say to think more Christianly—about our own cultural assumptions regarding hierarchy, equality, and so on.

We can see Lewis’s strategy at work if we just think for a moment about what his original stories are like. Narnia is a great repository of hierarchical images and relations—of good kings and noble knights, of laborers who are not disgruntled and servants who are not demeaned, of Aslan the great Lion who rules over all, who is never safe, but always good.

One can hardly turn a page of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or of Prince Caspian without encountering compelling images of royal authority and knightly virtue—and we see now that both of these themes are intimately connected with Lewis’s positive construal of hierarchy, which in turn is foundational to his distinctively Christian vision of reality.

Hollywood Shifts the Center

So, what about Hollywood? Is the Christian vision of the Narnia films anything like that of Lewis’s own Narnia stories? That is the question we turn to next.

Let us begin with some brief attention to Walden Media’s 2005 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—very brief attention, since we need to spend more time on Prince Caspian. This brevity is unfortunate in a way, because I think there really is a fundamental shift in focus in this first film, a shift from a story that is chiefly about Aslan to a story that is chiefly about the children, and especially about Peter as he grows toward maturity. To be sure, Aslan is quite helpful along the way, but he is no longer the center—and that is big news, if we are thinking about Lewis’s Christian worldview. So there is much more to be said about this first film, even if we do not have time to say it here.

Yet we must take time to note one aspect of Peter’s growing up that turns out to be especially relevant to our concerns. The greater part of Peter’s maturation is his learning to take responsibility for his situation rather than just quietly acquiescing in it. He must learn to take risks even in the teeth of Susan’s ever-so-rational good sense; he must learn to follow his own judgment, not just do what “Mum” would want him to do. This is not a bad lesson: unquestionably, maturity does involve this kind of growth toward independence. But consider the way this growth is formulated in the film.

The opening scene shows us an air raid in London, and we find Peter very angry at Edmund because the younger boy, rather than running to the bomb shelter as he has been instructed to do, runs back into the house to retrieve a photograph of his father and then has to be rescued by Peter. Peter performs the rescue all right, but he also savagely chastises his brother: “Why can’t you just do as you’re told!?”

A Strange Sign of Maturity

These are very significant words, for the movie as a whole consists in Peter learning to think and act independently—learning, in fact, not to do as he is told. The value of this kind of “disobedience” reappears frequently, but most significantly near the end of the film, in the high, climactic moment when the great battle against the White Witch seems all but lost. In despair, Peter commands Edmund to “get the girls and go home”—that is, to abandon this losing fight and get their sisters to safety. But the reformed Edmund now shows his own new maturity and virtue, and he shows it by disobeying.

It is a good move: by staying in the battle, Edmund is able to break the Witch’s wand and thus to contribute in no small way to the Narnian victory. In the celebration immediately after the Witch’s death, with everything now won and Edmund proved a hero, Peter offers a teasing, tongue-in-cheek “rebuke” to Edmund that takes us right back to the opening of the movie: “When are you going to learn to do as you’re told?” he hollers. Of course, he doesn’t mean it anymore. By now, he has grown enough to realize that receiving orders and following them is a sign of immaturity and weakness, whereas independent action, especially when it involves not doing as you’re told, is the sign of strength, maturity, and success.

Note well: disobedience is the sign of real maturity. This quiet, unobtrusive devaluation of humble submission to rightful authority is a significant omen of things to come in the later film.

Which brings us to the 2008 production called Prince Caspian. This film once again makes Aslan peripheral, and it also includes a greater number of departures from Lewis’s original story, including a sixteen-minute siege on the castle of the usurper Miraz that is nowhere in Lewis’s text. This film also addresses much more frequently and explicitly the important theme of hierarchy. Yet it is a hierarchy much different from that of Lewis’s books, and different in some pretty far-reaching ways.

This difference is evident absolutely everywhere in the film. One could look at Caspian himself, who is transformed from a noble and honorable young king in Lewis’s telling, into a tortured warrior whose unchecked desire for personal revenge against his father’s murderer leads to the deaths of scores of his Narnian subjects. Or again, one could look at the virtuous Red Dwarf Trumpkin, whose cheerful, good-humored embrace of obedience in Lewis’s story is quietly dropped from the film, replaced by the more modern virtues of sarcasm, irony, and cynicism.

Peter the Problem

But let us pass over examples like these and focus instead on that one character who demonstrates most clearly in the film that Lewis’s positive vision of hierarchy is not merely being overlooked by his Hollywood interpreters but is being self-consciously attacked. That character is the High King Peter.

