Dedicated Lion

John 3:16

2012-01-16T17:36:00.000-08:00

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

It’s one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the hit single everybody knows even if they don’t listen to the rest of the album. You can wave it on a banner, paint it in your eyeblack, or print it underneath your In-N-Out cup; John 3:16. No matter how often I see it, no matter what kind of knuckle-head has stuck it to their bumper, no matter how out-of-the-blue or isolated it is from its context, it always gets me.

Focus on the Family put it in the mouths of children and bought air time where a mass audience sensitized by Tebow hoopla would see and hear it. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

This verse has everything.

Start with the little word “so.” It’s actually the first word in the sentence, at least in the original Greek of John 3:16. It’s a great big pointer word. Its primary meaning isn’t “so much,” but “in this way,” or “thus.” The verse doesn’t say “God loves the world so much that he sent his Son,” rather it says “Look at this, this right here is the way God loved the world: he sent his Son.”

God loved like this! As a pointer-word, “so” directs your attention like an index finger toward a thing so unparalleled and singular that all we can do it look and learn. And it points to a past action, an event already accomplished. Think how much we lose when we unconsciously simplify this verse down to “How much God loves the world” (present tense, emphasizing magnitude) rather than what it wants to show us: Right over here is how God did decisively love the world!

If you do follow the pointing word to the recommended object of attention, you see vast expanses of doctrine opening up in front of you. God is in action here: He loves, he gives, he saves the perishing. J. Sidlow Baxter wrote a whole book on this verse, published under the title The Best Word Ever (and released in America as God So Loved). Baxter noted that this Best Word Ever contains at least ten vocabulary words which could practically stock a Christian understanding with everything it needs. Just look at them isolated in Baxter’s list form:

(1) God
(2) Loved
(3) the World
(4) Gave/Gave Over
(5) Son
(6) whoever
(7) Believe/have faith
(8) Perish
(9) To Have/ Possess
(10) Life

It would be worthwhile to expound on the biblical meaning of each of those words, but I would like to do something else: show how John 3:16 carries an entire systematic theology within itself, implicitly.

Consider the doctrinal loci in a traditional order:

The Doctrine of Revelation: According to John 3:16, God has made this love known to us in a mighty act of salvation which we should pay attention to. In John 3, Jesus has just told Nicodemus that he has heavenly things to declare, because he is the one who has descended from heaven and gives testimony about what he knows for certain and has seen. One of the heavenly things made known in John 3:16 is that God has an only Son, which is big news. And he has made this known especially in Scripture, which brings us to…

The Doctrine of Scripture: Jesus is arguing from Scripture, citing the book of Numbers (“as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”), affirming the unity of Old and New Testaments, and implying with regard to the Old Testament its historical veracity and its openness to typological interpretation. There’s something here to offend everybody, so take your pick. To top it off, have you ever noticed that it’s not clear who is the speaker in John 3:16? Translations all offer their best guess about where the quotation marks should begin and end in this conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus may well be the speaker, but the narrator of the Gospel may also be intruding his voice here (as he does elsewhere). You may object that it doesn’t matter who is speaking, and you may be right. But the only way you’re right is if the voice of God sounds forth equally in the words of Jesus as in the words of his apostolic evangelist, if “what the Scriptures say, God says.”

The Doctrine of God: The message of the verse is about the universal love of God for the cosmos, which only makes sense with a strong doctrine of creation in place (insert an implied doctrine of creation here). This God is an intervener, a wonder-worker, a healer of his chosen people. He is a judge whose wrath threatens destruction, and a savior whose love brings life that has no limit short of eternity. Eternity is his. He is also the kind of God who has a unique Son, meaning he is God the Father –not “father” with relation to a world which is his offspring, but Father with relation to a Son who is unique, only-begotten (whether the word “monogenes” is best rendered that way or not), and so intimate to the Father’s being that he is give-able. Like all the best Christian theology, John 3:16?s doctrine of God leads inexorably to…

The Doctrine of Christ: In systematic theology, it is traditional to divide the doctrine of Christology into two major sections: 1. On the Person of Christ, and 2. On the Work of Christ. John 3:16 includes both. It teaches that Christ is the unique Son of God (that is his person) and that he is given for the life of the world (that is his work).

The Doctrine of Sin: Within 3:16 itself, a very dark shadow is cast by the “giving” of the Son which is parallel to the lifting up of the bronze serpent in the wilderness. What human situation is presupposed by this giving and this lifting up? If this is the solution, what must be the problem? The answer is sin. And the following verses make the nature of sin an explicit subject of description: “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” Sin is a particular kind of culpable ignorance, a suppressing of the truth by those who know better because they know where the light is and what it will show.

The Doctrine of Salvation: In this verse, it’s wall to wall soteriology (the doctrine about salvation). The Father and the Son have worked out the way of salvation, and it is a plan wherein people will be saved by looking up. Just as the serpent in the wilderness was lifted up, Jesus Christ will be lifted up and we will look to him and be rescued. Somewhere in the tension between the universal scope of “the world” and the particular results among “whosoever,” salvation reaches the chosen. It reaches them by faith in the Son, and it has the character of life. Look how God loved!

The Doctrine of The Church: If the previous doctrine was too easy to find because it is so pervasive, this one is hidden or absent. I just can’t find much ecclesiology in John 3:16. If you find some, send it to me. No fair importing the ecclesiology of the whole book of John.

The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit: The only way to find pneumatology in John 3:16 is to dig in your heels and swear that it’s hidden in the word “believe.” Doctrinally speaking, I would in fact insist that saving faith is only possible where the Holy Spirit is at work within the believer. But exegetically, even I am willing to rein in my interpretive acrobatics at this point. It cannot be insignificant, however, that John 3:16 is prefaced by Jesus’ admonition that “what is born of the flesh is flesh, but what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” and that ending the section we have the remarkable statement: “He whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.”

The Doctrine of Final Things: Eschatology is here in John 3:16?s stark alternative between perishing and having eternal life. These are final and irreconcilable. Another kind of eschatology is recognized in the past tense of the verbs “loved” and “sent,” which show that God has already acted decisively and finally to bring about salvation. Between those accomplished past tenses of God’s determinative action on the one hand, and on the other hand the future tense of the life which believers will have and which those who perish will not have, we have the present moment when Jesus is telling Nicodemus that he must be born again.

(This is a revision of ScriptoriumDaily post from 2007.)

First Inaugural Address

2012-01-11T11:28:00.000-08:00

By Andrew Jackson
TeachingAmericanHistory.org

Fellow-Citizens:

About to undertake the arduous duties that I have been appointed to perform by the choice of a free people, I avail myself of this customary and solemn occasion to express the gratitude which their confidence inspires and to acknowledge the accountability which my situation enjoins. While the magnitude of their interests convinces me that no thanks can be adequate to the honor they have conferred, it admonishes me that the best return I can make is the zealous dedication of my humble abilities to their service and their good.

As the instrument of the Federal Constitution it will devolve on me for a stated period to execute the laws of the United States, to superintend their foreign and their confederate relations, to manage their revenue, to command their forces, and, by communications to the Legislature, to watch over and to promote their interests generally. And the principles of action by which I shall endeavor to accomplish this circle of duties it is now proper for me briefly to explain.

In administering the laws of Congress I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the Executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority. With foreign nations it will be my study to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms, and in the adjustment of any differences that may exist or arise to exhibit the forbearance becoming a powerful nation rather than the sensibility belonging to a gallant people.

In such measures as I may be called on to pursue in regard to the rights of the separate States I hope to be animated by a proper respect for those sovereign members of our Union, taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the Confederacy.

The management of the public revenue--that searching operation in all governments--is among the most delicate and important trusts in ours, and it will, of course, demand no inconsiderable share of my official solicitude. Under every aspect in which it can be considered it would appear that advantage must result from the observance of a strict and faithful economy. This I shall aim at the more anxiously both because it will facilitate the extinguishment of the national debt, the unnecessary duration of which is incompatible with real independence, and because it will counteract that tendency to public and private profligacy which a profuse expenditure of money by the Government is but too apt to engender. Powerful auxiliaries to the attainment of this desirable end are to be found in the regulations provided by the wisdom of Congress for the specific appropriation of public money and the prompt accountability of public officers.

With regard to a proper selection of the subjects of impost with a view to revenue, it would seem to me that the spirit of equity, caution, and compromise in which the Constitution was formed requires that the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored, and that perhaps the only exception to this rule should consist in the peculiar encouragement of any products of either of them that may be found essential to our national independence.

Internal improvement and the diffusion of knowledge, so far as they can be promoted by the constitutional acts of the Federal Government, are of high importance.

Considering standing armies as dangerous to free governments in time of peace, I shall not seek to enlarge our present establishment, nor disregard that salutary lesson of political experience which teaches that the military should be held subordinate to the civil power. The gradual increase of our Navy, whose flag has displayed in distant climes our skill in navigation and our fame in arms; the preservation of our forts, arsenals, and dockyards, and the introduction of progressive improvements in the discipline and science of both branches of our military service are so plainly prescribed by prudence that I should be excused for omitting their mention sooner than for enlarging on their importance. But the bulwark of our defense is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible. As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending; and so long as it is worth defending a patriotic militia will cover it with an impenetrable aegis. Partial injuries and occasional mortifications we may be subjected to, but a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war, can never be conquered by a foreign foe. To any just system, therefore, calculated to strengthen this natural safeguard of the country I shall cheerfully lend all the aid in my power.

It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people.

The recent demonstration of public sentiment inscribes on the list of Executive duties, in characters too legible to be overlooked, the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands.

In the performance of a task thus generally delineated I shall endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers.

A diffidence, perhaps too just, in my own qualifications will teach me to look with reverence to the examples of public virtue left by my illustrious predecessors, and with veneration to the lights that flow from the mind that founded and the mind that reformed our system. The same diffidence induces me to hope for instruction and aid from the coordinate branches of the Government, and for the indulgence and support of my fellow-citizens generally. And a firm reliance on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy, and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes, encourages me to offer up my ardent supplications that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.

The mathematics of your next family reunion

2012-01-11T11:26:00.000-08:00

By Jeffrey Rosenthal
+ plus Magazine

– I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.
– What does that make us?
– Absolutely nothing!

(Lord Dark Helmet and Lone Starr, discussing family relationships in the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs.)

Why is your great-grandmother great?

Keeping track of family relations can be difficult. If Edna marries your mother’s uncle Charlie, what should you call her? If your father’s cousin’s daughter just had a baby boy, how should you two be introduced? Who is your “great great aunt”, and how can you find your “first cousin twice removed”? Fortunately, a bit of mathematical logic can clarify who should be called what, and why – and even measure the degree of genetic similarity between different relatives.

Ancestor Lineage

To begin at the beginning (well, your beginning, anyway), you surely had two parents, a mother and father:

Continuing backwards, they each had two parents, giving you a total of four grandparents:

Going back still further, each of your ancestors in turn had two parents, indicated by prepending an extra “great” each time. For example, your maternal lineage is:

and so on (and similarly for “fathers” instead of “mothers” at any level).

Since each ancestor has two parents (one mother and one father), you have a total of 2n ancestors at level n: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. Summing up, you have a total of 2+2² +2³ +...+2ⁿ =2ⁿ⁺¹ − 2 ancestors of level n or lower; for example, your total number of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents combined is 2³⁺¹ − 2 = 16 − 2 = 14. In short, your ancestors form a perfect binary tree – simplicity itself.

Descendant legacy

If you have children yourself, then their children are your grandchildren, and your grand-children’s children are your great-grandchildren, and so on:

(and similarly for “son” instead of “daughter” at any level).

Unlike with ancestors, there is no simple formula for your number of descendants. Rather, you have to count up all of your children, and all of their children, and so on. For example, even if you have five children, it is possible that none of them will have children of their own, in which case your number of grandchildren will be zero. On the other hand, if they each have five children of their own, then you will have twenty-five grandchildren – a lot more.

Sideways, march!

When people have more than one child, this fattens the family tree, creating new relationships like sister and niece and great-aunt and more. For starters, if your parents have additional children besides you, then they are of course your siblings, that is your sisters and brothers:

(Here, and throughout, relationships to “you” are written within the boxes, and relationships between other pairs of individuals are indicated by connecting lines.)

If you and your siblings each have children, then those children are first-cousins of each other. Then, if the two first-cousins each have children, then those children are second-cousins of each other; and their children are third-cousins, and so on:

(and similarly for “son” instead of “daughter” at any level).

In general, n-level cousins share two (n + 1)-level ancestors (but no n-level ancestors). Thus, first-cousins share two grandparents (but no parents), and second-cousins share two great-grandparents (but no grandparents), and so on.

It follows that if A and B are n-level cousins, then A’s child and B’s child are (n+1)-level cousins. Thus, children of first-cousins are second-cousins, and children of second-cousins are third-cousins, and so on. In fact, if we regard siblings as 0-level cousins, then this reasoning applies to siblings too: children of 0-level cousins (ie, siblings) are themselves first-cousins.

Finally, your sibling’s child is your niece (or nephew, if male), and their child is your great-niece (or great-nephew), and so on:

(and similarly for “nephew” instead of “niece” at any level).

Cry Uncle

So now we know where your descendants’ cousins come from. To see where your cousins come from, we have to move up to your parents’ level. Your parents’ siblings are your aunts and uncles, and their children are your first-cousins (since you and they share the same grandparents, but not the same parents):

If your cousins have children, then what are they to you? Well, children of your first-cousin are called your “first-cousins-once-removed”, and their children are your “first-cousins-twice-removed”, and so on:

To see where your second-cousins come from, we have to move one more level up. Your grandparents’ siblings are your great-aunts and great-uncles. So their children (ie, your parents’ cousins) are your first-cousins-once-removed. And their children are your second-cousins:

The same pattern continues upwards for all earlier generations. Once again, your n^th cousins share your (n + 1)-level ancestors, but not your n^th-level ancestors. Siblings of your n^th-level ancestors are your great-...-great aunts and great-...-great uncles, where “great” is repeated n − 1 times. Furthermore, the n^th cousins of your m^th-level ancestors, and also the m^th-level descendants of your n^thcousins, are your n^th cousins m times removed.

For example, with n = 3 and m = 2, this says that your grandparents’ third-cousins are your third-cousins-twice-removed, and your third-cousins’ grandchildren are also your third-cousins-twice-removed. Tracing back to n = 3 gives:

In this diagram, your third-cousin (n = 3) shares two of your great-great-grandparents (level n + 1 = 4 ancestors) but none of your great-grandparents (level n = 3 ancestors). Your great-great-aunt is a sibling of your great-grandmother (n = 3). Your second-cousin-once-removed achieved that designation by being the second cousin (n = 2) of your mother (level m = 1 ancestor), while your third-cousin-once-removed achieved that designation by being the daughter (level m = 1 descendant) of your third cousin (n = 3). Tricky!

Thicker than water

One of the reasons we care about family trees is because of a sense that certain family relations are “more related” to us, and should be assisted and protected and loved on that basis. This attitude presumably has an evolutionary basis: our genes survived through the ages because our ancestors made efforts to help them survive by caring not only for themselves, but for their close relatives too. Indeed, there is an ancient Bedouin Arab saying, “I against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers”, which nicely illustrates the philosophy of caring most for those who are genetically closest to us.

This raises the question of just how similar our relatives’ genes are to our own. Well, first of all, about 99.9% of our genetic material is common to all humans (yes, even your in-laws), and indeed is what makes us human. Furthermore, some people may share other genes with us just by chance; for example, if I meet a stranger whose eyes are brown just like mine are, that does not necessarily establish that we are close relatives. In addition, there is lots of randomness in how genes are passed on (each individual gets half of their genetic material from their mother and half from their father, but which bits come from which parent is chosen at random and cannot be predicted), so we cannot draw precise conclusions with certainty.

To deal with all of this, we assign to each pair of individuals a relatedness coefficient which represents the expected fraction (ie, the fraction on average) of their genes which are forced to be identical by virtue of their family relationship. This approach averages out all of the randomness, while focusing on genetic similarities specifically due to family connections.

According to this definition, strangers have a relatedness of zero (the smallest possible value). By contrast, your relatedness with yourself is one (the largest possible value). Other relatedness coefficients fall between these two extremes. For example, your relatedness with your mother is 1/2, since you obtain half of your genetic material from her. And your relatedness with your father is also 1/2. By the same reasoning, your relatedness with your child is again 1/2. So far so good:

Next consider your maternal grandmother. She gave half of her genes to your mother, and then your mother gave half of her genes to you. It is possible that the half you took is exactly the same as the half your grandmother gave. It is also possible that the half you took has no overlap at all with the half your grandmother gave. But on average, that is, in expectation, exactly half of the genetic material you took from your mother originated from your maternal grandmother. So, your relatedness coefficient with your grandmother is one-half of one-half, that is, (1/2) × (1/2), or 1/4:

Continuing up the tree, your relatedness with your great-grandmother is one-half of one-half of one-half, that is: (1/2) × (1/2) × (1/2), or 1/8:

(and similarly for “father” instead of “mother” at any level). In general, your relatedness coefficient with your level-n ancestor is 1/2ⁿ.

By the same reasoning, your relatedness coefficient with your level-n descendant is also 1/2ⁿ. So, for example, your relatedness coefficient with your daughter is 1/2; with your granddaughter is 1/4; and with your great-granddaughter is 1/8 (and similarly for “son” instead of “daughter”).

For siblings, the situation is a little bit more complex. Consider first the case of two half-siblings (half-sisters or half-brothers), that is, people who share just one parent. Since they each got half of their genetic material from that one shared parent, their relatedness coefficient is one-half of one-half, that is 1/4:

Regular (full) siblings similarly share 1/4 of their genetic material through their mother, but also share 1/4 of their genetic material through their father. This gives a total relatedness coefficient of 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2:

(One special case is identical twins, who have identical genes and thus a relatedness coefficient of one. But fraternal twins have relatedness coefficient 1/2, just like other siblings.)

Continuing onward, since your mother and aunt are siblings, they have relatedness coefficient 1/2. Meanwhile, you and your mother have relatedness coefficient 1/2. Putting this together, you and your aunt (or uncle) have relatedness coefficient (1/2) × (1/2) = 1/4:

(and similarly with “aunt” replaced by “uncle”). And, your relatedness coefficient with your niece or nephew is also 1/4.

Then, since your first-cousin has relatedness coefficient 1/2 with your aunt, who in turn has relatedness coefficient 1/4 with you, it follows that you and your first-cousin share relatedness coefficient 1/8:

Now, since your mother and her first-cousin have relatedness coefficient 1/8, and since you have relatedness coefficient 1/2 with your mother, and since your mother’s first-cousin has relatedness coefficient 1/2 with her own child (who is your second-cousin), it follows that your relatedness coefficient with your second-cousin is (1/2) × (1/8) × (1/2) = 1/32:

In general, switching to level-n cousins from level-(n − 1) cousins introduces two new factors of 1/2. Since (1/2) × (1/2) = 1/4, this means that your relatedness coefficient with your level-n cousin is always 1/4 times your relatedness coefficient with your level-(n − 1) cousin. It follows that your relatedness coefficient with your level-n cousin is equal to 1/2²ⁿ⁺¹.

So, your relatedness coefficient with your first cousin is 1/8; with your second cousin is 1/32; with your third cousin is 1/128; and so on.

What about first-cousins-once-removed, and all of that? Well, since you and your first- cousin have relatedness 1/8, and since your first-cousin and their child (your first-cousin- once-removed) have relatedness 1/2, it follows that you and your first-cousin-once-removed have relatedness coefficient (1/8) × (1/2) = 1/16:

The pattern continues, with each new “removed” introducing an extra factor of 1/2 into the product. It follows that your relatedness coefficient with your nth cousin, m times removed, is equal to 1/2^2n+m+1. For example, your relatedness coefficient with your third cousin (n = 3) twice removed (m = 2) is equal to 1/2⁶⁺²⁺¹ = 1/2⁹ = 1/512 – not very close at all.

We can summarise the relatedness coefficients of various relationships in a table:

This table can be thought of as indicating your level of evolutionary imperative to protect and assist your various relatives. That perspective was nicely summarised by the early evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when he was asked if he would give his life to save a drowning brother, and replied “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” He was merely observing that 2 × (1/2) = 8 × (1/8) = 1, i.e. that two brothers, or eight cousins, are each “equal” (in evolutionary terms) to one copy of yourself.

So what about that saying, “I against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers”? Well, in the context of relatedness coefficients, it corresponds to the observation that your relatedness coefficient is higher with yourself (1) than with your brother (1/2), higher with your brother (1/2) than with your first-cousin (1/8), and higher with your first-cousin (1/8) than with a stranger (0). That is:

1 > 1/2 > 1/8 > 0.

Different life forms can lead to different mathematics: eg, in many species of bees and ants the males have only half as much genetic information as females. You can read more about the intricacies of bee relationships in the appendix!

It seems that those Bedouins knew their inequalities well!

Families of all shapes and sizes

Of course, the evolutionary imperative associated with relatedness coefficients does not tell the whole story. You would (hopefully) protect your spouse over your second-cousin even though, strictly speaking, your relatedness coefficient with your spouse is zero (since you have no actual blood relationship). And, parents of adopted children should surely treat them just like biological children, despite the lack of true genetic connection.

Other family relationships can arise too. For example, if you marry, then your spouse’s relations become your corresponding in-law relations – your husband’s father is your father- in-law, your husband’s cousin is your cousin-in-law, and so on. The suffix “in-law” is also used for those who marry your relations – for example, your brother’s wife is your sister-in- law. (One exception is that your aunt’s husband gets to be called your uncle, even though he is “really” your uncle-in-law; and similarly your uncle’s wife gets to be called your aunt.)

Meanwhile, a woman who marries your father after your mother becomes your step-mother (or step-father, if the genders are reversed). Her relations become your corresponding step-relations – your father’s second wife’s brother is your step-uncle, and his children are your step-cousins, and so on. Of course, your genetic relatedness coefficient with your in-laws and your step-relations is zero, since your relationship is through marriage rather than actual blood lines.

Family relations can lead to unexpected surprises. At a recent large family reunion, I met a young man whom I did not know. After some discussion, we determined that my great-grandfather was the brother of his great-grandmother – making us third cousins. Furthermore, my great-grandmother was the sister of his great-grandfather, too. That is, three generations earlier, a brother-and-sister pair had married off with a sister-and-brother pair. This meant that he and I were third-cousins by each of two different paths – we were “double third-cousins”! It followed that our relatedness coefficient was twice that of usual third-cousins – that is, equal to 2 × (1/128) = 1/64 – still not very close, but interesting nonetheless. I wish I had had the presence of mind to immediately say to him, “Pleased to meet you, double-third-cousin. I am honoured to share one sixty-fourth of your genes.”

Shop Class as Soulcraft

2012-01-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

By Matthew B. Crawford
The New Atlantis

Anyone in the market for a good used machine tool should talk to Noel Dempsey, a dealer in Richmond, Virginia. Noel’s bustling warehouse is full of metal lathes, milling machines, and table saws, and it turns out that most of it is from schools. EBay is awash in such equipment, also from schools. It appears shop class is becoming a thing of the past, as educators prepare students to become “knowledge workers.”

At the same time, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to “hide the works,” rendering the artifacts we use unintelligible to direct inspection. Lift the hood on some cars now (especially German ones), and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the cavemen in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood. This creeping concealedness takes various forms. The fasteners holding small appliances together now often require esoteric screwdrivers not commonly available, apparently to prevent the curious or the angry from interrogating the innards. By way of contrast, older readers will recall that until recent decades, Sears catalogues included blown-up parts diagrams and conceptual schematics for all appliances and many other mechanical goods. It was simply taken for granted that such information would be demanded by the consumer.

A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.

Judging from my admittedly cursory survey, articles began to appear in vocational education journals around 1985 with titles such as “The Soaring Technology Revolution” and “Preparing Kids for High-Tech and the Global Future.” Of course, there is nothing new about American future-ism. What is new is the wedding of future-ism to what might be called “virtualism”: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. New and yet not so new—for fifty years now we’ve been assured that we are headed for a “post-industrial economy.” While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China. And in fact there are reported labor shortages in both construction and auto repair. Yet the trades and manufacturing are lumped together in the mind of the pundit class as “blue collar,” and their requiem is intoned. Even so, the Wall Street Journal recently wondered whether “skilled [manual] labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living.” This possibility was brought to light for many by the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, which revealed that the typical millionaire is the guy driving a pickup, with his own business in the trades. My real concern here is not with the economics of skilled manual work, but rather with its intrinsic satisfactions. I mention these economic rumors only to raise a suspicion against the widespread prejudice that such work is somehow not viable as a livelihood.

The Psychic Appeal of Manual Work

I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday. Even if not, one feels responsible to one’s better self. Or rather, to the thing itself—craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake. If the primary satisfaction is intrinsic and private in this way, there is nonetheless a sort of self-disclosing that takes place. As Alexandre Kojève writes:

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

Hobbyists will tell you that making one’s own furniture is hard to justify economically. And yet they persist. Shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future. Finding myself at loose ends one summer in Berkeley, I built a mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions. More fundamentally, the durable objects of use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men,” as Hannah Arendt says. “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.”

Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism, as the sociologist Richard Sennett has recently argued. The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new. The craftsman is then more possessive, more tied to what is present, the dead incarnation of past labor; the consumer is more free, more imaginative, and so more valorous according to those who would sell us things. Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement. Somehow, every worker in the cutting-edge workplace is now supposed to act like an “intrapreneur,” that is, to be actively involved in the continuous redefinition of his own job. Shop class presents an image of stasis that runs directly counter to what Richard Sennett identifies as “a key element in the new economy’s idealized self: the capacity to surrender, to give up possession of an established reality.” This stance toward “established reality,” which can only be called psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw. It is dissatisfied with what Arendt calls the “reality and reliability” of the world. It is a strange sort of ideal, attractive only to a peculiar sort of self—gratuitous ontological insecurity is no fun for most people.

As Sennett argues, most people take pride in being good at something specific, which happens through the accumulation of experience. Yet the flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because one wants to get it right. In management-speak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out, and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry.

The Cognitive Demands of Manual Work

In The Mind at Work, Mike Rose provides “cognitive biographies” of several trades, and depicts the learning process in a wood shop class. He writes that “our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission.... It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain.”

Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world, precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of the “ways” of one’s materials—that is, knowledge of their nature, acquired through disciplined perception and a systematic approach to problems. And in fact, in areas of well-developed craft, technological developments typically preceded and gave rise to advances in scientific understanding, not vice versa. The steam engine is a good example. It was developed by mechanics who observed the relations between volume, pressure, and temperature. This at a time when theoretical scientists were tied to the caloric theory of heat, which later turned out to be a conceptual dead end. The success of the steam engine contributed to the development of what we now call classical thermodynamics. This history provides a nice illustration of a point made by Aristotle:

Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

Another example is the Vernier scale used on machinists’ calipers and micrometers. Invented in 1631, it is a sort of mechanical calculus that renders continuous measurement in discrete digital approximation to four decimal places. Such inventions capture a reflective moment in which some skilled worker has made explicit the assumptions that are implicit in his manual skill.

In what has to be the best article ever published in an education journal, the cognitive scientists Mike Eisenberg and Ann Nishioka Eisenberg give real pedagogical force to this reflective moment, and draw out its theoretical implications (“Shop Class for the Next Millennium: Education Through Computer-Enriched Handicrafts,” in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education). They offer a computer program to facilitate making origami, or rather Archimedean solids, by unfolding these solids into two dimensions. But they then have their students actually make the solids, out of paper cut according to the computer’s instructions. “Computational tools for crafting are entities poised somewhere between the abstract, untouchable world of software objects and the homey constraints of human dexterity; they are therefore creative exercises in making conscious those aspects of craft work ... that are often more easily represented ‘in the hand’ than in language.” It is worth pausing to consider their efforts, as they have implications well beyond mathematics instruction.

In our early work with HyperGami, we often ran into situations in which the program provided us with a folding net that was mathematically correct—i.e., a technically correct unfolding of the desired solid—but otherwise disastrous. Figure 7 shows an example. Here, we are trying to create an approximation to a cone—a pyramid on a regular octagonal base. HyperGami provides us with a folding net that will, indeed, produce a pyramid; but typically, no paper crafter would come up with a net of this sort, since it is fiendishly hard to join together those eight tall triangles into a single vertex. In fact, this is an illustrative example of a more general idea—the difficulty of formalizing, in purely mathematical terms, what it means to produce a ‘realistic’ (and not merely technically correct) solution to an algorithmic problem derived from human practice.

I take their point to be that the crafting problem is in fact not reducible to an algorithmic problem. More precisely, any algorithmic solution to the crafting problem cannot itself be generated algorithmically, as it must include ad hoc constraints known only through practice, that is, through embodied manipulations. Those constraints cannot be arrived at deductively, starting from mathematical entities. It is worth noting in passing that this has implications for the theory of mind favored by artificial intelligence researchers, as it speaks to the “computability” of pragmatic cognition. It would be a task for cognitive science to determine if these considerations place a theoretical limit on the automation of work, but I can speak firsthand to how one area of work is resistant to algorithmic thinking.

Following graduate school in Chicago, I took a job in a Washington, D.C. think tank. I hated it, so I left and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. When I would come home from work, my wife would sniff at me and say “carbs” or “brakes,” corresponding to the various solvents used. Leaving a sensible trace, my day was at least imaginable to her. But while the filth and odors were apparent, the amount of head-scratching I’d done since breakfast was not. Mike Rose writes that in the practice of surgery, “dichotomies such as concrete versus abstract and technique versus reflection break down in practice. The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.” This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair. You come up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred Cousins in Chicago, had such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I could offer him in exchange was regular shipments of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on decrepit machines, and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screw-ups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue. For example, the fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips-head, and they are always stripped and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch, if each of ten screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments can cloud one’s thinking. Put more neutrally, the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it (kind of like origami). The factory service manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, but they never take such factors into account. So you have to develop your own decision tree for the particular circumstances. The problem is that at each node of this new tree, your own, unquantifiable risk aversion introduces ambiguity. There comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition.

My shop-mate Tommy Van Auken was an accomplished visual artist, and I was repeatedly struck by his ability to literally see things that escaped me. I had the conceit of a being an empiricist, but seeing things is not a simple matter. Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. There was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank.

Socially, being the proprietor of a bike shop in a small city gave me a feeling I never had before. I felt I had a place in society. Whereas “think tank” is an answer that, at best, buys you a few seconds when someone asks what you do, while you try to figure out what it is that you in fact do, with “motorcycle mechanic” I got immediate recognition. I bartered services with machinists and metal fabricators, which has a very different feel than transactions with money, and further increased my sense of social embeddedness. There were three restaurants with cooks whose bikes I had restored, where unless I deceive myself I was treated as a sage benefactor. I felt pride before my wife when we would go out to dinner and be given preferential treatment, or simply a hearty greeting. There were group rides, and bike night every Tuesday at a certain bar. Sometimes one or two people would be wearing my shop’s T-shirt. It felt good.

Given the intrinsic richness of manual work, cognitively, socially, and in its broader psychic appeal, the question becomes why it has suffered such a devaluation in recent years as a component of education. The economic rationale so often offered, namely that manual work is somehow going to disappear, is questionable if not preposterous, so it is in the murky realm of culture that we must look to understand these things. To this end, perhaps we need to consider the origins of shop class, so that we can better understand its demise.

Arts, Crafts, and the Assembly Line

At a time when Teddy Roosevelt preached the strenuous life and elites worried about their state of “over-civilized” spiritual decay, the project of getting back in touch with “real life” took various forms. One was romantic fantasy about the pre-modern craftsman. This was understandable given changes in the world of work at the turn of the century, a time when the bureaucratization of economic life was rapidly increasing the number of paper shufflers. The tangible elements of craft were appealing as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the professional classes.

