I said I wouldn’t write weightier posts and I am trying to keep myself to it. But my mind is like a whirlpool of these lately, and my lighter reading is rapidly coming to an end. In appeasement to myself, I will post a few ‘weightier’ links.

Andrew is back to the online world, for which I am somewhat happy. I wish I had his knowledge about church history (which he finds depressing), for then I could say more than just that Christianity became progressively a political force, and it did, but also such things like ‘Cyril of Alexandria is an “uber-super-unmatched-bastard.”‘ Although I am not as knowledgeable as he, I have wondered about the ‘heresy’ of Nestorianism as it seems to deal with erudite matters over which ‘heresy’ is an overstrong word. And anyone willing to rationally defend Pelagius (who does seem to have far more in common with the early Fathers than Augustine!) gets automatic addition to my list of cool people. I don’t know why I still have so much interest in all this. Perhaps I really am turning into Bart Ehrman.

On another church-related note, it deeply saddens me to see the looming schism in the Anglican church. Honestly, for a church that remained united despite the issue of slavery, I find homosexuality a rather trivial thing to schism over. In fact, are they splitting over what it means to be a Christian, or who Jesus is, or the nature of God, or (for God’s sake) even over how to organize a church? No – it’s that members of the Global South can’t stand that there are congregations that disagree about whether it’s okay to advance a sexual ethic of monogamy regarding approx 3% of the human population. This may become a contentious issue to debate, but schism over it, really? Akinola I find to be a rather harsh and intolerable man, who has supported and advanced the passing of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws, which I should hope one opposes regardless of one’s ‘position’ on the morality of the issue. In light of the sort of legislation he backs, I am even more appalled that many US episcopates have switched allegiance to the Global South – I’d like to think that they are blind to Akinola’s political policies, as sadly few people know or care about this sort of thing, but that does not fully excuse them.

The world food crisis has me progressively concerned. And as Dan of Poser or Prophet points out, we typically find entertainment in stories of horror and exploitation when we should find transformation. I have been lax about finding a place to dedicate myself to the underadvantaged (a too-weak word: poor and exploited) this summer. I don’t know where to go through if not through a church, and don’t know whether to go through a church, but these are no excuse. And then at times I find myself wondering what the good is of working where I am, and if it is not just an exercise in selfishness.

Other deep currents in my mind have been spun off by listening to a very interesting interview of Jonathan Haidt by Will Wilkinson on the topic of happiness and morality, from a social sciences and, at least on Wilkinson’s end, libertarian perspective.

Well, that wraps it up for this installation of The Blog.

Hardball delenda est.

I spoke before about my problems with Christianity from the perspective of the text of Scripture. This is a continuation of that into (a quite unrelated) part two: the existence of evil.

The first thing I would like to address is that evil actually does exist, whether or not God does. It is interesting to me that Christian apologists will try to make the claim that without a God there is no such thing as evil, only atoms moving and waves waving which happen to do things we dislike. I find this claim absurd. Just because evil may boil down, in the end, to the materials of the physical universe does not make it any less than evil, any more than that the functioning of your brain boiling down to chemistry and biology makes you any less intelligent. When I speak about evil, what I mean is nothing less than, and nothing more transcendental than, the doing of harm to sentient, self-aware beings. This includes, in many cases, the animal as well as the human realm. So on a personal level, the dying of a baby in its mother’s arms is an evil; also, the torturing of a cat. On a more corporate level, the systematic genocide of a group of people (or the same accomplished by a malicious and deadly disease or set of diseases, such as what decimated the American populations) is an evil. I think these things being recognized as evil should be evident regardless of one’s theistic or atheistic beliefs.

On a final note, I’ve tried to keep this post from rambling and making it more coherent, but it is difficult to do, so apologies in advance.

Why Worship God?

I think this is a good question to ask whenever dealing with evil. Ought God to be worshiped simply because he is powerful, or is there another reason he is worshiped? To the answer that God ought to be worshiped because of his omnipotence, then if Satan were more powerful than God, should Satan be worshiped instead? My point – as I tried to make in the Euthyphro posts – is that God should be worshiped for the supreme excellence of the quality of his character. There are many governments in the world that wield a power over their people, some mostly for good and some mostly for evil. At present there is a government of the country ‘Myanmar’ which through its policies has knowingly and willingly killed many of its citizens in the aftermath of the recent typhoon. Should these citizens still respect (or ‘worship’) their leadership because of the absolute authority they have over their lives? Hell no! It is not by reason of power that we worship or even grant respect to individuals, but by the quality of their character. Why should this be different with God, or do we wish merely to be sycophants and cynics, doing at all times what will get us most ‘on the in’ with the powers that be? But for God to be a worship-worthy god, he must (in my view) possess a character the greatness of which cannot be imagined or surpassed. This does not mean human beings must be able to understand this character in its fullness – on the contrary, such would be impossible – but that his character must, inasmuch as it is fathomable, be manifestly good.

And this is much the picture the Jewish and Christian Scriptures give, from Psalms to gospels, though they often intermingle fear (of his power) with goodness (of his character):

The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him,
and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus answered. ‘No one is good—except God alone.’

That last passage – found both in Mark and Luke – alludes to the transcendent goodness of God about which I spoke: that he must be (and is) good to the highest extent which it is possible to be good, so that no one is ‘good’ as God is truly good. And so you may fear him for his power, but God is to be worshiped because of his character.

In A World Such as This, Can There Be a Good God?