The Peter we meet in the film version of Prince Caspian is a very different Peter from the one we saw grow up in the earlier film and certainly very different from the one in Lewis’s story. In the first place, it is hard to describe Hollywood’s Peter as anything other than a bumbler. He is not part of the deliverance that comes from the blowing of Queen Susan’s magic horn. He is instead part of the problem, a stupid, proud, boorish, arrogant fool who speaks and acts with ridiculous vanity and, far from delivering others, needs to be delivered himself. His arrogance and vanity are explicitly highlighted in the film:

• We first encounter Peter as the cause of a brawl in a London subway, which he started simply because someone bumped him.

• Once in Narnia, Peter sets out to lead the other children and gets hopelessly lost, but he keeps insisting (with stereotypical male vanity), “I’m not lost,” “We weren’t lost,” etc.

• When he finally assumes command of the Narnians and then is confronted by Lucy, who tries to talk sense into him and get him to wait patiently for Aslan, he condescendingly replies, “I think it’s up to us now. . . . We’ve waited for Aslan long enough.”

• In the enemy castle, in the midst of their failed attack, Peter stupidly and obstinately refuses to call for retreat, crying out instead, “No, I can still do this!”—which prompts Susan to ask, “Exactly who are you doing this for, Peter?”

These instances could easily be multiplied. At every point, the Peter of Hollywood’s Prince Caspian is the problem, not the solution. The high king of Narnia seems to have devolved into a young, handsome version of Homer Simpson.

Adamson’s Aim

But how has this happened? The point here is absolutely decisive. The makers of the film leave us in no doubt whatsoever that the brashness and insolence and haughtiness of Peter in the second film are precisely the result of his having been exalted as king in the first one.

Our first encounter with Peter in Prince Caspian makes this point quite intentionally. The scene opens with a general mêlée in the subway station, of which Peter is the cause. Order is finally restored by the intervention of the police, and then the four children are left waiting for a train. Susan takes this opportunity to ask Peter caustically, “What was it this time?”—giving us an unmistakable hint that this clash was only the latest in a series of conflicts that have had Peter at their center. After Peter explains what happened (including the satisfied acknowledgment that he himself threw the first punch), Susan sighs and asks, “Is it that hard just to walk away?” Peter snaps back, “I shouldn’t have to!”

Then follow some remarkable lines. Says Peter, “Don’t you ever get tired of being treated like a kid?” “We are kids,” Edmund wryly observes. “Well, I wasn’t always,” Peter retorts. He is obviously remembering that he used to be a king in Narnia—and he wants the kingship back.

Director Andrew Adamson helps us understand just what is going on in this scene in a commentary that is one of the bonus features on the Prince Caspian DVD. Adamson explains,

I always felt . . . how hard it must have been, particularly for Peter, to have gone from being high king to going back to high school, and what that would do to him, do to his ego. . . . I always thought that would be a really hard thing for a kid to go through.

Adamson acknowledges that this emotional turmoil was “not something that C. S. Lewis really got into,” but as director he wanted “to create more depth for the characters, more reality to the situation.” He wanted “to deal with what all the kids would go through having left behind that incredible experience and wanting to relive it.”

This emotional realism was Adamson’s explicit aim, and as a result, the screenwriters who put this scene together were actively encouraged to think about what it would be like to go from “king” to “schoolboy”—not a pleasant prospect, of course, and one to which any of us might react with bitterness and resentment, just as Peter does.

Right, any of us might react that way—but that is because we have not breathed the air of Narnia. We are thinking like ordinary persons (and worse, like self-sufficient, twenty-first-century, Western intellectuals) instead of like knights or kings. In Lewis’s telling of all of the Narnia tales, the children’s experiences as kings and queens in Narnia consistently transform them into nobler, more virtuous people in their own world. They are not spoiled children wanting to be kings again; they are noble kings who carry that very nobility back into their non-royal roles as schoolchildren.

But not so in Hollywood. To be a king at all is to hunger for power forevermore, like a tiger that has tasted human blood and ever afterwards is a “man-eater.” To lose imperial power by being transported back to England is to become a bitter, sullen, acrimonious brat. That is just what Peter has become, and his folly is the driving force behind most of the action in the movie.

Two Royal Stinkers

The difference between Lewis and his Hollywood interpreters could hardly be greater on this score, and it is demonstrated most clearly in the astonishingly different ways that the relationship between Peter and Caspian is portrayed in the film and in Lewis’s own text. The film version shows us a relationship of almost unrelieved hostility, suspicion, and animosity. It begins when Peter and Caspian first meet and mistake one another for opponents. They finally realize that they are fighting on the same side, but the civility that is practiced thereafter is obviously a thin veneer that masks a seething competition between them.

The conflict comes to a head after the failed attack on Miraz’s castle. As we have already noted, part of the fault for the failure lies with Caspian for abandoning the original strategy in order to pursue his own plans for vengeance, and part of the fault belongs to Peter for his proud insistence that no retreat be allowed until it is too late. But given what we have already seen of their characters, it is no surprise that each of these royal stinkers refuses to recognize his own part in the fiasco and instead blames the other.