The Arts and Crafts movement thus fit easily with the new therapeutic ethic of self-regeneration. Depleted from his workweek in the corporate world, the office worker repaired to his basement workshop to putter about and tinker, refreshing himself for the following week. As T. J. Jackson Lears writes in his history of the Progressive era, No Place of Grace, “toward the end of the nineteenth century, many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims.” Various forms of antimodernism gained wide currency in the middle and upper classes, including the ethic of craftsmanship. Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts conceived their task to be evangelizing good taste as embodied in the works of craft, as against machine-age vulgarity. Cultivating an appreciation for objets d’art was thus a form of protest against modernity, with a view to providing a livelihood to dissident craftsmen. But it dovetailed with, and gave a higher urgency to, the nascent culture of luxury consumption. As Lears tells the story, the great irony is that antimodernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the machine paved the way for certain unattractive features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after “authenticity,” precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind of compensation for, and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized, bureaucratic work.

But not everyone worked in an office. Indeed, there was class conflict brewing, with unassimilated immigrants accumulating in America’s Eastern cities and serious labor violence in Chicago and elsewhere. To the upper classes of those same cities, enamored of the craft ideal, the possibility presented itself that the laboring classes might remain satisfied with their material lot if they found joy in their labor. Shop class could serve to put the proper spin on manual work. Any work, it was posited, could be “artful” if done in the proper spirit; somehow a movement that had started with reverence for the craftsman now offered an apologetic for factory work. As Lears writes, “By shifting their attention from the conditions of labor to the laborer’s frame of mind, craft ideologues could acclaim the value of any work, however monotonous.”

The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The children of the managerial class could take shop as enrichment to the college-prep curriculum, making a bird-feeder to hang outside mom’s kitchen window, while the children of laborers would be socialized into the work ethic appropriate to their station through what was now called “industrial arts” education. The need for such socialization was not simply a matter of assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who lacked a Protestant work ethic. It was recognized as a necessity for the broader working-class population, precisely because the institutions that had previously served this socializing function, apprenticeship and guild traditions, had been destroyed by new modes of labor. Writing in 1918, one Robert Hoxie worried thus:

It is evident ... that the native efficiency of the working class must suffer from the neglect of apprenticeship, if no other means of industrial education is forthcoming. Scientific managers, themselves, have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsmen who applied for employment twenty years ago.

Needless to say, “scientific managers” were concerned more with the “efficient” part of this formula than with the “self-respecting” part, yet the two are not independent. The quandary was how to make workers efficient and attentive, when their actual labor had been degraded by automation. The motivation previously supplied by the intrinsic satisfactions of manual work was to be replaced with ideology; industrial arts education now concerned itself with moral formation. Lears writes that “American craft publicists, by treating craftsmanship ... as an agent of socialization, abandoned [the] effort to revive pleasurable labor. Manual training meant specialized assembly line preparation for the lower classes and educational or recreational experiences for the bourgeoisie.”

Of the Smith-Hughes Act’s two rationales for shop class, vocational and general ed, only the latter emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things (Dewey’s “learning by doing”). It is not surprising, then, that the act came four years after Henry Ford’s innovation of the assembly line. The act’s dual educational scheme mirrored the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements. Paradoxically, educators who would steer students toward cognitively rich work options might do this best by rehabilitating the manual trades, based on a firmer grasp of what such work is really like. And would this not be in keeping with their democratic mission? Let them publicly honor those who gain real craft knowledge, the sort we all depend on every day.

The Degradation of Blue-Collar Work

The degradation of work in the last century is often tied to the evils of technology in one way or another. And it is certainly true that “technical progress has multiplied the number of simplified jobs,” as one French sociologist wrote in the 1950s. This writer pointed out a resemblance between the Soviet bloc and the Western bloc with regard to work; both rival civilizations were developing “that separation between planning and execution which seems to be in our day a common denominator linking all industrial societies together.” Yet while technology plays a role in facilitating this separation of planning and execution, the basic logic that drives the separation rests not on technological progress, but rather on a certain mode of economic relations, as Harry Braverman has shown in his masterpiece of economic reflection, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Braverman was an avowed Marxist, writing in 1974. With the Cold War now safely decided, we may consider anew, without defensive ire, the Marxian account of alienated labor. Braverman gives a richly descriptive account of the degradation of many different kinds of work. In doing so, he offers nothing less than an explanation of why we are getting more stupid with every passing year—which is to say, the degradation of work is ultimately a cognitive matter.

The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.” The tenets of scientific management were given their first and frankest articulation by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an unembarrassed evangelist of efficiency whose Principles of Scientific Management was hugely influential in the early decades of the twentieth century. Stalin was a big fan, as were the founders of the first MBA program, at Harvard, where Taylor was invited to lecture annually. Taylor writes, “The managers assume ... the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae.” Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker’s own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product. Thus, according to Taylor, “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or lay-out department.” It is a mistake to suppose that the primary purpose of this partition is to render the work process more efficient. It may or may not result in extracting more value from a given unit of labor time. The concern is rather with labor cost. Once the cognitive aspects of the job are located in a separate management class, or better yet in a process that, once designed, requires no ongoing judgment or deliberation, skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower rate of pay. Taylor writes that the “full possibilities” of his system “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.”

What becomes of the skilled workers? They go elsewhere, of course. But the competitive labor-cost advantage now held by the more modern firm, which has aggressively separated planning from execution, compels the whole industry to follow the same route, and entire skilled trades disappear. Thus craft knowledge dies out, or rather gets instantiated in a different form, as process engineering knowledge. The conception of the work is remote from the worker who does it.

Scientific management introduced the use of “time and motion analysis” to describe the physiological capabilities of the human body in machine terms. As Braverman writes, “the more labor is governed by classified motions which extend across the boundaries of trades and occupations, the more it dissolves its concrete forms into the general types of work motions. This mechanical exercise of human faculties according to motion types which are studied independently of the particular kind of work being done, brings to life the Marxist conception of ‘abstract labor.’” The clearest example of abstract labor is thus the assembly line. The activity (in the Aristotelian sense) of self-directed labor, conducted by the worker, is dissolved into abstract parts and then reconstituted as a process controlled by management.

At the turn of the last century, the manufacture of automobiles was done by craftsmen recruited from bicycle and carriage shops: all-around mechanics who knew what they were doing. In The Wheelwright’s Shop, George Sturt relates his experience in taking over his family business of making wheels for carriages, in 1884, shortly before the advent of the automobile. He had been a school teacher with literary ambitions, but now finds himself almost overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of his new trade. In Sturt’s shop, working exclusively with hand tools, the skills required to build a wheel regress all the way to the selection of trees to fell for timber, the proper time for felling them, how to season them, and so forth. To select but one minor task out of the countless he describes, here is Sturt’s account of fabricating a part of a wheel’s rim called a felloe:

Yet it is in vain to go into details at this point; for when the simple apparatus had all been gotten together for one simple-looking process, a never-ending series of variations was introduced by the material. What though two felloes might seem much alike when finished? It was the wheelwright himself who had to make them so. He it was who hewed out that resemblance from quite dissimilar blocks, for no two felloe-blocks were ever alike. Knots here, shakes there, rind-galls, waney edges (edges with more or less bark in them), thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman’s ingenuity every few minutes. He had no band-saw (as now [1923]) to drive, with ruthless unintelligence, through every resistance. The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humour it.

Given their likely acquaintance with such a cognitively rich world of work, it is hardly surprising that when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.”

This would seem to be a crucial moment in the history of political economy. Evidently, the new system provoked natural revulsion. Yet, at some point, workers became habituated to it. How did this happen? One might be tempted to inquire in a typological mode: What sort of men were these first, the 100 out of 963 who stuck it out on the new assembly line? Perhaps it was the men who felt less revulsion because they had less pride in their own powers, and were therefore more tractable. Less republican, we might say. But if there was initially such a self-selection process, it quickly gave way to something less deliberate, more systemic.

In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed. As Braverman writes, this “opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs.” These anxious workers were more productive. Indeed, Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors. By doing so he destroyed his competitors, and thereby destroyed the possibility of an alternative way of working. (It also removed the wage pressure that comes from the existence of more enjoyable jobs.) At the Columbian World Expo held in Chicago in 1893, no fewer than seven large-scale carriage builders from Cincinnati alone presented their wares. Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy. Changing attitudes toward consumption seemed to play a role. A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode, and indeed the experience of early (eighteenth-century) capitalism, when many producers worked at home on a piece-rate basis, was that only so much labor could be extracted from them. Contradicting the assumptions of “rational behavior” of classical economics, it was found that when employers would increase the piece rate in order to boost production, it actually had the opposite effect: workers would produce less, as now they could meet their fixed needs with less work. Eventually it was learned that the only way to get them to work harder was to play upon the imagination, stimulating new needs and wants. The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has shown in a recent article, through the installment plan, previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. Indeed, 1907 saw the publication of a book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lears writes, “Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.”

The Degradation of White-Collar Work

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals. If genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking, because it is coming to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite, this has implications for the vocational advice that students ought to receive.

“Expert systems,” a term coined by artificial intelligence researchers, were initially developed by the military for battle command, then used to replicate industrial expertise in such fields as oil-well drilling and telephone-line maintenance. Then they found their way into medical diagnosis, and eventually the cognitively murky, highly lucrative, regions of financial and legal advice. In The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, Barbara Garson details how “Extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity.” She finds that, like Taylor’s rationalization of the shop floor, the intention of expert systems is “to transfer knowledge, skill, and decision making from employee to employer.” While Taylor’s time and motion studies broke every concrete work motion into minute parts,

The modern knowledge engineer performs similar detailed studies, only he anatomizes decision making rather than bricklaying. So the time-and-motion study has become a time-and-thought study.... To build an expert system, a living expert is debriefed and then cloned by a knowledge engineer. That is to say, an expert is interviewed, typically for weeks or months. The knowledge engineer watches the expert work on sample problems and asks exactly what factors the expert considered in making his apparently intuitive decisions. Eventually hundreds or thousands of rules of thumb are fed into the computer. The result is a program that can ‘make decisions’ or ‘draw conclusions’ heuristically instead of merely calculating with equations. Like a real expert, a sophisticated expert system should be able to draw inferences from ‘iffy’ or incomplete data that seems to suggest or tends to rule out. In other words it uses (or replaces) judgment.

The human expert who is cloned achieves a vast dominion and immortality, in a sense. It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized. “This means that more people in the advice or human service business will be employed as the disseminators, rather than the originators, of this advice,” Garson writes. In his 2006 book The Culture of the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett describes just such a process, “especially in the cutting-edge realms of high finance, advanced technology, and sophisticated services”: genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite. It seems we must take a cold-eyed view of “knowledge work,” and reject the image of a rising sea of pure mentation that lifts all boats. More likely is a rising sea of clerkdom. To expect otherwise is to hope for a reversal in the basic logic of the modern economy—that is, cognitive stratification. It is not clear to me what this hope could be based on, though if history is any guide we have to wonder whether the excitation of such a hope has become an instrument by which young people are prepared for clerkdom, in the same perverse way that the craft ideology prepared workers for the assembly line. Both provide a lens that makes the work look appealing from afar, but only by presenting an image that is upside down.

The Craftsman as Stoic

We are recalled to the basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests. That’s why you get paid. Thus chastened, we may ask the proper question: what is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. What I have tried to show is that this humane and commonsensical answer goes against the central imperative of capitalism, which assiduously partitions thinking from doing. What is to be done? I offer no program, only an observation that might be of interest to anyone called upon to give guidance to the young.

Since manual work has been subject to routinization for over a century, the nonroutinized manual work that remains, outside the confines of the factory, would seem to be resistant to much further routinization. There still appear developments around the margins; for example, in the last twenty years pre-fabricated roof trusses have eliminated some of the more challenging elements from the jobs of framers who work for large tract developers, and pre-hung doors have done the same for finish carpenters generally. But still, the physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability. One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction, but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life. This is the stoic ideal.

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

Matthew B. Crawford is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis. He would like to thank Joe Davis and David Franz, both of the Institute, for their contributions to this article. Mr. Crawford can be reached via matthewbcrawford.com.

Productive for the Glory of God, Good of Neighbors

2012-01-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

By Greg Forster
The Gospel Coalition Blog

No doubt America's church leaders are as concerned as anyone else about the grave news emerging from the European financial crisis ^[2]. It threatens a disruption so serious that every economy in the world would be damaged. But pastors may naturally ask what, if anything, it all has to do with their work as the spiritual leaders of God's people.

I don't think pastors are called to become experts in international finance. However, I do think the European crisis intersects with the daily work of stewarding the mysteries of God and equipping the saints for discipleship in the American context.

One of the most important callings of the pastor is to equip the saints in discerning and carrying out the various callings God has for them in every aspect of their lives, including as members of their civil communities ^[3]. And thinking Christianly about our daily calling to be good citizens in our homes, workplaces, and communities actually provides unique insight into the financial crisis and what we, as ordinary citizens, can do to make a productive contribution to the good of our neighbors and nation.

Moral and Theological Foundations

Looking at the European crisis, let's start with some simple economic knowledge and work our way back to moral and theological foundations. The immediate cause of the crisis was a broad constellation of bad policies that reward irresponsible behavior. For example, when European banks buy debt from European governments, they're exempted from rules requiring them to backstop the debt with some assets in case of default. Naturally, banks all across Europe have responded by buying lots of European government debt, even when they knew it was likely to default. So now, if one or more countries go bankrupt, the whole European financial system will suffer severe and unpredictable disruptions.

But how did Europe get to the point where so much of its financial policy and behavior is so irresponsible? And how did nations like Greece get to the point where voters won't let them make the necessary reforms even in the face of catastrophe? That's a longer story.

A historically unprecedented phenomenon has been unfolding---in Europe for the past five centuries, in America for the past two, and more recently everywhere across the globe except sub-Sarahan Africa. That phenomenon is explosive economic growth. After millennia of basically stagnant wealth levels from the earliest recorded history forward, God's world is at last beginning to flourish economically.

Just in the past two decades ^[4], the percentage of the population in the developing world that lives in dire poverty (less than $1 a day) has been cut in half. Contemplate that for a moment.

This economic flourishing was originally produced by a confluence of factors, the most important of which was Christianity. Late medieval Christianity ^[5] developed an increasing emphasis on universal human dignity and (consequently) the intrinsic goodness of economic activity ^[6]. The Reformation dramatically expanded ^[7] these trends and added critical new dimensions---especially the idea that your daily work is a calling from God ^[8] and the primary way God makes human civilizations flourish ^[9].

All this culminated in cultures that made productivity---improving the lives of others by responding to their authentic needs---central to both individual and national identity. Scriptural treatment of this topic is extensive ^[10]. Everything from the image of God ^[11] to the Trinity ^[12] to the prophets and parables ^[13] is implicated in understanding productivity.

Christians believe human beings are made in the image of a Father who creates from nothing; this explains why human work creates wealth rather than just moving it around. Christians believe in a divine Son who joined in mystical union with temporal and material humanity. Material activities like economic work are not separate from, and inferior to, "spiritual" activities. And Christians believe in a Spirit who liberates us from selfishness; this explains why life works best when people orient their daily lives around serving others.

The problem is, too many Europeans now take wealth for granted. Some have forgotten where it came from---productive work---and feel like they're entitled to it by birthright. More to the point, the people and institutions in authority have irresponsibly indulged this attitude (for various reasons, such as vote-buying) and have thereby anointed it as culturally accepted.

Where this happens, economics is reduced to the purely material. If the proper economic goal for individuals is to enjoy leisure rather than to be productive, then of course voters should demand endless, unsustainable entitlement programs. If the fundamental purpose of business is to make money rather than to serve customers, then of course businesses should game the system to enrich themselves---and nations can try to get rich by playing games with the money supply ^[14].

The idea that policy should encourage financial rewards for productivity, and culture should set the expectation of productive work from all who are able, simply makes no sense in this context. Once you forget the Creator, you quickly forget that wealth needs to be created.

American Asset

Where does America stand in all this? Our finances are not nearly as bad as, say Greece's. But they're not nearly as good as Germany's ^[15]. And, like Europe, we've been punishing productivity ^[16] and playing games with the money supply ^[17]. Not to mention continuing unsustainable entitlements ^[18], housing market shenanigans ^[19], irrational subsidies ^[20], and naïveté about destructive programs ^[21].

But America has a hidden economic asset that not even Germany has: churches full every Sunday with people ready to hear what God has to say.

Again, I don't think pastors should pretend to be experts on international finance, or try to handle political and policy questions beyond their knowledge. What they can do is equip people to discern the calling of God to productive work.

Imagine pulpits across America clearly and consistently preaching:

God is calling you to spend every day making the lives of others better through productive work in your home, workplace, and community.
God is calling you to be a spiritual leader who gracefully sets that expectation for others---because everyone made in God's image is called to productivity---and for our nation.

Productivity is a critically essential component of both discipleship and good citizenship. In the long term it is the only protection against both pietistic subjectivism in our churches and also economic collapse in our nation.

Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage?

2012-01-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

By Douglas Farrow
Touchstone Magazine

Why fight same-sex marriage? Even in America, where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to. The optics are poor and the mandate seems uncertain. Prospects for victory appear slim. Resources that might be reserved for more important frontsâ€”abortion, for exampleâ€”are squandered in defense of an institution to which our modern urban society is no longer committed. Industrial economies, reprogenetic technologies, and new ideas of autonomyâ€”not to speak of new moralitiesâ€”have called into question many of the assumptions on which that institution has always been based.

Moreover, it is perfectly plain to anyone following the fight closely that same-sex marriage is merely a proximate goalâ€”something to be abandoned as quickly as it was invented, when its work is done. Can it really be worth fighting then?

The answer is yes, for reasons that become clear when we have taken account of the work it is meant to do. And what is that work? Positively, to normalize homosexual relationships. Negatively, to de-normalize heterosexual monogamy. (Those who claim that they want homosexual relationships to be more like monogamous heterosexual relationships may or may not be sincere, but they represent no significant constituency.)

Now, some think that this larger project can be left to market forces. But others think that heterosexual monogamy, as the source of widespread discrimination against alternative sexualities and lifestyles, must be repudiated as a social standard. Same-sex marriage is the tool of choice for doing that. By redefining marriage as a union of two (or more) persons, rather than as the union of one man and one woman, the offending norm is removed from the body politic with a single incision. Afterwards, a wider assault on homophobia and heterosexism can follow.

Double-Edged Knife

Tools need to be crafted, of course, and social debates carefully framed. That has already been done with remarkable skill. The knife that is poised to remove the traditional definition of marriage from America has been honed at both edges.

The one edge is shaped by an appeal to our best instinctsâ€”the love of liberty, and of liberty in love. This is the emotive edge, flashing with winsome pictures of same-sex families and disturbing anecdotes about marginalization. It also plays on feelings of repression and guilt. As one young woman (quoted in an Associated Press story) put it: “They love and they have the right to love. And we can’t tell somebody how to love.”

The other edge is the harder, more rational edge, shaped by an appeal to autonomy and equality. Not content with the anecdotal, it drives home the case for rightsâ€”rights not merely to love as one sees fit but to equal recognition of that love by the state. Hence also to recognition of the wrong, both morally and constitutionally, of the traditional definition of marriage that privileges the heterosexual norm.

In America, this knife was first wielded in Massachusetts by the 2003 Goodridge court, which concluded as follows:

Barred access to the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage, a person who enters into an intimate, exclusive union with another of the same sex is arbitrarily deprived of membership in one of our community’s most rewarding and cherished institutions. That exclusion is incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy and equality under law.

Massachusetts later sued the federal government for attempting, through the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), to enshrine in law the status quo ante. The suit claimed that “in enacting DOMA Congress overstepped its authority, undermined states’ efforts to recognize marriages between same-sex couples, and codified an animus towards gay and lesbian people.” Not wishing to be implicated in that animus, the White House has declined to defend DOMA, the fate of which has yet to be decided. If DOMA fails, same-sex marriage will succeed in the courts of state after state, and with it the de jure normalization and denormalization of which we have spoken.

The Bonds of Marriage

Alarmed about all of this, various champions have sprung to the defense of marriage, which they are now reduced (in a concession I regard as a mistake) to calling “traditional” or “historic” marriage. Over the past decade or so, they have tried to re-frame the debate by highlighting the abiding contributions of that institution, while avoiding as far as possible the appearance of animus against homosexuals.

Those contributions are manifold, and a good deal of emphasis has rightly been placed on the positive social and economic outcomes that marriage continues to produce in contemporary society. But at the centerâ€”indispensable to the restâ€”is the service marriage does to the bond between a child and its natural parents. “Sex makes babies, and babies need a mother and a father,” as Maggie Gallagher (an indefatigable champion) likes to say. Marriage is designed to make it more likely that children will have and keep their parents.

Same-sex marriage proponents, for their part, are forced to set aside this concern. On their view, the parent-child bond lies beyond the immediate purview of marriage, as does the particular sexual act that produces children. Marriage is simply the formalization of an intimate relationship between adults. If those adults happen to produce or obtain children, well, that is another matter. Moreover, their bond with those children does not require any particular family structure to support it; good outcomes can be had from diverse family structures.

The debate about what constitutes a family, and about outcomes for children, is an increasingly lively one. It is largely driven, however, by the normalization/de-normalization agenda that underlies same-sex marriage. The irony of this can hardly be missed. For same-sex marriage, as courts in North America have made clear, is predicated on a denial of procreation or child-rearing as a definitive interest. Marriage is about adult bonding, and adult bonding is all there is to marriage.

The champions of marriage respond that they are very much in favor of adult bonding, which the institution is indeed meant to serve. That bonding, though good in itself, is for a purpose beyond itself, however. It is for a purpose of public as well as private interest, the purpose of procreation and child-rearing. It is not necessary, they point out, to hold that procreation constitutes the only good of marriage in order to recognize that procreation is an essential good of marriage. Nor, for that matter, is it necessary to hold that a childless marriage is not a marriage, at least where the childlessness is not deliberateâ€”a matter rightly shielded from public scrutiny. But they insist that to exclude procreation as an essential or defining good makes nonsense of marriage.

Divine & Human Rights

Surely that is correct. The third-century Roman jurist, Modestinus, captured the common understanding of marriage with the following definition: “Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, a consortium for the whole of life involving the communication of divine and human rights.” This union and these rights exist, not merely for their own sake, but also and especially for the sake of the inter-generational concerns of progeny and property; with a view, that is, to the conditions necessary for the founding and flourishing of the family. The rights involved are divine as well as human because marriage is generative, and hence pre- as well as pro-political; because what is founded through marriage is, in the twentieth-century language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “the natural and fundamental group unit of society.”

The same elements that found expression in Modestinus perdured and prospered in the Augustinian understanding of marriage as an institution entailing, not one, but three interwoven goods: proles, fides, et sacramentumâ€”procreation or fruitfulness, loyalty or faithfulness, and bonding or sacred union. That societies shaped by this understanding took the unusual step of making marriage monogamous testifies to the seriousness with which each of these goods was regarded, precisely in its service to the others. It was by developing them in their mutuality, moreover, that heterosexual monogamy (to use the language of its detractors) created the conditions for the new and deeper respect for women and for children that until recently has characterized the West.

But marriage for some time has been under feminist attack for its putative institutionalization, in the name of divine rights, of oppressive patriarchal tendencies. This attackâ€”coordinated, as it now is, with a Rawlsian assault on religious or comprehensive doctrines in the public sphereâ€”has helped create a very different set of conditions, the conditions necessary for the advent of same-sex marriage. And same-sex marriage, by eliminating the first good (proles), has begun to unravel the whole fabric of marriage, setting up something else in its place: an institution not intrinsically connected to the family, or at all events not connected to the natural family. The divine and human rights belonging to marriage are thus beginning to disappear, as I want now to make clear.

A Society Very Small

“Everyone has the right to marry and to found a family,” says the Universal Declaration, and the family thus founded “is entitled to protection by society and the State.”

Parenthetically, we should observe that “everyone” really does mean everyone, though of course not everyone wills to marry or is able to do so. It is ludicrous, then, to propose that same-sex marriage expands the pool of those who have a right to marry. It does no such thing, since everyone already has that right. As I pointed out some time ago in Divorcing Marriage, only if marriage is redefined as a union of persons, rather than the union of a man and a woman, is it possible to argue that homosexuals have been “barred access” to marriageâ€”which evokes the question, why change the definition?

It does no such thing, moreover, since what same-sex marriage offers, which has naught to do with founding a family, is indeed something other than marriage, as Girgis, George, and Anderson ably showed in their article, “What Is Marriage?” in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (2010). Same-sex marriage is simply a variant of what Elizabeth Brake calls “adult care networks,” which can be made available in virtually any size or shape (“Minimal Marriage,” Ethics, 2010).

Pace Brake, we should observe also that when a family of some description is founded by a same-sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent-child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect. It deprives the child, whether in the same way that divorce does or in some more innovative technological way, of its prima facie right to its own father and mother. But we should notice something else as well, and not merely parentheticallyâ€”something too little noticed either by the detractors or by the champions of marriage. Same-sex marriage violates the natural parent-child bond in every family, and the right of the family to protection by society and the state.

How so?

In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII rightly described the family as “a society very small . . . but none the less a true society, and one older than any State,” with “rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.” This society, “founded more immediately in nature,” is what the Universal Declaration has in mind when it speaks in article 16 of the family. The family’s status as “natural”â€”that controversial adjective is deployed only in this one specific articleâ€”allows it a certain priority over civil society and the state. The latter share an obligation to protect the family, but the family is not at their disposal.

Same-sex marriage dispenses with all of that, however. By excising sexual difference, with its generative power, it deprives itself of any direct connection to nature. The unit it creates rests on human choice, as does that created by marriage. But whether monogamous, polygamous, or polyamorous, it is a closed unit that reduces to human choice, rather than engaging choice with nature; and its lack of a generative dimension means that it cannot be construed as a fundamental building block.

Institutionally, then, it is nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older or more basic than the state itself. Indeed, it is a creature of the state, generated by the state’s assumption of the power of invention or re-definition. Which changes everything.

A Tool of the State

Six years ago, when same-sex marriage became law in Canada, the new legislation quietly acknowledged this. In its consequential amendments section, Bill C-38 struck out the language of “natural parent,” “blood relationship,” etc., from all Canadian laws. Wherever they were found, these expressions were replaced with “legal parent,” “legal relationship,” and so forth.

That was strictly necessary. “Marriage” was now a legal fiction, a tool of the state, not a natural and pre-political institution recognized and in certain respects (age, consanguinity, consent, exclusivity) regulated by the state. And the state’s goal, as directed by its courts, was to assure absolute equality for same-sex couples. The problem? Same-sex couples could be parents, but not parents of common children. Granting them adoption rights could not fully address the difference. Where natural equality was impossible, however, formal or legal equality was required. To achieve it, “heterosexual marriages” had to be conformed in law to “homosexual marriages.” The latter produced non-reproductive units, constituted not by nature but by law; the former had therefore to be put on the same footing, and were.

The aim of such legislation, as F. C. DeCoste has observed in “Courting Leviathan” (Alberta Law Review, 2005),

is to de-naturalize the family by rendering familial relationships, in their entirety, expressions of law. But relationships of that sortâ€”bled as they are of the stuff of social tradition and experienceâ€”are no longer family relationships at all. They are rather policy relationships, defined and imposed by the state.

Here we have what is perhaps the most pressing reason why same-sex marriage should be fought, and fought vigorously. It is a reason that neither the proponents nor the opponents of same-sex marriage have properly debated or thought through. In attacking “heterosexual monogamy,” same-sex marriage does away with the very institutionâ€”the only institution we haveâ€”that exists precisely in order to support the natural family and to affirm its independence from the state. In doing so, it effectively makes every citizen a ward of the state, by turning his or her most fundamental human connections into legal constructs at the state’s gift and disposal.

In Nation of Bastards I have tried to provide a larger account of this, and to show how it leaves the parent-child relation open to increasing intervention by the state. The current cover for that intervention is the notion of children’s rightsâ€”meaning, far too often, the right of the child to whatever it is that the state, acting on behalf of adults other than its parents, wants it to have: a good education in state ideology, for example, which these days includes “diversity training” in “alternative family structures.”

That should surprise no one, for if marriage is not procreative, it is not educative either. Where is the educative authority to be transferred, if not to the state, whose pater familias power increases as the rights and freedoms of the natural family diminish? And what will the state do with its newfound power, if not use it to undermine further the sphere of the family, and the sphere of the church or religious community as wellâ€”the two spheres where “divine and human rights” independent of the state are located?

Accelerated Unraveling

I spoke of an unraveling. Those who point to places like Canada as counter-evidenceâ€”gleefully observing, in their own preferred metaphor, that the sky has not yet fallen in jurisdictions with same-sex marriageâ€”either take others for fools or make fools of themselves. With an institution as basic as marriage, one must think in terms of centuries, not mere months or years.

There are, however, signs of a certain acceleration. It took some two hundred years for Jeremy Bentham’s essay on pederasty, which first proposed that objections to homosexual acts were rooted “only in prejudice,” to find political expression in the demand for same-sex marriage. (Is it not Bentham’s voice that we hear in the charge that DOMA “codifies an animus towards gays and lesbians”?) It has not taken long at all for activists in this tradition, aided by a development we will touch on later, to produce the still more radical Yogyakarta agenda, which they are presently trying to entrench at the United Nations and impose on states worldwide.

The Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity was crafted in 2006 as a master plan for the next phase of the war on heterosexual monogamy. The document dispenses, as does same-sex marriage legislation, with the binary logic of male and female that has hitherto governed human society. It presupposes instead the very different binary of homosexual and heterosexual orientationâ€”a binary that can more easily be cracked and broken down into a kaleidoscope of gender identities. It then reads into a long list of human rights, including the right to found a family and the right to education, a warrant, or rather a demand, for the protection and promotion of the interests of “people of all sexual orientations and gender identities” (emphasis added).

What this means in practice is an all-out assault, in every sector of society, on heterosexism or heteronormativity; that is, on anything that seems to privilege the male-female binary or the nuclear family. Here in Quebec there is even a government white paper mapping out the strategy for la lutte contre l’homophobie et l’hÃ©tÃ©rosexisme. Same-sex marriage, it says, served to “consecrate” the legal equality of same- and opposite-sex couples; it is time now to press on to full social equality by eradicating all forms of heterosexist bias. The commandments imperiously delivered to the nations at Yogyakarta, by a self-declared panel of experts, thus find local expression in a policy replete with warnings about “systemic investigations” of infractions and “rigorous monitoring and assessment mechanisms.”

There is, then, a further vital reason why same-sex marriage must be vigorously contested, namely, that no peace is to be had by capitulation. Like it or not, the great struggle is under way. Marriage, if you please, is the Sudetenland, and its concession is the precursor to a cultural Blitzkrieg.

Deconstructing “Orientation”

To be sure, there are weapons in the arsenal of the Yogyakartans that are prone to misfire. Take, for example, the term “orientation.” The main task of that term has been to mediate the transition from the maleâ€“female binary to the heterosexualâ€“homosexual binary. For that strategic purpose, it has maintained the aura of a hated naturalism: Orientation, like sex, is something fixed by nature, and can therefore compete with sex as a fundamental consideration in law and public policy.

But in the present phase, the term has new work to do. It is to be understood (so Yogyakarta tells us) as referring “to each person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.” Which is to say, it is to become a more malleable term, capable of taking as an adjective “each” or “all,” not merely “both.”

But “each” and “all” are dangerous adjectives. Pedophilia, for example, is an orientation, or so the psychologists tell us. And orientations are now constitutionally protected, not to say politically celebrated. How then can we continue discriminating against pedophiles, which clearly we do?

Pedophiles naturally, hence in some sense appropriately, desire sex with children. Children, on the other hand, being vulnerable in various ways, need to be protected from sexual advances by adults. So we tell pedophiles that they must restrain themselves, or find other outlets for their sexual urges. Which is discriminatory. A parliamentary committee in Canada recently found itself being backed into this very corner, and the panic was palpable.

We can try to justify the discrimination by proceeding to a balance of harm argument, of course, but we cannot then avoid the implication that there exists no inviolable right to sexual self-expression or indeed to public approval of a so-called orientation. And if that is true for pedophilesâ€”perhaps for consistency we should call them pedosexualsâ€”it is true also for homosexuals and heterosexuals. There may be, or arise, real and present dangers to society that justify repression of one or both of the latter, as of the former; and the same is true for any other tendency or orientation.