By ‘a world such as this’ I mean one which, as experience proves, contains evils. The typical atheistic argument is that a God who is good, and is both omnipotent and omniscient, would be able to prevent evils. That there are evils means that God is not good, or he is not omnipotent and omniscient. Hence, if he exists, he either ceases to be capable of solving our problems (benignly benevolent), or becomes the source of them (malevolent).

This argument is however a gross simplification. There is a caveat that it omits: that a God who is good, omnipotent and omniscient would prevent evils unless he had a significant moral reason to allow them. Humans allow this caveat all the time – especially in medical procedures – and it may well be that, just as by omnipotence we shouldn’t mean to say that God can make a being more powerful or ‘better’ (in any sense) than himself, there may be some things for which even God requires the existence of evils. Nevertheless, to be good, God must use these evils, as a doctor administering pain amid a medical treatment to save or drastically better a patient’s life, to capitalize on a greater good.

Sub-Problems: Unintended and Natural Evils

The greatest problems associated with evils are not those that one brings upon oneself, but evils capable of completely destroying one’s life that are outside one’s control. While intentional evils are bad enough (such as the holocaust of the Jews under Hitler), unintended evils are at least as common. For a child to be born during a famine in sub-Saharan Africa is quite outside both that child’s control and that of his parents, as is the hunger he feels as he dies at the age of four, severely undernourished and ridden with intestinal worms (skeletal images of children with bloated stomachs come to mind). On the other hand, some children are born in wealthy countries and never know life-threatening hunger, living to a ripe old age. Now suppose we could trace the source of this famine to the over-farming of the land fifty years ago by inept farmers living under the partial-disinterest of a colonial government. Even then, the death of that child cannot be laid wholly at the feet of those farmers, for what they did they did not out of malevolence but largely from ignorance not having the capacity to understand the ramifications of their agricultural decisions, and likewise the colonial powers did not foresee or intend the long-reaching ramifications of its policies. And so while it might have been prevented, the evil of the painful life and death of this child, and thousands like him, is the unintended consequence of the actions by others. And this does not even touch on entirely well-intended perpetrations of evil, such as ignorant or experimental attempts at medicine (or failed surgeries), or, as a book I am reading is fond of citing, the father who unintentionally and non-negligently runs over his infant child whom he loves.

Natural evils on the other hand are those not caused by any choice, but merely by the structure and fabric of the world we find ourselves in. There are many parasitic worms which are human-specific: that is, in order to complete their life cycle, they must have a human host. I do not know what it means to call God ‘good’ and acknowledge the existence of creatures whose lives only cause pain to others, particularly to humans (though if one has ever seen an animal in pain, they must also be included in this). And aside from specific creatures, it is the same physical laws of this universe that allow for combustion and cellular metabolism that cause hurricanes and tornados, which by their co-existence with humanity and animality cause much pain and difficulty to both. The nature of the material universe is self-destructive. Stars live out their ‘life cycle’ through nuclear fusion of their own materials, continuing to exist at the expense of their own substance until it is nearly all turned to iron, at which point they die, destroyed by the very process by which they lived. And similarly for biological organisms: we exist, at least most of us who are capable of thought, by the destruction of other organisms to provide our metabolism, by the division and recycling of our cells which each time are slightly degraded; species make their existence in ecological niches at the expense of other species vying for those niches; these species evolve at the expense of many genetic screw-ups, individuals being born deformed and not quite working out, the better ones doing better and progressing at the expense of the poor. Simply put: matter builds itself up by tearing itself down. The universe is inherently self-destructive, and if the laws of thermodynamics are to be believed, not for a greater end. And it is by this process that we live.

In the face of both of these it becomes difficult to affirm the existence of a good God. The first – the far-reaching consequences of choice, both malevolent and not – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a present and participatory God. The second – the natural evils seemingly built-in to the universe – seems to fly in the face of the notion of a creator God. These both are in need of answering, the first for theistic claims in particular, the second for deistic claims in general.

The Non-Answer of the Fall

The most typical Christian answer to these two sub-problems under the big problem of evil – unintended evils through choice and natural evils – is that, to quote a cliché, ‘we live in a fallen world.’ The notion is this: our forefathers (foreparentalunits?) disobeyed God and, as a result, we live in a world with the terrible and persistent evils that we currently see. It is not because God created the world that way nor that God delights in evil, but that we have (in some mysterious way, corporately through our forebears) disobeyed God, and these are the natural consequences.

However, I think this actually fails to explain the natural evils it sets out to explain – particularly those of the sort including the parasites that I mentioned above. If God is Creator (and most adherents to this explanation would emphatically say yes), where do these bits of creation come from? Did God ‘just get pissed off’ at Adam and Eve to such a degree that he went off and specifically created hundreds of species for the specific purpose of inflicting misery on them, and the rest of creation as well? These sorts of living creatures take some time to just ‘arise’ (if we are to hold to the scientific theory of evolution), and so their simply coming into existence as a result of the withdrawn presence of God after the Fall and within the scope human history is simply not a possibility. No, these creatures had to come into existence concurrently with the species they live off of; or otherwise God created them out of an act of spite. And a God who acts out of spite is, arguably, not good. A further warning against this explanation (of punishment or, as I would say, of spite) is that God’s wrath and judgment, at least in the New Testament, is described not as active retribution but as his withdrawn presence: ‘I tell you the truth, I never knew you’, and as a place of ‘darkness,’ e.g. outside of his presence.