The result is a fierce public quarrel that finally descends into a childish exchange of insults. When Lucy asks what happened in the battle, Peter spitefully replies, “Ask him.” Caspian is shocked to be blamed, and he retorts, “You could have called it off. There was still time.”

Peter: “No, there wasn’t, thanks to you. If you had kept to the plan, those solders might be alive right now.”

Caspian: “And if you had just stayed here like I suggested, they definitely would be!”

Peter: “You called us, remember?”

Caspian: “My first mistake.”

Peter: “No, your first mistake was thinking you could lead these people.”

(One can almost hear the “Nah-na-nah-na-nah-nah!” in the background.) The insults continue and escalate, until Peter even insults Caspian’s father—at which point swords are drawn in rage, and violence is barely averted.

Two Noble Kings

This account of hatred and rivalry and mutual recrimination is about as far as it could be from Lewis’s own account of the relationship between these two noble kings. For Lewis, that relationship is overwhelmingly marked by support, trust, and generosity.

Consider just a few lines from the drastically different story that Lewis tells of the first meeting of the kings. In Lewis’s story, that meeting takes place just after Peter has leaped in to help Caspian in a fight with the deceitful Black Dwarf Nikabrik. As the heroes catch their breath after this deadly clash, the following remarkable exchange occurs:

“We don’t seem to have any enemies left,” said Peter. “There’s the Hag, dead. . . . And Nikabrik, dead too. . . . And you, I suppose, are King Caspian?”

“Yes,” said the other boy. “But I’ve no idea who you are.”

“It’s the High King, King Peter,” said Trumpkin.

“Your majesty is welcome,” said Caspian.

“And so is your majesty,” said Peter. “I haven’t come to take your place, you know, but to put you into it.”

We are clearly in a different world, with a conversation like this one. Caspian is not overbearing and self-important; he knows that his army is in trouble, and he is glad for assistance. And when he learns that the assistance comes from the High King, he is not put off or threatened: “Your majesty is welcome,” he easily declares. Peter’s reply is equally striking: “So is your majesty.” Each side happily welcomes and supports the other. There is no pompous ego or arrogant competition here. Instead, we find nobility, authority, courtesy, and humility all wrapped into one.

The Outlook of Miraz

Indeed, for Lewis, the whole notion that kings must live in competition and suspicion of one another reflects the outlook not of Peter or Caspian or the noble Narnians, but of Miraz. It makes all the sense in the world that Miraz should be threatened by any authority other than his own, for his own authority is only that of a tyrannical usurper. Miraz doubts the very existence of such a thing as legitimate authority; for him, there is only power. And power is always threatened by any other power.

In fact, when we first meet Miraz in Lewis’s story, we find him disbelieving the ancient tales of Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy on precisely these grounds. He cries out in a rage, “How could there be two Kings at the same time?”

How could there, indeed! Such a harmonious, supportive, virtuous understanding of hierarchical rule is foundational to Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview, but it is utterly incomprehensible to Miraz—and also to the unwitting disciples of Miraz who wrote this Hollywood screenplay. In Miraz’s view, kingship is all about who calls the shots, who gets his way, who is top dog. Those who adopt this view cannot but find the notion of courteous, cooperative kings to be impossibly unrealistic.

And this, of course, is exactly my complaint. Everywhere you look in the first two Narnia films, you find incontrovertible evidence that the creators of those films take exactly this view. They simply have not seen the vision that Lewis saw. They have never tasted the joy, the power, the life of hierarchy—and so they drop all such foolishness and replace it with a more modern, more sensible story that reveals the dangerous, oppressive thing that hierarchy really is.

Bad Medicine

But hold on a minute. If there is a possibility that Lewis was right—even a bare possibility—then this loss of the original Narnia, this domestication of Aslan, is distressing indeed. It signals nothing less than an invasion by a foreign and hostile power. The creators of this “new improved” Narnia have taken the single element in Lewis’s tales that twenty-first-century viewers most need to be instructed in, and they have recast it so that it contributes to the error rather than correcting it.

Lewis the physician prescribed a strong medicine to treat our imaginative ailment, but the pharmacists in Hollywood have substituted a different medicine of the same name, and one that exacerbates the sickness instead of healing it. As a result, viewers encounter what they think is Narnia, and they get mere entertainment instead of the richly Christian view of the world that Lewis himself provided.

I confess, in closing, that I do not really know what anyone should do about all of this. There is a faint chance, I suppose, that future Narnia films will be more faithful to Lewis’s own vision. The next installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is scheduled for release in December under a new director (Michael Apted, who directed the film Amazing Grace in 2006), but since the same screenwriters are in place and since Andrew Adamson is now serving as one of the producers, I am not hopeful.

