Undeception

Despite Robert Burns’ own considerable moral indiscretions, he certainly had no trouble decrying religious phonies such as he saw in William Fisher, elder in Mauchline Kirk in 1785. In “Holy Willie’s Prayer”, Burns paints a vivid picture of a womanizing hypocrite whose excuses and even theological justifications strike me as authentic and potentially accurate. But forget those for this post. So as not to give the false appearance of indicting any of the Reformed with Willie’s moral failures, I will cut out all but the first five and final stanzas (but here’s the rest).

O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell,
Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,
Sends ane to heaven an’ ten to hell,
A’ for Thy glory,
And no for ony gude or ill
They’ve done afore Thee!

I bless and praise Thy matchless might,
When thousands Thou hast left in night,
That I am here afore Thy sight,
For gifts an’ grace
A burning and a shining light
To a’ this place.

What was I, or my generation,
That I should get sic exaltation,
I wha deserve most just damnation
For broken laws,
Five thousand years ere my creation,
Thro’ Adam’s cause?

When frae my mither’s womb I fell,
Thou might hae plunged me in hell,
To gnash my gums, to weep and wail,
In burnin lakes,
Where damned devils roar and yell,
Chain’d to their stakes.

Yet I am here a chosen sample,
To show thy grace is great and ample;
I’m here a pillar o’ Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a buckler, and example,
To a’ Thy flock.

………………

But, Lord, remember me an’ mine
Wi’ mercies temp’ral an’ divine,
That I for grace an’ gear may shine,
Excell’d by nane,
And a’ the glory shall be thine,
Amen, Amen!

Love that meter and rhyme scheme!

Isolating the theological content, and certainly not including Willie’s justification of his own hypocrisy in the omitted portion of the poem, on the whole I found that the depiction of Reformed doctrine in the first four and last stanzas, with its preoccupation on God’s acting in the interests of His “glory” via damnation and grace to fallen humanity, sounded very much like presentations I hear nowadays.

But considering Willie’s pompous demeanor, I must say that the ugly side of his attitude certainly bears a resemblance to someone I recently interacted with. (H/T to Matthew Raymer for reminding me of this poem.)

Again, I want to be careful not to bind Reformed theology – and still less all those who accept it as truth – to the personal flaws of Willie Fisher. But I do have to ask: considering their insistence that total depravity of the will, monergism, and unconditional election actually highlight our need for humility, why is it that the popular stereotype of those who are the most committed to Reformed theology as being insufferably arrogant seems to find so many matches in the real world?

My guess is that it would be hard not to let the idea of being “chosen” inflate the heads of those convinced that it applies to them. I know it would be hard for me to chalk up my own election (if I believed in such a thing) fully to divine mystery: I suspect that deep down I’d feel pride in somehow being one of those few whom God thought He could use to bring Himself glory, no matter how much my innate uselessness was necessary to qualify me. I suppose that in the end, even if I believed I had no merit going into it, that the act of divine election itself would afford me a special status in God’s economy and be a coat of many colors difficult to wear in humility. I must say, I know many very humble Reformed people, and I must applaud them for not succumbing to the temptation they face!

But the problem isn’t just with the Reformed, is it? It’s with all exclusivist Christians. Heck, it’s with all humanity. How can we avoid it?

Perhaps it’s in loving “the outsiders”, even our enemies, no less than we love ourselves. In kenosis, we forget whatever privileges we think we have and devote our very lives to making them available to others. A deep-seated, God-empowered will to love and act in love to all indiscriminately; a conscious decision on our part not to elect some and damn others, or treat anyone as though God had done so.

Gosh, it’s still a difficult balancing act, but it’s worth trying to keep in mind.

They say first, God must punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous; neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice is simply monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; for nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one that will no more sin.

George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Righteousness”

Synchronicity in the blogosphere can be almost spooky.

I was sitting in the library working on my dissertation a few days ago when an interesting thought occurred to me out of the blue. I floated it among some of my friends something like this:

If the universalist is right, everyone will be reconciled to God in the end. To many believers, universalism is a dangerous doctrine because they fear that evangelism will suffer, and so if universalism turns out to be wrong, more people will perish as a result of their having been lulled into a false sense of security. But the Reformed should have no bone with universalists: if the Calvinist is right, God’s people will go to heaven regardless. It is only those who reject unconditional election and irresistible grace who should find universalism to be a threat.