Unfolding the Logic

Alternatively, we can attack one of the premises, so as to invalidate the conclusion altogether. We might attack the first premise by saying that pedophilia is unnatural and immoral; that it is, in itself and as such, an illegitimate attraction, a morally and psychologically misdirected orientation. That indeed is the traditional view, but of course the traditional view does not recognize orientation as a protected category in the first place. To say that an orientation may be misdirected or illegitimate is to say that it cannot serve, as a person’s sex serves, to qualify one for legal protection. In other words, to attack the first premise is to fall back into the old biological objectivism and into the despised public morality of a pre-Benthamite era.

Perhaps, then, we are not prepared to attack the first premise; recognizing that, if we do attack it, we must either show that pedophilia is not really an orientation at all (but what then is an orientation?) or be prepared to overturn the jurisprudence and legislation entrenching orientation as a protected category. In that case, we may prefer to attack instead the second premise, and avoid in that way the troublesome and discriminatory conclusionâ€”restrain yourself or else!â€”that puts pedophiles in the position that homosexuals, or for that matter philandering heterosexuals, once were in.

Some attack the second premise only from the perimeter, so to speak, arguing for a narrower construal of the word “children,” that is, for a lowering of the age of consent; but that only postpones the problem rather than solving it. Others attack it at its core. Children, they say, may benefit from sex with adults; it depends how the pedophile handles the child in question.

This view is certainly not new, but today it is voiced much more openly than ever it was, because it is the only view that is actually consonant with the unfolding logic of our jurisprudence and legislation. It is the only alternative to admission of error. Nevertheless, it generates profound discomfort, and even meets with firm resistance, because it penetrates to the very bedrock of natural law. Bringing into view the problem of pedophilia, hidden in the coils of the term “orientation,” is an uncomfortable reminder that we can and do tell people how to love.

A More Glaring Problem

Orientation may be a vulnerable point in the vocabulary of the Yogyakartans, just as the “arbitrary exclusion” argument is in the reasoning of the Goodridge court. But before attempting to probe such vulnerabilities in public debate, it behooves the supporters of marriage to face a still more glaring weakness in their own position. I refer, of course, to the problem of contraception.

Elizabeth Anscombe foresaw the difficulty even before it arose. Already in 1968, in the midst of the furor surrounding Humanae Vitae, she delivered a paper in Toronto that laid bare the fuller significance of contraceptionâ€”of the “new offer” of sex without children that would make nonsense of marriage. In a later version of the paper, published in 1975 as “Contraception and Chastity,” she asked with disarming frankness:

If you can turn intercourse into something other than the reproductive type of act (I don’t mean of course that every act is reproductive any more than every acorn leads to an oak-tree, but it’s the reproductive type of act) then why . . . should it be restricted to the married? Restricted, that is, to partners bound in a formal, legal, union whose fundamental purpose is the bringing up of children?

In fact, “if that is not its fundamental purpose, there is no reason why . . . ‘marriage’ should have to be between people of opposite sexes.”

There is no need to rehearse her entire argument, which the reader may do for himself. But Anscombe was quick to recognize what too many marriage supporters are still reluctant to admit, namely, that “if contraceptive intercourse is all right, then so are all forms of sexual activity.” For contraceptive intercourse eliminates in principle the bond between the unitive and the reproductive, and with it any solid reason for confining sexual intimacy to the marital act.

Broadly put, to embrace contraception is also to embrace the utilitarianism that governs the Benthamite approach to sex. That approach sets aside the question of the intrinsic nature of an act, and of its ordering by the human agent to its proper ends, in order to concentrate solely on its capacity to maximize pleasure or happiness. But in doing so, it makes it impossible to distinguish morally between contraceptive and non-contraceptive intercourse, or between intercourse and other kinds of sexual activity, including sodomy, in a way that can sustain marriage as an institution that supports the natural family and is therefore of permanent public interest.

Recovering Our Nerve

Now, some shudder at the very mention of this subject, and want nothing to do with it, especially in public debate, but that is tantamount to refusing to use live ammunition on the battlefield. If the contraceptive mentality is not to be challenged, la lutte must be declared “no contest.” For it is precisely the contraceptive mentality that dismantlesâ€”gradually at first, then, when the marital core is reached, with great rapidityâ€”the whole nexus of attitudes and practices and policies informing the laws that have governed sexual behavior in the West.

Moreover, and more seriously, it is the contraceptive mentality that revives, as Anscombe also observed, the ancient “appetite for killing children,” whether the killing takes place in the bloody confines of a run-down abortion clinic or in the sanitized laboratories of the medical research establishment. The same-sex marriage issue and the abortion issue are joined hip and groin by contraception, and cannot be separated.

The path to Yogyakarta, in other words, like the path to Roe and to the burgeoning abortion industry, was already sign-posted by the placards protesting Humanae Vitae. At that pivotal moment, the faint-heartedness of Christians, especially of nominally Catholic Christiansâ€”who, according to a recent American poll, are today more in favor of same-sex marriage than is the general publicâ€”unleashed the tide that now threatens to wipe away the remaining outlines of Judeo-Christian civilization.

Without a recovery of nerve, and a new willingness to deal with the problem at its root, there is indeed little point in fighting the same-sex marriage battle, and almost no hope of victory. The fabric of marriage cannot withstand the acid of contraception.

Christians’ Particular Duty

Christians are not the only ones in a position to understand what Augustine and Leo XIII and Paul VI understoodâ€”that marriage resides at the very foundation of culture. They are not the only ones who have reason to be concerned about the bastardization of the citizenry through same-sex marriage, or about the Kulturkampf that threatens to leave behind it a moral wasteland blanketed by impenetrable judicial thickets. They are not the only ones capable of standing for freedom. Christians may, however, be the only ones capable of standing against contraception, which is their particular duty.

In my country we failed at that duty, and our leaders by and large failed with us. Within weeks of the promulgation of Humane Vitae, even the Catholic bishops were conceding, in their notorious Winnipeg Statement, that persons who “have tried sincerely but without success to pursue a line of conduct in keeping with the given directives . . . may be safely assured that, whoever honestly chooses that course which seems right to him does so in good conscience.” It took less than forty years for same-sex marriage to arrive in Canada, and not much longer to establish official policies and curricula promoting the sexualization of our children and depriving us of the power to intervene.

America, I fear, will experience no different fate unless its Christians are emboldened to attest, not merely as the Manhattan Declaration attests but also, and more especially, as Anscombe attested, both that marriage is a giftâ€”something we receive with creation, not something we inventâ€”and that “only what is capable of being a marriage act is natural sex.” Anscombe knew as well as anyone that this was “against the grain of the world, against the current of our time.” But she did not hesitate to remind Christians either of “the colossal strain” that has always existed between pagan morality and Christian morality, or of the far greater quarrel that exists with the “post-Christian morality that has sprung up as a result of contraception.”

A Clear Mirror for Society

Of the latter we scarcely need any more reminders, since we are constantly surrounded by them. Perhaps we still need to recall, however, how Christianity once revolutionized the pagan worldâ€”how, for example, it raised the stakes in marriage, not only by insisting on monogamy with all its benefits for women and children, but also by sacramentalizing it: declaring an institution belonging to the natural law open to divine grace in such a way as to found the “domestic church,” the secular image of an eschatological reality. These were monumental achievements, true revolutions at once spiritual and political, that turned marriage into a prize worth fighting for by connecting it both to what humans are and to what they may hope to be.

Christians, of all people, should not be surprised or cowed by those who are now seeking to seize the prize through political and juridical maneuvers. They should understand, however, the seriousness of the situation. For our society can never really be post-Christian. It can only lapse into a sub-pagan parody of its Christian heritage, which is just what we are witnessing with same-sex marriage.

Though our society now applauds almost any kind of “loving” union, it admits no sacramentum but sexual self-expression. Though it professes the highest respect for women, it no longer requires or expects fides from either men or women. Though it preaches progress, it is uncommitted even to prolesâ€”that is, to its own secular future. It prattles about children’s rights, but denies them even the right to life. It is a society that no longer knows what love is, and that no longer believes that humans may hope for very much.

Perhaps only Christians can present this society with the kind of mirror in which it can truly see itself for what it is. But a mirror clouded by the contraceptive mentality is no use at all. To offer it such a mirror is a decidedly un-serious gestureâ€”a parody of a parody. So it seems that, for Christians at least, the fight against same-sex marriage will have to begin at home. •

Douglas Farrow is Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal. His most recent book is Ascension Theology (T&T Clark, 2011).

On Being Happy this New Year

2012-01-05T13:09:00.001-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

My grandfather’s generation faced fascism, communism, and the Great Depression. They felt blessed if they were able to attend school through the junior-high. Indoor toilets were not a given and success might be rewarded by a second bathroom. Kids did not expect their own bedrooms or radios. My grandmothers were born without the guaranteed right to vote and drinking fountains were still segregated.

I have lived in more peaceful times, with more educational opportunities, and with greater prosperity. The past was measurably worse in so many ways that only a fool would want to go backwards to it. My grandparents and parents made the world a better place, though they did not do so perfectly.

What they did not do is make their grandchildren and children happier. Maybe a few were foolish enough to think that winning wars against great evils or making life more comfortable could make their children happier, but we at least know better than that now.

My grandparents jolted over clay roads and complained no more than I do sitting on the tarmac waiting for my jet to fly. They made travel faster, more comfortable, but we aren’t happier as a result. What does it profit me to rush over the entire planet in comfort, only to be miserable when I get there?

What does it profit a man to gain the Internet, if all he does is pour out his misery on-line? Ambitions that were science fiction in their generation are now fact. Star Trek (the Original Series) computers do less on the sixties show than my phone, but access to information is not the same as joy.

That is not a complaint.

A happy man would rather see peace and prosperity in his time, but it is not the peace and prosperity that made him happy. If we ever thought they could, then we confused external goods for internal happiness.

Our daily experiences should have shown that happy men and women find comfort even in tough times, but that miserable people often ruin parties held in their honor. You cannot make Eeyore jolly in anymore than you can hold down Tigger.

Some people are ambitious and don’t seem to mind the misery if they are “winning.” The rest of us just want to be happy. Of course, if you are a Christian, there is some guilt that goes with admitting this want of ambition.

Shouldn’t we at least want Jesus stuff?

And of course that is exactly what we should want. We should want for ourselves exactly what Jesus wants for us and what Jesus wants for us is a more abundant life. An abundant life is a pretty good definition of happiness.

What about taking up our cross and following Jesus?

We must take up our cross. Jesus commanded us to do it.

Why?

A cross brings great pain and death, but God does not want to torture His children. The cross exists as remedy and like a good medicine it is precious to sick souls. The purpose of our life is not the cross anymore than medicine is the purpose of healthcare. The cross is to kill our miserable life so we can have abundant life imperfectly here and perfectly in the world to come.

God does not delight in our suffering as suffering and He does want us to be happy. Why else would a good and loving God create humans?

We cannot be happy as we are now.

Humans are not the way we were created to be. We are broken physically and spiritually. Nobody can avoid dying, physically and spiritually as a result, but we can choose the manner of our death. We can choose to die spiritually before dying physically and so being the process of healing or we can die physically before the second death and damn ourselves.

God, after all, has never needed us to do anything.

Jesus loves me and does not even require me to love Him. I should love Him, it would be good for me to love Him, but Jesus will let me say “no” to Him for all eternity. He is no cosmic lounge lizard always waiting for an answer, but a courtly lover. He woos, but He does not demand.

If I insist on seeing His love as wrath and of turning from love to lusts than He will let me go to hell.

He would prefer that I be happy . . . to flourish as a human being. That is why human beings never go to “heaven.” Heaven is where God and the holy angels live now. Instead, God is making a new earth and a great city in which grownup humanity can live with Jesus. Someday humans can live on earth as they were meant to live.

Happiness cannot be found by fixing one part of a person. We have minds so we have to think. We have hearts and so we must feel. We have passions and so we must express them. We have bodies and so we must use them.

When every part of a human is working as it was designed to work by God, then a man is happy. Another way of saying this is to say that a happy man is “flourishing.” Like any living thing that gets just what it needs and uses it well, the happy human is flourishing. Virtue, excellence, produces flourishing, while vice withers us.

The greatest philosophers before Christ, Plato and Aristotle, knew this was true, but knowing was not enough. They could not find anyone who was happy or virtuous. They knew a lover of wisdom could achieve it, but lovers of wisdom are scarce! Jesus, Wisdom in skin, came down to be happy through virtue in actions and not just in theory.

Amongst the most basic human right given to people by Creator God is the right to flourish fully as a human, the right to happiness. No government is just, which prevents men from thinking, feeling, or being good. There can never be a law against the fruits of the Spirit!

The founders of the United States were picking up on this classical and Christian tradition when in the Declaration of Independence. Over time the idea of happiness has been corrupted by errors and lies. Shysters continue to sell the idea that some good thing or experience can make us happy.

After all, there is money to be made selling experiences or products. Internal happiness comes painfully, and may cost all we have, but there is no money to be made in the true cross or in true happiness.

Most Americans are confused about this truth. They believe the right to happiness in the West should promise a free trip to Las Vegas, if that is what they wish. There is, however, not right to vice.

Government or society cannot justly stop a man from doing good, but they may stop him from doing evil.1 I may wish to do things that are wrong or unhelpful, but that does not matter. Human experience shows that we are very good at knowing what we want, but very bad at knowing what we need.

When I wish to eat more than I need, I think it will make me happy. Indulging wants proves a bad way to happiness. One reason the Bible exists, I think, is to show us through examples what people need. The Bible is full of stories of indulgence turned to vomit and restraint becoming pleasure.

David followed his heart and harmed all he loved. Joseph followed God’s heart and gained all he needed.

People have minds, so they must think. Plenty of people with little formal education, like Abraham Lincoln, learn to think well and plenty of the rest of us go to much school, but gain only credentials. Four years of Spanish credentials will not get you through Madrid, but Spanish will.

My grandparents had little access to formal education, but they maximized what they had. Reading the King James Bible every day, and working to understand it, was intellectually transformative. They were wrestling with one the sources of the English language while reading this translation of a great book: the Bible.

My grandparents could not “relate” to this book. Seventeenth century English was no more their speech pattern as country folk in West Virginia, than it is for my college students. The difference is that they did not ask the Bible to relate to them, they grew in order to understand it.2

All four of my grandparents would have made excellent college students, but they were not given that option. Instead of being bitter, they kept learning so that in the end they gained more wisdom than most folk who have been to more school.

They learned the language of knowledge, if they never got the credentials.

In the same way, their jobs in and out of the home demanded a level of physical fitness of them. They walked, they made, and they gardened. They had to do so. Advertising had not yet utterly overwhelmed common sense so they had fewer body image issues. They hated their bodies less and used them more.

Music was not free to download or pervasive in the background of every place they visited. If you wanted music, the cheapest and easiest way to get it was to make it. The same thing was true of clothing and furniture. They sang, wrote plays, gospel songs, and built homes. This did not just exercise their minds, but their passions and their spirits. The quilts my grandmothers made were art and the houses my grandfathers built were architecture.

Talking on the porch in an evening, arguing politics and theology, was a longer pursuit of the dialectic, Socratic questions and tentative answers, than most college graduates now do after college.

Relative poverty demanded they do what we all should do and protected them from the vices of wealth. They lived in no golden age. Poverty is not good and it dulled much that could have been better. Ignorance as harder to dispel and sometimes was not. While they learned to love their neighbors, they sometimes lacked experiences to love more distant folks.

Nobody would return to that time, especially my grandparents, because they saw the evils clearly enough to fight and defeat many of them for us.

Instead of continuing and improving on this accomplishment, too many of us (though not all!) coasted. We spent what they left us and a good bit more. Our passion for social justice declined and we were content with “better.”

J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher on the Rye and other penetrating stories from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, does condemn my grandparent’s generation for one thing. His adults, men and women of my grandparent’s age, often thought that their sorrows, and they had many sorrows and made many errors, were the result of their struggles.

If they created a world of order and affluence for their children, then their children would be happier. Most had been protected from poverty from the errors of the 1920’s, the Gatsby belief that money could renew hope, but when they had money made it for their children. Fortunately for my parents, my grandparents Christianity kept them from this mistake, but many children of the sixties were not so blessed.

My grandparents became better people and parents the older they got. Many of their peers just got old and comfortable. Technology started giving them the riches that only the wealthy enjoyed in earlier times, but nobody educated that generation in what to do with the power. They were already formed, but their children were not. Just the radio gave them power of choice in music that even Queen Victoria would have envied.

Rich people of earlier ages could have warned my grandparent’s generation that indulgence would not make happy children, but my grandparents were not rich. Rising technology had given them wealth, but they did not know it, because they still measured riches by their bank account.

As a result, my grandparent’s generation too often allowed too much self-indulgence and so received the result Oscar Wilde would have predicted in earlier times of the children of overly indulged idle rich: shallow, credentialed, bored brats. The only difference was that the children of the middle class in the sixties were less cultured.

Still despite this folly, my grandparents and their friends were personally happier than their grandparent’s generation.

Why?

They would have said, because of Jesus. And they would have been right, but following Jesus in some ways was easier (though harder in others), because of their situation.

My grandparents were happier, because given little they made much of it. Given much, I have made too little. My waste overwhelms my tiny accomplishments.

My grandparents were happier, because most never expected to get their reward in this life. They mostly did not, so they were not disappointed. Nobody remembers my grandparents outside my family today. They are not in Wikipedia and cannot even be Googled.

When my grandfather died, he heard the bells of heaven at the end of a life well lived. He was a happy man. That is enough for me.

Objections to “Hearing God” (Part Two): The Question of Methodology

2011-12-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

By Timothy Bayless
J.P. Moreland Blog

There are several prominent objections to the view that God speaks extra-biblically as part of the ordinary Christian experience (call this view "HG" for "hearing God"). I take Stand To Reason’s Greg Koukl as my main dialogue partner on these matters, because he has thought extensively about these issues and has provided some accessible articles for public consideration (see my post here).

So, one such HG objection, as given by Greg Koukl, holds that the Bible fails to support HG and that therefore, this lack of evidence warrants rejecting it. Call this the “No-Evidence Objection”. The question of whether the Bible in fact supports HG is an important question, which J.P. Moreland addresses here, and in any case, the data (or its interpretation) is not relevant to assessing the objection. Instead, I’ll argue that the No-Evidence Objection is unsound because it makes an unjustifiable methodological assumption.

The reasoning behind the No-Evidence Objection is flawed. It's flawed because it excludes certain kinds of evidence (or reasons): the evidences of personal experience and credible testimony. Or to say it another way, it in principle limits what can count as evidence. And generally speaking, it's unjustifiable to treat some piece of purported evidence for any hypothesis as inadmissible simply because of its being the kind of evidence (or reason) it is.

But this is what the No-Evidence Objection does. Koukl’s view, for instance, is that the only way to settle the question of HG is by looking very carefully at the text of the Bible, and likewise, that to attempt to justify HG from experience is to reason circularly (for example, see his discussion here). But I don’t mean to single out Greg here; for many thoughtful people would affirm with him that "there is only one way to answer these questions [about HG], and the proper method is not by appealing to personal experience or citing godly authorities who disagree [but only by appealing carefully to the biblical text]." (See here, p.6). Let’s call the quoted material “the Methodological Claim.”

The Methodological Claim does all the “work” in the No-Evidence Objection. If someone (1) thinks that the Bible is silent on HG, and (2) affirms the Methodological Claim, it's no wonder HG comes out as unjustified: the conclusion doesn’t follow in any way from biblical teaching, but rather from a certain assumption about what can count as evidence. This is an epistemological issue, and not simply a biblical-theological or hermeneutical issue.

The Methodological Claim should be rejected for at least three reasons.

First, the Bible itself pretty plainly supports the idea that we can know truths about God extra-biblically (see, for instance, Romans 1:19-20). A person can come to regularly experience themselves as moral-spiritual creatures of a Creator, even if they don’t know that to have a basis or witness in scripture. (An argument could be made that this knowing is the result of what it means to be made in the imago Dei).

Moreover, when it comes to other issues—like the arguments for God’s existence—Greg even agrees that we can know truths about God extra-biblically. It’s just that when it comes to HG, he rejects this way of thinking about things.

Second, the Methodological Claim fails to account for an important distinction. Although the Bible is the ultimate source of knowledge of God, it is not the only such source. If that is true, then it would seem to at least counter the Methodological Claim by showing how it is inadequate as an approach (however well-intended!) or perhaps easily falsifiable. For the Methodological claim seems to land us in an unfortunate false dilemma: either trust scripture as the only reliable source of knowledge about HG or trust personal experience. It can’t account for credible testimony.

Curiously, Greg even agrees with this ultimate/only distinction in this article, but the distinction doesn’t appear to do much epistemological/methodological work for him when considering how to approach evidence for HG.

Third, and more seriously, the Methodological Claim is self-refuting. It entails the view that if a proposition about God is not in the Bible, it isn’t true (or at least we cannot know it to be true). But, the Methodological Claim itself is not contained in the Bible, so it isn’t true (or at least we cannot know it to be true).

The upshot of all this is that because the Methodological Claim is false, even if the Bible were silent on HG, the No-Evidence Objection would be no objection to HG at all.

Why Are Some Academics Conversational Ball Hogs?

2011-11-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

By Rachel Toor
The Chronicle of Higher Education

In conversation, I am what is known as an interrupter.

I know it's an annoying habit; I also know it's one I share with a lot of academics. What I tell myself is that I interrupt people—friends, colleagues, students—when they are midthought, sometimes midsentence, because I am so excited by their ideas I cannot help but engage. It's because I adore lively dialogue, and like to prod and provoke ideas. I'm not good at waiting my turn.

I might attribute that to having spent formative years in Manhattan, where interrupting goes unnoticed in the hustle and flow of city life. Or perhaps it's part of my ethnic heritage, the turbulence of the Jewish dinner table. Or maybe my mother didn't want to constrain my creativity and allowed me to run roughshod over conversations. Regardless of its provenance, what I know is that interrupting people when they speak is just plain rude. I've tried to cure myself of the habit but, like everything, it takes work. And in the course of working to be better, I've begun to wonder about the root of the problem.

Sure, part of the reason we interrupt each other may be excitement, but most grown-ups learn to tether their enthusiasm to polite patience. I can go for a long time nodding and saying "uh-huh" when someone is telling me a story, recounting an event, narrating a trauma, or just unwinding the reel of her day. Story arcs are something I recognize and respect.

Thinking often calls for a more interactive approach. Asking Socratic questions is an obvious move, though I'm sure Socrates, old sweetie that he was, waited for his interlocutors to at least finish their sentences. Or maybe Plato cleaned up his manners while inscribing his prose.

Plenty of people, other than New York Jews, share the irritating habit of interrupting. The Supreme Court justices (eight of them, anyway) break into speeches that have been long prepared and rehearsed. They get to steer the argument in ways they choose, which is not always the direction the arguers would like. Sometimes a lawyer can barely get a sentence out before the questioners leave her in quivers. In polite company, you're supposed to wait until someone has made her case before you start picking away at it. But when you have a long docket of law-making cases—and are appointed to your job for life—I guess you don't need to make nice.

I am not, alas, a Supreme Court justice, and while that black-clad gang can afford to be disliked, most of us can't. And most people don't cotton to being interrupted midstream. I know I don't.

When someone interrupts me, it may mean all of the things I tell myself it means: He's excited, he's impatient, he was raised by wolves. But it may also imply that the interrupter thinks his commentary is more important than my material, that he knows a bunch of stuff I don't, that he needs to make arguments he thinks I'm not taking into account, go down paths I've neglected to follow. Often, with a chronic interrupter, I have to say, "Let me finish," because I have in fact done all of those things, just not in the order—or as fast—as he would have liked.

I've come to think of interrupting as a subtle way of saying "I'm smarter than you!" It's a way of trying to snag the conversational spotlight.

Many people, even the socially adept, interrupt to crack jokes. For years I've done long runs on the weekend with different bunches of people. Usually my fellow runners are clever if not intellectual, canny if not bookish. A Sunday-morning 18-miler can include a version of "doing the dozens"—a banter-fest in which each person tries to verbally outrun the others. Performance takes precedence over any real conversation. Sometimes it's great fun; other times it makes me ache for a discussion that is meaningful and connected—in which each person gets a chance to have his or her say.

I have a friend I used to accuse of "chronic incessant joking." Whenever we were talking about something I thought was serious and important, he would break in midsentence to utter some quip. To his credit, he is a funny man, and kind; his jokes are never at anyone's expense. He did it so often I wondered if he interrupted conversations when they caused him discomfort, when they moved into territory that made him twitchy. We all have such short attention spans that sometimes if you can get someone to leave a subject you might never have to return to it.

In our classrooms, many students realize that and seek to derail lesson plans, or at least reroute them, by leading the class on tangents. It can be a way of taking a breather from the hard work of doing work. Sometimes the interruption can be productive, sometimes it's disruptive and annoying.

There is a sheaf of scholarship on gender difference in conversational styles. To overgeneralize and simplify, I suspect that when men interrupt, it's because they think they know more or better, or want to seem superior. With women, it's often to share: I hear your story; it reminds me of my story. Women's conversations can be like playing a game of jacks. I take my turn, and then, after a while, when I'm finished, I hand the ball to you. With men, discussions are often more of a passing game. Men tend to call for the ball.

I'm interested in an insidious turn this takes in scholarly work. Think of the many book (and manuscript) reviews when instead of attending closely to the author's argument, reviewers interrupt it with one of their own. I like to tell my writing students that readers are always in it for themselves. They care less about your story than what your story tells them about their own. With academics, it's often the case that readers will care more about how your research or argument informs or contradicts their work and will let their thoughts go in those directions, even if that's not where you're heading.

A typical interruption of scholarly thought is the "You didn't cite Jones" type. Sometimes, sure, you missed something big. But other times—and when I was a book editor I saw this in more readers' reports than I care to remember—the Jones in question is the reviewer. Or the reviewer's friend. Or someone in the reviewer's intellectual fraternity.

A similar phenomenon is at work when a reviewer makes an argument that is, at best, tangential to what the project is trying to accomplish. That is often the case when reviewers attack an author for not writing the article or book they think the author should have written. These cranks break into a book's argument with their own agenda, steering the material toward places the author never intended to go.

Sometimes, as a writer, you do this to yourself. (I am prone to interrupting my own prose with parenthetical remarks; it seems I can't even be patient with myself.)

It's hard to create something—an idea, a sentence, a book. It's easier to pick away at the edges. It's hard to listen, to put aside one's own thoughts, to let the ego take a back seat to someone else's cleverness, observations, or argument. To interrupt is to show dominance and try to wrest control. To be on the receiving end can feel dismissive and disempowering. I've read studies that show doctors wait about 18 seconds before they interrupt their patients. No wonder we're so unhappy with our health care: Attending physicians have stopped attending to us.

Sometimes, though, when academics are being conversational ball hogs—a common tic among those whose job is to profess—interruption is the only way to engage. Or you can surrender to it. I remember hearing a story about a famous translator of an even-more-famous philosopher. The translator was, apparently, the world's biggest narcissist. His graduate students liked to indulge in a game of counting the conversational steps it would take for the translator to bring the subject back to himself. One would say, "Hey, I got a new car, a Peugeot." The translator would look thoughtful and say, "Peugeot, a French brand. The French love my work." Two short steps.

I have a friend who indulges in conversational filibusters, pausing to take breaths only in midthought, trailing off before the end of one idea and then building into another. Lately I've been wondering if that is a defensive tactic she employs when talking to me, heading off what she knows is my tendency to interrupt. Now aware of this, I've determined to try not to break in, but just to listen, to wait until she's finished having her say, and then try not to assault her with mine.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University's writing program in Spokane. Her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com.

What Does It Mean to Love Somebody I Have Not Seen?

2011-11-18T17:46:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

At some point a Christian says he loves Jesus. I think that is an infallible test of anyone who might be a Christian. Not everybody who says they love the Savior is a Christian, but nobody who doesn’t is.

What does it mean to say I love somebody I have not seen?

It does not mean I love a mere idea. The ideas of Jesus are interesting, but not as intriguing to my intellect, I confess with some shame, as those of Plato. If my goal were to solve mental puzzles, then I would ask for a day with Socrates, not the Jesus of the Gospels.

Loving Jesus is not loving being in love. As a romantic the passion for passion is a problem for me, so I know the difference. Jesus insists on being treated like a person. When I sin, He insists I repent. He has mercy on me, but demands I admit I am a sinner. At times, I wish I were simply a “thing” Christ valued, but He loves me. When I wish to be treated like a commodity, He treats me like a person accountable for what I do.

Jesus is a person. He has opinions, ideas, and feelings. As God and as man, He has opinions only a fool would ignore and that are not so abstract that they are beyond impacting my daily life. If Jesus were just God, I might plead ignorance of His will, become lost in the real inability of any man to know the Divine Nature. Instead God insisted on becoming flesh and living as a man, so He can relate easily to me.

In some ways, it is like loving Hope. My wife, my bed partner as modern commercials call her, keeps insisting I treat her as a changing, living being that cannot be reduced to a check-list of “things I know about my wife.” Strictly speaking, she is not mine at all, but God’s own.

I can no more own Hope than a slaver could own Frederick Douglass.

And really who would want to try owning the woman she is?

Jesus insists that I treat Him as the person He is. In His case, that is a very big deal. Hope does not deserve capitalizing every personal pronoun. My darling is not She, but He is He.

My secular friends think, of course, that I am talking to myself. When I say I love Jesus, I love some mental construct that I have pulled together from reading the Gospels and my life experiences.

Maybe, but it does not feel that way. As a child I had imaginary friends, but Jesus is not like they were. He does not go along with my attitudes or prejudices, but in fact frequently challenges them. Just when I think I have Him figured out, He insists on overturning my neat image of Him.

In that way Jesus is more like my experiences with Hope, than my childhood experiences with race of imaginary beings called the Hongese. I could put the Hongese away, but Jesus keeps on appearing in my thought life at odd times.

As I get older, I begin to understand the answer to the most obvious question I am usually asked at this point. Why does Jesus hide His physical presence from me? I think it for the same reason that it is good for me to be far from Hope. When I am with Hope her beauty and my passion for her can overwhelm knowing her. I am tempted merely to adore and not to love her with my heart, mind, and body.

Jesus is more beautiful than Hope. If I saw Him, I could only worship, even if I did not love Him. Evidently, no being, not even Satan, can see Him as He is and not say: “Jesus Christ is Lord.” If I am to have a relationship with Him, He must hide as He did when He was on Earth.

I could be kidding myself, but I cannot believe it. My sense of Jesus has become greater than my sense of the world around me at times. It is easier for me to believe that my eyes are kidding me, than that His quiet, lovely, insistent voice is unreal. Years of listening, or trying to listen, have given me that blessing.

If it is an illusion, it is one I would have jarred, but which is not shaken by the real world. Instead, I hear His voice even at painful times or in hard turns my life takes.

I love Jesus. This Jesus is perfectly revealed in the Gospels and this has kept me from kidding myself or being deluded by false voices before and will do so again, but it is Jesus I love. I love the Gospels, because they show me my Lord and my God.

America, my beloved country, may fall. My friends may betray me. Hope may let me down, God help me, but there is a Man and more than a Man, God come in the flesh, a person that will never let me go. He judges me rightly, justly, and knows every error, stupidity, and vice in my life. He is not soft on that sin, but loves me in any case.

I cannot write what that does for me. I cannot say how I long for everyone I meet to have that comfort. That there is beauty does not comfort me, because I am not. That there is goodness can make me afraid, because I am not. That there is truth reveals my errors to me. But that there is Love and Love is a person full of grace and mercy is news so good that I cannot write anymore.

I love you Jesus.

Why Christians Favor Small Government

2011-11-18T17:45:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Economists tell us how the economy goes, but God tells us how it should go.

Christians know what God hates: oppression of the poor, stealing, and covetousness.

The rich must not oppress the poor. The rotten deals between big business and big government are an odor of death in Heaven’s nostrils. Big government will always be in the hands of looters and moochers with the money to buy favors.

Both parties reward donors with graft, favorable regulations, and special laws while ignoring the rest of America. It sickens me to see President Bush and President Obama declare some corporations “too big to fail” while the jobless rate grows. Big corporations hire lobbyists and lawyers to escape regulation. Mom and pop struggle to run a business, but are strangled by regulations designed to enshrine special favors to those in the economic aristocracy.

