Ask Dr. Torrey

By R. A. Torrey
Scriptorium Daily

“Are we in the time of which our Lord speaks when He says, ‘When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh?” (Luke 21:28).

There are many things that would seem to indicate that we are. Certainly men’s hearts are “fainting for fear and for expectation of the things which are coming on the world” (v.26). Certainly, there is upon the earth “distress of nations with perplexity” (v. 25). But it is never safe to conclude that because in some ways our times closely resemble the picture of the last times as given in the Scriptures (see, for example, 2 Tim. 3:1-5) that therefore our Lord will immediately come.

Time and time again in the history of the world since the ascension of our Lord, many things have seemed to indicate the very near approach of our Lord. Martin Luther, for example, in his day saw many things that were then occurring on the earth what appeared to him to be indications that the coming of the Lord was very near. So have man other mighty men of God thought throughout the centuries. And they were not mistaken; the ones who were mistaken were those that thought that the coming of our Lord was so far away that they let it have no practical effect upon their lives.

There is reason to hope that the coming of our Lord is very near, but we are not warranted on that account in saying that He will come within a certain specified time, nor even in teaching positively that He will come during our lifetime. The entire matter of setting dates is strictly forbidden in the Word of God (see, for example, Acts. 1:7). In the light of what our Lord says in Acts 1:7 anyone who tries to set times or seasons is going directly counter to the revealed will of God. There is reason to hope that our Lord will soon come and certainly every intelligent Christian heart must cry, “Even so, Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20). But there is no ground for prophesying that He will come at once or even that He will come in the lifetime of the present generation.

“How may we know that the soul of the unregenerate is immortal (in the sense of never ending, conscious existence) in view of 1 Timothy 6:16 and the fact that eternal life is promised only to believers in Jesus Christ?”

The soul of the unregenerate is not naturally immortal, but all men get resurrection and endless existence in Christ. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:22, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” which clearly means, when taken in its context, that as all descendants of Adam lost life in Adam, so in Christ shall all the same persons be made alive, i.e. they shall all be raised (as the context shows).

Whether this resurrection is a resurrection unto “eternal life” or whether it is a resurrection unto everlasting shame and contempt (see Dan. 12:2); or to put it in another way, whether it is a “resurrection of life” or a “resurrection of judgment” (see John 5:29) depends altogether upon what those who are raised have done with the Christ in whom they get resurrection. We must furthermore remember that “eternal life” does not mean merely endless existence; it has to do with the quality of existence as much as with its duration (see John 17:3). Existence is not life (in this sense). We are told in 1 Timothy 5:6 that “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.” She exists bust she has not life. All persons, good and bad, believers and infidels, get endless existence in Christ, only believers get “eternal life” in Christ.

“Was Cornelius a saved man before Peter was sent to him? In other words, would he have been lost if Peter had not gone to him?”

Cornelius was not a saved man before Peter went to him. He was distinctly told when he was directed to send for Peter that Peter would speak to him words “whereby thou and thy house shall be saved” (Acts 11:13, 14). Cornelius was a sincere seeker after truth and as such was “acceptable to God” as one to whom the way of life should be revealed.

It is utterly futile to ask what would have become of him if Peter had not gone to him; for Peter did go to him. Cornelius was seeking light; he went to God for light, his prayer was heard (Acts 10:4), as the prayer of every sincere seeker will be heard, and God sent Peter to him and he was saved, and so God will send some messenger to declare the Gospel to every one who is in Cornelius’ position. The trouble with men out of Christ is that they are not seeking the light. Indeed, as a rule they are doing their best to avoid the light.

Originally from The King’s Business “Questions and Answers” by R.A. Torrey, July 1914, pp. 402, 418

Finding Free Money

By Don Steinmann
Don Steinmann's Investment Tip of the Week

There is a lot of money out there the has been turned over to state or federal government that might have your name on it. If a bank account was closed, a relative died who has some government bonds, a rebate check couldn't be delivered, it's turned over to state or federal agencies and held waiting for the owner to show up. Fortunately it's free and easy to find out if you have some money coming.

To check for EE US government bonds that are being held by the Treasury, visit www.treasuryhunt.gov. This includes bonds held by deceased relatives and bonds that have matured and are no longer paying interest.

To look across many states for property held by many state governments at one time, go to www.missingmoney.com. and select the 'all states' option.

But the best place to search is www.unclaimed.org. Click on the map for your state, and follow the directions on how to search for your missing money.

I just found some cash my sister and her son were owed by doing a quick search. Look for all your friends and relatives even if there is nothing for you. You might get a nice dinner out of it if you call them and tell them the government owes them money!

Q&A: Soul and Spirit, The Mark of Cain, This Generation

By R. A. Torrey
Scriptorium Daily

Please explain the difference between soul and spirit.

The Bible clearly teaches that man possesses not a two-fold nature as it is ordinarily put but a three-fold nature, not merely soul and body but Spirit, Soul and Body (1 Thess. 5:23), though in some instances what is true of the spirit seems to be spoken of the soul.

The soul is the result of the union of the spirit and the body. We are taught in Genesis 2:7 that God formed man of the dust of the ground, thus his body was produced, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, that is the spirit, and man thus became a living soul.

There are those that maintain that only regenerate men have a spirit, but this position will not stand careful investigation. At the death of the believer the body crumbles into dust, the spirit, the real and essential man departs to be with Christ in conscious blessedness, “absent from the body, at home with the Lord” (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:1-8). What becomes of the soul during the period in which the spirit is absent from the body and before their reunion when the body of the believer is raised at the resurrection, we do not seem to be told.

It is difficult to distinguish in every instance between the soul and spirit. They are well nigh indivisible and inseparable, This is brought our very strongly in Hebrews 5:12, R.V. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joint and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

What was the mark that God set upon Cain?

