Undeception

While studying NT Greek in undergrad, I became interested in linguistics. I gradually became alarmed as I discovered that key insights into human language made by linguists were hardly ever taken into account among scholars intending to interpret the Bible from the original languages. Greek and Hebrew are treated by too many exegetes as special codes more than as living, changing, and internally diverse human languages.

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Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

This week’s episode of Unbelieveable? was nowhere near as incendiary as the interview released from last weekend — I’m glad Chris handled that one and not me! It was, however, a rather interesting contribution to the show’s “Mind, Body, and Soul Month.” (N.B. I have inserted the Oxford comma in that title where Brierley has omitted it. Bad Brit!)

The topic of discussion was “Has Neuroscience Killed God?” Featured was a discussion between Cambridge neuroscientist Rev. Dr. Aladair Coles and psychological therapist Martyn Frame, a Christian and an atheist respectively. The discussion covered the ground you might expect, e.g. whether determining the neurological phenomena associated with religious experiences fully explained those experiences and was therefore sufficient to discount them. Overall I think this was a much better discussion than last week’s disappointing conversation between David Papineau and Keith Ward over materialism/dualism, in which I sided with the materialist over Ward (whom I really respect).

Anatomy of a religious experience (via Wikipedia)

Frame early on concedes that religious experience as emanating from divine interaction is not strictly speaking disproved by neurological evidence, but keeps insisting that (reductive) naturalism is somehow more in line with the scientific evidence. Yet when pressed to explain how this was the case, he kept wanting to offer philosophical/theological challenges. Specifically, he wondered why the Christian God wouldn’t wire people to believe in specifically Him (i.e. the Christian God) rather than to allow people to either believe in another deity or disbelieve altogether. Unsurprisingly, Coles countered that 1) this is not after all a neurological question and 2) a God who wired everyone to believe in Him would be despotic and unlike the Christian God. Coles was very careful not to dismiss Frame’s concern as a real problem, but pointed out quite rightly that it was a philosophical and not a scientific challenge. As this show’s topic was specifically on the scientific evidence, I think Coles was right in respectfully and not dismissively steering things back.

Among the more interesting scientific discussions was the evidence cited by Coles that the parts of the brain that appear to be involved in the perception of religious experience are not at all unique to humans. There is no detectable “God module” that humans utilize for their prayer lives and religious experiences; people interact with their deities in the same way they interact with other humans. For Coles, it might be easier to dismiss God if there were such a lump of cells tacked on by evolution which makes humans think they are having their mystical experiences, but having the brain act in a normal, human way when interacting with either other humans or a spiritual being is “deeply Christian” in that it coincides with the Christian belief in God as a person with whom we interact rather than just some mystical force. I found that interesting; take it or leave it.

One of Frame’s lines of evidence was pointing out that people with a dominating right hemisphere were likelier to be religious than otherwise. The right hemisphere is the creative side of the brain and notoriously can find patterns even where there are none; the popular implication is that, essentially, right-brained people are the likeliest to believe in things that don’t exist, and that this explains religious people. Coles countered that there are plenty of left-brained people who are religious in different ways: he said that although right-brained individuals seem to have more mystical experiences, left-brained individuals are likelier to view God in doctrinal or theological terms. Moreover, Coles cited studies that show people with no religious inclinations who have the left side of their brain damaged will often find a sense for spirituality as a result of their dependence on the right hemisphere. From this he suggested that we all have the physical mechanisms for religious experience built in to us, but such inclinations are sometimes “bullied” out by a dominating left hemisphere. Such people are not de facto atheists or materialists, but may find mystical, religious experiences harder to access.

A couple additional thoughts from me.