Moreover, if my experience with my own children and with students whom I have casually surveyed is any indicator, the damage is already done. When one refers to The Chronicles of Narnia, most people already think of the films, not of Lewis’s own stories.

The Needed Insight

In many ways, the damage has probably even been done inadvertently. Remember the comparison I mentioned earlier: Lewis is like a member of the family whose idiosyncrasies we try to ignore or smooth over. I suspect that Doug Gresham and the filmmakers are simply doing what every polite, kind family member would do: they are telling “Uncle Jack’s” stories without all of the bothersome quirks and eccentricities. This is a generous, benevolent way to handle the flaws that appear in all of our characters, is it not?

Yes. But what if the flaw we are trying to smooth over turns out to be the very heart of the person? Further, what if the flaw turns out not to be a flaw at all, but a supremely countercultural insight that the world desperately needs? What if the kooky opinion turns out to have been right the whole time?

One can think of another well-known figure, this one of Jewish descent, whose well-meaning family was happy to talk about him to anyone who would listen: “Oh, Yeshua? He’s a fine young man . . . an excellent carpenter . . . quite pious in his own way . . . always cared very deeply for his mother . . . yes, a fine young man. What? Oh—well, yes, there is that silly business about him thinking himself the Messiah. . . . Let’s just let that pass, shall we? Did I mention what a skilled carpenter he is? . . .”

“Yeshua” without “Messiah” is just another carpenter. So also “Peter,” without the wisdom and dignity and nobility appropriate to “ High King Peter,” is just another struggling leader—and we already have plenty of those. Aslan, without his appallingly hierarchical claws, is just another pussycat. I myself would prefer to hear him roar. •

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Movie Admissions

In my college literature classes, I preach the goodness of hierarchy all the time—in Spenser, in Dante, in Milton, even in the pagan Virgil. The students get it. Both sexes, too. They understand the idea that just rulership and obedience are inextricable one from the other—that they are, in fact, the same virtue in different modes. Someone who does not understand that we are all called to obedience, both kings and peasants, is simply a brat.

The producers of the Narnia movies reveal a great deal about themselves: They are essentially admitting that they understand nothing about power other than that it is meant to make other people do what you want them to do. Underlying this utter blindness is a not-very-well-concealed contempt for the male. It’s right there in the films. The strange thing about it, too, is that the filmmakers’ tiresome feminism ended up making Susan, in the first movie, into a real snot, a thoroughly unpleasant young lady. I don’t think they intended that, but just as they have no concept of male virtue, they have no concept of female virtue, either.

It is amusing to ponder, though, how these same people could possibly produce and direct a movie without hierarchical relationships among themselves. Professors, too, are quite the egalitarians until some student questions a remark of theirs in a paper. Then they might as well be ensconced on the throne of Louis XIV.

— Anthony Esolen

Speaking of Casual

By Ken Myers
Touchstone Magazine

Not long ago, I had occasion to look at my high-school yearbook (no, Facebook was not involved). It was remarkable how many people who signed it with great affection and commitment are now mysterious strangers (demonstrating that faux-intimacy is not just a Facebook thing).

The most remarkable discovery in reading the comments of those signatories was how many of them—apparently lacking any real shared memories to commemorate—took the opportunity to celebrate one of the great achievements of our class (1970). It was on our watch—and due to our tireless efforts, I was reminded—that the school dress code had been eliminated. And just in time for the fashion explosion of the 1970s. Were we lucky or what?

“If someone were beamed forward in a time capsule from 1950 to today, the most notable thing would be that everyone dresses as if they just rolled out of bed.” So Mark Oppenheimer once commented to me in an interview about the cultural consequences of the 1960s. Oppenheimer, the author of the 2003 book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture, insisted that the most decisive cultural change of that tempestuous decade—coming to a close as I was getting ready to graduate—was the advent of a regime of informality.

What the counterculture finally countered was formality and propriety. “Our politics are not that different,” Oppenheimer reflected, “but how we act and how we look is tremendously different.”

Formality Rejected

Was this just a stylistic shift, like a move from pastels to earth tones? Or was something more at stake? Linguist John McWhorter argues that the advent of informality throughout cultural life is an expression of a radically new suspicion toward authority that emerged in the mid-1960s. In his book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, he writes that “formality in all realms, be it sartorial, terpsichorean, culinary, artistic, or linguistic, entails the dutiful acknowledgment of ‘higher’ public standards considered beyond question.” Thus, formality, in the patois of the late 1960s, meant caving in to The Man.

McWhorter explores the symptoms and the consequences of the loss of the possibility of eloquence in speech . He argues that the intense distrust of the government that fueled the countercultural expressions of the mid to late 1960s had the effect of creating suspicion toward verbal precision and elegance. “Because the Establishment had traditionally been the steward of formal conventions in its language, to hold the Establishment in contempt all but entails rejecting those conventions,” he writes. One had to abandon the standards of formal speech because of Vietnam, Jim Crow, and (eventually) Watergate.