We are not definitely told further than that it was a mark for Cain’s protection; the passage reads,

“And Cain said unto Jehovah, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou has driven me out this day from the face of the ground; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer in the earth; it shall come to pass that whosoever findeth me shall slay me. And Jehovah said unto him, “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold, and Jehovah appointed a sign for Cain lest any finding him should smite him.”

The mark was not a penalty but a protection. In it the grace of God and not the judgment of God was manifested. Of course, in ordinary, every-day speech the mark of Cain is spoken of as if it were a sign of scorn and judgment. This entirely perverts the Scripture teaching.

What is meant by “this generation” in Mark 13:30?

The generation living when these signs mentioned in the context begin. Our Lord is comparing the final culmination of things to the fig tree which when it becomes tender puts forth leaves showing that summer is near at hand. So when the things mentioned in the context begin to come to pass the consummation will be close at hand and the generation then living shall not come to an end until all these things be accomplished.

There is another interpretation that “generation” means race (as the Greek word often does) and that what Jesus taught was that the Jewish race should not pass away until all these things be accomplished. The Jewish race has been wonderfully preserved and there may be this added meaning in the passage, but the interpretation given above is the one that gives the most natural force to the words used and is in strictest accord with the context. It is the view held by Frederick Grant and other eminent commentators who have specialized on the subject of our Lord’s return.

Originally from The King’s Business “Questions and Answers” by R.A. Torrey, June 1914, pp. 353

The Challenge of Moral Machines

By Wendell Wallach
Philosophy Now

If a train continues on its current course, it will kill a workcrew of five down the track. However, a signalman is standing by a switch that can redirect the train to another branch. Unfortunately, a lone worker will be killed if the train is switched to the new track. If you were the signalman, what would you do? What should a computer or robot capable of switching the train to a different branch do?

You are hiding with friends and neighbors in the cellar of a house, while outside enemy solders search. If they find you, it is certain death for everyone. The baby you are holding in your lap begins to cry and won’t be comforted. What do you do? If the baby were under the care of a robot nurse, what would you want the robot to do?

Philosophers are fond of thought experiments that highlight different aspects of moral decision-making. Responses to a series of different dilemmas, each of which poses saving several lives by deliberately taking an action that will sacrifice one innocent life, illustrate clearly that most people’s moral intuitions do not conform to simple utilitarian calculations. In other words, for many situations, respondents do not perceive that the action that will create the greatest good for the greatest number is the right thing to do. Most people elect to switch the train from one track to another in order to save five lives, even when this will sacrifice one innocent person. However, in a different version of this dilemma there is no switch. Instead, you are standing on a bridge beside a large man. You can save five lives down the track by pushing the man to his certain death off the bridge into the path of the onrushing train. With this variant, only a small percentage of people say they would push the man off the bridge.

Introducing a robot into these scenarios raises some intriguing and perhaps disturbing possibilities. For example, suppose that you built a robot who’s standing next to the large man. What actions would you want the robot to consider? Would you have programmed the robot to push the large man off the bridge, even if you would not take this action yourself? Of course, the robot might come up with a different response to achieve a similar end – for example, by jumping off the bridge into the train’s path: a rather unappetizing solution for us humans.

Given that ‘driverless’ trains are already common at airports and in the metro systems of London, Paris, and Copenhagen, it’s not unlikely that a computer system will some day face a challenge similar to the example at the top of this article. While the prospect of a robot nurse’s actions affecting the lives of many is less likely, the development of service robots to help care for the elderly and homebound, and eventually for children, places such scenarios also within the realm of possibility. Of course, computer systems can be responsible for harming people too. Present-day harm to a number of people is most likely to arise from computer systems that control power grids, financial networks, or lethal weapons systems.

(Ro)bots is a term my colleague Colin Allen and I coined to represent both physical robots and virtual agents (bots) roaming within computer networks. The new field of machine morality or machine ethics focuses on the practical challenge of building (ro)bots which explicitly engage in making moral decisions. The values programmed into (ro)bots are largely those of the engineers and designers who build the system, or those of the companies for which they work. For simple applications, the designers and engineers can anticipate all the situations the system will encounter, and can program in appropriate responses. However, some method to explicitly evaluate courses of action will need to be programmed into any (ro)bot likely to encounter circumstances the designers could not anticipate. Machine morality is concerned with the values, principles and mechanisms that support these evaluations. It is not necessary that (ro)bots simulate human moral decision-making. However, the ability to be sensitive to the ethical considerations informing the choices humans make will certainly be front and center as criteria for evaluating the actions of ‘Artificial Moral Agents’ (AMAs).

Ensuring that autonomous (ro)bots are safe has made building moral decision-making faculties into systems a practical necessary. Either that, or we must stop autonomous (ro)bots being developed to encompass an ever-broader array of activities, including weapons systems and service robots.

To date, machine morality has largely been a series of philosophical reflections peppered with a few experiments implementing aspects of moral decision-making within computer systems. But the field touches upon a broad array of philosophical issues and controversies. These include questions regarding:

• The function of ‘top-down’ theories of ethics. Do rule-based ethical theories such as utilitarianism, Kant’s categorical imperative or even Asimov’s laws for robots, provide practical procedures (algorithms) for evaluating whether an action is right?

• (Ro)botic moral development and moral psychology. How might an artificial agent develop knowledge of right and wrong, moral character, and the propensity to act appropriately when confronting new challenges?

• The role of emotions. Will (ro)bots need simulated emotions in order to function as adequate moral agents? How? For what purpose? When? Perhaps more obviously philosophical, how can one reconcile the negative impact of emotions on moral decisions (as emphasized by the Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers) with the motivating power of moral sentiments (David Hume) and the apparent need for emotional intelligence?

• The role of consciousness. Can machines be conscious or have (real) understanding? Would an experience-filled consciousness be necessary for a machine to be a moral agent?