Most American Christians favor small government because we know that large government will always fall into the hands of those wealthy enough to buy favor. Public servants face inevitable corruption becoming bureaucrats bloated on boodle.

The power to do great good will corrupt, the power to reach utopia will corrupt absolutely.

In this sad time, Christianity offers hope of improvement, but no promise of utopia this side of paradise. Perfection is the enemy of good enough and good enough is all we can safely hope to see. The party that promises perfection today will strangle our liberty and make this life hell on earth.

Christians are content with two basic ideals.

The rich and the poor must receive equal justice before the law. Most Americans are convinced that money can buy a lawyer and that lawyers are no longer advocates of justice. The law is in the hands of sophists who will argue that good is bad for a fee.

Minority and poor defendants too often do time while rich defendants walk away. Christianity demands that the law not respect the rich more than the poor, but the prison terms given to drug offenders in the inner city compared to drug offenders from the suburbs mocks this notion.

We ask for a reformation in the law so that all Americans can anticipate an equal chance at justice. Christians reject special favors of the law for any man or woman based on wealth.

If the rich must not be favored, then the poor must not covet or steal the wealth of the rich. While the rich get no special favors, the poor cannot prosper by theft, graft, or threats. Too often the rich are forced to buy off the poor, or the false friends of the poor, with bribes.

Wealth stolen from the rich by punitive taxation is no more justice than wealth “liberated” by direct theft. An American should not face unequal taxation based only on his or her success.

It is not a crime to be rich and no virtue to be poor. It is injustice to favor the poor because they are poor just as much as to favor the rich because they are rich.

All of us should do to others as we would have them do to us. This simple idea from the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ would protect the rich and the poor. The Golden Rule would necessitate treating all humans as humans and not as “rich” or “poor.”

As we are equal before the judgment seat of God, so we must be equal before the throne of God.

Human beings have a God given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is impossible for a man or woman to reach their full potential without the chance for meaningful employment.

Theodore Roosevelt was right that government must act to defend the consumer from corrupt private wealth.

Ronald Reagan was correct in asserting that states and private individuals must be given liberty from oppressive government taxation and regulation.

When we pay for our welfare today by borrowing our grandchildren’s taxes, we act like sybaritic Romans and not as patriots.

Americans would accept a higher tax load if it came with reduced government spending and a balanced budget. Both parties have refused reasonable compromise on these issues. Like Reagan, Republicans should accept a social safety net and end the fantasy of a stateless state. Like Clinton, Democrats should accept that the era of big government must end.

Christians fear gigantic states, businesses, or organizations because we put no trust in humankind. We know we are all fallible: church, state, society, and business. By dividing power as equally as possible between each sphere of society and through prophetic cries for justice, we hope to lessen the pain of broken humanity longing for justice.

We reject the utopian delusions of no state and of an omni-competent state.

American Christians reject any king, but King Jesus. We reject any theocracy before King Jesus returns, because humans would have to run it. We long for justice tempered with mercy and we will vote for the man or woman who will give us a government small enough to allow liberty, but big enough to preserve it.

To Be or Not to Be (Judeo-Christian)

2011-11-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

A thoughtful reader asked, “Why do you use the expression “Judeo-Christian?” Did I wish to exclude the other great monotheistic faith: Islam? In the past, atheists or agnostics have asked me if I intended to slight secular contributions to American history.

One way to respond is to point out that both Islam and atheism have made mostly indirect contributions to American history. Most Americans have been Christian or associated themselves with Christianity. Christianity is born of Judaism and the American population has long had a significant Jewish minority. On the other hand, until very recently the United States has had few Muslims and they have not had much influence in the United States.

Atheists were about as rare at the American founding. Deists such as Tom Paine were not orthodox Christians, but they were theists and had not moved very far culturally from their English Christian patrimony. The rise of a class of agnostics and atheists did not change this situation much. These folk tended to accept the majority (Christian and Jewish) culture minus some elements they found “irrational.”

Victorian atheists were still Victorian!

In fact, secularism generally was often parasitic on the majority religious culture. It tended to right obvious wrongs or point out hypocritical attitudes, but it was the vast Christian majority that tolerated the corrections and allowed liberty. Even a curmudgeon like Mark Twain, whose own attitude was hostile to revealed religion, could fall in love with Joan of Arc, in his great novel, and live within American conventions to a great extent.

Twain mocked Christian America and profited from the mocked who rushed to buy his books and used the profits to live a comfortable Victorian life. He brilliantly critiqued a culture he could not have created.

When I say we live in a Judeo-Christian country, I mean just this: even if I am not a Jew or a Christian, I live in a nation shaped by ideas drawn cultures deeply shaped by Jewish and Christian ideas. No other single worldview is comparable. Ideas like deism or Spiritualism have come and gone, left their mark, and passed into a degree of obscurity. Our spiritualism was Christian-like, as was our deism.

But in fact, there is another reason that one need not, yet, speak of Islamic-Judeo-Christian theism. Islam has yet to prove that her adherents can be a majority and still allow religious liberty and full citizenship for religious minorities.

Any group can demand liberty when powerless. What do they do when powerful?

The Christian majority in America is rightly condemned for our denial of human rights to slaves, native Americans, and the unborn. We are inconsistent with our own beliefs when we claim a man can own another man, lie in our treaties, or kill the innocent. We have done all those things.

We love our nation because she is our nation, not because she is lovable. Her face is flawed from her vices, but she is our mother.

And yet having said this truth, it is equally true that the American Christian majority has a remarkable record of tolerance compared other nations at other places at other times. If we have often failed to live up to our ideals, it is in part because our ideals were so high.

We should have been better than we were and it is easy to say this by our own standards. Christians tolerated significant religious minorities, even ones they found distasteful. They did not always handle these tensions well, but the majority rejected the path of the Klan and the Know Nothings.

Woodrow Wilson’s racism was offset by Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivism.

Religious minorities were almost always better off here than any other place on the planet.

There was a time in history when the Orthodox Christian was less persecuted by Islam than other Christian states. There were times in history when Jews found greater protection in Islamic lands than almost any Christian one. One could be a second class subject in an Islamic state with some rights and an ability to have great power.

Many Christian states, sadly, denied even this to minority religious. This inconsistency with the Christian ideal of love stank to Heaven.

Christian America, however, found a way to go beyond tolerance and second-class citizenship so that non-Christians could be full citizens. We limited the role of the state so that a person need agree with very few basic ideas to be a full American. These ideas were consistent with Christianity, but also with natural reason. We followed the law of Nature and of Nature’s God.

Small government allowed religious groups and individuals to make most decisions.

Islam has shown only small ability to accept this idea, but I see no reason, in principle, that it cannot and I know Islamic scholars who do so. As a monotheistic faith, Islam has the intellectual resources to do so.

Atheism and agnosticism have more mixed track records. Where they formed a majority or at least governed, things have gone badly for those out of power. Western Europe recently has gained more secular governing majorities, but we shall have to see how they tolerate those who do not buy into the secular consensus or if this overtly non-religious ruling group can survive.

Even in Europe, fairly religious leaders such as Tony Blair or religious leaders like Pope Benedict remain major players. European secularists have yet to prove they have done more than inherit Christendom and rename it the “European Union.”

In any case, no good person hopes for the failure of either Islam or secularism to learn the lessons Jews and Christians learned at such cost. We hope that someday it will be sensible to refer to the Islamic-Secular-Jewish-Christian consensus of liberty under the Natural Law.

What my Uncle Arthur Taught Me About the Sabbath

2011-11-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I had an uncle named Arthur, but not by blood.

Instead, I read and reread children’s stories collected and written by Arthur Maxwell, Uncle Arthur. I doubt a single moment of my adult life has escaped his influence, because his stories were fascinating and true.

Maxwell, it turns out, was a Seventh Day Adventist, a group of Christians most famous for their devotion to health and healing. My family was Adventist; we were influenced by the teachings on the Second Coming in the middle of the eighteenth century, but not part of the Seventh Day movement. Seventh Day Adventists believed, amongst other ideas, that Christians should still worship on the Sabbath—the Seventh Day.

I thought about this hard at one time and decided against Sabbatarianism, but my Seventh Day Adventist friends still taught me several important truths that all Christians should recall. Uncle Arthur was, as usual, mostly right, because his wisdom was based on the Bible and practical Christian living.

First, Uncle Arthur reminded me that God built rest into true humanity. God labored six days and lives now at rest. Our workaholic culture may not admire the man who rests, but God does.

Second, Uncle Arthur pointed out that rest was good, recreation better, but that setting apart one day as holy was different. Simply saying “every day” is my Sabbath often means (to paraphrase the Incredibles) that day is holy. Making a day holy isn’t about making it awful as some people did in the country: forbidding jollity is no more apt than forbidding sorrow. Both sorrow and joy are proper human reactions to the awesome nature of God.

Following Uncle Arthur’s kindly advice, I try to take a Sabbath each week where my normal habits are suspended. I try to pray, read the Bible, and meditate more on that day than I can usually. I pull back from any work-for-pay activities. Since I often speak on Sunday that means Sunday is often not a day of rest for me.

Third, my Sabbath, and there is no way not to sound so cheesy you could dip Doritos in this section, is about loving people. I try to find actions where I can love my wife, my children, my family, friends, neighbors, and (too occasionally) my enemies. How does that work practically?

We try to have a family dinner with as many of the Reynolds’ clan as can come. We spend time and money on this meal . . . and contrary to the vegetarian Uncle Arthur it often centers on steak as a family favorite. We try to fill this time with some conversation, though occasionally we will view a film.

Uncle Arthur taught me that a “Sabbath” is a great time to help the poor or do charitable work. This is overlooked aspect of “rest” and one that has been a struggle. Is there an aspect of my week where I give labor for love and not money? If not, that is a problem.

My job is thinking and so on my Sabbath I tend to emphasize the heart aspect of my life. I can imagine someone else who is in a “feeling” job, spending a Sabbath in intellectual reflection.

Finally, Uncle Arthur taught me the importance of sleep. Rest should not just be “holy busyness,” but includes sleeping. There must have been a time when sleeping too much was a problem, but I have not known anybody afflicted with this issue. Most people I know view the perfect day as one where they sleep. This is not good.

If your ideal day is sleeping, then you need more sleep in your non-Sabbath life.

Uncle Arthur taught me that works would not save me, but the saved would do good works out of loving gratitude to God. Good works would in general cause me to do well. However, working is exhausting . . . even loving good works. Uncle Arthur told “bedtime stories” and that means there needs to bedtime when I am still awake to hear them.

Civics 101 With Professor Lincoln

2011-11-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

God has opinions about human affairs, but His opinions are not easy for any human to see.

Abraham Lincoln faced the Civil War, the greatest test the American Republic has endured, but he was not foolish enough to assume the government was on God’s side. In his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln pointed out that both sides asked God’s help and, “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.”

Why?

“The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Lincoln did not hesitate in judging the institution of slavery: it was immoral. He knew that rebellion and disunion, corrupted by a peculiar connection to slavery, was intolerable, but he also knew that the Union was not guiltless. The Constitution had tolerated slavery and the Union had profited from the unpaid work of slaves forced from them by the lash of the masters.

The factories that churned out the Northern arms were not models of equality or justice.

Saying that God Almighty was not “on the side” of the Union is just American Civics 101. Lincoln taught Americans that we must invoke God’s aid, but do so with humility. We can fight for justice, but with charity toward all. Our cause may be righteous, but we are not.

Lincoln accepted that the City of God and the City of Man never fully overlap. Subjects of King Jesus are always in tension with the demands of being a citizen of the Republic. This is not God’s nation (though it is His country), but this side of Paradise I am a member of the American commonwealth. When the judgment comes and all tribes and nations stand before the Almighty, I will stand with shame and pride before His throne as an American.

Practically speaking, this will matter in my vote for President of the United States. I am confident of the righteousness of the pro-life cause and of the morality of traditional marriage. My cause is just, but those are not the only issues that will be decided in the next great election.

And no party, certainly not the Republican Party, is righteous, because I am in it and I am not righteous. I stand before God imperfect and His judgments, with eternity in mind, are inscrutable. Many a slave owner was just in some area of his life not related to slavery; many a pro-choicer may be more loving than I in many ways not related to abortion.

Otherwise just men end up in unjust causes.

So I must press on with humility to do right as God gives me to see the right. For most of us, the realization that there are righteous causes, such as conservation, but no simple “bad guys” to oppose leads to impotence. Lincoln had no malice and great charity, but ran the largest armed force on the planet to do justice.

He was willing to act with determination, but not with ego. As a result, Lincoln was no tyrant and the bad he did, such as suspending some civil liberties, died with him, but his righteous causes, Union and liberty, lived to inspire other great men and women.

Let’s vote and disagree with this in mind. Our foes are wrong, but they are not Satan’s minions. We are not angels of God, but merely people sullying the flag by our raising it. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in . . . “

The Right Way to Be Wrong

2011-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Being wrong need not be bad.

Of course, nobody wishes to be wrong, but sometimes it is good for us. Sometimes when I am wrong about a fact or make a mistake in work, I take it as a moral failing when it is not. Assuming normal care and reasonable precautions, there is no sin in being mistaken.

We should embrace our errors of this sort, because they often teach us more than an accidental correctness. I poured hours into a chapter of my dissertation only to have my wise advisor cross it all out. She wrote only one short comment, but that comment summarized my error.

I was tempted to despair. All that work wasted.

But it had not been wasted, because when the error was revealed my mind was freed from error and able to soar a bit higher than it did before. Even the process of developing the wrong idea had helped me, because the labor was not wasted. My mental capacity and knowledge of the text I was studying increased.

I did not learn from this to embrace error, but to accept it. Error must come, but woe to the one who clings to it. Being wrong requires no forgiveness; stubborn love of my error is unforgiveable.

Many of us think a critique is personal, because sometimes it is. “Take this in the spirit in which it is intended,” has generally meant somebody was going to make me feel badly about myself. These critics also take our mistakes personally and so attack what they should gently correct.

I had a math teacher once who would glare at me over a red marked page as if I personally had insulted her by doing my best and doing poorly. “How dare you give me this?” she would towering over me in her zebra pantsuit.

I never knew what to say. My mathematical ineptitude only grew worse as I tried harder and the notion that I would have dared to insult my powerful teacher was ludicrous.

Hard enough to learn from error, but it is nearly impossible if error is used as weapon in hateful hands. Yet even a kind mentor finds it hard to communicate error well to a traumatized generation. The temptation is ether to ignore mistakes and focus only on the good or to despair of education altogether.

Self-esteem is fragile, because it is too often based on false praise and collapses under the weight of the tiniest just criticism. The weighty reality of error crushes the papier-mâché of false praise. The giant “most improved trophy” on the mantel cannot compensate for the realization, even kindly expressed, that the student actually cannot play the game well.

So I am praying for the mercy to accept my errors and be able to learn from them. I should not exactly love making mistakes, but not be worried about them either. If that is the judgment I must use on myself, then it is the standard I must use on others.

When a neighbor, or even an enemy, makes a mistake, I will not use it as an occasion to mock or denigrate, but as a chance to teach. God help me never to take honest errors personally.

What’s a Good Question?

2011-10-12T09:50:00.001-07:00

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

In his visionary book Finding Common Ground, Tim Downs noted that “because Christians tend to be answer people, we’re not especially skilled at asking good questions; questions that aren’t simplistic, leading, or downright insulting.” Ouch.

In Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute, we’re answer people, but we teach socratically. That means our primary job as teachers is to ask questions, and they need to be good ones. What’s a good question? That’s a good question.

A good question evokes curiosity by exhibiting curiosity.

A socratic teacher can’t hover above the discussion, occasionally hurling a thunderbolt of insight down toward the benighted students from the Olympian heights of clear understanding. A socratic teacher has to get down in the perplexities with the students, and find the way out using the same resources available to them.

When preparing for one of our 3-hour class sessions, a socratic teacher can script about half of the major questions in advance. By reading the text with students in mind, the tutor can generate a dozen major questions and some supporting questions under each of those. But once class begins, the dialectic takes unpredicted turns, leading out beyond the foreseen questions. Then the tutor has to set aside the scripted questions, and develop the skill of creating new questions on the spot.

A good question, in this sense, will be specifically tailored to the new situation. Here are some dichotomies to help in crafting questions.

Low level questions only require students to repeat information, perhaps to rephrase it. But High level questions require analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of the information (I’m using “low” and “high” loosely, but see Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives for a widespread definition).

Information retrieval questions get short, factual answers (“Who is Athena’s mother?”). Information evaluation questions presuppose information retrieval, and usually get the short, factual answer thrown in as the student hurries on to the evaluative task (“Is Athena like her mother?”). Info-retrieval questions are usually best used in a series that are leading somewhere.

Convergent questions imply one right answer (“What is the main idea of this book?”); Divergent questions suggest a range of possibilities (“What are some of the most important things in this book?”).

Unstructured questions do not indicate what form the answer should take (“What did you think of Paradise Lost?”); Structured questions dictate the right form of response (“What is a new idea you got from Milton?” “What makes you mad in Paradise Lost?”)

Multiple questions offer many questions at once, so the real question is “Which of my questions do you want to use?” (“Why does God choose certain people for his purposes?Was he not dealing with individuals before Genesis 11? What’s special about Abraham?Does the text say why Abraham was chosen by God?”) Singular questions present a sheer cliff by comparison (“Why did God choose Abraham?”). Singular questions usually produce some silence from students. Multiple questions are a way for the tutor to fill up gaps in the conversation, to seed the clouds, and to check several prospects at once.

Expected questions are smooth (“Do the Federalist Papers throw any light on the U.S. Constitution?”); Unexpected questions either approach the subject from a surprising angle, or play against student presuppositions (“Would the Federalists be in favor of dividing California into three separate states?”). Struggling with glib students and rapid answers? Deploy a few dramatically unexpected questions.

Some questions focus on how the text itself presents ideas (“Why does Bunyan compare the Christian life to a long journey with battles along the way?”); others look away from what the text presents by exploring terms and categories the author did not present (“Why didn’t Bunyan make this a sea journey, with pirates? Why didn’t he make it a cooking contest? Why didn’t he make his characters talking animals?”). When you use the second kind of question, make sure you’re serving the author and not changing the subject or becoming impressed with your own, supposedly superior, ideas.

Close-ended questions require one short answer, usually yes or no (“Had you ever read this book before today?”). Open-ended questions require a complex answer (“How many times have you read this book before today?”)

An obvious definition question seeks categorization (“What is an epic?”); a concealed definition question presupposes that, but puts it off by one step (“Is this an epic?”).

Some questions clarify by focusing on the intention of the student who has just spoken (“Do you mean that having faith is a kind of work?”); others clarify by focusing on the text (“Does Luther think that having faith is kind of work?”)

Some questions offer an invitation to synthesis (“How can mercy and justice be reconciled?”); others force a dichotomy (“Would you rather receive merciless justice or unjust mercy?”)

Some questions put the tutor in focus, requiring students to volley back to the authority figure (“Why am I asking about revenge, if Shakespeare doesn’t use that word?”); other questions encourage students to bat the discussion back and forth with each other (“Miss A, you seem to disagree with Mr. B.”)

Some questions are really an exercise in reflective listening in question form, showing that you are actively listening right now (“Do I hear you saying that Solomon was in fact one of the most foolish of men?.”)

Some questions are phrased in a way that aggressively moves the class over one issue and hurries them on to the next issue. These show that you have already heard (in the past tense) and are ready for the next step (“Yes, having hundreds of wives is not exactly wise. But what I want to know is, which of Solomon’s actions show him to be exercising the wisdom we know he was given?”).

Many of the best questions are so context-specific that they will emerge directly from close observation of the text or the conversation. Sometimes the tutor should simply ask how one sentence relates to the preceding one, or how a certain set of words is different from the diction used elsewhere in the same work (“Why are all these court-room terms being used on this page? Why is the vocabulary of a legal proceeding suddenly so prominent?”). Other times a quick internal summary of how the conversation got to this point will suggest an incisive question (“Then we asked about deceitfulness, and you said the king was a master rhetorician, and we started talking about the abuse of power. Was that a logical chain of thought, or free association?”).

Finally, if you get into enough long, involved conversations, you’re bound to reach a point where you’re out of ideas and the good questions aren’t coming to you fast enough, or when a student says something that you just can’t get your mind around. Instead of saying “huh” or “what in the world do you mean?”, do one of the following four things:

*Inquire into the assumptions behind what is being said
*Examine the reasons given, whatever they are
*Require evidence to be offered
*Ask about implications

Socratic teachers all experience those moments when they lose their bearings and can’t figure out how to get to the next major topic, or even what that topic is. While you’re waiting for the big idea to occur to you, or in an absolute emergency of mind-not-working-good-hood, you should memorize the following sets of syllables and say some of them out loud instead of saying “duh.”

Why do you say that?
How does what you’re saying relate to what we’ve said so far in this class?
X, what do you think Y is saying?
What is another example of what you’re saying?
If that is the answer, what was the question?
What is it that convinces you this is true?
What would it take to make you change your mind about this?
Can you explain what makes you think this?

None of those are great questions. But in the right place and time, they can be good questions.

Eyre Contra Robertson

2011-09-28T17:34:00.001-07:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I am no expert on how to succeed in marriage, but I do know failure. Nobody made me vow to love my wife Hope for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, but I did promise. When I have failed in love, and I have failed love, at least I had a standard to note my failure.

Forgiveness, the medicine of marriage, has given me chances to make my words real. If my vows are ever to have meaning, it will be in sacrifice to love of the beloved.

This brings me to Pat Robertson. By now Christendom knows that this man whom fame outran makes news only when he says something offensive or absurd. This time he suggested that a man quietly put away his wife, caring for her body, when she was senile and then remarry.

His needs, such as they are, must be met.

Evidently singleness is so horrific that vows must give way to it. What of the men and women with no chance at marriage? They seem happy, but if Robertson is right, this is only an illusion. They cannot be happy, because they are not married to a person who can meet their needs.

Oddly cool-headed rationalists might agree with Robertson. One can anticipate all sorts of exercises in what-iffery from the thinking class: What if a spouse went into a lifetime coma on the honeymoon? What if aliens abducted a spouse and he was gone for years?

Against the pharisaical desire to find a way stands only love, but but love is very powerful. A great author stood against Robertson and the vow benders in the Christian romance: Jane Eyre.

Love says, with noble Jane, that though Rochester may have a mad wife under care in his attic, he must keep his vows. Jane runs away from illicit love and finds happiness without Rochester.

Family, good friends, and work fill the place of a lover. She need betray no vows to serve God and her fellows.

Against what Jane wants stands only the laws of God and the vows of the man she loves that he made to a mad woman. Jane gives dignity to Rochester by honoring his word when he would dishonor it and so shows she really loves him.

Robertson would advise Rochester to divorce Bertha Mason and start over with Jane, but that would begin a new set of vows with an escape clause. It would cheapen love by refusing its absolute demands.

We can be glad that Jesus loved us enough to die for us in our decay, our senility, and the horrors of the world. We could not meet any of His needs, but He loved us and love was enough.

Robertson’s mistake was to forget love. Love is demanding and has its own rationality, its own calculus. It demands “until death do us part” and then hopes for more in eternity.

Who then would get married? Perhaps men for whom work or ministry will come first should give up one happiness to buy the security of being single. But if love vows, then it must keep its vows or it will cease to be love. We are warned by the marriage ceremony not to enter into this holy estate lightly for this very reason. Lovers will marry, because lovers must marry. If they allow love to mature and grow, they will regret this choice at times, but make it again and again.

When love grows, no man needs to be made to keep his vows.

All selfishness must be burned out of a lover in any marriage centered on love, because the absolute romance that love desires holds nothing back. Marriage is a bloodless martyrdom, said the Fathers. Divorce might make it bearable, but God hates divorce.

Marriage is a holy thing, and so an awful thing. I have watched grandparents suffer and die while a spouse cares for them right to the end. I have heard well-meaning Robertsons “comfort” them when death finally came by pointing out that after all: “now they were free to move on with their lives.” I saw a grandmother straighten her back and declare that she would suffer and serve her husband for twenty years, if it would give her five more minutes with him.

Her love had burned through her selfishness and in her vow keeping I saw the face of God.

Children of the Reformation

2011-09-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

By Allan Carlson
Touchstone Magazine

A Short & Surprising History of Protestantism & Contraception

It is a reckless analyst who risks reopening sixteenth-century disputes between Roman Catholics and the Protestant Reformers. I do so in the interest of a greater good, but my purpose is not to say who was right or who was wrong. I would simply like to explore why the Protestant churches maintained unity with the Catholic Church on the contraception question for four centuries, only to abandon this unity during the first half of the twentieth century.

I write as a historian, not an advocate. (I am a “cradle Lutheran,” but one who believes Martin Luther was wrong about what he called the impossibility of lifelong celibacy; I have come to know too many faithful Catholic priests to accept that.)

Orders & Disorders

To understand the change in Protestant thought and practice, we need to understand the Protestant vision of family and fertility, particularly as expressed by Luther and Calvin, and how it has changed over the last hundred years.

Early sixteenth-century Europe was an era very different from ours. The late medieval Church claimed about one of every four adults in celibate orders, serving either as priests, nuns, or monks or in celibate military and trading groups such as the Teutonic Knights.

Over the centuries, the religious orders had, through bequests, accumulated vast landed estates and gathered in the wealth that came through this ownership of productive land. The trading orders held remarkable assets in land, goods, and gold. Many orders were nonetheless faithful to their purposes and vows and used this wealth to tend the sick, help the poor, and lift prayers to heaven.

However, in others, spiritual discipline had grown lax. Indeed, sexual scandals of a sort rocked the church of that era. I draw strictly on Catholic witnesses for this.

For example, the great Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus, while always loyal to Rome, complained: “Let them prate as they will of the status of monks and virgins. Those who under the pretext of celibacy live in [sexual] license might better be castrated. . . . [T]here is a horde of priests among whom chastity is rare.”

Philip of Burgundy, the Catholic bishop of Utrecht, admitted that chastity was nearly impossible among clerics and monks who were “pampered with high living and tempted by indolence.” This problem festered until the reform-minded Council of Trent convened in 1545.

God Was Not Drunk

The key figure in developing a Protestant family ethic was Martin Luther. Himself an Augustinian monk and priest, Luther also served as Professor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg. The first element in Luther’s Protestant family ethic was a broad celebration not simply of marriage but of procreation.

For Luther, God’s words in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” were more than a blessing, even more than a command. They were, he declared in his 1521 treatise on The Estate of Marriage, “a divine ordinance which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore.”

Addressing the celibate Teutonic Knights, he also emphasized Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper who shall be with him.” The “true Christian,” he declared, “must grant that this saying of God is true, and believe that God was not drunk when he spoke these words and instituted marriage.”

Except among those rare persons—“not more than one in a thousand,” Luther said at one point—who received true celibacy as a special gift from God, marriage and procreation were divinely ordained. As he wrote: “For it is not a matter of free choice or decision but a natural and necessary thing, that whatever is a man must have a woman and whatever is a woman must have a man.”

John Calvin put even greater emphasis on Genesis 1:28. He argued that these words represented the only command of God made before the Fall that was still active after God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden. This gave them a unique power and importance.

While occasionally acknowledging in unenthusiastic fashion St. Paul’s defense of the single life, the Reformers were far more comfortable with the social order described in Luther’s Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order: “We were all created to do as our parents have done, to beget and rear children. This is a duty which God has laid upon us, commanded, and implanted in us, as is proved by our bodily members, our daily emotions, and the example of all mankind.”

Marriage with the expectation of children, in this view, represented the natural, normal, and necessary form of worldly existence.

Essential Procreation

Marriage with the expectation of children was also a spiritual expression. Luther saw procreation as the very essence of the human life in Eden before the Fall. As he wrote in his Commentary on Genesis:

[T]ruly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation. After the proclamation of the name of God it is the most important activity Adam and Eve in the State of innocence could carry on—as free from sin in doing this as they were in praising God.

The fall of Adam and Eve into sin interrupted this pure, exuberant potential fertility. Even so, the German Reformer praised each conception of a new child as an act of “wonderment . . . wholly beyond our understanding,” a miracle bearing the “lovely music of nature,” a faint reminder of life before the Fall:

This living together of husband and wife—that they occupy the same home, that they take care of the household, that together they produce and bring up children—is a kind of faint image and a remnant, as it were, of that blessed living together [in Eden].

Elsewhere, Luther called procreation “a most outstanding gift” and “the greatest work of God.”

Accordingly, Luther sharply condemned the contraceptive mentality that was alive and well in his own time. He noted that this “inhuman attitude, which is worse than barbarous,” was found chiefly among the wellborn, “the nobility and princes.” Elsewhere, he linked both contraception and abortion to selfishness:

How great, therefore, the wickedness of [fallen] human nature is! How many girls there are who prevent conception and kill and expel tender fetuses, although procreation is the work of God! Indeed, some spouses who marry and live together . . . have various ends in mind, but rarely children.

Regarding the sin of Onan, as recorded in Genesis and involving the form of contraception now known as “withdrawal,” Luther wrote: “Onan must have been a most malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes, a Sodomitic sin. . . . Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed.” Onan was “that worthless fellow” who “refused to exercise love.”

On this matter, Luther was again joined by Calvin. In his Commentary on Genesis, he wrote that “the voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the [human] race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring.”

A few decades later, the Synod of Dordt would declare that Onan’s act “was even as much as if he had, in a manner, pulled forth the fruit out of the mother’s womb and destroyed it.”

Religiously Married

A second element in Luther’s Protestant family ethic was his concept of a divine call to the vocations of husbandry and housewifery.

Emphasizing human frailty, he argued in The Estate of Marriage that a successful union was exceedingly difficult to attain if ungrounded in religious faith. In such cases, the delights of marriage—“that husband and wife cherish one another, become one, serve one another”—would commonly be overshadowed by the responsibilities, duties, and attendant loss of freedom which the married state entailed.

He believed that happiness in marriage depended on recognition that the married estate, with its attendant responsibilities, was “pleasing to God and precious in his sight.” Indeed, he argued that God called women—all women—to be Christian wives and mothers and called men—all men—home to serve as Christian “housefathers.”

In The Estate of Marriage, Luther described the father who confesses to God that “I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother.” He responded that “when a father goes ahead and washes diapers . . . for his child, God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, because he is doing so in Christian faith.”

In the Commandment, “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” he wrote to the Teutonic Knights, we see that “God has done marriage the honor of putting it . . . immediately after the honor due to himself.” He concluded that “there is no higher office, estate, condition, or work . . . than the estate of marriage.”

The third element of Luther’s Protestant family ethic was praise for parenting as a task and responsibility. In exalting this task, he energized the Christian home as an autonomous social sphere. “There is no power on earth that is nobler or greater than that of parents,” declared the Reformer in The Estate of Marriage. He added: “Most certainly father and mother are apostles, bishops, and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel.”

One of his colleagues, Justus Menius, explained the task of parenting in more detail. “The diligent rearing of children is the greatest service to the world, both in spiritual and temporal affairs, both for the present life and for posterity,” he wrote in an advice book on childrearing.

Just as one turns young calves into strong cows and oxen, rears young colts to be brave stallions, and nurtures small tender shoots into great fruit-bearing trees, so must we bring up children to be knowing and courageous adults, who serve both land and people and help both to prosper.

According to Harvard University historian Steven Ozment, in his book When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe: “Never has the art of parenting been more highly praised and parental authority more wholeheartedly supported than in Reformation Europe.” Child rearing, in this view, was not just “woman’s work.” In the Protestant home, father and mother would share the duties of child rearing to an unusual degree.

Luther saw the years from birth to age six as a time when a child’s reason was “asleep.” During these years, the mother took the dominant role in childcare. But at age seven, fathers should take the lead, with special responsibility for the moral and practical education of children. Inspired by Luther’s message and example, publishers turned out dozens of so-called Housefather books, sixteenth-century “self-help” volumes for dads.

Luther’s Burden

How might we judge the success of the Protestant family ethic? For nearly four centuries it worked reasonably well, as judged by its understanding of the divine ordinance to be fruitful and replenish the earth.

Accordingly, the Protestant opposition to contraception remained firm. Writing in the late eighteenth century, for example, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, also condemned the sin of Onan, adding, “The thing which he did displeased the Lord.”