Although this statement leaves untouched the question of the universalist’s and the Calvinist’s precise beliefs about evangelism as a Christian responsibility, the general consensus was that this is fairly airtight reasoning. In part I offered it as an attempt to show a huge class of universalism’s most vocal critics (the Reformed) that their core reasoning bore more affinities with universalism than they might care to admit. But my main point was that, despite the common belief that universalism is not merely a harmless false belief but one which poses a severe practical problem, i.e. it supposedly encourages a tapering off of evangelism, this is in fact only a valid fear if one believes that God is not sovereign over salvation. It is only the non-Calvinist who needs be wary of any pragmatic ill effects (as opposed to biblical or theological problems) of universalism.

In discussion with my friends, I came to realize that I, as someone who shamelessly flirts with universalism and shamelessly casts aspersion on many of the hideous conclusions of Reformed soteriology, fall equally-but-inversely under my own critique. I realized that if Ido indeed entertain the possibility of universalism, I could not maintain an unequivocal objection to at least one of the petals of T.U.L.I.P.: irresistible grace.

My friend Drew Smith then pointed me to a post written the day before, in which Roger Olson pointed out how universalism typically relies upon one of the same presuppositions underlying the so-called “doctrines of grace”, viz. that God will have His way in the end — they merely differ on the character of God and His way (although this is a dramatic difference). Olson objects to both views on the same basis: the free will objection to universalism and Calvinism, the problem of God somehow overriding human wills in order to force Himself upon us.

Drew also pointed out a post from last month by Eric Reitan, an excerpt from his upcoming book on universalism dealing specifically with the objection to universalism from free will. Well, it just so happened that the heretic universalist Joel Watts pointed out another blog post published today voicing the free will objection to universalism/Calvinism, which was also defended by Rod of Alexandria, who memorably characterizes universalism as “predestination with a smile on its face.” Interestingly, as evidence for the validity of the thought I had in the library, I’d like to note that all of the above-cited objectors to universalism are non-Calvinist, Wesleyan-leaning Christians.

But of course I was unaware of all of this when I was sitting in the library on Friday, and was already preparing to blog on the topic. Almost makes me think that this is all a part of some great divine plan set in order before the foundations of the world…almost.

I have a few thoughts on the free will objection, which I don’t find particularly persuasive, but I won’t really go into it here. For a start, however, be sure to read Eric Reitan’s post, and this from me/MacDonald as well. What are your thoughts?

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 3: “Inerrancy Stunts Your Growth”

Now, this is one chapter I thoroughly enjoyed. Stark spends the greater part exposing and surgically excising the internal logic used to defend inerrancy. Yet although this can be much like shooting fish in a barrel, and many of his points have been made elsewhere many times before (including on this blog), his accessible prose and razor sharp reasoning makes quick and elegant work of it. But I do have one beef, on which, keep reading.

The first claim usually offered by inerrantists is suitably the first to fall: the Bible claims inerrancy for itself. “The inerrantists talk about the Bible as if it were some self-aware being, like an artificial intelligence that, once assembled, achieves a sort of quasi-consciousness” (p. 47). But the simple fact is that these people who are the quickest to demand scriptural support can point to no scriptural basis for this belief. No passage speaks of the entire canon in which it has become enclosed, much less claiming inspiration or inerrancy for it. Instead, their belief comes down to “logic”, falsely so-called: if the Bible is inspired from start to finish — as surely it ought to be — than it will be inerrant — for surely, it ought to be. This is Stark’s next target, for even if we extrapolate from claims of authority given to certain segments of the text to the entirety of the canonized scriptures, by no means does there result an unavoidable trajectory from inspiration toward inerrancy. As I have pointed out before, 2 Timothy 3.16′s ”God-breathed” does not specify that this means the Bible was essentially “exhaled” through God’s lungs, with a practically incidental detour through human authors’ hearts and pens, as inerrantists suppose; Stark notes that it was more in line with first century thinking to rather understand divine inspiration as the animation and empowerment of the texts themselves. “To say that scripture is ‘God-breathed’,” Stark suggests, “could very well mean that God breathes new life and new meaning into even obscure texts that are outdated, irrelevant, and perhaps even wrong” (pp. 47-48, emphasis original).