As I said earlier, these natural evils are simply a result of how matter works, including how we function as a biological species. These are so deep-seated in the laws of the universe that it is just not enough to say that God made specific alterations, but to account for a prior existence sans natural evils, we must say he reorganized the entirety of the universe’s composition, raising the ‘punishment’ from specific consequences to a basic recreation of Created order. Furthermore, given the ‘Tree of Life’ imagery both in Genesis and Revelation, and the existence in both places of a ‘wilderness’ or a place that is ‘outside the city,’ I would propose that the Bible itself suggests not that the material universe has fundamentally changed in its structure but that its participants (namely, human beings) were sustained in it and despite its inherent self-destructiveness in a supernatural way by God. This meshes nicely with the concept of wrath described above, but leaves outstanding the problem of Creation containing natural evils in the first place.

But worse than all this, even if God is good in such retribution for Adam and Eve’s sin, he is still at least partly morally culpable for the Fall, and so also culpable for evils. Imagine that I take a child into an active nuclear silo. I set her down in the room, which contains many colored knobs and blinking buttons, and warn her not to touch any of them or else she will unleash a holocaust on many people. I then leave the room. Now suppose she does push buttons and turn knobs, and kills millions of people. When I return to the room, how much can I blame the child? Surely some, for she did what I had told her not to. But am I not chiefly to blame for putting a child at these controls? One might say that if she was fully aware of her consequences, she is to blame, but I don’t think such is possible for a child. Nor for Adam and Eve. Our ability as human beings to perpetrate evil far outweighs our ability to be held accountable for it. I may describe for you the death of a person’s child as they hold them in their arms, and I may do so quite vividly, but your ability to commiserate with this is limited by your experience of it. So also with the evils we perpetrate, we are incapable of fully understanding the depths of what we have done unless we have already experienced their equivalent at the point we commit them. Surely Hitler, though one of the most evil human beings in history, was not capable of fully understanding the evils that his policies perpetrated; and so forth. As we grow older, through the wear and tear of the world, we are more able to relate with those experiencing evils, and so understand them, but when we are younger, this is less true. How much more so for Adam and Eve, human beings who had never experienced evil and so could not have had any true conception of the horrors of it! So without serious modification being made to this argument, a portion of responsibility falls on Adam and Eve, to be sure, but the great bulk of it still falls on God.

The Non-Answer of Calvinism

Though often building on the previous answer of the ‘Fall,’ the answer of Calvinism is separate and distinct from it. The Calvinistic response runs something like this: but people deserve the evil things that happen to them. This means that the four year old who dies from hunger, because of his ‘sin nature,’ fully deserved the wretched end that he came to. And while it may be tempting to dismiss this answer as too horrific and making a monster out of God, it was an answer I held to for some time, and I think it is one that deserves serious consideration and a serious response.

One problem I see with Calvinism is its attempt to pass off moral blame for stative conditions. They say that people are ‘by nature objects of wrath’ where ‘wrath’ is imputed with moral valuation. Even given that human beings are ‘born evil’ it is not possible to blame the individual for how they were born any more than it is possible to blame a dog for being a dog. We may make the argument that the world is better off without dogs (I would disagree, but I do think the world is quite possibly better off without tapeworms and viruses), but we cannot place moral blame on each individual dog – or tapeworm or virus – for their being what they are. It is silly to say that a child ‘deserves’ death in any moral sense because of her putative sin nature, though this is precisely what I hear most Calvinists try to pass off as true. It only makes sense, given the theory’s premise, to take a utilitarian view of humans as objects and leave moral judgments out of it.

Which leads me to the greater problem I see with Calvinism, and that is that it incorporates malevolence into the nature of God. The Calvinist typically responds by saying that, without divine intervention, we are all damned, and in that situation God is still just. So if God intervenes and scoops some but not all from the jaws of hell, he is still just, and also now he is merciful for he did not let them all perish. One can argue all day about the meaning of justice and mercy in these thought-experiments, but the short of it is that such a God fails Jesus’ ‘Good Samaritan’ test. Remember, Jesus gives this story in Luke as a response to questions about righteousness and the Law! So like the priest and Levite in the story, God, seeing and knowing the man on the side of the road dying (for he is after all omniscient), passes by on the other side, saying ‘I have not chosen you.’ Worse yet, that ‘it is to my glory for him to suffer thusly forever’ – blatant malevolence. But the Samaritan – that dirty heretic – is better than God, for he stops to assist. Shall we say then that Jesus is less good than the heroes in his own moral parables? And what of the Sermon on the Mount, loving and doing good to one’s enemies, and giving to the needy? If God’s enemies are truly incapable of turning to righteousness apart from his intervention and saving themselves, then there too he also fails to live up to Jesus’ morality in failing to help them. There are more reasons I have abandoned Calvinism – taking Romans 9 out of context proves nothing (and that book may suffer more than any other from having complex arguments taken out of context!) – but I found this one, to me, to be a compelling reason. Making malevolence part of the character of God is not an answer to anything, least of all an answer to evil.

Grasping for an Answer

For God to be good (benevolent), omniscient, and omnipotent, and for there to be a world such as ours in which there are great and life-destroying evils uncaused and unasked for by their victims, God must make good to the individual, inasmuch as he is capable of doing, on their life experiences. How that may be possible is quite outside the capabilities of my mind. For God to be good, he must somehow (as the Good Samaritan does) assist every human being in their need, regardless of their personal sin. And for there to be a hell, or place without God – as I believe there probably is, should theism be correct at all – that hell can only be populated after the Samaritan’s object of affection has, being picked up from the road, said thank you very much but if this should mean spending time with you I would rather find my help somewhere else. And so they may be free to do so as long as they wish. This is why I love Lewis’ ‘The Great Divorce’ so much: he takes seriously God’s goodness and the doctrine of hell, and he does so in the only known way how, and that is taking human individuality and freedom to make choices seriously.