The nineteenth-century Reformed Pastor Johann Peter Lange, in his Christian Dogmatics, described contraception as “a most unnatural wickedness, and a grievous wrong. This sin . . . is [as] destructive as a pestilence that walketh in darkness, destroying directly the body and the soul of the young.”

At their 1908 Lambeth Conference, the world’s Anglican bishops recorded “with alarm the growing practice of artificial restriction of the family.” They “earnestly call[ed] upon all Christian people to discountenance the use of all artificial means of restriction as demoralizing to character and hostile to national welfare.”

As late as 1923, the Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod’s official magazine The Witness accused the Birth Control Federation of America of spattering “this country with slime” and labeled birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger a “she devil.” Pastor Walter Maier, founding preacher of the long-running Lutheran Hour radio program, called contraceptives “the most repugnant of modern aberrations, representing a twentieth-century renewal of pagan bankruptcy.”

On doctrine, then, Protestant leaders held firm well into the twentieth century. The weakness of the Protestant position actually lay elsewhere: in the informal institution of the Pastor’s Family. One possible cause of the change in Protestant teaching not often considered is the changed family life of the clergy themselves.

In rejecting lifelong celibacy, in casting marriage as the highest order and calling on earth, in elevating motherhood and homemaking, in emphasizing the spiritual authority and practical tasks of fatherhood, in refocusing adult lives around the tasks of childrearing, in celebrating procreation and large families, and in condemning contraception, Luther implicitly laid a great burden on Protestant clerics.

They had to serve as examples for their congregations, and specifically, they had to marry and bear large families themselves. Where the Catholic priest or the cloistered monk or nun faced the challenge of lifelong celibacy, the Protestant cleric faced the lifelong challenge of building a model and fruitful home.

Luther again supplied the prototype, in his marriage to Katharine von Bora. By the standards of the time, they married late, but still brought six children into the world, and their busy home served as the inspiration to generations of Protestant clerics.

This special role of the Pastor’s Family was rarely codified in church doctrine, but the Protestant rejection of both celibacy and contraception created a visible expectation. Barring infertility, a faithful Protestant pastor and his wife would be parents to a brood of children.

It was a difficult expectation to satisfy, and would only become more difficult as economic and cultural changes made providing for large families more burdensome and having many children less and less socially acceptable. Not surprisingly, many seem to have turned to contraception to limit their families, and equally unsurprisingly, this affected their articulation of the church doctrine for which they were responsible.

Declining Numbers

But again, for nearly four centuries, where it held sway, the Protestant family ethic, exemplified in the pastor’s family, worked to reshape the culture in family-affirming, child-rich ways.

Indeed, the large families of Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist clergy became something of a problem for relatively poor rural parishes, and something of a comic image for novelists. In Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 book The Vicar of Wakefield, we find a country pastor with six children who ends up (with his brood of children) in debtor’s prison, only to be rescued from his misfortunes by a benefactor.

As late as 1874, the average Anglican clergyman in England still had 5.2 living children. In 1911, however, just three years after the bishops had condemned contraception, the new census of England showed that the average family size of Anglican clergy had fallen to only 2.3 children, a stunning decline of 55 percent. The British Malthusian League—a strong advocate of contraception—had a field day exposing what it called the hypocrisy of the priests.

As the league explained, the Church of England continued to view contraception as a sin, and yet its clerics and bishops were obviously engaging in the practice. Apparently only the poor and the ignorant had to obey the church.

There was not much that Anglican leaders could say in response. This propaganda continued for another two decades, and soon some Anglican theologians were arguing that Britain’s poverty required the birth of fewer children.

Pressures culminated at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, where bishops heard an address by birth-control advocate Helena Wrighton on the advantages of contraception for the poor. On a vote of 193 to 67, the bishops (representing not only England but also America, Canada, and the other former colonies) approved a resolution stating that:

In those cases where there is such a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence, other methods may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles.

This was the first official statement by a major church body in favor of contraception. Thus was Christian unity on the question broken. The decision was condemned by many religious and secular bodies, including the editors of the Washington Post. Pope Pius XI responded to it in his encyclical Casti Connubii four months later.

The same stress line emerged in America. For example, in the very conservative Lutheran Church/Missouri Synod, the average pastor in 1890 had 6.5 children. The number fell to 3.7 children in 1920, 42 percent below the 1890 number. Other churches saw a similar decline. Here, too, the Protestant clergy had ceased to be models of a fruitful home for their congregations and the broader culture.

During the 1930s, the Missouri Synod quietly dropped its campaign against the Birth Control League of America. In the 1940s, one of the church’s leading theologians, Albert Rehwinkel, concluded that Luther had simply been wrong. God’s words in Genesis 1:28—“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”—were not a command; they were merely a blessing, and an optional one at that.

Malthusian Infection

A culture infected by neo-Malthusian ideas was reshaping the clerical family. Please note: As in England, so in America, the change in clerical family behavior came before the change in doctrine.

Meanwhile, mainstream American Protestants embraced contraception directly. In 1931, the Committee on Home and Marriage of the old Federal Council of Churches issued a statement defending family limitation and arguing for the repeal of laws prohibiting contraceptive education and sales. Some member churches—notably the Southern Methodists and the Northern Baptists—protested the action, and the Southern Presbyterians even withdrew their membership from the Federal Council for a decade, but they were the minority and even their protests did not last.

In only three decades, the Lambeth Conference’s qualified approval would turn into full celebration. At the astonishing and deeply disturbing 1961 North American Conference on Church and Family, sponsored by the National Council of Churches (successor to the Federal Council), population-control advocate Lester Kirkendall argued that America had “entered a sexual economy of abundance” where contraception would allow unrestrained sexual experimentation.

Wardell Pomeroy of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research explained how the new science of sexology required the abandonment of all old moral categories. Psychologist Evelyn Hooker celebrated the sterile lives of homosexuals. Planned Parenthood’s Mary Calderone made the case for universal contraceptive use, while colleague Alan Guttmacher urged the reform of America’s “mean-spirited” anti-abortion laws.

Not a single voice in the spirit of Luther or Calvin could be heard at this “Christian conference.” Indeed, the conferees saw the traditional Protestant family ethic focused on exuberant marital fertility as the problem and the act that Luther, Calvin, and others had condemned as the obvious answer.

In a way, though, this celebration of such a diversity of sexual practices followed the Protestant acceptance of contraception, which followed from the defection of the Protestant clergy from the Protestant Family Ethic. Rejecting both lifelong celibacy and contraception, classic Protestant theology required family-centered and child-rich pastors. When those clerical leaders, in the privacy of their bedrooms, broke faith with their tradition, when pastors and their wives consciously limited their families, the Protestant opposition to contraception faced a crisis.

Typical of a less radical development was the 1981 decision of the Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations, which argued that although “Be fruitful” is “both a command and a mandate,” “in the absence of Scriptural prohibition” contraception was acceptable “within a marital union which is, as a whole, fruitful.” And if contraception is acceptable, “we will also recognize that sterilization may under some circumstances be an acceptable form of contraception.”

A later, additional development only increased the appeal of contraception to the pastors of these churches. The ordination of women by a number of Protestant groups, commonly initiated in the late 1960s and 1970s, struck a nearly fatal blow to the informal Protestant institution of the Pastor’s Wife.

By upending and confusing sexual differences and by granting to women the religious functions long held exclusively by men, the ordination of women marginalized the special works and responsibilities of clerical wives, including their task of being model mothers with full quivers of children. Even more than before, contraception became their answer.

The Evangelical Turn

It would be the eventual turn by Evangelical Protestants to the pro-life position on abortion that would for some also reopen the contraception question. When in 1973 the US Supreme Court, in its Roe and Doe decisions, overturned the anti-abortion laws of all fifty states, relatively few Protestants voiced opposition. Indeed, some mainline denominations had already endorsed liberalized abortion.

The prominent Southern Baptist Pastor W. A. Criswell openly welcomed the decision. Representing a position many Evangelicals then took, he claimed: “I have always felt that it was only after the child was born and had life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.” Others drew the line at some point before birth, but few rejected the decisions outright.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) itself had in 1971 urged its members to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.

However, reflecting the movement of Evangelicalism as a whole (though not mainline Protestantism), in 2003, the SBC declared that this and the 1974 resolution “accepted unbiblical premises of the abortion rights movement, forfeiting the opportunity to advocate the protection of defenseless women and children” and that “we lament and renounce statements and actions by previous Conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered support to the abortion culture.”

An early sign of this shift occurred in 1975 when a young editor at Christianity Today, Harold O. J. Brown, authored a short anti-abortion editorial. From his home in L’Abri, Switzerland, the neo-Calvinist Francis Schaeffer mobilized Evangelicals against abortion with books such as How Should We Then Live?. This campaign grew through the founding of new Evangelical organizations with pro-life orientations, including Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and Concerned Women for America.

At first, this pro-life Evangelicalism avoided the issue of contraception. However, over time, it has become ever more difficult for many to draw an absolute line between contraception and abortion, because—whatever theological distinctions they made between the two—the “contraceptive mentality” embraces both, and some forms of “contraception” are in practice abortifacients.

A Major Rethinking

“ It is clear that there is a major rethinking going on among Evangelicals on this issue, especially among young people,” R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently told the Chicago Tribune. “There is a real push back against the contraceptive culture now.”

In his last years, Francis Schaeffer seemed to be moving toward the historic Christian view of contraception. Since 1980, several resolutions adopted by the Southern Baptists at their annual meeting have criticized contraception. By the close of the twentieth century, the Family Research Council featured special reports on “The Empty Promise of Contraception” and “The Bipartisan Blunder of Title X,” the latter referring to the domestic contraception program in the United States.

Conservative Calvinist publishers are producing books not only against contraception but promoting Natural Family Planning. A movement of Missouri Synod Lutherans is working to overturn their church’s current teaching and return it to Luther’s, and observers report a new interest in the traditional teaching among conservative movements in the mainline churches.

There have been other signs of Protestant rethinking on this question, including individual pastors and their wives who have opened their lives to bringing a full quiver of children into the world. For example, Pastor Matt Trewhella of Mercy Seat Christian Church in Milwaukee concluded that “we have no God-given right to manipulate God’s design for marriage by using birth control.” He had his vasectomy reversed, and he and his wife Clara have had seven more children.

While surely in the minority, the Trewhellas are not alone. In so acting, they are rediscovering their distinctive theology and their heritage, and they are accepting their special responsibility as a pastor’s family to serve as witnesses to the original Protestant understanding of the divine intent for marriage. Importantly, they are also rebuilding a common Christian front on the issue of contraception, one lost in the dark days of the first half of the twentieth century.

The quotations from the Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations are taken from Aaron Wolf’s “Hating Babies, Hating God” in the June 2003 issue of Chronicles (www.chroniclesmagazine.org). The texts of the Southern Baptist resolutions on abortion can be found at www.johnstonsarchive.net/baptist/sbcabres.html.

Allan Carlson Allan Carlson is President of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Illinois (www.profam.org). His books include Conjugal America: On The Public Purposes of Marriage and The Natural Family: Bulwark of Liberty. He is married and has four children and is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He is a senior editor for Touchstone.

Things Hidden Since the Beginning of the World

2011-09-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

By James Hitchcock
Touchstone Magazine

The Shape of Divine Providence & Human History

As with so many aspects of Christian higher education, the disappearance of “Christian history” in the past thirty years, while justified as a sign of a new intellectual maturity, was in fact the opposite—a panicky impulse motivated by insecurity before the larger secular culture.

The ideal of historical “objectivity,” first formulated by the “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century, was always misleading, in that such objectivity, implying the complete absence of personal feeling on the part of the scholar, would be possible only with respect to subjects that the scholar found uninteresting, even perhaps trivial. Almost by definition, an interesting and important subject calls forth a personal response from anyone who approaches it.

More realistically, many scholars now believe that their ideal ought to be honesty, a personal response that nonetheless strives to use evidence with scrupulous fairness and to reach conclusions based on the evidence, even though those conclusions might make the scholar uncomfortable.

Points of View

In fact, almost all great historical scholarship has been biased in certain respects, that is, based on the historian’s point of view, although often (as, for example, with the “Whig” interpretation of English history) not recognized as such by the historian himself. As Herbert Butterfield, one of the most astute historians of historiography, has put it, even an overtly polemical approach to history sometimes reveals aspects of the subject neglected by others. Even someone who is regarded as a crank may, by his very single-mindedness, focus attention on things no one else has noticed.

Even as Christians were surrendering the right to have their own history, that is, a history overtly informed by a Christian viewpoint, the legitimacy, indeed the inevitability, of this kind of scholarship was being urged as normative in the secular academy. Black history, women’s history, homosexual history, and numerous other kinds are now enshrined, each resting on the privileged assertion that only persons who belong to a particular social group can adequately understand that group’s history and that scholars outside the group are irredeemably insensitive or prejudiced. The claim of women’s history, for example, is that all of history needs to be interpreted from a feminist perspective and that those who do not do so are morally irresponsible and intellectually deficient.

Ironically, the intellectual deficiencies of Christian colleges and universities are revealed in the fact that, almost without exception, they have embraced this approach to scholarship even as they have systematically expunged all evidence of a “ghetto mentality” with respect to their own religious past.

Liberalism defines itself in terms of intellectual “openness” and thus is required to give evidence of its sincerity through repeated public acts of self-criticism. Perhaps the first great modern Catholic historian was Lord John Acton, who was also one of the fathers of modern liberal Catholicism, and Butterfield noted how Acton’s bias in his scholarship was against Ultramontanism, the Catholic historian distorting historical truth in the very act of demonstrating his “objective” detachment from credal loyalty. (Liberal Protestant scholarship of the nineteenth century, of course, did the same thing.)

Christian History from Within

On one level, “Christian history” proceeds from what Jacques Maritain called connatural knowledge—the understanding of his subject that a scholar possesses by virtue of its being in some sense a part of himself. Maritain noted that, whereas a scientist is wholly detached from the physical world that he studies, a historian approaches his human subject in terms of his entire personal disposition. Great works on religious history have been written by nonbelievers, but they are required to make a prodigious imaginative leap in order to do justice to their subjects, whereas for the believer, there is an immediate sympathetic comprehension of even the subtlest dimensions of religious history.

Thus, all things being equal, the believing historian should be a better student of religious phenomena, able to penetrate its inner meaning more profoundly. But of course, things are not always equal, and the believer may be deficient in intellect, ambition, or diligence. A peculiar temptation for believing scholars (Hilaire Belloc, for example) is to deduce reality from their principles instead of studying the empirical evidence, a habit that more than once has embarrassed Christians when a secular scholar discovers inconvenient information that the believer had neglected.

Curiously, what is still often called “the new social history,” although it is now four decades old, has had immense effect in revealing the pervasive influence of religion on history, despite the fact that almost all its practitioners have been secular-minded, since it strives to map nothing less than the entire fabric of a given society, and thereby comes face to face with the ubiquitous role of religion. At the same time, such discoveries are problematical for the believer, in that they often show that there was apparently a wide gap between official teaching and actual popular practice, a gap that a theologically and spiritually sophisticated scholar might be able to close on a deeper level.

Virtually all of Christopher Dawson’s works were a meditation, by a believing Catholic, on the meaning of history. Yet few of them actually required the reader himself to be a believer. Dawson’s faith made him extraordinarily sensitive to the powerful influence of religion in history, and he was able to reveal its workings in such a way that all but the most biased readers had to acknowledge it. Towards the end of his life Dawson had a plan for a comprehensive educational program based on the study of “Christian culture,” which was merely a plea for what is sometimes now called religious literacy—that students at least be made aware of the influence of Christianity on history, even if they reject that faith in their own lives. It was a program, Dawson noted, that would not necessarily require believing professors.

Once again, the failure of the Christian universities even to attempt an approximation of this is a sign of their intellectual deficiency, their failure to achieve a consistent and settled identity. This too may be endemic to a certain kind of Christian liberalism—Butterfield noted that Lord Acton tended to treat religion almost exclusively in institutional terms, especially the involvement of the Church in politics, which Acton deplored. The founders of the Catholic University of America, such as its first rector, Bishop John J. Keane, deliberately excluded “medievalism” from its curriculum; thus, an area where Catholics were potentially well equipped to exercise scholarly leadership was left to be developed by secular scholars like Charles Homer Haskins at Harvard.

The Heresy of Idealization

At the same time, Christian historians ought to avoid the trap of nostalgia, whereby the Middle Ages or the Reformation is presented as the high point of history, from which everything since has been a decline. To idealize a past historical age is itself heretical, the unrecognized assumption that orthodox belief is a guarantee against sin. Christian historians should not leave to their enemies the discovery of how often good has been perverted by self-righteous men, and the believer’s very understanding of his faith ought to make him especially sensitive to this inevitability. The idealization of a particular era is also heretical in that it fails to recognize that the work of redemption continues throughout history.

The refusal to idealize any past age also serves the Christian by precluding the use of the present to judge the past. One of the central insights of the man often considered the father of modern historiography, Leopold von Ranke (a devout Lutheran), was that “each age stands by itself in the sight of God,” that is, no age should be treated merely as a preliminary to what follows. Butterfield, unlike most liberal Christian historians, approached the history of Christianity itself in those terms, insisting that the greatest Christian contribution to history was its witnessing to the primacy of the spiritual and the imperative of charity. In contrast to the current practice of “politically correct” history, he insisted, for example, that the saints retain their significance despite perhaps having been wrong about certain historical questions, such as the rise of democracy. Here again, the wisdom of the historian and the wisdom of the believer, both recognizing the singularity of history, coincide.

Since history is an empirical discipline, in principle there ought not to be disagreements over facts between believing and nonbelieving scholars. The same criteria for establishing the credibility of historical sources ought to be employed identically by both. Inevitably, bias might affect the way they evaluate the evidence, but believing historians have a special obligation not to suppress or underestimate sordid chapters of church history.

Butterfield observed that, like the physical sciences, the study of history began to make “progress” when historians ceased to look for ultimate explanations and concentrated on secondary causes, which led to an increasingly detailed study of those causes. Both the scientific method and the historical method arose out of Western Christian culture. Men of faith have no shortcuts open to them to attain knowledge.

Practically speaking, a Christian historian will manifest his personal faith, at least minimally, in his recognition that the role of religion in history is often slighted, that even those who acknowledge it often do not adequately understand it as a spiritual phenomenon, and that the decline of religious belief has empirically verifiable effects on a culture, many of which are measurably debilitating. (American history, for example, is often written as though Christianity never existed, except in instances, like Puritanism, where it is unavoidable.)

Evil in History

In a famous remark, John Henry Newman said that experience seems to force the conclusion that mankind was implicated in some “primordial catastrophe,” and this awareness, too, is one of the believer’s special qualifications for the understanding of history. Specifically as a historian, the believer has no special knowledge of the exact nature of that catastrophe, but his faith allows him to understand that it did occur.

Butterfield proposed that the sense of sin is one of the believer’s crucial contributions to the understanding of history. The Christian understands evil best, because he is part of it (Maritain’s connatural knowledge). Historical evidence alone cannot unlock the mystery of human nature, and without this knowledge of sin, history finally remains a mystery. Butterfield noted that the historian and the Christian both begin by assuming the greatness of humanity, then proceed to offer negative accounts of human behavior. The historian’s negative view of humanity is demanded by the innumerable crimes of history, while that of the believer is reinforced by his faith.

R. G. Collingwood, a secular scholar who was the rare combination of a historian and a philosopher of history, went so far as to say that the Christian doctrine of the Fall, by asserting that man is not sovereign over history, broadened that study beyond what the Greeks knew and thereby rendered it open to an awareness of impersonal forces. The Jesuit theologian Jean Danielou argued that history simply cannot be understood apart from the fact of sin, in the form of universal selfishness, and this seems undeniable. Many secular-minded people employ the concept of sin, if not the word.

However, those who deny that a tendency towards evil is basic to human nature simply cannot make sense of history, which then becomes endless, incomprehensible tragedy, since the story of mankind is to so great an extent the story of benign dreams somehow treacherously betrayed and turned into evil. A sinless view of history could only be Sisyphean, the historian chronicling the endlessly repeated process whereby mankind approaches fulfillment of its exalted plans, only to see them destroyed in the end. Any doctrine of inherent human goodness must confront the massive and continuing evidence of James Joyce’s remark that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up.”

Moral Judgments

This daunting reality inspires an approach to history that is a perennial temptation for Christians, albeit by no means exclusively for them—history as moral judgment. Butterfield, who was a Methodist lay preacher as well as a distinguished historian, argued strongly against this, noting that few things foreclose historical understanding more quickly than the pronouncement of moral judgment.

Acton, he noted, was especially prone to this, and it is by no means merely the temptation of the orthodox. Indeed, contemporary historiography is awash with this kind of moralism, where the past is endlessly ransacked for examples of alleged injustice to designated groups, and appropriate condemnation then pronounced (the dominant approach at the time of the Columbus quincentenary in 1992, for example).

Butterfield offered a theological reason for refraining from such judgments—the fact that all men are sinners and thus dare not set themselves up to judge others. Acton had a famous exchange with the Anglican Bishop Mandell Creighton, himself an important historian, over the latter’s refusal to condemn Pope Alexander VI, whom Acton thought a wicked man representing a wicked ecclesiastical system. Butterfield observed that, apart from the question whether the contemporary accusations against Alexander were accurate, Acton lacked sufficient knowledge of the pope’s soul to condemn him, while for the same reason Creighton could not acquit him. (In fact he did not; he merely refrained from condemning.)

Acton came to believe that all the great men of history were wicked, in that virtually all of them used force and treachery to achieve their goals, and Butterfield responded that this may be true but is also unhelpful in understanding the past. (Acton’s curious myopia led him to concentrate his attentions almost exclusively on men of affairs and not, for example on the great saints of history.)

The Myth of Progress

Such moralism is perhaps inevitable in a certain kind of liberalism, which tends to assume human goodness and is endlessly sympathetic with what it deems to be the “progressive” movements of history, and can then only attempt to salvage meaning from the wreckage by pronouncing condemnation on those who appear responsible.

The historian’s task, according to Butterfield, is to record and describe the deeds of past men, deeds that may be deemed wicked by those who read of them, although it is not the historian’s task to force this conclusion. In Butterfield’s words,

The whole process of emptying oneself in order to reach the thoughts and feelings of men not like-minded with oneself is an activity that ought to commend itself to the Christian. In this sense the whole range of history is a boundless field for the constant exercise of Christian charity.

An obvious argument for Butterfield’s counsel of perfection is the fact that condemning the deeds of men who are long dead can have no effect whatever; they have passed into God’s hands. But the danger of this, as Acton saw, is the blunting of contemporary moral sensitivity—if the wicked deeds of past men cannot be condemned, how can modern men be held to account and their own wickedness thwarted?

The Christian historian must live with this tension, but in exactly the way that every Christian must, enjoined not to judge his fellow men but without falling into moral agnosticism. The Christian belief in human freedom proves to be one way out of this dilemma—since men can and do make responsible decisions, to understand all is not to forgive all. Historians can press to the limit their powers of empathy, without thereby becoming apologists for past wickedness.

No Moral Vindication

Moral judgment is at the origin of Western historical consciousness, which grew not only out of the Greek but also from the Hebrew sense of history, as the Hebrews were driven by an urgent need to find some comprehensible purpose in the repeated catastrophes that they suffered. As has often been pointed out, they were forced to reject the seductive, even irresistible, hypothesis that suffering was simply God’s punishment for sin, since they could see quite obviously that their faithless enemies repeatedly triumphed over God’s people and that Israel’s own infidelities could not adequately explain this. Making moral sense of history has preoccupied human beings ever since.

The study of history immediately confirms that evil men often flourish and the good are often defeated, with no reversal or vindication in this life. Indeed, this reality is almost knowable a priori, in that the selfishly wicked, who are usually calculating and clever, would obviously not embrace wickedness if experience showed that they would inevitably suffer punishment. The dichotomy of time and eternity is nowhere more evident than in the fact that justice often does not triumph in this world. Thus, calculating people can choose to ignore the justice that may be visited on them in the next life, in order to prosper in this one.

Calvinism offers a logical explanation of this in insisting that all men deserve damnation and God cannot be blamed for bestowing free gifts on some. But this view of history also tends to foster moral agnosticism, in that the seemingly innocent are revealed as being as wicked as the obviously guilty, no final distinction to be made, presumably, between Adolf Hitler and his victims.

Liberalism, including liberal Christianity, finds the triumph of evil particularly in need of urgent explanation, although, as noted, liberalism’s view of history inevitably dooms it to continuous disappointment and frustration. Butterfield pointed out that Acton originally viewed providence in the orthodox Christian sense of God bringing good out of evil, but then moved on to what is essentially a secular view that “progress” itself is the chief manifestation of divine providence in history.

The fatal flaw in the liberal idea of progress is its unavoidable shortsightedness. Thus, the evolution of the Greek polis might be celebrated as progress, but that achievement flourished for only about two centuries and was then crushed by new forms of despotism. Most liberals see the history of the past two centuries in terms of self-evident progress, yet no one would be so foolish as to deny the fragility of that achievement, vulnerable to being snuffed out by both physical and political disorders.

The liberal view of progress offers no explanation for the movement of history over the centuries, and in fact either forces the condemnation or ignoring of whole periods of history that were not “progressive,” or else settles for the trivial task of scanning bleak periods of history for small signs that the light of progress was dimly shining even then.

Hidden from Our Eyes

Butterfield believed that Christianity alone provides a resolution of this dilemma, through its doctrine of vicarious suffering, Christ himself the victim through whom the sufferings of other innocent people can have meaning.

In this as in other respects, however, the believing scholar’s personal faith cannot successfully be made an explicit part of his teaching and scholarship, except insofar as he explicitly makes himself into a kind of theologian. History does not prove beyond all doubt the value of vicarious suffering, and offers innumerable examples to the contrary. The triumph of Christianity can be seen as vindicating the sufferings of Christ, but the nonbeliever will persist in finding other explanations for this triumph.

Rather, faith allows the historian to approach his subject with a certain serenity, as capable as any nonbeliever of being shocked and appalled at “man’s inhumanity to man” but ultimately hopeful nonetheless. As Butterfield said, history is indeed the war of good against evil, but the exact progress of that war is hidden from human eyes.

From earliest times, one of the great temptations of Christian historiography has been to deduce, from a general belief in divine providence, its specific manifestations in history. Whole theologies of history have been based on this, and each one has finally failed as a comprehensive explanation of historical events.

The belief that specific catastrophes are direct divine punishment for sin dies hard, for obvious reasons—the laudable desire to make sense of events but also the less than laudable desire to see one’s enemies punished. For every wicked man who finally suffers his deserved fate, there are perhaps ten who die in prosperity, honored in their communities. Edifying stories of devout people saved from danger by divine intervention (a city spared the plague, an angelic visitor steering a child away from a precipice) fail to explain why countless other people, even more pious and innocent, have been allowed to perish.

Contours of Providence

Christianity can understand this quite easily on the individual level—suffering itself is redemptive and God takes his servants when he wants them. It is, however, far more difficult to explain events in terms of whole societies, the very mystery with which Israel was forced to wrestle obsessively.

The ultimate Christian explanation is again in terms of providence, meaning that God finally brings good from evil. Without such a belief there could be no such thing as redemption, since even Christ’s redemptive act would be repeatedly and successfully thwarted.

The temptation for Christians to discern the exact contours of providence in history is even more compelling than the tendency to explain evil merely as punishment, since it speaks to the basic question whether history makes any sense at all, whether God’s goodness can be vindicated within the confines of his creation. It is, however, a temptation that believers, and historians in particular, must resist. It is bad theology and even worse history. At best, its validity is limited to edifying speculation, which believers might engage in as a pious exercise but which can never be assumed as true.

The fundamental barrier to a knowledge of providential history is the simple fact of human fallibility; genuine understanding of providence would require omniscience; the pattern of history could be fully seen only by someone above history.

The most obvious obstacle is limited temporal horizons. If, as some early Christians believed, the Roman Empire came into being in order to prepare the way for the birth of the Savior, this was not at all evident to pious Jews longing for the messiah. They experienced the Roman incursion as merely another of those periodic mysterious catastrophes which fell upon them. But hindsight also does not suffice. An argument can be made for the providential role of the empire in preparing the way for Christ, but in other respects the empire was a formidable obstacle to the spread of the gospel, mainly through persecution, which had the effect of strengthening the faith of many but of intimidating many others.

Once again, this desire to discern the hand of providence is an especially strong temptation for liberal Christians, as exemplified in Acton’s facile, even perversely false, view that modern “progress” is equitable with divine providence.

Maritain was not a theological liberal, but he was a political liberal, and he tended to trivialize his own philosophy of history by making a similar suggestion—that modern democracy is somehow the fulfillment of providence and vindicates the actions of God in history, a judgment that precisely illustrates the fallacy of providential history. When Maritain formulated it, shortly after World War II, it was possible to see the American experiment in those terms, because Christianity was flourishing in ways it had never flourished anywhere else, at any other time in history, and this was attributable in part to the democratic conditions that gave religion the fullest possible freedom. Maritain did not foresee that democracy might finally reveal itself as hostile to all claims of spiritual authority and thus become a force for undermining the very possibility of genuine religion. (He also proposed the evolution of moral conscience as the greatest of all historical laws, without foreseeing how that conscience, on abortion and other matters, is now being systematically repealed.)

Slow Redemption

If evil produces good, although such production is often hidden from human eyes, the ironic view of history that Christians must espouse shows also that good produces evil. To deny this is not to defend the orthodox doctrine of providence but the reverse—a heterodox denial of the reality of human sinfulness, which is able to pervert the most sublime truths into pernicious errors. Drawing on the parable of the wheat and the tares, Maritain recalled, as all historically minded Christians must, that good and evil exist together in the world, and there is a constant double movement, both upwards and downwards. The work of redemption proceeds only slowly, against the inertia of human affairs.

Belief in human freedom finally provides as satisfactory an explanation of evil as men will ever achieve. Most of the moral evil in history can be explained in those terms, in God’s mysterious willingness to grant this freedom and permit its full exercise, even when it is used to thwart the divine plan. As Maritain said, God’s eternal plan operates in such a way as to anticipate these human failings. Butterfield saw the action of God in history as like a composer masterfully revising his music to overcome the inadequacies of the orchestra that plays it.

The relation of freedom to providence remains finally one of the most tenaciously impenetrable of all theological mysteries, and thus, for the Christian, there can be no final understanding of history in all its fullness. Maritain asked whether Brutus was free not to assassinate Caesar, and the obvious answer is that indeed he was. But if that is true, in what sense did God will the death of Caesar at that time and under those particular circumstances? Caesar’s death, like most events of human history, was the result of the freedom that God gave to man, not of some preordained script that had to be played out.

Thus, the believing historian must rely on the theologian and the preacher to remind people of the reality of divine providence, whose workings remain hidden. Not being above the historical process, the historian cannot claim to discern this through empirical investigation. In dialogue with his unbelieving colleagues, he has the advantage of knowing that all things human eventually end badly but that this is never the last word of the story. He is permanently inoculated against unrealistic expectations of progress but also against the concomitant despair that follows each disappointment. In purely worldly terms, he has achieved a ripe wisdom that is partly given to him by his faith.

The Dilemma of Miracles

A particular category of uncertainty concerning the discernment of the workings of providence are alleged acts of direct divine intervention, much more commonly believed by Catholics than by Protestants—Constantine’s vision at the Milvian Bridge, the Virgin Mary’s appearances at Lourdes and Fatima. Believers are, of course, free to reject these as pious fictions or delusions and indeed the Catholic Church itself has throughout its history instinctively followed a policy of scholarly skepticism, placing the burden of proof on those who claim a miracle and warning the faithful against credulity.

Yet some miraculous events, above all, Christ’s resurrection from the dead, are undeniable truths of faith, and the believing historian must judge how to include them in his work. Maritain thought that the historian is obligated to take into account all relevant information, including the supernatural, and should not bracket such events or treat them as having a natural explanation.