• The case was predictably made by Frame that being able to artificially stimulate mystical experiences using electrodes applied to the applicable regions of the brain invalidates any immaterial source for those experiences in other people. The implication is that if we can fool the brain into thinking there is a God through very mundane physical processes, this goes to show that it’s all delusion caused by our brains’ reactions to electro-chemical accidents. This is a very old, very tired bit of reductionism. If neuroscientists were able to manipulate a subject’s perception so that he thought his mother was in the room, this would not at all invalidate the existence of the subject’s mother, or even exclude the possibility that his mother was in the room. Similarly, neuroscientists are able to artificially approximate all kinds of reactions to stimuli that, while actually existing, are not actually present at the time. To my mind, this is a line of evidence that painfully begs the question. All that has been shown is that certain kinds of experiences that are experienced by our brain’s chemistry are in fact reproducible by chemistry.

• The topic of this show dealt specifically with religious experiences; I have indeed had religious, even mystical experiences, but I am not particularly right-brained. My left hemisphere really tries to get me to dismiss my experiences, and although I do think it important to suspend my belief in them when evaluating these questions, I find that my left hemisphere is more than adequate to explain my religious beliefs anyway. The fact is, I don’t believe primarily because of religious experiences as perceived by my right brain: equally so, perhaps even more commonly these days, I believe because the world makes better intellectual sense to me with a God behind it. Importantly, in practice I discount every mystical personal experience, mine included, and proceed with my belief in the Christian God based on a reasoned choice. All this to say, for me, not much hangs on the outcome of this discussion in either direction.

Please note that I’m not saying there aren’t real challenges for theism or Christianity from neuroscience. I honestly don’t know enough to say whether there are or aren’t. But I do know that Dr. Coles presented a better case than Mr. Frame.

Anyway, for a cordial, civil exchange of interesting ideas, I certainly recommend checking this episode out.

For most of us growing up as conservative Evangelicals, the term humanism was scarcely used apart from the modifier “secular”, and even it when it was, that scary adjective was implied and inferred. For this reason, one of my theology teachers in undergrad liked to try to reclaim humanism from the clutches of secular humanism among his students by describing the great movement of Christian humanism as represented by Erasmus. Dr. Bowdle defined humanism simply as “trying to be the best human you can be,” or the desire to reach one’s full potential as a human being in all areas, physical, mental, emotional, etc. I came to think of humanism as a main goal of Christianity — mine at least.

In a recent post called “Christianity as humanism,” David Withun reproduces part of a summary of Irenaeus‘ thought as described by Paul Tillich. Here’s a bit of it:

“Here we have a profound doctrine of what I call a transcendent humanism, a humanism which says that Christ is the fulfillment of essential man, of the Adamic nature. Such a fulfillment became necessary because a break occurred in the development of man; Adam fell away from what he was to be come. The childish innocence of Adam has been lost; but the second Adam can become what he was to become, fully human. And we can become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ.”

So in a mystical sense, Christianity has the potential to be humanistic. I do not at all disagree. But I am afraid that even many who champion this understanding of Christian humanism fail to distribute their emphasis in all the necessary places. More on that in a minute.

Erasmus the scholastic humanist

One of the ideals that modern Christians have lost out on after eschewing humanism as dirty, atheistic idolatry (humans are crap — didn’t you get Augustine’s memo?) is the importance of education and the development of the mind. Great institutions of higher learning were begun by those who believed that Christians couldn’t be the best humans they could be without an emphasis upon the life of the mind, whereas the early twentieth century saw the tide of Protestants intent on pitting the life of the mind against the life of the Spirit swelling, warning of the dangers of “overeducation”.

Education is a vital aspect of humanism, obviously. Learning the right stuff is important, no doubt. So is keeping our bodies healthy, producing art, etc. But how about our moral and ethical behavior? Isn’t being as good a human as I can be actually dependent on how I live? Certainly, as good humanists will tell you, because humanism is about a holistic approach to betterment; it’s about a dedication to excel for all the things human can excel in. This means that humanism, at least Christian humanism, is not an end in itself. You don’t become the best human you can be just so you can be proud of yourself. It’s because you recognize humanity as something valuable — and not just your own humanity.