Another way to overcome the problem of evil is to say that God is impersonal, and so not beholden to personal concepts of morality. One way to do this is assert a complete Tillichian God-as-Ground-of-Being. Though Tillich would say that God is supra-personal, he is nevertheless impersonal, and so God has no moral obligations toward Creation, but only sustains it being by his Being. (How Tillich squares this with the Incarnation I do not know, but I think he would have to accept docetism.) Although I find God-as-Ground-of-Being to be a tantalizing answer, I can only accept it partially without becoming a deist. I see very little substantive difference between the God of Being and Einstein’s God of Order. While it is one answer, it destroys the ability of a person to relate to God, pray to him or feel anything from him. He becomes the background across which the universe moves.

But to make God personal, and good, I find it difficult to conceive of him as Creator in any specific sense, largely because of the natural evils I mentioned above. At best, I can only say that he set the universe into motion and largely let it do its own thing, in order to, at a later point in time, come to it and woo it and unite himself with it. That this material universe is not the product of a God who spent tender loving care in its creation, but the product of its own ungodly rules and regulations, producing good and evil, and that an otherworldly God comes now from outside of it, into its chaos, to unite himself with it in a particular way, namely with its greatest product, sentient and competent beings capable of comprehending and communing with the divine. And to make this process occur, God must become more earthy (incarnate), and matter (via people) must become more divine (self-giving, rather than self-destructive). This is a partial solution which very much intrigues me, whatever it does to the biblical Genesis account.

The Upshot of All This

I cannot adhere anymore to the common Christian and theistic answers to the problem of evil. I believe evil is sufficiently deep, sufficiently integral to the universe, and sufficiently problematic that it deserves greater attention and better answers than I have seen it given in theistic systems. This is not to say we should not fight evil: most certainly we should, bettering the world as much as we are possibly can, whether or not there is a God. But the universe as we find it is a great challenge to the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and good God.

An Uncertain Way Forward

In case this post and its predecessor have not been explicit enough, I am at this point in my life an agnostic. I know where I have come from and I know what I have rejected, and I know my reasons for rejecting them. And so being clear of the reasons, the likelihood of my returning to any of the precise systems I have rejected is slim to none. This is not to say I am rejecting Christianity altogether: I have detailed the items I do reject, and do not understand how to hold to Christianity as a whole without them. However, in the realm of beliefs this leaves me with more problems than solutions, and seeing the problems are so great, I wonder whether they have solutions. I very much appreciate Christian thought, and in general I find it so far superior to other religions (or at least the ones of which I am sufficiently aware) that it is almost not worth comparing with them. But, in my heart, not being able to accept biblical testimony carte blanche, even about Jesus (thinking it eerily likely he was a mistaken apocalyptic preacher), and not quite being able to say that God exists, given this universe, I cannot claim myself currently as a participant in Christendom. That may someday change; I certainly would not protest to a change. There are many things about Christianity I would like to be true: its kernel – Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection – is beautiful to me almost beyond expression. But I do not want to accept something because it is convenient for me or because I would like it to be true, but only because I believe it to be true. And if I do return to the faith, I fear I will be so far outside of the mainstream it will be difficult for me to commune with other Christians (in a way in which I can actually let them know me or what I believe), and I will almost certainly be heretical to most – if not for the gay part, then for something else along the lines of what I’ve mentioned. But for now, I am a better skeptic than believer.

What I do know about life is that theism alone is not the only reason to live well. Other reasons in particular are another topic altogether. I desire still to do good to others with my choices in life, and may and shall still pursue that, falteringly, in what I do. My morals are surprisingly very similar, if not the same (minus the morality of worship), to what they were. How to go about fellow-human relationships, further inspection of belief and reality, how and whether to relate to the communion of religious believers of which I have made myself a participant, and pursuing the betterment of others, is mostly an uncertain way forward. But that I do want to pursue such things, at least, is certain.

Speaking with a friend (or acquaintance, or however you term that in-between state where you do not speak so often as you would like but are probably more than just-acquaintances) on these matters, he made the observation that I am ‘definitely peering over into the abyss.’ I thought these things merely evidences that I am, at heart, a better skeptic than believer (or to put it kindly, a ‘scientific rationalist’), but his words had a greater poetry to them than mine, and it is nice to know there are others who are prone, at times, to approach the same abyss.

I questioned whether to voice these thoughts, but in the end I have found too much doublespeak in Christianity, people affirming in public what they do not really affirm in private, going along with the crowd mostly to save face, asserting confidently that they have no doubts while, among those they know, confiding that they are haunted by doubt, and I at least do not find that hiding one’s beliefs or thoughts for the sake of popular acclaim to be an altogether healthy or worthy enterprise. Simply put, I typically find it cowardly. My intention is not to cause others’ beliefs to crumble – far from it – but to articulate the doubts of my own. So if at any point in reading this you feel an uncontrollable urge to call me a heretic, shout out that this is proof that people cannot be both gay and Christian, or simply feel too uncomfortable, please jump ship and hit that X button or back button on the browser window (though you are of course free, as always, to skip it all and leave feedback). But if reading this is not of any benefit to you, and it is a harm to you, then there is no point in continuing. So with that said, let us walk boldly into the realm of doubt…

My problems with the Christian religion are twofold, though I do not say this to limit the tremendous problems this religion faces to a mere number of two (I am quite sure there are those I have not yet thought of or encountered), but I mean to say that these two are of sufficient magnitude and seriousness to disturb the foundations of what I believe, or what I thought I believed. And the problems are these: the text of Scripture, and the existence of evil. The problem of Scripture is that it is not inerrant, it discusses differing concepts of God amongst its various books and authors, sometimes making contradictory claims in these, others portraying God in radically different manners; the problem of evil is that the world contains evils of such magnitude and distribution that, on the surface, are incompatible with a God who is omniscient and omnipotent, as well as good. While the first is Christian-specific, the second applies to all theistic and deistic systems, and neither is negligible in terms of constructing one’s view of the world, or considering the possibility, probability, or reality of God. And so while a complete answer to either is not necessary (though a sufficiently partial and reasonable one is), I do not feel I can honestly proclaim God with these left outstanding. I am splitting these two issues into two posts, since they are each the size of a baby rhinoceros, and if I combine them in a single post, their combined weight might cause a singularity in my database and collapse my blog.