Showing that he’s no stranger to arguments with inerrantists, Stark accurately predicts the inerrantists’ next line of defense, what he refers to as “the dominical trump card”: the belief that Jesus believed the Old Testament was inerrant. Ably, and I sincerely believe convincingly, he addresses and problematizes a fairly exhaustive list of proof texts for that claim, a list put forward by Norman Geisler in defense of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy substantiating his belief that “one cannot reject the divine authority of Scripture without thereby impugning the authority of Christ…” (p. 48): Matt. 5.17-18; Luke 24.44; John 10.34-45; 14.16; 16.13.

But what about those times in which Jesus cited Old Testament stories as evidence for a point? It’s quite possible that Jesus was more aware than most of his peers about the deeper truths of the universe, but merely adapted his teaching to them in condescension. The CSBI crowd anticipates that possibility and rejects it outright, because they feel that Jesus should not have lent his considerable credibility to unhistorical stories. Stark has little to do but gesture at the gaping hole in that logic: there is a chasmic difference between alluding to a point from a well-known story and committing oneself to the entire spectrum of truth claims possible for or about that story, including its historicity. But even if Jesus did hold inaccurate conceptions about the Old Testament, history, science, etc., not questioning the common understanding of those things handed down to him just like his contemporaries, Stark suggests that it approaches a violation of the unadulterated humanity of Jesus as affirmed at Chalcedon:

…[D]enying Jesus the right to have faulty assumptions is just another form of Docetism. It is a denial of Jesus’ humanity, because an indispensable part of being human is being a product of one’s own time and place…[I]f Jesus believed the world was flat, and that Daniel wrote Daniel, it is not because he was an inferior or imperfect being; it’s because he was fully a human being, which is precisely what the Council of Chalcedon affirms about him. [p. 55]

Stark spends the next several pages exposing a few more faulty and inconsistently applied presuppositions needed to maintain inerrancy. The highly selective appeal to the authority of church history is highlighted and critiqued as example after example of wildly inappropriate judgments by different presumably authoritative ecclesiastical magisteria is presented (Calvinists, beware: Servetus comes up). He also takes aim at the notion that we must believe the Bible’s authority and ostensible inerrancy just because it (supposedly) claims it for itself all the while denying such claims in other holy books like the Qur’an.

Despite finding the content of this chapter to be on the whole compelling and useful, I was nonetheless a bit disappointed that the purported theme of the chapter as suggested by the title was not really addressed until over halfway through. The shortcomings of inerrancy described above needed to be pointed out in this book somewhere, but if Stark thinks that these particular ways of being wrong-headed and inconsistent contribute to growth stunting, he never made it clear how or why. Yes, being wrong is something to avoid, but we’re all wrong in some way: why, my friends ask me, must I harp specifically on inerrancy? “Yeah, great, you’re not convinced of inerrancy, but why waste so much energy just to prove that you know better than us? How exactly is this supposed to help Christians out?”

Stark really begins to answer these questions with his discussion in the penultimate section of this chapter. Elucidating unwelcome side effects of inerrancy that he cleverly terms “the inerrancy tax”, he argues that accepting the inerrantist view of how the inspiration process worked leads to some compromises in a couple highly prized beliefs: the taxing of both free will and divine sovereignty. His point about the sacrifice of free will required in the CSBI’s conception of inspiration was valid, but not quite as compelling as his fair, careful, but deep-cutting critique of the problems associated with maintaining both inerrancy and a Reformed view of God as sovereign. This is particularly hard-hitting considering that the most hardcore advocates of inerrancy, including many of the most important framers and defenders of the CSBI, consider inerrancy to be the very foundation of the Reformed tradition. His tactic in this section is to show inerrantists that they, upon close examination, will themselves find inerrancy unsatisfactory for theological reasons. This contributes to an answer to the question, “Why should I care about this debate?”

The final section is (finally) devoted to the promised subject, “Inerrancy Stunts Your Growth”. This was the most original and interesting portion of the chapter by far, but I found it painfully short. I do not really mean that I found it underdeveloped or lacking in explanation, because it’s a relatively simple concept; I mean, rather, that I would have enjoyed continuing to hear his approach explained, for reasons akin to the exhilarating feeling one gets when one finds oneself staring at a waterfall and not wanting to continue hiking down the trail just yet. I hesitate to summarize it in detail here for fear of “spoiling” the book, as it’s one of the gems of his view of the Bible and alone worth reading the book for. The essence is that inerrancy “taxes your development as a moral agent” (p. 67): much as Christians have tended to view the Law contra the Spirit for salvation (“the letter kills,” etc.”), we can never mature in our growth as human beings so long as we insist on affirming every misconception, politically motivated mandate, and cultural prejudice recorded in Scripture as though each and every one of them is God’s very word to us. This is one of the most compelling defenses for assaulting inerrancy.

