Gratitude for the Council of Chalcedon

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Today (October 8 ) is the day that the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon, began in 451. In a 2007 blog post about Chalcedon, I said

Chalcedon means classic christology. Of course Chalcedon was a city near Constantinople, but the theological meeting held there in 451 was so important and influential that for the rest of Christian history the name “Chalcedon” has been a pointer to the right doctrine about Jesus Christ in distinction from errors.

The classic words of that classic christology go classically like this:

He was begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer, as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being.

And I paraphrase, with an evangelical accent, thus:

In Christ, God and man neither merge nor diverge. In Christ, God and man are hypostatically united, and one of the Trinity dies our death on the cross, to rise again for us and our salvation. This is the way the Chalcedonian categories serve the gospel story.

I’m co-editor of a book that warmly commends Chalcedon’s wisdom, especially as a resource for evangelical theology. That book, Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective (B&H Academic, 2007), is still available for sale, and would make a lovely Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas present for you or a loved one. Yes, folks, that’s Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective. Click on through and buy at least one copy today, won’t you? Act now and you’ll also receive this handy Chalcedonian Box diagram, free inside every copy of the book. It’s printed on page 24:

The chart is a visual aid I made up in teaching christology to undergraduates and in churches for a few years. It comes complete with this explanation:

Perhaps the best metaphor for what Chalcedon accomplishes is that it provides definite boundaries on four sides: On the top, it affirms Nicaea 325 (contra Arianism) by demanding that Christ is God, consubstantial with the Father. On the bottom, it affirms Constantinople I (contra Apollinarianism) by demanding that Christ is human, consubstantial with us. The soteriological axioms “God alone can save us” and “what is not assumed is not healed” mark these boundaries out. As for how the divine and human elements come together, Chalcedon marks out the right and the left with its four mighty negatives: no confusion and no change on the one hand (contra Monophysitism Eutychianism ), but no division and no separation on the other hand (contra Nestorianism).

Groundskeeping: On America's eclectic ways of mourning the dead

By Stefany Anne Golberg
The Smart Set

In her 1928 Blue Book of Social Usage, Emily Post wrote:

At no time are we so indifferent to the social world and all its code as when we stand baffled and alone at the brink of unfathomable darkness into which our loved one has gone. The last resource to which we would look for comfort at such a time is the seeming artificiality of etiquette. Yet it is in the hours of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most real service. All set rules of social procedure have for their object the smoothing of personal contacts, and in nothing is smoothness so necessary as in observing the solemn rites accorded to our dead.

Etiquette in America has always been slippery. And so it’s been with regard to mourning. The Pilgrims kept mourning on the DL. A fussy public burial was seen an affront to God’s will, as was mourning dress or other conspicuous displays of grief. Even praying for the dead was seen as a rebellion against predestination. There was no fanfare, no beating of the breast. A quiet, restrained Pilgrim death was most befitting a quiet, restrained Pilgrim life.

All that changed with the queen of artifice herself, Victoria. Of all the protocol of Victorian-era America, mourning etiquette was perhaps the most complicated, especially for women. Handbooks and catalogues rigorously detailed mourning manners, from how one should dress according to degrees of mourning (deep mourning, first mourning, second mourning, half mourning…), to how one’s house ought to be prepared (uncovered mirrors were a big no-no), to the infinite accoutrements like post-mortem photos and the ever-popular hairpiece jewelry made of the deceased’s, yes, hair. You always immediately knew when someone had a death in the family and how much the loss meant to them, not by any display of emotion, but rather by how well that emotion translated into etiquette. All this had the effect of bringing death out into the open, making it a matter of the utmost social importance. By the time the Civil War rolled around, rules of mourning served as a comfort and social cohesion that allowed people to somehow deal with the seemingly unending deluge of dead.

The most dramatic change in the ritual of American mourning was how the dead themselves were buried. The American cemetery came into its own in 1831 with the completion of Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Planned by Dr. Jacob Bigelow and the members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Mount Auburn Cemetery was the United States’ first rural (or garden) cemetery, a burial ground with the open-air, civic nature of a botanical garden. It would have rolling hills and landscaping and beautiful statues that would attract the general public. What better place for our dead-and-gone than among the cheerful diversions of the living? And what better comfort to mourners?

The garden cemetery would also be nonsectarian, removing the ritual of burial from the church and putting it in the hands of the community. The $6,000 needed to purchase 72 acres of land for the Mount Auburn Experimental Garden and Cemetery, (the “Garden of Graves”) would be purchased through the sale of 100 subscriptions and managed by the Cemetery and Garden committee. A death co-op. With a lovely park view.

Immediately after Mount Auburn’s completion, garden cemeteries like Laurel Hill in Philadelphia and the Woodland Cemetery & Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio became all the rage. These cemeteries were the precursors to the great American parks, both of which became refuges for city folk in the 20th century. Frederick Law Olmsted spent many a day musing over the design of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn before designing America’s über-park, Central Park. (The Park’s early admirers said it was as beautiful as a cemetery.) The two were of the same philosophy — that leisure and reflection are best fulfilled in a sculpted, naturalistic environment that everyone can share.

The thing about Victorian-era mourning is that, even though grief was public, it was so socialized it became almost divorced from actual grief. Cemeteries epitomized this. The more beautiful and romanticized mourning became, the less sad it was. What people experience at most American cemeteries is an overwhelming sensation of life. In a 1947 essay called “Half in Love with Easeful Death” the author Evelyn Waugh noted that what made Forest Lawn in Los Angeles (known to many as the “Disneyland of Death”) especially American is how completely it vanquished death from its gates. The six-cemetery Forest Lawn “memorial park” network hosts free concerts, an art museum, public lectures, film screenings, educational programs for children, pumpkin decorating classes….

With the 20th-century advent of women’s lib, ladies (responsible for most 19th-century mourning) just didn’t have the time or wherewithal to indulge in all the fuss. Rules, niceties, manners — all were quickly falling out of fashion. As the etiquette for death fell away, so did, once more, public grieving. What was left in its wake was a modern funeral industry that some feel is the worst of both worlds. It forces a lot of dehumanizing rules on the death process and — as it makes cemeteries the compulsory place for burial — is also still very public.

But on the morning of June 6, 2009 Nathaniel’s Roe’s family just decided to bury him in the backyard. And according to a July New York Times article — “Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative” — the Roes are not alone. It seems Americans are increasingly burying their dead at home. According to the Times, the number of assistance groups or individuals has grown from two in 2002 to 45 today.

Home burials continue the shift away from the public grieving their great-grandparents started a century ago. Advocates of the practice say all the hullabaloo of mourning rituals robs grieving of its intimacy and steers us away from the task at hand. Traditional funerals, they say, are wildly overpriced and artificial. Our grand graveyards spawned all this stuff that has nothing to do with death. Lacquered coffins lined with puffy satin. Professionals to reassemble rotting corpses with embalming fluid, prosthetics, and rouge. Viewing rooms. And decorations for the rooms. And professionals to arrange it all. And limos to take us to the cemetery. A cemetery to which we would rarely return.