I. The Text of Scripture

Examining the Christian Scriptures thoroughly, it is difficult for me to understand how claims of inerrancy can be made outside of ignorance. I do not mean this to suggest that all those making such claims are ignorant or that they are stupid – they may well have attained an understanding of Scripture which my mind has not – but that I simply do not comprehend how this is possible. Sticking to the New Testament (which is more my stomping grounds than the Old), I think it will be sufficient to show, from my understanding, a lack of literal, moral, and foundational inerrancy.

Literal inerrancy

The matter of literal errancy can be shown in cross-references (such as the infamous Mark 2:26 debacle), but a trivial, yet important example, can be taken from the three Synoptic accounts, in the sending out of the Twelve:

Do not take along any gold or silver or copper in your belts; take no bag for the journey, or extra tunic, or sandals or a staff; for the worker is worth his keep.
(Matthew 10:9-10)

He told them: ‘Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.’
(Luke 9:3)

These were his instructions: ‘Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic.’
(Mark 6:8-9)

The Matthean and Lukan accounts agree in what they say, but Mark is at odds with the other two.

If we are to say, along with most scholars, that Mark is earliest, are Matthew and Luke working with a corrupted version of the story, or do they correct the error contained in Mark? Whatever the case is, I think the contradiction is pretty evident in the text and it is not possible to work around it. There is no manuscript data of which I am aware that harmonizes these. I have heard with surprising frequency from those holding to biblical inerrancy that the original documents were inerrant, but what we have are not those originals, so that the documents at first agreed on all matters, but later were corrupted (even if there is no evidence for specific cases, we may take on faith that God inspired them perfectly, though we cannot tell in every situation how that plays out). But whether this is just me or whether it is a more important consideration, I do not understand the practical difference between an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon. Was God just negligent in his upkeep of the text (being sovereign one moment over its inspiration but not over its preservation)? And how does it mean anything to appeal to a hypothetical, largely imaginary inerrant original when we do not have that original nor any way of appealing to it besides the critical methods which have gotten us even this far? That is, I see no way that the interpretation of an inerrant canon now-corrupted and an errant canon differ from one another. And I further fail to see how an inerrant canon now-corrupted makes anything but a mess out of God’s interaction with mankind for the sake of his self-revelation.

But this error is pretty negligible, right? I mean, none of this affects the interpretation of the passage but only that some details may not be exact. This is a fair assessment, but this example cannot be passed up, I don’t think, without conceding the literal errancy of the Scriptures.

Moral Inerrancy

But what about moral matters? Surely there is agreement there. Again, for sake of simplicity (and sticking to where my knowledge is more complete), I will only look at New Testament examples, for considerations about Old Testament moral commands, their relevancy, and the scope of what is called Covenant Theology is very complex. But let us take one issue: the eating of meats sacrificed to idols. The first instruction concerning this matter comes in the book of Acts, in the letter from the Jerusalem council to the Gentile believers.

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.

I think it is clear from the context this occurs in that this was more of a command from church authority than a suggestion. And I think it not without reason (as some do on other matters) to say that ‘contextually speaking’ we cannot affirm eating meat sacrificed to idols without bringing the morality of sexual immorality into question.

Paul, however, takes another view of this altogether, alluding to this matter in Romans and more fully addressing it in 1 Corinthians, essentially saying the same thing in both places:

Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.

Paul is saying, clearly, that eating meat sacrificed to idols is a non-moral issue, but that those who do this need to be sensitive to their fellow believers who do view it as a moral issue, for these persons and their consciences are more important than an individual’s freedom. But in saying this, does he not explicitly flaunt the decree given only a few years earlier by the council at Jerusalem? Is he not suggesting that those who made this ruling were brothers with ‘weak consciences’? And what of the other matters in that decree? Or do the Scriptures not always speak with one voice on moral matters?

But the New Testament is not done addressing this topic, for we have two more mentions on this from the mouth of Christ himself, in the book of Revelation, first to the church at Pergamum and then the church at Thyatira:

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by committing sexual immorality.

Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.