A word about the tone of the book so far: it’s excellent. His attempt at conversational style is, in my opinion, dramatically successful because he does not give the impression either of speaking too harshly or talking down to those Christians whose beliefs a reader will, based upon Stark’s thoughtful discussion, nonetheless infer are benighted and naive. For this reason, as of the end of chapter three this book is drifting to the top of my “recommended for conservative Christians” books list even though I am aware of some pretty perilous waters beginning in the next chapter.

Here’s a little thought experiment.

Let’s say you heard tell of a ruler of a foreign country who decreed that all citizens of his country who broke even one of that country’s laws deserved to be, and henceforth would be, locked up and tortured for the rest of their lives.

Additionally, he took the most revered, humble, and law-abiding citizen up on his offer to take all the blame and punishment for all crimes great and small that were perpetrated by a select group of citizens, a group chosen neither by the severity of their crimes nor by any discernible merit on their part (the others were out of luck).

This left pardoned jay-walkers and murderers alike to roam the street and continue doing what they wanted with virtual impunity, although it was hoped that many would turn over a new leaf out of gratitude and the promise of a fatter retirement check. Everyone else would be tortured the moment they committed the most minor infraction, which was hard to avoid given that the laws of the land were intricate and formulated in direct opposition to basic human nature.

What would your response be to such a report?

1. “Injustice! Barbarism!”
2. “The real story here is grace. The demands of the law must be satisfied. Transgressors know what’s coming to them before they commit a criminal act. Justice must be served. The guilty must by no means go unpunished. After all, there’s nothing in Scripture that this violates, and his authority is guaranteed by Romans 13. But what grace the ruler shows by executing vengeance on the innocent, saving (some) from their punishment!”
3. Something else?

Would the report about this ruler’s policies seem more believable or less so if you discovered through close observation that the king otherwise seemed to be a good, tenderhearted man whose ideology and policies were upheld by fair-minded folk to be the very model of fairness? What if, after your own examination, you concluded that his other demonstrations of kindness and even personal affection for his people were unparalleled throughout the world? What if his pardoned citizens upheld his chief virtues to be “justice” and “grace”?

C.S. Lewis once said (on another subject), “…nonsense remains nonsense, even when we say it about God.”

I realize I’m taking on a few different evangelical narratives here, especially penal satisfaction, eternal conscious torment, and election. I also realize that many of my brothers and sisters on an entirely different theological page will answer none of those questions I posed, but will first scramble to make fine distinctions between this hypothetical ruler and God. To them I say: you know very well what I’m getting at, and if you dismiss the legitimacy of my analyzing your doctrine of God’s justice in this way, then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to come right out and honestly answer these questions within this hypothetical  construct. Right? Would such a ruler be a good, just, wise, and merciful ruler?

If you answer, “Your analogy is crude, limited, fanciful, and breaks down at various points,” I will congratulate you. I think this is exactly what happens when we try to weave together the various human approximations of the meaning of the atonement and salvation found in the NT and hold to our construct as the only inviolable doctrine.

Strange righteousness would be the decree, that because a man has done wrong—let us say has done wrong so often and so much that he is wrong—he shall for ever remain wrong! Do not tell me the condemnation is only negative—a leaving of the man to the consequences of his own will, or at most a withdrawing from him of the Spirit which he has despised. God will not take shelter behind such a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in heaven. He knows that that in him would be the same unforgivingness for which he refuses to forgive man. The only tenable ground for supporting such a doctrine is, that God cannot do more; that Satan has overcome; and that Jesus, amongst his own brothers and sisters in the image of God, has been less strong than the adversary, the destroyer. What then shall I say of such a doctrine of devils as that, even if a man did repent, God would not or could not forgive him?

from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 1, “It Shall Not Be Forgiven”

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

So begins the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Here’s George MacDonald:

“For my part, I wish the spiritual engineers who constructed it had, after laying the grandest foundation-stone that truth could afford them, glorified God by going no further.”