The Jesuit theologian Martin Cyril D’Arcy pointed to the encounter of the disciples with Jesus on the road to Emmaus as an instance of this dilemma—secular history has no way of dealing with such an occurrence, except perhaps by dismissing it as mere fiction, which is itself a dogmatically naturalistic assumption closed even to the possibility of the supernatural. D’Arcy’s solution was to point out that history is not “noumenal,” in the Kantian sense—what is known today is not the past as such but the past as it presents itself to the present mind. Hence, in a way, all historical events remain mysterious. He also pointed out the improbability, in purely human terms, that great men who recorded profound religious experiences, such as Paul on the road to Damascus, were simply the victims of delusion.

This hardly seems an adequate explanation for all that has followed from such events. Marc Bloch, the great medievalist who was a secular-minded Jew (he perished in a German prison camp), observed that the real question concerning the history of Christianity is why so many people fervently believed that Jesus rose from the dead, a belief of such power and duration as to be hardly explicable in purely reductionist terms.

Once again, however, the historian must separate his faith from his scholarship, for the simple reason that historical scholarship is an instrument completely unsuitable for discovering the supernatural. There is no historical argument that could convince skeptics that Jesus indeed rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples. The cliché question as to what Christians would think if his body were discovered still buried in Palestine overlooks the fact that, from a historical standpoint, such a thing could never happen. History and archaeology would have no conclusive way of proving whether such remains were really those of Jesus.

Thus, the Christian historian ought not to become involved in fruitless discussions about the reality of the supernatural in history but should simply treat such beliefs as themselves historical events—the powerful conviction that the early Christians had that Jesus had indeed risen, and the immense consequences that belief had for the future history of the world.

The Christian Claim on History

However, Christianity is a historical religion, which is a cliché only in proportion to one’s ignorance of other religions that are decidedly not historical. Emanating from a Judaism that was itself a historical religion, Christianity stakes its claim to truth on certain historical events, notably the claim that at a precise moment in history the Son of God did indeed come to earth. Thus, Christians can never be indifferent to the reliability of historical claims.

But the thrust of modern biblical scholarship has been steadily to diminish the historical reliability of the Bible, and even though there are some signs of a reversal, it is a process that seems fated to play itself out (as in the Jesus Seminar) to the point where the Scriptures are thought to provide no reliable basis for any kind of faith.

The discipline of history as such has relatively little to contribute to this discussion, which proceeds from related disciplines like philology, archaeology, and papyrology. But the whole subject is a vivid illustration of the point made by Butterfield and others—the greatest challenge to the credibility of faith comes not from the physical sciences but from the historical disciplines, which are able to discredit Christianity precisely because it is a faith based on historical claims.

The believing historian’s role here is secondary but not unimportant. He can, for example, trace the pedigree of modern biblical scholarship itself, showing its presuppositions, how it has deliberately adapted itself to a “culture of suspicion.” Beginning with the liberal attitude of agonized self-criticism, biblical scholarship has by now advanced to the point where many of its practitioners have a vested interest in discrediting as much of the Bible as they can. Modern biblical scholarship is one of the intellectual trends that have a history of their own and cannot be accepted merely on their own terms.

Historians can, in effect, “demythologize” claims of biblical criticism, instructing believers in the ways of modern scholarship. Phrases like “scripture scholars tell us” are almost meaningless in view of the fact that there are very sharp contradictions among such scholars. Finally, the mainstream of modern biblical scholarship tends to take a far more suspicious view of Christian origins than most historians would take towards other aspects of ancient history.

What is not open to the believer is the rejection of the “Jesus of history” and a flight to “the Christ of faith.” To do so precisely denies Christianity’s historical character and is a thinly veiled attempt to turn it into a myth. Thus, however troubling the theories of biblical scholars may be, the believing historian must continue to dwell on the level of historical inquiry.

The problem has relevance to the entire history of Christianity, since for over a century there has been a parallel, less well publicized debate over the reliability of Christian traditions (stories of saints, for example). Bloch pointed out that, parallel with the emergence of the modern scientific method, the method of modern historiography also emerged in the seventeenth century, and that Catholics (notably the Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon) were among its pioneers. The historical method grows out of Christianity by a natural process, and Christians can never reject it.

Christianity & the Lines of History

It has long been recognized that, not only is Christianity a historical religion, but it has also played a crucial role in the development of the understanding of history itself, replacing the cyclical theories common to the ancients with the “linear” view now taken for granted by almost everyone. The cyclical view was really a kind of despair, an expression of the sense that men were trapped in a process that they could not control and that would be endlessly repeated, albeit with variations.

Christianity, on the other hand, gave history a goal, an eschaton, towards which it relentlessly moves, so that repetition is more apparent than real. Thus, for the first time, the actual movement of history could have meaning. (To a lesser extent, Judaism had done the same, by pointing history towards the coming of the messiah.)

Linear time is the same both for believers and for modern historians because it is genuinely open to the future. Among the many ways in which history falls short of being a science is that it does not lead to prediction, at least not to prediction of a very high order of probability. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out that the Incarnation is the one absolutely unique event in all of human history, and in taking that as his starting point, the Christian historian must see history as completely open to God’s free action, thus as beyond both human control and final human understanding.

The historicity of Christianity also makes it a very concrete religion, in both respects the exact opposite of a myth. As Dawson said, in understanding Christianity, it is necessary to ask why great deeds, central to all of history, occurred among an obscure Near Eastern people, why an obscure peasant in that same part of the world was hailed as the world’s savior. This specificity has sometimes been an embarrassment to Christians, as well as a stumbling block to nonbelievers, and the gnostic temptation (alive again in modern times) has always been to fly to the realm of atemporal myth, which seeks to obliterate all specificity. The traditionalism of Christianity stems in part from the fact that, while God is present in all of history, Christians are also specially bound to a particular line of history, apart from any others, and are called to be faithful to that line.

The Lord of History

But if Christianity is by far the most historical of all religions, that should not obscure the fact that, from another point of view, it is problematical why Christians should respect history at all. The problem is obvious—Christianity points to the termination of history, which is precisely that—a termination. History will end. Christians are taught to live with the knowledge that “all this will pass away” and they will be gathered into eternity.

If one is a mere pilgrim in this life, how is it possible to regard what happens in this life as finally significant? It is a question, of course, with which Christians have wrestled since the beginning, and they will continue to do so until the end of time, when it will become meaningless.

Belief in providence is once again crucial. History has meaning because Christians know that God chose to reveal himself through history and that his providence works through history. Thus, even though believers cannot understand exactly how this occurs, they cannot dismiss history as unimportant. As Danielou pointed out, divine revelation reveals little about the inner nature of God; it mainly reveals his actions in history.

The Incarnation itself validates history, as the eternal descends into the temporal, and men have no way of working out their salvation except in this life. If history were solely the story of the saints, it would already be infinitely valuable. But its value lies also in the story it tells of sinners, of the entire great drama of human life.

But if the cyclical view of history expressed the pagans’ sense that they were at the mercy of the historical process, Christianity by no means offers the prospect of the reverse. One of the deepest insights available to the Christian is that he cannot hope to dominate history, and Butterfield judged (perhaps too simplistically) that history bestows its hardest rebuffs on those who arrogantly try. Christians “escape” from history not by mastering it but through faith in the benign Lord of History.

As Maritain observed, once this lordship was denied, it became necessary for secularists to seek for final meaning within history itself, thus giving rise to the various great “systems” of interpretation beginning with Hegel, of which Marxism was the most ambitious and influential. But the search for a supra-historical vantage point from which to see all of history is obviously futile. The end of history is beyond history, and history cannot reveal its own inner meaning.

History as Freedom

The great pioneer historians of the nineteenth century self-consciously spoke of history as “science” and tailored their research to subjects that lent themselves to such precision. They were thus forced to ignore vast areas of history, and as those neglected fields (religion among them) more and more came to be rediscovered, it became less and less feasible to think of history as a science, and today practically no one does. Here human experience merely confirms the wisdom of faith, for history could be a science only if human beings were not free. But, as Balthasar said, history is that space in his universe where God has created freedom. As Maritain said, there can be no “necessary” laws in history, only “general” laws that are mere approximations.

For Balthasar, the search for a final “system” of history is itself a significant manifestation of the reality of sin. Christ, he pointed out, did not anticipate the Father’s will but allowed it to unfold in time, and the desire to break out of the constraints of time is a fundamental expression of sinfulness.

Christ renounced sovereignty over his own life, as human beings must also do because they are historical beings. All things happen in the “fullness of time,” which cannot be known until it has already occurred. (As D’Arcy pointed out already in 1957, the once fashionable theories of the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were in principle beyond the possibility of historical evidence, although they posited the end of history, allegedly on the basis of such evidence.)

Christ the Center

Just as the Christian “linear” view of history is now universally accepted, so also the fallacy of great historical systems is now all but universally conceded. Historians are content to cultivate their particular gardens, to offer their produce for whatever finite value it may have, a task with which the Christian historian should also be content, although this does not, of course, preclude him from acting in other capacities at other times.

The fact that history is problematical for Christians is also seen in the fact that, as Danielou pointed out, there can be no “progress” beyond Christ. If Christ were merely a historical figure, he would then bring history to an end. However, he is also an eternal being whose reality permeates time, giving profound meaning to history, but a meaning that is hidden from the eyes of the historian. To D’Arcy, therefore, history is actually a kind of continuous present, although it does not seem that way to human experience.

As Dawson observed, the Christian approach to history is also perplexing to the secular mind because it is not completely linear, as all history is now assumed to be, but focuses around a central date—the coming of Christ—from which time is reckoned both forwards and backwards. (The present Western dating system, which is under some attack, is more than a pious commemoration of Christ’s birth. It expresses the fundamental Christian view of history. For this reason, it is almost bound to be repealed once cultural leaders have determined how to overcome the practical problems involved.)

Dawson also observed that secular-minded people do not accept a view of history that has a beginning and an end, a view that seems to depend on belief in an all-powerful God. Debates about the origins of the universe are now among the most significant in Western culture, but the historian as such has nothing to say on that subject. Similarly, by definition, the historian cannot even guess when time will end, and the believer is enjoined by Christ to refrain from such speculation.

Although the stretch of human history seems immensely long to the finite mind, in reality history has to be viewed, according to Dawson, as a “small” space surrounded by the infinity of eternity. If the human race survives another million years, its view of history will change profoundly, as all the carefully delineated eras that are now part of the historical record will recede into a very remote past, to be disposed of by future historians in the twinkling of an eye.

Select Bibliography:

Acton, John, Lectures on Modern History (New York, 1965)

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, A Theology of History (New York, 1963)

Bloch, Marc, The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1964)

Butterfield, Herbert, Christianity and History (New York, 1949)

____, History and Human Relations (New York, 1952)

____, Man on His Past (Boston, 1960)

Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (New York, 1956)

Danielou, Jean, The Lord of History (New York, 1958)

Darcy, M. C., The Meaning and Matter of History (Later edition titled The Sense of History, Secular and Sacred) (London, 1959)

Practically all the extensive works of Christopher Dawson either deal explicitly with the religious meaning of history or show a believing historian at work in an exemplary way.

James Hitchcock is Professor of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?

2011-09-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

By Mark Edmundson
Oxford American

A message in a bottle to the incoming class.

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.

It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.

You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.

Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people.

I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. I was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I told him, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”

My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog. “How about the science requirements?”

“Take ’em later,” he said, “you never know.”

My father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Malden High School Class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the score. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone else—students, teachers, and trustees and parents—sees the matter much differently. They have it wrong.

Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? America values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most for them is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.

The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

This is radically false. Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest: Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

The students and the professors have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.

As for the administrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible. The student will sue your eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.

Still, this was small potatoes. Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

You’ll find that cheating is common as well. As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year, it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.

Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

One of the reasons professors sometimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, he’s not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.

What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing. They’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding record—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.

In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isn’t really what matters. In five years (or five months, or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesn’t the content of the courses matter at all?

On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your life changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc. After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.

You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.

By the time you come to college, you will have been told who you are numberless times. Your parents and friends, your teachers, your counselors, your priests and rabbis and ministers and imams have all had their say. They’ve let you know how they size you up, and they’ve let you know what they think you should value. They’ve given you a sharp and protracted taste of what they feel is good and bad, right and wrong. Much is on their side. They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years. They’ve given you family traditions—you’ve learned the ways of your tribe and your community. And, too, you’ve been tested, probed, looked at up and down and through. The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, the guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged. You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

And—contra Foucault—that’s not so bad. Embedded in all of the major religions are profound truths. Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth. He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading. To the Christian, Schopenhauer said, pain was at the center of the understanding of life, and that was just as it should be.

One does not need to be as harsh as Schopenhauer to understand the use of religion, even if one does not believe in an otherworldly god. And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or their fulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored. Families have their wisdom. The question “Who do they think you are at home?” is never an idle one.

The major conservative thinkers have always been very serious about what goes by the name of common sense. Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time. You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

You may be all that the good people who raised you say you are; you may want all they have shown you is worth wanting; you may be someone who is truly your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. But then again, you may not be.

For the power that is in you, as Emerson suggested, may be new in nature. You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and college is the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.

This was my own experience reading the two writers who have influenced me the most, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself. They shone a light onto the world and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too. From Emerson I learned to trust my own thoughts, to trust them even when every voice seems to be on the other side. I need the wherewithal, as Emerson did, to say what’s on my mind and to take the inevitable hits. Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self-reliance and that is what I have tried most to take from him. I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful names and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them. When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles. He wasn’t invited back for decades.

From Freud I found a great deal to ponder as well. I don’t mean Freud the aspiring scientist, but the Freud who was a speculative essayist and interpreter of the human condition like Emerson. Freud challenges nearly every significant human ideal. He goes after religion. He says that it comes down to the longing for the father. He goes after love. He calls it “the overestimation of the erotic object.” He attacks our desire for charismatic popular leaders. We’re drawn to them because we hunger for absolute authority. He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them. They’re disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.

Freud has something challenging and provoking to say about virtually every human aspiration. I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud. He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche. His separation of the self into three parts, and his sense of the fraught, anxious, but often negotiable relations among them (negotiable when you come to the game with a Freudian knowledge), does a great deal to help one navigate experience. (Though sometimes—and this I owe to Emerson—it seems right to let the psyche fall into civil war, accepting barrages of anxiety and grief for this or that good reason.)

The battle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths. We need to see where they fall short and where they exceed the mark, and then to develop them a little, as the ideas themselves, one comes to see, actually developed others. (Both Emerson and Freud live out of Shakespeare—but only a giant can be truly influenced by Shakespeare.) In reading, I continue to look for one thing—to be influenced, to learn something new, to be thrown off my course and onto another, better way.

My father knew that he was dissatisfied with life. He knew that none of the descriptions people had for him quite fit. He understood that he was always out-of-joint with life as it was. He had talent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough. But what to do with that talent—there was the rub for my father. He used to stroll through the house intoning his favorite line from Groucho Marx’s ditty “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” (I recently asked my son, now twenty-one, if he thought I was mistaken in teaching him this particular song when he was six years old. “No!” he said, filling the air with an invisible forest of exclamation points.) But what my father never managed to get was a sense of who he might become. He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said. He didn’t get to revise his understanding of himself, figure out what he’d do best that might give the world some profit.

My father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character. He gave me the chance to see what I was all about, and if it proved to be different from him, proved even to be something he didn’t like or entirely comprehend, then he’d deal with it.

Right now, if you’re going to get a real education, you may have to be aggressive and assertive.

Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the soul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. No one will ask you, in the words of Emerson’s disciple William James, what their “cash value” might be. No one will suggest that you might use Plato as your bible for a week or a year or longer. No one, in short, will ask you to use Plato to help you change your life.

That will be up to you. You must put the question of Plato to yourself. You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth. You have to ask yourself if wildly expressive music (rock and rap and the rest) deranges the soul in ways that are destructive to its health. You must inquire of yourself if balanced calm is the most desirable human state.

Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true. And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical. (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.) You’ll be the one who pesters his teachers. You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.” You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking. You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers can explain but what they can’t.

Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak it expertly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words. You’ll be looking into the reach of every metaphor that every discipline offers, and you’ll be trying to see around their corners.

The whole business is scary, of course. What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

You might learn that you’re not meant to be a doctor at all. Of course, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one. You can pound your round peg through the very square hole of medical school, then go off into the profession. And society will help you. Society has a cornucopia of resources to encourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do. To ease your grief, society offers alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don’t need. But all those too have their costs.

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

Having found what’s best for you to do, you may be surprised how far you rise, how prosperous, even against your own projections, you become. The student who eschews medical school to follow his gift for teaching small children spends his twenties in low-paying but pleasurable and soul-rewarding toil. He’s always behind on his student-loan payments; he still lives in a house with four other guys (not all of whom got proper instructions on how to clean a bathroom). He buys shirts from the Salvation Army, has intermittent Internet, and vacations where he can. But lo—he has a gift for teaching. He writes an essay about how to teach, then a book—which no one buys. But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.

Money is still a problem, but in a new sense. The world wants him to write more, lecture, travel more, and will pay him for his efforts, and he likes this a good deal. But he also likes staying around and showing up at school and figuring out how to get this or that little runny-nosed specimen to begin learning how to read. These are the kinds of problems that are worth having and if you advance, as Thoreau said, in the general direction of your dreams, you may have them. If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away. But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary. “Strongly spent,” the poet says, “is synonymous with kept.”

The Gods Must Be Tidy!

2011-09-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

By Jonathan Witt
Touchstone Magazine

Is the Cosmos a Work of Poor Engineering or the Gift of an Artistic Designer?

When as a boy I read “The Scouring of the Shire” near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I could not understand why Tolkien felt the need to tack on such an anti-climactic and shabby bit of evil. Only later, as I began to notice modernity’s penchant for ugliness in the world beyond Middle Earth, did I understand that the scouring of the Shire bespoke a present evil, a malevolence insidious precisely because it lacked the stark drama of the trenches or the gas chambers.

I came to understand that the demolition of the hobbits’ lovely village possessed the striking lines of caricature not because it was unrealistic but rather because the depiction is so sharp and trenchant. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it can also breed cataracts, an incapacity to see a thing vividly, truly.

God of the Nazis

The twentieth century was, in its darkest moments, an arresting illustration of the will to power, but it also exhibited a less imposing if somewhat more curious urge: what could be aptly termed the will to ugliness. The perversely drab “pre-fabs” of postwar England, the American slum projects constructed by a later generation, the willfully dissonant monstrosities of much modern high architecture, the willfully tortured, obscure, and graceless prose of the deconstructionists, even the black-eyed and anorexic grotesques of the Paris catwalks—all bespeak an age driven to throw up trappings repulsive in their embrace of detachment and death.

The cultural pedigree of this modern predilection for ugliness is old, various, and to some degree mysterious. But here I want to suggest that Darwinism—in which I include its DNA-inspired mutation, neo-Darwinism—has contributed to this will to ugliness not merely by underwriting a vision of the world as a godless accident, but also in the very way it critiques and thereby dismisses the idea of an Author and Designer of life.

What I call the a-teleological macroevolutionists—those who argue that the cosmos is the product of chance and has no intrinsic end or purpose—argue that life emerged by natural selection without design from single-celled organisms, and they claim to use strictly scientific methods to support their position. In truth, however, they often slip into what is essentially an aesthetic and theological argument against a designer.1 Others have noted this, but what has not been fully explored is the dubious nature of the evolutionists’ aesthetic argument.

Consider one especially prominent example, evolutionist Richard Dawkins’s critique of the mammalian eye in his The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design:

Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. . . . This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!)2

Never mind for the moment that it has been clearly demonstrated that the backward wiring of the mammalian eye actually confers a distinct advantage by dramatically increasing the flow of oxygen to the eye.3 Let us ignore that brilliant bit of engineering and look at Dawkins’s intriguing obsession with neatness. O brave new world whose supreme designer distinguishes himself first and foremost by his tidy-mindedness! Aldous Huxley has ably dramatized the horror of a society so engineered.

Do we really wish to substitute the exuberantly imaginative, even whimsical designer of our actual universe for a cosmic neat freak? Such a deity might serve nicely as the national God of the Nazis, matching Hitler stroke for stroke: Hitler in his disdain for humanity’s sprawling diversity; the tidy cosmic engineer in his distaste for an ecosystem choked and sullied by a grotesque menagerie of strange and apparently substandard species. Out with that great big prodigal Gothic cathedral we call the world; in with a modern and minimalist blueprint for a new and neater cosmos.

Bye, Panda

One of the first things that would have to go is the panda—if not the whole bear, then certainly his two thumbs. In Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb, the late Harvard paleontologist has this criticism for his title character:

An engineer’s best solution is debarred by history. The panda’s true thumb is committed to another role, too specialized for a different function to become an opposable, manipulating digit. So the panda must use parts on hand and settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable, solution. The sesamoid thumb wins no prize in an engineer’s derby. It is, to use Michael Ghiselin’s phrase, a contraption, not a lovely contrivance.

Now one might take the usual defend-the-engineer tack here, and any design advocate trained in such matters certainly should scrutinize Gould’s assumptions as to the inferiority of the panda’s thumb. Gould even provides a small opening when he concedes that the sesamoid thumb is “quite workable” and “does its job.” Indeed, when he finally witnessed a panda firsthand, he “was amazed by their dexterity and wondered how the scion of a stock adapted for running could use its hands so adroitly.”

By Gould’s account, the panda’s thumb makes a fine peeler for bamboo, the panda’s principal food, and investigation may demonstrate that it is actually superior to an opposable thumb for such work.4

However, do not hold your breath waiting for pandas to take up fly-fishing or needlepoint. For versatility, the opposable thumb is the clear blue ribbon winner. Which raises the obvious question: If an intelligent designer designed the world, did he not think of the opposable thumb until after he designed the panda? And was he too tired to go back and upgrade that poor panda?

To such a question the Darwinian community collectively responds thus: “Obviously not. If there’s a designer out there running the show, he’s a real bumbler, a second-rate engineer who could not get a job in a third-rate Swiss watch factory. Since the idea of a second-rate designer is patently ridiculous, there is no designer.”

This argument is rife with problems already underscored by design thinkers like William Dembski in his book The Design Revolution. The most basic failing of this line of reasoning is that even if the panda’s thumb is proven to be less useful than it could be, that doesn’t negate the evidence that the whole panda has the mark of design. It’s a creature dependent upon an architecturally marvelous cathedral of complex, specified information, the sort we know from experience is fashioned only by intelligent agents.

Indeed, the panda would remain so even if it had no thumbs at all. The Yugo, I’m told, was a badly designed automobile, but no sane person would argue that with all its problems, it wasn’t designed. The same logic applies to a panda or a duck-billed platypus or an ostrich.

But the point here is that these anti-design arguments by Dawkins, Gould, and other Darwinists are not scientific ones. They are aesthetic arguments, expressing an idea of what the universe should look like—that is, that it should satisfy the tidy-minded engineer. But who is to say that the Darwinists’ taste is that of the cosmic designer, if there is one? Who is to say that the designer should value tidiness over, say, whimsy?

Bad Art

Recently, something else struck me about this effort to call attention to the apparently jury-rigged quality of certain elements of the cosmic “watch” and then declare that such things could not have been designed: Critics of intelligent design tuck some idiosyncratic and highly dubious aesthetic presuppositions into the metaphor of the cosmos as watch. These include an overemphasis on tidiness, a de-emphasis on beauty, and a dismissal of any possibility that the creator might wish to commune with his creation. Surely a perfect watchmaker would wind up his perfect (tidy, efficient, functional) watch and step away, freed by the perfection of his instrument from the need to tinker any further with it.

We can see how Enlightenment thinkers arrived at this metaphor of the watch, confronted as they were with fresh insights into the orderly, mathematically precise nature of the cosmos. And contemporary astrophysicists, even those who resist the idea of a cosmic design, now tell us that the laws and constants of the cosmos are, in fact, finely tuned to an almost unimaginable degree, such that even very small changes in a few of them would render complex life utterly impossible. So at least in one sense, the universe is watch-like.

But all metaphors break down if pressed far enough, and this one breaks down pretty quickly. Where a single metaphor crowds out all others in a matter as complex as our living world, it produces an intellectually impoverished and very misleading stick-figure rendering of the subject. Thus, the thinking person is wise to ask, to what extent is the universe watch-like? To what extent should it be watch-like?

To cling to the watch analogy in a critique of the notion of a wise cosmic designer fails to face an obvious (and theological) question: Is this an adequate way to speak of the hypothetical designer? Is his satisfying the aesthetic demands of the Darwinists a sufficient test of his existence? To put it another way, if there is a cosmic designer, what does he need a watch for? He doesn’t. One would be hard-pressed to name a major religion that posits a transcendent god who uses the universe primarily as a tool.

Not even the god articulated by the orderly minds of Plato and Aristotle fits the bill. Whether we think of the morally compromised gods of Mount Olympus meddling in the affairs of their various mortal offspring; or of Plato’s “the One” (what he also called “the Good” or “Father of that Captain and Cause”); or the holy God of the Bible, father and shepherd and husband of his people, the deity is not construed as one interested in the world primarily as a tool for himself. Indeed, whenever he is construed as a personality, and not merely as some sort of non-sentient organizing First Principle, he is depicted as one interested in the world itself, as a creator who delights in the work of his hands.

The Lover’s Watch

Dare we use the word “love” in this context? Dare one suggest that the designer loves his creation in a way the watchmaker does not love the watch he makes, that the Creator would no more think of his creation as a tool than would a bridegroom his bride or a father his children? The fact that such terms as love and bridegroom strike many as inappropriate to the evolution/design debate merely testifies to how thoroughly the utilitarian assumption behind the metaphor of the watch has permeated Western thinking.

Certainly, we could try to discuss the matter without considering the designer’s attitude toward his creation (that is, whether he is a watchmaker or a bridegroom or father). But the evolutionists have already smuggled this issue into the debate by assuming that, if there were a designer, he would be some sort of disinterested and hyper-tidy watchmaker. Having smuggled in this highly questionable point, they then regard as beneath consideration any idea of a designer who (as they put it) “meddles in his creation.”

Or they dismiss the notion that an omnipotent and omniscient designer might fashion a creature short of an optimal design. Here they not only make a theological claim but ignore a key question at once practical and aesthetic: How do concerns about ecological balance impinge upon a critique of animal structures?

Must the cosmic designer’s primary concern for pandas be that they are the most dexterous bears divinely imaginable? From a purely practical standpoint, might opposable-thumbed über-pandas wreak havoc on their ecosystem? From a purely aesthetic standpoint, might not those charming pandas up in their bamboo trees with their unopposing but quite workable thumbs be just the sort of humorous supporting character this great cosmic drama needs to lighten things up a bit? If Shakespeare could do it in his tragedies, why not God?

Pandas as comic relief? To spurn the notion as if it were patently ridiculous and beneath consideration is merely to expose one’s utilitarian presuppositions. Why, after all, should the designer’s world read like a dreary high-school science textbook, its style humorless, homogenous, and suffocating under the dead weight of a supposedly detached passive voice? Why should not the designer’s world entertain, amuse, and fascinate, as well as “work”?

In summary, virtually the entire bad-design versus good-design discussion is framed by an engineer’s perspective, not an artist’s or mystic’s. When I mentioned this to the philosopher Jay W. Richards a few years ago, he responded in a letter: “After all, why do we assume that God created the universe to be a watch, in which a self-winding mechanism makes it ‘better’? Maybe the universe is like a piano, or a novel with the author as a character, or a garden for other beings with whom God wants to interact. It’s amazing how a simple image can highjack a discussion for a century and a half.”

What is worse, Darwinists like Gould and Dawkins commit the error called atomism: the idea that, in Gould’s own words, “wholes should be understood by decomposition into ‘basic’ units.” In other words, they assume not only that nature is a kind of watch but that each individual design is its own watch—its own machine—meant to be judged in relative isolation. They evaluate the panda’s thumb by how well it works as a thumb, not by how well it fits into the whole life of the panda, including its place in its own environment.

This is, at the most practical level, to misunderstand pandas. At the aesthetic level, it is to declare that an artist who might have created pandas could not have been thinking (as artists do) of the whole work.

Unaesthetic Shakespeare

Interestingly, the god of the English canon, William Shakespeare, came in for much the same criticism by the tidier-minded among his neoclassical critics as the God of the cosmos has come in for from the tidier-minded scientists. This actor turned playwright lacked classical restraint, the argument went.

In 1726 Lewis Theobald perhaps initiated the century’s long criticism of Hamlet’s coarse speech when he commented on a particularly bawdy line spoken by Hamlet to Ophelia: “If ever the Poet deserved Whipping for low and indecent Ribaldry, it was for this Passage.”5

Another regarded Shakespeare’s general habit of mingling the low with the high, the comic with the tragic as a “wholly monstrous, unnatural mixture.”6 With only a little more restraint, a third lamented the bard’s tragedies: “How inattentive to propriety and order, how deficient in grouping, how fond of exposing disgusting as well as beautiful figures!”, how often he compels the audience “to grovel in dirt and ordure.”7

Happily, most neoclassical Shakespearean critics were enthusiastic, and yet, as one modern critic noted, even the admiration of the more sympathetic critics was always “modified and tempered . . . by regrets that Shakespeare had elected, either through ignorance or by design, to embrace a method that discarded all classical rules.”8

What do we make of such criticism today? To use Freud’s language, itself rude and vulgar, such criticism strikes us as anal-retentive. What emotionally whole and thoroughly sane admirer of Renaissance drama would want to substitute for the works of the “myriad minded” Shakespeare, the relatively impoverished fare left over after unsympathetic neoclassical critics tidied him up?

Perhaps the relevance of the analogy is becoming clear. The criticism of Shakespeare is akin to the evolutionists’ criticisms of the cosmic designer. In each case the critic believes the respective artist in question should build all of his characters according to some rigid set of criteria that ignores broader concerns, be they ecological, aesthetic, or otherwise. Proponents of this line of argument value tidiness over other and often more vital aesthetic criteria like intricacy, harmony, variety, imaginative exuberance, freedom, even moral complexity.

A Queer Assumption

The Darwinists’ aesthetic criticism moves from the unconvincing to the positively odd in a further and even queerer assumption: the conviction that no all-knowing and all-powerful designer would restrict himself to the materials at hand, even when such designs are clearly superb. Darwinists are quite fond of this argument, apparently considering it irresistibly persuasive to all but the most irrational mind.

I saw an especially brazen instance of this strange aesthetic dogma at a debate at Texas Tech University between Darwinist James Carr and intelligent design microbiologist Michael Behe. Arguing against Behe, Carr used the similarities in the genetic code of chimps and humans as a bad-design argument. What all-powerful creator would need to recycle his materials like this, he argued. It was almost as if he considered it unmanly of the Fellow Upstairs.

Gould leveled essentially the same criticism against a would-be cosmic designer in his description of Charles Darwin’s study of orchids:

Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.9

Or as one writer Gould quoted put it, nature is a superb tinkerer, not a divine artificer.10

The argument that no cosmic designer would so often recycle his creative material is a common tactic, one Darwin himself employed. In a letter to Asa Gray around 1861 Darwin wrote, “Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. . . . If man was made of brass or iron and no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced.”11

Certainly humans made of iron or brass would create enormous difficulties for a Darwinian explanation of humankind’s existence. But the tenor of this comment fits Darwin’s attitude to the similarities among the species. His unstated assumption seems to be that the similarities are not merely one missed opportunity for the natural world to reveal its design and thus falsify his theory, but a positive argument against a cosmic designer.

Darwin’s Design

Most of us would respond, “But why?” The only logical way to use the similarities as an argument against a designer is to take as an aesthetic premise the assumption that no omniscient and omnipotent designer would design in such a way. In other words, one would have to assume that using the ho-hum materials at hand instead of consistently elevating higher works of art with newer and “better” materials violates some pre-established and widely accepted aesthetic principle. “Why,” Darwin asked in The Origin of Species, “should the sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils in any individual flower, though fitted for such widely different purposes, be all constructed on the same pattern?”12

Ironically, Darwin unwittingly suggested a very un-Darwinian answer in a letter to his sister. Expressing his admiration for the Duke of Northumberland’s home, Darwin wrote, “His house was very grand; much more so than the other great nobility, and in much better taste.” The young biologist did not attribute the house’s nobility and beauty to a prodigal use of variously distinct materials or motifs—quite the contrary. “Every window in his house was full of straight lines of brilliant lights, and from their extreme regularity and number had a beautiful effect. The paucity of invention [emphasis mine] was very striking, crowns, anchors, and ‘W.R.’s’ were repeated in endless succession.”13

So why should Darwin be surprised that an intelligent designer of the world would proceed in the same way? Conventional wisdom in the field of aesthetics all but demands such an artistic method. Pattern and variation are interdependent concepts fundamental to art. Where would Schubert’s “Theme and Variations” be without the theme? The point is so basic one feels silly making it.