In the above passages from Revelation, as is arguably the same in the Acts passage, eating food sacrificed to idols is inextricably linked to sexual immorality (I suspect, particularly given the OT references in the Revelation passages, that this refers to the context of pagan mystery cults). However, there is not an out in the passage to say that food sacrificed to idols is wrong only when it leads to sexual immorality, but both are unequivocally condemned. Like my friend from whom I stole the title of this entry might say about other matters, it is not that eating causes sexual immorality per se, but that there is a link between rejecting giving thanks to God by eating food sacrificed to pagan gods, and rejecting the true God’s instruction on other matters, including sexual ones. Only because of Romans and 1 Corinthians can we, strictly within the scope of Scripture, seriously question this reasoning. So what are we to say? Shall we say that Paul disregards the clear instruction of the church and the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall we say that Christian thought developed on this matter over time, to approximate the truer morality of the matter, and that likewise the commendation in Acts did not represent God’s perfect will, but a first attempt thereat, hedged by invisible (in the text) cultural constraints, even though the council claims this ‘seemed good to the Holy Spirit’? (For we cannot easily contextualize away the command given in Acts, seeing that it was to the whole of the Gentile communion.) Shall we also then say, despite the most straight-forward hermeneutic of the Revelation passages, that food sacrificed to idols is condemned only because of its fundamental link, in that context, to sexual immorality, and it is not condemned for all people at all times, such as to the Corinthian and Roman churches to whom Paul wrote? My purpose here is to show that despite clear moral injunctions, Scriptural commands change, are reevaluated, and evolve over time and in the minds of its various authors, creating anything but a clear moral standard on all issues, but a complex and altogether human dialogue between authors, authorities, and congregants, at the very least obscuring, if not destroying, any universal moral inerrancy inherent in the text.

Foundational Inerrancy

Surely then, if literal and moral inerrancy are in question, we can depend on Scripture to tell us without erring the most important matters. The Resurrection, which along with the Incarnation and the Atonement forms a necessary trio for the Christian faith, would fall easily within this category. This, I fear, I also find more complex than meets the eye, and quite possibly lacking in inerrancy. The post-resurrection accounts have, to say the least, given me great pause concerning the validity of Christian claims. The variance in the accounts are rather infamous, including who was at the tomb and what they saw there, whether there was an earthquake, whether holy men from the past wandered around Jerusalem in-between the Lord’s death and resurrection, as only Matthew mentions – a rather noteworthy occurrence one would think for the other gospel writers! But there is one fairly large discrepancy I want to hone in on. Matthew, Mark, and John all have appearances by Jesus to the apostles in Galilee. Though the original ending to Mark is lost (that note in your Bible that ‘the earliest manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20’ is quite correct, though the details are outside the scope of this document), the trajectory to Galilee is evident from 14:28 and 16:6-7:

But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he [the angel] said, ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” ’

Matthew and John have similar accounts at the end of each of their gospels, which I (rather grotesquely) abbreviate here:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said […]

Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias [Galilee]. It happened this way: […]

It is striking to notice agreement between two Synoptics and John with one Synoptic missing out, for usually the Synoptics agree and John is the odd man out. One might say there is a gap in Luke except for the way he recounts Jesus’ first (recognizable) appearance to the disciples at the end of his gospel:

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. [… Jesus speaks, eats a fish to prove his corporeality …] Then he [Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

(emphasis mine)

Luke-Acts does not record any apparition of Jesus in Galilee, though the other three gospels say there was such an apparition. Furthermore, unless we are to assume the disciples disobeyed their risen Lord (which does not much fit the literary mood at the transition from Luke to Acts) or that their Lord rescinded his command and led his followers to Galilee (which does not much fit the description of him), there is not much room for Luke’s account to agree with the other three. The geography makes sense within the thematic scope of Luke-Acts – a Jewish messiah and his message spreading from the Jews to the world (thus beginning in Jerusalem, the center of Judaic life) – but I’d rather not think the evangelist altered the story to suit his theme. And as I mentioned, there are other notable discrepancies on the matter of the Resurrection. How could God, in a divinely-inspired writing for the purpose of giving men and women his truth, allow such contradiction in narratives seemingly necessary for his message to lodge themselves into his canon?

The Upshot of All This

The examples I have given are only that: examples of a class that exceeds the particular instances given here. I did not even touch authorial issues in the New Testament, which are another very difficult can of worms. But the gradual accumulation of examples – an umbrella I think it is fair to call ‘textual criticism’ – has wreaked on my faith a damage I did not anticipate, and has crept up on me and surprised me unexpectedly. I should not attempt to say anything other than that I was raised in a fundamentalist belief system that placed highest possible value on the inerrancy of Scripture, and that this background has, no doubt, significantly shaped how I have handled all this. Like every human, I am influenced by my upbringing. But the result is that the faith that I was brought up to have – that what the Bible says is true and beyond doubt, and it is the only source from which one can truly come to know God – is no longer tenable. The Bible is all too much a human document, containing our errors, our disagreements, our disputes…

This leaves me, hermeneutically, on unsteady ground, or rather on ground that has already collapsed and left me nowhere. In order for me to still consider the Bible ‘of God’ in any real sense, it must hold to a certain set of standards, and while it may be a mixture of human and divine elements (much like orthodox voicing of Jesus’ dual human and divine natures), it must at minimum speak about true interactions between God and the physical world. The Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection are non-negotiable: for any of these to be less than real material interactions between God and mankind, to which we have some reliable testimony, Christianity is ruined (for the Atonement, the material interaction may possibly be postponed to a future, glorified state, alongside the present experience of the Holy Spirit). I am not content to water away the narrative as internal personal experience, for internal personal experience is notoriously subjective and tells us more about ourselves than it does about God. No: we are material beings and as such any story giving glimpses into the character of God must ground itself in the same matter that our beings are made from, so that it becomes approachable to us.

What such a hermeneutic, or such a requirement, looks like when it pertains to the Christian Scriptures is quite beyond me. But I certainly know that if it is synonymous with the old requirements, then the very religion flounders before them and is thrown out altogether. I think that, to pursue this, I might be well-advised to pick up some Karl Barth (perhaps ‘Church Dogmatics’), for he along with many neo-orthodox theologians of the 20th century is one of the few who I know to have taken this matter seriously, and he and his kin may offer the only way of answering such questions. Nevertheless, at present this matter remains to me an incalculably high impediment to a conviction on Christianity containing the remotest degree of certainty.