All one needs to grieve, says the home burier, is a pine box and a yard. We prepare the body ourselves, dig a hole, and that is that. Organic, dignified, natural, economical. These are the adjectives a home burial offers. This description of a home burial from the New York Times article reads like a Wordsworth poem: “The next day, Mr. Roe was placed in a pine coffin made by his son, along with a tuft of wool from the sheep he once kept. He was buried on his farm in a grove off a walking path he traversed each day.” Who could doubt Mr. Roe and his tuft would find peace with this burial?

By planting our dead in public, Americans solved an urban planning problem and created an emotional one. Cemeteries put death in the public realm. But they also hide death by sticking it on a hilltop in the suburbs. One could thus argue that enveloping corpses with copses, decorating them with flowers and bits of marble, is simply an elaborate process of avoidance. That as we attend a jazz concert together over our dead grandmothers, we are distracted from grieving for them.

The question is whether home burials bring Americans any closer to death. Cemeteries may hide death in plain site but home burials shutter it away completely. The fact that you need a home for a home burial is a case in point. For Americans, the move towards intimacy — into private homes, private families, private graveyards — is also a move away from public life, “not having strangers intruding into the privacy of the family,” as Nancy Manahan, co-author of Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully, puts it. Home burials are kind of like eloping. In trying to preserve privacy they cancel community. Love and death become more than private — they become secret.

Rebelling against the rules has always left Americans at once liberated and lost. Americans are both free from and lacking a cohesive culture of death. We have Veteran’s Day and the newish 9/11 Day, but these are special. Obama’s well-intentioned call to make September 11 a day of National Service is almost absurd in the way it turns a time of mourning into yet another work day. Americans don't have grief-sharing holidays like some other countries. The Nepalese, for example, have Gai Jatra, a day for the recent dead that’s also a celebration of cows. That day, Nepalese dress in colorful costumes and parade in the streets, playing music and telling jokes and carrying portraits of those lost in the past year. Because America is a mutt society, sharing grief through any one particular ritual is virtually impossible. Lacking such fall-back cultural practices, we fumble around with death like a hot potato, changing our practices according to fashion, constantly wondering how we are to mourn.

A few years ago, I decided that a visit to Mexico City during Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) might give me a fresh perspective on the rituals of public mourning. On the way, I paraphrased a passage from Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude in my head. “The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips…. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death; jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.”

Ay, chihuahua!

Día de los Muertos is many things, but largely, it’s the smell of marigolds. They are everywhere — in crosses, over tombstones, petals crumpled and scattered. You can get them anywhere in the city, along with skulls made from painted sugar and paper. What I’ll remember most, though, is the din of Panteón de Dolores cemetery. Children hawking marigolds at top volume. Full mariachi bands singing the favorite songs of the departed. Families picnicking over graves, wailing for all to see. My friends and I weren’t Mexican, and we weren’t acquainted with their dead, but we bought some marigolds to sprinkle over neglected graves just because it seemed like the thing to do. It was a new experience, a day when a whole society mourned together, all at once, in public, and loudly. Mexicans dressed like skeletons and wept even as they laughed. Public and private were muddled up together, just like life and death.

Paz saw something deep about Mexican culture in this festival. “True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away: He looks at it face to face, with impatience, disdain, or irony.” The mocking of death, though, comes with a mocking of life. “Life and death are inseparable,” Paz says, “and when the former lacks meaning, the latter becomes equally meaningless.” Looked at one way, taking focus off the personal aspects of death, off individual life, is what makes communal mourning not only easier, but exciting, fun, liberating. As everyone cries, no one is crying. As everyone dies, no one has died. But the fun comes with a price: Life is cheap, death is cheap. Easy come, easy go. This cheapening of death (which goes hand in hand with more difficult, more impoverished lives) makes Día de los Muertos possible. And what makes it impossible for Americans. It's impossible because of America’s cult of the individual and our feeling that death is always so far away, intangible. (The glaring exceptions, usually concentrated in America’s poor communities, only emphasize this.) In making the comparison between the two cultures, Paz writes one of the greatest summations of American optimism ever written: “I met some elderly ladies [in America] who still had illusions and were making plans for the future as if it were inexhaustible.”

Paz was right that how we perform death is a little window into how we perform life.

As we try to deal with that thing called mortality, we all avoid it in our own way. Rituals don’t tell us how to live, but they do show us how we are living.

Academic Freedom and Discontent

By Peter Wood
National Association of Scholars

Academic freedom is one of the core doctrines of higher education. By “doctrine” I don’t mean an unquestioned or unquestionable idea. Everything can be questioned and it is another core doctrine of higher education that everything should be questioned—in the right time and place. The kind of “doctrine” I am referring to is the more or less explicit agreement among interested parties that, in order to get on with the work, we will act as if something is true.

To get on with the work of higher education, we have to imagine or at least pretend that certain conditions hold. Our premises include the idea that students are capable of learning and that teachers are capable of teaching. That seems uncontroversial, although we all know of students who don’t seem to be capable of learning much and teachers who can’t teach their way out of a paper bag. Still, it seems worthwhile to set those cases aside as exceptions to get on with the work of learning and teaching among the rest.

Troubled Doctrines

Learning and teaching thus have a doctrinal basis. Some of the other core doctrines of higher education are a bit more advanced and perhaps troublesome. Higher education is, or least long was, premised on the idea that “knowledge is good,” and the pursuit of knowledge is intrinsically worthwhile. To the extent this premise holds, we don’t have to justify spending time trying to find things out or passing along this knowledge to others. But as I said, a doctrine like this can be troublesome. Knowledge is not always good. Think of the mad scientist exception. Sometimes we pursue knowledge at too great a cost to ourselves or others, and we end up with a Faust, a Frankenstein, or a Dr. Moreau.

Yet another core doctrine of higher education is that the world is coherent and open to human understanding. A related doctrine is that truth exists and can be, in principle, distinguished from non-truth. Yet another is that human knowledge has an underlying unity such that what stands as truth in one domain must be true in all domains. Thus the truths of mathematics are, in principle, in the same continuum as the truths of history. That example illustrates the troubled nature of some of these doctrines. We may intuit that there is something very different about a mathematical proof deemed to be true and a historical fact likewise taken to be true. The differences between these two kinds of knowledge seem large and compelling. But higher education, at one level, overrides the differences between them. Mathematics and history are different disciplines but we make them part of a single university, a word which refers to the single whole of knowledge.