Should the later movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony be censured for continuing to build off an original motif? Do we exclaim with the woman at the first performance of Bolero that Ravel must be mad for building on his central motif? Do we not instead admire the way he built so exquisitely and powerfully on the central motif till the climactic grandeur of the finale? Ought we to demote Monet from the first rank of the impressionists because he had the bad taste to paint poplars and haystacks over and over again? Do we not instead marvel at the fecundity of his imagination, at the subtly of his observation and insight?

No one, not even his harshest eighteenth-century critics, accuses Shakespeare of bad art on the grounds that Much Ado About Nothing and Othello share virtually the same plot, creatively altered to produce radically different plays. Few if any object to Shakespeare’s repetition of motherless girls as heroines, or to his girls-disguised-as-boys theme, or to his repetitive use of the sonnet form for his poetry.

Unimaginable Genius

Where the atomist or reductionist regards elements in isolation (and properly so within certain intellectual disciplines), the artist seeks variety within unity, rhythm, and harmony, qualities fundamental to the creation of beauty. Notice I am not claiming a seat of honor for some culturally narrow artistic practice—say, the English sonnet—but rather appealing to principles broad and fundamental in the history of the world’s art.

If there is an intelligent designer behind this astonishingly complex work of art we call the world, it’s quite sensible to suppose he would be at least as artistically savvy as the artistically gifted among his creatures, that he would cultivate harmony and unity through the creative reuse of common materials. Now, the Darwinist might complain, “What is all this artistic, aesthetic balderdash? We are scientists, not poets or starry-eyed mystics. Leave the artists to their pattern-making and let us get back to our hard-nosed, empirical science.” Fine, but if they wish to avoid an argument about aesthetic principles, they should not assume within their arguments aesthetic principles that are at best highly debatable, and at worst contrary to the canons of art.

In the meantime, those who reject such dubious reasoning, who understand that the world is the handiwork of unimaginable genius, could do worse than to follow the aesthetic lead of those humble and beautiful hobbits who returned to their desecrated Shire carrying elven soil: We can take a soil richer than the dead ground of materialism and sprinkle it wherever we can, honoring the miracle of creation’s growth even as we tend to our proper role as stewards and gardeners of a world between Heaven and Hell, a place we might aptly call Middle Earth.

Notes:

1. See, for instance, Paul Nelson’s “The Role of Theology in Current Evolutionary Reasoning,” Biology and Philosophy 11 (1996), pp. 493–517; William Dembski’s Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press, 1999) and The Design Revolution (InterVarsity Press, 2004); and Cornelius G. Hunter’s Darwin’s God (Brazos Press, 2001).

2. W. W. Norton, 1996, p. 93.

3. Excerpts from “The Inverted Retina: Maladaptation or Pre-adaptation?” Origins and Design 19.2 (2000): 14 June 2000, www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od192/invertedretina192.htm.

4. W. W. Norton, 1980, pp. 21, 22, 24.

5. Quoted in Paul S. Conklin, A History of Hamlet Criticism: 1601–1821 (Humanities Press, 1968), p. 53.

6. Charles Gildon, quoted in Herbert Spencer Robinson, English Shakespearian Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (Gordian Press, 1968), pp. 26–27.

7. Edward Taylor, “From Cursory Remarks . . .”, in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1774–1801, edited by Brian Vickers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 130–132. This Taylor is not to be confused with the wonderful American poet Edward Taylor, the last of the metaphysical poets, who spent a great deal of time in the “dirt and ordure” exploring the mysteries of the divine and the human.

8. Robinson, English Shakespearian Criticism, p. xii.

9. The Panda’s Thumb, p. 20.

10. François Jacob, quoted ibid., p. 26.

11. “To Asa Gray,” 17 September 1861(?), volume 2 of Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext00/2llcd10.txt.

12. Sixth London Edition (1872), ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext99/otoos610.txt.

13. 9 September 1831, volume 1 of Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext00/1llcd10.txt.

Jonathan Witt is a senior fellow and writer in residence at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He and his wife Amanda have three children, whom they home school.

Does God Have to…?

2011-09-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

I’ve spent much of this week talking with students about Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). We don’t lecture in the Torrey Honors Institute; we discuss. To start off a class, we try and develop a crafty question, one that immediately sets the students before an issue at the heart of the text in a way that provokes, stimulates, hooks them into discussing the book. From talking to my colleague Diane I knew that the students had spent good time considering the atonement from the angle of humanity’s need, so in our classes we turned to inquire into the character of the God who became man for us and our salvation. As class began, I asked a simple question, ‘Did God have to be just?’ And we were off. Here are a few of my own thoughts in dialogue with Anselm on the question of just what God does or does not have to do.

God being God, it would seem that he is free to do whatever he wants. And so he is. Anselm is clear that ‘it is incorrect to say of God that he “cannot do something” or that he “does it of necessity.” For all necessity, and all impossibility, is subject to his will. Moreover his will is not subject to any necessity or impossibility. For nothing is necessary or impossible for any reason other than that he himself so wills it.’ God is the one than which no greater than be conceived, and as such he is ‘so free that he is subject to no law and no judgment, and is so benevolent that nothing can be conceived of more benevolent than he’; and so ‘there is nothing right or proper except what he wishes.’

Again, God is free to do whatever he wants. But for Anselm, much of this question is decided in the scope of that ‘whatever.’ Might God want to create for wanton sport? Might he want to do an about-face and decide to reward viciousness instead of virtue? We quickly recoil at this and suggest that there must be some limits to ‘whatever God wants,’ and this intuition is basic to a number of moves Anselm makes throughout his work.

For instance, could God tire of his creation, turn his back on it and consign it to oblivion? Could he take this drastic step of changing his mind? Isn’t he capable of this? Absolutely not, says Anselm. But, we might retort, does this not suggest an inappropriate limitation of God’s freedom? No, instead it evinces linguistic sloppiness. To plan something and then change one’s mind is to be reactive and inconstant; it is thus to make one’s will beholden to another, to allow it to be a function of external circumstances. But God wills whatever he wants, and so even the diabolical defection of humanity cannot change his mind about gathering people to himself. Were God capable of changing his mind – or, Anselm adds, of deceiving or wishing to lie – this ‘would be incapability more than capability.’

At times, Anselm will talk of God’s doing something ‘of necessity,’ but this is the necessity of self-consistency rather than the necessity of compulsion. God is never other than God, and so some things are ‘necessary.’ But there is nothing other than God that moves God to do what God does. He is in no way constrained, ‘in no way forced to do, or prohibited from doing, anything.’ Even this divine consistency is no straitjacket, but God’s ‘own spontaneous unchangeability’ – ‘spontaneous’ because even this unchangeability is never something which curbs the freedom of God. God does ‘put himself under an obligation to bring his good beginning [in creation] to fulfillment,’ which eventually requires the incarnation and crucifixion, but better than calling this necessity is to call it grace.

God does whatever he wants, and that is his freedom. When we do whatever he wants, that is our freedom. Anselm sets out a basic, far-reaching principle in his treatise On Free Will, defining ‘the liberty of will’ as ‘the capacity of preserving rectitude of the will for the sake of rectitude itself.’ Justice results when this capacity is exercised. Elsewhere, Anselm identifies truth and justice, defining them both as ‘rectitude.’ This is counter-intuitive in a late modernity reared on libertarian notions of freedom and a market economy. For Anselm, to be free is not to choose whatever I want; it is to have the capacity to want the right things, and thereby follow the grain of the universe.

All of which is, in a word, ‘fitting.’ That is, God being God, he does things well and in good order. There is an unalloyed rightness to what he does. All his works are just. This drives Anselm’s soteriology: ‘[I]f it is not fitting for God to do anything in an unjust and unregulated manner, it does not belong to his freedom or benevolence or will to release unpunished a sinner who has not repaid to God what he has taken away from him.’

But perhaps all this talk of regulation and order goose steps across the page too stridently. We fidget around such stark language and worry that this kind of structure is inimical to love and more suggestive of a tyrant. I suspect this is in large part because, in our limitations and sin, we cannot imagine that an immaculately ordered world might be enlarging and life-giving. To most of us, that sounds stifling. But to Anselm, such perfect order is at once true and beautiful. Augustine, the master of the medievals, spoke of the ‘harmony of redemption’, making a materially similar point that God’s way of redeeming fits with his way of creating and that the sinful disorder needs must give way to holy, beautiful order. Similar is Irenaeus’ logic of recapitulation in which Christ undoes Adam by redoing Adam the right way. There is a beauty to what he does. It is ‘fitting,’ ‘appropriate’ that God would redeem us in this way; and Anselm speaks of ‘the indescribably beauty of the fact.’

There is nothing, though, more unfitting than sin. The problem with sin is that the sinner ‘is disturbing, as far as he is able, the order and beauty of the universe.’ Without recompense or punishment for sin, which have a certain ‘regulatory beauty,’ ‘there would be in the universe, which God ought to be regulating, a certain ugliness, resulting from the violation of the beauty of order, and God would appear to be failing in his governance.’ As we turn to consider the Cur Deus Homo, then, we note Anselm’s initial answer to why God became man – because something had to be done to restore the ordered beauty of the universe. He offers the analogy of a dirty pearl: ‘What if he were to allow this same pearl to be knocked out of his hand into the mud by some malignant person, although it was in his power to prevent this, and afterwards, picking it up from the mud, dirty and unwashed, were to store it away in some clean and costly receptacle of his, intending to keep it there in that state.’ No, this would not be fitting. A beautifully ordered universe suggests a recompense for sin that is ‘in proportion to the magnitude of the sin.’ Mercy must align with justice.

Truth-Telling in a Time of Tragedy: September 11, 2001

2011-09-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

[This message was preached on September 13, 2001--two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. It is republished in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of those attacks. An extended reflection on these events from the perspective of 2011 will follow.]

Preachers are expected to speak when no one else has any idea what to say. This is not an enviable position. Standing at the graveside, the dying bedside, the scene of the accident, the preacher is supposed to know what to say, when nothing seems right to say.

Sometimes, saying nothing is best. We can be too hasty to speak, too eager to explain, too superficial in our answer, or too arrogant in our presumption. At other times, silence would be mere cowardice and the abdication of calling and responsibility. To fail to speak in these moments is to deny one’s calling and to fail the supreme test of authentic ministry.

The Book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak” [Ecclesiastes 3:7b]. It is often hard to know the one from the other. In most cases, we should carefully speak and prayerfully answer and fearfully explain. This is one of those moments.

Thousands of preachers will stand in pulpits this Sunday and speak with trembling lips to congregations loaded with expectancy. It could hardly be otherwise. The pictures are replayed in our minds and on our television screens again and again and again. We are watching the unbelievable transformed into the undeniable.

Modern airliners filled with passengers fly through a beautiful sky right into two of the tallest buildings on earth. We watch transfixed, and watch over and over again. The human mind can take only so much reality at any one time. We soon saw images of a burning Pentagon building and then the unimaginable-two 110-story skyscrapers falling into the ground, reduced to a horrific mound of rubble and debris.

We knew that thousands of human beings were dying as we watched. We had seen persons jump from windows, preferring the quick death of a fall to the terror of the fire. And then we saw the collapsing towers, one by one, with disintegrating concrete, glass, and steel reduced to particles of dust and fragments of debris.

The symbolism was unavoidable. These two towers represented the might and energy of the American economy, sending a message to the world of our national power and influence. Like modern towers of Babel, they represented our ambition to build great towers that would touch the sky and defy gravity. Now, millions of pieces of paper floated through the sky like grotesque confetti.

The Pentagon is so powerful a symbol that the name needs no further explanation. The Pentagon can unleash the power of the world’s greatest military force. Now, the Pentagon sits like a wounded giant on the ground. The world’s last remaining superpower doesn’t look so powerful through a veil of smoke.

We know that the world will never be the same after this. We do not want to exaggerate, but exaggeration seems almost impossible. There are no words adequate to convey the horror, the grief, the outrage, or the sense of disbelief.

Oddly enough, at the very same time we cannot help talking. We are glued to our televisions and computer screens, afraid to miss what may come next. We are a nation of voyeurs watching a pornography of death and destruction. It hardly seems right to watch, and it hardly seems right not to watch.

This is a crucial test for the Christian church. We must measure our words carefully. We must think biblically and seek a proper perspective into which we can put all of this. This is not easy, but authentic ministry often comes down to saying what you know to be true when people are desperate to hear it and no one seems to know where else to look.

Look with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 13, starting at verse 1:

1 Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.
2 And Jesus said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate?
3 “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
4 “Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem?
5 “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
6 And He began telling this parable: “A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any.
7 “And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’
8 “And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer;
9 and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, cut it down.’ ”
This is one of those hard passages of Scripture. Tragedy and theology intersect in the teaching of Jesus, and end up in a parable. The background events are genuinely tragic. The context is a call to repentance, national and individual. Most importantly, Jesus has just warned the people of the danger of missing His own messianic identity.

“When you see a cloud rising in the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming,’ and so it turns out. And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way. You hypocrites! You know how to analyze the appearance of the earth and the sky, but why do you not analyze this present time?” [Luke 12:54b-56]

Now, in chapter 13, Jesus is presented with news of a tragedy-indeed an atrocity. Pontius Pilate has caused innocent Galileans to be killed apparently within the precincts of the Temple, and their blood was mixed with the blood of their sacrifices.

A more heinous crime in Israel could hardly be imagined. Murder is mixed with the desecration of the Temple. Jesus should be outraged, and undoubtedly He is, but He turns the issue on those who raise it. “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate?”

This must have been a hard question to answer. Evidently, those who were asked the question assumed that these victims had been allowed to die because they were more sinful. Or, perhaps more to the point, the living may have assumed that they were therefore more righteous than the dead.

Jesus then turns to another tragedy. A tower had fallen in Siloam, killing eighteen men. Were these victims also more sinful than others, particularly those who live in Jerusalem? “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
The Christian Gospel and the Problem of Evil

Every thoughtful person must deal with the problem of evil. Evil acts and tragic events come to us all in this vale of tears known as human life. The problem of evil and suffering is undoubtedly the greatest theological challenge we face.

Most persons face this issue only in a time of crisis. A senseless accident, a wasting disease, or an awful crime demands some explanation.

For the atheist, this is no great problem. Life is a cosmic accident, morality is an arbitrary game by which we order our lives, and meaning is non-existent. As Oxford University’s Professor Richard Dawkins explains, human life is nothing more than a way for selfish genes to multiply and reproduce. There is no meaning or dignity to humanity.

For the Christian Scientist, the material world and the experience of suffering and death are illusory. In other religions suffering is part of a great circle of life or recurring incarnations of spirit.

Some Christians simply explain suffering as the consequence of sins, known or unknown. Some suffering can be directly traced to sin. What we sow, so shall we reap, and multiple millions of persons can testify to this reality. Some persons suffer innocently by the sinful acts of others.

But Jesus rejects this explanation in the two cases here recounted. We should note that the problem of evil and suffering, the theological issue of theodicy, is customarily divided into evil of two kinds, moral and natural. Both are included in this passage. The murder of the Galileans is clearly moral evil, a premeditated crime-just like the terrorist acts in New York and Washington.

Natural evil comes without a moral agent. A tower falls, an earthquake shakes, a tornado destroys, a hurricane ravages, a spider bites, a disease debilitates and kills. The world is filled with wonders mixed with dangers. Gravity can save you or gravity can kill you. When a tower falls, it kills.

People all over the world are demanding an answer to this question. It comes only to those who claim that God is mighty and that God is good. How could a good God allow this to happen? How can a God of love allow killers to kill, terrorists to terrorize, and the wicked to escape without a trace?

No superficial answer will do. Our quandary is well known, and the atheists think they have our number. As a character in Archibald MacLeish’s play, J.B. asserts, “If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd . . . .” As they see it, God can be good, or He can be powerful, but He cannot be both.
We will either take our stand with God’s self-revelation in the Bible, or we are left to invent a deity of our own imagination. The Bible quickly excludes two false understandings.

First, the Bible reveals that God is omnipotent and omniscient. These are unconditional and categorical attributes. The sovereignty of God is the bedrock affirmation of biblical theism. The Creator rules over all creation. Not even a sparrow falls without His knowledge. He knows the number of hairs upon our heads. God rules and reigns over all nations and principalities. Not one atom or molecule of the universe is outside His active rule.

The sovereignty of God was affirmed by King Nebuchadnezzar, who confessed that God “does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and no one can ward off His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’.” [Daniel 4:36] Process theologians have attempted to cut God’s power down to size, rendering the Creator as one power among others. The evangelical revisionists pushing open theism have attempted to cut God’s omniscience down to size, rendering Him as one mind among others.

Rabbi Harold Kushner argues that God is doing the best He can under the circumstances, but He lacks the power to either kill or cure. The openness theists argue that God is always ready with Plan B when Plan A fails. He is infinitely resourceful, they stress, just not really sovereign.

These are roads we dare not take, for the God of the Bible causes the rising and falling of nations and empires, and His rule is active and universal. Limited sovereignty is no sovereignty at all.

The second great error is to ascribe evil to God. But the Bible does not allow this argument. God is absolute righteousness, love, goodness, and justice. Most errors related to this issue occur because of our human tendency to impose an external standard-a human construction-of goodness upon God. But good does not so much define God as God defines good.

How then do we speak of God’s rule and reconcile this with the reality of evil? Between these two errors the Bible points us to the radical affirmation of God’s sovereignty as the ground of our salvation and the assurance of our own good. We cannot explain why God has allowed sin, but we understand that God’s glory is more perfectly demonstrated through the victory of Christ over sin. We cannot understand why God would allow sickness and suffering, but we must affirm that even these realities are rooted in sin and its cosmic effects.

How does God exercise His rule? Does He order all events by decree, or does He allow some evil acts by His mere permission? This much we know-we cannot speak of God’s decree in a way that would imply Him to be the author of evil, and we cannot fall back to speak of His mere permission, as if this allows a denial of His sovereignty and active will.

Our confession of faith states it rightly: “God from eternity, decrees or permits all things that come to pass, and perpetually upholds, directs, and governs all creatures and all events; yet so as not in any way to be the author or approver of sin nor to destroy the free will and responsibility of intelligent creatures.”

God is God, and God is good. As Paul affirms for the church, God’s sovereignty is the ground of our hope, the assurance of God’s justice as the last word, and God’s loving rule in the very events of our lives: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose.” [Romans 8:28]

We dare not speak on God’s behalf to explain why He allowed these particular acts of evil to happen at this time to these persons and in this manner. Yet, at the same time, we dare not be silent when we should testify to the God of righteousness and love and justice who rules over all in omnipotence. Humility requires that we affirm all that the Bible teaches, and go no further. There is much we do not understand. As Charles Spurgeon explained, when we cannot trace God’s hand, we must simply trust His heart.
The Reality of Evil and the Impossibility of Moral Relativism

Moral relativism is one of the hallmarks of the postmodern worldview, and it has become foundational to modern academic culture. As Allan Bloom recounted in The Closing of the American Mind, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”

Professor Robert L. Simon of Hamilton College has updated Dr. Bloom’s observation:

Although groups denying the reality of the Holocaust have raised controversies on some college campuses, in more than 20 years of teaching college students, I have yet to meet even one student who has expressed doubts about whether the Holocaust actually happened. However, I have recently seen an increasing number of students who, although well-meaning, hold almost as troubling a view. They accept the reality of the Holocaust, but they believe themselves unable morally to condemn it, or indeed to make any moral judgments whatsoever. Such students typically comment that they themselves deplore the Holocaust and other great evils, but then they wind up by suspending moral judgment.

This collapse of moral judgment is not only a slander against the victims of the Holocaust, but also a denial of the entire moral order. This cowardly abandonment of moral judgment, the inevitable product of the postmodern worldview, collides with reality when we see evil acts in others and in ourselves. The Apostle Paul reminds us that this law is known to all. We are quite efficient at ignoring or denying this knowledge in everyday life, but the sight of airplanes deliberately turned into missiles and flown into skyscrapers brings this knowledge into stark and undeniable sight.

We dare not lack the moral courage to call these acts what they are-murderous acts of mass terror. We dare not dignify the murderers by explaining their cause. No cause, however righteous, can justify such acts. And, no righteous cause could produce such acts.

President Bush rightly characterized these murders as “evil, despicable acts of terror.” We must call evil by its proper name and refuse to slander the victims by ascribing rationality to the terrorists’ cause. These murderers were driven by an irrational rage into diabolically rational plans for death and destruction.

Our Christian vocabulary is absolutely essential, and “sin” is an indispensable explanation. These acts of terror were not merely attacks upon individuals, or attacks upon America, or attacks upon civilization-these were attacks upon God’s dignity, God’s creatures, God’s law, and God’s glory.

Some persons seek a psychological explanation. The modern therapeutic worldview assumes that all persons are basically good, and that “antisocial” behavior is explained by environmental causes, a lack of education, persistent frustration, or inadequate socialization.

The prophet Jeremiah records God’s analysis of our human condition: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” [Jeremiah 17:9] Our heart tells lies even to ourselves. We are skillful self-deceivers. Human evil is real and it is an abomination in God’s sight.

As a matter of fact, the resolution of the sin problem can come only by God’s power, and will be found in accordance with His own righteousness. God will judge all of us, and we will bear the full wrath of His judgment except we be found in Christ, covered by His own righteousness imputed to us by faith.

Evil is real, not illusory, but evil will never have the last word. The righteous judgment of God will establish justice, and display His glory among the nations.
The Mandate of Justice and the Temptation to Vengeance

The blood of the victims and the sufferings of their loved ones call out for justice. Final justice belongs to God, but our Creator has assigned the cause of temporal justice to earthly rulers. As Paul wrote to the Romans:

For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same; for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil. [Romans 13:3-4]

Even the unbelieving ruler, who never acknowledges God, points to God’s righteousness when he executes justice. The Bible reminds us that justice is not merely a goal, it is a mandate. We are to seek justice and demand punishment for evil deeds.

Any nation that would allow evildoers to go unpunished is an affront to God’s dignity. The American people are right and righteous in demanding that the perpetrators of these acts be identified and justice must be executed. Those who would kill forfeit their own right to live, and those who would harbor them bring equal judgment upon themselves.

According to Romans 13, earthly rulers have not only the right but the responsibility to protect their citizens from such murderous acts, to uphold justice, and to maintain law, authority and order. Justice should be swift and order must be restored. The entire world hangs out of balance so long as such crimes are unpunished. This is no time for moral cowardice. We live in a real world of real evil and our national leaders bear full responsibility to ensure that the murderers are punished and the threat removed.

At the same time, sin can also be manifested in a desire to see others suffer as we have suffered. Justice is proportional to the crime. If a man kills the wife of another, justice does not allow the second man to kill the first man’s wife in an act of revenge. Justice is directed at those who bear moral responsibility, not at other innocent parties.

Revenge is an ugly substitute for justice. Americans must not direct our hatred at an ethnic group out of which murderers have come, but we must demand justice and demand that all persons whose hands are clean of innocent blood join and assist in this mandate. To refuse this demand is to join the murderers in complicity.

We must avoid moral cowardice disguised as pacifism and moral arrogance disguised as warmongering. Instead, we must pray for our national leaders as they demand justice and act to remove the threat of future acts of terrorism. All the peoples of the earth are threatened when international order is undermined by terrorists.

Temporal justice is God’s requirement of earthly rulers. Ultimate justice will come when God’s righteousness is established among the nations.
The Clash of Civilizations

Underlying these acts of terror is the development of a worldwide clash of civilizations. Many Americans live under the fiction that all persons share a common perception of justice and a common commitment to human rights. This is simply not the case.

Many persons and cultures around the world do not share our commitment to modern democratic values. The most important flashpoints in the world order fall where different civilizations with contrasting and conflicting worldviews come into contact.

For most of the twentieth century, western civilization faced its greatest challenge from fascism and international communism. These rival systems of belief were locked in a contest for world domination. They held very different conceptions of human rights and human dignity, and this led to almost categorical opposition on any issue of importance. The conflict with fascism led to a world war. The contest with communism led to a cold war.

Western civilization faces a particular challenge from the civilization of Islam. We must be very careful here. It would not be fair to accuse all Muslims of participation in violence or of celebrating these acts of terror. This would certainly be both inaccurate and unfair.

At the same time, the Islamic worldview is opposed to many of the most important pillars of western civilization. Though western secularists seek to deny the obvious, western civilization is based upon a Christian civilization and worldview. From the Judeo-Christian worldview of the Bible we gained our respect for human rights and human dignity. We have never held these ideals with full faithfulness, but no other worldview holds human life to be sacred because each human being is made in the image of God.

We face what Samuel P. Huntington has identified as a “clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order.” The victims and the perpetrators of these acts of terror represent two rival worldviews with irreconcilable aims and principles. Islam has turned its wrath upon the West, Israel, and Christian culture. Most particularly, Islamic culture hates western secularism and the moral relativism and corruption it has produced. As Huntington explains:

Muslims fear and resent Western power and the threat which this poses to their society and beliefs. They see Western culture as materialistic, corrupt, decadent, and immoral. They also see it as seductive, and hence stress all the more the need to resist its impact on their way of life. Increasingly, Muslims attack the West not for adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religion, which is nonetheless a ‘religion of the book,’ but for not adhering to any religion at all. In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them.

America has given the Muslim world many reasons to consider us decadent and dangerous to their concept of national righteousness and international order. The world-wide growth of Islamic civilization presents the West with its greatest contemporary challenge. This is hard for secularists to understand, but in the end, theology matters.
Is This a Sign of the Lord’s Imminent Return?

Callers to radio programs and Christians in chat rooms are debating whether these acts of terror are signs of the imminent return of the Lord. Let us be cautioned against the twin sins of understatement and overstatement.

Our Lord commanded us to be aware of the times and the seasons. Signs of His coming are identified, and a coming wave of unleashed terror is foretold. Nevertheless, we are also warned that we must not jump quickly to conclusions and over-read events as signs of the Lord’s immediate coming. In the end, He will return as a “thief in the night,” and the timing of our Lord’s return is unknown to us.

In the meantime, we are to live in the hope of the Lord’s coming, keep our hearts and lives ready for His coming, look always for His coming, and live in this expectancy. This much we know, every day we live brings us one day closer to the Lord’s return.

Furthermore, we know that the Lord’s return will bring the justice and righteousness for which we pray. In that light, we pray Maranatha, Lord come quickly.

The Call for Repentance

Jesus took the occasion of the tower’s fall in Siloam and asked, “Do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The falling tower in Siloam killed eighteen persons. The falling of the World Trade Center twin towers alone may have killed over 20,000 persons. They went to work Tuesday morning as any other day. They ate their breakfasts, kissed their husbands or wives, took the dog out for a walk, read the paper on the subway, got about their normal business and died in our greatest national tragedy.

This generation will remember that Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, as other generations remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of a President. We remember where we were standing, and the sense of unreality that came over us all. Reality has set in.

We are now facing one of the greatest challenges known by any people. International terrorism is unlike any foe we have ever faced. We are certain to be called upon to make sacrifices. Our way of life and our most cherished ideals, are at stake. The nation must rally around our leaders, pray for national righteousness mixed with rare wisdom, and work to rebuild a trust so horribly violated. We must reach out to pray for all those in peril and suffering loss, and offer material assistance wherever we can.

Jesus took the occasion of the tower’s fall and turned it into a call for national and individual repentance. Given our assurance that God is in control, and working even in this unspeakable tragedy to accomplish His will, dare we not see the horrors in New York and Washington as an opportunity for America-and Americans-to repent as well?

The parable of the fig tree makes the warning clear. The owner of the vineyard demands that his fig tree produce fruit, but there is no fruit. Cut it down, he orders. Why does it even take up space in my vineyard? The vineyard-keeper pleads for time to tend the tree that it might bear fruit.

“Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig it up and put in fertilizer; and if it bears fruit next year, fine, but if not, cut it down.”

It would be arrogance to claim that we have special knowledge of what God is doing through and in the midst of this horrible tragedy. But this biblical text explains that all such events are signs of our need for repentance. Thousands must have died in New York and many died in Washington. Like the Galileans in Jerusalem and the victims in Siloam, many may have died impenitent and unrepentant.

Our Lord’s warning is clear, for “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Clearly, Jesus was not warning that those who heard these words were in immediate danger of Pilate’s sword or a falling tower. They were, however, in immediate danger of God’s judgment, and so are we.

This is a time for repentance, and in the midst of this national horror, Christians will face unprecedented opportunities to share the Gospel and tell sinners of salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. We will be called upon to explain these events and to give an account. We must tell the truth in a time of terror. By God’s grace, may we find the right words to speak, when we dare not be silent.

God Scares Me

2011-09-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Sitting in Sunday School as a kid, Mrs. Her Name Is Hard to Recall told me the “fear of the Lord” was reverential awe for God, not being scared.

Slouching in Bible College waiting to be kicked out, Dr. I Will Protect His Identity told me this answer was inadequate and overly soft. He proceeded to expound at some depth on the idea of the fear of the Lord.

Much later as a philosophy graduate student in love with Plato, I was intent on learning exactly what the fear of the Lord is, because the Bible said in Proverbs 1:7 that it was the first step to knowledge or wisdom.

What is the fear of the Lord?

I think my Sunday School teacher was sort of right in the context of teaching children. The fear of the Lord is not being afraid as I was afraid of the Hound of the Baskerville. God is love and not horrible.

Non-Christian friends often think Christians live in constant terror of being smitten, but this is wrong. If God wanted to smite me, I would already be smitten. Instead our fear is motivated by love.

Perfect love casts out the bad source of fear, but longs to better serve the Beloved and fears giving pain.

As I got older my Bible college professor helped me, because he reminded me that it was scary to fall into God’s righteous hands unprepared. In myself, when I am most myself before redemption, I am unfit for the joys of Paradise. The love of God is wrath to me and Beauty will appear horrible.

It is part of the horror that is me that I find love wrathful and beauty terrible.

I am often too distracted to be afraid, but the dialectic, the path to wisdom, reminds me of the terror of being human. I am mortal man doomed to die. Eternity is in my heart but I cannot live in it by nature. My heart’s deepest longings are often what is worst for my own happiness and God wants my happiness.

It is fearful thing to be confused in a reasonable cosmos, selfish in a loving universe, and a dullard in a world of wonder.

An awe for God, His nature, and His works, and even a little bit of self-awareness is terrifying. I am terrified that having tasted a bit of the good things of God that I would miss those good things.

How do I know if I fear God?

I will love my neighbour to show my love of God. This love will make afraid of being cruel to His image in the people around me. I will treat the office workers as if they were Jesus to me.

I will read Scriptures with my whole heart and mind. I will honour Scriptures by asking them my best question and waiting to hear answers. When the truth is revealed to me, my love of Truth will motivate eager obedience to the new insights.

I will love God so much that the thought of missing His goodness, truth, and beauty will fill me with dread. I will pray for His grace and mercy at all times, because love takes nothing for granted.

A Requiem for Friendship

2011-09-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

By Anthony Esolen
Touchstone Magazine

Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution

Sam Gamgee has been fool enough to follow his beloved master Frodo into Mordor, the realm of death. To rescue Frodo from the orcs who have taken him captive and who will slay him as soon as he ceases to be of use in finding the Ring, Sam has fought the monstrous spider Shelob, has eluded the pursuit of the orcs, and has dispatched a few of them to their merited deaths.

Finally he finds Frodo in the upper room of a small filthy cell, naked, half-conscious, lying in a heap in a corner. “Frodo! Mr. Frodo, my dear!” he cries. “It’s Sam, I’ve come!” With a bluff tenderness he clasps him to his breast, assuring him that it is really he, Sam, in the flesh.

Still groggy, Frodo can hardly believe it, but he clutches at his friend. It seems to him all the tissue of a dream—that an orc with a whip has turned into Sam—and it is all mixed up with the sound of singing that he thought he heard and tried to answer. “That was me singing,” says Sam, shaking his head and saying that he had all but given up hope of ever finding his friend again. He cradles Frodo’s head, as one would comfort a troubled child.