• Criteria for ascribing moral agency. What faculties does an agent require in order to hold it morally responsible or legally liable for its actions? Should society grant rights to those agents it deems responsible for their actions?

Machine ethics approaches these and other questions with a consideration of the practical challenges entailed in building and evaluating AMAs that function within specific contexts. Such practical necessity forces at least some discipline upon philosophical thought experiments. As Daniel Dennett noted in a 1995 paper:

“These roboticists are doing philosophy, but that’s not what they think they’re doing… In philosophers’ thought experiments, the sun always shines, the batteries never go dead, and the actors and props always do exactly what the philosophers’ theories expect them to do. There are no surprises for the creators of the thought experiments, only for their audience or targets. As Ronald de Sousa has memorably said, much of philosophy is ‘intellectual tennis without a net’. Your [roboticists’] thought experiments have nets, but they are of variable height. ‘Proof of concept’ is usually all you strive for.” [from ‘Cog as a Thought Experiment’]

In building AMAs, a dialectic emerges between the theories of philosophers and the experimental testing of these theories within computational systems. Computers are beginning to serve as testbeds for the viability or practicality of various theories about decision-making and ethics.

A Comprehensive Approach to Ethics

Overall, machine ethics is itself a grand thought experiment; an enquiry into whether moral decision-making is computationally tractable. And building moral machines forces both philosophers and engineers to approach ethics in an unusually comprehensive manner.

Philosophers commonly approach moral decision-making as an activity based in the mind’s capacity to reason. Applying rules and duties or considering the consequences of a course of action, is essential for determining which actions are acceptable and which are not. However, for most moral challenges that humans respond to in daily life, the capacity to reason is dependent on a vast reservoir of knowledge and experience. Emotions, conscience, an understanding of what it means to be an actor in a social world and an appreciation of the beliefs, desires and intentions of others, contribute to working rationally through challenges, especially where values conflict. Furthermore, unconscious processes often drive responses to many challenges.

When considering human moral behavior, we tend to take for granted the underlying thought mechanisms that support the ability to reason morally or exercise a virtue such as courage or honesty. However, computer scientists understand that building systems to perform even simple tasks requires the painstaking implementation of the underlying mechanisms that support complex functions. Part of the engineer’s art lies in recognizing what subsystems are necessary and what architecture will support the integration of these subsystems. The control architecture of a (ro)bot ensures that its actions fall within safe parameters. This control architecture must increasingly cover cases where sensitivity to moral considerations is essential. And (ro)boticists have learnt through experience that overlooking even one small consideration can be the difference between whether a project is successful, fails to perform adequately, does not function at all, or functions destructively.

Machine ethics is a multi-disciplinary field that requires input from computer scientists, philosophers, social planners, legal theorists and others. The different contributors to the design of an Artificial Moral Agent are likely to focus on very different aspects of moral decision-making. A moral philosopher would stress the importance of analyzing the computational requirements for implementing a theory of ethics, such as Kantianism, within the (ro)bot. An evolutionary psychologist would underscore the way in which evolution has forged innate propensities to act in a social manner, perhaps even forged an innate moral grammar [see last issue]. A developmental psychologist might seek a method for educating the (ro)bot to be sensitive to moral considerations by building on one stage of learning after another. A mother, on the other hand, might emphasize the importance of the machine being empathetic and caring. Gaining access to and interpreting cases that illuminate the application of law to differing circumstances would be important from the perspective of a lawyer or judge. It would also be desirable for the system to have a way to evaluate its actions and learn from past mistakes.

In particular, a roboticist would want to know how the system can acquire the information it needs to make good decisions. What sensors and memory systems will the (ro)bot need? How will it integrate all its information in order to forge an adequate representation of each situation? Which responses to features in the environment can be built into the system, and how will it recognize challenges it will need to deliberate upon?

The engineers building the (ro)bot will design different modules or subsystems to handle each of these tasks. However, combining these into a working system whose behavior is safe and honors human values requires a more thorough understanding of the mental mechanics of ethical decision-making than presently exists.

People are rather imperfect in their ability to act morally. But even if moral (ro)bots will need some form of emotional intelligence, they need not be subject to the desires, prejudices or fears that get in the way of people honoring their better angels. This raises the possibility that artificial entities might be more moral than people. Furthermore, (ro)bots may be less bounded than humans in the number of options they can consider in response to a moral challenge. They might select a better course of action than their human counterpart could conceive. However, it’s also possible that human moral decision-making is facilitated by something essential that can not be simulated in (ro)bots. Some theorists argue that (ro)bots are not the kind of entities that can be true moral decision-makers because they lack consciousness, free-will, moral sentiments, or a conscience. However, even if this is correct, it does not obviate the practical necessity of implementing some aspects of moral decision-making in robots in order to ensure that their choices and actions do not harm humans or other entities worthy of moral consideration.

Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Supra-Rational

Three broad categories are helpful for teasing out various dimensions of moral decision-making important for machine ethics. These are:

• Top-down approaches. ‘Top-down’ refers the use of rules, standards or theories to guide the design of a system’s control architecture (eg the Ten Commandments, the utilitarian maxim, or even Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’). But what, for example, would be the computational requirements for a computer to follow Asimov’s laws?

• Bottom-up approaches. Rules are not explicitly defined in bottom-up approaches – rather, the system learns about them through experience. In a bottom-up approach, the (ro)bot explores various courses of action, is rewarded for morally praiseworthy behavior, and learns. The theory of evolution inspires some of the bottom-up techniques adopted by computer scientists. With the advent of more sophisticated learning algorithms, theories of moral development, such as those of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan, will inspire other bottom-up approaches to building Advanced Moral Agents.

• Supra-rational faculties. ‘Supra-rational’ refers to mental faculties beyond the ability to reason. Agents require faculties in addition to the capacity to reason in order to act morally in many situations. Emotions, consciousness, social acumen, and embodiment in an environment are among the supra-rational faculties essential for much moral decision-making.