In our time, almost all of these doctrines have begun to fall apart. As long ago as 1971, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote a book titled the Degradation of the Academic Dogma, warning that the idea that we should seek knowledge for its own sake was being comprised by the demand that universities produce usable knowledge. Nisbet traced this degradation to the post-World War II idea that universities could be fonts of research to drive capitalist economies. But he could easily have gone further back in American history. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress passed the Morrill Act, creating the framework for land-grant colleges. The bill expressly favored institutions that would provide practical training for future farmers and students of the mechanical arts, and the bill’s sponsor, Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont, heaped scorn on classical learning.1]

Thus, even before the founding of America’s first research universities in the 1870s, the nation had set a course that brushed aside the notion of knowledge for its own sake. So was Nisbet merely fantasizing that there had ever been an “academic dogma” of knowledge for its own sake? No, the Morrill Act itself bears witness to the idea that many Americans were drawn to this idea. If not, Senator Morrill would not have worked so hard to put it down. But that tells us something about core academic doctrines. They are seldom so well established that they are beyond dispute. Someone is always tearing up the railroad tracks.

And today, most of the core doctrines of higher education have been derailed several times over. We live in an age where the idea of knowledge has itself been knowledgably deconstructed by various theorists armed with the blowtorches of skepticism. We have no working agreement that knowledge is good; many value the academic enterprise not in its own right but as an extension of political ideals; and the old concept of the underlying coherence of the world has been ravaged by post-modernist delight in fragmentation.

A Social Contract and a Moat

But what does any of this have to do with “academic freedom?” Actually a great deal. Academic freedom is a doctrine like the others I have mentioned rooted in the history of an institution. The university found that, in order to get on with its work, it needed some basic agreement that students would be free to learn and professors free to teach—without undue interference from civil authorities and with some guarantee of internal toleration. Having students or faculty members hauled off to prison for reading books or pronouncing ideas disliked by the townsfolk was a practical problem, and so was the prospect of faculty members whose mutual detestation could get in the way of teaching.

The doctrine of academic freedom, of course, could not make such tensions disappear, but it could and did provide a way to defang them. Academic freedom is, in effect, the moat that surrounds the ivory tower. It is the doctrine that says to the townspeople, “Don’t get too worked up. It is only the university. They do things their own way.” It is also the doctrine that says to the academics, “Say what you need to say, but remember you are enjoying the privilege of speaking freely only within the context of your discipline.”

Academic freedom, as it arose among European universities over the centuries, was a kind of social contract—an agreement between town and gown to show each other some forbearance. Over time, it gained more specific meaning.

But before we tackle that, let’s consider the remarkable circumstance of the academic freedom doctrine right now. We live in an age in which almost all the other core doctrines of the university have been shredded. But not academic freedom. It alone is upheld as the one great indispensable ideal. Why is that? Academics in every discipline, at every kind of college and university, and representing every political position urge the continuing importance of academic freedom. But this unanimity is an illusion. There is broad consensus that something called “academic freedom” is important, but no consensus at all on what academic freedom means.

Highway or Can Opener?

To understand the enduring popularity of this one core academic doctrine amidst the ruins of so many other core doctrines we have to recognize that “academic freedom” means one thing to academic traditionalists and something radically different to academic progressives. Traditionalists view academic freedom as something like a limited access highway. It permits great freedom of movement, but it has its own rules and it doesn’t go everywhere. Academic freedom is not a license for driving west in the eastbound lane, for parking your car in the median, or careering recklessly across the road. Progressives, on the other hand, view academic freedom as something like a can opener. It is good for opening things up and that’s about it.

Academic Freedom, 1915

Let’s let these metaphors sit for a while and turn to a more academic consideration of academic freedom. What is “academic freedom”? A canonical definition was provided by the American Association of University Professors in its 1915 Declaration of Principles. Academic freedom, said the AAUP, is freedom of inquiry and research, freedom of teaching, and freedom of extra-mural utterance. The AAUP framed this definition in the aftermath of controversies in which professors had lost their positions as a result of publishing their views. The central case involved Professor Edward Ross, dismissed from Stanford University in 1900 because he campaigned for “free silver” and a ban on Asian immigration. Ross also called for municipal ownership of utilities and public scrutiny of railroads. Jane Lathrop Stanford, widow of Leeland Stanford, and Stanford University’s only trustee, pressured Stanford president David Starr Jordan to fire Ross, and Jordan accordingly pressured Ross to resign. That’s what lies behind that curious phrase “extra-mural utterance.” Among other things, Ross was criticized for his “slangy and scurrilous” way of speaking. One other faculty member was fired for defending him and seven others resigned in protest.

Beyond the extra-mural utterance part, the definition is transparent. Freedom of inquiry and research and freedom of teaching don’t need much explication. But note that it is a composite definition. Academic freedom is not a simple right. It is a collection of freedoms that are highly contextualized. It assumes the existence of the university and makes certain claims that have meaning only within the university.

Academic freedom thus doesn’t apply to publishers, politicians, political movements, pundits, or a thousand other contexts where people might demand freedom of expression. Freedom of expression and academic freedom are not the same thing—at least not according to the AAUP in 1915.

Whose Freedom?

Some people can claim academic freedom and some cannot. We most readily think of academic freedom as a possession of faculty members, but they are not alone in enjoying it. Students also are traditionally recognized as having academic freedom. The 1915 AAUP statement concentrated on faculty freedoms but acknowledged student freedom too, and cited the twin German words, Lehrfreiheit, freedom to teach, and Lernfreiheit, freedom to learn, as basic to the definition of academic freedom.

The AAUP does not say, but tradition also sanctions three other proper claimants. Academic administrators are widely regarded as possessing this freedom. A college president, for example, has the same rights to inquire, research, teach, and engage in extra-mural utterance as a faculty member. Likewise, it is customary to think of colleges and universities as corporate bodies possessing a degree of academic freedom. These institutions traditionally sit at a sufficient remove from the affairs of society to be entitled to a freedom to devise their own research programs and curricula. Without that academic freedom, the academic freedom of individual faculty members would be a dead letter.

Finally academic freedom extends to people who are not institutionally part of the university but who are its guests. Invited lecturers, visiting researchers, and speakers who come to campus under the auspices of the university, can rightly expect that the protections of academic freedom will be extended to them. This means they will not be shouted down, stampeded by mobs, afflicted with last-minute room changes to undisclosed locations, or made victims of any of the other techniques widely used by students, faculty members, and occasionally administrators used to disrupt speakers with whom they disagree.

Clearly a claim on having academic freedom is not enough to guarantee actual academic freedom. Academic freedom is, as I have said, a doctrine, not a description of how things actually work. It is a doctrine that is frequently ignored and often without consequence. That doesn’t make it unimportant, for the doctrine at least enunciates how things should be and provides a basis for calling down shame on those who make things otherwise.