For those who were intellectually and politically attentive during the 1950s and 1960s, this might have made a certain kind of sense. But, as McWhorter points out,

people growing up in the era [and their children and grandchildren] . . . never knew the former America. They simply imbibed the assumptions and customs of the new America from childhood, and this included a basic sentiment that the formal was to be avoided, that real life is a dress-down affair. One generation put their fedoras and jackets in the closet as a sign of the times, embracing a new informality. But the next generation never knew anything else.

More Melancholy Than Irritated

McWhorter’s discussion of the cultural and political effects of the loss of standards of formality focuses on language (since he is, after all, a linguist), and he analyzes these effects without scolding or enjoining. He is more melancholy than irritated. He clearly laments the fact that “a particular kind of artful use of English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage, has virtually disappeared.”

McWhorter doesn’t believe that all speech should be formal, but he does suggest that the almost universal suspicion toward a formal register of speech in any context—the assumption that “linguistically, every day would become Casual Day”—deprives both public and private life of great pleasures and valuable modes of expression. Contrasting the American insistence on informality with the wider range of expression in other cultures, he regrets that “we have become unusual in the global sense in our deafness to the sheer spiritual, Dionysian pleasure of our language wielded in an artistic way.”

The principal analytic tool McWhorter uses is to contrast written speech with spoken speech, and he argues that the conventions of written speech provide “a better vehicle for objective argument than speech.” Both eloquence and articulacy are typically honored more in written speech, while the spoken word conveys “authenticity” and individuality.

One of the most compelling chapters in Doing Our Own Thing concerns the way this suspicion toward formal speech has affected American attitudes toward poetry, and how recent, parochial, and tragic the typical American disdain for poetry is.

A New Counterculture

It would take another book to explore the theological, pastoral, and ecclesial effects of the phenomenon McWhorter has so carefully documented, and there are such books: Craig Gay’s Dialogue, Catalogue, & Monologue: Personal, Impersonal & Depersonalizing Ways to Use Words and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies are two recent examples.

I continue to live in the hope that communities of Christians can learn to be truly linguistically countercultural, repudiating in practice the new cultural status quo spawned by the old counterculture. We could thus recognize the communal nature of language (according to which self-expression is not the highest good); we could recover the beauty of good words well used; and we could sustain an articulacy in naming the world and telling the story of the world to come.

How God turns Lemons into Lemonade

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

Have you ever noticed that God doesn’t reverse anything? Human sins have consequences, but our Almighty Lord doesn’t just turn back the clock to the way things used to be. He lets those consequences stand, but He grows grace out of them.

To put it succinctly: the way God works is redemption, not reversal.
Or to put it more colloquially: this is God’s way of “turning lemons into lemonade.”

The Lord does this all throughout Scripture. Let me take seven examples:

1) The Fall. In the Garden of Eden, mankind sinned and was expelled from Paradise.
-What would the reversal of this have been? God could’ve taken us, wiped the slate clean, and put us back into a Garden.
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. We don’t go back to Eden; we head forward toward the New Jerusalem. He doesn’t give us another garden, but rather a city.
From the beginning, God turned lemons into lemonade.

2) Joseph and his brothers. The brothers sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt.
-What would the reversal of this have been? We would expect God to pluck Joseph out of slavery and restore him to Israel. And perhaps smiting the treacherous brothers in the process!
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. God puts Joseph as second-in-command of all of Egypt and allows Joseph to save Israel from famine!
God continues to turn lemons into lemonade.

3) The Tower of Babel. Men tried to build a tower to heaven and were cursed for their arrogance, becoming scattered across the globe into many different races and languages.
-What would the reversal of this have been? Unify everyone back into one language and one people, of course!
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. At Pentecost, God didn’t make everyone speak the same language; rather, He caused everyone to understand each other in their own languages. And in Revelation 7, every tongue, tribe, and nation will be worshiping around the throne of God together. Even in heaven, we will retain our ethnic and linguistic distinctives—so that which once was a cursed sign (diversity) is now inherently glorious to the Lord!
Again, God turned lemons into lemonade.

4) Saul and the Israelite monarchy. God didn’t want a human king, but the people clamored for one. The Lord relented, and look who they ended up with: Saul, hardly the model for good kingship!
-What would the reversal of this have been? Get rid of the monarchy and return the Israelites back into the age of the Judges.
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. God used the monarchy to establish David’s line from whence came the Messiah.
Yet again, God turned lemons into lemonade.

5) David & Bathsheba. David committed murder of Uriah and adultery with his wife.
-What would the reversal of this have been? Bring Uriah back to life (or at least have protected him in the front lines), and restore Bathsheba to her husband. Certainly the last thing one would expect is that David would get to marry the woman he stole in his lust!
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. God used the child of David & Bathsheba—not their first one who died, but Solomon—to build the great Temple and to be the wisest king in Israel’s history. Really? The fruit of adultery would be David’s successor in the line of Christ?
Yes, that’s right: God turned lemons into lemonade.