In his robot stories, sci fi writer Isaac Asimov proclaimed three Laws that he said should guide the behavior of robots (don’t allow humans to be harmed, obey humans, and self-preservation). Asimov’s Laws are what many people think of first when they think about rules for robots. However, in story after story Asimov demonstrated that even these three rather intuitive principles arranged hierarchically can lead to countless problems. For example, what should the robot do when it receives conflicting orders from different humans? Asimov’s stories illustrate the limits of any rule-based morality.

While the history of moral philosophy can be read as a long debate about the limitations inherent in the various ethical theories proposed, top-down theories are nevertheless an obvious starting place for discussing the prospects of building AMAs. The Golden Rule, utilitarianism, and Kant’s categorical imperative are among the attempts to make all ethical rules subservient to a single over-riding principle. However, theorists are discovering that implementing such principles in a computer system is by no means a straightforward exercise. Even the utilitarian proposal that one calculate the net benefit of different courses of action to determine which maximizes the greatest good for the greatest number is far from trivial. To perform such a calculation the computer would require extensive knowledge about the world, about human psychology, and about the effects of actions in the world. The computational load on the system would be tremendous. One cannot reduce ethics to a simple algorithm.

Bottom-up approaches also have their limitations. Artificial life experiments, genetic algorithms and robotic assembly techniques inspired by evolution are far from producing the complex and sophisticated faculties needed for higher-order cognitive processes such as moral decision-making. The learning algorithms computer scientists have developed to date are far from facilitating even the kind of learning we see in very young children. However, the future promise of taking an artificial agent through a process of moral development similar to the way children learn about right and wrong, is alive, even if the technologies required to do so are not yet available.

David Hume famously warned against deriving an ought from an is. Some moral philosophers take this to mean that one cannot determine what is right and good from moral psychology, from the way people actually make decisions. These philosophers struggle to keep at bay the game theorists and evolutionary psychologists who propose that evolution has built inherent biases into the structure of the mind determining much of what people believe to be right and good. Such philosophers are correct in their desire to separate reasoning about what we ought to do from the study of the psychological mechanisms that influence decisions. However, their excessive stress on the importance of moral reasoning has contributed to a fragmented understanding of moral decision-making.

The reasoning skills of (ro)bots will need to be supported by an array of other cognitive mechanisms that will serve as sources of essential information and will help frame the essential features of any challenge. Engineers have already come to recognize that emotional intelligence, sociability and having a dynamic relationship with the environment are necessary for (ro)bots to function competently in social contexts. For example, a (ro)bot will need to read facial expressions and other non-verbal cues in order to understand the intentions and beliefs of people with whom it is interacting. This understanding necessitates the (ro)bot having functional skills that are often associated with being aware (as opposed to being merely computational, merely running a program). The (ro)bot will also need a theory of mind – ie, need to appreciate that others have minds which differ from its own and so will have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from those of the (ro)bot.

How far will engineers progress in building distinctly human attributes into their (ro)bots? The rich engineering projects already begun in fields like affective (‘emotional’) computing, social robotics and machine consciousness surprises many people who view computers and robots as mere machines. However, emotions, social skills and (self-)awareness are unlikely by themselves to be sufficient to build AMAs (even if engineers can build sub-systems into (ro)bots that create supra-rational faculties). Top-down approaches, bottom-up approaches and supra-rational faculties will need to be combined. The challenge for philosophers and engineers is to determine the necessary cognitive faculties, the computational requirements necessary to support those faculties, and the available techniques for building those faculties in a (ro)bot.

The Future of Machine Morality

Eventually we may have artificial systems with intelligence comparable to humans’ – a subject which engenders a great deal of interest, and some anxiety. Might such systems be deemed moral agents with both rights and responsibilities? Would it make sense to punish an artificial agent when it performs an immoral or illegal act? Can society ensure that advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be friendly to humans? If not, should we ban research into AI? The prospect that future intelligent (ro)bots might want to override restraints suggests that moral propensities should be integral to the foundations of complex computer systems, and not treated as add-ons or secondary features.

Reflections on the possibilities can serve as fascinating and illuminating thought experiments. For example, philosophers and legal theorists find that considering the criteria for eventu ally granting (ro)bots rights and responsibilities contributes to a better understanding of when any agent should be held culpable.

Given the relatively primitive state of AI research, machine morality tends to be highly speculative. Yet themes that border on science fiction often mask more immediate considerations. For example, fears that superior (ro)bots will one day threaten humanity underscore a societal fear that science is untrustworthy and technology a juggernaut already out of control.

For the immediate future, machine morality research will be grounded in the challenges posed by presently available or imminent technologies. It will thrive as a continuing enquiry into the prospect for computerizing moral decision-making, spurred on by both practical and philosophical challenges. As (ro)bots with explicit moral decision-making faculties are developed, new markets for ingenious products will open up. However, some of the most significant research into machine morality will be philosophical in nature, and comprehensive reflection on teaching (ro)bots right from wrong will focus attention on many aspects of moral decision-making that have often been taken for granted. The building of moral machines provides a platform for the experimental investigation of decision-making and ethics. The similarities and differences between the way humans make decisions and what approaches work in (ro)bots will tell us much about how we humans do and do not function, and much about what, and who, we are.

Great Books and Undergraduate Education

By Michael M. Jordan
The Christendom Review

Generally speaking, we can say there are two major philosophies of education: an older model which addresses moral and spiritual concerns of the mind and heart of man, and a newer one which trains us to manipulate and control the material word for the good of the body. The older model requires the acquisition of intellectual skills (critical reading, thinking, and writing skills) as a means to reach its moral and spiritual end. The modern model requires the same skills to improve man’s physical estate. It generally applies these skills in service to professional and vocational interests in business and industry, in science, technology, and medicine. Both models intend to improve man’s estate. Both are worthy and important. However, material well being is not the chief or highest end of man. Therefore, the older model, designed to make us better human beings, should not be abandoned or replaced by the newer one. Indeed, the first must be pursued to properly orient and order the second.