Non-Academic Freedoms

I have written that academic freedom ought not to be confused with freedom of expression. In the United States, freedom of expression is embodied most succinctly in the First Amendment, and has been elaborated in countless legislative acts and judicial decisions. First Amendment freedom of speech covers a great many contexts, including universities, but it is not a simple duplication of academic freedom. Academic freedom is grounded, as the 1914 AAUP statement puts it, in “the nature of the academic calling” and the “the function of the academic institution.” It concerns the pursuit of truth by rigorous methods or by the most scrupulous methods available given the nature of the topic.

Academic freedom is thus narrower than First Amendment freedom of speech. The latter allows for people to pronounce their opinions on any basis they choose. Fiction, falsehood, exaggeration, parody, statements embodying outrageous bias—all are permitted, at least within the very capacious limits of libel law. Academic freedom offers no such latitude. At least academic freedom properly construed. Academic freedom allows scholars and students to express opinions of highly controversial subjects, but this a freedom yoked to the scholarly pursuit of truth.

In that light, we can also distinguish academic freedom from several other freedoms that are often mentioned as kindred. Freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, intellectual freedom, and freedom of self-definition each make a powerful claim against the powers that would restrict the individual in the name of some authority. But none of them are exactly identical to academic freedom. They are variously civil, Constitutional, religious, and existential claims against society. Academic freedom, by contrast, is merely a kind of institutional bargain. Colleges and universities gain a zone of autonomy in which those engaged in scholarly pursuit of truth may do their work unhindered, and society in turn gains an institution dedicated to the expansion of important knowledge and its transmission from generation to generation.

If I Had a Hammer

The bargain, however, comes with a caveat. Academic freedom must be upheld consistently within the university. It cannot be a doctrine of freedom for some and not for others. Here, of course, is the great difference between the world faced by the AAUP in 1915 and the world we face today. In 1915, the scholars imagined the threat to academic freedom could only come from outside the university—from boards of trustees dominated by wealthy capitalists, from demagogic politicians, from clergymen stirring up their congregations, and hostile newspaper editors. Today, it seems a much greater threat arises within the university, from faculty members, students, and administrators who have traded scholarly standards for political advocacy, and who see nothing wrong in attempting to marginalize or silence those with whom they disagree.

Here we touch again on the alternate—the progressive—view of academic freedom. I compared it to a can opener, as a tool for opening things up. Such a tool is needed according to the progressive view because important realities have been hidden away from public view by the rich and powerful. In this view, the most important task for educators is to make these realities visible, and doing so is bound to excite opposition from those who have something at stake in keeping them hidden. Thus academic freedom is an incipient revolutionary force. It is a device for forcing the hidden techniques of social and political oppression into the light of day.

The progressive view of academic freedom gives the doctrine an entirely political character. Ordinary academic inquiry—the kind that aims merely to expand the repository of factual knowledge—does not, according to this progressive view, need the assistance of academic freedom. The powers that be are all too content to see scholars toiling away at these incidental matters. Often their toils even help to sustain the system of privileges, so there is a slim chance that their work will excite opposition from the establishment. But those who labor on behalf of social justice and revolutionary change are in constant jeopardy of censure and repression. Academic freedom is their rhetorical shield against this.

The divergence between the two versions of academic freedom is stark. The traditional version focuses on the scholarly search for truth, and the progressive version focuses on advancing political opposition to liberal society and the state. These are not, however, simple inversions of each other. The traditional version doesn’t aim to support the state; and the progressive version doesn’t completely jettison the notion of truth. Something more complicated is at work, something having to do with the conceptions of higher education embedded in these views. The topic opens up too large a vista for this lecture, but I should at least point to it. The traditionalist view of higher education emphasizes the need to help each coming generation take possession of a whole civilization. The university exists, as first among its other functions, to engage students with their intellectual and cultural inheritance. The progressive view, by contrast, emphasizes higher education as the means and opportunity to escape that inheritance. It views the primary function of higher education to be personal liberation, on the path to a larger social liberation.

Neither of these views is, on its face, laughably wrong or without merit. Taking possession of a civilizational inheritance and liberating oneself from the dead hand of the past are both worthy if somewhat contradictory goals. But when it comes to academic freedom, I believe the traditionalists have the stronger case.

The University of Everyone

The university over the centuries won its relative autonomy by serving public ends. These included replenishing society’s reserve of learned men, especially in the professions that depend on advanced knowledge. Those professions changed both as knowledge grew and as society shifted, but whether it was training for the ministry, education in medicine, or study of the sciences, the need remained at the center of the university’s work. And the progressives are right, of course, that this work involved social privilege. Only a few enjoyed these opportunities.

America has dramatically changed the university by turning it into an institution for everyone, or nearly everyone, and creating social norms that make attending college an expected life-stage for more than sixty percent of American youth. The transformation of higher education from an elite institution to a mass market has inevitably changed what it teaches and how it teaches. One consequence has been the abandonment of a core curriculum in which all students were expected to master a common body of material. Instead the curriculum broke into a great profusion of courses, majors, and programs with very little in common. Another consequence was the dilution of academic standards. At almost all colleges, entrance criteria were lightened, courses were made easier, and graduation requirements were relaxed.

New Freedoms

This isn’t the place to ponder whether these were worthwhile developments. The question is, rather, how did they bear on academic freedom? The answer is that they hollowed it out. Academic freedom of the sort enunciated in the 1915 AAUP statement depended on a faculty who shared an understanding of disciplined pursuit of truth. They had a common language that transcended their different fields of study and could rise to the defense of a scholar whose opinions, though provocative, were materially connected to his research and expertise. This is a center that has not held. The very best proof lies in the AAUP’s most recent statement on academic freedom, a document issued in September 2007 titled Freedom in the Classroom.[2]

It is essentially a polemic against people who complain that too many college professors are misusing their classrooms to advocate for their political views. The AAUP in 2007 doubted that such abuses take place, but was eager to explain that what might seem to outsiders to be attempts by professors to indoctrinate students are really efforts to help “students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline.”

Take careful note of that last clause, “knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline.” The AAUP, it seems, is no longer interested in the pursuit of truth itself, but in protecting conformity within academic disciplines. Read a little further into Freedom in the Classroom and it becomes clear that the academic discipline is now the AAUP’s horizon. If some faculty members with a political cause decided to set themselves up as a “discipline,” that is good enough for the AAUP, and the “discipline” they create has the full power of academic freedom to decide what “knowledge is accepted as true.”

This is an epistemologically porous formulation and the sophisticated AAUP authors of Freedom in the Classroom were surely aware of that. Disingenuousness is very much at the heart of this new version of “academic freedom,” since what it promotes is neither academic nor free. It is ideological and coercive.

Under the “knowledge accepted as true” rubric it is entirely possible to justify lying, as long as someone accepts the lies as true. Similarly, the new standard poses no bar to circulating unfounded rumors and propaganda. As long as the “discipline” accepts the picture as true, textbooks can omit well-established facts that might be embarrassing to the advocates of a doctrine. There is no prohibition under this standard to editing texts selectively in order to mislead people in a preferred direction. Indeed, any technique that aids in moving “students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline” would seem an acceptable exercise justified in the name of the professors’ academic freedom.