At that a snigger rises from the audience in the theater. “What, are they gay?”

An ignorant but inevitable response. Shakespeare, or his narrative persona, expressed in his sonnets a passionate love for an unnamed and not too loyal young man, so Shakespeare must have been homosexual—despite the absence of evidence, and despite his persona’s explicit statement in sonnet 20 that the young man’s sexual accoutrements are of no interest (or use) to him whatever.

The bachelor Abe Lincoln long shared a bed with his closest friend, Joshua Speed, and later wrote letters expressing, with what seems a touch of self-deprecating irony, his fear that he would be lonely once Speed had taken a wife. Lincoln therefore must be homosexual. No matter that men (and women too) commonly shared beds, and also commonly spoke of their friendship in strong, earthy language that now embarrasses. The poet Edmund Spenser, celebrator of his own wedding in one of the most brilliant poems in English, used to share a bed with his friend and fellow scholar at Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey. There you go.

“Your love to me was finer than the love of women,” laments David in a public song, when he learns of the death of his friend Jonathan. We know why. The godlike hero Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu walk hand in hand into the dark forest of Humbaba. No wonder then that at Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh will weep inconsolably, letting his hair grow long, flinging away his royal robes, and leaving the city to wander in the wilderness.

One Tiny Insight

For many years I have smiled as that ballast known as the Academic Left have taken one tiny linguistic insight, that the sounds we use to denote things are usually arbitrary, and have elevated it to the single law of the universe. It was not a terribly great insight, nor was it at all new.

Plato had broached it in the Cratylus, associating it tentatively with sophism, and having Socrates argue, I fear not convincingly, against it. Dante seems to have accepted it: In the Paradiso Adam himself states with shocking matter of fact that even the name for God had already changed before that unpleasantness at the Tower of Babel, implying that no particular human word to denote him takes precedence over any other. Man’s ability to speak, says Adam, is the work of Nature, but as for the actual words we use, they lie within man’s choice:

Before I went to banishment below
“ Yah” was the name on earth for the high Good
that now has clothed me in the robe of joy;

And then they called it “El”—right that they should,
for mortal use is like a branch’s leaves:
where one may fall, another springs to bud.”

Even so, Dante does not assign language to the arbitrary human will alone, but also to Nature, the agent of God’s providence. The medieval dictum nomina sunt consequentia rerum—names are consequent upon the things they name—does not hold true, if man expects the causal link between thing and name to be clear and determined, but does hold true, in the mysterious working out of God’s order. If a leaf cannot fall without the will of God, then neither can the leaf be named; our language assumes its place in the providential chances and changes of time.

Thus Adam’s discussion of linguistic change is preceded by his revelation of how long ago and how many years he lived, and then by his revelation of how long he and Eve managed to enjoy the bliss of Eden before they were cast out forever: six hours, from dawn till noon.

Six hours is not long—and that is part of Dante’s point. Man’s loss of Eden and his consequent aging and death may appear as senseless as the change of a word, arbitrary and fleeting. Yet neither the loss of Eden nor the fall of the word, even of the holy word Yah, escapes the governance of Nature and the wisdom of God.

Arbitrary Words

And that order is what the linguists a sinistra object to. For their hearts lie not with words but with what the apparent arbitrariness of words can achieve, if that arbitrariness is assigned to everything else in human life. Again, they are partly correct. Language is a fit metaphor, or a powerful structuring concept, for our customs. As Dante saw, language is itself a custom.

Thus we have a language for the formal introduction of a stranger: the clipped “How do you do” with a nod and a firm handshake, for American men; the automatic smile, head tilt, “It’s nice to meet you,” and presentation of hand, for American women. We know that a certain style of sign outside of a restaurant means you had better go home and put on a tie (or take it off and leave it in the car). We know that if a grown man and woman are walking hand in hand, they are not brother and sister, though there seems nothing inherently untoward about brothers and sisters holding hands. We know what the teenage boy’s modest crew cut means, when all around him are dyeing their spiked hair grape.

Thus the Left proceed syllogistically. Language is utterly arbitrary. Social customs form a kind of language, and sexual customs form a very powerful language. Therefore social customs are arbitrary, and therefore sexual customs are equally arbitrary.

There is no more reason, essentially, for a man’s choosing a woman as his mate rather than a man, than there was for the Hebrews to name God Yah rather than El. The man may of course want children, and having a woman for a mate would obviously facilitate that desire, but that is as it happens. Sexual difference is no more an essential part of the relations between man and woman, and of a man’s sexual being as a man, than the vowel “ah” is an essential part of the name of God.

A Faulty Premise

Well, the syllogism is faulty: Even its major premise, that language is utterly arbitrary, seems to be contradicted on the level of phonology, or sound, by the human wish to use words that correspond delightfully with the objects they denote. Thus it is hard to imagine a language in which a word like “lalala” means “repulsive” or “muscular” or “impenetrable.”

Nor is language arbitrary on the level of syntax, the ordering of our thoughts by means of words. No language has as its typical sentence pattern Object-Verb-Subject; not one. The human mind does not like to work that way, probably because the human mind recognizes an order in actions, namely that some subject does some verb to some object, and likes its sentences somehow to respect the order.

Nor is it arbitrary in its semantics, the relation of words to meanings. That is because language has that annoying habit of referring to what the typical human being perceives as unitary things belonging to a recognizable kind. The typical human being, in his solid naiveté, believes that words have something or other (perhaps something mysterious or other) to do with things, with nature. No language invents a word to describe the union of the top half of your uncle in Milwaukee with the bottom half of your uncle in Baton Rouge.

But even if it were true that our spoken language were utterly arbitrary, it does not follow that the language of our customs is, or that our sense of good and evil is, or that the idea of human nature is. That is an unwarranted leap from phonology to anthropology to moral philosophy to metaphysics. It is a leap the Left makes precisely to attack the notion of order.

A strange double life they lead: professing fascination with language, yet abandoning any deep study of it; using it instead as a tool for dismantling the idea of natural order, or, since even academics abhor a vacuum, using it as a tool for establishing their own order and imposing it on everyone else. The language war of the early feminists—a war they have won resoundingly, despite the occasional embarrassing rout (anyone remember “waitron”?)—was about the ushering in of a new order, or rather a new and unnatural disorder. They were wrong who thought it was only a silly argument over words.

Pansexual Language

What does all this have to do with sex, or with friendship? A great deal, I am afraid. The pansexualists—they who believe in the libertarian dogma that what two consenting adults do with their privates in private is nobody’s business—understand that the language had to be changed to assist the realization of their dream, and also that the realization of their dream would change the world, because it would change the language for everyone else.

Language is not language if it is not communal; it is a neat trick of political abracadabra to argue for an individual’s right to change the very medium of our thought and our social intercourse. If clothing is optional on a beach, then that is a nude beach. It cannot be a nude beach for some and an ordinary beach for others; to wear clothes at that beach at the very least means something that it had not meant before. If you may paint your house phosphorescent orange and violet, and you persuade a couple of your neighbors to do likewise, you no longer have what anybody would call a historic neighborhood.

If all of Kate’s friends leap into bed with whatever male gives them a hearty dinner at Burger King and a round of miniature golf, and Kate chooses instead to kiss her date once on the cheek and leave him on the porch, she will suggest to everybody that she is a prude. She may be, or may not be; she may be more firmly in the grip of lust than they are, for all we know, and may just detest the boy. But her actions have connotations they did not use to have.

Imagine a world wherein the taboo has been broken and incest is loudly and defiantly celebrated. Your wife’s unmarried brother puts his hand on your daughter’s shoulder. That gesture, once innocent, must now mean something, or at least suggest something. If the uncle were wise and considerate, he would not make it in the first place. You see a father hugging his teenage daughter as she leaves the car to go to school. The possibility flits before your mind. The language has changed, and the individual can do nothing about it.

By now the reader must see the point. I might say that of all human actions there is nothing more powerfully public than what two consenting adults do with their bodies behind (we hope) closed doors. Open homosexuality, loudly and defiantly celebrated, changes the language for everyone. If a man throws his arm around another man’s waist, it is now a sign—whether he is on the political right or the left, whether he believes in biblical proscriptions of homosexuality or not.

If a man cradles the head of his weeping friend, the shadow of suspicion must cross your mind. If a teenage boy is found skinny-dipping with another boy—not five of them, but two—it is the first thing you will think, and you will think it despite the obvious fact that until swim trunks were invented this was exactly how two men or boys would go for a swim.

Because language is communal, the individual can choose to make a sign or not. He cannot determine what the sign is to mean, not to others, not to the one he signals, and not even to himself.

Friendship Without Blood

Friendship and the signs upon which it must subsist are in a bad way. I will focus on the friendships of men, since that is what I know about; many comparable things might be said about the friendships of women. We still have the word “friendship,” and we still have something of the reality, but it is distant, dilute, bloodless. For modern American men, friendship is no longer forged in the heat of battle, or in the dust of the plains as they drive their herds across half a continent, or in the choking air of a coalmine, or even in the cigar smoke of a debating club.

That is partly because our lives, for better and for worse, no longer involve the risk and the sweat that was the cement of deep friendship. No man will help hew the oaks for our cabin, because we no longer live in cabins. No man will stand by as we jump overboard to set the trawling net, because we have no boat and set no net; we live too comfortably for that. Under such fortunate circumstances, we need all the more the camaraderie and intellectual risk of the club.

But gentlemen’s clubs have vanished or have been sued out of existence. (The Citadel is not the Citadel, as the woman lawyer who sued it to death herself admitted, unwittingly and with amazing intellectual amnesia; on Monday arguing that her client wanted the same experience the young men then enjoyed, and after her victory on Tuesday crowing that a student’s experience at the Citadel would now be forever changed.) More than ever do men need to come together to eat and drink and argue and think, because more than ever their work separates them from each other; but now they are virtually forbidden to do so.

It is but more of the devastation wrought by the sexual revolution. That we fail to see it as such is no surprise: Naturally, when we think of that recrudescence of paganism, we think first of its damage to the family and to relations between men and women. We think of divorce, pornography, unwed motherhood, abortion, and suicidally falling birthrates. But the sexual revolution has also nearly killed male friendship as devoted to anything beyond drinking and watching sports; and the homosexual movement, a logically inevitable result of forty years of heterosexual promiscuity and feminist folly, bids fair to finish it off and nail the coffin shut.

What is more, those who will suffer most from this movement are precisely those whom our society, stupidly considering them little more than pests or dolts, has ignored. I mean boys.

Safely Shared Beds

How is this so? Return to the example of Lincoln. His age was surely not more tolerant of homosexuality or of sexual deviancy generally than is ours: Accounts of the Civil War show young men brought to the brink of blackest despair by their inability to break the habit of self-abuse. How, then, if deviancy was such a reproach, could Lincoln risk sharing a bed with a man and having the fact be publicly known? But that is precisely the point. Only in such a case is the bed-sharing possible.

I am sorry to have to use strong language, but only when sodomy is treated as a matter of course for everyone (as in the institutionalized buggery of boys and young men in ancient Sparta) or when it is met with such opprobrium that nobody would assume that a good man would engage in it, could Lincoln and his friend share that bed without suffering ridicule. The stigma against sodomy cleared away ample space for an emotionally powerful friendship that did not involve sexual intercourse, exactly as the stigma against incest allows for the physical and emotional freedom of a family.

In Japan, families bathe together, and it is considered a mark of the highest honor—the deepest trust—to be invited, as an outsider, to join them. This custom is only made possible by the assumption that any sexual dalliance among family members, including anyone invited to “belong” to the family, is absolutely out of the question.

The converse is also true. If your society depends upon such emotionally powerful friendships—if the fellow feeling of comrades in arms is necessary for your survival—then you can protect the opportunity for such friendships in only two ways. You may go the route of Sparta, or you may demand on pain of expulsion from the group that such friendships will not be sexualized. Essentially you must do for all-male groups exactly what a husband and wife must do with regard to other members of the opposite sex. Adulterers and sodomites there will be—but they must be called so, that we may have chaste spouses and bosom friends.

How does this latest twist of the sexual revolution hurt boys in particular? Some will say that it leaves them more vulnerable to be preyed upon by older men, and I have no doubt that this is true, given the psychological springs of male homosexuality, given the historical examples of ancient Greece and samurai Japan (among others), and given the terrible fact that many homosexual men were themselves abused as boys.

But I do not wish to overemphasize this; certainly most homosexual men abide by the law. I mean something quite different.

Men’s Signs

The prominence of male homosexuality changes the language for teenage boys. It is absurd and cruel to say that the boy can ignore it. Even if he would, his classmates will not let him. All boys need to prove that they are not failures. They need to prove that they are on the way to becoming men—that they are not going to relapse into the need to be protected by, and therefore identified with, their mothers.

Societies used to provide them with clear and public ways to do this. The Plains Indians would insert hooks into the flesh of their thirteen-year-old braves and hang them in the sun by those hooks, for hours—a test of endurance and courage. At his bar-mitzvah the Jewish boy reads from the Holy Torah and announces, publicly, that on this day he has become a man.

In our carelessness we have taken such signs away from boys and left them to fend for themselves. Two choices remain: The boys must live without public recognition of their manhood and without their own certainty of it, or they must invent their own rituals and signs.

And here the sexual revolution comes to peddle its poison. The single incontrovertible sign that the boy can now seize on is that he has “done it” with a girl, and the earlier and more regularly and publicly he does it, the safer and surer he will feel. If sex is easy to find, and if (as mothers of good-looking teenage boys will testify) the girls themselves seek it out, then you must have a pressing and publicly recognized excuse for not having sex. To avoid scandal—think of it!—you must be protected by your being a linebacker on the football team, or by being too homely for any girl to be interested in you.

A boy who does not agree to a girl’s demand for sex will be tagged with homosexuality. She will slander him herself. Ask teenagers; they will tell you. But even a linebacker known as a rake will not dare to venture into the dangerous territory of too-close association with the wrong sort. He, too, will avoid the close male friendship. The popular and athletic boys will thus have their tickets punched, while the others live under suspicion, alienated from the other boys, from the girls, and from one another.

This must happen. In large part, it has already happened. But we must try to remember when it was not so, if we are going to gauge what we have lost.

So far, I have lamented the attenuation of male friendships, which suffer under a terrible pincers attack: The libertinism of our day thrusts boys and girls together long before they are intellectually and emotionally ready for it, and at the same time the defiant promotion of homosexuality makes the natural and once powerful friendships among boys virtually impossible.

Anyone can count up the resulting cases of venereal disease and teen pregnancies. A few social analysts of more penetrating insight can note what is unquantifiable, the despair among our young people, the dullness in the eye, the feeling that people are never to be trusted, that to fall in love is to be a contemptible fool.

Audacious Men

Yet the most daunting task of all is to mark the good things that this sexual precocity has smothered in the very birth. It is one thing to say that it has made friendships among boys more distant and difficult, and to suppose that that is a bad thing for the emotional lives of those boys. It is quite another—and it takes someone willing to see through our jaded dalliance with androgyny—to see that the loss of such friendships stunts the boys intellectually and goes a long way towards depriving everybody of the benefits that such intellectual development used to provide.

That is, after all, one of the great things that male friendships are for. Consider how strong and audacious are the emotions of the young man. Suppose these are not directed towards sexual liaisons with young women, towards playing house. They do not therefore cease to exist; they must find some object. In the past that object would be the world and the group’s conquest of it.

The boys might get together to build a car from scratch. They might set up a series of telegraph connections. They might pitch themselves into learning everything they could about aircraft carriers and bombers. They might form a club to read Nietzsche, or to read the Scriptures, or to read both—audacity at this age can be wildly inconsistent. They might attach themselves to an acknowledged teacher, as did the young men of Athens who followed the chaste Socrates, or, dare I say, the young men of Palestine who followed Jesus. They might form guilds to ensure that the men they paid to teach them actually followed through on their end of the bargain—and thus would they create the medieval university. They might invent jazz music. They might rob banks.

They might do a thousand things fascinatingly creative and dangerously destructive, but one thing they would not do. They would not, as our boys do now, stagnate. They would be alive.

Edison formed such attachments—as early as age thirteen he had sought and found the men who could teach him all they knew about the telegraph. Louis Agassiz and his comrades defied death in mapping and studying glaciers. George Gershwin one day left one group of buddies playing stickball in the streets to go to the house of the boy who would be his lifelong friend and associate, Maxie Rosenzweig (later Max Rosen), from whom he learned the wonders of music. Lewis and Tolkien and their friends formed the Inklings and set their stamp on literary Christianity for a century.

Read the correspondence of Louis Pasteur, and you will come away thinking that the entire edifice of chemical research in France and Germany was built upon male friendship, the bonds of comrades going forth to battle. The language of these letters, to and from dozens of fellow scientists, is powerful and unashamedly personal. “I am touched by your acknowledgment of my deep and sincere affection for you,” writes the elder chemist Jean-Jacque Biot to Pasteur,

and I thank you for it. But whilst keeping your attachment for me as I preserve mine for you, let me for the future rejoice in it in the secret recesses of my heart and of yours. The world is jealous of friendships however disinterested, and my affection for you is such that I wish people to feel that they honor themselves by appreciating you, rather than that they should know that you love me and that I love you.

What man has the space to feel anything comparable now, or the language to express it?

Failed Boys

Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them?

For good reason boys used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They know, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship cannot subsist otherwise. If the company of girls is made possible, then the company of girls becomes a necessity, if only to avoid having to explain to others and to oneself why one would ever prefer the company of one’s own sex. Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether—criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems.

And what about the emotional damage? We learn from researchers who are willing to be derided by the sexual politicians that one of the causes of male homosexuality is precisely the disappointed desire, in certain boys, to form strong and physically expressed friendships with other boys. In our careless cruelty we have failed to protect all those whose feelings, as teenagers, are confused or ambiguous. If a teenage boy knows that nothing can happen between him and another boy, and if he knows that everybody else, including the other boy, knows it too, that knowledge must provide him the assurance that he can draw close to his friend.

He can “know” that it means only friendship, even if in another and fouler world it might mean more. He can rest easy with himself, because the meaning of his gestures and actions depends not on his confused and turbulent feelings, but upon an objective linguistic fact. Such a young man can thus negotiate his way through troubled times, fulfilling his need—and, if he has had a cruel father, it may be an aching need—for friendship, without corrupting his sexuality and without rejecting the possibility that he will become a true father and husband.

I do not know what agonies of loneliness and insecurity Abraham Lincoln, who did indeed have a cold father, suffered. But I assert that his lifeline for not becoming homosexual was the very same friendship that our pansexualists say was proof that he was. In the name of protecting homosexuals, we ignore the feelings of boys and snatch from them their dwindling opportunities to forge just such friendships whereof homosexual relations are a delusive mimicry.

Neither Frodo Nor David

On three great bonds of love do all cultures depend: the love between man and woman in marriage; the love between a mother and her child; and the camaraderie among men, a bond that used to be strong enough to move mountains. The first two have suffered greatly; the third has almost ceased to exist.

Think about that friendship, the next time you see the perpetual adolescents in feather boas as they march down Main Street, making their sexual proclivities known to everybody whether everybody cares or not. With every chanted slogan and every blaring sign, they crowd out the words of friendship, they appropriate the healthy gestures of love between man and man. Confess—has it not left you uneasy even to read the words of that last sentence?

What do the paraders achieve, with their public promotion of homosexuality? They come out of the closet, and hustle a lot of good and natural feelings back in. They indulge in garrulity, and consequently tie the tongues and chill the hearts of men, who can no longer feel what they ought, or speak what they feel.

Reader, the next time you feel moved to pity the delicate man in the workstation near you, give a thought also to an adolescent somewhere, one among uncounted millions, a kid with acne maybe, a kid with an idea or a love, who needs a friend. Know then that your tolerance for the flambeau, which is little more than a self-congratulating cowardice, or your easy and poorly considered approval of the shy workmate’s request that he be allowed to “marry” his partner, means that the unseen boy will not find that friend, and that the idea and the love will die.

No doubt about this: If you are a modern man, a half-man, many such ideas and loves have already died in you. For as much as you can admire them wistfully, from a half-understanding distance, you can be neither Frodo nor Sam, nor the man who created them. You dare not follow Agassiz, alone, to the Arctic. You will not weep for Jonathan. You once were acquainted with Enkidu, but that was all. Do not even mention John the Apostle.

Friendship, rest in peace. •

Work Friends

by Anthony Esolen
In our day, if any friendship is to be had, it will be had at work. Even women seem to need to earn a wage, not always for the wage or for the love of the particular task remunerated, but for escape from being the only person at home in an empty neighborhood—a perverse development, this.
I have good friends at the school where I teach, friends far closer to me than most that are made in academe. I thank God for them. Even so, friendships that center upon the modern workplace—not upon a farm or a range or a street or a town rampart, or down a mine or in a boat—can be flimsy things. We like someone at work, we might have lunch now and then, might even visit his house once a year, but it seldom goes beyond that. We share gossip, political opinions, the chatter about the local ball club.
We get along. And if he died in a car wreck tomorrow, we’d shed a tear, and would be sincerely disturbed by it, maybe for a week. Jonathan’s lament would strike us as absurd; Gilgamesh’s throwing over his kingship, childish, even obscene. After all, the separation might not have occurred because of death. He might have moved to another town to take a better job, or he might have changed shifts. We ourselves might move.
One sure sign of the desiccation of friendship is that the word is used to describe relations between a man and a woman at work, relations that involve at most a chatty raillery and a genuine, though always emotionally distant, appreciation of the other’s wit or intelligence or good nature.
Such “friends” cease to think of each other instantly upon leaving the lunch table, nor could they imagine what it might be like not to be able to imagine life without the other. They don’t have to imagine life without the other. Essentially, they live quite well without the other, and do so all the time, even when they are in the other’s company.
Outside of a few old haunts, like a fire-station or a road crew, friendship in its fullness is not to be found: the feeling that you and I, fools that we are, have always been together and always will be, that before you I can be utterly frank or cheerfully gross or plunged in the depth of grief or giddy with triumph. Men do not talk about such things; in some ways, men will easily resign themselves to the loneliness.
But I fear that more than their emotional health hangs in the balance. No civilization has been built without that foundation of male camaraderie directed toward civic ends: not Athens, not Rome, not Japan, not India. It remains to be seen whether any civilization can long endure without it. Looking at what used to be our cities, I’d say not. •

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of The Ironies of Faith (ISI Books), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery), and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books). He has also translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (Johns Hopkins Press) and Dante's The Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Adam and Eve: Clarifying Again What Is at Stake

2011-09-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

Recent evangelical discussion concerning Adam and Eve has served at least one good purpose — it has helped to clarify what is theologically at stake in the debate. The recent report by National Public Radio [NPR] alerted the larger secular culture to the debate, but the debate is hardly new.

What is new, however, is the candid admission on the part of some that the denial of a historical Adam requires a new understanding of the Bible’s basic story — and thus of the Gospel as well.

One of my recent articles, “False Start? The Controversy Over Adam and Eve Heats Up,” made this point clearly. As I argued there, the denial of a historical Adam means not only the rejection of a clear biblical teaching, but also the denial of the biblical doctrine of the Fall, leading to a very different way of telling the story of the Bible and the meaning of the Gospel.

By the way, those who try to deny that Genesis requires the affirmation of a historic Adam as a real and singular human individual (arguing, for example, that the Hebrew word translated “Adam” means only “the man”) must face the fact that the Genesis narrative clearly presents Adam as a singular individual who acts, speaks, marries, reproduces, and is listed even in the genealogy of Jesus. Hebrew vocabulary offers no escape hatch from historicity.

The main point of my “False Start” article, however, was that the denial of a historical Adam severs the essential point made by Paul in Romans 5:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. [Romans 5:12-17]

This is the Apostle Paul’s way of telling the story of the Bible and the meaning of the Gospel. If Adam was not a historical figure, and thus if there was no Fall into sin and all humanity did not thus sin in Adam, then Paul’s telling of the Gospel is wrong. Furthermore, Paul was simply mistaken to believe that Adam had been a real human being.

Thus, the denial of a historical Adam means that we would have to tell the Bible’s story in a very different way than the church has told it for centuries as the Bible has been read, taught, preached, and believed. If there is no historical Adam, then the Bible’s metanarrative is not Creation-Fall-Redemption-New Creation, but something very different.

To his credit, Brian McLaren affirms this very truth and agrees that the denial of Adam’s historicity requires a new way of telling the biblical story. But — and this is the essential point — he thinks this would be a very good thing.

Responding to my article, he wrote this:

I firmly agree (in an ironic sort of way) with the good Dr. Mohler. I think the conventional Constantinian “understanding of the gospel metanarrative and the Bible’s storyline” is wrong, misguided, and dangerous. We do in fact need “an entirely new understanding” - new, that is, compared to the status quo, but actually more ancient and primary than the conventional approach. In the process we’d better learn what a metanarrative actually is and realize that it’s not actually a great label to apply to the gospel … “the Bible’s storyline” is much better. That’s what I’ve been writing and speaking about for the last decade, and hope to keep advocating for and contributing to for the next.

Indeed, McLaren has been writing about and calling for just such a theological revolution. In his 2010 book, A New Kind of Christianity, McLaren explicitly denies that the Bible reveals Adam as a historical figure. He also denies that we should believe in a Fall into sin that leads to a divine verdict against sinful humanity.

In his words, speaking of the Genesis accounts:

It is patently obvious to me that these stories aren’t intended to be taken literally, although it didn’t used to be so obvious, and I know it won’t be so now for many of my readers. It is also powerfully clear to me that these nonliteral stories are still to be taken seriously and mimed for their rich meaning, because they instill time-tested, multilayered wisdom — through deep mythic language — about how our world came to be what it has become.

Writing about Genesis 3, he states:

In this world, there is not one isolated moment of ontological shift from state to story: it’s all story from beginning to end, and likely before and after as well. God doesn’t respond to a loss of perfect status with a furious promise of eternal condemnation, damnation, and destruction. God doesn’t pronounce the perfect state ruined and the planet destined for geocide. The experiment is not a failure.

A similar point was made by the writer known as RJS at “Jesus Creed,” the blog of New Testament scholar Scot McKnight. RJS rejected my claim that a right understanding of Adam is necessary for a correct understanding of Christ and his atonement. “I reject categorically the notion that having the right view of Adam (or any specific view of Adam) is a requirement for having the right view of Christ and his redeeming work in the world,” she wrote.

She is certainly right to argue that our understanding of creation is inherently and irreducibly Christological — based in texts such as John 1 and Colossians 1. Nevertheless, this does not reduce in any way the importance of the Bible’s affirmation of Adam as a historical figure and the Fall as a historical event.

Yet, she also writes this:

Frankly, I don’t think that the incarnation is a solution to a problem created by our original forefathers, whether two unique individuals created from the dust or a community who evolved into humans. I think that the incarnation was part of God’s plan from the beginning.

This is just stunning. The Old Testament clearly promises the coming of the One who will save his people from their sins. The incarnation is impossible for us to understand in biblical terms without the central affirmation that Christ came to redeem His people from sin. As Paul writes in Galatians 4:4-5, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”

In the context of God’s eternality, omniscience, and sovereignty, it is undeniable that “the incarnation was part of God’s plan from the beginning.” But it is also true that the creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall of humanity into sin were also parts of God’s plan from the beginning. This truth (set within the context of God’s eternality, omniscience, and sovereignty) has been affirmed, by the way, by both Calvinists and classical Arminians. Based upon the authority of the Scriptures, this has been the faith of the church.

I do genuinely appreciate an honest debate on these issues of undeniable and incalculable theological importance. This debate has served to clarify, once again, what is at stake.

I can only end again where I ended the “False Start” article:

The denial of a historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel.

If we do not know how the story of the Gospel begins, then we do not know what that story means. Make no mistake: a false start to the story produces a false grasp of the Gospel.

Stop Giving One Hundred Percent!

2011-09-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

College students are encouraged to live a balanced life and then each department demands one hundred percent effort. This hypocrisy is not intentional, but a result of departmental myopia. Most professors can only see the importance of their own area.

I once had a colleague tell me that the rigorous general education of Torrey had lowered his students GPA by three or four percentage points. The fact that this student was still getting an “A” did not matter. Liberal studies were distracting from the major, because one hundred percent effort was not possible.

Of course, Torrey tutors can assign the greatest texts ever written and assume that every student has the time to read them through at least thrice!

Here is a truth: you cannot give one hundred percent to the job, the Church, the family, and your hobbies. Anybody that is interesting will have to be “worse” at some things in order to do other things at all.

The parent who knows she can only do so much, because her Church work or reading has taken some of her time and psychic energy will never be “supermom,” but she might be the person God made her to be. We are not our jobs, even the “jobs for Jesus” that can be just as all consuming as anything else.

Of course, part of the problem is that we fill our lives with things we should not be doing. Most of us watch too much television or spend too much time (ahem!) on social media. Having a break from “doing” is vital, but filling up our rest time with more activities where we strain to grow proficient is not very restful.

My God-given nature and talents require filling several different roles and my time and energy to give those roles is limited. As a result, I can only be as good as I can be in a balanced life at any of those tasks, not as good as “me with only one thing to do” could be.

I chose to marry and when I did I chose to write less. I am not sure, however, that I chose to write less well, because being in love with Hope has given me much of what I have to say. Still everyday comes a reminder that there is a book to be read that will not be read thoroughly, a book to be written that will get delayed, and a class to prepare that cannot get my full attention.

Love demands everything, but there are many loves in my life. I must “fall short” of a false ideal and accept my limits.

This is hard to accept in myself, but easy to see as good for others. I enjoy watching relaxed amateurs do something “pretty well.” Every year my wife and I see hardworking Torrey students put on excellent amateur theatrical productions. We also go attend professional theater in cities around the world. We enjoy Torrey Theater as much as the best professional groups . . . just in a different way.

Watching friends do their best (in the context of their lives) with something that is not their paid job is joyful. We root for them as we never do professionals. Charge thirty pounds for a ticket in London and we expect to love the play. Ask for five dollars at Biola University and we expect to love the performers.

The driven theater group with delusions of Broadway may turn out a better performance, or not, but they are surely not having much fun. Watching amateurs have no fun is unlovely . . . worse than a few missed notes or lines from a more relaxed group.

Fun is underrated. It is not the perfect sign that things are going well, but it is a good sign. If I am not enjoying something that is good for me, it is a sign that there is something out of balance in me or that what seems good for me isn’t.

Something is wrong when the good, true, and beautiful is not enjoyable.

What of pain?

There are two kinds of pain. There is the almost-enjoyable and short-lived pain of accomplishment that takes us to the greater pleasure. Learning another language is like this. Then there is pain that comes because of sin. This pain was not God’s best intention, but is a result of my failure and the failures around me.

Sometimes I cause my own bad pain by demanding more from myself than God wanted me to demand. Instead of enjoying my workout like a forty-eight year old can, I demand my body respond as it did at twenty-eight and am miserable when it does not. So folly turns a pleasure into a pain.

Mostly we should press through pain for joy. If there is never any joy, then we should seek wisdom from others. We may have medical problems (like biologically based depression) or we may have sin in our life that needs to be purged.

Or it could be that equally hurting people are turning what should be joyful into a grind.

This doesn’t squash excellence, but neither does it encourage it.

A man or woman can be motivated by many things. Achilles became an excellent warrior fueled by rage, but it cost him his beloved friend. Napoleon used dreams of glory to carry him to Imperial sway, but it cost him his character and Europe her peace. Lenin used resentment to become ruler of Russia, but he destroyed the Russia he wanted to rule. Don Giovanni used twisted love and gained power, but lost his soul.

What should drive any quest for excellence?

True love of a thing that Love Himself gave me to do as part of my nature. These gifts of God stir passion in me and this passion drives me to a goal. What a man will do in terror for a time, he will do naturally for love and do it longer.

Of course sometimes my broken self, selfish and demanding, does not love what it should. At that moment duty, the higher love for what should be instead of what is, kicks into gear to carry me forward. This stern moment will not last forever, because over time Jesus will teach my soul to love what it should.

I am not very good at much, but I am becoming. Becoming who? I am learning to fill the little niche in the cosmos God made me to fill. I am becoming as happy as I can be, but no happier.

Join me!