Looking back, I see that the appreciation for humanism that awoke in me during college probably influenced my conviction about the importance of social concern as a necessary feature of Christianity. It might be returned that I’m confusing humanism with humanitarianism, but I would disagree: the latter is a significant element of the former. Integral to valuing humanity and human potential is being interested not only in what it means to be human, but being interested in actual humans. This is especially true of Christian humanism, or Tillich’s “transcendent humanism”, because NT theology teaches us that kenosis is an essential feature of God’s character (John Piper’s warped views notwithstanding). From a Christian perspective, the desire to become the best human you can be necessarily entails becoming more God-centered; becoming as divine as you can be (theosis) necessarily entails becoming more human-centered. “And the second is like it,” said our teacher.

Tragically, because of the lie that works = human effort and a myopic misunderstanding of Christian social concern as “the social gospel”, most conservative American Evangelicals really stink at this stuff. I give these guys are hard time for that. But unfortunately, it’s not just them: there are other faith traditions that despite being keenly aware of the need for orthopraxis as a complement of orthodoxy nonetheless seem to think that worship, whether in ritual/liturgical practices or in emotive song services, satisfies the bulk of the requirement. I asked one believer from the Orthodox tradition what the Christian life was all about, and the response consisted of things like mystic communion with God and following the ritual/liturgical guidelines prescribed by the Church. The Orthodox may affirm “transcendent humanism” all day long, but an attempt to partake of the divine nature and commune with God apart from cultivating the desire to emulate God’s love by substantive efforts to mitigate the suffering of fellow humans is not at all sufficient to be called humanism.

Developing one’s mind and body and contributing to human achievement are valid components of humanism; likewise, praying and communing with the Spirit of God are wonderful. But until we learn to obey God by developing His heart within us, our worship and rituals are nothing at all but clanging cymbals. Your praxis is not truly orthē and your sanctification/theosis is a farce without humanitarianism. In the Gospels, the manifestation of the Kingdom of God frequently took the form of Jesus demonstrating compassion — not just feeling it or passing the buck to God by praying that He intervene. We can’t then “become fully human through participation in this full humanity which has appeared in Christ” without an ever-present sense of compassion that erupts in action. “Oh, those poor suffering people” is a contemptibly selfish sentiment when it’s not followed through on, much like feeling sorry for or simply praying for a woman as you see her being raped in front of you.

Let me put it bluntly, brothers and sisters: you simply cannot live an authentic Christian life without being consumed by the passion that motivated God in Jesus: love and care for humanity. And not just their eternal destinies (which is mostly out of your jurisdiction anyway), but every part about them. We prove our dedication to God by taking care of their material circumstances and let God worry about whether they dedicate themselves to Him.

The brute fact is that people are dying of starvation and preventable disease, and we’re sitting over here in our comfort expecting to commune with God while we take care of our marginal concerns. This should not be so.

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Philippians 2.4-7

What makes us think that the “full humanity” which Christ brings with him could look like anything other than full, self-emptying submission to God through service of others?

All flaws duly acknowledged, I still loves me some C.S. Lewis. He is the reason I am where I am today (whether that’s credit or blame is up to you to decide, of course!). His thoughts here have been articulated time and again on my blog in my words, but I am glad to present them here in Lewis’s well-spun words.

Dear Mr. Beversluis,

Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be ‘What is that to thee?’ The passage may not be ‘addressed to our (your or my) condition’ at all.

I think we are v. much in agreement, aren’t we?

Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis

Big thanks to Alex Smith at the Evangelical Universalist message board for this gem (and David Baldwin for tipping me off).

No one disputes the observation that most conservative American Christians are both inerrantists and believers in constitutional “strict constructionism”, i.e. the idea that if a given power was not enumerated or otherwise granted by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, it’s out of bounds for the U.S. Federal government. The clever parallel between the errors of inerrantism and constitutionalism seems to have first surfaced in the biblioblogosphere a couple of years ago and made ripples throughout many of the sites that I usually enjoy for their theologically unconservative Christian views. I’ve seen the comparison rediscovered and reasserted several times since, and it’s grated on my nerves long enough to get me to write about it.