Academic freedom used to be anchored on the idea of knowable truth. Our predecessors in the scholarly world were not simpletons. They knew the truth was often difficult to attain and that great errors had from time to time a long reign before they were exposed as errors. But the scholars of 1915 committed themselves to this high standard anyway. They did not want “academic freedom” as a rationalization for presenting fashionable opinion as though it enjoyed scholarly authority or for presenting conjecture dressed as through it were substantiated fact. Academic freedom in its old version allowed for responsible discussion of opinion and conjecture, but what made the discussion responsible was the abiding rule that such opinion and conjecture were at the edges of inquiry, and the central enterprise was truth-seeking.

I said that the authors of Freedom in the Classroom are too sophisticated not to realize that they built epistemological loopholes into academic freedom—loopholes large enough to sail whole flotillas of opinion and conjecture into the classroom. I should add, however, that the flotilla has on board crew members who are not so sophisticated and who simply believe that their actions are justified because they are sailing in the right direction. These crew members claim academic freedom to build whole courses or programs on the basis of tendentious ideas, such as the continuing racist character of America, the post-colonial domination of the developing world, the patriarchal nature of our society, the need for radical reordering of the economy in light of climate change, and so on. The purveyors of these views need no “discipline” to assure them they are right. They teach propaganda, secure in the knowledge that their pronouncements are sanctioned by the prevailing political ambiance on campus.

Academic freedom, in this version of things, becomes a closed circle. Back in 1915, academic freedom was conceived to match the shared understanding of a university faculty of legitimate academic inquiry. The AAUP today matches academic freedom to the conventions that hold within a “discipline.” Some of these so-called disciplines are tiny; and some of them are overtly ideological and committed to advancing a political project. Other disciplines, such as history, psychology, political science, and English can claim large numbers of practitioners but are represented by professional associations that routinely adopt political resolutions with no basis in disciplinary knowledge.

The AAUP’s new approach reduces the idea of academic freedom to rhetorical badinage. It becomes a way of justifying the behavior of the classroom teacher who abuses the authority of his position. It also seems to leave unprotected those who would speak without the cover of “knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline.” This seems quite close to a paradox. The AAUP ostensibly seeks to exculpate those faculty members who dare to speak the truth. It declares it does this on behalf of students who must “remain free to question generally accepted beliefs.” But then it leaves those whose earnest inquiries carry them beyond the resolutions passed by majority vote of the floor of the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association or some such body with no claim at all on the protections of academic freedom.

The Larger Picture

In these remarks, I have deliberately remained at a fairly abstract level. That is not for lack of specific cases that might be discussed. Higher education in the United States and around the world is chock-a-block with disputes over academic freedom. The AAUP involves itself in many of these disputes; the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education likewise vigorously defends the freedom of students and professors punished for exercising their academic freedom. My organization, the National Association of Scholars, also engages with specific cases as well as the larger debate on principles. For cases of outside speakers silenced or beset with attempts to impede their speech, I need look no further than some of my own experiences. But I have avoided particular cases in this talk because the details are always sufficiently complicated and arresting in their own right that they tend to obscure the larger outline of the debate. And that larger outline deserves more attention than it usually receives.

This is an address sponsored by the Hamilton Institute and delivered at Hamilton College, which is no stranger to the forces that are ripping open the seam of academic freedom in American higher education.

I fear that the AAUP’s re-casting of the idea of academic freedom is becoming more and more common. It is a sinuous idea that seems to translate into other peculiar notions. We are not free unless we conform. Students are not free unless they have been busted loose from the jailhouse of their original values. Academic freedom justifies drowning out people who hold views that are not welcome on campus. Academic freedom conforming to progressive orthodoxy trumps academic freedom conjoined to causes that are deemed racist, sexist, or otherwise unwholesome.

If this is where the university chooses ultimately to take its stand, I doubt that academic freedom will retain its aura of authority. The doctrine exists because of a long-standing agreement between society and the university. If the university unilaterally abrogates the agreement, it is hard to see how or why society should continue to show deference to the underlying principle. I predict it won’t. Claiming that everything is political and therefore the university is available as a tool of progressive politics may produce some short-term advantages to the political left, but it will—and perhaps already has—fatally compromise the university itself.

This is why I believe the traditionalists have the stronger case. Academic freedom can only persist in an institution that strives to operate on a plane above politics, where it takes its central purpose as conveying that complex heritage we call civilization.

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[1] Robert A. Nisbet. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books. 1997. [Published originally by Basic Books, 1971]

[2] Matthew W. Finkin, Robert C. Post, Cary Nelson, Ernst Benjamin, and Eric Combest. Freedom in the Classroom. American Association of University Professors. 2007. http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/comm/rep/A/class.htm. Steve Balch and I published a line-by-line analysis and reply titled “A Response to the AAUP’s Report, Freedom in the Classroom.” Princeton: National Association of Scholars. September 2007. http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=32

The Secret of Marriage (for Paul and Charity)

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

If the old-fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense – love as distinct from ‘being in love’ – is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by… the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God… ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it. –C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Being in love, says C. S. Lewis, is the explosion that starts a marriage. But after that start-up, the engine of marriage is run by the steady supply of fuel, and that fuel is a quieter, less volatile love. Of course you need both for a marriage, and on this wedding day, we have a conspicuous display of both varieties of love. Paul and Charity stand before us today as a young couple who are head over heels in love with each other: Giddy, transfigured by the delight they take in each other, and a little bit silly. All of us are dressed up, surrounded by flowers and candles and music and color, partly because we enjoy celebrating that beautiful explosion of young love. We came to see the fireworks: Ooh. Aah.

But Paul and Charity also stand before us as young people who are making wise plans for a long, fruitful, and faithful life together. They are good students who have done their homework: They have studied marriage in the word of God, they have studied marriage in their own families, and they have studied marriage in the lives of their friends and counselors. They know the blessings of family life. They also know where the hidden dangers are. They are here with serious intentions, to make solemn promises to each other in the sight of God and as many of the most important witnesses they could possibly gather into one room. A word to the witnesses, especially those of you here at the front of the sanctuary: your duty is to remind this couple of the things they have promised each other here today. Whenever you are with them, make it clear by your conduct that you are expecting them to live up to these promises from now on.

So we have the explosion and the fuel; the blessed foolishness of falling in love, plus the sober wisdom of good planning; the initial excitement and the firm resolve. But Paul and Charity, you know that while both of these are necessary, they are not sufficient. For the high calling of Christian marriage, neither the thrill of being in love, nor the wise planning that you’re putting in place, will be enough to sustain this life-long union. That is why Lewis went on to say that you will need “the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.”