6) Jesus was crucified for our sins. God himself was nailed on the cross by humans who pierced his hands, feet, and side, with metal.
-What would the reversal of this have been? Not just the resurrection, but the complete healing of Jesus’s wounds, to show that the devil had no effect on God’s Anointed.
-But no, it’s a redemption, not a reversal. God kept the scars there to show doubting Thomas—and indeed, the whole world—that He can work through people’s abuse. We believe that Jesus Christ is, today, still seated at the right hand of the Father with a nail-scarred physical body. Though it is a glorified body, it is still physical, and still retains the marks of His passion.
God turns lemons into lemonade, which doesn’t mean that sin has no consequences, but rather that God can transform anything, no matter how bad, into His good.

7) You. You are sinful, broken, and rebellious against God, as we all are.
-What would the reversal of this have been? To revert you to a state of innocence, before you had original sin, like being in the Garden of Eden again.
-But no: it’s a redemption, not a reversal. Your testimony is part of who you are. Whatever sins you may have committed in the past, they are part of your history and will always be there; but the question is, are you going to let God transform your lemons into lemonade? Will your weaknesses show Him to be strong? And will you learn from your mistakes and not do them again, lest you fall into the trap of cheap grace? Remember how costly it was for Jesus to purchase you with His blood. Remember.

Money Matters

By Gaius Berg
InterVarsity - Alumni Blog

"Sell all you have and give the money to the poor," said the radical Christian, "that is the only way." "No," said the Christian businessman, "we mustn't forget that Abraham, the father of all the faithful, was a wealthy man." "You are both right," said the average Christian, eager that no one's feelings be hurt, "the important thing is that we have the right attitude toward our possessions." And so the conversation ended—but everybody still felt uneasy.

Most of us are defensive when someone challenges the way we earn or spend our money. Scripture, perhaps to our discomfort, has a lot to say about personal finances, and unsettling or not, it is in our best interest to check it out.

We are all familiar with Christ's teaching that we can't serve both God and mammon (property or wealth). But this is very abstract. Of course, my car or my wardrobe does not mean more to me than God. But if we look carefully, we notice that Christ does not say that we must serve God more than property. Therefore, the usual way of testing ourselves, by evaluating our life to see which has "first place," is not the proper test. The question is whether or not we are serving our property at all.

Hebrews says "Keep your life free from love of money" (v. 13:5). Love for money and love for God are mutually exclusive.

What then is the proper attitude toward property? In one word, our attitude should be caution. Jesus said, "Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). Paul warns that some, through this craving for money, have "spiked themselves on many thorny grief's" (1 Timothy 6:10). Property and riches should be viewed as dangerous (Ecclesiastes 5:13).

Riches don't only destroy. In the parable of the talents (Luke 19), the servants were rewarded according to how well they used their money. (The teaching of the parable includes more than the use of money.) Note Christ's words, "If then you have not proved trustworthy with the wealth of this world, who will trust you with the wealth that is real?" A careless use of money will exclude us from being entrusted with true riches.

The Christian's attitude cannot be a serious devotion to money or property, or a flippant disregard of it. Rather, it must be viewed as a powerful tool—one to be mastered so we can move on to higher things, lest it master us. To steer a course between an irresponsible attitude on the one hand, and an infatuation with property on the other, requires the strength of God's Spirit and the support of Christ's body—not a task for the individualistic crusader.

Scripture abounds with exhortations to generosity. Generosity, as set forth in Scripture, is not the same as "charity" as set forth by our culture. Charity connotes giving out of pity, and our culture gives us every opportunity to feel self-righteous—from little red "I gave" ribbons to "In memory of” buildings. Scriptural generosity, in contrast, stems from a humble and thankful spirit, and produces a deeper humility and a deeper thanks.

In 2 Corinthians 8, Paul encourages Christians to be prepared to give to the collection for the relief of the needy saints. Rather than giving a tearful description of the need, Paul reminds them that their "wealth" is theirs by God's generosity.

"For you know how generous our Lord Jesus Christ has been: he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich" (v. 9).

No longer can the giver feel superior to the recipient in scriptural generosity; rather, he gives out of humility before his generous Lord and in thanks to his Lord. Our motivation is our desire to be like our Lord (Proverbs 19:17).

To what extent are we to be generous with our money? Too often this important, but difficult, question is dismissed by pointing out that it is impossible to universally apply Christ's command to the rich young ruler to "sell everything." Scripture indicates that the answer to "how much" is "our surplus." Denying our children what they need or our creditors what they rightfully deserve, in order to be generous, is false piety.