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The first thing to point out is that believing that we should follow the Constitution as much as possible is not predicated on the belief that the Constitution is even approximately inerrant. What would it even mean to say the Constitution is “inerrant”, anyway? Most of the people who maintain that the Bible is inerrant mean primarily that the Bible does not err in matters of science, history, theology, and any presentations of facts. Now, can any of these expectations about the Bible be made to apply to the U.S. Constitution? Have you ever seen anyone try?

Taken that way, the inerrancy/constitutionalism argument is a sloppy criticism indeed, but the critics’ actual objection is not really as unreasonable as that. What they instead mean to imply is that neither the Bible nor the Constitution are infallible in their respective areas, and that inerrantists and constitutionalists believe against all the evidence that they are. The only thing that keeps this from being a completely laughable straw man is that there are indeed some constitutionalists, who indeed generally also happen to be inerrantist Christians, who talk as though the Constitution could not be improved upon in any way. There are certainly no fewer ignorant constitutionalists than there are among most political viewpoints, but even these would hardly say that criticism of the Constitution is out of bounds because of some mystical infallibility: rather, they’d say that criticism of the Constitution is automatically wrong-headed because the document was based on a sound political philosophy that they would be able to articulate even if the Constitution had never been written.

See, sniggering insinuations that constitutionalists believe the Constitution or its authors were endowed with something akin to divine inspiration is closely analogous to the preposterous idea that agreeing wholeheartedly with Why Evolution Is True is tantamount to believing in Jerry Coyne’s divine inspiration, when all it really takes is a decent, informed understanding of evolution to see that anyone who disagreed with the book’s broader points would be running afoul the scientific consensus undergirding the book. Many constitutionalists support adherence to the Constitution because they happen to think the principles are sound. Mocking the Constitution doesn’t knock down the political philosophy behind the Constitution, any more than refuting inerrancy logically refutes faith in God, of which the Bible is a fallible ancient expression. That actually leads me to perhaps the widest gulf between inerrancy and constitutionalism.

The constitutionalist’s “faith” in the Constitution is no more unreasonable than expecting any other law should be upheld or changed rather than merely ignored. Good laws, such as those against murder or theft, are meant to be universally applied. We suffer no loopholes or reading between the lines on those. Then there are tax codes: liberals, the chief skeptics in regard to constitutionalism, are the most likely to insist that every single person eligible to be taxed be required to contribute their fair share, and campaign to modify or repeal laws that don’t tax certain brackets in the proportion they see fit. The whole idea behind laws is that they do not suffer exceptions lightly: every possible exception must be codified in the wording, and every loophole must be closed or it will be exploited and the intent of the law thereby thwarted. If you understand this, you understand constitutionalism.

In fact, it’s not constitutionalists who make the U.S. Constitution out to be some sort of mystical exception: that’s actually done by those who have found it expedient to pretend that it, unlike every other “legal and binding” writ in jurisprudence, is a “living document” that is actually meant to be manipulated, conveniently misconstrued, and generally ignored.

And before you remind everyone, I am aware that Congress had compromised on these ideals before the first president’s first term was complete. This is a testament to the inadequacy of the Constitution as framed, and to the predilection of those in power for finding shortcuts to more power; but here again, this weakness doesn’t mean that we can allow politicians to proceed in running roughshod over “the supreme law of the land.” It means we need to patch up the holes a lot better. Here’s the thing: the Constitution never considers itself immutable, and neither do those who support it. But as with other imperfect or bad laws, you don’t ignore the flaws or come up with phony alternative interpretations of its meanings, like apologists who make the objectionable parts of the Bible into a holy allegory: you either amend it or you repeal it. If you think the Constitution should authorize the federal government to ensure that healthcare be free, or that abortions be illegal in all fifty states – whatever it is – you don’t corrupt the meaning of definite, established phrases in the Constitution to lend an air of legitimacy; you augment the powers of the federal government through the amendment process. Just as with any other law, exceptionlessness is a protection against the partiality and whims of demagoguery, the runaway ambitions of the political class, and power brokers who try to buy the federal government’s favor. To simply ignore the supreme law of the land when convenient is by definition lawlessness — and try to find a liberal who believes that anarchy is a good thing! Not having the powers of the federal government constrained by anything other than politicians’ imaginations is a sure way to maintain an oligarchy, which is essentially what we have now.