That grace of God is the invisible reality that makes marriage what it is. It is possible to look at a marriage as something made by humans. After all, we have a wedding license issued by the state. The two of you fell in love; Paul made the decision to propose; Charity accepted. She and her support staff planned the ceremony. But in, with, and under all of this human activity, the grace of God is at work bringing a new thing into the world. God has made a new entity, not out of nothing, but by putting two already existing things together with a deep and abiding unity that constitutes them as one real new thing rather than as a jumble or aggregate of constituent parts. These two are now one. We can no longer know either of them without taking the other into account. No more standing alone on the B-I-B-L-E: this family stands together alone on the B-I-B-L-E. And the new thing created here today is the work of God the Father almighty, the one true creator. As the Psalm says, “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” This was true of each of you before, and now it is also true of the one thing you are together. You were already God’s creatures, plural, but you are now also his singular creature.

Reflecting on the power of architecture, someone has said that we make our buildings, and then our buildings make us. The spaces we create have a daily influence on our state of mind as we move around inside them. This wonderful church space we are in was constructed by builders, and now it gives us some feeling of nobility and reverence just to be inside of it. In a similar way, we make our marriages, and then they make us. Insofar as this God-created marriage is yours to make, make it well, for it will keep making you as the years go by.

Marriage is a gift of God, although you could overlook this and consider it merely a human gift. After all, your mothers just now gave you to be wed. Above all, in this wedding ceremony you pledge to give yourselves to each other. That sounds like a lot of human gift-giving. But it is God who gives you to each other, just as it is God who gave you to yourselves. And it is this gift of God that you will rely on when your own resources for giving are exhausted. When you cannot give any more to each other, God will continue giving to you through each other, and he will continue giving you to each other.

As a couple, this new family has much to give to the world, in their nursing and medical work, in their volunteer work, in the ministry to friends, in their Christian service, and maybe in their giving of grandchildren to their parents. This union will be a source of service and blessing to the world around it, precisely because these two have been given so much, and have been forgiven so much. They will minister grace because they know where to go to find more of it to help in time of need.

Paul and Charity, you have been chosen by God, and he has prepared in advance good works for you to walk in (Eph. 2:10) and garments to clothe yourself in. Colossians exhorts all of us, and on this day we especially exhort you, to put on kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. And the bond of your unity as man and wife will be love, as you forgive one another as the Lord has forgiven you. The bond of your unity will be love, as the peace of Christ rules in your hearts. The bond of your unity will be love, as the word of Christ dwells richly in you, and you teach and admonish one another, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. The bond of your unity will be love, as everything you do in word and deed will be in the name of Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father (Colossians 3:12-17).

Paul and Charity, you have the explosion that starts a marriage and you have wisely stocked the fuel you need to sustain it. As you have prayed for and received the grace of God for this union, he has provided love as the bond of your unity. Let us praise him for this blessing!

Congregation, The words of the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” are printed in your programs. Please stand with me and sing.

If You Believed Moses, You Would Believe Me

By John Piper
Desiring God Sermon

John 5:33-47

“You sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Not that the testimony that I receive is from man, but I say these things so that you may be saved. 35 He was a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light. 36 But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, 38 and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. 41 I do not receive glory from people. 42 But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44 How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

Instead of moving on to chapter 6, I thought we should pause once more in John 5 and focus on something that is massively important for John and the other New Testament writers, namely, the way they viewed the Old Testament Scriptures and how those Scriptures relate to Jesus, and what difference it makes for us. This is a good place for this focus because twice in this passage Jesus says that the Old Testament Scriptures are written about him.

Gentiles Embracing the Jewish Scriptures

Look at John 5:39, “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus says, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” The word Scriptures here refers to the Jewish Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, which is another word for Old Covenant. We call it the Old Testament, or Old Covenant, because we believe that the Jewish Messiah has come—namely, Jesus—and by his death and resurrection has inaugurated a New Testament, that is, a New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31; Luke 22:20; Hebrews 8:13; 12:24; 13:20). So the writings that Jesus authorized through his apostles are included in our Bibles because they summarize the completion of what was promised in the Old Covenant, namely, the New Covenant.

The most decisive thing about this New Covenant is that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, died for sinners so that both Jews and Gentiles who trust him would become the heirs of the Old Testament promises. Jesus taught this when he said, “I tell you, many will come from east and west [meaning Gentiles] and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:11-12). In other words, Gentiles who believe in Jesus the Messiah are included in the blessing of Abraham. And Jews who don’t believe in Jesus are excluded from the blessings of Abraham.

To Save Both Israel and the World

In other words, any Jew or any Gentile will be an heir of Abraham’s blessing if he believes in Jesus, the Messiah. So Paul says, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. . . . If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:7, 29).

So the entire Old Testament is precious to Christians, because all Christians are counted by God as true Jews—beneficiaries of all the promises made to the covenant people. The Old Testament is precious to Christians because it’s a book about God’s work with Israel in preparation for the Messiah who would come not only to save Israel but to save the world from the power and punishment of sin.

A Lesson Book for the Nations

God promised Abram in Genesis 12:2-3, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And then Paul shows us that this promise is fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus, the Messiah. He says, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Galatians 3:8).

So we Christians don’t reject the Old Testament just because we have the New Testament. On the contrary, we embrace it as the word of God in preparation for Messiah Jesus, and as the word of God in the ongoing illumination of the meaning of Jesus and his work. The Old Testament is a lesson book for the nations that keeps shedding light on the work of Christ.

The Scriptures Witness to Jesus

Now back to John 5:39: “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus says, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” So Jesus is saying that the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, our Scriptures, taken as a whole, witness to Jesus.

And verse 46 says it again a little differently: “If you believed Moses [the author of the first five books of the Old Testament] you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” So verse 46 says that Moses wrote about Jesus, and verse 39 says that the Scriptures witness about Jesus.

How Do Scriptures Witness?

Ponder for a moment the implications of saying that the Scriptures “witness” about Jesus. What does the word witness imply? Listen to the way John uses the word. In John 1:34, John the Baptist says, “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” In John 3:11, Jesus says, “We speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen.” John 3:32 says, “He bears witness to what he has seen and heard.” And John 19:35 says, “He who saw it has borne witness.”

So a witness is ordinarily one who has seen something and can witness to what he has seen. A witness gives firsthand evidence. He was there. He doesn’t argue that something happened. He says, I know it happened, I saw it.

God Is the Witness

So what does it mean when John calls the Old Testament Scriptures a witness to Jesus. Since writings can’t see, I take it to mean that “Scriptures” is shorthand for God-who-inspired-the-Scriptures. God saw Jesus and knew Jesus long before Jesus was on the earth. He saw him as his Son in heaven eternally (John 1:1-3), and he saw what his Son would be in history when he came. And because he saw, he could witness.