When Paul enjoins the Corinthians to be generous, he spells this out, "...Give according to your means. Provided there is an eager desire to give, God accepts what a man has; he does not ask for what he has not. There is no question of relieving others at the cost of hardship to yourselves; it is a question of equality. At the moment your surplus meets their need, but one day your need may be met from their surplus" (2 Corinthians 8:11-14).

Further on Paul says that God supplies richly so that we will have enough—and enough to spare for generosity. We are not expected to be generous with what we have to meet our immediate needs—we are expected to be generous with whatever we have left over after meeting our immediate needs. In fact, the man who doesn't provide for his own family is said to be "worse than an infidel."(1 Tim 5:8)

The wisdom of this age teaches us that due to the uncertainty of the future, our surplus should be stored. The rich man in Luke 12 thought this way. Having built new barns to store his surplus, he concluded that he could now rest easy because his future was secured. But God said to him, "Fool!" The writer of Ecclesiastes sees through this so-called wisdom also. (v. 5:12)

True wisdom teaches us that due to the uncertainty of the future, our surplus should be given away. "Cast your bread upon the waters," advises Ecclesiastes 11:1-2, "for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight [an idiom meaning an indefinite number], for you know not what evil may happen on earth."

Christ admonishes against storing our surplus because moths, rust or thieves can destroy it. Rather he teaches us "Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys" (Luke 12:33).

The popular conception of the Protestant work ethic believes that riches are a sign of the blessing of God. Nowhere in Scripture, however, are we taught that God gives more than enough in order that man may hoard his wealth. God guarantees not wealth, but enough.

More than that, God guarantees that we will have enough left over to give some away. Indeed, part of God's blessing is that he allows us to participate in the giving process as well as receiving. God could have made all wealth like the manna—no matter how much a family gathered, they had just enough—and if they tried to save some for the next day, it rotted. "Now he who provides seed for sowing and bread for food will provide the seed for you to sow; he will multiply it and swell the harvest of your benevolence, and you will always be rich enough to be generous" (2 Corinthians 9:10).

Whether we consider giving in order to be rewarded as ethically commendable or not, it is nevertheless true that we will be rewarded if we give. "Give, and you will be given to," said Christ (Luke 6:38).

Giving should never be done under compulsion. We give freely, or not at all. When God told Moses to start gathering for the building of the tabernacle he told him to "accept whatever contribution each man shall freely offer" (Exodus 25:2). In collecting money from the Corinthians, Paul stressed that God will take care of them if they give, and said very clearly "each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7).

A true budget

Giving out of surplus or excess is a relatively vague guideline. The question of whether to give or how much to give is in every respect an individual decision. We have no grounds for judging anyone except ourselves in this matter. God allows us to plan our own budget—but we do so with the awesome knowledge that if we handle our possessions in an untrustworthy manner, we thereby prove that we will not be able to handle true riches.

Another guideline for giving in Scripture is that, while it is good to be generous to all, it is especially important to be generous to others in the body of Christ. "So then, as we have opportunity," said Paul to the Galatians, "let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith" (Galatians 6:10).

Throughout the Old Testament the Israelites are instructed that the poor, the needy, and the stranger are to be treated hospitably. There is, however, a special hospitality for one's fellow countrymen. This is illustrated in the year of release. Every seventh year debts were to be canceled (Deuteronomy 15:2). The Mosaic law was particularly concerned that there be no poor among God's people.

Paul points out to the Corinthians that giving to needy Christians not only helps them in their need, but "overflows in a flood of thanksgiving to God. For through the proof which this affords, many will give honor to God when they see how humbly you obey him and how faithfully you confess the gospel of Christ; and will thank him for your liberal contribution to their need and to the general good" (2 Corinthians 9:12). Giving to needy Christians has a double benefit. It helps the need, and it gives another opportunity for others to thank God.

There is a danger that must be avoided in our generosity. For if we give generously, trusting God to reward us, and yet give "before men in order to be seen by them" we will lose our God-sent reward. There's great reward in terms of ego satisfaction in being known as a generous person. It's nearly worth the money we give for the "strokes" we get in return.

Christ said, "When you do some act of charity, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:3-4).

If, however, all giving were done in absolute secrecy, where would be the opportunity that Paul speaks of for one Christian to thank God for another Christian's generosity? Christ's statements about secretive giving were made in response to the extreme showiness of the giving of the religious people of his day. The key phrase in his statement is that to "give before man in order to be seen by them" nullifies our reward from God. The ideal, obviously, is to be so thankful to God and concerned for our brothers' need, that we would be oblivious of others watching.