The Means and Ends of Education

In the opening of the first chapter of the Book of Proverbs, Solomon urges the young to acquire intellectual skills so that they can “understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles.” With critical reading and thinking skills, they will be able to “know wisdom and instruction, understand words of insight, receive instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice and equity (Proverbs 1:2-6). It seems to me that Solomon correctly identifies the means and the aims of higher education: an intellectual means to an ethical end. By grappling with the grammar, logic, diction, and rhetoric of texts, students develop intellectual skills that enable them to reach the aims of higher learning: the acquisition of wisdom and virtue, and the capability to seriously pursue knowledge and truth. These foundational means (acquiring critical intellectual skills) and ends (discerning spiritual, ethical, and epistemological realities) are readily met in reading and studying Great Books.

By Great Books I mean those works of literature generally recognized as having formed the Western world’s understanding of man’s nature and destiny. They are found in a variety of genres (sermon, dialogue, drama, epic, lyric, autobiography, essay, short story and novel) and disciplines (biblical studies, theology, philosophy, ethics, history, and literature). Though I have mentioned specific academic disciplines, I should emphasize that Great Books are trans-disciplinary: they help us to see the relationships between the disciplines—they help us to reflect upon the whole. Additionally, they have a universality about them that makes them trans-cultural and trans-temporal: though they are Western texts written at specific moments in time, they are not “foreign” texts to readers from other cultures. The following list of books is illustrative, not prescriptive or exhaustive: from classical and Christian antiquity, the literature of the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, Plutarch’s Lives, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s Apology and The Republic, Aristotle’s Nichomachaen Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions; from the Middle Ages, Beowulf, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the morality play Everyman; and from the Renaissance and beyond, works by Petrarch, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Machiavelli on down to Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and the recently deceased Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Religion, politics, morality, cultural identity—our experience of these things has been shaped by the Great Books.

In order to get at the meat of these books (the wisdom and truth they contain), one needs skills, the ability to read and write--to carefully understand and skillfully use words and sentences. Dorothy Sayers tells us that the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) supplied the medieval student with the tools of learning. However the student obtains these skills--in home school, in grammar, junior high, and high school, in college; in language and literature classes; in workouts with the dictionary, the syllogism, and a grammar book—he will need them to understand the Great Books and to give an intelligent account of what he has read. And we must emphasize that carefully studying the Great Books is the best way to exercise and develop intellectual skill. With any text one can attend to the nuances of words, the logic of sentences, the relation of the parts to the whole. One can analyze and synthesize the ideas in a newspaper article or editorial. But one finds greater sophistication and complexity, deeper mysteries and more refined beauties in the Great Books. Reading them, the student can more readily understand the literary conventions of metaphor, parable, allegory, and riddle (Solomon again). He can comprehend the prophetic utterances of God’s prophets (“I spoke to the prophets; it was I who multiplied visions, and through the prophets gave parables”—Hosea 10:1). He will have the ears to hear the parabolic teaching of Jesus, and the ability, as Paul urged Timothy, to “rightly [handle] the word of truth” (II Timothy 2:15).

Whether one seeks the truth in sacred or secular writings, he must have literary training; he must have skill. Marion Montgomery puts it this way in Liberal Arts and Community: “The truth of things, which must be our concern always, is revealed through words rightly used and rightly taken. That revelation is the art of all liberal arts.” If one aspires to get at the truth of any academic discipline, he had better have critical reading and writing skills. I might add that the same is true of professional and technical disciplines: the student of law, medicine, divinity, computer science, business, or aeronautics will have to have some mastery of the use of language to succeed in his chosen field.

Classical and Christian Learning

Augustine can be our guide in this discussion of the means and ends of education. Let us look to his Confessions, one of the greatest of Great Books and the most famous autobiography of all time. In his boyhood Augustine was forced to study rhetoric so that he “might get on in the world and excel in the handling of words to gain honor among men and deceitful riches”—the unworthy utilitarian ends coveted by worldly men throughout the ages. Like many a schoolboy, he was reluctant to learn and occasionally inattentive in his studies. But as he advanced in his schooling, he grew to love reading, and he also began to excel in memorizing and declaiming passages from Virgil’s Aeneid and other classics. He tells us that the earlier study, acquiring skill with words, was better because more useful than the “empty studies” pertaining to the Trojan Horse, the wanderings of Aeneas, and Dido’s death. Later still, following the usual course of studies, he read Cicero’s Hortensius, “an exhortation to philosophy” and defense of intellectual cultivation that changed the course of his life.

This encounter with a Great Book gave Augustine a “new purpose and ambition.” As he confesses to God, “Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You.” Another decisive turn in his life occurs when he takes up another Great Book, the Bible--in particular, he reads a specific verse from the book of Romans (Romans 13:13). Here he finds the Word of Life that enables him to turn from sin and convert to the Christian faith.

In the Confessions (completed around the year 400), we have Augustine’s early remarks about the means and ends of education. He defends the utility of acquiring skill with words, not because it brings honor and deceitful riches, but because it is a doorway to the truth of things. He scorns the “empty trifles” and errors of the poetic imagination, and he is moved, not by Cicero’s eloquence, but by his wisdom, for it opened the door to higher things. And it is his reading of scripture that brings him into the Christian fold.