So when John says about the Scriptures in 5:39, “It is they that bear witness about me,” he means that God knew Jesus perfectly and fully—as it were face to face—and that he inspired these Scriptures, and through the Scriptures revealed Jesus. God said things and did things in the Scriptures which, if we had understood them, would have given us a glimpse of Jesus and would have prepared us to recognize him and receive him when he came.

The Witness of the Scriptures in John’s Gospel

The implications of this for ourselves and for people of other religions are huge. But before I draw out those implications, look with me at how pervasive the Scriptures are in the way John writes his Gospel. Here’s a quick survey to give you a sense of how important the witness of Scripture is for John.

In John 2:17 Jesus drives out the money changers in the Temple, and John quotes Psalm 69:9 and says, “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

In John 6, Jesus reminded the Jews that their fathers had eaten manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:15) and then applied it to himself and said, “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33). So the manna is a pointer, a type of the life and ministry of Jesus.

In John 6:44-45, Jesus teaches that no one comes to him unless the Father draws him. And then explains it in terms of being personally taught by the Father. He refers to Isaiah 54:13, “It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” So the prophets point to how people will come to the Messiah, Jesus.

In John 7:38, Jesus compares the Holy Spirit to living water that will flow out of those who believe on him and says that this has all been “said” in the Scriptures: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Perhaps he’s referring to Isaiah 58:11—“You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail”—and to passages that compare the Holy Spirit to water (e.g., Isaiah 44:3; Ezekiel 36:25-26).

In John 7:42, the enemies of Jesus draw attention to the fact that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem, referring to Micah 5:2, because they didn’t think that’s where Jesus was born. But he was, and that too pointed to his truth.

John 10:35 is one of the most important references to the Scriptures in John’s Gospel because after referring to Psalm 82:6, Jesus says, “Scripture cannot be broken.” This is one of the strongest claims for the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible in all of Scripture.

And it’s not at all out of character. Jesus said in Matthew 5:17-18, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” Not the smallest teaching of Scripture will fall the ground. It will all be fulfilled. That was Jesus’ view.

Most Astonishing: John 12

Perhaps the most astonishing statements about the Scriptures in the Gospel of John is John 12:37-41 where John quotes Isaiah 6 (verse 10) which has in it the famous vision of God: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3). Then John says in John 12:41, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.”

This is simply astonishing. Isaiah is witnessing to the glory of Jesus because when he saw the glory of God revealed from heaven, he was seeing the glory of Jesus. Nothing more sweeping could be said about the way the Old Testament witnesses to Jesus. In essence, John is saying: Where God is manifest in the Old Testament, Jesus is manifest. If you see God at work, you see Jesus at work.

Profoundly Pointing to Jesus in Every Place

This means that the way the Old Testament gets people ready to know Jesus is not merely by specific prophecies that have specific fulfillments in Jesus (like being born in Bethlehem), but far more profoundly, the point is: If you meet God, and know God, and admire God, and trust God, and are shaped by God as he truly reveals himself and his ways in the whole of the Old Testament, then when Jesus comes, you will know him. You will have already known him. He will have so shaped your mind and heart that when he comes in the flesh, there will be no discord, no dissonance, no contradiction between the God you know from the Old Testament and the appearance of God in Jesus. John 12:37-41 is an amazing window onto how Jesus viewed the Jewish Scriptures.

Planned by God and Witnessed in Scripture

Then from chapter 13 to the end of the book, John pours it on to show that almost every detail of Jesus’ redeeming work was planned by God and witnessed in Scripture.

• “He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’” (John 13:18=Psalm 41:9).
• “They hated me without a cause” (John 15:25=Psalm 35:19).
• “Not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled” (John 17:12=Psalm 109:8).
• “They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” (John 19:24=Psalm 22:18).
• “Jesus said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst’” (John 19:28=Psalm 69:21).
• “Not one of his bones will be broken” (John 19:36=Psalm 34:20).
• “Another Scripture says, ‘They will look on him whom they have pierced’” (John 19:37=Zechariah 12:10).
• “As yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9=Psalm 16:10).

And besides all these explicit quotes from Scripture, John’s Gospel is strewn with indirect allusions to Scripture. So we have indirect allusions, direct quotes to show specific fulfillments, and we have statements, like in chapter 12, that show the whole Old Testament revelation of God is a revelation of Jesus. If we know God as he really is in the Old Testament, we know Jesus.

Huge Implications for the World

I said earlier that the implications of this for ourselves and for people of other religions are huge. Let’s close by looking at three of these.

Here’s the assumption behind these three implications, which are very controversial in a pluralistic, relativistic, religious world like ours. The assumption is that, the God of the Old Testament and the person of Jesus are revealed in Scripture as such a unity (when Isaiah saw the glory of God, he saw the glory of Jesus) that what one makes of either can be tested by what one makes of the other.

John shows us this three times. These are the three implications. Test yourself and test others who claim to know God.

1. Do You Know God?

In John 8:19, Jesus’ adversaries, who claimed to know God, said, “Where is your Father?” And Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” The fact that these adversaries do not know Jesus—do not perceive his deity or Messiahship or his role as the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53) shows that they don’t know God. “You know neither me nor my Father.”

2. Do You Honor God?

In John 5:23, Jesus says, “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.” The Father and the Son are revealed in Scripture as such a unity that if you dishonor one, you dishonor the other. If you claim to honor God today but reject Jesus as the divine Son of God and crucified and risen Savior and Messiah, your claim is false, and you do not honor God.

3. Do You Love God?

Jesus said in John 5:42-43, “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me.” How does Jesus know that they don’t love God? Because they don’t receive Jesus for who he really is, the Son of God.

The Test Is Jesus

In sum then, you can test yourself and others as to whether you know God, or honor God, or love God. And the test is Jesus. Any claim by a Jewish person or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a spiritualist or an animist or a Christian—any claim to know God or honor God or love God while not receiving Christ as the Son of God and the crucified risen Savior is a false claim. The measure of all true knowing God, honoring God, and loving God is knowing, honoring, and loving Jesus for who he really is.

Therefore, Christian—whether Jew or Gentile—embrace your Scriptures. All of them. Both Old Testament and New Testament. Because in them you come to know God for who he really is, and that means coming to know Jesus. For all of them witness to him and speak of him.

The Nuclear Sword Is Not In Vain

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Pray for peace, but pray for a peace where the free nations of the world, led by the United States, maintain a strong military—including a nuclear deterrent. Millions are now alive because of the United States nuclear weaponry and millions more are free. The United States has not borne the nuclear sword in vain.

Some Americans have an obsession with nuclear disarmament, but since World War II the strength of the United States has allowed previously war-torn Western Europe to peacefully unite. Since the goal of a Christian is to limit war, it is important to remember that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in battle without a single nuke being fired. World War I demonstrates how deadly a conventional war can be. A strong United States with her allies, armed with a nuclear arsenal, has brought on a period of unprecedented human achievement and prosperity.