Introduction

When Jesus came into Jerusalem on the day we now call ‘Palm Sunday,’ crowds gathered around him, shouted after him, and as Matthew says ‘spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.’ This looks like messiah worship, doesn’t it? But most Protestants are unaware of the Maccabean revolt, which happened a little less than two centuries before Christ, and I will admit that I am less aware of it than I should be. In the revolt, the Jewish people rose up and fought against the Seleucid empire and defeated them, winning for a short time their independence from any foreign power. When the Maccabean forces recaptured Jerusalem and cleansed the temple, 2 Maccabees records this:

Carrying rods entwined with leaves, green branches and palms, they sang hymns of grateful praise to him who had brought about the purification of his own Place.

Sounds astonishingly like the Jesus incident – save that I doubt the Maccabean forces rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (stallions are more likely). Palms were not something people happened to have available; it had a very specific political significance tied to a specific nation’s history (like throwing tea out of a ship in Boston harbor). This is not the recognition of God-dwelling-with-us, it is the people of Jerusalem asserting what they expect of Jesus – a prophet who will lead the Jewish people to political freedom from their Roman oppressors! Matthew’s gospel is saturated with the politics of Jewish independence, from the Maccabean expectations of Jerusalem toward Jesus to the later questioning by the Pharisees (to trap him – much like our current political journalists) about paying taxes to Caesar. Jesus himself gives acknowledgment of this at his arrest, ‘Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?’ Indeed, a rebellion was the expectation of the city at large.

Jesus spends his time between the triumphal entry and his arrest countering this expectation. There are many things he does in the Matthean account of Holy Week, but I want to look particularly at the six parables Matthew records in this time. He enters the city and clears the temple (in many ways, adding to the parallel with the Maccabean revolt!), and shortly thereafter tells 3 back-to-back parables; the author takes a break to record other happenings, and then gives 3 more parables. My contention: that all six of these parables reflect a soteriology based firmly on how one lives one’s life, not on faith alone. But let us take a look at these parables. Read on…

We live in a world of incomplete knowledge. In fact, it is actually impossible to attain complete knowledge – if you don’t believe me, ask Gödel, or even worse, ask Heisenberg. This doesn’t mean that some things cannot be proven – it can be proven, for example, that the world is round, or that the sun burns by hydrogen fusion, or that you are looking at a computer screen or fancy-schmancy cell phone screen while reading this. But it does mean that there are some things which cannot be proven, and others which we do not have the capacity to determine with certainty. We make sense of this part of the world (which is much of it) by determining probabilistically what is most likely to be true: it is likely, for instance, that Hilary (Rodham) Clinton is a democratic candidate for president who will not have sufficient delegates to win her party’s nomination, while it is unlikely that she is a secret service agent from Jupiter’s moon Io with the capacity to time-travel and, thus, win the democratic nomination and enslave humanity to the Ionians (that is, citizens of Io, not of a chain of islands off the coast of Greece). And it is likely that the sun is out today because the earth has rotated so that the ground I am standing on is struck by its rays, and unlikely that I am imagining it and that the entire phenomenon of “sun” is unique only to me.

When it comes to matters of religion, we also have incomplete knowledge. There are many holy books, all of them containing what appear to be errors and mistakes, all of them with defenders pointing out that these aren’t really errors or mistakes. Muslims, Christians, Orthodox Jews, and adherents of every religion (and even adherents of no religion) all feel at times a euphoric connectedness to the divine, and offer this as proof of their claims. All have histories that are dark at times, brilliant at others. All have intellectual men and women throughout time who have defended them. As to the existence even of God, there is no mechanism he has left us by which to test and see his existence, and he does not make himself physically manifest to each individual being. So when it comes to claims concerning religion, we are left to determine, according to some set of metrics for truthfulness, what seems most likely among a wide number of possibilities.

Let us suppose that there is a God who desires to and does communicate with men and women in the world, and we want to determine which of the competing claims about God is true. This is where Euthyphro’s dilemma comes in. If morality is what it is, and is acknowledged by God, then we may leverage the moral claims of the various religions and systems of philosophical thought to determine which is most likely to be true. If, on the other hand, morality is determined only by what God “likes”, or happens to choose, then moral claims (possibly the most important ramification of a religion) are irrelevant in our search for religious truth.

Consider the following scenario: It is the evening of September 10, 2001. You are speaking to what you once thought was a very nice middle-eastern man but who has now you tied up in his apartment because you came over to borrow some sugar at the wrong time and intruded on an argument between him and his friends about what was happening tomorrow and who was going to drive to the airport. In trying to dissuade him from what he is about to do, you plead with him, saying, “But would God really want you to kill so many people – children visiting their parents, those who are Muslims themselves with loved ones even in your home country?”

“Do not question the will of Allah!” he replies. “It is his will that the infidels be brought to repentance or be destroyed. They have already failed to come to repentance by wallowing in this country’s greed and rebellion to the will of Allah which is given in the Holy Quran.”

“But would Allah really want you to murder?” you say. “Is he so vindictive to want you to kill? Are you sure you are understanding him right? Is this who God is, so evil?”

“Allah is not evil. What he says is right because the will of Allah is always right.”