Please don’t dismiss me as a blind constitutionalist or a political conservative. I am neither. I used to have a higher opinion of the Constitution than I do now. I was taught by political and religious conservatives that although it’s not perfect, it’s the best thing free people have come up with in quite a long time, and maybe ever. I now think that’s an overstatement,  and I can point out several flaws without even trying very hard. Maybe the Constitution is entirely inadequate and awful, that the form of government it was intended to establish and perpetuate is useless for today’s world. Maybe what we need is more centralization of power rather than the checks and balances on national powers to preserve local, subsidiarian governments as intended by the Constitutional Convention. Maybe so. We can talk about that. But please don’t pretend that demanding that the federal government take no more power for itself than was set aside for it by the law written to establish it is somehow completely looney and absolutely necessary for reasonable people to dismiss. And still more, be intellectually honest enough to admit that insisting on laws having definite meaning that should not be ignored by the whims of the current majority is in any way related to believing that the Bible contains no errors.

The simultaneous popularity of inerrancy and strict constructionism among conservative Americans is mostly coincidental, with the exception that conservatives think that both ideas are worth conserving. Then again, given that there are plenty of things that even liberals want to conserve, that exception does not make the comparison of constitutionalism and inerrantism useful for anything but a cheap shot.

An article is up in Epiphenom called, “Supernatural explanations just don’t occur to kids – they need to be taught them.”

I saw this linked on Google+ from an atheist claiming this as evidence that children only believe in the supernatural because we “FORCE” them to learn about it. Religion is child abuse, etc.

It puzzles me a bit how this is touted as some kind of evidence that atheism as a default position is therefore more valid; there are all kinds of important things that kids don’t naturally know, but come to believe later after some life experience. This study, if it proves correct, may be handy as an excuse to refer to raising children from within a religious tradition as “mind-washing”, but it simultaneously seems to undermine another popular critique of religion.

Namely, is belief in the supernatural a childish, irrational, illogical, and completely unsourced just-so story, or is it the result of the higher reasoning of adults at least, or perhaps even some sort of supernatural revelation? If belief in the divine cannot be blamed on puerile and thoughtless speculation, isn’t it at least conceivable that the widespread human belief in the divine is the result of thoughtful adult reasoning (or revelation)? Occam’s razor cuts both ways.

I’m not saying any of these options is the most plausible. But the existence of different options does showcase the fact that no belief is exempt from the necessity of honest analysis, no matter how convenient it would be for our position to shortcut around it. You’ve heard of “gotcha politics”? Claiming this as proof of anything is gotcha science — hardly science at all.

I would not be misunderstood: there is no fact of science not yet incorporated in a law, no law of science that has got beyond the hypothetic and tentative, that has not in it the will of God, and therefore may not reveal God; but neither fact nor law is there for the sake of fact or law; each is but a mean to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God—not in the laws themselves, save as his means. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God; for human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to him, and is always leaving him—his intent, that is, his perfected work—behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where his work culminates in revelation. Doubtless it thus makes some small intellectual approach to him, but at best it can come only to his back; science will never find the face of God; while those who would reach his heart, those who, like Dante, are returning thither where they are, will find also the spring-head of his science. Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life. It discovers a little of the way God walks to his ends, but in so doing it forgets and leaves the end itself behind. I do not say the man of science does so, but the very process of his work is such a leaving of God’s ends behind. It is a following back of his footsteps, too often without appreciation of the result for which the feet took those steps. To rise from the perfected work is the swifter and loftier ascent. If the man could find out why God worked so, then he would be discovering God; but even then he would not be discovering the best and the deepest of God; for his means cannot be so great as his ends.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “The Truth”, published in Unspoken Sermons, Series 3, 1889)