But even in this early work, one clearly sees that Augustine has profited from his studies of Greek and Roman epics and Cicero’s eloquence. Immersed in the works of great writers and trained by imitating them, he memorably and masterfully used the scheme of antithesis, denouncing “the insatiable desire of man for wealth that is but penury and glory that is but shame,” and describing himself as “so small a boy and so great a sinner.” In describing his adolescent desires, he uses a cluster of cloudy, dark, hot, and restrictive images to paint a convincing picture of bewildering and enslaving lust. These images of lust are contrasted with the luminous and white light of love and friendship. Augustine presents a moving dramatic representation of the battle for his soul as he stands between his former mistresses and “the austere beauty of Continence.” Both the mistresses and Continence solicit him, but Continence does so honorably, and she is the fruitful mother of joys. On nearly every page of the Confessions, we see Augustine’s debt to his literary and rhetorical training. This training helped him to be eloquent and persuasive himself in his most famous work.

Later, in On Christian Doctrine (426-427), a more mature Augustine defends the study of rhetoric and the pagan classics. A chapter title tells why: “WHATEVER HAS BEEN RIGHTLY SAID BY THE HEATHERN, WE MUST APPROPRIATE TO OUR USES.” The study of rhetoric will enable the preacher to preach more effectually. Christians, Augustine says, should be like the Israelites in the Exodus, plundering the Egyptians, his term for accepting and using classical learning in a Christian curriculum. While he still decries the “false and superstitious fancies” of some pagan books, he emphasizes that “they also contain liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them.” Like Augustine, other Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil the Great, and Jerome made classical learning (Great Books in rhetoric, philosophy, epic, and drama) a staple of higher learning in Christendom. Later “Church Fathers,” theologians and men of letters such as Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and Newman, did the same. (For an account of this Christian appropriate of pagan learning, see The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being, edited by Richard M. Gamble).

G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, among other Christians in our own time, have likewise “sanctified” pagan learning. They tell us that pagan myths, the fruit of the moral imagination, are not to be scorned, for these myths offer glimpses and shadows of universal and transcendent truths. The pagan poet no less than the Christian writer is made in the image of God: both use the God-given moral imagination to craft stories that reveal truths about man and God. C. S. Lewis offers this illustration: “The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.” In other words, the pagan myths point to the true “myth”: the Incarnation—“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (II Corinthians 5: 19).

Truth is truth, wherever it comes from: it may be glimpsed by the poet’s moral imagination, discerned by the philosopher’s reason and intuition, or revealed in scripture by God’s appointed prophets and evangelists. But to get at this truth, one must have intellectual skill. To effectively share this truth, as Augustine has done, one must have some mastery of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And finally, the wisdom one gains in his encounter with the prophet, the poet, the dramatist, and the philosopher will instruct him in the proper use of his intellectual skills: not for the purpose of promoting vanity, pride, and avarice but to get at the truth of things.

The Place of the Bible in Education

The truth of things is most clearly revealed in the Bible, the greatest of Great Books. This book therefore deserves a central place in higher education, as it once did until education was secularized. From the Bible we learn the major outline of human history and destiny: Creation, Fall, man’s redemption through the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection of Christ, and the Judgment to come. Scripture clearly and unequivocally presents physical, moral, and spiritual truths about God, man, and the universe. God is Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, and Redeemer. Men are body and soul, “intellectual souls incarnate,” to use Marion Montgomery’s term (thus the dualism of Platonism and the naturalistic anthropology of modern times both miss the mark). All men are fundamentally equal in that they are made in God’s image, yet fallen, prone to a host of vices and sins. When God made the world, he pronounced it good and placed man in it to exercise stewardship and dominion over nature (stewardship and dominion should always be linked together). Men invariably trespass, fail to honor the God who made them, fail to love one another. This calamity leads us to the most important truth in all the world: the Gospel message. God was in Christ lovingly reconciling sinful humanity to himself. Christ is the wisdom, truth, power, love, and justice of God. He is the way to knowledge and wisdom, to door to righteousness and salvation. And he is most fully revealed in the Bible.

In the Middle Ages educators recognized the importance of the word and Word of God. This is reflected in their belief and claim that theology is the Queen of the Sciences. Theology, a biblically based discipline, puts all other studies into perspective. Scripture certainly puts much of the Western world’s literature and culture into perspective. Consider European, English, and American literature. Think of some of the classic or great authors: Augustine, the author of Beowulf, Chaucer, Dante, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, O’Connor, and Robert Penn Warren (who once told aspiring writers, “All novelists, budding or otherwise, should read and mark their Shakespeare, also their Bible. These are the two greatest founts for writers”). These famous writers knew the Bible and filled their own writings with biblical quotations, allusions motifs, images, and symbols. We cannot understand these authors unless we have some understanding of what they assume and incorporate into their work. The Bible has influenced much more than Western literature: much of the art and music and many of the laws, principles, beliefs, customs, and institutions of people from the Middle East, Europe, England and America are derived from the Bible. Both our literary and our cultural heritage bear the Bible’s stamp. And it is a pedagogical crime, it is spiritual and cultural suicide to ignore the Bible in our studies.

Revolutionary Changes in the Focus and Philosophy of Education

For over two thousand years Great Books were the basis of education in the West. In antiquity Jewish youth studied Old Testament literature and commentaries on scripture; Greek students read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, while Roman scholars studied Virgil’s Aeneid. At the beginning of the Christian era, classical and Christian books together formed the basis of education in Christendom. Through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up until around the beginning of the twentieth century, the staple of higher education was great literature or the classics. The grammar school lad, the young scholar, and the collegian spent much of their time reading Great Books, memorizing and declaiming selected passages, and imitating in their own compositions passages noted for eloquence in style or potency in theme. These books gave them a way to see beauty and goodness, to come to terms with such concepts as love and liberty, and to understand historical, economic, and political events. They gave the student an intelligible picture of the world.