There is another so-called trap that is really no danger at all. That is, "Beware, lest the con man get your goods." This is perhaps one of Satan's chief tools in keeping us from the joys of giving. God is aware of the existence of con men. "All day long the wicked covets" says Proverbs 12:26. But does it conclude that we should therefore guard our goods? On the contrary. Although Christ's words in Luke 6 seem contrary to our self-preservation instinct, they are backed up with his guarantee of protection: "When a man hits you on the cheek, offer him the other cheek too; when a man takes your coat, let him have your shirt as well. Give to everyone who asks you; when a man takes what is yours, do not demand it back" (Luke 6:29-30).

Being generous, even to the wicked, is God's example. "You will be sons of the Most High," Christ said, "because he himself is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate" (Luke 6:35).

Of Coins and Loins

Urbana.org - Least of These Blog

I conducted a study in the Gospels recently. I looked for all the places where Jesus connects spiritual health with sex, and compared it to all the places Jesus connects spiritual health to our attitude towards money and possessions. I discovered that Jesus is at least as concerned with how we use our coins as he is how we use our loins.

So far as I can see there are seven Gospel passages warning us of sexual sin (Matt 5:27-32, 15:18-20, 19:3-9, Mark 7:20-23, 10:2-12, Luke 16:18, John 8:3-11). On the contrary there are 37 passages, five times as many, where Jesus warns us against the spiritual corrosiveness of money and possessions.

Jesus appeared to be deeply concerned about a disciple’s ability to follow while attached to wealth – “Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth,” Matt 6:19; “You cannot serve both God and wealth,” Matt 6:24, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Luke 12:15; “… none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Luke 14:33, etc., etc., etc. When Jesus sent out the disciples he stripped them of their dependence on possessions and money, he drove out those who had turned God’s house into a marketplace, and he told parables about sheep and goats, bigger barns and rich men in Hell, all with a passion to spare his followers the spiritual devastation of materialism.

Can you imagine a church taking materialism as seriously as they take sexual sin? A difficult letter to the congregation on behalf of the elders might read something like this:

It is with a heavy heart that we announce Pastor will be stepping down from ministry due to a moral failing. We appreciate your support, prayers and concern during this trying time in our church family. In order to keep rumor and speculation to a minimum we have decided to disclose many details which some of you will find disturbing. Please do not share this letter with others.

On May 19 our church secretary brought to our attention her concerns that Pastor had been staring rather frequently at her iPad and asking inappropriate and uncomfortable questions about its cost and functions.

Then, about a week later, our church internet accountability software alerted us to the fact that Pastor’s laptop had been visiting several explicit shopping sites. It appears Pastor made several purchases of luxury items on credit card revealing not only an addiction to high-tech gadgetry but a serious debt issue as well.

Finally, yesterday one o f our elders spotted Pastor coming out of the IKEA parking lot. When confronted, Pastor confessed to having purchased several items which were not needed. After an emergency meeting of the elders last night, we agreed that Pastor should be relieved of preaching responsibilities and entered into a counseling program.

In making this comparison I am not suggesting that the church no longer take seriously the tragedy of sex outside of marriage. In an age where sex has been commodified and turned into a form of entertainment fueling an unbelievable sex trafficking and sex tourism industry, we dare not further plunder the sacredness of the gift of intercourse in a marriage. As Jesus told the Pharisees who had fastidiously tithed their herb gardens but neglected the weightier matters of justice, mercy and faith, we should practice the one (material fidelity) without neglecting the other (sexual fidelity).

There is something deeply spiritual about both sex and money. We ignore the impact of these things upon our souls to our ruin. How is it that Christians can teach about the pursuit of money, retiring rich, or boast about our spurious purchases without shame? How can magazines that titillate the desire for riches be allowed in our church reception areas while porn magazines are abhorred?

I believe that when Jesus called the rich man in Mark 10 to “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” he was not trying to solve the problem of material poverty in the vicinity; he was trying to solve the problem of this man’s spiritual poverty. Except for a couple of occasions when speaking to his disciples in the gospel of Mark, Jesus only used this particular form of the word “go” (Gk: hupago) when he was healing or exorcising someone.The demon possessed (Mk 5:19) the blind (Mk 10:52) and the leprous (1:44), among others, were invited by Jesus to “go their way” (hupago) when they were delivered or healed. I believe Jesus was inviting this man into healing and deliverance when he told him to “go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor.” A kind of healing which is desperately needed by me and others.

Greed is often overlooked by us because it is so rampant in our churches and because it can be difficult to identify and measure. It is part of the air we breathe, especially in the West. It’s as if a car is running and the garage door is closed. The spiritual sleepiness you are feeling is not due to tiredness. We are inhaling spiritual carbon monoxide by the 5,000 ads a day luring us to indulge materialism, or the lust for financial independence (independence from God, that is).

We were made to operate most effectively in our spiritual lives with material simplicity and the sufficiency of daily bread. Here are a few suggestions to keep us from the ruin and destruction which Paul says comes of loving money (I Tim 6:10).