More people are alive today living better and freer lives than in any period of human history. There are great global problems, and the United States has behaved imperfectly, but by any fair historical standard this nation and her allies have used their armed might with remarkable restraint.

We should pray for peace, but pray wisely. Our practical prayers would be better directed to the end of the statist regimes that provoke war than to banning the nuclear weapons that have helped keep the peace.

Dying at the hands of a barbarian in ancient Rome did not make a man any deader than dying from a nuclear weapon. Dropping “conventional” bombs, as the United States did to break the back of Nazi Germany, annihilated a city just as thoroughly as a nuclear bomb. All wars have dramatic environmental impact and the use of conventional weapons can degrade an area for decades.

Decades after the advent of nuclear weaponry the free nations of the world have proven their capacity to have them without using them irresponsibly. Traditional Christians have not been pacifists, because we are not Utopian. War is bad and every Christian prays for peace, but war is sometimes necessary in a broken world in order to avoid worse evils.

War is sometimes the answer to the difficult questions of living in an imperfect world. We also know from experience that strong nations have to fight less often than weak ones. A rich nation without a strong military, or a powerful protector, will certainly have to fight.

The tendency to obsess about nuclear disarmament demonstrates why the United States should keep some nuclear deterrent. Nuclear weaponry creates greater fear, even irrational fear, in some, and so is a greater deterrent. If the free nations abjure nuclear weapons soon only the tyrants will have them with the corresponding ability to blackmail democratic nations.
The most important thing to remember in any discussion about arms is the source of real danger to global peace. Israel is not the threat. Nuclear France and Great Britain are not the dangers, but rogue and wicked regimes in places like North Korea and Iran are. Thousands more die from civil wars in nations that have rejected civilized ways or have starved their people through the adoption of state run economies.

The contrast between North Korea and South Korea demonstrates the point. The world does not need to fear a heavily armed South Korea, but shudders at an armed North Korea. South Korea can only exist as a free, peaceful, and prosperous nation, because her own people and the people of the United States have kept their military strong. The nations of Western Europe are free to spend mightily on social services, because the American military guarantees their liberty. Israel’s neighbors do not need to fear her, but Israel has good reason to fear some of her neighbors. Israel has no president who dreams of wiping Persians from the world the way some mad Iranian leaders dream of destroying Jewish people.

Ronald Reagan was right when he argued for peace through strength. He was right that the only hope of ending the threat of nuclear world would come when technology rendered such weaponry useless. Before that goal is achieved unilaterally disarming in a world where nuclear technology is becoming more widely available is folly.

The end of the Cold War means that the United States probably can and should reduce her nuclear arsenal, but total nuclear disarmament is not a reasonable short-term goal.

I pray that Jesus Christ will return quickly to bring true peace to the world. A world free of weapons will result and no good man can fail to long for this outcome, but no wise man believes that any human society will achieve this perfection. My trust is in God, but God prizes prudence and wisdom in the governance of human affairs. Nations that disarm imprudently out of misplaced piety presume on the grace of God. We cannot bring on paradise by wishing it so.

This side of heaven, my prayers are for a strong United States and a spreading Pax Americana.

Lewis vs Haldane

By David Foster
Chicago Boyz Blog

J B S Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.

In 1946, Haldane published an article critiquing a series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength. Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and estoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

To briefly summarize That Hideous Strength, which is the only book of the trilogy that I’ve read: Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICE–the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation–having as its stated mission the application of science to social problems. (Unbelievably, today the real-life British agency which establishes rationing policies for healthcare is also called NICE.) In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers. It also turns out that the main reason NICE wanted to hire Mark is to get control of his wife, Jane (maiden name: Tudor) who has clairvoyant powers. The NICE officials want to use Jane’s abilities to get in touch with the magician Merlin and to effect a junction between modern scientific power and the ancient powers of magic, thereby bringing about the enslavement of mankind and worse. Jane, though, becomes involved with a group which represents the polar opposite of NICE, led by a philology professor named Ransom, who is clearly intended as a Christ-figure. The conflict between NICE and the Ransom group will determine the future of humanity.

A brilliantly written and thought-provoking book, which I highly recommend, even if, like me, you’re not generally a fan of fantasy novels.

With context established, here are some of the highlights of the Lewis/Haldane controversy:

1)Money and Power. In his article, Haldane attacks Lewis for the latter’s refusal to absolutely condemn usury, and celebrates the fact that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface”…clearly referring to the Soviet Union. Here’s part of Lewis’s response:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on
money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is
that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of
the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and
the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most
members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to
win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too
bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in
the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to
care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by
cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force? This
lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons
why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment
of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have
already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it
was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If
Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But
where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his
place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to
keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all
men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in
the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion
insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the
state of society is such that money is the passport to all these
prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But
when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

2)Centralized scientific planning. Haldane: “Mr. Lewis’s idea is clear enough. The application of science to human affairs can only lead to hell.” While denying that this is a correct statement of his views, Lewis goes on to say:

Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most modern countries respect science and want to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ’scientific planned democracy’.

and

My fears of such a tyranny will seem to the Professor either
insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the
opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism. I
must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of
some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of
this; he thinks I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I
’stand to lose by social change’. And indeed it would be hard for
me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a
concentration camp. I might add that it would be likewise easy for
the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the
highest rank of an omnicompetent oligarchy. That is why the
motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing _ad
nauseam_, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views
still remain to be considered on their merits.

3)Democracy and conservatism. Haldane accuses Lewis of being anti-democracy, which accusation Lewis denies. He expands on his views:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of
men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over
others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more
dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence
Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a
tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated;
and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly
repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of
power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely
because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience
and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since
Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to
Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers
with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the
inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents,
it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly
high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human
passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be
actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political
programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We
never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess
the future. To attach to a party programme -— whose highest real
claim is to reasonable prudence -— the sort of assent which we
should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of
intoxication.

This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldanes article.
He simply cannot believe that a man could really be in doubt
about usury. I have no objection to his thinking me wrong. What
shocks me is his instantaneous assumption that the question is so
simple that there could be no real hesitation about it. It is
breaking Aristotle’s canon—to demand in every enquiry that
degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not **on
your life** to pretend that you see further than you do.

Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and
sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they
never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That
technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly
disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police
follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group
good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions
with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation
will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring
which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high
ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the
dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the
change is made, it is for me damned by its _modus operandi_. The
worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety. The
character in _That Hideous Strength_ whom the Professor never
mentions is Miss Hardcastle, the chief of the secret police. She is
the common factor in all revolutions; and, as she says, you won’t
get anyone to do her job well unless they get some kick out of it.

Professor Haldane’s article can be found here.

Lewis’s response appears in the essay collection Of Other Worlds;, edited by Walter Hooper; excerpts are on-line at this site. There’s also a Wikipedia article on Haldane.