But revolutionary changes in the focus and philosophy of education have altered the curriculum. The elective system has vastly increased the number of specialized, usually pragmatic, instrumental, and utilitarian courses in the curriculum. The old core of the liberal arts college (humane studies in theology, ethics, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts—largely the study of Great Books in these disciplines) shrank as students elected to take specialized courses in specific disciplines, usually those that have practical ramifications in terms of career and cash. With the elective system (or the cafeteria-style curriculum), the student is not exposed to the best that has been thought, said, and made (to adapt Matthew Arnold’s phrase) but elects to take what interests him from a host of marketable degrees.

T. S. Eliot, writing in the 1930s, tells us of the consequences of the elective system. When students no longer study the same subjects and read the same books, they have no sense of “continuity and coherence in literature and the arts,” they have no shared “body of knowledge.” Consequently, “the idea of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation” (Christianity and Culture 32-33). William Butler Yeats describes a similar effect of the loss of cultural cohesion in “The Second Coming” (1919). As the old European order of Christendom disintegrates, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Eliot again, in lines from his Choruses for The Rock, describes the deracinated education and culture of modernity:

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

And our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

This declension from wisdom to knowledge to information results when we ignore a common heritage that addresses crucial moral and spiritual matters. Some sort of center is required for information to rise to knowledge, and for knowledge to rise to wisdom. Great Books, especially the Bible, used to supply this center, this orientation: a moral compass, a sense of the common good, an understanding of what it means to be human.

The proliferation of college courses and degrees and the accompanying emphasis on research and innovation, on technology and business, are not the only changes that have diminished or removed the study of Great Books from the college curriculum. Increasingly, contemporary literature replaces the classics in literature courses, presumably because the modern is more relevant than the old. Furthermore, most college campuses have joined the revolutionaries in chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture has to go,” thus substituting multicultural and politically correct studies for what had been a focus on the Western tradition. The result of these shifts in the focus and curriculum of education is to make us what Allen Tate calls provincials in time. Cut off from our classical-Christian heritage, we lose our “origins in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.” Cut off from the past, familiar only with the present, we see in “material welfare and social justice the whole solution to the human problem,” and forget the role that “honor, truth, imagination, human dignity, and limited acquisitiveness” should play in any social order (Allen Tate, “The New Provincialism”).

Thus the purpose of higher education has been thwarted. The new model of education focuses on specialization, vocational training, certification, professionalism. This is what one would expect of a secular, utilitarian, and pragmatic education. Now I have maintained that higher education may legitimately address itself to the comfort, security, sustenance, and healing of the body, the improvement of man’s physical welfare. We should use knowledge and skill to improve the human condition. We have a biblical mandate to be good stewards, properly dressing and keeping the garden, exercising dominion over nature for man’s common good. Jesus himself in his ministry to man improved man’s physical well being by healing the sick, feeding the hungry.

But to properly apply this knowledge and skill (in business, law, economics, politics, medicine and every other discipline and vocation) requires wisdom and virtue. Otherwise the businessman and economist won’t be humane, attentive to the common good; the lawyer won’t be ethical but sophistical; the politician will be a mere functionary, demagogue, or ideologue, not a statesman; and the physician will violate human rights and dignity. Let me give one case in point. Our brave new world of reproductive and genetic technologies needs the moral and spiritual compass provided by Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” The economic projector in Swift’s fable regards one-year old children as consumer products, no different than cattle. The scientist Aylmer in Hawthorne’s fable is not content with the good that he has but wants perfection. In his attempt to achieve perfection, he destroys his wife Georgiana and hence his own happiness. With the intellectual skills acquired in reading great literature and the ethical discernment obtained therefrom, one can recognize the deceitful manipulation of language in the feminists’ and abortionists’ credo: Every woman has a basic right to reproductive freedom—the astonishing euphemism for a mother’s “right” to kill her unborn child.

Conclusion

The end of higher education is the acquisition of wisdom and virtue and the serious pursuit of knowledge and truth—this is the older model of education. Reading the Great Books helps us to get to this end. It is a good means to a good end. Informed by the wisdom, the beauty, the goodness, and the truth we encounter in Great Books, we can responsibly and humanely practice our vocation in life. Exposure to great literature forms our heart, mind, and soul. It enriches the moral imagination; it plants judgment, right reason, wisdom, and humility in the mind; and it opens the heart and soul to higher things, “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). The student needs insight, wisdom, and virtue to love and serve his fellow man. Let us not deny him the effectual means to this good end, an end that has bearing on his citizenship in both this world and the world to come.

Sometimes Government Must Act

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

What should be done when parents rely on religion instead of medicine to heal sick children?

Christians know we are all broken. Nobody is perfect and so no human being can be trusted with total power. Institutions are often megaphones for personal power. In noble hands, like those of Reverend Martin Luther King, great good can be done with power, but even King was not perfect so that even the best of people and their institutions need a check and a balance.

No institution is so pure, no intentions are so noble, that they cannot be twisted into something impure and ignoble. This side of paradise the best humans can do is to disperse power between as many institutions as possible. This is why conservative Christians support giving different groups power over different aspects of human life. Most traditional Christians have learned through centuries of hard effort trying to apply the ethic of love to culture that any concentration of power, or making any authority absolute, is dangerous. Some danger is necessary to get things done, but the dynamite of power needs careful handling.

This is why even in my very traditional Church the laity confirms the worthiness of their leaders when they are appointed. Each member has a duty to attend to the wisdom of the leaders, but also to follow their conscience and take whatever consequences may come. No idea repudiated by most Christians, at most places, at most times is held as essential to the faith. There are checks and balances between the power of mere fashion and established authority. Sometimes tyrannical men have seized power in the Church and attempted to impose their will or the trends of the times on the laity. The average Christian responded by repudiating their leaders and waiting them out. At other times, the laymen have been infected with some cultural fad and the leadership has had to do the hard work of education and waiting for the up to date to become dated.

Christians divide power into three general categories: family, church, and state. This division of power minimizes the possibility of tyranny. State should interfere with church as little as possible and church should meddle the duties of God’s anointed civil authority as little as possible. Both should recognize the authority of the mother and father to run their own home.