Do you see how futile it is to reason about God if it is only God’s might that creates morality? It is impossible to determine between one system of belief about God versus another except through factual accuracy – and as I already noted (all too briefly), all systems I know of have some explaining to do, all being radically placed in that area of the world in which our knowledge is woefully incomplete. If might makes right, it is impossible for a Christian to stake Jesus’ divinity on the quality of his character, and likewise impossible to impugn other systems for the character of their god(s). A priori, fundamentalist Islam is just as valid an option as any form of Christianity. Reverse the above situation: assume that you are the terrorist, raised in a background of fundamentalist Islam, saturated with it, and someone is trying to reason with you. Assuming Allah’s will is all that makes an act right or wrong, there is no way for you to leave your beliefs for moral reasons, for there is no such thing as moral reasons to consider. And so I think that, in order for human beings to able to determine to any degree who God is in a world of incomplete knowledge, morality must be at least to some extent determinable apart from God. This does not necessarily mean that all of morality must be determinable by human means (this is part of the problem of incomplete knowledge), but some of it must be.

Consider another scenario: I wrote about a show I’ve been watching about a serial killer who kills other killers. If morality is determined by what God chooses, then this serial killer is not by his nature any more or less moral than God himself, just less powerful. In fact, in a strict interpretation of double predestination Calvinism, this serial killer may actually be more benevolent than God – choosing his victims based on their own benevolence or malevolence (and thus promoting benevolence), whereas God chooses his victims and friends based on no criterion at all concerning the individual at stake (thus promoting… what?). That’s not to say there aren’t Calvinistic answers to this charge (though I personally find them weak), but it is to say that in defining moral rightness strictly as what God chooses, we can rapidly end up with a human being – even a disturbing or morally ambiguous one – having greater benevolence toward humanity than God! (Necessarily, this means that benevolence is divorced from morality.) This is particularly true if, alongside double predestination, we take a punitive view of hell.

All this is to say, in order to know about God when we ourselves live in a world of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and in order to know about a God who is good to humanity, I believe the answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma must be that God loves that which is holy because it is holy. But I hold that this does not necessarily mean that humanity always has the capacity to determine holiness (or moral rightness, I am here using the terms interchangeably) in all cases, and this leaves me with another, subtly different dilemma which I feel inadequate to solve.

First for social justice: Trade As One. Do something with your discretionary funds that will help those who are living out the true horrors of human existence. The answer to this is not, I believe, to merely throw money at the poor (the liberal response), nor to ignore them (the conservative response), but to incorporate the least of these into the very systems which have brought so many of us such great relief and good in our earthly careers. For someone like me, the journals are the most enticing. But for God’s sake, make choices for the benefit of real men and women.

Secondly: Candy for your brain. Bart Ehrman and NT Wright talking theodicy; there are few discussions among men (=humankind, a word I wish would not have supplanted wer) that I would find more provoking, stimulating, or satisfying. Not satisfying in the sense that it solves any problem, but satisfying in the sense that an excellently cooked meal is satisfying.

In response to the unusual number of replies to my last post: I guess whenever I want to generate discussion and comments I should post about serial killers. Thanks for all the responses.

I’m staying at home sick today, skipping out on my one class for the day in hopes that staying home will lead to a better tomorrow (considering that I have a midterm tomorrow, which I am spending much of my time here studying for, I am very much hoping for a better tomorrow). Which also reminds me that it looks as though the courses I need to take and the variety I need to choose from are offered only on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, with the odd and daunting result that it looks like my fall semester will include six hours of class on Tuesday/Thursday and none at all on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Though I understand professors’ desires to only teach two days a week, I don’t remember signing up for this when I enrolled at the university.

But on to what I wanted to post about. I want to bring up two quotes from the discussion on morality. There were two comments I want to bring up first, the first from MR, the second from Brandon:

To summarize, simply doing the right actions is insufficient. I should seek to follow God’s commandments AND my heart should be in it. Love is NOT just deciding to do good to another. As my friend from Minnesota says, “Love is taking JOY in the good of another.”

Well, if a person follows the rules but feels nothing toward God, or has no relationship with God, then His following the rules is pretty much meaningless. …(long ellipsis)… What is the intentions for doing good? I think that determines ones morality.

This causes me to ask what God’s goals (or our goals, since we are the ones talking about this and I haven’t had my God phone-line installed yet) are in saying that doing good is insufficient. If doing good is insufficient, that means there is something that morality desires beyond doing good to another; what is this?

Though I wasn’t in the original post talking specifically about Christian Bible-based morality (and though it is obviously related), this brings out another important question: are the commands of God grounded in any principle(s)? That is, one just states that a person ought to follow God’s commands and from the heart, and that this is moral behavior. But why follow God’s commands – because God says so or because of what the commands themselves are? Is it more than a language-game, set up and directed by a divine being? What makes it moral other than divine fiat, or is there anything else? Socrates phrases the question more beautifully than I can and much earlier than I ever thought of it:

Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Socrates lived in a polytheistic culture, but this can be very easily translated into a monotheistic question by dropping the ’s’. (And don’t take this as too much of a plug for Socrates – brilliant though he was, I can’t imagine someone more annoying than someone who always seems to be a step ahead of you and you can never quite tell if he’s being sincere or not.) The above quotes from MR and Brandon seem to tend toward the answer that something ‘is holy because it is loved by God’ rather than ‘God loves it because it is holy’, but I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths, so I want to make sure. Additional questions that may help in answering this one are: could God have commanded other than what he did? and would it still be right to follow the behavior of the commands if we did not have them?

On an aside, why do I have so many gay commentators? Oh right, I suppose that makes sense – that tends to happen when one sets up a blog to deal with issues of one’s sexuality – but thanks to Abigail for commenting and adding another perspective. Not that I am unappreciative toward any of you others’ comments and posts! Now I must return to the lambda calculus from whence I came.