The existence of this very system suggests that one group or the other can become so broken that intervention will be necessary. Sometimes the church and family will have to defy a wicked state, as King and the African-American church defied segregation. At other times the state will have to intervene to correct dangerously broken religious institutions or families.

This is always a very dangerous moment for a culture as it raises the possibility that the intervening branch will seize too much power, weaken the other too greatly, or go too far. Still, the authority of state, church, and family are all limited and the individual, particularly the defenseless and weak, will have to look to the other branch if his can get no justice.

A good example of this proper, just, and necessary intervention is when parents will not feed their children or seek necessary medical treatment for them. The proper local authority has a duty to protect children against unconscionable behavior by parents even when that behavior has a religious justification. Churches also can and should act in this manner when they can with families who will not correct wrong behavior. In fact, it is safer for society when the Church can act to discipline its own members, because the Church does not have police power and tends toward mercy. Sadly, in some cases it is necessary for the state to act. Not only is this not anti-Christian, it is an application of Biblical ideas.

The courts should exercise great caution in undermining a family’s rights or disallowing any lifestyle. Persecution of disfavored minority groups is all too easy to justify in such cases. For example, it would be very wrong to take the children of atheists from them, or force them to attend private Christian schools, just because research shows that theists are happier than atheists. However, in the recent case where the life of the child was threatened by lack of medical care, it is easy to see that the rights of the parents, even the religious right to practice their own faith, do not extend to their care for the child.

Pro-life Christians must understand this to be consistent. Pro-life Christians believe a woman has a God-given right to personal integrity, but that this does not give her the right to kill another person in her womb. Her rights stop at the other person’s body. All our rights, even to our own body, have limits. This same reasoning limits the religious rights of parents over children. Their rights stop when grave and permanent harm will be done to the child by their religious beliefs.

This should not include government interventions anytime a local official does not like the ideas being taught to children. Atheists, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Pagans all have the right to teach their own children their own ideas. After all, grownup the children can change his or her minds . . . as many who convert to and away from Christianity demonstrate daily. However, a child killed by religious conviction about medicine will not be able to grow up to decide her parents were right or wrong.

One reason that traditional Christians support widespread education and worry about general moral decline is that it undercuts our hopes for the checks and balances to work. There is value to pluralism, but too great a cultural diversity about what is right and wrong or tolerable and intolerable make these decisions impossible. We need to continue a national conversation about our moral values and how we will derive those values.

Worse still cultural disaster and tyranny comes when all the parts of system are corrupt simultaneously. This can happen in secular societies like the Soviet Union or in broken Christians ones as we saw recently in Ireland. The results are always very bad.

All people of good will should work hard to see that proper boundaries are respected. Families, states, and churches should be left alone as much as is possible. However, we should also run great risks and allow the lines to be blurred when the certain evil of doing nothing outweighs the possibility of harm. It is a necessary risk in this life, since the risk of unified power or no checks and balances is greater. Only in paradise can unity of power exist with perfect safety when the king, priest, and father role are united and held by God Himself in perfect justice.

The Barmen Declaration

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

May 30 is the best day to commemorate the Theological Declaration of Barmen, the document in which the Confessing Church in Germany in 1934 drew the line against the steadily-advancing incursions of Nazi ideology into the life of the church. Karl Barth was the primary author of most of the text of the short confession of faith, which has been widely recognized as a classic statement on the limits of government interference in the church’s mission.

Each of the six theses of Barmen follow the format: Scripture passage, theological affirmation, theological denial. They move, therefore, toward more specific application to the charged situation of 1934. Sometimes quoting the Bible doesn’t get the point across; sometimes even saying what you take the Bible to mean by the words you are quoting doesn’t get the point across. Sometimes nobody can tell what point you’re trying to make until you follow the line of thought all the way out to being explicit about what you deny.

So in the sixth and final article, after quoting the Biblical statements that the church is to teach the nations what Christ has commanded, and that the word of God is not bound, Barmen affirms: “The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.”

And then the declaration follows that with the necessary denial: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” In 1934, the Confessing Church was guarding itself against “arbitrarily chosen desires” having to do with a neo-pagan religion of German racial greatness. But what makes the statement classic is that it is so sharply phrased that it cuts to the heart of a myriad of church problems.

Once when my family had recently moved to a new town, we were in our “find a good church” phase of church visiting. We tried a nearby mainline church and could tell immediately that the people in charge had no idea why Christians are supposed to gather together on Sunday morning. They had a variety of good causes to support, and were generally very positive, uplifting people with an encouraging message. But it wasn’t the gospel, so we left after one visit and never looked back. In retrospect, I suppose I knew in advance what goes on in most mainline churches, but I get optimistic anytime I see the name of the denomination where I got saved.

For a few Sundays we attended an evangelical church that did a much better job at proclaiming the message of Christ, but one Sunday we were surprised to find the entire service structured around affirming the giftings of people in the congregation who had physical disabilities. I was moved by the stories I heard, and I could see the value of taking special time for this good cause. What I couldn’t see, though, was sacrificing the main weekly meeting to do so. When the people of God gather around the word of God, they are supposed to know what to do. They are not supposed to have free days on their calendar to devote to a variety of good causes that occur to them.

That’s when Barmen echoed in my ears: “as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.” Affirming people with disabilities is a good thing to do. But compared to a clear, faithful, and consistent proclamation of what the Bible is about, it seems like such an arbitrarily chosen purpose. Aren’t there about 50 other good causes that we could devote other Sundays to? And if so, will we ever get around to the Word and work of the Lord for its own sake?

The Barmen Declaration’s great value is its powerful reminder that the Church already has a commission. It is not looking around the modern world to find out what it should do. We have been told what to do: Teach the nations what Christ has commanded us, because he is with us to the end of the world, and the word of God is not bound.